The solution isn't standardized DRM. It's no DRM. The music industry (and apparently government regulators) want you to believe the only practical solution is the former. The real solution is the latter, for all the reasons Jobs outlined, not the least of which is that DRM will NEVER stop piracy and ALWAYS be able to be defeated.
[devil's advocate]
I know that's what we'd like, and it's apparently what the EU and even Steve Jobs would like, but who's to say that it's really the "solution" for the music industry? Almost everyone I talk to seems to have some contorted excuse for why it's OK to copy music without rewarding the artist ("real musicians don't do it for the money", "they're already rich", "they hardly get any money per song anyway", "information wants to be free", "they should make their money from live performances", etc.). This just saddens me, and makes me wonder if a DRM-free music market could really work on a large scale (small indie labels don't count).
DRM can be broken, but it is moderately effective at starting garden variety home piracy. It might be the least bad of many options from the industry's perspective.
Thanks Steve - why not offer DRM free music from artists and labels that you already have granted you permission?
The same reason Apple is opposed to variable pricing: consistency. They don't want to clutter iTunes with complicated explanations of what you are and aren't allowed to do with each track of music. Consumers will get confused and pissed off when Britney Spears will play on their Zune but Christina Aguilera won't.
My collegues and I, being software engineers in X-Ray astronomy, disagree with you... It has been my observation that most of the science is done by physicists (and other scientists) who understand enough about computers to code their own small routine to illustrate their point, and hand it off to us software engineers to clean up, make reliable, and integrate in to a complete hardware system that is capable of performing the science work they need.
That's certainly true in many areas, but it doesn't make the software engineers scientists any more than machine shop technicians are scientists. Experimental physicists often draw up diagrams (with varying degrees of precision) of metal parts or circuits they need and take them to the machine shop or the electronics shop. The shop guys make the parts, often adding a fair amount of their own know-how. The shop guys are highly skilled and are essential to timely progress in many areas of experimental physics, but that doesn't make them scientists. This isn't an insult or a put-down, but simply a statement of the different roles people play.
Being a scientist typically involves some combination of hypothesizing, designing experiments, collecting data, analyzing data, comparing to theory, and drawing conclusions (theorists of course don't collect data from live experiments, although we do sometimes do simulations which produce "data").
With applied computer science, the line between technician and scientist is a bit blurry, but it's still there. Unless you're either working on theory*, or are collecting some sort of data with general implications**, you're probably not really doing computer science.
* For instance, complexity theory, theory of computation, and basic algorithm design are all types of theoretical computer science. AI, compiler design, operating system design, etc, can be applied computer science.
** For instance, studying human-computer interaction, observing real-world network behavior, etc.
What part of my post do you disagree with? From the article:
Apart from the vastness of the ocean and the outdated charts, there is another reason why the topography of the seabed could be poorly known: Some governments hang onto their information. How much exchange of information is there?
So, governments do classify their charts. Are you claiming that one crash proves the system doesn't work "pretty well"?
What is the current mechanism of position-fixing used for subs? Or is it more of the 'traditional' type of navigation where you know where you started, what direction you travelled, how fast and how long?
Subs have highly accurate inertial navigation systems. I've seen one on of the labs at Stanford where they develop the sensors, and it's amazing. It's kind of like a warehouse, with one of those huge 20 or 40 ton cranes. They use the crane to haul large masses around, and the sensors are able to detect the variations in the gravitational field caused by those objects.
On top of that, the navy has all sorts of charts of the sea floor, many of which are probably classified to some degree or other. Subs can use "landmarks" on the sea floor to determine their position. Since highly precise navigation is usually only important in coastal waters, this works pretty well.
GP is correct, actually. Suppose a user schedules an event for 9 am local time. The server re-maps this to UTC, then stores the UTC time. Then, government comes along and changes the mapping between local time and UTC by rescheduling the start of DST. Now, when the server maps back from UTC, the event ends up as 8 am local time. This is probably not what the user wanted.
It's good to hear that there are at least some journalists with an interest and an aptitude for science. I think the entire quantum computing academic community has been a bit bummed out about the quality of media coverage lately. Scott Aaronson's blog has a number of posts discussing this issue, including a letter that he wrote to The Economist about its particularly bad D-Wave coverage. There is also some good news--Scott got asked by Scientific American to write a summary of Shor's algorithm--but mostly reading press coverage of our field is just maddening.
Science is hard work -- is it really surprising that interpreting scientific research, and translating results into layman's terms, is in some ways almost as hard?
No, it's certainly not surprising. I get a reminder of how hard it is to explain this stuff every time I try to tell someone what I do and their eyes glaze over. I don't claim to be good at explaining it, whereas science journalists seem to be quite good at making stuff entertaining and bringing it down to a layman's level. The problem is the completely uncritical coverage of miraculous claims, and the glaring technical errors that horribly distort the science. Is it common for journalists/editors to run a draft of their article past an actual scientist in the field? If not, why doesn't this happen? Pride? Deadlines? Journalism guidelines?
After being burned on a previous interview, I'd now be very reluctant to give an interview about my work without the reporter agreeing to run a draft past me for me to check for technical accuracy. Do science journalists honor that kind of request? If not, can you give me a journalist's perspective on what I can do to ensure the resulting article is accurate? I ask because I've got a paper coming out soon that might attract a bit of media interest.
Disclaimer: IAAPRQC (I Am A Physicist Researching Quantum Computing).
I have no doubt their chip actually exists. That's not what people are skeptical of. There are more fundamental questions, a few of which I'll list below, along with my guesses as to the answers:
1) Does their chip demonstrate global coherence? Maybe.
2) If yes to (1), can they maintain that when scaling up to larger numbers of qubits? Almost certainly not with anything like their present design, unless they move to implement quantum error correction and the massive amounts of overhead that entails.
3) If no to either (1) or (2), can they implement a practical algorithm that gives at least a sqrt(N) speed-up over classical computers without global coherence? Possible, but would be surprising if true. This is probably the main thing the academic community is skeptical about--we want to see some peer-reviewed research from D-Wave on this.
4) Why is all the press coverage so horribly wrong and misinformative? Because it's more fun to make jokes and stupid statements about quantum mechanics than it is to actually write a clear and well-researched article. Also, talking to an actual physicist is far too scary for your typical J-school grad.
See this post on Scott Aaronson's blog for a much more informative and detailed analysis of D-Wave's claims.
You put words in my mouth to offer up an "easy" solution which you then proceed to knock down. Do you think I don't know that? Why do you think I said there were no easy solutions?
You were complaining that the current system of shielding shareholders from liability sucks. I inferred that you were suggesting we abolish or partially eliminate the corporate veil. You said there were no easy solutions, which I took to mean that you were acknowledging the details would be tricky. I then set out to categorically reject the idea of eliminating the corporate veil by attacking all possible methods of implementing what I took to be your general proposal.
If this is not at all what you were suggesting, then you were just complaining about the present situation without offering any solutions. Kind of whiney, if you ask me (not that I haven't been known to do just that).
Well, no, if all the small investors bail, sucking a huge (in aggregate) amount of capital from the market, the big investors are going to hurt big time.
The big investors will lose a lot of money on paper in the short term. Small investors will lose their shirts as they're forced to sell at whatever price they can get. Long-term, the big investors will have picked an enormous amount of undervalued assets, and will be very well off. (Wouldn't you like to buy stock in GOOG or AAPL or whatever at pennies on the dollar? Hello, dividend!)
I think what you mean to say is "I don't care enough to try to find out."
How would I do that? Just now I tried Googling the stock symbols of each of the companies and the word 'unethical', but didn't see anything. You're right that I should have done this before buying (the stocks were recommended to me by someone I trust, but all the same, I should have done my own check). Of course, this kind of cursory check is only going to uncover the very worst ethical abuses.
To dig deeper, I'd have to spend a few hours just finding out the names of all of the various mines these companies own interests in (probably a few dozen). Then, I'd probably have to spend about an hour per mine looking up the company that operates it and finding out what its track record is for environmental and child labor issues (just because they haven't yet been busted at mine X doesn't mean they're not doing anything wrong--past behaviour is probably a better indicator). Then, I'd have to see whether the royalty company had taken steps to stop or prevent abuse at the relevant mines. All told, we're probably talking nearly a week's worth of effort.
If you assign any sort of reasonable value to my time, the loss I'd take on investigating the companies is more than I would likely make on the stock. It's not that I don't care, it's that the logical choices are either "buy without knowing", or "don't buy", since finding out is so expensive. Does this mean it's unethical for me to invest?
Looking at it from another point of view, it's inefficient for thousands of investors to duplicate each others' efforts in conducting an ethical investigation of each company. It's much more efficient for that to be done once (and thoroughly) by the appropriate regulatory agencies. To make a half-assed analogy, should every consumer be responsible for personally determining the safety of all the products they buy, or should it be done once by a regulatory agency before the product is made available for sale?
I'm not offering any easy solutions, I'm not sure there are any easy ones.
Oh no, your solution is quite easy--eliminate the "corporate veil" and all that--it's just that it's misguided. What you're advocating would eliminate the ability of average people to own stock, and make it the exclusive province of those rich enough to afford all kinds of liability insurance and legal "firewalls" between them and their portfolios.
Think about it--if you're an average joe interested in buying a few shares of company X, how much time would it take you to ferret out any of X's wrongdoings? Even if you knew what to look for and somehow had access to all of the company's records, how long would it take you to sort through all of it? It's basically impossible unless you hire an army of lawyers and accountants, and that's only worth doing if you're planning to invest so much that you can afford take the hit on checking out the company. Even then, you'd probably still want to buy insurance in case you missed something.
Take me as an example. I have a small (2-4k) investment in two gold royalties companies. These companies don't operate mines themselves, but rather buy and sell royalty rights to other mines. They have no direct control over mine operations, but do help fund the development of new and existing mines. Do any of the mines from which they receive royalties do unethical things? Do those mines employ child labor or dump toxic chemicals or prop up evil dictators? I hope not, but I don't actually know. What's more, there's no practical way for me to find out. These royalties companies regularly acquire and sell interests in various mines, many of which are located in different countries, so it's hard to keep up to date. Most of the individual mines don't have websites, and, even if they did and were up to nefarious deeds, I doubt they'd show pictures of children working in cyanide gold leach pools. If one of the companies I own stock in is ethical, and the other is not, I would of course like to transfer my investment to the ethical company, but how can I possibly find out which is which? If I was faced with the possibility of criminal responsibility for the actions of others that were beyond my control and knowledge, I'd have to just exit the stock market. Most other small investors would have to do the same. Big investors would clean up, being the only ones who could stick around.
The logical response would be that companies should hire auditors and external accountants who could provide assurances to investors. Of course, if we have external verification of the company's ethics, why not just directly regulate rather than making investors liable? Bam, you're back to our present-day system, with all its inherent flaws and virtues. The system is not fundamentally broken--it just needs some fine-tuning.
All 19 of the 9/11 hijackers had valid photo ID and a valid boarding pass.
I know we all like to think the government is pure stupid with a touch of evil, or vice versa, but DHS has actually done better than you give them credit this time.
Many of the terrorists had IDs obtained either by bribing DMV officials or by using forged "primary" ID documents. If you read the proposed DHS rules, you'll see that they contain measures to require additional security checks for DMV employees, and measures to improve verification of primary ID documents and the data therein.
I read a good chunk of the DHS rules, and they've actually done a very good job, given what Congress told them to do. In fact, there were one or two spots where they flat-out told Congress to shove it (in bureaucrat-speak) because what Congress wanted wasn't possible or was ridiculous.
On its own, REAL ID won't catch terrorists, but, if paired with good intelligence and watch lists, could actually be effective. Whether it's worth the price (both monetary and otherwise) is another question.
Disclaimer: I am a physicist who works on quantum computing and also has a computer science background
Nobody is going to use Travelling Salesman in the real world to plan journeys. You can already quickly run an algorithm which will get you a journey plan that's maybe 99% as good as the optimum.
Actually, I think there is a theorem that finding an algorithm that efficiently produces highly-accurate approximate solutions to arbitrary problems in NP-hard is about as hard solving NP-complete problems exactly.
All this aside, it's worth noting that D-Wave is only claiming to provide a square-root speed-up for NP-complete problems, and there is some doubt as to whether they can even deliver that, as they scale up to larger numbers of quantum computers. While it's technically possible that P=NP, most people believe P!=NP, and it seems almost as likely that BQP != NP (BQP is the class of problems efficiently solvable with a quantum computer).
For an excellent discussion of what D-Wave has done and just how skeptical you should be, visit Scott Aaronson's blog. (No, I am not Scott Aaronson, but I do know him and can vouch for him being an extremely smart guy. I am also not the Quantum Pontiff, aka Dave Bacon.)
[Guilt by association] Is coming back into vogue? It never left, the media companies have based a lot of their cases on it.
Wow, it seems like everyone has no idea what's going on, even if they did RTFA. Every poster so far has either demonstrated an ignorance of civil lawsuits, or pretended that being in the swarm for a a copyrighted file is not a good indication you're trying to upload or download the file.
The burden of proof in a civil lawsuit is > 50%.. Constitutional protections on freedom of association have nothing to do with this. Being in a BitTorrent swarm is damn good evidence you're involved in uploading or downloading the file, since only about 0.0001% of BT users are actually running fake clients. Thus, membership in a BT swarm for a copyrighted file is almost certainly sufficient evidence for the RIAA to sue and win under civil copyright law. If we were talking criminal law, things might be different, but we're not.
I remember way back when the RIAA was suing Napster to get them shut down, and everybody was saying they should go after the individual infringers and not Napster, as Napster had legitimate uses. Well, now that's what they're doing. Maybe their sales are down because their business practices are stupid, but that doesn't change their right to enforce their copyright.
The only problem is polonium 210 is like pop-rocks candy, but you don't need water for it to fizzle. The decaying alpha particles will break nano particles off into the air. It fizzles all the time until its all broken down.
I'm not really sure what you mean. By "fizzle", do you mean a chemical reaction between polonium and air (which could be prevented by packing it in an appropriate airtight container in an inert gas), or do you mean nuclear decay? As I said before, the nuclear decay isn't a big problem because the emitted decay product is alpha particles, which are easily blocked by almost anything.
You have to inhale the "source" (the polonium itself), not the alpha particles, which are really just helium nuclei. The trail being left is minute amounts of polonium.
Just think - if you could buy as much polonium 210 as what was used against Litvinenko, do you really think that any postage service would want to deliver a radioactive package?
Actually, Polonium 210 is an alpha emitter, which means it's quite safe unless you ingest or inhale it (at which point even small amounts become deadly). Just putting it in a paper bag would shield you from much of the radiation. As long as it was securely packaged, I don't think it would be unsafe to mail.
That's because Microsoft now offer Flip4Mac's Quicktime codecs instead, which do work on Intel-Macs.
I use Flip4Mac myself, but it doesn't support WMP DRM, which was the whole point of this discussion. From the link you supplied (but clearly didn't read):
This product doesn't support content that is protected with Windows Media digital rights management (DRM).
Of course, WMP remains an option for people with PPC-based Macs
Buying music DRM'd in a dead-end (for your platform) format would be crazy, though. Why would anyone do that, and how can you claim it's a viable option?
Are they? Then I must be imagining the fact that Microsoft's Media Player 9 is available for OS X as a free download, that it works with all PlaysForSure DRM files sold by various sites, and that Apple's own software pages have a description of it and a link to Microsoft's download pages.
Sorry buddy, you're off in dreamland. Microsoft discontinued OS X support for Windows Media Player a while ago, and there is no OS X Intel-native version. While WMP might have been cross-platform, it's not anymore. Also, there's no Linux support.
As a Mac user, you'd have to be crazy to buy PlaysForSure content, knowing that your platform has been orphaned by Microsoft.
This is not quite true - it depends heavily on the particular journal, and the particular author. I've run a fairly decent-quality online journal [jmir.org] for the past few years, and I can attest that the copyediting, typesetting and formatting aspect of publishing is the most onerous and time-consuming.
These things improve the reading experience, and I appreciate them, but I don't think they're truly necessary. The arXiv does just fine with an almost fully-automated system. Aside from the occasional obvious crackpot, the scientific quality is comparable to the second-tier physics journals (I'm thinking of the Elsevier journals like Physics Letters).
Right now, the arXiv's goal is not to replace journals, but to be as fast and as efficient as possible at hosting preprints. If they set out to replace journals outright, and added a slighly more sophisticated review system and automated validation of input, they could do what most journals do with about 90% of the quality for about 10% of the cost. The remaining 10% could probably come from advertising, donations, government grants, or some combination thereof. Alternatively, you could sell "2-week advance notice subscriptions" for cheap, and make access free to anything over two weeks old.
The fact is, there is a great range in submission quality (in both content and layout), and for a fairly advanced journal that generates XHTML and PDF versions of articles from a standardized XML format (the one Pubmed Central uses), this can take on average 2-4h of copyediting and layout work per article.
I don't know too much about XML journal article formats, and would appreciate more info. PubMed's explanation didn't really help much. Why bother with XML? Why not just require authors to submit in LaTeX? Then you've got PDFs or DVIs or whatever "camera-ready" output you want with no further human interaction. If you combine it with a package like RevTex 4, you get standardized appearance and easy harvesting of meta-data. LaTeX predates XML and SGML (if you count SGML's age from when it was formalized as a standard). Why re-invent the wheel for publishing? My best guess so far is to accomodate authors who can't be bothered to learn LaTeX and insist on submitting Word docs, but that's about all I can think of. Why not just tell the Word users to suck it up and learn LaTeX?
To be honest, you only really need a calculator until you leave high school. Getting anything fancier than a TI-89 is a waste of money. In college, a simple scientific calculator will suffice for lower division classes. If you go into engineering you will be doing serious math by hand and serious calculations by computer (MATLAB or FORTRAN). No more "graphing" in the sense of the primitive capabilities of graphing calculators. Once you've learned about all the things they can do, you move onto more complex functions and calculations, more complex data sets, and you just don't need to use a calculator to figure out what y = x^2 looks like. I imagine science and mathematics is the same, except maybe with Maple or something.
Yes, this is 100% correct, except for the Maple comment. People in math & physics usually use Mathematica or Matlab. I don't think anyone uses Maple anymore. It was invented at the University of Waterloo, yet, when I visited there, it seemed like even they were using Mathematica.
Buy whatever calculator you can most easily resell. Once you graduate high school, sell it and get yourself a cheapo scientific calculator.
No, that's not the problem. Nobody is telling Apple to allow competitors to encrypt their songs using fairplay. What Norway is telling Apple is that songs that are encrypted with fairplay should be playable on devices other than the ipod.
So Apple is promoting device lock-in for portable players. Microsoft, a much bigger monopoly, is promoting lock-in for player software host OSs. All the other mainstream music DRM schemes are Windows-only. When Norway mandates that PlaysForSure, Napster, and Zune all have to be Mac- and Linux-compatible, then they might have a claim to being fair.
Really, what's worse, a monopoly on music players, or a monopoly on operating systems?
You realize there is a much easier counter-example where the socialists win, don't you?
Except my example really happened to my grandma, and your scenario is fictional. Anything can happen in fiction. My scenario is only one of many true stories I can tell you about the Canadian system screwing over my family members.
Also, are you really any better off if you don't get the surgery because of government wait lists than if you don't get it because of cost?
Government managed care is much more fair to everyone.
Fair is not the only important value. It's better to have an unfair system where the mean quality of service is good, rather than one in which the service is uniformly bad.
As a graduate student, I'm poor. My wife recently graduated and is starting her own business. Despite having very little money (rent alone takes about half our income), we can afford US medical insurance (which we pay for). Most people who don't have insurance in the US don't have it because it's a lower priority to them than cable TV or whatever, not because it's simply unaffordable.
...a *real* public healthcare sector incorporating research... can't [exist] while insanely profitable companies in the US keep snapping up the best and brightest. In a globalized economy you can't have one country with a publically funded medical research sector as its top workers will always be stolen by Pfizer or SKB.
In other words, socialism can't compete with capitalism. To elaborate, you can't socialize just medical research, and expect that to work. The "best and brightest", or at least a large chunk of them, will leave med research for some other sector where there's still a free market and they can get paid according to the value of their contributions. Are you going to socialize the entire economy, and have the government start dictating pay for everyone?
Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it.
To paraphrase Churchill, markets are the worst way of allocating resources, except for all the other ways we've tried. Medical care is a scarce resource. It may disgust you that money can buy better care, but the alternative is even worse. Countries like Canada with supposedly-universal healthcare really have no such thing--they have government-rationed health care. Here's an example: my grandmother, who lives in Canada and is in her eighties, had a problem with her hand. It resulted in her being in fairly bad pain every day, and made it impossible for her to use the hand for most things. The problem was easily treatable, but, because of her age, she was told she'd have to wait about a year for the surgery. My parents ended up taking her to an illegal* private clinic to get the surgery done at a cost of a few grand. Her hand is fine now, but she'd probably still be waiting if she'd stayed with in the system. Market forces: 1, Government managed care: 0.
Letting the government manage your care means they get to decide whether or not you are valuable enough to be worth treating. Doesn't having the government judge whether you are worth treating scare you, even just a little? I'm not advocating the libertarian philosophy of zero government involvement in medical care, and I think it's good that we have some sort of medical safety net for those who can't afford insurance, but giving the government total control over medical care would be a nightmare.
* Canadian law makes it illegal to charge for services that are covered under the Canada Health Care Act, but in the western provinces there are a number of private clinics that openly but illegally provide such services for a fee.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution isn't standardized DRM. It's no DRM. The music industry (and apparently government regulators) want you to believe the only practical solution is the former. The real solution is the latter, for all the reasons Jobs outlined, not the least of which is that DRM will NEVER stop piracy and ALWAYS be able to be defeated.
[devil's advocate]
I know that's what we'd like, and it's apparently what the EU and even Steve Jobs would like, but who's to say that it's really the "solution" for the music industry? Almost everyone I talk to seems to have some contorted excuse for why it's OK to copy music without rewarding the artist ("real musicians don't do it for the money", "they're already rich", "they hardly get any money per song anyway", "information wants to be free", "they should make their money from live performances", etc.). This just saddens me, and makes me wonder if a DRM-free music market could really work on a large scale (small indie labels don't count).
DRM can be broken, but it is moderately effective at starting garden variety home piracy. It might be the least bad of many options from the industry's perspective.
[/devil's advocate]
Thanks Steve - why not offer DRM free music from artists and labels that you already have granted you permission?
The same reason Apple is opposed to variable pricing: consistency. They don't want to clutter iTunes with complicated explanations of what you are and aren't allowed to do with each track of music. Consumers will get confused and pissed off when Britney Spears will play on their Zune but Christina Aguilera won't.
My collegues and I, being software engineers in X-Ray astronomy, disagree with you ... It has been my observation that most of the science is done by physicists (and other scientists) who understand enough about computers to code their own small routine to illustrate their point, and hand it off to us software engineers to clean up, make reliable, and integrate in to a complete hardware system that is capable of performing the science work they need.
That's certainly true in many areas, but it doesn't make the software engineers scientists any more than machine shop technicians are scientists. Experimental physicists often draw up diagrams (with varying degrees of precision) of metal parts or circuits they need and take them to the machine shop or the electronics shop. The shop guys make the parts, often adding a fair amount of their own know-how. The shop guys are highly skilled and are essential to timely progress in many areas of experimental physics, but that doesn't make them scientists. This isn't an insult or a put-down, but simply a statement of the different roles people play.
Being a scientist typically involves some combination of hypothesizing, designing experiments, collecting data, analyzing data, comparing to theory, and drawing conclusions (theorists of course don't collect data from live experiments, although we do sometimes do simulations which produce "data").
With applied computer science, the line between technician and scientist is a bit blurry, but it's still there. Unless you're either working on theory*, or are collecting some sort of data with general implications**, you're probably not really doing computer science.
* For instance, complexity theory, theory of computation, and basic algorithm design are all types of theoretical computer science. AI, compiler design, operating system design, etc, can be applied computer science.
** For instance, studying human-computer interaction, observing real-world network behavior, etc.
What part of my post do you disagree with? From the article:
Apart from the vastness of the ocean and the outdated charts, there is another reason why the topography of the seabed could be poorly known: Some governments hang onto their information. How much exchange of information is there?
So, governments do classify their charts. Are you claiming that one crash proves the system doesn't work "pretty well"?
What is the current mechanism of position-fixing used for subs? Or is it more of the 'traditional' type of navigation where you know where you started, what direction you travelled, how fast and how long?
Subs have highly accurate inertial navigation systems. I've seen one on of the labs at Stanford where they develop the sensors, and it's amazing. It's kind of like a warehouse, with one of those huge 20 or 40 ton cranes. They use the crane to haul large masses around, and the sensors are able to detect the variations in the gravitational field caused by those objects.
On top of that, the navy has all sorts of charts of the sea floor, many of which are probably classified to some degree or other. Subs can use "landmarks" on the sea floor to determine their position. Since highly precise navigation is usually only important in coastal waters, this works pretty well.
GP is correct, actually. Suppose a user schedules an event for 9 am local time. The server re-maps this to UTC, then stores the UTC time. Then, government comes along and changes the mapping between local time and UTC by rescheduling the start of DST. Now, when the server maps back from UTC, the event ends up as 8 am local time. This is probably not what the user wanted.
It's good to hear that there are at least some journalists with an interest and an aptitude for science. I think the entire quantum computing academic community has been a bit bummed out about the quality of media coverage lately. Scott Aaronson's blog has a number of posts discussing this issue, including a letter that he wrote to The Economist about its particularly bad D-Wave coverage. There is also some good news--Scott got asked by Scientific American to write a summary of Shor's algorithm--but mostly reading press coverage of our field is just maddening.
Science is hard work -- is it really surprising that interpreting scientific research, and translating results into layman's terms, is in some ways almost as hard?
No, it's certainly not surprising. I get a reminder of how hard it is to explain this stuff every time I try to tell someone what I do and their eyes glaze over. I don't claim to be good at explaining it, whereas science journalists seem to be quite good at making stuff entertaining and bringing it down to a layman's level. The problem is the completely uncritical coverage of miraculous claims, and the glaring technical errors that horribly distort the science. Is it common for journalists/editors to run a draft of their article past an actual scientist in the field? If not, why doesn't this happen? Pride? Deadlines? Journalism guidelines?
After being burned on a previous interview, I'd now be very reluctant to give an interview about my work without the reporter agreeing to run a draft past me for me to check for technical accuracy. Do science journalists honor that kind of request? If not, can you give me a journalist's perspective on what I can do to ensure the resulting article is accurate? I ask because I've got a paper coming out soon that might attract a bit of media interest.
Disclaimer: IAAPRQC (I Am A Physicist Researching Quantum Computing).
I have no doubt their chip actually exists. That's not what people are skeptical of. There are more fundamental questions, a few of which I'll list below, along with my guesses as to the answers:
1) Does their chip demonstrate global coherence?
Maybe.
2) If yes to (1), can they maintain that when scaling up to larger numbers of qubits?
Almost certainly not with anything like their present design, unless they move to implement quantum error correction and the massive amounts of overhead that entails.
3) If no to either (1) or (2), can they implement a practical algorithm that gives at least a sqrt(N) speed-up over classical computers without global coherence?
Possible, but would be surprising if true. This is probably the main thing the academic community is skeptical about--we want to see some peer-reviewed research from D-Wave on this.
4) Why is all the press coverage so horribly wrong and misinformative?
Because it's more fun to make jokes and stupid statements about quantum mechanics than it is to actually write a clear and well-researched article. Also, talking to an actual physicist is far too scary for your typical J-school grad.
See this post on Scott Aaronson's blog for a much more informative and detailed analysis of D-Wave's claims.
You put words in my mouth to offer up an "easy" solution which you then proceed to knock down. Do you think I don't know that? Why do you think I said there were no easy solutions?
You were complaining that the current system of shielding shareholders from liability sucks. I inferred that you were suggesting we abolish or partially eliminate the corporate veil. You said there were no easy solutions, which I took to mean that you were acknowledging the details would be tricky. I then set out to categorically reject the idea of eliminating the corporate veil by attacking all possible methods of implementing what I took to be your general proposal.
If this is not at all what you were suggesting, then you were just complaining about the present situation without offering any solutions. Kind of whiney, if you ask me (not that I haven't been known to do just that).
Well, no, if all the small investors bail, sucking a huge (in aggregate) amount of capital from the market, the big investors are going to hurt big time.
The big investors will lose a lot of money on paper in the short term. Small investors will lose their shirts as they're forced to sell at whatever price they can get. Long-term, the big investors will have picked an enormous amount of undervalued assets, and will be very well off. (Wouldn't you like to buy stock in GOOG or AAPL or whatever at pennies on the dollar? Hello, dividend!)
I think what you mean to say is "I don't care enough to try to find out."
How would I do that? Just now I tried Googling the stock symbols of each of the companies and the word 'unethical', but didn't see anything. You're right that I should have done this before buying (the stocks were recommended to me by someone I trust, but all the same, I should have done my own check). Of course, this kind of cursory check is only going to uncover the very worst ethical abuses.
To dig deeper, I'd have to spend a few hours just finding out the names of all of the various mines these companies own interests in (probably a few dozen). Then, I'd probably have to spend about an hour per mine looking up the company that operates it and finding out what its track record is for environmental and child labor issues (just because they haven't yet been busted at mine X doesn't mean they're not doing anything wrong--past behaviour is probably a better indicator). Then, I'd have to see whether the royalty company had taken steps to stop or prevent abuse at the relevant mines. All told, we're probably talking nearly a week's worth of effort.
If you assign any sort of reasonable value to my time, the loss I'd take on investigating the companies is more than I would likely make on the stock. It's not that I don't care, it's that the logical choices are either "buy without knowing", or "don't buy", since finding out is so expensive. Does this mean it's unethical for me to invest?
Looking at it from another point of view, it's inefficient for thousands of investors to duplicate each others' efforts in conducting an ethical investigation of each company. It's much more efficient for that to be done once (and thoroughly) by the appropriate regulatory agencies. To make a half-assed analogy, should every consumer be responsible for personally determining the safety of all the products they buy, or should it be done once by a regulatory agency before the product is made available for sale?
I'm not offering any easy solutions, I'm not sure there are any easy ones.
Oh no, your solution is quite easy--eliminate the "corporate veil" and all that--it's just that it's misguided. What you're advocating would eliminate the ability of average people to own stock, and make it the exclusive province of those rich enough to afford all kinds of liability insurance and legal "firewalls" between them and their portfolios.
Think about it--if you're an average joe interested in buying a few shares of company X, how much time would it take you to ferret out any of X's wrongdoings? Even if you knew what to look for and somehow had access to all of the company's records, how long would it take you to sort through all of it? It's basically impossible unless you hire an army of lawyers and accountants, and that's only worth doing if you're planning to invest so much that you can afford take the hit on checking out the company. Even then, you'd probably still want to buy insurance in case you missed something.
Take me as an example. I have a small (2-4k) investment in two gold royalties companies. These companies don't operate mines themselves, but rather buy and sell royalty rights to other mines. They have no direct control over mine operations, but do help fund the development of new and existing mines. Do any of the mines from which they receive royalties do unethical things? Do those mines employ child labor or dump toxic chemicals or prop up evil dictators? I hope not, but I don't actually know. What's more, there's no practical way for me to find out. These royalties companies regularly acquire and sell interests in various mines, many of which are located in different countries, so it's hard to keep up to date. Most of the individual mines don't have websites, and, even if they did and were up to nefarious deeds, I doubt they'd show pictures of children working in cyanide gold leach pools. If one of the companies I own stock in is ethical, and the other is not, I would of course like to transfer my investment to the ethical company, but how can I possibly find out which is which? If I was faced with the possibility of criminal responsibility for the actions of others that were beyond my control and knowledge, I'd have to just exit the stock market. Most other small investors would have to do the same. Big investors would clean up, being the only ones who could stick around.
The logical response would be that companies should hire auditors and external accountants who could provide assurances to investors. Of course, if we have external verification of the company's ethics, why not just directly regulate rather than making investors liable? Bam, you're back to our present-day system, with all its inherent flaws and virtues. The system is not fundamentally broken--it just needs some fine-tuning.
All 19 of the 9/11 hijackers had valid photo ID and a valid boarding pass.
I know we all like to think the government is pure stupid with a touch of evil, or vice versa, but DHS has actually done better than you give them credit this time.
Many of the terrorists had IDs obtained either by bribing DMV officials or by using forged "primary" ID documents. If you read the proposed DHS rules, you'll see that they contain measures to require additional security checks for DMV employees, and measures to improve verification of primary ID documents and the data therein.
I read a good chunk of the DHS rules, and they've actually done a very good job, given what Congress told them to do. In fact, there were one or two spots where they flat-out told Congress to shove it (in bureaucrat-speak) because what Congress wanted wasn't possible or was ridiculous.
On its own, REAL ID won't catch terrorists, but, if paired with good intelligence and watch lists, could actually be effective. Whether it's worth the price (both monetary and otherwise) is another question.
Disclaimer: I am a physicist who works on quantum computing and also has a computer science background
Nobody is going to use Travelling Salesman in the real world to plan journeys. You can already quickly run an algorithm which will get you a journey plan that's maybe 99% as good as the optimum.
Actually, I think there is a theorem that finding an algorithm that efficiently produces highly-accurate approximate solutions to arbitrary problems in NP-hard is about as hard solving NP-complete problems exactly.
All this aside, it's worth noting that D-Wave is only claiming to provide a square-root speed-up for NP-complete problems, and there is some doubt as to whether they can even deliver that, as they scale up to larger numbers of quantum computers. While it's technically possible that P=NP, most people believe P!=NP, and it seems almost as likely that BQP != NP (BQP is the class of problems efficiently solvable with a quantum computer).
For an excellent discussion of what D-Wave has done and just how skeptical you should be, visit Scott Aaronson's blog. (No, I am not Scott Aaronson, but I do know him and can vouch for him being an extremely smart guy. I am also not the Quantum Pontiff, aka Dave Bacon.)
[Guilt by association] Is coming back into vogue? It never left, the media companies have based a lot of their cases on it.
Wow, it seems like everyone has no idea what's going on, even if they did RTFA. Every poster so far has either demonstrated an ignorance of civil lawsuits, or pretended that being in the swarm for a a copyrighted file is not a good indication you're trying to upload or download the file.
The burden of proof in a civil lawsuit is > 50%.. Constitutional protections on freedom of association have nothing to do with this. Being in a BitTorrent swarm is damn good evidence you're involved in uploading or downloading the file, since only about 0.0001% of BT users are actually running fake clients. Thus, membership in a BT swarm for a copyrighted file is almost certainly sufficient evidence for the RIAA to sue and win under civil copyright law. If we were talking criminal law, things might be different, but we're not.
I remember way back when the RIAA was suing Napster to get them shut down, and everybody was saying they should go after the individual infringers and not Napster, as Napster had legitimate uses. Well, now that's what they're doing. Maybe their sales are down because their business practices are stupid, but that doesn't change their right to enforce their copyright.
Grow up, slashdot.
The only problem is polonium 210 is like pop-rocks candy, but you don't need water for it to fizzle. The decaying alpha particles will break nano particles off into the air. It fizzles all the time until its all broken down.
I'm not really sure what you mean. By "fizzle", do you mean a chemical reaction between polonium and air (which could be prevented by packing it in an appropriate airtight container in an inert gas), or do you mean nuclear decay? As I said before, the nuclear decay isn't a big problem because the emitted decay product is alpha particles, which are easily blocked by almost anything.
You have to inhale the "source" (the polonium itself), not the alpha particles, which are really just helium nuclei. The trail being left is minute amounts of polonium.
Disclaimer: IAAP (I Am A Physicist)
Just think - if you could buy as much polonium 210 as what was used against Litvinenko, do you really think that any postage service would want to deliver a radioactive package?
Actually, Polonium 210 is an alpha emitter, which means it's quite safe unless you ingest or inhale it (at which point even small amounts become deadly). Just putting it in a paper bag would shield you from much of the radiation. As long as it was securely packaged, I don't think it would be unsafe to mail.
I use Flip4Mac myself, but it doesn't support WMP DRM, which was the whole point of this discussion. From the link you supplied (but clearly didn't read): Of course, WMP remains an option for people with PPC-based Macs
Buying music DRM'd in a dead-end (for your platform) format would be crazy, though. Why would anyone do that, and how can you claim it's a viable option?
Are they? Then I must be imagining the fact that Microsoft's Media Player 9 is available for OS X as a free download, that it works with all PlaysForSure DRM files sold by various sites, and that Apple's own software pages have a description of it and a link to Microsoft's download pages.
Sorry buddy, you're off in dreamland. Microsoft discontinued OS X support for Windows Media Player a while ago, and there is no OS X Intel-native version. While WMP might have been cross-platform, it's not anymore. Also, there's no Linux support.
As a Mac user, you'd have to be crazy to buy PlaysForSure content, knowing that your platform has been orphaned by Microsoft.
I know of several chemical and mechanical engineers who do (including me). For symbolic manipulation Maple rocks.
I've tried both, and while they each have their quirks, Mathematica seems to be more powerful. It can of course also do symbolic manipulation.
This is not quite true - it depends heavily on the particular journal, and the particular author. I've run a fairly decent-quality online journal [jmir.org] for the past few years, and I can attest that the copyediting, typesetting and formatting aspect of publishing is the most onerous and time-consuming.
These things improve the reading experience, and I appreciate them, but I don't think they're truly necessary. The arXiv does just fine with an almost fully-automated system. Aside from the occasional obvious crackpot, the scientific quality is comparable to the second-tier physics journals (I'm thinking of the Elsevier journals like Physics Letters).
Right now, the arXiv's goal is not to replace journals, but to be as fast and as efficient as possible at hosting preprints. If they set out to replace journals outright, and added a slighly more sophisticated review system and automated validation of input, they could do what most journals do with about 90% of the quality for about 10% of the cost. The remaining 10% could probably come from advertising, donations, government grants, or some combination thereof. Alternatively, you could sell "2-week advance notice subscriptions" for cheap, and make access free to anything over two weeks old.
The fact is, there is a great range in submission quality (in both content and layout), and for a fairly advanced journal that generates XHTML and PDF versions of articles from a standardized XML format (the one Pubmed Central uses), this can take on average 2-4h of copyediting and layout work per article.
I don't know too much about XML journal article formats, and would appreciate more info. PubMed's explanation didn't really help much. Why bother with XML? Why not just require authors to submit in LaTeX? Then you've got PDFs or DVIs or whatever "camera-ready" output you want with no further human interaction. If you combine it with a package like RevTex 4, you get standardized appearance and easy harvesting of meta-data. LaTeX predates XML and SGML (if you count SGML's age from when it was formalized as a standard). Why re-invent the wheel for publishing? My best guess so far is to accomodate authors who can't be bothered to learn LaTeX and insist on submitting Word docs, but that's about all I can think of. Why not just tell the Word users to suck it up and learn LaTeX?
To be honest, you only really need a calculator until you leave high school. Getting anything fancier than a TI-89 is a waste of money. In college, a simple scientific calculator will suffice for lower division classes. If you go into engineering you will be doing serious math by hand and serious calculations by computer (MATLAB or FORTRAN). No more "graphing" in the sense of the primitive capabilities of graphing calculators. Once you've learned about all the things they can do, you move onto more complex functions and calculations, more complex data sets, and you just don't need to use a calculator to figure out what y = x^2 looks like. I imagine science and mathematics is the same, except maybe with Maple or something.
Yes, this is 100% correct, except for the Maple comment. People in math & physics usually use Mathematica or Matlab. I don't think anyone uses Maple anymore. It was invented at the University of Waterloo, yet, when I visited there, it seemed like even they were using Mathematica.
Buy whatever calculator you can most easily resell. Once you graduate high school, sell it and get yourself a cheapo scientific calculator.
No, that's not the problem. Nobody is telling Apple to allow competitors to encrypt their songs using fairplay. What Norway is telling Apple is that songs that are encrypted with fairplay should be playable on devices other than the ipod.
So Apple is promoting device lock-in for portable players. Microsoft, a much bigger monopoly, is promoting lock-in for player software host OSs. All the other mainstream music DRM schemes are Windows-only. When Norway mandates that PlaysForSure, Napster, and Zune all have to be Mac- and Linux-compatible, then they might have a claim to being fair.
Really, what's worse, a monopoly on music players, or a monopoly on operating systems?
You realize there is a much easier counter-example where the socialists win, don't you?
Except my example really happened to my grandma, and your scenario is fictional. Anything can happen in fiction. My scenario is only one of many true stories I can tell you about the Canadian system screwing over my family members.
Also, are you really any better off if you don't get the surgery because of government wait lists than if you don't get it because of cost?
Government managed care is much more fair to everyone.
Fair is not the only important value. It's better to have an unfair system where the mean quality of service is good, rather than one in which the service is uniformly bad.
As a graduate student, I'm poor. My wife recently graduated and is starting her own business. Despite having very little money (rent alone takes about half our income), we can afford US medical insurance (which we pay for). Most people who don't have insurance in the US don't have it because it's a lower priority to them than cable TV or whatever, not because it's simply unaffordable.
...a *real* public healthcare sector incorporating research... can't [exist] while insanely profitable companies in the US keep snapping up the best and brightest. In a globalized economy you can't have one country with a publically funded medical research sector as its top workers will always be stolen by Pfizer or SKB.
In other words, socialism can't compete with capitalism. To elaborate, you can't socialize just medical research, and expect that to work. The "best and brightest", or at least a large chunk of them, will leave med research for some other sector where there's still a free market and they can get paid according to the value of their contributions. Are you going to socialize the entire economy, and have the government start dictating pay for everyone?
Market forces are not a good way to allocate the resource of life, as life is neither a resource nor should financial capacity have any bearing on who should be allocated how much of it.
To paraphrase Churchill, markets are the worst way of allocating resources, except for all the other ways we've tried. Medical care is a scarce resource. It may disgust you that money can buy better care, but the alternative is even worse. Countries like Canada with supposedly-universal healthcare really have no such thing--they have government-rationed health care. Here's an example: my grandmother, who lives in Canada and is in her eighties, had a problem with her hand. It resulted in her being in fairly bad pain every day, and made it impossible for her to use the hand for most things. The problem was easily treatable, but, because of her age, she was told she'd have to wait about a year for the surgery. My parents ended up taking her to an illegal* private clinic to get the surgery done at a cost of a few grand. Her hand is fine now, but she'd probably still be waiting if she'd stayed with in the system. Market forces: 1, Government managed care: 0.
Letting the government manage your care means they get to decide whether or not you are valuable enough to be worth treating. Doesn't having the government judge whether you are worth treating scare you, even just a little? I'm not advocating the libertarian philosophy of zero government involvement in medical care, and I think it's good that we have some sort of medical safety net for those who can't afford insurance, but giving the government total control over medical care would be a nightmare.
* Canadian law makes it illegal to charge for services that are covered under the Canada Health Care Act, but in the western provinces there are a number of private clinics that openly but illegally provide such services for a fee.