...my first reaction upon hearing this was a sense of indignation rather than shame. Although my field is physics rather than biology, we have had out own high-profile fraudsters recently. The actions of this clown reflect poorly on all scientists, but, even worse, he has wasted the time and resources of researchers who are trying to build upon his results.
Many people will say that this was a failure of the scientific review system, but the unfortunate truth is that peer review can do very little to defend against malicious scientific fraud. When I review a paper for a journal, I have to assume that the original data is correct and truthful. I don't have access to the author's work samples for testing, and wouldn't have the time or equipment to perform the appropriate experiments even if I did. A reviewer may question data that looks unusual (e.g. great signal-to-noise or an odd feature in a time-varying signal), but otherwise the data itself will likely go unchallenged.
A reviewer's job is largely to ensure that there is sufficient data to support the conclusions that are drawn and that the methodology used to derive the underlying data is sound. They also weed out the whackos who think they have a warp drive design or perpetual motion machine, but that's less common.
...Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.(...)
To me, this was the single most interesting line in the entire article. Telling everyone that they must migrate to another operating system in one big step is bound to meet resistance and hassles. Instead they get people familiar with their day-to-day software tools, so that migrating to Linux/OSX/whatever later is largely irrelevant. If people's word processor and email system are still the same, they won't much care what OS is running.
With this strategy Windows loses its special status and becomes just a commodity, providing only storage and network access. It also becomes replacable on a whim (or close to it).
...but how did it seem twelve years ago when the patent was filed? Nobody knew what the Internet was capable of, and it may well have been a unique insight.
Hell if the patent office had just been granted twelve years ago, it would expire about 5 years from now. With IPTV probably still a few years out, it wouldn't make much difference to how things unfold.
The 38-year-old French patient from the northern French town of Valenciennes underwent extensive counselling before her operation, which is believed to have lasted at least five hours...
From the no hyperbole dept..
The operation lasted five hours, not the counselling.:)
Software is generally a commodity, not an invention. If I come up with a novel way of parsing files, storing data, or even creating better processing throughput, perhaps that may be thought of as unique, but the fact is I'm using a programming language that others have access to as well as systems others have access to, and there's every possibility that someone else may have had the same idea.
Modifying your statement slightly:
If I come up with a novel widget, perhaps that may be thought of as unique, but the fact is I'm using the laws of physics that others have access to as well as systems others have access to, and there's every possibility that someone else may have had the same idea.
It's not clear you're arguing against software patents so much as all patents. It's a legitimate case, but not one that I agree with. If someone makes a nontrivial advance in the sciences, software or not, patent protection should be available. Imagine someone creating an O(ln N) sort, a new encryption algorithm or a program for ultra-fast prime factoring. These are serious software advances, exactly the kind that the patent system should encourage.
Somewhere between the lab and the press release things got overstated. Since my PhD is in silicon-based optoelectronics, I am familiar with this kind of work. A few thoughts crossed my mind after reading the paper.
What these guys have found is a physical effect that possibly could lead to fast modulation of light. Neglected in the press release are a few fairly important issues:
They haven't demonstrated any time-resolved optical effect, and are inferring it strictly from what might be possible. I have no doubt they can modulate, but the operational speeds are still guesstimates.
The effect that was demonstrated is not within the 1550 nm wavelength window used for telecom traffic. Their current work shows the effect right in the middle of an H2O absorption peak. Can the effect be shifted? Probably, but these sorts of things are always more work than expected.
From a practical standpoint, other Quantum Confined Stark Effect devices often show a strong sensitivity to the polarization of the input light. Ensuring a known input polarization is a major problem right now in optoelectronics. Lord knows it was (still is, actually) a major hassle in my research
This device is not quite as CMOS compatible as might be hoped. Building strained germanium quantum wells on a silicon substrate requires depositing atoms layer by layer, and is a slow process. Process throughput will no doubt be an issue.
All that being said, this is still very exciting. It is a new physical effect demonstrated in a silicon-based material, and a physical effect that has been used elsewhere to do useful things. Hopefully a real modulation device will come along shortly.
It's not so strange that people download the music for free. Since usually if you purchase a CD nowadays. not only is it pricey compared to what it used to be. but usually only 1-2 tracks are actually good. the rest is just pure shit.:|
If it's any consolation, most of an album's tracks were crap when they were recorded on vinyl or casette tapes as well. Time has just changed the recording medium and given us the technology to download the tracks.
I read things like this all the time, but really why are we surprised? Setting aside the religious right and an anti-geek view of the world, there are simply a lot more foreign scientists than in the past.
50 years ago, North American and European scientists were the only ones who played the game. Places like Japan and Taiwan were only just moving beyond rice farming, and China and India were nowhere in sight. These days countries with a combined population in excess of 2 billion people are making committments to education and producing scientists on par with the rest of the world.
Of course the stature of American science is in decline; the entire field is a lot more competitive.
As much as they may have a case, I always find the "we don't want to, but they are forcing us" argument funny. Not because of the company itself, but because I can imagine some IP lawyers saying, "Yesss! They are being forccced to! Hisss!" as their forked tongues flick from their mouths and they rub thier greedy paws together with reptilian glint in their eyes.
One of the problems with owning a trademark is that you must defend it or lose it. Unlike copyright, trademarks can be invalidated in court if they become diluted through other people using it. If these guys want to continue to have rights to the GMail trademark, they are forced to litigate.
Ahh.. so that's what it boils down to. "There is money to be made there. We have to bend over for their government and/or police, it's our fiduciary responsibility".
Fuck Yahoo. Helping send a person to jail for 10 years for a petty "crime"? I'm sure this will not be lost on the Chinese market, and there goes your "world's biggest Internet market".
With Google helping to censor news articles, the Chinese market may never hear about this. Or perhaps they'll hear about patriotic Yahoo helping to capture a dangerous terrorist.
Depressing, but I think this will not make waves in China.
I think that evolution is valid in that species can change over time, but I can't believe that life started from a few random molecules. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases. How does that fit with a few molecules that became life evolving into a human being (that is a remarkably well ordered trillions? of molecules).
I should say first that the concepts of "order" and "disorder" as they relate to entropy are poorly understood outside of the science community. They have precise definitions having to do with the number of available quantum states etc., so how these things apply to living systems is a little nebulous. That being said...
The entropy of the universe goes up in any physical process, but with the input of energy you can make local areas ordered. When you clean your room it becomes more ordered, but you did work that increased the entropy of the universe as a whole.
The earth has a continual input of energy from the sun, so there's nothing that says that the local entropy can't decrease.
It is totally unimaginable that we came from something with no intelligence. It makes no logical sense. If you choose to believe that you came from an amoeba, that's fine. I think we should be able to disagree without flaming each other and calling each other's belief "junk science."
Here's the problem: your belief is junk science. As a matter of fact, it's not science at all, it's your faith .
It's fine if you believe that we did not evolve from single-celled amoebas, but don't pass that off as a science. For your belief to be a valid scientific theory, it must account for the current facts in evidence, e.g. fossil records, and demonstrated lab-based evolution in fruit flies, etc. It must explain how we interact with our world, and offer hypotheses and experiments by which we can test those predictions.
Intelligent design does none of these. It "explains" how things started off, but offers no understanding of how we currently interact within our world. It provides no predictive valid and cannot be validated by experiment. Accordingly, intelligent design is not useful science. It is a perfectly valid belief system, but it doesn't belong in a science class.
Slashdot Mirror
...my first reaction upon hearing this was a sense of indignation rather than shame. Although my field is physics rather than biology, we have had out own high-profile fraudsters recently. The actions of this clown reflect poorly on all scientists, but, even worse, he has wasted the time and resources of researchers who are trying to build upon his results.
Many people will say that this was a failure of the scientific review system, but the unfortunate truth is that peer review can do very little to defend against malicious scientific fraud. When I review a paper for a journal, I have to assume that the original data is correct and truthful. I don't have access to the author's work samples for testing, and wouldn't have the time or equipment to perform the appropriate experiments even if I did. A reviewer may question data that looks unusual (e.g. great signal-to-noise or an odd feature in a time-varying signal), but otherwise the data itself will likely go unchallenged.
A reviewer's job is largely to ensure that there is sufficient data to support the conclusions that are drawn and that the methodology used to derive the underlying data is sound. They also weed out the whackos who think they have a warp drive design or perpetual motion machine, but that's less common.
...Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.(...)
To me, this was the single most interesting line in the entire article. Telling everyone that they must migrate to another operating system in one big step is bound to meet resistance and hassles. Instead they get people familiar with their day-to-day software tools, so that migrating to Linux/OSX/whatever later is largely irrelevant. If people's word processor and email system are still the same, they won't much care what OS is running.
With this strategy Windows loses its special status and becomes just a commodity, providing only storage and network access. It also becomes replacable on a whim (or close to it).
It's the gift that keeps on giving!
...but how did it seem twelve years ago when the patent was filed? Nobody knew what the Internet was capable of, and it may well have been a unique insight. Hell if the patent office had just been granted twelve years ago, it would expire about 5 years from now. With IPTV probably still a few years out, it wouldn't make much difference to how things unfold.
From the no hyperbole dept..
The operation lasted five hours, not the counselling. :)
Modifying your statement slightly:
If I come up with a novel widget, perhaps that may be thought of as unique, but the fact is I'm using the laws of physics that others have access to as well as systems others have access to, and there's every possibility that someone else may have had the same idea.
It's not clear you're arguing against software patents so much as all patents. It's a legitimate case, but not one that I agree with. If someone makes a nontrivial advance in the sciences, software or not, patent protection should be available. Imagine someone creating an O(ln N) sort, a new encryption algorithm or a program for ultra-fast prime factoring. These are serious software advances, exactly the kind that the patent system should encourage.
What these guys have found is a physical effect that possibly could lead to fast modulation of light. Neglected in the press release are a few fairly important issues:
All that being said, this is still very exciting. It is a new physical effect demonstrated in a silicon-based material, and a physical effect that has been used elsewhere to do useful things. Hopefully a real modulation device will come along shortly.
It's not so strange that people download the music for free. Since usually if you purchase a CD nowadays. not only is it pricey compared to what it used to be. but usually only 1-2 tracks are actually good. the rest is just pure shit. :|
If it's any consolation, most of an album's tracks were crap when they were recorded on vinyl or casette tapes as well. Time has just changed the recording medium and given us the technology to download the tracks.
I read things like this all the time, but really why are we surprised? Setting aside the religious right and an anti-geek view of the world, there are simply a lot more foreign scientists than in the past. 50 years ago, North American and European scientists were the only ones who played the game. Places like Japan and Taiwan were only just moving beyond rice farming, and China and India were nowhere in sight. These days countries with a combined population in excess of 2 billion people are making committments to education and producing scientists on par with the rest of the world. Of course the stature of American science is in decline; the entire field is a lot more competitive.
One of the problems with owning a trademark is that you must defend it or lose it. Unlike copyright, trademarks can be invalidated in court if they become diluted through other people using it. If these guys want to continue to have rights to the GMail trademark, they are forced to litigate.
Fuck Yahoo. Helping send a person to jail for 10 years for a petty "crime"? I'm sure this will not be lost on the Chinese market, and there goes your "world's biggest Internet market".
With Google helping to censor news articles, the Chinese market may never hear about this. Or perhaps they'll hear about patriotic Yahoo helping to capture a dangerous terrorist. Depressing, but I think this will not make waves in China.
...how the same corporations that complain taxes are too high also whine about the government not spending taxes to help their industry.
I think that evolution is valid in that species can change over time, but I can't believe that life started from a few random molecules. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases. How does that fit with a few molecules that became life evolving into a human being (that is a remarkably well ordered trillions? of molecules). I should say first that the concepts of "order" and "disorder" as they relate to entropy are poorly understood outside of the science community. They have precise definitions having to do with the number of available quantum states etc., so how these things apply to living systems is a little nebulous. That being said... The entropy of the universe goes up in any physical process, but with the input of energy you can make local areas ordered. When you clean your room it becomes more ordered, but you did work that increased the entropy of the universe as a whole. The earth has a continual input of energy from the sun, so there's nothing that says that the local entropy can't decrease.
Here's the problem: your belief is junk science. As a matter of fact, it's not science at all, it's your faith .
It's fine if you believe that we did not evolve from single-celled amoebas, but don't pass that off as a science. For your belief to be a valid scientific theory, it must account for the current facts in evidence, e.g. fossil records, and demonstrated lab-based evolution in fruit flies, etc. It must explain how we interact with our world, and offer hypotheses and experiments by which we can test those predictions.
Intelligent design does none of these. It "explains" how things started off, but offers no understanding of how we currently interact within our world. It provides no predictive valid and cannot be validated by experiment. Accordingly, intelligent design is not useful science. It is a perfectly valid belief system, but it doesn't belong in a science class.