The debate over hard-forking Etherium demonstrates that even technological currency systems rely on trust in human governance. Thus, I'd see this more as people putting trust in technocrats (i.e., a perceived meritocracy) versus elected officials (i.e., democratic populism).
1900: "Manure is a problem, and by the way there are also lots of other good reasons to stop using horses as our major means of transportation."
2000: "Carbon dioxide is a problem, and by the way there are also lots of other good reasons to stop using fossil fuels as our major source of energy."
Mr. Nydam, along with several other defendants, is alleged to have participated in a peer-to-peer network using the BitTorrent protocol to download and share Dallas Buyers Club... Plaintiff has alleged and presented evidence that the IP address assigned to Mr. Nydam copied and distributed pieces of the film.
The court ruling makes clear that the defendant is guilty not just of downloading the movie, but also of distributing it because he used BitTorrent.
"Criminals need the internet to make money. They do not want to kill the net and they do not want to make it unusable for their victims."
But the tragedy of the commons shows how a group of criminals, none of whom want to kill off the net may end up doing so anyway because they are (a) greedy and (b) unable to coordinate their actions to keep their greed in check.
The net is a classic common pool resource, which means that Tragedy of the Commons is a real threat when each additional attack increases the profit to an individual black hat while reducing the collective profits taken by all of the black hats (the marginal utility to the individual is positive, but the marginal utility to the whole dark economy is negative). Over-fishing is a classic example.
Elinor Ostrom showed that in real life, common pool resources can be successfully managed against this threat, but only when there is a mechanism to set and enforce rules (either through formal governance or through informal norms and sanctions). Essentially, unless black hats develop their own dark government to effectively control and limit attacks, there is a real possibility, in principle at least, of tragedy of the commons bringing down the net.
However, just because it is possible does not make it likely. I am not qualified to assess the probability of this kind of collapse.
Well, he also doesn't know what he is talking about either. John Kasich has publicly said that humans contribute to climate change but he doesn't agree with the approaches to it with the EPA.
Kasich frequently asserts that "we don't know how much humans actually contribute" to climate change." And since scientific assessments can determine that there is greater than 90% probability that human activity is responsible for more most of the observed warming of the last half-century, Kasich is either dishonest or ignorant about the science.
"Justice is what the judge had for breakfast" isn't just a silly blurb, there was a study that showed increased parole rates for cases after lunch hours. Granted, it was probably American courts, but I doubt UK courts are equipped with enough checks and balances to avoid the fallibility of arbitrary law.
It turns out there's a massive amount of stuff that ultra-low latency isn't that important for.
I have no expertise here, but it strikes me that it's not just about latency due to path length and signal-propagation speed. It's also about traffic congestion.
If you shift a huge amount of traffic from inside the continent to overseas sites, you are moving form a highly connected network to one in which all the traffic has to move through a much smaller number of edges. If lots of companies moved lots of high-traffic data centers overseas, how would this traffic impact congestion on the international connections?
Child porn is illegal, even if it involves NO CHILDREN whatsoever. Many of the people being prosecuted were making or viewing animations or adult actors, not anything involving actual children.
Didn't Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition 535 US 234 (2002) overturn that and rule that the First Amendment protects cartoons, animations, and other works that do not show the sexual violation of actual children?
I wonder, if you are slow, or am I so unclear... Did you not see the requirement for pairs of links? One to a prediction, the other — to its confirmation?
Maybe you didn't understand what I was talking about. Your grant proposals and tenure review processes are secondary effects here. The primary driver is how the government sets its budget internally.
Thank you for the clarification. That context wasn't clear to me in your original comment and this makes it much clearer. I thought you were talking about how individual scientists' work is judged, but you were talking about how science is judged on a much larger scale, and in that context you are correct.
Physicists are very smart people. They have to be able to figure out a way to simplify the authorship issue on projects that large.
If large authorship were a problem, the kinds of fixes you suggest might be in order, but what is the problem? As publishing moves from dead trees to electrons, why is it a problem to list everyone who made a significant contribution to a large project as an author?
Science today is judged by two metrics: papers published and students graduated.
It's important to actually understand that statement if you want to understand some of the quirks and problems with scientific culture.
You do not get credit for projects, advancements, talks, transition to industry, programs, results, etc..
Wrong.
First, the National Science Foundation only allows you to list ten papers on your biography for grant applications, so whether you published 10 papers or 1000 papers, you still can only list ten on your biographical sketch.
Also, regarding things other than papers: you are required to include in your grant applications a report on the results (including "boarder impacts to society") of all your previously funded research projects. People get big credit when applications of their work is picked up by industry and a grant officer on one of my grants said they were very happy when my reports included working code on github and submitted to CRAN in addition to the usual scientific publications. At a meeting of grant-recipients I attended in Washington recently, the NSF had one researcher give a featured presentation highlighting an open-source web-based platform he had developed for integrating hydrologic, climate, and agricultural data to help farmers deal with drought.
For promotion and tenure, talks, patents, projects, industry collaborations, etc. are indeed counted. Moreover, when a professor is up for tenure, they have to go through their publication list and explain what they contributed to each paper they list, so if you didn't do much, the paper doesn't count much for your promotion.
And the quality of papers is at least as important as the number of papers. For promotion, the university contacts a dozen or so major scientists in other institutions who have never worked directly with you or co-authored any papers with you, and asks each of them to evaluate how important your contribution to science was. If you are just one of 1000 authors on a bunch of papers, but no one knows of any major contributions that you made to those papers, you almost certainly won't get tenure.
However, the physics and genetic articles that have thousands of authors are much harder to justify, and absurd to even think that anyone would go through the list.
Consider high energy physics, where the papers require the combination of major efforts by more than a thousand physicists: People who designed and built the detectors, people who operated them 24/7 for runs lasting several months, people who wrote the triggering and data analysis code, people who conducted the data analysis, etc.
All of these different aspects are major contributions, deserving co-authorship, and the papers draw on all those parts. Leave any out. You can't write a paper using only the data from the muon detector.
During the writing of the paper every piece of the paper has to be approved by the experiment as a whole and everyone takes responsibility for the content.
Atomic clocks won't work without electrical power, and would be subject to all the same physical rust and breakdown as other electronic devices over the years.
Indeed. I used to work at the Time and Frequency division at NIST, where they keep the master atomic clocks for the US. They had a big room full of 12-volt car batteries to provide backup power to the clocks in case of a power outage.
Slashdot Mirror
The debate over hard-forking Etherium demonstrates that even technological currency systems rely on trust in human governance. Thus, I'd see this more as people putting trust in technocrats (i.e., a perceived meritocracy) versus elected officials (i.e., democratic populism).
In case the domain gets blocked, there is always scihub22266oqcxt.onion
You make an excellent point:
FSF has required, for many years, that contributors to FSF projects assign copyright to FSF so they don't need to contact a zillion people for permission in managing GPL issues. Coding Standards for Accepting Contributions and Lawyer's Explanation
Unless you can point to an actual court case, I doubt if this is true.
Various Dallas Buyer's Club, LLC v. Does lawsuits. Here is one example: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/washington/wawdce/2:2014cv01819/207565/
The court ruling makes clear that the defendant is guilty not just of downloading the movie, but also of distributing it because he used BitTorrent.
"Criminals need the internet to make money. They do not want to kill the net and they do not want to make it unusable for their victims."
But the tragedy of the commons shows how a group of criminals, none of whom want to kill off the net may end up doing so anyway because they are (a) greedy and (b) unable to coordinate their actions to keep their greed in check.
The net is a classic common pool resource, which means that Tragedy of the Commons is a real threat when each additional attack increases the profit to an individual black hat while reducing the collective profits taken by all of the black hats (the marginal utility to the individual is positive, but the marginal utility to the whole dark economy is negative). Over-fishing is a classic example.
Elinor Ostrom showed that in real life, common pool resources can be successfully managed against this threat, but only when there is a mechanism to set and enforce rules (either through formal governance or through informal norms and sanctions). Essentially, unless black hats develop their own dark government to effectively control and limit attacks, there is a real possibility, in principle at least, of tragedy of the commons bringing down the net.
However, just because it is possible does not make it likely. I am not qualified to assess the probability of this kind of collapse.
Well, he also doesn't know what he is talking about either. John Kasich has publicly said that humans contribute to climate change but he doesn't agree with the approaches to it with the EPA.
Kasich frequently asserts that "we don't know how much humans actually contribute" to climate change." And since scientific assessments can determine that there is greater than 90% probability that human activity is responsible for more most of the observed warming of the last half-century, Kasich is either dishonest or ignorant about the science.
Is that the one where the guy admits that he has done absolutely no research and just makes the whole thing up?
For TED talks, that doesn't exactly narrow it down.
You are right, I think it is an American problem (I'm British, living in the USA).
The British libel laws seem to be a lot farther from common sense and to threaten free expression far more than anything the US courts do.
"Justice is what the judge had for breakfast" isn't just a silly blurb, there was a study that showed increased parole rates for cases after lunch hours. Granted, it was probably American courts, but I doubt UK courts are equipped with enough checks and balances to avoid the fallibility of arbitrary law.
It was Israeli courts. http://www.pnas.org/content/10...
And everyone warmist and denialist knows this one is due to El Nino, but that won't stop the warmists from crowing over it.
The point being that there have been lots of El Niños before, and yet this El Niño is a lot warmer than any previous El Niño on record.
It turns out there's a massive amount of stuff that ultra-low latency isn't that important for.
I have no expertise here, but it strikes me that it's not just about latency due to path length and signal-propagation speed. It's also about traffic congestion.
If you shift a huge amount of traffic from inside the continent to overseas sites, you are moving form a highly connected network to one in which all the traffic has to move through a much smaller number of edges. If lots of companies moved lots of high-traffic data centers overseas, how would this traffic impact congestion on the international connections?
Child porn is illegal, even if it involves NO CHILDREN whatsoever. Many of the people being prosecuted were making or viewing animations or adult actors, not anything involving actual children.
Didn't Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition 535 US 234 (2002) overturn that and rule that the First Amendment protects cartoons, animations, and other works that do not show the sexual violation of actual children?
I wonder, if you are slow, or am I so unclear... Did you not see the requirement for pairs of links? One to a prediction, the other — to its confirmation?
Raymond Pierrehumbert's lecture at AGU about successful predictions from climate models is well worth watching.
Dyson's big reason not to worry about climate change is that "I consider it likely that we shall have “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years. ... After we have mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed."
I am not so sanguine about betting the world's economy on massive breakthroughs in genetic engineering technology. Maybe they're work out, but maybe this prediction will be about as useful as Dyson's designs for spaceships powered by nuclear bombs.
Because no one ever cast int to pointer or vice versa in K&R C.
Maybe you didn't understand what I was talking about. Your grant proposals and tenure review processes are secondary effects here. The primary driver is how the government sets its budget internally.
Thank you for the clarification. That context wasn't clear to me in your original comment and this makes it much clearer. I thought you were talking about how individual scientists' work is judged, but you were talking about how science is judged on a much larger scale, and in that context you are correct.
Physicists are very smart people. They have to be able to figure out a way to simplify the authorship issue on projects that large.
If large authorship were a problem, the kinds of fixes you suggest might be in order, but what is the problem? As publishing moves from dead trees to electrons, why is it a problem to list everyone who made a significant contribution to a large project as an author?
Science today is judged by two metrics: papers published and students graduated.
It's important to actually understand that statement if you want to understand some of the quirks and problems with scientific culture.
You do not get credit for projects, advancements, talks, transition to industry, programs, results, etc..
Wrong.
First, the National Science Foundation only allows you to list ten papers on your biography for grant applications, so whether you published 10 papers or 1000 papers, you still can only list ten on your biographical sketch.
Also, regarding things other than papers: you are required to include in your grant applications a report on the results (including "boarder impacts to society") of all your previously funded research projects. People get big credit when applications of their work is picked up by industry and a grant officer on one of my grants said they were very happy when my reports included working code on github and submitted to CRAN in addition to the usual scientific publications. At a meeting of grant-recipients I attended in Washington recently, the NSF had one researcher give a featured presentation highlighting an open-source web-based platform he had developed for integrating hydrologic, climate, and agricultural data to help farmers deal with drought.
For promotion and tenure, talks, patents, projects, industry collaborations, etc. are indeed counted. Moreover, when a professor is up for tenure, they have to go through their publication list and explain what they contributed to each paper they list, so if you didn't do much, the paper doesn't count much for your promotion.
And the quality of papers is at least as important as the number of papers. For promotion, the university contacts a dozen or so major scientists in other institutions who have never worked directly with you or co-authored any papers with you, and asks each of them to evaluate how important your contribution to science was. If you are just one of 1000 authors on a bunch of papers, but no one knows of any major contributions that you made to those papers, you almost certainly won't get tenure.
However, the physics and genetic articles that have thousands of authors are much harder to justify, and absurd to even think that anyone would go through the list.
Consider high energy physics, where the papers require the combination of major efforts by more than a thousand physicists: People who designed and built the detectors, people who operated them 24/7 for runs lasting several months, people who wrote the triggering and data analysis code, people who conducted the data analysis, etc.
All of these different aspects are major contributions, deserving co-authorship, and the papers draw on all those parts. Leave any out. You can't write a paper using only the data from the muon detector.
During the writing of the paper every piece of the paper has to be approved by the experiment as a whole and everyone takes responsibility for the content.
Starbucks can have a new slogan.
There's a lot of wear on the turbine systems. They require weekly to monthly checks of bearings and regular lubrication and maintenance. I doubt that Hoover Dam would operate without maintenance for 50 years just as you could not run a car for a decade without ever changing the oil.
Atomic clocks won't work without electrical power, and would be subject to all the same physical rust and breakdown as other electronic devices over the years.
Indeed. I used to work at the Time and Frequency division at NIST, where they keep the master atomic clocks for the US. They had a big room full of 12-volt car batteries to provide backup power to the clocks in case of a power outage.
With no one around to lubricate the bearings and gear trains, I'm guessing that turbines of any sort would freeze up in a few years.