the force acting on the sail drops off as 1/d*d which is polynomial, not exponential
IIRC light energy flux from a point source decreases as the cube of the distance, not the square. To see why, imagine a unit sphere centered around a point source, and a two-unit sphere centered around the same source. The two-unit sphere has 8 times the surface area of the unit sphere, and the same total flux.
d^(-3) isn't exponential, but it's pretty quick. I'm sure the parties involved in the dispute have already taken this dramatic fall-off into account, but think a moment. A system that worked very well in our region of the solar system could be blown off course by the gravity of the tiniest speck of dust out around Neptune's orbit, if its only hedge against inertia was the sail. This is why it would be wise to bring rockets along even if you couldn't bring enough fuel to use them as propulsion.
...it does not look like any precedent against data mining for pricing information has been set. The closest this case comes to doing that is the First Circuit's opinion on what constitutes authorised use of the site under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They say that the terms of use of the site can restrict the use of scrapers.
To me, this is a loss for open systems. Nothing in any of the relevant RFCs mentions a method of specifying or obeying provisions against automatic downloading for a particular purpose. I'm sure one of them mentions robots.txt, but that would prohibit all automatic downloads, and I'm sure most e-commerce sites don't want to chase off Froogle and its ilk.
I'm against any judicial action that changes by fiat the conventions under which the internet operates, especially in the jursidiction in which I happen to reside. It is fundamental to the web that one only serves information one wants public. Someday there will be protocols that deal with issues of trust, priveleges, and negotiation programatically. They will be used in certain circumstances, but HTTP or its descendants will be far more common. When the courts trade the future of open systems for a temporary convenience to businesses that are careless with their proprietary information, we have lost.
If you have to agree to some sort of "terms of use" to get onto a website, you are bound by what those "terms of use" say. By clicking through, you have agreed to a contract and you have to abide by it.
Aside from the well-known problems with any click-through agreement (contract between unknown parties, software circumvention, lack of notarization, etc.), the additional flaw in this case is provided by web archives. If you don't want to have to look at a click-through page before reading your competitor's deep dark secrets, just download what you want from a public web cache. Are these jokers going to turn around and sue Google, as well?
Actually, that brings up an interesting point. When Google gets sued for forwarding information to competitors without click-throughing them, they will probably deny that such was not their "intent" in providing the web archive. Of course, the competitors do have an "intent" that the original site doesn't condone. But there is not a technical means of determining intent over the current version of HTTP. If the original site wants to do this, it is using the wrong technology. Of course someday if the ebXML folks get off their collective butts, we might have some sort of contract-negotiation protocol. I doubt a consumer e-commerce site would be interested in erecting such barriers to entry, but this would probably be useful in certain B2B contexts. Until then, honoring click-through pages in the breach will only harm the internet. Any court case that declares that particular intents make a party ineligible to download particular material served over the web (that's my understanding of the agreement that we're clicking through here) will only harm the web and all open systems.
I have a feeling that the reason your friend got the Best Buy bum's rush is his use of a pda to record prices. People are in general more scared of anything electronic than they are of the simple pencil-and-pad method. Perhaps they suspected that the pda was wirelessly linked to Circuit City's intranet. I've written prices on a piece of paper in a Best Buy before without suffering such a dire consequence.
accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access [18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4) of the CFAA]
How does one receive authorization to access a web server? Hmm, maybe with a simple html GET? The basic fact here is that of judicial cluelessness. If I put information on a public web server, pretend to "protect" it with a disclaimer (of everything) at the bottom of the page, and then get pissed off because somebody browsed that information, I'm an idiot. In addition, I am legless in court. Web servers make information available to the world. If I had wanted to make information available to certain parties that I trust not to compete with me, I should have set up a secure server with some provision for authentication and authorization.
Under these circumstances, I think it is beneficial for the legal system to wade in and redress the consumer/supplier power balance. Otherwise, just as in any monopoly type situation, you have an imbalanced system where there's no incentive to change.
Somewhere a thousand lawyers salivate. b-)
Of course your characterization of software suppliers using monopoly power to keep needed features out of products is conceivable. I think, however, it is exceedingly unlikely. The reasons we haven't seen more guaranteed software licenses are practical as well as contingent. The contingent reasons, such as the insurance industry's current inability to quantify software risk, could be amenable to judicial redress. The practical reasons include the vast diversity of operating environments, the 80/20 rule, the very broad range of problems to which software may be applied, and the unsolvability of the software risk quantification problem. b-) These are givens of our existence, that no judge could change (although many are sure to try).
Certainly a consumer user of word-processing products, for example, is out of luck if he wants to buy something that is "guaranteed never to lose my work". Similarly, a car enthusiast is out of luck if he wants to buy a flying car. While many engineer-centuries of work would probably solve either problem, the solution in both cases is for the user to realize the limitations of the product and to perform accordingly. I.e., I'll leave at least 45 minutes prior to work so I won't have to fly to get there on time, and I'll make sure not to indiscriminantly run "rm *" commands in my directories.
What they should do is remove any legal weight from clauses along the lines of "This software comes with no warranty of any kind, including fitness for any particular purpose..."
Remember that not all licenses and contracts have this phrase. Perhaps the vast majority do, but most companies that really want a license that doesn't disclaim fitness can buy software from someone, for some (great) price. I know that the market system isn't always right, but in most cases we should at least consider the possibility. In this case, the market has decided that most applications don't warrant software guaranteed for a particular purpose. When conditions change so that software users decide they want software guranteed to do the job they want to do, they'll pay for this and they'll get it. Eventually, various structures like bonding and accreditation will fall into place and guaranteed-fit software will cost less than it would today. Perhaps this possibility justifies some sort of government mandate today, but that seems a rather weak argument to me.
Hearing buyers complain that the law should have required them to buy something other than they wanted at the time reminds me of shareholders complaining about the actions of boards that they accepted by defualt proxy. In capitalism, it is not only the producers who are responsible for the traded products.
I'm guessing your background is in mathematics as you appear to be relying on the "existence proof" - the whole thrust of your argument appears to be that complex systems capable of supporting life are always or almost always possible in any universe because most arrangements are physically capable of supporting complex systems. But I don't wish to dispute that. My argument is only that though you may reason life may still be possible in most weird (to us) universes, it will still be highly improbable.
I've been enjoying this discussion so far. This seems like a good place to insert something I've been thinking. The original article emphasized that the "multiverse theory" is not scientific. I agree with that, and I expect that you do as well. The point is, however, that any theory that addresses these questions is unscientific, in the narrow sense that it is not testable. You consider these 'weird' versions of life highly improbable, but any probability distribution you could assign is surely only operative in this universe. All of your knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology must be checked at the door. Since mathematics is not science, we might speculate that it will be of some help in this instance where science is not.
This isn't to say that I particularly like the many-worlds or many-histories theories. My objections are not scientific, but rather from the viewpoint of Occam's Razor. The essence of both of these theories is that they "multiply entities without necessity". This makes them basically ugly (see, my background is in math as well).
I'll address many-histories first. I concede that the Copenhagen hypothesis is a little rough around the edges. I haven't seen an experiment that directly supports it. Likewise, I haven't seen an experiment that could directly support the many-histories hypothesis. Different people will offer different interpretations of the various multiple slit and other experiments, but the experiments just don't support a "proof" of any of these theories. Until I see an experiment that does, I consider this a philosophical rather than a scientific question. From that standpoint, I far prefer a theory that gives a special standing to a particular part of this universe, the observer, than one that assumes the existence of uncountably many universes (where 'universe' here only indicates an environment that bounds our observations).
Since I don't like many-histories, you won't be surprised to find that I don't like many-worlds that much either. But that isn't to say that I dismiss the anthropic principle out of hand. When mystical lazy-headed people start droning on about how wonderful it is that all physical constants just happen to have the values that they do, we need something to say to shut them up. I don't see why the anthropic principle must take as its premise the existence of infinities of boring, "failed" universes. Certainly this would make the theory more interesting to the Santa Fe Institute crowd, but it just isn't necessary from the standpoint of logic. Define p as "we exist" and q as "we observe a universe with property x". Then ((q -> p) ^ q) -> (p -> q) is a tautology no matter what other universes we imagine. From the standpoint of thought or logic (which like all flavors of math is simply a device for structuring thought), the anthropic principle doesn't require many worlds and its adherents (believers?) do it no favors by dragging them into the conversation.
I submit that if we don't have something scientific to say in response to every question, that isn't a failure of science and that also isn't a situation that we haven't been in before. We might snicker at Aristotle, but his now-laughable theories did support a certain level of thought and technology for many years. It's unfortunate that they also stifled inquiry in medieval Europe. Keeping that in mind, this discussion could still be valuable, even if not scientific.
later, Jess
p.s. When I was in college I had an argument with the house biology tutor in which he characterized the anthropic principle as "the ivy-league professoric principle". b-)
On a slightly unrelated note, how is this supposed to work in school districts that by law have to give access to illegal immigrants who by their very nature have no SSN?
The fact that this service assumes an in-home internet connection makes it unlikely that these parents (who are likely to be poor) will even use the system. Does this raise issues? It's easier for a wealthy parent to help his child succeed than it is for a poor parent, scratch that, a parent who is poor. Does this continue some sort of cycle? It is important for many Americans to be able to pretend that all public primary and secondary education is equal.
I'll grant that the president can, and does, come up with some really terrible ideas for potential laws. But the bills that are proposed by the president tend to be large-scale, politically-calculated, omnibus things that would rarely address something like the relation between reverse engineering and protected speech (is that in fact the issue here?). It doesn't have to be this way, but all the presidents I can remember (four) proposed legislation in this fashion.
The type of law that we're talking about here is proposed by the senator or congressman most in the pocket of the relevant industry (henceforth SOCMITPOTRI), and is faxed over from the lobbyist's office the day before it is presented. The bill can be effectively opposed at several points in the process, but probably the most effective point is before the SOCMITPOTRI is re-elected. The president may or may not eventually sign these laws, but he isn't elected based on that and wouldn't pay any attention to a letter-writing campaign with this type of focus.
If the goal is rational trade secret and reverse-engineering laws, I would recommend concentrating efforts on electing right-thinking candidates to Congress, rather than on reforming our electoral system (although that may be a laudable goal in its own right).
now that they, ibm, and others have released tweaked licenses that are (presumably) more friendly to business, is there really need for another one, or are the lawyers just extracting $$$?
Change "licenses" to "operational support systems" and "lawyers" to "Big 5 consultants" and you'll find many more examples of the same phenomenon. The easiest solution for a manager who needs something his own staff can't provide is to hire an outside expert and pay by the hour until he gets something he can live with. The outside consultants or lawyers pull together all their old documentation, global replace "Old Company Name" with "New Company Name", and start running the meter. When you ask the parties involved why this SAP (for instance) implementation is so different from any other in the same industry, they'll mumble something about "comparative advantage".
Open source may eventually rein in this phenomenon in software (not sure about licensing), but that will require managers to realize that they can get by just fine using the same shovels and rakes that their competition uses.
seen our revenue stream increase on the order of Olog(n)
What is n in this context? Does this mean that your revenues this month are equal to the logarithm of your revenues last month? That wouldn't seem to be such a good thing. Perhaps you mean to use some other, more-quickly-increasing, function of n?
Security is an area of programming in which examples can actually harm the quality of code. I don't mean to defend STO, but rather to point out that it's unlikely that the toy system used in a guide will be identical to the system under development by the reader of the guide. Both the inexperienced and the lazy face a terrible temptation to copy-and-paste whatever snippet they can find that they can convince themselves is applicable to the situation. A programmer is better served by being informed of the issues involved, and then forced to work out for himself what those issues mean for his code.
ABS is helpful in certain situations. For those situations in which it isn't helpful, its absence or failure will not cause a crash. That is, when ABS was added to certain cars, it didn't make those cars less safe than they already were in any situation.
Airbags have so far proven to be fairly reliable, despite the fact that they are electronically controlled. Thus, the addition of airbags to certain cars didn't make them less safe in any situation. If hordes of yahoos are inspired by your suggestion concerning EMP, I would expect many people to disable the airbags in their cars, as the cars would then be less safe.
The point I was trying to make is that any system that disconnects the steering wheel from the tires (and I take that to be the definition of steering by wire) will be less safe than current technology in some situations (e.g., loss of power), and it's understandable that regulators and consumers aren't so eager to see such a system in cars.
I'm sure your science critic has some reasonable criticisms of the scientific commununity, but because of your ridiculous arguments I'm not even going to bother reading him.
more than four hundred years after Newton and close to a century after the publication of Einstein's relativity, physicists (Hawking, Thorne, Feynman, and the rest) are still talking about time travel as if it were a physicial possibility?
Someone writing in the 1600s could have written: "two millenia after Aristotle explained why evidence is unimportant to scientific method, and nearly that long after Ptolemy formulated his model of the cosmos, we have these upstarts Newton and Copernicus, inspired no doubt by that buffoon Galileo, spouting about an invisible force and the earth not being the center of creation!" Science makes progress. Knowledge may not increase monotonically, but it does increase. Your appeal to the authority of Newton and Einstein probably wouldn't impress this Feyerabend fellow.
Even kids can understand that time cannot change if you explain it to them.
What does this even mean? Kids "understand" anything that is explained to them by an adult who wants them to. This is why we have som 8-year-olds knee-bobbing in madrassas and others repeating verbatim the racist jokes that they heard from their fathers. I've heard more ridiculous theological postulation from children than from the parents they were parroting.
In future, you would be wise to make your entire post a quote.
The above should not be rated as a troll. Anyone who needs convincing of the non-science of climate research I direct to the 30 August issue of Science (the polar issue), or to chapter 24 of The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. Is there a connection between the fact that there are hundreds of climate researchers with tenure and the fact that they consistently predict from inconsistent data that we are destroying our world? If these people had enough talent to get tenured in physics they would. Then maybe we'd already have "discovered" the island of nuclear stability.
engine: if this stops functioning, I soon will be going less than 65MPH
brakes: powered, but like steering still work very effectively without the engine running
airbags: so I'm going to get in a wreck at the same time that the very simple IC that controls the airbags somehow gets fried? I guess I should be wearing my seatbelt then.
Steering-by-wire will be very complicated. They have it on planes, it has to serviced continuously, and planes stay at least 1.5 miles from all obstacles at their altitude, as opposing to regularly passing within inches of other planes. The economics and technology of that do not transfer to automobiles.
If you hit a normal car hard enough to crack its engine block, the car will probably be totalled. That's not because of the high value of the engine, but because to get to the engine you'd have to screw up the frame and large sections of body paneling. I'm sure if you hit one of these cars at a similar speed (more than 15MPH, no matter how large a car you need to compensate for other shortcomings), the fuel cell will get screwed up, as well as the frame and large sections of body paneling.
I find it hard to believe that fuel cells used in cars would be so fragile that they would "crack" from the jarring involved in going over a speed bump. These things contain hydrogen after all, which is MUCH more explosive than gasoline. But by all means go ahead and drive your Bonneville into a hydrogen explosion. Somehow I doubt your big car will menace these new cars any more than it already menaces the environment and everyone else on the road.
This guy is an idiot for signing a contract and not thinking that he'll be bound by it.
Something I read somewhere else made me suspect that Alcatel is guilty of a bit of idiocy as well. It said something like "scientists
looked at it and found that there remain gaps in his disclosure". Hell, any yahoo can stipulate that a system to translate code from one language
to another would need to have certain properties, and even describe those properties in some detail. But actually getting the programming done is going to be the hard part, and it's pretty clear nobody has done this. If anyone had, he could write compilers that would make every language, even high-level stuff like Visual Basic or Delphi, run as fast as assembly. I
don't see that happening anytime soon.
So this guy has sufferred bankruptcy, and Alcatel has spent the time and money driving him into
bankruptcy, for a system that clearly hasn't been and won't be developed. The only winners here were the original owners of the company that Alcatel bought. The company probably got a higher valuation on the basis of the potential outcome of this dumb suit.
I assume the public computer would have some sign on it claiming that people could use it for all their surfing needs. A court could construe that to include secure surfing needs. If the people whose passwords you'd taken had some sort of binding relationship with you (IANAL, maybe reading the sign sets up this sort of relationship), you could be found guilty of fraud. If you just set up a computer somewhere without any sort of notice of its purpose, anyone who typed a password into it would have little ground for complaint.
A sysadmin who has been hired by a company is responsible for following the policies of that company. If those policies include sniffing for passwords, then he should do so and we should expect him to.
I'm not sure what the agents told these two individuals, but if they said something like, "this computer that we've set up for you to hack will not be used to get your confidential information", then the individuals have been lied to. I doubt they said that, and even if they did this is very similar to the old "you've won a prize, come to the courthouse to collect it" ruse that cops have used forever. Dumb criminals, and people who watch too much NYPD Blue, like to say that cops shouldn't be allowed to lie, but that seems like a different argument.
Two individuals were invited to a foreign country and were given the opportunity to input whatever information they wanted into a computer. Said individuals accepted the invitation, and proceeded to type root passwords into that computer.
MEANWHILE...
Using information that had been typed directly into a computer it owned (in the old-fashioned sense), a government agency sent information to another computer in another country, and then recorded the information that was sent back to the first country by that computer. It used that information to try suspected criminals, which is a task with which Congress has charged it.
This a great thing that has happened. If the internet is in any danger, it is in danger from hegemonic governments' passing laws based on basic misunderstandings of what the internet is. The most basic misunderstanding is that the internet is anything other than a group of computers sending electronic signals to each other. I.e., that it is a "place", that it "belongs" to copyright holders, that it is responsible to do anything for anyone, etc. When an agency of the most hegemonic government acts in a refreshingly realistic way concerning the internet, that is a great thing.
There has never been any need for new laws to "address the internet". Fraud is fraud, and a webpage set up to mine unsuspecting lusers for credit card numbers would have been illegal 50 years ago. Logging in using a password you've obtained legally, abusing a poorly-designed protocol, using a program in ways that its writer did not intend, etc. should all be legal actions. Anything done to restrict these actions legislatively as opposed to technically will only hurt us in the long run. I see a glimmer of hope in the fact that the FBI has used the internet in a realistic manner. If we can use hypocrisy as another argument against all sorts of laws that we don't want or need, so much the better.
As an aside, it seems that there could be a question about whether the passwords were legally obtained. I assume this was addressed in the hearing, and the judge found it acceptable. My point is that once the passwords were legally obtained, it is ludicrous to claim that sending them to a computer in another country should be illegal.
How is clicking alterated by typing worse than only using the mouse?
It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. When I was in college, the actual content of what I was writing was important, and I just wanted to get it on paper as fast as possible, I used vi and my hands would stay on the keyboard for 10 minutes at a time (hello carpal tunnel!). Of course nowadays when I want to have every page look good I use word and I'm constantly fiddling with the mouse. Then again if I was really cool and wanted things to look good I'd use LaTex and I'd be back in vi.
Anyway, if you observe a fast typist in action you'll probably notice that she has learned a number of keyboard shortcuts to do the things she needs to do. Because when one is deep in typing mode, there are no "one second" mouseclicks. That said, a five second mouse search-and-click is faster for most people than having to look at a help menu or cribsheet to remember what the proper keyboard shortcut is.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that careers are the most enormous stakes in an election, you're a little too close to the process for your own good. b-)
kind regards,
Jess
IIRC light energy flux from a point source decreases as the cube of the distance, not the square. To see why, imagine a unit sphere centered around a point source, and a two-unit sphere centered around the same source. The two-unit sphere has 8 times the surface area of the unit sphere, and the same total flux.
d^(-3) isn't exponential, but it's pretty quick. I'm sure the parties involved in the dispute have already taken this dramatic fall-off into account, but think a moment. A system that worked very well in our region of the solar system could be blown off course by the gravity of the tiniest speck of dust out around Neptune's orbit, if its only hedge against inertia was the sail. This is why it would be wise to bring rockets along even if you couldn't bring enough fuel to use them as propulsion.
You're right, http. Is the point somehow invalidated by this?
To me, this is a loss for open systems. Nothing in any of the relevant RFCs mentions a method of specifying or obeying provisions against automatic downloading for a particular purpose. I'm sure one of them mentions robots.txt, but that would prohibit all automatic downloads, and I'm sure most e-commerce sites don't want to chase off Froogle and its ilk.
I'm against any judicial action that changes by fiat the conventions under which the internet operates, especially in the jursidiction in which I happen to reside. It is fundamental to the web that one only serves information one wants public. Someday there will be protocols that deal with issues of trust, priveleges, and negotiation programatically. They will be used in certain circumstances, but HTTP or its descendants will be far more common. When the courts trade the future of open systems for a temporary convenience to businesses that are careless with their proprietary information, we have lost.
later,
Jess
Aside from the well-known problems with any click-through agreement (contract between unknown parties, software circumvention, lack of notarization, etc.), the additional flaw in this case is provided by web archives. If you don't want to have to look at a click-through page before reading your competitor's deep dark secrets, just download what you want from a public web cache. Are these jokers going to turn around and sue Google, as well?
Actually, that brings up an interesting point. When Google gets sued for forwarding information to competitors without click-throughing them, they will probably deny that such was not their "intent" in providing the web archive. Of course, the competitors do have an "intent" that the original site doesn't condone. But there is not a technical means of determining intent over the current version of HTTP. If the original site wants to do this, it is using the wrong technology. Of course someday if the ebXML folks get off their collective butts, we might have some sort of contract-negotiation protocol. I doubt a consumer e-commerce site would be interested in erecting such barriers to entry, but this would probably be useful in certain B2B contexts. Until then, honoring click-through pages in the breach will only harm the internet. Any court case that declares that particular intents make a party ineligible to download particular material served over the web (that's my understanding of the agreement that we're clicking through here) will only harm the web and all open systems.
later,
Jess
later,
Jess
How does one receive authorization to access a web server? Hmm, maybe with a simple html GET? The basic fact here is that of judicial cluelessness. If I put information on a public web server, pretend to "protect" it with a disclaimer (of everything) at the bottom of the page, and then get pissed off because somebody browsed that information, I'm an idiot. In addition, I am legless in court. Web servers make information available to the world. If I had wanted to make information available to certain parties that I trust not to compete with me, I should have set up a secure server with some provision for authentication and authorization.
It really is that simple
later,
Jess
Somewhere a thousand lawyers salivate. b-)
Of course your characterization of software suppliers using monopoly power to keep needed features out of products is conceivable. I think, however, it is exceedingly unlikely. The reasons we haven't seen more guaranteed software licenses are practical as well as contingent. The contingent reasons, such as the insurance industry's current inability to quantify software risk, could be amenable to judicial redress. The practical reasons include the vast diversity of operating environments, the 80/20 rule, the very broad range of problems to which software may be applied, and the unsolvability of the software risk quantification problem. b-) These are givens of our existence, that no judge could change (although many are sure to try).
Certainly a consumer user of word-processing products, for example, is out of luck if he wants to buy something that is "guaranteed never to lose my work". Similarly, a car enthusiast is out of luck if he wants to buy a flying car. While many engineer-centuries of work would probably solve either problem, the solution in both cases is for the user to realize the limitations of the product and to perform accordingly. I.e., I'll leave at least 45 minutes prior to work so I won't have to fly to get there on time, and I'll make sure not to indiscriminantly run "rm *" commands in my directories.
later,
Jess
Remember that not all licenses and contracts have this phrase. Perhaps the vast majority do, but most companies that really want a license that doesn't disclaim fitness can buy software from someone, for some (great) price. I know that the market system isn't always right, but in most cases we should at least consider the possibility. In this case, the market has decided that most applications don't warrant software guaranteed for a particular purpose. When conditions change so that software users decide they want software guranteed to do the job they want to do, they'll pay for this and they'll get it. Eventually, various structures like bonding and accreditation will fall into place and guaranteed-fit software will cost less than it would today. Perhaps this possibility justifies some sort of government mandate today, but that seems a rather weak argument to me.
Hearing buyers complain that the law should have required them to buy something other than they wanted at the time reminds me of shareholders complaining about the actions of boards that they accepted by defualt proxy. In capitalism, it is not only the producers who are responsible for the traded products.
later,
Jess
I've been enjoying this discussion so far. This seems like a good place to insert something I've been thinking. The original article emphasized that the "multiverse theory" is not scientific. I agree with that, and I expect that you do as well. The point is, however, that any theory that addresses these questions is unscientific, in the narrow sense that it is not testable. You consider these 'weird' versions of life highly improbable, but any probability distribution you could assign is surely only operative in this universe. All of your knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology must be checked at the door. Since mathematics is not science, we might speculate that it will be of some help in this instance where science is not.
This isn't to say that I particularly like the many-worlds or many-histories theories. My objections are not scientific, but rather from the viewpoint of Occam's Razor. The essence of both of these theories is that they "multiply entities without necessity". This makes them basically ugly (see, my background is in math as well).
I'll address many-histories first. I concede that the Copenhagen hypothesis is a little rough around the edges. I haven't seen an experiment that directly supports it. Likewise, I haven't seen an experiment that could directly support the many-histories hypothesis. Different people will offer different interpretations of the various multiple slit and other experiments, but the experiments just don't support a "proof" of any of these theories. Until I see an experiment that does, I consider this a philosophical rather than a scientific question. From that standpoint, I far prefer a theory that gives a special standing to a particular part of this universe, the observer, than one that assumes the existence of uncountably many universes (where 'universe' here only indicates an environment that bounds our observations).
Since I don't like many-histories, you won't be surprised to find that I don't like many-worlds that much either. But that isn't to say that I dismiss the anthropic principle out of hand. When mystical lazy-headed people start droning on about how wonderful it is that all physical constants just happen to have the values that they do, we need something to say to shut them up. I don't see why the anthropic principle must take as its premise the existence of infinities of boring, "failed" universes. Certainly this would make the theory more interesting to the Santa Fe Institute crowd, but it just isn't necessary from the standpoint of logic. Define p as "we exist" and q as "we observe a universe with property x". Then ((q -> p) ^ q) -> (p -> q) is a tautology no matter what other universes we imagine. From the standpoint of thought or logic (which like all flavors of math is simply a device for structuring thought), the anthropic principle doesn't require many worlds and its adherents (believers?) do it no favors by dragging them into the conversation.
I submit that if we don't have something scientific to say in response to every question, that isn't a failure of science and that also isn't a situation that we haven't been in before. We might snicker at Aristotle, but his now-laughable theories did support a certain level of thought and technology for many years. It's unfortunate that they also stifled inquiry in medieval Europe. Keeping that in mind, this discussion could still be valuable, even if not scientific.
later,
Jess
p.s. When I was in college I had an argument with the house biology tutor in which he characterized the anthropic principle as "the ivy-league professoric principle". b-)
The fact that this service assumes an in-home internet connection makes it unlikely that these parents (who are likely to be poor) will even use the system. Does this raise issues? It's easier for a wealthy parent to help his child succeed than it is for a poor parent, scratch that, a parent who is poor. Does this continue some sort of cycle? It is important for many Americans to be able to pretend that all public primary and secondary education is equal.
later,
Jess
The type of law that we're talking about here is proposed by the senator or congressman most in the pocket of the relevant industry (henceforth SOCMITPOTRI), and is faxed over from the lobbyist's office the day before it is presented. The bill can be effectively opposed at several points in the process, but probably the most effective point is before the SOCMITPOTRI is re-elected. The president may or may not eventually sign these laws, but he isn't elected based on that and wouldn't pay any attention to a letter-writing campaign with this type of focus.
If the goal is rational trade secret and reverse-engineering laws, I would recommend concentrating efforts on electing right-thinking candidates to Congress, rather than on reforming our electoral system (although that may be a laudable goal in its own right).
later,
Jess
Change "licenses" to "operational support systems" and "lawyers" to "Big 5 consultants" and you'll find many more examples of the same phenomenon. The easiest solution for a manager who needs something his own staff can't provide is to hire an outside expert and pay by the hour until he gets something he can live with. The outside consultants or lawyers pull together all their old documentation, global replace "Old Company Name" with "New Company Name", and start running the meter. When you ask the parties involved why this SAP (for instance) implementation is so different from any other in the same industry, they'll mumble something about "comparative advantage".
Open source may eventually rein in this phenomenon in software (not sure about licensing), but that will require managers to realize that they can get by just fine using the same shovels and rakes that their competition uses.
later,
Jess
What is n in this context? Does this mean that your revenues this month are equal to the logarithm of your revenues last month? That wouldn't seem to be such a good thing. Perhaps you mean to use some other, more-quickly-increasing, function of n?
later,
Jess
Airbags have so far proven to be fairly reliable, despite the fact that they are electronically controlled. Thus, the addition of airbags to certain cars didn't make them less safe in any situation. If hordes of yahoos are inspired by your suggestion concerning EMP, I would expect many people to disable the airbags in their cars, as the cars would then be less safe.
The point I was trying to make is that any system that disconnects the steering wheel from the tires (and I take that to be the definition of steering by wire) will be less safe than current technology in some situations (e.g., loss of power), and it's understandable that regulators and consumers aren't so eager to see such a system in cars.
later,
Jess
more than four hundred years after Newton and close to a century after the publication of Einstein's relativity, physicists (Hawking, Thorne, Feynman, and the rest) are still talking about time travel as if it were a physicial possibility?
Someone writing in the 1600s could have written: "two millenia after Aristotle explained why evidence is unimportant to scientific method, and nearly that long after Ptolemy formulated his model of the cosmos, we have these upstarts Newton and Copernicus, inspired no doubt by that buffoon Galileo, spouting about an invisible force and the earth not being the center of creation!" Science makes progress. Knowledge may not increase monotonically, but it does increase. Your appeal to the authority of Newton and Einstein probably wouldn't impress this Feyerabend fellow.
Even kids can understand that time cannot change if you explain it to them.
What does this even mean? Kids "understand" anything that is explained to them by an adult who wants them to. This is why we have som 8-year-olds knee-bobbing in madrassas and others repeating verbatim the racist jokes that they heard from their fathers. I've heard more ridiculous theological postulation from children than from the parents they were parroting.
In future, you would be wise to make your entire post a quote.
later,
Jess
later,
Jess
brakes: powered, but like steering still work very effectively without the engine running
airbags: so I'm going to get in a wreck at the same time that the very simple IC that controls the airbags somehow gets fried? I guess I should be wearing my seatbelt then.
Steering-by-wire will be very complicated. They have it on planes, it has to serviced continuously, and planes stay at least 1.5 miles from all obstacles at their altitude, as opposing to regularly passing within inches of other planes. The economics and technology of that do not transfer to automobiles.
later,
Jess
I find it hard to believe that fuel cells used in cars would be so fragile that they would "crack" from the jarring involved in going over a speed bump. These things contain hydrogen after all, which is MUCH more explosive than gasoline. But by all means go ahead and drive your Bonneville into a hydrogen explosion. Somehow I doubt your big car will menace these new cars any more than it already menaces the environment and everyone else on the road.
later,
Jess
Something I read somewhere else made me suspect that Alcatel is guilty of a bit of idiocy as well. It said something like "scientists looked at it and found that there remain gaps in his disclosure". Hell, any yahoo can stipulate that a system to translate code from one language to another would need to have certain properties, and even describe those properties in some detail. But actually getting the programming done is going to be the hard part, and it's pretty clear nobody has done this. If anyone had, he could write compilers that would make every language, even high-level stuff like Visual Basic or Delphi, run as fast as assembly. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
So this guy has sufferred bankruptcy, and Alcatel has spent the time and money driving him into bankruptcy, for a system that clearly hasn't been and won't be developed. The only winners here were the original owners of the company that Alcatel bought. The company probably got a higher valuation on the basis of the potential outcome of this dumb suit.
later,
Jess
A sysadmin who has been hired by a company is responsible for following the policies of that company. If those policies include sniffing for passwords, then he should do so and we should expect him to.
I'm not sure what the agents told these two individuals, but if they said something like, "this computer that we've set up for you to hack will not be used to get your confidential information", then the individuals have been lied to. I doubt they said that, and even if they did this is very similar to the old "you've won a prize, come to the courthouse to collect it" ruse that cops have used forever. Dumb criminals, and people who watch too much NYPD Blue, like to say that cops shouldn't be allowed to lie, but that seems like a different argument.
later,
Jess
Two individuals were invited to a foreign country and were given the opportunity to input whatever information they wanted into a computer. Said individuals accepted the invitation, and proceeded to type root passwords into that computer.
MEANWHILE...
Using information that had been typed directly into a computer it owned (in the old-fashioned sense), a government agency sent information to another computer in another country, and then recorded the information that was sent back to the first country by that computer. It used that information to try suspected criminals, which is a task with which Congress has charged it.
This a great thing that has happened. If the internet is in any danger, it is in danger from hegemonic governments' passing laws based on basic misunderstandings of what the internet is. The most basic misunderstanding is that the internet is anything other than a group of computers sending electronic signals to each other. I.e., that it is a "place", that it "belongs" to copyright holders, that it is responsible to do anything for anyone, etc. When an agency of the most hegemonic government acts in a refreshingly realistic way concerning the internet, that is a great thing.
There has never been any need for new laws to "address the internet". Fraud is fraud, and a webpage set up to mine unsuspecting lusers for credit card numbers would have been illegal 50 years ago. Logging in using a password you've obtained legally, abusing a poorly-designed protocol, using a program in ways that its writer did not intend, etc. should all be legal actions. Anything done to restrict these actions legislatively as opposed to technically will only hurt us in the long run. I see a glimmer of hope in the fact that the FBI has used the internet in a realistic manner. If we can use hypocrisy as another argument against all sorts of laws that we don't want or need, so much the better.
As an aside, it seems that there could be a question about whether the passwords were legally obtained. I assume this was addressed in the hearing, and the judge found it acceptable. My point is that once the passwords were legally obtained, it is ludicrous to claim that sending them to a computer in another country should be illegal.
later,
Jess
OK, then what happens when they enter a sharp downhill section?
It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. When I was in college, the actual content of what I was writing was important, and I just wanted to get it on paper as fast as possible, I used vi and my hands would stay on the keyboard for 10 minutes at a time (hello carpal tunnel!). Of course nowadays when I want to have every page look good I use word and I'm constantly fiddling with the mouse. Then again if I was really cool and wanted things to look good I'd use LaTex and I'd be back in vi.
Anyway, if you observe a fast typist in action you'll probably notice that she has learned a number of keyboard shortcuts to do the things she needs to do. Because when one is deep in typing mode, there are no "one second" mouseclicks. That said, a five second mouse search-and-click is faster for most people than having to look at a help menu or cribsheet to remember what the proper keyboard shortcut is.
later,
Jess