It's not astroturfing so much as just childishness. It's inherent in the process, too. If you make the factual assertion 'A is true,' there are two possible paths that will be taken:
1. The general childish consensus thinks either that A is not true or that A being true is a bad thing for them, and thus demand citations and consider 'A is true' statements, with or without citations, to be flamebait. The credibility of the cited sources will be attacked ad hominem.
2. The general childish consensus either agrees that A is true or thinks that A should be true, and thus launches ad hominem attacks on anyone who requests a citation supporting 'A is true.' People who say 'I am too lazy to do the research to prove that A is true, but I know for a fact that it is' are lauded.
Nothing new here. It's the same herd mentality and intellectual laziness that pervades most political discourse. The only thing that matters is whether your audience likes what you say, not whether what you say is true or supportable or even a reflection of what you believe.
You know that for a fact? Factual statements can be proven one way or the other. Prove it. You are making big claims and admitting you are too lazy to do any research about them. Your credibility is suspect at this point, and your "I know for a fact" is a fallacious appeal to authority where the authority in question has already demonstrated a lack of willingness and/or ability to do any factual research.
No shit. Absolutely ridiculous. And the guy refuses to cite sources, saying that he can't be bothered to do the research. You can't claim "federal law prohibits this" and then refuse to say which federal law. And you sure as hell can't say that it's flamebait to ask, in good faith, which federal law is being referred to. I think it's possible that there is such a law - so show it to me. Like I said in another reply, this is an interesting enough claim to merit citation to authority.
I never said that the government does not regulate this. I said that you are providing a positive statement without any proof that it is correct other than by extrapolation from inhalant regulations. I cannot cite to a US Code section that doesn't levy a fine on insurers for covering smartphones (well, I can, but that wouldn't prove the matter), whereas, if your statement is accurate, you can point to the section that says so. Your statement is interesting - sufficiently interesting that you would be well-served by proving that it's accurate.
The endgame puts the entire burden on the middle class. All of the health care alternatives being floated around allow people to opt out. What this means is that the upper class will be better off self-insuring because they will be paying for more than their fair share of the total risk and can afford to self-insure, even seeking treatment in other countries if they are prohibited from seeking treatment in the USA without being on the national health plan. The middle class will then be burdened with the bulk of the total risk, but won't be able to afford the risk of self-insuring against their medical needs.
Citation needed. Please indicate the title and section of the US Code that levies a fine on insurance companies for providing coverage to buy an iPhone or other smartphone for a hearing-disabled customer.
You can do both, among other things. For a really fun time, you could insist on only an in camera review of the source code, to let the judge look for any patent infringement with his own eyes. That could be really entertaining.
There is apparently a previous order that does provide some kind of protections for the source code, but I haven't seen a link to it and am not about to pay for Pacer access just to read it. Thus, I have no clue what those protections might include. I'm with you on the surety bond thing, though.
While you are probably correct in your conclusion that this is a troll patent, your reasoning is non sequitur and equivalent to saying that some automobiles are capable of pulling trailers and therefore that anything that cannot pull a trailer is not an automobile. (Car analogy FTW.) The patent here actually does describe a method of information organization, albeit at a relatively high level.
I skimmed the patent and agree that the summary got it wrong. I wanted to read the court's actual order to see if it protected Facebook's intellectual property with a protective order about allowed uses for the disclosed source code, but unfortunately the link that is supposedly to the order is actually to the main page of the submitter's blog. Blogwhores aggravate me. Show me the damn court order.
Addendum: I don't know when it was written, but the provisional application was dated 2002 and the patent application was dated 2003, with an issue date in 2006 - still before Facebook implemented the features that the patent claims.
That said, the Facebook source code issue needs the following to be said:
1. Discovery in the courts gets you access to anything unless it is protected by trade secrets laws or the like. I haven't read the order or anything, but it'd be outright insane if the judge didn't order that the source code not be used for anything but looking for patent violations. I have seen similar things done, with stiff penalties to the lawyers and to the parties for violating such an order.
2. You don't need to look at the source code of Facebook to see whether it implements the invention described by this patent. You only need to create a user account. The patent doesn't seem to describe any algorithms, but rather a high-level information organization scheme.
If you actually read the patent, which is something that the submitter appears to have skipped, it goes quite a bit further than just many-to-many database relationships. For something written in 2000, it is definitely novel. Whether it is appropriate for patent protection is debatable, of course, but it's not just a description of a relational database.
Thanks. The part about Objective-C using that mechanism to register, on a per-compilation-unit basis, selectors, classes, and the like is news to me.:)
For thoroughness, would you mind defining 'module load time' in the Objective-C context for me? I am familiar with the language but much less familiar with its runtime support components.
Not just that, but the expense of rewriting Openstep in C++ would have been ridiculous and likely would have put Apple out of business. They did the right thing, both in business terms and in technological terms. Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, they just got on the cart and started rolling forward. Obj-C is also not a bad language, all things considered.
So, Objective-C requires selectors (such as for message names) to be interned, and the old way was to intern all selectors at process startup time when the dynamic linker does its work; but the new way is to cache the interned selectors both on disk (faster startup) and in memory (even faster startup plus saved memory overhead). Is that correct?
My problem isn't that it is a bad idea. It's that it is a bad idea for 99% of parents, and of those 99% only a few are capable of proper self-selection. My fear is that idiots will raise idiot kids and not even have the benefit of the public schools to help their kids step out of their idiocy. 90% of parents think they are better than average parents and a substantial portion of them believe they can teach their kids better than trained teachers can. Add in the number of overprotective parents who don't want to let their kids out of their sight, and what you end up with is a bunch of stupid parents who can't get a grip on their separation anxiety playing at the park with their kid instead of teaching him how to read and write.
For the other one kid per 100,000, though, this is fine.
Why is the term in quotes if it's a 30-year-old, commonly used term? This is the first time the majority of Slashdot readers have seen it, from the comments, and its use in quotes indicates that it is not a commonly used, well-defined term.
As long as you're not telling me that I shouldn't eat beef that has been raised in a pasture with individual attention and slaughtered painlessly, then you are not the hypocrite that I was referring to. Too many people don't think these things through and fail where you have succeeded.
Slashdot Mirror
To a weak or lazy mind, asking for a citation is itself biased and off-topic.
It's not astroturfing so much as just childishness. It's inherent in the process, too. If you make the factual assertion 'A is true,' there are two possible paths that will be taken:
1. The general childish consensus thinks either that A is not true or that A being true is a bad thing for them, and thus demand citations and consider 'A is true' statements, with or without citations, to be flamebait. The credibility of the cited sources will be attacked ad hominem.
2. The general childish consensus either agrees that A is true or thinks that A should be true, and thus launches ad hominem attacks on anyone who requests a citation supporting 'A is true.' People who say 'I am too lazy to do the research to prove that A is true, but I know for a fact that it is' are lauded.
Nothing new here. It's the same herd mentality and intellectual laziness that pervades most political discourse. The only thing that matters is whether your audience likes what you say, not whether what you say is true or supportable or even a reflection of what you believe.
You know that for a fact? Factual statements can be proven one way or the other. Prove it. You are making big claims and admitting you are too lazy to do any research about them. Your credibility is suspect at this point, and your "I know for a fact" is a fallacious appeal to authority where the authority in question has already demonstrated a lack of willingness and/or ability to do any factual research.
No shit. Absolutely ridiculous. And the guy refuses to cite sources, saying that he can't be bothered to do the research. You can't claim "federal law prohibits this" and then refuse to say which federal law. And you sure as hell can't say that it's flamebait to ask, in good faith, which federal law is being referred to. I think it's possible that there is such a law - so show it to me. Like I said in another reply, this is an interesting enough claim to merit citation to authority.
I never said that the government does not regulate this. I said that you are providing a positive statement without any proof that it is correct other than by extrapolation from inhalant regulations. I cannot cite to a US Code section that doesn't levy a fine on insurers for covering smartphones (well, I can, but that wouldn't prove the matter), whereas, if your statement is accurate, you can point to the section that says so. Your statement is interesting - sufficiently interesting that you would be well-served by proving that it's accurate.
The endgame puts the entire burden on the middle class. All of the health care alternatives being floated around allow people to opt out. What this means is that the upper class will be better off self-insuring because they will be paying for more than their fair share of the total risk and can afford to self-insure, even seeking treatment in other countries if they are prohibited from seeking treatment in the USA without being on the national health plan. The middle class will then be burdened with the bulk of the total risk, but won't be able to afford the risk of self-insuring against their medical needs.
Citation needed. Please indicate the title and section of the US Code that levies a fine on insurance companies for providing coverage to buy an iPhone or other smartphone for a hearing-disabled customer.
"1d2", you mean, like a coin?
Like a coin, but +5 Nerdiness.
The rest of the blame can be attributed to how fun it is to taser someone, of course.
This happens a lot. Blame Alanis.
You can do both, among other things. For a really fun time, you could insist on only an in camera review of the source code, to let the judge look for any patent infringement with his own eyes. That could be really entertaining.
There is apparently a previous order that does provide some kind of protections for the source code, but I haven't seen a link to it and am not about to pay for Pacer access just to read it. Thus, I have no clue what those protections might include. I'm with you on the surety bond thing, though.
No kidding, I have never not been not that bad.
Or, in the words of a song: You shouldn't wanna do it if you don't wanna not do it right.
While you are probably correct in your conclusion that this is a troll patent, your reasoning is non sequitur and equivalent to saying that some automobiles are capable of pulling trailers and therefore that anything that cannot pull a trailer is not an automobile. (Car analogy FTW.) The patent here actually does describe a method of information organization, albeit at a relatively high level.
I skimmed the patent and agree that the summary got it wrong. I wanted to read the court's actual order to see if it protected Facebook's intellectual property with a protective order about allowed uses for the disclosed source code, but unfortunately the link that is supposedly to the order is actually to the main page of the submitter's blog. Blogwhores aggravate me. Show me the damn court order.
Addendum: I don't know when it was written, but the provisional application was dated 2002 and the patent application was dated 2003, with an issue date in 2006 - still before Facebook implemented the features that the patent claims.
That said, the Facebook source code issue needs the following to be said:
1. Discovery in the courts gets you access to anything unless it is protected by trade secrets laws or the like. I haven't read the order or anything, but it'd be outright insane if the judge didn't order that the source code not be used for anything but looking for patent violations. I have seen similar things done, with stiff penalties to the lawyers and to the parties for violating such an order.
2. You don't need to look at the source code of Facebook to see whether it implements the invention described by this patent. You only need to create a user account. The patent doesn't seem to describe any algorithms, but rather a high-level information organization scheme.
If you actually read the patent, which is something that the submitter appears to have skipped, it goes quite a bit further than just many-to-many database relationships. For something written in 2000, it is definitely novel. Whether it is appropriate for patent protection is debatable, of course, but it's not just a description of a relational database.
No, it's a work-around for a PEBKAC. That doesn't make it more or less worthy, it just isn't a bugfix.
Thanks. The part about Objective-C using that mechanism to register, on a per-compilation-unit basis, selectors, classes, and the like is news to me. :)
For thoroughness, would you mind defining 'module load time' in the Objective-C context for me? I am familiar with the language but much less familiar with its runtime support components.
Not just that, but the expense of rewriting Openstep in C++ would have been ridiculous and likely would have put Apple out of business. They did the right thing, both in business terms and in technological terms. Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, they just got on the cart and started rolling forward. Obj-C is also not a bad language, all things considered.
So, Objective-C requires selectors (such as for message names) to be interned, and the old way was to intern all selectors at process startup time when the dynamic linker does its work; but the new way is to cache the interned selectors both on disk (faster startup) and in memory (even faster startup plus saved memory overhead). Is that correct?
My problem isn't that it is a bad idea. It's that it is a bad idea for 99% of parents, and of those 99% only a few are capable of proper self-selection. My fear is that idiots will raise idiot kids and not even have the benefit of the public schools to help their kids step out of their idiocy. 90% of parents think they are better than average parents and a substantial portion of them believe they can teach their kids better than trained teachers can. Add in the number of overprotective parents who don't want to let their kids out of their sight, and what you end up with is a bunch of stupid parents who can't get a grip on their separation anxiety playing at the park with their kid instead of teaching him how to read and write.
For the other one kid per 100,000, though, this is fine.
Why is the term in quotes if it's a 30-year-old, commonly used term? This is the first time the majority of Slashdot readers have seen it, from the comments, and its use in quotes indicates that it is not a commonly used, well-defined term.
As long as you're not telling me that I shouldn't eat beef that has been raised in a pasture with individual attention and slaughtered painlessly, then you are not the hypocrite that I was referring to. Too many people don't think these things through and fail where you have succeeded.