Then there's the infamous case of the AT&T/bin/true program, which was a shell script that contained nothing but a blank line and a copyright notice. So if you include blank lines in your code, you're violating AT&T's copyright.
I had fun once (around 1990) by "publishing" the entire text of one of these on a newsgroup, and publicly challenging AT&T's lawyers to take me to court over this blatant copyright violation. For some unexplained reason, I never heard from them.
(If you google for "/bin/true copyright", with or without the quotes, you can find several copies of this script. Note that some of them include a version number and more than one copyright date. More recently, it has been distributed as/usr/bin/true, and it's a binary, so it runs much faster. I saw an early version of this that had a -c option which produced a copyright notice, presumably as a bit of geek humor. But I see that this option is no longer present in the current releases on several systems that I have available.)
Yeah, I'll probably be rated flamebait for saying that, but for me as a shareware author the GPL is reason enough not to use GPL-licenced code.
Nah; you're not flamebait. You just want a license to do more with the code than he GPL grants. You should ask the copyright owners for such a license; they might be willing to give it to you. They might also ask a price for such a license. But note that you don't need a license to merely use GPL'd code. Unless you change the code, just running it on your computer is the primary use of such code, so the courts will agree that you have the right to do that (if you paid the vendor's asking price). You only need a license if you want to do something not allowed by copyright law, such as modify the code or distribute copies.
I know the GPL people strongly/violently disagree.
In most of the world, it not the GPL people; it's the copyright law. You have no right to make "derived works" at all without a license. The GPL is in part a license to make derived works. It imposes a condition that you apparently don't like: If you distribute your code, you must give recipients the same license. But the GPL is a standard sort of copyright license, since without such a license, you can't do much of anything with a copyrighted work except read it (or run it if it's computer code). This has nothing to do with violence; it's just a fact of life with the copyright mess we have right now. But you can't just take a copyrighted work, modify it, and sell it as your own work. Unless what you're doing fits the list of exceptions in your local laws (such as small excerpts, educational use, and parody), you can't legally do that. You need a license from the copyright holder to do more than what copyright law permits. And the copyright holder can put any conditions on your use that they like (as long as those conditions are otherwise legal).
(N.B.: IANACL, but there are some here who can explain all this in much more detail.;-)
Well, maybe you do, and actually right at this minute I do, too. But I've been doing a bit of experimenting with my new G1 Android phone, and sometimes with my wife's iPhone. I have read/. on the G1, and even replied to something. I don't recommend it, and I recommend the iPhone for such tasks even less. I fully understand why someone might be tempted to abrev their typing a bit (or a lot). That cute slide-out G1 keyboard works, but two-thumb typing is a real PITA when you're a fairly fast touch typist on the regular keyboard. And even after a couple months, I keep having to erase the results of hitting two of the tiny keys instead of just one.
Hmmm... Maybe I should have tried doing this reply on the G1. It'd be a lot shorter if I had...
There's a long history of the main growth in the computer industry being in the smallest machines. Now what's really selling are pocket-sized computers; i.e., what the marketers call "smart phones"./. and everything else online will have to seriously face up this this change over the next few years. Most of those gadgets don't have and never will have full keyboards.
... look at the United States and its reasons for not switching to the (clearly superior) metric system.
Actually, as many historians have pointed out, the US has been "metric" for more than a century now. All the American "Imperial" units of measurement are legally defined in terms of ISO units. Thus, the inch is 2.54 cm because that's the legal definition of the inch. And if you look at the labels on most American goods, you'll find that they include the metric size (weight, volume) of the contents, along with the Imperial size.
I've seen it described as an "extended metric" system, in the same sense that much American industry and marketing uses the term "extended". We have not just meters, centimeters, millimeters, kilometers, etc.; we also have inches, feet, yards, miles, which are also defined as some multiple of a meter. We have all the power-of-ten prefixes, and we also have other really weird multiples for the people who prefer those. So our system is obviously better, right? After all, people who know only metric terms can't easily tell you the length of a(n American) football field, but those who know the additional "yards" unit can.
The problem isn't that the US hasn't "gone metric"; it's that people refuse to stop using the old terms and switch to the metric terms. But hey, we have Free Speech here; the government can't force us to stop talking about inches and feet and force us to talk about meters. That's good, right?
Well, at least it's good for the marketers, who can present us with a confused mess of bizarre units, and make it very difficult for us to compare prices of goods. Take a good look at the price/unit labels in most grocery stores, if you don't know what I mean.
They also decrease the bugs-per-line count in their coding standards. That's why you see lots of blank lines in the code, lines that contain just a single brace, etc. The more lines you can spread your code over, the fewer bug you have per line.
If you don't like this observation, you shouldn't be measuring bugs-per-line. But nearly every company does just that.
There was also the funny thing a few years ago, when MS was claiming that some percent of linux code was stolen from Windows. Someone did a grep, and found that the percent named matched almost exactly the count of lines that consisted of just "/*" or "*/".
But we can't stop management from counting things that way. We've been pointing out how silly it is for decades, and it has had no discernable effect on published figures.
There can be some serious "methodology" problems in many of the definitions of "bugs", that can seriously confuse the bug counters.
An example that I like to use is a project I worked on in the late 1990s. An important part of the package that I delivered included a directory of several hundred C source files, mostly small, with at least one bug in each. The project's leaders got some chuckles out of mentioning this at meetings, commenting that they had no intention of letting me fix any of the bugs, since they were an important contribution to the project. This produced much confusion among the higher ups, who took some time understanding what was going on and how to account for it.
Some readers might have guessed what my task was: Building a regression-testing suite for the C compiler. The directory in question was for testing the diagnostics in the compiler. Each source file had one or more carefully designed "bugs". The makefile ran the C compiler on each, and sent the stderr output to a validator that verified that the compiler had successfully identified the bug and produced the right error message.
We had a bit of fun confusing people by asking them whether these test files really contained "bugs" or not. According to the C standard, they certainly did. But according to the test procedure, these weren't bugs; they were tools for testing the compiler. If they were "fixed", the test scripts would no longer be able to validate the compiler's error messages.
The higher-ups did finally understand the value of this, and agreed that although this batch of files were full of "bugs", they shouldn't be counted as such in the bug reports.
I also sometimes listed my job as the project "bugger". It's always fun to construct new words by stripping prefixes off words that usually have them. But I wasn't sure what term was best for the task of making sure that a routine actually contains the bug that the specs say it should have. "Debugging" doesn't seem right when the job is making sure that the right bug is there.
(Actually, I mostly thought that the project had a minor management problem, since any competent software development manager should understand the value of making sure that the software's error messages are correct and useful. But we all know how rarely this is actually done well. How often does your compiler point to the right place in the code when it produces an error message? And how often does the message describe the actual error?)
Its the dry season. Rainy season ended a couple million years ago. Depends on where you are. Most of the current climate models have the eastern part of North America getting wetter as the temperature rises, while the western part gets drier. The American South just got a week-long dose of that pattern, and there have been lots of news stories about the growing drought in most of the Southwest.
Yes, it has all happened before, and it'll happen again. OTOH, we are reaching a level of understanding that suggests that we could do something to stabilize things a bit, if only we could get our act together and do it.
Instead, the evidence is that we're pushing things to change faster than they would have naturally. So stick around and see what happens. It might not be a good time to move to California or New Mexico.
You know what, after all these years in IT, I say... give 'em as much data as they want. They'll choke and drown on it.
Nah; they'll just follow the model of the RIAA and other "business" firm that they love. Pretty soon we'll be reading about the FBI busting a terrorist ring - of 2nd graders in Hobunk. They'll have lots of "evidence" - the testimony of other 2nd graders in the school, including a couple that are FBI informants.
They'll also be prosecuting grandmas, though in that case, there might be some real reasons that granny has joined a terrorist organization. Or is it a sewing circle? It's hard to tell the difference, y'know, especially inside a multi-terabyte database.
I bet most of us could read everyone else's email at school...
Probably not most of us here, but when I was a grad student, I had a job for several years that included managing the main campus email system. I've also had similar jobs inside a number of companies, mostly because I was one of the few who had experience with the task. In all of them, after various email emergencies in which I had to dig into the system's innards, I also frequently found myself explaining (preferably in private) that yes, I had to look into some of their emails to fix the problems, and yes, all the people who work to support the email system can do the same. So maybe they should be a bit more careful about the sort of things they send, or remember delete the messages quickly. As part of the explanations, I'd try to make it clear that I had no intention of reporting any "content" to anyone, but others in the support team might not be so supportive. I'd also offer to teach them how to use an available encryption package, if they'd like. Few of them took me up on this, though a some did, and at least one of them got interested enough to become somewhat of an encryption expert.
In some cases, I've been pretty sure that others on the support team were digging around in the email system during their spare time. But I've never tried to verify this, much less report it to anyone.
I'm confused, can you change the analogy to something involving a 4-wheeled motorized device?
Sure. It's sorta like you buy a car, and you don't like the quality of the sound system and/or the GPS gadget that the dealer installed in it, so you replaced them when high-quality equipment that you like better. Maybe you also added a subwoofer. Then one day you take it in for routine maintenance or repair of a minor problem. When you get it back, you find that the gadgets you installed are gone, replaced with the "dealer authorized" products that the car came with. And the subwoofer is gone.
This isn't actually a totally hypothetical scenario, BTW. And with the advent of computerized controls inside our cars, we can look forward to the day soon when the inner workings of your car will be proprietary and "locked", and only authorized dealers (and "pirate" repair shops) will be able to work on it. And like the cell-phone system, there may even be internal parts of your car that are illegal to document or work on unless you're authorized by the auto company. Look into why the low-level telecomm library inside the G1 Android phone isn't open source. This is a precedent that is making auto companies quite happy.;-)
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today.
Oh, I dunno; it seems to me that the news from "professional" sources has long had a reputation for biased, slanted news. It has mostly been in the form of quietly ignoring news that their employers and the advertisers don't want people to know about. Less often, it has been outright lies, though we saw a good example of this a few years back when the US media almost universally supported and pushed the idea that Iraq was the source of the attack on the World Trade Center. This was quite successful, as survey after survey showed that a large majority of Americans accepted the lie and the Iraq war.
We've also had a number of surveys before the last few US elections saying that the people who can correctly answer questions about candidates' policies are mostly the people who follow various political blogs (and the Daily Show and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me;-). Those who get most of their political information from "professional" sources somehow haven't been nearly as good at correctly answering the surveyors' questions.
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
We've had a number of discussions here on slashdot about a very similar sort of bias. This is the ongoing malware/hacking stories, though there's a difference in the media bias: The new stories almost never mention any brand name in the stories about the latest virus/worm/phishing/whatever attack. In almost all of the stories, the attack only affects Microsoft systems, although the media invariably reports it as affecting "computers". This looks very much like a case of not reporting bad news about a major advertiser, though it may be also a case of reporters not even knowing that there are different kinds of computers. Anyway, the effect is to convince the general public that it's "computers" that are having a problem, not specific brand of computer (hardware and/or software). It's interesting that in similar stories about other industry recalls, the media usually reports brand names, model numbers, etc. But with computers, it's just "computers", with no identification needed. If you want to know the brands and models, you have to go to "amateur" news sites (like slashdot;-) for the specific information.
In any case, people are noticing a serious problem with "professional" journalism: Now that we have the Internet, you can all too often get the real information only online, from the non-professional sources. Professional sources tend to show the same problems online that they have always had in print, mostly because professionals are paid and their employers are corporations that don't want some kinds of unbiased reporting.
Not that a random non-professional news source is necessarily reliable, of course. We still have to learn to read critically, and check stories with several sources (with different biases) before believing them or acting on them.
Would the Globe also close off access to their site from rival ISPs? Doesn't that undermine their advertising revenue from all those readers?
Indeed; if your (near-)monopoly ISP service costs "waytoofarkingmuch", the solution isn't to install a second corporation that would act as a "gateway" with a strong motive to block access to their competitors. It's to end the regulation that maintains the local monopolies like Comcast, and/or replace it with regulation that strongly punishes the sort of blocking games that Comcast has become known for. More competition probably would drive overpricing down better than new regulation, but the bias/blocking problem can probably only be handled by legal means.
Two examples that I've found useful in various online discussions:
1) If you go into any "tech" bookstore, up front you'll see some displays of the current best-sellers. If you open them and scan the first few pages, you'll typically find a URL where you can download them in PDF form, for free. So you can get them for free over the Net, but the books are selling well, typically at rather high prices. WTF is going on here? Simple: A printed book has a lot of advantages over a PDF on your disk. (And yes, the PDF has a lot of advantages over the hard copy form.) Try getting both and using them both as a reference; you'll quickly see what I mean. Every software lab I've worked in, including those devoted to network software, have had a small library of useful reference books. Sometime there are several copies of some of the books.
2) A year or two back, a musician whose name is well-known in the styles that he plays announced on several online forums that he had put together yet another collection of his new tunes. It wasn't actually in production yet, so he had put the whole collection online in several formats. He told us the URL and asked for comments and criticism. Over the next few days, there were a good number of questions posted asking "When can I buy the book?" He replied with comments like "Hey, I'm giving them out for free online; why are you all trying to pay me for them?" But of course, this was just joking, because he knew as well as the rest of us why. Yeah, we could download all the tunes, print them out, punch holes in the pages, and put them into a binder. Some of us did that. That takes time (and paper and ink and a binder, which aren't free). If we could send him $20 or so for the printed and bound version, we could spent the time saved playing music.
This example is interesting because it has shown one effect of online "publishing" which may be permanent. A common problem with music books is that the binding doesn't allow them to lie open on a music stand. It used to be that you had to copy the pages you want to play. Now, what you can do is send a message to the publisher (and announce on relevant music forums) that you aren't buying the book because of the bad binding; you have downloaded the music and printed it yourself. Music publishers are slowly learning that they have to use the right sort of binding, or they won't make many sales. When they all learn this, life will be a bit easier for a lot of musicians.
Anyway, both of these illustrate the fact that the physical medium and format may not be everything, but it can be an important part of why people buy hard copy rather than download, even when the hard copy is more expensive.
While the truth may be on your side, the delivery is not. If you speak like that you'll meet a mirror-image projection, and nobody will listen.
True in a general forum, perhaps, but slashdot isn't a general forum. It's explicitly aimed at nerds and geeks, people with a fair amount of technical background and interest. In such a setting, people will listen to offensive delivery and respond.
Someone here recently had a signature something like: "Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud. After a while, you realize that your opponent enjoys it." This is a bit of humor that is based on an important truth: Scientists, engineers, and other technical people tend to enjoy argument. Things that other find offensive, they often find amusing and challenging. So language that would put off a typical "man in the street" will here often get grins as people jump into the fray.
I've seen this listed as one of the important cultural differences between the academic and business worlds. In a business environment, you learn to talk nice to people, no matter what you think of them, because you want them to cooperate. But a side effect is the organizational inefficiencies and occasional disaster that the business world is prone to suffer, as people very nicely avoid pointing out that something is being done very wrong.
OTOH, science tends to flourish in an academic setting, because mistakes can be pointed out publicly. People are expected to be able to take criticism (even nasty, ad-hominem insults), because silencing criticism leads to mistakes being propagated. If mistakes can be openly discussed, we're much more likely to correct them. Developing a thick skin and a BS filter is a small price to pay for something that usually leads to advances in our knowledge and understanding.
In any case, good luck trying to suppress the offensive, insulting language here. I'll predict that you won't succeed very well. And if people do manage to suppress such language, it'll probably make slashdot a much less useful forum, and most of the techie types will drift away to other forums where open discussion is allowed.
(Not that nicer language wouldn't be, well, nicer, y'know. But history shows that it can usually only be achieved by active suppression, and that usually entails loss of information. And we don't want that around here.;-)
Actually, aspirin was originally a trade name, derived from the genus name Spiraea, which is a group of plants that contain acetyl salicylic acid. The common English name is meadowsweet, and teas made from such plants have been long used as we use aspirin now. The other common natural form of the drug is methyl salicylate, commonly called "oil of wintergreen", which is found in many other plants, including many mints and birches, plus of course the several plants called wintergreen. IMO, teas made from mint or black birch bark are much tastier than meadowsweet teas, but I'd generally use aspirin for medical purposes.
We have several Spiraea japonica bushes in our yard, an oriental meadowsweet that is reaching the "noxious weed" category here in New England. One of the bushes is growing in full sun, is about six feet in diameter, and gets lots of comments from neighbors during the month or so that it's completely covered with hundreds of clusters of small, pink flowers. I've never made tea from it, though.
No there aren't. Note that slashdot is explicitly advertised as "news for nerds", using one of the other popular calumnies against those of us with technical interests and education. Those are the people that this site was built for, and its success has been because it does a pretty good job of attracting the kind of people that its founders were trying to attract.
If you object to a forum that's run by and overpopulated by tech nerds and geeks, you're the one who doesn't belong here. But there are a zillion other news and discussion forums on the Web; you should look around for one that's more to your liking.
A few years ago, I read a complaint from medical researchers, aimed at botanists. The complaint was that when doing field research, botanists (and other biologists, too) usually record only the physical features of the specimens and a brief description of the environment. They rarely ask the local people about uses for the plants.
This is significant because a lot of pharmaceuticals start off as plant extracts, and this happened because someone learned that the local people used the plant in a "folk" treatment for some medical conditions. This information is not of great interest to most botanists, of course, so they don't bother with it. The result is a lot of duplicated field work by medical researchers (who aren't usually expert botanists). The suggestion was that medical research could benefit greatly from biological field researchers ("collectors") taking the minor extra step of asking the local people about any uses they knew for the collected specimens.
The article went on to give a few more detailed suggestions. One was based on a common occurrence: A medical researcher learns that a plant is used for pain relief, and decides to investigate, because new pain relievers are always useful. So he/she obtains a sample of the plant, sniffs it, says "Damn!", and goes on to the next specimen. The plant has a minty or wintergreen smell, implying that it's yet one more of the thousand or so plants known that produce methyl salicylate. It is a pain reliever, but we already have a synthetic version that can be bought cheaply and used in precisely controlled doses (aspirin). So knowing an additional bit of trivia, its smell, can be useful in pruning the research list.
Note that information about local uses and scent could easily be classified as "anecdotal". But such things can be useful hints about which things are worth further research. Or, as in the above case, it can be used to avoid unnecessary research.
Actually, the main reason that few stores give a discount for using cash is that their contracts with the credit-card companies explicitly forbids it. There are a few US states (and a few other countries) that have outlawed such contract terms. But in most places, it's legal, and so stores have a choice of giving every customer the same price or not be allowed to accept credit cards.
The summary (and TFA too;-) reminded me of the recent debate over the definition of "planet".
One obvious problem is with the claim that we only knew of four "rocky planets" before this one. Since Mercury and Mars are included, it's likely that the definition they're using would also classify at least Titan and Triton as "rocky planets", giving us six.
But, (I can hear people saying), Titan and Triton aren't planets because they don't orbit the sun. Well, neither does this new planet; it orbits another star. Some people have seriously defined "planet" to mean objects that orbit our sun, and of course that definition immediately says that there can't be any more planets in the rest of the universe. If you accept this new object as a "rocky planet", what's your definition? You'll have to word it very carefully so that it includes things orbiting a distant star, but not those that are in orbits around local gas giants.
And if you find a good wording for that, you face another likely future problem: How small an object is allowed as the primary? Suppose a new rocky-planet-like object is found in orbit around a nearby "brown dwarf". The primary isn't a proper star, so is the object merely a moon and not a planet? It's also likely that we'll soon find Jupiter-class objects in free space, not orbiting a star; if one has a Mercury- or Mars-like object in orbit, would it be classified as a rocky planet or a moon? If it's a planet, then why isn't Ganymede also a planet?
I'd predict that in the not-too-distant future, as smaller things can be detected remotely, astronomers might decide to abandon such definitions that depend on the type of primary, and rewrite definitions so that they only use properties of the object itself. Either that, or they'll deprecate "planet" as a lay term that's not useful for scientific purposes. Dunno what they'd replace it with, though.
Meanwhile, the Sophists amongst us may be in for a lot of fun in the near future. Those of us who sat at the sidelines chuckling over the angst caused by the demoting of Pluto are probably looking forward to a lot more astronomical geek humor in the next few years.
A listener might attribute "better" sound to a more expensive violin, *and* the player might play the more expensive violin with more care, resulting in a "better" sound. A real double blind test would require a robot player that played each instrument exactly the same. Some years back, I read of an interesting "double blind" test that showed another interesting complication.
The test setup was a violinist hidden behind a screen, playing the same pieces of music on several instruments. The listeners were a bunch of professional musicians and educators. Neither the play nor the listeners had any information about the instruments, just a number.
The result was that the player reported a quick judgement of each instrument's "quality", usually within just a few notes, and was consistent in that judgement even when the experimenters renumbered the instruments.
However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.
The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.
It would be interesting to read about other well-done experiments. But most of them probably aren't too useful, because the players and/or listeners know something about the instruments that they're listening to.
I learned a similar lesson a couple of decades ago, when I was shopping for a violin bow. I decided to carefully avoid looking at the names or prices of bows before playing with them. It turned out that my judgement was uncorellated with the price, and I ended up buying one of the cheaper bows. The shop owner just grinned when I chose that one, and said that he played with that type too, because he liked the sound.
But it's well known among players of bowed instruments that the best bow depends on the instrument, the player, and the style of music. It's meaningless to ask which bows are best without that information.
Why not make it compulsory to get networkable devices certified to be malware-free every year just as cars need to go through statutory vehicle inspections?
That might be a good idea, if we could solve the one major problem hinted at in the summary: Unlike the "vehicle" field, in the computer field the expected outcome would be that any non-Microsoft software would be automatically classified as malware, while all Microsoft-approved software would be approved. This worry isn't frivolous; we have plenty of precendent to say it's a likely outcome.
If we can figure out a way to ensure that the inspection system wouldn't be pwned by the Market Leader, we can expect strong resistance to such inspection schemes.
You missed the point. It's not punishment. It's quarantine. If a person gets sick with a contagious disease, it may not be their fault and you probably don't want to punish them.
Actually, in America, that's pretty much what people have done to the victims of AIDS. This is true in much of the rest of the world, too.
It's nothing new, either. Historically, the religious folks have often attributed disease as a punishment from God. And generally, if there's even a small correlation between a medical problem and some voluntary activity, many people are quick to blame the victim.
But I can't really bring myself to think that any (relevant) group of people would counsciously be trying to "dumb down" anyone, let alone an entire country.
I think you're right. It's not really a conspiracy in any meaningful sense. Rather, there is a large part of the culture that is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. It's not just an American thing, of course; it's common in most societies.
Thus, when I was in high school (in a town that perhaps should remain anonymous, so people will suspect it's theirs;-), I decided that math was interesting. So over a summer and for the first part of my 10th-grade year, I borrowed and read all the math books that I could find in the school. When I ran out of them, I asked the math teachers for more. Every one of them denied me the books. They all had the same excuse: I "wasn't ready" for such advanced math. So I went to some friends in a nearby college and asked them. I quickly got access to all sorts of college-level math texts.
You might think it's bizarre that math teachers would intentionally deny access to advanced texts to their best students (and I was that school's first student to get a "perfect" SAT score). But I've found that this isn't at all an unusual story. It's fairly common for students to be "tracked", i.e., restricted to learning that's considered appropriate for their age group. Most of the educators deserve praise for encouraging the slow students, but all too often this goes along with discouraging the students that learn quickly, by blocking access to further information.
I ran into the same thing when I moved on to college. I aced the math tests, and they gave me "advanced placement" - into a second-year calculus class. I couldn't talk them into letting me skip the class, which was a prerequisite for most of the physics classes that I wanted to take. I knew the subject better than the teacher, and could have taught the class. The teacher didn't like my attitude, and despite my getting the top score in all the tests, I got a C. His excuse was that I hadn't done all the class exercises. His real reason was fairly clear, however; I was an arrogant student who thought that I deserved to be allowed to skip his class. Again, the clear intent was to restrict my access to education (by wasting my time with material that I already knew), and it was at the college level.
None of this was unusual to me, of course. From an early age, I had the nickname "Einstein", and I understood that this was not a compliment. If you ask American geeks, you'll find that they all understand this problem quite well. But it's not any conspiracy of any anti-education, anti-math/science cabal. It's just the basic social attitudes of most of the society, with individuals (including educators) doing their part to uphold the society's standards as they understand them.
Here and there, I did have teachers who didn't have such attitudes, and let me work independently at my own speed. But there weren't very many of them, at any level.
Also, I noticed early on that most of my friends were the children of immigrants, who mostly were very strong supporters of their children's education. It's no surprise that these were usually the school's top students.
Slashdot Mirror
Then there's the infamous case of the AT&T /bin/true program, which was a shell script that contained nothing but a blank line and a copyright notice. So if you include blank lines in your code, you're violating AT&T's copyright.
I had fun once (around 1990) by "publishing" the entire text of one of these on a newsgroup, and publicly challenging AT&T's lawyers to take me to court over this blatant copyright violation. For some unexplained reason, I never heard from them.
(If you google for "/bin/true copyright", with or without the quotes, you can find several copies of this script. Note that some of them include a version number and more than one copyright date. More recently, it has been distributed as /usr/bin/true, and it's a binary, so it runs much faster. I saw an early version of this that had a -c option which produced a copyright notice, presumably as a bit of geek humor. But I see that this option is no longer present in the current releases on several systems that I have available.)
Nah; you're not flamebait. You just want a license to do more with the code than he GPL grants. You should ask the copyright owners for such a license; they might be willing to give it to you. They might also ask a price for such a license. But note that you don't need a license to merely use GPL'd code. Unless you change the code, just running it on your computer is the primary use of such code, so the courts will agree that you have the right to do that (if you paid the vendor's asking price). You only need a license if you want to do something not allowed by copyright law, such as modify the code or distribute copies.
I know the GPL people strongly/violently disagree.
In most of the world, it not the GPL people; it's the copyright law. You have no right to make "derived works" at all without a license. The GPL is in part a license to make derived works. It imposes a condition that you apparently don't like: If you distribute your code, you must give recipients the same license. But the GPL is a standard sort of copyright license, since without such a license, you can't do much of anything with a copyrighted work except read it (or run it if it's computer code). This has nothing to do with violence; it's just a fact of life with the copyright mess we have right now. But you can't just take a copyrighted work, modify it, and sell it as your own work. Unless what you're doing fits the list of exceptions in your local laws (such as small excerpts, educational use, and parody), you can't legally do that. You need a license from the copyright holder to do more than what copyright law permits. And the copyright holder can put any conditions on your use that they like (as long as those conditions are otherwise legal).
(N.B.: IANACL, but there are some here who can explain all this in much more detail. ;-)
We have a full keyboard here, use it.
Well, maybe you do, and actually right at this minute I do, too. But I've been doing a bit of experimenting with my new G1 Android phone, and sometimes with my wife's iPhone. I have read /. on the G1, and even replied to something. I don't recommend it, and I recommend the iPhone for such tasks even less. I fully understand why someone might be tempted to abrev their typing a bit (or a lot). That cute slide-out G1 keyboard works, but two-thumb typing is a real PITA when you're a fairly fast touch typist on the regular keyboard. And even after a couple months, I keep having to erase the results of hitting two of the tiny keys instead of just one.
Hmmm ... Maybe I should have tried doing this reply on the G1. It'd be a lot shorter if I had ...
There's a long history of the main growth in the computer industry being in the smallest machines. Now what's really selling are pocket-sized computers; i.e., what the marketers call "smart phones". /. and everything else online will have to seriously face up this this change over the next few years. Most of those gadgets don't have and never will have full keyboards.
... look at the United States and its reasons for not switching to the (clearly superior) metric system.
Actually, as many historians have pointed out, the US has been "metric" for more than a century now. All the American "Imperial" units of measurement are legally defined in terms of ISO units. Thus, the inch is 2.54 cm because that's the legal definition of the inch. And if you look at the labels on most American goods, you'll find that they include the metric size (weight, volume) of the contents, along with the Imperial size.
I've seen it described as an "extended metric" system, in the same sense that much American industry and marketing uses the term "extended". We have not just meters, centimeters, millimeters, kilometers, etc.; we also have inches, feet, yards, miles, which are also defined as some multiple of a meter. We have all the power-of-ten prefixes, and we also have other really weird multiples for the people who prefer those. So our system is obviously better, right? After all, people who know only metric terms can't easily tell you the length of a(n American) football field, but those who know the additional "yards" unit can.
The problem isn't that the US hasn't "gone metric"; it's that people refuse to stop using the old terms and switch to the metric terms. But hey, we have Free Speech here; the government can't force us to stop talking about inches and feet and force us to talk about meters. That's good, right?
Well, at least it's good for the marketers, who can present us with a confused mess of bizarre units, and make it very difficult for us to compare prices of goods. Take a good look at the price/unit labels in most grocery stores, if you don't know what I mean.
They also decrease the bugs-per-line count in their coding standards. That's why you see lots of blank lines in the code, lines that contain just a single brace, etc. The more lines you can spread your code over, the fewer bug you have per line.
If you don't like this observation, you shouldn't be measuring bugs-per-line. But nearly every company does just that.
There was also the funny thing a few years ago, when MS was claiming that some percent of linux code was stolen from Windows. Someone did a grep, and found that the percent named matched almost exactly the count of lines that consisted of just "/*" or "*/".
But we can't stop management from counting things that way. We've been pointing out how silly it is for decades, and it has had no discernable effect on published figures.
There can be some serious "methodology" problems in many of the definitions of "bugs", that can seriously confuse the bug counters.
An example that I like to use is a project I worked on in the late 1990s. An important part of the package that I delivered included a directory of several hundred C source files, mostly small, with at least one bug in each. The project's leaders got some chuckles out of mentioning this at meetings, commenting that they had no intention of letting me fix any of the bugs, since they were an important contribution to the project. This produced much confusion among the higher ups, who took some time understanding what was going on and how to account for it.
Some readers might have guessed what my task was: Building a regression-testing suite for the C compiler. The directory in question was for testing the diagnostics in the compiler. Each source file had one or more carefully designed "bugs". The makefile ran the C compiler on each, and sent the stderr output to a validator that verified that the compiler had successfully identified the bug and produced the right error message.
We had a bit of fun confusing people by asking them whether these test files really contained "bugs" or not. According to the C standard, they certainly did. But according to the test procedure, these weren't bugs; they were tools for testing the compiler. If they were "fixed", the test scripts would no longer be able to validate the compiler's error messages.
The higher-ups did finally understand the value of this, and agreed that although this batch of files were full of "bugs", they shouldn't be counted as such in the bug reports.
I also sometimes listed my job as the project "bugger". It's always fun to construct new words by stripping prefixes off words that usually have them. But I wasn't sure what term was best for the task of making sure that a routine actually contains the bug that the specs say it should have. "Debugging" doesn't seem right when the job is making sure that the right bug is there.
(Actually, I mostly thought that the project had a minor management problem, since any competent software development manager should understand the value of making sure that the software's error messages are correct and useful. But we all know how rarely this is actually done well. How often does your compiler point to the right place in the code when it produces an error message? And how often does the message describe the actual error?)
Yeah; all them Martians should move to California. They'd have more water than they've ever seen.
Hmmm ... Maybe they have. Maybe that's why we don't find them on Mars.
But I wonder how they survive the summer heat? It gets well above the melting point of ice in California in the summer.
Its the dry season. Rainy season ended a couple million years ago.
Depends on where you are. Most of the current climate models have the eastern part of North America getting wetter as the temperature rises, while the western part gets drier. The American South just got a week-long dose of that pattern, and there have been lots of news stories about the growing drought in most of the Southwest.
Yes, it has all happened before, and it'll happen again. OTOH, we are reaching a level of understanding that suggests that we could do something to stabilize things a bit, if only we could get our act together and do it.
Instead, the evidence is that we're pushing things to change faster than they would have naturally. So stick around and see what happens. It might not be a good time to move to California or New Mexico.
You know what, after all these years in IT, I say... give 'em as much data as they want. They'll choke and drown on it.
Nah; they'll just follow the model of the RIAA and other "business" firm that they love. Pretty soon we'll be reading about the FBI busting a terrorist ring - of 2nd graders in Hobunk. They'll have lots of "evidence" - the testimony of other 2nd graders in the school, including a couple that are FBI informants.
They'll also be prosecuting grandmas, though in that case, there might be some real reasons that granny has joined a terrorist organization. Or is it a sewing circle? It's hard to tell the difference, y'know, especially inside a multi-terabyte database.
I bet most of us could read everyone else's email at school...
Probably not most of us here, but when I was a grad student, I had a job for several years that included managing the main campus email system. I've also had similar jobs inside a number of companies, mostly because I was one of the few who had experience with the task. In all of them, after various email emergencies in which I had to dig into the system's innards, I also frequently found myself explaining (preferably in private) that yes, I had to look into some of their emails to fix the problems, and yes, all the people who work to support the email system can do the same. So maybe they should be a bit more careful about the sort of things they send, or remember delete the messages quickly. As part of the explanations, I'd try to make it clear that I had no intention of reporting any "content" to anyone, but others in the support team might not be so supportive. I'd also offer to teach them how to use an available encryption package, if they'd like. Few of them took me up on this, though a some did, and at least one of them got interested enough to become somewhat of an encryption expert.
In some cases, I've been pretty sure that others on the support team were digging around in the email system during their spare time. But I've never tried to verify this, much less report it to anyone.
I'm confused, can you change the analogy to something involving a 4-wheeled motorized device?
Sure. It's sorta like you buy a car, and you don't like the quality of the sound system and/or the GPS gadget that the dealer installed in it, so you replaced them when high-quality equipment that you like better. Maybe you also added a subwoofer. Then one day you take it in for routine maintenance or repair of a minor problem. When you get it back, you find that the gadgets you installed are gone, replaced with the "dealer authorized" products that the car came with. And the subwoofer is gone.
This isn't actually a totally hypothetical scenario, BTW. And with the advent of computerized controls inside our cars, we can look forward to the day soon when the inner workings of your car will be proprietary and "locked", and only authorized dealers (and "pirate" repair shops) will be able to work on it. And like the cell-phone system, there may even be internal parts of your car that are illegal to document or work on unless you're authorized by the auto company. Look into why the low-level telecomm library inside the G1 Android phone isn't open source. This is a precedent that is making auto companies quite happy. ;-)
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today.
Oh, I dunno; it seems to me that the news from "professional" sources has long had a reputation for biased, slanted news. It has mostly been in the form of quietly ignoring news that their employers and the advertisers don't want people to know about. Less often, it has been outright lies, though we saw a good example of this a few years back when the US media almost universally supported and pushed the idea that Iraq was the source of the attack on the World Trade Center. This was quite successful, as survey after survey showed that a large majority of Americans accepted the lie and the Iraq war.
We've also had a number of surveys before the last few US elections saying that the people who can correctly answer questions about candidates' policies are mostly the people who follow various political blogs (and the Daily Show and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me ;-). Those who get most of their political information from "professional" sources somehow haven't been nearly as good at correctly answering the surveyors' questions.
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
We've had a number of discussions here on slashdot about a very similar sort of bias. This is the ongoing malware/hacking stories, though there's a difference in the media bias: The new stories almost never mention any brand name in the stories about the latest virus/worm/phishing/whatever attack. In almost all of the stories, the attack only affects Microsoft systems, although the media invariably reports it as affecting "computers". This looks very much like a case of not reporting bad news about a major advertiser, though it may be also a case of reporters not even knowing that there are different kinds of computers. Anyway, the effect is to convince the general public that it's "computers" that are having a problem, not specific brand of computer (hardware and/or software). It's interesting that in similar stories about other industry recalls, the media usually reports brand names, model numbers, etc. But with computers, it's just "computers", with no identification needed. If you want to know the brands and models, you have to go to "amateur" news sites (like slashdot ;-) for the specific information.
In any case, people are noticing a serious problem with "professional" journalism: Now that we have the Internet, you can all too often get the real information only online, from the non-professional sources. Professional sources tend to show the same problems online that they have always had in print, mostly because professionals are paid and their employers are corporations that don't want some kinds of unbiased reporting.
Not that a random non-professional news source is necessarily reliable, of course. We still have to learn to read critically, and check stories with several sources (with different biases) before believing them or acting on them.
Would the Globe also close off access to their site from rival ISPs? Doesn't that undermine their advertising revenue from all those readers?
Indeed; if your (near-)monopoly ISP service costs "waytoofarkingmuch", the solution isn't to install a second corporation that would act as a "gateway" with a strong motive to block access to their competitors. It's to end the regulation that maintains the local monopolies like Comcast, and/or replace it with regulation that strongly punishes the sort of blocking games that Comcast has become known for. More competition probably would drive overpricing down better than new regulation, but the bias/blocking problem can probably only be handled by legal means.
Two examples that I've found useful in various online discussions:
1) If you go into any "tech" bookstore, up front you'll see some displays of the current best-sellers. If you open them and scan the first few pages, you'll typically find a URL where you can download them in PDF form, for free. So you can get them for free over the Net, but the books are selling well, typically at rather high prices. WTF is going on here? Simple: A printed book has a lot of advantages over a PDF on your disk. (And yes, the PDF has a lot of advantages over the hard copy form.) Try getting both and using them both as a reference; you'll quickly see what I mean. Every software lab I've worked in, including those devoted to network software, have had a small library of useful reference books. Sometime there are several copies of some of the books.
2) A year or two back, a musician whose name is well-known in the styles that he plays announced on several online forums that he had put together yet another collection of his new tunes. It wasn't actually in production yet, so he had put the whole collection online in several formats. He told us the URL and asked for comments and criticism. Over the next few days, there were a good number of questions posted asking "When can I buy the book?" He replied with comments like "Hey, I'm giving them out for free online; why are you all trying to pay me for them?" But of course, this was just joking, because he knew as well as the rest of us why. Yeah, we could download all the tunes, print them out, punch holes in the pages, and put them into a binder. Some of us did that. That takes time (and paper and ink and a binder, which aren't free). If we could send him $20 or so for the printed and bound version, we could spent the time saved playing music.
This example is interesting because it has shown one effect of online "publishing" which may be permanent. A common problem with music books is that the binding doesn't allow them to lie open on a music stand. It used to be that you had to copy the pages you want to play. Now, what you can do is send a message to the publisher (and announce on relevant music forums) that you aren't buying the book because of the bad binding; you have downloaded the music and printed it yourself. Music publishers are slowly learning that they have to use the right sort of binding, or they won't make many sales. When they all learn this, life will be a bit easier for a lot of musicians.
Anyway, both of these illustrate the fact that the physical medium and format may not be everything, but it can be an important part of why people buy hard copy rather than download, even when the hard copy is more expensive.
True in a general forum, perhaps, but slashdot isn't a general forum. It's explicitly aimed at nerds and geeks, people with a fair amount of technical background and interest. In such a setting, people will listen to offensive delivery and respond.
Someone here recently had a signature something like: "Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling with a pig in mud. After a while, you realize that your opponent enjoys it." This is a bit of humor that is based on an important truth: Scientists, engineers, and other technical people tend to enjoy argument. Things that other find offensive, they often find amusing and challenging. So language that would put off a typical "man in the street" will here often get grins as people jump into the fray.
I've seen this listed as one of the important cultural differences between the academic and business worlds. In a business environment, you learn to talk nice to people, no matter what you think of them, because you want them to cooperate. But a side effect is the organizational inefficiencies and occasional disaster that the business world is prone to suffer, as people very nicely avoid pointing out that something is being done very wrong.
OTOH, science tends to flourish in an academic setting, because mistakes can be pointed out publicly. People are expected to be able to take criticism (even nasty, ad-hominem insults), because silencing criticism leads to mistakes being propagated. If mistakes can be openly discussed, we're much more likely to correct them. Developing a thick skin and a BS filter is a small price to pay for something that usually leads to advances in our knowledge and understanding.
In any case, good luck trying to suppress the offensive, insulting language here. I'll predict that you won't succeed very well. And if people do manage to suppress such language, it'll probably make slashdot a much less useful forum, and most of the techie types will drift away to other forums where open discussion is allowed.
(Not that nicer language wouldn't be, well, nicer, y'know. But history shows that it can usually only be achieved by active suppression, and that usually entails loss of information. And we don't want that around here. ;-)
Actually, aspirin was originally a trade name, derived from the genus name Spiraea, which is a group of plants that contain acetyl salicylic acid. The common English name is meadowsweet, and teas made from such plants have been long used as we use aspirin now. The other common natural form of the drug is methyl salicylate, commonly called "oil of wintergreen", which is found in many other plants, including many mints and birches, plus of course the several plants called wintergreen. IMO, teas made from mint or black birch bark are much tastier than meadowsweet teas, but I'd generally use aspirin for medical purposes.
We have several Spiraea japonica bushes in our yard, an oriental meadowsweet that is reaching the "noxious weed" category here in New England. One of the bushes is growing in full sun, is about six feet in diameter, and gets lots of comments from neighbors during the month or so that it's completely covered with hundreds of clusters of small, pink flowers. I've never made tea from it, though.
There are too many computer geeks here.
No there aren't. Note that slashdot is explicitly advertised as "news for nerds", using one of the other popular calumnies against those of us with technical interests and education. Those are the people that this site was built for, and its success has been because it does a pretty good job of attracting the kind of people that its founders were trying to attract.
If you object to a forum that's run by and overpopulated by tech nerds and geeks, you're the one who doesn't belong here. But there are a zillion other news and discussion forums on the Web; you should look around for one that's more to your liking.
(Oh, and before someone else says it: Whoosh! ;-)
A few years ago, I read a complaint from medical researchers, aimed at botanists. The complaint was that when doing field research, botanists (and other biologists, too) usually record only the physical features of the specimens and a brief description of the environment. They rarely ask the local people about uses for the plants.
This is significant because a lot of pharmaceuticals start off as plant extracts, and this happened because someone learned that the local people used the plant in a "folk" treatment for some medical conditions. This information is not of great interest to most botanists, of course, so they don't bother with it. The result is a lot of duplicated field work by medical researchers (who aren't usually expert botanists). The suggestion was that medical research could benefit greatly from biological field researchers ("collectors") taking the minor extra step of asking the local people about any uses they knew for the collected specimens.
The article went on to give a few more detailed suggestions. One was based on a common occurrence: A medical researcher learns that a plant is used for pain relief, and decides to investigate, because new pain relievers are always useful. So he/she obtains a sample of the plant, sniffs it, says "Damn!", and goes on to the next specimen. The plant has a minty or wintergreen smell, implying that it's yet one more of the thousand or so plants known that produce methyl salicylate. It is a pain reliever, but we already have a synthetic version that can be bought cheaply and used in precisely controlled doses (aspirin). So knowing an additional bit of trivia, its smell, can be useful in pruning the research list.
Note that information about local uses and scent could easily be classified as "anecdotal". But such things can be useful hints about which things are worth further research. Or, as in the above case, it can be used to avoid unnecessary research.
Actually, the main reason that few stores give a discount for using cash is that their contracts with the credit-card companies explicitly forbids it. There are a few US states (and a few other countries) that have outlawed such contract terms. But in most places, it's legal, and so stores have a choice of giving every customer the same price or not be allowed to accept credit cards.
The summary (and TFA too ;-) reminded me of the recent debate over the definition of "planet".
One obvious problem is with the claim that we only knew of four "rocky planets" before this one. Since Mercury and Mars are included, it's likely that the definition they're using would also classify at least Titan and Triton as "rocky planets", giving us six.
But, (I can hear people saying), Titan and Triton aren't planets because they don't orbit the sun. Well, neither does this new planet; it orbits another star. Some people have seriously defined "planet" to mean objects that orbit our sun, and of course that definition immediately says that there can't be any more planets in the rest of the universe. If you accept this new object as a "rocky planet", what's your definition? You'll have to word it very carefully so that it includes things orbiting a distant star, but not those that are in orbits around local gas giants.
And if you find a good wording for that, you face another likely future problem: How small an object is allowed as the primary? Suppose a new rocky-planet-like object is found in orbit around a nearby "brown dwarf". The primary isn't a proper star, so is the object merely a moon and not a planet? It's also likely that we'll soon find Jupiter-class objects in free space, not orbiting a star; if one has a Mercury- or Mars-like object in orbit, would it be classified as a rocky planet or a moon? If it's a planet, then why isn't Ganymede also a planet?
I'd predict that in the not-too-distant future, as smaller things can be detected remotely, astronomers might decide to abandon such definitions that depend on the type of primary, and rewrite definitions so that they only use properties of the object itself. Either that, or they'll deprecate "planet" as a lay term that's not useful for scientific purposes. Dunno what they'd replace it with, though.
Meanwhile, the Sophists amongst us may be in for a lot of fun in the near future. Those of us who sat at the sidelines chuckling over the angst caused by the demoting of Pluto are probably looking forward to a lot more astronomical geek humor in the next few years.
A listener might attribute "better" sound to a more expensive violin, *and* the player might play the more expensive violin with more care, resulting in a "better" sound. A real double blind test would require a robot player that played each instrument exactly the same.
Some years back, I read of an interesting "double blind" test that showed another interesting complication.
The test setup was a violinist hidden behind a screen, playing the same pieces of music on several instruments. The listeners were a bunch of professional musicians and educators. Neither the play nor the listeners had any information about the instruments, just a number.
The result was that the player reported a quick judgement of each instrument's "quality", usually within just a few notes, and was consistent in that judgement even when the experimenters renumbered the instruments.
However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.
The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.
It would be interesting to read about other well-done experiments. But most of them probably aren't too useful, because the players and/or listeners know something about the instruments that they're listening to.
I learned a similar lesson a couple of decades ago, when I was shopping for a violin bow. I decided to carefully avoid looking at the names or prices of bows before playing with them. It turned out that my judgement was uncorellated with the price, and I ended up buying one of the cheaper bows. The shop owner just grinned when I chose that one, and said that he played with that type too, because he liked the sound.
But it's well known among players of bowed instruments that the best bow depends on the instrument, the player, and the style of music. It's meaningless to ask which bows are best without that information.
Why not make it compulsory to get networkable devices certified to be malware-free every year just as cars need to go through statutory vehicle inspections?
That might be a good idea, if we could solve the one major problem hinted at in the summary: Unlike the "vehicle" field, in the computer field the expected outcome would be that any non-Microsoft software would be automatically classified as malware, while all Microsoft-approved software would be approved. This worry isn't frivolous; we have plenty of precendent to say it's a likely outcome.
If we can figure out a way to ensure that the inspection system wouldn't be pwned by the Market Leader, we can expect strong resistance to such inspection schemes.
You missed the point. It's not punishment. It's quarantine. If a person gets sick with a contagious disease, it may not be their fault and you probably don't want to punish them.
Actually, in America, that's pretty much what people have done to the victims of AIDS. This is true in much of the rest of the world, too.
It's nothing new, either. Historically, the religious folks have often attributed disease as a punishment from God. And generally, if there's even a small correlation between a medical problem and some voluntary activity, many people are quick to blame the victim.
The US was settled by religious fanatics who were often hounded out of their home countries.
I read a comment a few years back by an Aussie who said he was happy that America got the religious believers and Australia got the criminals.
The great-great grandchildren of those criminals are, for the most part, good citizens. The descendants of the religious folks, however ...
But I can't really bring myself to think that any (relevant) group of people would counsciously be trying to "dumb down" anyone, let alone an entire country.
I think you're right. It's not really a conspiracy in any meaningful sense. Rather, there is a large part of the culture that is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. It's not just an American thing, of course; it's common in most societies.
Thus, when I was in high school (in a town that perhaps should remain anonymous, so people will suspect it's theirs ;-), I decided that math was interesting. So over a summer and for the first part of my 10th-grade year, I borrowed and read all the math books that I could find in the school. When I ran out of them, I asked the math teachers for more. Every one of them denied me the books. They all had the same excuse: I "wasn't ready" for such advanced math. So I went to some friends in a nearby college and asked them. I quickly got access to all sorts of college-level math texts.
You might think it's bizarre that math teachers would intentionally deny access to advanced texts to their best students (and I was that school's first student to get a "perfect" SAT score). But I've found that this isn't at all an unusual story. It's fairly common for students to be "tracked", i.e., restricted to learning that's considered appropriate for their age group. Most of the educators deserve praise for encouraging the slow students, but all too often this goes along with discouraging the students that learn quickly, by blocking access to further information.
I ran into the same thing when I moved on to college. I aced the math tests, and they gave me "advanced placement" - into a second-year calculus class. I couldn't talk them into letting me skip the class, which was a prerequisite for most of the physics classes that I wanted to take. I knew the subject better than the teacher, and could have taught the class. The teacher didn't like my attitude, and despite my getting the top score in all the tests, I got a C. His excuse was that I hadn't done all the class exercises. His real reason was fairly clear, however; I was an arrogant student who thought that I deserved to be allowed to skip his class. Again, the clear intent was to restrict my access to education (by wasting my time with material that I already knew), and it was at the college level.
None of this was unusual to me, of course. From an early age, I had the nickname "Einstein", and I understood that this was not a compliment. If you ask American geeks, you'll find that they all understand this problem quite well. But it's not any conspiracy of any anti-education, anti-math/science cabal. It's just the basic social attitudes of most of the society, with individuals (including educators) doing their part to uphold the society's standards as they understand them.
Here and there, I did have teachers who didn't have such attitudes, and let me work independently at my own speed. But there weren't very many of them, at any level.
Also, I noticed early on that most of my friends were the children of immigrants, who mostly were very strong supporters of their children's education. It's no surprise that these were usually the school's top students.