Stop overreacting, that is old news and long since fixed.
Letting someone else's code run on my computer is an act of trust. Once they've shown they're untrustworthy, that's it, as far as I'm concerned. The world's best security software is no good if the author is someone who's demonstrated at least once that you can't trust him.
NoScript is no more "malware" than Firefox itself.
This is an interesting statement, but I don't understand your reasoning. Maybe you could explain more. Have the developers of Firefox done something untrustworthy?
I'm sure you have more crapware and malware installed on your computer that you're blissfully unaware of than you care to admit,
I don't understand how you know so much about my computer. Maybe you could explain more how you became so well informed about what's on my hard disk. I'm running Ubuntu. Are you aware of a lot of crapware that comes with a freshly installed Ubuntu system? Are you aware of a lot of malware that's been observed in the wild infecting Ubuntu systems? If so, I'd be very interested to hear about it.
Hmm...my GP post is modded -1 troll, and the parent post, which says "This is not a troll," and explains why, is also modded -1 troll. It's too bad that you can't both mod and comment; I'd have liked to know why the mods thought there was something trollish about both posts.
I'd care a lot more about this if NoScript was still a viable option. NoScript has become malware at this point. The real issue is the need for someone more trustworthy to make a simpler, and more trustworthy replacement for NoScript. Please? Pretty please?
His brother, Even Magnar Strindmo, is also an IT professional. Even, like his brother Odd, has been testing candidates since 1996. The latest candidate in Even's search was 2^42,643,801-2, which was found to be composite. The very next number, 2^42,643,801-1, was the one his brother found to be prime. "Yeah, it kind of hurts to get so close and not be the one who got it," admits Even, "but I gave it my best game. We agreed back in '96 that we'd split up the work and go even-odd. I guess it was just a matter of luck that he got the first prime. I'm going to keep on trying, though. He's ahead now, 1-0, but if we keep going, I figure at some point I'll pull ahead."
>>The idea is to use it on crowds of people at sports events, etc
>These things are expensive. They're not going to sit there just for Superbowl Sunday or whatever. They'll be used for as much surveillance as they can get away with. Whether it's a good idea or not. Think 'mission creep'.
The slippery slope is always something to worry about. But I'd like to hear a realistic description of how that would work here. Its overhead point of view, hundreds of feet up, is going to give it mostly blurry shots of the tops of people's heads, with the line of sight often blocked by buildings. Suppose I wanted to use this thing for Maximum Evil. What exactly would I do?
To me, it seems inherently less worrisome than the pervasive surveillance cameras on the streets in many places in the UK. For one thing, it's going to be pretty obvious that there's a blimp in the sky, whereas it's pretty easy to miss the fact that there's a surveillance camera mounted high up on a building. There's the whole creepy thing in the UK with the voice from the video camera scolding you for spitting on the sidewalk; that can't be done with the blimp, either.
The fact that this is in yro makes it sound like someone thought it would be a privacy issue, but I don't see why. The idea is to use it on crowds of people at sports events, etc., where they don't have any expectation of privacy. Viewing from 500 feet and at a high angle, with a field of view wide enough to take in the whole crowd, they're not going to be able to identify individuals. They propose zooming in to a particular region if there are gunshots or something, and maybe then, if the angle is appropriate, they could get some kind of view of an individual's face, although it seems unlikely. What makes surveillance like this scary is if it (a) goes into places where you do have an expectation of privacy (like the Obama administration's plans to read email that crosses international borders), (b) is ubiquitous (as it is in the UK), (c) raises the prospect of aggregating data in creepy ways (like being denied health insurance because you buy too much vodka with your preferred customer card at Albertson's), or (d) forces us to take the government's word that it isn't going to be used more than they said (like the Bush administration's wiretaps). The blimp concept doesn't seem to lend itself to any of these.
I would post this on Boing Boing, but I was banned for posting something similar.
I like Doctorow's writing, and I used to enjoy reading and posting on boingboing. What drove me away from boingboing was their habit of deleting posts, etc. The problem is that Doctorow (a) is the world champion at self-promotion, (b) encourages people to form a community on boingboing, rather than treating it as a personal blog, (c) has a habit of getting into controversies, and (d) has folks working on boingboing who delete posts that he doesn't like.
There would be nothing wrong with d, deleting posts, if it weren't for b and c. If you try to take the other side on one of the controversies, your post gets deleted. That means it's not really a community, it's cheerleading section.
Will the solution to a problem often have only one series of steps, in one order? As in - is it possible to tell that the (correct) answer a student gives is his own, or from a third party?
I think your comparison with computer code is a good one. In both cases, there's typically a huge amount of variation between one person's work and another's, if they really worked independently. (Students are often very naive about this, which can make it easy to tell what they're doing. They think it's just "the answer" to the problem.)
I teach physics at a community college. Based on my own experiences, some of this speculation seems overblown to me.
His concern is that professors may need to adapt their assignments or test questions.
I don't understand the part about test questions. Students aren't normally allowed at access the internet during an exam, and WA is a web-based service, so this seems like a total non-issue.
When it comes to homework, I can see slightly more reason for concern, but only slightly. Any math or science teacher who's collected homework papers knows that some students will always try to copy the answers from each other. Whatever way you have of handling that, I would think it would still work if they were getting their answers from WA. (Possible ways of handling it include not allowing students to turn in identical papers, or not counting homework for very much compared to exams.)
I don't see why it's a big deal that WA can show the steps it took to get the answer. That just makes it easier to tell whether the student is using WA. If 5 students in a class of 20 are using WA on their homework, it'll be pretty obvious that they all wrote down exactly the same steps in exactly the same order. This is very much like the situation where you hand out homework solutions every semester, and a student starts turning in homework papers that are verbatim copies of the homework solutions.
One thing that I really haven't liked in the past was that for a lot of the math classes at my school, they required students to buy a specific brand of graphing calculator, for about $300. That's a heck of a lot of money for a lot of broke community college students, and I don't see why a student who wants to learn calculus without a graphing calculator should have to buy one. There's actually quite a bit of FOSS symbolic math out there, e.g., sage, maxima, wxmaxima, yacas, and axiom. If the student has access to a computer, they can use one of those. If the student doesn't have access to a computer, then a web-based service like WA isn't going to make any difference. When it comes to web-based apps, integrals.com has been around for years now, so this isn't a new issue.
The problem at the bottom of all this is the existence of local broadband monopolies. If local broadband markets weren't monopolies, there'd be no problem. Disney could try to extort money from ISP #1, in order to force all of 1's customers to pay an ESPN tax, regardless of whether they wanted to view ESPN via the internet or not. If there was a second ISP, then ISP #2 could position itself as the no-frills ISP in the area, not offering ESPN, and people like me who aren't interested in ESPN would go with ISP #2. In this competitive economic environment, Disney's business plan wouldn't work. All they'd accomplish would be to create a class of users, the customers of ISP #2, who wouldn't even have the option of paying to view ESPN if they wanted to. Disney would recognize that, and wouldn't try this business plan in the first place.
1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.
Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com.
Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net, which is now a redirect to his own blog because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.
The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.
Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)
In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs likethese.
What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.
Yep, that would be this bug, which, like pretty much all bugs in slashcode, will probably not get fixed.
And then there's this bug, which they don't seem to be in any hurry to deal with. If you read through the comments on the bug, they add up to complete info on how to reproduce and fix the bug. The bug only occurs for stories in certain slashdot sections, because only those sections' CSS is messed up. So all they had to do to fix it was to copy the correct CSS out of the not-broken files into the broken files.
Are you arguing that we don't understand the equations that describe the lowest level strong force interactions, or are you saying that we don't know any way to apply the equations to come up with answers for most real world situations?
I think we do have a complete model of the underlying interactions that we believe would churn out the right answer if we knew how to apply it correctly.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/31/8/E01 looked like a good overview of the issues.
I'd say that the abstract you linked to pretty much confirms what I was saying. (It's been 13 years since I did research in low-energy nuclear structure physics, and I haven't been reading the literature since then, but I have been keeping up to some extent via newspaper articles, etc. I know, for example, that there's been some encouraging success since then with applying QCD to systems with A<=2.)
Do you happen to know if we understand strong force, but the problem is that our model is extremely complex to solve in almost all real world scenarios, or if we just don't understand the low level? QCD should be our explanation of strong force,
The strong force is really an interaction between quarks and gluons. The problem is that nobody has the faintest idea how to calculate anything about the properties of a nucleus by treating it as a system of quarks. When we try to write down equations to approximate, say, the force between a neutron and a proton, we're already making an approximation to treat them as two bodies instead of six. Even if we had techniques of calculation that would allow us to get reasonable answers from a many-quark model, the model would have a ton of adjustable parameters. All you'd be able to do is to fit those parameters to the experimental data, but that doesn't mean you've got a true expression for the interaction. You'd just have another approximation.
What's interesting about this kind of thing is that it's getting very close to the island of stability, which is a predicted set of heavy elements that would be stable with respect to fission. What they made is Z=112 (number of protons) and N=165 (number of neutrons), which is a little on the neutron-deficient side of the island in the WP article's chart. If you want to go nuts with far-future scientific extrapolation, it's conceivable that if you could make the isotopes on the actual island of stability, you could actually have macroscopic quantities of the stuff. It would probably be extremely susceptible to neutron-induced fission, so you could probably make a nuclear bomb the size of a pencil eraser. Arms control would get really tough! So maybe it's fortunate that there are extremely difficult technical problems to be solved before we can get there.
To a nuclear physicist, what's more interesting about this kind of thing is that it's a sensitive test of models of nuclear forces and models of the many-body problem. The strong nuclear force isn't like gravity and electromagnetism, which are simple 1/r^2 forces; it doesn't have simple mathematical behavior, and all we have are approximations to its behavior. Also, many-body problems -- even classical many-body problems -- are really tough.
Technetium, element 43, has no stable isotopes. Do you want to forbid people from referring to it as an element? That would be kind of silly. Chemists can do reactions with technetium, form compounds with it, etc.
Or if you want to arbitrarily pick some minimum half-life, what is that half-life going to be?
Charge-backs aren't always that easy to do. I had one that I thought was super-straightforward (merchant charged me twice in a row for the same thing, and wouldn't communicate with me about the problem), but the cc company wouldn't do the chargeback because my evidence didn't convince them.
If you've got a recurring charge that you want to cancel, and you have a feeling that the company might be sleazy about it, the simplest thing to do is just cancel the cc number associated with the periodic billing, and have your cc company set you up with a new card and a new number. Same thing you'd do for any other kind of fraud, such as identity theft. If you have other recurring payments on that card, you do have to change them to the new number, but that's probably less than half an hour of work if you don't have too many of them -- that's a lot less than the amount of time you could spend banging your head against the wall trying to deal with the dishonest company that's the source of the problem.
Trying the charge-back can't hurt, of course. If the merchant is both small and sleazy, it might actually have a significant effect on them. If there are enough charge-backs, the cc company will shift them to a higher-risk category (which costs the merchant money).
The sleaziest example of abusive recurring charges I ever had to deal with was with the company that was providing me with a merchant credit card account. I canceled the account, but then a year later their charges mysteriously started showing up on my monthly cc bill again. Getting a new account number was my cc company's suggestion. Worked great.
>>Pixar-style CG movies are kind of a unique and interesting example of a purely digital form of entertainment that absolutely can't exist without copyright laws.
>But do Pixar-style CG films require a 95-year copyright term?
If I had to make a completely uninformed guess, I'd say that they required at least a 5-year copyright term.
I get the impression that they're fairly well insulated from Disney's pressure. I think Disney realizes that they were digging themselves into a big hole with their own crummy animated movies leading up to the time when they bought Pixar. "Wall-E" took a lot of commercial risks, with the long, no-dialog intro and the overt political satire. "Up" dismayed the marketing types by having almost no merchandising opportunities (want to buy action figures of an old guy or a chubby boy scout?). Basically they've been putting the story first, and it's actually been a real winning strategy for them in commercial terms. Making some sequels doesn't necessarily equate to being commercial sell-outs; it depends entirely on whether the sequels are good, which we have no way of knowing about right now.
I'd watch for the big pressure toward commercialism to happen if and when Pixar makes its first big box-office flop.
By the way, Pixar-style CG movies are kind of a unique and interesting example of a purely digital form of entertainment that absolutely can't exist without copyright laws. If copyright was abolished tomorrow, we'd still have garage bands, we'd still have (low-budget) movies, and we'd still have novels (which most novelists don't make enough profit from to live on anyway). But a CG movie is an art form that by its nature requires a very large budget. It's not the render farm, it's the incredible number of hours of labor that go into those movies.
Then what happens if for some reason these textbooks are not cross platform? What if they restrict access to only Windows machines, or Windows and Mac? [...] What happens if their computer is too old to properly render the site?
I'm participating in this initiative as an author, and the paperwork they made me fill out made it very clear that they'd thought about issues like these. I had to check a box on a form to say that the Adobe Reader plugin would be needed. I also had to fill in blanks saying what versions of IE and Firefox would work. As far as restricting access, you seem to be envisioning the kind of proprietary cruft that a traditional publisher would impose. This initiative is only dealing with free textbooks, which guarantees zero participation from traditional publishers.
online textbooks if they don't come with a hard-bound textbook are a bad idea.
The initiative is only dealing with free textbooks. Therefore (a) the books are not going to come with a physical object that would cost money to produce, but (b) there's nothing stopping anyone from just going ahead and printing copies. The Schwarzenegger opinion piece says, "Even if teachers have to print out some of the material, it will be far cheaper than regularly buying updated textbooks," so I think they're anticipating that. Self-service laser printing usually comes out to about 5 cents a page, which is quite a bit cheaper than the typical cost of a textbook (say $150 for 500 pages, which comes out to 30 cents a page). The real issue is durability. Print-on-demand houses will print and bind books for more like 3-5 cents a page, and that really works out to be a winning solution, because that type of bound book is durable enough to last for a while, but still an order of magnitude cheaper than traditional textbooks.
Printing doesn't really cost that much. Spending $10 to print and spiralbind a textbook is a lot cheaper than paying $150 for a hardcover version. Need someone to print and do the binding? Hire students over the summer and on breaks and have them do the work.
Yep.
Note Schwarzenegger's remark in the opinion piece linked to from the slashdot summary: "Even if teachers have to print out some of the material, it will be far cheaper than regularly buying updated textbooks."
But if you want a bound copy, it really no longer makes sense to DIY the way you're descibing, with labor-intensive laser-printing and countertop spiral binding. Print on demand has changed all that. For example, lulu.com will do it for about 3 cents a page (depending on quantity, page count, and quality of paper), which is significantly less than the cost of paper, toner, and binding supplies for a DIY operation, even assuming zero labor cost. And what you get is a nice, durable perfect-bound book, not something spiral-bound that will get destroyed rapidly in kids' backpacks.
[...] at the moment, there isn't a lot of high-quality free information out there. [...] You have to PAY people to produce stuff like that[...]
See my sig for hundreds of counterexamples.
[...] and it takes time.
But authors have already been doing this for years.
The project is only dealing with free textbooks, which means it is going to have zero participation from traditional textook publishers. (For confirmation that it's only about free books, see the project's web site, http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm, and the Schwarzenegger opinion piece linked to from the slashdot summary.)
Many, if not all over time, of the books may end up being "free"
100% of them will be free from the start. The project is called the Free Digital Textbook Initiative. Notice the word "free." Schwarzenegger's opinion piece in the Mercury News (linked to from the slashdot summary) confirms this: "this initiative paves the way for easier access to free digital texts in California's schools."
Slashdot Mirror
Letting someone else's code run on my computer is an act of trust. Once they've shown they're untrustworthy, that's it, as far as I'm concerned. The world's best security software is no good if the author is someone who's demonstrated at least once that you can't trust him.
This is an interesting statement, but I don't understand your reasoning. Maybe you could explain more. Have the developers of Firefox done something untrustworthy?
I don't understand how you know so much about my computer. Maybe you could explain more how you became so well informed about what's on my hard disk. I'm running Ubuntu. Are you aware of a lot of crapware that comes with a freshly installed Ubuntu system? Are you aware of a lot of malware that's been observed in the wild infecting Ubuntu systems? If so, I'd be very interested to hear about it.
Hmm...my GP post is modded -1 troll, and the parent post, which says "This is not a troll," and explains why, is also modded -1 troll. It's too bad that you can't both mod and comment; I'd have liked to know why the mods thought there was something trollish about both posts.
I'd care a lot more about this if NoScript was still a viable option. NoScript has become malware at this point. The real issue is the need for someone more trustworthy to make a simpler, and more trustworthy replacement for NoScript. Please? Pretty please?
His brother, Even Magnar Strindmo, is also an IT professional. Even, like his brother Odd, has been testing candidates since 1996. The latest candidate in Even's search was 2^42,643,801-2, which was found to be composite. The very next number, 2^42,643,801-1, was the one his brother found to be prime. "Yeah, it kind of hurts to get so close and not be the one who got it," admits Even, "but I gave it my best game. We agreed back in '96 that we'd split up the work and go even-odd. I guess it was just a matter of luck that he got the first prime. I'm going to keep on trying, though. He's ahead now, 1-0, but if we keep going, I figure at some point I'll pull ahead."
The slippery slope is always something to worry about. But I'd like to hear a realistic description of how that would work here. Its overhead point of view, hundreds of feet up, is going to give it mostly blurry shots of the tops of people's heads, with the line of sight often blocked by buildings. Suppose I wanted to use this thing for Maximum Evil. What exactly would I do?
To me, it seems inherently less worrisome than the pervasive surveillance cameras on the streets in many places in the UK. For one thing, it's going to be pretty obvious that there's a blimp in the sky, whereas it's pretty easy to miss the fact that there's a surveillance camera mounted high up on a building. There's the whole creepy thing in the UK with the voice from the video camera scolding you for spitting on the sidewalk; that can't be done with the blimp, either.
The fact that this is in yro makes it sound like someone thought it would be a privacy issue, but I don't see why. The idea is to use it on crowds of people at sports events, etc., where they don't have any expectation of privacy. Viewing from 500 feet and at a high angle, with a field of view wide enough to take in the whole crowd, they're not going to be able to identify individuals. They propose zooming in to a particular region if there are gunshots or something, and maybe then, if the angle is appropriate, they could get some kind of view of an individual's face, although it seems unlikely. What makes surveillance like this scary is if it (a) goes into places where you do have an expectation of privacy (like the Obama administration's plans to read email that crosses international borders), (b) is ubiquitous (as it is in the UK), (c) raises the prospect of aggregating data in creepy ways (like being denied health insurance because you buy too much vodka with your preferred customer card at Albertson's), or (d) forces us to take the government's word that it isn't going to be used more than they said (like the Bush administration's wiretaps). The blimp concept doesn't seem to lend itself to any of these.
I like Doctorow's writing, and I used to enjoy reading and posting on boingboing. What drove me away from boingboing was their habit of deleting posts, etc. The problem is that Doctorow (a) is the world champion at self-promotion, (b) encourages people to form a community on boingboing, rather than treating it as a personal blog, (c) has a habit of getting into controversies, and (d) has folks working on boingboing who delete posts that he doesn't like.
There would be nothing wrong with d, deleting posts, if it weren't for b and c. If you try to take the other side on one of the controversies, your post gets deleted. That means it's not really a community, it's cheerleading section.
I think your comparison with computer code is a good one. In both cases, there's typically a huge amount of variation between one person's work and another's, if they really worked independently. (Students are often very naive about this, which can make it easy to tell what they're doing. They think it's just "the answer" to the problem.)
I teach physics at a community college. Based on my own experiences, some of this speculation seems overblown to me.
I don't understand the part about test questions. Students aren't normally allowed at access the internet during an exam, and WA is a web-based service, so this seems like a total non-issue.
When it comes to homework, I can see slightly more reason for concern, but only slightly. Any math or science teacher who's collected homework papers knows that some students will always try to copy the answers from each other. Whatever way you have of handling that, I would think it would still work if they were getting their answers from WA. (Possible ways of handling it include not allowing students to turn in identical papers, or not counting homework for very much compared to exams.)
I don't see why it's a big deal that WA can show the steps it took to get the answer. That just makes it easier to tell whether the student is using WA. If 5 students in a class of 20 are using WA on their homework, it'll be pretty obvious that they all wrote down exactly the same steps in exactly the same order. This is very much like the situation where you hand out homework solutions every semester, and a student starts turning in homework papers that are verbatim copies of the homework solutions.
One thing that I really haven't liked in the past was that for a lot of the math classes at my school, they required students to buy a specific brand of graphing calculator, for about $300. That's a heck of a lot of money for a lot of broke community college students, and I don't see why a student who wants to learn calculus without a graphing calculator should have to buy one. There's actually quite a bit of FOSS symbolic math out there, e.g., sage, maxima, wxmaxima, yacas, and axiom. If the student has access to a computer, they can use one of those. If the student doesn't have access to a computer, then a web-based service like WA isn't going to make any difference. When it comes to web-based apps, integrals.com has been around for years now, so this isn't a new issue.
The problem at the bottom of all this is the existence of local broadband monopolies. If local broadband markets weren't monopolies, there'd be no problem. Disney could try to extort money from ISP #1, in order to force all of 1's customers to pay an ESPN tax, regardless of whether they wanted to view ESPN via the internet or not. If there was a second ISP, then ISP #2 could position itself as the no-frills ISP in the area, not offering ESPN, and people like me who aren't interested in ESPN would go with ISP #2. In this competitive economic environment, Disney's business plan wouldn't work. All they'd accomplish would be to create a class of users, the customers of ISP #2, who wouldn't even have the option of paying to view ESPN if they wanted to. Disney would recognize that, and wouldn't try this business plan in the first place.
Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com. Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net, which is now a redirect to his own blog because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.
The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.
Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)
In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs like these.
What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.
Yep, that would be this bug, which, like pretty much all bugs in slashcode, will probably not get fixed.
And then there's this bug, which they don't seem to be in any hurry to deal with. If you read through the comments on the bug, they add up to complete info on how to reproduce and fix the bug. The bug only occurs for stories in certain slashdot sections, because only those sections' CSS is messed up. So all they had to do to fix it was to copy the correct CSS out of the not-broken files into the broken files.
Both.
I'd say that the abstract you linked to pretty much confirms what I was saying. (It's been 13 years since I did research in low-energy nuclear structure physics, and I haven't been reading the literature since then, but I have been keeping up to some extent via newspaper articles, etc. I know, for example, that there's been some encouraging success since then with applying QCD to systems with A<=2.)
The strong force is really an interaction between quarks and gluons. The problem is that nobody has the faintest idea how to calculate anything about the properties of a nucleus by treating it as a system of quarks. When we try to write down equations to approximate, say, the force between a neutron and a proton, we're already making an approximation to treat them as two bodies instead of six. Even if we had techniques of calculation that would allow us to get reasonable answers from a many-quark model, the model would have a ton of adjustable parameters. All you'd be able to do is to fit those parameters to the experimental data, but that doesn't mean you've got a true expression for the interaction. You'd just have another approximation.
What's interesting about this kind of thing is that it's getting very close to the island of stability, which is a predicted set of heavy elements that would be stable with respect to fission. What they made is Z=112 (number of protons) and N=165 (number of neutrons), which is a little on the neutron-deficient side of the island in the WP article's chart. If you want to go nuts with far-future scientific extrapolation, it's conceivable that if you could make the isotopes on the actual island of stability, you could actually have macroscopic quantities of the stuff. It would probably be extremely susceptible to neutron-induced fission, so you could probably make a nuclear bomb the size of a pencil eraser. Arms control would get really tough! So maybe it's fortunate that there are extremely difficult technical problems to be solved before we can get there.
To a nuclear physicist, what's more interesting about this kind of thing is that it's a sensitive test of models of nuclear forces and models of the many-body problem. The strong nuclear force isn't like gravity and electromagnetism, which are simple 1/r^2 forces; it doesn't have simple mathematical behavior, and all we have are approximations to its behavior. Also, many-body problems -- even classical many-body problems -- are really tough.
Technetium, element 43, has no stable isotopes. Do you want to forbid people from referring to it as an element? That would be kind of silly. Chemists can do reactions with technetium, form compounds with it, etc.
Or if you want to arbitrarily pick some minimum half-life, what is that half-life going to be?
Cool, thanks for the links! My daughter and her friend liked Big Buck Bunny.
Charge-backs aren't always that easy to do. I had one that I thought was super-straightforward (merchant charged me twice in a row for the same thing, and wouldn't communicate with me about the problem), but the cc company wouldn't do the chargeback because my evidence didn't convince them.
If you've got a recurring charge that you want to cancel, and you have a feeling that the company might be sleazy about it, the simplest thing to do is just cancel the cc number associated with the periodic billing, and have your cc company set you up with a new card and a new number. Same thing you'd do for any other kind of fraud, such as identity theft. If you have other recurring payments on that card, you do have to change them to the new number, but that's probably less than half an hour of work if you don't have too many of them -- that's a lot less than the amount of time you could spend banging your head against the wall trying to deal with the dishonest company that's the source of the problem.
Trying the charge-back can't hurt, of course. If the merchant is both small and sleazy, it might actually have a significant effect on them. If there are enough charge-backs, the cc company will shift them to a higher-risk category (which costs the merchant money).
The sleaziest example of abusive recurring charges I ever had to deal with was with the company that was providing me with a merchant credit card account. I canceled the account, but then a year later their charges mysteriously started showing up on my monthly cc bill again. Getting a new account number was my cc company's suggestion. Worked great.
If I had to make a completely uninformed guess, I'd say that they required at least a 5-year copyright term.
I get the impression that they're fairly well insulated from Disney's pressure. I think Disney realizes that they were digging themselves into a big hole with their own crummy animated movies leading up to the time when they bought Pixar. "Wall-E" took a lot of commercial risks, with the long, no-dialog intro and the overt political satire. "Up" dismayed the marketing types by having almost no merchandising opportunities (want to buy action figures of an old guy or a chubby boy scout?). Basically they've been putting the story first, and it's actually been a real winning strategy for them in commercial terms. Making some sequels doesn't necessarily equate to being commercial sell-outs; it depends entirely on whether the sequels are good, which we have no way of knowing about right now.
I'd watch for the big pressure toward commercialism to happen if and when Pixar makes its first big box-office flop.
By the way, Pixar-style CG movies are kind of a unique and interesting example of a purely digital form of entertainment that absolutely can't exist without copyright laws. If copyright was abolished tomorrow, we'd still have garage bands, we'd still have (low-budget) movies, and we'd still have novels (which most novelists don't make enough profit from to live on anyway). But a CG movie is an art form that by its nature requires a very large budget. It's not the render farm, it's the incredible number of hours of labor that go into those movies.
I'm participating in this initiative as an author, and the paperwork they made me fill out made it very clear that they'd thought about issues like these. I had to check a box on a form to say that the Adobe Reader plugin would be needed. I also had to fill in blanks saying what versions of IE and Firefox would work. As far as restricting access, you seem to be envisioning the kind of proprietary cruft that a traditional publisher would impose. This initiative is only dealing with free textbooks, which guarantees zero participation from traditional publishers.
The initiative is only dealing with free textbooks. Therefore (a) the books are not going to come with a physical object that would cost money to produce, but (b) there's nothing stopping anyone from just going ahead and printing copies. The Schwarzenegger opinion piece says, "Even if teachers have to print out some of the material, it will be far cheaper than regularly buying updated textbooks," so I think they're anticipating that. Self-service laser printing usually comes out to about 5 cents a page, which is quite a bit cheaper than the typical cost of a textbook (say $150 for 500 pages, which comes out to 30 cents a page). The real issue is durability. Print-on-demand houses will print and bind books for more like 3-5 cents a page, and that really works out to be a winning solution, because that type of bound book is durable enough to last for a while, but still an order of magnitude cheaper than traditional textbooks.
Yep.
Note Schwarzenegger's remark in the opinion piece linked to from the slashdot summary: "Even if teachers have to print out some of the material, it will be far cheaper than regularly buying updated textbooks."
But if you want a bound copy, it really no longer makes sense to DIY the way you're descibing, with labor-intensive laser-printing and countertop spiral binding. Print on demand has changed all that. For example, lulu.com will do it for about 3 cents a page (depending on quantity, page count, and quality of paper), which is significantly less than the cost of paper, toner, and binding supplies for a DIY operation, even assuming zero labor cost. And what you get is a nice, durable perfect-bound book, not something spiral-bound that will get destroyed rapidly in kids' backpacks.
See my sig for hundreds of counterexamples.
But authors have already been doing this for years.
The project is only dealing with free textbooks, which means it is going to have zero participation from traditional textook publishers. (For confirmation that it's only about free books, see the project's web site, http://clrn.org/FDTI/index.cfm, and the Schwarzenegger opinion piece linked to from the slashdot summary.)
100% of them will be free from the start. The project is called the Free Digital Textbook Initiative. Notice the word "free." Schwarzenegger's opinion piece in the Mercury News (linked to from the slashdot summary) confirms this: "this initiative paves the way for easier access to free digital texts in California's schools."