So, who would MAKE a law for this? Um, I think that would be the...(wait for it) GOVERNMENT! Didn't think about that too much did you?
Harsh much? Geez....
Obviously, that occurred to me. However, I didn't think that the simple existence of a law necessarily translated into the goverment having its finger in your pie. If a law existed that allowed CIVIL penalties for failure to disclose, then the goverment is not involved at all, ever, except for the initial creation of the law. (Oh, well, unless you count the court's involvement during the civil trial as government involvement, even though the government is there to resolve the dispute, not to prosecute it.)
Don't you distinguish between government regulation and government oversight? Now, government OVERSIGHT is indeed the government having its hand in that pie. However, appropriate government REGULATION empowers the people to do the oversight themselves. Or do you fall into the group of people who figure the government should get out of business law, wipe the law books clean, and let all business self-regulate, and that the consumers have enough ability and power to be able to encourage industry to behave well? How far do you take this? Should CEO's be legally able to lie to the public about their company and say, "No, our web servers were not infected" when in fact they were? At what point should legal liability occur?
And notice how I was able to say all of this without being insulting?
The government has too many fingers in my pie already
Who said anything about the government being responsible for something about this? If the law makes it a legal requirement to disclose certain kinds of hacking, then citizens and whistle blowers are enough. I don't know that anyone is recommending that the goverment monitor every web site to see if there is a breakin, and when there is, notify the public.
In one case, public health is at stake. Lives. In the other, an annoying computer problem.
Except that they inform people even when lives are NOT at stake, but people might just become ill, but not die.
And keyloggers that steal financial information are well beyond just an "annoying computer problem." Extrapolating from the last couple of years, we can expect even more fierce attacks in the future. It just doesn't matter if the web site is negligent or not -- the public should be notified under certain cases.
On the other hand, my ability to continue to do business is important to me. You don't have to have an abhorrent track record to get hacked. Sometimes you just get unlucky. Unfortunately, no one is going to be very understanding about bad luck and, like you, they'll assume it's my fault.
Just like a meat packing plan can be unlucky in getting a tainted purchase of beef, and they would like to stay in business. Would you suggest that the public health interest is outweighed by the store's desire to "stay in business"? If your answer is "no," then why is your business any different? Just because people won't die?
If a site was hacked and was infecting people's computers with keyloggers or other serious malware, I believe it is a moral requirement for that site to inform visitors (as best as they can determine) about the possible infections. Public health concerns trump individual business concerns in the real world, and they should do so for sufficiently virulent or dangerous malware being served from a hacked web site.
was the 2.6.xx kernel even out when SCO fist started making accusations and filing various suits?
The 2.5.xx series was, and their claims were initially about that development stream. That development stream is indeed where much of the "contested" code was added to Linux by IBM. ("Contested" in quotes because it's contested by SCO, but not by many other viewers.)
the weather guys can barely get the next 3 days of weather correct but I'm supposed to believe that some scientist can predict the next hundred years...come on...thats funny.
Climate is much easier to predict than weather. One could guess with quite reasonable certainty how many fatal traffic accidents will occur each of the next ten years. That's climate. Weather? Well, can you predict who will die in those accidents or exactly when or where they will occur?
You don't have to know how much rain will fall tomorrow to predict how much will fall through the entire year. You don't have to know which cars will get stolen to know about how many will get stolen in the near future.
As many have said... climate != weather.
Your statement above is like mocking insurance companies for predicting risk because they can't tell you how many crimes will occur in your city block tomorrow.
Scientists argue about this stuff... it borders on religion... one needs faith to believe it.
Ah, it borders on religion for the people who politicize the science (in either direction), but not for those doing the science. All of the historical markers used to measure past climate temperatures agree within reasonable bounds. If any disagreed violently, the scientific community would notice that.
The study of past climate changes is a real science. Calling it a religion is something I see mainly as an attempt to discredit any scientific results by saying all scientific results are biased by peoples' faiths in what results they should get. Again, I'm distinguishing scientists here from those who politicize the results of science, those who take a scientific result and quote it as gospel while leaving out the scientific uncertainties and unknowns that the scientists put in there.
I am not one, but a scientist who studies these results could answer your question and tell you the current scientific consensus for the average annual temperature 350,000 years ago -- with the measurement uncertainties included as part of the measurement.
And to say something you would agree with: Distrust anyone who gives you any measurement without also giving the measurement's uncertainties, both statistical and otherwise, in the result. The old "such and such doubles your chance of getting cancer" when it turns out that one person in one group got cancer, two people in the other group, and both groups were say 5000 people.
But Mars is much more similar to Earth than Jupiter is. The only major difference is in surface water (which is, admittedly, is a big difference, given how the oceans act as a buffer to all manner of extreme atmospheric conditions.)
You forgot the other major differences: 1) Planet mass, and thus ability to hold onto atmosphere, 2) Distance from the sun, thus, different solar input, 3) Vastly different atmospheric pressures, 4) Different atmospheric makeup, 5) Sizable moon on the earth -- yes, this can influence climate by helping the Earth remain more geolically active, 6) Oh yeah, the Earth is still quite geologically active, with a large number of active volcanoes and active mountain and island building in recent geological times, 7) Doesn't Mars have a negligible magnetic field? 8) I don't believe Mars has an ozone layer, 9) Vastly different amounts of water, water vapor, or even ice in a climactically active state, 10) and I could go on.
That something happens on Mars -- even if it did -- doesn't by any stretch mean that it could happen on Earth.
So why is a supposed change in temperature of a few degrees over a century called "sudden" or "man-made?
The name "global warming" is somewhat of a misnomer, because the net climate temperature increasing does not mean everywhere gets warmer. A better name would be "global climactic change," except then you would have to quantify that this change is caused by climactic reations to more heat in the atmosphere. It is called "sudden" because generally speaking, the climate does not change rapidly. Also, a "global warming" of only a few degrees is enough to cause melting of ice caps and thus flooding of coastal areas.
That much is scientifically known by examining the archeological record of where the coasts used to be and by looking at records of ocean levels vs time and global temperature vs time. When the climate naturally increases in temperature by enough, the ocean levels rise by a few meters. (Or more... I don't have the absolute numbers. I'm not an environmental scientist.)
Why "man-made"? Because there is pursuasive evidence that human actions could have caused it. Those who say that it is absolutely impossible for human events to modify the climate, that volcanoes and such affect the climate much more, are simply ignoring the science. However, those who say that human behavior has absolutely 100% guaranteed caused the warming of the last century are also ignoring the science.
The best available scientific information I have seen is pursuasive, but is not yet at the level of proof. There is a good chance, I fear, that if global warming is both real and human caused, that we won't be able to provide evidence of that until it is too late.
Tangent: Even most scientists who disagree with human caused global warming do agree that the climate is warming and that the clear trend of the last 100 years and of the last 50 years is increasing global temperature. Most scientists who disagree just point out that we don't have sufficient evidence that human activity is the cause, and/or that natural climate variations could be causing all of what we see.
So what if the changes of the last few hundred years were actually normal climate variation (recovery from the little ice age, etc.) and all the sudden we try to "compensate" for it?
I don't believe that any serious scientists have suggested compensating -- all I have ever heard serious scientists recommend is that humans reduce their impact on the climate. There's a difference between taking one's foot off the gas pedal and shoving one's foot on the brake pedal.
Caveat: I'm personally in favor of trying to be clean. There's no reason to pollute more than we have to.
I agree with that. I think most scientists would agree with that. And by the way, I DON'T imagine that any serious scientist would advocate any likelihood of this movie's storyline being realistic!
However, out knowledge of prediction is so poor that we cannot be sure that reducing emission will not be a "trigger".
Oh, come on. You have GOT to be kidding! By that logic, we can do just about anything we want to we can't verify to everyone's satisfaction, in advance, what the consequences will be! Besides, how can reducing emissions be a trigger? That could only be true if human emissions are the only reason the climate hasn't gone into ice age mode. And for that to be true, you would have to admit that human emissions cause global warming!
(All right, no jokes about farts here, OK?)
The correct course of action is to do nothing
Again...... Really?
Nothing? Either you're exaggerating for effect -- the same thing you rightly accuse some environmentalists of -- or you're one of the many who choose to believe that which supports what they want to believe. (Yes, again, that kind of thinking is on both sides of that fence.) IMO, the correct course of action is a detailed and thoughtful cost-benefit analysis, and actions taken on the basis of that.
As far as CO2 goes, humans have verifiably almost doubled the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since the time before the Industrial Revolution. Even the scientists who disagree with (or more correctly, are skeptical that current evidence can support) human-caused global warming agree with that fact.
we can say for certain that adopting treaties like Kyoto would seriously happer our economy. (Which was the true intention of the treaty
On what do you base that assertion? That seems an extremist and alarmist statement, that much of the world (or perhaps just scientists and politicians from some of the world) would cloak as environmentalist an effort to hamper the US economy. What would those people gain from such a move?
So we can choose from the following
1) Unknown chances of global climate change
2) Uknownn chances of global climate change and large, negative impacts on the economy.
False dichotomy. There are many intermediate steps that can be taken by the reasonable. Only the unreasonable see just those two options. And again, yes, there are many of the unreasonable on both sides of the issue.
Seriously, tho', Lomborg's background is an advantage. If you want to be a serious academic, you need tenure. Who grants tenure? People who already have it. So, it's pretty much impossible to become an academic without adhering to the orthodoxy of the established academics.
I understand that this is true in some fields of endeavor, but it is much less true in the sciences than elsewhere. In the sciences, there are MANY tenured people with unorthodox views. It's not the views, it's whether those views can be argued from facts.
Yes, there are exceptions in the sciences where people are called "kooks" who are actually correct. However, looking at the last 150 years of science, most people labelled "kooks" were. Not all, surely, but most.
Throughout history, science is never done by consensus. Someone comes along with an idea, the bulk of the scientific community laughs in derision, 50 years later all those tenured professors are forgotten and that lone voice is elevated to the status of Einstein.
This does happen, but it is rare. You're right, science is not by consensus. That is why it works. The facts always prevail. At worst it takes a generation or two or three for the facts to outlast all prejudices, and that length of time gets shorter with each century.
What you talk about definitely happens. The guy who proposed continental drift was originally laughed at. Not for very long, however, as he successfully found the facts to support his case. The person who in the 70's (80's?) proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infection was laughed at for perhaps a decade, but then he found the evidence to prove his assertion.
MOST sciencific progress is done by established people, including breakthroughs. Only the occasional breakthrough idea is totally scorned for more than a brief period of time.
If you take 1000 people whose theories are labeled as wrong or kooky by the scienfic establishment, I'd be willing to place very good money that no more than two or three of those people will be even close to correct. MOST of the time, the scientific establishment is correct in its estimations, and MOST of the time, those estimations are fact-driven, not politics-driven. Now, this is more true in some fields, less true in others. How true it is appears to depend on how easy it is to verify facts.
I don't have any opinion on Lomborg, because I haven't read enough to have an opinion based on facts. My scientific background is not atmospheric science or any other environmental science. If he is labeled a "kook" then I am comfortable tossing him into that 1000 people who are labelled "kooks." If you are correct -- as I say, I don't have an opinion on Lomborg -- then he will be that one of a thousand who was correct all along.
Progress will stop. No company will be able to justify the R&D expense.
OK, let's get back to the article here. Do you believe that the current bill being discussed would cause this? Are you against any change of copyright based on a "slippery slope" theory? And oddly (yes this is mild sarcasm), in the days before copyright and patent and trademark, companies were still able to produce. But again, your argument above is a complete red herring. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. Unless you believe that allowing free use -- just allowing free use -- will cause your predictions to come true.
Again, yes, there are those who totally disregard the law and who steal digital content. I am absolutely 100% for RIAA and MPAA and others going after those people. That is the correct target -- go after the people who are infringing. But please don't sacrifice fair use on the alter of preventing unfair use.
I believe that most reasonable people would agree that it's fair to take measures to prevent unfair use. The problem people have with the DMCA is that it prevents fair use also. That's really it. I don't hear people saying copyright should be repealed. Except for a few, I don't hear people saying information and content all should be free.
This argument has long since lost any credibility. There is no point at which the "Fair Use supporters" will agree to stop wholesale infringement.
So you're lumping all who disagree with you into a single category of those who do wholesale infringement? Wow. Yes, there are such people, but it's pretty silly to suggest that Fair Use supporters ALL are wholesale infringers.
Discussion of legislation is pointless. Nobody respects the law now.
Again, wow! There are many who do respect the law, which is why those people are interested in changing it. The "wholesale infringers" are the ones who ignore the law and won't care what it says. The rest of us support changing the law to support fair use while still allowing companies to protect their products from unfair use.
If copyright is repealed (for example) 30% of the economy vanishes overnight.
OK, this is an amazing belief. Where do you get this idea from? 30%? Really? And anyway, this argument is a red herring even if true. No-one is suggesting REPEALLING copyright. You took a ridiculous extremist version of what people are arguing for and pointing out it would be a Bad Thing. Well, yeah, it would be. I think your 30% number is ridiculously high, but still, no reasonable person argues to repeal copyrights or patents. Reasonable poeople argue for reform of current law. That's exactly what this story is about, eh?
All of your arguments above are extremist. Yes, there are people who believe that all digital content should be free. I know some such people. With a few exceptions, I generally think they're idiots who want something for nothing, but I do know such people. However, the vast majority of people I know respect the rights of content creators and want fair use to be preserved at the same time. Do you just not believe that such positions are possible?
Don't know what kind of engineer you are but in the Real World (TM) you will find lots of engineers doing some quick & dirty calculations in Excel.
Back in my scientist days, we only used one of a small number of custom written applications. (Named "paw" and "mn_fit" plus a few others less commonly used.) Excel cannot even dream of producing the kinds of plots that I had to produce for my dissertation. Of course, these tools were command-line driven, but that gave the power to iterate on a plot, to view arbitrary plots of N-tuple data, to change the scales and so on. MUCH more power than Excel gives. I had scatterplots with many tens of thousands of points. (Took a LOOOONNNNNGGGGG time to print on laser printers of that day!)
But as you say, for quick and dirty stuff, Excel and the like are fine. I haven't figured out how to do two dimensional error bars -- the cross shapes showing the uncertainty in each variable -- and complicated stuff like that, but maybe Excel can do stuff like that as well. But if I were doing a scientific or engineering paper, I would not use Excel.
But that edge is lost when changing the format drives away your customers when they can no longer interoperate with users with competing products.
Are you talking about the same Microsoft that changed their file formats so often that even they cannot import old versions 100%? The Microsoft that obviously didn't care a whit about these changes even when WordPerfect was a real competitor?
Ideally, what you say is accurate. However, the Microsoft in Redmond just doesn't think the way you suggest. History makes that very clear. When Microsoft adopts an open standard (such as Kerberos in Win2k), they almost always make incompatible changes so they cannot interoperate fully with existing implementations. More accurately, so existing implementations cannot interoperate with Microsoft's implementation. This is where the phrase "Embrace and extend" came from! Microsoft simply does not appear to worry about a backlash.
The people who buy a couple of tons of fertilizer that can be used to make weapons, along with the also required diesel fuel are called... farmers.
Yes. My understanding, however, was that since the attack on the Oklahoma federal building, that the FBI watched this sort of thing. I don't know how thoroughly.
Just as some time in the mid 90's the FBI began to investigate people buying certain kinds of sunlamps because of their belief that many of the purchasers of those lamps were using them to grow pot in their basements. The FBI, I believe, was using subpoena to get the sales records from the vendors.
What I would honestly like to know: why is nobody in US (any citizen organization either) chalenging such obvious violations of US Constitution in Patriot Act?
There are groups doing this. These cases take years to go through the courts, but there are cases challenging the laws. In many casees (most cases?) you need to have the law applied to someone before you can challenge it, I think. Obviously, IANAL, but I notice that many cases where a law is challenged involve deliberately violating the law and then challenging it in court.
Jose Pedilla's incarceration as an enemy combatant is going to the US Supreme Court to see whether the Executive Branch has the right to hold a US Citizen without charges, without access to a lawyer, etc.
Sadly, people who challenge such actions or laws are often called unpatriotic or as acting to help US enemies, because you sometimes have to appear to defend someone you don't want to defend in order to prevent abuses from expanding and becoming entrenched. For example, the way the ACLU will defend blatant racists' First Amendment rights in court.
there is no such distinction between "normal laws" and "Patriot Act laws". The Patriot Act IS the law, modifies existing laws, or expands existing jurisdiction.
Well, yeah, of course. I was trying to make a distinction about whether the same old laws existing before were being used, or whether the new expanded powers were being used. I wasn't trying to pretend that there were two separate, parallel, independent law books and law enforcement got to choose.
Second of all, the Patriot Act demonstrably does not give the FBI the power to detain people without charge, without admitting they are holding them, and without warrant.
I slipped up here, confusing holding someone as an emeny combatant vs the powers given in the Patriot Act. You're right. I was wrong. (Am I allowed to say that on Slashdot?) The Patriot Act greatly increases surveillance and information gathering powers but doesn't give carte blanch (sp?) power as I had suggested. That power is simply being assumed by the Executive branch by calling someone an "enemy combatant." Now, in the cases where they have used this category, so far, I have agreed. But I get nervous when our government can change a name (criminal -> enemy combatant) and have unlimited power to take and hold an American citizen. If the Supreme Court agrees that the Executive Branch has this power, it will be widely abused. Within ten years at most. If the polarization of the US continues, anyway. These sorts of powers grow over time, with categories widening. Imagine how this would have been used during the 60's with the anti-war protestors.
With the Patriot Act, this isn't so much true any longer. It depends on whether the FBI was investigating under normal laws or under Patriot Act laws. Consider that the Patriot Act allows our government to hold people without charging them, without admitting they are holding them, and without warrant. This is why people worry about kinds of things like this story.
All that said, it's reasonable for the FBI to investigate certain kinds of FOIA requests, and this one seems reasonable to at least quickly investigate. If someone bought a couple tons of the kinds of fertilizer that can be used to make weapons, the FBI should at least quickly look into that as well.
This doensn't mean the student did anything wrong, nor that the FOIA request should be ignored.
(And I'm not saying you said any of that! I'm just using your post as a jumping off point.)
Because it was better technology? Overlooking that the cost of the memory was only about 10% higher
That it was a better technology depends on the benchmarks you run. RDRAM indeed had a higher bandwidth, but its latencies were significantly higher than normal SDRAM. Which matters more (latency or bandwidth) depends on what you are using your computer for, but latency is usually more important from what I have seen.
And for a long time, RDRAM was well more than 10% higher cost than normal SDRAM and DDR DRAM.
And yet people will now willingly buy matched pairs of Dual Channel DDR... Can anyone say hypocracy?
It would be hypocracy if people were forced by motherboard manufacturers to only be capable of using Dual Channel DDR, and on top of it, that memory cost 30% to 100% more than other choices. The insult was that RDRAM cost much more than normal SDRAM, and on top of that you were required to install it in pairs.
When you don't pay extra for installing it in pairs and you get a performance benefit to boot, then it's not hypocracy.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
What I don't get about that statement is that the RAMBus folks appear to think that they deserved guaranteed success. Why should anyone be required to pay royalties to use a process that they don't want to use in the first place? That's like suing people who sell their homes without a real estate agent and saying, "Hey, they didn't use real estate agents because they didn't want to pay a 6% commission."
RAMBus's argument only has merit if everyone was legally required to license their technologies instead of using different technologies. The submarine nature of their patent doesn't lend me toward having any sympathy toward them.
RAMbus "made" a product that, when including the royalties, was just too expensive for the market. Well, unless their argument is that those companies that did license RAMBus colluded on charging extra high prices for it so that it would not succeed in the market. I suppose that sort of collusion would be illegal.
How can you have a monopoly when there are "very viable alternatives"? Mono - single, one, i.e. no alternatives.
Sorry, but legally, a monopoly does not necessarily mean having 100% of the market. Of course, having 100% control of the market is a monopoly, but a company can be found to be a monopoly with less than 100% control of a market -- without abusing the letter and spirit and intent of the law.
Just because the common meaning of the word means 100% doesn't mean that the Sherman Antitrust Act requires 100% for a company to be declared a monopoly.
Also, you can have a monopoly despite there being "very viable alternatives" if the monopoly has a large enough market fraction and if there are sufficient barriers to entry. If you had read anything about antitrust law, you would know that many successful antitrust cases of the last 100 years are against companies that do not have 100% of the market.
How can the universe, the sum of everything which exists, have shape? What, then, is outside this funnel? Isn't it infinitely large by definition?
The universe doesn't have shape, as such, but it does have curvature. The universe being discussed here has a finite volume and a really interesting curvature and violate all theories that say that all directions are the same. In this universe, if you travel in one direction, you can travel an infinite distance. However, all other paths will form circles or loops.
Imagine that we are way out toward the lip of the horn. If you travel perpendicular to the axis of the horn, you will loop. Travel far enough and you will return to your starting point. (For the sake of example, let's pretend that you travel in just the right direction to exactly return to your starting point -- as opposed to just spiraling.) Thus, your loop will be, say, 100 Quadrillion light years, to make a number up.
Now travel a long distance down the axis of the horn in the direction where it gets narrower. After doing that, again go perpendicular to that direction. You'll now find that your circular loop is only 100 Million light years. Travel further down the horn and your loop will be 1000 light years. Travel an unimaginable distance into the horn and your loop will be 100 yards!:)
Thus, if you could travel far enough down the horn, two of the three dimensions of space curve back on themselves and the other does not. Looking in various directions if your body is pointed down the axis of the horn, you'll see the back of your head or the bottoms of your feet.
Travel further and space becomes too small in two of the three dimensions for a person to travel there. It's like a funhouse where you have a pair of mirrors parallel to each other and you can see infinite reflections -- except here all of the "reflections" are actually you, the same you. When the "reflections" get close enough, you will literally run into yourself and you just cannot go further down the horn.
This is similar in many ways to 11-dimensional theories of superstrings or supergravity, etc, where the extra (beyond 4 of space-time) dimensions are curled up on themselves in this sort of manner. Except here, the two dimensions of space that are curled up on themselves are two of the three familiar dimensions, and the curvature of those dimensions is not constant throughout space, but varies depending on where you are.
There is nothing outside the funnel, and the funnel is not infinitely large. The image at the article shows an open funnel, however, the "mouth" of the funnel is actually closed on itself so if you try to exit the mouth you will end up going the other direction on the other side of the mouth of the funnel.
The bizarre thing about this theory is that if it is true, all you need to do is measure the local curvature of space and you can know exactly where you are in the universe, at least in the one infinite dimension.
Slashdot Mirror
So, who would MAKE a law for this? Um, I think that would be the...(wait for it) GOVERNMENT! Didn't think about that too much did you?
Harsh much? Geez....
Obviously, that occurred to me. However, I didn't think that the simple existence of a law necessarily translated into the goverment having its finger in your pie. If a law existed that allowed CIVIL penalties for failure to disclose, then the goverment is not involved at all, ever, except for the initial creation of the law. (Oh, well, unless you count the court's involvement during the civil trial as government involvement, even though the government is there to resolve the dispute, not to prosecute it.)
Don't you distinguish between government regulation and government oversight? Now, government OVERSIGHT is indeed the government having its hand in that pie. However, appropriate government REGULATION empowers the people to do the oversight themselves. Or do you fall into the group of people who figure the government should get out of business law, wipe the law books clean, and let all business self-regulate, and that the consumers have enough ability and power to be able to encourage industry to behave well? How far do you take this? Should CEO's be legally able to lie to the public about their company and say, "No, our web servers were not infected" when in fact they were? At what point should legal liability occur?
And notice how I was able to say all of this without being insulting?
The government has too many fingers in my pie already
Who said anything about the government being responsible for something about this? If the law makes it a legal requirement to disclose certain kinds of hacking, then citizens and whistle blowers are enough. I don't know that anyone is recommending that the goverment monitor every web site to see if there is a breakin, and when there is, notify the public.
In one case, public health is at stake. Lives. In the other, an annoying computer problem.
Except that they inform people even when lives are NOT at stake, but people might just become ill, but not die.
And keyloggers that steal financial information are well beyond just an "annoying computer problem." Extrapolating from the last couple of years, we can expect even more fierce attacks in the future. It just doesn't matter if the web site is negligent or not -- the public should be notified under certain cases.
On the other hand, my ability to continue to do business is important to me. You don't have to have an abhorrent track record to get hacked. Sometimes you just get unlucky. Unfortunately, no one is going to be very understanding about bad luck and, like you, they'll assume it's my fault.
Just like a meat packing plan can be unlucky in getting a tainted purchase of beef, and they would like to stay in business. Would you suggest that the public health interest is outweighed by the store's desire to "stay in business"? If your answer is "no," then why is your business any different? Just because people won't die?
If a site was hacked and was infecting people's computers with keyloggers or other serious malware, I believe it is a moral requirement for that site to inform visitors (as best as they can determine) about the possible infections. Public health concerns trump individual business concerns in the real world, and they should do so for sufficiently virulent or dangerous malware being served from a hacked web site.
was the 2.6.xx kernel even out when SCO fist started making accusations and filing various suits?
The 2.5.xx series was, and their claims were initially about that development stream. That development stream is indeed where much of the "contested" code was added to Linux by IBM. ("Contested" in quotes because it's contested by SCO, but not by many other viewers.)
the weather guys can barely get the next 3 days of weather correct but I'm supposed to believe that some scientist can predict the next hundred years...come on...thats funny.
Climate is much easier to predict than weather. One could guess with quite reasonable certainty how many fatal traffic accidents will occur each of the next ten years. That's climate. Weather? Well, can you predict who will die in those accidents or exactly when or where they will occur?
You don't have to know how much rain will fall tomorrow to predict how much will fall through the entire year. You don't have to know which cars will get stolen to know about how many will get stolen in the near future.
As many have said ... climate != weather.
Your statement above is like mocking insurance companies for predicting risk because they can't tell you how many crimes will occur in your city block tomorrow.
Scientists argue about this stuff... it borders on religion... one needs faith to believe it.
Ah, it borders on religion for the people who politicize the science (in either direction), but not for those doing the science. All of the historical markers used to measure past climate temperatures agree within reasonable bounds. If any disagreed violently, the scientific community would notice that.
The study of past climate changes is a real science. Calling it a religion is something I see mainly as an attempt to discredit any scientific results by saying all scientific results are biased by peoples' faiths in what results they should get. Again, I'm distinguishing scientists here from those who politicize the results of science, those who take a scientific result and quote it as gospel while leaving out the scientific uncertainties and unknowns that the scientists put in there.
I am not one, but a scientist who studies these results could answer your question and tell you the current scientific consensus for the average annual temperature 350,000 years ago -- with the measurement uncertainties included as part of the measurement.
And to say something you would agree with: Distrust anyone who gives you any measurement without also giving the measurement's uncertainties, both statistical and otherwise, in the result. The old "such and such doubles your chance of getting cancer" when it turns out that one person in one group got cancer, two people in the other group, and both groups were say 5000 people.
But Mars is much more similar to Earth than Jupiter is. The only major difference is in surface water (which is, admittedly, is a big difference, given how the oceans act as a buffer to all manner of extreme atmospheric conditions.)
You forgot the other major differences: 1) Planet mass, and thus ability to hold onto atmosphere, 2) Distance from the sun, thus, different solar input, 3) Vastly different atmospheric pressures, 4) Different atmospheric makeup, 5) Sizable moon on the earth -- yes, this can influence climate by helping the Earth remain more geolically active, 6) Oh yeah, the Earth is still quite geologically active, with a large number of active volcanoes and active mountain and island building in recent geological times, 7) Doesn't Mars have a negligible magnetic field? 8) I don't believe Mars has an ozone layer, 9) Vastly different amounts of water, water vapor, or even ice in a climactically active state, 10) and I could go on.
That something happens on Mars -- even if it did -- doesn't by any stretch mean that it could happen on Earth.
So why is a supposed change in temperature of a few degrees over a century called "sudden" or "man-made?
The name "global warming" is somewhat of a misnomer, because the net climate temperature increasing does not mean everywhere gets warmer. A better name would be "global climactic change," except then you would have to quantify that this change is caused by climactic reations to more heat in the atmosphere. It is called "sudden" because generally speaking, the climate does not change rapidly. Also, a "global warming" of only a few degrees is enough to cause melting of ice caps and thus flooding of coastal areas.
That much is scientifically known by examining the archeological record of where the coasts used to be and by looking at records of ocean levels vs time and global temperature vs time. When the climate naturally increases in temperature by enough, the ocean levels rise by a few meters. (Or more ... I don't have the absolute numbers. I'm not an environmental scientist.)
Why "man-made"? Because there is pursuasive evidence that human actions could have caused it. Those who say that it is absolutely impossible for human events to modify the climate, that volcanoes and such affect the climate much more, are simply ignoring the science. However, those who say that human behavior has absolutely 100% guaranteed caused the warming of the last century are also ignoring the science.
The best available scientific information I have seen is pursuasive, but is not yet at the level of proof. There is a good chance, I fear, that if global warming is both real and human caused, that we won't be able to provide evidence of that until it is too late.
Tangent: Even most scientists who disagree with human caused global warming do agree that the climate is warming and that the clear trend of the last 100 years and of the last 50 years is increasing global temperature. Most scientists who disagree just point out that we don't have sufficient evidence that human activity is the cause, and/or that natural climate variations could be causing all of what we see.
So what if the changes of the last few hundred years were actually normal climate variation (recovery from the little ice age, etc.) and all the sudden we try to "compensate" for it?
I don't believe that any serious scientists have suggested compensating -- all I have ever heard serious scientists recommend is that humans reduce their impact on the climate. There's a difference between taking one's foot off the gas pedal and shoving one's foot on the brake pedal.
Caveat: I'm personally in favor of trying to be clean. There's no reason to pollute more than we have to.
I agree with that. I think most scientists would agree with that. And by the way, I DON'T imagine that any serious scientist would advocate any likelihood of this movie's storyline being realistic!
However, out knowledge of prediction is so poor that we cannot be sure that reducing emission will not be a "trigger".
Oh, come on. You have GOT to be kidding! By that logic, we can do just about anything we want to we can't verify to everyone's satisfaction, in advance, what the consequences will be! Besides, how can reducing emissions be a trigger? That could only be true if human emissions are the only reason the climate hasn't gone into ice age mode. And for that to be true, you would have to admit that human emissions cause global warming!
(All right, no jokes about farts here, OK?)
The correct course of action is to do nothing
Again ...... Really?
Nothing? Either you're exaggerating for effect -- the same thing you rightly accuse some environmentalists of -- or you're one of the many who choose to believe that which supports what they want to believe. (Yes, again, that kind of thinking is on both sides of that fence.) IMO, the correct course of action is a detailed and thoughtful cost-benefit analysis, and actions taken on the basis of that.
As far as CO2 goes, humans have verifiably almost doubled the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since the time before the Industrial Revolution. Even the scientists who disagree with (or more correctly, are skeptical that current evidence can support) human-caused global warming agree with that fact.
we can say for certain that adopting treaties like Kyoto would seriously happer our economy. (Which was the true intention of the treaty
On what do you base that assertion? That seems an extremist and alarmist statement, that much of the world (or perhaps just scientists and politicians from some of the world) would cloak as environmentalist an effort to hamper the US economy. What would those people gain from such a move?
So we can choose from the following
1) Unknown chances of global climate change
2) Uknownn chances of global climate change and large, negative impacts on the economy.
False dichotomy. There are many intermediate steps that can be taken by the reasonable. Only the unreasonable see just those two options. And again, yes, there are many of the unreasonable on both sides of the issue.
Seriously, tho', Lomborg's background is an advantage. If you want to be a serious academic, you need tenure. Who grants tenure? People who already have it. So, it's pretty much impossible to become an academic without adhering to the orthodoxy of the established academics.
I understand that this is true in some fields of endeavor, but it is much less true in the sciences than elsewhere. In the sciences, there are MANY tenured people with unorthodox views. It's not the views, it's whether those views can be argued from facts.
Yes, there are exceptions in the sciences where people are called "kooks" who are actually correct. However, looking at the last 150 years of science, most people labelled "kooks" were. Not all, surely, but most.
Throughout history, science is never done by consensus. Someone comes along with an idea, the bulk of the scientific community laughs in derision, 50 years later all those tenured professors are forgotten and that lone voice is elevated to the status of Einstein.
This does happen, but it is rare. You're right, science is not by consensus. That is why it works. The facts always prevail. At worst it takes a generation or two or three for the facts to outlast all prejudices, and that length of time gets shorter with each century.
What you talk about definitely happens. The guy who proposed continental drift was originally laughed at. Not for very long, however, as he successfully found the facts to support his case. The person who in the 70's (80's?) proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infection was laughed at for perhaps a decade, but then he found the evidence to prove his assertion.
MOST sciencific progress is done by established people, including breakthroughs. Only the occasional breakthrough idea is totally scorned for more than a brief period of time.
If you take 1000 people whose theories are labeled as wrong or kooky by the scienfic establishment, I'd be willing to place very good money that no more than two or three of those people will be even close to correct. MOST of the time, the scientific establishment is correct in its estimations, and MOST of the time, those estimations are fact-driven, not politics-driven. Now, this is more true in some fields, less true in others. How true it is appears to depend on how easy it is to verify facts.
I don't have any opinion on Lomborg, because I haven't read enough to have an opinion based on facts. My scientific background is not atmospheric science or any other environmental science. If he is labeled a "kook" then I am comfortable tossing him into that 1000 people who are labelled "kooks." If you are correct -- as I say, I don't have an opinion on Lomborg -- then he will be that one of a thousand who was correct all along.
Progress will stop. No company will be able to justify the R&D expense.
OK, let's get back to the article here. Do you believe that the current bill being discussed would cause this? Are you against any change of copyright based on a "slippery slope" theory? And oddly (yes this is mild sarcasm), in the days before copyright and patent and trademark, companies were still able to produce. But again, your argument above is a complete red herring. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand. Unless you believe that allowing free use -- just allowing free use -- will cause your predictions to come true.
Again, yes, there are those who totally disregard the law and who steal digital content. I am absolutely 100% for RIAA and MPAA and others going after those people. That is the correct target -- go after the people who are infringing. But please don't sacrifice fair use on the alter of preventing unfair use.
I believe that most reasonable people would agree that it's fair to take measures to prevent unfair use. The problem people have with the DMCA is that it prevents fair use also. That's really it. I don't hear people saying copyright should be repealed. Except for a few, I don't hear people saying information and content all should be free.
This argument has long since lost any credibility. There is no point at which the "Fair Use supporters" will agree to stop wholesale infringement.
So you're lumping all who disagree with you into a single category of those who do wholesale infringement? Wow. Yes, there are such people, but it's pretty silly to suggest that Fair Use supporters ALL are wholesale infringers.
Discussion of legislation is pointless. Nobody respects the law now.
Again, wow! There are many who do respect the law, which is why those people are interested in changing it. The "wholesale infringers" are the ones who ignore the law and won't care what it says. The rest of us support changing the law to support fair use while still allowing companies to protect their products from unfair use.
If copyright is repealed (for example) 30% of the economy vanishes overnight.
OK, this is an amazing belief. Where do you get this idea from? 30%? Really? And anyway, this argument is a red herring even if true. No-one is suggesting REPEALLING copyright. You took a ridiculous extremist version of what people are arguing for and pointing out it would be a Bad Thing. Well, yeah, it would be. I think your 30% number is ridiculously high, but still, no reasonable person argues to repeal copyrights or patents. Reasonable poeople argue for reform of current law. That's exactly what this story is about, eh?
All of your arguments above are extremist. Yes, there are people who believe that all digital content should be free. I know some such people. With a few exceptions, I generally think they're idiots who want something for nothing, but I do know such people. However, the vast majority of people I know respect the rights of content creators and want fair use to be preserved at the same time. Do you just not believe that such positions are possible?
Don't know what kind of engineer you are but in the Real World (TM) you will find lots of engineers doing some quick & dirty calculations in Excel.
Back in my scientist days, we only used one of a small number of custom written applications. (Named "paw" and "mn_fit" plus a few others less commonly used.) Excel cannot even dream of producing the kinds of plots that I had to produce for my dissertation. Of course, these tools were command-line driven, but that gave the power to iterate on a plot, to view arbitrary plots of N-tuple data, to change the scales and so on. MUCH more power than Excel gives. I had scatterplots with many tens of thousands of points. (Took a LOOOONNNNNGGGGG time to print on laser printers of that day!)
But as you say, for quick and dirty stuff, Excel and the like are fine. I haven't figured out how to do two dimensional error bars -- the cross shapes showing the uncertainty in each variable -- and complicated stuff like that, but maybe Excel can do stuff like that as well. But if I were doing a scientific or engineering paper, I would not use Excel.
But that edge is lost when changing the format drives away your customers when they can no longer interoperate with users with competing products.
Are you talking about the same Microsoft that changed their file formats so often that even they cannot import old versions 100%? The Microsoft that obviously didn't care a whit about these changes even when WordPerfect was a real competitor?
Ideally, what you say is accurate. However, the Microsoft in Redmond just doesn't think the way you suggest. History makes that very clear. When Microsoft adopts an open standard (such as Kerberos in Win2k), they almost always make incompatible changes so they cannot interoperate fully with existing implementations. More accurately, so existing implementations cannot interoperate with Microsoft's implementation. This is where the phrase "Embrace and extend" came from! Microsoft simply does not appear to worry about a backlash.
The people who buy a couple of tons of fertilizer that can be used to make weapons, along with the also required diesel fuel are called... farmers.
Yes. My understanding, however, was that since the attack on the Oklahoma federal building, that the FBI watched this sort of thing. I don't know how thoroughly.
Just as some time in the mid 90's the FBI began to investigate people buying certain kinds of sunlamps because of their belief that many of the purchasers of those lamps were using them to grow pot in their basements. The FBI, I believe, was using subpoena to get the sales records from the vendors.
What I would honestly like to know: why is nobody in US (any citizen organization either) chalenging such obvious violations of US Constitution in Patriot Act?
There are groups doing this. These cases take years to go through the courts, but there are cases challenging the laws. In many casees (most cases?) you need to have the law applied to someone before you can challenge it, I think. Obviously, IANAL, but I notice that many cases where a law is challenged involve deliberately violating the law and then challenging it in court.
Jose Pedilla's incarceration as an enemy combatant is going to the US Supreme Court to see whether the Executive Branch has the right to hold a US Citizen without charges, without access to a lawyer, etc.
Sadly, people who challenge such actions or laws are often called unpatriotic or as acting to help US enemies, because you sometimes have to appear to defend someone you don't want to defend in order to prevent abuses from expanding and becoming entrenched. For example, the way the ACLU will defend blatant racists' First Amendment rights in court.
there is no such distinction between "normal laws" and "Patriot Act laws". The Patriot Act IS the law, modifies existing laws, or expands existing jurisdiction.
Well, yeah, of course. I was trying to make a distinction about whether the same old laws existing before were being used, or whether the new expanded powers were being used. I wasn't trying to pretend that there were two separate, parallel, independent law books and law enforcement got to choose.
Second of all, the Patriot Act demonstrably does not give the FBI the power to detain people without charge, without admitting they are holding them, and without warrant.
I slipped up here, confusing holding someone as an emeny combatant vs the powers given in the Patriot Act. You're right. I was wrong. (Am I allowed to say that on Slashdot?) The Patriot Act greatly increases surveillance and information gathering powers but doesn't give carte blanch (sp?) power as I had suggested. That power is simply being assumed by the Executive branch by calling someone an "enemy combatant." Now, in the cases where they have used this category, so far, I have agreed. But I get nervous when our government can change a name (criminal -> enemy combatant) and have unlimited power to take and hold an American citizen. If the Supreme Court agrees that the Executive Branch has this power, it will be widely abused. Within ten years at most. If the polarization of the US continues, anyway. These sorts of powers grow over time, with categories widening. Imagine how this would have been used during the 60's with the anti-war protestors.
No, you are innocent until proven guilty
With the Patriot Act, this isn't so much true any longer. It depends on whether the FBI was investigating under normal laws or under Patriot Act laws. Consider that the Patriot Act allows our government to hold people without charging them, without admitting they are holding them, and without warrant. This is why people worry about kinds of things like this story.
All that said, it's reasonable for the FBI to investigate certain kinds of FOIA requests, and this one seems reasonable to at least quickly investigate. If someone bought a couple tons of the kinds of fertilizer that can be used to make weapons, the FBI should at least quickly look into that as well.
This doensn't mean the student did anything wrong, nor that the FOIA request should be ignored.
(And I'm not saying you said any of that! I'm just using your post as a jumping off point.)
Because it was better technology? Overlooking that the cost of the memory was only about 10% higher
That it was a better technology depends on the benchmarks you run. RDRAM indeed had a higher bandwidth, but its latencies were significantly higher than normal SDRAM. Which matters more (latency or bandwidth) depends on what you are using your computer for, but latency is usually more important from what I have seen.
And for a long time, RDRAM was well more than 10% higher cost than normal SDRAM and DDR DRAM.
And yet people will now willingly buy matched pairs of Dual Channel DDR... Can anyone say hypocracy?
It would be hypocracy if people were forced by motherboard manufacturers to only be capable of using Dual Channel DDR, and on top of it, that memory cost 30% to 100% more than other choices. The insult was that RDRAM cost much more than normal SDRAM, and on top of that you were required to install it in pairs.
When you don't pay extra for installing it in pairs and you get a performance benefit to boot, then it's not hypocracy.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
What I don't get about that statement is that the RAMBus folks appear to think that they deserved guaranteed success. Why should anyone be required to pay royalties to use a process that they don't want to use in the first place? That's like suing people who sell their homes without a real estate agent and saying, "Hey, they didn't use real estate agents because they didn't want to pay a 6% commission."
RAMBus's argument only has merit if everyone was legally required to license their technologies instead of using different technologies. The submarine nature of their patent doesn't lend me toward having any sympathy toward them.
RAMbus "made" a product that, when including the royalties, was just too expensive for the market. Well, unless their argument is that those companies that did license RAMBus colluded on charging extra high prices for it so that it would not succeed in the market. I suppose that sort of collusion would be illegal.
How can you have a monopoly when there are "very viable alternatives"? Mono - single, one, i.e. no alternatives.
Sorry, but legally, a monopoly does not necessarily mean having 100% of the market. Of course, having 100% control of the market is a monopoly, but a company can be found to be a monopoly with less than 100% control of a market -- without abusing the letter and spirit and intent of the law.
Just because the common meaning of the word means 100% doesn't mean that the Sherman Antitrust Act requires 100% for a company to be declared a monopoly.
Also, you can have a monopoly despite there being "very viable alternatives" if the monopoly has a large enough market fraction and if there are sufficient barriers to entry. If you had read anything about antitrust law, you would know that many successful antitrust cases of the last 100 years are against companies that do not have 100% of the market.
How can the universe, the sum of everything which exists, have shape? What, then, is outside this funnel? Isn't it infinitely large by definition?
The universe doesn't have shape, as such, but it does have curvature. The universe being discussed here has a finite volume and a really interesting curvature and violate all theories that say that all directions are the same. In this universe, if you travel in one direction, you can travel an infinite distance. However, all other paths will form circles or loops.
Imagine that we are way out toward the lip of the horn. If you travel perpendicular to the axis of the horn, you will loop. Travel far enough and you will return to your starting point. (For the sake of example, let's pretend that you travel in just the right direction to exactly return to your starting point -- as opposed to just spiraling.) Thus, your loop will be, say, 100 Quadrillion light years, to make a number up.
Now travel a long distance down the axis of the horn in the direction where it gets narrower. After doing that, again go perpendicular to that direction. You'll now find that your circular loop is only 100 Million light years. Travel further down the horn and your loop will be 1000 light years. Travel an unimaginable distance into the horn and your loop will be 100 yards! :)
Thus, if you could travel far enough down the horn, two of the three dimensions of space curve back on themselves and the other does not. Looking in various directions if your body is pointed down the axis of the horn, you'll see the back of your head or the bottoms of your feet.
Travel further and space becomes too small in two of the three dimensions for a person to travel there. It's like a funhouse where you have a pair of mirrors parallel to each other and you can see infinite reflections -- except here all of the "reflections" are actually you, the same you. When the "reflections" get close enough, you will literally run into yourself and you just cannot go further down the horn.
This is similar in many ways to 11-dimensional theories of superstrings or supergravity, etc, where the extra (beyond 4 of space-time) dimensions are curled up on themselves in this sort of manner. Except here, the two dimensions of space that are curled up on themselves are two of the three familiar dimensions, and the curvature of those dimensions is not constant throughout space, but varies depending on where you are.
There is nothing outside the funnel, and the funnel is not infinitely large. The image at the article shows an open funnel, however, the "mouth" of the funnel is actually closed on itself so if you try to exit the mouth you will end up going the other direction on the other side of the mouth of the funnel.
The bizarre thing about this theory is that if it is true, all you need to do is measure the local curvature of space and you can know exactly where you are in the universe, at least in the one infinite dimension.
FOX "News" almost sued The Simpsons for running a parody news ticker in a couple of their episodes
That's not actually true. If you google for this piece, you will find out it was a strange joke by Matt Groening. Google for groening fresh air fox news