Field lines are a metaphor useful in understanding certain physical processes.
Ask "any electrical engineer" what happens when a voltage opposes a current. The answer is heating.
Ask "any electrical engineer" if energy is stored in magnetic fields. The answer is yes.
Reconnection is a way of describing the change in magnetic topology during resistive heating; it is useful when the large-scale magnetic fields are better known than the small-scale electric fields. It is entirely equivalent the same electrical concepts we learned in high school.
Part of the answer is history and expectation. Society has had libraries for many years where you can search for information without leaving any record of what you are doing. It is not crazy to think that big musty buildings full of old paper books are going to start to disappear in my lifetime. Instead, people will have Google books, where what we read is recorded.
This represents a loss in privacy. On the other hand, my web searches were never private to begin with. You can argue reasonably that what privacy we end up with is more important than what is lost; that's a difference of opinion.
This is a well-known bit of US copyright law. If you are a programmer hired by a company to write code for them to use, you probably do own the code unless your contract states otherwise. You may think that paying someone to create something should mean that you own it, but that's not what the law says. Look up work for hire and read your contract.
How much has the change been in the American people and how much has the change been in the picture of America popularized by the mass media?
The image of the can-do take-charge American is an old one. See A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for an example from over 100 years ago. It is easier to believe that a particular self image has become less popular than that a culture that existed for over a century suddenly evaporated. That change is also important, of course.
The complexity of the problem is hideous. Think of all the interlocking components, all the fluid dynamics and chemistry that must be modeled in three dimensions, the huge span of relevant spatial and temporal scales. We're not exactly talking about a simple harmonic oscillator here.
I don't find it conceivable that the models and the data would match much at all. This does not disprove the hypothesis that the planet is experiencing significant global warming due to human activity. So if we can't prove it or disprove it right now, should we do nothing?
Unfortunately it's not clear to me how much we'll actually learn in that process;
The research goals are not secret. There is a lot to be learned. Things like net energy production are nice bullet points, but they are indeed almost meaningless scientifically. But what do we know about how a plasma reacts to a large population of energetic alphas generated by nuclear reactions? Not much. What do we know about how the buildup of a thermally equilibrated population of alphas will affect things? Not enough. Does ITER lie within the range of dimensionless performance parameters explored by existing machines? No. Are there lots of other physics effects that do not scale with the dimensionless performance parameters? Yes. And so on.
It's not your fault if people do a lousy job of explaining the scientific goals. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
It is fair to argue that the scientific goals could be partially addressed at a lower cost if the engineering goals were taken out. I don't know if you'd be right, but a plausible argument could be made. But it is not reasonable to say that the only important research component is the plant engineering.
All good points.
I would add that top down is valuable when budgeting is most important and bottom up works better when transparency is needed.
I think I want the people who are deciding what hash functions are secure to be different from the people worrying about whether it will annoy their vendors to ask for a patch and how much it will cost to push the patch to all vulnerable systems.
There doesn't seem to be enough overlap between, say, testing encryption, securing the root DNS servers, and locking down desktops running Windows to put all these under one person.
Let me emphasize --- boundaries between zip codes do not align with other boundaries, such as counties.
For a long time, I lived in the edges of a particular zip code which was centered in (and named after) an incorporated town in a different county. Oh, the joys of arguing with a minor bureaucratic functionary who truly believed that I did not know what county I lived in.
"Is this really something that is often missed in serious applications?"
That developers don't always make a distinction between (1) works-for-me reliance on undocumented side effects and (2) reliable, robustly written code? Are you seriously asking this?
Actually, a lot of people would argue that the philosophy of "as long as it works good enough for now for most people, it's perfect" leads to unmaintainable cruft. And some would say that this is the biggest problem with Windows, although I lack any personal knowledge of the matter.
I would be surprised to see an example of anyone criticizing Windows developers for following established standards.
What we don't want is Mars on a shoestring budget. If it comes down to axing robotic explorers, satellites to observe the Earth and the universe, reliable transport for installation and maintenance of said satellites, etc., to fund a Mars mission, then sending a few people to swoosh their feet through the red dust should wait.
Why does no one care about ISS or a permanent moon base? Are they inherently dullsville, or has the space science community done a lousy job selling itself to the public?
Can he use your paper as a start, add another 25% to it, and then copyright that? Yes. Is it plagiarism to submit it to a school without properly referencing your work? Yes.
You forget one thing -- such licenses can no longer be revoked if another party takes significant actions relying on the license.
IOW, if you release a piece of code under CC0 and I use it as a basis to write a program which I then am marketing, you cannot revoke your CC0 designation and stop me from selling my program.
Except that Apple's iP* brands are about the most popular in the history of mankind. Tell me about some business executive crying into his mocha about his mp3 player only having 70% the market of the iPod.
"I think this would be a superior option to having many completely independent distributions, and it would allow for faster innovation and easier support."
Until it didn't. You're right that this would have a large number of superior characteristics as long as it was working.
The trouble is that you need to pick who is going to run it, what system will be used, what packages are included, and so on. And when the decision-making process breaks, the whole thing collapses.
Here is an example of a very simple question to start with: Will the meta-distro avoid all tech that might be patent encumbered in the US or will it exist completely without corporate support from any US company?
If this system is so superior, why haven't groups of people started working together to make it happen already? There is nothing stopping them.
Look at what the FSF is asking for: an injunction to stop Cisco from distributing any more code, pay damages, give previous profits to the FSF, and pay the FSF's costs.
This is not exactly "put some code on the web for download."
If you mean that Linksys/Cisco could have avoided this at any time in the past five years by releasing the code, you are probably right. The FSF is easy to get along with. It is anybody's guess what they need to offer the FSF now to make it go away.
"But, since these files are key to IOS as well, one could take the view that IOS is now under the GPL."
No no no.
Cisco has violated copyright law by distributing GPLed FSF code under terms other than specified in the only available license. The ownership and licensing of IOS code is not affected by this in any way. This is the past.
Now for the future. If Cisco wants to keep distributing IOS code mixed with FSF code, there is only one way of doing it. That is to release the code under the GPL, because the FSF doesn't offer any other licenses. Only the IOS code which is mixed with FSF code needs to be released under the GPL. This has no effect on any other IOS code (older or in other products or whatever).
The FSF has filed suit against Cisco for copyright violations. Cisco distributed code owned by the FSF without permission.
Yes, Cisco could easily be distributing with permission, and hence legally, if they followed the requirements of the GPL. Instead, they chose to distribute without permission, a violation of federal copyright law.
"The ad repeatedly says you can get the whole 'internet', not just the web."
This is certainly OT, but it annoys me to no end when hotels do the same thing. "Wireless High Speed Internet!" -- when all they allow is web access. Believe it or not, some people care more about port 22 than about port 80. I guess if I were in the UK, I could sue.
The Apple case has some ambiguity. What is "access"? What constitutes "the internet"? Is it still the internet without Java? Maybe. Is it still the internet if it is restricted to the web? NO.
That depends. I remember reading about Natalie Coughlin four years ago, and one of the coaches was describing how Natalie could take a suggestion and instantly integrate it into her swim style, even in a competition. I believe that ability was seen as unique.
It is plausible that adaptability is one trait that helped the Olympic swimmers become Olympic swimmers in the first place. Certainly it would be interesting to hear more about it.
I don't think you can compare the two cases in this way. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence against Hans specifically (e.g. hidden car with a missing seat, etc.) rather than, say, the next door neighbor.
In this case, the question to be answered is what makes us think it was Ivans rather than someone else in the lab. This part of the case is weak. It seems that many people had access. Other people likely had as strong a motive. Why him specifically?
Evidence that he went to NJ is not strictly necessary, except that so many other areas are weak. Holes don't matter if the rest of the case is very strong, but they can sink a weak case.
In old-school webpage design, text and graphics were placed on the screen using tables. This is the primarily the use that should generally be converted to CSS. Things like placing a vertical menu next to a block of text, centering a heading over some text, or mixing images and text in a heading. I have seen html laid out with multiple nested tables simply to get different levels of indenting for different blocks of text.
Slashdot Mirror
Field lines are a metaphor useful in understanding certain physical processes. Ask "any electrical engineer" what happens when a voltage opposes a current. The answer is heating. Ask "any electrical engineer" if energy is stored in magnetic fields. The answer is yes. Reconnection is a way of describing the change in magnetic topology during resistive heating; it is useful when the large-scale magnetic fields are better known than the small-scale electric fields. It is entirely equivalent the same electrical concepts we learned in high school.
Part of the answer is history and expectation. Society has had libraries for many years where you can search for information without leaving any record of what you are doing. It is not crazy to think that big musty buildings full of old paper books are going to start to disappear in my lifetime. Instead, people will have Google books, where what we read is recorded.
This represents a loss in privacy. On the other hand, my web searches were never private to begin with. You can argue reasonably that what privacy we end up with is more important than what is lost; that's a difference of opinion.
This is a well-known bit of US copyright law. If you are a programmer hired by a company to write code for them to use, you probably do own the code unless your contract states otherwise. You may think that paying someone to create something should mean that you own it, but that's not what the law says. Look up work for hire and read your contract.
How much has the change been in the American people and how much has the change been in the picture of America popularized by the mass media?
The image of the can-do take-charge American is an old one. See A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for an example from over 100 years ago. It is easier to believe that a particular self image has become less popular than that a culture that existed for over a century suddenly evaporated. That change is also important, of course.
I disagree. Informed debate is healthy. Is this guy expressing a carefully considered opinion or spewing political ideology? The distinction matters.
The complexity of the problem is hideous. Think of all the interlocking components, all the fluid dynamics and chemistry that must be modeled in three dimensions, the huge span of relevant spatial and temporal scales. We're not exactly talking about a simple harmonic oscillator here.
I don't find it conceivable that the models and the data would match much at all. This does not disprove the hypothesis that the planet is experiencing significant global warming due to human activity. So if we can't prove it or disprove it right now, should we do nothing?
The research goals are not secret. There is a lot to be learned. Things like net energy production are nice bullet points, but they are indeed almost meaningless scientifically. But what do we know about how a plasma reacts to a large population of energetic alphas generated by nuclear reactions? Not much. What do we know about how the buildup of a thermally equilibrated population of alphas will affect things? Not enough. Does ITER lie within the range of dimensionless performance parameters explored by existing machines? No. Are there lots of other physics effects that do not scale with the dimensionless performance parameters? Yes. And so on.
It's not your fault if people do a lousy job of explaining the scientific goals. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
It is fair to argue that the scientific goals could be partially addressed at a lower cost if the engineering goals were taken out. I don't know if you'd be right, but a plausible argument could be made. But it is not reasonable to say that the only important research component is the plant engineering.
All good points. I would add that top down is valuable when budgeting is most important and bottom up works better when transparency is needed. I think I want the people who are deciding what hash functions are secure to be different from the people worrying about whether it will annoy their vendors to ask for a patch and how much it will cost to push the patch to all vulnerable systems. There doesn't seem to be enough overlap between, say, testing encryption, securing the root DNS servers, and locking down desktops running Windows to put all these under one person.
For a long time, I lived in the edges of a particular zip code which was centered in (and named after) an incorporated town in a different county. Oh, the joys of arguing with a minor bureaucratic functionary who truly believed that I did not know what county I lived in.
That developers don't always make a distinction between (1) works-for-me reliance on undocumented side effects and (2) reliable, robustly written code? Are you seriously asking this?
I would be surprised to see an example of anyone criticizing Windows developers for following established standards.
What we don't want is Mars on a shoestring budget. If it comes down to axing robotic explorers, satellites to observe the Earth and the universe, reliable transport for installation and maintenance of said satellites, etc., to fund a Mars mission, then sending a few people to swoosh their feet through the red dust should wait.
Why does no one care about ISS or a permanent moon base? Are they inherently dullsville, or has the space science community done a lousy job selling itself to the public?
Can he tell the school he wrote it? No.
Can he legally get copyright on it? No.
Can he use your paper as a start, add another 25% to it, and then copyright that? Yes. Is it plagiarism to submit it to a school without properly referencing your work? Yes.
IOW, if you release a piece of code under CC0 and I use it as a basis to write a program which I then am marketing, you cannot revoke your CC0 designation and stop me from selling my program.
Except that Apple's iP* brands are about the most popular in the history of mankind. Tell me about some business executive crying into his mocha about his mp3 player only having 70% the market of the iPod.
Everything you need to make the home network a usable network, rather than a collection of machines accessing the internet.
Multiple ethernet ports would be nice, but as long as the cable modem can use USB, not as big a problem as it could be.
"Eventually, prices are expected to drop to around $49" Wow. That is cheap enough to buy just to play around with.
Until it didn't. You're right that this would have a large number of superior characteristics as long as it was working.
The trouble is that you need to pick who is going to run it, what system will be used, what packages are included, and so on. And when the decision-making process breaks, the whole thing collapses.
Here is an example of a very simple question to start with: Will the meta-distro avoid all tech that might be patent encumbered in the US or will it exist completely without corporate support from any US company?
If this system is so superior, why haven't groups of people started working together to make it happen already? There is nothing stopping them.
This is not exactly "put some code on the web for download."
If you mean that Linksys/Cisco could have avoided this at any time in the past five years by releasing the code, you are probably right. The FSF is easy to get along with. It is anybody's guess what they need to offer the FSF now to make it go away.
No no no.
Cisco has violated copyright law by distributing GPLed FSF code under terms other than specified in the only available license. The ownership and licensing of IOS code is not affected by this in any way. This is the past.
Now for the future. If Cisco wants to keep distributing IOS code mixed with FSF code, there is only one way of doing it. That is to release the code under the GPL, because the FSF doesn't offer any other licenses. Only the IOS code which is mixed with FSF code needs to be released under the GPL. This has no effect on any other IOS code (older or in other products or whatever).
The FSF has filed suit against Cisco for copyright violations. Cisco distributed code owned by the FSF without permission.
Yes, Cisco could easily be distributing with permission, and hence legally, if they followed the requirements of the GPL. Instead, they chose to distribute without permission, a violation of federal copyright law.
This is a serious attack. Frankly, I cannot accept it at face value without your backing it up. Can you explain how Redhat was violating the GPL?
Just because all the code is GPLed doesn't mean that every bit on the distro disk is GPLed.
This is certainly OT, but it annoys me to no end when hotels do the same thing. "Wireless High Speed Internet!" -- when all they allow is web access. Believe it or not, some people care more about port 22 than about port 80. I guess if I were in the UK, I could sue.
The Apple case has some ambiguity. What is "access"? What constitutes "the internet"? Is it still the internet without Java? Maybe. Is it still the internet if it is restricted to the web? NO.
It is plausible that adaptability is one trait that helped the Olympic swimmers become Olympic swimmers in the first place. Certainly it would be interesting to hear more about it.
In this case, the question to be answered is what makes us think it was Ivans rather than someone else in the lab. This part of the case is weak. It seems that many people had access. Other people likely had as strong a motive. Why him specifically?
Evidence that he went to NJ is not strictly necessary, except that so many other areas are weak. Holes don't matter if the rest of the case is very strong, but they can sink a weak case.
In old-school webpage design, text and graphics were placed on the screen using tables. This is the primarily the use that should generally be converted to CSS. Things like placing a vertical menu next to a block of text, centering a heading over some text, or mixing images and text in a heading. I have seen html laid out with multiple nested tables simply to get different levels of indenting for different blocks of text.