Posts by Steven Knox

HP faces lawsuit by three News.com reporters

Excessive?

"Demands for several million dollars per reporter strike us as opportunistically excessive..."

Really? HP had 10 BILLION dollars in cash and cash equivalents as of the end of Jan. 07. Assuming by "several million" you mean, let's say $10 million, that would be $30 million total, or 0.3 percent of their cash.

Better yet, their net revenue for the quarter ending Jan. 07 was just about $25 billion. That amounts to just under $2 billion per week. So a $30 million settlement would be 1.5% of HP's Net Weekly Income. That'd be like punishing a kid by taking 15 cents out of a $10 weekly allowance.

Earnings v Revenue

Sorry, I made an error in my comment. I used net reveue, when I think net earnings would fit the analogy better (and be more favorable to HP.)

HP's net earnings were $1.54 billion last quarter, or about $118 million per week. That would make the penalty equal fto about $2.54 from a $10 weekly allowance.

Still nowhere near enough, methinks.

Space shuttle crashes in Alabama

Great headline?

Tyson: "The headline ... was true..."

No, it was not. The shuttle did not crash in Alabama. A train carrying rocket boosters did. Those boosters are part of the launch system for the shuttle, not even part of the shuttle itself. The train was not carrying a shuttle.

Now is indeed a good time to start thinking.

If Google kills penguins, is it doing evil?

Full disclosure is useless without proper handling

Ashlee,

I think the major point coming from most of these comments is that this article (and, in fact most journalism today) throws numbers out there without fully 1. checking the numbers, 2. analyzing the context of the numbers, and consequently 3. producing usable information from those numbers.

Checking the numbers would reveal that the Google server "count" was at best a wild guess, and the power consumption calculations were at least suspect, if not downright wrong.

Analyzing the context of the numbers would have brought in the idea that perhaps (probably very likely) all that power used by Google's servers has less of an effect than the alternatives to web-based searching.

I would prefer full disclosure as well, but until the world's journalists show that they can actually do math and critical thinking right, I don't blame companies from withholding information from you.

Kepler telescope primed to search for earth-like planets

Size does matter

No, they do mean size and distance. Hold a coin up to a light, and the coin will decrease the amount of light you see based on its relative size (i,e, size and distance), not its mass. See http://kepler.nasa.gov/about/#anchor409142 for NASA's (much better) explanation.

Plants may be red and yellow in galactic boonies

Infinity ain't all it's cracked up to be

Unfortunately for blue plants, your inital premise:

'As far as the infinite expanses of the universe are concerned, a blanket statement of "______ exists" has a 100 per cent chance of being correct.'

suffers from two flaws.

First of all, most scientists do not believe the universe to be infinite. The latest estimate I heard was 156 billion light years (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040524.html) Gigantically humongous, to be sure, but infinitely smaller than infinity.

Second, infinite size does not imply infinite possibility. The majority of space is remarkably consistent: vacuum. Adding more space does not necessarily add more variety.

It's a pity, too, because your otherwise excellent argument is remarkably similar to that put forth by Douglas Adams in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy to prove that the total population of the universe is 0, and that any person you may meet from time to time is the product of a deranged imagination. That is a very tempting philosophy...

Autonomy drops ACID test for copyrighted media

Taming the Wilderness

"The industry obsession with structure and tagging is fundamentally wrong," Lynch said. "It's like the idea we can tame the wilderness by building car parks over it."

No. That analogy only works from the viewpoint of a content producer who's frightened his content will be stolen (which does fit nicely in with their product, surprise surprise.)

From the viewpoint of content consumers, metadata (tags are just a specific form of metadata so I won't perpetuate the redundancy) is more like putting labels on boxes so you can find out what's in them.

The real problem with metadata as it stands is that it's generated by the content publishers, and so only reflects what they consider relevant about the content. A system which allows content consumers to produce metadata would allow for much richer description of the content. For example, a botanist might publish a picture of a particular plant, and tag it as such, whereas an entomologist might notice the insect walking up the stem, and want to tag that.

Borat's human rights restricted in Kazakhstan, US says

What America Would Do

>Ok, so if someone was to release a film portraying America as a "goat's-urine swilling, Jew-hating, sister-whoring nation"

Like say, anything by Michael Moore? Or perhaps anything on Comedy Central? Oh, here's a good one: a recent movie had this guy pretending to be a foreign reporter interviewing Americans, and they edited out the rational bits to showcase Americans as drunk, provincial, racist hypocrites. Whatever happened to that guy?

GPL advocates urged told to pay for love

Accuracy vs Precision

I think we could all benefit from a little logic refresher: specifically, the difference between accuracy and precision. Simply put, accuracy is whether you hit the mark, while precision is how well-defined (or small) the mark you hit is. For example, "Pi is just above 3" is an accurate statement, but it's not as precise as "Pi is approximately 3.14159".

Here's another example:

A contract is a legal agreement between two or more parties. (I know there's more to it than that, but I'm going for accuracy not precision here.)

A license agreement is a _contract_ with respect to a work protected by patent, copyright, trademark, or other laws. (There's your precision for you!)

So Mr. Goodin was right when he called the GPL a contract, he just wasn't being very precise. But "Idiot*" was wrong when he said a license was backed by copyright law and not contract law. A license is backed by copyright law AND contract law. Licenses (GPL included) often include terms such as limitations of liabilities and of warranties for specific purposes which are not covered by copyright law.

"Free or Libre" and Matt Kern both raised some good points, although I disagree with their interpretation of the article and its purpose. I don't think the article was really about the money (although that was the hook), and I don't believe the Mr. Goodin should be required to recap the entire history and current state of GPLv3 (interested parties who don't already know can google -- oops -- "search the web for" that.)

What I see as the point of this article is that the actions of the SFLC seem to imply that GPLv3 is much more complicated than v2, and that this could be a problem for a document which has historically been perceived as an attempt to simplify licensing.

Personally, I see this as a reflection of the larger legal environment: it's legally and politically more expedient to create special exceptions and complicate law rather than to retool existing law to make it simpler and more logically consistent. Consequently contracts such as GPLv3 have to be more complicated as well.

*I don't necessarily think he's an idiot, and I'm just using "he" as a neuter pronoun, because he didn't bother leaving a name.

Intel Tera – not firma, but coming

Itanic II: Electric Boogaloo?

>is Intel starting the long walk away from the x86 architecture and towards what it sees as the "next big thing" [parallel processing]?

Wasn't that the concept behind IA-64? How'd that work out for Intel, anyway?