We don't let people drive unsafe cars on the roads, or connect non-FCC certified equipment to the telephone network, or fly uninspected airplanes over other people's rooftops, so why should we let infected computers onto the Internet?
If it's clearly infected, you quarantine it and make sure all that can be accessed from that machine is instructions on how to remove the infection, updates for virus scanners, etc. Basic common sense.
Some of them might. Satellites need fuel to stay in the right place, and to keep themselves pointing in the right direction (solar panels at the Sun, antennas at the Earth). It's called station keeping. Sometimes otherwise functioning communications satellites run out of fuel, and end up being useless because they're pointing the wrong way. Refuelling them can give them a new life. If there's still fuel but the thrusters or reaction wheels break, you have the same problem. That might be fixed by swapping these out. Micrometeoroid damages your solar panel wiring? If it's on the outside, perhaps a flying soldering iron can fix it.
Obviously these are just ideas, you have to be able to get to the satellite first, and take up a fixed position relative to it even if it's rotating (see out-of-fuel above). That's what they're doing here. Then you have to grab it. There's some interesting work being done by Jon Goff and co. over at Altius Space Machines in essentially using static electricity to grab things in space, or electroadhesion. That seems pretty viable as well. Now we need satellites that are easier to fix up in space, or fancy tools to work on existing ones. All in all this is looking quite promising, although there's still a ways to go before we're sending robot mechanics up there.
In my mind, the request to drop NC/ND from CC is akin to asking the Open Source community to abolish GPL and use only BSD derived licences.
The GPL allows both commercial distribution and derivative works, so that's not a correct analogy. No-Derivatives is more like that Microsoft Shared Source licence that lets you look at the code but not change it, Share-Alike would be comparable to the GPL, and as far as I know there is no mainstream Free Software license that corresponds to Non-Commercial. BSD corresponds more or less to CC-BY I'd say.
Of course, this is all rough correspondences, and it's not clear that the same arguments apply to software and art anyway. I've seen RMS opinion pieces under a CC licence with the No-Derivatives clause actually, so I think he's fine with that clause at least.
I've seen very little discussion framed as "It will cost us X trillions to execute plan A and if we don't, ignoring it will cost Y trillions."
This appears to be mainly because we simply don't know very well what the consequences of climate change will be. Consider the distribution of species for example. We have maps of which species occur where, the fruits of our work in Species Distribution Modelling. It works like this: you take a bunch of maps of things that you assume affect the distribution of a particular species, say January and July temperatures and precipitation for some plant species. Next, you collect some observations of that species. Based on the observations, you derive a formula that computes the probability of the presence of the species in a certain location based on the environmental description. You then apply that formula to your environmental maps, and there's your distribution map. Apply the same formula to the output of a climate prediction model, and get a map of where the species will be in the future.
Sounds good, right? Well, it is pretty good compared to wild guesses especially if you have enough data, but the key is the formula (model) you use. Back in the late 1980's, we had models with simple ranges. If the temperature is in range, and the precipitation, and a few other things, then the area is suitable. We use fancier models now, with MaxEnt, which is based on information theory, being one of the best. But there are a lot of things that these models do not take into account. For example, species don't just appear somewhere when the climate becomes suitable, they have to move there from a place where they already are (and speeds may be limited, and there may be barriers). Also, species interact with each other, and an invading species may be beaten by the local population or push it aside. Animal behaviour may entail large-scale movement (e.g. bird migration). We're only just starting to model these things, their interactions, and many other intricate aspects of ecosystems.
And it turns out to be hard to model complex, highly interconnected, highly non-linear systems like nature. We're running into computational issues with models that are still much simpler than nature itself, there's never enough data, and there's a large degree of randomness in the system (for example, cranberries don't occur in The Netherlands, except on one island where a vat of them that fell off a ship once washed ashore and the seeds took; there's no predicting such events). Did you know that a simple food chain system of a predator, its prey, and the prey's prey is already complex enough to exhibit chaotic (in the mathematical sense) behaviour? Now compare that to a real food web with many more species, interactions with the abiotic environment, and human influence...
So is it all hopeless? No. We do have models that work fairly well in particular situations. We're getting more computational power, we're getting better methods, and we're getting more data. We can make broad predictions, and hopefully in the future will be able to make more detailed predictions as well. But there will always be limits to how much we can predict.
1) Assume Lance cheated
- How wasn't he caught in the act for so long?
Drug testing is chemistry, not computer science. You don't just enumerate all the molecules in a blood or urine sample and see if anything bad is in there. You run it through some analysis machine (probably a GCMS or LCMS or something like that, I'm not familiar with the details) which gives you some indication of what's in there and in which amounts. If you're lucky, the incriminating substance is still in there in sufficient amounts for it to be detectable. You have to be very lucky though: human growth hormones remain detectable for a few hours after they're taken, EPO for a few days, while the performance enhancing effects remain for much longer. With blood doping, the athlete injects their own blood, so there's nothing to detect (well, preservatives, again if you're lucky). Hence out-of-competition testing, but that's not every day either. Then the doping makers are generally a step ahead of the hunters, IIRC EPO wasn't even detectable in the early years of Armstrong's successes. So, if you're professional about it (and "Professional" is Lance's middle name), you can dope and not get caught.
- How can all the technological innovation that went into his cycling be ignored? The wind-tunnel testing, the water-tank-in-frame, the unique bike designs, those all were serious efforts that AFAIK were unique, why spend that effort if you're already doping?
Because a professional athlete optimises everything, not just their red blood cell count. And because the competition is doping too.
- How were others not able to cheat as well as he did?
Because they weren't nearly as professional as Armstrong. They were being paid for sure, but Armstrong brought an enormous amount to the sport in terms of professional organisation. He controlled everything. Furthermore, he stayed at home for most of the year, showing up only for the Tour de France. Others did more races, and were tested more frequently by other nations' doping hunters. Yes, this matters, think of the Spanish prosecutors deciding that it wasn't worth it to continue Operacion Puerto (a big doping scandal with dozens of athletes, mainly Spanish, involved). Also, Armstrong actually financed the purchase of some specialist detection equipment (I think for the UCI) at some point. Perhaps he was using something that couldn't be detected by these machines, while what the others were taking was detectable with them? Still, I think it's mainly that he was just better at it than the others.
- How was he not caught cheating in 2009 when he placed 3rd after not racing for 2 years? Wouldn't he be expected to be a total doper taking a standing that high after being retired for so long?
IIRC, he ran a couple marathons, did some triathlonning, placed second in a long-distance mountain bike race, and he had a full winter and spring season to prepare. He wasn't exactly idle in those two years, and he had a lot of training years to build on. Also, he only ended up on the podium because of a peloton break in one of the early stages (fall or wind, don't remember) where he was in the front with a lot of other favourites in the back. He then had his team mates open up the gap as much as possible, allowing him to make up a good chunk of time.
- How can the fact that he trained for only 1 race each year, the Tour de France, be ignored as explaining his stellar performance? Most other competition would do more racing per year, Lance focused like a laser beam on the Tour de France. How can this not help explain his insane performances?
Actually, in most sports, it's very difficult to perform at your best without having enough races under your belt for the season (track & field records are rarely run in spring for example!). You need the full-intensity workout that only a race can provide. Some riders are capable of doing that in t
For me, the one advantage MySQL (and MariaDB, and even Apache Derby!) have over PostgreSQL is that there are versions that can be run stand-alone "out of the box" as a non-root user. PostgreSQL (AFAIK) needs to be installed, and needs to be installed as root (and you need to create a postgres user, etc.).
As far as I know, you're correct; it can probably be done, but not easily. However, I've never considered it a problem. On my development machine (a laptop, not a big workstation) I just have PostgreSQL running and whenever I need to try something new, I just fire up PgAdmin and create a new database. Once I'm done or if I mess up, I just drop the database again. Instead of a directory and a file name, I have a port number and a database name.
All the users and ownerships and directories are handled by the package manager and the database, so setting this up was trivial. If I didn't have root, I would have needed the sysadmin to install PostgreSQL through the package manager, and then make me a superuser account (or just let me sudo to the postgres user so I could do it myself, or set up a separate cluster for me if there were other users wishing to use PostgreSQL on the same machine). I've done that too in the past with a machine I didn't even have a shell account on, and it worked fine.
I suspect the whole purpose was to get some good touchy-feely-see-I-care press for launching the site, not to actually do anything substantive but pat people on the head and continue to do whatever the hell they want anyway.
From my foreign perspective, it seems that American politicians often can't actually do that much. Let me explain that.
Here in The Netherlands, the most important elections are for our Lower House. The people vote for any of a range of political parties, and the seats get divided based on the vote share. Then, the largest party negotiates with other parties to form a coalition large enough to have a majority in the Lower House (and the Senate, although it's of less importance), and they together write a plan for the next four years and form an administration. The leader of the largest party becomes the Prime Minister, and the others contribute some ministers as well.
As a result of this, the executive branch is always backed by a majority in the legislative branch, enough to decide anything except changes to the constitution. Of course, this is counterbalanced by the fact that the administration is a collaboration of parties that partially disagree with each other, so that the common plan is a compromise that balances the various concerns. Sometimes parties are not willing to compromise, and they end up in the opposition as a result, with little opportunity to further their cause. Thus, there is an incentive to cooperate.
Looking at this chart of the various administrations and corresponding party representations reveals a general pattern of aligned legislative bodies and administrations especially in the early years, but more recently a lot of situations where it's not so clear-cut. For an administration to be really free to act, it needs the Presidency, a majority in the House of Representatives, and a majority in the Senate. Starting from the 63rd Congress on the page linked above (the last 100 years), I count 22 2-year periods in which there was no party agreement between the three, and 28 in which there was. It seems to me that it's actually pretty difficult to get anything done for an American administration.
Of course, this can still work if the other party is willing to cooperate on things they don't fully agree with in exchange for favours on other things. Historically, that seems to have gone pretty well. But the American political environment has been getting more and more hostile and negative, and now parties seem to be happy to block things that are in the interest of the nation just to keep the other party from getting the credits for them. Broad strategic filibustering has upped the Senate requirements for getting anything done to a 3/5 majority (which hasn't occurred since the 1970's). As a result, we see things blocked for the political advantage of being able to attack the opposition over not achieving it, unless someone is willing to contribute enough campaign funds. Meanwhile, the nation is falling apart, but the politicians are too busy recording attack ads to do something about it.
Final note: our system isn't perfect either. In the last elections we had five parties (Socialists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Populists) all come out at about the same amount of seats. The resulting ChrDem-Lib-Pop coalition had difficulty agreeing on a plan, and broke up prematurely when the Populists backed out of the 2013 budget negotiations. So it's back to the polls in September, and meanwhile no important decisions will be taken unless there's a majority amongst the existing representatives. The 2013 budget was agreed on by such an ad-hoc majority, who recognised that something had to be done and acted in the best interest of the nation. It has left our government hamstrung though, and current polls have the leftmost and the rightmost of the large parties leading, so it doesn't look like the situation will improve soon...
...for the least transparent administration in American history.
I seriously doubt that. With modern media and the Internet all the parts of the government are more visible than they've ever been. Yes, there are things that governments today won't tell their citizens about, but those have always been there. It's just that the citizens now know about the existence of these things at all, whereas in earlier times the citizens did what they did in their homes and the politicians did what they did in their capitols and there was much less communication. And so, modern governments seem less transparent, while the citizens now actually know more about what their government does than ever before.
And that is exactly what I do not agree with. If freedom must be pushed on people even against their will then it was never freedom even in the first place.
Not everybody is always aware of the potential future consequences of their actions. I'm sure Ernie Ball didn't realise what they were getting into when they chose to use Microsoft software. They thought they just bought some software, but didn't realise that they were losing quite a bit of freedom. When confronted with that reality, they promptly got rid of the software and regained their freedom.
Also, worth noting is the fact that RMS drives for freedom of code, not freedom of users; the two are mutually exclusive, and this is exactly what so many advocates either choose to deliberately ignore or just simply do not understand.
I'm one of those who doesn't understand. Would you please explain? It seems to me that if I'm a user of a program of which I don't have the freedom to use it in whatever way I like, the freedom to share it, and of which I don't have the source and the freedom to change it as I like, that I'm then less free a user than if I do have all those freedoms. I really don't see that the fact that the program is free does anything except guarantee my freedom as a user.
Perhaps you are saying that refusing to use proprietary software reduces the amount of choice I have? That's true, but it's just a matter of values. Stallman and other free software advocates simply say that it's in your best long-term interests to value freedom over convenience. You apparently disagree. It's difficult to argue these things.
The apparent contradiction goes away when you distinguish between short term and long term freedom. There is a general pattern of users getting quite a lot of freedom from smaller software makers initially, but that freedom being taken away as market share grows, and disappearing almost completely when a monopoly or oligopoly has been achieved. What I see people arguing for is to give up some short term freedom to avoid losing much more freedom in the long term.
In the case of games, the small game developers of the 1980's and early 1990's used to give users (players) the right to share the first couple of levels of their proprietary games with their friends. Games had no copy protection, or if they did it consisted of you having to type in a few random characters from the manual. You could play on your own machine in the privacy of your home, or on your own local network with friends. When you were done playing, you could resell the game (and the manual). Gamers liked this freedom, used it, and had lots of fun playing proprietary games.
A lot of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies later, and we have a market that is controlled by a few huge entities, who sell locked consoles (and take away features after you've bought it), who deliver their games with DRM systems that border on malware, who require an Internet connection even for single-player games, who collect data on your game-playing habits, and who take away your right to resell the games you bought.
Perhaps, if gamers back then had decided that they were only going to play Free games, that would have become the dominant paradigm, and these excesses wouldn't have occurred, or at least would have been exceptions rather than the rule. We'll never know, but I do think that sometimes giving up a little immediate freedom can help in the long term.
I read the article (I know! But there were no comments yet, so what am I to do?) and, not having understood much of it, did some reading to try and understand what's going on here. I think I've more or less figured it out, so I'm attempting a simple explanation here. Semiconducting physics nerds, please fix this for me as appropriate.
Atoms consist of a positively charged nucleus, surrounded by one or more shells of electrons. Electrons farther away from the nucleus have more energy than ones closer in. Put a bunch of those atoms together, and there are two things that can happen. In some materials, the electrons in the higher energy states are so "far away" from the nucleus in energetic terms, that they can easily move from one atom to the next. These materials are conductors. In other materials, there is a big gap (the band gap) between the highest "bound" (valence band) energy state, and the minimum energy state (the conduction band) needed to move between atoms. So, the electrons can't move away from their nuclei, and these materials are electrical insulators. Then there are some materials that have an intermediate sized gap between stuck valence states and free-to-move conduction states, and these are called semiconductors.
A solar cell works by the photoelectric effect: when an incoming photon (e.g. sunlight) hits an electron in a semiconductor, the electron absorbs the photon and its energy increases. If the photon is energetic enough, this will move the electron from the valence band to the conduction band. This also creates a positively charged "hole", where the electron was before. The electron and the hole attract each other because they have opposite charge. Left to their own devices, they'll just recombine, so in a solar cell, an electric field is applied. This moves the electron in one direction, and the hole in the opposite direction (because of the opposite charge). This moving electrical charge is otherwise known as current flow, and so we have a working solar cell.
So how do we make an electric field? In normal photovoltaic cells, this is done by doping (adding small impurities, typically boron and phosphorus to) the semiconductor. Since these have less or more electrons in their outer shells, they create areas in the semiconductor with more electrons or more holes, which creates a charge difference between them (a P-N junction). This charge difference creates an electric field, which will whisk away any electrons and holes created within it. Apparently, this doping process only works for relatively expensive semiconductors however.
So, if I understand correctly, what these researchers have done is to apply an external electric field, by applying a small voltage across the whole thing. This puts a charge on the contacts on each side of the cell, which draws electrons in the semiconductor one way and holes the other way, thus creating a P-N junction without doping. The problem is that normally the construction of the contacts keeps their electric field from propagating into the semiconductor, so that it doesn't generate a good P-N junction. Apparently they've overcome this by changing the geometry of one of them, in two different ways for two different alternative semiconductors. And then they have a version in which the external voltage is supplied by the cell itself, making it self-contained.
So is this useful? Well, conspicuously absent from the article is any mention of efficiency. So I'd speculate that this mainly allows the production of low-efficiency solar cells at lower prices than before, rather than getting more output from your roof. But if this makes solar cells cheap enough to just blanket anything and everything with them, that could still be useful of course.
I agree that it's childish, and that this particular debug value is not necessarily sexist. It's just a body part. But I think that Kate6 was referring to the general atmosphere that these kinds of jokes are a result of. I've worked on a project in the past that involved an IT company, and I spent quite a bit of time in their office working with them. They have about a 50/50 mix of men and women, mostly in their late 20's, early 30's, new parents or soon-to-be parents. Over lunch, people talk about kids and related issues, news, sports, or even on occasion technology. I'm sure that nobody there would have even thought of naming a debug value like this. Not thought of it and suppressed it in the name of professionalism, it just wouldn't have occurred to them.
Reading all these +5 comments about how women just have to stop being so wimpy, and about how a good working environment is one where you can be yourself without having to worry about political correctness, paints a picture in my mind of a very different kind of company. One where all the employees are nerds with limited personal skills who like it when everybody else is just like that, so that they can safely extend puberty by another year without their environment confronting them with the fact that it's really time to grow up. I'm not a woman (and I would agree that the society I live in is now trending a bit too much towards a matriarchy), but it seems to me that the main issue that women have with the geek-IT-culture is that they get tired of the immaturity in general. Sexism is just a major symptom, and often the last straw, which is why you hear about it more.
As for political correctness, it's mainly about personal communication skills. This is something that's just really difficult for everyone, and something that geeks find even more difficult than others. The key to good communication is to know your audience, and adapt to them. If your idea of communication is "I want to say whatever I want in whatever way that I want to say it, and those listening will have to adapt" then you've already lost. You can argue about whether that's right or not until you're blue in the face, but that's the way it is, that's the way Homo sapiens works. So next time you meet someone with different ideas of what is acceptable to say, or who seems to understand something very different from what you're saying, ask them questions, try to listen and try to understand the world they're living in. You don't have to make it yours, or agree with anything, but try. As a former no-social-skills nerd, I've learned a lot from that, and I've also found that those humans occupying the big blue room outside the basement are actually quite a varied and interesting bunch, maybe even more so than computers:-). And yes, that there are people who just have an axe to grind. Let them be, they usually have enough problems of their own.
"char" is translated as "aeichen", which isn't even a word in German.
It's just a typo, the German word for "character" is "Zeichen", and the A and Z keys are next to each other (on a German keyboard as well as an international one). I wonder why it's not been capitalised though, nouns in German are supposed to be. If you're going to translate things, go all the way...
Why try to use it as a Facebook replacement? It isn't designed to directly compete.
I'm not on G+ (or on Facebook), but from my perspective as an outside observer it seems to me like Facebook is IM with broadcast and shared history. It's used by teens the way they used to use MSN (and by adults the way teens used to use MSN), and you need an account to see anything. Google+ is Usenet 2.0, content is public, and it even seems mostly pre-Eternal September still. I'll go one step further and say that it's a good thing if Google+ isn't taking too many users from Facebook.
... because you can't do that now with a windows-based dell machine?
Well, that's what I tried to do...Ubuntu, not Debian. It didn't go so well.
My work laptop is a Latitude E6410 that came with Windows (Vista from Dell, replaced with XP by our IT department). It's their most expensive 14" Latitude, titanium shell and stuff, quite nice mechanically. It is officially certified for Ubuntu, albeit only for the 32-bit version of the OS. I got it about 1 1/2 years ago, and tried to install the then-current LTS, 10.04. It gave a blank screen on boot. Apparently there was some issue with the Intel video driver. 10.10 didn't work either, so I used the VESA driver for a while, and went through the kernel sources trying to isolate the problem, but failed (it's complicated code, and I don't know the hardware). After a couple of months, 11.04 came out, and there were some tweaks, and lo and behold, it started working. A few kernel updates later, it broke again. I'm still running 11.04 (an attempted upgrade to 11.10 hosed my system), but with an older kernel.
There were other issues: the touchpad wouldn't scroll, which turned out to be because the ALPS driver didn't recognise it. Dell eventually supplied a patch, which added a quirk to the ALPS driver to send a special byte sequence to the keypad that switches it into ImPS/2 compatibility mode. Now it does vertical scrolling, but not horizontal, and it still doesn't get recognised as a touchpad so you can't adjust the sensitivity or do any other configuration. Apparently this is considered a "fix". I've also had intermittent issues with the Broadcom wireless chip refusing to connect to anything, and I still get occasional random hangs that I've been unable to trace to anything but suspect may be wireless-related, since I get them more often in the confused spectrum at home than at work. Sometimes when I suspend the machine and then wake it up again, an additional battery is detected, which since it doesn't really exist shows up empty, causing the machine to go into an emergency shutdown. I mostly quit using suspend, but that isn't a fix either.
Now to be fair, the certification page has a disclaimer saying that it's only certified with the exact, 32-bit image that it came with if you ordered the machine with Ubuntu on it, and that it may not even boot with the normal Ubuntu that you download from the web. It also shows only one particular configuration that they're testing with, which has nVidia graphics. I'm not paying Canonical for support, so I have no right to expect anything from them. But it does read, right at the top "The Dell Latitude E6410 laptop has been awarded the status of Certified for Ubuntu". I'm not giving much weight to that statement anymore.
I switched to GNU/Linux 14 years ago mostly for practical reasons, it was more stable and more usable for me than Windows 98 was. Then I learnt about Free Software, and now I'm using it because it's Free and has a few key features that really help my productivity. But looking at my coworkers' screens, Windows has mostly caught up in terms of general quality, so that argument is gone, and it seems to me that Linux has actually got worse. Back in the late 90s when I started using it, quite a lot of hardware was not supported, but the stuff that was supported Just Worked, and the whole thing was rock solid. Now almost all hardware has some kind of support, but "supported" has grown to mean "works most of the time, any bugs may get fixed for some people in a couple of months' time if you're lucky". From a practical perspective, Ubuntu on Dell doesn't seem to be a very happy combination to me (my previous Dell, a Latitude D540, also had issues, although not as bad as the E6410). I'm planning to get a Thinkpad next time, on the theory that that seems to be what most kernel hackers are using, so that it should be well-supported (and it's good hardware). I don't think I'll be buying a Dell, not even with Ubuntu preloaded.
The invention of fertilizer allowed 6 billion people to be fed.
GM is what will allow us to continue feeding the planet as the population grows.
Well done to the people who invented fertiliser, and good luck to the genetic engineers. But it is, as we say in Dutch, mopping with the tap still running. Every time we engineer ourselves out of trouble, we procreate ourselves right back in*. At some point we'll have to figure out a way to limit the growth. We can then use our technology to improve quality rather than quantity. I'd have healthier, tastier, more varied and robust GM crops rather than just more of them and a larger population.
* Question: How are these activities distributed among Slashdotters and non-Slashdotters, and why? Bonus points if your answer includes a car analogy!
Technically, you're most likely using the taxpayers' money to conduct the research in the first place, so I find your argument that the publisher still gets exclusive rights to your work, hard to grasp.
I fully agree. As a publicly funded scientist, of course the results of my work (as in, the work done by me) belong to everyone, and so when I'm done, I want to share them with everybody. The problem is that before I can do so, I have to have the paper peer-reviewed and published to make sure it's up to scratch, and in the course of that, I have to give away the rights to share it with the people who paid for the research!
I don't want the copyright for myself (what am I going to do with it?) The only reason I want to have the copyright is so that I can distribute the paper under a free licence, so that anyone can benefit, rather than just the publisher, its shareholders, and whoever is rich enough to be able to afford the access fee.
One of the options they mention is to put the paper in an institutional repository (i.e. on a web server run by your university). Even Elsevier currently already allows you to put your final submission online yourself, so that shouldn't be a problem. This is not such a big step as it seems in that respect.
What I do very much like is the required use of the CC-BY licence if any processing fees are paid. To see why that is such a big deal, here's what e.g. Elsevier normally offers authors: 1) You write the paper, 2) we get a volunteer editor to look at it, 3) the volunteer editor gets some volunteer reviewers to review it, and you scientists go back and forth until the editor says that it's accepted, 4) you sign over your copyright to us, 5) we typeset it, 6) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays us for a subscription, and 7) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays a per-access fee. Recently, with all the Open Access discussion going on, they've added an option: 8) You pay a $3000 "handling fee" to cover our expenses, and we'll give access to anyone for free.
Note the catch: you the scientist do most of the work yourself, and pay the publisher for their part of the work, but the publisher still gets exclusive rights to your work! That seems grossly unfair to me. In this new policy, the publisher may still own the copyright even if they get paid, but with a CC-BY licence, everyone else essentially gets the same rights they do, so it's toothless. That is a step in the right direction.
Well, he's doing research on becoming a cyborg. The Borg didn't take off their gear before going to bed, and I can see how it just wouldn't be realistic if you could take your augmentations off whenever you wanted. And after all, glasses with built-in screens have been available for years now, so he would be rather behind the curve if he was simply wearing them occasionally.
I seem to recall a story about Steve Mann from many years ago (but can't find it any more), where he similarly bumped into society's expectations of what a human is supposed to be. He was refused entry to an airplane unless he turned off his wearable computer. He at least initially refused, arguing that since there was a heart monitor connected to it, turning it off could result in him having an undetected heart issue, so that turning it off meant risking his life.
It's not quite the same as here, as there were probably very valid safety grounds in that case, but it does show that the idea that a computer can be part of a person is still alien to us. At the same time, we are moving closer all the time to that scene in Accelerando where Manfred Macx is robbed of his computer and barely knows who he is anymore. Interesting times, and as you said, kudos to dr. Mann for pushing the envelope.
I'll play devil's advocate for a bit, since most comments so far seem to boil down to "everyone involved is an idiot", "this is not art" and/or "privacy, privacy, privacy!". I do think there is some room for the opposite point of view. From reading the article (I know, I know), it seems to me that he's been thinking about privacy, the lack thereof in our modern society, and its implications, for quite a while. Moreover, he's put his money where his mouth is and experimented on himself, and writes about his experiences. It's made me think about what it would be like to be watched all the time. I'm interested in surveillance and security and these things, but I'd always thought about them in general terms and in terms of consequences to society as a whole, and not applied it so personally. So at least I learned something from this keytweeter project he describes. And I'm now wondering what I look like as I'm typing this. Is his art at the level of Van Gogh or Picasso? Probably not, but it does have social relevance going for it. And it sparked a shitstorm online, which is exactly what art is supposed to do: spark discussion and make people think. Some of the 99% who never even think about how much of their lives is watched and recorded did so now. Mission accomplished.
As for expectations of privacy: I work in a city full of tourists, and it's pretty much impossible to go anywhere in the centre without being photographed by them. Many of those photographs probably end up on the web, with at least a time tag. I'm going to be in some of them. I don't like that, but I recognise that we can't go and forbid the tourists from taking pictures and putting them online, so I'll just have to live with it. This particular Apple store had a big glass front, and plenty of people inside taking pictures of anything and everything. If I'd ended up being photographed and published on the web as part of the exhibition, I would have thought it pretty cool to be part of this. Visiting an Apple store is not typically something that people try to keep private (and doing anything private in a busy store where anyone can walk in and look over your shoulder seems rather dumb to me), and the photographs were selected by the artist, who presumably would have left out anything sensitive (and did leave out the shots of the Apple tech back in Cupertino).
In the end, in my opinion it's a somewhat interesting art project that generated some valuable discussion, and the privacy consequences are a storm in a teacup. Apparently the Secret Service agreed with at least the latter, as they gave him back his stuff and closed the investigation without charging him with anything.
So it's a trade-off. How much must risk be reduced to make it possible to hire top quality astronauts? The claim of TFA is
that less can be spent reducing risk.
I agree with Zubrin in principle: in a rational world we'd accept a reasonable amount of risk, mourn the dead if and when they perish in our quest for knowledge, and keep exploring as long as the risk remained reasonable. But of course, our world is not rational.
Back in the 1980's, NASA announced that with the Space Shuttle space travel was now perfectly safe, and to prove the point, they selected a female, good-looking, mother-of-two teacher, and invited the world to watch as they put her in the space craft and launched it. Challenger exploded and Christa McAuliffe and the other crewmembers died, with hundreds of millions watching on prime time television.
It's difficult to put a monetary value on trust, and we don't know how NASA funding would have developed without the Challenger accident, but I think it's safe to say that NASA lost a good deal more than $350 million in that event, and that the consequences were much more severe than they would have been had the astronauts died in traffic accidents. Irrational as it is, the more public a (potential) death, the bigger the risk and the more expenses are warranted. And it doesn't get much more public than an exploding space craft.
I think the only way forward for NASA is to loudly and publicly accept that space exploration is inherently dangerous, and that they were wrong in thinking that they could make it safe enough to fly school teachers. And then ask the astronauts how much risk they'd be willing to accept, and work accordingly. But in reality, I think the SLS needs to fail first, and then they'll either start from scratch and taking more risks, or leave crewed space flight to the private sector entirely. I'm not expecting too much from NASA in the coming decade.
The fact is that the GPL restricts the free sharing that RMS was advocating for other creative works and uses the copyright law he often criticizes to do so.
How does the GPL restrict free sharing? I can share any software under the GPL with whomever I like, whenever I like. Yes, when I share it I have to include everything I got originally, including the source, but that doesn't keep me from sharing it any more than having to include say the BSD license text. I can even change it and share the changed version. Neat!
In Stallman's view, copyright law has some fortunate and some unfortunate consequences. A good consequence is that it's allowed him to construct a license that ensures that everyone who gets a piece of software distributed under its terms will not be dependent on the original maker of the software in any way. As a result of that, users are free to choose a supplier of surrounding services from the free market (Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Canonical, etc.), rather than being stuck with a single choice (Microsoft, Apple). Or if no satisfactory supplier can be found, they have the freedom to do what they want themselves. A bad consequence of current copyright law is for example that many out-of-print works are lost because copies deteriorate and no-one knows who owns the rights so new ones can't be made.
So, in the first case, copyright is used to promote the free market and it protects consumers, while in the second case it results in a piece of our culture being lost unnecessarily. Making use of copyright to do something good while criticising its bad uses is not a self-contradictory position.
So my takeaway from today is it's obviously okay to take GPL software and use it however I want, regardless of whether or not my use violates the terms defined within the GPL. RMS doesn't feel other licenses need to be honored, so there's no compelling reason to follow the terms of his licenses. So lets start using it in our commercial devices, modify it however we want and not bother releasing the source.
I don't think that that reasoning holds water. It's not about copyright law. Copyright is just a tool. RMS' key idea (as I interpret it) is that technology has given us the ability to copy information and knowledge and art and records (as in recordings of historical events), and that this copying allows us to share these things with everyone. He believes that the potential benefit of this sharing to humanity is so large that it outweighs anything else. After all, knowledge is power, and knowledge increases freedom. So, we must share as much information and knowledge and art and records as we can for the betterment of us all.
So what about software? Is taking a piece of software and distributing it in binary form sharing of information and knowledge? Well, what happens is that, if it's well-written software that fits the user's needs, it lets the user do something with less effort. It doesn't communicate anything about how it's done though, so that the user learns nothing, and it creates a dependency of the user on the software manufacturer. Once the user has chosen to use the binary-only software, they are no longer free to arbitrary change what they're doing, they have to ask the manufacturer to change the software.
Contrariwise, if the software is distributed with source code included, then this is a case of sharing information and knowledge. The user can learn how the software does things on their behalf, and is free to change how the software does things on their behalf. And that makes the world a little better. Again, this is not an opinion about copyright law. In one case following this ideal happens to entail violating copyright laws, while in another it doesn't. That just means that current copyright laws have some good and some bad effects, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't let people drive unsafe cars on the roads, or connect non-FCC certified equipment to the telephone network, or fly uninspected airplanes over other people's rooftops, so why should we let infected computers onto the Internet?
If it's clearly infected, you quarantine it and make sure all that can be accessed from that machine is instructions on how to remove the infection, updates for virus scanners, etc. Basic common sense.
Some of them might. Satellites need fuel to stay in the right place, and to keep themselves pointing in the right direction (solar panels at the Sun, antennas at the Earth). It's called station keeping. Sometimes otherwise functioning communications satellites run out of fuel, and end up being useless because they're pointing the wrong way. Refuelling them can give them a new life. If there's still fuel but the thrusters or reaction wheels break, you have the same problem. That might be fixed by swapping these out. Micrometeoroid damages your solar panel wiring? If it's on the outside, perhaps a flying soldering iron can fix it.
Obviously these are just ideas, you have to be able to get to the satellite first, and take up a fixed position relative to it even if it's rotating (see out-of-fuel above). That's what they're doing here. Then you have to grab it. There's some interesting work being done by Jon Goff and co. over at Altius Space Machines in essentially using static electricity to grab things in space, or electroadhesion. That seems pretty viable as well. Now we need satellites that are easier to fix up in space, or fancy tools to work on existing ones. All in all this is looking quite promising, although there's still a ways to go before we're sending robot mechanics up there.
In my mind, the request to drop NC/ND from CC is akin to asking the Open Source community to abolish GPL and use only BSD derived licences.
The GPL allows both commercial distribution and derivative works, so that's not a correct analogy. No-Derivatives is more like that Microsoft Shared Source licence that lets you look at the code but not change it, Share-Alike would be comparable to the GPL, and as far as I know there is no mainstream Free Software license that corresponds to Non-Commercial. BSD corresponds more or less to CC-BY I'd say.
Of course, this is all rough correspondences, and it's not clear that the same arguments apply to software and art anyway. I've seen RMS opinion pieces under a CC licence with the No-Derivatives clause actually, so I think he's fine with that clause at least.
I've seen very little discussion framed as "It will cost us X trillions to execute plan A and if we don't, ignoring it will cost Y trillions."
This appears to be mainly because we simply don't know very well what the consequences of climate change will be. Consider the distribution of species for example. We have maps of which species occur where, the fruits of our work in Species Distribution Modelling. It works like this: you take a bunch of maps of things that you assume affect the distribution of a particular species, say January and July temperatures and precipitation for some plant species. Next, you collect some observations of that species. Based on the observations, you derive a formula that computes the probability of the presence of the species in a certain location based on the environmental description. You then apply that formula to your environmental maps, and there's your distribution map. Apply the same formula to the output of a climate prediction model, and get a map of where the species will be in the future.
Sounds good, right? Well, it is pretty good compared to wild guesses especially if you have enough data, but the key is the formula (model) you use. Back in the late 1980's, we had models with simple ranges. If the temperature is in range, and the precipitation, and a few other things, then the area is suitable. We use fancier models now, with MaxEnt, which is based on information theory, being one of the best. But there are a lot of things that these models do not take into account. For example, species don't just appear somewhere when the climate becomes suitable, they have to move there from a place where they already are (and speeds may be limited, and there may be barriers). Also, species interact with each other, and an invading species may be beaten by the local population or push it aside. Animal behaviour may entail large-scale movement (e.g. bird migration). We're only just starting to model these things, their interactions, and many other intricate aspects of ecosystems.
And it turns out to be hard to model complex, highly interconnected, highly non-linear systems like nature. We're running into computational issues with models that are still much simpler than nature itself, there's never enough data, and there's a large degree of randomness in the system (for example, cranberries don't occur in The Netherlands, except on one island where a vat of them that fell off a ship once washed ashore and the seeds took; there's no predicting such events). Did you know that a simple food chain system of a predator, its prey, and the prey's prey is already complex enough to exhibit chaotic (in the mathematical sense) behaviour? Now compare that to a real food web with many more species, interactions with the abiotic environment, and human influence...
So is it all hopeless? No. We do have models that work fairly well in particular situations. We're getting more computational power, we're getting better methods, and we're getting more data. We can make broad predictions, and hopefully in the future will be able to make more detailed predictions as well. But there will always be limits to how much we can predict.
1) Assume Lance cheated - How wasn't he caught in the act for so long?
Drug testing is chemistry, not computer science. You don't just enumerate all the molecules in a blood or urine sample and see if anything bad is in there. You run it through some analysis machine (probably a GCMS or LCMS or something like that, I'm not familiar with the details) which gives you some indication of what's in there and in which amounts. If you're lucky, the incriminating substance is still in there in sufficient amounts for it to be detectable. You have to be very lucky though: human growth hormones remain detectable for a few hours after they're taken, EPO for a few days, while the performance enhancing effects remain for much longer. With blood doping, the athlete injects their own blood, so there's nothing to detect (well, preservatives, again if you're lucky). Hence out-of-competition testing, but that's not every day either. Then the doping makers are generally a step ahead of the hunters, IIRC EPO wasn't even detectable in the early years of Armstrong's successes. So, if you're professional about it (and "Professional" is Lance's middle name), you can dope and not get caught.
- How can all the technological innovation that went into his cycling be ignored? The wind-tunnel testing, the water-tank-in-frame, the unique bike designs, those all were serious efforts that AFAIK were unique, why spend that effort if you're already doping?
Because a professional athlete optimises everything, not just their red blood cell count. And because the competition is doping too.
- How were others not able to cheat as well as he did?
Because they weren't nearly as professional as Armstrong. They were being paid for sure, but Armstrong brought an enormous amount to the sport in terms of professional organisation. He controlled everything. Furthermore, he stayed at home for most of the year, showing up only for the Tour de France. Others did more races, and were tested more frequently by other nations' doping hunters. Yes, this matters, think of the Spanish prosecutors deciding that it wasn't worth it to continue Operacion Puerto (a big doping scandal with dozens of athletes, mainly Spanish, involved). Also, Armstrong actually financed the purchase of some specialist detection equipment (I think for the UCI) at some point. Perhaps he was using something that couldn't be detected by these machines, while what the others were taking was detectable with them? Still, I think it's mainly that he was just better at it than the others.
- How was he not caught cheating in 2009 when he placed 3rd after not racing for 2 years? Wouldn't he be expected to be a total doper taking a standing that high after being retired for so long?
IIRC, he ran a couple marathons, did some triathlonning, placed second in a long-distance mountain bike race, and he had a full winter and spring season to prepare. He wasn't exactly idle in those two years, and he had a lot of training years to build on. Also, he only ended up on the podium because of a peloton break in one of the early stages (fall or wind, don't remember) where he was in the front with a lot of other favourites in the back. He then had his team mates open up the gap as much as possible, allowing him to make up a good chunk of time.
- How can the fact that he trained for only 1 race each year, the Tour de France, be ignored as explaining his stellar performance? Most other competition would do more racing per year, Lance focused like a laser beam on the Tour de France. How can this not help explain his insane performances?
Actually, in most sports, it's very difficult to perform at your best without having enough races under your belt for the season (track & field records are rarely run in spring for example!). You need the full-intensity workout that only a race can provide. Some riders are capable of doing that in t
As far as I know, you're correct; it can probably be done, but not easily. However, I've never considered it a problem. On my development machine (a laptop, not a big workstation) I just have PostgreSQL running and whenever I need to try something new, I just fire up PgAdmin and create a new database. Once I'm done or if I mess up, I just drop the database again. Instead of a directory and a file name, I have a port number and a database name.
All the users and ownerships and directories are handled by the package manager and the database, so setting this up was trivial. If I didn't have root, I would have needed the sysadmin to install PostgreSQL through the package manager, and then make me a superuser account (or just let me sudo to the postgres user so I could do it myself, or set up a separate cluster for me if there were other users wishing to use PostgreSQL on the same machine). I've done that too in the past with a machine I didn't even have a shell account on, and it worked fine.
That's right on my head you insensitive clod!
From my foreign perspective, it seems that American politicians often can't actually do that much. Let me explain that.
Here in The Netherlands, the most important elections are for our Lower House. The people vote for any of a range of political parties, and the seats get divided based on the vote share. Then, the largest party negotiates with other parties to form a coalition large enough to have a majority in the Lower House (and the Senate, although it's of less importance), and they together write a plan for the next four years and form an administration. The leader of the largest party becomes the Prime Minister, and the others contribute some ministers as well.
As a result of this, the executive branch is always backed by a majority in the legislative branch, enough to decide anything except changes to the constitution. Of course, this is counterbalanced by the fact that the administration is a collaboration of parties that partially disagree with each other, so that the common plan is a compromise that balances the various concerns. Sometimes parties are not willing to compromise, and they end up in the opposition as a result, with little opportunity to further their cause. Thus, there is an incentive to cooperate.
Looking at this chart of the various administrations and corresponding party representations reveals a general pattern of aligned legislative bodies and administrations especially in the early years, but more recently a lot of situations where it's not so clear-cut. For an administration to be really free to act, it needs the Presidency, a majority in the House of Representatives, and a majority in the Senate. Starting from the 63rd Congress on the page linked above (the last 100 years), I count 22 2-year periods in which there was no party agreement between the three, and 28 in which there was. It seems to me that it's actually pretty difficult to get anything done for an American administration.
Of course, this can still work if the other party is willing to cooperate on things they don't fully agree with in exchange for favours on other things. Historically, that seems to have gone pretty well. But the American political environment has been getting more and more hostile and negative, and now parties seem to be happy to block things that are in the interest of the nation just to keep the other party from getting the credits for them. Broad strategic filibustering has upped the Senate requirements for getting anything done to a 3/5 majority (which hasn't occurred since the 1970's). As a result, we see things blocked for the political advantage of being able to attack the opposition over not achieving it, unless someone is willing to contribute enough campaign funds. Meanwhile, the nation is falling apart, but the politicians are too busy recording attack ads to do something about it.
Final note: our system isn't perfect either. In the last elections we had five parties (Socialists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Populists) all come out at about the same amount of seats. The resulting ChrDem-Lib-Pop coalition had difficulty agreeing on a plan, and broke up prematurely when the Populists backed out of the 2013 budget negotiations. So it's back to the polls in September, and meanwhile no important decisions will be taken unless there's a majority amongst the existing representatives. The 2013 budget was agreed on by such an ad-hoc majority, who recognised that something had to be done and acted in the best interest of the nation. It has left our government hamstrung though, and current polls have the leftmost and the rightmost of the large parties leading, so it doesn't look like the situation will improve soon...
I seriously doubt that. With modern media and the Internet all the parts of the government are more visible than they've ever been. Yes, there are things that governments today won't tell their citizens about, but those have always been there. It's just that the citizens now know about the existence of these things at all, whereas in earlier times the citizens did what they did in their homes and the politicians did what they did in their capitols and there was much less communication. And so, modern governments seem less transparent, while the citizens now actually know more about what their government does than ever before.
Not everybody is always aware of the potential future consequences of their actions. I'm sure Ernie Ball didn't realise what they were getting into when they chose to use Microsoft software. They thought they just bought some software, but didn't realise that they were losing quite a bit of freedom. When confronted with that reality, they promptly got rid of the software and regained their freedom.
I'm one of those who doesn't understand. Would you please explain? It seems to me that if I'm a user of a program of which I don't have the freedom to use it in whatever way I like, the freedom to share it, and of which I don't have the source and the freedom to change it as I like, that I'm then less free a user than if I do have all those freedoms. I really don't see that the fact that the program is free does anything except guarantee my freedom as a user.
Perhaps you are saying that refusing to use proprietary software reduces the amount of choice I have? That's true, but it's just a matter of values. Stallman and other free software advocates simply say that it's in your best long-term interests to value freedom over convenience. You apparently disagree. It's difficult to argue these things.
The apparent contradiction goes away when you distinguish between short term and long term freedom. There is a general pattern of users getting quite a lot of freedom from smaller software makers initially, but that freedom being taken away as market share grows, and disappearing almost completely when a monopoly or oligopoly has been achieved. What I see people arguing for is to give up some short term freedom to avoid losing much more freedom in the long term.
In the case of games, the small game developers of the 1980's and early 1990's used to give users (players) the right to share the first couple of levels of their proprietary games with their friends. Games had no copy protection, or if they did it consisted of you having to type in a few random characters from the manual. You could play on your own machine in the privacy of your home, or on your own local network with friends. When you were done playing, you could resell the game (and the manual). Gamers liked this freedom, used it, and had lots of fun playing proprietary games.
A lot of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies later, and we have a market that is controlled by a few huge entities, who sell locked consoles (and take away features after you've bought it), who deliver their games with DRM systems that border on malware, who require an Internet connection even for single-player games, who collect data on your game-playing habits, and who take away your right to resell the games you bought.
Perhaps, if gamers back then had decided that they were only going to play Free games, that would have become the dominant paradigm, and these excesses wouldn't have occurred, or at least would have been exceptions rather than the rule. We'll never know, but I do think that sometimes giving up a little immediate freedom can help in the long term.
I read the article (I know! But there were no comments yet, so what am I to do?) and, not having understood much of it, did some reading to try and understand what's going on here. I think I've more or less figured it out, so I'm attempting a simple explanation here. Semiconducting physics nerds, please fix this for me as appropriate.
Atoms consist of a positively charged nucleus, surrounded by one or more shells of electrons. Electrons farther away from the nucleus have more energy than ones closer in. Put a bunch of those atoms together, and there are two things that can happen. In some materials, the electrons in the higher energy states are so "far away" from the nucleus in energetic terms, that they can easily move from one atom to the next. These materials are conductors. In other materials, there is a big gap (the band gap) between the highest "bound" (valence band) energy state, and the minimum energy state (the conduction band) needed to move between atoms. So, the electrons can't move away from their nuclei, and these materials are electrical insulators. Then there are some materials that have an intermediate sized gap between stuck valence states and free-to-move conduction states, and these are called semiconductors.
A solar cell works by the photoelectric effect: when an incoming photon (e.g. sunlight) hits an electron in a semiconductor, the electron absorbs the photon and its energy increases. If the photon is energetic enough, this will move the electron from the valence band to the conduction band. This also creates a positively charged "hole", where the electron was before. The electron and the hole attract each other because they have opposite charge. Left to their own devices, they'll just recombine, so in a solar cell, an electric field is applied. This moves the electron in one direction, and the hole in the opposite direction (because of the opposite charge). This moving electrical charge is otherwise known as current flow, and so we have a working solar cell.
So how do we make an electric field? In normal photovoltaic cells, this is done by doping (adding small impurities, typically boron and phosphorus to) the semiconductor. Since these have less or more electrons in their outer shells, they create areas in the semiconductor with more electrons or more holes, which creates a charge difference between them (a P-N junction). This charge difference creates an electric field, which will whisk away any electrons and holes created within it. Apparently, this doping process only works for relatively expensive semiconductors however.
So, if I understand correctly, what these researchers have done is to apply an external electric field, by applying a small voltage across the whole thing. This puts a charge on the contacts on each side of the cell, which draws electrons in the semiconductor one way and holes the other way, thus creating a P-N junction without doping. The problem is that normally the construction of the contacts keeps their electric field from propagating into the semiconductor, so that it doesn't generate a good P-N junction. Apparently they've overcome this by changing the geometry of one of them, in two different ways for two different alternative semiconductors. And then they have a version in which the external voltage is supplied by the cell itself, making it self-contained.
So is this useful? Well, conspicuously absent from the article is any mention of efficiency. So I'd speculate that this mainly allows the production of low-efficiency solar cells at lower prices than before, rather than getting more output from your roof. But if this makes solar cells cheap enough to just blanket anything and everything with them, that could still be useful of course.
I agree that it's childish, and that this particular debug value is not necessarily sexist. It's just a body part. But I think that Kate6 was referring to the general atmosphere that these kinds of jokes are a result of. I've worked on a project in the past that involved an IT company, and I spent quite a bit of time in their office working with them. They have about a 50/50 mix of men and women, mostly in their late 20's, early 30's, new parents or soon-to-be parents. Over lunch, people talk about kids and related issues, news, sports, or even on occasion technology. I'm sure that nobody there would have even thought of naming a debug value like this. Not thought of it and suppressed it in the name of professionalism, it just wouldn't have occurred to them.
Reading all these +5 comments about how women just have to stop being so wimpy, and about how a good working environment is one where you can be yourself without having to worry about political correctness, paints a picture in my mind of a very different kind of company. One where all the employees are nerds with limited personal skills who like it when everybody else is just like that, so that they can safely extend puberty by another year without their environment confronting them with the fact that it's really time to grow up. I'm not a woman (and I would agree that the society I live in is now trending a bit too much towards a matriarchy), but it seems to me that the main issue that women have with the geek-IT-culture is that they get tired of the immaturity in general. Sexism is just a major symptom, and often the last straw, which is why you hear about it more.
As for political correctness, it's mainly about personal communication skills. This is something that's just really difficult for everyone, and something that geeks find even more difficult than others. The key to good communication is to know your audience, and adapt to them. If your idea of communication is "I want to say whatever I want in whatever way that I want to say it, and those listening will have to adapt" then you've already lost. You can argue about whether that's right or not until you're blue in the face, but that's the way it is, that's the way Homo sapiens works. So next time you meet someone with different ideas of what is acceptable to say, or who seems to understand something very different from what you're saying, ask them questions, try to listen and try to understand the world they're living in. You don't have to make it yours, or agree with anything, but try. As a former no-social-skills nerd, I've learned a lot from that, and I've also found that those humans occupying the big blue room outside the basement are actually quite a varied and interesting bunch, maybe even more so than computers :-). And yes, that there are people who just have an axe to grind. Let them be, they usually have enough problems of their own.
Oh, you're right of course, thanks! I'm still betting it's a typo though :-).
"char" is translated as "aeichen", which isn't even a word in German.
It's just a typo, the German word for "character" is "Zeichen", and the A and Z keys are next to each other (on a German keyboard as well as an international one). I wonder why it's not been capitalised though, nouns in German are supposed to be. If you're going to translate things, go all the way...
Why try to use it as a Facebook replacement? It isn't designed to directly compete.
I'm not on G+ (or on Facebook), but from my perspective as an outside observer it seems to me like Facebook is IM with broadcast and shared history. It's used by teens the way they used to use MSN (and by adults the way teens used to use MSN), and you need an account to see anything. Google+ is Usenet 2.0, content is public, and it even seems mostly pre-Eternal September still. I'll go one step further and say that it's a good thing if Google+ isn't taking too many users from Facebook.
... because you can't do that now with a windows-based dell machine?
Well, that's what I tried to do...Ubuntu, not Debian. It didn't go so well.
My work laptop is a Latitude E6410 that came with Windows (Vista from Dell, replaced with XP by our IT department). It's their most expensive 14" Latitude, titanium shell and stuff, quite nice mechanically. It is officially certified for Ubuntu, albeit only for the 32-bit version of the OS. I got it about 1 1/2 years ago, and tried to install the then-current LTS, 10.04. It gave a blank screen on boot. Apparently there was some issue with the Intel video driver. 10.10 didn't work either, so I used the VESA driver for a while, and went through the kernel sources trying to isolate the problem, but failed (it's complicated code, and I don't know the hardware). After a couple of months, 11.04 came out, and there were some tweaks, and lo and behold, it started working. A few kernel updates later, it broke again. I'm still running 11.04 (an attempted upgrade to 11.10 hosed my system), but with an older kernel.
There were other issues: the touchpad wouldn't scroll, which turned out to be because the ALPS driver didn't recognise it. Dell eventually supplied a patch, which added a quirk to the ALPS driver to send a special byte sequence to the keypad that switches it into ImPS/2 compatibility mode. Now it does vertical scrolling, but not horizontal, and it still doesn't get recognised as a touchpad so you can't adjust the sensitivity or do any other configuration. Apparently this is considered a "fix". I've also had intermittent issues with the Broadcom wireless chip refusing to connect to anything, and I still get occasional random hangs that I've been unable to trace to anything but suspect may be wireless-related, since I get them more often in the confused spectrum at home than at work. Sometimes when I suspend the machine and then wake it up again, an additional battery is detected, which since it doesn't really exist shows up empty, causing the machine to go into an emergency shutdown. I mostly quit using suspend, but that isn't a fix either.
Now to be fair, the certification page has a disclaimer saying that it's only certified with the exact, 32-bit image that it came with if you ordered the machine with Ubuntu on it, and that it may not even boot with the normal Ubuntu that you download from the web. It also shows only one particular configuration that they're testing with, which has nVidia graphics. I'm not paying Canonical for support, so I have no right to expect anything from them. But it does read, right at the top "The Dell Latitude E6410 laptop has been awarded the status of Certified for Ubuntu". I'm not giving much weight to that statement anymore.
I switched to GNU/Linux 14 years ago mostly for practical reasons, it was more stable and more usable for me than Windows 98 was. Then I learnt about Free Software, and now I'm using it because it's Free and has a few key features that really help my productivity. But looking at my coworkers' screens, Windows has mostly caught up in terms of general quality, so that argument is gone, and it seems to me that Linux has actually got worse. Back in the late 90s when I started using it, quite a lot of hardware was not supported, but the stuff that was supported Just Worked, and the whole thing was rock solid. Now almost all hardware has some kind of support, but "supported" has grown to mean "works most of the time, any bugs may get fixed for some people in a couple of months' time if you're lucky". From a practical perspective, Ubuntu on Dell doesn't seem to be a very happy combination to me (my previous Dell, a Latitude D540, also had issues, although not as bad as the E6410). I'm planning to get a Thinkpad next time, on the theory that that seems to be what most kernel hackers are using, so that it should be well-supported (and it's good hardware). I don't think I'll be buying a Dell, not even with Ubuntu preloaded.
The invention of fertilizer allowed 6 billion people to be fed.
GM is what will allow us to continue feeding the planet as the population grows.
Well done to the people who invented fertiliser, and good luck to the genetic engineers. But it is, as we say in Dutch, mopping with the tap still running. Every time we engineer ourselves out of trouble, we procreate ourselves right back in*. At some point we'll have to figure out a way to limit the growth. We can then use our technology to improve quality rather than quantity. I'd have healthier, tastier, more varied and robust GM crops rather than just more of them and a larger population.
* Question: How are these activities distributed among Slashdotters and non-Slashdotters, and why? Bonus points if your answer includes a car analogy!
Technically, you're most likely using the taxpayers' money to conduct the research in the first place, so I find your argument that the publisher still gets exclusive rights to your work, hard to grasp.
I fully agree. As a publicly funded scientist, of course the results of my work (as in, the work done by me) belong to everyone, and so when I'm done, I want to share them with everybody. The problem is that before I can do so, I have to have the paper peer-reviewed and published to make sure it's up to scratch, and in the course of that, I have to give away the rights to share it with the people who paid for the research!
I don't want the copyright for myself (what am I going to do with it?) The only reason I want to have the copyright is so that I can distribute the paper under a free licence, so that anyone can benefit, rather than just the publisher, its shareholders, and whoever is rich enough to be able to afford the access fee.
One of the options they mention is to put the paper in an institutional repository (i.e. on a web server run by your university). Even Elsevier currently already allows you to put your final submission online yourself, so that shouldn't be a problem. This is not such a big step as it seems in that respect.
What I do very much like is the required use of the CC-BY licence if any processing fees are paid. To see why that is such a big deal, here's what e.g. Elsevier normally offers authors: 1) You write the paper, 2) we get a volunteer editor to look at it, 3) the volunteer editor gets some volunteer reviewers to review it, and you scientists go back and forth until the editor says that it's accepted, 4) you sign over your copyright to us, 5) we typeset it, 6) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays us for a subscription, and 7) we give electronic and/or paper copies of your article to anyone who pays a per-access fee. Recently, with all the Open Access discussion going on, they've added an option: 8) You pay a $3000 "handling fee" to cover our expenses, and we'll give access to anyone for free.
Note the catch: you the scientist do most of the work yourself, and pay the publisher for their part of the work, but the publisher still gets exclusive rights to your work! That seems grossly unfair to me. In this new policy, the publisher may still own the copyright even if they get paid, but with a CC-BY licence, everyone else essentially gets the same rights they do, so it's toothless. That is a step in the right direction.
Well, he's doing research on becoming a cyborg. The Borg didn't take off their gear before going to bed, and I can see how it just wouldn't be realistic if you could take your augmentations off whenever you wanted. And after all, glasses with built-in screens have been available for years now, so he would be rather behind the curve if he was simply wearing them occasionally.
I seem to recall a story about Steve Mann from many years ago (but can't find it any more), where he similarly bumped into society's expectations of what a human is supposed to be. He was refused entry to an airplane unless he turned off his wearable computer. He at least initially refused, arguing that since there was a heart monitor connected to it, turning it off could result in him having an undetected heart issue, so that turning it off meant risking his life.
It's not quite the same as here, as there were probably very valid safety grounds in that case, but it does show that the idea that a computer can be part of a person is still alien to us. At the same time, we are moving closer all the time to that scene in Accelerando where Manfred Macx is robbed of his computer and barely knows who he is anymore. Interesting times, and as you said, kudos to dr. Mann for pushing the envelope.
I'll play devil's advocate for a bit, since most comments so far seem to boil down to "everyone involved is an idiot", "this is not art" and/or "privacy, privacy, privacy!". I do think there is some room for the opposite point of view. From reading the article (I know, I know), it seems to me that he's been thinking about privacy, the lack thereof in our modern society, and its implications, for quite a while. Moreover, he's put his money where his mouth is and experimented on himself, and writes about his experiences. It's made me think about what it would be like to be watched all the time. I'm interested in surveillance and security and these things, but I'd always thought about them in general terms and in terms of consequences to society as a whole, and not applied it so personally. So at least I learned something from this keytweeter project he describes. And I'm now wondering what I look like as I'm typing this. Is his art at the level of Van Gogh or Picasso? Probably not, but it does have social relevance going for it. And it sparked a shitstorm online, which is exactly what art is supposed to do: spark discussion and make people think. Some of the 99% who never even think about how much of their lives is watched and recorded did so now. Mission accomplished.
As for expectations of privacy: I work in a city full of tourists, and it's pretty much impossible to go anywhere in the centre without being photographed by them. Many of those photographs probably end up on the web, with at least a time tag. I'm going to be in some of them. I don't like that, but I recognise that we can't go and forbid the tourists from taking pictures and putting them online, so I'll just have to live with it. This particular Apple store had a big glass front, and plenty of people inside taking pictures of anything and everything. If I'd ended up being photographed and published on the web as part of the exhibition, I would have thought it pretty cool to be part of this. Visiting an Apple store is not typically something that people try to keep private (and doing anything private in a busy store where anyone can walk in and look over your shoulder seems rather dumb to me), and the photographs were selected by the artist, who presumably would have left out anything sensitive (and did leave out the shots of the Apple tech back in Cupertino).
In the end, in my opinion it's a somewhat interesting art project that generated some valuable discussion, and the privacy consequences are a storm in a teacup. Apparently the Secret Service agreed with at least the latter, as they gave him back his stuff and closed the investigation without charging him with anything.
So it's a trade-off. How much must risk be reduced to make it possible to hire top quality astronauts? The claim of TFA is that less can be spent reducing risk.
I agree with Zubrin in principle: in a rational world we'd accept a reasonable amount of risk, mourn the dead if and when they perish in our quest for knowledge, and keep exploring as long as the risk remained reasonable. But of course, our world is not rational.
Back in the 1980's, NASA announced that with the Space Shuttle space travel was now perfectly safe, and to prove the point, they selected a female, good-looking, mother-of-two teacher, and invited the world to watch as they put her in the space craft and launched it. Challenger exploded and Christa McAuliffe and the other crewmembers died, with hundreds of millions watching on prime time television.
It's difficult to put a monetary value on trust, and we don't know how NASA funding would have developed without the Challenger accident, but I think it's safe to say that NASA lost a good deal more than $350 million in that event, and that the consequences were much more severe than they would have been had the astronauts died in traffic accidents. Irrational as it is, the more public a (potential) death, the bigger the risk and the more expenses are warranted. And it doesn't get much more public than an exploding space craft.
I think the only way forward for NASA is to loudly and publicly accept that space exploration is inherently dangerous, and that they were wrong in thinking that they could make it safe enough to fly school teachers. And then ask the astronauts how much risk they'd be willing to accept, and work accordingly. But in reality, I think the SLS needs to fail first, and then they'll either start from scratch and taking more risks, or leave crewed space flight to the private sector entirely. I'm not expecting too much from NASA in the coming decade.
The fact is that the GPL restricts the free sharing that RMS was advocating for other creative works and uses the copyright law he often criticizes to do so.
How does the GPL restrict free sharing? I can share any software under the GPL with whomever I like, whenever I like. Yes, when I share it I have to include everything I got originally, including the source, but that doesn't keep me from sharing it any more than having to include say the BSD license text. I can even change it and share the changed version. Neat!
In Stallman's view, copyright law has some fortunate and some unfortunate consequences. A good consequence is that it's allowed him to construct a license that ensures that everyone who gets a piece of software distributed under its terms will not be dependent on the original maker of the software in any way. As a result of that, users are free to choose a supplier of surrounding services from the free market (Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Canonical, etc.), rather than being stuck with a single choice (Microsoft, Apple). Or if no satisfactory supplier can be found, they have the freedom to do what they want themselves. A bad consequence of current copyright law is for example that many out-of-print works are lost because copies deteriorate and no-one knows who owns the rights so new ones can't be made.
So, in the first case, copyright is used to promote the free market and it protects consumers, while in the second case it results in a piece of our culture being lost unnecessarily. Making use of copyright to do something good while criticising its bad uses is not a self-contradictory position.
So my takeaway from today is it's obviously okay to take GPL software and use it however I want, regardless of whether or not my use violates the terms defined within the GPL. RMS doesn't feel other licenses need to be honored, so there's no compelling reason to follow the terms of his licenses. So lets start using it in our commercial devices, modify it however we want and not bother releasing the source.
I don't think that that reasoning holds water. It's not about copyright law. Copyright is just a tool. RMS' key idea (as I interpret it) is that technology has given us the ability to copy information and knowledge and art and records (as in recordings of historical events), and that this copying allows us to share these things with everyone. He believes that the potential benefit of this sharing to humanity is so large that it outweighs anything else. After all, knowledge is power, and knowledge increases freedom. So, we must share as much information and knowledge and art and records as we can for the betterment of us all.
So what about software? Is taking a piece of software and distributing it in binary form sharing of information and knowledge? Well, what happens is that, if it's well-written software that fits the user's needs, it lets the user do something with less effort. It doesn't communicate anything about how it's done though, so that the user learns nothing, and it creates a dependency of the user on the software manufacturer. Once the user has chosen to use the binary-only software, they are no longer free to arbitrary change what they're doing, they have to ask the manufacturer to change the software.
Contrariwise, if the software is distributed with source code included, then this is a case of sharing information and knowledge. The user can learn how the software does things on their behalf, and is free to change how the software does things on their behalf. And that makes the world a little better. Again, this is not an opinion about copyright law. In one case following this ideal happens to entail violating copyright laws, while in another it doesn't. That just means that current copyright laws have some good and some bad effects, nothing more.