Well, this is not really addressing the real issue here but...:
I have read a lot about polar expeditions. A lot.
One of the major complaints, what makes the north pole hike so difficult is that you do bump into huge openings in the ice now and then. That they are a mile across is not unusual. Now, this happens to be almost at the pole right now. Strange?
How many of the global warming skeptics and advocates in here are climatologists, I wonder?
IANAC...:-) Anyway, I have become a skeptic after witnessing debates between climatologists and solar physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and lectures by climatologists alone. Basically, in the solar physicists vs. climatologists debate, climatologists attacks a strawman when they say that solar variations is 1% or 0.1% or whatever. It's far greater on a longer time scale. Climatologists are knowingly neglecting effects of short time solar variations, but they are increasingly starting to take them into account these days. This translates to that what climatologists thinks is a fourth order effect is a first order effect. If you neglect a first order effect, well, GIGO.
In one of the lectures I attended, a couple of CS professors sat in front of me. During the lecture, one of them whispered to her collegue that "if this guy had attended my numerical computing course, there is no way he would have passed." The questions she asked afterwards where rather devastating, the lecturer pretty much admitted that the conclusion "there has been a discernible human influence on global
climate." is premature. The simulations that was intended to be done before the conference that was supposed to take into account assumed important effects (I don't remember the details, it was about some sulfur stuff) was really never finished, they simply didn't have the CPU required to do it. I was disturbed to hear his admissions. This is about research funding I'm afraid (I'm of the opinion that the current ways of providing research funding is corrupting science in many ways, and I'm not saying that climatology is worse than other fields of science, it is probably not).
Norse settled in Greenland
(before being wiped out or assimilated with the Eskimos, depending on which theory you believe).
Even better in this context, the theory held by Thomas McGovern and others, they moved due to climate change....:-) There is no doubt that the climate changed significantly about 1350, making the place really cool, failing crops, etc. In addition, as pointed out by Helge Ingstad, it is likely that communication with Norway was cut down because of "black death" (it may have gotten there as well, but it is not that likely). Of course, it may have been lots of other things as well of course. It is probably not slave-hunts in the 16th century as some others have argued poorly...
It's practically unchallenged in serious scientific circles.
That's no less imbecellic than the statement you quoted. Now, the original poster did not make a clear distinction between "climate" and "weather", that's his fault. You really need to read up on this, there is a huge debate on whether the compositition of the atmosphere is really significantly altered. That a significant alteration will produce measurable effect is obvious, but a different matter alltogether. It is timely to point out that the World Watch Institute has lost all it's credibility by making as bombastic statements and predictions is you just did, their predictions have always failed miserably.
Yep, that's right, we have no clue. Now, the ozone hole over the antarctic wasn't actually big surprise to everyone, there is a old guy here who has measured ozone since early 50ties, just out of curiousity. Of course, nobody took notice of what he said or saw.
However, what frustrates me over the whole debate is that people seems to assume that normal means static. If the climate changes, it is abnormal, right? Wrong! Climate has changed over and over again on earth, it has driven people from their homes (e.g. the perishing of the population on Greenland in the 1350-ties), that's nothing new. If you want to have a good feel for the change of climate over the last few hundred years, go to a glacier.
Now, our civilization has been allowed to flourish because we happen to be between ice ages. OK, so we're vulnerable. Faced with the forces of nature, man will forever remain small. You know, a hundred years from now, it might just be politically correct to suggest pouring CO_2 out in the atmosphere to heat it up.
Now, I'm not saying that we should continue as we do, with our high-flying lifestyle of the west, but I'm saying that we should look more carefully at making changes that will have an effect. I think geophysicists have been overly reluctant to accept that long term variations in solar activity might have an effect, they always respond that the short term variations are very small. What we really don't need, is for political correctness to come and rule the debate.
I have heard that the Church in Galileo's time didn't actually want to suppress his information
about the solar system. They just begged him to give them a little more time, and let them publish
the information themselves.
Indeed, most modern historians will agree that the prosecution of Galileo, as well as others, was not over scientific issues. Galileo made claims that were far beyond what he did have evidence for. Note that heliocentrism was never officially declared heresy, so they couldn't nail him for that. What they prosecuted him for, was his big mouth. But, the church had not realized that heliocentrism was correct at the time, though some strong critics of heliocentrism did admit that the old systems were obsolete (those having a good library can look up the name "Clavius" and the year 1611).
However, prosecution of a big mouth is not better than prosecution of a scientist. What is to be learned from the matter, is that nobody, be it the church, the government, big corps, or scientists for that matter (myself being a scientist) should gain too much formal power to decide about the lives of others. Power is currupting, and power will be abused.
Wow, he realized Linux was a good thing from people searching the site.... This might be a good way to persuade hardware manufacturers to start supporting Linux. Everyone, let's go out and start searching for Linux on the sites of your favorite hardware manufacturer!:-)
OK, epicycles were added, but not to the extent that is commonly believed. That epicycles were added upon epicycles is a really hard-to-kill myth that I believe originates some time between 1820 and 1852.
This is what happened: Aristotelian physics required that all motions in the heavens to be circular, so some astronomers introduced epicycles to account for retrograde motion. Ptolemy incorporated this in his magnificient theory.
Now, the story goes:
The system was finally owerthrown as a result of the complexity which
arose when an ever-increasing number of superimposed circles had to be
postulated in order to represent the ever-multiplying inequalities in
the planetary motions revealed by observational progress
(taken from de Vaucouleurs, Gerard (1957)), it's just that this is wrong! First, where is the evidence that there was any significant observational progress. Have a good look, and you'll see that there wasn't any observational progress, so they had no reason whatsoever to introduce additional epicycles. The observational progress didn't come until Tycho Brahe, after Copernicus.
Now, the whole thing culminated in 1963, Robert Horace Baker wrote an article in the Encyclopedia
Britannica stating that 40 to 60 epicycles were added to each planet, which is absurd, they would have needed a Beowulf cluster to compute the positions of the planets if they did that...;-) At least with the math they had available.
Baker further said that Alfonso X stated that if he had been there at creation, he
would have given the good lord a few hints.
Alfonse X computed (well, as a patron) the Alfonsine Tables,
that astronomers needed to determine the expected positions of the planets.
Owen Gingerich bashed the myth in 1968 by recomputing the Alfonsine Tables, and found that they were based on a pure Ptolemaic model with only minor corrections to the parameters used by Ptolemy.
I have been trying to figure out why this myth came to be and how it propagated. I haven't had time to do much research on it lately, and I won't tire you with my stuff, but I have an old essay about it for those interested.
Now, the myth has been uncritically accepted by a number of canons, most notably Thomas Kuhn. I have read a couple of his books, and I'm a bit uncertain how important it is for his philosophy, but it is clearly motivating him to go in the direction he does. Gingerich told me on the History of Astronomy Discussion List that Kuhn was very embarrased when he told him about it.
It is very important to note, IMHO, that Ptolemy went away from Aristotelian physics a long way, and that allready in the 10th century (i.e. before Aristotle was made compatible with Christianity by Thomas Aquinas), the criticism against him gained strength. Ptolemy had to introduce several concepts, among them, the equant. The epicycle itself is not consistent with Aristotelian physics, because the circular motion should be around the centre of the universe, namely the earth. Now, could it be that Copernicus was mainly motivated by lack of proper physics as opposed to merely mathematical constructs?
Finally, as others has mentioned, Copernican cosmology had no advantage over Ptolemaic cosmology in terms of accuracy, also as shown by Owen Gingerich. The breakthrough in accuracy came with Kepler.
I agree, I'm 27 (yesterday...), and also stopped playing with Lego when I saw it going from generic building blocks, to highly specialized parts that can be used for very few things. I tend to think it destroys some of the creativity in the kids. Everything is prebuilt and there is just building it, and that's it.
Hm, I remember writing Lego in, well, I think it must have been shortly after the first Space Shuttle launch, suggesting more specialized parts, like curved things and such, to be able to make more smoothly looking spaceships... Maybe I am to blame....?:-)
Well, you won't get the nobel prize tomorrow, because if you solve the problem, nobody will realize how important your discovery was for another 40 years. Anyway, that's a good reason to start working on it....:-)
Nah, I've been in roomful of UFO nuts. Nothing compares to that. Besides, I don't see Katz promoting an invisible conspiracy, I see him critizing something that is done in the open.
I have fallen in love with R check out http://www.r-project.org/, and IMHO, it beats MATLAB clearly. R is a GPLed package, mainly for statistics and granted, it lacks things that MATLAB has, particulary in the image and signal processing area, but I can't see anything that would exclude R from doing everything there. Since it is Open Source, it is just start working on it.
Actually, I was sitting this very moment writing some code that I have shamelessly snatched from MATLAB's interpn.m and writing it in R for my personal use, and while I haven't tested this code yet, I just replaced the code
s = cell(size(y));
for i=1:length(s),
s{i} = 1 + (y{i}-x{i}(1))/(x{i}(xprodsiz(i))-x{i}(1))*(siz(i) -1);
end
end
for i=length(s):-1:1, ssiz{i} = size(s{i}); end
if ~isequal(ssiz{:}), error('Y1,Y2,Y3, etc. must be the same size.');
end
sout = cell(size(s));
for i=1:length(s),
sout{i} = find((s{i}<1) | (s{i}>siz(i)));
if ~isempty(sout{i}), s{i}(sout{i}) = ones(size(sout{i})); end
end
with
if(diff(sapply(y, length)) != 0) stop("y's must be of the same length")
s <- sapply(1:length(y), function(i) {
tmp <- (1 + (y[[i]] - x[[i]][1]) /
(x[[i]][xprodsiz[i]] - x[[i]][1]) *
(siz[i] - 1))
ifelse(tmp < 1 | tmp > siz[i], tmp, 1)})
in R. Neat, eh? Yep, I don't know that this works, but...:-)
Actually, in Norwegian child literature, there is a law known as "Kardemommeloven", it was formulated by "Sheriff Bastian" (that is, the author was Thorbjørn Egner, who also translated Winnie the Pooh to Norwegian), and it states:
You shouldn't bother others, you should be kind and good, and other than that, you may do as you please.
OK, it wasn't a first-rate example (and, I'm quite close to Godwin's law here....:-) ). Anyway, the guys near the top were also "just following orders", that's what they said in the Nürnberg trails.
Re:The above comment missed the point
on
Hacker Crackdown?
·
· Score: 1
To answer, though, a responsibility to society is not the same thing as liability for another's (or
society's) actions. I might be willing to take some responsibility for society if society agreed not
to hold me responsible for things done by others which are out of my control
OK, I'll slow down...:-) You are right, it is a great difference between social responsibility and liability for other people's actions. The main problem that the original article points to, is that the mere threat of a lawsuit is enough to cripple people's expressions, and that's a real threat. It means that what you do can very well be legal, and even be very moral, but as long as you run the risk of pissing somebody big off, you have to be careful what you do. And, lawyers have a social responsibility here too....:-) Now, as none of us are superhumans, one should not be held liable for outcomes which are impossible for us to foresee. However, in the case of Napster, it seems like they clearly stated that the primary use for Napster would be unauthorized distribution. I might argue that any distribution of art is good, and therefore one should not prosecute Napster creators, but that's a different matter.
It's entirely possible that all the developers felt this way, too. Assuming
this is so, since they personally saw nothing objectionable with what they were doing, does this
absolve any personal responsibility they may have? Doesn't this imply the need to define a
"common good"?
I guess so....:-) I know, it's hard. However, social responsibility also means that one has to take a step back once in a while, and ask oneself "what am I doing?" Then, my point is merely that the one who is most qualified to foresee the consequences of the stuff one is doing, also carries the most responsibility. A nuke-bomb creator is the most qualified to see what it will do when it explodes (while he might not appreciate the social change that comes with it). A lawyer is most qualified to see that filing a suit may cripple expression, the computer professional who is writing CSS is the most qualified to see that it will make fair use difficult. Therefore, these carry a huge social responsibility. I'm saying, hackers don't run away from it, assume it, and grow with it! Others might not, hackers should.
Well, while I'm going off topic, let me recommend a theatre piece called "Copenhagen". It is about Heisenberg's visit to Bohr in Copenhagen during WWII, where it is thought that they discussed the possibility of a German nuclear bomb. AFAIK, it is playing on Broadway (see the link), in London, in Copenhagen, and will play here in Oslo this autumn.
Re:The above comment missed the point [still OT]
on
Hacker Crackdown?
·
· Score: 1
Off topic but anyways....The dropping of the nuclear bomb saved a lot of lives during WWII,
and one could argue that it has saved many since. It's easy to say that the nuclear bomb is evil
and the world would be a better place without it, but you really have no way of knowing what
overall effect that would have had.
It is true, what has happened has happened, there is nothing we can do about it, and we can't say what history would have looked like if it had been done differently. Now, it is the thoughtsets behind the nukes that I'm after. Both nukes and conventional attacks represents organized mass murders, and I have a problem about that.
It is common that one says that nukes made sure the cold war stayed cold. This has been disputed by a number of high-ranking officers lately, in a document released by a group of them. I got this document from Jack Steinberger (nobel prize physics 1988), but I haven't found it anywhere on the web. It is a very interesting read, though.
I can imagine!:-) You bet, Norwegian and Swedes have tons of jokes about each other, the content is the same of course, it is just a matter of who's telling it...:-)
OK, a calculator was a nice thing to have back in high-school (or any equivalent), but I haven't used mine in years, don't even know where it is. If you do anything serious (beyond the product of two real numbers, which I do on my cell phone:-)), either you do mathematical analysis or something, or you don't want to program your stuff on a tiny screen, you need a real editor, and once your there, you might as well use a real computer.
Hey! That's a Norwegian joke about Sweden! You just swapped Sweden and Norway! Bloody %^&@!:-) LOL. Besides, Sweden is not on the top 5, right?
Re:The above comment missed the point
on
Hacker Crackdown?
·
· Score: 3
As for the soldier, well he really is just a link in the chain, since that's the way the military
works. He just follows orders, he doesn't need to worry about them. He can't decide which are the
"real" orders and to which ones he should say "That's immoral/unethical, I'm not going to do
that".
No. That is exactly the attitude which makes crimes against humanity possible: "I was just following orders". It doesn't stand up. Each individual is responsible for his or her own actions. You know, this has been the main point of every trail on war-crimes since WWII, and indeed, you bet top nazis where convicted, while they were "just following orders". Why is this wrong? Because if you are willing to follow a lunatic on top, then you are contributing, because if you hadn't followed orders, it had never gone that far. You are all individuals! (No, don't give me that "I'm not!":-) ).
As for the nuclear bomb, it was the scientists who should have stopped it, because only they could possibly be able to see the consequences of what they were up. Policymakers does not have the proper education to understand that, only the scientists.
As for technology in general, yes we do have a responsibility. As above, you can't just say you are a part of the chain, you will have to take responsibility for what you do. BTW, see Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
If designers of Napster designed it with the purpose of taking away somebody's rights, then, they must take responsibility for it. Ulrich felt that his right to decide how his music was to be distributed, and he has a point there. If Napster creators can convince people that there are more important concerns, then they must do it. It is still their responsibility, they can't run away from it.
In the case of DeCSS, I think the creators are assuming the responsibility for what they have done, and it is no small responsibility, it could prompt massive social change, and it is my firm belief, that it is social change for something good. It is not the DeCSS that should be illegal, but CSS. CSS was designed with the intention of taking away fundamental rights, notably the right for fair use. The creators are hiding behind copyright laws, not assuming the responsibility for something so bad they should have said "no, this stuff is not good, I won't make it". The same goes for a lot of things/. flame about, like spyware.
In conclusion, you must assume responsibility for what you do. Now, it is not ethically minded hackers that I'm most concerned about, it's all the coders who will do anything if you pay them big bucks.
Napster could be used like you say, but it isn't. Napster is a for profit company. Their
business plan is intimately tied to the free availability of copyrighted musical works.
I agree, while there are nuances here, that's probably true.
Suppose someone set up a search engine where the main
purpose was to track down kiddie porn.
I know that yes, I'd want the individual sites taken
down, but I'd also really want the search engine gone as well.
Actually, I have been thinking about how feasible it is to make such an engine, to nail the bastards. Such an engine would be tremendously useful in tracking down those who are responsible for the child abuse. OK, it isn't quite the same, because you wouldn't make the database available to anyone, but RIAA could also use such a service to find the responsible for unauthorized copying if they would. Of course, that would mean going after their best customers, so they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
At least you can launch stuff liquid nitrogen... Cool page.
I have read a lot about polar expeditions. A lot. One of the major complaints, what makes the north pole hike so difficult is that you do bump into huge openings in the ice now and then. That they are a mile across is not unusual. Now, this happens to be almost at the pole right now. Strange?
IANAC... :-) Anyway, I have become a skeptic after witnessing debates between climatologists and solar physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and lectures by climatologists alone. Basically, in the solar physicists vs. climatologists debate, climatologists attacks a strawman when they say that solar variations is 1% or 0.1% or whatever. It's far greater on a longer time scale. Climatologists are knowingly neglecting effects of short time solar variations, but they are increasingly starting to take them into account these days. This translates to that what climatologists thinks is a fourth order effect is a first order effect. If you neglect a first order effect, well, GIGO.
In one of the lectures I attended, a couple of CS professors sat in front of me. During the lecture, one of them whispered to her collegue that "if this guy had attended my numerical computing course, there is no way he would have passed." The questions she asked afterwards where rather devastating, the lecturer pretty much admitted that the conclusion "there has been a discernible human influence on global climate." is premature. The simulations that was intended to be done before the conference that was supposed to take into account assumed important effects (I don't remember the details, it was about some sulfur stuff) was really never finished, they simply didn't have the CPU required to do it. I was disturbed to hear his admissions. This is about research funding I'm afraid (I'm of the opinion that the current ways of providing research funding is corrupting science in many ways, and I'm not saying that climatology is worse than other fields of science, it is probably not).
Even better in this context, the theory held by Thomas McGovern and others, they moved due to climate change.... :-) There is no doubt that the climate changed significantly about 1350, making the place really cool, failing crops, etc. In addition, as pointed out by Helge Ingstad, it is likely that communication with Norway was cut down because of "black death" (it may have gotten there as well, but it is not that likely). Of course, it may have been lots of other things as well of course. It is probably not slave-hunts in the 16th century as some others have argued poorly...
That's no less imbecellic than the statement you quoted. Now, the original poster did not make a clear distinction between "climate" and "weather", that's his fault. You really need to read up on this, there is a huge debate on whether the compositition of the atmosphere is really significantly altered. That a significant alteration will produce measurable effect is obvious, but a different matter alltogether. It is timely to point out that the World Watch Institute has lost all it's credibility by making as bombastic statements and predictions is you just did, their predictions have always failed miserably.
However, what frustrates me over the whole debate is that people seems to assume that normal means static. If the climate changes, it is abnormal, right? Wrong! Climate has changed over and over again on earth, it has driven people from their homes (e.g. the perishing of the population on Greenland in the 1350-ties), that's nothing new. If you want to have a good feel for the change of climate over the last few hundred years, go to a glacier.
Now, our civilization has been allowed to flourish because we happen to be between ice ages. OK, so we're vulnerable. Faced with the forces of nature, man will forever remain small. You know, a hundred years from now, it might just be politically correct to suggest pouring CO_2 out in the atmosphere to heat it up.
Now, I'm not saying that we should continue as we do, with our high-flying lifestyle of the west, but I'm saying that we should look more carefully at making changes that will have an effect. I think geophysicists have been overly reluctant to accept that long term variations in solar activity might have an effect, they always respond that the short term variations are very small. What we really don't need, is for political correctness to come and rule the debate.
Feverishly, I hope not, but the W3C is working on micropayments and their Common Markup for micropayment per-fee-links is now a working draft in last call review period.
Indeed, most modern historians will agree that the prosecution of Galileo, as well as others, was not over scientific issues. Galileo made claims that were far beyond what he did have evidence for. Note that heliocentrism was never officially declared heresy, so they couldn't nail him for that. What they prosecuted him for, was his big mouth. But, the church had not realized that heliocentrism was correct at the time, though some strong critics of heliocentrism did admit that the old systems were obsolete (those having a good library can look up the name "Clavius" and the year 1611).
However, prosecution of a big mouth is not better than prosecution of a scientist. What is to be learned from the matter, is that nobody, be it the church, the government, big corps, or scientists for that matter (myself being a scientist) should gain too much formal power to decide about the lives of others. Power is currupting, and power will be abused.
Wow, he realized Linux was a good thing from people searching the site.... This might be a good way to persuade hardware manufacturers to start supporting Linux. Everyone, let's go out and start searching for Linux on the sites of your favorite hardware manufacturer! :-)
This is what happened: Aristotelian physics required that all motions in the heavens to be circular, so some astronomers introduced epicycles to account for retrograde motion. Ptolemy incorporated this in his magnificient theory. Now, the story goes:
(taken from de Vaucouleurs, Gerard (1957)), it's just that this is wrong! First, where is the evidence that there was any significant observational progress. Have a good look, and you'll see that there wasn't any observational progress, so they had no reason whatsoever to introduce additional epicycles. The observational progress didn't come until Tycho Brahe, after Copernicus.
Now, the whole thing culminated in 1963, Robert Horace Baker wrote an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica stating that 40 to 60 epicycles were added to each planet, which is absurd, they would have needed a Beowulf cluster to compute the positions of the planets if they did that... ;-) At least with the math they had available.
Baker further said that Alfonso X stated that if he had been there at creation, he would have given the good lord a few hints. Alfonse X computed (well, as a patron) the Alfonsine Tables, that astronomers needed to determine the expected positions of the planets.
Owen Gingerich bashed the myth in 1968 by recomputing the Alfonsine Tables, and found that they were based on a pure Ptolemaic model with only minor corrections to the parameters used by Ptolemy.
I have been trying to figure out why this myth came to be and how it propagated. I haven't had time to do much research on it lately, and I won't tire you with my stuff, but I have an old essay about it for those interested.
Now, the myth has been uncritically accepted by a number of canons, most notably Thomas Kuhn. I have read a couple of his books, and I'm a bit uncertain how important it is for his philosophy, but it is clearly motivating him to go in the direction he does. Gingerich told me on the History of Astronomy Discussion List that Kuhn was very embarrased when he told him about it.
It is very important to note, IMHO, that Ptolemy went away from Aristotelian physics a long way, and that allready in the 10th century (i.e. before Aristotle was made compatible with Christianity by Thomas Aquinas), the criticism against him gained strength. Ptolemy had to introduce several concepts, among them, the equant. The epicycle itself is not consistent with Aristotelian physics, because the circular motion should be around the centre of the universe, namely the earth. Now, could it be that Copernicus was mainly motivated by lack of proper physics as opposed to merely mathematical constructs?
Finally, as others has mentioned, Copernican cosmology had no advantage over Ptolemaic cosmology in terms of accuracy, also as shown by Owen Gingerich. The breakthrough in accuracy came with Kepler.
Hm, I remember writing Lego in, well, I think it must have been shortly after the first Space Shuttle launch, suggesting more specialized parts, like curved things and such, to be able to make more smoothly looking spaceships... Maybe I am to blame....? :-)
Well, you won't get the nobel prize tomorrow, because if you solve the problem, nobody will realize how important your discovery was for another 40 years. Anyway, that's a good reason to start working on it.... :-)
BTW, they have a good slogan: "It sucks less!"
Nah, I've been in roomful of UFO nuts. Nothing compares to that. Besides, I don't see Katz promoting an invisible conspiracy, I see him critizing something that is done in the open.
From the bios, it seems like this Professor Oliver B. Popov may be a good candidate:
I mean, being label as enthusiast when it comes to the internet usually means you are a geek, right?
And, as I've called for before, any /.ers for member nomination? You've got 4 days...
I have fallen in love with R check out http://www.r-project.org/, and IMHO, it beats MATLAB clearly. R is a GPLed package, mainly for statistics and granted, it lacks things that MATLAB has, particulary in the image and signal processing area, but I can't see anything that would exclude R from doing everything there. Since it is Open Source, it is just start working on it.
) -1);
:-)
Actually, I was sitting this very moment writing some code that I have shamelessly snatched from MATLAB's interpn.m and writing it in R for my personal use, and while I haven't tested this code yet, I just replaced the code
s = cell(size(y));
for i=1:length(s),
s{i} = 1 + (y{i}-x{i}(1))/(x{i}(xprodsiz(i))-x{i}(1))*(siz(i
end
end
for i=length(s):-1:1, ssiz{i} = size(s{i}); end
if ~isequal(ssiz{:}), error('Y1,Y2,Y3, etc. must be the same size.');
end
sout = cell(size(s));
for i=1:length(s),
sout{i} = find((s{i}<1) | (s{i}>siz(i)));
if ~isempty(sout{i}), s{i}(sout{i}) = ones(size(sout{i})); end
end
with
if(diff(sapply(y, length)) != 0) stop("y's must be of the same length")
s <- sapply(1:length(y), function(i) {
tmp <- (1 + (y[[i]] - x[[i]][1]) /
(x[[i]][xprodsiz[i]] - x[[i]][1]) *
(siz[i] - 1))
ifelse(tmp < 1 | tmp > siz[i], tmp, 1)})
in R. Neat, eh? Yep, I don't know that this works, but...
That's all the law you need... :-)
OK, it wasn't a first-rate example (and, I'm quite close to Godwin's law here.... :-) ). Anyway, the guys near the top were also "just following orders", that's what they said in the Nürnberg trails.
OK, I'll slow down... :-) You are right, it is a great difference between social responsibility and liability for other people's actions. The main problem that the original article points to, is that the mere threat of a lawsuit is enough to cripple people's expressions, and that's a real threat. It means that what you do can very well be legal, and even be very moral, but as long as you run the risk of pissing somebody big off, you have to be careful what you do. And, lawyers have a social responsibility here too.... :-) Now, as none of us are superhumans, one should not be held liable for outcomes which are impossible for us to foresee. However, in the case of Napster, it seems like they clearly stated that the primary use for Napster would be unauthorized distribution. I might argue that any distribution of art is good, and therefore one should not prosecute Napster creators, but that's a different matter.
I guess so.... :-) I know, it's hard. However, social responsibility also means that one has to take a step back once in a while, and ask oneself "what am I doing?" Then, my point is merely that the one who is most qualified to foresee the consequences of the stuff one is doing, also carries the most responsibility. A nuke-bomb creator is the most qualified to see what it will do when it explodes (while he might not appreciate the social change that comes with it). A lawyer is most qualified to see that filing a suit may cripple expression, the computer professional who is writing CSS is the most qualified to see that it will make fair use difficult. Therefore, these carry a huge social responsibility. I'm saying, hackers don't run away from it, assume it, and grow with it! Others might not, hackers should.
Well, while I'm going off topic, let me recommend a theatre piece called "Copenhagen". It is about Heisenberg's visit to Bohr in Copenhagen during WWII, where it is thought that they discussed the possibility of a German nuclear bomb. AFAIK, it is playing on Broadway (see the link), in London, in Copenhagen, and will play here in Oslo this autumn.
It is true, what has happened has happened, there is nothing we can do about it, and we can't say what history would have looked like if it had been done differently. Now, it is the thoughtsets behind the nukes that I'm after. Both nukes and conventional attacks represents organized mass murders, and I have a problem about that.
It is common that one says that nukes made sure the cold war stayed cold. This has been disputed by a number of high-ranking officers lately, in a document released by a group of them. I got this document from Jack Steinberger (nobel prize physics 1988), but I haven't found it anywhere on the web. It is a very interesting read, though.
I can imagine! :-) You bet, Norwegian and Swedes have tons of jokes about each other, the content is the same of course, it is just a matter of who's telling it... :-)
OK, a calculator was a nice thing to have back in high-school (or any equivalent), but I haven't used mine in years, don't even know where it is. If you do anything serious (beyond the product of two real numbers, which I do on my cell phone :-)), either you do mathematical analysis or something, or you don't want to program your stuff on a tiny screen, you need a real editor, and once your there, you might as well use a real computer.
Hey! That's a Norwegian joke about Sweden! You just swapped Sweden and Norway! Bloody %^&@! :-) LOL. Besides, Sweden is not on the top 5, right?
No. That is exactly the attitude which makes crimes against humanity possible: "I was just following orders". It doesn't stand up. Each individual is responsible for his or her own actions. You know, this has been the main point of every trail on war-crimes since WWII, and indeed, you bet top nazis where convicted, while they were "just following orders". Why is this wrong? Because if you are willing to follow a lunatic on top, then you are contributing, because if you hadn't followed orders, it had never gone that far. You are all individuals! (No, don't give me that "I'm not!" :-) ).
As for the nuclear bomb, it was the scientists who should have stopped it, because only they could possibly be able to see the consequences of what they were up. Policymakers does not have the proper education to understand that, only the scientists.
As for technology in general, yes we do have a responsibility. As above, you can't just say you are a part of the chain, you will have to take responsibility for what you do. BTW, see Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
If designers of Napster designed it with the purpose of taking away somebody's rights, then, they must take responsibility for it. Ulrich felt that his right to decide how his music was to be distributed, and he has a point there. If Napster creators can convince people that there are more important concerns, then they must do it. It is still their responsibility, they can't run away from it.
In the case of DeCSS, I think the creators are assuming the responsibility for what they have done, and it is no small responsibility, it could prompt massive social change, and it is my firm belief, that it is social change for something good. It is not the DeCSS that should be illegal, but CSS. CSS was designed with the intention of taking away fundamental rights, notably the right for fair use. The creators are hiding behind copyright laws, not assuming the responsibility for something so bad they should have said "no, this stuff is not good, I won't make it". The same goes for a lot of things /. flame about, like spyware.
In conclusion, you must assume responsibility for what you do. Now, it is not ethically minded hackers that I'm most concerned about, it's all the coders who will do anything if you pay them big bucks.
I agree, while there are nuances here, that's probably true.
Actually, I have been thinking about how feasible it is to make such an engine, to nail the bastards. Such an engine would be tremendously useful in tracking down those who are responsible for the child abuse. OK, it isn't quite the same, because you wouldn't make the database available to anyone, but RIAA could also use such a service to find the responsible for unauthorized copying if they would. Of course, that would mean going after their best customers, so they don't.