Store recordings in a fortress, and you'll preserve them for 100 years.
Digitalize and upload them, and they'll live as long as you have a running server.
Besides, a recording is more useful on the net than in a mountain.
i think _you_ are not understanding what you're talking about.
The TCPA is an 'alliance' of industrials promoting 'trusted computing' initiatives like Palladium. So a statement like Palladium or whatever it'll be called is something different and does not necessarily depend on TCPA, but it may use it. is meaningless. You don't 'use' the TCPA, it's not a technology.
ah ok then... jackboot is rather good because 'boot' has a meaning for computers... what about something around tolkien/wagner's ring ?
that reminds me of the old joke identifying the windows cdrom with the one ring... here it goes:
-Put it in the cdrom drive !
-W-what? in the cdrom drive ?
-Yes, says gandalf; and after a moment he carefully presses the EJECT button.
-Your hand ! See? It's quite cool ! can you see anything?
-N-no... wait... yes... there are writings... 'All rights reserved. By installing windows longhorn on any device you implicitly agree with the DRM User Licence.' I can't understand this language...
-None of you can... the letters are english, but the tongue is that of redmond, which I shall not utter here. it says...
I think 'the one ring' could be rather appropriate for palladium... what's your opinion ?
Re:The name has been changed because it was too se
on
Palladium Changes Name
·
· Score: 1
What does 'Jackboot' mean ? that sounds cool, but I have never heard it (and English is not my native language).
'Gestapo inside' is too violent, as you know.
Hey, I've just had an idea : why not picking some name involving 'Soma' or 'Our Ford' or anything else from the 'brave new world' book by Huxley ?
This is exactly the point ! Have you ever taken some time to think about the semantics of:
"Microsoft Windows", "Microsoft Word", etc... ?
What it they had been called "Tiny Sweet Windows", "Tiny Sweet Word" ? Wouldn't you think of those names as...... weird ?
why has the parent got 0 ? mod it up !
You are very naive for a Blacknight. Did you know that Linus is working for one of the companies behind palladium (there are frequently news on The Inquirer indicating that Transmeta is designing palladium chips) ? Did you know that an asian 'open source' community is registered as a member of the tcpa ?
The future is not bright. Most people, including among linux users, don't want to take ideological positions. The day Palladium will be necessary to connect to most of the net, they will adopt it. You can be pretty certain that some future linux kernel will have an optional palladium mode, and I bet this will be done in some 3.x version. Of course, this is madness since it will make them dependant on microsoft.
There will remain some who won't turn it on, but they won't be able to acces to the larger part of the net where all the media will be available; they won't be able to connect most peripherals and won't have access to entertainment (unless you call gnuchess entertainment); what's more, they won't have to possibility to communicate in any way (including e-mail) with the palladiumised world : so they won't be many. Only some gnu ideologists, and some LaTeX-addicted mathematicians like me.
The name has been changed because it was too sexy
on
Palladium Changes Name
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yes : Palladium was a 'good' name. It encouraged people to talk about it. It was a Name against which people could league them together. Now it's another dull acronym nobody is willing to talk about...
perhaps even to think about...
believe me, this is the most 'clever' idea from microsoft since June.
by the way, this technique is getting pretty common in the area. There were already the dmca, tcpa, sssca, cbtdpa....
I urge people here to find it a catchy nickname before it is too late (it will be to late when the hype about palladium will be over, which means soon).
"Big Brother" is maybe not original enough... and also not enough specific (there are other related issues in america, like the tia and the tips).
The hero's now working for PALLADIUM
on
Linus Is A Hero
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I posted this on the 'linuxnewbie' forums some time ago, but it curiously disappeared. I've received no mail from the moderators and I've really verified that my message had really been posted. My interpretation is that some linuxnewbie moderator was a Linus fan.
OpenGL 2.0 is going to be fully supported by 3DLabs's P10. Remember, the early proposals for OGL2 have been submitted by 3DLabs, and the shading language adopted by the OpenGL ARB (architecture review board) is 3DLabs's GLSLANG.
I'm no conspiracy theory fanatic, but I think that it's _intended to_.
When you're making a law against your citizens, there are two options: Either you want to make 'communication' to let people change their minds / unleash their instincts. Then you give it a neat name like 'Patriot Act'.
Or else it's better that the public does not think about it, because if he does not, he'll not notice the effects of the law. Then you give it an ugly name that no newspaper is going to make a big title of. Examples : CBDTPA, SSSCA.... (these are DMCA-like laws).
What you're saying here is so wrong, it's just hard to see where to start.
On only one, precise point, you're right : the religious attitude of the public towards science is absurd and even perverse. And so is the behaviour of those few scientists who exploit this situation to increase their importance.
I'll oppose to all the rest.
You say : There is nothing more obscure and inscrutinizable than science. Scientists make it a point to hide everything they do behind a impregnable wall of jargon and unnecessary mathematical obfuscation.
The point here is in 'unnecessary'. If it was unnecessary, everyone would prefer to speak in plain English, and the ones who wouldn't would look ridiculous. But unfortunately, that's impossible. By using plain English, one can sometimes obtain some qualitative results, and that's a good exercise often proposed to students in physics. But one can't obtain quantitative results. Let's take an example : quantum physics.
In quantum physics, as you might have heard talking about, it is possible for a particle to be in such a state that if you measure its position, the result is probabilistic, i.e., it is not determined before you actually perform the measurement. Now, a discussion in plain English about that is possible; it will indeed tell you that the result of the measure is probabilistic. That's not so bad. But you'll never be able to compute the actual probabilities if you use only English. How can I be sure of this ? Because I know what this computation amounts to, and there's no english word for that.
So, you'll tell me, if initially men didn't speek that horrible jargon but merely English, how have they been able, in the end, to make this computation ? The answer, of course, is that they have defined new words from existing ones. Of course one has not jumped directly from English to noncommutative geometry (the maths behind quantum physics). Each physics theory has required the introduction of some new math concepts. You'll notice that 1) the first pre-physic theories were expressed in ordinary speech and that 2) maths begin with english, then defining new words (like addition) from english words, and at each step defining new 'abstract' concepts from existing concepts. If you're interrested in seeing maths rewritten 'from scratch' like this, just take a good book on Set Theory (the beginning of a university math teaching in many countries).
Truth is, if a scientist claims to have an understanding of a natural phenomenon but is unable to explain it in everyday terms that laypeople can understand, it is a sure bet that he or she has no clue as to the nature of the phenomenon in question.
You're missing one point : Science does not pretend to tell the nature of things. This is the purpose of philosophy. Science is about the properties of thing. To know the properties is already not that bad, and is all what technology requires. It is also enough to challenge scientists. I agree that knowing the deep nature of things would be even much, much better, but might very well be beyond the reach of science. To discuss whether it is, is already philosophy. That's not my purpose here.
It is the elitism and censorship afforded by peer review (a form of intellectual incest) that gives a free rein to world-famous physicists and computer scientists [...] to write on subjects like time travel, multiple universes, warped spacetime [...]
Here you're mixing 3 different things in one statement:
1) Peer review
2) Apparently strange physical theories
3) Existence of a few, 'world-famous' scientist, abusing the public's admiration
I won't deny point 3). But I'd like to say that people like Hawkins are not very estimated by their colleagues. Not only aren't they very productive scientists (Hawkins' theory has been proved false by experiments), but they contribute to make the public's ideas about science even weirder.
Now for point 1). Do you really think that Hawkins ' books have been reviewed ? Of course, you'll always find a professor to tell you what you want to. So I guess there are some profs wo have celebrated Hawkins' work. But that's not peer review ! That's lack of it ! Now I admit that in physics they have a problem : they aren't enough careful in peer reviews. But that does not mean that peer review is intrisically bad. In maths, where peer reviews are extremely strict (if a journal let an error pass, its reputation would be wrecked, and nobody would publish in it anymore. Remember that peer review is the only reason not to totally dump journals in favor of the web), we don't have any problem of that kind. So, you're in fact pleading for more peer reviews ! Unless you declare that reviews must be public. So instead of choosing reviewers among the best specialists of the subject, one will ask Mr Smith to do the job. But Mr Smith does not necessarily understand what it's about, because it's not in plain English. And I've already shown that the scientific jargon can't be dumped; one can only hope to find shortcuts in it, and that's one of the main purposes of theoretical science.
Now for point 2). You don't seem to believe in the predictions of theoretical physics. You're not asked to. But that does not allow you to declare that they're fake. Take the curvature of space-time. Looks incredible ? It's observed by telescopes, like when the same star (as proved by spectroscopy) is seen at different (yet nearby) positions in the sky. And it's already taken in account for the Global Positionning System, which wouldn't be as accurate as it is with only newtonian mechanics. To believe that spacetime is flat is like to believe that the earth is flat. It's obscurantism.
Now I've said above that "to find shortcuts in science is one of the main purposes of theoretical science." That is, sometimes you find a way of telling in two equations what took 15 equations before. That's very attractive, because nobody loves jargon. But now it can happen that the newer theory makes a prediction apparently weird, like, say, that the physical world has got 11 dimensions, and that our apparent physical world is only a membrane in it. Why not ? If it can make the theory neater, why not ? If we had always followed our primeval intuition, we would still be applying those horrible newtonian formulas !
If you think that your scientific knowledge is so arcane and so special and complicated that it could never be explained to lay people, I am afraid that you are nothing but an elitist charlatan and/or a crackpot.
Like any mathematician, everything I write is proved and verified. (I'm only a student as for now, so I haven't written much). So I'm not a charlatan. Charlatany would be to write something wrong, and to pretend it's true.
The only question about a mathematician's work is not about it's truth - anyway it's true. It's about it's interest. When maths pretend to be their own goal, the question may be raised, whether they may. That would have been a 'level 1' contestation of maths.
Re:Peer Review Is a Bad Idea
on
Who Owns Science?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Louis wrote : Science belongs to the public who pays for it all, not just a bunch of elitist a-holes competing for grant money.
As an elitist a-hole, i'd like to add some comments to this.
Yes, science belongs to nobody in particular.
You suggest to Publish [my] stuff on the web for everybody to see, download and critique. Okay, so my paper on class field theory and Cebotarev's theorem is available on the web. Anyone can read it. But I've got no feedback from non-mathematicians, of course, because they simply didn't understand it. (In the improbable case that any non-mathematician did download it). I'm not proud of that. It's just a necessity : if I wanted to add enough explanations to make it readable by a very good hi-school student, my paper would be at least 3000 pages long. However, anybody can go to a math library, begin to read undergraduate books, and then more and more advanced books, and after 2 years (I guess) be able to read my paper.
Why do you call us elitist ? You're not the only one, you know. Science is growingly impopular, as obscurantist beliefs like astrology grow wider and wider. I'm from Paris, where the most ancient and prestigious university is called the 'Sorbonne'. Well, some years ago, a well-known astrologer has got a Ph.D. in 'sociology' in the Sorbonne ! One of the main arguments of such obscurantists is that 'official' science, being ununderstandable to the public, is no more verifiable, and hence is no more scientific, than astrology. More than 50% of the population believes in astrology.
I must add some words about the text you cite, which is near to what I hear from the many trotskysts that are present in my school. It talks about the most laughable results in their domain. Can you tell of one mathematic result you'd laugh about ? Every article you submit to publication is thouroughly verified by colleagues, and that verification can take 1 year. If you've noticed an error in a paper, I urge you to write to the author ASAP. But if you're one of the many that won't accept predictions of theoretical physics before they are brought to your eyes by technology, please understand than theoretical physics is not what one believes to be true, neither is it what one would like to be true. It is the most elegant way of formulating in mathematical words what is dictated by experiment. I don't say that there aren't fake papers written by unscrupulous physicists (for, regrettably, physics reviewers are less careful that math reviewers), but they'll all be unmasked if still not forgotten, and anyway most of the papers are very serious, even if they suggest that we live in a 26-dimensionnal space. Now if the public was asked to vote for such a theory against astrology, I guess there'd be 50% abstention, 30% for astrology and 20% for such a theory. And it'd be the end of our golden age.
Finally I'd like to say that I don't defend any business since I do only public research (and there ain't private funds for these useless, elitist, snobbish so-called 'pure' maths anyway).
I've seen FotR many times, and I must admit than in the theater, it was something to experience. But it raises the question to know whether the filmmakers really did understand the book.
Okay, as a simple scientific, maybe I shouldn't give litterature lessons to others. Still, I think it's worth noting that the book was basically *not only* an adventure book. The characters had much more depth.
Take Aragorn. In the film he's a superhero; and I've seen in the trailer that even Eowyn was in love with him. What has this to do with the real Aragorn ?
He's growing old, he says that all what he does turns bad, and, above all, he's *alone*. Only Gandalf and Arwen can understand what matters for him, and they do not meet often. Aragorn has spent most of his life alone across the paths of middle-earth, dreaming of his love.
Aragorn is a universal character, it's the universal 'single man'. I mean, all you nerds here, don't you identify a bit with him ?
But, did hollywood understand that ? If yes, why did they put Arwen with Aragorn along the whole adventure (for that seems to be the case, in the trailers) ? Why did they choose an actor looking 25, when Aragorn should look be at the very last years of his youth ?
In fact, Hollywood believes that any adventure film should have a super hero, who should be a symbol of successfulness.
Of course, Aragorn is only one example; one could as well take Frodo, Gandalf... Only Boromir and Sam are well played, but they are easier to grasp. And I can't stand the corny scene with Sam trying to swim at the end of FotR. Finally, Iarwain, the most mysterious character of the book, is simply forgotten.
When something is utterly wrong in its very principle, there's no way making it better. And palladium sure is utterly wrong.
No, I hope at least that linus does not work directly on palladium - there are other aspects of a microprocessor his knowledge can be useful for. Still, he shouldn't go on working for transmeta. If all the companies behind Palladium were to lose their best engeneers, that sure would teach them !
Stallman is often criticised as a fanatic ideologist.
Do you remember Linus Torvalds saying 'ideology sucks' or 'linux is just for fun'...
Well, today, linus is working for Palladium
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6487
so, although we don't know precisely ideology is leading us... we can get a picture of what absence of ideology leads to.
Slashdot Mirror
Store recordings in a fortress, and you'll preserve them for 100 years.
Digitalize and upload them, and they'll live as long as you have a running server.
Besides, a recording is more useful on the net than in a mountain.
i think _you_ are not understanding what you're talking about.
The TCPA is an 'alliance' of industrials promoting 'trusted computing' initiatives like Palladium. So a statement like
Palladium or whatever it'll be called is something different and does not necessarily depend on TCPA, but it may use it.
is meaningless. You don't 'use' the TCPA, it's not a technology.
ah ok then... jackboot is rather good because 'boot' has a meaning for computers...
...
what about something around tolkien/wagner's ring ?
that reminds me of the old joke identifying the windows cdrom with the one ring... here it goes:
-Put it in the cdrom drive !
-W-what? in the cdrom drive ?
-Yes, says gandalf; and after a moment he carefully presses the EJECT button.
-Your hand ! See? It's quite cool ! can you see anything?
-N-no... wait... yes... there are writings... 'All rights reserved. By installing windows longhorn on any device you implicitly agree with the DRM User Licence.' I can't understand this language...
-None of you can... the letters are english, but the tongue is that of redmond, which I shall not utter here. it says
I think 'the one ring' could be rather appropriate for palladium... what's your opinion ?
What does 'Jackboot' mean ? that sounds cool, but I have never heard it (and English is not my native language).
'Gestapo inside' is too violent, as you know.
Hey, I've just had an idea : why not picking some name involving 'Soma' or 'Our Ford' or anything else from the 'brave new world' book by Huxley ?
This is exactly the point ! Have you ever taken some time to think about the semantics of : ... ... weird ?
"Microsoft Windows", "Microsoft Word", etc... ?
What it they had been called "Tiny Sweet Windows", "Tiny Sweet Word" ? Wouldn't you think of those names as
why has the parent got 0 ? mod it up !
You are very naive for a Blacknight. Did you know that Linus is working for one of the companies behind palladium (there are frequently news on The Inquirer indicating that Transmeta is designing palladium chips) ? Did you know that an asian 'open source' community is registered as a member of the tcpa ?
The future is not bright. Most people, including among linux users, don't want to take ideological positions. The day Palladium will be necessary to connect to most of the net, they will adopt it. You can be pretty certain that some future linux kernel will have an optional palladium mode, and I bet this will be done in some 3.x version. Of course, this is madness since it will make them dependant on microsoft.
There will remain some who won't turn it on, but they won't be able to acces to the larger part of the net where all the media will be available; they won't be able to connect most peripherals and won't have access to entertainment (unless you call gnuchess entertainment); what's more, they won't have to possibility to communicate in any way (including e-mail) with the palladiumised world : so they won't be many. Only some gnu ideologists, and some LaTeX-addicted mathematicians like me.
Yes : Palladium was a 'good' name. It encouraged people to talk about it. It was a Name against which people could league them together. Now it's another dull acronym nobody is willing to talk about ...
perhaps even to think about...
believe me, this is the most 'clever' idea from microsoft since June. by the way, this technique is getting pretty common in the area. There were already the dmca, tcpa, sssca, cbtdpa....
I urge people here to find it a catchy nickname before it is too late (it will be to late when the hype about palladium will be over, which means soon). "Big Brother" is maybe not original enough... and also not enough specific (there are other related issues in america, like the tia and the tips).
> Linus Is A Hero
:
And today, the hero is working for one of the companies behind Palladium
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6487
I posted this on the 'linuxnewbie' forums some time ago, but it curiously disappeared. I've received no mail from the moderators and I've really verified that my message had really been posted. My interpretation is that some linuxnewbie moderator was a Linus fan.
By the way, did you know that Carmack is coding Doom3 using OpenGL 2.0 ?
OpenGL 2.0 is going to be fully supported by 3DLabs's P10. Remember, the early proposals for OGL2 have been submitted by 3DLabs, and the shading language adopted by the OpenGL ARB (architecture review board) is 3DLabs's GLSLANG.
I'm no conspiracy theory fanatic, but I think that it's _intended to_.
:
When you're making a law against your citizens, there are two options
Either you want to make 'communication' to let people change their minds / unleash their instincts. Then you give it a neat name like 'Patriot Act'.
Or else it's better that the public does not think about it, because if he does not, he'll not notice the effects of the law. Then you give it an ugly name that no newspaper is going to make a big title of. Examples : CBDTPA, SSSCA.... (these are DMCA-like laws).
Can't be done. To "monitor" the whole internet would require that all traffic pass through a central point
Well, it's not difficult to understand that this is precisely the long term objective of Microsoft (.net, palladium are precursors).
while it's easy to make jokes about Area 51 or Roswell, there is certainly a basis for those jokes and rumors.
that amounts to say 'there are certainly UFOs looping around the earth'. Whee, one more book I won't read.
What you're saying here is so wrong, it's just hard to see where to start.
:
On only one, precise point, you're right : the religious attitude of the public towards science is absurd and even perverse. And so is the behaviour of those few scientists who exploit this situation to increase their importance.
I'll oppose to all the rest.
You say : There is nothing more obscure and inscrutinizable than science. Scientists make it a point to hide everything they do behind a impregnable wall of jargon and unnecessary mathematical obfuscation.
The point here is in 'unnecessary'. If it was unnecessary, everyone would prefer to speak in plain English, and the ones who wouldn't would look ridiculous. But unfortunately, that's impossible. By using plain English, one can sometimes obtain some qualitative results, and that's a good exercise often proposed to students in physics. But one can't obtain quantitative results. Let's take an example : quantum physics.
In quantum physics, as you might have heard talking about, it is possible for a particle to be in such a state that if you measure its position, the result is probabilistic, i.e., it is not determined before you actually perform the measurement. Now, a discussion in plain English about that is possible; it will indeed tell you that the result of the measure is probabilistic. That's not so bad. But you'll never be able to compute the actual probabilities if you use only English. How can I be sure of this ? Because I know what this computation amounts to, and there's no english word for that.
So, you'll tell me, if initially men didn't speek that horrible jargon but merely English, how have they been able, in the end, to make this computation ? The answer, of course, is that they have defined new words from existing ones. Of course one has not jumped directly from English to noncommutative geometry (the maths behind quantum physics). Each physics theory has required the introduction of some new math concepts. You'll notice that 1) the first pre-physic theories were expressed in ordinary speech and that 2) maths begin with english, then defining new words (like addition) from english words, and at each step defining new 'abstract' concepts from existing concepts. If you're interrested in seeing maths rewritten 'from scratch' like this, just take a good book on Set Theory (the beginning of a university math teaching in many countries).
Truth is, if a scientist claims to have an understanding of a natural phenomenon but is unable to explain it in everyday terms that laypeople can understand, it is a sure bet that he or she has no clue as to the nature of the phenomenon in question.
You're missing one point : Science does not pretend to tell the nature of things. This is the purpose of philosophy. Science is about the properties of thing. To know the properties is already not that bad, and is all what technology requires. It is also enough to challenge scientists. I agree that knowing the deep nature of things would be even much, much better, but might very well be beyond the reach of science. To discuss whether it is, is already philosophy. That's not my purpose here.
It is the elitism and censorship afforded by peer review (a form of intellectual incest) that gives a free rein to world-famous physicists and computer scientists [...] to write on subjects like time travel, multiple universes, warped spacetime [...]
Here you're mixing 3 different things in one statement
1) Peer review
2) Apparently strange physical theories
3) Existence of a few, 'world-famous' scientist, abusing the public's admiration
I won't deny point 3). But I'd like to say that people like Hawkins are not very estimated by their colleagues. Not only aren't they very productive scientists (Hawkins' theory has been proved false by experiments), but they contribute to make the public's ideas about science even weirder.
Now for point 1). Do you really think that Hawkins ' books have been reviewed ? Of course, you'll always find a professor to tell you what you want to. So I guess there are some profs wo have celebrated Hawkins' work. But that's not peer review ! That's lack of it ! Now I admit that in physics they have a problem : they aren't enough careful in peer reviews. But that does not mean that peer review is intrisically bad. In maths, where peer reviews are extremely strict (if a journal let an error pass, its reputation would be wrecked, and nobody would publish in it anymore. Remember that peer review is the only reason not to totally dump journals in favor of the web), we don't have any problem of that kind. So, you're in fact pleading for more peer reviews ! Unless you declare that reviews must be public. So instead of choosing reviewers among the best specialists of the subject, one will ask Mr Smith to do the job. But Mr Smith does not necessarily understand what it's about, because it's not in plain English. And I've already shown that the scientific jargon can't be dumped; one can only hope to find shortcuts in it, and that's one of the main purposes of theoretical science.
Now for point 2). You don't seem to believe in the predictions of theoretical physics. You're not asked to. But that does not allow you to declare that they're fake. Take the curvature of space-time. Looks incredible ? It's observed by telescopes, like when the same star (as proved by spectroscopy) is seen at different (yet nearby) positions in the sky. And it's already taken in account for the Global Positionning System, which wouldn't be as accurate as it is with only newtonian mechanics. To believe that spacetime is flat is like to believe that the earth is flat. It's obscurantism.
Now I've said above that "to find shortcuts in science is one of the main purposes of theoretical science." That is, sometimes you find a way of telling in two equations what took 15 equations before. That's very attractive, because nobody loves jargon. But now it can happen that the newer theory makes a prediction apparently weird, like, say, that the physical world has got 11 dimensions, and that our apparent physical world is only a membrane in it. Why not ? If it can make the theory neater, why not ? If we had always followed our primeval intuition, we would still be applying those horrible newtonian formulas !
If you think that your scientific knowledge is so arcane and so special and complicated that it could never be explained to lay people, I am afraid that you are nothing but an elitist charlatan and/or a crackpot.
Like any mathematician, everything I write is proved and verified. (I'm only a student as for now, so I haven't written much). So I'm not a charlatan. Charlatany would be to write something wrong, and to pretend it's true.
The only question about a mathematician's work is not about it's truth - anyway it's true. It's about it's interest. When maths pretend to be their own goal, the question may be raised, whether they may. That would have been a 'level 1' contestation of maths.
Louis wrote : Science belongs to the public who pays for it all, not just a bunch of elitist a-holes competing for grant money.
As an elitist a-hole, i'd like to add some comments to this.
Yes, science belongs to nobody in particular.
You suggest to Publish [my] stuff on the web for everybody to see, download and critique. Okay, so my paper on class field theory and Cebotarev's theorem is available on the web. Anyone can read it. But I've got no feedback from non-mathematicians, of course, because they simply didn't understand it. (In the improbable case that any non-mathematician did download it). I'm not proud of that. It's just a necessity : if I wanted to add enough explanations to make it readable by a very good hi-school student, my paper would be at least 3000 pages long. However, anybody can go to a math library, begin to read undergraduate books, and then more and more advanced books, and after 2 years (I guess) be able to read my paper.
Why do you call us elitist ? You're not the only one, you know. Science is growingly impopular, as obscurantist beliefs like astrology grow wider and wider. I'm from Paris, where the most ancient and prestigious university is called the 'Sorbonne'. Well, some years ago, a well-known astrologer has got a Ph.D. in 'sociology' in the Sorbonne ! One of the main arguments of such obscurantists is that 'official' science, being ununderstandable to the public, is no more verifiable, and hence is no more scientific, than astrology. More than 50% of the population believes in astrology.
I must add some words about the text you cite, which is near to what I hear from the many trotskysts that are present in my school. It talks about the most laughable results in their domain. Can you tell of one mathematic result you'd laugh about ? Every article you submit to publication is thouroughly verified by colleagues, and that verification can take 1 year. If you've noticed an error in a paper, I urge you to write to the author ASAP. But if you're one of the many that won't accept predictions of theoretical physics before they are brought to your eyes by technology, please understand than theoretical physics is not what one believes to be true, neither is it what one would like to be true. It is the most elegant way of formulating in mathematical words what is dictated by experiment. I don't say that there aren't fake papers written by unscrupulous physicists (for, regrettably, physics reviewers are less careful that math reviewers), but they'll all be unmasked if still not forgotten, and anyway most of the papers are very serious, even if they suggest that we live in a 26-dimensionnal space. Now if the public was asked to vote for such a theory against astrology, I guess there'd be 50% abstention, 30% for astrology and 20% for such a theory. And it'd be the end of our golden age.
Finally I'd like to say that I don't defend any business since I do only public research (and there ain't private funds for these useless, elitist, snobbish so-called 'pure' maths anyway).
Hi
I've seen FotR many times, and I must admit than in the theater, it was something to experience. But it raises the question to know whether the filmmakers really did understand the book.
Okay, as a simple scientific, maybe I shouldn't give litterature lessons to others. Still, I think it's worth noting that the book was basically *not only* an adventure book. The characters had much more depth.
Take Aragorn. In the film he's a superhero; and I've seen in the trailer that even Eowyn was in love with him. What has this to do with the real Aragorn ?
He's growing old, he says that all what he does turns bad, and, above all, he's *alone*. Only Gandalf and Arwen can understand what matters for him, and they do not meet often. Aragorn has spent most of his life alone across the paths of middle-earth, dreaming of his love.
Aragorn is a universal character, it's the universal 'single man'. I mean, all you nerds here, don't you identify a bit with him ?
But, did hollywood understand that ? If yes, why did they put Arwen with Aragorn along the whole adventure (for that seems to be the case, in the trailers) ? Why did they choose an actor looking 25, when Aragorn should look be at the very last years of his youth ?
In fact, Hollywood believes that any adventure film should have a super hero, who should be a symbol of successfulness.
Of course, Aragorn is only one example; one could as well take Frodo, Gandalf... Only Boromir and Sam are well played, but they are easier to grasp. And I can't stand the corny scene with Sam trying to swim at the end of FotR. Finally, Iarwain, the most mysterious character of the book, is simply forgotten.
When something is utterly wrong in its very principle, there's no way making it better. And palladium sure is utterly wrong.
No, I hope at least that linus does not work directly on palladium - there are other aspects of a microprocessor his knowledge can be useful for. Still, he shouldn't go on working for transmeta. If all the companies behind Palladium were to lose their best engeneers, that sure would teach them !
absolutely not.
But working for *Palladium* is evil.
This is so hot a topic, every nerd should be aware of it.
see this link.
the FAQ is here
also see this post
Stallman is often criticised as a fanatic ideologist. Do you remember Linus Torvalds saying 'ideology sucks' or 'linux is just for fun' ...
Well, today, linus is working for Palladium
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6487
so, although we don't know precisely ideology is leading us... we can get a picture of what absence of ideology leads to.