"Should everything the government pays for be free?"
It depends on what the funding is for. If it is paying for something as in a customer, then yes. In the case of farming subsidies, we do get reduced prices. Subsidies are not intended to cover the entire cost of food production, just to cover enought to keep prices down and to be competitive with other producers. So, yes, we do get part of the food for free. As for small business loans, they are loans. Plus they are intended to pay for costs to get set up, not for the products.
The government should not, and generally does not, pay for things for which the public doesn't get some benefit. In the case of funded research, one might argue that the public benefits in the progress made, though in the circumstances discussed here they'd have to pay (again) for access to the progress, and to a third party, not the government nor the individual(s) doing the research. In other words, the third party publisher is benefiting, as a business, off the backs of publically funded research and then making the public pay for it again. The publishers get both the product (often including copyrights to the publication) without paying for it and gets to sell it to the people who did pay for it in the first place. This doesn't seem wrong to you? If not, how about you purchase a product with your own money, I'll take ownership over it (without me paying you anything), and everytime you want to use it you have to pay me.
Yes, they would make 1% more revenue, but with much higher bandwidth costs.
Two things: "more than" does not mean "exactly equal to and no more than", and considering that iTMS has sold over 300 million songs, at 99 cents a 1% increase in revenue would be just shy of $3 million. How much bandwidth would that have bought?
"Whatever happened to just adding a better battery and a pcmia card."
I'd say the exact opposite. To me, progress is doing something more efficiently. Adding a better battery is like saying progress in automobiles is best achieved by leaving them as gas-guzzlers and giving them bigger tanks. If a computer can do just as much with less power consumption, and produce less heat, I'm all for it. I hate wasting energy, especially since I pay for a lot of it. Other benefits of lower power and/or heat generation are less fan time (annoying noise) and a smaller and lighter power supply.
There seems to be lots of misinformation, misunderstandning, and even propaganda here. There are three issues: the ruling on the case, the jurisdiction, and the effect on "free speech".
1. The ruling on the case seems to be correct. This was a libel case and the evidence seems to clearly support libel. He was accussed of some nasty things by the Washington Post and an investigation proven them to be baseless. No problem here.
2. As to the jurisdiction, the ruling on the forum clearly shows the reasoning. There are only two potentially relevant forums for this case. There are a variety of considerations for the correct forum. It was in D.C. that the story was actually written and the authour resides. However, it was in Ontario that the damage was done to the plaintiff's reputation. The plaintiff has no reputation in Washington (never lived there, no job, no family, etc.). Furthermore, though written in Washington, the Post is available world-wide and especially through the internet where this set of articles was published. As far as witnesses, they're in several places but no more in Washington than Ontario. Case law states that if no better forum can be found then the plaintiff's choice of forum should be left undisturbed. There was no argument to show that D.C. was better than Ontario, so it was left in Ontario.
While the plaintiff did not permanently live in Ontario at the time of the first posting of this article, he was moving around a lot and spent much of his time in Ontario. Plus the libel continued for years including the time since he's become a permanent resident of Ontario. Put another way, there's no other forum that would be more appropriate for which damage was done to his reputation.
In short, the court made a fairly solid argument for keeping it in Ontario. It also noted, with references, that the chosen forum rarely affects the outcome of the case. Even if this had been heard in D.C. it should have come out with a similar ruling. This all seems well researched, documented, and argued. I'd appreciate it if someone could find a flaw in the reasoning (after reading the whole thing, since Slashdotters are known to make arguments against things they've never actually read). I'm always open to hear good objective debate on these things, so if his reasoning is flawed I'd like to see where.
3. The claim that this is harmful to free speech seems baseless, and almost propaganda. The Washington Post did break the law, whether Canada or the U.S. The result would be the same regardless. Libel isn't free speech and this ruling doesn't affect free speech. There are also many cases prior this where a person breaks the laws of one country from outside its borders. There's a whole field in international law. In fact, the plaintiff had a doctorate in international law. This is not new.
In short, this is blown way out of proportion. The Post did something wrong and got spanked for it. End of story. No new law, no bizarre rulings, despite the wild claims of the media (who have an obvious bias in this case, in additional to their natural tendancy to sensationalize things). Move along, nothing to see here.
"Obviously you never took economics 101 either.
Now true the cheaper you go, the more a person will download. The trick, however is to maximize profits. They are in business to make money. Period."
I'm confused at your point. The "sweet spot" he was talking about was the maximum profit point. That is, selling 100 units at 1$ each earns you $100 whereas selling 10,000 units at 5 cents a piece earns you $500 dollars. The question is where is price*volume at a maximum and that requires understanding the volume that people will buy as a function of price.
"They feel that 99 cents / song maximizes their reveues. Their choice - it's their product, and if you don't like it, move on and listen to the radio."
That's true. Any company is allowed to do things less than best for themselves and even drive themself into the ground. It certainly doesn't mean 99 cents actually is the sweet spot to maximize their profits thought. They might make a lot more money at 5 cents per song if that entices more than a 20 fold increase in sales.
"In the end the only system that works - is user pays."
Unfortunately it's not that simple. Many would argue that the 'user pay' systems doesn't work. First, much of the research published is paid for by government grants via taxes, so taxpayers are paying for the "privilege" of reading about research they already paid for themselves. Second, the goal of disseminating research results is the progress of society, so that people can learn from each other's work. With the user pays approach, only the rich or "connected" (e.g., paid for by employer) can afford it. Libraries are an option for some, but not everybody lives near a university, not every university offers public access, and libraries obviously don't have all journals. My former university library stopped getting many journals (too expensive) and instead joined a program where you could order in articles from other libraries for free, as long as you were a grad student at the university.
I'm not sure there is an ideal model for every case. I know I wouldn't have even a fraction of the papers I've read now if I had to pay for them myself. Citeseer has been a big help, and they seem to get by ok. Of course they don't publish their own (just a search for papers with links) and they get funded through sponsors, grants, donations, and have volunteers.
"The product databases are huge and difficult to maintain, and because signage can be confusing or tampered with, and sometimes the codes are actually erroneous."
I think that was taken care of by the investigation in which the error was 3 to 1 in favour of WalMart. If it was just an error, one would expect statistically it should happen both ways and average out. This implies systematic intent. However, it could also imply the assumption of random error is wrong, such as the unintentional errors tend to occur in updating databases with sale prices, which of course would always leave them higher than the advertised price. Unintentional, but still making WalMart money it shouldn't be getting.
"The public has plenty of tolerance for hypocritical behavior."
No, that's an example of the public's ignorance to the hypocrisy (even you said it wasn't well covered) and blind faith that "someone else will take care of it". That doesn't mean they are tolerant of it.
Applying this to the case of Google, the alleged hypocrisy probably will not be widely reported also and doesn't generally affect users directly (except those banned by the allegedly hypocritical rules) so there will probably not be much fallout. However, that's the point of the response. If it was well reported and people paid attention it would affect Google, which is why it should be reported and highlighted. The post this was in response to was asking "so what?", and this is the "what". That doesn't mean anything will become of this, but that isn't a reason that it shouldn't be reported.
"Why? Because it's their site and they are in no need to follow their own rules."
No, because of the public relations and potential litigation. The public relations are bad because the public has a low tolerance for hypocricy. Google's main asset is the user-base. If they public turns against them it could do major damage.
IANAL, but just because it is their site doesn't give them free reign to do anything they want. Since they have such a large market share of the search services there may, perhaps, be anti-competitive laws that come into play for taking advantage of their market share to artificially promote their own services above those of competition, as was the case with Microsoft and a few other similar cases we've seen lately (e.g., VoIP blocking). These might not be the case exactly here, but it is inching closer.
"Canada isn't FREE the government controls what they read listen too and watch on TV"
Oh, the irony. Yes, although there are Canadian content laws and a government funded national TV and radio station(s), it's ironic that it's the U.S. in which the media is the governments "bitch" as a compliant outlet for government propaganda. The rules and regulations in place to keep the Canadian government from using its own funded media for that purpose seem to do a better job at keeping the media "free" than the so-called independant media in the U.S. I wonder what Marshall McLuhan would have to say about that.
"US isn't the country that imprisons people for denying the holocaust."
You're right, that's Germany where it actually is illegal to deny the Holocaust. In Canada it is perfectly legal to deny the Holocaust, you just can't spread that belief as part of a campaign to incite hatred towards a group (such as Jews) or propagate a movement based on this effort (such as neo-Naziism). Incidently, the person in question here was a German national, exported to Germany, and imprisioned by Germany under German law. He was also deported from the U.S. back to Canada while trying to obtain U.S. citizenship. So neither the U.S. nor Canada wanted him.
"That the U.S. isn't as bad as the slashdotters say, and Canada isn't so great?"
Of course not. We both have problems with ultra-conservative nutbars. The biggest difference is that in Canada we delegate them to the radio or proposing legislation that will never pass. In the U.S., they're elected to run the country.
Most of them have other jobs at NASA when not in prep for a flight, such as running a lab, program manager for a particular system, performing various analyses or engineering work, etc., plus all the PR (trips to schools, educational programs). Basically their technical/leaderhship skills are used within the program.
Well, if they want to go into space they can always take one of the new private rides which will probably get them there faster than 2015, though not for as long a stay.
"It simply says that meeting a schedule is not more important than recognizing and understanding risks that come during the schedule, and adjusting the schedule accordingly."
That is what I meant by "schedule-driven". In the past NASA has been driven to take risks to meet an artificial (or real) deadline rather than waiting until the technical work and assessments can be properly completed. Nobody wants to be the one to delay a shuttle flight or expensive operations that's taken years of preparation, and often the launch or operation would go on even though it wasn't ready because nobody would say it wasn't. This is a problem that the CAIB report (and Challenger report) both highlight.
Now a manned Hubble mission would require the development of expensive and advanced systems for automated inspection and repair with a real deadline (Hubble's point of failure). In light of the NASA culture, who would be the one to stand up and say it isn't ready when the deadline comes? And once the deadline passes, the mission to save Hubble becomes magnitudes more difficult and expensive because it is a resurrection mission instead of an upgrade.
Again, I'm not saying this was/is/will be the right decision, but I can certainly see that it is a sound decision.
I don't think it's fair to put all this on him. A lot of this comes directly from the CAIB report. Recommendation R6.4-1 states:
"For missions to the International Space Station, develop a practicable capability to inspect and effect emergency repairs to the widest possible range of damage to the Thermal Protection System, including both tile and Reinforced Carbon-Carbon, taking advantage of the additional capabilities available when near to or docked at the International Space Station.
For non-Station missions, develop a comprehensive autonomous (independent of Station) inspection and repair capability to cover the widest possible range of damage scenarios."
Now they've just spent 2 years and hundreds of millions just developing the capabilities for inspecting and repairing based on the ISS option. The autonomous option is many years and probably billions of dollars away, and they only have a few years to repair Hubble before it goes down. Add to this that they're not supposed to be schedule-driven anymore by Recommendation R6.2-1:
"Adopt and maintain a Shuttle flight schedule that is consistent with available resources. Although schedule deadlines are an important management tool, those deadlines must be regularly evaluated to ensure that any additional risk incurred to meet the schedule is recognized, understood, and acceptable."
So NASA's in a tight spot here. Don't be schedule driven yet develop all of these capabilities that take years and huge budgets to develop but do it in time to save Hubble. And then they're retiring the shuttle fleet a few years later anyway so all of this effort and cost for the "non-ISS" flights is really just for Hubble. I'm not saying O'Keefe made the right decision, but I hardly think he deserves the trashing he's been getting on this decision, which isn't even final yet. It seems like a very sound decision given the circumstances, but we'll see how the political will finally responds.
"I have to concur, Pureto Rico and Settlers of Catan are probally the best two games my group of friends have been playing recently."
I third that, and I'd add Mexica. These three games are pretty wicked from a "geek game" perspective. However, they all pale in comparison to poker + beer, skiing, go-cart racing, or rock climbing for games/sports/activities to do with your buddies.
"Hmmmm. that's an interesting theory. Statistical analysis is the same as religious arguments."
Do you not actually read the comments you are responding to? I never said anything close to that. The circular reasoning is what is similar to religious arguments. Developing a model to fit real data and then statistically showing the data fits the model is circular reasoning and poor science.
For example, for a phenomenon X:
Religion: God causes X to happen.
Science: Well, we're not sure yet. Our best guess is that Y happens and then Z, so Y+Z = X, but it doesn't work in all cases.
Statistical analysis: The science model of X = Y+Z doesn't work most of the time, though is occasionally close. The religious model of "God causes X to happen" works 100% of the time with perfect precision.
Conclusion: Religious explanation is correct.
Now let's see what happened in this study:
1. Create greenhouse model based off of existing data.
2. Validate greenhouse model off of same data.
3. Statistically compare existing data to model.
4. Wow, the existing data matched the model. It must be a correct model.
5. Extrapolate model outside of calibrated region.
6. Since model was "proven" correct in Step 4, extrapolation must be correct too.
In any other system outside of climatology, this process would be a laughing stock. The inherent problem is that you can't build, calibrate, validate, and test a model using the same information. Yet that's pretty much all climatologists can do. We don't have a different set of data to validate or test it. We can't put the climate in a lab and generate new sets of data. The only thing we can do is take the extrapolated predictions and see how well they match the true data as time passes. The obvious problem there is that we can't know if things will go to hell until they actually do.
Add to this that climate is generally a chaotic system. If you haven't studied chaotic systems, basically it means that a small variation in the initial conditions can have a huge and unpredicable effect on the outcome later. In other words, a small error in measurement now, even with a perfect model, would result in a huge error later that grows very fast with the extrapolation. The whole "Butterfly Effect" is an example of chaotic systems. (A butterfly flapping it's wings may lead to catastrophic weather far in the future that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't flapped it's wings at that time.)
That being said, matching the model to the data as best as possible and then extrapolating is a "best guess" approach when you have to do it. It doesn't make the model correct and it doesn't make the prediction correct, no matter how much they statistically match in the calibrated region (since the calibration by nature makes them statistically match). In this case, a "best guess" is all we've got and all we can have. So I tend to believe the results and indicative of something we should pay strong attention to. But this is far from warranting claims of proof, the argument is over, implying only irrational people would question the results, and so forth. It's a best guess and that's all.
"Apparently not. Thousands of scientists are too stupid to realize what you have."
Wow, you're prone to all kinds of straw man arguments and other logical fallacies. These tests were not done by thousands of scientists nor were the claims that I quoted. But in general, yes, thousands of scientists are prone to the logical fallacies that the rest of us are. I am a scientist myself, with a PhD. At no point are "scientists" trained in logical reasoning, and few are taught how to keep the conclusions to what the data and/or circumstances actually say. Logical fallacies in scientific studies are everywhere these days. And no, I am not claiming to be smarter than any of them, or anything like that (this seems to be your implication). But the connection between logical reasoning and scientific studies is one a
"Does this not state that amd's are still in the lead, except for some business benchmarks"
No, you didn't finish the quotation:
"And again, when it comes to media encoding or conversion, 3D rendering and modeling, and most new standard business applications, the Pentium 4 extends it lead today with these new additions to the Intel lineup. Especially in common multitasking workloads and usage models, with an OS that supports Hyper-Threading, the Pentium 4 obviously is at its best."
What the report says is that the AMD 64 still wins in 3D gaming where it is best, but for median encoding/conversion, 3D rendering & modeling, business apps, and multitasking, the new Pentium 4 6XX wins. This is exactly what the plots show too. So it's only gaming that the AMD 64 wins.
Of course the binary decision of win/lose shouldn't really be the metric. Winning by 1% at a 300% increase in cost and 80% more heat doesn't cut it for me. (No, these aren't the real numbers, I'm giving an example.) I'd rather see some ratios of performance to cost and/or heat produced along with the absolute performance specs. I can do this on my own, except they didn't report the cost point of the AMD FX-55 or 4000+. I guess I'll have to look them up.
"If you think there's no tracking in the real world, you're sorely mistaken."
Yes, and this is the next big step down that road. Authorities can track you through transactions now. If they actually do, without probable cause, that's a violation of your privacy rights. (I don't want to argue legalities here, I'm talking moral/sociological issues here though there are legal implications.)
Now the methods you mention only indirectly track you by activities you've done, and as I say they shouldn't actually be doing that unless they have a reason to believe you've done something wrong. Tagging you so they can track your body itself in real-time is a magnitude worse invasion of privacy, and in this case we're talking about tracking people who have done nothing wrong, but rather are being tracked to ensure they don't do something wrong. I agree we're already on a slippery slope. Being on the slope isn't justification to take a big jump further down it. If anything, we should be trying to go back up it.
"Interesting you are saying there is an organized conspiracy by scientists to commit fraud upon the entire planet."
No, that's not what he said. He said they were susceptible to the same logical fallacies as everybody else. Read the article. They took a number of models of climate and compared to real data. The greenhouse models matched pretty close and the other models didn't. As a result, the report and/or scientists claim:
"The present trend of warmer sea temperatures, which have risen by an average of half a degree Celsius (0.9F) over the past 40 years, can be explained only if greenhouse gas emissions are responsible."
"The debate about whether there is a global warming signal now is over, at least for rational people"
"The models got it right. If a politician stands up and says the uncertainty is too great to believe these models, that is no longer tenable."
"All the potential culprits have been ruled out except one."
"The statistical significance of these results is far too strong to be merely dismissed and should wipe out much of the uncertainty about the reality of global warming."
This is similar reasoning as some religious arguments. "Science can't explain X but our model of God can, therefore we got it right." Has it not occured to anyone that perhaps their models aren't accurate. For instance, it could all be due to solar activity and their model of how solar activity affects climate is wrong. That could be true of any of their models. They could even have the greenhouse model completely wrong and it gives the right answers because building the models in the first place was based off of calibrating it against real data.
This is partially from my own experience. I've developed calibrations for complicated systems and I know that the calibration algorithms do their best to fit the model to the data, even if the model is wrong.
That being said, our best guess is that humans are affecting the climate. I tend to agree with that, but there is hardly indisputable evidence of that. None of the above claims are reasonable for the given conditions of the testing and model validation.
"With this system, that 5 minutes could be used for learning."
Those must be some bretty big classes. The general size of school classes is supposed to be around 20-30 people per teacher. It usually took my teachers less than 30 seconds to record attendance, usually completed as the last person walks in the room before any teaching could actually start anyway. And that's highschool. For elementary school we had assigned seats and had the same teacher for most of the day.
"If the kid is at the place where the kid is supposed to be, why is there a need for "privacy" in the first place?"
See, this is the problem that people don't get. If we teach our children that it's ok for the authorities (whomever they may be) to put tracking devices on them then they will grow up believing that it is ok. Remember, tracking devices are what we do to criminals who are released on parole. Now we're doing it to school children and once the next generation is de-sensitized to it, we'll be doing it when they're adults. A slow degradation of privacy rights is still degradation of those rights.
Also don't forget the risk of abuse. While they did shut of the trackers at the bathroom, that was a conscious decision. Next time they could record which stall the student is in and for how long, where they go during free periods, or generally use it to monitor every student's motion through the school through the whole day. While it is true they are supposed to be at school and in the their assigned classes at given times, we've given no authority to schools to track their every movement throughout the day. This system is one small step from that.
"Linux not secure either. There's a/. article today claiming Win2003 servers are generally more secure than Linux."
This is what we like to call excrapolation. The article in question only tested webservers with specifically matched settings and used a very limited set of metrics generally in terms of reported vulnerabilities, degree of vulnerability, and length of time to patching. That hardly says anything about Linux or Windows security in general, and certainly not desktops, firewalls, email, etc.
However, I'm not one to believe something just because I want it to be true. It is certainly possible that Linux is less secure, there have just been so many reports saying the opposite.
"It doesn't, which is why this is a stupid idea implemented by a stupid school paid by a company with no shame."
Exactly, that's what people seem to be missing. The whole privacy/tracking thing is a concern, of course. But what benefit is gained from this? It automates attendance keeping. In other words, the school is lazy and this feeds their laziness. And it does a poorer job. You could have one kid carry around the RFIDs for a bunch of people who aren't there and they'll be logged as present. You can't do that if a teacher actually takes attendance.
So there's no real benefit to the student or parents, and it does do harm in teaching that it's ok to put tracking devices on people plus the danger of children being tracked for nefarious reasons. I don't understand how anyone could think these would be a good thing.
"...if you publish what you reasonably should have known was a trade secret."
That may very well be the problem here. Not every secret that a company has qualifies as a trade secret in the legal sense. From and overview of Trade Secret Law:
In most states, a trade secret may consist of any formula, pattern, physical device, idea, process, compilation of information or other information that both:
provides the owner of the information with a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and
is treated in a way that can reasonably be expected to prevent the public or competitors from learning about it, absent improper acquisition or theft.
Trade secrets are usually secret formulas (think Coke, KFC, etc.), unpatented inventions, customer lists, etc. In other words, things that meant to stay secrets and provide an advantage over competitors. In this case, the secrets at issue were the existence of soon-to-be-released products. The fact that these products were to be sold publically means the secret was only temporary. And it's not clear how the secret of their existence, particularly as you get closer to their release date, would provide much of a competitive advantage. At a minimum, it's certainly debatable whether the temporary secret of the existence of a product that is soon to be released qualifies as providing a competitive advantage.
However, IANAL and I can see arguments both ways, so it'll be interesting to the outcome.
"A cell phone conversation is generally far more cognitively intrusive than listening to the radio."
See, that's what I mean. That's an opinion, or a "one would think". But has there been statistical and empirical studies to demonstrate that? I'm not arguing for use of cellphones in cars, I don't even have a cellphone. But it very much looks like a witch hunt to me. Nobody has demonstrated (that I'm aware of) that they are any more dangerous than anything else we have as an acceptable distraction.
And a conversation on the phone should not be any more cognitively intrusive than a conversation with a passenger. But then someone says "Oh, but the passenger can see the conditions around you." and others say "But they often don't and it's easier to drop/ignore a cellphone than a passenger." It's mostly opinions.
"Um, have you heard of confounding variables?"
You make the same mistake as someone else in another post. You have to think beyond the lab. I wasn't talking about the causation issue, I was talking about the reasonableness issue. This isn't a purely scientific/statistical issue and can't be argued that way. Can we reduce accidents by banning cellphones? Perhaps. What about banning radios, passengers, coffee, thinking about work, etc.? Same thing. But nobody's arguing they should be banned. The question isn't what minimizes accidents, it's what is a reasonable balance. And if we have fewer accidents now and rampant use of cellphones, I can't see it is reasonable to say banning them is necessary. If so, why isn't it (or wasn't it) necessary to ban other distractions? You've got to think of the sociological side of this too.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on what the funding is for. If it is paying for something as in a customer, then yes. In the case of farming subsidies, we do get reduced prices. Subsidies are not intended to cover the entire cost of food production, just to cover enought to keep prices down and to be competitive with other producers. So, yes, we do get part of the food for free. As for small business loans, they are loans. Plus they are intended to pay for costs to get set up, not for the products.
The government should not, and generally does not, pay for things for which the public doesn't get some benefit. In the case of funded research, one might argue that the public benefits in the progress made, though in the circumstances discussed here they'd have to pay (again) for access to the progress, and to a third party, not the government nor the individual(s) doing the research. In other words, the third party publisher is benefiting, as a business, off the backs of publically funded research and then making the public pay for it again. The publishers get both the product (often including copyrights to the publication) without paying for it and gets to sell it to the people who did pay for it in the first place. This doesn't seem wrong to you? If not, how about you purchase a product with your own money, I'll take ownership over it (without me paying you anything), and everytime you want to use it you have to pay me.
Two things: "more than" does not mean "exactly equal to and no more than", and considering that iTMS has sold over 300 million songs, at 99 cents a 1% increase in revenue would be just shy of $3 million. How much bandwidth would that have bought?
I'd say the exact opposite. To me, progress is doing something more efficiently. Adding a better battery is like saying progress in automobiles is best achieved by leaving them as gas-guzzlers and giving them bigger tanks. If a computer can do just as much with less power consumption, and produce less heat, I'm all for it. I hate wasting energy, especially since I pay for a lot of it. Other benefits of lower power and/or heat generation are less fan time (annoying noise) and a smaller and lighter power supply.
1. The ruling on the case seems to be correct. This was a libel case and the evidence seems to clearly support libel. He was accussed of some nasty things by the Washington Post and an investigation proven them to be baseless. No problem here.
2. As to the jurisdiction, the ruling on the forum clearly shows the reasoning. There are only two potentially relevant forums for this case. There are a variety of considerations for the correct forum. It was in D.C. that the story was actually written and the authour resides. However, it was in Ontario that the damage was done to the plaintiff's reputation. The plaintiff has no reputation in Washington (never lived there, no job, no family, etc.). Furthermore, though written in Washington, the Post is available world-wide and especially through the internet where this set of articles was published. As far as witnesses, they're in several places but no more in Washington than Ontario. Case law states that if no better forum can be found then the plaintiff's choice of forum should be left undisturbed. There was no argument to show that D.C. was better than Ontario, so it was left in Ontario.
While the plaintiff did not permanently live in Ontario at the time of the first posting of this article, he was moving around a lot and spent much of his time in Ontario. Plus the libel continued for years including the time since he's become a permanent resident of Ontario. Put another way, there's no other forum that would be more appropriate for which damage was done to his reputation.
In short, the court made a fairly solid argument for keeping it in Ontario. It also noted, with references, that the chosen forum rarely affects the outcome of the case. Even if this had been heard in D.C. it should have come out with a similar ruling. This all seems well researched, documented, and argued. I'd appreciate it if someone could find a flaw in the reasoning (after reading the whole thing, since Slashdotters are known to make arguments against things they've never actually read). I'm always open to hear good objective debate on these things, so if his reasoning is flawed I'd like to see where.
3. The claim that this is harmful to free speech seems baseless, and almost propaganda. The Washington Post did break the law, whether Canada or the U.S. The result would be the same regardless. Libel isn't free speech and this ruling doesn't affect free speech. There are also many cases prior this where a person breaks the laws of one country from outside its borders. There's a whole field in international law. In fact, the plaintiff had a doctorate in international law. This is not new.
In short, this is blown way out of proportion. The Post did something wrong and got spanked for it. End of story. No new law, no bizarre rulings, despite the wild claims of the media (who have an obvious bias in this case, in additional to their natural tendancy to sensationalize things). Move along, nothing to see here.
I'm confused at your point. The "sweet spot" he was talking about was the maximum profit point. That is, selling 100 units at 1$ each earns you $100 whereas selling 10,000 units at 5 cents a piece earns you $500 dollars. The question is where is price*volume at a maximum and that requires understanding the volume that people will buy as a function of price.
"They feel that 99 cents / song maximizes their reveues. Their choice - it's their product, and if you don't like it, move on and listen to the radio."
That's true. Any company is allowed to do things less than best for themselves and even drive themself into the ground. It certainly doesn't mean 99 cents actually is the sweet spot to maximize their profits thought. They might make a lot more money at 5 cents per song if that entices more than a 20 fold increase in sales.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. Many would argue that the 'user pay' systems doesn't work. First, much of the research published is paid for by government grants via taxes, so taxpayers are paying for the "privilege" of reading about research they already paid for themselves. Second, the goal of disseminating research results is the progress of society, so that people can learn from each other's work. With the user pays approach, only the rich or "connected" (e.g., paid for by employer) can afford it. Libraries are an option for some, but not everybody lives near a university, not every university offers public access, and libraries obviously don't have all journals. My former university library stopped getting many journals (too expensive) and instead joined a program where you could order in articles from other libraries for free, as long as you were a grad student at the university.
I'm not sure there is an ideal model for every case. I know I wouldn't have even a fraction of the papers I've read now if I had to pay for them myself. Citeseer has been a big help, and they seem to get by ok. Of course they don't publish their own (just a search for papers with links) and they get funded through sponsors, grants, donations, and have volunteers.
I think that was taken care of by the investigation in which the error was 3 to 1 in favour of WalMart. If it was just an error, one would expect statistically it should happen both ways and average out. This implies systematic intent. However, it could also imply the assumption of random error is wrong, such as the unintentional errors tend to occur in updating databases with sale prices, which of course would always leave them higher than the advertised price. Unintentional, but still making WalMart money it shouldn't be getting.
No, that's an example of the public's ignorance to the hypocrisy (even you said it wasn't well covered) and blind faith that "someone else will take care of it". That doesn't mean they are tolerant of it.
Applying this to the case of Google, the alleged hypocrisy probably will not be widely reported also and doesn't generally affect users directly (except those banned by the allegedly hypocritical rules) so there will probably not be much fallout. However, that's the point of the response. If it was well reported and people paid attention it would affect Google, which is why it should be reported and highlighted. The post this was in response to was asking "so what?", and this is the "what". That doesn't mean anything will become of this, but that isn't a reason that it shouldn't be reported.
No, because of the public relations and potential litigation. The public relations are bad because the public has a low tolerance for hypocricy. Google's main asset is the user-base. If they public turns against them it could do major damage.
IANAL, but just because it is their site doesn't give them free reign to do anything they want. Since they have such a large market share of the search services there may, perhaps, be anti-competitive laws that come into play for taking advantage of their market share to artificially promote their own services above those of competition, as was the case with Microsoft and a few other similar cases we've seen lately (e.g., VoIP blocking). These might not be the case exactly here, but it is inching closer.
Oh, the irony. Yes, although there are Canadian content laws and a government funded national TV and radio station(s), it's ironic that it's the U.S. in which the media is the governments "bitch" as a compliant outlet for government propaganda. The rules and regulations in place to keep the Canadian government from using its own funded media for that purpose seem to do a better job at keeping the media "free" than the so-called independant media in the U.S. I wonder what Marshall McLuhan would have to say about that.
You're right, that's Germany where it actually is illegal to deny the Holocaust. In Canada it is perfectly legal to deny the Holocaust, you just can't spread that belief as part of a campaign to incite hatred towards a group (such as Jews) or propagate a movement based on this effort (such as neo-Naziism). Incidently, the person in question here was a German national, exported to Germany, and imprisioned by Germany under German law. He was also deported from the U.S. back to Canada while trying to obtain U.S. citizenship. So neither the U.S. nor Canada wanted him.
Of course not. We both have problems with ultra-conservative nutbars. The biggest difference is that in Canada we delegate them to the radio or proposing legislation that will never pass. In the U.S., they're elected to run the country.
Most of them have other jobs at NASA when not in prep for a flight, such as running a lab, program manager for a particular system, performing various analyses or engineering work, etc., plus all the PR (trips to schools, educational programs). Basically their technical/leaderhship skills are used within the program.
Well, if they want to go into space they can always take one of the new private rides which will probably get them there faster than 2015, though not for as long a stay.
That is what I meant by "schedule-driven". In the past NASA has been driven to take risks to meet an artificial (or real) deadline rather than waiting until the technical work and assessments can be properly completed. Nobody wants to be the one to delay a shuttle flight or expensive operations that's taken years of preparation, and often the launch or operation would go on even though it wasn't ready because nobody would say it wasn't. This is a problem that the CAIB report (and Challenger report) both highlight.
Now a manned Hubble mission would require the development of expensive and advanced systems for automated inspection and repair with a real deadline (Hubble's point of failure). In light of the NASA culture, who would be the one to stand up and say it isn't ready when the deadline comes? And once the deadline passes, the mission to save Hubble becomes magnitudes more difficult and expensive because it is a resurrection mission instead of an upgrade.
Again, I'm not saying this was/is/will be the right decision, but I can certainly see that it is a sound decision.
Now they've just spent 2 years and hundreds of millions just developing the capabilities for inspecting and repairing based on the ISS option. The autonomous option is many years and probably billions of dollars away, and they only have a few years to repair Hubble before it goes down. Add to this that they're not supposed to be schedule-driven anymore by Recommendation R6.2-1:
So NASA's in a tight spot here. Don't be schedule driven yet develop all of these capabilities that take years and huge budgets to develop but do it in time to save Hubble. And then they're retiring the shuttle fleet a few years later anyway so all of this effort and cost for the "non-ISS" flights is really just for Hubble. I'm not saying O'Keefe made the right decision, but I hardly think he deserves the trashing he's been getting on this decision, which isn't even final yet. It seems like a very sound decision given the circumstances, but we'll see how the political will finally responds.
I third that, and I'd add Mexica. These three games are pretty wicked from a "geek game" perspective. However, they all pale in comparison to poker + beer, skiing, go-cart racing, or rock climbing for games/sports/activities to do with your buddies.
Do you not actually read the comments you are responding to? I never said anything close to that. The circular reasoning is what is similar to religious arguments. Developing a model to fit real data and then statistically showing the data fits the model is circular reasoning and poor science.
For example, for a phenomenon X:
Religion: God causes X to happen.
Science: Well, we're not sure yet. Our best guess is that Y happens and then Z, so Y+Z = X, but it doesn't work in all cases.
Statistical analysis: The science model of X = Y+Z doesn't work most of the time, though is occasionally close. The religious model of "God causes X to happen" works 100% of the time with perfect precision.
Conclusion: Religious explanation is correct.
Now let's see what happened in this study:
1. Create greenhouse model based off of existing data.
2. Validate greenhouse model off of same data.
3. Statistically compare existing data to model.
4. Wow, the existing data matched the model. It must be a correct model.
5. Extrapolate model outside of calibrated region.
6. Since model was "proven" correct in Step 4, extrapolation must be correct too.
In any other system outside of climatology, this process would be a laughing stock. The inherent problem is that you can't build, calibrate, validate, and test a model using the same information. Yet that's pretty much all climatologists can do. We don't have a different set of data to validate or test it. We can't put the climate in a lab and generate new sets of data. The only thing we can do is take the extrapolated predictions and see how well they match the true data as time passes. The obvious problem there is that we can't know if things will go to hell until they actually do.
Add to this that climate is generally a chaotic system. If you haven't studied chaotic systems, basically it means that a small variation in the initial conditions can have a huge and unpredicable effect on the outcome later. In other words, a small error in measurement now, even with a perfect model, would result in a huge error later that grows very fast with the extrapolation. The whole "Butterfly Effect" is an example of chaotic systems. (A butterfly flapping it's wings may lead to catastrophic weather far in the future that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't flapped it's wings at that time.)
That being said, matching the model to the data as best as possible and then extrapolating is a "best guess" approach when you have to do it. It doesn't make the model correct and it doesn't make the prediction correct, no matter how much they statistically match in the calibrated region (since the calibration by nature makes them statistically match). In this case, a "best guess" is all we've got and all we can have. So I tend to believe the results and indicative of something we should pay strong attention to. But this is far from warranting claims of proof, the argument is over, implying only irrational people would question the results, and so forth. It's a best guess and that's all.
"Apparently not. Thousands of scientists are too stupid to realize what you have."
Wow, you're prone to all kinds of straw man arguments and other logical fallacies. These tests were not done by thousands of scientists nor were the claims that I quoted. But in general, yes, thousands of scientists are prone to the logical fallacies that the rest of us are. I am a scientist myself, with a PhD. At no point are "scientists" trained in logical reasoning, and few are taught how to keep the conclusions to what the data and/or circumstances actually say. Logical fallacies in scientific studies are everywhere these days. And no, I am not claiming to be smarter than any of them, or anything like that (this seems to be your implication). But the connection between logical reasoning and scientific studies is one a
No, you didn't finish the quotation:
What the report says is that the AMD 64 still wins in 3D gaming where it is best, but for median encoding/conversion, 3D rendering & modeling, business apps, and multitasking, the new Pentium 4 6XX wins. This is exactly what the plots show too. So it's only gaming that the AMD 64 wins.
Of course the binary decision of win/lose shouldn't really be the metric. Winning by 1% at a 300% increase in cost and 80% more heat doesn't cut it for me. (No, these aren't the real numbers, I'm giving an example.) I'd rather see some ratios of performance to cost and/or heat produced along with the absolute performance specs. I can do this on my own, except they didn't report the cost point of the AMD FX-55 or 4000+. I guess I'll have to look them up.
Yes, and this is the next big step down that road. Authorities can track you through transactions now. If they actually do, without probable cause, that's a violation of your privacy rights. (I don't want to argue legalities here, I'm talking moral/sociological issues here though there are legal implications.)
Now the methods you mention only indirectly track you by activities you've done, and as I say they shouldn't actually be doing that unless they have a reason to believe you've done something wrong. Tagging you so they can track your body itself in real-time is a magnitude worse invasion of privacy, and in this case we're talking about tracking people who have done nothing wrong, but rather are being tracked to ensure they don't do something wrong. I agree we're already on a slippery slope. Being on the slope isn't justification to take a big jump further down it. If anything, we should be trying to go back up it.
No, that's not what he said. He said they were susceptible to the same logical fallacies as everybody else. Read the article. They took a number of models of climate and compared to real data. The greenhouse models matched pretty close and the other models didn't. As a result, the report and/or scientists claim:
This is similar reasoning as some religious arguments. "Science can't explain X but our model of God can, therefore we got it right." Has it not occured to anyone that perhaps their models aren't accurate. For instance, it could all be due to solar activity and their model of how solar activity affects climate is wrong. That could be true of any of their models. They could even have the greenhouse model completely wrong and it gives the right answers because building the models in the first place was based off of calibrating it against real data.
This is partially from my own experience. I've developed calibrations for complicated systems and I know that the calibration algorithms do their best to fit the model to the data, even if the model is wrong.
That being said, our best guess is that humans are affecting the climate. I tend to agree with that, but there is hardly indisputable evidence of that. None of the above claims are reasonable for the given conditions of the testing and model validation.
Those must be some bretty big classes. The general size of school classes is supposed to be around 20-30 people per teacher. It usually took my teachers less than 30 seconds to record attendance, usually completed as the last person walks in the room before any teaching could actually start anyway. And that's highschool. For elementary school we had assigned seats and had the same teacher for most of the day.
"If the kid is at the place where the kid is supposed to be, why is there a need for "privacy" in the first place?"
See, this is the problem that people don't get. If we teach our children that it's ok for the authorities (whomever they may be) to put tracking devices on them then they will grow up believing that it is ok. Remember, tracking devices are what we do to criminals who are released on parole. Now we're doing it to school children and once the next generation is de-sensitized to it, we'll be doing it when they're adults. A slow degradation of privacy rights is still degradation of those rights.
Also don't forget the risk of abuse. While they did shut of the trackers at the bathroom, that was a conscious decision. Next time they could record which stall the student is in and for how long, where they go during free periods, or generally use it to monitor every student's motion through the school through the whole day. While it is true they are supposed to be at school and in the their assigned classes at given times, we've given no authority to schools to track their every movement throughout the day. This system is one small step from that.
This is what we like to call excrapolation. The article in question only tested webservers with specifically matched settings and used a very limited set of metrics generally in terms of reported vulnerabilities, degree of vulnerability, and length of time to patching. That hardly says anything about Linux or Windows security in general, and certainly not desktops, firewalls, email, etc.
However, I'm not one to believe something just because I want it to be true. It is certainly possible that Linux is less secure, there have just been so many reports saying the opposite.
Exactly, that's what people seem to be missing. The whole privacy/tracking thing is a concern, of course. But what benefit is gained from this? It automates attendance keeping. In other words, the school is lazy and this feeds their laziness. And it does a poorer job. You could have one kid carry around the RFIDs for a bunch of people who aren't there and they'll be logged as present. You can't do that if a teacher actually takes attendance.
So there's no real benefit to the student or parents, and it does do harm in teaching that it's ok to put tracking devices on people plus the danger of children being tracked for nefarious reasons. I don't understand how anyone could think these would be a good thing.
That may very well be the problem here. Not every secret that a company has qualifies as a trade secret in the legal sense. From and overview of Trade Secret Law:
Trade secrets are usually secret formulas (think Coke, KFC, etc.), unpatented inventions, customer lists, etc. In other words, things that meant to stay secrets and provide an advantage over competitors. In this case, the secrets at issue were the existence of soon-to-be-released products. The fact that these products were to be sold publically means the secret was only temporary. And it's not clear how the secret of their existence, particularly as you get closer to their release date, would provide much of a competitive advantage. At a minimum, it's certainly debatable whether the temporary secret of the existence of a product that is soon to be released qualifies as providing a competitive advantage.
However, IANAL and I can see arguments both ways, so it'll be interesting to the outcome.
See, that's what I mean. That's an opinion, or a "one would think". But has there been statistical and empirical studies to demonstrate that? I'm not arguing for use of cellphones in cars, I don't even have a cellphone. But it very much looks like a witch hunt to me. Nobody has demonstrated (that I'm aware of) that they are any more dangerous than anything else we have as an acceptable distraction.
And a conversation on the phone should not be any more cognitively intrusive than a conversation with a passenger. But then someone says "Oh, but the passenger can see the conditions around you." and others say "But they often don't and it's easier to drop/ignore a cellphone than a passenger." It's mostly opinions.
"Um, have you heard of confounding variables?"
You make the same mistake as someone else in another post. You have to think beyond the lab. I wasn't talking about the causation issue, I was talking about the reasonableness issue. This isn't a purely scientific/statistical issue and can't be argued that way. Can we reduce accidents by banning cellphones? Perhaps. What about banning radios, passengers, coffee, thinking about work, etc.? Same thing. But nobody's arguing they should be banned. The question isn't what minimizes accidents, it's what is a reasonable balance. And if we have fewer accidents now and rampant use of cellphones, I can't see it is reasonable to say banning them is necessary. If so, why isn't it (or wasn't it) necessary to ban other distractions? You've got to think of the sociological side of this too.