This sounds a lot more like an online library than a "university" to me. In the article they suggest that professors would videotape their lectures in studios that the charity would set up, then they would presumably be available online for everyone. The article says his original thought on the matter was to address the question why someone in a remote location can't have access to a high quality education. As the announcement reads, it sounds like the goal of this is not to provide credentials to people, but instead access to knowledge.
Someone above suggested that this would bring about a new paradigm in education and I believe they are only partially correct. The history of the world and the US is full of self-educated people (eg Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln). The problem is that as access to knowledge becomes more a privelege of the economic elite (checked the price of an academic journal or textbook lately?) it is becoming increasingly difficult to be self educated.
I think Mr. Saylor's idea is a wonderful one. If such an online repository of knowledge becomes available I believe that people will begin to focus more on the capabilites of potential employees then their credentials. It will also decrease the barriers to learning that exist today.
This is an extremely good reason for standardization of distros IMHO. I believe that as long as the distros are mainly ways to add value and package linux differently there is no harm done by having a million of them as long as they are all decent and they are interoperable. If each distro puts its libs, config files, and executables in the same places, The danger of any real splintering is lessened greatly. In fact, as long as the libraries aren't too different between the various distributions, there will be few splintering problems indeed. After all, if you want to change something, you can always just go download the source, compile, configure and all your worries disappear.
I understand the merits of keeping the source to seti@home closed. It would be quite aweful if the project were invalidated by bogus results. However, I have a real problem in that the project maintainers seem to want their clients to run slowly. That's right! they seem to want to run inefficient code on your computer.
My chief example of this comes from some work that compaq has done on the client. They asked for the source to Seti@Home so they could get it to run on Alphas. the sent their version back to the maintainers and that is the alpha client that is being used now.
However, later they went back and tuned the client to run more efficiently. They linked the seti@home code against their Compaq Extended Math Library which contains a highly optimized FFT routine. The results are stunning. If you check out Compaq's stats, they have 21164 Alphas completing data blocks in under 3 hours. On my 21164 machine the best I've ever seen is 6. The speedup on the 21264 processor is even more dramatic. Check out their top users in the compaq team, they're flying through the data in under an hour per block!
Seti@Home has recieved that patch many months ago. (I found out about it from a compaq engineer on the now dwindling AlphaNT mailing list this summer) However the package maintainers have done nothing. This leads me to conclude that they either are technically incompetant and lack the skills to test this enhanced client (which I doubt because they are letting compaq use it) or simply want the clients to run slower.
So while I agree that open sourcing the client would be a very bad idea, I fail to see the logic behind refusing to distribute perfectly valid patches that could INCREASE the amount of science that seti@home does.
how do libraries fit into copyright law?
on
Copyright!
·
· Score: 1
Here's a question I've been wondering about. Libraries have been in existance since before the American Revolution. (I think Ben Franklin started one of the first in the US) Anyway, the purpose of these institutions is to allow the public to access works that are generally copyrighted.
Why are libraries not allowed to distribute this same information that their books hold digitally. I guess there must be some kind of fair use clause, but I can hardly imagine what writing a history term paper would be like if you had to purchase all of your sources.
Since the information in books and the music on Cd's is covered by basically the same laws, why are libraries not allowed to lend out copies popular CD's to the public. I've seen classical and jazz cd's available, but generally very old stuff that's probably in public domain.
So to boil it down I have two questions: Why can a library lend copyrighted works to other people and I can't? and Why can't a library distribute it's information online?
Sorry if this turned into a rant, I tried to be objective, but I feel pretty strongly on the subject.
I have been using Debian on a 21164A for the past year and I have to say that i have not run into any of the problems you allude to except for a few issues that can be traced directly to the kernel. (Pat on the back to the Debian development team).
In response to your comments on GCC, I agree with you wholeheartedly. GCC does not produce fast code on the Alpha platform.
However there is about to be an option. Compaq is porting their fortran and C compilers to Linux as we speak. The Fortran Compiler is already out in beta release and it is a dream. I have achieved at least a 2X speedup using the same code and as much as 5X depending on what I am working with. If the C compiler is nearly this good I'll be hooked.
This brings me to an interesting question. I Strongly doubt that Compaq will ever release the source code for these compilers. For me this is not an issue because I'm not really up to compiler development and for in house scientific applications speed is the only concern. However, what do you people think about using these compilers for developing linux distributions? If there is a significant advantage to using this technology on alphas running linux will people continue to stick with egcs/gcc?
OK, perhaps I misworded my original post. Where I grew up, extreme right wing == christian coalition. I am not a political science student, just a lowly mathematician. I have no views about the republican party as a whole. However, I do question the voting masses of Kansas that check the republican box without learning a thing about the candidates involved.
Nobody campaigns for State Board of Education in Kansas, the christian coalition was able to find candidates to get the republican nomination because without anybody even asking much partly because nobody seeking those spots. (as little attention as is paid to these offices on the statewide election, less is paid at the primaries).
Then comes the thing that gets me every time. Nobody stopped to even check what these people's views were before they voted for them on election day. I have asked several of my friends if they voted for or against the poeple currently on the board and many of them simply responded that they voted republican.
I have no problems with your views or with the republican party as a whole. I did think before I posted my original comment, however I think like a mahematician, not a politician. I perhaps do not understand the definitions and terms of this political game, but I do know how these people got elected and few Kansans will tell you that they think they represent the majority viewpoint.
Once again, sorry to have offended, but I believe that obscured by my clumsiness with language was a worthwhile insight.
PS please do not resort to name calling when questioning my viewpoint, it significantly decreases the chance that a constructive discussion will result.
My point in no way was to say that there is anything wrong with the republican party. However I do seriously question the way which Kansas citizens seem to vote republican without first finding out the first thing about the candidates. This only happened because nobody really campaigned for those seats on the board of education. The christian coalition candidates easily got the republican nomination and boom they were elected pretty much without anyone knowing what their views are. Many Kansans are quite ashamed about the PR that this generates for the state, but there's nothing that they can do about it now.
Please don't take my post as an attack on fiscal conservatism or "right wing" politics. Where I'm from when you say extreme right wing you mean the christian coalition and republican simply means the person who is going to win the election.
Didn't mean to offend anyone, I'm a mathematician, not a political science student.
no, the universities are not governed by the state board of education at all. Plus, what stupid university professor would actually stop teaching evolution and promptly lose all his/her federal funding?
PS I know, my father is an administrator at the University of Kansas
I am from Kansas (I just go to school in Massachusetts) who has a little bit of insight into this situation. The board of education is a powerful governmental institution whose members are elected by statewide ballot in Kansas. Unfortunately, this is an election that noone pays any attention to. The Christian coalition noticed this and proceded to find very very right wing candidates to run as republicans for the open seats several years ago.
Kansas is predominantly Republican (that's an understatement) and on the ballot you can just pick a straight ticket as one of your options, so many people just picked the repulican candidates and WHAM! half of the state board of education has a very fundimentalist viewpoint.
I'm not surprised at all with this latest move by such an esteemed body, next they'll probably require creationism to be taught and physics to be banned. I'm glad I got the heck out of that state.
I think the relevant issue is not whether AOL'ers can see your paper. The issue is whether or not they have power to review your work. In a completely open system, there is a huge amount of potential for abuse.
Imagine if mathematical journals allowed anybody who wanted to read the article to review it. The result could be disasterous! Say the problem is something to deal with pure math. The paper will state it's assumptions and methods in the proof as fact. It may appear to a "layman" who has good mathmatical knowledge that the paper is legitimate and proves the conclusion accurately, so he might up the rating on that article. This could similarly happen with lots of interested reviewers who aren't quite up to snuff. Thus the article could end up with a really credible score. Then a person who works in that field could look at the paper and discover that one of the theorems is used incorrectly or doesn't acutally prove the result. He reviews it down, but since 100 less qualified reviewers didn't catch the mistake the article still comes across as credible.
This in itself might not be aweful, but what happnes if researchers start reading the paper because of it's credibility, but being pressed for time they don't actually verify each step of the proof, they just use the result in a proof of their own. The result is after about 4 generations of this, a large portion of the work that is being published could be incorrect! The effect could be much more pronounced in an experimental discipline where very few readers actually have the resources to repeat the experiments.
The bottom line is this. As a scientist, I really don't want to spend my time reading articles that aren't valid. For this reason I don't see big problems with the current review process. I do think there might be room for pre-print repositories that would be unmoderated, but that official stamp of approval makes all the difference for people in the discipline.
A more addressable problem is the issue of journal cost. I know that there are currently exploratory efforts by universities to "unionize" and demand things from journal publishers. One especially popular suggesion is to continue publishing as it currently is, but after 3 months, all works would go into the public domain and would be freely available on the web. This would allow journals to survive, but would also grant free access to the works.
I agree that there is a serious problem with the way research is published today, but I do not think that an open review process is the answer. Scientists and Universities will continue subscribing to journals and will not be able to take advantage of more open efforts at publication if there is no guarantee of the validity of the work.
I know it's probably not the popular genere on Slashdot, but I have noticed that MP3 mangles classical music. I listen with a nice pair of headphones and there is a perceptable high frequency "hissing" for lack of a better word. It doesn't sound like white noise though and I don't get it when I listen to CD's through the computer. Bumping up to 192kbs doesn't seem to help either. Has anyone else experienced similar problems? If so what is a better format for classical music?
Perhaps this is an instance in which the massive readership of Slashdot could do some good. I don't think that there is any chance that AOL is going to relinquish this domain any time soon, however perhaps a flood of emails asking informing AOL executives of the situation and asking that:
A) AOL provide for the costs of registering a new domain for the African-Americans online search engine (perhaps aaolsearch.com) and
B) AOL put up a web page on the now void aolsearch.com domain which links to the african americans online search page for some agreeable amount of time (I would suggest a year)
I believe that if we send enough rationally worded emails that these two goals really are achievable. To a large company like AOL public image is really important and if they get 500 emails saying that this move has tarnished their public image they might just do something.
*** ONE FINAL NOTE *** Flamers please don't participate. The rational statements of hundreds of voices can be easily discounted if a person recieves 5 emails telling them to eat sh*t etc. etc. It's time to give our community a positive image again, not vent our pent up adolescent aggression.
Increasingly over the past few years, scientists have turned to computationally intensive solutions to all kinds of problems. As a student who has changed institutions in the past few years I have worked on two markedly different projects that involve computational power that was unheard of several years ago.
The real news in this announcement is that IBM is opening up supercomputers to researchers. Processing power of this magnitude was previously very, very difficult to come by. (either you worked at a national lab, or you got a grant from NCSA) Otherwise you chugged along on whatever hardware your funding would buy, perhaps a four processor SGI or so. And you could be guaranteed that you would wait on the order of a week for any meaningful results.
That said, this software IBM is creating doesn't seem to be terribly necessary to me. As I said earlier, people have been using computationally intensive methods to solve problems for over five years now. Only in fairly rare cases can a scientist not find code written by collegues that will preform the necessary computations with little modification.
In fact the whole idea seems a little bit misguided. In the article they talk about using supercomputers to model precise weather patterns. Lorentz showed a while back that precise weather patterns are chaotic, thus rendering most modeling quite useless! Unless this data explorer tool is a big improvement over already available packages it will fall by the wayside. The supercomputing time, however is one of the best gifts a computer company has given to science to date.
Even with a rugged laptop, how do people use these things in the field? Can they be hooked up with a modem via cellular or satallite networks? That combined with a GPS unit could be a really, really big help to people like park rangers and rescue workers who sometimes have difficulty with finding trekkers.
I'm no expert on why air port X-rays don't destroy computers, but I'm pretty certain that they use high energy PHOTONS, not electrons. However, whenevert they strike metal they can eject electrons via Einstein's Photoelectric effect.
Unfortuantely the campus police didn't have anything to do with it. This falls under facilities and maintnance and THEY DIDN'T KEEP THEIR WORD. I walked by the great dome today and the hack had been taken down! It's only Wednesday for crying out loud!
Perhaps patent laws are a bad idea from a philisophical standpoint. However, in the absence of such laws, there would in fact be disinsentive to spending on R and D. If a company could merely reproduce any device that a competitor had invented without even paying royalty, it could obviously offer the product for a lower cost than the rightful inventer becausse it would not have to recoup it's research costs. In this way the abolition of patent law would destroy technological progress. Only groups who had no monitary interest in the fruits of their research, such as governments would spend money to pay for the development of new technology.
This economic arguemet can be applied to copyrights, but on a lesser scale, because it often costs much less to create copyrighted material than it does to create patented material.
MSNBC, Your One Source for Biased Communications.
on
WSJ Says Linux Lags
·
· Score: 1
I don't mean to criticize, but perhaps this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I would be reasonably comfortable in saying that slashdot is a biased source of information too. (albeit a much better one because of the possibility of many many opinions being posted) But seriously, when was the last comment you've seen talking about the (admittedly few) good things about windows?
I know that this ended up on the MSNBC website, perhaps for obvious reasons, but it says that the article came from the Wall Street Journal. Does anybody know if there's an MS connection to the WSJ?
I don't understand the number of criticisms I've seen over the past few months saying that Linux doesn't support multiple processors. The frequency of such comments suggests to me that either there is such an issue with linux (which I'm pretty sure isn't true) or someone is "spreading rumors" to media sources about linux and it's capabilities. (an alternative I find just about as unlikely). Can anybody suggest what might be causing all of these complaints about SMP on Linux?
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds a lot more like an online library than a "university" to me. In the article they suggest that professors would videotape their lectures in studios that the charity would set up, then they would presumably be available online for everyone. The article says his original thought on the matter was to address the question why someone in a remote location can't have access to a high quality education. As the announcement reads, it sounds like the goal of this is not to provide credentials to people, but instead access to knowledge.
Someone above suggested that this would bring about a new paradigm in education and I believe they are only partially correct. The history of the world and the US is full of self-educated people (eg Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln). The problem is that as access to knowledge becomes more a privelege of the economic elite (checked the price of an academic journal or textbook lately?) it is becoming increasingly difficult to be self educated.
I think Mr. Saylor's idea is a wonderful one. If such an online repository of knowledge becomes available I believe that people will begin to focus more on the capabilites of potential employees then their credentials. It will also decrease the barriers to learning that exist today.
This is an extremely good reason for standardization of distros IMHO. I believe that as long as the distros are mainly ways to add value and package linux differently there is no harm done by having a million of them as long as they are all decent and they are interoperable.
If each distro puts its libs, config files, and executables in the same places, The danger of any real splintering is lessened greatly. In fact, as long as the libraries aren't too different between the various distributions, there will be few splintering problems indeed. After all, if you want to change something, you can always just go download the source, compile, configure and all your worries disappear.
I understand the merits of keeping the source to seti@home closed. It would be quite aweful if the project were invalidated by bogus results. However, I have a real problem in that the project maintainers seem to want their clients to run slowly. That's right! they seem to want to run inefficient code on your computer.
My chief example of this comes from some work that compaq has done on the client. They asked for the source to Seti@Home so they could get it to run on Alphas. the sent their version back to the maintainers and that is the alpha client that is being used now.
However, later they went back and tuned the client to run more efficiently. They linked the seti@home code against their Compaq Extended Math Library which contains a highly optimized FFT routine. The results are stunning. If you check out Compaq's stats, they have 21164 Alphas completing data blocks in under 3 hours. On my 21164 machine the best I've ever seen is 6. The speedup on the 21264 processor is even more dramatic. Check out their top users in the compaq team, they're flying through the data in under an hour per block!
Seti@Home has recieved that patch many months ago. (I found out about it from a compaq engineer on the now dwindling AlphaNT mailing list this summer) However the package maintainers have done nothing. This leads me to conclude that they either are technically incompetant and lack the skills to test this enhanced client (which I doubt because they are letting compaq use it) or simply want the clients to run slower.
So while I agree that open sourcing the client would be a very bad idea, I fail to see the logic behind refusing to distribute perfectly valid patches that could INCREASE the amount of science that seti@home does.
Here's a question I've been wondering about. Libraries have been in existance since before the American Revolution. (I think Ben Franklin started one of the first in the US) Anyway, the purpose of these institutions is to allow the public to access works that are generally copyrighted.
Why are libraries not allowed to distribute this same information that their books hold digitally. I guess there must be some kind of fair use clause, but I can hardly imagine what writing a history term paper would be like if you had to purchase all of your sources.
Since the information in books and the music on Cd's is covered by basically the same laws, why are libraries not allowed to lend out copies popular CD's to the public. I've seen classical and jazz cd's available, but generally very old stuff that's probably in public domain.
So to boil it down I have two questions: Why can a library lend copyrighted works to other people and I can't? and Why can't a library distribute it's information online?
Sorry if this turned into a rant, I tried to be objective, but I feel pretty strongly on the subject.
I have been using Debian on a 21164A for the past year and I have to say that i have not run into any of the problems you allude to except for a few issues that can be traced directly to the kernel. (Pat on the back to the Debian development team).
In response to your comments on GCC, I agree with you wholeheartedly. GCC does not produce fast code on the Alpha platform.
However there is about to be an option. Compaq is porting their fortran and C compilers to Linux as we speak. The Fortran Compiler is already out in beta release and it is a dream. I have achieved at least a 2X speedup using the same code and as much as 5X depending on what I am working with. If the C compiler is nearly this good I'll be hooked.
This brings me to an interesting question. I Strongly doubt that Compaq will ever release the source code for these compilers. For me this is not an issue because I'm not really up to compiler development and for in house scientific applications speed is the only concern. However, what do you people think about using these compilers for developing linux distributions? If there is a significant advantage to using this technology on alphas running linux will people continue to stick with egcs/gcc?
OK,
perhaps I misworded my original post. Where I grew up, extreme right wing == christian coalition. I am not a political science student, just a lowly mathematician. I have no views about the republican party as a whole. However, I do question the voting masses of Kansas that check the republican box without learning a thing about the candidates involved.
Nobody campaigns for State Board of Education in Kansas, the christian coalition was able to find candidates to get the republican nomination because without anybody even asking much partly because nobody seeking those spots. (as little attention as is paid to these offices on the statewide election, less is paid at the primaries).
Then comes the thing that gets me every time. Nobody stopped to even check what these people's views were before they voted for them on election day. I have asked several of my friends if they voted for or against the poeple currently on the board and many of them simply responded that they voted republican.
I have no problems with your views or with the republican party as a whole. I did think before I posted my original comment, however I think like a mahematician, not a politician. I perhaps do not understand the definitions and terms of this political game, but I do know how these people got elected and few Kansans will tell you that they think they represent the majority viewpoint.
Once again, sorry to have offended, but I believe that obscured by my clumsiness with language was a worthwhile insight.
PS please do not resort to name calling when questioning my viewpoint, it significantly decreases the chance that a constructive discussion will result.
My point in no way was to say that there is anything wrong with the republican party. However I do seriously question the way which Kansas citizens seem to vote republican without first finding out the first thing about the candidates. This only happened because nobody really campaigned for those seats on the board of education. The christian coalition candidates easily got the republican nomination and boom they were elected pretty much without anyone knowing what their views are. Many Kansans are quite ashamed about the PR that this generates for the state, but there's nothing that they can do about it now.
Please don't take my post as an attack on fiscal conservatism or "right wing" politics. Where I'm from when you say extreme right wing you mean the christian coalition and republican simply means the person who is going to win the election.
Didn't mean to offend anyone, I'm a mathematician, not a political science student.
no, the universities are not governed by the state board of education at all. Plus, what stupid university professor would actually stop teaching evolution and promptly lose all his/her federal funding?
PS I know, my father is an administrator at the University of Kansas
Hello,
I am from Kansas (I just go to school in Massachusetts) who has a little bit of insight into this situation. The board of education is a powerful governmental institution whose members are elected by statewide ballot in Kansas. Unfortunately, this is an election that noone pays any attention to. The Christian coalition noticed this and proceded to find very very right wing candidates to run as republicans for the open seats several years ago.
Kansas is predominantly Republican (that's an understatement) and on the ballot you can just pick a straight ticket as one of your options, so many people just picked the repulican candidates and WHAM! half of the state board of education has a very fundimentalist viewpoint.
I'm not surprised at all with this latest move by such an esteemed body, next they'll probably require creationism to be taught and physics to be banned. I'm glad I got the heck out of that state.
I think the relevant issue is not whether AOL'ers can see your paper. The issue is whether or not they have power to review your work. In a completely open system, there is a huge amount of potential for abuse.
Imagine if mathematical journals allowed anybody who wanted to read the article to review it. The result could be disasterous! Say the problem is something to deal with pure math. The paper will state it's assumptions and methods in the proof as fact. It may appear to a "layman" who has good mathmatical knowledge that the paper is legitimate and proves the conclusion accurately, so he might up the rating on that article. This could similarly happen with lots of interested reviewers who aren't quite up to snuff. Thus the article could end up with a really credible score. Then a person who works in that field could look at the paper and discover that one of the theorems is used incorrectly or doesn't acutally prove the result. He reviews it down, but since 100 less qualified reviewers didn't catch the mistake the article still comes across as credible.
This in itself might not be aweful, but what happnes if researchers start reading the paper because of it's credibility, but being pressed for time they don't actually verify each step of the proof, they just use the result in a proof of their own. The result is after about 4 generations of this, a large portion of the work that is being published could be incorrect! The effect could be much more pronounced in an experimental discipline where very few readers actually have the resources to repeat the experiments.
The bottom line is this. As a scientist, I really don't want to spend my time reading articles that aren't valid. For this reason I don't see big problems with the current review process. I do think there might be room for pre-print repositories that would be unmoderated, but that official stamp of approval makes all the difference for people in the discipline.
A more addressable problem is the issue of journal cost. I know that there are currently exploratory efforts by universities to "unionize" and demand things from journal publishers. One especially popular suggesion is to continue publishing as it currently is, but after 3 months, all works would go into the public domain and would be freely available on the web. This would allow journals to survive, but would also grant free access to the works.
I agree that there is a serious problem with the way research is published today, but I do not think that an open review process is the answer. Scientists and Universities will continue subscribing to journals and will not be able to take advantage of more open efforts at publication if there is no guarantee of the validity of the work.
I know it's probably not the popular genere on Slashdot, but I have noticed that MP3 mangles classical music. I listen with a nice pair of headphones and there is a perceptable high frequency "hissing" for lack of a better word. It doesn't sound like white noise though and I don't get it when I listen to CD's through the computer. Bumping up to 192kbs doesn't seem to help either. Has anyone else experienced similar problems? If so what is a better format for classical music?
Perhaps this is an instance in which the massive readership of Slashdot could do some good. I don't think that there is any chance that AOL is going to relinquish this domain any time soon, however perhaps a flood of emails asking informing AOL executives of the situation and asking that:
A) AOL provide for the costs of registering a new domain for the African-Americans online search engine (perhaps aaolsearch.com) and
B) AOL put up a web page on the now void aolsearch.com domain which links to the african americans online search page for some agreeable amount of time (I would suggest a year)
I believe that if we send enough rationally worded emails that these two goals really are achievable. To a large company like AOL public image is really important and if they get 500 emails saying that this move has tarnished their public image they might just do something.
*** ONE FINAL NOTE ***
Flamers please don't participate. The rational statements of hundreds of voices can be easily discounted if a person recieves 5 emails telling them to eat sh*t etc. etc. It's time to give our community a positive image again, not vent our pent up adolescent aggression.
Increasingly over the past few years, scientists have turned to computationally intensive solutions to all kinds of problems. As a student who has changed institutions in the past few years I have worked on two markedly different projects that involve computational power that was unheard of several years ago.
The real news in this announcement is that IBM is opening up supercomputers to researchers. Processing power of this magnitude was previously very, very difficult to come by. (either you worked at a national lab, or you got a grant from NCSA) Otherwise you chugged along on whatever hardware your funding would buy, perhaps a four processor SGI or so. And you could be guaranteed that you would wait on the order of a week for any meaningful results.
That said, this software IBM is creating doesn't seem to be terribly necessary to me. As I said earlier, people have been using computationally intensive methods to solve problems for over five years now. Only in fairly rare cases can a scientist not find code written by collegues that will preform the necessary computations with little modification.
In fact the whole idea seems a little bit misguided. In the article they talk about using supercomputers to model precise weather patterns. Lorentz showed a while back that precise weather patterns are chaotic, thus rendering most modeling quite useless! Unless this data explorer tool is a big improvement over already available packages it will fall by the wayside. The supercomputing time, however is one of the best gifts a computer company has given to science to date.
Even with a rugged laptop, how do people use these things in the field? Can they be hooked up with a modem via cellular or satallite networks? That combined with a GPS unit could be a really, really big help to people like park rangers and rescue workers who sometimes have difficulty with finding trekkers.
I'm no expert on why air port X-rays don't destroy computers, but I'm pretty certain that they use high energy PHOTONS, not electrons. However, whenevert they strike metal they can eject electrons via Einstein's Photoelectric effect.
Unfortuantely the campus police didn't have anything to do with it. This falls under facilities and maintnance and THEY DIDN'T KEEP THEIR WORD. I walked by the great dome today and the hack had been taken down! It's only Wednesday for crying out loud!
sluke@mit.edu
Perhaps patent laws are a bad idea from a philisophical standpoint. However, in the absence of such laws, there would in fact be disinsentive to spending on R and D. If a company could merely reproduce any device that a competitor had invented without even paying royalty, it could obviously offer the product for a lower cost than the rightful inventer becausse it would not have to recoup it's research costs. In this way the abolition of patent law would destroy technological progress. Only groups who had no monitary interest in the fruits of their research, such as governments would spend money to pay for the development of new technology.
This economic arguemet can be applied to copyrights, but on a lesser scale, because it often costs much less to create copyrighted material than it does to create patented material.
I don't mean to criticize, but perhaps this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I would be reasonably comfortable in saying that slashdot is a biased source of information too. (albeit a much better one because of the possibility of many many opinions being posted) But seriously, when was the last comment you've seen talking about the (admittedly few) good things about windows?
I know that this ended up on the MSNBC website, perhaps for obvious reasons, but it says that the article came from the Wall Street Journal. Does anybody know if there's an MS connection to the WSJ?
I don't understand the number of criticisms I've seen over the past few months saying that Linux doesn't support multiple processors. The frequency of such comments suggests to me that either there is such an issue with linux (which I'm pretty sure isn't true) or someone is "spreading rumors" to media sources about linux and it's capabilities. (an alternative I find just about as unlikely). Can anybody suggest what might be causing all of these complaints about SMP on Linux?