Exactly. Those signing onto such a license with M$ doesn't deserve better. They gave away their freedom, and it is too late to come whining about it when M$ knocks on your door. That's why Free software is a Good Thing, cause you're not giving up your freedom when you use it.
Also, it is entertaining that it's Virginia, they have UCITA, and now they're paying for it....
I just can't see how DMCA isn't self contradictory.... For many fair use purposes, unhindered access is necessary, so circumventing access control is necessary...
I think a good move is to start writing to companies in those states where this stupid legislation has a risk of going through, telling them that, while you think the company produces excellent hardware/software/whatever, you cannot do business with them, because you cannot risk anything when your consumer rights has been taken away. Now, if companies start getting floods of letters saying that UCITA is bad for their business, they might get the point, because UCITA is clearly bad for business, in the long run. When companies starts to write their representatives opposing UCITA, then, things might happen.
So, what is this doing in the "Science"-section? Scientists has stated over and over again that it is impossible to defend having Mir up there from a scientific viewpoint. Just dump the bloody thing!
Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary
to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law when committed
intentionally and without right:
c) the production, sale, procurement for use, import, distribution or
otherwise making available of a device, including a computer program, designed or adapted
[specifically] [primarily] [particularly] for the purpose of depriving citizens of fair use rights, right to free expression, or other human rights as established by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
... gravity waves is yours. If you are 15 or younger today, then you'll be exactly at the right age when LISA is going up, you'll be in the middle of the revolution when gravitational wave detectors get some kind of angular resolution, that means, you'll get pictures of the actual mass in the Universe. So, that's my advice to you, start reading about gravity waves!
Patience, my friend, patience....:-) It's really, really hard. First, spherically symmetric objects don't send out gravity waves, so the moon, the sun, most stars, etc, will emit very little. However, there are lots of things that will, some things are very far out in the Universe. In my personal opinion, it's not so much a matter about testing GR, I think that it is very certain that gravity waves exist, I think it is a matter of learning how to use them.
So, first, you would have to detect them, then, perhaps you connect them to events, e.g. Gamma Ray Bursts, then you may be able to tell if it comes from the one direction or the other, and finally, some time in the future (when we're talking LISA), we might talk about angular resolution.
And what that means? It opens a whole new view of the Universe. We're going to see where the matter is, directly. It's just fantastic, I'm telling you....
For an idea of how sensitive these instruments are, I attended a lecture given by a couple of students at a German project, and they once had a signal. Well, not really, it turned out that it couldn't be gravity waves, and they search for a long time to figure out what it could be. Finally, it turned out that a local farmer had bought a heavier tractor, and that shook the ground more than they had thought....
Talking about filesystems, I'm wondering about something that would seem like a useful feature: Setting the permissions on a per directory basis. So that if I put a file in my www_docs, it'll be 644, if I put it in a directory where several people help editing web pages, then it gets 664, my personal stuff is 600, and so on. It's not possible where I sit now, I've bothered every sysadmin I've met about it, is it possible on some file systems in widespread use? Is it something for future file systems, like this one? Or is it simply a Bad Idea [tm]?
I saw you corrected your own estimate, so I'll only comment on this:
Also, isn't the Kupier Belt at around 70-100 AU?
Last time I asked a friend who is studying these objects, he said that their characteristic is that they are mainly outside the orbit of Neptune, which is at about 30 AU. Where's Pluto? 40 AU? Anyway, it may be that there are Kuiper belt objects further out than this, but I think they generally have them a bit closer, but don't take my word for it.
However, the termination shock is believed to be about that distance (in my undergrad courses, a back-of-an-envelope calculation said 75AU, it's obviously inaccurate), but it is heading in the wrong direction, but Voayger may go through it.
The problem is, in my eyes, if this merger is completed, this huge corporation controls the information flow to millions of people. So, you've got 30 million americans who are reading Time Magazine, watch CNN, surf the web starting at AOL, and thinking they are informed, but in reality, they never got anything outside of AOL/Time-Warner.
Now, it may not be a problem as long as journalists have some integrity and money doesn't mean everything, but then...
I have no idea whether this answers your question, it is a brief comment about it in 4.24 of the KDE FAQ.
Re:The mandatory question for all stupid americans
on
Nobel Prizes
·
· Score: 2
Now the norwegians may view the "union" a bit differently...
You bet....:-) (The schoolbook story is that Denmark and Sweden were colonial powers....)
Actually, the Nobel Peace prize is awarded by a norwegian comittee, possibly a
gesture by Nobel to improve the relations between Sweden and Norway.
The reasons Nobel had for choosing a Norwegian Committee (or rather, let the Norwegian Parliament appoint a committee), is a long and difficult story, probably with no clear answer.
One possibility is that Norway was the only nation around that had never gone to war on anybody.
Another is that he did not trust the Swedish politicians, only the Swedish scientists.
Another is that he might have had personal reasons, and another is that it was such a gesture. I don't think we'll ever know for sure...
".global" -- makes sense for multinats orgs/corps.
I think that they should ease up on.int instead. Int is for international organizations formed by a treaty, that's OK, but then, what is meant by an internation organization is then defined to mean only inter-governmental organizations. I'll claim however, that it was never the intention of those who wrote the international law on treatises to come up with a general definition for "international organization". Now, the reason why I'm whining is that YMCA and ESA are not inter-governmental organizations, but yet they've got.int domains. Ain't fair.:-)
Certainly! That's why many, if not most, scientists are opposed to sending people to Mars before a rather exhaustive robotic exploration has been done.
Me three. I dropped them a note. Apparently, it's a bug in the VB stuff they're doing. Why is it that they do everything wrong? (OK, it's not ICANN itself that did this, apparently, they have paid elections.com to do it.)
You sound like one of those 'open source' weirdos.
Well, you shouldn't be surprised to find one of those on/., should you....:-) Anyway, I'm not a programmer, though I have a couple of tiny hacks GPLed.
However, I'm an athlete (used be a wannabee athlete at least), and I have seen where competition is good, and that's when you have a very clear quantitative metric for "win" and "loose". Like in most sports, where it is the clock or the weights or the length of the throw or things like that that decides who the winner is. In those cases, competition truly drives the development. The more a sport relies on human judgement, or subjective metrics, the less development is driven constructively by competition.
In science, there are a few metrics, they count publications, and they count how many other publications reference other publications, well this is not always a good metric. Sometimes, it takes 20 years before the full depth of a piece of work is realized, and by then, the scientist is out of funding. Too bad. Well, that's probably the extreme case, but you may get my point. None of the metrics are objective, in the sense that they measure well the primary goal of science, finding out things. When you measure things like number of publications, what you get is that people tend to focus on producing publications, even though they may not say anything. I think I have seen both the upside and the downside of competition, and I think I am myself very competition-minded, but not in science.
Of course, if you emphasize cooperation, you have other problems, fragmentation may be one of them. More serious is that you will not have resources to keep people in who are not actually contributing, and the problem is how do you decide who you want to throw out? I have no good solution to the problem, but I think the problem will be smaller, because you will have a broader front, and people may move to a different problem area where they may be more fit.
No, we don't need more competition in science. OK, for launch vehicles, it's allright with competition, but there is allready sufficient competition in that field. Anybody who desires to launch a satellite like e.g. Ikonos can buy the parts on the open market and launch it, totally independ of NASA.
In science, the competition is doing a lot of damage. Scientists compete to publish their articles, if somebody hears about what others are doing, some will rush to publish it before others do, and the consequence is that scientists keep their ideas and working plans secret as long as they can, with a huge loss for scientific progress as a result.
What we need is rather cooperation. People need to give up their egos in the name of scientific progress, something that should be encouraged by funding agencies (those are the mechanism that drives the unhealthy competition).
As for the space race, it wasn't the competition that made it so successful, it was that they threw so enormous amounts of money at it. If that kind of funding was provided for science today, it would have been a different story alltogether.
Actually, sharing telescopes is a simple time issue. Any good 2.5 meter telescope has three times as many applications as it is time. If it's bigger and better than that, you need an extraordinarily good research project to be considered.
However, the rest of what you write is true, the publication pressure is IMHO slowing down the progress of science because it forces scientists to be secretive beyond reason about their data and findings, and for one thing, it makes rapid follow-up programmes very, very difficult.
Uh-oh, I posted about this on the UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report-thread. And, since it seems awfully relevant to this article, I guess I'll just repost.... Wonder what happens to my karma...? Here we go:
Well, building a largish dedicated telescope is one thing, but I would rather start researching a possibility that would be much more useful, namely building a network of Liquid Mirror Telescopes. A liquid mirror telescope has a mirror of mercury that is rotating, forming a near-perfect paraboloid as it rotates. Obviously, you can't tilt the telescope, so you can't track objects like conventional telescopes, and you can't look wherever you like, you can only look straight up. The field is also pretty small, but if you put a lot of LMTs on different longitudes and latitudes, you will be able to scan most of the sky. And since LMTs come at the prize of 1/100 of the cost of a similar size of a conventional telescope, you can build a lot of them. So, say we start mass manufacturing (several hundred) 8 meter LMTs and place them all over the place.
This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.
There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well...:-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.
OK, this is pretty much just vapor, but when I finish my thesis and get my own box, very high on my agenda is to get a domain for my "How to use a compass"-page and build a community project around it with instructional materials for orienteering in general. Who says it is only geek literature that will be open sourced?
The pages has been translated into several languages allready, and illustrations are being used all over the place, a few mirrors are up, and the pages has been reprinted in magazines and textbooks all over the world.
Once, I was motivated by looking in my logs seeing how many check out the pages, and see my name all over the place, people citing me has having created the best compass pages on the net. However, this has changed, and I realize that for the pages to improve, I must give up my ego. I get far more e-mail requesting help than I can handle, and I will have to solve that problem by setting up a mailing list where more people can answer questions. I am getting feedback from people I haven't time to attend to, so I have to let more people access the source so that it becomes easier to contribute. When more people contribute, I can't say that it is exclusively my product.
The idea is that I will host many related pages, have a bunch of translations, using HTTP language negotation to serve them, let people contribute, have a bunch of mailing lists for different languages, for developers and translators, and so on.
That's today's ad, I couldn't resist (and it wasn't off-topic, was it...?)
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it is entertaining that it's Virginia, they have UCITA, and now they're paying for it....
It has been posted here several times that they all did.... Nobody voted against. I haven't checked, so I don't know if it's true, though.
I just can't see how DMCA isn't self contradictory.... For many fair use purposes, unhindered access is necessary, so circumventing access control is necessary...
I think a good move is to start writing to companies in those states where this stupid legislation has a risk of going through, telling them that, while you think the company produces excellent hardware/software/whatever, you cannot do business with them, because you cannot risk anything when your consumer rights has been taken away. Now, if companies start getting floods of letters saying that UCITA is bad for their business, they might get the point, because UCITA is clearly bad for business, in the long run. When companies starts to write their representatives opposing UCITA, then, things might happen.
So, what is this doing in the "Science"-section? Scientists has stated over and over again that it is impossible to defend having Mir up there from a scientific viewpoint. Just dump the bloody thing!
c) the production, sale, procurement for use, import, distribution or otherwise making available of a device, including a computer program, designed or adapted [specifically] [primarily] [particularly] for the purpose of depriving citizens of fair use rights, right to free expression, or other human rights as established by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
... gravity waves is yours. If you are 15 or younger today, then you'll be exactly at the right age when LISA is going up, you'll be in the middle of the revolution when gravitational wave detectors get some kind of angular resolution, that means, you'll get pictures of the actual mass in the Universe. So, that's my advice to you, start reading about gravity waves!
So, first, you would have to detect them, then, perhaps you connect them to events, e.g. Gamma Ray Bursts, then you may be able to tell if it comes from the one direction or the other, and finally, some time in the future (when we're talking LISA), we might talk about angular resolution.
And what that means? It opens a whole new view of the Universe. We're going to see where the matter is, directly. It's just fantastic, I'm telling you....
For an idea of how sensitive these instruments are, I attended a lecture given by a couple of students at a German project, and they once had a signal. Well, not really, it turned out that it couldn't be gravity waves, and they search for a long time to figure out what it could be. Finally, it turned out that a local farmer had bought a heavier tractor, and that shook the ground more than they had thought....
The question is: How do you know it?
Yep, auto racing is so much machine from the start. I wonder if a machine will beat me in orienteering in my lifetime? Even with a GPS...
Talking about filesystems, I'm wondering about something that would seem like a useful feature: Setting the permissions on a per directory basis. So that if I put a file in my www_docs, it'll be 644, if I put it in a directory where several people help editing web pages, then it gets 664, my personal stuff is 600, and so on. It's not possible where I sit now, I've bothered every sysadmin I've met about it, is it possible on some file systems in widespread use? Is it something for future file systems, like this one? Or is it simply a Bad Idea [tm]?
Last time I asked a friend who is studying these objects, he said that their characteristic is that they are mainly outside the orbit of Neptune, which is at about 30 AU. Where's Pluto? 40 AU? Anyway, it may be that there are Kuiper belt objects further out than this, but I think they generally have them a bit closer, but don't take my word for it.
However, the termination shock is believed to be about that distance (in my undergrad courses, a back-of-an-envelope calculation said 75AU, it's obviously inaccurate), but it is heading in the wrong direction, but Voayger may go through it.
Now, it may not be a problem as long as journalists have some integrity and money doesn't mean everything, but then...
I have no idea whether this answers your question, it is a brief comment about it in 4.24 of the KDE FAQ.
You bet.... :-) (The schoolbook story is that Denmark and Sweden were colonial powers....)
The reasons Nobel had for choosing a Norwegian Committee (or rather, let the Norwegian Parliament appoint a committee), is a long and difficult story, probably with no clear answer.
One possibility is that Norway was the only nation around that had never gone to war on anybody.
Another is that he did not trust the Swedish politicians, only the Swedish scientists.
Another is that he might have had personal reasons, and another is that it was such a gesture. I don't think we'll ever know for sure...
And, I would really like to get my hands on such a domain....
I think that they should ease up on .int instead. Int is for international organizations formed by a treaty, that's OK, but then, what is meant by an internation organization is then defined to mean only inter-governmental organizations. I'll claim however, that it was never the intention of those who wrote the international law on treatises to come up with a general definition for "international organization". Now, the reason why I'm whining is that YMCA and ESA are not inter-governmental organizations, but yet they've got .int domains. Ain't fair. :-)
Certainly! That's why many, if not most, scientists are opposed to sending people to Mars before a rather exhaustive robotic exploration has been done.
Me three. I dropped them a note. Apparently, it's a bug in the VB stuff they're doing. Why is it that they do everything wrong? (OK, it's not ICANN itself that did this, apparently, they have paid elections.com to do it.)
No, they didn't. You've gotta read up on that... :-) Celera is far from having the rigour HGP has.
Well, you shouldn't be surprised to find one of those on /., should you.... :-) Anyway, I'm not a programmer, though I have a couple of tiny hacks GPLed.
However, I'm an athlete (used be a wannabee athlete at least), and I have seen where competition is good, and that's when you have a very clear quantitative metric for "win" and "loose". Like in most sports, where it is the clock or the weights or the length of the throw or things like that that decides who the winner is. In those cases, competition truly drives the development. The more a sport relies on human judgement, or subjective metrics, the less development is driven constructively by competition.
In science, there are a few metrics, they count publications, and they count how many other publications reference other publications, well this is not always a good metric. Sometimes, it takes 20 years before the full depth of a piece of work is realized, and by then, the scientist is out of funding. Too bad. Well, that's probably the extreme case, but you may get my point. None of the metrics are objective, in the sense that they measure well the primary goal of science, finding out things. When you measure things like number of publications, what you get is that people tend to focus on producing publications, even though they may not say anything. I think I have seen both the upside and the downside of competition, and I think I am myself very competition-minded, but not in science.
Of course, if you emphasize cooperation, you have other problems, fragmentation may be one of them. More serious is that you will not have resources to keep people in who are not actually contributing, and the problem is how do you decide who you want to throw out? I have no good solution to the problem, but I think the problem will be smaller, because you will have a broader front, and people may move to a different problem area where they may be more fit.
In science, the competition is doing a lot of damage. Scientists compete to publish their articles, if somebody hears about what others are doing, some will rush to publish it before others do, and the consequence is that scientists keep their ideas and working plans secret as long as they can, with a huge loss for scientific progress as a result.
What we need is rather cooperation. People need to give up their egos in the name of scientific progress, something that should be encouraged by funding agencies (those are the mechanism that drives the unhealthy competition).
As for the space race, it wasn't the competition that made it so successful, it was that they threw so enormous amounts of money at it. If that kind of funding was provided for science today, it would have been a different story alltogether.
Actually, sharing telescopes is a simple time issue. Any good 2.5 meter telescope has three times as many applications as it is time. If it's bigger and better than that, you need an extraordinarily good research project to be considered.
However, the rest of what you write is true, the publication pressure is IMHO slowing down the progress of science because it forces scientists to be secretive beyond reason about their data and findings, and for one thing, it makes rapid follow-up programmes very, very difficult.
Well, building a largish dedicated telescope is one thing, but I would rather start researching a possibility that would be much more useful, namely building a network of Liquid Mirror Telescopes. A liquid mirror telescope has a mirror of mercury that is rotating, forming a near-perfect paraboloid as it rotates. Obviously, you can't tilt the telescope, so you can't track objects like conventional telescopes, and you can't look wherever you like, you can only look straight up. The field is also pretty small, but if you put a lot of LMTs on different longitudes and latitudes, you will be able to scan most of the sky. And since LMTs come at the prize of 1/100 of the cost of a similar size of a conventional telescope, you can build a lot of them. So, say we start mass manufacturing (several hundred) 8 meter LMTs and place them all over the place.
This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.
There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well... :-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.
The pages has been translated into several languages allready, and illustrations are being used all over the place, a few mirrors are up, and the pages has been reprinted in magazines and textbooks all over the world.
Once, I was motivated by looking in my logs seeing how many check out the pages, and see my name all over the place, people citing me has having created the best compass pages on the net. However, this has changed, and I realize that for the pages to improve, I must give up my ego. I get far more e-mail requesting help than I can handle, and I will have to solve that problem by setting up a mailing list where more people can answer questions. I am getting feedback from people I haven't time to attend to, so I have to let more people access the source so that it becomes easier to contribute. When more people contribute, I can't say that it is exclusively my product.
The idea is that I will host many related pages, have a bunch of translations, using HTTP language negotation to serve them, let people contribute, have a bunch of mailing lists for different languages, for developers and translators, and so on.
That's today's ad, I couldn't resist (and it wasn't off-topic, was it...?)