You do know that reviewers are not generally paid for the task right? And yet they continue to review, generally because they know that in order for the system to work and for they themselves to be publicized, someone has to review. Another motivation can be to become a better reviewer themselves. I do agree that not everyone is qualified to review however, any such system as the GP describes would have to have some sort of reputation mechanism and the reviewers can't choose what to review themselves (in order to avoid reviewers picking papers from their friends). Ideally, both the the authors and reviewers should be anonymous as well.
Except I think this trend is global, or at the very least western. Neoliberalism and corporatocracies are starting to take over everywhere, hell they essentially have direct control over Greece an Italy already, both have technocratic governments controlled by Goldman Sachs, the ECB and the like...
I wouldn't call a system where a large part of the generated value is siphoned off as profit for the capitalist class by any means efficient, that's a myth perpetuated by the media. An efficient system would be one where the surplus value benefit the workers themselves. The main problem has always been the capitalist resistance, capitalists don't want socialism to succeed so they try their damnedest to prevent that from happening. The US has been especially active in actively opposing any form of socialism cropping up, from the attempted invasion and subsequent embargo of Cuba (driving Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union, counterproductive to say the least) to the attempted coup of Chavez 10 years ago, the US has assassinated leaders and instigated coups against democratically elected governments all over the place.
I cannot call what we have a compromise between socialism and capitalism. What we have is a welfare system slapped on top of the capitalist system in order to try to rectify some of the catastrophes caused by the system.
It depends on what you compromise between though, I would say my stance is a pretty decent compromise. I'm not a Marxist-Leninist, i.e. I don't believe in state ownership other than infrastructure and natural resources. I would probably call myself a market Socialist, I think a market is a good thing, it's the ownership and the capital returns part that allow a small elite to obtain control over not only the economy but also governments by exploiting the work of everyone else that I have a problem with. I believe in worker and/or consumer cooperatives and similar forms of ownership. I don't have a problem with very small companies provided the employees actually receive the surplus value they themselves generate, but if they grow beyond a certain size, alternative forms of ownership would have to be implemented. Basic idea being that no one should be able to exploit others for personal profit and no one should have undue political or economic power outside of the democratic system.
I won't even bother to the first two. They're so out there, they're not even worth dignifying with a response.
As for the third, you still haven't specified where the funding for the education is coming from? Where is the funding for surviving coming from? Does it magically appear out of thin air?
1. Um, yeah, good luck with that. 2. Right, so poor people should give up their kids now... 3. I guess you never heard of this thing called unemployment? I don't know if you follow the news, but it's pretty damn high, especially for the unskilled. So how are you going to get the money for education so that you can get a job? How are you going to survive while going to school? Should education should be a privilege reserved for the well off?
PHP is by no means my favorite tool or technology (web development is not really my field but when I do develop web applications, python is my first choice. But I'm by no means fanatic about it, I can use any tool that does what I need), it's just a very common language for anyone that has ever done any web development for anything other than work. You'd be hard pressed to find a cheap host that doesn't support PHP, and conversely you'd be hard pressed to find a cheap host that supports Java or even python.
In the Netherlands (where I live) there's about 40.000 men in the age-group of 40-45. There are 30.000 in the age-group of 20-25.
I'm guessing that's supposed to be 400 000 and 300 000, 40 000 and 30 000 would mean the Netherlands had a male population of less than one million, leaving the remaining 15 million as females. Advantageous in many ways to be sure, but probably not true.;)
Facebook uses PHP as their internal language and the majority of CS-wonk new hires have never even used it. This is 100% by-design.
Even my little sister who's in high school (gymnasium) has coded PHP in school as part of web design courses, and she doesn't even have any ambitions of becoming a programmer. I can't imagine a CS grad never having come in contact with PHP unless they never took any courses in web development and only followed the curriculum, never experimenting with anything outside of that.
Re:They have lost all trust, but they retain distr
on
In Nothing We Trust
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· Score: 1
I would really like to see what the US could come up with if all those people who simply don't go to the polling booth actually did. If they all voted for a third party candidate, that candidate would probably win even if everyone else voted for the parties they always voted for...
We'll have to agree to disagree here. I would *never* want to live in your ideal society, to have to see others suffer even though there are plenty resources to go around all because you feel "enslaved" by having to contribute to make sure everyone can live a decent life. I really wonder about some people, are they really of the same species? Doesn't seem like it to me, humans ought to have at least a modicum of human compassion...
Housing, food, health care and education are basic human rights, so yes it's a responsibility that all of us have to share. Tell me, how is anyone in a situation where they don't have access to one or more of these ever going to improve their situation? "Buckle down" and go without food for the kids in order to afford the education needed to better their situation?
We're not far behind over here though, neoliberalism seems to be rearing its ugly head every day. We just have a more humane system built up by our obviously much wiser ancestors so it will take a while longer for that to be destroyed before it takes on the same proportions as in the US. Both the ruling right-wing "alliance" and the social democrats worship the almighty market in Sweden nowadays. It's depressing to say the least.
I don't think it's really that difficult to implement an actual socialist system if it wasn't for the sometimes violent opposition from entrenched capitalists and the capitalist control over the media and thus public agenda. These are problems that need addressing before any real change can come about.
We may have a more equal distribution of incomes, but in terms of ownership of capital, we're almost as bad as the US: the top 1% owns about 40% of all capital while the majority of the population is indebted to the capitalist class by way of banks.
The Qt strategy wasn't to create an entirely new ecosystem on its own, but to bring Symbian phones and MeeGo/Maemo phones into the Qt ecosystem. They still had massive Symbian sales, the right thing to do would have been to create a way for these customers to effortlessly and gradually migrate to MeeGo/Maemo. Switching to either Android or Windows phone meant loosing existing customers, and that's precisely what happened with Windows Phone.
They had a chance to really do something unique with MeeGo and Qt, but the suits blew it. Being yet another Windows Phone maker is just as bad (probably worse) than being yet another Android maker.
If the secreterial staff can't handle a pdf, get new secreterial staff. I haven't submitted to any journals yet, but the conferences in my field all seem to have LaTeX templates and accept pdfs..
Especially if you're in grad school, and if you're in a computer science related field, I just can't see how anyone could miss it. It seems to be the most popular tool of choice around here at least for everyone from grad students to professors and even some undergrad students. Already in the first year of my programme, LaTeX were the preferred tool for submission of written assignments in the introduction to computer science course.
How optimized are the numerical operations in NumPy? Matrix operations and such seems to me to be pretty much the only part optimized about Matlab, but those are also quite fast and even does some pretty decent threading. Other than that (and the large library of stuff I want to use), Matlab is a horrible language in terms of speed, though the syntax for matrix operations is also quite nice. Even function calls are horribly slow. The only way to get decent performance out of Matlab is to use vector operations wherever possible.
I was with you right up until you started talking about socialism and communism. The fundamental idea of socialism is not a safety net, it is the worker ownership of the means of production. There are many opinion on how the means of production should be owned by workers exactly, everything from Marxism-Leninism with the state owning everything (Soviet) to Anarchism with no one owning anything and society essentially based on completely voluntary associations. Personally I'm somewhere in between. I think infrastructure should be commonly owned by everyone in a society, presumably by the state in whatever form that may manifest itself, but I also want a market of cooperatively owned and controlled businesses. I guess I would fit the bill for what is called "market socialism".
Communism has nothing to do with state ownership. Communism is where Marx envisioned Socialism ending up. It's a classless and *stateless* society, this has never been even remotely achieved anywhere. Soviet called itself Communist but had neither of the ingredients necessary, they had a powerful state and they had a ruling class. The Soviet Union was really nothing more than state capitalism.
I very much agree that capitalism is essentially an outgrowth of feudalism though..
As a resident of one of said states and a socialist, I disagree. The closest thing we have to socialism in Sweden is a few state-owned companies - for instance companies exploiting natural resources. These are however by no means worker controlled and since they've been spun off into state-owned incorporated companies where there is no democratic control or even transparency.
There was an attempt at something that could be called socialism in the 80's, called "employee funds". Part of the profits would go toward these funds which would be used to buy up parts of the company. Of course capitalists didn't like the idea and used their media ownership to whip up a firestorm about it. They weren't perfect, but it was better alternative than the current situation. They were abolished when the bourgeois came into power in 1991.
That was pretty much the last gasp of socialism within the Social Democrats in Sweden, since then the right wing of the party has almost complete control and the politics they pursued since is something of a mix between social liberalism and neoliberalism.
So start a non-profit to compete with them.. They pay their fair share as far as I can tell, making a profit from distribution of music is not a right.
Actually, I would advise you to read up on socialism as well. Funding roads with taxes or even medical care doesn't necessarily have anything to do with socialism even if socialists tend to favor use of taxes to benefit society as a whole. Even Adam Smith saw that the market wasn't well equipped to handle many things and favored some degree of social welfare. This is more like social liberalism.
Socialism is an ideology striving for a society where the working class (where the working class is essentially everyone who actually has to work for a living rather than live off of capital returns, i.e. capitalists) owns the means of production, where the surplus value generated by employees does not benefit a tiny class of capitalists but instead the employee and his fellow workers. Right wingers like to complain about welfare cases, well capitalists are essentially the biggest welfare cases in existence. The only difference is that the those living on welfare receive their money from taxes and can barely survive on it whereas the capitalist class receives theirs from ownership of capital and can live in luxury off it in addition to the political influence that capital brings with it, and this is very much enforced by the state and the threat of violence. In most cases when it comes to the really wealthy the wealth is passed down through generations and it only grows in each generation due to the fact that capital itself generates capital./Actual socialist
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that reviewers are not generally paid for the task right? And yet they continue to review, generally because they know that in order for the system to work and for they themselves to be publicized, someone has to review. Another motivation can be to become a better reviewer themselves. I do agree that not everyone is qualified to review however, any such system as the GP describes would have to have some sort of reputation mechanism and the reviewers can't choose what to review themselves (in order to avoid reviewers picking papers from their friends). Ideally, both the the authors and reviewers should be anonymous as well.
Except I think this trend is global, or at the very least western. Neoliberalism and corporatocracies are starting to take over everywhere, hell they essentially have direct control over Greece an Italy already, both have technocratic governments controlled by Goldman Sachs, the ECB and the like...
I wouldn't call a system where a large part of the generated value is siphoned off as profit for the capitalist class by any means efficient, that's a myth perpetuated by the media. An efficient system would be one where the surplus value benefit the workers themselves. The main problem has always been the capitalist resistance, capitalists don't want socialism to succeed so they try their damnedest to prevent that from happening. The US has been especially active in actively opposing any form of socialism cropping up, from the attempted invasion and subsequent embargo of Cuba (driving Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union, counterproductive to say the least) to the attempted coup of Chavez 10 years ago, the US has assassinated leaders and instigated coups against democratically elected governments all over the place.
I cannot call what we have a compromise between socialism and capitalism. What we have is a welfare system slapped on top of the capitalist system in order to try to rectify some of the catastrophes caused by the system.
It depends on what you compromise between though, I would say my stance is a pretty decent compromise. I'm not a Marxist-Leninist, i.e. I don't believe in state ownership other than infrastructure and natural resources. I would probably call myself a market Socialist, I think a market is a good thing, it's the ownership and the capital returns part that allow a small elite to obtain control over not only the economy but also governments by exploiting the work of everyone else that I have a problem with. I believe in worker and/or consumer cooperatives and similar forms of ownership. I don't have a problem with very small companies provided the employees actually receive the surplus value they themselves generate, but if they grow beyond a certain size, alternative forms of ownership would have to be implemented. Basic idea being that no one should be able to exploit others for personal profit and no one should have undue political or economic power outside of the democratic system.
Ugh, neoliberals...
I won't even bother to the first two. They're so out there, they're not even worth dignifying with a response.
As for the third, you still haven't specified where the funding for the education is coming from? Where is the funding for surviving coming from? Does it magically appear out of thin air?
1. Um, yeah, good luck with that.
2. Right, so poor people should give up their kids now...
3. I guess you never heard of this thing called unemployment? I don't know if you follow the news, but it's pretty damn high, especially for the unskilled. So how are you going to get the money for education so that you can get a job? How are you going to survive while going to school? Should education should be a privilege reserved for the well off?
PHP is by no means my favorite tool or technology (web development is not really my field but when I do develop web applications, python is my first choice. But I'm by no means fanatic about it, I can use any tool that does what I need), it's just a very common language for anyone that has ever done any web development for anything other than work. You'd be hard pressed to find a cheap host that doesn't support PHP, and conversely you'd be hard pressed to find a cheap host that supports Java or even python.
In the Netherlands (where I live) there's about 40.000 men in the age-group of 40-45. There are 30.000 in the age-group of 20-25.
I'm guessing that's supposed to be 400 000 and 300 000, 40 000 and 30 000 would mean the Netherlands had a male population of less than one million, leaving the remaining 15 million as females. Advantageous in many ways to be sure, but probably not true. ;)
Facebook uses PHP as their internal language and the majority of CS-wonk new hires have never even used it. This is 100% by-design.
Even my little sister who's in high school (gymnasium) has coded PHP in school as part of web design courses, and she doesn't even have any ambitions of becoming a programmer. I can't imagine a CS grad never having come in contact with PHP unless they never took any courses in web development and only followed the curriculum, never experimenting with anything outside of that.
I would really like to see what the US could come up with if all those people who simply don't go to the polling booth actually did. If they all voted for a third party candidate, that candidate would probably win even if everyone else voted for the parties they always voted for...
We'll have to agree to disagree here. I would *never* want to live in your ideal society, to have to see others suffer even though there are plenty resources to go around all because you feel "enslaved" by having to contribute to make sure everyone can live a decent life.
I really wonder about some people, are they really of the same species? Doesn't seem like it to me, humans ought to have at least a modicum of human compassion...
Housing, food, health care and education are basic human rights, so yes it's a responsibility that all of us have to share. Tell me, how is anyone in a situation where they don't have access to one or more of these ever going to improve their situation? "Buckle down" and go without food for the kids in order to afford the education needed to better their situation?
We're not far behind over here though, neoliberalism seems to be rearing its ugly head every day. We just have a more humane system built up by our obviously much wiser ancestors so it will take a while longer for that to be destroyed before it takes on the same proportions as in the US. Both the ruling right-wing "alliance" and the social democrats worship the almighty market in Sweden nowadays. It's depressing to say the least.
I don't think it's really that difficult to implement an actual socialist system if it wasn't for the sometimes violent opposition from entrenched capitalists and the capitalist control over the media and thus public agenda. These are problems that need addressing before any real change can come about.
We may have a more equal distribution of incomes, but in terms of ownership of capital, we're almost as bad as the US: the top 1% owns about 40% of all capital while the majority of the population is indebted to the capitalist class by way of banks.
The Qt strategy wasn't to create an entirely new ecosystem on its own, but to bring Symbian phones and MeeGo/Maemo phones into the Qt ecosystem. They still had massive Symbian sales, the right thing to do would have been to create a way for these customers to effortlessly and gradually migrate to MeeGo/Maemo. Switching to either Android or Windows phone meant loosing existing customers, and that's precisely what happened with Windows Phone.
They had a chance to really do something unique with MeeGo and Qt, but the suits blew it. Being yet another Windows Phone maker is just as bad (probably worse) than being yet another Android maker.
If the secreterial staff can't handle a pdf, get new secreterial staff. I haven't submitted to any journals yet, but the conferences in my field all seem to have LaTeX templates and accept pdfs..
I use beamer for presentations and love it. I never tried to do anything serious in any of the WYSIWYG tools though so I can't really compare.
Especially if you're in grad school, and if you're in a computer science related field, I just can't see how anyone could miss it. It seems to be the most popular tool of choice around here at least for everyone from grad students to professors and even some undergrad students. Already in the first year of my programme, LaTeX were the preferred tool for submission of written assignments in the introduction to computer science course.
How optimized are the numerical operations in NumPy? Matrix operations and such seems to me to be pretty much the only part optimized about Matlab, but those are also quite fast and even does some pretty decent threading. Other than that (and the large library of stuff I want to use), Matlab is a horrible language in terms of speed, though the syntax for matrix operations is also quite nice. Even function calls are horribly slow. The only way to get decent performance out of Matlab is to use vector operations wherever possible.
I was with you right up until you started talking about socialism and communism.
The fundamental idea of socialism is not a safety net, it is the worker ownership of the means of production. There are many opinion on how the means of production should be owned by workers exactly, everything from Marxism-Leninism with the state owning everything (Soviet) to Anarchism with no one owning anything and society essentially based on completely voluntary associations.
Personally I'm somewhere in between. I think infrastructure should be commonly owned by everyone in a society, presumably by the state in whatever form that may manifest itself, but I also want a market of cooperatively owned and controlled businesses. I guess I would fit the bill for what is called "market socialism".
Communism has nothing to do with state ownership. Communism is where Marx envisioned Socialism ending up. It's a classless and *stateless* society, this has never been even remotely achieved anywhere. Soviet called itself Communist but had neither of the ingredients necessary, they had a powerful state and they had a ruling class. The Soviet Union was really nothing more than state capitalism.
I very much agree that capitalism is essentially an outgrowth of feudalism though..
As a resident of one of said states and a socialist, I disagree. The closest thing we have to socialism in Sweden is a few state-owned companies - for instance companies exploiting natural resources. These are however by no means worker controlled and since they've been spun off into state-owned incorporated companies where there is no democratic control or even transparency.
There was an attempt at something that could be called socialism in the 80's, called "employee funds". Part of the profits would go toward these funds which would be used to buy up parts of the company. Of course capitalists didn't like the idea and used their media ownership to whip up a firestorm about it. They weren't perfect, but it was better alternative than the current situation. They were abolished when the bourgeois came into power in 1991.
That was pretty much the last gasp of socialism within the Social Democrats in Sweden, since then the right wing of the party has almost complete control and the politics they pursued since is something of a mix between social liberalism and neoliberalism.
The only reason lobbyism is not called bribery is because the powers that be benefit from it and don't want it to be called bribery.
Who said it was a right to make a profit off of music distribution? Start your own non-profit if you want.
So start a non-profit to compete with them.. They pay their fair share as far as I can tell, making a profit from distribution of music is not a right.
Actually, I would advise you to read up on socialism as well. Funding roads with taxes or even medical care doesn't necessarily have anything to do with socialism even if socialists tend to favor use of taxes to benefit society as a whole. Even Adam Smith saw that the market wasn't well equipped to handle many things and favored some degree of social welfare. This is more like social liberalism.
Socialism is an ideology striving for a society where the working class (where the working class is essentially everyone who actually has to work for a living rather than live off of capital returns, i.e. capitalists) owns the means of production, where the surplus value generated by employees does not benefit a tiny class of capitalists but instead the employee and his fellow workers. Right wingers like to complain about welfare cases, well capitalists are essentially the biggest welfare cases in existence. The only difference is that the those living on welfare receive their money from taxes and can barely survive on it whereas the capitalist class receives theirs from ownership of capital and can live in luxury off it in addition to the political influence that capital brings with it, and this is very much enforced by the state and the threat of violence. In most cases when it comes to the really wealthy the wealth is passed down through generations and it only grows in each generation due to the fact that capital itself generates capital. /Actual socialist