Nupedia also had a fairly convoluted workflow path that the author had to traverse between proposing an article and final approval. Not only was the software needed to drive the system completely non functional, but there weren't enough (unpaid volunteer professional) people to do the actual work. As a result, the system became constipated almost immediately.
Yes, this was my experience as well when I tried to contribute an article to Nupedia. One of the huge things working in Wikipedia's favor was that they were building on the foundation of a wiki, which was an off-the-shelf technology. When they wanted new features, they could add them incrementally, but basic wiki functionality was enough to get them up and going.
The article is wildly inaccurate on the subject of Nupedia. They say, "Then he tried an online encyclopedia called Newpedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. He spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles. It failed."
They have the name wrong.
They portray it as Wales' project, when in fact it was more closely associated with Larry Sanger.
It wasn't written by paid experts. I believe Larry Sanger had a paid position as editor. I worked on an article for Nupedia, and I can assure you that they didn't offer me any money.
They make it sound like Nupedia commissioned 12 articles (at some price). Wow, I would have liked to be offered $20,000 to write an article! Actually 12 is just the number that got done (by people working for free) before they gave up and admitted Nupedia was a failure.
My own experience trying to write an article for them suggests two reasons why it failed: (1) The software to run it was mostly vaporware. Nothing worked. (2) It was no fun. I had a panel of people who were not experts in my field, and whom I had to satisfy in order to get the article accepted. That got old really fast. This is of course the exact opposite of WP's instant gratification philosophy. (Well, WP isn't so much like that today, because a newbie who comes in and tries to edit an article is likely to get his edit reverted without explanation. But that's how WP was in the initial barn-raising stage.)
Funny thing... sorting on positive values will always yield the same ordering as a sort on those values' logs.
Yes, but if you look back at my GP post, I explained that I'm not talking about taking the log of the final result (which would be irrelevant for sorting).
What really shocked me when someone first described page rank to me was that it was linear. I felt that this just had to be wrong, because it didn't seem right for a *million* inbound links to have a *million* times the effect compared to a single inbound link. Maybe this is just the elitist snob in me, but I don't feel that the latest American Idol singer is really a thousand times better than Billie Holliday, just because a thousand times more people listen to him than to her. If it was me, I'd have used some kind of logarithmic scaling. I think people do usually describe page ranks in terms of their logarithms, but that's taking the log on the final outcome. I'm talking about taking logs at each step before going on to the next iteration.
To me, this has an intuitive connection to the idea that the internet used to be more interesting and quirky, and it was more about individuals expressing themselves, whereas now it's more like another form of TV.
Of course that's not to say that I want to go back to the days before page rank. God, search engine results were just horrible in those days.
From an elitist snob point of view, one good thing about page rank is that it doesn't let you just vote in a passive way, as Nielsen ratings do for TV. In order to have a vote, you have to do something active, like making a web page that links to the page you want to vote for.
I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?
Yep. Coming at this from a slightly different angle, I use fluxbox on ubuntu rather than gnome. One of the big problems in karmic is that I'm being affected by multiple new regressions that seem to arise from the lack of any serious testing on any desktop environment other than gnome. Two examples: (1) Previously, sound used to work fine for me in fluxbox. Now, sound works sometimes in Gnome, never in fluxbox. (2) This bug appears to arise because they decided to implement a new signal from the Gnome desktop to let xsplash know when it was done starting up, but nobody appears to have bothered to check what would happen in desktop environments other than Gnome, which don't implement the signal.
I understand that Gnome is the primary desktop focus of the standard version of ubuntu. But is is really that much to ask that someone at least start up the other desktop environments once to see if they work? Both of the problems above were evident to me within five minutes of upgrading from jaunty to karmic.
This is an excellent question. I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.
Another regression that affected me after the upgrade to karmic was this one. I noticed the problem, and because it was causing me significant inconvenience I dug around in the source code and found it. As described in the bug report, there is a function called temporary_hack_for_initial_fade(). So obviously someone put a kludge in and then the kludge wasn't fixed in time for the release of karmic, so they released it anyway. This doesn't seem to speak well for the quality assurance procedures that go into a release of ubuntu.
The funny thing about this article is that he essentially never mentions (a) design flaws or (b) perverse economic incentives to sell defective software.
IMO these are probably the two biggest reason why MS has such a terrible reputation on security.
As an example of a design flaw, there are lots and lots of things that MS designed for ease of use, while ignoring security. MS software is way too willing to execute code in an email or on a web page just because they wanted to do something flashy without putting any responsibility on the user to know what the heck was going on. This is a design flaw. No amount of debugging will ever fully succeed in working around it.
The economic incentives to ship buggy, insecure software are also huge. Companies gather revenue by putting out a new version of the software with a long list of features. Users who buy the new version of the software generally have no way of knowing that it's full of bugs. MS is of course infamous for this.
Of course the implication of the whole article is that MS pays people to fix bugs, while nothing like that is going on in the open source world. This is complete nonsense. Most well known open-source projects are written by paid coders. But let's not let facts get in the way of MS advertising.
going through a car or a pedestrian green light, whichever comes first
This is perfectly legal, although of course the cyclist may want to make his intentions clear to avoid getting hit.
and acting like jerks every time a car fails to signal or otherwise violates some traffic rule while they themselves almost completely ignore every single one of them.
The problem is that when drivers ignore the traffic laws around cyclists, it's a threat to the cyclist's life. People tend to get testy when other people are acting like they want to kill them.
Two of the many reasons this may not catch on in the US:
One is drivers. I ride a (nonmotorized) bike to work twice a week. It would sure be nice if drivers here in the US showed that they had some clue that cyclists exist. This morning I got to deal with a woman who decided to pull her car over into the bike lane so that she could talk on her cell phone. On the way home, I got a teenage girl eating a banana while wanting to turn left in front of me without signaling. Other fun experiences include people swerving around me and cutting me off because they're too impatient to let me get across an intersection, and people yelling at me because I'm not in the bike lane (hey, sometimes cyclists do need to turn left, and in any case the law says that cyclists can ride in regular lanes).
Another reason is weather. US weather has more extremes than Europe. There's a reason that all the early colonists from England died of tropical diseases.
The reason it's opt-out is that there's a huge number of orphaned works out there whose copyrights are still valid but that can't be bought legally because they're out of print. The authors are probably dead, and the publishers aren't interested in communicating with anyone about the works, because the amount of money they could get out of it wouldn't be worth their time. Therefore it can't be opt-in. The copyright regime is having the effect of making these books permanently unavailable, which isn't doing the authors (or their heirs or their readers) any good. If copyright terms were more reasonable, it wouldn't be such a big problem, but congress has basically decided to keep extending copyrights so that they never expire. That's what's created this huge class of orphaned works. The only way to deal with the problem is to make it opt-out.
Some authors are complaining, after the class-action suit is all over, that it's unfair and they weren't consulted. Well, sorry, but that's how a class-action suit works. They have to make a certain legal effort to notify you as a member of the class, but if you don't see a notification, you're out of luck, and the settlement applies to you just like everyone else. Boo hoo. Go ahead and opt out.
By all accounts I can find, the issue with the Toyota's sticky gas pedal is a MECHANICAL one - not some electrical bug.
This article in the LA Times says a lot of knowledgeable people don't believe that. E.g., "A wide group of national automotive experts say there is strong evidence that a hidden electronic problem must account for at least some, if not most, of the Toyota sudden-acceleration events."
We have a Prius, and the electronic stuff does not inspire my confidence. It's a really crappy, poorly designed UI. My wife, my sister, and I have all drained the 12-volt battery at various times. We think it's because we didn't do the shutdown procedure in the right order, but we're not sure. There have been times when the car was non-operational, and we couldn't get it to release the key, so we had to leave the key in the ignition while the car was parked. (And there's another thing that is not a design issue, but -- the used car dealer revealed to us after we signed the contract that they only had one key to give us. A second key costs $500. If you lose your only key, it's $1000 to replace it.)
I like the car in general, but god, I wish it had an ordinary old-fasioned non-electronic key and ignition system. I'd have a lot more confidence in it.
The Apple ][ came with manuals that had the ROM listings. The ][+ (at least) had a mini-assembler built right in (Sweet-16, baby!). It had full schematics right there in the box.
Interesting. That definitely sets it apart from the TRS-80, for which Radio Shack didn't document the roms at all. There were eventually aftermarket books written by people who'd reverse-engineered them.
The default "shell" was a BASIC interpreter, fer cryin' out loud!
The BASIC interpreter was also the operating system, such as it was. I can imagine the howls of protest from slashdotters if someone praised a computer that had an MS operating system built into it, in rom:-) Today if you want to run an alternative OS like linux on your mac or PC, all you have to do is pop a CD in the drive and click OK. Then, the alternative OS was CP/M, and you couldn't run CP/M without hardware modifications. On the Apple II, you needed a Z80 upgrade kit. On a TRS-80, you needed a hardware mod that would map the rom to a different memory location, because CP/M expected to live at 0000.
There's a huge difference between the Apple ][ and pretty much any mainstream computer available today. The Apple ][ (and to a certain extent, the Commodore 64) was simple.
Yeah. It's actually kind of ironic. You'd think that if there was any room today for tinker-friendly machines, it would be with the smallest, simplest devices. But computers have gotten so much more complex that even the little ARM-based Debian box I use as a music server is a gazillion times more complicated in terms of software and hardware than an Apple II or a TRS-80. In fact, we're seeing the opposite: the simplest computers, like the iPod, are the ones that tend to be the least tinkerable.
I'm someone else who cut my teeth PEEKing and POKEing on Commodore and Sinclair machines. Hell, there were even magazines with "tricks-n-tips" for useful locations and what values would create what effects. Nowadays I suspect they'd just get sued under DMCA provisions for reverse engineering:-(
I had the same experience as you (TRS-80 rather than Commodore), but I'm not really convinced by this blog article's argument. The iPad is more of an appliance than a general-purpose computer. I prefer not to own a car that includes a computer I can't tinker with, but a car is qualitatively different from a general-purpose computer.
Others have also complained that since the Apple II days, Apple has drifted toward more closed systems. Well, my experience in the 80's was with a TRS-80, not an Apple II, but I think the situation was pretty similar throughout the whole "microcomputer" industry. Basically it was a hellishly bad environment for tinkerers. Those machines all had MS BASIC in rom, which made it, y'know, kind of hard to tinker with. The roms had various subroutines in them that were useful, but undocumented. People had to disassemble the roms in order to figure out how to access those routines, but if you wrote software that called address 02fc, you knew it was going to break when the next model came out. Hardware was all totally proprietary; it wasn't until the IBM PC that it became possible to go out and buy a generic hard disk or a keyboard and just plug it into a PC.
Moving on to the early Mac era, it's true that Apple was fairly friendly toward hobbyist developers. E.g., they sold Inside Mac, which was a cheap phone-book-formatted guide to all the system calls. But compilers were proprietary and expensive, and all the APIs described in Inside Mac were closed source. Mac hardware was still mostly proprietary. You couldn't use a PS/2 keyboard with a Mac, etc.
Comparing that with modern macs...wow, it's paradise today compared to then. There's a free C compiler. Lots and lots of the OS is open source. Most hardware is nonproprietary.
Of course if you really want an open, tinker-with-able system these days, you want to switch to Linux. That's what I did. But to suggest that Apple has gotten less open over the years seems like a serious distortion to me. They simply don't want to deal with the issues (support, viruses,...) that would come up if they supported the use of an iPod, iPad, etc. as a general-purpose computer. They impose an extra cost on people to get the SDK for these devices. Now personally I don't want to pay extra for the ability to program a computer I own, and that's one of the reasons I don't own an iPod or iPad. But it's not like these devices are totally closed.
I'll probably attract a zillion flames for saying this, but I think this is great. NASA does a great job on uncrewed probes, and that's a mission that can't be carried out by private enterprise. The shuttle and the ISS, however, are pure pork and nationalism; now that the cold war is over, the politicians cover the crewed space program with a thin veneer of scientific research, but the amount of good science that comes out of *crewed* spaceflight is not in reasonable proportion to the cost. We need to get NASA out of the business of doing things that the private sector can do, because otherwise the private sector will never get off the ground in those areas. Suborbital and LEO space tourism are the killer apps for private-sector crewed spaceflight. Let's unleash their energy and creativity to get that going, rather than spending public money on poorly engineered concepts for going back to to the moon.
The title of the slashdot article, "Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All," is misleading, although the summary is less misleading. There's no "after all." Here is the earlier paper, by Giddings and Mangano, which concluded that the LHC would not cause the end of the world. Here is the more recent paper, by Choptuik and Pretorius, referred to in the present slashdot summary.
The "after all" makes it sound as though the Choptuik paper contradicts the Giddings paper. It doesn't. Giddings and Choptuik agree that if the number of spacetime dimensions, D, equals 4, then black holes will not be formed at LHC energies. They agree that at much higher energies, with D=4, black holes will be formed. Choptuik checked the latter statement more carefully than had previously been done, and confirmed what everyone expected.
The LHC black hole doomsday scenarios all require D>4, and in addition they require a number of other implausible things to occur. The Choptuik calculation has little relevance to this discussion, because it just confirms something everyone was pretty sure was true anyway, without affecting the extreme unlikeliness of the long list of *other* things that would have to be true if you were to get an LHC black hole doomsday scenario.
I don't see anywhere in the Choptuik paper where they explicitly state that they're assuming D=4. But I think they must be, since, e.g., they refer to things like Petrov classification of spacetimes, which I think are specific to D=4.
By the way, a commonly quoted argument against the LHC black hole doomsday scenario is actually an oversimplification meant for consumption by nonscientists. The argument is that if such a thing was possible, it would actually already have happened to the earth because of cosmic-ray events. If you read the Giddings paper, there are some loopholes in this argument that they specifically identify. If the long list of implausible things actually all turn out to be true, then it is possible, in a certain specific example involving D=6 (see p. 28) that LHC collisions *would* destroy the earth after a lag of millions of years, while cosmic ray interactions would not. For that reason, they turn to arguments involving neutron stars and white dwarfs rather than planets. It turns out that this argument has no such loophole: even if the long list of implausible statements were all true, neutron stars and white dwarfs would already have been destroyed by cosmic rays. Since we observe that neutron stars and white dwarfs do exist, we conclude that the long list of implausible statements cannot be true. So I know it isn't as comforting to non-physicists as the argument based on the earth's present existence, but the argument based on neutron stars' and white dwarfs' existence is actually secure.
If you take a look at the paper, which is online and not paywalled, it's obvious junk science. They claim a correlation between mortality and sitting, and the abstract states that the variables they controlled for were "age, sex, waist circumference, and exercise." Well, watching eight hours a day of TV is probably negatively correlated with a lot of other variables, including general health, education, income, intelligence, and employment. And I would guess that mortality is probably also strongly negatively correlated with general health (duh), education, income, intelligence, and employment. On the second page of the paper, they say that they surveyed the participants for "demographic attributes" including education, but note that education is *not* listed in the abstract as one of the variables they controlled for. Look at table 1, and they show a clear anticorrelation between education and television viewing. On p. 387 they talk about how they tried to minimize the effect of the anticorrelations involving general health, but their method is pretty crude.
Isn't the gravitational pull of one mass on another mass a form of information? Say you had some control over the momentum of the sun? The gravitational effect of the sun on the earth would change the instant the sun's momentum changed, not 8 minutes later.
Actually the prediction of general relativity is that the field experienced by the earth would not change until 8 minutes later. The effect propagates as a gravitational wave, and the wave travels at c. Although gravitational waves have not yet been detected directly, there is extremely persuasive evidence that they exist, based on the observed orbital decay of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar.
Your post is basically on the right track, but some thing you say are not quite right.
There are many concepts in our current understanding of physics that you just take to be inviolate like conservation of energy, momentum, speed of light.
Well, not quite.
In flat spacetime, velocities greater than c lead to violations of causality: observer 1 says that event A caused event B, but observer 2, in a different state of motion, says that B caused A. Since violation of causality can produce paradoxes, we suspect that cause and effect can't be propagated at velocities greater than c in flat spacetime.
In curved spacetime, this is far from being established. General relativity has spacetimes, such as the Godel solution, that are valid solutions of the field equations, and that violate causality. Hawking's chronology protection conjecture says that this kind of causality violation can't arise from realistic conditions in our universe -- but that's all it is, a conjecture. Nobody has proved it. In fact, there is a major current research program that consists of nothing more than trying to *define* rigorously what the chronology protection conjecture means.
Physics develops from what proceeded it, from Newton to Einstein to Quantum Mechanics to String Theory, and those conservation laws always held.
Okay, but the prohibition on transmission of cause and effect at velocities greater than c isn't a conservation law.
You don't need to know the details of how a proposed "perpetual motion machine" may work to know that if the crackpot building it says that it violates the law of conservation of energy then it doesn't work.
I think the analogy here would be the following. Even the slashdot summary makes it clear that they aren't really claiming propagation of information at velocities greater than c. That's also reasonable, because although a neutron star is a relativistic object, it's not all that highly relativistic. Its structure is complicated from a nuclear physics point of view, but from the point of view of the relativistic description, it's a very plain vanilla solution of the Einstein field equations. If information was going to be transmitted at greater than c, then the chronology protection conjecture would also be violated, but that's not going to happen in such an ordinary, well studied spacetime.
It is not safe to use your criterion to rule out examples from general relativity without more attention to the details. Based on your criterion, the Godel spacetime has to be a crackpot idea, and so is the Alcubierre drive. In reality, there is a clear consensus among relativists that the spacetimes found by Godel and Alcubierre are correct -- it's just not clear how to interpret them, or whether they could actually arise from realistic conditions in our universe.
I run a couple of sites that, among other things, has links to return the "content" in a list of different formats (GIF, PNG, PS, PDF,...). Periodically, the servers get bogged down by search sites hitting them many times per second, trying to get every file in every format.
I've had sort of a similar issue, not with bots but with things known as "download managers" (example) Apparently people install a plugin in IE that is supposed to make their downloads go faster. If I'm understanding correctly, it opens up multiple http connections in order to retrieve the same file. I suspect it's basically snake oil. I suppose it might help in cases where the bottleneck isn't your own ISP but the overloaded server on the other end, although then you'd essentially be screwing the other users on the site in order to get more than your fair share. My site has a lot of books that are in the form of large PDF files. I'll get these users hitting my site, and it utterly brings my server to its knees. My apache logs show these people using up 50 Mb worth of data flow in order to download a 5 Mb pdf file. The only solution I've been able to find is to write a perl script that goes through my logs every 15 min looking for this pattern of usage. When it detects it, it writes to the.htaccess file to block that IP.
If you web search for the text, you will find it quoted in various web pages and books (not all recent).
You're right, e.g., this page seems to have the whole text of the book. However, (a) it is kind of cool to see it so directly, as written by one of Newton's contemporaries, and (b) very few people probably know about it. I'm a physics teacher, and I've been telling people for years that the story was probably true because Newton's niece remembered him telling it to her. I'd never heard that Stukeley also attested to the story. Here's my own transcription of the relevant page.
After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and
drank tea under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself.
Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation,
as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind.
Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the
ground, thought he to himself, occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he
sat in a contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways, or upwards?
but constantly to the earth's center? Assuredly the reason is, that the
earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. The
sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the
earth's center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore does this apple
fall perpendicularly or toward the center. If matter that draws
matter, it must be in proportion to its quantity. Therefore the apple
draws the earth as the earth draws the apple.
There's also the question of whether the story was actually true.
This page quotes Gauss as saying, "Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort: There comes to Newton a stupid importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. Newton. . . wanted to get rid of the man [and] told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied." Actually the Stukeley quote doesn't sound like that at all. It sounds more like Stukely was hanging out with his friend Newton, who was probably somewhere on the Asperger-autism spectrum, and Newton suddenly saw something that triggered a memory, and proceeded to give his friend a total core-dump on his scientific theory.
One of the reasons historians tend to be skeptical about this kind of thing is that scientists tend to rewrite history in order to make themselves seem more original, and their accomplishments more amazing. It's more glamorous to think that Miles Davis played jazz based on pure inspiration. It's less glamorous to imagine Miles Davis practicing scales and arpeggios for hour after hour.
You get into similar issues when you try to figure out whether or not Einstein was really influenced by the Michelson-Morley experiment or not.
Newton was quite a character. He was actually more interested in alchemy and arian theology than in physics. If his religious views had been public, he'd have been prosecuted as a heretic for sure. He may have been gay (which would have been another way to get in big legal trouble in that century). (But don't believe the B.S. meme that he was an astrologer. He specifically went on record as saying that he looked into astrology and thought it was stupid.)
Sorry, but your interpretation in terms of Saudi Arabia really doesn't make sense to me. The 1991 invasion of Iraq was primarily aimed at taking Kuwait away from Iraq. Sure, Saudi Arabia wasn't happy about having Iraqi troops on their border, but that was secondary. The link gets even weaker when you talk about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was primarily an attempt to destroy Al Qaeda, and Bush apparently wanted to do that even before 9/11.
but there is the Saudi tie in there too (Bin Laden wants to overthrow the Saudi government, that's how he started remember).
Hmm...well, I wasn't that familiar with Bin Laden's bio, but looking at the WP article, he actually started out by fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. When the US invaded Iraq in 1991, he criticized the Saudis for letting troops on American soil, so they banished him.
And when you come to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I really don't think it holds up if you try to analyze it as an action to protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam. Iraq's military capacity had been devastated in 1991. The WMD thing was obviously a baldfaced lie cooked up by Cheney as a pretext. (If they'd believed in it themselves, that would be hard to reconcile with the Valerie Plame affair and Powell's admission that he lied to the UN.) Since Bush and Cheney knew that Iraq had a degraded conventional military capacity and no WMDs, it doesn't make sense to say that the reason for the invasion was to protect Saudi Arabia. I think a more realistic assessment of the motivation for the war is that it was a political reaction to 9/11, based on an impulse to take military action as a response to do something -- anything -- in order to be seen as striking back forcefully. W was probably also predisposed to go along with Cheney because of a family grudge against Saddam, because of the Iraqi assassination plot in 1993.
He's talking about Saudi Arabia so it's not really half-baked.
You only quoted half the sentence. The whole sentence was quoted in the GP post: "Add Washington's propping up of dictatorial, repressive regimes in order to secure continuing access to oil and natural gas -- widely (and accurately) seen as one of the main reasons for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan." So he's not talking about Saudi Arabia, he's talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this was my experience as well when I tried to contribute an article to Nupedia. One of the huge things working in Wikipedia's favor was that they were building on the foundation of a wiki, which was an off-the-shelf technology. When they wanted new features, they could add them incrementally, but basic wiki functionality was enough to get them up and going.
The article is wildly inaccurate on the subject of Nupedia. They say, "Then he tried an online encyclopedia called Newpedia, a free encyclopedia created by paid experts. He spent $250,000 for writers to make 12 articles. It failed."
They have the name wrong.
They portray it as Wales' project, when in fact it was more closely associated with Larry Sanger.
It wasn't written by paid experts. I believe Larry Sanger had a paid position as editor. I worked on an article for Nupedia, and I can assure you that they didn't offer me any money.
They make it sound like Nupedia commissioned 12 articles (at some price). Wow, I would have liked to be offered $20,000 to write an article! Actually 12 is just the number that got done (by people working for free) before they gave up and admitted Nupedia was a failure.
My own experience trying to write an article for them suggests two reasons why it failed: (1) The software to run it was mostly vaporware. Nothing worked. (2) It was no fun. I had a panel of people who were not experts in my field, and whom I had to satisfy in order to get the article accepted. That got old really fast. This is of course the exact opposite of WP's instant gratification philosophy. (Well, WP isn't so much like that today, because a newbie who comes in and tries to edit an article is likely to get his edit reverted without explanation. But that's how WP was in the initial barn-raising stage.)
It took a lot of asking around, but someone finally pointed me the paper, which actually dates back to September.
Yes, but if you look back at my GP post, I explained that I'm not talking about taking the log of the final result (which would be irrelevant for sorting).
What really shocked me when someone first described page rank to me was that it was linear. I felt that this just had to be wrong, because it didn't seem right for a *million* inbound links to have a *million* times the effect compared to a single inbound link. Maybe this is just the elitist snob in me, but I don't feel that the latest American Idol singer is really a thousand times better than Billie Holliday, just because a thousand times more people listen to him than to her. If it was me, I'd have used some kind of logarithmic scaling. I think people do usually describe page ranks in terms of their logarithms, but that's taking the log on the final outcome. I'm talking about taking logs at each step before going on to the next iteration.
To me, this has an intuitive connection to the idea that the internet used to be more interesting and quirky, and it was more about individuals expressing themselves, whereas now it's more like another form of TV.
Of course that's not to say that I want to go back to the days before page rank. God, search engine results were just horrible in those days.
From an elitist snob point of view, one good thing about page rank is that it doesn't let you just vote in a passive way, as Nielsen ratings do for TV. In order to have a vote, you have to do something active, like making a web page that links to the page you want to vote for.
Yep. Coming at this from a slightly different angle, I use fluxbox on ubuntu rather than gnome. One of the big problems in karmic is that I'm being affected by multiple new regressions that seem to arise from the lack of any serious testing on any desktop environment other than gnome. Two examples: (1) Previously, sound used to work fine for me in fluxbox. Now, sound works sometimes in Gnome, never in fluxbox. (2) This bug appears to arise because they decided to implement a new signal from the Gnome desktop to let xsplash know when it was done starting up, but nobody appears to have bothered to check what would happen in desktop environments other than Gnome, which don't implement the signal.
I understand that Gnome is the primary desktop focus of the standard version of ubuntu. But is is really that much to ask that someone at least start up the other desktop environments once to see if they work? Both of the problems above were evident to me within five minutes of upgrading from jaunty to karmic.
This is an excellent question. I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.
Another regression that affected me after the upgrade to karmic was this one. I noticed the problem, and because it was causing me significant inconvenience I dug around in the source code and found it. As described in the bug report, there is a function called temporary_hack_for_initial_fade(). So obviously someone put a kludge in and then the kludge wasn't fixed in time for the release of karmic, so they released it anyway. This doesn't seem to speak well for the quality assurance procedures that go into a release of ubuntu.
The funny thing about this article is that he essentially never mentions (a) design flaws or (b) perverse economic incentives to sell defective software. IMO these are probably the two biggest reason why MS has such a terrible reputation on security.
As an example of a design flaw, there are lots and lots of things that MS designed for ease of use, while ignoring security. MS software is way too willing to execute code in an email or on a web page just because they wanted to do something flashy without putting any responsibility on the user to know what the heck was going on. This is a design flaw. No amount of debugging will ever fully succeed in working around it.
The economic incentives to ship buggy, insecure software are also huge. Companies gather revenue by putting out a new version of the software with a long list of features. Users who buy the new version of the software generally have no way of knowing that it's full of bugs. MS is of course infamous for this.
Of course the implication of the whole article is that MS pays people to fix bugs, while nothing like that is going on in the open source world. This is complete nonsense. Most well known open-source projects are written by paid coders. But let's not let facts get in the way of MS advertising.
This is perfectly legal, although of course the cyclist may want to make his intentions clear to avoid getting hit.
The problem is that when drivers ignore the traffic laws around cyclists, it's a threat to the cyclist's life. People tend to get testy when other people are acting like they want to kill them.
Two of the many reasons this may not catch on in the US:
One is drivers. I ride a (nonmotorized) bike to work twice a week. It would sure be nice if drivers here in the US showed that they had some clue that cyclists exist. This morning I got to deal with a woman who decided to pull her car over into the bike lane so that she could talk on her cell phone. On the way home, I got a teenage girl eating a banana while wanting to turn left in front of me without signaling. Other fun experiences include people swerving around me and cutting me off because they're too impatient to let me get across an intersection, and people yelling at me because I'm not in the bike lane (hey, sometimes cyclists do need to turn left, and in any case the law says that cyclists can ride in regular lanes).
Another reason is weather. US weather has more extremes than Europe. There's a reason that all the early colonists from England died of tropical diseases.
My wife's free French textbook: http://www.lightandmatter.com/french/
The reason it's opt-out is that there's a huge number of orphaned works out there whose copyrights are still valid but that can't be bought legally because they're out of print. The authors are probably dead, and the publishers aren't interested in communicating with anyone about the works, because the amount of money they could get out of it wouldn't be worth their time. Therefore it can't be opt-in. The copyright regime is having the effect of making these books permanently unavailable, which isn't doing the authors (or their heirs or their readers) any good. If copyright terms were more reasonable, it wouldn't be such a big problem, but congress has basically decided to keep extending copyrights so that they never expire. That's what's created this huge class of orphaned works. The only way to deal with the problem is to make it opt-out.
Some authors are complaining, after the class-action suit is all over, that it's unfair and they weren't consulted. Well, sorry, but that's how a class-action suit works. They have to make a certain legal effort to notify you as a member of the class, but if you don't see a notification, you're out of luck, and the settlement applies to you just like everyone else. Boo hoo. Go ahead and opt out.
This article in the LA Times says a lot of knowledgeable people don't believe that. E.g., "A wide group of national automotive experts say there is strong evidence that a hidden electronic problem must account for at least some, if not most, of the Toyota sudden-acceleration events."
We have a Prius, and the electronic stuff does not inspire my confidence. It's a really crappy, poorly designed UI. My wife, my sister, and I have all drained the 12-volt battery at various times. We think it's because we didn't do the shutdown procedure in the right order, but we're not sure. There have been times when the car was non-operational, and we couldn't get it to release the key, so we had to leave the key in the ignition while the car was parked. (And there's another thing that is not a design issue, but -- the used car dealer revealed to us after we signed the contract that they only had one key to give us. A second key costs $500. If you lose your only key, it's $1000 to replace it.)
I like the car in general, but god, I wish it had an ordinary old-fasioned non-electronic key and ignition system. I'd have a lot more confidence in it.
Interesting. That definitely sets it apart from the TRS-80, for which Radio Shack didn't document the roms at all. There were eventually aftermarket books written by people who'd reverse-engineered them.
The BASIC interpreter was also the operating system, such as it was. I can imagine the howls of protest from slashdotters if someone praised a computer that had an MS operating system built into it, in rom :-) Today if you want to run an alternative OS like linux on your mac or PC, all you have to do is pop a CD in the drive and click OK. Then, the alternative OS was CP/M, and you couldn't run CP/M without hardware modifications. On the Apple II, you needed a Z80 upgrade kit. On a TRS-80, you needed a hardware mod that would map the rom to a different memory location, because CP/M expected to live at 0000.
Yeah. It's actually kind of ironic. You'd think that if there was any room today for tinker-friendly machines, it would be with the smallest, simplest devices. But computers have gotten so much more complex that even the little ARM-based Debian box I use as a music server is a gazillion times more complicated in terms of software and hardware than an Apple II or a TRS-80. In fact, we're seeing the opposite: the simplest computers, like the iPod, are the ones that tend to be the least tinkerable.
I had the same experience as you (TRS-80 rather than Commodore), but I'm not really convinced by this blog article's argument. The iPad is more of an appliance than a general-purpose computer. I prefer not to own a car that includes a computer I can't tinker with, but a car is qualitatively different from a general-purpose computer.
Others have also complained that since the Apple II days, Apple has drifted toward more closed systems. Well, my experience in the 80's was with a TRS-80, not an Apple II, but I think the situation was pretty similar throughout the whole "microcomputer" industry. Basically it was a hellishly bad environment for tinkerers. Those machines all had MS BASIC in rom, which made it, y'know, kind of hard to tinker with. The roms had various subroutines in them that were useful, but undocumented. People had to disassemble the roms in order to figure out how to access those routines, but if you wrote software that called address 02fc, you knew it was going to break when the next model came out. Hardware was all totally proprietary; it wasn't until the IBM PC that it became possible to go out and buy a generic hard disk or a keyboard and just plug it into a PC.
Moving on to the early Mac era, it's true that Apple was fairly friendly toward hobbyist developers. E.g., they sold Inside Mac, which was a cheap phone-book-formatted guide to all the system calls. But compilers were proprietary and expensive, and all the APIs described in Inside Mac were closed source. Mac hardware was still mostly proprietary. You couldn't use a PS/2 keyboard with a Mac, etc.
Comparing that with modern macs...wow, it's paradise today compared to then. There's a free C compiler. Lots and lots of the OS is open source. Most hardware is nonproprietary.
Of course if you really want an open, tinker-with-able system these days, you want to switch to Linux. That's what I did. But to suggest that Apple has gotten less open over the years seems like a serious distortion to me. They simply don't want to deal with the issues (support, viruses,...) that would come up if they supported the use of an iPod, iPad, etc. as a general-purpose computer. They impose an extra cost on people to get the SDK for these devices. Now personally I don't want to pay extra for the ability to program a computer I own, and that's one of the reasons I don't own an iPod or iPad. But it's not like these devices are totally closed.
Sounds like it's time for someone with the relevant expertise to update this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf#Spectral_class_Y
I'll probably attract a zillion flames for saying this, but I think this is great. NASA does a great job on uncrewed probes, and that's a mission that can't be carried out by private enterprise. The shuttle and the ISS, however, are pure pork and nationalism; now that the cold war is over, the politicians cover the crewed space program with a thin veneer of scientific research, but the amount of good science that comes out of *crewed* spaceflight is not in reasonable proportion to the cost. We need to get NASA out of the business of doing things that the private sector can do, because otherwise the private sector will never get off the ground in those areas. Suborbital and LEO space tourism are the killer apps for private-sector crewed spaceflight. Let's unleash their energy and creativity to get that going, rather than spending public money on poorly engineered concepts for going back to to the moon.
The title of the slashdot article, "Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All," is misleading, although the summary is less misleading. There's no "after all." Here is the earlier paper, by Giddings and Mangano, which concluded that the LHC would not cause the end of the world. Here is the more recent paper, by Choptuik and Pretorius, referred to in the present slashdot summary.
The "after all" makes it sound as though the Choptuik paper contradicts the Giddings paper. It doesn't. Giddings and Choptuik agree that if the number of spacetime dimensions, D, equals 4, then black holes will not be formed at LHC energies. They agree that at much higher energies, with D=4, black holes will be formed. Choptuik checked the latter statement more carefully than had previously been done, and confirmed what everyone expected.
The LHC black hole doomsday scenarios all require D>4, and in addition they require a number of other implausible things to occur. The Choptuik calculation has little relevance to this discussion, because it just confirms something everyone was pretty sure was true anyway, without affecting the extreme unlikeliness of the long list of *other* things that would have to be true if you were to get an LHC black hole doomsday scenario.
I don't see anywhere in the Choptuik paper where they explicitly state that they're assuming D=4. But I think they must be, since, e.g., they refer to things like Petrov classification of spacetimes, which I think are specific to D=4.
By the way, a commonly quoted argument against the LHC black hole doomsday scenario is actually an oversimplification meant for consumption by nonscientists. The argument is that if such a thing was possible, it would actually already have happened to the earth because of cosmic-ray events. If you read the Giddings paper, there are some loopholes in this argument that they specifically identify. If the long list of implausible things actually all turn out to be true, then it is possible, in a certain specific example involving D=6 (see p. 28) that LHC collisions *would* destroy the earth after a lag of millions of years, while cosmic ray interactions would not. For that reason, they turn to arguments involving neutron stars and white dwarfs rather than planets. It turns out that this argument has no such loophole: even if the long list of implausible statements were all true, neutron stars and white dwarfs would already have been destroyed by cosmic rays. Since we observe that neutron stars and white dwarfs do exist, we conclude that the long list of implausible statements cannot be true. So I know it isn't as comforting to non-physicists as the argument based on the earth's present existence, but the argument based on neutron stars' and white dwarfs' existence is actually secure.
If you take a look at the paper, which is online and not paywalled, it's obvious junk science. They claim a correlation between mortality and sitting, and the abstract states that the variables they controlled for were "age, sex, waist circumference, and exercise." Well, watching eight hours a day of TV is probably negatively correlated with a lot of other variables, including general health, education, income, intelligence, and employment. And I would guess that mortality is probably also strongly negatively correlated with general health (duh), education, income, intelligence, and employment. On the second page of the paper, they say that they surveyed the participants for "demographic attributes" including education, but note that education is *not* listed in the abstract as one of the variables they controlled for. Look at table 1, and they show a clear anticorrelation between education and television viewing. On p. 387 they talk about how they tried to minimize the effect of the anticorrelations involving general health, but their method is pretty crude.
Actually the prediction of general relativity is that the field experienced by the earth would not change until 8 minutes later. The effect propagates as a gravitational wave, and the wave travels at c. Although gravitational waves have not yet been detected directly, there is extremely persuasive evidence that they exist, based on the observed orbital decay of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar.
Your post is basically on the right track, but some thing you say are not quite right.
Well, not quite.
In flat spacetime, velocities greater than c lead to violations of causality: observer 1 says that event A caused event B, but observer 2, in a different state of motion, says that B caused A. Since violation of causality can produce paradoxes, we suspect that cause and effect can't be propagated at velocities greater than c in flat spacetime.
In curved spacetime, this is far from being established. General relativity has spacetimes, such as the Godel solution, that are valid solutions of the field equations, and that violate causality. Hawking's chronology protection conjecture says that this kind of causality violation can't arise from realistic conditions in our universe -- but that's all it is, a conjecture. Nobody has proved it. In fact, there is a major current research program that consists of nothing more than trying to *define* rigorously what the chronology protection conjecture means.
Okay, but the prohibition on transmission of cause and effect at velocities greater than c isn't a conservation law.
I think the analogy here would be the following. Even the slashdot summary makes it clear that they aren't really claiming propagation of information at velocities greater than c. That's also reasonable, because although a neutron star is a relativistic object, it's not all that highly relativistic. Its structure is complicated from a nuclear physics point of view, but from the point of view of the relativistic description, it's a very plain vanilla solution of the Einstein field equations. If information was going to be transmitted at greater than c, then the chronology protection conjecture would also be violated, but that's not going to happen in such an ordinary, well studied spacetime.
It is not safe to use your criterion to rule out examples from general relativity without more attention to the details. Based on your criterion, the Godel spacetime has to be a crackpot idea, and so is the Alcubierre drive. In reality, there is a clear consensus among relativists that the spacetimes found by Godel and Alcubierre are correct -- it's just not clear how to interpret them, or whether they could actually arise from realistic conditions in our universe.
I've had sort of a similar issue, not with bots but with things known as "download managers" (example) Apparently people install a plugin in IE that is supposed to make their downloads go faster. If I'm understanding correctly, it opens up multiple http connections in order to retrieve the same file. I suspect it's basically snake oil. I suppose it might help in cases where the bottleneck isn't your own ISP but the overloaded server on the other end, although then you'd essentially be screwing the other users on the site in order to get more than your fair share. My site has a lot of books that are in the form of large PDF files. I'll get these users hitting my site, and it utterly brings my server to its knees. My apache logs show these people using up 50 Mb worth of data flow in order to download a 5 Mb pdf file. The only solution I've been able to find is to write a perl script that goes through my logs every 15 min looking for this pattern of usage. When it detects it, it writes to the .htaccess file to block that IP.
You're right, e.g., this page seems to have the whole text of the book. However, (a) it is kind of cool to see it so directly, as written by one of Newton's contemporaries, and (b) very few people probably know about it. I'm a physics teacher, and I've been telling people for years that the story was probably true because Newton's niece remembered him telling it to her. I'd never heard that Stukeley also attested to the story. Here's my own transcription of the relevant page.
There's also the question of whether the story was actually true. This page quotes Gauss as saying, "Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort: There comes to Newton a stupid importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. Newton. . . wanted to get rid of the man [and] told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied." Actually the Stukeley quote doesn't sound like that at all. It sounds more like Stukely was hanging out with his friend Newton, who was probably somewhere on the Asperger-autism spectrum, and Newton suddenly saw something that triggered a memory, and proceeded to give his friend a total core-dump on his scientific theory.
One of the reasons historians tend to be skeptical about this kind of thing is that scientists tend to rewrite history in order to make themselves seem more original, and their accomplishments more amazing. It's more glamorous to think that Miles Davis played jazz based on pure inspiration. It's less glamorous to imagine Miles Davis practicing scales and arpeggios for hour after hour. You get into similar issues when you try to figure out whether or not Einstein was really influenced by the Michelson-Morley experiment or not.
Newton was quite a character. He was actually more interested in alchemy and arian theology than in physics. If his religious views had been public, he'd have been prosecuted as a heretic for sure. He may have been gay (which would have been another way to get in big legal trouble in that century). (But don't believe the B.S. meme that he was an astrologer. He specifically went on record as saying that he looked into astrology and thought it was stupid.)
Sorry, but your interpretation in terms of Saudi Arabia really doesn't make sense to me. The 1991 invasion of Iraq was primarily aimed at taking Kuwait away from Iraq. Sure, Saudi Arabia wasn't happy about having Iraqi troops on their border, but that was secondary. The link gets even weaker when you talk about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was primarily an attempt to destroy Al Qaeda, and Bush apparently wanted to do that even before 9/11.
Hmm...well, I wasn't that familiar with Bin Laden's bio, but looking at the WP article, he actually started out by fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. When the US invaded Iraq in 1991, he criticized the Saudis for letting troops on American soil, so they banished him.
And when you come to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I really don't think it holds up if you try to analyze it as an action to protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam. Iraq's military capacity had been devastated in 1991. The WMD thing was obviously a baldfaced lie cooked up by Cheney as a pretext. (If they'd believed in it themselves, that would be hard to reconcile with the Valerie Plame affair and Powell's admission that he lied to the UN.) Since Bush and Cheney knew that Iraq had a degraded conventional military capacity and no WMDs, it doesn't make sense to say that the reason for the invasion was to protect Saudi Arabia. I think a more realistic assessment of the motivation for the war is that it was a political reaction to 9/11, based on an impulse to take military action as a response to do something -- anything -- in order to be seen as striking back forcefully. W was probably also predisposed to go along with Cheney because of a family grudge against Saddam, because of the Iraqi assassination plot in 1993.
You only quoted half the sentence. The whole sentence was quoted in the GP post: "Add Washington's propping up of dictatorial, repressive regimes in order to secure continuing access to oil and natural gas -- widely (and accurately) seen as one of the main reasons for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan." So he's not talking about Saudi Arabia, he's talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.