The contact info for the NYS attorney general
Eliot Spitzer is at this
link. If you are a New York resident, call
and register your concern about going along with
the settlement.
If you are a Californian, the contact info is here for California attorney general Bill Lockyer- you can call toll-free (800) 952-5225
inside California.
Given that MS has a history of
astroturfingagain and
again
pretending to have a grass-roots movement in its
support, it would be a good idea to express
bona fide concern about how fair the settlement
is at a time when it might make some difference.
The contact info for the NYS attorney general
Eliot Spitzer is at this
link. If you are a New York resident, call
and register your concern about going along with
the settlement.
If you are a Californian, the contact info is here for California attorney general Bill Lockyer- you can phone (800) 952-5225 from inside California.
It should be a good indication of the excellent
design and utilty of the HP calculators that
it has been so imitated... Of course, some
of that has to do with the sturdy hardware-
it is quite remarkable what can be done to
an HP calc and still have it work perfectly...
estimates of the number of Passport users?
on
Passport's Pocket Picked
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Any ideas on how to get a reasonable
estimate of the number of Passport users? From the article:
Overall, up to 200 million people have signed up for Passport accounts, which are nearly impossible to avoid under Microsoft?s new Windows XP operating system.
200 million is more than half of all Americans,
newborns to 100+ year olds,
so if these were only Americans, that seems
ridiculous.
"Up to" is vague- It is true that "up to 7 billion people have as much money as Bill Gates", but it might be good to have a better estimate...
If
you are counting hotmail accounts, many people have multiple accounts, which could
get things up towards 200 million just in the US,
so I am curious how many distinct users there
really are. In particular, how many people
have more than the default setup from having
a hotmail account and actually have info in
a Passport wallet? For people with multiple
hotmail accounts (for different purposes,
expired purposes or just forgot about it) presumably they would have one or only a few
accounts with the credit card info and so on.
`Convexity' of a search space which can be described
in terms of a vector of real numbers means that
given any valid search parameters A and B, all possible convex combinations (combinations which
are of the form
tA + (1-t)B for some real number t between 0 and 1) are valid search parameters
as well. If the search space lies in some Euclidean n-dimensional space, "convex" means
the same thing as the usual convexity of a
subset of n-dimensional space. (That is, a
subset X of R^n is convex if
given any two points A and B in X,
every point on the segment joining A to B
also lies in X.)
When you are searching a convex search space, it
makes sense to try things "in between" A and B-
if your space is not convex, it is more difficult
to come up with new valid guesses which are
somehow related to A and B.
There are some "real applications" where
genetic algorithms are used to solve some
difficult questions in abstract mathematics.
There are a number of difficult questions
in the field of research in combinatorial
group theory for which no reasonable-time
(non-exponential or worse)
algorithms are known. Genetic algorithms
have proven to be surprisingly effective
for some questions in
this area; I am part of an open-source
project (the Magnus project, an endeavor of the New York Group Theory Cooperative) which has
implemented a number of genetic algorithms
in our software for computations in
combinatorial group theory. See
this page
for a descripition of some of the genetic
algorithms implemented in our software.
In particular, some difficult theoretical
questions that had been studied for more
than 20 years turned out to be answered
quickly (less than 30 seconds on a 300 Mhz PII) via a genetic algorithm approach.
(The most remarkable of them was the
dismissal of a potential counterexample to
the Andrews-Curtis conjecture which had
been very resistant to theoretical and
traditional computational approaches.)
I know of other successes of genetic
algorithms in research mathematics in
areas like control theory and modelling,
but I am most familiar with algebraic
applications. In the situations described
above, there are good measures of `fitness'
and a good notion of two reasonably-fit
individuals combining and possibly mutating
to make even-more-fit offspring. It is
much more difficult to apply the techniques
where there is not a good measure of fitness
or of combination.
This bit from a news.com article makes it sound like there are some
built-in barriers to prevent using the
iPod (with iTunes) to copy music to other
machines, here it is:
The device does not use a digital-rights management scheme.
When it auto-syncs to iTunes, the iPod can only connect to one copy of the software on one Mac. But a manual mode allows the device to share songs between any number of Macs.
However, Jobs said Apple does not condone stealing music. In fact, he said, the company spent $50,000 on CDs to go along with review copies of the unit so that Apple would not be promoting piracy.
The iPod does come wrapped in plastic with a warning in English, French, German and Japanese that states, "Don't steal music."
"Piracy is not a technological issue. It's a behavior issue," Jobs said, adding that all the encryption schemes that have been developed can also be broken.
He added that Apple tried to go out of its way to show its concern for artists' copyrights, despite the relatively open nature of its hardware.
"We own a lot of intellectual property ourselves. We're one of the few companies in the industry that does," he said.
The "piracy is a behavior problem" comment is spot-on,
to my mind, but unfortunately is pretty much a minority opinion from the corporate side.
I must say I am amazed that the unbelievably useful
"Location Manager" which has been around for years
on MacOS hasn't been more widely adopted in other
operating systems. For those not familiar with LM,
it is a way of changing wholesale system preferences
(notably TCP/IP) so you have have your "home" location,
"office" , "travelling", "Stanford DHCP", whatever, so wherever you are, it quickly puts
the appropriately-remembered IP info into use. Maybe it is buried in Windows
somewhere, but I know too many people who use Windows
who type in their IP address, DNS servers, etc by
hand when they are visiting another building or whatnot
for it to be in common use. Under Linux, there is
some facility under netcfg to remember different
locations but it is primitive compared to what has
been in MacOS since 7.something. And the OS X implementation
"Network" system info panel is a nice evolution of
the location manager. I've been using LM on Powerbooks
since my Duo 230 (which was a long time ago)
and can't imagine life without it- I think I got
up to more than 35 locations on my original
Powerbook G3.
XDarwin is a very nice and very easy-to-install
implementation of XFree86 which runs on top of
OS X. You have now the choice of "rootless"
operation where the various X windows lie around,
mingling with the normal Aqua windows on your
OS X desktop, or the "take-over-the-screen" mode,
where it is just like running X with your favorite
window manager (several available, as well as
the usual X toys like xeyes, etc.)
It is available for download at
osxgnu.org
which also has various window manager
systems, including Enlightenment, AfterStep, and
more. These are good, easy-to-use installers,
and there is also the
fink installer which works great.
One thing that OS X has going for it is
that lots of the gnu tools are available
and very easy to install via the
fink mechanism and the other nice
installers available. There is a good central
clearing place of various tools,
including XFree86, various window managers,
and lots of good things at
osxgnu.org
which is worth checking out. For a while, XFree
was broken in 10.1 but there is a patch there
that works great. It seems like with so much available for OS X, it is harder to justify
using LinuxPPC or the other linux distros for
Apple machines.
The company LinuxPPC.com converted from to a nonprofit
corp a while ago (January 2001-ish), see slashdot story,
around the time not only that lots of
open-source companies were struggling, but
also in the wake of Jason Hass' dreadful
injuries after being hit by a drunk driver
and his decision to go to college.
According to this
NY times article an investigation into the
possible anti-competive practices of the big music
companies on their internet distribution
plans for Pressplay and Musicnet is being launched
by the antitrust division of the US Dept. of Justice
(this
link is has same story, no NYT registration required, I think.) No surprise that an
investigation is being launched; the news is
that subpoenas have been sent out.
I don't know about the inside, but as someone who
deals with the NSF from the outside applying for and getting grants,
they understand that most academic scientists are
using Linux/Unix etc. So they do give pointers
for tools for linux to get things into the
acceptable formats (TeX, dvi, Postscript, pdf) for submissions and so on. I mostly deal with
fastlane
their electronic grant submission/reviewing system and it now accepts things in lots of formats,
as explained here There was a time a few
years ago when they were requiring PDF and the
Linux tools for genereating PDF were not mature-
I ended up helping tons of people with getting
things into the right shape for them by moving
stuff over to a Mac, TeXing it there, including
all fonts, using Acrobat (blegh) but that was
the only reasonable option at the time.
Paul Ginsberg from Los Alamos gave a nice intro talk about the ideas behind
the arXiv and some of the issues. Here is a collection of
blurbs about the arXiv.
There is a nice
front end for the math articles in the arXiv.
This FAQ has info about contributing math preprints to this
well-run electronic preprint resource.
Rob Kirby, a prominent topologist at UC Berkeley, has been active in trying to improve the
journal situation for mathematicians.
The idea is to boycott the high-priced journals
by not submitting to them, and instead
submit to journals, especially electronic ones,
which are free or reasonably priced. Here is his
orignal letter and here is
an updated price list.
A number of research mathematicians take these
considerations into effect when deciding where
to submit, so perhaps things will improve.
The most preposterous thing about high-priced
journals is that the "value-added" part of
a journal is the peer review, which is done
almost always for free. When an article is
submitted it is sent out for review to someone
whose research is close enough to understand the
work. Getting an article to review is a chore;
it can take many months to thoroughly review
an article, many are poorly written and have
annoying minor mistakes, and there is no
recognition or pay associated to it. When it
turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many.
In general, reviewing articles is considered
a nescessary public service, and since the
editors of the highest-priced journals tend to
be the super-big shots, it is not easy to
refuse to review something. Hopefully,
things will improve! The
arXiv is
great for preprints but the reviewing
process is an important part of disseminating
research so it will take more than that for
things to get much better.
I concur with the response that you need experts to review, and would like to add
the following:
If you had ever been asked to review
a serious scientific research article, you would know that it is a chore and not
something to be desired. It can take
a great deal of energy to review a paper properly;
it can take as much as a month of intense work
to work through one page or sometimes even just
a paragraph of mathematical research. You get
minimal recognition for reviews, often have to
read poorly-written exposition (ambiguous definitions, inconsistent notation, incomplete
study of previously existing literature) and often
end up agonizing over lots of details. There
are a number of editors whom I dread hearing from
for exactly these reasons. I do review things
promptly when asked, to be a "good citizen" but
it can often take so much time that it detracts
from my own research.
The story at macnn.com is
that 10.1 will be a free to registered owners and CDs will be available at authorized Apple dealers.
It will be $20 if you have them ship you a CD.
Oh boy, it should be in stores Saturday!
macslash
has some blurbs with more details too, including
info about the installer.
Lifelong employment is dead- it works both ways
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
The days of working for a company forever are
gone, and much of this discussion has been
on the downside of layoffs, particularly when
layoffs are done moronically, as they often seem
to be. But there is a significant upside to
this environment, which is that it is not seen
as unreasonable to leave a good job for a better
one. Sometimes employees get screwed by getting laid off with no warning. Sometimes employers get screwed by key people leaving with no warning for a better job. In general,
this overall environment is an improvement for workers, who can
now honestly say "treat me better or I will leave" and be taken seriously.
In the bad old days of pension plans, there
were good people who were handcuffed to
jobs that were unsatisfactory, not particularly great pay, and so on. They would never
leave since they had so much invested
with the company in terms of retirement, and
on average, there were less layoffs in this
environment. Now, with individual retirement
plans (IRAs, etc)
and a new expectation that people are mobile,
I think things have improved. At least for
people who are valuable and who do contribute,
and have the potential to contribute to many
different projects, the mere existence of other
opportunties means better conditions where they
currently are, at least in principle.
I have moved jobs several times, for my great
benefit. Sometimes it was financial benefit, sometimes to
be in a more desirable part of the country, and
sometimes for a much better professional
opportunity. My grandfather would have never thought
of leaving his job, and spent years complaining
about how awful it was. He was never going to get laid off, but there was a price paid for that certainty,
which was less professional opportunity, not
a killer salary, and less exciting overall
professional opportunities.
The point is that there is a tradeoff of security
for reward on both sides (employers and employees.) A government job may not be
high-paying or particularly rewarding, but
the chance of layoff is low. A promising
startup might make someone rich quick, but
there is a chance it will crash and burn.
You can't (rationally) expect something for nothing!
One current problem with taking someone's licence
away is that in our "car-centric" society this
is seen as a drastic step, and thus is generally
only given to more serious offenders. A device
like this presents the possibility of a "middle-
ground"- hey, you can drive, just not with the
same liberty as someone who has not already shown
that they are suceptible to drunken driving.
Given three choices
Judge takes all ability to drive away.
Judge takes ability to drive without the intrusion (of this device) away.
Judge does nothing, "probation", etc.
It seems like if people who previously got #3
instead of #1 (happens often- "oh, I need to
drive for my job, honest, it will never happen
again") sometimes get #2, that is an improvement
for the overall driving public.
In theory, driving is a privledge not a right.
But in actuality, so many people are so dependant
upon their cars that taking away the ability to
drive is seen as unreasonably severe punishment,
and thus not doled out as often as perhaps it
should be. The number of people who drive anyway
after their license has been taken away is large-
if there are restricted levels of driving
(only alcohol-fume-free driving allowed, daytime driving only allowed, only allowed to drive
to work or taking kids to school) then with reasonable enforcement,
things could improve.
Actually, one of the projects in
Dave Baum's excellent
book is a block sorter.
It uses the light sensor and can separate the
blocks according to color; here is a link to
the the source, which is in NQC. It doesn't separate
by size but still is impressive.
All the big drug companies have labs in several countries, so that if regulations change in one country, their huge investments are not that much at risk- they just conduct research on different projects according to what is permitted where. The recent GWB decision mostly will result in certain projects taking place abroad, and will guarantee that smaller companies cannot participate as easily, since they can't fork over for the licensing like the big boys can and can't spring for labs in a bunch of countries.
American universities are at a big disadvantage here,
since:
they are more reliant on federal funds
than drug companies
they tend to have their research labs on campus
So the recent decision will make the possible
progress using stem cells happen abroad and
privately, at least moreso than other biomedical
research
It would be nice if there were some accountablility
for these costs for the responsible parts. Maybe
the idea of product liability in the case of defective products should apply somehow. Otherwise,
what is the incentive for improvement?
I'm not saying that MS should be ponying up billions
for Outlook's defects (esp. since estimates of
the value of "lost time" always seem to be generous;
witness the costs of "being stuck in traffic"
as being huge) but if there is some desire to
reduce the widespread incidence of viruses, then
there should be some mechanism, prefereably
financial, for encouraging people not to create
and sell vulnerable products.
All the big drug companies (I know folks at
Glaxo-Smith-etc) have labs in several countries,
so that if regulations change in one country,
their huge investments are not that much at
risk- they just conduct research on different
projects according to what is permitted where.
The recent GWB decision mostly will result in
certain projects taking place abroad, and will
guarantee that smaller companies cannot
participate as easily, since they can't fork
over for the licensing like the big boys can
and can't spring for labs in a bunch of countries.
The NYT article talks about concern about
making property sale prices conveniently available, but
those are already conveniently available
on the web. My preferred site for that
is
domania.com
which has good data for lots of states across
the country. There isn't data for states
that don't disclose sale prices, and some areas
are not well-covered, but in general, it has
reasonably useful data. Try a few friends
who bought places relatively recently- interesting. In some areas, it goes back to
sales from 1987 onwards.
Slashdot Mirror
- Ohio
- North Carolina
- New York
- Michigan
- Kentucky
- Illinois
- Maryland
- Louisiana
- Wisconsin
and the nine states that did not are:If you are a Californian, the contact info is here for California attorney general Bill Lockyer- you can call toll-free (800) 952-5225 inside California.
Given that MS has a history of astroturfing again and again pretending to have a grass-roots movement in its support, it would be a good idea to express bona fide concern about how fair the settlement is at a time when it might make some difference.
If you are a Californian, the contact info is here for California attorney general Bill Lockyer- you can phone (800) 952-5225 from inside California.
There is a comparison page on geekazoid about various Palm calculators, RPN and otherwise.
It should be a good indication of the excellent design and utilty of the HP calculators that it has been so imitated... Of course, some of that has to do with the sturdy hardware- it is quite remarkable what can be done to an HP calc and still have it work perfectly...
"Up to" is vague- It is true that "up to 7 billion people have as much money as Bill Gates", but it might be good to have a better estimate...
If you are counting hotmail accounts, many people have multiple accounts, which could get things up towards 200 million just in the US, so I am curious how many distinct users there really are. In particular, how many people have more than the default setup from having a hotmail account and actually have info in a Passport wallet? For people with multiple hotmail accounts (for different purposes, expired purposes or just forgot about it) presumably they would have one or only a few accounts with the credit card info and so on.
When you are searching a convex search space, it makes sense to try things "in between" A and B- if your space is not convex, it is more difficult to come up with new valid guesses which are somehow related to A and B.
There are a number of difficult questions in the field of research in combinatorial group theory for which no reasonable-time (non-exponential or worse) algorithms are known. Genetic algorithms have proven to be surprisingly effective for some questions in this area; I am part of an open-source project (the Magnus project, an endeavor of the New York Group Theory Cooperative) which has implemented a number of genetic algorithms in our software for computations in combinatorial group theory. See this page for a descripition of some of the genetic algorithms implemented in our software. In particular, some difficult theoretical questions that had been studied for more than 20 years turned out to be answered quickly (less than 30 seconds on a 300 Mhz PII) via a genetic algorithm approach. (The most remarkable of them was the dismissal of a potential counterexample to the Andrews-Curtis conjecture which had been very resistant to theoretical and traditional computational approaches.)
I know of other successes of genetic algorithms in research mathematics in areas like control theory and modelling, but I am most familiar with algebraic applications. In the situations described above, there are good measures of `fitness' and a good notion of two reasonably-fit individuals combining and possibly mutating to make even-more-fit offspring. It is much more difficult to apply the techniques where there is not a good measure of fitness or of combination.
I must say I am amazed that the unbelievably useful "Location Manager" which has been around for years on MacOS hasn't been more widely adopted in other operating systems. For those not familiar with LM, it is a way of changing wholesale system preferences (notably TCP/IP) so you have have your "home" location, "office" , "travelling", "Stanford DHCP", whatever, so wherever you are, it quickly puts the appropriately-remembered IP info into use. Maybe it is buried in Windows somewhere, but I know too many people who use Windows who type in their IP address, DNS servers, etc by hand when they are visiting another building or whatnot for it to be in common use. Under Linux, there is some facility under netcfg to remember different locations but it is primitive compared to what has been in MacOS since 7.something. And the OS X implementation "Network" system info panel is a nice evolution of the location manager. I've been using LM on Powerbooks since my Duo 230 (which was a long time ago) and can't imagine life without it- I think I got up to more than 35 locations on my original Powerbook G3.
XDarwin is a very nice and very easy-to-install implementation of XFree86 which runs on top of OS X. You have now the choice of "rootless" operation where the various X windows lie around, mingling with the normal Aqua windows on your OS X desktop, or the "take-over-the-screen" mode, where it is just like running X with your favorite window manager (several available, as well as the usual X toys like xeyes, etc.) It is available for download at osxgnu.org which also has various window manager systems, including Enlightenment, AfterStep, and more. These are good, easy-to-use installers, and there is also the fink installer which works great.
One thing that OS X has going for it is that lots of the gnu tools are available and very easy to install via the fink mechanism and the other nice installers available. There is a good central clearing place of various tools, including XFree86, various window managers, and lots of good things at osxgnu.org which is worth checking out. For a while, XFree was broken in 10.1 but there is a patch there that works great. It seems like with so much available for OS X, it is harder to justify using LinuxPPC or the other linux distros for Apple machines.
The company LinuxPPC.com converted from to a nonprofit corp a while ago (January 2001-ish), see slashdot story, around the time not only that lots of open-source companies were struggling, but also in the wake of Jason Hass' dreadful injuries after being hit by a drunk driver and his decision to go to college.
I don't know about the inside, but as someone who deals with the NSF from the outside applying for and getting grants, they understand that most academic scientists are using Linux/Unix etc. So they do give pointers for tools for linux to get things into the acceptable formats (TeX, dvi, Postscript, pdf) for submissions and so on. I mostly deal with fastlane their electronic grant submission/reviewing system and it now accepts things in lots of formats, as explained here There was a time a few years ago when they were requiring PDF and the Linux tools for genereating PDF were not mature- I ended up helping tons of people with getting things into the right shape for them by moving stuff over to a Mac, TeXing it there, including all fonts, using Acrobat (blegh) but that was the only reasonable option at the time.
There is a nice front end for the math articles in the arXiv. This FAQ has info about contributing math preprints to this well-run electronic preprint resource.
The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free. When an article is submitted it is sent out for review to someone whose research is close enough to understand the work. Getting an article to review is a chore; it can take many months to thoroughly review an article, many are poorly written and have annoying minor mistakes, and there is no recognition or pay associated to it. When it turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many. In general, reviewing articles is considered a nescessary public service, and since the editors of the highest-priced journals tend to be the super-big shots, it is not easy to refuse to review something. Hopefully, things will improve! The arXiv is great for preprints but the reviewing process is an important part of disseminating research so it will take more than that for things to get much better.
If you had ever been asked to review a serious scientific research article, you would know that it is a chore and not something to be desired. It can take a great deal of energy to review a paper properly; it can take as much as a month of intense work to work through one page or sometimes even just a paragraph of mathematical research. You get minimal recognition for reviews, often have to read poorly-written exposition (ambiguous definitions, inconsistent notation, incomplete study of previously existing literature) and often end up agonizing over lots of details. There are a number of editors whom I dread hearing from for exactly these reasons. I do review things promptly when asked, to be a "good citizen" but it can often take so much time that it detracts from my own research.
macslash has some blurbs with more details too, including info about the installer.
In the bad old days of pension plans, there were good people who were handcuffed to jobs that were unsatisfactory, not particularly great pay, and so on. They would never leave since they had so much invested with the company in terms of retirement, and on average, there were less layoffs in this environment. Now, with individual retirement plans (IRAs, etc) and a new expectation that people are mobile, I think things have improved. At least for people who are valuable and who do contribute, and have the potential to contribute to many different projects, the mere existence of other opportunties means better conditions where they currently are, at least in principle.
I have moved jobs several times, for my great benefit. Sometimes it was financial benefit, sometimes to be in a more desirable part of the country, and sometimes for a much better professional opportunity. My grandfather would have never thought of leaving his job, and spent years complaining about how awful it was. He was never going to get laid off, but there was a price paid for that certainty, which was less professional opportunity, not a killer salary, and less exciting overall professional opportunities.
The point is that there is a tradeoff of security for reward on both sides (employers and employees.) A government job may not be high-paying or particularly rewarding, but the chance of layoff is low. A promising startup might make someone rich quick, but there is a chance it will crash and burn. You can't (rationally) expect something for nothing!
- Judge takes all ability to drive away.
- Judge takes ability to drive without the intrusion (of this device) away.
- Judge does nothing, "probation", etc.
It seems like if people who previously got #3 instead of #1 (happens often- "oh, I need to drive for my job, honest, it will never happen again") sometimes get #2, that is an improvement for the overall driving public.In theory, driving is a privledge not a right. But in actuality, so many people are so dependant upon their cars that taking away the ability to drive is seen as unreasonably severe punishment, and thus not doled out as often as perhaps it should be. The number of people who drive anyway after their license has been taken away is large- if there are restricted levels of driving (only alcohol-fume-free driving allowed, daytime driving only allowed, only allowed to drive to work or taking kids to school) then with reasonable enforcement, things could improve.
American universities are at a big disadvantage here, since:
- they are more reliant on federal funds
than drug companies
- they tend to have their research labs on campus
So the recent decision will make the possible progress using stem cells happen abroad and privately, at least moreso than other biomedical researchI'm not saying that MS should be ponying up billions for Outlook's defects (esp. since estimates of the value of "lost time" always seem to be generous; witness the costs of "being stuck in traffic" as being huge) but if there is some desire to reduce the widespread incidence of viruses, then there should be some mechanism, prefereably financial, for encouraging people not to create and sell vulnerable products.
All the big drug companies (I know folks at Glaxo-Smith-etc) have labs in several countries, so that if regulations change in one country, their huge investments are not that much at risk- they just conduct research on different projects according to what is permitted where. The recent GWB decision mostly will result in certain projects taking place abroad, and will guarantee that smaller companies cannot participate as easily, since they can't fork over for the licensing like the big boys can and can't spring for labs in a bunch of countries.
The NYT article talks about concern about making property sale prices conveniently available, but those are already conveniently available on the web. My preferred site for that is domania.com which has good data for lots of states across the country. There isn't data for states that don't disclose sale prices, and some areas are not well-covered, but in general, it has reasonably useful data. Try a few friends who bought places relatively recently- interesting. In some areas, it goes back to sales from 1987 onwards.