Yeah, and I'd suggest that instead of the art/science dichotomy, we should have an art/math/scienc "trichotomy". The three approaches are fundamentally different.
OTOH, I like to tell people that when I got my B.A. in math, I had exactly the same number of credits in math and music. I could have got the music degree, but of course a math degree has the advantage of having monetary value in the Real World that mathematicians try to hard to ignore. I couldn't get both degrees, although I'd satisfied the requirements for both, because the universities rules required another year's worth of credits if you wanted two degrees. I already had scholarship support for grad work at another university, so I left with just the math degree.
Actually, I had a bit of fun with the U's administration, by pointing out that according to their rules, I actually didn't satisfy the requirements for the math degree, and never could. The problem was a rule saying that if you took a course and got a B or better, you couldn't take any of its prerequisites for credit. One of the requirements for the math degree I got was "analytic" courses up to a specific DE (differential equations) course. I hadn't actually taken the DE course; I'd just taken the final, got a good grade on it, and had the prof's signature on the doc saying I could claim credit for the class. But I'd earlier taken several physics courses that listed the DE course as a prereq, so by the above rule, I couldn't be given credit for the DE course, and thus could never satisfy the requirements for the math degree.
The administration wasn't happy with this, since it made them look stupid, and was happy to give me the degree and get rid of me (without a music degree that I was otherwise qualified for;-).
But this is OT, of course, and doesn't say anything about the fact that we divide up our fields of knowledge incorrectly. There should be at least three general areas: art, math and science. And probably more for the studies that don't fit into this classification scheme. For example, it's not clear that the "social sciences" properly fit in as fields of science. As with math, there are a lot of connections, but you can make a good argument that our relationship to our social structures is not all that similar to our relationship to the physical universe. Social structures are human mental constructs, not physical things, which makes them more like mathematical constructs. But they lack the strict logical nature of mathematical systems, so they don't fit there, either. And they're clearly not very artistic, in most cases.;-)
But academic bureaucracies can maintain obsolete, irrelevant classification schemes long after it has become obvious that they're wrong.
... but ultimately I think there's a lot of problems with our current conception with categorizing things into "science" and "not-science"....
It's fairly conventional for mathematicians to observe that math isn't a "science" for a very fundamental reason. Ultimately, all the subjects considered "science" are about understanding our real world. Science is based on data collection of various sorts (observation, experiment, etc.), combined with devising testable hypotheses to explain the data, and the development of generalized theories that summarize what has been learned. Scientific results are repeatedly challenged by pitting them against the real world, and a scientific theory that predicts the universe's response is in serious trouble.
Mathematics, on the other hand, isn't really based on the real world at all. Granted, its models turn out to be very useful in dealing with the real world. But, for example, nobody can actually verify that a line in a Euclidean space has infinite length by actually measuring it, but this is utterly irrelevant to Euclidean geometry. Similarly, the Parallel Postulate isn't tested by measuring real lines and testing them for being parallel. Nothing in math is tested by experiments or observation, and the universe isn't consulted to determine the validity of a mathematical result.
In fact, one of the ongoing metaphysical mysteries is why mathematics is so valuable to scientists. Math only deals with concepts in "spaces" that we imagine, and those spaces don't have to represent the physical universe. The universe isn't a finite non-Abelian group or a Hilbert space (to our knowledge;-). This doesn't stop mathematicians from working with such spaces and producing valuable knowledge in the process. What's curious is that mathematicians have been such failures at making their subject purely abstract and irrelevant to the real world. The real world keeps turning up situations where an abstract mathematical construct just happens to apply and make life easier for the scientists studying those real-world situations. But, considering the extreme disconnect between what math is and what the real world is, it's a bit strange that the former is so useful in understanding the latter.
And, of course, this turns out to be true for even the simplest mathematics. You can't find a number anywhere in the physical universe. A number is as abstract a concept as you can find, and has no physical reality at all. But it's common to observe that unless you can measure it, you're not doing real science. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, exponentiation all have direct uses in low-level physics, despite the fact that they're abstract manipulations of non-physical concepts. Calculating orbits is essentially impossible without understanding basic calculus, despite the fact that the physical bodies are all quantized while calculus is based on a model of an infinitely-divisible, continuous space that doesn't match the real world at all.
In any case, I was also one of the many to be somewhat amused by the fact that my math degree was a "B.A.", not a "B.S.". But I don't let it bother me. I also got a "M.S." in Computer Sciences, which is nearly as absurd a concept. After all, you don't use the Scientific Method (any of them;-) to build software. But I don't let this bother me, either.
(Unfortunately, this sort of linguistic analysis breaks down with "Ph.D.", and you have to switch to a different sort of word play to turn that into a joke.;-)
You should have had Mr Burton, my maths O level teacher. He was brilliant. He was totally passionate about his subject and he was also a fantastic teacher. he encouraged us to think about maths rather than to just blindly follow formulae....
You were lucky to have such a teacher. But there are other ways that can work, too.
Back when I was a high-school sophomore, I decided that math was interesting, so I read that year's math text in the first month, then grabbed copies of the more advanced texts over the following months. By late winter, I'd run out of math texts that the high school had, and asked the teacher for more. The reply was the conventional "You're not ready for those yet", which was clearly BS, but was supported by the other teachers, too.
But I had a couple of friends at a nearby college who were willing to loan books to me, and I got several years worth of math texts through them. One funny aspect was that they were female, contrary to the stereotypes. I had some good math discussions with them. One especially funny case was when they gave me a copy of the text called "Calculus for the Practical Man". I asked if they were permitted to read it, and they basically said "Of course not; we girls aren't smart enough to understand complex stuff like that" with grins on their faces. They were taking more advanced math classes at the time, though.
I'd have thought that that title would be too non-PC to still exist, but I just fed it to google, and it pointed me to the amazon.com page for the current edition. I guess some things never change. I did generally prefer the more theoretical texts, but it was good motivation to read explanations of why it could be valuable in real-world situations.
Anyway, my high-school math teachers turned out to function primarily as gatekeepers who blocked my access to more advanced math than they understood. But it didn't matter, because there were ways of doing an end run around them and getting the information elsewhere. Nowadays, the Internet exists, so kids in similar situations can often just download the PDF for a text and learn that way. Assuming that the kids actually have Internet access, of course, which isn't true in a lot of the world (or even parts of the US and Europe).
This is why they should rebuild the compiler from source for every release, and make sure to publish the source code to that compiler,
Okay then. What should they use to rebuild the compiler? Do they need to rebuild the compiler compiler? And what happens if the compiler compiler compiler compiler compiler has been compromised?
It's turtles all the way down.
Nah, probably not. The techniques for doing this tend to be variants of the famous example that Ken Thompson published back in 1983, and consists of a compiler routine that recognizes a specific chunk of code somewhere in the victim software, and adds the "backdoor" to the output. The meta stage consists of the compiler also recognizing the section of its own source code where this is done, and inserting the backdoor-insertion code there. This then allows you to remove the actual backdoor code from all the software, and recompiles will continue to insert it even though the code do do this no longer exists in source form anywhere.
The conventional scheme to defeat this is to use multiple compilers to compile each other. The more compilers the better, since if you have N compilers, the insertion code has to be developed for each compiler, and each of the N compilers must recognize the appropriate insertion point in all N compilers. If you randomize the use of compilers, a single instance of compiler i not correctly inserting the backdoor-insertion code into compiler j will break the loop, and after a few compiles, the backdoors will all evaporate.
This is actually a case where non-open code has a use. If you have one or more tightly-held compilers that you use as part of the random rotation, you can make it effectively impossible for an outside agency to successfully insert a backdoor-insertion routine into your other compilers, or into your system's binaries. This is most effective if you can keep these internal compilers a secret, of course, because the outside agency will attempt to bribe your people to get the backdoor-insertion code into those compilers, too.
But each independently-developed compiler makes the intruder's job exponentially more difficult. Even a few compilers would suffice to defeat most existing "outside agencies", especially since it would be very difficult to hide the massive communication and bribery needed to keep the backdoor code installed and functional. And it's especially difficult with open-source compilers, where the hacker community has a strong motive (reputation) to find and expose any mysterious, undocumented code in the code base.
Looking for code taken from somewhere else is relatively simple when you have access to both sets of code
So did MS actually show the ReactOS people the supposedly stolen code? A few years ago, when MS made similar accusations of stolen Windows code in linux, there were lots of calls for MS to tell us exactly what code they were talking about. MS simply stonewalled those requests, and continued to make vague, non-specific public accusations that couldn't be validated. It was widely understood to be a marketing ploy, to put the fear of Microsoft's lawyers into potential linux customers' minds.
If a company is serious about infringements, the laws generally require that the accusers state explicitly what is being infringed where, and give the culprits a chance to remove the offending infringement. An accusation without the specifics is legally worthless, since nobody can stop doing something if they don't know what the something is.
There was also the suspicion that, if there was common code in both OSs, it was because MS "stole" the publicly-published linux code rather than the other way around. But, while that's more credible (due to the difficulty in getting a copy of MS's source code), it's a different story than we're talking about here.
There was at least one bit of humor in the "linux stole from Windows" story. At one point, a MS rep mentioned a line count for the stolen code. Someone did a count, and said that the number matched the number of "/*" and "*/" lines in the linux kernel source. This might sound frivolous, but it goes along with the famous story of the Sys/V version of/bin/true, which was a shell script consisting solely of a blank line and an AT&T copyright notice. MS claiming copyright ownership of comment delimiters would be roughly similar to AT&T claiming copyright ownership of a blank line.
And come to think of it, is any establishment required by law to give you a place to pee?
Huh? In most of the US, the answer is "Yes." In most of this country, restaurants (at least those where you can sit down and eat) are legally required to supply rest rooms for their customers. In most places, you can just walk into a restaurant and use their rest rooms, though in some areas you do see signs saying that the rest rooms are for customers only. So you buy a Coke or a cup of coffee on the way out.
Some states or localities also require rest rooms in other kinds of commercial establishments, such as gas stations, but this is less common.
So where do you live that you don't have such laws?
(Yes, I know you could live in the US. There are still a few backwater places that don't require rest rooms anywhere.;-)
The only way laws change is if the general public stands up to them. If they cherry pick people to abuse then they mostly go unnoticed.
Ah, but most of the "general public" approves of the enforcement of such "nuisance laws", when applied to the "wrong" people. As long as it's not my sort of people being hit this way, it's just fine with me, y'know. But all of those people should be prosecuted for the slightest infringement, to teach them their place in society.
You hear it constantly from conservative media. You're constantly hearing about how they love law enforcement, how those who are accused of crimes are always guilty (of something) and how the police are "doing a very difficult job for very little pay".... We always hear how the military are "the best and brightest",... deference must be paid to the judgment of people who've put on a uniform,...
What is especially curious is that this sort of praise for the police and military seems to come from the same people who keep telling us that the government can't ever do anything right. They don't seem to be aware that the police and military are pretty much all government employees, working from some of the biggest government bureaucracies that exist.
So which is it? Are government employeess always incompetent and untrustworthy? Or are the police and military above suspicion?
(My personal conjecture is that they're all just humans, with pretty much the same foibles and failings -- and successes -- as the rest of us. But what do I know? I do suspect that we might learn something about the truth if we monitor them and make their activities public knowedge. Maybe we could hire the wikileaks folks for that data-collection task?;-)
Here's a good rule of thumb. Live your public life as though everything you do will end up on the internet.
Heh. I've long played in a number of local bands, and most of what we've done has never been at all visible to the public. After all, how many Americans have any idea what Finnish or Macedonian or Armenian folk music even sounds like? Or 17th-century English dance music, for that matter?
But in the last few years, I've found that I'm actually "performing" in some unknown number of youtube videos. In most cases, I didn't even notice that we were being recorded. (Though in the 17th-century English case, it was the dance that was recorded; as a musician, only my right elbow was visible in the video.;-)
Not that I minded all that much. But I can see the more profit-minded parts of the music crowd getting really upset by all this newfangled Internet video stuff. People are supposed to pay for access to our Great Art, y'know. And the way copyright is going, I'm starting to get a bit nervous at the thought that the publishers of those music books I bought will discover that I'm playing the (17th-century;-) music in a for-pay setting...
I hate to break it to the corporatist crowd, but the ISPs built those networks with our money, from government subsidies. They received those subsidies to enhance our national infrastructure....
Well, I suspect that the corporatist crowd here is well aware of all this.
What they're working on is a solution to a serious problem in the US any many other countries. Here, our First Amendment restricts the controls that any government agency can put on our public rants and ravings. But a private corporation has no such restrictions, and is free to impose any controls it likes on the content passing through its wires (even if those wires were paid for by a government subsidy).
It used to be that, as the saying goes, the Free Press applies to anyone with the wealth to buy and run a printing press. The Internet put an end to that rule. So the question is: How can we put similar controls on the Internet? The government can't do it in the US, due to the First Amendment.
Today's decision shows the way: By handing all public "speech" over to the comm monopolies (or duopolies) that run the Internet's infrastructure, the First Amendment is abrogated. Your ISP is a private corporation, and it can legally impose any controls it likes on the "content" that you attempt to transmit over your ISP's tubes. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private corporations.
The corporatist crowd sees a major victory here. Thus, if you and your band want to sell your music, it used to be that you needed a contract with a distributor. Now you can distribute for close to free via the Internet. But in the near future, your ISP will fill the role that the music distributors used to have: To get your music distributed, you'll have to assign your copyright to your ISP, and pay them 90% of your income for the "right" to distribute over their wires.
Plug in the appropriate words for whatever you're trying to do over the Internet, to see how it will affect you.
(Lest you think that example is wrong, consider: Most US ISPs have have a "no servers" rule in their customer' contract, so you can't legally run your own web server do do the distribution. You can, of course, "host" your files on your ISP's web site. But if you read the fine print in your contract, you'll usually find that any file you store on your ISPs machines become the legal property of the ISP. So if you're distributing by your ISP's oh-so-helpful web-hosting setup, you are assigning your copyright to them. You can probably figure out the rest from here. It's only a matter of time that they collect a fee for every download of your money-making files.)
I think you've pinpointed the general problem. To most of the population, including almost all high-school teachers in the US, math consists of arithmetic, science consists of memorizing obscure factoids handed down by authority figures, and computers are fancy electronic typewriters with a screen instead of a platen and paper.
You don't expect any high-school class labelled "science" to teach anything about scientific methods; they are almost all purely rote memorization. You don't expect any class labelled "math" to teach reasoning about a mathematical topic; they are almost all purely rote memorization. Why would you expect a "computer science" class to teach anything that involves thinking? You'd expect such classes to be rote memorization of something involving computers, such as where things are on the keyboard or how to basic commercial office software.
Students aren't generally permitted to commit acts of thought or reasoning until well after high school. True, there are exceptions, but the teachers that perpetrate such things tend to not last very long.
(OTOH, when I got my M.S. in CompSci at a university whose name you'd recognize, I realize that I'd never had to demonstrate the ability to produce correctly-functioning software. I'm not sure this extreme is ideal, either. After all, actual scientists are expected to demonstrate the ability to create new knowledge in their field, and this typically includes the ability to find their way around a lab and/or interact with whatever technology their field currently uses to do research. It's not obvious why the low-level "mechanical" stuff would be excluded from a "computer science" education.)
Remember, jury members come from all walks of life.
Maybe in your country, but not here in the US.;-)
It's pretty much an open scandal that in the US, people with any knowledge related to a court case are systematically excluded from the juries. This is done quite openly by the courts, as a way to ensure that juries are made of the most ignorant people. In this case, it was blatantly obvious that the judge objected to a juror merely looking up the definition of a legal term. Jurors aren't supposed to know such things; they are supposed to believe whatever the judge defines a legal term to mean. A fair number of cases of convictions being overturned on appeal are due to the judge being, uh, not totally honest to the jury about some aspect of the law pertaining to the case.
(Of course, those cases do get the most publicity, and may not be representative of the majority of trials. It's hard for a layperson to know how bad this problem really is, since most of us can't afford to spend our working hours in courtrooms checking out the nature of our "system of justice". So we base our conceptions on what the news and entertainment industries feed us. And we know how unbiased they are.;-)
We might also note that big peak in the incidence of "Britannica" in the early 1800s. But back then, it was still expected that educated people (at least in Europe) would study Latin, and "Britannica" is merely a Latin adjectival form of "Britannia", or "Britain", and the British Empire was rather active around the world at that time. So most of the uses of "Britannica" around then probably had nothing to do with the encyclopedia.
I'd guess that you'd also find a fair number of occurrences of "Britannica" before 1768, the year that the encyclopedia was first published. But most of those would probably be lower case.
OTOH, here in the US, I've often heard teenage girls vow to kill someone in revenge for a minor social slight. For some reason, people don't get all upset about "terrorist teenage girls" when they hear this, and they don't seem to worry at all about those girls getting access to weapons.
(And in Alaska, some of those girls grew up carrying and using weapons.;-)
This puts it all in some sort of perspective, I suppose.
We might note also that there's a similar labor dichotomy: Corporations can move their labor-intensive work to anywhere that labor is cheap, but humans laborers are forbidden to similarly cross borders when it's to their advantage to do so. This is especially blatant now in the US, where there is strong anti-immigrant political activity, but corporations are free to move their production across borders whenever they like. But it seems that governments nearly everywhere support this difference, locking labor into little boxes where you're a citizen, while allowing corporations to be "international" citizens that can roam the world freely and "work" anywhere.
that they based it on copyright law: an Omega logo on the watch.
Hmm... Wouldn't that be covered by trademark, not copyright?
Anyone know if it's possible to copyright a trademark's text in the US? If so, is any use of "omega" now illegal without Omega's permission? Would it apply if I were writing in Greek rather than English?
Yeah, and your original spelling probably gives you a valid copyright. Or maybe even a patent, since those aren't even English words. I wonder if we could get slashdot in trouble for automatically quoting you in my message's subject.
I recently gave up trying to explain to some mentally challenged person here on Slashdot the very simple concept of property ownership and how once somebody sells you something they literally have no rights over it. Morally, ethically, etc... no rights.
Well, they may have no moral or ethical rights, but here in the US, "Intellectual Property" (copyright, patent and trademark) law trumps any such rights. If the thing you buy is covered by copyright, patent, or trademark, you haven't actually bought the thing in any meaningful sense. The owner of the "IP" is still the thing's owner; they've only leased it to you, and you have no rights to do anything with it.
The recent cases of Amazon reversing sales to leasers (not owners;-) of their Kindle reader and erasing books that people had "bought" illustrates this quite well. There's little doubt that what Amazon has done is legal in the US, since those books were covered by copyright. This case just emphasizes the situation, using trademark rather than copyright, and a physical object rather than text (and there's probably a patent violation inside that watch, too).
I don't like this any more than you do, but what we like doesn't affect what the laws say. The laws say that we have no rights over anything we think we "buy", if the thing is covered by any copyright, patent or trademark law. Buying it doesn't make it our property, no matter how much we may argue that we paid for it. Morality and ethics may be on our side, but American law isn't.
You don't even have to pay anything for this to apply. This text has an automatic copyright, so if you quote anything I've typed here without my permission, you are technically in violation of my copyright. Now, I'm not going to do that, but you don't know that I'm telling the truth, so maybe you shouldn't quote me. Or anyone else here, for that matter. We all could be trying to trick you into committing a copyright violation.
(Hmm... I wonder if those two sentences that I quoted above qualify as "fair use". Maybe, but I'd bet it would take a 10-year, million-dollar court case to actually decide the matter.;-)
Yeah; my first reaction was "WTF? Archaeologists have been using variations in isotope ratios for decades as a way of learning about the diet of the people and other critters who left remains." This works (sort of) because different plant species have different isotope ratios for many of their constituent elements. Isotope ratios are also used to do things like locate the source of plant, mineral and metallic objects. Anyone who knows about this understands that the published "atomic weight" numbers are rough approximations, and will vary depending on the source of the samples.
How is this a news story at all? Maybe the news is that there exists someone with a technical background who doesn't understand that published atomic weights are only approximations.
Now, if Slashdot wishes to be taken as seriously as Wonder-Tonic or The ONION...
You might be surprised by how many times their articles have been excerpted and reported elsewhere as serious news. This has happened with The Onion articles since they started, over 20 years ago.
A small kid at a school is getting picked on by a bunch of other kids. His friends step in and try to set things right. Is it the small kid's fault that his friends got into an altercation? No. Is he the cause of it? Yes. Indirectly, he is the cause of the other kids jumping in to save his bacon.
The prime mover here is still the bullies. No bullies, no problem.
There is an old distinction between "proximate cause" and "ultimate cause" that applies here. Google the phrases.
I'm pretty sure its illegal to have thousands of customers in front of the bank clerks insisting that its their turn,...
Actually, this sort of thing has happened repeatedly throughout the history of banks. It's called a "run on the banks", and typically happens as part of some economic disaster that makes people fear loss of their savings. To my knowledge, nobody has ever been arrested and charged with attempting to withdraw their funds from a bank. (Though if it has happened, it might be interesting to read about.)
Typically, banks and governments react to this by first trying to calm the population and convince people that they aren't about to lose their money. And sometimes, they will declare a "bank holiday" that shuts all the banks down until the PR campaign has calmed the population down. This can backfire, of course.
But people descending on a bank all at once and wanting access to their money isn't a hypothetical thing; it has happened on numerous occasions.
Perhaps we should be pointing out that the problem here is the DDoSers, not their victims. And, more generally, the problem is that we are developing organizations that see it to their advantage to interfere with Internet traffic. Some of the organizations are political in nature, as with the wikileaks/amazon/etc snafu. Some are economic, as with the "traffic shaping" done by the Internet's supporting corporations for their own monetary gain and to damage competitors. Some are religious, as in the filtering done to block heretical and other indecent material by national chokepoint-type gateways.
All of these are the same threat to the rest of us: They are trying to limit our access to information that they don't want us to see. The best approach is to take an "agnostic" approach to their motives, ignore whether they're political or economic or religious, and just emphasize that we don't want them benefitting by controlling and limiting our access to information.
That Knowledge is Power is an old observation. These people all want power over us by limiting our access to information. Many of them have had such power in the past, and are now upset that their power is decreased by this newfangled "Internet" thing. This is, of course, part of why we built the Internet. The important thing is to prevent this control of information from being reestablished by anyone. We don't care how noble their motives are; we just want to make sure that they can't control what we are allowed to learn.
Amazon, Paypal, Visa certainly weren't connected to WL in any way prior to this, but have shown relationships and friends, and of course this means that friends to WL have now escalated the parties.
Hmm... It sounds like you're saying that wikileaks was the source of the DDoSs at Amazon, Paypal and Visa. Do we have any evidence for this? The reporting I've seen imply that it was "supporters of wikileaks", not WL themselves. From what little I know of their record, I'd think this wouldn't be their preferred tactic, since it would sorta amount to "shooting yourself in the foot", as the old metaphor goes.
(But I can imagine Julian & Co. quietly cheering the DDoSers on in private, as did a lot of us.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and I'd suggest that instead of the art/science dichotomy, we should have an art/math/scienc "trichotomy". The three approaches are fundamentally different.
OTOH, I like to tell people that when I got my B.A. in math, I had exactly the same number of credits in math and music. I could have got the music degree, but of course a math degree has the advantage of having monetary value in the Real World that mathematicians try to hard to ignore. I couldn't get both degrees, although I'd satisfied the requirements for both, because the universities rules required another year's worth of credits if you wanted two degrees. I already had scholarship support for grad work at another university, so I left with just the math degree.
Actually, I had a bit of fun with the U's administration, by pointing out that according to their rules, I actually didn't satisfy the requirements for the math degree, and never could. The problem was a rule saying that if you took a course and got a B or better, you couldn't take any of its prerequisites for credit. One of the requirements for the math degree I got was "analytic" courses up to a specific DE (differential equations) course. I hadn't actually taken the DE course; I'd just taken the final, got a good grade on it, and had the prof's signature on the doc saying I could claim credit for the class. But I'd earlier taken several physics courses that listed the DE course as a prereq, so by the above rule, I couldn't be given credit for the DE course, and thus could never satisfy the requirements for the math degree.
The administration wasn't happy with this, since it made them look stupid, and was happy to give me the degree and get rid of me (without a music degree that I was otherwise qualified for ;-).
But this is OT, of course, and doesn't say anything about the fact that we divide up our fields of knowledge incorrectly. There should be at least three general areas: art, math and science. And probably more for the studies that don't fit into this classification scheme. For example, it's not clear that the "social sciences" properly fit in as fields of science. As with math, there are a lot of connections, but you can make a good argument that our relationship to our social structures is not all that similar to our relationship to the physical universe. Social structures are human mental constructs, not physical things, which makes them more like mathematical constructs. But they lack the strict logical nature of mathematical systems, so they don't fit there, either. And they're clearly not very artistic, in most cases. ;-)
But academic bureaucracies can maintain obsolete, irrelevant classification schemes long after it has become obvious that they're wrong.
... but ultimately I think there's a lot of problems with our current conception with categorizing things into "science" and "not-science". ...
It's fairly conventional for mathematicians to observe that math isn't a "science" for a very fundamental reason. Ultimately, all the subjects considered "science" are about understanding our real world. Science is based on data collection of various sorts (observation, experiment, etc.), combined with devising testable hypotheses to explain the data, and the development of generalized theories that summarize what has been learned. Scientific results are repeatedly challenged by pitting them against the real world, and a scientific theory that predicts the universe's response is in serious trouble.
Mathematics, on the other hand, isn't really based on the real world at all. Granted, its models turn out to be very useful in dealing with the real world. But, for example, nobody can actually verify that a line in a Euclidean space has infinite length by actually measuring it, but this is utterly irrelevant to Euclidean geometry. Similarly, the Parallel Postulate isn't tested by measuring real lines and testing them for being parallel. Nothing in math is tested by experiments or observation, and the universe isn't consulted to determine the validity of a mathematical result.
In fact, one of the ongoing metaphysical mysteries is why mathematics is so valuable to scientists. Math only deals with concepts in "spaces" that we imagine, and those spaces don't have to represent the physical universe. The universe isn't a finite non-Abelian group or a Hilbert space (to our knowledge ;-). This doesn't stop mathematicians from working with such spaces and producing valuable knowledge in the process. What's curious is that mathematicians have been such failures at making their subject purely abstract and irrelevant to the real world. The real world keeps turning up situations where an abstract mathematical construct just happens to apply and make life easier for the scientists studying those real-world situations. But, considering the extreme disconnect between what math is and what the real world is, it's a bit strange that the former is so useful in understanding the latter.
And, of course, this turns out to be true for even the simplest mathematics. You can't find a number anywhere in the physical universe. A number is as abstract a concept as you can find, and has no physical reality at all. But it's common to observe that unless you can measure it, you're not doing real science. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, exponentiation all have direct uses in low-level physics, despite the fact that they're abstract manipulations of non-physical concepts. Calculating orbits is essentially impossible without understanding basic calculus, despite the fact that the physical bodies are all quantized while calculus is based on a model of an infinitely-divisible, continuous space that doesn't match the real world at all.
In any case, I was also one of the many to be somewhat amused by the fact that my math degree was a "B.A.", not a "B.S.". But I don't let it bother me. I also got a "M.S." in Computer Sciences, which is nearly as absurd a concept. After all, you don't use the Scientific Method (any of them ;-) to build software. But I don't let this bother me, either.
(Unfortunately, this sort of linguistic analysis breaks down with "Ph.D.", and you have to switch to a different sort of word play to turn that into a joke. ;-)
You should have had Mr Burton, my maths O level teacher. He was brilliant. He was totally passionate about his subject and he was also a fantastic teacher. he encouraged us to think about maths rather than to just blindly follow formulae. ...
You were lucky to have such a teacher. But there are other ways that can work, too.
Back when I was a high-school sophomore, I decided that math was interesting, so I read that year's math text in the first month, then grabbed copies of the more advanced texts over the following months. By late winter, I'd run out of math texts that the high school had, and asked the teacher for more. The reply was the conventional "You're not ready for those yet", which was clearly BS, but was supported by the other teachers, too.
But I had a couple of friends at a nearby college who were willing to loan books to me, and I got several years worth of math texts through them. One funny aspect was that they were female, contrary to the stereotypes. I had some good math discussions with them. One especially funny case was when they gave me a copy of the text called "Calculus for the Practical Man". I asked if they were permitted to read it, and they basically said "Of course not; we girls aren't smart enough to understand complex stuff like that" with grins on their faces. They were taking more advanced math classes at the time, though.
I'd have thought that that title would be too non-PC to still exist, but I just fed it to google, and it pointed me to the amazon.com page for the current edition. I guess some things never change. I did generally prefer the more theoretical texts, but it was good motivation to read explanations of why it could be valuable in real-world situations.
Anyway, my high-school math teachers turned out to function primarily as gatekeepers who blocked my access to more advanced math than they understood. But it didn't matter, because there were ways of doing an end run around them and getting the information elsewhere. Nowadays, the Internet exists, so kids in similar situations can often just download the PDF for a text and learn that way. Assuming that the kids actually have Internet access, of course, which isn't true in a lot of the world (or even parts of the US and Europe).
Okay then. What should they use to rebuild the compiler? Do they need to rebuild the compiler compiler? And what happens if the compiler compiler compiler compiler compiler has been compromised?
It's turtles all the way down.
Nah, probably not. The techniques for doing this tend to be variants of the famous example that Ken Thompson published back in 1983, and consists of a compiler routine that recognizes a specific chunk of code somewhere in the victim software, and adds the "backdoor" to the output. The meta stage consists of the compiler also recognizing the section of its own source code where this is done, and inserting the backdoor-insertion code there. This then allows you to remove the actual backdoor code from all the software, and recompiles will continue to insert it even though the code do do this no longer exists in source form anywhere.
The conventional scheme to defeat this is to use multiple compilers to compile each other. The more compilers the better, since if you have N compilers, the insertion code has to be developed for each compiler, and each of the N compilers must recognize the appropriate insertion point in all N compilers. If you randomize the use of compilers, a single instance of compiler i not correctly inserting the backdoor-insertion code into compiler j will break the loop, and after a few compiles, the backdoors will all evaporate.
This is actually a case where non-open code has a use. If you have one or more tightly-held compilers that you use as part of the random rotation, you can make it effectively impossible for an outside agency to successfully insert a backdoor-insertion routine into your other compilers, or into your system's binaries. This is most effective if you can keep these internal compilers a secret, of course, because the outside agency will attempt to bribe your people to get the backdoor-insertion code into those compilers, too.
But each independently-developed compiler makes the intruder's job exponentially more difficult. Even a few compilers would suffice to defeat most existing "outside agencies", especially since it would be very difficult to hide the massive communication and bribery needed to keep the backdoor code installed and functional. And it's especially difficult with open-source compilers, where the hacker community has a strong motive (reputation) to find and expose any mysterious, undocumented code in the code base.
They spent LOTS of time auditing.
Looking for code taken from somewhere else is relatively simple when you have access to both sets of code
So did MS actually show the ReactOS people the supposedly stolen code? A few years ago, when MS made similar accusations of stolen Windows code in linux, there were lots of calls for MS to tell us exactly what code they were talking about. MS simply stonewalled those requests, and continued to make vague, non-specific public accusations that couldn't be validated. It was widely understood to be a marketing ploy, to put the fear of Microsoft's lawyers into potential linux customers' minds.
If a company is serious about infringements, the laws generally require that the accusers state explicitly what is being infringed where, and give the culprits a chance to remove the offending infringement. An accusation without the specifics is legally worthless, since nobody can stop doing something if they don't know what the something is.
There was also the suspicion that, if there was common code in both OSs, it was because MS "stole" the publicly-published linux code rather than the other way around. But, while that's more credible (due to the difficulty in getting a copy of MS's source code), it's a different story than we're talking about here.
There was at least one bit of humor in the "linux stole from Windows" story. At one point, a MS rep mentioned a line count for the stolen code. Someone did a count, and said that the number matched the number of "/*" and "*/" lines in the linux kernel source. This might sound frivolous, but it goes along with the famous story of the Sys/V version of /bin/true, which was a shell script consisting solely of a blank line and an AT&T copyright notice. MS claiming copyright ownership of comment delimiters would be roughly similar to AT&T claiming copyright ownership of a blank line.
And come to think of it, is any establishment required by law to give you a place to pee?
Huh? In most of the US, the answer is "Yes." In most of this country, restaurants (at least those where you can sit down and eat) are legally required to supply rest rooms for their customers. In most places, you can just walk into a restaurant and use their rest rooms, though in some areas you do see signs saying that the rest rooms are for customers only. So you buy a Coke or a cup of coffee on the way out.
Some states or localities also require rest rooms in other kinds of commercial establishments, such as gas stations, but this is less common.
So where do you live that you don't have such laws?
(Yes, I know you could live in the US. There are still a few backwater places that don't require rest rooms anywhere. ;-)
The only way laws change is if the general public stands up to them. If they cherry pick people to abuse then they mostly go unnoticed.
Ah, but most of the "general public" approves of the enforcement of such "nuisance laws", when applied to the "wrong" people. As long as it's not my sort of people being hit this way, it's just fine with me, y'know. But all of those people should be prosecuted for the slightest infringement, to teach them their place in society.
You hear it constantly from conservative media. You're constantly hearing about how they love law enforcement, how those who are accused of crimes are always guilty (of something) and how the police are "doing a very difficult job for very little pay". ... We always hear how the military are "the best and brightest", ... deference must be paid to the judgment of people who've put on a uniform, ...
What is especially curious is that this sort of praise for the police and military seems to come from the same people who keep telling us that the government can't ever do anything right. They don't seem to be aware that the police and military are pretty much all government employees, working from some of the biggest government bureaucracies that exist.
So which is it? Are government employeess always incompetent and untrustworthy? Or are the police and military above suspicion?
(My personal conjecture is that they're all just humans, with pretty much the same foibles and failings -- and successes -- as the rest of us. But what do I know? I do suspect that we might learn something about the truth if we monitor them and make their activities public knowedge. Maybe we could hire the wikileaks folks for that data-collection task? ;-)
Here's a good rule of thumb. Live your public life as though everything you do will end up on the internet.
Heh. I've long played in a number of local bands, and most of what we've done has never been at all visible to the public. After all, how many Americans have any idea what Finnish or Macedonian or Armenian folk music even sounds like? Or 17th-century English dance music, for that matter?
But in the last few years, I've found that I'm actually "performing" in some unknown number of youtube videos. In most cases, I didn't even notice that we were being recorded. (Though in the 17th-century English case, it was the dance that was recorded; as a musician, only my right elbow was visible in the video. ;-)
Not that I minded all that much. But I can see the more profit-minded parts of the music crowd getting really upset by all this newfangled Internet video stuff. People are supposed to pay for access to our Great Art, y'know. And the way copyright is going, I'm starting to get a bit nervous at the thought that the publishers of those music books I bought will discover that I'm playing the (17th-century ;-) music in a for-pay setting ...
What exactly do you think will be the problem if a slashdotter will get playful with his computer?
Maybe you should make sure your shades are drawn the next time you're fapping to the image on your screen ...
I hate to break it to the corporatist crowd, but the ISPs built those networks with our money, from government subsidies. They received those subsidies to enhance our national infrastructure. ...
Well, I suspect that the corporatist crowd here is well aware of all this.
What they're working on is a solution to a serious problem in the US any many other countries. Here, our First Amendment restricts the controls that any government agency can put on our public rants and ravings. But a private corporation has no such restrictions, and is free to impose any controls it likes on the content passing through its wires (even if those wires were paid for by a government subsidy).
It used to be that, as the saying goes, the Free Press applies to anyone with the wealth to buy and run a printing press. The Internet put an end to that rule. So the question is: How can we put similar controls on the Internet? The government can't do it in the US, due to the First Amendment.
Today's decision shows the way: By handing all public "speech" over to the comm monopolies (or duopolies) that run the Internet's infrastructure, the First Amendment is abrogated. Your ISP is a private corporation, and it can legally impose any controls it likes on the "content" that you attempt to transmit over your ISP's tubes. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private corporations.
The corporatist crowd sees a major victory here. Thus, if you and your band want to sell your music, it used to be that you needed a contract with a distributor. Now you can distribute for close to free via the Internet. But in the near future, your ISP will fill the role that the music distributors used to have: To get your music distributed, you'll have to assign your copyright to your ISP, and pay them 90% of your income for the "right" to distribute over their wires.
Plug in the appropriate words for whatever you're trying to do over the Internet, to see how it will affect you.
(Lest you think that example is wrong, consider: Most US ISPs have have a "no servers" rule in their customer' contract, so you can't legally run your own web server do do the distribution. You can, of course, "host" your files on your ISP's web site. But if you read the fine print in your contract, you'll usually find that any file you store on your ISPs machines become the legal property of the ISP. So if you're distributing by your ISP's oh-so-helpful web-hosting setup, you are assigning your copyright to them. You can probably figure out the rest from here. It's only a matter of time that they collect a fee for every download of your money-making files.)
I think you've pinpointed the general problem. To most of the population, including almost all high-school teachers in the US, math consists of arithmetic, science consists of memorizing obscure factoids handed down by authority figures, and computers are fancy electronic typewriters with a screen instead of a platen and paper.
You don't expect any high-school class labelled "science" to teach anything about scientific methods; they are almost all purely rote memorization. You don't expect any class labelled "math" to teach reasoning about a mathematical topic; they are almost all purely rote memorization. Why would you expect a "computer science" class to teach anything that involves thinking? You'd expect such classes to be rote memorization of something involving computers, such as where things are on the keyboard or how to basic commercial office software.
Students aren't generally permitted to commit acts of thought or reasoning until well after high school. True, there are exceptions, but the teachers that perpetrate such things tend to not last very long.
(OTOH, when I got my M.S. in CompSci at a university whose name you'd recognize, I realize that I'd never had to demonstrate the ability to produce correctly-functioning software. I'm not sure this extreme is ideal, either. After all, actual scientists are expected to demonstrate the ability to create new knowledge in their field, and this typically includes the ability to find their way around a lab and/or interact with whatever technology their field currently uses to do research. It's not obvious why the low-level "mechanical" stuff would be excluded from a "computer science" education.)
Remember, jury members come from all walks of life.
Maybe in your country, but not here in the US. ;-)
It's pretty much an open scandal that in the US, people with any knowledge related to a court case are systematically excluded from the juries. This is done quite openly by the courts, as a way to ensure that juries are made of the most ignorant people. In this case, it was blatantly obvious that the judge objected to a juror merely looking up the definition of a legal term. Jurors aren't supposed to know such things; they are supposed to believe whatever the judge defines a legal term to mean. A fair number of cases of convictions being overturned on appeal are due to the judge being, uh, not totally honest to the jury about some aspect of the law pertaining to the case.
(Of course, those cases do get the most publicity, and may not be representative of the majority of trials. It's hard for a layperson to know how bad this problem really is, since most of us can't afford to spend our working hours in courtrooms checking out the nature of our "system of justice". So we base our conceptions on what the news and entertainment industries feed us. And we know how unbiased they are. ;-)
We might also note that big peak in the incidence of "Britannica" in the early 1800s. But back then, it was still expected that educated people (at least in Europe) would study Latin, and "Britannica" is merely a Latin adjectival form of "Britannia", or "Britain", and the British Empire was rather active around the world at that time. So most of the uses of "Britannica" around then probably had nothing to do with the encyclopedia.
I'd guess that you'd also find a fair number of occurrences of "Britannica" before 1768, the year that the encyclopedia was first published. But most of those would probably be lower case.
OTOH, here in the US, I've often heard teenage girls vow to kill someone in revenge for a minor social slight. For some reason, people don't get all upset about "terrorist teenage girls" when they hear this, and they don't seem to worry at all about those girls getting access to weapons.
(And in Alaska, some of those girls grew up carrying and using weapons. ;-)
This puts it all in some sort of perspective, I suppose.
We might note also that there's a similar labor dichotomy: Corporations can move their labor-intensive work to anywhere that labor is cheap, but humans laborers are forbidden to similarly cross borders when it's to their advantage to do so. This is especially blatant now in the US, where there is strong anti-immigrant political activity, but corporations are free to move their production across borders whenever they like. But it seems that governments nearly everywhere support this difference, locking labor into little boxes where you're a citizen, while allowing corporations to be "international" citizens that can roam the world freely and "work" anywhere.
that they based it on copyright law: an Omega logo on the watch.
Hmm ... Wouldn't that be covered by trademark, not copyright?
Anyone know if it's possible to copyright a trademark's text in the US? If so, is any use of "omega" now illegal without Omega's permission? Would it apply if I were writing in Greek rather than English?
Yeah, and your original spelling probably gives you a valid copyright. Or maybe even a patent, since those aren't even English words. I wonder if we could get slashdot in trouble for automatically quoting you in my message's subject.
I recently gave up trying to explain to some mentally challenged person here on Slashdot the very simple concept of property ownership and how once somebody sells you something they literally have no rights over it. Morally, ethically, etc... no rights.
Well, they may have no moral or ethical rights, but here in the US, "Intellectual Property" (copyright, patent and trademark) law trumps any such rights. If the thing you buy is covered by copyright, patent, or trademark, you haven't actually bought the thing in any meaningful sense. The owner of the "IP" is still the thing's owner; they've only leased it to you, and you have no rights to do anything with it.
The recent cases of Amazon reversing sales to leasers (not owners ;-) of their Kindle reader and erasing books that people had "bought" illustrates this quite well. There's little doubt that what Amazon has done is legal in the US, since those books were covered by copyright. This case just emphasizes the situation, using trademark rather than copyright, and a physical object rather than text (and there's probably a patent violation inside that watch, too).
I don't like this any more than you do, but what we like doesn't affect what the laws say. The laws say that we have no rights over anything we think we "buy", if the thing is covered by any copyright, patent or trademark law. Buying it doesn't make it our property, no matter how much we may argue that we paid for it. Morality and ethics may be on our side, but American law isn't.
You don't even have to pay anything for this to apply. This text has an automatic copyright, so if you quote anything I've typed here without my permission, you are technically in violation of my copyright. Now, I'm not going to do that, but you don't know that I'm telling the truth, so maybe you shouldn't quote me. Or anyone else here, for that matter. We all could be trying to trick you into committing a copyright violation.
(Hmm ... I wonder if those two sentences that I quoted above qualify as "fair use". Maybe, but I'd bet it would take a 10-year, million-dollar court case to actually decide the matter. ;-)
Yeah; my first reaction was "WTF? Archaeologists have been using variations in isotope ratios for decades as a way of learning about the diet of the people and other critters who left remains." This works (sort of) because different plant species have different isotope ratios for many of their constituent elements. Isotope ratios are also used to do things like locate the source of plant, mineral and metallic objects. Anyone who knows about this understands that the published "atomic weight" numbers are rough approximations, and will vary depending on the source of the samples.
How is this a news story at all? Maybe the news is that there exists someone with a technical background who doesn't understand that published atomic weights are only approximations.
Now, if Slashdot wishes to be taken as seriously as Wonder-Tonic or The ONION ...
You might be surprised by how many times their articles have been excerpted and reported elsewhere as serious news. This has happened with The Onion articles since they started, over 20 years ago.
A small kid at a school is getting picked on by a bunch of other kids. His friends step in and try to set things right. Is it the small kid's fault that his friends got into an altercation? No. Is he the cause of it? Yes. Indirectly, he is the cause of the other kids jumping in to save his bacon.
The prime mover here is still the bullies. No bullies, no problem.
There is an old distinction between "proximate cause" and "ultimate cause" that applies here. Google the phrases.
I'm pretty sure its illegal to have thousands of customers in front of the bank clerks insisting that its their turn, ...
Actually, this sort of thing has happened repeatedly throughout the history of banks. It's called a "run on the banks", and typically happens as part of some economic disaster that makes people fear loss of their savings. To my knowledge, nobody has ever been arrested and charged with attempting to withdraw their funds from a bank. (Though if it has happened, it might be interesting to read about.)
Typically, banks and governments react to this by first trying to calm the population and convince people that they aren't about to lose their money. And sometimes, they will declare a "bank holiday" that shuts all the banks down until the PR campaign has calmed the population down. This can backfire, of course.
But people descending on a bank all at once and wanting access to their money isn't a hypothetical thing; it has happened on numerous occasions.
Perhaps we should be pointing out that the problem here is the DDoSers, not their victims. And, more generally, the problem is that we are developing organizations that see it to their advantage to interfere with Internet traffic. Some of the organizations are political in nature, as with the wikileaks/amazon/etc snafu. Some are economic, as with the "traffic shaping" done by the Internet's supporting corporations for their own monetary gain and to damage competitors. Some are religious, as in the filtering done to block heretical and other indecent material by national chokepoint-type gateways.
All of these are the same threat to the rest of us: They are trying to limit our access to information that they don't want us to see. The best approach is to take an "agnostic" approach to their motives, ignore whether they're political or economic or religious, and just emphasize that we don't want them benefitting by controlling and limiting our access to information.
That Knowledge is Power is an old observation. These people all want power over us by limiting our access to information. Many of them have had such power in the past, and are now upset that their power is decreased by this newfangled "Internet" thing. This is, of course, part of why we built the Internet. The important thing is to prevent this control of information from being reestablished by anyone. We don't care how noble their motives are; we just want to make sure that they can't control what we are allowed to learn.
Amazon, Paypal, Visa certainly weren't connected to WL in any way prior to this, but have shown relationships and friends, and of course this means that friends to WL have now escalated the parties.
Hmm ... It sounds like you're saying that wikileaks was the source of the DDoSs at Amazon, Paypal and Visa. Do we have any evidence for this? The reporting I've seen imply that it was "supporters of wikileaks", not WL themselves. From what little I know of their record, I'd think this wouldn't be their preferred tactic, since it would sorta amount to "shooting yourself in the foot", as the old metaphor goes.
(But I can imagine Julian & Co. quietly cheering the DDoSers on in private, as did a lot of us. ;-)