"Not only that, the moment you accelerate you switch inertial frames, thus special relavitity no longer applies, the clocks converge and you gained nothing. Refer to the twin paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox"
No, general relativity is not required in order to describe objects that accelerate. Here's a FAQ I wrote on this topic.
FAQ: Does special relativity apply when things are accelerating?
Yes. There are three things you might want to do using relativity: (1) describe an object that's accelerating in flat spacetime; (2) adopt a frame of reference, in flat spacetime, that's accelerating; (3) describe curved spacetime. General relativity is only needed for #3.
A prohibition on #1 is particularly silly. It would make SR into a trivial theory incapable of describing interactions. If you believed this, you would have to stop believing, for example, in the special-relativistic description of the Compton effect and fine structure in hydrogen; these phenomena would have to be described by some as yet undiscovered theory of quantum gravity.
#1 often comes up in discussions of the twin paradox. A good way to see that general relativity is totally unnecessary for understanding the twin paradox is to pose a version in which the four-vector equation a=b+c represents the unaccelerated twin's world-line a and the accelerated twin's world-line consisting of displacements b and c. The accelerated twin is subjected to (theoretically) infinite accelerations at the vertices of the triangle. The triangle inequality for flat spacetime is reversed compared to the one in flat Euclidean space, so proper time |a| is greater than proper time |b|+|c|.
#2, accelerated *frames*, is less trivial. It's for historical reasons that you'll see statements that SR can't handle accelerated frames. Einstein published special relativity in 1905, general relativity in 1915. During that ten-year period in between, nobody really knew what the boundaries of applicability of special relativity were. This uncertainty made its way into textbooks and lectures, and because of the conservative nature of education, some students are still hearing, a century later, incorrect assertions about it. There is an overwhelming consensus among modern relativists that the boundary between SR and GR should be defined as the distinction between flat and curved spacetime, not unaccelerated and accelerated observers.[MTW 1973,Penrose 2004,Taylor 1992,Schutz 2009,Hobson 2005]
In an accelerating frame, the equivalence principle tells us that measurements will come out the same as if there were a gravitational field. But if the spacetime is flat, describing it in an accelerating frame doesn't make it curved. (Curvature is invariant under any smooth coordinate transformation.) Thus relativity allows us to have gravitational fields in flat space --- but only for certain special configurations like uniform fields. SR is capable of operating just fine in this context. For example, Chung et al. did a high-precision test of SR in 2009 using a matter interferometer in a vertical plane, specifically in order to test whether there was any violation of Lorentz invariance in a uniform gravitational field. Their experiment is interpreted purely as a test of SR, not GR.
MTW 1973 -- Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation, 1973, p. 163: "Accelerated motion and accelerated observers can be analyzed using special relativity." p. 164: "An accelerated observer can carry clocks and measuring rods with him, and he can use them to set up a reference frame (coordinate system) in his neighborhood."
Penrose, The Road to Reality, 2004, p. 422, "It used to be frequently argued that it would be necessary to pass to Einstein's general relativity in order to handle acceleration, but this is completely wrong. [...] We are working in special relativity provided that [the] metric is the flat metric of Minkowski Geometry M."
Taylor and Wheeler, Spacetime Physics, 1992, p. 132: "D
Considering that at speeds far far far below 1% of light speed, the speed itself is completely irrelevant and only 'acceleration' matters.....
No, this is incorrect. Both the kinematic time dilation and the gravitational time dilation are extremely small, but they are roughly on the same order of magnitude in many situations in ordinary life. E.g., if you're flying on a passenger jet, the size of the two effects differs by less than a factor of 10. Also, it's not acceleration that determines your gravitational time dilation, it's gravitational potential.
Got my now 7 year old through the last few winters. [...] He's an only child so going out to the yard to play unsupervised at that age is a little iffy.
Your kid is seven, and you don't let him play outside in his own *yard* without supervision? You're talking about the yard of your house? As in front yard or back yard?
I teach physics at a community college in California, a state in which Algebra I has been a high school graduation requirement since 2003. Virtually all of my students are high school graduates, and probably 80% of them graduated later than 2003. But guess what? Many of my students can't do algebra. Actually, some of them have passed a year of calculus at the college where I teach -- and nevertheless are surprised when I point out to them that sqrt(a+b) cannot be simplified to sqrt(a)+sqrt(b).
The problem is that we have an irresistible force encountering an immovable object. Students and teachers are told that the students must learn X or else the teachers will lose their jobs, and the students will never be able to get jobs, except maybe ones where you make minimum wage with no benefits for licking bird crap off of park benches. That creates an irresistible incentive to pretend that the students have learned X. We can let X equal a fluent reading knowledge of ancient Hebrew, and I guarantee you that schools and their students will start pretending that their students can do that.
I live in LA, but I get the NY Times delivered in dead-tree format every morning. Recently I found, for the first time, that when I went to look at an article online, it mysteriously wouldn't render properly -- presumably because I have ad blocking software. I used to read a good article in the dead-trees paper while drinking my coffee, then email people the link. A lot of those people were presumably generating ad revenue for the NY Times. Now I just won't do that anymore. Who exactly is this helping?
Dumb: As noted in the slashdot summary, quantity of papers isn't the same as quality. I have published physics papers in refereed journals, and my experience is that most scientific papers are correct but utterly inconsequential. They matter to the people who published them, because those people are desperate to get permanent jobs. Period.
Dumber: It's not a nuclear arms race, it's scientific research. By the (lame) metric of quantity of papers, the U.S. has increased its "output," while China has increased its "output" as well (and at a greater rate). Why is this a bad thing? Scientific progress enriches everyone.
Yes, for a variety of reasons. (a) Convert-ly doesn't always work. (b) I have to relearn the relevant parts of the language myself. (c) I have other software that generates lilypond code as output and takes it as input.
There are lots of good reasons why we don't redefine the syntax of Java or HTML every year and just tell everyone to run their code through a converter. All of those reasons apply to Lilypond.
Apparently MuseScore has been around for a long time in some form, but only recently has it started to become a real contender in same music notation space as Finale and Lilypond -- I had barely played with it until today.
Previously I've used Lilypond, which is very feature rich and produced beautiful output, but there were some things I didn't like about it. It's a non-GUI program, which is fine with me, but they kept changing the syntax of the language. Every time I installed a new version of Lilypond, I'd have to convert all my old files to the new version, and that was a big hassle. Also, for many musicians who are not programmers, the non-GUI nature of Lilypond meant that they weren't going to use it. Although there were GUI front-ends such as Denemo and Rosegarden, progress seemed extremely slow. I would check back every few years and find that they weren't really that much more capable than the last time I'd checked.
However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new.
Yeah, it is annoying how they keep taking functionality out when there's no rational justification in terms of usability. My 11-year-old daughter was running Gnome on Ubuntu Lucid, and she had her login screen all customized so it looked cool according to her 11-year-old criteria. Then I upgraded her to Maverick, and her customization went away. I spent some time trying to help her get it working again, and basically learned that it's impossible (or would require more wizardry than I possess). Try explaining to an 11-year-old why an upgrade has removed a feature that she was using and wanted. Is there some usability improvement due to removing this capability for customization? Of course not.
But that's the beauty of open source. We have fluxbox, xfce, KDE,...
One of the many reasons why I would never consider using an OS other than Linux these days is that on Windows or MacOS there is no (realistic) choice as to which desktop you're going to run. I use fluxbox. My wife and daughter use Gnome. I've used xfce on low-end hardware sometimes. Some people like KDE.
If Gnome has problems, just don't use it. It's not a big deal. Apt-get install fluxbox, or apt-get install xfce4, or whatever desktop you like.
It's not dying out any longer. We're heading toward having 700,000 U.S. hams due to the final elimination of the code test (you're welcome) and the fact that it's technically getting more fun due to software radio, etc. That's more than we've had in a very long time.
Interesting -- thanks for the info. However, that 700,000 figure would include people like me, who are no longer active. Seems like there ought to be more reliable indicators than number of licenses -- e.g., sales of radios.
I'm a ham operator, although I haven't been active on the air for a long time, so my information may be out of date. This doesn't seem like a huge crisis to me. Hams currently have 2 meters and 70 cm. This proposal would take away most of 70 cm, but there would still be a lot of bandwidth left in there. Considering that the hobby is basically dying out, I'm not sure it would be totally rational to keep allocating the same amount of spectrum to hams indefinitely. Is there any evidence that in a hurricane or earthquake, the remaining 10 MHz of bandwidth would be inadequate for emergency communications?
I think there's a problem because physicists have a strong motivation to exaggerate the practical utility of our work. If we claim that it might have some practical application someday, it makes what we're doing sound more worthwhile. It makes it sound like we're worthy of getting lots of money from the federal government.
An even more extreme example is the ridiculously overblown claims for the practical spin-offs from the crewed space program, which is basically pure nationalism and pork.
I don't do research anymore, but when I was doing research it was in experimental low-energy nuclear physics. I really, really don't believe that anything I did will ever have any practical application. Of course it depends on how indirect you're willing to make it. It's possible that something I did will have some indirect effect on some other field like condensed matter physics, since some of the phenomena are analogous.
Physics at this level is like abstract mathematics: it exists for its own sake. Practical applications of this physics is like practical applications of number theory: just not in the plan.
Completely wrong. I don't know a single physicist who believes that.
While I agree that austerity measures make sense, let's be honest about the numbers. NASA is such a tiny percentage of the budget that canceling their program isn't a realistic way to save money or pay down our debts.
Realistically, the mandatory budget and the defense budget are what will have to be (painfully) trimmed down if we want to stabilize the deficit.
NASA's budget is about 1.3% of discretionary, non-military federal spending ($9 bn out of $660 bn). I don't think 1.3% is negligible. If the federal budget is going to stop being wildly out of whack, we're going to need to cut lots of these little tiny discretionary items. We need to do that *and* cut military spending drastically *and* get out from under the crushing interest payments. Some politicians like to campaign on promises to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, which is most cases is nonsense, because there isn't that much waste, fraud, and abuse. But NASA's crewed spaceflight programs are pure waste. They don't produce good science in proportion to the money spent, they don't do anything that has to be done by a government monopoly as opposed to private contractors, and they don't have any economic value except as pork-barrel projects.
The one that doesn't work for me is AOL. Any email I send to their users goes straight to the bitbucket. I have never been able to find any mechanism for convincing them that I'm not a spammer. I'm sending mail from a dedicated server with a permanent IP address, SPF, DKIM, and reverse DNS all set up properly.
This whole trend is really upsetting to me, and totally broken. I never have a problem sending email to someone with a gmail.com address, and they have the best spam filtering of any email provider I've ever used. The shortcut of blocking any DSL IP is clearly unnecessary if Google can do such a good job without it.
It baffles me that some large email providers like hotmail and AOL don't implement DKIM. The added CPU load is negligible on a modern machine. I'm not saying that DKIM is a cure-all, but it works much better than these silly, ad hoc measures like blocking all vanity domains. If someone with a yahoo account sends spam to someone's gmail account, the user can report it to yahoo, yahoo can verify the dkim signature so they know it really came from that account, and they can deactivate the account. If someone sends spam to a gmail account, and they claim to be a yahoo user but they aren't, google can detect that it isn't properly signed and trash the mail.
Wires. That requires an external provider, either a private monopoly or the government. And of course that lets them tap the wire.
You might be able to get around that by using encryption (if that's legal in your country and if the encryption is easy enough to use). But encryption isn't going to help you communicate if your government pulls the kill switch on the internet, as Egypt's dictatorship did on Jan. 28. Moglen's talk was on Feb. 5, so you'd think he'd mention that, but he never mentions Egypt once in the whole talk. It could easily happen in the U.S.
When I'm paying in person with a credit card and a retailer asks me to provide my zip code, all I do is say "I'd rather not." Been doing it since the early 80's, when the practice first started. It's almost never a big deal. Very rarely (maybe once in several years) the cashier complains and I say that my zip code is 12345. They just want something they can punch in so they don't get in trouble with their manager.
Cashiers at some bricks-and-mortar retailers ask for a zip code even when I'm paying cash. I just give them a quizzical look and say, "Oh, I'm paying cash."
One reason people use MD5 and SHA1, even if they may not be optimal for a particular purpose, is that they're universally available. For example, any standard install of perl or ruby has MD5 available without installing any additional libraries. I have a perl application that I originally wrote using SHA1 for watermarking, but I started getting worried as I heard reports of SHA1 collisions being generated successfully and of possible weaknesses being found in SHA1 by cryptanalysis. I upgraded my software to use the Whirlpool hash, but that was a massive pain, because the perl implementation of Whirlpool hadn't been packaged conveniently for Debian/Ubuntu. What we really need is for a greater variety of state of the art crypto algorithms to be packaged conveniently, so that people will actually USE them.
For being so fundamentally flawed, the product is quite remarkable, don't you think?
Let's distinguish Wikipedia the product from Wikipedia the organization. The product improved rapidly from 2001 to about 2005 and has stagnated since then. The organization worked well from 2001 to about 2005 and has been dysfunctional since then.
I'm male, and I was an enthusiastic contributor to WP in its early days. Gave up about five years ago when it was no longer fun. WP these days is all about people watching their pet articles and instantly reverting anyone else's edits.
If women are disproportionately absent from WP, maybe it's because women are smarter than men. Maybe they realize that WP is totally dysfunctional and is not a good, healthy project to expend your time on.
As I understand it, the "share-alike" clause only applies to derivative works. Does combining a photo with a text story make the whole thing a "derivative work" of the photo?
For photography, it sucks. The photographer gets nothing out of it. They produce, but there's no reciprocation
This complaint makes no sense whatsoever. "The photographer gets nothing out of it." If this refers to money, then what's the issue? The photographer intentionally released it under a license that doesn't require payment of royalties. "They produce, but there's no reciprocation." If "reciprocation" refers to making the derived work free-as-in-speech, then what's the issue? If you want that type of reciprocation, you use CC-BY-SA. If you don't want that type of reciprocation, you use CC-BY.
Your photos get used by other people, sometimes they'll do something cool with it (I've had some of my stuff used as the basis for illustrations) but usually it's to illustrate some bullshit article on some crap blog.
If it's under a free license, that includes freedom to use it in derived works that don't meet your aesthetic standards or that contain opinions with which you don't agree. If you didn't want that, then you shouldn't have used a free license.
How about this example, where a french girl's self-portrait was used to illustrate an article about a lawsuit involving hotel pool sperm.
Apparently she licensed it under CC-BY. It might have been wiser to do it under CC-BY-SA, in which case the problem wouldn't have arisen, and she would still have been contributing to the free information movement. Also, a CC license doesn't immunize the authors of the news story from a libel lawsuit. If they created the impression that the girl in the photo was the same as the one in the story, then I would imagine that the girl in the photo has an extremely strong libel case. (Or she could just not worry about it, since she's probably not particularly identifiable in the photo.)
It is extremely important and useful for people to contribute photos to the commons under free licenses. For example, I'm the author of some CC-licensed physics textbooks. They're full of images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. I have a photo of a swimmer that I use to illustrate Newton's third law. (The swimmer pushes backward on the water, and the water pushes forward on the swimmer.) If that photographer had followed your advice, I wouldn't be able to use that photo. I don't know whether you'd consider my CC-licensed textbooks to be politically correct, socially worthy, aesthetically up to your standards, etc. But that's the whole point of a *free* license.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if everybody get a chance to get vaccines, then the only people who are at risk because of not wanting vaccines are the people who have chosen it for themselves, correct? And if there aren't enough vaccines to go around, then just skip over the people who don't want them and give them to the people who do.
Two problems with your logic:
1. The dead kids didn't make a choice. Their parents made a choice.
So the anti-vaccine parents aren't just making choices that hurt themselves, they're making choices that kill children, including other people's children.
Slashdot Mirror
"Not only that, the moment you accelerate you switch inertial frames, thus special relavitity no longer applies, the clocks converge and you gained nothing. Refer to the twin paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox"
No, general relativity is not required in order to describe objects that accelerate. Here's a FAQ I wrote on this topic.
FAQ: Does special relativity apply when things are accelerating?
Yes. There are three things you might want to do using relativity: (1) describe an object that's accelerating in flat spacetime; (2) adopt a frame of reference, in flat spacetime, that's accelerating; (3) describe curved spacetime. General relativity is only needed for #3.
A prohibition on #1 is particularly silly. It would make SR into a trivial theory incapable of describing interactions. If you believed this, you would have to stop believing, for example, in the special-relativistic description of the Compton effect and fine structure in hydrogen; these phenomena would have to be described by some as yet undiscovered theory of quantum gravity.
#1 often comes up in discussions of the twin paradox. A good way to see that general relativity is totally unnecessary for understanding the twin paradox is to pose a version in which the four-vector equation a=b+c represents the unaccelerated twin's world-line a and the accelerated twin's world-line consisting of displacements b and c. The accelerated twin is subjected to (theoretically) infinite accelerations at the vertices of the triangle. The triangle inequality for flat spacetime is reversed compared to the one in flat Euclidean space, so proper time |a| is greater than proper time |b|+|c|.
#2, accelerated *frames*, is less trivial. It's for historical reasons that you'll see statements that SR can't handle accelerated frames. Einstein published special relativity in 1905, general relativity in 1915. During that ten-year period in between, nobody really knew what the boundaries of applicability of special relativity were. This uncertainty made its way into textbooks and lectures, and because of the conservative nature of education, some students are still hearing, a century later, incorrect assertions about it. There is an overwhelming consensus among modern relativists that the boundary between SR and GR should be defined as the distinction between flat and curved spacetime, not unaccelerated and accelerated observers.[MTW 1973,Penrose 2004,Taylor 1992,Schutz 2009,Hobson 2005]
In an accelerating frame, the equivalence principle tells us that measurements will come out the same as if there were a gravitational field. But if the spacetime is flat, describing it in an accelerating frame doesn't make it curved. (Curvature is invariant under any smooth coordinate transformation.) Thus relativity allows us to have gravitational fields in flat space --- but only for certain special configurations like uniform fields. SR is capable of operating just fine in this context. For example, Chung et al. did a high-precision test of SR in 2009 using a matter interferometer in a vertical plane, specifically in order to test whether there was any violation of Lorentz invariance in a uniform gravitational field. Their experiment is interpreted purely as a test of SR, not GR.
MTW 1973 -- Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation, 1973, p. 163: "Accelerated motion and accelerated observers can be analyzed using special relativity." p. 164: "An accelerated observer can carry clocks and measuring rods with him, and he can use them to set up a reference frame (coordinate system) in his neighborhood."
Penrose, The Road to Reality, 2004, p. 422, "It used to be frequently argued that it would be necessary to pass to Einstein's general relativity in order to handle acceleration, but this is completely wrong. [...] We are working in special relativity provided that [the] metric is the flat metric of Minkowski Geometry M."
Taylor and Wheeler, Spacetime Physics, 1992, p. 132: "D
Considering that at speeds far far far below 1% of light speed, the speed itself is completely irrelevant and only 'acceleration' matters .....
No, this is incorrect. Both the kinematic time dilation and the gravitational time dilation are extremely small, but they are roughly on the same order of magnitude in many situations in ordinary life. E.g., if you're flying on a passenger jet, the size of the two effects differs by less than a factor of 10. Also, it's not acceleration that determines your gravitational time dilation, it's gravitational potential.
Your kid is seven, and you don't let him play outside in his own *yard* without supervision? You're talking about the yard of your house? As in front yard or back yard?
?
??
???
I teach physics at a community college in California, a state in which Algebra I has been a high school graduation requirement since 2003. Virtually all of my students are high school graduates, and probably 80% of them graduated later than 2003. But guess what? Many of my students can't do algebra. Actually, some of them have passed a year of calculus at the college where I teach -- and nevertheless are surprised when I point out to them that sqrt(a+b) cannot be simplified to sqrt(a)+sqrt(b).
The problem is that we have an irresistible force encountering an immovable object. Students and teachers are told that the students must learn X or else the teachers will lose their jobs, and the students will never be able to get jobs, except maybe ones where you make minimum wage with no benefits for licking bird crap off of park benches. That creates an irresistible incentive to pretend that the students have learned X. We can let X equal a fluent reading knowledge of ancient Hebrew, and I guarantee you that schools and their students will start pretending that their students can do that.
I live in LA, but I get the NY Times delivered in dead-tree format every morning. Recently I found, for the first time, that when I went to look at an article online, it mysteriously wouldn't render properly -- presumably because I have ad blocking software. I used to read a good article in the dead-trees paper while drinking my coffee, then email people the link. A lot of those people were presumably generating ad revenue for the NY Times. Now I just won't do that anymore. Who exactly is this helping?
This article is dumb for (at least) two reasons:
Dumb: As noted in the slashdot summary, quantity of papers isn't the same as quality. I have published physics papers in refereed journals, and my experience is that most scientific papers are correct but utterly inconsequential. They matter to the people who published them, because those people are desperate to get permanent jobs. Period.
Dumber: It's not a nuclear arms race, it's scientific research. By the (lame) metric of quantity of papers, the U.S. has increased its "output," while China has increased its "output" as well (and at a greater rate). Why is this a bad thing? Scientific progress enriches everyone.
Yes, for a variety of reasons. (a) Convert-ly doesn't always work. (b) I have to relearn the relevant parts of the language myself. (c) I have other software that generates lilypond code as output and takes it as input.
There are lots of good reasons why we don't redefine the syntax of Java or HTML every year and just tell everyone to run their code through a converter. All of those reasons apply to Lilypond.
Apparently MuseScore has been around for a long time in some form, but only recently has it started to become a real contender in same music notation space as Finale and Lilypond -- I had barely played with it until today.
Previously I've used Lilypond, which is very feature rich and produced beautiful output, but there were some things I didn't like about it. It's a non-GUI program, which is fine with me, but they kept changing the syntax of the language. Every time I installed a new version of Lilypond, I'd have to convert all my old files to the new version, and that was a big hassle. Also, for many musicians who are not programmers, the non-GUI nature of Lilypond meant that they weren't going to use it. Although there were GUI front-ends such as Denemo and Rosegarden, progress seemed extremely slow. I would check back every few years and find that they weren't really that much more capable than the last time I'd checked.
However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new.
Yeah, it is annoying how they keep taking functionality out when there's no rational justification in terms of usability. My 11-year-old daughter was running Gnome on Ubuntu Lucid, and she had her login screen all customized so it looked cool according to her 11-year-old criteria. Then I upgraded her to Maverick, and her customization went away. I spent some time trying to help her get it working again, and basically learned that it's impossible (or would require more wizardry than I possess). Try explaining to an 11-year-old why an upgrade has removed a feature that she was using and wanted. Is there some usability improvement due to removing this capability for customization? Of course not.
But that's the beauty of open source. We have fluxbox, xfce, KDE, ...
One of the many reasons why I would never consider using an OS other than Linux these days is that on Windows or MacOS there is no (realistic) choice as to which desktop you're going to run. I use fluxbox. My wife and daughter use Gnome. I've used xfce on low-end hardware sometimes. Some people like KDE.
If Gnome has problems, just don't use it. It's not a big deal. Apt-get install fluxbox, or apt-get install xfce4, or whatever desktop you like.
Interesting -- thanks for the info. However, that 700,000 figure would include people like me, who are no longer active. Seems like there ought to be more reliable indicators than number of licenses -- e.g., sales of radios.
I'm a ham operator, although I haven't been active on the air for a long time, so my information may be out of date. This doesn't seem like a huge crisis to me. Hams currently have 2 meters and 70 cm. This proposal would take away most of 70 cm, but there would still be a lot of bandwidth left in there. Considering that the hobby is basically dying out, I'm not sure it would be totally rational to keep allocating the same amount of spectrum to hams indefinitely. Is there any evidence that in a hurricane or earthquake, the remaining 10 MHz of bandwidth would be inadequate for emergency communications?
I think there's a problem because physicists have a strong motivation to exaggerate the practical utility of our work. If we claim that it might have some practical application someday, it makes what we're doing sound more worthwhile. It makes it sound like we're worthy of getting lots of money from the federal government.
An even more extreme example is the ridiculously overblown claims for the practical spin-offs from the crewed space program, which is basically pure nationalism and pork.
I don't do research anymore, but when I was doing research it was in experimental low-energy nuclear physics. I really, really don't believe that anything I did will ever have any practical application. Of course it depends on how indirect you're willing to make it. It's possible that something I did will have some indirect effect on some other field like condensed matter physics, since some of the phenomena are analogous.
I'm a physicist, and I believe that.
Here is the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6142
NASA's budget is about 1.3% of discretionary, non-military federal spending ($9 bn out of $660 bn). I don't think 1.3% is negligible. If the federal budget is going to stop being wildly out of whack, we're going to need to cut lots of these little tiny discretionary items. We need to do that *and* cut military spending drastically *and* get out from under the crushing interest payments. Some politicians like to campaign on promises to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, which is most cases is nonsense, because there isn't that much waste, fraud, and abuse. But NASA's crewed spaceflight programs are pure waste. They don't produce good science in proportion to the money spent, they don't do anything that has to be done by a government monopoly as opposed to private contractors, and they don't have any economic value except as pork-barrel projects.
I've had similar problems.
The clueful email service providers are yahoo and gmail. They both support dkim and sign all their outbound mail with dkim. They both have mechanisms for reporting dkim-signed spam from their users ( http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=abuse and http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/classic/spam.html ). If you dkim-sign your own outgoing email, you can go through a process with yahoo http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/forms_index.html to tell them that, and if the info you provide satisfies them, your mails are less likely to end up in users' spam boxes.
The one that doesn't work for me is AOL. Any email I send to their users goes straight to the bitbucket. I have never been able to find any mechanism for convincing them that I'm not a spammer. I'm sending mail from a dedicated server with a permanent IP address, SPF, DKIM, and reverse DNS all set up properly.
This whole trend is really upsetting to me, and totally broken. I never have a problem sending email to someone with a gmail.com address, and they have the best spam filtering of any email provider I've ever used. The shortcut of blocking any DSL IP is clearly unnecessary if Google can do such a good job without it.
It baffles me that some large email providers like hotmail and AOL don't implement DKIM. The added CPU load is negligible on a modern machine. I'm not saying that DKIM is a cure-all, but it works much better than these silly, ad hoc measures like blocking all vanity domains. If someone with a yahoo account sends spam to someone's gmail account, the user can report it to yahoo, yahoo can verify the dkim signature so they know it really came from that account, and they can deactivate the account. If someone sends spam to a gmail account, and they claim to be a yahoo user but they aren't, google can detect that it isn't properly signed and trash the mail.
Wires. That requires an external provider, either a private monopoly or the government. And of course that lets them tap the wire.
You might be able to get around that by using encryption (if that's legal in your country and if the encryption is easy enough to use). But encryption isn't going to help you communicate if your government pulls the kill switch on the internet, as Egypt's dictatorship did on Jan. 28. Moglen's talk was on Feb. 5, so you'd think he'd mention that, but he never mentions Egypt once in the whole talk. It could easily happen in the U.S.
When I'm paying in person with a credit card and a retailer asks me to provide my zip code, all I do is say "I'd rather not." Been doing it since the early 80's, when the practice first started. It's almost never a big deal. Very rarely (maybe once in several years) the cashier complains and I say that my zip code is 12345. They just want something they can punch in so they don't get in trouble with their manager.
Cashiers at some bricks-and-mortar retailers ask for a zip code even when I'm paying cash. I just give them a quizzical look and say, "Oh, I'm paying cash."
One reason people use MD5 and SHA1, even if they may not be optimal for a particular purpose, is that they're universally available. For example, any standard install of perl or ruby has MD5 available without installing any additional libraries. I have a perl application that I originally wrote using SHA1 for watermarking, but I started getting worried as I heard reports of SHA1 collisions being generated successfully and of possible weaknesses being found in SHA1 by cryptanalysis. I upgraded my software to use the Whirlpool hash, but that was a massive pain, because the perl implementation of Whirlpool hadn't been packaged conveniently for Debian/Ubuntu. What we really need is for a greater variety of state of the art crypto algorithms to be packaged conveniently, so that people will actually USE them.
For being so fundamentally flawed, the product is quite remarkable, don't you think?
Let's distinguish Wikipedia the product from Wikipedia the organization. The product improved rapidly from 2001 to about 2005 and has stagnated since then. The organization worked well from 2001 to about 2005 and has been dysfunctional since then.
Took the words out of my mouth.
I'm male, and I was an enthusiastic contributor to WP in its early days. Gave up about five years ago when it was no longer fun. WP these days is all about people watching their pet articles and instantly reverting anyone else's edits.
If women are disproportionately absent from WP, maybe it's because women are smarter than men. Maybe they realize that WP is totally dysfunctional and is not a good, healthy project to expend your time on.
As I understand it, the "share-alike" clause only applies to derivative works. Does combining a photo with a text story make the whole thing a "derivative work" of the photo?
Yes, it does.
For photography, it sucks. The photographer gets nothing out of it. They produce, but there's no reciprocation
This complaint makes no sense whatsoever. "The photographer gets nothing out of it." If this refers to money, then what's the issue? The photographer intentionally released it under a license that doesn't require payment of royalties. "They produce, but there's no reciprocation." If "reciprocation" refers to making the derived work free-as-in-speech, then what's the issue? If you want that type of reciprocation, you use CC-BY-SA. If you don't want that type of reciprocation, you use CC-BY.
Your photos get used by other people, sometimes they'll do something cool with it (I've had some of my stuff used as the basis for illustrations) but usually it's to illustrate some bullshit article on some crap blog.
If it's under a free license, that includes freedom to use it in derived works that don't meet your aesthetic standards or that contain opinions with which you don't agree. If you didn't want that, then you shouldn't have used a free license.
How about this example, where a french girl's self-portrait was used to illustrate an article about a lawsuit involving hotel pool sperm.
Apparently she licensed it under CC-BY. It might have been wiser to do it under CC-BY-SA, in which case the problem wouldn't have arisen, and she would still have been contributing to the free information movement. Also, a CC license doesn't immunize the authors of the news story from a libel lawsuit. If they created the impression that the girl in the photo was the same as the one in the story, then I would imagine that the girl in the photo has an extremely strong libel case. (Or she could just not worry about it, since she's probably not particularly identifiable in the photo.)
It is extremely important and useful for people to contribute photos to the commons under free licenses. For example, I'm the author of some CC-licensed physics textbooks. They're full of images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. I have a photo of a swimmer that I use to illustrate Newton's third law. (The swimmer pushes backward on the water, and the water pushes forward on the swimmer.) If that photographer had followed your advice, I wouldn't be able to use that photo. I don't know whether you'd consider my CC-licensed textbooks to be politically correct, socially worthy, aesthetically up to your standards, etc. But that's the whole point of a *free* license.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if everybody get a chance to get vaccines, then the only people who are at risk because of not wanting vaccines are the people who have chosen it for themselves, correct? And if there aren't enough vaccines to go around, then just skip over the people who don't want them and give them to the people who do.
Two problems with your logic:
So the anti-vaccine parents aren't just making choices that hurt themselves, they're making choices that kill children, including other people's children.