dhume

Outside the Valley, people would hear this and say, "get a job."

Is it? I just get a blank page.

with JS, people who are opting-out should blame themselves

No, I'm going to continue to blame that subset of JS coders who consume far too much of my CPU/memory resources. Thanks to them, I got to watch my browser slow to a crawl and become so unresponsive that it was difficult to even close the tab containing the offending site. The simplest solution is to have JS off by default. A whitelist system is nice for non-offending sites (I've never had this sort of trouble with JS on, say, HN).

How many tests did he run? What confidence interval did he establish? What factors did he control for and how?

Memorization is not learning. Neither is a subset of the other.

1. Reviewing everything submitted by users is unreasonable to expect.

2. People are upset that takedown notices are issued for works to which the issuer does not hold copyright and that those who issue such notices do so with impunity.

If they're going to take up scarce public resources (i.e. RF spectrum), then the public has a legitimate concern in ensuring such resources are used in a way that benefits the public.

As a disclaimer to all of this, I was the type that had fun proving stuff in seventh grade and had already read through Spivak's Calculus by Grade 10.

This makes your earlier claim of never having seen most of the concepts rather dubious.

So sales produces a prospectus that suggests this is a bad investment. Then they continue agreeing to package and promote these securities. Were there some information excluded from the prospectus which suggested to the sales force that they were actually a good investment, I might still be able to see them as honest. Otherwise, this sounds like an attempt to apply the Nuremberg defense where remaining in the situation of having immoral rules to follow was voluntary.

I'm a stats-heavy computer scientist, but I'd argue the opposite: the ability to construct and evaluate a rigorous argument is the first thing lacking: one that plausibly analyzes the domain, recounts opposing arguments reasonably fairly, constructs counterarguments that are actually responsive to the opponents' arguments, and uses logical argumentation along with empirical evidence in a way that correctly supports its points.

This seems closer to "statistics versus logos" than "statistics versus rhetoric."

All I could think of was making it difficult to find exactly what commit fixed/introduced what bugs.

From what I've heard, it's combination of time restrictions for reviewing a patent and penalizing rejections that later get overturned when the applicant appeals the decision.

On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1. Automation allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the market in exchange of a bit of your time.

Quite the opposite: this is all the dull, menial stuff that distracts people from their primary tasks. These are jobs that were "supposed to" get automated out of existence and didn't. The store has not automated the bagging of your groceries. This only frees up an employee by having you do it instead.

nobody forces the creator to create [or distribute the work].

Of course not. We just want to encourage them to do so.

Nope, somehow "creators" feel that the society is owing them the copyright protection.

That's the agreement between this society and creators who publish their creations.

If distribution cost were high and creation cost insignificant, copyright would not be needed -- the creator can handle competition from other distributors of his creation because they have to cover the same costs he does. It's only when creation cost is significant relative to distribution cost that the creator cannot compete with other distributors. Digital distribution is the extreme case of this: the creator must cover the cost of creation, while his competitors have almost no costs to cover.

Nor does he seem aware of inflation (see his "grandparents" paragraph at the end). The site below suggets $7k in 1950 would be about the same as $65k today, and I would hope people aren't amazed at the notion of being able to live on $65k per year.

http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

Are you trying to make a compiler that targets multiple platforms?

From what I've heard from them, I think "better safeguards against regulatory capture" would cover a lot of it, though I have yet to hear that term specifically.

If you think Zuckerberg is evil and that we're all just going to try to screw you, there's nothing I (or anyone else) can tell you that is going to change your mind.

Nothing you can say, perhaps, but here's something Facebook can do: establish a years-long history of having new privacy options/controls default to the setting which reveals the least information to other users. Doing that for several years should help Facebook overcome their reputation for not doing so (a reputation which it has for a reason).

So Mark's gone from having an uninspired house interior and no way to pay the bills to having a nicely-decorated house and no way to pay the bills.

Directly trading one luxury for another doesn't help when what you need is a way to feed yourself, pay the rent, heat the house, etc.

That's an emergent property of the system as a whole, not the desire of the typical participant, and it is not based on any motivation for working beyond desire to collect a paycheck.

Or perhaps they do want to get into computer science and there are a number of obstacles stopping them. Most people would agree with this.

Keep in mind when looking for the cause of the lopsided male-female split that it happens well before they even start university.

Your argument broken down goes like this: "If you can't touch it, it isn't natural, therefore disregard it"

It's more of an acknowledgment that our concept of ownership is derived from the scarcity of the objects we may own. Whether the thing over which someone claims ownership is natural doesn't enter into it.

You don't appear to have any will to solve the issue at hand.

I don't think GP is convinced there is a genuine issue at hand.

In case my username didn't give it away...

It's been a while since I last read TPM though.

Ever wonder why the private school teachers are content with their lower salary?

Public sector teachers have to deal with all of the problematic students that private schools can remove or refuse to admit in the first place.

Insurance does nothing to really insure your health.

You are confusing "insure" and "ensure."

As the userbase here tends towards software-based startups, people often forget that there are many markets where becoming a seller requires very large initial capital.

1) Patents shouldn't be transferable -- this eliminates patent trolls

6) If you don't use the patent in a business use-case, you lose it. A bit like Trademark.

Suppose somebody invents a device but lacks the facilities to mass-produce them (building by hand is probably too expensive to make for a viable product). Rule (1) bars the inventor from selling the patent to somebody who has these facilities, so it appears necessary to arrange a licensing deal with a manufacturer (I expect selling a license to manufacture is still allowed and would count as a business use of the patent). How long does the inventor have to make such a deal before those who do have the right production facilities can simply ignore the patent and produce/sell the invention without compensating the inventor?

if they were so obvious beforehand, somebody would have:

a) implemented it into a working system (prior art)

b) patented it themselves first

It seems to be fairly common that somebody already did (a) but chose to forgo (b).

spent $130 million dollars just in the R&D phase for what amounts to…. Obvious? Perhaps. But nobody had gone through the trouble to actually do it, and spending that kind of overhead was a significant risk.

How much of that was it actually necessary to spend just to come up with the concept? Evaluation of the available COTS components, writing the perl scripts and cron jobs, management overhead, etc. are costs a competitor would have to incur as well, which makes them not part of the cost a patent is meant to compensate for. The fact that nobody had done it before does not necessarily mean nobody was clever enough -- just that nobody who was clever enough had had the problem this product was meant to solve, and being a solution to a novel problem does not make it patentably non-obvious.

In other words, if the ideas are obvious, a piece of software that does this should be buildable.

I don't think a computer program is likely to cover everything that would count as obvious.

"A person of ordinary skill is also a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton." - SCOTUS opinion on KSR v. Teleflex

A comment from a related article makes me question the competence of the people making this proposal.

From someone who was present at a meeting discussing this:

“This decision, apparently still potential, is a permanent statement of the University about the future of Computer Science. The impression conveyed in the meeting with the Provost and Dean was that we had reached the End of History. Now that everyone has a computer and a spreadsheet and a wordprocessor, the contribution of computing to the life of the mind has been exhausted. I do not write this sarcastically. This was the sense of the meeting.”

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/western-washington-university-c...