The compulsory licensing idea would obviously require a more technically savvy government entity, capable of quickly assessing the value of patents, and adjudicating on payments...(including punative payments, if necessary). Clearly the litigation that occurs now, with non-expert judges, juries, and lawyers, is untenable for this idea. Such a patent licensing body would be more like the FCC than the Justice Department.
It certainly harms the progress of useful arts to stop sales and/or development. Instead, patent violation should be assessed only in the amount of money owed from one party to another, calculated as a reasonable fraction of the profit earned from goods in violation of the patent.
If the inventor has a great idea, but an incompetent marketing and/or development, the patent should allow others to compete on the basis of marketing and development, using the same idea, but the patentor should get his due in any case.
In other words, I think all licensing of patents should be compulsory. I can't see any argument why any party should disallow any other party from implementing their patents. It seems this is only ever used for anticompetitive purposes, which harms the market and harms consumers, and is illegal when done in other ways.
I've got better things to do with my time than play this shell game with scammers for a piddly $50. They know this, and that's why they make more money by offering rebates.
Rebates are a scam that allows a company to pad their ledger with artificial profits that get refunded some time later. It's an accounting scam. They make money by having more money in the bank, earning interest, while you don't. They also count on a good fraction of people simply not filling out the rebate form. So it's a form of false advertising that allows them to advertise one price when in fact you have to give them a different amount of money.
Don't do business with companies that offer rebates. Pay for what things are worth and screw this stupid shell game. I've not gotten my rebate many times, without explanation.
I keep wondering...X is a single threaded server, communicating with a (generally) single threaded game. Worse, wine inserts the wineserver process, so I have three single threaded things trying to synchronize to get interactivity. A low latency event like a keypress might require all three processes to be scheduled in succession, to get a response on the screen. A poor man's way to do this is with the kernel's scheduler, but a far superior way to do it is to have multiple threads in the X server. Scheduling an interactive event isn't hard. Getting crap on the screen in the same scheduling timeslice is hard (impossible?) since it requires a second scheduling point. As I understand, this is how BeOS achieved substantial interactivity in the presence of load -- my having a multi-threaded graphics server *and* kernel.
So, how much can be gained by rewriting X, or going to a different graphics server? Or do I completely misunderstand the effect of X?
All technology will be used, and all technology will be abused. The government has far more power to do harm with technology than individuals do. Therefore its use of any technology must be very, very carefully weighted in a cost/benefit analysis. When in doubt, do not give more power to governments. They will use it against you, eventually.
Furthermore this issue is fundamentally different than just technology. A watched society is not a free society. It does not matter who the watchers are, or whether they do good or ill with what the see. People behave differently when they know they're being watched.
People do not exercise their freedom of expression as often. They do not take unpopular views, or will not discuss them in public. They conform. They are not free. People need to escape from watchful eyes, for their own health and sanity. This starts in teenagers, when fundamental biological urges drive young people to get away from the tribe with their honey, for reproductive purposes. But it is a fundamental part of the human psyche.
We would be naive to believe that we could live a watched life, and still be the same person we are today.
The codes used took into account all the major sources of gravity, including all the planets and major asteroids. These are some of the same codes that have been used to place many, many other probes in proper orbits around planetary bodies as far away as Saturn, and land on tiny things like asteroids and comets.
The damned thing about the Pioneer anomaly is that the acceleration is constant and the measurement is exceedingly simple. It's just position vs. time. There isn't much that can mess with that, and since individual communications with the craft are uncorrelated with each other, there shouldn't be any kind of drift (relativistic clock drifts are taken into account). Since the acceleration is constant over a distance from roughly Jupiter to well past Pluto, and gravity follows a force law that goes like 1/r^2, you can't add a single source of gravity (e.g. a new planet) -- the force wouldn't be constant. You can't make the sun slightly heavier. You can't add dark matter to do it: the dark matter would have to conspire to have a density as a function of distance from the sun that mimicked the constant acceleration. Such a density profile has more dark matter at the edges of the solar system, which would not be stable. It should collapse and concentrate near the sun. The acceleration is approximately the same magnitude as the expansion of the universe, but it's in the wrong direction, and our current understanding of dark energy wouldn't cause such an effect anyway.
Personally, I think we've got gravity totally wrong.
The LHC will produce more data, but we also don't care about most of it. The vast majority of it is junk. The "interesting" physics (particles like W and Z bosons, top quarks, higgs, etc) are about 10^-9 of the events. It is a huge needle in a haystack problem and we throw out most data. We have many experts and professors who design "triggers" which, based on a subset of information that can be delivered to them in a reasonable time, decide whether a given proton-proton collison contains new physics. Many theorists these days are making dents in walls with their heads trying to think of ways these triggers might be missing important information, so that we can suggest changes before it's too late. This is a lot of dedicated silicon, FPGA's, VME crates, etc. Slashdotters should drool. Anyway, we throw out the vast majority of information.
By comparison, LSST is trying to store everything. Scroll up for an interesting comment about calibrating ambient brightness and seeing. I can't answer which will deliver more information, but both are incredibly interesting challenges.
Data challenges abound. We have designed the LHC Grid to distribute this information. There will be several data warehouses located around the world at national labs and universities. Even after the triggers decide what is "interesting", more sophisticated algorithms, with access to all the data in a single proton-proton collision are applied. Then, humans are applied to the data and we will try to dig out new signals from this.
In all this we expect to find (among other things) the origin of mass and Dark Matter, and we're working hard to prepare for the onslaught of data.:)
This can't possibly be the axion. If it were a particle it must show up as a narrow peak in Fig.2(a) due to the claimed lifetime in Fig.1(a). The width of a particle in the Q graph is 1/lifetime, and the claimed lifetime is so large that it's width must be tiny -- literally a line on the graph (smeared by detector resolution). But instead Fig.2(a) is totally smeared out. This must be some off-shell phenomena or fakes. It is not a particle.
Also, the standard for claiming discovery of a new particle is 5 standard deviations. The reason for this is because we often see fluctuations below this that go away with more data. The small peaks he does claim after massaging his data are only three standard deviations.
So, the claim that it's a particle is dubious. The claim of a discovery is absolutely wrong. This does not meet the criteria for a particle discovery in particle physics.
It's not necessary for congress to pass an Enabling Act if the president, his minions, or anyone else can slip in legislation undebated. The white house can and is making legislation without review. This procedural technicality gives anyone in the ruling party absolute power to pass legislation. This is no democracy.
It's about time we clamored for an Accountable Legislation provision:
All legislation will be provided in electronic and print formats, at taxpayer expense, to the people as well as representatives of the government for a period of not less than 30 days before a final vote shall be taken on said legislation.
Modifications may not be made to legislation for 30 days prior to a vote on it.
This seems obvious, but it gives the government time to sift through 500 page bills, it gives the public and media pundits time to vet legislation, and gives the opposition party an opportunity to be heard. Voting does not a democracy make. If you don't have transparency, you don't have a democracy.
Yes the arXiv is the answer. Not all fields of science have it as good as we do in astronomy/physics (me too, BTW). Everyone should use the arXiv, it should continue to be publicly funded (hell, it's quite cheap compared to journal costs). We need to get our colleagues in Bio and Chemistry to start using the arXiv. Some journal restrictions in those fields are downright horiffic.
But pertaining to the question of the article, the $100M should not be paid to support the arXiv. (Free, public distribution of science is a solved problem there -- but they still need peer review) I suggest the money should be used to buy or negotiate rights to ALL back-issue articles in all fields. Particularly articles which may be out of copyright, or hidden behind financial gateways by journals. How about the works of Archimedes? Kepler? Newton? Pasteur?
I never have, and never will pay per page charges. As you say, they should be paying me for the article itself, and referee services. No journal is worth it. I will (and do) publish in other journals.
You sir, apparently live in a more paranoid, vindictive and cruel world than I do.
Don't buy the same lobbyists used by the copyright cartels silly. Lobbyists don't work on principle, they work on money -- the money they can earn TODAY not the hypothetical money they could earn 10 years down the line by your paranoid conspiracy theory. Many lobbying groups are citizens groups. They're just massively underfunded compared to companies. But, they generally get a more sympathetic ear than companies, as I understand.
I agree it's disgusting that this is possible, that our government is for sale in this manner. But we must live in reality, not in our ideal world. Campaign financing, lobbying, and the role of money in the halls of congress is a separate problem, that must be attacked separately. But I'd rather not wait for the outcome of that war before making a move on copyright. (or rather, wait for that war to even start)
First, $100M will buy a lot of lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats. These people should then work with congress to return our copyright system to a reasonable state, with a functioning public domain. If the media on which works are recorded is degraded by the time they enter the public domain, then the public domain does not exist in any functional sense. Buying the works themselves within a broken system is only a short-term band-aid and would only work as long as there is money for it. Entering the public domain should be automatic for any work that is not being sold anymore by the copyright holder, or whose copyright holder has died.
But in case the person with money doesn't like lawyers or congress, here are some other ideas:
The Lexis Nexis database
All scientific works ever written. This is work done by scientists for the betterment of mankind and to have it locked away from the public behind electronic library access fees is absurd. The public has a right to academic works, not just academics.
Weaponizing civilian installations such as airports is a horrible idea. Sooner or later this system will accidentally shoot down a civilian aircraft. It's like weaponizing cars. You think there won't be mishaps? Increasing the number of ways an airplane can crash does not decrease the overall airplane accident rate.
Perhaps we should concentrate our efforts on finding people who want to commit homocidal acts and imprisoning them.
Or maybe stop international policies which cause people to want to commit homocidal acts against our airports.
While I'm at it...maybe we should stop trying to identify all the people that are not homocidal maniacs in a brain-dead attempt to find the homocidal maniacs by a process of elimination...
For the same reason that the FCC keeps certifying cell phones, CD players, and laptops that interfere with planes. Clearly the FCC cares more about corporate profits than their stated mandate of preventing interference in the radio spectrum.
Heads need to roll at the FCC, they are not doing their job.
If this is the case, then the FCC is certifying devices (both cell phones and aircraft GPS receivers) which are incapable of operating in the presence of interference, or are putting out interference in a frequency band outside what they are allowed. This is exactly the opposite of what the FCC is charged with doing. We've heard about this problem for years, it's about time they fixed it.
Heads should roll at the FCC because they are not doing their job.
Measuring the EM emissions of a device is very easy, and done anyway to certify devices. There is no black magic here. We know how radio transmissions work, we know who is transmitting/receiving on what frequencies, the spectrum is divided up, etc.
We will never build a collider with a center of mass at the (4-dimensional, normal) Planck scale.
Given any measurement at low energies, it is possible to construct multiple string theories describing all existing observations. Any new measurement will slightly reduce the set of possible theories, but we will never hit upon a unique solution. Even if we did build a Planck scale collider it is still possible to get multiple string theories. (here I mean theory in the tested, scientific sense)
Recent claims by stringers about explaining the cosmological constant by eternal inflation plus the anthropic principle are untestable, even in principle. (because we can't do experiments outside our own universe) Therefore, this aspect of string theory can never be more than a religious-like belief.
So at the end of the day, the whole thing is non-predictive (due to the multitude of indistinguishable models from low-energy experiments) and non-falsifiable (due to being able to wiggle out of any conceivable measurement).
Up until the recent anthropic arguments I was even willing to still call string theory science. But it is now careening over the edge of superstition. The anthropic arguments are unprovable in principle, and therefore, not science. (I could rant about this for a few more pages...)
No, if they do not produce a mini-black hole at the LHC, then gravity is not at the scales probed by the LHC. The extra dimensions are a little smaller, or we live confined to a brane.
That's what I mean by non-falsifiable. For any given conceivable measurement, there is a way to tweak the string theory to get around it. It can be discovered, but it can never be falsified. In this sense it is maximally non-predictive.
Yes it's easier to explore the workings of the universe within the context of a model, but that does not in any way tell you that the model is correct. It's little more than a toy. I am absolutely certain that someone will eventually write down a model within the context of string theory that contains the particles we see. I'm also absolutely certain there will be thousands of others that will eventually be written down that are indistinguishable. This doesn't help us make any predictions in particle physics.
A photon is both a particle and a wave, at all times. This is a common misunderstanding of the physics, unfortunately propagated by popular literature. One can solve certain problems easier by assuming that it is one or the other (e.g. the wave nature of a gamma ray is pretty useless, and the particle nature of radio waves is too), but the same equations govern both. All particles are both particles and waves, and for practical purposes we drop the distinction and call them all "particles".
Unfortunately, there is no official body which confers the moniker "theory" to bodies of work which are deserving. Rather, people just call it that so that's how it's known. It is not a theory in the scientific sense. One should really call it String Hypothesis or String Postulate.
It is a theory in the mathematical sense similar to Group Theory, Set Theory, or Ring Theory. In mathematics these "theories" really refer to the specific set of axioms assumed. There exist some axioms (well, really, assumptions) that define the body of work that is "string theory". But one should not confuse string theory for mathematics. There are few rigorous proofs in the literature, a very large set of assumptions, and a large set of unproven conjectures.
In practice, unless a very bizarre set of miracles occur (such as the fundamental scale of gravity being much, much lower than we measure it to be -- such as is assumed in the article), there is no way we will ever conclusively prove string theory to be correct. It will always be possible to write down a different theory which gives the same physics, but is far simpler. String theory is not falsifiable and therefore is unlikely to stand the test of time. (or, maybe, it will live forever -- kind of like dragons and vampires)
Do both. If economic power is not given a legal outlet, it will find an illegal one. Therefore to avoid corruption you need to both give economic power a legal voice and make strict anti-corruption laws so that economic power doesn't also corrupt.
Speaking of Farscape, WHERE THE HELL IS FARSCAPE?!?!? IMHO possibly the best science fiction ever made, and it's not even in the list. I think it's better than Babylon 5 (number 5), comparable to the new Battlestar Galactica (number 2 -- good show BTW that show is excellent -- yesterday's episode was fantastic).
Another glaring omission is The Prisoner. But Stargate Atlantis and Star Trek Voyager need to be dropped off the bottom of the list. Just about everything below it is better than them.
Thanks for the link. Actually I am the nominal maintainer of LatexWiki which is a latex plugin for ZWiki. However, I have decided to abandon it due to some disagreements with the ZWiki maintainer.
I looked at WikiTeX and mediawiki long ago, and the reason I decided against it is that it does not align equations with the surrounding text, the fonts look vastly different tex/html, and the input syntax is very un-latexlike.
Right now I have an experimental combination of jsMath and tiddlywiki that is pretty darn cool (using ziddlywiki as a backend server storage). I'm thinking of migrating my entire site to that...
Slashdot Mirror
The compulsory licensing idea would obviously require a more technically savvy government entity, capable of quickly assessing the value of patents, and adjudicating on payments...(including punative payments, if necessary). Clearly the litigation that occurs now, with non-expert judges, juries, and lawyers, is untenable for this idea. Such a patent licensing body would be more like the FCC than the Justice Department.
It certainly harms the progress of useful arts to stop sales and/or development. Instead, patent violation should be assessed only in the amount of money owed from one party to another, calculated as a reasonable fraction of the profit earned from goods in violation of the patent.
If the inventor has a great idea, but an incompetent marketing and/or development, the patent should allow others to compete on the basis of marketing and development, using the same idea, but the patentor should get his due in any case.
In other words, I think all licensing of patents should be compulsory. I can't see any argument why any party should disallow any other party from implementing their patents. It seems this is only ever used for anticompetitive purposes, which harms the market and harms consumers, and is illegal when done in other ways.
--Bob
I've got better things to do with my time than play this shell game with scammers for a piddly $50. They know this, and that's why they make more money by offering rebates.
Rebates are a scam that allows a company to pad their ledger with artificial profits that get refunded some time later. It's an accounting scam. They make money by having more money in the bank, earning interest, while you don't. They also count on a good fraction of people simply not filling out the rebate form. So it's a form of false advertising that allows them to advertise one price when in fact you have to give them a different amount of money.
Don't do business with companies that offer rebates. Pay for what things are worth and screw this stupid shell game. I've not gotten my rebate many times, without explanation.
This crap should be illegal.
I keep wondering...X is a single threaded server, communicating with a (generally) single threaded game. Worse, wine inserts the wineserver process, so I have three single threaded things trying to synchronize to get interactivity. A low latency event like a keypress might require all three processes to be scheduled in succession, to get a response on the screen. A poor man's way to do this is with the kernel's scheduler, but a far superior way to do it is to have multiple threads in the X server. Scheduling an interactive event isn't hard. Getting crap on the screen in the same scheduling timeslice is hard (impossible?) since it requires a second scheduling point. As I understand, this is how BeOS achieved substantial interactivity in the presence of load -- my having a multi-threaded graphics server *and* kernel.
So, how much can be gained by rewriting X, or going to a different graphics server? Or do I completely misunderstand the effect of X?
-- Bob
Furthermore this issue is fundamentally different than just technology. A watched society is not a free society. It does not matter who the watchers are, or whether they do good or ill with what the see. People behave differently when they know they're being watched.
People do not exercise their freedom of expression as often. They do not take unpopular views, or will not discuss them in public. They conform. They are not free. People need to escape from watchful eyes, for their own health and sanity. This starts in teenagers, when fundamental biological urges drive young people to get away from the tribe with their honey, for reproductive purposes. But it is a fundamental part of the human psyche.
We would be naive to believe that we could live a watched life, and still be the same person we are today.
The codes used took into account all the major sources of gravity, including all the planets and major asteroids. These are some of the same codes that have been used to place many, many other probes in proper orbits around planetary bodies as far away as Saturn, and land on tiny things like asteroids and comets.
The damned thing about the Pioneer anomaly is that the acceleration is constant and the measurement is exceedingly simple. It's just position vs. time. There isn't much that can mess with that, and since individual communications with the craft are uncorrelated with each other, there shouldn't be any kind of drift (relativistic clock drifts are taken into account). Since the acceleration is constant over a distance from roughly Jupiter to well past Pluto, and gravity follows a force law that goes like 1/r^2, you can't add a single source of gravity (e.g. a new planet) -- the force wouldn't be constant. You can't make the sun slightly heavier. You can't add dark matter to do it: the dark matter would have to conspire to have a density as a function of distance from the sun that mimicked the constant acceleration. Such a density profile has more dark matter at the edges of the solar system, which would not be stable. It should collapse and concentrate near the sun. The acceleration is approximately the same magnitude as the expansion of the universe, but it's in the wrong direction, and our current understanding of dark energy wouldn't cause such an effect anyway.
Personally, I think we've got gravity totally wrong.
-- Bob
The LHC will produce more data, but we also don't care about most of it. The vast majority of it is junk. The "interesting" physics (particles like W and Z bosons, top quarks, higgs, etc) are about 10^-9 of the events. It is a huge needle in a haystack problem and we throw out most data. We have many experts and professors who design "triggers" which, based on a subset of information that can be delivered to them in a reasonable time, decide whether a given proton-proton collison contains new physics. Many theorists these days are making dents in walls with their heads trying to think of ways these triggers might be missing important information, so that we can suggest changes before it's too late. This is a lot of dedicated silicon, FPGA's, VME crates, etc. Slashdotters should drool. Anyway, we throw out the vast majority of information.
By comparison, LSST is trying to store everything. Scroll up for an interesting comment about calibrating ambient brightness and seeing. I can't answer which will deliver more information, but both are incredibly interesting challenges.
Data challenges abound. We have designed the LHC Grid to distribute this information. There will be several data warehouses located around the world at national labs and universities. Even after the triggers decide what is "interesting", more sophisticated algorithms, with access to all the data in a single proton-proton collision are applied. Then, humans are applied to the data and we will try to dig out new signals from this.
In all this we expect to find (among other things) the origin of mass and Dark Matter, and we're working hard to prepare for the onslaught of data. :)
-- Bob
This can't possibly be the axion. If it were a particle it must show up as a narrow peak in Fig.2(a) due to the claimed lifetime in Fig.1(a). The width of a particle in the Q graph is 1/lifetime, and the claimed lifetime is so large that it's width must be tiny -- literally a line on the graph (smeared by detector resolution). But instead Fig.2(a) is totally smeared out. This must be some off-shell phenomena or fakes. It is not a particle.
Also, the standard for claiming discovery of a new particle is 5 standard deviations. The reason for this is because we often see fluctuations below this that go away with more data. The small peaks he does claim after massaging his data are only three standard deviations.
So, the claim that it's a particle is dubious. The claim of a discovery is absolutely wrong. This does not meet the criteria for a particle discovery in particle physics.
It's not necessary for congress to pass an Enabling Act if the president, his minions, or anyone else can slip in legislation undebated. The white house can and is making legislation without review. This procedural technicality gives anyone in the ruling party absolute power to pass legislation. This is no democracy.
It's about time we clamored for an Accountable Legislation provision:
This seems obvious, but it gives the government time to sift through 500 page bills, it gives the public and media pundits time to vet legislation, and gives the opposition party an opportunity to be heard. Voting does not a democracy make. If you don't have transparency, you don't have a democracy.
-- Bob
Yes the arXiv is the answer. Not all fields of science have it as good as we do in astronomy/physics (me too, BTW). Everyone should use the arXiv, it should continue to be publicly funded (hell, it's quite cheap compared to journal costs). We need to get our colleagues in Bio and Chemistry to start using the arXiv. Some journal restrictions in those fields are downright horiffic.
But pertaining to the question of the article, the $100M should not be paid to support the arXiv. (Free, public distribution of science is a solved problem there -- but they still need peer review) I suggest the money should be used to buy or negotiate rights to ALL back-issue articles in all fields. Particularly articles which may be out of copyright, or hidden behind financial gateways by journals. How about the works of Archimedes? Kepler? Newton? Pasteur?
I never have, and never will pay per page charges. As you say, they should be paying me for the article itself, and referee services. No journal is worth it. I will (and do) publish in other journals.
-- Bob
You sir, apparently live in a more paranoid, vindictive and cruel world than I do. Don't buy the same lobbyists used by the copyright cartels silly. Lobbyists don't work on principle, they work on money -- the money they can earn TODAY not the hypothetical money they could earn 10 years down the line by your paranoid conspiracy theory. Many lobbying groups are citizens groups. They're just massively underfunded compared to companies. But, they generally get a more sympathetic ear than companies, as I understand. I agree it's disgusting that this is possible, that our government is for sale in this manner. But we must live in reality, not in our ideal world. Campaign financing, lobbying, and the role of money in the halls of congress is a separate problem, that must be attacked separately. But I'd rather not wait for the outcome of that war before making a move on copyright. (or rather, wait for that war to even start)
- The Lexis Nexis database
- All scientific works ever written. This is work done by scientists for the betterment of mankind and to have it locked away from the public behind electronic library access fees is absurd. The public has a right to academic works, not just academics.
-- BobWeaponizing civilian installations such as airports is a horrible idea. Sooner or later this system will accidentally shoot down a civilian aircraft. It's like weaponizing cars. You think there won't be mishaps? Increasing the number of ways an airplane can crash does not decrease the overall airplane accident rate.
Perhaps we should concentrate our efforts on finding people who want to commit homocidal acts and imprisoning them.
Or maybe stop international policies which cause people to want to commit homocidal acts against our airports.
While I'm at it...maybe we should stop trying to identify all the people that are not homocidal maniacs in a brain-dead attempt to find the homocidal maniacs by a process of elimination...
Does fear run your life?
Heads need to roll at the FCC, they are not doing their job.
-- Bob
Heads should roll at the FCC because they are not doing their job.
Measuring the EM emissions of a device is very easy, and done anyway to certify devices. There is no black magic here. We know how radio transmissions work, we know who is transmitting/receiving on what frequencies, the spectrum is divided up, etc.
-- Bob
So at the end of the day, the whole thing is non-predictive (due to the multitude of indistinguishable models from low-energy experiments) and non-falsifiable (due to being able to wiggle out of any conceivable measurement).
Up until the recent anthropic arguments I was even willing to still call string theory science. But it is now careening over the edge of superstition. The anthropic arguments are unprovable in principle, and therefore, not science. (I could rant about this for a few more pages...)
-- Bob
That's what I mean by non-falsifiable. For any given conceivable measurement, there is a way to tweak the string theory to get around it. It can be discovered, but it can never be falsified. In this sense it is maximally non-predictive.
-- Bob
A photon is both a particle and a wave, at all times. This is a common misunderstanding of the physics, unfortunately propagated by popular literature. One can solve certain problems easier by assuming that it is one or the other (e.g. the wave nature of a gamma ray is pretty useless, and the particle nature of radio waves is too), but the same equations govern both. All particles are both particles and waves, and for practical purposes we drop the distinction and call them all "particles".
-- Bob
It is a theory in the mathematical sense similar to Group Theory, Set Theory, or Ring Theory. In mathematics these "theories" really refer to the specific set of axioms assumed. There exist some axioms (well, really, assumptions) that define the body of work that is "string theory". But one should not confuse string theory for mathematics. There are few rigorous proofs in the literature, a very large set of assumptions, and a large set of unproven conjectures.
In practice, unless a very bizarre set of miracles occur (such as the fundamental scale of gravity being much, much lower than we measure it to be -- such as is assumed in the article), there is no way we will ever conclusively prove string theory to be correct. It will always be possible to write down a different theory which gives the same physics, but is far simpler. String theory is not falsifiable and therefore is unlikely to stand the test of time. (or, maybe, it will live forever -- kind of like dragons and vampires)
-- Bob
Rebates and coupons are a scam and should be illegal. It's a form of false advertising.
-- Bob
Another glaring omission is The Prisoner. But Stargate Atlantis and Star Trek Voyager need to be dropped off the bottom of the list. Just about everything below it is better than them.
-- Bob (IMHO)
Have a small session at conferences discussing the importance of this, and encouraging the community to boycott certain journals.
In every field, there is more than one journal...
I looked at WikiTeX and mediawiki long ago, and the reason I decided against it is that it does not align equations with the surrounding text, the fonts look vastly different tex/html, and the input syntax is very un-latexlike.
Right now I have an experimental combination of jsMath and tiddlywiki that is pretty darn cool (using ziddlywiki as a backend server storage). I'm thinking of migrating my entire site to that...
-- Bob