If they give the hi quality picture to WP, it goes out into the world where anyone can do anything with it.
I'm not sure what "high quality" has to do with it, but I'm thinking the photo doesn't have to be high quality. Even a snapshot by the person's agent or spouse would be better than many of the pictures on Wikipedia, which are often taken from awkward angles. Maybe it would be easier if we could leave professional photographers out of it altogether, at that. Nor does the photo have to be high resolution (if that's what you mean by quality). Hey, they could even put a watermark on it if they wanted to keep it from being misused.
a significant difference between an amateur and a pro is just the number of shots taken.
And this is surely the solution to the problem: professional photographers must have hundreds of pictures of their subjects, most of which will never be used because they are second-rate, though still better than the picture on Wikipedia. Why can't they release THOSE pictures under CC, instead of just throwing them in the trash?
Ah, yes, the "internal complaint procedure". Criteria for responding: decide which party is most likely to sue or successfully make a stink in the press, and placate that party, regardless of fault.
Sounds like good ol' capitalism to me: whaddya got against capitalism?
Re:Paper tape of course
on
R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 2, Funny
I send my files in by paper tape sent by a bonded, armed courier.
I would like spam sorting also; I never empty my spam folder without reviewing it for false positives (which I rarely get, but still), and it would be very handy to sort it by subject, so that I can bypass duplicate spams all at once.
OK, this is probably too expensive, but maybe for the future: give each cow an RFID chip with a unique identifier. The chip broadcasts its identity over a short distance, and any time the RFID chip detects another chip nearby, it adds it to an internal list. When you find a sick cow, check its list: all those cows are problematic as well. Of course, if some of those cows are out on the range you might not find them right away, but humans who interact with the cows carry detectors with them so that movement can be traced to some degree. (Asking for strict monitoring of location may be difficult, but even sloppy monitoring is better than nothing.)
As to the proposed plan, I don't understand why ranchers would have to scan each cow individually; couldn't the chips be RFID chips and read from a distance. Wouldn't it be enough to get them to walk through some sort of gate, or drive by the herd? I don't really understand RFID but I know people are wrapping their passports in tinfoil because they're afraid of being detected, so it sounds like a human should be able to carry an RFID detector on their belt and have it register the cows automatically.
It's clear that we need professional journalists to exist, to write stories beyond what can be done by amateur bloggers. But there's no reason that these journalists have to work in media-- that is, the journalists don't have to be employed by the distribution mechanisms like newspapers. IMVHO, one good route might be to have non-profit journalism organizations, supported by grants and reader contributions, who do the reporting and writing. They can provide their reports on a website for free or for pay, and also sell them to local newsbundlers who produce a hardcopy of the day's news for commuters and other people who like a physical paper (maybe printed on demand). Because they're non-profit, they might be able to attract charitable contributions, and even if they charge for news access on their websites, it isn't such a big deal to have their stories showing up on blogs or paraphrased, so long as no one is doing so regularly and blatantly (e.g. posting all the day's stories on their blog). Perhaps they could run a system where for a certain fee, a blogger could "adopt" a story's link and make it freely available for everyone to read. There will be cheating, but maybe there's enough money in it for them too.
We also need to develop a sense among people that paying for the news is a citizens' responsibility, when they can afford it. One way to do this is to provide funding for news agencies out of federal or state taxes, although some might balk at the government deciding which news agencies are worthy of the funding. Another possibility could be to have such a tax, but also provide a tax waiver for anyone who can prove that they have donated $X to a news agency in the past year. That gives people the right to support news agencies of their own choice if they so desire, although we'll have to watch out for fraud with people setting up false newspapers or newssites, particularly political candidates. We could make payments to newspapers and other news agencies a potential itemized deduction, and look for fraud via the usual tax audits.
Or maybe something less formal is better: how can we change the perceptions of a culture, so that we recognize that some things are worth paying for?
I agree the multiple asterisks for each keystroke is a dumb system. However, I just think the no-feedback route would be just as unhelpful to many people, and I'd guess that that's the reason they came up with the asterisks in the first place.
I'm sure as hell not going to type in the address twice just because they think everyone's a moron. Why not make me type in my name or address twice, just to make sure there are no typos? Mistakes are possible in any field, it's time to find a better way to handle them (I would suggest starting with a method that actually works).
If any other information is incorrect, they can email you and ask you for a correction. If your email is incorrect, then they have no way of asking you for a correction. For the same reason, the most important part of a voicemail message from a stranger is the telephone number; you can always call them and ask them what their name is, but a name without a phone number is much less helpful.
I don't personally find it so difficult to type in my email address twice; perhaps you need a shorter address?
I agree; I generally get 1 or 2 messages per day (on average) that escape the Gmail filter. However, one of the email addresses I have forwarded there is roughly 14 years old, and was used on Usenet, so everybody's got it by now. To fix this, I've created a label called "!Spam", and as spam leaks through the filter I try to come up with a filter to send messages of that kind to !Spam, bypassing the inbox. I go through those messages to check for false positives regularly, but at least the spam doesn't show up in my email alerts, which makes me happy.
The only comparison that matters is you could write and run your own code on the C64 and you cannot on the iPhone.
Hmm, I would have thought another important distinction would be that one of them fits in your pocket, and the other is the size of a breadbox, not including the monitor.
Not to dismiss the calls for greater openness on the iPhone, which I fully support, but I can't help but imagine what a typical C64 user back in the day would think about this conversation. "Wait, you want to run a program on your WHAT? Your PHONE? Does your program have to be all in numbers, or what? Can I program with a rotary dial?" (I know most phones were touch-tone at the time, but we still had a rotary dial.)
He argues that a lot of what is taught in school ISN'T useful to most people, something that students have been catching on to for decades. It shouldn't take TWELVE YEARS to cover the useful part of math. My favorite part of the article was when he described trigonometry as being two weeks of material spread out over a semester; I teach college physics and this is very true. The trigonometry we use in mechanics problems can easily be explained in one class, even to people who have never seen it before.
Arithmetic: useful (though what we really need is the ability to estimate calculations in our head; precise results of large problems can be left to a calculator). Geometric formulas (areas and volumes): useful. Basic trig: useful. But algebra in everyday life? Who solves quadratic equations in everyday life?
And the worst part is that when an adult comes to a point where he needs to use some higher mathematics, he often can't do it because he's developed a block after spending 12 years doing drudgery mislabelled as mathematics. Maybe if we vastly reduced the required mathematics curriculum, then people would have more of an open mind about mathematics, and find it much easier to learn as adults once they're in a situation where they really need it. Come to think of it, the same is probably true of most standard subjects: would more people enjoy Shakespeare if they weren't forced to read his plays in high school under threat of failure?
If they had masters degrees in their subject areas, they wouldn't ever want to bother with the bullshit of being a teacher.
That's not true; there are plenty of PhDs who are passionate about teaching. From my point of view (as an intermittent physics professor), the problem with teaching in public schools is not the teaching part, but all the other crap that public school teachers have to do: discipline, hall monitoring, formal lesson plans, standardized tests, and the like-- not to mention the lower pay. Give high school teachers the academic freedom that college professors have, and you'd get more PhDs teaching high school.
That said, I think some training in education methods is essential for teachers particularly at the lower grades. The disconnect is too great otherwise; I would have a difficult time teaching science to 3rd graders because I wouldn't know how to describe things in a way they understand. Maybe (*maybe*) a whole M.A. in education is overkill, but some form of training along those lines seems vital to me.
My reasons for using LaTeX (as if anyone cares)
on
MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In this economy, it is unconscionable to get theory students "hooked" on commercial software like Word, Mathematica, or Matlab, when there are free alternatives. I've been out of grad school for about six years now, and haven't had a full-time job for four, which means no one is going to buy me pricey software. I am still maintaining a somewhat active research program in the hopes of jumping back into academia, so thank goodness that all of my graduate work was in C, rather than in Mathematica like my undergraduate work. This doesn't make as much difference to an unemployed experimentalist, of course-- software is probably the least expensive thing they lack-- but for a mathematician or theoretical physicist it makes all the difference.
I don't really care so much about how purty LaTeX looks, and in fact I often have to wrestle with it to get it to do what I want instead of what it wants. But I like that it lets me type in equations quickly (so much so that I often do algebraic derivation scratchwork on LaTeX, rather than on paper), I like that I can define elaborate macros (I use \def; none of this \newcommand stuff for me), and I like that my documents are completely transparent, being plain text files, and I can edit them anywhere.
If I were teaching a business course at a community college, I might require students to work in Word and Excel, because it prepares them to use the tools they are most likely to see in their professional life, and it's a fair bet (I'm guessing; I don't teach business) that many of my students won't have much experience with them.
As stated, this is really just AdBlock trying to make you feel guilty about blocking the ads on your favorite sites; there's no advantage for the user because it's easy to select "Disable on www.example.com" for any page you want to support.
Adblock gives us power over advertisers, and we should be using that power to make advertising better, by demanding concessions from the ad companies. Put together a list of companies (or adservers) which agree to a certain code of conduct-- no Flash, no animation, no NSFW, etc, and then give Adblock users the capability to show ads IF they are on sites the user wants to support AND if the ads come from a company on the list. It wouldn't even have to be the whole company; adservers could provide special "sanitized" feeds which would be put on the list. If they break the pledge, Adblock users complain and they get taken off the list.
---- Another, completely different idea: one thing I dislike about ads is how they clutter up a page. What if you could tell Adblock to shunt a page's advertising over to a specially designated ad window. Each ad could be labelled with the name of the site it came from, and you could peruse it at your leisure (or not-- the website will still get credit for eyeballs). Of course, you could specify which sites should have their ads shunted, and which should have their ads blocked. (And yeah, I know that this sounds a little like bringing back the pop-up ad, but in this case all the images end up in one window, which you can keep minimized if you like.)
Is this sort of behavior possible for a Firefox extension?
What part of our confrontational legal system does the RIAA not understand?
Absolutely: of COURSE they're biased. They're an ADVOCACY group. In some fields (e.g. journalism) "biased" is an insult; in this case, "biased" is their job.
No doubt the RIAA demands the same level of unbiasedness from their lawyers, right? "Your Honor, my client might be guilty, they might be innocent, hard to say really. On the one hand...but on the other hand....":)
For an introvert like me, it is easier to make friends in a group of 8 than in a group of 80. In the former, everyone knows everyone else, you can all go out for coffee or dinner, and each person feels like an important part of the group. In the group of 80, you can't really bond with everyone, so you have to pick and choose-- a difficult task for me, and I become overwhelmed by the number of choices and end up alone and anonymous.
I don't think cities and towns work in precisely the same way-- even Lake Wobegon is too large for you to get to know *everyone* quickly, so we all have to find our own cliques-- but there are similarities, no doubt.
When the government tries to do this, people can create an uproar and get politicians to back down-- it's hard to do, but it's possible. If a health insurance company does it, what can you do? If it were truly a free market, you could vote with your feet, but (a) most Americans get their health insurance through their employer (not a lot of choice there); (b) if you're already sick and running into problems with your healthcare, you probably can't switch: other insurance companies will turn you down because of your pre-existing condition; and (c) there is a large barrier (I think) for a new company to enter the health-insurance business, so all of the majors can adopt the same policies without worrying that some new company will come along, provide better service, and steal their customers.
Government responsiveness isn't great but it's wonderful compared to megacorporation responsiveness. (In my opinion anyway: I think one of the defining political distinctions in America is whether corporate rule or government rule sucks less.)
Slashdot Mirror
If they give the hi quality picture to WP, it goes out into the world where anyone can do anything with it.
I'm not sure what "high quality" has to do with it, but I'm thinking the photo doesn't have to be high quality. Even a snapshot by the person's agent or spouse would be better than many of the pictures on Wikipedia, which are often taken from awkward angles. Maybe it would be easier if we could leave professional photographers out of it altogether, at that. Nor does the photo have to be high resolution (if that's what you mean by quality). Hey, they could even put a watermark on it if they wanted to keep it from being misused.
a significant difference between an amateur and a pro is just the number of shots taken.
And this is surely the solution to the problem: professional photographers must have hundreds of pictures of their subjects, most of which will never be used because they are second-rate, though still better than the picture on Wikipedia. Why can't they release THOSE pictures under CC, instead of just throwing them in the trash?
Ah, yes, the "internal complaint procedure". Criteria for responding: decide which party is most likely to sue or successfully make a stink in the press, and placate that party, regardless of fault.
Sounds like good ol' capitalism to me: whaddya got against capitalism?
I send my files in by paper tape sent by a bonded, armed courier.
You only think he's a courier. Muhahahaha!
(Now where's that Anonymous button...?)
Al Gore received 90% of the black vote in 2000, and John Kerry received 88% of the black vote in 2004. (Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/10/21/black-support-for-obama-at-near-record-levels/)
So your 65% number is bullshit.
Since this is off-topic I'll say no more.
I would like spam sorting also; I never empty my spam folder without reviewing it for false positives (which I rarely get, but still), and it would be very handy to sort it by subject, so that I can bypass duplicate spams all at once.
OK, this is probably too expensive, but maybe for the future: give each cow an RFID chip with a unique identifier. The chip broadcasts its identity over a short distance, and any time the RFID chip detects another chip nearby, it adds it to an internal list. When you find a sick cow, check its list: all those cows are problematic as well. Of course, if some of those cows are out on the range you might not find them right away, but humans who interact with the cows carry detectors with them so that movement can be traced to some degree. (Asking for strict monitoring of location may be difficult, but even sloppy monitoring is better than nothing.)
As to the proposed plan, I don't understand why ranchers would have to scan each cow individually; couldn't the chips be RFID chips and read from a distance. Wouldn't it be enough to get them to walk through some sort of gate, or drive by the herd? I don't really understand RFID but I know people are wrapping their passports in tinfoil because they're afraid of being detected, so it sounds like a human should be able to carry an RFID detector on their belt and have it register the cows automatically.
If only plants actually tasted good....
Cellphones generally have to be charged, and cellphones don't always work everywhere in the house.
It's clear that we need professional journalists to exist, to write stories beyond what can be done by amateur bloggers. But there's no reason that these journalists have to work in media-- that is, the journalists don't have to be employed by the distribution mechanisms like newspapers. IMVHO, one good route might be to have non-profit journalism organizations, supported by grants and reader contributions, who do the reporting and writing. They can provide their reports on a website for free or for pay, and also sell them to local newsbundlers who produce a hardcopy of the day's news for commuters and other people who like a physical paper (maybe printed on demand). Because they're non-profit, they might be able to attract charitable contributions, and even if they charge for news access on their websites, it isn't such a big deal to have their stories showing up on blogs or paraphrased, so long as no one is doing so regularly and blatantly (e.g. posting all the day's stories on their blog). Perhaps they could run a system where for a certain fee, a blogger could "adopt" a story's link and make it freely available for everyone to read. There will be cheating, but maybe there's enough money in it for them too.
We also need to develop a sense among people that paying for the news is a citizens' responsibility, when they can afford it. One way to do this is to provide funding for news agencies out of federal or state taxes, although some might balk at the government deciding which news agencies are worthy of the funding. Another possibility could be to have such a tax, but also provide a tax waiver for anyone who can prove that they have donated $X to a news agency in the past year. That gives people the right to support news agencies of their own choice if they so desire, although we'll have to watch out for fraud with people setting up false newspapers or newssites, particularly political candidates. We could make payments to newspapers and other news agencies a potential itemized deduction, and look for fraud via the usual tax audits.
Or maybe something less formal is better: how can we change the perceptions of a culture, so that we recognize that some things are worth paying for?
I agree the multiple asterisks for each keystroke is a dumb system. However, I just think the no-feedback route would be just as unhelpful to many people, and I'd guess that that's the reason they came up with the asterisks in the first place.
I'm sure as hell not going to type in the address twice just because they think everyone's a moron. Why not make me type in my name or address twice, just to make sure there are no typos? Mistakes are possible in any field, it's time to find a better way to handle them (I would suggest starting with a method that actually works).
If any other information is incorrect, they can email you and ask you for a correction. If your email is incorrect, then they have no way of asking you for a correction. For the same reason, the most important part of a voicemail message from a stranger is the telephone number; you can always call them and ask them what their name is, but a name without a phone number is much less helpful.
I don't personally find it so difficult to type in my email address twice; perhaps you need a shorter address?
Because without some sort of feedback, one might suspect that the computer has frozen up.
I agree; I generally get 1 or 2 messages per day (on average) that escape the Gmail filter. However, one of the email addresses I have forwarded there is roughly 14 years old, and was used on Usenet, so everybody's got it by now.
To fix this, I've created a label called "!Spam", and as spam leaks through the filter I try to come up with a filter to send messages of that kind to !Spam, bypassing the inbox. I go through those messages to check for false positives regularly, but at least the spam doesn't show up in my email alerts, which makes me happy.
The only comparison that matters is you could write and run your own code on the C64 and you cannot on the iPhone.
Hmm, I would have thought another important distinction would be that one of them fits in your pocket, and the other is the size of a breadbox, not including the monitor.
Not to dismiss the calls for greater openness on the iPhone, which I fully support, but I can't help but imagine what a typical C64 user back in the day would think about this conversation. "Wait, you want to run a program on your WHAT? Your PHONE? Does your program have to be all in numbers, or what? Can I program with a rotary dial?" (I know most phones were touch-tone at the time, but we still had a rotary dial.)
It's just funny. :)
He argues that a lot of what is taught in school ISN'T useful to most people, something that students have been catching on to for decades. It shouldn't take TWELVE YEARS to cover the useful part of math. My favorite part of the article was when he described trigonometry as being two weeks of material spread out over a semester; I teach college physics and this is very true. The trigonometry we use in mechanics problems can easily be explained in one class, even to people who have never seen it before.
Arithmetic: useful (though what we really need is the ability to estimate calculations in our head; precise results of large problems can be left to a calculator). Geometric formulas (areas and volumes): useful. Basic trig: useful. But algebra in everyday life? Who solves quadratic equations in everyday life?
And the worst part is that when an adult comes to a point where he needs to use some higher mathematics, he often can't do it because he's developed a block after spending 12 years doing drudgery mislabelled as mathematics. Maybe if we vastly reduced the required mathematics curriculum, then people would have more of an open mind about mathematics, and find it much easier to learn as adults once they're in a situation where they really need it. Come to think of it, the same is probably true of most standard subjects: would more people enjoy Shakespeare if they weren't forced to read his plays in high school under threat of failure?
If they had masters degrees in their subject areas, they wouldn't ever want to bother with the bullshit of being a teacher.
That's not true; there are plenty of PhDs who are passionate about teaching. From my point of view (as an intermittent physics professor), the problem with teaching in public schools is not the teaching part, but all the other crap that public school teachers have to do: discipline, hall monitoring, formal lesson plans, standardized tests, and the like-- not to mention the lower pay. Give high school teachers the academic freedom that college professors have, and you'd get more PhDs teaching high school.
That said, I think some training in education methods is essential for teachers particularly at the lower grades. The disconnect is too great otherwise; I would have a difficult time teaching science to 3rd graders because I wouldn't know how to describe things in a way they understand. Maybe (*maybe*) a whole M.A. in education is overkill, but some form of training along those lines seems vital to me.
In this economy, it is unconscionable to get theory students "hooked" on commercial software like Word, Mathematica, or Matlab, when there are free alternatives. I've been out of grad school for about six years now, and haven't had a full-time job for four, which means no one is going to buy me pricey software. I am still maintaining a somewhat active research program in the hopes of jumping back into academia, so thank goodness that all of my graduate work was in C, rather than in Mathematica like my undergraduate work. This doesn't make as much difference to an unemployed experimentalist, of course-- software is probably the least expensive thing they lack-- but for a mathematician or theoretical physicist it makes all the difference.
I don't really care so much about how purty LaTeX looks, and in fact I often have to wrestle with it to get it to do what I want instead of what it wants. But I like that it lets me type in equations quickly (so much so that I often do algebraic derivation scratchwork on LaTeX, rather than on paper), I like that I can define elaborate macros (I use \def; none of this \newcommand stuff for me), and I like that my documents are completely transparent, being plain text files, and I can edit them anywhere.
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Said the man who won the Nobel Prize...in chemistry. :)
If I were teaching a business course at a community college, I might require students to work in Word and Excel, because it prepares them to use the tools they are most likely to see in their professional life, and it's a fair bet (I'm guessing; I don't teach business) that many of my students won't have much experience with them.
As stated, this is really just AdBlock trying to make you feel guilty about blocking the ads on your favorite sites; there's no advantage for the user because it's easy to select "Disable on www.example.com" for any page you want to support.
Adblock gives us power over advertisers, and we should be using that power to make advertising better, by demanding concessions from the ad companies. Put together a list of companies (or adservers) which agree to a certain code of conduct-- no Flash, no animation, no NSFW, etc, and then give Adblock users the capability to show ads IF they are on sites the user wants to support AND if the ads come from a company on the list. It wouldn't even have to be the whole company; adservers could provide special "sanitized" feeds which would be put on the list. If they break the pledge, Adblock users complain and they get taken off the list.
----
Another, completely different idea: one thing I dislike about ads is how they clutter up a page. What if you could tell Adblock to shunt a page's advertising over to a specially designated ad window. Each ad could be labelled with the name of the site it came from, and you could peruse it at your leisure (or not-- the website will still get credit for eyeballs). Of course, you could specify which sites should have their ads shunted, and which should have their ads blocked. (And yeah, I know that this sounds a little like bringing back the pop-up ad, but in this case all the images end up in one window, which you can keep minimized if you like.)
Is this sort of behavior possible for a Firefox extension?
Considering that we're talking about Sweden, saying that the US Democratic party has been usurped by socialists is pretty funny.
What part of our confrontational legal system does the RIAA not understand?
Absolutely: of COURSE they're biased. They're an ADVOCACY group. In some fields (e.g. journalism) "biased" is an insult; in this case, "biased" is their job.
No doubt the RIAA demands the same level of unbiasedness from their lawyers, right? "Your Honor, my client might be guilty, they might be innocent, hard to say really. On the one hand...but on the other hand...." :)
For an introvert like me, it is easier to make friends in a group of 8 than in a group of 80. In the former, everyone knows everyone else, you can all go out for coffee or dinner, and each person feels like an important part of the group. In the group of 80, you can't really bond with everyone, so you have to pick and choose-- a difficult task for me, and I become overwhelmed by the number of choices and end up alone and anonymous.
I don't think cities and towns work in precisely the same way-- even Lake Wobegon is too large for you to get to know *everyone* quickly, so we all have to find our own cliques-- but there are similarities, no doubt.
When the government tries to do this, people can create an uproar and get politicians to back down-- it's hard to do, but it's possible. If a health insurance company does it, what can you do? If it were truly a free market, you could vote with your feet, but
(a) most Americans get their health insurance through their employer (not a lot of choice there);
(b) if you're already sick and running into problems with your healthcare, you probably can't switch: other insurance companies will turn you down because of your pre-existing condition; and
(c) there is a large barrier (I think) for a new company to enter the health-insurance business, so all of the majors can adopt the same policies without worrying that some new company will come along, provide better service, and steal their customers.
Government responsiveness isn't great but it's wonderful compared to megacorporation responsiveness. (In my opinion anyway: I think one of the defining political distinctions in America is whether corporate rule or government rule sucks less.)