You are correct on your point about how the insurance system should work, but for some people it does work that way. I for instance pay far more in my personal premiums than I would pay to a doctor paying out of pocket every year, but I also know that I won't have to stop and debate if going in for that broken arm is worth the money or not because I am partially protected from the extremes.
Hardly. IF a supplier advertises a certain price for a certain speed then unless there are valid limits in the original agreement, the customer has every right to use all of that all the time. It is not over use if it what was contracted for. If the ISP cannot provide everything they contracted for they need to either expand their capabilities until they can or else change their advertising and terms so that they are not offering that much.
More than that, it is hard to have loyalty to a for profit company. You can have a mutually beneficial relationship with them for a long or short time, but in the end it is all just business. The goal is to make money, so when there is an offer for more money there is no moral reason at all not to take it, after all the relationship was always about the money.
Now, with a non-profit or some other entity that has a true mission, such as a church or the Military, beyond money things can be different. You can feel a loyalty to the cause that you are working towards. But as a worker in a for profit company your mission is overtly and simply to maximize profit and if your loyalty is to the profit then you will follow the greatest profit.
This is even more true in a for profit, publicly traded company. There the company is obligated to its stock holders to maximize the profit by every ethical means available and a company that knowingly fails to do so can open itself up to lawsuits for destroying shareholder value.
In short, if you want loyalty that goes beyond money, you need some common cause or mission or ideal to inspire it, and it is almost impossible to find that in a for profit corporation.
I find it impressive and a good sign that they are being this open about it. I wish the new Cyber Command the best and hope they find the type of people they truly need.
Perhaps a more apropos distinction is that steroids are specifically banned and generally illegal while (with a prescription) most of those discussed in the article are not. We can have a reasonable discussion about if they should be banned or at least more tightly controlled within the prescription channels, but the athletes who used steroids have clearly and absolutely broken laws and regulations where the flutists mentioned have not.
I completely agree they should allow elementary proofs. If they are supposed to be an encyclopedia, then it is certainly appropriate to hold elementary proofs about major theorems, for instance at least one of the proofs of the pythagorean theorem should be present, but going into detail of the proof of say Fermat's Last Theorem (Approximately 150 pages print, 200 if you include the 50 page proof of the required lemma) is beyond an encyclopedia's domain. In short, they should definitely host proofs, but I personally would keep it to an advanced high school/early undergraduate level of mathematics.
The article was never about replacing paper per se, but about the new loss of rights that goes with it. With paper, you had the right to resell it, lend it, give it away and could always count on it not changing. With the current terms of service, you lose all of those rights to the digital content you pay for. Its not about what medium you use to read, its about who controls that content and what you can do with it.
I agree with you at the present time, however if current trends continue, that could change. Every more significant items are being networked, and as things which people depend on for life are networked destroying the network could effectively ruin a city. If the power supply or water network in a major city is destroyed then it will almost certainly lead to some loss of life and the effective loss of the city as a production center for a possibly significant amount of time.
This seems a bit of an overstatement since the predictions of most economists range from a mere slowdown in growth to a mild recession on the pessimistic end.
True, but the article is titled the death of e-mail and it repeated talks about e-mail being obsolete in the article, which is an overstatement to say the least. I am not a big fan of phone text messaging, but I have been using IM's alongside my e-mail for close to a decade and I use them for very different purposes.
Everything you say is true, yet keep in mind that saying "nope, we're not gonna fix that" will almost certainly result in loss of customers and depending on the contract and type of software could easily result in a law suit. Each situation will be unique, but often, there will be a middle ground.
In any position that deals directly with the customer, it is often wise to apologize for the customer's inconvenience even when it is not your problem, and of course without admitting fault even if it is your fault. You do always have to on watch for feature creep that will increase your costs without increasing your pay and for unreasonable demands. But, when you can accommodate the customer, you should, and when you cannot you need to give them a reason why and also come as close as you can. In most situations, the right answer will lie between bowing down and obstinately refusing.
I don't see what your religious beliefs would have to do with music being hidden in the Last Supper or not. However, while the painting is a true work of genius and one of my personal favorites, it is more likely that there is no music in there. Humans are magnificently good at finding patterns, even where none exists.
Hardly, I do think that if research is paid for with public money then (barring classification or national security concerns) it should belong to the public. Now, nothing about that says that you cannot patent/copyright/otherwise protect research and the fruits of research financed by private funds.
Also, just because something is in the public domain does not mean it cannot be used as the basis for then protected works. The most famous and obvious example is that many of Disney's famous movies are loosely based on works that have entered the public domain, such as Grimm's Fairytales. It was the fact that these were in the public domain that made it easy for other things to be built on and from them.
Just for clarity, the law referenced in the article is not talking about placing things in the public domain though. It says that research funded with public money from a specific source must be made publicly accessible within a year. Someone please correct me if I missed it, but I did not see anything requiring forfeiture of copyright or preventing the acquisition of patents. Nor did I see anything about restrictions on private money or even on public money from other sources.
Keeping a limited degree of visibility on something is nearly impossible. If someone tells an extremely small number of people with a reason to know (such as medical information to medical professionals, legal information to lawyers, personal secrets to one or two close confidants who know you want it kept in confidence) then they (normally) have a right and reasonable expectation of privacy. If they post it to a large circle of friends, it is no longer private in any real sense. Those friends may tell others who may tell others, and they are generally not under any obligation not to.
To take a benign example, someone may send pictures of their kids to their immediate family. Your parents may well hang it up on the wall and then all of their guests see it. Putting it on a public website is like shouting it from the mountain, you can expect anyone who wants to know will find out, along with a lot of people who didn't want to know. Putting it on a semiprivate website is like, well, telling all of your friends. You can assume they will tell others and generally have no reason to expect them not to do that. Something that is meant to be truly private should be told only to those that have a reason to know and an obligation not to tell others.
There's a possibility that some parents will think that, but keep in mind that most parents who are harried, busy people and unless they are gamers themselves may never have taken a close look at a wiimote, much less gotten to know them. No gamer would ever be fooled, but I bet a decent number of parents and even more childless aunts and uncles for instance would not be able to tell the two apart.
Yes, but going back to economics, the more effective and thus desirable the fuel cells are, the more incentive there is to do research on storing hydrogen.
It seems they could both radically improve javascript and add in support for additional scripting languages. It would come at the price of increasing the size of the browsers, but that seems a small price to pay for the increased flexibility for developers.
It's an indication of *something* bad-- or at least "less than ideal". This intense focus on publishing, IMHO, distracts from teaching or even learning. That's right, learning. Even professors have a lot to learn in their field. We all have a lot to learn. And instead of encouraging these people to learn and teach, they're pushed to "output".
You are quite correct on the one hand, but missing the point on the other. Focusing on publishing absolutely does reduce the amount of time and effort available for teaching, but it is a core mission of most universities to conduct new research. The publication is the end result of that research and it is the way that research is made valuable by adding to the total human knowledge and making that new knowledge available to others. There are indeed plenty of institutions of higher learning that do not make research a core mission, but research universities must publish as part of their mission, and at some institutions, the main part of their mission.
It is also worth noting that research universities are the prime movers in fundamental theoretical research. Corporations and other entities are excellent at conducting short term research that is likely to lead to new technology, but most of the fundamental work is done by universities.
I feel compelled to point out that it is Stan Lee, one of the founders of Marvel Comics, that always used the phrase "true believers" and that Batman is a DC character.
Perhaps I misunderstood the article, but as I read it, the FBI's database contained a true and accurate record of her arrest. While she may consider to be justified, that is beside the point, they were legally criminal. The FBI simply reported the fact that she was arrested with an accurate reason as to why in their database. It was the Canadians who made the decision to refuse her entry using accurate information. She may argue that it was a peaceful arrest for deliberate civil disobedience, but it seems that its up to the Canadians what their criteria is for excluding people. If anything, it seems like her argument should be with Canada's policies, the FBI just reported facts.
Another point, is that those practicing civil disobedience are deliberately and knowingly breaking the law. Whether or not they were justified or morally right in doing so, they broke the law knowingly. Shouldn't they be prepared to accept those consequences? If they are truly morally right and justified in breaking the law, then isn't accepting the consequences of breaking the law as a very minor sacrifice for righteousness? If they are not ready to accept that price, they shouldn't have broken the law.
Note that I am not trying to pass judgment about whether they were or were not actually justified, but that is beside the point of the fact that they are knowingly practicing civil disobedience which by its definition involves deliberately breaking the laws.
I could not agree more. I am constantly seeking ways to automate my own job because that will free me of the tedium and let me get more done. Personally, if a machine can do it, it should, and I will move on to a larger challenge that cannot yet be automated.
The obvious answer is that it depends on the grade and the professor. You are always going to find some technophobes who insist on print, but even by the time I was finishing high school I made extensive use of online resources and often cited them. Whether Wikipedia/veropedia in particular is accepted is largely a question of grade. In grade school, I rarely used much more than encyclopedias. In high school, they were often a major source. After my freshmen year in college, I would often start my research by reading an encyclopedia especially for subjects outside my major, but I would never actually cite one.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct on your point about how the insurance system should work, but for some people it does work that way. I for instance pay far more in my personal premiums than I would pay to a doctor paying out of pocket every year, but I also know that I won't have to stop and debate if going in for that broken arm is worth the money or not because I am partially protected from the extremes.
Hardly. IF a supplier advertises a certain price for a certain speed then unless there are valid limits in the original agreement, the customer has every right to use all of that all the time. It is not over use if it what was contracted for. If the ISP cannot provide everything they contracted for they need to either expand their capabilities until they can or else change their advertising and terms so that they are not offering that much.
More than that, it is hard to have loyalty to a for profit company. You can have a mutually beneficial relationship with them for a long or short time, but in the end it is all just business. The goal is to make money, so when there is an offer for more money there is no moral reason at all not to take it, after all the relationship was always about the money.
Now, with a non-profit or some other entity that has a true mission, such as a church or the Military, beyond money things can be different. You can feel a loyalty to the cause that you are working towards. But as a worker in a for profit company your mission is overtly and simply to maximize profit and if your loyalty is to the profit then you will follow the greatest profit.
This is even more true in a for profit, publicly traded company. There the company is obligated to its stock holders to maximize the profit by every ethical means available and a company that knowingly fails to do so can open itself up to lawsuits for destroying shareholder value.
In short, if you want loyalty that goes beyond money, you need some common cause or mission or ideal to inspire it, and it is almost impossible to find that in a for profit corporation.
I find it impressive and a good sign that they are being this open about it. I wish the new Cyber Command the best and hope they find the type of people they truly need.
Who are these people that work a mere 40 hours in a week?
Which was the original intent of Tex when Donald Knuth first made it. Separating the writing from the typesetting.
Perhaps a more apropos distinction is that steroids are specifically banned and generally illegal while (with a prescription) most of those discussed in the article are not. We can have a reasonable discussion about if they should be banned or at least more tightly controlled within the prescription channels, but the athletes who used steroids have clearly and absolutely broken laws and regulations where the flutists mentioned have not.
I completely agree they should allow elementary proofs. If they are supposed to be an encyclopedia, then it is certainly appropriate to hold elementary proofs about major theorems, for instance at least one of the proofs of the pythagorean theorem should be present, but going into detail of the proof of say Fermat's Last Theorem (Approximately 150 pages print, 200 if you include the 50 page proof of the required lemma) is beyond an encyclopedia's domain. In short, they should definitely host proofs, but I personally would keep it to an advanced high school/early undergraduate level of mathematics.
The article was never about replacing paper per se, but about the new loss of rights that goes with it. With paper, you had the right to resell it, lend it, give it away and could always count on it not changing. With the current terms of service, you lose all of those rights to the digital content you pay for. Its not about what medium you use to read, its about who controls that content and what you can do with it.
I agree with you at the present time, however if current trends continue, that could change. Every more significant items are being networked, and as things which people depend on for life are networked destroying the network could effectively ruin a city. If the power supply or water network in a major city is destroyed then it will almost certainly lead to some loss of life and the effective loss of the city as a production center for a possibly significant amount of time.
This seems a bit of an overstatement since the predictions of most economists range from a mere slowdown in growth to a mild recession on the pessimistic end.
True, but the article is titled the death of e-mail and it repeated talks about e-mail being obsolete in the article, which is an overstatement to say the least. I am not a big fan of phone text messaging, but I have been using IM's alongside my e-mail for close to a decade and I use them for very different purposes.
Everything you say is true, yet keep in mind that saying "nope, we're not gonna fix that" will almost certainly result in loss of customers and depending on the contract and type of software could easily result in a law suit. Each situation will be unique, but often, there will be a middle ground.
In any position that deals directly with the customer, it is often wise to apologize for the customer's inconvenience even when it is not your problem, and of course without admitting fault even if it is your fault. You do always have to on watch for feature creep that will increase your costs without increasing your pay and for unreasonable demands. But, when you can accommodate the customer, you should, and when you cannot you need to give them a reason why and also come as close as you can. In most situations, the right answer will lie between bowing down and obstinately refusing.
I don't see what your religious beliefs would have to do with music being hidden in the Last Supper or not. However, while the painting is a true work of genius and one of my personal favorites, it is more likely that there is no music in there. Humans are magnificently good at finding patterns, even where none exists.
Hardly, I do think that if research is paid for with public money then (barring classification or national security concerns) it should belong to the public. Now, nothing about that says that you cannot patent/copyright/otherwise protect research and the fruits of research financed by private funds.
Also, just because something is in the public domain does not mean it cannot be used as the basis for then protected works. The most famous and obvious example is that many of Disney's famous movies are loosely based on works that have entered the public domain, such as Grimm's Fairytales. It was the fact that these were in the public domain that made it easy for other things to be built on and from them.
Just for clarity, the law referenced in the article is not talking about placing things in the public domain though. It says that research funded with public money from a specific source must be made publicly accessible within a year. Someone please correct me if I missed it, but I did not see anything requiring forfeiture of copyright or preventing the acquisition of patents. Nor did I see anything about restrictions on private money or even on public money from other sources.
Keeping a limited degree of visibility on something is nearly impossible. If someone tells an extremely small number of people with a reason to know (such as medical information to medical professionals, legal information to lawyers, personal secrets to one or two close confidants who know you want it kept in confidence) then they (normally) have a right and reasonable expectation of privacy. If they post it to a large circle of friends, it is no longer private in any real sense. Those friends may tell others who may tell others, and they are generally not under any obligation not to.
To take a benign example, someone may send pictures of their kids to their immediate family. Your parents may well hang it up on the wall and then all of their guests see it. Putting it on a public website is like shouting it from the mountain, you can expect anyone who wants to know will find out, along with a lot of people who didn't want to know. Putting it on a semiprivate website is like, well, telling all of your friends. You can assume they will tell others and generally have no reason to expect them not to do that. Something that is meant to be truly private should be told only to those that have a reason to know and an obligation not to tell others.
There's a possibility that some parents will think that, but keep in mind that most parents who are harried, busy people and unless they are gamers themselves may never have taken a close look at a wiimote, much less gotten to know them. No gamer would ever be fooled, but I bet a decent number of parents and even more childless aunts and uncles for instance would not be able to tell the two apart.
Yes, but going back to economics, the more effective and thus desirable the fuel cells are, the more incentive there is to do research on storing hydrogen.
It seems they could both radically improve javascript and add in support for additional scripting languages. It would come at the price of increasing the size of the browsers, but that seems a small price to pay for the increased flexibility for developers.
It's an indication of *something* bad-- or at least "less than ideal". This intense focus on publishing, IMHO, distracts from teaching or even learning. That's right, learning. Even professors have a lot to learn in their field. We all have a lot to learn. And instead of encouraging these people to learn and teach, they're pushed to "output".
You are quite correct on the one hand, but missing the point on the other. Focusing on publishing absolutely does reduce the amount of time and effort available for teaching, but it is a core mission of most universities to conduct new research. The publication is the end result of that research and it is the way that research is made valuable by adding to the total human knowledge and making that new knowledge available to others. There are indeed plenty of institutions of higher learning that do not make research a core mission, but research universities must publish as part of their mission, and at some institutions, the main part of their mission.
It is also worth noting that research universities are the prime movers in fundamental theoretical research. Corporations and other entities are excellent at conducting short term research that is likely to lead to new technology, but most of the fundamental work is done by universities.
I feel compelled to point out that it is Stan Lee, one of the founders of Marvel Comics, that always used the phrase "true believers" and that Batman is a DC character.
Perhaps I misunderstood the article, but as I read it, the FBI's database contained a true and accurate record of her arrest. While she may consider to be justified, that is beside the point, they were legally criminal. The FBI simply reported the fact that she was arrested with an accurate reason as to why in their database. It was the Canadians who made the decision to refuse her entry using accurate information. She may argue that it was a peaceful arrest for deliberate civil disobedience, but it seems that its up to the Canadians what their criteria is for excluding people. If anything, it seems like her argument should be with Canada's policies, the FBI just reported facts.
Another point, is that those practicing civil disobedience are deliberately and knowingly breaking the law. Whether or not they were justified or morally right in doing so, they broke the law knowingly. Shouldn't they be prepared to accept those consequences? If they are truly morally right and justified in breaking the law, then isn't accepting the consequences of breaking the law as a very minor sacrifice for righteousness? If they are not ready to accept that price, they shouldn't have broken the law.
Note that I am not trying to pass judgment about whether they were or were not actually justified, but that is beside the point of the fact that they are knowingly practicing civil disobedience which by its definition involves deliberately breaking the laws.
I could not agree more. I am constantly seeking ways to automate my own job because that will free me of the tedium and let me get more done. Personally, if a machine can do it, it should, and I will move on to a larger challenge that cannot yet be automated.
The obvious answer is that it depends on the grade and the professor. You are always going to find some technophobes who insist on print, but even by the time I was finishing high school I made extensive use of online resources and often cited them. Whether Wikipedia/veropedia in particular is accepted is largely a question of grade. In grade school, I rarely used much more than encyclopedias. In high school, they were often a major source. After my freshmen year in college, I would often start my research by reading an encyclopedia especially for subjects outside my major, but I would never actually cite one.
Ok, if it is as much as 3 generations out, how long until we have cryogenics so I can wait until they have it?