Yeah. Turns out that when you make your software freely available, you do not get paid for it. If you're not OK with that, don't put it under an open source license.
This is a feature of open source, not a bug.
As the fine blog post explains, it is a switchable option. You can set max_parallel_degree=0 to turn it off. Actually, right now, it's off by default, and you have to set max_parallel_degree>0 to turn it on.
Using a cell phone does sound like it would solve the problem (unless the publicly available databases that TelTech searches can find the billing address for the number) but not everyone communicates only by cell phone. Not everyone reads Slashdot, so there's a real possibility that someone might think that caller ID blocking was sufficient to protect themselves.
A rating system like you describe is very interesting and might be a good addition. I assume that you mean every visitor should have the option to rate a page. Have you discussed these suggestions at Wikipedia? I haven't gotten involved much there yet, but I imagine others have noticed and discussed these problems already.
Yes, that's what I mean. Unfortunately, I have not gotten involved enough even to know where such a thing could be suggested... it seems like there is a very hard-core core group and I just haven't been willing to spend the time and energy to get into it at that level. I have to conclude that the people who do it like it the way that it is, or it would have been changed by now, but what do I know?
Perhaps part of the issue is that discussion systems and rating systems inevitably give the developer or designer a lot of power and are therefore seen as undemocratic. I don't know what the objections are, but as you imply, I can't be the first person to have thought of these things.
I don't think there is any distinction between building an on-line encyclopedia that anyone can edit it and managing it. Wikipedians have necessarily been doing both tasks simultaneously from the beginning, though as it gets bigger and more popular, the management becomes more difficult. It's still being built just as much as it is being managed. If it's more difficult to manage and build now than it was a soon after it started, I think that's partly because tools have not scaled to match the complexity of the project. I agree. I was just referring to the "everything is a wikipage" philosophy.
Well, this is of course an arguable point, so I can only give you my own thought on the subject. It makes sense for a page like "Turtle" to be a web page that anyone can edit; that is, as you say, the point of Wikipedia. But it makes less sense (at least to me) for a page like "Talk:Turtle" to be a web page that anyone can edit, because the point of that page is to discuss the Turtle article. Right now, comments on talk pages and other forums where discussion occurs tend to be inconsistently formatted, sometimes unsigned and/or undated, subject to after-the-fact editing and/or deletion, and never expire unless someone removes them. I find that they are not infrequently difficult to read and difficult to update with my own thoughts. An actual discussion system could fix all of these problems.
Similarly, right now, the way that good editors are distinguished from bad editors is through the memory of those who watch the watchers, plus the history of comments on the person's talk page. It would be helpful if this could be quantified numerically, like by rating edits. Of course, any such system would be subject to the biases of the people doing the rating, but the current system is subject to the same bias complicated by the impossibility of doing any sort of halfway reasonable reporting. For that matter, why give every visitor the option to rate each page they view, making the pool of people doing the rating much broader? There would still be astroturfing and arguments about objectivity and bias, but that's inevitable. It would at least give you some data to argue about rather than just arguing about feelings.
Basically, the tools that are good for building an on-line encyclopedia that anyone can edit may not be the same tools that are good for managing that encyclopedia.
Correctness and vandalism are two separate issues. I don't think that technology can help with determining whether the orbit of Pluto is X miles or Y miles, but it can help with replacing the entire Pluto article with "jason sux". Of course subtle vandalism is harder to detect, but requiring users to create an account (rather than editing anonymously by IP address) and having some more structured way than a user's talk page to track whether they've vandalized articles in the past would probably be a good place to start. Nothing will be perfect and there will always be arguments, but I suspect that abandoning the "everything on the entire site is just a web page that anyone can edit" mentality would be a good place to start. If we can write software to score email spam and make a reasonable guess as to whether it is or isn't, why can't we do the same thing for Wikipedia edits? Remember, I'm not talking about correctness - just preventing vandalism.
I think this argument is fallacious. People contribute to Wikipedia because it is an open system to which anyone can contribute. The more open it is, the more people will choose to contribute. As long as articles are potentially useful and relatively unbiased, I can't see what harm it does to allow them. The argument about reverting vandalism rings hollow to me. Wikipedia could (but chooses not to) put in place technological measures to foil vandalism, preferring to rely on the efforts of volunteers to manually revert it. This seems monumentally inefficient. If it works, great. But if it doesn't work, the solution should be better technology, not filtering out potentially useful content.
Canada also has a national debt - about 40% of GDP as I understand. In fact, I think just about every country has a national debt. And most companies have corporate debt. And most individuals have personal debt. People seem to miss the fact that governments collect taxes and borrow money in order to provide social services that would otherwise be lacking. Things like... police protection, running water, a sewer system which disposes of waste in such a way that it doesn't end up in your drinking water, a public road system that anyone can drive on, a safe food supply, etc. It all seems very expensive until you imagine what life would be like without those things. Sure, it would be nice if those things could all be done more cheaply and with less waste, inefficiency, and corruption, but even so I have no plans to move to Baghdad any time soon. I'd probably pay less income taxes but it wouldn't be worth it.
I've been to the EU from the US. There's a short line for citizens of EU countries and a long line for everybody else. Still, the process really wasn't that bad.
I have to laugh at the rest of your description though, since the conveniences that you are describing are the things that come from having a bunch of (member) states that are united in some way... sorta like the United States. Our immigration may be (probably is, these days) more of a pain, but once you're in, you can drive around without changing currency or crossing borders here just the same way you do back home. Actually, we had it here first.:-)
The list of dedicated, talented contributors goes on and on.
Bingo. And that's why this argument seems so stupid to me. It's impossible to credit every person (or even organization) who deserves credit in the name of the operating system. That's why the kernel has a CREDITS file.
In the end, people usually get to name the things they create. So Linus gets to call it "the Linux kernel" because he wrote the first version of it. And whoever the people were the packaged the first distributions called them "Linux distributions". Stallman has no more right to rename Linux to GNU/Linux than he does to rename Microsoft to StallmanCorp or my son Mike to Harold. Of course, he can SUGGEST to Microsoft that they start calling themselves StallmanCorp, or to me that I start calling my son Harold, but he shouldn't be too surprised if he gets a lot of "no" answers...
You don't not eat dead people because of the wishes of the dead people, you don't eat dead people because people who are alive want to believe they won't be eaten when they die. And if dead people get eaten, then people who are alive can't live life in the comfort of knowing they won't be eaten.
Really? I'm not sure I care if someone eats me when I die, but I'm positive that I don't want to eat anyone else. Yuck.
It's not a good analogy - because living people are GOING to die. Nobody who is alive has any risk of being killed for stem cells. We're already past the point where that COULD have happened to us.
So, are all the currently not-dead-yet embryos served by knowing that they won't be killed for stem cell research? Of course not - they're just embryos, and not aware of anything.
I guess I'm dubious about the idea that morality is driven by fear that something similar might happen to oneself. I'm at very low risk of being the victim of an insurance scam because I'm well-educated and financially savvy; I'm at very low risk of being raped because I'm male; I'm at very low risk of being killed in a friendly fire incident because I'm not and have never been part of any country's military forces and I'm too old to be drafted. But this doesn't mean that I'm indifferent about those things happening to other people, because I'm capable of imagining myself in their place. I would not have wanted my mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with me, because then I wouldn't be here writing this comment on Slashdot when I should be working.
What makes one stage or state of your children's existence more important than the others?
Nothing. I'm just not so sure they can be said to "exist" in any meaningful way before they're conceived. If you pick any random sample of 17 pounds of atoms from the universe, there's some chance that they'll end up being part of a child very similar to my six-month old some day. But it's vanishingly small. Even if you pick a couple of random gametes, even from people of opposite sex whose relationship is such that those gametes might run into each other some day, the chance of a child from that particular remains very, very low. But once fertilization occurs in the womb, the chances go way up. They're nothing like 100% for the first few weeks, but the outlook is orders of magnitude brighter than it was before the happy coincidence of sperm meets egg. So I think that's the point when the child actually "exists" (though child may not be the right word for that point) and anything before that is something else which, as fortune would have it, ended up as part of the child.
Perhaps you refer to this as vitalist superstition, but I'm not so sure it's any different for a adult or, for that matter, an object. The atoms that were part a year ago are now dispersed far and wide, and still other ones will be part of you a year from now. Yet, somehow, you'll still be you. If I run a broadsword through the atoms that were part of you last year but are now someplace far from human habitation, you presumably will not care. If I run the same broadsword through the atoms that make up you right now, you'll probably mind a lot more, at least until you pass out from shock and blood loss. And I don't really care if you do whatever with the termite-infested boards that used to be on the back of my garage, wherever they are now, but I will mind quite a bit if you start ripping the boards that are part of it now apart. On the other hand, before my garage was built, it didn't exist at all: the boards were just boards, not parts of what was going to be a garage, and after it's knocked down, it won't exist any more either, even though all of its constituent parts will still be floating around there somewhere. I guess I can't prove that any of this has any objective reality to it at the atomic level, but I think it would be difficult to do much of anything without admitting that people and objects are concepts with some understandable, if not absolutely precise, meaning, and that it's possible to identify their boundaries by physical inspection.
That's a good question. If the "something productive" happens to be implanting them in the womb to be in rathof someone who wants to be a Mom, then I think it's a great idea. In fact, there are programs like Snowflake that attempt to accomplish exactly that.
If the "something productive" happens to be stem cell research, then it's a little bit more iffy, because if you thought that it was wrong to create the embryos in the first place, then you run the risk that by using them you're creating an incentive to (wrongly) create even more such embryos in the future. And, if you do happen to believe that they are human beings, then they deserve a certain amount of respect in both life and death. Most of us would, for example, consider eating our deceased relatives a rather disgusting prospect, even if it could be rendered safe from a public health perspective, but why not do something useful with all that good meat? Well, AFAICS, it's out of respect for the deceased, even though, in practical terms, they're not in a position to care.
I'd like to know what these many possibilities for the unborn child are. As far as I am aware, almost all pregnancies end in one of two outcomes: (1) the birth of a child or (2) a spontaneous or induced abortion. Embryos that spontaneously abort in the first few days do so because they have serious chromosomal defects that make it impossible for them to survive. The existence of such embryos is as inevitable as motor vehicle accidents, cancer, etc. and represents a questionable moral decision only if it were somehow avoidable, which is almost never the case. On the other hand, the intentional destruction of healthy embryos that would have developed into a child given the opportunity IS morally questionable. It "feels" different because the embryo, for much of its time in the womb, is very small, and doesn't look like a human being. But if allowed to come to term, it will smile and laugh and play and in all likelihood eventually go off to college, get married, and have children of it's own.
This is mildly inaccurate, since the Catholic Church does permit the use of
Natural Family Planning as a method of birth control, and also because the Catholic Church does not believe that there is anything sacred about sperm (or eggs, or skin cells, or anything other type of cell). The bigger problem is that referring to members of an organization that includes one-sixth of the world's population as "whacked out nutjobs" seems to meet the usual definition of "Flamebait".
The issue is really whether fertilization creates a human being. Neither an egg or a sperm individually can possibly be considered a human being, as it only has half the requisite number of chromosomes. The same thing cannot be said of a fertilized egg, and although many people don't believe it's a human being, some do.
With respect to an egg that has been fertilized outside of a woman, you're quite right: if it is not implanted, it will die. But how did that fertilized egg get there in the first place? It isn't as if they're just laying around on the floor and someone picks them up and uses them to do cloning research. If you believe that fertilization is sufficient to create a human being, then you probably shouldn't fertilize any eggs unless you believe that you have a pretty good chance of being able to keep them alive. If you don't believe that, then of course there isn't any problem.
It's true that a tiny clump of cells with no nervous system doesn't seem much like a person, but I have two young children who not very long ago were very similar tiny clumps of cells. Now, they eat and sleep and play and smile at their Dad, and the older one walks and talks and has all kinds of opinions about things. It seems sad to think that someone would do away with them at an early stage just because they weren't yet able to do all the things they can do now. Just my opinion of course.
Catholic moral teaching opposes both abortion and contraception (with the exception of NFP). However, I think you would find very few Catholics anywhere who believe that the two are morally equivalent, and I can't believe you would find anyone who would prefer an abortion over contraception. This is reflected in Church teaching as well, as by the teaching that anyone who procures an elective abortion automatically excommunicates themselves, which is certainly not true of contraception.
My real, actual Prius gets more than 50 MPG except when it's below 40 degrees out or it's wet/icy, which is about 9 months out of the year around here. Even then I get 45 MPG.
I have to agree. It seems very odd for lawyers to be asking Slashdot how to defend their client. Right? If your lawyer can't do better than that, you should get a better lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Turns out that when you make your software freely available, you do not get paid for it. If you're not OK with that, don't put it under an open source license. This is a feature of open source, not a bug.
As the fine blog post explains, it is a switchable option. You can set max_parallel_degree=0 to turn it off. Actually, right now, it's off by default, and you have to set max_parallel_degree>0 to turn it on.
Ouch.
Using a cell phone does sound like it would solve the problem (unless the publicly available databases that TelTech searches can find the billing address for the number) but not everyone communicates only by cell phone. Not everyone reads Slashdot, so there's a real possibility that someone might think that caller ID blocking was sufficient to protect themselves.
RTFA. It's court-mandated, they don't have a choice.
Yes, that's what I mean. Unfortunately, I have not gotten involved enough even to know where such a thing could be suggested... it seems like there is a very hard-core core group and I just haven't been willing to spend the time and energy to get into it at that level. I have to conclude that the people who do it like it the way that it is, or it would have been changed by now, but what do I know?
Perhaps part of the issue is that discussion systems and rating systems inevitably give the developer or designer a lot of power and are therefore seen as undemocratic. I don't know what the objections are, but as you imply, I can't be the first person to have thought of these things.
I don't think there is any distinction between building an on-line encyclopedia that anyone can edit it and managing it. Wikipedians have necessarily been doing both tasks simultaneously from the beginning, though as it gets bigger and more popular, the management becomes more difficult. It's still being built just as much as it is being managed. If it's more difficult to manage and build now than it was a soon after it started, I think that's partly because tools have not scaled to match the complexity of the project. I agree. I was just referring to the "everything is a wikipage" philosophy.Well, this is of course an arguable point, so I can only give you my own thought on the subject. It makes sense for a page like "Turtle" to be a web page that anyone can edit; that is, as you say, the point of Wikipedia. But it makes less sense (at least to me) for a page like "Talk:Turtle" to be a web page that anyone can edit, because the point of that page is to discuss the Turtle article. Right now, comments on talk pages and other forums where discussion occurs tend to be inconsistently formatted, sometimes unsigned and/or undated, subject to after-the-fact editing and/or deletion, and never expire unless someone removes them. I find that they are not infrequently difficult to read and difficult to update with my own thoughts. An actual discussion system could fix all of these problems.
Similarly, right now, the way that good editors are distinguished from bad editors is through the memory of those who watch the watchers, plus the history of comments on the person's talk page. It would be helpful if this could be quantified numerically, like by rating edits. Of course, any such system would be subject to the biases of the people doing the rating, but the current system is subject to the same bias complicated by the impossibility of doing any sort of halfway reasonable reporting. For that matter, why give every visitor the option to rate each page they view, making the pool of people doing the rating much broader? There would still be astroturfing and arguments about objectivity and bias, but that's inevitable. It would at least give you some data to argue about rather than just arguing about feelings.
Basically, the tools that are good for building an on-line encyclopedia that anyone can edit may not be the same tools that are good for managing that encyclopedia.
Correctness and vandalism are two separate issues. I don't think that technology can help with determining whether the orbit of Pluto is X miles or Y miles, but it can help with replacing the entire Pluto article with "jason sux". Of course subtle vandalism is harder to detect, but requiring users to create an account (rather than editing anonymously by IP address) and having some more structured way than a user's talk page to track whether they've vandalized articles in the past would probably be a good place to start. Nothing will be perfect and there will always be arguments, but I suspect that abandoning the "everything on the entire site is just a web page that anyone can edit" mentality would be a good place to start. If we can write software to score email spam and make a reasonable guess as to whether it is or isn't, why can't we do the same thing for Wikipedia edits? Remember, I'm not talking about correctness - just preventing vandalism.
I think this argument is fallacious. People contribute to Wikipedia because it is an open system to which anyone can contribute. The more open it is, the more people will choose to contribute. As long as articles are potentially useful and relatively unbiased, I can't see what harm it does to allow them. The argument about reverting vandalism rings hollow to me. Wikipedia could (but chooses not to) put in place technological measures to foil vandalism, preferring to rely on the efforts of volunteers to manually revert it. This seems monumentally inefficient. If it works, great. But if it doesn't work, the solution should be better technology, not filtering out potentially useful content.
Yeah... we just went right in there and took all their oil. `Now we're rich. Go us.
Canada also has a national debt - about 40% of GDP as I understand. In fact, I think just about every country has a national debt. And most companies have corporate debt. And most individuals have personal debt. People seem to miss the fact that governments collect taxes and borrow money in order to provide social services that would otherwise be lacking. Things like... police protection, running water, a sewer system which disposes of waste in such a way that it doesn't end up in your drinking water, a public road system that anyone can drive on, a safe food supply, etc. It all seems very expensive until you imagine what life would be like without those things. Sure, it would be nice if those things could all be done more cheaply and with less waste, inefficiency, and corruption, but even so I have no plans to move to Baghdad any time soon. I'd probably pay less income taxes but it wouldn't be worth it.
I've been to the EU from the US. There's a short line for citizens of EU countries and a long line for everybody else. Still, the process really wasn't that bad.
I have to laugh at the rest of your description though, since the conveniences that you are describing are the things that come from having a bunch of (member) states that are united in some way... sorta like the United States. Our immigration may be (probably is, these days) more of a pain, but once you're in, you can drive around without changing currency or crossing borders here just the same way you do back home. Actually, we had it here first. :-)
Bingo. And that's why this argument seems so stupid to me. It's impossible to credit every person (or even organization) who deserves credit in the name of the operating system. That's why the kernel has a CREDITS file.
In the end, people usually get to name the things they create. So Linus gets to call it "the Linux kernel" because he wrote the first version of it. And whoever the people were the packaged the first distributions called them "Linux distributions". Stallman has no more right to rename Linux to GNU/Linux than he does to rename Microsoft to StallmanCorp or my son Mike to Harold. Of course, he can SUGGEST to Microsoft that they start calling themselves StallmanCorp, or to me that I start calling my son Harold, but he shouldn't be too surprised if he gets a lot of "no" answers...
Really? I'm not sure I care if someone eats me when I die, but I'm positive that I don't want to eat anyone else. Yuck.
It's not a good analogy - because living people are GOING to die. Nobody who is alive has any risk of being killed for stem cells. We're already past the point where that COULD have happened to us.So, are all the currently not-dead-yet embryos served by knowing that they won't be killed for stem cell research? Of course not - they're just embryos, and not aware of anything.
I guess I'm dubious about the idea that morality is driven by fear that something similar might happen to oneself. I'm at very low risk of being the victim of an insurance scam because I'm well-educated and financially savvy; I'm at very low risk of being raped because I'm male; I'm at very low risk of being killed in a friendly fire incident because I'm not and have never been part of any country's military forces and I'm too old to be drafted. But this doesn't mean that I'm indifferent about those things happening to other people, because I'm capable of imagining myself in their place. I would not have wanted my mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with me, because then I wouldn't be here writing this comment on Slashdot when I should be working.
Nothing. I'm just not so sure they can be said to "exist" in any meaningful way before they're conceived. If you pick any random sample of 17 pounds of atoms from the universe, there's some chance that they'll end up being part of a child very similar to my six-month old some day. But it's vanishingly small. Even if you pick a couple of random gametes, even from people of opposite sex whose relationship is such that those gametes might run into each other some day, the chance of a child from that particular remains very, very low. But once fertilization occurs in the womb, the chances go way up. They're nothing like 100% for the first few weeks, but the outlook is orders of magnitude brighter than it was before the happy coincidence of sperm meets egg. So I think that's the point when the child actually "exists" (though child may not be the right word for that point) and anything before that is something else which, as fortune would have it, ended up as part of the child.
Perhaps you refer to this as vitalist superstition, but I'm not so sure it's any different for a adult or, for that matter, an object. The atoms that were part a year ago are now dispersed far and wide, and still other ones will be part of you a year from now. Yet, somehow, you'll still be you. If I run a broadsword through the atoms that were part of you last year but are now someplace far from human habitation, you presumably will not care. If I run the same broadsword through the atoms that make up you right now, you'll probably mind a lot more, at least until you pass out from shock and blood loss. And I don't really care if you do whatever with the termite-infested boards that used to be on the back of my garage, wherever they are now, but I will mind quite a bit if you start ripping the boards that are part of it now apart. On the other hand, before my garage was built, it didn't exist at all: the boards were just boards, not parts of what was going to be a garage, and after it's knocked down, it won't exist any more either, even though all of its constituent parts will still be floating around there somewhere. I guess I can't prove that any of this has any objective reality to it at the atomic level, but I think it would be difficult to do much of anything without admitting that people and objects are concepts with some understandable, if not absolutely precise, meaning, and that it's possible to identify their boundaries by physical inspection.
That's a good question. If the "something productive" happens to be implanting them in the womb to be in rathof someone who wants to be a Mom, then I think it's a great idea. In fact, there are programs like Snowflake that attempt to accomplish exactly that.
If the "something productive" happens to be stem cell research, then it's a little bit more iffy, because if you thought that it was wrong to create the embryos in the first place, then you run the risk that by using them you're creating an incentive to (wrongly) create even more such embryos in the future. And, if you do happen to believe that they are human beings, then they deserve a certain amount of respect in both life and death. Most of us would, for example, consider eating our deceased relatives a rather disgusting prospect, even if it could be rendered safe from a public health perspective, but why not do something useful with all that good meat? Well, AFAICS, it's out of respect for the deceased, even though, in practical terms, they're not in a position to care.
I'd like to know what these many possibilities for the unborn child are. As far as I am aware, almost all pregnancies end in one of two outcomes: (1) the birth of a child or (2) a spontaneous or induced abortion. Embryos that spontaneously abort in the first few days do so because they have serious chromosomal defects that make it impossible for them to survive. The existence of such embryos is as inevitable as motor vehicle accidents, cancer, etc. and represents a questionable moral decision only if it were somehow avoidable, which is almost never the case. On the other hand, the intentional destruction of healthy embryos that would have developed into a child given the opportunity IS morally questionable. It "feels" different because the embryo, for much of its time in the womb, is very small, and doesn't look like a human being. But if allowed to come to term, it will smile and laugh and play and in all likelihood eventually go off to college, get married, and have children of it's own.
This is mildly inaccurate, since the Catholic Church does permit the use of Natural Family Planning as a method of birth control, and also because the Catholic Church does not believe that there is anything sacred about sperm (or eggs, or skin cells, or anything other type of cell). The bigger problem is that referring to members of an organization that includes one-sixth of the world's population as "whacked out nutjobs" seems to meet the usual definition of "Flamebait".
The issue is really whether fertilization creates a human being. Neither an egg or a sperm individually can possibly be considered a human being, as it only has half the requisite number of chromosomes. The same thing cannot be said of a fertilized egg, and although many people don't believe it's a human being, some do.
With respect to an egg that has been fertilized outside of a woman, you're quite right: if it is not implanted, it will die. But how did that fertilized egg get there in the first place? It isn't as if they're just laying around on the floor and someone picks them up and uses them to do cloning research. If you believe that fertilization is sufficient to create a human being, then you probably shouldn't fertilize any eggs unless you believe that you have a pretty good chance of being able to keep them alive. If you don't believe that, then of course there isn't any problem.
It's true that a tiny clump of cells with no nervous system doesn't seem much like a person, but I have two young children who not very long ago were very similar tiny clumps of cells. Now, they eat and sleep and play and smile at their Dad, and the older one walks and talks and has all kinds of opinions about things. It seems sad to think that someone would do away with them at an early stage just because they weren't yet able to do all the things they can do now. Just my opinion of course.
Catholic moral teaching opposes both abortion and contraception (with the exception of NFP). However, I think you would find very few Catholics anywhere who believe that the two are morally equivalent, and I can't believe you would find anyone who would prefer an abortion over contraception. This is reflected in Church teaching as well, as by the teaching that anyone who procures an elective abortion automatically excommunicates themselves, which is certainly not true of contraception.
My real, actual Prius gets more than 50 MPG except when it's below 40 degrees out or it's wet/icy, which is about 9 months out of the year around here. Even then I get 45 MPG.
Score: 1, Informative ????
If you're blind, then why do you care about the light switch in the first place?
I have to agree. It seems very odd for lawyers to be asking Slashdot how to defend their client. Right? If your lawyer can't do better than that, you should get a better lawyer.