I _literally_ feel that we do not - as software developers - have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers.
Bill Gates has no qualms about enforcing his rules on hardware manufacturers. Neither does Steve Jobs or anybody else in industry. And corporate CEOs are religious about how they think the market should operate and won't shut up about it.
RMS is no more religious than any of these people, and the GPLv3 restrictions are still far less onerous than anything Microsoft, Apple, Sun, or any of the other big players will force you to agree to.
Linus is entitled to his opinion about the GPLv3. But his statement that we have no moral right to enforce those restrictions is ridiculous in light of the fact that everybody else is trying to place far stronger restrictions on licensees and nobody thinks twice about it.
Publishers that use technological measures to restrict use of their content end up restricting fair use. Since they aren't holding up their part of the copyright bargain, they should not be entitled to copyright protection. That is, once their technological measures have been cracked, you should be able to copy the content freely.
Conversely, publishers that choose to publish without technological restrictions should be entitled to full legal protection of their copyrights (although there should be some minor reforms, like a registration/maintenance requirement and a 20-40 year limit).
VMware's market is evaporating. Their value was virtualization of a difficult-to-virtualize architecture, the Pentium. Now that Pentium is getting hardware virtualization, virtualization is simple and it will just become a standard part of Linux, Windows, and OS X.
Journalism often contends with the irrational, both in the subject matter and in the method of reporting.
And, in contrast, science often contends with the irrational in subject matter, but not in the method of reporting. And that's the difference: science is an objective reporting of the facts, while journalism is not. You just confirmed it in your own words.
"rall aspects of human behavior that are related to rational decision making"
Religion is based on faith, and so, whether your believe in God(s) or not, religious experience lies outside the scope of science (and is therefore not appropriate in a science class).
First of all, religious belief is not related to rational decision making; quite to the contrary--it is related to irrational decision making. Therefore, the intrinsic logic of religion is unscientific. However, religion itself is a legitimate subject of scientific study and reporting, just like fruit flies or rocks or mass murderers are.
So, for example, in a psychology, sociology, and biology class, we should be able to look legitimately at why people entertain religious beliefs, what effects such beliefs have on society, and we can talk about why they are unscientific and irrational.
And, in fact, ID should be a subject in science class; as a scientific theory, it is unfounded and completely without merit, and science teachers should very much have the ability to expose it as such.
To quote Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Here though, I'd settle for ordinary evidence. Is is you who are making a claim. The burden of proof is yours.
Who made what claim at the beginning of this debate is irrelevant. What is relevant is the claim that you and your profession make: that you provide an objective and accurate reporting of the facts. That is an extraordinary claim in light of the anecdotal evidence we have seen to the contrary, reported by your own profession, and also in the light of scientific studies. So, the question is: where is your proof to back up your claim? Why should we listen to you people?
Fortunately, the problem seems to be taking care of itself: the economic basis of traditional news media is being undermined by the Internet, and that means a great reduction in journalism and journalists. We won't be able to eliminate them completely, but it's progress.
If others tried and failed, but yours works, then you must have invented something.
Or it may mean that other developers have deliberately chosen to use a cheaper technique because machines weren't fast enough. Or it may mean that the feature was cut because the art department didn't like it.
I went through this with a patent on game physics engines. The USPTO rejected some claims as an insufficent advance over prior art. So I sent in published reviews of games that didn't use my technology.
I think you just proved again how shoddy USPTO reviews are; your argument holds no water.
Does it mean that the initial examination by the PTO was substandard? Of course not
Of course, the initial examination wasn't "substandard", it was exactly the same standard shoddy examination that the USPTO gives most patents.
RIM, spending kazillions to search the world for prior art and multi-kazillions on lawyers to tear the patent and PTO to shreds, couldn't convince either a jury or the Federal Circuit that the patents were less than airtight
And what does that tell us? Not that the patent has any merit. No, if bogus patents like these get that far, what it tells us is that the legal system simply isn't equipped to deal with high tech.
The patents granted by the USPTO are effectively paper tigers and not worthy of investment trust.
No, all it means is that the patent office doesn't guarantee your patents, and they aren't supposed to. If you file a bogus patent that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, that's your problem. The burden of making sure you file good patents is on you and only on you.
Frankly, I think companies should be punished severely if their patents ever get thrown out--a patent that gets granted and then thrown out is pretty close to fraud on the part of the filer.
I hope so. But keep in mind that monopolies have come into existence in the past.
It seems to me that there are plenty of contenders out there vying for the home broadband market, and with upcoming wireless standards more contenders will emerge.
Those contenders will require backbone connectivity and big providers can simply refuse them, or they can put provisions into their contracts that forbid reselling. It will then take a while for anti-trust enforcement to catch up with them and restore competition, and without anti-trust enforcement, the market isn't going to restore competitiveness at all.
Way back in the day (think Compuserve), this is how things used to be. However, eventually competition forced providers to offer flat-rate service because that's what the market demanded.
The reason we have the Internet as it exists today is not because "the market demanded it"; Compuserve and others could have prevented something like the Internet from happening indefinitely.
The reason why we got the Internet as it is today is because the government made a huge up-front investment and set the standards by which we all interoperate. That's what broke the logjam, managed to dislodge the old monopolies, and allowed small players to enter the market and compete.
Unfortunately, there was consolidation and we have a small number of big players again, and they are trying to repeat the Bell monopoly and all that. And they will succeed for a while, until the government eventually steps in and breaks them all up again.
Journalism has different objectives, with different audience demands. Scientific reportage of facts is designed to allow other scientists to recreate those the process by which those facts were derived. Journalists don't do that -- for example, because Woodruff and Bernstein didn't tell every reader of the Washington Post exactly how they too could reproduce their reporting, should readers have rejected the evidence of corruption within the Nixon administration?
That is correct--they should have rejected it until and unless there was independent corroboration from multiple sources (as there was).
As the recent court case against intelligent design showed, attempting to broaden science to cover the full spectrum of human experience and thought is antithetical to what science is.
Showed? How?
Science has no problem dealing with the "full spectrum of human experience and thought".
And many current and former subscribers to FAIR (including myself) are journalists, and FAIR is regularly quoted by journalists in both the mainstream and alternative press.
Well, FAIR collects and describes the problems (pervasive bias) but fails to diagnose the underlying dysfunction (journalism itself).
Scientific papers, to have any value at all, confine themseleves to science.
Yes, and that means they include all aspects of human behavior that are related to rational decision making.
This isn't to attack cell biology as a crock, just to let you know that science isn't some totem that you can fetishize into a gold standard by which to weigh journalism.
You're confusing the scientific method and scientists. Scientists are no better on average than journalists. But the scientific method is better than the journalistic method for establishing and communicating objective truth.
A fabrication is a deliberate deception.
Fairy tales and fiction are fabrications but not deceptions. The kinds of fabrications that journalists engage in are accepted practice, that's why they generally aren't deceptions. As I keep saying: the problem is with journalism and journalistic ethics itself, not a few bad apples. The practice of journalism intrinsically fails to communicate an objective and accurate view of reality.
A link to the index page of an media watch dog is not putting up some numbers. Is this part of your scientifically rigourous approach to facts?
No, this is not part of my scientically rigorous approach to facts; I reserve my scientifically rigorous approach to facts to those forums where it is appropriate, and that includes neither Slashdot, nor newspapers.
Furthermore, you have cleverly attempted to shift the debate. I don't have to prove anything, I merely have to say "I don't believe you; I think journalists are fabricating". The burden of proof is on you, and so far, you have failed to produce anything.
Or maybe you're just slurring an entire profession based on the well publicized problems of a few.
I'm not talking about the deliberate deceptions that a number of journalists have been caught at, I'm talking about journalism itself. We have established minimal standards for how to report facts in the sciences, and journalists are not even close to following them.
Journalists are incentivized to sell newspapers, entertain, and make a name for themselves, not present reality objectively and accurately.
Intellectual rigour does not spring from generalizing from anecdotal evidence.
Journalists should take that to heart: "generalizing from anectodal evidence" is one of the more frequent journalistic devices in use.
This is not vapourware, pre-orders are being take now with a cut price until April 2nd.
My antigravity-driven, cold-fusion propelled aircraft isn't vaporware either. Hey, I can prove it: I'm taking pre-orders. Just transfer $100 into my bank account to make sure you get it as soon as it ships.
But it's not fair to say that journalists "built a news medium on the backs of other people lives, without paying for any of the content".
You haven't met a lot of journalists, have you? In fact, that's what a lot of them do. The bad part is that a lot of the effort that goes into their stories is fabrication or close to it.
The problem with opt-out for spammers is that you receive at least one message and that the opt-out procedures for spammers differ from spammer to spammer.
Opt-out for indexing has existed as a standard for many years: robots.txt. If you don't want to be indexed, all you have to do is put a single file on your web site once and you will be protected from all search engines in perpetuity. If spam opt-out worked like that, that would be great.
Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.
Well, Google has nothing to fear then: they aren't profiting from Google News, they are increasing the revenues of those other newspapers, and they are indexing and publishing the content with the newspaper's implicit permission (since the newspaper can state whatever policies it likes in its/robots.txt file).
On the other hand, publishers are not code jockeys (and robots.txt was not in the original spec).
Oh, please, how naive can you be? The NYT web site was created by highly paid, experienced web designers and developers. Of course, they know about robots.txt, and any court would expect a company of that wealth and publishing experience to hire people that know about it.
I don't see what they're complaining about. Google gets contents via two kinds of sources: (1) feeds, and (2) crawling. That means that publishers have full control over whether and what they want Google to index. So, what's the problem? Too lazy to put in a robots.txt file?
Anybody who thinks that a published book or newspaper is any more reliable than Wikipedia must be blind.
You must think for yourself; nothing you read can be taken as fact or on authority, no matter who wrote it. Facts only emerge after you correlate statements and find multiple independent sources to verify something.
Look, the cause of obesity is really very simple: the human body (and its ancestors) evolved in environments in which food was scarce, and during that time mechanisms came into being which helped to deal with that scarcity.
Plausible as that may seem, there is little evidence for that hypothesis. At this point, the causes of obesity still have to be considered unknown.
Besides, even if the hypothesis is true, the food consumption of our ancestors evolved in the presence of adenoviruses, which means that adenoviruses could still be the cause of modern-day obesity.
People manage to get away with lies in several ways. One is that they mask the physiological signs and body language that go along with lies' fMRI potentially can cut through that deception.
But another way is that they basically convince themselves that a false statement is actually true in some sense; fMRI probably cannot detect such lies.
For example, Clinton may have convinced himself that his statement "I have never had sexual relations with that woman." was not a lie because he in his mind legitimately restricted the meaning of "sexual relations" to a particular kind of activity.
Conversely, there may be people who habitually doubt the truth of any statement (for example, scientists), so they may activate the same brain areas as liars even when forced to make such a simple statement as "I had lunch a week ago at Burger King". After all, was that exactly a week ago or the week before this one? Is that on East Coast time or California time?
fMRI is likely to be a little bit more reliable than physiological indicators of lying, but probably not a whole lot. Whatever it is, it needs to be tested and validated very carefully. And there is one thing I'm sure of: Laken is not the guy to do it, and this sort of technology ought to be researched for decades before being put to use in a legal context. But, as a start, perhaps Laken could be put into the machine and answer questions like "do you believe that this system is 100% reliable" and "are you being scrupulously honest with the money of your investors" and "are you scrupulously honest on your taxes".
Slashdot Mirror
I _literally_ feel that we do not - as software developers - have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers.
Bill Gates has no qualms about enforcing his rules on hardware manufacturers. Neither does Steve Jobs or anybody else in industry. And corporate CEOs are religious about how they think the market should operate and won't shut up about it.
RMS is no more religious than any of these people, and the GPLv3 restrictions are still far less onerous than anything Microsoft, Apple, Sun, or any of the other big players will force you to agree to.
Linus is entitled to his opinion about the GPLv3. But his statement that we have no moral right to enforce those restrictions is ridiculous in light of the fact that everybody else is trying to place far stronger restrictions on licensees and nobody thinks twice about it.
Publishers that use technological measures to restrict use of their content end up restricting fair use. Since they aren't holding up their part of the copyright bargain, they should not be entitled to copyright protection. That is, once their technological measures have been cracked, you should be able to copy the content freely.
Conversely, publishers that choose to publish without technological restrictions should be entitled to full legal protection of their copyrights (although there should be some minor reforms, like a registration/maintenance requirement and a 20-40 year limit).
VMware's market is evaporating. Their value was virtualization of a difficult-to-virtualize architecture, the Pentium. Now that Pentium is getting hardware virtualization, virtualization is simple and it will just become a standard part of Linux, Windows, and OS X.
Despite its enormous power, protomatter is highly unstable and its use has been made illegal by civilized worlds in the galaxy.
For one, TCL/TK is not visual. You have to use "liguistical placement".
You have a choice; there are several visual designers for Tcl.
Second, TCL/TK lacks things like automatic scroll bars. You have to glue the scroll-bars to text and widget windows yourself. That is so 80's.
Megawidgets and iTcl give you scrollable components without any extra work.
Journalism often contends with the irrational, both in the subject matter and in the method of reporting.
And, in contrast, science often contends with the irrational in subject matter, but not in the method of reporting. And that's the difference: science is an objective reporting of the facts, while journalism is not. You just confirmed it in your own words.
"rall aspects of human behavior that are related to rational decision making"
Religion is based on faith, and so, whether your believe in God(s) or not, religious experience lies outside the scope of science (and is therefore not appropriate in a science class).
First of all, religious belief is not related to rational decision making; quite to the contrary--it is related to irrational decision making. Therefore, the intrinsic logic of religion is unscientific. However, religion itself is a legitimate subject of scientific study and reporting, just like fruit flies or rocks or mass murderers are.
So, for example, in a psychology, sociology, and biology class, we should be able to look legitimately at why people entertain religious beliefs, what effects such beliefs have on society, and we can talk about why they are unscientific and irrational.
And, in fact, ID should be a subject in science class; as a scientific theory, it is unfounded and completely without merit, and science teachers should very much have the ability to expose it as such.
To quote Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Here though, I'd settle for ordinary evidence. Is is you who are making a claim. The burden of proof is yours.
Who made what claim at the beginning of this debate is irrelevant. What is relevant is the claim that you and your profession make: that you provide an objective and accurate reporting of the facts. That is an extraordinary claim in light of the anecdotal evidence we have seen to the contrary, reported by your own profession, and also in the light of scientific studies. So, the question is: where is your proof to back up your claim? Why should we listen to you people?
Fortunately, the problem seems to be taking care of itself: the economic basis of traditional news media is being undermined by the Internet, and that means a great reduction in journalism and journalists. We won't be able to eliminate them completely, but it's progress.
If others tried and failed, but yours works, then you must have invented something.
Or it may mean that other developers have deliberately chosen to use a cheaper technique because machines weren't fast enough. Or it may mean that the feature was cut because the art department didn't like it.
I went through this with a patent on game physics engines. The USPTO rejected some claims as an insufficent advance over prior art. So I sent in published reviews of games that didn't use my technology.
I think you just proved again how shoddy USPTO reviews are; your argument holds no water.
Does it mean that the initial examination by the PTO was substandard? Of course not
Of course, the initial examination wasn't "substandard", it was exactly the same standard shoddy examination that the USPTO gives most patents.
RIM, spending kazillions to search the world for prior art and multi-kazillions on lawyers to tear the patent and PTO to shreds, couldn't convince either a jury or the Federal Circuit that the patents were less than airtight
And what does that tell us? Not that the patent has any merit. No, if bogus patents like these get that far, what it tells us is that the legal system simply isn't equipped to deal with high tech.
The patents granted by the USPTO are effectively paper tigers and not worthy of investment trust.
No, all it means is that the patent office doesn't guarantee your patents, and they aren't supposed to. If you file a bogus patent that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, that's your problem. The burden of making sure you file good patents is on you and only on you.
Frankly, I think companies should be punished severely if their patents ever get thrown out--a patent that gets granted and then thrown out is pretty close to fraud on the part of the filer.
I hope so. But keep in mind that monopolies have come into existence in the past.
It seems to me that there are plenty of contenders out there vying for the home broadband market, and with upcoming wireless standards more contenders will emerge.
Those contenders will require backbone connectivity and big providers can simply refuse them, or they can put provisions into their contracts that forbid reselling. It will then take a while for anti-trust enforcement to catch up with them and restore competition, and without anti-trust enforcement, the market isn't going to restore competitiveness at all.
Way back in the day (think Compuserve), this is how things used to be. However, eventually competition forced providers to offer flat-rate service because that's what the market demanded.
The reason we have the Internet as it exists today is not because "the market demanded it"; Compuserve and others could have prevented something like the Internet from happening indefinitely.
The reason why we got the Internet as it is today is because the government made a huge up-front investment and set the standards by which we all interoperate. That's what broke the logjam, managed to dislodge the old monopolies, and allowed small players to enter the market and compete.
Unfortunately, there was consolidation and we have a small number of big players again, and they are trying to repeat the Bell monopoly and all that. And they will succeed for a while, until the government eventually steps in and breaks them all up again.
Journalism has different objectives, with different audience demands. Scientific reportage of facts is designed to allow other scientists to recreate those the process by which those facts were derived. Journalists don't do that -- for example, because Woodruff and Bernstein didn't tell every reader of the Washington Post exactly how they too could reproduce their reporting, should readers have rejected the evidence of corruption within the Nixon administration?
That is correct--they should have rejected it until and unless there was independent corroboration from multiple sources (as there was).
As the recent court case against intelligent design showed, attempting to broaden science to cover the full spectrum of human experience and thought is antithetical to what science is.
Showed? How?
Science has no problem dealing with the "full spectrum of human experience and thought".
And many current and former subscribers to FAIR (including myself) are journalists, and FAIR is regularly quoted by journalists in both the mainstream and alternative press.
Well, FAIR collects and describes the problems (pervasive bias) but fails to diagnose the underlying dysfunction (journalism itself).
Scientific papers, to have any value at all, confine themseleves to science.
Yes, and that means they include all aspects of human behavior that are related to rational decision making.
This isn't to attack cell biology as a crock, just to let you know that science isn't some totem that you can fetishize into a gold standard by which to weigh journalism.
You're confusing the scientific method and scientists. Scientists are no better on average than journalists. But the scientific method is better than the journalistic method for establishing and communicating objective truth.
A fabrication is a deliberate deception.
Fairy tales and fiction are fabrications but not deceptions. The kinds of fabrications that journalists engage in are accepted practice, that's why they generally aren't deceptions. As I keep saying: the problem is with journalism and journalistic ethics itself, not a few bad apples. The practice of journalism intrinsically fails to communicate an objective and accurate view of reality.
A link to the index page of an media watch dog is not putting up some numbers. Is this part of your scientifically rigourous approach to facts?
No, this is not part of my scientically rigorous approach to facts; I reserve my scientifically rigorous approach to facts to those forums where it is appropriate, and that includes neither Slashdot, nor newspapers.
Furthermore, you have cleverly attempted to shift the debate. I don't have to prove anything, I merely have to say "I don't believe you; I think journalists are fabricating". The burden of proof is on you, and so far, you have failed to produce anything.
Or maybe you're just slurring an entire profession based on the well publicized problems of a few.
I'm not talking about the deliberate deceptions that a number of journalists have been caught at, I'm talking about journalism itself. We have established minimal standards for how to report facts in the sciences, and journalists are not even close to following them.
Journalists are incentivized to sell newspapers, entertain, and make a name for themselves, not present reality objectively and accurately.
Intellectual rigour does not spring from generalizing from anecdotal evidence.
Journalists should take that to heart: "generalizing from anectodal evidence" is one of the more frequent journalistic devices in use.
So put up some numbers, or shut up.
Easy: go to fair.org.
This is not vapourware, pre-orders are being take now with a cut price until April 2nd.
My antigravity-driven, cold-fusion propelled aircraft isn't vaporware either. Hey, I can prove it: I'm taking pre-orders. Just transfer $100 into my bank account to make sure you get it as soon as it ships.
You can crawl Google if you comply with their robots.txt file, same as everybody else and same as they do.
But it's not fair to say that journalists "built a news medium on the backs of other people lives, without paying for any of the content".
You haven't met a lot of journalists, have you? In fact, that's what a lot of them do. The bad part is that a lot of the effort that goes into their stories is fabrication or close to it.
The problem with opt-out for spammers is that you receive at least one message and that the opt-out procedures for spammers differ from spammer to spammer.
Opt-out for indexing has existed as a standard for many years: robots.txt. If you don't want to be indexed, all you have to do is put a single file on your web site once and you will be protected from all search engines in perpetuity. If spam opt-out worked like that, that would be great.
That is Google's policy: Google indexes only sites that actually permit indexing (via robots.txt).
Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.
/robots.txt file).
Well, Google has nothing to fear then: they aren't profiting from Google News, they are increasing the revenues of those other newspapers, and they are indexing and publishing the content with the newspaper's implicit permission (since the newspaper can state whatever policies it likes in its
On the other hand, publishers are not code jockeys (and robots.txt was not in the original spec).
Oh, please, how naive can you be? The NYT web site was created by highly paid, experienced web designers and developers. Of course, they know about robots.txt, and any court would expect a company of that wealth and publishing experience to hire people that know about it.
And even if the NYT employees were so incompetent that they don't know, Google tells them about it. Google even gives you a means for removing your site immediately.
I don't see what they're complaining about. Google gets contents via two kinds of sources: (1) feeds, and (2) crawling. That means that publishers have full control over whether and what they want Google to index. So, what's the problem? Too lazy to put in a robots.txt file?
Anybody who thinks that a published book or newspaper is any more reliable than Wikipedia must be blind.
You must think for yourself; nothing you read can be taken as fact or on authority, no matter who wrote it. Facts only emerge after you correlate statements and find multiple independent sources to verify something.
Look, the cause of obesity is really very simple: the human body (and its ancestors) evolved in environments in which food was scarce, and during that time mechanisms came into being which helped to deal with that scarcity.
Plausible as that may seem, there is little evidence for that hypothesis. At this point, the causes of obesity still have to be considered unknown.
Besides, even if the hypothesis is true, the food consumption of our ancestors evolved in the presence of adenoviruses, which means that adenoviruses could still be the cause of modern-day obesity.
it's why anyone ever uses the verb "decode" when speaking about DNA.
Because that's acceptable terminology in the field.
Now, what I don't understand is why computer scientists use the term "optimize" for processes that clearly produces suboptimal solutions.
People manage to get away with lies in several ways. One is that they mask the physiological signs and body language that go along with lies' fMRI potentially can cut through that deception.
But another way is that they basically convince themselves that a false statement is actually true in some sense; fMRI probably cannot detect such lies.
For example, Clinton may have convinced himself that his statement "I have never had sexual relations with that woman." was not a lie because he in his mind legitimately restricted the meaning of "sexual relations" to a particular kind of activity.
Conversely, there may be people who habitually doubt the truth of any statement (for example, scientists), so they may activate the same brain areas as liars even when forced to make such a simple statement as "I had lunch a week ago at Burger King". After all, was that exactly a week ago or the week before this one? Is that on East Coast time or California time?
fMRI is likely to be a little bit more reliable than physiological indicators of lying, but probably not a whole lot. Whatever it is, it needs to be tested and validated very carefully. And there is one thing I'm sure of: Laken is not the guy to do it, and this sort of technology ought to be researched for decades before being put to use in a legal context. But, as a start, perhaps Laken could be put into the machine and answer questions like "do you believe that this system is 100% reliable" and "are you being scrupulously honest with the money of your investors" and "are you scrupulously honest on your taxes".