This is not the way to get the ethos behind file-sharing taken seriously. It's counter-productive and childish.
It is, however, if they're successful, a way to enjoy the same legal protections granted to a number of other ethoses (ethoi?) which are demonstrably more counter-productive and childish than any amount of file-sharing could ever be. Which I kind of suspect is the point. "We don't care if you agree with us, just stop persecuting us" is a demand which has proven quite effective, in the civilized world, for all sorts of beliefs which previously been considered bizarre at best and criminal at worst.
(1) Peer review is a lot more powerful when you can review the data itself, not just what the paper says about the data. In bioinformatics, we've known this for years, which is why you absolutely can't publish a paper concerning a microarray experiment without making the raw data available in GEO or a similar repository.
(1.5) Any high-throughput experiment generates enormous amounts of data (that's pretty much the definition of "high-throughput") and that data is very often useful for answering questions other than the specific one the experimenter was asking. Public availability of data has proven an enormous boon to basic biology, and an awful lot of people would like to see that carry over into medical research.
(2) Generally speaking, "medicine" refers to clinical practice, and "medical research" to research in that practice, while "biomedical research" refers to research in the biology underlying disease and the treatment of disease. "Biomedicine" is, more or less, best defined as "what biomedical researchers do." For example, if you have cancer, your oncologist may prescribe chemotherapy (medicine) but before that, a pharmacologist designed the drug you're now being administered (biomedicine) and a biostatistician analyzed the results of the clinical trials on the drug (medical research). Ideally, data sharing will help close the loop: more biostatisticians can analyze the results of your and other patients' treatments, and more pharmacologists can use the results of that analysis to design the next generation of treatments.
Adverse event reporting covers only a tiny fraction of the data gathered in any clinical trial. There's an enormous amount of information that would be useful for future research locked up in clinical trials databases, and as we move into the "genomic medicine" era, this will be ever more the case. Having gone back and forth between bioinformatics and clinical research, and being persistently annoyed at how difficult it is to access data in the latter field, I say that anything that can bring bioinformatics' generally more open approach to the clinical research world is a good thing. Obviously there are privacy concerns when working with human data that don't exist when working with model organisms, but most of what keeps clinical data out of public research databases is plain old inertia, and it sounds like Sage Commons is working to overcome that -- good for them.
With a week's training, I'll bet the 1869 man could drive a car, use a cell phone, or browse the internet.
I'll bet you're wrong. (And it's a silly thing to bet on, of course, since there's no way to settle it either way.) There's a whole body of technological understanding that we absorb while growing up, without even thinking about it.
They learn that Heather has two mommies, that Islam is a religion of peace, hurt feelings run the world, and how to throw all of that into a inspirational powerpoint presentation.
Congratulations, you've just graduated summa cum laude from Fox Academy!
It's really amusing to note how much people complaining about how modern schools indoctrinate kids... all sound exactly alike.
I love alternate history stories, but Turtledove books always seem have obvious anachronisms in the artwork on their covers (i.e., modern weapons in the Civil War era) the idea of which always turned me off.
That's really only one particular Turtledove book you're thinking of, The Guns of the South, which was in fact inspired when someone asked at a convention panel, "What if Robert E. Lee had AK-47's?" Turtledove took the question and ran with it, and produced a very enjoyable time-travel story. If that's not your cup of tea, fine, but you should be aware that most of his alternate history works are straightforward "what if X had happened at this particular time instead of Y" stories, without any other MacGuffins. (Okay, he also did the "what if aliens had invaded in the middle of WW2" series, which has a lot of clever stuff in it but overall didn't work as well, IMO.) F'rinstance, you might want to try the series beginning with How Few Remain, which posits an entirely believable alternate Civil War and picks up in the aftermath.
Slashdotters, as a general rule, are woefully ignorant of relgion.
Being disinclined to swallow religious apologia does not equate to ignorance of religion. If anything, it indicates a better understanding of religion than that possessed by most believers.
Thank you, Your Grace, for the field upon which my family and I labor! I gladly offer to you the greater part of my crops, in return for your continued beneficence! True, my hut is collapsing and my children cry with hunger while yours grow fat in your castle, but I understand that this is the natural order of things as ordained by God, and I swear to you that I pay no attention to those troublemakers who suggest otherwise!
And, I've heard the same damn whining and trying to cover up for that lapse of good judgement by the party in question with the Democrats.
Can you cite a recent example where a Democrat elected to national office said something really dumb which (a) was deliberately propagated by the Democratic Party, and then (b) the party tried to use legal means to make "unhappen" once they realized how dumb it was? The first happens all the time -- they're politicians, after all -- but the second is what makes it really scary.
The Democrats have done plenty of nasty stuff, to be sure, but I honestly can't think of anything they've done lately, all on their own, that's so blatantly anti-American as this. It's not Duffy's statement itself that gets me, as dumb as it is, as the attempt to use legal means to remove information that's already been deliberately released to the public, which is the exact definition of censorship. The Wikileaks frenzy is similar, but that's a bipartisan madness. This one is all on the Republicans.
excuse me for being rational, but i'm not about to take an article from the Guardian as hard fact before it's reported on, say, the iaea website. I actually find it rather offensive that a site like/. would post this alarmist nonsense.
Here we see the inevitable conclusion to the "rationality" of the nuke-nuts: they will deny any facts which conflict with their preconceived ideas about how wonderful nuclear power is, and accuse any news source which offers such facts of lying. I swear to God, they're as bad as the "nukes are bad, mmmkay?" Greenpeace types, just in the opposite direction. I'm a big fan of clean, safe nuclear power, and I believe we should keep trying to develop new types of reactors which will provide power efficiently while standing up to natural and manmade disasters -- and this kind of "la la la I can't hear you" denialism is not helping in the effort to achieve that goal.
Yep. This is why I've said before that the simplest and easiest patent reform would be a rule saying that if any claim in a patent is found to be invalid, then the whole patent is invalid. It wouldn't prevent all patent trolling, of course, but it would provide a powerful incentive for patent holders not to sue over "infringements" that are clearly nothing of the sort in any reasonable person's eyes. Over the long term, it would produce patents for actual specific inventions rather than "hey, I've got a neat idea, let's patent it and sue anyone who does something vaguely similar."
There is no requirement that it be the only domain name that points back to that IP, or that it only point back to one IP.
Not yet. India's action is one half of the censorship that was (accurately) predicted for when.xxx became a reality; the other half, which will probably happen about five minutes from now, is exactly "requir[ing] all smut to show up only on.xxx." What constitutes smut? Why, that's up to "community standards" or some equally ill-defined phrase, of course.
It doesn't matter if the laws are meaningfully enforceable. It's just another move in the pass-laws-that-makes-everyone-a-criminal game. Double standards, hell -- there will be a different standard for every single case. Nobody at Playboy has anything to worry about, but people at Joe's Porn Shop will face a serious risk of fines and/or prison time because some zealous moralist prosecutor in East Donkey Creek, Mississippi, and equivalent places all over the world, sees an opportunity for mischief.
Are you charging the archaeologists with falsifying data? Because it sure sounds like that's what you're doing, and if so, you'd better contact the Texas A&M ethics board with your allegations. If you're not willing to do that, and provide evidence, you should probably just STFU.
Ah, I see you're using the right-wing definition of "fact" as "something I wish to be true because it supports my preconceived notions." (Except that's probably too long and polysyllabic a phrase for your Beck-addled brain. Sorry, it's hard to express complex ideas using the Tea Party Soundbite Dictionary.) [pat pat] Go play, kid, the grown-ups are talking.
The assumption you seem to be making, that Iraq=Libya and Hussein=Gaddafi, is so absurd on the face of it that I really see no reason I should have to refute it. If you want to make the argument that they're somehow equivalent, go ahead, but you're the one who's going to have to bring some more facts to the table.
... which happened at a time when the US considered him our best buddy in the Middle East and enthusiastically supported his regime because he was fighting Big Bad Iran, yeah. Like that.
There was really one and only one point when the US and our allies had both the moral authority and the military opportunity to do in Iraq what we're currently doing (or at least starting to do) in Libya: at the end of Desert Storm, when we had the largest allied military force assembled since WW2 waiting just across the border in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and a genuine popular uprising took place against Hussein's battered but still powerful army. Instead, we stood back and let the rebels get slaughtered. As one of the people who would have been fighting that war, having just done my part in fighting the last war (you know, the one that we won) I can't decide to this day if I wish we'd gone in or not. But I have no reservations in saying that doing what we did instead -- letting the serious internal opposition get wiped out, maintaining sanctions and a no-fly zone for over a decade with the inevitable hardening of national will, and then going to war over something that had nothing to do with Iraq or Hussein at all -- was unmitigated stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the way to get the ethos behind file-sharing taken seriously. It's counter-productive and childish.
It is, however, if they're successful, a way to enjoy the same legal protections granted to a number of other ethoses (ethoi?) which are demonstrably more counter-productive and childish than any amount of file-sharing could ever be. Which I kind of suspect is the point. "We don't care if you agree with us, just stop persecuting us" is a demand which has proven quite effective, in the civilized world, for all sorts of beliefs which previously been considered bizarre at best and criminal at worst.
(1) Peer review is a lot more powerful when you can review the data itself, not just what the paper says about the data. In bioinformatics, we've known this for years, which is why you absolutely can't publish a paper concerning a microarray experiment without making the raw data available in GEO or a similar repository.
(1.5) Any high-throughput experiment generates enormous amounts of data (that's pretty much the definition of "high-throughput") and that data is very often useful for answering questions other than the specific one the experimenter was asking. Public availability of data has proven an enormous boon to basic biology, and an awful lot of people would like to see that carry over into medical research.
(2) Generally speaking, "medicine" refers to clinical practice, and "medical research" to research in that practice, while "biomedical research" refers to research in the biology underlying disease and the treatment of disease. "Biomedicine" is, more or less, best defined as "what biomedical researchers do." For example, if you have cancer, your oncologist may prescribe chemotherapy (medicine) but before that, a pharmacologist designed the drug you're now being administered (biomedicine) and a biostatistician analyzed the results of the clinical trials on the drug (medical research). Ideally, data sharing will help close the loop: more biostatisticians can analyze the results of your and other patients' treatments, and more pharmacologists can use the results of that analysis to design the next generation of treatments.
Adverse event reporting covers only a tiny fraction of the data gathered in any clinical trial. There's an enormous amount of information that would be useful for future research locked up in clinical trials databases, and as we move into the "genomic medicine" era, this will be ever more the case. Having gone back and forth between bioinformatics and clinical research, and being persistently annoyed at how difficult it is to access data in the latter field, I say that anything that can bring bioinformatics' generally more open approach to the clinical research world is a good thing. Obviously there are privacy concerns when working with human data that don't exist when working with model organisms, but most of what keeps clinical data out of public research databases is plain old inertia, and it sounds like Sage Commons is working to overcome that -- good for them.
Oh, bravo, good sir! Bravo!
To be fair, most of the images contain some text. Often the text in the images is denser than the text in the article.
With a week's training, I'll bet the 1869 man could drive a car, use a cell phone, or browse the internet.
I'll bet you're wrong. (And it's a silly thing to bet on, of course, since there's no way to settle it either way.) There's a whole body of technological understanding that we absorb while growing up, without even thinking about it.
They learn that Heather has two mommies, that Islam is a religion of peace, hurt feelings run the world, and how to throw all of that into a inspirational powerpoint presentation.
Congratulations, you've just graduated summa cum laude from Fox Academy!
It's really amusing to note how much people complaining about how modern schools indoctrinate kids ... all sound exactly alike.
I love alternate history stories, but Turtledove books always seem have obvious anachronisms in the artwork on their covers (i.e., modern weapons in the Civil War era) the idea of which always turned me off.
That's really only one particular Turtledove book you're thinking of, The Guns of the South, which was in fact inspired when someone asked at a convention panel, "What if Robert E. Lee had AK-47's?" Turtledove took the question and ran with it, and produced a very enjoyable time-travel story. If that's not your cup of tea, fine, but you should be aware that most of his alternate history works are straightforward "what if X had happened at this particular time instead of Y" stories, without any other MacGuffins. (Okay, he also did the "what if aliens had invaded in the middle of WW2" series, which has a lot of clever stuff in it but overall didn't work as well, IMO.) F'rinstance, you might want to try the series beginning with How Few Remain, which posits an entirely believable alternate Civil War and picks up in the aftermath.
Apparently not. Man, there are some cranky people here today.
Oops. You broke the first rule of Slashdot discussions about Facebook: you do not say anything good about Facebook.
Slashdotters, as a general rule, are woefully ignorant of relgion.
Being disinclined to swallow religious apologia does not equate to ignorance of religion. If anything, it indicates a better understanding of religion than that possessed by most believers.
IT'S THAT "TOP 10%".
Thank you, Your Grace, for the field upon which my family and I labor! I gladly offer to you the greater part of my crops, in return for your continued beneficence! True, my hut is collapsing and my children cry with hunger while yours grow fat in your castle, but I understand that this is the natural order of things as ordained by God, and I swear to you that I pay no attention to those troublemakers who suggest otherwise!
And, I've heard the same damn whining and trying to cover up for that lapse of good judgement by the party in question with the Democrats.
Can you cite a recent example where a Democrat elected to national office said something really dumb which (a) was deliberately propagated by the Democratic Party, and then (b) the party tried to use legal means to make "unhappen" once they realized how dumb it was? The first happens all the time -- they're politicians, after all -- but the second is what makes it really scary.
The Democrats have done plenty of nasty stuff, to be sure, but I honestly can't think of anything they've done lately, all on their own, that's so blatantly anti-American as this. It's not Duffy's statement itself that gets me, as dumb as it is, as the attempt to use legal means to remove information that's already been deliberately released to the public, which is the exact definition of censorship. The Wikileaks frenzy is similar, but that's a bipartisan madness. This one is all on the Republicans.
... champion of traditional American values like free speech and personal responsibility!
excuse me for being rational, but i'm not about to take an article from the Guardian as hard fact before it's reported on, say, the iaea website. I actually find it rather offensive that a site like /. would post this alarmist nonsense.
Here we see the inevitable conclusion to the "rationality" of the nuke-nuts: they will deny any facts which conflict with their preconceived ideas about how wonderful nuclear power is, and accuse any news source which offers such facts of lying. I swear to God, they're as bad as the "nukes are bad, mmmkay?" Greenpeace types, just in the opposite direction. I'm a big fan of clean, safe nuclear power, and I believe we should keep trying to develop new types of reactors which will provide power efficiently while standing up to natural and manmade disasters -- and this kind of "la la la I can't hear you" denialism is not helping in the effort to achieve that goal.
The situational meaning of "irony" is very old and well-established, and in fact probably predates the linguistic meaning. Look it up, and don't try to impose your own ignorance on everyone else.
Yep. This is why I've said before that the simplest and easiest patent reform would be a rule saying that if any claim in a patent is found to be invalid, then the whole patent is invalid. It wouldn't prevent all patent trolling, of course, but it would provide a powerful incentive for patent holders not to sue over "infringements" that are clearly nothing of the sort in any reasonable person's eyes. Over the long term, it would produce patents for actual specific inventions rather than "hey, I've got a neat idea, let's patent it and sue anyone who does something vaguely similar."
There is no requirement that it be the only domain name that points back to that IP, or that it only point back to one IP.
Not yet. India's action is one half of the censorship that was (accurately) predicted for when .xxx became a reality; the other half, which will probably happen about five minutes from now, is exactly "requir[ing] all smut to show up only on .xxx." What constitutes smut? Why, that's up to "community standards" or some equally ill-defined phrase, of course.
It doesn't matter if the laws are meaningfully enforceable. It's just another move in the pass-laws-that-makes-everyone-a-criminal game. Double standards, hell -- there will be a different standard for every single case. Nobody at Playboy has anything to worry about, but people at Joe's Porn Shop will face a serious risk of fines and/or prison time because some zealous moralist prosecutor in East Donkey Creek, Mississippi, and equivalent places all over the world, sees an opportunity for mischief.
Are you charging the archaeologists with falsifying data? Because it sure sounds like that's what you're doing, and if so, you'd better contact the Texas A&M ethics board with your allegations. If you're not willing to do that, and provide evidence, you should probably just STFU.
Unfortunately, there is no limitation that prohibits people who lack friends from using or posting on slashdot.
Oh, well played!
Saddam was far, far worse.
The people of Libya might disagree.
Ah, I see you're using the right-wing definition of "fact" as "something I wish to be true because it supports my preconceived notions." (Except that's probably too long and polysyllabic a phrase for your Beck-addled brain. Sorry, it's hard to express complex ideas using the Tea Party Soundbite Dictionary.) [pat pat] Go play, kid, the grown-ups are talking.
The assumption you seem to be making, that Iraq=Libya and Hussein=Gaddafi, is so absurd on the face of it that I really see no reason I should have to refute it. If you want to make the argument that they're somehow equivalent, go ahead, but you're the one who's going to have to bring some more facts to the table.
Like when he gassed his own people?
... which happened at a time when the US considered him our best buddy in the Middle East and enthusiastically supported his regime because he was fighting Big Bad Iran, yeah. Like that.
There was really one and only one point when the US and our allies had both the moral authority and the military opportunity to do in Iraq what we're currently doing (or at least starting to do) in Libya: at the end of Desert Storm, when we had the largest allied military force assembled since WW2 waiting just across the border in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and a genuine popular uprising took place against Hussein's battered but still powerful army. Instead, we stood back and let the rebels get slaughtered. As one of the people who would have been fighting that war, having just done my part in fighting the last war (you know, the one that we won) I can't decide to this day if I wish we'd gone in or not. But I have no reservations in saying that doing what we did instead -- letting the serious internal opposition get wiped out, maintaining sanctions and a no-fly zone for over a decade with the inevitable hardening of national will, and then going to war over something that had nothing to do with Iraq or Hussein at all -- was unmitigated stupidity.