I can say from my personal experience that these paywalls on journal articles are hindering my ability to accomplish research. My institution doesn't normally subscribe to medical journals, yet it looks like the best source for some information I want is in those journals.
However, I can NOT tell for certain from abstracts that the articles actually contain ANYTHING of use to me.
It comes down to a case of playing 'bobbing for apples, for $40/shot'.
Good for the economy? Would you please look up "broken window fallacy"?
But in a nutshell, it's not of economic benefit to replace something that serves its purpose INSTEAD OF getting something new which serves a new purpose. The resources used "fixing the broken window" cannot then be used to, say, glaze a new window in a new store.
Using minute/hour/day thing isn't so irrational, really. 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour, 60 is a very nice number.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30 all divide into it without fractions.
For 10, you have 1, 2, 5, and that's it.
24 is a pretty nice number for dividing too, you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12.
I use encfs. You don't end up with a large monolithic file. Instead, a directory is created that stores all your files in encrypted format. An advantage is that your data on disk is stored encrypted--even the filenames. It is only decrypted in your core memory and in any "temporary backup" files your application may store elsewhere. There's a performance hit, though.
I then use rsync to back up the encrypted data. Your data is secure to all but the likes of keyloggers, applications that leave garbage outside of your secure dir and memory, root compromise of your machine, or walking away from your machine with the data unlocked.
I think it is even secure to some small degree from root compromise of your machine, though I'm not sure how. By this I don't mean that someone with root couldn't get your data one way or another, I just mean they'd have to work at it a bit. I admit I could be underestimating the strength of the security against root compromise.
I can't speak to the strength of the encryption used or the strength of the implementation, however, they seem to be using AES or another few choices of encryption algorithm. AES, if done right, can be strong encryption.
I really like how it works, though. I've had no problems with it other than the occasional problem remembering my key (fortunately temporary.)
Suppose "Science" delivers a finding to us that a certain chemical causes people to have a greatly increased risk of cancer, so much so that if not curtailed then hundreds of thousands of people in the US can be expected to die of it in just a few years.
And yet, you oppose the idea of the scientists who know this standing up and advocating with all (legal) force at their disposal, that the political process should act to ban the chemical?
I wish there were MORE science in politics! It beats the rest of the garbage that's there, like GREED, STUPIDITY, INTOLERANCE, UNINFORMED IDEOLOGY, BUSY-BODY-NESS, LUST FOR POWER, and on and on! How about we make decisions RATIONALLY based on DATA for a change???
I mean, if you're gonna believe in something, WHY NOT believe in the thing that makes cars, go, planes fly, drugs work, farms more productive, computers work, metals strong, i.e., EVERY BIT OF OUR TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY?
I mean, if you're going to believe in something, WHY NOT believe in the thing that slaps you in the face with literally thousands of miracles a day? Oh, and yes, it's true that they stop being miracles if you bother learning how they work and understand it, and all the miracle performers (scientists and engineers) TELL you that.
*NOT* to believe in science would require an incredible denial of reality. I mean, you'd have to be pretty much insane.
Science == miracles on demand. *SHOW ME* anything else so worthy of my faith. SERIOUSLY.
you're right and he's wrong, but he's not so wrong as you think.
what he's probably referring to is something i vaguely remember reading, about bacteria that can change soluble radioisotopes into insoluble form and thus immobilize them and prevent them from spreading in groundwater.
still radioactive, but no longer mobile in the environment.
However, I don't want to contribute because of Wikipedia's reputation for arbitrary deletion of good contributions and other mistreatment/discouragement of contributors, such as reversions of good work because some idiot doesn't like it.
I'm perfectly happy to write good contributions for the good of the people at large and no other reward than that, but not if the time I invest is wasted because of arbitrary deletion or other unjustified defacement of what I created.
Wikipedia would be better served by some sort of slashdot-style community moderation than the current Gestapo of people in power at Wikimedia. And if you want to really have quality content, perhaps you should give contributors more weight in the moderation system if they have ACTUAL PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES PUBLISHED ON THE TOPIC.
A brief survey of the other top-rated posts on this topic shows that no one has any confidence in the editors at Wikipedia because of their history of arbitrary actions and misconduct. You listening, Wikimedia? Get it? You have a really serious PR problem that you won't fix without serious reforms of your standard operating procedures.
I really think that some other group needs to copy and fork Wikipedia lock-stock-and-barrel and administer it properly, effectively obsoleting the people currently running it.
And one other comment, I second the guy who said, "Wikimedia, why are you so delete crazy? Are you afraid of runnnig out of bits?" If someone writes something for you, it's a creative work. Keep it, don't kill it, unless it's KNOWN WRONG.
It strikes me that this could be one of the FEW inventions that are actually worthy of a patent.
Also, I wonder how scalable this technology is. The explicitly say in the article that this wouldn't work well for a forest fire: why not?
Another thing I wonder is this: if you put out a fire with water, you cool down the stuff that's burning as well as removing oxygen. If your new flame suppressor is applied to a hot pile of, say, burning wood, the flame may go away as long as it's pointed at it, but wouldn't it burst into flames again immediately upon removing the suppressor beam, or even explode due to a build-up of combustible vapors?
You have electric and magnetic fields confused with each other. If you have a MAGNETIC FIELD, when charged particles move across (NOT along) it, there is a force on them perpendicular to their motion (and to the field, incidentally).
In an electric field, the force on the charged particle depends on the orientation of the electric field, not on the orientation of the charged particle's momentum.
I refer you to the Lorentz equation, which goes like this: F = q (E + V cross B) where capital letters denote vector quantities and "cross" is the cross-product operator. As you can see, the force from the electric field (q times E) is parallel to E. The force from the magnetic field (q V cross B) is perpendicular to both the magnetic field and the particle's velocity.
I'm not sure whether the rest of your explanation holds water--when you have a rapidly changing electric field it is accompanied by a magnetic field, which WILL curve particles like you say. In fact, when you have both, you have what is called an "E cross B" drift, in which charged particles have a motion perpendicular to both the E and the B field. (Is that what you meant?)
So, would you regard the playground bully who beats other kids up for their milk money a "success" too? Or will you concede that "might" doesn't make "right", and "law" and "right" are sometimes on opposite sides?
As in, for example, when someone who never produced anything collects money from those who do?
If you really want to be alarmist about disasters, you should be worried about other things than earthquakes. The most rational investments (not war, and not earthquake prevention) are these:
1) Make sure we have the best possible drugs and technology for fighting microbes. 2) Make sure our food supply is uninterrupted.
An earthquake can devastate a region, yes. But diseases can wipe out large segments of humanity worldwide. And diseases can also wipe out our food supply.
Look up what is happening to bananas, cocoa plants, citrus, and wheat. All of them are being wiped out by pathogens we can't really control yet. I think that most of these pathogens aren't spreading very fast, so we have time, but think what would happen if a rapidly spreading pathogen destroyed wheat production in a large area.
A rational allocation of resources would put fighting disease and ensuring our food supply absolutely first, ahead of trillions on useless wars, and yes, ahead of earthquake prevention/mitigation. However, we allocate resources based on perceived threat rather than actual risk--how else is it that we are still using coal power, and spending trillions to fight terrorism that killed 3k of us in one single year when antibiotic resistant bugs kill 50k+ of us per year?
That's right, folks, antibiotic resistant bugs inflict casualties on us at a rate of > FIFTEEN 9/11 scale attacks EVERY YEAR and the THREAT IS GROWING but WHERE ARE THE BILLIONS TO DEVELOP NEW ANTIBIOTICS????
When it comes to allocating resources in proportion to risk, we are ABSOLUTE MORONS.
My personal sweet spot for buying music (right now I don't either pirate OR buy music) is 10 cents/track and the ability to buy only the tracks I want. That's like $1/CD.
$.99 per track is way too high.
So I agree with you, the price asked for music is too high by 10x. I'd probably buy a considerable amount at $.1/track, above that and I won't buy. But I won't pirate in any case.
Right now I primarily "consume" music via broadcast.
I think just having "one" Hubble space telescope was a mistake. I hope they're building more than one of these new 'scopes.
I mean, it'd be a shame if a launch incident destroyed a unique capability. And it shouldn't cost anything like N times as much to build N of these at the same time, right?
If y'all haven't noticed, our planet is moving ever more to a "winner takes all" model of success. If you're successful, because of globalization and mass media, you get riches beyond imagination.
If you're not, you get to subsist on little to nothing. This is just another example of how the "winners" cash in, again, excluding the majority of us.
It's not enough that relatively few people now dominate the entertainment industry--it used to be that local people could make a living entertaining other locals because all entertainment wasn't provided by a small group of global celebrities. (Now very few locals can scratch out a living providing entertainment.)
NOW the entertainment moguls are getting the "creative" spots too.
How long, in this winner-takes-all world, until the majority of us are slaves with no means of earning an income, either starving or ekeing out a living by serving the whims of the elite?
One is "wurtzite boron nitride" and the other is another carbon crystal, lonsdaleite, which apparently has a hexagonal structure rather than the diamond structure.
Yes, you're quite right, some beef is fed on grass, and that beef is healthier to eat, and people can't digest grass.
And some grass fields aren't arable no matter what, while others are irrigated and could be used for crops instead, which people could eat.
It's a complicated picture and yes, excuse me for over-simplifying: grain-fed beef is an energy loser, grass-fed less clearly so but possibly so (and maybe we'd be better off eating something else grass-fed).
The point is, right now 50% of US grain is fed to animals, 40% worldwide, and 99% of that 50%/40% is wasted.
That's all fine if we want to continue to be nothing more than animals. However, over-riding our natural impulses is also a key element of humanity. There are plenty of advantages to not eating meat, health wise, environmentally, as well as ethically.
What's more, unless we start eating each other, eating meat isn't going to be viable for every much longer. It takes 100 cal of grain to make 1 cal of beef. At current rates of environmental degradation and population growth, the mass of humanity will be vegetarian very soon of necessity. We won't be able to continue wasting 99% of our food. (Though the ratio is 10/1 for pork, and 2/1 for chicken, which are better deals).
Also, ethanol-from-sugar should stop also for the same reason: do we really want the stomachs of the poor to have to compete with the gas tanks of the rich?
You realize that the ENTIRE KING JAMES BIBLE is only 4.8MB in size?
Not everyone's research needs 40G of storage! How many lines of code can you write in a day? Maybe 10kB, if you're really good? 1000 days of work is just 10MB.
Let me ask you this, what kind of wasteful drivel are you producing that requires 40G per year?
It carries "waves". The individual electrons don't really get very far, but the 60Hz electromagnetic wave that carries the power, that goes far.
All this is, is, hey, we carry a powerful 60Hz signal, how about we carry lower-power, high frequency signals too? And all the associated complexity of actually sending and receiving high frequency signals, a devil of many details.
You don't have to have a PhD to see that a spade is a spade.
They have no evidence, not really, that the planet actually holds water. In fact, since they assume (again they do not really know) that it is tidally locked, and therefore probably not possessed of a protective magnetic field like Earth's, perhaps the solar wind has LONG since stripped all the hydrogen from the planet's atmosphere and it is quite, quite dry (the exact situation of Venus.)
They do not know the atmospheric composition of the planet. It could easily be a dry, CO2 greenhouse wasteland similar to Venus.
Really, the only facts that support that this planet could have life on it is that it is in the "habitable" zone, and that it has enough mass to have retained some sort of atmosphere. To put *any* probability of there being life there is completely speculative. We don't know enough to even estimate the odds.
What we have here is what these guys would *like* to believe without evidence. You may as well take their religious beliefs as "true" based on the fact that they have PhD's: they have about the same amount of evidence for those as for life existing on that planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello,
I can say from my personal experience that these paywalls on journal articles are hindering my ability to accomplish research. My institution doesn't normally subscribe to medical journals, yet it looks like the best source for some information I want is in those journals.
However, I can NOT tell for certain from abstracts that the articles actually contain ANYTHING of use to me.
It comes down to a case of playing 'bobbing for apples, for $40/shot'.
This is a sorry state of affairs.
--PM
Good for the economy? Would you please look up "broken window fallacy"?
But in a nutshell, it's not of economic benefit to replace something that serves its purpose INSTEAD OF getting something new which serves a new purpose. The resources used "fixing the broken window" cannot then be used to, say, glaze a new window in a new store.
--PM
Hello,
Using minute/hour/day thing isn't so irrational, really. 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour, 60 is a very nice number.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30 all divide into it without fractions.
For 10, you have 1, 2, 5, and that's it.
24 is a pretty nice number for dividing too, you have
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12.
--PM
Hello,
I use encfs. You don't end up with a large monolithic file. Instead, a directory is created that stores all your files in encrypted format. An advantage is that your data on disk is stored encrypted--even the filenames. It is only decrypted in your core memory and in any "temporary backup" files your application may store elsewhere. There's a performance hit, though.
I then use rsync to back up the encrypted data. Your data is secure to all but the likes of keyloggers, applications that leave garbage outside of your secure dir and memory, root compromise of your machine, or walking away from your machine with the data unlocked.
I think it is even secure to some small degree from root compromise of your machine, though I'm not sure how. By this I don't mean that someone with root couldn't get your data one way or another, I just mean they'd have to work at it a bit. I admit I could be underestimating the strength of the security against root compromise.
I can't speak to the strength of the encryption used or the strength of the implementation, however, they seem to be using AES or another few choices of encryption algorithm. AES, if done right, can be strong encryption.
I really like how it works, though. I've had no problems with it other than the occasional problem remembering my key (fortunately temporary.)
Best,
--PeterM
Suppose "Science" delivers a finding to us that a certain chemical causes people to have a greatly increased risk of cancer, so much so that if not curtailed then hundreds of thousands of people in the US can be expected to die of it in just a few years.
And yet, you oppose the idea of the scientists who know this standing up and advocating with all (legal) force at their disposal, that the political process should act to ban the chemical?
I wish there were MORE science in politics! It beats the rest of the garbage that's there, like GREED, STUPIDITY, INTOLERANCE, UNINFORMED IDEOLOGY, BUSY-BODY-NESS, LUST FOR POWER, and on and on! How about we make decisions RATIONALLY based on DATA for a change???
--PeterM
I mean, if you're gonna believe in something, WHY NOT believe in the thing that makes cars, go, planes fly, drugs work, farms more productive, computers work, metals strong, i.e., EVERY BIT OF OUR TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY?
I mean, if you're going to believe in something, WHY NOT believe in the thing that slaps you in the face with literally thousands of miracles a day? Oh, and yes, it's true that they stop being miracles if you bother learning how they work and understand it, and all the miracle performers (scientists and engineers) TELL you that.
*NOT* to believe in science would require an incredible denial of reality. I mean, you'd have to be pretty much insane.
Science == miracles on demand. *SHOW ME* anything else so worthy of my faith. SERIOUSLY.
--PeterM
you're right and he's wrong, but he's not so wrong as you think.
what he's probably referring to is something i vaguely remember reading, about bacteria that can change soluble radioisotopes into insoluble form and thus immobilize them and prevent them from spreading in groundwater.
still radioactive, but no longer mobile in the environment.
--pm
Hello,
I am not a professor, but I have a PhD.
However, I don't want to contribute because of Wikipedia's reputation for arbitrary deletion of good contributions and other mistreatment/discouragement of contributors, such as reversions of good work because some idiot doesn't like it.
I'm perfectly happy to write good contributions for the good of the people at large and no other reward than that, but not if the time I invest is wasted because of arbitrary deletion or other unjustified defacement of what I created.
Wikipedia would be better served by some sort of slashdot-style community moderation than the current Gestapo of people in power at Wikimedia. And if you want to really have quality content, perhaps you should give contributors more weight in the moderation system if they have ACTUAL PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES PUBLISHED ON THE TOPIC.
A brief survey of the other top-rated posts on this topic shows that no one has any confidence in the editors at Wikipedia because of their history of arbitrary actions and misconduct. You listening, Wikimedia? Get it? You have a really serious PR problem that you won't fix without serious reforms of your standard operating procedures.
I really think that some other group needs to copy and fork Wikipedia lock-stock-and-barrel and administer it properly, effectively obsoleting the people currently running it.
And one other comment, I second the guy who said, "Wikimedia, why are you so delete crazy? Are you afraid of runnnig out of bits?" If someone writes something for you, it's a creative work. Keep it, don't kill it, unless it's KNOWN WRONG.
--PeterM
It strikes me that this could be one of the FEW inventions that are actually worthy of a patent.
Also, I wonder how scalable this technology is. The explicitly say in the article that this wouldn't work well for a forest fire: why not?
Another thing I wonder is this: if you put out a fire with water, you cool down the stuff that's burning as well as removing oxygen. If your new flame suppressor is applied to a hot pile of, say, burning wood, the flame may go away as long as it's pointed at it, but wouldn't it burst into flames again immediately upon removing the suppressor beam, or even explode due to a build-up of combustible vapors?
Best,
--PeterM
Sir,
You have electric and magnetic fields confused with each other. If you have a MAGNETIC FIELD, when charged particles move across (NOT along) it, there is a force on them perpendicular to their motion (and to the field, incidentally).
In an electric field, the force on the charged particle depends on the orientation of the electric field, not on the orientation of the charged particle's momentum.
I refer you to the Lorentz equation, which goes like this:
F = q (E + V cross B)
where capital letters denote vector quantities and "cross" is the cross-product operator. As you can see, the force from the electric field (q times E) is parallel to E. The force from the magnetic field (q V cross B) is perpendicular to both the magnetic field and the particle's velocity.
I'm not sure whether the rest of your explanation holds water--when you have a rapidly changing electric field it is accompanied by a magnetic field, which WILL curve particles like you say. In fact, when you have both, you have what is called an "E cross B" drift, in which charged particles have a motion perpendicular to both the E and the B field. (Is that what you meant?)
And yes, IAAP.
--PeterM
So, would you regard the playground bully who beats other kids up for their milk money a "success" too? Or will you concede that "might" doesn't make "right", and "law" and "right" are sometimes on opposite sides?
As in, for example, when someone who never produced anything collects money from those who do?
--PM
If you really want to be alarmist about disasters, you should be worried about other things than earthquakes. The most rational investments (not war, and not earthquake prevention) are these:
1) Make sure we have the best possible drugs and technology for fighting microbes.
2) Make sure our food supply is uninterrupted.
An earthquake can devastate a region, yes. But diseases can wipe out large segments of humanity worldwide. And diseases can also wipe out our food supply.
Look up what is happening to bananas, cocoa plants, citrus, and wheat. All of them are being wiped out by pathogens we can't really control yet. I think that most of these pathogens aren't spreading very fast, so we have time, but think what would happen if a rapidly spreading pathogen destroyed wheat production in a large area.
A rational allocation of resources would put fighting disease and ensuring our food supply absolutely first, ahead of trillions on useless wars, and yes, ahead of earthquake prevention/mitigation. However, we allocate resources based on perceived threat rather than actual risk--how else is it that we are still using coal power, and spending trillions to fight terrorism that killed 3k of us in one single year when antibiotic resistant bugs kill 50k+ of us per year?
That's right, folks, antibiotic resistant bugs inflict casualties on us at a rate of > FIFTEEN 9/11 scale attacks EVERY YEAR and the THREAT IS GROWING but WHERE ARE THE BILLIONS TO DEVELOP NEW ANTIBIOTICS????
When it comes to allocating resources in proportion to risk, we are ABSOLUTE MORONS.
--PeterM
My personal sweet spot for buying music (right now I don't either pirate OR buy music) is 10 cents/track and the ability to buy only the tracks I want. That's like $1/CD.
$.99 per track is way too high.
So I agree with you, the price asked for music is too high by 10x. I'd probably buy a considerable amount at $.1/track, above that and I won't buy. But I won't pirate in any case.
Right now I primarily "consume" music via broadcast.
--PM
Are you sure? I mean, can't a compassionate programmer have programmed the robot to be compassionate to a human for him, by proxy?
I mean, if you see the robot as an agent of a programmer who wants to help you, what's so creepy about that?
--PeterM
Modify parent insightful, please.
I think just having "one" Hubble space telescope was a mistake. I hope they're building more than one of these new 'scopes.
I mean, it'd be a shame if a launch incident destroyed a unique capability. And it shouldn't cost anything like N times as much to build N of these at the same time, right?
--PM
If y'all haven't noticed, our planet is moving ever more to a "winner takes all" model of success. If you're successful, because of globalization and mass media, you get riches beyond imagination.
If you're not, you get to subsist on little to nothing. This is just another example of how the "winners" cash in, again, excluding the majority of us.
It's not enough that relatively few people now dominate the entertainment industry--it used to be that local people could make a living entertaining other locals because all entertainment wasn't provided by a small group of global celebrities. (Now very few locals can scratch out a living providing entertainment.)
NOW the entertainment moguls are getting the "creative" spots too.
How long, in this winner-takes-all world, until the majority of us are slaves with no means of earning an income, either starving or ekeing out a living by serving the whims of the elite?
--PM
Hello,
There may be two harder substances---though I think it is theoretical?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16610-diamond-no-longer-natures-hardest-material.html
One is "wurtzite boron nitride" and the other is another carbon crystal, lonsdaleite, which apparently has a hexagonal structure rather than the diamond structure.
Best,
--PM
Hello,
The nuclear fuel is only a tiny portion of the cost, thorium or any other nuclear fuel wouldn't help a bit.
--PM
Yes, you're quite right, some beef is fed on grass, and that beef is healthier to eat, and people can't digest grass.
And some grass fields aren't arable no matter what, while others are irrigated and could be used for crops instead, which people could eat.
It's a complicated picture and yes, excuse me for over-simplifying: grain-fed beef is an energy loser, grass-fed less clearly so but possibly so (and maybe we'd be better off eating something else grass-fed).
The point is, right now 50% of US grain is fed to animals, 40% worldwide, and 99% of that 50%/40% is wasted.
That's all fine if we want to continue to be nothing more than animals. However, over-riding our natural impulses is also a key element of humanity.
There are plenty of advantages to not eating meat, health wise, environmentally, as well as ethically.
What's more, unless we start eating each other, eating meat isn't going to be viable for every much longer. It takes 100 cal of grain to make 1 cal of beef.
At current rates of environmental degradation and population growth, the mass of humanity will be vegetarian very soon of necessity.
We won't be able to continue wasting 99% of our food. (Though the ratio is 10/1 for pork, and 2/1 for chicken, which are better deals).
Also, ethanol-from-sugar should stop also for the same reason: do we really want the stomachs of the poor to have to compete with the gas tanks of the rich?
You realize that the ENTIRE KING JAMES BIBLE is only 4.8MB in size?
Not everyone's research needs 40G of storage! How many lines of code can you write in a day? Maybe 10kB, if you're really good? 1000 days of work is just 10MB.
Let me ask you this, what kind of wasteful drivel are you producing that requires 40G per year?
It carries "waves". The individual electrons don't really get very far, but the 60Hz electromagnetic wave that carries the power, that goes far.
All this is, is, hey, we carry a powerful 60Hz signal, how about we carry lower-power, high frequency signals too? And all the associated complexity of actually sending and receiving high frequency signals, a devil of many details.
--PM
Mod parent up! +1 sensible.
You don't have to have a PhD to see that a spade is a spade.
They have no evidence, not really, that the planet actually holds water. In fact, since they assume (again they do not really know) that it is tidally locked, and therefore probably not possessed of a protective magnetic field like Earth's, perhaps the solar wind has LONG since stripped all the hydrogen from the planet's atmosphere and it is quite, quite dry (the exact situation of Venus.)
They do not know the atmospheric composition of the planet. It could easily be a dry, CO2 greenhouse wasteland similar to Venus.
Really, the only facts that support that this planet could have life on it is that it is in the "habitable" zone, and that it has enough mass to have retained some sort of atmosphere. To put *any* probability of there being life there is completely speculative. We don't know enough to even estimate the odds.
What we have here is what these guys would *like* to believe without evidence. You may as well take their religious beliefs as "true" based on the fact that they have PhD's: they have about the same amount of evidence for those as for life existing on that planet.
Best,
--PeterM