Had this been the excuse given on day one, it would have been a plausible example of incompetence. Given the amount of time since the scandal broke, it now looks like it took some work to craft a lie that appears to be plausible incompetence.
Why do university students always forget that the professors are their employees?
**BZZZT** So sorry, but thanks for playing!
Students are neither the boss nor the customer, they are (one* of) the product(s). A campus' reputation rises and falls with the quality of its products.
* - Research is the other major product. Several people have already noted that a lot of professors spend more time on research than on students. That's because like anybody else, they follow the incentive systems, and Department Heads, Deans, Provosts, and Campus Presidents all know that research grants put a lot more money in their hands than tuition does.
Well, the first question in any copyright case is: "Is there a copyright?" There's an easy answer in this case to that question. I'll let you guess.
There can be no "ripping off" when you have no copyright.
Are you trying to infer that there's no copyright if there's not a copyright registration? You're wrong if that's what you think. Copyright, unlike patents, resides with the author from the moment of creation. Registration makes it easier to establish which of two duplicate works was the primal one, but isn't required if you can produce some other sort of evidence. For instance, I was told by a campus lawyer once that sending a copy of my work to myself via registered mail and then leaving the envelope sealed, so a judge could open it with their own hands, would be just as effective as registering a copyright and more secure if there was something I didn't yet want to divulge to the rest of the world. The only thing I've explicitly registered copyright on was my PhD thesis, but I've signed over my copyright to lots of articles to get them published since then without formally registering my original copyright in the first place. I also have a whole pile of copyright transfers in my file cabinet from the time when I edited a conference proceedings.
MODS - Parent post is not informative, it is flat-out wrong. A pseudo-random number generator is is considered unacceptable if it can't pass a Turing-like test - if I gave you two sequences where one was pseudo-random and the other was "truly" random, you would be unable to tell which was which using any statistical test you can dream up. If one of the sequences yielded biased results for some known distributional property, that would itself be grounds for rejecting it.
No bashing, it's not a bad question. The answer is because it still qualifies as a "rare event". The thing that's kind of counter-intuitive, but easy to demonstrate, is that having a particular rare event happen is rare, but having some rare event happen is common.
A good illustration of this is the so-called "birthday paradox", which asks what's the probability of having duplicate birthdays in a group of n people (whose birthdays are independent of each other). Think of adding the people to the room one by one. The first person doesn't have any chance of having a duplicate birthday, because there's nobody else in the room. The second person has 1/365 chances of duplicating, 364/365 of missing the first one. Let's follow up on the misses, they're easier to work with. In general, if we've got k people in the room without a duplicate, that means they've used up k of the 365 days in the year, and the next person we introduce to the room has to miss all of those days to avoid a duplication. So the probability of everybody missing everybody else, by the time we get up to n people in the room, is (365/365)*(364/365)*(363/365)*...*((365-n+1)/365), which starts diving towards zero really fast. The probability of having one or more duplicates is 1 - P(no duplicates), which correspondingly climbs to one really fast. If you write a short program to do the exact calculations, you'll find that by the time you have 23 people in the room the probability is greater than 0.5 of having a duplicate, and by the time you get 57 people it's greater than 0.99!
If you pick one particular person and ask what's the probability of duplicating that birthday it remains quite small. That's the difference between having a particular rare event rather than having some rare event. For a large enough group, some pair of people will almost surely share a birthday but the odds of it being you (or any other designated person) remain quite small.
Just to preserve my computing geek cred, this is why you need collision resolution for hashing algorithms. You don't know which entries will share hash values, but collisions are almost certain to happen by the time you've loaded 3 * sqrt(Hash Table Capacity) values, e.g., if your hash table has capacity 10000 you will almost surely see a duplicate within the first 300 entries.
You only think that's what you want, until you realize that somebody will have been on the hardware before you and set up a virtualization environment which looks like you own the hardware, but is quietly logging your keystrokes and mining your sensitive data.
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
That would seem to contradict the message printed on every dollar bill, found to the upper left of George's picture, which says "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE". Sorry for the shouting, the original is all caps.
If that's the point, I don't get it. It means the engine has to be way over-engineered relative to what's needed for the moon, with huge mass penalties, which boost the fuel requirements, which boost the mass even more... It would almost make more sense to me if they permitted you to use floatation to offset 5/6 of the weight.
Being underwater simulates the ability to be in any orientation relative to what you're working on, so you can acclimate to orientation-related difficulties. It doesn't alter the fact that you're still in a one G field physiologically. If your head is pointed towards the surface, your heart still has to pump blood up a foot or so against gravity to get it to your brain; if your head is pointed away from the surface you're still going to have to use the muscles of your trachea to swallow "uphill", and will have blood pooling towards your head.
And just when did the Russians allegedly experiment with this?
We've seen what happens with microgravity by having people in orbit for long periods of time. To know what happens in 1/6 G, you have to expose somebody to it for an extended period. We can simulate increased gravity with centrifuges, but the only ways we currently know to simulate decreased gravity are to 1) go where it exists or 2) go to a lesser gravity field and use a centrifuge.
Nobody has been exposed to 1/6 G for more than a few days, and until it happens this entire sub-thread is pure conjecture.
Slashdot Mirror
...was to teach Dartmouth undergrads how to count by tens.
Had this been the excuse given on day one, it would have been a plausible example of incompetence. Given the amount of time since the scandal broke, it now looks like it took some work to craft a lie that appears to be plausible incompetence.
Students are neither the boss nor the customer, they are (one* of) the product(s). A campus' reputation rises and falls with the quality of its products.
* - Research is the other major product. Several people have already noted that a lot of professors spend more time on research than on students. That's because like anybody else, they follow the incentive systems, and Department Heads, Deans, Provosts, and Campus Presidents all know that research grants put a lot more money in their hands than tuition does.
Are you trying to infer that there's no copyright if there's not a copyright registration? You're wrong if that's what you think. Copyright, unlike patents, resides with the author from the moment of creation. Registration makes it easier to establish which of two duplicate works was the primal one, but isn't required if you can produce some other sort of evidence. For instance, I was told by a campus lawyer once that sending a copy of my work to myself via registered mail and then leaving the envelope sealed, so a judge could open it with their own hands, would be just as effective as registering a copyright and more secure if there was something I didn't yet want to divulge to the rest of the world. The only thing I've explicitly registered copyright on was my PhD thesis, but I've signed over my copyright to lots of articles to get them published since then without formally registering my original copyright in the first place. I also have a whole pile of copyright transfers in my file cabinet from the time when I edited a conference proceedings.
Too bad there's not a "disinformative" mod for posts which propagate misinformation based on ignorance rather than trolling.
Yeah, I left out leap years too. None of which has enough impact to negate the point I was trying to make.
MODS - Parent post is not informative, it is flat-out wrong. A pseudo-random number generator is is considered unacceptable if it can't pass a Turing-like test - if I gave you two sequences where one was pseudo-random and the other was "truly" random, you would be unable to tell which was which using any statistical test you can dream up. If one of the sequences yielded biased results for some known distributional property, that would itself be grounds for rejecting it.
A good illustration of this is the so-called "birthday paradox", which asks what's the probability of having duplicate birthdays in a group of n people (whose birthdays are independent of each other). Think of adding the people to the room one by one. The first person doesn't have any chance of having a duplicate birthday, because there's nobody else in the room. The second person has 1/365 chances of duplicating, 364/365 of missing the first one. Let's follow up on the misses, they're easier to work with. In general, if we've got k people in the room without a duplicate, that means they've used up k of the 365 days in the year, and the next person we introduce to the room has to miss all of those days to avoid a duplication. So the probability of everybody missing everybody else, by the time we get up to n people in the room, is (365/365)*(364/365)*(363/365)*...*((365-n+1)/365), which starts diving towards zero really fast. The probability of having one or more duplicates is 1 - P(no duplicates), which correspondingly climbs to one really fast. If you write a short program to do the exact calculations, you'll find that by the time you have 23 people in the room the probability is greater than 0.5 of having a duplicate, and by the time you get 57 people it's greater than 0.99!
If you pick one particular person and ask what's the probability of duplicating that birthday it remains quite small. That's the difference between having a particular rare event rather than having some rare event. For a large enough group, some pair of people will almost surely share a birthday but the odds of it being you (or any other designated person) remain quite small.
Just to preserve my computing geek cred, this is why you need collision resolution for hashing algorithms. You don't know which entries will share hash values, but collisions are almost certain to happen by the time you've loaded 3 * sqrt(Hash Table Capacity) values, e.g., if your hash table has capacity 10000 you will almost surely see a duplicate within the first 300 entries.
Been done already.
You only think that's what you want, until you realize that somebody will have been on the hardware before you and set up a virtualization environment which looks like you own the hardware, but is quietly logging your keystrokes and mining your sensitive data.
Has anybody else noticed that the gas cloud looks a lot like a giant space goat?
Normal safe driving recommends the "2 second rule". These guys have to allow, what, 20 minutes?
Good explanation. Thanks.
If that's the point, I don't get it. It means the engine has to be way over-engineered relative to what's needed for the moon, with huge mass penalties, which boost the fuel requirements, which boost the mass even more... It would almost make more sense to me if they permitted you to use floatation to offset 5/6 of the weight.
Being underwater simulates the ability to be in any orientation relative to what you're working on, so you can acclimate to orientation-related difficulties. It doesn't alter the fact that you're still in a one G field physiologically. If your head is pointed towards the surface, your heart still has to pump blood up a foot or so against gravity to get it to your brain; if your head is pointed away from the surface you're still going to have to use the muscles of your trachea to swallow "uphill", and will have blood pooling towards your head.
And just when did the Russians allegedly experiment with this? We've seen what happens with microgravity by having people in orbit for long periods of time. To know what happens in 1/6 G, you have to expose somebody to it for an extended period. We can simulate increased gravity with centrifuges, but the only ways we currently know to simulate decreased gravity are to 1) go where it exists or 2) go to a lesser gravity field and use a centrifuge. Nobody has been exposed to 1/6 G for more than a few days, and until it happens this entire sub-thread is pure conjecture.
Lower gravity => less stress on heart + other parts that tend to sag.
There is accountability via the bar association, and the penalties can be devastating.
There's more to the concept of choice overload than you may think. I found this talk to be quite interesting.