I remember Arthur C Clarke saying that Sci Fi is something that could happen, while fantasy is something that could never happen.
Only if you use the word "could" to means "sometime in the future, but not with what we currently know." By that reasoning, fantasy could happen as well, assuming that we find some source of power that would grant people abilities indistinguishable from magic. Is that any crazier than assuming that at some point we'll be able to travel faster than the speed of light?
There's sort of a spectrum, with Lord of the Rings at one end and "hard" SF like Hal Clement at the other. Hard SF is SF that doesn't violate the laws of physics. People who don't really understand how science works will often say that our understanding of the laws of physics may change in the future, and therefore you can have your faster-than-light Millenium Falcon based on some future revision of the laws of physics. The thing is, the hard sciences don't work by throwing out old principles and replacing them with new ones. They work by recognizing that a given set of laws is an approximation that holds under certain circumstances, and finding new ways of dealing with circumstances in which the old laws were a poor approximation. Faster-than-light (FTL) isn't actually even completely ruled out by general relativity. What general relativity does rule out is FTL that works the way the Millenium Falcon does. FTL that was consistent with general relativity would have to involve the manipulation of matter and energy on godlike scales, it would have to be consistent with the relative nature of motion (so no getting up to close to c before making the "leap to hyperspace"), and it would be equivalent to time travel. FTL that doesn't have those characteristics is just scientifically wrong.
He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
If the point of your post is to say that nuclear weapons are a great defense against conventional weapons, then this doesn't strengthen your argument. We came to the brink of nuclear war, which would have destroyed our civilization, and quite possibly started a nuclear winter (a possibility that nobody knew about then). These pilots believed it. Kennedy, by all accounts, believed it. Just because we lucked out and averted a nuclear holocaust in 1962, that doesn't mean we'll be so lucky next time.
What actually would make a heck of a lot of sense right now would be to continue with the long, boring, unglamorous process of reducing the American and Russian nuclear arsenals. You don't need 5000 missiles each to have a credible deterrent. With a smaller number of missiles, the chances would be better than civilization could survive a nuclear war, and the chances of avoiding a biosphere-devastating nuclear winter would be better.
Reversing proliferation is harder. Israel, Iran, and North Korea all get very concrete political and/or security benefits from their nuclear programs.
If you're an executive in a company and the suitor making the offer won't agree to a golden parachute then it doesn't matter to you how much they are offering per share.
According to the article, IBM wasn't refusing to offer them a golden parachute. What it says is that various people at Sun already had contracts with Sun guaranteeing them golden parachutes in the event of a buyout. When IBM worked up all the figures, they realized that the golden parachutes were going to cost more than they'd thought, so they reduced their offer.
TFA doesn't give much information. It would be interesting to know whether there are some practical reasons to want this. One possibility I can imagine is that if you have a particular task that you want a server to do, you could measure its performance with both kernels. If one is 10% faster than the other, you pick that one. Another possibility would be if you want to test your software to see if it's likely to be portable, or if it contains hidden linuxisms; however, I would expect most of the incompatibilities to be in things like shells and command-line utilities, not the kernel.
Slashdot is starting to get like usenet. My first step every time I get on usenet is to filter out all the spam about porn and shoes. My first action every time I get on slashdot is to filter out which stories are mistakes, FUD, or slashvertisements. It seems like the firehose system has drastically reduced the signal to noise ratio.
I agree, although my reasons are slightly different than yours.
I teach physics at a community college in California, and I immediately choked when I got to When every student has a laptop. Huh? About 5% of my students bring laptops to class, and many don't have computers at home, either. I guess this is just one of those obvious socio-economic issues. One of the reasons people end up at a community college is because they're poor.
The cost of software is also a huge issue. The main computer application my students use for my class is a spreadsheet for graphing. I try to nudge them toward OOo Calc as much as possible, because then if they have a computer at home, they can just download OOo and install it for free. The truth is, however, that OOo kind of sucks, and in any case many of my students' computer skills are weak enough that it's not trivial for them to switch back and forth between Excel and OOo. Many of them already know Excel, and they're afraid to try to learn OOo Calc, even though I provide documentation, and to my mind OOo Calc is basically a total clone of Excel.
I like browsershots and use it quite a bit. I don't consider the wait time to be a huge issue. I can just do something else while I wait. It sure beats driving in to work to get access to a Windows machine for testing, and I don't have access to a mac at all, not even at work. You can test a huge number of browsers in it, way more than it would be practical to do by hand. The one place where browsershots doesn't quite do the job for me is when I have javascript that I need to test interactively. However, it is good enough to tell me whether my javascript loaded properly without causing an error.
It's scary any time you try to exercise your right to fair use. The problem is that the definition is vague, and you'll never know if you're okay until someone sues you and you get your day in court -- which you really don't want to happen.
I can predict that a lot of slashdotters will say, "Don't ask for legal advice on Ask Slashdot -- we're not lawyers!" Well, yeah, but obviously the OP can't afford to get a lawyer to take care of this, and the chilling effect he refers to in his post comes from the fact that he, unlike the publisher of the test, can't afford a lawyer.
If you take a look at the Wikipedia article on fair use, it lays out four criteria, and unfortunately they're kind of vague. However, you're good as far as noncommercial use, the factual nature of the work, the limited portion used, and the effect on market value. Sounds like all systems are go. Except that you don't want to be hauled into court so that you can make that argument.
Personality tests are bullshit. On an intellectual test like the SAT, the contents are things that everyone can pretty much agree on the face of it are reasonable. That is, in the language of standardized testing, the items have good "face validity." You don't need to disclose what's on this year's test in order to get some idea of what kind of items are on the test. On a personality test, there's no way to independently verify that the test has any scientific validity without disclosing at least a few of the items. For that reason, I think it's great that you're pushing your fair use rights here.
One thing to realize is that this is not a DMCA takedown notice, and they haven't specifically threatened to sue you. Another thing to realize is that in the US, you can be sued for damages beyond actual damages, provided that they've filed a copyright form, which they undoubtedly have. (Copyright is awarded automatically when you create the work, but unless you file the form you can only sue infringers for actual damages, which are often zero.)
You really did prove Bray's point--that content often trumps form.
It's actually kind of hilarious to go back and read the contents of what Bray said and compare it with the way they presented the interview on the web site. There's this, for instance:
I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with.
[Sites like Wikipedia] expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them
It really sounds like Bray saw how they presented the interview on their site, hopped in his time machine, went back in time for the interview, and explained to them exactly how not to present it -- and then they blithely ignored the content of what he was saying and did it the way he was telling them would suck. Either that or infoq.com has an extremely well developed sense of irony.
The article itself is a perfect example of what can go wrong when you use javascript, etc., inappropriately. They make you look at the article through a keyhole, and you can't make the keyhole bigger. The answers are also hidden behind these little plus-sign icons, which you have to click on. Hmm...so much for access for people with disabilities. Here's the full text in -- ahem -- html.
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Hi my name is Dionysios Synodinos and we are here at QCon San Francisco with Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems, to talk about the Future of the Web. Mister Bray with all the buzz about Rich Internet Applications there are many that believe that the future of the Web is synonymous to RIA technologies. What do you think of the RIA notion in general?
So when people talk about Rich Internet Applications unfortunately what they seem to usually mean is like Flash. Things that respond to key strokes and wiggle and morph and have video and move around, and they say that we need these things because the web needs to be more responsive, and more immersive and more reactive, and I am generally speaking massively unconvinced. I am old enough to remember before the web when everybody spent all day every day dealing with reactive immersive response compelled applications usually written in Visual Basic or Motif or something like that and mostly really bad. Because designing user interfaces is a hard thing and most of them aren't done well and most of them are bad.
When the web came along people shriked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web. I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with. Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: "We need something that is more immersive, more responsive, more interactive".
Every time without exception that somebody said that to me, they have either been a developer or a vendor who wants to sell the technology that is immersive or responsive, or something like that. I have not once in all those years heard an ordinary user say "Oh I wish we go back to before the days of the web when every application was different and idiosyncratic... ". On the other hand richness is a good thing but I would rather take an old fashioned point of view and if you look at the world's most popular actual real Internet applications you'll see things like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, and so on kind of which I play all day web applications, and they are rich all right, they are rich because they expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them So I tend to be highly cynical about this whole subject.
To the extend that web applications need to become richer, do you think Ajax is the horse to bet on? Also do you think that web browser is sufficiently interactive to facilitate highly engaging user experience?
Regarding the answer to the last question, the answer to this one will be fairly obvious. Yes, I mean Ajax is getting awfully good in particular with the advances that are being made in the browser technology with the increased compatibility between things like Firefox and Safari and so on and the new canvas element and the fact that the new browsers have these fantastically high performance JavaScript engines in them. I s
If that is the interpretation, then where is the crossover point between lower dimensional and higher dimensional space where the draws stop?
In the notation used in the wikipedia article, H is the number of dimensions, c is the number of symbols, n is the number of squares along each dimension, and delta is the fraction of the squares that are filled in. E.g., for normal tic-tac-toe, H=2, c=2, n=3, and delta=1 at the end of the game. For that particular set of parameters, we know that the theorem isn't true, because it's possible for normal tic-tac-toe to end in a tie. It sounds like nobody knows how to prove the exact conditions on (H,c,n,delta) for which the theorem holds. For a given (c,n,delta), there may be some crossover point for H, but I don't think anybody knows what it is, except in certain special cases.
What you won't be able to figure out from the slashdot summary, or from either of the links (unless you're a specialist) is that this is a theorem about n-dimensional tic-tac-toe. The idea is that you make an n×n×n×...×n in some number of dimensions, and then you fill in some fraction of the boxes with x's and o's (or possibly some set of more than 2 symbols). The theorem says that if the dimension is high enough, and the fraction of the boxes that get filled in is high enough, you're guaranteed to have a line of symbols (possibly diagonal) that wins the tic-tac-toe game. In other words, a tic-tac-toe game in a high-dimensional space can't end in a draw, and can't even go on for very long before someone wins. The definition of "high enough" is what they're trying to pin down. They apparently proved it (or just made some progress toward proving it?) in a particular special case.
"Are there any specific products that Sun sells that IBM doesn't have equivalents of? Sun has some good products"
Yes OpenOffice and Java.
OpenOffice and Sun's implementation of Java are both free. The real question is what products or services Sun can sell for money.
For a long time now, Sun has been having a lot of trouble differentiating itself sufficiently from PCs on the low end and big iron on the high end. Maybe part of the reason their stock dropped in November to 98.7% below its high was that the people who were investing in he stock market realized that Sun was in a losing position and wasn't likely to be able to reinvent itself in time to survive.
The article is based on nothing but anecdotal evidence. The person who wrote the slashdot summary (named, strangely enough, SpuriousLogic) relates some more anecdotal evidence. Now slashdotters are requested to supply even more anecdotal evidence.
I teach physics at a community college. Any generalization you can make about my students will be true about some of them and false about some others. Yes, I have encountered some students whose self-esteem seems unrealistically high. Yes, I have also encountered some other students whose self-esteem seemed to me to be unrealistically low.
If you want to show a trend over time, like increasing narcissism, you need quantitative data from two different times, and you need the random and systematic errors on those two data-points to be small enough that they can be shown to be unequal with a high level of confidence.
My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything. I'm only persuaded to the contrary if solid quantitative evidence shows up to the contrary. My default hypothesis is that the self-esteem movement has had absolutely no effect on students' self-esteem, or on their achievement, or on anything else. Students tend to be pretty realistic. They look and compare themselves with other students. They know if they got an F on their physics exam and their lab partner didn't.
It is kind of funny when people play the game of trying to figure out whether famous people from hundreds of years ago were gay. Isaac Newton is another good example. In that era, they would put a man to death if he was caught having sex with another man, so there was a heck of a strong incentive to hide it, and that's why we're unlikely to ever know for sure. There's also the whole issue of whether it makes sense to apply a modern term like "gay." Some men today who consider themselves gay believe that it's part of their genetic makup, which wouldn't even have been a concept Shakespeare and Newton would have understood. Other men today have sex with other men, but don't consider themselves gay. The one good reason I can see for indulging in this kind of speculation is that growing up gay in, say, the U.S. these days is pretty damn tough, and it might make it easier if you had role models from history, so you could say to yourself, "Newton and Shakespeare survived this, and I will, too."
It would be fun to have a program implementing a digit-extraction method that would just keep on printing digits of pi until you turned it off. (This is different from a traditional method, in which you have to decide how many digits to compute before you start summing the series.) Anyone know of any good open-source implementations on Linux? Apparently Sage's arbitrary-precision arithmetic is much more efficient than GMP. For example, (2**123456789-1)%(2**12345678-1) in Python, which uses GMP, takes longer to run than I was willing to wait, but (2^123456789-1)%(2^12345678-1) finishes in about 10 seconds in Sage.
Sure, but your MediaWiki way has the interesting possibility of setting a version number every time you export to LaTeX
I was assuming that exporting to latex would be too laborious to want to do more than once. I think it depends a lot on the type of book. In the case of a computer science book, it might need almost no tweaking after exporting, because basically all you have is text and code listings. But my experience is with illustrated physics textbooks, which need a lot of tweaking by hand for visual formatting.
I think any technical writer that isn't scared away by the syntax of LaTeX should be able to master "svn update", and "svn commit".
Well, in any scientific collaboration consisting of more then four people, there's most likely someone senior and crotchety who's stuck in his ways doesn't want to completely change the way he works. You'd also have to build a consensus that svn+latex was the best available solution, and that might not be so easy. I've used svn+latex. It sucked, partly because svn sucks. (Git is a lot better.)
If the goal is to write a scientific paper with a large number of authors, I think the most reasonable thing to do would be to write it in MediaWiki, which is the wiki software used by Wikipedia. In particular, MediaWiki has good support for LaTeX-formatted math. Once all the authors have had a chance to make their edits, and the whole thing has converged to the exact words, punctuation, and math you want, you convert it to LaTeX and you're all set. The conversion is ridiculously easy, because all the math is in LaTeX already, and you can use a script to convert, e.g., ==Procedure== to \section{Procedure}.
One big win with wiki->latex compared to version control+latex is that although it's fairly easy to learn a couple of the most basic commands of a vc system, it's much more difficult to learn to use it well enough to figure out who changed what, resolve conflicting edits, etc. A wiki is designed to do all that using a web interface, which makes it dead easy. To see what I'm talking about, go to a wikipedia article and click on the history history tab.
This is all assuming it's a scientific paper, which just needs to be worked on for a certain amount of time, and then it's published and you're not going to mess with it anymore. There's another interesting situation in academic writing, which is a textbook that's going to be edited on an ongoing basis over the years. That's an example where I think the case for vc+latex is much stronger.
The Tevatron will not get to a 5 sigma discovery significance unless the LHC is delayed by several years more
I didn't say 5 sigma, you did. Sure, 5 sigma is the gold standard. But suppose Fermilab finds the Higgs at the 2-sigma level, which is 98% confidence, and also measures the mass. Then say the LHC gets a 5-sigma peak, and their measurement of the mass agrees with the previous one by Fermilab. I think any reasonable observer would then have to agree that Fermilab had discovered the Higgs.
Regarding the Planck scale you only think that it is unreachable because gravity is so weak. If there are extra dimensions of space then the Planck scale might only be a few TeV and then we can do quantum gravity at the LHC. Personally I find this far less likely than finding Dark Matter but it is certianly a possibility. [...] You cannot say whether it is a strong or weak possibility because we do not know enough to assign any meaningful chance.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. First you say "I find this far less likely," and then you say that such statements about likelihood are not meaningful.
The GP would have been more accurate to say something more limited, like referring to "high-energy physics from the LHC" rather the just "high-energy physics." The painful truth is that the LHC may end up finding essentially nothing of interest. It's possible that Fermilab will discover the Higgs, and absolutely nothing else that's very exciting will ever be found using the general type of accelerator and detector technology represented by these systems.
It's unlikely that physics in general will ever become a a completely understood subject. However, certain subfields of physics do go extinct. A century ago, a Nobel prize was awarded in physics for the invention of a certain type of lighthouse, and many grad students were still doing their PhD theses on subjects like the motion of a certain type of top on an inclined plane. More recently, low-energy nuclear structure physics is an example of a field that is arguably just a corpse, because the techniques used to study it (such as arrays of HPGe gamma-ray detectors) have reached the point of diminishing returns. It's quite plausible that the same kind of stagnation will now happen in high-energy accelerator physics as currently practiced.
[...] we need to figure out how the universe 'cheated' and made the Higgs mass so light. [...] There are also several other questions we need to solve: what is all the dark matter?, what is all the dark energy?, why is there no anti-matter in the Universe?, is the neutrino its own anti-particle?, how does quantum gravity work? etc. etc. You need to remember that so far all of science has been based on the 4% of the Universe made of atoms. 96% of the Universe is made of stuff we do not understand so thinking that the Higgs is all that is left is just crazy talk!
There's a strong possibility that all of these questions will turn out to be ones that can't be answered by LHC-style accelerator experiments. Some of them almost certainly can't be. For instance, the LHC doesn't come anywhere near the Plank energy scale, so there's virtually no chance that it will give any insight into quantum gravity. Dark matter and dark energy probably aren't going to give up their mysteries to particle accelerator experiments, either; that's more likely to happen with astronomy or cosmic ray observations. The only thing that was really guaranteed to happen at LHC energies was that there had to be either a Higgs mechanism or some other, similar mechanism occurring in that energy range, because the standard model sans Higgs is provably not self-consistent in this energy range.
I'm in Hong Kong. I find some US ISPs (like AOL) bounce my mail solely based on my location.
How do you know it's location-based? I know someone who uses AOL. We're both in the US, but when I send her mail these days, AOL sends it straight to the bit bucket. There could be a lot of reasons AOL isn't accepting your mail. Maybe your ISP in Hong Kong is known as a spamhaven.
In general, email providers these days seem to have a very high tolerance for "ham" (false positives in their spam filters), and this seems to be especially true for the free services. I found out recently that all the email I was sending to my students who had yahoo addresses was going in their spam folders. Yahoo's default seems to be to blacklist mail coming from any domain they haven't heard of. Then the owner of the domain is expected to fill out a form in order to get unblocked. The form requires you to give info like a link to a page on your domain that states your privacy policy. They're also more likely to approve your request to be whitelisted if you sign your mail with domainkeys/dkim.
Maybe. Probably a better question is why are we allowing google to continue doing this at all? Shouldn't it be an opt-in service rather than opt-out? Shouldn't it have always been that way?
I'll give you several arguments to the contrary:
On this page, linked to from the NY Times article, Google denies that it has done anything illegal. Google says that it comes under the fair use exception to copyright. Under U.S. law, fair use is based on several criteria. Google argues that their use matches enough of these criteria well enough that it qualifies as fair use. IANAL, but I'd say they're probably right.
The part of the U.S. Constitution establishing copyright says, "The Congress shall have Power [. ..] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Note that the purpose of copyright is not to promote profitable business, it's to promote the progress of science and the arts. The vast majority of all books ever published are now out of print, so it seems likely that the vast majority of the books google is scanning are out of print. If a book is unobtainable, I don't think it's serving the purpose of promoting the progress of science and the arts.
If the vast majority of the books google is scanning are out of print, then the author is typically making zero income from the book. That means the author has nothing to lose. In fact the author may be dead, or there may be no way to contact the author. (The normal way you contact an author is by sending mail care of their publisher. Not gonna work if the book has been out of print since 1925.) If an author's book is still in print, then the publisher can just systematically handle the opting in or opting out. They can opt out for every single title they have in print, or they can contact authors and ask them what they want.
Google argues that this is the modern equivalent of a card catalog. They're right.
So, is google going to have an ad-based way to read books online for free?
No. The article has a link to this page, which explains that Google is only "scanning their Books, creating an electronic database and displaying short excerpts without the permission of the copyright holders."
Slashdot Mirror
There's sort of a spectrum, with Lord of the Rings at one end and "hard" SF like Hal Clement at the other. Hard SF is SF that doesn't violate the laws of physics. People who don't really understand how science works will often say that our understanding of the laws of physics may change in the future, and therefore you can have your faster-than-light Millenium Falcon based on some future revision of the laws of physics. The thing is, the hard sciences don't work by throwing out old principles and replacing them with new ones. They work by recognizing that a given set of laws is an approximation that holds under certain circumstances, and finding new ways of dealing with circumstances in which the old laws were a poor approximation. Faster-than-light (FTL) isn't actually even completely ruled out by general relativity. What general relativity does rule out is FTL that works the way the Millenium Falcon does. FTL that was consistent with general relativity would have to involve the manipulation of matter and energy on godlike scales, it would have to be consistent with the relative nature of motion (so no getting up to close to c before making the "leap to hyperspace"), and it would be equivalent to time travel. FTL that doesn't have those characteristics is just scientifically wrong.
If the point of your post is to say that nuclear weapons are a great defense against conventional weapons, then this doesn't strengthen your argument. We came to the brink of nuclear war, which would have destroyed our civilization, and quite possibly started a nuclear winter (a possibility that nobody knew about then). These pilots believed it. Kennedy, by all accounts, believed it. Just because we lucked out and averted a nuclear holocaust in 1962, that doesn't mean we'll be so lucky next time.
What actually would make a heck of a lot of sense right now would be to continue with the long, boring, unglamorous process of reducing the American and Russian nuclear arsenals. You don't need 5000 missiles each to have a credible deterrent. With a smaller number of missiles, the chances would be better than civilization could survive a nuclear war, and the chances of avoiding a biosphere-devastating nuclear winter would be better.
Reversing proliferation is harder. Israel, Iran, and North Korea all get very concrete political and/or security benefits from their nuclear programs.
According to the article, IBM wasn't refusing to offer them a golden parachute. What it says is that various people at Sun already had contracts with Sun guaranteeing them golden parachutes in the event of a buyout. When IBM worked up all the figures, they realized that the golden parachutes were going to cost more than they'd thought, so they reduced their offer.
TFA doesn't give much information. It would be interesting to know whether there are some practical reasons to want this. One possibility I can imagine is that if you have a particular task that you want a server to do, you could measure its performance with both kernels. If one is 10% faster than the other, you pick that one. Another possibility would be if you want to test your software to see if it's likely to be portable, or if it contains hidden linuxisms; however, I would expect most of the incompatibilities to be in things like shells and command-line utilities, not the kernel.
Slashdot is starting to get like usenet. My first step every time I get on usenet is to filter out all the spam about porn and shoes. My first action every time I get on slashdot is to filter out which stories are mistakes, FUD, or slashvertisements. It seems like the firehose system has drastically reduced the signal to noise ratio.
I agree, although my reasons are slightly different than yours.
I teach physics at a community college in California, and I immediately choked when I got to When every student has a laptop. Huh? About 5% of my students bring laptops to class, and many don't have computers at home, either. I guess this is just one of those obvious socio-economic issues. One of the reasons people end up at a community college is because they're poor.
The cost of software is also a huge issue. The main computer application my students use for my class is a spreadsheet for graphing. I try to nudge them toward OOo Calc as much as possible, because then if they have a computer at home, they can just download OOo and install it for free. The truth is, however, that OOo kind of sucks, and in any case many of my students' computer skills are weak enough that it's not trivial for them to switch back and forth between Excel and OOo. Many of them already know Excel, and they're afraid to try to learn OOo Calc, even though I provide documentation, and to my mind OOo Calc is basically a total clone of Excel.
I like browsershots and use it quite a bit. I don't consider the wait time to be a huge issue. I can just do something else while I wait. It sure beats driving in to work to get access to a Windows machine for testing, and I don't have access to a mac at all, not even at work. You can test a huge number of browsers in it, way more than it would be practical to do by hand. The one place where browsershots doesn't quite do the job for me is when I have javascript that I need to test interactively. However, it is good enough to tell me whether my javascript loaded properly without causing an error.
It's scary any time you try to exercise your right to fair use. The problem is that the definition is vague, and you'll never know if you're okay until someone sues you and you get your day in court -- which you really don't want to happen.
I can predict that a lot of slashdotters will say, "Don't ask for legal advice on Ask Slashdot -- we're not lawyers!" Well, yeah, but obviously the OP can't afford to get a lawyer to take care of this, and the chilling effect he refers to in his post comes from the fact that he, unlike the publisher of the test, can't afford a lawyer.
If you take a look at the Wikipedia article on fair use, it lays out four criteria, and unfortunately they're kind of vague. However, you're good as far as noncommercial use, the factual nature of the work, the limited portion used, and the effect on market value. Sounds like all systems are go. Except that you don't want to be hauled into court so that you can make that argument.
Personality tests are bullshit. On an intellectual test like the SAT, the contents are things that everyone can pretty much agree on the face of it are reasonable. That is, in the language of standardized testing, the items have good "face validity." You don't need to disclose what's on this year's test in order to get some idea of what kind of items are on the test. On a personality test, there's no way to independently verify that the test has any scientific validity without disclosing at least a few of the items. For that reason, I think it's great that you're pushing your fair use rights here.
One thing to realize is that this is not a DMCA takedown notice, and they haven't specifically threatened to sue you. Another thing to realize is that in the US, you can be sued for damages beyond actual damages, provided that they've filed a copyright form, which they undoubtedly have. (Copyright is awarded automatically when you create the work, but unless you file the form you can only sue infringers for actual damages, which are often zero.)
Good luck!
It's actually kind of hilarious to go back and read the contents of what Bray said and compare it with the way they presented the interview on the web site. There's this, for instance:
It really sounds like Bray saw how they presented the interview on their site, hopped in his time machine, went back in time for the interview, and explained to them exactly how not to present it -- and then they blithely ignored the content of what he was saying and did it the way he was telling them would suck. Either that or infoq.com has an extremely well developed sense of irony.
The article itself is a perfect example of what can go wrong when you use javascript, etc., inappropriately. They make you look at the article through a keyhole, and you can't make the keyhole bigger. The answers are also hidden behind these little plus-sign icons, which you have to click on. Hmm...so much for access for people with disabilities. Here's the full text in -- ahem -- html.
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Hi my name is Dionysios Synodinos and we are here at QCon San Francisco with Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems, to talk about the Future of the Web. Mister Bray with all the buzz about Rich Internet Applications there are many that believe that the future of the Web is synonymous to RIA technologies. What do you think of the RIA notion in general?
So when people talk about Rich Internet Applications unfortunately what they seem to usually mean is like Flash. Things that respond to key strokes and wiggle and morph and have video and move around, and they say that we need these things because the web needs to be more responsive, and more immersive and more reactive, and I am generally speaking massively unconvinced. I am old enough to remember before the web when everybody spent all day every day dealing with reactive immersive response compelled applications usually written in Visual Basic or Motif or something like that and mostly really bad. Because designing user interfaces is a hard thing and most of them aren't done well and most of them are bad.
When the web came along people shriked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web. I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with. Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: "We need something that is more immersive, more responsive, more interactive".
Every time without exception that somebody said that to me, they have either been a developer or a vendor who wants to sell the technology that is immersive or responsive, or something like that. I have not once in all those years heard an ordinary user say "Oh I wish we go back to before the days of the web when every application was different and idiosyncratic ... ". On the other hand richness is a good thing but I would rather take an old fashioned point of view and if you look at the world's most popular actual real Internet applications you'll see things like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, and so on kind of which I play all day web applications, and they are rich all right, they are rich because they expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them So I tend to be highly cynical about this whole subject.
To the extend that web applications need to become richer, do you think Ajax is the horse to bet on? Also do you think that web browser is sufficiently interactive to facilitate highly engaging user experience?
Regarding the answer to the last question, the answer to this one will be fairly obvious. Yes, I mean Ajax is getting awfully good in particular with the advances that are being made in the browser technology with the increased compatibility between things like Firefox and Safari and so on and the new canvas element and the fact that the new browsers have these fantastically high performance JavaScript engines in them. I s
In the notation used in the wikipedia article, H is the number of dimensions, c is the number of symbols, n is the number of squares along each dimension, and delta is the fraction of the squares that are filled in. E.g., for normal tic-tac-toe, H=2, c=2, n=3, and delta=1 at the end of the game. For that particular set of parameters, we know that the theorem isn't true, because it's possible for normal tic-tac-toe to end in a tie. It sounds like nobody knows how to prove the exact conditions on (H,c,n,delta) for which the theorem holds. For a given (c,n,delta), there may be some crossover point for H, but I don't think anybody knows what it is, except in certain special cases.
What you won't be able to figure out from the slashdot summary, or from either of the links (unless you're a specialist) is that this is a theorem about n-dimensional tic-tac-toe. The idea is that you make an n×n×n×...×n in some number of dimensions, and then you fill in some fraction of the boxes with x's and o's (or possibly some set of more than 2 symbols). The theorem says that if the dimension is high enough, and the fraction of the boxes that get filled in is high enough, you're guaranteed to have a line of symbols (possibly diagonal) that wins the tic-tac-toe game. In other words, a tic-tac-toe game in a high-dimensional space can't end in a draw, and can't even go on for very long before someone wins. The definition of "high enough" is what they're trying to pin down. They apparently proved it (or just made some progress toward proving it?) in a particular special case.
OpenOffice and Sun's implementation of Java are both free. The real question is what products or services Sun can sell for money.
For a long time now, Sun has been having a lot of trouble differentiating itself sufficiently from PCs on the low end and big iron on the high end. Maybe part of the reason their stock dropped in November to 98.7% below its high was that the people who were investing in he stock market realized that Sun was in a losing position and wasn't likely to be able to reinvent itself in time to survive.
The article is based on nothing but anecdotal evidence. The person who wrote the slashdot summary (named, strangely enough, SpuriousLogic) relates some more anecdotal evidence. Now slashdotters are requested to supply even more anecdotal evidence.
I teach physics at a community college. Any generalization you can make about my students will be true about some of them and false about some others. Yes, I have encountered some students whose self-esteem seems unrealistically high. Yes, I have also encountered some other students whose self-esteem seemed to me to be unrealistically low.
If you want to show a trend over time, like increasing narcissism, you need quantitative data from two different times, and you need the random and systematic errors on those two data-points to be small enough that they can be shown to be unequal with a high level of confidence.
My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything. I'm only persuaded to the contrary if solid quantitative evidence shows up to the contrary. My default hypothesis is that the self-esteem movement has had absolutely no effect on students' self-esteem, or on their achievement, or on anything else. Students tend to be pretty realistic. They look and compare themselves with other students. They know if they got an F on their physics exam and their lab partner didn't.
It is kind of funny when people play the game of trying to figure out whether famous people from hundreds of years ago were gay. Isaac Newton is another good example. In that era, they would put a man to death if he was caught having sex with another man, so there was a heck of a strong incentive to hide it, and that's why we're unlikely to ever know for sure. There's also the whole issue of whether it makes sense to apply a modern term like "gay." Some men today who consider themselves gay believe that it's part of their genetic makup, which wouldn't even have been a concept Shakespeare and Newton would have understood. Other men today have sex with other men, but don't consider themselves gay. The one good reason I can see for indulging in this kind of speculation is that growing up gay in, say, the U.S. these days is pretty damn tough, and it might make it easier if you had role models from history, so you could say to yourself, "Newton and Shakespeare survived this, and I will, too."
Okay, here's a way to print out pi continuously on Unix. Download piqpr8.c from http://www.experimentalmath.info/bbp-codes/ , then apply this patch:
Compile and run:
One appropriate way to celebrate is by calculating it. Here's a one-liner for Ubuntu/Debian:
It would be fun to have a program implementing a digit-extraction method that would just keep on printing digits of pi until you turned it off. (This is different from a traditional method, in which you have to decide how many digits to compute before you start summing the series.) Anyone know of any good open-source implementations on Linux? Apparently Sage's arbitrary-precision arithmetic is much more efficient than GMP. For example, (2**123456789-1)%(2**12345678-1) in Python, which uses GMP, takes longer to run than I was willing to wait, but (2^123456789-1)%(2^12345678-1) finishes in about 10 seconds in Sage.
If you have less than four people trying to edit the same document, then I think the OP's question becomes pointless.
I was assuming that exporting to latex would be too laborious to want to do more than once. I think it depends a lot on the type of book. In the case of a computer science book, it might need almost no tweaking after exporting, because basically all you have is text and code listings. But my experience is with illustrated physics textbooks, which need a lot of tweaking by hand for visual formatting.
Well, in any scientific collaboration consisting of more then four people, there's most likely someone senior and crotchety who's stuck in his ways doesn't want to completely change the way he works. You'd also have to build a consensus that svn+latex was the best available solution, and that might not be so easy. I've used svn+latex. It sucked, partly because svn sucks. (Git is a lot better.)
If the goal is to write a scientific paper with a large number of authors, I think the most reasonable thing to do would be to write it in MediaWiki, which is the wiki software used by Wikipedia. In particular, MediaWiki has good support for LaTeX-formatted math. Once all the authors have had a chance to make their edits, and the whole thing has converged to the exact words, punctuation, and math you want, you convert it to LaTeX and you're all set. The conversion is ridiculously easy, because all the math is in LaTeX already, and you can use a script to convert, e.g., ==Procedure== to \section{Procedure}.
One big win with wiki->latex compared to version control+latex is that although it's fairly easy to learn a couple of the most basic commands of a vc system, it's much more difficult to learn to use it well enough to figure out who changed what, resolve conflicting edits, etc. A wiki is designed to do all that using a web interface, which makes it dead easy. To see what I'm talking about, go to a wikipedia article and click on the history history tab.
This is all assuming it's a scientific paper, which just needs to be worked on for a certain amount of time, and then it's published and you're not going to mess with it anymore. There's another interesting situation in academic writing, which is a textbook that's going to be edited on an ongoing basis over the years. That's an example where I think the case for vc+latex is much stronger.
I didn't say 5 sigma, you did. Sure, 5 sigma is the gold standard. But suppose Fermilab finds the Higgs at the 2-sigma level, which is 98% confidence, and also measures the mass. Then say the LHC gets a 5-sigma peak, and their measurement of the mass agrees with the previous one by Fermilab. I think any reasonable observer would then have to agree that Fermilab had discovered the Higgs.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. First you say "I find this far less likely," and then you say that such statements about likelihood are not meaningful.
The GP would have been more accurate to say something more limited, like referring to "high-energy physics from the LHC" rather the just "high-energy physics." The painful truth is that the LHC may end up finding essentially nothing of interest. It's possible that Fermilab will discover the Higgs, and absolutely nothing else that's very exciting will ever be found using the general type of accelerator and detector technology represented by these systems.
It's unlikely that physics in general will ever become a a completely understood subject. However, certain subfields of physics do go extinct. A century ago, a Nobel prize was awarded in physics for the invention of a certain type of lighthouse, and many grad students were still doing their PhD theses on subjects like the motion of a certain type of top on an inclined plane. More recently, low-energy nuclear structure physics is an example of a field that is arguably just a corpse, because the techniques used to study it (such as arrays of HPGe gamma-ray detectors) have reached the point of diminishing returns. It's quite plausible that the same kind of stagnation will now happen in high-energy accelerator physics as currently practiced.
There's a strong possibility that all of these questions will turn out to be ones that can't be answered by LHC-style accelerator experiments. Some of them almost certainly can't be. For instance, the LHC doesn't come anywhere near the Plank energy scale, so there's virtually no chance that it will give any insight into quantum gravity. Dark matter and dark energy probably aren't going to give up their mysteries to particle accelerator experiments, either; that's more likely to happen with astronomy or cosmic ray observations. The only thing that was really guaranteed to happen at LHC energies was that there had to be either a Higgs mechanism or some other, similar mechanism occurring in that energy range, because the standard model sans Higgs is provably not self-consistent in this energy range.
How do you know it's location-based? I know someone who uses AOL. We're both in the US, but when I send her mail these days, AOL sends it straight to the bit bucket. There could be a lot of reasons AOL isn't accepting your mail. Maybe your ISP in Hong Kong is known as a spamhaven.
In general, email providers these days seem to have a very high tolerance for "ham" (false positives in their spam filters), and this seems to be especially true for the free services. I found out recently that all the email I was sending to my students who had yahoo addresses was going in their spam folders. Yahoo's default seems to be to blacklist mail coming from any domain they haven't heard of. Then the owner of the domain is expected to fill out a form in order to get unblocked. The form requires you to give info like a link to a page on your domain that states your privacy policy. They're also more likely to approve your request to be whitelisted if you sign your mail with domainkeys/dkim.
I'll give you several arguments to the contrary:
No. The article has a link to this page, which explains that Google is only "scanning their Books, creating an electronic database and displaying short excerpts without the permission of the copyright holders."