The notion that peace would be achieved if Israel just gave up the West Bank and Gaza is absurd. Too many Islamofascists need Israel as an object of hate to keep the average Akbar (or whatever "average Joe" translates to in Arabic) in a constant state of repression. Without Israel, the Islamofascist leaders would have to explain why they haven't done anything since the end of European colonialism to improve their countries.
If you need to be naive, why not at least be naive in the hope that, if it weren't for their awful leaders, the majority of Arab citizens would gladly coexist peacefully with Israel if only they had jobs and hope for a better life. Yes, that does sound naive, I know. But your world ain't never gonna happen, mrron.
This seems like a perfect item for Jon Stewart to cover. I can't figure out how to send info like this to Comedy Central, though, since the web site sucks and I'm too lazy to pursue beyond that. Anyone know if they are open to submissions?
Of course, the big downsides of democracy (uniformed voters, mostly) obviously wouldn't exist in a company, where (presumably) every employee is intelligent, educated about the company, and has a personal and very material stake in the company.
Doesn't sound like most of the companies I've worked for, although I was lucky enough to have a few smaller ones like that.
The vast majority of posts seem to accept the premise that the application of open source to other (non-software?) businesses means a non-hierarchical, cooperative type of organization. Open source projects still have some command and control, although anyone (by definition) is free to "fork". And, before anyone flames me, I'm not saying open source projects are organized in the same fashion as large corporate bureaucracies.
But the non-software analogy of an open-source business or project would be one where the product or service had no patent protection and no proprietary intellectual capital. Think of open-source soda as being a business where the secret formula isn't secret, so people are free to experiment with different recipes until they find one that lots of people seem to like better.
Are generic drugs the right analogy? I guess not quite, because even generic drug makers probably have some trade secrets. It's hard to know what business doesn't have any trade secrets, but I suppose some highly competitive commodity businesses might come close. What are the trade secrets of Merry Maids, for example? Credit card lending is somewhat close to an open-source business, because all lenders have access to the same credit bureau databases. They have "proprietary" scores that they develop in addition to the ones the bureaus give, but I think those are pretty useless, because predicting credit behavior is pretty well-understood at the mass-market level.
My point in mentioning these various businesses is simply that none of them implies a non-hierarchical approach, and neither does, say, Red Hat.
I think the analogy breaks down in most of the above examples (except Merry Maids) when it comes to means of production. Open source soda, for example, would require that anyone with a new recipe could direct the next production batch at the bottler. Seems pretty unworkable in any form of organization.
I obviously don't have the analogy worked out very far, but I still think the original analogy is on the wrong track.
Gosh, I wasn't anywhere close to suggesting a solution, but that's a pretty important idea.
low-volume personal infringement should be handled akin to a traffic ticket
Do you mean copyright cops? Historically, copyright enforcement has been private litigation. In theory, I like the idea of fixed penalties, though. If you set a fine at x times an average of retail prices, wouldn't that also be an effective amount for wholesale pirates? After all, it would far exceed their revenue. It would have to be a high enough multiplier to offset their probability of being caught. At that point, the amount of the fine would seem to be sufficient economic incentive for a rational actor. But I still don't know how you would set up something like the CHP (Copyright Highway Patrol) to issue the tickets. If you allow private parties to continue to enforce, you'll probably get more litigation than it's worth. However, if we forced low-volume cases into small claims court, maybe with the right rules of evidence, damages, etc., we could get rational incentives to work.
I'd be on the side of the 'AAs, if they weren't completely nuts in their practical application of copyright enforcement
Well, the EFF points out that even their notion of copyright itself is a little nuts, so I don't think it's just a matter of over-zealous enforcement. DRM seems to prevent fair use copying so that owners of a song, say, can have copies to play on different players (car, ipod, etc.). Not only is such copying not a violation of copyright, it is a violation of the rights of the person who bought a copy of the song.
I know that class action suits get abused (McDonald's coffee verdict, e.g.), but this seems like one of those cases where the theory actually fits the need. All people who have bought CDs or DVDs with DRM, as well as all people who have bought players that prevent copying because of DRM flags, could be defined as class members whose rights have been violated. The potential damages are enormous. Of course, the lawyers would have to be paid cash, but the plaintiff class could settle for new standards that allow copying for fair use. Plaintiffs never get much more than a few dollars each of nominal value in class action lawsuits, anyway. In this case, huge attorneys fees might be an acceptable price to pay for better standards.
artists have allowed that control to be used destructively and counterproductively, and have created resentment
I don't resent the artists. I'm not sure how much they have "allowed", since individual artists generally don't have the power to affect decisions by the big labels. When they have that much power, they usually start their own labels. I haven't paid any attention to whether any smaller or independent labels are behaving differently from the big players.
I'm sure I'm off on lots of things and don't disagree with your comment, but what I meant to add as a consideration in my first point was that lots of cases get settled before any suit is filed, so I still think the 18,000 is low. It wouldn't surprise me if the number of settlements exceeded that by an order of magnitude, since so much else in the legal system gets settled before a suit is actually filed. Of course, it may just be RIAA's strategery to file suit and ask questions later (seems like their style). So this isn't even much of a guess, yet.
Also, I have to say I'm embarrassed by the 5 karma points on my comment in relation to the 3 on the parent to my comment. I didn't mean to steal anyone's karma -- and that seems like such a bad karma thing to do, no? The parent to my comment was the greater insight; after all, I wouldn't have thought of my comment without it.
Well, now we've got non-lawyers arguing the law. Cool!
I have read of cases being accepted for appeal solely because of conflicting rulings in different jurisdictions, so I'm virtually certain your first sentence is incorrect.
However, as one non-lawyer to another, I'll respect your right to be as probabilistically incorrect as I am... in any case, this one will probably reach the Supremes eventually, making my point moot.
In general, I'm sympathetic to the EFF position on copyright issues. But, I think a lot of people are skeptical, mostly because they hear opinions like yours and confuse them with responsible ones.
Well, I'm not competent to judge whether or not the original sentence violates any strict rules of grammar, since I've been out of school for over twenty years. (The corporate world actually punished me several times for correct grammar; true story!)
However, it does seem clear that the original sentence does in fact allow for either your interpretation or the original critic's interpretation. It has nothing to do with verb choice and everything to do with placement.
Too bad the notion of Civil Disobediance is so unknown to Americans.
Too bad, indeed! You show a remarkable ignorance of it yourself.
The essential notion of civil disobedience is to disobey unjust laws openly and with the intention of submitting to the legal punishment, in order to show the unjustness of the law(s).
When Thoreau was imprisoned (I think for refusing to pay a sort of poll tax) he was visited in prision by Emerson, who asked "Why are you here?". Thoreau asked Emerson, "Why are you not?".
Regardless of the merits of the case being discussed here (and I have already stated my sympathies, above), it's very clear this has nothing to do with civil disobedience. Thoreau, Gandhi, MLK... all insisted on going to jail. Civil disobedience wasn't something they invoked in their defence, it was something they proclaimed not only as their right but as their duty. The whole point was to suffer the punishment to show the injustice. Otherwise, instead of staging sit-ins, MLK would simply have published articles and given speeches.
Well, IANAL, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night...
I believe that courts in one jurisdiction are not bound by the opinions of courts in another jurisdiction, only by the opinions of appellate courts above them (and not appellate courts of other jurisdiction, i.e., other circuit courts). So, unless this is appealed to a high enough level, it won't have any legal authority regarding other suits. But, assuming RIAA acts in its own self-interest, it might pay attention to an adverse ruling. What it probably means is that RIAA will change its tactics but not drop the matter altogether. Still might be a good thing...
no matter what side of the debate you are on, you must agree
Well, I happen to agree that this was harassment -- IANAL, so I don't mean to imply a legal definition.
But, that doesn't mean I have to agree. I can imagine a reasonable conversation with someone who doesn't think this is harassment, and I can certainly imagine myself thinking that an organization has a right to sue to defend property rights. That doesn't mean I agree with RIAA, just that I believe in property rights and the need to defend them.
Even if it's just a guess, it lays out the analysis.
Additional considerations:
18,000 is just the number of lawsuits filed. How many "settled" by paying some kind of greenmail before a lawsuit was filed?
From TFA, the range of settlements was $3,000 to $11,000. The average is probably closer to the low end, but might be a few thousand dollars more, which would bump the revenue by 30% ++
Most likely, there are several attorneys on staff but also law firms in every state that do the actual filings, appearances, etc.
In-house attorneys probably don't make $250K even fully loaded (benefits, overhead, etc.), but this is offset by the previous point.
It may be just a guess, but who thinks RIAA didn't do a cost-benefit analysis of their strategy before they started down this road? Of course, part of that analysis would have been the revenue they think they're losing (including future revenue) by not contesting file sharing. No idea on that number...
I believe the attorney fees would have to be paid by RIAA, not by "the state", if the petition for attorney fees succeeds. I responded here because I agree that frankie's was the first post to clarify part of the discussion. But this seems like another important point missed in the preceeding discussion.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm also not British, but perhaps someone from across the Pond can confirm my vague understanding that English courts have a "loser pays" rule in civil litigation. It's a policy designed to discourage frivolous lawsuits, and it somewhat counteracts the incentives of contingency fees (but that's another thread for another day, since contingency fees had no relevance in TFA and were introduced in the fuzzy discussion above).
See? This is the value of having others call me out on my biases!
I realize now that I have, for too long, bought into the culture of the "earthists" and "roomists". If anyone knows of any good de-programming seminars or books on sensitivity (to other planets, galaxies and living arrangements), that might help me become the caring, other-galaxy-nurturing being* that I know I can be*.
* Am I being too existence-centric? If so, I apologize to any non-entities who might be offended by my language. After all, they're people, too, right?
Neither "terrorist" nor "freedom fighter" is a neutral term
That's my point (I think?); on some things, we just don't have neutral terms. (On the wetness of water, I think we do, which is why I quibbled with the definition of bias.) And, yes, I mixed metaphors by using "freedom fighter", since that was so 1980s... and wasn't that a million "conflicts" ago? I was just trying to illustrate the difficulty of neutral terminology with issues that are sufficiently volatile.
So, we might be in violent agreement here... careful!
Obviously, FauxNews and others thought "suicide bomber" was objectionable because it sounded too sympathetic. That seems ironic to me, given the bias Faux would have about suicide being immoral, etc. It seems pretty neutral to me, as well, but that doesn't mean I feel neutrally about them. So, I would use a term like "asshole suicide bomber", I guess, to convey both my opinion and as accurate a description as possible. I'm less subtle than Faux, one of the benefits of not being corporate.
I tend to agree (90%+?) with your reaction to the parent comment, but I think you go too far in defining bias. "Water is wet" is not biased. But it's about something trivial enough that no sane person would disagree, unless it's a class on epistemological deconstruction or some bullshit like that.
However, when something becomes important enough, we have to choose between terms like "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" to describe the same people, depending on our biases. I agree that good journalism, or good discussion in general, needs to recognize bias and identify it wherever possible. For example, in discussing the current conflict (is that a biased word?) in Lebanon and Israel, it seems unbiased to report something like "Hezbollah launched 160 missiles aimed at Israel yesterday" or "the Israeli army attacked several Hezbollah bases in villages in southern Lebanon yesterday". It does get difficult after that (like "bases in villages", for example). For myself, I try to delineate where my personal biases lie, and I find that I can have reasonable discussions with others who do the same, regardless of whether or not I agree with them. BTW, identifying all those biases is difficult, and I value discussions with others of opposing viewpoints for calling me out on them from time to time.
That said, I guess I wouldn't bother to have a discussion with Reuters about... anything? OK, maybe that's too strong, but this definitely hurts its credibility in general, and not just on this narrow "conflict".
So far, all the answers to all the questions seem to be making the same implicit assumptions:
Hubble's Constant is constant
The current size of the universe is known
I'm sure there are many equally important assumptions, but these two seem to form the basis for using the inverse of H-nought (dang, I'm British, now!) to calculate the age of the universe.
If Hubble's Constant is actually Carpe Web's Variable (dang, I'm important, now!), then we'd have to know all the values of CW-i (index of Carpe Web's Variable over time, formerly thought to be Hubble's Constant) and then take one mother of an integral to calculate the age of the universe. Well, if we were smart enough to know all the values of CW-i over 6,000 years -- oops, I mean 15.8 billion years -- then maybe the integral wouldn't be too difficult.
But, we'd still need to know the current size of the universe to calculate the age. What if there's a little bit more beyond what we can currently "see"? What if there's some schmutz on the lens of the Hubble telescope? What if the invisible pink elephants only look invisible but are actually blocking our "view" of the real edge of the current universe (or maybe the edge of the universe 15.8 billion years ago, which is when the light from it started on its path to us)?
Anyway, my brain hurts, but either of the assumptions seems to swamp the margins of error mentioned in this thread.
... several other newspapers have tried to sue google for linking to their stuff with tiny excerpts.
I've never understood the "deep linking" controversy or -- more to the point -- how linkees had any cause to object. But I guess at least here the issue is "tiny excerpts". How tiny? Full text would clearly be a copyright violation. So, how tiny does an excerpt have to be in order to qualify as fair use? At least that's a reasonable basis for dispute, as opposed to linking itself.
It seems to me that Google might be paying AP for something that stretches beyond fair use, and it certainly is claiming fair use vs. the several other newspapers.
It seems more like "Little Brother"ing the government. You know, that pain in the rear who always tagged along, repeated what you said, but, ultimately, who you ignored...
... I'm hoping Little Brother grows up fast, but Big Brother seems to have the upper hand at the moment.
OK, I'll risk negative karma by going tangentially off-topic.
A start-up with 1000s of machines?
Regardless of where you advertise (this post was a decent start, but check out the other OSTG sites; plus, Google linux jobs for lots of other sites), make sure you screen every candidate to see which one has the best current job. Before you hire that candidate, make sure you have a shot at filling that vacant position. In other words, start looking for where you're going to land when this one crashes. Also, get an ebay account so that you can dump all the Herman Miller chairs and foosball tables when that's all you have left. And party like it's 1999.
Slashdot Mirror
The notion that peace would be achieved if Israel just gave up the West Bank and Gaza is absurd. Too many Islamofascists need Israel as an object of hate to keep the average Akbar (or whatever "average Joe" translates to in Arabic) in a constant state of repression. Without Israel, the Islamofascist leaders would have to explain why they haven't done anything since the end of European colonialism to improve their countries.
If you need to be naive, why not at least be naive in the hope that, if it weren't for their awful leaders, the majority of Arab citizens would gladly coexist peacefully with Israel if only they had jobs and hope for a better life. Yes, that does sound naive, I know. But your world ain't never gonna happen, mrron.
This seems like a perfect item for Jon Stewart to cover. I can't figure out how to send info like this to Comedy Central, though, since the web site sucks and I'm too lazy to pursue beyond that. Anyone know if they are open to submissions?
Of course, the big downsides of democracy (uniformed voters, mostly) obviously wouldn't exist in a company, where (presumably) every employee is intelligent, educated about the company, and has a personal and very material stake in the company.
Doesn't sound like most of the companies I've worked for, although I was lucky enough to have a few smaller ones like that.
The vast majority of posts seem to accept the premise that the application of open source to other (non-software?) businesses means a non-hierarchical, cooperative type of organization. Open source projects still have some command and control, although anyone (by definition) is free to "fork". And, before anyone flames me, I'm not saying open source projects are organized in the same fashion as large corporate bureaucracies.
But the non-software analogy of an open-source business or project would be one where the product or service had no patent protection and no proprietary intellectual capital. Think of open-source soda as being a business where the secret formula isn't secret, so people are free to experiment with different recipes until they find one that lots of people seem to like better.
Are generic drugs the right analogy? I guess not quite, because even generic drug makers probably have some trade secrets. It's hard to know what business doesn't have any trade secrets, but I suppose some highly competitive commodity businesses might come close. What are the trade secrets of Merry Maids, for example? Credit card lending is somewhat close to an open-source business, because all lenders have access to the same credit bureau databases. They have "proprietary" scores that they develop in addition to the ones the bureaus give, but I think those are pretty useless, because predicting credit behavior is pretty well-understood at the mass-market level.
My point in mentioning these various businesses is simply that none of them implies a non-hierarchical approach, and neither does, say, Red Hat.
I think the analogy breaks down in most of the above examples (except Merry Maids) when it comes to means of production. Open source soda, for example, would require that anyone with a new recipe could direct the next production batch at the bottler. Seems pretty unworkable in any form of organization.
I obviously don't have the analogy worked out very far, but I still think the original analogy is on the wrong track.
Gosh, I wasn't anywhere close to suggesting a solution, but that's a pretty important idea.
low-volume personal infringement should be handled akin to a traffic ticket
Do you mean copyright cops? Historically, copyright enforcement has been private litigation. In theory, I like the idea of fixed penalties, though. If you set a fine at x times an average of retail prices, wouldn't that also be an effective amount for wholesale pirates? After all, it would far exceed their revenue. It would have to be a high enough multiplier to offset their probability of being caught. At that point, the amount of the fine would seem to be sufficient economic incentive for a rational actor. But I still don't know how you would set up something like the CHP (Copyright Highway Patrol) to issue the tickets. If you allow private parties to continue to enforce, you'll probably get more litigation than it's worth. However, if we forced low-volume cases into small claims court, maybe with the right rules of evidence, damages, etc., we could get rational incentives to work.
I'd be on the side of the 'AAs, if they weren't completely nuts in their practical application of copyright enforcement
Well, the EFF points out that even their notion of copyright itself is a little nuts, so I don't think it's just a matter of over-zealous enforcement. DRM seems to prevent fair use copying so that owners of a song, say, can have copies to play on different players (car, ipod, etc.). Not only is such copying not a violation of copyright, it is a violation of the rights of the person who bought a copy of the song.
I know that class action suits get abused (McDonald's coffee verdict, e.g.), but this seems like one of those cases where the theory actually fits the need. All people who have bought CDs or DVDs with DRM, as well as all people who have bought players that prevent copying because of DRM flags, could be defined as class members whose rights have been violated. The potential damages are enormous. Of course, the lawyers would have to be paid cash, but the plaintiff class could settle for new standards that allow copying for fair use. Plaintiffs never get much more than a few dollars each of nominal value in class action lawsuits, anyway. In this case, huge attorneys fees might be an acceptable price to pay for better standards.
artists have allowed that control to be used destructively and counterproductively, and have created resentment
I don't resent the artists. I'm not sure how much they have "allowed", since individual artists generally don't have the power to affect decisions by the big labels. When they have that much power, they usually start their own labels. I haven't paid any attention to whether any smaller or independent labels are behaving differently from the big players.
I'm sure I'm off on lots of things and don't disagree with your comment, but what I meant to add as a consideration in my first point was that lots of cases get settled before any suit is filed, so I still think the 18,000 is low. It wouldn't surprise me if the number of settlements exceeded that by an order of magnitude, since so much else in the legal system gets settled before a suit is actually filed. Of course, it may just be RIAA's strategery to file suit and ask questions later (seems like their style). So this isn't even much of a guess, yet.
Also, I have to say I'm embarrassed by the 5 karma points on my comment in relation to the 3 on the parent to my comment. I didn't mean to steal anyone's karma -- and that seems like such a bad karma thing to do, no? The parent to my comment was the greater insight; after all, I wouldn't have thought of my comment without it.
Well, now we've got non-lawyers arguing the law. Cool!
... in any case, this one will probably reach the Supremes eventually, making my point moot.
I have read of cases being accepted for appeal solely because of conflicting rulings in different jurisdictions, so I'm virtually certain your first sentence is incorrect.
However, as one non-lawyer to another, I'll respect your right to be as probabilistically incorrect as I am
In general, I'm sympathetic to the EFF position on copyright issues. But, I think a lot of people are skeptical, mostly because they hear opinions like yours and confuse them with responsible ones.
Well, I'm not competent to judge whether or not the original sentence violates any strict rules of grammar, since I've been out of school for over twenty years. (The corporate world actually punished me several times for correct grammar; true story!)
However, it does seem clear that the original sentence does in fact allow for either your interpretation or the original critic's interpretation. It has nothing to do with verb choice and everything to do with placement.
- Lobby for sensible reform that would allow fair use but not mass distribution
- Settle cheaply enough with individuals to leave resources for going after "real pirates"
- Develop a PR/education campaign (don't laugh! If it worked for EXXON, it could work for anyone!)
I'm sure there a lots of more effective strategies.Too bad the notion of Civil Disobediance is so unknown to Americans.
... all insisted on going to jail. Civil disobedience wasn't something they invoked in their defence, it was something they proclaimed not only as their right but as their duty. The whole point was to suffer the punishment to show the injustice. Otherwise, instead of staging sit-ins, MLK would simply have published articles and given speeches.
Too bad, indeed! You show a remarkable ignorance of it yourself.
The essential notion of civil disobedience is to disobey unjust laws openly and with the intention of submitting to the legal punishment, in order to show the unjustness of the law(s).
When Thoreau was imprisoned (I think for refusing to pay a sort of poll tax) he was visited in prision by Emerson, who asked "Why are you here?". Thoreau asked Emerson, "Why are you not?".
Regardless of the merits of the case being discussed here (and I have already stated my sympathies, above), it's very clear this has nothing to do with civil disobedience. Thoreau, Gandhi, MLK
Well, IANAL, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night ...
...
I believe that courts in one jurisdiction are not bound by the opinions of courts in another jurisdiction, only by the opinions of appellate courts above them (and not appellate courts of other jurisdiction, i.e., other circuit courts). So, unless this is appealed to a high enough level, it won't have any legal authority regarding other suits. But, assuming RIAA acts in its own self-interest, it might pay attention to an adverse ruling. What it probably means is that RIAA will change its tactics but not drop the matter altogether. Still might be a good thing
no matter what side of the debate you are on, you must agree
Well, I happen to agree that this was harassment -- IANAL, so I don't mean to imply a legal definition.
But, that doesn't mean I have to agree. I can imagine a reasonable conversation with someone who doesn't think this is harassment, and I can certainly imagine myself thinking that an organization has a right to sue to defend property rights. That doesn't mean I agree with RIAA, just that I believe in property rights and the need to defend them.
Additional considerations:
- 18,000 is just the number of lawsuits filed. How many "settled" by paying some kind of greenmail before a lawsuit was filed?
- From TFA, the range of settlements was $3,000 to $11,000. The average is probably closer to the low end, but might be a few thousand dollars more, which would bump the revenue by 30% ++
- Most likely, there are several attorneys on staff but also law firms in every state that do the actual filings, appearances, etc.
- In-house attorneys probably don't make $250K even fully loaded (benefits, overhead, etc.), but this is offset by the previous point.
It may be just a guess, but who thinks RIAA didn't do a cost-benefit analysis of their strategy before they started down this road? Of course, part of that analysis would have been the revenue they think they're losing (including future revenue) by not contesting file sharing. No idea on that numberI believe the attorney fees would have to be paid by RIAA, not by "the state", if the petition for attorney fees succeeds. I responded here because I agree that frankie's was the first post to clarify part of the discussion. But this seems like another important point missed in the preceeding discussion.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm also not British, but perhaps someone from across the Pond can confirm my vague understanding that English courts have a "loser pays" rule in civil litigation. It's a policy designed to discourage frivolous lawsuits, and it somewhat counteracts the incentives of contingency fees (but that's another thread for another day, since contingency fees had no relevance in TFA and were introduced in the fuzzy discussion above).
See? This is the value of having others call me out on my biases!
I realize now that I have, for too long, bought into the culture of the "earthists" and "roomists". If anyone knows of any good de-programming seminars or books on sensitivity (to other planets, galaxies and living arrangements), that might help me become the caring, other-galaxy-nurturing being* that I know I can be*.
* Am I being too existence-centric? If so, I apologize to any non-entities who might be offended by my language. After all, they're people, too, right?
Neither "terrorist" nor "freedom fighter" is a neutral term
... and wasn't that a million "conflicts" ago? I was just trying to illustrate the difficulty of neutral terminology with issues that are sufficiently volatile.
... careful!
That's my point (I think?); on some things, we just don't have neutral terms. (On the wetness of water, I think we do, which is why I quibbled with the definition of bias.) And, yes, I mixed metaphors by using "freedom fighter", since that was so 1980s
So, we might be in violent agreement here
Obviously, FauxNews and others thought "suicide bomber" was objectionable because it sounded too sympathetic. That seems ironic to me, given the bias Faux would have about suicide being immoral, etc. It seems pretty neutral to me, as well, but that doesn't mean I feel neutrally about them. So, I would use a term like "asshole suicide bomber", I guess, to convey both my opinion and as accurate a description as possible. I'm less subtle than Faux, one of the benefits of not being corporate.
I tend to agree (90%+?) with your reaction to the parent comment, but I think you go too far in defining bias. "Water is wet" is not biased. But it's about something trivial enough that no sane person would disagree, unless it's a class on epistemological deconstruction or some bullshit like that.
... anything? OK, maybe that's too strong, but this definitely hurts its credibility in general, and not just on this narrow "conflict".
However, when something becomes important enough, we have to choose between terms like "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" to describe the same people, depending on our biases. I agree that good journalism, or good discussion in general, needs to recognize bias and identify it wherever possible. For example, in discussing the current conflict (is that a biased word?) in Lebanon and Israel, it seems unbiased to report something like "Hezbollah launched 160 missiles aimed at Israel yesterday" or "the Israeli army attacked several Hezbollah bases in villages in southern Lebanon yesterday". It does get difficult after that (like "bases in villages", for example). For myself, I try to delineate where my personal biases lie, and I find that I can have reasonable discussions with others who do the same, regardless of whether or not I agree with them. BTW, identifying all those biases is difficult, and I value discussions with others of opposing viewpoints for calling me out on them from time to time.
That said, I guess I wouldn't bother to have a discussion with Reuters about
I'm impressed, but does this mean that ebugger-day doesn't qualify as atiny-lay?
So far, all the answers to all the questions seem to be making the same implicit assumptions:
- Hubble's Constant is constant
- The current size of the universe is known
I'm sure there are many equally important assumptions, but these two seem to form the basis for using the inverse of H-nought (dang, I'm British, now!) to calculate the age of the universe.If Hubble's Constant is actually Carpe Web's Variable (dang, I'm important, now!), then we'd have to know all the values of CW-i (index of Carpe Web's Variable over time, formerly thought to be Hubble's Constant) and then take one mother of an integral to calculate the age of the universe. Well, if we were smart enough to know all the values of CW-i over 6,000 years -- oops, I mean 15.8 billion years -- then maybe the integral wouldn't be too difficult.
But, we'd still need to know the current size of the universe to calculate the age. What if there's a little bit more beyond what we can currently "see"? What if there's some schmutz on the lens of the Hubble telescope? What if the invisible pink elephants only look invisible but are actually blocking our "view" of the real edge of the current universe (or maybe the edge of the universe 15.8 billion years ago, which is when the light from it started on its path to us)?
Anyway, my brain hurts, but either of the assumptions seems to swamp the margins of error mentioned in this thread.
... several other newspapers have tried to sue google for linking to their stuff with tiny excerpts.
I've never understood the "deep linking" controversy or -- more to the point -- how linkees had any cause to object. But I guess at least here the issue is "tiny excerpts". How tiny? Full text would clearly be a copyright violation. So, how tiny does an excerpt have to be in order to qualify as fair use? At least that's a reasonable basis for dispute, as opposed to linking itself.
It seems to me that Google might be paying AP for something that stretches beyond fair use, and it certainly is claiming fair use vs. the several other newspapers.
It seems more like "Little Brother"ing the government. You know, that pain in the rear who always tagged along, repeated what you said, but, ultimately, who you ignored ...
... I'm hoping Little Brother grows up fast, but Big Brother seems to have the upper hand at the moment.
OK, I'll risk negative karma by going tangentially off-topic.
A start-up with 1000s of machines?
Regardless of where you advertise (this post was a decent start, but check out the other OSTG sites; plus, Google linux jobs for lots of other sites), make sure you screen every candidate to see which one has the best current job. Before you hire that candidate, make sure you have a shot at filling that vacant position. In other words, start looking for where you're going to land when this one crashes. Also, get an ebay account so that you can dump all the Herman Miller chairs and foosball tables when that's all you have left. And party like it's 1999.
Seems like English might help some ...
I guess you really are a cunning linguist (apologies to Miss Moneypenney)