But then we'll all get sued by the AMA, the RIAA, and SCO for copyright infringement for illegally distributing the patented cure virus to complete strangers. They'll demand royalties every time a cell undergoes mitosis!
You may think you're exaggerating here, but you're not that far from the truth. Check out
http://www.percyschmeiser.com/. This guy had his fields "infected" by genetically engineered crops carried in by windborne seeds. No big surprise there, we all knew this would happen, and it's not even the
first example. But Monsanto sued him for using their patented gene and WON!!! For him to be in compliance of the law, he would have had to either pay Monsanto for a product he didn't want to use, or burn his crops. I think it's still in appeals, but the fact that any judge anywhere would ever side with Monsanto on this is really scary.
"In a key part of the ruling, the judge agreed a farmer can generally own the seeds or plants grown on his land if they blow in or are carried there by pollen -- but the judge says this is not true in the case of genetically modified seed."
Did I read the "idea" correctly? Instead of sending the same exact message to 1 million people, their fantasitic breakthrough is to send 10 variant messages out so that only 100,000 people get the same message and the big ISP's don't get suspicious (I don't know any realistic numbers, but presumably the all important integer m is made large enough that the number of identical messages is small enough to seem innocent)?!?!?
The reason for the concept of "prior use" is to keep people from patenting ideas they didn't actually come up with first because they're so ridiculuously obvious. But spammers work so hard covering their tracks, are they going to have a hard time proving prior art if they get sued for patent infringement? It would an amusing irony if this wasn't such a blatent example of a patent that should get rejected on grounds of "duh!". I don't care if ATT's motives are purely altruistic. This is a BAD precedent for all the same reasons as the Patriot Act and the DMCA.
I think this is an example of an overly-zealous press release from a university employee trying to make it sound more exciting than it is. The actual article (+ errata) by the researchers can be found at
http://ojps.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?p rog=normal&id=APPLAB000080000015002800000001&idtyp e=cvips&gifs=yes Sorry, if you aren't browsing from an institution that subscribes to Applied Physics Letters, you probably won't be able to download the article for free. But I'll be happy to paraphrase what I understood from the article:
This phenomenon was purely predictable from Coulomb's law and Gauss's laws of electrostatic attraction/repulsion. Many of you should have learned about these in freshman physics. The spheres were arranged in an assymetric pattern, so rotation isn't breaking any kind of symmetry. If you arranged their spherical balls in a mirror image pattern, the rotation will reverse. The authors aren't trying to say they measured some kind of new mystical force that hasn't already been understood for 100's of years but simply that there could be an engineering application that no one had thought of before.
I'm inclined to agree with the original poster's comment that this has nothing to do with quantum mechanical spin.
"Just because he didn't RTFM, doesn't mean that it's the application's fault"
I'm sorry, I just have to disagree with this. It's one thing to lose patience with somebody trying to install Linux for the first time and expecting it to work without any effort or reading of the manual.
But I think it's safe to say that it is a standard, accepted behavior that a program which creates a file will still be able to access that file later. Computer users have been backing up data on alternate media in case of a computer crash since the first personal computers. If the pragram writer wants to break from that model (oh if you'd just read the entire 400 page manual, you would have known that in addition to selecting "save" from the menu, you have to go into the preferences menu and uncheck the "screw you" button. It's right here clear as day on page 354) it really is up to the programer to call attention to this fact.
There's no warning when you rip the file. There's no warning when you run the Windows backup utility (hey...this guys backing up.wma files...I wonder if I should warn him that he needs to back up his liscence). The only warning you get is when you turn it off...then you get a misleading dialog warning you that you may be limiting your ability to play certain files when you UNCHECK the DRM option. Fact is you CAN play protected content with DRM unchecked...AFAICT it only affects the files you make, which means there is absolutely no advantage to the user to leave this thing checked. This stupid "feature" even turns itself back on every time you upgrade WMP. Funny how the program manages to remember my other personal settings like my library, and my skin preferences, but GOD forbid I go from 7.0 to 7.01 and expect it to remember that I had turned off DRM
Yea, I know...it's a free program and who am I to complain if they do something I don't like. Well that's their prerogative, and it's my prerogative to switch to another program (which I did, and I'll freely admit I was the sucker here for being lazy and using a program that came with Windows instead of looking for a better one from the start) but don't tell me I should have anticipated their break from what has been normal behavior for the past 15 years I've been using personal computers.
I've had pretty good luck keeping my normal email account relatively spam free by using sacrificial hotmail accounts when I have to give out my email address to a spam harvester. This technique completely defeats that plan...I can't even convince most of my friends and family to stop using Outlook, how the hell am I going to explain to them that I never want my email address submitted to a website? I can't give them the "sacrificial" addresses...the whole point is that I want to be able to get email from these people without sorting through all the crap.
Yea...yea...make all the jokes about me not having to worry about anyone having a crush on me. This technique will spin off (if it already hasn't) in countless other BS "services" that will try to trick people into giving out their friends emails. Just a couple of weeks ago my boss sent our whole lab a link from this website that sends practical joke emails to your "friends"...
http://cgi.slygreetings.com/page.pl?page=0&aut h=
"Abraham hopes scientists can find a way to use the bacterium to clean up nuclear waste. "
Okay...I'll buy that you can make a hardier bacterium capable of withstanding high doses of radiation, but how is it actually going to CLEAN the waste? Radioactivity is a property of the individual atoms making up the waste. Digestion, even genetically engineered superbug digestion, is limited to making and breaking chemical bonds, not atom-smashing.
They already dump mutant bugs on oil spills, but that's because the difficulty there is recollecting all the oil, and the bugs can digest it and render it less harmfull to the environment. The key is that you don't have to go back later and clean up the bugs...they presumably die off when the oil is gone. The problem with nuclear waste isn't usually the spills so much as the fact that it has to be stored for 10000's of years before the radiation has dissipated enough. Even if you do have a nuclear waste spill and you dump some superbugs on it, you still have to clean up the now radioactive superbugs in order to remove the detrimental effects of the spill.
The majority of users may have more hard drive space than they know what to do with, but they are also still using 56k modems. I think it's a little early to consider lossy compression useless.
But arguably this article is much more about the danger of giving too much power to the patent owners. The aricle even ends with the line:
"You can't create a standard that doesn't infringe patents - PNG or Ogg Vorbis could equally be challenged. So it's no good saying something is patent free."
Of course this may just be alarmist propaganda, but as I (mis?)understood it, PNG was developped to replace GIF precisely because some other asshole company decided to start charging licencing fees for GIF. It's a little discouraging if it's true that PNG is susceptible to a similar nuiscance claim.
Or, what they are saying is that they used (or assumed) a realistically finite number of data points to try to reconstruct the original distribution. The random noise they add may well be perfectly characterized, and the random number generator perfectly random*, but if they are estimating 1000 randomized responses, or 10000, there is also a predictable, non-zero uncertainty in the result when they try to extract the original distribution.
However, since the reconstruction error would depend on the number of respondants, which will vary dramatically from site to site, I might also guess the 5% number was rectally extracted, and only used to make a point for the article that it will still be better than the error due to respondants lying, despite not being perfect.
All of this, or course, under the dubious assumption that people will stop lying just because random numbers have been added to their information, as numerous other posts here have discussed...
*...yea..yea..I know, there's no such thing as perfect random number generator, but those tests you hear about mathemiticians running on RNG algorithms are for the truly anal-retentive who are worried about patterns showing up after the 2^64th repetion or whatever. I doubt that even a relatively low-tech randum number algorithm would be taxed by this technique.
1. The picture is an artist's rendition (look at the caption under the picture to the right of the article). The article doesn't say how the nebula was observed, but it's entirely possible it was not using visible light at all but IR, UV, XRAY, whatever (I'm no astronomy expert, but I know they don't always limit themselves to the visible spectrum). The water could have been identified from any number of known absorption lines.
2. The water in question here is probably not liquid water. The article constantly refers to the star spewing "water molecules". Although the incredibly hot water coming from a star probably cools enough to liquify, it's still probably not dense enough to form liquid. If you were out there in a spaceship looking at this star, my guess is you wouldn't be able to see these plumes. Sensitive astronomical equipment, however can see things you can't. Again, this is an artist's rendition.
3. Liquid water is actually blue, and not just from the sky. It absorbs red light a little more than it absorbs blue light. A glass of water absorbs too little for you to see, so the water looks clear. 60 ft of water absorbs enough red light that everything you see looks blue or green. A quick google search turned up this link. http://www.sbu.ac.uk/water/vibrat.html
The discussion is pretty technical, but about halfway down the page is a nice graph showing water absorbtion vs. wavelength, with the visible spectrum colored in for reference.
4. That said, your point about the sky and reflection is not completely wrong. When you look down at a body of water (as opposed to swimming around under water), most of the light you see is reflected off its surface, and the water will appear similar in color to the sky, regardless of what colors it absorbs. And so, yes, if that were liquid water coming out of the nebula, and that were a real picture, "red" water could still be very easily explained if the nearest source of light were red (like the nebula as it's drawn in the picture).
I appreciate your candor (no sarcasm this time). Perhaps I owe Dr. Zimmerman an apology for doubting his existance and sincerity.
Despite my intentions not to get sucked into this thing I did wander over to the yahoo discussion group and read a few posts. I am perfectly willing to concede that Dr. Zimmerman is far more qualified to defend "conventional" physics than I am...both for being an actual physicist and for apparently having read Dr. Mills's book. I also think Dr. Zimmerman made some much better points in the posts I read there than the quote I objected to originally.
The quote on the website bothers me because I think the average public already thinks of the scientific community as narrow mindied and elitist enough as is. They're more than willing to side with the underdog, especially when the "defending champion" implies that they're stupid if they don't blindly accept the most odd-sounding concepts.
Thanks for the helpful information.
What...it would be too easy for me if you just told me what "high public science position" he holds? I wouldn't have "earned" the right to know if somebody just tells me? Why should I have to spend my time hunting through the website for this guy's info? His quote would have a lot more credibility if his "high public science position" were listed with his name.
I stand by my earlier statement. The quote (or misquote...or out of context quote?) is placed on the front page because it protrays the scientific community as a cult of elitist snobs (the "elementary" concepts line) whose debating skills are limited to appeals to authority ("Mills [read David] places himself squarely in opposition to the greatist theoritcal minds [read Goliath]"). If somebody actually said this in an attempt to argue against the existance of Hydrinos, he has done a disservice to the side of the debate he claims to be on.
From the front page of the hydrino.org link provided:
"By rejecting such elementary concepts as renormalization, virtual photons, virtual annihilation and creation, and even propagator theory... Mills places himself squarely in opposition to the greatest theoretical minds and experimental physicists of mid- and late twentieth century physics.... If that troubles you guys, I'm sorry. But reality is the readings on my instruments--period."
--Dr. Peter Zimmerman
Give me a break. I have met plenty of physicists in my life, and I have never heard a single one of them describe renormalization, virtual photons etc. as either elementary or simple. How about a source for this quote...like when and where the alleged Dr. Peter Zimmerman said it. Or even better, a little more specific information on who he is (there's probably quite a few Dr. Peter Zimmerman's in the world, and thus no one of them can sue the website for attributing false quotes to him) would shed some light how serious this should be taken. I mean he is supposedly arguing against the "Hydrino" theory, so even if he has a job in the academic communitee to protect, he shouldn't be in any danger by fessing up to this quote that "toes the party line."
Every huckster who wants to sell a new theory comprised of pretty pictures and no predictive powers tries to paint himself as a victim of the massive scientific machinery that conspires to quash original achievement in favor of the accepted standards. It's tired and old. A new one comes along every day, and it's just not worth a real scientist's time to try to study and learn in depth every single one of them only to hear "you still don't understand it" as the response to any fallacies, contradictions or problems he or she points out.
Unreduced fractions in statistics like this are shorthand, and contain more information than just the ratio. 2 out of 12 means:
The ratio we measured is 1 out of 6. We'd like you to assume that we used a statistically significant number of test subjects, but actually we used 12.
Are they going to send all these millions of people threatening emails?
Why not? Sending millions of emails is cheap. What ridiculously small fraction of people who receive Spam need to respond for it to be profitable? It obviously is considering how much worse it's gotten in the past few years. So now what fraction of people getting a threatening email that tells them they could be facing fines and/or jail time ('cuz really there's not going to be anything preventing the emailer quoting only worst case scenarios to the recipients) are going to be convinced to purchase a CD next time instead of looking for it on Kazaa?
The copyright holders could have absolutely no intention of taking any action against the recipients of the email. Sending the email is still cost effective if 0.1% of recipients believe it and are influenced by it.
Slashdot Mirror
But then we'll all get sued by the AMA, the RIAA, and SCO for copyright infringement for illegally distributing the patented cure virus to complete strangers. They'll demand royalties every time a cell undergoes mitosis!
You may think you're exaggerating here, but you're not that far from the truth. Check out http://www.percyschmeiser.com/. This guy had his fields "infected" by genetically engineered crops carried in by windborne seeds. No big surprise there, we all knew this would happen, and it's not even the first example. But Monsanto sued him for using their patented gene and WON!!! For him to be in compliance of the law, he would have had to either pay Monsanto for a product he didn't want to use, or burn his crops. I think it's still in appeals, but the fact that any judge anywhere would ever side with Monsanto on this is really scary.
"In a key part of the ruling, the judge agreed a farmer can generally own the seeds or plants grown on his land if they blow in or are carried there by pollen -- but the judge says this is not true in the case of genetically modified seed."
The reason for the concept of "prior use" is to keep people from patenting ideas they didn't actually come up with first because they're so ridiculuously obvious. But spammers work so hard covering their tracks, are they going to have a hard time proving prior art if they get sued for patent infringement? It would an amusing irony if this wasn't such a blatent example of a patent that should get rejected on grounds of "duh!". I don't care if ATT's motives are purely altruistic. This is a BAD precedent for all the same reasons as the Patriot Act and the DMCA.
I think this is an example of an overly-zealous press release from a university employee trying to make it sound more exciting than it is. The actual article (+ errata) by the researchers can be found atp rog=normal&id=APPLAB000080000015002800000001&idtyp e=cvips&gifs=yes
http://ojps.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?
Sorry, if you aren't browsing from an institution that subscribes to Applied Physics Letters, you probably won't be able to download the article for free. But I'll be happy to paraphrase what I understood from the article:
This phenomenon was purely predictable from Coulomb's law and Gauss's laws of electrostatic attraction/repulsion. Many of you should have learned about these in freshman physics. The spheres were arranged in an assymetric pattern, so rotation isn't breaking any kind of symmetry. If you arranged their spherical balls in a mirror image pattern, the rotation will reverse. The authors aren't trying to say they measured some kind of new mystical force that hasn't already been understood for 100's of years but simply that there could be an engineering application that no one had thought of before.
I'm inclined to agree with the original poster's comment that this has nothing to do with quantum mechanical spin.
I'm sorry, I just have to disagree with this. It's one thing to lose patience with somebody trying to install Linux for the first time and expecting it to work without any effort or reading of the manual.
But I think it's safe to say that it is a standard, accepted behavior that a program which creates a file will still be able to access that file later. Computer users have been backing up data on alternate media in case of a computer crash since the first personal computers. If the pragram writer wants to break from that model (oh if you'd just read the entire 400 page manual, you would have known that in addition to selecting "save" from the menu, you have to go into the preferences menu and uncheck the "screw you" button. It's right here clear as day on page 354) it really is up to the programer to call attention to this fact.
There's no warning when you rip the file. There's no warning when you run the Windows backup utility (hey...this guys backing up .wma files...I wonder if I should warn him that he needs to back up his liscence). The only warning you get is when you turn it off...then you get a misleading dialog warning you that you may be limiting your ability to play certain files when you UNCHECK the DRM option. Fact is you CAN play protected content with DRM unchecked...AFAICT it only affects the files you make, which means there is absolutely no advantage to the user to leave this thing checked. This stupid "feature" even turns itself back on every time you upgrade WMP. Funny how the program manages to remember my other personal settings like my library, and my skin preferences, but GOD forbid I go from 7.0 to 7.01 and expect it to remember that I had turned off DRM
Yea, I know...it's a free program and who am I to complain if they do something I don't like. Well that's their prerogative, and it's my prerogative to switch to another program (which I did, and I'll freely admit I was the sucker here for being lazy and using a program that came with Windows instead of looking for a better one from the start) but don't tell me I should have anticipated their break from what has been normal behavior for the past 15 years I've been using personal computers.
Yea...yea...make all the jokes about me not having to worry about anyone having a crush on me. This technique will spin off (if it already hasn't) in countless other BS "services" that will try to trick people into giving out their friends emails. Just a couple of weeks ago my boss sent our whole lab a link from this website that sends practical joke emails to your "friends"... http://cgi.slygreetings.com/page.pl?page=0&aut h=
Okay...I'll buy that you can make a hardier bacterium capable of withstanding high doses of radiation, but how is it actually going to CLEAN the waste? Radioactivity is a property of the individual atoms making up the waste. Digestion, even genetically engineered superbug digestion, is limited to making and breaking chemical bonds, not atom-smashing.
They already dump mutant bugs on oil spills, but that's because the difficulty there is recollecting all the oil, and the bugs can digest it and render it less harmfull to the environment. The key is that you don't have to go back later and clean up the bugs...they presumably die off when the oil is gone. The problem with nuclear waste isn't usually the spills so much as the fact that it has to be stored for 10000's of years before the radiation has dissipated enough. Even if you do have a nuclear waste spill and you dump some superbugs on it, you still have to clean up the now radioactive superbugs in order to remove the detrimental effects of the spill.
But arguably this article is much more about the danger of giving too much power to the patent owners. The aricle even ends with the line:
"You can't create a standard that doesn't infringe patents - PNG or Ogg Vorbis could equally be challenged. So it's no good saying something is patent free."
Of course this may just be alarmist propaganda, but as I (mis?)understood it, PNG was developped to replace GIF precisely because some other asshole company decided to start charging licencing fees for GIF. It's a little discouraging if it's true that PNG is susceptible to a similar nuiscance claim.
However, since the reconstruction error would depend on the number of respondants, which will vary dramatically from site to site, I might also guess the 5% number was rectally extracted, and only used to make a point for the article that it will still be better than the error due to respondants lying, despite not being perfect.
All of this, or course, under the dubious assumption that people will stop lying just because random numbers have been added to their information, as numerous other posts here have discussed...
*...yea..yea..I know, there's no such thing as perfect random number generator, but those tests you hear about mathemiticians running on RNG algorithms are for the truly anal-retentive who are worried about patterns showing up after the 2^64th repetion or whatever. I doubt that even a relatively low-tech randum number algorithm would be taxed by this technique.
1. The picture is an artist's rendition (look at the caption under the picture to the right of the article). The article doesn't say how the nebula was observed, but it's entirely possible it was not using visible light at all but IR, UV, XRAY, whatever (I'm no astronomy expert, but I know they don't always limit themselves to the visible spectrum). The water could have been identified from any number of known absorption lines.
2. The water in question here is probably not liquid water. The article constantly refers to the star spewing "water molecules". Although the incredibly hot water coming from a star probably cools enough to liquify, it's still probably not dense enough to form liquid. If you were out there in a spaceship looking at this star, my guess is you wouldn't be able to see these plumes. Sensitive astronomical equipment, however can see things you can't. Again, this is an artist's rendition.
3. Liquid water is actually blue, and not just from the sky. It absorbs red light a little more than it absorbs blue light. A glass of water absorbs too little for you to see, so the water looks clear. 60 ft of water absorbs enough red light that everything you see looks blue or green. A quick google search turned up this link. http://www.sbu.ac.uk/water/vibrat.html The discussion is pretty technical, but about halfway down the page is a nice graph showing water absorbtion vs. wavelength, with the visible spectrum colored in for reference.
4. That said, your point about the sky and reflection is not completely wrong. When you look down at a body of water (as opposed to swimming around under water), most of the light you see is reflected off its surface, and the water will appear similar in color to the sky, regardless of what colors it absorbs. And so, yes, if that were liquid water coming out of the nebula, and that were a real picture, "red" water could still be very easily explained if the nearest source of light were red (like the nebula as it's drawn in the picture).
Despite my intentions not to get sucked into this thing I did wander over to the yahoo discussion group and read a few posts. I am perfectly willing to concede that Dr. Zimmerman is far more qualified to defend "conventional" physics than I am...both for being an actual physicist and for apparently having read Dr. Mills's book. I also think Dr. Zimmerman made some much better points in the posts I read there than the quote I objected to originally.
The quote on the website bothers me because I think the average public already thinks of the scientific community as narrow mindied and elitist enough as is. They're more than willing to side with the underdog, especially when the "defending champion" implies that they're stupid if they don't blindly accept the most odd-sounding concepts.
I found one interesting article by a scientist discussing how difficult it can be to debate "pseudoscience" at http://www.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/nytimesaprilrev.h tml which addresses some of these issues.
Thanks for the helpful information. What...it would be too easy for me if you just told me what "high public science position" he holds? I wouldn't have "earned" the right to know if somebody just tells me? Why should I have to spend my time hunting through the website for this guy's info? His quote would have a lot more credibility if his "high public science position" were listed with his name. I stand by my earlier statement. The quote (or misquote...or out of context quote?) is placed on the front page because it protrays the scientific community as a cult of elitist snobs (the "elementary" concepts line) whose debating skills are limited to appeals to authority ("Mills [read David] places himself squarely in opposition to the greatist theoritcal minds [read Goliath]"). If somebody actually said this in an attempt to argue against the existance of Hydrinos, he has done a disservice to the side of the debate he claims to be on.
The ratio we measured is 1 out of 6. We'd like you to assume that we used a statistically significant number of test subjects, but actually we used 12.