I'm not sure where you get the idea that other gravitational wave detectors have "failed". I suppose you could regard an inability to build a sufficiently sensitive detector as a "failure" of sorts, but it's not the sort of failure that would cause you to draw any conclusions about the underlying theory because nobody really expected those detectors to find anything. Those experiments have been more about techniques in constructing large interferometers than they have been about astronomy. Moreover, gravitational radiation has been observed indirectly through its effects on binary pulsars. The loss of angular momentum in a binary pulsar system has been observed to be consistent with the predictions of General Relativity. It is possible, of course, that GR is wrong, and there is some other effect that is producing the angular momentum loss, but it would be a rather surprising coincidence if the rate of loss from this hitherto unsuspected mechanism were precisely what we would have expected from gravitational radiation.
As for the disagreement between GR and quantum mechanics, this is a long-standing theoretical issue. That is, you don't need observations to tell you that GR and QM don't work together; they are incompatible even at a theoretical level. Observations of gravitational waves, or lack thereof, are pretty much irrelevant to that debate. What this means in practical terms is that like classical mechanics GR is a useful approximation in the non-quantum regime, but it breaks down when you get into regimes where quantum effects are important. Physicists have been trying to figure out a new, quantum mechanics-compatible theory of gravity for decades, so it's not like they're waiting for the results of this experiment to come in before they get started on it. However, it turns out that coming up with a good, testable quantum theory of gravity is rather harder than it looks.
The real significance of these gravitational wave observatories is not in theoretical development of quantum gravity, but rather in their role as a new window on astrophysical phenomena. When astronomers began to observe in the radio we learned a lot about known astrophysical pheonomena, and we discovered entirely new phenomena that we never suspected. It seems reasonable to expect similar discoveries from gravitational wave astronomy when it becomes a reality. For example, once ground based detectors develop sufficient sensitivity, some astronomers hope to learn a lot about the makeup of neutron stars from the gravitational wave signature of binary neutron star coalescence. And the LISA experiment, if it ever flies, will have sensitivity in the frequencies that contain the relict gravitational radiation from the Big Bang. Just as the Cosmic Microwave Background has taught us a lot about the early universe, we hope to make similar discoveries from the Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background.
At this rate, how long will it be before the bill of rights falls into desuetude?
Judging from the whinging during the lead-up to the last election, the Bill of Rights was supposed to have been history not later than sometime last month; yet it's still with us. But, then, that's the government for you; they never could deliver anything on schedule or within budget.
A better question is, why do you feel you need us to validate your taste in sci-fi (or anything else for that matter)? Like what you like, don't like what you don't like, respect other people's choices on matters that are essentially arbitrary (that means words like 'hype' are probably right out), and above all don't try to conform to some approved standard of nonconformity. Do these things, grasshopper, and you'll probably be all right.
Yours in time-killing until the 2200 showing, -rpl
regarding anthropogenic climate change; there is no debate. the aggregate are certain it is happening.
When I went to the AMS conference back in January I saw plenty of debate. In fact, just about every aspect of global climate change beyond the simple fact of a warming trend had enough debate that it could reasonably be called "controversial". Moreover, the aforementioned Dr. Gray and others had some rather pointed questions about the methodology in several of the global climate change papers that to my mind were never satisfactorily answered. To me that suggests that the issues are not so cut and dried as you might think.
anti-science propaganda by the plutocratic status-quo is funding propaganda to present the appearance of "debate".
Nice. I can understand if you find the research on anthropogenic climate change compelling, but to dismiss perfectly legitimate questions about the validity of conclusions drawn from global climate change research without so much as acknowledging that they were asked seems profoundly "anti-science" to me, far moreso than any "plutocratic propaganda" or whatever.
As with any other science, astronomers claim a discovery when the available evidence indicates the "discovery" is more likely right than wrong. Exactly when that happens is subject to some personal judgement. Some scientists are more conservative than others. Some have wound up with egg on their faces after announcing a "discovery" prematurely. Some discoveries are quietly, or even noisily, disputed for years after they are announced. Some widely accepted "laws of nature" are found to be subtly incorrect hundreds of years after their discovery.
In other words, uncertainty and doubt are part and parcel of the science gig. If you work in the field for any length of time you come to accept that. Nevertheless, science represents our best understanding of the natural universe, given what we know right now. And that's really all you can fairly ask of it.
I think that people need to take a more cynical look at the claims being advanced here. The spoken claim is that if the judiciary gives up its right to privacy, then our privacy can't be far behind. That by itself is not too implausible, but the unspoken claim, which many of the people posting here seem to be buying into is that if these judges are willing to stand up for their own privacy, then surely they will stand up for ours when it comes before the bench. I'm not sure I believe that at all. The rich and powerful have always been more than happy to arrange for themselves not to have to live under the same laws that we plebes have to live under, and I see no reason to believe that they wouldn't happily do the same thing here.
Given my druthers, I'd prefer a system where everyone got to keep their privacy, but with companies increasingly taking the position, "they're our computers so we can monitor and filter if we want," and ISPs increasingly saying, "they're our networks so we can monitor and filter if we want," does anybody really still believe that's an option? At least one other poster has pointed out that this sort of monitoring is already de rigueur for many employees. Are our saviors on the bench prepared to join the crusade against this practice once their own privacy is assured? Somehow, I doubt it.
I think the worst of all possible worlds would be the one where the high and mighty are allowed to have privacy, but the rest of us are not. If every detail of my life is potentially open to scrutiny by the whole world, then I want, at the very least, to be able to discourage people from making unfair use of that information through the threat of exposing their secrets. If we rally behind these judges, perhaps we might strike a blow for privacy; then again, perhaps we might open the door to that lopsided scenario where judges and congresspeople and billionaries can protect their privacy, but the rest of us can just lump it.
No thanks. I propose instead that we support monitoring for judges and elected officials until such time as they get off their duffs and take steps to assure privacy protection for all of us.
Ok, sure, why not? But you should be aware that in the case of Steady State cosmology, that's not how it happened. Steady State cosmology was proposed by Hoyle and others (who arrived at the same mathematical solution from following different reasoning) in 1948. Steady State was attractive for theoretical reasons, and at that time it was consistent with all extant observations. As time went on observational evidence mounted, and it became harder and harder to reconcile Steady State with that evidence. Eventually most astrophysicists concluded that the theory was just unworkable. The cosmic microwave background measurements were widely regarded as the final nail in the coffin of Steady State; there isn't any good (i.e. not contrived) way to produce the observed thermal spectrum without having the universe in a hot, dense state at some point in its history, and that is incosistent with the Perfect Cosmological Principle that underlies Steady State cosmology.
Science needs skeptics; no doubt about that. But being a skeptic is not the same thing as being a contrarian. When the commonly accepted explanation has the weight of evidence behind it, a person who refuses to accept it is not by any stretch of the imagination a "good scientist," and he is not doing science any favors by continuing to rail against the accepted theory.
In this "enlightened" age of après-truth, it is not fashionable to talk of right and wrong answers; people prefer, rather, to talk about "different points of view." Nevertheless, nature is what it is, without regard to what point of view we might have on the matter. Any theory that disagrees with what nature reveals about itself through experiment and observation is simply an untruth, and clinging to such a theory in spite of the evidence is simply unscientific.
So, I first remember seeing the "Send in the Clones" joke in a Mad Magazine, years and years ago. Sure enough, somebody has reposted the text from the article, although in my opinion it loses a little without the illustrations. Whatever. Anyhow, having reread it after all these years, I want to call your attention to this passage (the emphasis is mine):
This ties in neatly with our fifth film (No. 1 in the series), "A Matter of Life and Darth", in which Luke, who has unraveled the secrets of time travel (in "Makin' Wookie", learns that Darth Vader is a half-droid and may be the real father of both Han Solo and See-Threepio.
Mmm hmm, check. Those Mad Magazine guys were onto something, I tell you. The future of Star Wars is right there for anyone not too blind to see it.
Ok, I have to go buy some more tinfoil and rewrite my pamphlet debunking the Clone Gunman theory. More later, if Lucas' minions don't catch up to me first.
You should have stopped after your second paragraph; I was all prepared to believe you. Unfortunately, you misrepresented the situation in the US Senate so grossly that I can't help but question whether you have your facts about the EU straight.
The motion you are thinking of is the motion to reconsider. Although one has to have voted on the winning side to make a motion to reconsider, one need not have voted on the winning side to vote for a motion to reconsider. Thus, it is wholly unnecessary (and highly irregular) for the entire support base for a measure to vote against it just to leave open the possibility of a motion to reconsider. Traditionally the party leadership takes on this duty. Furthermore, even if for some odd reason all the hypothetical Kyoto supporters in the Senate did vote against the treaty for the purpose of reconsidering, why didn't they do so?
Your misunderstanding goes even deeper, however, because you don't seem to realize that the Kyoto treaty was never sent to the Senate for ratification. The 96-0 vote people keep referring to was for Senate Resolution 98, which was passed before the Kyoto treaty was signed. The resolution laid out the conditions any treaty would have to fulfill in order for the Senate to ratify it. Many analysts feel that the Kyoto treaty fails to meet these criteria, and thus would be disapproved by the Senate, were it to be submitted. Since SR-98 is nonbinding, it's entirely possible that the current Senate would ratify it, but the chances of mustering the required 2/3 vote are basically nil (and that, by the way, is why if Gore had been elected the Kyoto treaty would still not be law in the United States).
All of that brings us to the final point, which is that whether or not you believe that climatic change is human caused (a whole debate unto itself), the Kyoto treaty is a bad treaty. There are plenty of analyses of the technical flaws of the treaty out there, but the most damning thing in my opinion is that it places responsibility for controlling CO2 emissions squarely on the shoulders of the industrialized nations. While that seems like a reasonable thing if you consider only that the (currently) industrialized nations have historically dominated world CO2 output. However, many developing nations have a tremendous rate of growth in their CO2 emissions, and when you take that into account, exempting them from emission limits will completely hamstring efforts to reduce global emissions. Advocates of Kyoto say that it isn't fair that industrialized nations have been emitting for years, and it isn't fair to ask developing nations to stop now that they are starting to ramp up their economies. They may have a point; it probably isn't fair, but the question you have to ask yourself is do you want to put a dent in global CO2 emissions or don't you? If the answer is yes, you do, then Kyoto isn't going to get you there. Controlling global emissions requires a global effort, not just effort from the nations the world loves to hate.
If you want to see an object lesson in why software EULAs are bogus, you need look no further than this ``agreement''. Here we have a body of text, and we have a whole community of reasonably intelligent people who have read it, and nobody can figure out what the hell it says. How is the mumbo-jumbo in this license any different from printing the whole works in Swahili with a little button at the bottom that says, ``I agree''. I agree to what? I for one can't make head nor tail of the damn thing.
Personally, I can't wait for this style of ``agreement'' to catch on in other industries; I'm looking forward with great anticipation to the day I have to take my lawyer with me to the grocery store to interpret the license on a bag of tater tots. It makes a feller glad to be alive.
AvWeb ran a story about the pilot that did the aerial cinematography in Pearl Harbor (evidently not everything was CGI). According to the article they managed to round up one authentic Zero and one replica for the filming. One of the more interesting factoids from the article was that it's actually cheaper to film using actual planes wherever possible than it is to do it as CGI.
It's not an unreasonable request on the face of it, but it concerns me nontheless. Have you ever had an argument where the person you are arguing with says, "Give me one good reason why..."? So, you do, and the other guy comes up with some excuse why that reason doesn't count. Then you come up with another one, and he comes up with an excuse why that one doesn't count either. And so it goes until you've given all the reasons you can think of, and they have all been dismissed as inconsequential. Every participant in the debate is going to define "good reason" in a way that is advantageous to his side of the debate, and that's what I'm afraid of here. The "intellectual property" industry knows what conclusion they want to reach, and I don't have a whole lot of confidence that they will let the other side have a fair hearing if they can help it.
There are plenty of "good" reasons to use distributed peer-to-peer file sharing. Personally, I think that these systems would make a good replacement for servers like astro-ph, once someone gets around to adding support for searching for keywords in parts of files besides filenames. (As it stands, including all of the relevant keywords in the filename leads to unreasonably long filenames.) People who want to distribute their own music, essays, or video productions could benefit similarly. These are all legal activities that we have every right to engage in, but the intellectual property industry will argue that those concerns are inconsequential next to the menace of "piracy". They will argue that I should give up my right to use my computer equipment in a perfectly legal manner because somebody else might use the same software to perform some illegal activity, and my activity just isn't important enough to justify that risk. Of course, that's easy for them to say, since they aren't being asked to give up anything.
By making these arguments, media companies are in effect saying that nobody but themselves has anything worthwhile to say, and therefore if anyone other than themselves is saying something that people are listening to, then that something must have been stolen from the purveyors of intellectual property. This sort of reasoning is an anathema to free speech, and we must resist it now, before it becomes entrenched in the form of legislation.
So, to summarise, you're happy for IP-holders to add conditions on use that you approve of.
Are you even listening? I'm happy for copyright holders to add whatever conditions they like on distributing copies of their software because that's what copyright is all about. I object to copyright holders placing restrictions on use, resale, or any other of the things not traditionally covered by copyright because the law doesn't give them that right.
Microsoft and Oracle say you can't benchmark their software.
Nothing in copyright law gives them this right. If a book publisher tried to say you couldn't publish a review of their book, they would get laughed out of court. Why are Microsoft and Oracle above the law?
GNU say that you can't withold the source-code or stop people copying your code.
They say nothing of the sort. Look at the GPL again. Read it this time. They say that if you want to distribute copies of software covered by the GPL, then you must distribute source code. If you do not wish to distribute copies of the software, then you can do whatever you want. In particular, if you just want to use the software, you can do so on whatever terms you want.
As far as stopping people copying your code, you have every right to do that, and nothing in the GPL changes that. The GPL does say that if you create a derivative of a GPL program, *and* you decide to distribute copies of it, then the derivative work must be covered by the GPL. Note, however, that under copyright law you have no right at all to distribute a derivative work. The GPL extends to you a right not otherwise given to you under the law, but it does so at a price; you have to give away the changes you've made. Note also that Microsoft claims that you do not have the right to create a derivative work at all, *even* if you do not distribute it, which again seems to me to fall outside the purview of copyright law.
That's really the crux of the difference here. One group (GPL, BSD, et al.) gives you rights that the law says they don't have to give you. The other group (Microsoft, Oracle, et al.) tries to claim for itself rights not granted to it by the law. That is the all-important distinction, and ignoring it is just plain disingenuous.
The libertarian philosophy is an attractive one in prosperous times like these, and particularly for those of us in booming high tech industries. It's easy to feel powerful when big companies bow and scrape and throw money at us. It's easy to believe that anyone with half a work ethic can get rich. It's easy to think that we negotiate with big corporations as equals.
It's all an illusion, though. I've seen nothing to make me believe that the laws of economics have been repealed. Good times will give way to recession; growth in high tech industries will saturate, and when that happens we will see who has the bargaining power. I'm guessing it's not us, and I'm guessing the results will not be pretty.
I believe that Bush and Gore have been bought and paid for by big business dollars. Harry Browne looks to be relatively free of campaign contribution corruption, but his political philosophy leads him to give away the store for free, so to speak. Either way, the result is the same. Either way the "rights" of monied interests continue to expand, and the "privileges" of private individuals continue to contract. And in the end, we all cease to be citizens and become merely consumers. In the end we lose control of our goods and chattels (instead "renting" them from corporations that retain actual ownership), we lose our privacy, and we lose the right to choose how we live our lives, free from meddling from outsiders who style themselves our masters.
I don't pretend that Ralph Nader is a panacea for all of these problems. I even think some of his economic proposals would be very bad for the country in practice. (However, I think that even if Nader were elected today the worst policies would be moderated substantially by the legislative process.) The important thing, to me, is that Ralph Nader stands for something. Among other things, Ralph Nader stands for personal dignity for all of us, not just those who can afford to purchase it. Ralph Nader does not have the answers for all of our problems, but he does have a remarkably insightful grasp of what those problems are, and he is willing to put forward and talk about earnest proposals for solving them. If Bush or Gore or even Browne or Buchanan had either of those two qualities I would consider voting for them. But they don't, and Nader does. So I voted for Nader instead.
The bottom line is that if you don't agree with the licence terms, then you don't have to use the software.
That's right because, as we all know, when you sit down at the bargaining table with Oracle or Microsoft, you negotiate as equals. No imbalance of power here; no sir, no way.
As the creator of the intellectual property it is your privilege to apply whatever conditions on its use that you see fit.
This is news to me. I see a lot of stuff in the copyright statutes about distributing copies and derivative works, but no mention of conditions on use. In fact, when other industries, say the publishing industry, for instance, have tried to put conditions on the sale of things like books (e.g. minimum retail price, prohibiting resale), they have gotten slapped down.
Even the software industry doesn't have the chutzpah to claim that these license terms can be justified under copyright law. Instead, they try to rationalize them as "voluntary" contracts. However, the law does, as others have pointed out, recognize the concept of "unconscionable" (and therefore unenforcable) contract terms. Do these terms qualify legally as unconscionable? It's hard to say; nobody knows for sure until you fight it out in court. I think it's rather telling, however, that for all their sabre rattling, software companies always seem to keep these matters out of court. I think it's equally telling that they feel they need to get special law passed to legitimate their license agreements.
In this respect, Microsoft is being no more evil than rms.
Well, except for the minor detail that the GPL places restrictions only on copying the software, while the commercial guys put restrictions on using it and (even more offensively) talking about using it. With as many times as this difference has been pointed out on slashdot, I'm amazed that anyone who has been reading for any length of time can remain ignorant of it.
Instead of writing or calling your Congressperson, write or call your candidates for Congress (and for Senate, if you happen to have a Senate election this year). It's very unlikely that this bill will go anywhere this session; Congress is already having trouble getting through its current agenda before the close of the session. So, it's really the next Congress that will decide on this issue. Call your candidates' campaign office and tell them that you care about this issue and that it will be a factor when you vote next month. Ask them what their position is, and if possible pick someone who will vote the right way.
I think you are probably right about the dynamic RAM issue. If you are putting the electron in anything but the ground state, then it will eventually decay, so you will have to referesh it periodically. I believe that is what the researcher is referring to when he says, ``Now we want to find out how long information can be stored.''
It turns out that there are an infinite number of energy states between the ground state and the ionization threshold (look at a diagram of Hydrogen energy levels to see what I mean), so the amount of energy available is not a limiting factor. One practical limit is that the highly excited states are very closely spaced in energy. At some point they get too close for your apparatus to reliably read and write them. Also, when the thermal noise becomes comparable to the the spacing between states you are going to run into problems. I didn't notice any mention of temperature in the article, but I suspect they had to keep things pretty cold to avoid getting killed by noise.
So, from the sound of it, it seems like you might conceivably be able to get down to something like one atom per register (which is still pretty amazing), but don't hold your breath waiting for a single-electron replacement for your HD, or even your L2 cache, for that matter.
Well, then, how about when you walk up to a movie theatre box office and pay $7.50, when the senior citizen behind you pays $5.00? Same thing, no? It's all about capturing what economists refer to as the "consumer surplus". Basically, the movie theatre charges you more because they perceive that you are likely to be willing to pay more. Brick and mortar businesses have been going after the consumer surplus for ages, and so it's only reasonable to expect online business to do the same.
What's interesting about these little pricing games is that we internet users have been sticking it to the online businesses for a while now. Armed with (nearly) perfect information about the marketplace we have forced them to give up the premiums that businesses have traditionally been able to charge for better location, better advertising, and the like, resulting in a huge consumer surplus. Now, it looks like businesses are finally learning how to use the unique characteristics of the net to their advantage, and they're starting to win back some of that consumer surplus. For all the talk about how the rules of business have changed in the digital age, it looks as if the game may be fundamentally the same, once everyone learns how to play under the modified rules.
I think that what we are seeing here is people's tendencies to see what they want to see and to try to validate their beliefs by ascribing them to other people they respect. It works something like this:
I believe in X, and I think I'm a pretty smart hacker type. I wonder if other hacker types believe in X too. Oh, look, here are a few really smart hacker types, and they believe in X, so I guess hackers in general must believe in X. I wonder why that is. Well, we're all hyper-smart rational types, so it must be that...
And so it goes. Naturally, there will be plenty of hacker types that don't believe in X (and, btw, please spare the jokes about the windowing system--you know what I mean), but those counterexamples are either ignored or marginalized as "rare exceptions" or "not true hackers" or whatever.
If you want to see some really good examples of this phenomenon in action, have a(nother) look at the Jargon File; it is rife with them. I mean, do we really believe that you're not a true hacker if you don't like Chinese food? I suspect not, but the guys that wrote the Jargon File liked it, and they constructed a whole mythology around why it was only natural that their hacker nature should lead to a love of Chinese food. It's the same thing with religion; in fact, with religion people have even more personal incentive to rationalize their beliefs, particularly in a subculture that prizes logic and analytical skills above all else.
My feeling is that there probably isn't any one religious stereotype that applies to hackers in general. There may be a slight trend away from mainstream religion, but even at that there seems to be no shortage of hackers that do follow a mainstream religion. Just believe what you want to believe, and don't worry about whether it's the "hackish" thing to do. And don't waste time trying to rationalize it. Religion is an inherently nonrational phenomenon, and that is not a bad thing.
This sort of "logic" comes up so often in public health debates and all it really reflects is that the person voicing it lacks critical thinking skills.
Before you impugn the critical thinking skills of others, you might want to break out a logic textbook and look up the term "begging the question". In this case your thesis is that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. You then go on to prove your thesis by assuming as a premise that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. That is not logic in any meaningful sense. No progress is possible in this debate until people recognize that the real question is not, "Is it ok to steal?" but rather "Does it make sense to classify something that can be endlessly replicated without cost as `property'?"
The argument in favor of intellectual property is that creators need incentive to create. I'm not entirely sure I believe that, but it is certainly true that creative people need to pay their rent and grocery bills the same as everyone else. The arguments against intellectual property are, first, that people are naturally creative, and they create more efficiently when they are free to build on previous work, and, second, that intellectual property laws can be used to stifle freedom.
The latter point is most troubling to me. As our economy evolves, we expect information products to become every bit as much necessities of life as food and shelter; in fact, in many cases we expect information products to displace physical goods as necessities of life. With physical goods the economy has always worked on the principle that once you buy it it's yours, and the seller has no further say in what you do with it. Not so, intellectual property. Intellectual property is governed by a license which binds you to an ongoing commitment to the seller. Vendors of intellectual property would have us believe that the terms of these license could be literally anything: a continuing financial commitment, refraining from using competing products, and disclosing sensitive personal information are all terms that have appeared in intellectual property licenses, and we can only expect the license terms to grow bolder.
To me, finding a balance for intellectual property law is the single most important challenge facing our civilization today. What good are the guarantees of liberty we have worked so hard to build (literally centuries of human endeavor) if we and our posterity are going to have to license ourselves into bondage just to participate in the digital economy? A fair and equitable balance must be found. I don't pretend that that balance will be found in "information wants to be free", but there's a lot less danger in that than in the "mine, all mine" espoused by the intellectual property industries and their apologists.
This is kind of a bizarre point of view. Let me see if I've got this straight. I sell you a piece of software which you can then use to connect to my server (for which I charge you a fee) and do some stuff. Then, someone else comes along and writes (using entirely his own code) a work-alike server and says, "Hey, you could use your program with our server instead; we think it's better than the original anyway." Now, how can this be a copyright infringement when in fact nobody has copied anything? Or, to put it another way, how can Verant claim a copyright on code they never wrote, or on data of someone else's devising?
You also say:
Even in emulation you're overstepping the boundaries of what's allowed (most emulation projects only get off the ground if the product hasn't been out for years and is no longer profitable, like MAME).
This seems like a dubious statement as well. As I understand it the legal issues surrounding emulators stem not from distributing the emulators per se, but from distributing the ROMs that go with them. The ROMs are definitely copyrighted, and making copies of them is definitely an infringement. The emulator is just a piece of software, and its copyright belongs to whomever wrote it, not to whomever wrote the thing that it is emulating. In fact, MAME is an interesting analogy because, as I understand it, it is perfectly legal to use MAME with a video game ROM that you have acquired legitimately. In other words, the owner of the copyright on the ROM cannot force you to run the programs contained therein only on hardware of their choosing; you are allowed to run it anyplace you can get it to run. Why should contemporary software be any different in that respect?
Oh, wait, I know. It's in the license agreement, right? You can't use the client with any server emulator. What a load of bunk. Since when does copyright give you the right to say how a person who has legally purchased a copy of something is allowed to use that copy? Copyright gives you the sole right to distribute copies and give public performances, and that's it. What the customer does with his copy is his business.
Finally, you observe:
Besides, they're underhanding Sony and Verant's entire profit system.
Just so. The problem with the old saw about "giving away the razors and selling the blades" is that you always run the risk that someone will come along with a compatible blade and undersell you. That's capitalism; you put your product on the shelves, and you take your chances. EQ has had a good run already, and there's no reason why they can't continue to do so, provided that they have a continuing commitment to improving their service; after all, they have a huge head start on any upstart emulators. If, however, they try to sit back and soak their captive audience, they will be surpassed by the new competition, and they will lose. That's as it should be.
Some of your arguments about the rarity of technological civilization strike me as a little specious. Why must intelligent life on other planets develop exactly the same as it did here? Let's look at your points:
the existence of moon of sufficient size to help create tides and provide a just the right amount of long term stability to the earth to allow life to evolve. . . That is a rare event
Granted, but is this the only stable configuration? What about moons around gas giants? What about configurations that don't occur at all in our solar system?
the extinction of the dinosaurs by an asteroid impact
Why is this necessary? Who is to say that the dinosaurs wouldn't have spawned an intelligent race on their own, had they survived. Or maybe they would have died off for other reasons; the late Cretaceous is not the only mass extinction in earth history, after all.
birth and procreation of mutated ape of sufficient intelligence to create civilization
We have no data on how rare this really is, nor can we be sure that something resembling a primate is the only sort of life that can develop civilization.
The existence of a very few brilliant individuals
This is a very distorted view of scientific and technological progress. Closer examination of history shows that when the time for an idea is right, there are usually many people working on it independently. We remember the one who got there first, and we forget the also-rans, but that doesn't mean they weren't there. If Newton had died of the plague, others would have picked up the torch. Maybe we would have had to wait another decade or two, but physics would have developed, just the same.
A long period of time without a life killing catastrophe of natural origin.
Sure, but how rare is that, really? With only our own planet's history to draw from, it's hard to say, exactly.
I think that if the probability of intelligent life arising naturally is nonzero (i.e. there is no divine intervention or the like required), then it must have happened many times throughout the universe; the universe is simply too unimaginably huge for it not to have. However, intelligent life in a galaxy a gigaparsec from us is not terribly interesting; if that's our closest neighbor, then we might as well be alone. The interesting question is whether there is intelligent life close enough that we might be able to interact with it someday, and on that question we are basically ignorant. We have no idea how typical our own planet and solar system really are. We have begun to see signs that planets, at least, are not all that uncommon, and this is progress, but we have no idea how likely the coincidences that allowed technological civilization to evolve really are. Any attempt to generalize from the one example we have to the galaxy as a whole is mere speculation. Not that there is anything wrong with speculation, mind you, but we should take care not to confuse our speculation with fact.
Since we are too ignorant to predict from theory what we might find out there, our only recourse is to look and see what we can turn up. SETI is a crude tool; there are too many ways for it to fail to detect something that really is out there. For the moment, however, it is the only tool we have. Someday we will have space-based interferometers that are capable of resolving nearby planets directly, and that will tell us a lot more about how typical or atypical our own planet really is. And after that, who knows? We may never find out whether or not we are alone, but if we don't look, then we'll definitely never know.
``Sure the game is rigged, but don't let that stop you. If you don't bet, then you can't win.'' --Robert A. Heinlein
A lot of people have commented on the trend at universities toward receiving corporate funding, in the form of grants and donations. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a discussion in itself. However, what is even more troubling is that universities are increasingly conducting themselves as though they were corporations. Things like patent portfolios and"responsibility-centered" management are all designed to make the university run more like a business. The thing is, running a university as a business is diametrically in opposition to the university's mission as an academic institution. Universities are meant to be repositories of a civilization's knowledge, not vendors of same.
There was a time when academicians disseminated their knowledge freely by publishing it in scholarly journals. This work was not encumbered with patents, and consequently anyone could walk into a library, read an article in a journal, and use the ideas contained therein in any way they saw fit, including in a commercial project. In that sense, academic research belonged to everyone.
Times have changed, however. These days universities have become more businesslike in their research, in that they want to cash in on potential commercial applications. Consequently, academic researchers at many institutions are now encouraged to patent any discovery they make that might be salable. They still publish in scholarly journals, of course, but only after securing the patent. Where before academic research was available to everyone, now it is increasingly available only to those who can pay for it.
The benefits of this new mode of academic research include licensing intellectual property as an additional source of funding for universities. In an era where public funding for academic research has been a little anemic by comparison to past decades, it's not hard to see why this is attractive to university administrators. However, I wonder if it's worth the price. Who will take over as the storehouse of our civilization's knowledge if universities abdicate that role to pursue the almighty buck? Will there even be any public knowledge left for universities to watch over, or will every scrap of information be somebody's property, usable only by those who are willing and able to pay for the privilege?
Since these trends are largely driven by public research funding drying up, we can always hope that they will reverse themselves when public research comes back into favor, provided that universities don't become too addicted to the patent gravy train in the meantime.
And if the trends don't reverse? Well, then, maybe we academicians can at least expect some directed shares when our universities have their IPOs. . . but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Note also that some companies will refuse permission to redistribute their abandoned software, even if they have no intention of ever selling it again because they regard it as competition for whatever they are selling today. For example, a game company might reason that time you spend playing their old "abandonware" is time that you will not be playing their latest release. Therefore, the company might refuse permission to redistribute old games in order to reduced the competition that their current titles face.
All the author has to do is scrap the '%-honest' requirement in favor of an absolute revenue requirement. After all, the author knows how much time he spent working on the book, and he has an opinion about how much his time is worth, so he knows how much he needs to make to turn a profit. After the book has been out for a while, the author totals up the money he has made and decides if he has made enough that he wants to continue. Since he doesn't count the number of downloads, the robot factor is irrelevant.
The '%-honest' metric is flawed anyhow, even absent the robot factor. It is symptomatic of an unhealthy 'mine, all mine' obsession. Does Stephen King get all worked up like this when I check out one of his books from the public library instead of buying a copy? I certainly hope not, so why, then, should they obsess over the possibility that someone might download the electronic version without paying? As long as enough people pay, that is, as long as the author makes enough money to satisfy him, why should he worry about all the other downloads?
Regarding the possibility of not getting the entire story, it seems to me that this is a risk of serialization that has little or nothing to do with online distribution. Even with traditional publishing, if the first novel of a trilogy sells poorly enough, the remainder of the series might be cancelled. If the possibility of not seeing the end bothers you, then wait until the entire series is complete before you buy the first one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure where you get the idea that other gravitational wave detectors have "failed". I suppose you could regard an inability to build a sufficiently sensitive detector as a "failure" of sorts, but it's not the sort of failure that would cause you to draw any conclusions about the underlying theory because nobody really expected those detectors to find anything. Those experiments have been more about techniques in constructing large interferometers than they have been about astronomy. Moreover, gravitational radiation has been observed indirectly through its effects on binary pulsars. The loss of angular momentum in a binary pulsar system has been observed to be consistent with the predictions of General Relativity. It is possible, of course, that GR is wrong, and there is some other effect that is producing the angular momentum loss, but it would be a rather surprising coincidence if the rate of loss from this hitherto unsuspected mechanism were precisely what we would have expected from gravitational radiation.
As for the disagreement between GR and quantum mechanics, this is a long-standing theoretical issue. That is, you don't need observations to tell you that GR and QM don't work together; they are incompatible even at a theoretical level. Observations of gravitational waves, or lack thereof, are pretty much irrelevant to that debate. What this means in practical terms is that like classical mechanics GR is a useful approximation in the non-quantum regime, but it breaks down when you get into regimes where quantum effects are important. Physicists have been trying to figure out a new, quantum mechanics-compatible theory of gravity for decades, so it's not like they're waiting for the results of this experiment to come in before they get started on it. However, it turns out that coming up with a good, testable quantum theory of gravity is rather harder than it looks.
The real significance of these gravitational wave observatories is not in theoretical development of quantum gravity, but rather in their role as a new window on astrophysical phenomena. When astronomers began to observe in the radio we learned a lot about known astrophysical pheonomena, and we discovered entirely new phenomena that we never suspected. It seems reasonable to expect similar discoveries from gravitational wave astronomy when it becomes a reality. For example, once ground based detectors develop sufficient sensitivity, some astronomers hope to learn a lot about the makeup of neutron stars from the gravitational wave signature of binary neutron star coalescence. And the LISA experiment, if it ever flies, will have sensitivity in the frequencies that contain the relict gravitational radiation from the Big Bang. Just as the Cosmic Microwave Background has taught us a lot about the early universe, we hope to make similar discoveries from the Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background.
-rpl
Judging from the whinging during the lead-up to the last election, the Bill of Rights was supposed to have been history not later than sometime last month; yet it's still with us. But, then, that's the government for you; they never could deliver anything on schedule or within budget.
-rpl
A better question is, why do you feel you need us to validate your taste in sci-fi (or anything else for that matter)? Like what you like, don't like what you don't like, respect other people's choices on matters that are essentially arbitrary (that means words like 'hype' are probably right out), and above all don't try to conform to some approved standard of nonconformity. Do these things, grasshopper, and you'll probably be all right.
Yours in time-killing until the 2200 showing,
-rpl
When I went to the AMS conference back in January I saw plenty of debate. In fact, just about every aspect of global climate change beyond the simple fact of a warming trend had enough debate that it could reasonably be called "controversial". Moreover, the aforementioned Dr. Gray and others had some rather pointed questions about the methodology in several of the global climate change papers that to my mind were never satisfactorily answered. To me that suggests that the issues are not so cut and dried as you might think.
Nice. I can understand if you find the research on anthropogenic climate change compelling, but to dismiss perfectly legitimate questions about the validity of conclusions drawn from global climate change research without so much as acknowledging that they were asked seems profoundly "anti-science" to me, far moreso than any "plutocratic propaganda" or whatever.
As with any other science, astronomers claim a discovery when the available evidence indicates the "discovery" is more likely right than wrong. Exactly when that happens is subject to some personal judgement. Some scientists are more conservative than others. Some have wound up with egg on their faces after announcing a "discovery" prematurely. Some discoveries are quietly, or even noisily, disputed for years after they are announced. Some widely accepted "laws of nature" are found to be subtly incorrect hundreds of years after their discovery.
In other words, uncertainty and doubt are part and parcel of the science gig. If you work in the field for any length of time you come to accept that. Nevertheless, science represents our best understanding of the natural universe, given what we know right now. And that's really all you can fairly ask of it.
-rpl
Given my druthers, I'd prefer a system where everyone got to keep their privacy, but with companies increasingly taking the position, "they're our computers so we can monitor and filter if we want," and ISPs increasingly saying, "they're our networks so we can monitor and filter if we want," does anybody really still believe that's an option? At least one other poster has pointed out that this sort of monitoring is already de rigueur for many employees. Are our saviors on the bench prepared to join the crusade against this practice once their own privacy is assured? Somehow, I doubt it.
I think the worst of all possible worlds would be the one where the high and mighty are allowed to have privacy, but the rest of us are not. If every detail of my life is potentially open to scrutiny by the whole world, then I want, at the very least, to be able to discourage people from making unfair use of that information through the threat of exposing their secrets. If we rally behind these judges, perhaps we might strike a blow for privacy; then again, perhaps we might open the door to that lopsided scenario where judges and congresspeople and billionaries can protect their privacy, but the rest of us can just lump it.
No thanks. I propose instead that we support monitoring for judges and elected officials until such time as they get off their duffs and take steps to assure privacy protection for all of us.
-rpl
Science needs skeptics; no doubt about that. But being a skeptic is not the same thing as being a contrarian. When the commonly accepted explanation has the weight of evidence behind it, a person who refuses to accept it is not by any stretch of the imagination a "good scientist," and he is not doing science any favors by continuing to rail against the accepted theory.
In this "enlightened" age of après-truth, it is not fashionable to talk of right and wrong answers; people prefer, rather, to talk about "different points of view." Nevertheless, nature is what it is, without regard to what point of view we might have on the matter. Any theory that disagrees with what nature reveals about itself through experiment and observation is simply an untruth, and clinging to such a theory in spite of the evidence is simply unscientific.
-rpl
Mmm hmm, check. Those Mad Magazine guys were onto something, I tell you. The future of Star Wars is right there for anyone not too blind to see it.
Ok, I have to go buy some more tinfoil and rewrite my pamphlet debunking the Clone Gunman theory. More later, if Lucas' minions don't catch up to me first.
-rpl
The motion you are thinking of is the motion to reconsider. Although one has to have voted on the winning side to make a motion to reconsider, one need not have voted on the winning side to vote for a motion to reconsider. Thus, it is wholly unnecessary (and highly irregular) for the entire support base for a measure to vote against it just to leave open the possibility of a motion to reconsider. Traditionally the party leadership takes on this duty. Furthermore, even if for some odd reason all the hypothetical Kyoto supporters in the Senate did vote against the treaty for the purpose of reconsidering, why didn't they do so?
Your misunderstanding goes even deeper, however, because you don't seem to realize that the Kyoto treaty was never sent to the Senate for ratification. The 96-0 vote people keep referring to was for Senate Resolution 98, which was passed before the Kyoto treaty was signed. The resolution laid out the conditions any treaty would have to fulfill in order for the Senate to ratify it. Many analysts feel that the Kyoto treaty fails to meet these criteria, and thus would be disapproved by the Senate, were it to be submitted. Since SR-98 is nonbinding, it's entirely possible that the current Senate would ratify it, but the chances of mustering the required 2/3 vote are basically nil (and that, by the way, is why if Gore had been elected the Kyoto treaty would still not be law in the United States).
All of that brings us to the final point, which is that whether or not you believe that climatic change is human caused (a whole debate unto itself), the Kyoto treaty is a bad treaty. There are plenty of analyses of the technical flaws of the treaty out there, but the most damning thing in my opinion is that it places responsibility for controlling CO2 emissions squarely on the shoulders of the industrialized nations. While that seems like a reasonable thing if you consider only that the (currently) industrialized nations have historically dominated world CO2 output. However, many developing nations have a tremendous rate of growth in their CO2 emissions, and when you take that into account, exempting them from emission limits will completely hamstring efforts to reduce global emissions. Advocates of Kyoto say that it isn't fair that industrialized nations have been emitting for years, and it isn't fair to ask developing nations to stop now that they are starting to ramp up their economies. They may have a point; it probably isn't fair, but the question you have to ask yourself is do you want to put a dent in global CO2 emissions or don't you? If the answer is yes, you do, then Kyoto isn't going to get you there. Controlling global emissions requires a global effort, not just effort from the nations the world loves to hate.
-rpl
Personally, I can't wait for this style of ``agreement'' to catch on in other industries; I'm looking forward with great anticipation to the day I have to take my lawyer with me to the grocery store to interpret the license on a bag of tater tots. It makes a feller glad to be alive.
-rpl
-rpl
There are plenty of "good" reasons to use distributed peer-to-peer file sharing. Personally, I think that these systems would make a good replacement for servers like astro-ph, once someone gets around to adding support for searching for keywords in parts of files besides filenames. (As it stands, including all of the relevant keywords in the filename leads to unreasonably long filenames.) People who want to distribute their own music, essays, or video productions could benefit similarly. These are all legal activities that we have every right to engage in, but the intellectual property industry will argue that those concerns are inconsequential next to the menace of "piracy". They will argue that I should give up my right to use my computer equipment in a perfectly legal manner because somebody else might use the same software to perform some illegal activity, and my activity just isn't important enough to justify that risk. Of course, that's easy for them to say, since they aren't being asked to give up anything.
By making these arguments, media companies are in effect saying that nobody but themselves has anything worthwhile to say, and therefore if anyone other than themselves is saying something that people are listening to, then that something must have been stolen from the purveyors of intellectual property. This sort of reasoning is an anathema to free speech, and we must resist it now, before it becomes entrenched in the form of legislation.
-rpl
Are you even listening? I'm happy for copyright holders to add whatever conditions they like on distributing copies of their software because that's what copyright is all about. I object to copyright holders placing restrictions on use, resale, or any other of the things not traditionally covered by copyright because the law doesn't give them that right.
Nothing in copyright law gives them this right. If a book publisher tried to say you couldn't publish a review of their book, they would get laughed out of court. Why are Microsoft and Oracle above the law?
They say nothing of the sort. Look at the GPL again. Read it this time. They say that if you want to distribute copies of software covered by the GPL, then you must distribute source code. If you do not wish to distribute copies of the software, then you can do whatever you want. In particular, if you just want to use the software, you can do so on whatever terms you want.
As far as stopping people copying your code, you have every right to do that, and nothing in the GPL changes that. The GPL does say that if you create a derivative of a GPL program, *and* you decide to distribute copies of it, then the derivative work must be covered by the GPL. Note, however, that under copyright law you have no right at all to distribute a derivative work. The GPL extends to you a right not otherwise given to you under the law, but it does so at a price; you have to give away the changes you've made. Note also that Microsoft claims that you do not have the right to create a derivative work at all, *even* if you do not distribute it, which again seems to me to fall outside the purview of copyright law.
That's really the crux of the difference here. One group (GPL, BSD, et al.) gives you rights that the law says they don't have to give you. The other group (Microsoft, Oracle, et al.) tries to claim for itself rights not granted to it by the law. That is the all-important distinction, and ignoring it is just plain disingenuous.
-rpl
It's all an illusion, though. I've seen nothing to make me believe that the laws of economics have been repealed. Good times will give way to recession; growth in high tech industries will saturate, and when that happens we will see who has the bargaining power. I'm guessing it's not us, and I'm guessing the results will not be pretty.
I believe that Bush and Gore have been bought and paid for by big business dollars. Harry Browne looks to be relatively free of campaign contribution corruption, but his political philosophy leads him to give away the store for free, so to speak. Either way, the result is the same. Either way the "rights" of monied interests continue to expand, and the "privileges" of private individuals continue to contract. And in the end, we all cease to be citizens and become merely consumers. In the end we lose control of our goods and chattels (instead "renting" them from corporations that retain actual ownership), we lose our privacy, and we lose the right to choose how we live our lives, free from meddling from outsiders who style themselves our masters.
I don't pretend that Ralph Nader is a panacea for all of these problems. I even think some of his economic proposals would be very bad for the country in practice. (However, I think that even if Nader were elected today the worst policies would be moderated substantially by the legislative process.) The important thing, to me, is that Ralph Nader stands for something. Among other things, Ralph Nader stands for personal dignity for all of us, not just those who can afford to purchase it. Ralph Nader does not have the answers for all of our problems, but he does have a remarkably insightful grasp of what those problems are, and he is willing to put forward and talk about earnest proposals for solving them. If Bush or Gore or even Browne or Buchanan had either of those two qualities I would consider voting for them. But they don't, and Nader does. So I voted for Nader instead.
-rpl
That's right because, as we all know, when you sit down at the bargaining table with Oracle or Microsoft, you negotiate as equals. No imbalance of power here; no sir, no way.
This is news to me. I see a lot of stuff in the copyright statutes about distributing copies and derivative works, but no mention of conditions on use. In fact, when other industries, say the publishing industry, for instance, have tried to put conditions on the sale of things like books (e.g. minimum retail price, prohibiting resale), they have gotten slapped down.
Even the software industry doesn't have the chutzpah to claim that these license terms can be justified under copyright law. Instead, they try to rationalize them as "voluntary" contracts. However, the law does, as others have pointed out, recognize the concept of "unconscionable" (and therefore unenforcable) contract terms. Do these terms qualify legally as unconscionable? It's hard to say; nobody knows for sure until you fight it out in court. I think it's rather telling, however, that for all their sabre rattling, software companies always seem to keep these matters out of court. I think it's equally telling that they feel they need to get special law passed to legitimate their license agreements.
Well, except for the minor detail that the GPL places restrictions only on copying the software, while the commercial guys put restrictions on using it and (even more offensively) talking about using it. With as many times as this difference has been pointed out on slashdot, I'm amazed that anyone who has been reading for any length of time can remain ignorant of it.
-rpl
-rpl
It turns out that there are an infinite number of energy states between the ground state and the ionization threshold (look at a diagram of Hydrogen energy levels to see what I mean), so the amount of energy available is not a limiting factor. One practical limit is that the highly excited states are very closely spaced in energy. At some point they get too close for your apparatus to reliably read and write them. Also, when the thermal noise becomes comparable to the the spacing between states you are going to run into problems. I didn't notice any mention of temperature in the article, but I suspect they had to keep things pretty cold to avoid getting killed by noise.
So, from the sound of it, it seems like you might conceivably be able to get down to something like one atom per register (which is still pretty amazing), but don't hold your breath waiting for a single-electron replacement for your HD, or even your L2 cache, for that matter.
-rpl
What's interesting about these little pricing games is that we internet users have been sticking it to the online businesses for a while now. Armed with (nearly) perfect information about the marketplace we have forced them to give up the premiums that businesses have traditionally been able to charge for better location, better advertising, and the like, resulting in a huge consumer surplus. Now, it looks like businesses are finally learning how to use the unique characteristics of the net to their advantage, and they're starting to win back some of that consumer surplus. For all the talk about how the rules of business have changed in the digital age, it looks as if the game may be fundamentally the same, once everyone learns how to play under the modified rules.
-rpl
And so it goes. Naturally, there will be plenty of hacker types that don't believe in X (and, btw, please spare the jokes about the windowing system--you know what I mean), but those counterexamples are either ignored or marginalized as "rare exceptions" or "not true hackers" or whatever.
If you want to see some really good examples of this phenomenon in action, have a(nother) look at the Jargon File; it is rife with them. I mean, do we really believe that you're not a true hacker if you don't like Chinese food? I suspect not, but the guys that wrote the Jargon File liked it, and they constructed a whole mythology around why it was only natural that their hacker nature should lead to a love of Chinese food. It's the same thing with religion; in fact, with religion people have even more personal incentive to rationalize their beliefs, particularly in a subculture that prizes logic and analytical skills above all else.
My feeling is that there probably isn't any one religious stereotype that applies to hackers in general. There may be a slight trend away from mainstream religion, but even at that there seems to be no shortage of hackers that do follow a mainstream religion. Just believe what you want to believe, and don't worry about whether it's the "hackish" thing to do. And don't waste time trying to rationalize it. Religion is an inherently nonrational phenomenon, and that is not a bad thing.
-rpl
Before you impugn the critical thinking skills of others, you might want to break out a logic textbook and look up the term "begging the question". In this case your thesis is that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. You then go on to prove your thesis by assuming as a premise that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. That is not logic in any meaningful sense. No progress is possible in this debate until people recognize that the real question is not, "Is it ok to steal?" but rather "Does it make sense to classify something that can be endlessly replicated without cost as `property'?"
The argument in favor of intellectual property is that creators need incentive to create. I'm not entirely sure I believe that, but it is certainly true that creative people need to pay their rent and grocery bills the same as everyone else. The arguments against intellectual property are, first, that people are naturally creative, and they create more efficiently when they are free to build on previous work, and, second, that intellectual property laws can be used to stifle freedom.
The latter point is most troubling to me. As our economy evolves, we expect information products to become every bit as much necessities of life as food and shelter; in fact, in many cases we expect information products to displace physical goods as necessities of life. With physical goods the economy has always worked on the principle that once you buy it it's yours, and the seller has no further say in what you do with it. Not so, intellectual property. Intellectual property is governed by a license which binds you to an ongoing commitment to the seller. Vendors of intellectual property would have us believe that the terms of these license could be literally anything: a continuing financial commitment, refraining from using competing products, and disclosing sensitive personal information are all terms that have appeared in intellectual property licenses, and we can only expect the license terms to grow bolder.
To me, finding a balance for intellectual property law is the single most important challenge facing our civilization today. What good are the guarantees of liberty we have worked so hard to build (literally centuries of human endeavor) if we and our posterity are going to have to license ourselves into bondage just to participate in the digital economy? A fair and equitable balance must be found. I don't pretend that that balance will be found in "information wants to be free", but there's a lot less danger in that than in the "mine, all mine" espoused by the intellectual property industries and their apologists.
-rpl
You also say:
This seems like a dubious statement as well. As I understand it the legal issues surrounding emulators stem not from distributing the emulators per se, but from distributing the ROMs that go with them. The ROMs are definitely copyrighted, and making copies of them is definitely an infringement. The emulator is just a piece of software, and its copyright belongs to whomever wrote it, not to whomever wrote the thing that it is emulating. In fact, MAME is an interesting analogy because, as I understand it, it is perfectly legal to use MAME with a video game ROM that you have acquired legitimately. In other words, the owner of the copyright on the ROM cannot force you to run the programs contained therein only on hardware of their choosing; you are allowed to run it anyplace you can get it to run. Why should contemporary software be any different in that respect?
Oh, wait, I know. It's in the license agreement, right? You can't use the client with any server emulator. What a load of bunk. Since when does copyright give you the right to say how a person who has legally purchased a copy of something is allowed to use that copy? Copyright gives you the sole right to distribute copies and give public performances, and that's it. What the customer does with his copy is his business.
Finally, you observe:
Just so. The problem with the old saw about "giving away the razors and selling the blades" is that you always run the risk that someone will come along with a compatible blade and undersell you. That's capitalism; you put your product on the shelves, and you take your chances. EQ has had a good run already, and there's no reason why they can't continue to do so, provided that they have a continuing commitment to improving their service; after all, they have a huge head start on any upstart emulators. If, however, they try to sit back and soak their captive audience, they will be surpassed by the new competition, and they will lose. That's as it should be.
-rpl
- the existence of moon of sufficient size to help create tides and provide a just the right amount of long term stability to the earth to allow life to evolve. . . That is a rare event
- the extinction of the dinosaurs by an asteroid impact
- birth and procreation of mutated ape of sufficient intelligence to create civilization
- The existence of a very few brilliant individuals
- A long period of time without a life killing catastrophe of natural origin.
I think that if the probability of intelligent life arising naturally is nonzero (i.e. there is no divine intervention or the like required), then it must have happened many times throughout the universe; the universe is simply too unimaginably huge for it not to have. However, intelligent life in a galaxy a gigaparsec from us is not terribly interesting; if that's our closest neighbor, then we might as well be alone. The interesting question is whether there is intelligent life close enough that we might be able to interact with it someday, and on that question we are basically ignorant. We have no idea how typical our own planet and solar system really are. We have begun to see signs that planets, at least, are not all that uncommon, and this is progress, but we have no idea how likely the coincidences that allowed technological civilization to evolve really are. Any attempt to generalize from the one example we have to the galaxy as a whole is mere speculation. Not that there is anything wrong with speculation, mind you, but we should take care not to confuse our speculation with fact.Granted, but is this the only stable configuration? What about moons around gas giants? What about configurations that don't occur at all in our solar system?
Why is this necessary? Who is to say that the dinosaurs wouldn't have spawned an intelligent race on their own, had they survived. Or maybe they would have died off for other reasons; the late Cretaceous is not the only mass extinction in earth history, after all.
We have no data on how rare this really is, nor can we be sure that something resembling a primate is the only sort of life that can develop civilization.
This is a very distorted view of scientific and technological progress. Closer examination of history shows that when the time for an idea is right, there are usually many people working on it independently. We remember the one who got there first, and we forget the also-rans, but that doesn't mean they weren't there. If Newton had died of the plague, others would have picked up the torch. Maybe we would have had to wait another decade or two, but physics would have developed, just the same.
Sure, but how rare is that, really? With only our own planet's history to draw from, it's hard to say, exactly.
Since we are too ignorant to predict from theory what we might find out there, our only recourse is to look and see what we can turn up. SETI is a crude tool; there are too many ways for it to fail to detect something that really is out there. For the moment, however, it is the only tool we have. Someday we will have space-based interferometers that are capable of resolving nearby planets directly, and that will tell us a lot more about how typical or atypical our own planet really is. And after that, who knows? We may never find out whether or not we are alone, but if we don't look, then we'll definitely never know.
``Sure the game is rigged, but don't let that stop you. If you don't bet, then you can't win.'' --Robert A. Heinlein
-rpl
There was a time when academicians disseminated their knowledge freely by publishing it in scholarly journals. This work was not encumbered with patents, and consequently anyone could walk into a library, read an article in a journal, and use the ideas contained therein in any way they saw fit, including in a commercial project. In that sense, academic research belonged to everyone.
Times have changed, however. These days universities have become more businesslike in their research, in that they want to cash in on potential commercial applications. Consequently, academic researchers at many institutions are now encouraged to patent any discovery they make that might be salable. They still publish in scholarly journals, of course, but only after securing the patent. Where before academic research was available to everyone, now it is increasingly available only to those who can pay for it.
The benefits of this new mode of academic research include licensing intellectual property as an additional source of funding for universities. In an era where public funding for academic research has been a little anemic by comparison to past decades, it's not hard to see why this is attractive to university administrators. However, I wonder if it's worth the price. Who will take over as the storehouse of our civilization's knowledge if universities abdicate that role to pursue the almighty buck? Will there even be any public knowledge left for universities to watch over, or will every scrap of information be somebody's property, usable only by those who are willing and able to pay for the privilege?
Since these trends are largely driven by public research funding drying up, we can always hope that they will reverse themselves when public research comes back into favor, provided that universities don't become too addicted to the patent gravy train in the meantime.
And if the trends don't reverse? Well, then, maybe we academicians can at least expect some directed shares when our universities have their IPOs. . . but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
-rpl
-rpl
The '%-honest' metric is flawed anyhow, even absent the robot factor. It is symptomatic of an unhealthy 'mine, all mine' obsession. Does Stephen King get all worked up like this when I check out one of his books from the public library instead of buying a copy? I certainly hope not, so why, then, should they obsess over the possibility that someone might download the electronic version without paying? As long as enough people pay, that is, as long as the author makes enough money to satisfy him, why should he worry about all the other downloads?
Regarding the possibility of not getting the entire story, it seems to me that this is a risk of serialization that has little or nothing to do with online distribution. Even with traditional publishing, if the first novel of a trilogy sells poorly enough, the remainder of the series might be cancelled. If the possibility of not seeing the end bothers you, then wait until the entire series is complete before you buy the first one.
-rpl