Is there some mystical part to the field being pushed that I am not aware of?
Yes. Chiropractic was originally a semi-mystical practice like a lot of pre-scientific medicine. The founders claimed that all sickness was caused by misalignment of the joints, so they could cure any disease by correcting the misalignments. A minority of chiropractors today still make those claims. They also oppose a lot of other modern scientific medicine, including vaccination.
Well, no, what's really new is that the top end hasn't come down, like it did on all my previous monitor purchases.
Or maybe there has been a change in what constitutes high-end. Resolutions haven't been going up by much- though I suspect that the current generation 1920x1200 monitors in your preferred price range would be at least a modest pixel count boost- but other aspects of performance have. Response rates and viewing angles have definitely improved, and gamut and color accuracy are now an issue for consumer models. Like you, I'm disappointed that pixel counts have largely stagnated- I'd love to see a 2160p-class monitor- but I'm looking forward to my next monitor having a color space that's substantially bigger than sRGB.
I don't see how this is an issue. Monitors appear to be getting wider, but not smaller height-wise.
They may not be getting smaller height wise in linear dimension, but they have gotten at least a little bit smaller in pixel dimension. Those wide computer screens are usually based on either 720 or 1080 vertical pixel HDTV screens, which means that you are losing some vertical pixels compared to an old 1600x1200 high definition monitor. There are screens available with a larger vertical pixel count, but you have to pay a substantial price premium for them.
OTOH, it looks to me as though this is more because HDTV based monitors are really cheap, not because the other monitors are expensive. I remember 1600x1200 monitors costing a lot of money back when they were considered high-end. Now you can get a 1920x1200 monitor for between $300 and $500 depending on size, and there are 2560x1440 monitors available for under $1000. What's really new is that you can get a 1920x1080 monitor for under $200.
If you had bothered to read the article- yeah, I know, this is Slashdot- you would have noticed that they mention that the cost is marginal. That's because the signs would need to be replaced on about the same schedule anyway as part of routine maintenance. So a more accurate description of the article would be "New York plans to use mixed case instead of all caps during routine street sign maintenance". But that wouldn't get enough people angry, so they went with the more inflammatory version.
I'm sure their marketing team has no problem with losing views so they can track whatever views they still have left.
Absolutely, and don't act surprised. You aren't doing them a favor by visiting their site; you're costing them money. They pay for those costs by advertising and tracking their visitors. If you aren't going to help them pay for your use by letting them display ads and track you, they'd be much happier if you didn't visit.
And can never work, because much of the time the only reason humans can understand each other is by making informed guesses based on context, which a computer program cannot do.
It's also worth pointing out that in practice people frequently fail to understand each other perfectly. In conversations, we routinely ask questions to ensure that we've correctly understood what the other person said. If you ever watch a TV newscast with the closed captions on, you can see that the people producing those captions routinely make glaring mistakes. High quality human produced transcripts can only be produced by double and triple checking the transcripts against the source recording to make sure they're correct. There's no reason to expect computer generated transcripts to be perfect, either.
Somebody needs to tell that to all the people who play variants of football other than Association, e.g. Rugby Football, Australian Rules Football, Canadian Football, etc. They all use an oblong ball and allow it to be held in the hand.
A third model would be to have the funding agencies handle the publications directly rather than working through any kind of middleman. Things have already moved quite a distance in that direction. For example, NIH now requires that any publications arising from NIH funded research be submitted to Pub Med Central within (IIRC) one year; once they're on PMC they're publicly available free of charge. Once you've gone that far, why not just cut out the middleman? They could just as easily turn PMC into the Journal of NIH Research and require researchers receiving NIH funding submit their publications there. All the research would be available to everyone immediately, and they'd probably save some money in the long run.
There are obviously some details to be worked out. How do you deal with research that's funded by more than one agency? Would privately funded researchers be able to publish in a publicly funded journal? But those are minor points compared to the idea of requiring publicly funded research to be immediately available to the public.
PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
PLoS is not free. It just shifts the costs from the readers to the authors, who must pay substantial fees ($1350 for PLoS One, for instance) to get their articles published. I think that's a better system overall- it lets anyone who's interested read the articles, it's relatively straightforward for authors to include publication costs in their grants, and it encourages authors to concentrate on quality over quantity- but it's not free.
This will spark Congress to fund useful things like space exploration.
You haven't been watching the way things work in Washington for very long, have you? Programs like this don't lose their funding because they're too expensive or bad ideas. They lose their funding because somebody doesn't like the science they're doing. In this case, it's probably the same gang of denialists who have been fighting tooth and nail against any substantive program to do anything about global warming. They see scientists being unable to tell us what's happening with global warming as a victory, so they'll fight harder than ever to keep denying funding.
So are you saying that students have no free speech rights (when applied to teachers and principals, who are public officials) whatsoever?
They have free speech rights, but those rights don't include defamation. Nobody has a right to engage in defamation, which is why the courts can punish people for it. If a student actually defames the school or somebody in it- and knowingly making a false accusation of an infamous crime would qualify under even the strictest defamation standards- they can't claim to be engaging in protected free speech.
There are plenty of rocks that contain carbon. Good examples include limestone, marble, coal, and oil shale. The problem isn't lack of carbon. The problem is that the half life of 14C is very short compared to the age of most rocks, so there isn't enough radiocarbon left to date.
No, he's right that it's 14C. Tritium gets incorporated into water, so it gets spread around very quickly and regularly. It also has a relatively short half life (~12 years). 14C released in nuclear testing mostly winds up as CO2, which gets pulled out of the air fast enough to serve as a useful marker but not so fast that it isn't still useful decades after the end of atmospheric testing.
I suspect that the reason is still incompetence rather than ill intent. They tried their shuffling algorithm, but it failed to pass whatever test they used to see if the order was random. They were either too incompetent or in too much of a hurry to look up a better method of shuffling, so they tried running their shuffle twice. That was good enough to pass whatever test they used, so they went with it.
OK, but if your code is ugly, will you be sure that it is implementing the right solution, and that you can keep it that way as it evolves?
My experience with code written by subject experts who aren't great coders is that their code is ugly but not actually evil. They aren't genius coders, but at least they know their limitations. They usually try to do things in a simple, straightforward way. The resulting code tends to be poorly factored, but it avoids the really dangerous trap of trying to be too clever. That means you can usually grind your way through it to figure out what it's trying to do and whether it succeeds. Doing so can be a long slog, but at least the path isn't strewn with traps for the unwary.
There's more than one kind of genius. The kind of genius it takes to solve a difficult and important problem is different from the kind of genius it takes to write clean and easily understood code. My experience using software for my scientific field is that the best software from the standpoint of getting good results is often very poorly written. That's because the people writing it are geniuses in their field but often indifferent programmers. It's much easier to fix a program that does an ugly job of implementing the right solution than one that does a beautiful job of implementing the wrong solution.
This simply a lie, as is the claim that 64 combinations producing 20 codons is "redundancy". The reason there are only 20 is well-known to anyone with the least little bit of familiarity with the subject: it is the maximum number of unambiguous combinations, so that if you get six bases in a row there is exactly one way to read them, because no two codons together can result in a third codon being read between them.
Except that isn't true. Every one of the 64 possible 3 base sequences is a valid code for either an amino acid or a stop codon. Some viruses take advantage of this by overlapping protein coding regions, with different proteins being coded by reading in different frames. In eukaryotes, there are some genes that can code for proteins with very different sequence regions because an exon skipping splice variant results in a frame shift that codes for a completely different sequence.
A more significant complaint about the "This code is universal, shared by all organisms" quote is that it isn't universal. There are small differences in the genetic code between genomes. NCBI lists no fewer than 23 different versions, but given that a tiny fraction of all species have been studied there are undoubtedly many more minor variants. An especially interesting case- and the place that difference in genetic codes were first discovered- is that human nuclear and mitochondrial sequences use slightly different genetic codes. The mitochondria even have their own distinct ribosomes.
But the court already ordered Toyota to pay royalties "based on the wholesale prices equal to 0.48 percent for a second- generation Prius, 0.32 percent for each Highlander and 0.26 percent for each Lexus RX400h."
But those aren't the cars at issue in this case. Paice is now suing over new vehicles that were sold since the last suit. It sounds as if Toyota is playing hardball by claiming that new models have modified drivetrains that don't violate the patent. As long as the suits take longer than a car generation, they can force Paice to re-litigate for each new generation of hybrid. I don't know if the judge will put up with that behavior, but I can see why Toyota is willing to give it a try.
If that were true, why did Paice ask the court to block sales of the Toyota cars in question?
Leverage. As long as Toyota is allowed to continue importing their hybrids, they have little reason to settle. Instead, they'll aggressively fight the suit in the hopes of either getting the patent invalidated or driving Paice into bankruptcy with legal fees. If Paice can get an injunction, though, it will hurt Toyota badly; they'll be forced to negotiate some kind of royalty deal or lose their hybrid sales. Even if the deal lets Toyota contest the patent, it still give Paice enough money to keep in business for the length of the suit plus a nice chunk of cash for bonuses and dividends.
How can you list Griffith Park Observatory as the best place in Los Angeles to visit? If you want a great science museum, you can't beat the Page Museum, aka the Tar Pits museum.
Richard Stallman, the original author of the GPL, agrees with you. To quote what the Free Software Foundation says about it:
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can...
Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it...
Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!
(Emphasis is in the original.) So not only does the FSF think that it's acceptable to charge money for GPLed software, they strongly encourage it.
I've never quite understood why; I have no problem understanding that if I have trouble walking then driving might not be such a good idea, but apparently some people do.
The problem is that alcohol impairs your judgment. It's the biggest danger of drinking. Alcohol impairs all of a person's mental functions, including the ability to recognize just how badly their abilities are impaired. The same drunkenness that makes a driver unsafe can also make that driver incapable of recognizing just how unsafe they are. That's why you're supposed to ask people for their keys while they're still sober. By the time they're drunk enough to be really dangerous, they're much less likely to give them to you.
In a word, no. A reference implementation is supposed to be a working version of the code, not just a mathematical description. With a working version, it's possible to do things like test its real world performance or cut and paste directly into a program that needs to use the function. That's obviously only possible if you have a version that works on real-world processors.
Consider Skein as an example. One of the things that Bruce Schneier described as a major goal of its design is that it uses functions that are highly optimized in real-world processors. That means that it's possible to make a version that's both very fast and straightforward to program, an important criterion for low-powered embedded applications. You won't discover that kind of detail until you implement it.
It's not quite the whole equation. The Kindle has at least a few other big wins:
It's good for periodicals. Delivery is a significant part of the cost of magazines and newspapers, so the electronic version can be substantially cheaper. My Kindle newspaper subscription is less than half the cost of a paper subscription, and that difference alone is enough to pay for the thing over the course of a few years.
It's fantastic for works that are out of copyright. Printed versions still have to pay for the printing and shipping of big chunks of paper, while electronic versions are all but free. You can get the complete works of just about any out of copyright author for less a used paperback copy of one of that author's works. This isn't necessarily specific to the Kindle- you could always download the Project Gutenberg version for any electronic reader- but combined with the convenience factor it's a huge win.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Chiropractic was originally a semi-mystical practice like a lot of pre-scientific medicine. The founders claimed that all sickness was caused by misalignment of the joints, so they could cure any disease by correcting the misalignments. A minority of chiropractors today still make those claims. They also oppose a lot of other modern scientific medicine, including vaccination.
Or maybe there has been a change in what constitutes high-end. Resolutions haven't been going up by much- though I suspect that the current generation 1920x1200 monitors in your preferred price range would be at least a modest pixel count boost- but other aspects of performance have. Response rates and viewing angles have definitely improved, and gamut and color accuracy are now an issue for consumer models. Like you, I'm disappointed that pixel counts have largely stagnated- I'd love to see a 2160p-class monitor- but I'm looking forward to my next monitor having a color space that's substantially bigger than sRGB.
They may not be getting smaller height wise in linear dimension, but they have gotten at least a little bit smaller in pixel dimension. Those wide computer screens are usually based on either 720 or 1080 vertical pixel HDTV screens, which means that you are losing some vertical pixels compared to an old 1600x1200 high definition monitor. There are screens available with a larger vertical pixel count, but you have to pay a substantial price premium for them.
OTOH, it looks to me as though this is more because HDTV based monitors are really cheap, not because the other monitors are expensive. I remember 1600x1200 monitors costing a lot of money back when they were considered high-end. Now you can get a 1920x1200 monitor for between $300 and $500 depending on size, and there are 2560x1440 monitors available for under $1000. What's really new is that you can get a 1920x1080 monitor for under $200.
If you had bothered to read the article- yeah, I know, this is Slashdot- you would have noticed that they mention that the cost is marginal. That's because the signs would need to be replaced on about the same schedule anyway as part of routine maintenance. So a more accurate description of the article would be "New York plans to use mixed case instead of all caps during routine street sign maintenance". But that wouldn't get enough people angry, so they went with the more inflammatory version.
Absolutely, and don't act surprised. You aren't doing them a favor by visiting their site; you're costing them money. They pay for those costs by advertising and tracking their visitors. If you aren't going to help them pay for your use by letting them display ads and track you, they'd be much happier if you didn't visit.
It's also worth pointing out that in practice people frequently fail to understand each other perfectly. In conversations, we routinely ask questions to ensure that we've correctly understood what the other person said. If you ever watch a TV newscast with the closed captions on, you can see that the people producing those captions routinely make glaring mistakes. High quality human produced transcripts can only be produced by double and triple checking the transcripts against the source recording to make sure they're correct. There's no reason to expect computer generated transcripts to be perfect, either.
Somebody needs to tell that to all the people who play variants of football other than Association, e.g. Rugby Football, Australian Rules Football, Canadian Football, etc. They all use an oblong ball and allow it to be held in the hand.
A third model would be to have the funding agencies handle the publications directly rather than working through any kind of middleman. Things have already moved quite a distance in that direction. For example, NIH now requires that any publications arising from NIH funded research be submitted to Pub Med Central within (IIRC) one year; once they're on PMC they're publicly available free of charge. Once you've gone that far, why not just cut out the middleman? They could just as easily turn PMC into the Journal of NIH Research and require researchers receiving NIH funding submit their publications there. All the research would be available to everyone immediately, and they'd probably save some money in the long run.
There are obviously some details to be worked out. How do you deal with research that's funded by more than one agency? Would privately funded researchers be able to publish in a publicly funded journal? But those are minor points compared to the idea of requiring publicly funded research to be immediately available to the public.
PLoS is not free. It just shifts the costs from the readers to the authors, who must pay substantial fees ($1350 for PLoS One, for instance) to get their articles published. I think that's a better system overall- it lets anyone who's interested read the articles, it's relatively straightforward for authors to include publication costs in their grants, and it encourages authors to concentrate on quality over quantity- but it's not free.
You haven't been watching the way things work in Washington for very long, have you? Programs like this don't lose their funding because they're too expensive or bad ideas. They lose their funding because somebody doesn't like the science they're doing. In this case, it's probably the same gang of denialists who have been fighting tooth and nail against any substantive program to do anything about global warming. They see scientists being unable to tell us what's happening with global warming as a victory, so they'll fight harder than ever to keep denying funding.
They have free speech rights, but those rights don't include defamation. Nobody has a right to engage in defamation, which is why the courts can punish people for it. If a student actually defames the school or somebody in it- and knowingly making a false accusation of an infamous crime would qualify under even the strictest defamation standards- they can't claim to be engaging in protected free speech.
There are plenty of rocks that contain carbon. Good examples include limestone, marble, coal, and oil shale. The problem isn't lack of carbon. The problem is that the half life of 14C is very short compared to the age of most rocks, so there isn't enough radiocarbon left to date.
No, he's right that it's 14C. Tritium gets incorporated into water, so it gets spread around very quickly and regularly. It also has a relatively short half life (~12 years). 14C released in nuclear testing mostly winds up as CO2, which gets pulled out of the air fast enough to serve as a useful marker but not so fast that it isn't still useful decades after the end of atmospheric testing.
Failure to understand the article isn't really fucking up. It's standard Slashdot practice.
I suspect that the reason is still incompetence rather than ill intent. They tried their shuffling algorithm, but it failed to pass whatever test they used to see if the order was random. They were either too incompetent or in too much of a hurry to look up a better method of shuffling, so they tried running their shuffle twice. That was good enough to pass whatever test they used, so they went with it.
My experience with code written by subject experts who aren't great coders is that their code is ugly but not actually evil. They aren't genius coders, but at least they know their limitations. They usually try to do things in a simple, straightforward way. The resulting code tends to be poorly factored, but it avoids the really dangerous trap of trying to be too clever. That means you can usually grind your way through it to figure out what it's trying to do and whether it succeeds. Doing so can be a long slog, but at least the path isn't strewn with traps for the unwary.
There's more than one kind of genius. The kind of genius it takes to solve a difficult and important problem is different from the kind of genius it takes to write clean and easily understood code. My experience using software for my scientific field is that the best software from the standpoint of getting good results is often very poorly written. That's because the people writing it are geniuses in their field but often indifferent programmers. It's much easier to fix a program that does an ugly job of implementing the right solution than one that does a beautiful job of implementing the wrong solution.
Except that isn't true. Every one of the 64 possible 3 base sequences is a valid code for either an amino acid or a stop codon. Some viruses take advantage of this by overlapping protein coding regions, with different proteins being coded by reading in different frames. In eukaryotes, there are some genes that can code for proteins with very different sequence regions because an exon skipping splice variant results in a frame shift that codes for a completely different sequence.
A more significant complaint about the "This code is universal, shared by all organisms" quote is that it isn't universal. There are small differences in the genetic code between genomes. NCBI lists no fewer than 23 different versions, but given that a tiny fraction of all species have been studied there are undoubtedly many more minor variants. An especially interesting case- and the place that difference in genetic codes were first discovered- is that human nuclear and mitochondrial sequences use slightly different genetic codes. The mitochondria even have their own distinct ribosomes.
But those aren't the cars at issue in this case. Paice is now suing over new vehicles that were sold since the last suit. It sounds as if Toyota is playing hardball by claiming that new models have modified drivetrains that don't violate the patent. As long as the suits take longer than a car generation, they can force Paice to re-litigate for each new generation of hybrid. I don't know if the judge will put up with that behavior, but I can see why Toyota is willing to give it a try.
Leverage. As long as Toyota is allowed to continue importing their hybrids, they have little reason to settle. Instead, they'll aggressively fight the suit in the hopes of either getting the patent invalidated or driving Paice into bankruptcy with legal fees. If Paice can get an injunction, though, it will hurt Toyota badly; they'll be forced to negotiate some kind of royalty deal or lose their hybrid sales. Even if the deal lets Toyota contest the patent, it still give Paice enough money to keep in business for the length of the suit plus a nice chunk of cash for bonuses and dividends.
How can you list Griffith Park Observatory as the best place in Los Angeles to visit? If you want a great science museum, you can't beat the Page Museum, aka the Tar Pits museum.
(Emphasis is in the original.) So not only does the FSF think that it's acceptable to charge money for GPLed software, they strongly encourage it.
The problem is that alcohol impairs your judgment. It's the biggest danger of drinking. Alcohol impairs all of a person's mental functions, including the ability to recognize just how badly their abilities are impaired. The same drunkenness that makes a driver unsafe can also make that driver incapable of recognizing just how unsafe they are. That's why you're supposed to ask people for their keys while they're still sober. By the time they're drunk enough to be really dangerous, they're much less likely to give them to you.
In a word, no. A reference implementation is supposed to be a working version of the code, not just a mathematical description. With a working version, it's possible to do things like test its real world performance or cut and paste directly into a program that needs to use the function. That's obviously only possible if you have a version that works on real-world processors.
Consider Skein as an example. One of the things that Bruce Schneier described as a major goal of its design is that it uses functions that are highly optimized in real-world processors. That means that it's possible to make a version that's both very fast and straightforward to program, an important criterion for low-powered embedded applications. You won't discover that kind of detail until you implement it.