Over 25 years of observation of a large sample group has shown me that depressed people take more anti-depression medication than people who are not depressed. Plainly we can solve the problem of depression by banning prozac.
I like the fact that the tag is the most incisive comment possible about this article.
It's important for the music industry to keep people thinking, even unconsciously, that these bits and bytes need to be attached to physical media. When the nebulous nature of intellectual property is emphasised then it's more difficult to associate conventional property rights to them.
That's not what 'begging the question' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_begging means. I think you mean 'raises the question'. I wouldn't mention it normally, but this is Slashdot and if I can't talk about logical fallacies here, where can I?
1. Does it protect and encourage artists/authors/creators?
No, they're still on the breadline. Only the most wildly successful have any money. Everyone else is doing it for the love of it.
Sometimes the people who created the thing have sold all their rights, and someone else entirely can reap the rewards (for instance, Michael Jackson getting a royalty any time a Beatles song is played).
2. Does it help recognise authorship?
Kind of. That's not really its focus, but it does establish clear lines of authorship as a kind of by product of guarding its licenses so closely.
3. It protects the artist's work from being used in a way they would disapprove of.
HELL no. Quite the reverse. The copyright system itself, which places so much power in the hands of the people who issue the licenses (the record companies/publishing companies) tends to allow the works to be used in any way the highest bidder wants. So we have a situation where authors have movies made of books they have written which they get no additional money for (probably they sold the rights when the book wasn't so popular) and which they hate. Which most of us end up hating.
Now, what about the harms it does:
a) Makes what is, essentially, a very cheap product (a 25c cd or $1 DVD), painfully overpriced.
b) It creates large barriers to entry by ensuring that only record company approved/publisher approved products can have any success.
c) It creates massive profits for people who play next to no part in the creative process.
Its dumb and I hate it.
I don't think piracy is right, but I do think that it's inevitable. When you're charging so much for a pathetic commodity (a very limited license to own and use one copy of something that costs next to nothing to produce) it's bound to happen. Creators should get rewarded for their work. Quality should be encouraged. Copyright needs to be rethought.
I initially wrote a long and detailed response to this guy's "arguments". It caused me physical pain to delete it all, but it occurs to that the simplest response is the best:
Occam's razor.
Now, I know this latter isn't a perfect refutation, and he only claims that his arguments make the postulate plausible, not certain, but I think it goes a long way. Plus, why would we expect a VR world to bear any similarities to computing within the VR world itself? Why would we expect physical laws to bear any similarities to the outside world at all?
Finally, to address his arguments that the world we live in is likely to be a virtual one. He claims that mathematics and computing bear a similarity to our physical world. He says that this gives weight to the idea that our physical world is a virtual one. However, another explanation for the same data might be that our computing and mathematics is similar to the physical world... because it derives from the physical world and still shares some features. Saying that aspects of the physical world are similar to aspects of a virtual world does not imply that the physical world is also a virtual world. That's like saying that I look a lot like my dad, so it is likely that I am his father.
If he's going to flirt with philosophy he should go out and read some of it before leaping into the middle of a long standing debate. He cites Plato from a quantum physics book, for Pete's sake! And Berkeley deserves a dismissive sentence. Sheesh.
My wife told me that her Windows PC hadn't updated for daylight savings time. With great smugness and confidence I told her that my Linux box would have done it because it was community based software and was therefore superior in every way. I sure felt like a dork when my linux box still had the wrong time on it. And she pinched and punched me for the first of the month again. Damn Debian politics. Red tape is there to be cut through.
You know, I liked 1 - 3 and I read a few more but then completely lost count of which one I was up to. Since most of them are substantially the same, I never bothered to try to work out exactly how many I had read.
We had the ad screening here for quite a while in NZ. It's a two year old driving a car, for pete's sake. How can they be worried about copycat crimes? Two year old's still think throwing poo is fun... which it is... but that's beside the point.
So the arguments are: imperial is easier to use (which anyone born in a metric country knows is just a matter of what you're used to) and imperial is our American heritage and no goddamn-pinko-lefty-hippy-mathematician will take it from me unless they pry it from my cold dead hands!
Lets just think about this for a second... imperial measurements... empire... England.... This isn't pride in independence, it's pride in being stubborn.
I'm not a creationist, but there's a few problems with what you're saying here.
For example, if Adam & Eve were the only parents why are people so different? This isn't an example of evolution, it's an example of genetic recombination. Which can be a part of evolution, but if you were a strict creationist you might separate the two.
Also, we may not have the ability to actually observe Macro Evolution, but Micro Evolution has been evident for some time now. We have documented proof that Americans have gotten taller for instance. Americans getting taller very much unlikely to be caused by evolutionary forces. What is the advantage? Is it really genetic, or is it caused by another factor, like diet? Lots of Asian people are short, but Asians who have been living on an American diet all their lives are average height. This does not sound like evolution, not even micro-evolution.
So when you have small changes over a small period of time, is believing that over a large period of time you could have large changes really that unreasonable? Well, no, but you're forgetting that the creationists think that the world is only about 6000 years old, which isn't really enough time for lumbering old evolution to swing into serious action.
All the rest of what you're saying isn't really reasons to believe evolution so much as reasons not to believe bible stories. Which is a different issue. Plus, lots of people take these stories as myths or as parables and not as the literal truth (I mean, if you think that evolution explains how we get from a boat with two of every animal to repopulating the world with an enormous diversity of species, then you're kidding yourself).
Thank you so much, I loved listening to this. It made me smile and bang my head on the table. You have the patience of Job and a gift for explaining math clearly and simply. You should consider becoming a math teacher so you can do this all the time!
It's even worse here in Aotearoa. Here they sell ipods very successfully (all the kids have 'em), and we can use iTunes; but we don't have access to the iTunes music store! Of course this means that all the kids must be converting their legal cds into legal MP3s, otherwise who could use them?
I spent some time as a university tutor and one of my roles was marking essays. When I started as a tutor, people were becoming increasingly net-savvy, and by the time I finished up, there was barely a single essay that wasn't making heavy use of the internet.
In my experience, and I am aware that I am certain to have missed some cheaters, plagiarism, even plagiarism from the net, is painfully easy to spot. Usually a sentence or paragraph doesn't sound like the rest of the essay. Then you do the technical bit: you take a few suspect words and type them into google. If they've plagiarised of the net, you know about it in seconds. It's pitifully simple and really effective.
Wikipedia is the biggest source for plagiarism, and it really puzzles me because, knowing this, I always made sure to read the articles before even beginning to mark.
So, basically, it's not all doom and gloom. Plagiarism is still easy to spot. There are bound to be some that slip through by using careful and sensible paraphrasing; but if they work hard enough to do that, then they probably deserve to get through!
Re:Ignoring all the stupid crap
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
I don't think it's very mature calling everyone who posts something anti-Irwin 'stupid crap' and I'm a little surprised the moderation has you pegged as 'insightful'.
I also think he was a pretty amazing person. He had an incredible way about him. I didn't dislike his 'kookyness' or 'in your face attitude', but I do think that baiting animals for people's amusement is a bit of a sick way of making a living and that he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a humanitarian. Regardless, it's still a very sad event.
It's pretty obvious Dr Hawking isn't interested in the answer, or at least not the answers bandied about by people on the forums.
First off, it's a loaded question. It implies that something needs to be done for us to survive the next 100 years. In answering the question we are buying into his assumption. Now, I don't know whether it is a valid assumption, but I think we should be conscious of what we buy into in answering the question.
Secondly, he already has an answer in mind - he thinks that for the human race to survive we need to colonise the solar system. So in essence, this isn't an attempt to generate meaningful answers, it's a way for him to persuade us there is a problem that needs addressing.
A quick search http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/edc/ tells me that in America the two big players are coal, at around 50% and nuclear at 20%. Oil sits at 4%, a large chunk in my opinion; especially when you consider that some of the ones you cite generate much less, with solar, wind and geothermal (which is one of the biggest players in NZ) contributing less than 5% combined. The reason I singled out oil was the irony value.
I guess my main point is that electricity generation is still not terribly ecologically friendly. A 'low emissions' vehicle that requires you to convert chemical energy in the form of coal into heat, into movement, into electricity, into stored chemical energy in a battery, back to electricity and then into kinetic energy can't really be helping the environment all that much.
Of course adding together two pieces of software and two software teams does not automatically create a superior product - despite what Darth Gates and Micro$oft would have you believe.
I thought I would pitch in from sunny New Zealand... which, for all you Americans out there, is NOT a part of Australia. Unfortunately, we lag behind even Australia when it comes to our internet. Oh mighty gods of the internet, why has Al Gore forsaken us?
I agree that the reason Linux hasn't been taken up as here much as overseas is quite likely due to poor internet. Our telephone company is a monopoly. We have broadband speeds here that are almost at dialup speed, most of the plans run at 30kbps. They are also very expensive compared to other countries (e.g. NZ$39.95 for the entry level plan from TeleCrim). Most of the country is on dialup. This means linux downloads are strictly for fanatics who are willing to leave their computers running a download for hours, or even days for those on dialup.
There is a strong Linux community here that and many devoted open source fanatics.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the fact that the tag is the most incisive comment possible about this article.
It's important for the music industry to keep people thinking, even unconsciously, that these bits and bytes need to be attached to physical media. When the nebulous nature of intellectual property is emphasised then it's more difficult to associate conventional property rights to them.
That's not what 'begging the question' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_begging means. I think you mean 'raises the question'. I wouldn't mention it normally, but this is Slashdot and if I can't talk about logical fallacies here, where can I?
1. Does it protect and encourage artists/authors/creators?
No, they're still on the breadline. Only the most wildly successful have any money. Everyone else is doing it for the love of it.
Sometimes the people who created the thing have sold all their rights, and someone else entirely can reap the rewards (for instance, Michael Jackson getting a royalty any time a Beatles song is played).
2. Does it help recognise authorship?
Kind of. That's not really its focus, but it does establish clear lines of authorship as a kind of by product of guarding its licenses so closely.
3. It protects the artist's work from being used in a way they would disapprove of.
HELL no. Quite the reverse. The copyright system itself, which places so much power in the hands of the people who issue the licenses (the record companies/publishing companies) tends to allow the works to be used in any way the highest bidder wants. So we have a situation where authors have movies made of books they have written which they get no additional money for (probably they sold the rights when the book wasn't so popular) and which they hate. Which most of us end up hating.
Now, what about the harms it does:
a) Makes what is, essentially, a very cheap product (a 25c cd or $1 DVD), painfully overpriced.
b) It creates large barriers to entry by ensuring that only record company approved/publisher approved products can have any success.
c) It creates massive profits for people who play next to no part in the creative process.
Its dumb and I hate it.
I don't think piracy is right, but I do think that it's inevitable. When you're charging so much for a pathetic commodity (a very limited license to own and use one copy of something that costs next to nothing to produce) it's bound to happen. Creators should get rewarded for their work. Quality should be encouraged. Copyright needs to be rethought.
Occam's razor.
Now, I know this latter isn't a perfect refutation, and he only claims that his arguments make the postulate plausible, not certain, but I think it goes a long way. Plus, why would we expect a VR world to bear any similarities to computing within the VR world itself? Why would we expect physical laws to bear any similarities to the outside world at all?
Finally, to address his arguments that the world we live in is likely to be a virtual one. He claims that mathematics and computing bear a similarity to our physical world. He says that this gives weight to the idea that our physical world is a virtual one. However, another explanation for the same data might be that our computing and mathematics is similar to the physical world... because it derives from the physical world and still shares some features. Saying that aspects of the physical world are similar to aspects of a virtual world does not imply that the physical world is also a virtual world. That's like saying that I look a lot like my dad, so it is likely that I am his father.
If he's going to flirt with philosophy he should go out and read some of it before leaping into the middle of a long standing debate. He cites Plato from a quantum physics book, for Pete's sake! And Berkeley deserves a dismissive sentence. Sheesh.
Once.
My wife told me that her Windows PC hadn't updated for daylight savings time. With great smugness and confidence I told her that my Linux box would have done it because it was community based software and was therefore superior in every way. I sure felt like a dork when my linux box still had the wrong time on it. And she pinched and punched me for the first of the month again. Damn Debian politics. Red tape is there to be cut through.
You know, I liked 1 - 3 and I read a few more but then completely lost count of which one I was up to. Since most of them are substantially the same, I never bothered to try to work out exactly how many I had read.
You probably/almost certainly already know, but you can set it to save as a regular .doc file as default.
We had the ad screening here for quite a while in NZ. It's a two year old driving a car, for pete's sake. How can they be worried about copycat crimes? Two year old's still think throwing poo is fun... which it is... but that's beside the point.
So the arguments are: imperial is easier to use (which anyone born in a metric country knows is just a matter of what you're used to) and imperial is our American heritage and no goddamn-pinko-lefty-hippy-mathematician will take it from me unless they pry it from my cold dead hands! Lets just think about this for a second... imperial measurements... empire... England.... This isn't pride in independence, it's pride in being stubborn.
Thank you so much, I loved listening to this. It made me smile and bang my head on the table. You have the patience of Job and a gift for explaining math clearly and simply. You should consider becoming a math teacher so you can do this all the time!
Yeah, but it's not just cost that is the prime factor. Vegetable oil is a renewable resource. Petrol/diesel is not.
It's even worse here in Aotearoa. Here they sell ipods very successfully (all the kids have 'em), and we can use iTunes; but we don't have access to the iTunes music store! Of course this means that all the kids must be converting their legal cds into legal MP3s, otherwise who could use them?
I spent some time as a university tutor and one of my roles was marking essays. When I started as a tutor, people were becoming increasingly net-savvy, and by the time I finished up, there was barely a single essay that wasn't making heavy use of the internet.
In my experience, and I am aware that I am certain to have missed some cheaters, plagiarism, even plagiarism from the net, is painfully easy to spot. Usually a sentence or paragraph doesn't sound like the rest of the essay. Then you do the technical bit: you take a few suspect words and type them into google. If they've plagiarised of the net, you know about it in seconds. It's pitifully simple and really effective.
Wikipedia is the biggest source for plagiarism, and it really puzzles me because, knowing this, I always made sure to read the articles before even beginning to mark.
So, basically, it's not all doom and gloom. Plagiarism is still easy to spot. There are bound to be some that slip through by using careful and sensible paraphrasing; but if they work hard enough to do that, then they probably deserve to get through!
I don't think it's very mature calling everyone who posts something anti-Irwin 'stupid crap' and I'm a little surprised the moderation has you pegged as 'insightful'. I also think he was a pretty amazing person. He had an incredible way about him. I didn't dislike his 'kookyness' or 'in your face attitude', but I do think that baiting animals for people's amusement is a bit of a sick way of making a living and that he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a humanitarian. Regardless, it's still a very sad event.
It's pretty obvious Dr Hawking isn't interested in the answer, or at least not the answers bandied about by people on the forums.
First off, it's a loaded question. It implies that something needs to be done for us to survive the next 100 years. In answering the question we are buying into his assumption. Now, I don't know whether it is a valid assumption, but I think we should be conscious of what we buy into in answering the question.
Secondly, he already has an answer in mind - he thinks that for the human race to survive we need to colonise the solar system. So in essence, this isn't an attempt to generate meaningful answers, it's a way for him to persuade us there is a problem that needs addressing.
A quick search http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/edc/ tells me that in America the two big players are coal, at around 50% and nuclear at 20%. Oil sits at 4%, a large chunk in my opinion; especially when you consider that some of the ones you cite generate much less, with solar, wind and geothermal (which is one of the biggest players in NZ) contributing less than 5% combined. The reason I singled out oil was the irony value.
I guess my main point is that electricity generation is still not terribly ecologically friendly. A 'low emissions' vehicle that requires you to convert chemical energy in the form of coal into heat, into movement, into electricity, into stored chemical energy in a battery, back to electricity and then into kinetic energy can't really be helping the environment all that much.
Not to mention that a large chunk of power generation comes from burning oil.
I do, much to my wife's charign. Ah, well.
Of course adding together two pieces of software and two software teams does not automatically create a superior product - despite what Darth Gates and Micro$oft would have you believe.
I thought I would pitch in from sunny New Zealand... which, for all you Americans out there, is NOT a part of Australia. Unfortunately, we lag behind even Australia when it comes to our internet. Oh mighty gods of the internet, why has Al Gore forsaken us?
I agree that the reason Linux hasn't been taken up as here much as overseas is quite likely due to poor internet. Our telephone company is a monopoly. We have broadband speeds here that are almost at dialup speed, most of the plans run at 30kbps. They are also very expensive compared to other countries (e.g. NZ$39.95 for the entry level plan from TeleCrim). Most of the country is on dialup. This means linux downloads are strictly for fanatics who are willing to leave their computers running a download for hours, or even days for those on dialup.
There is a strong Linux community here that and many devoted open source fanatics.