> I'll take someone with a constitutional law degree over a senile old man and a far-right nutjob any day.
This argument is rather long over, but I feel that it is worth point out the following:
McCain would have been a good choice _precisely_ because he was a senile old man.
Young people tend to be more easily influenced by their friends and popular beliefs (which are not those of the people in the pres. bubble). McCain had a history of doing what he wanted, and not so much what others wanted of him. He proposed all kinds of legislation that was against _both_ parties' desires, and were generally not supportive of corporate influence (thus the unpopularity). That is what got him the title of maverick, and what lost him the election.
Now, you certainly can disagree with his personal philosophy; that's easy enough. But to say he had no merit is quite inaccurate, especially since he probably had the best odds of not being a corporate sycophant.
That's not to say he'd have been the right choice or Obama was the the wrong one, but is to point out that dismissing him out of hand as a senile old man is rather... stupid.
Agreed. Given the high cost of hiring an employee (usually >$20k, IIRC), HR tends to be rather thorough. They will do a background check, which would (hopefully) reveal no charges related to pedophilia. In the event that they run your name through Google, they will certainly bother to read the links, both to make sure sure it's you and that the title is not misleading (morbid curiosity probably helps too).
Also, I recollect that many companies explicit searching potential employees for legal reasons in much the same way they will frequently prohibit engineers from checking whether a design infringes on any patents. Less commonly (or in addition) they don't count web info as admissible as it can be misleading and does not usually add a whole lot of new information (see above mentioned background check).
Of course; having an amendment that says "DRM is bad" would be pretty silly.
The idea would be to neutralize the government's ability to back up DRM and similar tech (like Trusted Computing). DRM would be a noting but a waste of money and a fun challenge if not for the DMCA. Similarly, no one's going to waste their time and money on TC hardware unless they are forced to.
So I'd envision it more like: "Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes."
There ya go, "The Hacker's Amendment". And it leaves plenty of room for interpretation, just like the rest of the Constitution...
Re:Stop misunderstanding Russian space announcemen
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Russia Aims Towards Mars
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· Score: 2, Funny
It's just as well though. Think of how disappointing it would be if they did launch something all that way only that have it collide with the polar orbiter upon arrival...
4) Quite a few of the companies running such systems are run by European companies that take all the profits back home rather than reinvesting in this country.
While I agree with the rest of your post, why is point 4) a bad things ? Shall we now boycott all US company in Europe on the ground that they bring the money back in the US, instead of Europe ? Don't you think it is a rather dumb argument , especially knowing how mostly bad can be protectionism in some case ? Because sooner or later it falls down in a tit-for-tat fight.
That would be because of the previously mentioned:
2) Most of the money doesn't go back to up keep of the road.. it goes to profit for the corporation running the toll system
In other words, the bulk of the money you're supposedly being charged for road maintenance isn't even staying in the country. So the fact that they're EU companies isn't inherently a problem, but it does add insult to injury.
It may feel like a tax, but what you're paying for is a product. And, more importantly, a more desirable and a semi-custom (as Vista is the default) product. So it really only makes sense that the "downgrade" is more expensive, as that's just the way the market should fall.
On top of that, XP is the previous generation and was released six years ago (IIRC). Plus, it'll be two generations old in a year or so when Win7 comes out. Why should MS continue to offer a product that was replaced more than a year ago and will soon will be phased out? The fact that they're offering a retail version is really more than they need to. The longer it's around, the longer they need to support it.
I don't like MS, but I like whiners even less. Windows XP is a product that costs $200 dollars retail. If you want it, buy it. Windows Vista is also a product, that costs $100-$500 (IIRC). Whether or not MS gives computer makers some deal on some product has got nothing to do with the price of tea in China. So these people should shut up and be glad they don't have to dish out $200.
While the poster did say that, if it were the case, MS would need some _serious_ cahonnes. They've already been slapped be a couple governments for simply _including_ IE. It would be positively suicidal to so blatantly restrict competition like that. On the other hand, their target markets for this don't really seem to be in the jurisdiction of those that care.
Still, expect the usual MS anti-competitive games. Suddenly MS Office will appear as one app, but you won't be able to have more than a couple OOo documents open at once. And so on.
> That's cute, but after their initial release, the Windows version is supported by Microsoft, > thus taking [it] out of the test-at-your-own-risk beta stage.
Oh? I wasn't aware that all one needs to do to create feature complete, bug free software is simply release it. Now don't all you programmers feel silly for spending all that time programming when you should have just been releasing! </sarcasm>
The fact that MS has decided to release something means absolutely nothing about the quality of the software. Commercial software releases are almost invariably motivated by market forces with little concern for the programs quality (supposing it meats the vague requirement of "merchantable quality").
What impact does the fact that they are officially supporting it have on bugs or missing features? They're in more of a bug fixing mood right now (when it's beta) then they will be after it's released and they're playing catchup with security. And if something major happens (e.g. it nukes your disk), what recourse do you have? That ELUA you agreed to basically says use-at-your-own-risk. But I suppose you can derive some comfort from that fact that you call the help desk twice for free (IIRC) and have them tell you the same.
So really, what the GP said is true: the release doesn't matter, and knowing MS it won't be far better than beta until SP1 or so.
> So Blizzard shouldn't be able to set the terms of use for a _service_ they provide?
They have every right to. The problem with these cases is just how obscenely far the laws are being stretched. It's setting precedents that could potentially have devastating consequences.
If Blizzard says "thou shall now use a bot", then fine. If a person uses a bot then they have violated Blizzard's terms of service, allowing Blizzard to do what the terms allow. This usually means disconnecting them, but could, in principal, include a fine of $1 million. (Of course, if that were the case they'd almost certainly require a notarized signature, not just a "I Agree" checkbox.)
In this case, Blizzard was unable to detect Glider, and was therefore unable to take recourse against it's users. That's where the road should end. They should either update their cheat detection or give up.
HOWEVER, they went to the courts. They said that because Glider breaks their ToS, the _company_ should be held liable. And because the ToS/EULA is broken, the copying of the program into RAM to operate is a violation of copyright. AND that the people behind Glider should be held responsible for this infringement. They won. As a result, we have the precedents: 1) Copying a program into RAM is not fair use. 2) A company can be held liable if someone breaches a contract with your product.
And now, we get the following: 3) A program which reads/interoperates a with another outside the ToS/EULA is considered a DMCA circumvention device, and the author is _CRIMINALLY_ liable.
All three of these rulings are beyond ridiculous. This one, however, takes the cake as now it's a criminal offense. It's essentially saying that writing an unauthorized plugin, addon, or even operating system can get you thrown in jail.
To highlight:
Windows Vista Home (or any that aren't Ultimate) state in their EULA that they may not be run under a VM. If I were to install it under VMWare server, by these points above, VMWare could be sued out of business and the CEO should go to jail.
The implications for Maxwell's equations is basically nil. Why? Because div_B=0 works perfectly for every application yet encountered. Thus, regardless of what div_B may end up being once monopoles are accounted for it'll end up being zero basically 100% of the time, unless someone wants to throw a monopole into the situation (on purpose) to spice things up a little.
That being said, it's not really like monopoles do anything much in the context of ME since magnetic fields only matter if they're varying, and it's not like they offer a whole lot of possibilities that dipoles don't. (But I'm sure if they are discovered for real someone will come up with a use for them.)
> I'm still trying to figure out how it can be both anonymous and used to identify too.
You're thinking about it the wrong way. The idea is that you don't know they're a repeat offender until they're caught a second time, at which point their info can be checked against the database. So think of it like a hash of your name: they can't figure out your name from it (small problem space aside), but can verify it.
That being said, this sort of thing is usually (read: supposed to be) managed through court records, sealed or otherwise. That fact that they're not would indicate that this is just more of the same "civil terrorism", if you will.
IANAL and all that, but "perform" doesn't mean what you think it means...
This is a _copyright_ license, not a _use_(EULA, etc) license. Section 3 grants you a subset of the rights that a copyright holder has, namely distribution and creation of derivative(adapted) works. The wording "publicly perform" is a specific reference to the rights granted under copyright law.
For science, none of that matters. Copyright only covers things like wording and data, and if you copy those, copyright violations will pale in comparison to your being kicked out of science, if you will. Instead, a scientist either performs the experiment himself, or does something to extend the original. At which point he writes his own document, includes his own figures, and makes his own conclusion. He will almost certainly cite the original, but that is covered under fair use.
tl;dr: Copyright and licenses thereof only cover text, graphics, etc. _Patents_ cover the ideas behind them. If Springer has some sort of ELUA in addition, that would change things, but no copyright license can dictate what you can do with the _contents_ of the original because copyright _law_ doesn't extend to that (quite intentionally).
If you took the ten seconds needed to read the abstract, you'd clearly see it's the former:
"... If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to address it."
In other words, since the upper bounds of a catastrophic outcome is a least the probability that they were wrong, it's important to estimate the missing factor.
Of course, the problem underlying this is the fact that if one _could_ calculate the missing factor, it wouldn't be an issue. In the case of the LHC, it is (probably:P) far more likely that the world would be destroyed by some yet-unknown physics (e.g. "the doctor" from Ender's Game) than by black holes. But, since it's impossible to predict the likelihood of something we don't know anything about, at some point one just has to throw the switch and see what happens.
Bad journalism, solid (enough) science. As always...
It is and it isn't. Without reading the actual paper, I can't say how much of the article's stuff is hype. However, this isn't really BS statistics abuse (probably).
It goes like this:
Someone published the risk of the LHC destroying the world. Let's call that probability X.
Particle Physics calculations/papers have a chance of being wrong, which we'll call Y (something like 0.01%, apparently)
So they are saying that we are really only Y sure that there's only an X chance of the world being destroyed, leaving an event a (1-Y) chance of doing something. Ergo, there is really a Y*X+(1-Y)*Z chance of the LHC nuking us, where Z is some unknown factor.
Now, for pretty much anything else, the probably X is large enough that Z (being capped at 1-Y) doesn't matter. However, for the LHC, X is so small that if Z were near unity the actual probability would be several orders of magnitude greater than originally thought (X). And since "destroying the world" carries a large negative score, it may be worth reconsidering the LHC.
So, it's kind of an interesting point really. I don't think at all that it's case for stopping the LHC, but it's actually a worthwhile point about statistics and certainty. Not at all an abuse of them.
> A century ago, the idea that anybody could reach sixth grade without being literate would > have been considered absurd; today, it's a given.
Surely you jest? A century ago was a very different time; you may recall that schools were still heavily segregated and would continue to be so for almost another 50 years.
In those days schools were only for the people that wanted and were able to go. Many people just grew up uneducated farmers, miners, mill-workers, etc. If you weren't smart, you didn't go to school. If your weren't interested, you didn't go to school. These people would go their whole lives without being able to read much more than some simple signage, and that was fine, because those were the times.
Today, we still have the same people, but the world isn't what it used to be; reading is important. So we try to educate _everyone_ now, but that just isn't so easy.
Bacteria are simple and do not need to do much. You, on the other hand, have an entire system to maintain. This means things like proteins, blood (water), bones, etc. Also, most (if not all) human cells are quite a bit larger than bacterial cells.
Yes, well, that, or maybe it's just that the notion of "expensive" disks is gone. These days, you pay a tiny amount per GB, which usually goes down with increasing size. Oh sure, you may pay a bit more at the top, but it's not much.
It used to be that you could get huge drives. I'm not just talking about the fact that they would store like 20+MB, but they were also physically huge. I used to have one that was 5 platters and two 3.5" slots high (though my memory is fuzzy). These suckers were EXPENSIVE; multiple times what the same capacity would cost across standard disks, thus the creation of RAID.
Since RAID because popular, the expensive disk died leaving us with only 'inexpensive' ones. Yes, WD Raptors are pricey, but they've got performance to back that up (usually). And yes, "RAID" versions are usually slightly (10%) more expensive, but they usually come with a longer warranty and are modified to work better in a RAID (which is a smaller market).
In short, you cynicism is misplaced. Expensive disks don't exist anymore so it only makes sense to update the acronym.
It honestly depends. At my old college, the sports stuff fell under an entity completely distinct from the school. It was initially set up this so that what you were describing couldn't happen. The school was one thing, and the sports were another, so that the school _couldn't_ give money to sports. And it turned out, the sports teams (well, specifically football) actually ended up turning _huge_ profits. Since they can transfer this to the school, the extra money ends up getting spent on new buildings and equipment.
The point I'm making here, in an admittedly roundabout way, is that sports actually tend to pull in a decent amount of money, so that the funding usually isn't that major.
Beyond that, 'starving' art and science budgets isn't exactly common, and the schools that do it are generally lacking enough money to even manage the basics (e.g. requiring HS students to share books) and usually have minimal sports programs. The rest of the time, it's usually only for lack of interest that arts and sciences don't get much funding; if kinds started a robotics club (or the like), they wouldn't have a hard time getting funds. But they rarely do, and for that, we should blame the parents.
That's true, but the problem is that Windows won't run on anything but x86, and even Linux isn't nearly complete on the ARM as it is on x86. On top of that, things like PCIe and other expansion buses quite simply aren't available on non-x86 systems.
These chips aren't about embedded devices, but rather more like embedded computers, if you will. The aim is to give most of the features of a standard computer, including pretty good performance, RAM, etc, in a lower power way.
It makes me think that this is really just misdirection to make Intel complacent. While not a great strategy most of the time, with the current economic situation the stock price isn't going to take much of a hit. Then, when they announce a new low power CPU, their stock should get a nice boost and Intel will need to redouble their R&D to catch up.
On the other hand, why would they even want "average user" over "average Firefox user"? I can understand that the former may have value in as far a switching users to Firefox, but on the other hand most people don't switch because IE is good enough and already installed. No matter how much touts improvements in whatever, they aren't going to convince these people. Mozilla is best off improving their experience for existing uses so that they: a) don't switch away, and b) install FF on their friends computers. Thus, "average Firefox user" really has more value to them anyway.
Actually, it's really just more like KDE4 is turning out to be much more work than everyone expected. In less than a week, they'll be putting out 4.2 which will essentially be the first major bugfix/upgrade of KDE4. Version 4.0 was little more than a developer release, and the transition to 4.1 was aimed to include the minimum functionality necessary to actually allow it to replace 3.5. With 4.2, KDE4 should finally be (nearly) what it was intended to be, and further releases will probably focus on simply adding features.
Setting global warming aside, this is still a bit of an issue. If "off" electronics can actually be expected to average around, say, 5-15W, it's not to hard to imagine that most households are probably looking at about 50W (esp. if one includes "wall warts", etc) being consumed by things that aren't in use. Given that the average household averages about 1kW power consumption, this would indicate roughly 5% of residential power consumption, or about 57 billion kWh annually. That's an awful lot of power to be wasting.
Sure, that number may be a bit high. On the other hand, if you look at the source, you'll see that they are listing 7.3% of energy use going to unsurveyed devices. This goes to all kinds of things, but most of them are only on for a max of 30min/day (hair dryers, power tools, etc), and probably (though it isn't clear*) "off" electronics. And keep in mind these number are from 7 years ago, which would be mostly before the advent of the always-kinda-on home theater.
So a huge problem? Not really, but a fairly serviceable one. And if we are going to be doing wind power and all that jazz, it'd be nice to have to make 5% less of 'em.
*The survey does cover things like VCR/DVD, but it doesn't specify if the data includes sleep mode draw or not.
People like to think that NASA is borderline retarded and would be better off simply using their funding dollars and fuel. Most of the time they are right. However, when it comes to safety, NASA is the top, through frequently to their own detriment.
For the case you pointed out: > I've read that the clever Russian solution to updating the computers in Soyuz. Rather than > a start from scratch rewrite of the controls and instruments, they choose to emulate all > their old computers in modern circuitry, and to display the same gauges and instruments > on modern LCDs.
The Russians here are totally in the wrong. First of all, one of the major issues concerning software in space is the ability of the hardware to work in the wild temperatures and radiation of space. NASA uses old hardware because they know it works. The Russians have swapped out their known-working hardware, and added fun potential issues like and LCD panel. On top of this, instead of just porting the code to a newer system and proving it still works, they now have to prove an emulator emulates the old hardware exactly: a much harder problem.
In short, this is like the old "Russians using a pencil / NASA spending $** million on the space pen story". It sounds clever until you realize that a pencil makes loose graphite dust in a closed environment.
Everyone seems fond of pointing this out, along with listing a bunch of other games that sold more copies. The thing is, however, that that isn't the point. Cheaper games _should_ sell more because of where they hit the demand curve. The point is that despite requiring somewhat pricey peripherals it still sold enough copies to reach $1 billion, and that's impressive. It's even more so when you consider that many people are buying this over 2 other games (due to increased price); that's why using total revenue is actually a useful benchmark.
Finally, I would point out that since guitars from previous versions work with III, a large percentage of people only needed to buy the software, not the bundle. So if you don't believe the above, than realize that 60% or so of those sales are at the standard game price.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'll take someone with a constitutional law degree over a senile old man and a far-right nutjob any day.
This argument is rather long over, but I feel that it is worth point out the following:
McCain would have been a good choice _precisely_ because he was a senile old man.
Young people tend to be more easily influenced by their friends and popular beliefs (which are not those of the people in the pres. bubble). McCain had a history of doing what he wanted, and not so much what others wanted of him. He proposed all kinds of legislation that was against _both_ parties' desires, and were generally not supportive of corporate influence (thus the unpopularity). That is what got him the title of maverick, and what lost him the election.
Now, you certainly can disagree with his personal philosophy; that's easy enough. But to say he had no merit is quite inaccurate, especially since he probably had the best odds of not being a corporate sycophant.
That's not to say he'd have been the right choice or Obama was the the wrong one, but is to point out that dismissing him out of hand as a senile old man is rather... stupid.
Agreed. Given the high cost of hiring an employee (usually >$20k, IIRC), HR tends to be rather thorough. They will do a background check, which would (hopefully) reveal no charges related to pedophilia. In the event that they run your name through Google, they will certainly bother to read the links, both to make sure sure it's you and that the title is not misleading (morbid curiosity probably helps too).
Also, I recollect that many companies explicit searching potential employees for legal reasons in much the same way they will frequently prohibit engineers from checking whether a design infringes on any patents. Less commonly (or in addition) they don't count web info as admissible as it can be misleading and does not usually add a whole lot of new information (see above mentioned background check).
Of course; having an amendment that says "DRM is bad" would be pretty silly.
The idea would be to neutralize the government's ability to back up DRM and similar tech (like Trusted Computing). DRM would be a noting but a waste of money and a fun challenge if not for the DMCA. Similarly, no one's going to waste their time and money on TC hardware unless they are forced to.
So I'd envision it more like:
"Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes."
There ya go, "The Hacker's Amendment". And it leaves plenty of room for interpretation, just like the rest of the Constitution...
It's just as well though. Think of how disappointing it would be if they did launch something all that way only that have it collide with the polar orbiter upon arrival...
That would be because of the previously mentioned: .. it goes to profit for the corporation running the toll system
2) Most of the money doesn't go back to up keep of the road
In other words, the bulk of the money you're supposedly being charged for road maintenance isn't even staying in the country. So the fact that they're EU companies isn't inherently a problem, but it does add insult to injury.
It may feel like a tax, but what you're paying for is a product. And, more importantly, a more desirable and a semi-custom (as Vista is the default) product. So it really only makes sense that the "downgrade" is more expensive, as that's just the way the market should fall.
On top of that, XP is the previous generation and was released six years ago (IIRC). Plus, it'll be two generations old in a year or so when Win7 comes out. Why should MS continue to offer a product that was replaced more than a year ago and will soon will be phased out? The fact that they're offering a retail version is really more than they need to. The longer it's around, the longer they need to support it.
I don't like MS, but I like whiners even less. Windows XP is a product that costs $200 dollars retail. If you want it, buy it. Windows Vista is also a product, that costs $100-$500 (IIRC). Whether or not MS gives computer makers some deal on some product has got nothing to do with the price of tea in China. So these people should shut up and be glad they don't have to dish out $200.
While the poster did say that, if it were the case, MS would need some _serious_ cahonnes. They've already been slapped be a couple governments for simply _including_ IE. It would be positively suicidal to so blatantly restrict competition like that. On the other hand, their target markets for this don't really seem to be in the jurisdiction of those that care.
Still, expect the usual MS anti-competitive games. Suddenly MS Office will appear as one app, but you won't be able to have more than a couple OOo documents open at once. And so on.
> That's cute, but after their initial release, the Windows version is supported by Microsoft,
> thus taking [it] out of the test-at-your-own-risk beta stage.
Oh? I wasn't aware that all one needs to do to create feature complete, bug free software is simply release it. Now don't all you programmers feel silly for spending all that time programming when you should have just been releasing! </sarcasm>
The fact that MS has decided to release something means absolutely nothing about the quality of the software. Commercial software releases are almost invariably motivated by market forces with little concern for the programs quality (supposing it meats the vague requirement of "merchantable quality").
What impact does the fact that they are officially supporting it have on bugs or missing features? They're in more of a bug fixing mood right now (when it's beta) then they will be after it's released and they're playing catchup with security. And if something major happens (e.g. it nukes your disk), what recourse do you have? That ELUA you agreed to basically says use-at-your-own-risk. But I suppose you can derive some comfort from that fact that you call the help desk twice for free (IIRC) and have them tell you the same.
So really, what the GP said is true: the release doesn't matter, and knowing MS it won't be far better than beta until SP1 or so.
> So Blizzard shouldn't be able to set the terms of use for a _service_ they provide?
They have every right to. The problem with these cases is just how obscenely far the laws are being stretched. It's setting precedents that could potentially have devastating consequences.
If Blizzard says "thou shall now use a bot", then fine. If a person uses a bot then they have violated Blizzard's terms of service, allowing Blizzard to do what the terms allow. This usually means disconnecting them, but could, in principal, include a fine of $1 million. (Of course, if that were the case they'd almost certainly require a notarized signature, not just a "I Agree" checkbox.)
In this case, Blizzard was unable to detect Glider, and was therefore unable to take recourse against it's users. That's where the road should end. They should either update their cheat detection or give up.
HOWEVER, they went to the courts. They said that because Glider breaks their ToS, the _company_ should be held liable. And because the ToS/EULA is broken, the copying of the program into RAM to operate is a violation of copyright. AND that the people behind Glider should be held responsible for this infringement. They won. As a result, we have the precedents:
1) Copying a program into RAM is not fair use.
2) A company can be held liable if someone breaches a contract with your product.
And now, we get the following:
3) A program which reads/interoperates a with another outside the ToS/EULA is considered a DMCA circumvention device, and the author is _CRIMINALLY_ liable.
All three of these rulings are beyond ridiculous. This one, however, takes the cake as now it's a criminal offense. It's essentially saying that writing an unauthorized plugin, addon, or even operating system can get you thrown in jail.
To highlight:
Windows Vista Home (or any that aren't Ultimate) state in their EULA that they may not be run under a VM. If I were to install it under VMWare server, by these points above, VMWare could be sued out of business and the CEO should go to jail.
Thanks, Blizzard.
The implications for Maxwell's equations is basically nil. Why? Because div_B=0 works perfectly for every application yet encountered. Thus, regardless of what div_B may end up being once monopoles are accounted for it'll end up being zero basically 100% of the time, unless someone wants to throw a monopole into the situation (on purpose) to spice things up a little.
That being said, it's not really like monopoles do anything much in the context of ME since magnetic fields only matter if they're varying, and it's not like they offer a whole lot of possibilities that dipoles don't. (But I'm sure if they are discovered for real someone will come up with a use for them.)
> I'm still trying to figure out how it can be both anonymous and used to identify too.
You're thinking about it the wrong way. The idea is that you don't know they're a repeat offender until they're caught a second time, at which point their info can be checked against the database. So think of it like a hash of your name: they can't figure out your name from it (small problem space aside), but can verify it.
That being said, this sort of thing is usually (read: supposed to be) managed through court records, sealed or otherwise. That fact that they're not would indicate that this is just more of the same "civil terrorism", if you will.
IANAL and all that, but "perform" doesn't mean what you think it means...
This is a _copyright_ license, not a _use_(EULA, etc) license. Section 3 grants you a subset of the rights that a copyright holder has, namely distribution and creation of derivative(adapted) works. The wording "publicly perform" is a specific reference to the rights granted under copyright law.
For science, none of that matters. Copyright only covers things like wording and data, and if you copy those, copyright violations will pale in comparison to your being kicked out of science, if you will. Instead, a scientist either performs the experiment himself, or does something to extend the original. At which point he writes his own document, includes his own figures, and makes his own conclusion. He will almost certainly cite the original, but that is covered under fair use.
tl;dr: Copyright and licenses thereof only cover text, graphics, etc. _Patents_ cover the ideas behind them. If Springer has some sort of ELUA in addition, that would change things, but no copyright license can dictate what you can do with the _contents_ of the original because copyright _law_ doesn't extend to that (quite intentionally).
If you took the ten seconds needed to read the abstract, you'd clearly see it's the former:
"... If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to address it."
In other words, since the upper bounds of a catastrophic outcome is a least the probability that they were wrong, it's important to estimate the missing factor.
Of course, the problem underlying this is the fact that if one _could_ calculate the missing factor, it wouldn't be an issue. In the case of the LHC, it is (probably :P) far more likely that the world would be destroyed by some yet-unknown physics (e.g. "the doctor" from Ender's Game) than by black holes. But, since it's impossible to predict the likelihood of something we don't know anything about, at some point one just has to throw the switch and see what happens.
Bad journalism, solid (enough) science. As always...
It is and it isn't. Without reading the actual paper, I can't say how much of the article's stuff is hype. However, this isn't really BS statistics abuse (probably).
It goes like this:
Someone published the risk of the LHC destroying the world. Let's call that probability X.
Particle Physics calculations/papers have a chance of being wrong, which we'll call Y (something like 0.01%, apparently)
So they are saying that we are really only Y sure that there's only an X chance of the world being destroyed, leaving an event a (1-Y) chance of doing something. Ergo, there is really a Y*X+(1-Y)*Z chance of the LHC nuking us, where Z is some unknown factor.
Now, for pretty much anything else, the probably X is large enough that Z (being capped at 1-Y) doesn't matter. However, for the LHC, X is so small that if Z were near unity the actual probability would be several orders of magnitude greater than originally thought (X). And since "destroying the world" carries a large negative score, it may be worth reconsidering the LHC.
So, it's kind of an interesting point really. I don't think at all that it's case for stopping the LHC, but it's actually a worthwhile point about statistics and certainty. Not at all an abuse of them.
> A century ago, the idea that anybody could reach sixth grade without being literate would
> have been considered absurd; today, it's a given.
Surely you jest? A century ago was a very different time; you may recall that schools were still heavily segregated and would continue to be so for almost another 50 years.
In those days schools were only for the people that wanted and were able to go. Many people just grew up uneducated farmers, miners, mill-workers, etc. If you weren't smart, you didn't go to school. If your weren't interested, you didn't go to school. These people would go their whole lives without being able to read much more than some simple signage, and that was fine, because those were the times.
Today, we still have the same people, but the world isn't what it used to be; reading is important. So we try to educate _everyone_ now, but that just isn't so easy.
Bacteria are simple and do not need to do much. You, on the other hand, have an entire system to maintain. This means things like proteins, blood (water), bones, etc. Also, most (if not all) human cells are quite a bit larger than bacterial cells.
It all adds up a great deal.
Yes, well, that, or maybe it's just that the notion of "expensive" disks is gone. These days, you pay a tiny amount per GB, which usually goes down with increasing size. Oh sure, you may pay a bit more at the top, but it's not much.
It used to be that you could get huge drives. I'm not just talking about the fact that they would store like 20+MB, but they were also physically huge. I used to have one that was 5 platters and two 3.5" slots high (though my memory is fuzzy). These suckers were EXPENSIVE; multiple times what the same capacity would cost across standard disks, thus the creation of RAID.
Since RAID because popular, the expensive disk died leaving us with only 'inexpensive' ones. Yes, WD Raptors are pricey, but they've got performance to back that up (usually). And yes, "RAID" versions are usually slightly (10%) more expensive, but they usually come with a longer warranty and are modified to work better in a RAID (which is a smaller market).
In short, you cynicism is misplaced. Expensive disks don't exist anymore so it only makes sense to update the acronym.
It honestly depends. At my old college, the sports stuff fell under an entity completely distinct from the school. It was initially set up this so that what you were describing couldn't happen. The school was one thing, and the sports were another, so that the school _couldn't_ give money to sports. And it turned out, the sports teams (well, specifically football) actually ended up turning _huge_ profits. Since they can transfer this to the school, the extra money ends up getting spent on new buildings and equipment.
The point I'm making here, in an admittedly roundabout way, is that sports actually tend to pull in a decent amount of money, so that the funding usually isn't that major.
Beyond that, 'starving' art and science budgets isn't exactly common, and the schools that do it are generally lacking enough money to even manage the basics (e.g. requiring HS students to share books) and usually have minimal sports programs. The rest of the time, it's usually only for lack of interest that arts and sciences don't get much funding; if kinds started a robotics club (or the like), they wouldn't have a hard time getting funds. But they rarely do, and for that, we should blame the parents.
That's true, but the problem is that Windows won't run on anything but x86, and even Linux isn't nearly complete on the ARM as it is on x86. On top of that, things like PCIe and other expansion buses quite simply aren't available on non-x86 systems.
These chips aren't about embedded devices, but rather more like embedded computers, if you will. The aim is to give most of the features of a standard computer, including pretty good performance, RAM, etc, in a lower power way.
It makes me think that this is really just misdirection to make Intel complacent. While not a great strategy most of the time, with the current economic situation the stock price isn't going to take much of a hit. Then, when they announce a new low power CPU, their stock should get a nice boost and Intel will need to redouble their R&D to catch up.
On the other hand, why would they even want "average user" over "average Firefox user"? I can understand that the former may have value in as far a switching users to Firefox, but on the other hand most people don't switch because IE is good enough and already installed. No matter how much touts improvements in whatever, they aren't going to convince these people. Mozilla is best off improving their experience for existing uses so that they: a) don't switch away, and b) install FF on their friends computers. Thus, "average Firefox user" really has more value to them anyway.
Actually, it's really just more like KDE4 is turning out to be much more work than everyone expected. In less than a week, they'll be putting out 4.2 which will essentially be the first major bugfix/upgrade of KDE4. Version 4.0 was little more than a developer release, and the transition to 4.1 was aimed to include the minimum functionality necessary to actually allow it to replace 3.5. With 4.2, KDE4 should finally be (nearly) what it was intended to be, and further releases will probably focus on simply adding features.
In short, KDE4 is basically a year late.
Using 2001 numbers from: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs2001/enduse2001/enduse2001.html
Setting global warming aside, this is still a bit of an issue. If "off" electronics can actually be expected to average around, say, 5-15W, it's not to hard to imagine that most households are probably looking at about 50W (esp. if one includes "wall warts", etc) being consumed by things that aren't in use. Given that the average household averages about 1kW power consumption, this would indicate roughly 5% of residential power consumption, or about 57 billion kWh annually. That's an awful lot of power to be wasting.
Sure, that number may be a bit high. On the other hand, if you look at the source, you'll see that they are listing 7.3% of energy use going to unsurveyed devices. This goes to all kinds of things, but most of them are only on for a max of 30min/day (hair dryers, power tools, etc), and probably (though it isn't clear*) "off" electronics. And keep in mind these number are from 7 years ago, which would be mostly before the advent of the always-kinda-on home theater.
So a huge problem? Not really, but a fairly serviceable one. And if we are going to be doing wind power and all that jazz, it'd be nice to have to make 5% less of 'em.
*The survey does cover things like VCR/DVD, but it doesn't specify if the data includes sleep mode draw or not.
People like to think that NASA is borderline retarded and would be better off simply using their funding dollars and fuel. Most of the time they are right. However, when it comes to safety, NASA is the top, through frequently to their own detriment.
For the case you pointed out:
> I've read that the clever Russian solution to updating the computers in Soyuz. Rather than
> a start from scratch rewrite of the controls and instruments, they choose to emulate all
> their old computers in modern circuitry, and to display the same gauges and instruments
> on modern LCDs.
The Russians here are totally in the wrong. First of all, one of the major issues concerning software in space is the ability of the hardware to work in the wild temperatures and radiation of space. NASA uses old hardware because they know it works. The Russians have swapped out their known-working hardware, and added fun potential issues like and LCD panel. On top of this, instead of just porting the code to a newer system and proving it still works, they now have to prove an emulator emulates the old hardware exactly: a much harder problem.
In short, this is like the old "Russians using a pencil / NASA spending $** million on the space pen story". It sounds clever until you realize that a pencil makes loose graphite dust in a closed environment.
Everyone seems fond of pointing this out, along with listing a bunch of other games that sold more copies. The thing is, however, that that isn't the point. Cheaper games _should_ sell more because of where they hit the demand curve. The point is that despite requiring somewhat pricey peripherals it still sold enough copies to reach $1 billion, and that's impressive. It's even more so when you consider that many people are buying this over 2 other games (due to increased price); that's why using total revenue is actually a useful benchmark.
Finally, I would point out that since guitars from previous versions work with III, a large percentage of people only needed to buy the software, not the bundle. So if you don't believe the above, than realize that 60% or so of those sales are at the standard game price.