Yes, but the LGPL has quite a few references to linking including some very confusing verbiage about the object code falling under section 6 if linked to header files and so on. The GPL does speak about "collections," "aggregations", "derivative works" and "Programs that make use of the source code".
There appears to be a fundamental problem with this law and it appears that we have all had our panties in such a bunch about the DMCA that we neglected to notice this over the last 6 years. I don't think that stealing trade secrets is good, and I don't think that people that do this should get a pass.
But look at what this new law says: if you misappropriate a trade secret and *anybody* profits from it, then you are committing "economic espionage". Pretty much any leaked trade secret can be argued to profit somebody. Remember the article from a few weeks back about the price information leaked on some website? Well, maybe competitors profited. Shit, must be economic espionage. Even though it's just arbitrary chunks of business data, not detailed technical information, schematics, source code, or other copyrightable material, it's still a "trade secret" to somebody. There is a reason that trade secrets always used to receive weak protection under the law - any arbitrary piece of information can be a trade secret, and information DOES leak like an anus on Olestra. A law enforcing the secret status of trade secrets can be whipped out against almost anybody who pisses off their employer or former employer, and does seem to be open to substantial amounts of potential abuse and capricious prosecution.
Luckily, this case seems pretty cut and dried. This guy sounds like he really directly misappropriated quite valuable trade secrets, and he probably deserves to go to jail if he's actually guilty. But the law (which is well and amply described here) But look at the way DMCA prosecution has been handled. I'm just surprised that we haven't heard about more abusive cases involving this law, and I fear we will hear more in the future.
The problem is that many of us who are very active in the Open Source/Free Software communities and are bright people and experienced coders, and some of us who are ALSO experienced businessmen AND have dealt with many lawyers in the past and written and signed many legal contracts STILL don't understand the GPL.
That's right. I consider myself to fall into the above. I mean, I think I understand the GPL, I understand the concepts behind the contract, but it is fucking vague. Concepts like linking - what does linking mean when you are referring to a Java program? If two classes are in the same jar, are they linked? Is it a derivative work? Are they part of a single "work"? If an interface is BSD-licensed or just public domain, but an implementation is GPLed, can I use runtime class binding to invoke it from a piece of commercial software? What about if I use RMI or some godawful XML/HTTP/SOAP mechanism to invoke it?
Now the usual Slashdot response when somebody submits an Ask Slashdot on these topics is "Don't ask us, call your lawyer"! The problem is that while lawyers are experienced and generally skilled at reading contracts, you know a fuck of a lot more about software construction, components and the like than your lawyer does. And though IANAL, I have many friends who are, and you'd be shocked at how much jurisprudence out there is based on concepts like "would a reasonable person expect that..." and so on. If a reasonable person doesn't know what the word "link" means or doesn't understand what a "derivative work" is, even a reasonable person who IS a practitioner of the art in question, then the contract is, IMHO, on shaky grounds when it comes to enforcement in a court of law.
But that's just my opinion. Feel free to prove me wrong.
Holy shit, this had me laughing for ten minutes... if you scroll down that page you'll find the NYLUG guys in a lot of errmm... interesting situations.
Granted, Bruce, if you say it's the best you and the W3C can do, then I will take your word on it, as will most of the rest of the people out there. I'm a businessman and I appreciate a company's need to protect their intellectual property - I just can't quite understand why they don't recognize that standardization and patent rights are pretty much totally at odds. Jumping ship from the W3C would be self-defeating - if they go elsewhere to create "standards" that are patent encumbered, then they might as well not create standards at all.
Like I said, I'm willing to accept the terms of the current agreement on patent licensing policy by the W3C, but I still think it's worth noting the potential problems created by this policy and I appreciate the fact that somebody brings them up. And I don't see how making a stink with the government will help - while I agree that software patents are generally a bad thing, I don't see why the only way to keep patents out of the standards process is to ban software patents entirely (not going to happen in the US anytime soon).
Honestly, this isn't a great idea. There is a reason to make a stink here. I think RMS is a smelly nutjob as much as the next guy, but sometimes he's a correct smelly nutjob.
Look at MP3s. MP3s have patent encumbrances that make them fundamentally incompatible with the GPL. Thus a company like Red Hat cannot legally use and distribute MP3 player software under the GPL without getting sued (unless they pay license fees to Thompson or whoever it is that has the MP3 patents). The proliferation of Free Software (and other free-as-in-herpes tools) for using MP3s are the primary reason that MP3 has become such a widely adopted standard. The Free Software community helped make profits for a company that obfuscated what their patents claims until their standards caught on, then tried to rape money from everyone who touched it.
Quite simply, nobody needs patents on things like SVG, HTML and so on to compete as a commercial company. If they tell you they do, they are lying. On the other hand, Free Software (at least GPLed software, and that's one of the most common Free Software licenses out there) CANNOT EXIST if standards are patent-encumbered under the current proposal. Realistically, your proposal that patent-free standards would give a monopoly to OSS developers is outrageous and unbelievable on the face of it.
Why can't the companies compete on the merits of their products, and if they want a proprietary, patented format for something, let them have it, but there's no need for the W3C to codify it as a standard and thereby endorse it. If they need proprietary intellectual property, let them patent supporting technologies that somehow complement the standard, not the technology that forms part of the standard itself.
And the key problem is that the recipient of said one-handed slideshow program (*ahem*) can no longer redistribute that program legally or otherwise use the patent-infriging source code. Thus the code and all the work put into it by the *modifier* who legally used GPLed code, perhaps without knowing about the patent restrictions, are now dead-ended. Useless. The infringing portion would have to be scrapped. In fact, it would be logically inconsistent to distribute it under the GPL since the referenced portion of the GPL is contradicted by the patent requirements. In other words, the software isn't TRULY GPLed, even if the original author says it's GPLed.
Quite simply, nothing in the article or the submission said anything about GPLing the W3C standard. It just pointed out a legal inconsistency between the new W3C patent requirements and the ABILITY to write your own GPLed implementation of future W3C standards.
Outpost was a game with a huge amount of potential that just way underdelivered because half the features didn't work as you pointed out. I still don't think it was the worst game ever, and with the 1.2 patch (or something like that - they did release two patches as I remember it) it was vaguely playable. But it was perhaps the most disappointing PC game ever.
The really low-down thing was they supposedly were going to take the final release and make it into a separate game, forcing people who wanted to play the game with all the originally advertised features to pay 50 bucks more. They lost a lot of fans that way. Did the fixed working version ever come out, either as a patch to Outpost or as another game? Outpost was published by Sierra as I remember it... I stopped buying their games after that because I felt so cheated - and there were hundreds if not more others who felt the same.
It's not a legitimate question when it's phrased in that fashion and you know it. Don't be a fucking prick, it doesn't make you any friends. You copy the text from my post in yours and yet you still seem incapable of reading it. I can't help you with the English language. Billions of neutrons per second was the number claimed by Hirsch and Meeks according to fusor.net, and AS I SAID BEFORE IF YOU HAD READ MY POST the basic premise that fusion occurs and neutrons are produced has been replicated, though nobody seems to have achieved the exact numbers that H&M claimed. In other words, when you ask whether I have read my own links you make yourself look like an idiot since my links corroborated the contents of my post.
I spent about an hour reading through the whole fusor.net site, including many of the forum posts, prior to posting anything, though clearly you did not or you would realize that the operators of that site made no such claim that you are arguing against. The results of the U Wisconsin group are ~1E8 neutrons/sec and the portable commercial device I linked to here are ~1E7. Please don't be a fucknut and imply that somebody with half a brain can't properly compare orders of magnitude. So again, cut the fucking ad hominem attacks ("Do you read your own links?"). That is an offensive comment to make as it implies that I have somehow made some whopping error in logic or observation, which I have certainly not done. The only error of logic and observation being made here is by you, who seems to want to attribute to me your own misreading of a fucking moronic Slashdor editor/submitter, which I had fuck-all to do with.
Nobody in their right mind is claiming that these things generate net power.
I agree that those words are somewhat misleading, but the whole fusor.net site clearly admits the current shortcomings of the technology. The Slashdot eds and submitters, as always, are irrelevant.
I don't care to argue further about what your original post said, but it was quite ambiguous. While you did say "respectable amounts of fusion" in one place, you then proceeded to give the appearance of making an argument that the whole concept was theoretically flawed when you said: "The potentials are a couple _thousand_ times too small to have any chance of confining fusion capable ions.". Also see your last paragraph in which you seem to claim that such a potential well could not exist. I merely tried to make a point that clearly fusion occurs in these devices. I find it annoying that you keep trying to attribute to me an argument that I never made. I'll stop claiming you said that IEC doesn't work if you stop claiming I said IEC will generate power, then we can get along and be friends and acknowledge that in the end we fully agree that this shit doesn't work now (for the purposes of power generation), might be feasible someday and thus is worthy of further investigation, but we aren't gonna see backpack sized fusion power generators anytime soon.
LOL. Mix in some straw man with an ad hominem attack. Nice. Who the hell said a thing about it generating power? Can you fucking read my posts??? I merely pointed out that it is a commercial IEC device that generates neutrons from a fusion reaction. Duh.
Eh? Re-read my post and you will see the last sentence makes the exact same statement you just made. Clearly none of these people have achieved or even come terribly close to breakeven energy production, and obviously the current forms of these devices aren't going to cut it. However, that's NOT what you said in your first post... you dismissed the concept out-of-hand as theoretically untenable and got yourself modded up to +5 despite the fact that quite a bit of evidence exists showing that lots of reasonable scientists have reproduced the basic results here. That's a straw man argument - you have proved a much weaker statement than you originally made, and in fact a point that everybody else agrees with you on already.
Oh, and yes, I realize the ISEF link doens't have any results, my point was that even a high school student actually DID build one of these things that the judges of this world-renowned contest, presumably scientists, were convinced did produce fusion. And my other links showed some other folks who had done the same in a legitimate research group at a well-respected university.
And I forgot to mention the European Aerospace Defense Corporation (formerly Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace) which sells these guys. Portable neutron generators using IEC. I doubt they just mistook the neutrons for background neutron flux...
It doesn't work because Adam Parker didn't win a second place prize (Engineering category) in the Intel Science and Engineering Foundation contest for building one.
I don't think claiming that it doesn't work is a very logical position. See some of the lists of peer reviewed publications on the subject which have obviously been fairly widely replicated (see for example this link. Clearly, the fact that these systems produce neutrons in substantial quantities seems unassailable - whether the exact results or numbers Hirsch and Meeks reported or claims (billions of neutrons per second or whatever) has been replicated doesn't affect the basic premise.
And of couse, patents be damned - trying to figure fuckall out from any patent is generally a futile exercise as anybody who's tried to do it will tell you.
Also, I remember the result you refer to from my Freshman year E&M class... that you can't produce a "particle trap" using an electric field alone. I remember similarly to you, that had to do with the fact that a potential well -> non-zero divergence and thus a source of charge... But I certainly don't remember in enough detail to imply that this device (whose existance is clearly admitted to by many real physicists) in any way contradicts Gauss' law. I sincerely doubt if you actually work through solving Poisson's equation in radial coordinates that you will find anything magically contradictory about the existence of this device, since nobody has gone around thumping their chests that Gauss was wrong because IEC is possible.
Now the question of whether these devices will lead to breakeven or better sustained fusion reactions - that's another question entirely, and I'll be damned if any of us know the answer to that one yet.
To be honest, I had never really heard about IEC/electrostatic confinement fusion before. The spherical containment idea is very cool, at least in concept, if it could even be conceivable to make it get to breakeven (.01% of breakeven... that's pretty pathetic).
I read through some of the basic info on the page (before some of it got Slashdotted) and then started reading the forums. That's when I started finding the unfortunate schwag like this thread . The problem with all of these sorts of projects is that they tend to attract nutters who think they've rewritten the laws of physics in their garage from scratch using "maths" that they just can't divulge yet because they don't quite work. Ugh. Free energy weirdos and neuvo-quantum threory weirdos - two of a kind.
Things like this always make me wonder, if an area is so promising, why aren't there any academics out there getting funding to pursue it? I mean, I realize sometimes the academic ESTABLISHMENT can be closeminded, but if something has merit, there are usually a FEW academics who will go out on a limb and pursue it to the point that they demonstrate sufficiently interesting results to build a broader base of interest. I've never honestly heard of massive numbers of academics whole-hog ignoring truly promising areas out of some misguided conspiracy bullshit, and frankly it's quite hard to imagine, since the drive for personal fame and glory usually trumps the desire to avoid stepping on toes and to "toe the line".
It sounds like there is real work yet to be done to get these things close to breakeven, and it probably ain't gonna get done in some garage project, but hey, you never know.
It is the Biblical Hebrew word commonly translated as "God". Same meaning, slightly different usage is the more commonly known Biblical Hebrew word "Yahweh" (which used to be Anglicized as Jehovah, primarily by medieval scholars who didn't understand the pronounciation of some Hebrew words very well). Yahweh is usually translated as "Lord", but has the same basic meaning. Elohim, according to some, was the name more commonly used for the Jewish god in the northern kingdom of Israel, and Yahweh was more commonly used in the sourthern kingdom of Judah, and this is used by Biblical scholars to assign authorship of parts of the Pentateuch (5 books of Moses from the Old Testament) to the two communities.
The beauty of it is that, yes, that is in fact one place where e pops up. But it's not the only place where e pops up. I mean, perhaps you can connect all the other problems where e arises to its role in integration, but I'm not sure - and it arises in areas such as continuous compounding of interest, the formula that relates the sine and cosine functions to e, which leads to the strange, almost mystical relation e^(i*pi)+1 = 0. You can find more historical depth on e in places like this.
Anyway, I think my point is that calling it a convenience number seems to trivialize it, though of course the relation you describe is one of the several true basic statements you can make about e, it's definitely not the only one.
Also, your site, autopr0n.com, rocks. I just wanted to take this brief offtopic chance to thank you and the autopr0n mods for giving the world good, fresh TGP links, and the new rating system rocks. I always refer friends to your site.
You mean people use XP with the 3733+ XP theme? I thought the first thing everyone did with an XP box was check the box that says "Use Windows Classic Theme". Hell, I forgot that XP even had that until you just mentioned it because 80% of the XP boxes I've seen are in Classic mode (including the three Windows XP machines I own).
Agreed fully. And now you have stumbled on the reason that I left physics, and I couldn't have stated it better myself. In fact, I have over the years explained to many friends, including folks in the software industry why I didn't pursue physics, and it precisely the inability at its fundamental levels to answer the 'why's. I mean, we can understand lightning (I think we can say we know 'why' lightning happens, but we don't really know why all the other things are the way they are SUCH THAT lightning happens). And we can elucidate the rules and postulates of quantum mechanics and general relativity. But physics can't tell us 'why 3 space and 1 time dimensions that are perceptible' or 'why is the Ricci tensor the correct description of our space time'. I mean, you have to basically posit a model and show that the model results in describing observed phenomena. At such a fundamental level, you really lose the ability to answer 'why'. I had hoped that perhaps string theory or other theoretical paths would lead to a better understanding of why, but then I realized after studying physics for a while that you never really get to the why, you just come up with more abstract, unified models that admittedly might be more aesthetically pleasing, but don't really get you anywhere in terms of real understanding. But if you stopped asking 'why', you'd never get to at least understanding 'how'. I think that most physicists accept that at the core of their discipline, there are some unanswerable 'why' questions, which require an appeal to religion, or the anthropic principle, or just an acceptance of the fact that they are. But if we had just accepted 'intention' as the heart of everything, we would never have bothered pursuing science... 'why is there lightning'... 'because there is and the gods will it'. The 'why' questions are what I think drives us, so they are useful to ask, but also frustrating since they are, at the heart of it, unanswerable.
Also note that the most miserable group of fellows I've ever met in my life were the Harvard physics faculty. I always believed it was because they had set out in their youth to answer why and discovered that they could only answer how, and usually only for such a small esoteric part of reality that nobody much cared outside of their specialty.
Perhaps you should consider taking your foot out of your mouth. If you have to resort to an ad hominem attack in your first sentence when we (pVoid and myself) are engaged in an otherwise civil discussion of the philosophy of science. This has very little to do with the pursuit or practice of physics or computer science, two areas in which I am somewhat accomplished, probably substantially more so than yourself.
The entire point of my post, if you cared to or took the time to read it, is that determining which things "happen by probabilistic chance" as you so eloquently explain it, and which do not is not nearly as easy as you posit. Clearly, we CURRENTLY believe that which subatomic particle decayed at any point in time is a random, probabilistic event, described by quantum mechanics. In fact, the indistinguishability of these particles is one of the basic tenets of traditional QM (and probably of modern QM variants as well), as you can find in any basic QM textbook.
But even this basic theory has its challengers. People who have posited non-local theories, hidden variable theories and so on. These include reputable theoretical physicists over the years, and the point is that they didn't take the fact that there was no "why" as a given, they questioned it.
With your other examples, there are definitely possible scientific explanations for these facts. The fact that we have 10 figers - an evolutionary argument can be made that the opposable thumb, plus at least 2 other fingers is required for minimal tool handling, and by biomechanical modeling, one might show why 5 fingers per hand is a partcularly efficient construction. Snowflake shapes - one could examine ice crystal formation to explain how ice crystals are able to form under certain conditions. Obviously, random molecular motion and configurations still have substantial effects on the exact final configuration of any given snowflake in a statistical sampling of snowflakes. (Again, get yourself a physics textbook - statistical mechanics and thermodynamics do have something to offer in understanding these kinds of systems). And the matter-antimatter question I won't even address since it involves possible symmetry breaking discussion which I am simply not qualfied to have, but suffice it to say that the discovery of CPT symmetry breaking has led to at least one or two Nobel prizes in the last 40 years. Thank god those scientists didn't accept your explanation that it's "just cause, and don't bother asking".
What you are doing is applying the anthropic principle, so-called because it is essentially an appeal to the fact that it is the way it is because we are here to ask it. Perhaps that sounds silly when reduced to its essence, but fundamentally what you are saying follows this basic pattern. The problem with this is trying to figure out what things, numbers or observations in our universe should be open to 'scientific explanation' and which should be written off to the anthropic principle. If you accept such a principle, it seems like you can essentially draw any arbitrary line and call the things on one side of the line open to scientific inquiry and the others not ("they just are that way" "why?" "just cuz." or "cuz you are here to ask why they are that way").
As a physicist by training (though not by profession), I take issue with this basic principle. The fine structure constant, e, pi, hbar, c.... these are all "weird" constants we observe in various places in the universe. Some of them have deeper meaning that we have discovered, or at least relationships that connect otherwise seemingly disparate areas of math, physics, or whatever. Some, as far as we know, are still arbitrary free parameters. As I remember it, the Standard Model currently has something like 5 or 6 free parameters in it.... if you fix these, you get all of modern physics to pop out (well, roughly like that). Are these random? Are they arbitrary? We don't know yet, but we shouldn't stop asking the questions.
Also, I know there are different forms of the anthropic principle (weak and strong) - I forget the exact distinction, and I believe what we are describing more or less corresponds to the strong form. The weak form is more watered down and palatable to a general scientific audience.:)
Yes, a blog can frankly be just about any website out there with shit that people are interested in. News, commentary, opinion, these are all things found on blogs. The term seems to be reserved these days for what we used to (way back in the day) call personal homepages, it's just that now these said homepages also contain regularly updated news/opinion/commentary on whatever the fuck people want to write about.
I personally prefer to waste my time posting my news/opinion/commentary to Slashdot, but who cares, the point is all about the democratization of opinion sharing the web allows. The more interesting the content you produce is, the more likely people will read it. Again, the large multiuser forums like/. seem a bit more interesting than just slapping it up on your own page and hoping somebody will read it. But whatever floats yer boat.
And how about all that excellent amateur porn out there? Presumably this stuff is put out there with the understanding that it will be passed around. Lots of pr0n videos on P2P networks (admittedly, some of the professional pr0n videos are probably not legal to redistribute, but I haven't heard the porn industry knocking down on anybody's door trying to shut down Kazaa et. al.).
Unemployed people don't have anything to do with their time. Also observed - a tendency to post more on Slashdot, download more porn, leech MP3s and warez from Kazaa, and install 5 Linux distros for comparison purposes and spent 18 hours setting up multi-boot. This and other news, tonight at 11.
Correct, and allowing the technology ubermensch such as ourselves to continue utilizing websites that make money from advertisers that we don't have to worry our pretty little heads over. The advertisers are happy because, uhh... well, I doubt anybody really clicks through, but they can at least continue with that fantasy, and support the websites with advertising bucks, the websites are happy because they don't go broke, and the ubermensch are happy because we don't have to see popups. The only people not happy are those too ignorant to realize that blocking popups is possible, and they subsidize the rest of us to access lots of great content on the post-magic-.com-era web.
So in short, let's stop worry so much about the technological underclass, since eventually they'll get bred out of existence and advertisers will come up with MORE annoying ways of trying to steal my fucking attention when I am surfing the web, which I pay 50 dollars a month to access. Then the vicious cycle starts all over again.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the LGPL has quite a few references to linking including some very confusing verbiage about the object code falling under section 6 if linked to header files and so on. The GPL does speak about "collections," "aggregations", "derivative works" and "Programs that make use of the source code".
But look at what this new law says: if you misappropriate a trade secret and *anybody* profits from it, then you are committing "economic espionage". Pretty much any leaked trade secret can be argued to profit somebody. Remember the article from a few weeks back about the price information leaked on some website? Well, maybe competitors profited. Shit, must be economic espionage. Even though it's just arbitrary chunks of business data, not detailed technical information, schematics, source code, or other copyrightable material, it's still a "trade secret" to somebody. There is a reason that trade secrets always used to receive weak protection under the law - any arbitrary piece of information can be a trade secret, and information DOES leak like an anus on Olestra. A law enforcing the secret status of trade secrets can be whipped out against almost anybody who pisses off their employer or former employer, and does seem to be open to substantial amounts of potential abuse and capricious prosecution.
Luckily, this case seems pretty cut and dried. This guy sounds like he really directly misappropriated quite valuable trade secrets, and he probably deserves to go to jail if he's actually guilty. But the law (which is well and amply described here)
But look at the way DMCA prosecution has been handled. I'm just surprised that we haven't heard about more abusive cases involving this law, and I fear we will hear more in the future.
That's right. I consider myself to fall into the above. I mean, I think I understand the GPL, I understand the concepts behind the contract, but it is fucking vague. Concepts like linking - what does linking mean when you are referring to a Java program? If two classes are in the same jar, are they linked? Is it a derivative work? Are they part of a single "work"? If an interface is BSD-licensed or just public domain, but an implementation is GPLed, can I use runtime class binding to invoke it from a piece of commercial software? What about if I use RMI or some godawful XML/HTTP/SOAP mechanism to invoke it?
Now the usual Slashdot response when somebody submits an Ask Slashdot on these topics is "Don't ask us, call your lawyer"! The problem is that while lawyers are experienced and generally skilled at reading contracts, you know a fuck of a lot more about software construction, components and the like than your lawyer does. And though IANAL, I have many friends who are, and you'd be shocked at how much jurisprudence out there is based on concepts like "would a reasonable person expect that..." and so on. If a reasonable person doesn't know what the word "link" means or doesn't understand what a "derivative work" is, even a reasonable person who IS a practitioner of the art in question, then the contract is, IMHO, on shaky grounds when it comes to enforcement in a court of law.
But that's just my opinion. Feel free to prove me wrong.
Holy shit, this had me laughing for ten minutes... if you scroll down that page you'll find the NYLUG guys in a lot of errmm... interesting situations.
Like I said, I'm willing to accept the terms of the current agreement on patent licensing policy by the W3C, but I still think it's worth noting the potential problems created by this policy and I appreciate the fact that somebody brings them up. And I don't see how making a stink with the government will help - while I agree that software patents are generally a bad thing, I don't see why the only way to keep patents out of the standards process is to ban software patents entirely (not going to happen in the US anytime soon).
Look at MP3s. MP3s have patent encumbrances that make them fundamentally incompatible with the GPL. Thus a company like Red Hat cannot legally use and distribute MP3 player software under the GPL without getting sued (unless they pay license fees to Thompson or whoever it is that has the MP3 patents). The proliferation of Free Software (and other free-as-in-herpes tools) for using MP3s are the primary reason that MP3 has become such a widely adopted standard. The Free Software community helped make profits for a company that obfuscated what their patents claims until their standards caught on, then tried to rape money from everyone who touched it.
Quite simply, nobody needs patents on things like SVG, HTML and so on to compete as a commercial company. If they tell you they do, they are lying. On the other hand, Free Software (at least GPLed software, and that's one of the most common Free Software licenses out there) CANNOT EXIST if standards are patent-encumbered under the current proposal. Realistically, your proposal that patent-free standards would give a monopoly to OSS developers is outrageous and unbelievable on the face of it.
Why can't the companies compete on the merits of their products, and if they want a proprietary, patented format for something, let them have it, but there's no need for the W3C to codify it as a standard and thereby endorse it. If they need proprietary intellectual property, let them patent supporting technologies that somehow complement the standard, not the technology that forms part of the standard itself.
Quite simply, nothing in the article or the submission said anything about GPLing the W3C standard. It just pointed out a legal inconsistency between the new W3C patent requirements and the ABILITY to write your own GPLed implementation of future W3C standards.
The really low-down thing was they supposedly were going to take the final release and make it into a separate game, forcing people who wanted to play the game with all the originally advertised features to pay 50 bucks more. They lost a lot of fans that way. Did the fixed working version ever come out, either as a patch to Outpost or as another game? Outpost was published by Sierra as I remember it... I stopped buying their games after that because I felt so cheated - and there were hundreds if not more others who felt the same.
I spent about an hour reading through the whole fusor.net site, including many of the forum posts, prior to posting anything, though clearly you did not or you would realize that the operators of that site made no such claim that you are arguing against. The results of the U Wisconsin group are ~1E8 neutrons/sec and the portable commercial device I linked to here are ~1E7. Please don't be a fucknut and imply that somebody with half a brain can't properly compare orders of magnitude. So again, cut the fucking ad hominem attacks ("Do you read your own links?"). That is an offensive comment to make as it implies that I have somehow made some whopping error in logic or observation, which I have certainly not done. The only error of logic and observation being made here is by you, who seems to want to attribute to me your own misreading of a fucking moronic Slashdor editor/submitter, which I had fuck-all to do with.
I agree that those words are somewhat misleading, but the whole fusor.net site clearly admits the current shortcomings of the technology. The Slashdot eds and submitters, as always, are irrelevant.
I don't care to argue further about what your original post said, but it was quite ambiguous. While you did say "respectable amounts of fusion" in one place, you then proceeded to give the appearance of making an argument that the whole concept was theoretically flawed when you said: "The potentials are a couple _thousand_ times too small to have any chance of confining fusion capable ions.". Also see your last paragraph in which you seem to claim that such a potential well could not exist. I merely tried to make a point that clearly fusion occurs in these devices. I find it annoying that you keep trying to attribute to me an argument that I never made. I'll stop claiming you said that IEC doesn't work if you stop claiming I said IEC will generate power, then we can get along and be friends and acknowledge that in the end we fully agree that this shit doesn't work now (for the purposes of power generation), might be feasible someday and thus is worthy of further investigation, but we aren't gonna see backpack sized fusion power generators anytime soon.
LOL. Mix in some straw man with an ad hominem attack. Nice. Who the hell said a thing about it generating power? Can you fucking read my posts??? I merely pointed out that it is a commercial IEC device that generates neutrons from a fusion reaction. Duh.
Oh, and yes, I realize the ISEF link doens't have any results, my point was that even a high school student actually DID build one of these things that the judges of this world-renowned contest, presumably scientists, were convinced did produce fusion. And my other links showed some other folks who had done the same in a legitimate research group at a well-respected university.
And I forgot to mention the European Aerospace Defense Corporation (formerly Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace) which sells these guys. Portable neutron generators using IEC. I doubt they just mistook the neutrons for background neutron flux...
It doesn't work because Adam Parker didn't win a second place prize (Engineering category) in the Intel Science and Engineering Foundation contest for building one.
And these guys at U Wisconsin are frauds too.
I don't think claiming that it doesn't work is a very logical position. See some of the lists of peer reviewed publications on the subject which have obviously been fairly widely replicated (see for example this link. Clearly, the fact that these systems produce neutrons in substantial quantities seems unassailable - whether the exact results or numbers Hirsch and Meeks reported or claims (billions of neutrons per second or whatever) has been replicated doesn't affect the basic premise.
And of couse, patents be damned - trying to figure fuckall out from any patent is generally a futile exercise as anybody who's tried to do it will tell you.
Also, I remember the result you refer to from my Freshman year E&M class
Now the question of whether these devices will lead to breakeven or better sustained fusion reactions - that's another question entirely, and I'll be damned if any of us know the answer to that one yet.
I read through some of the basic info on the page (before some of it got Slashdotted) and then started reading the forums. That's when I started finding the unfortunate schwag like this thread . The problem with all of these sorts of projects is that they tend to attract nutters who think they've rewritten the laws of physics in their garage from scratch using "maths" that they just can't divulge yet because they don't quite work. Ugh. Free energy weirdos and neuvo-quantum threory weirdos - two of a kind.
Things like this always make me wonder, if an area is so promising, why aren't there any academics out there getting funding to pursue it? I mean, I realize sometimes the academic ESTABLISHMENT can be closeminded, but if something has merit, there are usually a FEW academics who will go out on a limb and pursue it to the point that they demonstrate sufficiently interesting results to build a broader base of interest. I've never honestly heard of massive numbers of academics whole-hog ignoring truly promising areas out of some misguided conspiracy bullshit, and frankly it's quite hard to imagine, since the drive for personal fame and glory usually trumps the desire to avoid stepping on toes and to "toe the line".
It sounds like there is real work yet to be done to get these things close to breakeven, and it probably ain't gonna get done in some garage project, but hey, you never know.
Okay, enough biblical scholaring for the day.
Anyway, I think my point is that calling it a convenience number seems to trivialize it, though of course the relation you describe is one of the several true basic statements you can make about e, it's definitely not the only one.
Also, your site, autopr0n.com, rocks. I just wanted to take this brief offtopic chance to thank you and the autopr0n mods for giving the world good, fresh TGP links, and the new rating system rocks. I always refer friends to your site.
You mean people use XP with the 3733+ XP theme? I thought the first thing everyone did with an XP box was check the box that says "Use Windows Classic Theme". Hell, I forgot that XP even had that until you just mentioned it because 80% of the XP boxes I've seen are in Classic mode (including the three Windows XP machines I own).
Also note that the most miserable group of fellows I've ever met in my life were the Harvard physics faculty. I always believed it was because they had set out in their youth to answer why and discovered that they could only answer how, and usually only for such a small esoteric part of reality that nobody much cared outside of their specialty.
The entire point of my post, if you cared to or took the time to read it, is that determining which things "happen by probabilistic chance" as you so eloquently explain it, and which do not is not nearly as easy as you posit. Clearly, we CURRENTLY believe that which subatomic particle decayed at any point in time is a random, probabilistic event, described by quantum mechanics. In fact, the indistinguishability of these particles is one of the basic tenets of traditional QM (and probably of modern QM variants as well), as you can find in any basic QM textbook.
But even this basic theory has its challengers. People who have posited non-local theories, hidden variable theories and so on. These include reputable theoretical physicists over the years, and the point is that they didn't take the fact that there was no "why" as a given, they questioned it.
With your other examples, there are definitely possible scientific explanations for these facts. The fact that we have 10 figers - an evolutionary argument can be made that the opposable thumb, plus at least 2 other fingers is required for minimal tool handling, and by biomechanical modeling, one might show why 5 fingers per hand is a partcularly efficient construction. Snowflake shapes - one could examine ice crystal formation to explain how ice crystals are able to form under certain conditions. Obviously, random molecular motion and configurations still have substantial effects on the exact final configuration of any given snowflake in a statistical sampling of snowflakes. (Again, get yourself a physics textbook - statistical mechanics and thermodynamics do have something to offer in understanding these kinds of systems). And the matter-antimatter question I won't even address since it involves possible symmetry breaking discussion which I am simply not qualfied to have, but suffice it to say that the discovery of CPT symmetry breaking has led to at least one or two Nobel prizes in the last 40 years. Thank god those scientists didn't accept your explanation that it's "just cause, and don't bother asking".
As a physicist by training (though not by profession), I take issue with this basic principle. The fine structure constant, e, pi, hbar, c.... these are all "weird" constants we observe in various places in the universe. Some of them have deeper meaning that we have discovered, or at least relationships that connect otherwise seemingly disparate areas of math, physics, or whatever. Some, as far as we know, are still arbitrary free parameters. As I remember it, the Standard Model currently has something like 5 or 6 free parameters in it.... if you fix these, you get all of modern physics to pop out (well, roughly like that). Are these random? Are they arbitrary? We don't know yet, but we shouldn't stop asking the questions.
Also, I know there are different forms of the anthropic principle (weak and strong) - I forget the exact distinction, and I believe what we are describing more or less corresponds to the strong form. The weak form is more watered down and palatable to a general scientific audience.
I personally prefer to waste my time posting my news/opinion/commentary to Slashdot, but who cares, the point is all about the democratization of opinion sharing the web allows. The more interesting the content you produce is, the more likely people will read it. Again, the large multiuser forums like
And how about all that excellent amateur porn out there? Presumably this stuff is put out there with the understanding that it will be passed around. Lots of pr0n videos on P2P networks (admittedly, some of the professional pr0n videos are probably not legal to redistribute, but I haven't heard the porn industry knocking down on anybody's door trying to shut down Kazaa et. al.).
Unemployed people don't have anything to do with their time. Also observed - a tendency to post more on Slashdot, download more porn, leech MP3s and warez from Kazaa, and install 5 Linux distros for comparison purposes and spent 18 hours setting up multi-boot. This and other news, tonight at 11.
So in short, let's stop worry so much about the technological underclass, since eventually they'll get bred out of existence and advertisers will come up with MORE annoying ways of trying to steal my fucking attention when I am surfing the web, which I pay 50 dollars a month to access. Then the vicious cycle starts all over again.