HIPAA (not "HIPPA") doesn't have to be a barrier to sharing research data -- take a look at the U. of Pittsburgh's Honest Broker System for a very nicely put-together, largely decentralized method of moving data around while staying well within privacy guidelines. Financial interests are a much bigger obstacle to the free exchange of knowledge than are even the strictest regulations.
Shhh! You're not supposed to talk about science and the sharing of knowledge! You see, these days it's all about Innovation(tm). Nobody's sure exactly what Innovation(tm) is, but we know it's heavily dependent on Intellectual Property(c) and it's vitally important that Intellectual Property(c) be Protected(r). How else are we going to synergistically leverage our core assets to maximize stakeholder value?
Open access journals such as those from BMC and PLoS, databases such as those at NCBI and EBI, software repositories such as Bioconductor and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation projects (Bioperl, Biopython, etc.) If Sage can take it to the next level, good for them, but I'm not sure I see how one group is going to accomplish this. I suspect it will have to happen more, um, organically, the way open access publication and biology-targeted OSS have.
The US is (ideally) both a democracy and a republic. Democracy, rule by the people, is the strategy. Republicanism, the particular structure of our government, is a tactic. The two are mutually supporting, not mutually exclusive.
There are republics which aren't democracies, and democracies which aren't republics; the latter are generally much better places to live than the former. Hint: any country which has the words "Democratic Republic" in its name is lying with the first word, but usually not the second.
... you could look at any MBA curriculum. Although the fact that people can get a graduate degree by taking those courses is perhaps better described as "stomach-turning" rather than just "strange."
E.g., if the old line drugs for schizophrenia are so great, why haven't they worked?
No drugs for schizophrenia work very well, unfortunately. The point is that there's no evidence that the newer drugs work any better than the older ones.
And why is dehydrating someone the best way of treating high blood pressure? Give me a break.
It's not about dehydration. (In fact, patients on diuretics have to be reminded to make an effort to stay hydrated.) The reason why diuretics are used to treat hypertension is pretty simple, and you can find it yourself with about thirty seconds of Googling. But your dismissive "give me a break" indicates that you're really not that interested.
Did you RTFA? The whole point is that many physicians are doing things, such as pap smears for women without cervixes, which are contrary to both science and common sense -- and they react badly when informed that what they're doing is unscientific and nonensical. "Hate science" may be a bit strong, but there's no question that a lot of physicians don't care much for it when it interferes with their preconceived notions.
This was fine up until about 70 years ago. People felt better about having a stodgy old politician in office before then because the times really didn't change as much as they have in recent years.
70 years ago was 1939. Are you seriously going to argue that the world is changing more rapidly now than it was at the beginning of World War Two?
People who shout about how fast modern technology is changing the world really ought to pay more attention to history. We've been going from one technological revolution to another for a couple of centuries. Pretty much anyone born since 1800 or so has seen a completely different world, technologically and in many other ways, in their adulthood than the one they saw in their youth. And existing power structures have really never been able to keep up.
At least for my part, when I publish programs that I have written as open source, it is for perfectly selfish reasons.
And those reasons are... what, exactly?
As I said elsewhere in this thread, creating an open source project involves more than writing the code. There's work involved, and you don't get paid for that work. So there must be some other reason for doing it. While I can understand abstractly how that reason might be selfish, I certainly don't see my own OSS work that way, and I'm curious to hear an explanation from people who do, in fact, consider their OSS work to be selfish.
But there's more to doing an open source project that just writing the code. You could have written your program, kept it to yourself, and never bothered with choosing a license, putting it up on Sourceforge, etc. Or you could have decided that it was useful enough that people would pay for it, and tried to sell it as proprietary software. If you say you have a selfish reason for doing it as OSS, I believe you, but it's not clear from your post what that reason is -- "a personal need or desire by the original dev for some functionality not already provided by an existing piece of software" doesn't cover it.
Believe it or not, the War is Hell is very much a part of the whole glorification.
Here's the thing: the hellishness of war does isolate the people who experience it, and soldiers very often do come to think of themselves as superior because they've been through things that most people don't understand. It's impossible to write a realistic depiction of war without portraying the phenomenon, and depiction is not the same thing as glorification. I agree, however, that it's a fine line to walk -- it's very easy to slip into "we few, we happy few" without mentioning how deeply screwed up this mentality is. FWIW, I think Drake does a good job of showing that when this happens to people, it constitutes a type of damage, just as much as physical injury does. Weber, not so much. Flint is somewhere in the middle.
I think most/.ers know perfectly well that "normal people" don't care about openness. Many of us think people should care about it, and harbor the hope, however naive it may be, that they will care if they understand the implications better.
Because the publishers are raging assholes, I can never get "published" by any of the big publishing houses, I have been blackballed in the industry.
I'm curious as to what segment of the industry you publish in. Self-publishing by itself won't get you blackballed in the parts of it I'm familiar with (SF/F/H) but perhaps it works differently in other markets? I can't help but suspect, though, that you maybe did some bridge-burning of your own to get that kind of reaction.
pirating is stealing and let's not quibble over the definition
It must be very convenient for you to be able to dismiss a fundamental argument over the meaning of a word which is central to the debate at hand as "quibbling." I seem to recall various Bush Administration officials doing the same thing with words such as "rights" and "torture." You may believe that copyright infringement is the same thing as stealing; a great many people, clearly, do not. By calling any objection to your position a "quibble," you are trying to cut them out of the debate. Sorry, you don't get to do that.
This may come as a shock to you, but real governments (i.e., governments unlike the US government of the last eight years) don't just make sweetheart deals with private contractors. They actually do a lot of work themselves, and very often, software is involved in the process. When it comes to wise use of citizens' tax dollars (or euros, as the case may be) finding OSS solutions which can replace expensive proprietary software is pretty high on the list.
This is closely akin to the "empiricism is an ideology" canard that gets thrown around a lot in debates on science, and it's just as specious. Yes, you can build elaborate ideological arguments in favor of pragmatism and empiricism, but you really don't have to -- they are distinct from all other ideologies in that they're the only ones we're born with. Have you ever seen any evidence that babies are anything other than empirical pragmatists?
Note: I am not saying that as adults, we should all act like babies. I'm simply saying that calling instinctive behavior "ideological" is kind of silly.
People on Slashdot throwing around the word "denialist" is starting to annoy me now though. What, was heretic too strong of a word for you?
We call them "denialists" because it's an accurate description of their ideology: deny, deny, deny, no matter what the evidence says. They're not "heretics" because there's no holy doctrine for them to deviate from. They like to call themselves "skeptics," but that's not really accurate either, because "skeptic" implies that although you may be very dubious about a proposition, you're willing to be convinced by a sufficient weight of evidence. (E.g., I'm a skeptic about ghosts, reincarnation, or any sort of afterlife, but I'd be happy to be shown that such a thing exists, and it wouldn't really be all that difficult.) So if you come up with a better word than "denialist," please let us know. Just remember the way the people you're describing behave.
You know, I sometimes have the feeling that if some megacorporation figured out a way to make a profit torturing puppies to death, people like you would say, "Well, you know, they're just honoring their obligations to the shareholders!"
So in your mind, there's no obligation unless money changes hands? If you say you'll do someone a favor, do you feel free not to do it unless they pay you?
How much do they have to pay you to create a sense of obligation in your mind? A penny? A dollar? A thousand dollars? What's your price for keeping your word?
If you tell someone upfront that you'll only do something for a certain amount of money, then fine; you're under no obligation to do anything unless they meet your price. But once you commit, saying "oh, well, they didn't pay me enough" even if the price is zero marks you as a liar. Honest people do what they say they're going to do, and liars don't, regardless of money.
It's like if you're hitchhiking from St. Louis to Denver, and someone picks you up and tells you they'll take you all the way to Denver, then kicks you out of the car somewhere in Kansas. What, you haven't seen a building or another car for an hour? Tough shit, pal, get out and walk.
Free or not, it doesn't matter. If you say you're offering a service to someone, you need to offer it. If you're not willing to live up to the offer, don't make it.
If the state is already permitting the use of various frequencies for commercial companies, surely those companies should be able to use those frequencies as they see fit. Legislating that they must go from analog to digital at all is spitting in the face of the liberties of those companies. IMO the whole digital/analog thing should be up to the free market, NOT the state.
The problem with this is the phrase "those companies." Different companies bid on different frequencies, for different uses, at different times. Nobody gets to buy a frequency forever. The only alternative to state allocation of specific frequencies for specific uses is a free-for-all in which everyone broadcasts whatever they want at whatever frequency they want and whatever power they can afford, and you end up with interference on every channel. Nobody wins in such a scenario. The current auction model may be broken, but the idea that "the market" can solve this particular problem runs up smack against the laws of physics.
Maybe we should resolve the ethical concerns before we perform the science...
And maybe we should all go back to living in caves and chipping tools out of flint.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people are going to keep on discovering new knowledge and creating new technology whether the Luddite hypocrites like it or not. And they'll decry this process right up until it produces results that are useful to them, at which point they will eagerly embrace it, while whining about how eeevil and scary and dangerous the Next Big Thing is.
Slashdot Mirror
We'd much rather go to walmart buy what ever the antibiotic or box labeled take this for strep throat rather than the system we have now.
The level of insight and understanding in this sentence demonstrates beautifully why antibiotics should never, ever, ever be OTC.
Hopefully at that point, prior art kicks in. Whether it would actually work that way in practice, of course, remains to be seen.
HIPAA (not "HIPPA") doesn't have to be a barrier to sharing research data -- take a look at the U. of Pittsburgh's Honest Broker System for a very nicely put-together, largely decentralized method of moving data around while staying well within privacy guidelines. Financial interests are a much bigger obstacle to the free exchange of knowledge than are even the strictest regulations.
Shhh! You're not supposed to talk about science and the sharing of knowledge! You see, these days it's all about Innovation(tm). Nobody's sure exactly what Innovation(tm) is, but we know it's heavily dependent on Intellectual Property(c) and it's vitally important that Intellectual Property(c) be Protected(r). How else are we going to synergistically leverage our core assets to maximize stakeholder value?
Open access journals such as those from BMC and PLoS, databases such as those at NCBI and EBI, software repositories such as Bioconductor and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation projects (Bioperl, Biopython, etc.) If Sage can take it to the next level, good for them, but I'm not sure I see how one group is going to accomplish this. I suspect it will have to happen more, um, organically, the way open access publication and biology-targeted OSS have.
The US is (ideally) both a democracy and a republic. Democracy, rule by the people, is the strategy. Republicanism, the particular structure of our government, is a tactic. The two are mutually supporting, not mutually exclusive.
There are republics which aren't democracies, and democracies which aren't republics; the latter are generally much better places to live than the former. Hint: any country which has the words "Democratic Republic" in its name is lying with the first word, but usually not the second.
... you could look at any MBA curriculum. Although the fact that people can get a graduate degree by taking those courses is perhaps better described as "stomach-turning" rather than just "strange."
E.g., if the old line drugs for schizophrenia are so great, why haven't they worked?
No drugs for schizophrenia work very well, unfortunately. The point is that there's no evidence that the newer drugs work any better than the older ones.
And why is dehydrating someone the best way of treating high blood pressure? Give me a break.
It's not about dehydration. (In fact, patients on diuretics have to be reminded to make an effort to stay hydrated.) The reason why diuretics are used to treat hypertension is pretty simple, and you can find it yourself with about thirty seconds of Googling. But your dismissive "give me a break" indicates that you're really not that interested.
Did you RTFA? The whole point is that many physicians are doing things, such as pap smears for women without cervixes, which are contrary to both science and common sense -- and they react badly when informed that what they're doing is unscientific and nonensical. "Hate science" may be a bit strong, but there's no question that a lot of physicians don't care much for it when it interferes with their preconceived notions.
It should be different to keep you alive? What's so special about you that I should have to pay for that?
Well, for one thing, he's a decent human being, which you've just shown pretty clearly that you're not.
This was fine up until about 70 years ago. People felt better about having a stodgy old politician in office before then because the times really didn't change as much as they have in recent years.
70 years ago was 1939. Are you seriously going to argue that the world is changing more rapidly now than it was at the beginning of World War Two?
People who shout about how fast modern technology is changing the world really ought to pay more attention to history. We've been going from one technological revolution to another for a couple of centuries. Pretty much anyone born since 1800 or so has seen a completely different world, technologically and in many other ways, in their adulthood than the one they saw in their youth. And existing power structures have really never been able to keep up.
At least for my part, when I publish programs that I have written as open source, it is for perfectly selfish reasons.
And those reasons are ... what, exactly?
As I said elsewhere in this thread, creating an open source project involves more than writing the code. There's work involved, and you don't get paid for that work. So there must be some other reason for doing it. While I can understand abstractly how that reason might be selfish, I certainly don't see my own OSS work that way, and I'm curious to hear an explanation from people who do, in fact, consider their OSS work to be selfish.
But there's more to doing an open source project that just writing the code. You could have written your program, kept it to yourself, and never bothered with choosing a license, putting it up on Sourceforge, etc. Or you could have decided that it was useful enough that people would pay for it, and tried to sell it as proprietary software. If you say you have a selfish reason for doing it as OSS, I believe you, but it's not clear from your post what that reason is -- "a personal need or desire by the original dev for some functionality not already provided by an existing piece of software" doesn't cover it.
Believe it or not, the War is Hell is very much a part of the whole glorification.
Here's the thing: the hellishness of war does isolate the people who experience it, and soldiers very often do come to think of themselves as superior because they've been through things that most people don't understand. It's impossible to write a realistic depiction of war without portraying the phenomenon, and depiction is not the same thing as glorification. I agree, however, that it's a fine line to walk -- it's very easy to slip into "we few, we happy few" without mentioning how deeply screwed up this mentality is. FWIW, I think Drake does a good job of showing that when this happens to people, it constitutes a type of damage, just as much as physical injury does. Weber, not so much. Flint is somewhere in the middle.
I think most /.ers know perfectly well that "normal people" don't care about openness. Many of us think people should care about it, and harbor the hope, however naive it may be, that they will care if they understand the implications better.
Because the publishers are raging assholes, I can never get "published" by any of the big publishing houses, I have been blackballed in the industry.
I'm curious as to what segment of the industry you publish in. Self-publishing by itself won't get you blackballed in the parts of it I'm familiar with (SF/F/H) but perhaps it works differently in other markets? I can't help but suspect, though, that you maybe did some bridge-burning of your own to get that kind of reaction.
pirating is stealing and let's not quibble over the definition
It must be very convenient for you to be able to dismiss a fundamental argument over the meaning of a word which is central to the debate at hand as "quibbling." I seem to recall various Bush Administration officials doing the same thing with words such as "rights" and "torture." You may believe that copyright infringement is the same thing as stealing; a great many people, clearly, do not. By calling any objection to your position a "quibble," you are trying to cut them out of the debate. Sorry, you don't get to do that.
This may come as a shock to you, but real governments (i.e., governments unlike the US government of the last eight years) don't just make sweetheart deals with private contractors. They actually do a lot of work themselves, and very often, software is involved in the process. When it comes to wise use of citizens' tax dollars (or euros, as the case may be) finding OSS solutions which can replace expensive proprietary software is pretty high on the list.
short-term pragmatism is an ideology
This is closely akin to the "empiricism is an ideology" canard that gets thrown around a lot in debates on science, and it's just as specious. Yes, you can build elaborate ideological arguments in favor of pragmatism and empiricism, but you really don't have to -- they are distinct from all other ideologies in that they're the only ones we're born with. Have you ever seen any evidence that babies are anything other than empirical pragmatists?
Note: I am not saying that as adults, we should all act like babies. I'm simply saying that calling instinctive behavior "ideological" is kind of silly.
People on Slashdot throwing around the word "denialist" is starting to annoy me now though. What, was heretic too strong of a word for you?
We call them "denialists" because it's an accurate description of their ideology: deny, deny, deny, no matter what the evidence says. They're not "heretics" because there's no holy doctrine for them to deviate from. They like to call themselves "skeptics," but that's not really accurate either, because "skeptic" implies that although you may be very dubious about a proposition, you're willing to be convinced by a sufficient weight of evidence. (E.g., I'm a skeptic about ghosts, reincarnation, or any sort of afterlife, but I'd be happy to be shown that such a thing exists, and it wouldn't really be all that difficult.) So if you come up with a better word than "denialist," please let us know. Just remember the way the people you're describing behave.
You know, I sometimes have the feeling that if some megacorporation figured out a way to make a profit torturing puppies to death, people like you would say, "Well, you know, they're just honoring their obligations to the shareholders!"
So in your mind, there's no obligation unless money changes hands? If you say you'll do someone a favor, do you feel free not to do it unless they pay you?
How much do they have to pay you to create a sense of obligation in your mind? A penny? A dollar? A thousand dollars? What's your price for keeping your word?
If you tell someone upfront that you'll only do something for a certain amount of money, then fine; you're under no obligation to do anything unless they meet your price. But once you commit, saying "oh, well, they didn't pay me enough" even if the price is zero marks you as a liar. Honest people do what they say they're going to do, and liars don't, regardless of money.
It's like if you're hitchhiking from St. Louis to Denver, and someone picks you up and tells you they'll take you all the way to Denver, then kicks you out of the car somewhere in Kansas. What, you haven't seen a building or another car for an hour? Tough shit, pal, get out and walk.
Free or not, it doesn't matter. If you say you're offering a service to someone, you need to offer it. If you're not willing to live up to the offer, don't make it.
If the state is already permitting the use of various frequencies for commercial companies, surely those companies should be able to use those frequencies as they see fit. Legislating that they must go from analog to digital at all is spitting in the face of the liberties of those companies. IMO the whole digital/analog thing should be up to the free market, NOT the state.
The problem with this is the phrase "those companies." Different companies bid on different frequencies, for different uses, at different times. Nobody gets to buy a frequency forever. The only alternative to state allocation of specific frequencies for specific uses is a free-for-all in which everyone broadcasts whatever they want at whatever frequency they want and whatever power they can afford, and you end up with interference on every channel. Nobody wins in such a scenario. The current auction model may be broken, but the idea that "the market" can solve this particular problem runs up smack against the laws of physics.
Maybe we should resolve the ethical concerns before we perform the science ...
And maybe we should all go back to living in caves and chipping tools out of flint.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people are going to keep on discovering new knowledge and creating new technology whether the Luddite hypocrites like it or not. And they'll decry this process right up until it produces results that are useful to them, at which point they will eagerly embrace it, while whining about how eeevil and scary and dangerous the Next Big Thing is.