IANAL but from what I recollect this guy is going to have a hard time justifying his demand for the poster's information to a judge.
My understanding is that in order to prevail in a legal action of this kind you must demonstrate that you have a case, e.g., give good reason to believe that the person may have defamed you.
The problem with the quote mentioned in this article is that it's not defamation if it's true. So without knowing who the poster is how do they hope to establish that the poster has been to less clean food-service establishments?
It's probably bogus but I can't even figure out what the theory is on which manufacturers sue unauthorized distributors. I mean my understanding of trademark law is that it's uncontroversial that using a product's name to correctly identify the item you are selling isn't a violation of the trademark. Moreover, merely listing the item name isn't enough to create a copyright violation.
I mean I see how this might work against retail operations or online stores. After all they usually need to put up a description of the product, pictures of the box and other information to make it attractive to the customer. No doubt the allegation is that the text on the box or the blurb describing the item are copyrighted. But how does this reach ebay sellers?
Well, yes in a certain very distorted sense of the word there is more evidence coming out that carrying a cell phone isn't very healthy, I mean as time passes we do see more studies claiming connections between negative health outcomes and cell phone use. However, we also see more studies disputing this link.
Could cell phones be somewhat unhealthy? Sure, but there are some careful studies suggesting the opposite and most importantly any theoretical basis for the supposed effect is at best pretty speculative.
First of all ask yourself if you were a cell phone company would it make sense to go out and suppress the science with some organized cover up? For starters given that lots of smart people who have read the research aren't convinced it's likely that your biases as a cell phone exec would virtually guarantee that you didn't believe the health claims. But in that case you would want to fund the most reputable scientists and perform the most respectable study possible rather than funding less influential rent-a-studies. Even if these execs have been convinced of the link by a unpublished stream of compelling evidence the lawsuit against the tobacco companies should have taught them that you shouldn't cover up the science and risk liability when you can just use advertising to associate your product with healthy living in the mind of the public despite the science.
I mean let's be serious, the idea that the cell phone companies are engaged in some intentional plan to cover up the evidence about cell phone harm just isn't plausible. But while it isn't as sexy we know that publication bias exists and can have a substantial effect. Scientists want to spend their time on papers that will bring recognition, grants and employment not ones that say "we didn't find any statistically significant correlation in the groups we examined." This means we are a lot more likely to hear about data sets showing a link than those that don't. After all 5% of studies should end up with an effect at a 95% significance.
Moreover, it's hugely difficult to run a randomized trial for this kind of claim meaning that any effect could be nothing more than an unrecognized prior cause. People who use cell phones are far more likely to use a wide range of other products and probably correlates with a ton of genetic and socio-economic factors. Even studies linking which ear people used for their phone to later cancer occurrence aren't definitive. It's certainly plausible that our dominant hemisphere is more active/different and thus runs a greater risk of cancer.
The truth is that these sort of weak statistical links between an item an ill health effects are frequently wrong and need to be examined carefully. If, as we see in the cell phone study, not only do the studies go both ways but the more careful positive studies show a weaker effect and we lack any firm theoretical foundation for expecting an effect we should conclude it's probably just an artifact of publication bias or common causation.
Of course given that people are so conviced radiation is evil that they falsely convince themselves it makes them sick I don't expect this kind of reasoned consideration to have much impact on the public at large. However, if you are that afraid of "radiation" you should find another website.
This is a good start. If you want a really fast response see if you can get your hometown radio/TV news to do a segment on businesses scamming/letting down our troops.
I should add to this that I suspect something more is going on otherwise no suit would be being filled. I was just saying that from just the info in the summary it didn't seem like a violation.
Based on the totally inadequate summary it seems like there is no violation, except perhaps the minor one of Diebold not having their own ftp site with the normal GPLed gs code available (which they could fix in an hour).
I mean if Diebold didn't modify gs but merely used it on their machines they are only required to distributed the standard gs code. The mere fact that gs runs on the same machine doesn't make the rest of the diebold code a derived work. It's all about what is a derived work of the gs code.
Seems to me the "commercial trial agreement" constitutes a "settlement free peering agreement." Now IANAL but I suspect that at the very least it would be necessary to prove that Cogent KNEW or should have known that the contractual conditions that would have turned the trial agreement into a longer term proposition did not occur.
In other words it seems to me that Cogent and sprint had a contract that said if X,Y and Z occur then we keep peering for free. Cogent may be disagreeing with sprint over whether X,Y and Z did occur.
This whole "stop child porn" crusade simply makes me sick. Not because I like child porn, I personally find the idea quite unpleasent, but because people who crusade against child porn are putting their own desire to express righteous indignation above the interest of the very kids they claim to be interested in protecting.
For instance it turns out that 99% or so of child molestation is committed by family/friends and trusted community members. When you pass really harsh punishments against child porn/molestation and demand these perverts be alienated rather than phrasing it as treatment parents/relatives become more reluctant to bring their sucpiscions to the authorities. If you think you might be helping nice uncle Joe get over his sickness you are going to be a lot more willing to credit the possibility that something isn't right than if you know that the mere suggestion (even if you are wrong) may keep him from ever holding a decent job again.
It gets even worse. We know that someone with sexual urges towards children is much more likely to act on them if he lacks a social support network, a good job, social respect etc.. Thus by yanking all these things away from people who look at child porn we may be increasing the chances they will actually molest someone.
Moreover, by criminalizing an activity you lower the barrier between that activity and more extreme behavior. For instance criminalizing marijuanna meant that pot smokers ended up coming into contact with harder core drug dealers and criminals who they would have never associated with if the law hadn't created this bridge. So by criminalizing the mere possesion (of course sale or creation) of child porn we may be making it easier for guys to make the transition from just looking to taking action (after all society is telling them what they are already doing is just as bad).
Do I know if any of these effects is significant? No, of course not. But the point is that neither do any of the people who are righteously demanding we enforce these tough laws. The people who really care about the kids are the ones demanding we collect data before we legislate. The ones calling for something to be done in outraged tones are selfishly putting their own emotional needs over the welfare of the children they claim to care about.
Yes, but his basic point is still valid. The DMCA only provides a shield against claims of copyright infringement. This isn't the issue here at all.
Once the justice system recognizes some kind of legal obligation for the ISPs to scan the files passing through their pipes for child porn it is only a matter of time until some mother of an abused child sues the ISP for failing to properly monitor it's customers on the theory this would have prevented the abuse of her child.
Now you might respond that any law placing such a requirement on the ISPs might immunize them against any such lawsuit provided they implemented the required monitoring. Perhaps, but as a practical matter that will bring little comfort to the ISPs.
I mean even if the mother of an abused child doesn't have a legal leg to stand on once the public starts to think of ISPs as being responsible for child-porn monitoring just the bad PR alone from this kind of lawsuit poses a serious threat to the company. Moreover, when talking about child porn and child molestation you can't discount the total irrational fervor that comes over people.
I mean if you were an ISP would you really want to bet that some crusading attorney general wouldn't go over every last nitpicking detail of the monitoring safe harbor in the hope of crucifying the company that (perhaps in the name of protecting privacy) wasn't aggressive enough in their monitoring. And even if some kind of safe harbor works the first time congress and the states would rush to change the law to prevent 'negligent' companies from getting off the hook.
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Don't get me wrong, this isn't a guarantee something like this won't happen. Sure, your local neighborhood ISP might not like the idea but this doesn't mean it's in the interest of AT&T or Verizon to risk being seeing as insufficiently outraged about child porn.
You can be forced to testify to things that indicate you committed a crime, you just can't be made to incriminate yourself.
The difference is subtle but one part of it is that a judge can give you immunity for your testimony, e.g., tell us X and we promise not to use it to prosecute you, and then you can no longer refuse on 5th ammendment grounds since it would no longer incriminate you.
Thus while this is a neat idea it wouldn't work. The prosecution would just offer you immunity for the contents of your passphrase but not the data it unlocks. Well in the US, but in the US you might not have to reveal the passphrase anyway.
The real lesson from all this load time buisness is that our compilers still really really suck. I mean the truth is that when you boot your computer there is only a tiny bit of logic that really needs to go on because only a small amount of stuff changes between any two boots (and less between a boot and a power off).
A truly well desgined system wouldn't care about arbitrary boundaries between this program and that one, it would hunt down optimization opportunities everywhere and automatically reduce boot up to an extremely lean and quick procedure without adopting the harms of merely loading an old image.
I mean to take one example a substantial amount of time during start up is probably spent searching for and then parsing configuration files. So long as their is no cross cutting OS level JIT compiler that can deal with both system IO code and application code there isn't much we can do about this without massive investment of effort. However, in principle there is no reason that the system couldn't simply read the preparsed data from a cache and jump directly to the real substantive logic that needs to be done on boot (checking out network conditions, looking for changed hardware, dealing with changed configs)
First of all don't diss the benefits of pushing problems off to the future.
I mean the only real problem of CO2 is the cost of energy. We want energy and produce CO2 by running an energy positive chemical reaction (burning). If energy were sufficiently cheap we could simply take the CO2 and transform it into some non-greenhouse form of carbon.
Energy gets cheaper over time, the same amount of CO2 will be less of a problem for future generations with their superior technology and better infrastructure. Besides, it was underground to start with so long as it doesn't leak that seems like a fine place to leave it.
Hmm, but while you are at it you will hugely acidify the ocean. The chemicals that react with the CO2 only enter the ocean so fast.
The deep ocean trenches may be deep enough to simply liquefy the CO2 so it simply pools on the bottom. This may be more promising. Still not as good as geological storage, however.
Where do you think it came from? It was buried deep in the earth in the form of fossil fuels.
Carbon sequestration schemes usually involve injecting the C02 back into the same sorts of geological structures where, under substantial pressure, it is rendered back into a liquid and contained by the geological formations.
It may seem counter intuitive but so far studies have shown promising results for long term containment.
Godel's theorem tells us that ANY system that provides what we would intuitively call proofs is going to be either incomplete, inconsistent or too weak too be interesting. Godel's theorem applies just as much to the informal output of human mathematicians as it does to computer verified proofs.
As a working mathematician my goal is always to produce arguments that convey enough information that the reader could turn them into a formal proof with enough time and effort. It would be a huge benefit if we could actually check that we weren't making some dumb mistake when we convince ourselves that we could make the proofs rigorous if we had the time/inclination.
I highly doubt that mechanical theorem proving is at this point yet. However, I've also long been convinced that one big thing holding it back is the lack of a database of proved theorems. Mathematicians have a huge advantage understanding each other because we all have the same theorems in the back of our heads we learned in school. Computers that are trying to fill in the gaps in our proofs need the same database.
Moreover, this sort of database will get more mathematicians interested in working on the project as well.
I am a mathematician and in fact one who works in this area and what you say is pretty much correct.
More accurately what Godel showed is that no system complex enough to include arithmetic with a computable proof predicate is complete.
Let's take this apart and see what it means.
Complex enough to include arithmetic: This means the system is complex enough to express standard questions in number theory e.g., for every even number > 2 there are two primes which sum to it and anything else that we can express by quantification over the relation of equality and the operations +, * and exponentiation. I could trivially make a complete consistent system which didn't allow you to express any interesting questions.
More precisely the system must be sufficiently strong to prove a few basic facts about the integers and not prove false things about the integers.
Computable proof predicate: In standard first order logic this simply reduces to the requirement that the axioms in the system must be in principal enumerable by a computer (which is equivalent to saying that there is a sentence in number theory with only a single existential quantifier that can answer whether something is an axiom or not). Without this restriction I could simply declare my system took as axioms all true arithmetical statements. Obviously though to qualify as the sort of mathematics we can verify and check it better satisfy this.
consistent: The system doesn't prove both a statement and it's negation.
complete: A system is complete if it admits a proof of S or ~S for every statement S in the language of the system. For instance a theory of arithmetic is complete if it proves or disproves every statement built up from basic arithmetic operations (+, *, exponentiation) via logical operations (and, or, not, existential and universal quantification).
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People tend to make this whole thing way harder than it is. Here is a quick paragraph long sketch of Godel's first incompletness theorem.
Suppose there is a predicate P(s,p) which holds whenever p is an integer coding for a proof of the statement coded by the integer s (if you sit down for a few minutes you can figure out how to do the coding). Now suppose that P(s,p) can be expressed by a sentence in number theory involving only an existential quantifier, e.g, P(s,p) Ez(blah holds of s, p) where blah has no quantifiers.
Now it turns out that if you are a bit clever you can show that there is a sentence G so that
G holds iff (Ep)P('~G',p)
Where 'G' denotes the integer that codes for the sentence G. In other words G says "There is a proof that this statement is false".
Now suppose there was a proof of G. In this case it must follow that since the system correctly interprets arithmetic that there really is a proof of the negation of G. Hence both G and ~G have proofs so the system is incomplete. But if there was a proof of ~G then, as the system correctly interprets arithmetic, there is no proof of ~G. This is a contradiction. So neither G or ~G have a proof.
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The only hard part here is showing that G can talk about itself. The formal proof is pretty straightforward if we leave out the details. We define a formula F(n) (where n is a free variable) defined by:
F(n) n codes for a formula S(x) and (Ep)P('~S(n)',p)
Now consider the formula F('F'), i.e. apply F to the integer that codes for F. Expanding out the definition we see that
F('F') (Ep)P('~F('F')',p)
So we get our G simply by setting G = F('F'). To get an understanding about where you might get the idea to define F as this you need to understand that existential statements are really program and that this is really an application of the recursion theorem.
But you might want to consider one of the many licenses that prevent intermediate parties from passing on the source code with all references to your group stripped out.
To elaborate on my prior comment it's not clear to me whether merely using a copy of your code for research purposes without passing it on would be covered as a type of fair use and hence not require accepting the license in the first place.
Your academic papers don't have such a licensce. They are cited because it's considered unethical not to do so. The same would apply to using your source code.
Also, your license can't actually enforce the citation clause. I mean whoever uses the code won't necessarily be the same person who writes the paper. Additionally I have some doubts that the kind of clause you are interested in would be legally enforceable.
Science works because we trust other scientists to cite our work if they use it. If we kept our work secret unless other scientists signed agreements to do so nothing would get done.
No, the law can't and shouldn't have an explicit exception for people like this one. Whether or not someone is "white hat" is too fuzzy and too hard to prove in court to make it part of the law.
This is where prosecutorial discretion is supposed to come into the scene
Now there is a useful and precise notion of physical addiction when we are talking about certain kinds of drugs (e.g. opiates) that produce a definite withdrawal syndrome when their use is stopped. I have some fairly close experience with this and trust me it's nothing like not getting your MMORPG fix. There may even be a broader well defined notion of addiction that applies to drugs without substantial *physical* withdrawal symptoms (amphetamines) but which produce extreme levels of craving when withdrawn and particular psychological withdrawal symptoms when removed.
However, talking about "addiction" to things like computer games or porn and the like is stupid and downright misleading. Can people get overly caught up in these things and damage their lives? Of course but using the term addiction suggests it is a particular syndrom that is in principle distinct from other sorts of activities we find rewarding in a basic neurochemical fashion.
I mean sure people might crave their computer games, engage in them to the determint of their relationships with friends etc.. but the same can be said about spending time with my wife. Before I met her I got along fine on my own, spending time with her takes away time from hanging out with my friends and other life activities (and no doubt for some people who marry poorly this can make their life worse). The difference between an addiction to computer games and an addiction to seeing one's wife or an addiction to eating tasty food is simply a value judgment we make not something intrinsic in the activities themselves.
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Ultimately this whole debate is just about how to name something. If nothing fishy is going on with saying people are "addicted" to computer games then presumably it doesn't matter if you say they are addicted or explain out the way they behave towards their computer games. However, if you just said, "hey some people engage in this harmful pattern of behavior with computer games" everyone would shrug and move on. If substituting a word's supposed definition for it's use eliminates the impact of the claim something fishy is going on.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds too 'good' (i.e. bad) to be true. I suspect it is more along the lines of an urban legend.
Could be opinion but it's unclear. After all relative cleanliness is fairly objective.
I still think the problem is establishing this guy has been to worse places before they know who he is.
IANAL but from what I recollect this guy is going to have a hard time justifying his demand for the poster's information to a judge.
My understanding is that in order to prevail in a legal action of this kind you must demonstrate that you have a case, e.g., give good reason to believe that the person may have defamed you.
The problem with the quote mentioned in this article is that it's not defamation if it's true. So without knowing who the poster is how do they hope to establish that the poster has been to less clean food-service establishments?
It's probably bogus but I can't even figure out what the theory is on which manufacturers sue unauthorized distributors. I mean my understanding of trademark law is that it's uncontroversial that using a product's name to correctly identify the item you are selling isn't a violation of the trademark. Moreover, merely listing the item name isn't enough to create a copyright violation.
I mean I see how this might work against retail operations or online stores. After all they usually need to put up a description of the product, pictures of the box and other information to make it attractive to the customer. No doubt the allegation is that the text on the box or the blurb describing the item are copyrighted. But how does this reach ebay sellers?
Well, yes in a certain very distorted sense of the word there is more evidence coming out that carrying a cell phone isn't very healthy, I mean as time passes we do see more studies claiming connections between negative health outcomes and cell phone use. However, we also see more studies disputing this link.
Could cell phones be somewhat unhealthy? Sure, but there are some careful studies suggesting the opposite and most importantly any theoretical basis for the supposed effect is at best pretty speculative.
First of all ask yourself if you were a cell phone company would it make sense to go out and suppress the science with some organized cover up? For starters given that lots of smart people who have read the research aren't convinced it's likely that your biases as a cell phone exec would virtually guarantee that you didn't believe the health claims. But in that case you would want to fund the most reputable scientists and perform the most respectable study possible rather than funding less influential rent-a-studies. Even if these execs have been convinced of the link by a unpublished stream of compelling evidence the lawsuit against the tobacco companies should have taught them that you shouldn't cover up the science and risk liability when you can just use advertising to associate your product with healthy living in the mind of the public despite the science.
I mean let's be serious, the idea that the cell phone companies are engaged in some intentional plan to cover up the evidence about cell phone harm just isn't plausible. But while it isn't as sexy we know that publication bias exists and can have a substantial effect. Scientists want to spend their time on papers that will bring recognition, grants and employment not ones that say "we didn't find any statistically significant correlation in the groups we examined." This means we are a lot more likely to hear about data sets showing a link than those that don't. After all 5% of studies should end up with an effect at a 95% significance.
Moreover, it's hugely difficult to run a randomized trial for this kind of claim meaning that any effect could be nothing more than an unrecognized prior cause. People who use cell phones are far more likely to use a wide range of other products and probably correlates with a ton of genetic and socio-economic factors. Even studies linking which ear people used for their phone to later cancer occurrence aren't definitive. It's certainly plausible that our dominant hemisphere is more active/different and thus runs a greater risk of cancer.
The truth is that these sort of weak statistical links between an item an ill health effects are frequently wrong and need to be examined carefully. If, as we see in the cell phone study, not only do the studies go both ways but the more careful positive studies show a weaker effect and we lack any firm theoretical foundation for expecting an effect we should conclude it's probably just an artifact of publication bias or common causation.
Of course given that people are so conviced radiation is evil that they falsely convince themselves it makes them sick I don't expect this kind of reasoned consideration to have much impact on the public at large. However, if you are that afraid of "radiation" you should find another website.
This is a good start. If you want a really fast response see if you can get your hometown radio/TV news to do a segment on businesses scamming/letting down our troops.
I should add to this that I suspect something more is going on otherwise no suit would be being filled. I was just saying that from just the info in the summary it didn't seem like a violation.
Based on the totally inadequate summary it seems like there is no violation, except perhaps the minor one of Diebold not having their own ftp site with the normal GPLed gs code available (which they could fix in an hour).
I mean if Diebold didn't modify gs but merely used it on their machines they are only required to distributed the standard gs code. The mere fact that gs runs on the same machine doesn't make the rest of the diebold code a derived work. It's all about what is a derived work of the gs code.
I dunno about you but I kinda like that law making illegal to murder people...those ones about theft are pretty good too.
Ohh yah, pollution laws, worker safety provisions, etc.. etc..
Seems to me the "commercial trial agreement" constitutes a "settlement free peering agreement." Now IANAL but I suspect that at the very least it would be necessary to prove that Cogent KNEW or should have known that the contractual conditions that would have turned the trial agreement into a longer term proposition did not occur.
In other words it seems to me that Cogent and sprint had a contract that said if X,Y and Z occur then we keep peering for free. Cogent may be disagreeing with sprint over whether X,Y and Z did occur.
This whole "stop child porn" crusade simply makes me sick. Not because I like child porn, I personally find the idea quite unpleasent, but because people who crusade against child porn are putting their own desire to express righteous indignation above the interest of the very kids they claim to be interested in protecting.
For instance it turns out that 99% or so of child molestation is committed by family/friends and trusted community members. When you pass really harsh punishments against child porn/molestation and demand these perverts be alienated rather than phrasing it as treatment parents/relatives become more reluctant to bring their sucpiscions to the authorities. If you think you might be helping nice uncle Joe get over his sickness you are going to be a lot more willing to credit the possibility that something isn't right than if you know that the mere suggestion (even if you are wrong) may keep him from ever holding a decent job again.
It gets even worse. We know that someone with sexual urges towards children is much more likely to act on them if he lacks a social support network, a good job, social respect etc.. Thus by yanking all these things away from people who look at child porn we may be increasing the chances they will actually molest someone.
Moreover, by criminalizing an activity you lower the barrier between that activity and more extreme behavior. For instance criminalizing marijuanna meant that pot smokers ended up coming into contact with harder core drug dealers and criminals who they would have never associated with if the law hadn't created this bridge. So by criminalizing the mere possesion (of course sale or creation) of child porn we may be making it easier for guys to make the transition from just looking to taking action (after all society is telling them what they are already doing is just as bad).
Do I know if any of these effects is significant? No, of course not. But the point is that neither do any of the people who are righteously demanding we enforce these tough laws. The people who really care about the kids are the ones demanding we collect data before we legislate. The ones calling for something to be done in outraged tones are selfishly putting their own emotional needs over the welfare of the children they claim to care about.
Yes, but his basic point is still valid. The DMCA only provides a shield against claims of copyright infringement. This isn't the issue here at all.
Once the justice system recognizes some kind of legal obligation for the ISPs to scan the files passing through their pipes for child porn it is only a matter of time until some mother of an abused child sues the ISP for failing to properly monitor it's customers on the theory this would have prevented the abuse of her child.
Now you might respond that any law placing such a requirement on the ISPs might immunize them against any such lawsuit provided they implemented the required monitoring. Perhaps, but as a practical matter that will bring little comfort to the ISPs.
I mean even if the mother of an abused child doesn't have a legal leg to stand on once the public starts to think of ISPs as being responsible for child-porn monitoring just the bad PR alone from this kind of lawsuit poses a serious threat to the company. Moreover, when talking about child porn and child molestation you can't discount the total irrational fervor that comes over people.
I mean if you were an ISP would you really want to bet that some crusading attorney general wouldn't go over every last nitpicking detail of the monitoring safe harbor in the hope of crucifying the company that (perhaps in the name of protecting privacy) wasn't aggressive enough in their monitoring. And even if some kind of safe harbor works the first time congress and the states would rush to change the law to prevent 'negligent' companies from getting off the hook.
------
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a guarantee something like this won't happen. Sure, your local neighborhood ISP might not like the idea but this doesn't mean it's in the interest of AT&T or Verizon to risk being seeing as insufficiently outraged about child porn.
You can be forced to testify to things that indicate you committed a crime, you just can't be made to incriminate yourself.
The difference is subtle but one part of it is that a judge can give you immunity for your testimony, e.g., tell us X and we promise not to use it to prosecute you, and then you can no longer refuse on 5th ammendment grounds since it would no longer incriminate you.
Thus while this is a neat idea it wouldn't work. The prosecution would just offer you immunity for the contents of your passphrase but not the data it unlocks. Well in the US, but in the US you might not have to reveal the passphrase anyway.
The real lesson from all this load time buisness is that our compilers still really really suck. I mean the truth is that when you boot your computer there is only a tiny bit of logic that really needs to go on because only a small amount of stuff changes between any two boots (and less between a boot and a power off).
A truly well desgined system wouldn't care about arbitrary boundaries between this program and that one, it would hunt down optimization opportunities everywhere and automatically reduce boot up to an extremely lean and quick procedure without adopting the harms of merely loading an old image.
I mean to take one example a substantial amount of time during start up is probably spent searching for and then parsing configuration files. So long as their is no cross cutting OS level JIT compiler that can deal with both system IO code and application code there isn't much we can do about this without massive investment of effort. However, in principle there is no reason that the system couldn't simply read the preparsed data from a cache and jump directly to the real substantive logic that needs to be done on boot (checking out network conditions, looking for changed hardware, dealing with changed configs)
No, diffusion is WAY too efficient for this to be a really serious problem.
First of all don't diss the benefits of pushing problems off to the future.
I mean the only real problem of CO2 is the cost of energy. We want energy and produce CO2 by running an energy positive chemical reaction (burning). If energy were sufficiently cheap we could simply take the CO2 and transform it into some non-greenhouse form of carbon.
Energy gets cheaper over time, the same amount of CO2 will be less of a problem for future generations with their superior technology and better infrastructure. Besides, it was underground to start with so long as it doesn't leak that seems like a fine place to leave it.
Hmm, but while you are at it you will hugely acidify the ocean. The chemicals that react with the CO2 only enter the ocean so fast.
The deep ocean trenches may be deep enough to simply liquefy the CO2 so it simply pools on the bottom. This may be more promising. Still not as good as geological storage, however.
Where do you think it came from? It was buried deep in the earth in the form of fossil fuels.
Carbon sequestration schemes usually involve injecting the C02 back into the same sorts of geological structures where, under substantial pressure, it is rendered back into a liquid and contained by the geological formations.
It may seem counter intuitive but so far studies have shown promising results for long term containment.
Godel's theorem tells us that ANY system that provides what we would intuitively call proofs is going to be either incomplete, inconsistent or too weak too be interesting. Godel's theorem applies just as much to the informal output of human mathematicians as it does to computer verified proofs.
As a working mathematician my goal is always to produce arguments that convey enough information that the reader could turn them into a formal proof with enough time and effort. It would be a huge benefit if we could actually check that we weren't making some dumb mistake when we convince ourselves that we could make the proofs rigorous if we had the time/inclination.
I highly doubt that mechanical theorem proving is at this point yet. However, I've also long been convinced that one big thing holding it back is the lack of a database of proved theorems. Mathematicians have a huge advantage understanding each other because we all have the same theorems in the back of our heads we learned in school. Computers that are trying to fill in the gaps in our proofs need the same database.
Moreover, this sort of database will get more mathematicians interested in working on the project as well.
Crap the post pulled out my double headed arrows since it thought they were markup the last two formula should read
and
I am a mathematician and in fact one who works in this area and what you say is pretty much correct.
More accurately what Godel showed is that no system complex enough to include arithmetic with a computable proof predicate is complete.
Let's take this apart and see what it means.
More precisely the system must be sufficiently strong to prove a few basic facts about the integers and not prove false things about the integers.
-------------
People tend to make this whole thing way harder than it is. Here is a quick paragraph long sketch of Godel's first incompletness theorem.
Suppose there is a predicate P(s,p) which holds whenever p is an integer coding for a proof of the statement coded by the integer s (if you sit down for a few minutes you can figure out how to do the coding). Now suppose that P(s,p) can be expressed by a sentence in number theory involving only an existential quantifier, e.g, P(s,p) Ez(blah holds of s, p) where blah has no quantifiers.
Now it turns out that if you are a bit clever you can show that there is a sentence G so that
G holds iff (Ep)P('~G',p)
Where 'G' denotes the integer that codes for the sentence G. In other words G says "There is a proof that this statement is false".
Now suppose there was a proof of G. In this case it must follow that since the system correctly interprets arithmetic that there really is a proof of the negation of G. Hence both G and ~G have proofs so the system is incomplete. But if there was a proof of ~G then, as the system correctly interprets arithmetic, there is no proof of ~G. This is a contradiction. So neither G or ~G have a proof.
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The only hard part here is showing that G can talk about itself. The formal proof is pretty straightforward if we leave out the details. We define a formula F(n) (where n is a free variable) defined by:
Now consider the formula F('F'), i.e. apply F to the integer that codes for F. Expanding out the definition we see that
So we get our G simply by setting G = F('F'). To get an understanding about where you might get the idea to define F as this you need to understand that existential statements are really program and that this is really an application of the recursion theorem.
But you might want to consider one of the many licenses that prevent intermediate parties from passing on the source code with all references to your group stripped out.
To elaborate on my prior comment it's not clear to me whether merely using a copy of your code for research purposes without passing it on would be covered as a type of fair use and hence not require accepting the license in the first place.
Your academic papers don't have such a licensce. They are cited because it's considered unethical not to do so. The same would apply to using your source code.
Also, your license can't actually enforce the citation clause. I mean whoever uses the code won't necessarily be the same person who writes the paper. Additionally I have some doubts that the kind of clause you are interested in would be legally enforceable.
Science works because we trust other scientists to cite our work if they use it. If we kept our work secret unless other scientists signed agreements to do so nothing would get done.
No, the law can't and shouldn't have an explicit exception for people like this one. Whether or not someone is "white hat" is too fuzzy and too hard to prove in court to make it part of the law.
This is where prosecutorial discretion is supposed to come into the scene
Now there is a useful and precise notion of physical addiction when we are talking about certain kinds of drugs (e.g. opiates) that produce a definite withdrawal syndrome when their use is stopped. I have some fairly close experience with this and trust me it's nothing like not getting your MMORPG fix. There may even be a broader well defined notion of addiction that applies to drugs without substantial *physical* withdrawal symptoms (amphetamines) but which produce extreme levels of craving when withdrawn and particular psychological withdrawal symptoms when removed.
However, talking about "addiction" to things like computer games or porn and the like is stupid and downright misleading. Can people get overly caught up in these things and damage their lives? Of course but using the term addiction suggests it is a particular syndrom that is in principle distinct from other sorts of activities we find rewarding in a basic neurochemical fashion.
I mean sure people might crave their computer games, engage in them to the determint of their relationships with friends etc.. but the same can be said about spending time with my wife. Before I met her I got along fine on my own, spending time with her takes away time from hanging out with my friends and other life activities (and no doubt for some people who marry poorly this can make their life worse). The difference between an addiction to computer games and an addiction to seeing one's wife or an addiction to eating tasty food is simply a value judgment we make not something intrinsic in the activities themselves.
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Ultimately this whole debate is just about how to name something. If nothing fishy is going on with saying people are "addicted" to computer games then presumably it doesn't matter if you say they are addicted or explain out the way they behave towards their computer games. However, if you just said, "hey some people engage in this harmful pattern of behavior with computer games" everyone would shrug and move on. If substituting a word's supposed definition for it's use eliminates the impact of the claim something fishy is going on.