I picked up a low-end kindle at a discounted price (~$40) that I'm sure represented a loss for Amazon, and I don't buy any DRM'd books for it, so they're not recouping that loss from me. This gives me a gratifying feeling that I've successfully fought back against "the Man." I can read Jane Austen novels while traveling and not run out of reading material.
But the ads really are creepy and a nuisance. Every time you stop reading for a while, an ad comes up. To get past the ad, you have to click a button. Then it talks to your wifi network and pops up the details of the ad. Then you can finally click again to get back to reading Pride and Prejudice.
I accepted the ads as a conscious part of my plot to screw Amazon financially and get a useful toy for myself, which I use only while traveling. But would I pay hundreds of dollars for a device that pulled this kind of crap, if I was going to use the device a lot? No. Way. In. Hell.
We're really headed for a nasty, dystopian future with ebooks.
Sound worked great for me on every version of linux I ran up until ubuntu Intrepid. It started breaking at Jaunty. As of Precise, it's still broken on most machines.
I have a classroom with 7 linux boxes in it that I bought on ebay. Around the Jaunty period, sound broke on most of the machines. I put the same sound card in all of them in an effort to get consistent behavior, but that didn't help. Right now, sound works on 3 out of 7.
Why, oh why did the kernel developers have to take something that worked fine and break it completely?
It's not exactly the same, but it is the same kookery warmed over. Here's a summary. Do rates of nuclear decay depend on environmental factors? There is one environmental effect that has been scientifically well established for a long time. In the process of electron capture, a proton in the nucleus combines with an inner-shell electron to produce a neutron and a neutrino. This effect does depend on the electronic environment, and in particular, the process cannot happen if the atom is completely ionized. Other claims of environmental effects on decay rates are crank science, often quoted by creationists in their attempts to discredit evolutionary and geological time scales. He et al. (He 2007) claim to have detected a change in rates of beta decay of as much as 11% when samples are rotated in a centrifuge, and say that the effect varies asymmetrically with clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. He believes that there is a mysterious energy field that has both biological and nuclear effects, and that it relates to circadian rhythms. The nuclear effects were not observed when the experimental conditions were reproduced by Ding et al. [Ding 2009] Jenkins and Fischbach (2008) claim to have observed effects on alpha decay rates at the 10^-3 level, correlated with an influence from the sun. They proposed that their results could be tested more dramatically by looking for changes in the rate of alpha decay in radioisotope thermoelectric generators aboard space probes. Such an effect turned out not to exist (Cooper 2009). Undeterred by their theory's failure to pass their own proposed test, they have gone on to publish even kookier ideas, such as a neutrino-mediated effect from solar flares, even though solar flares are a surface phenomenon, whereas neutrinos come from the sun's core. An independent study found no such link between flares and decay rates (Parkhomov 2010a). Laboratory experiments[Lindstrom 2010] have also placed limits on the sensitivity of radioactive decay to neutrino flux that rule out a neutrino-mediated effect at a level orders of magnitude less than what would be required in order to explain the variations claimed in [Jenkins 2008]. Despite this, Jenkins and Fischbach continue to speculate about a neutrino effect in [Sturrock 2012]; refusal to deal with contrary evidence is a hallmark of kook science. They admit that variations shown in their 2012 work "may be due in part to environmental influences," but don't seem to want to acknowledge that if the strength of these influences in unknown, they may explain the entire claimed effect, not just part of it. Jenkins and Fischbach made further claims in 2010 based on experiments done decades ago by other people, so that Jenkins and Fischbach have no first-hand way of investigating possible sources of systematic error. Other attempts to reproduce the result are also plagued by systematic errors of the same size as the claimed effect. For example, an experiment by Parkhomov (2010b) shows a Fourier power spectrum in which a dozen other peaks are nearly as prominent as the claimed yearly variation. Cardone et al. claim to have observed variations in the rate of alpha decay of thorium induced by 20 kHz ultrasound, and claim that this alpha decay occurs without the emission of gamma rays. Ericsson et al. have pointed out multiple severe problems with Cardone's experiments. In agreement with theory, high-precision experimental tests show no detectable temperature-dependence in the rates of electron capture[Goodwin 2009] and alpha decay.[Gurevich 2008] He YuJian et al., Science China 50 (2007) 170. YouQian Ding et al., Science China 52 (2009) 690. Jenkins and Fischbach (2008), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283v1, Astropart.Phys.32:42-46,2009 Jenkins and Fischbach (2009), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3156, Astropart.Phys.31:407-411,2009 Jenkins and Fischbach (2010), http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3318
Yes, something very similar to this has been done:
Lindstrom et al. (2010), http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.5071 , Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A, 622 (2010) 93-96
It puts limits on the sensitivity of radioactive decay to neutrino flux that rule out a neutrino-mediated effect at a level orders of magnitude less than what would be required in order to explain the variations claimed by Jenkins and Fischbach in 2008. And yet Jenkins and Fischbach are still speculating that the effect they claim has something to do with neutrinos.
One of the hallmarks of kooks is that they ignore contrary evidence.
I'm no expert in quantum gravity, but I have sometimes the impression that the pictures of spacetime quantization are often a bit naive; basically the pictures of quantum spacetime look to me more like a classical discrete spacetime. I can't of course exclude the possibility that it's just the presentation.
What you're presenting is similar to a point of view that was being pushed ca. 2006 by some folks at the Perimeter Institute doing loop quantum gravity (LQG). They were talking like they had a theory that really made predictions about vacuum dispersion that would be testable by the GLAST gamma-ray telescope. That was exciting, because if your theory doesn't expose itself to the possibility of falsification, then you're not really doing science. Unfortunately it then became clear that LQG doesn't actually make any such definite prediction. LQG might predict much less vacuum dispersion, or none at all. This puts LQG back in the same category as string theory: theories that aren't really theories yet, because they don't make predictions. (String theory does kinda sorta require supersymmetry at the electroweak scale, so in that sense it has failed an experimental test, because the LHC doesn't seem to be finding supersymmetry.)
Creative Commons isn't intended to be a free license-we have the GPL, BSD license etc for that.
No, some CC licenses are free and some are not. CC-BY-SA is free. (It's what Wikipedia uses.) Anything with ND or NC is not free.
The difference between CC-BY-SA and GPL is that GPL is designed as a software license, CC-BY-SA for other creative works such as books. There's an analogous relationship between CC-BY and BSD.
I fail to see how dropping NC/ND types from CC v4.0 would be a benefit. If the authors would really want a license that amounts to one/both of the NC/ND and there's none to reference on the CC site, they'll specify them expressly; so "hiding" them from the CCv4.0 set of licenses won't bring more "liberty" for the community.
Right. Or they'll write their own licenses, which has a couple of big disadvantages: (1) Non-lawyers will write their own licenses and mess up, or people will put things in their license that will have unintended consequences. (2) There will be lots of different and incompatible licenses, which makes sharing more difficult. Neither of these is purely hypothetical. There really was an overproliferation of licenses ca. 2000. E.g., here is a license created in 1999; its author now recommends using CC instead. The existence of both GFDL and CC-BY-SA has created huge hassles for a lot of people. There are definitely examples of misconceived clauses in software licenses, e.g., the infamous BSD advertising clause. A similar example in non-software licenses would be the optional invariant sections clause in the GFDL, which caused major hassles in debian documentation.
The ND clause survives on the idea that rightsholders would not otherwise be able protect their reputation or preserve the integrity of their work, but all these fears about allowing derivatives are either permitted by fair use anyway or already protected by free licenses.
Counterexamples:
1. I write an opinion piece for my local paper on why G.W. Bush was the worst US president in history. Under any free license, someone else can write a revised version in which my opinions are all changed, then distribute it with attribution to me and the reviser. Fair use doesn't allow this. An ND license does what I want, which is to prevent this misrepresentation of my opinions.
2. Alice Randall wrote a book called The Wind Done Gone using the setting and characters of Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell's estate sued Randall and won. If Gone With the Wind had been distributed under an ND license, this would have been prevented. Under a free license, it would have been allowed. Fair use doesn't allow this use.
3. I make coffee mugs with Harry Potter characters on them and sell them on the internet without paying a royalty to J.K. Rowling. If Rowling had chosen any free license, this would have been allowed. With an NC license, it's prohibited, which is what she wants. It doesn't fall under fair use.
Most importantly, though, is that both clauses do not actually contribute to a shared commons.
Yes, this is blindingly obvious. In all three examples above, the original author had no intention of contributing to a shared commons.
Perhaps the silliest thing of all about this is the belief that people can somehow be prevented from using NC or ND licenses. Nobody can prevent this. The CC organization could "deprecate" them, and this would have absolutely no effect.
even Slashdot would be unsustainable if no one viewed the ads
The "what if everyone did it?" test is always interesting to apply, but not always valid. By that test, it would be immoral for me to go backpacking in the Sierra, because if the whole population of California did it, the wilderness experience would be completely ruined. But anyway, let's apply that test to ad blocking. If everyone did it... then advertisers would be forced to modify the poor behavior that made people start using ad blockers. They'd be forced to eliminate animated ads, popovers, etc., etc.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. [...] If you don't want to be profiled by having your online behavior tracked, and you don't want to pay for the product (see outrage over NYT paywall), and you don't want to view ads... what of similar value would you prefer to give?
I'm perfectly willing to have my behavior tracked. That's why every time I buy groceries at Albertson's, I voluntarily punch in my phone number on the little terminal. The thing is, there's no such thing as a free lunch, so I certainly wouldn't do it for free. Albertson's pays me a significant amount of money for that info, by giving me discounts. I probably save $5 per shopping trip by letting them track my buying. If you know of a web site that will pay me $5 to let them track my behavior, then by all means, please let me know about them, and I'll add them to my whitelist and start accepting cookies from them.
I happen to get the NY Times delivered to my house every day, but anyway they're free to paywall or not paywall their site, display ads or not display ads. Whatever choice they make, they're making it because they think it's the most efficient way to make a buck. Almost all newspapers seem to have decided that the profit-optimizing combination is not to paywall, and to display ads. It allows them to reach a huge number of people who would never see them in print, and whichever of those people don't have ad blockers installed, the papers get something of value from them through advertising revenue.
(a) This is posted to Ask Slashdot, but it's not really a question, it's a plug for the author's answer.
(b) The slashdot summary is incoherent.
(c) TFA consists of an incoherent intro followed by a description of what the author does. To save you the trouble of wading through the incomprehensible text, here's what he does: "#1 -- Disable third-party cookies [...] #2 -- Use Ghostery to block everything indiscriminately, but whitelist the sites I support."
A typical piece of bizarre reasoning, incoherently expressed, from TFA:
I want to reinforce myself with content that makes me a better person. If an advertiser uses a technology of behaviour on this type of content, I agree.
This whole thing about the morally correct response to internet advertising has been rehashed over and over on slashdot. Over and over, people have made the same point: internet ads wouldn't be objectionable if they were like ads in a newspaper or magazine, but because they aren't like that, any user with enough know-how is going to block them. I'm sorry, but I just can't read an article while an animated monkey is jumping up and down next to it on the screen.
Text-oriented sites like slashdot are relatively cheap to run, on a per-user basis, so as long as some percentage of their users don't use ad blockers, these sites are viable.
I asked someone I know, who works in online advertising, whether ad blocking is an issue for her company. I told her I never saw ads on the internet and was surprised that anyone was... well, dumb enough... to fail to install ad blocking software. Her response: "Do you use Hulu?"
This isn't exactly new. The original Macintosh was rather deliberately designed to be a sealed unit, with no user-upgradable/replaceable components inside.
Total nonsense. It wasn't "sealed." You simply needed a certain torx screwdriver to open it. And there certainly were user-upgradeable parts inside. I got a 4 MB upgrade to my 512k mac from a company called Mac Megabytes in Berkeley, at the Claremont Hotel, ca. 1986.
It's depressing when total misinformation like this gets modded up to 5 on slashdot, half a dozen users point out that it's wrong, and then it never gets modded back down.
I live in California, and there are legally mandated warnings like this all over the place -- so many of them that it's impossible to take them seriously.
"WARNING: This area contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
You get this in places like hotel rooms and gas stations. What am I going to do, stop putting gas in my car or stop staying in hotels?
It's also applied in totally inconsistent ways. Some companies that sell herbal medicines have to put the warning on their product, which sort of makes sense, because any carcinogenic effect is an effect regardless of whether the product is "natural." But in other cases (chocolate, vinegar), the courts have ruled that other "natural" products don't have to have the warnings because they're natural.
There are some possible sane, logical reasons to be concerned about the political and economic effects of GMOs (concern about patents, inability of farmers to use seed from their own crops, reduction of genetic variability, harm to neighboring fields from spraying roundup on GM roundup-resistant fields,...), but there are no sane, logical reasons to be worried about health effects of eating them -- not on a population basis, and certainly not on an individual basis. Therefore I think it's great that Californians are bestowing upon themselves yet another set of warnings. The proliferation of warnings ensures that people will pay even less attention to them than they do now, and that's exactly the right result, since they should be paying zero attention to them in the first place.
Eating is actually a fairly dangerous activity, because we do a lot of it, and even a low probability of harm becomes significant when it's repeated by every individual many, many times. But we don't want to know about the high risk of harm from eating "natural" foods (salmonella, carcinogens in barbecued meat,...). We only want to know about the (zero) risk of harm from eating "unnatural" GM foods, because that seems scarier.
Same deal with people being afraid their kids will get kidnapped by a stranger when they should be worried about them getting run over by someone talking on their cell phone. The first risk is nearly zero, but it's unusual, so we're more scared of it.
Same deal with people thinking the Fukushima nuclear accident (with zero deaths) is really horrible, while the tsunami (18,000 deaths) isn't a big deal. The rational reaction would be to improve early warning systems for tsunamis, but because nuclear stuff is unusual, we're more scared of it.
No, seriously. There is no food crisis. As a species we have a food distribution problem, and a food wastage problem and they're rather shocking at that, but we really have no issue with feeding the population of earth today [...]
This is a little misleading IMO.
First off, you can't argue with the basic Malthusian issue. If population grows geometrically, at some point we are guaranteed to run out of food, if only because we reach the limits imposed by the laws of thermodynamics.
And even supposing that the planet's population eventually levels off at some number where we're still able to feed everyone, there is no guarantee that we will be happy with the way the world turns out at that point. In particular, the environmental effects may be ugly. Here in California, for example, we have serious ecological problems in the Sacramento Delta and Owens Valley due to diversion of water to agriculture.
The perception now is that if you want to go from university into a "good" job, then you need either a science degree,[...]
Yes, this is a much more likely explanation than TFA's claim, given without any evidence, that the cause of the higher enrollments is "better science teaching" or that "science has become cool again."
In addition to making bogus assumptions about the cause of the increase, there is a likely tendency to make bogus assumptions about its effects. In particular, you might think that higher enrollments would lead to more people succeeding in getting science degrees and then landing jobs in which they use what they learned. I teach physics at a community college in the US, and many of my students are clearly not capable of succeeding in STEM; they're just in a STEM major because they perceive it as being a track to a good job, regardless of their lack of talent, preparation, or willingness to study.
Yet another incorrect assumption that many people make is that there is a shortage of workers with STEM degrees. Any employer who can't find someone to fill a position requiring a STEM degree is having that problem based on how much they're paying for that position. If they keep offering more and more money, I guarantee you that at some point they will start getting qualified applicants. This is the same fallacy we see in many other fields with claimed shortages of workers, from agricultural work to programming.
Radon, from unventilated places, is the leading cause of radiation induced death.
I don't think this is quite right. Do you have a source for this claim? First off, I don't think radon is the leading source of radiation dose to the population; the leading source is natural radioactivity. It may be true that radon is the leading source of artificial radiation dose to the population. But even then, that's not the same as saying that it's the leading cause of death induced by artificial radiation. To assert that, you would have to be able to verify some hypothesis such as LNT. But LNT doesn't hold in animal studies, so there's no reason to expect that it holds in humans; we just can't say for sure, because we can't do controlled experiments with humans. We actually don't know anything quantitative about radiation hormesis in humans, but if humans work like other animals, it may be that radon actually prevents more deaths than it causes.
Postscript - integral to PDF internals - is itself a Turing-complete language, derived from Forth.
It will always be a problem.
No, because PDF, unlike PS, was intentionally designed to be Turing-incomplete. That was a good design decision, which was then unfortunately screwed with when they added javascript.
Having EVERYBODY vote on whether the "2011 US bilateral investment treaty with Uruguay" should be signed or not, what percentage of the mortgage insurance premiums should be deductible from the tax return, and every other one of the million issues that come up to the legislators every year, would make great comedy but horrible governance.
If you click through from TFA to the site's home page, there's a reasonably coherent statement of the fundamental principles they have in mind. They want a system where one is "free to delegate one's own and one's received votes to whoever one chooses; and to withdraw delegation at any time." So presumably I would delegate my vote on anything related to the U.S.'s foreign policy with Latin America to someone I think is an expert.
But there are plenty of other things to object to in the slashdot summary and metagovernment's stated philosophy.
As we (very gradually) move away from feudal, leader-based forms of governance
"Feudal" has a definite meaning, involving a hierarchical political structure based on inheritance, a system of mutual obligations, and being tied to the land. Using it as a generic term of disapproval is dumb. I haven't seen any evidence that we're undergoing any "move away" from "leader-based forms of governance." If we were, it would violate metagovernment's statement of principles, since delegation would inevtitably create leaders -- people to whom many voters had delegated their votes.
free to vote on every issue of his/her concern, regardless of geography or scale
This sounds groovy. I live in Fullerton, California. Can the entire population of China vote on whether to institute a one-child policy in Fullerton?
But anyway, in general it should be pretty clear that a political system such as the one in the US, which was designed in the 18th century, is probably not optimal for the 21st century. I like the idea of delegation, which for example would break the back of the two-party system. On a smaller scale, I work at a college that has a few thousand employees, and the processes by which it's run, although they include many republican forms, suck mightily, mainly because people are too lazy to study the issues and engage in reasoned debate. Having a debate on a wiki, for example, would be a huge step up in deliberative quality from what we do now.
In East Africa, there's a money transfer service called M-Pesa that is home-grown and wildly popular. It uses cell phones, and everywhere you go there are green shops and kiosks that allow you to put in or take out cash. A lot of the people using it have never had a bank account before, and may never have one. From this point of view, a cell phone is more of a necessity and not a toy as it is in the U.S.
For telephony, a lot of the third world leapfrogged over land-lines and went straight to cell phones.
There is an easy workaround for this. You go to the trouble of using a high-entropy password for a certain web site, and then their web interface insists on knowing something like your dog's name, which would be a huge security hole. Well, whatever method you use for making a secure password (I use a hash function), just use that to generate your dog's name. So I'll tell google that my dog's name is bHo3HI38, and lolcats.edu that it's QRYh3l34.
Give up on wanting it to be memorable. That's pointless and self-defeating. Just stick it in an encrypted file. It's not an inconvenience, because you're never going to use it. I don't ever expect to have to actually tell lolcats.edu again that my dog's name is QRYh3l34.
Sling shot was always the option for emergency and in fact was actually tested on Apollo 8.
Yep. If they hadn't wanted the "free return" capability for emergencies, they could have made the trip much more quickly. With only 10% more initial velocity, they could have cut the transit time to the moon by about a factor of 3 (from 70 hours each way to about 20 hours). But that would have put them at too high a speed to slingshot around the moon. The gravitational potential energy maxes out 9/10 of the way to the moon, and with the course they actually used, they were just barely going fast enough to coast over this big hump.
You raise an interesting point, but the numbers don't seem to bear you out. The local cost of electricity is 19 cents per kilowatt-hour. These machines are typically powered on for maybe 10 hours a week, which is about a 5% duty cycle. At 50 W, the electricity cost for a year of use comes out to be about $4. To pay back the cost of a $50 power-saving upgrade, as you suggest, would take decades, which is much longer than these things will be in use. (My time is also worth something to me, so there's no way I would replace all these CPUs.)
When using old hardware, a better thing to focus on is usually replacing CRTs with LCDs. Monitors last much longer than computers and obsolesce much more slowly. People also usually appreciate the extra desk space they get with an LCD.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, that isn't how it works on my device. No need to be rude just because your device behaves differently than mine.
what if you don't have internet access or some sort of proxy has restricted access to their ad server?
Then it fails to fetch the details (second page of the ad), but you still have to go through the annoying process.
It does show the first page of the ad even when you're out of wifi contact, from which I infer that it caches them in memory.
I picked up a low-end kindle at a discounted price (~$40) that I'm sure represented a loss for Amazon, and I don't buy any DRM'd books for it, so they're not recouping that loss from me. This gives me a gratifying feeling that I've successfully fought back against "the Man." I can read Jane Austen novels while traveling and not run out of reading material.
But the ads really are creepy and a nuisance. Every time you stop reading for a while, an ad comes up. To get past the ad, you have to click a button. Then it talks to your wifi network and pops up the details of the ad. Then you can finally click again to get back to reading Pride and Prejudice.
I accepted the ads as a conscious part of my plot to screw Amazon financially and get a useful toy for myself, which I use only while traveling. But would I pay hundreds of dollars for a device that pulled this kind of crap, if I was going to use the device a lot? No. Way. In. Hell.
We're really headed for a nasty, dystopian future with ebooks.
yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
Sound worked great for me on every version of linux I ran up until ubuntu Intrepid. It started breaking at Jaunty. As of Precise, it's still broken on most machines.
I have a classroom with 7 linux boxes in it that I bought on ebay. Around the Jaunty period, sound broke on most of the machines. I put the same sound card in all of them in an effort to get consistent behavior, but that didn't help. Right now, sound works on 3 out of 7.
Why, oh why did the kernel developers have to take something that worked fine and break it completely?
It's not exactly the same, but it is the same kookery warmed over. Here's a summary.
Do rates of nuclear decay depend on environmental factors?
There is one environmental effect that has been scientifically well established for a long time. In the process of electron capture, a proton in the nucleus combines with an inner-shell electron to produce a neutron and a neutrino. This effect does depend on the electronic environment, and in particular, the process cannot happen if the atom is completely ionized.
Other claims of environmental effects on decay rates are crank science, often quoted by creationists in their attempts to discredit evolutionary and geological time scales.
He et al. (He 2007) claim to have detected a change in rates of beta decay of as much as 11% when samples are rotated in a centrifuge, and say that the effect varies asymmetrically with clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. He believes that there is a mysterious energy field that has both biological and nuclear effects, and that it relates to circadian rhythms. The nuclear effects were not observed when the experimental conditions were reproduced by Ding et al. [Ding 2009]
Jenkins and Fischbach (2008) claim to have observed effects on alpha decay rates at the 10^-3 level, correlated with an influence from the sun. They proposed that their results could be tested more dramatically by looking for changes in the rate of alpha decay in radioisotope thermoelectric generators aboard space probes. Such an effect turned out not to exist (Cooper 2009). Undeterred by their theory's failure to pass their own proposed test, they have gone on to publish even kookier ideas, such as a neutrino-mediated effect from solar flares, even though solar flares are a surface phenomenon, whereas neutrinos come from the sun's core. An independent study found no such link between flares and decay rates (Parkhomov 2010a). Laboratory experiments[Lindstrom 2010] have also placed limits on the sensitivity of radioactive decay to neutrino flux that rule out a neutrino-mediated effect at a level orders of magnitude less than what would be required in order to explain the variations claimed in [Jenkins 2008]. Despite this, Jenkins and Fischbach continue to speculate about a neutrino effect in [Sturrock 2012]; refusal to deal with contrary evidence is a hallmark of kook science. They admit that variations shown in their 2012 work "may be due in part to environmental influences," but don't seem to want to acknowledge that if the strength of these influences in unknown, they may explain the entire claimed effect, not just part of it.
Jenkins and Fischbach made further claims in 2010 based on experiments done decades ago by other people, so that Jenkins and Fischbach have no first-hand way of investigating possible sources of systematic error. Other attempts to reproduce the result are also plagued by systematic errors of the same size as the claimed effect. For example, an experiment by Parkhomov (2010b) shows a Fourier power spectrum in which a dozen other peaks are nearly as prominent as the claimed yearly variation.
Cardone et al. claim to have observed variations in the rate of alpha decay of thorium induced by 20 kHz ultrasound, and claim that this alpha decay occurs without the emission of gamma rays. Ericsson et al. have pointed out multiple severe problems with Cardone's experiments.
In agreement with theory, high-precision experimental tests show no detectable temperature-dependence in the rates of electron capture[Goodwin 2009] and alpha decay.[Gurevich 2008]
He YuJian et al., Science China 50 (2007) 170.
YouQian Ding et al., Science China 52 (2009) 690.
Jenkins and Fischbach (2008), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283v1, Astropart.Phys.32:42-46,2009
Jenkins and Fischbach (2009), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3156, Astropart.Phys.31:407-411,2009
Jenkins and Fischbach (2010), http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3318
Yes, something very similar to this has been done:
Lindstrom et al. (2010), http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.5071 , Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A, 622 (2010) 93-96
It puts limits on the sensitivity of radioactive decay to neutrino flux that rule out a neutrino-mediated effect at a level orders of magnitude less than what would be required in order to explain the variations claimed by Jenkins and Fischbach in 2008. And yet Jenkins and Fischbach are still speculating that the effect they claim has something to do with neutrinos.
One of the hallmarks of kooks is that they ignore contrary evidence.
The two main contenders are string theory (ST) and loop quantum gravity (LQG). ST doesn't quantize spacetime at all. LQG gives quantization of area and volume, but not lengths. It is definitely wrong to present either theory as existing on a discrete grid: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/186076/is-there-such-a-thing-as-discrete-riemannian-geometry
What you're presenting is similar to a point of view that was being pushed ca. 2006 by some folks at the Perimeter Institute doing loop quantum gravity (LQG). They were talking like they had a theory that really made predictions about vacuum dispersion that would be testable by the GLAST gamma-ray telescope. That was exciting, because if your theory doesn't expose itself to the possibility of falsification, then you're not really doing science. Unfortunately it then became clear that LQG doesn't actually make any such definite prediction. LQG might predict much less vacuum dispersion, or none at all. This puts LQG back in the same category as string theory: theories that aren't really theories yet, because they don't make predictions. (String theory does kinda sorta require supersymmetry at the electroweak scale, so in that sense it has failed an experimental test, because the LHC doesn't seem to be finding supersymmetry.)
No, some CC licenses are free and some are not. CC-BY-SA is free. (It's what Wikipedia uses.) Anything with ND or NC is not free.
The difference between CC-BY-SA and GPL is that GPL is designed as a software license, CC-BY-SA for other creative works such as books. There's an analogous relationship between CC-BY and BSD.
Cory Doctorow proposed an interesting method for handling this kind of situation.
Right. Or they'll write their own licenses, which has a couple of big disadvantages: (1) Non-lawyers will write their own licenses and mess up, or people will put things in their license that will have unintended consequences. (2) There will be lots of different and incompatible licenses, which makes sharing more difficult. Neither of these is purely hypothetical. There really was an overproliferation of licenses ca. 2000. E.g., here is a license created in 1999; its author now recommends using CC instead. The existence of both GFDL and CC-BY-SA has created huge hassles for a lot of people. There are definitely examples of misconceived clauses in software licenses, e.g., the infamous BSD advertising clause. A similar example in non-software licenses would be the optional invariant sections clause in the GFDL, which caused major hassles in debian documentation.
This is really, really silly.
Counterexamples:
1. I write an opinion piece for my local paper on why G.W. Bush was the worst US president in history. Under any free license, someone else can write a revised version in which my opinions are all changed, then distribute it with attribution to me and the reviser. Fair use doesn't allow this. An ND license does what I want, which is to prevent this misrepresentation of my opinions.
2. Alice Randall wrote a book called The Wind Done Gone using the setting and characters of Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell's estate sued Randall and won. If Gone With the Wind had been distributed under an ND license, this would have been prevented. Under a free license, it would have been allowed. Fair use doesn't allow this use.
3. I make coffee mugs with Harry Potter characters on them and sell them on the internet without paying a royalty to J.K. Rowling. If Rowling had chosen any free license, this would have been allowed. With an NC license, it's prohibited, which is what she wants. It doesn't fall under fair use.
Yes, this is blindingly obvious. In all three examples above, the original author had no intention of contributing to a shared commons.
Perhaps the silliest thing of all about this is the belief that people can somehow be prevented from using NC or ND licenses. Nobody can prevent this. The CC organization could "deprecate" them, and this would have absolutely no effect.
The "what if everyone did it?" test is always interesting to apply, but not always valid. By that test, it would be immoral for me to go backpacking in the Sierra, because if the whole population of California did it, the wilderness experience would be completely ruined. But anyway, let's apply that test to ad blocking. If everyone did it ... then advertisers would be forced to modify the poor behavior that made people start using ad blockers. They'd be forced to eliminate animated ads, popovers, etc., etc.
I'm perfectly willing to have my behavior tracked. That's why every time I buy groceries at Albertson's, I voluntarily punch in my phone number on the little terminal. The thing is, there's no such thing as a free lunch, so I certainly wouldn't do it for free. Albertson's pays me a significant amount of money for that info, by giving me discounts. I probably save $5 per shopping trip by letting them track my buying. If you know of a web site that will pay me $5 to let them track my behavior, then by all means, please let me know about them, and I'll add them to my whitelist and start accepting cookies from them.
I happen to get the NY Times delivered to my house every day, but anyway they're free to paywall or not paywall their site, display ads or not display ads. Whatever choice they make, they're making it because they think it's the most efficient way to make a buck. Almost all newspapers seem to have decided that the profit-optimizing combination is not to paywall, and to display ads. It allows them to reach a huge number of people who would never see them in print, and whichever of those people don't have ad blockers installed, the papers get something of value from them through advertising revenue.
(a) This is posted to Ask Slashdot, but it's not really a question, it's a plug for the author's answer.
(b) The slashdot summary is incoherent.
(c) TFA consists of an incoherent intro followed by a description of what the author does. To save you the trouble of wading through the incomprehensible text, here's what he does: "#1 -- Disable third-party cookies [...] #2 -- Use Ghostery to block everything indiscriminately, but whitelist the sites I support."
A typical piece of bizarre reasoning, incoherently expressed, from TFA:
This whole thing about the morally correct response to internet advertising has been rehashed over and over on slashdot. Over and over, people have made the same point: internet ads wouldn't be objectionable if they were like ads in a newspaper or magazine, but because they aren't like that, any user with enough know-how is going to block them. I'm sorry, but I just can't read an article while an animated monkey is jumping up and down next to it on the screen.
Text-oriented sites like slashdot are relatively cheap to run, on a per-user basis, so as long as some percentage of their users don't use ad blockers, these sites are viable.
I asked someone I know, who works in online advertising, whether ad blocking is an issue for her company. I told her I never saw ads on the internet and was surprised that anyone was ... well, dumb enough ... to fail to install ad blocking software. Her response: "Do you use Hulu?"
Total nonsense. It wasn't "sealed." You simply needed a certain torx screwdriver to open it. And there certainly were user-upgradeable parts inside. I got a 4 MB upgrade to my 512k mac from a company called Mac Megabytes in Berkeley, at the Claremont Hotel, ca. 1986.
It's depressing when total misinformation like this gets modded up to 5 on slashdot, half a dozen users point out that it's wrong, and then it never gets modded back down.
I live in California, and there are legally mandated warnings like this all over the place -- so many of them that it's impossible to take them seriously.
"WARNING: This area contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
You get this in places like hotel rooms and gas stations. What am I going to do, stop putting gas in my car or stop staying in hotels?
It's also applied in totally inconsistent ways. Some companies that sell herbal medicines have to put the warning on their product, which sort of makes sense, because any carcinogenic effect is an effect regardless of whether the product is "natural." But in other cases (chocolate, vinegar), the courts have ruled that other "natural" products don't have to have the warnings because they're natural.
There are some possible sane, logical reasons to be concerned about the political and economic effects of GMOs (concern about patents, inability of farmers to use seed from their own crops, reduction of genetic variability, harm to neighboring fields from spraying roundup on GM roundup-resistant fields, ...), but there are no sane, logical reasons to be worried about health effects of eating them -- not on a population basis, and certainly not on an individual basis. Therefore I think it's great that Californians are bestowing upon themselves yet another set of warnings. The proliferation of warnings ensures that people will pay even less attention to them than they do now, and that's exactly the right result, since they should be paying zero attention to them in the first place.
Eating is actually a fairly dangerous activity, because we do a lot of it, and even a low probability of harm becomes significant when it's repeated by every individual many, many times. But we don't want to know about the high risk of harm from eating "natural" foods (salmonella, carcinogens in barbecued meat, ...). We only want to know about the (zero) risk of harm from eating "unnatural" GM foods, because that seems scarier.
Same deal with people being afraid their kids will get kidnapped by a stranger when they should be worried about them getting run over by someone talking on their cell phone. The first risk is nearly zero, but it's unusual, so we're more scared of it.
Same deal with people thinking the Fukushima nuclear accident (with zero deaths) is really horrible, while the tsunami (18,000 deaths) isn't a big deal. The rational reaction would be to improve early warning systems for tsunamis, but because nuclear stuff is unusual, we're more scared of it.
This is a little misleading IMO.
First off, you can't argue with the basic Malthusian issue. If population grows geometrically, at some point we are guaranteed to run out of food, if only because we reach the limits imposed by the laws of thermodynamics.
And even supposing that the planet's population eventually levels off at some number where we're still able to feed everyone, there is no guarantee that we will be happy with the way the world turns out at that point. In particular, the environmental effects may be ugly. Here in California, for example, we have serious ecological problems in the Sacramento Delta and Owens Valley due to diversion of water to agriculture.
Yes, this is a much more likely explanation than TFA's claim, given without any evidence, that the cause of the higher enrollments is "better science teaching" or that "science has become cool again."
In addition to making bogus assumptions about the cause of the increase, there is a likely tendency to make bogus assumptions about its effects. In particular, you might think that higher enrollments would lead to more people succeeding in getting science degrees and then landing jobs in which they use what they learned. I teach physics at a community college in the US, and many of my students are clearly not capable of succeeding in STEM; they're just in a STEM major because they perceive it as being a track to a good job, regardless of their lack of talent, preparation, or willingness to study.
Yet another incorrect assumption that many people make is that there is a shortage of workers with STEM degrees. Any employer who can't find someone to fill a position requiring a STEM degree is having that problem based on how much they're paying for that position. If they keep offering more and more money, I guarantee you that at some point they will start getting qualified applicants. This is the same fallacy we see in many other fields with claimed shortages of workers, from agricultural work to programming.
I don't think this is quite right. Do you have a source for this claim? First off, I don't think radon is the leading source of radiation dose to the population; the leading source is natural radioactivity. It may be true that radon is the leading source of artificial radiation dose to the population. But even then, that's not the same as saying that it's the leading cause of death induced by artificial radiation. To assert that, you would have to be able to verify some hypothesis such as LNT. But LNT doesn't hold in animal studies, so there's no reason to expect that it holds in humans; we just can't say for sure, because we can't do controlled experiments with humans. We actually don't know anything quantitative about radiation hormesis in humans, but if humans work like other animals, it may be that radon actually prevents more deaths than it causes.
No, because PDF, unlike PS, was intentionally designed to be Turing-incomplete. That was a good design decision, which was then unfortunately screwed with when they added javascript.
If you click through from TFA to the site's home page, there's a reasonably coherent statement of the fundamental principles they have in mind. They want a system where one is "free to delegate one's own and one's received votes to whoever one chooses; and to withdraw delegation at any time." So presumably I would delegate my vote on anything related to the U.S.'s foreign policy with Latin America to someone I think is an expert.
But there are plenty of other things to object to in the slashdot summary and metagovernment's stated philosophy.
"Feudal" has a definite meaning, involving a hierarchical political structure based on inheritance, a system of mutual obligations, and being tied to the land. Using it as a generic term of disapproval is dumb. I haven't seen any evidence that we're undergoing any "move away" from "leader-based forms of governance." If we were, it would violate metagovernment's statement of principles, since delegation would inevtitably create leaders -- people to whom many voters had delegated their votes.
This sounds groovy. I live in Fullerton, California. Can the entire population of China vote on whether to institute a one-child policy in Fullerton?
But anyway, in general it should be pretty clear that a political system such as the one in the US, which was designed in the 18th century, is probably not optimal for the 21st century. I like the idea of delegation, which for example would break the back of the two-party system. On a smaller scale, I work at a college that has a few thousand employees, and the processes by which it's run, although they include many republican forms, suck mightily, mainly because people are too lazy to study the issues and engage in reasoned debate. Having a debate on a wiki, for example, would be a huge step up in deliberative quality from what we do now.
In East Africa, there's a money transfer service called M-Pesa that is home-grown and wildly popular. It uses cell phones, and everywhere you go there are green shops and kiosks that allow you to put in or take out cash. A lot of the people using it have never had a bank account before, and may never have one. From this point of view, a cell phone is more of a necessity and not a toy as it is in the U.S.
For telephony, a lot of the third world leapfrogged over land-lines and went straight to cell phones.
There is an easy workaround for this. You go to the trouble of using a high-entropy password for a certain web site, and then their web interface insists on knowing something like your dog's name, which would be a huge security hole. Well, whatever method you use for making a secure password (I use a hash function), just use that to generate your dog's name. So I'll tell google that my dog's name is bHo3HI38, and lolcats.edu that it's QRYh3l34.
Give up on wanting it to be memorable. That's pointless and self-defeating. Just stick it in an encrypted file. It's not an inconvenience, because you're never going to use it. I don't ever expect to have to actually tell lolcats.edu again that my dog's name is QRYh3l34.
Yep. If they hadn't wanted the "free return" capability for emergencies, they could have made the trip much more quickly. With only 10% more initial velocity, they could have cut the transit time to the moon by about a factor of 3 (from 70 hours each way to about 20 hours). But that would have put them at too high a speed to slingshot around the moon. The gravitational potential energy maxes out 9/10 of the way to the moon, and with the course they actually used, they were just barely going fast enough to coast over this big hump.
You raise an interesting point, but the numbers don't seem to bear you out. The local cost of electricity is 19 cents per kilowatt-hour. These machines are typically powered on for maybe 10 hours a week, which is about a 5% duty cycle. At 50 W, the electricity cost for a year of use comes out to be about $4. To pay back the cost of a $50 power-saving upgrade, as you suggest, would take decades, which is much longer than these things will be in use. (My time is also worth something to me, so there's no way I would replace all these CPUs.)
When using old hardware, a better thing to focus on is usually replacing CRTs with LCDs. Monitors last much longer than computers and obsolesce much more slowly. People also usually appreciate the extra desk space they get with an LCD.