I wish the article had spent a bit more time justifying the analogy, as you have done. The way it's written, it seems to conflate three things:
Writing a work-alike
Reverse engineering for compatability (e.g. file formats and netowork communication)
Reverse engineering functionality (actually attempting to determine specifically how functonality is implemented in the code)
Perhaps people with more experience in writing software can correct me, but it seems like these are three distinct, inequivolent things. From what I know Linux is an example of #1; Samba, Gaim, and Open Office are examples of #1 and #2. I guess what McVoy is claiming is that Tridge is doing #3, while Bruce seems to be claiming it's actually #2. It would seem Linus can only consistently object to #3. Can one draw a clear, unambiguous division?
Ubuntu is debian and uses apt. You'll be right back in dependency hell. Stick with gentoo, unless you're specifically looking for a binary distribution.
You know, I've used Ubuntu, Debian, and even Mandrake, which are all binary distros. Now and again, I hear people say something about "dependancy hell" (usually in an argument over package management systems). I get the idea (missing or conflicting dependancies), but I have to say that I've never encountered a significant problem in this area. I assume that most of this comes from people who remember the bad old days when package management was still immature. Perhaps times have changed, or perhaps it's only something you run into if you do a lot of developement work. Whatever the case, from my experience I'd guess it's a problem that doesn't apply to a majority of users anymore.
As for Gentoo: It's an interesting idea, but I doubt if I'll try it anytime soon. I was a little interested for a while, but overhearing (or reading) discussions between gentoo users frequently discussing many, seemingly complex problems with the latest emerge they've done on their system abated my interest. Talking to people about possibly installing gentoo and being told, "Oh well, you should configure settings X, Y, and Z manually, and if you don't know the ins and outs of it then you really should learn anyway" helped seal the deal. Gentoo seems like it could be really cool if you really want to dig into the internals of your system, but if you just want your computer to be a useful tool that doesn't absorb too much of your time...well, I'll stick with Ubuntu.
My experience is much the same. Win2k and WinXP have been very solid for me. During the time I've been using them, I have had two or three crashes per year at most. I've had about the same number from Linux on my desktop machine. (My Linux servers, on the other hand, have only gone down when I shut them down on purpose for a hardware upgrade.)
In short, the whole Windows-crashes-all-the-time argument is outdated.
Well, I think the truth is more that, whereas Windows 95 and 98 were almost universally unstable, Windows 2000 and XP can be fairly stable in some configurations. I had Windows 2000 Pro running for something like 2 years on my laptop, and it was quite stable (with the exception of if I played 3D shooters). Like you, I thought that Windows instability was largely a thing of the past. About a year ago, I had hard drive problems and had to reinstall. Since then, the system has been fairly unstable, and often halts for no decernable reason. This is on the same machine with the same hardware. I'm not sure what caused the instability, a new service pack, a slightly different set of applications, etc, etc. Talking to others who use Windows XP, I find wide variablity in the reported stability of their systems, from those that stay up for weeks to those that crash daily. My point is that I think that these days it's possible for a windows system to be stable, but they are still often unstable, and keeping your system stable is not necessarily simple.
So, I still think better stability is an advantage that Linux has over Windows. Many Windows systems are still unstable, whereas making a Linux system stable is almost always quite simple (unless there's a hardware problem in which case you're probably boned no matter which OS you're using). It is important to recognize, as you say, that not every Windows system is unstable. So, if you're trying to convince someone to try Linux, it makes sense to get an idea of what problems they have with their OS and what they want out of it, rather than telling them how Linux will solve problems they don't have.
I never figured out what made my reinstall of Windows unstable. By that time I had Linux installed on another partition, and I started using it as my primary desktop. I haven't looked back, and crashes are generally a non-issue. But the truth is that I didn't choose it for the stability. I chose it because I like using it.
I don't understand why you and people like you are treating this like a religious issue. The fervency of the rebuttals approaches fanaticism.
Funny, to me it looks like he provided a lot of relevent background that shows reasons why Gore's claim might be considered reasonable. Most of us call that reason, not fanaticism.
The point is that what you call the beginning of "The Internet" is a matter of semantics. Gore split hairs to make himself look good. You apparently want to split hairs to make him look foolish. Personally, I wouldn't agree with Gore's statement, but most of the discussion about it that has followed has been nonsense distortions. I'm glad people jump on the "Al Gore invented the internet" thing because there's no point in spreading that distortion or arguing over a claim that was never made.
I sort of agree with you, but I think Xbox is probably a bad example. Doesn't MS sell Xboxes at a loss, with the thought of gaining revenues back in game sales? This article says, "Microsoft loses about $70 on each Xbox it sells," but it's admittedly an older piece. If they really do sell units below cost, then people who buy them and then use them to, for example, run Linux instead are still screwing MS. The only thing they get out of the deal is inflated sales numbers, but they get no actual profit.
I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but if you talking about this/. article from a few weeks ago, then the answer is no. The summary for that article was misleading, and the news article it pointed to was vague, but the actual paper merely said the object they observed had certain mathematical similarities to a black hole. See this post for a brief explanation.
I don't know much technical detail about software packaging, either in Windows or Linux, so I can only speak based upon my experience. My experience has been that package management in Linux is much preferable to Windows. When I used Windows 2000, I would often install software that later could not be fully or completely uninstalled (broken uninstall), and often software that was installed would make undesirable and unauthorized changes to settings like file associations. I'm not talking about malware here, just legitimate software behaving badly.
Since I've been using Linux, I find that installing packages has predictable results without the unpleasent side effects I mentioned before, and I have yet to have any issues completely removing unneeded software. What's more, installation is generally simpler and more rapid, e.g. apt-get install foo. This was true using both apt-get and urpmi. I won't attempt to claim this is universal, I will only say that it's my experience.
I always throught that in windows the installer what a standalone program that could essentially do whatever it wanted, and uninstallation depended on the good graces of that software. I'm not sure that this is the case, but it seems to fit my experiences. That system always seemed backward to me, because I'd rather that a trusted program on my system perform installation tasks and keep track of them for later removal. This seems to be what happens in apt-get like systems, and it has led to much more desirable results in my case.
It contains a reasonable discussion of signal speed and an experimental test that demonstrates things very well. You should find more detailed theoretical discussions in the references.
Instantaneous wavefunction collapse doesn't cause paradoxes (as far as I am a aware), because the wavefunction itself is not observable. In other words, in order for there to be a true paradox we have to be able to show that one will be able to effect another observation in a region not allowed by causality (outside the lightcone). In quantum field theory (the relativistic treatment of quantum mechanics) you can show, at least for the dirac field (which descibes the electron), that a measurement at one point will not effect measurements at causally disconnected points. Hence, no causality paradox as far as I know.
In any case, none of that really has to do with these effects involving the speed of light. These have only to do with different definitions of the "speed of light" and figuring out which is meaningful. See some of the other responses to the parent for a discussion of this.
Thank you. Yours is one of the more useful comments I've seen on/. From the abstract on the arXiv, I think you're correct. The first sentance of the abstract says, "...he fireball observed at RHIC is (the analog of) a dual black hole." I'd say the words "analog of" are key.
It's also important in general to remember that things on the arXiv have not yet been peer reviewed. There's still a lot of good work there, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Even good, legitimate scientists make mistakes. It's very useful for experts who can look at the details with a skeptical eye, but maybe not as useful for laymen.
I don't know why most US banks haven't already started using two factor authentication. That would be a plus for me in choosing a bank. My guess is that they anticipate too many problems with lost keys and that either the losses from security breaches aren't higher than the anticipated cost or they can recover the losses through insurance, so there's no motivator. I'm not trying to say they shouldn't use two-factor authentication only pointing out that they've been ignoring the tools they already have.
I don't know about IE's authentication problems. It seems like Schneiener make a pursuasive argument that phishing could still be effective against two-factor authentication using man-in-the-middle attacks. So it seems we still need working authentication for the server before better authentication for the client (as is being discussed here) will be too helpful. It seems like authentication for the banks (in email and on the web) works fairly well, except that it isn't used correctly as I pointed out before.
It seems like there's a lot of technology out there already that could easily prevent a lot of phishing. The technology exists for digital signatures. If banks, ebay, paypal, etc, used digital signatures to authenticate their emails then that would make it more difficult to phish. If checking the signature was easy to do (and I don't know whether it is in normal windows apps), it seems this would be an easy way for people to distinguish legit messages from phishing ones. Yet, to my knowledge no company I get emails from uses this. Clearly, some users would still respond to unauthenticated emails, but at least this would give them a tool to differentiate.
In many cases banks and credit card companies seem to have practices that encourage unsafe bahvior. Witness my credit card company, which calls me up with some offer, and then when I say I'm interested they ask me for my account number. After a moment of silence, I tried to explain to the guy that he called me and I had no proof that he was actually with the credit card company (I was later satisfied that he was). Then there's the fact that my bank and some of my credit card issuers have websites with a login prompt on the front page, which is not a secure page. Now, when you hit the login button, it starts an SSL connect, but by that point you've already sent your login and password to an unauthenticated site. What really cracks me up is the little lock icon next to the box to tell you it's secure.
Perhaps it's a sign of the times. Maybe it's not that slashdot has moved from tech into law, but that law has moved increasingly into tech, something I think the majority of/. users would prefer were not the case.
Again, if you can't prove something true does not mean it is false. It may simply mean you don't have enough information. In the case of the recent election, no one could convincingly show (as far as I'm aware) that there was significant foul play in the election. This is similar to a criminal trial in which a criminal is found "not guilty". They don't say he's found "innocent", because they don't prove that; they only conclude they can't be sure he's guilty. In just the same way that many criminals who are actually guilty are found "not guilty", the election could have significant irregularities but there may not be enough evidence. We'd like to have an election process in the future that leaves us enough evidence to declare the process fair, rather than just being able to say we can't prove it's rigged.
I don't necessarily think the most recent elections were any less fair than an others in recent history, but the point is that if possible we should have an election process where that is clear for all to see, which is not the case today. In a democracy we must keep our government accountable, not take these matters on faith.
A statement may be true, but we may not be able to prove that it is true. Similarly, a statement may be false, but we may be unable to prove that it is false. This is true even in formal logic, but it's must more obviously true in everyday life, where we are always using inductive logic to may what are, in essense, educated guesses about things. There are many situation where one guess is as good as another, meaning we're unable to rule any out with reasonable confidence.
In many formal logical systems, a statement may be true but not possible to prove (see here for some discussion of the idea). In fact Goedel's Theorem is famous result in mathematical logic showing essentially that any sufficiently complex logical system is incomplete (has true statements that are not provable).
So, back to reality, the point people are making is that with "black box" voting, where there is not verifiable trail of voting, the vote tally may be incorrect, but there may be no way of proving that it's incorrect. Similarly, there may be no way of proving it's correct. What others are asserting is that we should require a voting system that is verifiable, where we can show that the person declared the winner actually is the winner. It does not seem we can do this with the current generation of touchscreen voting machines.
Remember, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
I have no real opinion on this one way or the other, but I'd say it would hardly be surprising if a general purpose dictionary gets a definition wrong in the context of a specialized field. The American Heritage dictionary is not written for CS, Physics, Biochemistry, or any other such specialized purpose and isn't really reliable for them. A more reasonable thing to do would be to look at some cannonical sources in the field and see how they use the word.
Then again, I'd also suggest that this argument about semantics is really pointless.
"[That Bush is a bad president is] An opinion of yours, one that I do not share."
I don't have any illusion that everyone agrees with this position. My point was that your claim that people only talk about this stuff because of a "my-gy-lost-so-bash-Bush" mentality is false (and rather silly). I don't think everyone who supports Bush does so out of mindless jingoism (which would be an equally silly idea), but as the study I pointed to shows, a lot of people who voted for him didn't know some very relivant facts. So yes, I think many (but not all) voted for him partially out of ignorance.
"...look at the evidence, which says that THERE WERE WMD IN IRAQ before we got there (He had them, and used them on the Kurds.)"
I haven't read the 2002 CIA report, but the following is from the 2004 CIA report:
"ISG has not found evidence that Saddam Husayn possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but the available evidence from its investigation--including detainee interviews and document exploitation--leaves open the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq although not of a militarily significant capability."
So there it is, it's possible, but there's no evidence. I would say that, as the report indicates, it seems doubtful but not impossible at this point that there were ever significant stockpiles of WMD in Iraq in the period immediately preceeding the war, but at that time the idea that Iraq had WMD was certainly plausible. Whether there were WMDs, though, is not really the point.
The reason many of us are angry with the Bush adminstration is that they presented claims about WMD as quite certain, when they were often based on extremely dubious evidence. They asked us to trust that the classified intelligence to back these claims was sound, and they betrayed that trust. One much discussed example of this was the case of the aluminum tubes, supposedly for use in refining uranium. It wasn't just that this turned out to be wrong but that it was widely known to be highly dubious in the intelligence community even before the claims were being made, as has been documented in many major news outlets, e.g. the Washington Post. Bush claims like, "Intelligence...leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," completely misrepresented the sketchy evidence. The "lie" was not saying that Saddam had WMD, it was the "sound" evidence that was known to be faulty and the claims that there was "no doubt". Even if there actually were WMD, these would not cease being falsehoods.
I put lie in quotes, because I haven't seen conclusive proof that Bush intended to deceive people. He made unjustified claims, falsehoods, to congress, the American people, and the soldiers who went over there (some never to return), whether he did so out of an intent to deceive (i.e. he lied) or out of incompetence is not clear, but either is unacceptable in a president. That's what I'm talkning about.
Again, this has very little to do with Kerry, his loss in the election, and what he may or may not have said (which I can't judge with no knowledge of details or context). What we are saying is that Bush has failed his country, a statement that has nothing to do with anyone but Bush and his administration.
We "bash" Bush because he is doing a bad job as a president. Unfortunately, a large portion of the populous is still ignorant of the facts, so he got reelected, but pointing out where the government goes wrong is still an important duty, not just during election time. This has nothing to do with "my guy lost"; this has to do with the fact that truth and liberty lost in the 2004 election.
Well, I think the more important thing is that people hire reformed crackers as security professionals. I think very few people would advocate hiring a black hat while he's still breaking into systems regularly. If this guy still works for Claria/Gator, then he's complicit in their ongoing invasion of privacy.
"Keep in mind that our understanding of gravity is that we have no clue what it is. However, our understanding of the effect of gravity has been working fine. The effect of gravity and gravity are two different things."
As far as a scientist is concerned, gravity is only an explanation of effects. Consider atoms: To a scientists, atoms "exist" insofar as the idea of atoms allows correct predictions about effects we observe in the physical world (from chemistry to the signal from a electron microscope). As you claim, the theory of gravity (currently General Relativity) allows us to make good predictions about the physical world, so a scientist can say "gravity exists". It doesn't make a lot of sense to treat it differently in that respect from the other fundemental forces.
Now, you may be addressing some metaphysical idea of existence, that is seperate from effects on the physical world. I just want to be clear that that is quite separate from the question of whether gravity exists in the scientific sense, to which the answer must be yes. Of course, the weird thing about the scientific notion of existence is that new data may show us that something actually does not have quite the properties we thought or that only something that approximates it actually exists. In the case of gravity, we know that there must be corrections to the way we understand it now in order to account for quantum effects, but the most reasonable way to view this is then to say that gravity exists, but we don't entirely understand the nature of it yet.
Electric charges and their motion are the sources of electric and magnetic fields. However, you can also have electromagnetic waves (radio waves, light, gamma rays, etc.), which are self-purpetuating in the absense of charges. These wave are produced when an electric charge accelerates and keep going far away from the charge that produced them.
Mass and energy* are the sources of gravitational fields, and, in fact, Newton's law (which is an approximate description of gravity in certain situations) looks mathematically a lot like Coulomb's law (which describes the electric field of a charge). As with E&M, when mass and energy move in certain ways# they emit gravitational waves. These waves travel far away from the mass that produced them and are self-sustaining, much like the EM waves. Graviational waves are not exactly analogous, though, because General Relativity is non-linear, meaning gravity can interact with itself, unlike classical electromagnetism. However, for weak waves traveling in a nearly flat background spacetime, the behavior is similar to E&M in many ways.
* Technically the source is the stress energy field, which includes mass and rest energy, but also momentum (and pressure in fluids).
# The "certain ways" are different for GR than for EM. In EM, at least the dipole moment must change to emit wave, while in GR the quadrapole moment of an object must change, meaning some sorts of motions that would produce EM waves produce no gravitational waves.
Your claim seems pretty reasonable, but I wonder is it possible to determine the codec that is being used for compression in the original Napster file? What if one then encoded the WAV using the same codec, could one get back a file of the same quality as the original? It seems like in principle if you encode with a lossy codec, decode, and then encode again (same codec, same settings) there shouldn't be any additional loss, but these things often don't work out like they "should" in principle, so does anyone know if this is the case, or with which codecs?
It's true that they were selling hot coffee and that hot coffee is known to be mildly dangerous, but in this case they had knowingly adopted procedures of holding the coffee at a temperature far higher than normal or reasonable, causing a danger far in excess of what one would normally expect from a cup of coffee. It's somewhat analogous to a restaurant serving you a plate that has been heated to 500 degrees in the oven and then saying, "be careful, it's hot." When you burned the hell out of yourself (expecting the plate to be, say, 120 degrees), I think you'd feel this was not responsible behavior. What's more, McDonalds had already been advised that this procedure was dangerous and ignored those warnings. The suit sounds unreasonable at first, but when you read up on the facts of the case, you realize it was just corporate negligence...or really even depraved indifference.
"I have yet to find, in the course of normal use, a single thing that fair use protects that iTunes' DRM doesn't allow. You might as well complain that CDs are inherently restrictive, because I can't listen to them on a record player."
Well, let's see if I can come up with a few off the top of my head...(and as I've said I don't use iTMS for a number of reasons, so correct me if I'm wrong)...well, how about playing music with the player software of your choice (perhaps something with a bit smaller footprint than iTunes) or listening to it on another computer you use that does not have iTunes (for example my Linux desktop). A lot of things can play AAC files if they aren't DRM'ed.
I'm not clear on the options for outputing uncompressed sound files from a iTMS music file. Is is possible to get an uncompressed sound file (.wav or similar) without burning a physical CD (or doing something very tricky using virtual CD drives, etc.)? Certainly one might want to do that in order to create mp3s to use on a non-iPod portable. One might also want to excerpt a small part of a music file (to use in artistic or scholarly work, consistent with fair use). Will the Fairplay DRM allow you to do this (by creating an uncompressed file or otherwise) using standard tools?
Now to address the analogy to a CD; it's true that a CD will not necessarily play on any sound player, but it will play on huge variety where technically possible. Your iTMS music, however, has been specifically hamstrung to only run on iTunes and the iPod, analogous to a CD that's been altered only to play on Sony CD players and made so that you can only copy it to certain other formats (in the case of iTunes, CDs but not mp3s). That seems unacceptable because those are perfectly legal, reasonable things to do with music I've payed for a copy of.
As I said before, what I gather is that the iTMS Fairplay DRM is comparatively quite permissive, but I wouldn't go in for is any more than I'd go in for the hypothetical CD I described above, given the choice. Now this hypothetical is already pretty much the case with DVDs, and I admit I use them, because there doesn't appear to be a viable, competitive alternative due to their market dominance. One day that might be the case with digital music as well, which, in my view, makes it all the more important that people not swallow DRM now, even the fairly permissive kind. In other words, I don't want to give the RIAA their Lebensraum.
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OOHHHhh, well when you put it that way...screw 'em. I am not shelling out for HDTV so that they can have more spectrum to play with.
I wish the article had spent a bit more time justifying the analogy, as you have done. The way it's written, it seems to conflate three things:
Perhaps people with more experience in writing software can correct me, but it seems like these are three distinct, inequivolent things. From what I know Linux is an example of #1; Samba, Gaim, and Open Office are examples of #1 and #2. I guess what McVoy is claiming is that Tridge is doing #3, while Bruce seems to be claiming it's actually #2. It would seem Linus can only consistently object to #3. Can one draw a clear, unambiguous division?
You know, I've used Ubuntu, Debian, and even Mandrake, which are all binary distros. Now and again, I hear people say something about "dependancy hell" (usually in an argument over package management systems). I get the idea (missing or conflicting dependancies), but I have to say that I've never encountered a significant problem in this area. I assume that most of this comes from people who remember the bad old days when package management was still immature. Perhaps times have changed, or perhaps it's only something you run into if you do a lot of developement work. Whatever the case, from my experience I'd guess it's a problem that doesn't apply to a majority of users anymore.
As for Gentoo: It's an interesting idea, but I doubt if I'll try it anytime soon. I was a little interested for a while, but overhearing (or reading) discussions between gentoo users frequently discussing many, seemingly complex problems with the latest emerge they've done on their system abated my interest. Talking to people about possibly installing gentoo and being told, "Oh well, you should configure settings X, Y, and Z manually, and if you don't know the ins and outs of it then you really should learn anyway" helped seal the deal. Gentoo seems like it could be really cool if you really want to dig into the internals of your system, but if you just want your computer to be a useful tool that doesn't absorb too much of your time...well, I'll stick with Ubuntu.
Well, I think the truth is more that, whereas Windows 95 and 98 were almost universally unstable, Windows 2000 and XP can be fairly stable in some configurations. I had Windows 2000 Pro running for something like 2 years on my laptop, and it was quite stable (with the exception of if I played 3D shooters). Like you, I thought that Windows instability was largely a thing of the past. About a year ago, I had hard drive problems and had to reinstall. Since then, the system has been fairly unstable, and often halts for no decernable reason. This is on the same machine with the same hardware. I'm not sure what caused the instability, a new service pack, a slightly different set of applications, etc, etc. Talking to others who use Windows XP, I find wide variablity in the reported stability of their systems, from those that stay up for weeks to those that crash daily. My point is that I think that these days it's possible for a windows system to be stable, but they are still often unstable, and keeping your system stable is not necessarily simple.
So, I still think better stability is an advantage that Linux has over Windows. Many Windows systems are still unstable, whereas making a Linux system stable is almost always quite simple (unless there's a hardware problem in which case you're probably boned no matter which OS you're using). It is important to recognize, as you say, that not every Windows system is unstable. So, if you're trying to convince someone to try Linux, it makes sense to get an idea of what problems they have with their OS and what they want out of it, rather than telling them how Linux will solve problems they don't have.
I never figured out what made my reinstall of Windows unstable. By that time I had Linux installed on another partition, and I started using it as my primary desktop. I haven't looked back, and crashes are generally a non-issue. But the truth is that I didn't choose it for the stability. I chose it because I like using it.
Funny, to me it looks like he provided a lot of relevent background that shows reasons why Gore's claim might be considered reasonable. Most of us call that reason, not fanaticism.
The point is that what you call the beginning of "The Internet" is a matter of semantics. Gore split hairs to make himself look good. You apparently want to split hairs to make him look foolish. Personally, I wouldn't agree with Gore's statement, but most of the discussion about it that has followed has been nonsense distortions. I'm glad people jump on the "Al Gore invented the internet" thing because there's no point in spreading that distortion or arguing over a claim that was never made.
I sort of agree with you, but I think Xbox is probably a bad example. Doesn't MS sell Xboxes at a loss, with the thought of gaining revenues back in game sales? This article says, "Microsoft loses about $70 on each Xbox it sells," but it's admittedly an older piece. If they really do sell units below cost, then people who buy them and then use them to, for example, run Linux instead are still screwing MS. The only thing they get out of the deal is inflated sales numbers, but they get no actual profit.
I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but if you talking about this /. article from a few weeks ago, then the answer is no. The summary for that article was misleading, and the news article it pointed to was vague, but the actual paper merely said the object they observed had certain mathematical similarities to a black hole. See this post for a brief explanation.
I don't know much technical detail about software packaging, either in Windows or Linux, so I can only speak based upon my experience. My experience has been that package management in Linux is much preferable to Windows. When I used Windows 2000, I would often install software that later could not be fully or completely uninstalled (broken uninstall), and often software that was installed would make undesirable and unauthorized changes to settings like file associations. I'm not talking about malware here, just legitimate software behaving badly.
Since I've been using Linux, I find that installing packages has predictable results without the unpleasent side effects I mentioned before, and I have yet to have any issues completely removing unneeded software. What's more, installation is generally simpler and more rapid, e.g. apt-get install foo. This was true using both apt-get and urpmi. I won't attempt to claim this is universal, I will only say that it's my experience.
I always throught that in windows the installer what a standalone program that could essentially do whatever it wanted, and uninstallation depended on the good graces of that software. I'm not sure that this is the case, but it seems to fit my experiences. That system always seemed backward to me, because I'd rather that a trusted program on my system perform installation tasks and keep track of them for later removal. This seems to be what happens in apt-get like systems, and it has led to much more desirable results in my case.
Check out
Brunner, Scarani, Wegmueller, Legre, and Gisin, Phys. Rev. Lett., 93, 203902 (2004).
It contains a reasonable discussion of signal speed and an experimental test that demonstrates things very well. You should find more detailed theoretical discussions in the references.
Instantaneous wavefunction collapse doesn't cause paradoxes (as far as I am a aware), because the wavefunction itself is not observable. In other words, in order for there to be a true paradox we have to be able to show that one will be able to effect another observation in a region not allowed by causality (outside the lightcone). In quantum field theory (the relativistic treatment of quantum mechanics) you can show, at least for the dirac field (which descibes the electron), that a measurement at one point will not effect measurements at causally disconnected points. Hence, no causality paradox as far as I know.
In any case, none of that really has to do with these effects involving the speed of light. These have only to do with different definitions of the "speed of light" and figuring out which is meaningful. See some of the other responses to the parent for a discussion of this.
Thank you. Yours is one of the more useful comments I've seen on /. From the abstract on the arXiv, I think you're correct. The first sentance of the abstract says, "...he fireball observed at RHIC is (the analog of) a dual black hole." I'd say the words "analog of" are key.
It's also important in general to remember that things on the arXiv have not yet been peer reviewed. There's still a lot of good work there, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Even good, legitimate scientists make mistakes. It's very useful for experts who can look at the details with a skeptical eye, but maybe not as useful for laymen.
I don't know why most US banks haven't already started using two factor authentication. That would be a plus for me in choosing a bank. My guess is that they anticipate too many problems with lost keys and that either the losses from security breaches aren't higher than the anticipated cost or they can recover the losses through insurance, so there's no motivator. I'm not trying to say they shouldn't use two-factor authentication only pointing out that they've been ignoring the tools they already have.
I don't know about IE's authentication problems. It seems like Schneiener make a pursuasive argument that phishing could still be effective against two-factor authentication using man-in-the-middle attacks. So it seems we still need working authentication for the server before better authentication for the client (as is being discussed here) will be too helpful. It seems like authentication for the banks (in email and on the web) works fairly well, except that it isn't used correctly as I pointed out before.
It seems like there's a lot of technology out there already that could easily prevent a lot of phishing. The technology exists for digital signatures. If banks, ebay, paypal, etc, used digital signatures to authenticate their emails then that would make it more difficult to phish. If checking the signature was easy to do (and I don't know whether it is in normal windows apps), it seems this would be an easy way for people to distinguish legit messages from phishing ones. Yet, to my knowledge no company I get emails from uses this. Clearly, some users would still respond to unauthenticated emails, but at least this would give them a tool to differentiate.
In many cases banks and credit card companies seem to have practices that encourage unsafe bahvior. Witness my credit card company, which calls me up with some offer, and then when I say I'm interested they ask me for my account number. After a moment of silence, I tried to explain to the guy that he called me and I had no proof that he was actually with the credit card company (I was later satisfied that he was). Then there's the fact that my bank and some of my credit card issuers have websites with a login prompt on the front page, which is not a secure page. Now, when you hit the login button, it starts an SSL connect, but by that point you've already sent your login and password to an unauthenticated site. What really cracks me up is the little lock icon next to the box to tell you it's secure.
Perhaps it's a sign of the times. Maybe it's not that slashdot has moved from tech into law, but that law has moved increasingly into tech, something I think the majority of /. users would prefer were not the case.
Again, if you can't prove something true does not mean it is false. It may simply mean you don't have enough information. In the case of the recent election, no one could convincingly show (as far as I'm aware) that there was significant foul play in the election. This is similar to a criminal trial in which a criminal is found "not guilty". They don't say he's found "innocent", because they don't prove that; they only conclude they can't be sure he's guilty. In just the same way that many criminals who are actually guilty are found "not guilty", the election could have significant irregularities but there may not be enough evidence. We'd like to have an election process in the future that leaves us enough evidence to declare the process fair, rather than just being able to say we can't prove it's rigged.
I don't necessarily think the most recent elections were any less fair than an others in recent history, but the point is that if possible we should have an election process where that is clear for all to see, which is not the case today. In a democracy we must keep our government accountable, not take these matters on faith.
A statement may be true, but we may not be able to prove that it is true. Similarly, a statement may be false, but we may be unable to prove that it is false. This is true even in formal logic, but it's must more obviously true in everyday life, where we are always using inductive logic to may what are, in essense, educated guesses about things. There are many situation where one guess is as good as another, meaning we're unable to rule any out with reasonable confidence.
In many formal logical systems, a statement may be true but not possible to prove (see here for some discussion of the idea). In fact Goedel's Theorem is famous result in mathematical logic showing essentially that any sufficiently complex logical system is incomplete (has true statements that are not provable).
So, back to reality, the point people are making is that with "black box" voting, where there is not verifiable trail of voting, the vote tally may be incorrect, but there may be no way of proving that it's incorrect. Similarly, there may be no way of proving it's correct. What others are asserting is that we should require a voting system that is verifiable, where we can show that the person declared the winner actually is the winner. It does not seem we can do this with the current generation of touchscreen voting machines.
Remember, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
I have no real opinion on this one way or the other, but I'd say it would hardly be surprising if a general purpose dictionary gets a definition wrong in the context of a specialized field. The American Heritage dictionary is not written for CS, Physics, Biochemistry, or any other such specialized purpose and isn't really reliable for them. A more reasonable thing to do would be to look at some cannonical sources in the field and see how they use the word.
Then again, I'd also suggest that this argument about semantics is really pointless.
I don't have any illusion that everyone agrees with this position. My point was that your claim that people only talk about this stuff because of a "my-gy-lost-so-bash-Bush" mentality is false (and rather silly). I don't think everyone who supports Bush does so out of mindless jingoism (which would be an equally silly idea), but as the study I pointed to shows, a lot of people who voted for him didn't know some very relivant facts. So yes, I think many (but not all) voted for him partially out of ignorance.
I haven't read the 2002 CIA report, but the following is from the 2004 CIA report:
So there it is, it's possible, but there's no evidence. I would say that, as the report indicates, it seems doubtful but not impossible at this point that there were ever significant stockpiles of WMD in Iraq in the period immediately preceeding the war, but at that time the idea that Iraq had WMD was certainly plausible. Whether there were WMDs, though, is not really the point.
The reason many of us are angry with the Bush adminstration is that they presented claims about WMD as quite certain, when they were often based on extremely dubious evidence. They asked us to trust that the classified intelligence to back these claims was sound, and they betrayed that trust. One much discussed example of this was the case of the aluminum tubes, supposedly for use in refining uranium. It wasn't just that this turned out to be wrong but that it was widely known to be highly dubious in the intelligence community even before the claims were being made, as has been documented in many major news outlets, e.g. the Washington Post. Bush claims like, "Intelligence...leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," completely misrepresented the sketchy evidence. The "lie" was not saying that Saddam had WMD, it was the "sound" evidence that was known to be faulty and the claims that there was "no doubt". Even if there actually were WMD, these would not cease being falsehoods.
I put lie in quotes, because I haven't seen conclusive proof that Bush intended to deceive people. He made unjustified claims, falsehoods, to congress, the American people, and the soldiers who went over there (some never to return), whether he did so out of an intent to deceive (i.e. he lied) or out of incompetence is not clear, but either is unacceptable in a president. That's what I'm talkning about.
Again, this has very little to do with Kerry, his loss in the election, and what he may or may not have said (which I can't judge with no knowledge of details or context). What we are saying is that Bush has failed his country, a statement that has nothing to do with anyone but Bush and his administration.
We "bash" Bush because he is doing a bad job as a president. Unfortunately, a large portion of the populous is still ignorant of the facts, so he got reelected, but pointing out where the government goes wrong is still an important duty, not just during election time. This has nothing to do with "my guy lost"; this has to do with the fact that truth and liberty lost in the 2004 election.
Here's hoping they make a come back.
Well, I think the more important thing is that people hire reformed crackers as security professionals. I think very few people would advocate hiring a black hat while he's still breaking into systems regularly. If this guy still works for Claria/Gator, then he's complicit in their ongoing invasion of privacy.
As far as a scientist is concerned, gravity is only an explanation of effects. Consider atoms: To a scientists, atoms "exist" insofar as the idea of atoms allows correct predictions about effects we observe in the physical world (from chemistry to the signal from a electron microscope). As you claim, the theory of gravity (currently General Relativity) allows us to make good predictions about the physical world, so a scientist can say "gravity exists". It doesn't make a lot of sense to treat it differently in that respect from the other fundemental forces.
Now, you may be addressing some metaphysical idea of existence, that is seperate from effects on the physical world. I just want to be clear that that is quite separate from the question of whether gravity exists in the scientific sense, to which the answer must be yes. Of course, the weird thing about the scientific notion of existence is that new data may show us that something actually does not have quite the properties we thought or that only something that approximates it actually exists. In the case of gravity, we know that there must be corrections to the way we understand it now in order to account for quantum effects, but the most reasonable way to view this is then to say that gravity exists, but we don't entirely understand the nature of it yet.
Electric charges and their motion are the sources of electric and magnetic fields. However, you can also have electromagnetic waves (radio waves, light, gamma rays, etc.), which are self-purpetuating in the absense of charges. These wave are produced when an electric charge accelerates and keep going far away from the charge that produced them.
Mass and energy* are the sources of gravitational fields, and, in fact, Newton's law (which is an approximate description of gravity in certain situations) looks mathematically a lot like Coulomb's law (which describes the electric field of a charge). As with E&M, when mass and energy move in certain ways# they emit gravitational waves. These waves travel far away from the mass that produced them and are self-sustaining, much like the EM waves. Graviational waves are not exactly analogous, though, because General Relativity is non-linear, meaning gravity can interact with itself, unlike classical electromagnetism. However, for weak waves traveling in a nearly flat background spacetime, the behavior is similar to E&M in many ways.
Your claim seems pretty reasonable, but I wonder is it possible to determine the codec that is being used for compression in the original Napster file? What if one then encoded the WAV using the same codec, could one get back a file of the same quality as the original? It seems like in principle if you encode with a lossy codec, decode, and then encode again (same codec, same settings) there shouldn't be any additional loss, but these things often don't work out like they "should" in principle, so does anyone know if this is the case, or with which codecs?
It's true that they were selling hot coffee and that hot coffee is known to be mildly dangerous, but in this case they had knowingly adopted procedures of holding the coffee at a temperature far higher than normal or reasonable, causing a danger far in excess of what one would normally expect from a cup of coffee. It's somewhat analogous to a restaurant serving you a plate that has been heated to 500 degrees in the oven and then saying, "be careful, it's hot." When you burned the hell out of yourself (expecting the plate to be, say, 120 degrees), I think you'd feel this was not responsible behavior. What's more, McDonalds had already been advised that this procedure was dangerous and ignored those warnings. The suit sounds unreasonable at first, but when you read up on the facts of the case, you realize it was just corporate negligence...or really even depraved indifference.
See this link for more detail.
Greetings fellow noder. ;-)
Well, let's see if I can come up with a few off the top of my head...(and as I've said I don't use iTMS for a number of reasons, so correct me if I'm wrong)...well, how about playing music with the player software of your choice (perhaps something with a bit smaller footprint than iTunes) or listening to it on another computer you use that does not have iTunes (for example my Linux desktop). A lot of things can play AAC files if they aren't DRM'ed.
I'm not clear on the options for outputing uncompressed sound files from a iTMS music file. Is is possible to get an uncompressed sound file (.wav or similar) without burning a physical CD (or doing something very tricky using virtual CD drives, etc.)? Certainly one might want to do that in order to create mp3s to use on a non-iPod portable. One might also want to excerpt a small part of a music file (to use in artistic or scholarly work, consistent with fair use). Will the Fairplay DRM allow you to do this (by creating an uncompressed file or otherwise) using standard tools?
Now to address the analogy to a CD; it's true that a CD will not necessarily play on any sound player, but it will play on huge variety where technically possible. Your iTMS music, however, has been specifically hamstrung to only run on iTunes and the iPod, analogous to a CD that's been altered only to play on Sony CD players and made so that you can only copy it to certain other formats (in the case of iTunes, CDs but not mp3s). That seems unacceptable because those are perfectly legal, reasonable things to do with music I've payed for a copy of.
As I said before, what I gather is that the iTMS Fairplay DRM is comparatively quite permissive, but I wouldn't go in for is any more than I'd go in for the hypothetical CD I described above, given the choice. Now this hypothetical is already pretty much the case with DVDs, and I admit I use them, because there doesn't appear to be a viable, competitive alternative due to their market dominance. One day that might be the case with digital music as well, which, in my view, makes it all the more important that people not swallow DRM now, even the fairly permissive kind. In other words, I don't want to give the RIAA their Lebensraum.
Hmm...now I know a node that needs improvement.