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However, I am still wondering (1) whether you read the interview with Mead about his book, or are just taking the first part of Elby's quote (about imprecise equipment) at face value; and (2) whether you are accusing Mead of being an intellectual fraud.

I did read the article, and looked at the sample pages from the book, and read another interesting speech of Mead's, and think that it might be possible that there is a lot of merit in wanting to consider some particles - particularly electrons - as manifolds with boundary in stead of as singular points.

To deal with the first question, I think that Mead's main intent was to say that the Copenhagen Interpretation went wrong in insisting upon dogmatic adherence to the point particle model. He says that they understandably did not have access to the kind of data we do now, such as being able to see a single electron, but even more importantly, they had no experimental experience with coherent systems. Since their only experience was of incoherent systems, then of necessity, statistical models were all they could talk about. Mead is saying that with mounting evidence of coherent systems such as Lasers, Masers, Bose-Einstein condensates, etc. (he lists 10 in his book), that it appears to him that this is an even more important litmus test for understanding properties of "pure particles" (my paltry words here) than something like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Criterion.

The other thing I think Mead is addressing are logical paradoxes, which like you also mention, we all know must be created by lesser minds misapplying theoretical concepts. But like you, I feel unqualified to talk about these in physics at present. My gut feeling, however, is that dogmatism has been poisoning academic physics for decades.

Finally, our thread root poster, Elby, mentioned a "growing school" of thought. The article quotes Mead as follows:

John Cramer at the University of Washington was one of the first to describe it as a transaction between two atoms. At the end of his book, Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, John Gribbin gives a nice overview of Cramer's interpretation and says that "with any luck at all it will supercede the Copenhagen interpretation as the standard way of thinking about quantum physics for the next generation of scientists."

Well, that's my quick summary. I'd be curious to know what a "Real" scientist thought about Mead's perspective; I found it very interesting. [Disclaimer: I am not a scientist although I have a fair background in graduate mathematics and a bit as well in undergrad physics. But,] In fact, I have enough experience with math to have a certain skepticism about the wisdom of unthinkingly applying things as basic as the real number field, with its Archimedean property, or the idea of a mathematical point, with unqualified enthusiasm to great unknowns such as the elementary particles of nature. And for criticizing such an unthinking approach to matter, I would like to know if I am truly justified in applauding Mead (i.e. in the name of Real science).

In any case, I would be grateful to be educated out of any of my own misconceptions. Best of luck to you in producing Real science - I hope I get to read about the results some day!

However, I am still wondering (1) whether you read the interview with Mead about his book, or are just taking the first part of Elby's quote (about imprecise equipment) at face value; and (2) whether you are accusing Mead of being an intellectual fraud.

I did read the article, and looked at the sample pages from the book, and read another interesting speech of Mead's, and think that it might be possible that there is a lot of merit in wanting to consider some particles - particularly electrons - as manifolds with boundary in stead of as singular points.

To deal with the first question, I think that Mead's main intent was to say that the Copenhagen Interpretation went wrong in insisting upon dogmatic adherence to the point particle model. He says that they understandably did not have access to the kind of data we do now, such as being able to see a single electron, but even more importantly, they had no experimental experience with coherent systems. Since their only experience was of incoherent systems, then of necessity, statistical models were all they could talk about. Mead is saying that with mounting evidence of coherent systems such as Lasers, Masers, Bose-Einstein condensates, etc. (he lists 10 in his book), that it appears to him that this is an even more important litmus test for understanding properties of "pure particles" (my paltry words here) than something like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Criterion.

The other thing I think Mead is addressing are logical paradoxes, which like you also mention, we all know must be created by lesser minds misapplying theoretical concepts. But like you, I feel unqualified to talk about these in physics at present. My gut feeling, however, is that dogmatism has been poisoning academic physics for decades.

Finally, our thread root poster, Elby, mentioned a "growing school" of thought. The article quotes Mead as follows:

John Cramer at the University of Washington was one of the first to describe it as a transaction between two atoms. At the end of his book, Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, John Gribbin gives a nice overview of Cramer's interpretation and says that "with any luck at all it will supercede the Copenhagen interpretation as the standard way of thinking about quantum physics for the next generation of scientists."

Well, that's my quick summary. I'd be curious to know what a "Real" scientist thought about Mead's perspective; I found it very interesting. [Disclaimer: I am not a scientist although I have a fair background in graduate mathematics and a bit as well in undergrad physics. But,] In fact, I have enough experience with math to have a certain skepticism about the wisdom of unthinkingly applying things as basic as the real number field, with its Archimedean property, or the idea of a mathematical point, with unqualified enthusiasm to great unknowns such as the elementary particles of nature. And for criticizing such an unthinking approach to matter, I would like to know if I am truly justified in applauding Mead (i.e. in the name of Real science).

In any case, I would be grateful to be educated out of any of my own misconceptions. Best of luck to you in producing Real science - I hope I get to read about the results some day!

There's a growing school of thought within physics that the Heisenburg uncertainty prinicple could be a misconception arising from inexact experimental tools, and from an unwillingness to abandon the idea of the point perticle. Carver Mead, a past student of Richard Feynman and one of the most important practical scientists of the past 50 years discusses this in an interview in the American Spectator.

I might be worried, except the EU can barely operate cohesively now. Entropy always increases--they'll be squabbling like a bunch of horny teenage boys over a Playboy in 10 years (or less).

The EU already has traitors in their midst economically. The end result of that debate will be quite interesting.

If you want to get a look at what an EU military would look like, keep an eye on the UN's military endeavors.

Perhaps I was a bit unclear, but the basic point still stands:

Protection of IP is an artificial monopoly. It is a right granted for the common good. Again, quid pro quo. You get the right to disallow everyone else to sell a copy of your creation, as an incentive to create. The cost to you is that one day your creation becomes public property.

Why would the law grant you extra rights, without you giving something back? Why should the judges+police do work just to make you rich? Doesn't that seem selfish to you?

My code has value to me - the value of the hundreds of hours of my finite life that I put into creating it. That is not value that can, or should, belong to anyone else - even mankind as a whole. The ideas used to create the code (even if they are my own ideas), however, can belong to mankind as whole (after the patent incentive) - but that does not give anyone any rights (moral or legal) to my code.

You can always keep it to yourself. If you do, none except you can profit from your creation (that seems to appeal to you very much which saddens me). But as soon as you sell it and use the law to make sure you will be repaid for your hard work (by getting money or more code through the GPL), you (automatically) accept the consequences of that. Your creation becomes part of our culture and the law makes sure that it will one day become free. This is very fortunate or we would still be paying the heirs of Shakespeare. And it is extremely fortunate that we thus may preserve works that the IP owner doesn't care to sell anymore (see Project Gutenberg). Doesn't this make you even a bit happy?

Well, Lawrence Lessig is much better at explaining these things. I fully agree with him. I don't want to become a slave of IP-owners. But I not only disagree with the RIAA/MPAA's quest for control over our lives, but also with the programmers that want to do the same (like the GPL programmers that want to disallow certain uses of software).

Laws as arbitrary as copyright laws must be bad.Why not 40 years or 27 years? Five years should be enough.

The length of terms is something which can be debated ad infinitum. Maybe what's needed is some formula like "3 times the mean anount of time a typical publisher will attempt to make money from this kind of work."

This was one area of Lawrence Lessig's proposals that I really liked. He suggests a short copyright term (five years) that can be renewed a large number of times, but requires active effort from the copyright holder to obtain each renewal. Further, he suggests that a fee be associated with the renewal and that the terms of the renewals become progressively more onerous.

Besides being quite a logical approach, it's also a reasonable compromise. Copyright holders who really, really care can still maintain control of their IP for a long, long time (which would obviously appeal to Disney and the like), but nearly everything would fall into the public domain rather quickly. Out-of-print books, for example, would almost certainly become public shortly after going out of print. Even megacorps like Disney probably wouldn't choose to maintain protection over the majority of their works, because managing and paying for all of the renewals on thousands of no-longer-saleable works would be difficult, expensive and pointless (no ROI).

As I said in a comment attached to another story, Mr. Lessig's suggestions don't work well for software, but I think he's got some very good ideas about books, movies, music and the like.

My personal feelings on abandonware are that there's really nothing wrong with it. I think it's healthy for the market and wonderful for players.

When I was about 9 years old, my father bought me Starflight... a game we saw on the shelves of Radio Shack and thought looked cool. We enjoyed it but never got very far because the game has a high probability of corrupting itself (otherwise it's a terrific game... a true classic). Years later I realized that surely someone must have preserved a copy of the game that I could download... and thanks to abandonware, I was right. I tracked down a copy for download and fiddled around with my system until I could get it to work... and it was just great... it was a minor obsession of mine for several weeks and I finally beat it, getting my father's money's worth out of the purchase. Lot's of nostalgia, lot's of fun. Who gets hurt here?

I dismiss most of the arguments of the game publishers, and especially the stance of the IDSA. The bulk of their argument is that legality equals morality, which any freethinking individual probably realizes isn't true... or else laws would never be repealed or changed.

I also don't understand how Abandonware sites hurt their intellectual property rights as many of them seem to claim. They still own the copyrights, they still own the trademarks. Nobody is going to tell Nintendo that they don't own the rights to produce Mario games because they fail to rabidly attack an abandonware site with a Mario Bros romdump from a 20 year old arcade board. Nobody is arguing that Mario Bros is "public domain" from a legal perspective. The one fellow put it succintly "It's piracy, but so what?" The pirates aren't challenging the rights of the publisher's... they only hurt the publishers by denying them revenue, and in the case of the vast majority of abandonware, they're not even doing that.

Another argument a few of them made was "Well, we might want to release a classics pack one day." This is a semi-legitimate argument, but in reality we know that the only "classics packs" that are truly successful commericially are those that package together a few familiar arcade classics... not more obscure PC titles. Most people only buy "arcade classics collections" because they are familiar with playing those games in arcades.

What is the market for a classics pack of old PC games, on the other hand? There aren't going to be very many people who are going to plunk down $20 for a bunch of old games with EGA graphics that they're not familiar with. If people ARE familiar with the games, on the other hand... it's probably because they legitimately owned the games at one point in time.

And the truth that we all know is that very few people are actually trying to sell 10+ year old games... at least not without heavily retooling the game (like Frogger 3D).

So Abandonware really is quite harmless. I'd like to think that there are a few current and future game designers out there getting exposure to these "Golden Oldies" like Starflight for inspiration on how to do more with less and that thanks to Abandonware, we will (and have been) enjoying better games. I really think the IDSA is doing the gaming community and the companies they represent a disservice by going after abandonware sites so diligently, but I guess they have to take a hardline stance on all forms of piracy to convince their members that they're doing their job.

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