A science class is well... a science class. It's ultimately about science. What is science? How does it work? How is it applied? How has it been applied?
It depends. If you start talking to a ten-year-old about the cause of his and the world's existence, do you really think the only questions he'll have are "could you tell me more about the experimental data collection methods?" Science can only work just as a science class if there are philosophy and religion classes available for the non-science questions to be asked in. And that's why this has been problematic in the US but not so much in Europe. And it's also why the current European push to improve the quality of RE teaching in schools might well be a better way of solving the problem.
Not true! Intelligent Design creationism has made exactly one claim, as far as I know: certain biological structures are "irreducibly complex", and therefore cannot have evolved for some reason.
This is false. For every structure thrown up as "irreducibly complex" (ranging from the eye to the immune system to flagella), scientists have shown a reasonable pathway through which evolution could have constructed the "irreducibly complex" structure, and frequently examples of the intermediate steps can be found in nature.
There is a corollary to this. Absolute rational materialism* is based on the assertion that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything. That itself is unfalsifiable because for any phenomenon, right up until the end of time, "we might yet discover the rational scientific explanation tomorrow".
(* whereas science merely says there are some things -- actually rather a lot of things -- that have rational material explanations, so let's discover rational material explanations for as many things as we can.)
Bringing it back to your post, one of the issues that comes up with that is that finding a "reasonable pathway" sometimes doesn't involve producing any evidence that the pathway actually occurred -- just a thought experiment. The specific "reasonable pathway" can itself be unfalsifiable just because there is no data to perform any potentially-falsifying experiments on. There's the hope we might discover some data -- some new fossil -- but that's a bit like the absolute materialsm claim ("we might yet discover a fossil that makes it falsifiable tomorrow").
But then you go and look at the legal code and see that, what do you know, the real definition of derivative work is vague. This is an issue that applies to all of copyright, and sparks many debates (and lawsuits), and has nothing specifically to do with the GPL. The lack of a clear definition is not something the GPL can fix.
However it is much more vague for software than it is for other works. As is the issue of aggregated vs combined works. And since the GPL relies heavily on those two concepts, it becomes much trickier than other OSS licenses that don't try to achieve copyleft. For example, a hypothetical WordPress template --
In Mark Jaquith's commentary, he says Template is necessarily derivative of WordPress's code because it calls WordPress functions. But is the uncompiled, unexecuted PHP source of a WordPress Theme derivative of WordPress's code or its documentation, which might be provided under a different license? (It's perfectly possible to write a PHP script would call WordPress code without ever seeing its code but only its documentation). The executing process is derivative of WordPress code, but is that combined work created by the code author (who wrote the PHP script) or by the customer (who has downloaded the PHP and now executed it)? If it the second case, then was no work derived from the code ever distributed because the work wasn't derived from the code until after distribution? (If at the time of download it was only derived from the documentation).
And does that mean it is different for compiled libraries such as Linux kernel modules (where it was explicitly compiled against the code) than for scripts (where it isn't compiled at all but only executed against the code)? And what of libraries that are distributed in source form and compiled by the user in the install script -- are they then derivative of the code or of the documentation, and who creates the combined work that is derivative of the code?
And what then if person A comes up with a "generic system API" with a mod that supports a GPL system, and distributes that under an MIT licence. And person B then comes up with a proprietary system using person A's generic API that they distribute (without dirstributing the GPL'ed system). Neither A nor B distributes the GPL system, instead giving their customers an install script so that the customer retrieves the GPL system. What if A and B are the same person?
It all seems a bit tangly, and as if it's the kind of license that makes work for lawyers rather than making things clear for users.
if higher education in design does not provide a strong enough competitive advantage in terms of output quality, than such education is a waste of resources and should die off. this isn't medicine or engineering where fuckups kill people. the worse that happens is a design does not win, or a company chooses a crap design and has an ugly logo or website until they figure out that it sucks and change it.
You're not thinking this through. If professional designers are crowded out by cut-price students, and the higher education then dies off because there are no jobs, then there aren't any more cut price students to do the work... If the competition model does take off then in the very long term (100 years?) market forces will bring things to a new equilibrium. But in the meantime, the transient effects could wreak havoc on the industry and customer alike (designer unemployment, followed by institutional closures, followed by designer shortages...). The new equilibrium might be cheaper, but it might also be lacking certain services that are no longer economic.
I think Slashdot has a general shortcoming in understanding the importance of economics. For example, that a valuable (to customers) product can be prevented from ever being developed because of monetisation problems. For instance, suppose in R&D the cost of the R is much higher than the cost of the D. The first entrant pays the R, but their competitors just pay the D, and the first entrant would never get their investment back. (They can't earn back the R cost before the competitors hit the market at a lower price point.) So the investors never invest in it, and there is no first entrant -- it never gets developed. Now consider you've come up with a new way of reducing 'D' for all products, but 'R' doesn't change. Worse, you've come up with a way of both reducing D and time-to-market of D. How does that affect the products that can be developed? They have to have lower and lower Rs. We get cheaper production, but less innovation.
Because if you're a publicist, why would you offer The Times content in return for publicity that nobody will see? If you're a columnist, how does it help your career to write articles that nobody reads, or can link to?
The printed paper is still where the cache and kudos is. So for instance Lord Mandelson's political memoirs are being "serialised in The Times". Not serialized in timesonline.co.uk. Serialised in The Times. If it was numbers-of-eyeballs that the publicists were after, it'd be serialised in The Sun (Murdoch's tabloid newspaper that has roughly six times the sales figures of The Times). But it isn't just numbers of eyeballs that matters. So for instance The Guardian has had many more online readers for a very long time (perhaps a decade or more), but The Times is still the broadsheet everyone wants to be publicised in.
They usually leave to "try their hand in the US" or "move on to newer bigger roles"... and find that without the attention that being the Doctor brings you, their careers take a dive. Eccleston had a brief role in Heroes but is now back in the UK doing mostly theatre. Tennant's US show didn't get picked up. Tom Baker, the most popular of the Doctors in his time, pretty much vanished for ten years after he left. Even Peter Davison (who has had the most successful post-Who career) found himself without a popular role for a couple of years after he left.
I'd have hoped Matt'd have realised -- being the Doctor is a gift to actors (a fabulously popular role, with the opportunity to be flamboyant, steal every scene, and save the world every week) but it doesn't mean your next role's going to be like that. There aren't many of those roles out there. It you've got one, for goodness sakes milk it and don't worry about being "typecast" because frankly you're typecast from day one in that role.
So I'm expecting the usual reaction from the Slashdot audience cheering the gloriously free nature of information on the net and our ability to stick it to the man. And don't get me wrong, I'm a (free) news junkie myself. But how sustainable is the current paradigm? . I'm asking a sincere question, as the journalists really do have to get paid eventually. Advertisers? Probably not with the click rates the way they are nowadays. I don't see any any alternative to Murdoch's vision - other than some of the micropayment schemes that have been proposed. As the media outlets adjust to the new world and figure out ways to regulate, it's hard to see how this vision is anything but inevitable.
The most likely alternative is that the newspaper ditches the online edition completely and focuses on mobiles, iPads, Kindles, and the like for its electronic delivery, where there is a healthy and rapidly growing market in paid-for content, and which are probably more relevant to the kinds of customers who buy newspapers anyway (commuters reading on the train, etc). The strategy they are not going to do is decide "oh well, since the pay-wall doesn't work we should just make it free and pour millions of pounds a year into a website we can't make any money from". Murdoch doesn't stick with sacred cows like "all newspapers must have a Web edition". He was the media baron that moved Fleet Street out of Fleet Street. And since timesonline.co.uk only had a small market share anyway (vs the print newspaper's dominance of the broadsheet market) I doubt he thinks timesonline would be a big loss anyway.
I may not agree on everything this man said, and hell he wouldn't want me to. But he sure did nail some things right:
Fear of Germs
Where did this sudden fear of germs come from in this country?...
George Carlin
You do know that dioxin is a chemical, not a germ, right?
US life expectancy is 78.2 years. You're saying other countries life expectancy is 92 years? I think you're off by a bit. Japan, with the highest life expectancy in the world, is at 82.6 years. The UK is at 79.4 years.
"The life expectancy figures above make no allowance for future changes in mortality. Taking into account the continued improvements in mortality assumed in the 2008-based principal population projections, life expectancy at birth for those born in 2008 is projected to be 88.6 years for males and 92.2 years for females. "
So it seems 92 isn't really such a stretch by some measures.
Because lots and lots (and lots and lots) of people don't see the Genuine Advantage? That's how you get SP3 via Windows Update.
So you mean there really is a Genuine Advantage then... not being owned by hackers tomorrow! My goodness, Slashdot just discovered a Microsoft slogan is right after all. Has the world gone mad?
Re:The Internet as a business
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The End of Free
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If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests; the original network of academics and hackers is just a tiny fraction of what the Internet has now become. Most of the people on the Internet have no interest in freedom, they just want to go to some large business' website and do whatever it is that they do there.
There had been a big business rush towards "free" -- a little akin to a second dot-com bubble but around a business model rather than a method of delivery. If "you can't compete with free" then let's put our stuff out there free, take the market, and work out how to monetise it later. Or for software If we release this free, the community will support it so we won't have to carry all the expense and will grow faster. As with the dot com bubble, there were winners and losers. It turns out to be pretty hard to monetise "free" and costs quite a bit of effort to build and maintain a community and momentum. Some companies are making a success of the "free" business model, but there's not the mad rush there used to be.
Ok, but maybe the taxpayer dollars should be spent on services that everyone can make use of, not just iPhone users.
It's more than just that. If the Government develops iPhone apps, but not apps for the other proprietary platforms, then that could be seen as a Government endorsement of Apple over their competitors. Why are taxpayers' pounds being spent endorsing and promoting a foreign company's products that few can afford? Of course it offends British sensibilities -- not only is it the poor subsidising the rich (all taxpayers pay, but only the wealthier who can afford iPhones benefit), and not only does it distort the market for smart-phones, but it also puts the companies that invest in the UK and EU at a disadvantage. (Many of the other mobile developers, such as Nokia and Google, invest and employ significantly in the UK)
... the whole court case only happened as a result of a TV panel game, Spicks and Specks (Australian version of Never Mind The Buzzcocks). In how many years of every employee of that Australian music company presumably hearing Down Under played how many hundreds of times, nobody noticed until it came up as a curious fact on the telly...
It reminds me of once when my boss was giving instructions on which sites were appropriate to browse from work. A secretary remarked "all I browse are news sites", the boss answered "so you think you're being paid to read newspapers?"
However, the point is not that. If the TSA had an intent to regulate which sites are not appropriate for browsing at work they should include a lot more than "controversial material". OTOH, some "controversial material" shold be allowed, at least for some employees.
Why? It's up to them what they consider appropriate for someone's leisure use of their work computers. And unless reviewing "controversial opinion" sites is explicitly part of your job, I don't think they want to pay you to have raving arguments over the internet all day.
I had someone come for interview not that long ago with a "first class" degree in computer science from a former poly. I actually apologised to him for asking our standard questions, which begin "How many bits in a computer word?" - which can elicit a response from "32" to "which architecture are we talking about here?" - it's an open ended question, in fact. Blank look.
Bad question. Most interviewees, even if they are smart, will give you a blank look to questions with multiple possible answers, or anything that looks like it could be a trick. There's a good bet your interviewee was giving a blank look at you, not at the question, thinking "Shit, this interviewer doesn't seem to know it's different on different architectures... if I make him look dumb he won't like me and I won't get the job... but if I just say 32 that's dumb and maybe he's tricking me and I wouldn't get the job then... shit... what do I say...". It is very well known in psychology that if someone is undecided between two plausible answers, they will usually just not say anything, especially in stressful situations (look up decision theory). The problem is usually not the interviewee, it's the interviewer -- the computing industry is full of people with no training in interviewing, who don't understand the dynamics of an interview, but who magically think that in half an hour of their amateur interviewing they can find out more about the candidate than the candidate's entire work history and education revealed. And so we (the interviewers) keep asking crap questions that are frankly no better than saying "I'm thinking of A, B, or C -- guess which one because your job depends on it".
Computing interviewers need to drop their unrealistic view of their own interviewing skills. Everyone believes that 99% of the candidates are dross and we're only hiring the top 1%, but IIRC, the studies show most interviewing practices do little better than random chance at selecting suitable candidates. (We assume the 99% we rejected were worse than the 1% we hired based on bogus evidence.)
I became good at math and physics because I was bad with people. If we understood people, we wouldn't have become scientists.
*Ahem* please do not paint all scientists with your own particular issues.
Public communication is becoming an expected part of scientists' work. If nothing else, remember that most scientists are employed by publicly funded teaching institutions.
Scientists don't like to lie or avoid topics or spin shortcomings; all things that are necessary to control the course of public discourse, which can easily be led astray.
Sadly that isn't true. Many scientists deliberately lead things astray, for instance by doing most of their public communication about things that aren't in actually their field but that gain them a higher profile or are a political cause they feel strongly about. Lambasting the religious community sells many more books than explaining the latest biology research, so we've seen remarkably few scientific papers or scientific books from a former biologist and current "professor of the public understanding of science", even though he's a very good science writer. Unsurprisingly, that's swamping out time and attention from public dissemination of new scientific discoveries in his role.
As the article notes, it depends what you mean by "one of", (specific one vs "at least one"), and quibbling mathematicians don't always pick the most common interpretation.
In other news, an aeroplane carrying a hundred mathematicians crashed with no survivors; their university made a press release stating that one of its mathematicians died in the crash.
And here's the thing: when you get down to it, the shareholders invested in a company that was behaving unethically. It's the shareholder's investment that allows BP to function this way. When CEOs act unethically, they do it in the name of serving the shareholders. Don't the shareholders bear some responsibility? Isn't part of the problem that the "owners" of the company failed to ensure that their company was "doing the right thing?" I'm not sure that we should be seeking to punish shareholders, but I also don't see why they should take a pass.
Many of BP's major shareholders are pension funds -- largely where the person whose cash it is doesn't have a choice about investing (as it is usually the employer who chooses the pension fund not the employee). I'm not sure I see the moral link where Mrs Oakley classroom teacher of 6B at Scarborough Comprehensive School (or of an American school as BP has almost as much US investment as UK) is "responsible" for this oil leak for the dastardly act of working for a school whose pension fund uses and investment manager who chose to invest in a company that undertook US Government-approved oil drilling using an American-owned drilling rig and being operated mostly by Transocean employees that had an accident that the exact cause of which is yet to be officially determined...
Obama pointedly refers to BP as "British Petroleum" even though that's not been the company's name for many years and it is actually almost as much American-owned as British (30% vs 34% if I recall correctly) and the drilling operations that went wrong are all run out of America. There is a political game of "blame some foreigners" going on in the US that looks deeply suspect, and there does seem to be a literal desire to make foreigners pay for the accident (and let's forget about the local involvement).
The well casing is ruptured below the sea floor. If they cap it, oil will begin leaking below the surface. This will cause extensive erosion leading to the collapse of the blow out preventor. This erosion will continue and leakage rates will continue to increase until the whole oil field depressurizes. In other words: The very best anybody will ever do is to leave this pipe wide open. It will only get worse from here, and substantially faster if they do cap it. Our only hope is with other means to depressurize this (relief wells).
There's always the Machiavellian way of looking at it...
<silly conspiracy theory> BP causes an accident in the gulf, that leads to a drilling moritorium on this large deep sea oil-field. But the only way to stop the leak is for BP themselves to drill several fat juicy "relief wells" to suck up the oil (while the other companies are banned from drilling) as they are told to clean up their mess. And who said Tony Hayward didn't know what he was doing? </silly conspiracy theory>
It says that a women with 10 to 20 years of experience is getting a salary that is about 11% smaller of a comparable male worker, again, who knows, we don't normally share our salary data among each other, right?
This is actually a very good point. The articles usually come from survey data where they ask people how much they are paid. And the surveys blindly believe them. It may well be that the result we are seeing is "Men lie about their income 11% more than women". That might sound glib, but it is serious. Surveys of sexual behaviour have often found results like "heterosexual men had an average of previous 6 sexual partners, and heterosexual women had an average of previous 3 sexual partners" (right, so just who were the men having sex with all those extra times?)
Which news network are you watching? Or which people are you tweeting with? Because mykos' version seems to be closer to what I'm hearing form people.
I've been doing that old-fashioned thing where you find out what people's opinions are by talking to them rather than by letting the media tell you what they should be. (Meanwhile "people who Twitter about politics" probably isn't a very representative sample of the Australian population.)
Politics would be a lot more tolerable if politicians called each other out in meaningful ways more often. This is the best display of nose-to-the-grindstone politics since Honduras last year.
That's not how it's playing out in Australia. The Labor party had their first wobble in the polls, and immediately turned on Rudd (until very recently the most popular PM in history, and still will a large lead as "preferred Prime Minister" over the opposition leader). They did it in an overnight back-room deal while Australia was distracted by the soccer, and the new leader Julia Gillard had already been involved in ousting two previous Labor party leaders (Latham and Beazley). Rudd was known to be more popular with the public than inside the Labor party. He had a dip in the polls but wasn't desperately low (the public don't feel that they had rejected him, just disapproved of a couple of party policies), so this is coming across as a political assassination rather than replacing an unpopular leader. Especially given Rudd had just led Labor to their first election win in a decade, and made the historic apology to the Stolen Generation the previous government was too afraid to do. Australia doesn't often react well to deposing popular leaders -- after Paul Keating ousted Bob Hawke, the following election was nicknamed the "drover's dog" election because it looked like a drover's dog could win it for the opposition. (In the event, John Hewson cocked it up spectacularly by promising to bring in a new tax and failing miserably to explain what the effects would be, and Keating survived that election and lost the following one). The Australian Democrats entirely destroyed themselves (they no longer exist) when their previously very popular senator Natasha Stott Despoja decided to oust their moderately popular leader Meg Lees in what was seen by the public as a political machination. Right now, in the eyes of the Australian public, Julia Gillard is effectively Brutus to Rudd's Julius Caesar, and Tony Abbott (Liberal/National coalition) will almost certainly win the election that has to happen in the next year.
Slashdot Mirror
A science class is well... a science class. It's ultimately about science. What is science? How does it work? How is it applied? How has it been applied?
It depends. If you start talking to a ten-year-old about the cause of his and the world's existence, do you really think the only questions he'll have are "could you tell me more about the experimental data collection methods?" Science can only work just as a science class if there are philosophy and religion classes available for the non-science questions to be asked in. And that's why this has been problematic in the US but not so much in Europe. And it's also why the current European push to improve the quality of RE teaching in schools might well be a better way of solving the problem.
Not true! Intelligent Design creationism has made exactly one claim, as far as I know: certain biological structures are "irreducibly complex", and therefore cannot have evolved for some reason.
This is false. For every structure thrown up as "irreducibly complex" (ranging from the eye to the immune system to flagella), scientists have shown a reasonable pathway through which evolution could have constructed the "irreducibly complex" structure, and frequently examples of the intermediate steps can be found in nature.
There is a corollary to this. Absolute rational materialism* is based on the assertion that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything. That itself is unfalsifiable because for any phenomenon, right up until the end of time, "we might yet discover the rational scientific explanation tomorrow".
(* whereas science merely says there are some things -- actually rather a lot of things -- that have rational material explanations, so let's discover rational material explanations for as many things as we can.)
Bringing it back to your post, one of the issues that comes up with that is that finding a "reasonable pathway" sometimes doesn't involve producing any evidence that the pathway actually occurred -- just a thought experiment. The specific "reasonable pathway" can itself be unfalsifiable just because there is no data to perform any potentially-falsifying experiments on. There's the hope we might discover some data -- some new fossil -- but that's a bit like the absolute materialsm claim ("we might yet discover a fossil that makes it falsifiable tomorrow").
But then you go and look at the legal code and see that, what do you know, the real definition of derivative work is vague. This is an issue that applies to all of copyright, and sparks many debates (and lawsuits), and has nothing specifically to do with the GPL. The lack of a clear definition is not something the GPL can fix.
However it is much more vague for software than it is for other works. As is the issue of aggregated vs combined works. And since the GPL relies heavily on those two concepts, it becomes much trickier than other OSS licenses that don't try to achieve copyleft. For example, a hypothetical WordPress template --
In Mark Jaquith's commentary, he says Template is necessarily derivative of WordPress's code because it calls WordPress functions. But is the uncompiled, unexecuted PHP source of a WordPress Theme derivative of WordPress's code or its documentation, which might be provided under a different license? (It's perfectly possible to write a PHP script would call WordPress code without ever seeing its code but only its documentation). The executing process is derivative of WordPress code, but is that combined work created by the code author (who wrote the PHP script) or by the customer (who has downloaded the PHP and now executed it)? If it the second case, then was no work derived from the code ever distributed because the work wasn't derived from the code until after distribution? (If at the time of download it was only derived from the documentation).
And does that mean it is different for compiled libraries such as Linux kernel modules (where it was explicitly compiled against the code) than for scripts (where it isn't compiled at all but only executed against the code)? And what of libraries that are distributed in source form and compiled by the user in the install script -- are they then derivative of the code or of the documentation, and who creates the combined work that is derivative of the code?
And what then if person A comes up with a "generic system API" with a mod that supports a GPL system, and distributes that under an MIT licence. And person B then comes up with a proprietary system using person A's generic API that they distribute (without dirstributing the GPL'ed system). Neither A nor B distributes the GPL system, instead giving their customers an install script so that the customer retrieves the GPL system. What if A and B are the same person?
It all seems a bit tangly, and as if it's the kind of license that makes work for lawyers rather than making things clear for users.
if higher education in design does not provide a strong enough competitive advantage in terms of output quality, than such education is a waste of resources and should die off. this isn't medicine or engineering where fuckups kill people. the worse that happens is a design does not win, or a company chooses a crap design and has an ugly logo or website until they figure out that it sucks and change it.
You're not thinking this through. If professional designers are crowded out by cut-price students, and the higher education then dies off because there are no jobs, then there aren't any more cut price students to do the work... If the competition model does take off then in the very long term (100 years?) market forces will bring things to a new equilibrium. But in the meantime, the transient effects could wreak havoc on the industry and customer alike (designer unemployment, followed by institutional closures, followed by designer shortages...). The new equilibrium might be cheaper, but it might also be lacking certain services that are no longer economic.
I think Slashdot has a general shortcoming in understanding the importance of economics. For example, that a valuable (to customers) product can be prevented from ever being developed because of monetisation problems. For instance, suppose in R&D the cost of the R is much higher than the cost of the D. The first entrant pays the R, but their competitors just pay the D, and the first entrant would never get their investment back. (They can't earn back the R cost before the competitors hit the market at a lower price point.) So the investors never invest in it, and there is no first entrant -- it never gets developed. Now consider you've come up with a new way of reducing 'D' for all products, but 'R' doesn't change. Worse, you've come up with a way of both reducing D and time-to-market of D. How does that affect the products that can be developed? They have to have lower and lower Rs. We get cheaper production, but less innovation.
Because if you're a publicist, why would you offer The Times content in return for publicity that nobody will see? If you're a columnist, how does it help your career to write articles that nobody reads, or can link to?
The printed paper is still where the cache and kudos is. So for instance Lord Mandelson's political memoirs are being "serialised in The Times". Not serialized in timesonline.co.uk. Serialised in The Times. If it was numbers-of-eyeballs that the publicists were after, it'd be serialised in The Sun (Murdoch's tabloid newspaper that has roughly six times the sales figures of The Times). But it isn't just numbers of eyeballs that matters. So for instance The Guardian has had many more online readers for a very long time (perhaps a decade or more), but The Times is still the broadsheet everyone wants to be publicised in.
They usually leave to "try their hand in the US" or "move on to newer bigger roles" ... and find that without the attention that being the Doctor brings you, their careers take a dive. Eccleston had a brief role in Heroes but is now back in the UK doing mostly theatre. Tennant's US show didn't get picked up. Tom Baker, the most popular of the Doctors in his time, pretty much vanished for ten years after he left. Even Peter Davison (who has had the most successful post-Who career) found himself without a popular role for a couple of years after he left.
I'd have hoped Matt'd have realised -- being the Doctor is a gift to actors (a fabulously popular role, with the opportunity to be flamboyant, steal every scene, and save the world every week) but it doesn't mean your next role's going to be like that. There aren't many of those roles out there. It you've got one, for goodness sakes milk it and don't worry about being "typecast" because frankly you're typecast from day one in that role.
So I'm expecting the usual reaction from the Slashdot audience cheering the gloriously free nature of information on the net and our ability to stick it to the man. And don't get me wrong, I'm a (free) news junkie myself. But how sustainable is the current paradigm? . I'm asking a sincere question, as the journalists really do have to get paid eventually. Advertisers? Probably not with the click rates the way they are nowadays. I don't see any any alternative to Murdoch's vision - other than some of the micropayment schemes that have been proposed. As the media outlets adjust to the new world and figure out ways to regulate, it's hard to see how this vision is anything but inevitable.
The most likely alternative is that the newspaper ditches the online edition completely and focuses on mobiles, iPads, Kindles, and the like for its electronic delivery, where there is a healthy and rapidly growing market in paid-for content, and which are probably more relevant to the kinds of customers who buy newspapers anyway (commuters reading on the train, etc). The strategy they are not going to do is decide "oh well, since the pay-wall doesn't work we should just make it free and pour millions of pounds a year into a website we can't make any money from". Murdoch doesn't stick with sacred cows like "all newspapers must have a Web edition". He was the media baron that moved Fleet Street out of Fleet Street. And since timesonline.co.uk only had a small market share anyway (vs the print newspaper's dominance of the broadsheet market) I doubt he thinks timesonline would be a big loss anyway.
I may not agree on everything this man said, and hell he wouldn't want me to. But he sure did nail some things right: Fear of Germs Where did this sudden fear of germs come from in this country? ...
George Carlin
You do know that dioxin is a chemical, not a germ, right?
US life expectancy is 78.2 years. You're saying other countries life expectancy is 92 years? I think you're off by a bit. Japan, with the highest life expectancy in the world, is at 82.6 years. The UK is at 79.4 years.
Well, according to the Office of National Statistics in the UK:
"The life expectancy figures above make no allowance for future changes in mortality. Taking into account the continued improvements in mortality assumed in the 2008-based principal population projections, life expectancy at birth for those born in 2008 is projected to be 88.6 years for males and 92.2 years for females. "
So it seems 92 isn't really such a stretch by some measures.
Because lots and lots (and lots and lots) of people don't see the Genuine Advantage? That's how you get SP3 via Windows Update.
So you mean there really is a Genuine Advantage then ... not being owned by hackers tomorrow! My goodness, Slashdot just discovered a Microsoft slogan is right after all. Has the world gone mad?
If you want to know why the "Information wants to be free" attitude is dying, it is because the Internet has been taken over by business interests; the original network of academics and hackers is just a tiny fraction of what the Internet has now become. Most of the people on the Internet have no interest in freedom, they just want to go to some large business' website and do whatever it is that they do there.
There had been a big business rush towards "free" -- a little akin to a second dot-com bubble but around a business model rather than a method of delivery. If "you can't compete with free" then let's put our stuff out there free, take the market, and work out how to monetise it later. Or for software If we release this free, the community will support it so we won't have to carry all the expense and will grow faster. As with the dot com bubble, there were winners and losers. It turns out to be pretty hard to monetise "free" and costs quite a bit of effort to build and maintain a community and momentum. Some companies are making a success of the "free" business model, but there's not the mad rush there used to be.
Ok, but maybe the taxpayer dollars should be spent on services that everyone can make use of, not just iPhone users.
It's more than just that. If the Government develops iPhone apps, but not apps for the other proprietary platforms, then that could be seen as a Government endorsement of Apple over their competitors. Why are taxpayers' pounds being spent endorsing and promoting a foreign company's products that few can afford? Of course it offends British sensibilities -- not only is it the poor subsidising the rich (all taxpayers pay, but only the wealthier who can afford iPhones benefit), and not only does it distort the market for smart-phones, but it also puts the companies that invest in the UK and EU at a disadvantage. (Many of the other mobile developers, such as Nokia and Google, invest and employ significantly in the UK)
... the whole court case only happened as a result of a TV panel game, Spicks and Specks (Australian version of Never Mind The Buzzcocks). In how many years of every employee of that Australian music company presumably hearing Down Under played how many hundreds of times, nobody noticed until it came up as a curious fact on the telly...
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/quiz-show-sparks-aussie-anthems-battle/story-e6frfn09-1111117725552
It reminds me of once when my boss was giving instructions on which sites were appropriate to browse from work. A secretary remarked "all I browse are news sites", the boss answered "so you think you're being paid to read newspapers?"
However, the point is not that. If the TSA had an intent to regulate which sites are not appropriate for browsing at work they should include a lot more than "controversial material". OTOH, some "controversial material" shold be allowed, at least for some employees.
Why? It's up to them what they consider appropriate for someone's leisure use of their work computers. And unless reviewing "controversial opinion" sites is explicitly part of your job, I don't think they want to pay you to have raving arguments over the internet all day.
I had someone come for interview not that long ago with a "first class" degree in computer science from a former poly. I actually apologised to him for asking our standard questions, which begin "How many bits in a computer word?" - which can elicit a response from "32" to "which architecture are we talking about here?" - it's an open ended question, in fact.
Blank look.
Bad question. Most interviewees, even if they are smart, will give you a blank look to questions with multiple possible answers, or anything that looks like it could be a trick. There's a good bet your interviewee was giving a blank look at you, not at the question, thinking "Shit, this interviewer doesn't seem to know it's different on different architectures... if I make him look dumb he won't like me and I won't get the job... but if I just say 32 that's dumb and maybe he's tricking me and I wouldn't get the job then... shit... what do I say...". It is very well known in psychology that if someone is undecided between two plausible answers, they will usually just not say anything, especially in stressful situations (look up decision theory). The problem is usually not the interviewee, it's the interviewer -- the computing industry is full of people with no training in interviewing, who don't understand the dynamics of an interview, but who magically think that in half an hour of their amateur interviewing they can find out more about the candidate than the candidate's entire work history and education revealed. And so we (the interviewers) keep asking crap questions that are frankly no better than saying "I'm thinking of A, B, or C -- guess which one because your job depends on it".
Computing interviewers need to drop their unrealistic view of their own interviewing skills. Everyone believes that 99% of the candidates are dross and we're only hiring the top 1%, but IIRC, the studies show most interviewing practices do little better than random chance at selecting suitable candidates. (We assume the 99% we rejected were worse than the 1% we hired based on bogus evidence.)
I became good at math and physics because I was bad with people. If we understood people, we wouldn't have become scientists.
*Ahem* please do not paint all scientists with your own particular issues.
Public communication is becoming an expected part of scientists' work. If nothing else, remember that most scientists are employed by publicly funded teaching institutions.
Scientists don't like to lie or avoid topics or spin shortcomings; all things that are necessary to control the course of public discourse, which can easily be led astray.
Sadly that isn't true. Many scientists deliberately lead things astray, for instance by doing most of their public communication about things that aren't in actually their field but that gain them a higher profile or are a political cause they feel strongly about. Lambasting the religious community sells many more books than explaining the latest biology research, so we've seen remarkably few scientific papers or scientific books from a former biologist and current "professor of the public understanding of science", even though he's a very good science writer. Unsurprisingly, that's swamping out time and attention from public dissemination of new scientific discoveries in his role.
We were all hoping he'd announce proof that P = NP....
He was going to, but he thought he'd need a better system to typeset a big announcement like that first.
As the article notes, it depends what you mean by "one of", (specific one vs "at least one"), and quibbling mathematicians don't always pick the most common interpretation.
In other news, an aeroplane carrying a hundred mathematicians crashed with no survivors; their university made a press release stating that one of its mathematicians died in the crash.
And here's the thing: when you get down to it, the shareholders invested in a company that was behaving unethically. It's the shareholder's investment that allows BP to function this way. When CEOs act unethically, they do it in the name of serving the shareholders. Don't the shareholders bear some responsibility? Isn't part of the problem that the "owners" of the company failed to ensure that their company was "doing the right thing?" I'm not sure that we should be seeking to punish shareholders, but I also don't see why they should take a pass.
Many of BP's major shareholders are pension funds -- largely where the person whose cash it is doesn't have a choice about investing (as it is usually the employer who chooses the pension fund not the employee). I'm not sure I see the moral link where Mrs Oakley classroom teacher of 6B at Scarborough Comprehensive School (or of an American school as BP has almost as much US investment as UK) is "responsible" for this oil leak for the dastardly act of working for a school whose pension fund uses and investment manager who chose to invest in a company that undertook US Government-approved oil drilling using an American-owned drilling rig and being operated mostly by Transocean employees that had an accident that the exact cause of which is yet to be officially determined...
Obama pointedly refers to BP as "British Petroleum" even though that's not been the company's name for many years and it is actually almost as much American-owned as British (30% vs 34% if I recall correctly) and the drilling operations that went wrong are all run out of America. There is a political game of "blame some foreigners" going on in the US that looks deeply suspect, and there does seem to be a literal desire to make foreigners pay for the accident (and let's forget about the local involvement).
The well casing is ruptured below the sea floor. If they cap it, oil will begin leaking below the surface. This will cause extensive erosion leading to the collapse of the blow out preventor. This erosion will continue and leakage rates will continue to increase until the whole oil field depressurizes. In other words: The very best anybody will ever do is to leave this pipe wide open. It will only get worse from here, and substantially faster if they do cap it. Our only hope is with other means to depressurize this (relief wells).
There's always the Machiavellian way of looking at it...
<silly conspiracy theory>
BP causes an accident in the gulf, that leads to a drilling moritorium on this large deep sea oil-field. But the only way to stop the leak is for BP themselves to drill several fat juicy "relief wells" to suck up the oil (while the other companies are banned from drilling) as they are told to clean up their mess. And who said Tony Hayward didn't know what he was doing?
</silly conspiracy theory>
It says that a women with 10 to 20 years of experience is getting a salary that is about 11% smaller of a comparable male worker, again, who knows, we don't normally share our salary data among each other, right?
This is actually a very good point. The articles usually come from survey data where they ask people how much they are paid. And the surveys blindly believe them. It may well be that the result we are seeing is "Men lie about their income 11% more than women". That might sound glib, but it is serious. Surveys of sexual behaviour have often found results like "heterosexual men had an average of previous 6 sexual partners, and heterosexual women had an average of previous 3 sexual partners" (right, so just who were the men having sex with all those extra times?)
Which news network are you watching? Or which people are you tweeting with? Because mykos' version seems to be closer to what I'm hearing form people.
I've been doing that old-fashioned thing where you find out what people's opinions are by talking to them rather than by letting the media tell you what they should be. (Meanwhile "people who Twitter about politics" probably isn't a very representative sample of the Australian population.)
Politics would be a lot more tolerable if politicians called each other out in meaningful ways more often. This is the best display of nose-to-the-grindstone politics since Honduras last year.
That's not how it's playing out in Australia. The Labor party had their first wobble in the polls, and immediately turned on Rudd (until very recently the most popular PM in history, and still will a large lead as "preferred Prime Minister" over the opposition leader). They did it in an overnight back-room deal while Australia was distracted by the soccer, and the new leader Julia Gillard had already been involved in ousting two previous Labor party leaders (Latham and Beazley). Rudd was known to be more popular with the public than inside the Labor party. He had a dip in the polls but wasn't desperately low (the public don't feel that they had rejected him, just disapproved of a couple of party policies), so this is coming across as a political assassination rather than replacing an unpopular leader. Especially given Rudd had just led Labor to their first election win in a decade, and made the historic apology to the Stolen Generation the previous government was too afraid to do. Australia doesn't often react well to deposing popular leaders -- after Paul Keating ousted Bob Hawke, the following election was nicknamed the "drover's dog" election because it looked like a drover's dog could win it for the opposition. (In the event, John Hewson cocked it up spectacularly by promising to bring in a new tax and failing miserably to explain what the effects would be, and Keating survived that election and lost the following one). The Australian Democrats entirely destroyed themselves (they no longer exist) when their previously very popular senator Natasha Stott Despoja decided to oust their moderately popular leader Meg Lees in what was seen by the public as a political machination. Right now, in the eyes of the Australian public, Julia Gillard is effectively Brutus to Rudd's Julius Caesar, and Tony Abbott (Liberal/National coalition) will almost certainly win the election that has to happen in the next year.
Someone tell me if i should hate her or not, the internet has failed me so far
Mate, she's a politician. Surely that's all you need to know!
No she didn't, Australians can spell.
You reckon? She's the new leader of the Australian Labor Party... and that's in a country that spells labour with a 'u'.