There are usable GUI's for R, and best of all: they can be installed as packages from within R.
The best-known one is called 'R commander' (package name = Rcmdr ). It gives you a point-and-click interface and (like SPSS) drops the R code to repeat what you did using the menu (so that your work is reproducable).
Functionality includes: data summaries, contingency tables, means tests, proportions tests, variance tests, ANOVA, cluster analysis, model fitting (linear, generalised linear, logit), various graphs, tests for comparison between fitted models, plus draws and lookup tables for lots of continuous and discrete distributions. Rcmdr allows for plugins, and a number of them are also downloadable as R packages (e.g. experimental design).
The second one I know about is called 'Deducer' (package name Deducer), which provides a GUI loosely resembling that of SPSS.
Both GUIs are workable and allow you to do simple things simply.
There's also a rather nice IDE, called RStudio (which is a separate download).
This is how it should be done ...
on
R 3.0.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
R's developers are, unlike many other Open Source developers, very careful about releasing production-quality software.
As in: when they release it, you can trust it to work.
Hence they didn't mess around with major reconstruction of R's guts until they could release something that's finished (and well-tested !) and bumped the version number to 3.0.0 when they did in order to properly differentiate it from previous versions.
This is one of the differences between amateur OSS offerings (like for example KDE with its miriad half-baked Kxxx packages, sundry horrible OSS games, etc.) and genuine production-quality OSS (like R, Lapack, Octave, Libre Office, PostgressQL, MySQL, GRASS GIS, QGIS, Maria DB, GNU CC, the Linux kernel etc.)
This is very gratifying as R happens to see widespread use in academia, government and business when it comes to data analysis and statistics.
If R has a weakness, it is that uses an in-memory approach to data-processing, unlike e.g. SPSS, which keeps almost nothing in memory and simply makes passes through datafiles whenever it needs something. R is also a bit memory-hungry, so the need for genuine 64-bit implementations should be clear.
Apart from sporting about 4000 useful and ready-to-run statistical applications packages, R has convenient and efficient integration with C code and has what's probably a contender for the best support for data-graphics anywhere.
For those who didn't know, even packages like SPSS and SAS have incorporated R interfaces to tap into the wealth of application packages that R offers. Can't think of a more significant compliment right now.
I plan to call it the "urgent-cease-and-desist" sandwich.
It constitutes of two slices of brown bread, with brown peanut butter, lettuce with brown spots, seasoned with a smallish amount of ground chili peppers, and served in a mock-up (brown) leather briefcase.
All civilised countries in the world have a tax known in various forms as 'value-added tax' (or VAT). The US has sales tax. See e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_added_tax
The difference between sales tax and VAT is that VAT is levied through out the supply chain but paid only by the end customer as firms are obliged to charge VAT when they sell things, but get VAT tax credits when they purchase.
What Massachusetts is doing here is to bring its tax code more in line with de-facto international standard. Something that will happen anyway over time.
And no, there are no discernible deleterious effects of VAT, and it doesn't affect international competitiveness much (China,India, Mexico, Canada and the EU all levy VAT). So it may be delayed for awhile, but given the current state of federal finances probably not for more than a few years or so.
First off, talking to people takes valuable time. Time to schedule, time to conduct, time to evaluate.
Assigning a score to someone's facebook profile only takes a few millisecs of computer time plus the cost of processing a facebook profile, but you can outsource that to a consultant (or even a website).
Chances are you won't even be talked to if your facebook profile suggests there's a better than even chance you have some characteristics the person considering to get in touch with you deems undesirable.
Secondly, people are adept at concealing any personal *characteristics* considered undesirable by whatever group they try to be a part of by adjusting their *behaviour*. It's part of human nature.
So you won't probably won't find out by simply talking to them. And most of the time people succeed in keeping that up for long periods of time or even indefinitely, allowing them to function in the group of their choice.
This development could well cut that sort of chances short.
I'm amazed that some people still don't seem to understand what this discovery means in the real world and come up with dumb tweets like "knowing and presuming aren't the same thing" and "facebook incorrectly presumes".
It's never about *proving* you're gay, conservative, or whatever. It's about obtaining a better than even probability that you might be. That's all that's required.
And since when do you have to prove gossip? Facebook also happens to be way more reliable than gossip with a 90%-95% hit rate, ok? That's good enough for management work.
Since you seem to stop so far short of thinking it through, let me give you a few examples.
Consider your health insurance (if you have any). What's to stop every insurer in the country from assigning you a risk factor on basis of your facebook profile and use that to raise your premiums? Insurers deal in risks every single day: there simple are no certainties in insurance. Insuirance is the business of mitigating and managing risks. Facebook-based models would fit in perfectly. And you have no comebacks whatsoever unless it's legally prohibited to do this. Like it?
If someone were in charge of hiring staff for a sensitive position, and had reason to believe that certain of your facebook characteristics signaled that you'd be a 30% risk in the job instead of the ordinary 15%, what do you think that would do to your chances of being hired? Why do you assume a potential employer would take 1% more risk than they absolutely have to?
Want to bet even now companies are checking with their legal department to see if they are allowed to weigh this kind of probability-based info when assessing candidates? How's that for fun?
If a manager in charge of a bank's mortgage desk thought that certain of your facebook characteristics signaled an increased risk of defaulting on your part, he/she could block your mortgage. No questions asked (and certainly no questions from you answered in any meaningful way). Good eh?
Just assume you're applying for a place in college (a good college). Competition is tough and one of the things that affects your chances is the essay you'll have to write about yourself and your motivation. How would you like that college to just assign a score to your facebook profile and use that instead?
If the above examples don't focus your mind a little, I don't know what will.
Spurred by all the stories I Googled for Prenda Law to see what they say on their website.
What I found was a referring site (http://www.wefightpiracy.org/ that has a link to Prenda Law).
When I followed this link I was greeted by the following message: "This Site is not Compatible With Your Browser".
That's odd... in fact it's a first. Well... since I'm using Mozilla they just might refuse to interact with any browser but true and trusted Microsoft IE. So I went to another machine and used IE on the website, only to be greeted with the exact same message.
Woops. A site that's incompatible with both Mozilla *and* MS Internet Explorer? Very very unlikely to be anywhere near truthful I'd say.
Might it perhaps mean that this particular website is temporarily incompatible with *any* browser? As in "Prenda wishes to keep its website from public scrutiny for the moment, and thought this message might be a good way to mask their taking it offline"? Who knows?
I really wonder who they thought would actually believe that.
I'm offended by the extremist views taken by companies like Oracle and Microsoft on what is or is not copyrightable. Recognising non-literal copying is simply equivalent to recognising copyright on ideas.
I wonder if anyone has considered the position of a professor (full, associate, or assistant) who teaches a course.
Students who follow that course learn (among other things) intellectual concepts, structure, sequence, and organisation of algorithms to solve certain problems. Much of that can be found in the literature, but not everything. Some of that is what the professor thought of and added. And that literature is usually copyrighted too
Now the student graduates, goes away, and applies those concepts, structure, sequence, and organisation to solving problems in the real world, possibly even writing software that incorporates knowledge learned in university.
Can I (plus anyone who has contributed to the literature) now ask that student (read: the company employing him/her) to buy a license for the copyrights on the non-literal copying of what I taught that student?
One might argue that the tuition fee covers this, and that hence the student indemnifies his/her employer against me in regard of using what he learned. Fair enough. But now his employer asks my ex-student to pour his knowledge into software. Software that will continue to work (and may even be sold) long after my ex-student has moved on in his/her career, or even left the company. Why should that be covered? One could very well argue that the tuition fee only covers my student's personal use of that specific part in his knowledge that I and others contributed, no? I foresee interesting legal discussions on the topic, and my guess is that many a college president and many a commercial publisher would like to have this possibility scrutinised very closely.
I think that if the court decides to recognise non-literal copying precisely this idea *will* be scrutinised by the parties I mentioned. And it's no good threatening no to hire US graduates anymore because we're talking about tons of stuff that has already made its way into commercial software over decades.
It's only fair that universities (producers of knowledge) and publishers (purveyors of knowledge) should protect their valuable intellectual property, right?
I like the idea of taking out insurance against a possible catastrophic meteor hit.
In previous discussions we have seen references to more 'soft-force' solutions, such as spraying paint on the meteorite to have it nudged it off course by sunlight pressure or mounting a small ion-motor on the surface.
The more 'robust' approaches proposed here like blowing it up (opinions are sharply divided as to how much good that would do though) or vaporising it by aiming big lasers at it have a big disadvantage. They're basically big weapon systems in orbit, whose target could very well be meteorites, among other things.
As regards the lasers, what's to stop such a laser from taking aim at a satelite that we don't like and treating it as a meteorite? And if you believe that the BRIC countries will agree to such a setup, just consider what the reception here would be if the entire system would be built and operated by e.g. the Chinese or the Russians. Or by a collaboration of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba. Or India, Brazil, South Africa, and Pakistan.
The most natural and politically neutral (from a jurisdictional point of view) would be to build the system by a group of nations and allow it to be controlled by e.g. the UN security council. Of course that idea will live only as long as it takes for the first tea-partier to hear about it and start screaming his/her head off.
If we push ahead with a system, who's willing to bet that BRIC countries won't race to have their own version up in the same timeframe?
Building the darn thing might be the least of our worries.
An enthusiastic and experienced R user myself, I use a speadsheet (like Excel or Calc) to do what R simply oesn't do as well or as easily or as quickly.
Like when I want to actually look at my data in column format (scrolling, frozen panes, column hiding, conditional cell colouring anyone?). Or when I need to edit it (e.g. convert ascii strings to something numeric using search/replace). Or when I want to do a quick interactive pivot table. Or a quick sum or count. Or when I want to try out one or two formulas or expressions before I start coding them. O r when I just need a small table to look good for insertion into a document (the best Latex table editors that I know are plug-ins for Excel or Calc: format in spreadsheet, push button, copy-paste Latex code; works every time).
Of course it's possible to do most of those things in R too, if your time time has no value and if you love writing one-off code. I prefer to select the best tool for the job, and use that. Even if that sometimes means using VBA.
Interestingly I find myself using RExcel (integrating R and Excel) sometimes.
Most of the time however I have no time for zealots who tell me that I don't need X,Y, or Z because I supposedly can make do with A,B, or C too. They can e entertaining though, as long as you recognise them for what they are: rants from zealots.
Hmm... I sort of see your point, but are zombies really illegal?
After all, most of them were born here, right? How exactly does their legal title to be in the US change on death?
After all, they wouldn't be deported while they rested quietly in their designated resting place, so why would that change now that they've suddenly decided to change their err... unlife-style... and become more active? There could be significant savings on legal risks here.
Think of it... zombies don't need health insurance, retirement packages, dental care, medical care, or career prospects. And they're not taxed either.
They also don't take bathroom breaks, don't need time off. Health and safety laws don't apply to them, they're genuinely American (don't forget to bring geo-coded picture of your personal grave), if one or two get caught up in machinery or drop from scaffolding no-one will ask inconvenient questions, and they will work for a few pounds of squishy matter a day that should be easy enough to obtain.
Hey, I have an idea: lets all crowd-fund patent litigation cases.
It works as follows:
- anyone with a patent that looks monetizable starts a cheap one-off company.
- this company floats an IPO through a crowd-funding offer (see e.g. http://crowdfunding.com/ ) for, say, $250,000 in which the text of the patent in question is put online plus a target amount of money you propose to raise through licensing
- if the IPO succeeds in raising the money, $10,000 is used for administrative affairs and the rest goes towards legal costs. Everyone who puts in money becomes a shareholder.
- as the legal resources aren't too big, you avoid suing large companies but go after medium-sized ones that you can 'touch' for, say, a $10,000 prot... errm.. license
- when (if) you gain the target amount, you take a shareholder vote: continue as before, upscale (go after bigger targets), or liquidate (the company liquidated, the proceeds paid out, and the patent returned to the original owner)
- the original patent owner can now crowd-fund a new cycle for the same patent
That would put a little oomph into patent-monetization, right? So what's not to like?
Oh, and picture this: in the IPO you can list a number of companies that you view as infringers and likely licensees (read: "a list of companies that you're going to sue", hehe! Anyone want to see Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, or anyone else get sued? Queue here and contribute $49.99 ! Risk-free!)
Pssstt... know any politician you don't like? Anyone at all? Pesky troublesoume Liberal? Dumb clueless Wingnut? There must be some patent his/her campaign is violating. And no, that's not stifling the democratic process through gross abuse of the patent system; it's solely about... errm... "monetizing your valuable intellectual property" (remember that term, you must be able to reproduce it letter-perfect if grilled by a judge or in a senate hearing). Just think of the possibilities!
Err perhaps I should have patented this idea before publishing, you never know.
I think the removal of the 3d drawings is justified as it's childishly irresponsible to offer large magazines for John Q. Public to print.
Especially, as in this when it's done solely to thwart legislation from making large magazines harder to get.
One might consider passing legislation that makes it a criminal offence to make weapons, or parts of weapons, available outside the regular arms dealers.
And no, that would in no way contravene the second amendment.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I really have to set you straight. You won't be much of an obstacle against the installation of spyware, should someone decide that your box needs it installed.
First off, you won't be told when they install spyware on your computer. And I'm fairly positive that you lack the time, inclination, and competence to either use sourcecode distributions of FOSS exclusively (_and_ read the entire source before you install), or to disassemble and thoroughly study all and any proprietary software you may be installing. And neither will you thoroughly secure all the ports and networking software on your box, again because it takes too much time, hassle, and expertise.
Should you be using MS Windows or X-os, there's no need to talk further as you've already lost.
Secondly, "they" won't be installing any spyware on your box. You will be doing that for them. By running binary installers (legitimate or illegitimate doesn't matter), by installing software that employs DRM, or by surfing to dodgy sites.
There are basically two ways: you can follow Stallman's lead, or you can get accustomed to the fact that there's a lot going on on your box that you don't get told about. Get used to it or go sourcecode-FOSS exclusively.
The solution to all and any speeding problems, red light running, tailgating, obnoxious lane swerving already exists. It's fully autonomous (i.e. driverless) cars.
The only thing that's needed is to mandate the things, say within 20 years every single private vehicle must be driverless and driving licenses will be issued only for professional drivers.
I'm sure that Google, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Daewoo, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, and others would agree. So it should be easy enough to drive this kind of legislation through congress.
Oh, and before you ask, the second amendment doesn't protect your rights to drive manually. Cars can admittedly be used as weapons but they still aren't covered.
There isn't all that much wrong with the powers accorded the DOJ.
The key issue (that I see) can lead to abuse is the widespread phenomenon of 'plea bargaining'.
It is this mechanism that provides an incentive for the DOJ to heap unreasonable amounts of far-fetched charges on a single suspect. The sole objective is to render it unattractive for the suspect to let the case come to court and thereby pressure the suspect into copping to specific charges.
There are two reasons to do this. The first is based solely on cost reasons (as with most decisions in the US), as in: it's costly to prosecute and it's cheap to file charges. If you can get suspects to plead guilty and accept the penalties, you've handled a case cost-effectively.
The second reason is that people have sought for means to make things sufficient hot for extreme cases (like e.g. mafia bosses) who are likely to shrug off most charges that can be proven against them beyond reasonable doubt. For such cases people saw fit to impose totally disproportionate penalties for relatively innocuous offenses.
Unfortunately this practice has been adopted for general use, specifically for serving as a deterrent against law-breaking by increasing the perceived risk of law-breaking. As in :
perceived risk = probability of capture x potential penalty
In the Middle Ages they used torture, mutilation, branding and suchlike to up the potential penalty to "deterrent values". Nowadays we use disproportional (and crippling) fines and equally disproportionate (and equally crippling) prison sentences for the same purpose.
People who complain ought to realise that this setup is very 'American' in nature and that it continues to exist only because a majority doesn't think it worth changing this aspect of the system.
Of course the whole thing can be changed: simply lower maximum penalties to proportionate values and invest (much) more money in increasing the probability of getting caught in order to keep the perceived risk of lawbreaking constant. It's completely feasible, but expensive.
Only people here don't want to hear that: they (collectively) prefer to destroy the odd individual in order to maintain the balance of terror on part of the law by the cheapest means available.
It's a choice (if a callous one), and it has nothing whatsoever to do with awarding the DOJ "too much power", let alone with the DOJ being ''corrupted by power". The DOJ simply does what it's told to do... by the outcomes of a democratic process. If you don't like it, then have it changed.
I don't know Fedor (and I don't plan to either as I use SuSE) but a crappy installer for a distro is just... amateurish... in the worst possible sense of the word.
This is exactly what gives Linux a bad name: revisiting something that worked before and really doesn't need to be ''improved", and then slinging in some glitzy pre-beta code and dropping it smack in the middle of a distribution channel for production code. That's something dumb that only hobbyists and amateurs do.
Distros are meant for people who don't want to waste their time tinkering with a ton of software that has already been sorted out. The installer on a Distro should 'just work', and work predictable and reproduceably.
Like most slashdot articles, this one doesn't exactly help you understand what's going on. Unless you click on the links, read the articles referred to, and do a little research on things that remain unclear.
So, like most of us, you don't know. Fair enough, but please don't confuse your lack of background knowledge and your failure to do any background research for being able to tell whether or not the allegations are "nonsensical".
A few second's Googling would have given you this link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-responds-to-eu-antitrust-concerns-2012-07-02
which explains the term "diverting users". The ZDnet article the slashdot article links to is simply unclear about the matter, I agree with you there.
The terms seems to mean: redirecting users looking for a specific topic to Google's own "vertical" search engines, thereby throttling traffic to competing vertical search engines. That in itself could be an issue for a search engine provider, especially if it doesn't clearly mark such results as 'advertising our own services'.
In addition not even the article refers to "monopoly", which Google hasn't; instead it refers to "dominant market position", which it definitely has.
At the latest since the mainstream media coverage of SCO versus IBM and SCO versus NOVELL, people ought to know that what an article claims isn't always a reliable indicator of what the ones being quoted actually said.
So: why not either go to the actual text of the Financial Times interview and base your "it looks like" opinion on that?
So it looks like it's a little early in the day to bandy words like "blatant cash grab" about, yes?
Most of us here already knew about ITER, thanks. A little more development of your thoughts (if any) would assist at this point.
What might have escaped you is that ITER, while it does a good job of covering the Tokamak approach, still isn't *guaranteed* to succeed. Or to succeed *quicker* than inertial confinement fusion (shooting lasers at pellets).
That's why it makes sense to hedge our bets with the laser approach at the NIF.
For those too lazy to follow a link, here is the gist:
"Earlier this month Samsung asked that the court force Apple to turn over its settlement agreement with HTC, and today US Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal granted that requested. According to Samsung, the document could play a vital role in determining whether it will need to take any of its products off the market in the wake of the $1.049 billion verdict Apple won back in August. If Apple licensed some of its unique user experience patents, Samsung argues, then Cupertino is clearly fine with competitors using that IP as long as it receives money in return â" and since Apple will be receiving a payout in connection with the verdict, the extra step of an injunction isn't justified."
In plain text: Apple: no injunctions for you and drop the damages you ask to what you can actually negotiate in the marketplace.
Want to bet that Apple isn't at all happy about this?
Explained this way (the hard-coded password device-specific and printed on a sticker inderneath it), what you sketch here sounds practical and thoroughly reasonable (something you couldn't possibly guess from the usual Slashdot headlines though).
Slashdot Mirror
The best-known one is called 'R commander' (package name = Rcmdr ). It gives you a point-and-click interface and (like SPSS) drops the R code to repeat what you did using the menu (so that your work is reproducable).
Functionality includes: data summaries, contingency tables, means tests, proportions tests, variance tests, ANOVA, cluster analysis, model fitting (linear, generalised linear, logit), various graphs, tests for comparison between fitted models, plus draws and lookup tables for lots of continuous and discrete distributions. Rcmdr allows for plugins, and a number of them are also downloadable as R packages (e.g. experimental design).
The second one I know about is called 'Deducer' (package name Deducer), which provides a GUI loosely resembling that of SPSS.
Both GUIs are workable and allow you to do simple things simply.
There's also a rather nice IDE, called RStudio (which is a separate download).
As in: when they release it, you can trust it to work.
Hence they didn't mess around with major reconstruction of R's guts until they could release something that's finished (and well-tested !) and bumped the version number to 3.0.0 when they did in order to properly differentiate it from previous versions.
This is one of the differences between amateur OSS offerings (like for example KDE with its miriad half-baked Kxxx packages, sundry horrible OSS games, etc.) and genuine production-quality OSS (like R, Lapack, Octave, Libre Office, PostgressQL, MySQL, GRASS GIS, QGIS, Maria DB, GNU CC, the Linux kernel etc.)
This is very gratifying as R happens to see widespread use in academia, government and business when it comes to data analysis and statistics.
If R has a weakness, it is that uses an in-memory approach to data-processing, unlike e.g. SPSS, which keeps almost nothing in memory and simply makes passes through datafiles whenever it needs something. R is also a bit memory-hungry, so the need for genuine 64-bit implementations should be clear.
Apart from sporting about 4000 useful and ready-to-run statistical applications packages, R has convenient and efficient integration with C code and has what's probably a contender for the best support for data-graphics anywhere.
For those who didn't know, even packages like SPSS and SAS have incorporated R interfaces to tap into the wealth of application packages that R offers. Can't think of a more significant compliment right now.
I plan to call it the "urgent-cease-and-desist" sandwich. It constitutes of two slices of brown bread, with brown peanut butter, lettuce with brown spots, seasoned with a smallish amount of ground chili peppers, and served in a mock-up (brown) leather briefcase.
What Massachusetts is doing here is to bring its tax code more in line with de-facto international standard. Something that will happen anyway over time.
And no, there are no discernible deleterious effects of VAT, and it doesn't affect international competitiveness much (China,India, Mexico, Canada and the EU all levy VAT). So it may be delayed for awhile, but given the current state of federal finances probably not for more than a few years or so.
Assigning a score to someone's facebook profile only takes a few millisecs of computer time plus the cost of processing a facebook profile, but you can outsource that to a consultant (or even a website).
Chances are you won't even be talked to if your facebook profile suggests there's a better than even chance you have some characteristics the person considering to get in touch with you deems undesirable.
Secondly, people are adept at concealing any personal *characteristics* considered undesirable by whatever group they try to be a part of by adjusting their *behaviour*. It's part of human nature.
So you won't probably won't find out by simply talking to them. And most of the time people succeed in keeping that up for long periods of time or even indefinitely, allowing them to function in the group of their choice.
This development could well cut that sort of chances short.
It's never about *proving* you're gay, conservative, or whatever. It's about obtaining a better than even probability that you might be. That's all that's required. And since when do you have to prove gossip? Facebook also happens to be way more reliable than gossip with a 90%-95% hit rate, ok? That's good enough for management work.
Since you seem to stop so far short of thinking it through, let me give you a few examples.
Consider your health insurance (if you have any). What's to stop every insurer in the country from assigning you a risk factor on basis of your facebook profile and use that to raise your premiums? Insurers deal in risks every single day: there simple are no certainties in insurance. Insuirance is the business of mitigating and managing risks. Facebook-based models would fit in perfectly. And you have no comebacks whatsoever unless it's legally prohibited to do this. Like it?
If someone were in charge of hiring staff for a sensitive position, and had reason to believe that certain of your facebook characteristics signaled that you'd be a 30% risk in the job instead of the ordinary 15%, what do you think that would do to your chances of being hired? Why do you assume a potential employer would take 1% more risk than they absolutely have to? Want to bet even now companies are checking with their legal department to see if they are allowed to weigh this kind of probability-based info when assessing candidates? How's that for fun?
If a manager in charge of a bank's mortgage desk thought that certain of your facebook characteristics signaled an increased risk of defaulting on your part, he/she could block your mortgage. No questions asked (and certainly no questions from you answered in any meaningful way). Good eh?
Just assume you're applying for a place in college (a good college). Competition is tough and one of the things that affects your chances is the essay you'll have to write about yourself and your motivation. How would you like that college to just assign a score to your facebook profile and use that instead?
If the above examples don't focus your mind a little, I don't know what will.
What I found was a referring site (http://www.wefightpiracy.org/ that has a link to Prenda Law).
When I followed this link I was greeted by the following message: "This Site is not Compatible With Your Browser".
That's odd ... in fact it's a first. Well ... since I'm using Mozilla they just might refuse to interact with any browser but true and trusted Microsoft IE. So I went to another machine and used IE on the website, only to be greeted with the exact same message.
Woops. A site that's incompatible with both Mozilla *and* MS Internet Explorer? Very very unlikely to be anywhere near truthful I'd say.
Might it perhaps mean that this particular website is temporarily incompatible with *any* browser? As in "Prenda wishes to keep its website from public scrutiny for the moment, and thought this message might be a good way to mask their taking it offline"? Who knows?
I really wonder who they thought would actually believe that.
I wonder if anyone has considered the position of a professor (full, associate, or assistant) who teaches a course.
Students who follow that course learn (among other things) intellectual concepts, structure, sequence, and organisation of algorithms to solve certain problems. Much of that can be found in the literature, but not everything. Some of that is what the professor thought of and added. And that literature is usually copyrighted too
Now the student graduates, goes away, and applies those concepts, structure, sequence, and organisation to solving problems in the real world, possibly even writing software that incorporates knowledge learned in university.
Can I (plus anyone who has contributed to the literature) now ask that student (read: the company employing him/her) to buy a license for the copyrights on the non-literal copying of what I taught that student?
One might argue that the tuition fee covers this, and that hence the student indemnifies his/her employer against me in regard of using what he learned. Fair enough. But now his employer asks my ex-student to pour his knowledge into software. Software that will continue to work (and may even be sold) long after my ex-student has moved on in his/her career, or even left the company. Why should that be covered? One could very well argue that the tuition fee only covers my student's personal use of that specific part in his knowledge that I and others contributed, no? I foresee interesting legal discussions on the topic, and my guess is that many a college president and many a commercial publisher would like to have this possibility scrutinised very closely.
I think that if the court decides to recognise non-literal copying precisely this idea *will* be scrutinised by the parties I mentioned. And it's no good threatening no to hire US graduates anymore because we're talking about tons of stuff that has already made its way into commercial software over decades.
It's only fair that universities (producers of knowledge) and publishers (purveyors of knowledge) should protect their valuable intellectual property, right?
In previous discussions we have seen references to more 'soft-force' solutions, such as spraying paint on the meteorite to have it nudged it off course by sunlight pressure or mounting a small ion-motor on the surface.
The more 'robust' approaches proposed here like blowing it up (opinions are sharply divided as to how much good that would do though) or vaporising it by aiming big lasers at it have a big disadvantage. They're basically big weapon systems in orbit, whose target could very well be meteorites, among other things.
As regards the lasers, what's to stop such a laser from taking aim at a satelite that we don't like and treating it as a meteorite? And if you believe that the BRIC countries will agree to such a setup, just consider what the reception here would be if the entire system would be built and operated by e.g. the Chinese or the Russians. Or by a collaboration of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba. Or India, Brazil, South Africa, and Pakistan.
The most natural and politically neutral (from a jurisdictional point of view) would be to build the system by a group of nations and allow it to be controlled by e.g. the UN security council. Of course that idea will live only as long as it takes for the first tea-partier to hear about it and start screaming his/her head off.
If we push ahead with a system, who's willing to bet that BRIC countries won't race to have their own version up in the same timeframe?
Building the darn thing might be the least of our worries.
Like when I want to actually look at my data in column format (scrolling, frozen panes, column hiding, conditional cell colouring anyone?). Or when I need to edit it (e.g. convert ascii strings to something numeric using search/replace). Or when I want to do a quick interactive pivot table. Or a quick sum or count. Or when I want to try out one or two formulas or expressions before I start coding them. O r when I just need a small table to look good for insertion into a document (the best Latex table editors that I know are plug-ins for Excel or Calc: format in spreadsheet, push button, copy-paste Latex code; works every time).
Of course it's possible to do most of those things in R too, if your time time has no value and if you love writing one-off code. I prefer to select the best tool for the job, and use that. Even if that sometimes means using VBA.
Interestingly I find myself using RExcel (integrating R and Excel) sometimes.
Most of the time however I have no time for zealots who tell me that I don't need X,Y, or Z because I supposedly can make do with A,B, or C too. They can e entertaining though, as long as you recognise them for what they are: rants from zealots.
I'd personally nominate the Purple Wrist medal for service personnel who got Carpal Wrist Syndrome in the course of duty.
After all, most of them were born here, right? How exactly does their legal title to be in the US change on death?
After all, they wouldn't be deported while they rested quietly in their designated resting place, so why would that change now that they've suddenly decided to change their err ... unlife-style ... and become more active? There could be significant savings on legal risks here.
They also don't take bathroom breaks, don't need time off. Health and safety laws don't apply to them, they're genuinely American (don't forget to bring geo-coded picture of your personal grave), if one or two get caught up in machinery or drop from scaffolding no-one will ask inconvenient questions, and they will work for a few pounds of squishy matter a day that should be easy enough to obtain.
Am I the only one who sees an opportunity here?
It works as follows:
- anyone with a patent that looks monetizable starts a cheap one-off company.
- this company floats an IPO through a crowd-funding offer (see e.g. http://crowdfunding.com/ ) for, say, $250,000 in which the text of the patent in question is put online plus a target amount of money you propose to raise through licensing
- if the IPO succeeds in raising the money, $10,000 is used for administrative affairs and the rest goes towards legal costs. Everyone who puts in money becomes a shareholder.
- as the legal resources aren't too big, you avoid suing large companies but go after medium-sized ones that you can 'touch' for, say, a $10,000 prot ... errm .. license
- when (if) you gain the target amount, you take a shareholder vote: continue as before, upscale (go after bigger targets), or liquidate (the company liquidated, the proceeds paid out, and the patent returned to the original owner)
- the original patent owner can now crowd-fund a new cycle for the same patent
That would put a little oomph into patent-monetization, right? So what's not to like?
Oh, and picture this: in the IPO you can list a number of companies that you view as infringers and likely licensees (read: "a list of companies that you're going to sue", hehe! Anyone want to see Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, or anyone else get sued? Queue here and contribute $49.99 ! Risk-free!)
Pssstt ... know any politician you don't like? Anyone at all? Pesky troublesoume Liberal? Dumb clueless Wingnut? There must be some patent his/her campaign is violating. And no, that's not stifling the democratic process through gross abuse of the patent system; it's solely about ... errm ... "monetizing your valuable intellectual property" (remember that term, you must be able to reproduce it letter-perfect if grilled by a judge or in a senate hearing). Just think of the possibilities!
Err perhaps I should have patented this idea before publishing, you never know.
Especially, as in this when it's done solely to thwart legislation from making large magazines harder to get.
One might consider passing legislation that makes it a criminal offence to make weapons, or parts of weapons, available outside the regular arms dealers.
And no, that would in no way contravene the second amendment.
First off, you won't be told when they install spyware on your computer. And I'm fairly positive that you lack the time, inclination, and competence to either use sourcecode distributions of FOSS exclusively (_and_ read the entire source before you install), or to disassemble and thoroughly study all and any proprietary software you may be installing. And neither will you thoroughly secure all the ports and networking software on your box, again because it takes too much time, hassle, and expertise.
Should you be using MS Windows or X-os, there's no need to talk further as you've already lost.
Secondly, "they" won't be installing any spyware on your box. You will be doing that for them. By running binary installers (legitimate or illegitimate doesn't matter), by installing software that employs DRM, or by surfing to dodgy sites.
There are basically two ways: you can follow Stallman's lead, or you can get accustomed to the fact that there's a lot going on on your box that you don't get told about. Get used to it or go sourcecode-FOSS exclusively.
Like the ones being test-driven on public roads right now by Google, Nissan, Toyota, Audi and others (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car ).
The only thing that's needed is to mandate the things, say within 20 years every single private vehicle must be driverless and driving licenses will be issued only for professional drivers.
I'm sure that Google, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Daewoo, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, and others would agree. So it should be easy enough to drive this kind of legislation through congress.
Oh, and before you ask, the second amendment doesn't protect your rights to drive manually. Cars can admittedly be used as weapons but they still aren't covered.
The key issue (that I see) can lead to abuse is the widespread phenomenon of 'plea bargaining'.
It is this mechanism that provides an incentive for the DOJ to heap unreasonable amounts of far-fetched charges on a single suspect. The sole objective is to render it unattractive for the suspect to let the case come to court and thereby pressure the suspect into copping to specific charges.
There are two reasons to do this. The first is based solely on cost reasons (as with most decisions in the US), as in: it's costly to prosecute and it's cheap to file charges. If you can get suspects to plead guilty and accept the penalties, you've handled a case cost-effectively.
The second reason is that people have sought for means to make things sufficient hot for extreme cases (like e.g. mafia bosses) who are likely to shrug off most charges that can be proven against them beyond reasonable doubt. For such cases people saw fit to impose totally disproportionate penalties for relatively innocuous offenses.
Unfortunately this practice has been adopted for general use, specifically for serving as a deterrent against law-breaking by increasing the perceived risk of law-breaking. As in :
perceived risk = probability of capture x potential penalty
In the Middle Ages they used torture, mutilation, branding and suchlike to up the potential penalty to "deterrent values". Nowadays we use disproportional (and crippling) fines and equally disproportionate (and equally crippling) prison sentences for the same purpose.
People who complain ought to realise that this setup is very 'American' in nature and that it continues to exist only because a majority doesn't think it worth changing this aspect of the system.
Of course the whole thing can be changed: simply lower maximum penalties to proportionate values and invest (much) more money in increasing the probability of getting caught in order to keep the perceived risk of lawbreaking constant. It's completely feasible, but expensive.
Only people here don't want to hear that: they (collectively) prefer to destroy the odd individual in order to maintain the balance of terror on part of the law by the cheapest means available.
It's a choice (if a callous one), and it has nothing whatsoever to do with awarding the DOJ "too much power", let alone with the DOJ being ''corrupted by power". The DOJ simply does what it's told to do ... by the outcomes of a democratic process. If you don't like it, then have it changed.
This is exactly what gives Linux a bad name: revisiting something that worked before and really doesn't need to be ''improved", and then slinging in some glitzy pre-beta code and dropping it smack in the middle of a distribution channel for production code. That's something dumb that only hobbyists and amateurs do.
Distros are meant for people who don't want to waste their time tinkering with a ton of software that has already been sorted out. The installer on a Distro should 'just work', and work predictable and reproduceably.
So, like most of us, you don't know. Fair enough, but please don't confuse your lack of background knowledge and your failure to do any background research for being able to tell whether or not the allegations are "nonsensical".
A few second's Googling would have given you this link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-responds-to-eu-antitrust-concerns-2012-07-02 which explains the term "diverting users". The ZDnet article the slashdot article links to is simply unclear about the matter, I agree with you there. The terms seems to mean: redirecting users looking for a specific topic to Google's own "vertical" search engines, thereby throttling traffic to competing vertical search engines. That in itself could be an issue for a search engine provider, especially if it doesn't clearly mark such results as 'advertising our own services'.
In addition not even the article refers to "monopoly", which Google hasn't; instead it refers to "dominant market position", which it definitely has.
At the latest since the mainstream media coverage of SCO versus IBM and SCO versus NOVELL, people ought to know that what an article claims isn't always a reliable indicator of what the ones being quoted actually said.
So: why not either go to the actual text of the Financial Times interview and base your "it looks like" opinion on that?
So it looks like it's a little early in the day to bandy words like "blatant cash grab" about, yes?
I'd like to see a breakdown of flu patients by whether they had a flu shot in the past 6 months.
If it's effective, probably best to mandate flu shots for health care workers, shop attendants, and all civil servants.
I'm at liberty to appoint anyone I want, and especially a telecoms company, to screen and filter calls on my behalf.
What might have escaped you is that ITER, while it does a good job of covering the Tokamak approach, still isn't *guaranteed* to succeed. Or to succeed *quicker* than inertial confinement fusion (shooting lasers at pellets).
That's why it makes sense to hedge our bets with the laser approach at the NIF.
See:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012112121031884 .
For those too lazy to follow a link, here is the gist:
"Earlier this month Samsung asked that the court force Apple to turn over its settlement agreement with HTC, and today US Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal granted that requested. According to Samsung, the document could play a vital role in determining whether it will need to take any of its products off the market in the wake of the $1.049 billion verdict Apple won back in August. If Apple licensed some of its unique user experience patents, Samsung argues, then Cupertino is clearly fine with competitors using that IP as long as it receives money in return â" and since Apple will be receiving a payout in connection with the verdict, the extra step of an injunction isn't justified."
In plain text: Apple: no injunctions for you and drop the damages you ask to what you can actually negotiate in the marketplace.
Want to bet that Apple isn't at all happy about this?
Explained this way (the hard-coded password device-specific and printed on a sticker inderneath it), what you sketch here sounds practical and thoroughly reasonable (something you couldn't possibly guess from the usual Slashdot headlines though).