There's almost always better solutions than violence.

Not always. Violence has a *deterrent* effect, which is worth quite a bit. That's why it's used where it matters, by criminals and by governments and law enforcement. To think that violence has no legitimate role in human society is naive.

Suppose every glasshole gets attacked on sight for wearing them, by vigilantes.That' would have a chilling effect and, ignoring the legality for a moment, would cause the glassholes to stop wearing them in public very quickly. Compare that with the expense and complication of sueing every glasshole on a different technicality, for every instance where they abuse their spying powers. It would clog the court systems, be impossible to do *systematically*, and would lead to a neverending battleground between the 'holes and regular people.

Now deterrence can also be approximated nonviolently - for example, the police could fine glassholes for wearing them in the street. That wouldn't stop people like Oracle's Larry Ellison or Google's Eric Schmidt from doing what they want, but it would deter a large number of people. And yet, ultimately, this still depents on the threat of violence, in this case the legitimate violence that the police are able to use in the pursuit of their duties.

The point is, human societies have a way of regulating the beheviour of individuals, and one of the tools that get used is violence. The world is what it is.

And that's *exactly* why we call glassholes just that - glassholes. Uploading snapshots and video in realtime? Really? Fucking spying douchebags. If I see one, I don't care if they tell me it's "turned off", I guess I'll just have to turn it off for them forcibly (from behind). It's the only way to be sure.

It is not possible to make a general statement about which layer of interpretation is the right one to be made public. Higher levels, closer to the final results, are more likely to be reusable by other researchers. However, higher levels of interpretation provide the least information for someone attempting to confirm that the total analysis is valid.

You're wrong. It is perfectly clear what needs to be published openly: whatever is necessary for someone to confirm that the total analysis is valid.

That is the fundamental principle required for scientific progress. The fact that this statement is not specific enough to prescribe exactly what needs to be done in every scientific experiment is not a flaw. If in doubt, err on the side of caution, ie publish more than is strictly necessary to confirm that the total analysis is valid.

Yes, this may sometimes be costly, but so what? Some experiments are costly, and that often causes scientists to think trough variations that show the same effect in a cheaper way. Such calculations can and should factor in the cost of making the necessary data available. They are not orthogonal to the science per se, because ensuring repeatability and verifiability is at the heart of the scientific method.

So when designing an experiment, think about what it will take not just to convince the journal's referees, but also to prove repeatability against anyone who is willing to properly test it. Then implement the experiment and provide the proof, and publish the summary in a journal.

No, cryptographic hash functions have certain strong guarantees, but all(*) hash functions are supposed to mimic independent, uniformly random, behaviour of inputs. Since in the physical world, inputs often come from processes, and processes tend to evolve continuously, the inputs to be hashed by a computer system often have some amount of similarity if they occur close together in time. Thus to transform consecutive inputs into a pair of independent uniformly random hashes, it is desirable that small changes in the input result in completely changed output.

(*) There are exceptions, such as when devising algorithms for locality sensitive hashing, but they are few.

I hate the taste of stamp glue, so I lick my thumb and wet the stamp with my thumb, doe that count, too?

No, but if you use your middle finger instead that counts as a win for the rest of us.

You're being stupid by displaying your ignorance. You assume, entirely baselessly, that a human being is worth more than a horse. This is true in today's western, industrial society but has not been so historically.

In pre-industrial societies horses are important, and have more value than an average human being. A horse can carry warriors, and pull heavy equipment, which is more than a single human labourer can do. Moreover, horses are usually owned by important people, and in hierarchical societies the possessions of one's betters often have more value than oneself.

You don't even have to go to exotic historical examples, in the Wild West one hundred years ago, a horse thief would be hanged. That shows clearly that a horse had at least the value of a human being in America.

To take a modern analogy: there is a threat. You have an infantryman and an F22. Would you let the infantryman sacrifice himself to save the group, or should the F22 be destroyed instead?

Elmer Fudd using a drone to hunt Bugs Bunny? Dammit, I don't think I've seen that one yet.

Fitt's law is bullshit however. It's stupid to throw your mouse against the top of the screen to access a menu. It's a lot smarter to reserve a button on the mouse (maybe the fourth or fifth, eg to use with your thumb), and have the menu just appear where you are. It's faster and there's less focus switching overall. Basically you get a "menu" button on your mouse, and your eyes get to stay looking at the place on the screen where they were looking before.

Also, it was an American drone. It might have been commandeered by the NSA to kill a suspected terrorist.

Being a pedant, I have to disagree.

Firstly, Pratchett's comment has nothing to do with a paradox something of the sort. It's a simple claim that scientists are bad at estimating very small probabilities, and typically get them wrong by a factor of hundreds of thousands. This is actually true and rather insightful in a the-emperor-has-no-clothes kind of way, and also not very deep at all.

The concept of the long tail is somewhat more interesting, but not that deep either. It's merely about realizing that many processes aren't Gaussian, unlike what students are lead to believe in highschool and various introductory courses which are not primarily about statistics.

However, your distinction between likely and unlikely events is confused. If you are going to label two events as likely and unlikely, then you are asserting that the likely event is to be observed with higher probability than the unlikely event. This is always true by definition.

What you are trying to say is that, if you restrict yourself to a particular family of events and you compare the probability of occurrence of an unspecified member of the family with the probability of occurrence of a single specified member, then the former can be larger.

As an example, consider the family of events {the hour of your death is N}. It is fairly unlikely that I can predict the hour of your death (not being a serial killer myself), so if I specify the event {the hour of your death is 12am} then the probability of occurrence is small. But if I do not specify the event, by saying {the hour of your death is N, where N is some hour in the day}, then that event is certain. Of course I haven't said anything interesting *with certainty*, whereas in the case of 12am I have said something interesting *with low probability*.

The tragedy of statistics is that the great majority of things we know with high probability aren't interesting, and the majority of things that are interesting have low probabilities or cannot be estimated accurately.

Firstly, thank you for such a considered reply. I think you'll find, if you look through my comment history, that on my serious days whenever I comment on the BSD licence, I do appreciate the advantages of that license over the GPL for certain goals. While I personally always use the GPL for my projects, I don't advocate it for everything.

However, I think it is clear that the currency of the GPL community are ideas and implementations. These are the membership dues you pay to be part of, and considered to be part of, the community. It makes no sense to argue against this, as if it was perhaps a minor flaw in the license that can or should be remedied for the purpose of keeping commercial players in the club. Yes, it is a goal of the GPL community to grow, people such as RMS are very clear on that, but membership dues are required from all members - that is what limits the growth and so it should be.

I come from an academic background, and the history of science suggests strongly that progress requires full disclosure of ideas and methods. In the 17th century and before, scientists hid their methods, and hid their results. These were competitive advantages. People like Cardano kept jealously the secret of solving cubic equations - it was literally worth money, as there were circus competitions where people solved equations in front of an audience. Science made very little progress, and many ideas were lost, and many ideas were improperly evaluated and wrongly praised. Today, Science requires full disclosure, and scientists often disclose their work in progress years before it is fully completed. The rate of discoveries has skyrocketed, and the rate at which scientific advances are incorporated into society has too. No serious scientist would argue for hiding *anything* as a competitive advantage - if anything they would prefer to share trivial advances on the off chance that they can be viewed as having invented them. The lesson has been learned.

I view open source in this light. There are parts of the community which have learned the lesson and espouse full sharing of all "competitive advantages", and there are more primitive parts which do not agree. I call them primitive in the same way that I view 17th century scientists as primitive. They didn't know any better, and that was tragic. Many of their ideas and methods can't be used any more, but we remember them for their historical importance, at least sometimes.

I don't feel the need to convince you to choose the GPL, I choose it because any other license is just a waste. And I do expect those who join the community to pay their dues, because that is what grows the community's value, and allows it to thrive.

I actually read slashdot in w3m. I do it because it's fast, I don't care about images and design, and most importantly it integrates very well with emacs for writing comments. Finally, it's fast, really fast. For example, if I drill down into a comment and go back up, there's no delay while the browser has to re-render the page, refresh the content or run some javascript hooks, etc. It's just the little things that I notice every time I accidentally use a graphical browser to view slashdot.

Agreed.

If he's really lucky, something else will kill him fast and first.

But he shouldn't make it too obvious, or we'll crucify him for being a coward who took the easy way out.

Considering that the request states "I am the rights holder and they don't have rights to distribute", step 3 is trivial.

That's probably the *least* trivial step. Deciding who is the rights holder is what lawyers are needed for, whenever there is a dispute. The world is full of business partners who, after years of working together, part ways *both* claiming the rights to their work. How is an ISP to know at a glance that this takedown isn't part of some ongoing legal dispute where nobody yet knows who has what rights? It might not be, and then again it might be.