Actually, what most Libertarians realize is that you cannot govern based on emotions, and that everything has a value.
For example, the latest just-approved medical treatment is usually very expensive (it may have cost $1bn to develop), while the treatments we had 10 years ago are cheaper, but not as effective. Should every medical plan have to cover the expensive option?
For a more stark example, six healthy British men nearly died while participating in a safety test for a new drug. Do you think it ok for drug companies (and indirectly, us consumers) to pay for people to risk their lives for this? Or is it wrong to ascribe a value to this?
Remember Carnivore? The US intelligence agencies have had for years the capability to analyze some of the Internet traffic going through the US. To do so they must have some direct connection to the backbone. Apparently AT&T has been providing some of the connection by I doubt that they are the only ones. Given that they were able to intercept communications in foreign countries I would surely expect them to be able to access the backbone even if no local company co-operated and hence I assume that anything I transmit unencrypted is accessible to US intelligence. So far this hasn't led me to encrypt any non-commercial communications.
On the policy side, this is an issue of trust and secrecy. This kind of intelligence operation is something you want to be available due to its good uses (and don't want to know about it), but you are afraid of because of the way the government can abuse it. The current administration has greatly reduced my trust in the professionalism of the US intelligence agencies to the point where I'm willing to support this kind of lawsuit.
For a (past) contest targeting the specific scenario I described above, see the Obfustcated V contest, which was the inspiration for Xcott's contest. The winning entry manages to only show its bias on the day of the election itself, but not before, so that it can satisfy serious testing.
This problem arises whenever you need to use software for an application that must be secure. One famous case of tampering was by the CIA; control software for a Soviet oil pipeline purchased in the West was modified to fail upon a remote command causing a massive explosion.
One hypothetical scenario: Diebold decide to act on their CEO's promise to deliver the election to the Republican party by making a small modification to their voting machines. If they can use the techniques this contest is looking for they would write the code so that it would escape even scrutiny by an outside agency (say, the government).
In general, the idea of the contest is to showcase ways of breaking security and therefore perhaps ways to overcome them.
Well, these are two separate questions that deserve separate answers:
1. Is it important to study highschool / college math?
That one is easy: the entire point of teaching mathematics to young people is to teach them how to think systematically (and quantitatively). Some basic math skills are important for everyone (arithmetic, order of magnitude) but the main goal of math ed is the way of thinking: how to solve problems, how to make logical arguments etc. The specific math problem you solve is irrelevant -- it's learning how to solve problems that is. The way of thinking you learn is math is the thing you'll later in life need in order to understand technical drawings, make the new design when you renovate your house, figure out if the crap a politician says about social security makes sense and prove that the computer program you wrote actually does what it's supposed to do. Knowing how to solve mathematical problems is also closely related to the skill of taking a toaster apart and putting is back together again.
Think back to gym class: unless you're a serious athlete you probably aren't using most of the specific skills you learned there. But learning how to be athletic and how to interact with your body is useful even if you never have to run a timed mile or compete in the high jump every again.
1. Are professional mathematicians doing useful work?
This is a lot more complicated. My view is that you can't tell which math will be useful someday (though most of it won't be) so you can't simply have directed research. Moreover most pure mathematicians do what they do because they enjoy it -- not because it will have applications outside math (otherwise they become applied mathematicians, engineers or scientists). This means that they won't do what society tells them is important but what they like doing. The main thing they give back to society is that they teach mathematics to college students. So society wants math education (and practically useful math results), mathematicians want to do research (even if it has no applications today), and they make a deal: society hires mathematicians to teach, understanding that they will spend some of their time doing research. The better the mathematician is, the less teaching society is asking him to do for the same amount of money (for example, Harvard professors are paid more and teach less [leaving them more time for research] than professors at a small liberal-arts college). The point is that if society asked me to teach so much I didn't have time to do research, I'd quit math altogether and both sides would lose.
Search Wikipedia entries, the articles, all links - no mention of iPod except in those annoying side adverts.
You seem to ascribe to Wikipedia a degree of authority and completeness that even the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't claim. Just because a connection isn't documented there doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This is not to say Carlsson's Theorem has anything to do with digital signal processing (it doesn't, of course).
What is the arithmetic factor in the asymptotics of the third moment of the Riemann zeta-function?
In more detail: If you integrate the nth power of the absolute value of the Riemann zeta function on the the critical line between heights -T and T and divide by 2T, you will get a sort of nth moment on average. Random matrix theory predicts the growth of this function to be asymptotic to a "geometric factor" (coming from an integral over the unitary group) times the n^2 power of the logarithm of T. It turned out that the random matrix theory prediction is off by an "arithmetic" factor, so that the correct asymptotics is
a(n)g(n) (log T)^(n^2)
where g(n) is the geometric factor from above and a(n) is a rational number. The article is about the prediction a(3)=42.
I agree -- but there should be a difference between giving your information to the governemnt (where you generally have to provide it) and private companies (where you generally don't have to interact with them). By this logic, your local telephone monopoly should have to provide you with telephone service at the regulated price without sharing your personal information. The tax preparation company should be allowed to refuse to work with you if you don't let them share your data.
It's not your data anymore. This is like you selling me a book and then trying to dictate what tone of voice I use while reading it aloud because it's your poetry.
Say you decided to sign a contract whereby you gave them the data and allowed them to use it for various purposes, in return for $10. If you didn't like the terms (e.g. you want more than $10, you want royalties, or you don't want them to have your data at all) them you should not have signed the contract in the first place. What the law should say is that they are not allowed to do anything with your information unless you explicitely sold it to them (just like I can't read your book in public without signing a contract while it's under copyright protection).
Since the main arguments for and against various tax reform proposals depend on much more serious problems with the US Federal tax system, I think the increased taxpayer privacy attribute of the national sales tax proposal is only of marginal importance in this field.
Moreover, I feel I must point out that naming your proposal the "FairTax" rather than the "National Sales Tax" is political demagoguery at its worst. This is without considering the merits of the proposal.
Well, this rule should not be too alarming -- as long as these companies are up-front about it. What I'd like to see is a premium price for privacy: for an extra $10 (or whatever the value of your personal data is), they promise to never share it. Think of it another way: there's a $10 discount for letting them share your data.
It would be different if you had to go through these people, but since there are alternatives [TurboTax?] I suspect the market will sort it out. If tax preparation software acquired a "phone home" behaviour I'd start getting concerned.
Not quite. For example, the "Euclidean Algorithm" appears in the "Elements". It is true that the guy (Al Khawarizmi) wrote a book (Al Jabr wa'l Muqqabala) describing the foundations of algebra. The word "algebra" derives from the title of the book. In arabic "Al Jabr" meant the distributive law.
The earth is round! (and the greeks knew it)
on
1001 Islamic Inventions
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
At #18, the Guardian notes that by the 9th century Muslim astronomers knew the Earth was round and had measured the circumference. The writer conveniently omits to mention that more than a thousand years before, the greek philosopher Eratosthenese has already done that. Certainly Muslim astronomy of the 9th century was far more advanced than European astronomy of the same time, but this article smacks to me of an attempt to say "everything was invented by a Islam". This is strengthed by #14 where they say "the zero was invented in India, but we use arabic numerals". I submit that the shape of the numerals is not very important, while the decimal notation and especially the concept of zero are the major invention here.
Aha! -- indeed they are responsible for investigating computer and telecommunication fraud. You got the love the number of law-enforcement agencies the USA has created.
Actually, I must disagree. People are not required to report their own past crimes, and neither are their lawyers. In fact, a criminal defense laywer is positively charged with helping his client getting away with it (assuming the client is guilty). That's a fundamental principle of the US adversarial criminal system, and goes hand in hand with the right to be free from self-incrimination. So, even though Diebold may have been guilty, it should be OK for them to enlist a lawyer in trying to get away with it, and enjoy privilege. Or perhaps you think that consultation with a laywer before you are officially charged should be not privileged, unlike ones afterwards?
On the other hand, knowledge of future criminal plans should not be subject to privilege. Of course this means plans the client intends to carry out despite advise to the contrary from the lawyer. In that case the lawyer might even have the duty to report his client to the authorities.
Just to be clear: copyright infringement is for the example given. We also have laws against industrial espionage, against misappropriation of trade secrets, etc. In this case the prosuection should be for breach of attorney-client privilege, and I think that the firm of Jones-Day (who hired this subcontractor) should also be prosecuted.
I would certainly have problems. Which is why there are laws against bugulary and criminal tresspass regardless of anything taken, and against unauthorized access to private data (including files and computers). I was merely saying that you reading my private diary should be prosecuted under a different law from you taking the physical object, rather than by claiming that you stole the "information" included in the diary.
The problem is that physical objects can only be owned and enjoyed by one person at a time. Information, on the other hand, can be easily copied and enjoyed by multiple people. If I borrow your CD and never give it back, you have lost the CD. I have clearly committed theft. On the other hand, if I borrow a CD, copy it, and give it back, your enjoyment of the CD is not being diminished and it is still in your possession. This was clearly not a case of theft. Unfortunately, if this was legal this would reduce the market for recording original CDs (I would have zero incentive to buy a CD if I could simply copy yours). I argue that the solution is not to make copying the information CD a crime of theft (they way the ??AA speak). Instead, the solution is to create a complete different crime, specifically related to information. That crime is called "copyright infringement".
IANAL either, but it seems to me that a law criminalizing the act of an employee revealing internal company documents makes sense, especially when this involved attorneys speculating on the legality of actions of their client. I mislike calling information "property" -- for the life of me I can't understand why this guy is being charged with theft -- but the I think the principle of this suit is sound and makes for good policy.
Now, whistleblowing is good, but part of attorney-client privilege is that people should be free to ask a lawyer "I've done X -- was that a crime?" and be able to rely on the lawyer's office to keep that discussion secret. This should have been handled differently if the leaker was an employee of Diebold, rather than a subcontractor for their laywer.
The blurb is highly misleading. No CDs were confiscated. Rather, the officer did the right thing: upon uncountering the "suspicious" distributor, he first contacted the copyright owner (the Mozilla Foundation) to ask what gives. In particular, no confiscated CDs had to be returned.
As another poster above points out, the Trading Standards Office should have been able to figure this out by reading the license, but you cannot fault them for going to the people who licensed the software initialy.
As Linus (and many others) have been saying for a long time, it will be impossible to release a GPLv3 kernel anyway. Copyrights to submission to the Linux kernel (mostly licensed under GPLv2 not v2 or later) have been retained by thousands of developers and companies, many of which will prove impossible to track down many years after the fact.
This means that this discussion does not pertain to the kernel -- we are simply discussing Linuss opinions on software licensing in the abstract. I happen to agree that some of the new clasues are problematic, but is Linus really an authority on licensing?
Regarding signed code, I understand why the FSF wants to say if the program only runs signed code, or only works with signed data, you have to provide means to sign code and data to the program, but I think thats taking it too far. The users of the program have the source code -- they can always make a derivate version which accepts code signed by them. I thought this freedom to modify was a central part of free software. The DRM clause is even worse. They attempt to say DRM effected by the program can be freely circumvented. But this is silly -- the legality of circumvention depends on the laws of the country where this happens. For example, in the US Im sure a judge will rule that whether the program ëffectively controls access should be determined objectively independently of any claims by the authors of the software. I simply fail to see how a software license can make a legal determination on the behaviour of derivate works when this behaviour was not present in the orignal program.
Actually, for technical issues Wikipedia articles seem to be ok -- people who write articles are people who care, and thus they usually have reasonable expertise. As a mathematician I can say that the Math articles are quite reasonable. Still can replace MathWorld, but if you need a definition you can look it up. Physics articles are not quite as good, mostly because of popular influences (tend to discuss popular controversies), but are rather reliable. Politics is a different kettle of fish -- because people have a stake and are rather more biased.
NASA does a lot of things -- not all directly involve space travel. This guy happens to be in charge of climate simulations; in particular we should listen to his opinion about how changing our behaviour might affect the climate.
What's more disturbing is the politicians telling us to "leave the policy decisions to [them]". While it's true that they are the one who will make decisions, they are not experts on anything -- we put them there to choose among options offered by experts. The scientists should be saying "if we don't do anything now, the climate situation will get worse". The politicians might then decide "doing something now will have more negative impact than the climate change it averts" (that's up to them), but they shouldn't try to diss the scientists.
My personal take: the politicians prefer lobbyists to be the ones offering the options, since in that case they are paid to make the right decision instead of having to think.
I'm not sure you can label the product as "defective". Software is too complicated to be labelled "defective" just becuase it has bugs. Moreover, I'm not sure you could legally require Microsoft to reveal every bug they know about, especially since the software you bought carried a prominent notice in the EULA saying, roughly "This software is not guaranteed to work; if it fails to function in some way it's not our problem -- you shouldn't have relied on it in the first place". They never promised the ACPI driver will actually work. Note that the GPL carries a similar clause.
That said, I'd rather rely on free software to function as advertized. When the big pieces fail (kernel, web broswer,...) fixes are usually quick since many experts are working transparently. When small pieces fail (my favorite editor) I can fix them myself and submit a patch.
The other solution, of course, is to pay for warranty. The problem is that no-one is willing to guarantee Windows will work, and that includes the hardware OEM -- I'm sure the people who make the laptop will say that they can't warranty someone else's OS.
Actually, this research will say next to nothing about string theory. The "string theory" mumbo-jumbo there is just hype. The IceCube experiment will (hopefully) see physics beyond the Standard Model, but it's a far cry from that to saying "this will test predictions of string theory". There are literally hundreds of models (many of them string-theory based) for what could happen. More importantly, the energy scale of the experiment will never detect anything "stringy" directly. It can only see the effective theory at that energy scale, in fact only a small piece of that. Whenver people hype an experiment as potentially providing "evidence for string theory" what they really hope for is "evidence for phsyics beyond the standard model".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, what most Libertarians realize is that you cannot govern based on emotions, and that everything has a value.
For example, the latest just-approved medical treatment is usually very expensive (it may have cost $1bn to develop), while the treatments we had 10 years ago are cheaper, but not as effective. Should every medical plan have to cover the expensive option?
For a more stark example, six healthy British men nearly died while participating in a safety test for a new drug. Do you think it ok for drug companies (and indirectly, us consumers) to pay for people to risk their lives for this? Or is it wrong to ascribe a value to this?
On the policy side, this is an issue of trust and secrecy. This kind of intelligence operation is something you want to be available due to its good uses (and don't want to know about it), but you are afraid of because of the way the government can abuse it. The current administration has greatly reduced my trust in the professionalism of the US intelligence agencies to the point where I'm willing to support this kind of lawsuit.
For a (past) contest targeting the specific scenario I described above, see the Obfustcated V contest, which was the inspiration for Xcott's contest. The winning entry manages to only show its bias on the day of the election itself, but not before, so that it can satisfy serious testing.
This problem arises whenever you need to use software for an application that must be secure. One famous case of tampering was by the CIA; control software for a Soviet oil pipeline purchased in the West was modified to fail upon a remote command causing a massive explosion.
One hypothetical scenario: Diebold decide to act on their CEO's promise to deliver the election to the Republican party by making a small modification to their voting machines. If they can use the techniques this contest is looking for they would write the code so that it would escape even scrutiny by an outside agency (say, the government).
In general, the idea of the contest is to showcase ways of breaking security and therefore perhaps ways to overcome them.
Well, these are two separate questions that deserve separate answers:
That one is easy: the entire point of teaching mathematics to young people is to teach them how to think systematically (and quantitatively). Some basic math skills are important for everyone (arithmetic, order of magnitude) but the main goal of math ed is the way of thinking: how to solve problems, how to make logical arguments etc. The specific math problem you solve is irrelevant -- it's learning how to solve problems that is. The way of thinking you learn is math is the thing you'll later in life need in order to understand technical drawings, make the new design when you renovate your house, figure out if the crap a politician says about social security makes sense and prove that the computer program you wrote actually does what it's supposed to do. Knowing how to solve mathematical problems is also closely related to the skill of taking a toaster apart and putting is back together again.Think back to gym class: unless you're a serious athlete you probably aren't using most of the specific skills you learned there. But learning how to be athletic and how to interact with your body is useful even if you never have to run a timed mile or compete in the high jump every again.
This is a lot more complicated. My view is that you can't tell which math will be useful someday (though most of it won't be) so you can't simply have directed research. Moreover most pure mathematicians do what they do because they enjoy it -- not because it will have applications outside math (otherwise they become applied mathematicians, engineers or scientists). This means that they won't do what society tells them is important but what they like doing. The main thing they give back to society is that they teach mathematics to college students. So society wants math education (and practically useful math results), mathematicians want to do research (even if it has no applications today), and they make a deal: society hires mathematicians to teach, understanding that they will spend some of their time doing research. The better the mathematician is, the less teaching society is asking him to do for the same amount of money (for example, Harvard professors are paid more and teach less [leaving them more time for research] than professors at a small liberal-arts college). The point is that if society asked me to teach so much I didn't have time to do research, I'd quit math altogether and both sides would lose.You seem to ascribe to Wikipedia a degree of authority and completeness that even the Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't claim. Just because a connection isn't documented there doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This is not to say Carlsson's Theorem has anything to do with digital signal processing (it doesn't, of course).
In fact, the question is:
In more detail: If you integrate the nth power of the absolute value of the Riemann zeta function on the the critical line between heights -T and T and divide by 2T, you will get a sort of nth moment on average. Random matrix theory predicts the growth of this function to be asymptotic to a "geometric factor" (coming from an integral over the unitary group) times the n^2 power of the logarithm of T. It turned out that the random matrix theory prediction is off by an "arithmetic" factor, so that the correct asymptotics is
where g(n) is the geometric factor from above and a(n) is a rational number. The article is about the prediction a(3)=42.I agree -- but there should be a difference between giving your information to the governemnt (where you generally have to provide it) and private companies (where you generally don't have to interact with them). By this logic, your local telephone monopoly should have to provide you with telephone service at the regulated price without sharing your personal information. The tax preparation company should be allowed to refuse to work with you if you don't let them share your data.
It's not your data anymore. This is like you selling me a book and then trying to dictate what tone of voice I use while reading it aloud because it's your poetry.
Say you decided to sign a contract whereby you gave them the data and allowed them to use it for various purposes, in return for $10. If you didn't like the terms (e.g. you want more than $10, you want royalties, or you don't want them to have your data at all) them you should not have signed the contract in the first place. What the law should say is that they are not allowed to do anything with your information unless you explicitely sold it to them (just like I can't read your book in public without signing a contract while it's under copyright protection).
Since the main arguments for and against various tax reform proposals depend on much more serious problems with the US Federal tax system, I think the increased taxpayer privacy attribute of the national sales tax proposal is only of marginal importance in this field. Moreover, I feel I must point out that naming your proposal the "FairTax" rather than the "National Sales Tax" is political demagoguery at its worst. This is without considering the merits of the proposal.
Well, this rule should not be too alarming -- as long as these companies are up-front about it. What I'd like to see is a premium price for privacy: for an extra $10 (or whatever the value of your personal data is), they promise to never share it. Think of it another way: there's a $10 discount for letting them share your data.
It would be different if you had to go through these people, but since there are alternatives [TurboTax?] I suspect the market will sort it out. If tax preparation software acquired a "phone home" behaviour I'd start getting concerned.
Not quite. For example, the "Euclidean Algorithm" appears in the "Elements". It is true that the guy (Al Khawarizmi) wrote a book (Al Jabr wa'l Muqqabala) describing the foundations of algebra. The word "algebra" derives from the title of the book. In arabic "Al Jabr" meant the distributive law.
At #18, the Guardian notes that by the 9th century Muslim astronomers knew the Earth was round and had measured the circumference. The writer conveniently omits to mention that more than a thousand years before, the greek philosopher Eratosthenese has already done that. Certainly Muslim astronomy of the 9th century was far more advanced than European astronomy of the same time, but this article smacks to me of an attempt to say "everything was invented by a Islam". This is strengthed by #14 where they say "the zero was invented in India, but we use arabic numerals". I submit that the shape of the numerals is not very important, while the decimal notation and especially the concept of zero are the major invention here.
Aha! -- indeed they are responsible for investigating computer and telecommunication fraud. You got the love the number of law-enforcement agencies the USA has created.
I wonder why illegal spamming comes under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service and not the FBI. This is not a treasury matter after all.
Actually, I must disagree. People are not required to report their own past crimes, and neither are their lawyers. In fact, a criminal defense laywer is positively charged with helping his client getting away with it (assuming the client is guilty). That's a fundamental principle of the US adversarial criminal system, and goes hand in hand with the right to be free from self-incrimination. So, even though Diebold may have been guilty, it should be OK for them to enlist a lawyer in trying to get away with it, and enjoy privilege. Or perhaps you think that consultation with a laywer before you are officially charged should be not privileged, unlike ones afterwards?
On the other hand, knowledge of future criminal plans should not be subject to privilege. Of course this means plans the client intends to carry out despite advise to the contrary from the lawyer. In that case the lawyer might even have the duty to report his client to the authorities.
Just to be clear: copyright infringement is for the example given. We also have laws against industrial espionage, against misappropriation of trade secrets, etc. In this case the prosuection should be for breach of attorney-client privilege, and I think that the firm of Jones-Day (who hired this subcontractor) should also be prosecuted.
I would certainly have problems. Which is why there are laws against bugulary and criminal tresspass regardless of anything taken, and against unauthorized access to private data (including files and computers). I was merely saying that you reading my private diary should be prosecuted under a different law from you taking the physical object, rather than by claiming that you stole the "information" included in the diary.
The problem is that physical objects can only be owned and enjoyed by one person at a time. Information, on the other hand, can be easily copied and enjoyed by multiple people. If I borrow your CD and never give it back, you have lost the CD. I have clearly committed theft. On the other hand, if I borrow a CD, copy it, and give it back, your enjoyment of the CD is not being diminished and it is still in your possession. This was clearly not a case of theft. Unfortunately, if this was legal this would reduce the market for recording original CDs (I would have zero incentive to buy a CD if I could simply copy yours). I argue that the solution is not to make copying the information CD a crime of theft (they way the ??AA speak). Instead, the solution is to create a complete different crime, specifically related to information. That crime is called "copyright infringement".
IANAL either, but it seems to me that a law criminalizing the act of an employee revealing internal company documents makes sense, especially when this involved attorneys speculating on the legality of actions of their client. I mislike calling information "property" -- for the life of me I can't understand why this guy is being charged with theft -- but the I think the principle of this suit is sound and makes for good policy.
Now, whistleblowing is good, but part of attorney-client privilege is that people should be free to ask a lawyer "I've done X -- was that a crime?" and be able to rely on the lawyer's office to keep that discussion secret. This should have been handled differently if the leaker was an employee of Diebold, rather than a subcontractor for their laywer.
The blurb is highly misleading. No CDs were confiscated. Rather, the officer did the right thing: upon uncountering the "suspicious" distributor, he first contacted the copyright owner (the Mozilla Foundation) to ask what gives. In particular, no confiscated CDs had to be returned.
As another poster above points out, the Trading Standards Office should have been able to figure this out by reading the license, but you cannot fault them for going to the people who licensed the software initialy.
As Linus (and many others) have been saying for a long time, it will be impossible to release a GPLv3 kernel anyway. Copyrights to submission to the Linux kernel (mostly licensed under GPLv2 not v2 or later) have been retained by thousands of developers and companies, many of which will prove impossible to track down many years after the fact.
This means that this discussion does not pertain to the kernel -- we are simply discussing Linuss opinions on software licensing in the abstract. I happen to agree that some of the new clasues are problematic, but is Linus really an authority on licensing?
Regarding signed code, I understand why the FSF wants to say if the program only runs signed code, or only works with signed data, you have to provide means to sign code and data to the program, but I think thats taking it too far. The users of the program have the source code -- they can always make a derivate version which accepts code signed by them. I thought this freedom to modify was a central part of free software. The DRM clause is even worse. They attempt to say DRM effected by the program can be freely circumvented. But this is silly -- the legality of circumvention depends on the laws of the country where this happens. For example, in the US Im sure a judge will rule that whether the program ëffectively controls access should be determined objectively independently of any claims by the authors of the software. I simply fail to see how a software license can make a legal determination on the behaviour of derivate works when this behaviour was not present in the orignal program.
Actually, for technical issues Wikipedia articles seem to be ok -- people who write articles are people who care, and thus they usually have reasonable expertise. As a mathematician I can say that the Math articles are quite reasonable. Still can replace MathWorld, but if you need a definition you can look it up. Physics articles are not quite as good, mostly because of popular influences (tend to discuss popular controversies), but are rather reliable. Politics is a different kettle of fish -- because people have a stake and are rather more biased.
NASA does a lot of things -- not all directly involve space travel. This guy happens to be in charge of climate simulations; in particular we should listen to his opinion about how changing our behaviour might affect the climate.
What's more disturbing is the politicians telling us to "leave the policy decisions to [them]". While it's true that they are the one who will make decisions, they are not experts on anything -- we put them there to choose among options offered by experts. The scientists should be saying "if we don't do anything now, the climate situation will get worse". The politicians might then decide "doing something now will have more negative impact than the climate change it averts" (that's up to them), but they shouldn't try to diss the scientists.
My personal take: the politicians prefer lobbyists to be the ones offering the options, since in that case they are paid to make the right decision instead of having to think.
I'm not sure you can label the product as "defective". Software is too complicated to be labelled "defective" just becuase it has bugs. Moreover, I'm not sure you could legally require Microsoft to reveal every bug they know about, especially since the software you bought carried a prominent notice in the EULA saying, roughly "This software is not guaranteed to work; if it fails to function in some way it's not our problem -- you shouldn't have relied on it in the first place". They never promised the ACPI driver will actually work. Note that the GPL carries a similar clause.
That said, I'd rather rely on free software to function as advertized. When the big pieces fail (kernel, web broswer, ...) fixes are usually quick since many experts are working transparently. When small pieces fail (my favorite editor) I can fix them myself and submit a patch.
The other solution, of course, is to pay for warranty. The problem is that no-one is willing to guarantee Windows will work, and that includes the hardware OEM -- I'm sure the people who make the laptop will say that they can't warranty someone else's OS.
Actually, this research will say next to nothing about string theory. The "string theory" mumbo-jumbo there is just hype. The IceCube experiment will (hopefully) see physics beyond the Standard Model, but it's a far cry from that to saying "this will test predictions of string theory". There are literally hundreds of models (many of them string-theory based) for what could happen. More importantly, the energy scale of the experiment will never detect anything "stringy" directly. It can only see the effective theory at that energy scale, in fact only a small piece of that. Whenver people hype an experiment as potentially providing "evidence for string theory" what they really hope for is "evidence for phsyics beyond the standard model".