There is a proposal to do just what you describe. It's called LISA, short for Laser Space Interferometer Antenna. ESA has a LISA web page that gives all the gory details. Note that the big win from going into space is not getting away from the planet's gravity, as you might guess at first, but getting away from mechanical vibrations induced by being in contact with the ground. Gravitational wave disturbances produced by movements within the earth are negligible, even to a device with the LIGO's extreme sensitivity.
As you might imagine, the major obstacle to LISA is the expense of the thing. I suspect that the success (or lack thereof) of LIGO will have a big impact on whether LISA ever gets funded. However, all the signals that we know are out there (coalescing neutron stars and the like) are likely to be too weak to detect with LIGO I (only the most optimistic estimates give an appreciable event rate with LIGO I). If LIGO II gets funded, then it will almost certainly see some events, and that could renew interest in LISA. LIGO II isn't scheduled to begin installation until 2004 (assuming it gets funded at all), so I expect we won't see a space-based gravitational wave observatory until sometime after then.
Yes, it does appear that they broke the law. So why are we complaining?
Perhaps some of us feel it is an unreasonable law. Perhaps some of us are outraged that our governments continue to pander to greedy corporations. Perhaps some of us feel it's time the law put the right of free speech ahead of intellectual property "rights".
Last time I heard, the government worked for us. Last time I heard, the purpose of the law was to serve our best interests. In days gone by people protested -- vigorously -- when they felt the law was wrong, and very often they got it changed.
One wonders why we have by and large forgotten how to protest. I think many of us have grown greedy ourselves, so that when others, in their greed, trample on our freedom, we find it only natural; it's just what we would have done in their position. Maybe it's time we reexamined those values. It's a pretty sure bet that the law will never put freedom ahead of greed until "We the People" do so.
The author makes two statements that I find very interesting:
Independent invention does not protect one from liability for infringement.
A patent can be held invalid if it either lacks novelty or is an obvious extension of prior work. (He goes on to explain that proving either of these is very difficult).
Now, it would seem to me that in any rational system, independent invention would be prima facie evidence of obviousness and/or lack of novelty, but clearly this is not the case. So, my question is, why not? Viz., why do the courts not recognize that the "invention" is suspect in any device that multiple people come up with independently?
Well, in fairness, the article looks more like a teaser for the segment on BBC-2 than a report on the interview per se. So, it's not too surprising that it's short on "useful information". They want you to tune in to the interview.
As a side note, I had the opportunity to see Bill Gates speak when he came to Indiana University, and I have to confess that he is a compelling speaker. He can seriously turn on the charm when he wants to. Whatever you think of Microsoft or Gates himself, it's sure to be interesting viewing; tune in if you possibly can.
Mott pointed out that, quantum mechanically, the emitted alpha particle is a spherical wave which slowly leaks out of the nucleus. It is difficult to picture how it is that an outgoing spherical wave can produce a straight line," he argued. We think intuitively that it should ionise atoms at random throughout space.
I don't think (intuitively or otherwise) any such thing. It is true that the particle exists as an expanding spherical wave, but as soon as you measure its position it becomes localized. From that point forward it exists as a new expanding spherical wave centered on the new position where it was last measured. Thus, its probability of suddenly appearing on a distant (for example, diametrically opposing) point on the original spherical wave is infinitesimal. That wave simply no longer describes the particle.
The practical upshot is that viewed as a series of snapshots in the macroscopic world the particle does what you expect; it sets out in some direction and occasionally interacts, possibly changing direction after each interaction. It is only in between the macroscopic observations that quantum mechanical ``weirdness'' is happening.
However, mathematicians can, and frequently do, win the Nobel prizes for economics and physics. The idea is that math itself does not "confer [a great] benefit on mankind", but the things you do with it might. Presumably computer science would work the same way. So, there's no reason why a computer scientist couldn't win the prize for practically any of fields, although literature, for one, seems a bit unlikely. (Start writing those Perl poems now!)
Who says a domain name has to follow you for life? To draw an analogy, up until a few months ago I had a phone number with an (812) area code. When I moved I had to get a new phone number in the (804) area code. It's not really a big deal, though, because I notified everyone who might be likely to call me, and for 90 days after I move, when you call my old number the phone company plays a recording with my new number. And anyone who can't get my number through one of those mechanisms can just look me up in the phone book. The system works pretty well for phone numbers, and I don't see why it couldn't work for domain names.
Wouldn't a lot of these problems be avoided if private individuals sought domain names in the appropriate subdomain of.us? For instance, in my case, the nation is positively littered with "Robert Link"s, but I am most likely the only one in Charlottesville. Thus, robertlink.com or the like is probably going to be a source of conflict, but I doubt anyone would fight me for robertlink.chr.va.us (or whatever the appropriate subdomain for Charlottesville is).
We need to get over our.com fever and stop trying to use the DNS as a phone book. It isn't necessary to be able to guess a person or company's name to guess his/its domain name; that's what search engines are for.
I have to say that I'm less than impressed with the "bored teenager" excuse that seems to crop up whenever cracking is mentioned. There are plenty of interesting problems you can work on.
Take a classic board game and write your own computer version of it. Program "perfect" play for the computer player. Write a program to "solve" checkers through brute force. Write a fractal viewer with a cool zoom-in feature. Write a dense linear algebra package. Write a sparse linear algebra package. Get the edition of Numerical Recipes without the code and implement all the algorithms therein. Get the NR code and time test your implementations against theirs. Beat the times of the NR algorithms.
Still bored? Write a fluid dynamics code. Add viscosity. Add MHD. Add self-gravity. Add adaptive grids.
Download all the cracking scripts and figure out how and why they work. Fix the holes they exploit. Find a missing feature in Linux that really annoys you and add it. If you are at a loss I have a couple of suggestions.
Download the Infocom engine and write your own adventure. Write your own MUD or chat program.
That's just off the top of my head, but I think you get the idea. Any teen who is so "bored" with computers that he can think of nothing better to do than to break into other people's machines and cause trouble is either pathetically uncreative or just plain ornery. Which one are you?
(Sigh. Not even 30 and already an "old fart". That's got to be some kind of record.) -r
The quality of the output of the AD&D rules was always directly proportional to the amount of creativity input. If you could see past the stats and die rolls, AD&D gave you a simple, abstracted system for conflict resolution that allowed you to get on with the story without having to worry about exactly how many arteries the sword stroke severed or other such minutae. If, on the other hand, you can't see past the numbers, then I doubt that simply finding a "more realistic" game system will cure the problem. Most likely you will wind up with a morass of detail that does nothing to advance the story, but causes an encounter with a small party of orcs to consume an entire evening's gaming (Rolemaster, anyone?).
In any case, I doubt very much that that being "true to the AD&D rules" is meant to extend down to the level of individual die rolls. I read that claim as meaning that the characters should be recognizable as something that might crop up in an actual AD&D game; that is, the spells would be actual AD&D spells, mages would memorize them the way they do in the game, thieves would have the abilities you would expect, and so on.
Actually, I think the main feature that determines AD&D compliance (so to speak) is the magic system. When you think about it, swinging a sword looks the same no matter what the mechanics for resolving it are. Presumably that is because it is based on something that one can actually do in real life, and so we have a pretty good idea what should or should not be possible. Magic, on the other hand, differs wildly between game systems, and the restrictions (or lack thereof) placed on magic use can heavily influence the tone of a story.
So, my guess is that they have stressed this going on about the AD&D rules means they have stressed the workings of magic somewhat in the movie. This can be either a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, having some hard and fast rules regarding magic can prevent some sorts of plot holes where magic is all-powerful in one scene, but next to useless in another. On the other hand, AD&D magic does have some serious warts. For instance, do we really want to see the mages sitting around for 4 hours every morning memorizing spells? And if the system really does work like AD&D, why doesn't everyone load up with 14 stoneskins before the start of the adventure?
Still, one hopes they will exercise enough discretion to chuck the stuff that doesn't work story-wise. I mean, if we managed to come up with a workable subset of the rules using only enough funds to supply the group with pizza for the evening, surely they can do the same with $30M, right?
They give 1000:1 to a bank failure, and a 300:1 for a airline going down on Y2K.
Yeah, well, one of the bookies they interviewed is also giving 100:1 that the President announces that the moon landings were faked. Since they presumably don't take bets on the other side, this is undoubtedly their way of "favoring the house". That is, I wouldn't take these numbers as indicative of any sort of real estimate of what is likely to happen when the calendar rolls over.
Most airlines are requiring their Y2K-readiness exec to fly on Jan 1, 2000, prompting these execs to make absolutely sure that they're ready.
I remember reading that the government of China made an announcement to that effect, but somehow I don't think chinese airlines constitute "most" of the airlines in the world. However, that does bring up an interesting point vis a vis these wagers. Most of them are worded such that only a single incidence is needed for the claim to pay off. If the bookies made their odds estimates with countries like the US, Canada, and Britain in mind and they didn't specifically exclude other, less prepared countries, then they could be in real trouble if a plane goes down or a bank fails in some obscure corner of the world.
I'll still be getting a written proof of my account status in early Dec,though my bank has promised Y2K compliance.
It's hard to see how Y2K could screw up existing bank balances. A more likely scenario is that interest calculations and the like go haywire, but even these, it would seem, are going to be the sort of error that would instantly fail a reality check.
Maybe I'm just an optimist (or maybe I just don't have that much money to lose), but about the extent of the extraordinary steps I'm taking regarding my finances is keeping my bank statements (which I usually throw away as soon as I balance my chekbook) for the next few months. I guess I have to lump myself in with the crowd that feels that the Y2K charlatans that feed on public hysteria over the unknown are worse than the actual bug will ever be.
I see a lot of people saying that we shouldn't blame the media, that the media spreading myths and hearsay is just a reflection of our instant-gratification culture. But I do blame the media, at least the mainstream media. I blame them because they will make no substantive effort to set the record straight. I understand that retractions and clarifications of a story that ran months ago don't sell newspapers or get ratings like the latest breaking news, but there was a time (or at least I like to believe so) when news outlets believed they had a duty to report the news as faithfully and accurately as was humanly possible, even doing so didn't precisely maximize bottom-line profits. It's called "journalistic integrity," and it seems to be a thing of the past.
For me this sort of thing (and this is by no means an isolated incident) underscores the fact that as a reputable source of information our mainstream media are a joke. Fallible human beings cannot be expected to get it perfect every time, but they can make an honest effort to approach that ideal. Evidently the news media have decided that we're not worth the effort.
Here's the good news: The people who care about Linux are the people who code, right? Every CS professor I've had at IU hates Microsoft as much as the next geek. Furthermore, most of my classes so far have been java based. Also, as far as I know, 90% of the servers here are unix-based. I think there's a few NT file servers. _shrug_ We get our email with Pine like everybody else.
What's more, the research computing systems at IU are almost entirely Unix based, and that is what determines what students are going to learn on. One thing that many people seem not to understand is that "Office of the VP for Information Technology" != "Computer Science Department". The CS department has zero control over the servers used to provide email to the students at large, and the OVPIT has zero control over the computer science curriculum. Even if OVPIT decided to go entirely MS (and at IU they insist that they have no plans to do so), the research computing systems would still be Unix based because that's what CS, Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy want.
I think this is a non-issue. The students that MS is reaching were, for the most part, all Windows users anyhow. All this agreement does is get the state of Indiana to buy them software that they might otherwise have done without (or perhaps copied illegally). More money into MS's pocket? Sure, but hardly a ploy to take over the world. As for the non-Windows users, they will find a way to get what the need regardless of what MS does, same as always.
I agree in principle that extraterrestrial life might take very different forms than it does here on earth. However, I think it's probably a safe bet that it requires some sort of relatively complex molecules. Strong radiation like you find in Jupiter's magnetosphere has a tendency to dissociate even fairly robust molecules. Consequently, such environments are likely to be unfriendly to most forms of life.
The Neutron flux at the earth's surface is pretty small. I doubt very much that it would produce an appreciable background. Certainly, I've never heard anyone talk about it at any neutrino detector talk I've ever been to. The Super-Kamiokande info page, for instance comments:
The detector is located deep underground in order to shield it from cosmic ray muons by the rock above it.
You have the wrong physics here; this project is looking for neutrinos, not neutrons. The deal with neutrinos is that they seldom interact with other particles, which makes detecting them problematic, since ultimately we detect particles through their interactions with the particles that make up our detectors. However, "seldom" is not the same as "never". There is a constant stream of neutrinos passing through the earth, and even though only a tiny fraction of them interact, the result is a measurable number of detectable events per day.
The key here is that the bigger your detector, the more collecting volume you have; thus, the more events you see. Traditional detectors have used huge tanks of water, cleaning fluid (CCl_4), or Gallium to get the necessary volume, but there's a limit to how big you can make the tanks. The beauty of using the ocean (or the Antarctic ice pack for another proposed experiment) is that the "tank" is already built for you.
Now, there's another problem, and that is that when a neutrino interacts you still don't see the neutrino; you see the byproducts of that interaction. In this sort of experiment that would be a muon, a particle similar to (but much heavier than) an electron. The problem is that cosmic rays are filled with muons. If you want to see the muons produced by neutrino interactions you need to screen out all that background. Fortunately, muons are easily screened; just put a bunch of junk between you and them. That's why traditional neutrino experiments are located in tunnels or mines. Here again, by using the ocean you win because if you go deep enough you already have a lot of stuff between you and the cosmic ray muons.
That about wraps it up. I haven't had time to check out the details of this proposal. I'll be interested to see how they plan to get the water sufficiently clear that they can detect the scintillations from the muons. If the water is too murky, then the tiny Cherenkov flashes get absorbed, and you don't get any signal. Perhaps the sea water clears up if you go down deep enough?
I was curious about this one, since I don't recall any mention of an earth-sized planet at the July AAS meeting on gravitational lensing. Still, I work on cosmological gravitational lensing, not microlensing, so perhaps I came down with a case of tunnel vision at the conference.
Running this one down took a little leg work, seeing as how the BBC did not elect to give the names of the researchers involved. As best I can tell the BBC has mixed up two separate lensing events. The paper that appears to have triggered the story is probably this paper on MACHO-97-BLG-41, since that is the most recent paper claiming a gravitational lensing planet detection. However, that paper is about a 3-Jupiter mass planet orbiting a binary star system, an interesting find, to be sure, but a far cry from an earth-sized planet. So, even if that is the article the BBC is responding to, it's not the one they're talking about.
The article mentions that the event was observed in 1998 and involved an earth-sized planet, so that sounds suspiciously like MACHO-98-BLG-35, but that paper came out (as a preprint) back in May, and it was announced at the January AAS meeting, so it's a little surprising to see a news article on it just now, unless it's just now appearing in the journals.
Anyhow, assuming the event is 98-BLG-35, there's more to the story. The PLANET collaboration also monitored this event, and they found no evidence of a planet in this system. As far as I know, the status of this system is still under dispute. Unless some problem has been found with PLANET's data, I think it's a little early to claim that an earthlike planet has been detected.
To get the scoop on microlensing, its application in planet searches, and the other things we can learn from it, I recommend PLANET's web page. Among other things, they talk about why microlensing is more sensitive than radial velocity studies (the technique that has produced most of the other extrasolar planet detections) to planets in star systems similar to our own solar system.
It seems to me that this scheme is designed to be immune to civil disobedience. For instance, you suggest:
I would definately set up a system of proxies in the US and send massive amounts of email to be forwarded to the germans showing them how to use the proxies.
Of course, you would have to strip out the ratings on the content you proxy (else the keywords will be caught anyhow), but then your proxy would be serving unrated content, which is expressly forbidden by the protocol. At best data from your site would blocked because it lacks ratings; at worst your ISP would be pressured to shut you down.
You also suggest:
I'm sure a lot of sysadmins would be glad to rate ALL of their content as "sexually violent racial slurs"
Actually, I'll bet the sysadmins at Bertelsmann and other large publishing houses wouldn't do anything of the kind. A boycott from independent information providers will do little more than cede the battlefield to corporate interests by default.
And that's what this proposal is really about, isn't it, turning control of the Internet over to moneyed interests? Previous censorship initiatives have been based on ideology; thus, they were doomed to failure because in the end the censors can't all agree on what, exactly, to censor. This proposal seems to be rooted in plain old greed, and it's a lot easier to get people to agree on that.
And if it goes through, it will probably work. The criminal genius in this plan is the byzantine system of keywords. Under this system, any sort of online publishing will require an army of specialists to work out the rating and keep it up to date. Who can afford to retain a staff just for working out keywords? I'll bet Bertelsmann can, and I'll bet they're not too busted up about the fact that many independent publishers can't.
This is a proposal that has to be nipped in the bud. Protests after the fact will be too little too late this time because the protest will fall on deaf ears, if, indeed, it manages to reach any ears at all through the filters. I know that if I were a censor the first thing I would block out would be criticism of censorship.
It seems to me that most of the objection to an online rating system stems from the fear that somebody upstream may decide to filter based on ratings. Nobody here would object (I hope) to a person who wants to set up his own computer to reject (for instance) violent material and would like a mechanism for doing so.
So, suppose legislation were enacted forbidding a common carrier from filtering content (possibly allowing an exception for "opt-in" systems, e.g. anti-spam services). This needn't even be legislated explicitly; for example, a law protecting carriers that do no filtering from legal responsibility, but making carriers that do any filtering at all responsible for everything that they do carry, would do the job. Then, people who want to hide from material they find objectionable can do so; people who want to be able to access that same material can also do so, and ISPs don't have to worry about getting sued all the time. In other words, everyone is happy (well, except for would-be censors, anyhow).
On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly bet the rent on such a bill even being proposed in Congress, let alone actually enacted. After all, even the most staunch free speech advocate in Congress can think of at least one or two types of speech he'd like to ban, and if he has to barter away the free speech rights of someone else (not himself, of course) to get it, well, that's not too high a price to pay, is it?
As I see it there are two main obstacles to making this scheme practical. The first, as many people have mentioned, is that automatically parallelizing a serial code is a nontrivial task, even when the underlying problem has a lot of parallelism.
For instance, I once had the task of parallelizing a subroutine that used an expansion in spherical harmonics to calculate the gravitational potential on the boundary of a fluid dynamics grid. There is a lot of parallelism in this problem; you can parallelize over the mass integrals, over the boundary points, or both. Balancing these advantages, however, is that you would like, as much as possible to reuse the sin and cos terms that recur throughout the expansion (rather than recalculating them every time they crop up). Consequently, there are a lot of scratch arrays and temporary variables scattered throughout the code, as well as weird loop orders intended to allow coefficients to be precalculated and reused.
The code was to run on an SGI Origin 2000 (an SMP machine), and there was an automagic parallelizing compiler for the machine. To make a long story short, the auto-parallelizer failed miserably on this piece of code. It turned out to be easier to recode the algorithm by hand to run in parallel than it would have been to tweak it so that the compiler could figure it out "automatically." You can expect these problems only to get worse as you try to adapt the automatic parallelizing system to work with distributed machines. (Indeed, to my knowledge all automatic parallelizing systems run on SMP systems.)
Still, I'm hesitant to say "never." A programmer hand hacking assembly in the 60s might well have been equally skeptical that optimizing compilers would ever outperform human assembly programmers; yet here we are. However, there is another, IMO, more fundamental problem with "all-purpose" distributed computing. The tasks into which you divide the program have to be large enough to cover the overhead of farming them out to the remote hosts. This is not a problem for SETI@home because the 24 hours or so of computing that you get on each block easily dominates the time required to fetch the block. But, how many people work on problems that break down so neatly into huge tasks with no communication requirements? For most people's calculations the communication latency will likely overwhelm any parallel gains you might hope for. Consequently, I expect that heterogeneous distributed computing will for the forseeable future remain exclusively the province of large, special-purpose, compute-intensive software written specifically to work in that environment.
I admit that I didn't read the article in depth, but from what I gathered skimming over it, this sounds like someone has just gotten a bunch of big computers to do what, up until now, has been primarily done by hackers.
You make it sound as though that's a trivial task. For a more in-depth discussion of what's involved in creating a computer "immune system", see, for instance:
NPR's All Things Considered ran an interesting story about the huge difference in the way people in their 20s and people in their 40s have reacted to JFKjr's death. You can listen to it on Real Audio at the link above.
Loosely abstracted, the article claims that for forty-somethings JFK was the embodyment of all their generation's hopes and dreams for a better America. (Never mind that the reality of the Kennedy administration didn't really live up to those expectations; it's the perception that counts.) When JFK and RFK were assassinated, many people transferred their hopes onto the rest of the family. Apparently, a lot of people honest-to-God, no-lie, really expected JFKjr to come riding in on a white horse some day and rescue those dreams.
For twenty-somethings, however, they found that there was no visceral connection with the "Kennedy mystique." Our generation was much more likely to view JFKjr as an unremarkable media figure whose untimely death was sad, but not a national tragedy.
So, it's not surprising that the news media tended to cater to the older generation's viewpoint. Not only do forty-somethings compose a big segment of their audience, a lot of the media decision-makers are themselves of that generation. Given a story that resonates with them personally and with a huge segement of their audience, it's almost a given that the result would be the media orgy that we saw.
I don't know that I agree that science "has a tendency to reinforce any bias..." Certainly, people with agendas to push have a tendency to twist scientific results to their own ends (often perverting them into the exact opposite of what they really said). And I think "junk" science ("science" that uses shoddy methods and/or outright mendacity to support some predetermined conclusion) is all too common. However, I think that on the whole scientific results do represent an honest assessment of our best guess at how the world works.
do you really believe that the majority of the population is going to bother to think this through rather than knee-jerking one way or another?
Hmm. I had to ponder this one a while. I think the majority of the population will follow the side that shouts the loudest and pushes their buttons the best. Unfortunately, the anti-rational side of an argument usually has the advantage when it comes to button-pushing. On my more idealistic days I have been heard to argue that that just means the forces of rationalism just have to shout that much louder and refuse that much more sternly to back down. Funny, I seem to be having fewer and fewer of those days lately.
Sure, it was, as I said, just a thought experiment.
I think this statement sums it up:
...we can't just "implant" a moral code of any kind into someone's brain.
Agreed, that we cannot implant a moral code into people's brains, and if we could, I'm not sure we would want to (I'm reminded of Robert Heinlein's "If This Goes On..."). What we can do, however, is to forbid the most obvious types of abuse. We can, for instance, guarantee individuals the privacy of their genetic details. We can continue to protect endangered species despite our ability to replace them through cloning. We can carefully control nuclear materials so that they do not fall into dangerous and/or incompetent hands. IMO these are better responses than burying our heads in the sand and hoping that the new technology will just go away. In fact, if you stipulate that someone will eventually develop the technology, then it makes the most sense to face the ethical issues head-on, rather than to wake up one morning and discover that the technology has arrived anyhow, and we are not prepared ethically to deal with it.
Severe topic drift here, but I had to comment:
OTOH, find "straight" folk with the "gay gene," and the fundies get more proof that we're a bunch of perverts who can change if we really WANT to. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. It sucks.
This is, IMO, why arguments for gay equality based on the genetic origin or lack thereof of homosexuality are the Wrong Thing. It creates the idea in many people's minds that homosexuality is ok only because homosexuals "can't help it," and "they're just born that way." If you argue based on the idea that it's nobody else's business what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom, then you don't run into that problem.
This seems like a bit of an evasion to me because you are punting the decision to someone else. In effect, "Well I won't fund it, but I take no position on whether or not someone else does."
As a thought experiment, suppose you had the final say; on your word the research either happens, or it doesn't. So, do we do it or do we not do it? And in making this decision, do you factor in only the potential harm that the discoveries could cause, or do you factor in the potential benefits as well? It seems to me that there is no new technology that does not carry some risk of abuse. So, if we are ever to realize the benefits of any new technology we, as a society, must assume the responsibility for making sure we don't abuse our new tools.
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As you might imagine, the major obstacle to LISA is the expense of the thing. I suspect that the success (or lack thereof) of LIGO will have a big impact on whether LISA ever gets funded. However, all the signals that we know are out there (coalescing neutron stars and the like) are likely to be too weak to detect with LIGO I (only the most optimistic estimates give an appreciable event rate with LIGO I). If LIGO II gets funded, then it will almost certainly see some events, and that could renew interest in LISA. LIGO II isn't scheduled to begin installation until 2004 (assuming it gets funded at all), so I expect we won't see a space-based gravitational wave observatory until sometime after then.
-r
Perhaps some of us feel it is an unreasonable law. Perhaps some of us are outraged that our governments continue to pander to greedy corporations. Perhaps some of us feel it's time the law put the right of free speech ahead of intellectual property "rights".
Last time I heard, the government worked for us. Last time I heard, the purpose of the law was to serve our best interests. In days gone by people protested -- vigorously -- when they felt the law was wrong, and very often they got it changed.
One wonders why we have by and large forgotten how to protest. I think many of us have grown greedy ourselves, so that when others, in their greed, trample on our freedom, we find it only natural; it's just what we would have done in their position. Maybe it's time we reexamined those values. It's a pretty sure bet that the law will never put freedom ahead of greed until "We the People" do so.
-r
Now, it would seem to me that in any rational system, independent invention would be prima facie evidence of obviousness and/or lack of novelty, but clearly this is not the case. So, my question is, why not? Viz., why do the courts not recognize that the "invention" is suspect in any device that multiple people come up with independently?
-r
As a side note, I had the opportunity to see Bill Gates speak when he came to Indiana University, and I have to confess that he is a compelling speaker. He can seriously turn on the charm when he wants to. Whatever you think of Microsoft or Gates himself, it's sure to be interesting viewing; tune in if you possibly can.
I don't think (intuitively or otherwise) any such thing. It is true that the particle exists as an expanding spherical wave, but as soon as you measure its position it becomes localized. From that point forward it exists as a new expanding spherical wave centered on the new position where it was last measured. Thus, its probability of suddenly appearing on a distant (for example, diametrically opposing) point on the original spherical wave is infinitesimal. That wave simply no longer describes the particle.
The practical upshot is that viewed as a series of snapshots in the macroscopic world the particle does what you expect; it sets out in some direction and occasionally interacts, possibly changing direction after each interaction. It is only in between the macroscopic observations that quantum mechanical ``weirdness'' is happening.
-r
-r
-r
We need to get over our
-r
Take a classic board game and write your own computer version of it. Program "perfect" play for the computer player. Write a program to "solve" checkers through brute force. Write a fractal viewer with a cool zoom-in feature. Write a dense linear algebra package. Write a sparse linear algebra package. Get the edition of Numerical Recipes without the code and implement all the algorithms therein. Get the NR code and time test your implementations against theirs. Beat the times of the NR algorithms.
Still bored? Write a fluid dynamics code. Add viscosity. Add MHD. Add self-gravity. Add adaptive grids.
Download all the cracking scripts and figure out how and why they work. Fix the holes they exploit. Find a missing feature in Linux that really annoys you and add it. If you are at a loss I have a couple of suggestions.
Download the Infocom engine and write your own adventure. Write your own MUD or chat program.
That's just off the top of my head, but I think you get the idea. Any teen who is so "bored" with computers that he can think of nothing better to do than to break into other people's machines and cause trouble is either pathetically uncreative or just plain ornery. Which one are you?
(Sigh. Not even 30 and already an "old fart". That's got to be some kind of record.)
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In any case, I doubt very much that that being "true to the AD&D rules" is meant to extend down to the level of individual die rolls. I read that claim as meaning that the characters should be recognizable as something that might crop up in an actual AD&D game; that is, the spells would be actual AD&D spells, mages would memorize them the way they do in the game, thieves would have the abilities you would expect, and so on.
Actually, I think the main feature that determines AD&D compliance (so to speak) is the magic system. When you think about it, swinging a sword looks the same no matter what the mechanics for resolving it are. Presumably that is because it is based on something that one can actually do in real life, and so we have a pretty good idea what should or should not be possible. Magic, on the other hand, differs wildly between game systems, and the restrictions (or lack thereof) placed on magic use can heavily influence the tone of a story.
So, my guess is that they have stressed this going on about the AD&D rules means they have stressed the workings of magic somewhat in the movie. This can be either a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, having some hard and fast rules regarding magic can prevent some sorts of plot holes where magic is all-powerful in one scene, but next to useless in another. On the other hand, AD&D magic does have some serious warts. For instance, do we really want to see the mages sitting around for 4 hours every morning memorizing spells? And if the system really does work like AD&D, why doesn't everyone load up with 14 stoneskins before the start of the adventure?
Still, one hopes they will exercise enough discretion to chuck the stuff that doesn't work story-wise. I mean, if we managed to come up with a workable subset of the rules using only enough funds to supply the group with pizza for the evening, surely they can do the same with $30M, right?
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Yeah, well, one of the bookies they interviewed is also giving 100:1 that the President announces that the moon landings were faked. Since they presumably don't take bets on the other side, this is undoubtedly their way of "favoring the house". That is, I wouldn't take these numbers as indicative of any sort of real estimate of what is likely to happen when the calendar rolls over.
I remember reading that the government of China made an announcement to that effect, but somehow I don't think chinese airlines constitute "most" of the airlines in the world. However, that does bring up an interesting point vis a vis these wagers. Most of them are worded such that only a single incidence is needed for the claim to pay off. If the bookies made their odds estimates with countries like the US, Canada, and Britain in mind and they didn't specifically exclude other, less prepared countries, then they could be in real trouble if a plane goes down or a bank fails in some obscure corner of the world.
It's hard to see how Y2K could screw up existing bank balances. A more likely scenario is that interest calculations and the like go haywire, but even these, it would seem, are going to be the sort of error that would instantly fail a reality check.
Maybe I'm just an optimist (or maybe I just don't have that much money to lose), but about the extent of the extraordinary steps I'm taking regarding my finances is keeping my bank statements (which I usually throw away as soon as I balance my chekbook) for the next few months. I guess I have to lump myself in with the crowd that feels that the Y2K charlatans that feed on public hysteria over the unknown are worse than the actual bug will ever be.
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For me this sort of thing (and this is by no means an isolated incident) underscores the fact that as a reputable source of information our mainstream media are a joke. Fallible human beings cannot be expected to get it perfect every time, but they can make an honest effort to approach that ideal. Evidently the news media have decided that we're not worth the effort.
Disgustedly yours,
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What's more, the research computing systems at IU are almost entirely Unix based, and that is what determines what students are going to learn on. One thing that many people seem not to understand is that "Office of the VP for Information Technology" != "Computer Science Department". The CS department has zero control over the servers used to provide email to the students at large, and the OVPIT has zero control over the computer science curriculum. Even if OVPIT decided to go entirely MS (and at IU they insist that they have no plans to do so), the research computing systems would still be Unix based because that's what CS, Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy want.
I think this is a non-issue. The students that MS is reaching were, for the most part, all Windows users anyhow. All this agreement does is get the state of Indiana to buy them software that they might otherwise have done without (or perhaps copied illegally). More money into MS's pocket? Sure, but hardly a ploy to take over the world. As for the non-Windows users, they will find a way to get what the need regardless of what MS does, same as always.
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The key here is that the bigger your detector, the more collecting volume you have; thus, the more events you see. Traditional detectors have used huge tanks of water, cleaning fluid (CCl_4), or Gallium to get the necessary volume, but there's a limit to how big you can make the tanks. The beauty of using the ocean (or the Antarctic ice pack for another proposed experiment) is that the "tank" is already built for you.
Now, there's another problem, and that is that when a neutrino interacts you still don't see the neutrino; you see the byproducts of that interaction. In this sort of experiment that would be a muon, a particle similar to (but much heavier than) an electron. The problem is that cosmic rays are filled with muons. If you want to see the muons produced by neutrino interactions you need to screen out all that background. Fortunately, muons are easily screened; just put a bunch of junk between you and them. That's why traditional neutrino experiments are located in tunnels or mines. Here again, by using the ocean you win because if you go deep enough you already have a lot of stuff between you and the cosmic ray muons.
That about wraps it up. I haven't had time to check out the details of this proposal. I'll be interested to see how they plan to get the water sufficiently clear that they can detect the scintillations from the muons. If the water is too murky, then the tiny Cherenkov flashes get absorbed, and you don't get any signal. Perhaps the sea water clears up if you go down deep enough?
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Running this one down took a little leg work, seeing as how the BBC did not elect to give the names of the researchers involved. As best I can tell the BBC has mixed up two separate lensing events. The paper that appears to have triggered the story is probably this paper on MACHO-97-BLG-41, since that is the most recent paper claiming a gravitational lensing planet detection. However, that paper is about a 3-Jupiter mass planet orbiting a binary star system, an interesting find, to be sure, but a far cry from an earth-sized planet. So, even if that is the article the BBC is responding to, it's not the one they're talking about.
The article mentions that the event was observed in 1998 and involved an earth-sized planet, so that sounds suspiciously like MACHO-98-BLG-35, but that paper came out (as a preprint) back in May, and it was announced at the January AAS meeting, so it's a little surprising to see a news article on it just now, unless it's just now appearing in the journals.
Anyhow, assuming the event is 98-BLG-35, there's more to the story. The PLANET collaboration also monitored this event, and they found no evidence of a planet in this system. As far as I know, the status of this system is still under dispute. Unless some problem has been found with PLANET's data, I think it's a little early to claim that an earthlike planet has been detected.
To get the scoop on microlensing, its application in planet searches, and the other things we can learn from it, I recommend PLANET's web page. Among other things, they talk about why microlensing is more sensitive than radial velocity studies (the technique that has produced most of the other extrasolar planet detections) to planets in star systems similar to our own solar system.
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Of course, you would have to strip out the ratings on the content you proxy (else the keywords will be caught anyhow), but then your proxy would be serving unrated content, which is expressly forbidden by the protocol. At best data from your site would blocked because it lacks ratings; at worst your ISP would be pressured to shut you down.
You also suggest:
Actually, I'll bet the sysadmins at Bertelsmann and other large publishing houses wouldn't do anything of the kind. A boycott from independent information providers will do little more than cede the battlefield to corporate interests by default.
And that's what this proposal is really about, isn't it, turning control of the Internet over to moneyed interests? Previous censorship initiatives have been based on ideology; thus, they were doomed to failure because in the end the censors can't all agree on what, exactly, to censor. This proposal seems to be rooted in plain old greed, and it's a lot easier to get people to agree on that.
And if it goes through, it will probably work. The criminal genius in this plan is the byzantine system of keywords. Under this system, any sort of online publishing will require an army of specialists to work out the rating and keep it up to date. Who can afford to retain a staff just for working out keywords? I'll bet Bertelsmann can, and I'll bet they're not too busted up about the fact that many independent publishers can't.
This is a proposal that has to be nipped in the bud. Protests after the fact will be too little too late this time because the protest will fall on deaf ears, if, indeed, it manages to reach any ears at all through the filters. I know that if I were a censor the first thing I would block out would be criticism of censorship.
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So, suppose legislation were enacted forbidding a common carrier from filtering content (possibly allowing an exception for "opt-in" systems, e.g. anti-spam services). This needn't even be legislated explicitly; for example, a law protecting carriers that do no filtering from legal responsibility, but making carriers that do any filtering at all responsible for everything that they do carry, would do the job. Then, people who want to hide from material they find objectionable can do so; people who want to be able to access that same material can also do so, and ISPs don't have to worry about getting sued all the time. In other words, everyone is happy (well, except for would-be censors, anyhow).
On the other hand, I wouldn't exactly bet the rent on such a bill even being proposed in Congress, let alone actually enacted. After all, even the most staunch free speech advocate in Congress can think of at least one or two types of speech he'd like to ban, and if he has to barter away the free speech rights of someone else (not himself, of course) to get it, well, that's not too high a price to pay, is it?
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For instance, I once had the task of parallelizing a subroutine that used an expansion in spherical harmonics to calculate the gravitational potential on the boundary of a fluid dynamics grid. There is a lot of parallelism in this problem; you can parallelize over the mass integrals, over the boundary points, or both. Balancing these advantages, however, is that you would like, as much as possible to reuse the sin and cos terms that recur throughout the expansion (rather than recalculating them every time they crop up). Consequently, there are a lot of scratch arrays and temporary variables scattered throughout the code, as well as weird loop orders intended to allow coefficients to be precalculated and reused.
The code was to run on an SGI Origin 2000 (an SMP machine), and there was an automagic parallelizing compiler for the machine. To make a long story short, the auto-parallelizer failed miserably on this piece of code. It turned out to be easier to recode the algorithm by hand to run in parallel than it would have been to tweak it so that the compiler could figure it out "automatically." You can expect these problems only to get worse as you try to adapt the automatic parallelizing system to work with distributed machines. (Indeed, to my knowledge all automatic parallelizing systems run on SMP systems.)
Still, I'm hesitant to say "never." A programmer hand hacking assembly in the 60s might well have been equally skeptical that optimizing compilers would ever outperform human assembly programmers; yet here we are. However, there is another, IMO, more fundamental problem with "all-purpose" distributed computing. The tasks into which you divide the program have to be large enough to cover the overhead of farming them out to the remote hosts. This is not a problem for SETI@home because the 24 hours or so of computing that you get on each block easily dominates the time required to fetch the block. But, how many people work on problems that break down so neatly into huge tasks with no communication requirements? For most people's calculations the communication latency will likely overwhelm any parallel gains you might hope for. Consequently, I expect that heterogeneous distributed computing will for the forseeable future remain exclusively the province of large, special-purpose, compute-intensive software written specifically to work in that environment.
You make it sound as though that's a trivial task. For a more in-depth discussion of what's involved in creating a computer "immune system", see, for instance:
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Loosely abstracted, the article claims that for forty-somethings JFK was the embodyment of all their generation's hopes and dreams for a better America. (Never mind that the reality of the Kennedy administration didn't really live up to those expectations; it's the perception that counts.) When JFK and RFK were assassinated, many people transferred their hopes onto the rest of the family. Apparently, a lot of people honest-to-God, no-lie, really expected JFKjr to come riding in on a white horse some day and rescue those dreams.
For twenty-somethings, however, they found that there was no visceral connection with the "Kennedy mystique." Our generation was much more likely to view JFKjr as an unremarkable media figure whose untimely death was sad, but not a national tragedy.
So, it's not surprising that the news media tended to cater to the older generation's viewpoint. Not only do forty-somethings compose a big segment of their audience, a lot of the media decision-makers are themselves of that generation. Given a story that resonates with them personally and with a huge segement of their audience, it's almost a given that the result would be the media orgy that we saw.
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Hmm. I had to ponder this one a while. I think the majority of the population will follow the side that shouts the loudest and pushes their buttons the best. Unfortunately, the anti-rational side of an argument usually has the advantage when it comes to button-pushing. On my more idealistic days I have been heard to argue that that just means the forces of rationalism just have to shout that much louder and refuse that much more sternly to back down. Funny, I seem to be having fewer and fewer of those days lately.
Indeed.
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Sure, it was, as I said, just a thought experiment.
I think this statement sums it up:
Agreed, that we cannot implant a moral code into people's brains, and if we could, I'm not sure we would want to (I'm reminded of Robert Heinlein's "If This Goes On..."). What we can do, however, is to forbid the most obvious types of abuse. We can, for instance, guarantee individuals the privacy of their genetic details. We can continue to protect endangered species despite our ability to replace them through cloning. We can carefully control nuclear materials so that they do not fall into dangerous and/or incompetent hands. IMO these are better responses than burying our heads in the sand and hoping that the new technology will just go away. In fact, if you stipulate that someone will eventually develop the technology, then it makes the most sense to face the ethical issues head-on, rather than to wake up one morning and discover that the technology has arrived anyhow, and we are not prepared ethically to deal with it.
Severe topic drift here, but I had to comment:
This is, IMO, why arguments for gay equality based on the genetic origin or lack thereof of homosexuality are the Wrong Thing. It creates the idea in many people's minds that homosexuality is ok only because homosexuals "can't help it," and "they're just born that way." If you argue based on the idea that it's nobody else's business what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom, then you don't run into that problem.
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As a thought experiment, suppose you had the final say; on your word the research either happens, or it doesn't. So, do we do it or do we not do it? And in making this decision, do you factor in only the potential harm that the discoveries could cause, or do you factor in the potential benefits as well? It seems to me that there is no new technology that does not carry some risk of abuse. So, if we are ever to realize the benefits of any new technology we, as a society, must assume the responsibility for making sure we don't abuse our new tools.