Of course, I was a contract
employee, so I had no legal recourse,
I hope you know by now that this is not true.
Discrimination (age, race, sex, marital status...) is never legal, whether you are a contract employee or not, whether your contract says you can be terminated without cause or not.
Of course, this is not legal advice, IANAL, and you may well not have prevailed in a legal action. But you would have been well within your rights. This is (one of the reasons) why we have courts, contingency-fee lawyers, and anti-discrimination laws.
Just wanted to second this choice. The War of the Worlds was just loaded with now-standard ideas including landing vessels, motorized spacesuits (for the Martians!), and heat-rays / lasers.
In your opinion, what will it take - either in terms of EFF-style activism or in terms of 1984-style government repression - to make the average person-on-the-street care about our digital freedoms?
In the current environment it seems that most people have adopted the attitude of Britain's John Major who said - as his Tories wired the UK with videocameras - ``If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.''
I would like to caution you and the Slashdot crew
against allowing too much self-selection by your readers, as this will break the uniformity of experience that Slashdot currently offers (same scores for the same posts, for everyone) and thus be detrimental to the community at large.
As it is now, your readers can change their browsing threshold, but they cannot reorder the ratings of posts - that is left exclusively to each story's moderators. Now, that may be annoying at some times and for some readers - I recall a "funny" Dmitry Sklyarov post (deliberately not linked to here) that nearly made me sick - but it is part of what makes Slashdot a community, more than just a News source.
When I first started reading Slashdot, I had no idea what was going on. Acronyms flew, the jokes were obscure, and people made repeated reference to issues and articles I had no knowledge of. Reading the posts and seeing what posts were rated highly allowed me to gain a sense of the community over time. What I found wasn't always to my liking or even, necessarily, pleasant, but it was an honest reflection of your readership/postership - and there's something to be said for that.
To anticipate the first round of responses, what I'm talking about here is not groupthink (although some of that undoubtedly goes on). On the contrary, I have found that well-reasoned dissenting opinions are reliably among the top few posts on a story, with the system as it is.
So I urge you to think carefully before allowing your readers too much power of self-selection of posts (even against AC's).
Your billiard ball example is equivalent to Einstein's "hidden variables" attempt to explain away quantum entanglement. Bell's theorem demonstrated that the predictions of quantum mechanics were actually inconsistent with such a theory - and subsequent experiments proved him right. The universe is far more mysterious than you or Einstein give it credit for.
In fact the reproduction of a quantum state - in all its particulars - is as perfect a teleportation as we might ever expect to achieve - see my accompanying comment. So I don't think your criticisms are entirely justified.
I say "not entirely" because extrapolating 13 orders of magnitude, and to real systems rather than super-cooled ones - as required for useful teleportation - still requires a bit of hutzpah. But the scientists cannot take all the blame. After all, the Trekkies were there long before...
Can anybody shed light on this? How would this experiment lead to a teleporter??
Well, this will get us into some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of quantum mechanics, but I'll see what I can do.
The quantum entanglement of two particles means that (just as you say) the behavior of one particle becomes perfectly correlated with the behavior of another. In the classic example case, two photons are generated with opposite polarizations. If you can transmit them a distance apart without any interference, then the photons will remain entangled, and a measurement of the polarization of one photon will have immediate implications for the polarization of the other.
Although this is very useful for quantum cryptography, please note that it will NOT allow you to transmit information any faster than the speed of light. To take the cryptographic example, it allows you to generate a safe one-time pad, known to both sides and to no one else, but you still have to transmit your actual message separately.
How can quantum entanglement be used for something like teleportation? Well, let us agree first that if I can produce a perfect quantum replica of a distant system, that is equivalent to teleporting the system. Any given electron (for example) is indistinguishable (in a very deep sense) from every other electron in the universe. So for teleportation all we need to do is reproduce a quantum state. You might say it's more akin to a quantum xerox machine than to most people's classical idea of teleportation.
Okay, so here's how it works: take your two quantum-entangled photons, and instead of simply measuring the polarization of the one nearby, get it to interact with a "target photon" that you want to teleport. If you set things up properly, and observe the outcome very carefully, then the interaction of the two photons on your end will cause the entangled photon - an arbitrary distance away - to enter a new state which is perfectly correlated with the state that your target photon had. Then, once you tell your distant collaborator about the exact outcome of the photon interaction on your side, your collaborator will be able to apply that knowledge to her entangled photon, and produce an exact quantum replica of your original target photon. Voila! Teleportation.
Note again that no faster-than-light communication is enabled by this. You still have to communicate a regular light-speed message between collaborators to get this to work. The actual experiment was carried out several years ago and is old hat by now. The current experiment improves upon previous efforts by entangling so many more (trillions!) particles.
The quantum entanglement of so many particles makes the actual teleportation of a similar number feasible, but one final note - even trillions of particles is many orders of magnitude less than the 10^27 or so particles in your average Starship Captain.
Sure a lot of these apps aren't
free, but I was never using them because they were free: I was using them because they got the job done well.
The problem, to most open source advocates, is not that your new applications aren't (beer) free - we all like to see developers well compensated for their efforts - but rather that they aren't (speech) free. You will never see the source code, and the community will never have the benefit of the work of those developers... at some point in the not-so-distant future, you will no longer even be able to "purchase" any license for that software you're using; you'll have to lease it instead. Both Microsoft and Adobe have expressed interest in this new-and-improved revenue model - which they will undoubtedly market (consumer inconvenience aside) as merely their best response to "software piracy".
Of course you are (speech) free to use the software that you prefer. But I hope you consider the political benefits of (speech) free software to be a point in its favor - above and beyond any price differential.
He is gonna donate this money, then get federal funding for the research and then
patent everything that comes from it and make billions of dollars.
Umm... no. He was going to donate the money to Stanford, not fund a startup with it.
The big compainies only want the federal funding for research so they don't have to spend
the money, yet they still get the patents.
Possibly (companies always want something for nothing), but consider it from Joe/Jill Citizen's point of view. If Federal money funds the research then the government / public sector gets guaranteed dibs (low-cost licenses) to any resulting technology. Whereas if the research is funded solely by private interests, guess who reaps the rewards.
If all these big companies think its sooooo important to have more than these 60 stem cells why don't they fork over the money for
the research?
Oh don't worry - they will. And so will the UK and other more enlightened governments. It's just the US public sector / universities that are in danger of falling behind.
I doubt W would accept your characterization of his position (W: He may be inconsistent, but at least he's pragmatic!). But okay, I'll bite.
What is it about the already-dead embryos that were responsible for the (nominal) 60 preexisting stem cell lines of W's speech that distinguishes them from the already-dead embryos that are responsible for any additional stem cell lines that exist today? Or that will exist in one year?
Dead is dead - use the cell lines for research. You can't get more pragmatic than that.
I defy anyone to explain to me how (as W would have it) it can be okay to finance research on human stem cell lines that were created before a certain date (date of W's speech?), and verboten to finance research on stem cells created after that date.
What is the moral value of a date? Either it is okay to create stem cell lines (all right, all right, "destroy embryos") or it is not. The fact that the cell lines were created (embryos destroyed) before W started paying attention to the subject has no relevance. And if it is not okay to create stem cell lines, then it cannot be okay to use them for research purposes.
And please don't tell me about how the net result will be fewer of these embryos destroyed. Frozen embryos are destroyed at fertility clinics every day, en masse, and W has not lifted even his pinky finger to stop that. Far more useful, in my opinion, is the approach now being taken by Harvard and Boston IVF, to use these embryos for research rather than simply dump them in the garbage.
Microsoft sent the petition to the high court two days before the case was to be sent to a new judge to decide what penalty the Redmond, Wash., firm should face.
Man - that's two whole days' potential delay they passed up on!
First, I want to thank Jon Katz for keeping this issue in front of the eyes of Slashdot readers. Dmitry imprisoned is an injustice every day, and not just when "case developments" prompt the major news media to give it lip service.
Jon asks "why [Dmitry] should go free" and not why the DMCA is bad law, so I will restrict my comments to this limited question, and target them towards the US policymakers who have the power NOW to change the government's course.
Dmitry was arrested under the provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). It has been argued that Dmitry did not violate this law - but I will not make that argument; assume instead that he did. It has also been argued that the DMCA (or part of it) is bad law - but I will not make that argument either. Instead, I will argue that even granted these points, Dmitry should go free.
To make this argument I assert, first, that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA - those that Dmitry is accused of violating - are controversial law. Specifically, these provisions of the law may be unconstitutional. As evidence I offer up, first, Constitutional Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times; and second, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's essay on their web site. Note that one does not have to agree with all or even most of these arguments to accept that the law is controversial - one merely has to accept that some of these arguments are reasonable.
Second, I assert that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, and particularly their criminal remedies, are currently untested law. This point is almost self-evident, as nearly every media story about the case has referred to its ground-breaking nature. It suffices merely to point out that in addition (1) the two other cases brought under the DMCA, DeCSS (2600 magazine) and SDMI (Prof. Edward Felten) are civil actions; and (2) Neither of those cases are yet resolved in the courts.
Finally, I assert that it is not in the US government's interest to make Dmitry Sklyarov the test case for these controversial, untested provisions of the DMCA. There are several reasons for this. First, Dmitry is a working graduate student and not clearly either criminally responsible for the software or wealthy because of it; therefore he is a sympathetic defendant for judge or jury. Second, the chief complainant in the case, Adobe, has recommended dropping the charges. Third, he is a foreign national who is accused of breaking this controversial, untested American law while in his home country, which adds needless complexity (and diplomatic ramifications) to the case, and threatens to deprive the US of the expertise of foreign programmers (c.f. Alan Cox).
Rather than pursue the risky brute-force prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov, then, US policymakers should tell the FBI to pick on someone their own size - that is, a US citizen who has clearly broken these provisions of the law while on American soil.
Umm... sorry (for all of us) - but the fact that CDFreak is not selling their software will provide them no protection at all against DMCA actions (civil and criminal).
The point is that they are distributing a copyright-protection circumvention device; even the tangential benefits that they realize by doing this (more visitors to their website?) will suffice to make them liable.
I'm wagering they'll be the next copyright-lobby DMCA-effectiveness poster-children, myself.
In other words, Microsoft is mad because it wants to "build" upon free software.
Exactly. Or to put it a different way: MS is terrified that someday, somehow, a group of "hackers" will develop a piece of GPL'd software that is so good that MS can't reproduce or compete with it. Embrace and extend is powerless against the GPL.
You have to hand it to them - it's a reasonable fear. In fact, it has probably happened already.
In the article it notes that the actual archiving of the papers will be done by PubMedCentral. There would be no costs to any participating journals. Nonetheless the journals (absent a few exceptions) are refusing to take part.
In any case, there are great advantages to collecting all of the literature at one site - you can do better search and retrieval, and enable systematic cross-literature studies. Even if the journals did make their own archives publicly accessible we would probably want to collect the literature in some noncommercial space.
Nobody's asking for something for nothing. But when you've done the research, and payed to have it published, you'd like to think you could make it available in a free public forum (if you wanted to).
I would advise scientists in disciplines other than physics and applied math to check out the arXiv.org website and e-print archive.
This was started by a lone eccentric^H^H^H^H visionary genius named Paul Ginsparg, a physicist employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (yes, tax dollars at work!), in 1991. The site is nearly self-maintaining and serves up hundreds of thousands of e-prints a year to physicists and mathematicians worldwide. For those who are interested, this report gives Dr. Ginsparg's view of the archive circa 1996.
The New York Times had a nice article about the archive on May 1 of this year (now only accessible via pay at the "Premium Archive"... how's that for irony?) and how it has levelled the scientific playing field for researchers in less-developed countries who cannot afford premium journal subscriptions.
The most important point, though, is that this free e-print service coexists with the high-subscription journals (Phys Rev; Science; Nature; ApJ) that serve these communities. Young researchers bucking for tenure submit to the prestigious journal... and also to arXiv.org. That way their research gets both respect and the broadest possible distribution.
This sort of compromise is going to be harder to achieve, I think, in fields where publishing is an even bigger-money business (MoBio comes to mind). But it does demonstrate that full-scale war is not the only alternative to all-out capitulation to commercial interests.
if the law's so patently unconstitutional, then why do we need a criminal case to overturn it?
and if it has to be a criminal case, why does it have to be Dmitry, rather than some US citizen (you?) who volunteers to be a test case and stays free on bail as the case works its way through the courts (c.f. the CDA case)?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you know by now that this is not true.
Discrimination (age, race, sex, marital status...) is never legal, whether you are a contract employee or not, whether your contract says you can be terminated without cause or not.
Of course, this is not legal advice, IANAL, and you may well not have prevailed in a legal action. But you would have been well within your rights. This is (one of the reasons) why we have courts, contingency-fee lawyers, and anti-discrimination laws.
-Renard
-Renard
In your opinion, what will it take - either in terms of EFF-style activism or in terms of 1984-style government repression - to make the average person-on-the-street care about our digital freedoms?
In the current environment it seems that most people have adopted the attitude of Britain's John Major who said - as his Tories wired the UK with videocameras - ``If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.''
-Renard
Ah, yes! Case in point: the original poster.
-Renard
Poster apparently has never found his/her way to the Cheesy Portal (TM).
Enjoy!
-Renard
I would like to caution you and the Slashdot crew against allowing too much self-selection by your readers, as this will break the uniformity of experience that Slashdot currently offers (same scores for the same posts, for everyone) and thus be detrimental to the community at large.
As it is now, your readers can change their browsing threshold, but they cannot reorder the ratings of posts - that is left exclusively to each story's moderators. Now, that may be annoying at some times and for some readers - I recall a "funny" Dmitry Sklyarov post (deliberately not linked to here) that nearly made me sick - but it is part of what makes Slashdot a community, more than just a News source.
When I first started reading Slashdot, I had no idea what was going on. Acronyms flew, the jokes were obscure, and people made repeated reference to issues and articles I had no knowledge of. Reading the posts and seeing what posts were rated highly allowed me to gain a sense of the community over time. What I found wasn't always to my liking or even, necessarily, pleasant, but it was an honest reflection of your readership/postership - and there's something to be said for that.
To anticipate the first round of responses, what I'm talking about here is not groupthink (although some of that undoubtedly goes on). On the contrary, I have found that well-reasoned dissenting opinions are reliably among the top few posts on a story, with the system as it is.
So I urge you to think carefully before allowing your readers too much power of self-selection of posts (even against AC's).
Sincerely,
Renard
I think you mean "intuitive."
< Insert witty quip here>
-Renard
I can't think of any similarly superior book treatments at the moment but I'll check my bookshelves and get back to you if I find something.
-Renard
In fact the reproduction of a quantum state - in all its particulars - is as perfect a teleportation as we might ever expect to achieve - see my accompanying comment. So I don't think your criticisms are entirely justified.
I say "not entirely" because extrapolating 13 orders of magnitude, and to real systems rather than super-cooled ones - as required for useful teleportation - still requires a bit of hutzpah. But the scientists cannot take all the blame. After all, the Trekkies were there long before...
-Renard
Well, this will get us into some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of quantum mechanics, but I'll see what I can do.
The quantum entanglement of two particles means that (just as you say) the behavior of one particle becomes perfectly correlated with the behavior of another. In the classic example case, two photons are generated with opposite polarizations. If you can transmit them a distance apart without any interference, then the photons will remain entangled, and a measurement of the polarization of one photon will have immediate implications for the polarization of the other.
Although this is very useful for quantum cryptography, please note that it will NOT allow you to transmit information any faster than the speed of light. To take the cryptographic example, it allows you to generate a safe one-time pad, known to both sides and to no one else, but you still have to transmit your actual message separately.
How can quantum entanglement be used for something like teleportation? Well, let us agree first that if I can produce a perfect quantum replica of a distant system, that is equivalent to teleporting the system. Any given electron (for example) is indistinguishable (in a very deep sense) from every other electron in the universe. So for teleportation all we need to do is reproduce a quantum state. You might say it's more akin to a quantum xerox machine than to most people's classical idea of teleportation.
Okay, so here's how it works: take your two quantum-entangled photons, and instead of simply measuring the polarization of the one nearby, get it to interact with a "target photon" that you want to teleport. If you set things up properly, and observe the outcome very carefully, then the interaction of the two photons on your end will cause the entangled photon - an arbitrary distance away - to enter a new state which is perfectly correlated with the state that your target photon had. Then, once you tell your distant collaborator about the exact outcome of the photon interaction on your side, your collaborator will be able to apply that knowledge to her entangled photon, and produce an exact quantum replica of your original target photon. Voila! Teleportation.
Note again that no faster-than-light communication is enabled by this. You still have to communicate a regular light-speed message between collaborators to get this to work. The actual experiment was carried out several years ago and is old hat by now. The current experiment improves upon previous efforts by entangling so many more (trillions!) particles.
The quantum entanglement of so many particles makes the actual teleportation of a similar number feasible, but one final note - even trillions of particles is many orders of magnitude less than the 10^27 or so particles in your average Starship Captain.
-Renard
The problem, to most open source advocates, is not that your new applications aren't (beer) free - we all like to see developers well compensated for their efforts - but rather that they aren't (speech) free. You will never see the source code, and the community will never have the benefit of the work of those developers... at some point in the not-so-distant future, you will no longer even be able to "purchase" any license for that software you're using; you'll have to lease it instead. Both Microsoft and Adobe have expressed interest in this new-and-improved revenue model - which they will undoubtedly market (consumer inconvenience aside) as merely their best response to "software piracy".
Of course you are (speech) free to use the software that you prefer. But I hope you consider the political benefits of (speech) free software to be a point in its favor - above and beyond any price differential.
-Renard
Umm... no. He was going to donate the money to Stanford, not fund a startup with it.
The big compainies only want the federal funding for research so they don't have to spend the money, yet they still get the patents.
Possibly (companies always want something for nothing), but consider it from Joe/Jill Citizen's point of view. If Federal money funds the research then the government / public sector gets guaranteed dibs (low-cost licenses) to any resulting technology. Whereas if the research is funded solely by private interests, guess who reaps the rewards.
If all these big companies think its sooooo important to have more than these 60 stem cells why don't they fork over the money for the research?
Oh don't worry - they will. And so will the UK and other more enlightened governments. It's just the US public sector / universities that are in danger of falling behind.
-Renard
What is it about the already-dead embryos that were responsible for the (nominal) 60 preexisting stem cell lines of W's speech that distinguishes them from the already-dead embryos that are responsible for any additional stem cell lines that exist today? Or that will exist in one year?
Dead is dead - use the cell lines for research. You can't get more pragmatic than that.
-Renard
What is the moral value of a date? Either it is okay to create stem cell lines (all right, all right, "destroy embryos") or it is not. The fact that the cell lines were created (embryos destroyed) before W started paying attention to the subject has no relevance. And if it is not okay to create stem cell lines, then it cannot be okay to use them for research purposes.
And please don't tell me about how the net result will be fewer of these embryos destroyed. Frozen embryos are destroyed at fertility clinics every day, en masse, and W has not lifted even his pinky finger to stop that. Far more useful, in my opinion, is the approach now being taken by Harvard and Boston IVF, to use these embryos for research rather than simply dump them in the garbage.
-Renard
Man - that's two whole days' potential delay they passed up on!
The MS legal team must be losing their edge.
-Renard
-Renard
Jon asks "why [Dmitry] should go free" and not why the DMCA is bad law, so I will restrict my comments to this limited question, and target them towards the US policymakers who have the power NOW to change the government's course.
Dmitry was arrested under the provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). It has been argued that Dmitry did not violate this law - but I will not make that argument; assume instead that he did. It has also been argued that the DMCA (or part of it) is bad law - but I will not make that argument either. Instead, I will argue that even granted these points, Dmitry should go free.
To make this argument I assert, first, that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA - those that Dmitry is accused of violating - are controversial law. Specifically, these provisions of the law may be unconstitutional. As evidence I offer up, first, Constitutional Law Professor Lawrence Lessig's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times; and second, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's essay on their web site. Note that one does not have to agree with all or even most of these arguments to accept that the law is controversial - one merely has to accept that some of these arguments are reasonable.
Second, I assert that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, and particularly their criminal remedies, are currently untested law. This point is almost self-evident, as nearly every media story about the case has referred to its ground-breaking nature. It suffices merely to point out that in addition (1) the two other cases brought under the DMCA, DeCSS (2600 magazine) and SDMI (Prof. Edward Felten) are civil actions; and (2) Neither of those cases are yet resolved in the courts.
Finally, I assert that it is not in the US government's interest to make Dmitry Sklyarov the test case for these controversial, untested provisions of the DMCA. There are several reasons for this. First, Dmitry is a working graduate student and not clearly either criminally responsible for the software or wealthy because of it; therefore he is a sympathetic defendant for judge or jury. Second, the chief complainant in the case, Adobe, has recommended dropping the charges. Third, he is a foreign national who is accused of breaking this controversial, untested American law while in his home country, which adds needless complexity (and diplomatic ramifications) to the case, and threatens to deprive the US of the expertise of foreign programmers (c.f. Alan Cox).
Rather than pursue the risky brute-force prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov, then, US policymakers should tell the FBI to pick on someone their own size - that is, a US citizen who has clearly broken these provisions of the law while on American soil.
Free Dmitry Sklyarov!
-Renard
The point is that they are distributing a copyright-protection circumvention device; even the tangential benefits that they realize by doing this (more visitors to their website?) will suffice to make them liable.
I'm wagering they'll be the next copyright-lobby DMCA-effectiveness poster-children, myself.
-Renard
Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing, by William H. Press,Brian P. Flannery,Saul A. Teukolsky,William T. Vetterling.
To paraphrase the Planet of the Apes star: Anyone who wants my copy can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
-Renard
Exactly. Or to put it a different way: MS is terrified that someday, somehow, a group of "hackers" will develop a piece of GPL'd software that is so good that MS can't reproduce or compete with it. Embrace and extend is powerless against the GPL.
You have to hand it to them - it's a reasonable fear. In fact, it has probably happened already.
-Renard
To summarize: Yes, but you can't launch outgoing attacks from any of the honeynet machines (they're careful that way).
-Renard
Um... maybe because MSFT is a member and key financer of the BSA, one of the DMCA's chief architects/proponents?
Is there any reason NOT to keep the pressure on these guys until DMCA is overturned?
-Renard
In any case, there are great advantages to collecting all of the literature at one site - you can do better search and retrieval, and enable systematic cross-literature studies. Even if the journals did make their own archives publicly accessible we would probably want to collect the literature in some noncommercial space.
Nobody's asking for something for nothing. But when you've done the research, and payed to have it published, you'd like to think you could make it available in a free public forum (if you wanted to).
-Renard
This was started by a lone eccentric^H^H^H^H visionary genius named Paul Ginsparg, a physicist employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (yes, tax dollars at work!), in 1991. The site is nearly self-maintaining and serves up hundreds of thousands of e-prints a year to physicists and mathematicians worldwide. For those who are interested, this report gives Dr. Ginsparg's view of the archive circa 1996.
The New York Times had a nice article about the archive on May 1 of this year (now only accessible via pay at the "Premium Archive"... how's that for irony?) and how it has levelled the scientific playing field for researchers in less-developed countries who cannot afford premium journal subscriptions.
The most important point, though, is that this free e-print service coexists with the high-subscription journals (Phys Rev; Science; Nature; ApJ) that serve these communities. Young researchers bucking for tenure submit to the prestigious journal... and also to arXiv.org. That way their research gets both respect and the broadest possible distribution.
This sort of compromise is going to be harder to achieve, I think, in fields where publishing is an even bigger-money business (MoBio comes to mind). But it does demonstrate that full-scale war is not the only alternative to all-out capitulation to commercial interests.
-Renard
and if it has to be a criminal case, why does it have to be Dmitry, rather than some US citizen (you?) who volunteers to be a test case and stays free on bail as the case works its way through the courts (c.f. the CDA case)?
-renard