scientists and researchers themselves regard peer review as providing 'only a minimal assurance of quality'
The idea that "peer reviewed" means "correct", or that it even should mean that, is a misunderstanding of what peer review is about. When I review a paper, I don't check every last statement to make sure it's correct, work through their derivations in detail searching for errors, look up all their references to be sure they say exactly what the article says they do, etc. That's just not what peer review is about. Recommending an article for publication basically means the following:
1. The work described in it is likely to be interesting to other researchers.
2. The work seems to have been carried out reasonably competently.
3. The article describes it clearly enough so that readers can understand what was done.
Once it's published, lots of other people will analyze it much more carefully and try to reproduce the work. If they find errors or can't reproduce it, they in turn will publish that. Science is a conversation. Recommending an article for publication just means it deserves to be a part of that conversation.
There's an easy solution to that: don't install one of these on a steep hill! As with any form of transportation, you should use it where it's appropriate, and not use it where it isn't. I'm sure we can think of lots of places where this system would work really badly, but that's irrelevant. There are also lots of places it would work well, so that's where you would install it.
Perhaps you could elaborate on what you think the problems are? But first look at their FAQ. You'll probably find it addresses whatever problems you think it has.
Having gone through their website, I think it sounds very clever and entirely practical. Compared to the light rail systems currently used in many cities, it would be less expensive to build and less expensive to operate, would require less land, would be safer, and would get you to your destination faster. What do you see as the practical problems?
That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
The only skills that depreciate that quickly are ones that any competent programmer can pick up very quickly and with very little effort. The important skills are the ones that take years to acquire, and those don't go out of date just because Magic Web Framework 3.0 gets released.
From the journal's website (http://www.springer.com/astronomy/journal/10509):
Astrophysics and Space Science publishes original contributions and invited reviews covering the entire range of astronomy, astrophysics, astrophysical cosmology, planetary and space science and the astrophysical aspects of astrobiology.
Note the last one: astrobiology is within the scope of that journal. Given that, the editors are certainly knowledgeable about who else works in that field, and can find appropriate reviewers for an astrobiology article.
None of this guy's (Godfrey Louis) stuff on the subject seems to be peer reviewed.
Incorrect. Quoting from the linked article: "Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion that the cells could be extraterrestrial."
arxiv.org is a non-peer-reviewed preprint repository widely used by the physics community. "Submitted" means exactly what it says: it's just listing the date that article was submitted to arxiv.org. This work will undoubtedly be submitted elsewhere also. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arxiv.
I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually leads to a decrease in customization/fragmentation/whatever you want to call it. Handset vendors insist on customizing the OS because they want to "differentiate themselves". So they stick on a custom UI, a bunch of their own apps, etc. But they're already discovering the downside to this: the more they customize, the more they're stuck maintaining themselves. Look how many phones don't even have Android 2.1 yet, much less 2.2. They're discovering that it takes a lot of work to port their customizations to a new OS version. The situation will become a lot worse when malware writers start to actively target Android and Google starts to regularly issue security patches. Integrating and testing those patches on a timely basis will become a huge burden for them. At that point, they may start deciding, "Just shipping stock Android wouldn't be such a bad thing after all."
Exactly. The author of this article makes the critical point clearly and effectively: our current prison system is worse than broken. It actually makes the problem worse. By any objective standard, most prison sentences actually do more to harm public safety than to help it. People get far too caught up in the rhetoric of being "tough on crime" and denouncing the "bleeding hearts" who "care more about the rights of criminals than the rights of victims." And so we end up making decisions based on "principles" rather than on facts. But the facts are overwhelming: our current prison system does more to increase crime than to decrease it.
Assuming Allen's not a patent troll and is actually making things
He isn't making things, at least not anymore. The lab where these "inventions" were developed has already gone out of business. Now he's just trying to make some money off litigation. So he isn't worried about any of the companies suing him back.
In most countries, yes it's irrevocable. Once you voluntarily place something in the public domain, that's that. I believe there are a few countries (Germany?) where things are more ambiguous and the law doesn't recognize the concept of public domain in the same way it does elsewhere. The Creative Commons folks have been developing a "public domain equivalent" license which is supposed to be somehow more reliable in those countries.
What do you mean by, "legally protect them to be in public domain?" When something is in the public domain, absolutely anyone can use it in any way they want. Including using it as part of a non-free, non-public domain product. They can do whatever they want with it, just as everyone else can.
Perhaps you're asking about copyfraud, where someone falsely claims to have exclusive rights to a work in the public domain? For example, publishing a copy of Shakespeare's plays and putting a notice on it that says, "No part of this may be reproduced without permission from the publisher." That's just lying. A license like GPL wouldn't prevent that either. Licenses only apply to people who are honest or who get caught. If someone intentionally lies about what rights they have, the only thing you can do is call them on it (and sue them if you're sufficiently motivated).
Or maybe you're just asking what the mechanism is? In most countries, all you need to do is stick a notice on it saying, "This work is in the public domain."
Whether a Republican or Democrat has been in charge, government has been slowly growing in power and size since this country was founded.
We have only ourselves to blame for that. Everyone claims to want a smaller government, but whenever someone tries to actually shrink some part of it, everyone starts screaming in protest. Government spending is "waste" when it doesn't directly benefit you, but it's "jobs" and "public services" when it does benefit you. Look at Gates' attempts to restructure the defense department: the same politicians who talk about shrinking the government suddenly are outraged about all the government jobs in their districts that will be lost. Or look at the Tea Partiers demanding that the goverment "keep it's hands off my Medicare!" Hello? Where do you think Medicare comes from if not the government?
It's very pleasant to pretend some hidden conspiracy is responsible for our problems. Much easier than admitting our own hypocrisy.
DNA evidence is a far more useful tool for defense than prosecution. Showing that a DNA sample really came from a certain person is difficult, and can never be 100% accurate. But showing it didn't come from someone is easy. If it obviously doesn't match, that's that. There's no question at all in how to interpret it.
It's not even meant to replace it. The problem is that airplane ridership has been growing steadily over the years, and it can't keep doing that forever without spending a lot of money to expand airports, many of which don't have land to expand onto even if the money were available. Ditto for cars: you can't keep adding cars forever without adding new lanes to freeways. This was one of the primary reasons for the California high speed rail project. To quote Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail):
The high-speed rail system is also projected to be half the cost of building new airport runways, gates, and expanded highways necessary to handle the same capacity of travelers, to accommodate future demand due to California's increasing population.
And of course the singularity folks typically conveniently ignore the possibility that we are already close to the limit on intelligence density with the human brain
That seems fairly unlikely. A neuron is an incredibly complicated machine relative to the role it plays in information processing. Millions of proteins and lipids, a full copy of your DNA, all the cellular machinery required for transcription and translation, etc. The most powerful supercomputer in the world couldn't simulate even one of those protein molecules in real time. Yet you can write some fairly simple differential equations that describe, to a reasonable approximation, the behavior of that neuron in terms of integrating nerve impulses and triggering new impulses.
it was Sun who created the limited patent grant under conditions that nobody could meet.
Not true at all. For example, that's exactly what Apache Harmony is: a clean room implementation that meets all the conditions. The goal of the patent grant was clearly to avoid fragmentation. It covers any implementation that is compatible with Sun's, but not incompatible ones like Android. If it were Microsoft instead of Google that had created an incompatible psuedo-Java, no one would be defending them. Everyone would be talking about "embrace and extend" and laughing at them for having gotten caught.
Really, it's not that important. You can pick up a new language in very little time. What matters is that you have a strong background in the fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, architecture, etc. My current job is mostly C++, yet I had done very little C++ programming when I was hired. That didn't matter. I once hired someone as a Java programmer who had never used Java before. That also didn't matter. He was a good programmer, and he took very little time to start turning out high quality Java code.
If your experience is all in Fortran, COBOL, and the like, the big thing you're missing is experience with object oriented design. So you need to focus on acquiring that. And you can do that with any modern, object oriented language.
So what language should you learn? That depends what you want to do.
iPhone/iOS: Objective-C. That's the only option.
Android: Java. It's not the only option, but it's the very strongly encouraged one.
Windows: C#. Again, it's not the only option, but it's the recommended one.
Web development: Java. People love to debate about what's the best language for web development, but Java is probably the dominant one, and it's a good default in any case.
You're misinterpreting the study. The actual quote was, "Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants." That is, you need to factor in the cost of building the nuclear plant in the first place. Once it's built, the incremental cost of producing each kwh of electricity is obviously much lower.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_wars#Worldwide_sales_figures_5, total worldwide sales are 41.7 million for the Xbox 360 and 70.9 million for the Wii. (And the Wii figure is almost four months older than the Xbox figure, so the real difference is even larger.) Then add in 35.7 million PS3s. I don't think it's at all accurate to say the Xbox is "dominating the living room". It accounts for well under a third of current generation consoles.
You know, the sad thing is, I remember a time when it wasn't true. When I preferred to use the Macs in the computer lab at the university over the PC's specifically because I could carry around a floppy full of extensions that all I needed to do was drop into the extension folder and reboot and have a machine that looked and mostly worked completely different from any other Mac.
Macs still let you do that. OK, you probably can't do it in a computer lab because you need an administrator password to install a lot of those extensions, but that's just reasonable security. I'm very happy with my Mac because it lets me do whatever I want with it. And I'm very happy with my Android phone because it, too, lets me do whatever I want with it. If Apple some day decides that Macs will no longer let you install any software except what has been approved by Apple, I certainly won't buy any more Macs after that.
If you're going to count the cost of three additional Wiimotes, you also need to assume the Xbox owner has probably already bought three extra gamepads ($50 each list price, though I see Amazon is currently selling them for $32 each). That again puts the cost of Xbox controllers well above the cost of Wii controllers.
But that isn't really my point. Regardless of how you add up the total cost, the point is that Nintendo has structured their prices and distribution model so that developers can safely write games for Wiimote and Wii Motion Plus, and they aren't limiting their market by doing so. And Microsoft has structured their prices and distribution model so any developer who develops for Natal is severely limiting their market.
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scientists and researchers themselves regard peer review as providing 'only a minimal assurance of quality'
The idea that "peer reviewed" means "correct", or that it even should mean that, is a misunderstanding of what peer review is about. When I review a paper, I don't check every last statement to make sure it's correct, work through their derivations in detail searching for errors, look up all their references to be sure they say exactly what the article says they do, etc. That's just not what peer review is about. Recommending an article for publication basically means the following:
1. The work described in it is likely to be interesting to other researchers.
2. The work seems to have been carried out reasonably competently.
3. The article describes it clearly enough so that readers can understand what was done.
Once it's published, lots of other people will analyze it much more carefully and try to reproduce the work. If they find errors or can't reproduce it, they in turn will publish that. Science is a conversation. Recommending an article for publication just means it deserves to be a part of that conversation.
I always hated the name OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice, fine. But OpenOffice.org? That's an internet address, not a name for a program.
There's an easy solution to that: don't install one of these on a steep hill! As with any form of transportation, you should use it where it's appropriate, and not use it where it isn't. I'm sure we can think of lots of places where this system would work really badly, but that's irrelevant. There are also lots of places it would work well, so that's where you would install it.
Perhaps you could elaborate on what you think the problems are? But first look at their FAQ. You'll probably find it addresses whatever problems you think it has.
Having gone through their website, I think it sounds very clever and entirely practical. Compared to the light rail systems currently used in many cities, it would be less expensive to build and less expensive to operate, would require less land, would be safer, and would get you to your destination faster. What do you see as the practical problems?
That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
The only skills that depreciate that quickly are ones that any competent programmer can pick up very quickly and with very little effort. The important skills are the ones that take years to acquire, and those don't go out of date just because Magic Web Framework 3.0 gets released.
Astrophysics and Space Science publishes original contributions and invited reviews covering the entire range of astronomy, astrophysics, astrophysical cosmology, planetary and space science and the astrophysical aspects of astrobiology.
Note the last one: astrobiology is within the scope of that journal. Given that, the editors are certainly knowledgeable about who else works in that field, and can find appropriate reviewers for an astrobiology article.
None of this guy's (Godfrey Louis) stuff on the subject seems to be peer reviewed.
Incorrect. Quoting from the linked article: "Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion that the cells could be extraterrestrial."
arxiv.org is a non-peer-reviewed preprint repository widely used by the physics community. "Submitted" means exactly what it says: it's just listing the date that article was submitted to arxiv.org. This work will undoubtedly be submitted elsewhere also. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arxiv.
I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually leads to a decrease in customization/fragmentation/whatever you want to call it. Handset vendors insist on customizing the OS because they want to "differentiate themselves". So they stick on a custom UI, a bunch of their own apps, etc. But they're already discovering the downside to this: the more they customize, the more they're stuck maintaining themselves. Look how many phones don't even have Android 2.1 yet, much less 2.2. They're discovering that it takes a lot of work to port their customizations to a new OS version. The situation will become a lot worse when malware writers start to actively target Android and Google starts to regularly issue security patches. Integrating and testing those patches on a timely basis will become a huge burden for them. At that point, they may start deciding, "Just shipping stock Android wouldn't be such a bad thing after all."
Exactly. The author of this article makes the critical point clearly and effectively: our current prison system is worse than broken. It actually makes the problem worse. By any objective standard, most prison sentences actually do more to harm public safety than to help it. People get far too caught up in the rhetoric of being "tough on crime" and denouncing the "bleeding hearts" who "care more about the rights of criminals than the rights of victims." And so we end up making decisions based on "principles" rather than on facts. But the facts are overwhelming: our current prison system does more to increase crime than to decrease it.
Assuming Allen's not a patent troll and is actually making things
He isn't making things, at least not anymore. The lab where these "inventions" were developed has already gone out of business. Now he's just trying to make some money off litigation. So he isn't worried about any of the companies suing him back.
Another possibility is that Microsoft has already paid to license those patents.
In most countries, yes it's irrevocable. Once you voluntarily place something in the public domain, that's that. I believe there are a few countries (Germany?) where things are more ambiguous and the law doesn't recognize the concept of public domain in the same way it does elsewhere. The Creative Commons folks have been developing a "public domain equivalent" license which is supposed to be somehow more reliable in those countries.
What do you mean by, "legally protect them to be in public domain?" When something is in the public domain, absolutely anyone can use it in any way they want. Including using it as part of a non-free, non-public domain product. They can do whatever they want with it, just as everyone else can.
Perhaps you're asking about copyfraud, where someone falsely claims to have exclusive rights to a work in the public domain? For example, publishing a copy of Shakespeare's plays and putting a notice on it that says, "No part of this may be reproduced without permission from the publisher." That's just lying. A license like GPL wouldn't prevent that either. Licenses only apply to people who are honest or who get caught. If someone intentionally lies about what rights they have, the only thing you can do is call them on it (and sue them if you're sufficiently motivated).
Or maybe you're just asking what the mechanism is? In most countries, all you need to do is stick a notice on it saying, "This work is in the public domain."
Whether a Republican or Democrat has been in charge, government has been slowly growing in power and size since this country was founded.
We have only ourselves to blame for that. Everyone claims to want a smaller government, but whenever someone tries to actually shrink some part of it, everyone starts screaming in protest. Government spending is "waste" when it doesn't directly benefit you, but it's "jobs" and "public services" when it does benefit you. Look at Gates' attempts to restructure the defense department: the same politicians who talk about shrinking the government suddenly are outraged about all the government jobs in their districts that will be lost. Or look at the Tea Partiers demanding that the goverment "keep it's hands off my Medicare!" Hello? Where do you think Medicare comes from if not the government?
It's very pleasant to pretend some hidden conspiracy is responsible for our problems. Much easier than admitting our own hypocrisy.
DNA evidence is a far more useful tool for defense than prosecution. Showing that a DNA sample really came from a certain person is difficult, and can never be 100% accurate. But showing it didn't come from someone is easy. If it obviously doesn't match, that's that. There's no question at all in how to interpret it.
The high-speed rail system is also projected to be half the cost of building new airport runways, gates, and expanded highways necessary to handle the same capacity of travelers, to accommodate future demand due to California's increasing population.
the "definitive" work on physics that's going to refudiate Einstein.
Cool! I just discovered what Sarah Palin's Slashdot username is!
And of course the singularity folks typically conveniently ignore the possibility that we are already close to the limit on intelligence density with the human brain
That seems fairly unlikely. A neuron is an incredibly complicated machine relative to the role it plays in information processing. Millions of proteins and lipids, a full copy of your DNA, all the cellular machinery required for transcription and translation, etc. The most powerful supercomputer in the world couldn't simulate even one of those protein molecules in real time. Yet you can write some fairly simple differential equations that describe, to a reasonable approximation, the behavior of that neuron in terms of integrating nerve impulses and triggering new impulses.
it was Sun who created the limited patent grant under conditions that nobody could meet.
Not true at all. For example, that's exactly what Apache Harmony is: a clean room implementation that meets all the conditions. The goal of the patent grant was clearly to avoid fragmentation. It covers any implementation that is compatible with Sun's, but not incompatible ones like Android. If it were Microsoft instead of Google that had created an incompatible psuedo-Java, no one would be defending them. Everyone would be talking about "embrace and extend" and laughing at them for having gotten caught.
If your experience is all in Fortran, COBOL, and the like, the big thing you're missing is experience with object oriented design. So you need to focus on acquiring that. And you can do that with any modern, object oriented language.
So what language should you learn? That depends what you want to do.
iPhone/iOS: Objective-C. That's the only option.
Android: Java. It's not the only option, but it's the very strongly encouraged one.
Windows: C#. Again, it's not the only option, but it's the recommended one.
Web development: Java. People love to debate about what's the best language for web development, but Java is probably the dominant one, and it's a good default in any case.
You're misinterpreting the study. The actual quote was, "Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants." That is, you need to factor in the cost of building the nuclear plant in the first place. Once it's built, the incremental cost of producing each kwh of electricity is obviously much lower.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_wars#Worldwide_sales_figures_5, total worldwide sales are 41.7 million for the Xbox 360 and 70.9 million for the Wii. (And the Wii figure is almost four months older than the Xbox figure, so the real difference is even larger.) Then add in 35.7 million PS3s. I don't think it's at all accurate to say the Xbox is "dominating the living room". It accounts for well under a third of current generation consoles.
You know, the sad thing is, I remember a time when it wasn't true. When I preferred to use the Macs in the computer lab at the university over the PC's specifically because I could carry around a floppy full of extensions that all I needed to do was drop into the extension folder and reboot and have a machine that looked and mostly worked completely different from any other Mac.
Macs still let you do that. OK, you probably can't do it in a computer lab because you need an administrator password to install a lot of those extensions, but that's just reasonable security. I'm very happy with my Mac because it lets me do whatever I want with it. And I'm very happy with my Android phone because it, too, lets me do whatever I want with it. If Apple some day decides that Macs will no longer let you install any software except what has been approved by Apple, I certainly won't buy any more Macs after that.
If you're going to count the cost of three additional Wiimotes, you also need to assume the Xbox owner has probably already bought three extra gamepads ($50 each list price, though I see Amazon is currently selling them for $32 each). That again puts the cost of Xbox controllers well above the cost of Wii controllers.
But that isn't really my point. Regardless of how you add up the total cost, the point is that Nintendo has structured their prices and distribution model so that developers can safely write games for Wiimote and Wii Motion Plus, and they aren't limiting their market by doing so. And Microsoft has structured their prices and distribution model so any developer who develops for Natal is severely limiting their market.