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I'll second Alonzo Church. Think about it -- to have a meeting "in Church"!

Request for information:
According to Biot-Savart's law, as well as coming directly out of Maxwell's equations and Ampiere's theorem, the strength of a magnetic field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the conductor...

Or, in other words, magnetic field strength drops off as a square of the distance you travel away from it... so yes, it should weaken much when you walk away -- unless MRIs work in some drastically different way?

-T

Anyone who has even a minimum grasp of basic voting theory knows that Kenneth Arrow proved in 1952 that there is no consistent method of making a fair choice among three or more candidates. Thus all voting systems are, in some respect, flawed.

Short intro here. Couldn't find a link to the proof itself, unfortunately.

People have been writing math-based music since the '20s. In the '50s, it was probably the *most* common form of music written in conservatories -- the Romantic style was considered somewhat atavistic. Thank God those days are gone.

It's called serialism. See Schoenberg, Berio and Boulez.

--Tom, who strangely has a B. Mus. in composition.

Schoenburg created what was is called Serialism. The basic concept that Shoenburg thought up was to constrain the tones by making a strict rule: in his case you must use all 12 notes in some sort of sequence, but no notes may be used twice until the sequence has terminated. This is known more commonly as 12-Tone Music.

However, this idea can be extended to other aspects of music: tempo, rhythm, dynamics, etc. The idea of putting formulaic constraints like this is called Total Serialism. The guy in this article is just another total serialist.. using the platonic dice to constrain the music. The idea of constraining music with math is not new.. it's been around since the 1920's.

DEF: "restraint of trade"

You might be thinking of tortious interference, but it's not that either. eBay can do business, or not do business with whomever they choose, within the limits of civil rights and other antidiscrimination laws.

I'm no astrophysicist, but really, wtf could hold an entire GALAXY together but a black hole?

I can tell from the aggression present in your post that you're clearly no WIMP.

Is there not any legal remedy small webcasters can take, regarding the shocking carve up their larger competitors have set up. Surely this must constitute a cartel operation, or at least a breach of some relevant antitrust legislation.

ObDisclaimer: I am not a British lawyer, let alone an American one.

ObJoke: Why is there only one Monopolies And Mergers Commission?

This sleeze seems to be an American phenomenon.

Land of the free, home of the brave.

.mike
sig? what the hell for?

I never told anyone about the metor I heard explode during a party one October night about 10 years ago. I figured that no one would believe me. For years I thought I must have had an "auditory halucination" or some such. (It was a hell of a party.)

Then while I was watching Discovery one night about a year ago I heard an astronomer talk about exactly what I saw: A fireball that burst into a shower of sparks with an audible explosion. It's called a bolide.

Google Search on Metor & Bolide

xrefer bolide entry

Duh. Another expression for methanol is "wood alcohol".

1. Isn't the adjective pertaining to Venus 'venereal'?

Yes, but to avoid the obvious innuendo people tend to derive an alternative based on 'Martian'. i.e. 'Venusian' or 'Venutian'.

You can use "Cytherean" as well.

Just keep those pesky imperial units away from the project

You probably meant to keep these imperial units away from the probe device. But perhaps it would be just as well to keep these imperial units away too.

pay off my student loans

The current interest rate is APR 1.3%, at least in the UK. May as well keep the money in a bank account and pay off the minimum (and your credit card, if any, first)...

I'll file the following Patent now: "Method of generating income by filing obvious patents and suing everyone in sight."

The method suggested is "not of industrial application" (see entry at xrefer.com) so cannot be patentable. At least the actual patent is at least potentially of industrial application (though its novelty is questionable). Litig

The actual patent can be avoided just by using a fixed "pay page" (in other words, the account number has to be typed in by hand). Alternatively, the goods could simply be sent Cash on Delivery (if still available - Royal Mail appears to have done away with it) or with an ordinary invoice (quite trusting, especially if solicitors are not called or the invoice is fairly small).

IANAL:
Yes, that's an actionable cause. It's called Barratry in the past, now I think they use Harrisment by Process, or maybe "Corporate Attack Dog".

"A corporation has no soul to damn and no body to kick" (variously "kill", "punish").

This comes from the Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor of England in the 1700's and as far as I can tell (http://www.xrefer.com) the full and correct quote is :

"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like."

Or you might prefer this from Ambrose Bierce :

"Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."

More at http://www.endgame.org/primer-quotes.html. These quotes (naturally) apply to HP, to MS, to Dell, Red Hat and so on

It's even possible that complete languages existed before humans were able to speak. American Sign Language is an example of a language with its own complete, unique grammar and morphology, which does not make use of speech. (See Pinker's book again.) Its existence supports the hypothesis that the parts of the brain responsible for language can operate independently of the parts that co-ordinate speech. In summary, there is a lot more to language than co-ordinating the muscles of the mouth and throat.

> "thats" is spelt "that's".

Unless you are one of the greatest writers that the English-speaking world has ever produced.

(yeah, offtopic, i know. so sue me.)

I remember the last wedding/funeral I heard about. This Palestinian group wanted to celebrate the happy event (wedding) by firing a mortar. That's right - a fucking mortar. Ended up killing about 25 people, including the groom (funeral). Darwin awards candidates, all.

2. Please define the word "god." If the word has no definition, it is nonsense.

He'll probably have no trouble defining it. viz. for example something like Aristotle's prime mover. Perhaps the bare minimal, quasi-Judeo-Christian God is that which created everything. There are ways to ciriticize the necessity of such a move (what created God? If nothing did, then why postulate a creater seperate from the everything itself?), but that's besides my point.

What you probably mean is that it's not an empirically verifiable term or something. If this is the case, you're proposing a form of the verification principle, and you should know the problems that go along with it. It is not widely accepted anymore that the verification principle is without problems of its own. See the link for more (albiet brief) details.

Actually, as mentioned in the article, you don't have to be a law enforcement organisation to carry out a search order in Britain. These special search orders are known as Anton Piller orders.

Also, you can be in a ruling body without being elected in Britain. In fact, in Britain, you can serve at the highest level of the judicial, executive and legislative branch at the same time, all without being elected. Lord Irvine of Lairg, the Lord Chancellor, does so.

Copyright was something an author sold a publisher, and didn't exist in any form, really, until it got put in the American constitiution.

Why are Americans so embarassingly ignorant of history? Are schools in the United States really that bad?

Unsurprisingly, copyright in the United Kingdom dates back to before the revolting colonies threw their tea out of the pram. And Alan is absolutely right that - in England, anyway - it was based on the 1662 Licensing Act, whose aim was primarily censorship.

I'm not claiming the United Kingdom had the first copyright laws; I think at least the French and the Dutch had them before we did. But we had them before the United States even existed.

This article reminds me of the headline from the Times newspaper (London, not New York) that is said to have won a most boring headline competition: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead".

I can see tomorrow's Slashdot headlines now:

CmdrTaco not dead.
JohnKatz (sadly) not dead.
Dick Cheney: is he dead yet?

etc.

Talk about a Freudian slip. I must have the original Star Trek on the brain.

In the U.S., we have a certain amount of disconnection between laws and morals. For instance, while the moral "Do not kill" is codified as a law, "Don't look at p0rn" is not (at least in most cases). IMHO, this disconnection is due to the two facts that people in the U.S. come from diverse backgrounds and that personal freedoms are (or at least were) highly valued.

Look at what was proposed:

• Maximum warning. Employees ought to have between three and six months' notice before they're laid off. That would be nice, but you had better have tham escrow the money, because sh*t happens. Since you want them to tie up a bunch of money, what will you compensate them with? Will you work for free for the first six months to 'escrow' your work in case you die suddenly and you can't be replaced easily?
• Continued health benefits. Why would you expect them to pay your benefits for an indefinite time? Again, sh*t happens. They may not have any money to pay those benefits. And if they were willing to make sucha commitment (maybe by purchasing some sort of insurance), what would you offer up to compensate them? A smaller paycheck? The right to have the company mandate you eat right, jog 2 miles a day and get 8 hours of sleep every day so that the insurance is cheaper?
• Innovative responses. Actually, this is not a bad idea, although HP is getting racked over the coals for tring something different. The legal environment in the U.S. discourages innovations in a lot of areas, and this is one of them.

As a former USAF guy, I'm all for bombing them back to the stone age (Curtis LeMay [xrefer.com]), only... it seems like they're already there.

What I think might have more long-term effect would be to air-drop Big Mac's, Levi 501 jeans, and bottles of Pepsi. Later we can send in ranks of solar-powered CD players with stacks of WEA cut-outs (start with Michael Jackson's latest flop). It'll be more effective than the M-1942 Liberator Pistol [gunnery.net].

In short, corrupt their youth with Western consumer goods, like we did with the Soviets. It'll take 20 years, but we'll end up with a new market for our goods, a pliable populace, and no terrorists.

Basically, it says that at extremely high temperatures, forces combine together. First, the electromagnetic force with weak nuclear force, becoming electroweak force, then the strong nuclear force, then finally, gravity (it is better explained in Hawking's book). Basically, depending on the temperature of the substance you're working with, constants, laws, and forces that it obey change as well.

Hawking also tells us that there is a constant amount of energy and matter in the universe, and the universe is constantly expanding and cooling. Since no natural law is so abrupt as to spontaneously jump from one value to another (a bullet traveling in one direction cannot change its direction entirely without stopping first, then going the other way, even if it is shot at directly with a cannon ball), then it only makes sense that it would change smoothly on some sort of function. Why shouldn't this idea be applied to constants? In this case, the force combination at high temperatures (such as the infinte temperature at the beginning of time) would follow some sort of inverse function, such as c = k ^ h + 300,000 (where k is some unknown value, h is the temperature of the location in space). So, at incredibly high temperatures, this would severely change the value of "c" (the speed of light), but at lower ones, the change would have less effect.

I don't believe that the value of light or gravity or any other constant will change with time, but instead with temperature, since the temperature of an object directly changes how it acts (H20: ice vs. water vs. vapor, etc), not what particular time it is in. This would still hold up with the quasar observations. With an incredible amount of distance separating us and the phenomena we're observing, the temperature of the universe in between here and there would affect the observations more, not the time in which it was sent.

Well, this is defintely more than just $.02 worth, but interesting to consider, nonetheless.

This is (quite literally) not the end of the world, and also not relevant to the evolution debate (although it will surely be blown out of proportion a billion-fold by shoddy journalists). Some info for the crowd:

The fine structure constant (alpha) is found by combining several other "universal constants" in such a way that all of the units (such as meters per second) cancel out. You get a dimensionless number, like pi, whose particular value (about 137) is basically built in to the universe. One formula is:

• alpha = (q_e)^2 / (E_0 * h * c)
  where
• q_e = charge of an electron
• E_0 = permittivity of space
• h = Planck's constant
• c = speed of light

So if alpha is actually not constant, any one of those items may have changed while others remained constant. And more importantly, the research points to a change of only 0.001% over the past 12 billion years. In short, warp drive this ain't.

IANAL, but IIRC delaying before bringing suit in order to wreak greater havoc can backfire if the defendant can show that the plaintiff delayed excessively-- such delay is called laches, and can result in the plaintiff losing rights to equitable remedies (such as damages and injunction).

Okay, I accept that these labels are only applicable from the public, or the Free software community's perspective. IBM is, of course, consistently self interested. When I say that IBM does things which are unethical, I refer to utilitarian ethics; although I'm not actually a utilitarian myself, I don't think there is another ethical framework which has the same legitimacy in discussions of public policy.

Many people defened the "free market" economy because they claim that it has many desirable utilitarian properties. Those people tend to ignore the distorting economic effects of power. When a large corporation actively lobbies for changes in, for example, IP laws, which are clearly contrary to the public interest, it is our responsibility as informed citizens to point that out to them (in the politest possible way, of course ;).

For more background, see The Unconscious Civilisation by Jon Ralston Saul, Anansi Press. It traces the common ideological heritage of corporatism and that other -ism.
--
Change is inevitable.

Katz apparently thinks he has coined this term "corporatism" to refer to rampant pro-business policies. However, the word "corporatism" is already used widely to mean something very different. Katz, I implore you, come up with a new word, to avoid confusion. It's as if I decided suddenly to start using the word "socialism" to refer to the social hierarchy that makes some people popular and others unpopular.

Open-sourced and free software follow the process of evolution

Biological evolution postulates mutation as an information-generating mechanism, against all common sense, mathematical principles and every shard of experimental evidence. This is so absurd a practice that bizarre ideas like entelechy are offered as alternatives.

Mutation is about as useful for providing or improving biological design as a high-powered rifle is for providing or improving Lego layouts.

To make the US gummint purchasing system work for software, all you need add is Free (libre) Software. They may get shafted once, but only once, in each segment of the market.

A quick google search shows that waveguides were theorized in 1890 and proven in the 1930's.

Delphion's patent search for waveguides returns stuff so old they don't even have it online.

My November 1962 copy of CQ (which retailed for a buck) shows how to make a 10db transistorized preamp for 420 megacycles (it wasn't megahertz back then) in a .5" x 1.25" x 1" box, barely larger than the BNC connectors attached to it, with less than ten components. The article mentions that this particular design "shows significant improvement in signals up to 800 mc."

The only thing that had to be digital about original cell phones was that you had to dial the number with your fingers. NTSC (do I need to tell you how long that's been around?) uses the same 25khz-wide FM signal as the original US cellular standard, AMPS. That's why people can modify old 60's television sets that tuned channels 82-84 (the same frequencies as AMPS cellular) to recieve transmissions from cellular towers.

There's no shortage of historical information on the net, but if you want in depth analysis of some historical issue or other, you basically have to go and look in a library.

In fact, I often find that Xrefer does a better job of answering historical or philosophical questions than a generic web search. Since Xrefer is just [free beer] access to a collection of reference books, that isn't really very encouraging.

Basically, the net is great for breadth, but for non-geek disciplines, the depth is often lacking. We need to shrink copyright terms down to at most 5 or 10 years. That might help :)

If NASA is able to spot a polar lander from orbital photography, why do we still have all these disputes over the history of mars; i.e. whether or not Mars had water, whether canals were formed by water, etc.

Uhhh... what canals?

Lowell had a dodgy telescope.

martian canals ('canali')


Optical illusions, produced by telescopic viewing of Mars with a resolution of poorer than about 100 km, first reported by Schiaparelli ('canali' is the Italian for 'channels') and especially championed by Percival Lowell (1855 - 1916). These observers produced maps of the martian surface showing interconnected networks of canals, implying the presence of intelligent life on Mars. The intelligence which devised the canals was, however, on the terrestrial side of the telescope.

A Dictionary of Earth Sciences, © Oxford University Press 1999

If NASA is able to spot a polar lander from orbital photography, why do we still have all these disputes over the history of mars; i.e. whether or not Mars had water, whether canals were formed by water, etc.

Uhhh... what canals?

Lowell had a dodgy telescope.

martian canals ('canali')


Optical illusions, produced by telescopic viewing of Mars with a resolution of poorer than about 100 km, first reported by Schiaparelli ('canali' is the Italian for 'channels') and especially championed by Percival Lowell (1855 - 1916). These observers produced maps of the martian surface showing interconnected networks of canals, implying the presence of intelligent life on Mars. The intelligence which devised the canals was, however, on the terrestrial side of the telescope.

A Dictionary of Earth Sciences, © Oxford University Press 1999

Well, that's because there was no flaw in the proof of his theorem. And he didn't even use the dreaded "choice axiom" nor the sacred number 18. You have to remember that the kids in yesterday's story only got into trouble because they used list context in a situation where it wasn't appropriate.

Someday, look at the history of John Wilkes, (opposition m.p. in Britain. and learn why we have a fourth ammendment.

Just because law enforcement wants to search in an unrestricted manner does not mean that we should let them. Furthermore, I have not seen a method of encryption which is easy enough for my mother-in-law to use.

Protection of freedom by nerdly end-runs is no protection at all. My ability to talk on clearspeech phones has been preserved- so must my ability to send messages unintercepted. Yes, as a stopgap, we must keep anonymization and encryption legal. However, we should enforce the laws we have which protect our freedoms.

Someday, look at the history of John Wilkes, (opposition m.p. in Britain. and learn why we have a fourth ammendment.

Just because law enforcement wants to search in an unrestricted manner does not mean that we should let them. Furthermore, I have not seen a method of encryption which is easy enough for my mother-in-law to use.

Protection of freedom by nerdly end-runs is no protection at all. My ability to talk on clearspeech phones has been preserved- so must my ability to send messages unintercepted. Yes, as a stopgap, we must keep anonymization and encryption legal. However, we should enforce the laws we have which protect our freedoms.

Read this quick summary.

Methinks Clay's been reading the popular science books and jotting down the interesting words again...