Am I the only one that thinks that this information should have been released to the people making rootkits, and not the vendors?
Time has shown that the vendors cannot be trusted and are far more evil than the people allowing people root access on their own machines. Bloatware, regressions through updates (often forced or nagged into acceptance), pushing their own branded crapware, removing options from the user, *preventing* the user from making the machine work the way they want it to, and so forth. You want to *not* have the screen turn on automatically when it starts charging? Sorry, you don't have permissions to do that on your own machine. They're evil. They should get the second look at these vulnerabilities after everyone who wants to root their devices has done so.
I've had bad experience with touchscreens. Right now, I have a software back button on the corner of my touchscreen and it just won't recognize any touches. Sometimes I can tap at it for five or ten seconds to get it to register, but most of the time is is just.... dead.
However, my phone has a single hardware button, and that allows the phone to still be usable.
This is the second phone this has happened on, so I think physical buttons are now a requirement for me.
>It does not seem to be well-known that Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) spent two academic years at Princeton University, from the summer of 1936 to the summer of 1938.
It's pretty famous, actually. He worked with Von Neumann, though not with anything related to computers, ironically enough.
>I know because I went ahead and played the games I played when I was young, and it's just not as fun anymore. Games haven't changed, I have.
I dunno. I played my first LAN party game of Quake in ages last month (playing the CustomTF mod for Team Fortress that I wrote) and it was still a heck of a lot of fun.
In fact, the people that I was playing with were rather surprised at how much faster players used to be than in modern CoD games where you're running in mud in comparison.
While there's modernish clients for Quake, if id or someone did a really professional job just putting a spit shine on the original Quakeworld (like with what they did with DOOM) I think it'd be a very popular game even today.
>CNN, NYT, HuffPost, (notice how there were only three of these) are long established news sources presenting a balanced viewpoint.
Hah. No. I don't even think that any of these three would even pretend they're presenting a balanced viewpoint these days. CNN has been caught running the Russia story just for ratings, despite thinking there's nothing actually there, NYT had a complete meltdown on election night (want to see a screenshot? I took a screenshot), and the HuffPo is described as a "politically liberal American news and opinion website."
If you don't believe me, here's Harvard on the matter -
You want to talk regressions - if I move a single icon on my desktop, all the icons on the left hand side leap downwards by four icon places. If I save anything to desktop, they all move.
This is after updating to the latest Win10 on my gaming box. Before, if I turned my monitor off and on again it would reset all the icons on the desktop. There are huge threads of people having the same problems.
You can't make this shit up - desktop icons have not been a problem since the Win95 days.
Ok, let me give you my story, then. I run my own small business, and I did some work with a public agency out in New Jersey for a few days, for which I was to be paid X dollars.
So I invoice the people I did the work for. They write back and say that regulations say the following (which I quote, so you can't claim I'm misrepresenting it):
"Businesses planning to contract with any public agency in New Jersey, including state agencies, local governments, colleges/universities and local school boards as well as with casino licensees will be required to provide a Business Registration Certificate as proof of registration. To obtain a Business Registration Certificate, you must have filed Form NJ-REG."
I navigate bureaucracy professionally, since, again, I run a business that deals with government agencies - I have a CAGE number, a FEIN, a DUNS, have registered on SAMS and grants.gov, and any other number of government red tape sites... and the New Jersey registration process was the most hideous piece of shit I've ever seen in my life. Hours into the process, I discovered that I wasn't actually allowed to complete the registration process, since the registration process requires (or required, this was a couple years ago, I haven't checked) me to have *a New Jersey address*. So then I start looking into how I could get a fucking PO box or something just so that I could get a fucking address in New Jersey so I could finish their fucking registration process so I could get paid for work that I had already completed.
Ask me if I'd recommend that anyone do business with New Jersey, and tell me that this brain-splittingly stupid process was all worth it because some "slimeball company abused a process".
>The alternative was Fortran, which is what I was taught, or C or C++, which is what I was taught in college. I think most would agree that these often are too complex and can impede the learning of principles.
Out of curiosity, what about modern C++ do you think is too complex for new programmers and can impede their learning of principles?
20 years ago, I'd agree with you - char * strings and [] arrays, sure, were and are terrible - but modern C++ can be written without any of that stuff.
>The problem with the statement that they're "nowhere near ready for prime time" is that it's demonstrably wrong unless you define "ready for prime time" to mean something other than "already on the public streets, driving themselves in traffic" because that's the actual current state of self-driving cars.
Beta testing isn't the same as release.
They're driving on streets at extremely low speeds, and stopping entirely when they get confused.
>So, that almost makes me curious as to what it's supposed to mean.
As I said, I visited the CARS center at Stanford last semester. They're doing lots of interesting things, but they're still at an early stage in the engineering cycle. They've found that, for example, when you have a fully autonomous vehicle the driver gets distracted and is much more likely to cause an accident in case he has to take over in an emergency. So they're trying to solve that problem with eye tracking systems and alerts and such.
What's hilarious is that there is actually a really nice autonomous vehicle lab at Stanford (CARS). I've been to it and talked to the director there. They're nowhere, nowhere near ready for prime time, and this guy has dealerships vanishing by 2024.
> Good lecturers can tell when the students are being lost and inject an ad hoc adjustment to capture their attention and comprehension.
This is exactly it.
If you keep lecturing after you've lost someone, you're just wasting both of your time. Youtube videos have no ability to detect this, and so are fundamentally useless. A good lecturer will constantly evaluate the expression on the students' faces and adjust in real time.
>and I still do but I'm slowly accepting there's some wisdom in forcing the software we all rely on to be transparent.
Transparent isn't enough. It needs to be modifiable.
I bought a television that after purchased updated its firmware to install ads in the input select bar. (A high end Samsung 4K TV that absolutely couldn't use a low price to justify the advertising.) The real kick in the nuts was that 2106 Samsung TVs run Tizen, which is free software - but cannot be, you know, actually modified by the users of the television. It's not helpful to be able to see the source code that Samsung maliciously installs on your television without your consent. You need to have the freedom to be able to modify them as well.
I returned the television and go another one without the advertising in it, and disabled firmware updates. Guess what happened? It re-enabled firmware updates and the next morning I had advertising back on it again. (I have photos of it before and after going to bed. It re-enabled itself without any input from me.) So I returned it again. I hope Samsung made enough money off of both of the ads it served me to warrant the return of a nice television. Wait. No I don't. They can burn in a fire.
I've had RMS over at my house before, and all rumors aside, he's actually a nice guy.
I did my own research on this, and went through the top 10 computer science universities and looked at what they taught in their introductory CS classes. Python and Java made up 100% of them, with only one (Stanford) having a C++ option.
Personally, I think C++ should be the introductory language for computer science majors. (Non-CS majors? Sure, teach them Python or Javascript.) Why? Because CS majors all have to learn computer architecture and usually assembly programming is part of learning architecture. It's way, way easier for people to go from C++ to ASM than it is to go Python to ASM or Java to ASM. So a lot of assembly classes I've gone through have backed away from teaching ASM and instead teach C with a touch of ASM in it, which means that their education gets compromised by an attempt to make the introductory class easier.
But research in computer science education shows that you can learn basic computer science principles pretty much equally well regardless of language taught, so we're sacrificing educational quality for no real benefit.
I think most opposition to C++ came from people that learned it back in the day with square bracket arrays and char* strings, none of which really should be used any more now that we have vectors and strings. (And have had for a very long time, really.) Modern C++ is a very enjoyable language to code in.
>Who would have ever thought that a company founded on the principle [sic] of breaking the law in multiple jurisdictions would ignore and circumvent the terms and conditions, to which they agreed, of an entity with which they do business. Whodathunkait.
They're adding functionality that Apple refuses to do. If you cheat in a Steam game, your device and account gets banned. On iOS, apparently, you just uninstall and reinstall and then you can fraudlently order cars all over again.
Might violate the Apple TOS, but they're in the ethical right on this one.
>As the average net work in a bar jumps the moment Bill Gates walks into it. You wouldn't pretend that Bill Gates has the same standard of living of someone making $7.25 an hour, so why pretend there isn't an enormous gap between schools in wealthy districts and poor ones? There's a reason why no one talks about "failing public schools" in Westchester or the Hamptons.
Which is why teachers around here get paid more to work in bad schools. It doesn't help, though, the research shows. The best teachers still bail out of the schools because they want to work with better kids.
>You know perfectly well that teachers don't start and stop school when students do.
Sure. So do software engineers. How much time do software engineers spend coding on their own free time? More time than teachers spend prepping for class, especially after they've been teaching the class for a while.
>it would be more than balanced by working 50-70 hours a week when school is in session.
On the clock? Hah. No, teachers unions would eat such a proposed workweek alive. If, again, you're taking about other stuff, again, so do software engineers.
>Reasonable? The people claiming this wouldn't touch a teaching job for less than a six figure salary.
Ah, there's the ad hominem. Except you'd be wrong. I taught at a high school just last year, in fact. In addition to running a software consulting business.
>Earning a masters degree, having tens of thousands in student loans to pay off, being salaried and invariably working far beyond 40 hours a week...and that's before even getting to the students. How much would you want to get paid per hour, per kid for being a babysitter, disciplinarian, nurse and social worker.
A master's degree? Are we talking a community college instructor, now?
>And that's before even getting to the actual teaching part, where your performance reviews
What performance reviews? I suspect you're unfamiliar with how the education system actually works.
>Not for a penny under six figures.
You think a person with a bachelor's degree in any subject should make six digits out of college? That's hilarious. You're talking pharmacist-level salary, and pharmacists are a hell of a lot more educated (and attendant student debt) than people with a BS or BA.
>Until they can't find a job that pays off their student loans, at which point it's time to sneer at them for taking on risk they couldn't afford.
How could you even type this? Doctors will take on six digits of student debt because they know they'll be able to pay it off in 10 years and then be very comfortable thereafter. To get a BS around here, it'll cost you about $10k for the first two years in a community college, and about $20k to go to a CSU. $30k in debt can be retired by a teacher off their salary. If they somehow go to Harvard to become a K-12 teacher, then they sign up for one of dozens of debt-forgiveness programs and go work in the ghetto for a while and all their student debt gets bought off by the government.
>You do realize, right, that the reason why doctors salaries are so high is because only wealthy families can risk the six figure cost of a medical degree
No. Again, I don't think you comprehend how student loans work. If you're a poor kid, for one thing, you'll pay close to zero to actually go to college through your bachelor's, and then you'll take on student debt for medical school, which you can work off quickly. Anyone can get a medical degree regardless of financial status.
You're stuck in some sort of 1950s mindset of how education works. I suggest you educate yourself as to how college works these days.
>Uh huh. Found a reason yet for why countries that do far more "meddling" in health care or education than the United States cover all or most of their population for a fraction of the cost?
Are you confusing the tuition paid by students in these countries for the actual cost to educate them? Or the nominal tuition price at a US college with the average price paid? I suspect you are.
>Our public education system is woefully underfunded
You think so? We spend about $13,000 per student per year, nationwide. (http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html)
Average teacher salary is $55,000. (http://www.nea.org/home/54597.htm), but this varies pretty wildly by state.
That's a pretty reasonable amount, IMO, considering you only work 9 months a year and get pretty significant benefits.
>higher education is very costly
Anyone *can* go to college, that's how the system is currently set up. Even if it makes no economic sense, the federal government will subsidize your education.
>It would be nice if everyone smart enough to be a doctor or an engineer could just decide to go to school.
You do realize, right, that the reason why doctors salaries are so high is because we impose artificially low quotas on how many people can go to medical school each year?
If you look at costs over time, the two areas that have been spiraling out of control, cost wise, are medicine and college. This is the direct result of government meddling in the field trying to be more fair and just, but really just fucking over the vast majority of Americans.
>It costs money to administer it all. Can that money be better spent elsewhere?
Yes, and if it costs a dollar, it would be well worth it, but if it is a trillion dollars it is not well worth it. So the question is how much? At the Department of Education, they do something similar and the overhead is between a tenth and a hundredth of a percentage point. So yeah, it's well worth it to make a public database. Especially since a lot of people will dig into the datasets for free on their own time, like I do. And if you find something damning, hey, you get a free paper out of it, which is great.
Frankly, your attitude that scientists won't go after replication because they want to chase after new stuff all the time is basically exactly the problem that we have. It's not as sexy as chasing after new research, but since new research is based on old research, this crisis means we're building giant edificies on foundations of sand. We're talking hugely influential, highly cited papers being unable to be replicated. This is a very, very serious matter. We're essentially wasting our money when we get research that we don't know is accurate or not. So our national priorities should change to fix that.
If you think it is career killing to replicate other people's work, I will just say that if the NSF funds these efforts, you'll see replication centers springing up at universities all over the country as they chase that sweet sweet money. Being a professor isn't just about publishing papers, it's about publishing papers and getting grant money. (Teaching? What's that?) New tenure track professors live and die based on grant money, so if you build it, they will come... and fight tooth and nail for it.
>Having all data for all things published wouldn't make a sea change in science.
It would reveal if the scientists were p-hacking to get a significant result. On the downside, there is no downside. The NSF has been pushing for open data for a while, but it's nice to see it encoded into law.
> It would affect less than you expect in practice. It's certainly a bit useful for other scientists, but most scientists are keen on doing their own science.
Which is what needs to change. The NSF needs to fund more replicability grants.
>Has the EPA or NSF ever passed a regulation based off a brand new paper for which there's been no further work in the scientific community?
I didn't say no further work. I said we need to get way from thinking of peer reviewed papers as being actual scientific findings, even if they have p-values included. We used to consider a peer reviewed published paper as being something meaningful, but if it's worse than a coin flip, we need to set up a whole new grant infrastructure for repeating tentative findings that look interesting.
Says it all. This bill will actually implement it. It's a good thing. And it can't be overriden by Trump, which is also good.
The Replicability Crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) is the most serious issue in modern day science. When 70% of published papers can't be reproduced, that means that you are making the correct bet to believe that any published, peer-reviewed, landmark study in a prestigious journal is wrong. And that's a very sad thing that I just had to write. But this is what happens when people set up a system that works the way ours does - people game the system and the trust and credibility of science is hurt by it.
So yeah. We really, really need to be pushing hard for public datasets and replicability of results.
If I were the head of the NSF, I would treat any paper that has not been replicated yet as tentative, and only accept it as a scientific finding until it has been repeated at least once by a third party.
Seriously. If the EFF isn't the right group to go after Verizon, please let me know who is and I'll donate $100 to the cause.
The doctrine of first sale should apply to cell phones as much as it applies to everything else. Our oligopolic mobile overlords have gotten away with being shitty corporations for way, way, too long now.
The saddest line ever penned by man was Stallman was right again.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one that thinks that this information should have been released to the people making rootkits, and not the vendors?
Time has shown that the vendors cannot be trusted and are far more evil than the people allowing people root access on their own machines. Bloatware, regressions through updates (often forced or nagged into acceptance), pushing their own branded crapware, removing options from the user, *preventing* the user from making the machine work the way they want it to, and so forth. You want to *not* have the screen turn on automatically when it starts charging? Sorry, you don't have permissions to do that on your own machine. They're evil. They should get the second look at these vulnerabilities after everyone who wants to root their devices has done so.
I've had bad experience with touchscreens. Right now, I have a software back button on the corner of my touchscreen and it just won't recognize any touches. Sometimes I can tap at it for five or ten seconds to get it to register, but most of the time is is just.... dead.
However, my phone has a single hardware button, and that allows the phone to still be usable.
This is the second phone this has happened on, so I think physical buttons are now a requirement for me.
>It does not seem to be well-known that Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) spent two academic years at Princeton University, from the summer of 1936 to the summer of 1938.
It's pretty famous, actually. He worked with Von Neumann, though not with anything related to computers, ironically enough.
>I know because I went ahead and played the games I played when I was young, and it's just not as fun anymore. Games haven't changed, I have.
I dunno. I played my first LAN party game of Quake in ages last month (playing the CustomTF mod for Team Fortress that I wrote) and it was still a heck of a lot of fun.
In fact, the people that I was playing with were rather surprised at how much faster players used to be than in modern CoD games where you're running in mud in comparison.
While there's modernish clients for Quake, if id or someone did a really professional job just putting a spit shine on the original Quakeworld (like with what they did with DOOM) I think it'd be a very popular game even today.
>The UK tried it for a generation with BBC Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Ebon Upton grew up with the BBC Micros and this directly led to the Raspberry Pi being developed.
>CNN, NYT, HuffPost, (notice how there were only three of these) are long established news sources presenting a balanced viewpoint.
Hah. No. I don't even think that any of these three would even pretend they're presenting a balanced viewpoint these days. CNN has been caught running the Russia story just for ratings, despite thinking there's nothing actually there, NYT had a complete meltdown on election night (want to see a screenshot? I took a screenshot), and the HuffPo is described as a "politically liberal American news and opinion website."
If you don't believe me, here's Harvard on the matter -
https://shorensteincenter.org/...
You want to talk regressions - if I move a single icon on my desktop, all the icons on the left hand side leap downwards by four icon places. If I save anything to desktop, they all move.
This is after updating to the latest Win10 on my gaming box. Before, if I turned my monitor off and on again it would reset all the icons on the desktop. There are huge threads of people having the same problems.
You can't make this shit up - desktop icons have not been a problem since the Win95 days.
My chiropractor works with a GP, a physical therapist, and an RN.
Chiropractic medicine is at least as effective as mainstream medicine at treating lower back pain.
This doesn't mean that it works for treating cancer or whatever else the quacks peddle.
Look at what the research says:
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/c...
Ok, let me give you my story, then. I run my own small business, and I did some work with a public agency out in New Jersey for a few days, for which I was to be paid X dollars.
So I invoice the people I did the work for. They write back and say that regulations say the following (which I quote, so you can't claim I'm misrepresenting it):
"Businesses planning to contract with any public agency in New Jersey, including state agencies, local governments, colleges/universities and local school boards as well as with casino licensees will be required to provide a Business Registration Certificate as proof of registration. To obtain a Business Registration Certificate, you must have filed Form NJ-REG."
I navigate bureaucracy professionally, since, again, I run a business that deals with government agencies - I have a CAGE number, a FEIN, a DUNS, have registered on SAMS and grants.gov, and any other number of government red tape sites... and the New Jersey registration process was the most hideous piece of shit I've ever seen in my life. Hours into the process, I discovered that I wasn't actually allowed to complete the registration process, since the registration process requires (or required, this was a couple years ago, I haven't checked) me to have *a New Jersey address*. So then I start looking into how I could get a fucking PO box or something just so that I could get a fucking address in New Jersey so I could finish their fucking registration process so I could get paid for work that I had already completed.
Ask me if I'd recommend that anyone do business with New Jersey, and tell me that this brain-splittingly stupid process was all worth it because some "slimeball company abused a process".
>I am curious as to the shooter's personal politics and motivations.
You can read his own political views in his letters to the editor here:
http://heavy.com/news/2017/06/...
He's a Bernie supporter who claims that Bush is a traitor, dislikes Hillary, and hates Trump.
The Portland hate crime shooter was also a Bernie supporter who hated Hillary and Trump.
>The alternative was Fortran, which is what I was taught, or C or C++, which is what I was taught in college. I think most would agree that these often are too complex and can impede the learning of principles.
Out of curiosity, what about modern C++ do you think is too complex for new programmers and can impede their learning of principles?
20 years ago, I'd agree with you - char * strings and [] arrays, sure, were and are terrible - but modern C++ can be written without any of that stuff.
>The problem with the statement that they're "nowhere near ready for prime time" is that it's demonstrably wrong unless you define "ready for prime time" to mean something other than "already on the public streets, driving themselves in traffic" because that's the actual current state of self-driving cars.
Beta testing isn't the same as release.
They're driving on streets at extremely low speeds, and stopping entirely when they get confused.
>So, that almost makes me curious as to what it's supposed to mean.
As I said, I visited the CARS center at Stanford last semester. They're doing lots of interesting things, but they're still at an early stage in the engineering cycle. They've found that, for example, when you have a fully autonomous vehicle the driver gets distracted and is much more likely to cause an accident in case he has to take over in an emergency. So they're trying to solve that problem with eye tracking systems and alerts and such.
What's hilarious is that there is actually a really nice autonomous vehicle lab at Stanford (CARS). I've been to it and talked to the director there. They're nowhere, nowhere near ready for prime time, and this guy has dealerships vanishing by 2024.
> Good lecturers can tell when the students are being lost and inject an ad hoc adjustment to capture their attention and comprehension.
This is exactly it.
If you keep lecturing after you've lost someone, you're just wasting both of your time. Youtube videos have no ability to detect this, and so are fundamentally useless. A good lecturer will constantly evaluate the expression on the students' faces and adjust in real time.
Certain functionalities like HDR in some TVs are only accessible through the built-in apps.
>and I still do but I'm slowly accepting there's some wisdom in forcing the software we all rely on to be transparent.
Transparent isn't enough. It needs to be modifiable.
I bought a television that after purchased updated its firmware to install ads in the input select bar. (A high end Samsung 4K TV that absolutely couldn't use a low price to justify the advertising.) The real kick in the nuts was that 2106 Samsung TVs run Tizen, which is free software - but cannot be, you know, actually modified by the users of the television. It's not helpful to be able to see the source code that Samsung maliciously installs on your television without your consent. You need to have the freedom to be able to modify them as well.
I returned the television and go another one without the advertising in it, and disabled firmware updates. Guess what happened? It re-enabled firmware updates and the next morning I had advertising back on it again. (I have photos of it before and after going to bed. It re-enabled itself without any input from me.) So I returned it again. I hope Samsung made enough money off of both of the ads it served me to warrant the return of a nice television. Wait. No I don't. They can burn in a fire.
I've had RMS over at my house before, and all rumors aside, he's actually a nice guy.
I did my own research on this, and went through the top 10 computer science universities and looked at what they taught in their introductory CS classes. Python and Java made up 100% of them, with only one (Stanford) having a C++ option.
Personally, I think C++ should be the introductory language for computer science majors. (Non-CS majors? Sure, teach them Python or Javascript.) Why? Because CS majors all have to learn computer architecture and usually assembly programming is part of learning architecture. It's way, way easier for people to go from C++ to ASM than it is to go Python to ASM or Java to ASM. So a lot of assembly classes I've gone through have backed away from teaching ASM and instead teach C with a touch of ASM in it, which means that their education gets compromised by an attempt to make the introductory class easier.
But research in computer science education shows that you can learn basic computer science principles pretty much equally well regardless of language taught, so we're sacrificing educational quality for no real benefit.
I think most opposition to C++ came from people that learned it back in the day with square bracket arrays and char* strings, none of which really should be used any more now that we have vectors and strings. (And have had for a very long time, really.) Modern C++ is a very enjoyable language to code in.
>Who would have ever thought that a company founded on the principle [sic] of breaking the law in multiple jurisdictions would ignore and circumvent the terms and conditions, to which they agreed, of an entity with which they do business. Whodathunkait.
They're adding functionality that Apple refuses to do. If you cheat in a Steam game, your device and account gets banned. On iOS, apparently, you just uninstall and reinstall and then you can fraudlently order cars all over again.
Might violate the Apple TOS, but they're in the ethical right on this one.
>As the average net work in a bar jumps the moment Bill Gates walks into it. You wouldn't pretend that Bill Gates has the same standard of living of someone making $7.25 an hour, so why pretend there isn't an enormous gap between schools in wealthy districts and poor ones? There's a reason why no one talks about "failing public schools" in Westchester or the Hamptons.
Which is why teachers around here get paid more to work in bad schools. It doesn't help, though, the research shows. The best teachers still bail out of the schools because they want to work with better kids.
>You know perfectly well that teachers don't start and stop school when students do.
Sure. So do software engineers. How much time do software engineers spend coding on their own free time? More time than teachers spend prepping for class, especially after they've been teaching the class for a while.
>it would be more than balanced by working 50-70 hours a week when school is in session.
On the clock? Hah. No, teachers unions would eat such a proposed workweek alive. If, again, you're taking about other stuff, again, so do software engineers.
>Reasonable? The people claiming this wouldn't touch a teaching job for less than a six figure salary.
Ah, there's the ad hominem. Except you'd be wrong. I taught at a high school just last year, in fact. In addition to running a software consulting business.
>Earning a masters degree, having tens of thousands in student loans to pay off, being salaried and invariably working far beyond 40 hours a week...and that's before even getting to the students. How much would you want to get paid per hour, per kid for being a babysitter, disciplinarian, nurse and social worker.
A master's degree? Are we talking a community college instructor, now?
>And that's before even getting to the actual teaching part, where your performance reviews
What performance reviews? I suspect you're unfamiliar with how the education system actually works.
>Not for a penny under six figures.
You think a person with a bachelor's degree in any subject should make six digits out of college? That's hilarious. You're talking pharmacist-level salary, and pharmacists are a hell of a lot more educated (and attendant student debt) than people with a BS or BA.
>Until they can't find a job that pays off their student loans, at which point it's time to sneer at them for taking on risk they couldn't afford.
How could you even type this? Doctors will take on six digits of student debt because they know they'll be able to pay it off in 10 years and then be very comfortable thereafter. To get a BS around here, it'll cost you about $10k for the first two years in a community college, and about $20k to go to a CSU. $30k in debt can be retired by a teacher off their salary. If they somehow go to Harvard to become a K-12 teacher, then they sign up for one of dozens of debt-forgiveness programs and go work in the ghetto for a while and all their student debt gets bought off by the government.
>You do realize, right, that the reason why doctors salaries are so high is because only wealthy families can risk the six figure cost of a medical degree
No. Again, I don't think you comprehend how student loans work. If you're a poor kid, for one thing, you'll pay close to zero to actually go to college through your bachelor's, and then you'll take on student debt for medical school, which you can work off quickly. Anyone can get a medical degree regardless of financial status.
You're stuck in some sort of 1950s mindset of how education works. I suggest you educate yourself as to how college works these days.
>Uh huh. Found a reason yet for why countries that do far more "meddling" in health care or education than the United States cover all or most of their population for a fraction of the cost?
Are you confusing the tuition paid by students in these countries for the actual cost to educate them? Or the nominal tuition price at a US college with the average price paid? I suspect you are.
>Our public education system is woefully underfunded
You think so? We spend about $13,000 per student per year, nationwide. (http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html)
Average teacher salary is $55,000. (http://www.nea.org/home/54597.htm), but this varies pretty wildly by state.
That's a pretty reasonable amount, IMO, considering you only work 9 months a year and get pretty significant benefits.
>higher education is very costly
Anyone *can* go to college, that's how the system is currently set up. Even if it makes no economic sense, the federal government will subsidize your education.
>It would be nice if everyone smart enough to be a doctor or an engineer could just decide to go to school.
You do realize, right, that the reason why doctors salaries are so high is because we impose artificially low quotas on how many people can go to medical school each year?
If you look at costs over time, the two areas that have been spiraling out of control, cost wise, are medicine and college. This is the direct result of government meddling in the field trying to be more fair and just, but really just fucking over the vast majority of Americans.
>My biggest regret in life is not registering a /. account earlier. I'm not even joking.
Seriously. I lurked on Slashdot for a long time before registering, and regret it every time one of these threads starts.
>It costs money to administer it all. Can that money be better spent elsewhere?
Yes, and if it costs a dollar, it would be well worth it, but if it is a trillion dollars it is not well worth it. So the question is how much? At the Department of Education, they do something similar and the overhead is between a tenth and a hundredth of a percentage point. So yeah, it's well worth it to make a public database. Especially since a lot of people will dig into the datasets for free on their own time, like I do. And if you find something damning, hey, you get a free paper out of it, which is great.
Frankly, your attitude that scientists won't go after replication because they want to chase after new stuff all the time is basically exactly the problem that we have. It's not as sexy as chasing after new research, but since new research is based on old research, this crisis means we're building giant edificies on foundations of sand. We're talking hugely influential, highly cited papers being unable to be replicated. This is a very, very serious matter. We're essentially wasting our money when we get research that we don't know is accurate or not. So our national priorities should change to fix that.
If you think it is career killing to replicate other people's work, I will just say that if the NSF funds these efforts, you'll see replication centers springing up at universities all over the country as they chase that sweet sweet money. Being a professor isn't just about publishing papers, it's about publishing papers and getting grant money. (Teaching? What's that?) New tenure track professors live and die based on grant money, so if you build it, they will come... and fight tooth and nail for it.
>Having all data for all things published wouldn't make a sea change in science.
It would reveal if the scientists were p-hacking to get a significant result. On the downside, there is no downside. The NSF has been pushing for open data for a while, but it's nice to see it encoded into law.
> It would affect less than you expect in practice. It's certainly a bit useful for other scientists, but most scientists are keen on doing their own science.
Which is what needs to change. The NSF needs to fund more replicability grants.
>Has the EPA or NSF ever passed a regulation based off a brand new paper for which there's been no further work in the scientific community?
I didn't say no further work. I said we need to get way from thinking of peer reviewed papers as being actual scientific findings, even if they have p-values included. We used to consider a peer reviewed published paper as being something meaningful, but if it's worse than a coin flip, we need to set up a whole new grant infrastructure for repeating tentative findings that look interesting.
>develop plans
Says it all. This bill will actually implement it. It's a good thing. And it can't be overriden by Trump, which is also good.
The Replicability Crisis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) is the most serious issue in modern day science. When 70% of published papers can't be reproduced, that means that you are making the correct bet to believe that any published, peer-reviewed, landmark study in a prestigious journal is wrong. And that's a very sad thing that I just had to write. But this is what happens when people set up a system that works the way ours does - people game the system and the trust and credibility of science is hurt by it.
So yeah. We really, really need to be pushing hard for public datasets and replicability of results.
If I were the head of the NSF, I would treat any paper that has not been replicated yet as tentative, and only accept it as a scientific finding until it has been repeated at least once by a third party.
This should be illegal.
Seriously. If the EFF isn't the right group to go after Verizon, please let me know who is and I'll donate $100 to the cause.
The doctrine of first sale should apply to cell phones as much as it applies to everything else. Our oligopolic mobile overlords have gotten away with being shitty corporations for way, way, too long now.
The saddest line ever penned by man was Stallman was right again.