I can't believe we're having an argument about the usefulness of ad supported web businesses with barely any mention of Google. Dear everyone, where do you think their money comes from? If there were no ads on the internet there would be no google and no facebook and no twitter, to name just a few. Maybe you can live with that, but it's hard to say that they aren't adding value or providing services that people like. The truth of the matter is that hardly anyone cares about ads, especially if they aren't obnoxious interstitials or flash spam and every once and a while you see something you like which is a win win. Run adblock if you like, but there's just no case for a crusade against advertising based revenue models. Those are the revenue models that support that suppor the services we love on the internet.

I don't know where you work, but the complexity of the algorithms we're using comes up every day at work. The difference is that you can't just implement the "assume without loss of generality" version of the algorithm; you have to actually make the damn thing work. And you have to handle possibly corrupt inputs, and up and downstream failures, and your problems span multiple algorithms feeding into and through one another.

So yeah, its complicated, and there's time pressure, but at good development shops people think about quality. It's just that quality is a much higher bar when you're trying to develop supportable systems for complex and evolving problems. What looks like ugly code to academics is, often as not, just hardened code, code that deals with the mess of disk failures and language-level memory leaks and all the detritus that piles up around our implementations of the turing machine. The big challenge is that the particular crap around the turing machine shifts over time, and no one has enough time to pay down technical debt all the time.

I think it's worth thinking a little bit about what the incentives are in this situation. Google's expertise, their secret sauce, the thing they pitch to the companies whose ads they distribute is that they have a done of user data AND they know what to do with it. The "and we know what to do with it" thing is a huge value add. Google knows much better than their clients who is the best target for a given add. That's their competitive advantage. They don't WANT to sell the data to other companies because that hurts their business model. That's why we can be confident that the Today policies are here to stay.

Couldn't agree more

Not that this helps the root problem, which is that a research lab has to blow its budget on lawyers to defend their work, but I have to imagine that the original research group published a paper either about the method, or using the method, since that's the primary deliverable for most research. If that's the case, they've almost certainly got a strong prior art case.

I'm curious as to what sort of limitations the building mechanism puts on the structures. There wouldn't be any supporting superstructure holding everything in place until the building is structurally sound. Every stage would have to be able to stand up on its own power. I wonder what the impact would be on design? Would buildings that are stable at every stage of their construction be more stable upon completion? Regardless, this seems pretty damn cool.

Based on their experience with the finger-crosser, I'd say this is a stunningly effective anti-terror mechanism

I don't think we're questioning whether or not she copied excerpts verbatim. The question is whether or not the entirety of the work is going to contribute to literature in a novel way.

The idea of copyright in literature is brand spanking new. Some of our greatest works of literature have blatant elements of "plagiarism". A significant portion of the body of Arthurian literature is straightforwardly copied, often word for word, from one source to another. Medieval authors embellish or elide where they feel it is appropriate, but they have no qualms about lifting verbatim from earlier writers. Many commonly anthologized and academically respected english sonnets are straightforwardly copies of pre-existing italian ones. The bible is a hodgepodge of shoplifted stories from the epic of gilgamesh and who knows how many other ancient sources. Literature is a dialogue and a group endeavor and it has been for ages. This isn't new, and so long as it adds value to the body of literature, it isn't bad.

I think that it's possible for a book composed entirely of excerpts to be an excellent, creative, and original work. The key question for me is whether the author stole someone's novel and changed some bits, or genuinely pasted together pieces from a body of work in order to create something new.

Having not read the book, and seen no real analysis of its content, I can't comment on whether this was achieved, but if it was I don't think it flies in the face of copyright (especially as applied to literature).

You copyright a work, not a portion of a work (though of course portions are also protected), and the purpose of that copyright is to prevent mis-attribution of praise (whether monetary or otherwise) for the creative output generated. If her book uses the words of another author in parts in order to support her unique overarching theme, I don't think the spirit of copyright has really been violated.

Dear Slashdot,

I would like to direct you to the article, as you seem to have neglected it in favor of mindless over-reaction.

Item 1: The study doesn't BLAME the victims of bullying and social rejection, it asserts that there is a correlation between underdeveloped social skills and bullying and rejection. People who have paid attention to the universe have probably already noticed this correlation. Under the "ways to help" section, the neglect and bullying are explicitly pointed out as CAUSES of the underdeveloped social skills.

Item 2: It is painfully clear that social skills are important for being well liked. Yes, people are assholes and bullies unfairly prey on unpopular kids, but that doesn't change the essential fact that social skills can help you extract yourself gracefully from these situations (without resorting to the sort of violent fantasies described in earlier (and unfortunately upmodded) posts). Furthermore, those same skills are vitally important for future success in education and the workplace.

In summary:

Being socially effective is important, maybe we should help kids who are having trouble figure out how.
Bullying and social rejection cause and are caused by underdeveloped social skills. That is bad, and we should do stuff (practical, achievable, forward moving stuff) in order to help alleviate it.

Thank you, as always, for the stream of unproductive invective.

Rory

I want to find out about stuff that I could use. If there exists a product that is perfectly suited to my needs, I want to be told about it. There is absolutely NO way to do this without knowing something about me. Therefore, I want targeted advertising. A significant part of the reason I read slashdot, and browse newegg and gizmodo, is so that I can find stuff that meets my needs. I waste enormous amounts of time doing that in order to find a product I actually want. If google read all the emails, IMs, &c that I sent and figured out that I was looking for a gadget with properties x, y, and z, and then marketed one to me I would be ecstatic. If you don't want that, I don't understand you. What people don't want is: 1. disruptive advertising - we all hate popup adds and flash banners 2. bad advertising - see all viagra, tampon, &c references above 3. invasions of privacy - no one wants the general public to know they're in the market for a vibrator (well, almost no one) It doesn't mean they're not hoping for an add for the perfect one I think we can all agree on this one.

Notre Dame's oit provides a fair amount of linux support, and generally provides applications and installation instructions for windows, mac, and one linux distribution (typically Red Hat or Ubuntu)