And you're aware that modern newspapers are news aggregators just like Drudge, adding little more than local flavor, etc.
To a large degree, this is true -- which is one of the main reasons they're in trouble. The way for papers to survive is not for them to become more like blogs, but less so. My problem is with the idea that the line I quoted (your words, "Drudge is 21st century news, adapt or die") provides a model for newspapers or other organizations which want to do original reporting in this century or any other.
Drudge breaks stories when he gets them, and conducts original reporting, just like the regular newspapers do... Drudge got his big break by breaking a story that the MSM did not want to report on, the Lewinsky scandal
Did Drudge go out and cover the story himself, conducting interviews, reading records, digging through the dirt? Did he pay other reporters to do this? Or did he just link to those existing news outlets which were covering the story, thus calling attention to it and inspiring even more MSM coverage for him to link to?
As of now, drudge.com is basically a link farm. There's no evidence of original reporting on there that I can see. Don't get me wrong -- I think this kind of news aggregation is great, and I'm glad Drudge and many others are doing it. But they could no more exist without original journalism to feed their sites than/. could exist without the computer industry.
In case you didn't notice, Drudge and his host of imitators are news aggregators, not reporters. The stories they link too have to come from somewhere. If all the old line, stale, MSM news outlets that people love to bitch about closed up shop, the blogosphere would have precious little to do.
"Open access" != "posted on Arxiv by any yahoo". There is nothing in the MIT policy which will discourage peer review or any of the other traditional means of evaluating the quality of papers.
In a true democracy, the will of the people is followed. Right down to the burning of witches. A true democracy is better known as mob rule.
No, mob rule is mob rule. That's not the same thing as democracy, and it's an absurd bit of political rhetoric to claim that it is.
Most countries that we call democracies are actually republics.
Most democracies are also republics. New Zealand, however, most certainly is not a republic, although it is a democracy.
The key points of a republic are (a) the government is ruled by representatives chosen by the people, and (b) the rule of law is superior to the rulers.
Those are the principles of any workable democratic system that anyone has ever devised, as long as you replace the word "ruled" with "run" in point (a). A republic is one way to implement those principles; a constitutional monarchy, which is what New Zealand has, is another. Americans, living in a republican democracy (or a "democratic republic," but that phrase has been hijacked by a type of government which creates emphatically non-democratic republics) tend to confuse the two.
If you can't explain it to a layman, you don't really understand it.
From this it follows that: If it's worth publishing a scholarly paper about it, then you don't really understand it.
This proposition implies that most people in most academic fields don't understand their own research. You can believe that if you want to, but it requires rejection of a great deal of useful knowledge.
I strongly suspect that this system is designed to identify people like your wife's ex-boss as valuable employees, while denigrating people like your wife, who (I assume) does real, useful work. The middle-management drones want to justify their existence to the upper-management drones, and software that assigns a number to "networking" and "synergies" and "six-sigma leveraging of core stakeholder values" is exactly the right tool for this. The upper-management drones are inclined to believe this sort of thing already, of course, and the sorts of reports the software generates add to their self-satisfaction.
It really does depend on the field you're in; you don't say, but from your PubMed mention I'm guessing medicine or biology. In bioinformatics, fortunately, the computer scientists and mathematicians have won this particular argument over the biologists and chemists -- nearly every bioinformatics journal accepts LaTeX, and many prefer it over Word. This includes a number of journals from Springer, Elsevier, Oxford and Blackwell.
Having served as both an infantryman and a medic, and currently being a "techie" in the more usual sense of the word, I can tell you that characterizing medics as "non-technical" is absurd. Medics are kind of the OG's (Original Geeks) of military culture, and what programmers are currently going through is very similar to what medics have gone through for a very long time.
So if the owners are paying the managers ridiculously large wages while the people actually doing the "real work" are getting cheated then the entrepreneur will not be in business very long.
Have you paid any attention to economic news over the past year or so? At all?
Given the choice would you really want to be standing next to warehouse racks holding palettes of merchandise built by some one who toked up before they came to work or some one who doesn't use.
This is a red herring. "Before they came to work," of course not, but then, I wouldn't want to be there next to someone who downed a six-pack before coming to work either. But if he got stoned the night before, or got drunk the night before, or both, or neither -- why should I care?
That's about the same logic as the wingnuts who claim that video games lead to real-life violence.
If I play a game in which (just to choose a random example *cough cough*) my character steals cars and beats up hookers, that doesn't give any rational person a reason to assume that I actually do those things. But if I brag about stealing cars and beating up hookers, or even say to my friends one day, "You know, what I'd really like to do is steal a car and beat up a hooker" -- that definitely gives people a reason to be suspicious of me. And if shortly after I make that statement, there is a case in my neighborhood involving these crimes, I will, quite justifiably, become a person of great interest to the local PD.
I'm a highschool teacher. Sometimes I'm in a bad, homicidal, don't-even-talk-to-me humour and that has NEVER made me fail a student or even treat them poorly.
I can be angry without being biased. I can do my job in a respectful, fair manner, no matter what my mood is.
So now what? Any policeman having a bad day is biased? Should they be sent home just because they had a rough day?
Do you make jokes on Myspace about, say, wanting to beat up your students?
Do you cite fictional portrayals of abusive teachers as role models?
If you do these things, and then one of your students accuses you of assault, do you think it might, maybe, possibly, have a bearing on the outcome of the case?
The fact that anyone would truly believe that line of reasoning is what's wrong with today's society...
Well, you're entitled to that opinion. Some of us understand that what's wrong with today's society is that there are so many cowards like you out there who are willing to cede any power to the State so long as they tell you it's for your own good.
it's also why we're greeted by the astounding news that the criminal was actually allowed to subpoena anything so completely unrelated to the charge.
The officer in question described, in detail and in public, the thinking that motivated his actions in the case. If you think that's "unrelated to the charge," then I have to wonder what would be related in your mind.
Do you really not understand the facts of the case? The officer lied. The suspect never had the gun. The officer made the story up.
Sorry, should have been tossed out. We don't have time, nor should we have any tolerance or patience, for this kind of nonsense.
Yeah, that pesky "civil rights" thing, and that "police officers should uphold the law" nonsense -- such a time-waster... Indeed. Why should we tolerate such silly ideas?
Sorry, but that is nothing more than "locker room talk".
"Locker room talk" very often reveals more about what a person is actually like than the professional image they try to present.
If silly bits and pieces like that are valid in court,
There are lots of words to describe a real-life cop citing a movie's depiction of a corrupt cop as a role model, but "silly" isn't one of them. "Dangerous," "scary," and "psychotic" come to mind.
then the idiotic judge just opened a massive can of worms.
Oh yeah, that idiot judge, preserving people's Constitutional rights. What a moron! What does he think this is, anyway, America or something?
Nice precedent, asshole.
A precedent that will keep people safe when the people who are supposed to protect them go off the deep end. Yeah, there's an asshole here, all right, but it's not the judge.
And your source for this sweeping dismissal is... what, exactly? Please, oh please, share with us your understanding of the subject that has apparently eluded all those scientists and engineers who have worked on this project for years.
It's a nice idea, but realistically, you have to know it's never going to happen. Politicians and corporate oligarchs will be effectively immune to the law; regular folks won't. That's just the way it works.
I think Office Depot/Max have started to expand into the electronics area. They don't really carry TVs,
Actually, they do, at least in some stores. I recently bought a ViewSonic flatscreen TV from Office Depot (after all, TVs are basically large monitors) for a hell of a lot less than I would have paid for a comparable Sony, Panasonic, etc. My experience with it has been good enough to sell my parents and several friends on doing the same.
Like, why are you not totally rejecting this and not talking to her about her porn habits?
Maybe... because she's twenty years old? As in, old enough (by a couple of years) to vote, get married, buy a house, or get pieces of herself blown off in Iraq -- but apparently not old enough to read about guys getting it on, at least in your book.
Or maybe he feels that his daughter is an independent, thinking human being and he doesn't get to tell her what to read.
Of course, maybe it's that she's twenty years old.
Possibly it's because he doesn't have the same visceral reaction to guy-guy porn that you do. Something tells me that if OP had mentioned that he had a son (particularly a grown son) who's into girl-girl porn, you wouldn't have a problem with it.
Also, did I mention that she's twenty years old?
Someone needs some serious help here, and you know, it's not OP or his daughter.
Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
If it were my call, I would find a nice wall to put them against it. Not a popular view, I know.
Um, no, "put all the lawyers up against the wall" is a very popular view, actually. Kind of a dumb one, IMO, but certainly not unpopular, and you're not doing anything daring or original by expressing it.
Whether you agree with them or not, The Authors Guild is the name of the organization. Putting it in quotation marks to show your disdain is as silly as the recently developed habit of Republicans calling their main opposition the "Democrat Party."
As a member of SFWA, which has some close ties with TAG, I'm not a fan at all of how TAG seems to be trying to turn itself into the RIAA/MPAA of the written word. I'd like to see us either sever our ties with them, or lobby hard to get them to adopt more reasonable positions. But refusing to use its proper name is childish and does nothing to bolster its opponents' case.
Slashdot Mirror
And you're aware that modern newspapers are news aggregators just like Drudge, adding little more than local flavor, etc.
To a large degree, this is true -- which is one of the main reasons they're in trouble. The way for papers to survive is not for them to become more like blogs, but less so. My problem is with the idea that the line I quoted (your words, "Drudge is 21st century news, adapt or die") provides a model for newspapers or other organizations which want to do original reporting in this century or any other.
Drudge breaks stories when he gets them, and conducts original reporting, just like the regular newspapers do ... Drudge got his big break by breaking a story that the MSM did not want to report on, the Lewinsky scandal
Did Drudge go out and cover the story himself, conducting interviews, reading records, digging through the dirt? Did he pay other reporters to do this? Or did he just link to those existing news outlets which were covering the story, thus calling attention to it and inspiring even more MSM coverage for him to link to?
As of now, drudge.com is basically a link farm. There's no evidence of original reporting on there that I can see. Don't get me wrong -- I think this kind of news aggregation is great, and I'm glad Drudge and many others are doing it. But they could no more exist without original journalism to feed their sites than /. could exist without the computer industry.
Drudge is 21st century news, adapt or die.
In case you didn't notice, Drudge and his host of imitators are news aggregators, not reporters. The stories they link too have to come from somewhere. If all the old line, stale, MSM news outlets that people love to bitch about closed up shop, the blogosphere would have precious little to do.
"Open access" != "posted on Arxiv by any yahoo". There is nothing in the MIT policy which will discourage peer review or any of the other traditional means of evaluating the quality of papers.
In a true democracy, the will of the people is followed. Right down to the burning of witches. A true democracy is better known as mob rule.
No, mob rule is mob rule. That's not the same thing as democracy, and it's an absurd bit of political rhetoric to claim that it is.
Most countries that we call democracies are actually republics.
Most democracies are also republics. New Zealand, however, most certainly is not a republic, although it is a democracy.
The key points of a republic are (a) the government is ruled by representatives chosen by the people, and (b) the rule of law is superior to the rulers.
Those are the principles of any workable democratic system that anyone has ever devised, as long as you replace the word "ruled" with "run" in point (a). A republic is one way to implement those principles; a constitutional monarchy, which is what New Zealand has, is another. Americans, living in a republican democracy (or a "democratic republic," but that phrase has been hijacked by a type of government which creates emphatically non-democratic republics) tend to confuse the two.
We have already witnessed voter registration fraud at the hand of ACORN.
You mean the attempted fraudulent registrations that ACORN themselves identified and reported?
There is no evidence that ACORN has ever suborned registration fraud. None. Zero. You people are going to have to find another scapegoat.
If you can't explain it to a layman, you don't really understand it.
From this it follows that: If it's worth publishing a scholarly paper about it, then you don't really understand it.
This proposition implies that most people in most academic fields don't understand their own research. You can believe that if you want to, but it requires rejection of a great deal of useful knowledge.
I strongly suspect that this system is designed to identify people like your wife's ex-boss as valuable employees, while denigrating people like your wife, who (I assume) does real, useful work. The middle-management drones want to justify their existence to the upper-management drones, and software that assigns a number to "networking" and "synergies" and "six-sigma leveraging of core stakeholder values" is exactly the right tool for this. The upper-management drones are inclined to believe this sort of thing already, of course, and the sorts of reports the software generates add to their self-satisfaction.
It really does depend on the field you're in; you don't say, but from your PubMed mention I'm guessing medicine or biology. In bioinformatics, fortunately, the computer scientists and mathematicians have won this particular argument over the biologists and chemists -- nearly every bioinformatics journal accepts LaTeX, and many prefer it over Word. This includes a number of journals from Springer, Elsevier, Oxford and Blackwell.
That's because they don't hire you to fill their head with technical jargon.
"Technical jargon" is the only way to explain the problem.
What's wrong in GPP's scenario is not that the statistician is being obfuscatory. What's wrong is that the executive is being wilfully ignorant.
infantry or medics or other non-technical fields
Having served as both an infantryman and a medic, and currently being a "techie" in the more usual sense of the word, I can tell you that characterizing medics as "non-technical" is absurd. Medics are kind of the OG's (Original Geeks) of military culture, and what programmers are currently going through is very similar to what medics have gone through for a very long time.
Dear God, that may be the best Slashdot one-liner EVAR.
[applause]
99999 - "*I* *did* *not* *have* sexual relations with *that* *woman*!"
So you think that Clinton's lie about a blowjob was more than 150 times as bad as Bush's lie about WMDs?
Dear God.
So if the owners are paying the managers ridiculously large wages while the people actually doing the "real work" are getting cheated then the entrepreneur will not be in business very long.
Have you paid any attention to economic news over the past year or so? At all?
Given the choice would you really want to be standing next to warehouse racks holding palettes of merchandise built by some one who toked up before they came to work or some one who doesn't use.
This is a red herring. "Before they came to work," of course not, but then, I wouldn't want to be there next to someone who downed a six-pack before coming to work either. But if he got stoned the night before, or got drunk the night before, or both, or neither -- why should I care?
That's about the same logic as the wingnuts who claim that video games lead to real-life violence.
If I play a game in which (just to choose a random example *cough cough*) my character steals cars and beats up hookers, that doesn't give any rational person a reason to assume that I actually do those things. But if I brag about stealing cars and beating up hookers, or even say to my friends one day, "You know, what I'd really like to do is steal a car and beat up a hooker" -- that definitely gives people a reason to be suspicious of me. And if shortly after I make that statement, there is a case in my neighborhood involving these crimes, I will, quite justifiably, become a person of great interest to the local PD.
I'm a highschool teacher. Sometimes I'm in a bad, homicidal, don't-even-talk-to-me humour and that has NEVER made me fail a student or even treat them poorly.
I can be angry without being biased. I can do my job in a respectful, fair manner, no matter what my mood is.
So now what? Any policeman having a bad day is biased? Should they be sent home just because they had a rough day?
Do you make jokes on Myspace about, say, wanting to beat up your students?
Do you cite fictional portrayals of abusive teachers as role models?
If you do these things, and then one of your students accuses you of assault, do you think it might, maybe, possibly, have a bearing on the outcome of the case?
The fact that anyone would truly believe that line of reasoning is what's wrong with today's society...
Well, you're entitled to that opinion. Some of us understand that what's wrong with today's society is that there are so many cowards like you out there who are willing to cede any power to the State so long as they tell you it's for your own good.
it's also why we're greeted by the astounding news that the criminal was actually allowed to subpoena anything so completely unrelated to the charge.
The officer in question described, in detail and in public, the thinking that motivated his actions in the case. If you think that's "unrelated to the charge," then I have to wonder what would be related in your mind.
Do you really not understand the facts of the case? The officer lied. The suspect never had the gun. The officer made the story up.
Sorry, should have been tossed out. We don't have time, nor should we have any tolerance or patience, for this kind of nonsense.
Yeah, that pesky "civil rights" thing, and that "police officers should uphold the law" nonsense -- such a time-waster ... Indeed. Why should we tolerate such silly ideas?
Sorry, but that is nothing more than "locker room talk".
"Locker room talk" very often reveals more about what a person is actually like than the professional image they try to present.
If silly bits and pieces like that are valid in court,
There are lots of words to describe a real-life cop citing a movie's depiction of a corrupt cop as a role model, but "silly" isn't one of them. "Dangerous," "scary," and "psychotic" come to mind.
then the idiotic judge just opened a massive can of worms.
Oh yeah, that idiot judge, preserving people's Constitutional rights. What a moron! What does he think this is, anyway, America or something?
Nice precedent, asshole.
A precedent that will keep people safe when the people who are supposed to protect them go off the deep end. Yeah, there's an asshole here, all right, but it's not the judge.
because it's not going to be energy production, fusion has been 10 years off for the last 40 years.
Which clearly means it is never, ever going to work and we should just give up, right?
And your source for this sweeping dismissal is ... what, exactly? Please, oh please, share with us your understanding of the subject that has apparently eluded all those scientists and engineers who have worked on this project for years.
Your .sig is oddly appropriate in this context.
It's a nice idea, but realistically, you have to know it's never going to happen. Politicians and corporate oligarchs will be effectively immune to the law; regular folks won't. That's just the way it works.
I think Office Depot/Max have started to expand into the electronics area. They don't really carry TVs,
Actually, they do, at least in some stores. I recently bought a ViewSonic flatscreen TV from Office Depot (after all, TVs are basically large monitors) for a hell of a lot less than I would have paid for a comparable Sony, Panasonic, etc. My experience with it has been good enough to sell my parents and several friends on doing the same.
Like, why are you not totally rejecting this and not talking to her about her porn habits?
Maybe ... because she's twenty years old? As in, old enough (by a couple of years) to vote, get married, buy a house, or get pieces of herself blown off in Iraq -- but apparently not old enough to read about guys getting it on, at least in your book.
Or maybe he feels that his daughter is an independent, thinking human being and he doesn't get to tell her what to read.
Of course, maybe it's that she's twenty years old.
Possibly it's because he doesn't have the same visceral reaction to guy-guy porn that you do. Something tells me that if OP had mentioned that he had a son (particularly a grown son) who's into girl-girl porn, you wouldn't have a problem with it.
Also, did I mention that she's twenty years old?
Someone needs some serious help here, and you know, it's not OP or his daughter.
If it were my call, I would find a nice wall to put them against it. Not a popular view, I know.
Um, no, "put all the lawyers up against the wall" is a very popular view, actually. Kind of a dumb one, IMO, but certainly not unpopular, and you're not doing anything daring or original by expressing it.
Whether you agree with them or not, The Authors Guild is the name of the organization. Putting it in quotation marks to show your disdain is as silly as the recently developed habit of Republicans calling their main opposition the "Democrat Party."
As a member of SFWA, which has some close ties with TAG, I'm not a fan at all of how TAG seems to be trying to turn itself into the RIAA/MPAA of the written word. I'd like to see us either sever our ties with them, or lobby hard to get them to adopt more reasonable positions. But refusing to use its proper name is childish and does nothing to bolster its opponents' case.