I like your point b. For some reason, somewhere between the 80s and now, avoiding to look like the "unfree", "antidemocratic" culture the 'west' is supposed to oppose, got completely removed from the political agenda. These days, it is perfectly acceptable to introduce measures that are antidemocratic or removing the liberties of citizens. One just wonders when that change happened.
Or just add enemies to what you're seeing! Do edge detection on buildings etc, and hide enemies behind that. This will probably be a good simulation of paranoia. OMG everyone's out to kill me!! Sick but cool.
I think you have a point. Normally, the case for sim-locks is the fact that the provider gives you a rebate on the phone (so you pay 1 euro for a 400 euro phone). But, if I understood correctly, the iPhone does not come with a rebate from the provider, so in fact the only reason your phone is connected to your provider is because they probably have the infrastructure to cope with the increased traffic caused by the iPhone (haha). I cannot think of any other valid reason, other than just plain consumer-cow-milking.
A comment from an ex-getty employee that has been posted later answers this: using the watermarked-images is prohibited. If you pay the license, use the non-watermarked ones. Furthermore, research from commenters on the cognitive daily site seems to indicate that they have used photoshop to remove the watermarks.
In any case, it reeks of amateurism, just the kind of people you trust your money to, isn't it. Also, as a researcher I am offended by the way these people want to mingle in research, saying it is ment to save the 'quality of research'.
As for the right of companies to protect research data, as long as they need it. That makes complete sense, they paid good money for it, and a research group will always be able to use overlapping technique and time from the researchers to make a decent publication.
But the biggest hurdle are scientific publishing corporations: The fact that you have to pay up to 1000 euro to publish a paper with a color picture in it!! And then have to pay for the subscription from the journal to be able to read it!! And the careful reviewing is mostly done by unpaid volunteers (that even don't get a subscription in return or whatever). In the early days, when publishing was expensive, the high costs made sense, but now, there is no reason whatsoever that publishing should stay with corporate publishers, especially not from a quality point of view. The journals of physics and chemistry associations are often of a much higher standard than the corporate ones.
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po
on
Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Any start is a good start, and one is already been made for supercomputers: Next to the top500, a few people have started a new list, ranking supercomputers on performance per watt, the green500. This is actually not an easy task, as to be honest one also has to include the power consumption of the cooling. Taking into account that one server room can contain various supercomputers, some estimated guesses are needed.
With the relatively low cost and high availability of computing speed nowadays, the green500 list might become very important, as it is not only the environment-friendliness but also a lot of the running cost that is involved here.
I agree with you that these 'Samaritan' cases should have some protection, otherwise no-one will help a person in need just because of the legal implications. But! This person wrote a book in a scientific style about a subject he could only write nonsense about. He is not volunteering to help people in need, he wants to earn big bucks with deceit. Same is probably true for the Dutch case. These people are running a business trying to fool dumb people to buy dumb books. That is everybody's right, but as soon as you make claims of medical/psychological/scientific nature, you can expect appropriate responses from the community you try to relate to, uncovering the things you tried to deceit, and thereby putting your in your place. A good response is to improve your method until it cannot be as easily falsified, a bad response is to sue because of 'libel'.
I think you are allowed to publish such statements, as you need to warn the general public about the scientific wrongdoing by this person. The person is publishing a book that is ment as a scientific-looking publication (that is why he searched a review from a university professor in the first place), and therefore has the responsibility to follow the scientific method. He did not do that, but used crackpot methods to write the book. Should the author have used crackpot methods for a book that was not _claiming_ to be a scientific book, it should also not been crackpottery but just nonsense. Noone will call a cartoon artist a crackpot just because in the cartoon the principles of physics are ignored. This case is different, though, as it was claiming itself to be scientific.
Maybe the libel could have been avoided by not addressing the author as a crackpot, but instead calling the book a manifestation of crackpottery. Then it is not a personal attack, and should be safe from libel charges. This is just a form of newspeak, but if the laywers and courts agree with it, then so be it our new way to talk about crackpots.
Just click the link I put in the original post, they also have the text in Dutch. Somewhere half way they mention the lawsuit, they won for the lower court in 2005, and lost for the higher court in 2007. The whole lawsuit took about 7 years and 90.000 euro, since this all started when they made a list of 'biggest quacks of the century' in 2000. They lost because the higher court used the definition of a quack as someone who intentionally fools people with non-working remedies, and didn't thought the woman promoted her non-working remedies with the intent of doing so. Put otherwise, they probably assumed she was too stupid to know what she was doing. Personally, I don't think "intent" should be part of quakery, instead the guilt of quakery lies in the fact that you, knowingly or unknowingly, are a potential harm to people who are in real need for a remedy, and are not working within the rules that are laid out for medical treatment. Hospitals and medicine are institionalized for a reason!
This court order defeats the centuries of learning by suffering that lead to the strict way medical treatment is organized.
Just check out the link I posted somewhere earlier on in this thread: a similar case in the Netherlands worked out all wrong. The "society against quacks" called someone a quack who wrote a book with very dubious statements about human psychology (even going into nonsenical racial disciminations). This society lost their defence when being sued for libel because the higher court took the definition of a 'quack' as someone who *intentionally* promotes wrong ideas. The court probably assumed the author was just stupid and therefore not knowing about how wrong she was. She wrote the nonsense without intent of writing nonsense, this didn't make her a 'quack' and therefore calling her a 'quack' an incorrect factual statement: libel!
This happened in 2007! A sad 0:1 in the competition of reason versus idiocracy, the defeats keep on coming:(
In scientific communities it is common practice to get a book or article for review from a scientific publisher. I don't know if there are implicit contracts involved from the side of the publisher, but at least you never get to sign anything. You review without getting paid for it because it emphasises your importance in the field and it is part of your unwritten scientific plight (or you can use it to stretch other people's work, not nice, but it happens). So I'd guess the professor handled in good faith and according to common practice. Now it might be smart to require a contract for cases like these, but I don't think the professor should be held liable just because he didn't explicitly state so. IANAL, though. Actually, if the publisher didn't want to get a bad review out, I think the publisher should have made a contract that the professor should only have its review send to the publisher. Then the prof. would be on the wrong when writing about it. That will still not stop anyone reading a crappy book from writing honest reviews on amazon though.
Also, just imagine what would happen if all scientists started sueing over bad reviews of their research articles! Progress would come to a standstill.
In addition to fulfilling Godwin's law for us, it's false.
I would like to introduce the Meta-Godwin's Law: Any online discussion will, as long as it goes on long enough, result in someone invoking Godwin's law, be it appropriate or not. The term 'nazi' is currently (and especially in slashdot) just used out of its original context. E.g. calling someone 'a grammar nazi' does not have anything to do with the Holocaust or the eradication of ethnic groups, and does not deserve an invokation of Godwin's law.
Not just in the US, in Netherlands the society against quacks had to pay a considerable amount to a quack, by court order! And because of the 'loser pays' system, even had to pay for this quacks lawyer costs:( Face it: stupidity has settled itself in all social layers and is international, no way to run or hide from it anymore.
Blogs? People actually use blogs as a means of person-to-person communication? Who reads personal blogs anyway? Reminds me a bit of this cartoon with two brides in a church and the groom saying to one of them 'didn't you get my e-mail?'. But instead it should read 'didn't you read my livejournal?'. That is, if there would be at least one livejournal blogger around that is emotionally stable enough to get married.
And for the Germans there is heise.de. The biggest disadvantage tweakers and heise have is their commenting system. Comments are already with respect to the layout of minor importance to the article. Then Heise has a nasty thread/reply browsing system which doesn't help a fast reading of the comments one bit. Tweakers has a more simple system, but the different layers of moderation are not as nicely arranged. And of course size of the user base limit is a point, as tweakers and heise will not have anyone who can speak English reading it, whereas many germans and dutch people do read slashdot.
I must say that I think Barropunto is a pretty cool name for anything, would very well fit a sporty Seat for example.
strangely enough, the only one of whom I know that he had problems had a thinkpad. Back to black magic again! I tried power saving modes in openbsd once, it was fun because turning off the harddrive would work nice, but turning on the harddrive when accessing them was impossible: since they were turned off, the system would give an I/O error instead of coming to the idea of turning them on.
Indeed, it`s just politics, just like the 200 ml bottle rule. And at the same time having to pack tax-free stuff in transparent bags, so you can still generate money for the airport, even by buying bottles with more than 200 ml.
Actually any article that involves texts like 'your for safety' you should read 'for our political strength'.
Indeed, I first thought the link was wrong, as it started saying he would leave his job there. Just in the next paragraph he wrote his frustrations about Vista. Coincidence? In any case, he mentions problems with power-saving modes. It is very bad that this doesn't work as any new motherboard should be supported by vista already. But I wonder if going to linux there will make his life simpler, I never even tried, and from what I've heard it is far from easy to get it working satisfactorily. Then again, linux is not made to be shut down in the first place.
Now that link is a bit of a read, but a very striking introduction on influencing decision-making with presentation techniques, even if this costs other people's lives.
With Universal's products, you can selectively scare the kids of your lawn, or attract them. For this, they use an ingenious system based on the age/frequency-dependent brain impulse generation in humans.
That didn't really deserve to be modded down, did it?
Realize that HyperCard was actually ment as a database and presentation program, and as a drawing program, say Access, Powerpoint, and Paint combined. Maybe you could also add Flash to the list.
The normal idea to use it was that your database of costumers or whatever would be a stack of cards, and there was a simple GUI to make your own GUI to interact with the stack of cards. Already quite nice that this was easy to do, but just imagine that you could also fill the cards with pictures and whatever, and 10 year olds can actually make a simple interactive game out of it! That deserves a lot of respect. Just try to make a game in Access! Actually I tried to make an interactive quiz in powerpoint last year, and it was horrible! I am not a VB expert but know my way around in several languages, and still this thing was a disaster, had a hard time trying to make one item loop (as a timer) and have another item interact with that loop (stop the timer). How come that in the end of the 80s there was a program that was more user-friendly than similar programs now? If you're unknown to Flash and you want to make a simple presentation, you're hit with a huge amount of complex menus. Just click, draw, and create a simple animation is next to impossible.
Hypercard was a revolutionary program. If it would've been cross-platform or web-integrateable it would probably be one of the most important programs used now. I guess its strength was in its limit, but that also meant the end of it for all practical purposes. Reading up on the other reactions here, I think the python-based version somebody suggested would be the most interesting. Free AND cross-platform!
Slashdot Mirror
I like your point b. For some reason, somewhere between the 80s and now, avoiding to look like the "unfree", "antidemocratic" culture the 'west' is supposed to oppose, got completely removed from the political agenda. These days, it is perfectly acceptable to introduce measures that are antidemocratic or removing the liberties of citizens. One just wonders when that change happened.
Good one. Am I far off if I would guess this is a matter of reaction kinetics in the end, and not of thermodynamics?
You're supporting torrents, that makes you an enemy of the state. Duh.
Or just add enemies to what you're seeing! Do edge detection on buildings etc, and hide enemies behind that. This will probably be a good simulation of paranoia. OMG everyone's out to kill me!! Sick but cool.
I think you have a point. Normally, the case for sim-locks is the fact that the provider gives you a rebate on the phone (so you pay 1 euro for a 400 euro phone). But, if I understood correctly, the iPhone does not come with a rebate from the provider, so in fact the only reason your phone is connected to your provider is because they probably have the infrastructure to cope with the increased traffic caused by the iPhone (haha). I cannot think of any other valid reason, other than just plain consumer-cow-milking.
In any case, it reeks of amateurism, just the kind of people you trust your money to, isn't it. Also, as a researcher I am offended by the way these people want to mingle in research, saying it is ment to save the 'quality of research'.
As for the right of companies to protect research data, as long as they need it. That makes complete sense, they paid good money for it, and a research group will always be able to use overlapping technique and time from the researchers to make a decent publication.
But the biggest hurdle are scientific publishing corporations: The fact that you have to pay up to 1000 euro to publish a paper with a color picture in it!! And then have to pay for the subscription from the journal to be able to read it!! And the careful reviewing is mostly done by unpaid volunteers (that even don't get a subscription in return or whatever). In the early days, when publishing was expensive, the high costs made sense, but now, there is no reason whatsoever that publishing should stay with corporate publishers, especially not from a quality point of view. The journals of physics and chemistry associations are often of a much higher standard than the corporate ones.
I can see where this is heading.... NLRC!
With the relatively low cost and high availability of computing speed nowadays, the green500 list might become very important, as it is not only the environment-friendliness but also a lot of the running cost that is involved here.
I agree with you that these 'Samaritan' cases should have some protection, otherwise no-one will help a person in need just because of the legal implications. But! This person wrote a book in a scientific style about a subject he could only write nonsense about. He is not volunteering to help people in need, he wants to earn big bucks with deceit. Same is probably true for the Dutch case. These people are running a business trying to fool dumb people to buy dumb books. That is everybody's right, but as soon as you make claims of medical/psychological/scientific nature, you can expect appropriate responses from the community you try to relate to, uncovering the things you tried to deceit, and thereby putting your in your place. A good response is to improve your method until it cannot be as easily falsified, a bad response is to sue because of 'libel'.
Maybe the libel could have been avoided by not addressing the author as a crackpot, but instead calling the book a manifestation of crackpottery. Then it is not a personal attack, and should be safe from libel charges. This is just a form of newspeak, but if the laywers and courts agree with it, then so be it our new way to talk about crackpots.
This court order defeats the centuries of learning by suffering that lead to the strict way medical treatment is organized.
This happened in 2007! A sad 0:1 in the competition of reason versus idiocracy, the defeats keep on coming :(
Also, just imagine what would happen if all scientists started sueing over bad reviews of their research articles! Progress would come to a standstill.
I would like to introduce the Meta-Godwin's Law: Any online discussion will, as long as it goes on long enough, result in someone invoking Godwin's law, be it appropriate or not. The term 'nazi' is currently (and especially in slashdot) just used out of its original context. E.g. calling someone 'a grammar nazi' does not have anything to do with the Holocaust or the eradication of ethnic groups, and does not deserve an invokation of Godwin's law.
Put otherwise: grow up!
Not just in the US, in Netherlands the society against quacks had to pay a considerable amount to a quack, by court order! And because of the 'loser pays' system, even had to pay for this quacks lawyer costs :( Face it: stupidity has settled itself in all social layers and is international, no way to run or hide from it anymore.
Blogs? People actually use blogs as a means of person-to-person communication? Who reads personal blogs anyway? Reminds me a bit of this cartoon with two brides in a church and the groom saying to one of them 'didn't you get my e-mail?'. But instead it should read 'didn't you read my livejournal?'. That is, if there would be at least one livejournal blogger around that is emotionally stable enough to get married.
I must say that I think Barropunto is a pretty cool name for anything, would very well fit a sporty Seat for example.
strangely enough, the only one of whom I know that he had problems had a thinkpad. Back to black magic again! I tried power saving modes in openbsd once, it was fun because turning off the harddrive would work nice, but turning on the harddrive when accessing them was impossible: since they were turned off, the system would give an I/O error instead of coming to the idea of turning them on.
Actually any article that involves texts like 'your for safety' you should read 'for our political strength'.
Indeed, I first thought the link was wrong, as it started saying he would leave his job there. Just in the next paragraph he wrote his frustrations about Vista. Coincidence? In any case, he mentions problems with power-saving modes. It is very bad that this doesn't work as any new motherboard should be supported by vista already. But I wonder if going to linux there will make his life simpler, I never even tried, and from what I've heard it is far from easy to get it working satisfactorily. Then again, linux is not made to be shut down in the first place.
Now that link is a bit of a read, but a very striking introduction on influencing decision-making with presentation techniques, even if this costs other people's lives.
With Universal's products, you can selectively scare the kids of your lawn, or attract them. For this, they use an ingenious system based on the age/frequency-dependent brain impulse generation in humans.
Ah, this one is cross-platform, free as in beer, and comes with a BSD-like license. Promising! Thanks!
Realize that HyperCard was actually ment as a database and presentation program, and as a drawing program, say Access, Powerpoint, and Paint combined. Maybe you could also add Flash to the list.
The normal idea to use it was that your database of costumers or whatever would be a stack of cards, and there was a simple GUI to make your own GUI to interact with the stack of cards. Already quite nice that this was easy to do, but just imagine that you could also fill the cards with pictures and whatever, and 10 year olds can actually make a simple interactive game out of it! That deserves a lot of respect. Just try to make a game in Access! Actually I tried to make an interactive quiz in powerpoint last year, and it was horrible! I am not a VB expert but know my way around in several languages, and still this thing was a disaster, had a hard time trying to make one item loop (as a timer) and have another item interact with that loop (stop the timer). How come that in the end of the 80s there was a program that was more user-friendly than similar programs now? If you're unknown to Flash and you want to make a simple presentation, you're hit with a huge amount of complex menus. Just click, draw, and create a simple animation is next to impossible.
Hypercard was a revolutionary program. If it would've been cross-platform or web-integrateable it would probably be one of the most important programs used now. I guess its strength was in its limit, but that also meant the end of it for all practical purposes. Reading up on the other reactions here, I think the python-based version somebody suggested would be the most interesting. Free AND cross-platform!
Now bring back hypercard, apple! That was so much fun, I programmed graphical interfaces with it when I was 10!