One of the things that aroused suspicion was that the images used by Ortiz were two years old. It would be quite a coincidence if he just happened to notice the object on reviewing his old data right after Brown published his abstract. It would also seem unlikely that he did notice it, and decided not to publish for so long
Why? Brown sat on his data for a while, at least from the time of abstract submission to abstract publication, and he even gives the reasons for that on his web page. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that Ortiz discovered the independently over the prior weeks or months and didn't publish for the same reasons. And if Ortiz's announcement hadn't forced Brown's hand, he might still be sitting on the data.
It seems highly likely that Ortiz didn't see the object in his data until he was prompted to re-examine it by Brown's abstract.
Given the timeframe, I disagree that that is "highly likely". But whether "possible", "plausible", or "highly likely", the point is that the standard for wrecking someone's career should be "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "preponderance of the evidence" or "highly likely". If Brown can't establish that Ortiz did this beyond a reasonable doubt, then Ortiz should be considered completely innocent.
What bothers me about this case is that possibility of suspicion about Ortiz was raised by Brown's mistake ("Using this name turns out to have been a very bad idea on our part!") and by Brown's attempt to game the system ("We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting.").
I don't know whether Ortiz is guilty or not and we may never know. What I do know is that I want behavior like Brown's stamped out for good because it is bad for science. The web should not become a minefield for scientists of partially published data or incomplete results. When I do a web search and I come across a half-finished version of that is similar to a paper I'm about to submit, I do not want to be obligated to cite it. And I do not want people to "whet" my appetite for a presentation and then use an abstract to claim priority for a discovery.
Until you put a full paper on Arxiv, or until you submit a full paper to some peer reviewed venue, you have no claims to your discovery, because everything else is unfair to scientists who do their work properly. Even if Ortiz may have committed scientific fraud, Brown shouldn't have a claim; web server logs, abstracts without papers, and accidental publication of vital data should simply not be allowed to be the sole basis of a claim or even investigation. Only if Brown had clear evidence from other sources should he be allowed to charge misconduct, and he apparently doesn't.
(Note, incidentally, that we have no independent evidence corroborating Brown's claims either; it is also possible that his claims about E-mail and web server logs are fabricated. I'm not saying I believe that, I'm just saying people are already exhibiting biases. If this were a legal case, the web server logs might well get thrown out if their authenticity couldn't be established.)
Even if he did independently discover the object and was just checking to confirm that it was the same object, he should have acknowledged his checking of the data and the work of the American team. The fact that he did not makes his actions look much more suspicious, and the lack of acknowledgment is also possibly a form of misconduct.
That's not obvious to me. It was clearly not prudent for them to drill down into that web site. But it seems to me that whether they had an obligation to acknowledge this hinges on whether the information they found had any bearing on what they reported, and that's just impossible to know.
Ultimately, what bothers me about tolerating Brown's behavior is the long-term effects.
I don't want the web to become a minefield where people leave poorly written up scientific ideas and partially analyzed data in semi-public places and then construct claims of precedence based on that. People like Brown should learn to release their claims and their data in a clear and definitive manner, not let them dribble out or have them be indexed by Google. If Brown was sure of his discovery in May, he should have put all the evidence on Arxiv or submitted a Nature paper.
In the long run, I think tolerating Brown's approach to publishing scientific results and his way of making allegations against others is very damaging to the scientific community, regardless of whether Ortiz is actually guilty of anything or not.
(Here's another question: why are Brown's claims about web server entries necessarily true?)
Have you ever actually read an abstract for a scientific meeting? People say things all the time at meetings before every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed.
Whether that's OK or not depends on the claim. So, if you claim "we discovered planet X" and you don't have the data to support it, then that's misconduct. If you say "we have suggestive data for the existence of planet X", then that's OK, but then you aren't (yet) the discoverer.
But if this was an abstract-only meeting (and it sounds like it was), it is doubtful that it establishes anything at all. You need to submit a full paper to a journal, to an archive site, to a conference, and/or to a professional association to establish precedence.
Good grief - if Brown had put all the data into the abstract, that's be equivalent to publishing w/o any peer review at all, which we all agree is bad, right?
Why would there be anything wrong with publishing without peer review? If you publish a major result with all supporting data on arxiv.org without peer review and the version you submitted checks out afterwards, you have established precedence.
On the other hand, a peer reviewed abstract-only submission doesn't establish precedence because the reviewers can't check.
Precedence is established by publishing a claim and all supporting data, not by peer review.
Ortiz is free to do that, but if he really learned something of value (e.g. that his two-year-old observations probably captured the same object, and he should go look at his old data) from those records, he is required ethically to cite those records. This is pretty clear cut.
Yes, that is clear cut. What we don't know is whether (1) Ortiz already knew of the object and was merely curious whether Brown's object happened to be the same one, or (2) Ortiz read Brown's announcement, then tracked down the data on the web, then searched his own old data for possibly matching observations (why would he even assume he had them?), then put together a fake story, and then release it, all in a day, all from a guy that (apparently) has never done anything to suggest misconduct.
Sorry, I find possibility (1) far more plausible. And given that the mistake was Brown's, the burden of proof for (2) is pretty high.
The way they could have known what to search for was that they could have taken the object's designation from the conference abstract that the Americans submitted.
I think there is no question that Ortiz took the designation from the abstract, searched for it on the web, and located Brown's data. I also seems likely that Ortiz even tracked the object from Brown's data.
The question is whether they did that after they had already discovered the object themselves in their own data (after all, that's what Ortiz's job is and he had his own data) or whether they used that information to find the object in their own plates. The first would be legitimate (though stupid), while the second would be scientific misconduct.
Since we can't tell which of the two occurred, and since it was Brown's mistake to let the data become public in the first place, I don't see how we can condemn Ortiz based on what we know so far.
Have you forgotten the purpose of an abstract? It's primary function is to allow future researchers to quickly determine if the information contained in the presentation or paper is relevant to their work.
If the conference has papers, the abstract that is indexed and that future researches see is not the abstract that gets printed in the conference program, it's the abstract that's printed at the top of the paper. There is no reason why the two need to be the same.
If the conference doesn't have full papers, then it doesn't matter anyway what you write in your abstract because it is completely unsubstantiated and just doesn't count.
If the abstract just said, "I've discovered an object,"
I think "Discovery of a new, large trans-Neptunian object. [abstract withheld]" would have been sufficient for this conference. If the conference has published proceedings, databases would later still contain the full abstract.
The other thing he could have done is keep the data private. Scientists should not let valuable experimental results sit around of public servers prior to publication.
It's common practice in science to submit an abstract before work is completed. If this is misconduct, then the majority of researchers are guilty of it.
It is misconduct to publish scientific claims, and worse to use the to claim priority for a discovery, if you do not yet have the data and analysis to support those claims. The fact that many people do it, that it's hard to detect, and that many people get away with it doesn't change that.
Think about it: if this were actually acceptable, everybody might just submit an abstract claiming to have a proof of P=NP (and P!=NP) every few months, on the hope that eventually they get it right themselves, or they can just copy the proof from someone who does and use their abstract to claim priority.
In any case, the solution to this is simple: abstracts without supporting evidence simply should not establish priority for discoveries. If Brown had submitted a paper to Nature at the same time, well, then that would be a different matter.
He just criticized Brown for not publishing sooner. It's like he was saying, "if you had published your data right away, then it wouldn't have been stolen."
I still have not seen any evidence that data was stolen. Ortiz used their own data, from 2003, to make their announcement. Are you saying they faked their own images? Or what are you actually suggesting happened?
Given Brown's own sequence of events, it is perfectly reasonable and probable to assume that Ortiz discovered the object independently, then read the abstract, and then searched on the web for it and tried to determine whether K40506A was the same or a different object as their own. It turned out it was the same, so they decided to go public right away.
Again, Ortiz or the grad student may well be guilty of misconduct, but Brown's argument seems too weak to me to ruin someone's career.
well he did. He used Brown's data without attribution.
How do you know? Ortiz's site (you can find it on Google) claims that they were using their own observations.
We found a very bright slowly moving object in three images while checking some of our older images of the modest TNO survey that we carry out from Sierra Nevada since 2002. Subsets of the three images taken on three separate dates of March 2003 are shown here in an animated gif so that the object motion can be seen. The images were taken on March 7th, 9th, 10th, 2003.
There's even an animated GIF showing their images, which look different from those used by Brown's group. That's also why the designation of the object is 2003EL61 rather than 2004something.
I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz.
If what you say were clearly true, then people wouldn't defend Ortiz. But it is far from obvious based on what Brown himself put on his webpage.
Based on what I've seen, Ortiz's story is just as plausible as Brown's. If you had discovered a new object and you read an abstract about another such discovery, wouldn't you also try hard to determine whether the other object was the same as yours? A priori, I see nothing at all suspicious about Ortiz's behavior, even as described by Brown.
I think what Slashdotters find annoying is that people leave their data unprotected and then try to blame others for the mere possibility of having misused the data.
Generally, in science, if you don't protect your experimental results or if you carelessly talk about new ideas to other people, don't complain if people scoop you. I have gotten scooped that way, and the best thing to do is not to throw around accusations, but to shut up about it, congratulate the other guy, and be more careful again next time.
In any case, let's keep this in perspective: the discovery of a new planet, at this point, is not a crowning intellectual achievement, it is simply sweat and a lot of luck.
When such a discovery is made, one does not immediately announce it, partially (although it is not the only reason) in case one turns out to have made a mistake in one's observations.
But Brown did just that: they announced the name of the object in an abstract but didn't supply the orbital data or evidence. And now, they want to claim credit for the discovery of the object because, essentially, they were the first ones to publish the existence but not the data for the new object. If Brown had waited with his announcement, then Ortiz couldn't have searched for the images on the web.
I don't know whether Ortiz committed scientific misconduct, but there is obviously something wrong with what Brown did: his abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private. Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
To me, it looks like both Brown and Ortiz made serious mistakes. So far, however, I haven't seen any concrete evidence for misconduct in this story.
So, the guys looked at where the telescope was pointed. So, they guessed web pages to get that information. Big deal.
That is just as easily explained by assuming that they were curious whether their competitors had discovered the same object.
Looking at web pages on a public server is not evidence of wrongdoing. And if it suggests anything, it suggests that they already had pretty much found the same object; otherwise, how would they have known what to search for and where to look in the first place?
At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something. Novell was the best at file servers. Lotus was the best at spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best at word processing.
"But we fixed that. We didn't get any better, we just used dirty tricks to kill our competitors (cf. Ballmer's statement). Now, we are the best by default, because we are the only ones left in the market."
drsmith-fraud.com may constitute libel, but drsmith-sucks.com or drsmith-problems.com probably wouldn't; the former is an opinion, and the latter factual (if there actually were problems).
Of course, just wait until doctors have you sign non-disclosure agreements:-(
They aren't AT&T code, but they are UNIX. UNIX is a trademark of The Open Group, and does not refer to any specific source code.
Well, my remark (obviously) referred to the original UNIX (as in "Research Unix") scheduler, not any software system that happens to carry the trademark but may have a completely different scheduler.
"First, torrents are neither CPU nor disk bound." Even if they are network-bound, they still shouldn't interfere with scheduling of non-network processes. But in my experience, they do.
Well, that suggests that it isn't a problem with the scheduler. But if it is, it's a problem with the Linux scheduler, not the UNIX scheduler.
I don't know what "very fast" is, but my internet connection is 100Mbps (peak).
Ours is faster, but it's pretty much academic at that point.
It is almost always "legal" to sue. As for Lee, based on what is publicly known, it seems like a stretch that setting up a new research lab would fall under a non-compete clause. It's not the non-compete clause that makes him a "highly paid HR manager", it's his actual job. Maybe he should have expected his lawsuit because of his previous and his current employers, but based on the facts alone, it's a stretch.
Altogether, this lawsuit makes Microsoft a significantly less attractive place to work for skilled computer scientists. Microsoft couldn't have done something more stupid for their ability to attract talent.
Modern Unix schedulers are written by people that never had to deal with a real multiuser timesharing system supporting varied workloads while still remaining responsive for interactive use. [...] As an example, on an Athlon XP 2500 system with a 3ware RAID controller, running BitTorrent with only a few torrents will completely hose interactive response with Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 4 kernels. (I haven't yet tried FreeBSD 5.)
Linux is not UNIX, and I believe all UNIX code was removed from BSD as well, so those are not UNIX schedulers.
Be that as it may, it sounds like your problem is not the scheduler. First, torrents are neither CPU nor disk bound. Second, I don't observe this behavior on my machines, and my Internet connection is very fast.
I don't have anything to hide that needs that level of encryption.
Well, I'm sorry you still live in the stone age. But those of us that do do on-line banking, that do have photographs of our own families and children on our computers, that have address books and personal letters, doctor's appointments and on-line passwords stored on our machines, in short, those of us that lead normal, wholesome on-line lives require this sort of protection from criminals.
Having had computer hardware with personal data stolen twice despite careful precautions, and having been the subject of identity theft, I can assure you there is a lot that normal, law-abiding citizens have to lose.
I'm also not interested in accusing anybody in particular of anything, btw.
Well, I'm accusing you specifically of either being terribly naive or terribly technophobic. Take your pick.
A judge on Tuesday cleared the way for Google Inc. to hire a former Microsoft executive to head its Chinese research and development center so long as the employee does not recruit from Microsoft. [...] Lee can begin working for Google (Research) by setting up a research office in China and recruiting software engineers if he does not use confidential information gleaned while he worked at Microsoft, the judge found.
I have worked at two places that got raided by Microsoft for employees. Just about every month, some other important employee disappeared to Microsoft, sometimes in groups of two or three, and then those people would call their buddies and the next month even more would disappear. It was horrible for morale and it was horrible for projects. And of course these people were working on the same things at Microsoft that they had been working on before.
And historically, many of Microsoft's major products were created by hiring away key employees from competitors and then having them build exactly the same product for Microsoft that they had been building before.
This lawsuit is a complete joke, coming from Microsoft. The judge should have told Microsoft to stuff it.
All drives should really be encrypted, whether they are transportable or not. If they are server drives, then the key can be physical (like a USB stick) that is left in place until the drive/machine needs repairs.
Some recent motherboards have the right idea: they come with an encryption key (a physical object) that you plug into the motherboard for encrypting the disks completely without OS intervention as far as I can tell.
Let's hope that kind of feature becomes standard on all motherboards.
Even if there were, there would be so few users affected that it still wouldn't matter for the product design: keeping costs down and selling to the PC market is more important than a few Mac users that use a USB hub, a Nano, and a USB disk all at the same time and on the same port.
In your definitions, you're confusing "necessary" and "sufficient". Falsifiability is necessary for something to be a scientific theory, but it is not sufficient. So, the fact that string theory is perhaps falsifiable doesn't automatically make it a scientific theory.
It seems to me that BeOS does better with that stuff because it's designed to be a desktop OS and not a server, so its scheduler is probably a little more fine tuned for that role.
Yes. But is that a tradeoff worth making? A properly configured Linux system is probably indistinguishable from a properly configured BeOS system under normal desktop use. And who really needs to view 40 MPEG-4 streams at the same time on their desktop? Furthermore, many desktops are used for server-like purposes part of the time.
I think flexibility and generality are a better tradeoff in this case.
gmail.com, g-mail.com and gmail.co.uk are all owned by Google. g-mail.co.uk is owned by the Guardian, but they don't seem to be conducting any business under that domain. Google even owns gmale.com.
So, altogether, the claim that anybody has trademark rights to the name for an E-mail service seems weak, at least in the US and the UK, since such a service would really need at least the domain they claim to have a trademark on.
beos actually has poor latencies and response times in a number of areas, it just accelled at scheduling and prioritisation
I have yet to see a better scheduler than the UNIX schedulers; it makes the best tradeoff for general purpose workstation, multiuser server, and compute use of any system that I have used. And it's not so much intelligent design that's responsible for that, but simply a quarter of a century of trial and error.
BeOS may have wowed you with great movie playback, but I suspect it was considerably worse in other areas.
I don't have it on an iPod (don't like them), but I've never had it peel off from any other device like that. But, then, we may use our electronics differently.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things that aroused suspicion was that the images used by Ortiz were two years old. It would be quite a coincidence if he just happened to notice the object on reviewing his old data right after Brown published his abstract. It would also seem unlikely that he did notice it, and decided not to publish for so long
Why? Brown sat on his data for a while, at least from the time of abstract submission to abstract publication, and he even gives the reasons for that on his web page. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that Ortiz discovered the independently over the prior weeks or months and didn't publish for the same reasons. And if Ortiz's announcement hadn't forced Brown's hand, he might still be sitting on the data.
It seems highly likely that Ortiz didn't see the object in his data until he was prompted to re-examine it by Brown's abstract.
Given the timeframe, I disagree that that is "highly likely". But whether "possible", "plausible", or "highly likely", the point is that the standard for wrecking someone's career should be "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "preponderance of the evidence" or "highly likely". If Brown can't establish that Ortiz did this beyond a reasonable doubt, then Ortiz should be considered completely innocent.
What bothers me about this case is that possibility of suspicion about Ortiz was raised by Brown's mistake ("Using this name turns out to have been a very bad idea on our part!") and by Brown's attempt to game the system ("We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting.").
I don't know whether Ortiz is guilty or not and we may never know. What I do know is that I want behavior like Brown's stamped out for good because it is bad for science. The web should not become a minefield for scientists of partially published data or incomplete results. When I do a web search and I come across a half-finished version of that is similar to a paper I'm about to submit, I do not want to be obligated to cite it. And I do not want people to "whet" my appetite for a presentation and then use an abstract to claim priority for a discovery.
Until you put a full paper on Arxiv, or until you submit a full paper to some peer reviewed venue, you have no claims to your discovery, because everything else is unfair to scientists who do their work properly. Even if Ortiz may have committed scientific fraud, Brown shouldn't have a claim; web server logs, abstracts without papers, and accidental publication of vital data should simply not be allowed to be the sole basis of a claim or even investigation. Only if Brown had clear evidence from other sources should he be allowed to charge misconduct, and he apparently doesn't.
(Note, incidentally, that we have no independent evidence corroborating Brown's claims either; it is also possible that his claims about E-mail and web server logs are fabricated. I'm not saying I believe that, I'm just saying people are already exhibiting biases. If this were a legal case, the web server logs might well get thrown out if their authenticity couldn't be established.)
Even if he did independently discover the object and was just checking to confirm that it was the same object, he should have acknowledged his checking of the data and the work of the American team. The fact that he did not makes his actions look much more suspicious, and the lack of acknowledgment is also possibly a form of misconduct.
That's not obvious to me. It was clearly not prudent for them to drill down into that web site. But it seems to me that whether they had an obligation to acknowledge this hinges on whether the information they found had any bearing on what they reported, and that's just impossible to know.
Ultimately, what bothers me about tolerating Brown's behavior is the long-term effects.
I don't want the web to become a minefield where people leave poorly written up scientific ideas and partially analyzed data in semi-public places and then construct claims of precedence based on that. People like Brown should learn to release their claims and their data in a clear and definitive manner, not let them dribble out or have them be indexed by Google. If Brown was sure of his discovery in May, he should have put all the evidence on Arxiv or submitted a Nature paper.
In the long run, I think tolerating Brown's approach to publishing scientific results and his way of making allegations against others is very damaging to the scientific community, regardless of whether Ortiz is actually guilty of anything or not.
(Here's another question: why are Brown's claims about web server entries necessarily true?)
Have you ever actually read an abstract for a scientific meeting? People say things all the time at meetings before every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed.
Whether that's OK or not depends on the claim. So, if you claim "we discovered planet X" and you don't have the data to support it, then that's misconduct. If you say "we have suggestive data for the existence of planet X", then that's OK, but then you aren't (yet) the discoverer.
But if this was an abstract-only meeting (and it sounds like it was), it is doubtful that it establishes anything at all. You need to submit a full paper to a journal, to an archive site, to a conference, and/or to a professional association to establish precedence.
Good grief - if Brown had put all the data into the abstract, that's be equivalent to publishing w/o any peer review at all, which we all agree is bad, right?
Why would there be anything wrong with publishing without peer review? If you publish a major result with all supporting data on arxiv.org without peer review and the version you submitted checks out afterwards, you have established precedence.
On the other hand, a peer reviewed abstract-only submission doesn't establish precedence because the reviewers can't check.
Precedence is established by publishing a claim and all supporting data, not by peer review.
Ortiz is free to do that, but if he really learned something of value (e.g. that his two-year-old observations probably captured the same object, and he should go look at his old data) from those records, he is required ethically to cite those records. This is pretty clear cut.
Yes, that is clear cut. What we don't know is whether (1) Ortiz already knew of the object and was merely curious whether Brown's object happened to be the same one, or (2) Ortiz read Brown's announcement, then tracked down the data on the web, then searched his own old data for possibly matching observations (why would he even assume he had them?), then put together a fake story, and then release it, all in a day, all from a guy that (apparently) has never done anything to suggest misconduct.
Sorry, I find possibility (1) far more plausible. And given that the mistake was Brown's, the burden of proof for (2) is pretty high.
IAAP (I am a physicist)
Yeah, and it shows.
The way they could have known what to search for was that they could have taken the object's designation from the conference abstract that the Americans submitted.
I think there is no question that Ortiz took the designation from the abstract, searched for it on the web, and located Brown's data. I also seems likely that Ortiz even tracked the object from Brown's data.
The question is whether they did that after they had already discovered the object themselves in their own data (after all, that's what Ortiz's job is and he had his own data) or whether they used that information to find the object in their own plates. The first would be legitimate (though stupid), while the second would be scientific misconduct.
Since we can't tell which of the two occurred, and since it was Brown's mistake to let the data become public in the first place, I don't see how we can condemn Ortiz based on what we know so far.
Have you forgotten the purpose of an abstract? It's primary function is to allow future researchers to quickly determine if the information contained in the presentation or paper is relevant to their work.
If the conference has papers, the abstract that is indexed and that future researches see is not the abstract that gets printed in the conference program, it's the abstract that's printed at the top of the paper. There is no reason why the two need to be the same.
If the conference doesn't have full papers, then it doesn't matter anyway what you write in your abstract because it is completely unsubstantiated and just doesn't count.
If the abstract just said, "I've discovered an object,"
I think "Discovery of a new, large trans-Neptunian object. [abstract withheld]" would have been sufficient for this conference. If the conference has published proceedings, databases would later still contain the full abstract.
The other thing he could have done is keep the data private. Scientists should not let valuable experimental results sit around of public servers prior to publication.
It's common practice in science to submit an abstract before work is completed. If this is misconduct, then the majority of researchers are guilty of it.
It is misconduct to publish scientific claims, and worse to use the to claim priority for a discovery, if you do not yet have the data and analysis to support those claims. The fact that many people do it, that it's hard to detect, and that many people get away with it doesn't change that.
Think about it: if this were actually acceptable, everybody might just submit an abstract claiming to have a proof of P=NP (and P!=NP) every few months, on the hope that eventually they get it right themselves, or they can just copy the proof from someone who does and use their abstract to claim priority.
In any case, the solution to this is simple: abstracts without supporting evidence simply should not establish priority for discoveries. If Brown had submitted a paper to Nature at the same time, well, then that would be a different matter.
He just criticized Brown for not publishing sooner. It's like he was saying, "if you had published your data right away, then it wouldn't have been stolen."
I still have not seen any evidence that data was stolen. Ortiz used their own data, from 2003, to make their announcement. Are you saying they faked their own images? Or what are you actually suggesting happened?
Given Brown's own sequence of events, it is perfectly reasonable and probable to assume that Ortiz discovered the object independently, then read the abstract, and then searched on the web for it and tried to determine whether K40506A was the same or a different object as their own. It turned out it was the same, so they decided to go public right away.
Again, Ortiz or the grad student may well be guilty of misconduct, but Brown's argument seems too weak to me to ruin someone's career.
How do you know? Ortiz's site (you can find it on Google) claims that they were using their own observations.
There's even an animated GIF showing their images, which look different from those used by Brown's group. That's also why the designation of the object is 2003EL61 rather than 2004something.
I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz.
If what you say were clearly true, then people wouldn't defend Ortiz. But it is far from obvious based on what Brown himself put on his webpage.
Based on what I've seen, Ortiz's story is just as plausible as Brown's. If you had discovered a new object and you read an abstract about another such discovery, wouldn't you also try hard to determine whether the other object was the same as yours? A priori, I see nothing at all suspicious about Ortiz's behavior, even as described by Brown.
I think what Slashdotters find annoying is that people leave their data unprotected and then try to blame others for the mere possibility of having misused the data.
Generally, in science, if you don't protect your experimental results or if you carelessly talk about new ideas to other people, don't complain if people scoop you. I have gotten scooped that way, and the best thing to do is not to throw around accusations, but to shut up about it, congratulate the other guy, and be more careful again next time.
In any case, let's keep this in perspective: the discovery of a new planet, at this point, is not a crowning intellectual achievement, it is simply sweat and a lot of luck.
When such a discovery is made, one does not immediately announce it, partially (although it is not the only reason) in case one turns out to have made a mistake in one's observations.
But Brown did just that: they announced the name of the object in an abstract but didn't supply the orbital data or evidence. And now, they want to claim credit for the discovery of the object because, essentially, they were the first ones to publish the existence but not the data for the new object. If Brown had waited with his announcement, then Ortiz couldn't have searched for the images on the web.
I don't know whether Ortiz committed scientific misconduct, but there is obviously something wrong with what Brown did: his abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private. Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
To me, it looks like both Brown and Ortiz made serious mistakes. So far, however, I haven't seen any concrete evidence for misconduct in this story.
So, the guys looked at where the telescope was pointed. So, they guessed web pages to get that information. Big deal.
That is just as easily explained by assuming that they were curious whether their competitors had discovered the same object.
Looking at web pages on a public server is not evidence of wrongdoing. And if it suggests anything, it suggests that they already had pretty much found the same object; otherwise, how would they have known what to search for and where to look in the first place?
At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something. Novell was the best at file servers. Lotus was the best at spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best at word processing.
"But we fixed that. We didn't get any better, we just used dirty tricks to kill our competitors (cf. Ballmer's statement). Now, we are the best by default, because we are the only ones left in the market."
drsmith-fraud.com may constitute libel, but drsmith-sucks.com or drsmith-problems.com probably wouldn't; the former is an opinion, and the latter factual (if there actually were problems).
:-(
Of course, just wait until doctors have you sign non-disclosure agreements
They aren't AT&T code, but they are UNIX. UNIX is a trademark of The Open Group, and does not refer to any specific source code.
Well, my remark (obviously) referred to the original UNIX (as in "Research Unix") scheduler, not any software system that happens to carry the trademark but may have a completely different scheduler.
"First, torrents are neither CPU nor disk bound." Even if they are network-bound, they still shouldn't interfere with scheduling of non-network processes. But in my experience, they do.
Well, that suggests that it isn't a problem with the scheduler. But if it is, it's a problem with the Linux scheduler, not the UNIX scheduler.
I don't know what "very fast" is, but my internet connection is 100Mbps (peak).
Ours is faster, but it's pretty much academic at that point.
It is almost always "legal" to sue. As for Lee, based on what is publicly known, it seems like a stretch that setting up a new research lab would fall under a non-compete clause. It's not the non-compete clause that makes him a "highly paid HR manager", it's his actual job. Maybe he should have expected his lawsuit because of his previous and his current employers, but based on the facts alone, it's a stretch.
Altogether, this lawsuit makes Microsoft a significantly less attractive place to work for skilled computer scientists. Microsoft couldn't have done something more stupid for their ability to attract talent.
Modern Unix schedulers are written by people that never had to deal with a real multiuser timesharing system supporting varied workloads while still remaining responsive for interactive use. [...] As an example, on an Athlon XP 2500 system with a 3ware RAID controller, running BitTorrent with only a few torrents will completely hose interactive response with Linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 4 kernels. (I haven't yet tried FreeBSD 5.)
Linux is not UNIX, and I believe all UNIX code was removed from BSD as well, so those are not UNIX schedulers.
Be that as it may, it sounds like your problem is not the scheduler. First, torrents are neither CPU nor disk bound. Second, I don't observe this behavior on my machines, and my Internet connection is very fast.
"We suck less than we used to."
"Now only 50% more overpriced than the competition."
"Still powered by formerly open source software now almost open sourced again."
"Trust us, we are a nice vendor (and don't read the fine print)."
"Slightly less evil than Microsoft, and we only golf with them once a month."
"Give in to the dark side of the Schwartz."
"Spreading FUD about FOSS for nearly a decade."
"It's slow and overpriced, but our innovative benchmarking tools let you measure in exactly what way."
"Sun's got a 64bit server. Watch out. Use your magnifying glass to look for its market share."
(Sun used to be a decent company that made good products at a good price, but they have really gone downhill over the last ten years.)
I don't have anything to hide that needs that level of encryption.
Well, I'm sorry you still live in the stone age. But those of us that do do on-line banking, that do have photographs of our own families and children on our computers, that have address books and personal letters, doctor's appointments and on-line passwords stored on our machines, in short, those of us that lead normal, wholesome on-line lives require this sort of protection from criminals.
Having had computer hardware with personal data stolen twice despite careful precautions, and having been the subject of identity theft, I can assure you there is a lot that normal, law-abiding citizens have to lose.
I'm also not interested in accusing anybody in particular of anything, btw.
Well, I'm accusing you specifically of either being terribly naive or terribly technophobic. Take your pick.
A judge on Tuesday cleared the way for Google Inc. to hire a former Microsoft executive to head its Chinese research and development center so long as the employee does not recruit from Microsoft. [...] Lee can begin working for Google (Research) by setting up a research office in China and recruiting software engineers if he does not use confidential information gleaned while he worked at Microsoft, the judge found.
I have worked at two places that got raided by Microsoft for employees. Just about every month, some other important employee disappeared to Microsoft, sometimes in groups of two or three, and then those people would call their buddies and the next month even more would disappear. It was horrible for morale and it was horrible for projects. And of course these people were working on the same things at Microsoft that they had been working on before.
And historically, many of Microsoft's major products were created by hiring away key employees from competitors and then having them build exactly the same product for Microsoft that they had been building before.
This lawsuit is a complete joke, coming from Microsoft. The judge should have told Microsoft to stuff it.
All drives should really be encrypted, whether they are transportable or not. If they are server drives, then the key can be physical (like a USB stick) that is left in place until the drive/machine needs repairs.
Some recent motherboards have the right idea: they come with an encryption key (a physical object) that you plug into the motherboard for encrypting the disks completely without OS intervention as far as I can tell.
Let's hope that kind of feature becomes standard on all motherboards.
Built into Tiger; there is a one-pass, seven-pass, and thirty-two pass erase.
There shouldn't be.
Even if there were, there would be so few users affected that it still wouldn't matter for the product design: keeping costs down and selling to the PC market is more important than a few Mac users that use a USB hub, a Nano, and a USB disk all at the same time and on the same port.
In your definitions, you're confusing "necessary" and "sufficient". Falsifiability is necessary for something to be a scientific theory, but it is not sufficient. So, the fact that string theory is perhaps falsifiable doesn't automatically make it a scientific theory.
It seems to me that BeOS does better with that stuff because it's designed to be a desktop OS and not a server, so its scheduler is probably a little more fine tuned for that role.
Yes. But is that a tradeoff worth making? A properly configured Linux system is probably indistinguishable from a properly configured BeOS system under normal desktop use. And who really needs to view 40 MPEG-4 streams at the same time on their desktop? Furthermore, many desktops are used for server-like purposes part of the time.
I think flexibility and generality are a better tradeoff in this case.
gmail.com, g-mail.com and gmail.co.uk are all owned by Google. g-mail.co.uk is owned by the Guardian, but they don't seem to be conducting any business under that domain. Google even owns gmale.com.
So, altogether, the claim that anybody has trademark rights to the name for an E-mail service seems weak, at least in the US and the UK, since such a service would really need at least the domain they claim to have a trademark on.
beos actually has poor latencies and response times in a number of areas, it just accelled at scheduling and prioritisation
I have yet to see a better scheduler than the UNIX schedulers; it makes the best tradeoff for general purpose workstation, multiuser server, and compute use of any system that I have used. And it's not so much intelligent design that's responsible for that, but simply a quarter of a century of trial and error.
BeOS may have wowed you with great movie playback, but I suspect it was considerably worse in other areas.
He's a genius.. one of his theories is that all planets with intelligent beings on them can be categorized into a few distinct categories..
Yeah, because being a string theorist makes you so qualified to formulate theories about the social and technological evolution of planets, right?
Sorry, but that "theory" is about as profound as a Star Trek episode. Mostly, what it shows is hubris and ignorance on the part of its author.
I don't have it on an iPod (don't like them), but I've never had it peel off from any other device like that. But, then, we may use our electronics differently.