Where I live, commercial establishments usually have outward opening doors for the safety of the large number of people that might need to exit in an emergency; whereas residential doors will have inward opening doors so that the hinges are not exposed.
I believe there's a federal law to build public buildings doors so that they open outwards because of the fire in Chicago theater from the early 20th century when lots of people died jammed at the entrance/exit doors trying to get out...
To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".
I think you are right, I mean not exactly right, just roughly. You are basically not enough wrong to be wrong, just enough right to take your analysis almost seriously.
Harry Truman used to say he didn't want to talk to experts because an expert was just someone who didn't want to learn anything more on a subject because if he did, then he'd find out he didn't know it all and wasn't an expert any longer.
Generally the best are the ones that know more than others, but because of that, they realize how much they DON'T know and that tends to keep them from getting those ego highs.
oh, I know that I know nothing? Socrates? The one who does not write? Not even computer code?
I've no idea why the parent post is modded Troll when it is one of the better posts here.
I'm just wondering-- this isn't a topic I'm all that familiar with-- but do journals really serve a very good purpose these days? I'm assuming that whatever the purpose is, it's not simply the distribution of the articles, since that can easily be done online for free.
Of course that's not their only purpose, as you further write:
As far as the "publish or perish" nature of academia, that in itself seems like a problem to me. I've had some exposure to that quality of academia, and it always feels like it's the wrong focus. I've wondered if there shouldn't just be more of a split between research institutions and educational institutions-- or something...? I'm not sure it really works that well to have such a results-driven approach to education and academic study. Or am I completely misunderstanding the situation?
You're not misunderstanding the situation, and these are very good questions, hard to properly answer without going on in depth. The distinguishing between educational and research functions of academia is very good starting point, but I don't think you could carry on that distinction to the actual separation of the two functions in academic practice.
It seems to me like you could have research institutions that handled peer review and offered some degree of endorsement to studies which are deemed to have been carried out in reasonable ways, but without it being connected to the publishing/copyright concerns involved.
This seems as a reasonable idea, but really hard to implement. Which institutions would do this work? For starters, they shouldn't be doing research because of the conflict of interests. With journals however, there is no such a conflict, but rather an interest to publish the best research available. But then we have a problem with copyright.
Yeah the bit about not being able to cite your own work is just wrong. In fact, journals compete partially on impact scores, which are based on how many citations their papers get. The would have no motive to go after people citing papers they published, even if they had some legal basis to do so- which I don't think they do.
You are confused about the difference between citations and references. They don't need to cite their previous work when they can refer to it. Impact scores are based on the number of references, not on the number of citations. To be fair to you, it should be said that this confusion is in part generated by a common practice of calling references citations, which they are not.
Life is not infinite, so I will go ahead and use the tools that let me get done the things I want to get done during this short life. I see no difference between, say, riding in a vehicle like a boat or plane where I cannot inspect and study the engine and using a piece of software where I cannot see the code. For the boat, all I care about is that it accomplishes the task I need--getting me safely to my destination. Same for software.
That's fine as long as you don't expect from others to trust your calculations or use your code.
SURPRISE, yet another national govenrment considers unhindered, truly private free speech to be a national security risk,[...]
unhindered, truly private free speech as in: provided to you by a corporation through some closed and obsfurcated code with strange secretive routing schemes.
While the purist is sounding off about some moral crusade for cuter kittens or something, the pragmatist will have finished what they're doing and be in the bar with a beer. The purists see this as proof that they are right. The pragmatists see this as proof that they've got a beer.
I dunno,... now that I think about it, last time I was in a store selling computers I saw lots of PC's with "Vista" stickers on them, so maybe it's really some kind of hardware.
[...]I don't really understand the mechanisms that cause volatility (but I'm a programmer, so that's not surprising). Do you?
As a programmer you should be familiar with the volatile declaration in C. A volatile variable can have its value
changed seemingly unpredictably from the program's logic point of view, usually because its value is changed non-obviously if one just reads the code and does not look at the logic how the variable is actually changed, say from concurent process, hardware, etc, which means from some other part of the system outside of the subroutine that does something with the variable. Analogously, volatile stock is the stock whose value can change outside of the usual flow of market logic, for example because of strange past behavior of its value or large uncertainties in buyers/sellers expectations about its future value.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I live, commercial establishments usually have outward opening doors for the safety of the large number of people that might need to exit in an emergency; whereas residential doors will have inward opening doors so that the hinges are not exposed.
I believe there's a federal law to build public buildings doors so that they open outwards because of the fire in Chicago theater from the early 20th century when lots of people died jammed at the entrance/exit doors trying to get out...
3) why isn't Reiser 4 in the damn kernel already?
ditto ZFS.
To be fair, "I no longer care" is shorthand for the closely related "I no longer care enough to put up with the criticism" which is just a statement of cost/benefit analysis. He does care, but not enough to keep going, and that roughly approximates "I don't care".
I think you are right, I mean not exactly right, just roughly. You are basically not enough wrong to be wrong, just enough right to take your analysis almost seriously.
I have no idea if you can drag an image from Firefox to the Gimp nowadays, and I don't care.
Me neither.
> wasn't properly overloaded.
Please mod parent up
This sounds like another good reason to switch to BSD.
And why not SunOS?
Using myself as an example: I have a (Tested) IQ of 151, [...]
Howdy Forest!
Harry Truman used to say he didn't want to talk to experts because an expert was just someone who didn't want to learn anything more on a subject because if he did, then he'd find out he didn't know it all and wasn't an expert any longer.
Yeah, Harry was a real expert on experts.
Generally the best are the ones that know more than others, but because of that, they realize how much they DON'T know and that tends to keep them from getting those ego highs.
oh, I know that I know nothing? Socrates? The one who does not write? Not even computer code?
I'm the AC.
If you say so...
The researcher is paid to make public research. It just makes sense that his research is made public.
Ideed. Thus all the publications.
This is because Nature is more like a "Best Of..." magazine, than a journal.
Not really, it's a journal allright.
I'm just wondering-- this isn't a topic I'm all that familiar with-- but do journals really serve a very good purpose these days? I'm assuming that whatever the purpose is, it's not simply the distribution of the articles, since that can easily be done online for free.
Of course that's not their only purpose, as you further write:
As far as the "publish or perish" nature of academia, that in itself seems like a problem to me. I've had some exposure to that quality of academia, and it always feels like it's the wrong focus. I've wondered if there shouldn't just be more of a split between research institutions and educational institutions-- or something...? I'm not sure it really works that well to have such a results-driven approach to education and academic study. Or am I completely misunderstanding the situation?
You're not misunderstanding the situation, and these are very good questions, hard to properly answer without going on in depth. The distinguishing between educational and research functions of academia is very good starting point, but I don't think you could carry on that distinction to the actual separation of the two functions in academic practice.
It seems to me like you could have research institutions that handled peer review and offered some degree of endorsement to studies which are deemed to have been carried out in reasonable ways, but without it being connected to the publishing/copyright concerns involved.
This seems as a reasonable idea, but really hard to implement. Which institutions would do this work? For starters, they shouldn't be doing research because of the conflict of interests. With journals however, there is no such a conflict, but rather an interest to publish the best research available. But then we have a problem with copyright.
Yeah the bit about not being able to cite your own work is just wrong. In fact, journals compete partially on impact scores, which are based on how many citations their papers get. The would have no motive to go after people citing papers they published, even if they had some legal basis to do so- which I don't think they do.
You are confused about the difference between citations and references. They don't need to cite their previous work when they can refer to it. Impact scores are based on the number of references, not on the number of citations. To be fair to you, it should be said that this confusion is in part generated by a common practice of calling references citations, which they are not.
[...]the people who publish the papers (who do provide a valuable function) DO derive their funding from selling the papers.
Despite your capitalization of the word "do", that's not true.
Yeah, no shit.
Life is not infinite, so I will go ahead and use the tools that let me get done the things I want to get done during this short life. I see no difference between, say, riding in a vehicle like a boat or plane where I cannot inspect and study the engine and using a piece of software where I cannot see the code. For the boat, all I care about is that it accomplishes the task I need--getting me safely to my destination. Same for software.
That's fine as long as you don't expect from others to trust your calculations or use your code.
SURPRISE, yet another national govenrment considers unhindered, truly private free speech to be a national security risk,[...]
unhindered, truly private free speech as in: provided to you by a corporation through some closed and obsfurcated code with strange secretive routing schemes.
I am confused. Does it suck, or does it blow? These are opposites, are they not?
The verb that solves this logical conundrum is: fellate.
While the purist is sounding off about some moral crusade for cuter kittens or something, the pragmatist will have finished what they're doing and be in the bar with a beer. The purists see this as proof that they are right. The pragmatists see this as proof that they've got a beer.
So who's gonna get the girl then?
I dunno,... now that I think about it, last time I was in a store selling computers I saw lots of PC's with "Vista" stickers on them, so maybe it's really some kind of hardware.
[...]I don't really understand the mechanisms that cause volatility (but I'm a programmer, so that's not surprising). Do you?
As a programmer you should be familiar with the volatile declaration in C. A volatile variable can have its value changed seemingly unpredictably from the program's logic point of view, usually because its value is changed non-obviously if one just reads the code and does not look at the logic how the variable is actually changed, say from concurent process, hardware, etc, which means from some other part of the system outside of the subroutine that does something with the variable. Analogously, volatile stock is the stock whose value can change outside of the usual flow of market logic, for example because of strange past behavior of its value or large uncertainties in buyers/sellers expectations about its future value.
looks like 10/09/08 10:32:33 pm to me (probably international time?)
Hey, it's not fair, you've been reading!
What's Vista? When did it come out? Who makes it?
I believe it's some kind of operating system from Microsoft.