But down the road if they start doing research on creating custom DNA strands What you're trying to describe and what this article are about are radically different things, to the point of having nothing to do with each other.
(in essense synthetic life) That's a leap of a few orders of magnitude.
because it wouldn't be mapped to an identical natural strand. It can potentially be bad. Your hypothetical that has nothing to do with this article has the potential to "be bad." Yes.
If they can create a custom made bacteria that attacks cancer cells Seriously, just stop. You're now writing science fiction. As with much science fiction, your story might one day be possible, but today it has nothing to do with research that's being done.
The problem is that correlating those two factors requires that we understand the climate on a macroscopic level
The points in that article are useful, but fail to address the concerns raised by the likes of Freeman Dyson as to the reliability of our current models.
This is just poor arm-waving. We understand (since the 1970s) that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas. The problem is that we don't understand much about how it impacts the Earth's climate. The way we determine that now is to build a model which predicts past events using CO2 as a forcer. This is fine, but it's quite possible that these models over or under emphasize the importance of CO2, and ignore other factors. For example (and this is only an example for sake of the more abstract discussion of the models), I'm not aware of any model that takes ground-cover water vapor into account. Water, as you almost certainly know, is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but is traditionally discounted as a candidate for recent warming because cloud-cover water vapor maintains a fairly constant balance through precipitation. Add more water and you just get more precipitation. For ground-cover water vapor this isn't the case. When you irrigate a field, you create a constant blanket of water vapor over it that wasn't there when you started. If you look at the extent of human irrigation over the past few decades, you will find an explosion in irrigation.
Is this related to warming? Perhaps, but the more important question is: why are we so quick to assume that we understand the relationship between humans and climate when we're still at such an early stage of our understanding of the climate?
Now, action is a different issue. Should we take action to reduce our impact on the environment? Absolutely. However, there are many priorities there, and once the panicked hype around global warming is stripped away, you find that other forms of pollution result in death and injury to far too many people today. We don't have to wait for an environmental apocalypse. It's already here. If you don't believe me, try living on a fish-rich diet for a few years without suffering from mercury poisoning. My stepfather found that difficult; about as difficult as he found tying his own shoes once mercury poisoning set in.
[git] gives you private branches and commits Subversion provides the capability for private branching an commits. Problem is, you failed to define "private". If you mean private in the sense that you can work on your own without having others' changes affect your personal work area (or visa versa), then subversion provides private branching. If you are talking about privacy in the sense of others not knowing what you're doing, then you need svk for that.
And specifically with git vs. SVN, git offers true branches and tags (unlike SVN's bizarre, nonsensical "simulations") Subversion provides true branches. It just does so in a directory-tree model. There's no mathematical difference between subversion's branches and those of another VCS, just an interface difference which I have come to appreciate. I'll admit, though, that there was a significant mental hurdle for me to get over. Tagging in subversion is another case that feels "odd", but is mathematically identical. Because copying a tree doesn't feel like adding a tag, it's off-putting at first, but there really is no difference due to the copy-on-write nature of subversion's directory management.
and true merges. You phrased that incorrectly. Subversion has true merges. What it lacks is merge tracking. For that you need to use something like svk.
For instance, in SVN, how do you move a changeset from the tip of one branch to another? Of course, you're using the terminology of git to ask a subversion question, which isn't exactly reasonable. The real question, here, is how you move changes between branches which is fundamentally an abstraction of merging. As noted above, the merge is trivial. The merge tracking (that allows consistency to be maintained post-merge) is not in subversion's toolkit. svk provides this, and moving changes between branches sensibly is quite easy using it.
Instead of considering the deeper, underlying issues, the SVN team just cloned CVS's behavior and made it cleaner. This is absolutely untrue. On so many levels that it demonstrates how little you know about those two tools. You cannot emulate subversion using cvs because subversion implements many things that cvs never did (directory tracking, repository versioning, copy/move-on-write, among many others). If you don't understand the tools, you are best avoiding a debate about their capabilities.
Will you argue against ID by use of the common descent argument? One doesn't need to argue against ID, any more than one needs to argue against solipsism. If you want to pursue that particular philosophical rabbit-hole, feel free. There's nothing wrong with that. What typically gets scientists' riled up is when someone calls ID science. It's simply not.
Then, in reply, I can say- how can you distinguish between COMMON DESCENT and COMMON DESIGN? I'm not sure what common design is.
We need even more funding than we have for those who seek to assail the consensus, not because we think it will fall, but because that's what the scientific method demands. Anything less is not science, it's just politics in a lab coat.
By that rationale, we should still be funding the flat-Earthers. At some point those who argue against the scientific consensus have to actually provide evidence and start convincing others, otherwise their "research" will never end.
This is the wrong way to look at it. Funding isn't how you control that process, peer review and credentials are. When a respected member of the scientific community decides that they are going to try to attack a popular theory in a way that their peers feel is sufficiently sound, there should be no political consideration at all. Today, there is. This is a problem.
I believe there's no better yes or no question ["Do you believe that humans evolved from much simpler life forms over millions of years?"] for dividing people in the US these days. I think the better question to ask is the more specific one:
There are many aspects of the theory of evolution from the principle of natural selection to genetic drift to speciation to common descent. What parts of the theory, if any, do you feel are invalid and why? The answer to that question can come in many forms, and allows a person to reveal themselves in much more detail than the more straightforward yes/no question. For example, you might answer that you accept all of the aspects of evolution except for common descent of man. This is a radically different position than answering that you don't understand the differences between these aspects, but are sure that your particular religious text got it right.
Don't let "global warming may not be real" be an excuse to give waste and inefficiency a pass. Oh, you misunderstand me entirely! My concern with respect to the climate is that it takes our eyes off of the environmental issues that routinely kill and permanently damage vast numbers of people. My #1 environmental issue right now is mercury. After that, it's the general issue of drinking water, especially in those nations that the "developed world" uses as manufacturing centers. Global warming isn't even close to the top of the list, but I think that's appropriate, given how horrible the state of the environment is TODAY.
Ahem... correcting my statement "80% margin for error" should read "20% margin for error"... that was a silly mistake, but the core point is still there: this is the margin for error with respect to the model's representation of the hypothesis. If the model correctly emulates global climate, then we're 80% certain that it demonstrates that the hypothesis was correct.
Fox and Co think that the world consist only of USA, news at 10. My problem with the debate (and this isn't new... it's at least 2 decades old) is that every time some conservative politician or news outlet waves some piece of information around (usually misunderstanding it badly), we immediately seek to use that to discredit the person or group who produced or publicized the information.
We desperately need to remember that scientists and politicians have an intersection, but the vast majority of them don't have anything to do with each other. A scientist who seeks to prove Einstein wrong isn't some Einstein-hating nutjob (typically). In fact, they're performing the most valuable task that the scientific method sets forth: seeking to disprove. By attempting and failing, we learn more about the value of a theory. By attempting and succeeding, we learn more about the theory's weaknesses, and often improve upon it.
Let's not start marching toward those scientists who seek flaws in global climate change research with pitchforks and torches (or rather, let's stop doing so), and instead seek to pressure the media and politicians into supporting them and their less skeptical peers without confusing the issue by politicizing results too early. We need even more funding than we have for those who seek to assail the consensus, not because we think it will fall, but because that's what the scientific method demands. Anything less is not science, it's just politics in a lab coat.
they've come to the conclusion with 80% certainty that global climate change is not only real, but is caused by human activities. That's a bit of a mis-statement. The computer models used generate results that conform to that hypothesis with an 80% margin for error. The idea that we're 80% certain that the models are correct is not supported by anything I've read.
As some scientists have pointed out, there's substantial concern about these models and how accurate they can be in the first place. What we know is this: some of the Earth is undergoing substantial climate change (always true, but this is exceptional), and much of the change is in the direction of warming (the arctic and antarctic regions, especially). We also know that CO2 levels have risen. The problem is that correlating those two factors requires that we understand the climate on a macroscopic level, which, sadly, we do not. We have models that predict past activity, but they have so far failed to accurately predict future activity accurately. Dyson suggests a naive model ("no change") would be more accurate that the models we use. That's been hotly debated, and I'm willing to believe that he might have gone a bit overboard there.
Still, the fact of the matter is that we're uncertain about a great many things, and until we are certain, we should be careful about what we insist is "fact".
I finally understand D&D. In D&D the rules are the content. They need to change them frequently because you run out of content. If you're actually interested in stories and "role-playing" (vs. leveling up and trying out new spells and magic items), then D&D's rules get in the way and you play something else... D&D is a framework. It allows for munchkin roleplaying (which is the name that has developed over the decades for what you describe), and encourages it institutionally, as those players tend to love to buy new product. However, at its heart, D&D is a roleplaying game, and will always be fertile ground for good roleplayers who find the story more interesting than the stat blocks. I'm sorry you obviously have had such poor experiences with it.
Flipping through the pages of Dragon magazine over the past few years really gives you a sense of both of these worlds. The "Core Deities" series of articles is a deep exploration of a world that has been developed since the very start of the game. It's good fiction and good roleplaying fodder. Then there are articles with new prestige classes and magic items strewn about like candy at the checkout isle in a drug store. It takes all kinds, and fortunately this game supported all of them. I'm hesitant about 4e because I suspect that it's going to be more of what you obviously dislike about the game and less of what I've come to enjoy about it.
Still, I'll have 3.5e and the spin-off d20 games like Iron Heroes (review by me). Maybe you can come join one of my games sometime.;-)
Taken at face value, I don't see any weaseling going on. The claim that AOL should have blocked the downloads is the killer, here. That one needs to be shot down, and fast, otherwise you can kiss you nice fast Linux downloads goodbye, since ISPs will feel compelled to block all peer to peer traffic.
I've played every edition of D&D as well.. I'm certainly not buying 4th edition. I have a bookshelf of D&D products, and I canceled all of my outstanding orders when they canceled their relationship with the brilliant folks at Paizo, dumping the hardcopy magazines, Dungeon and Dragon. Now they're issuing a new version of the game, which will put further nails in the coffin of Paizo, and trying to milk the franchise for another round of "upgrade", which will incidentally harm all of the third parties like Malhavoc Press who have just finished huge efforts to publish OGL-compatable d20 games.
No, I can keep buying the 3rd party d20 stuff and just ignore Wizards from here on... if I'm really jonsing for something D&D I can whip out my 3.5 edition rules and the dozen or so sourcebooks I have.
Maybe our universe is just a simulation, running inside a simulation, in a much bigger universe that itself is just a molecule in an even bigger universe that is just a molecule in that cloud of pot smoke you just exhaled. Ever think of that? That's a quote from something... I know I've heard it before....
... must now pay the fine of $300,000 immediately, or be subjected to further lawsuits. You're taking this out of context. This suit was over a company using a publishing service's news reports internally to conduct their business (marketing research) without licensing the copyrighted material. This is just dumb, and they deserved the fine (presumably assessed with respect to how much it would have cost to license the news for internal use, plus legal fees).
Simply re-publishing a single article from InfoWorld on Slashdot isn't even remotely comparable.
It's good to see the courts taking such care with respect to costs. I just wish that they took such care uniformly. Sadly, they do not. It's still the unchallenged case that when a company assesses damage due to computer-related criminal activities, they total up the cost of all of the hardware involved and all of the staff involved without any analysis of how much staff time was dedicated to dealing with the problem or how useful the hardware was and continues to be.
The same is the case with many drugs. Last I heard, for example, LSD had an interesting double-standard. The mass of the "drug" is measured with respect to the medium used (e.g. the mass of the blotter paper it's laced in plus the inconsequential mass of the drug itself). Then, that mass is compared to the effective dosage to determine "intent to distribute." You see, if you have a 1g piece of blotter, and the effective dose for LSD is 50-100 micro-grams, then legally you are said to possess between 1,000 and 20,000 doses of LSD, which implies your intent to distribute.... Follow that logic if you can.
If the courts were uniform in how they deal with quantifications during their cases, it would be a much more reasonable system.
Is real-world impact actually a consideration in copyright cases Sort of.
Google is contending, I believe, that they do what they can do police their users by allowing them to police themselves, and by responding to copyright holders who have complaints. Showing that doing so has limited any financial loss to the copyright holder could make the point that they're doing a sufficient job, even if, at any given time, you can find something that violates copyrights on You Tube.
This would not work for someone who was actively violating copyright (say, distributing a song on your own Web site), but when you're a service provider, there has to be some reality-check for the fact that you simply can't police all of your thousands or millions of users all the time... you have to show a good faith effort and work with the copyright holders to a reasonable degree, but ultimately, it's just not your fault that little Timmy uploaded an episode of The Daily Show.
You ask to depose a number of people, hoping that the inconvenience of the process will force the other side to back down. That's why Comedy Central has the Google founders on their deposition list. It's lawyering. Probably not. The goal, here, is to discover exactly what's going to come out in court. Obviously the folks involved with The Daily Show will have information about the impact that You Tube has had on the show, how ratings have been doing, and so on.
Google needs to make the case that brief exposure to copyright violation (while Viacom staff hunts down the content and issues formal complaints to You Tube) has not had a negative impact on the programs that have been infringed. They also need to show that they've been prompt in responding to concerns about copyright violations on their site.
If they can make those two points, they'll have a start to a workable case. The real question is how much effort Google can realistically be asked to put in to make sure that their users don't upload copyrighted material. The answer to that question will have far-reaching impacts on every site (mine included) that allow users to contribute their own content whether text, audio, video or something else.
Microsoft is, as I understand it, representing the interests of all of the companies involved, here (including Google). It makes sense. Microsoft has some of the best lobbying capabilities and has had the most success in managing policy. These companies need a strong front since they're going up against the cable/telco companies.
Similarly, if there's a geometric center of our universe's expansion, it's not a 3-space point within our frame of reference, and thus moot when talking about distances between two points in our Universe. Can you elaborate on what you mean by the geometric center not being a 3-space point within our frame of reference? Is this because our frame of reference is moving with respect to any such center? No. Picture a sphere. The surface of the sphere is roughly analogous to our universe, except we don't know what the topology of our universe is for sure. It might be sphere-like in that travel in any direction would ultimately put you back at your starting point, but there are many possible topologies. Just stick with the sphere as an example for now.
If you now inflate the sphere like a balloon, you get an effect like that of the expanding universe. All points on the surface of the sphere will see their neighboring points recede from them, and from any point on the sphere, an observer would think that they are at the "center" of the expansion. In reality, the geometric center of the expansion is the center of the sphere, but that point cannot be reached by traveling in any direction on the surface of the sphere, only by traveling perpendicular to the surface. If you live in the two-dimensional universe that is the surface of that sphere, then you can never reach the "center" of your universes expansion. Similarly with our universe, if there is some "center" to our universe's expansion, then it is almost certainly at a point which is not within our universe's frame of reference. We simply cannot observe that point because, long ago, our universe expanded in 4 (or more) dimensions away from that point.
Now, that need not be the case. The universe could be a dumbbell-like 4-dimensional figure-8 where the center of expansion is at the point where the two "lobes" of the figure-8 cross over. In that case, the center of the universe's expansion would lie within our universe. However, this idea is not likely to be the case. In fact, we don't even know if there's a 4th-dimensional frame of reference in which to measure a geometric center of our universe's expansion.
So it is fairly safe to say that the expansion of the universe has no "center". It's an approximation and simplification of quite a lot of math and theory, but it's a fair approximation.
Yeah, the bottom line, here, is that nothing short of urinating on a picture of Tux or calling the current state of global warming politics "hysteria" could get the Slashdot community to openly attack Freeman Dyson... sad. You'd think the man had earned enough street cred to have us all sit back and ask ourselves, "did we go overboard?" No, it's easier to just attack him.
I'm just glad that someone with the credentials to get listened to (I hope) is saying what I've been trying to say for years: global warming hysteria is endangering the future of mankind. We're ignoring critical environmental issues such as mercury pollution and the raping of our oceans' fish stocks (two mutually compounding problems). We need to step back, assess the true impact of global warming, fund solid attacks on the science (just as we do for any other theory), and take the results and budget our responses to them against the rest of the environmental problems that we have.
Frankly, I think the damage is already done. I think a lot of good people have left climate science because of the politics. I know a couple of them personally, and they're now in different industries (mostly computing), and not looking to go back. It will be a generation at least before people who are naive enough to think that good science is always the right answer return to the field.
I'm an amateur at conveying these sorts of concepts. The grand-master was Asimov. If you ever get a chance, treat yourself to some of his science essays. Many folks who enjoyed his science fiction forget that he was a professor of biochemistry who had a decent grasp of most of the hard sciences.
Asimov on Physics, Asimov On Astronomy and some others comprise the collected versions of these essays.
I am sorta haphazardly amazed that people are surprised
No one is surprised that I know, though I'm sure someone is. Headlines on Slashdot notwithstanding, the only general and systemic surprise when we discover something new stems from the thrill of discovery, not a violation of anyone's expectations that the universe was a well-defined and cataloged thing.
... that something isn't playing by the rules that we have artificially set when we haven't gotten our tails out there and truly tested.
Well, to be fair, there's an awful lot that we can know without going to a place. For example, going to Mars resolved quite a few questions, and introduced new ones, but we knew a great deal before a rover ever touched down.
On the big bang question, understanding that there are points we haven't seen yet due to the speed of light (horizon theory) and points we might never see, is it possible that we are mis-guessing ages by not understand our position to the position of the sighted object versus the position of the singularity point?
Hrm... quite a few problems with that question.
First off, we are the position of the singularity. The singularity of the big bang wasn't a firecracker in an empty room. It was all of space (and time, we think). As it expanded outward, our universe came into being as we know it. There's no place in the Universe that's the origin of the big bang, just as there's no "center" of the expansion on the surface of a sphere as it's inflated from the inside. There's a center of a sphere in 3 dimensions, but THAT center isn't actually part of the surface. Similarly, if there's a geometric center of our universe's expansion, it's not a 3-space point within our frame of reference, and thus moot when talking about distances between two points in our Universe.
Now, on to your question: is it possible that we don't understand distances in space, and thus are mis-measuring the age of the universe? ABSOLUTELY! I'd say certainly, but being certain about uncertainty is a sticky concept. However, it's important to understand the scale of that uncertainty. We have many ways of measuring distance, and at the very least we can be pretty sure about the size of our own galaxy (on the order of 100,000 light years in diameter, depending on where you measure it). That means that light arriving to earth from the center of our galaxy is tens of thousands of years old. We might be off in our measurements, but it's very unlikely beyond reason that we'd be off by an order of magnitude, so these rough approximations are about as reliable as you're going to get.
Now, when measuring further out, effects which we have less understanding of start to become more important. Gravitational lensing isn't a huge problem for measuring the distance to other Local Group galaxies (such as Andromeda), but it does enter into measuring the distance to distant galaxies outside of the Local Group. Again, we can be pretty sure that the distance to Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years. Now, we might be off on that, but it's very unlikely to be by an order of magnitude (e.g. while 2-3 million light years might be conceivable, it would require that many different, unrelated sorts of measurements were wrong in the same ways for it to be 100,000 or 10 million light years away). This is almost unimaginably improbable.
When you start to talk about galactic superclusters and structures that are larger, still, then there's significant uncertainty. Is the most distant object that we can see at the "edge" of the Universe? Is there an edge at all, or does space form a continuous surface like the circumference of a circle? Are these objects 8 billion lightyears away or 15? More? Effects such as gravitational lensing and the unknown makeup of the vast cosmic distances involved make it impossible to be certain.
On the logic part, scientists are humans first. I knew a guy who was very smart and excel
Information is meant to be FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Are we still confused about this phrase? I thought that was so 1990s....
Once again for those in the cheap seats: "information wants to be free" is roughly equivalent to the statement, "a gas wants to expand to fill its container." It's not wishful thinking. It's not a political statement. It's not an assertion of an ethical point of view. It's just a fairly easily demonstrated fact that no matter how hard you work to contain information (and arguably as a RESULT of how hard you work at it), said information will "seek" ways to be communicated to the widest possible audience.
Of course, this is an anthropomorphization of what is more in the realm of math or physics. It's just a simplification for the masses.
Answer: Nothing. Quite a lot, actually. We can attach strictures of implementation to the article element, write test suites, define tags, and otherwise build a substantial set of semantics for any new element. A div that just has a particular class is like any other div. It doesn't have its own tags, and it might well have very different meanings to different HTML authors and browser vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
How did the parent get modded up?
Try this: New Scientist Climate Myths, in particular the section on computer models.
The points in that article are useful, but fail to address the concerns raised by the likes of Freeman Dyson as to the reliability of our current models.No, it requires understanding basic physics, that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas.
This is just poor arm-waving. We understand (since the 1970s) that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas. The problem is that we don't understand much about how it impacts the Earth's climate. The way we determine that now is to build a model which predicts past events using CO2 as a forcer. This is fine, but it's quite possible that these models over or under emphasize the importance of CO2, and ignore other factors. For example (and this is only an example for sake of the more abstract discussion of the models), I'm not aware of any model that takes ground-cover water vapor into account. Water, as you almost certainly know, is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but is traditionally discounted as a candidate for recent warming because cloud-cover water vapor maintains a fairly constant balance through precipitation. Add more water and you just get more precipitation. For ground-cover water vapor this isn't the case. When you irrigate a field, you create a constant blanket of water vapor over it that wasn't there when you started. If you look at the extent of human irrigation over the past few decades, you will find an explosion in irrigation.Is this related to warming? Perhaps, but the more important question is: why are we so quick to assume that we understand the relationship between humans and climate when we're still at such an early stage of our understanding of the climate?
Now, action is a different issue. Should we take action to reduce our impact on the environment? Absolutely. However, there are many priorities there, and once the panicked hype around global warming is stripped away, you find that other forms of pollution result in death and injury to far too many people today. We don't have to wait for an environmental apocalypse. It's already here. If you don't believe me, try living on a fish-rich diet for a few years without suffering from mercury poisoning. My stepfather found that difficult; about as difficult as he found tying his own shoes once mercury poisoning set in.
By that rationale, we should still be funding the flat-Earthers. At some point those who argue against the scientific consensus have to actually provide evidence and start convincing others, otherwise their "research" will never end.
This is the wrong way to look at it. Funding isn't how you control that process, peer review and credentials are. When a respected member of the scientific community decides that they are going to try to attack a popular theory in a way that their peers feel is sufficiently sound, there should be no political consideration at all. Today, there is. This is a problem.One is a valid, if highly unlikely possibility.
One is an indicator of simple ignorance.
Ahem... correcting my statement "80% margin for error" should read "20% margin for error"... that was a silly mistake, but the core point is still there: this is the margin for error with respect to the model's representation of the hypothesis. If the model correctly emulates global climate, then we're 80% certain that it demonstrates that the hypothesis was correct.
We desperately need to remember that scientists and politicians have an intersection, but the vast majority of them don't have anything to do with each other. A scientist who seeks to prove Einstein wrong isn't some Einstein-hating nutjob (typically). In fact, they're performing the most valuable task that the scientific method sets forth: seeking to disprove. By attempting and failing, we learn more about the value of a theory. By attempting and succeeding, we learn more about the theory's weaknesses, and often improve upon it.
Let's not start marching toward those scientists who seek flaws in global climate change research with pitchforks and torches (or rather, let's stop doing so), and instead seek to pressure the media and politicians into supporting them and their less skeptical peers without confusing the issue by politicizing results too early. We need even more funding than we have for those who seek to assail the consensus, not because we think it will fall, but because that's what the scientific method demands. Anything less is not science, it's just politics in a lab coat.
As some scientists have pointed out, there's substantial concern about these models and how accurate they can be in the first place. What we know is this: some of the Earth is undergoing substantial climate change (always true, but this is exceptional), and much of the change is in the direction of warming (the arctic and antarctic regions, especially). We also know that CO2 levels have risen. The problem is that correlating those two factors requires that we understand the climate on a macroscopic level, which, sadly, we do not. We have models that predict past activity, but they have so far failed to accurately predict future activity accurately. Dyson suggests a naive model ("no change") would be more accurate that the models we use. That's been hotly debated, and I'm willing to believe that he might have gone a bit overboard there.
Still, the fact of the matter is that we're uncertain about a great many things, and until we are certain, we should be careful about what we insist is "fact".
Flipping through the pages of Dragon magazine over the past few years really gives you a sense of both of these worlds. The "Core Deities" series of articles is a deep exploration of a world that has been developed since the very start of the game. It's good fiction and good roleplaying fodder. Then there are articles with new prestige classes and magic items strewn about like candy at the checkout isle in a drug store. It takes all kinds, and fortunately this game supported all of them. I'm hesitant about 4e because I suspect that it's going to be more of what you obviously dislike about the game and less of what I've come to enjoy about it.
Still, I'll have 3.5e and the spin-off d20 games like Iron Heroes (review by me). Maybe you can come join one of my games sometime.
I've played every edition of D&D as well.. I'm certainly not buying 4th edition. I have a bookshelf of D&D products, and I canceled all of my outstanding orders when they canceled their relationship with the brilliant folks at Paizo, dumping the hardcopy magazines, Dungeon and Dragon. Now they're issuing a new version of the game, which will put further nails in the coffin of Paizo, and trying to milk the franchise for another round of "upgrade", which will incidentally harm all of the third parties like Malhavoc Press who have just finished huge efforts to publish OGL-compatable d20 games.
No, I can keep buying the 3rd party d20 stuff and just ignore Wizards from here on... if I'm really jonsing for something D&D I can whip out my 3.5 edition rules and the dozen or so sourcebooks I have.
... must now pay the fine of $300,000 immediately, or be subjected to further lawsuits. You're taking this out of context. This suit was over a company using a publishing service's news reports internally to conduct their business (marketing research) without licensing the copyrighted material. This is just dumb, and they deserved the fine (presumably assessed with respect to how much it would have cost to license the news for internal use, plus legal fees).Simply re-publishing a single article from InfoWorld on Slashdot isn't even remotely comparable.
It's good to see the courts taking such care with respect to costs. I just wish that they took such care uniformly. Sadly, they do not. It's still the unchallenged case that when a company assesses damage due to computer-related criminal activities, they total up the cost of all of the hardware involved and all of the staff involved without any analysis of how much staff time was dedicated to dealing with the problem or how useful the hardware was and continues to be.
The same is the case with many drugs. Last I heard, for example, LSD had an interesting double-standard. The mass of the "drug" is measured with respect to the medium used (e.g. the mass of the blotter paper it's laced in plus the inconsequential mass of the drug itself). Then, that mass is compared to the effective dosage to determine "intent to distribute." You see, if you have a 1g piece of blotter, and the effective dose for LSD is 50-100 micro-grams, then legally you are said to possess between 1,000 and 20,000 doses of LSD, which implies your intent to distribute.... Follow that logic if you can.
If the courts were uniform in how they deal with quantifications during their cases, it would be a much more reasonable system.
Google is contending, I believe, that they do what they can do police their users by allowing them to police themselves, and by responding to copyright holders who have complaints. Showing that doing so has limited any financial loss to the copyright holder could make the point that they're doing a sufficient job, even if, at any given time, you can find something that violates copyrights on You Tube.
This would not work for someone who was actively violating copyright (say, distributing a song on your own Web site), but when you're a service provider, there has to be some reality-check for the fact that you simply can't police all of your thousands or millions of users all the time... you have to show a good faith effort and work with the copyright holders to a reasonable degree, but ultimately, it's just not your fault that little Timmy uploaded an episode of The Daily Show.
Google needs to make the case that brief exposure to copyright violation (while Viacom staff hunts down the content and issues formal complaints to You Tube) has not had a negative impact on the programs that have been infringed. They also need to show that they've been prompt in responding to concerns about copyright violations on their site.
If they can make those two points, they'll have a start to a workable case. The real question is how much effort Google can realistically be asked to put in to make sure that their users don't upload copyrighted material. The answer to that question will have far-reaching impacts on every site (mine included) that allow users to contribute their own content whether text, audio, video or something else.
Microsoft is, as I understand it, representing the interests of all of the companies involved, here (including Google). It makes sense. Microsoft has some of the best lobbying capabilities and has had the most success in managing policy. These companies need a strong front since they're going up against the cable/telco companies.
If you now inflate the sphere like a balloon, you get an effect like that of the expanding universe. All points on the surface of the sphere will see their neighboring points recede from them, and from any point on the sphere, an observer would think that they are at the "center" of the expansion. In reality, the geometric center of the expansion is the center of the sphere, but that point cannot be reached by traveling in any direction on the surface of the sphere, only by traveling perpendicular to the surface. If you live in the two-dimensional universe that is the surface of that sphere, then you can never reach the "center" of your universes expansion. Similarly with our universe, if there is some "center" to our universe's expansion, then it is almost certainly at a point which is not within our universe's frame of reference. We simply cannot observe that point because, long ago, our universe expanded in 4 (or more) dimensions away from that point.
Now, that need not be the case. The universe could be a dumbbell-like 4-dimensional figure-8 where the center of expansion is at the point where the two "lobes" of the figure-8 cross over. In that case, the center of the universe's expansion would lie within our universe. However, this idea is not likely to be the case. In fact, we don't even know if there's a 4th-dimensional frame of reference in which to measure a geometric center of our universe's expansion.
So it is fairly safe to say that the expansion of the universe has no "center". It's an approximation and simplification of quite a lot of math and theory, but it's a fair approximation.
Yeah, the bottom line, here, is that nothing short of urinating on a picture of Tux or calling the current state of global warming politics "hysteria" could get the Slashdot community to openly attack Freeman Dyson... sad. You'd think the man had earned enough street cred to have us all sit back and ask ourselves, "did we go overboard?" No, it's easier to just attack him.
If you're interested, the Wikipedia article I linked to above has some more detail on his global warming science views.
I'm just glad that someone with the credentials to get listened to (I hope) is saying what I've been trying to say for years: global warming hysteria is endangering the future of mankind. We're ignoring critical environmental issues such as mercury pollution and the raping of our oceans' fish stocks (two mutually compounding problems). We need to step back, assess the true impact of global warming, fund solid attacks on the science (just as we do for any other theory), and take the results and budget our responses to them against the rest of the environmental problems that we have.
Frankly, I think the damage is already done. I think a lot of good people have left climate science because of the politics. I know a couple of them personally, and they're now in different industries (mostly computing), and not looking to go back. It will be a generation at least before people who are naive enough to think that good science is always the right answer return to the field.
I'm an amateur at conveying these sorts of concepts. The grand-master was Asimov. If you ever get a chance, treat yourself to some of his science essays. Many folks who enjoyed his science fiction forget that he was a professor of biochemistry who had a decent grasp of most of the hard sciences.
Asimov on Physics, Asimov On Astronomy and some others comprise the collected versions of these essays.
I am sorta haphazardly amazed that people are surprised
No one is surprised that I know, though I'm sure someone is. Headlines on Slashdot notwithstanding, the only general and systemic surprise when we discover something new stems from the thrill of discovery, not a violation of anyone's expectations that the universe was a well-defined and cataloged thing.
... that something isn't playing by the rules that we have artificially set when we haven't gotten our tails out there and truly tested.
Well, to be fair, there's an awful lot that we can know without going to a place. For example, going to Mars resolved quite a few questions, and introduced new ones, but we knew a great deal before a rover ever touched down.
On the big bang question, understanding that there are points we haven't seen yet due to the speed of light (horizon theory) and points we might never see, is it possible that we are mis-guessing ages by not understand our position to the position of the sighted object versus the position of the singularity point?
Hrm... quite a few problems with that question.
First off, we are the position of the singularity. The singularity of the big bang wasn't a firecracker in an empty room. It was all of space (and time, we think). As it expanded outward, our universe came into being as we know it. There's no place in the Universe that's the origin of the big bang, just as there's no "center" of the expansion on the surface of a sphere as it's inflated from the inside. There's a center of a sphere in 3 dimensions, but THAT center isn't actually part of the surface. Similarly, if there's a geometric center of our universe's expansion, it's not a 3-space point within our frame of reference, and thus moot when talking about distances between two points in our Universe.
Now, on to your question: is it possible that we don't understand distances in space, and thus are mis-measuring the age of the universe? ABSOLUTELY! I'd say certainly, but being certain about uncertainty is a sticky concept. However, it's important to understand the scale of that uncertainty. We have many ways of measuring distance, and at the very least we can be pretty sure about the size of our own galaxy (on the order of 100,000 light years in diameter, depending on where you measure it). That means that light arriving to earth from the center of our galaxy is tens of thousands of years old. We might be off in our measurements, but it's very unlikely beyond reason that we'd be off by an order of magnitude, so these rough approximations are about as reliable as you're going to get.
Now, when measuring further out, effects which we have less understanding of start to become more important. Gravitational lensing isn't a huge problem for measuring the distance to other Local Group galaxies (such as Andromeda), but it does enter into measuring the distance to distant galaxies outside of the Local Group. Again, we can be pretty sure that the distance to Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years. Now, we might be off on that, but it's very unlikely to be by an order of magnitude (e.g. while 2-3 million light years might be conceivable, it would require that many different, unrelated sorts of measurements were wrong in the same ways for it to be 100,000 or 10 million light years away). This is almost unimaginably improbable.
When you start to talk about galactic superclusters and structures that are larger, still, then there's significant uncertainty. Is the most distant object that we can see at the "edge" of the Universe? Is there an edge at all, or does space form a continuous surface like the circumference of a circle? Are these objects 8 billion lightyears away or 15? More? Effects such as gravitational lensing and the unknown makeup of the vast cosmic distances involved make it impossible to be certain.
On the logic part, scientists are humans first. I knew a guy who was very smart and excel
Once again for those in the cheap seats: "information wants to be free" is roughly equivalent to the statement, "a gas wants to expand to fill its container." It's not wishful thinking. It's not a political statement. It's not an assertion of an ethical point of view. It's just a fairly easily demonstrated fact that no matter how hard you work to contain information (and arguably as a RESULT of how hard you work at it), said information will "seek" ways to be communicated to the widest possible audience.
Of course, this is an anthropomorphization of what is more in the realm of math or physics. It's just a simplification for the masses.
<div class="article">...</div>
And:
<article>...</article>
Answer: Nothing. Quite a lot, actually. We can attach strictures of implementation to the article element, write test suites, define tags, and otherwise build a substantial set of semantics for any new element. A div that just has a particular class is like any other div. It doesn't have its own tags, and it might well have very different meanings to different HTML authors and browser vendors.