Yes. You can play JAVA-based multi-player netwoked wireless pong. Hence the name, "tele" from the Greek "telos" for distance and pong from "ping pong" for the sound made by ping pong (don't you just love recursive definitions). The Telepong allows pong at a distance.
The ergonomic design of the Telepong enables it to additionally be used as a ping pong paddle.
With the proper extensions it can also be used as a motorized ice cream scooper, leaf blower, and many other things. You can even use it to cut a tin can - but you wouldn't want to.
The DeltaV (i.e. fuel needed) to launch to Mars is only slightly higher than that required to go to the moon. Of course, it gets much higher if you want to get there quickly. Once you get to Mars you can use aerocapture to save DV and you can even use a direct descent with parachutes to land on the surface. At the moon use can use third-body effects for a ballistic capture without using DV... but you still need DV for landing on the surface.
For practical manned Mars missions with around six months in deep space, I think Mars will be more expensive... Although Lunar missions will be in the same DV ballpark, a Mars mission will require more provisions (food, water, etc) and the spacecraft will weigh more - which will require more fuel for the same DV.. and will have higher launch costs.
As far as aerobraking goes... it's a little tricky when you want to go into orbit around Mars, but if you just want to land it's much simpler. You'll probably still need retro rockets, but they will require much less fuel than if you did an Apollo style mission where you went into orbit first and then landed.
Fant additionally proposes replacing the conventional system of digital logic with what he calls "null convention logic," a scheme that identifies not only "yes" and "no," but also "no answer yet"
"On the Moon, we want to look at those lunar polar regions, where there may be hydrogen concentrations...water ice, perhaps"
Water is far more valuable for being water than for being a source of hydrogen. Mining the ice on the moon for propellant is stupid and short-sighted. The moon has very little water and that water will be needed to support eventual human colonies on the moon.
There is a real danger that missions to the moon in the near future will use the water ice to make propellant and lower their cost. I don't think that wasting this water is a good idea... the Moon is the only water source near Earth that won't cost you hefty launch costs. This lunar water will be valuable to lunar colonies as well as colonies on asteroids and in orbit around the Earth as it will be much easier to get than water from Earth or Mars.
Second, 802.11a has issues of its own. Most importantly, it is WAY shorter range, and can be blocked by a wet piece of paper. 802.11b is so robust, people have run over several miles (with special antennas).
Short range prevents network leakage and enhances security, which can be a good thing.
Re:Science must be testable
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No. Of course it won't. Measurements simply don't behave like that. Measurements, as the term is used by particle physicists, give you an single answer/number.
And large numbers of measurements give you several different numbers as all real-world measurements have error and you'll never measure exactly the same value twice. All of these different measurements with their random error will fall into some sort of distribution of different values.
Err. No. You'll only get a range of values if you carry out a sequence of measurements. And, if the time between measurements is sufficiently short, they'll be similar to the first measurements (modulo the amount each measurement perturbs the particle).
That's the theory... but I'm not aware of any tests of that idea.
I'd be very interested if you could point me to any experiment that repeatedly measures the state of the same particle (electron, photon, etc). The experiments that I have performed in lab classes were measuring the states of large numbers of different particles... I've looked through several books and I've asked several of my professors if they knew of any experiments that repeatedly measure the same particle, and I haven't been able to find one.
To my knowledge, every experiment out there collects measurements on large numbers of different particles... if you have a counterexample I would be very interested in it (and grateful for the information).
Re:Science must be testable
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In the Copenhagen interpretation the act of observation changes reality as opposed to revealing some part of reality that was previously known. An electron will behave differently depending on what you know about it.
What spike? The spike in what? This is physics, be specific
When you measure a quantity (Energy, momentum, voltage, there's lot of them) where the wave function is a Gaussian distribution, for example, of different values (of Energy, momentum, whatever) your measurements won't show a Gaussian distribution of that quantity -- even though that's what your theory says is there -- rather you'll see a range of values for that quantity with most of the measured values in a spike where the wave function collapsed. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the wave function collapsed due to the act of measurement. According to the law of large numbers the wave function collapsed because of the way you analyze and process the data from your experiment.
Re:Science must be testable
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Groundless faith won't stay challenges, especially in the IT/IT-education world. We're a trying bunch with matters we don't find logical (or at least reasonable).
How can some Faith be groundless and other Faith be grounded?
How can God's existence be proven or disproven? God is by definition supernatural and not beholden to natural law. To me this seems to say that by definition God and God's existence is not governed by laws of logic and mathematics - God cannot be fully comprehended by mortals...
People with strong faith will hold that faith even when confronted with strong evidence to the contrary.. that's what makes faith, Faith.
Xtian God, Muslim God, Hindu Gods, Buddha in leather pants... any "proof" for these is subjective and not on the level of proofs in logic and math -- even though I think just about anyone who saw that girl in those red leather pants would have been every bit as enlightened as I was.
Science must be testable
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's easy to make up 'theories' to explain phenomena... before Descartes and the Scientific Method theories were accepted based upon how good a story they were and how they appealed to various people -- reinforce existing beliefs and your theory is accepted. Descarte realized that hypotheses must be testable in order to decide if they're true or false.
There are lots of neat ideas out there to explain various physical phenomena, but its hard to come up for tests for many of these... How would you test to see if matter is popping in and out of existence? What do you mean by existence anyway? What exactly does the word matter mean?...hmm and this idea has an implied conception of time that must be defined as well.
My point is, scientific facts must be tested and verified by experiment. Sure there are lots of other ideas that can't be tested.... but these fall in the same realm as religion and require faith. The so called Copenhagen interpretation is a prime example of this.
The Copenhagen interpretation claims that wave functions in Quantum mechanics collapse because they are effected by being observed by an intelligent observer. Supposedly you can see this by taking a large number of observations of photons or electrons or whatever and seeing the 'spike' from the wave function collapse. But wait, statistic's Law of Large Numbers says that if you take a large number of observations with random error you'll get this spike no matter what just because of the math - not because of some interaction between the particle and the observer.
Sainted Indy labels screw over artists just as bad as big labels. Indy labels often make the artist pay all of the recording costs and lock them into a contract where they agree to promote and distribute an album... then decide that they don't want to distribute the album after all because they deem the cost of promoting the album too risky, yet they won't release the artist from the contract to pursue another label that might actually promote the album.
There ain't no justice for you if you can't afford a lawyer.
A new design like the X-33 and its leaky tanks?? When the government throws money at the big boys (Boeing and Lockheed) it makes it so no one wants to invest in the little companies with the really good ideas, like Beal.
The Shuttle was, is, and has always been an experimental vehicle. It was the first vehicle of its kind and if they would have "designed it as an airplane" it would have cost many Billions more to develop.
NASA should stick to researching new technologies and then distributing them for free, as per its charter. NASA should not give subsidies to some companies at the expense of others.
Much of Shuttle operations are already privatized and run by the United Space Alliance. USA is a joint venture by Lockheed and Boeing. They save costs in three main ways: 1) USA pays less than NASA... and NASA already pays much lower than the rest of the Aerospace industry (at least they did when I was job hunting last year). 2) USA cuts the deadwood. Since NASA employees are civil servants they pretty much have their jobs for life and NASA employs lots of people who don't really contribute to a project but have to be paid anyway. 3) USA can hire people when there's lots of work and fire them when the work load drops. NASA hires people and keeps them so its difficult to hire more people when the work load jumps.
From what I've heard, USA does a good job as most of their people are highly motivated by manned space flight.. and I guess the salary doesn't look that small when you work with the Russian controllers who sometimes don't even get paid at all.
This is not to say that privatization is always a good thing. Lots and lots of government contractors do a worse job and end up costing more than what they replaced... many charge so much it verges on fraud.
The story's been slashdotted... so here's a cut and paste of the story on the other end of the shiny direct link to Eric's Commentary. After reading this, I don't think I'll buy any more books from CRC... but I guess they're making Wolfram pay for the books they don't sell anyway, so this probably won't do any good.
Here it is:
What Happened to MathWorld
It is no secret that one consequence of the explosion in the popularity of the internet and related electronic technologies is that many battles will be fought over how information is created, stored, and accessed. It is equally clear that we all have a stake in how these battles are decided.
Below is an account of one such battle--the lawsuit served on me and Wolfram Research in the spring of 2000 by CRC Press, a publisher that generations of scientists used to know as the Chemical Rubber Company. This lawsuit was instigated by CRC Press after I had contracted with them to print and distribute a "snapshot" of my math web site in book form. My goal in recounting how that contract went awry is to give others an opportunity to learn less painfully what I have learned--especially about the deep cultural divide that appears to be opening up between most, but I hope not all, book publishers and their potential customers and authors. In particular, many publishers seem unable to understand a new generation for whom dynamic web sites are rapidly becoming a primary medium--sometimes co-equal with books, sometimes preferred over books--for gathering, extending, and sharing knowledge.
In this account, you will find links that will take you to extensive documents containing all you could possibly want to know (and probably more) about the lawsuit that took this web site off the internet for more than a year. What happened to MathWorld will happen again elsewhere. But I believe and hope that the lessons learned from my experience can reduce the frequency of such events in the future.
The following detailed summaries are extracted in part from an even more detailed exposition of the history of my web site contained in my affidavit in response to CRC's motion for an injunction against MathWorld.
How MathWorld Came to Be
I began collecting the material now found in MathWorld when I was in high school, and then continued the project as a college student in the late 1980s. As I collected them, I stored my notes on my state-of-the-art MacPlus personal computer and started sharing my collections of math and science facts with friends. "Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics," the predecessor site to MathWorld, first went online in 1995 when I was a graduate student in planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.
As the site became more widely known and used, dozens of contributors offered new entries. Hundreds of others from around the world offered technical advice, criticism, and kind messages. The web site was in a constant state of evolution. It was a hugely rewarding experience. The growing volume of comments and submissions from the diverse community of users made clear that what had started as a labor of love for me was becoming a major math and science resource for thousands, just as I had hoped.
The Book: A "Snapshot" of the Evolving Web Site
As the web site grew, I came to believe that a snapshot of its contents in printed form could be useful. I myself do not always have a computer at my fingertips. A book would also make the material accessible to pre-college educators and people less comfortable with (or without access to) the Internet. (For some of you it may require some imagination to conjure up the dark ages of 1995, when web browsers were in their infancy and email was hardly the mass phenomenon it has since become.)
Although new material was being added daily, I felt that the Treasure Trove had become comprehensive enough (and sufficiently polished, due in large part to helpful suggestions from critical readers) that a snapshot of it would constitute a useful reference book. So in February, 1996, I began seeking a publisher to print and market such a snapshot. I presented a nearly complete paper manuscript to several publishers of scientific and technical books, including CRC Press.
Tales of warm friendships between famous authors and their longtime editors are legendary. I imagined that publishers must have a natural interest in retaining the good will of their authors, especially authors of works likely to be revised and reissued in new editions. When CRC agreed to publish the book, I therefore gave limited scrutiny to the "boilerplate publishing contract" they provided--especially since my editor, Bob Stern, characterized the contract as "very straight forward and easily understood." Its language and terms were standard in the publishing business, he assured me. So I signed it.
Lesson #1. (Where have you heard this before?) Never sign a contract until you feel that you understand and agree with, or at least accept, every clause in it. If you are not sure of the meaning or implications of any phrase or provision, find a lawyer experienced in your kind of project and take her advice! (This Lesson to be read repeatedly and committed to memory.) Also consult with authors organizations and make use of helpful on-line resources such as Wilfred Hodges' mathematical copyright webpage, a public page devoted to copyright issues in mathematical publications.
CRC's contract defined the "Work" with which I was contracting them as "approximately 1400 camera-ready manuscript pages and includ[ing] approximately 1200 camera-ready illustrations to yield a completed work of approximately 1408 printed pages[.]" I understood this to mean that I was assigning to CRC the right to publish the typeset camera-ready text I had offered them.
The Web Site and Its Relationship to Book Sales
In late October or early November 1998, as the book adaptation neared final production, I received a phone call from Mr. Stern. Throughout this pre-publication period, my web site had been receiving a great deal of attention. I had posted on the web site an announcement of the imminent appearance of the CRC book; that announcement appeared to be generating a significant number of pre-release sales for the book. I thought things were going very well.
But now Mr. Stern was on the phone asking me to remove portions of the web site content in order to create greater incentives for online users to purchase the book.
I had always assumed that there would be at most a modest overlap between the set of people who were users of the web site, and the set of people who would want to own a printed reference book created by formatting a snapshot of the web site contents. It had been gratifying to discover that people in that intersection seemed enthusiastic about buying the book.
So I told Mr. Stern that I felt the web site was, on balance, creating sales for the book, not suppressing them. I was very reluctant to restrict free access to any contents of the web site.
However, in November 1998, against my better judgment, I began to comply with Mr. Stern's request. At first I did this by randomly choosing a set of letters of the alphabet each day and blocking all entries starting with those letters. That way, some inconvenience was introduced into use of the web site, but no material remained blocked for long.
From the start this struck me as a poor device for dealing with irresponsible internet users who might attempt to bulk-download large portions of on-line material. Taking arbitrary entries offline was inconveniencing all users who happened to need the blocked material. And happily, bulk downloading was an uncommon pattern of use according to my analysis of web site traffic.
If the problem was the user who wants to own a snapshot of the web site but, to avoid purchasing the CRC book, downloads major portions of the web site's content, then why not inconvenience only those exhibiting such patterns of use? So I began to improve my monitoring and access system. By mid-1999, I felt that the software I had written was able to detect and prevent attempts to download large bodies of material. So I removed the letter-based access restrictions altogether.
I was now morally certain that no online user could, in effect, get around CRC's rights to be sole provider of comprehensive snapshots of the web site. (In addition to the printed book, CRC had agreed to market a CD-ROM version--a snapshot with its own advantages and disadvantages compared to a book. I had prepared the CD-ROM; CRC duplicated it and promised to promote it.)
Eric Comes to Wolfram Research
In the meantime, a representative of Wolfram Research had invited me to visit its Champaign headquarters and speak about my mathematical web site. I traveled to Champaign in February 1999, presented my work, and shortly thereafter was delighted to be offered a position with Wolfram Research.
I had for some time admired Wolfram Research's support of long-term efforts to collect and disseminate mathematical knowledge on the internet through a collection of information-rich web sites. And I was enthusiastic about the possibility of working for what I knew to be the world's premier technical software company.
As my postdoctoral research at the University of Virginia neared completion, I purchased the "www.treasure-troves.com" domain name and moved my web pages from the university address at which it had resided to a commercial internet-hosting site. Throughout this period the math treasure trove was accessible to the public and free of charge.
I began work at Wolfram Research on June 1, 1999.
Stephen Wolfram and others suggested that the web site ought to give its users the ability to locate information based on a custom-tailored subject classification. A number of Wolfram Research staff joined me in developing an intuitive and powerful new graphical user interface that greatly enhanced the usefulness of the burgeoning content of the math web site.
In December 1999, Wolfram Research and I unveiled the enhanced web site, now renamed MathWorld and located at mathworld.wolfram.com.
CRC Fails to Promote the Book
When the book was first released, CRC promoted it with what I thought was some vigor. However, as the months passed I grew increasingly disappointed with their efforts. Less than a year after its release, the book ceased appearing in CRC mailings that I received, including special ones for its "Most Popular Math Titles."
I was also greatly disappointed that CRC had raised the price of the book twice within its first year, from the original $65, to $79.95, to $99.95. This seemed to undermine our original strategy of keeping the price low enough for students to afford.
And it appeared to me that CRC had done little to get the book into bookstores. In fact, to date, I have only seen the book carried in a single bookstore: the campus bookstore of my highly atypical alma mater, the California Institute of Technology.
Accordingly, on February 15, 2000, I sent a note to Mr. Stern:
"I've recently noticed a few signs which seem to indicate CRC is not doing an optimal job of publicizing the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Math. I was hoping you could reassure me: (1) I just got the CRC "Best of Math" flier. To my surprise, my encyclopedia is nowhere to be found. (2) amazon.com has been listing the book/CD-ROM combo as out of print and back-ordered for about 4 months now... Would it be possible to have someone contact amazon.com and find out why they think the combo is on back order? (3) I never heard back from you about the color direct mail flier which was supposed to go out promoting the [CD-ROM--erroneously written as "book" in the original] (and on which I sent you comments last summer). Do you know if it ever went out, or did the flier just get dropped?"
Later that day, I received a phone call from Mr. Stern. He told me that (1) because the encyclopedia had been out for two years now (actually, it had been out for less than 15 months), it was not considered a very high priority and hence may have been "overlooked" when creating the brochure; (2) CRC had decided to discontinue the CD/book bundle, though he could offer no reason for this decision; and (3) promotional fliers for the CD-ROM and bundle editions had never seen the light of day.
CRC Sues Eric and Wolfram Research
At the end of this conversation, Mr. Stern changed the topic. He told me that he had heard that my web site was now located at a Wolfram Research web address.
I told him that this was indeed true.
Mr. Stern said that something would have to be done about that.
I replied that I did not understand why the shift from the old web site to the MathWorld site should be a matter of any concern. Mr. Stern simply repeated that it was, and that he would have to inform his superiors at CRC. I did not know what to make of this, so I asked him to contact an attorney at Wolfram Research who I believed would be able to clear up any concerns.
On March 8, 2000, I was greatly surprised when, after returning from lunch, I was informed that a sheriff's deputy was waiting for me in the Wolfram Research lobby.
I was even more dismayed when he served me with a document naming me and my employer as defendants in a Federal copyright violation lawsuit.
This was my first and only communication from CRC since my conversation three weeks earlier with Mr. Stern. For the interested reader, here is a copy of the lawsuit filed by CRC. A complete list of case documents is also available, many of which make interesting reading and give a good feel for the attitude of CRC Press. A set of FAQs about the case is also available.
How the Tail Came to Wag the Dog
In their lawsuit, CRC claimed that the existence of the MathWorld web site "competes with and interferes and impairs with [sic] sales of the Concise Encyclopedia."
They sought monetary damages from Wolfram Research. From me, they sought "not less than the advance and all royalties earned by Weisstein"--everything, in short, that they had ever paid me!
Apparenly impervious to irony, CRC at the same time acknowledged in its own court filing that the book was the company's best-selling mathematics title! (This, one month after Mr. Stern had "explained" to me that my book was a back list item that I should not be surprised to see dropped from its promotional materials.)
Arguments that the web site was hurting sales of the book, in CRC's subsequent motion to force us to shut down the web site, were completely contrary to the facts as I knew them and as I had tried repeatedly to explain to Mr. Stern.
CRC claimed that "anyone can download MathWorld", and that MathWorld "supplants" or poses "a formidable threat" to the book. As explained above, I had taken steps to prevent large downloads; I knew from monitoring traffic at the web site that large downloads were in fact not happening.
And CRC also claimed, with a straight face, that "...the public will suffer no injury from a preliminary injunction because the Encyclopedia will continue to be available without interruption, from CRC Press".
This argument, in particular, confirmed my worst fears that CRC's representatives had never understood the nature of my web site. They were blind to the interests of the thousands of you in our online community who had helped expand and improve it. They seemed completely oblivious of the fact that without you, there might not have been a book worth publishing.
Wolfram Research and I were confident that CRC's factual assertions about the web site had no merit. But the law takes copyright very seriously. Language in my contract with CRC (that I had never construed in the way that CRC now presented it) apparently persuaded the Court, on October 23, 2000, to grant CRC's injunction, perhaps to create a strong incentive for Wolfram Research and me to negotiate a settlement with CRC. (It was clear to all parties that that original contract had flaws; in such cases, the best approach is often for the disputants to reach an out-of-court settlement by writing a new, clarified, contract. In effect, that is what has, at long last, happened.)
I simply could not believe what was happening. The interests of thousands of enthusiastic users of the web site were about to be sacrificed to the misperceived commercial interests of the company I had brought in to provide a printed version to the comparatively few users who might want a book. What I had conceived as a minor side activity was threatening to destroy the core activity at which I had been working for more than a decade!
Some Comments about CRC Press LLC
As the shock wore off, Wolfram Research and my first instincts were to reason with CRC. We were certain, based on feedback from readers of the web site, that their assertions about it were unfounded, that in fact it was generating book sales for them, not suppressing sales.
But when we attempted to present these facts, we found that there was no one from CRC press even listening. During the course of these discussions, the heads of CRC's book publishing and electronic publishing divisions both left the company. We could not get anyone to listen to arguments actually focusing on the marketing of books. CRC responses were overwhelmingly legal and contractual. When facts entered at all, they were simply repeated assertions that we were certain would not stand up to reasonable scrutiny.
We wanted very much to negotiate a settlement that would allow us to bring the web site back. We proposed what we thought were attractive arrangements that would benefit both companies. Our proposals were ignored.
For months, I could not imagine why CRC was behaving as it was. Why would a technical publisher not listen to one of its best-selling authors, and to his employer, the world leader in mathematical computation? Why treat us, instead, in a way almost guaranteed to alienate us? It seemed insane!
I have had to conclude, to my sorrow, that CRC--perhaps like many other publishers in our era of wild corporate acquisitions and conglomerations--is no longer managed by people who understand and love books, authors, and readers.
The parent company of CRC, Information Holdings, Inc., appears unashamed to treat information as a commodity to be exploited for short-term bottom-line cash, with no concern for long-term strategic planning. The goal of the CRC representatives seemed to be monomaniacal: to squeeze from Wolfram Research and from me as much instant and short-term cash as possible, using the lawsuit as a lever.
How self-defeating in an era of rapid technological change! Apparently uninterested in looking forward, building good future business strategies, here are publishers focusing instead on how to squeeze greater quantities of immediate cash from old "properties."
I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders that appears so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders.
The behavior of CRC's representatives this last year has been, for me, convincing evidence of the wisdom of Wolfram Research's strategy. The people at my company believe in what they do, make money doing it, and have fun along the way. I didn't see much fun being had among the CRC people we dealt with.
Settling the Case
We eventually concluded that there was no real business discussion possible. CRC was simply incapable of listening to or evaluating an actual business proposal. So we weighed the costs of continued litigation against the costs of giving CRC some of the cash for which it appeared so hungry. The cash approach won.
In addition to its "instant win," CRC will be paid annually for books they don't sell, according to a formula that both sides have accepted--although we continue to believe that any past or future failure to achieve projected sales is far more plausibly attributed to CRC's abysmal marketing efforts than to any abuse of the web site by people who want to have and hold snapshots of its contents. But in this life we do what we have to do--and what we are willing to do.
Another important change is that, as part of the settlement agreement, CRC Press will now be given permission to create editions of the printed book based on future snapshots of the website. As a result, CRC insisted that broad reproduction rights to all contributed material be secured. Furthermore, if we are not able to secure such rights, then Wolfram Research and I, at our own expense, must rewrite the entries in question from scratch for CRC to reproduce. This makes it extremely difficult for us to include any new contributed material on the website unless we first secure permissions using CRC's boilerplate permissions form. This form is endorsed by neither Wolfram Research nor myself, but as part of the settlement agreement, we are required to ask contributors to sign it. Since our goal is and always has been to provide your contributions on-line to the worldwide math community, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or imposition this CRC-mandated form may cause you.
Thanks
After a draining personal ordeal lasting more than a year and during which the site was unavailable to readers, MathWorld is now back. We've even taken the opportunity to add a new streamlined graphical design, and also added a new feature in which important breaking mathematical news will be announced and described. I hope this will be useful to readers of the web site as a means for keeping tabs on what is happening in the mathematical sciences. Please feel free to contribute new results to news@mathworld.wolfram.com so I can pass the word along to others!
Wolfram Research and I have been and remain steadfastly committed to supporting the development of MathWorld. Wolfram Research has committed considerable resources to defend MathWorld against the threat of being permanently removed from the internet--an outcome CRC Press has repeatedly told us would suit it just fine. I am personally grateful for the support of Wolfram Research, and for the fact that MathWorld will not be relegated to an electronic trashheap. If you want to show your appreciation of the stand Wolfram Research is taking, please visit what I can do to help web page.
Finally, I would like to extend my sincerest thanks for your patience and support over this past year. I invite your continued partnership in my efforts to expand and improve MathWorld, as well as to support other efforts to gather and present educational information free of charge over the internet. Let's continue to together spread the wonder and beauty that is mathematics!
Regards,
Eric W. Weisstein
Encyclopedist
Wolfram Research, Inc.
November 6, 2001
Champaign, Illinois
A second Bachelor's is a lot of work. It's easier (and it pays more) to go and get a Master's degree in another subject. With a Bachelor's in CS most Master degree programs would take you... you'd need to take a few extra background classes, but it's still less than the classes for another BS.
I've got to BS degrees and an MS. My MS got me my job... a second BS isn't worth much more than a minor in another subject.
how about this... a 'virtual machine' as cracker bait...
set up a cgi program that fakes being a vulnerable system just to see what sort of attacks you get... call it 'perl', 'sh', or something especially enticing... and set up a fake file system for the hacker to explore, fake log files for them to modify, etc
this would be kind of like writing a text adventure game. you could put several fake encrypted files that are just random strings of characters..
C3L = C3 of Launch... C3 is (2*(Kinetic_energy/mass))^2 (or if you know orbit mechanics V-Infinity^2)
TTIME = Transfer Time (days)... that is, how long it take to get to Mars
SEP = Sun-Earth-Probe angle... that is, the angle on the corner of the triangle made by Sun-Earth-Probe... when this angle is too small you can't get a signal from the probe because of the noise from the Sun
Ls --- I'm not sure on this one, it seems to be some sort of Launch angle
Who pays for the stolen money? Can MS be sued?
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Passport's Pocket Picked
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· Score: 1, Interesting
And even Microsoft's lawyers were in on the gig of making sure everyone knew about it.
Hey if someone's credit cards get stolen due to a security hole in passport and a whole bunch of money gets stolen... can Microsoft be sued by the person whose cards were stolen or by their bank or somebody?..or does some "AS IS" clause in a license protect them... who ends up paying for the money stolen through the security hole?
What if MS knows about a security hole but they leave it running while the patch is being worked out, and my money gets stolen.. then are they liable?
It seems like Passport might open up MS to lots of litigation if some major heist happens..
Multinationals can leap from country to country and avoid whatever laws that they don't like. Sweatshops are a prime example. If Country A cracks down on me for the way I run factory X, I'll just pack up and move to country B. Hell, I can stay in country A even and just hide my factory. --The US dept. of Labor estimates that 70% of US apparel factories violate labor law... they just can't catch the factories before they move to a new site.
Effectively governments have no power to eliminate sweatshops. If they crack down they just burden legitimate operators with excess regulation and audits while the real culprits go deeper into hiding or just move to another country that either doesn't want to crack down or can't afford to crack down (inspectors cost a lot of money because you have to pay them enough so that they can't be bribed).
So do we just give up and throw our hands up in the air -- market forces will be market forces...
Just because governments cannot stop sweatshops doesn't mean they can't be stopped. We have to realize that the monoliths of government, globalism, and the Man are just figments of our imagination.... we need to think about how to solve the problem without inventing a beast called globalism and without turning to the white night of government.
The student anti-sweatshop movement has been very successful not by petitioning for more laws -- but by getting colleges to think about who they are licensing their logos too. Many colleges now make the companies who want to make their "Threepeat" shirt prove that they aren't using sweatshops. This give a competitive advantage to legitimate apparel manufacturers over the crooked ones. This tactic sets up market forces instead of armed forces to regulate the industry.
These are the sorts of tactics we need to employ to fight what is evil in globalism and promote what is good. We need to forget coersive regulation and focus on subtler market based tactics.
10-31-2001 Duuude, me and my buds have a great idea -- we took our machine and put it in a pumpkin -- we call it "Jack-O-Linux" get it? Linus would be proud!
11-04-2001 JOL (Jack-O-Linux) has begun to smell. I'm beginning to regret not putting in a fan as playing Quake tends to heat it up quite a bit and makes the rotting stench almost unbearable... should've used a Crusoe.
11-06-2001 JOL caught on fire today. I think a piece of rotting pumpkin flesh fell onto the sound card and caused a spark... I'm not really sure though, as I'm afraid to look inside the pumpkin.
11-07-2001 Fabreeze doesn't work on pumkins
11-09-2001 The JOL exploded today as I was browsing slashdot. Apparently the Methane inside the pumkin built up to critical levels. Now my room smells like an odd mixture of farts, pumpkin pie, ozone, and death. Funny thing though -- JOL still boots.
11-10-2001 Drinking with my buds tonight we came up with a great idea: B-E-O-W-O-L-F..
I know it's a basic question - but it seems to be at the heart of the Free-Crypto debate. Free speech should be free whether its in English, French, FORTRAN or Perl. What arguments do you hear against programming being protected as free speech? Can you use the First Amendment against DMCA, ITAR, etc?
Who would pay to cut a 30 hour flight to 1 hour.. hmmm...
Scramjets are great for going from one side of the planet to the other. The actual time out of the atmosphere would be pretty short.. most of the time will be spent getting out of the atmosphere and then landing.
The Concorde can't flight over land because of its shock wave. A scramjet would be out of the atmosphere so the shock wave would only be a problem during landing. I've heard the shuttle's sonic boom when landing at Edwards a couple of times when it flew over LA, and it's not very loud - most people don't even notice it.
- Why don't they launch rockets from under water using that submarine ICBM technology and leverage the floatation benefits for better performance?
Actually the Russians are converting old ICBMs to launch satellites, but they are doing this mostly for cost reasons... i.e., they have old ICBMs lying around and they'd like to use them.
The really cool use of floating rockets is in concepts like the SeaDragon where the rocket is so freakin' huge that it would melt the launch pad. So you build a rocket the size of an oil tanker and float it out to sea on its side, right it, and then light it off... This is how you get a rocket big enough to launch the space station in a single shot or to launch people to Mars.
The sad thing is that the Apollo era Saturn V is in many ways the most advanced rocket ever built.. and we lack the technology to build it again without a lot of research (Nixon recycled the plans and the components aren't made anymore anyway and would have to be re-invented).
Scramjets are cool and all, but I doubt if they will get us to Mars.. They WILL get us from London to Syndney damn fast. And they will be able to ferry people up to low Earth orbit where they could board another larger ship to go on to Mars.
Globalism is blanding out the world
on
Globalization
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· Score: 1
I've driven through most of the country and I was disappointed by the uniformity of all the small towns I passed through. Each was just a slight variation on the theme of McDonalds + WalMart. The only thing different as you cross the US is to see what the local Grocery store chain is. The US is a huge country - but without the variety of other parts of the world the same size. Globalism will just mix all of the worlds cultures together until we get one big old bland McCulture of mass media and the lowest common denominator... At least that's my fear.
The elimination of the directory/file paradigm seems like a good one as well as the virtual machine... but I don't know about the HTML and XML for all human readable text... and what good is a 3D GUI?
Can anyone think of a good reason to have a 3D GUI? It seems like a waste of compute power.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you play pong on a telepong?
Yes. You can play JAVA-based multi-player netwoked wireless pong. Hence the name, "tele" from the Greek "telos" for distance and pong from "ping pong" for the sound made by ping pong (don't you just love recursive definitions). The Telepong allows pong at a distance.
The ergonomic design of the Telepong enables it to additionally be used as a ping pong paddle.
With the proper extensions it can also be used as a motorized ice cream scooper, leaf blower, and many other things. You can even use it to cut a tin can - but you wouldn't want to.
The DeltaV (i.e. fuel needed) to launch to Mars is only slightly higher than that required to go to the moon. Of course, it gets much higher if you want to get there quickly. Once you get to Mars you can use aerocapture to save DV and you can even use a direct descent with parachutes to land on the surface. At the moon use can use third-body effects for a ballistic capture without using DV... but you still need DV for landing on the surface.
For practical manned Mars missions with around six months in deep space, I think Mars will be more expensive... Although Lunar missions will be in the same DV ballpark, a Mars mission will require more provisions (food, water, etc) and the spacecraft will weigh more - which will require more fuel for the same DV.. and will have higher launch costs.
As far as aerobraking goes... it's a little tricky when you want to go into orbit around Mars, but if you just want to land it's much simpler. You'll probably still need retro rockets, but they will require much less fuel than if you did an Apollo style mission where you went into orbit first and then landed.
Fant additionally proposes replacing the conventional system of digital logic with what he calls "null convention logic," a scheme that identifies not only "yes" and "no," but also "no answer yet"
This brings to mind the Ternary Computing article back in October.
"On the Moon, we want to look at those lunar polar regions, where there may be hydrogen concentrations...water ice, perhaps"
Water is far more valuable for being water than for being a source of hydrogen. Mining the ice on the moon for propellant is stupid and short-sighted. The moon has very little water and that water will be needed to support eventual human colonies on the moon.
There is a real danger that missions to the moon in the near future will use the water ice to make propellant and lower their cost. I don't think that wasting this water is a good idea... the Moon is the only water source near Earth that won't cost you hefty launch costs. This lunar water will be valuable to lunar colonies as well as colonies on asteroids and in orbit around the Earth as it will be much easier to get than water from Earth or Mars.
Second, 802.11a has issues of its own. Most importantly, it is WAY shorter range, and can be blocked by a wet piece of paper. 802.11b is so robust, people have run over several miles (with special antennas).
Short range prevents network leakage and enhances security, which can be a good thing.
A quick search of the Fermilab site found some more specifics than in the Washington Post article: a press release, the paper itself: A Precise Determination of Electroweak Parameters in Neutrino-Nucleon Scattering, and some slides [PDF] from a Fermilab seminar.
No. Of course it won't. Measurements simply don't behave like that. Measurements, as the term is used by particle physicists, give you an single answer/number.
And large numbers of measurements give you several different numbers as all real-world measurements have error and you'll never measure exactly the same value twice. All of these different measurements with their random error will fall into some sort of distribution of different values.
Err. No. You'll only get a range of values if you carry out a sequence of measurements. And, if the time between measurements is sufficiently short, they'll be similar to the first measurements (modulo the amount each measurement perturbs the particle).
That's the theory... but I'm not aware of any tests of that idea.
I'd be very interested if you could point me to any experiment that repeatedly measures the state of the same particle (electron, photon, etc). The experiments that I have performed in lab classes were measuring the states of large numbers of different particles... I've looked through several books and I've asked several of my professors if they knew of any experiments that repeatedly measure the same particle, and I haven't been able to find one.
To my knowledge, every experiment out there collects measurements on large numbers of different particles... if you have a counterexample I would be very interested in it (and grateful for the information).
In the Copenhagen interpretation the act of observation changes reality as opposed to revealing some part of reality that was previously known. An electron will behave differently depending on what you know about it.
What spike? The spike in what? This is physics, be specific
When you measure a quantity (Energy, momentum, voltage, there's lot of them) where the wave function is a Gaussian distribution, for example, of different values (of Energy, momentum, whatever) your measurements won't show a Gaussian distribution of that quantity -- even though that's what your theory says is there -- rather you'll see a range of values for that quantity with most of the measured values in a spike where the wave function collapsed. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the wave function collapsed due to the act of measurement. According to the law of large numbers the wave function collapsed because of the way you analyze and process the data from your experiment.
Groundless faith won't stay challenges, especially in the IT/IT-education world. We're a trying bunch with matters we don't find logical (or at least reasonable).
How can some Faith be groundless and other Faith be grounded?
How can God's existence be proven or disproven? God is by definition supernatural and not beholden to natural law. To me this seems to say that by definition God and God's existence is not governed by laws of logic and mathematics - God cannot be fully comprehended by mortals...
People with strong faith will hold that faith even when confronted with strong evidence to the contrary.. that's what makes faith, Faith.
Xtian God, Muslim God, Hindu Gods, Buddha in leather pants... any "proof" for these is subjective and not on the level of proofs in logic and math -- even though I think just about anyone who saw that girl in those red leather pants would have been every bit as enlightened as I was.
It's easy to make up 'theories' to explain phenomena... before Descartes and the Scientific Method theories were accepted based upon how good a story they were and how they appealed to various people -- reinforce existing beliefs and your theory is accepted. Descarte realized that hypotheses must be testable in order to decide if they're true or false.
...hmm and this idea has an implied conception of time that must be defined as well.
There are lots of neat ideas out there to explain various physical phenomena, but its hard to come up for tests for many of these... How would you test to see if matter is popping in and out of existence? What do you mean by existence anyway? What exactly does the word matter mean?
My point is, scientific facts must be tested and verified by experiment. Sure there are lots of other ideas that can't be tested.... but these fall in the same realm as religion and require faith. The so called Copenhagen interpretation is a prime example of this.
The Copenhagen interpretation claims that wave functions in Quantum mechanics collapse because they are effected by being observed by an intelligent observer. Supposedly you can see this by taking a large number of observations of photons or electrons or whatever and seeing the 'spike' from the wave function collapse. But wait, statistic's Law of Large Numbers says that if you take a large number of observations with random error you'll get this spike no matter what just because of the math - not because of some interaction between the particle and the observer.
Buy from indy labels, dont buy from the big boys.
Sainted Indy labels screw over artists just as bad as big labels. Indy labels often make the artist pay all of the recording costs and lock them into a contract where they agree to promote and distribute an album... then decide that they don't want to distribute the album after all because they deem the cost of promoting the album too risky, yet they won't release the artist from the contract to pursue another label that might actually promote the album.
There ain't no justice for you if you can't afford a lawyer.
A new design like the X-33 and its leaky tanks?? When the government throws money at the big boys (Boeing and Lockheed) it makes it so no one wants to invest in the little companies with the really good ideas, like Beal.
The Shuttle was, is, and has always been an experimental vehicle. It was the first vehicle of its kind and if they would have "designed it as an airplane" it would have cost many Billions more to develop.
NASA should stick to researching new technologies and then distributing them for free, as per its charter. NASA should not give subsidies to some companies at the expense of others.
Much of Shuttle operations are already privatized and run by the United Space Alliance. USA is a joint venture by Lockheed and Boeing. They save costs in three main ways: 1) USA pays less than NASA... and NASA already pays much lower than the rest of the Aerospace industry (at least they did when I was job hunting last year). 2) USA cuts the deadwood. Since NASA employees are civil servants they pretty much have their jobs for life and NASA employs lots of people who don't really contribute to a project but have to be paid anyway. 3) USA can hire people when there's lots of work and fire them when the work load drops. NASA hires people and keeps them so its difficult to hire more people when the work load jumps.
From what I've heard, USA does a good job as most of their people are highly motivated by manned space flight.. and I guess the salary doesn't look that small when you work with the Russian controllers who sometimes don't even get paid at all.
This is not to say that privatization is always a good thing. Lots and lots of government contractors do a worse job and end up costing more than what they replaced... many charge so much it verges on fraud.
The story's been slashdotted... so here's a cut and paste of the story on the other end of the shiny direct link to Eric's Commentary. After reading this, I don't think I'll buy any more books from CRC... but I guess they're making Wolfram pay for the books they don't sell anyway, so this probably won't do any good.
...the public will suffer no injury from a preliminary injunction because the Encyclopedia will continue to be available without interruption, from CRC Press".
Here it is:
What Happened to MathWorld
It is no secret that one consequence of the explosion in the popularity of the internet and related electronic technologies is that many battles will be fought over how information is created, stored, and accessed. It is equally clear that we all have a stake in how these battles are decided.
Below is an account of one such battle--the lawsuit served on me and Wolfram Research in the spring of 2000 by CRC Press, a publisher that generations of scientists used to know as the Chemical Rubber Company. This lawsuit was instigated by CRC Press after I had contracted with them to print and distribute a "snapshot" of my math web site in book form. My goal in recounting how that contract went awry is to give others an opportunity to learn less painfully what I have learned--especially about the deep cultural divide that appears to be opening up between most, but I hope not all, book publishers and their potential customers and authors. In particular, many publishers seem unable to understand a new generation for whom dynamic web sites are rapidly becoming a primary medium--sometimes co-equal with books, sometimes preferred over books--for gathering, extending, and sharing knowledge.
In this account, you will find links that will take you to extensive documents containing all you could possibly want to know (and probably more) about the lawsuit that took this web site off the internet for more than a year. What happened to MathWorld will happen again elsewhere. But I believe and hope that the lessons learned from my experience can reduce the frequency of such events in the future.
The following detailed summaries are extracted in part from an even more detailed exposition of the history of my web site contained in my affidavit in response to CRC's motion for an injunction against MathWorld.
How MathWorld Came to Be
I began collecting the material now found in MathWorld when I was in high school, and then continued the project as a college student in the late 1980s. As I collected them, I stored my notes on my state-of-the-art MacPlus personal computer and started sharing my collections of math and science facts with friends. "Eric's Treasure Trove of Mathematics," the predecessor site to MathWorld, first went online in 1995 when I was a graduate student in planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.
As the site became more widely known and used, dozens of contributors offered new entries. Hundreds of others from around the world offered technical advice, criticism, and kind messages. The web site was in a constant state of evolution. It was a hugely rewarding experience. The growing volume of comments and submissions from the diverse community of users made clear that what had started as a labor of love for me was becoming a major math and science resource for thousands, just as I had hoped.
The Book: A "Snapshot" of the Evolving Web Site
As the web site grew, I came to believe that a snapshot of its contents in printed form could be useful. I myself do not always have a computer at my fingertips. A book would also make the material accessible to pre-college educators and people less comfortable with (or without access to) the Internet. (For some of you it may require some imagination to conjure up the dark ages of 1995, when web browsers were in their infancy and email was hardly the mass phenomenon it has since become.)
Although new material was being added daily, I felt that the Treasure Trove had become comprehensive enough (and sufficiently polished, due in large part to helpful suggestions from critical readers) that a snapshot of it would constitute a useful reference book. So in February, 1996, I began seeking a publisher to print and market such a snapshot. I presented a nearly complete paper manuscript to several publishers of scientific and technical books, including CRC Press.
Tales of warm friendships between famous authors and their longtime editors are legendary. I imagined that publishers must have a natural interest in retaining the good will of their authors, especially authors of works likely to be revised and reissued in new editions. When CRC agreed to publish the book, I therefore gave limited scrutiny to the "boilerplate publishing contract" they provided--especially since my editor, Bob Stern, characterized the contract as "very straight forward and easily understood." Its language and terms were standard in the publishing business, he assured me. So I signed it.
Lesson #1. (Where have you heard this before?) Never sign a contract until you feel that you understand and agree with, or at least accept, every clause in it. If you are not sure of the meaning or implications of any phrase or provision, find a lawyer experienced in your kind of project and take her advice! (This Lesson to be read repeatedly and committed to memory.) Also consult with authors organizations and make use of helpful on-line resources such as Wilfred Hodges' mathematical copyright webpage, a public page devoted to copyright issues in mathematical publications.
CRC's contract defined the "Work" with which I was contracting them as "approximately 1400 camera-ready manuscript pages and includ[ing] approximately 1200 camera-ready illustrations to yield a completed work of approximately 1408 printed pages[.]" I understood this to mean that I was assigning to CRC the right to publish the typeset camera-ready text I had offered them.
The Web Site and Its Relationship to Book Sales
In late October or early November 1998, as the book adaptation neared final production, I received a phone call from Mr. Stern. Throughout this pre-publication period, my web site had been receiving a great deal of attention. I had posted on the web site an announcement of the imminent appearance of the CRC book; that announcement appeared to be generating a significant number of pre-release sales for the book. I thought things were going very well.
But now Mr. Stern was on the phone asking me to remove portions of the web site content in order to create greater incentives for online users to purchase the book.
I had always assumed that there would be at most a modest overlap between the set of people who were users of the web site, and the set of people who would want to own a printed reference book created by formatting a snapshot of the web site contents. It had been gratifying to discover that people in that intersection seemed enthusiastic about buying the book.
So I told Mr. Stern that I felt the web site was, on balance, creating sales for the book, not suppressing them. I was very reluctant to restrict free access to any contents of the web site.
However, in November 1998, against my better judgment, I began to comply with Mr. Stern's request. At first I did this by randomly choosing a set of letters of the alphabet each day and blocking all entries starting with those letters. That way, some inconvenience was introduced into use of the web site, but no material remained blocked for long.
From the start this struck me as a poor device for dealing with irresponsible internet users who might attempt to bulk-download large portions of on-line material. Taking arbitrary entries offline was inconveniencing all users who happened to need the blocked material. And happily, bulk downloading was an uncommon pattern of use according to my analysis of web site traffic.
If the problem was the user who wants to own a snapshot of the web site but, to avoid purchasing the CRC book, downloads major portions of the web site's content, then why not inconvenience only those exhibiting such patterns of use? So I began to improve my monitoring and access system. By mid-1999, I felt that the software I had written was able to detect and prevent attempts to download large bodies of material. So I removed the letter-based access restrictions altogether.
I was now morally certain that no online user could, in effect, get around CRC's rights to be sole provider of comprehensive snapshots of the web site. (In addition to the printed book, CRC had agreed to market a CD-ROM version--a snapshot with its own advantages and disadvantages compared to a book. I had prepared the CD-ROM; CRC duplicated it and promised to promote it.)
Eric Comes to Wolfram Research
In the meantime, a representative of Wolfram Research had invited me to visit its Champaign headquarters and speak about my mathematical web site. I traveled to Champaign in February 1999, presented my work, and shortly thereafter was delighted to be offered a position with Wolfram Research.
I had for some time admired Wolfram Research's support of long-term efforts to collect and disseminate mathematical knowledge on the internet through a collection of information-rich web sites. And I was enthusiastic about the possibility of working for what I knew to be the world's premier technical software company.
As my postdoctoral research at the University of Virginia neared completion, I purchased the "www.treasure-troves.com" domain name and moved my web pages from the university address at which it had resided to a commercial internet-hosting site. Throughout this period the math treasure trove was accessible to the public and free of charge.
I began work at Wolfram Research on June 1, 1999.
Stephen Wolfram and others suggested that the web site ought to give its users the ability to locate information based on a custom-tailored subject classification. A number of Wolfram Research staff joined me in developing an intuitive and powerful new graphical user interface that greatly enhanced the usefulness of the burgeoning content of the math web site.
In December 1999, Wolfram Research and I unveiled the enhanced web site, now renamed MathWorld and located at mathworld.wolfram.com.
CRC Fails to Promote the Book
When the book was first released, CRC promoted it with what I thought was some vigor. However, as the months passed I grew increasingly disappointed with their efforts. Less than a year after its release, the book ceased appearing in CRC mailings that I received, including special ones for its "Most Popular Math Titles."
I was also greatly disappointed that CRC had raised the price of the book twice within its first year, from the original $65, to $79.95, to $99.95. This seemed to undermine our original strategy of keeping the price low enough for students to afford.
And it appeared to me that CRC had done little to get the book into bookstores. In fact, to date, I have only seen the book carried in a single bookstore: the campus bookstore of my highly atypical alma mater, the California Institute of Technology.
Accordingly, on February 15, 2000, I sent a note to Mr. Stern:
"I've recently noticed a few signs which seem to indicate CRC is not doing an optimal job of publicizing the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Math. I was hoping you could reassure me: (1) I just got the CRC "Best of Math" flier. To my surprise, my encyclopedia is nowhere to be found. (2) amazon.com has been listing the book/CD-ROM combo as out of print and back-ordered for about 4 months now... Would it be possible to have someone contact amazon.com and find out why they think the combo is on back order? (3) I never heard back from you about the color direct mail flier which was supposed to go out promoting the [CD-ROM--erroneously written as "book" in the original] (and on which I sent you comments last summer). Do you know if it ever went out, or did the flier just get dropped?"
Later that day, I received a phone call from Mr. Stern. He told me that (1) because the encyclopedia had been out for two years now (actually, it had been out for less than 15 months), it was not considered a very high priority and hence may have been "overlooked" when creating the brochure; (2) CRC had decided to discontinue the CD/book bundle, though he could offer no reason for this decision; and (3) promotional fliers for the CD-ROM and bundle editions had never seen the light of day.
CRC Sues Eric and Wolfram Research
At the end of this conversation, Mr. Stern changed the topic. He told me that he had heard that my web site was now located at a Wolfram Research web address.
I told him that this was indeed true.
Mr. Stern said that something would have to be done about that.
I replied that I did not understand why the shift from the old web site to the MathWorld site should be a matter of any concern. Mr. Stern simply repeated that it was, and that he would have to inform his superiors at CRC. I did not know what to make of this, so I asked him to contact an attorney at Wolfram Research who I believed would be able to clear up any concerns.
On March 8, 2000, I was greatly surprised when, after returning from lunch, I was informed that a sheriff's deputy was waiting for me in the Wolfram Research lobby.
I was even more dismayed when he served me with a document naming me and my employer as defendants in a Federal copyright violation lawsuit.
This was my first and only communication from CRC since my conversation three weeks earlier with Mr. Stern. For the interested reader, here is a copy of the lawsuit filed by CRC. A complete list of case documents is also available, many of which make interesting reading and give a good feel for the attitude of CRC Press. A set of FAQs about the case is also available.
How the Tail Came to Wag the Dog
In their lawsuit, CRC claimed that the existence of the MathWorld web site "competes with and interferes and impairs with [sic] sales of the Concise Encyclopedia."
They sought monetary damages from Wolfram Research. From me, they sought "not less than the advance and all royalties earned by Weisstein"--everything, in short, that they had ever paid me!
Apparenly impervious to irony, CRC at the same time acknowledged in its own court filing that the book was the company's best-selling mathematics title! (This, one month after Mr. Stern had "explained" to me that my book was a back list item that I should not be surprised to see dropped from its promotional materials.)
Arguments that the web site was hurting sales of the book, in CRC's subsequent motion to force us to shut down the web site, were completely contrary to the facts as I knew them and as I had tried repeatedly to explain to Mr. Stern.
CRC claimed that "anyone can download MathWorld", and that MathWorld "supplants" or poses "a formidable threat" to the book. As explained above, I had taken steps to prevent large downloads; I knew from monitoring traffic at the web site that large downloads were in fact not happening.
And CRC also claimed, with a straight face, that "
This argument, in particular, confirmed my worst fears that CRC's representatives had never understood the nature of my web site. They were blind to the interests of the thousands of you in our online community who had helped expand and improve it. They seemed completely oblivious of the fact that without you, there might not have been a book worth publishing.
Wolfram Research and I were confident that CRC's factual assertions about the web site had no merit. But the law takes copyright very seriously. Language in my contract with CRC (that I had never construed in the way that CRC now presented it) apparently persuaded the Court, on October 23, 2000, to grant CRC's injunction, perhaps to create a strong incentive for Wolfram Research and me to negotiate a settlement with CRC. (It was clear to all parties that that original contract had flaws; in such cases, the best approach is often for the disputants to reach an out-of-court settlement by writing a new, clarified, contract. In effect, that is what has, at long last, happened.)
I simply could not believe what was happening. The interests of thousands of enthusiastic users of the web site were about to be sacrificed to the misperceived commercial interests of the company I had brought in to provide a printed version to the comparatively few users who might want a book. What I had conceived as a minor side activity was threatening to destroy the core activity at which I had been working for more than a decade!
Some Comments about CRC Press LLC
As the shock wore off, Wolfram Research and my first instincts were to reason with CRC. We were certain, based on feedback from readers of the web site, that their assertions about it were unfounded, that in fact it was generating book sales for them, not suppressing sales.
But when we attempted to present these facts, we found that there was no one from CRC press even listening. During the course of these discussions, the heads of CRC's book publishing and electronic publishing divisions both left the company. We could not get anyone to listen to arguments actually focusing on the marketing of books. CRC responses were overwhelmingly legal and contractual. When facts entered at all, they were simply repeated assertions that we were certain would not stand up to reasonable scrutiny.
We wanted very much to negotiate a settlement that would allow us to bring the web site back. We proposed what we thought were attractive arrangements that would benefit both companies. Our proposals were ignored.
For months, I could not imagine why CRC was behaving as it was. Why would a technical publisher not listen to one of its best-selling authors, and to his employer, the world leader in mathematical computation? Why treat us, instead, in a way almost guaranteed to alienate us? It seemed insane!
I have had to conclude, to my sorrow, that CRC--perhaps like many other publishers in our era of wild corporate acquisitions and conglomerations--is no longer managed by people who understand and love books, authors, and readers.
The parent company of CRC, Information Holdings, Inc., appears unashamed to treat information as a commodity to be exploited for short-term bottom-line cash, with no concern for long-term strategic planning. The goal of the CRC representatives seemed to be monomaniacal: to squeeze from Wolfram Research and from me as much instant and short-term cash as possible, using the lawsuit as a lever.
How self-defeating in an era of rapid technological change! Apparently uninterested in looking forward, building good future business strategies, here are publishers focusing instead on how to squeeze greater quantities of immediate cash from old "properties."
I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders that appears so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders.
The behavior of CRC's representatives this last year has been, for me, convincing evidence of the wisdom of Wolfram Research's strategy. The people at my company believe in what they do, make money doing it, and have fun along the way. I didn't see much fun being had among the CRC people we dealt with.
Settling the Case
We eventually concluded that there was no real business discussion possible. CRC was simply incapable of listening to or evaluating an actual business proposal. So we weighed the costs of continued litigation against the costs of giving CRC some of the cash for which it appeared so hungry. The cash approach won.
In addition to its "instant win," CRC will be paid annually for books they don't sell, according to a formula that both sides have accepted--although we continue to believe that any past or future failure to achieve projected sales is far more plausibly attributed to CRC's abysmal marketing efforts than to any abuse of the web site by people who want to have and hold snapshots of its contents. But in this life we do what we have to do--and what we are willing to do.
There are a few other consequences of the settlement which are of interest to MathWorld readers. The first is that a copyright statement "© 1999 CRC Press LLC" (in addition of the © 1999-2001 Wolfram Research, Inc. notice) now appears at the bottom of MathWorld entries that have a corresponding article in CRC's printed shapshot. Despite the fact the I (or volunteer contributors) wrote these entries, that CRC Press did nothing to support their creation or the creation of the web site in which they appear, and the fact that they existed in the website long before they ever appeared in the printed version, the tail has truly come to wave this dog, and this copyright statement will henceforth be a constant reminder of this fact.
Another important change is that, as part of the settlement agreement, CRC Press will now be given permission to create editions of the printed book based on future snapshots of the website. As a result, CRC insisted that broad reproduction rights to all contributed material be secured. Furthermore, if we are not able to secure such rights, then Wolfram Research and I, at our own expense, must rewrite the entries in question from scratch for CRC to reproduce. This makes it extremely difficult for us to include any new contributed material on the website unless we first secure permissions using CRC's boilerplate permissions form. This form is endorsed by neither Wolfram Research nor myself, but as part of the settlement agreement, we are required to ask contributors to sign it. Since our goal is and always has been to provide your contributions on-line to the worldwide math community, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or imposition this CRC-mandated form may cause you.
Thanks
After a draining personal ordeal lasting more than a year and during which the site was unavailable to readers, MathWorld is now back. We've even taken the opportunity to add a new streamlined graphical design, and also added a new feature in which important breaking mathematical news will be announced and described. I hope this will be useful to readers of the web site as a means for keeping tabs on what is happening in the mathematical sciences. Please feel free to contribute new results to news@mathworld.wolfram.com so I can pass the word along to others!
Wolfram Research and I have been and remain steadfastly committed to supporting the development of MathWorld. Wolfram Research has committed considerable resources to defend MathWorld against the threat of being permanently removed from the internet--an outcome CRC Press has repeatedly told us would suit it just fine. I am personally grateful for the support of Wolfram Research, and for the fact that MathWorld will not be relegated to an electronic trashheap. If you want to show your appreciation of the stand Wolfram Research is taking, please visit what I can do to help web page.
Finally, I would like to extend my sincerest thanks for your patience and support over this past year. I invite your continued partnership in my efforts to expand and improve MathWorld, as well as to support other efforts to gather and present educational information free of charge over the internet. Let's continue to together spread the wonder and beauty that is mathematics!
Regards,
Eric W. Weisstein
Encyclopedist
Wolfram Research, Inc.
November 6, 2001
Champaign, Illinois
A second Bachelor's is a lot of work. It's easier (and it pays more) to go and get a Master's degree in another subject. With a Bachelor's in CS most Master degree programs would take you... you'd need to take a few extra background classes, but it's still less than the classes for another BS.
I've got to BS degrees and an MS. My MS got me my job... a second BS isn't worth much more than a minor in another subject.
how about this... a 'virtual machine' as cracker bait...
set up a cgi program that fakes being a vulnerable system just to see what sort of attacks you get... call it 'perl', 'sh', or something especially enticing... and set up a fake file system for the hacker to explore, fake log files for them to modify, etc
this would be kind of like writing a text adventure game. you could put several fake encrypted files that are just random strings of characters..
C3L = C3 of Launch... C3 is (2*(Kinetic_energy/mass))^2 (or if you know orbit mechanics V-Infinity^2)
TTIME = Transfer Time (days)... that is, how long it take to get to Mars
SEP = Sun-Earth-Probe angle... that is, the angle on the corner of the triangle made by Sun-Earth-Probe... when this angle is too small you can't get a signal from the probe because of the noise from the Sun
Ls --- I'm not sure on this one, it seems to be some sort of Launch angle
And even Microsoft's lawyers were in on the gig of making sure everyone knew about it.
..or does some "AS IS" clause in a license protect them... who ends up paying for the money stolen through the security hole?
Hey if someone's credit cards get stolen due to a security hole in passport and a whole bunch of money gets stolen... can Microsoft be sued by the person whose cards were stolen or by their bank or somebody?
What if MS knows about a security hole but they leave it running while the patch is being worked out, and my money gets stolen.. then are they liable?
It seems like Passport might open up MS to lots of litigation if some major heist happens..
Multinationals can leap from country to country and avoid whatever laws that they don't like. Sweatshops are a prime example. If Country A cracks down on me for the way I run factory X, I'll just pack up and move to country B. Hell, I can stay in country A even and just hide my factory. --The US dept. of Labor estimates that 70% of US apparel factories violate labor law... they just can't catch the factories before they move to a new site.
Effectively governments have no power to eliminate sweatshops. If they crack down they just burden legitimate operators with excess regulation and audits while the real culprits go deeper into hiding or just move to another country that either doesn't want to crack down or can't afford to crack down (inspectors cost a lot of money because you have to pay them enough so that they can't be bribed).
So do we just give up and throw our hands up in the air -- market forces will be market forces...
Just because governments cannot stop sweatshops doesn't mean they can't be stopped. We have to realize that the monoliths of government, globalism, and the Man are just figments of our imagination.... we need to think about how to solve the problem without inventing a beast called globalism and without turning to the white night of government.
The student anti-sweatshop movement has been very successful not by petitioning for more laws -- but by getting colleges to think about who they are licensing their logos too. Many colleges now make the companies who want to make their "Threepeat" shirt prove that they aren't using sweatshops. This give a competitive advantage to legitimate apparel manufacturers over the crooked ones. This tactic sets up market forces instead of armed forces to regulate the industry.
These are the sorts of tactics we need to employ to fight what is evil in globalism and promote what is good. We need to forget coersive regulation and focus on subtler market based tactics.
10-31-2001 Duuude, me and my buds have a great idea -- we took our machine and put it in a pumpkin -- we call it "Jack-O-Linux" get it? Linus would be proud!
11-04-2001 JOL (Jack-O-Linux) has begun to smell. I'm beginning to regret not putting in a fan as playing Quake tends to heat it up quite a bit and makes the rotting stench almost unbearable... should've used a Crusoe.
11-06-2001 JOL caught on fire today. I think a piece of rotting pumpkin flesh fell onto the sound card and caused a spark... I'm not really sure though, as I'm afraid to look inside the pumpkin.
11-07-2001 Fabreeze doesn't work on pumkins
11-09-2001 The JOL exploded today as I was browsing slashdot. Apparently the Methane inside the pumkin built up to critical levels. Now my room smells like an odd mixture of farts, pumpkin pie, ozone, and death. Funny thing though -- JOL still boots.
11-10-2001 Drinking with my buds tonight we came up with a great idea: B-E-O-W-O-L-F..
I know it's a basic question - but it seems to be at the heart of the Free-Crypto debate. Free speech should be free whether its in English, French, FORTRAN or Perl. What arguments do you hear against programming being protected as free speech? Can you use the First Amendment against DMCA, ITAR, etc?
Who would pay to cut a 30 hour flight to 1 hour.. hmmm...
Scramjets are great for going from one side of the planet to the other. The actual time out of the atmosphere would be pretty short.. most of the time will be spent getting out of the atmosphere and then landing.
The Concorde can't flight over land because of its shock wave. A scramjet would be out of the atmosphere so the shock wave would only be a problem during landing. I've heard the shuttle's sonic boom when landing at Edwards a couple of times when it flew over LA, and it's not very loud - most people don't even notice it.
- Why don't they launch rockets from under water using that submarine ICBM technology and leverage the floatation benefits for better performance?
Actually the Russians are converting old ICBMs to launch satellites, but they are doing this mostly for cost reasons... i.e., they have old ICBMs lying around and they'd like to use them.
The really cool use of floating rockets is in concepts like the SeaDragon where the rocket is so freakin' huge that it would melt the launch pad. So you build a rocket the size of an oil tanker and float it out to sea on its side, right it, and then light it off... This is how you get a rocket big enough to launch the space station in a single shot or to launch people to Mars.
The sad thing is that the Apollo era Saturn V is in many ways the most advanced rocket ever built.. and we lack the technology to build it again without a lot of research (Nixon recycled the plans and the components aren't made anymore anyway and would have to be re-invented).
Scramjets are cool and all, but I doubt if they will get us to Mars.. They WILL get us from London to Syndney damn fast. And they will be able to ferry people up to low Earth orbit where they could board another larger ship to go on to Mars.
I've driven through most of the country and I was disappointed by the uniformity of all the small towns I passed through. Each was just a slight variation on the theme of McDonalds + WalMart. The only thing different as you cross the US is to see what the local Grocery store chain is. The US is a huge country - but without the variety of other parts of the world the same size. Globalism will just mix all of the worlds cultures together until we get one big old bland McCulture of mass media and the lowest common denominator... At least that's my fear.
The elimination of the directory/file paradigm seems like a good one as well as the virtual machine... but I don't know about the HTML and XML for all human readable text... and what good is a 3D GUI?
Can anyone think of a good reason to have a 3D GUI? It seems like a waste of compute power.