By snidely remarking that scientists should *not* test established hypothesis and instead saying they should be "clubbed over the head with a baseball bat" you are furthering an idea that science 'already knows' something.
The issue I have is the article itself, not the scientific method. If scientists want to test or re-test something to validate a previous claim or to see if something thought to hold still holds that's fine.
But don't write an article suggesting it was anything more than a validation of an already widely believed and previously tested hypothesis.
The sarcasm and disdain comes from the "Scientists claim water is wet; this idea rebuts theory that water just looks wet but is actually scaly like a lizard" aspect of this article. Its not a new or even controversial claim, so couch it as a validation of what a lot of people already thought, rather than choosing phrasing that these scientists have boldly gone into uncharted territory; or suggesting that their results challenge a widely held theory.
Nobody thinks water is dry and scaly so "rebutting that theory" is of no noteworthiness; just as nobody really thinks speed readers sound out all the words when they read.
He might have 10 million in assets, but if he has 10.25 million in liabilities than "on paper" he's in the hole a quarter million bucks.
The whole "worth a lot on paper" idiom generally refers to people who actually are worth a lot, but have no liquid cash. Typically, they can get liquidity by selling a few assets... presumably well below market value, since the assets aren't all that liquid... but he'll still end up way ahead of zero. WAY AHEAD.
Your friend sounds like he's bankrupt on paper, but in practice is ahead of most bankrupt people because at least there is a chance his investments will turn around and pull him back into the black.
Most businesses around here *make* money on groupon deals.
There are -some- business models where groupon makes money. There are several more where it makes sense to run a groupon for advertising at certain pricepoints / limits.
But to claim "most businesses around here make money on groupon deals" is a flat out lie, and is precisely the sort of CRAP groupon tells businesses while inducing them to make catastrophic decisions.
Youre acting like I have an interest in not knowing these things.
If you were interested, you could have done your own trivial amount of research.
Why couldnt someone have come out 10 posts ago and just linked to an article like that or simply said "Ishaqi incident"?
Because usually when someone on slashdot makes a big deal about there not being any credible specific information about things which are TRIVIAL to find out for oneself it means that someone has no interest in actually knowing the truth.
I mean, i googled wikileaks atrocities, and the execution mentioned above was the first fucking result. If you are really so interested in the truth... perhaps try looking for it.
Not quite. The merchants that elect to set reasonable caps don't get their promo run. So you don't see them.
Groupon runs the deals that make them the most money.
If a cupcake business wants to run 200 coupons @ 75% off for $7where groupon takes half ($4.50) that's only $900 for groupon.
Groupon simply won't run that deal.
Groupon pushes hard for deals they damn well know don't make an ounce of sense for the business.
When I hire a contractor, or a consultant, or an ad agency... their job is fundamentally to come up with a good solution for the the business.
If a particular contractor consistently advises, even pushes businesses hard to make catastrophic decisions then they deserve some of the credit for those catastrophic decisions.
Then don't put stuff that would require such measures on your phone. Why would you do so anyway?
My phone accesses many of the same resources my desktop does. Virtually all the online services I use, VPNs, and wireless access points I use,... hell I even remote to my own desktop from my phone.
To be honest, other than a BIOS boot password on my desktop PC, I'm hard pressed to think of a password I'd never have to enter on my phone...
The problem should be illegal surveillance, not the cameras. The difference between a plainclothes police officer standing at a corner and a surveillance camera is how effective the watcher can be. If it's legal for the officer to watch a street no one should complain about a camera doing the same. A camera increases the effectiveness, but the same is true of binoculars or hand held cameras.
Yes and no. Mostly no.
Saying, "Its the same thing, the camera is just more effective" is a red herring.
The public's tolerance for various activities is implicitly at various levels of effectiveness.
I tolerate the police wandering about, doing their job, and if they happen to see me going about my business, I'm perfectly fine with that.
A network of cameras at every intersection recording every movement I and everyone else makes is a FUNDAMENTALLY thing.
It is so much more effective that its an entirely new thing.
You told me to re-read the thread... so here i am, and this even more wrong, imo.
But agreements still carry weight, and if you violate an agreement and that means you have to consider yourself banned and then you access the website afterward, whether you've been not to or not, then you fall under the law regarding unlawful acess of a computer.
If I break an agreement, i should "consider my self banned"?
My local pool has a set of rules for using the facility. No running, no diving, no children unattended, no bubblebath or oils in the hottub...
So if I run for any reason, should I "consider myself banned", and by remaining at the facility I should be charged with criminal trespassing even though nobody asked me to leave? Seriously?
I don't think it should in all cases, but if you're doing it to harass someone, then it's an aggravating circumstance in the harassment.
Harrassment is a crime. Let them be charged with harassment. That ought to be enough.
So it's not automatic that if the courts apply the law this way to a case where someone harassed someone else into suicide it means that you can be jailed just for logging into a machine after violating some minor clause in the agreement.
Why? If I rob a bank and use my car as a getaway vehicle. They can come after me for robbing the bank. But it would be idiotic to have a law on the books that made letting the parking meter run out on your car a CRIME, just so that if someone ever robs a bank down the road, and then parks there car at an expired meter... that they can be arrested and tossed in jail for that.
And then rely on the courts and prosecutors to only enforce the whole "toss them in jail" part of the law only when the perpetrator is a bank robber.
Incidentally, your scrambled words example is a great way to show that word shape is very important, more important than just "the first and last letters".
Oh I agree shape is very important, and yes, that text was careful to preserve shape.
But its clearly more than -just- shape, because if you preserve the shape but start replacing those inner letters with other similiarly shapped letters it breaks down.
Shape is just a filter used to narrow it down to candidate words. Inner letters flters it down further. Order of inner letters pins it down... but it turns out shape and inner letters filters it down good enough that we don't actually rely on order of inner letters provided shape is right, and the inner letters are present.
It's pretty clear it should be some sort of a crime
No. Not its not clear that this should be the case at all.
Fact is, a website is someone else's property, and violating someone else's rules on their property is, at the least, a violation of an agreement.
So what? Its a violation of an agreement. They can try and sue you for damages if they feel they've been harmed enough to be worth it.
But to make it a crime is absurd. Think about what it means for something to be a crime. The police are involved... you are arrested, you get a criminal record... because your a criminal if you commited a crime.
If I order a thousand widgets from your company, and we sign a contract that you'll deliver them May 1st. If your late... you've just violated our signed contract... that's way more forceful than a ToS fine-print on a website... and that's not a crime. Can you imagine a world where it was. You miss that May 1st deadline... and the police show up to arrest you for committing a crime
Next time your late on a cell phone bill payment... your arrested. You agreed to pay them $X by y date, even signed a contract.
Next time your late bringing in a library book; well you've already got a criminal record for the cell phone crime... I guess you get hauled of to PMIA prison, you repeat offender.
Violating a contract shouldn't be a crime. Violating a ToS even less so.
It's already been well established that at least many people read this way.
Its common knowledge that most people can read normal (lower) case text faster than upper case text. And it has long been surmised that its due to the much better word shape diversity of lower case.
Its also common knowledge that most people can read jumbled up words with very little difficulty, as long as the first and last letters are correct, and the rest of the letters are in there in a random order.
Such as:
"I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae."
Given the number of people who can read the above almost effortlessly, anyone clinging to the theory that fast readers are "sounding words out" needs to be clubbed over the head with a baseball bat.
It also rebuts the premise of the article that we read by word shape. Its clearly a bit more complicated than that.
I expect we simultaneously look at word shape, the leading and closing letters, the length, and the middle letters along with some "predictive" matching based on context cues so we can narrow down likely candidate words that "fit" the sentence.
Oh you are going to cry but I don't want pay $60+ for 1.5Mbit/384Kbps, Comcast and AT&T will sell me 20Mbps/15Mbps for that. Well yes they will but along with their caps, throttling, and other BS.
If your complaining that the car you bought has a speed limiter that won't let it go over 300kph; you don't solve the problem by buying a car that costs the same with a top speed of 150kph... but hey, at least there is no speed limiter.
1.5Mbit/384kbps at the same price is actually worse than throttling and caps. You move slower than you would throttled ALL the time, and you can't pull enough data to hit the old caps now anyway.
but 'patent parasite' implies that they are leaching off others.
You mean Apple invented anything to do with cell phones?
I mean sure they did a bunch of neat stuff with the ipod touch as a user interface, and sticking a phone into it was a good move too...but lets take a look at that phone that they stuck into it?
That's quite a bit of sophisticated radio technology in there. We're not talking "swipe to unlock" or "rounded rectangle"... crap. We're talking the nuts and bolts of maintaining a high speed data connection while moving from cell to cell communicating with multiple cells at once, in a noisy RF environment stuff... real patents. Modern cellular networks are a pretty sophisticated animal.
Care to even try to quantify how many patents they are using?
Apple thinks it should get to use all that for nothing AND keep its rounded rectangle idea for itself too.
You cut down to the entire companies managmants wages to lowest engineering wage, and no bonuses. That includes the stockholdes, CEOs and other "high positions".
Or maybe if they cut the engineering wages to that of the lowest janitors wage and no bonuses. What do you think that would accomplish?
A big fat surplus of cash? Of course not. All the engineers would find new jobs and quit.
What makes you think management would be any different?
I agree executive compensation is way out of whack, but you can't just cut their wages to below market norms or they'll just go find new jobs like anyone else.
These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press."
Better to cut marketing and the "vital" line of communication to the press, than to cut product development and not have a new product next quarter... because then having lines of communication to the press won't seem so vitally important anymore.
When Mentor Graphics bought Code Sourcery, they continued developing the closed-course one and discontinued, then deleted, the GPL variant. It's unclear to me if that's kosher, as the closed variant must contain code that had been GPLed at one point.
Whether its kosher or not depends entirely on copyright. If they accepted patches from the community, incorporated them, and the community did not assign them the copyright, then no they can't change the license without removing any code they don't have copyright to.
However, if they have copyright on the code, and copyright of any submitted patches was assigned to them (which is pretty normal); even the FSF has you assign them copyright. (Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to chagne the license from GPLv2 to GPLv3 without contacting each person who submitted a patch and getting permission...)
Now, if a company that owns the copyright decides to discontinue a GPL'd product or close source it or whatever, that is entirely within their right.
However, that doesn't revoke the license on the GPL'd version, so anyone that has a copy of the GPL'd version is still free to make copies, redistribute it, and fork a new project from it if there is any interest in doing so.
The status of the code in the closed source fork is not inviolation. The owners of that fork own the copyright on that code.
The status of the code in the open source fork, should someone make one is also fine. It was licensed under the GPL. The only real restriction on it, is the new open source fork doesn't have copyright so they can't change the license -- ie its stuck on gpl version X. The new fork can't close source it or change the gpl version.
I mean, consider that you aren't allowed to board a plane with dangerous objects like nail clippers or a can of sprite.
Do you really think they'd allow you to connect a personal computer that they didn't completely control to any network in their jurisdiction?
Good God man, you can't just attach your laptop to the internet... you could be the pawn of a chinese hacker group and that laptop could be full of attack tools. Better not chance it. You aren't allowed on the network.
Slashdot Mirror
By snidely remarking that scientists should *not* test established hypothesis and instead saying they should be "clubbed over the head with a baseball bat" you are furthering an idea that science 'already knows' something.
The issue I have is the article itself, not the scientific method. If scientists want to test or re-test something to validate a previous claim or to see if something thought to hold still holds that's fine.
But don't write an article suggesting it was anything more than a validation of an already widely believed and previously tested hypothesis.
The sarcasm and disdain comes from the "Scientists claim water is wet; this idea rebuts theory that water just looks wet but is actually scaly like a lizard" aspect of this article. Its not a new or even controversial claim, so couch it as a validation of what a lot of people already thought, rather than choosing phrasing that these scientists have boldly gone into uncharted territory; or suggesting that their results challenge a widely held theory.
Nobody thinks water is dry and scaly so "rebutting that theory" is of no noteworthiness; just as nobody really thinks speed readers sound out all the words when they read.
He might have 10 million in assets, but if he has 10.25 million in liabilities than "on paper" he's in the hole a quarter million bucks.
The whole "worth a lot on paper" idiom generally refers to people who actually are worth a lot, but have no liquid cash. Typically, they can get liquidity by selling a few assets... presumably well below market value, since the assets aren't all that liquid... but he'll still end up way ahead of zero. WAY AHEAD.
Your friend sounds like he's bankrupt on paper, but in practice is ahead of most bankrupt people because at least there is a chance his investments will turn around and pull him back into the black.
Really? Is that the best argument for "most businesses in your area actually make money directly from groupon" that you can come up with?
I guess it was.
Really you live in/have detailed knowledge of my local area? how exactly do you even know where that is?
I don't need to know where you are.
Such an area doesn't exist, except in your imagination.
(And Drawing an 8 foot radius around a particular business that made money on groupon and calling that a "local area" doesn't count.)
Most businesses around here *make* money on groupon deals.
There are -some- business models where groupon makes money. There are several more where it makes sense to run a groupon for advertising at certain pricepoints / limits.
But to claim "most businesses around here make money on groupon deals" is a flat out lie, and is precisely the sort of CRAP groupon tells businesses while inducing them to make catastrophic decisions.
Youre acting like I have an interest in not knowing these things.
If you were interested, you could have done your own trivial amount of research.
Why couldnt someone have come out 10 posts ago and just linked to an article like that or simply said "Ishaqi incident"?
Because usually when someone on slashdot makes a big deal about there not being any credible specific information about things which are TRIVIAL to find out for oneself it means that someone has no interest in actually knowing the truth.
I mean, i googled wikileaks atrocities, and the execution mentioned above was the first fucking result. If you are really so interested in the truth... perhaps try looking for it.
Merchants simply fail to actually do so.
Not quite. The merchants that elect to set reasonable caps don't get their promo run. So you don't see them.
Groupon runs the deals that make them the most money.
If a cupcake business wants to run 200 coupons @ 75% off for $7where groupon takes half ($4.50) that's only $900 for groupon.
Groupon simply won't run that deal.
Groupon pushes hard for deals they damn well know don't make an ounce of sense for the business.
When I hire a contractor, or a consultant, or an ad agency... their job is fundamentally to come up with a good solution for the the business.
If a particular contractor consistently advises, even pushes businesses hard to make catastrophic decisions then they deserve some of the credit for those catastrophic decisions.
Then don't put stuff that would require such measures on your phone. Why would you do so anyway?
My phone accesses many of the same resources my desktop does. Virtually all the online services I use, VPNs, and wireless access points I use,... hell I even remote to my own desktop from my phone.
To be honest, other than a BIOS boot password on my desktop PC, I'm hard pressed to think of a password I'd never have to enter on my phone...
The only disadvantage is that such a long passphrase is quite annoying
Or you have to enter it in on a phone. And i don't want to ever have to do that on a phone.
The problem should be illegal surveillance, not the cameras. The difference between a plainclothes police officer standing at a corner and a surveillance camera is how effective the watcher can be. If it's legal for the officer to watch a street no one should complain about a camera doing the same. A camera increases the effectiveness, but the same is true of binoculars or hand held cameras.
Yes and no. Mostly no.
Saying, "Its the same thing, the camera is just more effective" is a red herring.
The public's tolerance for various activities is implicitly at various levels of effectiveness.
I tolerate the police wandering about, doing their job, and if they happen to see me going about my business, I'm perfectly fine with that.
A network of cameras at every intersection recording every movement I and everyone else makes is a FUNDAMENTALLY thing.
It is so much more effective that its an entirely new thing.
Maybe, I haven't extensively tested it.
How did you test it?
Try, say, 5 pages of prose. And then time it. I also find reading uppercase that long fairly exhausting compared to proper cased text.
You told me to re-read the thread... so here i am, and this even more wrong, imo.
But agreements still carry weight, and if you violate an agreement and that means you have to consider yourself banned and then you access the website afterward, whether you've been not to or not, then you fall under the law regarding unlawful acess of a computer.
If I break an agreement, i should "consider my self banned"?
My local pool has a set of rules for using the facility. No running, no diving, no children unattended, no bubblebath or oils in the hottub...
So if I run for any reason, should I "consider myself banned", and by remaining at the facility I should be charged with criminal trespassing even though nobody asked me to leave? Seriously?
I don't think it should in all cases, but if you're doing it to harass someone, then it's an aggravating circumstance in the harassment.
Harrassment is a crime. Let them be charged with harassment. That ought to be enough.
So it's not automatic that if the courts apply the law this way to a case where someone harassed someone else into suicide it means that you can be jailed just for logging into a machine after violating some minor clause in the agreement.
Why? If I rob a bank and use my car as a getaway vehicle. They can come after me for robbing the bank. But it would be idiotic to have a law on the books that made letting the parking meter run out on your car a CRIME, just so that if someone ever robs a bank down the road, and then parks there car at an expired meter... that they can be arrested and tossed in jail for that.
And then rely on the courts and prosecutors to only enforce the whole "toss them in jail" part of the law only when the perpetrator is a bank robber.
That's absurd.
Incidentally, your scrambled words example is a great way to show that word shape is very important, more important than just "the first and last letters".
Oh I agree shape is very important, and yes, that text was careful to preserve shape.
But its clearly more than -just- shape, because if you preserve the shape but start replacing those inner letters with other similiarly shapped letters it breaks down.
Shape is just a filter used to narrow it down to candidate words. Inner letters flters it down further. Order of inner letters pins it down... but it turns out shape and inner letters filters it down good enough that we don't actually rely on order of inner letters provided shape is right, and the inner letters are present.
It's pretty clear it should be some sort of a crime
No. Not its not clear that this should be the case at all.
Fact is, a website is someone else's property, and violating someone else's rules on their property is, at the least, a violation of an agreement.
So what? Its a violation of an agreement. They can try and sue you for damages if they feel they've been harmed enough to be worth it.
But to make it a crime is absurd. Think about what it means for something to be a crime. The police are involved... you are arrested, you get a criminal record... because your a criminal if you commited a crime.
If I order a thousand widgets from your company, and we sign a contract that you'll deliver them May 1st. If your late... you've just violated our signed contract... that's way more forceful than a ToS fine-print on a website... and that's not a crime. Can you imagine a world where it was. You miss that May 1st deadline... and the police show up to arrest you for committing a crime
Next time your late on a cell phone bill payment... your arrested. You agreed to pay them $X by y date, even signed a contract.
Next time your late bringing in a library book; well you've already got a criminal record for the cell phone crime... I guess you get hauled of to PMIA prison, you repeat offender.
Violating a contract shouldn't be a crime. Violating a ToS even less so.
It's already been well established that at least many people read this way.
Its common knowledge that most people can read normal (lower) case text faster than upper case text. And it has long been surmised that its due to the much better word shape diversity of lower case.
Its also common knowledge that most people can read jumbled up words with very little difficulty, as long as the first and last letters are correct, and the rest of the letters are in there in a random order.
Such as:
"I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae."
Given the number of people who can read the above almost effortlessly, anyone clinging to the theory that fast readers are "sounding words out" needs to be clubbed over the head with a baseball bat.
It also rebuts the premise of the article that we read by word shape. Its clearly a bit more complicated than that.
I expect we simultaneously look at word shape, the leading and closing letters, the length, and the middle letters along with some "predictive" matching based on context cues so we can narrow down likely candidate words that "fit" the sentence.
Oh you are going to cry but I don't want pay $60+ for 1.5Mbit/384Kbps, Comcast and AT&T will sell me 20Mbps/15Mbps for that. Well yes they will but along with their caps, throttling, and other BS.
If your complaining that the car you bought has a speed limiter that won't let it go over 300kph; you don't solve the problem by buying a car that costs the same with a top speed of 150kph... but hey, at least there is no speed limiter.
1.5Mbit/384kbps at the same price is actually worse than throttling and caps. You move slower than you would throttled ALL the time, and you can't pull enough data to hit the old caps now anyway.
Or to put this another way, the NPRP was the last line of defense against a bad review.
Not having a new product to review in the first place is far worse.
but 'patent parasite' implies that they are leaching off others.
You mean Apple invented anything to do with cell phones?
I mean sure they did a bunch of neat stuff with the ipod touch as a user interface, and sticking a phone into it was a good move too...but lets take a look at that phone that they stuck into it?
That's quite a bit of sophisticated radio technology in there. We're not talking "swipe to unlock" or "rounded rectangle" ... crap. We're talking the nuts and bolts of maintaining a high speed data connection while moving from cell to cell communicating with multiple cells at once, in a noisy RF environment stuff... real patents. Modern cellular networks are a pretty sophisticated animal.
Care to even try to quantify how many patents they are using?
Apple thinks it should get to use all that for nothing AND keep its rounded rectangle idea for itself too.
That's parasitic.
You cut down to the entire companies managmants wages to lowest engineering wage, and no bonuses. That includes the stockholdes, CEOs and other "high positions".
Or maybe if they cut the engineering wages to that of the lowest janitors wage and no bonuses. What do you think that would accomplish?
A big fat surplus of cash? Of course not. All the engineers would find new jobs and quit.
What makes you think management would be any different?
I agree executive compensation is way out of whack, but you can't just cut their wages to below market norms or they'll just go find new jobs like anyone else.
These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press."
Better to cut marketing and the "vital" line of communication to the press, than to cut product development and not have a new product next quarter... because then having lines of communication to the press won't seem so vitally important anymore.
Still it sucks for anyone to lose their jobs.
Are you sure?
So if it says "GPLv2 or later", you are welcome to fork it and release a "GPLv3 or later" version? What about a "GPLv3 only" version?
I thought it was always GPLv2 or later, so yes, you could use it with GPLv3 stuff just fine... but you couldn't ever take away the GPLv2 at will.
It was stuck on "GPLv2 or later".
Am I mistaken?
When Mentor Graphics bought Code Sourcery, they continued developing the closed-course one and discontinued, then deleted, the GPL variant. It's unclear to me if that's kosher, as the closed variant must contain code that had been GPLed at one point.
Whether its kosher or not depends entirely on copyright. If they accepted patches from the community, incorporated them, and the community did not assign them the copyright, then no they can't change the license without removing any code they don't have copyright to.
However, if they have copyright on the code, and copyright of any submitted patches was assigned to them (which is pretty normal); even the FSF has you assign them copyright. (Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to chagne the license from GPLv2 to GPLv3 without contacting each person who submitted a patch and getting permission...)
Now, if a company that owns the copyright decides to discontinue a GPL'd product or close source it or whatever, that is entirely within their right.
However, that doesn't revoke the license on the GPL'd version, so anyone that has a copy of the GPL'd version is still free to make copies, redistribute it, and fork a new project from it if there is any interest in doing so.
The status of the code in the closed source fork is not inviolation. The owners of that fork own the copyright on that code.
The status of the code in the open source fork, should someone make one is also fine. It was licensed under the GPL. The only real restriction on it, is the new open source fork doesn't have copyright so they can't change the license -- ie its stuck on gpl version X. The new fork can't close source it or change the gpl version.
That's just the start.
I mean, consider that you aren't allowed to board a plane with dangerous objects like nail clippers or a can of sprite.
Do you really think they'd allow you to connect a personal computer that they didn't completely control to any network in their jurisdiction?
Good God man, you can't just attach your laptop to the internet... you could be the pawn of a chinese hacker group and that laptop could be full of attack tools. Better not chance it. You aren't allowed on the network.
Star Wars, 1977
It was referred to as a "tractor beam", yet it was not visible light.
Now, I'm not sure what the point of naming "Star Wars" in anything that is even slightly related to science though.
Personally, I'd rather we far overstated China's abilities and designed our systems to counter such a threat.
So, like terrorism, then?
Do you really want the TSA administering network security as well?