Ah, well that's potentially useful. Thanks for the info.

Despite the name, Sidewiki is not a wiki such that people can edit, prune, and synthesize information, nor is it moderated in any way. It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise. It's also unclear how people are supposed to use it- e.g., what to post (which is a significant failing imo). Interesting as an approach to layer user comments onto webpages, but not useful yet. Arstechnica pretty much nailed it with the following:

This new offering from Google is intriguing in some ways and it shows that the company is thinking creatively about how to build dialog and additional value around existing content. The scope and utility of the service seems a bit narrow. The random nature of the existing annotations suggest that the quality and depth of the user-contributed content will be roughly equivalent with the comments that people post about pages at aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit.
What makes Wikipedia content useful is the ability of editors to delete the crap and restructure the existing material to provide something of value. Without the ability to do that with Sidewiki, it's really little more than a glorified comment system and probably should have been built as such. As it stands, I think that most users will just be confused about what kind annotations they should post.

When I play wow, I probably play too much. I'd like to use some built-in functionality to gently put limits on my playtime and remind me how much I've played in a week. At first I had high hopes that the Parental Controls function could help me.

Unfortunately, though the rest of wow's interface is great, its parental controls are not only a crime against all that is beautiful and elegant, but pretty useless in the real world. There's no way to set "able to play X hours per week" or "able to play Y hours per weekday, Z hours per weekend". One must set a hard-coded block schedule, click okay, then hope you've predicted your exact needs. And there's no in-game warning when you're coming up against a limit-- you're simply disconnected when it hits.

Please, please, please tell me there are plans afoot to fix this tool and perhaps remake it into a more general method for account owners to manage playtime better? Extra kudos if it could include a Netflix-style option to put your account on vacation for a variable length of time...

It's pretty clear that the real reason for this delay isn't some minor quibble regarding content. It's that China doesn't want a Western/foreign company to dominate their online gaming market.

Clever, unethical (from certain standpoints), and frustrating for Blizzard, no doubt.

If there were any high-quality for-pay alternatives, I'd say he might have a point.

Unfortunately, most antivirus software sucks, with Symantec more or less epitomizing how good ideas on paper can turn into terrible/buggy/bloated security software that actually increases your exposure since it adds another node malicious code can attack. Symantec's argument-from-assertion notwithstanding, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between antivirus software being for-pay and higher quality.

From my experience, there's really bad antivirus software (such as Norton, which I have zero confidence in and would never let touch my machine), and slightly less bad antivirus software. What went wrong? Why does this industry suck so badly? Anyone have any insight?

It's certainly an interesting development, and one that I think will slightly curb the growth of gold farming, gold spam, wacky in-game currency trends, and so forth, but I think the real question here is, why would this be in China's interest to do this, and shut down a blossoming home-grown (if gray-market) industry?

The IW article notes that "The government justifies its ban on virtual currency trading as a way to curtail gambling and other illegal online activities." It just seems this isn't the real or whole story, though. Control? International reputation? Deals with Chinese MMO devs?

Thank you; it's a pleasure to talk about this with someone who approaches a discussion with good faith.

I will say I tend to agree with you that Posner's suggestion to involve and expand copyright law in this situation may cause more problems than it solves; I'm not convinced that deep linking is protected by the speech/press clauses in the constitution, but I'm not at all certain that they're not, either. It seems problematic to wade into this with a change to copyright law and fair use rights that might be used to infringe upon free speech on the internet, with uncertain gain.

On the other hand, I think Posner's explanation of the situation is very apt, and I also think it exposes a real problem. Newspapers are in trouble. Extremely good things will be lost if we let them crash and burn-- perhaps this is inevitable, but if there are things we can do that will help newspapers without giving them any sort of unfair or rights-infringing advantage, we should consider them.

I also completely reject this concept (mentioned in your prior post) that the government should be worrying about any sort of "creation of the most good." All I want the government to do is to fulfill their duties as enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, no more and no less.

I think a relevant point here is that the Constitution empowers the Congress to enact copyright laws specifically such as to maximize the common good, so to fulfill their duties as enumerated in the Constitution, they're required to consider what sorts of copyright laws create or preserve the most good. "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".

Of course, copyright law has been so dramatically expanded and twisted from how it originally started out that I personally think it's difficult to constitutionally justify the current legal state of affairs, but I do think it's constitutionally defensible to say copyright law has a mandate to maximize the greatest good.

I'm sorry; on my initial reading I glossed over where you detailed you feel this infringes upon your rights of freedom of speech and of the press. I take back my criticism re: enunciating rights.

I do think the ability to deep link to specific articles, etc, is important for a healthy public debate. I'm not certain linking to someone else's work is completely under the umbrella of speech, however, and would be protected under the speech/press protections.

I'm not quite sure what inalienable right you feel would be violated by preventing deep linking. I'm not scoffing at the idea that your rights would be violated-- but I'm saying it's problematic to just claim your rights are being violated. You need to enunciate which rights are being violated.

Posner's opinion seems not to push the government into determining "who wins and who loses in the business world" so much as explore what the ideal legal state of affairs would be so as to create the most social and economic good.

Obviously if things keep on as they are and free riders essentially reap most of the benefit from real reporting, newspapers are by and large going to go under, and the sort of deep reporting newspapers have traditionally done will be done much less frequently. Nobody wins in that scenario. Perhaps tweaking the law so as to protect newspapers would create the most good; perhaps letting newspapers crash and burn and seeing what arises from the ashes (and it would be messy, and a lot of good organizational structure / wealth would be destroyed) would create the most good.

I have my own opinions, but I see possible merit and possible pitfalls in both routes. If you don't, I submit you're not giving the issue careful enough attention.

Netcraft confirms it.

While this seems like an opinion that runs counter to many tenants slashdotters hold dear, I think we should at least consider it. By any measure, Posner is one of the most impressive judges on the bench today-- and in my opinion, one of the only judges that really 'get' all the issues surrounding copyright and digital things in general.

I'm hardly alone-- Lessig has noted that there isn't a federal judge I respect more, both as a judge and person, and Posner was Obama's first choice when asked which sitting judge he would most like to argue before.

So you may disagree with this opinion-- I'm leaning that way too-- but it's worth fair consideration. Go and actually read his post before passing judgment. When he was guest blogging about copyright law at Lessig.org back in 2004, he noted, "I am distrustful of people who think they have confident answers to such questions." That goes for both sides in this debate.

Sort of a hack job by techcrunch actually.

I would say that the real problem with saying anything definitive about points 2 and 3 is that we have very little to go on as far as how genetic differences influence phenotype function. We can point to some specific limited examples, but we haven't been able to construct any grand theory about how genotype change influences phenotype function.

Right. One of the corners that gets cut when dividing people up into genetic clusters is that small populations get tossed out as outliers. Indigenous Australians would certainly count as a very distinct ethnic group if one did not simplify things in this way.

Native Americans are indeed /historically/ East Asian, but they split off long enough ago such that they have a relatively distinct genetic signature. This may be more due to neutral genetic drift (as the article suggests) or adaptive selection based on their environment (as I would tend to believe). It's both, of course, but I don't think the selective adaptation has been trivial in that timeframe. See, for instance, "Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution" by Hawks et al.

Not very close. Genetically speaking, Indians are classified as Caucasian, and share much more of their ancestry with other Caucasian groups than East Asian. And from what I can recall (and I don't have a ready citation for this) there hasn't been a very significant amount of gene flow between China and India either.

India itself is very interesting in terms of a genetic case study: as opposed to China, which is somewhat genetically homogeneous, India is composed of hundreds of rather distinct sub-ethnicities that have evolved more-or-less in isolation. Some peg this on the cultural traditions of keeping marriage within communities; some peg this on the caste system which prevents both social and geographical mobility. At any rate, especially for a population with more-or-less a common pool of ancestors, India has a huge amount of genetic non-homogeneity when looking at different communities, and to an extent, different social classes.

As far as I can tell, this story attempts to make three points:

1. Human genomes tend to cluster into three groups: african, eurasian, and east asian.

2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.

3. Neutral drift is the major story in how ethic groups' genomes differ.

This pretty much follows the contours of the current orthodoxy in population genetics (with certain distinct exceptions).

So are these three points meaningfully true?

1. Human genomes tend to cluster into three groups: african, eurasian, and east asian.

Generally speaking they /do/ cluster this way. Of course, you can make room for as few or as many clusters as you want-- if it was two, it'd be african/everything else. Three, african/eurasian/east asian. Four, perhaps african/eurasian/east asian/naitive american. Five, perhaps west african/east african/eurasian/east asian/naitive american. From what I've read, the most elegant statistical clusters arise when you allow for four groups (splitting native americans off from east asians). Of course, this clustering gets more complex when you consider admixture populations (e.g., the majority of south america and mexico).

2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.

It's hard to say this is true or false yet, because we simply don't know how functionally significant these differences are. Two genomes may look very similar, yet be very different in many very significant ways.

3. Neutral drift is the major story in how ethic groups' genomes differ.

This is code for a very contentious question-- are ethnic differences merely skin-deep? The fact is, we don't know yet. There's a lot of research that points to yes; there's a lot of research that points to no. The answer to this is undoubtedly going to turn out to be: yes and no, depending on the context and the threshold you look at.