If there is no copyright claim by the original author then I don't see what the problem is. AFAIK that means it's in the public domain
This is completely incorrect. In the United States, everything is automatically copyright by it's author, regardless of whether they explicitly say so or not. Depending on the forum agreement, they author might have given up the copyright to the forum itself, but it is highly unlikely that the forum agreement gives everybody the right to use the code as they wish. The fact that the code did not come with a license means that you have no license to use the code.
If code is released under the GPL, then one can use it subject to certain restrictions. If you use GPL'd code without actually abiding by those restrictions, the GPL just says that the license is revoked and that you are committing the exact same crime (subject to the exact same penalties) as using code with no license.
You might be right that nobody cares, and if that is the case, then nothing will come of this theft of code. However, saying that it is in the public domain and that one should use it without fear is perhaps the worse legal/business advice I have ever seen on slashdot.
I realize that you are joking, but the terminology actually makes a lot of sense in the right context. "Complex" refers to the fact that you are looking at something defined with respect to the complex numbers. "Simple" refers to the fact that it isn't built out of smaller pieces in some particular way.
In some sense, it is a shame that mathematicians have turned standard words into technical terms, because people can't look at phrases and instantly say "Oh, that's just jargon, I shouldn't try to understand it." We should take a cue from physicists in that respect*. On the other hand, the misappropriation of language done here is far less worse than what comes out of the marketing department at Microsoft (or anywhere else, for that matter).
*I once tried to read a string theory paper that was cited by a math paper, and I couldn't get a page in before giving up. Instead of saying that variables commute or commute up to a sign (anti-commute), they threw around terms like fermionic and bosonic. After that, things just got weird. I guess it come from the same kind of thinking that leads to people saying "not commenting code means your company can't afford to fire you"?
The NSA exists to do more than spying and code breaking. As was pointed out when the NSA released SELinux, part of their job is to help keep our messages secure (even if they are spying on U.S. citizens in violation of American law). When they come up with standards that the government is mandated to use, the part of the NSA which wants a back door is less influential (I hope) than the part that doesn't want our top secret materials to be decoded by other countries.
If it were clear that a back door existed, there are a lot of people who would put a lot of resources into finding it (either by brute force, or by coercing someone who has the key). It would take a healthy dose of hubris for a group of people that smart to think that nobody else could find the key. It would not, however, be implausible for them to overlook a subtle design flaw that makes the algorithm less secure than they thought it was. I realize that it is easy to be a conspiracy theorist when talking about the NSA, but cryptography is hard enough and subtle enough that I don't think we should cry foul play. Instead, we should just shy away from this particular standard.
The thing is, before social networking, showing pictures to their friends wouldn't have been a huge violation of your privacy. However, due to the way that people now use social networking sites, the preferred method of sharing photos with friends is a violation. Sure, you can request that they not post the pictures, and more than likely they will just laugh it off and ask what the big deal is. You can ask that they not tag you in the pictures, but that doesn't mean that a third party won't end up doing the job. If you are a member of the site, you can restrict access to pictures which you are tagged in (maybe), but that does nothing if you aren't a member. Your only real options are to look like a nutjob to your friends or to put up with the privacy violation.
You're right that it isn't the facebook's fault that your friends are violating your privacy in exactly the same way it isn't thepiratebay's fault that people are downloading movies. Just because taking severe action against them isn't the proper course of action doesn't mean that they aren't contributing greatly to your violated privacy and profiting off of it. Nor does it mean that they should not at all be held accountable or take steps to fix the problem.
So yes, by all means, speak to your friends. But don't pretend that it will be enough to stem the problem for you or for the countless masses who don't even realize yet what a problem it is for them.
Except you're not. This is about how capsaicin can be used to prevent long term pain in the weeks after surgery, while that one was about how it can be used to deliver new anesthetics that won't leave you numb. You don't even have to have read the articles to know this, just the summary. Why people post when they only read titles is entirely beyond me.
It doesn't matter that it is a true comment. It's not "not directly relevant," it is completely irrelevant. It doesn't fit into the standard background facts that people generally mention (e.g. many people have preconceived notions about people of particular races or genders, and so it piques people's interest when a white mother of 4 is accused of dismembering a vagrant, yet it doesn't when an MS sufferer commits copyright infringement). It is the kind of comment that might be used to sway the public into thinking, "Oh no! What meanies the RIAA are!" and disregard the issues entirely, and as such, I feel sick supporting people who would use such a tactic. It is the kind of tactic that, when I see it used, I have to ask myself, "Is their case really that weak that they would resort to this?".
Besides, the battle we want to win is not with this particular case, but rather something on a much larger front. If we win public opinion here only because of the MS issue, then we gain no actual ground. In fact, if people start to think, "I support the RIAA except with the exceptions of sick people and grandmothers," it will be much harder to sway them later. It is much like the DMCA which, due to the additions of exemptions, went from "really bad" to "mildly bad but not bad enough to spend effort on to repeal" for many people.
So yes, bring up MS with the most ham-handed sentence construction ever, if you wish, but remember that even if it helps the individual in the public's eye, it hurts the cause.
The BSD license places no restrictions on what you can do with the code except release the source without attribution or under a different license. The GPL, on the other hand, restricts your ability to distribute the program without the source. While the GPL gives something to the end users (they have access to the source), and while the GPL gives something to the original developer (if someone changes the source, he can use those improvements himself), the GPL gives everybody else less freedom, except for the freedom to restrict what other people can do with their work. Unless, of course, you wish to anthropomorphize the code and claim that the code itself has more freedom?
Don't go twisting the layman's version of what might be the easiest license on earth to understand to claim that anybody who supports it must be a hypocrite.
I think that there is a misunderstanding of what computer science encompasses. We don't call the people who use physical principals to design products physicists, we call them engineers. Similarly, if you are a situation where you are developing solutions for customers, you are not doing computer science. That said, you are pretty much right. Most of the people who want to do computer science or software engineering don't need to know about the vast majority of what is covered in the standard mathematics major/minor. Indeed, a good CS program will have a math for computer scientists which briefly covers the basics of what they will need. In fact, with just a good sense of analytical reasoning, most people can pick up what they need as they go. However, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be served well by a solid understanding of discrete math, linear algebra, and basic abstract algebra. Additionally, the skills you develop by taking challenging math classes go well beyond the details of the theorems you cover. And if you want to have any hope of designing a better algorithm or more efficient data structure, you need to be able to look at situations in a mathematical way. Also, don't forget that logic can roughly be defined as the intersection of math and philosophy (but that it is easier to understand what good logic is when you're not dealing with rhetoric and ill defined terms).
So, you're right. If you're just implementing the things that mathematicians (or who I would call computer scientists) develop, then you don't necessarily need a strong mathematical background. However, you are also not doing computer science. You still might have benefited from more math classes, though, even if not directly.
On one hand, if people are required to have insurance, this is essentially forcing them to buy a product, which doesn't seem like a fair thing for the consumers. In that respect, I want to say that maybe there is room to disagree with the decision. On the other hand, if car theft rates are so high, the only realistic options for the insurance companies is to either make people take steps to lower their risk or to raise the rates to compensate for the increased risk. In the end, it boils down to the fact that people who live in high risk areas have to bear that burden somehow, either through the cost of lowering the risk, the cost of sharing the risk, or the cost of facing the risk unprotected.
At least this way, since cars will become harder to steal, fewer people will try to steal them, and thus this is the best long term solution.
He's not just one citizen, though. It has nothing to do with his net worth either. He's in charge of a company large enough that congress holds hearings and proposes bills that not only directly affect his company, but sometimes affect only his company. If 535 men were discussing whether to restrict what only you were doing or whether to help only your biggest competitors, you would be entitled to an audience with them too.
Or are his opinions about net neutrality and Chinese Internet censorship no more important than yours when congress discusses them?
If you stick the best data you have into the model, it throws out a number. How you interpret it, whether you take 25% and 26% to be essentially different, and what you do with the results are completely removed from what the model gives. Of course the model is going to give exact numbers. That's how models work. If I say that gravity is 9.8m/s^2, and I plug into the formula, I can find how long it takes to drop a ball to 10 significant figures. Should I disregard the model because it is spitting out answers that are far too exact to be "correct"?
I am a PhD candidate in mathematics, and I can't see why the general population would be looking at most of the upper level math entries on wikipedia. I also can't figure out what you want the math articles to do.
Since math is all about carefully using precise definitions, giving a hand-holding, dumbed down, technically false presentation of the math would serve no one's best interests. The best you can do to make things accessible to the uninitiated (if they aren't taking a course, and willing to wade through a host of definitions, many of which might build on other technical definitions) is to give examples and applications. The article on group theory begins with how group theory is used, and what you can do with it, with links to everything. Maybe the order they chose for the applications should have started with physics and chemistry before moving to those within mathematics, but overall, I don't see what they could have done to the structure for someone who is making the mistake of trying to learn mathematics from an encyclopedia.
Now, if you skip down to the definition of a group, that's what I remember from my graduate Algebra course and it is more or less readable. Why the hell couldn't that be up top? Moreover, why couldn't the main article for Group Theory essentially be a non-technical rendition of that definition, along with some non-technical examples of where Group Theory is used?
This isn't a textbook, and starting with a dry, unmotivated definition would serve very few people. A non-technical rendition of the definition sounds nice in theory, but in practice, what would this be? One could write that a group is an attempt to rigorously model the notion of "symmetry", but that will leave most people more confused than when they came. With most mathematical definitions, an attempt at simplifying the definition won't even be possible. They also had several links to non-technical uses of group theory. Most math articles don't have any to link to, though.
Wikipedia does not serve as a place to educate people, so lying to them for the sake of making it easier at first doesn't accomplish what you want. That is a disservice unless people are still there later to relearn the correct things. This is fine for a course, but it is not what you want in a reference.
I think you are faulting wikipedia for not being what it isn't meant to be, and cannot be with the space it allows and the attention spans of its readers. However, if you think the articles should change, you can do your part. You don't even have to edit articles. Just participate in the discussions about the articles, and if you can convince someone of your cause, they can rewrite group theory to be accessible in the way you want.
Also, Feynmann's lectures were at Caltech, not MIT.
As I read the article, something seemed amiss (other than the fact that I was reading the article). And then, as I reached the end, I knew why.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk-science expert and advocate of free enterprise, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Suddenly, it made sense why CFLs were equated with thermometers (which contain over 100 times the mercury, and for which safer, equivalent replacements exist), why the environmental impact of the mercury was not weighed against the impact of the energy gains, why the author would question why we want mercury in our bulbs but not in our fish, or why environmentalist was used as a pejorative.
Remember, if you're reading something that sounds mildly absurd, the author might have an agenda. That doesn't mean that he can't make valid points, but it helps you to know how much skepticism to have.
This is mostly Big Medicine, and if Big Medicine can't manage to be profitable at the prices the public is willing to pay (generic prices) without patent protection, then they (and the public) need to rethink the model: The public can either have new drugs and pay a lot to support the development costs, or have cheap generic drugs and no new ones. Supply and demand, free-market style (without the protectionism of patents).
I'm sorry, but what? Are you serious here? Let's say that the cost to research and develop new drugs cannot be recouped in five years, because the price of drugs would either be too high for them to sell or or too low to pay for development. When you factor in the cost of developing and testing drugs that don't make it to market, this does not seem too far fetched. What happens after five years? Other companies that don't have the development costs to recoup can afford to sell generic versions of the drugs at much closer to cost, which would force the original manufacturer to do the same, and thus, it would become impossible for the people who develop the drugs to be profitable.
What happens in this scenario? Because it makes no sense to develop new drugs (because the laws of supply and demand say so), no knew drugs get produced, except in the rare case that a university researcher happens to stumble upon something exciting. Even in that case, it is possible that the cost of testing and bringing to market such a product would still be prohibitively high. In this situation, a good deal of medical research is never done, and many potential cures for many ailments never materialize. While the drug companies won't get all the profits off the new drugs, and while many researchers would be out of jobs, the people who suffer the most are the people for whom life saving medication is never developed.
You glibly say that they should rethink their model, but what makes you so sure that there is a viable model out there to be found? Regardless how efficient you are, development has some sort of inherent cost, and without either a temporary monopoly or substantial subsides, it does not make sense to engage in such development.
Medicine is one of the few places where patents do make a whole lot of sense, and it would be a shame to kill off the work these companies do just because their model doesn't fit with your ideology. It has been said that America's reduction in basic R&D over the last 20-30 years is a large factor in why we are losing our technical superiority. Do you really want to put the last nail in the coffin?
What you are missing is that not all models are created equal, and not all things are as easy to model. It's all about variance. Consider the weather, for example. We can accurately predict what it will be for a day or two, and we have a decent guess for about a week, but beyond that, there is too much complexity and variability for us to say much (not to mention that weather appears to be a dynamical system, i.e., an example of chaos theory, which means that prediction is theoretically impossible). However, if I were to ask you what kind of weather I could expect this July, you could make some fairly accurate guess of "warm". All the small scale variations cancel out, and you can have a very good prediction of what the average temperature, or average rainfall, or average anything else will be over the next year, or 10.
For long term climate, we have a good idea how many of the processes involved work, and we can vary all the parameters to give ranges on the possible outcomes. While we can't use them to predict the rainfall in Boston on July 4, 2057, we can use them to say that the mean global temperature will be 3-5 degrees warmer that year (or some other similar statement).
Compare this to baseball. There aren't enough interactions for small variations not to throw everything off. Things like injuries, marital problems, drugs, rivalries, and weather could shift the outcomes of major games in ways and change the outcome in this model more severely than China switching to nuclear power would do in climate models. There is a better chance at predicting total numbers of runs or hits during the season, as the variation on things like that is smaller. Predicting the number of games won is almost as hopeless as predicting the outcome of an individual game, and if you could do that, you could hire people to post to slashdot for you.
A few quick comments. First, relativity does not conflict with Newton's second law. It only needs to be changed from F=mA to F=dp/dt where p is momentum. Second, nobody said that general relativity was the pinnacle of physical theories. People have been trying for a while to find a grand unified theory that incorporated all the known forces in the universe and worked at both small and large scales. This appears to have nothing to do with the article, though. Third, while our experimental observations may only cover the cases we have thought to test, our laws are further verified every time the world behaves like we expect it to, every time we use GPS satellites with relativistic corrections, and every time we use devices that rely on quantum effects to work. The odds that everything holds except for 2/1000 of a second each year in two places on earth is unlikely. Maybe the experiment will work. That is science. However, it doesn't hurt to be skeptical until the experiment is done. I'm not saying that it won't happen, just that it seems premature to talk about rewriting textbooks just yet.
"In the end, if Newton's Second Law could be violated, he would be forcing physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law -- which is quite a bit.'"
In the end, if the second law of thermodynamics [or any other law of physics] could be violated, it would force physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law - which is quite a bit. However, given that what we have derived from our laws generally fits with experimental observation (which is why we call them laws), the odds of him disproving Newton's second law with this experiment are about as good as me disproving the second law of thermodynamics by accidentally building a perpetual motion device.
Experiments disproving longstanding laws have happened before. People don't have reason to care about them until afterwards, though.
Best I can tell, ton is imperial, tonne is metric. However, it is about a 10% difference between the two, so it doesn't make a huge difference when you're working with large ballpark figures.
Well, I think that there is an important way in which this is nothing like epicycles. With the theory of epicycles, people (I hesitate to call them scientists) were looking to describe how the heavens moved without much thought of why. Here, scientists are working with a theory of why the world behaves as it does, and is trying to tweak parameters to make the model obey observation. When people added circles within circles to make the epicycles more accurate, there was no reasonable explanation for why this should be the case. Now, we have a reasonable sounding explanation that "the physics of over there should be the same as the physics over here." This is science. That was not.
While this probably is an accurate translation, GP has a point. A lot of science can seem rather ad hoc at times. Before we had discovered all the planets, scientists noted that the orbits of the known planets were not quite what they should be. Instead of declare that newton's theory of gravity was wrong, they theorized that there was an unknown planet. After doing some calculations, they determined where this planet had to be, looked up at the sky, and found Neptune.
Similarly, when cosmologists look at the apparent rate of expansion of the universe (and how that rate has changed over time), they get that if their model of the way things work (general relativity) is correct, then their estimates of the mass in the universe based on empirical observation cannot possibly be right. Instead of abandoning relativity and leaving a void in its place, they say, "This will work of there is a large amount of matter that we can't observe. Dark matter!" Of course, this doesn't resolve everything, and we need various other adjustments (like dark energy, or physical constants that aren't constant) which look like kludges, but which have predictive power and are the best answers we've got.
Do we "know" this is correct? Of course not! We don't even know that the next time we drop an apple, it will fall to the floor. Science is a process, though, and it isn't productive to dismiss the theories of today before we've seen the observations of tomorrow.
Exactly. The fact that the data is preserved by being copied every 20 minutes is entirely counteracted by the fact that reproduction is inherently error prone. Many species of bacteria regularly swap DNA to get around the fact that their reproduction is mostly asexual, but even then, mutations can and do occur. Without some mechanism to kill the bacteria when there is a mutation with the encoded data, this is a horrible long term data storage solution. There are interesting short term tracking applications, but data storage? No.
Teaching mathematics is difficult. Many people can only think about things in terms of concrete examples, but even when math is trying to generalize a real world concept, it generally does so by using abstract looking definitions (which are made using precise terms, often employing a symbolic language). People generally don't care about these abstract ideas, though. They either want to know what a concept "means" or exactly how to use it. Often times, there aren't any good examples that illustrate exactly what something is, and which people could soundly base their understand on. Moreover, before university, many teachers don't understand what they are actually teaching, so they can't impart any real insight.
If you were told to explain a toolbox to a group of people, without being allowed to pull in outside material (like wood or nails), and the people were looking for some sort of deep appreciation for a screw driver, you would probably have difficulty even if you were a professional carpenter. No cries of "You will need to know this later!" will make people pay attention, and you will be hard pressed to find something that will actually help people understand.
What needs to be done is that people need to learn to think at an early age, become comfortable with abstract ideas, and the people teaching children about math need to understand what they are saying (so that they don't then say something wrong which forever taints someone's thinking). That way, when people get to college, they won't have to drop engineering classes because they don't like math.
This sounds like a decent system. However, in some situations (e.g. someone sues a large corporation and loses because the letter of the law is not on their side, even though the spirit of the law is), forcing the loser to pay anything besides their own fees is still somewhat unjust. I have heard that, in some countries, the judges have full power to decide who pays what fees and sometimes have the winners pay the losers fee, depending on specifics of the case and specifics of both sides financial states. Personally, I feel that a combination of this idea with your idea is ideal: there are limits to how much of their opponents legal fees one side can be forced to pay, but it is up to the judges digressions to decide anything in this range.
Of course, for this to work, we have to trust that judges are rational, unbiased, and always looking for the most fair solution they can legally provide. If judges can be bought, perhaps stricter guidelines are required. Then again, if judges can be bought, we're in much deeper trouble than I care to imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is no copyright claim by the original author then I don't see what the problem is. AFAIK that means it's in the public domain
This is completely incorrect. In the United States, everything is automatically copyright by it's author, regardless of whether they explicitly say so or not. Depending on the forum agreement, they author might have given up the copyright to the forum itself, but it is highly unlikely that the forum agreement gives everybody the right to use the code as they wish. The fact that the code did not come with a license means that you have no license to use the code.
If code is released under the GPL, then one can use it subject to certain restrictions. If you use GPL'd code without actually abiding by those restrictions, the GPL just says that the license is revoked and that you are committing the exact same crime (subject to the exact same penalties) as using code with no license.
You might be right that nobody cares, and if that is the case, then nothing will come of this theft of code. However, saying that it is in the public domain and that one should use it without fear is perhaps the worse legal/business advice I have ever seen on slashdot.
I realize that you are joking, but the terminology actually makes a lot of sense in the right context. "Complex" refers to the fact that you are looking at something defined with respect to the complex numbers. "Simple" refers to the fact that it isn't built out of smaller pieces in some particular way.
In some sense, it is a shame that mathematicians have turned standard words into technical terms, because people can't look at phrases and instantly say "Oh, that's just jargon, I shouldn't try to understand it." We should take a cue from physicists in that respect*. On the other hand, the misappropriation of language done here is far less worse than what comes out of the marketing department at Microsoft (or anywhere else, for that matter).
*I once tried to read a string theory paper that was cited by a math paper, and I couldn't get a page in before giving up. Instead of saying that variables commute or commute up to a sign (anti-commute), they threw around terms like fermionic and bosonic. After that, things just got weird. I guess it come from the same kind of thinking that leads to people saying "not commenting code means your company can't afford to fire you"?
The NSA exists to do more than spying and code breaking. As was pointed out when the NSA released SELinux, part of their job is to help keep our messages secure (even if they are spying on U.S. citizens in violation of American law). When they come up with standards that the government is mandated to use, the part of the NSA which wants a back door is less influential (I hope) than the part that doesn't want our top secret materials to be decoded by other countries.
If it were clear that a back door existed, there are a lot of people who would put a lot of resources into finding it (either by brute force, or by coercing someone who has the key). It would take a healthy dose of hubris for a group of people that smart to think that nobody else could find the key. It would not, however, be implausible for them to overlook a subtle design flaw that makes the algorithm less secure than they thought it was. I realize that it is easy to be a conspiracy theorist when talking about the NSA, but cryptography is hard enough and subtle enough that I don't think we should cry foul play. Instead, we should just shy away from this particular standard.
The thing is, before social networking, showing pictures to their friends wouldn't have been a huge violation of your privacy. However, due to the way that people now use social networking sites, the preferred method of sharing photos with friends is a violation. Sure, you can request that they not post the pictures, and more than likely they will just laugh it off and ask what the big deal is. You can ask that they not tag you in the pictures, but that doesn't mean that a third party won't end up doing the job. If you are a member of the site, you can restrict access to pictures which you are tagged in (maybe), but that does nothing if you aren't a member. Your only real options are to look like a nutjob to your friends or to put up with the privacy violation.
You're right that it isn't the facebook's fault that your friends are violating your privacy in exactly the same way it isn't thepiratebay's fault that people are downloading movies. Just because taking severe action against them isn't the proper course of action doesn't mean that they aren't contributing greatly to your violated privacy and profiting off of it. Nor does it mean that they should not at all be held accountable or take steps to fix the problem.
So yes, by all means, speak to your friends. But don't pretend that it will be enough to stem the problem for you or for the countless masses who don't even realize yet what a problem it is for them.
Except you're not. This is about how capsaicin can be used to prevent long term pain in the weeks after surgery, while that one was about how it can be used to deliver new anesthetics that won't leave you numb. You don't even have to have read the articles to know this, just the summary. Why people post when they only read titles is entirely beyond me.
It doesn't matter that it is a true comment. It's not "not directly relevant," it is completely irrelevant. It doesn't fit into the standard background facts that people generally mention (e.g. many people have preconceived notions about people of particular races or genders, and so it piques people's interest when a white mother of 4 is accused of dismembering a vagrant, yet it doesn't when an MS sufferer commits copyright infringement). It is the kind of comment that might be used to sway the public into thinking, "Oh no! What meanies the RIAA are!" and disregard the issues entirely, and as such, I feel sick supporting people who would use such a tactic. It is the kind of tactic that, when I see it used, I have to ask myself, "Is their case really that weak that they would resort to this?".
Besides, the battle we want to win is not with this particular case, but rather something on a much larger front. If we win public opinion here only because of the MS issue, then we gain no actual ground. In fact, if people start to think, "I support the RIAA except with the exceptions of sick people and grandmothers," it will be much harder to sway them later. It is much like the DMCA which, due to the additions of exemptions, went from "really bad" to "mildly bad but not bad enough to spend effort on to repeal" for many people.
So yes, bring up MS with the most ham-handed sentence construction ever, if you wish, but remember that even if it helps the individual in the public's eye, it hurts the cause.
The BSD license places no restrictions on what you can do with the code except release the source without attribution or under a different license. The GPL, on the other hand, restricts your ability to distribute the program without the source. While the GPL gives something to the end users (they have access to the source), and while the GPL gives something to the original developer (if someone changes the source, he can use those improvements himself), the GPL gives everybody else less freedom, except for the freedom to restrict what other people can do with their work. Unless, of course, you wish to anthropomorphize the code and claim that the code itself has more freedom?
Don't go twisting the layman's version of what might be the easiest license on earth to understand to claim that anybody who supports it must be a hypocrite.
I think that there is a misunderstanding of what computer science encompasses. We don't call the people who use physical principals to design products physicists, we call them engineers. Similarly, if you are a situation where you are developing solutions for customers, you are not doing computer science. That said, you are pretty much right. Most of the people who want to do computer science or software engineering don't need to know about the vast majority of what is covered in the standard mathematics major/minor. Indeed, a good CS program will have a math for computer scientists which briefly covers the basics of what they will need. In fact, with just a good sense of analytical reasoning, most people can pick up what they need as they go. However, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be served well by a solid understanding of discrete math, linear algebra, and basic abstract algebra. Additionally, the skills you develop by taking challenging math classes go well beyond the details of the theorems you cover. And if you want to have any hope of designing a better algorithm or more efficient data structure, you need to be able to look at situations in a mathematical way. Also, don't forget that logic can roughly be defined as the intersection of math and philosophy (but that it is easier to understand what good logic is when you're not dealing with rhetoric and ill defined terms).
So, you're right. If you're just implementing the things that mathematicians (or who I would call computer scientists) develop, then you don't necessarily need a strong mathematical background. However, you are also not doing computer science. You still might have benefited from more math classes, though, even if not directly.
On one hand, if people are required to have insurance, this is essentially forcing them to buy a product, which doesn't seem like a fair thing for the consumers. In that respect, I want to say that maybe there is room to disagree with the decision. On the other hand, if car theft rates are so high, the only realistic options for the insurance companies is to either make people take steps to lower their risk or to raise the rates to compensate for the increased risk. In the end, it boils down to the fact that people who live in high risk areas have to bear that burden somehow, either through the cost of lowering the risk, the cost of sharing the risk, or the cost of facing the risk unprotected.
At least this way, since cars will become harder to steal, fewer people will try to steal them, and thus this is the best long term solution.
He's not just one citizen, though. It has nothing to do with his net worth either. He's in charge of a company large enough that congress holds hearings and proposes bills that not only directly affect his company, but sometimes affect only his company. If 535 men were discussing whether to restrict what only you were doing or whether to help only your biggest competitors, you would be entitled to an audience with them too.
Or are his opinions about net neutrality and Chinese Internet censorship no more important than yours when congress discusses them?
If you stick the best data you have into the model, it throws out a number. How you interpret it, whether you take 25% and 26% to be essentially different, and what you do with the results are completely removed from what the model gives. Of course the model is going to give exact numbers. That's how models work. If I say that gravity is 9.8m/s^2, and I plug into the formula, I can find how long it takes to drop a ball to 10 significant figures. Should I disregard the model because it is spitting out answers that are far too exact to be "correct"?
This is a good thing. Most MBA's will see right through both the motivation and the push for licensing.
You have met MBA's before, right?
I am a PhD candidate in mathematics, and I can't see why the general population would be looking at most of the upper level math entries on wikipedia. I also can't figure out what you want the math articles to do.
Since math is all about carefully using precise definitions, giving a hand-holding, dumbed down, technically false presentation of the math would serve no one's best interests. The best you can do to make things accessible to the uninitiated (if they aren't taking a course, and willing to wade through a host of definitions, many of which might build on other technical definitions) is to give examples and applications. The article on group theory begins with how group theory is used, and what you can do with it, with links to everything. Maybe the order they chose for the applications should have started with physics and chemistry before moving to those within mathematics, but overall, I don't see what they could have done to the structure for someone who is making the mistake of trying to learn mathematics from an encyclopedia.
Now, if you skip down to the definition of a group, that's what I remember from my graduate Algebra course and it is more or less readable. Why the hell couldn't that be up top? Moreover, why couldn't the main article for Group Theory essentially be a non-technical rendition of that definition, along with some non-technical examples of where Group Theory is used?
This isn't a textbook, and starting with a dry, unmotivated definition would serve very few people. A non-technical rendition of the definition sounds nice in theory, but in practice, what would this be? One could write that a group is an attempt to rigorously model the notion of "symmetry", but that will leave most people more confused than when they came. With most mathematical definitions, an attempt at simplifying the definition won't even be possible. They also had several links to non-technical uses of group theory. Most math articles don't have any to link to, though.
Wikipedia does not serve as a place to educate people, so lying to them for the sake of making it easier at first doesn't accomplish what you want. That is a disservice unless people are still there later to relearn the correct things. This is fine for a course, but it is not what you want in a reference.
I think you are faulting wikipedia for not being what it isn't meant to be, and cannot be with the space it allows and the attention spans of its readers. However, if you think the articles should change, you can do your part. You don't even have to edit articles. Just participate in the discussions about the articles, and if you can convince someone of your cause, they can rewrite group theory to be accessible in the way you want.
Also, Feynmann's lectures were at Caltech, not MIT.
Suddenly, it made sense why CFLs were equated with thermometers (which contain over 100 times the mercury, and for which safer, equivalent replacements exist), why the environmental impact of the mercury was not weighed against the impact of the energy gains, why the author would question why we want mercury in our bulbs but not in our fish, or why environmentalist was used as a pejorative.
Remember, if you're reading something that sounds mildly absurd, the author might have an agenda. That doesn't mean that he can't make valid points, but it helps you to know how much skepticism to have.
This is mostly Big Medicine, and if Big Medicine can't manage to be profitable at the prices the public is willing to pay (generic prices) without patent protection, then they (and the public) need to rethink the model: The public can either have new drugs and pay a lot to support the development costs, or have cheap generic drugs and no new ones. Supply and demand, free-market style (without the protectionism of patents).
I'm sorry, but what? Are you serious here? Let's say that the cost to research and develop new drugs cannot be recouped in five years, because the price of drugs would either be too high for them to sell or or too low to pay for development. When you factor in the cost of developing and testing drugs that don't make it to market, this does not seem too far fetched. What happens after five years? Other companies that don't have the development costs to recoup can afford to sell generic versions of the drugs at much closer to cost, which would force the original manufacturer to do the same, and thus, it would become impossible for the people who develop the drugs to be profitable.
What happens in this scenario? Because it makes no sense to develop new drugs (because the laws of supply and demand say so), no knew drugs get produced, except in the rare case that a university researcher happens to stumble upon something exciting. Even in that case, it is possible that the cost of testing and bringing to market such a product would still be prohibitively high. In this situation, a good deal of medical research is never done, and many potential cures for many ailments never materialize. While the drug companies won't get all the profits off the new drugs, and while many researchers would be out of jobs, the people who suffer the most are the people for whom life saving medication is never developed.
You glibly say that they should rethink their model, but what makes you so sure that there is a viable model out there to be found? Regardless how efficient you are, development has some sort of inherent cost, and without either a temporary monopoly or substantial subsides, it does not make sense to engage in such development.
Medicine is one of the few places where patents do make a whole lot of sense, and it would be a shame to kill off the work these companies do just because their model doesn't fit with your ideology. It has been said that America's reduction in basic R&D over the last 20-30 years is a large factor in why we are losing our technical superiority. Do you really want to put the last nail in the coffin?
What you are missing is that not all models are created equal, and not all things are as easy to model. It's all about variance. Consider the weather, for example. We can accurately predict what it will be for a day or two, and we have a decent guess for about a week, but beyond that, there is too much complexity and variability for us to say much (not to mention that weather appears to be a dynamical system, i.e., an example of chaos theory, which means that prediction is theoretically impossible). However, if I were to ask you what kind of weather I could expect this July, you could make some fairly accurate guess of "warm". All the small scale variations cancel out, and you can have a very good prediction of what the average temperature, or average rainfall, or average anything else will be over the next year, or 10.
For long term climate, we have a good idea how many of the processes involved work, and we can vary all the parameters to give ranges on the possible outcomes. While we can't use them to predict the rainfall in Boston on July 4, 2057, we can use them to say that the mean global temperature will be 3-5 degrees warmer that year (or some other similar statement).
Compare this to baseball. There aren't enough interactions for small variations not to throw everything off. Things like injuries, marital problems, drugs, rivalries, and weather could shift the outcomes of major games in ways and change the outcome in this model more severely than China switching to nuclear power would do in climate models. There is a better chance at predicting total numbers of runs or hits during the season, as the variation on things like that is smaller. Predicting the number of games won is almost as hopeless as predicting the outcome of an individual game, and if you could do that, you could hire people to post to slashdot for you.
Replace "changed" with "restated as" and you preserve my meaning while getting rid of your nitpick.
A few quick comments. First, relativity does not conflict with Newton's second law. It only needs to be changed from F=mA to F=dp/dt where p is momentum. Second, nobody said that general relativity was the pinnacle of physical theories. People have been trying for a while to find a grand unified theory that incorporated all the known forces in the universe and worked at both small and large scales. This appears to have nothing to do with the article, though. Third, while our experimental observations may only cover the cases we have thought to test, our laws are further verified every time the world behaves like we expect it to, every time we use GPS satellites with relativistic corrections, and every time we use devices that rely on quantum effects to work. The odds that everything holds except for 2/1000 of a second each year in two places on earth is unlikely. Maybe the experiment will work. That is science. However, it doesn't hurt to be skeptical until the experiment is done. I'm not saying that it won't happen, just that it seems premature to talk about rewriting textbooks just yet.
"In the end, if Newton's Second Law could be violated, he would be forcing physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law -- which is quite a bit.'"
In the end, if the second law of thermodynamics [or any other law of physics] could be violated, it would force physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law - which is quite a bit. However, given that what we have derived from our laws generally fits with experimental observation (which is why we call them laws), the odds of him disproving Newton's second law with this experiment are about as good as me disproving the second law of thermodynamics by accidentally building a perpetual motion device.
Experiments disproving longstanding laws have happened before. People don't have reason to care about them until afterwards, though.
Best I can tell, ton is imperial, tonne is metric. However, it is about a 10% difference between the two, so it doesn't make a huge difference when you're working with large ballpark figures.
Well, I think that there is an important way in which this is nothing like epicycles. With the theory of epicycles, people (I hesitate to call them scientists) were looking to describe how the heavens moved without much thought of why. Here, scientists are working with a theory of why the world behaves as it does, and is trying to tweak parameters to make the model obey observation. When people added circles within circles to make the epicycles more accurate, there was no reasonable explanation for why this should be the case. Now, we have a reasonable sounding explanation that "the physics of over there should be the same as the physics over here." This is science. That was not.
While this probably is an accurate translation, GP has a point. A lot of science can seem rather ad hoc at times. Before we had discovered all the planets, scientists noted that the orbits of the known planets were not quite what they should be. Instead of declare that newton's theory of gravity was wrong, they theorized that there was an unknown planet. After doing some calculations, they determined where this planet had to be, looked up at the sky, and found Neptune.
Similarly, when cosmologists look at the apparent rate of expansion of the universe (and how that rate has changed over time), they get that if their model of the way things work (general relativity) is correct, then their estimates of the mass in the universe based on empirical observation cannot possibly be right. Instead of abandoning relativity and leaving a void in its place, they say, "This will work of there is a large amount of matter that we can't observe. Dark matter!" Of course, this doesn't resolve everything, and we need various other adjustments (like dark energy, or physical constants that aren't constant) which look like kludges, but which have predictive power and are the best answers we've got.
Do we "know" this is correct? Of course not! We don't even know that the next time we drop an apple, it will fall to the floor. Science is a process, though, and it isn't productive to dismiss the theories of today before we've seen the observations of tomorrow.
Exactly. The fact that the data is preserved by being copied every 20 minutes is entirely counteracted by the fact that reproduction is inherently error prone. Many species of bacteria regularly swap DNA to get around the fact that their reproduction is mostly asexual, but even then, mutations can and do occur. Without some mechanism to kill the bacteria when there is a mutation with the encoded data, this is a horrible long term data storage solution. There are interesting short term tracking applications, but data storage? No.
Teaching mathematics is difficult. Many people can only think about things in terms of concrete examples, but even when math is trying to generalize a real world concept, it generally does so by using abstract looking definitions (which are made using precise terms, often employing a symbolic language). People generally don't care about these abstract ideas, though. They either want to know what a concept "means" or exactly how to use it. Often times, there aren't any good examples that illustrate exactly what something is, and which people could soundly base their understand on. Moreover, before university, many teachers don't understand what they are actually teaching, so they can't impart any real insight.
If you were told to explain a toolbox to a group of people, without being allowed to pull in outside material (like wood or nails), and the people were looking for some sort of deep appreciation for a screw driver, you would probably have difficulty even if you were a professional carpenter. No cries of "You will need to know this later!" will make people pay attention, and you will be hard pressed to find something that will actually help people understand.
What needs to be done is that people need to learn to think at an early age, become comfortable with abstract ideas, and the people teaching children about math need to understand what they are saying (so that they don't then say something wrong which forever taints someone's thinking). That way, when people get to college, they won't have to drop engineering classes because they don't like math.
This sounds like a decent system. However, in some situations (e.g. someone sues a large corporation and loses because the letter of the law is not on their side, even though the spirit of the law is), forcing the loser to pay anything besides their own fees is still somewhat unjust. I have heard that, in some countries, the judges have full power to decide who pays what fees and sometimes have the winners pay the losers fee, depending on specifics of the case and specifics of both sides financial states. Personally, I feel that a combination of this idea with your idea is ideal: there are limits to how much of their opponents legal fees one side can be forced to pay, but it is up to the judges digressions to decide anything in this range.
Of course, for this to work, we have to trust that judges are rational, unbiased, and always looking for the most fair solution they can legally provide. If judges can be bought, perhaps stricter guidelines are required. Then again, if judges can be bought, we're in much deeper trouble than I care to imagine.