However, my boss is not a developer. She makes slide presentations and writes papers. The problems she has with Libre Office tend to be font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats.
Well, I have had MANY problems with "font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats" in MS Word over the years. Open a document on a Mac, then on Windows... see the problems. Open a document from two MS Office versions ago... see the problems.
Personally, I've seen LESS of this when going between computers and OSes with LibreOffice compared to MS Office. If you're complaining about formatting problems going between MS Office AND LibreOffice, well, that's hardly all LibreOffice's fault, since MS Office does a poor job of rendering LibreOffice native documents too.
Are these insurmountable problems? No. But considering her salary, it only takes 1 hours of fiddling with issues like that to have Libre Office cost more than a Word license. The costs of having your highly paid scientists and managers diddling with fonts and trying to find a features add up VERY quickly.
Obviously. I completely sympathize with this argument. However, I would counter that if a SCIENTIST is wasting time "diddling with fonts" and formatting, she/he is using the wrong software. MS Word AND LibreOffice are bad choices for a consistent layout engine. If your boss really wants professional-looking output, she'd be better off with LaTeX or a dedicated commercial layout application (e.g. InDesign).
Way too many people seem to complain about stuff that could be more easily solved if they knew what they want. Word and LibreOffice were never designed or intended to create publication-quality output. Formatting is not consistent because that's not what they are primarily focused on. You want to do desktop publishing? Choose the right tool (which will reflow things and make reasonable layout decisions as necessary). Otherwise, stop getting hung up on your font choice.
Unfortunately, that relatively small percentage are creating all the reports and templates the rest of the lot are using.
That's often true -- so that raises two more questions:
(1) These are often the most tech-savvy people in an organization, so isn't it easier for them to retrain to use a new piece of software, or hire people who can use cheaper or more flexible software? (And would it be cheaper to retrain 2% of the office workforce to avoid licensing stuff to 100% of them that 98% of them don't use?)
(2) In most cases, the "normal office workers" are just entering data. Why exactly do they need full-fledged Excel on their computers to just enter data? (I suspect the answer to this second question is "because that's how Excel works." And thus I again raise the question about whether it might not be better to try to find a better solution -- spreadsheet or not -- that perhaps separates out functionality or provides a cheaper solution for people to enter data into.)
2) Not from Harvard or Yale (how long ago do you have to look through presidents to find one that is not?)
Ronald Reagan.
Other 20th century presidents who didn't go to Harvard or Yale: Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman, Hoover, Harding, Wilson, McKinley.
Once you go back to Reagan and before, less than half of 20th-century presidents had a connection to Harvard or Yale (and before 1900 only 3 presidents had such a connection).
So it's really just the last four presidents that have made the "streak." Before that there was only one case where two consecutive presidents had such connections (T. Roosevelt and Taft).
I'm not saying it isn't an important trend, but it's a relatively recent one. Personally, I find it more disconcerting regarding recent Supreme Court appointments.
Writer is a passable substitute for MS Word, but Calc doesn't come close to Excel, and most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel.
I think it's all in your perspective. People who use Word's more "advanced" features probably think that it is essential, too. But that's a very small segment of the general office population (probably less than 5%).
And I think that's probably true of Excel as well. Most of the office folks I know can barely do anything with Excel other than entering data into a pre-existing spreadsheet. Of the remainder, most of them use it for relatively simple tasks that never make use of advanced functions (e.g., basic arithmetic manipulation of cells, sorting, etc.).
I'd guess if you looked at office worker usage of Excel, you'd probably find only a couple percent of office workers actually use those advanced functions which you couldn't find in Calc.
So then the larger question becomes -- should a company pay the MS Office premium for those few people? And it also brings up other questions, because a lot of those "advanced" functions are mostly useful to people who'd be better off using a more appropriate piece of software -- e.g., a database, a math program, a stats program, etc. -- rather than a bloated spreadsheet like Excel.
If you start thinking along these lines, it's a pretty rare office worker for whom Excel is the only useful AND appropriate tool.
"Beg the question" doesn't mean "beg for the question." It means to avoid answering the question.
No, it doesn't. It means assuming something unproven as basis for a conclusion, or more typically a circular logic, using the conclusion as a premise for drawing the conclusion. Also known as "petitio principii".
Actually, "beg the question" doesn't really mean petitio principii anymore, outside of philosophy journals. A post over at Language Log from 2010 noted that of the 20 most recent hits for "beg the question" in the New York Times, only ONE was an actual example of "correct" usage: 15 used it to me "raises the question," and 4 were just people bitching about other people using it wrong. A survey of 50 usages in Google News showed 49 uses to mean "raises the question" and 1 hit discussing its usage (not just using it "correctly").
When the vast majority of even educated, edited prose adopts a new meaning for a phrase, it's standard. Deal with it.
It's called "begging the question" because the one who makes the fallacy petitions the opponent to accept the premise that's in question.
Well, that's sort of in the right direction. The link above has detailed etymology -- the problem is that the phrase originally comes from Aristotle, where (in Greek) it would have been understood in context as meaning something like "assuming the conclusion," which is a pretty clear description of the philosophical fallacy. Then it got rendered in medieval Latin as petitio principii, which used two words that had changed meaning since Classical Latin and had connotations that confused things. THEN it was rendered in English about 400 years ago as "beg the question" which was a literal translation of petitio principii, except not really the meanings of that phrase that got across Aristotle's meaning well. THEN both the words "beg" and "question" changed their meaning over the past 400 years to exclude the original connotations that caused that translation from Latin.
To sum up, we're a couple millennia, three languages, and a few major meaning shifts from the original phrase... so it's no wonder the original meaning of the phrase got lost somewhere.
Bottom line: nobody but philosophers and language pedants actually know the original meaning of that phrase anymore. Heck, you can find citations of the phrase meaning "raise the question" in good writers' prose even back in the mid 1800s!! The meaning of "raise the question" is well-established and completely dominates current usage.
Thus, it's time to give up the battle. I used to have my "pet peeves" for usage too, but an English teacher once gave me very sound advice: "When saying the 'correct' thing sounds weird enough or is obscure enough that it distracts from your writing/speaking, it's time to just avoid that 'correct' construction -- because language is about communication, and you're no longer communicating effectively."
Usage expert Brian Garner calls this a "skunked term": a word or phrase whose common meaning is branded by pedants as "wrong" but whose "right" meaning is no longer understood by even educated speakers. The only right thing to do then is choose a different term.
If you mean petitio principii, then use "assume the conclusion" or "circular logic" or whatever MORE DESCRIPTIVE phrase actually makes your point clear. If you mean "raise the question," then say it. All of these pedantic arguments about what "beg the question" REALLY means are just BS now -- they're just a waste of time arguing about a ship that sailed LONG ago.
but the pause button is an active disengagement... you may pause in the middle of somebody saying something, for example, even without meaning to. Commercial breaks are, at least, usually actually *between* scenes... and give you the opportunity to disengage from the TV without having to concentrate over when to hit that pause button.
Huh, really? Commercials "between scenes"? I guess you've never watched any mystery series or drama or... Well pretty much anything that might ever have suspense built in. Or the news -- " Stay with us... Up next, all those parts of the news you actually want to hear about, but which we delay until later to force you to watch commercials..."
I mean, seriously do you have a clue how programming is often explicitly designed to end on a disruptive point before a commercial to ensure you're in suspense and won't change a channel?? Or are you just trolling?
I wouldn't exactly call my feelings "moral outrage," but commercials are actually quite annoying. I personally never noticed it until I "cut the cord" and haven't had cable for quite a few years. Once you get used to TV all the time without commercials, you realize how truly disruptive and annoying they can be. Personally, when I stay with family or whatever now and they have broadcast TV on, I usually just leave the room and go do something else. TV is already mostly a waste of time, but with commercials it has now become unbearable for me.
Imagine if you were trying to read a book or look at art in a museum or something, and every 5 minutes some annoying person would come around and shout at you or do something random and stupid to distract you... That would be really ridiculous, but most people accept it when watching TV. Once you live without those distractions for a while though, you realize how weird it is.
So which US president(s) visited Hiroshima prior to 1945?
Why the downmod? AC asks a legitimate question about the phrasing of the headline. No U.S. president has ever visited Hiroshima, and Gerald Ford was the first sitting president to visit Japan, period.
The title of this story is poorly worded. In the midst of various editorial gaffes at Slashdot, this is pretty low on the list, but it's unclear nonetheless.
You can have small government and not have it bother people too much. Everyone just has to be very clear on just what job the government is there for... and by extension, what it isn't there for. That last one is the kicker.
Ah, yes -- everyone "just has to clear on" that. And exactly how do you make sure EVERYONE is "clear on" that??
It means that politicians getting bothered by some one issue pressure group, need to have the spine to stand up to such whiners and say "Sorry, but that's not what the government is for. Here, this is the list of things we do and your idea isn't on it. Sorry again."
You do realize the only way to achieve your goals is therefore to remove power from the people, right? I'm assuming you're not completely going against democracy, so I'm guessing your logic runs along the lines of: "We have a democracy that allows people to elect those who make the laws, unless those people want the lawmakers to make laws NOT on this list, in which case, democracy is out of luck."
Good luck with that. The US federal government tried that, where the Founders tried to maintain an undemocratic system to avoid "mob rule" by putting many layers between the "will of the people" and the federal government. They deliberately stripped the central government of all but a few select powers... but ultimately the democratization of voting in the US in the past century has overturned those principles.
And anyhow, while the federal government had limits, there were precious few on the state and local governments in the early US. (This is something the "small government" libertarians often forget in their question to go back to the Constitution of yesteryear -- government in the past was also overpowerful and invasive, it's just that more of that happened at state and local levels.)
History is not on your side -- you act as though politicians alone are the ones responsible for enlarging government. But you ignore the fact that throughout history there are MANY examples of democracies and republics turning into authoritarian governments mostly because THE PEOPLE voted authoritarian leaders in.
It's often "the people" who want bigger government, particularly in times of crisis. It was "the people" who elected Tributes of the Plebs in Ancient Rome who ultimately broke down the Republican system by promising popular agendas, paving the way for Caesar to become perpetual Dictator. It was "the people" who voted Hitler into office and encouraged his authoritarian state. It was "the people" who elected FDR to expand the U.S. federal government in a time of crisis, a president who famously threatened to enlarge the Supreme Court and pack it with his own cronies if they didn't go along with his plan to make the government bigger. Etc., etc.
The problem with your proposal is that no matter "how clear" everyone is on what the government is supposed to do, that only lasts until the lower classes experience a crisis of some sort (war, economic problems, famine), and then they'll vote whoever into office will take more power and promise to save them.
Of course, that doesn't fly under any current government... but that doesn't mean it cannot possibly fly at all, ever.
That's true. We could throw out democracy and institute an authoritarian dictatorship, in which case the number of people who "are clear" about what the government isn't supposed to do is reduced to one. Or a totalitarian oligarchy, as long as each member of "the party" is "clear" and keeps in line.
Alas, it's not all a bunch of philosopher kings who get those dictator jobs. So that won't work either.
It perhaps isn't hopeless, but until you figure out how to enforce that "everyone must be clear about small government" aspect of your plan, I don't think it's going to work any better than what people have already tried.
Generalizability, no, but you can get there with the basic divisibility rules they do teach in middle school. Multiples of 100 are divisible by 4, multiples of 1,000 are divisible by 8. 32=8x4, so you just need a multiple of 100,000.
While that's true, I think it already requires one generalization that most middle-school kids don't realize, i.e., that you can effectively "multiply" the requirements for divisibility rules to obtain rules for higher numbers.
(In middle school, some kids realize this about 6 -- which is usually taught to encompass the rules for 2 and for 3. A Mathcounts kid might also learn how to use this for divisibility by 12 or 15, etc. But I think it takes a little extra leap of logic to do what you did. Either way, the kid obviously had to take a leap beyond the "normal" use of middle-school divisibility rules.)
The difference between people who are good at math and people who win math competitions is the ability to make educated guesses on the fly. Once you see enough problems that look difficult but turn out to be trivial when viewed in the right context, you start looking for that context instead of trying to calculate the answer.
Uh, the whole point of Mathcounts is to encourage middle-school students to think on a more "abstract" level. They actively WANT you to do "tricks" to solve the problems. For this purpose, they aren't "tricks" nor for that matter was this answer likely an "educated guess." It's only a trivial problem if you know a little basic number theory and can see a pattern.
ALL of the kids who had gotten to the final round of this competition would have realized that they did NOT want them to calculate the answer by direct division. This competition is not a calculation speed contest, it's about applying various mathematical tools to get to a quick answer.
Seeing the pattern, by the way, IS still "calculating" the answer. It's just doing it more efficiently, because you have better knowledge and better abilities to generalize (which are important skills to do well in more advanced math).
By the way, of course there are other simple ways of solving the problem (e.g., recognizing that 10^n is automatically divisible by 2^n, since 32=2^5, then any power of 10 greater than 10^5 is automatically divisible by 32) -- I was just referencing the general divisibility rules that I know kids in the Mathcounts stuff are usually taught.
Arithmetic. Americans seem unable to tell the difference
Nope. Three problems:
(1) Arithmetic is a PART of mathematics.
(2) Even if you want to insist it's not, the Mathcounts competition includes all sorts of stuff including basic geometry, basic algebra, probability, combinatorics, basic number theory, etc. NOT just arithmetic.
(3) If you think this kid solved that problem by basic "arithmetic" like division in 7 seconds, you're crazy. It requires an understanding of basic divisibility theory (i.e., part of number theory) to see certain patterns. For example, most kids know that you can determined divisibility by 2 by looking at last digit (even or odd). Some might realize that you can determine divisibility by 4 by looking at last TWO digits.
In this case, divisibility requires looking at last FIVE digits. (This requires generalizability of divisibility rules, usually something not taught directly to middle school kids.) Given that adding one produces a number with five zeroes at the end, that number would be divisible by 32, hence this number would have a remainder of 31.
Frankly, I'm surprised it took kids at this level 7 seconds to jump in with such a simple problem.
..excuse me friend, but it seems like you stopped reading my comment after the first couple sentences;
Perhaps a little good faith here? No, I read your entire comment and was so excited about it that I felt I should add more detail!
you're preaching to the choir, so-to-speak, and more or less repeating what I already stated.
Yes, AND adding some more detail about why BMI is so bad. I wasn't arguing against you -- I was trying to emphasize your points.
Sorry if I wasn't clear about that, but next time please also don't assume that someone didn't read your comment just because they only responded to a portion of it (to agree with it!!).
Rather than waster hours at the gym or the idiotic exercise of jogging, I do what came naturally a hundreds years ago... work. It's amazing how much weight I have lost doing simple things like watching what I eat (i.e. stop buying chips, and eating Oreos in moderation), and laying pavers. Or mixing and pouring concrete by hand. Or using an ax and saw to cut down a tree and cut it to length instead of a chain saw. Installing my own flooring and kitchen cabinets instead of paying someone to do it.
THIS!
I really think in all of the discussions of the "obesity epidemic," the role of everyday exercise that happened in the context of chores and normal housework is underestimated. Yes, I think the rising levels of sugar, portion sizes, and the absence of as many "manual labor" jobs all have impacts -- but so does modern "convenience" in avoiding exercise.
I got to watch my father gradually succumb to this problem over the years. When I was young, I can remember him doing mostly manual work outside to keep up things: mowing the lawn with a push-mower, trimming the hedges with manual shears, digging up the garden each spring to turn over the soil with a shovel, raking leaves in the fall, shoveling snow off the driveway in the winter, cutting wood with manual saws and axes, etc.
And he was relatively trim. I recall helping him with many of these tasks. But over the years, riding mowers became more popular and affordable, the rototiller replaced the shovel to turn over soil, the leaf blower replaced the rake, the snowblower replaced the shovel, the wood was cut with a chain saw. And with each "convenience" it seems he put on a little weight.
I noticed this myself a few years back after I had put on a little more weight than I would like. But I bought a lot of manual tools for doing work around the house, rather than "convenient" ways to get stuff done faster. I never really liked "exercising" at the gym much -- an hour on a treadmill or exercise bike or whatever just seemed boring... and a complete waste of time.
But if you actually have to push a mower around the yard for an hour, that's good aerobic exercise. And turning over soil in the spring before planting the garden is a REAL workout with a shovel (if you have a garden of any size). And you feel like you've accomplished something.
And this is only just normal "maintenance" on your property. Add in more do-it-yourself projects, as most homeowners would do themselves decades ago, and you have a full "training program" covering all sorts of muscle groups, often combinations of aerobic exercise with weight training, etc... all just keeping up your house.
I understand some people may not enjoy this sort of thing as much as others -- some may just like spending hours at the gym or whatever. To each his own. My larger point, however, is that our "obesity epidemic" may also just be related to convenience -- both in terms of food and in avoiding the "normal" exercise that people a generation or two ago just had to do.
Hello friend, we have something in common: The bloody BMI charts don't represent us.
They never were designed to. BMI was designed to be an approximate measure for population averages; it was never intended to be a measure of individual health or obesity.
BMI charts are crap, they only represent the average, non-trained people, not anyone who deliberately trains for anything that causes them to build muscle.
Actually they don't represent the "average" people very well either. I've addressed studies on this in a comment on a previous story. Basically, no matter what threshold you set for "obesity" in BMI, you end up misdiagnosing at least 1/3 of people one way or the other. (With the current thresholds, it's closer to 1/2.) This isn't hard to understand: women are shorter on average but also tend to have higher bodyfat when healthy. Men are taller but have lower bodyfat. Thus, in order to encompass non-equivalent groups as a population metric, it has a built-in bias to make overestimate obesity in tall people and to underestimate it in short people.
Again, it was never designed as a metric for individuals when it was designed by demographers a couple centuries ago. For some weird reason, ignorant doctors and medical professionals adopted it ~40 years ago as an individual metric without understanding its statistical flaws for that purpose.
There are better metrics out there. Even the old tables from the 1960s are generally better, which usually separated out men from women, had separate categories for "body frame size" on the basis of various metrics, and sometimes incorporated age data too. Heck, there are studies which show that even measuring men's waist circumference ALONE (with no accounting for weight, height, or anything else) is a much better predictor of health problems than BMI. Let that sink in for a second. The single "one-fits-all" BMI number is a terrible indicator.
There may be good reasons to have authority to (de)escalate outside the hands of the flight crew.
Perhaps in some circumstances, but the flight crew should serve as a first-level "sanity check." The chances of having a paranoid or delusional person with an unjustified belief that terrorists are common on planes is orders of magnitude higher than the chances of seeing an actual terrorist on a plane.
And even if the person isn't mentally ill and imagining evil people everywhere, the flight crews on airplanes at least tend to have some actual training in spotting suspicious activity and handling terrorist situations. Random passengers generally do not.
Again, if the woman insisted on escalating beyond flight crew, fine -- they could have radioed/telephoned into security and cleared it up in a matter of minutes (in a rational world, that is).
I hope they billed the idiot for the inconvenience, expense and defamation...
While people are (perhaps rightly) ganging up on this passenger and blaming her for being ignorant, she was only a small part of the problem here. The Washington Post story on this incident notes a comment from Menzio that isn't in the summary here, where Menzio expressed concern about...
"A security protocol that is too rigid--in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks--and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless. "
Contrast this incident with what would happen in a sane world.
What happened here:
- Woman feigns illness to deplane. Reports suspicious person to authorities. Pilot escorts "terrorist" off plane. Delays follow for hours as suspect is questioned until "threat" is cleared.
What would happen in a sane world:
- Woman says to flight attendant, "Can I talk to you for a second?" and gets up from seat. Attendant knows terrorists are much rarer than lightning strikes, so is skeptical. After short conversation, flight attendant walks past, glances at man's paper, sees he's just doing math, and tells woman everything is fine -- return to seat.
What would happen in a relatively sane world with some greater level of caution:
- Woman has conversation with flight attendant. Flight attendant walks up to man, sees math. Attendant casually asks, "Hey, sir, what are you working on there?" Guy replies, "Oh, well... economics actually. I'm a prof at Penn." Situation resolved.
If still suspicious, we could even go a step further -- Attendant: "Oh, can I just check your ticket? We had a question from a passenger about seat numbers?" Attendant checks name of passenger, excuses herself, sends message to security -- they do a Google search and verify guy actually is Ivy League prof in economics, and situation is resolved in 3 minutes instead of hours.
Bottom line: while we can laugh that this woman's ignorance, the greater problem here is the general paranoia and bureaucratic structure around security theatre that requires disproportionate responses to things that don't deserve them.
"There's this guy in the seat next to me... he's writing some message with Arabic numbers in it."
See -- that was the suspicion! The passenger obviously saw he was Italian, so why wasn't he using Roman numerals?!? Those suspicious Arabic numerals were a dead giveaway: Obviously he must be an Arab terrorist posing as an Italian. it's always those little things that give the foreigners away....
So a man discovers computers, a women figured out how to do a diddly on it, and we celebrate her as the first programmer without calling him the first programmable machine inventor.
Typical Feminism, and these days, Typical Slashdot.
Umm... huh? From TFS:
Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after.
That sounds like we start TFS by recognizing Babbage's contributions for designing these "programmable computing engines." And, just in case that's not enough for you, there's a link to the Wikipedia article on Babbage right in that sentence in TFS which acknowledges in its opening paragraph that Babbage: "...is best remembered for originating the concept of a programmable computer."
So, I'm really not sure how you get that Slashdot is somehow recognizing Lovelace without acknowledging Babbage's contributions.
Can we get past a week here without our allotted dosage of this bullshit for fucking once?
Ada Lovelace did some interesting stuff. She was an interesting person. And she's mentioned in the summary because Slashdot had a story on her bicentennial last year. Babbage's bicentennial was in 1991... but should we celebrate him this year too even though it's just his bicenquasquigenary (a term 99.9% of people haven't even heard of, because we generally don't celebrate 225 year anniversaries)? Would that make you happier?
In what way was the name inappropriate, except insofar as it concerns the utter humourless pomposity of bureaucrats and scientists?
(1) I know quite a few scientists. While they may not have the same sense of humor as the average person, they often have a quite well-developed (if sometimes weird) sense of humor. Bureaucrats? That's a different story...
(2) While I find this whole situation funny, I do think the name is a bit inappropriate for a long-term thing in a serious scientific research ship. Maybe they could have named it that for a day or a week or something, just to honor the silliness (and get some media attention), and then renamed it something more "serious" for the rest of its lifespan.
But naming it "Boaty McBoatface" for the long term? Can you imagine a scientist who worked on that ship and putting that on your resume? I don't know what you do for a living, but supposing you're a programmer, imagine that some serious research project that you put years of your life into was given the official designation "Codey McCodeface," and when you tried to get other jobs or talk to people in other fields, you had to use that name to tell them what you had invested your work in. "What was your project?!? What, were you one of the idiots who worked on Clippy??"
Would some people find it funny? Sure. But there are way too many people in the word who make a distinction between times for humor and times to "act like a grown-up." That's the reality of the world. How would you feel if you lost a job or were denied interviews because people who didn't know about your company's "Codey McCodeface" joke thought you weren't a serious candidate when you submitted your resume or mentioned it in an interview?
And, sure -- if you're secure in your career at the moment, you might say, "Well, I wouldn't want to work for those humorless idiots anyway." That's all well and good until you really need a job. Or you're a scientist up for tenure or some significant prize, and someone who doesn't read the news sees you did research on "Boaty McBoatface."
We have social and linguistic conventions in the world. It's generally frowned upon to show up to a funeral dressed in ripped jeans and a tee-shirt, unless that's something the family is cool with. It's generally frowned upon to swear repeatedly in front of a bunch of little kids who aren't your own.
And it's generally appropriate to follow tradition in choosing names for major sea vessels from certain kinds of linguistic categories. That's just the way the world is... when you get your own ship, you can name it what you want.
Let's just hope they don't feed in Fifty Shades of Grey to the AI as part of the project. Then I'm sure you'd see a whole new layer of meaning to "getting tied up in traffic."
The move to an open-access model is not one that can be done in a short period of time, because it takes time for journals to develop the reputation that is the basis for their value.
Actually, it could be done rather quickly -- if academics simply just quit the major journals. Journals don't simply get reputation from their name alone -- they get their reputation from the people who continue to be involved with them. If major academics on the editorial board of a journal decided to quit en masse and did it publicly, that journal's reputation could plunge quickly, and much of that reputation could move to a new replacement open-access journal.
The Slashdot story I linked above regarding Lingua (now reformed as Glossa) is just one example; there are plenty of others that have happened in recent decades.
And whether the old journal's reputation simply dies or stays somewhat high (with less of its former glory) is irrelevant. The point is that an editorial board of major scholars reconstituted as a new journal can quickly move a lot of reputation to a new place... this doesn't necessarily have to be a slow process.
All I want is what is mine. The people paid for this research, they should get access to it. Full stop, end of story, no exceptions, not next year, not when (if) the copyright expires, NOW. Copyright infringement is downloading something you did not pay for. This is not copyright infringement because you have in fact already payed for it. This is getting what you are owed, what you and I have already paid for through our taxes.
I absolutely agree with you that there should be stipulations in public research dollars that fruits of research (such as publications) should be made freely available to the public.
HOWEVER, I actually disagree that -- without this stipulation being incorporated into grants -- a published piece is the property of taxpayers. Just because you have a financial interest in facilitating something doesn't mean you own all possible things that could come out of it -- at least not without a contract that says so.
What if a taxpayer-funded grant only paid for 1% of the research expenses? What if the grant paid for the lab research time, etc., but the publication also contains significant original work generated by the researcher on his/her own time? (This would be more common in social sciences or humanistic fields where the writing of research itself is a significant act separate from basic data collection/organization.)
There are all sorts of complex issues about who "owns" something here, and multiple funding sources also muddy the waters. That's why we should have specific guidelines worked into government grant programs that specify free and open publications of research when certain criteria are met.
Leeches like Elsevier and their ilk are the thieves who are stealing from us, not the other way around.
Well, to be fair, part of the problem is the researchers who chose not to publish in open journals.
But of course that's also a larger problem in academia where tenure expectations are often based on the reputation of publications, which usually emphasizes publication in "high-quality" journals... and those are often older ones that are part of these publishing empires. Shifting to open-access publication for research requires commitment from many major researchers in a discipline to actively promote open-access journals and shift the focus away from other journals... but junior scholars often can't take such a risk and publish where they know others will evaluate their work as "influential," regardless of access.
Putting stipulations on grant money like I mentioned above might solve some of these issues, since it will drive researchers to find ways to publish and/or drive journals to find ways to make such funding more accessible.
Slashdot Mirror
However, my boss is not a developer. She makes slide presentations and writes papers. The problems she has with Libre Office tend to be font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats.
Well, I have had MANY problems with "font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats" in MS Word over the years. Open a document on a Mac, then on Windows... see the problems. Open a document from two MS Office versions ago... see the problems.
Personally, I've seen LESS of this when going between computers and OSes with LibreOffice compared to MS Office. If you're complaining about formatting problems going between MS Office AND LibreOffice, well, that's hardly all LibreOffice's fault, since MS Office does a poor job of rendering LibreOffice native documents too.
Are these insurmountable problems? No. But considering her salary, it only takes 1 hours of fiddling with issues like that to have Libre Office cost more than a Word license. The costs of having your highly paid scientists and managers diddling with fonts and trying to find a features add up VERY quickly.
Obviously. I completely sympathize with this argument. However, I would counter that if a SCIENTIST is wasting time "diddling with fonts" and formatting, she/he is using the wrong software. MS Word AND LibreOffice are bad choices for a consistent layout engine. If your boss really wants professional-looking output, she'd be better off with LaTeX or a dedicated commercial layout application (e.g. InDesign).
Way too many people seem to complain about stuff that could be more easily solved if they knew what they want. Word and LibreOffice were never designed or intended to create publication-quality output. Formatting is not consistent because that's not what they are primarily focused on. You want to do desktop publishing? Choose the right tool (which will reflow things and make reasonable layout decisions as necessary). Otherwise, stop getting hung up on your font choice.
Unfortunately, that relatively small percentage are creating all the reports and templates the rest of the lot are using.
That's often true -- so that raises two more questions:
(1) These are often the most tech-savvy people in an organization, so isn't it easier for them to retrain to use a new piece of software, or hire people who can use cheaper or more flexible software? (And would it be cheaper to retrain 2% of the office workforce to avoid licensing stuff to 100% of them that 98% of them don't use?)
(2) In most cases, the "normal office workers" are just entering data. Why exactly do they need full-fledged Excel on their computers to just enter data? (I suspect the answer to this second question is "because that's how Excel works." And thus I again raise the question about whether it might not be better to try to find a better solution -- spreadsheet or not -- that perhaps separates out functionality or provides a cheaper solution for people to enter data into.)
2) Not from Harvard or Yale (how long ago do you have to look through presidents to find one that is not?)
Ronald Reagan.
Other 20th century presidents who didn't go to Harvard or Yale: Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman, Hoover, Harding, Wilson, McKinley.
Once you go back to Reagan and before, less than half of 20th-century presidents had a connection to Harvard or Yale (and before 1900 only 3 presidents had such a connection).
So it's really just the last four presidents that have made the "streak." Before that there was only one case where two consecutive presidents had such connections (T. Roosevelt and Taft).
I'm not saying it isn't an important trend, but it's a relatively recent one. Personally, I find it more disconcerting regarding recent Supreme Court appointments.
Writer is a passable substitute for MS Word, but Calc doesn't come close to Excel, and most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel.
I think it's all in your perspective. People who use Word's more "advanced" features probably think that it is essential, too. But that's a very small segment of the general office population (probably less than 5%).
And I think that's probably true of Excel as well. Most of the office folks I know can barely do anything with Excel other than entering data into a pre-existing spreadsheet. Of the remainder, most of them use it for relatively simple tasks that never make use of advanced functions (e.g., basic arithmetic manipulation of cells, sorting, etc.).
I'd guess if you looked at office worker usage of Excel, you'd probably find only a couple percent of office workers actually use those advanced functions which you couldn't find in Calc.
So then the larger question becomes -- should a company pay the MS Office premium for those few people? And it also brings up other questions, because a lot of those "advanced" functions are mostly useful to people who'd be better off using a more appropriate piece of software -- e.g., a database, a math program, a stats program, etc. -- rather than a bloated spreadsheet like Excel.
If you start thinking along these lines, it's a pretty rare office worker for whom Excel is the only useful AND appropriate tool.
"Beg the question" doesn't mean "beg for the question." It means to avoid answering the question.
No, it doesn't. It means assuming something unproven as basis for a conclusion, or more typically a circular logic, using the conclusion as a premise for drawing the conclusion. Also known as "petitio principii".
Actually, "beg the question" doesn't really mean petitio principii anymore, outside of philosophy journals. A post over at Language Log from 2010 noted that of the 20 most recent hits for "beg the question" in the New York Times, only ONE was an actual example of "correct" usage: 15 used it to me "raises the question," and 4 were just people bitching about other people using it wrong. A survey of 50 usages in Google News showed 49 uses to mean "raises the question" and 1 hit discussing its usage (not just using it "correctly").
When the vast majority of even educated, edited prose adopts a new meaning for a phrase, it's standard. Deal with it.
It's called "begging the question" because the one who makes the fallacy petitions the opponent to accept the premise that's in question.
Well, that's sort of in the right direction. The link above has detailed etymology -- the problem is that the phrase originally comes from Aristotle, where (in Greek) it would have been understood in context as meaning something like "assuming the conclusion," which is a pretty clear description of the philosophical fallacy. Then it got rendered in medieval Latin as petitio principii, which used two words that had changed meaning since Classical Latin and had connotations that confused things. THEN it was rendered in English about 400 years ago as "beg the question" which was a literal translation of petitio principii, except not really the meanings of that phrase that got across Aristotle's meaning well. THEN both the words "beg" and "question" changed their meaning over the past 400 years to exclude the original connotations that caused that translation from Latin.
To sum up, we're a couple millennia, three languages, and a few major meaning shifts from the original phrase... so it's no wonder the original meaning of the phrase got lost somewhere.
Bottom line: nobody but philosophers and language pedants actually know the original meaning of that phrase anymore. Heck, you can find citations of the phrase meaning "raise the question" in good writers' prose even back in the mid 1800s!! The meaning of "raise the question" is well-established and completely dominates current usage.
Thus, it's time to give up the battle. I used to have my "pet peeves" for usage too, but an English teacher once gave me very sound advice: "When saying the 'correct' thing sounds weird enough or is obscure enough that it distracts from your writing/speaking, it's time to just avoid that 'correct' construction -- because language is about communication, and you're no longer communicating effectively."
Usage expert Brian Garner calls this a "skunked term": a word or phrase whose common meaning is branded by pedants as "wrong" but whose "right" meaning is no longer understood by even educated speakers. The only right thing to do then is choose a different term.
If you mean petitio principii, then use "assume the conclusion" or "circular logic" or whatever MORE DESCRIPTIVE phrase actually makes your point clear. If you mean "raise the question," then say it. All of these pedantic arguments about what "beg the question" REALLY means are just BS now -- they're just a waste of time arguing about a ship that sailed LONG ago.
but the pause button is an active disengagement... you may pause in the middle of somebody saying something, for example, even without meaning to. Commercial breaks are, at least, usually actually *between* scenes... and give you the opportunity to disengage from the TV without having to concentrate over when to hit that pause button.
Huh, really? Commercials "between scenes"? I guess you've never watched any mystery series or drama or... Well pretty much anything that might ever have suspense built in. Or the news -- " Stay with us... Up next, all those parts of the news you actually want to hear about, but which we delay until later to force you to watch commercials..."
I mean, seriously do you have a clue how programming is often explicitly designed to end on a disruptive point before a commercial to ensure you're in suspense and won't change a channel?? Or are you just trolling?
I wouldn't exactly call my feelings "moral outrage," but commercials are actually quite annoying. I personally never noticed it until I "cut the cord" and haven't had cable for quite a few years. Once you get used to TV all the time without commercials, you realize how truly disruptive and annoying they can be. Personally, when I stay with family or whatever now and they have broadcast TV on, I usually just leave the room and go do something else. TV is already mostly a waste of time, but with commercials it has now become unbearable for me.
Imagine if you were trying to read a book or look at art in a museum or something, and every 5 minutes some annoying person would come around and shout at you or do something random and stupid to distract you... That would be really ridiculous, but most people accept it when watching TV. Once you live without those distractions for a while though, you realize how weird it is.
So which US president(s) visited Hiroshima prior to 1945?
Why the downmod? AC asks a legitimate question about the phrasing of the headline. No U.S. president has ever visited Hiroshima, and Gerald Ford was the first sitting president to visit Japan, period.
The title of this story is poorly worded. In the midst of various editorial gaffes at Slashdot, this is pretty low on the list, but it's unclear nonetheless.
You can have small government and not have it bother people too much. Everyone just has to be very clear on just what job the government is there for... and by extension, what it isn't there for. That last one is the kicker.
Ah, yes -- everyone "just has to clear on" that. And exactly how do you make sure EVERYONE is "clear on" that??
It means that politicians getting bothered by some one issue pressure group, need to have the spine to stand up to such whiners and say "Sorry, but that's not what the government is for. Here, this is the list of things we do and your idea isn't on it. Sorry again."
You do realize the only way to achieve your goals is therefore to remove power from the people, right? I'm assuming you're not completely going against democracy, so I'm guessing your logic runs along the lines of: "We have a democracy that allows people to elect those who make the laws, unless those people want the lawmakers to make laws NOT on this list, in which case, democracy is out of luck."
Good luck with that. The US federal government tried that, where the Founders tried to maintain an undemocratic system to avoid "mob rule" by putting many layers between the "will of the people" and the federal government. They deliberately stripped the central government of all but a few select powers... but ultimately the democratization of voting in the US in the past century has overturned those principles.
And anyhow, while the federal government had limits, there were precious few on the state and local governments in the early US. (This is something the "small government" libertarians often forget in their question to go back to the Constitution of yesteryear -- government in the past was also overpowerful and invasive, it's just that more of that happened at state and local levels.)
History is not on your side -- you act as though politicians alone are the ones responsible for enlarging government. But you ignore the fact that throughout history there are MANY examples of democracies and republics turning into authoritarian governments mostly because THE PEOPLE voted authoritarian leaders in.
It's often "the people" who want bigger government, particularly in times of crisis. It was "the people" who elected Tributes of the Plebs in Ancient Rome who ultimately broke down the Republican system by promising popular agendas, paving the way for Caesar to become perpetual Dictator. It was "the people" who voted Hitler into office and encouraged his authoritarian state. It was "the people" who elected FDR to expand the U.S. federal government in a time of crisis, a president who famously threatened to enlarge the Supreme Court and pack it with his own cronies if they didn't go along with his plan to make the government bigger. Etc., etc.
The problem with your proposal is that no matter "how clear" everyone is on what the government is supposed to do, that only lasts until the lower classes experience a crisis of some sort (war, economic problems, famine), and then they'll vote whoever into office will take more power and promise to save them.
Of course, that doesn't fly under any current government... but that doesn't mean it cannot possibly fly at all, ever.
That's true. We could throw out democracy and institute an authoritarian dictatorship, in which case the number of people who "are clear" about what the government isn't supposed to do is reduced to one. Or a totalitarian oligarchy, as long as each member of "the party" is "clear" and keeps in line.
Alas, it's not all a bunch of philosopher kings who get those dictator jobs. So that won't work either.
It perhaps isn't hopeless, but until you figure out how to enforce that "everyone must be clear about small government" aspect of your plan, I don't think it's going to work any better than what people have already tried.
Generalizability, no, but you can get there with the basic divisibility rules they do teach in middle school. Multiples of 100 are divisible by 4, multiples of 1,000 are divisible by 8. 32=8x4, so you just need a multiple of 100,000.
While that's true, I think it already requires one generalization that most middle-school kids don't realize, i.e., that you can effectively "multiply" the requirements for divisibility rules to obtain rules for higher numbers.
(In middle school, some kids realize this about 6 -- which is usually taught to encompass the rules for 2 and for 3. A Mathcounts kid might also learn how to use this for divisibility by 12 or 15, etc. But I think it takes a little extra leap of logic to do what you did. Either way, the kid obviously had to take a leap beyond the "normal" use of middle-school divisibility rules.)
The difference between people who are good at math and people who win math competitions is the ability to make educated guesses on the fly. Once you see enough problems that look difficult but turn out to be trivial when viewed in the right context, you start looking for that context instead of trying to calculate the answer.
Uh, the whole point of Mathcounts is to encourage middle-school students to think on a more "abstract" level. They actively WANT you to do "tricks" to solve the problems. For this purpose, they aren't "tricks" nor for that matter was this answer likely an "educated guess." It's only a trivial problem if you know a little basic number theory and can see a pattern.
ALL of the kids who had gotten to the final round of this competition would have realized that they did NOT want them to calculate the answer by direct division. This competition is not a calculation speed contest, it's about applying various mathematical tools to get to a quick answer.
Seeing the pattern, by the way, IS still "calculating" the answer. It's just doing it more efficiently, because you have better knowledge and better abilities to generalize (which are important skills to do well in more advanced math).
By the way, of course there are other simple ways of solving the problem (e.g., recognizing that 10^n is automatically divisible by 2^n, since 32=2^5, then any power of 10 greater than 10^5 is automatically divisible by 32) -- I was just referencing the general divisibility rules that I know kids in the Mathcounts stuff are usually taught.
Arithmetic. Americans seem unable to tell the difference
Nope. Three problems:
(1) Arithmetic is a PART of mathematics.
(2) Even if you want to insist it's not, the Mathcounts competition includes all sorts of stuff including basic geometry, basic algebra, probability, combinatorics, basic number theory, etc. NOT just arithmetic.
(3) If you think this kid solved that problem by basic "arithmetic" like division in 7 seconds, you're crazy. It requires an understanding of basic divisibility theory (i.e., part of number theory) to see certain patterns. For example, most kids know that you can determined divisibility by 2 by looking at last digit (even or odd). Some might realize that you can determine divisibility by 4 by looking at last TWO digits.
In this case, divisibility requires looking at last FIVE digits. (This requires generalizability of divisibility rules, usually something not taught directly to middle school kids.) Given that adding one produces a number with five zeroes at the end, that number would be divisible by 32, hence this number would have a remainder of 31.
Frankly, I'm surprised it took kids at this level 7 seconds to jump in with such a simple problem.
..excuse me friend, but it seems like you stopped reading my comment after the first couple sentences;
Perhaps a little good faith here? No, I read your entire comment and was so excited about it that I felt I should add more detail!
you're preaching to the choir, so-to-speak, and more or less repeating what I already stated.
Yes, AND adding some more detail about why BMI is so bad. I wasn't arguing against you -- I was trying to emphasize your points.
Sorry if I wasn't clear about that, but next time please also don't assume that someone didn't read your comment just because they only responded to a portion of it (to agree with it!!).
Rather than waster hours at the gym or the idiotic exercise of jogging, I do what came naturally a hundreds years ago ... work. It's amazing how much weight I have lost doing simple things like watching what I eat (i.e. stop buying chips, and eating Oreos in moderation), and laying pavers. Or mixing and pouring concrete by hand. Or using an ax and saw to cut down a tree and cut it to length instead of a chain saw. Installing my own flooring and kitchen cabinets instead of paying someone to do it.
THIS!
I really think in all of the discussions of the "obesity epidemic," the role of everyday exercise that happened in the context of chores and normal housework is underestimated. Yes, I think the rising levels of sugar, portion sizes, and the absence of as many "manual labor" jobs all have impacts -- but so does modern "convenience" in avoiding exercise.
I got to watch my father gradually succumb to this problem over the years. When I was young, I can remember him doing mostly manual work outside to keep up things: mowing the lawn with a push-mower, trimming the hedges with manual shears, digging up the garden each spring to turn over the soil with a shovel, raking leaves in the fall, shoveling snow off the driveway in the winter, cutting wood with manual saws and axes, etc.
And he was relatively trim. I recall helping him with many of these tasks. But over the years, riding mowers became more popular and affordable, the rototiller replaced the shovel to turn over soil, the leaf blower replaced the rake, the snowblower replaced the shovel, the wood was cut with a chain saw. And with each "convenience" it seems he put on a little weight.
I noticed this myself a few years back after I had put on a little more weight than I would like. But I bought a lot of manual tools for doing work around the house, rather than "convenient" ways to get stuff done faster. I never really liked "exercising" at the gym much -- an hour on a treadmill or exercise bike or whatever just seemed boring... and a complete waste of time.
But if you actually have to push a mower around the yard for an hour, that's good aerobic exercise. And turning over soil in the spring before planting the garden is a REAL workout with a shovel (if you have a garden of any size). And you feel like you've accomplished something.
And this is only just normal "maintenance" on your property. Add in more do-it-yourself projects, as most homeowners would do themselves decades ago, and you have a full "training program" covering all sorts of muscle groups, often combinations of aerobic exercise with weight training, etc... all just keeping up your house.
I understand some people may not enjoy this sort of thing as much as others -- some may just like spending hours at the gym or whatever. To each his own. My larger point, however, is that our "obesity epidemic" may also just be related to convenience -- both in terms of food and in avoiding the "normal" exercise that people a generation or two ago just had to do.
Hello friend, we have something in common: The bloody BMI charts don't represent us.
They never were designed to. BMI was designed to be an approximate measure for population averages; it was never intended to be a measure of individual health or obesity.
BMI charts are crap, they only represent the average, non-trained people, not anyone who deliberately trains for anything that causes them to build muscle.
Actually they don't represent the "average" people very well either. I've addressed studies on this in a comment on a previous story. Basically, no matter what threshold you set for "obesity" in BMI, you end up misdiagnosing at least 1/3 of people one way or the other. (With the current thresholds, it's closer to 1/2.) This isn't hard to understand: women are shorter on average but also tend to have higher bodyfat when healthy. Men are taller but have lower bodyfat. Thus, in order to encompass non-equivalent groups as a population metric, it has a built-in bias to make overestimate obesity in tall people and to underestimate it in short people.
Again, it was never designed as a metric for individuals when it was designed by demographers a couple centuries ago. For some weird reason, ignorant doctors and medical professionals adopted it ~40 years ago as an individual metric without understanding its statistical flaws for that purpose.
There are better metrics out there. Even the old tables from the 1960s are generally better, which usually separated out men from women, had separate categories for "body frame size" on the basis of various metrics, and sometimes incorporated age data too. Heck, there are studies which show that even measuring men's waist circumference ALONE (with no accounting for weight, height, or anything else) is a much better predictor of health problems than BMI. Let that sink in for a second. The single "one-fits-all" BMI number is a terrible indicator.
There may be good reasons to have authority to (de)escalate outside the hands of the flight crew.
Perhaps in some circumstances, but the flight crew should serve as a first-level "sanity check." The chances of having a paranoid or delusional person with an unjustified belief that terrorists are common on planes is orders of magnitude higher than the chances of seeing an actual terrorist on a plane.
And even if the person isn't mentally ill and imagining evil people everywhere, the flight crews on airplanes at least tend to have some actual training in spotting suspicious activity and handling terrorist situations. Random passengers generally do not.
Again, if the woman insisted on escalating beyond flight crew, fine -- they could have radioed/telephoned into security and cleared it up in a matter of minutes (in a rational world, that is).
I hope they billed the idiot for the inconvenience, expense and defamation...
While people are (perhaps rightly) ganging up on this passenger and blaming her for being ignorant, she was only a small part of the problem here. The Washington Post story on this incident notes a comment from Menzio that isn't in the summary here, where Menzio expressed concern about...
"A security protocol that is too rigid--in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks--and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless. "
Contrast this incident with what would happen in a sane world.
What happened here:
- Woman feigns illness to deplane. Reports suspicious person to authorities. Pilot escorts "terrorist" off plane. Delays follow for hours as suspect is questioned until "threat" is cleared.
What would happen in a sane world:
- Woman says to flight attendant, "Can I talk to you for a second?" and gets up from seat. Attendant knows terrorists are much rarer than lightning strikes, so is skeptical. After short conversation, flight attendant walks past, glances at man's paper, sees he's just doing math, and tells woman everything is fine -- return to seat.
What would happen in a relatively sane world with some greater level of caution:
- Woman has conversation with flight attendant. Flight attendant walks up to man, sees math. Attendant casually asks, "Hey, sir, what are you working on there?" Guy replies, "Oh, well... economics actually. I'm a prof at Penn." Situation resolved.
If still suspicious, we could even go a step further -- Attendant: "Oh, can I just check your ticket? We had a question from a passenger about seat numbers?" Attendant checks name of passenger, excuses herself, sends message to security -- they do a Google search and verify guy actually is Ivy League prof in economics, and situation is resolved in 3 minutes instead of hours.
Bottom line: while we can laugh that this woman's ignorance, the greater problem here is the general paranoia and bureaucratic structure around security theatre that requires disproportionate responses to things that don't deserve them.
Best play of words I've read in a very long time. Virtual +5 Funny to you, my good sir.
Actually, I assume it was just a reference to this internet meme from over a decade ago with the same puns. Still funny though.
"There's this guy in the seat next to me... he's writing some message with Arabic numbers in it."
See -- that was the suspicion! The passenger obviously saw he was Italian, so why wasn't he using Roman numerals?!? Those suspicious Arabic numerals were a dead giveaway: Obviously he must be an Arab terrorist posing as an Italian. it's always those little things that give the foreigners away....
So a man discovers computers, a women figured out how to do a diddly on it, and we celebrate her as the first programmer without calling him the first programmable machine inventor.
Typical Feminism, and these days, Typical Slashdot.
Umm... huh? From TFS:
Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after.
That sounds like we start TFS by recognizing Babbage's contributions for designing these "programmable computing engines." And, just in case that's not enough for you, there's a link to the Wikipedia article on Babbage right in that sentence in TFS which acknowledges in its opening paragraph that Babbage: "...is best remembered for originating the concept of a programmable computer."
So, I'm really not sure how you get that Slashdot is somehow recognizing Lovelace without acknowledging Babbage's contributions.
Can we get past a week here without our allotted dosage of this bullshit for fucking once?
Ada Lovelace did some interesting stuff. She was an interesting person. And she's mentioned in the summary because Slashdot had a story on her bicentennial last year. Babbage's bicentennial was in 1991... but should we celebrate him this year too even though it's just his bicenquasquigenary (a term 99.9% of people haven't even heard of, because we generally don't celebrate 225 year anniversaries)? Would that make you happier?
In what way was the name inappropriate, except insofar as it concerns the utter humourless pomposity of bureaucrats and scientists?
(1) I know quite a few scientists. While they may not have the same sense of humor as the average person, they often have a quite well-developed (if sometimes weird) sense of humor. Bureaucrats? That's a different story...
(2) While I find this whole situation funny, I do think the name is a bit inappropriate for a long-term thing in a serious scientific research ship. Maybe they could have named it that for a day or a week or something, just to honor the silliness (and get some media attention), and then renamed it something more "serious" for the rest of its lifespan.
But naming it "Boaty McBoatface" for the long term? Can you imagine a scientist who worked on that ship and putting that on your resume? I don't know what you do for a living, but supposing you're a programmer, imagine that some serious research project that you put years of your life into was given the official designation "Codey McCodeface," and when you tried to get other jobs or talk to people in other fields, you had to use that name to tell them what you had invested your work in. "What was your project?!? What, were you one of the idiots who worked on Clippy??"
Would some people find it funny? Sure. But there are way too many people in the word who make a distinction between times for humor and times to "act like a grown-up." That's the reality of the world. How would you feel if you lost a job or were denied interviews because people who didn't know about your company's "Codey McCodeface" joke thought you weren't a serious candidate when you submitted your resume or mentioned it in an interview?
And, sure -- if you're secure in your career at the moment, you might say, "Well, I wouldn't want to work for those humorless idiots anyway." That's all well and good until you really need a job. Or you're a scientist up for tenure or some significant prize, and someone who doesn't read the news sees you did research on "Boaty McBoatface."
We have social and linguistic conventions in the world. It's generally frowned upon to show up to a funeral dressed in ripped jeans and a tee-shirt, unless that's something the family is cool with. It's generally frowned upon to swear repeatedly in front of a bunch of little kids who aren't your own.
And it's generally appropriate to follow tradition in choosing names for major sea vessels from certain kinds of linguistic categories. That's just the way the world is... when you get your own ship, you can name it what you want.
Let's just hope they don't feed in Fifty Shades of Grey to the AI as part of the project. Then I'm sure you'd see a whole new layer of meaning to "getting tied up in traffic."
The move to an open-access model is not one that can be done in a short period of time, because it takes time for journals to develop the reputation that is the basis for their value.
Actually, it could be done rather quickly -- if academics simply just quit the major journals. Journals don't simply get reputation from their name alone -- they get their reputation from the people who continue to be involved with them. If major academics on the editorial board of a journal decided to quit en masse and did it publicly, that journal's reputation could plunge quickly, and much of that reputation could move to a new replacement open-access journal.
The Slashdot story I linked above regarding Lingua (now reformed as Glossa) is just one example; there are plenty of others that have happened in recent decades.
And whether the old journal's reputation simply dies or stays somewhat high (with less of its former glory) is irrelevant. The point is that an editorial board of major scholars reconstituted as a new journal can quickly move a lot of reputation to a new place... this doesn't necessarily have to be a slow process.
All I want is what is mine. The people paid for this research, they should get access to it. Full stop, end of story, no exceptions, not next year, not when (if) the copyright expires, NOW. Copyright infringement is downloading something you did not pay for. This is not copyright infringement because you have in fact already payed for it. This is getting what you are owed, what you and I have already paid for through our taxes.
I absolutely agree with you that there should be stipulations in public research dollars that fruits of research (such as publications) should be made freely available to the public.
HOWEVER, I actually disagree that -- without this stipulation being incorporated into grants -- a published piece is the property of taxpayers. Just because you have a financial interest in facilitating something doesn't mean you own all possible things that could come out of it -- at least not without a contract that says so.
What if a taxpayer-funded grant only paid for 1% of the research expenses? What if the grant paid for the lab research time, etc., but the publication also contains significant original work generated by the researcher on his/her own time? (This would be more common in social sciences or humanistic fields where the writing of research itself is a significant act separate from basic data collection/organization.)
There are all sorts of complex issues about who "owns" something here, and multiple funding sources also muddy the waters. That's why we should have specific guidelines worked into government grant programs that specify free and open publications of research when certain criteria are met.
Leeches like Elsevier and their ilk are the thieves who are stealing from us, not the other way around.
Well, to be fair, part of the problem is the researchers who chose not to publish in open journals.
But of course that's also a larger problem in academia where tenure expectations are often based on the reputation of publications, which usually emphasizes publication in "high-quality" journals... and those are often older ones that are part of these publishing empires. Shifting to open-access publication for research requires commitment from many major researchers in a discipline to actively promote open-access journals and shift the focus away from other journals... but junior scholars often can't take such a risk and publish where they know others will evaluate their work as "influential," regardless of access.
Putting stipulations on grant money like I mentioned above might solve some of these issues, since it will drive researchers to find ways to publish and/or drive journals to find ways to make such funding more accessible.