Seems like a similar concept, only on Twitter, instead of e-mail.
I can't wait for the researchers to conclude that liberal tweets are 100% true, and conservative tweets are astroturfing. And that the users who are all astroturfers remind them of Nazis, too.
Current college student here.
In my experience, the "distraction" argument comes up a lot from professors banning laptops, but an argument comes up just as frequently. Professors who ban laptops in their classrooms ioften argue that they present an unfair advantage for students who don't have laptops. I like use my laptop for taking notes, as I can keep my notes highly organized and keep up with the lecture's pace. My top typing speed is around 100 WPM with 99% accuracy, so typing makes things very easy. I avoid the stenographer pitfall, as I like to leave myself notes about what the professor is talking about and rephrase concepts.
I actually had a professor deny my accommodation request, on the grounds that, on the first day of class, I was taking notes and had been chuckling softly (I think I might have made 3 soft chuckles, tops. How she heard me from the other side of the room, I don't know) about the irony of a British priest writing to the Brits about how horrible the Colonial Spaniards were to the Native Americans. She assumed that I had been talking online or something and was laughing about that.
I tried to argue my case, but eventually decided just to conform and accede to her demands.
Excuse me, but it's only been Democrats who are calling exercising the First Amendment by derisive sexual terms, right?
Oh, sorry, you were trying to be cute by continuing the practice started by Matt Tabibi, Rachael Maddow, and Markos Moulitsas. My bad.
Well, well said. I understand your frustration, but sometimes Slash-think can be hard to pierce through. The best that you can do is fight the misconceptions and misfired synapses with "truthiness" and transparency. I think that it's good that this discussion is taking place, so that people can learn about the program and if they wish, voice their concerns and ideas in community-driven forums like/.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the Federation cloak. After all, it *was* the Federation who one-up'd the rest and made their cloaks do the whole "pass through solid matter" trick.
Pesky Treaty of Algernon, always getting in the way...
If the MPAA paid to go see their movies, they could single-handedly reverse the trend that they've been crying about! And if they couldn't eat all the snacks, give the leftovers to the hungry.
Seriously though, I don't think that the MPAA needs to worry about pirates or ninjas. What will spell the end for the MPAA, as well as us all, is the elusive Ninja Pirate... the FSM's Angel of Death.
The Students for a Free Tibet created a Greasemonkey script (http://www.userscripts.org/scripts/show/3056) that replaces the Google logo with a slighty funnier version. I have it installed on my Fx, just because I think it's a nifty bit of satire, and because, well, I liked it.
On a related note, is China really such a big monster, like we always hear it is? With the one-child-per-family rule, and the abortions of baby girls, they have to have like a hundred million less girls than they'd normally have. Can a such a large and unwieldy military power itself with such a bad demographic outlook, birth rate/death rate-wise?
Translation: On down the road, it's gonna be awfully hard for guys to get dates in China.
The cops/police/fuzz don't always understand what they are allowed to do or not do, under the law.
I'm a college student here at Ohio University, and as part of the required freshman introduction-to-college course, we had to learn and understand what, under the rules of the college and laws of the land, the police and campus security were allowed and not allowed to do.
Example: Say the president of the college (unlikely) knocked on my door while I had friends over to partake of substances of debatable legality with, I have the right to refuse his request to come in and look around for said substances. He could get all the campus cops and resident assistants he wanted to, but as long as the substances are not immediately visible from OUTSIDE the room, there is no trouble.
Take home: campus police can't bust in, even if they'd like to. if they in any way break with the stated policy, any charges they might want to file are thrown out.
Second example: Any member of campus security is not allowed to request identification that contains your age on it. So if I was at a party (which happens often, even though I take time for classes and the occasional/. read-through), and campus security busted in, I would not be required to prove that I am of legal drinking age, even if they request it.
Take home: There's a set minimum level of compliance that students have to give to campus security, mandated by both on-campus civil liberties and those granted under the Constitution and assorted Amendments.
TFA is an extreme case, I believe. Sometimes police get a bit overzealous, which is why it's up to the townfolkery to know where their rights/liberties begin, and where the police's legal and civil abilities end.
Hmm. May explain the rise in belief of intelligent design.
This was kind of expected as soon as I saw the topic of the article. Bash the US, bash conservatives, bash Bush, etc. How does this sort of thing elevate the conversation or bring anything new to light? We all know that if your a conservative, American, Christian, or any combination of the three, and you talk about your opinions or insights on/., you get modded down for Troll/Flamebait, and get ridiculed. Move along, nothing to see here, just the usual America-bashing by the mob mentality./rant- off
On topic, which is more than the parent can say, this study has some basic flaws that I don't think were addressed. And yes, I RTFA. First, the study claimed to only measure "scientific knowledge" of 11-year olds. So TFA is saying that third-graders (or there abouts, I was 11 when i was in third grade, IIRC) should have a firm grasp on the principles of displacement, density, inherent properties of liquids, and so on?
Of course the study would find that there's a *huge problem* that the school system in the UK needs to throw money at. Would this be Slashdot-worthy if the study found "Third-graders are as 'equally intelligent' as their counterparts 30 years ago"? Of course not.
1. Get a grant
2. Find/Make up scary-sounding problem with no single easily-identifiable cause
3. ????
4. Profit!
(and optional 5. Blame US)
:) thanks for reposting TFA. you just saved about 100/.ers the trouble of reading it before posting.
According to the London Times Online Rates Technologies, Inc. just got done suing Nortel Networks, a voice/video/data communications company, presumably for the same thing RTI is suing Google for: VOIP technology, or some parts thereof. The US Court of Appeals confirmed an earlier decision dismissing the patent infringement case this past February.
If RTI actually won a case, what would they do with the patents? Sell them to the highest bidder? And wouldn't it be very expensive to build a company by just suing bigger companies? Maybe they've won some cases in the past, and are using the riches to try to make more.
For those who know, these guys are worse than the Borg. They're... they're... just a bunch of Pakleds!;)
...the RIAA should have to be forced to show the actual loss in revenue from each song, and where do they come up with the numbers they sue people for.
This Harvard Business School/UNC-Chapel Hill study tackles this question of whether the RIAA's bellyaching is warranted, and is quite interesting.
To sum it up, it found that file-sharing actually increased the sales of albums which contained the most popularly downloaded tracks, contrary to the findings of an earlier study.
From the Oberholzer/Strumpf study (March 2004):
We consider
the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset
containing 0.01% of the world's downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large
number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical
features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as
international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically
indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates
are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing
is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.
Let's face it. The after-Christmas week is a very slow news week,/. included. CNet News admits this, while is why they have barely updated their news site. Most people... Steve Ballmer, Google spooks, clueless legislators, even Jack Thompson, are all off celebrating and drinking eggnog with their families. Not much is going on, so news outlets turn to news that would otherwise not reported, for whatever reason.
This isn't a big deal, I don't think. What horrible things does a cookie do to your computer or Your Rights Online, even a cookie placed by the government. How horrible! Shame on them! The government placed not a rootkit, not malware or spyware, not a virus or a hard drive searcher, but an easily deleteable cookie! And oh the horrors, it was persistant!
Most people know how to delete cookies, some even know how to refuse them. Join the crowd.
This isn't a big deal if you think about it objectively. Do you really think that if you go to websites, you don't get cookies? I actually would have expected that this would be common practice on government websites, not out of paranoia, but because it's such a widespread and somewhat-minimally invasive practice used by webmasters to generate webhit statistics, among other benign things.
It's simply a minor webmaster goof, not an issue of trying to spy on people or track them through government sites. If the NSA was really trying to spy on people's computer use, they'd go ask CoolWebSearch or some other malware/spyware vendor to give them the results of their "information collection."
I disagree with those who say that non-Microsoft OS's are going to be banned, or that everyone will be forced to use an "approved" list of applications and devices. It would be ridiculous and a very poor PR move on the part of ISPs and, yes, Microsoft, to announce to the world that if people want their precious Internet, they will have to bow to them. I don't post much, but I do read a lot of articles here, because I like the news and discussion about aspects of technology, and from reading TFA and the following discussion, I draw my own conclusions.
I did a 6-month internship with a national ISP called CopperNet. They're based in my hometown, and serve all over the country except in my area. I don't know why. As part of my internship, I "shadowed" the CopperNet Customer Service Manager, and spent most of my hours there listening in on calls with Tech Support agents. Also, I got to sit in on a very critical department head meeting, which was called by the president to coordinate a response to the Worm of the Month, one of the earlier Sober variants. This one in particular rated 5 out of 5 on Symantec's virus outbreak report... very fast-spreading, borks up the computer good, and is all over the place ITW (in the wild).
Some of their customers had been infected with it, and CopperNet was in the process of a) getting off Earthlink's blacklist, because customers were complaining that their e-mail to Earthlink users was being bounced, b) diagnosing and helping infected customers get the worm squished, and c) managing a TEMPORARY block-list of users who they believed to be infected.
And at my college, all students are provided with wireless and high-speed Internet access for no extra cost beyond room and tutition, with some restrictions. One of those restrictions is that they will deny Internet access if you are known to be infected with a virus or are the source of malicious traffic. They also run some kind of remote security scanner on connected computers several times a day. I choose to block this inbound traffic with my firewall, but I understand that many people are oblivious about computers, and that this security scanner, while it can be considered an invasion of privacy, is doing the job of mantaining a baseline of security to be responsible stewards of the freedom the Internet gives us.
The bottom line is: Some users are stupid, and that will always be a constant, no matter what OS or ISP they use. If the user doesn't know how or refuses to ensure that his or her computer is being sufficiently secure in order to avoid hurting other users, then someone has to minimize the effects of the user's lack of security know-how, until such time that the user is secure enough to be a responsible citizen of the Internet, regardless of their operating system or service provider of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
"Send us any fishy e-mails about Obamacare that you get," anyone?
Seems like a similar concept, only on Twitter, instead of e-mail.
I can't wait for the researchers to conclude that liberal tweets are 100% true, and conservative tweets are astroturfing. And that the users who are all astroturfers remind them of Nazis, too.
Current college student here. In my experience, the "distraction" argument comes up a lot from professors banning laptops, but an argument comes up just as frequently. Professors who ban laptops in their classrooms ioften argue that they present an unfair advantage for students who don't have laptops. I like use my laptop for taking notes, as I can keep my notes highly organized and keep up with the lecture's pace. My top typing speed is around 100 WPM with 99% accuracy, so typing makes things very easy. I avoid the stenographer pitfall, as I like to leave myself notes about what the professor is talking about and rephrase concepts. I actually had a professor deny my accommodation request, on the grounds that, on the first day of class, I was taking notes and had been chuckling softly (I think I might have made 3 soft chuckles, tops. How she heard me from the other side of the room, I don't know) about the irony of a British priest writing to the Brits about how horrible the Colonial Spaniards were to the Native Americans. She assumed that I had been talking online or something and was laughing about that. I tried to argue my case, but eventually decided just to conform and accede to her demands.
Excuse me, but it's only been Democrats who are calling exercising the First Amendment by derisive sexual terms, right? Oh, sorry, you were trying to be cute by continuing the practice started by Matt Tabibi, Rachael Maddow, and Markos Moulitsas. My bad.
Well, well said. I understand your frustration, but sometimes Slash-think can be hard to pierce through. The best that you can do is fight the misconceptions and misfired synapses with "truthiness" and transparency. I think that it's good that this discussion is taking place, so that people can learn about the program and if they wish, voice their concerns and ideas in community-driven forums like /.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the Federation cloak. After all, it *was* the Federation who one-up'd the rest and made their cloaks do the whole "pass through solid matter" trick.
Pesky Treaty of Algernon, always getting in the way...
If the MPAA paid to go see their movies, they could single-handedly reverse the trend that they've been crying about! And if they couldn't eat all the snacks, give the leftovers to the hungry.
Seriously though, I don't think that the MPAA needs to worry about pirates or ninjas. What will spell the end for the MPAA, as well as us all, is the elusive Ninja Pirate... the FSM's Angel of Death.
The Students for a Free Tibet created a Greasemonkey script (http://www.userscripts.org/scripts/show/3056) that replaces the Google logo with a slighty funnier version. I have it installed on my Fx, just because I think it's a nifty bit of satire, and because, well, I liked it.
On a related note, is China really such a big monster, like we always hear it is? With the one-child-per-family rule, and the abortions of baby girls, they have to have like a hundred million less girls than they'd normally have. Can a such a large and unwieldy military power itself with such a bad demographic outlook, birth rate/death rate-wise?
Translation: On down the road, it's gonna be awfully hard for guys to get dates in China.
The cops/police/fuzz don't always understand what they are allowed to do or not do, under the law.
/. read-through), and campus security busted in, I would not be required to prove that I am of legal drinking age, even if they request it.
I'm a college student here at Ohio University, and as part of the required freshman introduction-to-college course, we had to learn and understand what, under the rules of the college and laws of the land, the police and campus security were allowed and not allowed to do.
Example: Say the president of the college (unlikely) knocked on my door while I had friends over to partake of substances of debatable legality with, I have the right to refuse his request to come in and look around for said substances. He could get all the campus cops and resident assistants he wanted to, but as long as the substances are not immediately visible from OUTSIDE the room, there is no trouble.
Take home: campus police can't bust in, even if they'd like to. if they in any way break with the stated policy, any charges they might want to file are thrown out.
Second example: Any member of campus security is not allowed to request identification that contains your age on it. So if I was at a party (which happens often, even though I take time for classes and the occasional
Take home: There's a set minimum level of compliance that students have to give to campus security, mandated by both on-campus civil liberties and those granted under the Constitution and assorted Amendments.
TFA is an extreme case, I believe. Sometimes police get a bit overzealous, which is why it's up to the townfolkery to know where their rights/liberties begin, and where the police's legal and civil abilities end.
apologies for the big block of text. i neglected to use the br tag
:) thanks for reposting TFA. you just saved about 100 /.ers the trouble of reading it before posting.
;)
According to the London Times Online Rates Technologies, Inc. just got done suing Nortel Networks, a voice/video/data communications company, presumably for the same thing RTI is suing Google for: VOIP technology, or some parts thereof. The US Court of Appeals confirmed an earlier decision dismissing the patent infringement case this past February.
If RTI actually won a case, what would they do with the patents? Sell them to the highest bidder? And wouldn't it be very expensive to build a company by just suing bigger companies? Maybe they've won some cases in the past, and are using the riches to try to make more.
For those who know, these guys are worse than the Borg. They're... they're... just a bunch of Pakleds!
To sum it up, it found that file-sharing actually increased the sales of albums which contained the most popularly downloaded tracks, contrary to the findings of an earlier study.
From the Oberholzer/Strumpf study (March 2004):
We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world's downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.
TFA:
http://www.nber.org/~confer/2004/URCs04/felix.pdf
For those who wish to read it in a non-annoying format:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cac
Let's face it. The after-Christmas week is a very slow news week, /. included. CNet News admits this, while is why they have barely updated their news site. Most people... Steve Ballmer, Google spooks, clueless legislators, even Jack Thompson, are all off celebrating and drinking eggnog with their families. Not much is going on, so news outlets turn to news that would otherwise not reported, for whatever reason.
This isn't a big deal, I don't think. What horrible things does a cookie do to your computer or Your Rights Online, even a cookie placed by the government. How horrible! Shame on them! The government placed not a rootkit, not malware or spyware, not a virus or a hard drive searcher, but an easily deleteable cookie! And oh the horrors, it was persistant!
Most people know how to delete cookies, some even know how to refuse them. Join the crowd.
This isn't a big deal if you think about it objectively. Do you really think that if you go to websites, you don't get cookies? I actually would have expected that this would be common practice on government websites, not out of paranoia, but because it's such a widespread and somewhat-minimally invasive practice used by webmasters to generate webhit statistics, among other benign things.
It's simply a minor webmaster goof, not an issue of trying to spy on people or track them through government sites. If the NSA was really trying to spy on people's computer use, they'd go ask CoolWebSearch or some other malware/spyware vendor to give them the results of their "information collection."
I disagree with those who say that non-Microsoft OS's are going to be banned, or that everyone will be forced to use an "approved" list of applications and devices. It would be ridiculous and a very poor PR move on the part of ISPs and, yes, Microsoft, to announce to the world that if people want their precious Internet, they will have to bow to them. I don't post much, but I do read a lot of articles here, because I like the news and discussion about aspects of technology, and from reading TFA and the following discussion, I draw my own conclusions.
I did a 6-month internship with a national ISP called CopperNet. They're based in my hometown, and serve all over the country except in my area. I don't know why. As part of my internship, I "shadowed" the CopperNet Customer Service Manager, and spent most of my hours there listening in on calls with Tech Support agents. Also, I got to sit in on a very critical department head meeting, which was called by the president to coordinate a response to the Worm of the Month, one of the earlier Sober variants. This one in particular rated 5 out of 5 on Symantec's virus outbreak report... very fast-spreading, borks up the computer good, and is all over the place ITW (in the wild).
Some of their customers had been infected with it, and CopperNet was in the process of a) getting off Earthlink's blacklist, because customers were complaining that their e-mail to Earthlink users was being bounced, b) diagnosing and helping infected customers get the worm squished, and c) managing a TEMPORARY block-list of users who they believed to be infected.
And at my college, all students are provided with wireless and high-speed Internet access for no extra cost beyond room and tutition, with some restrictions. One of those restrictions is that they will deny Internet access if you are known to be infected with a virus or are the source of malicious traffic. They also run some kind of remote security scanner on connected computers several times a day. I choose to block this inbound traffic with my firewall, but I understand that many people are oblivious about computers, and that this security scanner, while it can be considered an invasion of privacy, is doing the job of mantaining a baseline of security to be responsible stewards of the freedom the Internet gives us.
The bottom line is: Some users are stupid, and that will always be a constant, no matter what OS or ISP they use. If the user doesn't know how or refuses to ensure that his or her computer is being sufficiently secure in order to avoid hurting other users, then someone has to minimize the effects of the user's lack of security know-how, until such time that the user is secure enough to be a responsible citizen of the Internet, regardless of their operating system or service provider of choice.