At Fermilab, no data gets released until the entire experimental collaboration (500-700 people in the case of CDF and D0) has approved, or "blessed" it. Why is this? One is scientific credibility. You don't get to publish a paper and then send out bugfix updates. Once something is published, it is published for all time (well, until civilisation collapses at least). You can retract it by publishing a retraction, but that is looked upon as evidence of a rather bad failure. The second reason is that since it is a US national laboratory, the government owns the data. The department of energy, as I understand it, requires this blessing process before any analysis of their data is published.
OTOH, if you're moving a lot (I am) because you're in college and have to move out of the dorm every summer, back home, and then 900 miles away for a summer job (that's my last three summers), then back to the dorm (or apt next year), and all you have to move stuff in is a 93 buick, then having to haul around two boxes is not really an option. Also, for your average college student, that 50$ is their next ten dinners, maybe 15.
That said, I'd also suggest saving a little extra: don't buy monitor/keyboard/mouse. Buy a KVM switch.
Good heavens. ADD is not "being wild and unfocused". I have ADD. I was never wild. I was not hyperactive. Nobody looked at me on the playground and said "Oh that kid is soooo ADD" (Which phrase I positively detest). However, my performance in school did not at all match my intelligence. I was given some kind of IQ test (I don't remember anything about it, nor do I know what I scored on it.) The psych just went on and on about how intelligent I was. My grades (esp. the work habits section that was on our elementary school report cards) sucked. I was not just unfocused, I was unable to focus. In third grade, my parents finally found a doctor who didn't just say "Oh he seems to be emotionally healthy, and plenty smart, I don't know why he's sucking so much at school", and he said that I had ADD. I was given Ritalin, and suddenly, when I sat down to do my homework, I was actually capable of doing more than one problem at once without drifting off and thinking about who knows what for half an hour in between. Oh and by the way, my parents did make me sit down and work. I could spend three hours sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing but homework, and still only finish a single one page worksheet. And this was with my mom in the kitchen checking on me to make sure I was still working every few minutes. Oh yes, my parents made me sit down and work. On the other hand I never have had time advantages on tests or anything. I could at my college, but I don't because I don't need to, and if I didn't take my medicine, the time advantages wouldn't be anywhere near long enough.
Yes, ADD is horribly overdiagnosed, and the typical "That kid is so ADD" reaction to undisciplined children doesn't help at all. However, in spite of this, it is a real problem, and it does affect numerous people, many of whom you would never suspect. It is worth noting that I am no longer taking narcotics like Ritalin, but am now on Strattera. Strattera is not a stimulant. In fact, there are large segments of the population on whom strattera doesn't work at all. This seems to correlate well with people who actually have ADD versus those who were just "wild and unfocused children". My doctor says that he'll put people on strattera, and they'll complain and want to go back to ritalin, because "It doesn't give me the same rush". Well, Ritalin never gave me a rush at all. In fact, that is sometimes used as a diagnostic test for ADD: a small dose of ritalin will make someone without ADD slightly high, but someone with ADD will not get high at all.
You say that kids with ADD are getting time and focus advantages. I can assure you that in cases where those kids actually have ADD that taking ritalin or whatever is not an advantage over kids without ADD. In fact, unless the dosage is pretty much perfect, it probably still leaves them at a slight disadvantage.
Now, all this is not to say that I think drugs like ritalin should be given out willy-nilly. In fact I am completely opposed to it. It would also be nice if all extant diagnoses of ADD could be required to go back and see an actual competent doctor this time and get rediagnosed (or, in perhaps most cases, not). Then, if those people could be convinced not to stupidly give out their pills, and to keep them locked up (my ritalin was stolen from the school nurse's cabinet several times when I was little), perhaps these drugs would not be a problem, ADD would be recognized as a real problem instead of being scorned as a cop out for bad parenting, and you wouldn't have to whine about kids getting advantages on tests anymore. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen.
Who on earth modded this up? If I hadn't already commented on this article, I'd mod this flamebait myself. I mean, honestly, that is a can of worms that has been opened thousands of times, was not really on topic, and certainly was not necessary. And from somebody with a UID in the 100000s, too. Wow, I'd expect better behavior of such an old man.
"BSA's claim is akin to the MPAA/RIAA's claims each downloaded/pirated DVD/CD is a lost sale. And, there have (AFAIK, and I've researched this many times) been no studies coming close to showing causal relationship between pirating and decreased sales."
And yet people have no problem with a "causal" relationship showing a benefit from said action.
If it is actually shown, then of course noone would have a problem with it. Your statement is more or less meaningless. What the GP is saying is that in spite of **AA's claims that pirating causes decreased sales, there has not been any evidence produced to suggest that this is in fact true.
"Interestingly, one of the most damning contra-examples was the huge spike in CD sales corresponding to the spike in file sharing at the emergence of the original Napster. Of course, once the RIAA and music industry managed to rein Napster in, the dropoff in shared files was matched almost identically for a decline of CD sales."
Another "causal" relationship? Can I get a phone poll to go with that?
This would suggest a positive correlation between cd sales and music downloading. A phone poll? What, pray, do you imagine would be the use of that in this case? If we take song downloads and CD sales as x and y coordinates, respectively, of points on a scatter plot, then we see a strong positive relationship between the two. In statistics, we would say that some percentage of the variation in CD sales is predicted by the variation in song downloads. Now, this does not indicate a necessarily causal relationship. In fact, it is impossible to determine a causal relationship using merely statistics, because there is always the possibility of confounding variables which you simply haven't thought of and checked for. However, this does show a positive correlation, whereas from **AA's statements, we would expect a negative correlation. Thus, this suggests rather strongly that **AA is wrong or lying.
gmail is a web service. So is hotmail. So is MSN. I used to know what Passport was, but I've forgotten since. But my point is, gmail isn't bundled, really.
Are you 100% sure that the groupthink isn't just segmented? Perhaps the people saying "BUNDLED SOFTWARE IS TEH BAD!" are not the same people as those who say "GOGLE COULD STOMP M$ INOT TEH GROUND IF THEY JUST HAD A FARE CHANCE!". I'm not saying that they are different people, but I've never really investigated it myself, nor seen anything from anyone else who has. If it were the case, of course, you wouldn't be having anything to complain about.
I somewhat agree. I learned (first) with an IDE (Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 (no, take that back. First was GW-Basic... an IDE? It defies classification as anything other than hell.)), and I never grasped the underpinnings of having a compiler and a linker etc until the IDE was gone. OTOH, I never use an IDE at all now, I use vi and make every day. I've learned vi quite well by now, and I don't care to bother with another learning curve for some IDE.
If Em believes that his interpretation a) asserts itself to be the only true interpretation (possibly true? wtf do you mean by that? It is either true or it is not.) and b) demands that he act in a certain manner, whether or not some other people see his actions as "enforcing his interpretation on others", then it would be bloody stupid for him not to act in that particular manner.
If you're going to argue against a particular set of beliefs, you must begin with all the assumptions, moral and otherwise, of that set of beliefs. Taking a set of beliefs which calls for evangelism as a virtue to be practiced, and denouncing it on the grounds that "You're enforcing your beliefs on someone else!!" is just bad reasoning. Someone who holds that set of beliefs obviously doesn't think that enforcing his/her beliefs is wrong. You might try persuading him/her that enforcing beliefs is wrong, but just saying it doesn't make it so.
On the other hand, it would appear that you do think that enforcing beliefs is wrong. Thus, you prohibit yourself from telling the first person (who perhaps thinks enforcing beliefs is right) to stop, because that would be enforcing your own beliefs on him/her. Now then, of course, if your beliefs include some double standard, which is perfectly plausible, although rare, then that is fine, you are perfectly consistent. For that matter, you could exclude the double standard, so long as you also excluded the principle of non-contradiction. That is perfectly fine.
I just wanted to make sure that you had thought about things and were certain that your system of morals, which appears to tell you that anyone enforcing their beliefs on someone else is wrong, does not condemn your own actions.
nothing makes your interpretation of those laws superior to anothers.
So what makes whatever interpretation of "those laws" that allows you to say this superior to his?
One more question: Does this come under the heading of me enforcing my beliefs on you, or me enforcing your beliefs on you?
I'd like to see game AI that adapts to the ability of the player(s). That way, someone with little patience could start playing and see a reasonable rate of success immediately, but still enjoy things later as they become more skilled.
When I was somewhere around 8-10 years old (I can't remember exactly), my father was a software engineer. He'd come home and tell my mother about "coding this" or "programming that", and my sister (2 years older than me) and I started bugging him to teach us how to program. We had a Packard Bell 286 at the time. He thought we were too young to learn to program, and wouldn't teach us. Eventually, he got fed up, and came up with a solution. He pulled up GW-BASIC, with a program that he'd written in college that made a line move around the edges of the screen and change color. It made a pretty pattern. He showed us how to list the program, how to edit lines, and how to run it. Then he pointed out that the line was drawn by connecting two points. He said "make it three points, and three lines", and went outside to do yardwork. His thought was to scare us off of programming, make us realize it was really hard, and get us to quit bugging him. My turn was first (before my sister), and about 20 minutes later, I went outside and said "Ok, Dad, what do I do next?". So he was stuck, and then he had to teach us to program.
At least the way it works at fermilab, you have to join one of the experimental collaborations before you are allowed to use the data. So, a casual programmer could only do something with it if he or she got a job at Atlas or CMS or whatnot, in which case he or she would not be exactly a casual programmer anymore.
It is worth pointing out that when things crashed, it spit you back out at the gdm. That is to say, after the crash, the computer was immediately in a useable state. Not the desired useable state, but a useable state nonetheless. Most crashes with win* lead to some form of an unuseable state. For example, the infamous bsod. Or, perhaps more commonly, the system simply hangs. The only recourse is to reboot.
That is what is typically meant by linux stability. The linux kernel is unaffected. Even if something freezes X so it won't accept any input, the kernel is still chugging away, and, assuming you have sshd or telnetd (hopefully not this one) or something similar running, you can remotely log in, kill the offending process (sometimes X itself), and carry on your merry way. Also, if one process crashes or hangs, it usually doesn't affect the rest of the system, and you can kill the offender and go on again.
Windows kernel is nothing like as stable. One process dying messily can screw up any number of other processes, or even the kernel itself.
Statistically, if some small percentage of attacks is reported, then you could, if you knew on average what percentage is reported, divide the number reported by that percentage and get an estimator of the total number of attacks. However, the variance of that estimator gets much much higher as the percentage gets lower.
Oh, wait, you didn't. You just made an assertion "Hardware patents are identical to software patents" without doing even the slightest thing to justify it.
To object to GP post, but not to yours is inconsistent.
The problem is that the enticement part has become the all-consuming focus of the patent process, rather than the disclosure of useful trade secrets part.
Interesting that this is pretty much precisely what happens when you attempt to bribe children to behave themselves. The focus shifts from good behavior being a good unto itself to good behavior being a means to get a piece of candy (a coke from the coke machine, a trip to the amusement park, whathaveyou).
A vibrant, full motion advertisement sends me scrambling to write a new adblock filter. Static graphical advertisements are also quite likely to get filtered. Text advertisements are harder to filter, and also, they are sufficiently less obtrusive that I sometimes don't try to block them.
Which all goes to show that I'm probably well away from the average when it comes to internet use habits...:-/
Slashdot Mirror
At Fermilab, no data gets released until the entire experimental collaboration (500-700 people in the case of CDF and D0) has approved, or "blessed" it. Why is this? One is scientific credibility. You don't get to publish a paper and then send out bugfix updates. Once something is published, it is published for all time (well, until civilisation collapses at least). You can retract it by publishing a retraction, but that is looked upon as evidence of a rather bad failure. The second reason is that since it is a US national laboratory, the government owns the data. The department of energy, as I understand it, requires this blessing process before any analysis of their data is published.
Or Godwin's law, like any time at all.
Or for that matter, Cole's law: thinly sliced cabbage.
OTOH, if you're moving a lot (I am) because you're in college and have to move out of the dorm every summer, back home, and then 900 miles away for a summer job (that's my last three summers), then back to the dorm (or apt next year), and all you have to move stuff in is a 93 buick, then having to haul around two boxes is not really an option. Also, for your average college student, that 50$ is their next ten dinners, maybe 15.
That said, I'd also suggest saving a little extra: don't buy monitor/keyboard/mouse. Buy a KVM switch.
Good heavens. ADD is not "being wild and unfocused". I have ADD. I was never wild. I was not hyperactive. Nobody looked at me on the playground and said "Oh that kid is soooo ADD" (Which phrase I positively detest). However, my performance in school did not at all match my intelligence. I was given some kind of IQ test (I don't remember anything about it, nor do I know what I scored on it.) The psych just went on and on about how intelligent I was. My grades (esp. the work habits section that was on our elementary school report cards) sucked. I was not just unfocused, I was unable to focus. In third grade, my parents finally found a doctor who didn't just say "Oh he seems to be emotionally healthy, and plenty smart, I don't know why he's sucking so much at school", and he said that I had ADD. I was given Ritalin, and suddenly, when I sat down to do my homework, I was actually capable of doing more than one problem at once without drifting off and thinking about who knows what for half an hour in between. Oh and by the way, my parents did make me sit down and work. I could spend three hours sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing but homework, and still only finish a single one page worksheet. And this was with my mom in the kitchen checking on me to make sure I was still working every few minutes. Oh yes, my parents made me sit down and work. On the other hand I never have had time advantages on tests or anything. I could at my college, but I don't because I don't need to, and if I didn't take my medicine, the time advantages wouldn't be anywhere near long enough.
Yes, ADD is horribly overdiagnosed, and the typical "That kid is so ADD" reaction to undisciplined children doesn't help at all. However, in spite of this, it is a real problem, and it does affect numerous people, many of whom you would never suspect. It is worth noting that I am no longer taking narcotics like Ritalin, but am now on Strattera. Strattera is not a stimulant. In fact, there are large segments of the population on whom strattera doesn't work at all. This seems to correlate well with people who actually have ADD versus those who were just "wild and unfocused children". My doctor says that he'll put people on strattera, and they'll complain and want to go back to ritalin, because "It doesn't give me the same rush". Well, Ritalin never gave me a rush at all. In fact, that is sometimes used as a diagnostic test for ADD: a small dose of ritalin will make someone without ADD slightly high, but someone with ADD will not get high at all.
You say that kids with ADD are getting time and focus advantages. I can assure you that in cases where those kids actually have ADD that taking ritalin or whatever is not an advantage over kids without ADD. In fact, unless the dosage is pretty much perfect, it probably still leaves them at a slight disadvantage.
Now, all this is not to say that I think drugs like ritalin should be given out willy-nilly. In fact I am completely opposed to it. It would also be nice if all extant diagnoses of ADD could be required to go back and see an actual competent doctor this time and get rediagnosed (or, in perhaps most cases, not). Then, if those people could be convinced not to stupidly give out their pills, and to keep them locked up (my ritalin was stolen from the school nurse's cabinet several times when I was little), perhaps these drugs would not be a problem, ADD would be recognized as a real problem instead of being scorned as a cop out for bad parenting, and you wouldn't have to whine about kids getting advantages on tests anymore. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen.
Wow... Talk about a chaotic feedback system. Google makes videos popular by measuring how popular they are...
Who on earth modded this up? If I hadn't already commented on this article, I'd mod this flamebait myself. I mean, honestly, that is a can of worms that has been opened thousands of times, was not really on topic, and certainly was not necessary. And from somebody with a UID in the 100000s, too. Wow, I'd expect better behavior of such an old man.
"BSA's claim is akin to the MPAA/RIAA's claims each downloaded/pirated DVD/CD is a lost sale. And, there have (AFAIK, and I've researched this many times) been no studies coming close to showing causal relationship between pirating and decreased sales."
And yet people have no problem with a "causal" relationship showing a benefit from said action.
If it is actually shown, then of course noone would have a problem with it. Your statement is more or less meaningless. What the GP is saying is that in spite of **AA's claims that pirating causes decreased sales, there has not been any evidence produced to suggest that this is in fact true.
"Interestingly, one of the most damning contra-examples was the huge spike in CD sales corresponding to the spike in file sharing at the emergence of the original Napster. Of course, once the RIAA and music industry managed to rein Napster in, the dropoff in shared files was matched almost identically for a decline of CD sales."
Another "causal" relationship? Can I get a phone poll to go with that?
This would suggest a positive correlation between cd sales and music downloading. A phone poll? What, pray, do you imagine would be the use of that in this case? If we take song downloads and CD sales as x and y coordinates, respectively, of points on a scatter plot, then we see a strong positive relationship between the two. In statistics, we would say that some percentage of the variation in CD sales is predicted by the variation in song downloads. Now, this does not indicate a necessarily causal relationship. In fact, it is impossible to determine a causal relationship using merely statistics, because there is always the possibility of confounding variables which you simply haven't thought of and checked for. However, this does show a positive correlation, whereas from **AA's statements, we would expect a negative correlation. Thus, this suggests rather strongly that **AA is wrong or lying.
gmail is a web service. So is hotmail. So is MSN. I used to know what Passport was, but I've forgotten since. But my point is, gmail isn't bundled, really.
Are you 100% sure that the groupthink isn't just segmented? Perhaps the people saying "BUNDLED SOFTWARE IS TEH BAD!" are not the same people as those who say "GOGLE COULD STOMP M$ INOT TEH GROUND IF THEY JUST HAD A FARE CHANCE!". I'm not saying that they are different people, but I've never really investigated it myself, nor seen anything from anyone else who has. If it were the case, of course, you wouldn't be having anything to complain about.
I somewhat agree. I learned (first) with an IDE (Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 (no, take that back. First was GW-Basic... an IDE? It defies classification as anything other than hell.)), and I never grasped the underpinnings of having a compiler and a linker etc until the IDE was gone. OTOH, I never use an IDE at all now, I use vi and make every day. I've learned vi quite well by now, and I don't care to bother with another learning curve for some IDE.
So... what can a normal person see at 20ft?
If Em believes that his interpretation a) asserts itself to be the only true interpretation (possibly true? wtf do you mean by that? It is either true or it is not.) and b) demands that he act in a certain manner, whether or not some other people see his actions as "enforcing his interpretation on others", then it would be bloody stupid for him not to act in that particular manner.
If you're going to argue against a particular set of beliefs, you must begin with all the assumptions, moral and otherwise, of that set of beliefs. Taking a set of beliefs which calls for evangelism as a virtue to be practiced, and denouncing it on the grounds that "You're enforcing your beliefs on someone else!!" is just bad reasoning. Someone who holds that set of beliefs obviously doesn't think that enforcing his/her beliefs is wrong. You might try persuading him/her that enforcing beliefs is wrong, but just saying it doesn't make it so.
On the other hand, it would appear that you do think that enforcing beliefs is wrong. Thus, you prohibit yourself from telling the first person (who perhaps thinks enforcing beliefs is right) to stop, because that would be enforcing your own beliefs on him/her. Now then, of course, if your beliefs include some double standard, which is perfectly plausible, although rare, then that is fine, you are perfectly consistent. For that matter, you could exclude the double standard, so long as you also excluded the principle of non-contradiction. That is perfectly fine.
I just wanted to make sure that you had thought about things and were certain that your system of morals, which appears to tell you that anyone enforcing their beliefs on someone else is wrong, does not condemn your own actions.
nothing makes your interpretation of those laws superior to anothers.
So what makes whatever interpretation of "those laws" that allows you to say this superior to his?
One more question: Does this come under the heading of me enforcing my beliefs on you, or me enforcing your beliefs on you?
I'd like to see game AI that adapts to the ability of the player(s). That way, someone with little patience could start playing and see a reasonable rate of success immediately, but still enjoy things later as they become more skilled.
Lots of the same stuff in massive amounts.
Like graphics. Isn't this exactly what high-end graphics cards are high-end for? Just my ha'penny, I couldn't afford tuppence.
The best kept secret of the decades:
the HURD IS Duke Nukem Forever!
When I was somewhere around 8-10 years old (I can't remember exactly), my father was a software engineer. He'd come home and tell my mother about "coding this" or "programming that", and my sister (2 years older than me) and I started bugging him to teach us how to program. We had a Packard Bell 286 at the time. He thought we were too young to learn to program, and wouldn't teach us. Eventually, he got fed up, and came up with a solution. He pulled up GW-BASIC, with a program that he'd written in college that made a line move around the edges of the screen and change color. It made a pretty pattern. He showed us how to list the program, how to edit lines, and how to run it. Then he pointed out that the line was drawn by connecting two points. He said "make it three points, and three lines", and went outside to do yardwork. His thought was to scare us off of programming, make us realize it was really hard, and get us to quit bugging him. My turn was first (before my sister), and about 20 minutes later, I went outside and said "Ok, Dad, what do I do next?". So he was stuck, and then he had to teach us to program.
At least the way it works at fermilab, you have to join one of the experimental collaborations before you are allowed to use the data. So, a casual programmer could only do something with it if he or she got a job at Atlas or CMS or whatnot, in which case he or she would not be exactly a casual programmer anymore.
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html 'nuff said.
you will probably have to use it one day.
Well, ok.... But only so long as it is only one.
It is worth pointing out that when things crashed, it spit you back out at the gdm. That is to say, after the crash, the computer was immediately in a useable state. Not the desired useable state, but a useable state nonetheless. Most crashes with win* lead to some form of an unuseable state. For example, the infamous bsod. Or, perhaps more commonly, the system simply hangs. The only recourse is to reboot.
That is what is typically meant by linux stability. The linux kernel is unaffected. Even if something freezes X so it won't accept any input, the kernel is still chugging away, and, assuming you have sshd or telnetd (hopefully not this one) or something similar running, you can remotely log in, kill the offending process (sometimes X itself), and carry on your merry way. Also, if one process crashes or hangs, it usually doesn't affect the rest of the system, and you can kill the offender and go on again.
Windows kernel is nothing like as stable. One process dying messily can screw up any number of other processes, or even the kernel itself.
When I was in high school, your identity was wrapped up in your choice of music.
geez.... that makes me sound like a geezer.
Statistically, if some small percentage of attacks is reported, then you could, if you knew on average what percentage is reported, divide the number reported by that percentage and get an estimator of the total number of attacks. However, the variance of that estimator gets much much higher as the percentage gets lower.
I like the well-reasoned argument you give.
Oh, wait, you didn't. You just made an assertion "Hardware patents are identical to software patents" without doing even the slightest thing to justify it.
To object to GP post, but not to yours is inconsistent.
The problem is that the enticement part has become the all-consuming focus of the patent process, rather than the disclosure of useful trade secrets part.
Interesting that this is pretty much precisely what happens when you attempt to bribe children to behave themselves. The focus shifts from good behavior being a good unto itself to good behavior being a means to get a piece of candy (a coke from the coke machine, a trip to the amusement park, whathaveyou).
A vibrant, full motion advertisement sends me scrambling to write a new adblock filter. Static graphical advertisements are also quite likely to get filtered. Text advertisements are harder to filter, and also, they are sufficiently less obtrusive that I sometimes don't try to block them.
:-/
Which all goes to show that I'm probably well away from the average when it comes to internet use habits...