If you read part 1 of the NYT story, you find out that many more students were penalized by incorrect answer keys than by computer errors. Thus, if we are to trumpet open-source as the appropriate way to deal with risks of errors in the algorithm for normalizing percentiles for test difficulty, then do we also conclude that all answers must be revealed so that erroneous answer keys can be caught?
Perhaps. I always give my students answer keys after I give them a test. But for big tests such as are described in the story, I would worry that having to change all the questions several times every year would introduce so much opportunity for poorly worded, misleading, or fundamentally flawed questions that this risk would outweigh the current risk of incorrect answer keys.
There is also the cost question. If companies had to rewrite the whole test every time they administered it (because they would publish the answers), then the costs would rise sharply and the tests would become less affordable to struggling school districts (or we would see large tax increases to pay for the tests). The benefits of increased test accuracy might not justify the cost to the taxpayers.
None of these considerations apply to the case of the software used to grade the tests. There seems to be little risk that understanding the way the grades are curved would enable cheats other gamesmanship. Since this is not networked software, the potential for attacking it from another computer is small (social engineering is still a risk, though, but no more so for open source than for closed-source software).
Thus, although it would be tempting to put "Open Answer" on par with "Open Source," the first seems impractical and the latter seems well suited to the problem at hand.
I think you may be thinking about the short story "Marching Morons," by C.M. Kornbluth (c. 1950), in which the world is overrun by people who use GUI interfaces instead of command-lines, and all the competent people end up with menial tech-support jobs. Finally, someone at tech support has the bright idea of telling all the users that they can get a free space ride to Venus, where they can pick up the next service pack for their OS (the rockets actually blow up on the pad, leaving the world free for competence to assert itself).
Kornbluth never suffered fools gladly and his unabashed elitism and social Darwinism would have made him a high-karma/.er in very little time indeed if he'd had internet access in the 1950s.
There's good reason for the uneven playing field with the Kyoto treaty. China and India simply cannot afford high-technology solutions, such as the U.S. and western Europe can. The US and Europe have done most of the damage so far (raising CO2 levels by over 30 percent in the past century, and we have the wealth to begin doing something about it. There is no way that China will sign onto a treaty that leaves all its people in the dark.
Global warming may hit the third world harder than the US, but the US will be affected too. It does not look to be worthwhile to take Draconian measures to reduce emissions, but a middle road looks economically feasible.
If you take the history of the treaty on the ozone layer as an example of how this thing might work, you can see that as China and India begin to industrialize to a significant extent, the rest of the world will be in a better position to apply pressure on them. At that point, the US may well have a competitive advantage in selling clean power technology that US industry has developed in the interim, under pressure from the Kyoto treaty.
The historical record shows that compliance with environmental laws and regulations in the US has cost less than half what industry estimated when the laws/regulations were enacted and that the cost to clean up pollution has tended to cost many times the initial estimates. Thus, regulating to reduce emissions of pollution turns out to be many times cheaper than polluting and hoping that we can postpone the cleanup, even when you factor in the opportunity costs.
Did anyone in your class have any suggestions other than simply allowing atmospheric CO2 to grow without limit? It's easy to criticize the Kyoto treaty. It's another to try to come up with a constructive and realistic alternative.
So you dont think M$ can find a way to make 'just their product' compatible with XML?
They won't E&E XML too soon. They're still working on embracing and extending TCP/IP and ZIP codes.
After all, XML, including Schema, is just a way to format your data to make it easy for other machines to parse. It doesn't help you understand what the data means.
What MS is likely to do is to send data while not documenting the meaning of the data, and then claim that they're "Standards Compliant." I can just see the schema, defining fields such as
It may be standards compliant, but without Microsoft Secret Decoder Ring 2001, it won't do you much good.
Bethell misrepresents Lander's objections, too
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A Map to Nowhere?
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· Score: 1
In addition to agreeing with the criticisms you raise above, I would note that Bethell completely misrepresents Eric Lander's objection to Science publishing the Celera paper on the genome.
The real issue is one that should interest/. readers: access to the data. Prior to the Celera paper on the genome, the standard at Science papers on new sequences was for the authors to deposit their annotated sequences in the public GenBank database. Celera made special arrangements with Science to keep its human genome sequence secret (actually quasi-secret. You can access small chunks of it from Celera if you sign away many of your rights to do as you wish with the information).
Since open exchange of data is the lifeblood of science and served as a precedent and inspiration for RMS's original thinking on free software, this precedent is legitimate cause for concern. Without access to the complete sequence, scientists have limited ability to build upon Celera's work and to look for errors in the genome.
In fact, the previous sentence is somewhat hyperbolic---the HGP sequence is freely available and many universities and other not-for-profit laboratories are licensing full access to the Celera data, but as a point of principle Lander was right to voice concern.
In fact, if you think about it from the standard knee-jerk conservative point of view, the new mystery over only 30 K genes should be something the government funded labs should be shouting from the rooftops. After all, if the genome were completely understood, then the government could close its checkbook, issue a great tax refund, and send the scientists home or into the private sector. However, if a great conspiracy of scientists suppressed their mastry of the genome and said that lots more research was necessary to understand it, then they would guarantee further trips to the trough. This is the standard conservative criticism of research on global climate change---that the scientists know it's bunk, but continue to pretend that more research is needed in order to receive continuing funding.
I can no more patent a comet than I can patent a genetic sequence. They are discoveries, and not inventions.
Here is the appropriate line from the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8:
To promote the progress of
science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
If you go back to the RFCs (1341, MIME spec, 1992) you will find
The "application" Content-Type is to be used for data which
do not fit in any of the other categories, and particularly
for data to be processed by mail-based uses of application
programs. This is information which must be processed by an
application before it is viewable or usable to a user.
Expected uses for Content-Type application include mail-
based file transfer, spreadsheets, data for mail-based
scheduling systems, and languages for "active"
(computational) email. (The latter, in particular, can pose
security problems which should be understood by
implementors, and are considered in detail in the discussion
of the application/PostScript content-type.)
Moreover, Jon Postel himself, the author of SMTP, waxes enthusiastic in his book, "Closing the Book on Electronic Mail," about how a friend at Bell Labs sent him email that, when Postel opened it, automatically connected to another host, downloaded multimedia files, and played a song for him.
It's a bit naive to imagine that Microsoft figured out this active content stuff all by themselves. Here they were simply implementing what lots of Unix folks had done long before Windows had a built-in TCP/IP stack, much less IE or Outlook!
you make the mistake of equating Europe and North America with the entire world
The story of the Little Dryas (the 1000-year mini Ice Age just after the last major ice age, which is believed to have resulted from the massive influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic as Lake Agasiz drained down the St. Lawrence) is not completely resolved, but isotope ratios in sediment cores from South American bogs suggest strongly that the Little Dryas caused global cooling, not just cooling in Northern Europe.
What causes interhemispheric links is unknown, but powerful. After all, the Milankovich explanation for the ice ages would suggest that the ice age cycle for the Northern and Southern hemispheres should be exactly out of phase. Some poorly understood interhemispheric linkages are believed to be responsible for the fact that the Southern Hemisphere experiences warmings and coolings driven by radiative forcing of the Northern Hemisphere.
Thus, a Heinrich event in the North Atlantic, driven by greenhouse warming, could hypothetically cause a global mini-ice-age, but we don't know enough to say for sure.
What the writer of the top post on this thread misses completely is that none of this is certain and Wallace Broecker introduced the idea of an ice age hiding in the greenhouse (as he titled his 1995 address to the AAAS) to get climate scientists to be less smug about their ability to tell what would happen in a CO2-doubled world (i.e., things could either be much less severe or much more severe than current predictions imagine).
The crazy thing about many greenhouse skeptics is not their skepticism---too many mainstream climate scientists are far too smug about their models---but their assumption that the error bars only extend in one direction: that uncertainties in model predictions mean that outcomes will likely be less severe than predicted. Few skeptics follow Broecker in addressing the question of whether the current generation of models may be seriously underpredicting global climate change.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you can establish prior use, nobody can subsequently make you stop using a name. What you can't do without a valid trademark is to prevent someone else from using the mark.
If you're interested in preventing others from using your mark, then even if you're making free software, you may want to ask a lawyer whether advertising paid support or consulting services for your product or selling books about the product would constitute enough of a commercial interest to garner trademark protection.
Remember that you get a fair bit of trademark protection just by using the term in commerce, even if you don't register with the PTO.
>Everybody is singular? What's the plural form? Everybodies?
Everyone
Bzzt! "Everyone" is singular for the same reason "everybody" is singular. Consider how you would conjugate a verb to go with this: would you say, "Everyone read Slashdot" (plural) or "Everyone reads Slashdot" (singular)?
The plural would change 'every', which is singular, to 'all', which is plural, so we want the equivalent of "all bodies." There's no colloquial plural term that comes to my mind.
Here's another application. I ask my friend (call him Teller) to guess a number. Then I tell him to type it into a quantum computer and multiply it by zero. The output is zero.
I take another quantum computer, type zero into it and reverse the original calculation. The output will be the number Teller typed in. He will be truly amazed!
This article completely misunderstands quantum computing. A key point is with respect to reversibility and energy consumption. The simplest picture of quantum computing, as proposed by Feynman and Deutsch, involves doing the processing by reversible steps, but absolutely requires making an irreversible quantum measurement at the end to discover the result.
In other words, if there is no thermal dephasing, you can operate with no energy consumption so long as you never look at the output, but there is a rigorous minimum value of energy that it costs to look at the output. This limit is set by basic thermodynamics and is inescapable.
In practical terms, cooling the computer to feasible cryogenic temperatures will consume lots of energy even when the qbits do not. Moreover, the fact that you will run the computer at finite temperature makes it necessary to apply error-correcting codes to compensate for thermal dephasing. Error-correcting steps are irreversible and thus consume energy during the calculations.
Most of the comments I see here (mea culpa) fail to recognize that this is not a legal challenge. The letter from the Authors Guild makes no legal claims nor threatens legal action.
The letter merely requests that Amazon change its policy and makes moral arguments why Amazon ought to voluntarily change its policy. There is no threat nor invocation of lawyers or copyright law. Merely an appeal to Amazon's good will and community spirit.
This is an exemplary practice and should be encouraged at a time when most businesses call the lawyers and issue threats without making any attempt to speak with the other party human to human.
The problem here is one the publishers have created for themselves: They sell the book outright rather than license it with conditions on resale.
It would be easy for book publishers to offer their wares as licensed content, just as software is currently distributed.
Perhaps book publishers could go further and follow software publishers by prohibiting the lending of books by libraries or follow the publishers of academic journals by setting up a multi-tiered pricing structure with higher prices for lending institutions)
There are many ways of addressing the problem that the publisher and author are only paid once when many people read a book, but the publishers should not blame Amazon for the publishers' inability to retroactively alter the contracts under which they have sold books.
Show me one, just one instance in which devices manufactured with modern techniques aren't as good as devices manufactured with traditional techniques
I agree with the spirit of everything you write, but the contrarian in me must point out that my house, built in 1929, has nice solid soundproof plaster and lath walls that stand up nicely to high-speed collisions with my three-year-old's tricycle (now that's operational tolerance!); modern house manufacturing techniques (i.e., gypsum board) don't come close. Similarly, older houses tend to be much more resistant to vibration than newer ones---try setting up a turntable on an upper floor!
You can argue legitimately that moving to pre-fab mass-produced materials for home construction made it possible for millions of people to afford houses who otherwise could not have, but the quality of the old plaster-and-lath technology is incomparably better.
I would disagree with you. It is never moraly acceptable to commit murder, but not all killing is murder. It is to my mind acceptable to kill in self defence. It is also moral to kill in war (with some limits).
To split a few hairs, I would ask, "acceptable to whom?" Killing another human is never acceptable to my ethical code. It may be to yours. We'll never resolve our differences on this.
A more useful consideration may be how people actually respond to killing under necessity. Guilt and severe emotional distress are quite common among soldiers, police officers, and others who kill under necessity (self defense, to save innocent lives, etc.). Not everyone has this response, but many do. We should trust this fundamental human reaction and say that while we would not call these people "bad" for what they did, their sense of guilt is real and should be respected.
The best sense I can make of it is that you can find yourself in a situation in which there is no morally acceptable choice. My philosophy of conscientious objection to military service is that once you are in a war, you may well find yourself facing a situation in which you cannot behave ethically. You must choose between killing someone else and having that other person continue to kill people. Neither killing the other, nor allowing him to continue killing is an acceptable choice. Either leaves you with dirty hands. The ethical thing to do is to plan ahead and avoid the situtation if possible.
Perhaps you can't avoid the situation. Too bad---no one promised that you would be given the opportunity to get through life with a clean conscience. Many major ethical thinkers, including Aristotle and Calvin, understood that chance and luck play an important part in the ethical life and that you may be damned through no fault of your own, but by circumstances beyond your control.
The question is not states' rights vs. federal rights, but the balance of power within the state and the wording of Article II of the Constitution.
The key problem, which honestly does come under federal jurisdiction, since it is a matter of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, is that SCOTSOF (Supreme Court of the State of Florida) interpreted Florida state law in light of the Florida constitution, applying the principle that the right of citizens to vote is important. The issue here is whether the constitution of the state of Florida can override powers explicitly vested in the state legislature by the U.S. Constitution.
SCOTUS noted that the citizens DO NOT choose the electors; the legislature of the state chooses the electors. This is spelled out explicitly in the U.S. Constitution. SCOTUS validly invoked the federal interest in reminding SCOTSOF that citizens do not have a constitutional right to vote for president. The state legislature may give citizens such a right, but they may choose not to. Decisions made on the basis of a fictitious right to vote for president are contrary to the U.S. Constitution and must thus be vacated by SCOTUS.
This raises the interesting question: If the legislature voted to appoint electors in a certain manner and the governor vetoed this law, would the law hold in spite of the veto? By SCOTUS's opinion, it would seem that the governor would have no power to veto any laws relating to the selection of presidential electors.
The New York Times reported on Saturday that poll workers were explicitly instructed not to help explain the ballots to anyone who was confused:
...some precinct workers said that they were under strict instructions to turn away people asking for voting assistance -- mainly out of fear that it would slow down the voting. Louise Austin, a precinct worker in Boynton Beach, said she and other workers at her precinct turned away voters who besieged them with questions.
"People were coming up to me," Ms. Austin said, "and I had to follow the directive -- `Don't help anyone. Don't talk to anyone.' "
Ms. Austin said that under directions given by the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections, precinct workers were supposed to provide assistance to voters only if there was a mechanical problem with the voting machine. Everyone else, she said, was supposed to be turned away.
A later directive by the supervisor of elections, Theresa LePore, a Democrat, telling precinct workers to help confused voters was prepared for all precincts on Election Day. But Ms. Austin said her precinct did not receive the memorandum until late in the afternoon.
You misunderstand. At least one voter interviewed on NPR said that she took her mispunched ballot to the election official and asked to swap it for a clean one. According to this voter, the election official told her she could not do that, snatched the ballot from her hand, and stuffed it into the ballot box.
In other words, she tried to do what you said would be proper, and was not offered the chance.
Of course this was just one person's assertion. NPR did not present any confirming or contradictory evidence from witnesses, so I would urge a grain or two of salt here.
NPR interviewed a W. Palm Beach resident yesterday evening who claimed that she punched the wrong hole and then, before turning in her ballot, told an official at the polling place that she thought she'd screwed up, and could she swap the bad ballot for a new one.
According to her story, the official then snatched the ballot out of her hand and stuffed it in the ballot box. This, contrary to the instructions that were written on the sample ballot, which said that if you made a mistake, you could exchange the bad ballot for a new blank one.
There was no independent confirmation of her story, so I am skeptical, but if things like this happened, then there is cause for concern. Even so (see my other comment in this forum), I think we must just move forward and be more careful with the ballots next time.
Let's look at the big picture, folks. Nader was pretty much right. The two parties are so similar that to find the difference, you must dissect down to less than two tenths of a percent (Gore leads Bush in the popular vote by about 0.19 percent of the total vote).
I don't believe that further recounts or reballoting will reduce the error below this level, so let's just accept that there will always be the chance that the "wrong" candidate won by statistical fluctuation.
Any election will have problems and redoing the vote will only introduce a new set of problems. Can you imagine that a new ballot in W. Palm Beach, with the entire presidency resting upon its outcome, would be free of irregularities? We have to do the best we can and them move forward.
If Gore takes this to court, then whoever prevails will have no legitimacy in the U.S. If Gore prevails on a re-election, then Bush partisans will believe with reason that they were robbbed, while if Bush wins in court and a re-election does not take place in W. Palm Beach, Gore partisans will believe with reason that they were robbed. The country could never come together behind the new president whoever he would be.
As much as it rankles (I strongly supported Gore) I would call upon Gore not to challenge the Florida balloting in court. This would just do far more damage to our nation than a Bush presidency. He must call on his supporters to support whoever wins today's recount and look to the future.
Nixon refused to contest the voter fraud in 1960 because he was concerned that tying up the succession of the presidency for six months or so would do more harm to the nation than Kennedy would. (He discusses this in his memoirs)
Nixon also realized that such a challenge would permanently label him as a sore loser and kill his political future. Gore can reinvent himself as well as Nixon could and I would not be surprised to see "the new Gore" emerge in eight years to win the presidency, just as the new Nixon did in 1968.
GENEVA, 8 NOVEMBER. With evidence for and against the existence of the Higgs particle too close to call, exit polls of bleary-eyed unshaven scientists emerging from their counting houses shows a deeply divided physics community.
"With so few events, it is critical that the data analysis be done correctly," said one physicist who wished to remain anonymous. I will not concede that Fermi National Laboratory in the United States will win the race for the Higgs until our events are recounted and all absentee events have arrived from the French portion of the accelerator.
Early media accounts of the discovery of the Higgs were retracted and then un-retracted in the most closely contested experiment since Carlo Rubbia discovered alternating neutral currents.
Science reporters are stocking up on coffee, as the Higgs watch promises to drag on through the night.
One thing that comes in is that well-raised children provide benefits to all of society, not just to themselves and their parents. When they grow up, as workers they will produce more wealth than they earn. If they are responsible citizens, they will contribute to their entire communities through good citizenship, volunteering, etc.
A case in point is the difficulty Social Security is facing because the baby boomers irresponsibly did not produce enough children to keep the system solvent during their retirement. Today's child will be the one working and paying twenty to forty years from now for your and my Social Security benefits. If there are not children to buy the stock you and I sell from our private retirement investments, the price will crash as everyone sells with no buyers.
Many employers recognize that they have some responsibility to society as well as to their bottom line and support employees who want to contribute to society. Sometimes they hold blood drives on site, sometimes they support people who want to do volunteer work, sometimes they match charitable donations by their employees, and sometimes they subsidize employees with children. It's all part of being a good citizen.
I don't see people complaining that if they don't give to charity, they should be able to pocket the money the employer would have given in matching their donation.
I don't see people saying that if the employer give employees time off to donate blood or volunteer in the community, that less civic-minded employees should get the same time off to take long lunches or go to movies in the middle of the day.
The analogy is not exact because there is no denying that raising a child gives a parent more pleasure and satisfaction than most kinds of volunteer work, so it's less purely altruistic, but the fact remains that a well-raised child really is an asset to all of us, not only to the parents.
You're entitled to your opinion, but I must disagree. For my daughter's first six months my wife and I worked out a flexible arrangement with our employer where each of us took her to work with us for half the day---I had mornings, my wife had evenings. It was acknowledged all around that we would be less productive during this time than if we did not do this, but we were certainly more productive and maintained more continuity on projects that we were managing than would have been possible if either of us had taken FMLA leave for half a year. At six months, when she learned to crawl, it was no longer safe or fair to her to keep her at work, so my wife and I put her in a daycare program.
My daughter is in day care for about 7 hours a day five days a week and I would assert that for her, it is better than being at home with a full-time parent. My wife and I have learned a lot about being good parents from my daughter's teachers, my daughter has the opportunity to play with many other children throughout the day and has learned to get along with other children, to show them love and respect, and to settle conflicts without fighting in ways that I do not think she would have done staying at home. I don't think any child is hurt by staying at home---there are tradeoffs either way---but to my mind, my daughter is better off in day care.
Most importantly for me, my daughter is healthy, happy, and is growing into a wonderful girl. I would take her out of day care in a minute and stay home to raise her if I felt that day care was hurting her. My decision may not be the right one for everyone and not everyone's employer offers the kind of excellent daycare that mine does, but I would argue vehemently about someone else trying to stuff me into a procrustean box and second guess my qualities as a parent.
Big problem: short storage times
on
Quantum Security
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· Score: 1
All current implementations and proposed implementations of quantum cryptography have a major weakness: storage of envrypted data. I started looking into this about ten years ago and although there has been a lot of progress in the development of error correcting codes for short-term storage (quantum computing, etc.), there is no conceivable way that I have seen to store a quantum key or quantum-encrypted information for more than a few hours.
The problem is that one must maintain phase-coherence between the basis states of the entangled states and the enemy is thermal noise. There is simply no feasible way today to insulate a quantum system from heat baths well enough to maintain phase-coherence for more than a few hours.
The world's record as far as I know is held by Dave Wineland's ion storage laboratory at NIST, who maintain trapped laser cooled ions in coherent superposition states for around ten minutes before significant phase decoherence sets in, mostly due to collisions with background gas (See D.J. Wineland et al., "Experimental Issues in Coherent Quantum-State Manipulation of Trapped Atomic Ions," Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Vol. 103, pp. 259-328 (1998)).
Thus, while quantum encryption may be useful for transmitting data where there is not a good way to distribute a secret key, such as a one-time pad, it holds little promise for storing sensitive information.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps. I always give my students answer keys after I give them a test. But for big tests such as are described in the story, I would worry that having to change all the questions several times every year would introduce so much opportunity for poorly worded, misleading, or fundamentally flawed questions that this risk would outweigh the current risk of incorrect answer keys.
There is also the cost question. If companies had to rewrite the whole test every time they administered it (because they would publish the answers), then the costs would rise sharply and the tests would become less affordable to struggling school districts (or we would see large tax increases to pay for the tests). The benefits of increased test accuracy might not justify the cost to the taxpayers.
None of these considerations apply to the case of the software used to grade the tests. There seems to be little risk that understanding the way the grades are curved would enable cheats other gamesmanship. Since this is not networked software, the potential for attacking it from another computer is small (social engineering is still a risk, though, but no more so for open source than for closed-source software).
Thus, although it would be tempting to put "Open Answer" on par with "Open Source," the first seems impractical and the latter seems well suited to the problem at hand.
Kornbluth never suffered fools gladly and his unabashed elitism and social Darwinism would have made him a high-karma /.er in very little time indeed if he'd had internet access in the 1950s.
Global warming may hit the third world harder than the US, but the US will be affected too. It does not look to be worthwhile to take Draconian measures to reduce emissions, but a middle road looks economically feasible.
If you take the history of the treaty on the ozone layer as an example of how this thing might work, you can see that as China and India begin to industrialize to a significant extent, the rest of the world will be in a better position to apply pressure on them. At that point, the US may well have a competitive advantage in selling clean power technology that US industry has developed in the interim, under pressure from the Kyoto treaty.
The historical record shows that compliance with environmental laws and regulations in the US has cost less than half what industry estimated when the laws/regulations were enacted and that the cost to clean up pollution has tended to cost many times the initial estimates. Thus, regulating to reduce emissions of pollution turns out to be many times cheaper than polluting and hoping that we can postpone the cleanup, even when you factor in the opportunity costs.
Did anyone in your class have any suggestions other than simply allowing atmospheric CO2 to grow without limit? It's easy to criticize the Kyoto treaty. It's another to try to come up with a constructive and realistic alternative.
So you dont think M$ can find a way to make 'just their product' compatible with XML?
They won't E&E XML too soon. They're still working on embracing and extending TCP/IP and ZIP codes.
After all, XML, including Schema, is just a way to format your data to make it easy for other machines to parse. It doesn't help you understand what the data means.
What MS is likely to do is to send data while not documenting the meaning of the data, and then claim that they're "Standards Compliant." I can just see the schema, defining fields such as
<xsd:element name="reserved" type=ObfuscatedType>
<xsd:complexType name="ObfuscatedType">
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name="undoc1" type="xsd:integer"%gt;
<xsd:element name="undoc2" type="xsd:boolean>
</xsd:sequence>
<xsd:attribute name="BillsSecretCode" type="xsd:string"/>
</xsd:complexType>
It may be standards compliant, but without Microsoft Secret Decoder Ring 2001, it won't do you much good.
The real issue is one that should interest /. readers: access to the data. Prior to the Celera paper on the genome, the standard at Science papers on new sequences was for the authors to deposit their annotated sequences in the public GenBank database. Celera made special arrangements with Science to keep its human genome sequence secret (actually quasi-secret. You can access small chunks of it from Celera if you sign away many of your rights to do as you wish with the information).
Since open exchange of data is the lifeblood of science and served as a precedent and inspiration for RMS's original thinking on free software, this precedent is legitimate cause for concern. Without access to the complete sequence, scientists have limited ability to build upon Celera's work and to look for errors in the genome.
In fact, the previous sentence is somewhat hyperbolic---the HGP sequence is freely available and many universities and other not-for-profit laboratories are licensing full access to the Celera data, but as a point of principle Lander was right to voice concern.
In fact, if you think about it from the standard knee-jerk conservative point of view, the new mystery over only 30 K genes should be something the government funded labs should be shouting from the rooftops. After all, if the genome were completely understood, then the government could close its checkbook, issue a great tax refund, and send the scientists home or into the private sector. However, if a great conspiracy of scientists suppressed their mastry of the genome and said that lots more research was necessary to understand it, then they would guarantee further trips to the trough. This is the standard conservative criticism of research on global climate change---that the scientists know it's bunk, but continue to pretend that more research is needed in order to receive continuing funding.
I can no more patent a comet than I can patent a genetic sequence. They are discoveries, and not inventions.
Here is the appropriate line from the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8:
Moreover, Jon Postel himself, the author of SMTP, waxes enthusiastic in his book, "Closing the Book on Electronic Mail," about how a friend at Bell Labs sent him email that, when Postel opened it, automatically connected to another host, downloaded multimedia files, and played a song for him.
It's a bit naive to imagine that Microsoft figured out this active content stuff all by themselves. Here they were simply implementing what lots of Unix folks had done long before Windows had a built-in TCP/IP stack, much less IE or Outlook!
The story of the Little Dryas (the 1000-year mini Ice Age just after the last major ice age, which is believed to have resulted from the massive influx of fresh water into the North Atlantic as Lake Agasiz drained down the St. Lawrence) is not completely resolved, but isotope ratios in sediment cores from South American bogs suggest strongly that the Little Dryas caused global cooling, not just cooling in Northern Europe.
What causes interhemispheric links is unknown, but powerful. After all, the Milankovich explanation for the ice ages would suggest that the ice age cycle for the Northern and Southern hemispheres should be exactly out of phase. Some poorly understood interhemispheric linkages are believed to be responsible for the fact that the Southern Hemisphere experiences warmings and coolings driven by radiative forcing of the Northern Hemisphere.
Thus, a Heinrich event in the North Atlantic, driven by greenhouse warming, could hypothetically cause a global mini-ice-age, but we don't know enough to say for sure.
What the writer of the top post on this thread misses completely is that none of this is certain and Wallace Broecker introduced the idea of an ice age hiding in the greenhouse (as he titled his 1995 address to the AAAS) to get climate scientists to be less smug about their ability to tell what would happen in a CO2-doubled world (i.e., things could either be much less severe or much more severe than current predictions imagine).
The crazy thing about many greenhouse skeptics is not their skepticism---too many mainstream climate scientists are far too smug about their models---but their assumption that the error bars only extend in one direction: that uncertainties in model predictions mean that outcomes will likely be less severe than predicted. Few skeptics follow Broecker in addressing the question of whether the current generation of models may be seriously underpredicting global climate change.
If you're interested in preventing others from using your mark, then even if you're making free software, you may want to ask a lawyer whether advertising paid support or consulting services for your product or selling books about the product would constitute enough of a commercial interest to garner trademark protection.
Remember that you get a fair bit of trademark protection just by using the term in commerce, even if you don't register with the PTO.
Everyone
Bzzt! "Everyone" is singular for the same reason "everybody" is singular. Consider how you would conjugate a verb to go with this: would you say, "Everyone read Slashdot" (plural) or "Everyone reads Slashdot" (singular)?
The plural would change 'every', which is singular, to 'all', which is plural, so we want the equivalent of "all bodies." There's no colloquial plural term that comes to my mind.
I take another quantum computer, type zero into it and reverse the original calculation. The output will be the number Teller typed in. He will be truly amazed!
In other words, if there is no thermal dephasing, you can operate with no energy consumption so long as you never look at the output, but there is a rigorous minimum value of energy that it costs to look at the output. This limit is set by basic thermodynamics and is inescapable.
In practical terms, cooling the computer to feasible cryogenic temperatures will consume lots of energy even when the qbits do not. Moreover, the fact that you will run the computer at finite temperature makes it necessary to apply error-correcting codes to compensate for thermal dephasing. Error-correcting steps are irreversible and thus consume energy during the calculations.
The letter merely requests that Amazon change its policy and makes moral arguments why Amazon ought to voluntarily change its policy. There is no threat nor invocation of lawyers or copyright law. Merely an appeal to Amazon's good will and community spirit.
This is an exemplary practice and should be encouraged at a time when most businesses call the lawyers and issue threats without making any attempt to speak with the other party human to human.
It would be easy for book publishers to offer their wares as licensed content, just as software is currently distributed.
Perhaps book publishers could go further and follow software publishers by prohibiting the lending of books by libraries or follow the publishers of academic journals by setting up a multi-tiered pricing structure with higher prices for lending institutions)
There are many ways of addressing the problem that the publisher and author are only paid once when many people read a book, but the publishers should not blame Amazon for the publishers' inability to retroactively alter the contracts under which they have sold books.
I agree with the spirit of everything you write, but the contrarian in me must point out that my house, built in 1929, has nice solid soundproof plaster and lath walls that stand up nicely to high-speed collisions with my three-year-old's tricycle (now that's operational tolerance!); modern house manufacturing techniques (i.e., gypsum board) don't come close. Similarly, older houses tend to be much more resistant to vibration than newer ones---try setting up a turntable on an upper floor!
You can argue legitimately that moving to pre-fab mass-produced materials for home construction made it possible for millions of people to afford houses who otherwise could not have, but the quality of the old plaster-and-lath technology is incomparably better.
To split a few hairs, I would ask, "acceptable to whom?" Killing another human is never acceptable to my ethical code. It may be to yours. We'll never resolve our differences on this.
A more useful consideration may be how people actually respond to killing under necessity. Guilt and severe emotional distress are quite common among soldiers, police officers, and others who kill under necessity (self defense, to save innocent lives, etc.). Not everyone has this response, but many do. We should trust this fundamental human reaction and say that while we would not call these people "bad" for what they did, their sense of guilt is real and should be respected.
The best sense I can make of it is that you can find yourself in a situation in which there is no morally acceptable choice. My philosophy of conscientious objection to military service is that once you are in a war, you may well find yourself facing a situation in which you cannot behave ethically. You must choose between killing someone else and having that other person continue to kill people. Neither killing the other, nor allowing him to continue killing is an acceptable choice. Either leaves you with dirty hands. The ethical thing to do is to plan ahead and avoid the situtation if possible.
Perhaps you can't avoid the situation. Too bad---no one promised that you would be given the opportunity to get through life with a clean conscience. Many major ethical thinkers, including Aristotle and Calvin, understood that chance and luck play an important part in the ethical life and that you may be damned through no fault of your own, but by circumstances beyond your control.
The key problem, which honestly does come under federal jurisdiction, since it is a matter of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, is that SCOTSOF (Supreme Court of the State of Florida) interpreted Florida state law in light of the Florida constitution, applying the principle that the right of citizens to vote is important. The issue here is whether the constitution of the state of Florida can override powers explicitly vested in the state legislature by the U.S. Constitution.
SCOTUS noted that the citizens DO NOT choose the electors; the legislature of the state chooses the electors. This is spelled out explicitly in the U.S. Constitution. SCOTUS validly invoked the federal interest in reminding SCOTSOF that citizens do not have a constitutional right to vote for president. The state legislature may give citizens such a right, but they may choose not to. Decisions made on the basis of a fictitious right to vote for president are contrary to the U.S. Constitution and must thus be vacated by SCOTUS.
This raises the interesting question: If the legislature voted to appoint electors in a certain manner and the governor vetoed this law, would the law hold in spite of the veto? By SCOTUS's opinion, it would seem that the governor would have no power to veto any laws relating to the selection of presidential electors.
In other words, she tried to do what you said would be proper, and was not offered the chance.
Of course this was just one person's assertion. NPR did not present any confirming or contradictory evidence from witnesses, so I would urge a grain or two of salt here.
According to her story, the official then snatched the ballot out of her hand and stuffed it in the ballot box. This, contrary to the instructions that were written on the sample ballot, which said that if you made a mistake, you could exchange the bad ballot for a new blank one.
There was no independent confirmation of her story, so I am skeptical, but if things like this happened, then there is cause for concern. Even so (see my other comment in this forum), I think we must just move forward and be more careful with the ballots next time.
I don't believe that further recounts or reballoting will reduce the error below this level, so let's just accept that there will always be the chance that the "wrong" candidate won by statistical fluctuation.
Any election will have problems and redoing the vote will only introduce a new set of problems. Can you imagine that a new ballot in W. Palm Beach, with the entire presidency resting upon its outcome, would be free of irregularities? We have to do the best we can and them move forward.
If Gore takes this to court, then whoever prevails will have no legitimacy in the U.S. If Gore prevails on a re-election, then Bush partisans will believe with reason that they were robbbed, while if Bush wins in court and a re-election does not take place in W. Palm Beach, Gore partisans will believe with reason that they were robbed. The country could never come together behind the new president whoever he would be.
As much as it rankles (I strongly supported Gore) I would call upon Gore not to challenge the Florida balloting in court. This would just do far more damage to our nation than a Bush presidency. He must call on his supporters to support whoever wins today's recount and look to the future.
Nixon refused to contest the voter fraud in 1960 because he was concerned that tying up the succession of the presidency for six months or so would do more harm to the nation than Kennedy would. (He discusses this in his memoirs)
Nixon also realized that such a challenge would permanently label him as a sore loser and kill his political future. Gore can reinvent himself as well as Nixon could and I would not be surprised to see "the new Gore" emerge in eight years to win the presidency, just as the new Nixon did in 1968.
GENEVA, 8 NOVEMBER. With evidence for and against the existence of the Higgs particle too close to call, exit polls of bleary-eyed unshaven scientists emerging from their counting houses shows a deeply divided physics community. "With so few events, it is critical that the data analysis be done correctly," said one physicist who wished to remain anonymous. I will not concede that Fermi National Laboratory in the United States will win the race for the Higgs until our events are recounted and all absentee events have arrived from the French portion of the accelerator. Early media accounts of the discovery of the Higgs were retracted and then un-retracted in the most closely contested experiment since Carlo Rubbia discovered alternating neutral currents. Science reporters are stocking up on coffee, as the Higgs watch promises to drag on through the night.
A case in point is the difficulty Social Security is facing because the baby boomers irresponsibly did not produce enough children to keep the system solvent during their retirement. Today's child will be the one working and paying twenty to forty years from now for your and my Social Security benefits. If there are not children to buy the stock you and I sell from our private retirement investments, the price will crash as everyone sells with no buyers.
Many employers recognize that they have some responsibility to society as well as to their bottom line and support employees who want to contribute to society. Sometimes they hold blood drives on site, sometimes they support people who want to do volunteer work, sometimes they match charitable donations by their employees, and sometimes they subsidize employees with children. It's all part of being a good citizen.
I don't see people complaining that if they don't give to charity, they should be able to pocket the money the employer would have given in matching their donation. I don't see people saying that if the employer give employees time off to donate blood or volunteer in the community, that less civic-minded employees should get the same time off to take long lunches or go to movies in the middle of the day.
The analogy is not exact because there is no denying that raising a child gives a parent more pleasure and satisfaction than most kinds of volunteer work, so it's less purely altruistic, but the fact remains that a well-raised child really is an asset to all of us, not only to the parents.
My daughter is in day care for about 7 hours a day five days a week and I would assert that for her, it is better than being at home with a full-time parent. My wife and I have learned a lot about being good parents from my daughter's teachers, my daughter has the opportunity to play with many other children throughout the day and has learned to get along with other children, to show them love and respect, and to settle conflicts without fighting in ways that I do not think she would have done staying at home. I don't think any child is hurt by staying at home---there are tradeoffs either way---but to my mind, my daughter is better off in day care.
Most importantly for me, my daughter is healthy, happy, and is growing into a wonderful girl. I would take her out of day care in a minute and stay home to raise her if I felt that day care was hurting her. My decision may not be the right one for everyone and not everyone's employer offers the kind of excellent daycare that mine does, but I would argue vehemently about someone else trying to stuff me into a procrustean box and second guess my qualities as a parent.
The problem is that one must maintain phase-coherence between the basis states of the entangled states and the enemy is thermal noise. There is simply no feasible way today to insulate a quantum system from heat baths well enough to maintain phase-coherence for more than a few hours.
The world's record as far as I know is held by Dave Wineland's ion storage laboratory at NIST, who maintain trapped laser cooled ions in coherent superposition states for around ten minutes before significant phase decoherence sets in, mostly due to collisions with background gas (See D.J. Wineland et al., "Experimental Issues in Coherent Quantum-State Manipulation of Trapped Atomic Ions," Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Vol. 103, pp. 259-328 (1998)).
Thus, while quantum encryption may be useful for transmitting data where there is not a good way to distribute a secret key, such as a one-time pad, it holds little promise for storing sensitive information.