First of all, most of the Stingers in Afghanistan haven't been maintained properly, and probably don't work.
Even if they do, they have IFF transceivers, and can't be used against "friendly" (NATO) forces. The Taliban could remove the IFF transceivers, but that takes a fair amount of know-how, and is unlikely.
Hmm, what will the next Internet Explorer license look like?
"You may not use the Software to view any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography. Or Slashdot."
I wonder if the lawyers at various companies have contests to see who can sneak the most outrageous EULA past customers. I can just see it,
"Hey Ted, now everybody who buys our software X has to name their firstborn after me."
"Ha! That's nothing. Everybody who buys our stuff has to GIVE me their firstborn."
We get to cheat. In order for a black hole to "eat" something the potential munchie needs to have a De Broglie wavelength no larger than the diameter of the black hole (according to prevailing wisdom in how black holes and quantum mechanics will interact).
That's prevailing wisdom. Problem is, gravity is the one remaining fundamental force that hasn't been reconcilled with the others. The strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces all "play nice" in a theoretical sense, but we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that fits with the standard model. We don't really know, in other words. Still, I tend to think it would just "boil off" via Hawking radiation before it became a problem.
Your point about electric charge is a good one. Presumably, if the beamline was tuned just right (and that's by no means trivial), the black hole could be accelerated back out of the accelerator, and probably into orbit. I suppose it could be contained by magnetic fields until we were ready to launch it (or we could just wait until it boiled off). Not sure whether it would hit much stuff on the way out--I'm too tired to do the calculations. Also, LHC isn't my specialty--I was just working at a cyclotron, which is a horse of a different colour.
Then some well-paid foreign hacker can crack the server, launch the missile at Canada and all heck breaks loose.
I'm not too worried about that. Most of Canada is nearly uninhabited, so you'd probably only kill some deer and the rednecks who were hunting them. Given the average American's knowledge of Canadian geography, I'm not too worried about you guys finding our major population centres, even though they're pretty much all within a 100 kilometres of the US border (and yes, that's how we spell "centres" here).:-)
Seriously, though, I must urge my fellow Canadians to visit this government site and send them your comments on the proposed DMCA-like revisions to Canadian copyright law.
As an ISP, you have to get a search warrant to log your own traffic? What the hell? You don't even need to log message contents to prove it's spam--just look for patterns generated by mass-emailers (shitloads of messges of about the same size all going out at once). True, they could be mailing customers, but, if they're a small company and mailing 10 million people, that's kinda unlikely.
WTF is up with Australia? The government can rape you any way they want, but, as a private individual or company, you have to tiptoe around restrictive slander laws, you seem to get screwed every time you connect to the internet, and only China and Afghanistan have worse internet censorship. And you call yourselves a democracy?
Why are there no protestors outside women's only gyms? That's blatant sexual discrimination, and yet nobody seems to be concerned. The reason is that, because it's a private establishment, they can admit whoever the hell they want.
If women's-only gyms can kick me out for having a penis, then surely bookstores can kick people out for having previously shoplifted (last I checked, having a penis wasn't a crime, although there are some extremists who'd like to change that). Bookstores can even kick you out if you look suspicious--it's their right, just as it's your right to not shop there.
Go ahead and complain, boycott, and write letters. I wish you luck. Please don't ask for a ban on private use of this technology, though (I know you haven't said that, but I'm sure somebody here is thinking that).
That's why it bothers me. While I agree with you, before long, there won't be many places to shop that don't implement this - if it works.
True. If it works, everyone will use it. So where's the problem?
Re the last comment (allowing them back in your store): you know, I agree with you here, too, but the whole point of the judicial system was SUPPOSED to be for rehabilitation.
No, that's just one of the four purposes of imprisoning criminals. Here are the other three: punishment, getting them off the streets so they don't break more laws, and appeasing victims.
Yes, you lock up violent offenders and such, but for "the rest of them", it's supposed to make you not want to go to jail anymore, fly straight and narrow.
Sure, and maybe, after you start getting kicked out of all the Borders stores around, you'll realize that, if you keep shoplifting, you won't be able to shop anywhere.
I'm going to take my turn as the token Slashdot libertarian today, and defend Borders while criticizing the Tampa municipal government for doing the same thing.
First of all, Borders is legally within their rights to do this. The store is private property, and they're perfectly within their rights to do this. Hell, I think it would even be legal for them to say something to say, "no customers of skin color X allowed", although the public relations disaster would destroy them instantly (note: they couldn't do the same for employees).*
OTOH, different laws and standards apply to what governments can do. City streets are public property, not private. It's highly inappropriate for the government to forcibly take your money (taxation), then use it to institute machine surveillance of you and other innocent citizens.
I used to work at a grocery store, and, if we ever caught a shoplifter, we would make them sign something acknowledging their crime, and make them promise never to enter one of our stores again. If they did, we'd prosecute. Enforcement was left to in-store detectives, and I can tell you they weren't 100% accurate. Even if the occasional false alarm happens with the Borders system, it only has to be better than a detective to be worth-while and a benefit to everybody.
The appropriate response to a "positive" ID by this face recognition system is closer surveillance by humans. If a human confirms that the person in question is a previous shoplifter, then they should be asked to leave. If, on the other hand, Guido and his rent-a-cop friends immediately start beating you with the Webster Unabridged New English Dictionary because their system beeped, then you can sue them. If it offends you on principle, shop elsewhere.
Here's a quick summary of why this is different than the Tampa situation:
With Borders, if you don't like it, you can shop elsewhere. With Tampa, you have to move and never visit the
entire city.
The Borders system is funded by money voluntarily given to them by customers (i.e. from profits). The Tampa system is funded by money they forcibly take from citizens through taxation.
Borders stores are private property. Tampa streets are public property.
Borders can legally ask you to leave the store for any reason they want. Tampa can't do the same. (This highlights differences in what legal protections you have on private vs. public property).
Somebody in an earlier message said something to the effect that it's not right to further persecute shoplifters who have already been prosecuted and done their time. Of that person, I ask, if somebody stole from you, did a few weeks in jail, then was released, would you feel obligated to let him back in your house? Why should it be any different for Borders?
*Generally, private organizations are allowed to discriminate with their membership on racial, religious, or sexual lines. Obviously, the Catholic Church down the street isn't legally obliged to allow Church of Satan members to join, even if denying them constitutes religious discrimination. Gyms are allowed to restrict their customer base to women-only. If they can do that, then bookstores can restrict customers to people who aren't in their database of shady characters. When you start employing people for money, then different laws apply.
In reality, the type of people who have long industry experience, or many advanced degrees you would NEVER want in an Elementary teaching position. The job requirements are completely different. Being smart isn't enough: you need the proper training.
Given the results coming out of the American school system, I think it's safe to say that those with the "proper training" don't know what the hell they're doing, either.
knowing the subject material has very little to do with knowning how to teach the subject material.
That's just plain ridiculous. Sure, you need to know how to teach, but actually being able to teach something well requires a deep knowledge of the subject. The level of understanding required to teach something is much deeper than that required to apply it yourself. Also, some of the thrill of science and the enthusiasm might rub off if we had real researchers in schools.
I don't think it's an efficient use of resources to have PhDs teaching classes all the time, but one or two "guest lectures" a month in high schools and elementary schools would be a great idea.
Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the MacOS scheme is equivalent to having 4 character extensions which aren't displayed, with the corresponding problem of having malicious executables named README.txt (or even README)?
Yes, I've noticed that. You'd also have to create a custom icon for the file, because the OS would otherwise associate the "vbs" (or whatever) icon with the file--a dead giveaway that it wasn't a text file. Of course, custom icons don't tend to survive being emailed, so it's *reasonably* safe.
Yes, and that's the reason the Mac has 31-character filename limits. Having 33-byte strings would have been annoying. Ars said the file names were limited to 32 characters, and I corrected them by saying 31. If they'd said filename strings, they would have been right.
I think the reason Apple went to a dual file type system (extensions and metadata) is because it's too hard to implement the necessary level of interoperability otherwise. Suppose you want to keep the usual Classic MacOS method of just having file type/creator code metadata. You merrily store your files on your hard drive, with no extensions in sight.
Now you share your drive on a heterogenous network. A Win98 box connects, and looks at your files via NFS. Does the MacOS X-side NFS server automatically translate the filenames and add extensions?
Then another MacOS X user uses ssh to connect to your box. He types 'ls'. Does he see "virtual" extensions or not? What if it's a Windows user telnetting in? How would your box even know what OS the remote user was coming from?
It's just too easy to run into inconsistencies if you stick with the system of mapping file name extensions. Yes, extensions annoy me, especially since older versions of MacOS are stuck with a 31 character limit (yes, it's 31, not 32--Ars is wrong), and I have to keep file names short to be backwards compatible. Unfortunately, it's just another bad MS decision we have to live with.
Oh my god, isn't this a steaming pile of bullshit.
Gore graduated from Harvard with honors in 1969. George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 with a GPA he said could be described as a "gentleman's C."
Al Gore enlisted and served in Vietnam through 1971. George Bush joined the Texas National Guard -- getting pushed ahead of a waiting list of about 500.
Al served as a military journalist in the Vietnam war--not a soldier. He had bodyguards (not the norm for journalists) arranged for him by his senator father so he'd never be in harm's way.
After Gore returned from Vietnam, he took graduate courses at Vanderbilt while simultaneously holding a job as a newspaper reporter.
Would that be the five courses he failed at Vanderbilt?
Considering that Bush lost his home country,
Bush won his country. You obviously don't understand the electoral system of your own country, and why it is the way it is. The electoral college exists because the USA is representative republic of semi-autonomous states. The electoral college serves to increase the relative power of small states, thus preventing them from being ignored in the presidential election.
Uneducated yahoos in the bible belt preferred Bush.
And homeless drug addicts preferred Gore (especially the ones Democratic supporters bribed on election day with free packs of cigarettes and rides to the polls). What's your point?
I'm not sure what you mean by "observational science". All science is observational, in the science that observation and experiment is the ultimate test of theory. If it wasn't, it would either be math, philosophy, or just pure bullshit. I agree with you that evolutionary theory isn't a very good theory, but I hold that it's better than creationism.
About your point that radioisotope dating methods may not be accurate due to changes in physical constants, please stop being ridiculous. Scientists have possible evidence for a 0.001% change in a physical constant unrelated to radioactive decay in a place 12 billion light years away and time 12 billion years ago. That's hardly reason to criticize radioisotope dating. You're obviously tremendously biased towards anything that might lend a shred of support to your theory. That's not objective science.
As to why I have issues with evolutionary theory, here are my tests for a good scientific theory:
1. Must be falsifiable. If there is no reasonable way it could be proved wrong, it's not science.
2. Must make verifiable predictions. If a theory doesn't make any predictions that can be checked, it's not terribly useful.
It's pretty damn hard to think of how you could disprove evolution. Just about anything you find, the biologists will make up an explanation for. Evolutionary theory also doesn't really make testable predictions. About all it's good for is explaining things after-the-fact. Of course, creationism fails both tests in an even worse manner. Thus, lacking a better alternative, I believe in evolution, but hold healthy doubts.
Here's a quick summary, for those opposed to NYTimes registration (incidentally, feel free to use the login slashdot66, password slashdot):
Astrophysicists have observed spectra from metallic atoms in gas clouds up to 12 billion light years away. Certain patterns in these spectra cannot be explained with current physics, and suggest that the fine structure constant (alpha) had a value slightly different in that place and time. From memory, I believe alpha is a dimensionless number with a value near (but not exactly) 137. The difference between alpha as we know it, and the apparent alpha in these gas clouds is about 0.001%. The observation was made from the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Something like this, if confirmed, would almost certainly win the discoverers a Nobel Prize. Also, such a discovery would apparently also support string theory (although that's outside my area of research).
I'll stop karma whoring now, and return you to your regularly-scheduled uninformed flamefest.
There are not enough users of non-Microsoft operating systems to make profitable a company dedicated only to porting high-profile games to them.
Uh, what about MacPlay? Or were you forgetting about non-Linux non-Microsoft OSs? I think the problem is the demographics of the user base, not the size.
I think this may be a case where a bit more thinking and literature research about the problem would help a great deal.
We're looking at using MINUIT, a package written by the computing divsion at CERN, as our fitting engine. MINUIT's algorithms are quite advanced, and it's commonly recognized within the physics community as the best general-purpose fitting package out there.
I think you may not realize how complicated the functions we're trying to fit are. Here's the quick and simple version: we study magnetic fields within superconductors and semiconductors on a microscopic level. We do this by using spin-polarized muons or radioactive light ions as a probe, and measuring anisotropy of the emitted decay products. That data then has to be compared against complex models of superconductivity. The computationally expensive part here is calculating the values predicted by the model for a given set of parameters. This has to be done once for each data point to calculate chi-squared, and repeated many times (once in each iteration of the fitting process), each time with different parameters. The models typically contain difficult integrals which must be evaluated numerically thousands of times with very high precision.
Since the function we're trying to fit changes fairly often depending on the sample and measurement techniques used, it's not practical for us to spend huge amounts of time optimizing each individual function to be fitted. The fitting package is already optimized, so the only thing left is to parallelize it.
I'm trying to design a specialized data-fitting program to be used for accelerator-based condensed matter physics (and maybe ultimately other branches of science as well). I need information on adding clustering support to this program. Here's a brief description of what the program does:
The user writes a small chunk of code that calculates the function they're trying to fit the data to. We require the user to code the function him/herself because speed is important, and some of these functions are too difficult for Mathematica or the like to fit. Once the user writes their function, it's linked (dynamically) with the rest of the code. The user then passes in a parameter file, and away it goes.
Many of these fits can take days, and, since they often have to be repeated many times with slight changes to the fitted function or initial parameters, this is a serious concern.
Can this new approach to Linux clusters be used here? We have tons of Linux boxes lying around that are being used for other things, but have lots and lots of spare cycles. We probably couldn't afford a dedicated processing farm, but we could easily live with something like distributed.net where the program transparently takes all the spare cycles.
I know the problem is parallelizable, since each node can calculate the value of the function at a few of the data points, then send back to the "master" the chi-squared contribution of those points. Each iteration of the fitting process, the master sends out the current parameter values, and then the nodes grind away... There's not too much communication required.
One of my big concerns is how to get the user-written function from the "master" computer to all the "slaves". It's unrealistic to expect the user to manually install it on all the machines each time something in the function gets tweaked and it's recompiled. Are there pre-existing standards on how to send code to nodes in a cluster, then have it executed?
Any advice or pointers to good starting places on distributed computing would be much appreciated.
BTW, as a hint to all the other comp sci geeks out there--physics is a great place to find new and challenging computing problems (I'm not claiming this is one). In particular, the particle physics people often have to deal with spectacular data rates, and do extremely complicated event reconstruction. Check it out some time.
May I suggest one more distribution, one I've heard a lot of good things about--it's called a life. Who the hell has time to try five different Linux distributions just to figure out which one he likes best? Well, maybe you do, but, since the guy is asking, he probably wants useful advice and not somebody saying "figure it out yourself". Sheesh.
Excellent response. I agree with all of your points but one:
The hysteria surrounding 'viral' spreading of copyrighted works, is just that, hysteria. One need look no futher than the software industry to see that copy protection is not necessary. The software industry remains extremely profitable, even though people can, and do, pirate thousands of products.
Software is different from books, music, and other copyrightable forms of IP in a few ways. First, books and music tend to be much more compact (a few megs vs. hundreds), making music & books easier to "trade". Second, businesses are the main (paying) consumers of most software, whereas individuals consume most books and music (computer games being the exception here--note that they do have big piracy problems). Third, books and music don't require tech support, patches, updates, manuals or other services to be useful.
All in all, I think there are enough differences that you can't draw a direct analogy between software and music/books. I do think you're right that IP ultimately must rely on a social contract and public good will to work. Whether it will work is still up for debate.
When was the last time you heard about private individuals making major discoveries in the automobile industry? Probably quite a while ago. As industries mature, the innovations stop happening in garages, and start happening in corporate labs. That's the typical lifecycle of any industry as it matures.
The problem with the computer industry is that that wasn't happening, so companies had to turn to the courts to force it to happen. As for the dot coms, I think that was Wall Street's way of saying, "party's over, nerds, now get to work". I just hope things don't end the way I think they will (no more individual innovation in the computer industry, death of open source from IP lawsuits, etc.).
On another note, I'm going to play devil's (lawyer's?) advocate and defend the DMCA (sort of):
Devil's Advocate:
People on/. are constantly slamming companies for hiding behind laws like DMCA instead of building better copy protection/encryption into their products. At the same time, when they try to improve their "rights management system" or whatever, we laugh at their feeble attempts *cough*SDMI*cough*. We know that the problem of protecting trusted content on an untrusted system is impossible. Ultimately, if we can see/hear it, we can capture it.
What's it going to be, folks? How are content providers supposed to protect their works? Unbreakable encryption is a myth, and once your encryption is broken, the hack can be distributed to millions within hours. The hack may have originally been created for legitimate access, but it can just as easily be used by your local warez d00d. The same is not true of analog content--even if you figure out how to photocopy a book, you haven't made it any easier for others to do so. Since technology provides no complete solution, content providers must turn to the law.
Predictably, the law (DMCA) is screwed up (when does government ever get anything right?). Think of it as an alpha release. Other countries, wiser from watching the US experience, will make better, fairer laws. Unfortunately, alpha may be all the US gets.
Seeing as I haven't seen a realistic, workable alternative economic system for what we now call Intellectual Property, I figure we should probably stick with the current concept of IP, and try to patch it up so it can survive the "digital age" without being too broken or stupid.
Ok, the letter from Dolby was none to clear about what the actual problem was, but I suspect it's a patent infringement, not copyright. As such, it has little or nothing to do with the DMCA.
Put plainly, if you develop an encoding/decoding standard, and intelligently patent key parts of that standard, you own it. Doesn't matter if anybody reverse-engineers it in a clean room. You still own it until the patent expires.
The only ways around the patent are to find a completely different way of decoding/encoding the data (very unlikely, if the patent attorney did his job), or doing everything in a country in which the invention is not patented, does not have extradition treaties (etc) with the US, and is not part of whatever the hell that international convention on IP is called. Such countries generally aren't good places to live or work, for other reasons.
Is Dolby in the wrong? I'd have to see the details of the patent to say. It may be genuine innovation, or it may be more along the lines of the Amazon one-click patent.
Perhaps the reason we have so much trouble with domain names is that we have the wrong economic metaphor (or none at all). Why not treat domain names as real estate? If you're the first to stake a claim to coke.biz, congratulations. Coke can get into a bidding war with Pepsi to buy it. Same as if you were the first to stake a claim to a piece of swamp loaded with oil, or whatever. OTOH, if you use coke.biz to put up a site that is confusingly similar to the Coke website, then and only then could you be sued for trademark infringement.
This whole WIPO/ICANN deal doesn't seem so hot. Time for something new?
Alternatively, I do like the idea of opening the TLDs to everyone, but it might get confusing for Lusers ("coke.biz? Don't you mean coke.biz.com? Argh! I'll just go back to AOL...")
It might be somehow connected with the fact that men can pee standing up. If worst comes to worst, and you have to use one of those super-nasty gas station bathrooms, you can always just kick open the door, do your business, and go, all without having touched anything but your zipper. Women don't have that option.
At least, that's my guess. You should probably ask a woman, and/. isn't the best place to find them (see that poll from a while ago).
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, most of the Stingers in Afghanistan haven't been maintained properly, and probably don't work.
Even if they do, they have IFF transceivers, and can't be used against "friendly" (NATO) forces. The Taliban could remove the IFF transceivers, but that takes a fair amount of know-how, and is unlikely.
Hmm, what will the next Internet Explorer license look like?
"You may not use the Software to view any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services, infringe any intellectual property or other rights of these parties, violate any state, federal or international law, or promote racism, hatred or pornography. Or Slashdot."
I wonder if the lawyers at various companies have contests to see who can sneak the most outrageous EULA past customers. I can just see it,
"Hey Ted, now everybody who buys our software X has to name their firstborn after me."
"Ha! That's nothing. Everybody who buys our stuff has to GIVE me their firstborn."
We get to cheat. In order for a black hole to "eat" something the potential munchie needs to have a De Broglie wavelength no larger than the diameter of the black hole (according to prevailing wisdom in how black holes and quantum mechanics will interact).
That's prevailing wisdom. Problem is, gravity is the one remaining fundamental force that hasn't been reconcilled with the others. The strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces all "play nice" in a theoretical sense, but we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that fits with the standard model. We don't really know, in other words. Still, I tend to think it would just "boil off" via Hawking radiation before it became a problem.
Your point about electric charge is a good one. Presumably, if the beamline was tuned just right (and that's by no means trivial), the black hole could be accelerated back out of the accelerator, and probably into orbit. I suppose it could be contained by magnetic fields until we were ready to launch it (or we could just wait until it boiled off). Not sure whether it would hit much stuff on the way out--I'm too tired to do the calculations. Also, LHC isn't my specialty--I was just working at a cyclotron, which is a horse of a different colour.
Then some well-paid foreign hacker can crack the server, launch the missile at Canada and all heck breaks loose.
:-)
I'm not too worried about that. Most of Canada is nearly uninhabited, so you'd probably only kill some deer and the rednecks who were hunting them. Given the average American's knowledge of Canadian geography, I'm not too worried about you guys finding our major population centres, even though they're pretty much all within a 100 kilometres of the US border (and yes, that's how we spell "centres" here).
Seriously, though, I must urge my fellow Canadians to visit this government site and send them your comments on the proposed DMCA-like revisions to Canadian copyright law.
As an ISP, you have to get a search warrant to log your own traffic? What the hell? You don't even need to log message contents to prove it's spam--just look for patterns generated by mass-emailers (shitloads of messges of about the same size all going out at once). True, they could be mailing customers, but, if they're a small company and mailing 10 million people, that's kinda unlikely.
WTF is up with Australia? The government can rape you any way they want, but, as a private individual or company, you have to tiptoe around restrictive slander laws, you seem to get screwed every time you connect to the internet, and only China and Afghanistan have worse internet censorship. And you call yourselves a democracy?
Why are there no protestors outside women's only gyms? That's blatant sexual discrimination, and yet nobody seems to be concerned. The reason is that, because it's a private establishment, they can admit whoever the hell they want.
If women's-only gyms can kick me out for having a penis, then surely bookstores can kick people out for having previously shoplifted (last I checked, having a penis wasn't a crime, although there are some extremists who'd like to change that). Bookstores can even kick you out if you look suspicious--it's their right, just as it's your right to not shop there.
Go ahead and complain, boycott, and write letters. I wish you luck. Please don't ask for a ban on private use of this technology, though (I know you haven't said that, but I'm sure somebody here is thinking that).
That's why it bothers me. While I agree with you, before long, there won't be many places to shop that don't implement this - if it works.
True. If it works, everyone will use it. So where's the problem?
Re the last comment (allowing them back in your store): you know, I agree with you here, too, but the whole point of the judicial system was SUPPOSED to be for rehabilitation.
No, that's just one of the four purposes of imprisoning criminals. Here are the other three: punishment, getting them off the streets so they don't break more laws, and appeasing victims.
Yes, you lock up violent offenders and such, but for "the rest of them", it's supposed to make you not want to go to jail anymore, fly straight and narrow.
Sure, and maybe, after you start getting kicked out of all the Borders stores around, you'll realize that, if you keep shoplifting, you won't be able to shop anywhere.
First of all, Borders is legally within their rights to do this. The store is private property, and they're perfectly within their rights to do this. Hell, I think it would even be legal for them to say something to say, "no customers of skin color X allowed", although the public relations disaster would destroy them instantly (note: they couldn't do the same for employees).*
OTOH, different laws and standards apply to what governments can do. City streets are public property, not private. It's highly inappropriate for the government to forcibly take your money (taxation), then use it to institute machine surveillance of you and other innocent citizens.
I used to work at a grocery store, and, if we ever caught a shoplifter, we would make them sign something acknowledging their crime, and make them promise never to enter one of our stores again. If they did, we'd prosecute. Enforcement was left to in-store detectives, and I can tell you they weren't 100% accurate. Even if the occasional false alarm happens with the Borders system, it only has to be better than a detective to be worth-while and a benefit to everybody.
The appropriate response to a "positive" ID by this face recognition system is closer surveillance by humans. If a human confirms that the person in question is a previous shoplifter, then they should be asked to leave. If, on the other hand, Guido and his rent-a-cop friends immediately start beating you with the Webster Unabridged New English Dictionary because their system beeped, then you can sue them. If it offends you on principle, shop elsewhere.
Here's a quick summary of why this is different than the Tampa situation:
Somebody in an earlier message said something to the effect that it's not right to further persecute shoplifters who have already been prosecuted and done their time. Of that person, I ask, if somebody stole from you, did a few weeks in jail, then was released, would you feel obligated to let him back in your house? Why should it be any different for Borders?
*Generally, private organizations are allowed to discriminate with their membership on racial, religious, or sexual lines. Obviously, the Catholic Church down the street isn't legally obliged to allow Church of Satan members to join, even if denying them constitutes religious discrimination. Gyms are allowed to restrict their customer base to women-only. If they can do that, then bookstores can restrict customers to people who aren't in their database of shady characters. When you start employing people for money, then different laws apply.
In reality, the type of people who have long industry experience, or many advanced degrees you would NEVER want in an Elementary teaching position. The job requirements are completely different. Being smart isn't enough: you need the proper training.
Given the results coming out of the American school system, I think it's safe to say that those with the "proper training" don't know what the hell they're doing, either.
knowing the subject material has very little to do with knowning how to teach the subject material.
That's just plain ridiculous. Sure, you need to know how to teach, but actually being able to teach something well requires a deep knowledge of the subject. The level of understanding required to teach something is much deeper than that required to apply it yourself. Also, some of the thrill of science and the enthusiasm might rub off if we had real researchers in schools.
I don't think it's an efficient use of resources to have PhDs teaching classes all the time, but one or two "guest lectures" a month in high schools and elementary schools would be a great idea.
Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the MacOS scheme is equivalent to having 4 character extensions which aren't displayed, with the corresponding problem of having malicious executables named README.txt (or even README)?
Yes, I've noticed that. You'd also have to create a custom icon for the file, because the OS would otherwise associate the "vbs" (or whatever) icon with the file--a dead giveaway that it wasn't a text file. Of course, custom icons don't tend to survive being emailed, so it's *reasonably* safe.
Yes, and that's the reason the Mac has 31-character filename limits. Having 33-byte strings would have been annoying. Ars said the file names were limited to 32 characters, and I corrected them by saying 31. If they'd said filename strings, they would have been right.
I think the reason Apple went to a dual file type system (extensions and metadata) is because it's too hard to implement the necessary level of interoperability otherwise. Suppose you want to keep the usual Classic MacOS method of just having file type/creator code metadata. You merrily store your files on your hard drive, with no extensions in sight.
Now you share your drive on a heterogenous network. A Win98 box connects, and looks at your files via NFS. Does the MacOS X-side NFS server automatically translate the filenames and add extensions?
Then another MacOS X user uses ssh to connect to your box. He types 'ls'. Does he see "virtual" extensions or not? What if it's a Windows user telnetting in? How would your box even know what OS the remote user was coming from?
It's just too easy to run into inconsistencies if you stick with the system of mapping file name extensions. Yes, extensions annoy me, especially since older versions of MacOS are stuck with a 31 character limit (yes, it's 31, not 32--Ars is wrong), and I have to keep file names short to be backwards compatible. Unfortunately, it's just another bad MS decision we have to live with.
Oh my god, isn't this a steaming pile of bullshit.
Gore graduated from Harvard with honors in 1969. George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968 with a GPA he said could be described as a "gentleman's C."
Gore dropped or failed out of not one but two graduate schools.
Al Gore enlisted and served in Vietnam through 1971. George Bush joined the Texas National Guard -- getting pushed ahead of a waiting list of about 500.
Al served as a military journalist in the Vietnam war--not a soldier. He had bodyguards (not the norm for journalists) arranged for him by his senator father so he'd never be in harm's way.
After Gore returned from Vietnam, he took graduate courses at Vanderbilt while simultaneously holding a job as a newspaper reporter.
Would that be the five courses he failed at Vanderbilt?
Considering that Bush lost his home country,
Bush won his country. You obviously don't understand the electoral system of your own country, and why it is the way it is. The electoral college exists because the USA is representative republic of semi-autonomous states. The electoral college serves to increase the relative power of small states, thus preventing them from being ignored in the presidential election.
Uneducated yahoos in the bible belt preferred Bush.
And homeless drug addicts preferred Gore (especially the ones Democratic supporters bribed on election day with free packs of cigarettes and rides to the polls). What's your point?
I'm not sure what you mean by "observational science". All science is observational, in the science that observation and experiment is the ultimate test of theory. If it wasn't, it would either be math, philosophy, or just pure bullshit. I agree with you that evolutionary theory isn't a very good theory, but I hold that it's better than creationism.
About your point that radioisotope dating methods may not be accurate due to changes in physical constants, please stop being ridiculous. Scientists have possible evidence for a 0.001% change in a physical constant unrelated to radioactive decay in a place 12 billion light years away and time 12 billion years ago. That's hardly reason to criticize radioisotope dating. You're obviously tremendously biased towards anything that might lend a shred of support to your theory. That's not objective science.
As to why I have issues with evolutionary theory, here are my tests for a good scientific theory:
1. Must be falsifiable. If there is no reasonable way it could be proved wrong, it's not science.
2. Must make verifiable predictions. If a theory doesn't make any predictions that can be checked, it's not terribly useful.
It's pretty damn hard to think of how you could disprove evolution. Just about anything you find, the biologists will make up an explanation for. Evolutionary theory also doesn't really make testable predictions. About all it's good for is explaining things after-the-fact. Of course, creationism fails both tests in an even worse manner. Thus, lacking a better alternative, I believe in evolution, but hold healthy doubts.
Here's a quick summary, for those opposed to NYTimes registration (incidentally, feel free to use the login slashdot66, password slashdot):
Astrophysicists have observed spectra from metallic atoms in gas clouds up to 12 billion light years away. Certain patterns in these spectra cannot be explained with current physics, and suggest that the fine structure constant (alpha) had a value slightly different in that place and time. From memory, I believe alpha is a dimensionless number with a value near (but not exactly) 137. The difference between alpha as we know it, and the apparent alpha in these gas clouds is about 0.001%. The observation was made from the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Something like this, if confirmed, would almost certainly win the discoverers a Nobel Prize. Also, such a discovery would apparently also support string theory (although that's outside my area of research).
I'll stop karma whoring now, and return you to your regularly-scheduled uninformed flamefest.
There are not enough users of non-Microsoft operating systems to make profitable a company dedicated only to porting high-profile games to them.
Uh, what about MacPlay? Or were you forgetting about non-Linux non-Microsoft OSs? I think the problem is the demographics of the user base, not the size.
I think this may be a case where a bit more thinking and literature research about the problem would help a great deal.
We're looking at using MINUIT, a package written by the computing divsion at CERN, as our fitting engine. MINUIT's algorithms are quite advanced, and it's commonly recognized within the physics community as the best general-purpose fitting package out there.
I think you may not realize how complicated the functions we're trying to fit are. Here's the quick and simple version: we study magnetic fields within superconductors and semiconductors on a microscopic level. We do this by using spin-polarized muons or radioactive light ions as a probe, and measuring anisotropy of the emitted decay products. That data then has to be compared against complex models of superconductivity. The computationally expensive part here is calculating the values predicted by the model for a given set of parameters. This has to be done once for each data point to calculate chi-squared, and repeated many times (once in each iteration of the fitting process), each time with different parameters. The models typically contain difficult integrals which must be evaluated numerically thousands of times with very high precision.
Since the function we're trying to fit changes fairly often depending on the sample and measurement techniques used, it's not practical for us to spend huge amounts of time optimizing each individual function to be fitted. The fitting package is already optimized, so the only thing left is to parallelize it.
I'm trying to design a specialized data-fitting program to be used for accelerator-based condensed matter physics (and maybe ultimately other branches of science as well). I need information on adding clustering support to this program. Here's a brief description of what the program does:
The user writes a small chunk of code that calculates the function they're trying to fit the data to. We require the user to code the function him/herself because speed is important, and some of these functions are too difficult for Mathematica or the like to fit. Once the user writes their function, it's linked (dynamically) with the rest of the code. The user then passes in a parameter file, and away it goes.
Many of these fits can take days, and, since they often have to be repeated many times with slight changes to the fitted function or initial parameters, this is a serious concern.
Can this new approach to Linux clusters be used here? We have tons of Linux boxes lying around that are being used for other things, but have lots and lots of spare cycles. We probably couldn't afford a dedicated processing farm, but we could easily live with something like distributed.net where the program transparently takes all the spare cycles.
I know the problem is parallelizable, since each node can calculate the value of the function at a few of the data points, then send back to the "master" the chi-squared contribution of those points. Each iteration of the fitting process, the master sends out the current parameter values, and then the nodes grind away... There's not too much communication required.
One of my big concerns is how to get the user-written function from the "master" computer to all the "slaves". It's unrealistic to expect the user to manually install it on all the machines each time something in the function gets tweaked and it's recompiled. Are there pre-existing standards on how to send code to nodes in a cluster, then have it executed?
Any advice or pointers to good starting places on distributed computing would be much appreciated.
BTW, as a hint to all the other comp sci geeks out there--physics is a great place to find new and challenging computing problems (I'm not claiming this is one). In particular, the particle physics people often have to deal with spectacular data rates, and do extremely complicated event reconstruction. Check it out some time.
May I suggest one more distribution, one I've heard a lot of good things about--it's called a life. Who the hell has time to try five different Linux distributions just to figure out which one he likes best? Well, maybe you do, but, since the guy is asking, he probably wants useful advice and not somebody saying "figure it out yourself". Sheesh.
I think Canada must be firewalled, too. Every time I try to go to a page linked from Slashdot, I get a "server busy" error. Must be a conspiracy...
Excellent response. I agree with all of your points but one:
The hysteria surrounding 'viral' spreading of copyrighted works, is just that, hysteria. One need look no futher than the software industry to see that copy protection is not necessary. The software industry remains extremely profitable, even though people can, and do, pirate thousands of products.
Software is different from books, music, and other copyrightable forms of IP in a few ways. First, books and music tend to be much more compact (a few megs vs. hundreds), making music & books easier to "trade". Second, businesses are the main (paying) consumers of most software, whereas individuals consume most books and music (computer games being the exception here--note that they do have big piracy problems). Third, books and music don't require tech support, patches, updates, manuals or other services to be useful.
All in all, I think there are enough differences that you can't draw a direct analogy between software and music/books. I do think you're right that IP ultimately must rely on a social contract and public good will to work. Whether it will work is still up for debate.
The problem with the computer industry is that that wasn't happening, so companies had to turn to the courts to force it to happen. As for the dot coms, I think that was Wall Street's way of saying, "party's over, nerds, now get to work". I just hope things don't end the way I think they will (no more individual innovation in the computer industry, death of open source from IP lawsuits, etc.).
On another note, I'm going to play devil's (lawyer's?) advocate and defend the DMCA (sort of):
Seeing as I haven't seen a realistic, workable alternative economic system for what we now call Intellectual Property, I figure we should probably stick with the current concept of IP, and try to patch it up so it can survive the "digital age" without being too broken or stupid.
Ok, the letter from Dolby was none to clear about what the actual problem was, but I suspect it's a patent infringement, not copyright. As such, it has little or nothing to do with the DMCA.
Put plainly, if you develop an encoding/decoding standard, and intelligently patent key parts of that standard, you own it. Doesn't matter if anybody reverse-engineers it in a clean room. You still own it until the patent expires.
The only ways around the patent are to find a completely different way of decoding/encoding the data (very unlikely, if the patent attorney did his job), or doing everything in a country in which the invention is not patented, does not have extradition treaties (etc) with the US, and is not part of whatever the hell that international convention on IP is called. Such countries generally aren't good places to live or work, for other reasons.
Is Dolby in the wrong? I'd have to see the details of the patent to say. It may be genuine innovation, or it may be more along the lines of the Amazon one-click patent.
Perhaps the reason we have so much trouble with domain names is that we have the wrong economic metaphor (or none at all). Why not treat domain names as real estate? If you're the first to stake a claim to coke.biz, congratulations. Coke can get into a bidding war with Pepsi to buy it. Same as if you were the first to stake a claim to a piece of swamp loaded with oil, or whatever. OTOH, if you use coke.biz to put up a site that is confusingly similar to the Coke website, then and only then could you be sued for trademark infringement.
This whole WIPO/ICANN deal doesn't seem so hot. Time for something new?
Alternatively, I do like the idea of opening the TLDs to everyone, but it might get confusing for Lusers ("coke.biz? Don't you mean coke.biz.com? Argh! I'll just go back to AOL...")
It might be somehow connected with the fact that men can pee standing up. If worst comes to worst, and you have to use one of those super-nasty gas station bathrooms, you can always just kick open the door, do your business, and go, all without having touched anything but your zipper. Women don't have that option.
/. isn't the best place to find them (see that poll from a while ago).
At least, that's my guess. You should probably ask a woman, and