SCO did file stuff, but some of it was "You told us we couldn't ask for anything from IBM, but we won't give IBM what it wants until we get what we want", and more of it was "Oh, gee, our executives don't give a damn about a $3billion lawsuit -- they went away for Xmas, and we couldn't reach them. Too bad."
I suspect that it's all part of the Plan. SCO's discovery demands are ridiculous--unless of course you buy SCO's extreme interpretation of what comprises "derivative works." SCO's persistent refusal to come up with any real support for their accusations puts the judge in a difficult position. SCO almost seems to be daring the judge to dismiss the case. But by doing so without ruling upon the validity of SCO's interpretation of copyright law (which the judge cannot do without hearing arguments) provides grounds for an appeal. I figure that SCO wants to lose this round. SCO's stock will fall sharply. And the principals who have been unloading SCO at a healthy profit will turn around and buy it back at rock-bottom prices.
Then there will be an appeal, and another barrage of press releases, the stock will go up again, and they'll sell again. Perhaps they'll even make it to the Supreme Court, and be able to run the whole churn their stock a third time.
On the other hand, perhaps some judge will actually allow SCO's discovery demands. With that much information to fish in, chances are that they can find something that IBM did improperly, and that they can use to shake down IBM for a settlement.
I have never seen that affect with digital cameras, even near bright backgrounds. If anything, the bright backgrounds create a kind of "halo affect" that itself tends to have soft edges
The halo effect you describe is probably either overexposure or a sharpening artifact. I've certainly seen pixellation in digital photos when a dark object is seen against the sky.
NASA has a broad spectrum of image data from Mars. They could use this data to present a picture of Mars as it actually appears, or they could use the data to present a picture of Mars which does not represent the actual appearance.
They certainly can (and occasionally do) manipulate an image to simulates what an imaginary human visitor might see, but you can hardly blame them for preferring to show the real data, which is really more honest.
Yes, but rocks near the horizon *are* blurred (anti-aliased). If the sampling was too "sharp", then the rocks and ridge borders near the horizon would also look "pixelly", but they don't.
I think the horizon is too far away for us to see any detail of rocks near the horizon. If you zoom in with an image editor, you will see that the rocks also look "pixelly," but since it's dark brown against a somewhat less dark brown, it's not that noticeable. But the sky is so much lighter than the ground that a pixel that includes any significant part of the ground is going to look much darker than a pixel that is all sky, hence the pixels are more obvious.
A property of bitmapped images, such as those taken by digital cameras, is that sharp boundaries tend to look jagged, unless antialiasing techniques are used to mask this effect. Such antialiasing would not be appropriate for scientific images, because even though it produces a more pleasing image to the eye, it degrades the data.
It is true that the Amiga1000 was released prematurely. It should've had a finished OS, GUI, and more ram. But Commodore wasn't very bright.
I bought my Amiga at least a couple of years after the initial release, and it still had that "unfinished" feel to it. By that time, I was using my Mac for serious work on a daily basis. I never seriously contemplated using the Amiga as anything more than a toy (although it was the video tool of choice for a few years). Perhaps the Amiga eventually got its act together, but by that time it was far too late to challenge the Mac, much less the Intel machines. It is amusing to imagine what Apple might have done if they'd had the Amiga hardware to work with, instead of the limited original Mac design. Clearly, the Amiga OS was technically more ambitious. But the Mac had that "It just works" thing going for it from the very outset, while the Amiga did not.
I think the school culture is bit out of sync with the working world. In school cooperation is called "cheating" in the working world it's being "team player".
Cheating in school is taking credit for somebody else's work, or pretending to have done work that you haven't actually done. Most employers also look down on this. A well-rounded student or employee should be capable of both team and independent work, and a good educational program will provide multiple opportunities for both.
Flamebait my ass. The Amiga was more powerfull, and CHEAPER too! That's fact! Oh, and it had 4096 colors at a time when the Mac had *2* and the Pc had *4*.
The Amiga was a really nice piece of hardware. But the multitasking OS had a really poor user interface and was constantly crashing and throwing up guru meditation numbers. It just had an overall "unfinished" feel. I'm not surprised that it never really challenged the Mac. Great games for its time, though.
If Apple had made the Mac expandable using some kind of external bus (something the Apple II and Commodore 64 and CP/M systems and PCs all did), there would have been a supply of external disks that would have allowed it to compete with the PC.
The Mac Plus, with its external SCSI connector, was released in '86. SCSI was a standard feature on all subsequent Macs through the beige G3, after which Apple switched to firewire. The Mac II, with its plug-and-play NuBus was released the following year.
Good lord... why in the world would you pay thousands of dollars a year for an education and then blow it all off and not learn anything?
Most of the time, they aren't paying for it; their parents are. Undergraduates aren't terribly mature, and it's not that uncommon for them to fail to grasp the fact that they are no longer in school because they are required to be, but because they are paying the university to teach them things that they need to know. That's why easy classes are always in demand, even they generally provide the lowest return on investment, because they usually teach subjects that the student could easily learn on his own. The intelligent thing to do in college is to focus on difficult subjects where you can really use some guidance, but most undergraduates don't appreciate this. The cheating student is mostly cheating himself, and the professor who checks for plagiarism is actually serving the student.
I don't see the problem with letting people fall on their face. If they're stupid enough to cheat their way through college, not learning anything, and then go into a situation which requires legitimate knowledge of the material they did not learn, that's really their own damn fault. I don't feel sorry for them.
The main point of going to a University is to obtain training that prevents you from falling flat on your face later on. To me, this is considerably more important than the concern that the fragile egos of some students might be harmed by their university's "lack of trust." I am not prepared to dismiss a student who fails to absorb a particular lesson as "stupid." Sometimes, it simply means that that student needs to be taught in a different way.
Schools and universities already teach what is legitimate scholarship, or EVERYONE would be cheating
Right...and English classes already teach how to write good english grammar, or EVERYONE would have bad grammar.
My experience is that reality does not correspond to your simplistic division of students into "cheats" and "honest students." The fact is that not everybody learns at the same pace or in the same way, and many students do come out of college not understanding where the dividing line is between honest scholarship and plagiarism. I don't see any difference between routinely checking a paper for plagiarism and routinely checking for bad grammar.
I've encountered bright, promising students from good undergraduate institutions who believed that it's not plagiarism if they only copy a sentence or two from a given source. Now I have no doubt that somewhere along the line, they were told otherwise, and the lesson simply didn't take. On the other hand, getting an "F" on an undergraduate paper because of inadequate citation of primary sources is the sort of memorable lesson that can save a student no end of grief later on in their careers.
And to add a bit to the discussion, most courses require several papers, and if the student is plagiarizing every paper plus each paper is on a different subject, then I believe the student will be plagiarizing from different authors for each paper. From this I conclude that this student's work will have a writing style that jumps all over the place, making it obvious that he/she is plagiarizing.
Plagiarism is a serious charge. You can't accuse a student of plagiarism because of an inconsistent writing style. And a good plagiarist will not necessarily have an inconsistent style. I knew a student who got into trouble in graduate school for plagiarism, having had the singular misfortune to run into a professor with a photographic memory. At the hearing, he admitted that he'd plagiarized all of his undergraduate papers. He never plagiarized from a single source. Instead, he would assemble a paper like a jigsaw puzzle, plagiarizing one sentence from one source, the next from a different source. His writing had a consistent style--the problem was that it was not really a writing style; it was a plagiarism style, reflecting his taste in what sentence to swipe from what source. As it happens, this particular student was quite capable of writing well. He'd just picked up this bad habit as an undergraduate, and unfortunately none of his professors had caught it. When he finally tripped up as a graduate student, the consequences were severe.
So then, an environment in which everyone is assumed to be a cheater until proven otherwise by automated software is an environment that fosters trust, growth, and learning?
It goes further than that. Shockingly, many schools are actually known to lock up exams before tests. Even supplies and audiovisual equipment are frequently kept under lock and key. Access to grade records over the internet requires a password. Clearly, they are assuming that everybody is a cheater and thief until proven otherwise....
That is an excellent point. Is it good to evolve? First we must define what we mean by "evolve". I think a good definition would be 'improve our innate physical characteristics'.
Evolution by natural selection already has a definition: "increase the number of surviving, fertile offspring." For example, evolution will favor a gene that increases your fertility, but as a side effect, causes you to die a painful death in your mid-fifties from cancer.
Not so. Say you've got a student with poor reading and writing skills. Said student suddenly turn in an erudite, well-written paper. You don't have to know jack about its sources to smell something funny.
"Smelling something funny" and proving it are two different things. And of course, not every plagiarized paper is erudite and well-written. The crafty plagiarist might well choose a paper that earned its original author a "B". And if the student is plagiarizing from the outset, the teacher may know little about his true writing skills.
I don't know. In my job I use a lot of open source libraries and "plagiarize" code from other people's programs. Is this really bad?
Plagiarism is passing somebody else's work off as your own, so if you are telling your boss that you wrote it yourself, then yes, it is really wrong. And of course, if the original source is copyrighted or limited by license, you could be exposing your employer to liability that they don't know about. They probably wouldn't take that lightly.
One flaw in plagiarism is that each person has an individual writing style.
A professor might suggest that a student is plagiarizing if the writing style is inconsistent. But a lot of undergraduates have writing styles that are not all that distinctive, while a particular creative student might show a lot of variation in style. And ultimately, the professor would probably have to go to an originality testing service to get evidence to support the accusation.
My mother is a French professor; even her fourth-year students are easily distinguishable from published sources, which makes the sudden jump in apparent writing capability a clear sign of plagiarism.
Ah, but can she distinguish a paper written by one of her fourth year students from one written by a fourth year student at another university three years ago, and then sold or traded to a student in her class?
Isnt that the job of lecturers/professors? They're supposed to know the material and recognise when something is copied.
So professors are expected to be familiar with every recycled term paper that is going around on the internet or being sold by term paper mills?
In reality, professors are going to catch plagiarism only if the student happens to copy from a source that the professor is very familiar with. A system where some students get hauled before disciplinary hearings while many others who are doing the same thing get away with high grades hardly seems fair, either.
Unfortunately, students often get away with petty plagiarism all through college, and then move on to graduate school or professional careers where sources are more easily identified, and the penalty for plagiarism tends to be much heavier.
Teaching students what constitutes original scholarship is part of the legitimate mission of the university, so outlawing tools that enable professors to catch cheaters ultimately is harmful to the student.
Still, asking the student to submit his paper to an originality checker seems a bit like a slap in the face, and from a practical point of view, letting the students know just how their papers are going to be checked makes it easier for them to circumvent those measures. It would probably be better simply to inform the students that there papers will be checked for originality without telling them how.
That actually brings up another concern. If an animal is genetically modified, including sterility, and it gets into the wild. There is a chance that the rest of the modifications will give it a reproductive advantage (like salmon made larger so we get more food out of them).
If you take some well engineered piece of machinery and randomly bolt on a piece of equipment from something else, how likely do you imagine it is that it will work better? Organisms are optimized by millions of years of evolution. That means that the overwhelming majority of changes will be harmful. In particular, salmon have genetic variability in size, which is acted upon by selection. So that if it was better for salmon to be bigger, they already would be
Where is the guarantee that some unforeseen feature may arise that is harmful to a greater system?
There are few guarantees in life. Even with non-GM food, there is no guarantee that it will not induce in you some sort of bizarre and fatal allergic reaction.
However, once consequence of the widespread use of GFP in biological research is that it has been introduced into all sorts of creatures and cells for all sorts of purposes. And to do a study with GFP, you obviously have to check that it isn't causing any kind of toxic effects. So in practice, we have an immense amount of evidence that this particular protein is well tolerated.
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Think of the $500 as a cheap version for small businesses or students.
For students, it's even cheaper. The educational pricing is $249 for the 10-user version and $499 for the unlimited version.
SCO did file stuff, but some of it was "You told us we couldn't ask for anything from IBM, but we won't give IBM what it wants until we get what we want", and more of it was "Oh, gee, our executives don't give a damn about a $3billion lawsuit -- they went away for Xmas, and we couldn't reach them. Too bad."
I suspect that it's all part of the Plan. SCO's discovery demands are ridiculous--unless of course you buy SCO's extreme interpretation of what comprises "derivative works." SCO's persistent refusal to come up with any real support for their accusations puts the judge in a difficult position. SCO almost seems to be daring the judge to dismiss the case. But by doing so without ruling upon the validity of SCO's interpretation of copyright law (which the judge cannot do without hearing arguments) provides grounds for an appeal. I figure that SCO wants to lose this round. SCO's stock will fall sharply. And the principals who have been unloading SCO at a healthy profit will turn around and buy it back at rock-bottom prices.
Then there will be an appeal, and another barrage of press releases, the stock will go up again, and they'll sell again. Perhaps they'll even make it to the Supreme Court, and be able to run the whole churn their stock a third time.
On the other hand, perhaps some judge will actually allow SCO's discovery demands. With that much information to fish in, chances are that they can find something that IBM did improperly, and that they can use to shake down IBM for a settlement.
I have never seen that affect with digital cameras, even near bright backgrounds. If anything, the bright backgrounds create a kind of "halo affect" that itself tends to have soft edges
The halo effect you describe is probably either overexposure or a sharpening artifact. I've certainly seen pixellation in digital photos when a dark object is seen against the sky.
NASA has a broad spectrum of image data from Mars.
They could use this data to present a picture of
Mars as it actually appears, or they could use the
data to present a picture of Mars which does not
represent the actual appearance.
They certainly can (and occasionally do) manipulate an image to simulates what an imaginary human visitor might see, but you can hardly blame them for preferring to show the real data, which is really more honest.
Yes, but rocks near the horizon *are* blurred (anti-aliased). If the sampling was too "sharp", then the rocks and ridge borders near the horizon would also look "pixelly", but they don't.
I think the horizon is too far away for us to see any detail of rocks near the horizon. If you zoom in with an image editor, you will see that the rocks also look "pixelly," but since it's dark brown against a somewhat less dark brown, it's not that noticeable. But the sky is so much lighter than the ground that a pixel that includes any significant part of the ground is going to look much darker than a pixel that is all sky, hence the pixels are more obvious.
A property of bitmapped images, such as those taken by digital cameras, is that sharp boundaries tend to look jagged, unless antialiasing techniques are used to mask this effect. Such antialiasing would not be appropriate for scientific images, because even though it produces a more pleasing image to the eye, it degrades the data.
Can anyone explain to me why the horizon of the hi-res images is bitmapped
The entire image is a bitmap, because that's the way digital cameras work. It's just more obvious when you have a sharp boundary to look at.
I bought my Amiga at least a couple of years after the initial release, and it still had that "unfinished" feel to it. By that time, I was using my Mac for serious work on a daily basis. I never seriously contemplated using the Amiga as anything more than a toy (although it was the video tool of choice for a few years). Perhaps the Amiga eventually got its act together, but by that time it was far too late to challenge the Mac, much less the Intel machines. It is amusing to imagine what Apple might have done if they'd had the Amiga hardware to work with, instead of the limited original Mac design. Clearly, the Amiga OS was technically more ambitious. But the Mac had that "It just works" thing going for it from the very outset, while the Amiga did not.
I think the school culture is bit out of sync with the working world. In school cooperation is called "cheating" in the working world it's being "team player".
Cheating in school is taking credit for somebody else's work, or pretending to have done work that you haven't actually done. Most employers also look down on this. A well-rounded student or employee should be capable of both team and independent work, and a good educational program will provide multiple opportunities for both.
Flamebait my ass. The Amiga was more powerfull, and CHEAPER too! That's fact! Oh, and it had 4096 colors at a time when the Mac had *2* and the Pc had *4*.
The Amiga was a really nice piece of hardware. But the multitasking OS had a really poor user interface and was constantly crashing and throwing up guru meditation numbers. It just had an overall "unfinished" feel. I'm not surprised that it never really challenged the Mac. Great games for its time, though.
If Apple had made the Mac expandable using some kind of external bus (something the Apple II and Commodore 64 and CP/M systems and PCs all did), there would have been a supply of external disks that would have allowed it to compete with the PC.
The Mac Plus, with its external SCSI connector, was released in '86. SCSI was a standard feature on all subsequent Macs through the beige G3, after which Apple switched to firewire. The Mac II, with its plug-and-play NuBus was released the following year.
Good lord... why in the world would you pay thousands of dollars a year for an education and then blow it all off and not learn anything?
Most of the time, they aren't paying for it; their parents are. Undergraduates aren't terribly mature, and it's not that uncommon for them to fail to grasp the fact that they are no longer in school because they are required to be, but because they are paying the university to teach them things that they need to know. That's why easy classes are always in demand, even they generally provide the lowest return on investment, because they usually teach subjects that the student could easily learn on his own. The intelligent thing to do in college is to focus on difficult subjects where you can really use some guidance, but most undergraduates don't appreciate this. The cheating student is mostly cheating himself, and the professor who checks for plagiarism is actually serving the student.
I don't see the problem with letting people fall on their face. If they're stupid enough to cheat their way through college, not learning anything, and then go into a situation which requires legitimate knowledge of the material they did not learn, that's really their own damn fault. I don't feel sorry for them.
The main point of going to a University is to obtain training that prevents you from falling flat on your face later on. To me, this is considerably more important than the concern that the fragile egos of some students might be harmed by their university's "lack of trust." I am not prepared to dismiss a student who fails to absorb a particular lesson as "stupid." Sometimes, it simply means that that student needs to be taught in a different way.
Schools and universities already teach what is legitimate scholarship, or EVERYONE would be cheating
Right...and English classes already teach how to write good english grammar, or EVERYONE would have bad grammar.
My experience is that reality does not correspond to your simplistic division of students into "cheats" and "honest students." The fact is that not everybody learns at the same pace or in the same way, and many students do come out of college not understanding where the dividing line is between honest scholarship and plagiarism. I don't see any difference between routinely checking a paper for plagiarism and routinely checking for bad grammar.
I've encountered bright, promising students from good undergraduate institutions who believed that it's not plagiarism if they only copy a sentence or two from a given source. Now I have no doubt that somewhere along the line, they were told otherwise, and the lesson simply didn't take. On the other hand, getting an "F" on an undergraduate paper because of inadequate citation of primary sources is the sort of memorable lesson that can save a student no end of grief later on in their careers.
And to add a bit to the discussion, most courses require several papers, and if the student is plagiarizing every paper plus each paper is on a different subject, then I believe the student will be plagiarizing from different authors for each paper. From this I conclude that this student's work will have a writing style that jumps all over the place, making it obvious that he/she is plagiarizing.
Plagiarism is a serious charge. You can't accuse a student of plagiarism because of an inconsistent writing style. And a good plagiarist will not necessarily have an inconsistent style. I knew a student who got into trouble in graduate school for plagiarism, having had the singular misfortune to run into a professor with a photographic memory. At the hearing, he admitted that he'd plagiarized all of his undergraduate papers. He never plagiarized from a single source. Instead, he would assemble a paper like a jigsaw puzzle, plagiarizing one sentence from one source, the next from a different source. His writing had a consistent style--the problem was that it was not really a writing style; it was a plagiarism style, reflecting his taste in what sentence to swipe from what source. As it happens, this particular student was quite capable of writing well. He'd just picked up this bad habit as an undergraduate, and unfortunately none of his professors had caught it. When he finally tripped up as a graduate student, the consequences were severe.
So then, an environment in which everyone is assumed to be a cheater until proven otherwise by automated software is an environment that fosters trust, growth, and learning?
It goes further than that. Shockingly, many schools are actually known to lock up exams before tests. Even supplies and audiovisual equipment are frequently kept under lock and key. Access to grade records over the internet requires a password. Clearly, they are assuming that everybody is a cheater and thief until proven otherwise....
That is an excellent point. Is it good to evolve? First we must define what we mean by "evolve". I think a good definition would be 'improve our innate physical characteristics'.
Evolution by natural selection already has a definition: "increase the number of surviving, fertile offspring." For example, evolution will favor a gene that increases your fertility, but as a side effect, causes you to die a painful death in your mid-fifties from cancer.
Not so. Say you've got a student with poor reading and writing skills. Said student suddenly turn in an erudite, well-written paper. You don't have to know jack about its sources to smell something funny.
"Smelling something funny" and proving it are two different things. And of course, not every plagiarized paper is erudite and well-written. The crafty plagiarist might well choose a paper that earned its original author a "B". And if the student is plagiarizing from the outset, the teacher may know little about his true writing skills.
I don't know. In my job I use a lot of open source libraries and "plagiarize" code from other people's programs. Is this really bad?
Plagiarism is passing somebody else's work off as your own, so if you are telling your boss that you wrote it yourself, then yes, it is really wrong. And of course, if the original source is copyrighted or limited by license, you could be exposing your employer to liability that they don't know about. They probably wouldn't take that lightly.
One flaw in plagiarism is that each person has an individual writing style.
A professor might suggest that a student is plagiarizing if the writing style is inconsistent. But a lot of undergraduates have writing styles that are not all that distinctive, while a particular creative student might show a lot of variation in style. And ultimately, the professor would probably have to go to an originality testing service to get evidence to support the accusation.
My mother is a French professor; even her fourth-year students are easily distinguishable from published sources, which makes the sudden jump in apparent writing capability a clear sign of plagiarism.
Ah, but can she distinguish a paper written by one of her fourth year students from one written by a fourth year student at another university three years ago, and then sold or traded to a student in her class?
Isnt that the job of lecturers/professors? They're supposed to know the material and recognise when something is copied.
So professors are expected to be familiar with every recycled term paper that is going around on the internet or being sold by term paper mills?
In reality, professors are going to catch plagiarism only if the student happens to copy from a source that the professor is very familiar with. A system where some students get hauled before disciplinary hearings while many others who are doing the same thing get away with high grades hardly seems fair, either.
Unfortunately, students often get away with petty plagiarism all through college, and then move on to graduate school or professional careers where sources are more easily identified, and the penalty for plagiarism tends to be much heavier.
Teaching students what constitutes original scholarship is part of the legitimate mission of the university, so outlawing tools that enable professors to catch cheaters ultimately is harmful to the student.
Still, asking the student to submit his paper to an originality checker seems a bit like a slap in the face, and from a practical point of view, letting the students know just how their papers are going to be checked makes it easier for them to circumvent those measures. It would probably be better simply to inform the students that there papers will be checked for originality without telling them how.
Fluorescent zebra fish, like all ornamental fish, are NOT intended for human consumption; they should never be eaten.
And if you did, they are almost certainly completely harmless. But we have no intention of wasting a couple of million dollars proving it.
That actually brings up another concern. If an animal is genetically modified, including sterility, and it gets into the wild. There is a chance that the rest of the modifications will give it a reproductive advantage (like salmon made larger so we get more food out of them).
If you take some well engineered piece of machinery and randomly bolt on a piece of equipment from something else, how likely do you imagine it is that it will work better? Organisms are optimized by millions of years of evolution. That means that the overwhelming majority of changes will be harmful. In particular, salmon have genetic variability in size, which is acted upon by selection. So that if it was better for salmon to be bigger, they already would be
potentially the fish that we do eat.
And probably some of the fish that we already do eat. After all, it is a natural protein found in jellyfish. And some fish eat jellyfish.
Where is the guarantee that some unforeseen feature may arise that is harmful to a greater system?
There are few guarantees in life. Even with non-GM food, there is no guarantee that it will not induce in you some sort of bizarre and fatal allergic reaction.
However, once consequence of the widespread use of GFP in biological research is that it has been introduced into all sorts of creatures and cells for all sorts of purposes. And to do a study with GFP, you obviously have to check that it isn't causing any kind of toxic effects. So in practice, we have an immense amount of evidence that this particular protein is well tolerated.