In that case, how would it communicate with the base lab on Earth?
Well, if you did it close enough to the poles, a very short extension cord might be sufficient to get the signal around the moon to where it could transmit. Otherwise a long one... or a series of solar-powered microwave towers (with batteries). They might require some robotics to move around and adjust themselves, but we've got fair mobility on Mars, so I'm assuming it could be done.
Presumably the web of communication satellites around the earth is up to the task of relaying a message coming back from the moon to anywhere on earth.
All of this would be good practice for getting supplies and equipment up there for a manned expedition. Or so it seems to me...
In my experience, the highest order bit in deciding to work for a University is understanding that they sell degrees. That implies that there's a pecking order that is fundamentally related to degrees because they are pretty much honorbound to make what they sell seem important.
I recall an interview at Stanford when I was just starting out in my career. I'd only ever worked at MIT as research staff since graduating with my Bachelor's, and I was interviewing with a PostDoc there. He was very arrogant and said to me, "I can't tell you what you'll be making, but I can tell you what you won't be making, which is $39K." (This is a long time ago, and the absolute magnitudes will likely have changed, but the numbers are important relatively speaking within this story.) It immediately alerted me to the fact that (a) salaries are dictated by degree, and (b) presumably since he had a PhD and I did not, he was saying that my salary would peak just below his. After this arrogant treatment, you can imagine I was pleased as punch to get an offer of $38K, even though I got better offers from the commercial world and decided to go with one of those. An unanswered question is whether my salary would have peaked at the entry level or if the PostDoc was just confused. But surely equity is going to suggest that your salary won't easily exceed professorial salaries, and such salaries may be publicly findable, so it's worth finding out what your upper salary bound is.
Incidentally, related to that, Stanford had a thing (at least then, perhaps now) where they had a four day work week and the last day you were allowed to consult to augment your salary. Someone I talked to there claimed to me that often people could double their salary in that one extra day on the commercial world by leveraging the prestige of being a Stanford employee in getting the consulting work. Whether that's true or not again will vary with university and circumstance, but certainly knowing whether outside work is encouraged or discouraged is worth knowing up front, since clearly it can make a serious dent in your pay.
Knowing, too, what your publication rights are is something you should know at any job, university or not, in case research you're doing wants to be written up in a book, not just a lab paper.
But back to the University and Politics, the other thing is that if you're not a PhD, then you probably won't get to be Principal Investigator on grant proposals, and that means you'll be constantly in the shadow of someone else no matter how good the work you do is. There may be exceptions to this, but it's worth assuming this is true unless strong promises are made to the contrary. Usually there's the subtle cue that the position is titled "Scientist" and not either "Engineer" or "Associate" that says "we actually respect you rather than merely tolerating you because you can do cool things we need".
As to salary, the rule I learned is to expect half of an industry salary for a very prestigious University, but to expect it to inch up to larger amounts as the University is less well-known and/or more focused on teaching than research. That is, if you work for Harvard or MIT you're expected to sacrifice half of your salary to just having the coolness of the name, but if you work for Foobar City University, they know you aren't there because of the prestige so they'd better come much closer to industry wages even though you're still expected to cut them a break. And yet, on top of this, if you don't have that all-important PhD, expect them to treat you less well even after you've made this financial sacrifice.
Note: In fact, MIT treated me quite well as a staff employee. This note might sound like I'm dissing them for a bad experience, which is not so one either account--neither was my experience bad nor am I dissing them. But I am saying that I believe there are limitations to how good it can get in a place like that. Much of the information I've gleaned in here is info I've picked up along the way later in my career from here and there, and I'm just using these names as examples and offering this info in the strongest possible terms not to get back at anyone but on the theory of "better safe than sorry".
It really does seem like a tenuous accident that there's no interference coming from the skies.
Why isn't this a reason for putting a listening station on the far side of the moon? At least until we're populated there (which at this rate is going to be a while), it would presumably mask out signals from the earth and not have to contend with atmospheric effects. Such a listening station could probably be arranged to be dropped on the Moon even without a manned expedition...
Why not forever? A bad patent doesn't instantly become a good one after it's been a patent for 9 months.
First, at some point the owner of the patent wants to know if they can plan on the actual having of the patent. Business plans differ based on whether you have it or not. For example, you could allow people to challenge bad calls in the Olympics forever, claiming a bad call is always a bad call. But after a while, it's more important to let books and movies get published that say who won than it is to allow people to nitpick forever.
Second, after a while your brain gets fuzzy about what's "obvious" and what's not. The light bulb, the radio, etc. all seem obvious after sufficient time has passed, but were new in context and legitimately deserving patent protection. If you allow enough time to pass, people will forget that.
If you don't believe me, look at the number of people who look back at social morality evidenced in TV and movies pre-1970 (when a lot of social enlightenment started to take hold) and claim that the people who did this or that back then should be prosecuted or otherwise held accountable for violation of modern social norms retroactively applied. But since the violated norms didn't even exist at the time, it really gets hard to reason about after a while.
Why not introduce a peer review process by which a patent in a particular industry is reviewed by patent holders in the same industry?
I liked this up to "peer review", but once the people doing the review are patent holders, it becomes an "old boys network". Existing peer review as done in any other science field, for example, should be adequate and more open.
We just disagree. This will be my last response in this subthread. If you feel a need, you can follow with one I won't reply to, or you can let your last post be that one if you feel it stated your case most clearly.
If there is no copyright (and for arguments sake, no other IP), and everything created falls into the public domain, then how is a derivative work not in the public domain?
Eliminating copyright is not the same as making a law against the creation of agreements requiring you to keep secrets. Even absent copyright, I can make a private copy, modify it, and refuse to show it to you unless you write a contract with me saying you promise to keep it secret. If you're saying that you imagine a world where such contracts are illegal, you're saying more than just that copyright is eliminated, you're saying agreements to keep secrets are and unenforceable legally, which is more than an issue of eliminating copyright protection, it's the establishment of new protection against people making private agreements about keeping secrets in private contracts.
the main point... If copyrights were abolished, they would not need the GPL anymore, and contractual limitations and the question what clauses could be valid or not, have nothing to do with this...
I simply disagree, but my reasons (like yours) are already clearly stated. Anyone following this thread can make up their own mind, or take it to hypothetical court. Thanks for the discussion, though.
Thus, if a law would state that a customer has the right to use all public domain material (which would be the case for all copyrighted materials, if copyright is abolished) freely (as in speech), then contract law can't do diddly anymore.
The modified version in this hypothetical is not available to the public domain. The public is entitled to the free version without the commercial bug fixes in this hypothetical. But the commercial version is offered to you only if you sign a contract promising to keep it secret.
Copyright may be, at some level, controversial, and you might convince a government somewhere to eliminate copyright (as in our hypothetical here), but I doubt you can convince a government anywhere to eliminate either contracts or secrets, nor to make unenforceable the idea of a voluntarily entered contract where one party promises to keep a secret.
Ah yes, but they couldn't protect it with copyright anymore, so their content/data would be public domain also
They can still offer the program under contract protected by Trade Secret, requiring the end-user to keep the contents of the program confidential. (Sorry to effectively re-introduce Trade Secret, but it's relevant now that you've made this claim.) Contract law is powerful enough to construct protection, since it is entered into voluntarily by customers. Yes, the customer can obtain the original, but the original may not have the fixes that the commercial version has.
I'm not making a value judgment about this. (I have many value judgments I could make, but this is not the appropriate forum.) I'm just saying a world without copyright is a structurally different world than you suggest it is. The GPL right now creates a contract by its use only because by default, copyright prevents your use unless you agree to the contract. If there were not copyright, the content of a publicly accessible document would not force a contract. You could just edit out the contract and then use the result. The same way as you can do that for any document in which copyright has lapsed that may contain requirements for use (or non-use).
If *NO* copyrights whatsoever would exist, then clearly, there would be no need for the GPL.
Nonsense. In a world without copyright, there would be only the Public Domain. The Public Domain does not prohibit inclusion of content into commercial programs. A world in which that could occur would be very different than a world full of GPL-style sharing. The GPL is a poison pill to direct commercial competition.
(I'm ignoring Trade Secret and Patent, since they're not mostly not relevant to this discussion.)
Nobody's interested in anything you haven't published. Once it is published, it irretrievably becomes part of the public consciousness. You are asking the public to do something very unnatural, which is not to use information...
Where to start?
First, the line between publication and non-publication in the modern world is substantially blurred. But copyright "attaches" at the moment the work is "fixed in a medium". The reason for this is that otherwise there would be a window during which copyright did not attach and anyone could steal it.
Second, copyright protects "the little guy". The big companies don't need copyright. They have capital investment. MSN or C|Net could survive if they didn't have copyright. As fast as anyone could steal their content, they could steal others', and it's the continuous providing of new content, not the content itself, that people are paying for. Individuals, by contrast, cannot provide content continuously at such a rate. They have to work to provide content. And, as such, they are continually at risk of predatory practices by the larger companies.
Absent copyright protection, it would be mostly business as usual for the hyperlarge companies, especially on the web, and the death of cash flow to many content producers.
And, finally, just a technical clarification, but copyright does not protect "information" nor "ideas". It protects the form of that information or idea. That is, it protects lierary expression. In fact, the more "information-like" the expression is, the less copyright protection it enjoys. So if I tell you that President Kennedy was shot, even if I tell you in a publication, you can repeat that. But the more fanciful my words, the more they are useless to you except to do the one thing I created them for, and that's to entertain. That entertainment is personal to me. The world would not have it but for me. And it is a mere show of respect that you are not to use it without my permission. I guess you might find showing respect unnatural, but I don't.
It's also part of a bargain the public makes in order to have such entertainment shared freely, rather than having me show it only in a private tent with a ten dollar admission charge. The basis for copyright law in general is to promote sharing, by separating the notion of "sharing" from the notion of "giving". Even the many GPL'ers here at Slashdot should understand this concept, since GPL'd software (sometimes erroneously called "free" software) is anything but freely given. It is given with strings attached--shared, but in point of fact, not given. This is the precise bargain that copyright sought to achieve. I might even question the virtue of the GPL, but I won't question the sheer volume of it. So I must conclude that the qualified bargain it seeks to achieve is natural to a lot of people.
And, incidentally, taxing copyright would directly imply taxing free software.
Your tone presumes a single pattern of usage for credit cards that certainly does not apply to me.
I ordinarily wouldn't use credit cards. Except for a period of time a few years ago, I just had them as a backup and because you really can't pay cash very easily in too many places. I used mine in what I felt was a responsible way, paying them every month in full. And then I used them in a situation where I had a temporary cash shortfall to solve what should have been a short term financial crisis, and had a major problem caused by their desire to squeeze extra bucks out of me for doing so, making it hard to pay off in the short term and turning it to a long-term problem.
I'm doing my part by paying years of interest to prove that I was and am genuinely interested in holding up my side of the deal. I have, through that action, earned the right to be annoyed at the outlandish way they behaved (see my other response on this subthread for details). There was no excuse for it.
My only point here on this whole thread was that they get to laugh at me for being dumb enough to think they'd act responsibly, and now I get to laugh at them for getting caught acting irresponsibly on their own. They can plead "I'm a good guy and don't deserve this because I acted in good faith" but they didn't listen when I said the same, so they deserve what they get.
lemme guess: someone's bitter becuase they signed a contract...
It never occurs to anyone that the Bank, and not me, might be the one who didn't like their end of the contract...
I
I got an adverse credit report and they raised my interest. The nature of the adverse report? I had used my card.
Yes, they give you cards at a certain interest rate and if you've never seen it happen, you can use them responsibly, make your payments, etc. and still end up with a "too much unsecured credit" marker from the credit agencies because they decide (after issuing the cards, when they realize you're going to use them) that you borrowed too much (i.e., that they offered you more credit than they meant to). They don't frame it (as they should) as "oops, we didn't mean to authorize that card. They think it's my burden to keep track of that, I guess. And I thought it was just my burden to make the payments.
Have I failed to keep my credit current? Nope. I managed to keep up to date even with the near crippling interest rates. But I did my financial planning based on the smaller interest rate they had originally negotiated with me, not realizing I'd be a bad customer by merely using my cards. I just had some intermediate bloat while I waited to sell my house and needed a large amount of short-term credit to cover some upgrades on the house while it was preparing for sale. I saw my rates jump from single-digits into the 20's.
Why did they do it? Because their economic models said I was a risk and because they could. But then, with all that personalization (by which they mean a "photo on the card") it never occurred them to just call me and talk to me about what was going on in my life and to find out why my balance was high. Some personalization.
First USA (bought by BankOne, then bought by Chase) and MBNA are the absolute worst. Citibank and Sears were intermediately aggressive. They're all suddenly calling me a valued customer and offering me single digit rates again now that my house got sold and I paid some of it back down.
They spend tons of money trying to detect bad customers. They spend nothing trying to detect good customers. You're right I'm bitter.
But, just to stay on topic (which your uninformed, ad hominem attack on me was not, IMO), my real point is that the credit card companies behave in a routinely holier-than-thou way about everything they do involving money, while they soak the public for infinite money.
Then on top of large profits, they ask a Republican Congress for a change to the bankruptcy bill because they allege they are being soaked by bankruptcies, even though they're seeing huge profits even before the changes. To listen to these megabanks, they are the victims and we the public are the powerful perpetrators. I just don't see it. So I see no reason not to be quite harsh with them when they screw up.
Having myself been lectured (and inappropriately, by the way) by Citibank employees about how it's my own fault my credit card interest rates went up (it wasn't, by the way), I hope at minimum that someone sits down the entire senior staff of this company and lectures them like they were children for many hours, making them feel as embarrassed and disrespected as they routinely do to their customers.
And then, just to make the point, they should have to pay not just whatever court-assessed penalties, but that amount plus 24.99% retroactively applied to the entire amount backdated from the time they finally pay all the way back to the time of the incident, just like they're always raising people's interest rates to unreasonable amounts like that even retroactively on purchases already made, and to ensure that they pay in a timely way.
And it goes without saying that reparations should be paid personally by the people who run the company, not passed along to customers.
This is what makes me worry about science. What is the purpose of knowing this information?
It would worry me a lot more if science filtered what it studied by what we have need of today. A great many discoveries of science precede the uses that are found for them. Certainly we didn't have a lot of use for quantum mechanics when it was originally devised, for example.
It may seem that because the dinos are gone, all use for knowledge related to dinos is also gone, but there's no logical reason to assume the former fact necessarily implies the latter conclusion.
Nor does Darwinian evolution imply that everything now dead is dead for things that people might think of as good reasons. You might have a desert-dwelling animal that is perfectly functional but killed off by a great flood because it can't swim. That doesn't mean its systems for dealing with low-water conditions weren't worth knowing about.
We learn from the study of animals how to be inventive and resourceful. Animals, even ones for which we have no DNA, have processes and techniques that we might not have thought of. These might be mimicked mechanically, either to help us or other animals medically, or even just to help us build other kinds of machines. Or they might just expand our imaginations and make us think "gee, there are often more ways to think about something than I had thought".
In fact, just the fact that someone has learned how the life processes of millions of year extinct animals by examining a heap of rocks should tell you something about the value of knowledge that might, on its surface, appear to have little to offer.
Nor does the good that is done have to be direct. Consider that the good that comes from this discovery could be something like someone saying "I want to be an astrophysicist, but at first I thought it was just too hard to conclude anything reliable about things that far away. Then I saw a special on TV about how paleontologists conclude great things from very obscure pieces of information, and I thought--if they can do it, I can do it." Inspiration in life comes from all manner of places.
What if you just could bunch those profitable business together and force them to pay more?... Why should it be this expensive?
Indeed. It almost makes sense if you were thinking "well, it costs the community a great deal to cope with the problem of porn 'overflow'. But once you realize that the extra money will not go to any of the people who feel the pain, it looks like outright extortion.
Also, it's not enough to keep any real porn company from doing business. What it's enough to do is to be a barrier to new entrants to the market--people who don't yet have a cash flow.
But, of course, we don't really care about treating this industry fairly, right? I think it's a bit of judgmentalism about the industry that says "no one will dare complain", and if they do, we can probably just ignore them and expect no one to care if they get outraged. The business is either illegal or it's not. And if it's not illegal, then I don't see that it's fair to charge it a different amount. Is there no requirement of fairness in ICANN's charter? Does it not even occur to ICANN that this price might be unfair? Or does it just not matter to them?
Actually, it would be interesting to see a Bible translation that is objectively obtained by a neural net that is not seeking to push a particular political point of view. Of course, it might just turn into a fight over which documents the neutral translator was trained on, and whether those documents were, themselves, political in some way that influenced the translator. But still, it would seem a fun experiment to try. Perhaps we could learn something about the agendas we introduce into language by having an agenda-free program.
Equally fun might be a kind of "translator diff" that noticed biases in someone's translations.
Empirically, as a matter of science, it's clear that the reason scientists believe in science is that they have faith, not proof that the Universe is well-ordered. If the Universe were not well-ordered, science would be meaningless. Scientists take it on faith that a certain amount of variation from statistical probability implies truth, but it is at least conceivable to think of Science as a faith if you believe God made the rules and is capable of bending them.
Consider a well-ordered virtual reality simulation; there's no reason the programmer can't have a back door. As such, all the science in the virtual reality world can test the apparent rules of the virtual reality--e.g., that things that glow on Titan require a source of energy such as biology, chemistry, or physics. But maybe that's not required. Maybe conservation isn't required. Maybe the real truth is that it's just programmed that way and that the owner of the virtual reality can violate that any time it wants by just writing a special subroutine called emit_light_consuming_nothing. You probably take it on faith that the Great Maker won't do that. The answer to your question lies in the observation that you apparently think it's a religion if someone believes God would intervene but considers it a non-religion if they believe they can conclude God won't.
I'm all about Science because I see little point in wasting time on things I cannot observe or predict. But I don't feel I'm being slighted if someone wants to label that a religion. Heck, I think it's nice if they do label it that. It makes any work I do in that area tax-deductible.
isn't religion a subset of atheism? After all, a religious person rejects at least 99% of all gods
There are various different ways I could go about answering this, but the briefest is to say that Atheism is not an absence of belief in God, it's an assertion of the non-existence of God. It therefore contradicts religions and religions contradict it, hence I'd say it is a religion. Agnosticism might come closer to being common ground, but it would depend on how you define it (where it just permits or actively requires uncertainty about God), though perhaps there's a difference between believing there's no useful evidence about God and not taking a position on whether there is useful evidence on God--probably the latter is the only true subset, and I'm not sure it has a better name than just "uninquisitive".
I think the reason for this is that any new invention/discovery now takes years of reading and understanding the basic work that has already been done.
Nah, it's that this is the amount of time it takes to fill out all the intellectual property paperwork before you announce...;-)
This is why I said, for purposes of this discussion anyway, that science could be usefully viewed as a subset or religion, and not vice versa. Prediction is not a goal of all religions, only explaining is. Prediction is a goal of some religions. Moreover, each religion has the burden of at least explaining the effects of science, even as science evolves. But most religions don't stop there--most seek to explain other things, too.
In the context of this article, Science may explain that molten lava, or lichen, or mineral deposits made this glow on Titan (just to keep this on topic). But religion and philosophy are free to go farther, asking whether if there is lichen present, does that mean God had a backup plan in case earth failed, or does that mean there is no God. Either of these positions must be taken on faith since neither can be proven. You may appeal to Ocham's Razor in preferring the "no God" theory, but that is hardly proof.
I'm just saying that science and religion are about Man's basic desire to put the world into a frame of reference, and that some of the questions man asks are not answerable by science, so religion (and, incidentally, philosophy) exist as broader nets to discuss the unanswerable.
Incidentally, in terms of the basic questions Man asks, I always appeal to the set addressed by the Dewey Decimal System. It seems as an indexing system not to be as popular as when I grew up, but I still always liked the questions it asked. Even those who know it may nto know its basis, and may wish to follow that link to understand.
I think you're right that pretty much anything can be religious. If you look at the list of accepted religions in the world, many are pretty much equivalent to believing in the Easter Bunny. I have friends that make up very elaborated theories of a "next life" that don't come from any organized religion. Each person answers the basic questions in a form appropriate to them. The thing people in disparate religions seem to agree on more than the answers are the questions, hence my reference to Dewey above. The fact that there is no set answer is why some people might say the concept is useless. But there are many questions for which there is no set answer that are not useless. Most questions of ethics and morality fall into that category--and it's usually the asking of questions and the search for answers that is important, not the fact of a particular answer.
Required Viewing: Dark Star (particularly the discussions of Phenomenology).
For some reason people think that life on other planets means something religious?
I have often said "There are no political answers, only political questions." When someone tries to convince you not to answer a certain way to a question they allege is not political, they're being naive or disingenuous. Consider a question like: "What services will this hospital provide?" and a response that includes "Abortion." Telling someone that the answer must not include political answers like that is a trick. Leaving out abortion is just as political.
Why is he babbling off-topic like this? you find yourself asking just about now. Well, I've recently extended my rule to say "There are no religious answers, only religious questions." If one possible answer to a question is "Religion caused this." then the question is religious. That tells us something as important about religion as the politics rule tells us about politics.
Religion isn't the study of a kind white man with a booming voice who hangs out in the clouds and is good pals with someone named Peter. Religion is simply the way each of us answer the inevitable questions about the Universe, where it came from, etc. Stories about the Bible are one set of people's answers, Science is another. Science, in that sense, is another kind of religion with different rules. It adds the ability to test what it knows at the expense of knowability of other things. Some people find testability comforting and don't mind knowing. Others find knowability comforting, and will sacrifice testing for it.
Perhaps it would be better if we ALL simply sat down and decided that these old religious things we carry around are not right, and a new view is in order?
I think it's reasonable to think of science as a (growing) subset of religion, if you think of religion as the quest to know All The Answers. It's pretty clear that no matter what religion you have, it needs to explain the testable aspects of science. But saying that religion then has no place or has been obviated by science makes no sense. No matter how many things are discovered, we'll have a lot of unknowables for a long time yet, probably forever. I don't see any harm in a live and let live policy for religion as long as it has the same policy for science. Of course, now we're back to politics, so I must be drifting off-topic again and should stop before I'm modded down.
Ah, cool. That makes a lot of sense, actually, since I guess it also means you can keep lots of debris out that would only grind down the pipes and/or lower the efficiency...
Wouldn't excessive use of this method perhaps alter ocean temperatures?
And even if it didn't, aren't there things that live down there that are used to not having their environment pumped through a tube to a temperature and pressure it wasn't used to? Sounds like we could seriously mess up the world's ecosystem if we ever did it in any volume.
Well, when the web came along, everyone thought the web would be this big amorphous blob with no discernable center, just a sense of egalitarianism in which everyone was as important as everyone else. But no one could see their way around, and some sites had more content than others, but most importantly this upset the establishment, who quickly moved to have portal pages like msn.com and aol.com and such that controlled what most people saw first. Soon order was restored, and the establishment was on top again.
Now blogs have sought to re-organize the media into an egalitarian space where anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's. And now there's a move by establishment media to have blog portals, and rankings of blogs, and whatnot. This is good because not every blog is worth the time. It's bad because you're substituting someone else's opinion for your own. But it's good because we have finite lifespans and can't devote our whole lives to having an opinion on everything. But mostly it's really good because it restores order and says that establishment media still has a place in the world, and that that place is, as it always was, to tell us what information we want and what information we don't.
Really, this is a victory. It means you don't have to decide for yourself. And we're a culture who doesn't like to do things for ourselves, right? That sounds too much like work. And who wants to work when one can press a button and not have to think...? I, for one, am thrilled that this easy information about who's on the A, B, and C lists is available to me. Think of the time it's going to save me. Can we get these guys to sort through Slashdot and give us A, B, and C lists of topics, too? Why, there's just no end to the time savings they could be to us if we'd only utilize their services properly...
We'll never build technology that always protects people from themselves without making it overly intrusive.
Always? No. But sometimes? Often? I wouldn't be so defeatist on those options. If you meant literally what you said, then I'd say you're speaking way too narrowly. If you just mean "sometimes" or "often", and were exaggerating, then I'd say your statement is somewhere between defeatist and outright untrue.
People don't consider food, condoms, kitchen knives, air travel, or dentistry "safe" because it's not possible for there to be materials or process errors. They are willing to call these things safe because a reasonable standard of care is applied to the associated tasks. I don't know that I see those same levels of care applied to programming, incidentally... although the level of care that goes into the corresponding legal disclaimer is often quite competent.
Anyone that falls for a phishing scam is too dumb to have their money anyway.
I would venture a guess that among the vulnerable are the parents and/or grandparents of most of the people who read Slashdot. You don't see an ethical obligation on the party of the technically savvy to care about and protect the technically unsavvy? Shame on you.
Software can be anything we make it be. The technologists who have shaped the world have made many choices and will continue to make choices about what our programs will and won't do, how information will be presented, etc. They make those choices on behalf of the public, and they cannot simply shirk responsibility in this way.
Almost all technological problems of this kind reduce to our desire to get as far as possible as fast as possible, and damn any ill side-effects. If browsers required you to know and approve each site before you connected to it, this wouldn't happen. "But that would slow us all down," I can hear you say. The world needs this now, now, now. Indeed, we get benefits by not holding back. But we get ill effects, too, and we can't just poo poo those as not our responsibility. They follow directly from the design decisions we make on behalf of our parents and friends, people who often don't know we're making them nor the consequences of their having been made.
If we spent half as much time, energy, and intellect solving social problems as we do solving technical ones, I suspect the world would be happier.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, how would it communicate with the base lab on Earth?
Well, if you did it close enough to the poles, a very short extension cord might be sufficient to get the signal around the moon to where it could transmit. Otherwise a long one... or a series of solar-powered microwave towers (with batteries). They might require some robotics to move around and adjust themselves, but we've got fair mobility on Mars, so I'm assuming it could be done.
Presumably the web of communication satellites around the earth is up to the task of relaying a message coming back from the moon to anywhere on earth.
All of this would be good practice for getting supplies and equipment up there for a manned expedition. Or so it seems to me...
In my experience, the highest order bit in deciding to work for a University is understanding that they sell degrees. That implies that there's a pecking order that is fundamentally related to degrees because they are pretty much honorbound to make what they sell seem important.
I recall an interview at Stanford when I was just starting out in my career. I'd only ever worked at MIT as research staff since graduating with my Bachelor's, and I was interviewing with a PostDoc there. He was very arrogant and said to me, "I can't tell you what you'll be making, but I can tell you what you won't be making, which is $39K." (This is a long time ago, and the absolute magnitudes will likely have changed, but the numbers are important relatively speaking within this story.) It immediately alerted me to the fact that (a) salaries are dictated by degree, and (b) presumably since he had a PhD and I did not, he was saying that my salary would peak just below his. After this arrogant treatment, you can imagine I was pleased as punch to get an offer of $38K, even though I got better offers from the commercial world and decided to go with one of those. An unanswered question is whether my salary would have peaked at the entry level or if the PostDoc was just confused. But surely equity is going to suggest that your salary won't easily exceed professorial salaries, and such salaries may be publicly findable, so it's worth finding out what your upper salary bound is.
Incidentally, related to that, Stanford had a thing (at least then, perhaps now) where they had a four day work week and the last day you were allowed to consult to augment your salary. Someone I talked to there claimed to me that often people could double their salary in that one extra day on the commercial world by leveraging the prestige of being a Stanford employee in getting the consulting work. Whether that's true or not again will vary with university and circumstance, but certainly knowing whether outside work is encouraged or discouraged is worth knowing up front, since clearly it can make a serious dent in your pay.
Knowing, too, what your publication rights are is something you should know at any job, university or not, in case research you're doing wants to be written up in a book, not just a lab paper.
But back to the University and Politics, the other thing is that if you're not a PhD, then you probably won't get to be Principal Investigator on grant proposals, and that means you'll be constantly in the shadow of someone else no matter how good the work you do is. There may be exceptions to this, but it's worth assuming this is true unless strong promises are made to the contrary. Usually there's the subtle cue that the position is titled "Scientist" and not either "Engineer" or "Associate" that says "we actually respect you rather than merely tolerating you because you can do cool things we need".
As to salary, the rule I learned is to expect half of an industry salary for a very prestigious University, but to expect it to inch up to larger amounts as the University is less well-known and/or more focused on teaching than research. That is, if you work for Harvard or MIT you're expected to sacrifice half of your salary to just having the coolness of the name, but if you work for Foobar City University, they know you aren't there because of the prestige so they'd better come much closer to industry wages even though you're still expected to cut them a break. And yet, on top of this, if you don't have that all-important PhD, expect them to treat you less well even after you've made this financial sacrifice.
Note: In fact, MIT treated me quite well as a staff employee. This note might sound like I'm dissing them for a bad experience, which is not so one either account--neither was my experience bad nor am I dissing them. But I am saying that I believe there are limitations to how good it can get in a place like that. Much of the information I've gleaned in here is info I've picked up along the way later in my career from here and there, and I'm just using these names as examples and offering this info in the strongest possible terms not to get back at anyone but on the theory of "better safe than sorry".
It really does seem like a tenuous accident that there's no interference coming from the skies.
Why isn't this a reason for putting a listening station on the far side of the moon? At least until we're populated there (which at this rate is going to be a while), it would presumably mask out signals from the earth and not have to contend with atmospheric effects. Such a listening station could probably be arranged to be dropped on the Moon even without a manned expedition...
First, at some point the owner of the patent wants to know if they can plan on the actual having of the patent. Business plans differ based on whether you have it or not. For example, you could allow people to challenge bad calls in the Olympics forever, claiming a bad call is always a bad call. But after a while, it's more important to let books and movies get published that say who won than it is to allow people to nitpick forever.
Second, after a while your brain gets fuzzy about what's "obvious" and what's not. The light bulb, the radio, etc. all seem obvious after sufficient time has passed, but were new in context and legitimately deserving patent protection. If you allow enough time to pass, people will forget that.
If you don't believe me, look at the number of people who look back at social morality evidenced in TV and movies pre-1970 (when a lot of social enlightenment started to take hold) and claim that the people who did this or that back then should be prosecuted or otherwise held accountable for violation of modern social norms retroactively applied. But since the violated norms didn't even exist at the time, it really gets hard to reason about after a while.
I liked this up to "peer review", but once the people doing the review are patent holders, it becomes an "old boys network". Existing peer review as done in any other science field, for example, should be adequate and more open.
I also have another variant of the peer review proposal: make (software) patents a prize (like the Nobel prize, with only a few winners per year), not something everyone can get.
We just disagree. This will be my last response in this subthread. If you feel a need, you can follow with one I won't reply to, or you can let your last post be that one if you feel it stated your case most clearly.
Eliminating copyright is not the same as making a law against the creation of agreements requiring you to keep secrets. Even absent copyright, I can make a private copy, modify it, and refuse to show it to you unless you write a contract with me saying you promise to keep it secret. If you're saying that you imagine a world where such contracts are illegal, you're saying more than just that copyright is eliminated, you're saying agreements to keep secrets are and unenforceable legally, which is more than an issue of eliminating copyright protection, it's the establishment of new protection against people making private agreements about keeping secrets in private contracts.
I simply disagree, but my reasons (like yours) are already clearly stated. Anyone following this thread can make up their own mind, or take it to hypothetical court. Thanks for the discussion, though.
The modified version in this hypothetical is not available to the public domain. The public is entitled to the free version without the commercial bug fixes in this hypothetical. But the commercial version is offered to you only if you sign a contract promising to keep it secret.
Copyright may be, at some level, controversial, and you might convince a government somewhere to eliminate copyright (as in our hypothetical here), but I doubt you can convince a government anywhere to eliminate either contracts or secrets, nor to make unenforceable the idea of a voluntarily entered contract where one party promises to keep a secret.
They can still offer the program under contract protected by Trade Secret, requiring the end-user to keep the contents of the program confidential. (Sorry to effectively re-introduce Trade Secret, but it's relevant now that you've made this claim.) Contract law is powerful enough to construct protection, since it is entered into voluntarily by customers. Yes, the customer can obtain the original, but the original may not have the fixes that the commercial version has.
I'm not making a value judgment about this. (I have many value judgments I could make, but this is not the appropriate forum.) I'm just saying a world without copyright is a structurally different world than you suggest it is. The GPL right now creates a contract by its use only because by default, copyright prevents your use unless you agree to the contract. If there were not copyright, the content of a publicly accessible document would not force a contract. You could just edit out the contract and then use the result. The same way as you can do that for any document in which copyright has lapsed that may contain requirements for use (or non-use).
Nonsense. In a world without copyright, there would be only the Public Domain. The Public Domain does not prohibit inclusion of content into commercial programs. A world in which that could occur would be very different than a world full of GPL-style sharing. The GPL is a poison pill to direct commercial competition.
(I'm ignoring Trade Secret and Patent, since they're not mostly not relevant to this discussion.)
Where to start?
First, the line between publication and non-publication in the modern world is substantially blurred. But copyright "attaches" at the moment the work is "fixed in a medium". The reason for this is that otherwise there would be a window during which copyright did not attach and anyone could steal it.
Second, copyright protects "the little guy". The big companies don't need copyright. They have capital investment. MSN or C|Net could survive if they didn't have copyright. As fast as anyone could steal their content, they could steal others', and it's the continuous providing of new content, not the content itself, that people are paying for. Individuals, by contrast, cannot provide content continuously at such a rate. They have to work to provide content. And, as such, they are continually at risk of predatory practices by the larger companies.
Absent copyright protection, it would be mostly business as usual for the hyperlarge companies, especially on the web, and the death of cash flow to many content producers.
And, finally, just a technical clarification, but copyright does not protect "information" nor "ideas". It protects the form of that information or idea. That is, it protects lierary expression. In fact, the more "information-like" the expression is, the less copyright protection it enjoys. So if I tell you that President Kennedy was shot, even if I tell you in a publication, you can repeat that. But the more fanciful my words, the more they are useless to you except to do the one thing I created them for, and that's to entertain. That entertainment is personal to me. The world would not have it but for me. And it is a mere show of respect that you are not to use it without my permission. I guess you might find showing respect unnatural, but I don't.
It's also part of a bargain the public makes in order to have such entertainment shared freely, rather than having me show it only in a private tent with a ten dollar admission charge. The basis for copyright law in general is to promote sharing, by separating the notion of "sharing" from the notion of "giving". Even the many GPL'ers here at Slashdot should understand this concept, since GPL'd software (sometimes erroneously called "free" software) is anything but freely given. It is given with strings attached--shared, but in point of fact, not given. This is the precise bargain that copyright sought to achieve. I might even question the virtue of the GPL, but I won't question the sheer volume of it. So I must conclude that the qualified bargain it seeks to achieve is natural to a lot of people.
And, incidentally, taxing copyright would directly imply taxing free software.
Your tone presumes a single pattern of usage for credit cards that certainly does not apply to me.
I ordinarily wouldn't use credit cards. Except for a period of time a few years ago, I just had them as a backup and because you really can't pay cash very easily in too many places. I used mine in what I felt was a responsible way, paying them every month in full. And then I used them in a situation where I had a temporary cash shortfall to solve what should have been a short term financial crisis, and had a major problem caused by their desire to squeeze extra bucks out of me for doing so, making it hard to pay off in the short term and turning it to a long-term problem.
I'm doing my part by paying years of interest to prove that I was and am genuinely interested in holding up my side of the deal. I have, through that action, earned the right to be annoyed at the outlandish way they behaved (see my other response on this subthread for details). There was no excuse for it.
My only point here on this whole thread was that they get to laugh at me for being dumb enough to think they'd act responsibly, and now I get to laugh at them for getting caught acting irresponsibly on their own. They can plead "I'm a good guy and don't deserve this because I acted in good faith" but they didn't listen when I said the same, so they deserve what they get.
It never occurs to anyone that the Bank, and not me, might be the one who didn't like their end of the contract...
I I got an adverse credit report and they raised my interest. The nature of the adverse report? I had used my card.
Yes, they give you cards at a certain interest rate and if you've never seen it happen, you can use them responsibly, make your payments, etc. and still end up with a "too much unsecured credit" marker from the credit agencies because they decide (after issuing the cards, when they realize you're going to use them) that you borrowed too much (i.e., that they offered you more credit than they meant to). They don't frame it (as they should) as "oops, we didn't mean to authorize that card. They think it's my burden to keep track of that, I guess. And I thought it was just my burden to make the payments.
Have I failed to keep my credit current? Nope. I managed to keep up to date even with the near crippling interest rates. But I did my financial planning based on the smaller interest rate they had originally negotiated with me, not realizing I'd be a bad customer by merely using my cards. I just had some intermediate bloat while I waited to sell my house and needed a large amount of short-term credit to cover some upgrades on the house while it was preparing for sale. I saw my rates jump from single-digits into the 20's.
Why did they do it? Because their economic models said I was a risk and because they could. But then, with all that personalization (by which they mean a "photo on the card") it never occurred them to just call me and talk to me about what was going on in my life and to find out why my balance was high. Some personalization.
First USA (bought by BankOne, then bought by Chase) and MBNA are the absolute worst. Citibank and Sears were intermediately aggressive. They're all suddenly calling me a valued customer and offering me single digit rates again now that my house got sold and I paid some of it back down.
They spend tons of money trying to detect bad customers. They spend nothing trying to detect good customers. You're right I'm bitter.
But, just to stay on topic (which your uninformed, ad hominem attack on me was not, IMO), my real point is that the credit card companies behave in a routinely holier-than-thou way about everything they do involving money, while they soak the public for infinite money. Then on top of large profits, they ask a Republican Congress for a change to the bankruptcy bill because they allege they are being soaked by bankruptcies, even though they're seeing huge profits even before the changes. To listen to these megabanks, they are the victims and we the public are the powerful perpetrators. I just don't see it. So I see no reason not to be quite harsh with them when they screw up.
Having myself been lectured (and inappropriately, by the way) by Citibank employees about how it's my own fault my credit card interest rates went up (it wasn't, by the way), I hope at minimum that someone sits down the entire senior staff of this company and lectures them like they were children for many hours, making them feel as embarrassed and disrespected as they routinely do to their customers.
And then, just to make the point, they should have to pay not just whatever court-assessed penalties, but that amount plus 24.99% retroactively applied to the entire amount backdated from the time they finally pay all the way back to the time of the incident, just like they're always raising people's interest rates to unreasonable amounts like that even retroactively on purchases already made, and to ensure that they pay in a timely way.
And it goes without saying that reparations should be paid personally by the people who run the company, not passed along to customers.
It would worry me a lot more if science filtered what it studied by what we have need of today. A great many discoveries of science precede the uses that are found for them. Certainly we didn't have a lot of use for quantum mechanics when it was originally devised, for example.
It may seem that because the dinos are gone, all use for knowledge related to dinos is also gone, but there's no logical reason to assume the former fact necessarily implies the latter conclusion.
Nor does Darwinian evolution imply that everything now dead is dead for things that people might think of as good reasons. You might have a desert-dwelling animal that is perfectly functional but killed off by a great flood because it can't swim. That doesn't mean its systems for dealing with low-water conditions weren't worth knowing about.
We learn from the study of animals how to be inventive and resourceful. Animals, even ones for which we have no DNA, have processes and techniques that we might not have thought of. These might be mimicked mechanically, either to help us or other animals medically, or even just to help us build other kinds of machines. Or they might just expand our imaginations and make us think "gee, there are often more ways to think about something than I had thought".
In fact, just the fact that someone has learned how the life processes of millions of year extinct animals by examining a heap of rocks should tell you something about the value of knowledge that might, on its surface, appear to have little to offer.
Nor does the good that is done have to be direct. Consider that the good that comes from this discovery could be something like someone saying "I want to be an astrophysicist, but at first I thought it was just too hard to conclude anything reliable about things that far away. Then I saw a special on TV about how paleontologists conclude great things from very obscure pieces of information, and I thought--if they can do it, I can do it." Inspiration in life comes from all manner of places.
Indeed. It almost makes sense if you were thinking "well, it costs the community a great deal to cope with the problem of porn 'overflow'. But once you realize that the extra money will not go to any of the people who feel the pain, it looks like outright extortion.
Also, it's not enough to keep any real porn company from doing business. What it's enough to do is to be a barrier to new entrants to the market--people who don't yet have a cash flow.
But, of course, we don't really care about treating this industry fairly, right? I think it's a bit of judgmentalism about the industry that says "no one will dare complain", and if they do, we can probably just ignore them and expect no one to care if they get outraged. The business is either illegal or it's not. And if it's not illegal, then I don't see that it's fair to charge it a different amount. Is there no requirement of fairness in ICANN's charter? Does it not even occur to ICANN that this price might be unfair? Or does it just not matter to them?
Actually, it would be interesting to see a Bible translation that is objectively obtained by a neural net that is not seeking to push a particular political point of view. Of course, it might just turn into a fight over which documents the neutral translator was trained on, and whether those documents were, themselves, political in some way that influenced the translator. But still, it would seem a fun experiment to try. Perhaps we could learn something about the agendas we introduce into language by having an agenda-free program.
Equally fun might be a kind of "translator diff" that noticed biases in someone's translations.
Empirically, as a matter of science, it's clear that the reason scientists believe in science is that they have faith, not proof that the Universe is well-ordered. If the Universe were not well-ordered, science would be meaningless. Scientists take it on faith that a certain amount of variation from statistical probability implies truth, but it is at least conceivable to think of Science as a faith if you believe God made the rules and is capable of bending them.
Consider a well-ordered virtual reality simulation; there's no reason the programmer can't have a back door. As such, all the science in the virtual reality world can test the apparent rules of the virtual reality--e.g., that things that glow on Titan require a source of energy such as biology, chemistry, or physics. But maybe that's not required. Maybe conservation isn't required. Maybe the real truth is that it's just programmed that way and that the owner of the virtual reality can violate that any time it wants by just writing a special subroutine called emit_light_consuming_nothing. You probably take it on faith that the Great Maker won't do that. The answer to your question lies in the observation that you apparently think it's a religion if someone believes God would intervene but considers it a non-religion if they believe they can conclude God won't.
I'm all about Science because I see little point in wasting time on things I cannot observe or predict. But I don't feel I'm being slighted if someone wants to label that a religion. Heck, I think it's nice if they do label it that. It makes any work I do in that area tax-deductible.
There are various different ways I could go about answering this, but the briefest is to say that Atheism is not an absence of belief in God, it's an assertion of the non-existence of God. It therefore contradicts religions and religions contradict it, hence I'd say it is a religion. Agnosticism might come closer to being common ground, but it would depend on how you define it (where it just permits or actively requires uncertainty about God), though perhaps there's a difference between believing there's no useful evidence about God and not taking a position on whether there is useful evidence on God--probably the latter is the only true subset, and I'm not sure it has a better name than just "uninquisitive".
Nah, it's that this is the amount of time it takes to fill out all the intellectual property paperwork before you announce... ;-)
This is why I said, for purposes of this discussion anyway, that science could be usefully viewed as a subset or religion, and not vice versa. Prediction is not a goal of all religions, only explaining is. Prediction is a goal of some religions. Moreover, each religion has the burden of at least explaining the effects of science, even as science evolves. But most religions don't stop there--most seek to explain other things, too.
In the context of this article, Science may explain that molten lava, or lichen, or mineral deposits made this glow on Titan (just to keep this on topic). But religion and philosophy are free to go farther, asking whether if there is lichen present, does that mean God had a backup plan in case earth failed, or does that mean there is no God. Either of these positions must be taken on faith since neither can be proven. You may appeal to Ocham's Razor in preferring the "no God" theory, but that is hardly proof.
I'm just saying that science and religion are about Man's basic desire to put the world into a frame of reference, and that some of the questions man asks are not answerable by science, so religion (and, incidentally, philosophy) exist as broader nets to discuss the unanswerable.
Incidentally, in terms of the basic questions Man asks, I always appeal to the set addressed by the Dewey Decimal System. It seems as an indexing system not to be as popular as when I grew up, but I still always liked the questions it asked. Even those who know it may nto know its basis, and may wish to follow that link to understand.
I think you're right that pretty much anything can be religious. If you look at the list of accepted religions in the world, many are pretty much equivalent to believing in the Easter Bunny. I have friends that make up very elaborated theories of a "next life" that don't come from any organized religion. Each person answers the basic questions in a form appropriate to them. The thing people in disparate religions seem to agree on more than the answers are the questions, hence my reference to Dewey above. The fact that there is no set answer is why some people might say the concept is useless. But there are many questions for which there is no set answer that are not useless. Most questions of ethics and morality fall into that category--and it's usually the asking of questions and the search for answers that is important, not the fact of a particular answer.
Required Viewing: Dark Star (particularly the discussions of Phenomenology).
I have often said "There are no political answers, only political questions." When someone tries to convince you not to answer a certain way to a question they allege is not political, they're being naive or disingenuous. Consider a question like: "What services will this hospital provide?" and a response that includes "Abortion." Telling someone that the answer must not include political answers like that is a trick. Leaving out abortion is just as political.
Why is he babbling off-topic like this? you find yourself asking just about now. Well, I've recently extended my rule to say "There are no religious answers, only religious questions." If one possible answer to a question is "Religion caused this." then the question is religious. That tells us something as important about religion as the politics rule tells us about politics.
Religion isn't the study of a kind white man with a booming voice who hangs out in the clouds and is good pals with someone named Peter. Religion is simply the way each of us answer the inevitable questions about the Universe, where it came from, etc. Stories about the Bible are one set of people's answers, Science is another. Science, in that sense, is another kind of religion with different rules. It adds the ability to test what it knows at the expense of knowability of other things. Some people find testability comforting and don't mind knowing. Others find knowability comforting, and will sacrifice testing for it.
I think it's reasonable to think of science as a (growing) subset of religion, if you think of religion as the quest to know All The Answers. It's pretty clear that no matter what religion you have, it needs to explain the testable aspects of science. But saying that religion then has no place or has been obviated by science makes no sense. No matter how many things are discovered, we'll have a lot of unknowables for a long time yet, probably forever. I don't see any harm in a live and let live policy for religion as long as it has the same policy for science. Of course, now we're back to politics, so I must be drifting off-topic again and should stop before I'm modded down.
Ah, cool. That makes a lot of sense, actually, since I guess it also means you can keep lots of debris out that would only grind down the pipes and/or lower the efficiency...
And even if it didn't, aren't there things that live down there that are used to not having their environment pumped through a tube to a temperature and pressure it wasn't used to? Sounds like we could seriously mess up the world's ecosystem if we ever did it in any volume.
Well, when the web came along, everyone thought the web would be this big amorphous blob with no discernable center, just a sense of egalitarianism in which everyone was as important as everyone else. But no one could see their way around, and some sites had more content than others, but most importantly this upset the establishment, who quickly moved to have portal pages like msn.com and aol.com and such that controlled what most people saw first. Soon order was restored, and the establishment was on top again.
Now blogs have sought to re-organize the media into an egalitarian space where anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's. And now there's a move by establishment media to have blog portals, and rankings of blogs, and whatnot. This is good because not every blog is worth the time. It's bad because you're substituting someone else's opinion for your own. But it's good because we have finite lifespans and can't devote our whole lives to having an opinion on everything. But mostly it's really good because it restores order and says that establishment media still has a place in the world, and that that place is, as it always was, to tell us what information we want and what information we don't.
Really, this is a victory. It means you don't have to decide for yourself. And we're a culture who doesn't like to do things for ourselves, right? That sounds too much like work. And who wants to work when one can press a button and not have to think...? I, for one, am thrilled that this easy information about who's on the A, B, and C lists is available to me. Think of the time it's going to save me. Can we get these guys to sort through Slashdot and give us A, B, and C lists of topics, too? Why, there's just no end to the time savings they could be to us if we'd only utilize their services properly...
Always? No. But sometimes? Often? I wouldn't be so defeatist on those options. If you meant literally what you said, then I'd say you're speaking way too narrowly. If you just mean "sometimes" or "often", and were exaggerating, then I'd say your statement is somewhere between defeatist and outright untrue.
People don't consider food, condoms, kitchen knives, air travel, or dentistry "safe" because it's not possible for there to be materials or process errors. They are willing to call these things safe because a reasonable standard of care is applied to the associated tasks. I don't know that I see those same levels of care applied to programming, incidentally... although the level of care that goes into the corresponding legal disclaimer is often quite competent.
I would venture a guess that among the vulnerable are the parents and/or grandparents of most of the people who read Slashdot. You don't see an ethical obligation on the party of the technically savvy to care about and protect the technically unsavvy? Shame on you.
Software can be anything we make it be. The technologists who have shaped the world have made many choices and will continue to make choices about what our programs will and won't do, how information will be presented, etc. They make those choices on behalf of the public, and they cannot simply shirk responsibility in this way.
Almost all technological problems of this kind reduce to our desire to get as far as possible as fast as possible, and damn any ill side-effects. If browsers required you to know and approve each site before you connected to it, this wouldn't happen. "But that would slow us all down," I can hear you say. The world needs this now, now, now. Indeed, we get benefits by not holding back. But we get ill effects, too, and we can't just poo poo those as not our responsibility. They follow directly from the design decisions we make on behalf of our parents and friends, people who often don't know we're making them nor the consequences of their having been made.
If we spent half as much time, energy, and intellect solving social problems as we do solving technical ones, I suspect the world would be happier.