But we're not just talking about software here. And there is no question that when an exploit is published that some individuals will take advantage of it.
Ahhg, I hate these complex ethical questions. In dealing with physical structures, we have to remember that you can't just issue a patch for a bridge or a tunnel. Budgetary, engineering, or other concerns might well prevent you from repairing a flaw even if it's out there. Plus, of course, physical structures are not likely to benefit from the "many eyeballs" effect: With source code, you check it because, after all, you will be using it. For a bridge or tunnel or power plant, that motivation is much removed.
What did John Malcolm base that statement on though? His own independent assessment or cajoling from his fatcat friends at M$FT and the MPAA?
It well could be. But the matter is left unstated and you cannot in good conscience assert this, unless you're privvy to information not in the article. Confusion between fact and people's assumptions is what gets us into many of the problems we face...
Intended implication being "If your kids illegally download music, they will grow up to be Mafia shills or even terrorists!!"
Maybe we should push file-sharing as a road to a solid career in organized crime.:) "Yeah, Bobby just ripped his millionth MP3 -- now he's a made man."
... it isn't clear that Microsoft or the MPAA made the terrorism charge. From the article,
John Malcolm, a Justice Department official who oversees the computer crime division, warned the panel about the connections between copyright piracy and terrorism.
For now, at least, the corporations are not exactly synonymous with the government.... even if they do pull the strings.
Drugs are bad because buying them funds terrorism. Yep, that's right. Even when it's homegrown.:P
Well of course it does, even if homegrown. After all, imagine all the resources we could be using in counter-terrorism -- all the legitimate law enforcement power that could be applied to homeland security -- if only we didn't have to divert them to bashing down the doors of gloucoma(sp?) patients...
What legitimate "speech" are you really going to convey in a commercial to a child that is 1, 3, 5, 7 years old? It's disgusting.
Free speech only works when no one gets to decide which speech is "legitimate" and which is merely disgusting. That's why so much time is spent each year in court dancing with obscenity cases. Free speech means that speech is not assigned a value (by the government) by content but only by context. That's why you can ban all parades down Main Street as a safety hazard but you cannot ban a march by neo-Nazis simply because Nazism is repulsive.
Free speech means allowing things you personally would not prefer, because no one is competent to make that call for society on all issues.Here's the key tent, too often lost: Free speech -- like all freedom -- is hard.
Information is information. If you have the "right" to scrape whatever you want and distribute it however you want, then companies have the right to distribute your personal information to whomever they want, under whatever circumstances they want.
Bzzz, sorry, no. The difference is this: American Airlines put the information out there, in the public. I agree that if I start renting billboards and posting my address in 1,000,000 pt font on them, then I cannot cry foul if someone goes and sends me something -- or even if someone merely tells someone else my address.
On the other hand, I cannot do business with amazon.com without giving them my address. Not only is it required so that stuff can be shipped to me, but it is also required by them for, well, the marketability of it. I haven't broadcast that address; I haven't made it public; I've sent it in confidence to one party.
If you can't see the difference, well, it strikes me you aren't looking for one.
What Reed is calling "interference" w.r.t photons is what a reputable scientist would call "scattering".
Darn, that is exactly the mot juste I was fishing for.:) I'm a little disturbed that an alleged expert in the field would through around improper terminology with such abandon.
was Dr. Reed's willingness to wave away two hundred years of well-established physics. Waves of the same frequency crossing the same point in space do interfere. How do I know? Because the very definition of interference is the effect they have.
There must be some other explanation, but it seems like Dr. Reed is making a freshman-physics terminology mistake. When a physicist says that two waves "interfere", he/she doesn't mean that one wave knocks out the other or that they undergo some linked dance. The linearity of Maxwell's equations indeed does show that each wave "passes through" the other without reducing or amplifying it.
Nonetheless, they interfere -- because "interference" is the interaction of the waves at a given point in space, where the amplitudes add algebraically. Consider a given location x at a given time t. If at that moment wave A has ampitude 5 and wave B has amplitude -2, then a receiver will measure a disturbance of amplitude 3. It doesn't -- and can't -- know that there are two waves, because there is only one signal. If the content in wave A is uncorrelated with the content in wave B (for example, two different radio stations playing different songs), then their addition will be essentially random -- and hence sound like noise (because it is noise).
Dr. Reed's proposal doesn't really speak to this. He wants smarter receivers that can track a signal and so distinguish wave A from wave B. The technology is not here, not cheap, and certainly not universal. The system we have was not foisted on us by some big government conspiracy and it's not maintained by the pressures of a cartel. It's here because interference is a fact and that "overcoming" it -- which is really more like shuffling past it -- is expensive and unproven.
And you would still have to deal with the transition from legacy to newfangled... what do all those "dumb" radios make of the frequency-hopping signal as it passes through their current band? In any event, I found his tone to be wildly optimistic (if one is generous) and far too disingenuous in throwing out a well-defined technical term.
And what would you do if you have a center of mass inside BOTH objects?
It doesn't seem useful to extend "planet" to these situations. I believe that having the center of mass "inside" both objects effectively means the objects must interpenetrate... at which point, can we really say there are two distinct objects at all?
This is wrong. The center of mass is about 30,000 miles from the earths center, about 27000 miles above the earth's surface.
I don't know the exact number and am too lazy to do the calculation myself. But I am absolutely sure that the center-of-mass is not that close to geosynchronous orbit. Your number is about 10% of the total Earth-Moon distance -- this would imply that the ratio of the Earth's mass to the Moon's is about 9:1, which is clearly bogus. The true ratio is much closer to 81:1.
Oh, hell. I might as well get over my laziness. From here -- I assume NASA Goddard SFC is sufficiently respectable? -- we have
Mmoon = 0.073E24 kg
Mearth = 5.97E24 kg
Rearth = 6378 km
D = 0.38E6 km So doing a little basic physics:
Mearth * 0 + Mmoon * L = (Mearth+Mmoon)*Xcm
Xcm = Mmoon / (Mearth+Mmoon) * L
Xcm = 4590 km
Since 4590 is less than 6378 under most systems of arithmetic, the center-of-mass lies within the Earth's surface. QED.
You there have in such huge space a multitasking kernel, a GUI, a tcp/ip stack and a web browser. Imagine if linux kernel + XF86 + Mozilla run under not 64k, but 640k, or even 6.4Mb.
No way, Gollum's got to lose the award, so he can jump onstage and bite into the winner, leaving them with a nice bloody stump while Gollum goes through his "thank-yous" while holding the precious statuette...
Hey, if the Oscars culminated with someone falling into a pool of molten rock, which went on to tear down the whole room, then I'd watch 'em.
(With apologies to Jed Bartlett, nee Aaron Sorkin.)
It is also more accurate to say that the earth and moon together revolve about their common center of mass, rather than saying that the moon revolves about the earth. This common center of mass lies beneath the earth's surface, about 3,000 mi (4800 km) from the earth's center.
Since the COM is inside the Earth, I think it's fair to say that the Moon orbits the Earth (and not vice versa).
(Interesting note, Nicolaus Copernicus dedicated his On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs to Pope Paul III)
Yeah, but Copernicus also delayed publication until he was on his deathbed, to avoid being burned at the stake. This just shows that he was aware of the risks of his theories and that he was savvy enough to try to ameliorate them.
Laymen will be involved in the process at some point.
It's a sad day for democracy and the rule of law when this is seen as an intrinsically bad thing. Of course "laymen" will be involved at some point. They should -- it's "their" justice system, too, you know. The real issue is -- and as a science teacher I will accept some of the blame here -- our schools are not doing enough to ensure that mere "laymen" have the critical facility needed to resist junk science.
hmm . . . I notice that this formula does not factor in mass of the pancake. this makes me wonder, being not-so-smart in physics, would this formula apply for any size pancake??
In problems driven solely by gravity, the mass typically drops out. Thank you, Equivalence Principle.
and how about objects other than pancakes? could I flip say, a thanksgiving turkey and still have it land perfectly in the pan, using this formula?
A pancake is a nicely simple and symmetric object. Indeed, the symmetry means that whenever you flip it, you're doing so about a stable axis. Other shapes, not so nice... your turkey might tumble wildly. Also, while the mass drops out of the angular velocity, it does not drop out of the formula for the needed force -- and a turkey tends to be quite a bit more massive than a crepe.
Now, in non-Western cultures, there isn't the no-child or few-child culture as there is in the West, so much of what I've said doesn't apply there. But it's coming. The growth rate (worldwide) peaked around 1970, when the annual rate of growth was 2.1%. By 1995 it was down to 1.5%. It's still dropping steadily.
That's the unsung irony of the population issue: Industrialization is devestating to the environment. Overpopulation would be more so. The surest way to avoid overpopulation is industrialization. Historically it's the only method that works. So do you gamble that you can industrialize the world before you destroy it? It's a thorny question for the 21st century.
(I have my pet answer, of course: space exploitation -- industrialize but move the industries off-world.)
Slashdot Mirror
Compression schemes?
Back in my day, people understood that "minicomputer" was the thing between "mainframe" and "microcomputer" on the hierarchy of power...
Ahhg, I hate these complex ethical questions. In dealing with physical structures, we have to remember that you can't just issue a patch for a bridge or a tunnel. Budgetary, engineering, or other concerns might well prevent you from repairing a flaw even if it's out there. Plus, of course, physical structures are not likely to benefit from the "many eyeballs" effect: With source code, you check it because, after all, you will be using it. For a bridge or tunnel or power plant, that motivation is much removed.
It well could be. But the matter is left unstated and you cannot in good conscience assert this, unless you're privvy to information not in the article. Confusion between fact and people's assumptions is what gets us into many of the problems we face...
Maybe we should push file-sharing as a road to a solid career in organized crime.
For now, at least, the corporations are not exactly synonymous with the government.... even if they do pull the strings.
Well of course it does, even if homegrown. After all, imagine all the resources we could be using in counter-terrorism -- all the legitimate law enforcement power that could be applied to homeland security -- if only we didn't have to divert them to bashing down the doors of gloucoma(sp?) patients...
Thanks for saving me the effort of making exactly those points.
Free speech only works when no one gets to decide which speech is "legitimate" and which is merely disgusting. That's why so much time is spent each year in court dancing with obscenity cases. Free speech means that speech is not assigned a value (by the government) by content but only by context. That's why you can ban all parades down Main Street as a safety hazard but you cannot ban a march by neo-Nazis simply because Nazism is repulsive.
Free speech means allowing things you personally would not prefer, because no one is competent to make that call for society on all issues.Here's the key tent, too often lost: Free speech -- like all freedom -- is hard .
Bzzz, sorry, no. The difference is this: American Airlines put the information out there, in the public. I agree that if I start renting billboards and posting my address in 1,000,000 pt font on them, then I cannot cry foul if someone goes and sends me something -- or even if someone merely tells someone else my address.
On the other hand, I cannot do business with amazon.com without giving them my address. Not only is it required so that stuff can be shipped to me, but it is also required by them for, well, the marketability of it. I haven't broadcast that address; I haven't made it public; I've sent it in confidence to one party.
If you can't see the difference, well, it strikes me you aren't looking for one.
Darn, that is exactly the mot juste I was fishing for.
I don't have any professional competence to comment on GNUradio but as a physicist and physics teacher, I do feel confident that waves interfere.
There must be some other explanation, but it seems like Dr. Reed is making a freshman-physics terminology mistake. When a physicist says that two waves "interfere", he/she doesn't mean that one wave knocks out the other or that they undergo some linked dance. The linearity of Maxwell's equations indeed does show that each wave "passes through" the other without reducing or amplifying it.
Nonetheless, they interfere -- because "interference" is the interaction of the waves at a given point in space, where the amplitudes add algebraically. Consider a given location x at a given time t. If at that moment wave A has ampitude 5 and wave B has amplitude -2, then a receiver will measure a disturbance of amplitude 3. It doesn't -- and can't -- know that there are two waves, because there is only one signal. If the content in wave A is uncorrelated with the content in wave B (for example, two different radio stations playing different songs), then their addition will be essentially random -- and hence sound like noise (because it is noise).
Dr. Reed's proposal doesn't really speak to this. He wants smarter receivers that can track a signal and so distinguish wave A from wave B. The technology is not here, not cheap, and certainly not universal. The system we have was not foisted on us by some big government conspiracy and it's not maintained by the pressures of a cartel. It's here because interference is a fact and that "overcoming" it -- which is really more like shuffling past it -- is expensive and unproven.
And you would still have to deal with the transition from legacy to newfangled
It doesn't seem useful to extend "planet" to these situations. I believe that having the center of mass "inside" both objects effectively means the objects must interpenetrate
I don't know the exact number and am too lazy to do the calculation myself. But I am absolutely sure that the center-of-mass is not that close to geosynchronous orbit. Your number is about 10% of the total Earth-Moon distance -- this would imply that the ratio of the Earth's mass to the Moon's is about 9:1, which is clearly bogus. The true ratio is much closer to 81:1.
Oh, hell. I might as well get over my laziness. From here -- I assume NASA Goddard SFC is sufficiently respectable? -- we have
Mmoon = 0.073E24 kg
Mearth = 5.97E24 kg
Rearth = 6378 km
D = 0.38E6 km
So doing a little basic physics:
Since 4590 is less than 6378 under most systems of arithmetic, the center-of-mass lies within the Earth's surface. QED.
This is a bit of wisdom sorely needed these days.
And if Yoda says it's true, it must be true...
Hey, if the Oscars culminated with someone falling into a pool of molten rock, which went on to tear down the whole room, then I'd watch 'em.
(With apologies to Jed Bartlett, nee Aaron Sorkin.)
This is sort of handled(here):
Since the COM is inside the Earth, I think it's fair to say that the Moon orbits the Earth (and not vice versa).
Yeah, but Copernicus also delayed publication until he was on his deathbed, to avoid being burned at the stake. This just shows that he was aware of the risks of his theories and that he was savvy enough to try to ameliorate them.
It's a sad day for democracy and the rule of law when this is seen as an intrinsically bad thing. Of course "laymen" will be involved at some point. They should -- it's "their" justice system, too, you know. The real issue is -- and as a science teacher I will accept some of the blame here -- our schools are not doing enough to ensure that mere "laymen" have the critical facility needed to resist junk science.
In problems driven solely by gravity, the mass typically drops out. Thank you, Equivalence Principle.
A pancake is a nicely simple and symmetric object. Indeed, the symmetry means that whenever you flip it, you're doing so about a stable axis. Other shapes, not so nice... your turkey might tumble wildly. Also, while the mass drops out of the angular velocity, it does not drop out of the formula for the needed force -- and a turkey tends to be quite a bit more massive than a crepe.
That's the unsung irony of the population issue: Industrialization is devestating to the environment. Overpopulation would be more so. The surest way to avoid overpopulation is industrialization. Historically it's the only method that works. So do you gamble that you can industrialize the world before you destroy it? It's a thorny question for the 21st century.
(I have my pet answer, of course: space exploitation -- industrialize but move the industries off-world.)
ObSimpson ref: Lisa (paraphrased): "Look, it's Tomorrowland -- a vision of what the people of 1962 thought life would be like in 1987"