Say you somehow have advance knowledge of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Is it legal to steal as many books as you can from the Library prior? Of course not. Is this the only way to save unique volumes from irrevocable destruction when you have no way to convince the librarians of its imminent fate, or even to contact them at all? Yes.
And then return them to the owner once the emergency is over? Yes. I don't see that happening here. What you describe is an emergency response; what's happening here looks like looting.
(Edit: soften what could be read as an outright accusation.)
To clarify, I should have said, "I don't foresee that happening here." I predict, based on the attitudes the article expressed, that the writer has little interest in the owners of these games, and even less interest in their rights.
I think the broad market trends are pretty suggestive -- consumers in general don't care about DRM or wouldn't see e.g. Amazon's success in the ebook business. For more specifics I think we'd need hyper-detailed data. For example, how many people consider Google's use of the broken ACS4 DRM "close enough" to DRM-free?
I'm just a consumer, but Google Play Books are in fact available for DRM-free download when so-requested by the publisher. Or least that's the reason Google gives when directly providing the book as a DRM-free download.
Yeah. Also I'd rather not give Google my money. If something goes wrong I don't like my chances of getting it back. At least with O'Reilly you could talk to a human.
I agree that innumeracy of various degrees is a widespread problem, but I do think the last example is because the term "false positive rate" sounds to many people like it should mean the false discovery rate. I'm sure there are some people who do have trouble reasoning from the correct definitions, but mis-identifying/remembering the semantics of the values provided leaves no chance for succesful calculation.
That we're modeling the outcome of a coin toss as a sample space set containing at least two event elements, one of which we call "heads," and that we have a probability measure which assigns 0.5 to the subset consisting of only the "heads" event.
Worth it just for finding out about `stty -ixon`. I never would have guessed from the `stty` man page description that this option would give me back C-s and C-q to bind to something actually useful.
It is described perfectly, but it does presume the reader knows the meaning of "XON/XOFF flow control".
Whether the reader knows that meaning immediately is a rather good proxy for just how long they have been working and/or playing with computers. Long ago, in a world of RS-232 connected display terminals and/or analog telephone modems, one became very familiar with "XON/XOFF flow control".
My take from the introduction is that the books is going to mostly be about probabilistic graphical models (PGMs).
I look forward to reading this book when finished and hope they find success with this presentation of the core ideas. As a practitioner I see a fair amount of "I have a hammer; now I just need this problem to be a nail" type thinking with regard to using off-the-shelf techniques.
In the intro to this book the authors have an example with Kalman filters. A similar example is how Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is treated by different communities. In a certain chunk of the CS-dominated topic-modeling literature and in the data science blogosphere LDA is this recieved atomic technique; a black-box tool for modeling documents. In the Stan manual, it is one fairly boring example of a mixture model, only worth talking about explicitly because so many people ask about it.
I've been enrolled in an MS Statistics program part-time while working full-time. I'm around half-way done, and by the end it will have taken me three years total taking two classes at a time, although that includes a few extra courses beyond what the program strictly requires.
I had a pretty different reaction to "Story of Your Life." I can maybe see the description of "nihilist," but only in the sense of "positive nihilism" -- nothing outside of conscious life defines value, so it's up to us to define it and find it ourselves. The fact that life ends doesn't make it less valuable: it just frames the urgency of finding meaning within the small window we have.
I find that this is a theme which runs through a number of Chiang's stories. If you haven't read it, you might find "Exhalation" interesting: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ . You may also find it nihilst, but makes the positive, celabratory element even more explicit.
> so it's up to us to define it and find it ourselves
That's the part I didn't get from the story. In fact, there was a strong sense of "the future is already written so you might as well not try to get out of it". Life is short so let's just drift along whatever little we have of it passively kind of thing.
I'll keep in mind Chiang's other stories (already bought them long ago) but to be honest there are many books ahead of it on the reading list.
spoilers below
The only positive interpretation I can think of the story is a fairly complex critique of the heroine (and through that human nature) as wanting the safety of knowledge even at great personal cost (25 more years of sadness than she was supposed to have). She did have a choice: she could have forgotten how to read the language and through this regained agency in her own life (or at least hope). This is an example of the cognitive bias of picking suboptimal options because we are familiar with them. She did not pick that choice, although you could argue that knowing she did not pick that choice, she did not pick that choice (return to nihilist square one, the only square).
Asimov's The End of Eternity deals much better with time travel and information about future timelines. IMHO.
