As far as wilful misinterpretation goes, you have to worry a lot more about the creationists on this one than the "greenies." It doesn't really affect the environmentalist viewpoint in any meaningful way, but it requires the more sophisticated creationists to move the goalposts again to maintain the artificial "microevolution/macroevolution" dichotomy they're so enamored of.
Slashdot regularly reports on new products costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands. You don't get to use the product (particularly if it's hardware) without paying for it, yet many more people will talk about it than will pony up the cash.
If you want to read the article without a subscription, you can do so for fifteen bucks. If you're in school, or know anyone who is, there's a good chance you can do so for free.
For those of us in bioinformatics, this kind of thing is our bread and butter. Don't dismiss this as "not news for nerds" just because it doesn't happen to relate to one of the particular kinds of nerdiness about which you care enough to pay a small amount of money.
The simple answer is this: Apple makes good products, and Microsoft makes lousy products. If Windows or IE or Office were good enough to justify their market share, hardly anyone would complain. The problem is that they're not; they're inferior to competing products, and yet they continue to dominate the market, to the point where in many working environments people are forced to use MS products even when there are clearly better tools for the job at hand. In some market segments, this is finally starting to change, but it's been a long hard road.
For a lot of people, Apple's offerings just work better than competing offerings from other companies. As long as that's the case, people will continue to buy from Apple and put up with their Stupid Corporation Tricks. YMMV, of course -- if you don't like OS X or the iPod or the iPhone, then nobody will make you use them. But for the many people who generally like the way Apple products work, the productivity and enjoyment they gain with those products outweigh the problems Apple's behavior creates.
This shouldn't be hard to figure out, but unfortunately there's a substantial portion of the/. population who start shouting "fanboi fanatic!" every time the word "Apple" is mentioned, and refuse to accept that in many cases buying a Mac, or anything else from Apple, might possibly be a rational choice.
/. demographics being what they are, it's unlikely that GPP is in the 72-to-96-year-old age cohort that was used in the study. What he's experiencing may be a placebo effect, or it may be that ginkgo works for younger people. More study is needed, and presenting a study which focuses exclusively on the elderly as saying "gingko doesn't work for anybody" is just as intellectually dishonest as "gingko seems to work for me, so it must be great for everybody!"
If I can't buy products that use it at my local hardware store or via Amazon for my iphone/laptop/electronic device, it might as well not exist.... The REAL story would be an announcement of a product that will be SOLD.
Please turn in your nerd card on the way out the door.
Those are tough questions, and I don't have all the answers. As for the first one, although there are a lot of separate laws and court decisions which led up to the current situation, I put much of the blame on Bayh-Dole; read up on it and decide for yourself if that's where the blame lies.
As for the second, yes, sometimes it is a bit of a deal with the devil, and I'm no happier about it than anyone else. There are, fortunately, many good open-access journals in my field (bioinformatics) but not all fields have that. And there are a lot of very good traditional journals too; it's really not realistic, at this point, for any researcher to decide to publish only open-access. Will Google make it easier for people to get to information which until now has been locked away behind pay walls? If so, I'm 100% in favor. But I think the question on the librarians' minds is this: given publishers' historic reluctance to make any kind of deal that would permit this, how likely is it that a complex settlement engineered by the publishers, one giant media corporation, and government lawyers, with hardly any input from authors or librarians, will really accomplish this goal? The answer to that question may be a pleasant surprise... but it's well worth asking, and it hasn't yet been adequately answered.
JSTOR is limited by its agreements with the publishers, of course. If Google can push through a more user-friendly publisher agreement, good for them, but the librarians quite reasonably do not want the ability to make such agreements limited to one organization, not even one with Google's well-earned reputation.
The DoJ is already in their business, by virtue of the settlement. What the librarians are trying to do is limit the damage which this in-their-business-ness may do. It's not analagous at all to someone who bitches about the cops but then calls 911 at the first sign of trouble. It's more like someone who was once tasered for asking an officer why he was getting a speeding ticket trying to figure out, the next time he gets pulled over, what he can do to avoid it happening again.
This isn't about fair prices for consumers, it's about control.... They probably think that people will use Google to "steal" what should be in the public domain to begin with.
I think you've got it exactly backwards. Here's the key line from TFA:
The library groups also express "great disappointment" that the DOJ did not not urge the parties to require representation of academic authors on the Registry board, even though academic authors wrote the vast majority of the books Google will include in its database, and those authors--unlike those in the Authors Guild---"probably would want the Registry to price the institutional subscription in a manner that maximizes public access rather than profits."
Get that? The library associations are the good guys here. Most librarians are very much in favor of public access (it kind of goes along with the whole concept of a library) and academic librarians in particular are really sick of seeing their limited budgets eaten up by absurd journal costs. What they're worried about, I think, is that Google will end up as a partner with the publishers in making it more expensive for people to get access to information which, as you correctly point out, they've already paid for with their taxes. Whether or not this concern is justified, I don't claim to know, but it's certainly worth raising the issue. And speaking as an academic, I can say that they're absolutely right about what academic authors in general would want. I'll never make a dime on any article I publish in a journal, and that's fine; the whole point of writing journal articles is to publicize the work.
That's because murder is illegal everywhere. Countries may disagree about the specific penalties (death penalty vs. life imprisonment, for example) but everyone agrees that it's a serious crime and has to be severely punished, no matter where it happens or the nationalities of the people involved.
Internet law is a lot more variable. Should, say, Saudi Arabia be able to deport people from the US for online blasphemy? Should the RIAA be able to deport someone from Sweden (just to pick a random example...) to face trial in the US for making copyrighted music available for download? Most countries have laws about what you can do and say online, but relatively few countries agree on what those laws should be. And although this situation is far from perfect, it's also far preferable to having everyone in the world subject to everyone else's laws, which is pretty much what a "global cyber police force" would come down to.
Note that I'm not saying I'd work this way all the time; most of the time, I'd probably keep tabs grouped with their own apps. But having the option to move tabs around from window to window, without regard to application, would be really useful sometimes.
As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?
Because to a lot of people on/. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.
When I clicked on this story, I knew there would countless comments saying, "We've already got this, it's called the taskbar" or words to that effect.
It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file (a common enough occurrence in my field, which is bioinformatics; it's considered good form to put references to the appropriate journal articles in the code comments) then it would be very nice to be able to group the code and the browser windows in this way -- i.e., instead of a few code tabs in one window and a bunch of reference tabs in another window, for each chunk of code there would be associated references. If I could save those multi-tabbed windows and open them back up the same way the next time I got back to work on the project, so much the better.
We're so afraid of dying that we don't live anymore. We're busy surviving. Personally, I guess I won't see the age of 60. But I'll do my best to have lived every single day 'til.
I'd be willing to bet that at the age of 59, you'll have a far different attitude.
Oh, I got your point just fine, but it looks like you missed mine. I'll spell it out: humans don't live on geological timescales. The climate change debate is not about what the Earth's climate will be like millions, or tens of thousands, or even thousands of years from now. It's about what it will be like in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. And on that human timescale, things are changing very fast indeed.
Also... dude, "Pol Pot?" Seriously? If you think any measure that will ever be taken, or even seriously proposed, to control CO2 emissions is in any way comparable to what the Khmer Rouge did, you are insane.
Did they bother to teach you about the timescale over which these geological changes occurred? Or are you simply incapable of grasping that tens of thousands of years is a long time, millions of years is a longer time, and tens or hundreds of millions of years is a very long time indeed?
No, wait, don't tell me -- you stopped listening when they mentioned any date before 4004 BC.
I'm fed up with the general consensus that people are able to walk around outside without being punched in the face. After all, anyone can be punched in the face at any time, so I've been thinking about going up to random people on the street and punching them in the face. People need to learn to take reasonable steps to protect themselves from being punched in the face, such as wearing full-face motorcycle helmets at all times, and how are they going to learn that if I don't show them? But now I'm having second thoughts about whether or not it would be ethical to go around randomly punching people in the face. Does anyone have any advice?
I find it hard to believe that you know much of anything about the cold fusion flap when you can't even spell the names of the scientists involved.
As for the whole "global cooling" thing, it's bullshit. Sorry, anyone who brings up that old chestnut in any climate change discussion immediately loses all credibility.
(Note: if you don't consider USA Today a reliable source, I don't blame you, but the linked article gives the names of the study authors and the peer-reviewed journal in which they were published. What, you don't have access to the literature? Then you have even less credibility than before... headed into negative numbers territory there, pal.)
So you don't think it's worth trying to figure out whether, to use the hurricane metaphor, you're at the eye or the edge? You know, as a basis for deciding whether to start taking the storm shutters down and cleaning up the yard, or hunker down and wait for the next round? All predictions are inexact by their nature, epidemiological predictions no more (or less) so than meteorological ones. That doesn't mean they're not worth trying to make.
OP wasn't talking about the launch systems, he was talking about the controllers in the warheads themselves -- causing the warheads to melt themselves down (which I'm reasonably sure isn't something they're designed to do under any circumstances) rather than a missile launch. I spent long enough in uniform to know that military intelligence is an oxymoron and all that, but that's not the kind of stupidity militaries go in for.
You're assuming that the software controlling nuclear warheads is exposed to the network. The US certainly isn't stupid enough to do that, and I doubt China is either.
Are there actually that many more attacks, or are they just detecting more of them? I wouldn't be at all surprised if in years past, a lot of military computers have been pwned without anyone knowing it happened... especially given the DoD's ongoing love affair with Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
(1) Yes, of course. Whenever humans get power, many of them will abuse it.
(2) Users, all the time. Management, hardly ever. What else would you expect?
As far as wilful misinterpretation goes, you have to worry a lot more about the creationists on this one than the "greenies." It doesn't really affect the environmentalist viewpoint in any meaningful way, but it requires the more sophisticated creationists to move the goalposts again to maintain the artificial "microevolution/macroevolution" dichotomy they're so enamored of.
Slashdot regularly reports on new products costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands. You don't get to use the product (particularly if it's hardware) without paying for it, yet many more people will talk about it than will pony up the cash.
If you want to read the article without a subscription, you can do so for fifteen bucks. If you're in school, or know anyone who is, there's a good chance you can do so for free.
For those of us in bioinformatics, this kind of thing is our bread and butter. Don't dismiss this as "not news for nerds" just because it doesn't happen to relate to one of the particular kinds of nerdiness about which you care enough to pay a small amount of money.
The simple answer is this: Apple makes good products, and Microsoft makes lousy products. If Windows or IE or Office were good enough to justify their market share, hardly anyone would complain. The problem is that they're not; they're inferior to competing products, and yet they continue to dominate the market, to the point where in many working environments people are forced to use MS products even when there are clearly better tools for the job at hand. In some market segments, this is finally starting to change, but it's been a long hard road.
For a lot of people, Apple's offerings just work better than competing offerings from other companies. As long as that's the case, people will continue to buy from Apple and put up with their Stupid Corporation Tricks. YMMV, of course -- if you don't like OS X or the iPod or the iPhone, then nobody will make you use them. But for the many people who generally like the way Apple products work, the productivity and enjoyment they gain with those products outweigh the problems Apple's behavior creates.
This shouldn't be hard to figure out, but unfortunately there's a substantial portion of the /. population who start shouting "fanboi fanatic!" every time the word "Apple" is mentioned, and refuse to accept that in many cases buying a Mac, or anything else from Apple, might possibly be a rational choice.
/. demographics being what they are, it's unlikely that GPP is in the 72-to-96-year-old age cohort that was used in the study. What he's experiencing may be a placebo effect, or it may be that ginkgo works for younger people. More study is needed, and presenting a study which focuses exclusively on the elderly as saying "gingko doesn't work for anybody" is just as intellectually dishonest as "gingko seems to work for me, so it must be great for everybody!"
If I can't buy products that use it at my local hardware store or via Amazon for my iphone/laptop/electronic device, it might as well not exist. ... The REAL story would be an announcement of a product that will be SOLD.
Please turn in your nerd card on the way out the door.
If a schism group wanted to form their own church, why would they even want to use the Papal symbols as they exist today?
The history of the Church answers that question pretty nicely.
Those are tough questions, and I don't have all the answers. As for the first one, although there are a lot of separate laws and court decisions which led up to the current situation, I put much of the blame on Bayh-Dole; read up on it and decide for yourself if that's where the blame lies.
As for the second, yes, sometimes it is a bit of a deal with the devil, and I'm no happier about it than anyone else. There are, fortunately, many good open-access journals in my field (bioinformatics) but not all fields have that. And there are a lot of very good traditional journals too; it's really not realistic, at this point, for any researcher to decide to publish only open-access. Will Google make it easier for people to get to information which until now has been locked away behind pay walls? If so, I'm 100% in favor. But I think the question on the librarians' minds is this: given publishers' historic reluctance to make any kind of deal that would permit this, how likely is it that a complex settlement engineered by the publishers, one giant media corporation, and government lawyers, with hardly any input from authors or librarians, will really accomplish this goal? The answer to that question may be a pleasant surprise ... but it's well worth asking, and it hasn't yet been adequately answered.
JSTOR is limited by its agreements with the publishers, of course. If Google can push through a more user-friendly publisher agreement, good for them, but the librarians quite reasonably do not want the ability to make such agreements limited to one organization, not even one with Google's well-earned reputation.
The DoJ is already in their business, by virtue of the settlement. What the librarians are trying to do is limit the damage which this in-their-business-ness may do. It's not analagous at all to someone who bitches about the cops but then calls 911 at the first sign of trouble. It's more like someone who was once tasered for asking an officer why he was getting a speeding ticket trying to figure out, the next time he gets pulled over, what he can do to avoid it happening again.
This isn't about fair prices for consumers, it's about control. ... They probably think that people will use Google to "steal" what should be in the public domain to begin with.
I think you've got it exactly backwards. Here's the key line from TFA:
The library groups also express "great disappointment" that the DOJ did not not urge the parties to require representation of academic authors on the Registry board, even though academic authors wrote the vast majority of the books Google will include in its database, and those authors--unlike those in the Authors Guild---"probably would want the Registry to price the institutional subscription in a manner that maximizes public access rather than profits."
Get that? The library associations are the good guys here. Most librarians are very much in favor of public access (it kind of goes along with the whole concept of a library) and academic librarians in particular are really sick of seeing their limited budgets eaten up by absurd journal costs. What they're worried about, I think, is that Google will end up as a partner with the publishers in making it more expensive for people to get access to information which, as you correctly point out, they've already paid for with their taxes. Whether or not this concern is justified, I don't claim to know, but it's certainly worth raising the issue. And speaking as an academic, I can say that they're absolutely right about what academic authors in general would want. I'll never make a dime on any article I publish in a journal, and that's fine; the whole point of writing journal articles is to publicize the work.
That's because murder is illegal everywhere. Countries may disagree about the specific penalties (death penalty vs. life imprisonment, for example) but everyone agrees that it's a serious crime and has to be severely punished, no matter where it happens or the nationalities of the people involved.
Internet law is a lot more variable. Should, say, Saudi Arabia be able to deport people from the US for online blasphemy? Should the RIAA be able to deport someone from Sweden (just to pick a random example ...) to face trial in the US for making copyrighted music available for download? Most countries have laws about what you can do and say online, but relatively few countries agree on what those laws should be. And although this situation is far from perfect, it's also far preferable to having everyone in the world subject to everyone else's laws, which is pretty much what a "global cyber police force" would come down to.
No, that's not what I'm talking about. (Since I'm on OS X, I don't know about kpager, so take this FWIW.) What I have right now is
Window 1: BBEdit tab 1, tab 2, tab 3 ... ...
Window 2: Seamonkey tab 1, tab 2,
Window 3: Safari tab 1, tab 2
What I'd like to have, or at least be able to have, is:
Window 1: BBEdit file 1, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 2: BBEdit file 2, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 3: BBEdit file 3, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Note that I'm not saying I'd work this way all the time; most of the time, I'd probably keep tabs grouped with their own apps. But having the option to move tabs around from window to window, without regard to application, would be really useful sometimes.
As long as it's stable and doesn't consume resources unduly, why wouldn't you want the option?
Because to a lot of people on /. (and everywhere else, to be sure) the way they do things is the One True Way, and anyone who disagrees with their way of doing things is clearly evil, insane, or a moron (possibly all three.) "My workflow is Good And Right; yours is Inferior And Must Be Destroyed. Users must not even have the option to follow your unclean way, lest they be tempted from the path of righteousness!" That kind of thing.
When I clicked on this story, I knew there would countless comments saying, "We've already got this, it's called the taskbar" or words to that effect.
It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file (a common enough occurrence in my field, which is bioinformatics; it's considered good form to put references to the appropriate journal articles in the code comments) then it would be very nice to be able to group the code and the browser windows in this way -- i.e., instead of a few code tabs in one window and a bunch of reference tabs in another window, for each chunk of code there would be associated references. If I could save those multi-tabbed windows and open them back up the same way the next time I got back to work on the project, so much the better.
We're so afraid of dying that we don't live anymore. We're busy surviving. Personally, I guess I won't see the age of 60. But I'll do my best to have lived every single day 'til.
I'd be willing to bet that at the age of 59, you'll have a far different attitude.
Oh, I got your point just fine, but it looks like you missed mine. I'll spell it out: humans don't live on geological timescales. The climate change debate is not about what the Earth's climate will be like millions, or tens of thousands, or even thousands of years from now. It's about what it will be like in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. And on that human timescale, things are changing very fast indeed.
Also ... dude, "Pol Pot?" Seriously? If you think any measure that will ever be taken, or even seriously proposed, to control CO2 emissions is in any way comparable to what the Khmer Rouge did, you are insane.
Did they bother to teach you about the timescale over which these geological changes occurred? Or are you simply incapable of grasping that tens of thousands of years is a long time, millions of years is a longer time, and tens or hundreds of millions of years is a very long time indeed?
No, wait, don't tell me -- you stopped listening when they mentioned any date before 4004 BC.
I'm fed up with the general consensus that people are able to walk around outside without being punched in the face. After all, anyone can be punched in the face at any time, so I've been thinking about going up to random people on the street and punching them in the face. People need to learn to take reasonable steps to protect themselves from being punched in the face, such as wearing full-face motorcycle helmets at all times, and how are they going to learn that if I don't show them? But now I'm having second thoughts about whether or not it would be ethical to go around randomly punching people in the face. Does anyone have any advice?
I find it hard to believe that you know much of anything about the cold fusion flap when you can't even spell the names of the scientists involved.
As for the whole "global cooling" thing, it's bullshit. Sorry, anyone who brings up that old chestnut in any climate change discussion immediately loses all credibility.
(Note: if you don't consider USA Today a reliable source, I don't blame you, but the linked article gives the names of the study authors and the peer-reviewed journal in which they were published. What, you don't have access to the literature? Then you have even less credibility than before ... headed into negative numbers territory there, pal.)
The crime of which your family was a victim was not gambling, but arson.
So you don't think it's worth trying to figure out whether, to use the hurricane metaphor, you're at the eye or the edge? You know, as a basis for deciding whether to start taking the storm shutters down and cleaning up the yard, or hunker down and wait for the next round? All predictions are inexact by their nature, epidemiological predictions no more (or less) so than meteorological ones. That doesn't mean they're not worth trying to make.
OP wasn't talking about the launch systems, he was talking about the controllers in the warheads themselves -- causing the warheads to melt themselves down (which I'm reasonably sure isn't something they're designed to do under any circumstances) rather than a missile launch. I spent long enough in uniform to know that military intelligence is an oxymoron and all that, but that's not the kind of stupidity militaries go in for.
You're assuming that the software controlling nuclear warheads is exposed to the network. The US certainly isn't stupid enough to do that, and I doubt China is either.
Are there actually that many more attacks, or are they just detecting more of them? I wouldn't be at all surprised if in years past, a lot of military computers have been pwned without anyone knowing it happened ... especially given the DoD's ongoing love affair with Windows.