Yes, but while that might happen tomorrow, statistically, we have a long time before that will happen. We can pretty safely put off manned space travel for a hundred thousand years or even a million years. If it hits us before then, that's just bad luck. But, frankly, if we get out into the galaxy the way we are behaving right now, that would be really bad luck for the galaxy.
At some point we're going to have to spread to the moon and other planets, if for no simpler reason then it's going to begin to get awefully crowded down here.
So, let's stop breeding like rabbits.
Spreading humanity to other planets so as not to have all our 'eggs' in one basket
If we figure out how to take care of our basket, that just wouldn't be a problem. Short of an asteroid hitting us, there is no reason why we shouldn't live on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. And while asteroids are a real concern over long time spans, we can worry about that after the first million years as a species, not after a few tens of thousands of years.
Besides, settling Mars wouldn't help: Martian colonies would remain completely dependent on Earth for a long time, if they could ever become self-sustaining.
The potential discoveries are out there, new materials, etc.
Yes, and those are more easily and more efficiently explored by robotic probes, directly and/or via return missions.
It's just plain Cool!
I don't see what's "cool" about it. Space exploration is "cool", but it is much more efficient with robotic probes than with people.
I really dont see what the big fuss from some politicians about going to Mars.
No big fuss, other than that it is hugely expensive. Is Bush going to raise taxes for it in order to pay for it? Are scientists willing to sacrifice the potential scientific results from 200 robotic probes in order to pay for a couple of people getting to Mars? It just makes no sense: not economic, not scientific.
500 years ago sailors went to the New World (risking their lives) with really no garunteed return on investments.
They thought they were going to find a route to India. It was a high-risk investment, but would have been hugely profitable if they had succeeded. So, it wasn't some shot in the dark, it was a business plan that could have made people fabulously rich.
What they actually found was even more valuable: a sparsely populated, fertile continent with incredible natural and biological resources. That didn't help the original investors much, but it helped Europe as a whole in the centuries to come.
With Mars, we already know what we are going to get, since we have studied it extensively: there is nothing there of economic value to us. Establishing a colony there would be hugely expensive and it would be centuries before anything could become self-sustaining, if it ever could. The only value Mars seems to have is scientific, and that value is largely destroyed by putting people on it.
Perhaps for humans to spread across the galaxy like a bunch of rats or cockroaches would allow us to avoid facing our problems: we could keep breeding with impunity and consume resources. If we found "natives" on other worlds, we'd conquer them, enslave them, and exterminate them. And when we have used up one planet, we would just move on to the next.
I'm glad that it looks like we are forced to figure out how to solve our problems here for now: we need to figure out how to keep us from killing each other on earth, how to reduce our population, how to take full advantage of our human resources by making sure everybody gets basic educational and health services, and how to live sustainably.
If we ever get manned interstellar space travel (and that's a big if), maybe we'll have figured out how to behave sensibly and responsibly towards ourselves and other species we may encounter. On the other hand, if we kill ourselves before then, that's just as well--leave the stars to some other species that's smarter than us.
So, if that argument holds for Linux and OSS, then it also holds for Microsoft's software: just about every single piece of Microsoft software has been "stolen" in that sense. Windows, Word, Excel, C#, the NT kernel are all rip-offs of other people's ideas, inventions, and developments. Even software that Microsoft supposedly bought or licensed, like InternetExplorer, constantly had "stolen" ideas put into it to the point that it's pretty much all a rip-off now. Microsoft "steals" in many ways. Most commonly, they copy other people's ideas outright or they hire away people who spent decades developing some technology at some other company.
In fact, that kind of "theft" is how the industry works--it's, in fact, not "theft" at all, it's how engineering, science, and art works: you build on other people's ideas. Microsoft may do it, and so may Linux, and everybody else.
This guy didn't find any problems with the AES encryption per se, he just doesn't like the way it is used. But the same objections he has to WinZip would apply to using PGP or AES command line tools, either for files on disk or inside tar archives.
WinZip seems to do what you expect it to do: it encrypts each file individually using AES. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and that's all there is to it. It's the objections that are bogus, not WinZip.
From a quick glance through the paper, it doesn't sound like he found any smoking guns. The attacks he thinks of are pretty unlikely, and he did not find anything that makes the method intrinsically insecure.
WinZip seems to do what it claims it does: encrypt file contents with AES, no more and no less. Yes, it leaves the "metadata" unencrypted, such as it is, but so what? You get the same kind of behavior when you use the AES command line utility on UNIX. Nobody ever said that it would protect metadata, and it should be pretty clear to users that it doesn't as soon as they open the WinZip archive and see the file names. Furthermore, protecting the metadata through encryption would decrease usability significantly.
We also know that shredders don't offer perfect security, but they are sure a lot better than just throwing out documents on the curb. Well, it's the same with cryptography. The sooner people like Schneier realize that and stop scaring people away from cryptography by making obscure points, the better off we all are.
This kind of vigilante approach is risky, because while you may or may not have guessed correctly that someone is trying to defraud you, sending a piece of plastic instead of a PowerBook is definitely attempted fraud.
For example, if the guy at the other end has a mean streak and some spare cash, he may just send the $2100 and then charge you with fraud. Try explaining to the police and judge that you thought you were being defrauded because some WHOIS information didn't look right to you when the other guy can prove he sent the money to you and you sent him a worthless piece of plastic. Or maybe you are just dealing with a very unprofessional operation, but not necessarily a fraudulent one.
If you believe someone is trying to defraud you, just don't do business with them, contact eBay's fraud department, and maybe go to the police. That's better for everybody involved.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how it is bad that people are trusting and helpful. Apparently, stuff gets stolen infrequently enough this way that people can afford to be trusting and helpful--otherwise, the employees would already be more careful. OTOH, if someone in "Vernstown" is really waiting for his five computers and isn't getting them because some employee forgot his badge, the business may be in trouble--the customer doesn't give a damn why he isn't getting what he ordered, he just knows the products didn't arrive when promised.
There may be procedures that you can follow that avoid this sort of social engineering and still let the business function--but devising them, implementing them, and training the employees for them has its own costs. A phone call would have done the trick in this case and may have been prudent, but getting each employee to remember to make the phone call is difficult. Employing a separate person keeping track of everything that leaves the store and asking the right kind of questions would be better and ensure that only one person was distrusting, but it has an obvious cost--another salary to pay.
Efficient businesses need a lot of trust and initiative on the part of employees. If you try to make this kind of social engineering too difficult, you may be preventing more thefts, but you also may be preventing your business from working. Given that this was demonstrated through a staged theft, it seems like the real thing is happening rarely enough for employees to be aware of it; this sort of thing is self-limiting--once the first real theft like that happens, people become less trusting automatically--with all the costs that that entails.
There are no easy answers--in some environments, you just have to bear the costs that come with increased security--but one also shouldn't automatically assume that it is automatically better to adopt business procedures that prevent loss or theft.
With a complex 'look and feel' patent portfolio, Apple are either looking to protecting themselves from lawsuits from others,
They don't need these kinds of patents to "protect themselves from others".
or perhaps preparing to go after Microsoft again, when Longhorn comes out.
I doubt it--Microsoft isn't looking to imitate Apple, and don't they have patent cross-licensing agreements anyway?
More likely, this is an attempt to fight open source because open source is the real threat to Apple. Apple already has moved to a UNIX-compatible environment--they only thing that distinguishes their brand is their GUI. And technologically, they don't have much either: an aging toolkit and a sluggish DisplayPDF server.
Not only can Gnome and KDE easily imitate the entire OS X desktop perfectly, they can do so while remaining fully compatible with "normal" Linux desktops--an ideal way for users to migrate off of OS X to Linux. The only thing that keeps Gnome and KDE from perfectly imitating Apple is the fear of LAF lawsuits from Apple. That's, for example, why Aqua themes aren't being distributed anymore.
Everything is a bad idea until someone implements it in a particularly brilliant way.
So why should Apple get this patent, then? Their patent describes the bad idea itself, not the brilliant implementation of it.
Imagine throwing oxygen and gasoline inside a steel box and using the explosive reaction to move. Imagine powering a state with a nuclear reaction. It takes real work to make raw unfinished ideas and make them usable.
Yup, and it is that kind of "real work" that was patented when it came to the gasoline engine.
'Somebody ends up paying for this,' said Microsoft attorney Robert Rosenfeld. 'These large fee awards get passed on to consumers.'
I think that's one of the points: it reduces a little one of Microsoft's unfair monopolistic advantages--namely to set prices arbitrarily. Unfortunately, it doesn't go far enough.
They are shooting themselves in the foot. They think that a "better UI" is a great selling point, but it isn't. UIs are largely about familiarity, and the more Apple's UI differs from everybody else's, the worse their chances become in the market because only dedicated Mac users will stick with Macs while everybody else will be turned off.
They are also missing where user interfaces are going. They still think it's all about windows, buttons, and visual flash, but the world is moving in a different direction.
It's going to be a lot harder to find prior art for this one.
Yes: that's because it's probably a bad idea. People have looked at use/time-dependent changes of window state or appearance before, but they have never become popular. You can probably still dig up some prior art from the HCI literature if you really care. Many bad patents are just not worth fighting, however.
Apple isn't patenting "translucent windows", they are patenting a specific method for choosing to make windows translucent. The method seems pretty hokey to me (windows automatically become more translucent over time and eventually let events pass through), and probably has horrible usability problems. I can just see the support calls: "but my Microsoft Word window was there a few minutes ago, and after I came back from getting a cup of coffee it was just gone".
In this wonderful world of software patents, the patent may be valid, but it is not relevant to anything real.
If you want to read about good uses of translucency in user interfaces, see this survey from 1994 (long before OS X).
Few people will have heard of where you studied, so they'll just assume the worst. If you can study here in the US, do so.
For graduate school, it's the research lab where you do your work that matters, not the university. And there are lots of excellent research labs outside the US. Any US university that doesn't want to give you a job because they don't know a good foreign research lab where you did your Ph.D. is a university to be avoided.
If you're planning on just getting a masters and coming back to the states for the Ph.D., that can work,
You got it backwards. Getting a Masters outside the US is hard because requirements are often so different and because of language barriers. Getting a Ph.D. overseas is generally much easier because you will be in a research environment, people will tend to speak English in the research labs, and because the main requirement for a Ph.D. after you have finished your M.A. is doing a good thesis.
The personality, reputation, connections, and quality of a Ph.D. advisor are far more important than whether they happen to be located in the US, France, or Japan.
I've been hit by this kind of thing before. Now I really look hard at the license.
If they can do this, it can't have been an open source license. So these kinds of problems are actually a good reason why you should look for software whose license is compliant with the official open source definition, not just software for which you can get the source. You can get the source for Windows or Java, and you sell your soul if you look at it.
Actually, given MT's presentation, this shouldn't come as a surprise anyway. With many projects, you can tell whether they are commercial and use source availability (under an OSS license or not) to try to get into a market in which they would otherwise not have a snowball's chance in hell, or whether they area genuine community-driven open source projects. Unfortunately, source availability as a marketing gimmick is becoming more and more common and developers keep falling for it, sometimes in really big ways.
Of course, because if that light didn't hit those particles it would simply pass through the fucking Earth.
No, it would hit the earth's surface, which is probably more reflective on average than, say, particles of soot.
Thanks for thinking things through instead of just rationalizing new information into your set of prejudices.
Maybe you should think things through yourself before behaving like a jerk.
Incidentally, I didn't even claim that these particulates necessarily contribute to global warming, I just gave a mechanism by which they could. Whether the particles responsible for dimming actually do or not depends on what exactly they are.
Sure, funding different efforts and approaches is great, rather than giving huge amounts of money to a few megalabs. That's particularly true for biology, where you really don't need huge investments to do something useful.
But such decisions should still be based on scientific arguments, not on who can come up with the catchiest phrase ("synthetic biology") or who can pull the best publicity stunt.
So Arkin and Schaffer are instead calling the process "synthetic biology." Despite appearances, it's not an arbitrary term: The researchers are synthesizing biological elements into machines to do their bidding.
Wow, some computer scientists discover biology and think they thought of things nobody ever thought of before. "Synthetic biology" is as old as molecular biology--that's what all those wonderful tools Arkin is playing around with were developed for. That's why he can buy the enzymes, chemicals, cell lines, DNA, and other components from dozens of vendors. Furthermore, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and other non-biologists, have been looking at biological problems for decades, so crossing disciplines is hardly new.
So, Arkin's general approach (as well as the general approach of the whole "synthetic biology" crowd) is nothing new. It is possible that he has come up with a specific new mechanism for interfering with HIV, but plenty of thought has gone into the careful design of similar schemes before and they have failed to work in humans.
Arkin may or may not have done some decent science in this work. But it foremost sounds like an attempt to grab attention. And that isn't nice: it not just detracts from other good research, in the case of proclaiming an HIV cure, it has the potential to hurt people.
It depends on the nature of the particles and where exactly in the atmosphere they are located. It also depends on what you measure the temperature of. So, yes, you can get either effect from particulates, clouds, etc.
That's why I said it may be getting warmer because...; I did not claim that they necessarily and always lead to warming.
The EU implementing biometrics because they want visa free travel is very different than doing it because the US is forcing them.
No, it's not. Visa-free travel between the US and Europe isn't some gimmick, it is essential for both economies. Removing visa-free travel is a serious threat by the US, a threat that pretty much forces Europe to comply. It's a stupid threat, too, because the US stands to lose much more than Europe from it, even if the current US administration is too stupid to realize it.
I think Europe should have played hardball with this one and just said "suit yourself and let's talk again when you have implemented biometric identifiers domestically". After a year or two, the US travel and tourism industry would have forced Bush to reverse himself.
I wonder what it was that freed those poor Iraqis and Afghans from those regimes.... Oh yeah, lots of guns.
How is that an argument for the second amendment? The regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan changed because of foreign guns; their domestic militias and gun ownership are interfering with the process of democratizing those nations. That's why Americans keep getting killed there, you know. If anything, both nations are a good example why private gun ownership is undesirable because it's usually the wrong people who have them.
I don't even have a strong opinion on whether you should or shouldn't be able to own guns--I generally just think they are dangerous and stupid, but so are a lot of other things people own and do. But it is clear that as a means of protecting people from totalitarian regimes or maintaining a nation as a democracy, private gun ownership is a complete failure.
Furthermore, you assume that this was a trade the Iraqis and Afghans were willing to make: a war, devastation, and large numbers of civilian deaths in return for regime change (and change to what anyway? US occupation and roaming armed hoodlums?). But it wasn't--this was something the US imposed on them whether they wanted it or not.
Re:Let's just get this out of the way...
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But if dust and grime catch the energy instead of the ground, then isn't the radiation more likely to be radiated out into space, cooling the planet?
If they "catch" the energy, they reflect a little bit as visible light and convert most of it into heat. Part of that heat gets radiated back into space and part heats up the surrounding air. The overall effect seems to be a significant contribution to global warming.
Global warming models take this effect into account. However, particulates are not as much of a concern for global warming because, unlike CO2, they disappear from the atmosphere fairly quickly (they are still a huge health concern, however). With CO2, once it's released, we are stuck with the consequences for a century or two. Furthermore, global dimming reduces photosynthesis, further slowing down the removal of CO2 and worsening the problem.
Re:Let's just get this out of the way...
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Just because it's "dimmer" doesn't mean it isn't getting warmer.
Actually, it may be getting warmer because it is getting dimmer: if visible light is absorbed by something in the atmosphere, it would end up heating up the atmosphere. Think of a black solar collector used for water heating.
We can communicate.' As agents of free-will, the aliens are self-aware of good and evil, thus convertible to some terrestrial religion.
What about possibility four: The aliens are self-aware and recognize religion and simplistic divisions into "good and evil" for what they are: mental dysfunctions and primitive rites that are used by power-hungry leaders (religious and otherwise) to cause people to kill each other in large numbers and behave in self-destructive ways (yes, this includes the Vatican). The aliens have better things to do than to fix and meddle with some backwards world and simply ignore (and if need be, contain) us until we have changed to the point where we are worth interacting with.
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Yes, but while that might happen tomorrow, statistically, we have a long time before that will happen. We can pretty safely put off manned space travel for a hundred thousand years or even a million years. If it hits us before then, that's just bad luck. But, frankly, if we get out into the galaxy the way we are behaving right now, that would be really bad luck for the galaxy.
At some point we're going to have to spread to the moon and other planets, if for no simpler reason then it's going to begin to get awefully crowded down here.
So, let's stop breeding like rabbits.
Spreading humanity to other planets so as not to have all our 'eggs' in one basket
If we figure out how to take care of our basket, that just wouldn't be a problem. Short of an asteroid hitting us, there is no reason why we shouldn't live on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. And while asteroids are a real concern over long time spans, we can worry about that after the first million years as a species, not after a few tens of thousands of years.
Besides, settling Mars wouldn't help: Martian colonies would remain completely dependent on Earth for a long time, if they could ever become self-sustaining.
The potential discoveries are out there, new materials, etc.
Yes, and those are more easily and more efficiently explored by robotic probes, directly and/or via return missions.
It's just plain Cool!
I don't see what's "cool" about it. Space exploration is "cool", but it is much more efficient with robotic probes than with people.
I really dont see what the big fuss from some politicians about going to Mars.
No big fuss, other than that it is hugely expensive. Is Bush going to raise taxes for it in order to pay for it? Are scientists willing to sacrifice the potential scientific results from 200 robotic probes in order to pay for a couple of people getting to Mars? It just makes no sense: not economic, not scientific.
500 years ago sailors went to the New World (risking their lives) with really no garunteed return on investments.
They thought they were going to find a route to India. It was a high-risk investment, but would have been hugely profitable if they had succeeded. So, it wasn't some shot in the dark, it was a business plan that could have made people fabulously rich.
What they actually found was even more valuable: a sparsely populated, fertile continent with incredible natural and biological resources. That didn't help the original investors much, but it helped Europe as a whole in the centuries to come.
With Mars, we already know what we are going to get, since we have studied it extensively: there is nothing there of economic value to us. Establishing a colony there would be hugely expensive and it would be centuries before anything could become self-sustaining, if it ever could. The only value Mars seems to have is scientific, and that value is largely destroyed by putting people on it.
Perhaps for humans to spread across the galaxy like a bunch of rats or cockroaches would allow us to avoid facing our problems: we could keep breeding with impunity and consume resources. If we found "natives" on other worlds, we'd conquer them, enslave them, and exterminate them. And when we have used up one planet, we would just move on to the next.
I'm glad that it looks like we are forced to figure out how to solve our problems here for now: we need to figure out how to keep us from killing each other on earth, how to reduce our population, how to take full advantage of our human resources by making sure everybody gets basic educational and health services, and how to live sustainably.
If we ever get manned interstellar space travel (and that's a big if), maybe we'll have figured out how to behave sensibly and responsibly towards ourselves and other species we may encounter. On the other hand, if we kill ourselves before then, that's just as well--leave the stars to some other species that's smarter than us.
So, if that argument holds for Linux and OSS, then it also holds for Microsoft's software: just about every single piece of Microsoft software has been "stolen" in that sense. Windows, Word, Excel, C#, the NT kernel are all rip-offs of other people's ideas, inventions, and developments. Even software that Microsoft supposedly bought or licensed, like InternetExplorer, constantly had "stolen" ideas put into it to the point that it's pretty much all a rip-off now. Microsoft "steals" in many ways. Most commonly, they copy other people's ideas outright or they hire away people who spent decades developing some technology at some other company.
In fact, that kind of "theft" is how the industry works--it's, in fact, not "theft" at all, it's how engineering, science, and art works: you build on other people's ideas. Microsoft may do it, and so may Linux, and everybody else.
This guy didn't find any problems with the AES encryption per se, he just doesn't like the way it is used. But the same objections he has to WinZip would apply to using PGP or AES command line tools, either for files on disk or inside tar archives.
WinZip seems to do what you expect it to do: it encrypts each file individually using AES. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and that's all there is to it. It's the objections that are bogus, not WinZip.
From a quick glance through the paper, it doesn't sound like he found any smoking guns. The attacks he thinks of are pretty unlikely, and he did not find anything that makes the method intrinsically insecure.
WinZip seems to do what it claims it does: encrypt file contents with AES, no more and no less. Yes, it leaves the "metadata" unencrypted, such as it is, but so what? You get the same kind of behavior when you use the AES command line utility on UNIX. Nobody ever said that it would protect metadata, and it should be pretty clear to users that it doesn't as soon as they open the WinZip archive and see the file names. Furthermore, protecting the metadata through encryption would decrease usability significantly.
We also know that shredders don't offer perfect security, but they are sure a lot better than just throwing out documents on the curb. Well, it's the same with cryptography. The sooner people like Schneier realize that and stop scaring people away from cryptography by making obscure points, the better off we all are.
This kind of vigilante approach is risky, because while you may or may not have guessed correctly that someone is trying to defraud you, sending a piece of plastic instead of a PowerBook is definitely attempted fraud.
For example, if the guy at the other end has a mean streak and some spare cash, he may just send the $2100 and then charge you with fraud. Try explaining to the police and judge that you thought you were being defrauded because some WHOIS information didn't look right to you when the other guy can prove he sent the money to you and you sent him a worthless piece of plastic. Or maybe you are just dealing with a very unprofessional operation, but not necessarily a fraudulent one.
If you believe someone is trying to defraud you, just don't do business with them, contact eBay's fraud department, and maybe go to the police. That's better for everybody involved.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how it is bad that people are trusting and helpful. Apparently, stuff gets stolen infrequently enough this way that people can afford to be trusting and helpful--otherwise, the employees would already be more careful. OTOH, if someone in "Vernstown" is really waiting for his five computers and isn't getting them because some employee forgot his badge, the business may be in trouble--the customer doesn't give a damn why he isn't getting what he ordered, he just knows the products didn't arrive when promised.
There may be procedures that you can follow that avoid this sort of social engineering and still let the business function--but devising them, implementing them, and training the employees for them has its own costs. A phone call would have done the trick in this case and may have been prudent, but getting each employee to remember to make the phone call is difficult. Employing a separate person keeping track of everything that leaves the store and asking the right kind of questions would be better and ensure that only one person was distrusting, but it has an obvious cost--another salary to pay.
Efficient businesses need a lot of trust and initiative on the part of employees. If you try to make this kind of social engineering too difficult, you may be preventing more thefts, but you also may be preventing your business from working. Given that this was demonstrated through a staged theft, it seems like the real thing is happening rarely enough for employees to be aware of it; this sort of thing is self-limiting--once the first real theft like that happens, people become less trusting automatically--with all the costs that that entails.
There are no easy answers--in some environments, you just have to bear the costs that come with increased security--but one also shouldn't automatically assume that it is automatically better to adopt business procedures that prevent loss or theft.
With a complex 'look and feel' patent portfolio, Apple are either looking to protecting themselves from lawsuits from others,
They don't need these kinds of patents to "protect themselves from others".
or perhaps preparing to go after Microsoft again, when Longhorn comes out.
I doubt it--Microsoft isn't looking to imitate Apple, and don't they have patent cross-licensing agreements anyway?
More likely, this is an attempt to fight open source because open source is the real threat to Apple. Apple already has moved to a UNIX-compatible environment--they only thing that distinguishes their brand is their GUI. And technologically, they don't have much either: an aging toolkit and a sluggish DisplayPDF server.
Not only can Gnome and KDE easily imitate the entire OS X desktop perfectly, they can do so while remaining fully compatible with "normal" Linux desktops--an ideal way for users to migrate off of OS X to Linux. The only thing that keeps Gnome and KDE from perfectly imitating Apple is the fear of LAF lawsuits from Apple. That's, for example, why Aqua themes aren't being distributed anymore.
Everything is a bad idea until someone implements it in a particularly brilliant way.
So why should Apple get this patent, then? Their patent describes the bad idea itself, not the brilliant implementation of it.
Imagine throwing oxygen and gasoline inside a steel box and using the explosive reaction to move. Imagine powering a state with a nuclear reaction. It takes real work to make raw unfinished ideas and make them usable.
Yup, and it is that kind of "real work" that was patented when it came to the gasoline engine.
'Somebody ends up paying for this,' said Microsoft attorney Robert Rosenfeld. 'These large fee awards get passed on to consumers.'
I think that's one of the points: it reduces a little one of Microsoft's unfair monopolistic advantages--namely to set prices arbitrarily. Unfortunately, it doesn't go far enough.
They are shooting themselves in the foot. They think that a "better UI" is a great selling point, but it isn't. UIs are largely about familiarity, and the more Apple's UI differs from everybody else's, the worse their chances become in the market because only dedicated Mac users will stick with Macs while everybody else will be turned off.
They are also missing where user interfaces are going. They still think it's all about windows, buttons, and visual flash, but the world is moving in a different direction.
It's going to be a lot harder to find prior art for this one.
Yes: that's because it's probably a bad idea. People have looked at use/time-dependent changes of window state or appearance before, but they have never become popular. You can probably still dig up some prior art from the HCI literature if you really care. Many bad patents are just not worth fighting, however.
Apple isn't patenting "translucent windows", they are patenting a specific method for choosing to make windows translucent. The method seems pretty hokey to me (windows automatically become more translucent over time and eventually let events pass through), and probably has horrible usability problems. I can just see the support calls: "but my Microsoft Word window was there a few minutes ago, and after I came back from getting a cup of coffee it was just gone".
In this wonderful world of software patents, the patent may be valid, but it is not relevant to anything real.
If you want to read about good uses of translucency in user interfaces, see this survey from 1994 (long before OS X).
Few people will have heard of where you studied, so they'll just assume the worst. If you can study here in the US, do so.
For graduate school, it's the research lab where you do your work that matters, not the university. And there are lots of excellent research labs outside the US. Any US university that doesn't want to give you a job because they don't know a good foreign research lab where you did your Ph.D. is a university to be avoided.
If you're planning on just getting a masters and coming back to the states for the Ph.D., that can work,
You got it backwards. Getting a Masters outside the US is hard because requirements are often so different and because of language barriers. Getting a Ph.D. overseas is generally much easier because you will be in a research environment, people will tend to speak English in the research labs, and because the main requirement for a Ph.D. after you have finished your M.A. is doing a good thesis.
The personality, reputation, connections, and quality of a Ph.D. advisor are far more important than whether they happen to be located in the US, France, or Japan.
I've been hit by this kind of thing before. Now I really look hard at the license.
If they can do this, it can't have been an open source license. So these kinds of problems are actually a good reason why you should look for software whose license is compliant with the official open source definition, not just software for which you can get the source. You can get the source for Windows or Java, and you sell your soul if you look at it.
Actually, given MT's presentation, this shouldn't come as a surprise anyway. With many projects, you can tell whether they are commercial and use source availability (under an OSS license or not) to try to get into a market in which they would otherwise not have a snowball's chance in hell, or whether they area genuine community-driven open source projects. Unfortunately, source availability as a marketing gimmick is becoming more and more common and developers keep falling for it, sometimes in really big ways.
Of course, because if that light didn't hit those particles it would simply pass through the fucking Earth.
No, it would hit the earth's surface, which is probably more reflective on average than, say, particles of soot.
Thanks for thinking things through instead of just rationalizing new information into your set of prejudices.
Maybe you should think things through yourself before behaving like a jerk.
Incidentally, I didn't even claim that these particulates necessarily contribute to global warming, I just gave a mechanism by which they could. Whether the particles responsible for dimming actually do or not depends on what exactly they are.
Sure, funding different efforts and approaches is great, rather than giving huge amounts of money to a few megalabs. That's particularly true for biology, where you really don't need huge investments to do something useful.
But such decisions should still be based on scientific arguments, not on who can come up with the catchiest phrase ("synthetic biology") or who can pull the best publicity stunt.
So Arkin and Schaffer are instead calling the process "synthetic biology." Despite appearances, it's not an arbitrary term: The researchers are synthesizing biological elements into machines to do their bidding.
Wow, some computer scientists discover biology and think they thought of things nobody ever thought of before. "Synthetic biology" is as old as molecular biology--that's what all those wonderful tools Arkin is playing around with were developed for. That's why he can buy the enzymes, chemicals, cell lines, DNA, and other components from dozens of vendors. Furthermore, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and other non-biologists, have been looking at biological problems for decades, so crossing disciplines is hardly new.
So, Arkin's general approach (as well as the general approach of the whole "synthetic biology" crowd) is nothing new. It is possible that he has come up with a specific new mechanism for interfering with HIV, but plenty of thought has gone into the careful design of similar schemes before and they have failed to work in humans.
Arkin may or may not have done some decent science in this work. But it foremost sounds like an attempt to grab attention. And that isn't nice: it not just detracts from other good research, in the case of proclaiming an HIV cure, it has the potential to hurt people.
It depends on the nature of the particles and where exactly in the atmosphere they are located. It also depends on what you measure the temperature of. So, yes, you can get either effect from particulates, clouds, etc.
That's why I said it may be getting warmer because...; I did not claim that they necessarily and always lead to warming.
The EU implementing biometrics because they want visa free travel is very different than doing it because the US is forcing them.
No, it's not. Visa-free travel between the US and Europe isn't some gimmick, it is essential for both economies. Removing visa-free travel is a serious threat by the US, a threat that pretty much forces Europe to comply. It's a stupid threat, too, because the US stands to lose much more than Europe from it, even if the current US administration is too stupid to realize it.
I think Europe should have played hardball with this one and just said "suit yourself and let's talk again when you have implemented biometric identifiers domestically". After a year or two, the US travel and tourism industry would have forced Bush to reverse himself.
I wonder what it was that freed those poor Iraqis and Afghans from those regimes.... Oh yeah, lots of guns.
How is that an argument for the second amendment? The regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan changed because of foreign guns; their domestic militias and gun ownership are interfering with the process of democratizing those nations. That's why Americans keep getting killed there, you know. If anything, both nations are a good example why private gun ownership is undesirable because it's usually the wrong people who have them.
I don't even have a strong opinion on whether you should or shouldn't be able to own guns--I generally just think they are dangerous and stupid, but so are a lot of other things people own and do. But it is clear that as a means of protecting people from totalitarian regimes or maintaining a nation as a democracy, private gun ownership is a complete failure.
Furthermore, you assume that this was a trade the Iraqis and Afghans were willing to make: a war, devastation, and large numbers of civilian deaths in return for regime change (and change to what anyway? US occupation and roaming armed hoodlums?). But it wasn't--this was something the US imposed on them whether they wanted it or not.
But if dust and grime catch the energy instead of the ground, then isn't the radiation more likely to be radiated out into space, cooling the planet?
If they "catch" the energy, they reflect a little bit as visible light and convert most of it into heat. Part of that heat gets radiated back into space and part heats up the surrounding air. The overall effect seems to be a significant contribution to global warming.
Global warming models take this effect into account. However, particulates are not as much of a concern for global warming because, unlike CO2, they disappear from the atmosphere fairly quickly (they are still a huge health concern, however). With CO2, once it's released, we are stuck with the consequences for a century or two. Furthermore, global dimming reduces photosynthesis, further slowing down the removal of CO2 and worsening the problem.
Just because it's "dimmer" doesn't mean it isn't getting warmer.
Actually, it may be getting warmer because it is getting dimmer: if visible light is absorbed by something in the atmosphere, it would end up heating up the atmosphere. Think of a black solar collector used for water heating.
What about possibility four: The aliens are self-aware and recognize religion and simplistic divisions into "good and evil" for what they are: mental dysfunctions and primitive rites that are used by power-hungry leaders (religious and otherwise) to cause people to kill each other in large numbers and behave in self-destructive ways (yes, this includes the Vatican). The aliens have better things to do than to fix and meddle with some backwards world and simply ignore (and if need be, contain) us until we have changed to the point where we are worth interacting with.