A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
Note however the valid criticism of the essay (see the wikipedia entry).
And personally, I want artists and engineers thanks. I prefer my engines to be beautiful---most especially my engines of mass destruction:)
It's a valid point. Death is a great, scary taboo. So we avert our eyes and say he "passed away", or even "passed".
Fred Pohl has died. Mincing words does not help. My sadness at this is not helped by such euphemisms. In fact, like the AC OP, I, personally, find "passed away" slightly offensive---and "passed" more so.
So, let's accept that Fred has died. Let's rejoice in the life he led, the books he wrote, the pleasure he gave to so many. Let's celebrate him living a ling life, and being productive to the very end.
I read his latest blog post, and then, the next day. saw he'd died. Way to go!
That doesn't sound like Gandhi to me, not the man who said:
I believe that all life is one. Thoughts take definite forms. Tigers and snakes have kinship with us. They are a warning to us to avoid harbouring evil, wicked, lustful thoughts. If I want to rid the earth of venomous beasts and reptiles, I must rid myself of all venomous thoughts. I shall not do so if, in my impatient ignorance and in my desire to prolong the existence of the body, I seek to kill the so-called venomous beasts and reptiles. If in not seeking to defend myself against such noxious animals I die, I should rise again a better and fuller man. With that faith in me, how should I seek to kill a fellow-being in a snake?
As for civil disobedience against the Nazis:
In a post-war interview in 1946, he said, "Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."
On top of that, Hamlet is stolen from the old Danish story of Amleth. Which is a lot more violent:)
There's always Titus Andronicus if that's what you like.
A scottish schoolmaster called Adam McNaughtan took on the challenge of summarizing the whole play in one song. If you need a translation from Scots to English, then you might prefer Martin Carthy's version.
I love the bit towards the end. "Fortinbras, knee-deep in Danes, lived happily ever after."
there was never enough data to confirm or deny the theory
I remember watching a documentary about about B&W striped wet suits where the guy got a whole lot of reef sharks into a feeding frenzy and then just jumped in with them, sure enough the sharks scattered out of sight. However they were common reef sharks that are pretty much harmless, I've yet to see it tested with great whites.
Do I detect a new game show here? "Survivor: Great White".
everyone knows its going to let you shoot and kill people and monsters with lots of blood and gore in HD
the TV part is going to sell it to the wife and the ESPN features are the knife in sony's back
Is it going to be quiet, or sound like an unmuffled hovercraft like the original XBOX 360?
If you have the volume turned up to 11 for FPS then the loudness of the console is not so much of an issue, but as an STB replacement, it needs to be silent.
Once again, prison is to isolate dangerous people from the rest of society, not for harmless fraudsters.
harmless fraudsters?
In Dante's Inferno, Fraud is the 2nd most serious sin:
Circle 1: Limbo
Circle 2: Lust
Circle 3: Gluttony
Circle 4: Greed
Circle 5: Anger
Circle 6: Heresy
Circle 7: Violence
Circle 8: Fraud
Circle 9: Treachery
It's worthwhile considering why he thought that way. Who does more harm to society: a mugger or a corrupt banker? How many people do you know who have been mugged? How many people do you know who have been hurt by corruption?
Fiber optic is pretty fragile - far more so than a copper cable. Can't bend it past a certain radius, much less kink it.
Most copper data cables, including UTP, STP and co-ax react very poorly to sharp bends or kinking. If you take a Cat5 cable and kink it or stretch it, it's not going to work any more, at least not at Gbps rates.
Optical's main benefit is distance, not speed...
TOSlink and all that jazz worked because you connect stuff and that's it- the cable rarely gets disturbed. Think of your average business traveler - they'd go through optical cables like candy.
Good point, though I think the problem would more likely be the connector than the cable. Optical does not cope well with dust, grime etc.
This 100w power standard is pretty stupid, though. We're talking power levels where fires will definitely be possible from damaged USB cables.
Unless (and I have no idea if such is being implemented) a smart, bidirectional power protocol is in place that monitors the power sent vs the power received and shuts it down if there is a discrepancy---sort of like a super RCD.
So which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of aerogel?
Who cares, my question is how did you fit an entire pound of aerogel in that room?
A pound of lead. No, really, unless you are weighing in a vacuum.
Think of weighing a pound of lead and a pound of wood underwater. The lower density of the wood and the weight of the water displaced makes for the difference. The same holds for air, but for most substances the difference is undetectable. However, lead vs aerogel is easily detectable. By my rough calculations, at room temperature, 1lb of lead weighs 0.99989418lb allowing for air displacement and 1lb of aerogel (at 1.9kg/m^3) weighs 0.368421053lb (and occupies 0.238732632m^3, so it'll fit in the room quite easily)
(Of course, to be ultra pedantic, I'm assuming you mean pound mass rather than pound force here)
Well, since the purpose of a name is to interact with other people, it is more accurate to say that your name is what other people call you. If 'Bud' is what everybody calls you every day in 'real life', then that is you real name.
It's quite normal to have multiple names: one of my relatives was called by one name by half the family and another name by the other half. Was one of those names not her 'real' name?
If I am known by a nym in a community---a community that I interact with only using that name, then that is my name----in that community.
The question -- as it always is -- is: What is the operating temperature range for this material?
They don't say. The most we know from the article is
its effective operating temperature is higher than that of conventional superconducting materials such as niobium, lead or mercury.
which means higher than 9.3K (Nb critical temperature).
The article also says:
Currently, even unconventional high-temperature superconductors operate below -369 degrees Fahrenheit.
or about 50K. Still below the magic 77K of liquid Nitrogen at which point things become economically interesting---and I can't see any statement in the article that the substance is even as good as, never mind better than 50K, although there is an implication that it is.
All in all, the article says remarkably little, at some length.
Javascript is not too bad, but I suspect that it won't help in this case because the problem is not merely the language but the mind-rottingly horrible object model.
If you can keep it to rslt = function(cell1, cell2, cell3) then it's OK, but in practice it seems to involve rslt = use.of.some.object.you.didnt.expect where goat.sacrifice(was.successful) [but.I.lied.to.you]
Bagpipes were given by the Irish to the Scots---who haven't gotten the joke yet.
I'd suggest taking up the Bodhran. Don't worry too much about learning to play it---most people can't, so that doesn't matter, and if anyone gives you grief just explain that you made it yourself and that the skin is wearing out, which should ensure isolation.
So, they do understand that means the Chinese government can install rootkits on their servers, because they bought kit with chips made in China, and packets passing through them need to be investigated to ensure there are no dissidents using them, in violation of Chinese law (that would be the contravention of the laws of a foreign state mentioned)?
This seems to be only about "work produced for the school", meaning papers for class, lesson plans and the like. It doesn't seem as though they plan to lay claim to your Great American Novel (TM) if you plan on writing one while enrolled or employed there.
For the pupils at least, that claim also likely has no standing, notwithstanding any delusional beliefs to the contrary of the board.
All contracts require some consideration from all parties to the contract. Consideration, in the contract sense, means a bargained-for performance or promise. Restatement (Second) of Contracts 71(1). Basically, this is something of value given or promised as part of the agreement. This can be anything that the parties agree is valuable; the classic example is a single peppercorn. Whitney v. Stearns, 16 Me. 394, 397 (1839).
That means, the school has to explicitly give the pupils something in exchange for their copyright. 'Teaching' can't be it, since they are obliged to do that anyway.
people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.
While MAFIAA may be incredibly stupid, don't think their finance people are as stupid. It's not hard for them to figure out if it's not worth the money.
Apparently, it is.
If they thought about it, it's obvious that this isn't going to recover money. As the thread title says, it's about heads on pikes. The aim is to scare people into not downloading.
Of course, even that is not really the aim. The argument actually goes like:
1. We used to make lots of money
2. We don't make as much as we used to (actually, we don't think we are making as much money as we think we should be)
3. The kids are downloading it and not paying us
4. Let's count every download as a lost sale...There!that's where our money went
4. If we can stop downloading, people will buy the music instead
5. We can afford to spend a few megabucks if it stops piracy
6. PROFIT
It's further complicated by a sense of moral outrage from point 3. They are CRIMINALS. It is our DUTY to PUNISH them.
And then they sign off on their advertising budgets and promotions and schmoozing and expense accounts, because that's just a legitimate and accepted cost of doing business. Sure, it'd be nice to cut those costs, but "spend a dollar, get two back" is good financial math.
So, the finance guys accept the cost, because of points 5 and 6.
They won't, they can't think of downloading as a legitimate business expense, despite strong indications that downloaders spend MORE money on purchases. They refuse to consider that, maybe, their business model is broken.
The music industry does not want to think of themselves as being like Polaroid, or Kodak, or Atari, or Nokia.
Their finance people may be smart and competent, but right now that equates to an optimal deck-chair rearrangement, whereas what's needed is a course change away from the iceberg.
You've got a contradiction in your logic there. The "NPE" is also known as an inventor. The patent system was created to separate the roles of invention from the roles of production.
To be pedantic, the patent system was created to encourage the production of more useful stuff. As I said, it's the production bit that's important, otherwise there is no point. A patent for an invention that is never produced is, by definition, useless. So a patent that prevents a useful thing being produced is worse than useless.
A consequence of the patent system was that it tended to encourage (but did not enforce) a separation between invention and production, but that was not the intent.
The troll, or NPE, has already done their part by creating the invention and gets paid for it via licensing fees, as intended. Even if the invention is sold by the original inventor to another NPE, the patent system still served the function for providing a market for inventions.
Now personally I hate all the bad patents floating around, and seriously question if the patent system isn't doing more harm than good anyways, even if only "good" patents were allowed, but the "troll" patent owner, as defined, is what patents are essentially there for.
Yes, markets are often a good thing. However, back to trolls. In practice trolls don't actually produce anything. A NPE doesn't seek to make the invention. The troll doesn't seek to sell the invention to someone to have it made. The troll waits under its bridge until someone tries to to make something useful and then slithers out and demands protection money.
We can look at that and decide that trolls are bad, but as you say, they are just a consequence of the rules we made. We can try to create anti-troll regulations—which just evolves smarter, tougher trolls—or we can go back to first principles and try a different way.
If you wield a bad patent you're a patent troll be you some little company with no assets or the latest do no wrong tech firm, if you use a good patent you're not.
...
I think the term Patent Troll is more exactly defined than that, and divorced from the subjective judgment of "Good" or "Bad" patent. A Patent Troll is a non-practicing entity (NPE). The sole aim of a patent is to encourage the creation of new inventions. The mechanism to do that involves remuneration, but that's not the aim. A NPE doesn't produce anything, so it doesn't encourage the creation of new inventions. It sure encourages the creation of new patents, but is doesn't encourage the creation of new 'things'.
You might argue over the goodness/badness of Amazon's 1-click patent, but Amazon at least provides a useful service using the process for which they hold a patent and isn't, in my opinion, a patent troll.
Patents, like copyrights and all sorts of other intellectual property, are a necessary evil, they always have downsides, but they're supposed to have upsides.When they don't, the holder is a troll.
I disagree with you only over the term 'troll'. Otherwise, you've got to the nub. Patents and copyright exist only to benefit society. "We, the people" created them solely to benefit us. If the economic burden of the current copyright and patent system outweighs its economic benefit—which numerous studies have indicated is so—we need to uncreate them
That may seem naive, but OTOH, simply nuking software and business patents would go a huge way to fixing this, and that does seem to be the worldwide trend.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean if they do this sometime they are going to recreate something NASTY.
Do we really want to have something that you would need to hunt using an AA12 or M60??
No, I want something you need to hunt with a Challenger 2 because anything less is suicidal.
C'mon, are you up for a real challenge?
(Why, yes, I may have been watching too many sf movies.)
Note however the valid criticism of the essay (see the wikipedia entry).
And personally, I want artists and engineers thanks. I prefer my engines to be beautiful---most especially my engines of mass destruction :)
It's a valid point. Death is a great, scary taboo. So we avert our eyes and say he "passed away", or even "passed".
Fred Pohl has died. Mincing words does not help. My sadness at this is not helped by such euphemisms. In fact, like the AC OP, I, personally, find "passed away" slightly offensive---and "passed" more so.
So, let's accept that Fred has died. Let's rejoice in the life he led, the books he wrote, the pleasure he gave to so many. Let's celebrate him living a ling life, and being productive to the very end.
I read his latest blog post, and then, the next day. saw he'd died. Way to go!
As for civil disobedience against the Nazis:
On top of that, Hamlet is stolen from the old Danish story of Amleth. Which is a lot more violent :)
There's always Titus Andronicus if that's what you like.
A scottish schoolmaster called Adam McNaughtan took on the challenge of summarizing the whole play in one song. If you need a translation from Scots to English, then you might prefer Martin Carthy's version.
I love the bit towards the end. "Fortinbras, knee-deep in Danes, lived happily ever after."
I'm fairly certain that I can out run a shark, they damn animal doesn't even have legs!
this one did
Note that of this list of the 10 most dangerous animals in Australia, five are marine.
there was never enough data to confirm or deny the theory
I remember watching a documentary about about B&W striped wet suits where the guy got a whole lot of reef sharks into a feeding frenzy and then just jumped in with them, sure enough the sharks scattered out of sight. However they were common reef sharks that are pretty much harmless, I've yet to see it tested with great whites.
Do I detect a new game show here? "Survivor: Great White".
I take it OP is an astrophysicist, and anything quicker than stellar evolution is "very soon".
everyone knows its going to let you shoot and kill people and monsters with lots of blood and gore in HD
the TV part is going to sell it to the wife and the ESPN features are the knife in sony's back
Is it going to be quiet, or sound like an unmuffled hovercraft like the original XBOX 360?
If you have the volume turned up to 11 for FPS then the loudness of the console is not so much of an issue, but as an STB replacement, it needs to be silent.
Once again, prison is to isolate dangerous people from the rest of society, not for harmless fraudsters.
harmless fraudsters?
In Dante's Inferno, Fraud is the 2nd most serious sin:
It's worthwhile considering why he thought that way. Who does more harm to society: a mugger or a corrupt banker? How many people do you know who have been mugged? How many people do you know who have been hurt by corruption?
the company is being forcibly wound up and the directors are facing further action.
Fiber optic is pretty fragile - far more so than a copper cable. Can't bend it past a certain radius, much less kink it.
Most copper data cables, including UTP, STP and co-ax react very poorly to sharp bends or kinking. If you take a Cat5 cable and kink it or stretch it, it's not going to work any more, at least not at Gbps rates.
Optical's main benefit is distance, not speed...
TOSlink and all that jazz worked because you connect stuff and that's it- the cable rarely gets disturbed. Think of your average business traveler - they'd go through optical cables like candy.
Good point, though I think the problem would more likely be the connector than the cable. Optical does not cope well with dust, grime etc.
This 100w power standard is pretty stupid, though. We're talking power levels where fires will definitely be possible from damaged USB cables.
Unless (and I have no idea if such is being implemented) a smart, bidirectional power protocol is in place that monitors the power sent vs the power received and shuts it down if there is a discrepancy---sort of like a super RCD.
So which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of aerogel? Who cares, my question is how did you fit an entire pound of aerogel in that room?
A pound of lead. No, really, unless you are weighing in a vacuum.
Think of weighing a pound of lead and a pound of wood underwater. The lower density of the wood and the weight of the water displaced makes for the difference. The same holds for air, but for most substances the difference is undetectable. However, lead vs aerogel is easily detectable. By my rough calculations, at room temperature, 1lb of lead weighs 0.99989418lb allowing for air displacement and 1lb of aerogel (at 1.9kg/m^3) weighs 0.368421053lb (and occupies 0.238732632m^3, so it'll fit in the room quite easily)
(Of course, to be ultra pedantic, I'm assuming you mean pound mass rather than pound force here)
Well, since the purpose of a name is to interact with other people, it is more accurate to say that your name is what other people call you. If 'Bud' is what everybody calls you every day in 'real life', then that is you real name.
Now is maybe a good time to post the link to the falsehoods that people[programmers] believe about names.
It's quite normal to have multiple names: one of my relatives was called by one name by half the family and another name by the other half. Was one of those names not her 'real' name?
If I am known by a nym in a community---a community that I interact with only using that name, then that is my name----in that community.
The question -- as it always is -- is: What is the operating temperature range for this material?
They don't say. The most we know from the article is
its effective operating temperature is higher than that of conventional superconducting materials such as niobium, lead or mercury.
which means higher than 9.3K (Nb critical temperature).
The article also says:
Currently, even unconventional high-temperature superconductors operate below -369 degrees Fahrenheit.
or about 50K. Still below the magic 77K of liquid Nitrogen at which point things become economically interesting---and I can't see any statement in the article that the substance is even as good as, never mind better than 50K, although there is an implication that it is.
All in all, the article says remarkably little, at some length.
If you can keep it to rslt = function(cell1, cell2, cell3) then it's OK, but in practice it seems to involve rslt = use.of.some.object.you.didnt.expect where goat.sacrifice(was.successful) [but.I.lied.to.you]
I'd suggest taking up the Bodhran. Don't worry too much about learning to play it---most people can't, so that doesn't matter, and if anyone gives you grief just explain that you made it yourself and that the skin is wearing out, which should ensure isolation.
So, they do understand that means the Chinese government can install rootkits on their servers, because they bought kit with chips made in China, and packets passing through them need to be investigated to ensure there are no dissidents using them, in violation of Chinese law (that would be the contravention of the laws of a foreign state mentioned)?
Nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
This seems to be only about "work produced for the school", meaning papers for class, lesson plans and the like. It doesn't seem as though they plan to lay claim to your Great American Novel (TM) if you plan on writing one while enrolled or employed there.
For the pupils at least, that claim also likely has no standing, notwithstanding any delusional beliefs to the contrary of the board.
As per analysis of the contract in the Hobbit
All contracts require some consideration from all parties to the contract. Consideration, in the contract sense, means a bargained-for performance or promise. Restatement (Second) of Contracts 71(1). Basically, this is something of value given or promised as part of the agreement. This can be anything that the parties agree is valuable; the classic example is a single peppercorn. Whitney v. Stearns, 16 Me. 394, 397 (1839).
That means, the school has to explicitly give the pupils something in exchange for their copyright. 'Teaching' can't be it, since they are obliged to do that anyway.
people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.
not true even remotely.
While MAFIAA may be incredibly stupid, don't think their finance people are as stupid. It's not hard for them to figure out if it's not worth the money.
Apparently, it is.
If they thought about it, it's obvious that this isn't going to recover money. As the thread title says, it's about heads on pikes. The aim is to scare people into not downloading.
Of course, even that is not really the aim. The argument actually goes like:
It's further complicated by a sense of moral outrage from point 3. They are CRIMINALS. It is our DUTY to PUNISH them.
And then they sign off on their advertising budgets and promotions and schmoozing and expense accounts, because that's just a legitimate and accepted cost of doing business. Sure, it'd be nice to cut those costs, but "spend a dollar, get two back" is good financial math.
So, the finance guys accept the cost, because of points 5 and 6.
They won't, they can't think of downloading as a legitimate business expense, despite strong indications that downloaders spend MORE money on purchases. They refuse to consider that, maybe, their business model is broken.
The music industry does not want to think of themselves as being like Polaroid, or Kodak, or Atari, or Nokia.
Their finance people may be smart and competent, but right now that equates to an optimal deck-chair rearrangement, whereas what's needed is a course change away from the iceberg.
You've got a contradiction in your logic there. The "NPE" is also known as an inventor. The patent system was created to separate the roles of invention from the roles of production.
To be pedantic, the patent system was created to encourage the production of more useful stuff. As I said, it's the production bit that's important, otherwise there is no point. A patent for an invention that is never produced is, by definition, useless. So a patent that prevents a useful thing being produced is worse than useless.
A consequence of the patent system was that it tended to encourage (but did not enforce) a separation between invention and production, but that was not the intent.
The troll, or NPE, has already done their part by creating the invention and gets paid for it via licensing fees, as intended. Even if the invention is sold by the original inventor to another NPE, the patent system still served the function for providing a market for inventions.
Now personally I hate all the bad patents floating around, and seriously question if the patent system isn't doing more harm than good anyways, even if only "good" patents were allowed, but the "troll" patent owner, as defined, is what patents are essentially there for.
Yes, markets are often a good thing. However, back to trolls. In practice trolls don't actually produce anything. A NPE doesn't seek to make the invention. The troll doesn't seek to sell the invention to someone to have it made. The troll waits under its bridge until someone tries to to make something useful and then slithers out and demands protection money.
We can look at that and decide that trolls are bad, but as you say, they are just a consequence of the rules we made. We can try to create anti-troll regulations—which just evolves smarter, tougher trolls—or we can go back to first principles and try a different way.
...
If you wield a bad patent you're a patent troll be you some little company with no assets or the latest do no wrong tech firm, if you use a good patent you're not.
...
I think the term Patent Troll is more exactly defined than that, and divorced from the subjective judgment of "Good" or "Bad" patent. A Patent Troll is a non-practicing entity (NPE). The sole aim of a patent is to encourage the creation of new inventions. The mechanism to do that involves remuneration, but that's not the aim. A NPE doesn't produce anything, so it doesn't encourage the creation of new inventions. It sure encourages the creation of new patents, but is doesn't encourage the creation of new 'things'.
You might argue over the goodness/badness of Amazon's 1-click patent, but Amazon at least provides a useful service using the process for which they hold a patent and isn't, in my opinion, a patent troll.
Patents, like copyrights and all sorts of other intellectual property, are a necessary evil, they always have downsides, but they're supposed to have upsides.When they don't, the holder is a troll.
I disagree with you only over the term 'troll'. Otherwise, you've got to the nub. Patents and copyright exist only to benefit society. "We, the people" created them solely to benefit us. If the economic burden of the current copyright and patent system outweighs its economic benefit—which numerous studies have indicated is so—we need to uncreate them
That may seem naive, but OTOH, simply nuking software and business patents would go a huge way to fixing this, and that does seem to be the worldwide trend.