As an academic, I'd be the first to tell you: (high-quality) academic degrees are worth a lot if you are going to do research in that field. They are of little value for "general education" and life experience. Attending a top college is good for your networking and your resume, but otherwise I'd say only go to college if you want the education.
In this case, she was clearly doing the job well. Since we are no longer trying to predict how good she'll be at the job, her lying is irrelevant on that count, and if she had a research position, the story should have ended there (there are many professors with no undergrad or even grad degrees). However, she was Dean of Admissions. As such, she was in charge of using people's resumes for application purposes, and MIT would be sending an odd statement to future applicants by letting her keep her job had she not resigned.
You are confused. GP does refer to a proof that there is no sterile neutrino as claimed by LSND -- a proof based on cosmological data. The new "proof" is based on accelerator data. Good to see that they both give the same result.
Apologies -- this post uses a lot of technical jargon. However, the article is so badly written that I decided to post some remarks. And yes, I am a professional mathematician.
First, what they mapped was not the "structure" of the Lie group E_8 -- the structure of the group has been known for a long time. What they mapped is what are called the "representations" of the group E_8, which is part of Vogan's program to understand the "unitary dual" (=list of representations) for all (reductive) Lie groups.
Second, this has no relevance to grand unified theories. Even though a (compact) form of E_8 can be the gauge group of a GUT, the relevant representations are finite-dimensional and have been classified by Weyl decades ago.
Finally, this is an important result. It is relevant to number theory, and to abstract mathematics in general. The fact that a (finite) computer calculation can help determining an infinite list of representation is very nice.
I thought that treaty-making was a function reserved for the Executive Branch (subject to the "advice and consent" of the Senate; see article II, section 2 of the Constitution). So how can the two senators instruct the US delegation to do anything?
Someone must be a bit confused methinks. It is not now (and will never be) technologically feasible to keep a record of network traffic over any non-trivial amount of time.
Well, a NAT is a physical device. When functioning as such it will have two IP addresses -- one on the local network and one on the outside one. Contrary to your beliefs, TCP/IP packets only have one "source address" and one "destination address" fields. As an outgoing packet transits the NAT, the device overwrites the source address with its own (global internet-) address. When an incoming packet arrives, the NAT replaces the destination address (which is the NAT's global Internet address) with the correct local address and forwards the packet to the local network. In particular just by looking at the TCP/IP headers of a packet on the internet there's no way to tell if it was modified by a NAT or not.
What you need to understand is that the NAT does not use any addressing information in the packet header to tell which local computer the packet should go to. Rather, all this decision-making is internal to the NAT. The device keeps track of the connections the local computers have to the outside world (via port number etc). Depending on the port and the connection the packet belongs to it knows which local computer it is representing for the purposes of this particular packet.
I think you misunderstand what a MAC address is. A MAC address is a physical address used by the wired ethernet (and wireless ethernet) protocols to allow several network cards to communicate on a single physical network. If you are on a computer outside this physical network then you have no way of determining the MAC addresses of any computers inside it (IP packet headers don't record MAC addresse, only IP addresses) -- except if the data payload of the packet included the information -- say if you sent your own MAC address in an e-mail. It is possible, however, that Windows records the MAC address of the network cards in the hardware profile in the registry. This could give an indication (but not a proof) that the hard-drive came from the computer it is claimed to have come from.
Regarding the "internal IP address range". As you can see in this wikipedia table, the address range 192.168.x.x (and a few others) are reserved for "private networks". Computers on the internet-at-large are assigned addresses in other ranges. In particular, if you connect to wireless access point, you will typically be assigned an address in a "private network" for the purposes of the internal network. Thus, if the KaZaa software is claiming to the outside world that it is running on a computer with an address in that range, then probably the computer is hiding behind a NAT -- while if it is claiming to be running on a computer with an IP address outside this range then this computer is probably directly connected to the internet.
PS: apologies about the lack of spacing in the parent post -- should have previewed before submitting.
Dear Mr. Beckerman,
It seems that you misunderstood one point about IP addresses and NATs, which led to a lot of time wasted in the deposition. In a situation where the user's computer hides behind a NAT, it will still have an IP address on the local network (the one on which the user's computer and the NAT reside). The NAT will have two IP addresses (one on the local network and one on the global internet). In this setup, the IP address space on the local network is completely independent of the IP address space on the global one.
The witness explained that the KaZaa software will determine the address of the computer it's running on and includes it in the data it transmits to the outside world, which data is available to other computers connected to the FastTrack network. The way the data gets to the outside world is by being bundled into TCP/IP packets, which carry on them addressing information for routing. It is this addressing information that gets rewritten by the NAT to implement IP masquerating.
Now if the home computer is directly connected to the internet (say via dial-up or DSL) then it acts as its own router, and both the addressing (TCP/IP) information on the packet and the (application-generated) content of the packet will agree on the IP address. If the computer is hiding behind the NAT then the routing information on packets will show the IP address of the NAT (the one that was assigned by the ISP) while the KaZaa data in the packet will include the IP address of the software-running computer on the local network (typically in the address space 192.168.x.x which is reserved for such networks). By comparing these two pieces of information he was able to detect which scenario happened in this particular case.
Note that I have no personal knowledge about the FastTrack protocol, so I can't say whether this is the way things actually work, but this is what the witness said and it sounds reasonable to me.
(that would be the local, private, IP address in this scenario).
Hey -- this is simply a setuid root shell, a potential security hole as old as Unix. Apparently programmers never learn from experience. When I administer a system, a program which runs other programs based on user input doesn't get to be setuid root.
Actually, 35 USC 102 already limits patents to a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter". Facts of nature (such as the sequence of a gene) are not patentable -- though Congress in its infinite wisdon has declined to specificially add this to the law (as done in some countries). All that remains is for the court (that is, the CAFC) to actually care about the law.
Based on project homepage, especially the list of parnters, it seems that this study was mostly financed by the EU. The secondary sources include interested parties (an association of Indian IT companies, Mitsubishi) and non-interested ones (e.g. the Soros foundation). This leads me to trust the study more than ones funded by Redhat and Microsoft.
Actually, a twin prime is a prime number n such that n+2 or n-2 is prime. In everyday English a "twin" is not a pair of people but a member of a pair [under certain assumptions, of course]. The same holds in mathematical English.
You almost got the time frame right. Actually, some of the founders considered the veto powers to be the main consitutional check on the lawmaking of congress. This view was shared by George Washington and James Madison. It was in 1803 that things changed, when the Supreme Court took it upon itself to be the arbiter of the constitutionality of laws (see Marbury v. Madison). In retrospect I think this was a good idea -- but even today not everybody agrees.
I alreayd wrote this in another post, but let me make the point again: to the extent Mr. Bush is saying "if we think we're looking at a letter bomb, we'll send the bomb squad first and worry about legal issues later", there's no controversy. However, considering past government behaviour under this president I would suspect that they would consider the current general "terrorism" paranoia to be sufficient to make the opening of any piece of mail they have a hunch about "reasonable".
In theory, you are quite right, since the president has not been in charge of interpreting the laws for a long time. In practice, however, very few acts of the "FedGov" are ever challenged in court – a large portion of your constitutional protections arise from what the government decides not to do, rather than from you retroactively getting a court order enforcing your rights. In particular, if the government decides to ignore a particular right, they can effectively nullify it.
Actually, to the extent that Mr. Bush is saying "if we believe there's a ticking bomb in a letter we will send the bomb squad in first and resolve the legal issues later", there is no controversey. Unfortunately, he also seems to be saying "if we believe the sender and reciever are contemplating un-american behaviour during a time of national emergency, we will read their mail first and put them on the no-fly list later".
A "Technical Note" on the talk page clarifies that the blocking of an IP address includes a ban on creating new user accounts. There's no discussion of what happens with existing accounts though.
This seems to be a technical weakness of Qatar's method of filtering the web access of its citizens. For a website which is accessible to everyone can, the IP address is the only way to distinguish visitors from each other. Now if the government of Qatar decided to hide all its citizen's IP addreses behind that of a proxy, then the citizens of Qatar should not be surprised when they cannot be distinguished from each other by web sites. Persumably Qataris who have Wikipedia user accounts (logons) would be able to edit anyway -- and others can petition their government to change its internet policy.
Imagine how good Microsoft Word and WordPerfect would be if there were not 200 other alternative. How good Minix and Xenix would be if there were no other x86 Unix-like operating systems... Competition is good. People contribute code and ideas to the project they care about, not to the program they are supposed to be using. If there were only two options the people who really cared about the other alternatives wouldn't suddenly switch camp -- they would simply go site on the sideline, to everybody's loss.
Porting good ideas from one program to another is good by the way. In a big project, you can't get anything done except by committee -- it's non-trivial to get your good idea even tested by other people. It's easier to get the small project you care about to add the extra feature you want. Later other projects might notice this feature and pick it up. This is not duplicatio of effort -- this is about having parallel efforts to sift out good ideas. Having Gnome, Qt, Xforms and Motif all together [as well as Win32, Aqua, BeOS and whatnot] is essential for any one of them to have good features and a loyal userbase,
So light goes backwards in this doodad?
We're always looking for ways to make light go faster than C
This is a common misunderstanding. The light will always go forward, and never at a speed exceeding the speed of light. It's true that the index of refraction will be less than 1, not negative. However, it is a function of the phase velocity – the ratio of wavelength to frequency, which is a mathematical abstraction (the speed at which peaks of the wave travel). It can exceed 'c' as demonstrated here. The group velocity is the speed at which the information (and energy) contained in the wave travels. This can't exceed 'c' -- otherwise we'd have acausal physics.
Well, it's true that if you already possess a passport and want to copy it, it's essentially the same problem with and without an RFID. It's also true that the RFID chip does stop the basic hack of replacing the photo in the passport (since the data on the chip is persumably read-only, and the chip can't be replaced without mutilating the passport).
I think what the esteemed spokesman missed is the privacy implications (I can now read your passport without your knowledge). In particular, you can clone these passports without actually holding the original. In the past to clone a passport you needed the co-operation of its owner (if you steal a passport it's known to be stolen). Now you can make your own sure-to-be valid passport by just stepping into the airport and choosing an appropriate victim (someone who looks like you, perhaps?).
For another example why error bars matter, think back to the Florida Elections Debacle of 2000. Essentially, the errors inherent in the elections process were much greater than the effect that the balloting was supposed to measure, rendering the entire results meaningless. Of course, someone had to be declared a winner so as a matter of legal fiction, Mr. Bush was (rightfully, I suspect) declared to have carried the state. However, it is meaningless to talk about who really won the election -- the difference between the number of votes garnered by the two main candidates was much finer than our ability to measure who got more votes. The main sources of error are:
Disagreement about how to read ballots in principle [with chads? without chads?]
Errors in the human interpretation of actual ballots according to whatever definition we settle on.
If the real goal is to measure the voter intent as it putatively existed in the minds of the voters, we also have to consider:
Sorry, but I am detecting crap. The process of measuring something in real life has inheret errors built into it. I doubt Dr. Edelman can measure the fraction of dangerous search results so accurately so that decimal digits have any meaning. Given that his methodology is to perform particular searches, for example, it's not obvious that his search pattern exactly represents that of a typical user, that his definition of a dangerous site is accurate, or how big are the fluctuations in search result placement in the search engines. Actually, I doubt you can even define the parameter he's measuring accurately enough for the difference between 4.4% and 5% to make sense. Very telling is that at not point does the study bother to address the error bars of the methodology. This indicates that no-one has any idea what the results actually mean, and that we should treat them with grave suspicion.
Specifically, the implicit claim in the article that the difference between 4.4% and 5% is statistically significant is bougs. The real byline is "fraction of dangerous websites remains unchanged". The two numbers are clearly equal within any reasonable error of measurement. Note that Dr. Edelman's study does not actually make this comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
As an academic, I'd be the first to tell you: (high-quality) academic degrees are worth a lot if you are going to do research in that field. They are of little value for "general education" and life experience. Attending a top college is good for your networking and your resume, but otherwise I'd say only go to college if you want the education.
In this case, she was clearly doing the job well. Since we are no longer trying to predict how good she'll be at the job, her lying is irrelevant on that count, and if she had a research position, the story should have ended there (there are many professors with no undergrad or even grad degrees). However, she was Dean of Admissions. As such, she was in charge of using people's resumes for application purposes, and MIT would be sending an odd statement to future applicants by letting her keep her job had she not resigned.
You are confused. GP does refer to a proof that there is no sterile neutrino as claimed by LSND -- a proof based on cosmological data. The new "proof" is based on accelerator data. Good to see that they both give the same result.
Apologies -- this post uses a lot of technical jargon. However, the article is so badly written that I decided to post some remarks. And yes, I am a professional mathematician.
First, what they mapped was not the "structure" of the Lie group E_8 -- the structure of the group has been known for a long time. What they mapped is what are called the "representations" of the group E_8, which is part of Vogan's program to understand the "unitary dual" (=list of representations) for all (reductive) Lie groups.
Second, this has no relevance to grand unified theories. Even though a (compact) form of E_8 can be the gauge group of a GUT, the relevant representations are finite-dimensional and have been classified by Weyl decades ago.
Finally, this is an important result. It is relevant to number theory, and to abstract mathematics in general. The fact that a (finite) computer calculation can help determining an infinite list of representation is very nice.
I thought that treaty-making was a function reserved for the Executive Branch (subject to the "advice and consent" of the Senate; see article II, section 2 of the Constitution). So how can the two senators instruct the US delegation to do anything?
And I always thought that dissidents relocating their subsersive activities to these shores (the US of A) was a good thing(TM) ?
Someone must be a bit confused methinks. It is not now (and will never be) technologically feasible to keep a record of network traffic over any non-trivial amount of time.
Well, a NAT is a physical device. When functioning as such it will have two IP addresses -- one on the local network and one on the outside one. Contrary to your beliefs, TCP/IP packets only have one "source address" and one "destination address" fields. As an outgoing packet transits the NAT, the device overwrites the source address with its own (global internet-) address. When an incoming packet arrives, the NAT replaces the destination address (which is the NAT's global Internet address) with the correct local address and forwards the packet to the local network. In particular just by looking at the TCP/IP headers of a packet on the internet there's no way to tell if it was modified by a NAT or not.
What you need to understand is that the NAT does not use any addressing information in the packet header to tell which local computer the packet should go to. Rather, all this decision-making is internal to the NAT. The device keeps track of the connections the local computers have to the outside world (via port number etc). Depending on the port and the connection the packet belongs to it knows which local computer it is representing for the purposes of this particular packet.
In the same vein,
I think you misunderstand what a MAC address is. A MAC address is a physical address used by the wired ethernet (and wireless ethernet) protocols to allow several network cards to communicate on a single physical network. If you are on a computer outside this physical network then you have no way of determining the MAC addresses of any computers inside it (IP packet headers don't record MAC addresse, only IP addresses) -- except if the data payload of the packet included the information -- say if you sent your own MAC address in an e-mail. It is possible, however, that Windows records the MAC address of the network cards in the hardware profile in the registry. This could give an indication (but not a proof) that the hard-drive came from the computer it is claimed to have come from.
Regarding the "internal IP address range". As you can see in this wikipedia table, the address range 192.168.x.x (and a few others) are reserved for "private networks". Computers on the internet-at-large are assigned addresses in other ranges. In particular, if you connect to wireless access point, you will typically be assigned an address in a "private network" for the purposes of the internal network. Thus, if the KaZaa software is claiming to the outside world that it is running on a computer with an address in that range, then probably the computer is hiding behind a NAT -- while if it is claiming to be running on a computer with an IP address outside this range then this computer is probably directly connected to the internet.
PS: apologies about the lack of spacing in the parent post -- should have previewed before submitting.
Dear Mr. Beckerman, It seems that you misunderstood one point about IP addresses and NATs, which led to a lot of time wasted in the deposition. In a situation where the user's computer hides behind a NAT, it will still have an IP address on the local network (the one on which the user's computer and the NAT reside). The NAT will have two IP addresses (one on the local network and one on the global internet). In this setup, the IP address space on the local network is completely independent of the IP address space on the global one. The witness explained that the KaZaa software will determine the address of the computer it's running on and includes it in the data it transmits to the outside world, which data is available to other computers connected to the FastTrack network. The way the data gets to the outside world is by being bundled into TCP/IP packets, which carry on them addressing information for routing. It is this addressing information that gets rewritten by the NAT to implement IP masquerating. Now if the home computer is directly connected to the internet (say via dial-up or DSL) then it acts as its own router, and both the addressing (TCP/IP) information on the packet and the (application-generated) content of the packet will agree on the IP address. If the computer is hiding behind the NAT then the routing information on packets will show the IP address of the NAT (the one that was assigned by the ISP) while the KaZaa data in the packet will include the IP address of the software-running computer on the local network (typically in the address space 192.168.x.x which is reserved for such networks). By comparing these two pieces of information he was able to detect which scenario happened in this particular case. Note that I have no personal knowledge about the FastTrack protocol, so I can't say whether this is the way things actually work, but this is what the witness said and it sounds reasonable to me. (that would be the local, private, IP address in this scenario).
Hey -- this is simply a setuid root shell, a potential security hole as old as Unix. Apparently programmers never learn from experience. When I administer a system, a program which runs other programs based on user input doesn't get to be setuid root.
Actually, 35 USC 102 already limits patents to a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter". Facts of nature (such as the sequence of a gene) are not patentable -- though Congress in its infinite wisdon has declined to specificially add this to the law (as done in some countries). All that remains is for the court (that is, the CAFC) to actually care about the law.
What do this say about proxy services, then? These also store content which may be subject to copyright and serve it to users.
Based on project homepage, especially the list of parnters, it seems that this study was mostly financed by the EU. The secondary sources include interested parties (an association of Indian IT companies, Mitsubishi) and non-interested ones (e.g. the Soros foundation). This leads me to trust the study more than ones funded by Redhat and Microsoft.
Actually, a twin prime is a prime number n such that n+2 or n-2 is prime. In everyday English a "twin" is not a pair of people but a member of a pair [under certain assumptions, of course]. The same holds in mathematical English.
You almost got the time frame right. Actually, some of the founders considered the veto powers to be the main consitutional check on the lawmaking of congress. This view was shared by George Washington and James Madison. It was in 1803 that things changed, when the Supreme Court took it upon itself to be the arbiter of the constitutionality of laws (see Marbury v. Madison). In retrospect I think this was a good idea -- but even today not everybody agrees.
I alreayd wrote this in another post, but let me make the point again: to the extent Mr. Bush is saying "if we think we're looking at a letter bomb, we'll send the bomb squad first and worry about legal issues later", there's no controversy. However, considering past government behaviour under this president I would suspect that they would consider the current general "terrorism" paranoia to be sufficient to make the opening of any piece of mail they have a hunch about "reasonable".
In theory, you are quite right, since the president has not been in charge of interpreting the laws for a long time. In practice, however, very few acts of the "FedGov" are ever challenged in court – a large portion of your constitutional protections arise from what the government decides not to do, rather than from you retroactively getting a court order enforcing your rights. In particular, if the government decides to ignore a particular right, they can effectively nullify it.
Actually, to the extent that Mr. Bush is saying "if we believe there's a ticking bomb in a letter we will send the bomb squad in first and resolve the legal issues later", there is no controversey. Unfortunately, he also seems to be saying "if we believe the sender and reciever are contemplating un-american behaviour during a time of national emergency, we will read their mail first and put them on the no-fly list later".
A "Technical Note" on the talk page clarifies that the blocking of an IP address includes a ban on creating new user accounts. There's no discussion of what happens with existing accounts though.
This seems to be a technical weakness of Qatar's method of filtering the web access of its citizens. For a website which is accessible to everyone can, the IP address is the only way to distinguish visitors from each other. Now if the government of Qatar decided to hide all its citizen's IP addreses behind that of a proxy, then the citizens of Qatar should not be surprised when they cannot be distinguished from each other by web sites. Persumably Qataris who have Wikipedia user accounts (logons) would be able to edit anyway -- and others can petition their government to change its internet policy.
Imagine how good Microsoft Word and WordPerfect would be if there were not 200 other alternative. How good Minix and Xenix would be if there were no other x86 Unix-like operating systems ... Competition is good. People contribute code and ideas to the project they care about, not to the program they are supposed to be using. If there were only two options the people who really cared about the other alternatives wouldn't suddenly switch camp -- they would simply go site on the sideline, to everybody's loss.
Porting good ideas from one program to another is good by the way. In a big project, you can't get anything done except by committee -- it's non-trivial to get your good idea even tested by other people. It's easier to get the small project you care about to add the extra feature you want. Later other projects might notice this feature and pick it up. This is not duplicatio of effort -- this is about having parallel efforts to sift out good ideas. Having Gnome, Qt, Xforms and Motif all together [as well as Win32, Aqua, BeOS and whatnot] is essential for any one of them to have good features and a loyal userbase,
This is a common misunderstanding. The light will always go forward, and never at a speed exceeding the speed of light. It's true that the index of refraction will be less than 1, not negative. However, it is a function of the phase velocity – the ratio of wavelength to frequency, which is a mathematical abstraction (the speed at which peaks of the wave travel). It can exceed 'c' as demonstrated here. The group velocity is the speed at which the information (and energy) contained in the wave travels. This can't exceed 'c' -- otherwise we'd have acausal physics.
Well, it's true that if you already possess a passport and want to copy it, it's essentially the same problem with and without an RFID. It's also true that the RFID chip does stop the basic hack of replacing the photo in the passport (since the data on the chip is persumably read-only, and the chip can't be replaced without mutilating the passport). I think what the esteemed spokesman missed is the privacy implications (I can now read your passport without your knowledge). In particular, you can clone these passports without actually holding the original. In the past to clone a passport you needed the co-operation of its owner (if you steal a passport it's known to be stolen). Now you can make your own sure-to-be valid passport by just stepping into the airport and choosing an appropriate victim (someone who looks like you, perhaps?).
Disagreement about how to read ballots in principle [with chads? without chads?]
Errors in the human interpretation of actual ballots according to whatever definition we settle on. If the real goal is to measure the voter intent as it putatively existed in the minds of the voters, we also have to consider:
Errors by the human casting the ballot.
Sorry, but I am detecting crap. The process of measuring something in real life has inheret errors built into it. I doubt Dr. Edelman can measure the fraction of dangerous search results so accurately so that decimal digits have any meaning. Given that his methodology is to perform particular searches, for example, it's not obvious that his search pattern exactly represents that of a typical user, that his definition of a dangerous site is accurate, or how big are the fluctuations in search result placement in the search engines. Actually, I doubt you can even define the parameter he's measuring accurately enough for the difference between 4.4% and 5% to make sense. Very telling is that at not point does the study bother to address the error bars of the methodology. This indicates that no-one has any idea what the results actually mean, and that we should treat them with grave suspicion.
Specifically, the implicit claim in the article that the difference between 4.4% and 5% is statistically significant is bougs. The real byline is "fraction of dangerous websites remains unchanged". The two numbers are clearly equal within any reasonable error of measurement. Note that Dr. Edelman's study does not actually make this comparison.