Yes, you can accurately communicate the information, but you have to add 10-50% more words (or worse) to do so. That sounds like a "flaw" to me.
If the goal of a language is to communicate in the fewest number of grunts possible then every natively spoken tongue on the planet is extremely flawed. Given that no real language seem to be designed to optimize this (I suppose there might be some strange invented ones but even ones like esperanto don't seem to have this as their primary goal) I'd suggest that this is, in fact, NOT the primary aim of a language and so it cannot be said to be a flaw.
No, the author isn't wrong at all, he's just unwittingly exposed one of the flaws of the English language...
This is not a flaw in the English language - it is quite easy to accurately communicate the information. For example: "Microsoft has 13 retail stores in the US and will open its fourteenth on 20th October in Seattle's popular University Village shopping center, where...". If you choose to write ambiguously it is not a flaw in the language but a flaw in the author.
You can't blame everyone for speaking English as a second language.
No, but clearly he has either never written a paper about photons before otherwise he would know the correct spelling because the journal would catch it. This strongly suggests that he is outside his area of expertise.
True but the paper was written in english, not dutch. I wouldn't write 'Electron' when writing german since, in that language, it is spelt 'Elektron'. While it is an understandable mistake the fact that the author does not know the correct spelling suggests that either does not normally write papers or that he does not normally write papers about photons i.e. he is out of his area of expertise.
Maybe its because GPS understands relativity well enough to get planes to the correct runway...
GPS understands relativity well enough to require General Relativistic corrections. This paper suggests that the GPS clock is inaccurate and suffers a lag based on location which, since GPS requires accurate timing to pinpoint your location a 64ns time difference would put you 20m off your correct location. In addition the author uses a very simplistic model of GPS clock and satellite for getting the clock. I would also have assumed that the GPS clock is based on multiple satellites since it has to know your location to calculate the propagation delay and it does this by comparing one satellite clock to another.
However the final nail in the coffin is that he doesn't know how to spell photon (it is not spelt foton!)...so I have extreme doubts that this is paper is correct. In fact I'd need to hear from a GPS expert that his simplistic model is reasonable because I don't believe that it is (but then I'm not a GPS expert!).
A copy of a good lecture is worth much more than the live presentation of a bad one.
True, but a live presentation of a good lecture is worth much more than a copy of a good lecture. In addition you gain a lot of benefit from interacting with fellow students. It is amazing how much better your understanding can become when confronted by trying to explain a concept to a peer. In fact it is called peer instruction and does have scientific data (in as much as you can get good data) to support it.
It is certain that as your own intelligence increases to where you find yourself smarter than all but a fraction of a percent of the population, the ideas you have will be mostly correct but most other people won't be able to understand you.
That might be a common problem but if you are that smart you can usually explain yourself at an appropriate level if you take the time. Typically the problem arises from one of three things: the person is not as smart as they think they are and actually doesn't really understand what they are trying to explain as well as they think they do; the person doesn't really care whether you understand or not - they want to show off that they know something; or they are smart and did not stop to think that you are not as smart and as knowledgable about the subject as they are. Were the problem not solvable then the teaching profession would cease to exist.
Oh right, because the inevitable bullies giving him hell will do wonders for his social skills
It did for me. First it taught me how to avoid coming across as an arrogant bastard because I found school work simple as well as teaching me that not everyone found it so easy. Secondly, by getting over that hurdle, some of the guys who I'd pissed off with my attitude before realized that it was actually useful to get on well with someone who could help them with their homework (and NOT by doing it for them - by showing them how to do it). The result was a reasonable working relationship. Of course there were a few unstable individuals (one of whom apparently got arrested for armed robbery of a post office a few years after we left school!) but getting along well with most of the sporty-types generally solved that problem since they didn't like them either.
No he does not need a special mentor, nor does he need special schooling. He needs to learn to function in the normal world. This means learning to deal with people that might be less smart than he is. How many child prodigies have there been that fizzle out as adults because they simply cannot deal with the real world? No matter how smart you are you have to learn to deal with people to get anywhere - humans are social animals. If he is smart and motivated (and not being shoved by parents which I highly suspect otherwise why take exams?) then he will learn extra things on his own time according to his own interests.
You could do this with normal neutrinos - they's travel through the planet, not around it. However your receiver will be a bit on the large side. If they had FTL neutrinos they could do far better: they could receive the signal before they send it!
In 1987 there was supernova (SN1987A) in the large magellanic cloud which produced a burst of neutrinos in time with the light becoming visible (at least to within some hours accuracy) as seen in several detectors on earth.
A (very!) rough back of the envelope calculation would suggest that if the claimed effect is true of all neutrinos this neutrino burst would have been ~years earlier although the energy of the neutrinos is lower for an SN than an accelerator. So I'll need some convincing as to why these neutrinos did very clearly NOT travel faster-than-light. Since neutrinos barely notice ordinary matter it can hardly be a tunneling effect (which can make particles go FTL but not information) and the only other differences are that OPERA has muon, not electron neutrinos (at source) of a higher energy.
Details: CERN to Gran Sasso is O(10^5 m) and gives an O(10^-8s) time gain so the LMC is O(10^21m) away so, if the speed is the same, I'd expect an O(10^8s) time gain which is several years whereas they were observed in time enough to make the measurement one of the most stringent limits on neutrino mass at the time!
there comes a certain point where the creator is just being a dick and refusing to move on.
Actually I think it is far more of the former than the latter. I've no problem if he thinks he can make Star Wars better but that is not a reason to refuse to release the original version too. By doing that he is attempting to say that his judgement is superior to everyone else's which is just stupid. It's a subjective opinion: we all have our own point of view.
In the UK there are laws to prevent private owners of historically important property being idiots and making severe alterations to important buildings e.g. adding a modern concrete and glass extension to the side of a tudor mansion. the argument being that the owner has a duty to preserve the property for future generations to enjoy. Perhaps we ought to have similar laws for important cultural intellectual property which is privately owned, or at least some restriction on copyright to require the owner to make the original version of culturally important works available or else lose their copyright so that other can make it available.
But how is it any different from a new version of a computer program that has more efficient algorithms and fewer security vulnerabilities?
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Whether or not you like a film is a subjective decision - you cannot prove that one film/book/poem is better than another: we all have our own opinions. Hence any change to a work of art is bound to have those that like it and those who do not.
I guess a lot are missing out on the "just started a research group" part.
No, not really, I've been there and done that. Rather than waste time and effort putting together a tiny cluster (remember the budget is £4k!) you will be better off using a large cluster. Develop/test your algorithms on your desktop as much as possible and then submit to the large clusters. Yes there might be latency in getting the results but not as much latency as there will be running on a tiny cluster. In addition you can submit multiple jobs with different data and/or parameters to speed things up that way.
Plus 5 years from now the cluster will probably become desktops for grad students
Not really - you would need to buy monitors and rack mount cases are pretty hard to accomodate in an office. Certainly that did not happen with the cluster I had was tenure track (which was before these large grid clusters were available!).
No, engineering is not science in the same way that a reader of a book is not an author. Engineering uses science. If you need further proof just look at the vast majority of universities: science and engineering and separate faculties.
I thought CERN was all about science. What's this about building bridges?
CERN was founded in the post second world war period. Part of its aim was to build bridges between nations THROUGH science since it was well recognised that science provides a common goal to work towards and that scientists are usually pretty open minded about most things. It certainly worked for me - as a Brit I now have many friends and colleagues scattered around the globe from a huge variety of different national, cultural and religious backgrounds thanks to CERN.
Sorry but percentages are primary school maths. We are exposed to them frequently in the news, with interest rates etc. I'm sure the investigators in this case are well equipped to handle the average idiot criminal but if you are going to investigate a science-based case you should send someone with at least a basic grasp maths and some clue as to how science works if for no other reason that you have no context in which to evaluate the statements made by the person being investigated. It is not a proper investigation if you cannot evaluate whether the actions taken are reasonable or whether the statements being made are correct. He could probably have just sat there and told them that 11% was a calibration constant based on the aircraft they were using and they would not have had a clue.
Asking a high price for batteries is in no way an exploitation and is actually very useful from an efficiency standpoint
Only if you live in a world where everyone has plenty of money. Ever considered what happens when the price rises so high that those who need the goods cannot afford to buy them? Seems like a rich person making an ill-thought out argument about why they should be allowed to exploit people in trouble to make more money. As for the ambulance argument - please actually make an argument. If you cannot be bothered to do that I'm certainly not going to be bothered to listen to an hour long podcast by some random unknown person.
Why buy your own when you can use existing GRID infrastructure? For 4k you can't do much more that get a few decent desktops for yourself and a few grad students and/or postdocs. Rather than blow it on a massively underpowered cluster use the grid. I know the UK has massive clusters available to researchers so find out how to get an account and resources on them and use those. For test jobs, interactive analysis and other low latency tasks use your desktop.
In the case of HPCC's needs, this allows them to continue to own their entire product, and to list their entire product as an asset.
If it is very important that they completely own their product then I think that Open Source is the wrong strategy for them. I very much appreciate what you are trying to do but Open Source is a community effort and the community needs to be the one which owns the project (at least the open source verison of it). I simply would not trust a commercial company with my code. Sorry - HPCC may be very trustworthy but as your original article mentions many others are not (or get taken over, get a new CEO etc.) and giving away copyright is too high a price just because they would like to have some feeling of ownership.
The summary says they have to open source any resulting software and inventions.
The only way to do this is to patent it and THEN open source it....but this costs money. Since the patent goes to the first to file, even in the US now I believe, this is the only way to do it safely.
Now, if you had a work of the painted kind, it goes for sale in auction, a percentage has to go to the original artist.
It doesn't work like that. However if they keep extending the length of copyright then it will not be long before Leonardo da Vinci's heirs can start suing tourists photographing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.
I agree. I fail to understand the need to assign copyright. Surely the developer can just give HPCC a license to the code which includes the right to relicense the code under any commercial license they wish so long as they continue to support and release an open source version. Call this the HPCC Turkish Delight license and then just say that you are releasing your code under this license instead of GPL/.... By assigning copyright HPCC could use the code in a different, closed source product without compensating the developer in anyway.
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Yes, you can accurately communicate the information, but you have to add 10-50% more words (or worse) to do so. That sounds like a "flaw" to me.
If the goal of a language is to communicate in the fewest number of grunts possible then every natively spoken tongue on the planet is extremely flawed. Given that no real language seem to be designed to optimize this (I suppose there might be some strange invented ones but even ones like esperanto don't seem to have this as their primary goal) I'd suggest that this is, in fact, NOT the primary aim of a language and so it cannot be said to be a flaw.
No, the author isn't wrong at all, he's just unwittingly exposed one of the flaws of the English language...
This is not a flaw in the English language - it is quite easy to accurately communicate the information. For example: "Microsoft has 13 retail stores in the US and will open its fourteenth on 20th October in Seattle's popular University Village shopping center, where...". If you choose to write ambiguously it is not a flaw in the language but a flaw in the author.
You can't blame everyone for speaking English as a second language.
No, but clearly he has either never written a paper about photons before otherwise he would know the correct spelling because the journal would catch it. This strongly suggests that he is outside his area of expertise.
Not every language spells photon as such.
True but the paper was written in english, not dutch. I wouldn't write 'Electron' when writing german since, in that language, it is spelt 'Elektron'. While it is an understandable mistake the fact that the author does not know the correct spelling suggests that either does not normally write papers or that he does not normally write papers about photons i.e. he is out of his area of expertise.
Maybe its because GPS understands relativity well enough to get planes to the correct runway...
GPS understands relativity well enough to require General Relativistic corrections. This paper suggests that the GPS clock is inaccurate and suffers a lag based on location which, since GPS requires accurate timing to pinpoint your location a 64ns time difference would put you 20m off your correct location. In addition the author uses a very simplistic model of GPS clock and satellite for getting the clock. I would also have assumed that the GPS clock is based on multiple satellites since it has to know your location to calculate the propagation delay and it does this by comparing one satellite clock to another.
However the final nail in the coffin is that he doesn't know how to spell photon (it is not spelt foton!)...so I have extreme doubts that this is paper is correct. In fact I'd need to hear from a GPS expert that his simplistic model is reasonable because I don't believe that it is (but then I'm not a GPS expert!).
A copy of a good lecture is worth much more than the live presentation of a bad one.
True, but a live presentation of a good lecture is worth much more than a copy of a good lecture. In addition you gain a lot of benefit from interacting with fellow students. It is amazing how much better your understanding can become when confronted by trying to explain a concept to a peer. In fact it is called peer instruction and does have scientific data (in as much as you can get good data) to support it.
It is certain that as your own intelligence increases to where you find yourself smarter than all but a fraction of a percent of the population, the ideas you have will be mostly correct but most other people won't be able to understand you.
That might be a common problem but if you are that smart you can usually explain yourself at an appropriate level if you take the time. Typically the problem arises from one of three things: the person is not as smart as they think they are and actually doesn't really understand what they are trying to explain as well as they think they do; the person doesn't really care whether you understand or not - they want to show off that they know something; or they are smart and did not stop to think that you are not as smart and as knowledgable about the subject as they are. Were the problem not solvable then the teaching profession would cease to exist.
Oh right, because the inevitable bullies giving him hell will do wonders for his social skills
It did for me. First it taught me how to avoid coming across as an arrogant bastard because I found school work simple as well as teaching me that not everyone found it so easy. Secondly, by getting over that hurdle, some of the guys who I'd pissed off with my attitude before realized that it was actually useful to get on well with someone who could help them with their homework (and NOT by doing it for them - by showing them how to do it). The result was a reasonable working relationship. Of course there were a few unstable individuals (one of whom apparently got arrested for armed robbery of a post office a few years after we left school!) but getting along well with most of the sporty-types generally solved that problem since they didn't like them either.
No he does not need a special mentor, nor does he need special schooling. He needs to learn to function in the normal world. This means learning to deal with people that might be less smart than he is. How many child prodigies have there been that fizzle out as adults because they simply cannot deal with the real world? No matter how smart you are you have to learn to deal with people to get anywhere - humans are social animals. If he is smart and motivated (and not being shoved by parents which I highly suspect otherwise why take exams?) then he will learn extra things on his own time according to his own interests.
You could do this with normal neutrinos - they's travel through the planet, not around it. However your receiver will be a bit on the large side. If they had FTL neutrinos they could do far better: they could receive the signal before they send it!
In 1987 there was supernova (SN1987A) in the large magellanic cloud which produced a burst of neutrinos in time with the light becoming visible (at least to within some hours accuracy) as seen in several detectors on earth.
A (very!) rough back of the envelope calculation would suggest that if the claimed effect is true of all neutrinos this neutrino burst would have been ~years earlier although the energy of the neutrinos is lower for an SN than an accelerator. So I'll need some convincing as to why these neutrinos did very clearly NOT travel faster-than-light. Since neutrinos barely notice ordinary matter it can hardly be a tunneling effect (which can make particles go FTL but not information) and the only other differences are that OPERA has muon, not electron neutrinos (at source) of a higher energy.
Details: CERN to Gran Sasso is O(10^5 m) and gives an O(10^-8s) time gain so the LMC is O(10^21m) away so, if the speed is the same, I'd expect an O(10^8s) time gain which is several years whereas they were observed in time enough to make the measurement one of the most stringent limits on neutrino mass at the time!
there comes a certain point where the creator is just being a dick and refusing to move on.
Actually I think it is far more of the former than the latter. I've no problem if he thinks he can make Star Wars better but that is not a reason to refuse to release the original version too. By doing that he is attempting to say that his judgement is superior to everyone else's which is just stupid. It's a subjective opinion: we all have our own point of view.
In the UK there are laws to prevent private owners of historically important property being idiots and making severe alterations to important buildings e.g. adding a modern concrete and glass extension to the side of a tudor mansion. the argument being that the owner has a duty to preserve the property for future generations to enjoy. Perhaps we ought to have similar laws for important cultural intellectual property which is privately owned, or at least some restriction on copyright to require the owner to make the original version of culturally important works available or else lose their copyright so that other can make it available.
But how is it any different from a new version of a computer program that has more efficient algorithms and fewer security vulnerabilities?
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Whether or not you like a film is a subjective decision - you cannot prove that one film/book/poem is better than another: we all have our own opinions. Hence any change to a work of art is bound to have those that like it and those who do not.
I guess a lot are missing out on the "just started a research group" part.
No, not really, I've been there and done that. Rather than waste time and effort putting together a tiny cluster (remember the budget is £4k!) you will be better off using a large cluster. Develop/test your algorithms on your desktop as much as possible and then submit to the large clusters. Yes there might be latency in getting the results but not as much latency as there will be running on a tiny cluster. In addition you can submit multiple jobs with different data and/or parameters to speed things up that way.
Plus 5 years from now the cluster will probably become desktops for grad students
Not really - you would need to buy monitors and rack mount cases are pretty hard to accomodate in an office. Certainly that did not happen with the cluster I had was tenure track (which was before these large grid clusters were available!).
Politics have no business in science.
Accuracy does though - Israel is becoming and associate member NOT a full member of CERN. There is a difference!
Engineering is not science?
No, engineering is not science in the same way that a reader of a book is not an author. Engineering uses science. If you need further proof just look at the vast majority of universities: science and engineering and separate faculties.
I thought CERN was all about science. What's this about building bridges?
CERN was founded in the post second world war period. Part of its aim was to build bridges between nations THROUGH science since it was well recognised that science provides a common goal to work towards and that scientists are usually pretty open minded about most things. It certainly worked for me - as a Brit I now have many friends and colleagues scattered around the globe from a huge variety of different national, cultural and religious backgrounds thanks to CERN.
if one isn't that used to handling percentages
Sorry but percentages are primary school maths. We are exposed to them frequently in the news, with interest rates etc. I'm sure the investigators in this case are well equipped to handle the average idiot criminal but if you are going to investigate a science-based case you should send someone with at least a basic grasp maths and some clue as to how science works if for no other reason that you have no context in which to evaluate the statements made by the person being investigated. It is not a proper investigation if you cannot evaluate whether the actions taken are reasonable or whether the statements being made are correct. He could probably have just sat there and told them that 11% was a calibration constant based on the aircraft they were using and they would not have had a clue.
Asking a high price for batteries is in no way an exploitation and is actually very useful from an efficiency standpoint
Only if you live in a world where everyone has plenty of money. Ever considered what happens when the price rises so high that those who need the goods cannot afford to buy them? Seems like a rich person making an ill-thought out argument about why they should be allowed to exploit people in trouble to make more money. As for the ambulance argument - please actually make an argument. If you cannot be bothered to do that I'm certainly not going to be bothered to listen to an hour long podcast by some random unknown person.
Why buy your own when you can use existing GRID infrastructure? For 4k you can't do much more that get a few decent desktops for yourself and a few grad students and/or postdocs. Rather than blow it on a massively underpowered cluster use the grid. I know the UK has massive clusters available to researchers so find out how to get an account and resources on them and use those. For test jobs, interactive analysis and other low latency tasks use your desktop.
Because we’re nostalgic old farts, we’re also looking at making sure there’s a way for you to boot the board straight into BASIC.
Nice, but it won't be the same without the two tone beep!
In the case of HPCC's needs, this allows them to continue to own their entire product, and to list their entire product as an asset.
If it is very important that they completely own their product then I think that Open Source is the wrong strategy for them. I very much appreciate what you are trying to do but Open Source is a community effort and the community needs to be the one which owns the project (at least the open source verison of it). I simply would not trust a commercial company with my code. Sorry - HPCC may be very trustworthy but as your original article mentions many others are not (or get taken over, get a new CEO etc.) and giving away copyright is too high a price just because they would like to have some feeling of ownership.
The summary says they have to open source any resulting software and inventions.
The only way to do this is to patent it and THEN open source it....but this costs money. Since the patent goes to the first to file, even in the US now I believe, this is the only way to do it safely.
Now, if you had a work of the painted kind, it goes for sale in auction, a percentage has to go to the original artist.
It doesn't work like that. However if they keep extending the length of copyright then it will not be long before Leonardo da Vinci's heirs can start suing tourists photographing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.
I agree. I fail to understand the need to assign copyright. Surely the developer can just give HPCC a license to the code which includes the right to relicense the code under any commercial license they wish so long as they continue to support and release an open source version. Call this the HPCC Turkish Delight license and then just say that you are releasing your code under this license instead of GPL/.... By assigning copyright HPCC could use the code in a different, closed source product without compensating the developer in anyway.