Re:Python is part of the answer
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Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
Well, this rather depends on the situation. If you have to go off and design and implement a complicated algorithm to check many cases (4 colour theorem), then mostly journals will want to at least be able to point at source code, if not actually publish it.
On the other hand, I can think of a lot of papers (in graph theory) which contain some phrase like 'we can easily check the small cases' where it's clear that what that means is either the author spent a couple of weeks hand-checking (yeah right) or they wrote a program and ran it overnight. Now, maybe they used python or something similar, in which case they wrote their own code to handle graphs and implemented their own algorithms (not likely) or alternatively they fired up mathematica and used the built in algorithms. And then there are a fair few mathematicians who will play around with a computer to get ideas for how a proof might go. Again usually some commercial software gets used because it's easily available (on a university system) and quicker than writing your own stuff.
So then you get quite a few people who will submit to journals a paper together with a mathematica script which does some kind of case checking. And this is what the AMS are complaining about. Especially since it is usually a real pain to referee this sort of thing properly (i.e. check the code and run it yourself) and therefore referees tend to quietly assume the program bit probably works and focus on the maths. Usually in fact if there is an error in a program like this it will either be spotted very quickly (there will be lots of results the author will know and recognise if they're wrong) but as you say not quite always (e.g. there was an error in a planarity checking algorithm not so log ago).
So you mean she didn't try to claim someone was spoofing her using her wifi connection when she didn't even have a wireless connection? Accidentally just happening to use her favourite handle?
It was a civil case, not a criminal case. In a criminal case you do fixed penalty plus punitive and then go on to obstruction or perjury, in a civil case you make use of the range of penalties to get the same sort of result (minus jail time).
Lying out of court is one thing and in America you probably get away with it if you're a big corporation (even though you shouldn't). Lying in court is a very different thing, you end up in all kinds of trouble.
Re:Good luck with positional evaluation
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Cracking Go
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Because you can search the entire game tree if you really want to. Your 'final position' is when a pair of humans agree on what is dead, a computer wouldn't and would have to check the game tree from that point, but the computer will eventually get the right answer. Fine, most of those games will end at a point far beyond the time when human players would have stopped and counted up the dead stones, but you can do the search.
Of course, it will take a very, very long time.
Re:why check everything
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Cracking Go
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Go is not NP-complete, it's PSPACE-complete (at least on arbitrarily large boards... the question doesn't make sense on fixed size boards as then it's fixed-time soluble). PSPACE is generally thought to be a much larger class than NP (which in turn is larger than P), though that's not proven.
NP problems usually do admit some kind of heuristic 'this is good' algorithm; it goes with approximate solutions (which you can often manage in poly-time). PSPACE-complete problems do not seem to admit either, in general. If you don't feel like learning Go (which isn't so easy to get a grip on) try playing Hex (takes about 10 seconds to learn) which is also PSPACE-complete: you'll soon find that a position that looks clearly winning for one player can turn out to be losing (you can't draw Hex).
Re:why check everything
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Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
NP-complete _does_ have something to do with game theory: some (a very few) games can be interpreted as NP-complete problems.
More commonly, though, you find that a game (assuming it's easy to extend the rules to allow play on arbitrarily large boards, which is true for Go but not chess) is either polynomial-time soluble ('bad' games, in some sense) or PSPACE-complete (Go, Hex, etc.. try Hex sometime, it's proven the first player has a winning strategy but even the first move in that strategy isn't known on any reasonable-sized board). PSPACE is the class of decision problems soluble in polynomial space on a Turing machine; it's easy to see this includes NP: simply run the NP certificate verifier (which takes polynomial time and so must use polynomial space) on each of the possible certificates (which is immediately at least exp-time but you can run each check on the same bit of memory so still only poly-space), return Yes if you get a valid certificate and No if there is none. And of course P is a subclass of NP. It's obvious that games will generally be in PSPACE (checking the game tree is poly-space doable for most games), proving that some are PSPACE-complete is harder.
A jury basically comes back and simply says whose favour they find in. They do not have to explain their decision.
So, yes, there is no provision for a verdict of 'she did it but the law is wrong'. Instead there is provision for 'we find in her favour' even when the evidence that she did it is clear. Judges will not say this, and lawyers generally won't mention it (some places it's against the code of conduct, even) but it's been established for a long time as a legal principle that the jury's decision is not forced by a judge's instructions (Penn's preaching) or by evidence.
That said, in this case I agree the jury did something resembling the right thing.
You're missing the reason for the penalty, I think.
If this woman had downloaded 22 songs and been caught, _then_ turned over the right hard drive and not told lies, taken straight to court with no reasonable offer to settle and been honest, then probably either the jury would've decided on the minimum $750/song penalty or refused to convict. Because then all she would have done would be download a few songs and probably share a few back, total money lost maybe $200 even with the price of a single.
However, what she actually did do was obstruct the police and lie a lot (which juries do not like, especially when it's obvious after the fact that the lies were never going to work), then when she had an offer to settle (which was larger than a 'reasonable offer' would be in the previous case, but after the lies it was probably the best option) she rejected it.
So this jury was not going to be some bunch of totally impartial citizens looking at the money lost by the RIAA only, instead they were a bunch of citizens who probably had lots of better things to do than be grabbed for jury duty, who gave a penalty mainly for lying and acting like an asshat after the downloading. This is why most financial penalties come with a wide range of possibilities: so the jury can either take a bit off if they feel there are mitigating circumstances somehow, or add a bit on if they feel it's necessary. That said, the low end of the range here is far too high.
Short version: if you're on the wrong end of this sort of thing, don't start lying and being obstructive unless you're sure that you can actually get away with it. Instead tell the, truth then if you get a settlement offer below $20/song you probably should take it, otherwise go to court, stand up and say you did download what the prosecution say you did (assuming they don't try to lie which they almost certainly won't) but you do not believe $750/song is reasonable and you hope the jury will agree.
It's by now pretty clear that you've never written a paper...
Lots of people do put their papers on one or another free electronic resource (arxiv, homepage, whatever) as well as submitting to a journal. So, you can avoid most of your precious 'economic problems' that way, and if you ever bother to be minimally polite you can probably find some friendly university professor to give you access to his library anyway.
It's a nice idea that a scientist could just add a few hyperlinks and magically his paper would become intelligible to everyone, but it's just not true. I, for example, work in combinatorics, which is a fairly basic area of mathematics, where you don't really need to know too much to get started.
which in turn is a very simple paper; it doesn't reference all that much because it doesn't need to, and those things it does reference are mainly just to mention people who've done similar things. I'd guess that if you spent enough time you probably could understand that: but you'd need to start by understanding what I mean by a graph and getting a bit of basic graph theory. Now, I could've provided a hyperlink to Diestel's book (which is available online for free) to explain that - but then I'd have to keep updating it whenever the link changed, et cetera. And when I write a more complicated paper, I do not want to write an undergraduate course to go with it - so I am not going to try to explain all the stuff that everyone in the field already knows. If I mention the blow-up lemma in passing, and you want to know about it, read the paper describing it. When you discover you need to read a bunch of other papers to understand, go read those. Since they won't be all that helpful, you'll probably need to find a book on probabilistic graph theory. Which you can probably get hold of for free if you want to: but it will take you a few months to understand enough to know what the blow-up lemma is. That's nothing to do with economics, it's to do with how fast you can absorb information.
Put it another way: if you really want a helpful link to let anyone understand a scientific paper, then probably the most helpful one is a link to a nearby university's lecture list. They don't generally check that the people in the audience are registered students. And yes, it will take you a few years.
Fine while you're in grad school, but your career plan is not going to be to work at McDonalds during the day and write papers during the night. You want to stay in academia, you need to get a job at a department (or Microsoft, if you can get it). That said, it's easier in the US than the UK, and you have more sources of funding that care about what the quality of a paper actually is rather than just look where it's published.
It is not held in low regard. It is usually considered to be one of the most useful sites around: for example the two journal links I have in my favourites are to my library's journal search facility and to the ArXiV recent combinatorics submissions page. A lot of good stuff appears there, and it's not two years old by the time you see it (journals often take that long to publish submissions). I check it every few days.
But, the funding body in the UK, which does not have professional mathematicians on it, doesn't like it because it will _also_ accept the less good stuff. So unless you happen to have rich parents and don't want to be part of a maths department, you have to play the game and submit to a highly rated journal. Then maybe you send a copy to the ArXiV as well.
With regards to the job interview - well, I am exaggerating a bit. But only a little bit: often when a department advertises a job they have a person in mind already: if you want to get in in his place when no-one knows you, you'll have to be pretty stunning at interview. But again, you don't really get known by publishing in journals, you get known by going to conferences and giving good talks and then by word of mouth.
The other thing you're missing is that the top ranked journals are not necessarily the most expensive ones. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. Annals of Mathematics is where you go if you've just proved a really big result; it's also one of the cheapest journals. You can publish in cheaper journals without hurting your career.
Yes, it is - but not things that someone else has already figured out. One person proving a theorem is interesting, ten people proving it ten times in different ways (or more likely ten times in basically the same way) isn't. So you ask someone if this useful step you'd like to use has been solved, if yes you read the paper, understand the methods, go on to look at your own problem which has not been solved, solve it.
Feynman didn't invent Monte Carlo (that's Ulam, IIRC). And it wouldn't be any use here.
Monte Carlo is useful when you have some finite input for a question (whose answer you can easily calculate given the input) and you need some kind of idea about what the output usually is: throw in random inputs until you think you have an idea. Then prove it.
This is different: he wants to know how to calculate the answer to his problem, because it's not easy. Making random guesses won't help. Grid methods will, but they will cost a hell of a lot of memory and computation. Maybe pestering the computational fluid dynamics community would be a good idea?
Two points. One, I said the UK funding body rates papers on the basis of which journal they're in. Professional mathematicians don't, generally: there are one or two journals around which don't actually peer-review properly, so you aren't likely to read them (anything there is very likely to be either very boring or wrong, and life is too short to spend time on that). Otherwise, you usually judge by the title and maybe abstract whether it's worth spending time having a look, then you read the introduction and maybe skim the rest. You don't generally spend too much time reading in detail until you need to. And of course you can find title and abstract for anything in a bunch of places.
Two, if you know what you're looking for, and it was written any time this millennium, you have a pretty good chance of finding it by searching the web. Most people do put their stuff up. For an example, take the Journal of Combinatorial Theory B (another top-level journal, published by Elsevier). It has the usual Elsevier notice about submissions being published elsewhere. But if you look at the titles, then you still find a lot are on websites, usually on authors' homepages.
There are two reasons to publish in a journal. One, funding bodies often use journals to rank academics (and departments funded by such bodies will have to do the same to some extent, because they need money). Two, more people will hear about your stuff if it's in a good journal. Not in fact a lot more, but some. Mostly people who want to know about your stuff will find out by checking your website (if they really like you), by listening to a conference talk (you probably give several in a year), by word of mouth or Google searches (if someone wants to work on the same topic as your paper they probably will find it), by skimming the arxiv submissions (if you put it there, a lot of people will check the recent titles about once a week, even if they don't open the articles most of the time) and failing that then after the standard publishing delay (12-30 months, depending) if it appears in a journal there's another chance to be seen by someone skimming the journal's latest issues. And you do want people to read your stuff (if it's good). Because when you apply for a job, you'll come with your best papers and talk about them. If the people in the department have never heard of you, you hope that there's someone in the department who's willing to spend a lot of time reading your papers and that person is interested in the area, or alternatively you produce a really brilliant presentation. Often everyone's busy interviewing six other candidates, teaching and doing their own research. If you show up and one of your interviewers has already read some of your papers, then you don't have to do a brilliant job of compressing three years of research into a twenty minute why-I-am-interesting presentation. A department will usually reject the unheard-of guy with a good presentation in favour of the guy with a decent presentation but where someone already in the department can stand up and say, I know this guy's work and it's good.
Well, it rather depends what you're doing as to whether you need references. I'm a mathematician, so from that POV...
If your paper starts from the basics that everyone learns in undergrad lectures, builds up to a result and stops, then you probably don't really need to reference anything. Though chances are your paper will be much more readable and useful if you try to explain why your result is interesting, which means discussing other results a little, which means you reference them.
If you use someone else's results along the way without acknowledging the fact, then you are being exceptionally rude, even if it's clear from context that you're not claiming the result as your own. If it's not clear (e.g. if you include a proof) then it will look like you're plagiarising. Since you're early on in your, career, let me try to help. If you want to continue in academia, you will need to convince someone to give you a job. If you write a paper which doesn't acknowledge results it uses, then you had better hope that not many people read it, or you will never get a job.
If you use someone else's results and name them but don't give a reference, then you are being deliberately unhelpful to your readers. Some of them will want to check those results, you presumably know which papers those results were in (since you're using them) and it's not exactly hard to get journal issue and page numbers off citeseer when you know what you're looking for. When you don't, it can be a real pain. This won't kill any chance of a job, but it will make you unpopular.
If you really do not like journals, then you can publish in the ArXiV (or similar). You can stick stuff on your website. You can reference the ArXiV. You can reference other people's websites (though that's risky: websites change). A few people do do these things (and many people stick stuff in the ArXiV or on a website as well as submitting to a journal). That said, at least in the UK your department gets funding by getting a good score in the research assessment exercise. To get a good RAE score you need your staff to be publishing 'good papers'. And the way that is measured is that each member of staff submits his best papers since the last RAE, which are given a score according to the quality of the journals they were published in. No-one actually reads the papers to see if they really are good or not, they go by if it's in Combinatorica then it's good (generally true), if it's in Discrete Math then it's not so good (usually true, but of course DM won't reject a really good paper that would get into Combinatorica), if it's just in the ArXiV then it barely counts (although e.g. Perelman put his proof of Poincare's conjecture straight into the ArXiV without submitting it to any journal - it does happen).
Actually, that's not true. They can demand you leave if you refuse to let them search, that's it. You do not forfeit privacy when you enter a business during its trading hours. This is more well known with bars - it's well established that the bouncers cannot search you for knives/guns/whatever without permission, but they can refuse you entrance or throw you out unless you give permission. Walmart, very simply, cannot legally insist they check your bag against your receipt. They do it anyway because most people will accept it (I won't, but I choose to just not shop there rather than annoy everyone by causing a scene) and those who won't, and will screw around, and will then take Walmart to court, will get nothing much out of it unless the checker-idiot has done something stupid.
The police thing is different. It's again generally held that if you are messing a police officer around, then you deserve to get arrested for obstruction. You pretty much have to prove that the police were messing you around (e.g. the black man jogging case).
It doesn't cost all that much to shut down and bring back on line a nuclear plant: it's fairly automated, not quite you press the big START button and wait, but close.
The expensive bit is that when you start shutting down you must complete the shutdown then restart it: if you try to jump in half way and restart then you create all sorts of heat stresses the plant wasn't designed for, heat stresses lead to cracks and cracks in a nuclear plant are a big no-no. So how long does it take to shut down and restart? Well, probably four or five days. That's maybe 120 hours that the plant is sitting there not generating anything - which is at least 5 million dollars worth of electricity, plus (depending on the country) a good chance you get fined for not producing the electricity you promised the grid you'd produce (so they have to pay some other power station emergency fees).
Maybe. I'd hope they'd at least do some kind of testing to make sure the money only got handed out to reasonably decent candidates in the first place, though (and IMO in fact it would be easier to get an understanding of maths and do maths or a physical science; biology generally involves a lot of learning facts and a lot of lab time, whereas if you feel like putting in enough effort to understand what maths is doing then a maths degree is relatively low-work).
I think forcing people into teaching was basically the point.
And I think a physics graduate who doesn't especially want to teach will do a much better job than many current teachers. A lot of physics teachers have a general teaching qualification, weren't good enough to do what they wanted to do, were told to learn enough physics to teach that, and have neither motivation nor enthusiasm for the subject. At least a physics graduate will have the latter, and some will have the former as well (teaching can be enjoyable).
What gives you the idea the job market has 'no need' for those people? There's a massive shortage of qualified teachers, for a start - a lot of maths and science teaching at high school level is done by people who've learnt the syllabus and not much else. If you're taught by that sort of teacher through high school, you'll likely leave with no interest in doing maths or science (because your teacher wasn't interested and will have passed on the idea that you learn it because you have to for a job) and with no background knowledge (because your teacher couldn't answer any questions off the syllabus). At this point in life you either decide to spend a few years correcting the faults of your previous education (like learning to solve problems by being creative rather than just following a rote method), or you accept that you will not get any job requiring that sort of competence - which includes most of the ones that pay a decent salary.
Right now, if you have a decent degree in maths or a hard science and you cannot get a good job, then either you are being lazy or you have some kind of major personality problem.
There is a difference between 'elastic energy exists' and 'here is the shape formed when a material is elastically deformed to satisfy certain boundary conditions, subject to minimum elastic energy criteria'.
Same way it's easy to say 'a quantum electromagnetic effect exists' but it is much harder to go on and use the basic equations to describe the operation of an avalanche diode.
Yes, in some situations. If the cheater tries to always get as much bandwidth as possible, then yes.
If there are a lot of low-throughput TCPs and no or few higher throughput ones then exactly what you describe will happen. However, it's also the case that if you have a large number of low throughput TCPs, then chances are that they are mainly short term TCPs in the first place, lots of new ones coming along and old ones finishing all the time. And all of those new ones are going to slow start, which means the bottleneck is probably overloading far too frequently anyway. If on the other hand you've got a decent number of higher throughput TCPs around, then the cheater will win (even though there will be a lot of slow-start mess making for less data actually being transferred, the cheater will end up with more bandwidth).
The sort of thing that really benefits from cheating is something like videoconferencing or streaming - you don't ever grab enough of the channel to knock lots of people into slowstart, because you never need that much bandwidth, but you do keep your bandwidth high enough to avoid freezes.
Yes - but essentially this is because TCP includes a bunch of be-nice-to-everyone stuff. It doesn't try just to optimise your personal connection, it tries to send your data in a way that will not screw over everyone else who uses the same channel.
If you just want to transfer your data as fast as possible, change a couple of parameters in your TCP implementation so it ramps up faster and drops to maybe 95% instead of all the way to 50% when it gets packet loss. That'll work about as well as completely doing your own thing with UDP. But, you will have no friends because all the channels you send data over will end up carrying your data and no-one else's (you overload the channel, it drops many packets, your rate drops to 95% but everyone else's drops to 50%, then you ramp up quicker than they do and grab most of the bandwidth they used to have, rinse and repeat).
Basic TCP simply ramps up the transmission rate linearly until it starts dropping packets (timeout for receiver acknowledgement), then it halves the rate and begins to ramp up again. So that means that if there is a decent amount of capacity (i.e. the receiver can ack the packets in time) then you expect to get at least half the speed the data protocol allows (this too isn't perfect but again it's not too far from Shannon). There are fiddles to deal with low capacity channels, which are pretty standard. There are a few tricks (called 'slow start'!) to get a decent transmission rate quickly from the off (if you have a 10M connection and you use the original TCP protocol you'll spend the first couple of minutes of transmission just getting up to pace). Still not very good if you have a really fast connection for big files (say a few TB of astronomical data) when you spend 20 minutes building the rate up to the channel limit only to see it reset to half.
So, there are problems. One is that if a channel gets overloaded and starts dropping packets then probably there are several TCP links going through it, most of them lose packets, drop to half rate and the link is suddenly at about 60% capacity. Another is that if you have time-critical data (videoconferencing, say) there isn't any way to protect capacity - so your videoconference gets freezes which annoy everyone because some PFY's P2P traffic is filling the channel, even though the PFY couldn't care less if his porn takes five or ten minutes to download.
There are also things you can do - for example there is nothing to stop you fiddling your implementation of TCP to only drop to 90% on a packet loss; do that and you'll get about 40% better upload speed (obviously it'll do nothing to download speed) if you're on a reasonably direct backbone connection (i.e. not a T1 or cable or whatever). But that's antisocial, and if you send enough data for people to notice then you will be very unpopular (you'll be causing far more channel overloads, and everyone else's data rates will take a big hit).
Ultimately, though, even if you cannot in theory do better than get 2x performance over TCP (it's probably a bit less than 2, I'd guess) you're still going to find it cheaper to get 1% more performance out of TCP (which certainly is possible) than to lay another 1% of fibre.
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Well, this rather depends on the situation. If you have to go off and design and implement a complicated algorithm to check many cases (4 colour theorem), then mostly journals will want to at least be able to point at source code, if not actually publish it.
On the other hand, I can think of a lot of papers (in graph theory) which contain some phrase like 'we can easily check the small cases' where it's clear that what that means is either the author spent a couple of weeks hand-checking (yeah right) or they wrote a program and ran it overnight. Now, maybe they used python or something similar, in which case they wrote their own code to handle graphs and implemented their own algorithms (not likely) or alternatively they fired up mathematica and used the built in algorithms. And then there are a fair few mathematicians who will play around with a computer to get ideas for how a proof might go. Again usually some commercial software gets used because it's easily available (on a university system) and quicker than writing your own stuff.
So then you get quite a few people who will submit to journals a paper together with a mathematica script which does some kind of case checking. And this is what the AMS are complaining about. Especially since it is usually a real pain to referee this sort of thing properly (i.e. check the code and run it yourself) and therefore referees tend to quietly assume the program bit probably works and focus on the maths. Usually in fact if there is an error in a program like this it will either be spotted very quickly (there will be lots of results the author will know and recognise if they're wrong) but as you say not quite always (e.g. there was an error in a planarity checking algorithm not so log ago).
So you mean she didn't try to claim someone was spoofing her using her wifi connection when she didn't even have a wireless connection? Accidentally just happening to use her favourite handle?
Try not to be stupid...
It was a civil case, not a criminal case. In a criminal case you do fixed penalty plus punitive and then go on to obstruction or perjury, in a civil case you make use of the range of penalties to get the same sort of result (minus jail time).
Lying out of court is one thing and in America you probably get away with it if you're a big corporation (even though you shouldn't). Lying in court is a very different thing, you end up in all kinds of trouble.
Because you can search the entire game tree if you really want to. Your 'final position' is when a pair of humans agree on what is dead, a computer wouldn't and would have to check the game tree from that point, but the computer will eventually get the right answer. Fine, most of those games will end at a point far beyond the time when human players would have stopped and counted up the dead stones, but you can do the search.
Of course, it will take a very, very long time.
Go is not NP-complete, it's PSPACE-complete (at least on arbitrarily large boards... the question doesn't make sense on fixed size boards as then it's fixed-time soluble). PSPACE is generally thought to be a much larger class than NP (which in turn is larger than P), though that's not proven.
NP problems usually do admit some kind of heuristic 'this is good' algorithm; it goes with approximate solutions (which you can often manage in poly-time). PSPACE-complete problems do not seem to admit either, in general. If you don't feel like learning Go (which isn't so easy to get a grip on) try playing Hex (takes about 10 seconds to learn) which is also PSPACE-complete: you'll soon find that a position that looks clearly winning for one player can turn out to be losing (you can't draw Hex).
NP-complete _does_ have something to do with game theory: some (a very few) games can be interpreted as NP-complete problems.
More commonly, though, you find that a game (assuming it's easy to extend the rules to allow play on arbitrarily large boards, which is true for Go but not chess) is either polynomial-time soluble ('bad' games, in some sense) or PSPACE-complete (Go, Hex, etc.. try Hex sometime, it's proven the first player has a winning strategy but even the first move in that strategy isn't known on any reasonable-sized board). PSPACE is the class of decision problems soluble in polynomial space on a Turing machine; it's easy to see this includes NP: simply run the NP certificate verifier (which takes polynomial time and so must use polynomial space) on each of the possible certificates (which is immediately at least exp-time but you can run each check on the same bit of memory so still only poly-space), return Yes if you get a valid certificate and No if there is none. And of course P is a subclass of NP. It's obvious that games will generally be in PSPACE (checking the game tree is poly-space doable for most games), proving that some are PSPACE-complete is harder.
A jury basically comes back and simply says whose favour they find in. They do not have to explain their decision.
So, yes, there is no provision for a verdict of 'she did it but the law is wrong'. Instead there is provision for 'we find in her favour' even when the evidence that she did it is clear. Judges will not say this, and lawyers generally won't mention it (some places it's against the code of conduct, even) but it's been established for a long time as a legal principle that the jury's decision is not forced by a judge's instructions (Penn's preaching) or by evidence.
That said, in this case I agree the jury did something resembling the right thing.
You're missing the reason for the penalty, I think.
If this woman had downloaded 22 songs and been caught, _then_ turned over the right hard drive and not told lies, taken straight to court with no reasonable offer to settle and been honest, then probably either the jury would've decided on the minimum $750/song penalty or refused to convict. Because then all she would have done would be download a few songs and probably share a few back, total money lost maybe $200 even with the price of a single.
However, what she actually did do was obstruct the police and lie a lot (which juries do not like, especially when it's obvious after the fact that the lies were never going to work), then when she had an offer to settle (which was larger than a 'reasonable offer' would be in the previous case, but after the lies it was probably the best option) she rejected it.
So this jury was not going to be some bunch of totally impartial citizens looking at the money lost by the RIAA only, instead they were a bunch of citizens who probably had lots of better things to do than be grabbed for jury duty, who gave a penalty mainly for lying and acting like an asshat after the downloading. This is why most financial penalties come with a wide range of possibilities: so the jury can either take a bit off if they feel there are mitigating circumstances somehow, or add a bit on if they feel it's necessary. That said, the low end of the range here is far too high.
Short version: if you're on the wrong end of this sort of thing, don't start lying and being obstructive unless you're sure that you can actually get away with it. Instead tell the, truth then if you get a settlement offer below $20/song you probably should take it, otherwise go to court, stand up and say you did download what the prosecution say you did (assuming they don't try to lie which they almost certainly won't) but you do not believe $750/song is reasonable and you hope the jury will agree.
It's by now pretty clear that you've never written a paper...
Lots of people do put their papers on one or another free electronic resource (arxiv, homepage, whatever) as well as submitting to a journal. So, you can avoid most of your precious 'economic problems' that way, and if you ever bother to be minimally polite you can probably find some friendly university professor to give you access to his library anyway.
It's a nice idea that a scientist could just add a few hyperlinks and magically his paper would become intelligible to everyone, but it's just not true. I, for example, work in combinatorics, which is a fairly basic area of mathematics, where you don't really need to know too much to get started.
Here's a paper of mine:
http://www.cdam.lse.ac.uk/Reports/Files/cdam-2006-10.pdf
which in turn is a very simple paper; it doesn't reference all that much because it doesn't need to, and those things it does reference are mainly just to mention people who've done similar things. I'd guess that if you spent enough time you probably could understand that: but you'd need to start by understanding what I mean by a graph and getting a bit of basic graph theory. Now, I could've provided a hyperlink to Diestel's book (which is available online for free) to explain that - but then I'd have to keep updating it whenever the link changed, et cetera. And when I write a more complicated paper, I do not want to write an undergraduate course to go with it - so I am not going to try to explain all the stuff that everyone in the field already knows. If I mention the blow-up lemma in passing, and you want to know about it, read the paper describing it. When you discover you need to read a bunch of other papers to understand, go read those. Since they won't be all that helpful, you'll probably need to find a book on probabilistic graph theory. Which you can probably get hold of for free if you want to: but it will take you a few months to understand enough to know what the blow-up lemma is. That's nothing to do with economics, it's to do with how fast you can absorb information.
Put it another way: if you really want a helpful link to let anyone understand a scientific paper, then probably the most helpful one is a link to a nearby university's lecture list. They don't generally check that the people in the audience are registered students. And yes, it will take you a few years.
Fine while you're in grad school, but your career plan is not going to be to work at McDonalds during the day and write papers during the night. You want to stay in academia, you need to get a job at a department (or Microsoft, if you can get it). That said, it's easier in the US than the UK, and you have more sources of funding that care about what the quality of a paper actually is rather than just look where it's published.
With ArXiV...
It is not held in low regard. It is usually considered to be one of the most useful sites around: for example the two journal links I have in my favourites are to my library's journal search facility and to the ArXiV recent combinatorics submissions page. A lot of good stuff appears there, and it's not two years old by the time you see it (journals often take that long to publish submissions). I check it every few days.
But, the funding body in the UK, which does not have professional mathematicians on it, doesn't like it because it will _also_ accept the less good stuff. So unless you happen to have rich parents and don't want to be part of a maths department, you have to play the game and submit to a highly rated journal. Then maybe you send a copy to the ArXiV as well.
With regards to the job interview - well, I am exaggerating a bit. But only a little bit: often when a department advertises a job they have a person in mind already: if you want to get in in his place when no-one knows you, you'll have to be pretty stunning at interview. But again, you don't really get known by publishing in journals, you get known by going to conferences and giving good talks and then by word of mouth.
The other thing you're missing is that the top ranked journals are not necessarily the most expensive ones. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. Annals of Mathematics is where you go if you've just proved a really big result; it's also one of the cheapest journals. You can publish in cheaper journals without hurting your career.
Yes, it is - but not things that someone else has already figured out. One person proving a theorem is interesting, ten people proving it ten times in different ways (or more likely ten times in basically the same way) isn't. So you ask someone if this useful step you'd like to use has been solved, if yes you read the paper, understand the methods, go on to look at your own problem which has not been solved, solve it.
Feynman didn't invent Monte Carlo (that's Ulam, IIRC). And it wouldn't be any use here.
Monte Carlo is useful when you have some finite input for a question (whose answer you can easily calculate given the input) and you need some kind of idea about what the output usually is: throw in random inputs until you think you have an idea. Then prove it.
This is different: he wants to know how to calculate the answer to his problem, because it's not easy. Making random guesses won't help. Grid methods will, but they will cost a hell of a lot of memory and computation. Maybe pestering the computational fluid dynamics community would be a good idea?
Two points. One, I said the UK funding body rates papers on the basis of which journal they're in. Professional mathematicians don't, generally: there are one or two journals around which don't actually peer-review properly, so you aren't likely to read them (anything there is very likely to be either very boring or wrong, and life is too short to spend time on that). Otherwise, you usually judge by the title and maybe abstract whether it's worth spending time having a look, then you read the introduction and maybe skim the rest. You don't generally spend too much time reading in detail until you need to. And of course you can find title and abstract for anything in a bunch of places.
Two, if you know what you're looking for, and it was written any time this millennium, you have a pretty good chance of finding it by searching the web. Most people do put their stuff up. For an example, take the Journal of Combinatorial Theory B (another top-level journal, published by Elsevier). It has the usual Elsevier notice about submissions being published elsewhere. But if you look at the titles, then you still find a lot are on websites, usually on authors' homepages.
There are two reasons to publish in a journal. One, funding bodies often use journals to rank academics (and departments funded by such bodies will have to do the same to some extent, because they need money). Two, more people will hear about your stuff if it's in a good journal. Not in fact a lot more, but some. Mostly people who want to know about your stuff will find out by checking your website (if they really like you), by listening to a conference talk (you probably give several in a year), by word of mouth or Google searches (if someone wants to work on the same topic as your paper they probably will find it), by skimming the arxiv submissions (if you put it there, a lot of people will check the recent titles about once a week, even if they don't open the articles most of the time) and failing that then after the standard publishing delay (12-30 months, depending) if it appears in a journal there's another chance to be seen by someone skimming the journal's latest issues. And you do want people to read your stuff (if it's good). Because when you apply for a job, you'll come with your best papers and talk about them. If the people in the department have never heard of you, you hope that there's someone in the department who's willing to spend a lot of time reading your papers and that person is interested in the area, or alternatively you produce a really brilliant presentation. Often everyone's busy interviewing six other candidates, teaching and doing their own research. If you show up and one of your interviewers has already read some of your papers, then you don't have to do a brilliant job of compressing three years of research into a twenty minute why-I-am-interesting presentation. A department will usually reject the unheard-of guy with a good presentation in favour of the guy with a decent presentation but where someone already in the department can stand up and say, I know this guy's work and it's good.
Well, it rather depends what you're doing as to whether you need references. I'm a mathematician, so from that POV...
If your paper starts from the basics that everyone learns in undergrad lectures, builds up to a result and stops, then you probably don't really need to reference anything. Though chances are your paper will be much more readable and useful if you try to explain why your result is interesting, which means discussing other results a little, which means you reference them.
If you use someone else's results along the way without acknowledging the fact, then you are being exceptionally rude, even if it's clear from context that you're not claiming the result as your own. If it's not clear (e.g. if you include a proof) then it will look like you're plagiarising. Since you're early on in your, career, let me try to help. If you want to continue in academia, you will need to convince someone to give you a job. If you write a paper which doesn't acknowledge results it uses, then you had better hope that not many people read it, or you will never get a job.
If you use someone else's results and name them but don't give a reference, then you are being deliberately unhelpful to your readers. Some of them will want to check those results, you presumably know which papers those results were in (since you're using them) and it's not exactly hard to get journal issue and page numbers off citeseer when you know what you're looking for. When you don't, it can be a real pain. This won't kill any chance of a job, but it will make you unpopular.
If you really do not like journals, then you can publish in the ArXiV (or similar). You can stick stuff on your website. You can reference the ArXiV. You can reference other people's websites (though that's risky: websites change). A few people do do these things (and many people stick stuff in the ArXiV or on a website as well as submitting to a journal). That said, at least in the UK your department gets funding by getting a good score in the research assessment exercise. To get a good RAE score you need your staff to be publishing 'good papers'. And the way that is measured is that each member of staff submits his best papers since the last RAE, which are given a score according to the quality of the journals they were published in. No-one actually reads the papers to see if they really are good or not, they go by if it's in Combinatorica then it's good (generally true), if it's in Discrete Math then it's not so good (usually true, but of course DM won't reject a really good paper that would get into Combinatorica), if it's just in the ArXiV then it barely counts (although e.g. Perelman put his proof of Poincare's conjecture straight into the ArXiV without submitting it to any journal - it does happen).
Actually, that's not true. They can demand you leave if you refuse to let them search, that's it. You do not forfeit privacy when you enter a business during its trading hours. This is more well known with bars - it's well established that the bouncers cannot search you for knives/guns/whatever without permission, but they can refuse you entrance or throw you out unless you give permission. Walmart, very simply, cannot legally insist they check your bag against your receipt. They do it anyway because most people will accept it (I won't, but I choose to just not shop there rather than annoy everyone by causing a scene) and those who won't, and will screw around, and will then take Walmart to court, will get nothing much out of it unless the checker-idiot has done something stupid.
The police thing is different. It's again generally held that if you are messing a police officer around, then you deserve to get arrested for obstruction. You pretty much have to prove that the police were messing you around (e.g. the black man jogging case).
It doesn't cost all that much to shut down and bring back on line a nuclear plant: it's fairly automated, not quite you press the big START button and wait, but close.
The expensive bit is that when you start shutting down you must complete the shutdown then restart it: if you try to jump in half way and restart then you create all sorts of heat stresses the plant wasn't designed for, heat stresses lead to cracks and cracks in a nuclear plant are a big no-no. So how long does it take to shut down and restart? Well, probably four or five days. That's maybe 120 hours that the plant is sitting there not generating anything - which is at least 5 million dollars worth of electricity, plus (depending on the country) a good chance you get fined for not producing the electricity you promised the grid you'd produce (so they have to pay some other power station emergency fees).
Maybe. I'd hope they'd at least do some kind of testing to make sure the money only got handed out to reasonably decent candidates in the first place, though (and IMO in fact it would be easier to get an understanding of maths and do maths or a physical science; biology generally involves a lot of learning facts and a lot of lab time, whereas if you feel like putting in enough effort to understand what maths is doing then a maths degree is relatively low-work).
I think forcing people into teaching was basically the point.
And I think a physics graduate who doesn't especially want to teach will do a much better job than many current teachers. A lot of physics teachers have a general teaching qualification, weren't good enough to do what they wanted to do, were told to learn enough physics to teach that, and have neither motivation nor enthusiasm for the subject. At least a physics graduate will have the latter, and some will have the former as well (teaching can be enjoyable).
What gives you the idea the job market has 'no need' for those people? There's a massive shortage of qualified teachers, for a start - a lot of maths and science teaching at high school level is done by people who've learnt the syllabus and not much else. If you're taught by that sort of teacher through high school, you'll likely leave with no interest in doing maths or science (because your teacher wasn't interested and will have passed on the idea that you learn it because you have to for a job) and with no background knowledge (because your teacher couldn't answer any questions off the syllabus). At this point in life you either decide to spend a few years correcting the faults of your previous education (like learning to solve problems by being creative rather than just following a rote method), or you accept that you will not get any job requiring that sort of competence - which includes most of the ones that pay a decent salary.
Right now, if you have a decent degree in maths or a hard science and you cannot get a good job, then either you are being lazy or you have some kind of major personality problem.
There is a difference between 'elastic energy exists' and 'here is the shape formed when a material is elastically deformed to satisfy certain boundary conditions, subject to minimum elastic energy criteria'.
Same way it's easy to say 'a quantum electromagnetic effect exists' but it is much harder to go on and use the basic equations to describe the operation of an avalanche diode.
Yes, in some situations. If the cheater tries to always get as much bandwidth as possible, then yes.
If there are a lot of low-throughput TCPs and no or few higher throughput ones then exactly what you describe will happen. However, it's also the case that if you have a large number of low throughput TCPs, then chances are that they are mainly short term TCPs in the first place, lots of new ones coming along and old ones finishing all the time. And all of those new ones are going to slow start, which means the bottleneck is probably overloading far too frequently anyway. If on the other hand you've got a decent number of higher throughput TCPs around, then the cheater will win (even though there will be a lot of slow-start mess making for less data actually being transferred, the cheater will end up with more bandwidth).
The sort of thing that really benefits from cheating is something like videoconferencing or streaming - you don't ever grab enough of the channel to knock lots of people into slowstart, because you never need that much bandwidth, but you do keep your bandwidth high enough to avoid freezes.
Yes - but essentially this is because TCP includes a bunch of be-nice-to-everyone stuff. It doesn't try just to optimise your personal connection, it tries to send your data in a way that will not screw over everyone else who uses the same channel.
If you just want to transfer your data as fast as possible, change a couple of parameters in your TCP implementation so it ramps up faster and drops to maybe 95% instead of all the way to 50% when it gets packet loss. That'll work about as well as completely doing your own thing with UDP. But, you will have no friends because all the channels you send data over will end up carrying your data and no-one else's (you overload the channel, it drops many packets, your rate drops to 95% but everyone else's drops to 50%, then you ramp up quicker than they do and grab most of the bandwidth they used to have, rinse and repeat).
Basic TCP simply ramps up the transmission rate linearly until it starts dropping packets (timeout for receiver acknowledgement), then it halves the rate and begins to ramp up again. So that means that if there is a decent amount of capacity (i.e. the receiver can ack the packets in time) then you expect to get at least half the speed the data protocol allows (this too isn't perfect but again it's not too far from Shannon). There are fiddles to deal with low capacity channels, which are pretty standard. There are a few tricks (called 'slow start'!) to get a decent transmission rate quickly from the off (if you have a 10M connection and you use the original TCP protocol you'll spend the first couple of minutes of transmission just getting up to pace). Still not very good if you have a really fast connection for big files (say a few TB of astronomical data) when you spend 20 minutes building the rate up to the channel limit only to see it reset to half.
So, there are problems. One is that if a channel gets overloaded and starts dropping packets then probably there are several TCP links going through it, most of them lose packets, drop to half rate and the link is suddenly at about 60% capacity. Another is that if you have time-critical data (videoconferencing, say) there isn't any way to protect capacity - so your videoconference gets freezes which annoy everyone because some PFY's P2P traffic is filling the channel, even though the PFY couldn't care less if his porn takes five or ten minutes to download.
There are also things you can do - for example there is nothing to stop you fiddling your implementation of TCP to only drop to 90% on a packet loss; do that and you'll get about 40% better upload speed (obviously it'll do nothing to download speed) if you're on a reasonably direct backbone connection (i.e. not a T1 or cable or whatever). But that's antisocial, and if you send enough data for people to notice then you will be very unpopular (you'll be causing far more channel overloads, and everyone else's data rates will take a big hit).
Ultimately, though, even if you cannot in theory do better than get 2x performance over TCP (it's probably a bit less than 2, I'd guess) you're still going to find it cheaper to get 1% more performance out of TCP (which certainly is possible) than to lay another 1% of fibre.