What a lousy, misleading article. He makes it clear upfront that he's talking about two separate things, but then he goes on to mix them together indiscriminately throughout the rest of the article. (1) If you build your business on GPL 2 software, you'd better read the GPL 2. People who don't are getting sued. (2) GPL 3 is different from GPL 2, and may be incompatible with some business models that GPL 2 is compatible with.
Re #1: Duh. Don't agree to a license without making sure you can abide by the license. Re #2: Similar duh, and it's relatively inconsequential because very little software is under GPL 3 so far. (The typical PHB reading this is probably not going to understand that GPL 2 doesn't automatically update GPL 3, but the article could easily leave you with the impression that it does.)
With the filing of court documents, a philosophical debate about the proper place for software in society has become a business dispute with the risk of substantial consequences.
Well, no, it's not a risk. A risk refers to something you can't predict. If you agree to a license and then violate the license, that's not a risk, that's intentionally shooting yourself in the foot.
For-profit companies using open source software should take notice
He talks about "for-profit" like this all through the article. That's stupid. The GPL doesn't discriminate between for-profit and not-for-profit use. Of course the people getting sued are all for-profit companies. Is this a surprise? A nonprofit probably wouldn't have any motivation to violate the GPL, and anyhow you don't usually pick people to sue who don't have money.
The new lesson is that the freedom belongs to the software, not to users. You are not free to do whatever you want with the open source software and may find yourself in a legal fight if what you do restricts the freedom of the software.
Huh? This is idiotic. Software doesn't have human rights. The GPL also doesn't place any restrictions on how software is used. In fact, you can use GPL'd sofwtware without even agreeing to the license. You only have to agree to the GPL if you want to modify the software and then redistribute it.
Any activity that leverages software for business advantage is likely to restrict the software's freedom
Hmm...say Joe's Garage uses Firefox and OpenOffice. Can anyone explain why that's likely to "restrict the software's freedom?" Or say Barnes and Noble runs Linux on their servers. Does that mean they're "likely to restrict the software's freedom?" What he really means is that if you try to violate the GPL by making OSS into proprietary software, you've got a problem. That's a lot narrower than "leveraging software for business advantage."
and the growing use of open source software by for-profit companies has been a growing irritant for free software advocates.
Oh, God, it just gets dumber and dumber. The OSS community wants users. Everyone I know in the OSS community is typically overjoyed that IBM got on the Linux bandwagon. They're happy that Google is generally OSS-friendly. They love it that more and more OEMs are offering machines with Linux preinstalled.
I've had a couple of my sites (lightandmatter.com, theassayer.org) hosted there since they were Rackshack. IIRC, they renamed themselves to EV1, then got bought by The Planet. EV1 is the company that made themselves unpopular with the open-source community by paying protection money to SCO. I thought about changing hosts due to the SCO episode, but ended up not wanting to go through that kind of hassle and expense on a matter of principle. Their reliability has generally been pretty good. Support has been miserable on the few occasions when I've had to use it, but that seems par for the course with $100/mo webhosting. Now that The Planet has bought them, and SCO is essentially history, I'm starting to feel like the cooties have worn off, and I'll probably stick with them.
No all we need [...] Is for Google to release a Linux distro for desktops... Then Microsoft would be truly pissed off
Why in the world would that make any difference? Does stamping the name "Google" on something suddenly make it better? It wouldn't solve any of the existing problems that are keeping people from switching from Windows to Linux: installing an OS is too difficult for most users; people are used to Windows and Office and are scared to change; Linux's support for printing and wifi is still horrible; Windows games don't run on Linux; people are locked into proprietary file formats that they can't use on Linux.
I have a bachelor's in physics from Berkeley (1987) and a PhD in physics from Yale (1994). There was never any formal requirement that I take a programming course. I happened to have been interested in programming since I was a teenager, and I used it sometimes in my PhD research, but I could have done just fine without it. In fact, it might have been better for me if I hadn't known how to program, because I would have wasted less time on coding that wasn't strictly necessary in order to get my research done. I can recall at least one Yale grad student, a member of my lab group, who never learned any programming at all. It wasn't a problem for him. To me, it just seems like one more skill that might come in handy, sort of like learning to use a mill and a lathe; my lab paid for us grad students to take a machine shop course (total of maybe 10 hours in the classroom), but it wasn't a requirement.
A formal requirement seems like a really, really bad idea to me. Undergrads who are interested in programming because they think it's fun will either teach themselves (like I did) or take a course voluntarily. Grad students who need programming for their research -- ditto. I'm sure many people will want to have a programming course on their transcript just because it will be useful for getting jobs; if so, that should be their choice.
None of this needs to be a formal requirement.
A physics degree is really a liberal arts degree. You're learning how to think about nature. It shouldn't be like an engineering degree.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy with just a window manager. I run fluxbox, and it's as fast as every GUI should be, i.e., fast enough that I can't tell that it's not responding instantaneously. The whole idea of having a computer screen littered with icons is something that I got used to ca. 1985, because it was the only game in town, but eventually I decided I didn't like. It feels like in addition to the mess on my physical desk, I'm also being saddled with a mess on my computer desktop.
But the good news about linux is that nobody has to agree with me. If they prefer a Windows-style desktop, they can use Gnome or KDE. If they prefer something a little more Mac-flavored, they can use gOS.
If you've got files on your computer that you only read, never write, and those files are getting corrupted, then it sounds like you have a problem with your filesystem, or a problem with your hardware. You need to find and fix the problem with the filesystem or hardware, not apply band-aids to PDF files if the problem has nothing to do with the PDF format per se.
Another possibility would be that you're using buggy software that is supposed to open PDF files in read-only mode, but actually corrupts them. If so, then you need to identify what the software is that's doing it, so you can remove that software from your computer.
For diagnosis, and also recovery, one thing you could try would be using the Unison file synchronizer to synchronize your files with a hard disk on another computer. If the files aren't changing, it will run extremely fast. If you notice mysterious changes to files right after a blackout or an electrical storm, then you can guess that's why. If you notice mysterious changes right after you use a particular application, ditto. Unison has a -fastcheck option on Windows, which you should read about; you'd probably want to run most of the time with it, and maybe once a week without it.
There are some pretty straightforward things you can do to protect yourself from identity theft, without paying any money.
You can opt out of getting unsolicited credit card offers at optoutprescreen.com. (Here is a link to them from an FTC web page so you can tell they're legit.)
You can also make a habit of getting an annual free credit report from annualcreditreport.com. This can help you to detect if something goofy is going on. (Link from FTC. It's run by the credit reporting companies, and as you go through the process, they'll try hard to sell you on getting non-free services as well. You have to watch carefully, and not accept the defaults.)
IIRC there is also a process for locking your credit reports completely, but it costs money unless you can demonstrate that you've already been a victim of fraud.
There are quite a few professional authors releasing fiction under some kind of CC license. Cory Doctorow,
Rudy Rucker,
Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, and
Charles Stross are some of the better known SF pros who are doing this. Bruce Sterling has released some nonfiction under a CC license. Other, less well known professionally published authors are trying it as well, e.g., Rick Dakan, Mike Brotherton, Jim Munroe.
I'm not sure what's so notable about the "community-edited" part. It sounds like an attempt to make a false analogy between fiction writing and software development. Software is a tool, so the "with enough eyeballs, all bugs become shallow" concept makes sense; if it's broken, people can help you fix it. Fiction isn't a tool. The difference between a good novel and a bad novel isn't just that there are typos here and there. There's also a massive oversupply of people who think they can write fiction, so it's not exactly exciting news that someone is willing to give me his novel for free. Slush pile editors get paid to read unpublished fiction all day, and at night they go home bleary-eyed and debating whether to slit their wrists.
One similarity that does exist between fiction writing and software hacking is that they both require a large amount of practice to get good at. I collected about forty rejection slips on about a dozen pieces of short fiction before making my first sale. If the OP really wants to get to the point where he can reach an audience with his science fiction, I'd advise him to look into some online groups where he can get feedback on his work. Two good communities are critters.org and the Baen's Universe e-slush board. I also benefited a lot from attending one of the Clarion workshops.
I think the analogy with open-source software works much better for nonfiction, and it's also with nonfiction that you can actually hope to reach a significant audience without going through a traditional publisher.
I don't see how the shape of the airplane can make any difference in the propagation of the wave once it's gotten far away from the airplane. I'm still guessing it's some kind of nonlinearity in the propagation of sound waves. E.g., maybe an extreme decompression propagates at a smaller velocity than an extreme compression.
I'm sure glad the state of civil liberties is so much better in the U.S. We just have torture, secret prisons where people can be held forever without trial, and an executive branch that claims habeas corpus doesn't exist. It's also no big deal that we have one of the world's highest incarceration rates, which is as high as it is mainly because of the victimless crime of selling drugs. Nope, no problem here. Those Canadians sure are bad, though.
Hmm...sorry, but I don't follow your argument. I don't understand what you're referring to when you talk about the N shape. I don't understand how the opening angle of either cone can be anything but sin-1(c/v) (I goofed in my previous post by saying tan-1.) I don't see how the shape of the airplane can matter at all.
The slashdot summary repeats a statement that I've heard elsewhere, which is that the delay between the leading and trailing booms is altitude-dependant, i.e., the opening angle of the trailing cone is smaller than the opening angle of the leading cone. Does anyone have a good explanation of why this is true? Naively I'd expect the opening angle for both cones to be the same, and given by tan-1(c/v). If that was the case, then the delay between the leading and trailing booms would always be extremely short (tens of milliseconds). That's not the case, so what's the more complicated effect that's going on here? Something to do with nonlinearity of sound waves?
Nobody so far has said anything about your point that ISPs won't like it.
[...]
For some time, ISPs had clauses in contracts that only allowed a single computer to use a connection. With NAT so easy to implement, they relaxed that stipulation. But if subscribers start providing free internet to their neighbors, and especially if that network gets expanded as per suggestion, ISPs will probably start disconnecting users that abuse their policies.
The article actually does refer to this, but only at the very end:
Most ISPs have anti-sharing requirements in their license agreement, but as long as mesh users don't in the aggregate do anything more obnoxious than a typical user would do (and mesh hardware can be set to throttle the bandwidth available to each individual node, preventing one porn fiend from absorbing 99% of the bandwidth 100% of the time), the ISPs a mesh connects to are unlikely to care, or even notice.
This makes very little sense to me. If I saturate my neighborhood with wifi, but it's all going through my own individual cable modem connection, then the results are pretty predictable. First my cable modem connection will get so slow that it will drive me nuts. Then my ISP will disconnect me for excessive use of bandwidth.
Of course we can now insert the usual slashdot discussion of bandwidth caps. Yes, it's dishonest of ISPs to call it unlimited internet access when really there's a cap. Yes, they should reveal what the caps are. No, it's not really possible for ISPs to provide enough of a dedicated pipe to allow every single user to access the internet simultaneously at full speed; they have to overscribe, or the economics don't work.
Every copylefted open educational resource is incompatible with every other copylefted open educational resource with a different license.
The only
free-as-in-speech licenses of any importance at this point are GFDL and
CC-BY-SA. I'm not a lawyer, but my inderstanding is that GFDL and CC-BY-SA are
compatible enough that by dual-licensing a book under those two licenses,
I can incorporate photos that are under both licenses.
In answer to the arguments in your blog post about this licensing issue, I don't think the logic of the section "Historical Lessons Of The OPL"
makes sense as applied to FWK. FWK is providing the books as free downloads,
which means that the prices of the books in print can't be significantly
higher than the incremental cost of production. Therefore there's no
risk of being undercut.
If you have a pool, there are systems you can buy that run your pool pump off of photovoltaics. Pool pumps are infamous energy hogs, and you can run a pump off of DC, which cuts out the inverter. Getting rid of the inverter improves efficiency and cuts the cost of the project. This is not a grid-tied system.
My field is nuclear physics, and I'm also very skeptical about this. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and their evidence is weak. They haven't done any nuclear characterization of these supposed atoms at all. They haven't even measured Z. All they've measured is a peak in a mass spectrum, and as you point out, the much less heroic explanation for that is simply that they're seeing molecules. It would also be extraordinarily surprising if these isotopes had half-lives of millions of years. The authors seem to be pushing the idea that they're superdeformed states, analogous to the fission isomers. The thing is, the liquid drop model tells us that as you increase Z, the potential barrier preventing fission is going to get systematically lower and lower. Likewise, the time-scale for alpha decay (as they point out) is expected to be very short for something with a Z this high.
The Open Source way is to direct the efforts of academic communities toward the creation of fully free e-texts under licensing that permits redistribution and derivative works. This is already well under way.
I have to disagree with you that it's "well under way." There's this wiki. If you look at the books listed there, there is almost nothing at all at the K-12 level. Virtually the entire list consists of college textbooks, and quite a few of them are not even freshman college texts, they're at the upper-division level.
Maybe we're talking about different time scales. I've been cataloguing free books at theassayer.org since 2000. During that time, the good news has been that hundreds of high-quality free books have appeared. The bad news is that essentially none of those are K-12 books. If the deficit of free K-12 is going to start changing, I'd expect that the time scale for that to happen would have to be at least a decade. And a decade would, IMO, be an optimistic figure that would occur only if something fundamental changed that would get people started on writing those K-12 books. In fact, I don't see that kind of fundamental change happening. I think there are probably two reasons why free K-12 books have never gotten off the ground. (1) People writing free books are generally affluent people in the U.S., who can afford to do it as a hobby. Some are computer programmers writing documentation for software, and others are university professors. None of them are K-12 teachers, probably because K-12 teachers have all they can handle just managing a classroom full of 35 kids. (2) In most places in the U.S., textbook buying decisions are heavily bureacratized. Book publishers spend vast amounts of money on marketing and lobbying. My own free physics books are college-level books, but sometimes high schools do use them; I think it's telling that nearly all the high schools using them are private schools.
If "well under way" means "likely to get going within our lifetimes," then I'd say maybe. But I certainly don't see any sign that it's going to happen during the lifetime of OLPC.
On a related topic, the usenet groups I subscribe to are getting a ridiculous amount of spam recently from gmail accounts. On a given day, you'll get, say, 10 new posts, each with its own distinct subject line, trying to sell watches or running shoes. They're all from the same gmail account. It doesn't do you any good to plonk that gmail account, because the next day it's 10 new spams from some new gmail account. It's gotten to the point where I'm considering just filtering out all posts that come from gmail accounts. I'm guessing this is happening because google has relaxed their conditions for getting a gmail account, and at the same time the spammers are getting more sophisticated about solving captchas. The impression I get is that google is starting to feel the need to grow into their ridiculously large market capitalization, and they can only do that by bringing in lots of new users. If that means letting in lots of spambots too, well...
Nicole Allen, Textbooks Program Director at CalPIRG, wrote to say that a more relevant link than the CalPIRG link at the end of my slashdot summary would be maketextbooksaffordable.org. That's where the information about CalPIRG's open textbooks campaign is.
Sure this is a nice service, but it is dependent upon instructors/authors to upload books to Flat World Knowledge. Most professors, in my experience, like money more than spreading knowledge and competence. They will likely choose not to participate unless there is some incentive for them to actually upload the book PDF.
Check out the three links at the beginning of the last sentence of the slashdot summary. There are hundreds of free textbooks catalogued at those sites. Some college professors may fit your negative stereotype, but the evidence seems to show that many others do not.
One of the reasons textbooks cost so much is because professors' salaries are bad. There is a very very good incentive for a professor to charge a lot for their book.
Speaking as a college professor, I think you're wrong on both points. Professors' salaries are actually very reasonable these days. Also, very little of the retail price of a $130 goes in the professor's pocket. Most textbooks do not make any significant amount of money for their authors -- the exceptions are home-run books aimed at the most popular freshman courses, and there just aren't that many of those. The typical motivation for a professor to write a textbook is that he doesn't like the choices that are already available.
The reason for high textbook prices is profit-taking by publishers. In the last 25 years, textbook prices have risen much, much faster than can be explained by inflation.
My only disappointment with the G1G1 program is that it wasn't G2G1, Give 2 Get 1. That could have resulted in more laptops in the hands of children, and fewer laptops in the hands of these complainers.
There's a G1G0 program.
Let's be realistic. First off, there is no information to show how common the problem is: 1 in 100, 1 in 1000, 1 in 10,000? Also, note that it appears that everyone on the forums complaining about this is someone in a developed country who bought one via give-one-get-one. The blog at olpcnews.com linked to in the slashdot summary seems to be saying that there needs to be a system for distributing spare parts. Well, actually that wouldn't do any good with the stuck key problem, because the OLPC folks don't have enough information yet to know which keyboard supplier or suppliers are causing the problem. They could ship spare keyboards to Mongolia, but there's no way to know yet whether the replacements would have the same problem. OLPC does have a plan for dealing with hardware breakage. The plan is that they're trying to get the defect rate very low, and then have people in the communities receiving the laptops take care of the small number of defects by cannibalizing machines. That seems like a very reasonable plan for a village in Mongolia where 100 kids have 100 laptops. No, it's not a very reasonable plan for an affluent adult in the U.S. who isn't part of a community that has received a pile of these laptops -- but, uh, sorry, that isn't the main mission of OLPC.
Some of the buyers in developed countries seem upset that the warranty period is only 30 days, and that they have to pay for shipping. Yeah, sure, OLPC could extend the warranty to a year, and pay for shipping, but that would cost money, and they'd have to pass on those costs, driving up the cost of the laptops. The goal right now is to continue decreasing the cost of the laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
What a lousy, misleading article. He makes it clear upfront that he's talking about two separate things, but then he goes on to mix them together indiscriminately throughout the rest of the article. (1) If you build your business on GPL 2 software, you'd better read the GPL 2. People who don't are getting sued. (2) GPL 3 is different from GPL 2, and may be incompatible with some business models that GPL 2 is compatible with.
Re #1: Duh. Don't agree to a license without making sure you can abide by the license. Re #2: Similar duh, and it's relatively inconsequential because very little software is under GPL 3 so far. (The typical PHB reading this is probably not going to understand that GPL 2 doesn't automatically update GPL 3, but the article could easily leave you with the impression that it does.)
With the filing of court documents, a philosophical debate about the proper place for software in society has become a business dispute with the risk of substantial consequences.
Well, no, it's not a risk. A risk refers to something you can't predict. If you agree to a license and then violate the license, that's not a risk, that's intentionally shooting yourself in the foot.
For-profit companies using open source software should take notice
He talks about "for-profit" like this all through the article. That's stupid. The GPL doesn't discriminate between for-profit and not-for-profit use. Of course the people getting sued are all for-profit companies. Is this a surprise? A nonprofit probably wouldn't have any motivation to violate the GPL, and anyhow you don't usually pick people to sue who don't have money.
The new lesson is that the freedom belongs to the software, not to users. You are not free to do whatever you want with the open source software and may find yourself in a legal fight if what you do restricts the freedom of the software.
Huh? This is idiotic. Software doesn't have human rights. The GPL also doesn't place any restrictions on how software is used. In fact, you can use GPL'd sofwtware without even agreeing to the license. You only have to agree to the GPL if you want to modify the software and then redistribute it.
Any activity that leverages software for business advantage is likely to restrict the software's freedom
Hmm...say Joe's Garage uses Firefox and OpenOffice. Can anyone explain why that's likely to "restrict the software's freedom?" Or say Barnes and Noble runs Linux on their servers. Does that mean they're "likely to restrict the software's freedom?" What he really means is that if you try to violate the GPL by making OSS into proprietary software, you've got a problem. That's a lot narrower than "leveraging software for business advantage."
and the growing use of open source software by for-profit companies has been a growing irritant for free software advocates.
Oh, God, it just gets dumber and dumber. The OSS community wants users. Everyone I know in the OSS community is typically overjoyed that IBM got on the Linux bandwagon. They're happy that Google is generally OSS-friendly. They love it that more and more OEMs are offering machines with Linux preinstalled.
I've had a couple of my sites (lightandmatter.com, theassayer.org) hosted there since they were Rackshack. IIRC, they renamed themselves to EV1, then got bought by The Planet. EV1 is the company that made themselves unpopular with the open-source community by paying protection money to SCO. I thought about changing hosts due to the SCO episode, but ended up not wanting to go through that kind of hassle and expense on a matter of principle. Their reliability has generally been pretty good. Support has been miserable on the few occasions when I've had to use it, but that seems par for the course with $100/mo webhosting. Now that The Planet has bought them, and SCO is essentially history, I'm starting to feel like the cooties have worn off, and I'll probably stick with them.
I have a bachelor's in physics from Berkeley (1987) and a PhD in physics from Yale (1994). There was never any formal requirement that I take a programming course. I happened to have been interested in programming since I was a teenager, and I used it sometimes in my PhD research, but I could have done just fine without it. In fact, it might have been better for me if I hadn't known how to program, because I would have wasted less time on coding that wasn't strictly necessary in order to get my research done. I can recall at least one Yale grad student, a member of my lab group, who never learned any programming at all. It wasn't a problem for him. To me, it just seems like one more skill that might come in handy, sort of like learning to use a mill and a lathe; my lab paid for us grad students to take a machine shop course (total of maybe 10 hours in the classroom), but it wasn't a requirement.
A formal requirement seems like a really, really bad idea to me. Undergrads who are interested in programming because they think it's fun will either teach themselves (like I did) or take a course voluntarily. Grad students who need programming for their research -- ditto. I'm sure many people will want to have a programming course on their transcript just because it will be useful for getting jobs; if so, that should be their choice. None of this needs to be a formal requirement. A physics degree is really a liberal arts degree. You're learning how to think about nature. It shouldn't be like an engineering degree.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy with just a window manager. I run fluxbox, and it's as fast as every GUI should be, i.e., fast enough that I can't tell that it's not responding instantaneously. The whole idea of having a computer screen littered with icons is something that I got used to ca. 1985, because it was the only game in town, but eventually I decided I didn't like. It feels like in addition to the mess on my physical desk, I'm also being saddled with a mess on my computer desktop.
But the good news about linux is that nobody has to agree with me. If they prefer a Windows-style desktop, they can use Gnome or KDE. If they prefer something a little more Mac-flavored, they can use gOS.
If you've got files on your computer that you only read, never write, and those files are getting corrupted, then it sounds like you have a problem with your filesystem, or a problem with your hardware. You need to find and fix the problem with the filesystem or hardware, not apply band-aids to PDF files if the problem has nothing to do with the PDF format per se.
Another possibility would be that you're using buggy software that is supposed to open PDF files in read-only mode, but actually corrupts them. If so, then you need to identify what the software is that's doing it, so you can remove that software from your computer.
For diagnosis, and also recovery, one thing you could try would be using the Unison file synchronizer to synchronize your files with a hard disk on another computer. If the files aren't changing, it will run extremely fast. If you notice mysterious changes to files right after a blackout or an electrical storm, then you can guess that's why. If you notice mysterious changes right after you use a particular application, ditto. Unison has a -fastcheck option on Windows, which you should read about; you'd probably want to run most of the time with it, and maybe once a week without it.
There are some pretty straightforward things you can do to protect yourself from identity theft, without paying any money.
You can opt out of getting unsolicited credit card offers at optoutprescreen.com. (Here is a link to them from an FTC web page so you can tell they're legit.)
You can also make a habit of getting an annual free credit report from annualcreditreport.com. This can help you to detect if something goofy is going on. (Link from FTC. It's run by the credit reporting companies, and as you go through the process, they'll try hard to sell you on getting non-free services as well. You have to watch carefully, and not accept the defaults.)
IIRC there is also a process for locking your credit reports completely, but it costs money unless you can demonstrate that you've already been a victim of fraud.
There are quite a few professional authors releasing fiction under some kind of CC license. Cory Doctorow, Rudy Rucker, Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, and Charles Stross are some of the better known SF pros who are doing this. Bruce Sterling has released some nonfiction under a CC license. Other, less well known professionally published authors are trying it as well, e.g., Rick Dakan, Mike Brotherton, Jim Munroe.
I'm not sure what's so notable about the "community-edited" part. It sounds like an attempt to make a false analogy between fiction writing and software development. Software is a tool, so the "with enough eyeballs, all bugs become shallow" concept makes sense; if it's broken, people can help you fix it. Fiction isn't a tool. The difference between a good novel and a bad novel isn't just that there are typos here and there. There's also a massive oversupply of people who think they can write fiction, so it's not exactly exciting news that someone is willing to give me his novel for free. Slush pile editors get paid to read unpublished fiction all day, and at night they go home bleary-eyed and debating whether to slit their wrists.
One similarity that does exist between fiction writing and software hacking is that they both require a large amount of practice to get good at. I collected about forty rejection slips on about a dozen pieces of short fiction before making my first sale. If the OP really wants to get to the point where he can reach an audience with his science fiction, I'd advise him to look into some online groups where he can get feedback on his work. Two good communities are critters.org and the Baen's Universe e-slush board. I also benefited a lot from attending one of the Clarion workshops.
I think the analogy with open-source software works much better for nonfiction, and it's also with nonfiction that you can actually hope to reach a significant audience without going through a traditional publisher.
Here is the preprint on arxiv.
I don't see how the shape of the airplane can make any difference in the propagation of the wave once it's gotten far away from the airplane. I'm still guessing it's some kind of nonlinearity in the propagation of sound waves. E.g., maybe an extreme decompression propagates at a smaller velocity than an extreme compression.
I'm sure glad the state of civil liberties is so much better in the U.S. We just have torture, secret prisons where people can be held forever without trial, and an executive branch that claims habeas corpus doesn't exist. It's also no big deal that we have one of the world's highest incarceration rates, which is as high as it is mainly because of the victimless crime of selling drugs. Nope, no problem here. Those Canadians sure are bad, though.
Hmm...sorry, but I don't follow your argument. I don't understand what you're referring to when you talk about the N shape. I don't understand how the opening angle of either cone can be anything but sin-1(c/v) (I goofed in my previous post by saying tan-1.) I don't see how the shape of the airplane can matter at all.
The wikipedia article doesn't address the point I was asking about, though.
The slashdot summary repeats a statement that I've heard elsewhere, which is that the delay between the leading and trailing booms is altitude-dependant, i.e., the opening angle of the trailing cone is smaller than the opening angle of the leading cone. Does anyone have a good explanation of why this is true? Naively I'd expect the opening angle for both cones to be the same, and given by tan-1(c/v). If that was the case, then the delay between the leading and trailing booms would always be extremely short (tens of milliseconds). That's not the case, so what's the more complicated effect that's going on here? Something to do with nonlinearity of sound waves?
The article actually does refer to this, but only at the very end:
Most ISPs have anti-sharing requirements in their license agreement, but as long as mesh users don't in the aggregate do anything more obnoxious than a typical user would do (and mesh hardware can be set to throttle the bandwidth available to each individual node, preventing one porn fiend from absorbing 99% of the bandwidth 100% of the time), the ISPs a mesh connects to are unlikely to care, or even notice.This makes very little sense to me. If I saturate my neighborhood with wifi, but it's all going through my own individual cable modem connection, then the results are pretty predictable. First my cable modem connection will get so slow that it will drive me nuts. Then my ISP will disconnect me for excessive use of bandwidth.
Of course we can now insert the usual slashdot discussion of bandwidth caps. Yes, it's dishonest of ISPs to call it unlimited internet access when really there's a cap. Yes, they should reveal what the caps are. No, it's not really possible for ISPs to provide enough of a dedicated pipe to allow every single user to access the internet simultaneously at full speed; they have to overscribe, or the economics don't work.
Every copylefted open educational resource is incompatible with every other copylefted open educational resource with a different license.
The only free-as-in-speech licenses of any importance at this point are GFDL and CC-BY-SA. I'm not a lawyer, but my inderstanding is that GFDL and CC-BY-SA are compatible enough that by dual-licensing a book under those two licenses, I can incorporate photos that are under both licenses.
In answer to the arguments in your blog post about this licensing issue, I don't think the logic of the section "Historical Lessons Of The OPL" makes sense as applied to FWK. FWK is providing the books as free downloads, which means that the prices of the books in print can't be significantly higher than the incremental cost of production. Therefore there's no risk of being undercut.
If you have a pool, there are systems you can buy that run your pool pump off of photovoltaics. Pool pumps are infamous energy hogs, and you can run a pump off of DC, which cuts out the inverter. Getting rid of the inverter improves efficiency and cuts the cost of the project. This is not a grid-tied system.
My field is nuclear physics, and I'm also very skeptical about this. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and their evidence is weak. They haven't done any nuclear characterization of these supposed atoms at all. They haven't even measured Z. All they've measured is a peak in a mass spectrum, and as you point out, the much less heroic explanation for that is simply that they're seeing molecules. It would also be extraordinarily surprising if these isotopes had half-lives of millions of years. The authors seem to be pushing the idea that they're superdeformed states, analogous to the fission isomers. The thing is, the liquid drop model tells us that as you increase Z, the potential barrier preventing fission is going to get systematically lower and lower. Likewise, the time-scale for alpha decay (as they point out) is expected to be very short for something with a Z this high.
I have to disagree with you that it's "well under way." There's this wiki. If you look at the books listed there, there is almost nothing at all at the K-12 level. Virtually the entire list consists of college textbooks, and quite a few of them are not even freshman college texts, they're at the upper-division level.
Maybe we're talking about different time scales. I've been cataloguing free books at theassayer.org since 2000. During that time, the good news has been that hundreds of high-quality free books have appeared. The bad news is that essentially none of those are K-12 books. If the deficit of free K-12 is going to start changing, I'd expect that the time scale for that to happen would have to be at least a decade. And a decade would, IMO, be an optimistic figure that would occur only if something fundamental changed that would get people started on writing those K-12 books. In fact, I don't see that kind of fundamental change happening. I think there are probably two reasons why free K-12 books have never gotten off the ground. (1) People writing free books are generally affluent people in the U.S., who can afford to do it as a hobby. Some are computer programmers writing documentation for software, and others are university professors. None of them are K-12 teachers, probably because K-12 teachers have all they can handle just managing a classroom full of 35 kids. (2) In most places in the U.S., textbook buying decisions are heavily bureacratized. Book publishers spend vast amounts of money on marketing and lobbying. My own free physics books are college-level books, but sometimes high schools do use them; I think it's telling that nearly all the high schools using them are private schools.
If "well under way" means "likely to get going within our lifetimes," then I'd say maybe. But I certainly don't see any sign that it's going to happen during the lifetime of OLPC.
On a related topic, the usenet groups I subscribe to are getting a ridiculous amount of spam recently from gmail accounts. On a given day, you'll get, say, 10 new posts, each with its own distinct subject line, trying to sell watches or running shoes. They're all from the same gmail account. It doesn't do you any good to plonk that gmail account, because the next day it's 10 new spams from some new gmail account. It's gotten to the point where I'm considering just filtering out all posts that come from gmail accounts. I'm guessing this is happening because google has relaxed their conditions for getting a gmail account, and at the same time the spammers are getting more sophisticated about solving captchas. The impression I get is that google is starting to feel the need to grow into their ridiculously large market capitalization, and they can only do that by bringing in lots of new users. If that means letting in lots of spambots too, well ...
Nicole Allen, Textbooks Program Director at CalPIRG, wrote to say that a more relevant link than the CalPIRG link at the end of my slashdot summary would be maketextbooksaffordable.org. That's where the information about CalPIRG's open textbooks campaign is.
Sure this is a nice service, but it is dependent upon instructors/authors to upload books to Flat World Knowledge. Most professors, in my experience, like money more than spreading knowledge and competence. They will likely choose not to participate unless there is some incentive for them to actually upload the book PDF.
Check out the three links at the beginning of the last sentence of the slashdot summary. There are hundreds of free textbooks catalogued at those sites. Some college professors may fit your negative stereotype, but the evidence seems to show that many others do not.
One of the reasons textbooks cost so much is because professors' salaries are bad. There is a very very good incentive for a professor to charge a lot for their book.
Speaking as a college professor, I think you're wrong on both points. Professors' salaries are actually very reasonable these days. Also, very little of the retail price of a $130 goes in the professor's pocket. Most textbooks do not make any significant amount of money for their authors -- the exceptions are home-run books aimed at the most popular freshman courses, and there just aren't that many of those. The typical motivation for a professor to write a textbook is that he doesn't like the choices that are already available.
The reason for high textbook prices is profit-taking by publishers. In the last 25 years, textbook prices have risen much, much faster than can be explained by inflation.
My only disappointment with the G1G1 program is that it wasn't G2G1, Give 2 Get 1. That could have resulted in more laptops in the hands of children, and fewer laptops in the hands of these complainers.
There's a G1G0 program.
Let's be realistic. First off, there is no information to show how common the problem is: 1 in 100, 1 in 1000, 1 in 10,000? Also, note that it appears that everyone on the forums complaining about this is someone in a developed country who bought one via give-one-get-one. The blog at olpcnews.com linked to in the slashdot summary seems to be saying that there needs to be a system for distributing spare parts. Well, actually that wouldn't do any good with the stuck key problem, because the OLPC folks don't have enough information yet to know which keyboard supplier or suppliers are causing the problem. They could ship spare keyboards to Mongolia, but there's no way to know yet whether the replacements would have the same problem. OLPC does have a plan for dealing with hardware breakage. The plan is that they're trying to get the defect rate very low, and then have people in the communities receiving the laptops take care of the small number of defects by cannibalizing machines. That seems like a very reasonable plan for a village in Mongolia where 100 kids have 100 laptops. No, it's not a very reasonable plan for an affluent adult in the U.S. who isn't part of a community that has received a pile of these laptops -- but, uh, sorry, that isn't the main mission of OLPC. Some of the buyers in developed countries seem upset that the warranty period is only 30 days, and that they have to pay for shipping. Yeah, sure, OLPC could extend the warranty to a year, and pay for shipping, but that would cost money, and they'd have to pass on those costs, driving up the cost of the laptops. The goal right now is to continue decreasing the cost of the laptops.