Value can only be attributed towards things that can be bought and sold.
In most everyday cases, this is true. However precise monetary value can also be assigned to things which cannot be bought or sold, or which are illegal to trade. Consider the life insurance policy taken out on a spouse, for instance. A precise monetary value is attached to the loss of the spouse. This cannot be the replacement cost to buy a new spouse, since buying and selling spouses is not legal.
They can be as precise as they like, and revise their estimates to 361.055371 (or 31573.22 or 37964.0000) if they want. Precision without accuracy is worthless.
At least they estimated distributions for some of the parameters. My favourite part was the honest phrase "the model now enters the realm of essentially pure conjecture" when they moved to considering the life parameters. Probabilities and uncertainty estimates here should have been of the NaN sort.
Alas, they then proceeded to assign finite uncertainties to unestimable quantities. The standard deviations they actually gave are merely parametric, with the assumption that the underlying model structure is valid. Given that they obtained very different values from three different models (all of which may be wrong), the true uncertainty is far higher. An estimate of a value accompanied by an estimate of its uncertainty - with the estimates depending on pure conjecture - does not convey anything approaching accuracy.
Of course, if the numbers are just for fun, or for dinner conversation, that's fine. As scientific estimates, they should be discarded.
If you want a versioning file system, go use VMS for a while. They've been doing it since at least the early '90s. Not sure if ADVFS has that feature or not, never got a chance to use Tru64.
Actually, the versioning file system FILES-11 originated in 1980 or perhaps earlier. At least, I recall that it was standard on RSX systems in 1980, and supported file versioning (albeit with wierd "directory" organization: UIDs like [310,54] were used instead of directories).
File names could have a semicolon and version number attached, or if no version was specified then the highest version was implied. This led to the need to clean up old versions regularly, with a command such as:
PIP LB2:[310,54]*.TSK/PU:3
which would purge all but the three highest versions of each task file in [310,54] on the library 2 device. More explicitly, single file versions could be deleted with a command such as:
PIP LB2:[310,54]F11ACP.TSK;4033/DE
which would delete only version 4033 of the named file.
The PIP commands acquired saner aliases in VMS, and the organization of the file system was somewhat improved. But the versioning was there already in 1980 in FILES-11 under RSX-11.
Sing along for the censor (I may heve mis-spelled the first words in each line to assist with pronunciation):
asshole, asshole, a soldier I shall be
to piss, to piss, two pistols by my side
fucking, fucking, for king and queen we'll fight
this cunt, this cunt, this country I'll defend
Calling somebody a "copulating vagina" is arguably even more effective than the usual phrase. Other politenesses, such as alleging that a person is "capital fecal matter" can probably be used also.
Any sound-parsing censor is also liable to generate false positives. What would it do to different voices s and accents rendering "for King", "forking", "a sole", "ash it", and phrases involving the word "country".
Anyone remember when typewriters had to be registered in several Eastern European countries? Being mechanical devices, each had its own unique signature (character shapes, weights, and so forth). The idea was to be able to track the origin of unapproved newsletters etc. which were typically produced via typewriter and stencil or carbon paper. This was all rendered irrelevant by the arrival of PC-based communications (a rear-guard action was fought over printers, faxes, and so forth).
Looks like the UK has just revised those old Soviet-era laws for current technology. Anonymous communication must be considered to be really subversive in the UK.
Wasn't this the experiment that was determined to apply to conditions that never really obtained, leading to the current leading theory that life molecules came to earth from comets?
Amazing how much of the stuff in high school biology texts turns out to be not-quite-as-advertised.
Amazing how some people write before they read.
If you read TFA, or even if you read the OP, you'd have noticed that the tests using lightning in a reducing atmosphere are no longer thought to be representative of conditions on the early Earth. You'd also have noticed that the tests using conditions around volcanic eruptions ARE thought to be representative of similar scenarios on the early Earth. The latter are the experiments whose results were unpublished and samples from which were recently found and analyzed.
This bill was brought to you by your local censors.
So Aussies can look forward to a rabid reaming by prurient hypocrites, and the undoubted pleasure of being billed for it, too. The details of the public reaming will also be off-limits, of course (for the public good: can't have people witnessing such lurid acts).
Due to the shotgun nature of blocking filters, there will be many pages wrongfully blocked. Based on the blocking policies enforced at some workplaces, entire domains may be blocked on account of just a single objectionable page in a single user's subdomain. Whole domains may also be blocked wrongly, through ambivalent ignorance or a mere typo.
Whole communities might find themselves wrongfully off-limits, as happened a few years ago, when the alt.binaries.pictures.astronomy usenet group was blacklisted by a large US ISP. The ISP did not block all alt.binaries.pictures groups, but chose to lump the astrophotography group in with the porn groups. That's what misinterpretation of phrases such as "heavenly body", "images from last night", "multiple exposure", "open truss", "polar mount", "white dwarf", "full moon" and the like can cause. I doubt if anyone involved in the decision to block the group actually looked at the images being posted there - I never saw an inappropriate image in several years of regularly reading that group.
Presumably, all anonymizing services will promptly find themselves on the blacklist, lest anyone use them to bypass the filters and look at unapproved pages. Expect also, that anyone acting as a freenet node will be dealt with appropriately (ISP cutoff, or legal action).
Because I have a secondary monitor to the left of my Microsoft Windows Vista laptop. Why is that an issue?
- Because after undocking, Microsoft Outlook insists on opening on that (non-existent) monitor.
- Because after re-docking, Microsoft Windows insists on logically placing my external monitor to the RIGHT of my Laptop, and swapping the screens that the start bar and sidebar show up on.
- Because after undocking, carrying my laptop to the conference room and plugging it into the projector, all kinds of weird things happen.
That's why I shutdown daily.
You can undock? My work laptop is infested with XP, and refuses to undock. If I try to undock, Windows informs me that a serial port is in use and prevents the undocking. As far as I know, there are no serial ports in the port replicator, other than USB ports which are not in use. It has always done this, since it arrived out of the box last year.
Uptime: limited by need to shutdown before undocking [stupid bloody Windows], rarely more than 1 day.
The only thing Microsoft does well (without breaking any laws) is marketing. I expect they'll call it Windows SeXen, so when reviewers say it's a dog, people will think doggie style...
Interestingly, if you used the Windows calculator to do the calculation: 3.11 - 3.1 it gave the answer as zero! So according to Windows, there was no difference between 3.1 and 3.11
This was one manifestation of the rotten programming in calculator. The bug existed in Windows 3.0 and remained unfixed even in Windows 95. It was eventually corrected in Windows 98.
I dunno, it works out if you do consumer OSs:
Win 3
Win 95
Win 98
Win ME
Win XP
Vista
Win 7
You left out a few: Windows 1.x, Windows 2.x, Windows 286, Windows 386. All of them pre-dated Windows 3.0 and sucked almost as much as subsequent versions of Windows, except that they lacked the BSOD. I was afflicted by them all.
Everything I can think of that falls in this class of device (PDA-ish or MP3 player with additional features) is locked to a propriety OS, be it OSX, WinCE, Palm, or something else. Very rarely can you change it out, even if it is an Android phone. It's still limited to what it came with.
They are not all as "locked-down" as their manufacturers would have you believe.
Rockbox is a Linux-based alternative firmware which can provide enhanced functions on a variety of media players. It can be installed on several versions of iPod, as well as some media players from Archos, Cowon, iRiver, Olympus, SanDisk, and Toshiba. See http://www.rockbox.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox, for instance.
1. The actual peer review is done by other scientists for free, not by the publishers.
Indeed. I can vouch for this as I have been a reviewer on a few occasions.
2. Most publications actually require the author to suggest who should peer review it, so the publisher usually doesn't even have to work to figure out who should review what.
Not exactly. Journal editors usually have a good idea of who has recently worked in the same field, as many of them may have submitted articles to the same journal. However, if the article is in a field which is not frequently published in their journal, they may ask for a few names of experts in the field who could suggest suitable reviewers who would not be biased. The reviewers should not be friends, colleagues, or enemies of the authors.
Seriously, hosting a document for me to view doesn't cost $100/mo. so why are you trying to charge me that?
So they don't devalue the print versions, which is where they make all their cash.
Nice try, try this instead - "so they can still do review (peer as well) - checking for quality comes at a price"
Unless, of course, you want the serious articles mixed in with the perpetual motion machine descriptions...
Nice try, but reviewers are generally not paid.
I have been a peer reviewer on a few occasions, and there was never any mention of payment (those journals aren't the type to have t-shirts or mugs on offer either). Peer review is a duty undertaken as a matter of professional responsibility.
The journals administer the peer reviewing procedure. On occasion they must interpret the dialog between the article's authors and the anonymous reviewers. Usually there is no need, of course, as the authors sort out whatever issues the reviewers identified in the original article, unitl the reviewers flag it as suitable for publication (i.e. abstract and conclusions are clear and concise, no obvious holes in reasoning, clear and logical presentation of data and arguments, adequate reference to related work, conflicts with other work reconciled or discussed adequately, etc.).
"prang" is a verb meaning crash. It originated in Britain in the early days of aviation to describe an airplane coming into contact with the ground (crashing or landing poorly) such that the airplane is damaged or destroyed. It's commonly used in aviation circles, but is also encountered in Britain in connection with crashing other types of vehicle.
Some cards here do offer no-questions-asked protection plans (I know American Express does) against defective goods.
A couple of decades ago, American Express pioneered the concept of "money back, no questions asked" if a product bought with AmEx became broken for any reason during the first 30 days after purchase. They had some dumb commercial on TV featuring a kid feeding porridge into a VCR, and a refund being given for the gummed-up VCR.
A colleague of mine perpetually travelled and regularly put more than $20k per month through his AmEx, so they automatically accepted almost any charge from him. Skipping a long and tortuous story, he bought a used airplane in Australia as part of some hare-brained get-rich-quick scheme (probably caused by alcohol). It was charged to his AmEx! His partner in the scheme was the pilot, who pranged the airplane on the first take-off. He survived, but the plane was a complete write-off.
Rather than accept the partial payment from their basic insurance coverage, my colleague called American Express, since the plane had been bought only a week or so previously. Contrary to their advertising, they asked a great many questions, and wriggled like mad in vain attempts to avoid the refund. Eventually, they cancelled the charge.
American Express tried to impose an inadequate monthly charge limit on him after that, but our mutual boss stood up to them, by threatening to cancel the corporate reliance on AmEx if there were any restrictions. We had almost a hundred perpetual travellers and a couple of hundred regular travellers (I occasionally exceeded US$10k on AmEx in a month). AmEx backed down.
To further amaze and/or impress you, the male echidna has a four-headed penis. Two of them become erect at a time and are both used during mating. The pairs of active penis heads alternate in subsequent matings.
Mind you, I bet their sex lives are pestered horribly by grad students wielding research grants and expensive cameras.
People don't demand the physical CD, DVD, etc., they demand the content. How that content is delivered is secondary.
If the content is essentially the same, the delivery method is secondary. The problem is that the content is often different in important ways in online-purchased media and physical CD/DVD media. First, the online-purchased media may have a lower resolution audio or video or graphics. Second, online-purchased media often (but not always) has much more restrictive DRM. Both of these reduce the value of online-purchased media to the consumer. The price to the consumer is not reduced to nearly the same extent, if it is reduced at all.
I have bought MP3s online (American Baroque, FWIW), and will probably do so again. I have never bought audio with DRM online, and probably never will. We have a few hundred CDs, and have ripped most of them to our MP3 players; this convenience is very important.
I have also bought a couple of PDFs online, which turned out to be crippled by DRM (maximum 10 pages printed per 30 days, maximum 2 PCs authorized for reading, etc.) and then the store ceased providing authorizations for new versions of Acrobat Reader; the store was Adobe itself. As a result, I will not buy PDFs or any other ebook form until they are available without DRM. Printed books are a similar price to ebooks and much better value.
Slashdot Mirror
When they package this as a notebook or netbook (at an attractive price), I'll be interested.
Value can only be attributed towards things that can be bought and sold.
In most everyday cases, this is true. However precise monetary value can also be assigned to things which cannot be bought or sold, or which are illegal to trade. Consider the life insurance policy taken out on a spouse, for instance. A precise monetary value is attached to the loss of the spouse. This cannot be the replacement cost to buy a new spouse, since buying and selling spouses is not legal.
They can be as precise as they like, and revise their estimates to 361.055371 (or 31573.22 or 37964.0000) if they want. Precision without accuracy is worthless.
At least they estimated distributions for some of the parameters. My favourite part was the honest phrase "the model now enters the realm of essentially pure conjecture" when they moved to considering the life parameters. Probabilities and uncertainty estimates here should have been of the NaN sort.
Alas, they then proceeded to assign finite uncertainties to unestimable quantities. The standard deviations they actually gave are merely parametric, with the assumption that the underlying model structure is valid. Given that they obtained very different values from three different models (all of which may be wrong), the true uncertainty is far higher. An estimate of a value accompanied by an estimate of its uncertainty - with the estimates depending on pure conjecture - does not convey anything approaching accuracy.
Of course, if the numbers are just for fun, or for dinner conversation, that's fine. As scientific estimates, they should be discarded.
If you want a versioning file system, go use VMS for a while. They've been doing it since at least the early '90s. Not sure if ADVFS has that feature or not, never got a chance to use Tru64.
Actually, the versioning file system FILES-11 originated in 1980 or perhaps earlier. At least, I recall that it was standard on RSX systems in 1980, and supported file versioning (albeit with wierd "directory" organization: UIDs like [310,54] were used instead of directories).
File names could have a semicolon and version number attached, or if no version was specified then the highest version was implied. This led to the need to clean up old versions regularly, with a command such as:
PIP LB2:[310,54]*.TSK/PU:3
which would purge all but the three highest versions of each task file in [310,54] on the library 2 device. More explicitly, single file versions could be deleted with a command such as:
PIP LB2:[310,54]F11ACP.TSK;4033/DE
which would delete only version 4033 of the named file.
The PIP commands acquired saner aliases in VMS, and the organization of the file system was somewhat improved. But the versioning was there already in 1980 in FILES-11 under RSX-11.
Sing along for the censor (I may heve mis-spelled the first words in each line to assist with pronunciation):
asshole, asshole, a soldier I shall be
to piss, to piss, two pistols by my side
fucking, fucking, for king and queen we'll fight
this cunt, this cunt, this country I'll defend
Add more lines as you think of them...
Calling somebody a "copulating vagina" is arguably even more effective than the usual phrase. Other politenesses, such as alleging that a person is "capital fecal matter" can probably be used also.
Any sound-parsing censor is also liable to generate false positives. What would it do to different voices s and accents rendering "for King", "forking", "a sole", "ash it", and phrases involving the word "country".
Anyone remember when typewriters had to be registered in several Eastern European countries? Being mechanical devices, each had its own unique signature (character shapes, weights, and so forth). The idea was to be able to track the origin of unapproved newsletters etc. which were typically produced via typewriter and stencil or carbon paper. This was all rendered irrelevant by the arrival of PC-based communications (a rear-guard action was fought over printers, faxes, and so forth).
Looks like the UK has just revised those old Soviet-era laws for current technology. Anonymous communication must be considered to be really subversive in the UK.
We setting scientologists on fire now? I missed this memo!
The memo said put them in volcanos so they can play with their thetans.
Wasn't this the experiment that was determined to apply to conditions that never really obtained, leading to the current leading theory that life molecules came to earth from comets?
Not really. The comet arrival conjecture is applied mainly to the basic organic molecules, not to amino acids. There's a brief summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life_(science)
Amazing how much of the stuff in high school biology texts turns out to be not-quite-as-advertised.
Amazing how some people write before they read.
If you read TFA, or even if you read the OP, you'd have noticed that the tests using lightning in a reducing atmosphere are no longer thought to be representative of conditions on the early Earth. You'd also have noticed that the tests using conditions around volcanic eruptions ARE thought to be representative of similar scenarios on the early Earth. The latter are the experiments whose results were unpublished and samples from which were recently found and analyzed.
Can we be sure it doesn't ever abuse it's powers?
Can we be sure it doesn't ever abuse its apostrophes?
This bill was brought to you by your local censors.
So Aussies can look forward to a rabid reaming by prurient hypocrites, and the undoubted pleasure of being billed for it, too. The details of the public reaming will also be off-limits, of course (for the public good: can't have people witnessing such lurid acts).
Due to the shotgun nature of blocking filters, there will be many pages wrongfully blocked. Based on the blocking policies enforced at some workplaces, entire domains may be blocked on account of just a single objectionable page in a single user's subdomain. Whole domains may also be blocked wrongly, through ambivalent ignorance or a mere typo.
Whole communities might find themselves wrongfully off-limits, as happened a few years ago, when the alt.binaries.pictures.astronomy usenet group was blacklisted by a large US ISP. The ISP did not block all alt.binaries.pictures groups, but chose to lump the astrophotography group in with the porn groups. That's what misinterpretation of phrases such as "heavenly body", "images from last night", "multiple exposure", "open truss", "polar mount", "white dwarf", "full moon" and the like can cause. I doubt if anyone involved in the decision to block the group actually looked at the images being posted there - I never saw an inappropriate image in several years of regularly reading that group.
Presumably, all anonymizing services will promptly find themselves on the blacklist, lest anyone use them to bypass the filters and look at unapproved pages. Expect also, that anyone acting as a freenet node will be dealt with appropriately (ISP cutoff, or legal action).
Because I have a secondary monitor to the left of my Microsoft Windows Vista laptop. Why is that an issue? - Because after undocking, Microsoft Outlook insists on opening on that (non-existent) monitor. - Because after re-docking, Microsoft Windows insists on logically placing my external monitor to the RIGHT of my Laptop, and swapping the screens that the start bar and sidebar show up on. - Because after undocking, carrying my laptop to the conference room and plugging it into the projector, all kinds of weird things happen.
That's why I shutdown daily.
You can undock? My work laptop is infested with XP, and refuses to undock. If I try to undock, Windows informs me that a serial port is in use and prevents the undocking. As far as I know, there are no serial ports in the port replicator, other than USB ports which are not in use. It has always done this, since it arrived out of the box last year.
Uptime: limited by need to shutdown before undocking [stupid bloody Windows], rarely more than 1 day.
Don't forget the telescreens, not just cameras. The UK is part of Oceania, ya know.
So, are you at war with Eurasia or Eastasia? I can never tell for sure.
"The sun is God"
The only thing Microsoft does well (without breaking any laws) is marketing. I expect they'll call it Windows SeXen, so when reviewers say it's a dog, people will think doggie style...
The big difference was 3.1 to 3.11.
Interestingly, if you used the Windows calculator to do the calculation: 3.11 - 3.1 it gave the answer as zero! So according to Windows, there was no difference between 3.1 and 3.11
This was one manifestation of the rotten programming in calculator. The bug existed in Windows 3.0 and remained unfixed even in Windows 95. It was eventually corrected in Windows 98.
I dunno, it works out if you do consumer OSs: Win 3 Win 95 Win 98 Win ME Win XP Vista Win 7
You left out a few: Windows 1.x, Windows 2.x, Windows 286, Windows 386. All of them pre-dated Windows 3.0 and sucked almost as much as subsequent versions of Windows, except that they lacked the BSOD. I was afflicted by them all.
Everything I can think of that falls in this class of device (PDA-ish or MP3 player with additional features) is locked to a propriety OS, be it OSX, WinCE, Palm, or something else. Very rarely can you change it out, even if it is an Android phone. It's still limited to what it came with.
They are not all as "locked-down" as their manufacturers would have you believe.
Rockbox is a Linux-based alternative firmware which can provide enhanced functions on a variety of media players. It can be installed on several versions of iPod, as well as some media players from Archos, Cowon, iRiver, Olympus, SanDisk, and Toshiba. See http://www.rockbox.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox, for instance.
1. The actual peer review is done by other scientists for free, not by the publishers.
Indeed. I can vouch for this as I have been a reviewer on a few occasions.
2. Most publications actually require the author to suggest who should peer review it, so the publisher usually doesn't even have to work to figure out who should review what.
Not exactly. Journal editors usually have a good idea of who has recently worked in the same field, as many of them may have submitted articles to the same journal. However, if the article is in a field which is not frequently published in their journal, they may ask for a few names of experts in the field who could suggest suitable reviewers who would not be biased. The reviewers should not be friends, colleagues, or enemies of the authors.
Seriously, hosting a document for me to view doesn't cost $100/mo. so why are you trying to charge me that?
So they don't devalue the print versions, which is where they make all their cash.
Nice try, try this instead - "so they can still do review (peer as well) - checking for quality comes at a price" Unless, of course, you want the serious articles mixed in with the perpetual motion machine descriptions...
Nice try, but reviewers are generally not paid.
I have been a peer reviewer on a few occasions, and there was never any mention of payment (those journals aren't the type to have t-shirts or mugs on offer either). Peer review is a duty undertaken as a matter of professional responsibility.
The journals administer the peer reviewing procedure. On occasion they must interpret the dialog between the article's authors and the anonymous reviewers. Usually there is no need, of course, as the authors sort out whatever issues the reviewers identified in the original article, unitl the reviewers flag it as suitable for publication (i.e. abstract and conclusions are clear and concise, no obvious holes in reasoning, clear and logical presentation of data and arguments, adequate reference to related work, conflicts with other work reconciled or discussed adequately, etc.).
"prang" is a verb meaning crash. It originated in Britain in the early days of aviation to describe an airplane coming into contact with the ground (crashing or landing poorly) such that the airplane is damaged or destroyed. It's commonly used in aviation circles, but is also encountered in Britain in connection with crashing other types of vehicle.
Some cards here do offer no-questions-asked protection plans (I know American Express does) against defective goods.
A couple of decades ago, American Express pioneered the concept of "money back, no questions asked" if a product bought with AmEx became broken for any reason during the first 30 days after purchase. They had some dumb commercial on TV featuring a kid feeding porridge into a VCR, and a refund being given for the gummed-up VCR.
A colleague of mine perpetually travelled and regularly put more than $20k per month through his AmEx, so they automatically accepted almost any charge from him. Skipping a long and tortuous story, he bought a used airplane in Australia as part of some hare-brained get-rich-quick scheme (probably caused by alcohol). It was charged to his AmEx! His partner in the scheme was the pilot, who pranged the airplane on the first take-off. He survived, but the plane was a complete write-off.
Rather than accept the partial payment from their basic insurance coverage, my colleague called American Express, since the plane had been bought only a week or so previously. Contrary to their advertising, they asked a great many questions, and wriggled like mad in vain attempts to avoid the refund. Eventually, they cancelled the charge.
American Express tried to impose an inadequate monthly charge limit on him after that, but our mutual boss stood up to them, by threatening to cancel the corporate reliance on AmEx if there were any restrictions. We had almost a hundred perpetual travellers and a couple of hundred regular travellers (I occasionally exceeded US$10k on AmEx in a month). AmEx backed down.
The echidna (a monotreme mammal, related to the platypus) forms conga-lines for sex.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/scribblygum/June2000/default.htm
To further amaze and/or impress you, the male echidna has a four-headed penis. Two of them become erect at a time and are both used during mating. The pairs of active penis heads alternate in subsequent matings.
Mind you, I bet their sex lives are pestered horribly by grad students wielding research grants and expensive cameras.
I can understand your dislike of firearms, but whomever said "the pen is mightier than the sword" didn't have two in the chest and one in the head.
Two pens in the chest and a third in the head? Sounds fatal enough to me.
People don't demand the physical CD, DVD, etc., they demand the content. How that content is delivered is secondary.
If the content is essentially the same, the delivery method is secondary. The problem is that the content is often different in important ways in online-purchased media and physical CD/DVD media. First, the online-purchased media may have a lower resolution audio or video or graphics. Second, online-purchased media often (but not always) has much more restrictive DRM. Both of these reduce the value of online-purchased media to the consumer. The price to the consumer is not reduced to nearly the same extent, if it is reduced at all.
I have bought MP3s online (American Baroque, FWIW), and will probably do so again. I have never bought audio with DRM online, and probably never will. We have a few hundred CDs, and have ripped most of them to our MP3 players; this convenience is very important.
I have also bought a couple of PDFs online, which turned out to be crippled by DRM (maximum 10 pages printed per 30 days, maximum 2 PCs authorized for reading, etc.) and then the store ceased providing authorizations for new versions of Acrobat Reader; the store was Adobe itself. As a result, I will not buy PDFs or any other ebook form until they are available without DRM. Printed books are a similar price to ebooks and much better value.