And heck, those of you talking about a permanent Mars base: what about Luna? If we establish a permanent moonbase, we could set up an enormous linear motor tunnel that would make flights to Mars more practical and safer. With no atmosphere, such an accelerator could accelerate objects to very high speeds for escaping the gravity well.
Actually, as Zubrin points out, the delta-V to get to Mars is less than the delta-V to get to the moon, so stopping at the moon as a means to reaching Mars is not practical -- it would actually require more fuel.
The previous post said "in certain peer groups" (or something close to that:). With that qualification, it's true.
Certainly. I wasn't debating the truth of that statement. Rather, I noted that queers have managed to sanitize the word "queer" to a great extent -- I can call my queer friends queer without anyone taking offense. The same is not true for any ethnic slurs I can think of. They may be used within that group, but they are still taboo outside it. And rightly so, IMO. Whatever one might say about the neutrality of words, they do get poisoned by frequent contact with the mouths of biggots. So whereas Carlin's "seven dirty words" (shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits) don't bother me, I find n----r offensive.
Absolutely. The term is "reclaiming" words of abuse. It's a form of verbal judo. Take the words that your enemies use against you and make them work for you instead. The gay community is masterful at that. They didn't just reclaim queer, but also faggot and dyke. Those words don't seem to have the power to burn that they once had. I don't think the same is true for ethnic slurs. N-----r is still a nasty word, IMO.
I went to a symposium a year or so ago on the Sage system -- the first world's first air defense computer system. As a backdrop to the talks, there was this huge wall of vacuum tubes that was actually a tiny piece of the computer. Someone pointed out that all those tubes were actually quite valuable -- audiophiles are willing to pay a small fortune for them. One of the speakers at the symposium, Paul Edwards, wrote The Closed World, which discusses the role of the Cold War in the development of computer technology.
One thing that the networks have learned is that people love a disaster movie (or, better still, a disaster -- note obsessive nature of the news coverage whenever wind, rain or shaky ground cause sufficient mayhem). The fact that y2k is so topical makes it just too easy to pass up.
That said, I don't entirely share the view that y2k will pass without a hitch. The interesting thing to me about y2k is that no one really knows what's going to happen. Those predicting widespread disaster and the collapse of civilization are bound to find the rollover anti-climactic, but the simple truth is no one knows what to expect.
I do think problems directly due to technology are likely to be the least of our worries. The biggest problems will be second-order effects. Some people worried about failure of banks or the stock market will take their money out, which is actually a pretty good way to stimulate the collapse of banks and markets. Even people who don't fear the y2k bug will have enough fear of the herd mentality that they join the stampede.
Since governments are increasing the money supply to deal with increased withdrawls, and presumably would close banks if things got out of hand, outright failure of banks is unlikely. Similarly, for every person frantic to dump his or her stocks there will be someone else grateful for the bargain (I will be one of them:-). So worldwide economic collapse seems unlikely, but there will probably be some effect. No one really knows how much.
Also a concern are all the nuts out there who expect the end of the world or the collapse of civilization, and opportunists just waiting for a good occasion to loot. Again, no one really knows what to expect, since most of the kooks are keeping their plans to themselves.
As for me, I won't be stocking up on ammo, but just to be on the safe side, my y2k celebration will be strictly limited to technology available in 1900. Anyone have an old Victrola I could borrow?
Um, this was a GOOD study that showed that prayer does work.
No, it was an extremely flawed study, with weak, inconclusive results. To be fair, a study like this would be difficult to do well. As others pointed out, there is really no way to determine how much "uncontrolled" prayer the patients are getting, so even if there were an effect, it is not clear this study would be able to measure it.
The above poster is a damned anti-Christian zealot who will do something, anything, to attempt to discredit it.
I'm not anti-Christian. Granted, I'm not Christian, but I have friends and family members who are Christian, and while I don't share their beliefs, I don't attack them. However, I do attack bad science, which (IMHO) is what this study is. The page is certain to offend you, but here's an argument for why the Byrd study is bad. Many of the same arguments apply to the later one.
Well, let me fill you in on something: prayer does work! This post was a blatant and sickening attack on Christianity, and whoever moderated it up: I will be praying for you. Let's hope that God is as forgiving as I am.
Gosh, your post doesn't sound very forgiving, but thanks for the thought.
it is worth pointing out that, despite being widely cited by religious groups
To follow up on my own post, I realized that the article in question is not the one I was thinking of when I described it as "widely cited by religious groups." (I think it is destined to become so, but it is quite recent.) Actually, the article I was thinking of, by Byrd, is much worse! Again, patients who were prayed for took just as long to recover as patients who were not, despite the prayers being for a "rapid recovery." Byrd claims an overall benefit to the experimental group, but his results are not statistically significant. However, he uses highly questionable statistical techniques to massage the data into a "significant" result (in particular, the statistical analysis depends on independence of variables that are certainly not independent
I didn't actually know what study I was referring to. =) I only remember reading about it. That may well have been it -- but there coulld have been others, I'm sure.
There have been. If you read the discussion of related work in the article I pointed to, you'll find that most of the other studies mentioned produced statistically insignificant results.
It is also important to bear in mind that even if a result is "statistically significant," it could still be due to chance. The results in the paper I referenced have a 1/25 chance of being due to chance. If you have 25 such studies, you should expect one of them to give you a "significant" positive result.
Also - not implying that this is the case - but if the authors are doing anything fishy, such as coming up with the scoring function after seeing the results, then the odds of getting a favorable result are approximately 1.
Some studies have shown that hospital patients who are prayed for will statistically do better than patients who are not prayed for.
If you're referring to this, it is worth pointing out that, despite being widely cited by religious groups, the study really isn't all it's cracked up to be. About 1000 patients at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo were randomly assigned to be prayed for or not. The prayers were for "a speedy recovery with no complications." There was in fact no significant difference between the recovery times of the experimental and control groups. The researchers nonetheless managed to concoct a scoring system by which the experimental group did 10% better than the control group.
Some people might like their bloated word processors, but I'll stick with raw LaTeX, thanks. Doesn't suck down all my memory and I invariably get better output than that of any GUI word processor I've ever seen.
Agreed. The only time I use anything else is when I get some annoying Word files at work, or worse, am required to submit something in Word format. Usually then I fire up StarOffice. If WP does at least as well as soffice at importing word files, I would happily use it instead.
Somewhat offtopic: I recently started using LyX, basically a WYSIWYG front-end to LaTeX that's actually pretty cool. I find it nice when creating documents containing lots of greek to actually see what the formulas are going to look like. It even supports macros (though only in math mode). Plus, it's open source! I used it to write a conference paper submission and found it way smoother than hacking the raw LaTeX. Not everything is as intuitive as one might hope -- I had a few points of confusion early on, mainly because I didn't RTFM, but the developers were quite helpful and set me straight.
Granted, LyX still has some stability problems (i.e. it randomly dumps core) but since it makes emacs-stlye emergency backups, in addition to creating recovery files just before giving up the ghost, I've never lost a single keystroke of data, unlike some other word processors I've used.
Firstly, the evidence for tobacco causing cancer is statistical and epidemiological. When you deal with discrete cases, it's very hard to pin it on a single causal factor. Lawyers know this; expert witnesses know this, and they can team up and rip great big holes in a study-based argument. (This is why it was such a big jump for a tobacco executive to concede that tobacco could cause harm a couple of years ago; it was their collective policy to deny, deny, deny)
Agreed, but a big part of the reason for denying is that acknowledging that their product was harmful in itself would increase their liability. The really bad case for tobacco company liability would be (1) the companies knew the product was harmful (2) the customers didn't (3) the companies lied to the customers. Note that they went from saying their product wasn't harmful to the customers knew the risks and thus took it on themselves. The nail in the coffin was in the form of leaked reports on the harmfulness of tobacco and the addictiveness of nicotine. IANAL, but based on the cases I've read about, it would seem that if the tobacco companies had recalled all of their product when the first evidence of its harmfulness came to their attention, there would not have been much of a case against them.
Granted, just about any company other than a tobacco company would settle lawsuits out of court to save money, so even if a company was not negligent, they could still lose a bundle from lawsuits. Futhermore, jury trials are highly unpredictable, and they have a tendency to rob Goliath to pay David, even when David's case is weak. But I stand by my claim the the original poster was correct -- the company must be found negligent.
Secondly, big tobacco decided to play the hardest of all hardball and did so very well for decades, both inside and outside a court. They also played it on the political arena; tobacco was up there with aerospace and defense industries when it came to political donations in the eighties. This bought influence paid off handsomely. When the government turned against big tobacco, OTOH, that was the beginning of the end.
That was my point about employing a lot of lawyers. I should have mentioned lobbyists as well.
I'm afraid I can't agree with you here; the electromagnetic spectrum contains much nastiness, from gamma rays all the way down to sunburn.
Absolutely.
The problem isn't the frequency; it's the energy that is pumped through the device and how much is absorbed by the brain.
I can't tell if you mean frequency isn't the problem in general, or just in the case of the cell phones. In general, frequency is by far the larger problem. High-frequency radiation means high-energy photons. High energy photons do a lot of damage, such as ionizing molecules in your body and causing all sorts of nasty chemical reactions. If the molecules happen to be DNA, that can be bad.
Even in the case of the cell phones, if this turns out to be real, I think we'll find that the frequency is key. For example, we get bombarded with a lot of radiation every day in the form of visible light at much higher energy levels and (although no one's done a controlled experiment -- I hope), it doesn't seem like that causes memory loss. Maybe the skull is more transparent to microwaves than to visible light, or maybe something in the brain responds differently to microwaves.
You are posing an interersting thought experiment. I happen to think that, yes, if Slashdot's colour scheme turned out to rot the brain one day, Cmdr Taco should end up in the dock for it. However, damages should suit the crime: if there was no knowledge that it could call damage at the time, if there was no malice and no negligence, then damages should reflect that.
That Big Tobacco knew of and withheld evidence on the deadliness of tobacco was certainly an aggravating circumstance, but it wasn't the basis for the charges. When Big Tobacco started producing cigarettes which would eventually kill people, they were liable; when they found out it was deadly but decided to go on marketing it, they were malicious or negligent.
No, the original poster was correct. It isn't enough that the product causes harm -- you must prove negligence or worse. That's why the tobacco companies managed to get by for so long without losing a lawsuit (that, and employing a lot of lawyers).
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding about quantum computing, both in this post and in the replies to it (and on/. in general). The key idea behind quantum computing is to use "quantum superposition" to effectively perform many computations in parallel -- without requiring parallel hardware.
It is not just a single bit that can be in a superposition of states, but all the bits of the computation. (A superposition of states can be described as probability distribution over all the possible states the system could be in). Thus, the limit on the number of parallel computations in a binary quantum computer is 2^N, where N is the number of quantum bits (qubits) used in the computation.
The degree of parallelism this implies is staggering. Some problems that are believed to require exponential time to solve on a classical computer could be solved in polynomial time on a quantum computer. This includes factoring (think RSA encryption).
Some people overgeneralize and think that a quantum computer could solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. Unfortunately, that's not the case (or at least, hasn't been proven). To get an answer out of a quantum computer, you need to be able to get all of the exponentially many wrong solutions to somehow "cancel out," leaving the correct solution. Doing that in the general case is non-trivial and probably impossible. Quantum compilers are a long way off.
But so far, quantum computers have proven difficult to build. The problem is getting a useful computation without a "collapse" of the wave function. (A collapse is when the system rolls the dice or whatever it does, and settles on a single state to be in. Oops, there goes your parallelism!) The biggest quantum computer I've heard about has 2 qubits. An impressive achievement, but not quite ready to port Linux to.
Too often, they get around this by hiring some company to do the work and let them profit off the copyrights in addition to paying them for the work.
Unfortunately, that does happen. Though, based on my reading of the copyright law, I believe the practice of using copyright transfers to get around the requirement that government works be PD is expressly forbidden. However, IANAL.
The idea behind the law should be obvious: stuff developed with public money should be free for unrestricted use by the public who paid for it.
That is the opinion I most often hear, but I don't think that's the reason government works are PD. For example, as you pointed out, works developed by private contractors are generally owned by those contractors, even when the development was paid for entirely out of taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, even if the government owns a copyright, the work is still public property, in the same sense that government-owned streets or buildings are public property. You don't have "unrestricted use" of the streets, even though you paid for them, because the interests of the public at large are best served by imposing some restrictions.
Rather, I think the real reason government works aren't copyrighted is that there's no reason for them to be. The purpose of copyrights is to promote the development of valuable works for public consumption, by giving the creators the oportunity to profit from selling copies of the works, and thus an incentive to develop them. Works developed by the government are already developed specifically for the public good (at least in theory), so there's no need for an additional profit motive.
Of course, that doesn't explain government-owned patents.
I hate to see this stuff disappearing from the public domain into the chains of the GPL.
I think you're confused here. If something is in the public domain, it cannot disappear from the public domain unless all copies disappear. Furthermore, government agencies are required to make their (non-classified, PD) products available to the public at a reasonable fee (to cover costs), so just because government-developed software is released under the GPL doesn't mean you can't obtain a PD version.
However, anyone can take that PD software, make some trivial changes, copyright it and release the result as proprietary, GPL, or whatever.
I actually think in many ways the GPL serves the public better than releasing it PD. Look at the TIGER/LINE data that Bruce Parens released under the GPL. Before that, there were dozens and dozens of companies taking that data (acquired at considerable public expense), making proprietary modifications and reselling it. All perfectly legitimate, but also wasteful, since anyone who wanted commercial-quality maps that weren't subject to someone else's copyright would have to go back to the PD version and duplicate the work that has been done dozens of times before. On the other hand, any improvements made the the GPL'ed version will be free to everyone, so no one needs to reinvent the wheel.
I'm married to a geek (my wife and I are both CS PhDs), and I couldn't be happier. I know many other such couples who are also happy. It is not a question of whether she uses computers, but whether she's on the same wavelength as you. Do you enjoy the same books? Can you hold each other's interest in conversation? Do you get the same jokes? Do you like the same friends? Having a close intellectual relationship, along with a close emotional relationship, can be very fulfilling.
I also find that my wife is more understanding when I do something a non-geek would consider just too wierd, like staying up until dawn hacking or playing with some new toy. She understands, 'cause she's been there.
A woman just like you wouldn't be there for you when you wanted a hug. She'd be obsessively coding or posting on Slashdot herself, and would brush you off when you needed her.
Translation: if you are insensitive to your partner's needs, then you don't want a partner like you. We're agreed on that point, but on the same count, what would she want with you? Being a geek is no excuse for being insensitive.
I find that my wife is more understanding when I do something a non-geek would consider just too wierd, like staying up until dawn hacking or playing with some new toy. She understands, 'cause she's been there. We cut each other some slack, 'cause we recognize when the other person is in that place. Also, we hack together. Each of us spends more time at the computer than a non-geek partner would consider reasonable, but since we have two linux boxes and DSL, there's no resource conflict, so what's the problem?
Men involved in activities that demand long periods of intense concentration (programmers, artists, writers, musicians, etc.) need women who will respect what they do and help them do it well, not women who compete with them. We need what are now called "old fashioned girls" who don't mind cooking our meals, rubbing our sore shoulders, and running our bath water for us.
I can't begin to list the number of ways I find this offensive. Well, actually, I can, and will:
What you are describing is not a relationship of equals. Why can't you rub her shoulders, or cook meals for her? In my house, I do the cooking (because I enjoy playing with food) and my wife does the shopping (because she's the one with the car). But with most things, it's give and take. If I come home tired and sore, or destroy my body by spending too much time in front of the computer, she rubs my back. If she's the tired one, I pamper her. If we're both worn out and in need of pampering, we just cuddle together and order in food.
Why the assumption that the creative, intense person in the relationship is necessarily male? Yes, I know, you're male, as are a majority of geeks, but there are geek women out there.
Why the assumption that any woman who is your intellectual equal is "competing" with you? It sounds like you want a partner who will stand in your shadow, and not threaten your ego. Partners in a loving relationship don't compete, they cooperate, help each other, compensate for each other's weaknesses and add to each other's strengths. My wife is frighteningly smart, but I'm not threatened by that, because my wife isn't my adversay -- she's my ally!
Using the word "girl" interchangeably with "woman" is offensive to many women. If you're trying to attract intelligent, interesting, secure (read "feminist") women, laying off "girl" and "chick" might be a good start.
I don't think it's quite that simple. It's an unfortunate but inescapable fact that our bodies deteriorate with age (as I'm starting to discover...:-). It would be nice if our brains were immune, but they're not. The fact that we make new neurons is encouraging, but we make new cells throughout our bodies, and that doesn't stop the aging process.
Although it's possible that a simple tweak will completely prevent the slow slide into senility, I doubt it. The brain is a complex beast, and there are just too damn many things that can go wrong with it. Granted, I've met people lucky enough to remain very sharp late in their lives, and the wisdom that comes from experience often more than makes up for reduced mental agility, but the fact remains that the brain does suffer from old age.
The body is like a lot like a microsoft os: when you first start it up, it's in a fairly simple, clean, state, but the longer it runs, the more random cruft and unanticipated mutations it accumulates, until it becomes incredibly unstable and finally crashes. After all, both are a collection of hacks generated by the same design process: tweak the code and ship if, say, the mean time between failures is twice the expected period of operation. for windows, the expected period of operation is 8 hours (by then, the average user has shut it down for the night), so it should run, on average, for 16 hours before crashing. for the human body, it's about 25-35 years (by then, like any good hunter-gatherer, you've had your kids, raised them to maturity and been eaten by a saber-toothed tiger), so MTBF should be 50-70 years. with medical technology, that's been pushed back a bit, but we're operating way out of spec, and our bodies come with no warrantee, express or implied, regarding fitness of use for any purpose, including, but not limited to, survival, reproduction, or the ability to operate a computer in the wee ours of the morning while retaining sufficient mental capacity to post a reply to/. that doesn't degenerate into a rambling jumble of twisted metaphors, all different.
any resemblance between the above post and the writings of a sane person are purely coincidental.
They hated it. Washday was exactly that: an entire day. Cooking an evening meal for the family took most of the afternoon.
And just think how long it must have taken them to read their email with no computers to translate the telegraph signals for them.:-)
In all seriousness, a modern family limited to technology that was available 100 years ago would have a much harder time of it than families really did 100 years ago. We adjust, and optimize our behavior, based on the technology that's available. You mention spending an entire day doing laundry, but I'll bet those modern families insisted on wearing fresh clean clothes every day, and I'll bet that they didn't have nifty pre-washing-machine inventions like shirts with detatchable collars and cuffs (the collars and cuffs get dirty more quickly, and thus need to be washed more often). And they were probably much less skilled at doing laundry by hand.
Before the vacuum cleaner made it possible to have wall-to-wall carpet and clean it on a weekly basis, people took their rugs out and shook them, but probably not more than once or twice a year.
Anyone who has ever gone on an extended camping trip or bike tour knows that if you lower your standards enough, and hold your nose, you can accomplish common chores like laundry and cooking quite efficiently with very little technology, but it takes practice and it takes getting used to.
Certainly, we have a much higher standard of living today, and we smell a lot better, but if all those labor-saving devices are saving all that labor, how come everyone is still working so damn hard?
We die because it is advantageous to our species to die.
This is a commonly held belief, but natural selection doesn't work that way. Selection acts on individuals, not species. A trait that is benefitial to the individual (i.e., helps that individual reproduce) will always win out, even if it is harmful to the species as a whole. If longer-lived people passed on more of their genes than shorter-lived people, then soon the population would be made up only of the longer-lived people. Even if humanity as a whole were worse off because of it, it would still happen.
So if it's not for the benefit of humanity, why do we all self-destruct within a century or so? Well, evolution is all about compromises. Few of our ancestors lived long enough to die of heart attacks or cancer, since they were more likely to become some predator's lunch. So rather than optimizing for conditions that rarely happen, such old age, nature, like any good hacker, optimized for the common case: youth. Any mutation that increases our survival when we're young at the expense of killing us when were ancient is likely to have been selected for.
You'll find in lingustics as well that most people do not have a concurrently available vocabulary of thousands of words, in fact 5000 words is a lot even for an adult, you don't need nearly that to get along in society.
You and I have obviously been reading different linguistics texts. A non-native speaker visiting a foreign country could get by reasonably well with a vocabulary of 5000 words, but that is not a lot of words for a native adult speaker. In fact, it is not that much for a child.
The question of how many words a person knows cannot be answered very precisely -- in part because the question is ill-defined. Do you include derived words, or only root words? How well does the person need to know the meaning of the words? What about words that have multiple meanings? Do they count as one word or several?
However, once you settle on a definition of "knowing" a word, you can estimate the number of words a person knows by randomly selecting words from a dictionary of known size (preferably a very large dictionary) and conducting a little vocabulary test. The "known size" requirement of the dictionary isn't trivial, since you are presumably only interested in root words, whereas the publisher's word count will include compound words, whose meaning could be inferred from the root words.
Using the above approach, Nagy and Anderson at U. Illinois, estimated that the average high school grad knows 45,000 words. Throw in all the words that aren't listed in an English language dictionary, such as proper nouns, acronyms, recent slang, etc., and the count will be closer to 60,000. Averaged over the student's lifetime, this works out to learning an average of 10 or more words per day! I've read other, higher, estimates of the size of an adult vocabulary. I found this particular analysis in George A. Miller's The Science of Words.
IANAL (I am not a linguist), and I would be happy to be corrected by someone who is. But as someone who has struggled to learn foreign languages as an adult, I am well aware of how far 5000 words is from a passable adult vocabulary. If anyone else, like me, is interested in learning languages, you might find this web hack I wrote of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, "nastier" is a nasty word.
Absolutely. The term is "reclaiming" words of abuse. It's a form of verbal judo. Take the words that your enemies use against you and make them work for you instead. The gay community is masterful at that. They didn't just reclaim queer, but also faggot and dyke. Those words don't seem to have the power to burn that they once had. I don't think the same is true for ethnic slurs. N-----r is still a nasty word, IMO.
A nerd is someone who is fascinated by everything except how to dress.
That said, I don't entirely share the view that y2k will pass without a hitch. The interesting thing to me about y2k is that no one really knows what's going to happen. Those predicting widespread disaster and the collapse of civilization are bound to find the rollover anti-climactic, but the simple truth is no one knows what to expect.
I do think problems directly due to technology are likely to be the least of our worries. The biggest problems will be second-order effects. Some people worried about failure of banks or the stock market will take their money out, which is actually a pretty good way to stimulate the collapse of banks and markets. Even people who don't fear the y2k bug will have enough fear of the herd mentality that they join the stampede.
Since governments are increasing the money supply to deal with increased withdrawls, and presumably would close banks if things got out of hand, outright failure of banks is unlikely. Similarly, for every person frantic to dump his or her stocks there will be someone else grateful for the bargain (I will be one of them :-). So worldwide economic collapse seems unlikely, but there will probably be some effect. No one really knows how much.
Also a concern are all the nuts out there who expect the end of the world or the collapse of civilization, and opportunists just waiting for a good occasion to loot. Again, no one really knows what to expect, since most of the kooks are keeping their plans to themselves.
As for me, I won't be stocking up on ammo, but just to be on the safe side, my y2k celebration will be strictly limited to technology available in 1900. Anyone have an old Victrola I could borrow?
Okay, I'm a sucker. :-)
It is also important to bear in mind that even if a result is "statistically significant," it could still be due to chance. The results in the paper I referenced have a 1/25 chance of being due to chance. If you have 25 such studies, you should expect one of them to give you a "significant" positive result.
Also - not implying that this is the case - but if the authors are doing anything fishy, such as coming up with the scoring function after seeing the results, then the odds of getting a favorable result are approximately 1.
Somewhat offtopic: I recently started using LyX, basically a WYSIWYG front-end to LaTeX that's actually pretty cool. I find it nice when creating documents containing lots of greek to actually see what the formulas are going to look like. It even supports macros (though only in math mode). Plus, it's open source! I used it to write a conference paper submission and found it way smoother than hacking the raw LaTeX. Not everything is as intuitive as one might hope -- I had a few points of confusion early on, mainly because I didn't RTFM, but the developers were quite helpful and set me straight.
Granted, LyX still has some stability problems (i.e. it randomly dumps core) but since it makes emacs-stlye emergency backups, in addition to creating recovery files just before giving up the ghost, I've never lost a single keystroke of data, unlike some other word processors I've used.
Granted, just about any company other than a tobacco company would settle lawsuits out of court to save money, so even if a company was not negligent, they could still lose a bundle from lawsuits. Futhermore, jury trials are highly unpredictable, and they have a tendency to rob Goliath to pay David, even when David's case is weak. But I stand by my claim the the original poster was correct -- the company must be found negligent.
That was my point about employing a lot of lawyers. I should have mentioned lobbyists as well.Even in the case of the cell phones, if this turns out to be real, I think we'll find that the frequency is key. For example, we get bombarded with a lot of radiation every day in the form of visible light at much higher energy levels and (although no one's done a controlled experiment -- I hope), it doesn't seem like that causes memory loss. Maybe the skull is more transparent to microwaves than to visible light, or maybe something in the brain responds differently to microwaves.
No, the original poster was correct. It isn't enough that the product causes harm -- you must prove negligence or worse. That's why the tobacco companies managed to get by for so long without losing a lawsuit (that, and employing a lot of lawyers).It is not just a single bit that can be in a superposition of states, but all the bits of the computation. (A superposition of states can be described as probability distribution over all the possible states the system could be in). Thus, the limit on the number of parallel computations in a binary quantum computer is 2^N, where N is the number of quantum bits (qubits) used in the computation.
The degree of parallelism this implies is staggering. Some problems that are believed to require exponential time to solve on a classical computer could be solved in polynomial time on a quantum computer. This includes factoring (think RSA encryption).
Some people overgeneralize and think that a quantum computer could solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. Unfortunately, that's not the case (or at least, hasn't been proven). To get an answer out of a quantum computer, you need to be able to get all of the exponentially many wrong solutions to somehow "cancel out," leaving the correct solution. Doing that in the general case is non-trivial and probably impossible. Quantum compilers are a long way off.
But so far, quantum computers have proven difficult to build. The problem is getting a useful computation without a "collapse" of the wave function. (A collapse is when the system rolls the dice or whatever it does, and settles on a single state to be in. Oops, there goes your parallelism!) The biggest quantum computer I've heard about has 2 qubits. An impressive achievement, but not quite ready to port Linux to.
Rather, I think the real reason government works aren't copyrighted is that there's no reason for them to be. The purpose of copyrights is to promote the development of valuable works for public consumption, by giving the creators the oportunity to profit from selling copies of the works, and thus an incentive to develop them. Works developed by the government are already developed specifically for the public good (at least in theory), so there's no need for an additional profit motive.
Of course, that doesn't explain government-owned patents.
I think you're confused here. If something is in the public domain, it cannot disappear from the public domain unless all copies disappear. Furthermore, government agencies are required to make their (non-classified, PD) products available to the public at a reasonable fee (to cover costs), so just because government-developed software is released under the GPL doesn't mean you can't obtain a PD version.However, anyone can take that PD software, make some trivial changes, copyright it and release the result as proprietary, GPL, or whatever.
I actually think in many ways the GPL serves the public better than releasing it PD. Look at the TIGER/LINE data that Bruce Parens released under the GPL. Before that, there were dozens and dozens of companies taking that data (acquired at considerable public expense), making proprietary modifications and reselling it. All perfectly legitimate, but also wasteful, since anyone who wanted commercial-quality maps that weren't subject to someone else's copyright would have to go back to the PD version and duplicate the work that has been done dozens of times before. On the other hand, any improvements made the the GPL'ed version will be free to everyone, so no one needs to reinvent the wheel.
I'm married to a geek (my wife and I are both CS PhDs), and I couldn't be happier. I know many other such couples who are also happy. It is not a question of whether she uses computers, but whether she's on the same wavelength as you. Do you enjoy the same books? Can you hold each other's interest in conversation? Do you get the same jokes? Do you like the same friends? Having a close intellectual relationship, along with a close emotional relationship, can be very fulfilling.
I also find that my wife is more understanding when I do something a non-geek would consider just too wierd, like staying up until dawn hacking or playing with some new toy. She understands, 'cause she's been there.
Translation: if you are insensitive to your partner's needs, then you don't want a partner like you. We're agreed on that point, but on the same count, what would she want with you? Being a geek is no excuse for being insensitive.I find that my wife is more understanding when I do something a non-geek would consider just too wierd, like staying up until dawn hacking or playing with some new toy. She understands, 'cause she's been there. We cut each other some slack, 'cause we recognize when the other person is in that place. Also, we hack together. Each of us spends more time at the computer than a non-geek partner would consider reasonable, but since we have two linux boxes and DSL, there's no resource conflict, so what's the problem?
I can't begin to list the number of ways I find this offensive. Well, actually, I can, and will:Although it's possible that a simple tweak will completely prevent the slow slide into senility, I doubt it. The brain is a complex beast, and there are just too damn many things that can go wrong with it. Granted, I've met people lucky enough to remain very sharp late in their lives, and the wisdom that comes from experience often more than makes up for reduced mental agility, but the fact remains that the brain does suffer from old age.
The body is like a lot like a microsoft os: when you first start it up, it's in a fairly simple, clean, state, but the longer it runs, the more random cruft and unanticipated mutations it accumulates, until it becomes incredibly unstable and finally crashes. After all, both are a collection of hacks generated by the same design process: tweak the code and ship if, say, the mean time between failures is twice the expected period of operation. for windows, the expected period of operation is 8 hours (by then, the average user has shut it down for the night), so it should run, on average, for 16 hours before crashing. for the human body, it's about 25-35 years (by then, like any good hunter-gatherer, you've had your kids, raised them to maturity and been eaten by a saber-toothed tiger), so MTBF should be 50-70 years. with medical technology, that's been pushed back a bit, but we're operating way out of spec, and our bodies come with no warrantee, express or implied, regarding fitness of use for any purpose, including, but not limited to, survival, reproduction, or the ability to operate a computer in the wee ours of the morning while retaining sufficient mental capacity to post a reply to /. that doesn't degenerate into a rambling jumble of twisted metaphors, all different.
any resemblance between the above post and the writings of a sane person are purely coincidental.
And just think how long it must have taken them to read their email with no computers to translate the telegraph signals for them. :-)
In all seriousness, a modern family limited to technology that was available 100 years ago would have a much harder time of it than families really did 100 years ago. We adjust, and optimize our behavior, based on the technology that's available. You mention spending an entire day doing laundry, but I'll bet those modern families insisted on wearing fresh clean clothes every day, and I'll bet that they didn't have nifty pre-washing-machine inventions like shirts with detatchable collars and cuffs (the collars and cuffs get dirty more quickly, and thus need to be washed more often). And they were probably much less skilled at doing laundry by hand.
Before the vacuum cleaner made it possible to have wall-to-wall carpet and clean it on a weekly basis, people took their rugs out and shook them, but probably not more than once or twice a year.
Anyone who has ever gone on an extended camping trip or bike tour knows that if you lower your standards enough, and hold your nose, you can accomplish common chores like laundry and cooking quite efficiently with very little technology, but it takes practice and it takes getting used to.
Certainly, we have a much higher standard of living today, and we smell a lot better, but if all those labor-saving devices are saving all that labor, how come everyone is still working so damn hard?
So if it's not for the benefit of humanity, why do we all self-destruct within a century or so? Well, evolution is all about compromises. Few of our ancestors lived long enough to die of heart attacks or cancer, since they were more likely to become some predator's lunch. So rather than optimizing for conditions that rarely happen, such old age, nature, like any good hacker, optimized for the common case: youth. Any mutation that increases our survival when we're young at the expense of killing us when were ancient is likely to have been selected for.
The question of how many words a person knows cannot be answered very precisely -- in part because the question is ill-defined. Do you include derived words, or only root words? How well does the person need to know the meaning of the words? What about words that have multiple meanings? Do they count as one word or several?
However, once you settle on a definition of "knowing" a word, you can estimate the number of words a person knows by randomly selecting words from a dictionary of known size (preferably a very large dictionary) and conducting a little vocabulary test. The "known size" requirement of the dictionary isn't trivial, since you are presumably only interested in root words, whereas the publisher's word count will include compound words, whose meaning could be inferred from the root words.
Using the above approach, Nagy and Anderson at U. Illinois, estimated that the average high school grad knows 45,000 words. Throw in all the words that aren't listed in an English language dictionary, such as proper nouns, acronyms, recent slang, etc., and the count will be closer to 60,000. Averaged over the student's lifetime, this works out to learning an average of 10 or more words per day! I've read other, higher, estimates of the size of an adult vocabulary. I found this particular analysis in George A. Miller's The Science of Words.
IANAL (I am not a linguist), and I would be happy to be corrected by someone who is. But as someone who has struggled to learn foreign languages as an adult, I am well aware of how far 5000 words is from a passable adult vocabulary. If anyone else, like me, is interested in learning languages, you might find this web hack I wrote of interest.