Indeed. More attention needs to be focused on the investigation aspect of science, and less on the knowledge aspect of science. The defining aspect of science is the process that's continually gone through to find truth, not the truth itself.
All to often science is taught as a series of facts. I think science facts are important to know, but the process of discovery is ignored so people never gain the ability to analyse claims. That's probbably the greatest skill we could teach anyone as life is filled with people making claims about something every day.
There isn't even a correlation. The submitter picks file sharing out of his ass as a cause for increased sales. Maybe it was the Iraq war that caused the big increase in CD sales? There's just as much evidence for that.
I think you're being unfair. The Indiana Jones series was very good. Poltergeist was scary. Schindlers List was.. well, hard to judge if it was good given the subject. I think his last really good movie was Last Crusade though. Saving Private Ryan was merely OK, and Minority Report was worth the $2 I paid to see it at second run, but not much beyond that. Catch Me If You Can was pretty good, though it doesn't compare to Indiana Jones though.
It's true that Spielberg does have a tendency to make schlocky, crappy hollywood movies. AI was one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and he should be beaten for the Jurasic Park series. Let's hope WOTW will follow with the sucesses, and not the miserable failures.
You really think that 128 bit SSL can't be cracked in real-time...nonsense?...maybe not?...given various mathematical shorcuts combined with large amounts of memory, SSL may not be as secure as most folks are led to believe.
The question is who can break strong crypto. Large Corps? No. The FBI? Very Very unlikely. The FBI is good at investigating crime, but they don't know jack about breaking crypto. The CIA? Maybe, but they aren't really crypto guys either. The NSA? Yah, I'd be willing to bet they could crack SSL with some effort. Even the NSA it's hard to say though. I'd bet these days they go more for breaking into computers and bugging them than going the hard route and breaking the crypto. It's much easier to compromise the pathways that are unencrypted than break crypto.
If the NSA is monitoring your communications, you're very likely an international threat, and not some penny-anty political criminal, or war3z d00d. The NSA is also only an intelligence agency, so they're MUCH more interested in the information you leak than busting you for whatever they can try to pin on you. They're also unlikely to reveal the information they gathered on you via crypto-breaking, as that would tip the hat as to what they can break.
Because that's all that reserving the artwork does: the artwork is an imprimatur, a symbol essentially equivalent to a signature, that identifies a build as official.
You can make this claim as much as you want, but that's not how people interpret the artwork/symbol. The artwork/symbol on a program identifies what program it is, not any official build status. If the firefox people want a symbol to represent that, they should specifically develop that. Perhaps they could develop artwork with some sort of "official build" text in it that they don't release, and another version of artwork that doesn't have the "official build" text in it. Maybe it could be slightly different, but easily recognizable as foxfire.
That would certainly make it clear the intention of the artwork/logo, and wouldn't lead to confusion when distributions release their own versions of the software. I understand Mozillas need to protect its brand name, but I doubt this is just an issue with highly principled Debian. Having vastly different, or absent artwork makes a program look like a different program. That's just plain confusing.
Sure, there are things he wouldn't understand, but then again I don't think there is even anyone at Microsoft who understands what "registering components...updating registry" means!
The difference is those messages are just informational, you aren't expected to make a decision whether you want to update the registry, or register components. People tend to get nervous when they're forced into making a decision they don't understand. "Bob" is comfortable with configuring a network, selecting resolutions, etc. But much of the time he has no idea what a boot loader is, or how he should partition his drive. I don't know about you, but with new software I'm often mystified what option to select. i.e. "Do you want to select the NEW database format, or the old one". Uhh.. I don't know, and I don't want to spend a half hour investigating the consequences of each choice.
Personally I think the installer should boot up to a config screen where you choose novice, or expert. The novice option holds your hand, makes sane choices, and gives you as few confusing, technical choices as possible. The expert option lets you change everything. I also really like the MS way of doing things where there's an advanced tab where the more confusing aspects of configuration are hidden. Less choices usually means less oonfusing.
Incorrect. I used to work for the US Geological Survey, and they used Data General unix systems about 10 years ago. I seriously doubt they've dropped all the unix machines as science has a strong history of using Unix. The Dept of Interior is also a huge department, so it'd be very difficult for them to have ONLY windows machines throughout the entire organization.
The Big Evil Corporations also make the tools to help your body beat cancer, fight infections, help the crippled become mobile once again, and so on.
Yah, unfortunately the big evil corps are also the ones that have polluted our water (Love Canal), promoted dangerous drugs (fen-phen), and lied about cigarettes being addictive and harmfull. Not to mention the Enrons of the world who merely try to bilk people out of billions of dollars.
The Big Corps are for the most part about making money by doing anything they think they can get away with. People distrust corps for good reason. Sadly the anti-GM crowd has latched onto the usual scare tactics of the unknown. They reject anything GM just like the anti-nuke crowd rejected anything nuclear. I think there is reason to be suspicious of GM food, but only because it's unregulated and being wielded by entities who have a record of caring about profits first, and health second.
P.S. For those that say "but we might get a driver for the buggy chipset that we've only got a buggy closed source driver for now" - will you listen to yourselves? Support another chipset vendor, you twits!
Buggy open source drivers can be fixed or re-written from scratch. Buggy closed source drivers can't. As far as supporting another chipset vendor, who's selling an inexpensive AP with all the hardware necessary to run linux, and an open source radio driver? No one AFAIK.
Is the problem here that RealTek didn't distribute the driver as a binary module? If that's the only issue I'd tend to agree that the effect is fairly minor, though I still think RealTek should get bonked on the head for breaking copyright. Realtek should have known better, as it's fairly clear that that's a violation of the GPL.
Toilet seats are flat and non-porous. They're easy to clean and there's nowhere for bits of food to go. The reputation for toilet seats being "dirty" is rather unfounded unless someone shits or pisses all over them. And while urine is disgusting and I don't want to sit in it, it's actually almost always sterile.
Bacteria usually need food to multiply on. People don't tend to eat in bathrooms, but they do eat at a desk. Keyboards are filled with places for dust, food, moisture, etc to collect. Great places for bacteria to multiply. Keyboards are also very hard to clean, and almost impossible to clean well because of all the spaces inside them.
What upsets me most though is the comparison to toilet seats that winds up in every "thing X has this many germs/inch article". In understanding anything context and perspective is king. The implications is that if something is dirtier than a toilet seat, it just MUST be dirty as hell. It's a rare article that points out that maybe the premise (toilet seats are really dirty) is at fault. I'd be more interested in comparisons to things that ARE dirty, like a cutting board after having cut raw meat on it. Unfortunately articles like these always end up as the "interesting little tidbit" articles in newspapers where they have to grab your attention and don't have time for things like giving out real information.
Whaa? Less than a watt of energy used to power speakers is a "waste of energy"? Your post is a waste of energy. Every little bit does NOT count. I'm really sick and tired of this nonsense of adding up miniscule "savings" and making them into big sounding numbers to the ignorant masses.
There's this attitude that's developed among the eco-freaks in this country that they can save the world by reducing their own personal consumption by.01%, because "every little bit counts. Not flushing your toilet to "save water" is idiotic. If you want to "save water" don't water your lawn, or stop lettings farmers irrigate farm land. Worrying about a watt of energy to do noise cancellation is equally idiotic. If you want to use less oil stop driving the goddamn gas guzzling SUVs.
Ok, let's do the numbers. A big 8 meg cache will take 8/100, or.08 seconds with ATA-100. It will take 8/133 or about.06 seconds with ATA-133. That's a difference of a whopping.02 seconds. After that huge savings of.02 seconds you're back to the disk bottleneck of 45 MB/sec.
Yah, ATA-100 is just so much faster than ATA-133. In fact if you're only using one drive you can get away with only ATA-66 and interface still isn't a bottleneck. A big on-drive cache is to maximize the throughput of the drive so it can stream data as fast as possible to system memory. It's not really a very good disk cache, as system memory is a better, and larger place for that.
Don't ever say a PHD in Computer Science, and "15 years of experience in computer security" means you can't say something stupid. You're right, you don't need a private key to do authentication, you need the public key. The private key holder is the only one that can sign messages.
The fact that Mr. Krawetz doesn't understand basic public key crypto makes me question his credibility and this entire article. I don't make it a habbit of studying spam solutions, and I understand authentication schemes. This guy writes a damn article about it in Security Focus, and makes a MAJOR mistake about the very basis of public key authentication. Sorry Neal, but you're on my bozo list now.
Yes, I'm sure the kind of people that respond to penile enlargement, viagra, and porn advertisements will certainly be shamed out of responding to spam email from television ads. I'm sorry, but this has to be about the most ineffective method of stopping spam I've heard of.
How is the value of software intangible? The lowest price I see for the full retail version of Office 2003 is $350 on pricewatch. Other places list it for $500. That sounds like a very tangible price to me. Intangible when talking about value refers to things like the value of the brand "Coca Cola". It's intangible because you can't assess a real value for it.
Your MSDN subscription price means nothing. According to the website an MSDN subscription costs $2799, and $2299 for a renewal. Kind of a bit more than $500.
The average teacher will have to learn how to deal with that fairly quickly. There's simply no way to block out all the bad sources of information, or even come close.
Either you use the 'net as a source of information and teach kids how to discern good sources from bad, or you give up on the internet entirely. There's no trying to "fix" the internet. You could do some form of whitelisting and only allow access to an approved list, but that's basically the same thing as discerning good information from bad. It also turns the internet into a small series of electronic books.
Personally I think forcing kids to scrutinize early on is the best thing that can happen to education. The pass the buck till later phenomenon goes on until College, and even then it often never gets addressed. You then wind up with people watching Fox specials on "Was the moon landing faked?" and believing it.
The best thing any kid could learn is to not accept everything they read or hear as fact. Blocking this site is a disservice to that end. The site is deceptive and wrong, but then again so is Dateline NBC (just to a lesser degree). What if a teacher wanted to teach about propoganda? Strangely all the propoganda sites are blocked! The world is full of lies, and trying to block out the more obvious ones is just another form of deception.
While I think AOL is in the wrong here and should get punched in the face for their stupid actions, I find it hard to have sympathy for this Ellison guy. From the looks of it he found copies of his books on usenet. Does he really believe any significant number of people really wants to read books on a computer?
Paperbacks are still relatively cheap and available. I much prefer an actual printed book for $7 to having to scrunch up in front of a computer and strain my eyes for several hours to read a book. Sure I can read it on a teeny tiny PDA screen, but that sucks too. Books are probbably the _least_ susceptible to copyright violation, and have withstood the onslaught of copy machines for decades. Printed books are simply a better technology than electronic books, and probbably will be true for the forseeable future. While Ellison certainly has a right to complain about his works being posted on usenet, it seems more akin to some old man yelling at kids to "get off my lawn!".
I actually wonder about the same thing. Then again I'm not a Nasa scientist or engineer and don't know how small+light you can make a usefull scientific instrument. Cameras can be very small though, and if you can deflate the baloon for a period and look around a bit it might be a wonderfull transport mechanisms for a long distance Rover.
It's sad that you (and so many others) think that way. I think the wrong thing about plagiarism is that it's dishonest and disrespectful to pass someone else's ideas off as your own. Period.
Dishonest? Ideas don't belong to anyone. None are original, they're all built off someone elses ideas. This is a basic disagreement over the nature of ownership. Taking someones verbatim text is certainly one thing. We generally recognize that someones words are personal enough that taking them and calling them "your own" is dishonest. But this notion that everyone should be spouting off accredidation every time they utter a phrase is ridiculous.
Well, they were talking about using it at the polar ice caps on mars. I'd assume there are relatively few craters at the ice caps.
I am a bit amazed that they think they can create something that'll have a high enough surface area/mass ration to be blown around by the very thin martian atmosphere, but still have enough radios and equipment to produce usefull information.
How can you simulate low atmosphere martian conditions? Can you make a sealed wind tunnel with a 1% atmospere and do your test at scale?
The point is no one gets all huffy about "plagarism" in the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. The world isn't one big academic journal.
Perhaps you do not recognize the emotional need people have to be recognized for their profound ideas, because you have not contributed any profound ideas?
Or perhaps I'm not an egoist who requires constant re-filling of my own self worth through others quoting me on the internet as BillaBong13? Anyone that gets upset over people not crediting their ideas on a blog needs to grow up.
We still have this idea that print is some cherished medium where high-level conversation takes place. We're now in an era where print has begun to take on a much less respected role. . When you write in a blog it's not the same thing as publishing something in a newspaper or magazine. Blogs are a lot closer to casual conversation you have with your friends than they are to any other printed medium. Quite frankly I'd be more flattered that people are listening to what I have to say among the thousands of other voices than worried about "idea theft".
On the other hand, if I just read someone else's weblog entry about freedom as it pertains to flying in a post-9/11 US, with specific examples of loss of freedom, then write about that very same topic, and give some of those same examples, but don't say where they come from, that's plagiarism, even if I contribute original thought. That's the kind of stuff that I (and the Wired article--see the example about "furry germs") am talking about.
I think this is the difference between casual conversation, and professional dialogue. If I print a paper in an academic journal that goes as far as using someone elses specific examples, that's plagarism. Is this really the same thing as writing on a blog as BillaBong13 about what you read on some other Blog posted by PowerPuffGirl45?
The wrong thing about plagarism is that academics live and die by their academic reputation. Me talking to my friends and not quoting sources for ideas is quite a different thing than posting an academic paper.
The article says that they wanted to test the durability of the design in a cold environment. That's proven to be a success. Don't start talking about the limitations of the device based on one experiment. The point was to test how well the wind transport design will work, and track its position using a simple, cheap, and pre-existing satelite network. This test is but one test in an ongoing process.
To some degree I agree with you. But this whole idea of people owning ideas is ridiculous. Are you saying every time I reference the idea of freedom I have to reference whoever came up with it first? Is Thomas Jefferson a plagarist because he didn't put references to the "original authors" of his ideas in the Declaration of Independance? Eventually ideas become part of the mainstream consciousness. How big does an idea have to be to be "copyrightable" Say I read John Stuart Mill, and his ideas influence mine. Are my ideas suddenly infected with Mills work and I have to reference him each time I speak?
The whole concept is kind of ridiculous. Everyone steals everyone elses ideas. It reminds me of the music world where everyone steals everyone elses work. The plagarism part comes when the music is similar enough to be considered the same work. There's also a minimum number of notes you have to have for a work to be copyrightable. What you're talking about is gross plagarism and perhaps stealing entire concepts. It's also something that mostly applies to acadamia where people care about that sort of thing. The whole argument just begs the question how original is anyones work? Ideas don't come out of a vacuum, they come from other ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. More attention needs to be focused on the investigation aspect of science, and less on the knowledge aspect of science. The defining aspect of science is the process that's continually gone through to find truth, not the truth itself.
All to often science is taught as a series of facts. I think science facts are important to know, but the process of discovery is ignored so people never gain the ability to analyse claims. That's probbably the greatest skill we could teach anyone as life is filled with people making claims about something every day.
There isn't even a correlation. The submitter picks file sharing out of his ass as a cause for increased sales. Maybe it was the Iraq war that caused the big increase in CD sales? There's just as much evidence for that.
I think you're being unfair. The Indiana Jones series was very good. Poltergeist was scary. Schindlers List was.. well, hard to judge if it was good given the subject. I think his last really good movie was Last Crusade though. Saving Private Ryan was merely OK, and Minority Report was worth the $2 I paid to see it at second run, but not much beyond that. Catch Me If You Can was pretty good, though it doesn't compare to Indiana Jones though.
It's true that Spielberg does have a tendency to make schlocky, crappy hollywood movies. AI was one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and he should be beaten for the Jurasic Park series. Let's hope WOTW will follow with the sucesses, and not the miserable failures.
You really think that 128 bit SSL can't be cracked in real-time...nonsense?...maybe not?...given various mathematical shorcuts combined with large amounts of memory, SSL may not be as secure as most folks are led to believe.
The question is who can break strong crypto. Large Corps? No. The FBI? Very Very unlikely. The FBI is good at investigating crime, but they don't know jack about breaking crypto. The CIA? Maybe, but they aren't really crypto guys either. The NSA? Yah, I'd be willing to bet they could crack SSL with some effort. Even the NSA it's hard to say though. I'd bet these days they go more for breaking into computers and bugging them than going the hard route and breaking the crypto. It's much easier to compromise the pathways that are unencrypted than break crypto.
If the NSA is monitoring your communications, you're very likely an international threat, and not some penny-anty political criminal, or war3z d00d. The NSA is also only an intelligence agency, so they're MUCH more interested in the information you leak than busting you for whatever they can try to pin on you. They're also unlikely to reveal the information they gathered on you via crypto-breaking, as that would tip the hat as to what they can break.
Because that's all that reserving the artwork does: the artwork is an imprimatur, a symbol essentially equivalent to a signature, that identifies a build as official.
You can make this claim as much as you want, but that's not how people interpret the artwork/symbol. The artwork/symbol on a program identifies what program it is, not any official build status. If the firefox people want a symbol to represent that, they should specifically develop that. Perhaps they could develop artwork with some sort of "official build" text in it that they don't release, and another version of artwork that doesn't have the "official build" text in it. Maybe it could be slightly different, but easily recognizable as foxfire.
That would certainly make it clear the intention of the artwork/logo, and wouldn't lead to confusion when distributions release their own versions of the software. I understand Mozillas need to protect its brand name, but I doubt this is just an issue with highly principled Debian. Having vastly different, or absent artwork makes a program look like a different program. That's just plain confusing.
Sure, there are things he wouldn't understand, but then again I don't think there is even anyone at Microsoft who understands what "registering components...updating registry" means!
The difference is those messages are just informational, you aren't expected to make a decision whether you want to update the registry, or register components. People tend to get nervous when they're forced into making a decision they don't understand. "Bob" is comfortable with configuring a network, selecting resolutions, etc. But much of the time he has no idea what a boot loader is, or how he should partition his drive. I don't know about you, but with new software I'm often mystified what option to select. i.e. "Do you want to select the NEW database format, or the old one". Uhh.. I don't know, and I don't want to spend a half hour investigating the consequences of each choice.
Personally I think the installer should boot up to a config screen where you choose novice, or expert. The novice option holds your hand, makes sane choices, and gives you as few confusing, technical choices as possible. The expert option lets you change everything. I also really like the MS way of doing things where there's an advanced tab where the more confusing aspects of configuration are hidden. Less choices usually means less oonfusing.
Incorrect. I used to work for the US Geological Survey, and they used Data General unix systems about 10 years ago. I seriously doubt they've dropped all the unix machines as science has a strong history of using Unix. The Dept of Interior is also a huge department, so it'd be very difficult for them to have ONLY windows machines throughout the entire organization.
The Big Evil Corporations also make the tools to help your body beat cancer, fight infections, help the crippled become mobile once again, and so on.
Yah, unfortunately the big evil corps are also the ones that have polluted our water (Love Canal), promoted dangerous drugs (fen-phen), and lied about cigarettes being addictive and harmfull. Not to mention the Enrons of the world who merely try to bilk people out of billions of dollars.
The Big Corps are for the most part about making money by doing anything they think they can get away with. People distrust corps for good reason. Sadly the anti-GM crowd has latched onto the usual scare tactics of the unknown. They reject anything GM just like the anti-nuke crowd rejected anything nuclear. I think there is reason to be suspicious of GM food, but only because it's unregulated and being wielded by entities who have a record of caring about profits first, and health second.
P.S. For those that say "but we might get a driver for the buggy chipset that we've only got a buggy closed source driver for now" - will you listen to yourselves? Support another chipset vendor, you twits!
Buggy open source drivers can be fixed or re-written from scratch. Buggy closed source drivers can't. As far as supporting another chipset vendor, who's selling an inexpensive AP with all the hardware necessary to run linux, and an open source radio driver? No one AFAIK.
Is the problem here that RealTek didn't distribute the driver as a binary module? If that's the only issue I'd tend to agree that the effect is fairly minor, though I still think RealTek should get bonked on the head for breaking copyright. Realtek should have known better, as it's fairly clear that that's a violation of the GPL.
Toilet seats are flat and non-porous. They're easy to clean and there's nowhere for bits of food to go. The reputation for toilet seats being "dirty" is rather unfounded unless someone shits or pisses all over them. And while urine is disgusting and I don't want to sit in it, it's actually almost always sterile.
Bacteria usually need food to multiply on. People don't tend to eat in bathrooms, but they do eat at a desk. Keyboards are filled with places for dust, food, moisture, etc to collect. Great places for bacteria to multiply. Keyboards are also very hard to clean, and almost impossible to clean well because of all the spaces inside them.
What upsets me most though is the comparison to toilet seats that winds up in every "thing X has this many germs/inch article". In understanding anything context and perspective is king. The implications is that if something is dirtier than a toilet seat, it just MUST be dirty as hell. It's a rare article that points out that maybe the premise (toilet seats are really dirty) is at fault. I'd be more interested in comparisons to things that ARE dirty, like a cutting board after having cut raw meat on it. Unfortunately articles like these always end up as the "interesting little tidbit" articles in newspapers where they have to grab your attention and don't have time for things like giving out real information.
Whaa? Less than a watt of energy used to power speakers is a "waste of energy"? Your post is a waste of energy. Every little bit does NOT count. I'm really sick and tired of this nonsense of adding up miniscule "savings" and making them into big sounding numbers to the ignorant masses.
.01%, because "every little bit counts. Not flushing your toilet to "save water" is idiotic. If you want to "save water" don't water your lawn, or stop lettings farmers irrigate farm land. Worrying about a watt of energy to do noise cancellation is equally idiotic. If you want to use less oil stop driving the goddamn gas guzzling SUVs.
There's this attitude that's developed among the eco-freaks in this country that they can save the world by reducing their own personal consumption by
Ok, let's do the numbers. A big 8 meg cache will take 8/100, or .08 seconds with ATA-100. It will take 8/133 or about .06 seconds with ATA-133. That's a difference of a whopping .02 seconds. After that huge savings of .02 seconds you're back to the disk bottleneck of 45 MB/sec.
Yah, ATA-100 is just so much faster than ATA-133. In fact if you're only using one drive you can get away with only ATA-66 and interface still isn't a bottleneck. A big on-drive cache is to maximize the throughput of the drive so it can stream data as fast as possible to system memory. It's not really a very good disk cache, as system memory is a better, and larger place for that.
Don't ever say a PHD in Computer Science, and "15 years of experience in computer security" means you can't say something stupid. You're right, you don't need a private key to do authentication, you need the public key. The private key holder is the only one that can sign messages.
The fact that Mr. Krawetz doesn't understand basic public key crypto makes me question his credibility and this entire article. I don't make it a habbit of studying spam solutions, and I understand authentication schemes. This guy writes a damn article about it in Security Focus, and makes a MAJOR mistake about the very basis of public key authentication. Sorry Neal, but you're on my bozo list now.
Yes, I'm sure the kind of people that respond to penile enlargement, viagra, and porn advertisements will certainly be shamed out of responding to spam email from television ads. I'm sorry, but this has to be about the most ineffective method of stopping spam I've heard of.
How is the value of software intangible? The lowest price I see for the full retail version of Office 2003 is $350 on pricewatch. Other places list it for $500. That sounds like a very tangible price to me. Intangible when talking about value refers to things like the value of the brand "Coca Cola". It's intangible because you can't assess a real value for it.
Your MSDN subscription price means nothing. According to the website an MSDN subscription costs $2799, and $2299 for a renewal. Kind of a bit more than $500.
The average teacher will have to learn how to deal with that fairly quickly. There's simply no way to block out all the bad sources of information, or even come close.
Either you use the 'net as a source of information and teach kids how to discern good sources from bad, or you give up on the internet entirely. There's no trying to "fix" the internet. You could do some form of whitelisting and only allow access to an approved list, but that's basically the same thing as discerning good information from bad. It also turns the internet into a small series of electronic books.
Personally I think forcing kids to scrutinize early on is the best thing that can happen to education. The pass the buck till later phenomenon goes on until College, and even then it often never gets addressed. You then wind up with people watching Fox specials on "Was the moon landing faked?" and believing it.
The best thing any kid could learn is to not accept everything they read or hear as fact. Blocking this site is a disservice to that end. The site is deceptive and wrong, but then again so is Dateline NBC (just to a lesser degree). What if a teacher wanted to teach about propoganda? Strangely all the propoganda sites are blocked! The world is full of lies, and trying to block out the more obvious ones is just another form of deception.
While I think AOL is in the wrong here and should get punched in the face for their stupid actions, I find it hard to have sympathy for this Ellison guy. From the looks of it he found copies of his books on usenet. Does he really believe any significant number of people really wants to read books on a computer?
Paperbacks are still relatively cheap and available. I much prefer an actual printed book for $7 to having to scrunch up in front of a computer and strain my eyes for several hours to read a book. Sure I can read it on a teeny tiny PDA screen, but that sucks too. Books are probbably the _least_ susceptible to copyright violation, and have withstood the onslaught of copy machines for decades. Printed books are simply a better technology than electronic books, and probbably will be true for the forseeable future. While Ellison certainly has a right to complain about his works being posted on usenet, it seems more akin to some old man yelling at kids to "get off my lawn!".
I actually wonder about the same thing. Then again I'm not a Nasa scientist or engineer and don't know how small+light you can make a usefull scientific instrument. Cameras can be very small though, and if you can deflate the baloon for a period and look around a bit it might be a wonderfull transport mechanisms for a long distance Rover.
It's sad that you (and so many others) think that way. I think the wrong thing about plagiarism is that it's dishonest and disrespectful to pass someone else's ideas off as your own. Period.
Dishonest? Ideas don't belong to anyone. None are original, they're all built off someone elses ideas. This is a basic disagreement over the nature of ownership. Taking someones verbatim text is certainly one thing. We generally recognize that someones words are personal enough that taking them and calling them "your own" is dishonest. But this notion that everyone should be spouting off accredidation every time they utter a phrase is ridiculous.
Well, they were talking about using it at the polar ice caps on mars. I'd assume there are relatively few craters at the ice caps.
I am a bit amazed that they think they can create something that'll have a high enough surface area/mass ration to be blown around by the very thin martian atmosphere, but still have enough radios and equipment to produce usefull information.
How can you simulate low atmosphere martian conditions? Can you make a sealed wind tunnel with a 1% atmospere and do your test at scale?
Yes. So he's a famous guy. Your point?
The point is no one gets all huffy about "plagarism" in the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. The world isn't one big academic journal.
Perhaps you do not recognize the emotional need people have to be recognized for their profound ideas, because you have not contributed any profound ideas?
Or perhaps I'm not an egoist who requires constant re-filling of my own self worth through others quoting me on the internet as BillaBong13? Anyone that gets upset over people not crediting their ideas on a blog needs to grow up.
We still have this idea that print is some cherished medium where high-level conversation takes place. We're now in an era where print has begun to take on a much less respected role. . When you write in a blog it's not the same thing as publishing something in a newspaper or magazine. Blogs are a lot closer to casual conversation you have with your friends than they are to any other printed medium. Quite frankly I'd be more flattered that people are listening to what I have to say among the thousands of other voices than worried about "idea theft".
On the other hand, if I just read someone else's weblog entry about freedom as it pertains to flying in a post-9/11 US, with specific examples of loss of freedom, then write about that very same topic, and give some of those same examples, but don't say where they come from, that's plagiarism, even if I contribute original thought. That's the kind of stuff that I (and the Wired article--see the example about "furry germs") am talking about.
I think this is the difference between casual conversation, and professional dialogue. If I print a paper in an academic journal that goes as far as using someone elses specific examples, that's plagarism. Is this really the same thing as writing on a blog as BillaBong13 about what you read on some other Blog posted by PowerPuffGirl45?
The wrong thing about plagarism is that academics live and die by their academic reputation. Me talking to my friends and not quoting sources for ideas is quite a different thing than posting an academic paper.
The article says that they wanted to test the durability of the design in a cold environment. That's proven to be a success. Don't start talking about the limitations of the device based on one experiment. The point was to test how well the wind transport design will work, and track its position using a simple, cheap, and pre-existing satelite network. This test is but one test in an ongoing process.
To some degree I agree with you. But this whole idea of people owning ideas is ridiculous. Are you saying every time I reference the idea of freedom I have to reference whoever came up with it first? Is Thomas Jefferson a plagarist because he didn't put references to the "original authors" of his ideas in the Declaration of Independance? Eventually ideas become part of the mainstream consciousness. How big does an idea have to be to be "copyrightable" Say I read John Stuart Mill, and his ideas influence mine. Are my ideas suddenly infected with Mills work and I have to reference him each time I speak?
The whole concept is kind of ridiculous. Everyone steals everyone elses ideas. It reminds me of the music world where everyone steals everyone elses work. The plagarism part comes when the music is similar enough to be considered the same work. There's also a minimum number of notes you have to have for a work to be copyrightable. What you're talking about is gross plagarism and perhaps stealing entire concepts. It's also something that mostly applies to acadamia where people care about that sort of thing. The whole argument just begs the question how original is anyones work? Ideas don't come out of a vacuum, they come from other ideas.