My wife is fixing her credit right now. And she has the same problem. She is even responsible for debt she did not make on the basis that she can not prove that she did not make that debt. Most of the entry are indeed wrongly labeled which is quite scary frankly. That credit report business is complete BS in here. They hold a list of things that you did secret. You can access it but with a ridiculously high fee. And you can not contest anything important.
"I wonder how much a system would cost that could switch my light from green to red if it detected a vehicle approaching from a red-lit direction at dangerous speeds."
Once people know that they'll get a (de facto) green light by speeding, what do you think will happen? That does not sound like a good idea at all.
I have been playing the wii up to now. I am actually interested in the Wii U. But the price is just too high for me to get it.
370 bucks for a gaming system with one game. Then each subsequent game is $60 new, $50 preowned. I am going to pass on that.
For comparison the wii launched at $250 and games were less than $50. 20% jack up in 7 years is too much. according to [1], inflation since the wii launch is only 14%. So definitely, the price rose.
There are a couple things that could be helpful in a kitchen from a purely technical perspective.
We could make pots smarter to somewhat display the temperature distribution in it, maybe the materiel could change color depending on its temperature.
Oven based feedback loop. many things in the oven need to stay at a precise temperature. For instance all bain-marie based cooking. For instance for creme brule. the oven could automatically adjust its temperature to keep the bain marie at the right temperature. If the water gets too low, it could notify you.
Rice cooker could get much smarter than they are. I am sure, they could precisely tell you when the rice is cooked, whether you should add more water,...
While having a fridge that orders food from you is overall a bad idea, having a fridge that can tell you what is inside, when you put everything in, and when it will expire is of interest. Especially if you can query it while doing grocery shopping.
My wife is Korean and I am not familiar yet with everything which means that I have close to no clue what some things are in my kitchen. We have 4 different soy sauces. Which one should I use for a given task? In the same idea, what is in that bottle that do not have a label? A sci-fi bottle could tell me all that.
The bell where I leave cheese to mature could actually tell me when it is getting too mature.
Pots or plates could automatically tell you what is inside, how many servings that will make and the energetic and nutriment intake of what is inside.
There is plenty of things technology could help in the kitchen. But I agree that "look there is a tablet on the oven" is not very helpful.
I read the blog of Zoe Keating[1], the artist whose quote was extracted in the new york times article.
You said: "Seriously though, this person is getting upset because they don't have a large volume of listeners, not because the songs are not paid enough for listening."
This is not what Zoe Keating is complaining about. She complains that the artist on streaming platforms are made per play. Though, depending on who you are, you don't get paid the same per play. She claims that this is unfair. Basically because she is independent she can not negogiate a higher rate.
As for live performance, it appears to only represent 25% of her income, while music sales represent about 45%.
I am not really surprised. It looks like the amount of offer in music grows with time. There is more directors and composers than before. According to [1], there are 2.5 more music director and composer than 3 years ago while the number of musician appears to have decrease by roughly 10% in the same time. Since 99, it went from 52K people to 67K people. So there are 15% more people to pay. Meanwhile the US population only increase 12% [2]. I do not think the average entertainement of famillies changed a lot but if anything the music budget went down. So I am really not surprised.
Moreover, I feel like Internet concentrated music interest on a smaller number of artists which performs better than anybody else for no good reason. I mean gangnam style from psy shipped more than 6 millions albums in not even a year [3].
I do not know the artist that is speaking and I never listen to her music. But she is a cello artist which is not a popular style. So of course making money out of it is difficult. Yet her income increased according to her own numbers [4].
The real numbers we lack are the numbers from 10 or 15 years ago. How much money did an independent artist make in the 90's ? Is it really worse in 2013? (I ma not saying it is not, I am asking a real question)
I completely agree with you. And I try to publish code as often as I can. Though, I do not believe the original article is about getting the code out.
I think the original article is getting the code in the shape where it can be reused and built upon in the same way open source software is. Any code released under CRAPL is probably not in a shape where it can reasonably be built upon. Most of the code I published are not in a very good shape.
Interesting. I am French. I studied in France up to PhD. My parents being poor, I did not paid for anything. Pretty much all my education was paid from other people tax dollar. And for that I am really grateful.
Once I graduated, two options appeared to me. I could stay in France and work either in a company that have no clue what PhD stands for and will ask me the most stupid job, or in the academia where I will be underpaid, overworked and the scapegoat of the all-the-troubles-in-France (It was in 2008, Sarkozy just got elected).
On the other hand, I could have gone to the United States where PhD are paid a lot in the industry to do actual PhD work. I could also stay in the academia where I will still be overworked but I will be properly funded and equipped to solve issues that actually matter.
Which option do you think I picked?
The problem we have is France is that we train people really well. But we have no good use for their training.
Actually, the copyright issues you are mentionning are important. I frequently end up mashing together code found god knows where. When we finally wanted to publish our code, we had to go through the various files and decide which ones we can publish and which one we can not publish because of copyright. We use them internally (and probably we actually should not, but nobody cares about that). But putting it on your website opens potential lawsuits.
We ended up scrapping auxilary functions and reimplementing a part of I/O that was relevant to us. It took a few days from a grad student. In the end, the time spent was worth it. But the code is just in a working state, as long as you do not blow on it too much. Proper documentation and making the code robust would certainly have taken weeks. We do not have time for that. It is not our goal, code is often a by-product.
"What the author of the article fails to understand is that software is not the point of research - it is a side-effect, and I say that as someone whose field is CS."
(disclaimer: I am working as a postdoc for some US university)
The article in general is clueless. You are of course right. Researchers don't care about their code. I want to know if a design work, if an algorithm work or if it does not. That's why I end up writing code. Once my report/paper/thesis/grant application is written I do not care about the software anymore.
I'd love to produce proper software. But most researchers do not have a clue how to make good software. Software engineering is not our job. We typically do not know how to do *really* good software. That type of skills is not commonly found in grad students. You'll need a postdoc or a professor to do it well. PhD time is valuable, it *is* worth a lot of money. None of the money that come from grants pays for software development. Even if it was, my career would certainly advance more if I do research instead of software. (With occasional exception like "This is the holy grail. We need it done well.") The only other option would be to pay a software engineer. Grants typically do not cover that. Some do, but most don't. The final option would be to get somebody else to cover the software development cost. That can happen, but that's very rare. You'll need to find a company that need the proper edge the software will bring, that actually want to work with the academia and that is ok publishing the source code (so potentially losing the edge the project bring them.) That can happen, but do not count on it.
Finally, even assuming there is a useful software framework close to something I am interested in. What will be the investment cost for me to get in that software. Recently I was looking at Android programming for adding a calendar type. That stuff is ridiculously complicated with dozens of concepts and objects and all. And I am talking about a freaking calendar. All encompassing software tends to an overly engineered design. If it takes me more time to get into the software than getting my job done, why should I use it?
Assuming you could not find it. And the author is a jerk. And you don't want to pay for it. You can still stop by a university libray where you will be able to download it using university subscription or photocopy it if the library has a paper edition.
Finally, we are not looking to send our papers to the most expensive journal. To the most prestigious certainly, but the price has nothing to do with it. Arguably, one of the most prestigious journal in CS is ACM Computing Surveys. It is an ACM journal, so all ACM members can read it online for the price of their subscription. Hardly the most expensive journal.
That being said, I'd rather we only publish in openaccess journal et we ditch the publishers out. But that's not realistically going to happen anytime soon.
You invented lots of things that proved to be very useful to a wide range of people and industries. While the patent war is going stronger than ever, do you believe that you could have succesfully develop so many ideas in the current legal context?
Well, I played andor's trail a year ago. I pretty much finished it, in the sense that there was nothing more to do. The game was not complete at this point. It did not take me hours and hours and hours to finish it: maybe a week of playing before going to bed.
It is definitely worth checking out and maybe there is more content now. But if you are going for hours and hours of content, one will be disappointed.
I always wondered if it could be possible to run android natively on a gnu/linux distribution. The android kernel and linux kernel are so similar. I understand most of the userspace is different, but running in a different cgroups and in a different chroot should provide some help with it. Anybody had some success with that?
disclaimer: I am currently an alien worker in the US under working visa.
I believe the question of how many foreign workers to allow in the country is a very difficult one. There are many things to weight.
First, of course, is the level on unemployement in the country. If you have many unemployed skilled workers within the country, then you do not help your citizens (which should be the point of a government).
Second, as was pointed out before, foreign workers increase offer and tends to decrease salaries; which can also be detrimental to your workers.
But there are also good effects in foreign workers. It brings people that are (typically) debt free and that the will to make important decisions. It is a H1B worker now, but it might be a company tomorrow.
It can brings more skills in the country. Visa workers might stay which means you instantly gained a new trained worker. You lured him pretty much for free. That means he contributes to your economy and not to his country of origin's economy.
It increase competition. Surely american people should understand that's a good things.
I think you are making a logical leap in your post. The fact that the law is so complex that everybody could be charged and jail for something is definitively true and a major problem. Though I do not see how government involvment is related to any of it.
Involvment and control are different things. The government needs (in my opinion) enough power to fix things, but not enough to screw things up. Associations and the government are the only entity somewhat interested in teh greater good. But associations typically completely lacks funding to solve large scale problems.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife is fixing her credit right now. And she has the same problem. She is even responsible for debt she did not make on the basis that she can not prove that she did not make that debt. Most of the entry are indeed wrongly labeled which is quite scary frankly. That credit report business is complete BS in here. They hold a list of things that you did secret. You can access it but with a ridiculously high fee. And you can not contest anything important.
"I wonder how much a system would cost that could switch my light from green to red if it detected a vehicle approaching from a red-lit direction at dangerous speeds."
Once people know that they'll get a (de facto) green light by speeding, what do you think will happen? That does not sound like a good idea at all.
I have been playing the wii up to now. I am actually interested in the Wii U. But the price is just too high for me to get it.
370 bucks for a gaming system with one game. Then each subsequent game is $60 new, $50 preowned. I am going to pass on that.
For comparison the wii launched at $250 and games were less than $50. 20% jack up in 7 years is too much. according to [1], inflation since the wii launch is only 14%. So definitely, the price rose.
[1] http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
There are a couple things that could be helpful in a kitchen from a purely technical perspective.
We could make pots smarter to somewhat display the temperature distribution in it, maybe the materiel could change color depending on its temperature.
Oven based feedback loop. many things in the oven need to stay at a precise temperature. For instance all bain-marie based cooking. For instance for creme brule. the oven could automatically adjust its temperature to keep the bain marie at the right temperature. If the water gets too low, it could notify you.
Rice cooker could get much smarter than they are. I am sure, they could precisely tell you when the rice is cooked, whether you should add more water, ...
While having a fridge that orders food from you is overall a bad idea, having a fridge that can tell you what is inside, when you put everything in, and when it will expire is of interest. Especially if you can query it while doing grocery shopping.
My wife is Korean and I am not familiar yet with everything which means that I have close to no clue what some things are in my kitchen. We have 4 different soy sauces. Which one should I use for a given task? In the same idea, what is in that bottle that do not have a label? A sci-fi bottle could tell me all that.
The bell where I leave cheese to mature could actually tell me when it is getting too mature.
Pots or plates could automatically tell you what is inside, how many servings that will make and the energetic and nutriment intake of what is inside.
There is plenty of things technology could help in the kitchen. But I agree that "look there is a tablet on the oven" is not very helpful.
Maybe not, we want some actual work to get done! :)
I read the blog of Zoe Keating[1], the artist whose quote was extracted in the new york times article.
You said: "Seriously though, this person is getting upset because they don't have a large volume of listeners, not because the songs are not paid enough for listening."
This is not what Zoe Keating is complaining about. She complains that the artist on streaming platforms are made per play. Though, depending on who you are, you don't get paid the same per play. She claims that this is unfair. Basically because she is independent she can not negogiate a higher rate.
As for live performance, it appears to only represent 25% of her income, while music sales represent about 45%.
[1] http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/
I am not really surprised. It looks like the amount of offer in music grows with time. There is more directors and composers than before. According to [1], there are 2.5 more music director and composer than 3 years ago while the number of musician appears to have decrease by roughly 10% in the same time. Since 99, it went from 52K people to 67K people. So there are 15% more people to pay. Meanwhile the US population only increase 12% [2].
I do not think the average entertainement of famillies changed a lot but if anything the music budget went down. So I am really not surprised.
Moreover, I feel like Internet concentrated music interest on a smaller number of artists which performs better than anybody else for no good reason. I mean gangnam style from psy shipped more than 6 millions albums in not even a year [3].
I do not know the artist that is speaking and I never listen to her music. But she is a cello artist which is not a popular style. So of course making money out of it is difficult. Yet her income increased according to her own numbers [4].
The real numbers we lack are the numbers from 10 or 15 years ago. How much money did an independent artist make in the 90's ? Is it really worse in 2013? (I ma not saying it is not, I am asking a real question)
[1] http://money.futureofmusic.org/how-many-musicians-are-there/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style
[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkasqHkVRM1OdGhjdExSMzYyMXFZUkZNSUJrY3MwNXc&pli=1#gid=0
I completely agree with you. And I try to publish code as often as I can. Though, I do not believe the original article is about getting the code out.
I think the original article is getting the code in the shape where it can be reused and built upon in the same way open source software is. Any code released under CRAPL is probably not in a shape where it can reasonably be built upon. Most of the code I published are not in a very good shape.
Interesting. I am French. I studied in France up to PhD. My parents being poor, I did not paid for anything. Pretty much all my education was paid from other people tax dollar. And for that I am really grateful.
Once I graduated, two options appeared to me. I could stay in France and work either in a company that have no clue what PhD stands for and will ask me the most stupid job, or in the academia where I will be underpaid, overworked and the scapegoat of the all-the-troubles-in-France (It was in 2008, Sarkozy just got elected).
On the other hand, I could have gone to the United States where PhD are paid a lot in the industry to do actual PhD work. I could also stay in the academia where I will still be overworked but I will be properly funded and equipped to solve issues that actually matter.
Which option do you think I picked?
The problem we have is France is that we train people really well. But we have no good use for their training.
Can you suggest hardware or software to do that?
Actually, the copyright issues you are mentionning are important. I frequently end up mashing together code found god knows where. When we finally wanted to publish our code, we had to go through the various files and decide which ones we can publish and which one we can not publish because of copyright. We use them internally (and probably we actually should not, but nobody cares about that). But putting it on your website opens potential lawsuits.
We ended up scrapping auxilary functions and reimplementing a part of I/O that was relevant to us. It took a few days from a grad student. In the end, the time spent was worth it. But the code is just in a working state, as long as you do not blow on it too much. Proper documentation and making the code robust would certainly have taken weeks. We do not have time for that. It is not our goal, code is often a by-product.
"What the author of the article fails to understand is that software is not the point of research - it is a side-effect, and I say that as someone whose field is CS."
(disclaimer: I am working as a postdoc for some US university)
The article in general is clueless. You are of course right. Researchers don't care about their code. I want to know if a design work, if an algorithm work or if it does not. That's why I end up writing code. Once my report/paper/thesis/grant application is written I do not care about the software anymore.
I'd love to produce proper software. But most researchers do not have a clue how to make good software. Software engineering is not our job. We typically do not know how to do *really* good software. That type of skills is not commonly found in grad students. You'll need a postdoc or a professor to do it well. PhD time is valuable, it *is* worth a lot of money. None of the money that come from grants pays for software development. Even if it was, my career would certainly advance more if I do research instead of software. (With occasional exception like "This is the holy grail. We need it done well.")
The only other option would be to pay a software engineer. Grants typically do not cover that. Some do, but most don't.
The final option would be to get somebody else to cover the software development cost. That can happen, but that's very rare. You'll need to find a company that need the proper edge the software will bring, that actually want to work with the academia and that is ok publishing the source code (so potentially losing the edge the project bring them.) That can happen, but do not count on it.
Finally, even assuming there is a useful software framework close to something I am interested in. What will be the investment cost for me to get in that software. Recently I was looking at Android programming for adding a calendar type. That stuff is ridiculously complicated with dozens of concepts and objects and all. And I am talking about a freaking calendar. All encompassing software tends to an overly engineered design. If it takes me more time to get into the software than getting my job done, why should I use it?
Citeseer and google scholar contain a large amount of scientific papers freely accessible. Many journals have open access policies. Many researchers publish their result on arxiv before sending it anywhere else. IEEE and ACM let their members access papers (IEEE policy at http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subscriptions/prod/mdl/mdl_overview.html . ACM's policy at https://campus.acm.org/public/qj/profqj/qjprof_control.cfm?form_type=Professional . SIAM's policy http://www.siam.org/membership/individual/benefits.php ). So ok, it is not free, but that's not really expensive either if you are actually interested. Most researchers publish preprint on their website. If they don't, drop them an email they'll send you a preprint (if I had not put it on my website, I would send a preprint.)
Assuming you could not find it. And the author is a jerk. And you don't want to pay for it. You can still stop by a university libray where you will be able to download it using university subscription or photocopy it if the library has a paper edition.
Finally, we are not looking to send our papers to the most expensive journal. To the most prestigious certainly, but the price has nothing to do with it. Arguably, one of the most prestigious journal in CS is ACM Computing Surveys. It is an ACM journal, so all ACM members can read it online for the price of their subscription. Hardly the most expensive journal.
That being said, I'd rather we only publish in openaccess journal et we ditch the publishers out. But that's not realistically going to happen anytime soon.
Why exactly do you think that we need to solve the P=NP problem in order to have strong AIs?
You invented lots of things that proved to be very useful to a wide range of people and industries. While the patent war is going stronger than ever, do you believe that you could have succesfully develop so many ideas in the current legal context?
Well, I played andor's trail a year ago. I pretty much finished it, in the sense that there was nothing more to do. The game was not complete at this point. It did not take me hours and hours and hours to finish it: maybe a week of playing before going to bed.
It is definitely worth checking out and maybe there is more content now. But if you are going for hours and hours of content, one will be disappointed.
without even mentionning that "nihao" is chinese...
Despite I like JoCo and that I agree overall with your opinion. I think we should not forget that it is copyright infrigment, and not theft.
I always wondered if it could be possible to run android natively on a gnu/linux distribution. The android kernel and linux kernel are so similar. I understand most of the userspace is different, but running in a different cgroups and in a different chroot should provide some help with it. Anybody had some success with that?
disclaimer: I am currently an alien worker in the US under working visa.
I believe the question of how many foreign workers to allow in the country is a very difficult one. There are many things to weight.
First, of course, is the level on unemployement in the country. If you have many unemployed skilled workers within the country, then you do not help your citizens (which should be the point of a government).
Second, as was pointed out before, foreign workers increase offer and tends to decrease salaries; which can also be detrimental to your workers.
But there are also good effects in foreign workers. It brings people that are (typically) debt free and that the will to make important decisions. It is a H1B worker now, but it might be a company tomorrow.
It can brings more skills in the country. Visa workers might stay which means you instantly gained a new trained worker. You lured him pretty much for free. That means he contributes to your economy and not to his country of origin's economy.
It increase competition. Surely american people should understand that's a good things.
not really, you can get a ok/good GPU for about $300, I do not think you can get a i7 system for that price. Just an i7 will cost you $300.
Pigs are omnivorous and they eat all kind of stuff. We still eat them.
"Then, horse meat is generally cheaper than beef."
really? I never found any in the US. And horse meat is ridiculously expensive in france.
Actually, they are more intelligent overall. But more importantly, they are so much more yummy! Where can I buy horsemeat in the US?
I think you are making a logical leap in your post. The fact that the law is so complex that everybody could be charged and jail for something is definitively true and a major problem. Though I do not see how government involvment is related to any of it.
Involvment and control are different things. The government needs (in my opinion) enough power to fix things, but not enough to screw things up. Associations and the government are the only entity somewhat interested in teh greater good. But associations typically completely lacks funding to solve large scale problems.