It's important to note that the DOJ references the PATRIOT Act as justification for this argument. It's a little awkward for the EFF to say
No one -- not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration -- has ever interpreted the law this way.
when we're talking only about a single administration.
Yes, the Obama administration's stance is intolerable. But the problem, I believe, is not the administration -- it is the law. Repeal the PATRIOT Act. Pass a law requiring stricter oversight of government surveillance.
THAT is the answer. Not some mindless, useless "Obama is teh suxxor" bullshit.
Right. Like the fact that as rates of legal gun ownership go up, gun violence goes down. Talk about in inconvenient truth.
That's not an inconvenient truth, unless you believe that correlation equals causation.
Perhaps your little factoid is only true because guns are easier and cheaper to acquire illegally (than legally) in areas with higher gun violence?
Or perhaps it is because people who acquire guns legally are less likely to commit gun violence than people who acquire them illegally -- and legal or illegal, those people will still commit gun violence?
Here's an inconvenient truth for you: As rates of legal gun ownership go up, so do rates of gun accidents resulting in injury or death.
The truth is, your fact is useless unless we can rule out other reasons why gun violence is more prevalent in areas with lower legal gun ownership rates -- and you'd be hard pressed to do so, unless you're able to do what the huge resources of the NRA have been unable to do for decades.
Comparing a 90 day period to a 365 day period isn't a like for like comparison (obviously). Statistically it's meaningless.
Not so. We have two statistical samplings, one with n=90, one with n=365. Based on the sample sizes and some other info, we can establish a confidence interval. Yes, the interval will be larger for the 90-day sample... but just because we can't be 100% confident of the exact results doesn't mean it's statistically meaningless.
One other note -- historical data must be used to establish that there are not periodic cycles with a frequency of less than one year, which would make the 90-day sample set inaccurate.
I think what you are looking for is something called "document management" software.
Ugh... for a secon there, I thought Clippy started posting to slashdot. Would you like help with that?
I don't think he's looking for a DMS, which includes lots of things like workflows, audit trails, etc. DMSs are typically used to make an office go paperless, but he's not looking for a processing and tracking mechanism. He's looking for an easy way to create a searchable archive index.
My suggestion? Since he's a professor, get a bunch of students to "help with research" by scanning the docs and OCRing them. If he's willing to shell out a few hundred bucks from his research grant, there are services that will do this... Most of the best OCR tools are proprietary, not open source, but even a crappy one should get enough text that the OCRed files could be indexed usefully.
For an indexer, I've heard good things about MPS, and a friend did a similar project to yours with Yaz/Zebra, but he was working with a library, there may have been a special reason for that.
Perhaps it's time we revolt and set up a new Internet with a non-commerical clause so we can get back to using the Internet for what it was intended for, making us smarter rather then selling us shit...
And who's going to pay for all the infrastructure? Magical bandwidth fairies?
The internet is so extensive and powerful because it became commercialized.
No politician ever increased state power by saying "I'd like to see this nation become a totalitarian state and you should support me because this law will bring it closer to that goal." They do it by saying "this is for your safety" or "this is to stop terrorism" and the people who mean well and don't understand the damage they can do will eagerly eat that shit up. That's true whether or not the politician himself believes anything he is saying.
Well, that brings up an interesting philosophical question -- assuming the politician in charge IS evil, who, actually, is responsible for the evil of the totalitarian state? Do the people cause the harm, by supporting the disingenuous politician? Or does the evil politician cause the harm?
I'd say the evil politician causes the harm, because but for his actions, the harm would not happen. Ability to prevent harm, and lack of exercise of that ability due to good intentions, does not imply responsibility for causation -- the people who mean well and don't understand the implications are not the cause of the harm.
That doesn't mean that failure to understand the ramifications is an excuse, it just means that the actual cause should be attributed to the person of bad will, not to the people of good will and little understanding.
And maybe if they stopped calling these times "economic" all money would disappear!
And maybe if they'd stop calling it "time" our universe would disappear!
Or at least be static, in which case we'd have no chance to formulate thoughts on the universe, in which case the universe would, in essence, cease to exist due to lack of observation. Or maybe instead we'd all instantaneously be travelling at the speed of light, since the universe would be static (i.e., "time" would have stopped). Or something.
If a transport product is going to be called PUMA, it should at the very least allow me to stalk prey from tree branches, rocky outcroppings, or tall grass, silently leaping with claws outstretched, to hamstring them and then choke them with my jaws, so I can drag them back to my lair and devour their tender innards at ease.
I think this product should be called COUGAR, for Compensatory Object for Urban Guys Against Railtransit.
Let's go ahead and talk about that *other* addiction...
No really, in the AM I roll a 4-sided die and add three to it. That is my limit on coffee for the day.
If it's a weekday, I then roll d% to find out if I'm going to work, and at what time. Since I have 20 vacation days, and there are approximately 250 workdays in the year, I have an 8% chance of calling out for the day. If I roll 09-12, I go in late. If I roll 96-00, then I work overtime.
Once I get to work, I look at my email inbox. I roll a d6 surreptitiously. If I roll a 1, I address the email. If I roll a 2-5, I pass it on to a team member offshore. If I roll a 6, I accidentally the mail, then log into the mail server and edit the log files to remove all traces of the offending mail. Sometimes this takes longer than dealing with the email, but it's more fun in the long run.
You, sir, are a member of the Caffeine Underacheivers Club of the World. Until you can regularly consume an average of three or four pots of coffee in day (30 to 40 cups) without experiencing caffeine intoxication, you have no idea what how "nasty" withdrawal can get.
So you're not experiencing caffeine intoxication... good for you. Have you had to expel kidney stones yet? How about the other side effects from caffeine poisoning? Have you had your renal function tested? How's the chronic diarrhea going?
I'm a caffeine addict too, but I've cut down to 1d4 + 3 cups per day. I've had kidney stones and luckily ultrasound treatment broke them up so I didn't have to pass them whole. You're damaging your body, please cut down.
Being executed for collaboration is still not the same thing as acts of terror committed against whole populations. Do you have a single shred of evidence that the Continental Army engaged in actions remotely similiar to what the Sunni insurgents were doing?
It's commonly known. Typically there were irregular units or private forces doing it, not the Continental Army... but it's well known and documented that Crown supporters in NJ, the Carolinas, and other places were badly mistreated by American troops. Southern and Central New Jersey were hammered particularly hard, due to their strategic value. There are first-hand accounts of crops being razed, livestock slaughtered (when not taken as forage for the Army), and civilian farmers being killed due to allegiance to England.
Google is your friend -- but contemporary history works are an even better friend, since we've mostly gotten over the whole "America can do no wrong" theme. Let me give you a hint -- the history you were taught in grade school and high school is far from complete, and is probably contained as much propaganda as history.
You have it backwards. The reason newspapers are turning to AP for a moajority of their stories is that their circulations are way down, and so their ad revenues are way down.
Today, newspapers can't afford a full staff of reporters, so they've laid them off and replaced them with cheap copyeditors who rewrite the AP feeds.
It's quite a conundrum... newspapers can;t afford reporters due to decreased circulation, so they publish more vanilla news. As you point out, this means they get less interest from readers, which drives circulation down further.
Even if newspapers were able to field enough reports to cover local news properly, they'd still fail due to the internet -- the simply can't get enough eyes to pay for their content. The truth is, print publishing of news is going bye-bye. The only things propping it up right now are readers from earlier generations. They'll hang on for another 20-30 years, but then they will be gone. Especially since people will be able to get the news on their smartphones easily and cheaply.
If you really want to use a wife analogy, then we can do that.
The value of your wife is the summation of the change in transaction costs if you replaced her with a null wife (as opposed to a dull wife, which you may already have).
If you replace her with a more efficient wife, then the old wife's value is less than the new wife's, but it would be almost always non-zero.
Beckstrom's approach gets at something, just as most simple-minded reductions have some grain of truth in them. But it's also, in the large picture, mostly wrong.
Says you. I disagree... I think it's a good estimation of the value of a network. The key is to properly assign the transactional costs/benefits of the network; if they are overstated, then the value of the network could be multiplied greatly. Summation of transactional gains/losses for all users, from the perspective of each user? That's a whole lot of transactions. Even a small network of say, five nodes, with twenty transactions between each pair of nodes. There are ten node pairs, so 200 transactions... double the size of the netork and there are now 900 transactions. In a large network, a bad estimate of transactional value could skew the network value way off.
'pp.' as an abbreviation for pages comes from latin, pagina plura (multiple pages). Adding a 'p' was the common way of pluralizing abbreviations (since p == plura), not duplicating the single-letter abbreviation as you've mentioned.
Other examples: tsp (teaspoonus plura), tbsp (tablespoonus plura).
Whether or not Google publically posts P&L by division, analysts have pegged Youtube for a half a billion in losses in the current year.
And Youtube will post a profit or loss -- whether that is disclosed to the public is another matter (and most likely will not be disclosed), but you can bet your bottom dollar that Youtube will post a loss (or gain:) ) to Google's books.
Well.. in many places it is illegal to use an open accesspoint without permission.
Just wait... pretty soon it'll be illegal to provide an open accesspoint.
Because, you know, terrorists (or even child pornographers!) might use it.
The sad thing is, I'd be actually scared to put one of these up. People wardrive around my neighborhood all the time during the day... what if one of them was transmitting kiddie porn? Would I be legally liable? Even if I wasn't legally liable, would the potenital inconvenience of the legal issues outweigh the benefits of this product?
What if I live in Australia -- would I have to retain logs of all the traffic? And when will Americans be required to do the same?
Slashdot Mirror
when we're talking only about a single administration.
Yes, the Obama administration's stance is intolerable. But the problem, I believe, is not the administration -- it is the law. Repeal the PATRIOT Act. Pass a law requiring stricter oversight of government surveillance.
THAT is the answer. Not some mindless, useless "Obama is teh suxxor" bullshit.
Also, I suggest we all tag the article "plagiarized". I have.
And furthermore, everyone should blacklist the blog in question (not that it would prevent the plagiarist from setting up another site).
I'd even say that the submitter should be banned from submitting links.
That's not an inconvenient truth, unless you believe that correlation equals causation.
Perhaps your little factoid is only true because guns are easier and cheaper to acquire illegally (than legally) in areas with higher gun violence?
Or perhaps it is because people who acquire guns legally are less likely to commit gun violence than people who acquire them illegally -- and legal or illegal, those people will still commit gun violence?
Here's an inconvenient truth for you: As rates of legal gun ownership go up, so do rates of gun accidents resulting in injury or death.
The truth is, your fact is useless unless we can rule out other reasons why gun violence is more prevalent in areas with lower legal gun ownership rates -- and you'd be hard pressed to do so, unless you're able to do what the huge resources of the NRA have been unable to do for decades.
Not so. We have two statistical samplings, one with n=90, one with n=365. Based on the sample sizes and some other info, we can establish a confidence interval. Yes, the interval will be larger for the 90-day sample... but just because we can't be 100% confident of the exact results doesn't mean it's statistically meaningless.
One other note -- historical data must be used to establish that there are not periodic cycles with a frequency of less than one year, which would make the 90-day sample set inaccurate.
The chimps aren't entering supposedly monogamous relationships, though.
This more of a "friends with benefits" situation.
Which we also do. Well, by "we", I mean humans in general, not slashdotters (obviously).
Because you have gas heat but electric AC, and you changed the bulbs in the fall?
Copying excerpts for educational use in a classroom setting is actually an explicitly protected fair use case.
This is not a classroom setting, this is a research setting. Very different.
Though it may be covered under other criteria of fair use, the educational purposes exemption from copyright does not apply.
Idiot. The correct grammar is:
He should have beworn the Ides of March.
Ugh... for a secon there, I thought Clippy started posting to slashdot. Would you like help with that?
I don't think he's looking for a DMS, which includes lots of things like workflows, audit trails, etc. DMSs are typically used to make an office go paperless, but he's not looking for a processing and tracking mechanism. He's looking for an easy way to create a searchable archive index.
My suggestion? Since he's a professor, get a bunch of students to "help with research" by scanning the docs and OCRing them. If he's willing to shell out a few hundred bucks from his research grant, there are services that will do this... Most of the best OCR tools are proprietary, not open source, but even a crappy one should get enough text that the OCRed files could be indexed usefully.
For an indexer, I've heard good things about MPS, and a friend did a similar project to yours with Yaz/Zebra, but he was working with a library, there may have been a special reason for that.
And who's going to pay for all the infrastructure? Magical bandwidth fairies?
The internet is so extensive and powerful because it became commercialized.
Well, that brings up an interesting philosophical question -- assuming the politician in charge IS evil, who, actually, is responsible for the evil of the totalitarian state? Do the people cause the harm, by supporting the disingenuous politician? Or does the evil politician cause the harm?
I'd say the evil politician causes the harm, because but for his actions, the harm would not happen. Ability to prevent harm, and lack of exercise of that ability due to good intentions, does not imply responsibility for causation -- the people who mean well and don't understand the implications are not the cause of the harm.
That doesn't mean that failure to understand the ramifications is an excuse, it just means that the actual cause should be attributed to the person of bad will, not to the people of good will and little understanding.
And maybe if they'd stop calling it "time" our universe would disappear!
Or at least be static, in which case we'd have no chance to formulate thoughts on the universe, in which case the universe would, in essence, cease to exist due to lack of observation. Or maybe instead we'd all instantaneously be travelling at the speed of light, since the universe would be static (i.e., "time" would have stopped). Or something.
Now, where did I put that cruller?
PUMA? Portable Urban Mobility and Accessibility?
Is that the best they could come up with?
If a transport product is going to be called PUMA, it should at the very least allow me to stalk prey from tree branches, rocky outcroppings, or tall grass, silently leaping with claws outstretched, to hamstring them and then choke them with my jaws, so I can drag them back to my lair and devour their tender innards at ease.
I think this product should be called COUGAR, for Compensatory Object for Urban Guys Against Railtransit.
No really, in the AM I roll a 4-sided die and add three to it. That is my limit on coffee for the day.
If it's a weekday, I then roll d% to find out if I'm going to work, and at what time. Since I have 20 vacation days, and there are approximately 250 workdays in the year, I have an 8% chance of calling out for the day. If I roll 09-12, I go in late. If I roll 96-00, then I work overtime.
Once I get to work, I look at my email inbox. I roll a d6 surreptitiously. If I roll a 1, I address the email. If I roll a 2-5, I pass it on to a team member offshore. If I roll a 6, I accidentally the mail, then log into the mail server and edit the log files to remove all traces of the offending mail. Sometimes this takes longer than dealing with the email, but it's more fun in the long run.
Caffeine reduces the absorption of calcium. It's also a diuretic.
Both of these contribute to kidney stones.
So you're not experiencing caffeine intoxication... good for you. Have you had to expel kidney stones yet? How about the other side effects from caffeine poisoning? Have you had your renal function tested? How's the chronic diarrhea going?
I'm a caffeine addict too, but I've cut down to 1d4 + 3 cups per day. I've had kidney stones and luckily ultrasound treatment broke them up so I didn't have to pass them whole. You're damaging your body, please cut down.
It's commonly known. Typically there were irregular units or private forces doing it, not the Continental Army... but it's well known and documented that Crown supporters in NJ, the Carolinas, and other places were badly mistreated by American troops. Southern and Central New Jersey were hammered particularly hard, due to their strategic value. There are first-hand accounts of crops being razed, livestock slaughtered (when not taken as forage for the Army), and civilian farmers being killed due to allegiance to England.
Google is your friend -- but contemporary history works are an even better friend, since we've mostly gotten over the whole "America can do no wrong" theme. Let me give you a hint -- the history you were taught in grade school and high school is far from complete, and is probably contained as much propaganda as history.
Yes, but the current layoff of reporters dwarfs the layoffs of the 80s.
New Jersey alone has lost 600 reporting jobs in the past year.
You have it backwards. The reason newspapers are turning to AP for a moajority of their stories is that their circulations are way down, and so their ad revenues are way down.
Today, newspapers can't afford a full staff of reporters, so they've laid them off and replaced them with cheap copyeditors who rewrite the AP feeds.
It's quite a conundrum... newspapers can;t afford reporters due to decreased circulation, so they publish more vanilla news. As you point out, this means they get less interest from readers, which drives circulation down further.
Even if newspapers were able to field enough reports to cover local news properly, they'd still fail due to the internet -- the simply can't get enough eyes to pay for their content. The truth is, print publishing of news is going bye-bye. The only things propping it up right now are readers from earlier generations. They'll hang on for another 20-30 years, but then they will be gone. Especially since people will be able to get the news on their smartphones easily and cheaply.
The value of your wife is the summation of the change in transaction costs if you replaced her with a null wife (as opposed to a dull wife, which you may already have).
If you replace her with a more efficient wife, then the old wife's value is less than the new wife's, but it would be almost always non-zero.
Says you. I disagree... I think it's a good estimation of the value of a network. The key is to properly assign the transactional costs/benefits of the network; if they are overstated, then the value of the network could be multiplied greatly. Summation of transactional gains/losses for all users, from the perspective of each user? That's a whole lot of transactions. Even a small network of say, five nodes, with twenty transactions between each pair of nodes. There are ten node pairs, so 200 transactions... double the size of the netork and there are now 900 transactions. In a large network, a bad estimate of transactional value could skew the network value way off.
If that was intentional, very nice =)
'pp.' as an abbreviation for pages comes from latin, pagina plura (multiple pages). Adding a 'p' was the common way of pluralizing abbreviations (since p == plura), not duplicating the single-letter abbreviation as you've mentioned.
Other examples: tsp (teaspoonus plura), tbsp (tablespoonus plura).
Whether or not Google publically posts P&L by division, analysts have pegged Youtube for a half a billion in losses in the current year.
:) ) to Google's books.
And Youtube will post a profit or loss -- whether that is disclosed to the public is another matter (and most likely will not be disclosed), but you can bet your bottom dollar that Youtube will post a loss (or gain
Just wait... pretty soon it'll be illegal to provide an open accesspoint.
Because, you know, terrorists (or even child pornographers!) might use it.
The sad thing is, I'd be actually scared to put one of these up. People wardrive around my neighborhood all the time during the day... what if one of them was transmitting kiddie porn? Would I be legally liable? Even if I wasn't legally liable, would the potenital inconvenience of the legal issues outweigh the benefits of this product?
What if I live in Australia -- would I have to retain logs of all the traffic? And when will Americans be required to do the same?
Alternatively, it means someone was on usenet before eternal September.