When diplomats get embarrassed by seeing their confidential memos getting put in newspapers the next day, they may very well start self-censoring their memos. It's kind of important for diplomats and analysts to not self-censor, because Big Things get decided based on their reports. The net result of these cable leaks will very likely be no paper trails at all, or incomplete reports being sent up the command chain, and that doesn't really serve the public in the long term.
I don't actually hate Silverlight. I'm not really sure why I should, other than the obvious (it's a microsoft technology). What can I say? It works just fine on the browsers and operating systems I use. It does seem like it's better than Flash. The only thing that bothers me is how often Netflix complains I don't have the most up-to-date version of the plug-in on the various computers I use. Would I prefer everybody use HMTL5 though? Sure. But we're not at that point yet, and I'm much more concerned about scrubbing all the icky Flash off the web first. Can somebody explain to me why Silverlight is the enemy?
Amazing what two little words can do to the comments section of slashdot. My guess is nobody actually RTFA, and everyone was too busy cracking jokes about the summary to care.
Hehe, your link is funny. It's about metadata being bad, but then it clearly says Google does metadata right towards the bottom.
Clearly there's little incentive for news sites to actually use this meta tag. I think it's obvious why a lot of sites will quietly ignore it and of course others will try to exploit it. Still, Google is usually pretty smart about figuring out how to use metadata. I'm going to wait and see what they do with it before I condemn it.
My first thought of course was this would simply stop duplicate stories from being at the top of the page, but I think you're right, this won't just bring different articles towards the first page of results, it will ensure that "better" articles are in their rightful place, by pooling together the popularity of identical articles, and using that as the basis for page rank (presumably for whichever was the original source).
I'm sure a lot of news companies who want to share articles because it's a cheap way of doing business will simply not use these tags though, so they can still get ad revenue from dupes. Hopefully Google's new emphasis on the news will yield new formulas to both fact-check whether or not an article is an original source, and to prevent dupes regardless of people using the new meta tags or not.
While I don't entirely agree with you that Alta Vista fell because of meta tags (at least, not alone), meta tags are indeed fairly easy to spoof. Obviously anybody can claim they are the original source. Obviously anybody can just ignore these tags entirely.
One can hope that Google will do at least some extra checking as well. As they say in TFA, Google will be looking at how these are used in the wild before they make any big changes in how they display their news.
My Apple laptop has a little button, and if I press it, even when it's off, a strip of lights come on to tell me how much power capacity I have on it. Maybe you should turn in your Schrodinger's Laptop for a better one.
I ran into this problem myself recently. While it doesn't surprise me in the least, I was shocked by the magnitude of how badly it killed my battery. I had a browser open with a few tabs, not that many open. My battery life which I normally have at about 10 hours remaining on a full charge dropped suddenly to 4 when I unplugged it and went mobile. Closing just one of those tabs, which had a few flash ads on there, and the battery life went up to 8 hours!
How was this marked insightful? It's just a rambling conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Guess what, folks, computers aren't phones, and browsers can download stuff from the internets if you're not on a phone! Even if Apple wanted to create a walled garden, they'll never be able to, if for no other reason than developers don't want to give up 30% of their software price, and never will.
Justice isn't served by making examples of people. Justice is in doing ridiculous amounts of hard work to make sure that only the people who are guilty are convicted, and then the punishment meets the crime. The problem is, the RIAA doesn't want to do ridiculous amounts of work, they want a few big splashy news articles to scare people. If the legal system is truly interested in justice, it should not allow the RIAA to abuse it so.
Again, making examples of people is not justice. You see those statues with the blindfolded lady holding up a scale? The scale isn't balanced by million dollar verdicts for sharing 24 songs. That's an imbalanced scale. The blindfolded lady is crying. The RIAA made her cry by breaking her lovely scale.
1. This is the applicable law. 2. You are here to determine exactly what happened. 3. You are here to serve justice.
Note "justice", not "the law". Jury nullification is a valid part of common law. Judges hate it, prosecutors and the police hate it, but it's a part of the legal system. We have jurors, rather than just a judge, because jurors are the conscience of the system. A judge is sworn to uphold the law. A juror is there to make sure justice is carried out, regardless of the applicable law. Juries are part of our democracy, and juries do have a say in how the (democratically created) law is enforced, or not.
I would love for evidentiary hearings to also have juries in the room, like the good old days, but sadly we haven't had that in a while.
Which is why the plaintiff should have to prove just how much data was actually shared, and to whom. Theoretical number-pulling-out-of-dark-places arguments is all the RIAA is bringing to the table here. If the RIAA can't prove how much was actually distributed, they haven't proved a crime has been committed. Certainly, they can't prove they've had a million dollars of damages.
Jury nullification is a valid part of common law, but unfortunately one that's maligned by judges and prosecutors. Most juries aren't aware they can ignore the law in the interests of justice, but they can.
That said, it won't be until a jury convicts somebody, and that person appeals to a high enough court that a law can be overturned. The long expensive way is the only way that justice is served long-term.
Personally I like being a juror. It's a break from the routine, and I get to influence a system that hopefully I'll never be subjected to, but if I ever am, a system I would like to function well.
I also vote in every election.
Sadly civic-minded people like myself are rather rare.
Jury nullification, while a valid part of common law, has sadly been facing increased barriers of late, with judges attempting to crush any and all mention of the possibility to juries. Juries these days feel they aren't allowed to nullify, and that they're there to serve the law rather than justice. I haven't been in a jury yet where nullification was something I wanted to do, but if I ever am I will do my best to educate my fellow jurors.
While my own experiences are quite similar to yours, studies have shown that people tend to trust law enforcement witnesses more than any other witnesses, believe that defendants wouldn't be in court if they are guilty, and a host of other biases that do unfortunately lead to problems. Ideally, judges are able to instruct juries properly to eliminate those biases, but judges aren't perfect either.
Yeah, where the heck are these jurors coming from? I've never been on a jury for a civil case before, but I find it hard to believe the juries on civil cases would be so callous. On criminal juries, at least the ones I've been on, people have been extremely mindful and considerate.
Undeniably, this is a good thing. I rather dislike Microsoft, but I'll give them kudos for making progress towards standards compliance. So good job, Microsoft. Hopefully other browsers will be all like "oh shit, Microsoft is kicking our asses in standard compliance" and step it up a notch. IE versus Netscape was a terrible time, but now that we've got a lot more competition in the market, browsers are getting better.
I thought the exact same thing as grandparent, when I read the carrier pigeon thing. Judging by the pictures of North Korean soldiers, and how malnourished they looked, it wouldn't surprise me if border guards started shooting down the carrier pigeons.
Also, considering how those soldiers looked, I have to say a war against North Korea would not scare me in the slightest, aside from the nuke thing. I imagine just seeing our well-fed muscular soldiers would make them all want to throw down their arms immediately and become POWs so they could be fed decently.
Uh, what? This is probably a joke, but it's so bizarre that I feel I have to take it at least somewhat seriously and ask for sources on all that.
Even assuming ice can "evolve" to become resistant to something as a lifeless frozen chemical, I can find no useful results for wikipedia and google searches for ice mites.
Slashdot Mirror
When diplomats get embarrassed by seeing their confidential memos getting put in newspapers the next day, they may very well start self-censoring their memos. It's kind of important for diplomats and analysts to not self-censor, because Big Things get decided based on their reports. The net result of these cable leaks will very likely be no paper trails at all, or incomplete reports being sent up the command chain, and that doesn't really serve the public in the long term.
I don't actually hate Silverlight. I'm not really sure why I should, other than the obvious (it's a microsoft technology). What can I say? It works just fine on the browsers and operating systems I use. It does seem like it's better than Flash. The only thing that bothers me is how often Netflix complains I don't have the most up-to-date version of the plug-in on the various computers I use. Would I prefer everybody use HMTL5 though? Sure. But we're not at that point yet, and I'm much more concerned about scrubbing all the icky Flash off the web first. Can somebody explain to me why Silverlight is the enemy?
Amazing what two little words can do to the comments section of slashdot. My guess is nobody actually RTFA, and everyone was too busy cracking jokes about the summary to care.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of Homeland Security.
Seriously, how did this make slashdot? It's completely unfounded speculation that doesn't even make sense.
Hehe, your link is funny. It's about metadata being bad, but then it clearly says Google does metadata right towards the bottom.
Clearly there's little incentive for news sites to actually use this meta tag. I think it's obvious why a lot of sites will quietly ignore it and of course others will try to exploit it. Still, Google is usually pretty smart about figuring out how to use metadata. I'm going to wait and see what they do with it before I condemn it.
My first thought of course was this would simply stop duplicate stories from being at the top of the page, but I think you're right, this won't just bring different articles towards the first page of results, it will ensure that "better" articles are in their rightful place, by pooling together the popularity of identical articles, and using that as the basis for page rank (presumably for whichever was the original source).
I'm sure a lot of news companies who want to share articles because it's a cheap way of doing business will simply not use these tags though, so they can still get ad revenue from dupes. Hopefully Google's new emphasis on the news will yield new formulas to both fact-check whether or not an article is an original source, and to prevent dupes regardless of people using the new meta tags or not.
While I don't entirely agree with you that Alta Vista fell because of meta tags (at least, not alone), meta tags are indeed fairly easy to spoof. Obviously anybody can claim they are the original source. Obviously anybody can just ignore these tags entirely.
One can hope that Google will do at least some extra checking as well. As they say in TFA, Google will be looking at how these are used in the wild before they make any big changes in how they display their news.
My Apple laptop has a little button, and if I press it, even when it's off, a strip of lights come on to tell me how much power capacity I have on it. Maybe you should turn in your Schrodinger's Laptop for a better one.
I ran into this problem myself recently. While it doesn't surprise me in the least, I was shocked by the magnitude of how badly it killed my battery. I had a browser open with a few tabs, not that many open. My battery life which I normally have at about 10 hours remaining on a full charge dropped suddenly to 4 when I unplugged it and went mobile. Closing just one of those tabs, which had a few flash ads on there, and the battery life went up to 8 hours!
How was this marked insightful? It's just a rambling conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Guess what, folks, computers aren't phones, and browsers can download stuff from the internets if you're not on a phone! Even if Apple wanted to create a walled garden, they'll never be able to, if for no other reason than developers don't want to give up 30% of their software price, and never will.
Justice isn't served by making examples of people. Justice is in doing ridiculous amounts of hard work to make sure that only the people who are guilty are convicted, and then the punishment meets the crime. The problem is, the RIAA doesn't want to do ridiculous amounts of work, they want a few big splashy news articles to scare people. If the legal system is truly interested in justice, it should not allow the RIAA to abuse it so.
Again, making examples of people is not justice. You see those statues with the blindfolded lady holding up a scale? The scale isn't balanced by million dollar verdicts for sharing 24 songs. That's an imbalanced scale. The blindfolded lady is crying. The RIAA made her cry by breaking her lovely scale.
The scales of justice are way out of calibration if you think that.
An eye for an eye. No less, but no more.
Jury instructions should be rather simple.
1. This is the applicable law.
2. You are here to determine exactly what happened.
3. You are here to serve justice.
Note "justice", not "the law". Jury nullification is a valid part of common law. Judges hate it, prosecutors and the police hate it, but it's a part of the legal system. We have jurors, rather than just a judge, because jurors are the conscience of the system. A judge is sworn to uphold the law. A juror is there to make sure justice is carried out, regardless of the applicable law. Juries are part of our democracy, and juries do have a say in how the (democratically created) law is enforced, or not.
I would love for evidentiary hearings to also have juries in the room, like the good old days, but sadly we haven't had that in a while.
Which is why the plaintiff should have to prove just how much data was actually shared, and to whom. Theoretical number-pulling-out-of-dark-places arguments is all the RIAA is bringing to the table here. If the RIAA can't prove how much was actually distributed, they haven't proved a crime has been committed. Certainly, they can't prove they've had a million dollars of damages.
Jury nullification is a valid part of common law, but unfortunately one that's maligned by judges and prosecutors. Most juries aren't aware they can ignore the law in the interests of justice, but they can.
That said, it won't be until a jury convicts somebody, and that person appeals to a high enough court that a law can be overturned. The long expensive way is the only way that justice is served long-term.
Personally I like being a juror. It's a break from the routine, and I get to influence a system that hopefully I'll never be subjected to, but if I ever am, a system I would like to function well.
I also vote in every election.
Sadly civic-minded people like myself are rather rare.
Did millions of people download from her?
Jury nullification, while a valid part of common law, has sadly been facing increased barriers of late, with judges attempting to crush any and all mention of the possibility to juries. Juries these days feel they aren't allowed to nullify, and that they're there to serve the law rather than justice. I haven't been in a jury yet where nullification was something I wanted to do, but if I ever am I will do my best to educate my fellow jurors.
While my own experiences are quite similar to yours, studies have shown that people tend to trust law enforcement witnesses more than any other witnesses, believe that defendants wouldn't be in court if they are guilty, and a host of other biases that do unfortunately lead to problems. Ideally, judges are able to instruct juries properly to eliminate those biases, but judges aren't perfect either.
Maybe if the movie is a blockbuster, politicians will change the laws to be more reasonable.
Yeah, where the heck are these jurors coming from? I've never been on a jury for a civil case before, but I find it hard to believe the juries on civil cases would be so callous. On criminal juries, at least the ones I've been on, people have been extremely mindful and considerate.
Undeniably, this is a good thing. I rather dislike Microsoft, but I'll give them kudos for making progress towards standards compliance. So good job, Microsoft. Hopefully other browsers will be all like "oh shit, Microsoft is kicking our asses in standard compliance" and step it up a notch. IE versus Netscape was a terrible time, but now that we've got a lot more competition in the market, browsers are getting better.
I thought the exact same thing as grandparent, when I read the carrier pigeon thing. Judging by the pictures of North Korean soldiers, and how malnourished they looked, it wouldn't surprise me if border guards started shooting down the carrier pigeons.
Also, considering how those soldiers looked, I have to say a war against North Korea would not scare me in the slightest, aside from the nuke thing. I imagine just seeing our well-fed muscular soldiers would make them all want to throw down their arms immediately and become POWs so they could be fed decently.
Uh, what? This is probably a joke, but it's so bizarre that I feel I have to take it at least somewhat seriously and ask for sources on all that.
Even assuming ice can "evolve" to become resistant to something as a lifeless frozen chemical, I can find no useful results for wikipedia and google searches for ice mites.