"Scientific" studies are supposed to be criticised, repeated, disproven...and then when all else fails...accepted.
You're right. It's essential for scientific ideas to be challenged by the scientific community. On the other hand, what's happening here is the scientific community's consensus being challenged by the political community, which is insane.
Well, in a 1D universe, it'd be impossible for stuff to get past your forces without completely obliterating them...:)
You raise a good point - defence in depth is a wonderful thing. However, it's also very expensive in terms of forces, for the very reason you point out. This is why trench warfare was so common back in the day - manning every square mile of no-man's land would require far too many troops. In practice, the standard strategy was to man a fixed thickness of perimeter (the area of which would tend to the thickness multiplied by the circumference as the radius increased) with a few reserve companies to react to any surprises.
Of course, this 2D model of warfare became less useful as access to the third dimension of conventional warfare increased. Paratroopers and stealth bombers, not to mention bloody big rockets, have more or less killed trench warfare.
Not quite. In a 1D universe the space won't increase at all - it'll be two dots moving outwards. In a 2D universe it'll increase linearly - the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*radius. So in our 3D universe it'll increase quadratically.
This has nothing to do with open source
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The Demise of IP?
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Well, not directly anyway. The issue in Massachusetts is one of open standards. Either the Massachusetts government chooses to store their data in a format whereby anyone can produce software to read and write it (thus allowing market forces to act to improve value for money) or it chooses to adopt a standard that people can only develop for with Microsoft's permission, and on their terms (but of course, they'd never behave anticompetitively...). Which are likely to, for example, preclude GPLed software, among others.
The only connection that open source has to this situation is how easily Microsoft will be able to lock it out if Massachusetts chooses unwisely.
I thought the main point of quantum computing is that it could solve problems that can't be tackled by digital computers. So, for example, whereas factoring a 64-bit prime number might take a fairly hefty digital computer a decent chunk of time, all a quantum computer would need is 64 qbits and the problem would be effectively solved.
As a mathematician in training, my biggest worry is that all the interesting cryptography jobs will have been obsoleted by the time I get that far.
I'm perfectly happy for them to add to an open standard. Just as long as their additions are kept as open as the standard was. Otherwise (for example if they patent their extensions) they're just leeching off the hard work of others, and historically such actions have mostly been anticompetitive too.
I await the licensing of these extensions. Do you think they'll be GPL compatible?
I did read TFA. This is not another "Ooh, I wonder what DRM it has" post. I'm aware that this version contains no DRM. My point stands.
At the time the article came out, I'd just spent half an hour pondering how DRM could be turned into more than a temporary speed bump in the warezers' path, and the system I described in the GP was the only one I could think of. Then I spent another 10 minutes pondering how I'd introduce such a system. Using USB keys for music was going to be step one, since it's the only remotely valid way to get people used to music-in-a-box. Then this article came out and nearly gave me a brain haemorrhage.
The capacity of the USB keys they're using is under a quarter of the capacity of the CDROMs they were using, and vastly more expensive. So, other than "it's a cute idea, why the hell not", why are they introducing this system? My suggestion is one possible answer, and it indicates that we should be at least a little wary.
To me that reads as "people being trained to attach little black boxes of music to their computer, with the eventual intention of DRMing said boxes". If people are trained to attach arbitrary boxes to their computer to get music/films, the next step is to have those boxes "streaming" the audio/video straight to a Trusted Output Device [tm]. This probably wouldn't stop piracy, but it'd make backing up your media nigh-on impossible, since you'd no longer be able to copy directly.
This fits in well with plans to make Windows Vista only play DVDs at full quality using the aforementioned Trusted Output Devices [tm]
If you're looking for a quiet way of handling it, try talking to the vicar/pastor/equivalent religious authority of your church in confidence. Explain that it's bothering you that kids are being taught pseudointellectual tripe. Regardless of whether your church is creationist or not (if the latter, it's safe to point out the Catholic church's opposition to ID), teaching creation as science can only be a bad thing as it reduces Christianity from a faith to a hypothesis.
If the religious authority is uninterested in sorting things out, *then* you might want to ponder the burning of bridges that a number of others have mentioned.
You're right, I completely misinterpreted the greatgreatgrandparent - I read it as suggesting that the embedded developers license their code under the BSD license rather than just using it as a base. Doh.
However, in context, there's still the remnants of a point amidst the scattered detritus of my idiocy (note: idiot, not shill). This was an academic gathering not an industry event, so any code probably would be passed around and tinkered with (this sort of thing is where the FOSS movement came from, of course). In that context, my rant is not completely without meaning - from conversations I've had at uni, Microsoft appears to have alienated a decent chunk of Computer Science academia (remember Kerberos? I believe that was mostly an MIT thing til MS killed it). As such, they might well choose to license under the GPL rather than BSD license.
I'm getting convoluted in an attempt to save face, so will quit now. Again, apologies for completely misreading the original poster.
Problem is, it doesn't work for everyone. I know that at my school there were a hell of a lot of people for whom the education system was just a hoop they had to jump through til they could get on with their actual life. Their response to this would have boiled down to "yeah, whatever. Now where did I put my ciggies?"
If we're going to put these people in a program like this, we might as well just send them home, cos the fact that the school environment is so structured is the only reason they absorb anything in their entire time there. The eternal balancing act of the public education system is to provide a military academy for the yobs and a miniature university for the smart kids, all on the same premises and with a limited budget. Neither type of kid thrives in a class aimed at the other type. There's actually a decent chunk of management theory behind this, which I only just this second made the connection to.
If it wernt for microsoft computers wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are today
Just because Microsoft managed to sneak their operating system in at the right moment doesn't mean that they deserve credit for the IBM PC revolution. As the name suggests, it was IBM who first started building standardised desktops and letting others in on the standards in question. Microsoft's one innovation was their refusal to exclusively license the DOS variant they acquired to IBM, thus opening the way for OS standardisation. And yes, that was fairly handy, but (IMO) nowhere near as big a contributory factor as you're making out.
Just the warm feeling of knowing what you wrote became something so much more is nice in itself.
And then watching the company using it turn round and do its best to cripple you and your co-developers by (for example) patenting software, distorting standards and applying legal pressure to competitors wherever possible? Doesn't that annoy you even slightly? The thought obviously worries a lot of people (probably including, as I said, some of the developers in question), otherwise the GPL wouldn't be so popular.
That's a rather negative view of the GPL. I'd point out, for example, that helping companies like Microsoft by supplying them with good code allows them to become yet more powerful and do even more damage to the rest of the computing world. In my recent job I had to use Win2K for compatibility reasons. This is due to Windows' massive predominance within the business world, which in turn is partly the fault of, for example, the people who produced the Berkeley TCP/IP stack, as they helped Windows to achieve (moderate) network stability and thus compete more effectively, greasing the tracks of MS's meteoric rise to monopoly.
I'm aware that this is an extremely bad example as BSDing protocols is generally a good thing for uniform adoption. My point is that using the GPL is often an indication of a desire to protect the community of developers rather than of "irrational possessiveness" - possessiveness maybe, but hardly irrational. In this particular case, the "loss of control along with a lessened responsibility" of which you speak includes an increased ability of the more evil proprietary software companies to undermine your developer community - thus there's no short-term incentive for them to play nice. I personally am not quite advanced enough along the Zen path to take this with a smile and a nod and carry on helping it happen.
Because those better alternatives provide more freedom for Microsoft to take the code, repackage it, hack it about as they wish and sell it to the masses, giving fuck-all back to the community. This would likely bother a few of the developers in question.
the problem is that [IDNRTFA] apparently he shot first. If he'd just reported it, but no he had to threaten a lawsuit
If I understand correctly, he reported it, Amazon took down a bunch of bad negative reviews (and a couple of bad positive reviews, which really pissed JT off), and more bad negative reviews appeared. So JT started threatening them for basically not policing his book's reviews 24/7. Or something like that.
You know it has something to do with something, and you can't be bothered to go check and tell us what. But you decided to post anyway that you had some information at some time in the past.
Don't quote you? No worries...
Fair point. Tell you what, when I have a few hours to spare, I'll fire up XP and have a play around to refresh my memory. If I find anything I'll stick it in my journal; if I come up blank I'll stick a public apology in the same spot. Does that sound sufficiently intellectually honest?
RFID tag put on your name tag so that you can be tracked by security as you wander around a secure installation that might have sensitive information stashed away here and there: good.
UN falsely claiming after a 2003 conference that they'd never put RFID tags in name badges again, then reneging on that: worth drawing attention to.
It has something to do with Microsoft when said programs included their office suite. And I'm sure there were some elements of XP that stubbornly stuck with IE, but I can't remember which they were at the moment so don't quote me on that.
When I tried making Firefox the default browser on XP, I discovered that IE still got popped open for a lot of stuff (remember the fiasco with virus-ridden help files? Classic example). This was two years ago (have since Gone Linux) but XP never seemed too happy to completely give up Internet Explorer. Kinda like KDE apps always pop open !"£$% Konqueror.
What they're talking about is solutions for the equation x^5 + a.x^4 + b.x^3 + c.x^2 + d^x + e = 0. For the linear version (x + a = 0) there's a bloody obvious solution. For the quadratic version (x^2 + a.x + b = 0) there's a standard formula - the "quadratic formula" that you almost certainly learned in High School. There are also similar formulas using addition, multiplication, subtraction, division and taking square roots (the so-called "radical" operations) for cubic and quartic equations. There is no equivalent formula for the quintic equation.
The reason for this is somewhat complex, but eventually boils down to the fact that a special group called the alternating group of order 5 (denoted A_5) has a property known as simplicity. This property, when converted from pure group theory to the theory of polynomials, translates to their being no way to build up the roots of an arbitrary fifth-order (quintic) polynomial using radical operations. Galois theory itself is a clever hack that lets you take a polynomial and discuss it in terms of a group structure (specifically the group of "legitimate" ways to rearrange its roots).
I can go on about this for hours (have just sat through half a term of Galois Theory and Number Fields) so will stop now.
I quite like your strategy. Just one question: what would happen when two or more countries wanted the same domain? Should it just be first come first served? And who should control the generic TLDs?
That does not give them any property rights any more than driving your car on a road means you own the road.
Sorry, my point was in response to "As a UKian, I'm quite pleased that the UN has decided it cannot stick its nose in where it doesn't belong." I was debating whether or not its nose belonged there. I'd say that any government whose economy comes to rely heavily on a resource has a responsibility to its citizens to make sure that that resource is safe. And, in the case of the domain name system, there's no way of doing that without having at least a modicum of control over the root server. What the UN is offering to its members is security - having the UN in control may not actually improve anything, but it means that, for example, France doesn't have to worry about.fr being eliminated next time the US is going through a "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" phase.
The US doesn't have anything to do with what goes on in your University's network.
Actually it does. It has control over the company that allocates TLDs, so it has control over the ability of computers outside my university's network to easily connect to computers within my university's network. Eliminating.uk (I'm a Brit too) from the DNS root would probably have more effects that I'm not aware of. Having control over the DNS root gives the US govt the ability to cause considerable problems for a massive number of networks worldwide, very few of which they actually own.
If you tamper with something that works you take a big risk on breaking it.
In this case, the change is, technically speaking, extremely small (in fact, it's mostly political), so there's slim to none chance of bringing the net to its knees.
Technically, so is most of ODF - it's XML remember? The word you're looking for is markup, and what you're talking about is part of the reason why XML is so popular - you pretty much just have to swap tags around (gross oversimplification I know).
Many of the UN nations are becoming heavily reliant on the Internet. As such, it is very much their business how it is run (if their domain name gets wiped tomorrow, they're in deep shit). As such, their nose does indeed belong.
I'm sure my university would dispute that their section of the Internet is the US's system.
The US govt originally only made a small network (ARPAnet). Which, yes, was imitated by everyone else, but you could say the same about the US imitating the WWW or even the computer. The fact that this resulted in the US govt "inheriting" control from itself doesn't mean that this is an optimal system.
Having said this, I would agree with the "quite well, all things considered", which is why I'm happy with this proposal.
Surely the problem there is the idiots on the road, not the speed at which they drive? If so, why should we penalise the good drivers so harshly?
You'll probably be pleased to know that, at least in the UK, driving whilst holding a mobile phone is illegal. So next time you see some muppet doing that, you would probably be justified in calling the cops!
Slashdot Mirror
"Scientific" studies are supposed to be criticised, repeated, disproven...and then when all else fails...accepted.
You're right. It's essential for scientific ideas to be challenged by the scientific community. On the other hand, what's happening here is the scientific community's consensus being challenged by the political community, which is insane.
Well, in a 1D universe, it'd be impossible for stuff to get past your forces without completely obliterating them... :)
You raise a good point - defence in depth is a wonderful thing. However, it's also very expensive in terms of forces, for the very reason you point out. This is why trench warfare was so common back in the day - manning every square mile of no-man's land would require far too many troops. In practice, the standard strategy was to man a fixed thickness of perimeter (the area of which would tend to the thickness multiplied by the circumference as the radius increased) with a few reserve companies to react to any surprises.
Of course, this 2D model of warfare became less useful as access to the third dimension of conventional warfare increased. Paratroopers and stealth bombers, not to mention bloody big rockets, have more or less killed trench warfare.
Not quite. In a 1D universe the space won't increase at all - it'll be two dots moving outwards. In a 2D universe it'll increase linearly - the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*radius. So in our 3D universe it'll increase quadratically.
Well, not directly anyway. The issue in Massachusetts is one of open standards. Either the Massachusetts government chooses to store their data in a format whereby anyone can produce software to read and write it (thus allowing market forces to act to improve value for money) or it chooses to adopt a standard that people can only develop for with Microsoft's permission, and on their terms (but of course, they'd never behave anticompetitively...). Which are likely to, for example, preclude GPLed software, among others.
The only connection that open source has to this situation is how easily Microsoft will be able to lock it out if Massachusetts chooses unwisely.
I thought the main point of quantum computing is that it could solve problems that can't be tackled by digital computers. So, for example, whereas factoring a 64-bit prime number might take a fairly hefty digital computer a decent chunk of time, all a quantum computer would need is 64 qbits and the problem would be effectively solved.
As a mathematician in training, my biggest worry is that all the interesting cryptography jobs will have been obsoleted by the time I get that far.
I'm perfectly happy for them to add to an open standard. Just as long as their additions are kept as open as the standard was. Otherwise (for example if they patent their extensions) they're just leeching off the hard work of others, and historically such actions have mostly been anticompetitive too.
I await the licensing of these extensions. Do you think they'll be GPL compatible?
I did read TFA. This is not another "Ooh, I wonder what DRM it has" post. I'm aware that this version contains no DRM. My point stands.
At the time the article came out, I'd just spent half an hour pondering how DRM could be turned into more than a temporary speed bump in the warezers' path, and the system I described in the GP was the only one I could think of. Then I spent another 10 minutes pondering how I'd introduce such a system. Using USB keys for music was going to be step one, since it's the only remotely valid way to get people used to music-in-a-box. Then this article came out and nearly gave me a brain haemorrhage.
The capacity of the USB keys they're using is under a quarter of the capacity of the CDROMs they were using, and vastly more expensive. So, other than "it's a cute idea, why the hell not", why are they introducing this system? My suggestion is one possible answer, and it indicates that we should be at least a little wary.
To me that reads as "people being trained to attach little black boxes of music to their computer, with the eventual intention of DRMing said boxes". If people are trained to attach arbitrary boxes to their computer to get music/films, the next step is to have those boxes "streaming" the audio/video straight to a Trusted Output Device [tm]. This probably wouldn't stop piracy, but it'd make backing up your media nigh-on impossible, since you'd no longer be able to copy directly.
This fits in well with plans to make Windows Vista only play DVDs at full quality using the aforementioned Trusted Output Devices [tm]
If you're looking for a quiet way of handling it, try talking to the vicar/pastor/equivalent religious authority of your church in confidence. Explain that it's bothering you that kids are being taught pseudointellectual tripe. Regardless of whether your church is creationist or not (if the latter, it's safe to point out the Catholic church's opposition to ID), teaching creation as science can only be a bad thing as it reduces Christianity from a faith to a hypothesis.
If the religious authority is uninterested in sorting things out, *then* you might want to ponder the burning of bridges that a number of others have mentioned.
You're right, I completely misinterpreted the greatgreatgrandparent - I read it as suggesting that the embedded developers license their code under the BSD license rather than just using it as a base. Doh.
However, in context, there's still the remnants of a point amidst the scattered detritus of my idiocy (note: idiot, not shill). This was an academic gathering not an industry event, so any code probably would be passed around and tinkered with (this sort of thing is where the FOSS movement came from, of course). In that context, my rant is not completely without meaning - from conversations I've had at uni, Microsoft appears to have alienated a decent chunk of Computer Science academia (remember Kerberos? I believe that was mostly an MIT thing til MS killed it). As such, they might well choose to license under the GPL rather than BSD license.
I'm getting convoluted in an attempt to save face, so will quit now. Again, apologies for completely misreading the original poster.
Problem is, it doesn't work for everyone. I know that at my school there were a hell of a lot of people for whom the education system was just a hoop they had to jump through til they could get on with their actual life. Their response to this would have boiled down to "yeah, whatever. Now where did I put my ciggies?"
If we're going to put these people in a program like this, we might as well just send them home, cos the fact that the school environment is so structured is the only reason they absorb anything in their entire time there. The eternal balancing act of the public education system is to provide a military academy for the yobs and a miniature university for the smart kids, all on the same premises and with a limited budget. Neither type of kid thrives in a class aimed at the other type. There's actually a decent chunk of management theory behind this, which I only just this second made the connection to.
If it wernt for microsoft computers wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are today
Just because Microsoft managed to sneak their operating system in at the right moment doesn't mean that they deserve credit for the IBM PC revolution. As the name suggests, it was IBM who first started building standardised desktops and letting others in on the standards in question. Microsoft's one innovation was their refusal to exclusively license the DOS variant they acquired to IBM, thus opening the way for OS standardisation. And yes, that was fairly handy, but (IMO) nowhere near as big a contributory factor as you're making out.
Just the warm feeling of knowing what you wrote became something so much more is nice in itself.
And then watching the company using it turn round and do its best to cripple you and your co-developers by (for example) patenting software, distorting standards and applying legal pressure to competitors wherever possible? Doesn't that annoy you even slightly? The thought obviously worries a lot of people (probably including, as I said, some of the developers in question), otherwise the GPL wouldn't be so popular.
That's a rather negative view of the GPL. I'd point out, for example, that helping companies like Microsoft by supplying them with good code allows them to become yet more powerful and do even more damage to the rest of the computing world. In my recent job I had to use Win2K for compatibility reasons. This is due to Windows' massive predominance within the business world, which in turn is partly the fault of, for example, the people who produced the Berkeley TCP/IP stack, as they helped Windows to achieve (moderate) network stability and thus compete more effectively, greasing the tracks of MS's meteoric rise to monopoly.
I'm aware that this is an extremely bad example as BSDing protocols is generally a good thing for uniform adoption. My point is that using the GPL is often an indication of a desire to protect the community of developers rather than of "irrational possessiveness" - possessiveness maybe, but hardly irrational. In this particular case, the "loss of control along with a lessened responsibility" of which you speak includes an increased ability of the more evil proprietary software companies to undermine your developer community - thus there's no short-term incentive for them to play nice. I personally am not quite advanced enough along the Zen path to take this with a smile and a nod and carry on helping it happen.
Because those better alternatives provide more freedom for Microsoft to take the code, repackage it, hack it about as they wish and sell it to the masses, giving fuck-all back to the community. This would likely bother a few of the developers in question.
the problem is that [IDNRTFA] apparently he shot first. If he'd just reported it, but no he had to threaten a lawsuit
If I understand correctly, he reported it, Amazon took down a bunch of bad negative reviews (and a couple of bad positive reviews, which really pissed JT off), and more bad negative reviews appeared. So JT started threatening them for basically not policing his book's reviews 24/7. Or something like that.
You know it has something to do with something, and you can't be bothered to go check and tell us what. But you decided to post anyway that you had some information at some time in the past. Don't quote you? No worries...
Fair point. Tell you what, when I have a few hours to spare, I'll fire up XP and have a play around to refresh my memory. If I find anything I'll stick it in my journal; if I come up blank I'll stick a public apology in the same spot. Does that sound sufficiently intellectually honest?
RFID tag put on your name tag so that you can be tracked by security as you wander around a secure installation that might have sensitive information stashed away here and there: good.
UN falsely claiming after a 2003 conference that they'd never put RFID tags in name badges again, then reneging on that: worth drawing attention to.
It has something to do with Microsoft when said programs included their office suite. And I'm sure there were some elements of XP that stubbornly stuck with IE, but I can't remember which they were at the moment so don't quote me on that.
When I tried making Firefox the default browser on XP, I discovered that IE still got popped open for a lot of stuff (remember the fiasco with virus-ridden help files? Classic example). This was two years ago (have since Gone Linux) but XP never seemed too happy to completely give up Internet Explorer. Kinda like KDE apps always pop open !"£$% Konqueror.
What they're talking about is solutions for the equation x^5 + a.x^4 + b.x^3 + c.x^2 + d^x + e = 0. For the linear version (x + a = 0) there's a bloody obvious solution. For the quadratic version (x^2 + a.x + b = 0) there's a standard formula - the "quadratic formula" that you almost certainly learned in High School. There are also similar formulas using addition, multiplication, subtraction, division and taking square roots (the so-called "radical" operations) for cubic and quartic equations. There is no equivalent formula for the quintic equation.
The reason for this is somewhat complex, but eventually boils down to the fact that a special group called the alternating group of order 5 (denoted A_5) has a property known as simplicity. This property, when converted from pure group theory to the theory of polynomials, translates to their being no way to build up the roots of an arbitrary fifth-order (quintic) polynomial using radical operations. Galois theory itself is a clever hack that lets you take a polynomial and discuss it in terms of a group structure (specifically the group of "legitimate" ways to rearrange its roots).
I can go on about this for hours (have just sat through half a term of Galois Theory and Number Fields) so will stop now.
I quite like your strategy. Just one question: what would happen when two or more countries wanted the same domain? Should it just be first come first served? And who should control the generic TLDs?
That does not give them any property rights any more than driving your car on a road means you own the road.
.fr being eliminated next time the US is going through a "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" phase.
.uk (I'm a Brit too) from the DNS root would probably have more effects that I'm not aware of. Having control over the DNS root gives the US govt the ability to cause considerable problems for a massive number of networks worldwide, very few of which they actually own.
Sorry, my point was in response to "As a UKian, I'm quite pleased that the UN has decided it cannot stick its nose in where it doesn't belong." I was debating whether or not its nose belonged there. I'd say that any government whose economy comes to rely heavily on a resource has a responsibility to its citizens to make sure that that resource is safe. And, in the case of the domain name system, there's no way of doing that without having at least a modicum of control over the root server. What the UN is offering to its members is security - having the UN in control may not actually improve anything, but it means that, for example, France doesn't have to worry about
The US doesn't have anything to do with what goes on in your University's network.
Actually it does. It has control over the company that allocates TLDs, so it has control over the ability of computers outside my university's network to easily connect to computers within my university's network. Eliminating
If you tamper with something that works you take a big risk on breaking it.
In this case, the change is, technically speaking, extremely small (in fact, it's mostly political), so there's slim to none chance of bringing the net to its knees.
latex is plain text
Technically, so is most of ODF - it's XML remember? The word you're looking for is markup, and what you're talking about is part of the reason why XML is so popular - you pretty much just have to swap tags around (gross oversimplification I know).
Having said this, I would agree with the "quite well, all things considered", which is why I'm happy with this proposal.
Surely the problem there is the idiots on the road, not the speed at which they drive? If so, why should we penalise the good drivers so harshly?
You'll probably be pleased to know that, at least in the UK, driving whilst holding a mobile phone is illegal. So next time you see some muppet doing that, you would probably be justified in calling the cops!