It may well be that CompSci grads have higher expectations and refuse to take the first thing offered to them. When you hear about the salaries talked about on/., HN and Reddit, who the hell wants to take a job for £15k working for Asda as a maintenance programmer?
Another aspect is: how many CompSci grads will initially attempt to start their own consultancy or work freelance as opposed to Creative Arts grads? And what percentage of them will be successful? It's impossible to draw too much from these statistics, because they assume that all graduates are equally suited to traditional employment, and that traditional employment is what they seek. With CompSci, where you can make a living as a freelancer without needing too many contacts or a huge reputation, it ain't necessarily so...
I teach an entry-level computing class in a large European university. So long as it doesn't comprise the entire assessment, students sitting together and working the lab out is a good thing, I think. It's how most of the real world works, after all. You need to have some individual assessment, but working in small study groups to crack a problem is probably the best way to learn. Having the peer-pressure to do the work, and to contribute to the group, can really encourage a student to surpass the effort that they may have been happy with individually.
Hm - it could be that he wasn't getting the support he needed. But, in my experience the people who cheat are not the type who would directly come and ask for support. Cheaters tend to be people who don't know the answers because they never really tried, and therefore don't have a huge emotional investment in the course. The cheating generally occurs as a last-minute attempt to hand in something 'reasonable' without having had to do the work.
I've found that the students that come and ask for help directly are a little too proud to scheme off someone else's work - and that since they are willing to work at the course and come for help when necessary, they rarely need to cheat.
I'm not instigating an 'insane left vs. right debate';-)
I agree that your solution would be relatively cheap, but it would be wrong. There seems to be an attitude that those associated with the ??AAs deserve to be supported by the public. Why them, and not people who deliver measurable benefit to society - teachers, garbagemen, nurses and so forth?
I think I'd rather that artisits and musicians provide for themselves, just like everyone else. I don't owe them special rights to work created 50 years ago, nor do I owe them any special retirement fund that is denied to software developers, private tutors, or any other work-for-hire private market participant.
Corporate musicians and artists are better treated by our society than almost any class of persons throughout history. Yet we can probably all agree that these people contribute less to creativity and originality than most independent artists, where an 'artist' is defined purely as someone who creates something.
There's really nothing special about these people - music existed before the 1930s, and it will exist even if we allow the RIAA to go to the wall. Their advantage is hype, marketing and spin. They've no celestial right to that.
I can't help but think that this is a troll, and the mods have been taken for suckers.
If we look at the major creative works of the last 100 years, there's Disney animated film, the creation of Rock & Roll, the majority of Science Fiction, almost all Televisual and Film works and a bunch more things that have built on 'plundering the past of its riches'. Disney ripped off the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (Grimm and Andersen 'plundered' folklore), Rock & Roll was based on blues rhythms, most SciFi is folklore, rewritten with shiny robots and there's nothing on TV or in Film that doesn't rip-off Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde.
Yes, that's pretty facile, but you have to remember to what I am responding;-) These things are all worth watching, and learning from. Simply because they are not entirely original does not mean that they are worthless...
Still, congratulations, DNS-and-BIND - I think that when you are unable to see any worth in contemporary culture, you qualify for a stick, a cap, a bus-pass and possibly a kid-infested lawn!
In fact, this is as close to 'copyright theft' as we have yet seen. In this case, the artist's copyright has been more or less appropriated by the music label, with no visible attempt on their part to rectify the situation...
Well, evolution can skew towards all sorts of benefits in long life. This can happen quite easily if having grand parents who help look after the family mean that the youngest survive to reproduce.
To say that evolution is all about reproduction is nonsense. It's also about raising offspring to survive better than the environment and other predators can kill them off.
Not everyone can afford a $30k SUV. On the whole, we in the UK feel that if you can't afford to have a life-saving procedure at the age of 40, then the nation-wide community should pay for it for you. There's a lot of waste in the NHS (stop-smoking co-ordinators, diversity outreach co-ordinators, etc. - anything with 'co-ordinator' in it, basically), but I prefer to live in a community where someone who needs that broken leg fixed so that they don't walk with a limp for the rest of their lives gets treatment.
I do recall a rumour from a few years ago that the US health system is not cheaper than socialised health care though. If that's true, then I think that our system is superior. Even if all our system does is stop you from dying for a few years...
In which case, why not let it die? If you want a populist service, there is Sky, and ITV and Five and Channel 4. The BBC should stick to high-quality, informative broadcasting - rather than paying premium salaries to ensure that they have the 'talent' to fulfil their obligations on BBC 1 and Radio 1.
Why should I have to prove that I don't watch TV online? That's impossible.
They should prove that I do.
The TV licence is anyway ridiculous when you consider the populist direction that the BBC has taken in the last 10 years. It does very little under its public service remit and the licence is anachronistic and unfair now. I don't think, for example, that football would be unknown in the UK were it not for MOTD. There are other available outlets.
But the idea that I should fund the BBC unless I can prove that I take steps not to consume its output is scary, and a good measure of the political atmosphere of guilty until proven innocent that has invested the UK over the last 10 years or so.
That's remarkably reasonable. If I was LOVEFiLM or Amazon I'd be cackling with glee. I'm not though, so I'll just be depressed that one could hope to patent an algorithm. Not hardware that carries out an algorithm, but just an algorithm.
Although if I were a netflix shareholder I'd be pissed off that the company were giving away my funded research for free, when they could probably get it closed off and reap the rewards. Mind you, the amount of publicity that they have received - I know about Netflix now and I don't watch DVDs or live in the USA! - is probably more than worth it...
It's not selling yourself short to work on FOSS for a very simple reason. Work on FF, or Thunderbird, or open-sourcing a script that I wrote to convert music is free at the point of delivery. That is, anyone can use it without paying. Freely given, and freely distributed.
However, in this case the user of the algorithm is paying Netflix. Netflix takes the work that I have done, and closes it off from other people. My work goes not to benefit the community, but merely to benefit one company - a company that has paid me (cheaply) for my work. Since companies by definition only care about the bottom line, their intent is not to benefit the community, but to benefit themselves. You are effectively working for them for cheap, selling yourself short.
If netflix were to give away the algo for use by anyone else too, then it would be very generous and then you may be able to make a comparison with FOSS. I( have no idea if they will do that or not. However, if I were a shareholder, I would not want them to give away a potentially killer feature for which they paid $1m.
Saying that, if you enjoy playing with this, go ahead! Just be honest with yourself about. If you still want to do it, wallow in it. But it's an extremely pernicious thing to do to link this with working on something that is done to benefit everyone. It simply is not the same thing.
By then some of your users may have been eaten by velociraptors, but your server will come back online eventually and you'll have saved yourself some power!
Does it have adblock plus? Cause if not, I won't use it. Adblock is the only reason I use FF, and not Konq. on KDE. And the same deal with Safari on OS X. Adblock Plus is, quite simply, the most 'killer' feature that I have ever seen in a piece of software. I wish I could get something similar for Safari on the iPhone, because the large flash ads are the only thing that ruin the net experience on the iPhone.
I don't think that having someone check your email is the same as having someone search your home. That's just as stupid a thing to say as it is to ignore her privacy (about which I agree with you).
Email is a form of communication. Having someone go through your house is a much more personal sense of violation, and is far more traumatic than someone reading your email.
I also agree that the division along party lines is pretty terrible. What's almost worse about that is that both parties are different flavours of the same ice cream.
This seems like a terribly 'advertisy' to discuss the added cost of an antenna/modem. In fact the whole summary sounds like a press release. Is this just copy and paste, or are we merely allowing marketers to post stories now?
Incidently, I won't be signing up. Last time I tried to change the credit card which I use to pay for top-ups, I was told that I would have to speak to someone personally. And that this would cost me 25p for a support call. On principle, I refuse to pay t-mobile for calling them to pay them. Instead, I will be switching to another provider, just as soon as my current credit runs out.
Aside from the fact that you've had a wee rant about an article you didn't read, anyone who is capable of hacking a piece of software with a hex editor is more than capable of shorting a circuit board or even, y'know, damaging the light (especially if it was already in his hands for technical repairs).
And on top of all that, why the hell should the webcam maker be sued? Did they provide any guarantees that the webcam could not be hacked? Was it sold as completely secure and unbreakable? No? Then why are you so keen to drag lawyers into it and try to punish a private enterprise for the criminal behaviour of some asshole in an unrelated transaction? How about we don't try to make every single corporation and business run around nannying people in case some idiot with an ambulance chaser tries to make a quick buck?
It's an impressive engineering feat. However, the BBC article presents it as some kind of pure science breakthrough. OMG!!!! COOLER THAN SPACE!!!1!!.
When I first read the article (about two days ago) I was also bemused as to why it warranted a news story. It was only when I thought about the sheer scale of the installation that I realised what CERN PR were pushing...
I think that the original poster is more disappointed about the quality of the journalism than the scale of achievement. I'm a bit fed up of seeing CERN PR stories reprinted in 'serious' news sources because the journalists don't a clue about science. I'm even more fed up when those PR releases get confused by a journalist and sound moronic.
It seems that there's a news story about CERN once a month, and a news story about Gravitational Waves about one every three months. The irritating thing is that neither of these have actually had any major breakthrough for quite some time...and yes, I am a physicist, and I work somewhere similar in flavour, if not scale, to CERN.
I pretty much disagree with that. Most engineering disciplines are reasonably intuitive on some level, and use macroscopic behaviour that most people can understand. They may not get all the immediate consequences, but most things there are somehow 'what one might reasonably expect'. I am a physicist working on medium energy scales, similar to BaBar, and I don't find most stuff intuitive at all! Particle creation is fine and dandy, but predicting the other behaviours in a multi-particle system is not obvious to me at all.
I do the maths and it generally works out, but if you ask me to explain qualitatively how (for example) the input pion mass directly influences the difference between lattice calculations and experimental results, I'd find it difficult to give any layman a reasonable answer, other than the mind-numbingly obvious "they choose a false starting position so one expects to be consistently wrong". Certainly expecting anyone who is not a specialist to 'get' how QM works like they 'get' how an engine works or how a ball flies through the air is, well, ambitious to say the least!
How anyone can call QM an engineering discipline is beyond me. It's a scientific theory that is a hell of a lot more developed than the theories in most fields (and there's lots of evidence for it being the most correct thing we thought of), but there's still a hell of a long way to go. If you find it intuitive, then congrats! But if you think that most people would (or EM field theory, for that matter) - then you need to spend a little less time in university;)
As a member of an active high energy physics collaboration, we just published our first paper at JHEP which is an open access journal that does not charge for access to papers. It works like any other journal - you email your submission, and it is refereed by, IIRC, two independent anonymous referees.
Not only is it free, it has a high impact rating in the UK, so we can even publish there without having our careers impacted. Backed by the Institute of Physics, it is an example of what journals could easily become in time. I doubt that much in there will be of interest to the/. community, but it's a harbinger of things to come across all fields, I hope. I would expect that within 10-20 years, there'll be very few, if any pay-to-publish-and-pay-to-read journals.
In the same way that HEP has been using linux now for at least a decade, we are getting there with publishing too. Let's hope we can have some more examples here of other serious sciences with open-access journals.
Slashdot Mirror
It may well be that CompSci grads have higher expectations and refuse to take the first thing offered to them. When you hear about the salaries talked about on /., HN and Reddit, who the hell wants to take a job for £15k working for Asda as a maintenance programmer?
Another aspect is: how many CompSci grads will initially attempt to start their own consultancy or work freelance as opposed to Creative Arts grads? And what percentage of them will be successful? It's impossible to draw too much from these statistics, because they assume that all graduates are equally suited to traditional employment, and that traditional employment is what they seek. With CompSci, where you can make a living as a freelancer without needing too many contacts or a huge reputation, it ain't necessarily so...
I teach an entry-level computing class in a large European university. So long as it doesn't comprise the entire assessment, students sitting together and working the lab out is a good thing, I think. It's how most of the real world works, after all. You need to have some individual assessment, but working in small study groups to crack a problem is probably the best way to learn. Having the peer-pressure to do the work, and to contribute to the group, can really encourage a student to surpass the effort that they may have been happy with individually.
Hm - it could be that he wasn't getting the support he needed. But, in my experience the people who cheat are not the type who would directly come and ask for support. Cheaters tend to be people who don't know the answers because they never really tried, and therefore don't have a huge emotional investment in the course. The cheating generally occurs as a last-minute attempt to hand in something 'reasonable' without having had to do the work.
I've found that the students that come and ask for help directly are a little too proud to scheme off someone else's work - and that since they are willing to work at the course and come for help when necessary, they rarely need to cheat.
I'm not instigating an 'insane left vs. right debate' ;-)
I agree that your solution would be relatively cheap, but it would be wrong. There seems to be an attitude that those associated with the ??AAs deserve to be supported by the public. Why them, and not people who deliver measurable benefit to society - teachers, garbagemen, nurses and so forth?
I think I'd rather that artisits and musicians provide for themselves, just like everyone else. I don't owe them special rights to work created 50 years ago, nor do I owe them any special retirement fund that is denied to software developers, private tutors, or any other work-for-hire private market participant.
Corporate musicians and artists are better treated by our society than almost any class of persons throughout history. Yet we can probably all agree that these people contribute less to creativity and originality than most independent artists, where an 'artist' is defined purely as someone who creates something.
There's really nothing special about these people - music existed before the 1930s, and it will exist even if we allow the RIAA to go to the wall. Their advantage is hype, marketing and spin. They've no celestial right to that.
I can't help but think that this is a troll, and the mods have been taken for suckers.
;-) These things are all worth watching, and learning from. Simply because they are not entirely original does not mean that they are worthless...
If we look at the major creative works of the last 100 years, there's Disney animated film, the creation of Rock & Roll, the majority of Science Fiction, almost all Televisual and Film works and a bunch more things that have built on 'plundering the past of its riches'. Disney ripped off the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (Grimm and Andersen 'plundered' folklore), Rock & Roll was based on blues rhythms, most SciFi is folklore, rewritten with shiny robots and there's nothing on TV or in Film that doesn't rip-off Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde.
Yes, that's pretty facile, but you have to remember to what I am responding
Still, congratulations, DNS-and-BIND - I think that when you are unable to see any worth in contemporary culture, you qualify for a stick, a cap, a bus-pass and possibly a kid-infested lawn!
In fact, this is as close to 'copyright theft' as we have yet seen. In this case, the artist's copyright has been more or less appropriated by the music label, with no visible attempt on their part to rectify the situation...
Well, evolution can skew towards all sorts of benefits in long life. This can happen quite easily if having grand parents who help look after the family mean that the youngest survive to reproduce.
To say that evolution is all about reproduction is nonsense. It's also about raising offspring to survive better than the environment and other predators can kill them off.
"This is a public street, not a beach"
Umm...aren't most beaches public?
I do recall a rumour from a few years ago that the US health system is not cheaper than socialised health care though. If that's true, then I think that our system is superior. Even if all our system does is stop you from dying for a few years...
In which case, why not let it die? If you want a populist service, there is Sky, and ITV and Five and Channel 4. The BBC should stick to high-quality, informative broadcasting - rather than paying premium salaries to ensure that they have the 'talent' to fulfil their obligations on BBC 1 and Radio 1.
Why should I have to prove that I don't watch TV online? That's impossible.
They should prove that I do.
The TV licence is anyway ridiculous when you consider the populist direction that the BBC has taken in the last 10 years. It does very little under its public service remit and the licence is anachronistic and unfair now. I don't think, for example, that football would be unknown in the UK were it not for MOTD. There are other available outlets.
But the idea that I should fund the BBC unless I can prove that I take steps not to consume its output is scary, and a good measure of the political atmosphere of guilty until proven innocent that has invested the UK over the last 10 years or so.
That's remarkably reasonable. If I was LOVEFiLM or Amazon I'd be cackling with glee. I'm not though, so I'll just be depressed that one could hope to patent an algorithm. Not hardware that carries out an algorithm, but just an algorithm.
Although if I were a netflix shareholder I'd be pissed off that the company were giving away my funded research for free, when they could probably get it closed off and reap the rewards. Mind you, the amount of publicity that they have received - I know about Netflix now and I don't watch DVDs or live in the USA! - is probably more than worth it...
It's not selling yourself short to work on FOSS for a very simple reason. Work on FF, or Thunderbird, or open-sourcing a script that I wrote to convert music is free at the point of delivery. That is, anyone can use it without paying. Freely given, and freely distributed.
However, in this case the user of the algorithm is paying Netflix. Netflix takes the work that I have done, and closes it off from other people. My work goes not to benefit the community, but merely to benefit one company - a company that has paid me (cheaply) for my work. Since companies by definition only care about the bottom line, their intent is not to benefit the community, but to benefit themselves. You are effectively working for them for cheap, selling yourself short.
If netflix were to give away the algo for use by anyone else too, then it would be very generous and then you may be able to make a comparison with FOSS. I( have no idea if they will do that or not. However, if I were a shareholder, I would not want them to give away a potentially killer feature for which they paid $1m.
Saying that, if you enjoy playing with this, go ahead! Just be honest with yourself about. If you still want to do it, wallow in it. But it's an extremely pernicious thing to do to link this with working on something that is done to benefit everyone. It simply is not the same thing.
By then some of your users may have been eaten by velociraptors, but your server will come back online eventually and you'll have saved yourself some power!
Everybody wins!!!
Does it have adblock plus? Cause if not, I won't use it. Adblock is the only reason I use FF, and not Konq. on KDE. And the same deal with Safari on OS X. Adblock Plus is, quite simply, the most 'killer' feature that I have ever seen in a piece of software. I wish I could get something similar for Safari on the iPhone, because the large flash ads are the only thing that ruin the net experience on the iPhone.
I don't think that having someone check your email is the same as having someone search your home. That's just as stupid a thing to say as it is to ignore her privacy (about which I agree with you). Email is a form of communication. Having someone go through your house is a much more personal sense of violation, and is far more traumatic than someone reading your email. I also agree that the division along party lines is pretty terrible. What's almost worse about that is that both parties are different flavours of the same ice cream.
The goggles! They do nothing!!!
This seems like a terribly 'advertisy' to discuss the added cost of an antenna/modem. In fact the whole summary sounds like a press release. Is this just copy and paste, or are we merely allowing marketers to post stories now?
Incidently, I won't be signing up. Last time I tried to change the credit card which I use to pay for top-ups, I was told that I would have to speak to someone personally. And that this would cost me 25p for a support call. On principle, I refuse to pay t-mobile for calling them to pay them. Instead, I will be switching to another provider, just as soon as my current credit runs out.
This is stunning...
Aside from the fact that you've had a wee rant about an article you didn't read, anyone who is capable of hacking a piece of software with a hex editor is more than capable of shorting a circuit board or even, y'know, damaging the light (especially if it was already in his hands for technical repairs).
And on top of all that, why the hell should the webcam maker be sued? Did they provide any guarantees that the webcam could not be hacked? Was it sold as completely secure and unbreakable? No? Then why are you so keen to drag lawyers into it and try to punish a private enterprise for the criminal behaviour of some asshole in an unrelated transaction? How about we don't try to make every single corporation and business run around nannying people in case some idiot with an ambulance chaser tries to make a quick buck?
It's an impressive engineering feat. However, the BBC article presents it as some kind of pure science breakthrough. OMG!!!! COOLER THAN SPACE!!!1!!.
When I first read the article (about two days ago) I was also bemused as to why it warranted a news story. It was only when I thought about the sheer scale of the installation that I realised what CERN PR were pushing...
I think that the original poster is more disappointed about the quality of the journalism than the scale of achievement. I'm a bit fed up of seeing CERN PR stories reprinted in 'serious' news sources because the journalists don't a clue about science. I'm even more fed up when those PR releases get confused by a journalist and sound moronic.
It seems that there's a news story about CERN once a month, and a news story about Gravitational Waves about one every three months. The irritating thing is that neither of these have actually had any major breakthrough for quite some time...and yes, I am a physicist, and I work somewhere similar in flavour, if not scale, to CERN.
I do the maths and it generally works out, but if you ask me to explain qualitatively how (for example) the input pion mass directly influences the difference between lattice calculations and experimental results, I'd find it difficult to give any layman a reasonable answer, other than the mind-numbingly obvious "they choose a false starting position so one expects to be consistently wrong". Certainly expecting anyone who is not a specialist to 'get' how QM works like they 'get' how an engine works or how a ball flies through the air is, well, ambitious to say the least!
How anyone can call QM an engineering discipline is beyond me. It's a scientific theory that is a hell of a lot more developed than the theories in most fields (and there's lots of evidence for it being the most correct thing we thought of), but there's still a hell of a long way to go. If you find it intuitive, then congrats! But if you think that most people would (or EM field theory, for that matter) - then you need to spend a little less time in university ;)
Not only is it free, it has a high impact rating in the UK, so we can even publish there without having our careers impacted. Backed by the Institute of Physics, it is an example of what journals could easily become in time. I doubt that much in there will be of interest to the /. community, but it's a harbinger of things to come across all fields, I hope. I would expect that within 10-20 years, there'll be very few, if any pay-to-publish-and-pay-to-read journals.
In the same way that HEP has been using linux now for at least a decade, we are getting there with publishing too. Let's hope we can have some more examples here of other serious sciences with open-access journals.
They don't know if it works properly yet - they're still waiting for it to finish running "Hello World"....
...if it succeeds, then you can surely be held responsible for all those AOL CDs! ;)
I hope you kept them in a safe place