D'oh; I just looked at the first patent — the "orientation locking" I mentioned is hinted at in the first claim. It doesn't appear they're claiming a patent on "using an accelerometer to rotate the screen" at all (or at least not here—perhaps there's another patent). Both patents seem to be pretty specific to overcoming certaing UI design issues involved in screen rotation using the touch screen and/or sensors on the device to detect finger positions. They were also filed six months after the iPhone was released, so theymost likely relate to features not present in the initial product (i.e., not screen rotation).
Astonishingly, the summary appears to be wholly inaccurate. There goes Slashdot's bid for the Pulitzer.
Can you name a product that used them together the way the iPhone and iPad do? If not, then, apparently, it's not sufficiently obvious to all the other consumer gadget makers out there otherwise somebody else would have done it.
Per my (admittedly quite limited — but, hey, this is Slashdot, not a court of law) understanding of patent law, this is indeed one element of a legitimate argument for non-obviousness. Presuming there were other "sufficiently similar" touch-screen mobile devices preceding the iPad (so it can't be argued that the idea would be obvious to "average" engineers building such devices), that none used Apple's claimed invention to solve the particular problem it solves, and that the reason wasn't merely economic or a matter of evolutionary technology (perhaps accelerometers were prohibitively expensive or fragile until 2007 — doubtful, but you get the idea; a "battery-powered portable computer" was obvious once appropriate batteries became available, given that portable computers already existed), I suspect the invention would pass the "non-obviousness" test, more or less for this reason.
Unfortunately, the "non-obviousness" rule is itself "non-obvious" in many ways, but patent law is hardly "novel" in this respect!
The second, "support" patent is particularly interesting: it includes being able to "hold the orientation in place" with one's thumbs while rotating the device (this is not obvious from the description of the patenton the linked page, as it covers a variety of "thumb-related" patents — but see, e.g., the summary in the patent itself). Presumably, the use case is quickly "reorienting" one's view of the display without triggering automatic screen rotation, and the invention proposes "hold thumbs, rotate, release thumbs" to "lock, rotate, unlock." Given that the use case itself doesn't even strike me as "obvious" to the "average" mobile device designer, and it's an "obvious in retrospect" solution to the problem, lawyers aside, I have to hand it to Apple's designers for noticing the problem in the first place.
As a hundred "little things" like this combine to make iOS devices sell so well, it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to want to patent these "touches," to dissuade competitors from merely imitating the iPhone and iPad; like it or not, this is a quite conventional use of both utility and design patents, and has nothing to do with "patent trolling."
Should gas stations should be allowed to charge customers for car washes they aren't aware of, since they don't specifically request otherwise? Should restaurants be allowed to tack on additional "prepaid" menu items that are only actually served by special request? Should Best Buy be allowed to tack on an extended warranty to one out of five purchases automatically, without asking?
This isn't about "freedom of choice," it's about fraudulent charges — and if telecommunications companies knowingly and willingly permit and profit from them, they should be prosecuted.
So you're right, we probably don't need legislation that isn't already on the books; we just need more effective enforcement of the laws we have.
It's not news? It's not insightful? It's not about astronomy? It's a human interest story about the difficulties amateur astronomers face in a war zone, so it might be interesting to some humans — those who regularly visit an astronomy news site, say.
It's clearly very hard to get a "fair and balanced" perspective on foreign conflicts from news stories alone, so I'd argue this sort of reporting is quite important even if one dismisses the "entertainment value" entirely.
Incidentally, these astronomers deserve support from anyone truly interested in "fighting terrorism," for providing constructive alternative forms of "excitement." Terrorists are no different than anyone else in that their actions are quite often motivated by the desire to "find something interesting to do with their lives." And the fact that astronomy encourages science education, yet has deep roots in both Islamic and Western cultural traditions, is a nice bonus.
Ignoring the issue of compatibility with both current OSes and BIOSes, wouldn't it be best to develop a bus that is specific to SSD and is presumably closer to being directly addressed by the CPU via. contemporary OSes?
What CPU and OSes do you have in mind? SATA and SAS interfaces are used on "non-legacy" systems that range from embedded systems to mainframes, running dozens of different operating systems, not to mention external drives with USB/FireWire bridge chipsets. Even ignoring economies of scale, "loose coupling" tends to be a good engineering practice, especially given that components in a design typically don't evolve in lock-step.
Moreover, given that the need to support additional interfaces adds cost and complexity, I suspect it'd be more likely for things to move in the other direction — replacing the essentially "storage-only" SATA, not with SATA + SSD port, but with some more general I/O interface like Thunderbolt or USB.
Finally, "naïve block management" of SSDs isn't merely inefficient, it significantly reduces the useful life of the drive, thus it's even more important that some layer of abstraction exists between the physical media and the rest of the system — otherwise you'd wind up with newer drives that require newer drivers, and thus eventually a "cascade of upgrades" — new drivers are only available for a new OS version, new OS version requires newer hardware.
As much as anything, this separation seems like it'd be important for warranty purposes — manufacturers can only warrant a drive if they maintain enough control to have a reasonable grasp on its lifetime.
I like how easy it is for the 'informed media' to confuse NOT COMPLIANT with ILLEGAL.
Especially with the help of Charlene Wan, director of marketing for HDMI LLC, who claimed that "it is illegal to make and sell non compliant products." Nowhere does she say it would be a violation of any criminal law.
Perhaps "illegal" is a term of art meaning "criminal" in some circles, but this is hardly the "generally accepted" definition — it merely means non-compliant with the law — here, this could simply be "the law that says you need a patent license."
Note also that Ms. Wan is most likely not an attorney, and is most certainly not writing as HDMI LLC's attorney; it'd be unreasonable to expect marketing communications to claim "HDMI LLC believes manufacture of such devices requires the use of one or more US patents it holds, thus manufacture and sale in many jurisdictions requires a license" or any such "reasonably precise" statements. I'm no fan of bullshit marketing tactics, but that's all this is — a brazen attempt to create uncertainty around the future of HDMI/DisplayPort interoperability.
Incidentally, violating pseudoephedrine statutes can actually be a crime.
As for "all citizens are always guilty of something and can be fucked with," this is why "innocent until proven..." is such an important concept. And preventing "fuckings-with," official or otherwise — well, this is one of the major unsolved problems in every society. Any suggestions?
It's hard to imagine the HDMI crew having much control over retailers.
From the article:
HDMI LLC has the right to demand all retailers and channels to remove any and all non complaint products from the shelves but haven't done so.
Gee, I wonder why. Hell, I have the right to demand this — and the retailers have a right to ignore me. What sort of leverage do they have, really? How likely is it thatany of the HDMI patent-holders are going to "threaten" to pull its products from, say, Wal-Mart's shelves, or threaten to sue Wal-Mart or its customers if they don't "comply" with the terms of an agreement they never signed, presumably on patent or trademark grounds? It seems more likely that the Wal-Marts of the world would say "either allow us to continue to sell these profitable accessories without hassles, or else we'll stop wasting precious display space on your bulky, low-margin devices."
Moreover, presuming the adapters in question do their job and work well, what actual damages could the HDMI guys claim? "Potential revenues due to lack of competition?" As far as I can see, these products don't actually compete with licensed products, unless the claim is that customers could buy, say, a Sony PC instead of an iMac, and it's hard to see any reasonable court sympathetic to this sort of claim, patents and trademarks be damned.
Chances are the project simply spooked someone with the authority to open an investigation, sothey opened one.
On the other hand, consider: along with its investigative duties, the Secret Service may be tasked with protecting certain individuals when they visit New York. As far as I know, Prince Sultan is hospitalized, but it's not as if he travels alone; perhaps some spoiled Saudi kid wanted an iPad. Moreover, for obvious reasons, New York is not an entirely unpopular destinationfor important foreign officials.
With that said, given Apple's international cachet, it's certainly not inconceivable the project caught the "watchful eye" of the Secret Service for reasons unrelated to computer fraud or financial crimes —"location and disposition of CCTV cameras" may simply be a "checklist item" for a Secret Service protective detail conducting a site survey, thus it's conceivable that the Secret Service was drawn into this "by accident," more or less, and felt they had a responsibility to investigate. The "computer fraud" angle might just be a convenient cover story; they needed a warrant for "off the record" reasons, and, given that one can at least argue that store computers were used in an "unauthorized" fashion, this happened to be "good enough for the judge," and, more importantly, "for the record."
Conceivable "bad timing" aside, I do suspect "arguable creepiness" probably plays as large a part in this case asany "honest" legal and ethical issues.
This is true, but only true in a uselessly pedantic sense — it comes with the recovery/installation environment as a bootable HFS+ disk image; "burn it" if you like, but it's likely to install much faster from magnetic or solid state media, and Mac OS X doesn't tend to care much about what sort of medium it's installed from or to.
Contrary to popular belief, you need a working Snow Leopard to purchase and download the OS, not to boot and install it. Do people seriously think Apple will continue supporting Snow Leopard on newer hardware just to bootstrap Lion?
Jobs clearly wants to eliminate optical media as a preferred installation vector because he plans to ship more Macs without what he sees as the 2011 equivalent of floppy drives, and he wants to push Lion out over the App Store to drive adoption of the App Store. Hard to see this as a "secret plan," as it's more or less what he's been saying, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. Customers underserved by the distribution channel are free to "bootleg" it — "non-officially," of course, but the "losses" are likely to be a smaller hit to Apple's bottom line than would be maintaining production and distribution channels for a small number of shrink-wrapped copies, especially in light of the likely demographics of underserved populations.
Millions of people choose to teach rather than "keep up with the Joneses" — seems like a rather encouraging sign. Recall no society (or business) pays people "what they're worth" — whatever that means.
Moreover, annualize based on the number of weeks off, elementary and secondary school teacher salaries aren't that bad. Not to mention the fact that teachers are more or less evenly distributed throughout the population, while many of the more lucrative jobs tend to be concentrated in areas with relatively high costs of living. And so on.
Finally, teachers consistently rank high in "most admired profession" surveys, so "society" seems to have a decently high opinion of these graduates.
So I guess I'm not sure what you're driving at — are you suggesting elementary and secondary schools should (somehow) start offering six figure salaries to "compete" with more lucrative occupations?
Funnily, I was just wondering if newer graphing calculators chewed through batteries like the ones we were forced to use in the mid nineties.
Picked up an HP-15C on eBay a few years later; I think I've changed the batteries twice. It does integrals, works with complex numbers, and inverts matrices. Anything more, I'd just as soon use a computer (or iPad, or...).
To me, the bizarre thing about graphing calculator use in high school is I only ever remember graphing things(quadratic curves, trig functions, maybe an exponential here and there) that are really easy to graph by hand.
In high school calculus, I seem to remember they were used in a way that's almost the opposite of how they should be used, trying to "visualize" epsilon/delta neighborhoods instead of, say, linear and Taylor approximations to functions, even though the former are essentially topological (or, if you prefer, infinitesimal), and thus pointless to visualize ("what do you want me to look like?"), while the latter let you _see what's going on and why it turns out to be so useful_.
On the other hand, graphing 3-D _anything_ is hard. If I were teaching and I had a choice, I'd want my students to have access to some sort of technology — most likely not on exams — but I'd most likely suggest they shell out the extra $50 or so and get something like an iPod touch, use one of the cheap/free graphing apps and/or WolframAlpha.
And if I did let them use the things on exams, I wouldn't care much about notes — if they put together good, concise notes, and knew the material well enough to reference them efficiently enough to finish the exam on time, they deserve to pass.
Of course, I'd also tell them to learn the Pythagorean theorem, what a circle is, and Euler's identity
e^it = cos t + i sin t, then forget whatever trig identities they don't need all the time. But remember the quadratic formula and binomial theorem, by all means.
This last bit, of course, is for students who actually care/plan to use math for anything but calculating tips.
As for pointlessness, I'd say it depends on how one uses them. Overpriced? Only if people are forced to buy them. Oh, wait...
I don't know about *starting* in assembler, but a programmer who isn't somewhat proficient in assembler is going to have a very weird mental model of how programs work.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Yet a person who is "somewhat proficient" in assembler will likely have a mental model of how a modern computer works, that, while possibly less wierd, is no less incorrect. And it's is even more difficult to reason about how most nontrivial "programs" work by trying to "think like the machine." Moreover, to the extent this is false, the programs tend to be either trivial, or else difficult to design and maintain.
Once you know how the machine works, then you can start studying abstraction.
Given that the machine is a highly layered system of abstractions, this strikes me as a naïve and even dangerous philosophy from standpoints both theoretical and practical.
C.f., e.g., Parnas' remarks on your approach — under the heading "why conventional software development does not produce reliable programs" — "this intuitively appealing method works well," he writes, "on problems too small to matter."
With that said, I suspect we agree more than we disagree. To wit,
Treating OOP as the only way, or even the best way, to solve any computing problem is going to tend to produce programmers who think everything is a nail.
I agree completely. And it's even worse to treat OOP as synonymous with "abstraction," given that the problems with OOP are not that it encourages"abstraction," rather that it very frequently seems to lead to the wrong abstractions! But students' learning less about how to build the "right" abstractions doesn't strike me as a good solution to this problem.
In fact, the less practitioners know about "abstraction," the more likely they'll have little choice but to use "pre-canned abstractions," and in a very bad position, moreover, to evaluate vendors' claims that the "Frobozz Magic Framework(tm) v10.0" (incorporating even better "best practices") is not only both a floor wax and a dessert topping, but in fact the solution to all possible problems.
This is hyperbole, of course, but your "square peg, round hole" comment is quite on-point —I spent years working with developers, consultants, etc., who seemed to see programming as figuring out how to "adapt customers' problems to the latest solutions," and nearly always had a "solution" in mind before they knew anything about the problem. This led to things like "projects" like replacing perfectly workable Perl-driven Web applications with Java applications that were not only buggier, but orders of magnitude slower, to boot, because "Perl doesn't scale," then, when performance became a probem, suggesting a rewrite to enable a "multi-tier architecture" that included "Web acceleration front-ends" (read: proxy servers) to cache static pages, rather than forcing the application server to generate each page dynamically.
The reason why the Perl code was much faster than its replacement was that it only generated dynamic content once, so nearly every request was simply served by Apache out of the application's "content cache," guaranteed to be correct since the appropriate bits were purged automatically whenever new data arrived.
When I pointed this out, I was flooded with questions about whether it was "designed with future applications in mind." When I asked what future applications were in mind, none were, so I couldn't answer the question, of course. But given that the whole thing, modulo Apache itself and mod_perl, consisted of maybe 500 lines of code and was written in the course of a couple weeks, if, given some "future application," the answer wasn't an unqualified "yes,"
I doubt you'd be singing the same tune if it was 4.2g of Plutonium 239. The unexplained appearance in a restricted area of any illegal substance is a cause for concern.
Only in a trivial sense. Reasonable security measures are at least somewhat threat-specific, and the Kennedy protocols most likely weren't implemented to curtail interplanetary narcotics trafficking. As for plutonium, I'd assume officials are more concerned with the substance leaving the premises than arriving.
To me, that these things are discovered "after the fact" is a good sign that things are working right, given that random "preventative" drugscreening tends to catch at least as many recreational pot smokers as employees with serious, untreated drug/alcohol problems, in spite of the fact that the latter group pose an inarguably greater threat to both safety and security. On the other hand, for many reasons, it is important and useful to know when and if any substance abuse actually played a role in a serious workplace accident, as opposed to whether it could, in theory, do so.
Regardless of one's moral views, it's difficult to argue with the fact that the "war on politically unpopular drugs" leads to serious resource misallocation, given that this viewpoint seems to be supported by virtually every study ever done, not to mention many if not most people working in state and local law enforcement.
The single most useful thing a lecturer can do to improve lectures and outcomes for all students is to strongly suggest (i.e., "insist") students make an effort tofamiliarize themselves with the relevant material in the textbook before a lecture on any given subject, and to lecture under the assumption that the "good students" are doing so.
Among other things, this means "good students" will be less likely to waste "mental energy" transcribing facts (formulas, definitions, etc.) that appear in the textbook, and "bad students" will be compelled to at least open it up once in awhile (since the material in the lecture won't "make any sense" without reference tocited definitions from the text).
If any of this is "asking too much," a student(or lecturer) truly doesn't belong in college. Note in particular that I said "make an effort" above — not understanding everything "the first time through" is the rule rather than the exception, even for exceptional students, in most if not all subjects.
The worst thing a lecturer can do is to assign "brownie points" to reward students for "paying attention" —I've seen this — by including "easter eggs" in lectures.
"As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping," William James once wrote, "so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
This "certain stage" is different for each student, and something "students" in all walks of life must ultimately figure out for themselves.
Trigonometric functions especially are always treated as little boxes that magically calculate what you need.
Amen to that — and the sad bit is that the truth is both simpler and more beautiful than SOH CAH TOA ever was. The chapter in Euler's "pre-calculus" textbook Introductio in analysin infinitorum* that introduces the trigonometric functions is entitled "On Transcendental Quantities Which Arise from the Circle." Small wonder sines and cosines "often arise in applications." Mutatis mutandis for Bessel functions, say, or spherical harmonics. Speaking of Bessel, while he never got around to a university education, he was the first person to calculate the distance to a star with reasonable accuracy — and it sure wasn't "easy"!
Seriously, though, if I catch your meaning correctly, I wholeheartedly agree — for math majors, at least, mathematics should be very far removed from mindless calculation — a large part of mathematical research involves trying to understand calculations well enough to know when they're unnecessary — or if they're even possible. After all, many of the things we'd really like to calculate are, in some sense at least, "incalculable."
As an aside, if you like calculus: try solving the differential equation
x'' = cx
for a few "natural" values of the parameter c and initial values x(0) and x'(0), say
c = -1, x(0) = 1, x'(0) = 0
or perhaps
c = -1, x(0) = 0, x'(0) = 1.
Practically speaking, a course in "mental arithmetic" seems like it'd be far more useful — for future mathematicians as much as everyone else — than a semester spent memorizing antiderivatives of inverse hyperbolic functions and Stewert-esque "strategies" for trigonometric integrals**, with little or no time spent on why they work — which actually is both interesting and instructive. When it comes down to it, it's more a matter of accident than design — students whose primary focus is science or engineering really do "just need the damn formulas," assuming they're unwilling to wait until grad school for a first course in, say, electromagnetism, so they have time to learn enough linear algebra and differential topology to prove the general Stokes' theorem beforehand.
As for "abstract algebra," it's interesting to note that authors — van der Waerden, say, or Artin, or Mac Lane — who actually studied with Noether and Hilbert never seemed to use the phrase: for the first few decades, it was "modern" algebra, then simply "algebra." Perhaps this is because it's essentially the same subject we all studied in high school.
Moreover, both homology and category theory both arose from concerns largely inspired by mathematical physics. The former, rather transparently; as for the latter, think about Courant's proof of the original "natural transformation" for a bit. This is my vote for the most beautiful theorem in all of mathematics. This paper of Mac Lane's is also interesting and instructive.
Cheers, Jason
* I don't read Latin either — an Englishtranslation is available, and worth every penny. Recall that Euler knew a few things about trigonometric functions.
Would it be any different if it had been a confidential business letter or accounts statement?
Just as Penthouse sells somewhat better than the Budget of the United States Government, I presume naked pictures of women have more mass appeal than naked pictures of companies' operational and financial information.
As is so often the case with security, the difference lies in the threat model.
I hope the employee has been dropped from a very great height by Dell.
Agreed.
It doesn't inspire much trust in getting support from them.
I don't know — beyond terminating the offending parties with prejudice, I'm not sure there's much "garden variety" (i.e., those who do not specialize in providing support to clients with stringent security requirements) vendors can be expected to do — SCIF-calibre security doesn't come cheap. Where possible, for good measure, I tend to wipe systems before sending them off for repair, and I've never had a problem. The probability of the CIA, say, sending its laptops to Dell for repair/exchange is effectively nil, regardless of any security restrictions Dell imposes; much the same applies to any sensible organization with truly critical confidentiality requirements. "Extreme security" is hard and expensive, so it can't, and shouldn't, be provided "just because."
The idea, roughly, is this: if your information is so confidential that you need to worry about support organization security procedures, you better be prepared to support yourself, or obtain alternative support from vendors specializing in this sort of thing, because "the masses" aren't willing to pay the price of good security (and rightly so).
Note that photo processors were compromising, ahem, compromising pictures long before the advent of the personal computer; that one should apply common sense and discretion under these circumstances is hardly new; that the parties involved often fail to do so is hardly surprising. The good news is that creators of amateur erotica need no longer invest in a darkroom when "playing it safe" with this sort of thing.
No, it's really not simpler. Our universe has a one-dimensional timeline, which means there's a definite beginning to it.
Citation? Explanation? Topologically speaking, circles (without boundary, but limited in extent), lines (a "circle with infinite radius," if you like, without boundary and unlimited in extent), rays (unlimited in extent, but "bounded below"), and line segments ("bounded above and below") are all quite "one-dimensional" (we can describe our position with a single number). Which is not to say the OP can't define things such that his statement is true.
Moreover, in some sense, his definitions need only be consistent with logic to be possible. Generally, and with good reason, science prefers theories to be consistent with empirical evidence, as well, but there's no logical reason God might not be Descartes' evil demon, crafting dinosaur bones to deceive us into disbelieving Genesis.
This is of course why science looks for the simplest theory that is sufficient to explain the evidence, and leaves claims of necessity to philosophers and divines. No one claims the insufficiency of the "God hypothesis," which is sufficient to "explain" everything, if we're only willing to accept that "the best explanation" amounts to "shut up and get back to work, you'll understand when you're older."
It makes absolutely no sense to say that our universe created itself, and does makes sense to say it had an origin in something outside of the universe.
These are just words. If we define "universe," loosely, as "everything that is the case," then your God would be part of the "universe," no? To put it in a more Slashdot-friendly idiom, you define "universe" as userland, I claim the universe includes code running in kernel mode. Neither is "wrong," we're just using the word "universe" in different senses. You claim processes can't create themselves, so something outside the "universe" must exist, which you call the "kernel." I don't necessarily disagree — I'm just saying we can look at the kernel as "just another process," and that any explanation that purports to explain "how the universe was created" needs to explain how the origin of all processes, not just those running in user mode.
This doesn't imply an anthropomorphic God, but a sort of Deistic Creator... much more plausible than "nothing" (which is the atheists' option of choice).
Again, we're just playing with words. Athiesm is simply not holding a certain belief, namely, the traditional belief in "some sort of supernatural being," itself not now, nor never, really, particularly well defined. The only way your assertion that athiests believe "nothing" created the universe makes any sense is if you mean that there is no general consensus among atheists as to why the universe exists, which, while true, is no less true of "theists" taken as a group. "Devoutly religious folk," on the other hand, tend to claim God not only exists, but that He's actually given them His telephone number.
Phelps, on the other hand, believes God not only exists, but that He's an asshole. A viewpoint which is, sadly, perfectly consistent with the Hebrew scriptures. If you ask me, I think he's taking the bit about man being made in God's image rather personally.
Evidence won't change the fact that "correlation does not imply causation," which just says correlation is not sufficient to prove causation through logical inference rules. "Evidence of what?" one might ask, "causation?" To the extent evidence proves anything (i.e., to the extent we're talking about "inductive proof," whatever that means), great, but it has nothing to do with the claim that "correlation does not imply causation."
The phrasing of "correlation does not imply causation," is, to be fair, more confusing than it needs to be, as garden-variety material implication itself does not imply causation: given the usual elementary definitions of 1, 0, and =, "(1=0) implies I will live forever" is a true proposition, yet I'm not banking on immortality. Similarly, "(1+1 = 2) implies Fermat's Last Theorem," while true, is hardly worthy of a Fields medal: taking "1+1=2" as given, the proposition follows from Fermat's Last Theorem itself.
If, on the other hand, I could show "(1+1 = 2) implies the Riemann Hypothesis," I might attain immortality yet, if only through my work.
Correlation is often used as evidence in inductive contexts, but beware — it is not (I claim, leaving "proof" as an exercise) unreasonable for me to assume the sun will rise tomorrow, but it is also not unreasonable for a chicken to assume the farmer who feeds her every day has only the chicken's best interests in mind.
In other words, YMMV (a disclaimer characteristically inapplicable to the deductive case!).
I sort of like they payment idea, at least in this context. While there is clearly value to "raw" discussion fora (e.g., Slashdot, or at least Slashdot % idle section), restrictions intended to increase signal-to-noise ratio aren't necessarily a bad thing. Apparently this paper prefers the "comments" section to more resemble a "democratized" version of "letters to the editor" than it does the "comments" section of a random blog (with the latter most likely the status quo). For my time, that doesn't sound like such a terrible idea — it's not as if "anonymous discussion fora" are a scarce resource on the Internet, after all.
Half the steeper-than-required-to-dissuade-spammers-and-trolls $0.99 price point probably comes from transaction costs; the other half can probably be chalked up to a combination of corporate politics and delusions of grandeur (someone probably positioned the proposal as a much-needed revenue source in this age of dwindling newspaper readership, most likely based on fuzzy numbers ["we get 10,000 posts a week; at $1/post, that's over $5 million/year!"]), but the idea of asking for some token payment is sound — in essence, they're collecting money for their "automated editorial control" on behalf of their readership. IIRC, something similar was proposed for email (where it's unlikely to work for logistical reasons — who runs the "Internet post office," and where does the profit go? Incidentally, this is a much better idea, in principle, than similar "antispam" requirements that require relatively costly challenge/response computations, which is roughly equivalent to the same thing, but since we can't decide who gets the money, we just burn it, literally, with the resulting environmental costs when the "solution" runs at scale).
The requirement for a real name strikes me as misguided; those who claim that people should be willing to "stand behind their words" often forget the importance of anonymity in speech, especially in political speech. To take just two obvious examples from American history, consider Common Sense, written by "an Englishman," a.k.a. Thomas Paine, and The Federalist, written by "Publius," a.k.a. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.
I suspect the "real name" requirement came about because, while nearly all "junk posts" use fake names, the majority of "well-reasoned posts" (appear to) use the poster's real name, and the newspaper figured that the "false negatives" aren't worth wading through the mountain of garbage. Maybe, maybe not (of all the "good posts" I might inadvertently censor, the "false negatives" might be the ones with the most value), but my solution would be to try the payment thing alone first, then review the results before imposing further changes.
But then, you're left with "A brief history of the universe", and I suppose, tack an exam (of course, abstracting from the math), and you now have a "graduate-level" course.
I humbly submit Feynman 1988 as a counterexample. Therein, the author describes the basics of quantum electrodynamics using what appears to be little more than grade school mathematics.
I write "appears to be" because his presentation amounts to an extremely casual exposition of elementary ideas from rather more advanced mathematics (complex and even functional analysis) in terms of "adding arrows."
This book stands out in my mind as perhaps the best "popular science book" ever written, precisely because Feynman understands, here as elsewhere, the difference between glazing over the mathematics — modulo mathematics, there's not really much "modern theoretical physics" to speak of — and glazing over the inessential (to casual exposition, certainly not to understanding, application, or development of theories!) calculational details.
Incidentally, complex algebra is, in a sense, "the algebra of scaling and rotating little arrows" Feynman describes. Put this way, it comes as no surprise that the things have so many practical applications. Forget "square roots of negative one," rotations often arise in applications, as do "functions of circular (periodic) variables."
After months of digging though speculation and polar opposite opinions from PCI experts, I finally sent a direct request to Amazon's AWS sales team asking if they are in fact PCI compliant
It's awfully considerate of you to invest large amounts of effort in research to avoid bothering the sales team with, you know, sales inquiries.
Putting the debate about the differences between academic CS, practical software development, and IT/MIS aside, it seems to me that, all other things being equal, an IT environment built from mostly off-the-shelf components will require fewer, but better developers. After all, it's far easier (and requires far fewer skills) to build a one-off custom application (or component, or robot, or whatever) that works (I'm tempted to say "happens to work") for a single customer (especially if the original developers remain available to provide ongoing support and maintenance) than it is to build a robust, off-the-shelf application that works well for many customers in many different environments, especially if the market demands reasonably-priced support for said app.
I'm tempted to say that this is a good thing, i.e., being able to take advantage of economies of scale to drive the cost of established technology down. And it's only the death of (applied) CS when people stop coming up with novel ideas for new applications of technology (what was that about the Patent Office closing down because everything worth inventing had already been invented in the 19th century?). I don't know about you, but I'd rather the greatest minds of my generation spend their time developing interesting new application areas than writing ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of QuickBooks with Excel macros and duck tape (apologies to Philip Greenspun). In the words of Thoreau, "the sun was made to light worthier toil than this."
Unfortunately in order to match the online prices Best Buy's customer service staff is required to log onto the website from the store cash registers to verify the price. A printed version of the website isn't enough to guarantee the price.
The time I ran in to this, I had to talk with a manager, but they gave me the online price. Fortunately, my office at the time was a few blocks from the Best Buy in question, so getting the printout was not hard.
With that said, the "secret Web site" practice sucks, and I'm glad to see someone take action.
Slashdot Mirror
D'oh; I just looked at the first patent — the "orientation locking" I mentioned is hinted at in the first claim. It doesn't appear they're claiming a patent on "using an accelerometer to rotate the screen" at all (or at least not here—perhaps there's another patent). Both patents seem to be pretty specific to overcoming certaing UI design issues involved in screen rotation using the touch screen and/or sensors on the device to detect finger positions. They were also filed six months after the iPhone was released, so theymost likely relate to features not present in the initial product (i.e., not screen rotation).
Astonishingly, the summary appears to be wholly inaccurate. There goes Slashdot's bid for the Pulitzer.
Can you name a product that used them together the way the iPhone and iPad do? If not, then, apparently, it's not sufficiently obvious to all the other consumer gadget makers out there otherwise somebody else would have done it.
Per my (admittedly quite limited — but, hey, this is Slashdot, not a court of law) understanding of patent law, this is indeed one element of a legitimate argument for non-obviousness. Presuming there were other "sufficiently similar" touch-screen mobile devices preceding the iPad (so it can't be argued that the idea would be obvious to "average" engineers building such devices), that none used Apple's claimed invention to solve the particular problem it solves, and that the reason wasn't merely economic or a matter of evolutionary technology (perhaps accelerometers were prohibitively expensive or fragile until 2007 — doubtful, but you get the idea; a "battery-powered portable computer" was obvious once appropriate batteries became available, given that portable computers already existed), I suspect the invention would pass the "non-obviousness" test, more or less for this reason.
Unfortunately, the "non-obviousness" rule is itself "non-obvious" in many ways, but patent law is hardly "novel" in this respect!
The second, "support" patent is particularly interesting: it includes being able to "hold the orientation in place" with one's thumbs while rotating the device (this is not obvious from the description of the patenton the linked page, as it covers a variety of "thumb-related" patents — but see, e.g., the summary in the patent itself). Presumably, the use case is quickly "reorienting" one's view of the display without triggering automatic screen rotation, and the invention proposes "hold thumbs, rotate, release thumbs" to "lock, rotate, unlock." Given that the use case itself doesn't even strike me as "obvious" to the "average" mobile device designer, and it's an "obvious in retrospect" solution to the problem, lawyers aside, I have to hand it to Apple's designers for noticing the problem in the first place.
As a hundred "little things" like this combine to make iOS devices sell so well, it's perfectly reasonable for Apple to want to patent these "touches," to dissuade competitors from merely imitating the iPhone and iPad; like it or not, this is a quite conventional use of both utility and design patents, and has nothing to do with "patent trolling."
Should gas stations should be allowed to charge customers for car washes they aren't aware of, since they don't specifically request otherwise? Should restaurants be allowed to tack on additional "prepaid" menu items that are only actually served by special request? Should Best Buy be allowed to tack on an extended warranty to one out of five purchases automatically, without asking?
This isn't about "freedom of choice," it's about fraudulent charges — and if telecommunications companies knowingly and willingly permit and profit from them, they should be prosecuted.
So you're right, we probably don't need legislation that isn't already on the books; we just need more effective enforcement of the laws we have.
It's not news? It's not insightful? It's not about astronomy? It's a human interest story about the difficulties amateur astronomers face in a war zone, so it might be interesting to some humans — those who regularly visit an astronomy news site, say.
It's clearly very hard to get a "fair and balanced" perspective on foreign conflicts from news stories alone, so I'd argue this sort of reporting is quite important even if one dismisses the "entertainment value" entirely.
Incidentally, these astronomers deserve support from anyone truly interested in "fighting terrorism," for providing constructive alternative forms of "excitement." Terrorists are no different than anyone else in that their actions are quite often motivated by the desire to "find something interesting to do with their lives." And the fact that astronomy encourages science education, yet has deep roots in both Islamic and Western cultural traditions, is a nice bonus.
What CPU and OSes do you have in mind? SATA and SAS interfaces are used on "non-legacy" systems that range from embedded systems to mainframes, running dozens of different operating systems, not to mention external drives with USB/FireWire bridge chipsets. Even ignoring economies of scale, "loose coupling" tends to be a good engineering practice, especially given that components in a design typically don't evolve in lock-step.
Moreover, given that the need to support additional interfaces adds cost and complexity, I suspect it'd be more likely for things to move in the other direction — replacing the essentially "storage-only" SATA, not with SATA + SSD port, but with some more general I/O interface like Thunderbolt or USB.
Finally, "naïve block management" of SSDs isn't merely inefficient, it significantly reduces the useful life of the drive, thus it's even more important that some layer of abstraction exists between the physical media and the rest of the system — otherwise you'd wind up with newer drives that require newer drivers, and thus eventually a "cascade of upgrades" — new drivers are only available for a new OS version, new OS version requires newer hardware.
As much as anything, this separation seems like it'd be important for warranty purposes — manufacturers can only warrant a drive if they maintain enough control to have a reasonable grasp on its lifetime.
Especially with the help of Charlene Wan, director of marketing for HDMI LLC, who claimed that "it is illegal to make and sell non compliant products." Nowhere does she say it would be a violation of any criminal law.
Perhaps "illegal" is a term of art meaning "criminal" in some circles, but this is hardly the "generally accepted" definition — it merely means non-compliant with the law — here, this could simply be "the law that says you need a patent license."
Note also that Ms. Wan is most likely not an attorney, and is most certainly not writing as HDMI LLC's attorney; it'd be unreasonable to expect marketing communications to claim "HDMI LLC believes manufacture of such devices requires the use of one or more US patents it holds, thus manufacture and sale in many jurisdictions requires a license" or any such "reasonably precise" statements. I'm no fan of bullshit marketing tactics, but that's all this is — a brazen attempt to create uncertainty around the future of HDMI/DisplayPort interoperability.
Incidentally, violating pseudoephedrine statutes can actually be a crime.
As for "all citizens are always guilty of something and can be fucked with," this is why "innocent until proven..." is such an important concept. And preventing "fuckings-with," official or otherwise — well, this is one of the major unsolved problems in every society. Any suggestions?
It's hard to imagine the HDMI crew having much control over retailers.
From the article:
Gee, I wonder why. Hell, I have the right to demand this — and the retailers have a right to ignore me. What sort of leverage do they have, really? How likely is it thatany of the HDMI patent-holders are going to "threaten" to pull its products from, say, Wal-Mart's shelves, or threaten to sue Wal-Mart or its customers if they don't "comply" with the terms of an agreement they never signed, presumably on patent or trademark grounds? It seems more likely that the Wal-Marts of the world would say "either allow us to continue to sell these profitable accessories without hassles, or else we'll stop wasting precious display space on your bulky, low-margin devices."
Moreover, presuming the adapters in question do their job and work well, what actual damages could the HDMI guys claim? "Potential revenues due to lack of competition?" As far as I can see, these products don't actually compete with licensed products, unless the claim is that customers could buy, say, a Sony PC instead of an iMac, and it's hard to see any reasonable court sympathetic to this sort of claim, patents and trademarks be damned.
Surely retailers' lawyers aren't this stupid.
Chances are the project simply spooked someone with the authority to open an investigation, sothey opened one.
On the other hand, consider: along with its investigative duties, the Secret Service may be tasked with protecting certain individuals when they visit New York. As far as I know, Prince Sultan is hospitalized, but it's not as if he travels alone; perhaps some spoiled Saudi kid wanted an iPad. Moreover, for obvious reasons, New York is not an entirely unpopular destinationfor important foreign officials.
With that said, given Apple's international cachet, it's certainly not inconceivable the project caught the "watchful eye" of the Secret Service for reasons unrelated to computer fraud or financial crimes —"location and disposition of CCTV cameras" may simply be a "checklist item" for a Secret Service protective detail conducting a site survey, thus it's conceivable that the Secret Service was drawn into this "by accident," more or less, and felt they had a responsibility to investigate. The "computer fraud" angle might just be a convenient cover story; they needed a warrant for "off the record" reasons, and, given that one can at least argue that store computers were used in an "unauthorized" fashion, this happened to be "good enough for the judge," and, more importantly, "for the record."
Conceivable "bad timing" aside, I do suspect "arguable creepiness" probably plays as large a part in this case asany "honest" legal and ethical issues.
It doesn't come as a burnable ISO
This is true, but only true in a uselessly pedantic sense — it comes with the recovery/installation environment as a bootable HFS+ disk image; "burn it" if you like, but it's likely to install much faster from magnetic or solid state media, and Mac OS X doesn't tend to care much about what sort of medium it's installed from or to.
Contrary to popular belief, you need a working Snow Leopard to purchase and download the OS, not to boot and install it. Do people seriously think Apple will continue supporting Snow Leopard on newer hardware just to bootstrap Lion?
Jobs clearly wants to eliminate optical media as a preferred installation vector because he plans to ship more Macs without what he sees as the 2011 equivalent of floppy drives, and he wants to push Lion out over the App Store to drive adoption of the App Store. Hard to see this as a "secret plan," as it's more or less what he's been saying, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. Customers underserved by the distribution channel are free to "bootleg" it — "non-officially," of course, but the "losses" are likely to be a smaller hit to Apple's bottom line than would be maintaining production and distribution channels for a small number of shrink-wrapped copies, especially in light of the likely demographics of underserved populations.
Cheers,
Jason
Millions of people choose to teach rather than "keep up with the Joneses" — seems like a rather encouraging sign. Recall no society (or business) pays people "what they're worth" — whatever that means.
Moreover, annualize based on the number of weeks off, elementary and secondary school teacher salaries aren't that bad. Not to mention the fact that teachers are more or less evenly distributed throughout the population, while many of the more lucrative jobs tend to be concentrated in areas with relatively high costs of living. And so on.
Finally, teachers consistently rank high in "most admired profession" surveys, so "society" seems to have a decently high opinion of these graduates.
So I guess I'm not sure what you're driving at — are you suggesting elementary and secondary schools should (somehow) start offering six figure salaries to "compete" with more lucrative occupations?
Cheers,
Jason
Funnily, I was just wondering if newer graphing calculators chewed through batteries like the ones we were forced to use in the mid nineties.
Picked up an HP-15C on eBay a few years later; I think I've changed the batteries twice. It does integrals, works with complex numbers, and inverts matrices. Anything more, I'd just as soon use a computer (or iPad, or...).
To me, the bizarre thing about graphing calculator use in high school is I only ever remember graphing things(quadratic curves, trig functions, maybe an exponential here and there) that are really easy to graph by hand.
In high school calculus, I seem to remember they were used in a way that's almost the opposite of how they should be used, trying to "visualize" epsilon/delta neighborhoods instead of, say, linear and Taylor approximations to functions, even though the former are essentially topological (or, if you prefer, infinitesimal), and thus pointless to visualize ("what do you want me to look like?"), while the latter let you _see what's going on and why it turns out to be so useful_.
On the other hand, graphing 3-D _anything_ is hard. If I were teaching and I had a choice, I'd want my students to have access to some sort of technology — most likely not on exams — but I'd most likely suggest they shell out the extra $50 or so and get something like an iPod touch, use one of the cheap/free graphing apps and/or WolframAlpha.
And if I did let them use the things on exams, I wouldn't care much about notes — if they put together good, concise notes, and knew the material well enough to reference them efficiently enough to finish the exam on time, they deserve to pass.
Of course, I'd also tell them to learn the Pythagorean theorem, what a circle is, and Euler's identity
e^it = cos t + i sin t,
then forget whatever trig identities they don't need all the time. But remember the quadratic formula and binomial theorem, by all means.
This last bit, of course, is for students who actually care/plan to use math for anything but calculating tips.
As for pointlessness, I'd say it depends on how one uses them. Overpriced? Only if people are forced to buy them. Oh, wait...
Cheers,
Jason
I don't know about *starting* in assembler, but a programmer who isn't somewhat proficient in assembler is going to have a very weird mental model of how programs work.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Yet a person who is "somewhat proficient" in assembler will likely have a mental model of how a modern computer works, that, while possibly less wierd, is no less incorrect. And it's is even more difficult to reason about how most nontrivial "programs" work by trying to "think like the machine." Moreover, to the extent this is false, the programs tend to be either trivial, or else difficult to design and maintain.
Once you know how the machine works, then you can start studying abstraction.
Given that the machine is a highly layered system of abstractions, this strikes me as a naïve and even dangerous philosophy from standpoints both theoretical and practical.
C.f., e.g., Parnas' remarks on your approach — under the heading "why conventional software development does not produce reliable programs" — "this intuitively appealing method works well," he writes, "on problems too small to matter."
With that said, I suspect we agree more than we disagree. To wit,
Treating OOP as the only way, or even the best way, to solve any computing problem is going to tend to produce programmers who think everything is a nail.
I agree completely. And it's even worse to treat OOP as synonymous with "abstraction," given that the problems with OOP are not that it encourages"abstraction," rather that it very frequently seems to lead to the wrong abstractions! But students' learning less about how to build the "right" abstractions doesn't strike me as a good solution to this problem.
In fact, the less practitioners know about "abstraction," the more likely they'll have little choice but to use "pre-canned abstractions," and in a very bad position, moreover, to evaluate vendors' claims that the "Frobozz Magic Framework(tm) v10.0" (incorporating even better "best practices") is not only both a floor wax and a dessert topping, but in fact the solution to all possible problems.
This is hyperbole, of course, but your "square peg, round hole" comment is quite on-point —I spent years working with developers, consultants, etc., who seemed to see programming as figuring out how to "adapt customers' problems to the latest solutions," and nearly always had a "solution" in mind before they knew anything about the problem. This led to things like "projects" like replacing perfectly workable Perl-driven Web applications with Java applications that were not only buggier, but orders of magnitude slower, to boot, because "Perl doesn't scale," then, when performance became a probem, suggesting a rewrite to enable a "multi-tier architecture" that included "Web acceleration front-ends" (read: proxy servers) to cache static pages, rather than forcing the application server to generate each page dynamically.
The reason why the Perl code was much faster than its replacement was that it only generated dynamic content once, so nearly every request was simply served by Apache out of the application's "content cache," guaranteed to be correct since the appropriate bits were purged automatically whenever new data arrived.
When I pointed this out, I was flooded with questions about whether it was "designed with future applications in mind." When I asked what future applications were in mind, none were, so I couldn't answer the question, of course. But given that the whole thing, modulo Apache itself and mod_perl, consisted of maybe 500 lines of code and was written in the course of a couple weeks, if, given some "future application," the answer wasn't an unqualified "yes,"
I doubt you'd be singing the same tune if it was 4.2g of Plutonium 239. The unexplained appearance in a restricted area of any illegal substance is a cause for concern.
Only in a trivial sense. Reasonable security measures are at least somewhat threat-specific, and the Kennedy protocols most likely weren't implemented to curtail interplanetary narcotics trafficking. As for plutonium, I'd assume officials are more concerned with the substance leaving the premises than arriving.
To me, that these things are discovered "after the fact" is a good sign that things are working right, given that random "preventative" drugscreening tends to catch at least as many recreational pot smokers as employees with serious, untreated drug/alcohol problems, in spite of the fact that the latter group pose an inarguably greater threat to both safety and security. On the other hand, for many reasons, it is important and useful to know when and if any substance abuse actually played a role in a serious workplace accident, as opposed to whether it could, in theory, do so.
Regardless of one's moral views, it's difficult to argue with the fact that the "war on politically unpopular drugs" leads to serious resource misallocation, given that this viewpoint seems to be supported by virtually every study ever done, not to mention many if not most people working in state and local law enforcement.
Cheers,
Jason
The single most useful thing a lecturer can do to improve lectures and outcomes for all students is to strongly suggest (i.e., "insist") students make an effort tofamiliarize themselves with the relevant material in the textbook before a lecture on any given subject, and to lecture under the assumption that the "good students" are doing so.
Among other things, this means "good students" will be less likely to waste "mental energy" transcribing facts (formulas, definitions, etc.) that appear in the textbook, and "bad students" will be compelled to at least open it up once in awhile (since the material in the lecture won't "make any sense" without reference tocited definitions from the text).
If any of this is "asking too much," a student(or lecturer) truly doesn't belong in college. Note in particular that I said "make an effort" above — not understanding everything "the first time through" is the rule rather than the exception, even for exceptional students, in most if not all subjects.
The worst thing a lecturer can do is to assign "brownie points" to reward students for "paying attention" —I've seen this — by including "easter eggs" in lectures.
"As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping," William James once wrote, "so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
This "certain stage" is different for each student, and something "students" in all walks of life must ultimately figure out for themselves.
Cheers,
Jason
Trigonometric functions especially are always treated as little boxes that magically calculate what you need.
Amen to that — and the sad bit is that the truth is both simpler and more beautiful than SOH CAH TOA ever was. The chapter in Euler's "pre-calculus" textbook Introductio in analysin infinitorum* that introduces the trigonometric functions is entitled "On Transcendental Quantities Which Arise from the Circle." Small wonder sines and cosines "often arise in applications." Mutatis mutandis for Bessel functions, say, or spherical harmonics. Speaking of Bessel, while he never got around to a university education, he was the first person to calculate the distance to a star with reasonable accuracy — and it sure wasn't "easy"!
Seriously, though, if I catch your meaning correctly, I wholeheartedly agree — for math majors, at least, mathematics should be very far removed from mindless calculation — a large part of mathematical research involves trying to understand calculations well enough to know when they're unnecessary — or if they're even possible. After all, many of the things we'd really like to calculate are, in some sense at least, "incalculable."
As an aside, if you like calculus: try solving the differential equation
x'' = cx
for a few "natural" values of the parameter c and initial values x(0) and x'(0), say
c = -1, x(0) = 1, x'(0) = 0
or perhaps
c = -1, x(0) = 0, x'(0) = 1.
Practically speaking, a course in "mental arithmetic" seems like it'd be far more useful — for future mathematicians as much as everyone else — than a semester spent memorizing antiderivatives of inverse hyperbolic functions and Stewert-esque "strategies" for trigonometric integrals**, with little or no time spent on why they work — which actually is both interesting and instructive. When it comes down to it, it's more a matter of accident than design — students whose primary focus is science or engineering really do "just need the damn formulas," assuming they're unwilling to wait until grad school for a first course in, say, electromagnetism, so they have time to learn enough linear algebra and differential topology to prove the general Stokes' theorem beforehand.
As for "abstract algebra," it's interesting to note that authors — van der Waerden, say, or Artin, or Mac Lane — who actually studied with Noether and Hilbert never seemed to use the phrase: for the first few decades, it was "modern" algebra, then simply "algebra." Perhaps this is because it's essentially the same subject we all studied in high school.
Moreover, both homology and category theory both arose from concerns largely inspired by mathematical physics. The former, rather transparently; as for the latter, think about Courant's proof of the original "natural transformation" for a bit. This is my vote for the most beautiful theorem in all of mathematics. This paper of Mac Lane's is also interesting and instructive.
Cheers,
Jason
* I don't read Latin either — an English translation is available, and worth every penny. Recall that Euler knew a few things about trigonometric functions.
...I wonder what the world's smallest violin would sound like in the concert hall of Dr. Stewart's $24 million mansion.
Just as Penthouse sells somewhat better than the Budget of the United States Government, I presume naked pictures of women have more mass appeal than naked pictures of companies' operational and financial information.
As is so often the case with security, the difference lies in the threat model.
Agreed.
I don't know — beyond terminating the offending parties with prejudice, I'm not sure there's much "garden variety" (i.e., those who do not specialize in providing support to clients with stringent security requirements) vendors can be expected to do — SCIF-calibre security doesn't come cheap. Where possible, for good measure, I tend to wipe systems before sending them off for repair, and I've never had a problem. The probability of the CIA, say, sending its laptops to Dell for repair/exchange is effectively nil, regardless of any security restrictions Dell imposes; much the same applies to any sensible organization with truly critical confidentiality requirements. "Extreme security" is hard and expensive, so it can't, and shouldn't, be provided "just because."
The idea, roughly, is this: if your information is so confidential that you need to worry about support organization security procedures, you better be prepared to support yourself, or obtain alternative support from vendors specializing in this sort of thing, because "the masses" aren't willing to pay the price of good security (and rightly so).
Note that photo processors were compromising, ahem, compromising pictures long before the advent of the personal computer; that one should apply common sense and discretion under these circumstances is hardly new; that the parties involved often fail to do so is hardly surprising. The good news is that creators of amateur erotica need no longer invest in a darkroom when "playing it safe" with this sort of thing.
Citation? Explanation? Topologically speaking, circles (without boundary, but limited in extent), lines (a "circle with infinite radius," if you like, without boundary and unlimited in extent), rays (unlimited in extent, but "bounded below"), and line segments ("bounded above and below") are all quite "one-dimensional" (we can describe our position with a single number). Which is not to say the OP can't define things such that his statement is true.
Moreover, in some sense, his definitions need only be consistent with logic to be possible. Generally, and with good reason, science prefers theories to be consistent with empirical evidence, as well, but there's no logical reason God might not be Descartes' evil demon, crafting dinosaur bones to deceive us into disbelieving Genesis.
This is of course why science looks for the simplest theory that is sufficient to explain the evidence, and leaves claims of necessity to philosophers and divines. No one claims the insufficiency of the "God hypothesis," which is sufficient to "explain" everything, if we're only willing to accept that "the best explanation" amounts to "shut up and get back to work, you'll understand when you're older."
These are just words. If we define "universe," loosely, as "everything that is the case," then your God would be part of the "universe," no? To put it in a more Slashdot-friendly idiom, you define "universe" as userland, I claim the universe includes code running in kernel mode. Neither is "wrong," we're just using the word "universe" in different senses. You claim processes can't create themselves, so something outside the "universe" must exist, which you call the "kernel." I don't necessarily disagree — I'm just saying we can look at the kernel as "just another process," and that any explanation that purports to explain "how the universe was created" needs to explain how the origin of all processes, not just those running in user mode.
Again, we're just playing with words. Athiesm is simply not holding a certain belief, namely, the traditional belief in "some sort of supernatural being," itself not now, nor never, really, particularly well defined. The only way your assertion that athiests believe "nothing" created the universe makes any sense is if you mean that there is no general consensus among atheists as to why the universe exists, which, while true, is no less true of "theists" taken as a group. "Devoutly religious folk," on the other hand, tend to claim God not only exists, but that He's actually given them His telephone number.
Phelps, on the other hand, believes God not only exists, but that He's an asshole. A viewpoint which is, sadly, perfectly consistent with the Hebrew scriptures. If you ask me, I think he's taking the bit about man being made in God's image rather personally.
Evidence won't change the fact that "correlation does not imply causation," which just says correlation is not sufficient to prove causation through logical inference rules. "Evidence of what?" one might ask, "causation?" To the extent evidence proves anything (i.e., to the extent we're talking about "inductive proof," whatever that means), great, but it has nothing to do with the claim that "correlation does not imply causation."
The phrasing of "correlation does not imply causation," is, to be fair, more confusing than it needs to be, as garden-variety material implication itself does not imply causation: given the usual elementary definitions of 1, 0, and =, "(1=0) implies I will live forever" is a true proposition, yet I'm not banking on immortality. Similarly, "(1+1 = 2) implies Fermat's Last Theorem," while true, is hardly worthy of a Fields medal: taking "1+1=2" as given, the proposition follows from Fermat's Last Theorem itself.
If, on the other hand, I could show "(1+1 = 2) implies the Riemann Hypothesis," I might attain immortality yet, if only through my work.
Correlation is often used as evidence in inductive contexts, but beware — it is not (I claim, leaving "proof" as an exercise) unreasonable for me to assume the sun will rise tomorrow, but it is also not unreasonable for a chicken to assume the farmer who feeds her every day has only the chicken's best interests in mind.
In other words, YMMV (a disclaimer characteristically inapplicable to the deductive case!).
I sort of like they payment idea, at least in this context. While there is clearly value to "raw" discussion fora (e.g., Slashdot, or at least Slashdot % idle section), restrictions intended to increase signal-to-noise ratio aren't necessarily a bad thing. Apparently this paper prefers the "comments" section to more resemble a "democratized" version of "letters to the editor" than it does the "comments" section of a random blog (with the latter most likely the status quo). For my time, that doesn't sound like such a terrible idea — it's not as if "anonymous discussion fora" are a scarce resource on the Internet, after all.
Half the steeper-than-required-to-dissuade-spammers-and-trolls $0.99 price point probably comes from transaction costs; the other half can probably be chalked up to a combination of corporate politics and delusions of grandeur (someone probably positioned the proposal as a much-needed revenue source in this age of dwindling newspaper readership, most likely based on fuzzy numbers ["we get 10,000 posts a week; at $1/post, that's over $5 million/year!"]), but the idea of asking for some token payment is sound — in essence, they're collecting money for their "automated editorial control" on behalf of their readership. IIRC, something similar was proposed for email (where it's unlikely to work for logistical reasons — who runs the "Internet post office," and where does the profit go? Incidentally, this is a much better idea, in principle, than similar "antispam" requirements that require relatively costly challenge/response computations, which is roughly equivalent to the same thing, but since we can't decide who gets the money, we just burn it, literally, with the resulting environmental costs when the "solution" runs at scale).
The requirement for a real name strikes me as misguided; those who claim that people should be willing to "stand behind their words" often forget the importance of anonymity in speech, especially in political speech. To take just two obvious examples from American history, consider Common Sense, written by "an Englishman," a.k.a. Thomas Paine, and The Federalist, written by "Publius," a.k.a. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.
I suspect the "real name" requirement came about because, while nearly all "junk posts" use fake names, the majority of "well-reasoned posts" (appear to) use the poster's real name, and the newspaper figured that the "false negatives" aren't worth wading through the mountain of garbage. Maybe, maybe not (of all the "good posts" I might inadvertently censor, the "false negatives" might be the ones with the most value), but my solution would be to try the payment thing alone first, then review the results before imposing further changes.
-jtm
I humbly submit Feynman 1988 as a counterexample. Therein, the author describes the basics of quantum electrodynamics using what appears to be little more than grade school mathematics.
I write "appears to be" because his presentation amounts to an extremely casual exposition of elementary ideas from rather more advanced mathematics (complex and even functional analysis) in terms of "adding arrows."
This book stands out in my mind as perhaps the best "popular science book" ever written, precisely because Feynman understands, here as elsewhere, the difference between glazing over the mathematics — modulo mathematics, there's not really much "modern theoretical physics" to speak of — and glazing over the inessential (to casual exposition, certainly not to understanding, application, or development of theories!) calculational details.
Incidentally, complex algebra is, in a sense, "the algebra of scaling and rotating little arrows" Feynman describes. Put this way, it comes as no surprise that the things have so many practical applications. Forget "square roots of negative one," rotations often arise in applications, as do "functions of circular (periodic) variables."
Easy. Let n be some positive whole number (1, 2, 3, etc.).
n^3 is n × n × n.
2^n is 2 × 2 × ... × 2 × 2, where the "..." means we have a total of n twos. This is generally much, much larger.
As an example, consider this graph.
It's awfully considerate of you to invest large amounts of effort in research to avoid bothering the sales team with, you know, sales inquiries.
Putting the debate about the differences between academic CS, practical software development, and IT/MIS aside, it seems to me that, all other things being equal, an IT environment built from mostly off-the-shelf components will require fewer, but better developers. After all, it's far easier (and requires far fewer skills) to build a one-off custom application (or component, or robot, or whatever) that works (I'm tempted to say "happens to work") for a single customer (especially if the original developers remain available to provide ongoing support and maintenance) than it is to build a robust, off-the-shelf application that works well for many customers in many different environments, especially if the market demands reasonably-priced support for said app.
I'm tempted to say that this is a good thing, i.e., being able to take advantage of economies of scale to drive the cost of established technology down. And it's only the death of (applied) CS when people stop coming up with novel ideas for new applications of technology (what was that about the Patent Office closing down because everything worth inventing had already been invented in the 19th century?). I don't know about you, but I'd rather the greatest minds of my generation spend their time developing interesting new application areas than writing ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of QuickBooks with Excel macros and duck tape (apologies to Philip Greenspun). In the words of Thoreau, "the sun was made to light worthier toil than this."
-jtm
The time I ran in to this, I had to talk with a manager, but they gave me the online price. Fortunately, my office at the time was a few blocks from the Best Buy in question, so getting the printout was not hard.
With that said, the "secret Web site" practice sucks, and I'm glad to see someone take action.