If you have administrative access to confidential information systems at a publicly traded company, they could quite reasonably interpret their obligations under Sarbanes-Oxley as requiring them to revoke this the moment they know you're leaving. Not everyone does interpret it this way, but depending on how jittery they are about their investors, some companies play it extremely strict to make sure they don't piss off the SEC. Some specific industries also have strict information control regulations and laws with severe penalties. HIPAA comes to mind, as well as the various regulated financial industries. If your company does any classified work for the government, it's understandable they'd be a bit paranoid.
Don't take it personally. If something happens in those two weeks (and that would be a perfect time for someone else to do something and blame it on you) even if nobody can prove you had anything to do with it, there are plenty of ways that can expose them to liability that dwarfs the cost of paying you for two weeks. It's just business, and being risk-averse.
Would you call sickle-cell anemia a defect? We know that one varies with ethnicity. Specifically, ethnicities that come from parts of the world where malaria is prevalent have it in high concentration, because a single sickle-cell gene offers some resistance to the disease, but having two of them is crippling even with life-long intense medical care, and fatal otherwise.
Calling it a defect isn't a comment on the quality of the ethnicities in which it is present, just a recognition that evolutionary pressures in different parts of the world have caused some populations to tolerate moderate levels of genes that yield proteins that are not optimal for their primary task, due to side effects that may or may not harm the person in other ways, depending on other factors.
People are treating this like there's a "smart gene". That's not at all the case. All they've done is identify a genetic defect which tends to lower the IQ of people who have this defect. They don't know the mechanism, and they still have a wide range, so it's probably one of many factors that is meaningless in isolation. Testing a particular living person for it wouldn't tell you anything useful about their intelligence.
So, what about potential people who do not yet have an intelligence that can be tested? Well, it turns out that IGF2R is a very, very special gene for other reasons. There are certain genes that are "imprinted" in sexual reproduction. You might wonder why, with all the mutations and screwups that nature seems to allow, we don't see female mammals occasionally giving birth to their own clones, from meiosis that doesn't go as planned. Well, inheriting two of the same chromosome is almost always fatal because of these imprinted genes. With imprinted genes, genes are expressed if and only if they come from one particular parent. IGF2 is expressed exclusively from the father. IGF2R is expressed exclusively from the mother. The upshot of this is that while you could use this to discriminate among egg donors, using it to discriminate among sperm donors would be useless. As the mechanism that causes the correllation is still unknown, and ova are in much shorter supply than sperm, people are unlikely to be terribly selective about it in ova. Given all the other things we can test for, it's unlikely people would make a sperm decision based on how smart the grandsons of their designer daughters would be. If we're assuming babies with pre-selected genetic makeup, the next generation could do the same, rendering the decision moot.
This is a commercial product, so it's clearly beyond the "research" phase. Sounds more like "analysis" to me. I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince twelve jurors of that.
It wasn't just a critique. He posted a suggestion that someone stage getting arrested for the purpose of getting a campus police officer in trouble. Obviously, context is key, but in the absence of any contextual information to the contrary, it sounds like the school's response was appropriate, assuming of course that it was otherwise consistent with their policies.
Except that patent clerk was properly trained (his career having been sabotaged by a vengeful professor), his ideas were theoretical (rather than an apparent extremely profitable working prototype that contradicts everything we know), and his ideas filled a theoretical void that everyone knew needed to be filled by something.
a) An MIT EE dropout who advertises his irrelevant association with Harvard turns physics on his head and has a working prototype that generates incredibly cheap energy.
b) Yet another cheap energy fraud/error/delusion.
I'd be thrilled if Occam's razor was wrong this time around, but this whole thing reads exactly like every other cheap energy scam/hoax/error in history.
I'm pretty sure the Speaker of the House is not going to go into a deep analysis of the world energy market on his blog, so I can't blame him for asking the rhetorical question. I think he's trying to get more people interested in what the government is doing, so they'll be paying attention when they're discussing these things in the near future, which is a cause I applaud, left of Mao though I am at times.
On a completely unrelated note, I have some criticisms (positive and negative) of your answers to the question. This is a politics article, so it can't be but so off-topic.
NIMBY environmentalists on the local level.
I tend not to refer to these people as environmentalists at all. I like to think of myself as a mild environmentalist. I've built trails in the wilderness, and the first thing they tell you is that you're going to completely annihilate a 3-foot wide by X mile long patch of wilderness, so that people don't wreak havoc on several square miles. Rational environmentalists understand this principle, and are careful to distinguish between times when concentrated impact is a benefit and when it is not. If environmental opposition merely moves the problem and increases inconvenience and overhead, it's ultimately worse for the environment. If the refinery is going to be built somewhere, you might as well build it where the least amount of fuel and other resources will need to be spent to move it to where it is going to be consumed. As recent evidence shows, petroleum has fairly resilient demand in light of rising prices, so the added cost of refining overseas doesn't really change the amount consumed.
Federal enviro regulators who have no idea how jobs or how exactly the money that gets direct deposited into their accounts every month is generated
Actually, the EPA generally takes a very strict economic view about such things. If you're wondering, your life is worth $3.7 million to them. This is higher than the number the FAA uses, but when you die in a plane crash you don't have years of cancer treatments to pay for before or mysterious degenerative nerve diseases that disrupt your entire family, so this isn't really unreasonable.
Where it starts getting messy is with Endangered Species protections. The problem with endangered species protections is that the penalties are often suffered by people who had little to do with creating the problem in the first place. I don't think it's unjust, as it generally does accomplish what it sets out to do, and what it sets out to do (protect biodiversity) is a decent proxy for overall environmental health (think of each species as a canary tuned to a different potential threat), but it's unfair in that it kicks in only for the latecomers.
Basically, the law generally says you can do whatever you want until you hit certain triggers, and then suddenly everything changes. Supposedly this is a simpler system than attempting to account for every molecule of mercury, but in practice large companies treat the fines as a cost of doing business while the overhead of compliance swallows up smaller companies. I first learned of the idea to auction pollution rights from a Republican economics professor that I vehemently disagree with on many social issues, but I think it's wonderful. The popularly elected government can decide how much environmental damage we're willing to tolerate, the (hopefully objective) scientists can interpret that into quantities of various pollutants and other destructive activity, and then the market equilibrates, favoring constant innovation in environmentally-friendly industry, as opposed to merely taking advantage of innovations that are handed to them, or going and doing research only when expensive new legislation or regulation looms on the horizon.
Unions for treating investors like the enemy rather than their best friend
Investors have been screwing labor since the dawn of time, to the long-term detriment of us all. Unions are a sorely-needed countervailing
Several nations already do this with AIDS drugs, and much like Taiwan, only after negotiations fail. This is a perfect example of the perversion of the modern US patent system. The patent system is designed to encourage innovators to share as much knowledge as possible for the benefit of everyone. If patent holders want to play chicken with sovereign nations over matters of global security, they can expect this kind of thing to happen.
Freedom wireless made enemies of Cingular and Sprint? Wow. Either they're trying to steal the business for themselves, or they're about to be in a world of hurt. Given that they named Cingular as a defendant in one of their cases, I'm guessing the latter.
I've had moderately severe attention deficit disorder since second grade. While the root cause seems to be genetic, I blame the severity of it on years of television with 3 or 4 blocks of a minute and a half of 15 to 30 second ads per half hour on children's programming. Ads, like this damn animated Yahoo ad at the top of my screen right now (I'm not on a machine with adblock) try as hard as possible to break my concentration on whatever I actually care about. Even as I type this it's slowing me down.
There. I just scrolled it off the screen. Much better. I'm installing adblock on this machine right now.
Every generation, despite and sometimes because of its best intentions, breaks its children in unprecedented ways.
Oh, so YOU are the one responsible for the millions of people with easily treatable psychiatric conditions who do not seek professional help. YOU are the one telling them that their problems with loving and working are an integral part of their identity, reinforcing their belief that they will never be normal, that they are fundamentally defective. YOU are the one hiding the well-understood biological factors, leaving patients with nothing more than murky definitions full of weak intensifiers and DSM criteria including phrases like "five or more of the following", making them question whether they have a condition that's understood well enough to be treated.
There's actually a great significance to this. When you can diagnose something by a blood test, people think of it as a medical problem. Most people still don't think of psychiatry as a medical field, and think of psychiatric problems as indivisible from a person's identity. This will be a huge step towards helping people recognize the medical nature of treating psychiatric problems, and remove the stigma of seeking treatment. Anxiety disorders tend to exhibit positive feedback, so catching and treating them early, before they're so severe that friends and family are hauling you in for treatment, is critical.
Testing will never give you bug-free software. Ever.
Only formal verification of the source code and the entire toolchain will do that.
You're right about the economic cost-benefit analysis. Most people would rather have MS word as it is than a formally-verified pico for the same price. For many purposes, I would too.
as fair use isn't codified, there would be as many definitions of it as there are consumers
Actually, fair use *is* established in law. Specifically, it's established in case law, the salient points of which strike me as somewhat less arcane than acts of Congress.
There seems to be a growing trend of pretending that the judiciary is *not* one of three equal branches of government that check and balance each other's powers. The term "strict construction" is ironically accurate, as they construct a strictness over the judiciary that was never written in the Constitution.
I hear all this talk of Google making an OS. I think what Google has realized is that desktop users really don't care. Their OS is a web browser. Sun more or less declared this to be so when they started working on Java. Sun did it from the bottom up, starting with a programming language and portable virtual machine. Google did it from the top down, writing interesting applications to meet demand. So far Google's approach has worked a lot better than Sun's. I guess we'll find out if the market is ready for this kind of convergence.
SELinux is ideal for creating single-purpose servers. That's mostly what enterprise markets use. The web server connects to a database backend on one machine and a file server on yet another machine. Separating concerns is generally good, and it's mandatory in high-security environments. Even if you're not doing that, SELinux is configurable, so you can disable a particular restriction without turning it all off. If an SELinux policy doesn't have configuration parameters permitting a particular use case, that's just because the policy maintainer hasn't created them yet. When projects become involved in development of SELinux policies affecting their programs, this will improve quite rapidly.
This report should come as no surprise. When the economy is lousy, grad school enrollment rises. The real question is undergraduate degrees awarded in technical fields. Most technical workers do not have a postgraduate degree.
Polycarbonate is not hard, and in fact it's quite soft. It has excellent tensile and compressional strength, making it quite impact resistant. A quarter inch thick sheet can stop some firearm rounds. For safety reasons, I have polycarbonate glasses lenses. They have a fairly expensive scratch-resistant coating on them. The first time I got polycarbonate lenses, this was optional. The second time, I was not given the choice. The shop wouldn't sell me lenses with no coating, because they'd never survive the warranty period.
The US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right to format-shift, and scanning certainly qualifies for this. The very limited browsing capability sure looks like fair use to me. Where this gets sticky is the matter of posession. If Google is hosting this on behalf of the libraries, the literal fact that the bits are on disks in Google's data centers just makes them nice people. If Google is doing something with the work as a whole that's not covered under fair use, and they're not doing it on behalf of the owners of the original published copies from which the images were scanned, then they've infringed copyright, unless they actually have legal copies on their own shelves somewhere. I could see the argument going either way on this, and ultimately it may hinge on the role the libraries have in this.
That said, at worst, Google is making (and offering to remove on request) at most single copy that would be unauthorized under a strict reading of copyright law, assuming the context they're showing is indeed held to be fair use. So, the authors want to sue over a single easy opt-out copy of each work that will drive far greater sales. Why are they doing this?
It's about control. It's always about control. Read the press release. "...the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights..." But the authors (almost always) aren't actually the legal holders of those copyrights! Authors have been getting screwed by publishers for centuries, but at least things have settled down into a predictable pattern of getting screwed. They don't know what changes are coming next, but they can hardly be blamed for suspecting that as individuals they're less equipped to adapt to whatever changes are coming than the centralized publishing houses, and that they'll end up even worse off.
Ultimately, the decoupling of data and media and obsolescence of traditional publishing will benefit authors, but it may take a very long time to happen.
...you're probably not doing your job as well as you could.
Seriously. I work in IT and study graduate CS, all of it in discrete, not continuous math. I don't have to do any continuous math.
That said, applying principles of continuous math routinely saves me time, and familiarity with it routinely helps me notice things that I'd otherwise miss entirely.
I could get by without trig, differential calculus, and even linear algebra. I'm sure many of my classmates and coworkers do. That's why I'll be getting promoted and getting my degree faster than they will.
A lot of universities have not-well-advertised public ftp servers that are used for transferring large files, generally with scripts that scrub things that have been around for more than a day to avoid turning into warez servers. I know of one multi-campus institution where an employee at one campus and their counterpart at another campus agreed to use this method to transfer a list of all currently enrolled students at one of the campuses. This included phone numbers, addresses, and student ID numbers, which were mostly SSNs, because that was the default and most students didn't know to ask for a different ID number. Once the transfer was complete and they discovered they could not delete files from this server, they called support, and it was gone in under 5 minutes. They'd already had it drilled into their heads how bad it would be if such a list got out, but no procedure for securely transferring very large files had been established, and they did not have the technical expertise to establish one themselves.
I imagine this happens a lot, especially at research institutions whose scientists need to be able to receive large amounts of data from collaborators without having to set up accounts for them.
This article isn't funny. I'm sorry, it's just weak, which is pathetic given how easy the target is, but given how little actual content the article actually has, it's unsurprising that it fails to accomplish anything. So, why post it at all? Well, it's pretty obvious that PC magazine has sunk to the level of posting things that might get slashdotted just to sell ad impressions. I'm using Firefox on a 1024x768 monitor. With prefbar and the tab bar, the first page of the article doesn't quite fit within one screen, and the second fits in one screen comfortably. That's only by putting the whole page inside a column that gives everyone the 800x600 experience, ostensibly for consistent user experience, but really just to hide how little is actually there. Inside that column is the column of ads on the right, and the gigantic ad in the middle of the article that makes it annoying to read. How much space do the actual web pages take? Well, the first page takes 8 screens, and the second takes 7.5 screens. The article is so short that the only possible justification for breaking it into two pages is to show the extra 6.5 screens twice. There's really only about 1 screen of actual content, out of a total of 15.5 screens between the two pages.
This leaves two possible conclusions:
1) They actually believe that there's some utility to putting that much annoying crap around the article, and even so far below it that nobody will ever see it, in which case someone needs to be fired.
2) They don't care if a human ever sees it, and are just throwing it up there to generate ad impressions, in which case their advertisers all need to dump them, or move to pay-per-click ads.
In either case, I'm ignoring PC Magazine from now on.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have administrative access to confidential information systems at a publicly traded company, they could quite reasonably interpret their obligations under Sarbanes-Oxley as requiring them to revoke this the moment they know you're leaving. Not everyone does interpret it this way, but depending on how jittery they are about their investors, some companies play it extremely strict to make sure they don't piss off the SEC. Some specific industries also have strict information control regulations and laws with severe penalties. HIPAA comes to mind, as well as the various regulated financial industries. If your company does any classified work for the government, it's understandable they'd be a bit paranoid.
Don't take it personally. If something happens in those two weeks (and that would be a perfect time for someone else to do something and blame it on you) even if nobody can prove you had anything to do with it, there are plenty of ways that can expose them to liability that dwarfs the cost of paying you for two weeks. It's just business, and being risk-averse.
Would you call sickle-cell anemia a defect? We know that one varies with ethnicity. Specifically, ethnicities that come from parts of the world where malaria is prevalent have it in high concentration, because a single sickle-cell gene offers some resistance to the disease, but having two of them is crippling even with life-long intense medical care, and fatal otherwise.
Calling it a defect isn't a comment on the quality of the ethnicities in which it is present, just a recognition that evolutionary pressures in different parts of the world have caused some populations to tolerate moderate levels of genes that yield proteins that are not optimal for their primary task, due to side effects that may or may not harm the person in other ways, depending on other factors.
People are treating this like there's a "smart gene". That's not at all the case. All they've done is identify a genetic defect which tends to lower the IQ of people who have this defect. They don't know the mechanism, and they still have a wide range, so it's probably one of many factors that is meaningless in isolation. Testing a particular living person for it wouldn't tell you anything useful about their intelligence.
P ages/I/Imprinting.html
So, what about potential people who do not yet have an intelligence that can be tested? Well, it turns out that IGF2R is a very, very special gene for other reasons. There are certain genes that are "imprinted" in sexual reproduction. You might wonder why, with all the mutations and screwups that nature seems to allow, we don't see female mammals occasionally giving birth to their own clones, from meiosis that doesn't go as planned. Well, inheriting two of the same chromosome is almost always fatal because of these imprinted genes. With imprinted genes, genes are expressed if and only if they come from one particular parent. IGF2 is expressed exclusively from the father. IGF2R is expressed exclusively from the mother. The upshot of this is that while you could use this to discriminate among egg donors, using it to discriminate among sperm donors would be useless. As the mechanism that causes the correllation is still unknown, and ova are in much shorter supply than sperm, people are unlikely to be terribly selective about it in ova. Given all the other things we can test for, it's unlikely people would make a sperm decision based on how smart the grandsons of their designer daughters would be. If we're assuming babies with pre-selected genetic makeup, the next generation could do the same, rendering the decision moot.
Read more: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/Biology
This is a commercial product, so it's clearly beyond the "research" phase. Sounds more like "analysis" to me. I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince twelve jurors of that.
It wasn't just a critique. He posted a suggestion that someone stage getting arrested for the purpose of getting a campus police officer in trouble. Obviously, context is key, but in the absence of any contextual information to the contrary, it sounds like the school's response was appropriate, assuming of course that it was otherwise consistent with their policies.
Anyone have more context?
Except that patent clerk was properly trained (his career having been sabotaged by a vengeful professor), his ideas were theoretical (rather than an apparent extremely profitable working prototype that contradicts everything we know), and his ideas filled a theoretical void that everyone knew needed to be filled by something.
Okay, we have two choices:
a) An MIT EE dropout who advertises his irrelevant association with Harvard turns physics on his head and has a working prototype that generates incredibly cheap energy.
b) Yet another cheap energy fraud/error/delusion.
I'd be thrilled if Occam's razor was wrong this time around, but this whole thing reads exactly like every other cheap energy scam/hoax/error in history.
What do you think DARPA does with all that funding for CS research?
I'm pretty sure the Speaker of the House is not going to go into a deep analysis of the world energy market on his blog, so I can't blame him for asking the rhetorical question. I think he's trying to get more people interested in what the government is doing, so they'll be paying attention when they're discussing these things in the near future, which is a cause I applaud, left of Mao though I am at times.
On a completely unrelated note, I have some criticisms (positive and negative) of your answers to the question. This is a politics article, so it can't be but so off-topic.
NIMBY environmentalists on the local level.
I tend not to refer to these people as environmentalists at all. I like to think of myself as a mild environmentalist. I've built trails in the wilderness, and the first thing they tell you is that you're going to completely annihilate a 3-foot wide by X mile long patch of wilderness, so that people don't wreak havoc on several square miles. Rational environmentalists understand this principle, and are careful to distinguish between times when concentrated impact is a benefit and when it is not. If environmental opposition merely moves the problem and increases inconvenience and overhead, it's ultimately worse for the environment. If the refinery is going to be built somewhere, you might as well build it where the least amount of fuel and other resources will need to be spent to move it to where it is going to be consumed. As recent evidence shows, petroleum has fairly resilient demand in light of rising prices, so the added cost of refining overseas doesn't really change the amount consumed.
Federal enviro regulators who have no idea how jobs or how exactly the money that gets direct deposited into their accounts every month is generated
Actually, the EPA generally takes a very strict economic view about such things. If you're wondering, your life is worth $3.7 million to them. This is higher than the number the FAA uses, but when you die in a plane crash you don't have years of cancer treatments to pay for before or mysterious degenerative nerve diseases that disrupt your entire family, so this isn't really unreasonable.
Where it starts getting messy is with Endangered Species protections. The problem with endangered species protections is that the penalties are often suffered by people who had little to do with creating the problem in the first place. I don't think it's unjust, as it generally does accomplish what it sets out to do, and what it sets out to do (protect biodiversity) is a decent proxy for overall environmental health (think of each species as a canary tuned to a different potential threat), but it's unfair in that it kicks in only for the latecomers.
Basically, the law generally says you can do whatever you want until you hit certain triggers, and then suddenly everything changes. Supposedly this is a simpler system than attempting to account for every molecule of mercury, but in practice large companies treat the fines as a cost of doing business while the overhead of compliance swallows up smaller companies. I first learned of the idea to auction pollution rights from a Republican economics professor that I vehemently disagree with on many social issues, but I think it's wonderful. The popularly elected government can decide how much environmental damage we're willing to tolerate, the (hopefully objective) scientists can interpret that into quantities of various pollutants and other destructive activity, and then the market equilibrates, favoring constant innovation in environmentally-friendly industry, as opposed to merely taking advantage of innovations that are handed to them, or going and doing research only when expensive new legislation or regulation looms on the horizon.
Unions for treating investors like the enemy rather than their best friend
Investors have been screwing labor since the dawn of time, to the long-term detriment of us all. Unions are a sorely-needed countervailing
Several nations already do this with AIDS drugs, and much like Taiwan, only after negotiations fail. This is a perfect example of the perversion of the modern US patent system. The patent system is designed to encourage innovators to share as much knowledge as possible for the benefit of everyone. If patent holders want to play chicken with sovereign nations over matters of global security, they can expect this kind of thing to happen.
Freedom wireless made enemies of Cingular and Sprint? Wow. Either they're trying to steal the business for themselves, or they're about to be in a world of hurt. Given that they named Cingular as a defendant in one of their cases, I'm guessing the latter.
I've had moderately severe attention deficit disorder since second grade. While the root cause seems to be genetic, I blame the severity of it on years of television with 3 or 4 blocks of a minute and a half of 15 to 30 second ads per half hour on children's programming. Ads, like this damn animated Yahoo ad at the top of my screen right now (I'm not on a machine with adblock) try as hard as possible to break my concentration on whatever I actually care about. Even as I type this it's slowing me down.
There. I just scrolled it off the screen. Much better. I'm installing adblock on this machine right now.
Every generation, despite and sometimes because of its best intentions, breaks its children in unprecedented ways.
Oh, so YOU are the one responsible for the millions of people with easily treatable psychiatric conditions who do not seek professional help. YOU are the one telling them that their problems with loving and working are an integral part of their identity, reinforcing their belief that they will never be normal, that they are fundamentally defective. YOU are the one hiding the well-understood biological factors, leaving patients with nothing more than murky definitions full of weak intensifiers and DSM criteria including phrases like "five or more of the following", making them question whether they have a condition that's understood well enough to be treated.
Your studied opinion can go fuck itself.
There's actually a great significance to this. When you can diagnose something by a blood test, people think of it as a medical problem. Most people still don't think of psychiatry as a medical field, and think of psychiatric problems as indivisible from a person's identity. This will be a huge step towards helping people recognize the medical nature of treating psychiatric problems, and remove the stigma of seeking treatment. Anxiety disorders tend to exhibit positive feedback, so catching and treating them early, before they're so severe that friends and family are hauling you in for treatment, is critical.
Testing will never give you bug-free software. Ever.
Only formal verification of the source code and the entire toolchain will do that.
You're right about the economic cost-benefit analysis. Most people would rather have MS word as it is than a formally-verified pico for the same price. For many purposes, I would too.
From TFA:
as fair use isn't codified, there would be as many definitions of it as there are consumers
Actually, fair use *is* established in law. Specifically, it's established in case law, the salient points of which strike me as somewhat less arcane than acts of Congress.
There seems to be a growing trend of pretending that the judiciary is *not* one of three equal branches of government that check and balance each other's powers. The term "strict construction" is ironically accurate, as they construct a strictness over the judiciary that was never written in the Constitution.
I hear all this talk of Google making an OS. I think what Google has realized is that desktop users really don't care. Their OS is a web browser. Sun more or less declared this to be so when they started working on Java. Sun did it from the bottom up, starting with a programming language and portable virtual machine. Google did it from the top down, writing interesting applications to meet demand. So far Google's approach has worked a lot better than Sun's. I guess we'll find out if the market is ready for this kind of convergence.
SELinux is ideal for creating single-purpose servers. That's mostly what enterprise markets use. The web server connects to a database backend on one machine and a file server on yet another machine. Separating concerns is generally good, and it's mandatory in high-security environments. Even if you're not doing that, SELinux is configurable, so you can disable a particular restriction without turning it all off. If an SELinux policy doesn't have configuration parameters permitting a particular use case, that's just because the policy maintainer hasn't created them yet. When projects become involved in development of SELinux policies affecting their programs, this will improve quite rapidly.
This report should come as no surprise. When the economy is lousy, grad school enrollment rises. The real question is undergraduate degrees awarded in technical fields. Most technical workers do not have a postgraduate degree.
Polycarbonate is not hard, and in fact it's quite soft. It has excellent tensile and compressional strength, making it quite impact resistant. A quarter inch thick sheet can stop some firearm rounds. For safety reasons, I have polycarbonate glasses lenses. They have a fairly expensive scratch-resistant coating on them. The first time I got polycarbonate lenses, this was optional. The second time, I was not given the choice. The shop wouldn't sell me lenses with no coating, because they'd never survive the warranty period.
randomize... *mumble* optimal brain damage algorithm... *snore* markov chaining on similarity matrices...
The US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right to format-shift, and scanning certainly qualifies for this. The very limited browsing capability sure looks like fair use to me. Where this gets sticky is the matter of posession. If Google is hosting this on behalf of the libraries, the literal fact that the bits are on disks in Google's data centers just makes them nice people. If Google is doing something with the work as a whole that's not covered under fair use, and they're not doing it on behalf of the owners of the original published copies from which the images were scanned, then they've infringed copyright, unless they actually have legal copies on their own shelves somewhere. I could see the argument going either way on this, and ultimately it may hinge on the role the libraries have in this.
That said, at worst, Google is making (and offering to remove on request) at most single copy that would be unauthorized under a strict reading of copyright law, assuming the context they're showing is indeed held to be fair use. So, the authors want to sue over a single easy opt-out copy of each work that will drive far greater sales. Why are they doing this?
It's about control. It's always about control. Read the press release. "...the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights..." But the authors (almost always) aren't actually the legal holders of those copyrights! Authors have been getting screwed by publishers for centuries, but at least things have settled down into a predictable pattern of getting screwed. They don't know what changes are coming next, but they can hardly be blamed for suspecting that as individuals they're less equipped to adapt to whatever changes are coming than the centralized publishing houses, and that they'll end up even worse off.
Ultimately, the decoupling of data and media and obsolescence of traditional publishing will benefit authors, but it may take a very long time to happen.
...you're probably not doing your job as well as you could.
Seriously. I work in IT and study graduate CS, all of it in discrete, not continuous math. I don't have to do any continuous math.
That said, applying principles of continuous math routinely saves me time, and familiarity with it routinely helps me notice things that I'd otherwise miss entirely.
I could get by without trig, differential calculus, and even linear algebra. I'm sure many of my classmates and coworkers do. That's why I'll be getting promoted and getting my degree faster than they will.
A lot of universities have not-well-advertised public ftp servers that are used for transferring large files, generally with scripts that scrub things that have been around for more than a day to avoid turning into warez servers. I know of one multi-campus institution where an employee at one campus and their counterpart at another campus agreed to use this method to transfer a list of all currently enrolled students at one of the campuses. This included phone numbers, addresses, and student ID numbers, which were mostly SSNs, because that was the default and most students didn't know to ask for a different ID number. Once the transfer was complete and they discovered they could not delete files from this server, they called support, and it was gone in under 5 minutes. They'd already had it drilled into their heads how bad it would be if such a list got out, but no procedure for securely transferring very large files had been established, and they did not have the technical expertise to establish one themselves.
I imagine this happens a lot, especially at research institutions whose scientists need to be able to receive large amounts of data from collaborators without having to set up accounts for them.
This article isn't funny. I'm sorry, it's just weak, which is pathetic given how easy the target is, but given how little actual content the article actually has, it's unsurprising that it fails to accomplish anything. So, why post it at all? Well, it's pretty obvious that PC magazine has sunk to the level of posting things that might get slashdotted just to sell ad impressions. I'm using Firefox on a 1024x768 monitor. With prefbar and the tab bar, the first page of the article doesn't quite fit within one screen, and the second fits in one screen comfortably. That's only by putting the whole page inside a column that gives everyone the 800x600 experience, ostensibly for consistent user experience, but really just to hide how little is actually there. Inside that column is the column of ads on the right, and the gigantic ad in the middle of the article that makes it annoying to read. How much space do the actual web pages take? Well, the first page takes 8 screens, and the second takes 7.5 screens. The article is so short that the only possible justification for breaking it into two pages is to show the extra 6.5 screens twice. There's really only about 1 screen of actual content, out of a total of 15.5 screens between the two pages.
This leaves two possible conclusions:
1) They actually believe that there's some utility to putting that much annoying crap around the article, and even so far below it that nobody will ever see it, in which case someone needs to be fired.
2) They don't care if a human ever sees it, and are just throwing it up there to generate ad impressions, in which case their advertisers all need to dump them, or move to pay-per-click ads.
In either case, I'm ignoring PC Magazine from now on.