Good points, all. First, 'hot' dark matter, that is, matter that has too much energy to remain bound to galaxies, is right out. Hot dark matter impedes the formation of large scale structure.
It's certainly possible that dark matter has some sort of weird interaction characteristics that cause it not to cluster, but it's not what you expect. Particle-particle interactions are typically mediated by short-range forces, while gravity is a long-range force. In dense materials like water and oil the molecular separations are small enough that van der Waals forces and the like dominate gravity. By contrast, in space interparticle separations are large, and so interactions strong enough to separate out the dark matter would be surprising. That's not to say it can't happen (in fact, something very like that scenario happens with phenomena like ambipolar diffusion), but for it to happen on intergalactic length scales would require some creative physics. Moreover, if I recall correctly, field (i.e. away from galaxy clusters) gravitational lensing surveys put some constraints on the existence of dark clusters, so the dark matter would have to interact in such a way that it doesn't cluster at all, not even with itself. Again, one could probably work up a scenario to fit this constraint, but it's not what you expect.
Basically, it comes down to a question of parsimony. It's bad enough that the dark matter has to be nonbaryonic; one would like to stay away from anything that makes it even more exotic. Finding more mass density in the universe than can be accounted for in galaxy clusters would have required lots of new physics, and in some sense it would have undermined confidence in the standard model because when a model starts growing too many patches you start to look for something simpler. Instead the new result bolsters confidence that the standard model is basically on the right track.
I guess the short answer, then, is that nonclustering dark matter is only really "a problem" for the standard model. If the standard model is overthrown it's not the end of the world or anything. However, we like the standard model; we think we understand it pretty well, and it has a lot of useful predictive power. Consequently, most astrophysicists (including this one) would rather see it refined than discarded.
The flat universe implied by these measurements is of the Omega~0.3, Lambda~0.7 variety. If the results are valid, that means that most, if not all of the matter in the universe is observable through its gravitational effects, albeit not directly through emitted radiation.
Also, the nonzero cosmological constant invalidates the BBC journalist's claim that the universe will coast to a stop at very large times. As the universe expands the matter density drops, and so a positive cosmological constant will drive the universe into exponential expansion when the matter density becomes negligible. That's assuming, of course, that the cosmological constant really is constant, which is the case in the standard cosmological models. One can imagine (and there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe) that if lambda is nonzero, then it is also nonconstant.
Finally, regarding the heat death of the universe, see the article by Adams and Laughlin in the August 1998 issue of Sky and Telescope. Apparently there will still be interesting phenomena in the universe, even after the last of the stars burn out.
First, the dependence on omega_m goes oppositely to what you suggest. Smaller omega_m -> older universe. Second, a flat cosmology and a nonzero lambda are not mutually exclusive; the condition for flatness is that Omega(matter) + Omega(cosmological constant) = 1. In fact, their preliminary result (based on the test flight data) seems to favor a flat cosmology of the large-lambda variety (Omega(lambda) = 0.75). That's not too much of a surprise, since both timescale arguments and Hubble diagrams from Type Ia supernovae point toward the same thing. The difference seems to be that this result excludes Omega(lambda) = 0 much more strongly than previous results.
What I found most interesting, however, was the discrepancy between their estimates of Omega(baryon) = 0.05 and Omega(matter) = 0.31 (again, based on the test flight data). That means that their result requires Omega(non-baryonic) of 0.26. That is, if this result is correct there is definitely not just dark matter, but 'exotic' dark matter (WIMPs, primordial black holes, or other strange stuff) out there. Again, that's not too surprising, since primordial nucleosynthesis arguments place rather severe restrictions on how much baryonic matter there can be in the universe. Still, this gives yet another independent argument for dark matter. What's more, the amount of dark matter required is close to what is implied by galactic dynamics, which means that you have enough to explain galaxy rotation curves, but you don't have any embarrassing intergalactic dark matter. It would be a problem if there were a lot of dark matter that steadfastly refused to cluster like ordinary matter.
At the end of the day, this result looks huge. If it is borne out, then it will go a long way toward settling the question of cosmography. Then the question becomes, what to do with lambda. A nonzero cosmological constant really doesn't make any sense from a theoretical standpoint, and it brings back all of the fine-tuning problems that inflationary scenarios were supposed to rid us of in the first place. The cosmological question of the next decade will be, "What does this nonzero cosmological constant mean, and why are both it and omega so close in magnitude?" The so-called 'quintessence' models look promising in this regard. At any rate, the ball is pretty firmly back in the theorists' court.
I don't think very many slashdotters identify with the killers at all. Who we do identify with are all the kids out there who have been tarred with the same brush as those killers simply for being a little different from the norm. Just because a kid dresses strangely or likes computers or otherwise doesn't conform doesn't make him a potential killer; however, there seems to be no shortage of teachers and administrators out there who think that it does. The persecution many geek-types suffer from their peers is bad enough; must we add persecution from adults too?
The real story of Columbine, at least from the slashdot point of view, has never been the killers or why they did their horrific deeds. In the end, as much as people dread to hear it, I don't think there was any reason behind their acts; I think they were just nuts, and there isn't a whole lot you can learn from a nutcase. No, the real story of Columbine is what came after; it's all the hysteria from baby-boomers who don't understand their progeny, and who fear them accordingly. The victims Katz speaks of were not Klebold and Harris; they were all the kids who got harassed, suspended from school, or worse in the aftermath of Columbine for the arch-crime of nonconformity. Those kids deserve an advocate, and that's what Katz is trying to be.
-rpl
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
--Henry David Thoreau
I suppose that is a fair assessment. When I hear the "doomsayers" prophecy the end of a technology, I generally interpret it as a hyperbolic way of saying, "we're going to have to do something more clever than the incremental refinements that we've been getting by with so far." Whether the end result of the more clever improvements is a "new technology" is open to debate. I think some of the refinements to HDDs mentioned in the article are significant enough that modern HDDs could be called a "different technology" from previous HDDs, and in that sense the people who predicted the "death" of the old-style disks were right. In any case, even if they overstate their claims, the doomsayers are still useful because they neatly outline (and help motivate people to overcome) the challenges looming on the horizon.
Alternatively, we could just paraphrase a pithier expression: I don't know what devices we'll be storing our data on in 5 years but they'll be called "hard disks".
I applaud you, sir, for not bothering to muck around debating the issues, but instead proceeding directly to demonizing anyone with the temerity to disagree with you. Why waste time constructing an articulate argument when you can simply dismiss your opponents as "a bunch of pirates and thieves and communists and stuff"? Have you ever considered a career in mainstream media?
Media interests like the RIAA, MPAA, et alia are very interested in extending copyright privileges far beyond what has hitherto been allowed. These very same organizations would be the first to admit this goal, claiming that it is necessary to "protect their business models". Now, despite the words you saw fit to put into my mouth, I have no problem with respecting other people's property rights; I have no problem with paying for what I use. I do have a problem with the "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine too" attitude that has come into vogue. I do have a problem with intellectual property laws that function more to shut out competition than to protect anyone from having their work ripped off. I do have a problem with taking away (for all practical purposes) the fair use rights that have traditionally been reserved to the consumers. Personally, I think these are reasonable stands on these issues; I would be interested in hearing why you think otherwise.
You do get one thing right, however, when you point out that Napster is one of our more embarrassing allies. Napster has very little legitimate use. However, "very little" is not the same as "none", and I suspect that this, combined with a fear of a "slippery slope" argument is what keeps a lot of people supporting Napster. If you admit that a tool like Napster should be banned because it has insufficient legitimate uses, you leave open the question of how much legitimate use is necessary to justify a tool's continued existence. Should a tool with 30/70% legitimate/illegitimate usage be banned? What about 50/50? 70/30?
Personally, I would love to see the opponents of extending copyright privileges dump Napster as an ally. I would also like to see an established legal standard of how much illegal usage is necessary before a tool should be banned. If the latter happened there would be no need to support Napster because there would be no fear that it might set a precedent for attacking tools that do have significant legitimate uses.
Once upon a time, it was said that modems could never exceed 9,600 bps, as the phone lines couldn't cope with higher than 9,600 baud. Then, one day, someone realised that - hey! If you throw away the assumption that baud == bps, you can actually drive up speeds to 56Kb/s!
Mmm hmm. And do you think anyone would have gotten around to that realization had someone not observed that the "baud == bps" approach would not work forever?
Then, as modems went up in speed, the same engineers moaned and groaned. The 56Kb/s limit was near, and without a total rewiring of the phone network... the 56K barrier would never be breached! Calamity! Then, one day, another bright spark realised that if you had modems at the junctions, you could shove REALLY high-speeds down the wires...
Right, but would anyone have bothered to do this had someone not pointed out that you couldn't get higher speeds using the conventional approach?
The moral of the story is that there is value to pointing out the limitations of current technology because that is what allows us to avoid wasting effort by developing new technologies to replace existing technologies that don't need replacing. Conversely, it helps to anticipate problems in existing technology before they start to limit progress, so that new technologies will be ready by the time those limits are reached. This is not "doomsaying", it is simply having a good understanding of current technology. You have to have a thorough understanding of existing technologies, including their limitations, before you can hope to improve on them.
I think J-clip's point was that one of the reasons for assigning research papers is so that the students can learn how to do their own research without having to rely on others to point them in the right direction. Sure, he can get away with it in this case because a lot of us on Slashdot are interested in cryptography, and we like to talk about it. Next time, however, he might have a topic that doesn't have an easily accessible crowd of helpful enthusiasts. Then what? If he doesn't learn how to use actual research tools, then he's sunk.
According to Top500, the fastest supercomputer that was not at a government installation was a Hitachi SR8000/128 at the University of Tokyo, which weighed in at number 5 overall. If you want to discount academe, the fastest owned by a business appears to be at Charles Schwab. It's a 2000 processor IBM SP PC604e, and it rates number 12 overall. So, either Celera got a very big machine since those statistics were compiled, or they are using a different standard of "bigness" than the LINPACK benchmarks used in the list, or they were playing a little fast and loose with the truth. I would tend to bet on option number 2, myself.
With the option you describe set I copied my cookie file to a backup, and then I bounced around msnbc.com until I had seen a few ads. Here's the diff file: % diff cookies cookies.old
Note the second to last cookie from msn.com, which is not in the msnbc.com domain. I have also noticed this phenomenon with doubleckick cookies (before I started blocking them). Maybe netscape intended the "only from originating domain" to work as you describe, but clearly it only checks to see if the cookie is being set for the domain to which the HTTP request is being sent, which is useless for blocking cookies attatched to images.
Did you read the article, or did you just see the title and make a knee-jerk post? The article is about increasingly strict copyright laws stifling new creative efforts.
You say that there are more books, music, movies, and software today than ever before. What does that prove? Would you seriously suggest that we have enough culture, that we don't need to write any more books or record any more music because we already have all we need? A stagnant culture is a dead culture. Or perhaps you are suggesting that we only need a half-dozen or so voices to define our culture, that we have Time-Warner and Disney, so we don't need any more voices? Wrong again. Culture thrives when there are a multitude of voices, each giving its unique perspective. Take a look around you at what comes out of the movie and music industry. Most of it isn't necessarily bad per se, but much of it does have a bland, cookie-cutter sameness about it. That's what happens when you allow a small number of cultural gatekeepers to take over; it all starts to sound the same because it's largely the same people producing it.
The bottom line is that all great works of literature, art, music, science, and film have borrowed themes and ideas from stuff that has come before. The increasing trend toward cutting new works off from what has come before does stifle those new works because a work that is produced in a cultural vacuum is generally irrelevant. It doesn't "speak" to its listeners and viewers.
You seem to have the sarcasm down to a fine art, but you don't do much to refute what the article actually says. I'm curious, what do you say to the article's claims that George Lucas will not allow new artists to borrow from Star Wars the same way he borrowed from Kurasawa and from popular myth? What do you say to the article's claims that for (certain types of) new music to evolve they must be able to sample from previous music the way that music lifted guitar riffs and other musical elements from music that came before? Why, in your own words, is it ok for the current gatekeepers to have borrowed from work that came before, but it is no longer acceptable for anyone to borrow from work that is currently popular? Why was it necessary to extend lengths of copyrights? Were artists really having trouble making money with the shorter terms, or are they just trying to guarantee their continued dominance into the indefinite future?
Try as you might, you simply aren't going to get me to feel sorry for the media compaines. They are doing just fine, and they would continue to do just fine, even if intellectual property law were rolled back to what it was 50 or even 100 years ago. However, if I don't like the crap they're churning out, I would like an alternative, and media companies seem hell-bent on preventing me from having one. But, then, God forbid anyone consider anything besides corporate profit in determining social policy or anything.
Mostly true. It turns out that most of the 4He around also dates back to the big bang. Although 4He is produced in stars, much of that is either further processed into heavier elements, or it is trapped in the stellar remnant. Consequently, the present-day abundance of 4He is not too different from its primordial value of about 1/4.
There is also another way to produce 4He that, while insignificant on a cosmic scale, accounts for most of the 4He in the earth's crust. It turns out that an alpha-particle is nothing but a 4He nucleus, and so alpha-decay produces helium as a byproduct. On earth, helium produced this way gets trapped in pockets in the crust (much like natural gas), and so can't escape into space. Atmospheric helium, on the other hand, tends to escape into space. So, what you have is helium in the atmosphere (including most of the 3He-laden primordial helium) escaping into space, and being replaced by helium produced in radioactive decay (which doesn't produce 3He at all), and that, I believe, is why the abundance of 3He on the earth is lower than in the solar system at large.
If Coke and Pepsi advertising are so ineffective, then why do both of them sell so much better than RC and Shasta? Advertising is all about recognition. If the Coke and Pepsi ads keep customers from defecting to minor brands, then they have done their job.
Still don't think the ads are effective? Try standing outside a WalMart on a sunday afternoon, and watch the soda machines carefully. The Coke machine will still get business even though the Sam's Choice machine right next to it is priced 20 cents lower. That's what advertising does for you.
I agree, fleshing out the gameworld with NPC ords is not difficult at all. The hard part is providing enough adventure for 10,000 (or, worse, 100,000!) PCs. There's only one death star to blow up, only one evil henchman to the Emperor, only one student of the jedi master, and so on. Most of your PCs are going to be a lot closer to "Many Bothans died to bring us this information" than they are to "Great shot, kid, that was one in a million."
Think back to any face-to-face rpg you played in, or good fantasy novel you read. For a single (say, Greyhawk-sized) continent, within the course of, say, a year of game time you probably encountered something like:
half a dozen PCs.
half a dozen henchmen.
two dozen major NPCs (rulers of major kingdoms, high priests of important religions, powerful wizards, PCs' mentors, etc.)
a dozen recurring villains.
a dozen gods, legendary heroes, and other personages of distinction.
And that's pretty much it for the people who really move earth and heaven; everyone else is just part of the backdrop. Even being generous with the numbers, I doubt they top 100, and even at that most of those roles are arguably unsuitable to be filled by any but the most experienced PCs. How do you scale that up to tens of thousands of PCs? I'm not saying it can't be done, but the simple approaches have been tried, and (IMO) they just don't work. In EverQuest there aren't enough monsters to go around. In Ultima Online you sit around baking bread all day. In neither game is anything resembling high fantasy a regular part of most players' gaming experience.
Give me peasant revolts. Give me evil priests whose dark rituals must be stopped before they unleash a demon horde across the countryside. Give me plots, schemes, dragons, and the stuff legends are made of, but whatever you do, don't give me "kill monsters so you can gain experience and gear so that you can kill bigger monsters and gain more experience and better gear, so that..." ad nauseum. Don't give me anything that reeks of the real, mundane world because I get plenty of that on a daily basis thankyouverymuch.
I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they promised me it would be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled up mess it is. --Oscar Gordon, hero
-rpl (not a hero, but likes to pretend occasionally)
I notice the other guy didn't actually answer your question, so maybe this would help. If you should actually come up with a proof, the Journal of the American Mathematical Society would be a good place to start. On their website they have a link with submission instructions. I didn't look at their particular instructions, but it's pretty safe to assume that they expect the manuscript to be in LaTeX using the AMSTeX macro package. Send it wherever the instructions say to send it. That's pretty much it. From there the scientific editor will probably hand it off to a referee, and you will get back status reports as things progress. I guess if you are really paranoid about someone trying to claim your idea you could take a hardcopy, date it, and take it to a notary or something, but really it shouldn't be a problem.
Having said all that, the other poster was right; if this were easy someone would have done it already. At the very least you will need enough mathematical background to write with the correct terminology and symbols. Really you shouldn't seriously attempt this sort of research without first becoming familliar with what other people have tried and why it didn't work. Please don't annoy the journal editors with bogus submissions (not that I think you were planning to, but it bears repeating nonetheless).
As someone else noted, many people think Fermat stumbled on one of the elegant but incorrect proofs of his theorem that other people produced over the years. In fact, although the marginal note was made toward the end of Fermat's life, it's not like it's the last thing he ever wrote; he did write letters afterward, and he didn't mention the theorem in any of them, so it seems plausible that he himself realized his proof was incorrect, and so he dropped the matter.
This is exactly the problem that MMP games have had so much difficulty dealing with. If you make 90% of the population inkeepers and bartenders and other such drones, then the game is only fun for the few that get to be heroes. On the other hand, if you make everyone a hero, then the ecology and the economy of the game world get completely unbalanced. Treasure becomes meaningless because you can always find someone who has an extra sword of flaming doom that he's willing to sell, and once you've bought it, good luck finding any monsters to kill with it. They've all been wiped out by the plague of heroes swarming over the land.
None of the currently operating MMP RPGs has found a completely satisfactory solution to the problem, and it may be that none exists. One thing that would help a lot would be to have death be for keeps. As it stands, whenever the monsters manage to take down a player character, it is an empty victory at best; he'll be back within minutes, perhaps with a slight XP penalty, perhaps without some of his equipment, but nevertheless largely unscathed. However, most players seem to resist the idea of death being deadly pretty fervently, so don't expect to see it any time soon.
Call me a fuddy-duddy, or whatever you will, but I don't have a lot of confidence that MMP games will ever "get there" as far as capturing the RPG experience. There is an editorial at Games Domain that sums it up pretty well. When I play an RPG I want to have at least an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the campaign world; however, in any campaign world few people have that opportunity. In a game with only half a dozen players, the deck is stacked in your favor; by design you get to play the characters that have a chance to make a difference. In MMP games there are simply too many players for that to be practical. The result is stagnation and boredom, which isn't really what I look for in a game. So, here's hoping they get it right with this one, but I'm not holding my breath.
So, I had a look at their "privacy center", which appears to be a bunch of links to articles about privacy issues. So I followed the first link in the "Consumer Profiling" category, and what do I find at the top of the article but a banner ad from, you guessed it, our old buddies at doubleclick. Nice work, guys!
And this affects us, how, again? My job is to build things.. networks, servers, applications,
I'd have thought this was obvious. Do you really need it spelled out for you? Every time someone files a patent they are in essence telling you, "This thing you may not build without our consent." Sometimes that is appropriate, if, for instance, the patent holder spent a lot of time and money inventing the thing being patented, but more and more frequently the thing being patented is either bleeding obvious, or else so broad that it covers not only the patent holder's invention, but also a whole bunch of other things that he didn't invent. All of this translates to shutting you (yes, you) out of the market. (Isn't it amusing how everybody flaps their lips about how wonderful the "free market" is; yet, nobody actually wants to compete in it?)
Let's use one of your own examples:
Somebody patents the CPU? I'll grab my soldering gun and make an analog computer out of op amps and transistors with a level of parallelism unknown previous to this.
But of course your solution is complete baloney because if your analog processor were so superior you would have invented it without having been forced into it by someone else's patent. For a company to patent their own revolutionary CPU design is reasonable; a patent that covers any CPU that someone else may invent subsequently is way out of line. And for a slightly sillier example you say:
Somebody patents the knife and fork? I'll use chopsticks then.
But, what if somebody patents "the use of man made utensils to facilitate ingestion of foodstuffs"? Will you then just eat with your hands?
Burying our heads in the sand is not the answer. If we "stop worrying" and "just hack code", we could well find a cadre of lawyers at our doors telling us that we no longer have the right to hack code unless we pay up to some bozo who has gone and patented whatever we happen to work on. If that happens, far from "dying of its own excesses", the system will perpetuate itself as large companies that can afford to patent everything under the sun enjoy a legalized monopoly on writing software.
These discussions of copyright in the digital age used to fascinate me, but I think it has been a long time since one of them generated as much light as heat. For the most part, participants have crystallized into one of four viewpoints:
Copyright owners are entitled to use license agreements to place whatever restrictions they can get away with on their IP. In particular, they can restrict how you use the product, how often you use it, and whether or not you can resell it when you are done with it.
Copyright owners are entitled only to restrict distribution of copies and public performance, but they are entitled to use whatever means necessary to enforce those restrictions, regardless of what side effects (such as restricting activities traditionally regarded as "fair use") those measures may have.
Copyright owners are entitled only to restrict distribution and public performance, but their attempts to enforce those restrictions must not be allowed to trump the public's right to "fair use," even if that means some people are able to get away with making illicit copies.
Copyright is by its very nature evil. Anyone should be able to copy anything they want and distribute it however they see fit.
I am beginning to believe that communication between people in different categories simply isn't possible, because each of these positions follows perfectly logically from the right set of initial postulates. In fact, let's see a show of hands; how many people have revised their positions on IP in the last four months based on a discussion on Slashdot? Is there any actual communication happening here?
I suspect that which set of postulates you start with (and therefore which position you wind up at) depends primarily on whether you stand to gain or lose from a change in copyright laws. For instance, based on the software license agreements I have seen over the years, I'd say there are a lot of software companies (and individual developers, for that matter) in category 1. Phrases like "Free for noncommercial use...," and "You may not modify, disassemble, or reverse engineer...," and "This license is nontransferrable...," presuppose that the developer has a right to dictate the terms on which you use the product. In fact, I daresay that this is so much taken for granted in the industry that even suggesting publicly that it might not be so would draw some strange looks, if not outright hostility.
Category 2 seems to include most publishers of "traditional" media. Of course, many slashdotters have their suspicions that the RIAA and MPAA are really closer to category 1, but those organizations at least claim to be in category 2, and I think position 2 is ultimately most in line with their interests. The reason is that demand for entertaiment is very elastic, and there are a lot of substitutes for whatever entertainment some particular company is selling. In fact, you can't go too far wrong in modelling an individual's demand for entertainment by saying he has a fixed budget for entertainment, and he will buy exactly as much as he can afford on that budget. Taken to its logical extreme, this would seem to imply that entertainment companies shouldn't worry too much about piracy because consumers with money to spend will find something to spend it on; however, this is a huge leap of faith for entertainment companies to make, and some industries (like recording, for instance) worry that their goods are more easily copied than those of other industries (like movies, for instance), and therefore that they will lose out if consumers' entertainment dollars go primarily toward the stuff they can't easily get for free. Consequently, they want to protect their copyrights, and they don't much care if consumer rights become collateral damage in the "war on piracy".
Incidentally, it is interesting to look at why entertainment and software companies come out with slightly different positions on this issue. The demand for software is much less elastic than the demand for entertainment (once you already have an office suite, a second one is not of much value to you); consequently, companies have a lot to gain from tactics like per-use licenses and charging more for commercial use. Simultaneously they have a lot more to lose if you choose an alternative; if I go see a movie from TriMount pictures, I might still go see ParaStar's movie next week, but if I buy WordPerfect, it's unlikely that I will buying Word any time soon. Consequently, software companies have more of an interest in locking consumers into their product line than entertainment companies.
Category 3 seems to be the mainstream view on slashdot (although the others do have some very vocal supporters). Phrases like, "I want to watch my DVDs under Linux...," and, "Time shifting is my right," are the battle cries of people in category 3. The difference between category 2 and category 3 is crucial for the survival of free software, for a variety of reasons. The obvious reason is that free software often has to rely on reverse engineering in order to interoperate with nonfree software that uses secret formats and protocols to lock in its customer base. Less obvious, but more important, is that free operating systems like Linux are an anathema to category 2 types because copy protection really isn't possible on an untrusted client. In other words, the only way category 2 types can achieve their objectives is to make sure their content is only usable in closed environments where they can shut the users out of the inner workings of the codec. I predict that if position 2 becomes entrenched in the law, free operating systems are going to be in a world of hurt.
Finally, there isn't much left to say about category 4. They have a vocal (but I think minority) presence on slashdot, so they pretty much speak for themselves.
My personal opinion is that position 1 would be disastrous if it ever became the dominant theory of IP. The end result of position 1 is software filled with backdoors, and the associated orwellian monitoring of everything you do on your computer. Restrictions on the use of software simply aren't enforcable any other way. Position 4 is pretty bad too. It might be made to work, if for instance we adopted something like Richard Stallman's proposal for handling the "DAT tax", but it would require setting up a whole bureaucracy to administer the plan, with associated opportunities for graft and corruption. It's also not clear that a tax on storage media can raise enough to support all of the industries that currently depend on copyrights. Certainly it would inflate the cost of storage media significantly, which would be bad for people who generate a lot of their own data (astrophysicists spring to mind, for some reason). Position 2 is less evil, but the problem is that copying digital media is so easy that rigorously enforcing copying restrictions will require fairly draconian restrictions on what people can do with their own equipment in their own homes. While I am not opposed to rigorous enforcement in principle, the price in this case seems to high. In the end, position 3 is the only one that seems to balance consumers' rights with the need to "promote science and the useful arts," and so in the long run it will be the healthiest for our society. Now, all we need to do is to convince the lawmakers.
The reason DIVX got squashed is that it had to compete with vanilla DVD. Had vanilla DVD not been around, I don't think DIVX would have been vanquished so easily. I doubt very much this lesson is lost on the RIAA, or the MPAA, or the Bavarian Illuminati, or whoever the villain of the week is. That is why you see the push to come up with a legal framework where less restrictive formats can simply be outlawed. Now, some will think what I am about to say is naive, but I think that at the heart of it the record executives and their cohorts only want what is right, namely to protect their rights under copyright law to control the distribution of their copyrighted material, and I think that is reasonable enough. Certainly, they might realize some additional income if they could eliminate second-hand sales or if they could charge pay-for-play, but in the end, I think most consumers' entertainment budgets are fairly fixed, and they will buy exactly as much entertainment as that budget allows. Viewed in that light, the RIAA and company don't have too much to gain from forcing restrictive media down consumers' throats.
As I see it, there are two main problems with their methods for pursuing their anti-piracy goal. First, they don't care if consumers' fair use rights become collateral damage in the battle against piracy, and, second, they are not above FUD-mongering to get their way. Again, I don't think their motives are necessarily bad, but clearly they don't care who besides pirates gets hurt by their stand.
Voting with our feet is one option, and a good one for the time being, as long as alternatives are available, but I worry about whether it will be effective if and when alternatives are outlawed. Can a person live a normal life without using any copyrighted material, ever? In the end we have to rely upon our legislators to do the right thing (with suitable encouragement thorough letters and phone calls, of course) by not just failing to kill fair use rights in any new legislation, but also by guaranteeing that distributors cannot circumvent those rights using nonnegotiable click-through or shrink-wrap licenses.
Neal Stephenson fans may remember this very issue arising as a plot point in Cryptonomicon.
(I don't think this is a spoiler, but if you haven't read the book, proceed at your own risk.)
At one point the bad guys want a particular piece of information that they are pretty sure resides on our hero's mail server. So, in order to get it they jimmy up a lawsuit and subpoena the mail server.
Returning to the real world, I don't think that this is a particularly stunning revelation; people have been aware of these issues surrounding paper documents for a long time. The only difference is that we are accustomed to thinking of email as a more informal medium than paper. Apparently the courts don't agree. Just follow the same policy with confidential email that you follow for confidential paper documents, and you should be all right.
In the US the Constitution guarantees the citizens certain rights. Those guarantees are not there to protect popular groups or popular opinions. Those guarantees are not there to protect people who could win a referrendum ballot. Those guarantees are there precisely to protect people who might otherwise be trampled upon by majority rule. Ballot initiatives that threaten to take away those rights, even for less than 50% of the population, are inappropriate, and should be blocked from the ballot. So, I see no contradiction in jamie's statement; he clearly feels that censorware in libraries is a violation of the right to free speech. (I'm not sure I agree, but that is a separate issue entirely.) Do not make the mistake of confusing the right to hold whatever opinions you care to hold and the right to speak them to anyone who may listen with the right to make them the law of the land by simple majority vote.
The issues involved are more subtle than your post suggests. Primordial nucleosynthesis places an upper limit on the total amount of baryonic matter (matter made up of garden-variety protons and neutrons) in the universe. When you observe galaxy clusters and individual galaxies you can infer their masses from their gravitational motions, and the total mass you come up with is higher than the limit on baryonic mass from primordial nucleosynthesis. That means that if gravitational estimates of galaxy masses are to be believed, a substantial fraction of the mass in the universe must comprise nonbaryonic matter. That in a nutshell is the real dark matter problem. If it were just a bunch of unseen dust, gas, stellar remnants, and whatnot nobody would be much concerned. However, the astrophysical dark matter problem seems to imply the existence of exotic, hitherto undetected (excepting, perhaps, this new result) forms of matter, which is really quite profound, and certainly not something that "has always been known."
Even the scientific community is guilty. They have their own absolute truths, and anyone who tries to cross them gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
It may look that way to an outsider, but if you ever as a scientist you will see that that simply isn't true. To be sure, there are some scientists that are dogmatic about their beliefs, but on the whole the scientific community as a whole is fairly tolerant of unorthodox views, provided that there is at least a smidgeon of evidence to back them up. Naturally, unorthodox theories are treated with some skepticism until they have proven themselves through experimental tests. This is as it should be; our confidence in the orthodox theories is the result of many years of experimental trial, and we should expect similar successes from new theories before we give them the same credence.
As an example, take the theory of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). This is a theory that solves the "dark matter" problem in astronomy not by invoking unseen matter, but by modifying the law of gravity for very weak fields. Most astronomers are understandably skeptical of MOND; however, the honest ones (and there really are quite a lot of them) will admit that it cannot be ruled out. In time the evidence will favor one side or the other, but until and unless strong evidence for MOND materializes few are going to rush to embrace it. That's the scientific method for you. It may not be perfect, but I'd say it's a huge improvement over inquisitions and burning at the stake. Perhaps you can think of something even better; if so, I, for one, would love to hear about it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly possible that dark matter has some sort of weird interaction characteristics that cause it not to cluster, but it's not what you expect. Particle-particle interactions are typically mediated by short-range forces, while gravity is a long-range force. In dense materials like water and oil the molecular separations are small enough that van der Waals forces and the like dominate gravity. By contrast, in space interparticle separations are large, and so interactions strong enough to separate out the dark matter would be surprising. That's not to say it can't happen (in fact, something very like that scenario happens with phenomena like ambipolar diffusion), but for it to happen on intergalactic length scales would require some creative physics. Moreover, if I recall correctly, field (i.e. away from galaxy clusters) gravitational lensing surveys put some constraints on the existence of dark clusters, so the dark matter would have to interact in such a way that it doesn't cluster at all, not even with itself. Again, one could probably work up a scenario to fit this constraint, but it's not what you expect.
Basically, it comes down to a question of parsimony. It's bad enough that the dark matter has to be nonbaryonic; one would like to stay away from anything that makes it even more exotic. Finding more mass density in the universe than can be accounted for in galaxy clusters would have required lots of new physics, and in some sense it would have undermined confidence in the standard model because when a model starts growing too many patches you start to look for something simpler. Instead the new result bolsters confidence that the standard model is basically on the right track.
I guess the short answer, then, is that nonclustering dark matter is only really "a problem" for the standard model. If the standard model is overthrown it's not the end of the world or anything. However, we like the standard model; we think we understand it pretty well, and it has a lot of useful predictive power. Consequently, most astrophysicists (including this one) would rather see it refined than discarded.
-rpl
Also, the nonzero cosmological constant invalidates the BBC journalist's claim that the universe will coast to a stop at very large times. As the universe expands the matter density drops, and so a positive cosmological constant will drive the universe into exponential expansion when the matter density becomes negligible. That's assuming, of course, that the cosmological constant really is constant, which is the case in the standard cosmological models. One can imagine (and there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe) that if lambda is nonzero, then it is also nonconstant.
Finally, regarding the heat death of the universe, see the article by Adams and Laughlin in the August 1998 issue of Sky and Telescope. Apparently there will still be interesting phenomena in the universe, even after the last of the stars burn out.
-rpl
What I found most interesting, however, was the discrepancy between their estimates of Omega(baryon) = 0.05 and Omega(matter) = 0.31 (again, based on the test flight data). That means that their result requires Omega(non-baryonic) of 0.26. That is, if this result is correct there is definitely not just dark matter, but 'exotic' dark matter (WIMPs, primordial black holes, or other strange stuff) out there. Again, that's not too surprising, since primordial nucleosynthesis arguments place rather severe restrictions on how much baryonic matter there can be in the universe. Still, this gives yet another independent argument for dark matter. What's more, the amount of dark matter required is close to what is implied by galactic dynamics, which means that you have enough to explain galaxy rotation curves, but you don't have any embarrassing intergalactic dark matter. It would be a problem if there were a lot of dark matter that steadfastly refused to cluster like ordinary matter.
At the end of the day, this result looks huge. If it is borne out, then it will go a long way toward settling the question of cosmography. Then the question becomes, what to do with lambda. A nonzero cosmological constant really doesn't make any sense from a theoretical standpoint, and it brings back all of the fine-tuning problems that inflationary scenarios were supposed to rid us of in the first place. The cosmological question of the next decade will be, "What does this nonzero cosmological constant mean, and why are both it and omega so close in magnitude?" The so-called 'quintessence' models look promising in this regard. At any rate, the ball is pretty firmly back in the theorists' court.
-rpl
The real story of Columbine, at least from the slashdot point of view, has never been the killers or why they did their horrific deeds. In the end, as much as people dread to hear it, I don't think there was any reason behind their acts; I think they were just nuts, and there isn't a whole lot you can learn from a nutcase. No, the real story of Columbine is what came after; it's all the hysteria from baby-boomers who don't understand their progeny, and who fear them accordingly. The victims Katz speaks of were not Klebold and Harris; they were all the kids who got harassed, suspended from school, or worse in the aftermath of Columbine for the arch-crime of nonconformity. Those kids deserve an advocate, and that's what Katz is trying to be.
-rpl
Alternatively, we could just paraphrase a pithier expression: I don't know what devices we'll be storing our data on in 5 years but they'll be called "hard disks".
-rpl
Media interests like the RIAA, MPAA, et alia are very interested in extending copyright privileges far beyond what has hitherto been allowed. These very same organizations would be the first to admit this goal, claiming that it is necessary to "protect their business models". Now, despite the words you saw fit to put into my mouth, I have no problem with respecting other people's property rights; I have no problem with paying for what I use. I do have a problem with the "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine too" attitude that has come into vogue. I do have a problem with intellectual property laws that function more to shut out competition than to protect anyone from having their work ripped off. I do have a problem with taking away (for all practical purposes) the fair use rights that have traditionally been reserved to the consumers. Personally, I think these are reasonable stands on these issues; I would be interested in hearing why you think otherwise.
You do get one thing right, however, when you point out that Napster is one of our more embarrassing allies. Napster has very little legitimate use. However, "very little" is not the same as "none", and I suspect that this, combined with a fear of a "slippery slope" argument is what keeps a lot of people supporting Napster. If you admit that a tool like Napster should be banned because it has insufficient legitimate uses, you leave open the question of how much legitimate use is necessary to justify a tool's continued existence. Should a tool with 30/70% legitimate/illegitimate usage be banned? What about 50/50? 70/30?
Personally, I would love to see the opponents of extending copyright privileges dump Napster as an ally. I would also like to see an established legal standard of how much illegal usage is necessary before a tool should be banned. If the latter happened there would be no need to support Napster because there would be no fear that it might set a precedent for attacking tools that do have significant legitimate uses.
-rpl
Mmm hmm. And do you think anyone would have gotten around to that realization had someone not observed that the "baud == bps" approach would not work forever?
Right, but would anyone have bothered to do this had someone not pointed out that you couldn't get higher speeds using the conventional approach?
The moral of the story is that there is value to pointing out the limitations of current technology because that is what allows us to avoid wasting effort by developing new technologies to replace existing technologies that don't need replacing. Conversely, it helps to anticipate problems in existing technology before they start to limit progress, so that new technologies will be ready by the time those limits are reached. This is not "doomsaying", it is simply having a good understanding of current technology. You have to have a thorough understanding of existing technologies, including their limitations, before you can hope to improve on them.
-rpl
-rpl
-rpl
% diff cookies cookies.old
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Note the second to last cookie from msn.com, which is not in the msnbc.com domain. I have also noticed this phenomenon with doubleckick cookies (before I started blocking them). Maybe netscape intended the "only from originating domain" to work as you describe, but clearly it only checks to see if the cookie is being set for the domain to which the HTTP request is being sent, which is useless for blocking cookies attatched to images.
-rpl
You say that there are more books, music, movies, and software today than ever before. What does that prove? Would you seriously suggest that we have enough culture, that we don't need to write any more books or record any more music because we already have all we need? A stagnant culture is a dead culture. Or perhaps you are suggesting that we only need a half-dozen or so voices to define our culture, that we have Time-Warner and Disney, so we don't need any more voices? Wrong again. Culture thrives when there are a multitude of voices, each giving its unique perspective. Take a look around you at what comes out of the movie and music industry. Most of it isn't necessarily bad per se, but much of it does have a bland, cookie-cutter sameness about it. That's what happens when you allow a small number of cultural gatekeepers to take over; it all starts to sound the same because it's largely the same people producing it.
The bottom line is that all great works of literature, art, music, science, and film have borrowed themes and ideas from stuff that has come before. The increasing trend toward cutting new works off from what has come before does stifle those new works because a work that is produced in a cultural vacuum is generally irrelevant. It doesn't "speak" to its listeners and viewers.
You seem to have the sarcasm down to a fine art, but you don't do much to refute what the article actually says. I'm curious, what do you say to the article's claims that George Lucas will not allow new artists to borrow from Star Wars the same way he borrowed from Kurasawa and from popular myth? What do you say to the article's claims that for (certain types of) new music to evolve they must be able to sample from previous music the way that music lifted guitar riffs and other musical elements from music that came before? Why, in your own words, is it ok for the current gatekeepers to have borrowed from work that came before, but it is no longer acceptable for anyone to borrow from work that is currently popular? Why was it necessary to extend lengths of copyrights? Were artists really having trouble making money with the shorter terms, or are they just trying to guarantee their continued dominance into the indefinite future?
Try as you might, you simply aren't going to get me to feel sorry for the media compaines. They are doing just fine, and they would continue to do just fine, even if intellectual property law were rolled back to what it was 50 or even 100 years ago. However, if I don't like the crap they're churning out, I would like an alternative, and media companies seem hell-bent on preventing me from having one. But, then, God forbid anyone consider anything besides corporate profit in determining social policy or anything.
-rpl
There is also another way to produce 4He that, while insignificant on a cosmic scale, accounts for most of the 4He in the earth's crust. It turns out that an alpha-particle is nothing but a 4He nucleus, and so alpha-decay produces helium as a byproduct. On earth, helium produced this way gets trapped in pockets in the crust (much like natural gas), and so can't escape into space. Atmospheric helium, on the other hand, tends to escape into space. So, what you have is helium in the atmosphere (including most of the 3He-laden primordial helium) escaping into space, and being replaced by helium produced in radioactive decay (which doesn't produce 3He at all), and that, I believe, is why the abundance of 3He on the earth is lower than in the solar system at large.
-rpl
Still don't think the ads are effective? Try standing outside a WalMart on a sunday afternoon, and watch the soda machines carefully. The Coke machine will still get business even though the Sam's Choice machine right next to it is priced 20 cents lower. That's what advertising does for you.
-rpl
Think back to any face-to-face rpg you played in, or good fantasy novel you read. For a single (say, Greyhawk-sized) continent, within the course of, say, a year of game time you probably encountered something like:
And that's pretty much it for the people who really move earth and heaven; everyone else is just part of the backdrop. Even being generous with the numbers, I doubt they top 100, and even at that most of those roles are arguably unsuitable to be filled by any but the most experienced PCs. How do you scale that up to tens of thousands of PCs? I'm not saying it can't be done, but the simple approaches have been tried, and (IMO) they just don't work. In EverQuest there aren't enough monsters to go around. In Ultima Online you sit around baking bread all day. In neither game is anything resembling high fantasy a regular part of most players' gaming experience.
Give me peasant revolts. Give me evil priests whose dark rituals must be stopped before they unleash a demon horde across the countryside. Give me plots, schemes, dragons, and the stuff legends are made of, but whatever you do, don't give me "kill monsters so you can gain experience and gear so that you can kill bigger monsters and gain more experience and better gear, so that..." ad nauseum. Don't give me anything that reeks of the real, mundane world because I get plenty of that on a daily basis thankyouverymuch.
-rpl (not a hero, but likes to pretend occasionally)
Having said all that, the other poster was right; if this were easy someone would have done it already. At the very least you will need enough mathematical background to write with the correct terminology and symbols. Really you shouldn't seriously attempt this sort of research without first becoming familliar with what other people have tried and why it didn't work. Please don't annoy the journal editors with bogus submissions (not that I think you were planning to, but it bears repeating nonetheless).
-rpl
-rpl
None of the currently operating MMP RPGs has found a completely satisfactory solution to the problem, and it may be that none exists. One thing that would help a lot would be to have death be for keeps. As it stands, whenever the monsters manage to take down a player character, it is an empty victory at best; he'll be back within minutes, perhaps with a slight XP penalty, perhaps without some of his equipment, but nevertheless largely unscathed. However, most players seem to resist the idea of death being deadly pretty fervently, so don't expect to see it any time soon.
Call me a fuddy-duddy, or whatever you will, but I don't have a lot of confidence that MMP games will ever "get there" as far as capturing the RPG experience. There is an editorial at Games Domain that sums it up pretty well. When I play an RPG I want to have at least an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the campaign world; however, in any campaign world few people have that opportunity. In a game with only half a dozen players, the deck is stacked in your favor; by design you get to play the characters that have a chance to make a difference. In MMP games there are simply too many players for that to be practical. The result is stagnation and boredom, which isn't really what I look for in a game. So, here's hoping they get it right with this one, but I'm not holding my breath.
-rpl
-rpl
I'd have thought this was obvious. Do you really need it spelled out for you? Every time someone files a patent they are in essence telling you, "This thing you may not build without our consent." Sometimes that is appropriate, if, for instance, the patent holder spent a lot of time and money inventing the thing being patented, but more and more frequently the thing being patented is either bleeding obvious, or else so broad that it covers not only the patent holder's invention, but also a whole bunch of other things that he didn't invent. All of this translates to shutting you (yes, you) out of the market. (Isn't it amusing how everybody flaps their lips about how wonderful the "free market" is; yet, nobody actually wants to compete in it?)
Let's use one of your own examples:
But of course your solution is complete baloney because if your analog processor were so superior you would have invented it without having been forced into it by someone else's patent. For a company to patent their own revolutionary CPU design is reasonable; a patent that covers any CPU that someone else may invent subsequently is way out of line. And for a slightly sillier example you say:
But, what if somebody patents "the use of man made utensils to facilitate ingestion of foodstuffs"? Will you then just eat with your hands?
Burying our heads in the sand is not the answer. If we "stop worrying" and "just hack code", we could well find a cadre of lawyers at our doors telling us that we no longer have the right to hack code unless we pay up to some bozo who has gone and patented whatever we happen to work on. If that happens, far from "dying of its own excesses", the system will perpetuate itself as large companies that can afford to patent everything under the sun enjoy a legalized monopoly on writing software.
I am beginning to believe that communication between people in different categories simply isn't possible, because each of these positions follows perfectly logically from the right set of initial postulates. In fact, let's see a show of hands; how many people have revised their positions on IP in the last four months based on a discussion on Slashdot? Is there any actual communication happening here?
I suspect that which set of postulates you start with (and therefore which position you wind up at) depends primarily on whether you stand to gain or lose from a change in copyright laws. For instance, based on the software license agreements I have seen over the years, I'd say there are a lot of software companies (and individual developers, for that matter) in category 1. Phrases like "Free for noncommercial use...," and "You may not modify, disassemble, or reverse engineer...," and "This license is nontransferrable...," presuppose that the developer has a right to dictate the terms on which you use the product. In fact, I daresay that this is so much taken for granted in the industry that even suggesting publicly that it might not be so would draw some strange looks, if not outright hostility.
Category 2 seems to include most publishers of "traditional" media. Of course, many slashdotters have their suspicions that the RIAA and MPAA are really closer to category 1, but those organizations at least claim to be in category 2, and I think position 2 is ultimately most in line with their interests. The reason is that demand for entertaiment is very elastic, and there are a lot of substitutes for whatever entertainment some particular company is selling. In fact, you can't go too far wrong in modelling an individual's demand for entertainment by saying he has a fixed budget for entertainment, and he will buy exactly as much as he can afford on that budget. Taken to its logical extreme, this would seem to imply that entertainment companies shouldn't worry too much about piracy because consumers with money to spend will find something to spend it on; however, this is a huge leap of faith for entertainment companies to make, and some industries (like recording, for instance) worry that their goods are more easily copied than those of other industries (like movies, for instance), and therefore that they will lose out if consumers' entertainment dollars go primarily toward the stuff they can't easily get for free. Consequently, they want to protect their copyrights, and they don't much care if consumer rights become collateral damage in the "war on piracy".
Incidentally, it is interesting to look at why entertainment and software companies come out with slightly different positions on this issue. The demand for software is much less elastic than the demand for entertainment (once you already have an office suite, a second one is not of much value to you); consequently, companies have a lot to gain from tactics like per-use licenses and charging more for commercial use. Simultaneously they have a lot more to lose if you choose an alternative; if I go see a movie from TriMount pictures, I might still go see ParaStar's movie next week, but if I buy WordPerfect, it's unlikely that I will buying Word any time soon. Consequently, software companies have more of an interest in locking consumers into their product line than entertainment companies.
Category 3 seems to be the mainstream view on slashdot (although the others do have some very vocal supporters). Phrases like, "I want to watch my DVDs under Linux...," and, "Time shifting is my right," are the battle cries of people in category 3. The difference between category 2 and category 3 is crucial for the survival of free software, for a variety of reasons. The obvious reason is that free software often has to rely on reverse engineering in order to interoperate with nonfree software that uses secret formats and protocols to lock in its customer base. Less obvious, but more important, is that free operating systems like Linux are an anathema to category 2 types because copy protection really isn't possible on an untrusted client. In other words, the only way category 2 types can achieve their objectives is to make sure their content is only usable in closed environments where they can shut the users out of the inner workings of the codec. I predict that if position 2 becomes entrenched in the law, free operating systems are going to be in a world of hurt.
Finally, there isn't much left to say about category 4. They have a vocal (but I think minority) presence on slashdot, so they pretty much speak for themselves.
My personal opinion is that position 1 would be disastrous if it ever became the dominant theory of IP. The end result of position 1 is software filled with backdoors, and the associated orwellian monitoring of everything you do on your computer. Restrictions on the use of software simply aren't enforcable any other way. Position 4 is pretty bad too. It might be made to work, if for instance we adopted something like Richard Stallman's proposal for handling the "DAT tax", but it would require setting up a whole bureaucracy to administer the plan, with associated opportunities for graft and corruption. It's also not clear that a tax on storage media can raise enough to support all of the industries that currently depend on copyrights. Certainly it would inflate the cost of storage media significantly, which would be bad for people who generate a lot of their own data (astrophysicists spring to mind, for some reason). Position 2 is less evil, but the problem is that copying digital media is so easy that rigorously enforcing copying restrictions will require fairly draconian restrictions on what people can do with their own equipment in their own homes. While I am not opposed to rigorous enforcement in principle, the price in this case seems to high. In the end, position 3 is the only one that seems to balance consumers' rights with the need to "promote science and the useful arts," and so in the long run it will be the healthiest for our society. Now, all we need to do is to convince the lawmakers.
-r
As I see it, there are two main problems with their methods for pursuing their anti-piracy goal. First, they don't care if consumers' fair use rights become collateral damage in the battle against piracy, and, second, they are not above FUD-mongering to get their way. Again, I don't think their motives are necessarily bad, but clearly they don't care who besides pirates gets hurt by their stand.
Voting with our feet is one option, and a good one for the time being, as long as alternatives are available, but I worry about whether it will be effective if and when alternatives are outlawed. Can a person live a normal life without using any copyrighted material, ever? In the end we have to rely upon our legislators to do the right thing (with suitable encouragement thorough letters and phone calls, of course) by not just failing to kill fair use rights in any new legislation, but also by guaranteeing that distributors cannot circumvent those rights using nonnegotiable click-through or shrink-wrap licenses.
-rpl
(I don't think this is a spoiler, but if you haven't read the book, proceed at your own risk.)
At one point the bad guys want a particular piece of information that they are pretty sure resides on our hero's mail server. So, in order to get it they jimmy up a lawsuit and subpoena the mail server.
Returning to the real world, I don't think that this is a particularly stunning revelation; people have been aware of these issues surrounding paper documents for a long time. The only difference is that we are accustomed to thinking of email as a more informal medium than paper. Apparently the courts don't agree. Just follow the same policy with confidential email that you follow for confidential paper documents, and you should be all right.
-rpl
-r
-r
It may look that way to an outsider, but if you ever as a scientist you will see that that simply isn't true. To be sure, there are some scientists that are dogmatic about their beliefs, but on the whole the scientific community as a whole is fairly tolerant of unorthodox views, provided that there is at least a smidgeon of evidence to back them up. Naturally, unorthodox theories are treated with some skepticism until they have proven themselves through experimental tests. This is as it should be; our confidence in the orthodox theories is the result of many years of experimental trial, and we should expect similar successes from new theories before we give them the same credence.
As an example, take the theory of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). This is a theory that solves the "dark matter" problem in astronomy not by invoking unseen matter, but by modifying the law of gravity for very weak fields. Most astronomers are understandably skeptical of MOND; however, the honest ones (and there really are quite a lot of them) will admit that it cannot be ruled out. In time the evidence will favor one side or the other, but until and unless strong evidence for MOND materializes few are going to rush to embrace it. That's the scientific method for you. It may not be perfect, but I'd say it's a huge improvement over inquisitions and burning at the stake. Perhaps you can think of something even better; if so, I, for one, would love to hear about it.
-r