Sorry, but you seem to be misconstruing my point. I'm not trying to be a widget nazi and say nobody should make new widgets. But they should consistently fit the basic look and feel of the system. I am not trying to defend some of the major fuckups Microsoft has had with some of their more recent apps - there is really no excuse for not using system menus, or at least making your menus look and feel exactly like system menus.
The problem is that there are no system menus at all in X. Everything is just drawn on. There are basic widgets in Windows that provide some minimal level of consistent look and feel to apps that's missing when there are TWO sets of totally disparate widget bases to work from (Gtk, Qt, let's not even talk about raw X/Xlib/Xaw/Athena/whatever apps/widgets).
I realize that ultimately it's up to the developer to make apps that look aesthetically pleasing, are usable, AND conform with the look and feel expectations of the platform. In Windows you at least have a baseline for what that look and feel is, and though far from perfect, the platform has much better look and feel consistency than does the X Window System platform.
Now can we make a decision about toolkit? I like choice as much as the next guy, but the choice is at the wrong level here. I NEVER want to see multiple mismatched, clashing toolkits on my screen at the same time. I want to have to *force* some compatibility layer to make such a beastly occurrence happen. Everything looks consistent and doesn't hurt my eyeballs or brain in Windows (well, Windows hurts my brain, but that's mostly when I'm trying to write raw Win32 code... ugh). Maybe I'm just in the same "more aesthetically aware user" category that composes the majority of Mac customers, and maybe nobody else cares about this, but I suppose the inability to get a consistent looking and feeling suite of apps in a Linux desktop (that actually does everything you need it to do) is a major reason some folks won't switch to desktop Linux.
I mean, you have to use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derivative for web browsing (Konqueror is nice and all, but the last time I tried it extensively it still felt toy-like, and Mozilla is the cross-platform standard I am used to and want to use). But that forces you to use Gtk - so forget about KDE, you need to use GNOME. But now you have to use the awful mismatched GNOME apps. Then what about the OOo monstrosity? The toolkit, widgets, fonts, etc. don't seem to match anything else on the desktop. Why does this just never happen in Windows (even OOo doesn't exhibit these awful characteristics in Windows - yes, this is a rhetorical question, I understand the technical reasons and they all indicate major flaws in the X architecture to me)?
Keith P, you are doing the right thing. I wish I had more time, I'd pitch in and help out with this project, since it might allow me to actually use X without clawing my eyes out some day (or coping with atrocious performance when you hack in all the eye candy on top).
I'm not clear about whether you really violated somebody's copyright if you looked at an LGPLed work and followed the same basic design structure to write your own work. I mean, the many instances of things like bean accessors/mutators having the same names and basic implementations are endemic to Java. Then there's stuff like logging based on other Apache licensed work.
It does sound like there were a few particular instances where a class' design and the set of methods in the class were directly patterned on the JBoss design - not necessarily copied line-by-line, but the solution to a fundamental part of the J2EE specification "problem" was ripped from JBoss and modified to suit the code needs of Geronimo. Whether this is violation of copyright or not is a tough question. Copyright doesn't protect a design pattern, a solution to a problem, the logical organization of a set of objects, or an algorithm. Proving that somebody actually violated copyright in this case seems rather hard to me - though perhaps a bit of credit to the JBoss folks for their thoughts and design work is in order.
I support these kinds of standards. Marketing is all about proclaiming how great your product is. But there is a line between superlatives ("they're the best desktop computers money can buy") vs. ("the world's fastest desktop computers"). Despite the fact that Slashdotters consider computer speed to be subjective because there are so many metrics for speed, most people see computer speed as a cut-and-dried issue. The reality is that saying a computer is the "fastest" without clarifying what it's the fastest at IS misleading to the majority of people, who will interpret that claim to mean it's the fastest at all computing tasks (because to them "speed" is like the speed of a car, measureable in absolute terms, they don't see all the complex interactions going on as relevant).
I have no problem with Apple saying their computers are "the best" or them saying that their computers are "the fastest multimedia desktop machines" or something else, assuming it's substantiated by a fairly broad array of meaningful benchmark data. But having the government draw a line in the sand about this sort of thing isn't a bad idea at all.
Why does it seem like government regulatory agencies and enforcement agencies only give a shit once it happens to whoever is in charge of them? Baah, well, let's make sure to sign up the commissioner of the FTC to a bunch of spam lists while we're at it, then maybe they'll see fit to pursue some of those scumbags too.
Also, what about all those TV ads for reprehensibly misrepresented products. Why doesn't the FDA or the FTC go after the dozens of companies flagrantly running ads making miraculous health claims, many of whom have become so brazen as to not even bother with the little disclaimer at the bottom of the screen saying "this product is not intended to treat or cure any medical disorder or disease".
The one bright light I've heard about recently was the Q-Ray (www.qray.com if you're curious). The founder of the company apparently had his personal assets ordered frozen by a judge, to be used to pay back duped customers, after the FTC cracked down on them hard. Note that they no longer make most of the fraudulent deceptive claims about their product, they just vaguely hint about it balancing your chi, ionic energy, and so on. They used to pretty much flagrantly imply that it cures arthritis, makes your joints stop aching, and so on.
New York takes about 4-5 months to learn pretty well. I have lived in Boston for 7 years, and lived full time in New York for 4 years (and part time for another 7 years - I spent summers and vacations in college, plus vacations and free time since in NYC). I know New York, except for certain crazy parts of downtown, like the back of my hand. In Boston, I only have a basic empirical knowledge of certain streets and regions, I know _most_ of the streets in Cambridge proper well, though I can still get lost in some of the more isolated residential areas, and getting to and from downtown _STILL_ confuses me when I'm behind the wheel (partially because the routes change every 6 months thanks to the Big Dig).
Boston is undoutedly the most FUBAR city navigationally speaking in the country.
Nice try about the broadcast depth thing. But Smith's control over Bane is complete - he has really written himself into his brain somehow, and that stayed true even in Zion. I actually said "WiFi, Neo is rigged with 802.11b" to my friends as we walked out of the movie, so you aren't the only one who thought of the analogy. Still doesn't really all explain the mystical fact that both Neo and Smith have the ability to move between the machine world and the "real" world (which I still refuse to accept was supposed to be real - I think they fucking revised the plot of Revs after they tested plot summaries on sample audiences and realized that the majority of idiots wouldn't get it).
Oh well, I am still trying to sort out whether I'm really disappointed in Matrix Revolutions or just mildly disappointed. It left me craving more explanation, and clarification of the issues and questions posed in Matrix Reloaded, as it seems to have with many, and it felt like a sellout by the Wachowskis, but maybe I'll decide they just went for a more subtle, but equally poignant film. I'm still thinking on it.
Definitely a +5 insightful if I've ever seen one. The real problem is that computers follow unambiguous instructions and logical execution flows, and people express needs in ambiguous and domain-jargon-laden terms. My favorite personal example of this was: "Of course the price in the two underlying markets can imply a price in the spread markets, and the incoming fixed leg can imply a price in the floating leg, but it's got to be grounded to the underlying..." That's a nearly verbatim quote from a project building a trading system for a large futures exchanges.
If such a large, infrastructure critical organization had _nobody_ on staff who could completely and unambiguously describe the pricing rules for their markets, how the hell can we expect that your average business is going to have anybody who can accurately describe the detailed processes involved in their domains? The way humans work, we generally deal with complicated and exceptional cases when they occur, we don't try to think them all through in advance. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work very well for huge transaction volumes of mission critical information.
Admittedly, certain domains of problems are strictly categorizable and declarative enough in nature they can be solved by special-purpose point-click-n-drool tools that your average business user can use. But only because each of the underlying components in a process is standard enough that's it's all been precoded for all the possible variations and configurations of that process. Without that, you get into so many different levels of complexity and abstraction that, well, you need a programmer of some sort or another to handle it.
Please, God, don't let these new friend/foe/neutral images be permanent... I was kinda hoping it was just a joke. They are annoying to the point of distraction - the friend and foe are okay, but the neutral is impossible to distinguish from friend without close inspection and they all look fucking goofy. Are you sure Cowboi Kneel didn't just go crazy with the images server?
You can already modify the kernel of OS/X - it's called Darwin, and it's open source (or at least some sort of shared source model... I don't remember the license). I suppose if you are just a NetBSD freak and want to run a pure-blood BSD licensed OS but still run all your spiffy looking Mac apps in an Aqua environment, this project will get you there as soon as the full Aqua window manager runs on top of NetBSD/PPC.
You could just as well argue that raising speed limits to 65 miles per hour is an "accomplice" to murder, since it increases you likelihood to die in a car crash by some infinitesimal amount. Most of these regulatory decisions are tradeoffs between different people's rights and responsibilities to each other and to society.
But that's beside the point. The founding fathers didn't protect an undefined right to bear arms in the Constitution. Furthermore, even if you think they did, they certainly were working in a world lacking weapons of the power and destructive capability we have today AND without the kind of violent, heterogeneous society we have today. I agree with you that it's very _unfortunate_ that there are people who would wield guns carelessly and kill others, but in a society in which everybody totes guns around, every testosterone-ridden dispute is as likely as not to devolve into a gunfight - isn't this more or less the way things happened in the Western frontier in the 1800s (discounting Hollywood inflation, I still think there's a substantial amount of truth to it).
The more people live closely packed together and the more destructive technology is, the more we need to make compromises to make society work properly (to argue otherwise invariably results in your making logically fallacious "slippery slope" argument). In the same way that your right to yell "Fire" ends when you enter a crowded theater, why can't your right to carry a gun end when you enter an urban area? If it poses more of a risk, statistically, to others around you for you to have it than for you not to have it, what's wrong with the people of that area judging for themselves that by their measurement of your utility and theirs (a utilitarian argument, in other words), it doesn't make sense to allow guns? If everybody in that city is able to be more relaxed and happier in their everyday life knowing that the first person to get pissed off at them isn't going to pull a gun out and cap them, what the hell is wrong with that?
You can go on pretending that I should feel secure with everybody around me packing heat because only crazy, evil criminals would use a gun to kill somebody else, but the fact is I've observed plenty of otherwise calm, rational people lose their shit and do crazy things, especially when alcohol and drugs are involved. Your entire argument rests on the assumption that people are rational, logical creatures all the time (I know, I know, I must be a liberal with my patronizing attitude, but I've lived in New York half my life, and the fact is most people ARE irresponsible idiots who need some supervision from the government - remember too that many of these people are from poor ghettos and don't have your or my educational background, or are from Third World countries and simply weren't raised to know how to exercise self-control). Yeah, they'd regret it the rest of their lives, but I'd still be dead after they shot me in a bar brawl. Thanks, but I'll continue to choose to live in cities where guns aren't welcome, and enjoy shooting when I'm out in the countryside.
So what? Just because something isn't constitutionally protected doesn't mean people shouldn't have the privilege of owning arms. I think the ACLU's position is similar to that of many reasonable Americans - that gun ownership by the civilian populace should not be banned, but should be considered a privilege, not a fundamental right, which can and should be regulated to a certain extent. Thus, we have a system with local police forces that answer to state and city/town/county governments, National Guardsmen, an a national military force that answer to the Federal Government, and states with their own particular laws, as appropriate to the type of people and living situations commonly found in the state regarding gun ownership, with some level of interstate cooperation and federal oversight. Somebody please explain to me how this represents anything other than a natural adaptation of the Constitution to the modern living conditions we find ourselves in, with densely packed urban environments, assault weapons with power unimaginable in the 1700s, violent crime rates that vary greatly by state, heterogeneity of people in some locales unimaginable to the Founding Fathers, etc. You can still keep and bear arms, in accordance with local and state level needs for a well-regulated militia, and for sport and hunting.
I have no problem with guns in the abstract, and I have a 22 semi-automatic rifle that I used to use for target shooting in Vermont. But I don't really want people packing concealed heat on the streets of New York City because they think that shooting people who threaten them or just piss them off is a right protected by the second-amendment. I think my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. not having to dodge bullets or end up looking down the muzzle of handgun, which incidentally, I have before, and not in a good way) trumps their right to own or carry a handgun.
They paid for music, $30,000 worth of music, and played it back in an analog, targeted-delivery format (not broadcast to the public). No different than playing the music over the music channels on the machines at the gym, or broadcasting it over an ultra-low-power (campus-area only) radio station. The only difference as far as I can tell is that you took turns being the "DJ".
If the company they licensed the 30k worth of music from didn't have the rights to license it under these terms, then that's hardly MIT's fault.
Sorry, but you're just wrong. You describe one reason that documents may be redacted in legal circles. However, that is not by far the reason that documents are usually redacted in government as a whole. Documents are often released to comply with FOIA requests that are redacted to the point of saying nothing other than "something happened to somebody on this date, and somebody else said something to somebody", but you can't figure out what they said or who it was too - this isn't generally done to protect the government from libel charges, it's done to avoid releasing embarrassing information.
Your analogy of a redacted court document to a redacted internal government report doesn't seem to hold up. The judicial system doesn't have any vested interest in preventing embarrasment of parties to law suits beyond the requirements of the law, and the protection of their legally guaranteed privacy, but government _bureaucrats_ have every interest in protecting their superiors, their superiors' superiors, and the elected officials who appointed them.
I don't think these guys are the first to demonstrate a CNOT gate, contrary to what the headline implies. This is just the first implementation of a CNOT gate in a _solid-state_ quantum computation device - not having followed this particular area, I can't say whether this was an incremental, and expected development, or a real "breakthrough". But it's nice to finally see people pursuing something other than using bigger, bulkier molecules in jerry-rigged NMR machines, which might actually scale to enough qubits to be useful some years down the road.
Well I disagree. I don't know whether the transactional interpretation says anything particularly interesting (I'll let you know when I've had a chance to read this), but I definitely think that interpretations of previous theories are quite relevant to the choices we make in which new branches of theory we pursue. Obviously I understand the math of quantum mechanics is the same any way you slice it, and I spent countless weeks and months internalizing that mathematics in college (which admittedly I have in some substantial part forgotten).
I don't think it will necessarily directly lead to new theories, but I think we are inspired in the choices of which ideas to pursue by our understanding and interpretation of existing theory. Calculating the spectrum of the hydrogen atom is a straightforward question - predicting new phenomena in testable, disprovable _theories_ that unify or at least substantially improve our actual understanding of the world is something else entirely.
For example, is nonlocality a fundamental fact that should be integral to any unifying theory, or is just an illusion caused by our misunderstanding of the forces of the universe? At least, this is based on my memory of discussing the Aharonov-Bohm effect, EPR paradox, etc.
And it's important to remember that most of the time, mathematics doesn't guide the formation of theory, a theory starts as a conceptual improvement on existing understanding, and the math is worked out from there. Sure, sometimes parts of theories or particular facets fall out from math alone, but the inspiration to follow particular mathematical calculations to completion doesn't just come from thin air.
In other news, God countersued Atari based on his patent #7,221,235,235 for a "n-dimensional reach around where n is any fucking number I feel like". The Almighty was quoted as saying "hey, I gave reach arounds in four dimensions before you were even born, kid... oh, wrap-around domains?... never mind..."
Awesome link... I can't believe I never heard of this (Transactional Interpretation) before, and why most physicists seem so uninterested in sorting out some of the basic inconsistencies in interpretations of quantum mechanics, and just want to plug ahead with their math - it's like they never bother to think that if we just sorted some of the earlier generation of theories out a bit better, we might have an inkling of a fucking clue where to go from here (and they definitely don't have that).
We spent second semester QMech twiddling our navels, wondering at the EPR paradox and the like, only to have our dumbass visiting prof basically help us get nowhere in terms of real understanding (I think primarily because he didn't have any).
Do these people who mimic the 419 scams also mimic the atrocious spelling, typos and poor command of the english language in most of the Nigerian scam emails I get? I just wonder how an Australian dude could pull off a _true_ Nigerian scam unless he gets all those little details just right.
It's amazing how much of a problem people have with these fundamental attribution errors. My company has been accused several times of adding people's email addresses to porn spam lists ("it couldn't have been anybody else, we bought stuff from you 3/4/20 days before we started getting porn spam!"), breaking computers ("my computer won't boot anymore, it must be your screensaver"), and so on.
I know technology is confusing, but god, it's frustrating when no matter how hard you try to be honest and release good, useful products, you still get blamed for all the nasty shit that other people do out there.
Yeah, we just better hope the mice don't ramp up their bioweapons team first... insta-death mice poop, strategically placed behind all of your cabinets and cupboards. Bad, bad voodoo.
Your first sentence is unintelligible and your second sentence is the obvious point of my previous post. So you post a comment that makes no sense and get modded up, and I simply make a factual observation about the recent series of e-Voting topics and get modded down. Great work, moderators.
Welcome to Slashdot, where we go on and on for months about how e-voting should all be powered by Open Source software because it's more secure. Then somebody gets their hands on a binary from an existing system, and suddenly it's a security leak.
Consistency police, we have an emergency situation on our hands...
Your definition makes no sense. Cannot be "predicted" by whom, with how much computational power and how exact a state of knowledge of the universe? In other words, by your definition, the only thing that can be called "emergent" is quantum-level phenomema that are truly non-predictable, no matter how much computational power is at your disposal.
Generally people use the phrase "cannot be predicted" to mean "cannot be predicted by a reasonable person without a complete and accurate simulation of the system being described". Sure, you can predict them all if you simulate the system, but that's not an analytical prediction from the rules themselves, that's the application of the rules to simulate the system.
The speed improvements matter to many people. You seem to be suggesting I'm the only person ever frustrated with XFree86, which is easily disproved by looking around on Slashdot, a pack of X lovers if you'll ever find them. I find X to be sluggish and unresponsive on GeForce-class graphics cards, on 1-2 Ghz P4/Athlon processors, compared to Windows. What I mean by that is that I frequently perceive subjective response lags in screen refresh for various applications that are moderately graphically intense which are far longer than the corresponding lags in Windows.
From a UI perspective, this is all that matters. I realize the many technical merits of X, and I'm certainly not suggesting that it's useless to have network transparency or anything of the sort. I think there'll always be a place for the X protocol, and I don't think we should throw away network transparency as a design consideration. And clearly XFree86 will be here for some time - but we should be working on something better, which can thunk through X support so we can run legacy X apps on it for the time being (a la Cosmoe/DirectFB, which is a decent first step).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that there are no system menus at all in X. Everything is just drawn on. There are basic widgets in Windows that provide some minimal level of consistent look and feel to apps that's missing when there are TWO sets of totally disparate widget bases to work from (Gtk, Qt, let's not even talk about raw X/Xlib/Xaw/Athena/whatever apps/widgets).
I realize that ultimately it's up to the developer to make apps that look aesthetically pleasing, are usable, AND conform with the look and feel expectations of the platform. In Windows you at least have a baseline for what that look and feel is, and though far from perfect, the platform has much better look and feel consistency than does the X Window System platform.
I mean, you have to use Mozilla or a Mozilla-derivative for web browsing (Konqueror is nice and all, but the last time I tried it extensively it still felt toy-like, and Mozilla is the cross-platform standard I am used to and want to use). But that forces you to use Gtk - so forget about KDE, you need to use GNOME. But now you have to use the awful mismatched GNOME apps. Then what about the OOo monstrosity? The toolkit, widgets, fonts, etc. don't seem to match anything else on the desktop. Why does this just never happen in Windows (even OOo doesn't exhibit these awful characteristics in Windows - yes, this is a rhetorical question, I understand the technical reasons and they all indicate major flaws in the X architecture to me)?
Keith P, you are doing the right thing. I wish I had more time, I'd pitch in and help out with this project, since it might allow me to actually use X without clawing my eyes out some day (or coping with atrocious performance when you hack in all the eye candy on top).
It does sound like there were a few particular instances where a class' design and the set of methods in the class were directly patterned on the JBoss design - not necessarily copied line-by-line, but the solution to a fundamental part of the J2EE specification "problem" was ripped from JBoss and modified to suit the code needs of Geronimo. Whether this is violation of copyright or not is a tough question. Copyright doesn't protect a design pattern, a solution to a problem, the logical organization of a set of objects, or an algorithm. Proving that somebody actually violated copyright in this case seems rather hard to me - though perhaps a bit of credit to the JBoss folks for their thoughts and design work is in order.
I have no problem with Apple saying their computers are "the best" or them saying that their computers are "the fastest multimedia desktop machines" or something else, assuming it's substantiated by a fairly broad array of meaningful benchmark data. But having the government draw a line in the sand about this sort of thing isn't a bad idea at all.
Also, what about all those TV ads for reprehensibly misrepresented products. Why doesn't the FDA or the FTC go after the dozens of companies flagrantly running ads making miraculous health claims, many of whom have become so brazen as to not even bother with the little disclaimer at the bottom of the screen saying "this product is not intended to treat or cure any medical disorder or disease".
The one bright light I've heard about recently was the Q-Ray (www.qray.com if you're curious). The founder of the company apparently had his personal assets ordered frozen by a judge, to be used to pay back duped customers, after the FTC cracked down on them hard. Note that they no longer make most of the fraudulent deceptive claims about their product, they just vaguely hint about it balancing your chi, ionic energy, and so on. They used to pretty much flagrantly imply that it cures arthritis, makes your joints stop aching, and so on.
Boston is undoutedly the most FUBAR city navigationally speaking in the country.
Oh well, I am still trying to sort out whether I'm really disappointed in Matrix Revolutions or just mildly disappointed. It left me craving more explanation, and clarification of the issues and questions posed in Matrix Reloaded, as it seems to have with many, and it felt like a sellout by the Wachowskis, but maybe I'll decide they just went for a more subtle, but equally poignant film. I'm still thinking on it.
If such a large, infrastructure critical organization had _nobody_ on staff who could completely and unambiguously describe the pricing rules for their markets, how the hell can we expect that your average business is going to have anybody who can accurately describe the detailed processes involved in their domains? The way humans work, we generally deal with complicated and exceptional cases when they occur, we don't try to think them all through in advance. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work very well for huge transaction volumes of mission critical information.
Admittedly, certain domains of problems are strictly categorizable and declarative enough in nature they can be solved by special-purpose point-click-n-drool tools that your average business user can use. But only because each of the underlying components in a process is standard enough that's it's all been precoded for all the possible variations and configurations of that process. Without that, you get into so many different levels of complexity and abstraction that, well, you need a programmer of some sort or another to handle it.
Please, God, don't let these new friend/foe/neutral images be permanent... I was kinda hoping it was just a joke. They are annoying to the point of distraction - the friend and foe are okay, but the neutral is impossible to distinguish from friend without close inspection and they all look fucking goofy. Are you sure Cowboi Kneel didn't just go crazy with the images server?
You can already modify the kernel of OS/X - it's called Darwin, and it's open source (or at least some sort of shared source model... I don't remember the license). I suppose if you are just a NetBSD freak and want to run a pure-blood BSD licensed OS but still run all your spiffy looking Mac apps in an Aqua environment, this project will get you there as soon as the full Aqua window manager runs on top of NetBSD/PPC.
But that's beside the point. The founding fathers didn't protect an undefined right to bear arms in the Constitution. Furthermore, even if you think they did, they certainly were working in a world lacking weapons of the power and destructive capability we have today AND without the kind of violent, heterogeneous society we have today. I agree with you that it's very _unfortunate_ that there are people who would wield guns carelessly and kill others, but in a society in which everybody totes guns around, every testosterone-ridden dispute is as likely as not to devolve into a gunfight - isn't this more or less the way things happened in the Western frontier in the 1800s (discounting Hollywood inflation, I still think there's a substantial amount of truth to it).
The more people live closely packed together and the more destructive technology is, the more we need to make compromises to make society work properly (to argue otherwise invariably results in your making logically fallacious "slippery slope" argument). In the same way that your right to yell "Fire" ends when you enter a crowded theater, why can't your right to carry a gun end when you enter an urban area? If it poses more of a risk, statistically, to others around you for you to have it than for you not to have it, what's wrong with the people of that area judging for themselves that by their measurement of your utility and theirs (a utilitarian argument, in other words), it doesn't make sense to allow guns? If everybody in that city is able to be more relaxed and happier in their everyday life knowing that the first person to get pissed off at them isn't going to pull a gun out and cap them, what the hell is wrong with that?
You can go on pretending that I should feel secure with everybody around me packing heat because only crazy, evil criminals would use a gun to kill somebody else, but the fact is I've observed plenty of otherwise calm, rational people lose their shit and do crazy things, especially when alcohol and drugs are involved. Your entire argument rests on the assumption that people are rational, logical creatures all the time (I know, I know, I must be a liberal with my patronizing attitude, but I've lived in New York half my life, and the fact is most people ARE irresponsible idiots who need some supervision from the government - remember too that many of these people are from poor ghettos and don't have your or my educational background, or are from Third World countries and simply weren't raised to know how to exercise self-control). Yeah, they'd regret it the rest of their lives, but I'd still be dead after they shot me in a bar brawl. Thanks, but I'll continue to choose to live in cities where guns aren't welcome, and enjoy shooting when I'm out in the countryside.
I have no problem with guns in the abstract, and I have a 22 semi-automatic rifle that I used to use for target shooting in Vermont. But I don't really want people packing concealed heat on the streets of New York City because they think that shooting people who threaten them or just piss them off is a right protected by the second-amendment. I think my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. not having to dodge bullets or end up looking down the muzzle of handgun, which incidentally, I have before, and not in a good way) trumps their right to own or carry a handgun.
If the company they licensed the 30k worth of music from didn't have the rights to license it under these terms, then that's hardly MIT's fault.
Your analogy of a redacted court document to a redacted internal government report doesn't seem to hold up. The judicial system doesn't have any vested interest in preventing embarrasment of parties to law suits beyond the requirements of the law, and the protection of their legally guaranteed privacy, but government _bureaucrats_ have every interest in protecting their superiors, their superiors' superiors, and the elected officials who appointed them.
I don't think these guys are the first to demonstrate a CNOT gate, contrary to what the headline implies. This is just the first implementation of a CNOT gate in a _solid-state_ quantum computation device - not having followed this particular area, I can't say whether this was an incremental, and expected development, or a real "breakthrough". But it's nice to finally see people pursuing something other than using bigger, bulkier molecules in jerry-rigged NMR machines, which might actually scale to enough qubits to be useful some years down the road.
I don't think it will necessarily directly lead to new theories, but I think we are inspired in the choices of which ideas to pursue by our understanding and interpretation of existing theory. Calculating the spectrum of the hydrogen atom is a straightforward question - predicting new phenomena in testable, disprovable _theories_ that unify or at least substantially improve our actual understanding of the world is something else entirely.
For example, is nonlocality a fundamental fact that should be integral to any unifying theory, or is just an illusion caused by our misunderstanding of the forces of the universe? At least, this is based on my memory of discussing the Aharonov-Bohm effect, EPR paradox, etc.
And it's important to remember that most of the time, mathematics doesn't guide the formation of theory, a theory starts as a conceptual improvement on existing understanding, and the math is worked out from there. Sure, sometimes parts of theories or particular facets fall out from math alone, but the inspiration to follow particular mathematical calculations to completion doesn't just come from thin air.
In other news, God countersued Atari based on his patent #7,221,235,235 for a "n-dimensional reach around where n is any fucking number I feel like". The Almighty was quoted as saying "hey, I gave reach arounds in four dimensions before you were even born, kid... oh, wrap-around domains?... never mind..."
We spent second semester QMech twiddling our navels, wondering at the EPR paradox and the like, only to have our dumbass visiting prof basically help us get nowhere in terms of real understanding (I think primarily because he didn't have any).
Do these people who mimic the 419 scams also mimic the atrocious spelling, typos and poor command of the english language in most of the Nigerian scam emails I get? I just wonder how an Australian dude could pull off a _true_ Nigerian scam unless he gets all those little details just right.
I know technology is confusing, but god, it's frustrating when no matter how hard you try to be honest and release good, useful products, you still get blamed for all the nasty shit that other people do out there.
Yeah, we just better hope the mice don't ramp up their bioweapons team first... insta-death mice poop, strategically placed behind all of your cabinets and cupboards. Bad, bad voodoo.
Your first sentence is unintelligible and your second sentence is the obvious point of my previous post. So you post a comment that makes no sense and get modded up, and I simply make a factual observation about the recent series of e-Voting topics and get modded down. Great work, moderators.
Consistency police, we have an emergency situation on our hands...
Generally people use the phrase "cannot be predicted" to mean "cannot be predicted by a reasonable person without a complete and accurate simulation of the system being described". Sure, you can predict them all if you simulate the system, but that's not an analytical prediction from the rules themselves, that's the application of the rules to simulate the system.
From a UI perspective, this is all that matters. I realize the many technical merits of X, and I'm certainly not suggesting that it's useless to have network transparency or anything of the sort. I think there'll always be a place for the X protocol, and I don't think we should throw away network transparency as a design consideration. And clearly XFree86 will be here for some time - but we should be working on something better, which can thunk through X support so we can run legacy X apps on it for the time being (a la Cosmoe/DirectFB, which is a decent first step).