The buyers of this item did not walk out of a store with the intent of not paying for goods.
Now, granted the GP was a troll, but I don't understand all the posts saying essentially this -- it seems quite likely that in this situation Amazon is legally in the wrong (or at least on very shaky ground). But I find it very hard to believe that more than a tiny fraction of the people who ordered the DVDs didn't realize something was wrong. Unless you have reason to think otherwise, it seems like the vast majority of these people realized the mistake and were trying to take advantage of it. This is legal, but not particularly ethical, and even if Amazon is wrong it's not like these people are innocent victims being taken advantage of by a big corporation -- the law may be in their favor, but most of them knowingly did the wrong thing.
Or to respond directly to your quote above: they did, quite literally, take the items with the intent of not paying for them. The moral issue is that they knew they were only able to do this because of a mistake on someone else's part, and even though they were able to not pay for it, that was not the intention behind the offer.
Well, its use is phenomenally widespread, and in many fields it is one of the best places to look for a general survey -- even in highly technical fields (for example, there are many times I've gotten better explanation of some topic in higher mathematics from Wikipedia than from my textbooks). I'm almost certain some of these were not included in the count of 1700 "good articles," just because if you only have 1700, having dozens of them on areas of math that 99.99% of people will have no interest or need for seems unlikely (how many people do you know who need to read about higher cohomology?). Thus, the "good article" status is almost certainly not a real measure of how many good (in the English sense, i.e. the opposite of bad) articles there are on Wikipedia. While having the "good article" distinction is useful since it can direct people to especially polished material, it is not at all a good idea to make the logical leap and conclude that all the other articles are bad.
There, that's a (credible, I hope) argument that Wikipedia is not failing, followed by a partial refutation of the article that it is (I don't have time for a more thorough discussion). So the answer to your question is yes -- now let's get back on topic and leave aside the FUD:-P
Oh come now, you can't just quote it arbitrarily, you have to use context!
In this case, the correct response to "Wikipedia isn't failing" was: "Yeah! I hear that donations to Wikipedia have tripled in the last six months." Other similar variations would also be accepted.
Pfft! Even a body means nothing. The dead body could still have been a clone, for example, or a robot, or from an alternate timeline / dimension, or even a real dead body could be resurrected with alien technology... or all of the above.
Superheroes don't die, their books just go on hiatus...
Well, obviously I was being sarcastic, but did you have a reply to my actual point rather than a general implication that people modded the post up by accident?
It's perfectly normal to expect that some things a person says will be generally reasonable and some other things will not be (unless it's possible to have a person who is 100% reasonable about everything, or 100% unreasonable. Maybe the latter could happen, I guess:-P) -- the post above mine was ignoring this obvious part of reality and implying (also sarcastically, I note, but you didn't mind there?) that the only explanation for people liking one thing Crichton says and disliking another is their preconceptions about his conclusions, rather than, say, the actual quality of his reasoning.
Not that I personally find the quality of his gene patents reasoning stellar, exactly, but it does not as blatantly ignore major sources/results as his global warming writing does...
Yeah, I know, it's crazy. It's almost as if someone's opinions in disparate subjects might be of different legitimacy! This is just like those stupid professors when I was in school... when I wrote a thoroughly researched paper that presented a clear and accurate picture of something, I'd get a good grade -- but then when I wrote a poorly researched paper that ignored major sources and was mostly a personal diatribe, I'd get a bad grade!
Is it evidence for ESP if I'm able to discern your identity?;)
More seriously, the experience you describe is fairly common. There are a number of normal factors that can cause this impression. It's related to the opposite phenomenon that an application that works perfectly whenever the developers use it can break within 30 seconds of a new user trying it. It's not that it worked, and now it doesn't -- it's that the standard use-paths and expectations of the program were heavily ingrained in the people who used it, so without even thinking about it they did what the program expected. As soon as a new user, who doesn't have all the expectations and officially-approved metaphors in his head uses it, it falls over.
Similarly, something that appears to be broken can start working as soon as someone who understands it well tries to use it. It's not supernatural, it's just a lot of little habits of understanding that people don't even really notice, but that develop automatically over years of experience.
Another contributing factor is that this common impression overrides occasional negative experiences (I can't count the number of hard drives that have died on me:-P but in common situation I still get a lot of "things just working," enough to make me forget the bad times). It's a sort of opposite to the "I'm always in the slow lane" experience in traffic jams.
A nice illustration is the following joke from the Hacker's Dictionary:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power
off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot
fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is
going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
This joke is funny precisely because so many people have had exactly this experience. I've had similar things happen to me many times, where I just look at the computer and (theoretically) do exactly what the previous user has been doing, only when I do it, it works. I doubt there's really anything supernatural about it, but after so many years of working with computers I automatically avoid potential problems because I understand how computers "think" (one reason a lot of techies prefer UNIX -- despite some limitations, its "thinking process" is extremely clear and consistent, allowing the "just works" experience more often for people who really know the system... Windows, even when stable, can have very erratic thinking patterns).
Look. With the trivial results they've produced, I have to say I just don't believe any of it. ESP doesn't exist. I'll even go further, and say that I'll never believe any of it.
"If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."
Whoa.... that's uncanny!
Maybe there is something in this after all...
(But wait... that would mean his prediction was wrong... agh!)
Boston had a legitimate bomb scare at a hospital on the same day.
So? Then the legitimate bomb scare should be in the news. But it isn't. Only the illegitimate one. If this is a real explanation for the reaction, it should be presented as such, instead of treating the devices like they really looked threatening.
The hoaxsters may have called in the bomb threat themselves, explaining why no other city reacted this way, and also why they are facing prosecution.
Nice begging the question there. They aren't hoaxsters unless they deliberately tried to make people think it was a bomb. You say they may have. If there is serious evidence of this, why isn't the story being presented in this way, instead of, as I already said, treating the devices like they really looked threatening? All the public figures I know of are justifying their actions based on how these really were appropriate reactions to the mere presence of the devices. No one has been saying they reacted that way purely because of a hypothetical bomb threat, and it doesn't seem like there's much (public) evidence for what you're suggesting. If I were justifying a reaction like this, I'd be sure to mention "and we received a bomb threat" at every opportunity...
The dread-haired guy videotaped police officers removing one of his devices and didn't step in to inform them of its benign nature.
So? So, maybe he passed up an opportunity to decrease the magnitude of the reaction. I'm not particularly defending the guys involved, it seems like they've made things a lot harder on themselves and they could have responded a lot better. But this is again a hypothetical scenario: I wasn't criticizing the people in charge because I believed that no one else could have done anything to stop it. I was criticizing them because even if nothing else had been done to stop this overreaction, they should have been able to handle it themselves. The fact that someone else could have improved the situation and didn't is no excuse, when the situation never should have gotten that bad in the first place.
I am surprised by the triple fallout ($2m settlement, CEO resignation, and criminal charges) but this lends further support to the theory that this was a deliberate hoax.
Hmm. So, legal action lends support to the theory that the person is guilty. Eh.
The guys seem to have been clueless. They don't seem to have incited a deliberate hoax, and if they did I don't understand why no one has bothered to mention this fact except by vague implications about how suspicious-looking the devices were.
Perhaps you're right -- unsurprisingly, there has been little coverage of who exactly is responsible for the bizarre overreaction, and most media seems to be ignoring the issue entirely by pretending the overreaction was justified. Sigh. It is plausible, though, that someone jumped the gun and signaled the alert (shut down the T, etc.) before there was really any information, and then just tried to mask that afterwards by not releasing the information that the bomb squad immediately realized there was nothing dangerous.
Such a scenario would still be really screwed up. But screwed up in a "bureaucratic ass-covering" way which, while still highly distasteful, is still more appealing to me than what I had been assuming, that is, that the people encouraging this response were the actual trained experts...
First: Not all of Massachusetts overreacted. I don't personally know anyone who reacted the way you describe. Certainly those people exist, but I don't believe there are nearly as many of them as you're suggesting. The fact that news agencies managed to find hysterical people here is not surprising, but doesn't say much about (1) the density of those people (in both senses:-P), or (2) what those people were reacting to. A lot of people were probably reacting strongly at first, knowing nothing except that the T was shut down and there were "dangerous-looking devices" found. Okay, they believed what they were told, and didn't know any more than that, some concern is appropriate. But we're past that now, and the fraction of people who both know the details of the event and believe the reaction was appropriate is not very large, at least not judging by every single reaction I've seen here (as opposed to the completely different ones I see in the paper -- and, for whatever it's worth, everyone I've talked to here is also annoyed at it being called a "hoax").
Second: I did vote for Governor Patrick. I'm glad I did, because he's already undone some of the damage done by the previous governor, and his opponent was running one of the worst smear campaigns I've ever seen (including the recent presidential runs), not to mention having a very disturbing platform in other ways. Saying that this one incident is my fault for voting that way, and completely ignoring every other possible issue facing the state, is a little ridiculous, to put it lightly.
I don't like Ted Kennedy either.
The fact that you even included the "Our troops are idiots" thing probably means I shouldn't have replied, since that kind of makes it clear that you aren't basing your comment on actual events that actually happened, but on how it can be spun if you take things out of context and consider every individual in an entire state in the worst possible light. I guess Fox News has probably been making fun of Massachusetts a lot since this incident...
Of course, your "People from Massachusetts are idiots" should also have clued me in. Oh well.
I live in Boston. The city screwed up, badly. Pretty much everyone I know thinks city officials made us look completely ridiculous. This was not a case of reasonable precautions, even, as they say, in a post-9/11 world.
All these people keep saying "But it could have been a bomb, you don't know!" or "Well if it had been a bomb, you'd be glad they responded the way they did!"
No. I agree wholeheartedly with the parent here. It couldn't have been a bomb. Literally, physically, something that looks like those devices could not possibly be an explosive device of any serious power, nothing that poses any danger to any structure or even any human who wasn't essentially holding them in his hands.
An ordinary person off the street might not know this. That's fine. But a bomb squad member damn well better know this, and it terrifies me that the bomb squad members in our city apparently don't. What the hell are they going to do if there is a real bomb, and they have to try and disable it without blowing up anything important? If they don't even have the basic grasp required to know there should be a payload, what exactly do they know about the construction of bombs? Seriously, I'm not nearly as bothered by the possibility of some terrorists planting a bomb as I am knowing that if there is a bomb, our trained professionals whose job it is to handle that sort of thing won't be able to do anything about it, even if they know where the bomb is and have plenty of extra time. What the hell is the bomb squad for?
If you're going to go that far, why not just learn to play guitar?
Well, there's a couple answers. As a related example, I absolutely love Wii Boxing (I've played my brother's system), but have no interest in actually learning how to box in real life. It's a completely different activity. I'm not using Guitar Hero as a stand-in for a real guitar, it's a fun activity all by itself (I've loved pretty much every rhythm game I've ever played).
Or, an alternate but related answer: I do have a guitar, and play it from time to time -- I'm not very good, but when I'm in the right mood it's a lot of fun. But it requires a drastically higher investment in terms of time, practice, concentration, etc., so I'm not likely to progress beyond the level of an occasional fun hobby, and I'm certainly unlikely to be able to play serious songs with a larger group -- guitar hero does approximate this kind of feel. And GH is something anyone can pick up -- I don't have any friends I can invite over to jam with on real instruments, but even people with no music experience can have fun hanging out and playing GH.
The bottom line is that GH is not at all like real guitar playing, and it's not really intended to be -- so while I'm sure there are many people who do both, they're fundamentally different activities with the only real common ground being the sense of rhythm required...
I've been waiting for this news for a long, long time.
However, what's with the assumption that the DS will get Guitar Hero? The actual quote is "In fiscal 2008, we'll double our offerings on DS and the Wii, including Spiderman, Shrek, Transformers, and Guitar Hero." -- it seems a peculiar assumption to make that every single one of those things is coming to both platforms. It was just a list of things they'll be bringing to Nintendo systems. Unless the company confirms this, I think it's a very odd interpretation to assume that this means the DS will get Guitar Hero.
That said, though... Guitar Hero on Wii. That single game was the biggest reason I've been tempted, for a long time, to buy a PS2 (there are other games I might play, but nothing else that was worth buying the system). Now, I know I can have it anyway if I just hold out a little while longer.
Now, if I could just find a store with the Wii in stock...:-P
OK, the opposite of this would be laid-back herb-toking free-love hippies. While it's true that such folk will be disinclined to kill each other in a jealous rage, but they are also not likely to be inclined to get into a tin can with no weed for three years and walk around on Mars collecting rocks they won't even get to keep or sell on EBay.
Good point. Any mars mission should involve plenty of weed and frequent sex. Thanks for the excellent advice!
I always knew I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up...
Of course, as you say "not ready" doesn't mean "doesn't work", but I would expect Apple to *at least* get Quicktime to function correctly.
Uhm, isn't that the point the GP was making? It does function correctly. At least, that's what people seem to be saying (I don't have Vista myself). So it isn't officially supported yet, so what? It would be kind of silly to declare "official support" before having the real, final, public version(s) of Vista so they can work out all the details (as opposed to the beta versions they can use to recognize major issues and minor things that may become issues if they last into the final version).
With minor exceptions, these applications work. They function correctly. They just don't have official support from Apple yet, but they will soon. Why is this even a slashdot story?
Honestly, I have no idea, and they haven't really said -- they claim to be able to do this, but nobody (that I've talked to) seems to have any idea how. I know the Ising model has so far received less attention on the CS side (I don't know much about that model personally besides the name), but I haven't heard any claims about anyone doing anything remotely close to what this group is claiming, seemingly out of nowhere.
If they really do have something substantial, presumably your question will be answered after the demo...
Quadratic Integer Programming != "quadratic equations" (though strictly speaking it does involve them). It's not about plugging in the quadratic formula or something, it's about optimizing over a set of quadratic inequalities. This is an NP-Complete problem, and I'm almost certain Babbage's computer was not built to solve an NP-Complete problem...
This could very well be snake oil, not in the sense that they don't have a device that solves what they say it does, but in their claims about the more general implications: (1) On such small inputs as we can assume they'll be using, of course it's trivial for any computer to solve that problem, so they aren't doing anything special. (2) As another poster points out, it's not even clear the extent to which this is really a "quantum computer." (3) Right now it's not even clear that it's theoretically possible for a quantum device to efficiently solve an NP-Complete problem (e.g. a quantum computer could, in theory, break your RSA key, though there are currently intractable engineering obstacles -- but it would be major news, regardless of engineering issues, if it was even theoretically possible to solve QIP efficiently). It seems odd that someone would announce a device that solves the problem (on very small inputs), without also announcing that e.g. this technique could be extended to larger inputs without exponential blowup (which after all is the only obstacle to solving the same problem classically).
Personally, I suspect that the device is partial snake oil in the sense that they are being misleading about how it really works, and that the algorithm is total snake oil in the sense that they don't really have an efficient algorithm for QIP in a more general quantum computing setting. But I guess we'll see...
No, the astonishing thing is that, even after the cops blew the thing apart with water (revealing a total lack of explosive components), they continued to tell the media that it was a suspicious device
Agreed. Of course someone walking by is going to be concerned about a device like that, and it's not reasonable to expect an average person to understand why it's ridiculous to suggest these devices are dangerous. And, once someone reports a possible bomb, of course the police should investigate. But a trained bomb squad member should have been able to look at it, laugh, disconnect the batteries, and move on. That's what made the incident so embarrassing to most people in the city (I live in Boston, and yes, most people here do think the whole incident was stupid) -- that even our trained professionals are apparently completely ignorant of how a bomb works...
Sort of true, but in the situation you describe, a proof that no such algorithm exists (e.g. finding integer zeroes of multivariate polynomials -- provably undecidable IIRC, which is a bit surprising) would commonly be considered to "resolve" the open question, even though it wasn't maybe the particular resolution we would have preferred.
However, in most (nearly all?) cases, open problems are not nearly so poorly specified: often there is a definite answer even if (as you point out) there may theoretically be no way to prove what that answer is. P=NP, for example, is definitely either true or false, though it is possible (though unlikely) that ZFC is not powerful enough to prove which. However, independence results are not nearly as common in mathematics as they are in popular imagination (except perhaps in formal logic, where they are one of the main subfields, and in some parts of set theory), and this is an obstacle that almost never comes up in practice.
I will agree, however, that the wording in the article is overly sloppy, and could have been rephrased in a way less likely to have confusing/ambiguous connotations...
Ah, the plague of "If we can make it into a bad analogy, then obviously it's okay."
Other people have pointed out that the physical behavior you described actually would be illegal and could have noticeable consequences. But I want to pick on the analogy itself: this was not a case of "it looked like the store was open, the door was unlocked, so I went in and messed around with things." The store did not look open. He did not enter through the front door. It was very clear that he was exploiting something that was not ever intended to happen -- at best, the analogy would be entering through an unlocked (or insufficiently locked) window when the store was clearly closed.
He may not have been doing this maliciously, but that does not mean he was somehow under the mistaken impression that myspace thought this was acceptable, or this hack was intended to be used.
Understanding technology has nothing to do with it -- a lot of computer people have this bizarre conflation of what can be done with what is acceptable to actually do. There are computers all over just waiting to be exploited, but if I release a worm that sets a picture of myself as the desktop background of 99% of Internet-connected Windows boxen, it doesn't matter that, in my own opinion, I didn't "hurt anybody," or that I was just "demonstrating a flaw to Microsoft" or whatever. Intent should be taken into account in sentencing (and I think in this case it was, or there probably would have been jail time), but that doesn't mean that wide scale vandalism should receive a mere slap on the wrist, just because computers are involved.
Now before we all cry bloody murder, why are we calling this a bribe?... That company doesn't have the scientific capability to refute the findings, so they are hiring scientists to document any and all shortcomings for them.
Wrong. If that was the case, they could certainly offer $10,000 to a scientist to perform a thorough review of the findings. It could even be an aggressive stance, i.e. "We will give you $10,000 if you go through these findings and find as many potential problems in it as you can." That's still ethical.
What is not ethical, and what they have done, is to say that they will give the $10,000 for scientists to disagree with the findings. Not for studying the findings, or looking for problems in the findings. The funding is contingent, not on a thorough and honest review of the findings, but on the conclusion. The difference is that in the former case, an honest scientist could do a thorough, conscientious examination of the findings, come to the conclusion "I found one or two issues that are a little fuzzy, but there aren't any major problems with the study," and still be paid for his work.
Instead, the funding can only go to people who disagree with the findings, whether or not the findings are legitimate. This is an unethical approach to research, and this is why this situation is completely different from e.g. the grant funding that many posters have compared it to. Any honest research funding must have built in the expectation that the study may not yield the expected (or even desired) outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
The buyers of this item did not walk out of a store with the intent of not paying for goods.
Now, granted the GP was a troll, but I don't understand all the posts saying essentially this -- it seems quite likely that in this situation Amazon is legally in the wrong (or at least on very shaky ground). But I find it very hard to believe that more than a tiny fraction of the people who ordered the DVDs didn't realize something was wrong. Unless you have reason to think otherwise, it seems like the vast majority of these people realized the mistake and were trying to take advantage of it. This is legal, but not particularly ethical, and even if Amazon is wrong it's not like these people are innocent victims being taken advantage of by a big corporation -- the law may be in their favor, but most of them knowingly did the wrong thing.
Or to respond directly to your quote above: they did, quite literally, take the items with the intent of not paying for them. The moral issue is that they knew they were only able to do this because of a mistake on someone else's part, and even though they were able to not pay for it, that was not the intention behind the offer.
Well, its use is phenomenally widespread, and in many fields it is one of the best places to look for a general survey -- even in highly technical fields (for example, there are many times I've gotten better explanation of some topic in higher mathematics from Wikipedia than from my textbooks). I'm almost certain some of these were not included in the count of 1700 "good articles," just because if you only have 1700, having dozens of them on areas of math that 99.99% of people will have no interest or need for seems unlikely (how many people do you know who need to read about higher cohomology?). Thus, the "good article" status is almost certainly not a real measure of how many good (in the English sense, i.e. the opposite of bad) articles there are on Wikipedia. While having the "good article" distinction is useful since it can direct people to especially polished material, it is not at all a good idea to make the logical leap and conclude that all the other articles are bad.
There, that's a (credible, I hope) argument that Wikipedia is not failing, followed by a partial refutation of the article that it is (I don't have time for a more thorough discussion). So the answer to your question is yes -- now let's get back on topic and leave aside the FUD :-P
Oh come now, you can't just quote it arbitrarily, you have to use context!
In this case, the correct response to "Wikipedia isn't failing" was: "Yeah! I hear that donations to Wikipedia have tripled in the last six months." Other similar variations would also be accepted.
No, you can't copyright a DNA sequence, as it's not something you explicitly created.
Patenting's all good, though :-P
Gee, that would be good. An X-Men storyline about the patent litigation following Jean Grey's next resurrection...
Pfft! Even a body means nothing. The dead body could still have been a clone, for example, or a robot, or from an alternate timeline / dimension, or even a real dead body could be resurrected with alien technology... or all of the above.
Superheroes don't die, their books just go on hiatus...
Well, obviously I was being sarcastic, but did you have a reply to my actual point rather than a general implication that people modded the post up by accident?
It's perfectly normal to expect that some things a person says will be generally reasonable and some other things will not be (unless it's possible to have a person who is 100% reasonable about everything, or 100% unreasonable. Maybe the latter could happen, I guess :-P) -- the post above mine was ignoring this obvious part of reality and implying (also sarcastically, I note, but you didn't mind there?) that the only explanation for people liking one thing Crichton says and disliking another is their preconceptions about his conclusions, rather than, say, the actual quality of his reasoning.
Not that I personally find the quality of his gene patents reasoning stellar, exactly, but it does not as blatantly ignore major sources/results as his global warming writing does...
Yeah, I know, it's crazy. It's almost as if someone's opinions in disparate subjects might be of different legitimacy! This is just like those stupid professors when I was in school... when I wrote a thoroughly researched paper that presented a clear and accurate picture of something, I'd get a good grade -- but then when I wrote a poorly researched paper that ignored major sources and was mostly a personal diatribe, I'd get a bad grade!
Let's have a little consistency, people.
Is it evidence for ESP if I'm able to discern your identity? ;)
More seriously, the experience you describe is fairly common. There are a number of normal factors that can cause this impression. It's related to the opposite phenomenon that an application that works perfectly whenever the developers use it can break within 30 seconds of a new user trying it. It's not that it worked, and now it doesn't -- it's that the standard use-paths and expectations of the program were heavily ingrained in the people who used it, so without even thinking about it they did what the program expected. As soon as a new user, who doesn't have all the expectations and officially-approved metaphors in his head uses it, it falls over.
Similarly, something that appears to be broken can start working as soon as someone who understands it well tries to use it. It's not supernatural, it's just a lot of little habits of understanding that people don't even really notice, but that develop automatically over years of experience.
Another contributing factor is that this common impression overrides occasional negative experiences (I can't count the number of hard drives that have died on me :-P but in common situation I still get a lot of "things just working," enough to make me forget the bad times). It's a sort of opposite to the "I'm always in the slow lane" experience in traffic jams.
A nice illustration is the following joke from the Hacker's Dictionary:
This joke is funny precisely because so many people have had exactly this experience. I've had similar things happen to me many times, where I just look at the computer and (theoretically) do exactly what the previous user has been doing, only when I do it, it works. I doubt there's really anything supernatural about it, but after so many years of working with computers I automatically avoid potential problems because I understand how computers "think" (one reason a lot of techies prefer UNIX -- despite some limitations, its "thinking process" is extremely clear and consistent, allowing the "just works" experience more often for people who really know the system... Windows, even when stable, can have very erratic thinking patterns).
Anyway. That's my take on it ;)
Look. With the trivial results they've produced, I have to say I just don't believe any of it. ESP doesn't exist. I'll even go further, and say that I'll never believe any of it.
"If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."
Whoa.... that's uncanny!
Maybe there is something in this after all...
(But wait... that would mean his prediction was wrong... agh!)
Always!
Hmm... you "hope I'm aware that":
Boston had a legitimate bomb scare at a hospital on the same day.
So? Then the legitimate bomb scare should be in the news. But it isn't. Only the illegitimate one. If this is a real explanation for the reaction, it should be presented as such, instead of treating the devices like they really looked threatening.
The hoaxsters may have called in the bomb threat themselves, explaining why no other city reacted this way, and also why they are facing prosecution.
Nice begging the question there. They aren't hoaxsters unless they deliberately tried to make people think it was a bomb. You say they may have. If there is serious evidence of this, why isn't the story being presented in this way, instead of, as I already said, treating the devices like they really looked threatening? All the public figures I know of are justifying their actions based on how these really were appropriate reactions to the mere presence of the devices. No one has been saying they reacted that way purely because of a hypothetical bomb threat, and it doesn't seem like there's much (public) evidence for what you're suggesting. If I were justifying a reaction like this, I'd be sure to mention "and we received a bomb threat" at every opportunity...
The dread-haired guy videotaped police officers removing one of his devices and didn't step in to inform them of its benign nature.
So? So, maybe he passed up an opportunity to decrease the magnitude of the reaction. I'm not particularly defending the guys involved, it seems like they've made things a lot harder on themselves and they could have responded a lot better. But this is again a hypothetical scenario: I wasn't criticizing the people in charge because I believed that no one else could have done anything to stop it. I was criticizing them because even if nothing else had been done to stop this overreaction, they should have been able to handle it themselves. The fact that someone else could have improved the situation and didn't is no excuse, when the situation never should have gotten that bad in the first place.
I am surprised by the triple fallout ($2m settlement, CEO resignation, and criminal charges) but this lends further support to the theory that this was a deliberate hoax.
Hmm. So, legal action lends support to the theory that the person is guilty. Eh.
The guys seem to have been clueless. They don't seem to have incited a deliberate hoax, and if they did I don't understand why no one has bothered to mention this fact except by vague implications about how suspicious-looking the devices were.
Perhaps you're right -- unsurprisingly, there has been little coverage of who exactly is responsible for the bizarre overreaction, and most media seems to be ignoring the issue entirely by pretending the overreaction was justified. Sigh. It is plausible, though, that someone jumped the gun and signaled the alert (shut down the T, etc.) before there was really any information, and then just tried to mask that afterwards by not releasing the information that the bomb squad immediately realized there was nothing dangerous.
Such a scenario would still be really screwed up. But screwed up in a "bureaucratic ass-covering" way which, while still highly distasteful, is still more appealing to me than what I had been assuming, that is, that the people encouraging this response were the actual trained experts...
Uhm.
Alright, this is a troll, but whatever.
First: Not all of Massachusetts overreacted. I don't personally know anyone who reacted the way you describe. Certainly those people exist, but I don't believe there are nearly as many of them as you're suggesting. The fact that news agencies managed to find hysterical people here is not surprising, but doesn't say much about (1) the density of those people (in both senses :-P), or (2) what those people were reacting to. A lot of people were probably reacting strongly at first, knowing nothing except that the T was shut down and there were "dangerous-looking devices" found. Okay, they believed what they were told, and didn't know any more than that, some concern is appropriate. But we're past that now, and the fraction of people who both know the details of the event and believe the reaction was appropriate is not very large, at least not judging by every single reaction I've seen here (as opposed to the completely different ones I see in the paper -- and, for whatever it's worth, everyone I've talked to here is also annoyed at it being called a "hoax").
Second: I did vote for Governor Patrick. I'm glad I did, because he's already undone some of the damage done by the previous governor, and his opponent was running one of the worst smear campaigns I've ever seen (including the recent presidential runs), not to mention having a very disturbing platform in other ways. Saying that this one incident is my fault for voting that way, and completely ignoring every other possible issue facing the state, is a little ridiculous, to put it lightly.
I don't like Ted Kennedy either.
The fact that you even included the "Our troops are idiots" thing probably means I shouldn't have replied, since that kind of makes it clear that you aren't basing your comment on actual events that actually happened, but on how it can be spun if you take things out of context and consider every individual in an entire state in the worst possible light. I guess Fox News has probably been making fun of Massachusetts a lot since this incident...
Of course, your "People from Massachusetts are idiots" should also have clued me in. Oh well.
Mod parent up.
I live in Boston. The city screwed up, badly. Pretty much everyone I know thinks city officials made us look completely ridiculous. This was not a case of reasonable precautions, even, as they say, in a post-9/11 world.
All these people keep saying "But it could have been a bomb, you don't know!" or "Well if it had been a bomb, you'd be glad they responded the way they did!"
No. I agree wholeheartedly with the parent here. It couldn't have been a bomb. Literally, physically, something that looks like those devices could not possibly be an explosive device of any serious power, nothing that poses any danger to any structure or even any human who wasn't essentially holding them in his hands.
An ordinary person off the street might not know this. That's fine. But a bomb squad member damn well better know this, and it terrifies me that the bomb squad members in our city apparently don't. What the hell are they going to do if there is a real bomb, and they have to try and disable it without blowing up anything important? If they don't even have the basic grasp required to know there should be a payload, what exactly do they know about the construction of bombs? Seriously, I'm not nearly as bothered by the possibility of some terrorists planting a bomb as I am knowing that if there is a bomb, our trained professionals whose job it is to handle that sort of thing won't be able to do anything about it, even if they know where the bomb is and have plenty of extra time. What the hell is the bomb squad for?
If you're going to go that far, why not just learn to play guitar?
Well, there's a couple answers. As a related example, I absolutely love Wii Boxing (I've played my brother's system), but have no interest in actually learning how to box in real life. It's a completely different activity. I'm not using Guitar Hero as a stand-in for a real guitar, it's a fun activity all by itself (I've loved pretty much every rhythm game I've ever played).
Or, an alternate but related answer: I do have a guitar, and play it from time to time -- I'm not very good, but when I'm in the right mood it's a lot of fun. But it requires a drastically higher investment in terms of time, practice, concentration, etc., so I'm not likely to progress beyond the level of an occasional fun hobby, and I'm certainly unlikely to be able to play serious songs with a larger group -- guitar hero does approximate this kind of feel. And GH is something anyone can pick up -- I don't have any friends I can invite over to jam with on real instruments, but even people with no music experience can have fun hanging out and playing GH.
The bottom line is that GH is not at all like real guitar playing, and it's not really intended to be -- so while I'm sure there are many people who do both, they're fundamentally different activities with the only real common ground being the sense of rhythm required...
I've been waiting for this news for a long, long time.
However, what's with the assumption that the DS will get Guitar Hero? The actual quote is "In fiscal 2008, we'll double our offerings on DS and the Wii, including Spiderman, Shrek, Transformers, and Guitar Hero." -- it seems a peculiar assumption to make that every single one of those things is coming to both platforms. It was just a list of things they'll be bringing to Nintendo systems. Unless the company confirms this, I think it's a very odd interpretation to assume that this means the DS will get Guitar Hero.
That said, though... Guitar Hero on Wii. That single game was the biggest reason I've been tempted, for a long time, to buy a PS2 (there are other games I might play, but nothing else that was worth buying the system). Now, I know I can have it anyway if I just hold out a little while longer.
Now, if I could just find a store with the Wii in stock... :-P
OK, the opposite of this would be laid-back herb-toking free-love hippies. While it's true that such folk will be disinclined to kill each other in a jealous rage, but they are also not likely to be inclined to get into a tin can with no weed for three years and walk around on Mars collecting rocks they won't even get to keep or sell on EBay.
Good point. Any mars mission should involve plenty of weed and frequent sex. Thanks for the excellent advice!
I always knew I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up...
Of course, as you say "not ready" doesn't mean "doesn't work", but I would expect Apple to *at least* get Quicktime to function correctly.
Uhm, isn't that the point the GP was making? It does function correctly. At least, that's what people seem to be saying (I don't have Vista myself). So it isn't officially supported yet, so what? It would be kind of silly to declare "official support" before having the real, final, public version(s) of Vista so they can work out all the details (as opposed to the beta versions they can use to recognize major issues and minor things that may become issues if they last into the final version).
With minor exceptions, these applications work. They function correctly. They just don't have official support from Apple yet, but they will soon. Why is this even a slashdot story?
Honestly, I have no idea, and they haven't really said -- they claim to be able to do this, but nobody (that I've talked to) seems to have any idea how. I know the Ising model has so far received less attention on the CS side (I don't know much about that model personally besides the name), but I haven't heard any claims about anyone doing anything remotely close to what this group is claiming, seemingly out of nowhere.
If they really do have something substantial, presumably your question will be answered after the demo...
Quadratic Integer Programming != "quadratic equations" (though strictly speaking it does involve them). It's not about plugging in the quadratic formula or something, it's about optimizing over a set of quadratic inequalities. This is an NP-Complete problem, and I'm almost certain Babbage's computer was not built to solve an NP-Complete problem...
This could very well be snake oil, not in the sense that they don't have a device that solves what they say it does, but in their claims about the more general implications: (1) On such small inputs as we can assume they'll be using, of course it's trivial for any computer to solve that problem, so they aren't doing anything special. (2) As another poster points out, it's not even clear the extent to which this is really a "quantum computer." (3) Right now it's not even clear that it's theoretically possible for a quantum device to efficiently solve an NP-Complete problem (e.g. a quantum computer could, in theory, break your RSA key, though there are currently intractable engineering obstacles -- but it would be major news, regardless of engineering issues, if it was even theoretically possible to solve QIP efficiently). It seems odd that someone would announce a device that solves the problem (on very small inputs), without also announcing that e.g. this technique could be extended to larger inputs without exponential blowup (which after all is the only obstacle to solving the same problem classically).
Personally, I suspect that the device is partial snake oil in the sense that they are being misleading about how it really works, and that the algorithm is total snake oil in the sense that they don't really have an efficient algorithm for QIP in a more general quantum computing setting. But I guess we'll see...
IIATheoretical Computer Scientist
No, the astonishing thing is that, even after the cops blew the thing apart with water (revealing a total lack of explosive components), they continued to tell the media that it was a suspicious device
Agreed. Of course someone walking by is going to be concerned about a device like that, and it's not reasonable to expect an average person to understand why it's ridiculous to suggest these devices are dangerous. And, once someone reports a possible bomb, of course the police should investigate. But a trained bomb squad member should have been able to look at it, laugh, disconnect the batteries, and move on. That's what made the incident so embarrassing to most people in the city (I live in Boston, and yes, most people here do think the whole incident was stupid) -- that even our trained professionals are apparently completely ignorant of how a bomb works...
But Square Enix, they're the granddaddy. I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll gradually crack that nut.
My poor little grammar^W English nazi head just exploded :(
Sort of true, but in the situation you describe, a proof that no such algorithm exists (e.g. finding integer zeroes of multivariate polynomials -- provably undecidable IIRC, which is a bit surprising) would commonly be considered to "resolve" the open question, even though it wasn't maybe the particular resolution we would have preferred.
However, in most (nearly all?) cases, open problems are not nearly so poorly specified: often there is a definite answer even if (as you point out) there may theoretically be no way to prove what that answer is. P=NP, for example, is definitely either true or false, though it is possible (though unlikely) that ZFC is not powerful enough to prove which. However, independence results are not nearly as common in mathematics as they are in popular imagination (except perhaps in formal logic, where they are one of the main subfields, and in some parts of set theory), and this is an obstacle that almost never comes up in practice.
I will agree, however, that the wording in the article is overly sloppy, and could have been rephrased in a way less likely to have confusing/ambiguous connotations...
Ah, the plague of "If we can make it into a bad analogy, then obviously it's okay."
Other people have pointed out that the physical behavior you described actually would be illegal and could have noticeable consequences. But I want to pick on the analogy itself: this was not a case of "it looked like the store was open, the door was unlocked, so I went in and messed around with things." The store did not look open. He did not enter through the front door. It was very clear that he was exploiting something that was not ever intended to happen -- at best, the analogy would be entering through an unlocked (or insufficiently locked) window when the store was clearly closed.
He may not have been doing this maliciously, but that does not mean he was somehow under the mistaken impression that myspace thought this was acceptable, or this hack was intended to be used.
Understanding technology has nothing to do with it -- a lot of computer people have this bizarre conflation of what can be done with what is acceptable to actually do. There are computers all over just waiting to be exploited, but if I release a worm that sets a picture of myself as the desktop background of 99% of Internet-connected Windows boxen, it doesn't matter that, in my own opinion, I didn't "hurt anybody," or that I was just "demonstrating a flaw to Microsoft" or whatever. Intent should be taken into account in sentencing (and I think in this case it was, or there probably would have been jail time), but that doesn't mean that wide scale vandalism should receive a mere slap on the wrist, just because computers are involved.
Now before we all cry bloody murder, why are we calling this a bribe? ... That company doesn't have the scientific capability to refute the findings, so they are hiring scientists to document any and all shortcomings for them.
Wrong. If that was the case, they could certainly offer $10,000 to a scientist to perform a thorough review of the findings. It could even be an aggressive stance, i.e. "We will give you $10,000 if you go through these findings and find as many potential problems in it as you can." That's still ethical.
What is not ethical, and what they have done, is to say that they will give the $10,000 for scientists to disagree with the findings. Not for studying the findings, or looking for problems in the findings. The funding is contingent, not on a thorough and honest review of the findings, but on the conclusion. The difference is that in the former case, an honest scientist could do a thorough, conscientious examination of the findings, come to the conclusion "I found one or two issues that are a little fuzzy, but there aren't any major problems with the study," and still be paid for his work.
Instead, the funding can only go to people who disagree with the findings, whether or not the findings are legitimate. This is an unethical approach to research, and this is why this situation is completely different from e.g. the grant funding that many posters have compared it to. Any honest research funding must have built in the expectation that the study may not yield the expected (or even desired) outcome.