If you are not doing scientific research why are you trying to read science articles, drone?
I'd appreciate your point a little more were it not for the fact that whenever I start talking to any non-researcher about my research, their eyes glaze over and they change the subject at the first possible opportunity.
Then again, my own lab falls asleep when I start talking about my research... maybe it's just me...
I know you need funding, but could you please not sell your research to publishing companies that have paywalls like this?
Sure, just as soon as it won't hurt my career. If I have research that a top journal would publish, publishing there is better for me, as many jobs I'd be looking at would judge me based on where I had published rather than what I had published. And of course, top journals know they can get away with charging a huge fee for it.
This is something that really needs to be solved elsewhere, as neither researchers nor publishers have any incentive to change.
You're dying. Six weeks to live. What do you care of side effects? This is the major problem with FDA interference with medicines that can control or cure life-ending diseases.
I think hypothetical situations like one you just made are not good foundations for changing policy.
For one thing, I'm uncomfortable with allowing companies to be in a position to exploit desperate people, which is what you're doing if you say "You can skip the safety trials and go directly to human testing if people are desperate enough."
True, you also have added the caveat of "dying in 6 weeks." That's 6 weeks longer than the patient might have if the meds unexpectedly prove toxic in humans. And where's the line? 2 months? A year? How certain does death have to be before you say to hell with all safety testing? I'm not a cancer expert of any type, but it seems to me that if you're -definitely- going to die, the cancer has already metastasized to secondary sites which will kill you, and this drug does nothing at that point. Maybe that's not the case, but if the drug has no chance of saving an individual, I don't think skipping safety testing and going directly to terminal cases is justified.
I think it's also important to keep in mind that testing on people who are about to die from cancer has limited use anyway. Seems like a bigger goal would be preventing cancer in the first place or fighting cancer in it's earlier stages, well before you're about to die of it. I'd guess that type of testing would be more likely to find drugs that would -delay- death (definitely a worthy goal) but would be less likely to find "the cure for cancer."
So I don't think "this patient is about to die" means all strings should be off, there are still important ethical questions. The pharmaceutical industry doesn't exactly have a perfect record when it comes to ethics, and dying patients could easily be duped into making themselves guinea pigs, sacrificing what little time they have left without understanding the risks.
It's also important to realize that the FDA doesn't exist to block life-saving drugs from being available, they're not as unreasonable as you might think, they deserve a little more credit than I feel you're giving them. When the cocktail treatment for HIV was being tested in humans, it quickly became clear that the treatment was significantly better than the placebo and it would be unethical to continue administering the placebo instead, and if I recall the test was ended prematurely and the drug was available to the market soon after. Conversely, FDA interference has worked in the past, the industry was complaining about how much interference it was putting up on a drug called thalidomide when all of Europe had already approved it, when it became clear it had unpleasant side effects.
Indeed, really speaks to the large "grew up in a totalitarian society where you did what you were told by a faceless voice without question" segment of the slashdot population. Those slashdotters who grew up in north korea? Totally reading the book right now.
So if we manage to reduce the boot time by ten seconds, that'll add up to decades of time saved amongst all the Mac users. That's the equivalent of saving the lives of one or more Mac users! The engineer says that Steve putting such issues in perspective like that is one of the ways he motivates the folks at Apple to go that extra mile to deliver (for the most part) stellar products.
So he motivates his employess by showing that he is completely insane? Hmm... I think I have a future in management...
"By filling out this TPS report correctly, you'll save Bob in HR 5 minutes, which is 5 minutes he could spend knocking up some broad, and that kid could later go on to prevent nuclear war. THE WORLD DEPENDS ON YOU FILLING OUT THE TPS CORRECTLY!!! If you do not, I will unleash the rats. Do the right thing."
the criminals will have to wade through a sea of lolcats and fail posters to get to any actual business information
Unless they find a way to make the text searcheable and just search for "social security number" or "credit card number" and look at what's written right next to it. And while I don't know how to do that personally, it seems like the type of thing that would take about 10 minutes to figure out and then another 10 minutes to actually do.
It's supposed to be obvious when your giant MFP has a goddamn HARD DRIVE in it, and I've seen many that do.
See, I don't even know what an MFP is, so whether or not mine has a hard drive in it is really not obvious to me or my coworkers at the buffalo police office sex crimes division.
(For those of you who didn't RTFA, the "buffalo police office sex crimes division" was a humorous reference to the article. You missed out on that very funny joke. That'll learn you to not RTFA.)
- Proud graduate of the Roger Ebert school of winning fights on the Internet.
To be fair, this is really the best school for arguing with the hordes on the internet. You know, someone says you weren't born in the US and can't be president, and you show them the document proving them wrong, and they and 10,000 other people say it's a lie, and you point out that it's from the state, and they say they've never heard of Hawaii and if it's real it's probably in on the conspiracy, and then they come up with a fake document claiming you were born elsewhere, and you point out that country on the certificate didn't exist at the date on the certificate, and then suddenly there's a facebook group of "The time space continuum is clearly biased and is in on this communist conspiracy!" and has 3 million fans, and then you just sit in your oval office and rock back and forth crying "Why did I want this job!?!" Running away is really the best option, or may be a second best option behind "nuking it from orbit."
While I agree, the start of his article is along the lines of "Why did I write this? Because people keep bothering me about it, with suggestions for games. But they're wrong, games can never ever be art and here's why."
He doesn't quite come out and say he's never played a single videogame in the past decade, or admit that he's a confused old man who gets frustrated before he gets into a videogame, but it's there.
How was Portal art? It was just a fun, quirky first-person puzzle game. People have stretched the word art to far that it now includes anything they think is clever or memorable. I saw someone call Braid a work of art. No, it's just a side-scrolling puzzle game with piano music and pretentious level transitions.
I feel like you could say that about any work of art. For instance
How is the Mona Lisa art? It's just a nice looking painting of a smiling chick. People have stretch the word art to far that it now includes anything they think is clever or memorable. I saw someone call "The Scream" a work of art. No, it's just an expressionist painting with a lot of orange, pretentious people fawning over it, and people trying to steal it.
a lot of people here are just attacking him because they're gamers and want to attach some kind of significant meaning to their World of Warcraft characters or something.
Again to turn that around, a lot of artists and art critics are writing off games as insignificant because they want to attach some kind of significance to their equally pointless profession or something.
Interactive art doesn't let you "win." There's no boss and often there's no story. And if you bring up non-games, or games that are made to be experienced rather than progress or win, then Ebert argues that you're not making a game anymore, but rather simply making interactive art. I think Ebert's definition is that art can be video games, but video games are not art.
The "winnable" criteria seems completely arbitrary. How does winning a game make it not art? Example:Grand theft auto. You can finish all the missions and say you won, but then the game goes back to you running around in a violent virtual world filled with crime with no goal beyond what you set for yourself. Would you argue that grand theft auto is only a game when you're playing the missions, and when you're not progressing through it, it's "interactive art" instead of a game?
At this point it's almost like he's desperately trying to find some way of defining "art" in a way that excludes video games purely because he, for some reason, NEEDS them to not be art.
It's true. His response to the argument that "There are games from the first 20 years of videogames that are clearly more art than any movie from the first 20 years of filmmaking" boils down to "No, that silent movie where they go to the moon is more imaginative than any game, although I've never actually played any of the games you just mentioned."
It's an important point too. There's a reason why we don't remember anyone from the first 20 years of movie making saying "This isn't art." It's not because they didn't say that, art critics were no less pretentious or full of crap back in the early 1900's. It's because they were wrong, movies evolved significantly and became art, it just took a while.
Guess what - only criminals use guns to commit murder.
I'm unconvinced. I've met several law-abiding people who would likely be murderers if they had easy access to guns. Whether or not that -justifies- gun control legislation, I'm not going to argue. And whether or not legislation rather than laziness, rational thought most of the tmie, or financing prevented those individuals from having a gun, I also won't argue.
Agreed. If you buy an iPhone when you really wanted an Android phone, or an XBox 360 when you wanted a PC, or any number of other closed-platform solutions when what you wanted was an open-platform you have only yourself to blame.
I think complaining about how locked down something is more legitimate when there's not complete choice, or when your options are limited. Actually, I think consumers complaining about what they're offered is always acceptable. But more specifically, all the consoles are basically as locked down as each other. It doesn't need to be that way.
If you're choosing between two equal alternatives, one open and one closed, sure you're an idiot if you go with the closed one. On the other hand, if you live in an area where AT&T is the only one who gets decent reception... well, it's not really a hypothetical. I would have preferred the droid for a variety of reasons, but verizon's reception here is crap.
There were other AT&T alternatives I could have gone with, all of course with other tradeoffs. I own most of the blame, yes, but there were other factors to consider.
Re:Slashdot modded by petulant children these days
on
In Defense of Jailbreaking
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ya gotta love the sensitivity of the slashdot children when you criticize anything about their firefox blankey.
..when you go out of your way to criticize firefox on a topic that has nothing to do with firefox. Yeah, I know, like petulant little children, all modding that off topic flamebaiting as off topic, the nerve! They're almost as bad as [insert group here] when I go into one of their [rallies/forums/other place of gathering or discussion] and talk trash on [insert unrelated subject that happens to be viewed favorably by a good number of said partisans].
In Australian universities, rightly or wrongly, they have something of a reputation for being underhanded, plagiarising cheats who you really, really do not want to have in your group assignments
That's funny because, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the student in front of you for our group assignment.
Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Interkin3tic: Wait til I get going! Now, where was I?
Man in Black: Australia.
(sorry, I realize that few people outside of the US get that princess bride reference. It's from a movie.)
they will lie cheat and steal to get their way - china has truely embraced western culture.
Lying, cheating, or stealing for financial gain were pioneered far before western culture was around, so I'm not quite sure what that last part is about. Seems ethnocentric to suggest it's a cultural difference.
'We're breaking new ground. Playboy has [an edition with] Braille wording, but there are no pictures.'
They had to withdraw it - too many teenagers were injuring themselves on the centerfold staples.
Maybe that was intentional. Playboy without the pictures, just the articles? I'd rather impale my finger on a staple read than Norman Mailer's latest clap-trap about his waning libido.
(This Simpson's reference probably would have been funnier before 2007, or were Norman Mailer still alive.)
wooshmodded! (That being my term for when someone makes a response to a funny or sarcastic post, misses the point, and in fact restates the joke more obvious or the point without sarcasm, and gets modded higher for it. It seemed important when I started explaining this...)
That would be a HUGE seller for demonstrations, students in libraries, passengers at airports, etc.
I could see some airtravelers buying it not realizing that if a terrorist did attack, he wouldn't be shooting them. Demonstrators usually are facing clubs and gas, but I guess some might be interested there too.
What kind of students and what kind of libraries though are you thinking of?!?
It isn't going to help much if the bullet has enough force to make the t-shirt penetrate you. If we're talking a 2-inch stretch, then it'll make things less messy, but no less lethal.
That's why you wear a bullet-proof armor underneath the t-shirt.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are not doing scientific research why are you trying to read science articles, drone?
I'd appreciate your point a little more were it not for the fact that whenever I start talking to any non-researcher about my research, their eyes glaze over and they change the subject at the first possible opportunity.
Then again, my own lab falls asleep when I start talking about my research... maybe it's just me...
I know you need funding, but could you please not sell your research to publishing companies that have paywalls like this?
Sure, just as soon as it won't hurt my career. If I have research that a top journal would publish, publishing there is better for me, as many jobs I'd be looking at would judge me based on where I had published rather than what I had published. And of course, top journals know they can get away with charging a huge fee for it.
This is something that really needs to be solved elsewhere, as neither researchers nor publishers have any incentive to change.
You're dying. Six weeks to live. What do you care of side effects? This is the major problem with FDA interference with medicines that can control or cure life-ending diseases.
I think hypothetical situations like one you just made are not good foundations for changing policy.
For one thing, I'm uncomfortable with allowing companies to be in a position to exploit desperate people, which is what you're doing if you say "You can skip the safety trials and go directly to human testing if people are desperate enough."
True, you also have added the caveat of "dying in 6 weeks." That's 6 weeks longer than the patient might have if the meds unexpectedly prove toxic in humans. And where's the line? 2 months? A year? How certain does death have to be before you say to hell with all safety testing? I'm not a cancer expert of any type, but it seems to me that if you're -definitely- going to die, the cancer has already metastasized to secondary sites which will kill you, and this drug does nothing at that point. Maybe that's not the case, but if the drug has no chance of saving an individual, I don't think skipping safety testing and going directly to terminal cases is justified.
I think it's also important to keep in mind that testing on people who are about to die from cancer has limited use anyway. Seems like a bigger goal would be preventing cancer in the first place or fighting cancer in it's earlier stages, well before you're about to die of it. I'd guess that type of testing would be more likely to find drugs that would -delay- death (definitely a worthy goal) but would be less likely to find "the cure for cancer."
So I don't think "this patient is about to die" means all strings should be off, there are still important ethical questions. The pharmaceutical industry doesn't exactly have a perfect record when it comes to ethics, and dying patients could easily be duped into making themselves guinea pigs, sacrificing what little time they have left without understanding the risks.
It's also important to realize that the FDA doesn't exist to block life-saving drugs from being available, they're not as unreasonable as you might think, they deserve a little more credit than I feel you're giving them. When the cocktail treatment for HIV was being tested in humans, it quickly became clear that the treatment was significantly better than the placebo and it would be unethical to continue administering the placebo instead, and if I recall the test was ended prematurely and the drug was available to the market soon after. Conversely, FDA interference has worked in the past, the industry was complaining about how much interference it was putting up on a drug called thalidomide when all of Europe had already approved it, when it became clear it had unpleasant side effects.
I bet it wouldn't have taken you that long to figure out.
I don't know, I'm very easily dist- whoa, a butterfly!
Indeed, really speaks to the large "grew up in a totalitarian society where you did what you were told by a faceless voice without question" segment of the slashdot population. Those slashdotters who grew up in north korea? Totally reading the book right now.
So if we manage to reduce the boot time by ten seconds, that'll add up to decades of time saved amongst all the Mac users. That's the equivalent of saving the lives of one or more Mac users! The engineer says that Steve putting such issues in perspective like that is one of the ways he motivates the folks at Apple to go that extra mile to deliver (for the most part) stellar products.
So he motivates his employess by showing that he is completely insane? Hmm... I think I have a future in management...
"By filling out this TPS report correctly, you'll save Bob in HR 5 minutes, which is 5 minutes he could spend knocking up some broad, and that kid could later go on to prevent nuclear war. THE WORLD DEPENDS ON YOU FILLING OUT THE TPS CORRECTLY!!! If you do not, I will unleash the rats. Do the right thing."
the criminals will have to wade through a sea of lolcats and fail posters to get to any actual business information
Unless they find a way to make the text searcheable and just search for "social security number" or "credit card number" and look at what's written right next to it. And while I don't know how to do that personally, it seems like the type of thing that would take about 10 minutes to figure out and then another 10 minutes to actually do.
It's supposed to be obvious when your giant MFP has a goddamn HARD DRIVE in it, and I've seen many that do.
See, I don't even know what an MFP is, so whether or not mine has a hard drive in it is really not obvious to me or my coworkers at the buffalo police office sex crimes division.
(For those of you who didn't RTFA, the "buffalo police office sex crimes division" was a humorous reference to the article. You missed out on that very funny joke. That'll learn you to not RTFA.)
Taco really was assking for it with the "office-party-bums dept" bit.
- Proud graduate of the Roger Ebert school of winning fights on the Internet.
To be fair, this is really the best school for arguing with the hordes on the internet. You know, someone says you weren't born in the US and can't be president, and you show them the document proving them wrong, and they and 10,000 other people say it's a lie, and you point out that it's from the state, and they say they've never heard of Hawaii and if it's real it's probably in on the conspiracy, and then they come up with a fake document claiming you were born elsewhere, and you point out that country on the certificate didn't exist at the date on the certificate, and then suddenly there's a facebook group of "The time space continuum is clearly biased and is in on this communist conspiracy!" and has 3 million fans, and then you just sit in your oval office and rock back and forth crying "Why did I want this job!?!" Running away is really the best option, or may be a second best option behind "nuking it from orbit."
While I agree, the start of his article is along the lines of "Why did I write this? Because people keep bothering me about it, with suggestions for games. But they're wrong, games can never ever be art and here's why."
He doesn't quite come out and say he's never played a single videogame in the past decade, or admit that he's a confused old man who gets frustrated before he gets into a videogame, but it's there.
How was Portal art? It was just a fun, quirky first-person puzzle game. People have stretched the word art to far that it now includes anything they think is clever or memorable. I saw someone call Braid a work of art. No, it's just a side-scrolling puzzle game with piano music and pretentious level transitions.
I feel like you could say that about any work of art. For instance
How is the Mona Lisa art? It's just a nice looking painting of a smiling chick. People have stretch the word art to far that it now includes anything they think is clever or memorable. I saw someone call "The Scream" a work of art. No, it's just an expressionist painting with a lot of orange, pretentious people fawning over it, and people trying to steal it.
a lot of people here are just attacking him because they're gamers and want to attach some kind of significant meaning to their World of Warcraft characters or something.
Again to turn that around, a lot of artists and art critics are writing off games as insignificant because they want to attach some kind of significance to their equally pointless profession or something.
Interactive art doesn't let you "win." There's no boss and often there's no story. And if you bring up non-games, or games that are made to be experienced rather than progress or win, then Ebert argues that you're not making a game anymore, but rather simply making interactive art. I think Ebert's definition is that art can be video games, but video games are not art.
The "winnable" criteria seems completely arbitrary. How does winning a game make it not art? Example:Grand theft auto. You can finish all the missions and say you won, but then the game goes back to you running around in a violent virtual world filled with crime with no goal beyond what you set for yourself. Would you argue that grand theft auto is only a game when you're playing the missions, and when you're not progressing through it, it's "interactive art" instead of a game?
At this point it's almost like he's desperately trying to find some way of defining "art" in a way that excludes video games purely because he, for some reason, NEEDS them to not be art.
It's true. His response to the argument that "There are games from the first 20 years of videogames that are clearly more art than any movie from the first 20 years of filmmaking" boils down to "No, that silent movie where they go to the moon is more imaginative than any game, although I've never actually played any of the games you just mentioned."
It's an important point too. There's a reason why we don't remember anyone from the first 20 years of movie making saying "This isn't art." It's not because they didn't say that, art critics were no less pretentious or full of crap back in the early 1900's. It's because they were wrong, movies evolved significantly and became art, it just took a while.
Guess what - only criminals use guns to commit murder.
I'm unconvinced. I've met several law-abiding people who would likely be murderers if they had easy access to guns. Whether or not that -justifies- gun control legislation, I'm not going to argue. And whether or not legislation rather than laziness, rational thought most of the tmie, or financing prevented those individuals from having a gun, I also won't argue.
Agreed. If you buy an iPhone when you really wanted an Android phone, or an XBox 360 when you wanted a PC, or any number of other closed-platform solutions when what you wanted was an open-platform you have only yourself to blame.
I think complaining about how locked down something is more legitimate when there's not complete choice, or when your options are limited. Actually, I think consumers complaining about what they're offered is always acceptable. But more specifically, all the consoles are basically as locked down as each other. It doesn't need to be that way.
If you're choosing between two equal alternatives, one open and one closed, sure you're an idiot if you go with the closed one. On the other hand, if you live in an area where AT&T is the only one who gets decent reception... well, it's not really a hypothetical. I would have preferred the droid for a variety of reasons, but verizon's reception here is crap.
There were other AT&T alternatives I could have gone with, all of course with other tradeoffs. I own most of the blame, yes, but there were other factors to consider.
Edit: meant group, not partisans...
Ya gotta love the sensitivity of the slashdot children when you criticize anything about their firefox blankey.
..when you go out of your way to criticize firefox on a topic that has nothing to do with firefox. Yeah, I know, like petulant little children, all modding that off topic flamebaiting as off topic, the nerve! They're almost as bad as [insert group here] when I go into one of their [rallies/forums/other place of gathering or discussion] and talk trash on [insert unrelated subject that happens to be viewed favorably by a good number of said partisans].
In Australian universities, rightly or wrongly, they have something of a reputation for being underhanded, plagiarising cheats who you really, really do not want to have in your group assignments
That's funny because, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the student in front of you for our group assignment.
Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Interkin3tic: Wait til I get going! Now, where was I?
Man in Black: Australia.
(sorry, I realize that few people outside of the US get that princess bride reference. It's from a movie.)
They took a map, a ruler and pencil, and started chopping up the continent. Literally.
Wow! The pencil really is mightier than the sword if it can -literally- cleave continents! Or else that was not actually a literal statement.
they will lie cheat and steal to get their way - china has truely embraced western culture.
Lying, cheating, or stealing for financial gain were pioneered far before western culture was around, so I'm not quite sure what that last part is about. Seems ethnocentric to suggest it's a cultural difference.
'We're breaking new ground. Playboy has [an edition with] Braille wording, but there are no pictures.'
They had to withdraw it - too many teenagers were injuring themselves on the centerfold staples.
Maybe that was intentional. Playboy without the pictures, just the articles? I'd rather impale my finger on a staple read than Norman Mailer's latest clap-trap about his waning libido.
(This Simpson's reference probably would have been funnier before 2007, or were Norman Mailer still alive.)
wooshmodded! (That being my term for when someone makes a response to a funny or sarcastic post, misses the point, and in fact restates the joke more obvious or the point without sarcasm, and gets modded higher for it. It seemed important when I started explaining this...)
That would be a HUGE seller for demonstrations, students in libraries, passengers at airports, etc.
I could see some airtravelers buying it not realizing that if a terrorist did attack, he wouldn't be shooting them. Demonstrators usually are facing clubs and gas, but I guess some might be interested there too.
What kind of students and what kind of libraries though are you thinking of?!?
It isn't going to help much if the bullet has enough force to make the t-shirt penetrate you. If we're talking a 2-inch stretch, then it'll make things less messy, but no less lethal.
That's why you wear a bullet-proof armor underneath the t-shirt.