GPS satellites need their internal clocks corrected to take into account relativistic effects based on the speed they are going. And they are only travelling at about 4km per second.
So yeah, relativity does have an effect.
Absolutely. But the relativistic effects are extremely small at those speeds. For instance, the relativistic time dilation aboard a GPS satellite is about 1 part in 10^10.
Mercury orbits at half of those 100 km/s, and yet also at those orbital energies, curvature of space, you have to take into account relativistic effects to have any understanding of its orbit.
No, that's incorrect. Newtonian physics is an excellent approximation to the orbit of Mercury. The famous relativistic effects on Mercury's orbit are tiny. To see them, you have to subtract out a whole bunch of other effects, some of them a hundred times bigger than the relativistic one.
and hey, for supermassive black holes acceleration resulting in orbital velocity of 100 km/s might fall under rather small BTW
No, because the adjustable parameter in MOND is specifically tuned up so that you only get significant anomalous effects for stars farther out in the disks of galaxies. Comerford's paper says they expect the black-hole pairs to be separated by ~1 kpc, which is small compared to the size of a galaxy. If you estimate the acceleration from their numbers, you get a=v^2/r=(100 km/s)^2/(0.5 kpc)=6x10^-10 m/s2, which is about 5 times bigger than the a0 parameter in MOND, so you won't see any significant effect. This isn't a coincidence, because supermassive black holes are observed at the *centers* of galaxies, not out in the disks, whereas the MOND parameter is chosen so as to have an effect on the disk while leaving things at smaller radii alone.
At those masses, the choreographer is most likely Einstein
That's incorrect. The paper gives the orbital velocities as being ~100 km/s. If the black holes were close enough to one another for their orbits around their mutual center of mass to be significantly affected by relativity, their distance from one another would have to be comparable to the radii of their event horizons. But at a distance that's comparable to the radius of the event horizon, orbital velocities are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Since we observe that their orbital velocities are very small compared to the speed of light, it follows that their orbits are Newtonian to a good approximation.
that dark matter might be not the underlying cause of some discrepancy between how we think gravity works and what we are observing at galactic scales; we might as well have a different choreographer yet
I assume you're referring to something like MOND, in which case this is also incorrect. MOND gives significant corrections for objects with very small accelerations. These black holes actually have very big accelerations compared to the accelerations of ordinary disk stars, which are what MOND was invented to explain. Therefore even if MOND were right (which seems increasingly unlikely), it wouldn't be relevant for understanding these binary black holes' orbits.
The same thing occurred to me. Here is what appears to be the paper describing the observations. It's remarkably silent on whether any of this has implications for gravitational wave astronomy or tests of general relativity. They basically seem to see it as purely a way of finding out about evolution of galaxies. I guess the fact that these pairs are reasonably frequent implies that you can make reasonable estimates, probably for the first time, of the rate at which black hole collisions should be expected. I wonder to what extent these black hole pairs can be used as laboratories for testing general relativity in the same sense as the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, even before they merge. I guess the orbital periods would be very long, though.
He got paid a large amount of money for MySQL, and now he's not satisfied. MySQL is under GPL v. 2, so there isn't a problem. If Sun takes it in a bad direction, it can be forked.
I teach physics at a community college. As far as I understand, my school has no no blocking or censorship in general, although it's possible that, e.g., they block facebook on the special-purpose machines in the library that are meant only for looking up books in the catalog. I had a student who copied his lab partner's take-home exam while she wasn't looking, and also apparently was porn-surfing on the computer while he was supposed to be working on a lab with her. When I initiated student disciplinary proceedings against him, the dean made it very clear that popping up a naked woman's butt on a school computer wasn't the issue -- the student could have done that, and if it was for a valid academic purpose, it would have been okay. What was not okay was using the network for a purpose that was not school-related. Theoretically, he could have been surfing mylittlepony.com, and it would have been just as big a no-no, unless mylittlepony.com was somehow relevant to getting his schoolwork done. I have never, ever heard of a college or university in the US blocking or censoring internet access. That would be nuts. I'm shocked that the GP's school apparently does it. That's pathetic.
If your university had 1000 people per semester taking freshman calculus, did they have 1000 copies of the calculus textbook on the shelf? I believe that in Greece the government supplies all the textbooks to university students for free, but from what I've heard it's a terrible system in practice, very corrupt.
Haven't books really been open source all along anyway? They're not always copyright free, but anyone can read them.
The software terminology doesn't really map well onto books. With a book, here are some of the questions you can ask:
Is it in an editable format?
Is it in an openly defined, legally unencumbered format?
Can you sell it when you're done reading it?
Can you loan it to a friend?
Can you freely copy and redistribute it on a noncommercial basis?
Can you freely copy and redistribute it on a commercial basis?
For a Kindle e-book, the answer to all six questions is no. For a typical paper book that's still in copyright, the answers are no, yes, yes, yes, no, no. For wikipedia, the answers are all yes.
The word "source" doesn't have any useful meaning if you're talking about the Gutenberg Bible. It does have a useful meaning if you're talking about Wikipedia: the source code is the mediawiki markup, svg files for illustrations, etc.
Unfortunately the average person has very little idea what the term "open source" actually means. It's a technical term that's vague to them. These are the kind of people who probably also aren't clear on the term "operating system," etc.
I've seen both positive and negative misinterpretations flying around. The usage in TFA seems to be open source == piracy, or maybe open source == free as in beer. If you really parse the quote from the article in terms of the actual meaning of "open source," it doesn't make any sense. Actual quote: "With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." Meaning: "People on the internet are used to being able to see the original programming instructions used to create their software, and with that culture, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." It obviously doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't make sense when you consider that open-source licenses like BSD and GPL can only be enforced because the original authors own the copyright.
There are also people who see "open-source" as a feel-good term, like "green," and they apply it inappropriately because they want some of that goodness to rub off on them. For instance, I went to a symposium in August here in California where the results of Schwarzenegger's Free Digital Textbook Initiative were announced. Participants included open-source types from Curriki, CK-12, and Connexions, as well as teachers, politicians, IT folks, hardware vendors, and textbook publishers. The only traditional publisher that submitted any books to the initiative was Pearson, and all they submitted was a consumable workbook, not actual textbooks. Pearson's rep referred to its workbook as "free and open-source," but in fact the workbook is not open source in any sense. (It's distributed in a non-editable format, and it's not distributed under an open-source license.)
It's unfortunate that we haven't ended up with terminology that's more understandable to the average person. We had people like RMS advocating the term "free software," and others like Eric Raymond pushing for "open source." This had to do with an ideological agreement within the free software/OSS movement. The problem is that neither term is easy for outsiders to understand. "Free software" simply implies free as in beer to most people. They equate it to "freeware," i.e., low-quality, closed-source Windows software that you download from someone's Geocities page as a.exe file. "Open source" isn't understandable to most people, because they don't understand the distinction between source code and executable code.
The newest relevant scientific review article seems to be "Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review",
J. Philippe Rushton and C. Davison Ankney, International Journal of Neuroscience vol 119 issue 5 pages 692-732 (2009), available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668913/
Thanks for the link. My statement that there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence is clearly wrong.
On the other hand:
Correlation doesn't imply causation. For example, it's possible that high socioeconomic status causes both a more intellectually enriching environment and better nutrition, leading to bigger brains.
If you talk to anyone who's a professional in the field of educational measurement, they'll tell you that so-called "IQ tests" are extremely poorly constructed and poorly normed compared to the modern level of quality expected in standardized tests.
I thought it was interesting that the correlation vanished for certain types of mental ability. Traditionally, the ability to visualize rotations in three dimensions has been considered an important proxy for measuring mathematical and abstract reasoning. However, this kind of spatial ability is uncorrelated with brain size. This is an example of the fact that "IQ tests" lump together a lot of different things that may not really be related. Nobody can really say what scores on these tests mean. All they can say is that they're correlated with some other things, like professional success. They're strongly affected by things like training kids receive in school on how to take tests.
In the context of the fossil skulls we're talking about here, what's being measured in head size rather than brain size. According to the paper, the correlation between head size and IQ is only.2, which means that head size only accounts for 4% of the variance in IQ scores. (The correlation between brain size and IQ is higher, about.4, but even that only accounts for 16% of IQ variance.) 4% of variance doesn't seem like much to go on, especially if you're trying to interpret fossils of extinct people who can't be given IQ tests to find out if the correlation holds for them. Of the other 96% of the variance, presumably quite a bit is explained by environment, and quite a bit by genetic differences that don't fossilize.
Re fossilization, a member of the team is quoted in the WP as saying, "Starting from the DNA extracted from a fossil, it is and will remain impossible" [to clone a Neanderthal]. The article refers to fossilization later as well. Presumably the fossilization is incomplete.
If you compare across species, there is some correlation between brain size and intelligence, but not much. For instance, a whale's brain is a lot bigger than a human's, but there's no evidence that whales are all that much smarter than humans. Hamsters' brains are a lot smaller than horses', but they aren't dramatically dumber. The correlation gets somewhat stronger if you rate each species in terms of the ratio of brain size to body size. But in any case, the correlation is fairly weak, and is only a cross-species correlation. If you compare humans, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence. Women have smaller heads than men on the average, but they're not less intelligent.
The scientific consensus is that Boskop is not a separate species from H. Sapiens. Even if it was, the cross-species correlation is extremely loose, so you can't infer anything about one specific species. By the way, neanderthals also had bigger brains than humans, but the evidence is that they weren't any more intelligent. For example, there are areas where neanderthals and humans lived side by side for thousands of years, using identical types of tools. If the neanderthals were that much smarter than the humans, you'd think they'd have had fancier tools. Later on, humans started using more sophisticated tools (e.g., fish hooks and needles carved from bone), but IIRC the big-brained neanderthals never did.
Human intelligence depends a lot on specific genes, such as FOXP2. These genes have dramatic effects on intellectual ability, e.g., verbal ability. Families with abnormal FOXP2 have problems with language, but their brains are normal in size, and you wouldn't be able to tell them from normal humans based on their skulls. When you splice FOXP2 into mice, the baby mice vocalize differently than normal mice. But again, you wouldn't be able to tell the mice were abnormal based on their skulls. FOXP2 has been sequenced from DNA from Neanderthal fossils at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the result is that neanderthals have the same FOXP2 as modern humans. Note that they had to use molecular biology to find this out, though; you can't detect it by any amount of staring at the fossilized skulls.
Thanks for the link. The crucial part seems to be on p. 8. I just don't find his argument very plausible. Goodstein has to resort to "What he means to say is..." I've tried repeating the Millikan oil drop experiment using student-lab equipment, and it's an extremely difficult technique. I find it plausible that the technique can be used (1) to determine e based on a tendency for the charges to clump around certain values, but I don't find it plausible that it can be used (2) to disprove the existence of intermediate values of charge. It's #2 that Millikan really wanted to do, and he clearly made false statements in order to do so. Goodstein says that Millikan's selection of which points to publish didn't "bias" his result. I don't understand what he means by this. The graph on p. 7 shows that he threw out more points that disagreed with his hypothesis, and fewer points that agreed with it. This seems to clearly indicate that the selection biased the result.
Feyerabend and many other philosophers of science take a complementary stand to this by stressing the theory-ladenness of "facts."
Yep, they're totally right. For example, this 2003 paper claimed to have empirically verified the prediction of general relativity that gravitational forces propagate at the speed of light. The authors made some technical errors, which were rapidly pointed out by others in the field. The final answer is that actually nobody has the faintest clue how to test this specific, century-old prediction by Einstein. The reason is that nobody has figured out any alternative theory of gravity that (a) fits presently known experiments, and (b) predicts that gravitational forces propagate at some other velocity than the speed of light. There are other theories of gravity that satisfy a, and are inconsistent with general relativity, but they are all consistent with general relativity on b. Since there is no alternative theoretical framework, there is no way to design or analyze an experiment to test the question.
If the data don't make sense according to your theory, you don't discard the data, you discard the theory and work out a new one that fits the facts as you've observed them. TFA says that Dunbar was watching postdocs doing research, and if so, they should have known better. Alas, too many people who call themselves scientists are more interested in proving their pet theory true than in finding out what's actually going on.
This is a beautiful explanation of how science is supposed to work. In reality, science doesn't really work this way. It doesn't work this way in my experience as a scientist, and it doesn't work this way if you read the history of science.
For some good historical examples, see Microbe Hunters, by de Kruif (one of the best science books of all time, although you have to look past the racism in some places -- de Kruif was born in 1890). A good example from physics is the Millikan oil-drop experiment, where he threw out all the data that didn't fit what he was trying to prove -- but then claimed in his paper that he'd never thrown out any data. Galileo described lots of experiments as if he'd done them, even though he didn't actually do them, or they wouldn't have actually come out the way he described.
Michelson and Morley set out to prove the existence of the aether, published their results believing they must be wrong. Nobody else believed them, either. Various people then spent the next 30 years trying to fix the experiment by doing things like taking the apparatus up to the top of a mountain, or doing the experiment in a tent, so that the aether wouldn't be pulled along with the earth or the walls of a building. By the time Einstein published special relativity in 1905, most physicists had either never heard of the MM experiment, or considered it inconclusive.
When your results come out goofy, 99.9% of the time it's because you screwed up. You don't publish it, you go back and fix it. If every scientist published every result he didn't believe himself, the results would be disastrous. If you try over and over again to fix it, and you still fail, only then do you have to make a complicated judgment about whether to publish it or not.
The way science really works is not that scientists are disinterested. Scientists generally have extremely strong opinions that they set out to prove are true using experiments. The motivation is often that scientist A dislikes scientist B and wants to prove him wrong, or something similarly irrational, personal, or emotional. The reason this doesn't cause the downfall of science as an enterprise is that there are checks and balances built in. If A and B are enemies (and if you think the word "enemies" is too strong, you haven't spent much time around academics), and A publishes something, B may decide just to see if he can screw that sonofabitch A over by reproducing his work and finding something wrong with it. It's just like the adversarial system of justice. Society doesn't fall apart just because there are lawyers willing to represent nasty criminals. Einstein was famously asked what he would do if a certain experiment didn't come out consistent with relativity; his reply was that then the experiment would be wrong. Einstein fought against Bohr's quantum mechanics for decades. Bohr fought against Einstein's photons for decades. They were bitter rivals (and also good friends). It didn't matter that they were intensely prejudiced, and wrong 50% of the time; in the end, things sorted themselves out.
Isn't this a waldo, rather than a robot? My understanding is that a robot is defined as something that is at least somewhat autonomous, at least to the extent that it incorporates a feedback loop. For instance, some of the earliest robots from the mid-20th century were little things that rolled around on the floor searching for bright light. A Roomba is a robot. If all it does is shadow the motion of your hand, then I think it's called a waldo (named after a science fiction story by Robert Heinlein) or a remote manipulator. Most likely they're using the term "robot" because it makes a better marketing term.
No indicators, no action, as the number of indicators goes up, raise the response level to the appropriate level for the individual at hand. In other words, ACTUALLY USE THE RESULTS OF INVESTIGATION AND INTELLIGENCE IN A TIMELY AND APPROPRIATE MANNER. . .
This presupposes that the indicators are accurate. The TSA "threat levels" are nonsense. People get put on the TSA's lists simply because their names are similar to other people's names. People get beaten by border guards, or detained and interrogated for no apparent reason; want to know the reason, i.e., the "indicator?" -- you're not allowed to, because it's a secret.
I'm not criticizing you for disagreeing with Schneier. He's not a god or an oracle. But when you say "Bruce is only pointing out the obvious...," and then go on to contradict everything he says in the article, it does seem a little odd. Maybe we should check what he has to say about the "indicators" you want to put so much faith in -- "indicators" such as the TSA threat level and the no-fly list. You seem to be advocating strip-searching people because they show up on lists like the no-fly list. Schneier says the no-fly list is bogus.
In a RATIONAL world, **one** terrorism flag (i.e. one-way ticket, buying with cash, no luggage, watch list, etc) would yield pulling the passenger aside and "enhanced investigation": two flags, and the person is getting a very thorough body and luggage search, and three or more flags, it's grab the latex gloves, because it's a strip-search and fine-tooth comb search through luggage and posessions.
It's pretty evident from your remarks that you didn't actually read Schneier's article. He doesn't advocate anything like this.
Your post advocates focusing on airplanes. Schneier's article advocates not focusing on airplanes.
Your post advocates increased security at the airport. His article advocates "investigation, intelligence, and emergency response," i.e., old-fasioned police work to foil plots before they go into action.
Your post advocates strip searching people because a bureaucrat put their name on a list, presumably because you believe that if one guy put explosives in his underwear, the next guy will do that too. His article says, "We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning."
For Adobe Reader, the solution is really easy. Either install something faster and more secure as your browser's PDF plugin, or disable javascript in Adobe Reader. All the security vulnerabilities in AR have been related to javascript, which is a feature that almost nobody wants or needs in pdf files anyway.
I'm skeptical about any risk from flash. Flash apps run in a sandbox. Are they referring to things like malicious facebook apps? That seems like a relatively minor concern to me. Sure, it would be embarrassing to have all your facebook friends get spam from you, but the potential damage seems relatively minor. It can't take over your machine, can't access your banking info, etc. And of course flashblock, which I would never be without in any case, will protect you from running untrusted flash apps on random webpages that you hit.
One of the basic rules of the game for anyone who's a competent cryptographer is that if you're not selling snake-oil, you expose your algorithm to public scrutiny. The modern approach to crypto is based on the assumption that it's only the keys that are secret, not the algorithm. If you don't take this approach, then essentially you never have any way of knowing whether what you've got is any good. Imagine if Toyota thought that it was a good idea to suppress discussion and research about reports of uncontrolled acceleration in their cars. Now imagine that Toyota was able to get the government to pass a law suppressing such discussion. Then how would you ever know if your car was safe or not?
They can't even keep their story straight. First they say that the attack is "theoretically possible but practically unlikely." Then they say that it's so bad and evil that it's a good thing that "What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States." How can it be so bad and evil if it's not workable?
I can understand why companies that sell DRM'd media want to outlaw academic research into their encryption methods. It makes sense, because DRM is fundamentally snake-oil, and it can never be anything but snake oil. Therefore the only way they can keep on selling their snake oil is to forbid open discussion. This is why we have the anti-circumvention parts of the DMCA. It's an evil position, but it's an intelligent, self-consistent evil position.
But cell phone carriers really can provide good security, if they try hard enough. There is nothing fundamentally theoretically suspect about secure communication, as there is about DRM. So why do they need to try to suppress research? It seems like it would have to be because they're either incompetent or stupid.
Someone buys something for a couple bucks and suddenly you have to send payments of a few cents to three different places.
Yep, and there are practical issues that make it hard to work around this. E.g., one way to handle this would be to have a uniform internet-based system for making the necessary micropayments automatically. This would effectively mandate that every small business have a computer and a working internet connection, which would be unreasonable. You could get around that by making small businesses exempt, but (a) big businesses would complain about unfair competition, (b) you'd have to get every state to agree to such a system. The real killer is b. No way are all the states going to agree on such a thing.
Another way to handle it would be to set a standard federal sales tax of, say, 5%, and make it the only sales tax that could legally be applied to interstate transactions. This is close enough to the average state use/sales tax rate that it would eliminate most of the incentive to buy from out of state in order to avoid tax. But again, this isn't going to happen because the states would see it as a huge power grab by the federal government, and low-tax conservatives would see it as a de facto tax increase (even though it would really have a net effect more akin to simply enforcing the existing use tax laws).
Another solution: get every state to eliminate sales tax and raise other taxes to compensate. Problem: states like California are already in horrible budgetary straits because they depend too much on one type of tax, which fluctuates a lot.
Honestly, I always thought Knuth was kind of arrogant to ascribe this status to TeX, given that TeX is an absolute nightmare to use on a modern machine.
A modern TeX distribution is usually a 1.3gb download, doesn't support modern typefaces, and produces some of the most unintelligible error messages I've ever seen. To get other "modern" features (ie. embedding a.png or adding hyperlinks), you have to rely on unofficial extensions to the language.
I don't think anyone claims that the design of TeX is optimal. I don't think anyone claims that TeX is free of inconveniences in its design that are the way they are for historical reasons. The thing is that given the design, there is very little room for improvement. The current version is TeX is an extremely efficient, bug-free implementation of the design.
Using one of your examples, it's true that you can't embed a.png using Knuth tex; but you can using pdflatex. Ditto for hyperlinks. I guess you can consider pdflatex to be an "unofficial extension," but I don't really see why that's a problem. It works.
It's true that a complete TeX distribution is huge. However, you don't have to install the whole thing. E.g., Ubuntu breaks it down into lots of small packages.
The error messages are indeed lousy. However, this is basically a property of macro languages. Given the initial design decision to make it a macro language, it was kind of inevitable that it was going to have lousy error messages.
I don't really think bloat is an issue with Emacs any more. Not that it hasn't/won't grow in size over time but computers and other IDEs have far surpassed it.
I have a pretty modern machine, and the X-windows version of emacs (as opposed to emacs -nw) takes about 4 seconds to start up the first time, 2 seconds to start each time after that. To me, that's really unacceptable. Obviously a lot of other people consider it acceptable, but there is still clearly a lot of room for improvement.
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Absolutely. But the relativistic effects are extremely small at those speeds. For instance, the relativistic time dilation aboard a GPS satellite is about 1 part in 10^10.
No, that's incorrect. Newtonian physics is an excellent approximation to the orbit of Mercury. The famous relativistic effects on Mercury's orbit are tiny. To see them, you have to subtract out a whole bunch of other effects, some of them a hundred times bigger than the relativistic one.
No, because the adjustable parameter in MOND is specifically tuned up so that you only get significant anomalous effects for stars farther out in the disks of galaxies. Comerford's paper says they expect the black-hole pairs to be separated by ~1 kpc, which is small compared to the size of a galaxy. If you estimate the acceleration from their numbers, you get a=v^2/r=(100 km/s)^2/(0.5 kpc)=6x10^-10 m/s2, which is about 5 times bigger than the a0 parameter in MOND, so you won't see any significant effect. This isn't a coincidence, because supermassive black holes are observed at the *centers* of galaxies, not out in the disks, whereas the MOND parameter is chosen so as to have an effect on the disk while leaving things at smaller radii alone.
That's incorrect. The paper gives the orbital velocities as being ~100 km/s. If the black holes were close enough to one another for their orbits around their mutual center of mass to be significantly affected by relativity, their distance from one another would have to be comparable to the radii of their event horizons. But at a distance that's comparable to the radius of the event horizon, orbital velocities are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Since we observe that their orbital velocities are very small compared to the speed of light, it follows that their orbits are Newtonian to a good approximation.
I assume you're referring to something like MOND, in which case this is also incorrect. MOND gives significant corrections for objects with very small accelerations. These black holes actually have very big accelerations compared to the accelerations of ordinary disk stars, which are what MOND was invented to explain. Therefore even if MOND were right (which seems increasingly unlikely), it wouldn't be relevant for understanding these binary black holes' orbits.
The same thing occurred to me. Here is what appears to be the paper describing the observations. It's remarkably silent on whether any of this has implications for gravitational wave astronomy or tests of general relativity. They basically seem to see it as purely a way of finding out about evolution of galaxies. I guess the fact that these pairs are reasonably frequent implies that you can make reasonable estimates, probably for the first time, of the rate at which black hole collisions should be expected. I wonder to what extent these black hole pairs can be used as laboratories for testing general relativity in the same sense as the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, even before they merge. I guess the orbital periods would be very long, though.
He got paid a large amount of money for MySQL, and now he's not satisfied. MySQL is under GPL v. 2, so there isn't a problem. If Sun takes it in a bad direction, it can be forked.
I teach physics at a community college. As far as I understand, my school has no no blocking or censorship in general, although it's possible that, e.g., they block facebook on the special-purpose machines in the library that are meant only for looking up books in the catalog. I had a student who copied his lab partner's take-home exam while she wasn't looking, and also apparently was porn-surfing on the computer while he was supposed to be working on a lab with her. When I initiated student disciplinary proceedings against him, the dean made it very clear that popping up a naked woman's butt on a school computer wasn't the issue -- the student could have done that, and if it was for a valid academic purpose, it would have been okay. What was not okay was using the network for a purpose that was not school-related. Theoretically, he could have been surfing mylittlepony.com, and it would have been just as big a no-no, unless mylittlepony.com was somehow relevant to getting his schoolwork done. I have never, ever heard of a college or university in the US blocking or censoring internet access. That would be nuts. I'm shocked that the GP's school apparently does it. That's pathetic.
What country is this?
If your university had 1000 people per semester taking freshman calculus, did they have 1000 copies of the calculus textbook on the shelf? I believe that in Greece the government supplies all the textbooks to university students for free, but from what I've heard it's a terrible system in practice, very corrupt.
The software terminology doesn't really map well onto books. With a book, here are some of the questions you can ask:
For a Kindle e-book, the answer to all six questions is no. For a typical paper book that's still in copyright, the answers are no, yes, yes, yes, no, no. For wikipedia, the answers are all yes.
The word "source" doesn't have any useful meaning if you're talking about the Gutenberg Bible. It does have a useful meaning if you're talking about Wikipedia: the source code is the mediawiki markup, svg files for illustrations, etc.
Unfortunately the average person has very little idea what the term "open source" actually means. It's a technical term that's vague to them. These are the kind of people who probably also aren't clear on the term "operating system," etc.
I've seen both positive and negative misinterpretations flying around. The usage in TFA seems to be open source == piracy, or maybe open source == free as in beer. If you really parse the quote from the article in terms of the actual meaning of "open source," it doesn't make any sense. Actual quote: "With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." Meaning: "People on the internet are used to being able to see the original programming instructions used to create their software, and with that culture, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." It obviously doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't make sense when you consider that open-source licenses like BSD and GPL can only be enforced because the original authors own the copyright.
There are also people who see "open-source" as a feel-good term, like "green," and they apply it inappropriately because they want some of that goodness to rub off on them. For instance, I went to a symposium in August here in California where the results of Schwarzenegger's Free Digital Textbook Initiative were announced. Participants included open-source types from Curriki, CK-12, and Connexions, as well as teachers, politicians, IT folks, hardware vendors, and textbook publishers. The only traditional publisher that submitted any books to the initiative was Pearson, and all they submitted was a consumable workbook, not actual textbooks. Pearson's rep referred to its workbook as "free and open-source," but in fact the workbook is not open source in any sense. (It's distributed in a non-editable format, and it's not distributed under an open-source license.)
It's unfortunate that we haven't ended up with terminology that's more understandable to the average person. We had people like RMS advocating the term "free software," and others like Eric Raymond pushing for "open source." This had to do with an ideological agreement within the free software/OSS movement. The problem is that neither term is easy for outsiders to understand. "Free software" simply implies free as in beer to most people. They equate it to "freeware," i.e., low-quality, closed-source Windows software that you download from someone's Geocities page as a .exe file. "Open source" isn't understandable to most people, because they don't understand the distinction between source code and executable code.
Thanks for the link. My statement that there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence is clearly wrong.
On the other hand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project
Re fossilization, a member of the team is quoted in the WP as saying, "Starting from the DNA extracted from a fossil, it is and will remain impossible" [to clone a Neanderthal]. The article refers to fossilization later as well. Presumably the fossilization is incomplete.
Yep, the article is total nonsense.
If you compare across species, there is some correlation between brain size and intelligence, but not much. For instance, a whale's brain is a lot bigger than a human's, but there's no evidence that whales are all that much smarter than humans. Hamsters' brains are a lot smaller than horses', but they aren't dramatically dumber. The correlation gets somewhat stronger if you rate each species in terms of the ratio of brain size to body size. But in any case, the correlation is fairly weak, and is only a cross-species correlation. If you compare humans, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence. Women have smaller heads than men on the average, but they're not less intelligent. The scientific consensus is that Boskop is not a separate species from H. Sapiens. Even if it was, the cross-species correlation is extremely loose, so you can't infer anything about one specific species. By the way, neanderthals also had bigger brains than humans, but the evidence is that they weren't any more intelligent. For example, there are areas where neanderthals and humans lived side by side for thousands of years, using identical types of tools. If the neanderthals were that much smarter than the humans, you'd think they'd have had fancier tools. Later on, humans started using more sophisticated tools (e.g., fish hooks and needles carved from bone), but IIRC the big-brained neanderthals never did.
Human intelligence depends a lot on specific genes, such as FOXP2. These genes have dramatic effects on intellectual ability, e.g., verbal ability. Families with abnormal FOXP2 have problems with language, but their brains are normal in size, and you wouldn't be able to tell them from normal humans based on their skulls. When you splice FOXP2 into mice, the baby mice vocalize differently than normal mice. But again, you wouldn't be able to tell the mice were abnormal based on their skulls. FOXP2 has been sequenced from DNA from Neanderthal fossils at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the result is that neanderthals have the same FOXP2 as modern humans. Note that they had to use molecular biology to find this out, though; you can't detect it by any amount of staring at the fossilized skulls.
Thanks for the link. The crucial part seems to be on p. 8. I just don't find his argument very plausible. Goodstein has to resort to "What he means to say is ..." I've tried repeating the Millikan oil drop experiment using student-lab equipment, and it's an extremely difficult technique. I find it plausible that the technique can be used (1) to determine e based on a tendency for the charges to clump around certain values, but I don't find it plausible that it can be used (2) to disprove the existence of intermediate values of charge. It's #2 that Millikan really wanted to do, and he clearly made false statements in order to do so. Goodstein says that Millikan's selection of which points to publish didn't "bias" his result. I don't understand what he means by this. The graph on p. 7 shows that he threw out more points that disagreed with his hypothesis, and fewer points that agreed with it. This seems to clearly indicate that the selection biased the result.
There's a paywall. Maybe you could summarize for us?
Yep, they're totally right. For example, this 2003 paper claimed to have empirically verified the prediction of general relativity that gravitational forces propagate at the speed of light. The authors made some technical errors, which were rapidly pointed out by others in the field. The final answer is that actually nobody has the faintest clue how to test this specific, century-old prediction by Einstein. The reason is that nobody has figured out any alternative theory of gravity that (a) fits presently known experiments, and (b) predicts that gravitational forces propagate at some other velocity than the speed of light. There are other theories of gravity that satisfy a, and are inconsistent with general relativity, but they are all consistent with general relativity on b. Since there is no alternative theoretical framework, there is no way to design or analyze an experiment to test the question.
This is a beautiful explanation of how science is supposed to work. In reality, science doesn't really work this way. It doesn't work this way in my experience as a scientist, and it doesn't work this way if you read the history of science.
For some good historical examples, see Microbe Hunters, by de Kruif (one of the best science books of all time, although you have to look past the racism in some places -- de Kruif was born in 1890). A good example from physics is the Millikan oil-drop experiment, where he threw out all the data that didn't fit what he was trying to prove -- but then claimed in his paper that he'd never thrown out any data. Galileo described lots of experiments as if he'd done them, even though he didn't actually do them, or they wouldn't have actually come out the way he described.
Michelson and Morley set out to prove the existence of the aether, published their results believing they must be wrong. Nobody else believed them, either. Various people then spent the next 30 years trying to fix the experiment by doing things like taking the apparatus up to the top of a mountain, or doing the experiment in a tent, so that the aether wouldn't be pulled along with the earth or the walls of a building. By the time Einstein published special relativity in 1905, most physicists had either never heard of the MM experiment, or considered it inconclusive.
When your results come out goofy, 99.9% of the time it's because you screwed up. You don't publish it, you go back and fix it. If every scientist published every result he didn't believe himself, the results would be disastrous. If you try over and over again to fix it, and you still fail, only then do you have to make a complicated judgment about whether to publish it or not.
The way science really works is not that scientists are disinterested. Scientists generally have extremely strong opinions that they set out to prove are true using experiments. The motivation is often that scientist A dislikes scientist B and wants to prove him wrong, or something similarly irrational, personal, or emotional. The reason this doesn't cause the downfall of science as an enterprise is that there are checks and balances built in. If A and B are enemies (and if you think the word "enemies" is too strong, you haven't spent much time around academics), and A publishes something, B may decide just to see if he can screw that sonofabitch A over by reproducing his work and finding something wrong with it. It's just like the adversarial system of justice. Society doesn't fall apart just because there are lawyers willing to represent nasty criminals. Einstein was famously asked what he would do if a certain experiment didn't come out consistent with relativity; his reply was that then the experiment would be wrong. Einstein fought against Bohr's quantum mechanics for decades. Bohr fought against Einstein's photons for decades. They were bitter rivals (and also good friends). It didn't matter that they were intensely prejudiced, and wrong 50% of the time; in the end, things sorted themselves out.
Isn't this a waldo, rather than a robot? My understanding is that a robot is defined as something that is at least somewhat autonomous, at least to the extent that it incorporates a feedback loop. For instance, some of the earliest robots from the mid-20th century were little things that rolled around on the floor searching for bright light. A Roomba is a robot. If all it does is shadow the motion of your hand, then I think it's called a waldo (named after a science fiction story by Robert Heinlein) or a remote manipulator. Most likely they're using the term "robot" because it makes a better marketing term.
This presupposes that the indicators are accurate. The TSA "threat levels" are nonsense. People get put on the TSA's lists simply because their names are similar to other people's names. People get beaten by border guards, or detained and interrogated for no apparent reason; want to know the reason, i.e., the "indicator?" -- you're not allowed to, because it's a secret.
I'm not criticizing you for disagreeing with Schneier. He's not a god or an oracle. But when you say "Bruce is only pointing out the obvious...," and then go on to contradict everything he says in the article, it does seem a little odd. Maybe we should check what he has to say about the "indicators" you want to put so much faith in -- "indicators" such as the TSA threat level and the no-fly list. You seem to be advocating strip-searching people because they show up on lists like the no-fly list. Schneier says the no-fly list is bogus.
It's pretty evident from your remarks that you didn't actually read Schneier's article. He doesn't advocate anything like this.
Your post advocates focusing on airplanes. Schneier's article advocates not focusing on airplanes.
Your post advocates increased security at the airport. His article advocates "investigation, intelligence, and emergency response," i.e., old-fasioned police work to foil plots before they go into action.
Your post advocates strip searching people because a bureaucrat put their name on a list, presumably because you believe that if one guy put explosives in his underwear, the next guy will do that too. His article says, "We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning."
McAfee, of course, has a product to sell.
For Adobe Reader, the solution is really easy. Either install something faster and more secure as your browser's PDF plugin, or disable javascript in Adobe Reader. All the security vulnerabilities in AR have been related to javascript, which is a feature that almost nobody wants or needs in pdf files anyway.
I'm skeptical about any risk from flash. Flash apps run in a sandbox. Are they referring to things like malicious facebook apps? That seems like a relatively minor concern to me. Sure, it would be embarrassing to have all your facebook friends get spam from you, but the potential damage seems relatively minor. It can't take over your machine, can't access your banking info, etc. And of course flashblock, which I would never be without in any case, will protect you from running untrusted flash apps on random webpages that you hit.
One of the basic rules of the game for anyone who's a competent cryptographer is that if you're not selling snake-oil, you expose your algorithm to public scrutiny. The modern approach to crypto is based on the assumption that it's only the keys that are secret, not the algorithm. If you don't take this approach, then essentially you never have any way of knowing whether what you've got is any good. Imagine if Toyota thought that it was a good idea to suppress discussion and research about reports of uncontrolled acceleration in their cars. Now imagine that Toyota was able to get the government to pass a law suppressing such discussion. Then how would you ever know if your car was safe or not?
They can't even keep their story straight. First they say that the attack is "theoretically possible but practically unlikely." Then they say that it's so bad and evil that it's a good thing that "What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States." How can it be so bad and evil if it's not workable?
I can understand why companies that sell DRM'd media want to outlaw academic research into their encryption methods. It makes sense, because DRM is fundamentally snake-oil, and it can never be anything but snake oil. Therefore the only way they can keep on selling their snake oil is to forbid open discussion. This is why we have the anti-circumvention parts of the DMCA. It's an evil position, but it's an intelligent, self-consistent evil position.
But cell phone carriers really can provide good security, if they try hard enough. There is nothing fundamentally theoretically suspect about secure communication, as there is about DRM. So why do they need to try to suppress research? It seems like it would have to be because they're either incompetent or stupid.
Yep, and there are practical issues that make it hard to work around this. E.g., one way to handle this would be to have a uniform internet-based system for making the necessary micropayments automatically. This would effectively mandate that every small business have a computer and a working internet connection, which would be unreasonable. You could get around that by making small businesses exempt, but (a) big businesses would complain about unfair competition, (b) you'd have to get every state to agree to such a system. The real killer is b. No way are all the states going to agree on such a thing.
Another way to handle it would be to set a standard federal sales tax of, say, 5%, and make it the only sales tax that could legally be applied to interstate transactions. This is close enough to the average state use/sales tax rate that it would eliminate most of the incentive to buy from out of state in order to avoid tax. But again, this isn't going to happen because the states would see it as a huge power grab by the federal government, and low-tax conservatives would see it as a de facto tax increase (even though it would really have a net effect more akin to simply enforcing the existing use tax laws).
Another solution: get every state to eliminate sales tax and raise other taxes to compensate. Problem: states like California are already in horrible budgetary straits because they depend too much on one type of tax, which fluctuates a lot.
I don't think anyone claims that the design of TeX is optimal. I don't think anyone claims that TeX is free of inconveniences in its design that are the way they are for historical reasons. The thing is that given the design, there is very little room for improvement. The current version is TeX is an extremely efficient, bug-free implementation of the design.
Using one of your examples, it's true that you can't embed a .png using Knuth tex; but you can using pdflatex. Ditto for hyperlinks. I guess you can consider pdflatex to be an "unofficial extension," but I don't really see why that's a problem. It works.
It's true that a complete TeX distribution is huge. However, you don't have to install the whole thing. E.g., Ubuntu breaks it down into lots of small packages.
The error messages are indeed lousy. However, this is basically a property of macro languages. Given the initial design decision to make it a macro language, it was kind of inevitable that it was going to have lousy error messages.
I have a pretty modern machine, and the X-windows version of emacs (as opposed to emacs -nw) takes about 4 seconds to start up the first time, 2 seconds to start each time after that. To me, that's really unacceptable. Obviously a lot of other people consider it acceptable, but there is still clearly a lot of room for improvement.