Is there anyone with two semesters of economics AND hands-on experience in working in an ISP who supports the notion that capped data is an unjustifiable rip-off?
Am I the only person disappointed to find out that this article is about a massive grid for electric vehicles, rather than a grid for massive electric vehicles?
Damn.
My Voltron fantasies will have to wait for another day.
While correlation does not prove causation, it sure does imply causation.
More simply, causation causes correlation. If you don't have correlation, then you can't claim causation.
More to the point, causation is highly correlated with correlation (rho=0.977).
Problems arise when people claim that correlation causes causation. Since causation is a boolean variable while correlation is real-valued, with suitable rounding, then yes, it's true.
First of all it is creative on the part of the broadcasting company not the TV guide publishers. So using your logic the copyright should belong to the station broadcasting and the guide people have no standing.
Yes, you are exactly correct. The Nine Network (broadcasting company) asserts ownership of the schedule. They are the party in the court case.
Yes, I'm sympathetic to that view, but it's important to recognise that sometimes the universities are trying to protect wider interests too.
In the course of various meetings with the university's "IP managers", it was explained to me that some students waltz in, do a tiny piece of a very large project involving dozens of researchers, then waltz out with a doctorate and some crucial (albeit small) IP.
Apparently, they could - in principle - then hold the entire project to ransom. These IP assignment agreements are an attempt to stop that.
It was suggested this is more of a problem in commercially hot lab-based areas like biotech - nothing at all like my research project.
From what I can gather, some people in those fields are getting PhDs as a reward for doing a three year stint as a lowly-paid lab tech and feel entitled to try it on. Personally, I reckon the answer is to actually hire lab techs and tighten up the requirements for individual contributions in doctorates.
What's "spurious" about it? If it's true that the company paid for lab equipment and (part of) your salary, why shouldn't they own the results?
Right, four things you need to understand:
1) University wanted to own the IP.
2) Industry partner did not want the IP and had no knowledge of or interest in the audacious move.
3) Industry partner provided a modest amount of cash - a quarter of the value of the scholarship (thank you Australian taxpayers).
4) There was no lab equipment or other expenses.
These are the people who don't realise that the IP agreement they're signing means that the University now owns their thoughts, dreams and lives.
I'm a postgrad student at an Australian university. One uni pressured me to assign my IP rights to them for spurious reasons involving the fact that my research was partly sponsored by an industry partner. This included granting the uni the right to withhold my research from publication! The only guarantee for me was that my PhD thesis would be "published" - even if that meant it would remain "behind the counter" at the library and hence not publicly available for (I think) two years. WTF!?
I tried to re-negotiate the terms so that the uni granted me a non-exclusive perpetual licence to my own research so that I could, for instance, work on it as a postdoc or maybe write a book down the track. No dice.
Then they tried to make it a condition of my scholarship. Fortunately, I'd already started so there was little they could do when I just refused to sign.
For other reasons, I left that uni and went to another one in the same city. Not a problem there.
Unbelievable. Still, at some level you have to admire the pure gall of it.
... information theory shows that a fractional bit is a probability of transmitting the desired bit correctly. A true source of random noise generates no bits, but a highly noisy channel transmits fractional bits per noisy bit sent. Fractional bits are well-founded mathematically.
Only the last sentence is correct. The first two are incorrect.
You're confusing "bit" as a symbol (as in, kbps) and "bit" as a unit of entropy.
When a bit is fractional (eg 1.8), it is not "a probability of transmitting the desired bit correctly". It means that on average the receiver expects her "uncertainty" (equivocation) to be reduced by 1.8 bits.
Here's an example. Suppose I hold a playing card. You are unsure which card it is out of the 52 possibilities. Given that each is equally likely, you have 5.7 bits of uncertainty - log2(52). Now, suppose I tell you that the card is a diamond. Your uncertainty dropped to 3.7 bits. (13 equally likely possibilities.) The message "the card is a diamond" therefore contains 2 bits of information, since this is how much your uncertainty dropped by. Note the change in uncertainty is only loosely related to the number of 1/0 symbols conveyed.
The thing was, the web page that was the source for the key data to be mashed-up, though a classic HTML data table, didn't offer an RSS feed. And Pipes doesn't seem to offer even the most basic page scraping utility. (If it does, I couldn't find it.)
Use Dapper to scrape HTML tables into RSS, XML, iCal, JSON, YAML or whatever else floats your boat.
But if you kill someone in the act of robbing you, you can use the robbery as a defense for the homocide.
Not where I live. You're either not in a common law country (UK, Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand) or one that has strayed so far from the principles of common law that it doesn't count any more (eg South Africa, Zimbabwe).
if deadly force is justified during the act of some crimes, why can't these same crimes carry the death penalty?
Here's the legalistic explanation: If a police sniper shoots a guy on a train with a bomb, this is not an act of punishment. Death is not the intent here, merely an unfortunate side-effect. It's done to stop the bomb going off. The only realistic and practicable way of achieving this is to cause a small piece of metal to travel through his head at high speed. If there was an alternative that was just as effective but not lethal, the law would mandate that be used.
I'm curious about these people who've beaten a murder rap for killing a pickpocket. Most places, you have to establish that you were in immediate fear of your life or someone else's. Would you mind digging up a link from your local paper?
Exactly. Most courts put a higher premium on our physical integrity and well-being than mere money. Consider what is implicitly being advocated: the harshness of punishment is proportional to the amount stolen, not the violence threatened.
Would anyone be happy to see a pickpocket who steals $50 receive a harsher punishment than someone who threatens to rape you and cut your throat to steal $10? What sort of warped values would you need to have to accept that proposition?
In Australia, getting TV guide data is a constant struggle due to our odd copyright laws. Since it's possible to claim copyright on a collection of facts, the TV companies banded together, assigned their copyright to one company and then milk it for monopoly profits. Another company, IceTV, started offering subscriptions (around US$12/month) but has been taken to court by the first one. While IceTV claims to have independently built their listings - and even offered to show this to the cartel's lawyers - this matter is still wending its way through court.
The response from the "underground" has been to build scrapers. Lots of scrapers. The guide publishers repond with increasingly complex obfuscation of the listings. Eg have a look at the source for this TV guide.
Yes, there are a number of working scrapers and XMLTV files are accessed - but only by people with a fair amount of technical skills. The rest either pay or go without.
Another approach - also suggested here - has been to set up a wiki with user-populated data, released under Creative Commons. This is operational and useful, but is obviously threatened by the above court action.
In light of Australia's Free Trade Agreement with the US, we can expect "copyright harmonisation". How would Americans feel about getting our bizarre law regarding copyrighting of facts?
I don't think it has to be an either/or proposition. With tags, you can use your most-frequent ones as categories. You can also keep your specific words, shiboleths and "one-shot" tags in the mix, for Technorati and other tag-based searches.
The aforementioned "enthusiasts who extend Blogger in useful, novel and unexpected ways" are still digesting the implications of this change for their carefully-constructed, hand-wrought hacks. Especially those that supplement Blogger's lack of categories and comment feeds.
"A lot of blogs will take user comments and stick them into their own RSS feeds," he said.
Blogger doesn't (directly) support comment feeds. If you're interested in setting this up on your Blogspot blog (so you can, for example, get truly recent comments), check out this bloghacking wiki.
I can't vouch for the security of these methods, though.
Ok, I dunno about actually paying for it, but it is surprisingly handy. I've been setting recordings via my (old and crappy) mobile phone for about a year. I use the wonderful, open source WebScheduler, mobile phone method explained here.
I would use this perhaps once a month - and when I do, I'm always grateful for it. It usually happens when I'm sitting in a pub somewhere and a fellow boozer laments "you know, we're missing that David Attenborough doco right now...". I've used it when I've been held up on public transport. I've used it when my girlfriend has expressed interest in a show I had declined to watch.
If you can get it for free - and from the discussion above it seems doable - then you should set it up.
Delicious also allow you to tap into the "hive mind" by using a generic mode whereby you can see tags/URLs for all users, not just your own account. Somewhat perversely, Joshua announced that they have stopped supporting this mode with JSON - leaving only RSS. In fact, Joshua stated that the/json/tag/* was just an "accident" in the first place!
Anyone got any theories as to why that is? Why publish "socialised content" as (much heavier) RSS feeds but disallow lightweight JSON feeds? Is it to drive users to Yahoo? Or stop third party searches and other add-ons? Maybe it's the more prosaic "we forgot to put it in the specs, now we can't be arsed supporting it 'cause it's someone else's baby now."
It was clear your original remark about the use of term "semiotics" was in the context of the Anglosphere. This is a broader concept than the United States. You'll find semiotics - as a category - is a bigger deal in the rest of the English-speaking world.
Re: research relevance. Does (eg) Harnard not count?
Slashdot Mirror
Is there anyone with two semesters of economics AND hands-on experience in working in an ISP who supports the notion that capped data is an unjustifiable rip-off?
Am I the only person disappointed to find out that this article is about a massive grid for electric vehicles, rather than a grid for massive electric vehicles?
Damn.
My Voltron fantasies will have to wait for another day.
While correlation does not prove causation, it sure does imply causation.
More simply, causation causes correlation. If you don't have correlation, then you can't claim causation.
More to the point, causation is highly correlated with correlation (rho=0.977).
Problems arise when people claim that correlation causes causation. Since causation is a boolean variable while correlation is real-valued, with suitable rounding, then yes, it's true.
It's all very simple really.
Mark this article "correlation IS causation" -- simply because it's so ludicrous. ;)
Yes, of course "correlation is causation". If you look at the data, the two are so tightly correlated, than causation can be inferred.
First of all it is creative on the part of the broadcasting company not the TV guide publishers. So using your logic the copyright should belong to the station broadcasting and the guide people have no standing.
Yes, you are exactly correct. The Nine Network (broadcasting company) asserts ownership of the schedule. They are the party in the court case.
Yes, I'm sympathetic to that view, but it's important to recognise that sometimes the universities are trying to protect wider interests too.
In the course of various meetings with the university's "IP managers", it was explained to me that some students waltz in, do a tiny piece of a very large project involving dozens of researchers, then waltz out with a doctorate and some crucial (albeit small) IP.
Apparently, they could - in principle - then hold the entire project to ransom. These IP assignment agreements are an attempt to stop that.
It was suggested this is more of a problem in commercially hot lab-based areas like biotech - nothing at all like my research project.
From what I can gather, some people in those fields are getting PhDs as a reward for doing a three year stint as a lowly-paid lab tech and feel entitled to try it on. Personally, I reckon the answer is to actually hire lab techs and tighten up the requirements for individual contributions in doctorates.
What's "spurious" about it? If it's true that the company paid for lab equipment and (part of) your salary, why shouldn't they own the results?
Right, four things you need to understand: 1) University wanted to own the IP. 2) Industry partner did not want the IP and had no knowledge of or interest in the audacious move. 3) Industry partner provided a modest amount of cash - a quarter of the value of the scholarship (thank you Australian taxpayers). 4) There was no lab equipment or other expenses.
These are the people who don't realise that the IP agreement they're signing means that the University now owns their thoughts, dreams and lives.
I'm a postgrad student at an Australian university. One uni pressured me to assign my IP rights to them for spurious reasons involving the fact that my research was partly sponsored by an industry partner. This included granting the uni the right to withhold my research from publication! The only guarantee for me was that my PhD thesis would be "published" - even if that meant it would remain "behind the counter" at the library and hence not publicly available for (I think) two years. WTF!?
I tried to re-negotiate the terms so that the uni granted me a non-exclusive perpetual licence to my own research so that I could, for instance, work on it as a postdoc or maybe write a book down the track. No dice.
Then they tried to make it a condition of my scholarship. Fortunately, I'd already started so there was little they could do when I just refused to sign.
For other reasons, I left that uni and went to another one in the same city. Not a problem there.
Unbelievable. Still, at some level you have to admire the pure gall of it.
Your story pleases me greatly.
I'm glad you had pistols and flashlights in your face, that your equipment was confiscated, that you lost $7,000 in legal fees.
I bet you choose better friends from now on, right? And that you also take a stronger interest in what people do with your equipment.
It shows that, from time to time, the systems we have in place to stamp out child pornography do occasionally work.
Or, try Embiggen TinyURL. It works as either a bookmarklet (all browsers), GreaseMonkey script or a button on your twitter, MySpace etc page.
It expands any URLs on the current page to their full version. Very handy for staying safe.
Only the last sentence is correct. The first two are incorrect.
You're confusing "bit" as a symbol (as in, kbps) and "bit" as a unit of entropy.
When a bit is fractional (eg 1.8), it is not "a probability of transmitting the desired bit correctly". It means that on average the receiver expects her "uncertainty" (equivocation) to be reduced by 1.8 bits.
Here's an example. Suppose I hold a playing card. You are unsure which card it is out of the 52 possibilities. Given that each is equally likely, you have 5.7 bits of uncertainty - log2(52). Now, suppose I tell you that the card is a diamond. Your uncertainty dropped to 3.7 bits. (13 equally likely possibilities.) The message "the card is a diamond" therefore contains 2 bits of information, since this is how much your uncertainty dropped by. Note the change in uncertainty is only loosely related to the number of 1/0 symbols conveyed.
Use Dapper to scrape HTML tables into RSS, XML, iCal, JSON, YAML or whatever else floats your boat.
Not where I live. You're either not in a common law country (UK, Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand) or one that has strayed so far from the principles of common law that it doesn't count any more (eg South Africa, Zimbabwe).
if deadly force is justified during the act of some crimes, why can't these same crimes carry the death penalty?Here's the legalistic explanation: If a police sniper shoots a guy on a train with a bomb, this is not an act of punishment. Death is not the intent here, merely an unfortunate side-effect. It's done to stop the bomb going off. The only realistic and practicable way of achieving this is to cause a small piece of metal to travel through his head at high speed. If there was an alternative that was just as effective but not lethal, the law would mandate that be used.
I'm curious about these people who've beaten a murder rap for killing a pickpocket. Most places, you have to establish that you were in immediate fear of your life or someone else's. Would you mind digging up a link from your local paper?
I gather you mean "legal" when you say "justified"?
Um, where do you live? Sounds Hobbesian, to say the least. Got any references to instances of people killing pickpockets without sanction?
Exactly. Most courts put a higher premium on our physical integrity and well-being than mere money. Consider what is implicitly being advocated: the harshness of punishment is proportional to the amount stolen, not the violence threatened.
Would anyone be happy to see a pickpocket who steals $50 receive a harsher punishment than someone who threatens to rape you and cut your throat to steal $10? What sort of warped values would you need to have to accept that proposition?
Come on people, we've been over this already!
If you look at the scientific studies, correlation is so closely correlated with causation that it's safe to say that one causes the other.
Check the stats for yourself.
C'mon people. This old chestnut has been put to bed already
In Australia, getting TV guide data is a constant struggle due to our odd copyright laws. Since it's possible to claim copyright on a collection of facts, the TV companies banded together, assigned their copyright to one company and then milk it for monopoly profits. Another company, IceTV, started offering subscriptions (around US$12/month) but has been taken to court by the first one. While IceTV claims to have independently built their listings - and even offered to show this to the cartel's lawyers - this matter is still wending its way through court.
The response from the "underground" has been to build scrapers. Lots of scrapers. The guide publishers repond with increasingly complex obfuscation of the listings. Eg have a look at the source for this TV guide.
Yes, there are a number of working scrapers and XMLTV files are accessed - but only by people with a fair amount of technical skills. The rest either pay or go without.
Another approach - also suggested here - has been to set up a wiki with user-populated data, released under Creative Commons. This is operational and useful, but is obviously threatened by the above court action.
In light of Australia's Free Trade Agreement with the US, we can expect "copyright harmonisation". How would Americans feel about getting our bizarre law regarding copyrighting of facts?
I don't think it has to be an either/or proposition. With tags, you can use your most-frequent ones as categories. You can also keep your specific words, shiboleths and "one-shot" tags in the mix, for Technorati and other tag-based searches.
That way, you get the best of both worlds. Of course, there are other views.
The aforementioned "enthusiasts who extend Blogger in useful, novel and unexpected ways" are still digesting the implications of this change for their carefully-constructed, hand-wrought hacks. Especially those that supplement Blogger's lack of categories and comment feeds.
A good jumping off point can be found at this post: Blogger Beta Explored.
Blogger doesn't (directly) support comment feeds. If you're interested in setting this up on your Blogspot blog (so you can, for example, get truly recent comments), check out this bloghacking wiki.
I can't vouch for the security of these methods, though.
-Thetan.
Hey buddy,
You don't need a fancy antenna. Just type in your SMS, press "send" and immediately throw the phone straight up as high as you can.
It'll get through.
-Thetan.
ps Make sure you catch it again!
Ok, I dunno about actually paying for it, but it is surprisingly handy. I've been setting recordings via my (old and crappy) mobile phone for about a year. I use the wonderful, open source WebScheduler, mobile phone method explained here.
I would use this perhaps once a month - and when I do, I'm always grateful for it. It usually happens when I'm sitting in a pub somewhere and a fellow boozer laments "you know, we're missing that David Attenborough doco right now ...". I've used it when I've been held up on public transport. I've used it when my girlfriend has expressed interest in a show I had declined to watch.
If you can get it for free - and from the discussion above it seems doable - then you should set it up.
The real power of delicious is that they allow you to get your tags back in a multitude of ways - HTML, RSS and JSON. This means you can integrate your tags into your content to create a better browsing experience. (JSON is also the preferred data interchange method for Yahoo.)
Delicious also allow you to tap into the "hive mind" by using a generic mode whereby you can see tags/URLs for all users, not just your own account. Somewhat perversely, Joshua announced that they have stopped supporting this mode with JSON - leaving only RSS. In fact, Joshua stated that the /json/tag/* was just an "accident" in the first place!
Anyone got any theories as to why that is? Why publish "socialised content" as (much heavier) RSS feeds but disallow lightweight JSON feeds? Is it to drive users to Yahoo? Or stop third party searches and other add-ons? Maybe it's the more prosaic "we forgot to put it in the specs, now we can't be arsed supporting it 'cause it's someone else's baby now."
It was clear your original remark about the use of term "semiotics" was in the context of the Anglosphere. This is a broader concept than the United States. You'll find semiotics - as a category - is a bigger deal in the rest of the English-speaking world.
Re: research relevance. Does (eg) Harnard not count?