Nonsense. Responding to an request, they provided a text file containing rendering instructions compliant with standards (or not, but close to compliant). End of transaction. You don't violate any of their rights by not reading their reply in the way that they expect you to.
You don't HAVE to use a browser at all to view their site. You could use wget piped to less and 'render' it in your mind's eye. Alternatively, you could use a simple (or complicated!) algorithm to render the parts that you were most interested in and suppress those parts that you were not interested in. The fact that someone else will give the webmaster money every time someone downloads the instructions and subsequently renders the ad in no way changes the fact that you are free to use your computer to process information in a manner you see fit.
From a pragmatic standpoint, I agree with you that in order to support websites that ads should be viewed, but claiming that you're required to process information the way the sender wants you to simply doesn't seem to have support.
Another thing I don't understand is how anyone could take a pill that spends more then half of the tv commercial talking about how many side effects there are and that rare occasional deaths can occur. WTF?
Every drug has side effects, some more noticeable than others. The simple fact is that we don't understand human biology well enough to predict or prevent all side effects while preserving the mechanism of action of the drug. As in engineering, it is a trade off: you exchange symptomatic and pathophysiologic relief for less severe symptoms due to adverse reactions to the drug. When adverse reaction to drugs exceeds the relief granted by them, they're typically discontinued on a patient-by-patient basis. The only way to avoid all side effects is stop taking drugs until human biology advances far enough to control for them all which will never occur in our lifetime.
Isn't this basically the business model of Napster? A quick search of their website reveals the following marketing text:
Napster maintains the largest on-demand streaming and MP3 catalog - over 7 million songs - so you don't have to. Never download another file or rip another CD unless you want to. With Napster, you can easily access your music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I prefer certainty. If it turns-out that arresting people are 66 is too stringent, then solution is to rewrite the laws to make them effective, not to just ignore them or apply them randomly.
Agreed, but until the laws are rewritten so that they would reasonably be enforced 100% of the time, it's probably not a good idea to push for 100% enforcement of laws that were written at a time when that simply wasn't possible.
I agree with you that increasing efficiency would ideally end up being a good thing. My primary objection is that the laws are not written to be enforced 100% of the time. Should every single person who exceeds the speed limit by 1 mph even for a few seconds get a ticket? Should every jaywalker get ticketed every time even when there is no traffic to speak of? I'm not too keen to see either of these happen.
Efficiency in law enforcement is great, but I'm not sure the efficiency of our policy makers in writing reasonable laws has quite caught up with our new technological abilities to enforce the law.
Well, they do spend more on marketing than they do actual research... I've noticed that this is often brought up when discussing drug companies. I'm never quite sure what to make of it. The often efficient properties of capitalism notwithstanding, isn't the need to deploy money into advertising an inefficient aspect of a competitive economic system rather than some evil aspect of Big Pharma?
Perhaps I simply don't see a more elegant solution, but it seems that in order to eliminate the need for marketing in drug development competition would need to be eliminated (perhaps by the creation of some national or international regulatory authority?), but I haven't often heard people suggesting that be done. Thoughts?
Not that I've implemented such a solution, but you could envision doing this by principle component analysis. You could build a vector space out of "typical" people as basis vectors (in some rigorously defined sense; you'd probably call them "eigenpeople" if you were a researcher; see Eigenface on Wikipedia for an example). Then for each individual you want to profile, you could project a data set with data about them onto the set of representative eigenpeople and get back some type of information like:
40% match to people who are good programmers
30% match to people who like vanilla ice cream
20% match to people who want to conquer Earth
10% match to people who like Death Metal Armed with that, you could try to construct some type of marketing scheme based on some combination of the strategies that are effective with your "typical" people. That would allow you to target any arbitrary individual even if they aren't well represented by anyone you've encountered so far.
I guess that's less of a well-developed algorithm and more of a plausibility argument, but the point is that you could imagine that there could be successful strategies to deal with unique individuals given general a large enough data set containing informative information on how humans operate (even if this particular algorithm doesn't work that well in practice).
While that is an interesting and provocative idea, it's also a stupid one. This would allow for all sorts of eminent domain-esque property seizures done by anyone with sufficient resources to slightly outbid you. Maybe it's a better allocation of resources from the perspective of the tax-collecting government that someone seizes your house to build a tax-generating UberMart Ultimate Shopping Center, but the system unfairly penalizes real people who have value entrenched in non-taxable things (for example, providing a stable environment for a family). Effectively, it would begin taxing those things as well since they would have to be just summed into the total value of the property.
I'm not sure I agree that the ruling class is entirely at fault here. I'd lay the blame squarely on the large middle class who are often all too willing to trade away their freedom for additional security. I'd say you're right on target here except I would be a bit less kind to the middle class. The middle class doesn't appear to require an actual increase in security, but rather only a perceived increase in security.
While this has the advantage of being employee-implementable, it is also quite inefficient. It requires a phone call and 2 or more e-mail messages ("Is this correct?", "No, item 4 should be...", "Okay, is this now correct?", "Yes") in order to convey the information that could have been send correctly the first time by the boss requiring only one e-mail. If a boss wants to ruin his employees productivity in order to enforce a specific communication format, I suppose that's his right, but does that make that person a very good leader or communicator? No.
Interesting, but I'm not sure how much trust I would place in a photograph in this age of photoshop especially if they were being delivered by someone who could be an adversary. Then again, I'm not skilled in the use of photo editing programs so maybe more is involved to commit some type of fraud through photographs than I might naively imagine (and I suppose there are likely easier ways of doing it).
What good is freedom of expression if you can't be sure your expression is your own? Isn't this already solved through public key cryptography (i.e. message signing in PGP/GPG)? Such mechanisms enable it to be demonstrated that the message hasn't been tampered with. Instead, what it might pose a threat to is anonymous free speech. Admittedly, though, that is just as bad.
My current understanding of quantum tech is the data still goes by traditional means but they use a quantum *handwaving* thing to ensure the bits sent traditionally haven't been messed with. It works under a simple principle: Bits coming down a traditional wire from Alice to Bob can be intercepted by Eve, read and then re-generated down the wire so that neither Alice nor Bob know that Eve has read the message. Quantum cryptography exploits a property of a quantum system that says that if you measure a system: (a) you change the system and (b) you can't get all of the original information about the system back out [think Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: if you know position accurately, you don't know velocity accurately; there are other pairs of physical quantities that have this relationship too]. (a) and (b) together imply that Eve can't measure a signal and then re-create it and send it on it's way without Alice and Bob noticing a problem with the statistics they expect to observe. The benefit of quantum cryptography is that Alice and Bob know that there was an interceptor if there was one and can react accordingly. Because it is relatively low-throughput, usually only some garbage data like a key is exchanged and then more traditional means of cryptography can be used.
IAAUP (I am an undergraduate physicist), but if YAAP and know better, please correct me if I'm at all wrong.
Whatever you do, skip research - unless you look forward to flushing several years of your life down the drain to help some professor reel in a research grant, who'll barely care to list your name on the paper. I can't help but feel that this is overly cynical. I'm an undergraduate science and engineering major and spent the summer working at a medical center as a undergraduate researcher. My experience, as well as those of my peers, was largely positive with my principle investigator being insightful, thoughtful and fully willing to give credit where it was due. His graduate students and postdocs seemed similarly happy in their positions in the lab. I think it's true that the life of a graduate student is likely to be one of long hours, but if you're really passionate about your field it's probably not that difficult to allocate a lot of time to it. And sure, there are definitely bad heads of laboratories out there who need to be avoided, but it's not unreasonable to find a good professor to serve as a mentor and a guide if you're willing to look for one.
If you want to be successful coming out of grad school- go for engineering, either mechanical or electrical. Big shortages predicted in both fields, from what I've heard. Not that I'm against graduate school in electrical engineering (part of my undergraduate training is in it), but it doesn't seem like a safe life strategy to choose a field based on where shortages in the job market are when choosing a career. A shortage today could well translate into a saturated field in 10 years. Fields should be chosen based on where passion is. I really don't want someone who just loves biology and would make important contributions to that field if there were able to follow their passion to go off and become an uninspired electrical engineer (not to say that there aren't inspired electrical engineers!).
Have you considered helping to build infrastructure (bridges, buildings, roads)? Alternatively, you could get a PhD and work in some theoretical area (e.g. building faster semiconductors, developing better materials). Perhaps you might find some period of service to a humanitarian organization like Engineers Without Borders to be worthwhile?
The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution is a restriction on the powers of the government, not on private individuals. Since a corporation is largely treated as an individual, I don't think the 4th Amendment has anything to do with this technology. The only case in which there might even be questions seems to be if the government was using this technology for some purpose and even then it doesn't seem obvious that there is necessarily anything wrong with that either.
IANAL; If you AAL, please correct my interpretation if it's wrong.
As a Christian, I've been dreading the opening of this museum. It can only undermine what little dwindling respect remains for the Bible and for God. As an atheist, I have mixed feelings about the opening of this museum for exactly that reason. One the one hand, the claims of the Institute for Creation Research (icr.org) were sufficiently shocking that I began thinking critically about my religion. In my case, it led to the abandonment of my faith, but that that isn't a given. So in one sense, it is probably good that there is something like this new creation museum opening because it will get people to think closely about religious ideas.
On the other hand, this will serve as yet another lightening rod in the on-going conflict between religion and secularism in Western culture. Intense conflict about this isn't going to solve much of anything. Nothing is solved by shouting at those who disagree with you about their status as one of the damned or about their their stupidity for ignoring science.
While your statement is informative and interesting, I still think there is a significant problem with that even being a possibility. Why even bother with the rule of law if the only thing preventing its abuse is the sanity of our judges? If the law allows for something so ridiculous as a 40 year sentence, then there is a bug in the law. We ought to specify the law much more precisely so as to prevent obviously incorrect possible sentences. Why not operate on the principle of minimum privilege? Give the judge the absolute minimum amount of discretionary power as is reasonable to implement in legislation. If it's good enough for security in software engineering, why isn't it good enough for our legal code?
Slightly OT, but did you noticed on the download page that it says "Due to the french DADVSI law, we are requested to remove the following legal BitTorrent links...". I read the Wikipedia article, but it's still not clear to me what this might mean. Anyone have insight?
Meetings in face to face can be more productive and it can be easier to get things done. You really think so? I find that face-to-face meetings are a much more difficult medium to exchange ideas in rather than than e-mail or, when rapid response is required, using IMs or video conferencing software. When discussing in person ideas are often broken before being fully expressed or parties can be subtly influenced by social and conversational constraints. I know that I'm at least much more likely to express disagreement in written form rather than in conversation. Usually, also, I find ideas are sub-optimally expressed in conversation rather than in writing since one doesn't have the luxury of editing to ensure that all the written words actually express the true intent of the thinker in the most clear manner possible. Plus, you can't search reality the way you could e-mail or an IM or (maybe as a future speech-recognition application a recorded video conference?)
I would be a bit curious, actually, to know whether/.'ers think that meetings can be productive. Perhaps my own experience or preferences are not the norm (or perhaps they are?).
The issues you raised about whether or not the fourth amendment applies aside for the moment:
However, the idea of giving constitutional protections to everyone who makes it inside our borders, even those planning to do us harm, seems like a more serious threat than any amount of illegal wiretapping. If there was some way to magically determine (with perfect accuracy) the people who were planning to do harm to society, there would be no need for this provision at all. The police would just make the determination and accomplish their mission to defend and serve by dealing with those people directly. The entire point of the provision against unreasonable search and seizure is that we don't know who those people are and it is used to protect innocent people from invasion of privacy even if the ends of the government are noble.
It is not at all clear that those who seek to do us harm are the most serious threat to our republic. It seems that lack of respect for the law much more threatening. If the government must necessarily fail to identify some threats to the nation in order to act within the confines of the law than that is the way it must be. If it is not the case, respect for the law will gradually degrade and, left unchecked, the republic will eventually fall. I'm not saying that we couldn't change the law (although I wouldn't advocate that it be changed) in order to make law enforcement more efficient, but I am saying that no amount of government illegality should be tolerated whatsoever because respect for the rule of law hangs in the balance.
I'm tagging this article "horriblyworded" because of the intense confusion the summary seems to be generating about who was doing the confessing. Will others do so too?
While I agree with you to a limited extent that software patents are broken, I generally have to disagree with you about pharmaceutical patents which I think are serving their function correctly. The whole point of a patent is to encourage development and innovation of new technologies by providing a limited window of profitability for that company. With the titanic cost of development of a new drug and then passing all of the required regulatory trials, I have serious doubts that companies in the pharmaceutical industry would have any hope of being profitable without being able to enforce patents. No profitability would simply mean that these companies wouldn't exist and the state of health care would be in an even worse state because we would lack all the drugs developed by those companies with the expectation of future profits.
Obviously, it seems, there is still some sort of problem with any health care system which causes there to be access problems for people who have few financial resources. The root cause isn't the evil and greed Big Pharma abusing the patent system though; they're using patent law in exactly the way it was intended to be used.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. Responding to an request, they provided a text file containing rendering instructions compliant with standards (or not, but close to compliant). End of transaction. You don't violate any of their rights by not reading their reply in the way that they expect you to.
You don't HAVE to use a browser at all to view their site. You could use wget piped to less and 'render' it in your mind's eye. Alternatively, you could use a simple (or complicated!) algorithm to render the parts that you were most interested in and suppress those parts that you were not interested in. The fact that someone else will give the webmaster money every time someone downloads the instructions and subsequently renders the ad in no way changes the fact that you are free to use your computer to process information in a manner you see fit.
From a pragmatic standpoint, I agree with you that in order to support websites that ads should be viewed, but claiming that you're required to process information the way the sender wants you to simply doesn't seem to have support.
Another thing I don't understand is how anyone could take a pill that spends more then half of the tv commercial talking about how many side effects there are and that rare occasional deaths can occur. WTF?
Every drug has side effects, some more noticeable than others. The simple fact is that we don't understand human biology well enough to predict or prevent all side effects while preserving the mechanism of action of the drug. As in engineering, it is a trade off: you exchange symptomatic and pathophysiologic relief for less severe symptoms due to adverse reactions to the drug. When adverse reaction to drugs exceeds the relief granted by them, they're typically discontinued on a patient-by-patient basis. The only way to avoid all side effects is stop taking drugs until human biology advances far enough to control for them all which will never occur in our lifetime.
Napster maintains the largest on-demand streaming and MP3 catalog - over 7 million songs - so you don't have to. Never download another file or rip another CD unless you want to. With Napster, you can easily access your music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
for which they charge $13/month.
Better to just cite the CDC guidelines for adults:
(150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity activities OR 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity) + muscle strengthening 2 days / week
See http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/everyone/guidelines/adults.html
I prefer certainty. If it turns-out that arresting people are 66 is too stringent, then solution is to rewrite the laws to make them effective, not to just ignore them or apply them randomly.
Agreed, but until the laws are rewritten so that they would reasonably be enforced 100% of the time, it's probably not a good idea to push for 100% enforcement of laws that were written at a time when that simply wasn't possible.
I agree with you that increasing efficiency would ideally end up being a good thing. My primary objection is that the laws are not written to be enforced 100% of the time. Should every single person who exceeds the speed limit by 1 mph even for a few seconds get a ticket? Should every jaywalker get ticketed every time even when there is no traffic to speak of? I'm not too keen to see either of these happen.
Efficiency in law enforcement is great, but I'm not sure the efficiency of our policy makers in writing reasonable laws has quite caught up with our new technological abilities to enforce the law.
Perhaps I simply don't see a more elegant solution, but it seems that in order to eliminate the need for marketing in drug development competition would need to be eliminated (perhaps by the creation of some national or international regulatory authority?), but I haven't often heard people suggesting that be done. Thoughts?
30% match to people who like vanilla ice cream
20% match to people who want to conquer Earth
10% match to people who like Death Metal
Armed with that, you could try to construct some type of marketing scheme based on some combination of the strategies that are effective with your "typical" people. That would allow you to target any arbitrary individual even if they aren't well represented by anyone you've encountered so far.
I guess that's less of a well-developed algorithm and more of a plausibility argument, but the point is that you could imagine that there could be successful strategies to deal with unique individuals given general a large enough data set containing informative information on how humans operate (even if this particular algorithm doesn't work that well in practice).
While that is an interesting and provocative idea, it's also a stupid one. This would allow for all sorts of eminent domain-esque property seizures done by anyone with sufficient resources to slightly outbid you. Maybe it's a better allocation of resources from the perspective of the tax-collecting government that someone seizes your house to build a tax-generating UberMart Ultimate Shopping Center, but the system unfairly penalizes real people who have value entrenched in non-taxable things (for example, providing a stable environment for a family). Effectively, it would begin taxing those things as well since they would have to be just summed into the total value of the property.
While this has the advantage of being employee-implementable, it is also quite inefficient. It requires a phone call and 2 or more e-mail messages ("Is this correct?", "No, item 4 should be...", "Okay, is this now correct?", "Yes") in order to convey the information that could have been send correctly the first time by the boss requiring only one e-mail. If a boss wants to ruin his employees productivity in order to enforce a specific communication format, I suppose that's his right, but does that make that person a very good leader or communicator? No.
Interesting, but I'm not sure how much trust I would place in a photograph in this age of photoshop especially if they were being delivered by someone who could be an adversary. Then again, I'm not skilled in the use of photo editing programs so maybe more is involved to commit some type of fraud through photographs than I might naively imagine (and I suppose there are likely easier ways of doing it).
IAAUP (I am an undergraduate physicist), but if YAAP and know better, please correct me if I'm at all wrong.
Just some thoughts though.
Have you considered helping to build infrastructure (bridges, buildings, roads)? Alternatively, you could get a PhD and work in some theoretical area (e.g. building faster semiconductors, developing better materials). Perhaps you might find some period of service to a humanitarian organization like Engineers Without Borders to be worthwhile?
The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution is a restriction on the powers of the government, not on private individuals. Since a corporation is largely treated as an individual, I don't think the 4th Amendment has anything to do with this technology. The only case in which there might even be questions seems to be if the government was using this technology for some purpose and even then it doesn't seem obvious that there is necessarily anything wrong with that either.
IANAL; If you AAL, please correct my interpretation if it's wrong.
On the other hand, this will serve as yet another lightening rod in the on-going conflict between religion and secularism in Western culture. Intense conflict about this isn't going to solve much of anything. Nothing is solved by shouting at those who disagree with you about their status as one of the damned or about their their stupidity for ignoring science.
So it's good and bad.
Wikipedia reports that that theory is currently discredited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_RNA/.
While your statement is informative and interesting, I still think there is a significant problem with that even being a possibility. Why even bother with the rule of law if the only thing preventing its abuse is the sanity of our judges? If the law allows for something so ridiculous as a 40 year sentence, then there is a bug in the law. We ought to specify the law much more precisely so as to prevent obviously incorrect possible sentences. Why not operate on the principle of minimum privilege? Give the judge the absolute minimum amount of discretionary power as is reasonable to implement in legislation. If it's good enough for security in software engineering, why isn't it good enough for our legal code?
Slightly OT, but did you noticed on the download page that it says "Due to the french DADVSI law, we are requested to remove the following legal BitTorrent links...". I read the Wikipedia article, but it's still not clear to me what this might mean. Anyone have insight?
I would be a bit curious, actually, to know whether
It is not at all clear that those who seek to do us harm are the most serious threat to our republic. It seems that lack of respect for the law much more threatening. If the government must necessarily fail to identify some threats to the nation in order to act within the confines of the law than that is the way it must be. If it is not the case, respect for the law will gradually degrade and, left unchecked, the republic will eventually fall. I'm not saying that we couldn't change the law (although I wouldn't advocate that it be changed) in order to make law enforcement more efficient, but I am saying that no amount of government illegality should be tolerated whatsoever because respect for the rule of law hangs in the balance.
I'm tagging this article "horriblyworded" because of the intense confusion the summary seems to be generating about who was doing the confessing. Will others do so too?
While I agree with you to a limited extent that software patents are broken, I generally have to disagree with you about pharmaceutical patents which I think are serving their function correctly. The whole point of a patent is to encourage development and innovation of new technologies by providing a limited window of profitability for that company. With the titanic cost of development of a new drug and then passing all of the required regulatory trials, I have serious doubts that companies in the pharmaceutical industry would have any hope of being profitable without being able to enforce patents. No profitability would simply mean that these companies wouldn't exist and the state of health care would be in an even worse state because we would lack all the drugs developed by those companies with the expectation of future profits.
Obviously, it seems, there is still some sort of problem with any health care system which causes there to be access problems for people who have few financial resources. The root cause isn't the evil and greed Big Pharma abusing the patent system though; they're using patent law in exactly the way it was intended to be used.