I know of no group that has enough power (and evilness) to taint their date records.
So, write down your scoop, put it on arXiv, and then submit to peer-review. I don't see how could you possibly lose it.
I'm aware that there are journals that don't publish things that are already on arXiv (like Nature [although I don't think they do CS]). Ignore these bastards. They'll have to change their mind or become irrelevant.
That's good. But have they fixed the bug where TB would mysteriously swallow your address book? Last time I checked, the bug was already 3 years old, and no sign of the developers.
I mean. Is there a feature more important than not losing data?
At least my ISP is a relatively small company who is not affiliated with Google.
Google already has my email, my searches, (some of) my IMs, my social network, my maps. There's Google Docs, too, which I don't use.
I don't need them to have my DNS records as well. If they have that too, the question becomes which information about me they don't have. And that is fucking scary.
Notice that this applies on many scales, whether we're talking about excellent textbooks with limited markets and relatively high prices...
Sorry to interrupt, but I have to bite on this one.
I'll give you an example, of one of the best textbooks on basic quantum mechanics ever written: Cohen-Tannoudji's Quantum Mechanics. It was written in 1973, and was sold by relatively high prices. But that was ok, the book was new, and it was surely very hard to write.
Now we are in 1997. Even though the costs are already recouped, the book is still expensive. Then lo and behold, Cohen-Tannoudji wins the Nobel. What happens? The book's price doubles overnight.
Now you see the problem with the monopoly?
The author himself was embarrassed by this. When he visited my university, a few years ago, he autographed some copies that were photocopied.
"But when you are not accusing a scientist of basic incompetence or outright fraud, the raw data it's pretty useless."
So what, then, would be the purpose of deleting it? A-ha!
Have you not read anything I wrote? Yes, it was a mistake to delete data, precisely because the subject is of such public concern. But raw data is irrelevant, and it is often deleted after the paper is published.
Of course, the most likely thing is, is that you're just a chem major at some second-rate university sounding off.
Actually, I am a theoretical physicist graduated in one of the best universities of my country. And precisely what relation does this bear with the matter at hand?
About the Oregon petition:
1 - It is not 32000 scientists. At most 4000 work with climate science, with varying degrees of knowledge, and no confirmation whatsoever. 2 - It is a petition, for fuck's sake. I don't want 30000 people shouting something. I ask for just one peer-reviewed article.
You are obviously not a scientist and have never worked with raw data.
Raw data is usually very large and uninteresting. It only becomes informative after some normalisation. It is not 10 data points that you have to fit in a straight line. It is disparate temperature readings from all around the globe. You have to use some clever tricks to even begin to understand it.
Yes, it is better to not delete anything. Storage is cheap. But when you are not accusing a scientist of basic incompetence or outright fraud, the raw data it's pretty useless. What can be understood is their pretty graphics on their papers. And I bet you haven't looked at any paper before screaming "raw data!!!"
Wake me up when you see a scientist questioning global warming. I'm sick of laymen talking about what they don't understand.
It actually is a different translation. A worse one, IMHO. But the GP's quote is fake. The real one is about eugenics, not censorship. Here it is:
It will be the task of the People's State to make the race the centre of the life of the community. It must make sure that the purity of the racial strain will be preserved. It must proclaim the truth that the child is the most valuable possession a people can have. It must see to it that only those who are healthy shall beget children; that there is only one infamy, namely, for parents that are ill or show hereditary defects to bring children into the world and that in such cases it is a high honour to refrain from doing so.
Interesting. I loathe the nautilus' video thumbnails and always turn it off. It's horribly slow and CPU intensive. And does not play nicely with video torrents.
But what irritates me the most is that they're just plain useless. Which frame should you pick? Not the first, they're usually black. In the first minute? In the middle? It's hard to pick up a representative frame, and even if you do, it will be mostly meaningless. Contrast with photos' thumbnails.
You're missing the point. As long as the estate still controls copyright, there's still a single canon. You can end it wherever you like, but you can't branch it.
I think Sherlock Holmes is a good example of a public domain character. There aren't any branches that I know of, but there are a lot of books that use it in a way or another. My favourite one is a Brasilian book that does not resemble a holmesian story at all (nor tries to), but uses the character to make a delightful satire of detective stories.
- Scientists publish PDF too but then also use other formats for data. For example on arxiv, one scientists recently published animations inside a zip but it was hard to find the link
Err... also? I've never seen a scientist using pdf to publish data. We use pdf (and ps and div) to publish typeset papers. The actual data is in a lot of formats, dependent on the field and application. I've seen csv, matlab's.mat, xml, jpeg, tiff, proprietary crap, etc.
Whether or not you can make enough money to buy food and pay rent is going to be a much more important part of the decision.
You seem to have a very distorted view of reality. It's very hard to find a job in which you can't buy food or pay rent. Even if you are a janitor you don't starve.
Of course, people do have some minimum level of comfort that they aspire to. The pay science career offers is more than enough to satisfy mine.
I've seem some people leave science because the pay was too low. Know what, they were crappy scientists to begin with.
Do you think lord Kelvin did it for the money? Or Hawking? It was for the chicks.
The free market has spoken
There is no free market. Science always offered low wages. Just about every great scientist struggled for money at some point in life. This has more to do with the scientists' personalities than with the "market value" science has.
My first reaction was "OMG that's awesome!!" Then I got scared that I actually liked a geocities-like design. Then the scare became amusement when I realised that geocities had become a sacred relic. Then I got scared again when it became clear that that's about the greatest contribution to human culture by my generation.
I wouldn't even answer to this, but since it's modded insightful I guess its a common doubt.
Of course FTL travel implies FTL communication. And vice versa. There are monstrosities like wormholes that are seemingly allowed by general relativity, but they always fail to deliver when you examine more closely. The Universe in a Nutshell explains some guesses (only guesses, since we don't have quantum gravity) of what quantum mechanics would do in face of such a time machine.
But the convincing argument for me is that FTL => time travel => (P == NP). Since P != NP, FTL and time travel are impossible.
That's not denying advancements. There are mistakes in the current physics, and there's still a lot of things to discover. But there are fundamental principals that I'm pretty confident we've got right.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having trouble deciding if this is a bad joke or you are just raving mad.
Have you heard of arXiv, sir?
I know of no group that has enough power (and evilness) to taint their date records.
So, write down your scoop, put it on arXiv, and then submit to peer-review. I don't see how could you possibly lose it.
I'm aware that there are journals that don't publish things that are already on arXiv (like Nature [although I don't think they do CS]). Ignore these bastards. They'll have to change their mind or become irrelevant.
That's good. But have they fixed the bug where TB would mysteriously swallow your address book? Last time I checked, the bug was already 3 years old, and no sign of the developers.
I mean. Is there a feature more important than not losing data?
At least my ISP is a relatively small company who is not affiliated with Google.
Google already has my email, my searches, (some of) my IMs, my social network, my maps. There's Google Docs, too, which I don't use.
I don't need them to have my DNS records as well. If they have that too, the question becomes which information about me they don't have. And that is fucking scary.
Notice that this applies on many scales, whether we're talking about excellent textbooks with limited markets and relatively high prices...
Sorry to interrupt, but I have to bite on this one.
I'll give you an example, of one of the best textbooks on basic quantum mechanics ever written:
Cohen-Tannoudji's Quantum Mechanics. It was written in 1973, and was sold by relatively high prices. But that was ok, the book was new, and it was surely very hard to write.
Now we are in 1997. Even though the costs are already recouped, the book is still expensive. Then lo and behold, Cohen-Tannoudji wins the Nobel. What happens? The book's price doubles overnight.
Now you see the problem with the monopoly?
The author himself was embarrassed by this. When he visited my university, a few years ago, he autographed some copies that were photocopied.
"But when you are not accusing a scientist of basic incompetence or outright fraud, the raw data it's pretty useless."
So what, then, would be the purpose of deleting it? A-ha!
Have you not read anything I wrote? Yes, it was a mistake to delete data, precisely because the subject is of such public concern. But raw data is irrelevant, and it is often deleted after the paper is published.
Of course, the most likely thing is, is that you're just a chem major at some second-rate university sounding off.
Actually, I am a theoretical physicist graduated in one of the best universities of my country. And precisely what relation does this bear with the matter at hand?
About the Oregon petition:
1 - It is not 32000 scientists. At most 4000 work with climate science, with varying degrees of knowledge, and no confirmation whatsoever.
2 - It is a petition, for fuck's sake. I don't want 30000 people shouting something. I ask for just one peer-reviewed article.
You are obviously not a scientist and have never worked with raw data.
Raw data is usually very large and uninteresting. It only becomes informative after some normalisation. It is not 10 data points that you have to fit in a straight line. It is disparate temperature readings from all around the globe. You have to use some clever tricks to even begin to understand it.
Yes, it is better to not delete anything. Storage is cheap. But when you are not accusing a scientist of basic incompetence or outright fraud, the raw data it's pretty useless. What can be understood is their pretty graphics on their papers. And I bet you haven't looked at any paper before screaming "raw data!!!"
Wake me up when you see a scientist questioning global warming. I'm sick of laymen talking about what they don't understand.
Well, you can just kill the rhino. Try harder.
It's probably a kind of Godwin by now, but http://xkcd.com/301/
It actually is a different translation. A worse one, IMHO. But the GP's quote is fake. The real one is about eugenics, not censorship. Here it is:
Interesting. I loathe the nautilus' video thumbnails and always turn it off. It's horribly slow and CPU intensive. And does not play nicely with video torrents.
But what irritates me the most is that they're just plain useless. Which frame should you pick? Not the first, they're usually black. In the first minute? In the middle? It's hard to pick up a representative frame, and even if you do, it will be mostly meaningless. Contrast with photos' thumbnails.
Bad example. "len" was chosen to stop people typing "lenght", not to be shorter.
No, no, you're getting it wrong. Ken discovered UNIX. It was there since the begining of the universe.
In fact from time to time I have considered the possibilities of a virus that would format the hard disk.
As a time bomb, you see.
But I always think about the grannies losing the family photos and I give up.
Or it could be distributed only through porn.
Nothing against porn. But that would select out (most) grannies, leaving the stupid fucks who hunt for porn in IE6.
Humm. I'm getting bitter. Better stop with the porn and get sex.
Hummm... that's it! I will buy a machine with Windows preinstalled, and then purchase MacOS upgrades.
You're missing the point. As long as the estate still controls copyright, there's still a single canon. You can end it wherever you like, but you can't branch it.
I think Sherlock Holmes is a good example of a public domain character. There aren't any branches that I know of, but there are a lot of books that use it in a way or another. My favourite one is a Brasilian book that does not resemble a holmesian story at all (nor tries to), but uses the character to make a delightful satire of detective stories.
- Scientists publish PDF too but then also use other formats for data. For example on arxiv, one scientists recently published animations inside a zip but it was hard to find the link
Err... also? I've never seen a scientist using pdf to publish data. We use pdf (and ps and div) to publish typeset papers. The actual data is in a lot of formats, dependent on the field and application. I've seen csv, matlab's .mat, xml, jpeg, tiff, proprietary crap, etc.
Whether or not you can make enough money to buy food and pay rent is going to be a much more important part of the decision.
You seem to have a very distorted view of reality. It's very hard to find a job in which you can't buy food or pay rent. Even if you are a janitor you don't starve.
Of course, people do have some minimum level of comfort that they aspire to. The pay science career offers is more than enough to satisfy mine.
I've seem some people leave science because the pay was too low. Know what, they were crappy scientists to begin with.
Do you think lord Kelvin did it for the money? Or Hawking? It was for the chicks.
The free market has spoken
There is no free market. Science always offered low wages. Just about every great scientist struggled for money at some point in life. This has more to do with the scientists' personalities than with the "market value" science has.
If the salary of foreigners were as high as americans', big tech would become very good at finding local talent.
Well, new car smell is actually quite toxic, you know?
Isopropyl Alcohol? Are you sure? IIRC, it was quite expensive in my lab years.
And it does not smell good. Yes, it can get you high.
$0 = 1 + e^{i \pi}$
I'm both scared and amazed.
My first reaction was "OMG that's awesome!!"
Then I got scared that I actually liked a geocities-like design.
Then the scare became amusement when I realised that geocities had become a sacred relic.
Then I got scared again when it became clear that that's about the greatest contribution to human culture by my generation.
What are you talking about?
I wouldn't even answer to this, but since it's modded insightful I guess its a common doubt.
Of course FTL travel implies FTL communication. And vice versa. There are monstrosities like wormholes that are seemingly allowed by general relativity, but they always fail to deliver when you examine more closely. The Universe in a Nutshell explains some guesses (only guesses, since we don't have quantum gravity) of what quantum mechanics would do in face of such a time machine.
But the convincing argument for me is that FTL => time travel => (P == NP). Since P != NP, FTL and time travel are impossible.
That's not denying advancements. There are mistakes in the current physics, and there's still a lot of things to discover. But there are fundamental principals that I'm pretty confident we've got right.