I mean this as a comment on the legal standard not just the good consequences of such a ruling. It's pretty clear that most people really do have an expectation of privacy in email they send from home (work is another matter). An average person would be both shocked and horrified to learn that someone else was reading their email and would feel it was an invasion of their privacy. Most certainly the average person does not have the same attitude toward email stored on their ISP's servers as they do to other buisness records, e.g., the time of their purchase of a magazine at the store.
I don't necessarily agree with software patents but they are not what is wrong with the US patent system. The problem with the US patent system is that it grants obvious patents.
Why does cell phone use and drunk driving generate such massive disapproval? I don't doubt that they make us worse drivers but so do a lot of things. I'm sure that breaking up with your girlfriend in the car increases your chance of an accident 400%. I bet you which radio shows you listen to have an effect on how likely you are to get in an accident. What's next laws about which radio shows you can listen too?
If the idea was that some activities are just too dangerous to do on the road then arresting EVERYONE for having cell phones isn't the answer. Some people are better drivers than others. Instead only people with no accidents on their record or something would be allowed to talk on the cell phone.
What really gauls me about the whole business is the arbitrary moral approbation involved. Driving drunk is really really bad yet driving while sleepy is just minor misbehavior even though being tipsy and sleepy can be just as dangerous on the road.
Whatever the law needs to practically say we should have no more approbation for the really good driver who gets in his car while a little tipsy than the horribly bad driver who chooses to drive his car (rather than take the train) totally sober. Both are putting other people at the same risk (by assumption) so why is one a worse person than the other?
I just want a coherent criteria that tells me why some sorts of increased driving risk are such a big deal while not others.
Just because it requires courage to oppose the current consensus doesn't mean you are right. It takes courage to believe in young earth creationism as well. Courage without reason or justification is not a virtue.
As I expected I was disgusted by the implicit suggestion in this article that laymen should be in the business of evaluating the convincingness of scientific arguments they won't even bother to read. Ultimately if you have the evidence it shouldn't matter if the whole world is against you. Truth isn't determined by a vote. However, on the flip side, unless you decide to actually put in the time to look at and understand the evidence your opinion about the matter means squat. If you haven't even read a smattering of the journal articles on climate change it's pretty damn ridiculous to think you know better than the experts how good the arguments are.
However, I was surprised to find that there was definitely a kernel of truth in what President Klaus was saying. Not about a threat to liberty or the reality of climate change but the unfortunate confusion of value judgements and political views with scientific judgements. Certainly scientists have just as much (if not more) right to have political views and make policy recommendations as the next guy but they have a responsibility to distinguish these from their scientific findings. The fact that the world is warming from human causes is a scientific fact. The idea that we need to burn less fossil fuels, conserve energy, and behave more environmentally responsibly are value judgements.
I was nearly a scientist myself (I'm a mathematician) so I wasn't as worried that the value judgements and biases that I object to in many environmentalists were polluting the results. Also I could penetrate the technical talk well enough to tell that the studies weren't being horrible misrepresented. However, the average person can't tell this or distinguish between what the science proved and the calls from climate scientists for certain policy objectives.
As a practical matter it may be in the interests of scientists to avoid the appearance of the conflict of interest by publicly affiliating themselves with any particular policy solutions or advocacy group. The same way we require certain government employees (election monitors) to avoid overtly affiliating themselves with political parties it might actually help the trustworthiness of the scientific community if there was a clear delineation between public and private roles.
All this bitching about google's harm to privacy is really ridiculous.
For starters it is just a mistake to say that google is causing a loss of privacy. Privacy is what you lose when someone peers in your window while your having sex. You haven't lost any privacy, merely obscurity, if someone takes your picture while you are having sex in the public park. Google tells you upfront what information it's collecting and what it's doing with it so you can hardly claim you thought it was totally private and heck it even lets you control alot of the info they have (delete things from search history). Moreover, it isn't like google is somehow invasively tracking information that other companies don't capture, you are just worried they will keep it longer.
Moreover, the real harm would be if people weren't aware that their activities and clickstreams online were probably being monitored. Either you have to admit that google poses no particular privacy risk or you think that without google people would feel that their online activities were anonymous and not being tracked, the net result of which being that people wouldn't even realize that if they wanted to keep their activities a total secret they better use something like Tor.
Well that all depends what you mean by software patents. There are plenty of patents that cover a machine that does such and such, where the machine is just a standard computer and the such and such is just a particular technique (say like using a B-tree to hold the active processes you need to schedule).
Regardless of whether they will actually be upheld the point is that people think/fear they MIGHT be upheld. After all how did MS convince Novell and others to sign these deals if it wasn't fear of IP lawsuit against them or their customers? In fact their are plenty of software type patents that have been upheld by the appeals courts, say the RIM or vonage lawsuits.
Now suppose the FSF put in some effort and money in making sure it held a bunch of patents on operating systems, network protocols etc.. etc.. Obviously they shouldn't go out suing people with them but their very presence would be enough of a threat to MS and other big companies that they could demand MS agree not to sue free software users in return for a similar agreement from the MS about windwos.
I don't think we can fault Gates from using the current patent rules as best he can to create a profit from microsoft. After all microsoft is going to have to pay the toll to patent trolls like Eolas whether or not they use their own patents as weapons. If they refuse to use patent law as an offensive weapon it just means they are at a relative competitive disadvantage to their competitors who do.
I mean I sure as hell don't think their ought to be a tax break for owning a home but you can sure as hell bet that I'm going to take that deduction so long as it's the law and I expect others to behave the same way. Campaigning to make the rules of the game more fair is one thing, but refusing to use the rules as they are just delays reform (hides problem) and puts you at an unfair disadvantage to all of those using the current rules.
Since Bill Gates seems to still be pushing for patent reform I'm not sure what their is to fault him on about this. Sure we might resent him because we want to win and he is using a stupid rule to get ahead but he is doing nothing immoral. In fact his fiduciary duty to MS shareholders means it might very well be immoral not to use patents against his competitors.
Admittedly if Gates started using MS patents to go directly after free software itself (getting injunctions on linux distribution) that starts to get a bit more grey. However, so long as he is just going after distributors and making them sign cross-licensing agreements it's just part of the corporate game. After all the primary thing that MS gets out of the Novell deal is assurance from novell not to sue for patent infringements, i.e., a defense against the assertion of patents by free software vendors.
As a strategy matter I think the open source movement's failure to accumulate a large centralized patent warchest is hurting us. If the GNU/FSF people actively accumulated a centralized patent warchest I suspect we could have made a deal with MS not to sue for patent infringement. We need to lobby for changes to the patent laws but until then we, just like MS, need to play using the current rules.
Doesn't matter who I am so long as I'm right. Go ask some constitutional scholars, I bet you they will have grave doubts about the constitutionality. Had this article been a constitutional analysis that would have been one thing but it's more of a policy document than an analysis of the first ammendment. Sure if the loss of obscurity is as problematic as they seem to think it is then maybe SCOTUS will overrule it's 1st ammendment jurisprudence but right now I think any such attempt would be struck down.
The basic issue is that the exceptions to first amendment protection revolve around either a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' or the right to publicity, i.e., not to have your picture show up on a best buy ad. It's legally quite clear that if I take a photo of my friend on the street I can post that picture to my blog EVEN IF other people show up in the background or whatever. In fact there are actual judicial opinions holding that the 1st amendment protects photographs or total strangers taken on the street even if you choose to show them in a gallery.
Thus in order to hold that this scheme is constitutional without running afoul of prior rulings (admittedly the one I linked to is only precedential in NY) you would have to hold that saying, "ohh hey that person in your photo is so and so" is not speech protected by the first ammendment and that just isn't credible.
Ok to be more clear I think the same *legal* arguments apply to people who want to unmask anonymous bloggers. Indeed if you ferret out who an anonymous blogger is through legal means you should be free to post their identity online, even in a centralized DB if you wish.
My point was that the COSTS and BENEFITS for purposeful anonymous speech are totally different than the costs and benefits for public but obscure speech. That is I think their are important public goods (bloggers in repressive regimes, anonymous corporate or governmental bloggers etc..) that come from allowing purposeful anonymous speech. But these benefits occur by allowing people to choose to speak anonymously. What doesn't make sense and isn't a good idea is to legally enforce obscurity, i.e., public speech or actions that somehow other people aren't supposed to repeat.
I mean I support a right to privacy in private. People should be barred from sneaking cameras into your private residence or photographing you in the shower. Similarly it should be illegal for a company to advertise something as an anonymous blogging/email service and not keep your name anonymous (within the limits of the law). It just shouldn't be illegal to convey or index information that people had no expectation of privacy for in the first place just because it is now easier for their coworkers to hear from the random people on the street that saw them do it.
The article seems to posit a false dichotomy between increased rates of cancer and deformity and a flourishing animal population. The usual mutation rate for most animals is pretty damn small. You could probably increase it 100 fold if not more and still maintain a large population of healthy breeding animals. Since animals, like humans, are naturally programed to prefer to breed with healthy members of their species there is no reason to think that the harmful mutations would 'take over' and cause the local animals to die out. Also just because more animals die of cancer doesn't mean they don't live long enough to successfully breed.
I mean it should be a lot like inbreeding. Sure inbreeding increases the number of seriously fucked up members of the population significantly so you wouldn't want to do it with humans but it can also be used to help establish certain useful traits fairly quickly. The animals living in the Chernobyl area might have more deformed babies, and no doubt if they had to fairly compete with non-irradiated members of their kind they would be at a disadvantage, but the long term effect might just be to increase the rate at which they evolve.
Of course you can't really decide this with a thought experiment but it is annoying that the article suggests increased deformity and cancer rates in individual animals is incompatible with overall health of the species/group.
Not only is this suggestion a really bad idea it seems pretty obviously unconstitutional. Rather than giving any serious consideration to the question of whether likenesses of ourselves taken in public deserve protection the paper reads more like something a student would write trying to create an impressive paper. After all everyone realizes that our loss of privacy is a bad thing so lets propose changing the law to fix it, right?
Sure, our loss of anonymity can have some harmful consequences as the anecdotes in the paper illustrate but this doesn't mean they can't convey important information. I mean on first glance the story about the republican congressman whose daughter was seen kissing another girl on facebook might appear to illustrate a harm of our loss of privacy, and it certainly was a harm to the congressmen, but I would argue it was actually a benefit to society. If that congressman didn't get elected because people found out what he was really like (more tolerant than they suspected) then it was a win for the country.
Ultimately all this technology does is let us effectively say who did what when. Surely it wouldn't be right or constitutional to ban the news media from telling us about the picture of the congressman's daughter. Nor is it acceptable to outlaw any particular act of saying who is in what picture, that is quite squarely inside the domain of free speech. Yet if free speech protects my right to tag each individual photo then it would be a very troubling precedent to set to say it doesn't protect my right to organize those tags in an accessible way. I mean just think of the problems you would get into just trying to catalog the CSPAN archive to indicate which congressmen were doing what when.
More generally while the short term effect of a loss of anonymity in public might be immediate harms in the long term we will eventually discover that everyone does stupid shit and crosses sexual and religious lines. Hopefully the ultimate effect of this loss of anonymity will be to eliminate the double standard which allows everyone to say swears, have naughty/kinky sex, and make blasphemous/non-PC remarks but gives any public official caught doing it hell.
Of course it is scary to lose a protection that has kept us safe for so long but the truth of the matter is that anonymity in public is eroding no matter what we do about it. We can either choose to embrace the good consequences along with the bad by allowing search engines and tagging sites that set up a level playing field for everyone or we can choose a system where those with enough money and lawyers get to keep their anonymity while the rest of society does not. However, that's the worst of all options because it isn't really the loss of anonymity that's harmful but the unequal loss of anonymity. If someone at your office finds pictures of just you getting drunk and doing stupid thats awful, if they can find pictures of a large fraction of the employees it's just amusing.
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Note: purposeful anonymous commentary, e.g., anonymous blogs, are a totally different subject and should be preserved.
People create pirate copies and run the (fairly organized) distribution networks just because they can and for the social recognition in the pirate community.
Other people download them because they want to watch the movies.
I couldn't agree more. This is exactly why I use wikipedia. Usually for any topic that *could* be explained in laymans terms there are several such explanations floating around the web. However, only wikipedia only lets me look up the real shit.
Maybe this is a justification for better non-technical summaries but that's about it.
First of all the probability that these rockets hit a habitable planet rather than a star or jupiter like object is going to be extremely low no matter what the article claims. The vast maority of bodies in the universe are not habitable and when you add this to the fact that the really heavy (hence gravitationally powerful) ones aren't habitable the odds become really low. Add in the requirement that the planet not only be habitable but actually habitable by earth bugs and that they land safely after a long radiation filled interstellar journey and it starts to get really unlikely.
But even if this is the case what's the big deal. The big reason we want to prevent contamination of mars and similar bodies is for our scientific interest (don't mess up our later experiments). If these organisms colonize some distant planet why is this a bad thing? Now some planet that didn't have any life at all now does. Maybe in a billion years it will evolve spaceships and explore the universe (hell maybe that's how we happened:-) ).
Either life is common in the universe in which case we just foster a little bit of microbacterial competition (our diseases aren't going to infect complex multicellular aliens) or life is uncommon and we seed a planet with life that might not have otherwise had it. Either way whats the problem?
The GPL exists mainly to make sure that people who benefit from open source code can't then own their changes and deny others the benefits. If there was no copyright then there would be no legal way they could keep others from using their improvements (sure they could try to obfuscate them but the binary copy itself would be free so they would gain little from doing this)
Actually they are still implementing much of Carly's plan. A lot of observers think she just wasn't given enough time for her changes to show progress.
Well, I highly doubt that AMD's integrated memory controller's ability to hide the latency can scale any faster than Intel's cache tech. After all they basically control latency in the same manner, smartly guessing what memory the chip is going to need and making sure they keep the cache filled with that data. Of course the on board memory controller means that the latency starts at a lower place in the first place. Though it could be that the extra latency of going across the northbridge gets worse as clock speeds increase but I kinda expect it will remain proportional to bus speed.
The real issue in the next generation is simply the raw bandwidth. If AMD keeps moving in the direction it has it's next systems will be NUMA architectures like the Quad FX. This means that each chip (maybe next gen it will be core) has a constant memory bandwidth while Intel has to divide one FSB by the total number of chips in the system. Also AMD no doubt will have copied some of Intel's smart cache techniques.
Still if Intel can just keep parity (and they have the advantage of just now moving to 45nm) for another year or so (and not fuck up CSI again) that's pretty much good enough. At that point Intel no loner suffers a fundamental architectural deficit compared to AMD and their superior process technology gives them a serious advantage.
The three two questions are these:
1) How much market share can AMD gain capitalizing on Intel's memory starvation in the next year or two? Mostly this is going to depend on how well AMD can copy Intel's fancy cache and memory conflict checking hardware. If they can do a fair job of this then their underlying architectural advantages should let them overcome Intel's process advantages and make a fair bit of headway.
Unfortunately for AMD they could end up not being able to take full advantage of their superior (large scale) architecture if OS vendors don't provide better NUMA support. Eventually this is the way both AMD and Intel are going but better support now would be a huge boon for AMD.
2) Can AMD pull another rabbit out of it's hat that will give it a fundamental *architectural* advantage before Intel comes out with an acceptable version of CSI? Simply upping the GHz on HyperTransport isn't enough. AMD and Intel face the same fundamental obstacles to making high speed serial links and this area just isn't complex enough to let them totally out do Intel on transport speed. This is what AMD needs to overcome their process disadvantages and remain a serious contender for the performance and performance/watt crown (unless Intel just gives up the former to pursue the later). Given AMD's history they very well might pull this off but it's going to be tough.
Of course there is always the chance of a total shakeup in this industry if either Intel or IBM manages to patent some amazing process trick that isn't easily copied.
Well, as much as I think Intel usually gets a bad rap on slashdot and similar places, in fairness I out to point out that this is really easy to do when you have the performance crown. Taking out ads bragging about their superior performance would mostly just give people a reason to doubt intel (if they are taking out ads does it mean it's in doubt?) while AMD had better take out these ads as at the moment no one else is going to do it for them.
If the situation ever reverses and AMD's strategy to keep up sales while on the losing end works don't be surprised for Intel to do exactly the same thing.
First of all you can't put two dies on the same cpu, or at least it would be a horribly bad idea. You can put 2 cpu's on a die. Now I thought AMD already did this but they could just package several chips together and I'm feeling too lazy to look it up.
Anyway, yes for Intel chips they must communicate over the FSB. However, as I've recently been finding out they don't do that much communicating. For instance most cache state info is generated just by listening on the FSB. Though sometimes one CPU needs to invalidate a read.
However, not having an FSB AMD's chips don't have a set total system bandwidth they 'use up.' Each chip has it's own memory controller and HT lanes. Perhaps putting the chips in the same package will allow AMD to speed up hypertransport or indirect memory lookup but since AMD doesn't use just an FSB it seems they actually have less to gain than intel by putting many cpus on one chip.
Actually if Intel is running on 10 year old chip design technology (I presume this is primarily a remark about the FSB) then this suggests they have the potential to *radically* increase performance over AMD. If Intel's process advantages and chip design teams can actually gain a performance advantage while using 10 year old technology they can sit back and pick the low hanging fruit (changing to modern methods) and gain huge performance boosts while AMD has to do truly innovative things to gain any performance increases.
Frankly this sounds more like fanboi talk than a serious analysis. If your goal is to diss Intel and give AMD props then saying they are using 10 year old technology makes sense. If you are actually trying to argue that AMD's future is much brighter than Intel's it's totally non-sensical. If Intel can gain huge performance benefits just copying stuff AMD is doing now while AMD has to make huge advances just to stay competitive I know who I would put my money on.
Rather they made the reasonable ruling that if someone does something illegal from your IP then the police still have probable cause to get a warrant. Hell, they probably didn't even go that far since as long as the police acted in good faith the warrant would be valid and the police likely didn't even know he had an open WAP at that point.
Calling this proof the open WAP defense doesn't work is the dumbest thing I ever heard. It's like claiming the defense, "I didn't do it my identical twin brother did it" won't work because the police will serve search warrants on both of you.
The police just need to have good reason to believe there will be evidence relevant to the investigation at that location. Given there is a high probability the person owning the account was using it this is a perfectly justified search.
So how is it that releasing exploits or flaws immediately after patch Tuesday is supposed to maximize user's exposure to the bugs? One of the reasons MS has patch Tuesdays (apart from making like easier for IT guys) is because they need to do QA testing and otherwise take time to validate the patch before they can release it. If the exploit was released the day or even three days before patch Tuesday then it still wouldn't be possible for MS to patch it that month.
In fact releasing the exploits on patch Tuesday may minimize the amount of time users are exposed. Presumably the programmers working on creating the patches work on the same monthly cycle and right after patch Tuesday they likely pick and start work on a new set of bugs. Thus by releasing the flaw information right on patch Tuesday one makes sure it doesn't have to take two cycles for the software to get patched.
Of course this whole analysis changes if you think MS has already been informed of the problem and already generated patch code to fix it but just not bothered to ship it yet. Perhaps this is the case but either way something seems fishy about this reasoning.
So even after Taking calculus and philosophy courses for many years now I'm still appalled at how many people who teach put form over substance. I mean it's hard enough to get students to really learn or do anything but blindly follow algorithmic directions without making it worse. Now you are going to give them the message that 'No, that's not the right way to learn about something.' I mean what better way could you find to grind home the message that learning isn't important; only following the arbitrary rules is important.
Jesus Christ if this was April fools I would be sure this was a joke. I mean is wikipedia totally 100% accurate, of course not. Is it more accurate than asking your teacher? Probably. Both having been a student for some time and now having TAed I'm fully prepared to say that teachers are totally human and even the best of them get confused about things, misremember or otherwise give the wrong answer from time to time. Does it follow that we should ban teachers as well?
Obviously not because teachers, despite being poor authoritative references, are quite useful to help students learn. The same goes with wikipedia. The situations are no different. You would take off points for a student who quoted the teacher in his term paper and you can do the same with wikipedia.
I used to believe all that stuff about people resenting wikipedia because it undermined the traditional authorities was total BS. After incidents like this I find myself questioning that conclusion. Of course most likely this is motivated by the uncomfortably of teachers with this new technology and new ways of doing things but still it's totally amazing.
As already pointed out we should expect a decline in mac sales as people await the release of leopard.
Also remember that XP numbers are actually going to be inflated by anyone using parallels on a Mac (they are XP users but Mac users as well).
My experience as a student as well as having Taed philosophy and currently Taking math gives me a fair bit of insight into this problem. Here are some points that I think the article doesn't address properly.
1) Cheating is a problem for every sort of assignment be it in class or out of class. If you want to look at how difficult it is to stop cheating look at the art form it has been turned into in some countries. In class assessments are far from a cure to the cheating issue. In fact exactly because in class assessments only allow the students limited resources they are more vulnerable to cheating. If the students aren't allowed to look up a formula or refer back to the text then comparatively small effort (hidden notes, SMS messages) can give a fairly large bonus.
2) It is far from clear that technology has shifted power towards the cheater and away from the professor/TAs in terms of cheating on term papers. For as long as we have had formal schooling one could always pay someone else to write your term paper and back when the only way to catch a cheater was to manually compare two documents it was almost impossible to prove someone was cheating unless someone was stupid enough to turn in the same paper (or sections thereof) to the same professor.
TAs and professors usually have a good intuition about who seemed to magically learn to write better on this paper or otherwise turns in a suspicious paper and now we can catch a fair number of them just by googling sentences from the paper. The hard part isn't guessing who is cheating but gathering enough evidence to punish/deter them from doing it. I actually think the internet has shifted the balance away from the cheater as you can no longer count on trying to turn in the same term paper that people at other colleges/classes have turned in as it might be on the internet now.
3) In class assessment on it's own is a remarkably poor way to both teach and assesses student knowledge/ability. In fact if I could do away with in class assesment in mathematics I would. This form of assesment encourages useless memorization of formula at the expense of understanding. In the real world you can always use references/resources and you will naturally start to remember those things you look up repeatedly so concerns over speed are usually unfounded. On the other hand it is very common to have problems that require a great deal of thought and the unfamiliar application of known principles which are almost impossible to test on in class assessments (if it is easy enough to not be mostly about getting lucky it isn't hard enough). I majored in mathematics at caltech and the honor system let us have entirely take home exams and homework and I feel the ability to work at hard problems over long periods of time was extremely useful in learning.
The problem is just as bad in philosophy (and likely other humanities). Instead of testing the student's creativity and ability to come up with innovative new ideas in class exams tend to favor memorization of who said what when and shallow analysis of the material. While the ability to engage in dialogue about the subject during class is an important part of philosophy so too is coming up with and developing interesting ideas and arguments and that simply can't be tested in class.
Worse some students don't do very well under the time pressure of an exam. In class assessments tend to depend highly on test taking strategy while longer term assignments better mirror what students will encounter in the real world. In short in class assesment doesn't cut it.
4) Clamping down on cheating is often counterproductive. It may be counterintuitive but people are much less likely to cheat and subvert the rules if you demonstrate that you trust and expect them to follow the rules. This is why the honor system worked at caltech (combined with student body makeup). When you show someone you trust them they feel bad about betraying that trust. On the other hand the more you show them that you expect them to cheat by invasively
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I mean this as a comment on the legal standard not just the good consequences of such a ruling. It's pretty clear that most people really do have an expectation of privacy in email they send from home (work is another matter). An average person would be both shocked and horrified to learn that someone else was reading their email and would feel it was an invasion of their privacy. Most certainly the average person does not have the same attitude toward email stored on their ISP's servers as they do to other buisness records, e.g., the time of their purchase of a magazine at the store.
I don't necessarily agree with software patents but they are not what is wrong with the US patent system. The problem with the US patent system is that it grants obvious patents.
Why does cell phone use and drunk driving generate such massive disapproval? I don't doubt that they make us worse drivers but so do a lot of things. I'm sure that breaking up with your girlfriend in the car increases your chance of an accident 400%. I bet you which radio shows you listen to have an effect on how likely you are to get in an accident. What's next laws about which radio shows you can listen too?
If the idea was that some activities are just too dangerous to do on the road then arresting EVERYONE for having cell phones isn't the answer. Some people are better drivers than others. Instead only people with no accidents on their record or something would be allowed to talk on the cell phone.
What really gauls me about the whole business is the arbitrary moral approbation involved. Driving drunk is really really bad yet driving while sleepy is just minor misbehavior even though being tipsy and sleepy can be just as dangerous on the road.
Whatever the law needs to practically say we should have no more approbation for the really good driver who gets in his car while a little tipsy than the horribly bad driver who chooses to drive his car (rather than take the train) totally sober. Both are putting other people at the same risk (by assumption) so why is one a worse person than the other?
I just want a coherent criteria that tells me why some sorts of increased driving risk are such a big deal while not others.
Just because it requires courage to oppose the current consensus doesn't mean you are right. It takes courage to believe in young earth creationism as well. Courage without reason or justification is not a virtue.
As I expected I was disgusted by the implicit suggestion in this article that laymen should be in the business of evaluating the convincingness of scientific arguments they won't even bother to read. Ultimately if you have the evidence it shouldn't matter if the whole world is against you. Truth isn't determined by a vote. However, on the flip side, unless you decide to actually put in the time to look at and understand the evidence your opinion about the matter means squat. If you haven't even read a smattering of the journal articles on climate change it's pretty damn ridiculous to think you know better than the experts how good the arguments are.
However, I was surprised to find that there was definitely a kernel of truth in what President Klaus was saying. Not about a threat to liberty or the reality of climate change but the unfortunate confusion of value judgements and political views with scientific judgements. Certainly scientists have just as much (if not more) right to have political views and make policy recommendations as the next guy but they have a responsibility to distinguish these from their scientific findings. The fact that the world is warming from human causes is a scientific fact. The idea that we need to burn less fossil fuels, conserve energy, and behave more environmentally responsibly are value judgements.
I was nearly a scientist myself (I'm a mathematician) so I wasn't as worried that the value judgements and biases that I object to in many environmentalists were polluting the results. Also I could penetrate the technical talk well enough to tell that the studies weren't being horrible misrepresented. However, the average person can't tell this or distinguish between what the science proved and the calls from climate scientists for certain policy objectives.
As a practical matter it may be in the interests of scientists to avoid the appearance of the conflict of interest by publicly affiliating themselves with any particular policy solutions or advocacy group. The same way we require certain government employees (election monitors) to avoid overtly affiliating themselves with political parties it might actually help the trustworthiness of the scientific community if there was a clear delineation between public and private roles.
All this bitching about google's harm to privacy is really ridiculous.
For starters it is just a mistake to say that google is causing a loss of privacy. Privacy is what you lose when someone peers in your window while your having sex. You haven't lost any privacy, merely obscurity, if someone takes your picture while you are having sex in the public park. Google tells you upfront what information it's collecting and what it's doing with it so you can hardly claim you thought it was totally private and heck it even lets you control alot of the info they have (delete things from search history). Moreover, it isn't like google is somehow invasively tracking information that other companies don't capture, you are just worried they will keep it longer.
Moreover, the real harm would be if people weren't aware that their activities and clickstreams online were probably being monitored. Either you have to admit that google poses no particular privacy risk or you think that without google people would feel that their online activities were anonymous and not being tracked, the net result of which being that people wouldn't even realize that if they wanted to keep their activities a total secret they better use something like Tor.
Well that all depends what you mean by software patents. There are plenty of patents that cover a machine that does such and such, where the machine is just a standard computer and the such and such is just a particular technique (say like using a B-tree to hold the active processes you need to schedule).
Regardless of whether they will actually be upheld the point is that people think/fear they MIGHT be upheld. After all how did MS convince Novell and others to sign these deals if it wasn't fear of IP lawsuit against them or their customers? In fact their are plenty of software type patents that have been upheld by the appeals courts, say the RIM or vonage lawsuits.
Now suppose the FSF put in some effort and money in making sure it held a bunch of patents on operating systems, network protocols etc.. etc.. Obviously they shouldn't go out suing people with them but their very presence would be enough of a threat to MS and other big companies that they could demand MS agree not to sue free software users in return for a similar agreement from the MS about windwos.
I don't think we can fault Gates from using the current patent rules as best he can to create a profit from microsoft. After all microsoft is going to have to pay the toll to patent trolls like Eolas whether or not they use their own patents as weapons. If they refuse to use patent law as an offensive weapon it just means they are at a relative competitive disadvantage to their competitors who do.
I mean I sure as hell don't think their ought to be a tax break for owning a home but you can sure as hell bet that I'm going to take that deduction so long as it's the law and I expect others to behave the same way. Campaigning to make the rules of the game more fair is one thing, but refusing to use the rules as they are just delays reform (hides problem) and puts you at an unfair disadvantage to all of those using the current rules.
Since Bill Gates seems to still be pushing for patent reform I'm not sure what their is to fault him on about this. Sure we might resent him because we want to win and he is using a stupid rule to get ahead but he is doing nothing immoral. In fact his fiduciary duty to MS shareholders means it might very well be immoral not to use patents against his competitors.
Admittedly if Gates started using MS patents to go directly after free software itself (getting injunctions on linux distribution) that starts to get a bit more grey. However, so long as he is just going after distributors and making them sign cross-licensing agreements it's just part of the corporate game. After all the primary thing that MS gets out of the Novell deal is assurance from novell not to sue for patent infringements, i.e., a defense against the assertion of patents by free software vendors.
As a strategy matter I think the open source movement's failure to accumulate a large centralized patent warchest is hurting us. If the GNU/FSF people actively accumulated a centralized patent warchest I suspect we could have made a deal with MS not to sue for patent infringement. We need to lobby for changes to the patent laws but until then we, just like MS, need to play using the current rules.
Doesn't matter who I am so long as I'm right. Go ask some constitutional scholars, I bet you they will have grave doubts about the constitutionality. Had this article been a constitutional analysis that would have been one thing but it's more of a policy document than an analysis of the first ammendment. Sure if the loss of obscurity is as problematic as they seem to think it is then maybe SCOTUS will overrule it's 1st ammendment jurisprudence but right now I think any such attempt would be struck down.
The basic issue is that the exceptions to first amendment protection revolve around either a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' or the right to publicity, i.e., not to have your picture show up on a best buy ad. It's legally quite clear that if I take a photo of my friend on the street I can post that picture to my blog EVEN IF other people show up in the background or whatever. In fact there are actual judicial opinions holding that the 1st amendment protects photographs or total strangers taken on the street even if you choose to show them in a gallery.
Thus in order to hold that this scheme is constitutional without running afoul of prior rulings (admittedly the one I linked to is only precedential in NY) you would have to hold that saying, "ohh hey that person in your photo is so and so" is not speech protected by the first ammendment and that just isn't credible.
Ok to be more clear I think the same *legal* arguments apply to people who want to unmask anonymous bloggers. Indeed if you ferret out who an anonymous blogger is through legal means you should be free to post their identity online, even in a centralized DB if you wish.
My point was that the COSTS and BENEFITS for purposeful anonymous speech are totally different than the costs and benefits for public but obscure speech. That is I think their are important public goods (bloggers in repressive regimes, anonymous corporate or governmental bloggers etc..) that come from allowing purposeful anonymous speech. But these benefits occur by allowing people to choose to speak anonymously. What doesn't make sense and isn't a good idea is to legally enforce obscurity, i.e., public speech or actions that somehow other people aren't supposed to repeat.
I mean I support a right to privacy in private. People should be barred from sneaking cameras into your private residence or photographing you in the shower. Similarly it should be illegal for a company to advertise something as an anonymous blogging/email service and not keep your name anonymous (within the limits of the law). It just shouldn't be illegal to convey or index information that people had no expectation of privacy for in the first place just because it is now easier for their coworkers to hear from the random people on the street that saw them do it.
The article seems to posit a false dichotomy between increased rates of cancer and deformity and a flourishing animal population. The usual mutation rate for most animals is pretty damn small. You could probably increase it 100 fold if not more and still maintain a large population of healthy breeding animals. Since animals, like humans, are naturally programed to prefer to breed with healthy members of their species there is no reason to think that the harmful mutations would 'take over' and cause the local animals to die out. Also just because more animals die of cancer doesn't mean they don't live long enough to successfully breed.
I mean it should be a lot like inbreeding. Sure inbreeding increases the number of seriously fucked up members of the population significantly so you wouldn't want to do it with humans but it can also be used to help establish certain useful traits fairly quickly. The animals living in the Chernobyl area might have more deformed babies, and no doubt if they had to fairly compete with non-irradiated members of their kind they would be at a disadvantage, but the long term effect might just be to increase the rate at which they evolve.
Of course you can't really decide this with a thought experiment but it is annoying that the article suggests increased deformity and cancer rates in individual animals is incompatible with overall health of the species/group.
Not only is this suggestion a really bad idea it seems pretty obviously unconstitutional. Rather than giving any serious consideration to the question of whether likenesses of ourselves taken in public deserve protection the paper reads more like something a student would write trying to create an impressive paper. After all everyone realizes that our loss of privacy is a bad thing so lets propose changing the law to fix it, right?
Sure, our loss of anonymity can have some harmful consequences as the anecdotes in the paper illustrate but this doesn't mean they can't convey important information. I mean on first glance the story about the republican congressman whose daughter was seen kissing another girl on facebook might appear to illustrate a harm of our loss of privacy, and it certainly was a harm to the congressmen, but I would argue it was actually a benefit to society. If that congressman didn't get elected because people found out what he was really like (more tolerant than they suspected) then it was a win for the country.
Ultimately all this technology does is let us effectively say who did what when. Surely it wouldn't be right or constitutional to ban the news media from telling us about the picture of the congressman's daughter. Nor is it acceptable to outlaw any particular act of saying who is in what picture, that is quite squarely inside the domain of free speech. Yet if free speech protects my right to tag each individual photo then it would be a very troubling precedent to set to say it doesn't protect my right to organize those tags in an accessible way. I mean just think of the problems you would get into just trying to catalog the CSPAN archive to indicate which congressmen were doing what when.
More generally while the short term effect of a loss of anonymity in public might be immediate harms in the long term we will eventually discover that everyone does stupid shit and crosses sexual and religious lines. Hopefully the ultimate effect of this loss of anonymity will be to eliminate the double standard which allows everyone to say swears, have naughty/kinky sex, and make blasphemous/non-PC remarks but gives any public official caught doing it hell.
Of course it is scary to lose a protection that has kept us safe for so long but the truth of the matter is that anonymity in public is eroding no matter what we do about it. We can either choose to embrace the good consequences along with the bad by allowing search engines and tagging sites that set up a level playing field for everyone or we can choose a system where those with enough money and lawyers get to keep their anonymity while the rest of society does not. However, that's the worst of all options because it isn't really the loss of anonymity that's harmful but the unequal loss of anonymity. If someone at your office finds pictures of just you getting drunk and doing stupid thats awful, if they can find pictures of a large fraction of the employees it's just amusing.
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Note: purposeful anonymous commentary, e.g., anonymous blogs, are a totally different subject and should be preserved.
People create pirate copies and run the (fairly organized) distribution networks just because they can and for the social recognition in the pirate community.
Other people download them because they want to watch the movies.
I couldn't agree more. This is exactly why I use wikipedia. Usually for any topic that *could* be explained in laymans terms there are several such explanations floating around the web. However, only wikipedia only lets me look up the real shit.
Maybe this is a justification for better non-technical summaries but that's about it.
First of all the probability that these rockets hit a habitable planet rather than a star or jupiter like object is going to be extremely low no matter what the article claims. The vast maority of bodies in the universe are not habitable and when you add this to the fact that the really heavy (hence gravitationally powerful) ones aren't habitable the odds become really low. Add in the requirement that the planet not only be habitable but actually habitable by earth bugs and that they land safely after a long radiation filled interstellar journey and it starts to get really unlikely.
:-) ).
But even if this is the case what's the big deal. The big reason we want to prevent contamination of mars and similar bodies is for our scientific interest (don't mess up our later experiments). If these organisms colonize some distant planet why is this a bad thing? Now some planet that didn't have any life at all now does. Maybe in a billion years it will evolve spaceships and explore the universe (hell maybe that's how we happened
Either life is common in the universe in which case we just foster a little bit of microbacterial competition (our diseases aren't going to infect complex multicellular aliens) or life is uncommon and we seed a planet with life that might not have otherwise had it. Either way whats the problem?
The GPL exists mainly to make sure that people who benefit from open source code can't then own their changes and deny others the benefits. If there was no copyright then there would be no legal way they could keep others from using their improvements (sure they could try to obfuscate them but the binary copy itself would be free so they would gain little from doing this)
Actually they are still implementing much of Carly's plan. A lot of observers think she just wasn't given enough time for her changes to show progress.
Well, I highly doubt that AMD's integrated memory controller's ability to hide the latency can scale any faster than Intel's cache tech. After all they basically control latency in the same manner, smartly guessing what memory the chip is going to need and making sure they keep the cache filled with that data. Of course the on board memory controller means that the latency starts at a lower place in the first place. Though it could be that the extra latency of going across the northbridge gets worse as clock speeds increase but I kinda expect it will remain proportional to bus speed.
The real issue in the next generation is simply the raw bandwidth. If AMD keeps moving in the direction it has it's next systems will be NUMA architectures like the Quad FX. This means that each chip (maybe next gen it will be core) has a constant memory bandwidth while Intel has to divide one FSB by the total number of chips in the system. Also AMD no doubt will have copied some of Intel's smart cache techniques.
Still if Intel can just keep parity (and they have the advantage of just now moving to 45nm) for another year or so (and not fuck up CSI again) that's pretty much good enough. At that point Intel no loner suffers a fundamental architectural deficit compared to AMD and their superior process technology gives them a serious advantage.
The three two questions are these:
1) How much market share can AMD gain capitalizing on Intel's memory starvation in the next year or two? Mostly this is going to depend on how well AMD can copy Intel's fancy cache and memory conflict checking hardware. If they can do a fair job of this then their underlying architectural advantages should let them overcome Intel's process advantages and make a fair bit of headway.
Unfortunately for AMD they could end up not being able to take full advantage of their superior (large scale) architecture if OS vendors don't provide better NUMA support. Eventually this is the way both AMD and Intel are going but better support now would be a huge boon for AMD.
2) Can AMD pull another rabbit out of it's hat that will give it a fundamental *architectural* advantage before Intel comes out with an acceptable version of CSI? Simply upping the GHz on HyperTransport isn't enough. AMD and Intel face the same fundamental obstacles to making high speed serial links and this area just isn't complex enough to let them totally out do Intel on transport speed. This is what AMD needs to overcome their process disadvantages and remain a serious contender for the performance and performance/watt crown (unless Intel just gives up the former to pursue the later). Given AMD's history they very well might pull this off but it's going to be tough.
Of course there is always the chance of a total shakeup in this industry if either Intel or IBM manages to patent some amazing process trick that isn't easily copied.
Well, as much as I think Intel usually gets a bad rap on slashdot and similar places, in fairness I out to point out that this is really easy to do when you have the performance crown. Taking out ads bragging about their superior performance would mostly just give people a reason to doubt intel (if they are taking out ads does it mean it's in doubt?) while AMD had better take out these ads as at the moment no one else is going to do it for them.
If the situation ever reverses and AMD's strategy to keep up sales while on the losing end works don't be surprised for Intel to do exactly the same thing.
This post is very confused.
First of all you can't put two dies on the same cpu, or at least it would be a horribly bad idea. You can put 2 cpu's on a die. Now I thought AMD already did this but they could just package several chips together and I'm feeling too lazy to look it up.
Anyway, yes for Intel chips they must communicate over the FSB. However, as I've recently been finding out they don't do that much communicating. For instance most cache state info is generated just by listening on the FSB. Though sometimes one CPU needs to invalidate a read.
However, not having an FSB AMD's chips don't have a set total system bandwidth they 'use up.' Each chip has it's own memory controller and HT lanes. Perhaps putting the chips in the same package will allow AMD to speed up hypertransport or indirect memory lookup but since AMD doesn't use just an FSB it seems they actually have less to gain than intel by putting many cpus on one chip.
Actually if Intel is running on 10 year old chip design technology (I presume this is primarily a remark about the FSB) then this suggests they have the potential to *radically* increase performance over AMD. If Intel's process advantages and chip design teams can actually gain a performance advantage while using 10 year old technology they can sit back and pick the low hanging fruit (changing to modern methods) and gain huge performance boosts while AMD has to do truly innovative things to gain any performance increases.
Frankly this sounds more like fanboi talk than a serious analysis. If your goal is to diss Intel and give AMD props then saying they are using 10 year old technology makes sense. If you are actually trying to argue that AMD's future is much brighter than Intel's it's totally non-sensical. If Intel can gain huge performance benefits just copying stuff AMD is doing now while AMD has to make huge advances just to stay competitive I know who I would put my money on.
Rather they made the reasonable ruling that if someone does something illegal from your IP then the police still have probable cause to get a warrant. Hell, they probably didn't even go that far since as long as the police acted in good faith the warrant would be valid and the police likely didn't even know he had an open WAP at that point.
Calling this proof the open WAP defense doesn't work is the dumbest thing I ever heard. It's like claiming the defense, "I didn't do it my identical twin brother did it" won't work because the police will serve search warrants on both of you.
The police just need to have good reason to believe there will be evidence relevant to the investigation at that location. Given there is a high probability the person owning the account was using it this is a perfectly justified search.
So how is it that releasing exploits or flaws immediately after patch Tuesday is supposed to maximize user's exposure to the bugs? One of the reasons MS has patch Tuesdays (apart from making like easier for IT guys) is because they need to do QA testing and otherwise take time to validate the patch before they can release it. If the exploit was released the day or even three days before patch Tuesday then it still wouldn't be possible for MS to patch it that month.
In fact releasing the exploits on patch Tuesday may minimize the amount of time users are exposed. Presumably the programmers working on creating the patches work on the same monthly cycle and right after patch Tuesday they likely pick and start work on a new set of bugs. Thus by releasing the flaw information right on patch Tuesday one makes sure it doesn't have to take two cycles for the software to get patched.
Of course this whole analysis changes if you think MS has already been informed of the problem and already generated patch code to fix it but just not bothered to ship it yet. Perhaps this is the case but either way something seems fishy about this reasoning.
So even after Taking calculus and philosophy courses for many years now I'm still appalled at how many people who teach put form over substance. I mean it's hard enough to get students to really learn or do anything but blindly follow algorithmic directions without making it worse. Now you are going to give them the message that 'No, that's not the right way to learn about something.' I mean what better way could you find to grind home the message that learning isn't important; only following the arbitrary rules is important. Jesus Christ if this was April fools I would be sure this was a joke. I mean is wikipedia totally 100% accurate, of course not. Is it more accurate than asking your teacher? Probably. Both having been a student for some time and now having TAed I'm fully prepared to say that teachers are totally human and even the best of them get confused about things, misremember or otherwise give the wrong answer from time to time. Does it follow that we should ban teachers as well? Obviously not because teachers, despite being poor authoritative references, are quite useful to help students learn. The same goes with wikipedia. The situations are no different. You would take off points for a student who quoted the teacher in his term paper and you can do the same with wikipedia. I used to believe all that stuff about people resenting wikipedia because it undermined the traditional authorities was total BS. After incidents like this I find myself questioning that conclusion. Of course most likely this is motivated by the uncomfortably of teachers with this new technology and new ways of doing things but still it's totally amazing.
As already pointed out we should expect a decline in mac sales as people await the release of leopard. Also remember that XP numbers are actually going to be inflated by anyone using parallels on a Mac (they are XP users but Mac users as well).
My experience as a student as well as having Taed philosophy and currently Taking math gives me a fair bit of insight into this problem. Here are some points that I think the article doesn't address properly. 1) Cheating is a problem for every sort of assignment be it in class or out of class. If you want to look at how difficult it is to stop cheating look at the art form it has been turned into in some countries. In class assessments are far from a cure to the cheating issue. In fact exactly because in class assessments only allow the students limited resources they are more vulnerable to cheating. If the students aren't allowed to look up a formula or refer back to the text then comparatively small effort (hidden notes, SMS messages) can give a fairly large bonus. 2) It is far from clear that technology has shifted power towards the cheater and away from the professor/TAs in terms of cheating on term papers. For as long as we have had formal schooling one could always pay someone else to write your term paper and back when the only way to catch a cheater was to manually compare two documents it was almost impossible to prove someone was cheating unless someone was stupid enough to turn in the same paper (or sections thereof) to the same professor. TAs and professors usually have a good intuition about who seemed to magically learn to write better on this paper or otherwise turns in a suspicious paper and now we can catch a fair number of them just by googling sentences from the paper. The hard part isn't guessing who is cheating but gathering enough evidence to punish/deter them from doing it. I actually think the internet has shifted the balance away from the cheater as you can no longer count on trying to turn in the same term paper that people at other colleges/classes have turned in as it might be on the internet now. 3) In class assessment on it's own is a remarkably poor way to both teach and assesses student knowledge/ability. In fact if I could do away with in class assesment in mathematics I would. This form of assesment encourages useless memorization of formula at the expense of understanding. In the real world you can always use references/resources and you will naturally start to remember those things you look up repeatedly so concerns over speed are usually unfounded. On the other hand it is very common to have problems that require a great deal of thought and the unfamiliar application of known principles which are almost impossible to test on in class assessments (if it is easy enough to not be mostly about getting lucky it isn't hard enough). I majored in mathematics at caltech and the honor system let us have entirely take home exams and homework and I feel the ability to work at hard problems over long periods of time was extremely useful in learning. The problem is just as bad in philosophy (and likely other humanities). Instead of testing the student's creativity and ability to come up with innovative new ideas in class exams tend to favor memorization of who said what when and shallow analysis of the material. While the ability to engage in dialogue about the subject during class is an important part of philosophy so too is coming up with and developing interesting ideas and arguments and that simply can't be tested in class. Worse some students don't do very well under the time pressure of an exam. In class assessments tend to depend highly on test taking strategy while longer term assignments better mirror what students will encounter in the real world. In short in class assesment doesn't cut it. 4) Clamping down on cheating is often counterproductive. It may be counterintuitive but people are much less likely to cheat and subvert the rules if you demonstrate that you trust and expect them to follow the rules. This is why the honor system worked at caltech (combined with student body makeup). When you show someone you trust them they feel bad about betraying that trust. On the other hand the more you show them that you expect them to cheat by invasively