The language in Darmok is not at all like Chinese. I learned Chinese, and was quite able to get by in Taiwan and China without having to resort to the classics of Chinese literature. In Darmok it is impossible to communicate anything simple without knowing the history of that culture.
As much as bloggers try to claim otherwise, publishing online has generally been a rather poor substitute for peer review and generally allows for a lot of really bad science to get wide attention.
What randoms unidentified bloggers think about publishing has no bearing whatsoever on what scientists think about scientific publishing. Publishing online does not necessitate that peer review be dispensed with. I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.
"Opposed" is a weasel word. There are more people who are unhappy with the ACA than people who are happy with it. However, a substantial portion of those people are unhappy with it because it is a half-baked compromise that does not really fixes the problems of the health care system; that is, it does not go far enough in reforming the system. Unhappiness with the ACA does not entail approval of the Republican bullshit.
A very interesting piece of info is at the bottom of TFA:
since readers were allowed to make comments without registering their names, the identity of the authors would have been extremely difficult to establish. Making Delfi legally responsible for the comments was therefore practical, said the court. It was also reasonable, because the news portal received commercial benefit from comments being made.
(Bold added by me.)
Thanks for bringing this up. Their rationale for holding Delfi responsible is the same damn rationale that cheerleaders for the police state everywhere bring up, every single time. Doing the right thing would have been too hard. See, if they actually had done the right thing, they would have had to actually spend substantial effort at unmasking who actually posted anonymously. So they decided to just peg the act on a convenient actor.
Are we going to be throwing meatspace postal workers into jail when they read the text next to the address on a postcard? That would be insane and unrealistic expectation of privacy, wouldn't it?
The comparison is not apposite. What Google does is akin to postal workers scanning postcards and storing them in a database which is used to profile people so as to push services on them. You can be certain that if postal workers did this, then there would be an outcry.
That's not just my opinion, it's the opinion of everyone who knows anything about email.
I've been an email postmaster since the early 90s. Your opinion is not by any means representative of "the opinion of everyone who knows anything about email." The issue is not storing the emails but the damn data mining that Google performs on them. I've never data-mined the emails stored on my server, nor have the postmasters that I've had the pleasure to work with. As a matter of fact, we take measures to avoid accidentally looking at people's emails. That they are not encrypted does not make it okay to snoop. It's called having a sense of ethics.
And we (me and the postmasters I've worked with) all think what Google is doing is shit.
I share the same policy. I bought one and only one Acer in my life. It was the first Acer I bought and is the last. Early on it would not sleep under Linux so I took at look at the BIOS. That thing was so sloppily coded! The batteries that Acer shipped with the laptop also had a manufacturing flaw that caused them to fail prematurely. Batteries degrade over time progressively but these would one day perform at 90% original specs and the next day perform the best brick impression. I owned two Acer-approved batteries for this laptop and both failed in exactly the same way. I also bought an ultra-cheap third-party battery that did not show this problem.
Except, with torrenting, you're distributing without authorization.
Torrenting does not amount to "distributing without authorization." Here's a motion picture that was distributed through torrenting by its author from the get go:
When I torrented it, I did not distribute it without authorization! And I'd expect posters on this site to know that Linux distros are distributed by torrenting, again, with authorization.
I know that the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk want everybody and their brother to believe that torrent == illegal but we should not swallow their bullshit.
It's people like this poster who promote the whole "infectious" GPL crap that Microsoft et al have been capitalising.
[...] If you use GPL code, you have to publish that code. If you make changes to it, you need to publish those changes as well.
You take to task another poster's understanding of the GPL and yet you do not seem to understand it yourself. Anybody who uses Ubuntu (to take just one example) is using GPLed code. They don't have to publish anything. As far as changes go, you are not required to release your changes unless you decide to release binaries derived from your changes.
In general, people that use BSD contribute patches back because it is in their best financial interest to do so. Not because the license says they must, but because they want to. This generally leads to better quality patches too, in my experience.
Let me pick out the problematic statement in what you say here: "Not because the license says they must [contribute patches], but because they want to." The text in bracket is warranted by the context in which you've written this sentence. You're talking about some license which say people must contribute patches. Which license is this exactly? Not the GPL for sure, and I don't know of any other license which says that people modifying the software must contribute patches. At most, they require releasing the source code. Releasing source code is not the same as releasing a patch.
Your analysis is appreciated but, let's consider the following. I'm sure I have at least one old hard drive somewhere that I have effectively written off but I have not trashed for which I don't remember the encryption key nor have any record of the key.
Okay, so it *is* my hard disk but I cannot decrypt it. What then?
While the first couple you mention may indeed be sleeping in separate rooms because of a bad marriage, their sleeping arrangement is the sole evidence presented to us that the marriage is bad. There are many reasons for sleeping in separate rooms, sleeping disorders in particular, none of which are an indication regarding the quality of the marriage.
One photographer took a photo of a black man dressed in a business suit with a briefcase walking through Grand Central Station. The New York Times magazine published it on the cover to illustrate a story on "The Black Middle Class." He sued and won, complaining that it subjected him to ridicule and invaded his right to privacy and right to control his own image.
Another photographer set up an automatic camera on 42nd St., took photos of people walking by, blew them up as large-format portraits, exhibited them in an art gallery and included them in a published gallery catalog. A subject sued him, charging that his right to privacy was violated. The judge ruled that he was in a public place, and should have been prepared to be photographed. If they used his photo on an advertisement or a peanut butter jar, the courts might have come to a different conclusion.
Do you have references for these two cases? If yes, please provide them.
I was going to make a comment like the one you made. The stakes for historians is not overcoming a lack of information, tout court, but to overcome a lack of reliable information. Life reviews are not it.
Another problem is that, even assuming perfect reliability (which we both agree is unlikely), additional documents may have a very low signal to noise ratio. In know from experience that an overabundance of data is not a blessing when combing through it for relevant information has to be done by hand. Something like a full-text search helps but is not nearly enough to solve the problem.
I owned two Palm devices. In their heyday these were great devices. In their heyday I would not have wanted any other type of PDA. But I feel no nostalgia whatsoever today for those devices. My old Palm devices don't hold a candle to my Android devices. There is nothing, absolutely not-a-thing, that my Palm devices did that my Android devices do not do better. Handwriting recognition? How about entering note using real-time *voice* recongition.
The reason for filters is that for every candidate who actually reads the job posting and is sending an application that shows that the candidate's experience and skills intersect with what the posting is looking for, there are dozens of morons whose method of applying is spray and pray, or do not know that the people reading applications are not mindreaders.
I'd also want to know about the shipping costs associated with any quoted prices. I've done my share of building systems. I know from experience that the strategy of seeking the cheapest cost on each and every part is easily undone by shipping fees.
===
Commenting now on the larger discussion, it's not always about getting the cheapest price. Building my own NAS cost me more money than buying an off-the-shelf solution, but what I got with my own build was better specs and much more flexibility than what vendors offered. I've performed experiments with it that I'm sure I would have had a hard time performing with an off-the-shelf solution, even with one whose firmware I could have replaced with somethig more palatable. There was no direct equivalent to what I ended up building.
One potential buyer got a static shock from the carpet as is common in the dry vegas air. She actuually thought the solar power array caused it! How am I supposed to reason with that kind of stupidity?
Tell her the reason she got a shock is because of her negative emotions.
You missed this bit: "There may be good reasons for this figure, since they have to recoup their costs."
All the graphs, charts, calculations are "good reasons." I did not say they were just pulling numbers out of thin air. Their opinion is an informed one but it is still an opinion. Even with all the good reasons, they have to realize that there is difference in kind between their assessment that the game should cost $60 and the assessment of a natural quality. But they don't. They think that their $60 assessment is on part with finding that a bunch of apples weighs 10kg. For the industry, their $60 assessment should elicit the same agreement from other folks as the assessment that a bunch of apples weighs 10kg. When they find that folks do not agree with them, it is as puzzling to them as finding that people claim their 10kg bunch of apples weights 1kg or 3kg.
(Postmodernists like to claim that there is no difference between opinions and facts. So for them measuring the bunch of apples to be 10kg is just as much opinion as saying the game is worth $60. And saying "seeing this movie cost me $12" or "the running time of this movie was 93 minutes" is just as much opinion as saying "this movie sucked!" Then again, for postmodernists, gravity is also opinion, that the moon is not made of cheese is also opinion, that lightning is not caused by gremlins is also opinion, etc.)
You say:
Part of it is our fault, because we just accept that games cost $60 (or whatever).
The industry lamenting that people are not going to pay $60 when there are games available for $1 (or 99 cents) is proof that a good deal of people are no longer accepting the $60 figure. If I can derive the same enjoyment from buying a $1 game than I can get from buying a $60 game, why on earth should I pay $60? Probably the $60 game has "better" graphics but better graphics does not mean greater enjoyment. When a lot of people perform this reasoning and consequently stop buying $60 games, those who think that $60 is the way things ought to be --- that it is the natural order of things --- are completely confused.
'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents
And again, the fat cats in the industry are looking at things backwards. Once the costs are calculated, they figure each copy of the game should go for $60. There may be good reasons for this figure, since they have to recoup their costs. In their head, they think that this $60 figure they discovered is a natural fact, like weight, for instance, is a natural fact. If you take a bunch of apples and put them on a scale, you'll get a certain weight. Give the same bunch of apples to someone else and they'll get the same weight. (Those who would like to quibble can go jump off a cliff a this point.) You can repeat the experiment with 10, 100, 1000 people and maybe after discovering that their scale needs recalibrating, they'll agree on the weight.
The $60 figure is not like this. It is not a natural fact. It is an opinion that the game holds such value to potential buyers that they'll willingly give up $60 for it. And then if you ask 10, 100, 1000 people about how much they value the game, they'll give very different answers. It may very well be that no one agrees that the value of the game is such that it is worth $60. Now, if it so happens that there are games which are sold for $1 which provide what people seek in a game, why should they be willing to pay $60?
So the fat cats say "$60", the market says "no way!" but because the fat cats think their opinion is a natural fact, they then assume that there is something terribly wrong with the world. They do not ever consider that their opinion that their $60 game is "really worth $60" could be mistaken because they think the $60 figure is a natural fact rather than an opinion.
(Other entertainment media also think like this. CD sales declining? It is not because we do not deliver the value people want. It is because something external (e.g. piracy) is interfering with the order of nature.)
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... what? Diseases now use Wikipedia?
Yep, I saw that very scene because my wife watches it and I happened to be around, and I also had to explain to my wife why I was laughing derisively.
I'm sure some hack can spin our common laughter into a story about how watching Scorpion is a communal experience for people in tech fields.
The language in Darmok is not at all like Chinese. I learned Chinese, and was quite able to get by in Taiwan and China without having to resort to the classics of Chinese literature. In Darmok it is impossible to communicate anything simple without knowing the history of that culture.
What randoms unidentified bloggers think about publishing has no bearing whatsoever on what scientists think about scientific publishing. Publishing online does not necessitate that peer review be dispensed with. I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.
You're attacking a strawman.
First, it is opposed by more people than favor it
"Opposed" is a weasel word. There are more people who are unhappy with the ACA than people who are happy with it. However, a substantial portion of those people are unhappy with it because it is a half-baked compromise that does not really fixes the problems of the health care system; that is, it does not go far enough in reforming the system. Unhappiness with the ACA does not entail approval of the Republican bullshit.
A very interesting piece of info is at the bottom of TFA:
since readers were allowed to make comments without registering their names, the identity of the authors would have been extremely difficult to establish. Making Delfi legally responsible for the comments was therefore practical, said the court. It was also reasonable, because the news portal received commercial benefit from comments being made.
(Bold added by me.)
Thanks for bringing this up. Their rationale for holding Delfi responsible is the same damn rationale that cheerleaders for the police state everywhere bring up, every single time. Doing the right thing would have been too hard. See, if they actually had done the right thing, they would have had to actually spend substantial effort at unmasking who actually posted anonymously. So they decided to just peg the act on a convenient actor.
That said, the author is guilty of cherry-picking.
FIFY
Are we going to be throwing meatspace postal workers into jail when they read the text next to the address on a postcard? That would be insane and unrealistic expectation of privacy, wouldn't it?
The comparison is not apposite. What Google does is akin to postal workers scanning postcards and storing them in a database which is used to profile people so as to push services on them. You can be certain that if postal workers did this, then there would be an outcry.
That's not just my opinion, it's the opinion of everyone who knows anything about email.
I've been an email postmaster since the early 90s. Your opinion is not by any means representative of "the opinion of everyone who knows anything about email." The issue is not storing the emails but the damn data mining that Google performs on them. I've never data-mined the emails stored on my server, nor have the postmasters that I've had the pleasure to work with. As a matter of fact, we take measures to avoid accidentally looking at people's emails. That they are not encrypted does not make it okay to snoop. It's called having a sense of ethics.
And we (me and the postmasters I've worked with) all think what Google is doing is shit.
I share the same policy. I bought one and only one Acer in my life. It was the first Acer I bought and is the last. Early on it would not sleep under Linux so I took at look at the BIOS. That thing was so sloppily coded! The batteries that Acer shipped with the laptop also had a manufacturing flaw that caused them to fail prematurely. Batteries degrade over time progressively but these would one day perform at 90% original specs and the next day perform the best brick impression. I owned two Acer-approved batteries for this laptop and both failed in exactly the same way. I also bought an ultra-cheap third-party battery that did not show this problem.
Except, with torrenting, you're distributing without authorization.
Torrenting does not amount to "distributing without authorization." Here's a motion picture that was distributed through torrenting by its author from the get go:
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/
When I torrented it, I did not distribute it without authorization! And I'd expect posters on this site to know that Linux distros are distributed by torrenting, again, with authorization.
I know that the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk want everybody and their brother to believe that torrent == illegal but we should not swallow their bullshit.
It's people like this poster who promote the whole "infectious" GPL crap that Microsoft et al have been capitalising.
[...] If you use GPL code, you have to publish that code. If you make changes to it, you need to publish those changes as well.
You take to task another poster's understanding of the GPL and yet you do not seem to understand it yourself. Anybody who uses Ubuntu (to take just one example) is using GPLed code. They don't have to publish anything. As far as changes go, you are not required to release your changes unless you decide to release binaries derived from your changes.
In general, people that use BSD contribute patches back because it is in their best financial interest to do so. Not because the license says they must, but because they want to. This generally leads to better quality patches too, in my experience.
Let me pick out the problematic statement in what you say here: "Not because the license says they must [contribute patches], but because they want to." The text in bracket is warranted by the context in which you've written this sentence. You're talking about some license which say people must contribute patches. Which license is this exactly? Not the GPL for sure, and I don't know of any other license which says that people modifying the software must contribute patches. At most, they require releasing the source code. Releasing source code is not the same as releasing a patch.
You've errected a strawman.
Your analysis is appreciated but, let's consider the following. I'm sure I have at least one old hard drive somewhere that I have effectively written off but I have not trashed for which I don't remember the encryption key nor have any record of the key.
Okay, so it *is* my hard disk but I cannot decrypt it. What then?
While the first couple you mention may indeed be sleeping in separate rooms because of a bad marriage, their sleeping arrangement is the sole evidence presented to us that the marriage is bad. There are many reasons for sleeping in separate rooms, sleeping disorders in particular, none of which are an indication regarding the quality of the marriage.
Other than that, I agree.
One photographer took a photo of a black man dressed in a business suit with a briefcase walking through Grand Central Station. The New York Times magazine published it on the cover to illustrate a story on "The Black Middle Class." He sued and won, complaining that it subjected him to ridicule and invaded his right to privacy and right to control his own image.
Another photographer set up an automatic camera on 42nd St., took photos of people walking by, blew them up as large-format portraits, exhibited them in an art gallery and included them in a published gallery catalog. A subject sued him, charging that his right to privacy was violated. The judge ruled that he was in a public place, and should have been prepared to be photographed. If they used his photo on an advertisement or a peanut butter jar, the courts might have come to a different conclusion.
Do you have references for these two cases? If yes, please provide them.
Are there any "killer app" uses for %n that anyone can think of?
According to the summary, with %n you can write a killer app that kills other apps:
"Then there’s the %n format string specifier – the one that crashes applications because it writes addresses to the stack."
I was going to make a comment like the one you made. The stakes for historians is not overcoming a lack of information, tout court, but to overcome a lack of reliable information. Life reviews are not it.
Another problem is that, even assuming perfect reliability (which we both agree is unlikely), additional documents may have a very low signal to noise ratio. In know from experience that an overabundance of data is not a blessing when combing through it for relevant information has to be done by hand. Something like a full-text search helps but is not nearly enough to solve the problem.
I owned two Palm devices. In their heyday these were great devices. In their heyday I would not have wanted any other type of PDA. But I feel no nostalgia whatsoever today for those devices. My old Palm devices don't hold a candle to my Android devices. There is nothing, absolutely not-a-thing, that my Palm devices did that my Android devices do not do better. Handwriting recognition? How about entering note using real-time *voice* recongition.
In case it need be said...
The reason for filters is that for every candidate who actually reads the job posting and is sending an application that shows that the candidate's experience and skills intersect with what the posting is looking for, there are dozens of morons whose method of applying is spray and pray, or do not know that the people reading applications are not mindreaders.
No, no, no. It's not *building* unless you grew the tree, cut it down, and milled it yourself.
Good points you raise there.
I'd also want to know about the shipping costs associated with any quoted prices. I've done my share of building systems. I know from experience that the strategy of seeking the cheapest cost on each and every part is easily undone by shipping fees.
===
Commenting now on the larger discussion, it's not always about getting the cheapest price. Building my own NAS cost me more money than buying an off-the-shelf solution, but what I got with my own build was better specs and much more flexibility than what vendors offered. I've performed experiments with it that I'm sure I would have had a hard time performing with an off-the-shelf solution, even with one whose firmware I could have replaced with somethig more palatable. There was no direct equivalent to what I ended up building.
It's a shame I have no mod points right now, because your contribution is definitely worthy of being read.
One potential buyer got a static shock from the carpet as is common in the dry vegas air. She actuually thought the solar power array caused it! How am I supposed to reason with that kind of stupidity?
Tell her the reason she got a shock is because of her negative emotions.
You missed this bit: "There may be good reasons for this figure, since they have to recoup their costs."
All the graphs, charts, calculations are "good reasons." I did not say they were just pulling numbers out of thin air. Their opinion is an informed one but it is still an opinion. Even with all the good reasons, they have to realize that there is difference in kind between their assessment that the game should cost $60 and the assessment of a natural quality. But they don't. They think that their $60 assessment is on part with finding that a bunch of apples weighs 10kg. For the industry, their $60 assessment should elicit the same agreement from other folks as the assessment that a bunch of apples weighs 10kg. When they find that folks do not agree with them, it is as puzzling to them as finding that people claim their 10kg bunch of apples weights 1kg or 3kg.
(Postmodernists like to claim that there is no difference between opinions and facts. So for them measuring the bunch of apples to be 10kg is just as much opinion as saying the game is worth $60. And saying "seeing this movie cost me $12" or "the running time of this movie was 93 minutes" is just as much opinion as saying "this movie sucked!" Then again, for postmodernists, gravity is also opinion, that the moon is not made of cheese is also opinion, that lightning is not caused by gremlins is also opinion, etc.)
You say:
The industry lamenting that people are not going to pay $60 when there are games available for $1 (or 99 cents) is proof that a good deal of people are no longer accepting the $60 figure. If I can derive the same enjoyment from buying a $1 game than I can get from buying a $60 game, why on earth should I pay $60? Probably the $60 game has "better" graphics but better graphics does not mean greater enjoyment. When a lot of people perform this reasoning and consequently stop buying $60 games, those who think that $60 is the way things ought to be --- that it is the natural order of things --- are completely confused.
And again, the fat cats in the industry are looking at things backwards. Once the costs are calculated, they figure each copy of the game should go for $60. There may be good reasons for this figure, since they have to recoup their costs. In their head, they think that this $60 figure they discovered is a natural fact, like weight, for instance, is a natural fact. If you take a bunch of apples and put them on a scale, you'll get a certain weight. Give the same bunch of apples to someone else and they'll get the same weight. (Those who would like to quibble can go jump off a cliff a this point.) You can repeat the experiment with 10, 100, 1000 people and maybe after discovering that their scale needs recalibrating, they'll agree on the weight.
The $60 figure is not like this. It is not a natural fact. It is an opinion that the game holds such value to potential buyers that they'll willingly give up $60 for it. And then if you ask 10, 100, 1000 people about how much they value the game, they'll give very different answers. It may very well be that no one agrees that the value of the game is such that it is worth $60. Now, if it so happens that there are games which are sold for $1 which provide what people seek in a game, why should they be willing to pay $60?
So the fat cats say "$60", the market says "no way!" but because the fat cats think their opinion is a natural fact, they then assume that there is something terribly wrong with the world. They do not ever consider that their opinion that their $60 game is "really worth $60" could be mistaken because they think the $60 figure is a natural fact rather than an opinion.
(Other entertainment media also think like this. CD sales declining? It is not because we do not deliver the value people want. It is because something external (e.g. piracy) is interfering with the order of nature.)