The rest of the story is pretty offtopic. But I found that to be a highly successful and satisfying use of the FOIA on the local level. I'm sorry Federal cases don't sound as profitable and I don't mean to sound naive but it is the Federal Government.
You do know that the FOIA only applies to the Federal Government to start with, right? Many states have sunshine laws, which may apply to local governments within the state, and local governments may have their own sunshine laws as well, but those are not the FOIA. Whether your friend's dad actually gave you a template for a request under the actual records law applicable to the school, whether the school treated the request as one under the applicable records law, or whether the school felt it was easier to dump a bunch of paper on you rather than even bother to evaluate your request, the one thing that can be stated with a fair degree of certainty is that the actual federal Freedom of Information Act had little substantive to do with your experience.
May I present two packages: 1) Dumb Cell Phone ($0), Desktop PC ($600), Wireless Service ($35/mo), and Wired Internet ($30/mo). They can make calls anywhere, but they have to go home to check their email. Total cost: $600 up front, $65 a month.
2) Smart Phone ($200), No PC ($0), No wired Internet ($0), Wireless service with data ($50/mo). Suddenly, their email goes with them. If they opt for a computer, they can get a laptop and tether.
Yes, Windows and iPhone belong on the same usage chart. It shows that the average consumer is finally figuring out that option 2 makes a lot more sense.
With a majority using Windows XP, a sizable fraction of the remainder using Vista, and most of the rest using other traditional computer platforms rather than any of the mobile platforms on the list, I hardly see how the conclusion you draw about "the average user" is even remotely justified by the source data.
This might be a "new tactic" in reference to browsers, specifically, but its hardly new to Microsoft. I've frequently had Windows updates switch default associations back to Windows bundled components (Media Player most recently).
Except that he's right. Basically they're throwing out the entirety of the established universe and re-creating it using only the barest of threads to dress it in a way that appears similar.
Which, you know, was already done with Enterprise. Anyway, given the number of time travelling entities encountered working to disrupt history in the Trek canon, there's sort of a built in excuse for a past that is completely different from the established timeline, right?
I'm pretty sure the Klingon language (and forehead bumps) where introduced in the first movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture).
There were a couple of words of Klingon used in ST:TMP, but there was no language (there was no grammar, and the only words in the vocabulary were those used in the scene.) It wasn't a language until the grammar and vastly expanded vocabulary was created for ST3:TSFS.
Which is why I said, in GP, "the Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol), as such (that is, having an actual grammar rather than just a handful of words) was created for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock".
Seems like a non-story to me. Wrath of Khan didn't have any spoken Klingon either (closest was Khan claiming the Klingon proverb: Revenge is a dish best served cold.... It is very cold, in spaaaaaaaaaaace.)
Since the Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol), as such (that is, having an actual grammar rather than just a handful of words) was created for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, this is not all that surprising. OTOH, its been used pretty heavily in the movies (and, to a lesser extent, series) since that, though I can't see why anyone would complain about it not being used in a new film (I can see, perhaps, complaining if Klingon's were talking in what was supposed to be "Klingon" but it wasn't tlhIngan Hol, particularly if there was no in-setting justification, but that's a different issue.)
We ought to go back to the timeframes set back in the beginning or to two times that time and leave it alone. 14-28 years should be more than enough for most situations- but we have monied interests such as Disney doing everything they can to protect things like Mickey Mouse and making a mockery of the law as it was intended to be.
A one-size-fits-all fixed term is a blunt instrument; "limited term" need not always be the same. I personally am a big fan of a reasonably short (10-15 year, or maybe even as short as 5 years) "free" period of copyright protection, with subsequent renewal for very short fixed terms (probably 1 year at a time) available for a cost that is a fixed proportion of a declared surrender value; if the surrender value is paid by any person or combination of persons, the copyright holder gets the surrender value and the copyright is extinguished, moving the work into the public domain.
I read an article a couple days ago, apparently there was a swine flu outbreak in 1976, and the US was quite proactive in stopping it, encouraging everyone to get vaccinated. The problem came when more people died from the vaccine than from the flu.
That's not really the right comparison to judge a "problem" with the course of action. It would clearly be, in retrospect, the wrong decision if more people died of the vaccine than would have been expected to have died from the flu had the vaccination not been carried out, but the fact that more people died of the vaccine than died of the flu when the vaccination was carried out does not appear to be a valid basis, on its own, for criticism.
Otherwise, a vaccination program that prevented all deaths from a disease (even if, unchecked, it would have been expected to kill billions) would be the wrong decision if even one person died from the vaccine, a result that is clearly ludicrous.
Autorun isn't intended to do what users want it to do. Close, but not quite. Autorun is intended to do what...... somebody...... wants it to do. That person is never the user, unless the user wrote the autorun script.
Or, unless the user deliberately enabled autorun and deliberately put the media in the drive/slot/etc. What the user wants can be "whatever the creator of the autorun script on this drive programmed", after all.
This is fundamental misthinking about copyright. Copyright doesn't exist to protect corporate interests. It exists to protect authors...
This is fundamental misthinking about copyright. Copyright (in the United States) doesn't exist to protect authors, it exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." (U.S. Const., Art. I, Sec. 8) To the extent it fails to do that -- or, a fortiori, impedes such progress -- it is because the rules of copyright are poorly crafted from the perspective of the Constitutional basis of Congress's power to grant copyrights in the first place, and need to be reformed to serve that purpose.
From my own analsys of the codified fair use doctrine, the proportion of the copyrighted work that is used for a fair use purpose is not explicitly stated excepting that it must not be in it's entierety
It doesn't say that either. It says that the portion used is a factor to be considered in determining fair use, it doesn't say, in the statute, which way that factor weighs. Which makes sense; there are circumstances where using the whole work would probably weigh in favor of fair use, where using selected portions might not (e.g., format- or time-shifting of a work which includes advertising, where removing--or, a fortiori, replacing--the advertising content might, all other things being equal, make the use less likely to be considered fair use.)
To me it's better to see the "ugly" pixels, than to see stuff smeared. Especially for games - since often a single pixel = your target/enemy far away, or sticking out a bit behind something.
Since antialiasing means you are less likely to miss something that is within the space covered by a single pixel because it isn't at the exact grid point, it should usually be a benefit, not a detriment. Antialiasing doesn't work by averaging adjacent pixels, it takes additional samples within the space that is closer to the pixel being rendered than any other pixel.
There are actually democracies where it's virtually impossible to get a majority.
More precisely, there are democracies where it is virtually impossible for one party to get a majority, which means that majority coalitions are formed on a more transitory, ad hoc basis.
This creates the illusion to Americans of "less-stable" governments, as the ending of a coalition is characterized as a government "falling", but it actually tends to create more stable governments in that there is, on average, less change between successive governments/administrations than in the US system.
Its also notable that popular satisfaction with the government tends to be notably higher in such governments that achieve majorities through ad hoc coalitions than in the US and similar governments which tend toward two-party duopoly with alternating partisan majorities.
Why exactly would people be expected to know what women's suffrage means in this day and age? At least in this country, the term hasn't been used in normal conversation for some time, it was part of a political battle that is 80 years gone, and left our vocabulary.
Its not jargon, both words in the phrase "women's suffrage" are used in their normal sense, so the fact that "women's suffrage" isn't an active issue shouldn't make the meaning of the phrase obscure. However, the fact that the average person's vocabulary now is much smaller than it was in even the 1950s might have something to do with why many people don't understand what "women's suffrage" means.
How does it make it any less "fair" than people freely suggesting how other people should vote through media other than the internet? On Slashdot, we ridicule patents whose only claim of novelty is "on the internet", so I'm kind of baffled by the hysteria about "if we allow voting on the internet, people will tell other people how they should vote using the internet."
Because, you know, its hardly as if when we allow voting off the internet, people never suggest to other people how they should vote.
Its an ok email/text message reader, but it utterly fails at the main task of a phone- calls.
My current "smart" phone is a Windows Mobile device, and compared either to my previous Palm OS device or the iPhones I've handled, the OS seems not only not great as a phone, but not great for the PDA features of a smartphone, either. When I replace it, I can guarantee that the one thing I won't be considering is another Windows mobile offering.
Well I'm not an expert of any kind, but AFAIK the point of antialiasing is pretty much to compensate for low-resolutions displays. If you have a high enough DPI or a big enough display (and so you can sit far enough away) then FSAA isn't going to make a huge difference anymore.
It exists to compensate for rendering artifacts due to rendering points on a regular grid; having more pixels per steradian (whether due to higher resolution or greater viewing distance) doesn't eliminate the artifacts, though it will, for most kinds of rendering artifacts, make them less noticeable. AA tries to eliminate the artifacts by sampling additional points around the "real" location on the grid and blending them to create the actual value rendered for the pixel.
In order to make the game fun... it simply has to sacrifice some amount of realism for fun factor.
I'm not sure wargamers would agree.
Yeah, but Konami isn't a company that is much interested in the kind of scale that is acheived by niche wargames, its a company that is interested in mass market games. That means its looking for the mass entertainment audience, not the wargamer audience.
I thought detecting design wasn't science. I guess that only applies if we don't like the implications of a possible "yes." Otherwise, it can be science.
Like answering any other question of fact, answering the question "is this outcome the result of design?" can be science, if it is done using the scientific method.
Deliberately ignoring empirical evidence and making "ooh, that seems hard, it must be design" arguments, as is done in the most popular "detecting design" effort that is dismissed as not being science is, indeed, not science.
Queries like "What is the melting point of iron?" are processed and answered, instead of just trying to score pages based on keywords.
I would suggest you search Google for "What is the melting point of iron" (or just "melting point of iron"). In addition to scoring pages based on keywords, it also does natural language search that returns answers to questions that it can handle, including, as it turns out, this one. (In addition to giving you direct answers, it provides the source, or multiple sources, for those answers.)
Finding out actual facts from solid data, and building new facts based on an existing scientific foundation, all asked in natural language, on the other hand... Google has never even tried improving in that area
That's not entirely true. Google has done work on integrating natural language search and returning both answers and links to the sources from which the answers come to direct factual questions (e.g., query google for "population of the united states", "gdp of china", or "surface area of mars"), though it doesn't (currently) try to synthesize information. OTOH, without clearly identifying the sources of the information used in synthesis and their assumptions, the kind of synthesis Alpha seems like it is intended to do looks to be, often, worse-than-useless in that it will produce misleading results with extraordinary detail whose limitations and assumptions will not be obvious to the user.
Rand Simberg asks why express it in terms of percentage of GDP rather than in terms of percentage of federal budget?
Because the important target is the share of the overall economy devoted toward scientific research, not the share of the spending of the federal government; its about the long-term health of the economy.
The budget is something that the president has some control over...
So is the economy, though of course the President's control over the budget is more direct. But, inasmuch as the greater control the President has over the budget is relevant at all, it is why the budget is one place where government action to move the reality to meet the target will be likely to show up, but its certainly not a reason why the target itself should be based on the budget rather than the size of the economy, which is, IMO, a rather bizarre suggestion that makes no sense of any kind.
If the president wasn't on board, why did they bother with a fighter escort?
I would guess because the VC-25A is an airborne military command post, an extremely high value (and expensive, at about 1/3 of a billion dollars each), critical, and limited (there are two) strategic asset.
Re: parachutes as "standard equipment" for skyscrapers.
While it may not have saved everyone, it would have saved a lot of people. Now lets face it, jumping from a building with a parachute is dangerous especially to people untrained (you are essentially facejumping) and in a urban environment, without much room to move, along with possibly hundreds or thousands of other jumpers is not something without major risks. But for all those people where were trapped on the upper floors who couldn't get out of the building because the stairwells and elevators were destroyed below them, well, they would have at least had an option to attempt a first time jump without training with high risk, or if not, die anyway, I would personally be strapping on the parachute and jumping.
Sure, if they were located where they were accessible to those people, they would have probably saved at least some of them. OTOH, they'd also probably result in people being killed who wouldn't otherwise be when they were used in unwarranted panic in situations that, while real emergencies, did not require parachute evacuations. Given that the events of 9/11 are not merely rare but practically sui generis, adopting safety practices designed narrowly to serve in a near-exact repeat of the same circumstances without adequate consideration of the expected outcomes of those practices in vastly more common situations would not be wise.
I'm very curious in what sense of "free" RMS's statement that SaaS is not "free" is intended to be categorically true. Clearly, most SaaS is not "free as in beer", because you pay for it, but that's usually not what "free" means when its used in the sense of something being, or not being, "compatible with your freedom".
Most SaaS relies to some degree on proprietary, as opposed to FOSS, software, and so is likely not "free" in the "free software" sense, but it is of course completely possible to build SaaS systems completely on free software, so while that may be usually true, its certainly not categorically true.
SaaS inherently comes with a risk of data loss or exposure from failures of the service itself (a technical risk), the service operator (a business risk), or your relationship with the service operator (a social risk). But none of those make SaaS "incompatible with your freedom" in any meaningful sense I can see of the word "freedom". They certainly are all risks that should be considered in the context of what one is using SaaS, but they are also all risks that can be mitigated, and are largely risks that exist, assuming you aren't a one-man operation, in any normal business as well (the business risk associated with the outside vendor is really the only thing added to the normal set of risks; the social risks exists in businesses already, presuming they aren't operations where only one person has access to the computing system and data storage media.)
The key thing RMS points to as indicating the anti-"freedom" nature of SaaS seems to be that you can't apply binary patches to the software running on someone else's server. In real SaaS systems, you may have quite a bit of freedom to do this, what you can't do (usually; its of course theoretically possible to allow this, though it would likely lead to disaster in any system without a very well-coordinated group of users) is alter the software that provides the fundamental infrastructure for the SaaS system (e.g., providing and managing the virtual machines on which the software you supply runs.) This certainly limits your practical control of the server, but I'm not sure why it should be considered incompatible with your freedom such that you "must not use" such services, any more than the fact that a server you buy and operate yourself comes with core components that you cannot, as a practical matter, reconfigure (like the internals of the CPU or memory controller) should be considered to make such servers "incompatible with your freedom".
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that the FOIA only applies to the Federal Government to start with, right? Many states have sunshine laws, which may apply to local governments within the state, and local governments may have their own sunshine laws as well, but those are not the FOIA. Whether your friend's dad actually gave you a template for a request under the actual records law applicable to the school, whether the school treated the request as one under the applicable records law, or whether the school felt it was easier to dump a bunch of paper on you rather than even bother to evaluate your request, the one thing that can be stated with a fair degree of certainty is that the actual federal Freedom of Information Act had little substantive to do with your experience.
With a majority using Windows XP, a sizable fraction of the remainder using Vista, and most of the rest using other traditional computer platforms rather than any of the mobile platforms on the list, I hardly see how the conclusion you draw about "the average user" is even remotely justified by the source data.
This might be a "new tactic" in reference to browsers, specifically, but its hardly new to Microsoft. I've frequently had Windows updates switch default associations back to Windows bundled components (Media Player most recently).
Which, you know, was already done with Enterprise. Anyway, given the number of time travelling entities encountered working to disrupt history in the Trek canon, there's sort of a built in excuse for a past that is completely different from the established timeline, right?
There were a couple of words of Klingon used in ST:TMP, but there was no language (there was no grammar, and the only words in the vocabulary were those used in the scene.) It wasn't a language until the grammar and vastly expanded vocabulary was created for ST3:TSFS.
Which is why I said, in GP, "the Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol), as such (that is, having an actual grammar rather than just a handful of words) was created for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock".
Since the Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol), as such (that is, having an actual grammar rather than just a handful of words) was created for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, this is not all that surprising. OTOH, its been used pretty heavily in the movies (and, to a lesser extent, series) since that, though I can't see why anyone would complain about it not being used in a new film (I can see, perhaps, complaining if Klingon's were talking in what was supposed to be "Klingon" but it wasn't tlhIngan Hol, particularly if there was no in-setting justification, but that's a different issue.)
A one-size-fits-all fixed term is a blunt instrument; "limited term" need not always be the same. I personally am a big fan of a reasonably short (10-15 year, or maybe even as short as 5 years) "free" period of copyright protection, with subsequent renewal for very short fixed terms (probably 1 year at a time) available for a cost that is a fixed proportion of a declared surrender value; if the surrender value is paid by any person or combination of persons, the copyright holder gets the surrender value and the copyright is extinguished, moving the work into the public domain.
That's not really the right comparison to judge a "problem" with the course of action. It would clearly be, in retrospect, the wrong decision if more people died of the vaccine than would have been expected to have died from the flu had the vaccination not been carried out, but the fact that more people died of the vaccine than died of the flu when the vaccination was carried out does not appear to be a valid basis, on its own, for criticism.
Otherwise, a vaccination program that prevented all deaths from a disease (even if, unchecked, it would have been expected to kill billions) would be the wrong decision if even one person died from the vaccine, a result that is clearly ludicrous.
Or, unless the user deliberately enabled autorun and deliberately put the media in the drive/slot/etc. What the user wants can be "whatever the creator of the autorun script on this drive programmed", after all.
This is fundamental misthinking about copyright. Copyright (in the United States) doesn't exist to protect authors, it exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." (U.S. Const., Art. I, Sec. 8) To the extent it fails to do that -- or, a fortiori, impedes such progress -- it is because the rules of copyright are poorly crafted from the perspective of the Constitutional basis of Congress's power to grant copyrights in the first place, and need to be reformed to serve that purpose.
It doesn't say that either. It says that the portion used is a factor to be considered in determining fair use, it doesn't say, in the statute, which way that factor weighs. Which makes sense; there are circumstances where using the whole work would probably weigh in favor of fair use, where using selected portions might not (e.g., format- or time-shifting of a work which includes advertising, where removing--or, a fortiori, replacing--the advertising content might, all other things being equal, make the use less likely to be considered fair use.)
Since antialiasing means you are less likely to miss something that is within the space covered by a single pixel because it isn't at the exact grid point, it should usually be a benefit, not a detriment. Antialiasing doesn't work by averaging adjacent pixels, it takes additional samples within the space that is closer to the pixel being rendered than any other pixel.
More precisely, there are democracies where it is virtually impossible for one party to get a majority, which means that majority coalitions are formed on a more transitory, ad hoc basis.
This creates the illusion to Americans of "less-stable" governments, as the ending of a coalition is characterized as a government "falling", but it actually tends to create more stable governments in that there is, on average, less change between successive governments/administrations than in the US system.
Its also notable that popular satisfaction with the government tends to be notably higher in such governments that achieve majorities through ad hoc coalitions than in the US and similar governments which tend toward two-party duopoly with alternating partisan majorities.
Its not jargon, both words in the phrase "women's suffrage" are used in their normal sense, so the fact that "women's suffrage" isn't an active issue shouldn't make the meaning of the phrase obscure. However, the fact that the average person's vocabulary now is much smaller than it was in even the 1950s might have something to do with why many people don't understand what "women's suffrage" means.
How does it make it any less "fair" than people freely suggesting how other people should vote through media other than the internet? On Slashdot, we ridicule patents whose only claim of novelty is "on the internet", so I'm kind of baffled by the hysteria about "if we allow voting on the internet, people will tell other people how they should vote using the internet."
Because, you know, its hardly as if when we allow voting off the internet, people never suggest to other people how they should vote.
My current "smart" phone is a Windows Mobile device, and compared either to my previous Palm OS device or the iPhones I've handled, the OS seems not only not great as a phone, but not great for the PDA features of a smartphone, either. When I replace it, I can guarantee that the one thing I won't be considering is another Windows mobile offering.
It exists to compensate for rendering artifacts due to rendering points on a regular grid; having more pixels per steradian (whether due to higher resolution or greater viewing distance) doesn't eliminate the artifacts, though it will, for most kinds of rendering artifacts, make them less noticeable. AA tries to eliminate the artifacts by sampling additional points around the "real" location on the grid and blending them to create the actual value rendered for the pixel.
Yeah, but Konami isn't a company that is much interested in the kind of scale that is acheived by niche wargames, its a company that is interested in mass market games. That means its looking for the mass entertainment audience, not the wargamer audience.
Like answering any other question of fact, answering the question "is this outcome the result of design?" can be science, if it is done using the scientific method.
Deliberately ignoring empirical evidence and making "ooh, that seems hard, it must be design" arguments, as is done in the most popular "detecting design" effort that is dismissed as not being science is, indeed, not science.
I would suggest you search Google for "What is the melting point of iron" (or just "melting point of iron"). In addition to scoring pages based on keywords, it also does natural language search that returns answers to questions that it can handle, including, as it turns out, this one. (In addition to giving you direct answers, it provides the source, or multiple sources, for those answers.)
That's not entirely true. Google has done work on integrating natural language search and returning both answers and links to the sources from which the answers come to direct factual questions (e.g., query google for "population of the united states", "gdp of china", or "surface area of mars"), though it doesn't (currently) try to synthesize information. OTOH, without clearly identifying the sources of the information used in synthesis and their assumptions, the kind of synthesis Alpha seems like it is intended to do looks to be, often, worse-than-useless in that it will produce misleading results with extraordinary detail whose limitations and assumptions will not be obvious to the user.
Because the important target is the share of the overall economy devoted toward scientific research, not the share of the spending of the federal government; its about the long-term health of the economy.
So is the economy, though of course the President's control over the budget is more direct. But, inasmuch as the greater control the President has over the budget is relevant at all, it is why the budget is one place where government action to move the reality to meet the target will be likely to show up, but its certainly not a reason why the target itself should be based on the budget rather than the size of the economy, which is, IMO, a rather bizarre suggestion that makes no sense of any kind.
I would guess because the VC-25A is an airborne military command post, an extremely high value (and expensive, at about 1/3 of a billion dollars each), critical, and limited (there are two) strategic asset.
Re: parachutes as "standard equipment" for skyscrapers.
Sure, if they were located where they were accessible to those people, they would have probably saved at least some of them. OTOH, they'd also probably result in people being killed who wouldn't otherwise be when they were used in unwarranted panic in situations that, while real emergencies, did not require parachute evacuations. Given that the events of 9/11 are not merely rare but practically sui generis, adopting safety practices designed narrowly to serve in a near-exact repeat of the same circumstances without adequate consideration of the expected outcomes of those practices in vastly more common situations would not be wise.
I'm very curious in what sense of "free" RMS's statement that SaaS is not "free" is intended to be categorically true. Clearly, most SaaS is not "free as in beer", because you pay for it, but that's usually not what "free" means when its used in the sense of something being, or not being, "compatible with your freedom".
Most SaaS relies to some degree on proprietary, as opposed to FOSS, software, and so is likely not "free" in the "free software" sense, but it is of course completely possible to build SaaS systems completely on free software, so while that may be usually true, its certainly not categorically true.
SaaS inherently comes with a risk of data loss or exposure from failures of the service itself (a technical risk), the service operator (a business risk), or your relationship with the service operator (a social risk). But none of those make SaaS "incompatible with your freedom" in any meaningful sense I can see of the word "freedom". They certainly are all risks that should be considered in the context of what one is using SaaS, but they are also all risks that can be mitigated, and are largely risks that exist, assuming you aren't a one-man operation, in any normal business as well (the business risk associated with the outside vendor is really the only thing added to the normal set of risks; the social risks exists in businesses already, presuming they aren't operations where only one person has access to the computing system and data storage media.)
The key thing RMS points to as indicating the anti-"freedom" nature of SaaS seems to be that you can't apply binary patches to the software running on someone else's server. In real SaaS systems, you may have quite a bit of freedom to do this, what you can't do (usually; its of course theoretically possible to allow this, though it would likely lead to disaster in any system without a very well-coordinated group of users) is alter the software that provides the fundamental infrastructure for the SaaS system (e.g., providing and managing the virtual machines on which the software you supply runs.) This certainly limits your practical control of the server, but I'm not sure why it should be considered incompatible with your freedom such that you "must not use" such services, any more than the fact that a server you buy and operate yourself comes with core components that you cannot, as a practical matter, reconfigure (like the internals of the CPU or memory controller) should be considered to make such servers "incompatible with your freedom".