Are you kidding? You can't have "licenses" for things you don't own. If the work doesn't have copyright protection, then its in the public domain. If you try to force me to obey some "license" I can simply choose to ignore your license and use the work anyway. Copyright is necessary to enforce the license, like say the GPL. Without that license, I can take your "open" software and do anything I want with it, including adding my own modifications to it and selling the entire thing without giving anyone any right to see the source or anything else. And you can't do anything to stop me legally. Since one of the primary principles of open source is the "share and share alike" principle where if you use it, you yourself have to contribute under similar license, that principle can only be enforced if you can enforce anything at all, and that requires legal protection. Copyright provides that protection.

The problem that Bruce has identified with Open hardware is that the only way to enforce anything with hardware requires patent protection analogous to the copyright protection that allows open software licenses to work, or extending copyright protections into new areas. But the problem is that both using patents in this way and trying to extend copyright protections instead of patents both seem to have legal gotchas that don't exist to the same extent with software. The problem is if the Open hardware movement tries to leverage either patent protections into designs or copyright protection into implementations it will either not work because the law won't evolve correctly, or worse they might evolve in such a way to allow Open hardware licenses to work but create a new form of legal ammunition that unscrupulous entities could use in entirely different ways to gain new IP protection rights they don't currently have.

Although the title of the post said "developer" the content said "developer/architect." Unless they were hiring a programmer that could also design houses, I'm assuming they mean IT infrastructure architect. I would presume a systems architect would be familiar with how internet protocols work (like DNS), how common physical network infrastructure works (like switches), how fundamental concepts like client-server architectures and encryption work, and the issues involved in major ares of system design (storage, virtualization, wide area networking, etc).

Programmers just need to know how to write computer code. Software engineers need to know how software systems work. Architects have to know how the pieces of systems work that they will eventually be the architect for. Perhaps the problem right up front is that unless this is some small company where everyone wears a ton of hats, "Programmer/Architect" is not a proper job designation in the first place. "Programmer/Software Architect" might be more applicable, in which case the applicant should fundamentally understand how to code and what common software design methodologies are. If the intended target application(s) are internet-based, an additional requirement to understand the problem domain would also be reasonable (familiarity with medicine if you're writing medical software, internet protocols if you are writing large scale internet applications, human resources if you're being hired to be a Peoplesoft app developer, etc).

In any case, the subject question was "what portion of developers are bad at what they do" which is a different question than the one posed by the actual post. The answer to that question is, in my experience, most of them. Note that I'm not saying most developers are bad at writing software. I'm saying most developers are bad at what they do. What they do tends to be, whether its their own fault or someone else's, significantly outside their actual area of expertise whatever that might be.

I am fully aware. You are almost certainly referencing the McLean study which showed a potential reduction in effectiveness due to repeated vaccination controlled for a single virus strain. However, that study reiterated previous studies which showed no statistically significant vaccination interference between consecutive years of vaccination. They suggested the potential for such interference over significantly longer timeframes such as five years but also explicitly stated that the data in their study could not draw that conclusion given many other possible explanations for their results.

Assuming ignorance from refutation is another characteristic of the phenomenon I characterized earlier. In either case, there are reasons for repeated vaccination due to the nature of how the vaccine is constituted that would override this result even if it was conclusive. Furthermore, the study did not suggest escalating resistance which would incur the risk of the vaccine eventually becoming ineffective. They suggested the potential for successive interference which would more reasonably mandate switching to longer vaccination schedules instead.

As to the rate of measles infection going down, public health improvements did reduce the rate of measles infection in the early part of the twentieth century, but only by incrementally small amounts due to the highly contagious nature of measles. Mandated vaccination in the 1960s dropped the infection rate almost immediately to very low levels. There was no recorded trend that would have reduced the rate to current levels prior to mass vaccination in the United States. That is not even remotely credibly in dispute. Given the mortality statistics, mass vaccination has saved literally tens of thousands of lives in the last fifty years, and eliminated hundreds of thousands of cases severe enough to require hospitalization.

According to the CDC, prior to mass vaccination in the 1960s the annual rate of measles infection was about half a million cases were reported in the US annually. Of those, just under ten percent required hospitalization, about a thousand had chronic disability and about five hundred died. That's per year.

Also, measles is caused by a virus, which means antibiotics have no effect on the infection. Treatment with antibiotics only occurs in cases with serious complications involving secondary bacterial infections, which by definition is not a minor case.

That's a frighteningly wrong set of what I hesitate to call "information."

In my experience, there's science denial, and then there's the more likely phenomenon occurring here which is the belief that one's personal interpretation of the evidence is vastly superior to anyone else's. If an anti-vax article sounds reasonable to them, its far more likely to their thinking that everyone else who considers it rubbish is wrong, because their own understanding is far superior.

That's not exactly science denial, that's narcissism masquerading as science denial. And this general belief is, in my experience, extremely prevalent in the various technology industries, particularly IT.

I never said or implied that change required armed forces. What I said was it required someone willing to stick to their principles without compromising them even if it meant people had to die. Gandhi was in fact one such leader who preached non-violence to such an extent he told his own supporters they needed to be willing to die non-violently rather than kill or fight back to convince the British that they would never be able to break their resolve. That is entirely analogous to what I mentioned above that it would take a leader willing to say they would rather see Americans (or other citizens) die at the hands of terrorists rather than destroy their civil rights trying to protect them. Gandhi was able to convince huge numbers of people that it was better to die in the pursuit of freedom than live under oppression. It would take that kind of leader, I think, to reverse the trend of using ever stronger government controls to fight terrorism and other crimes.

When the government says "because of Apple's iPhone encryption one day a child will die" the people have to say "I'd rather a child die than the American people be oppressed." A leader has to convince them to say it and believe it. Gandhi actually managed to do it, so its possible. But its not easy to find Gandhis.

Its easy to paint the situation as the masses being dominated by the people in power but the truth is that a revolt is unlikely to work for the simple reason that the average person really isn't just a passive observer; they really want much of what they claim they don't want. In terms of the specifics, its easy to claim that one doesn't want mass surveillance but that's just a symptom of a more fundamental truth. The truth is that given the choice presented to the people in power, most people would choose the same thing: namely given a choice between using every means at one's disposal to stop terrorism or not, most people would in fact choose to use every means at one's disposal, even if it infringed on personal freedom.

And the reason why a revolt is unlikely is the same reason why the Occupy Movement didn't generate lasting results in the same way many other movements did. Revolutions require people willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a result, often without the kinds of compromise that people normally engage in. A revolution to stop people from doing whatever it takes to achieve a goal is difficult to achieve when backed only by people unwilling to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.

George Washington famously assumed enormous military, and thus political power when he became the leader of the Continental Army, and his hands were not entirely clean when wielding it. But without him, there probably is no revolution that survives. When the war was over he surrendered that power by resigning his commission. The number of people both willing and able to exercise such vast power to achieve an end which results in surrendering that power entirely (even if only temporarily) is exceedingly small. Most people willing to do the latter have no capacity to do the former and vice versa.

To put it another way, what you need is a leader willing to say "I would rather see Americans die than surrender their freedom" that is also so popular he isn't immediately driven out of the country by pitchforks the next day, and can convince the average American (or for that matter any other citizen of any other country) to accept those values. Until such a person arrives, all revolutions to change the situation will fail, because none will genuinely have the support of the people.

Someone will probably come along and say that's a false choice, but that's missing the point. The point is that is the general perception: you either have the values that say "do everything you possibly can, pushing the envelope as far as you can" or you don't. If you don't, someone will always come along and say they would do more, and they would be correct, and because there's no way to prove it with certainty you'd always take the blame for the next person killed. That's just reality. You did everything possible, or you didn't. Leaders don't want to say they didn't, and citizens don't want excuses for why they didn't. That needs to change somehow, but most people I think don't really want that to change, deep down.

I believe the primary potential advantage of railguns is that they allow for a higher number of rounds to be carried and potentially fired at a higher rate, and have the defensive aspect of removing a critical vulnerability aboard ship. Its a significant advantage if, as you imply, the enemy will have a hard time sinking you because you don't have a magazine to detonate.

On the subject of ammunition, railguns are probably less efficient in general, but its probably a lot easier to store more fuel and less intrinsically explosive ordinance. Its not just that your ammunition is smaller because it doesn't need propellant, its likely the lower safety requirements would allow you to store your rounds at a higher space density over all. Naval vessels that are already nuclear don't need to even worry about higher fuel requirements, but even diesel ships are probably easier to design as carrying more fuel than more ammunition.

Thinking about efficiency, I wonder how much conventional ammunition is destroyed when it is not used for a significant length of time? I would imagine naval artillery shells have a "best used by" date of some kind, and their propellant and/or warheads don't have infinite shelf stable lifetimes. A railgun bullet could last a lot longer without degrading, and if your propellant is fundamentally diesel fuel (indirectly converted to electricity) then your diesel fuel remains constantly refreshed whether you fire your weapons or not. In terms of energy density cordite might be more efficient than railgun power, but the actual logistics of having a single fuel and using electricity might be in the long run cheaper than building and periodically recycling old ammunition.

It can be. But "improperly" requires context. Its not improper for the police to search servers. It is illegal for them to search servers in violation of fourth amendment protections. But the fourth amendment only applies when the search violates your rights. You have no right to prevent the police from searching property that is not yours.

No, he can't. In the first case, the defendant can claim the drugs were not his but *the house* was his and his privacy rights *to his home* were violated by the illegal search of his home.

But if the cops break into the house across the street and find drugs there and claim its yours, you cannot simultaneously claim the house and its contents are not yours *and* your right to privacy in that house was violated by an illegal search. You have no such right to have other people's houses not searched. *The owner* would have some legal recourse, but even then if the drugs were not used against him, he would not have a fourth amendment challenge because nothing is being used against him. He would have the right to sue for illegal trespass only.

What you're asserting is precisely why you should generally take advice of legal counsel rather than try to defend yourself based on incomplete knowledge of the law. The average person's actual understanding of the law tends to be woefully incomplete and inaccurate, because the law tends to be misrepresented in popular discussion. For example, the belief that the US Constitution grants the right to free speech, when it actually only asserts a right for speech to be free from government restrictions (and implicitly only unreasonable ones that do not prevent other Constitutional duties from being executed) is probably the most commonly misrepresented element of US law.

The answer to many questions about the defense strategy during the trial seem to be that either Ulbricht or his attorney or both thought they were engaged in an internet debate and not a criminal trial. His lawyer repeatedly failed to follow proper procedure during the trial that every trial lawyer knows, and used legal strategies that weirdly precluded them from offering certain lines of defense. For example, a critical defense assertion seems to have been that many of the pieces of evidence the prosecution used against Ulbricht were not owned by him or not his property. By making that assertion, he couldn't simultaneously assert that his rights were violated when they were acquired because he claimed they were not his in the first place. When his lawyer tried to do so, he was explicitly told he couldn't do that, as if he didn't even know.

Its almost as if the defense believed that since the prosecution bears the burden of proof, anything that had *any* alternative explanation, no matter how unlikely or illogical, automatically prevented proof beyond reasonable doubt. Which is ridiculous. I have a sneaking suspicion that most of this strategy was forced upon defense counsel by Ulbricht himself. It looks from the outside less like something an (even incompetent) attorney would do, and more like someone used to internet board sparring would think should work.

If Scott Adams thinks Science has failed him because of all the weird diet experts in the world, he probably thinks Medicine has failed him because of Doctor Oz, Psychology has failed him because of Dr. Phil, and the US Justice system has failed him because of Judge Judy.

I don't have a problem with the credibility of Science. On the other hand, I don't think Scott Adams career as a cartoonist grants a lot of credibility speaking about Science.

Most GRBs have a signal that's inconsistent with that scenario because of the size of the black holes: basically most GRBs have signals consistent with much smaller objects than galactic black holes.

The original theory, and one which still explains some GRBs, are the gamma ray emissions from two neutron stars merging. Binary stars are common, and in some cases both stars eventually become neutron stars. When their orbits decay, they can merge to form black holes and in the process convert a huge amount of mass into gamma ray energy. But the prevailing theory that best explains the majority of the rest of them are a special class of supernova that emits a huge amount of its energy in two narrow jets. When those jets happen to be pointed in our general direction, they appear to be a GRB.

Some GRBs emit so much energy that for a while astronomers couldn't reconcile their energy output with the limits on their size: even total conversion of all the matter in an object of that size into energy seemed to be insufficient to generate the kind of energy a GRB produces. When it was discovered that supernova can sometimes emit jets rather than explode outward equally in all directions, that provided a way for something of that size to appear to emit more energy than possible. Astronomers were calculating the energy reaching us from the GRBs, and assuming the object sent that much energy in all directions. Astronomers now think we only see a small fraction of all GRBs that detonate, and most jet their energy in directions we can't see.

No, you would not. The problem with this is that the whole point of the paper was to analyze ways to improve the reliability of disk arrays. You can do what you're describing if there was no specific timeframe in which hard drives need to be replaced: you just replace them whenever you get around to it, rather than soon after they fail. But that only works in environments where actual disk reliability is not important. In environments where actual array reliability is important, delaying the swapping of drives widens the window of vulnerability for an array, even one with hot spares, because of the need to survive the rare cases of multiple drives failing in a short span. That isn't likely, but when you're dealing with five nines of uptime requirement, those unlikely events have to be accounted for.

I'm also trying to imagine implementing a system whereby a $30/hr tech just walks down aisles and pulls blinking drives and replaces them, and I'm thinking anyone who does that deserves the uptime they get.

Or we're just the oldest in the neighborhood. The really cool kids might simply be too far away for us to have met them yet.

On the subject of books, Stephen Baxter wrote a series of fiction novels designed to tackle the Fermi Paradox, each one of which containing similar characters but set in a different universe with a different answer to the paradox. In Manifold Time, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is basically "we were the first, and because we take over the universe quickly enough we also become the only." In Manifold Space, the answer to the Fermi Paradox is comparable to the subject being discussed: advanced civilizations pop up all the time but they get wiped out by massive cosmic disasters repeatedly throughout the history of the universe. Manifold Origin is a bit harder to summarize, but I guess the best way to put it is that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that evolution to advanced civilizations is contrary to our guesses so improbable, even we shouldn't be here but we didn't arrive by chance, we were "shepherded" into being here.