I read the text of the passport release earlier, and they claim to have addressed the privacy concerns but really haven't. The biggest problem is that a criminal could very easily grab all of your identity information without your knowledge. They assert that (I'm paraphrasing) "since the chip has no internal power source, it can't broadcast your identity". But that is a canard -- anyone who wants to read out your identity can simply use the same high-gain antenna to beam power your way as to pick up your passport's readout. Of course the protocols will be discovered -- at least by the people you don't want reading your passport.
All the more reason to stick your passport in the microwave with your new shirts from Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, bop on over to www.house.gov and send a quick note of outrage to your representative!
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. --Northrop Frye
But once that book is bought, what does it matter whether I go to Google or no? The libraries will presumably continue to be repositories of reference works, whether Google Print scan them or no.
The big question is: do reference works like Bartlett's get encouraged or discouraged by being indexed online? That gets to the root of copyright law. Based on the large number of free quotation websites online, I think that the answer is that people are encouraged to make such lists and even lists of lists available online, if only because their interesting bits of knowledge are indexed!
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. -- Robert A. Heinlein
At first, I thought, "Huh? Why would the publishers be renumbered at all?". Then I realized you meant to say "THE PUBLISHERS RECEIVE ZERO REMUNERATION".
Then I thought, "Huh? they didn't receive any money under the old way either -- when I visited the library to find my quotes."
First get your facts straight. Then you can distort them as you please. -- Mark Twain
PDAs aren't as intuitive and simple to use, simply because you can do more with them. I often reflect on Don Norman's old rants about the invisible computer (from one of his popular books, I forget which). His point was that computers are visible to us precisely because we haven't figured out how to optimize them yet.
He used to talk about how gadget-happy folks would buy electric motors for the kitchen. When I was a kid we had one: it was a motor mounted in the kitchen counter, and it came with all sorts of attachments - the blender attachment, the mixer attachment, the chopper attachment. Very easy to use, quite powerful. In those days (early 1970s I guess) there was a competition between built-in motor manufacturers for whose was the most reliable, whose was the most powerful, etc.
When's the last time you bought a motor for your kitchen? I have lots of appliances but no lone motors.
The IPOD vs PDA thing bears out Don's prescient thinking: people don't want computers, we want applications. We buy the computers to get the applications, and when the applications are well enough developed we won't bother buying a "computer" at all.
Running a Xeon dual-core is like mounting a Chevy big-block engine under a VW carburetor. The memory access just isn't there. Most of my stuff (modeling the solar corona) is RAM-bound anyway, so there's no win to be had at all by running the dual Intel cores. The Opterons have better RAM latency, which is a win -- but, more importantly, the two cores communicate cache-to-cache at the CPU clock speed, so dual-threaded processes run amazingly fast. If they're sharing memory, you effectively double the L2 cache size of both cores, which is a big win all around.
The problem with the multi-antenna (ie phased-array) approach is that it's just another way of describing angular encoding of the beams, and it's impractical for small or mobile installations below VHF (frequency 30 MHz; wavelength about 10 meters), and much above that you're into very short range stuff anyway.
Nah, visible light can carry mindbogglingly huge quantities of data, because you can multiplex by angle -- so it's not limited in the same way that RF is. What I mean is, suppose you have a visible light transmitter/receiver pair that can send (say) a terabit per second down a fiber. (This is possible now with wavelength multiplexing of multiple LEDs!). Then you can make an array of 10^6 of those, mounted on a billboard or something, and "broadcast" the signal along lines off sight that face the billboard. The detector would be a telescope with an array of 10^6 receivers at the focal plane.
Also, visible light is not susceptible to interference in the way that RF is. If you don't want to receive the yottobit per second that your neighbor is broadcasting, you can simply build a fence to hide the transmitter.
There is only so much bandwidth in the radio spectrum. In signal theory, the bandwidth of an analog channel is pretty well defined: it's log(S/N)(fmax). That is to say, it's the logarithm of the signal-to-noise ratio, multiplied by the maximum number of samples per second you can send. The S/N logarithm determines how many bits you can commmunicate with each sample of the channel; the fmax determines how many samples per second you can transmit.
The current FCC strategy for allocating bandwidth is to let the natural background S/N dominate, and allocate pieces of frequency spectrum. The UWB strategy is to increase N over the entire frequency spectrum. They both consume bandwidth in the public airwaves. Remember, unless you're using angular encoding (like a camera) there is only one signal to be had: the voltage off an antenna, versus time. Traditional radio broadcasting uses the Fourier basis to describe that voltage signal and to cut up pieces of the signal for different people to use. CDMA, TDMA, and other WB strategies use different bases -- the effect is that their interference is spread over a LOT of Fourier space, so no one user affects any one channel more than infinitesimally.
But there's no free lunch. A zillion users, all degrading signal infinitesimally, are just as bad as a single doofus who's stomping on your allocated frequency band. Even worse, actually, because you can (usually) find and unplug the doofus's equipment -- but nothing short of a nuclear strike will stop the UWB interference once it gets bad.
Hmmm... Tried to reply to this hours ago but was blocked from posting for some reason...
The idea is that seizure of the computers completely disrupts his business and livelihood. Ralsky may (or may not) be a cut-and-dried case; but even if he is found innocent he is unlikely to see his computers again for at least a year or two. At that point they will be obsolete, and unless he has replaced them his business will likely be completely gone. There is little more than semantic difference between "seizing for evidence" and "seizing and never giving back". Consider Indymedia, who had their computers seized for months during election season and were never charged with anything.
Hmm.... I tried to make this comment earlier but was unable to post for a while, so here's take 3:
The point is that FBI seizure of computers for evidence is extremely disruptive, and (since the computers are generally kept for at least a full obsolescence cycle and often damaged) amounts to taking stuff and not giving it back. We've all heard stories about people and organizations who lose lots of stuff for no good reason. The most famous recent one was Indymedia but there are others. That sort of thing is not supposed to happen.
Hmmm... Actually, there was more to it too -- for a period of several hours after the "nuking" comment I was unable to post at all. But my point was that FBI seizure of evidence amounts to taking stuff and never giving it back -- we have all heard the stories about people losing computers, disks, networks, and whatnot and getting them back, years later, in sometimes-working condition. Whether it's legal or not, that seems to be against the spirit of the due process clause.
My original comment was rapidly moderated up to +5 Interesting and spawned a lot of replies. Then it sank to "1,Interesting". Looking at the moderation screen for the article, apparently it has now been moderated 0 times.
And I thought capricious editors were only for the paranoid. Thanks, guys.
Surely they did have a warrant -- but should it be possible for someone, with merely a search warrant, to shut down your entire livelihood? There's no doubt that it is possible -- we often read about computers being seized and then returned, broken, years later. That seems wrong to me, whether it be legal or no.
Seriously -- whether you like Ralsky or not, this practice of seizing computer equipment is probably unconstitutional. He is being deprived of his property and his ability to make a living, without due process of law. According to TFA, all of his computer were seized, shutting him down.
We may object to Ralsky's nefarious tactics, but the point is that SourceForge could in principle be next.
A confederation of disgruntled DNS servers, of which OpenNIC is one, has been running an alternative namespace to ICANN for a long time now. Looks like opennic.org and opennic.net have been taken over by evil cybersquatters in the ICANN namespace -- but point to opennic.unrated.net and expand your DNS horizon...
The problem with going at solar minimum is that more galactic cosmic rays make it inward to the inner solar system, increasing radiation dose. The problem with going at solar maximum is occasional sudden death from energetic proton streams. Solar flares cause three main hazards: gamma rays from the flare itself (a problem but not a lethal one for most events); energetic protons that are accelerated by the flare and any post-flare coronal mass ejection; and bulk clouds of material that are thrown off by the Sun and that entrain magnetic fields.
The energetic protons are a real problem for man and machine. They arrive minutes to hours after the flare itself is seen. They have a high "quality factor", meaning they do a lot more biological damage than an equivalent ionizing dose of X-rays or gamma rays; and they tend to embed themselves in insulators, developing a humongous static charge that screws with electronic circuits and can burn out components. The clouds are more of a problem for planet-sized bodies (like the Earth) than for astronauts, but they do have some potential health consequences. They travel at "only" 1-4 million miles per hour, arriving at Earth about 1-4 days after the solar event.
Over the last three years we've had six or seven large flares that could have caused radiation sickness or death for Apollo astronauts (or Mars-bound astronauts with similar amounts of shielding to a mere Apollo capsule). That's enough that you'd have to expect at least one such event during a Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars, if you travelled at this phase of the solar cycle (declining).
The space station is largely shielded from the energetic protons, because it stays in low Earth orbit, underneath the Van Allen radiation belts -- Earth's magnetosphere diverts the protons away from the station. But the high energy galactic cosmic rays have no trouble passing through and hitting the station. So station astronauts are (probably somewhat) safer during solar maximum, but interplanetary astronauts are (probably) safer during solar minimum. Either way the radiation dose is a problem that has to be designed around.
Incidentally, the largest effect of solar activity on the space station is orbital decay! During solar maximum, the increased far-ultraviolet brightness of the Sun heats the outer layers of the atmosphere (the "thermosphere"), making them expand significantly -- that increases orbital drag a LOT. It's one reason (the other being delays in the Shuttle program) that Skylab re-entered the atmosphere before the Shuttle came on-line to provide additional boost. Skylab was launched during solar minimum in the mid 1970s, and the orbital decay projections were based on solar minimum conditions. It re-entered several years earlier than initially expected, because the atmosphere (and hence orbital drag) got larger in the solar maximum period of the late 1970s. The space station has similar orbital-decay issues; if you Google for the altitude-versus-time plots, you'll see that at its chosen altitude, the ISS needs to be boosted every six months or so, or it will spiral in and re-enter the atmosphere.
now, when I fly, I have to worry not just about whether I handled matches or toy cap guns or went to the shooting range in the last 24 hours, but also whether my neighbor, my dog, or the taxi driver handled any nitrate-laden deli meat in the last month.
It will take at least 250 years before lifespans of 300 years are commonplace. By that time, it will seem, well, commonplace to live a long time -- it will be no big deal. Considering what life was like 250 years ago, and 250 years before that, it seems that we've already passed the singularity.
The people of 1505 might have been rather impressed by societal change through 1755 (development of stock companies, the scientific method, the reformation) -- but the people of 1755 would be absolutely floored by the world of 2005.
I was in D.C. two weeks ago and took pictures of myself and my wife next to it. It's in the aviation wing of Air & Space, at the end, covered with a not-so-opaque blue tarp.
When I bought my Prius, the price difference between a Corolla and a Prius (cars that are comparable except for the powertrain) was about $6,000. In 100,000 miles the corolla will burn about 4,000 gallons of gas; the Prius will burn about 2,000 gallons. Hence purchasing the Prius makes sense from a fuel-only standpoint at about $3.00/gallon. That price point seemed unlikely to happen when I bought the car and fuel was about $1.80/gallon in Colorado. Now that fuel is close to $2.80/gallon (and I'm 30,000 miles into that 100,000 mile amortization) it's doesn't seem so unlikely.
But in the debate over pricing most people forget the all-important motivating difference between up-front and marginal pricing. When each mile costs a lot, you tend not to drive as much as when you pay for them all up front! This is the reason I buy a ski pass every year: although I may or may not get my "money's worth" from the pass over the whole year, I'm more likely to ski more times with the pass -- it's a no-brainer to head up the mountain. That convenience, for me, makes the pass worthwhile.
Similarly, having a very fuel-efficient car makes it more likely that I'll actually use and enjoy the convenience of my car. If it cost me $50 every 200 or 250 miles, I might think more about hopping in the car -- but at $30 every 400 miles, I don't really think about the price of fuel when i'm deciding whether to zip off somewhere to go hiking.
Nah, there are circumstances where everybody wins by giving the code to the employee. If the employer just wants some software to use, and doesn't care about reselling it, then letting the employee own/reuse/market the code outside of work may well yield better code for the employer! I know several brick-and-mortar businesses that have used this model, because it gives them cheaper, more effective custom software than they could get any other way and, frankly, they don't care much about the resale value of the software.
That's not stupid -- it's just that not every business wants to be a software company. They just want a tool to help their main trade. If giving the rights to the developer helps get them their niche "killer app" more cheaply then it can be a very astute business decision. Perhaps even more astute is to give the rights to the employee but require, say, 20% of any resale profits for the first n years -- that gives everyone an incentive to make a go of it, with minimal effort on the host company's part.
Well, the last time I chimed in with experience from lecturing, I was modded down "flamebait" -- but I'll come back for more. The clickers (in my experience) really help the middle third of the class -- the people who aren't coming back as majors, and therefore will only learn whatever they glean from this particular class: it is the last time they will encounter this material formally.
The future majors will probably do just fine anyway -- it's the history majors in astronomy class, or the engineers in art history class, who need help. The clickers have been shown to help those students focus and assimilate material.
The point is not to test whether you are paying attention, the point is to get you to pay more attention and to learn more. Folks seem to learn more when they are thinking and solving problems, rather than simply allowing the lecture to wash over them. The clickers are a tool to get people thinking about and applying (or maybe even just regurgitating) what they just heard -- it's a memory aid.
I have lectured at CU in several courses with over 200 students, and it's remarkable how difficult preparing such lectures can be. The problem is that the professor must pitch the discussion at a level where all but the worst students are not lost, and even the brightest students get something. Even among students with about the same level of understanding, different people learn in different ways.
Doing example problems is (of course) very important -- but the point of the clicker is to get you, the student, to think about the example problem as it is happening. Otherwise a large fraction of the class simply gets lost -- doesn't assimilate the material.
Now, one might argue that "getting lost" in lecture is a sign that one shouldn't be there in the first place -- but that is a discussion for pundits and university administrators. The job of the lecturer is to get the material planted in the minds of as many of the students as possible. The best ones will pick it up anyway, and the worst ones are hopeless -- so the name of the game is to help the mediocre students as much as possible.
Of course, upper-division courses are different. I am speaking of large (introductory) lecture courses.
Nah, that's not a violation of scientific protocol. To be doing good science, all you have to do is cite your sources well enough that someone else can reproduce the result. In this case, that means calling out observing locations well enough that anyone with good orbital fitting software and a midsized telescope can observe the object.
What is alleged here is merely a violation of professional ethics. That's pretty serious, but only because it breaks down the trust between individuals and institutions. It doesn't reflect on the quality of the result or of the scientific presentation -- only on who "should" get the professional recognition for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the text of the passport release earlier, and they claim to have addressed the privacy concerns but really haven't. The biggest problem is that a criminal could very easily grab all of your identity information without your knowledge. They assert that (I'm paraphrasing) "since the chip has no internal power source, it can't broadcast your identity". But that is a canard -- anyone who wants to read out your identity can simply use the same high-gain antenna to beam power your way as to pick up your passport's readout. Of course the protocols will be discovered -- at least by the people you don't want reading your passport.
All the more reason to stick your passport in the microwave with your new shirts from Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, bop on over to www.house.gov and send a quick note of outrage to your representative!
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
--Northrop Frye
But once that book is bought, what does it matter whether I go to Google or no? The libraries will presumably continue to be repositories of reference works, whether Google Print scan them or no.
The big question is: do reference works like Bartlett's get encouraged or discouraged by being indexed online? That gets to the root of copyright law. Based on the large number of free quotation websites online, I think that the answer is that people are encouraged to make such lists and even lists of lists available online, if only because their interesting bits of knowledge are indexed!
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. -- Robert A. Heinlein
At first, I thought, "Huh? Why would the publishers be renumbered at all?". Then I realized you meant to say "THE PUBLISHERS RECEIVE ZERO REMUNERATION".
Then I thought, "Huh? they didn't receive any money under the old way either -- when I visited the library to find my quotes."
First get your facts straight. Then you can distort them as you please. -- Mark Twain
He used to talk about how gadget-happy folks would buy electric motors for the kitchen. When I was a kid we had one: it was a motor mounted in the kitchen counter, and it came with all sorts of attachments - the blender attachment, the mixer attachment, the chopper attachment. Very easy to use, quite powerful. In those days (early 1970s I guess) there was a competition between built-in motor manufacturers for whose was the most reliable, whose was the most powerful, etc.
When's the last time you bought a motor for your kitchen? I have lots of appliances but no lone motors.
The IPOD vs PDA thing bears out Don's prescient thinking: people don't want computers, we want applications. We buy the computers to get the applications, and when the applications are well enough developed we won't bother buying a "computer" at all.
Running a Xeon dual-core is like mounting a Chevy big-block engine under a VW carburetor. The memory access just isn't there. Most of my stuff (modeling the solar corona) is RAM-bound anyway, so there's no win to be had at all by running the dual Intel cores. The Opterons have better RAM latency, which is a win -- but, more importantly, the two cores communicate cache-to-cache at the CPU clock speed, so dual-threaded processes run amazingly fast. If they're sharing memory, you effectively double the L2 cache size of both cores, which is a big win all around.
So, er, Xeon is teh 5uk and Opteron Pwns.
The problem with the multi-antenna (ie phased-array) approach is that it's just another way of describing angular encoding of the beams, and it's impractical for small or mobile installations below VHF (frequency 30 MHz; wavelength about 10 meters), and much above that you're into very short range stuff anyway.
Nah, visible light can carry mindbogglingly huge quantities of data, because you can multiplex by angle -- so it's not limited in the same way that RF is. What I mean is, suppose you have a visible light transmitter/receiver pair that can send (say) a terabit per second down a fiber. (This is possible now with wavelength multiplexing of multiple LEDs!). Then you can make an array of 10^6 of those, mounted on a billboard or something, and "broadcast" the signal along lines off sight that face the billboard. The detector would be a telescope with an array of 10^6 receivers at the focal plane.
Also, visible light is not susceptible to interference in the way that RF is. If you don't want to receive the yottobit per second that your neighbor is broadcasting, you can simply build a fence to hide the transmitter.
There is only so much bandwidth in the radio spectrum. In signal theory, the bandwidth of an analog channel is pretty well defined: it's log(S/N)(fmax). That is to say, it's the logarithm of the signal-to-noise ratio, multiplied by the maximum number of samples per second you can send. The S/N logarithm determines how many bits you can commmunicate with each sample of the channel; the fmax determines how many samples per second you can transmit.
The current FCC strategy for allocating bandwidth is to let the natural background S/N dominate, and allocate pieces of frequency spectrum. The UWB strategy is to increase N over the entire frequency spectrum. They both consume bandwidth in the public airwaves. Remember, unless you're using angular encoding (like a camera) there is only one signal to be had: the voltage off an antenna, versus time. Traditional radio broadcasting uses the Fourier basis to describe that voltage signal and to cut up pieces of the signal for different people to use. CDMA, TDMA, and other WB strategies use different bases -- the effect is that their interference is spread over a LOT of Fourier space, so no one user affects any one channel more than infinitesimally.
But there's no free lunch. A zillion users, all degrading signal infinitesimally, are just as bad as a single doofus who's stomping on your allocated frequency band. Even worse, actually, because you can (usually) find and unplug the doofus's equipment -- but nothing short of a nuclear strike will stop the UWB interference once it gets bad.
Hmmm... Tried to reply to this hours ago but was blocked from posting for some reason...
The idea is that seizure of the computers completely disrupts his business and livelihood. Ralsky may (or may not) be a cut-and-dried case; but even if he is found innocent he is unlikely to see his computers again for at least a year or two. At that point they will be obsolete, and unless he has replaced them his business will likely be completely gone. There is little more than semantic difference between "seizing for evidence" and "seizing and never giving back". Consider Indymedia, who had their computers seized for months during election season and were never charged with anything.
Hmm.... I tried to make this comment earlier but was unable to post for a while, so here's take 3:
The point is that FBI seizure of computers for evidence is extremely disruptive, and (since the computers are generally kept for at least a full obsolescence cycle and often damaged) amounts to taking stuff and not giving it back. We've all heard stories about people and organizations who lose lots of stuff for no good reason. The most famous recent one was Indymedia but there are others. That sort of thing is not supposed to happen.
Hmmm... Actually, there was more to it too -- for a period of several hours after the "nuking" comment I was unable to post at all. But my point was that FBI seizure of evidence amounts to taking stuff and never giving it back -- we have all heard the stories about people losing computers, disks, networks, and whatnot and getting them back, years later, in sometimes-working condition. Whether it's legal or not, that seems to be against the spirit of the due process clause.
My original comment was rapidly moderated up to +5 Interesting and spawned a lot of replies. Then it sank to "1,Interesting". Looking at the moderation screen for the article, apparently it has now been moderated 0 times.
And I thought capricious editors were only for the paranoid. Thanks, guys.
Surely they did have a warrant -- but should it be possible for someone, with merely a search warrant, to shut down your entire livelihood? There's no doubt that it is possible -- we often read about computers being seized and then returned, broken, years later. That seems wrong to me, whether it be legal or no.
Seriously -- whether you like Ralsky or not, this practice of seizing computer equipment is probably unconstitutional. He is being deprived of his property and his ability to make a living, without due process of law. According to TFA, all of his computer were seized, shutting him down.
We may object to Ralsky's nefarious tactics, but the point is that SourceForge could in principle be next.
A confederation of disgruntled DNS servers, of which OpenNIC is one, has been running an alternative namespace to ICANN for a long time now. Looks like opennic.org and opennic.net have been taken over by evil cybersquatters in the ICANN namespace -- but point to opennic.unrated.net and expand your DNS horizon...
The problem with going at solar minimum is that more galactic cosmic rays make it inward to the inner solar system, increasing radiation dose. The problem with going at solar maximum is occasional sudden death from energetic proton streams. Solar flares cause three main hazards: gamma rays from the flare itself (a problem but not a lethal one for most events); energetic protons that are accelerated by the flare and any post-flare coronal mass ejection; and bulk clouds of material that are thrown off by the Sun and that entrain magnetic fields.
The energetic protons are a real problem for man and machine. They arrive minutes to hours after the flare itself is seen. They have a high "quality factor", meaning they do a lot more biological damage than an equivalent ionizing dose of X-rays or gamma rays; and they tend to embed themselves in insulators, developing a humongous static charge that screws with electronic circuits and can burn out components. The clouds are more of a problem for planet-sized bodies (like the Earth) than for astronauts, but they do have some potential health consequences. They travel at "only" 1-4 million miles per hour, arriving at Earth about 1-4 days after the solar event.
Over the last three years we've had six or seven large flares that could have caused radiation sickness or death for Apollo astronauts (or Mars-bound astronauts with similar amounts of shielding to a mere Apollo capsule). That's enough that you'd have to expect at least one such event during a Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars, if you travelled at this phase of the solar cycle (declining).
The space station is largely shielded from the energetic protons, because it stays in low Earth orbit, underneath the Van Allen radiation belts -- Earth's magnetosphere diverts the protons away from the station. But the high energy galactic cosmic rays have no trouble passing through and hitting the station. So station astronauts are (probably somewhat) safer during solar maximum, but interplanetary astronauts are (probably) safer during solar minimum. Either way the radiation dose is a problem that has to be designed around.
Incidentally, the largest effect of solar activity on the space station is orbital decay! During solar maximum, the increased far-ultraviolet brightness of the Sun heats the outer layers of the atmosphere (the "thermosphere"), making them expand significantly -- that increases orbital drag a LOT. It's one reason (the other being delays in the Shuttle program) that Skylab re-entered the atmosphere before the Shuttle came on-line to provide additional boost. Skylab was launched during solar minimum in the mid 1970s, and the orbital decay projections were based on solar minimum conditions. It re-entered several years earlier than initially expected, because the atmosphere (and hence orbital drag) got larger in the solar maximum period of the late 1970s. The space station has similar orbital-decay issues; if you Google for the altitude-versus-time plots, you'll see that at its chosen altitude, the ISS needs to be boosted every six months or so, or it will spiral in and re-enter the atmosphere.
now, when I fly, I have to worry not just about whether I handled matches or toy cap guns or went to the shooting range in the last 24 hours, but also whether my neighbor, my dog, or the taxi driver handled any nitrate-laden deli meat in the last month.
The people of 1505 might have been rather impressed by societal change through 1755 (development of stock companies, the scientific method, the reformation) -- but the people of 1755 would be absolutely floored by the world of 2005.
I was in D.C. two weeks ago and took pictures of myself and my wife next to it. It's in the aviation wing of Air & Space, at the end, covered with a not-so-opaque blue tarp.
When I bought my Prius, the price difference between a Corolla and a Prius (cars that are comparable except for the powertrain) was about $6,000. In 100,000 miles the corolla will burn about 4,000 gallons of gas; the Prius will burn about 2,000 gallons. Hence purchasing the Prius makes sense from a fuel-only standpoint at about $3.00/gallon. That price point seemed unlikely to happen when I bought the car and fuel was about $1.80/gallon in Colorado. Now that fuel is close to $2.80/gallon (and I'm 30,000 miles into that 100,000 mile amortization) it's doesn't seem so unlikely.
But in the debate over pricing most people forget the all-important motivating difference between up-front and marginal pricing. When each mile costs a lot, you tend not to drive as much as when you pay for them all up front! This is the reason I buy a ski pass every year: although I may or may not get my "money's worth" from the pass over the whole year, I'm more likely to ski more times with the pass -- it's a no-brainer to head up the mountain. That convenience, for me, makes the pass worthwhile.
Similarly, having a very fuel-efficient car makes it more likely that I'll actually use and enjoy the convenience of my car. If it cost me $50 every 200 or 250 miles, I might think more about hopping in the car -- but at $30 every 400 miles, I don't really think about the price of fuel when i'm deciding whether to zip off somewhere to go hiking.
That's not stupid -- it's just that not every business wants to be a software company. They just want a tool to help their main trade. If giving the rights to the developer helps get them their niche "killer app" more cheaply then it can be a very astute business decision. Perhaps even more astute is to give the rights to the employee but require, say, 20% of any resale profits for the first n years -- that gives everyone an incentive to make a go of it, with minimal effort on the host company's part.
That is what LyX is for.
Well, the last time I chimed in with experience from lecturing, I was modded down "flamebait" -- but I'll come back for more. The clickers (in my experience) really help the middle third of the class -- the people who aren't coming back as majors, and therefore will only learn whatever they glean from this particular class: it is the last time they will encounter this material formally.
The future majors will probably do just fine anyway -- it's the history majors in astronomy class, or the engineers in art history class, who need help. The clickers have been shown to help those students focus and assimilate material.
The point is not to test whether you are paying attention, the point is to get you to pay more attention and to learn more. Folks seem to learn more when they are thinking and solving problems, rather than simply allowing the lecture to wash over them. The clickers are a tool to get people thinking about and applying (or maybe even just regurgitating) what they just heard -- it's a memory aid.
I have lectured at CU in several courses with over 200 students, and it's remarkable how difficult preparing such lectures can be. The problem is that the professor must pitch the discussion at a level where all but the worst students are not lost, and even the brightest students get something. Even among students with about the same level of understanding, different people learn in different ways.
Doing example problems is (of course) very important -- but the point of the clicker is to get you, the student, to think about the example problem as it is happening. Otherwise a large fraction of the class simply gets lost -- doesn't assimilate the material.
Now, one might argue that "getting lost" in lecture is a sign that one shouldn't be there in the first place -- but that is a discussion for pundits and university administrators. The job of the lecturer is to get the material planted in the minds of as many of the students as possible. The best ones will pick it up anyway, and the worst ones are hopeless -- so the name of the game is to help the mediocre students as much as possible.
Of course, upper-division courses are different. I am speaking of large (introductory) lecture courses.
What is alleged here is merely a violation of professional ethics. That's pretty serious, but only because it breaks down the trust between individuals and institutions. It doesn't reflect on the quality of the result or of the scientific presentation -- only on who "should" get the professional recognition for it.