Now that Verizon has more-or-less successfully defended their BROAD patents on VoIP stuff, I wonder how long it will be before AT&T/Cingular starts suing ALL of the other phone companies for violating THEIR patents.
Its hardly as if AT&T wasn't already enforcing its patents.
I imagine that AT&T owns MANY of the patents on much of the phone technology currently in use.
Possibly, though patents don't live forever (or effectively so) the way modern copyrights do, so lots of the patents that they may have secured over traditional telephone service are probably long expired. Then again, just because AT&T owns a patent in that area doesn't mean other big phone companies are violating it if they are using the patented technology. Licensing exists, after all.
What really is lame is that since the former tenant was family the police are calling it a family feud. Thus, they won't issue the subpoena to Craigslist so that the lady can try and press criminal charges. Which basically means since the cops won't help her, she probably wouldn't even win in a civil courtroom. She'll never be able to prove who made the post without the police - and thus the crime will go unpunished.
This would all be true if it weren't possible for litigants in a civil case to secure subpoenas and for civil cases to be initiated against unknown defendants. Its no uncommon for civil cases against anonymous internet posters to be filed against a "John Doe" defendant, then the plaintiff issues a subpoena against either an ISP or a forum host to get information from which the anonymous poster can be better identified, and then revising the claim to target the appropriate specific defendant.
So, no, the absence of criminal prosecution does not mean she can't get the records in the course of a civil suit.
How long before we see a defection and find out that N.Korea or some other evil empire's government is sponsoring this type of activity.
I dunno. Seems more likely that there'd be a scandal and we'd find out that AV vendors were sponsoring this type of activity. The worse the problem is, the more people will pay for protection, after all.
I don't think you've thought it through . . . if you look at the cost vs. efficiency the paint still comes ahead, even with the efficiency hit. You just bump the area requirements by 2, so you only get a 1/5 cost advantage, so you pay 20% of the equivalent silicon system.
I don't think you've thought it through: both for people putting cells on their house and for large scale installations, available area is either an absolutely limited or often an expensive thing to add (the area required per unit output is already one of the major drawbacks to solar plants for large-scale generation.) Anything that reduces efficiency is a losing proposition.
There's a concept called the "eggshell skull rule" which basically says that if your actions harm someone, you're responsible even if you couldn't predict the extent of the harm based on what you knew at the time - e.g. if you slap someone in the head, not knowing that his skull is as brittle as an eggshell, you're in trouble even though the slap wouldn't have harmed an average person.
Now, suppose we extend that a little. If you're prone to compulsive gambling, but you don't know it yet, and you go into a casino, play those first few hands, get hooked, and five years down the line your kids are starving... aren't you still ultimately responsible for that harm?
The "eggshell skull" rule is a legal principle which applies to harms to others, and applies to harms of an unexpected degree (due to an unexpected sensitivity in the victim) resulting form a kind of conduct prone to cause the kind, though not usually the degree, of harm that actually results; the most natural extension of it (though even this is a stretch) to gambling would be to make the gambling establishment responsible for harm to the compulsive gambler whether or not they had any reason to know the gambler was compulsive.
Of course, as I said, even that is something of a stretch; the "extension" you propose, though, is so distant from the rule and its rationale that invoking them does nothing to justify the position you are arguing for.
We can argue if our brain has enough capacity to hold all that data and compute a usefull result, it probably don't. But that is a useless argument since we are using external storage devices for a few milenia now, and external computation devices for a few decades.
Actually, we've been (from the perspective of any one brain) using both since, at least, the invention of language, which is a considerably longer time than "a few millenia", by most usual definitions of "a few". But, yeah, your general point holds.
If you realize that 95% of those are bots, or "players" being _paid_ to occupy content providers areas (the 2nd live version of link-networks to boost ranking), it shrinks quite a bit.
Even if your 95% number is accurate, and ignoring that paid players are still live human participants, 5% of 5 million total subscribers is 250,000 and 5% of the 1.6 million recent users is 80,000, either of which still show the earlier 20k claim of total users to be way low.
Typically, for the purposes of deciding whether an act is a "victimless crime", we ignore the person committing the act, on the principle that the kind of "victims" we're concerned about are unwilling, innocent victims.
In that context it's easy to see that gambling is indeed victimless. If I go to a casino and play a hand of blackjack, who's the victim? Not me; I committed the act with full knowledge of the possible consequences and willingly accepted them.
If you are a compulsive gambler, its arguable whether or not you freely accepted the risks, because its arguable whether you had actual capacity to refrain. Still, one could still view criminalizing the individual gambler as punishing victimless crime, but as gambling doesn't require a distinct "house" to occur, without punishing the gambler, you can't deal with the potential victimization of gambling systematically without criminalizing all participants, with a greater focus on those that a clearly gambling "establishments".
Of course, dealing with harms to particular "victims" isn't even theoretically the purpose of criminal law, that's the purpose of civil law; preventing general social harm is the point of criminal law, which is why criminal prosecutions are conducted in the name of the state, not the purportedly injured party. This is also why many criminal laws criminalize, and seek thereby to discourage, behavior to which harm to uninvolved third parties frequently (or perhaps even less frequently, where the harm is serious) results, even if it is not part of the essence of the act.
Yeah, it is. "Product X is something you need" is an idea. And, if you want people to internalize it, you'll often need to get them to internalize a number of other ideas.
Lots of things have caused harm to people, and yet they're still legal. Alcohol, driving, guns.
Yes, things that are legal and cause harm may not be "victimless", but they aren't crimes.
Gambling is certainly no worse than any of these!
Whether it is worse than any of those things (and, I'd say, its pretty clearly worse in terms of harm:utility ratio than driving, but that's another discussion) is irrelevant to the question of whether it is fairly described as a "victimless crime."
That it is not "worse" than other things which may have victims but are not crimes does not establish that it is a victimless crime. It may be useful as part of an argument that it, despite not being victimless, ought not to be a crime, but you'd need more than you've presented to make that argument.
Alcoholics Anonymous has weekly meetings, where you discuss not drinking is a better way of being and share support stories for not drinking, and write books on how you can be a very happy non drinker and find meaning in it.
But that doesn't make Alcoholics Anonymous a religion.
Actually, that's quite debatable, and certainly depends on the precise context of the discussion of "religion". There is a reason that AA rates a significant discussion in Galanter's book on new religious movements, Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion.
The thing is, as with many categories, "religion" is fuzzy rather than crisp set; there are things which clearly are very much religions (like, say, the Catholic Church) and things that are very much not religions (like, say, a rocking chair), and lots of things whose membership or lack thereof in the set of "religions" is far less unambiguous.
Note also that unless you're speaking to naked pigmy mole rats in the hopes of starting a kinky intimate relationship with them, a lecture is not in general a sales effort.
Its more like a sales presentation than all too many lecturers want to think; the fundamental techniques of getting people to retain the ideas you are presenting aren't that much different. Now, the details will vary some based on the idea you are trying to transfer and on the audience, to be sure.
Really? A comma splice is where two independent clauses are joined by a comma rather than being either separate sentences, joined by a semicolon, or joined by a comma and a preposition. Would you care to identify which comma in that sentence you think is joining two independent clauses?
and it's still bad grammar.
Well, yes, there were several syntactical errors (such as "its" for "it's") in the sentence. Had someone made a point about those, it could have been an accurate grammar flame. I didn't say the sentence was grammatically correct; I said the particular attack made was inaccurate. Which it was.
Their findings completely fail to take into account multiple learning styles.
No, they just fail to accord with your expectations based on your beliefs about how multiple learning styles should make the results turn out.
People who are heavy visual learners will tune out what the speaker is saying and just read what's on it. Most of the stuff that the speaker is saying is near insensible anyway because those paths aren't very good at absorption. For heavy auditory learners, you could have almost anything on the slide, but it wouldn't matter unless the speaker described it. The power point isn't redundant to the speaker, it's a backup, in case the audience contains heavy visual/poor auditory learners.
No, its not. The results show that that doesn't work. And, you know, you explain what may be part of the reason why: most learners are strong in both visual and auditory, though which they are strongest in varies. So perhaps getting identical information down the channels people tend not to shut out increases distraction without much increasing the effectiveness of the most effective channel.
That doesn't mean you don't use visual and audio in an effective presentation: this finding is about how you make an effective presentation combining them, and its not by presenting the same words simultaneously in different media.
The best teachers in the industry also include segments where they have their students moving physically about the classroom.
Different segments appealing to different senses (or breaking up boredom) is completely different from presenting identical information in different channels concurrently.
The phrase you want to use is "raises the question," not "begs the question." The latter refers very specifically to circular reasoning, which isn't what you meant to describe.
No, "begs the question" used intransitively (As in "The argument #{foo} begs the question") refers to circular reasoning. Used transitively as in ("The argument #{foo} begs the question #{bar}") it means exactly the same as "raises the question" or "calls for an answer to the question". The transitive use is unambiguously distinguishable from the intransitive use and common. It also (though this is not consistently with the etymology of the intransitive form) makes a nice, consistent generalization of the intransitive form, since the intransitive form can be viewed as equivalent to the transitive form where the implied object is whatever question the argument that is the subject purports to answer.
You're assuming that it was ideas and not facts that were rewritten. If he was explaining the process that an engine uses to work, it's rather hard to come up with a new angle on that. If he was talking about the socio-political climate today, there's plenty of room for original thought.
Since there WAS technical language involved, I'm inclined to think it was a description of a process, rather than an idea that was being talked about.
So? While the inability to express the same idea in alternate form may be a relevant consideration for copyright or other legal violations, its not relevant to the discussion of plagiarism. If you use a source for information, even if that is transformed somewhat, you need to cite it. Period.
But say it WAS an idea. Why can't he write about it?
He can write about it. He just needs to cite the source for the original idea.
Nobody owns them.
That's not the issue with plagiarism, which is distinct from (though the two overlap) IP violation. If it was owned, he couldn't use it without permission. Plagiarism isn't about ownership and permission, its about intellectual honesty.
And putting it 'in his own words' makes it his interpretation of the idea, rather than plagiarism of the original author's idea.
Yes, it makes it "his interpretation" of the original author's idea. It remains plagiarism, however, if the original idea is not credited properly to the original author. Paraphrases, of course, are different than direct quotation, which is why, while sourced, they aren't set off with quotation marks or indentation for long passages; that indicates that the interpretation is the immediate author's, while the ideas underlying that interpretation come from the cited source.
My personal view is that rights are not granted unless there is a reciprocal responsibility.
Your personal view is, as a statement of fact, incorrect as applied to human rights now (while humans have both rights and responsibilities under the law, they are often independent of each other, and many human rights exist for people who because of age or other personal characteristics are excused from the responsibilities that are commonly viewed as somehow "attached" to those rights.)
If you meant merely to state that rights ought to inextricably be linked to reciprocal responsibilities, well, then I think I prefer to current status quo in human rights to a state in which that view was actually practiced.
Both the first and second of your points rest on the confusion of an argument for a sufficient condition for rights with a claim of a necessary condition. The two are not the same thing.
The third point is just feigned ignorance. They expressly make the argument of why they think chimps should have human rights, you have simply ignored it and then asked a question already answered, and then gone on to repeat the first point you make.
By that standard, shouldn't people, say, in vegitative states or with extreme cases of metal retardation be legally not human, and therefore eligible for the hot dog machine?
Saying that having a certain degree of function ought to be viewed as a sufficient condition for granting basic rights is not the same as saying it is a necessary condition.
If a chimp can sue me for abusing it, then I damn sure better be able to sue the chimp for abusing me.
Even among humans, its possible for someone (i.e., a child) to be protected by laws that provide causes of action that are not symmetric with the causes of action available against the protected person.
You certainly wouldn't expect a chimp to be able to understand the law and understand the consequences of things such as the aforementioned flinging poo at people.
Nor would I expect a human infant too understand the law and the consequences of its actions. Nevertheless, I would expect such an infant to be entitled to protection against, e.g., arbitrary detention by the government and be entitled to the full benefit of protections like habeas corpus.
Besides, what the hell is the point in chimps even having rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion?
If they had no capacity to exercise the right (a questionable supposition, chimps can learn rudimentary human sign language and express preferences with it, which is all that is necessary to exercise free expression) there would be no effect at all (and thus no harm) in granting it to them. If they have the capacity, there is clearly a point in protecting them for punishment for pure exercise of that capacity.
If you RTFA, you'll note (once you get past the the typical spin in the first couple 'graphs of any newspaper article) that the substance is not that PowerPoint, or presentation software more generally, or even, more generally still, using visual aids in a presentation is ineffective or hurts retention.
Its presenting exact same information in the same manner (i.e., the same words) in multiple different formats simultaneously hurts retention. As John Sweller states in TFA:
It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.
Of course, anyone who has taken a basic speech class that discusses effective use of visual aids would know that's exactly the wrong use of a visual aid, computerized or otherwise. So, while its interesting research that reveals that what is widely accepted by experts in the field of communication to be a bad practice is actually demonstrably counterproductive to recall rather than merely an annoyance to the audience that isn't an optimum use of resources, its not any kind of particular blow against PowerPoint, presentation software, or visual aids in presentation, just further reinforcement that having an easy-to-use tool to produce and display visual aids doesn't replace understanding how to effectively use them.
For the record, I've spent quite a few hours looking at various EV conversions, and even light sports cars using LI-ION batteries tend to have a range of about 30 miles from what I've seen. Vehicles that can't actually be used by anyone are poor representatives of technology.
Production cars—some of the RAV4 EVs are still on the road, the EV1 and EVplus aren't becaue they were all leased rather than sold, and retired when the original leases expired—are not "vehicles that can't actually be used by anyone". And the RAV4 EV gets (and the EV1 and EVplus got) over 100 miles per charge, not around 30.
Electric vehicles that have been built and used and continue to be used are better representatives of what can be done with electric vehicles than aftermarket conversions.
Self driving cars? Yes, along with time-traveling Delorians and floating skateboards.
There is a considerable difference between technology demonstrators and movie props.
Neither tiltrotor transport aircraft nor warp drives are commercially available or in mass production, but they are in widely different categories. Self-driving cars are in the category with tiltrotors, while time-traveling Delorians (other than fixed-rate unidirectional travel, of course) are in the category with warp drives.
Self driving cars have to be, (at least in recent years) an absolute con, just to get grant money. Would you trust technology as stupid as what we have?
I don't trust humans as stupid as what we have on the road, for the most part.
Slashdot Mirror
Its hardly as if AT&T wasn't already enforcing its patents.
Possibly, though patents don't live forever (or effectively so) the way modern copyrights do, so lots of the patents that they may have secured over traditional telephone service are probably long expired. Then again, just because AT&T owns a patent in that area doesn't mean other big phone companies are violating it if they are using the patented technology. Licensing exists, after all.
This would all be true if it weren't possible for litigants in a civil case to secure subpoenas and for civil cases to be initiated against unknown defendants. Its no uncommon for civil cases against anonymous internet posters to be filed against a "John Doe" defendant, then the plaintiff issues a subpoena against either an ISP or a forum host to get information from which the anonymous poster can be better identified, and then revising the claim to target the appropriate specific defendant.
So, no, the absence of criminal prosecution does not mean she can't get the records in the course of a civil suit.
I dunno. Seems more likely that there'd be a scandal and we'd find out that AV vendors were sponsoring this type of activity. The worse the problem is, the more people will pay for protection, after all.
I don't think you've thought it through: both for people putting cells on their house and for large scale installations, available area is either an absolutely limited or often an expensive thing to add (the area required per unit output is already one of the major drawbacks to solar plants for large-scale generation.) Anything that reduces efficiency is a losing proposition.
Actually, we've been (from the perspective of any one brain) using both since, at least, the invention of language, which is a considerably longer time than "a few millenia", by most usual definitions of "a few". But, yeah, your general point holds.
Even if your 95% number is accurate, and ignoring that paid players are still live human participants, 5% of 5 million total subscribers is 250,000 and 5% of the 1.6 million recent users is 80,000, either of which still show the earlier 20k claim of total users to be way low.
If you are a compulsive gambler, its arguable whether or not you freely accepted the risks, because its arguable whether you had actual capacity to refrain. Still, one could still view criminalizing the individual gambler as punishing victimless crime, but as gambling doesn't require a distinct "house" to occur, without punishing the gambler, you can't deal with the potential victimization of gambling systematically without criminalizing all participants, with a greater focus on those that a clearly gambling "establishments".
Of course, dealing with harms to particular "victims" isn't even theoretically the purpose of criminal law, that's the purpose of civil law; preventing general social harm is the point of criminal law, which is why criminal prosecutions are conducted in the name of the state, not the purportedly injured party. This is also why many criminal laws criminalize, and seek thereby to discourage, behavior to which harm to uninvolved third parties frequently (or perhaps even less frequently, where the harm is serious) results, even if it is not part of the essence of the act.
Yeah, it is. "Product X is something you need" is an idea. And, if you want people to internalize it, you'll often need to get them to internalize a number of other ideas.
Yes, things that are legal and cause harm may not be "victimless", but they aren't crimes.
Whether it is worse than any of those things (and, I'd say, its pretty clearly worse in terms of harm:utility ratio than driving, but that's another discussion) is irrelevant to the question of whether it is fairly described as a "victimless crime."
That it is not "worse" than other things which may have victims but are not crimes does not establish that it is a victimless crime. It may be useful as part of an argument that it, despite not being victimless, ought not to be a crime, but you'd need more than you've presented to make that argument.
Actually, that's quite debatable, and certainly depends on the precise context of the discussion of "religion". There is a reason that AA rates a significant discussion in Galanter's book on new religious movements, Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion.
The thing is, as with many categories, "religion" is fuzzy rather than crisp set; there are things which clearly are very much religions (like, say, the Catholic Church) and things that are very much not religions (like, say, a rocking chair), and lots of things whose membership or lack thereof in the set of "religions" is far less unambiguous.
Its more like a sales presentation than all too many lecturers want to think; the fundamental techniques of getting people to retain the ideas you are presenting aren't that much different. Now, the details will vary some based on the idea you are trying to transfer and on the audience, to be sure.
Really? A comma splice is where two independent clauses are joined by a comma rather than being either separate sentences, joined by a semicolon, or joined by a comma and a preposition. Would you care to identify which comma in that sentence you think is joining two independent clauses?
Well, yes, there were several syntactical errors (such as "its" for "it's") in the sentence. Had someone made a point about those, it could have been an accurate grammar flame. I didn't say the sentence was grammatically correct; I said the particular attack made was inaccurate. Which it was.
No, they just fail to accord with your expectations based on your beliefs about how multiple learning styles should make the results turn out.
No, its not. The results show that that doesn't work. And, you know, you explain what may be part of the reason why: most learners are strong in both visual and auditory, though which they are strongest in varies. So perhaps getting identical information down the channels people tend not to shut out increases distraction without much increasing the effectiveness of the most effective channel.
That doesn't mean you don't use visual and audio in an effective presentation: this finding is about how you make an effective presentation combining them, and its not by presenting the same words simultaneously in different media.
Different segments appealing to different senses (or breaking up boredom) is completely different from presenting identical information in different channels concurrently.
If you would be that with artificial neurons, why are you anything else with natural ones?
No, "begs the question" used intransitively (As in "The argument #{foo} begs the question") refers to circular reasoning. Used transitively as in ("The argument #{foo} begs the question #{bar}") it means exactly the same as "raises the question" or "calls for an answer to the question". The transitive use is unambiguously distinguishable from the intransitive use and common. It also (though this is not consistently with the etymology of the intransitive form) makes a nice, consistent generalization of the intransitive form, since the intransitive form can be viewed as equivalent to the transitive form where the implied object is whatever question the argument that is the subject purports to answer.
I don't know, but what I'd like to know is why you quoted a long sentence that is not a run-on before asking that question?
So? While the inability to express the same idea in alternate form may be a relevant consideration for copyright or other legal violations, its not relevant to the discussion of plagiarism. If you use a source for information, even if that is transformed somewhat, you need to cite it. Period.
He can write about it. He just needs to cite the source for the original idea.
That's not the issue with plagiarism, which is distinct from (though the two overlap) IP violation. If it was owned, he couldn't use it without permission. Plagiarism isn't about ownership and permission, its about intellectual honesty.
Yes, it makes it "his interpretation" of the original author's idea. It remains plagiarism, however, if the original idea is not credited properly to the original author. Paraphrases, of course, are different than direct quotation, which is why, while sourced, they aren't set off with quotation marks or indentation for long passages; that indicates that the interpretation is the immediate author's, while the ideas underlying that interpretation come from the cited source.
Your personal view is, as a statement of fact, incorrect as applied to human rights now (while humans have both rights and responsibilities under the law, they are often independent of each other, and many human rights exist for people who because of age or other personal characteristics are excused from the responsibilities that are commonly viewed as somehow "attached" to those rights.)
If you meant merely to state that rights ought to inextricably be linked to reciprocal responsibilities, well, then I think I prefer to current status quo in human rights to a state in which that view was actually practiced.
Both the first and second of your points rest on the confusion of an argument for a sufficient condition for rights with a claim of a necessary condition. The two are not the same thing.
The third point is just feigned ignorance. They expressly make the argument of why they think chimps should have human rights, you have simply ignored it and then asked a question already answered, and then gone on to repeat the first point you make.
Saying that having a certain degree of function ought to be viewed as a sufficient condition for granting basic rights is not the same as saying it is a necessary condition.
p --> q does not entail not-p --> not-q.
Even among humans, its possible for someone (i.e., a child) to be protected by laws that provide causes of action that are not symmetric with the causes of action available against the protected person.
Nor would I expect a human infant too understand the law and the consequences of its actions. Nevertheless, I would expect such an infant to be entitled to protection against, e.g., arbitrary detention by the government and be entitled to the full benefit of protections like habeas corpus.
If they had no capacity to exercise the right (a questionable supposition, chimps can learn rudimentary human sign language and express preferences with it, which is all that is necessary to exercise free expression) there would be no effect at all (and thus no harm) in granting it to them. If they have the capacity, there is clearly a point in protecting them for punishment for pure exercise of that capacity.
Its presenting exact same information in the same manner (i.e., the same words) in multiple different formats simultaneously hurts retention. As John Sweller states in TFA:
Of course, anyone who has taken a basic speech class that discusses effective use of visual aids would know that's exactly the wrong use of a visual aid, computerized or otherwise. So, while its interesting research that reveals that what is widely accepted by experts in the field of communication to be a bad practice is actually demonstrably counterproductive to recall rather than merely an annoyance to the audience that isn't an optimum use of resources, its not any kind of particular blow against PowerPoint, presentation software, or visual aids in presentation, just further reinforcement that having an easy-to-use tool to produce and display visual aids doesn't replace understanding how to effectively use them.
Production cars—some of the RAV4 EVs are still on the road, the EV1 and EVplus aren't becaue they were all leased rather than sold, and retired when the original leases expired—are not "vehicles that can't actually be used by anyone". And the RAV4 EV gets (and the EV1 and EVplus got) over 100 miles per charge, not around 30.
Electric vehicles that have been built and used and continue to be used are better representatives of what can be done with electric vehicles than aftermarket conversions.
There is a considerable difference between technology demonstrators and movie props.
Neither tiltrotor transport aircraft nor warp drives are commercially available or in mass production, but they are in widely different categories. Self-driving cars are in the category with tiltrotors, while time-traveling Delorians (other than fixed-rate unidirectional travel, of course) are in the category with warp drives.
I don't trust humans as stupid as what we have on the road, for the most part.