pingswept

The subheading of the linked article, "Monthly IT complaints dropped from 70 to a maximum of 4" is contradicted in the article text. The text of the article says that the "maximum number of complaints" per month dropped from 70 to 46, not 4.

(Also, the maximum number of complaints is irrelevant, but I guess complaining here about people not understanding statistics is pointless.)

I live in the US. I think most of those things happen a lot less than you think. To take what I think is the most extreme example, in the ~35 years that I've been parsing speech successfully, I don't think I've ever heard someone refer to a fat person as "horizontally challenged."

Maybe this stuff just happens on TV?

One exception: not saying "fuck" on TV. That's accurate and fucking insane.

(Not sure why you were downvoted-- seemed like a reasonable response.)

I do think the degree to which software builds on itself is different than in other engineering disciplines, but I'm afraid I don't have evidence to back it up. The closest I can get in the time I've got this morning: consider the amount of (compiled) code Dell ships on a $500 PC and compare that to a $500 mechanical device like a bicycle. I can imagine doing the research to figure out whether the bicycle infringes any patents. With the PC, I can't imagine how it would be possible. You'd have to understand how all of every program shipped on the PC works; I doubt that there is anyone alive who has even read more than half of the code in any single modern operating system. You'd need a team of programmer/lawyers and the source code from every vendor who ships code on the PC.

From there, I'd say that a system where an inventor can't assess whether their invention is infringing without an effort comparable to the amount of work needed to create the invention is a bad system.

Historically, you're correct. But the people who codified patent law certainly didn't anticipate the development of software, in which every program of substantial size necessarily uses multiple different patented techniques.

Do you think this is the way property rights and software ought to work together?

I don't think that the examples given in the blog post are examples of a "hair trigger." For one, it's repeated behavior; even a small annoyance is worse when repeated for years.

If I were one of her male coworkers, and I had to watch that kind of behavior continually, I would quit. I want my coworkers to be able to do their jobs without being tormented.

Also, I think you're missing the distinction between sexual jokes and sexist jokes. There are plenty of funny sexual jokes. There are even plenty of sexist jokes that the joke-teller finds funny. That opinion is not shared by the butt of the joke, and that makes them crappy jokes.

I agree that there's no need for mischaracterization, but there is a need for people to jump in and say what they think. I'll try to explain why I thought you were defending sexist humor.

This is the line that made me think you were defending sexist humor: "I would be sad if my relationship with my coworkers couldn't handle, let alone thrive upon, humorous interactions."

Maybe you meant non-sexist humor that erroneously came across as sexist?

Agreed that we should strive to be less fragile. I think Jon Postel put it well in RFC 793:

"TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793#page-13

I agree with your description of how humor typically happens, and because of that, I don't enjoy working in most places. While it seems "fun is fun" for you, the same fun sucks for me.

But I'd suggest that an alternative exists-- you can actually be hilarious without knocking other people down. I think that's a worthy goal.

I think you should revise your perception of what is being gained by sexist humor. It seems that you get some good laughs out of it-- no problem for you.

For the people on the other side of the joke, it's not fun. From what Katie Cunningham writes, it's so unbearable that she's on the verge of leaving the profession she loves.

With that understanding of the situation, sexist jokes lose their humor, at least for me.

Do you think there's a conflict between sexism and fun? As in, "Well, I'd like to stop making sexist jokes, but then it would be so boring here."

I would rather work in an office where the jokes are of the funny sort, rather than the makes-one-person-feel-miserable sort. I really don't think there's any overlap between funny jokes and sexist jokes.

Nice work, Dave. This has come a long way since last summer.

The book mentioned appears to be: http://www.amazon.com/B-S-Price-Strategy-Prisoners-Prosperit...

From what I understand, Toyota is using Tesla's motor and battery technology in the new electric RAV4: http://wot.motortrend.com/toyota-tesla-come-together-compani...

"taught me to sled"

Does "sled" mean something unusual here? My experience is that it is similar to falling down a hill, but with something slippery under you-- not really a skill that needs teaching, I thought.

I don't think that the article was too strident at all. (I was a high school math teacher for years, and computers seem utterly useless to me when it comes to teaching kids to think mathematically.)

I'll take a look at the videos, as you suggest.

Elsewhere on this page, someone comments: "I would love to see one of these 'complaining about Khan Academy' articles with an attached example of the author's Right Way to teach whatever subject."

I'd be interested in your response to that.

I don't think it's odd, but I'm much more likely to contribute to something open source than proprietary on Kickstarter. With open source, if the project fails, the parts of the project still be useful to the world. Not so much with proprietary stuff.

If the restrictions were made clear before the software is installed, I would agree with you. Yes, you can see the EULA as part of the sales process, but it's presented as part of an unreadable pile of legal crap. If it were presented in the same way that Apple explains other restrictions (like "This iPhone only works on Verizon's network"), I would have no complaint.

I think we actually agree here. I said: "net gain, after you count all the costs." I meant "all the costs" to include opportunity costs.

Agreed. I'm assuming that even though individuals might all like to live in a society that is unfairly biased in their favor, we have no way of creating that. The next best option is a fair society, where, as you say, legislation and reduction of barriers attempt to align the interests of the individual with the interests of society.

As long as the household percentage is nonzero, I'm afraid I disagree.

Suppose recycling used more energy than it saved (which is the case for some materials e.g. low grade plastic waste in places with little plastic manufacturing). Then, even if that waste were most of the waste stream, getting people to recycle would not be essential-- it would actually create more waste, something to avoid.

My claim is that as long as recycling is a net gain, after you count all the costs, it doesn't matter what percentage of the total waste stream it is.

Note that I'm not saying that industry shouldn't also recycle. I suspect that the potential gains there are even larger, but that's not an argument against household recycling, given that the tasks are executed by different people in parallel.

To quote you: "you don't have some God given right to the content they produce/deliver. Instead of pirating go without."

I don't understand how that fits with finishing making the list. If you can keep some pirated music around since high school, and now longer so that you can make a list, can't I download a little to see if I like it? If it's good, I'll pay to go to a concert or buy the tracks off Amazon. ":)"

The fraction of the total waste stream that you can affect is irrelevant when deciding whether to recycle. Any single industrial waste creator could make the same argument-- my company only creates 0.001% of the waste stream, so it doesn't matter what I do. This has to be wrong, because we know that the total outcome is nothing other than the aggregated behaviors of all of us, and the total outcome matters.

The important question is whether the impact of recycling the waste you create is a net gain or loss, after you take into account all the work needed to do the recycling. From an energy perspective, most recycling is a massive saver of energy [1], but that doesn't mean it's economical. England, for example, imports a lot of glass, but does very little glass manufacturing. Recycling glass there is probably not a valuable service, but that says nothing about its value where you live (unless you happen to live in England).

Waste stream sorting technology is still developing; I wouldn't be surprised if that reduces costs in the future such that sorting waste in your house isn't worth it-- you'll just dump everything in the bin and let robots pick out the valuable stuff later.

[1]: http://www.economist.com/node/9249262 (Money quote: "Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass.")

I agree with your sentiment, but it seems you have a contradiction here: " (All I have left is to make a list of the music I have and listen to in order to delete it all and slowly purchase it, which I've started doing). I either pay for something, borrow it or go without."

If you really believe what you say, you'd delete all your pirated music right now. Either that, or you might modify your views a bit.

"infringing a state granted monopoly" is the best description I've heard yet. Thanks for that.

> Regarding the "facilitating" part, notice it is just one of three items in a definition. ALL of these items have to be satisfied

Yes, you are correct. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

Ah, it appears that the HN link parser clips the colon off the end of the URL in my previous post. I fixed the formatting, but the link is no longer clickable. Should be copy/pasteable.

About the "wholesale piracy" bit: that's also wrong. The bill would apply to an "an Internet site, or a portion thereof" ... "primarily designed or operated for the purpose of" piracy. (Sec 103.a.1.A-B) Links on bit.ly (for example) that pointed to illegal downloads would fall into that category. The phrase "portion of" is not compatible with Cotton's "wholesale" description.

For me, the worst part is that the bill targets sites "facilitating the commission of criminal violations," (Sec 102.a.2) related to copyright law, rather than actually committing the criminal violations. If this were in the realm of guns rather than copyright, it would make every gun magazine publisher a criminal. In general, speech about crime is different than crime itself, especially when the activity at hand can be criminal or noncriminal in different circumstances.

The rebuttal is this:

The bill defines "foreign infringing sites" as those infringing sites that have their domains registered outside the US, are "US-directed" and "used by users in the United States." This would include, for example, all the sites that use Libya's top-level domain, like bit.ly, but would not include a site like thepiratebay.org, as the US controls the .org top-level domain.

You can check that this is true by reading Sec. 101.3-8 and Sec. 102.1.a. (13 lines of text in total) on the Library of Congress website here:

  http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261:

This doesn't address whether a site is "infringing" or not, but it makes it clear that sites that most people would consider US websites, like bit.ly, can certainly be affected by the bill. Cotton's argument that only foreign sites will be affected is bogus, when you look at the details of what "foreign" means.

Apology accepted. I do agree that "it's not a straw man" is a weak rebuttal, but that's more reason to keep the tone civil-- so that people will argue with you sensibly.

> Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point?

You could make the same point more civilly.