PLoS Biology has an insanely high impact factor. If I got a paper accepted in a journal with an impact factor of 14.1 I'd be an instant star in my department, and my department head would certainly have no problem finding the money. It is really a small amount compared to the price of doing research. A Danish university researcher cost about 100.000 USD per year including overheads, so it would be 3% of the budget for dissemination of the research results. Not that bad. (They would probably like us to publish more than one paper per year, but most papers have more than one author, so one paper per author per year is acceptable).
And that is a worst (or best) case. PLoS Biology gets lots of submission because of the high impact factor, which means they have to reject lots of papers, which create a large overhead. Their other journals are somewhat cheaper to publish in, even though all of them have what I'd consider very high impact factors.
Also, the subscription fee for the PLoS journals is much lower than for the old style journals, so roughly, for every two old style journals we could cancel subscriptions to, we could publish one article in a PLoS journal.
The average cost of a new pharmaceutical in the US is roughly $1.2 billion, and this is something that an individual or corporation is just going to do out of the goodness of their hearts when other corporations can immediately go out and sell the same pills without having the overhead that is R&D? I find that hard to believe.
Most of the world have public health care, which means that the development of the new drugs are going to be paid by the tax payers through the government anyway. Instead of the government financing the research indirectly through time limited monopolies, it could be financed directly through grants. This would eliminate a lot of unnecessary overheads, and more important, eliminate a lot of bad side effect from patents. Such as poor people being unable to afford medicine, despite the production price being well within their economic ability. That alone has most likely cost millions of lives in the third world. Add to that all the drawbacks of a monopoly (even time limited) that any economist will tell you about.
The research could still be done by private companies, competing for the grants.
> In fact these journals provide for a significant source of grants for projects which are not qualified for federal > funding.
I have never in my ten years working with scientists heard of anyone getting a grant from a journal.
Can you provide any numbers that suggest this should be a significant source for anything?
(Even if it was, with a few exceptions scientific journals are read almost exclusively by scientist, usually paid for by the basis research money for the institution. Thus, it would just move research money from one pocket to another, with a lot of overhead loss in the process).
Again, I have usually seen retrieved files (and directories) being placed in a different location than the original, so you can examine them before manually placing them in their original location.
The ones I have dealt with have all allowed you to retrieve a single file from within the backup granularity. Not sure what you mean by preview. Sounds like an interface thing.
The interface has always been horrible though, which kind of reinforces the original posters claim that the new (or at least less common) stuff is in the interface.
Only one of them has static typing. That alone ought to be the deciding factor for most people, one way or the other. Some people hate static typing, others can't live without it.
Personally, I find static typing annoying for small programs, and godsend for large programs.
Sun Java was not open source by the original meaning of the term, which was simply a new more "business acceptable" phrasing for the term free software.
It is true that the gcj/gij "camp" probably didn't call it closed source, but that is because they were part of the GNU family, who preferred the original term (free software) with all its connotations.
Later the term "open source" has been diluted on message boards byt people trying to "reverse engineer" a meaning from the name. But this is no different from "free software", which some people also guess includes any software that doesn't cost any money.
You are both still chasing the same red herring the article submitter tried to kill. Smoking is always the wrong choice (unless, of course, you want to look cool), so anyone choosing to smoke shows poor judgment, independent on age.
The reasons society value the freedom lower for kids are 1) kids don't have any anyway, being dependent on their parents, and 2) kids must undergo socialization before they can function in a society. The second reason is obviously politically incorrect, but nonetheless scientifically correct. 18 is arbitrarily chosen for some legal purposes as an age where the kids are supposed to be able to function independently.
The data should be valuable for image analysis. Mirror them, and develop an algorithm to find the head and tail of a sheep. Pay people to draw cows, and develop an algorithm to distinguish between species.
Only problem is, I'm not sure how valuable automated software for analyzing drawings is.
NANNYBOT 1.0: "WHAT A FINE... COW... YOU HAVE DRAWN!"
The benefit of a ban is possibly improved health in the group of people the ban effects. The cost of the ban is decreased freedom in the group the ban effects.
Your argument address the possibility that the value of the benefit might differ with age. You argument fail to address the possibility that the value of the cost might differ with age.
Since society value freedom for adults much higher than freedom for minors, the age discrimination is justified in this case. QED.
(A totally different discussion is whether society should value freedom for adults higher than freedom for minors, but it clearly does).
> Now, can you imagine your reaction if MS revoked your license because you bashed them in an > email sent from a Windows box?
No imagining needed, Microsoft has an equivalent clause. Not on hotmail, but then, it wasn't exactly the gmail license you quoted either.
(c) not use the Character Animation Data and Image Files to disparage Microsoft, its products or services or for promotional goods or for products which, in Microsoft's sole judgment, may diminish or otherwise damage Microsoft's goodwill
As far as I remember, it was brought up on/. and were were all appropriately outraged.
> That's like saying CBS is an advertising company, not a television company,
We *should* say that. It certainly makes a lot more sense when discussing CBS to keep in mind that the purpose of their shows are to sell advertisement, rather than wrongly assume that the purpose of the advertisements is to finance good shows.
> or the the NYT is an advertising company, not a newspaper company.
It is less clear cut, part of the purpose of NYT is to sell newspapers, part of it is to sell advertisement space. And some newspapers actually have purposes not related to profit as well, I don't know if NYT is one of those.
Anyway, Google is as much about broking ads for other peoples servers, as it is about selling ads on their own servers.
When talking about the identity of a business, it is useful to look at where they earn their money. Google have two substantial sources of income, the first is selling space for targeted advertising on their own servers, the second is broking targeted advertisements on other peoples servers. There are other sources of income, but they are insignificant.
This makes Google an advertising company.
We can speculate on how much their targeting depend on the content of the servers, and how much depends on profile information on the user. I suspect it mostly depends on the former, the ads I see certainly seem to have more to do with the site than with me. Only the second really has a potential for monopolistic abuse,
> It's the richest country in the world because its citizens can and do take care of their basic > needs themselves.
Six of seven countries (I don't know about Qatar) listed as richer than USA have universal health care.
> What you don't seem to understand is that the taking care of its citizens is not one of the > government's jobs.
Nonetheless, a job it does much more efficiently than the private sector. The total health care expense in Denmark per citizen is half of the amount in USA.
> It isn't that "you can't do anything" with the iPhone; it's that the iPhone doesn't enable you > to do what you want on a "smartphone." The iPhone - like virtually all Apple products, from Mac > OS X (and Macs) to the iPhone and iPod - is aimed at the average consumer, while attempting to > hit enough high notes for the geeks to be satisfied. The Apple of late has been largely > successful in this regard.
Reminds me of the last days of the "academic Internet". The phone companies were arguing that the anarchistic Internet where everybody could set up a service was fine for geeks, but that the average consumer would just be confused, and therefore were better off with the Phone Company's strictly controlled data network with Phone Company approved services.
The truth is that the Phone Company or in this case Apple, no matter how smart they believe they are, cannot duplicate the inventive power of a free market. That is why Apple lost the battle of the PC market to the plain IBM architecture (which they eventually adopted), and why the Phone Companies lost the battle of the data networks to the "academic and geeky" Internet.
Apple did win control of the music player market for now, but then again these devices doesn't need to do much beside playing music.
> However, I would argue a an inbox full of spam can do a lot less damage to an individual than getting mixed up with drugs.
Correct. It can also do more damage, depending on the drug in question, and on the content of the real mail you lost because the inbox was full, or that you accidentally deleted because it drowned in all the spam.
So the fair thing would be to treat the two cases as equally bad per end user. So spamming a million people should be punished like dealing (illegal) drugs to a million people.
[Actually, the drug dealers "victims" generally agree to the transaction, while the spammers victims doesn't, so the two crimes aren't really comparable. ]
There is, at least in Europe, a span between something being a secret, and something being public. We could call it "private". There are several homosexual members of the parliament whose sexual orientation is not really a secret. They live together with their lovers, the press know it, and for the more prominent members (such as possibly our prime minister[*]) the man on the street knows it as well.
But the press generally doesn't write about it, until they appear as a couple at an official event, in which case the more gossip oriented part of the press will cover it like any other famous or semi-famous couple. It is not really different from how heterosexual couples are treated, who your partner is is considered a private matter, until you choose to make it part of your public image.
[*] The press don't write about it, but the rappers rap about it, and one guy made a (state-sponsored) mockumentary about it.
Slashdot Mirror
PLoS Biology has an insanely high impact factor. If I got a paper accepted in a journal with an impact factor of 14.1 I'd be an instant star in my department, and my department head would certainly have no problem finding the money. It is really a small amount compared to the price of doing research. A Danish university researcher cost about 100.000 USD per year including overheads, so it would be 3% of the budget for dissemination of the research results. Not that bad. (They would probably like us to publish more than one paper per year, but most papers have more than one author, so one paper per author per year is acceptable).
And that is a worst (or best) case. PLoS Biology gets lots of submission because of the high impact factor, which means they have to reject lots of papers, which create a large overhead. Their other journals are somewhat cheaper to publish in, even though all of them have what I'd consider very high impact factors.
Also, the subscription fee for the PLoS journals is much lower than for the old style journals, so roughly, for every two old style journals we could cancel subscriptions to, we could publish one article in a PLoS journal.
Most of the world have public health care, which means that the development of the new drugs are going to be paid by the tax payers through the government anyway. Instead of the government financing the research indirectly through time limited monopolies, it could be financed directly through grants. This would eliminate a lot of unnecessary overheads, and more important, eliminate a lot of bad side effect from patents. Such as poor people being unable to afford medicine, despite the production price being well within their economic ability. That alone has most likely cost millions of lives in the third world. Add to that all the drawbacks of a monopoly (even time limited) that any economist will tell you about.
The research could still be done by private companies, competing for the grants.
> In fact these journals provide for a significant source of grants for projects which are not qualified for federal
> funding.
I have never in my ten years working with scientists heard of anyone getting a grant from a journal.
Can you provide any numbers that suggest this should be a significant source for anything?
(Even if it was, with a few exceptions scientific journals are read almost exclusively by scientist, usually paid for by the basis research money for the institution. Thus, it would just move research money from one pocket to another, with a lot of overhead loss in the process).
Again, I have usually seen retrieved files (and directories) being placed in a different location than the original, so you can examine them before manually placing them in their original location.
The ones I have dealt with have all allowed you to retrieve a single file from within the backup granularity. Not sure what you mean by preview. Sounds like an interface thing.
The interface has always been horrible though, which kind of reinforces the original posters claim that the new (or at least less common) stuff is in the interface.
you are not supposed to promote your lover way beyond his or her level of competence.
> Yeah. There's more to Time Machine than just a one-off backup of your data. TM
> aggregates changes and you can roll back to any point in time.
Doesn't all backup programs do this?
Only one of them has static typing. That alone ought to be the deciding factor for most people, one way or the other. Some people hate static typing, others can't live without it.
Personally, I find static typing annoying for small programs, and godsend for large programs.
Sun Java was not open source by the original meaning of the term, which was simply a new more "business acceptable" phrasing for the term free software.
It is true that the gcj/gij "camp" probably didn't call it closed source, but that is because they were part of the GNU family, who preferred the original term (free software) with all its connotations.
Later the term "open source" has been diluted on message boards byt people trying to "reverse engineer" a meaning from the name. But this is no different from "free software", which some people also guess includes any software that doesn't cost any money.
You are both still chasing the same red herring the article submitter tried to kill. Smoking is always the wrong choice (unless, of course, you want to look cool), so anyone choosing to smoke shows poor judgment, independent on age.
The reasons society value the freedom lower for kids are 1) kids don't have any anyway, being dependent on their parents, and 2) kids must undergo socialization before they can function in a society. The second reason is obviously politically incorrect, but nonetheless scientifically correct. 18 is arbitrarily chosen for some legal purposes as an age where the kids are supposed to be able to function independently.
> Depends on the point of view doesn't it? Somehow I don't think most cognitive under 18's will see it that way.
How so? Will they disagree with the claim that society value their freedom less than the freedom of adults?
The data should be valuable for image analysis. Mirror them, and develop an algorithm to find the head and tail of a sheep. Pay people to draw cows, and develop an algorithm to distinguish between species.
... COW ... YOU HAVE DRAWN!"
Only problem is, I'm not sure how valuable automated software for analyzing drawings is.
NANNYBOT 1.0: "WHAT A FINE
The benefit of a ban is possibly improved health in the group of people the ban effects.
The cost of the ban is decreased freedom in the group the ban effects.
Your argument address the possibility that the value of the benefit might differ with age.
You argument fail to address the possibility that the value of the cost might differ with age.
Since society value freedom for adults much higher than freedom for minors, the age discrimination is justified in this case. QED.
(A totally different discussion is whether society should value freedom for adults higher than freedom for minors, but it clearly does).
I'd say that the absence of the #1 cell phone maker (while #2 and #3 is there) is more striking than some net providers missing.
> email sent from a Windows box?
No imagining needed, Microsoft has an equivalent clause. Not on hotmail, but then, it wasn't exactly the gmail license you quoted either.
As far as I remember, it was brought up on
> This could be argued about MSDOS and Windows too, for many it was the best product available.
An OS rarely has any value in itself, the value is in the applications available for it (ignoring bundled application for the argument).
MSDOS and MS-Windows is/were the only way to enable the applications (again, ignoring stuff like DR-DOS and OS/2 for the argument).
Google, on the other hand, only searches the sites available to everybody.
So Google (at least their search engine part) wins in a free market, where Microsoft "wins" in market where it holds a monopoly.
> That's like saying CBS is an advertising company, not a television company,
We *should* say that. It certainly makes a lot more sense when discussing CBS to keep in mind that the purpose of their shows are to sell advertisement, rather than wrongly assume that the purpose of the advertisements is to finance good shows.
> or the the NYT is an advertising company, not a newspaper company.
It is less clear cut, part of the purpose of NYT is to sell newspapers, part of it is to sell advertisement space. And some newspapers actually have purposes not related to profit as well, I don't know if NYT is one of those.
Anyway, Google is as much about broking ads for other peoples servers, as it is about selling ads on their own servers.
When talking about the identity of a business, it is useful to look at where they earn their money. Google have two substantial sources of income, the first is selling space for targeted advertising on their own servers, the second is broking targeted advertisements on other peoples servers. There are other sources of income, but they are insignificant.
This makes Google an advertising company.
We can speculate on how much their targeting depend on the content of the servers, and how much depends on profile information on the user. I suspect it mostly depends on the former, the ads I see certainly seem to have more to do with the site than with me. Only the second really has a potential for monopolistic abuse,
> It's the richest country in the world because its citizens can and do take care of their basic
> needs themselves.
Six of seven countries (I don't know about Qatar) listed as richer than USA have universal health care.
> What you don't seem to understand is that the taking care of its citizens is not one of the
> government's jobs.
Nonetheless, a job it does much more efficiently than the private sector. The total health care expense in Denmark per citizen is half of the amount in USA.
> It isn't that "you can't do anything" with the iPhone; it's that the iPhone doesn't enable you
> to do what you want on a "smartphone." The iPhone - like virtually all Apple products, from Mac
> OS X (and Macs) to the iPhone and iPod - is aimed at the average consumer, while attempting to
> hit enough high notes for the geeks to be satisfied. The Apple of late has been largely
> successful in this regard.
Reminds me of the last days of the "academic Internet". The phone companies were arguing that the anarchistic Internet where everybody could set up a service was fine for geeks, but that the average consumer would just be confused, and therefore were better off with the Phone Company's strictly controlled data network with Phone Company approved services.
The truth is that the Phone Company or in this case Apple, no matter how smart they believe they are, cannot duplicate the inventive power of a free market. That is why Apple lost the battle of the PC market to the plain IBM architecture (which they eventually adopted), and why the Phone Companies lost the battle of the data networks to the "academic and geeky" Internet.
Apple did win control of the music player market for now, but then again these devices doesn't need to do much beside playing music.
> They keep bragging about how a minute's play can wipe out months of work.
I would never get that far, I refuse to play any game for which playtime feels like work.
> However, I would argue a an inbox full of spam can do a lot less damage to an individual than getting mixed up with drugs.
Correct. It can also do more damage, depending on the drug in question, and on the content of the real mail you lost because the inbox was full, or that you accidentally deleted because it drowned in all the spam.
So the fair thing would be to treat the two cases as equally bad per end user. So spamming a million people should be punished like dealing (illegal) drugs to a million people.
[Actually, the drug dealers "victims" generally agree to the transaction, while the spammers victims doesn't, so the two crimes aren't really comparable. ]
> I, for one, welcome our new PER* overlords.
Thank you.
There is, at least in Europe, a span between something being a secret, and something being public. We could call it "private". There are several homosexual members of the parliament whose sexual orientation is not really a secret. They live together with their lovers, the press know it, and for the more prominent members (such as possibly our prime minister[*]) the man on the street knows it as well.
But the press generally doesn't write about it, until they appear as a couple at an official event, in which case the more gossip oriented part of the press will cover it like any other famous or semi-famous couple. It is not really different from how heterosexual couples are treated, who your partner is is considered a private matter, until you choose to make it part of your public image.
[*] The press don't write about it, but the rappers rap about it, and one guy made a (state-sponsored) mockumentary about it.
I'd agree with the GP, anyone arguing at that level is unlikely to get the grammar right.