I think it's a bad plan to get assassinated right after being elected, since you don't take office for a while yet. Also, people usually don't get buried for three days after dying. Oh, and you can't get elected on a Friday; people vote on a Tuesday and the electors cast electoral votes on a Monday. If you win the 2016 election, however, you can get inaugurated on a Friday, which will have to do.
(IANAL) If the license on the code that they paid you to modify requires that changes be licensed under the same license, then they own the copyrights but they'd have a hard time arguing that you don't have a license to it. (So far as the changes are a derived work of the code they don't own; separate stuff that you did along with the open source project doesn't count.) Just make sure that the copyright notices credit the company (not yourself) and that the license is GPL-like rather than BSD-like. (If they pay you to work on a BSD/X/MIT-licensed piece of OSS for internal use, they may well be preparing a proprietary version, which is perfectly fine by the license, and you don't get to pass it on.)
Note that the important detail here is that the company is under license obligations in order to prepare derived works of the code they don't own and use those modified versions.
Ten years ago, I was running Linux, X, fvwm, ssh, xclock, screen, pine, bash, emacs, and netscape (only for web). Today I'm running Linux, X, fvwm, xterm, openssh, xclock, screen, alpine, bash, emacs, and firefox. All of the programs I used in '98 are still maintained in '08, with the occasional name change and slight changes to appearance and behavior, except for netscape. All of these programs were open source, except for netscape. I hear that Windows 95 and Office 97 haven't gotten any updates lately. So if you want to keep running the same software for over a decade, you'd do better with open source software.
Most of the flaws that Coverity finds are not bugs in the sense of cases where the code does the wrong thing. They are more often areas where the code works as written, but is misleading in some way, such that people working on the code are likely to introduce crashes.
A lot of other flaws they find are cases in which the program crashes cleanly (by dereferencing NULL) in some error case instead of reporting the error. Depending on what sort of program it is and what sort of data error is required to reach that point, it may not matter (e.g., if there's some weird thing the user can do that crashes their mail client, it's not a big deal, because anyone who could do that could also just tell it to quit). But, again, reasonable changes to the code could expose this as a real problem, and having these flaws means that the description of the state of the program that the programmer has to keep in mind in order to only make correct changes is more complicated, and the intended behavior of the program is harder to pick out from the actual code.
And then, of course, there are real issues that they're finding, and these are often difficult to distinguish automatically from things that are just badly written, and it's better to just fix everything that's wrong rather than trying to determine how wrong it is.
That system is essentially what the ACLU is complaining about: if a ballot is unclear, there's no way to allow the voter to try again. The advantage of optical scan machines in the polling places is that they reject unclear ballots when the voter tries to cast them, so the voter can cast a replacement. The physical ballots, after they're scanned and accepted, go into a box and can be recounted by humans if necessary.
Ohio wants to do the scanning in a central location, which is approximately equivalent to counting them manually in the central location, so far as it really matters, because the scanners will never count a ballot that humans wouldn't argue over.
I think it was a perfectly good review, aside from the tone and the final score. He has no major complaints about it, and the minor issues are valid. From the substance of the review, it sounds like it got 1.5 out of 2 stars. I can only assume that it didn't qualify for the other 3 stars for some other reason.
This is a great example of science journalism. The study that the article is based on found that Wii games use at least 65.1 kJ/kg/min more than the 125.5 kJ/kg/min burnt playing sedentary games. Because science journalists lack even rudimentary math skills, they're often unaware that "2% more" isn't the same thing as "more than half again". Furthermore, since they also lack reading comprehension skills, they weren't tipped off that the position of the article was dead wrong by the statement that energy use when playing Wii games "was significantly greater than when playing sedentary games".
Of course, they also failed to notice that the study was from an issue of BMJ consisting entirely of jokes, like every other Christmas edition of this journal. In case it wasn't sufficiently clear that the articles were all jokes, one of the articles analyzed the distribution of types of jokes in articles in BMJ Christmas editions. It's unclear whether the cited study was actually carried out (some people will go to great lengths for a joke, perhaps even so far as to play video games in lab), but that just makes it even more annoying that the article managed to come up with a conclusion entirely contrary to the only possible source.
On the other hand, a stethoscope isn't like an ultrasound machine, where you've got a lot of things you can control in the process. It seems to me that a USB digital stethoscope, which you could plug into whatever other piece of equipment you're using, or into the computer you're taking notes on, would be more valuable than yet another device that you interact with separately.
And, of course, once the data has been captured by whatever primary piece of equipment you're using, it can analyze it in software regardless of which host it is, and it will have the data naturally aligned with other data, so that you can replay the same thing happening as seen with multiple sensors.
The most significant thing in their case is that the phrases they deal with don't have verbs (and the associated syntactic function words). They're talking about noun phrases, which go from just after a word like "the" to the next word that's nested less deeply than "the". For example, "most significant thing" or "associated syntactic function words". You know, like the things you might type into a Google search...
Textbooks and Encyclopedias differ in the relation of the text to the audience. A textbook is designed to teach a topic to an audience who has a particular background (from reading earlier parts of the textbook) and who needs to understand the topic in a way such that it can be applied to understanding later chapters. An encyclopedia presents self-contained articles, to be read in no particular order, with the reader generally starting at some topic of interest and reading that article as well as other articles needed to understand it, and it presents a wide variety of information about the topic (such as different historical ideas about the topic and who the people involved were).
Due to the unordered character of an encyclopedia, having proofs is essentially worthless, because a proof will rely on a set of other theorems, which all must be proved first. But without an ordering of theorems, it is impractical for the reader to verify that the argument is not circular. And there are generally a number of different proofs of each theorem, each depending on different theorems being proven first, such that an arbitrary collection is almost certain to be circular, especially if the clearest proof available for each statement is used.
So I would claim that it isn't right for a single document to attempt to be both an encyclopedia article and a textbook presentation. On the other hand, I think that Wikimedia should host sites to contain information which is of sufficient quality but of the wrong character for Wikipedia, and this sort of information should be cross-linked with Wikipedia. Wikipedia inherently has a particular organizing principle which is not appropriate for all valuable information, and other types of reference work should not be forced into an organizational structure that does not work for them.
It does seem like the AG's request is procedurally bogus; I'm not even sure that the judge is permitted to follow the request in that document, because it's part of a motion to do something else. In fact, it's so out-of-line that it looks to me like somebody filed the document with the wrong title or something. The argument looks like a motion to compel discovery, not a reply memorandum in support of a motion to quash a subpoena. I think the judge's options are to quash the subpoena, not quash it, or not handle the motion at this time, and the judge can't rule that the RIAA has to turn over information unless the AG actually files a motion requesting that, rather than tossing a request for it into some other memorandum.
So I was all set to download the source and build some chips in my basement fab, but then I looked at the system requirements. It's only for Solaris, and worse, it's only for SPARC. How the heck am I supposed to run this software so I can build a CPU when I need that same CPU to run the software? Obviously, Sun is going to have a lot of SPARCs sitting around from earlier development, so they wouldn't have this problem themselves, but they should have thought of it, at least, and provided binaries for Cell or ARM or something.
It's a lot more likely for individual consumers that their cars will store less electricity than their homes use, and they'll plug them into the house's electrical system, so that they do the same thing this article describes but on a purely personal scale: use the car's battery to allow them to get power from the grid at off-peak times, when it's cheaper, and store it until times when the power costs more.
This is also beneficial in exactly the way the article suggests, since time-based price differences for consumers, if the consumers systems can respond to them, will help to load-balance things that can't be made as responsive. And if the area prices electricity such that individuals get credited the current price of electricity for power that the grid pulls from them, they can get credits on their power bills for storing it across price changes.
I'm a bit dubious of the possibility of individuals getting money for just being available (rather than by playing the obvious commodities market), but it's entirely plausible to do it with corporate car fleets.
I hear that if you want to play PS2 games, Sony makes a product that's cheaper than a PS3 and will play all of them just like on the original system...
If you receive a program with public domain code in it, you can do what you want with it. It's when you receive a binary derived from public domain code that you may be out of luck.
Of course, it doesn't matter to you whether some source code is public domain or GPL; if you only acquire GPL binaries (whether they're derived from public domain code or not), you can do what you want with them, while if you acquire non-GPL binaries (whether they're derived from public domain code or not), you may not be able to.
As an end user, assuming you don't want Bernstein's own distribution of the source (if you do, taking public domain source directly is fine for your purposes), you're going to be selecting among redistributors, and you can do so based on the terms they impose, and you can simply reject any that don't give you the rights and abilities you want, in much the same way that you would reject proprietary programs not derived from Bernstein's work. By placing his work in the public domain, he permits people who don't play nice to also benefit from his work, but that's largely irrelevant to those who do play nice (aside from the quality of the proprietary competition).
Ordinary flu is an order of magnitude more deadly than bird flu in number of deaths caused. In 2001, ordinary flu killed over a hundred people, and an average year has under 10 deaths from bird flu. Rule of thumb: any dumb thing you can think of that somebody could die from is an order of magnitude more deadly than anything where individual deaths are world news.
I credit David Kelly at Hampshire College, where I went for a summer program during high school. There's a value to the jargon, which is that it's lossless compression for explanations, but you need to decompress it if you want it to be comprehensible. If your audience knows the jargon, it's quicker and clearer, but the jargon doesn't help at all for introducing new concepts.
I'm actually a programmer, although I was a TA when I was doing my master's. I suspect that I'd mostly fail as a lecturer, because if I happen not to be inspired for a particular lecture, I'd just have nothing to say. As a TA, I'd show up for my recitations and ask the class what they didn't understand from the lecture, and explain that, rather than trying to plan out what I was going to say. That worked well for that part of it (and is similar to this piece, actually), but wouldn't work at all if I were leading the class as a whole.
Someday, I want something suitable in direction and such to contribute such things to.
What's this about smoking? Nobody on Sesame Street smoked. That pipe clearly wasn't lit. Even in 1969, it was pretty well-known that it's unhealthy in a very rapid way for furry, flammable monsters to smoke. The point was that he didn't know what a pipe was for, aside from that you need one to present theatrical productions and that it was smaller than his head and therefore food.
Of course, I have a hard time imagining preschoolers today having any clearer an idea of the intended use of a pipe than Cookie Monster, or even knowing its use as a prop.
(I am not a particle physicist or a mathematician of the right sort, but I can kind of follow this sort of thing)
Okay, the context is that you've got particles, and they're fundamentally all the same, but they're "turned" in different ways. Think of a ball with 3-color LEDs inside: you can rotate it around three axes, and move it in three directions, and you can also cycle its color and change its blinking pattern. Particles are like that, except that the topology is weird: it's not back to the same orientation until you turn it around 720 degrees, instead of 360 like normal objects. The "gauge group" is the rules for how you can change things. For example, the total color of the universe is white: if you turn something from red to blue, you have to turn something else from blue to red; but you can also create a pair of a green and a purple (anti-green). They write all these rules up in math, and it's tricky because a lot of the features vary continuously (that is, you can rotate something an arbitrarily small amount). And due to the interaction of the rules for one property with the rules for other properties, there are only certain combinations of properties that you can get. They work out all the combinations that you can have and those are what you see as "different" particles that your experiments show. Of course, we don't know what the rules are, and we're trying to figure that out from what combinations of properties we've seen and which ones we're speculating are impossible. And it's hard and takes a lot of calculation to figure out what a candidate set of rules would even mean as far as results. And people are looking at known results and trying to describe them better than "we've done a billion things, and a billion things happened".
Now, the math of rules for how things can interact turns out to be sort of limited; there are basically 4 normal cases, which are boring, and then there are a few exceptional cases, which are interesting. Of these, the hardest to prove stuff about is E8, and it's just now becoming clear what combinations it allows. It's like one of those puzzles where you press a corner and lights change, and you have to turn off all the lights, but it's got dozens of corners and dozens of lights and every time you press a corner a bunch of things change at once, and there are different kinds of corners and it also matters exactly what angle you're holding it at, so there are hundreds of things you can say about each move.
And the mathematicians working on E8 recently said, "well, you can get positions like this and not like that", where "this" and "that" are big complicated lists. And this physicist read that paper and said, "hey, those lists are familiar; I made similar lists of particle interactions". So the proposal is that particles work like E8 in what kind of rules they follow. And it's a really nice theory, because E8 is essentially the most flexible set of rules you can have without it falling apart into just anything being possible (and some rules or properties just not mattering).
I suspect that tax software is going to be entirely online before too long, just because the important part is the sequence of forms and calculations, and the program isn't that interesting. Popular games are all going to be for the Wii, so that's not relevant. And most of the other stuff just comes with the computer.
I'm actually kind of surprised that tax software isn't available for Linux yet. The smart thing would be for TurboTax to be a free program for Linux, but require a yearly CD of this year's forms in order to do anything useful. And it would efile through TurboTax's servers, so you'd need to buy a copy in order to have that aspect work.
Those are reasonably good, but they're not as good as the machines we have where I live. Ours use paper ballots that you mark with a magic marker with nice 1-inch margins between mark locations, the mark location adjacent to what you're voting for, ballot images available beforehand online, and the ballot layout according to a format that's entirely determined by standard and the available options. I think people who are either totally blind or quadrupelegic have to submit absentee ballots, and people who are partially blind probably need to bring their own magnifying glasses, but I don't think either is unreasonable.
After marking your ballot, you put it in a privacy folder and feed it into a scantronic machine, which counts the votes as the ballots are collected, in addition to keeping all of the accepted ballots in a box that can be checked by hand in the event that the machine breaks or fails to agree with counts based on the lists of who was given a ballot and who turned one in.
IIRC, the machine also rejects spoiled ballots (ones which it can't read clearly or which don't make sense), so the voter can try again. (I haven't messed any up, but I think I remember being there when somebody else did once) If the machine accepts a ballot, it's got to be perfectly clear.
AFAICS, this is the ideal device: the ballots are marked physically and directly by the voter, an electronic device looks at each ballot to determine whether it is marked correctly, and the original ballots prepared by voters are available for inspection afterward. I haven't tried buying one, but I think they're easily available, and are also used for standardized testing and such (so there's a large body of other users concerned with scanning accuracy).
$1M/year is absolutely nothing compared to what for-profit journals gross, and they don't have huge costs that you didn't. If anything, the better-known the journal, the less trouble it will be to put together, because reviewers will care more.
And $1M/year is not all that much to raise from a group of research institutions, even without providing a tangibly different benefit to those that pay versus those that don't. Divide it among the institutions that regularly publish in your journal, and have them mark it as part of the administrative overhead of doing research, and it's negligable. It's not that it costs nothing to run a journal, but the costs aren't large compared to everything else that's necessary to have research get done that doesn't get individually earmarked funding.
For that matter, if it costs $50 to make a year's set of issues, and you're selling most of your print run and not making a profit, your subscription price couldn't be something that even an interested individual would balk at paying just for the warm fuzzy feeling of doing their share of supporting a valuable resource. $1M/year/20K readers is, in standard approximation units, "less than the price of a cup of coffee", i.e., nothing.
People in Building 20 did complain in the summer, since it didn't have central HVAC. The classrooms weren't great, because they had pilars in the middle, so not all of the space was useable. And you couldn't get to it without going outside, since it wasn't connected to anything and didn't have a basement. But those were the only flaws I remember with it.
Of course, Stata isn't at all a replacement for Building 20. It's a replacement for NE43 and the east garage, so the lessons of Building 20 aren't particularly applicable to Stata. I think it would be worth having a new building like Building 20, but part of its magic was that it wasn't the CS building or the linguistics building or the ROTC building, but was used for whatever needed a space that the institute didn't already have, because you could do whatever you needed to do to it and have your lab space in time to do what you needed to do, without waiting for a new building to be built for you or for remodelling a more static building.
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I think it's a bad plan to get assassinated right after being elected, since you don't take office for a while yet. Also, people usually don't get buried for three days after dying. Oh, and you can't get elected on a Friday; people vote on a Tuesday and the electors cast electoral votes on a Monday. If you win the 2016 election, however, you can get inaugurated on a Friday, which will have to do.
(IANAL) If the license on the code that they paid you to modify requires that changes be licensed under the same license, then they own the copyrights but they'd have a hard time arguing that you don't have a license to it. (So far as the changes are a derived work of the code they don't own; separate stuff that you did along with the open source project doesn't count.) Just make sure that the copyright notices credit the company (not yourself) and that the license is GPL-like rather than BSD-like. (If they pay you to work on a BSD/X/MIT-licensed piece of OSS for internal use, they may well be preparing a proprietary version, which is perfectly fine by the license, and you don't get to pass it on.)
Note that the important detail here is that the company is under license obligations in order to prepare derived works of the code they don't own and use those modified versions.
Ten years ago, I was running Linux, X, fvwm, ssh, xclock, screen, pine, bash, emacs, and netscape (only for web). Today I'm running Linux, X, fvwm, xterm, openssh, xclock, screen, alpine, bash, emacs, and firefox. All of the programs I used in '98 are still maintained in '08, with the occasional name change and slight changes to appearance and behavior, except for netscape. All of these programs were open source, except for netscape. I hear that Windows 95 and Office 97 haven't gotten any updates lately. So if you want to keep running the same software for over a decade, you'd do better with open source software.
Most of the flaws that Coverity finds are not bugs in the sense of cases where the code does the wrong thing. They are more often areas where the code works as written, but is misleading in some way, such that people working on the code are likely to introduce crashes.
A lot of other flaws they find are cases in which the program crashes cleanly (by dereferencing NULL) in some error case instead of reporting the error. Depending on what sort of program it is and what sort of data error is required to reach that point, it may not matter (e.g., if there's some weird thing the user can do that crashes their mail client, it's not a big deal, because anyone who could do that could also just tell it to quit). But, again, reasonable changes to the code could expose this as a real problem, and having these flaws means that the description of the state of the program that the programmer has to keep in mind in order to only make correct changes is more complicated, and the intended behavior of the program is harder to pick out from the actual code.
And then, of course, there are real issues that they're finding, and these are often difficult to distinguish automatically from things that are just badly written, and it's better to just fix everything that's wrong rather than trying to determine how wrong it is.
For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
Obviously she wants to demonstrate to the Democrats that she has what it takes to win a presidential election in this era.
That system is essentially what the ACLU is complaining about: if a ballot is unclear, there's no way to allow the voter to try again. The advantage of optical scan machines in the polling places is that they reject unclear ballots when the voter tries to cast them, so the voter can cast a replacement. The physical ballots, after they're scanned and accepted, go into a box and can be recounted by humans if necessary.
Ohio wants to do the scanning in a central location, which is approximately equivalent to counting them manually in the central location, so far as it really matters, because the scanners will never count a ballot that humans wouldn't argue over.
I think it was a perfectly good review, aside from the tone and the final score. He has no major complaints about it, and the minor issues are valid. From the substance of the review, it sounds like it got 1.5 out of 2 stars. I can only assume that it didn't qualify for the other 3 stars for some other reason.
This is a great example of science journalism. The study that the article is based on found that Wii games use at least 65.1 kJ/kg/min more than the 125.5 kJ/kg/min burnt playing sedentary games. Because science journalists lack even rudimentary math skills, they're often unaware that "2% more" isn't the same thing as "more than half again". Furthermore, since they also lack reading comprehension skills, they weren't tipped off that the position of the article was dead wrong by the statement that energy use when playing Wii games "was significantly greater than when playing sedentary games".
Of course, they also failed to notice that the study was from an issue of BMJ consisting entirely of jokes, like every other Christmas edition of this journal. In case it wasn't sufficiently clear that the articles were all jokes, one of the articles analyzed the distribution of types of jokes in articles in BMJ Christmas editions. It's unclear whether the cited study was actually carried out (some people will go to great lengths for a joke, perhaps even so far as to play video games in lab), but that just makes it even more annoying that the article managed to come up with a conclusion entirely contrary to the only possible source.
On the other hand, a stethoscope isn't like an ultrasound machine, where you've got a lot of things you can control in the process. It seems to me that a USB digital stethoscope, which you could plug into whatever other piece of equipment you're using, or into the computer you're taking notes on, would be more valuable than yet another device that you interact with separately.
And, of course, once the data has been captured by whatever primary piece of equipment you're using, it can analyze it in software regardless of which host it is, and it will have the data naturally aligned with other data, so that you can replay the same thing happening as seen with multiple sensors.
The most significant thing in their case is that the phrases they deal with don't have verbs (and the associated syntactic function words). They're talking about noun phrases, which go from just after a word like "the" to the next word that's nested less deeply than "the". For example, "most significant thing" or "associated syntactic function words". You know, like the things you might type into a Google search...
Textbooks and Encyclopedias differ in the relation of the text to the audience. A textbook is designed to teach a topic to an audience who has a particular background (from reading earlier parts of the textbook) and who needs to understand the topic in a way such that it can be applied to understanding later chapters. An encyclopedia presents self-contained articles, to be read in no particular order, with the reader generally starting at some topic of interest and reading that article as well as other articles needed to understand it, and it presents a wide variety of information about the topic (such as different historical ideas about the topic and who the people involved were).
Due to the unordered character of an encyclopedia, having proofs is essentially worthless, because a proof will rely on a set of other theorems, which all must be proved first. But without an ordering of theorems, it is impractical for the reader to verify that the argument is not circular. And there are generally a number of different proofs of each theorem, each depending on different theorems being proven first, such that an arbitrary collection is almost certain to be circular, especially if the clearest proof available for each statement is used.
So I would claim that it isn't right for a single document to attempt to be both an encyclopedia article and a textbook presentation. On the other hand, I think that Wikimedia should host sites to contain information which is of sufficient quality but of the wrong character for Wikipedia, and this sort of information should be cross-linked with Wikipedia. Wikipedia inherently has a particular organizing principle which is not appropriate for all valuable information, and other types of reference work should not be forced into an organizational structure that does not work for them.
It does seem like the AG's request is procedurally bogus; I'm not even sure that the judge is permitted to follow the request in that document, because it's part of a motion to do something else. In fact, it's so out-of-line that it looks to me like somebody filed the document with the wrong title or something. The argument looks like a motion to compel discovery, not a reply memorandum in support of a motion to quash a subpoena. I think the judge's options are to quash the subpoena, not quash it, or not handle the motion at this time, and the judge can't rule that the RIAA has to turn over information unless the AG actually files a motion requesting that, rather than tossing a request for it into some other memorandum.
So I was all set to download the source and build some chips in my basement fab, but then I looked at the system requirements. It's only for Solaris, and worse, it's only for SPARC. How the heck am I supposed to run this software so I can build a CPU when I need that same CPU to run the software? Obviously, Sun is going to have a lot of SPARCs sitting around from earlier development, so they wouldn't have this problem themselves, but they should have thought of it, at least, and provided binaries for Cell or ARM or something.
It's a lot more likely for individual consumers that their cars will store less electricity than their homes use, and they'll plug them into the house's electrical system, so that they do the same thing this article describes but on a purely personal scale: use the car's battery to allow them to get power from the grid at off-peak times, when it's cheaper, and store it until times when the power costs more.
This is also beneficial in exactly the way the article suggests, since time-based price differences for consumers, if the consumers systems can respond to them, will help to load-balance things that can't be made as responsive. And if the area prices electricity such that individuals get credited the current price of electricity for power that the grid pulls from them, they can get credits on their power bills for storing it across price changes.
I'm a bit dubious of the possibility of individuals getting money for just being available (rather than by playing the obvious commodities market), but it's entirely plausible to do it with corporate car fleets.
I hear that if you want to play PS2 games, Sony makes a product that's cheaper than a PS3 and will play all of them just like on the original system...
If you receive a program with public domain code in it, you can do what you want with it. It's when you receive a binary derived from public domain code that you may be out of luck.
Of course, it doesn't matter to you whether some source code is public domain or GPL; if you only acquire GPL binaries (whether they're derived from public domain code or not), you can do what you want with them, while if you acquire non-GPL binaries (whether they're derived from public domain code or not), you may not be able to.
As an end user, assuming you don't want Bernstein's own distribution of the source (if you do, taking public domain source directly is fine for your purposes), you're going to be selecting among redistributors, and you can do so based on the terms they impose, and you can simply reject any that don't give you the rights and abilities you want, in much the same way that you would reject proprietary programs not derived from Bernstein's work. By placing his work in the public domain, he permits people who don't play nice to also benefit from his work, but that's largely irrelevant to those who do play nice (aside from the quality of the proprietary competition).
Ordinary flu is an order of magnitude more deadly than bird flu in number of deaths caused. In 2001, ordinary flu killed over a hundred people, and an average year has under 10 deaths from bird flu. Rule of thumb: any dumb thing you can think of that somebody could die from is an order of magnitude more deadly than anything where individual deaths are world news.
I credit David Kelly at Hampshire College, where I went for a summer program during high school. There's a value to the jargon, which is that it's lossless compression for explanations, but you need to decompress it if you want it to be comprehensible. If your audience knows the jargon, it's quicker and clearer, but the jargon doesn't help at all for introducing new concepts.
I'm actually a programmer, although I was a TA when I was doing my master's. I suspect that I'd mostly fail as a lecturer, because if I happen not to be inspired for a particular lecture, I'd just have nothing to say. As a TA, I'd show up for my recitations and ask the class what they didn't understand from the lecture, and explain that, rather than trying to plan out what I was going to say. That worked well for that part of it (and is similar to this piece, actually), but wouldn't work at all if I were leading the class as a whole.
Someday, I want something suitable in direction and such to contribute such things to.
What's this about smoking? Nobody on Sesame Street smoked. That pipe clearly wasn't lit. Even in 1969, it was pretty well-known that it's unhealthy in a very rapid way for furry, flammable monsters to smoke. The point was that he didn't know what a pipe was for, aside from that you need one to present theatrical productions and that it was smaller than his head and therefore food.
Of course, I have a hard time imagining preschoolers today having any clearer an idea of the intended use of a pipe than Cookie Monster, or even knowing its use as a prop.
(I am not a particle physicist or a mathematician of the right sort, but I can kind of follow this sort of thing)
Okay, the context is that you've got particles, and they're fundamentally all the same, but they're "turned" in different ways. Think of a ball with 3-color LEDs inside: you can rotate it around three axes, and move it in three directions, and you can also cycle its color and change its blinking pattern. Particles are like that, except that the topology is weird: it's not back to the same orientation until you turn it around 720 degrees, instead of 360 like normal objects. The "gauge group" is the rules for how you can change things. For example, the total color of the universe is white: if you turn something from red to blue, you have to turn something else from blue to red; but you can also create a pair of a green and a purple (anti-green). They write all these rules up in math, and it's tricky because a lot of the features vary continuously (that is, you can rotate something an arbitrarily small amount). And due to the interaction of the rules for one property with the rules for other properties, there are only certain combinations of properties that you can get. They work out all the combinations that you can have and those are what you see as "different" particles that your experiments show. Of course, we don't know what the rules are, and we're trying to figure that out from what combinations of properties we've seen and which ones we're speculating are impossible. And it's hard and takes a lot of calculation to figure out what a candidate set of rules would even mean as far as results. And people are looking at known results and trying to describe them better than "we've done a billion things, and a billion things happened".
Now, the math of rules for how things can interact turns out to be sort of limited; there are basically 4 normal cases, which are boring, and then there are a few exceptional cases, which are interesting. Of these, the hardest to prove stuff about is E8, and it's just now becoming clear what combinations it allows. It's like one of those puzzles where you press a corner and lights change, and you have to turn off all the lights, but it's got dozens of corners and dozens of lights and every time you press a corner a bunch of things change at once, and there are different kinds of corners and it also matters exactly what angle you're holding it at, so there are hundreds of things you can say about each move.
And the mathematicians working on E8 recently said, "well, you can get positions like this and not like that", where "this" and "that" are big complicated lists. And this physicist read that paper and said, "hey, those lists are familiar; I made similar lists of particle interactions". So the proposal is that particles work like E8 in what kind of rules they follow. And it's a really nice theory, because E8 is essentially the most flexible set of rules you can have without it falling apart into just anything being possible (and some rules or properties just not mattering).
I suspect that tax software is going to be entirely online before too long, just because the important part is the sequence of forms and calculations, and the program isn't that interesting. Popular games are all going to be for the Wii, so that's not relevant. And most of the other stuff just comes with the computer.
I'm actually kind of surprised that tax software isn't available for Linux yet. The smart thing would be for TurboTax to be a free program for Linux, but require a yearly CD of this year's forms in order to do anything useful. And it would efile through TurboTax's servers, so you'd need to buy a copy in order to have that aspect work.
Those are reasonably good, but they're not as good as the machines we have where I live. Ours use paper ballots that you mark with a magic marker with nice 1-inch margins between mark locations, the mark location adjacent to what you're voting for, ballot images available beforehand online, and the ballot layout according to a format that's entirely determined by standard and the available options. I think people who are either totally blind or quadrupelegic have to submit absentee ballots, and people who are partially blind probably need to bring their own magnifying glasses, but I don't think either is unreasonable.
After marking your ballot, you put it in a privacy folder and feed it into a scantronic machine, which counts the votes as the ballots are collected, in addition to keeping all of the accepted ballots in a box that can be checked by hand in the event that the machine breaks or fails to agree with counts based on the lists of who was given a ballot and who turned one in.
IIRC, the machine also rejects spoiled ballots (ones which it can't read clearly or which don't make sense), so the voter can try again. (I haven't messed any up, but I think I remember being there when somebody else did once) If the machine accepts a ballot, it's got to be perfectly clear.
AFAICS, this is the ideal device: the ballots are marked physically and directly by the voter, an electronic device looks at each ballot to determine whether it is marked correctly, and the original ballots prepared by voters are available for inspection afterward. I haven't tried buying one, but I think they're easily available, and are also used for standardized testing and such (so there's a large body of other users concerned with scanning accuracy).
$1M/year is absolutely nothing compared to what for-profit journals gross, and they don't have huge costs that you didn't. If anything, the better-known the journal, the less trouble it will be to put together, because reviewers will care more.
And $1M/year is not all that much to raise from a group of research institutions, even without providing a tangibly different benefit to those that pay versus those that don't. Divide it among the institutions that regularly publish in your journal, and have them mark it as part of the administrative overhead of doing research, and it's negligable. It's not that it costs nothing to run a journal, but the costs aren't large compared to everything else that's necessary to have research get done that doesn't get individually earmarked funding.
For that matter, if it costs $50 to make a year's set of issues, and you're selling most of your print run and not making a profit, your subscription price couldn't be something that even an interested individual would balk at paying just for the warm fuzzy feeling of doing their share of supporting a valuable resource. $1M/year/20K readers is, in standard approximation units, "less than the price of a cup of coffee", i.e., nothing.
People in Building 20 did complain in the summer, since it didn't have central HVAC. The classrooms weren't great, because they had pilars in the middle, so not all of the space was useable. And you couldn't get to it without going outside, since it wasn't connected to anything and didn't have a basement. But those were the only flaws I remember with it.
Of course, Stata isn't at all a replacement for Building 20. It's a replacement for NE43 and the east garage, so the lessons of Building 20 aren't particularly applicable to Stata. I think it would be worth having a new building like Building 20, but part of its magic was that it wasn't the CS building or the linguistics building or the ROTC building, but was used for whatever needed a space that the institute didn't already have, because you could do whatever you needed to do to it and have your lab space in time to do what you needed to do, without waiting for a new building to be built for you or for remodelling a more static building.