People who have a hunger for learning and are self-motivated about it face a system that is stacked against them in many ways, unless they take an entrepreneurial path.
Pretty much any discipline you'd want to learn is out there for the taking these days, no charge. Not too many people have the interest, motivation, and discipline to stick with self-directed study, but for those that do it can work very well. The problem, of course, is credibility: It can be very hard to convince others that you have the background, knowledge, and understanding that you say you do, or even to get the opportunity to do so.
That's the boat I find myself in now. I have a degree, but not in anything related to what my field has been for the last 20 years. I've been able to pursue my interests by starting a couple of companies, both fairly successful for a while but now defunct. I've learned the shit out of the fields in which I operate (and others as well), but now I find it's no simple matter to get my foot in the door of established organizations in those fields, for whom I look like a very risky and possibly unqualified hire. But even with that, I don't think I'd do it differently if I had the chance.
but those benefits are viewed as drawbacks by much of the traditional business community.
Which is why we should all welcome "much of the traditional business community" as our competitors.
You say what you do knowing full well that you'll be paying forever to keep your office suite up to date, which will hardly be optional as file formats change, often gratuitously.
The worst case scenario for OO/LO and other FOSS is that a day will come when it's no longer actively developed by a community with critical mass. In that case the code base doesn't disappear, and nothing that you rely upon becomes unavailable. The same cannot be said for when a closed-source software vendor goes belly-up, or sells out to a different company intent on driving a harder bargain with tied-in users.
As others point out here, this response to the takeover by Oracle is a demonstration of the strength and resiliency of Open Source, not a harbinger of risk.
Rules may be rules, but senseless, pointless rules, if never challenged, will accumulate and ultimately strangle the society that enshrines them. Rather than being prescriptions on behavior that are necessary to keep the machine running smoothly, they become traditional vestiges with no rhyme or reason, to be followed because pappy did, as did grandpappy before him.
But that's the great liberal/conservative divide, isn't it? Reason, sometimes errant but able to correct itself, vs. tradition, often mindless and always without a rudder.
A better comparison would be to the "colonization" of Antarctica, except that Antarctica is far, far more hospitable a place than Mars. Not only is it much warmer than Mars, but the atmosphere contains lots of oxygen, and there's plenty of water lying about. It's not cheap to get your gear and supplies there, but it doesn't cost a bazillion dollars per kilo, either.
Conversely, anyone volunteering to go to Mars - permanently or not - ought to be required to live by themselves in some remote outpost in Antarctica for several years, with only a ton or two of materials and supplies with which to build shelter and sustain themselves for the duration. If you can't figure out how to do that, you have no business on Mars.
Well, you can't do anything without first having a Theory of Ghosts from which you can make predictions about what things you should expect to observe if ghosts do indeed exist. It isn't sufficient (or even valid) just to observe phenomena that you can't easily explain and conclude that ergo there be ghosts.
Umm... I don't think anyone here is arguing that they don't have the legal right to file a lawsuit. The point is precisely as you say: "hey don't use these guys, they're litigious jerks." So what's the problem? We all like our daily righteous indignation.
And why, more generally, is there always someone in every thread like this who suggests that no valid criticism can be made of behavior - however reprehensible - that violates no laws?
Consider also that a result being significant to 95% confidence simply means that you would expect that same result 5% of the time purely by chance.
But I suspect the larger problem stems from the career aspect of modern science. Sometimes the failure of a promising experiment can set you back by months or even years, not to mention clouding the horizon for future funding. It's not surprising that some will do whatever is needed to present their results in a positive light, even if that crosses ethical lines.
...that these attacks "in support of Wikileaks" are what they are represented to be? Or is it possible that at least some of them could be false flag attacks designed to make the case later that breaching government secrecy is somehow tantamount to terrorism? Just asking... I really have no idea, but neither do I expect things always to be what they appear.
On the other hand, fragment sizing is exactly how traditional Sanger sequencing is done. If you could use this to rapidly size a sufficient sample of fragments from each of the four sequencing reactions -- instead of waiting for them to separate electrophoretically -- it could still be quite useful.
Hmmm... My quick scan of this failed to turn up any mention of progress toward differentiating between the 4 bases (A,C,G,T) as the DNA strand exits the pore. That's going to be quite a challenge, especially with unlabeled DNA, but it's pretty fundamental to this being used directly for sequencing. Looks like it might be great for fragment sizing in the shorter term, though.
Realistically, you're usually working with reagents that are only 99% (or so) pure, as well. In that case using more than 3 significant digits is pretty meaningless.
Congratulations for getting through the first 3 weeks of Econ 101. If you show up next week too, you'll learn about oligopoly and cartels, which, while impossible (or benign) in the libertarian fantasy universe, are actually more the rule than the exception in modern capitalism.
Texting services are nearly costless for the telecomms, so you'd think that at least one would offer it to customers at no (additional) charge to gain market share, wouldn't you? Price equals marginal cost to maximize profit, right? But they all know that if they did so, all of the others would have to follow, hence killing the goose that laid the golden egg and leaving them all worse off than they were before. That's the way things work when only a few companies dominate an industry.
And now we get to the crux of the matter. When government and the corporate sector join forces, they don't have to throw you in jail; they can simply deny you the opportunity to earn a living. That's the way it worked back in the 50s during the McCarthy witchhunt, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more of it in the future.
F/OSS products which scratch an individual or a small group of peoples' itch generally get developed to a certain point and then stagnate.
Indeed. I use it extensively, and have noticed that they always forget to put in the malware, nagware, and crapware parts.
I suppose you could adopt a business model whereby you'd put those things in there and charge a premium just like closed-source software, but since you'd have to make the source available somebody could just take it out again. Why anyone would want to, I don't know.
If you judge each character -- God, the winner, and Satan, the loser -- by their acts alone, it certainly gives you cause to wonder.
I doubt that this thought is worrisome for very many, though, since the proportion of people who are able to reason their way out of what they were taught as children is somewhere down there in single digits...
Al Queda is 90% myth. It exists, in a sense, because loosely-organized terrorist groups get a lot of publicity and notoriety mileage for nothing but calling themselves that. Any group of dickheads in any country can do it and be taken seriously.
Western governments - and the US in particular - encourage the myth because it gives the public a mysterious and sinister enemy to focus on, like THRUSH or CHAOS. That's a prerequisite if you're going to use terrorism as a pretext for spending $trillions on war and your friends in the private sector who help you wage it.
I'll be looking for you in the next airport security line, then.
Most people don't feel it (at first) when their rights are taken away, because they're submissive to authority and have no desire to attract its wrath by rocking the boat. As humiliations mount, they justify them by thinking, "Well, this is necessary to protect us from the terrorists."
Are your rights intact because you're standing up for them, or because you're not planning on using them anyway?
They wouldn't have won if the cowards who think all these trampling of our rights were "necessary" to be safe.
The weird thing is that most of the conservative "nuke-em" tough-guys I know are the same ones screaming for someone else to kill the scary spider they just found in the bathtub. They're "tough" because they want it killed, and don't care what damage is done in the process.
That was the strategy exactly. Ironic, isn't it, that we're now doing to ourselves the very thing that we did to bring down the USSR? We're even using the same country (Afghanistan) for a good part of it!
Let's face it, I don't know if the Terrorists have "won", but we have surely lost.
Depends on who you mean by "we". Maybe these days we're fighting wars and engaging in self-damaging security theater not in spite of the cost, but rather because of it. Every cost to the public is income to somebody, and clearly the interests of those particular somebodies now outweighs any "public" interest.
As Eisenhower (a republican, no less) warned, when war comes to be perceived as profitable, we're going to see a lot more of it. The same can be said for security, prisons, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
People who have a hunger for learning and are self-motivated about it face a system that is stacked against them in many ways, unless they take an entrepreneurial path.
Pretty much any discipline you'd want to learn is out there for the taking these days, no charge. Not too many people have the interest, motivation, and discipline to stick with self-directed study, but for those that do it can work very well. The problem, of course, is credibility: It can be very hard to convince others that you have the background, knowledge, and understanding that you say you do, or even to get the opportunity to do so.
That's the boat I find myself in now. I have a degree, but not in anything related to what my field has been for the last 20 years. I've been able to pursue my interests by starting a couple of companies, both fairly successful for a while but now defunct. I've learned the shit out of the fields in which I operate (and others as well), but now I find it's no simple matter to get my foot in the door of established organizations in those fields, for whom I look like a very risky and possibly unqualified hire. But even with that, I don't think I'd do it differently if I had the chance.
but those benefits are viewed as drawbacks by much of the traditional business community.
Which is why we should all welcome "much of the traditional business community" as our competitors.
You say what you do knowing full well that you'll be paying forever to keep your office suite up to date, which will hardly be optional as file formats change, often gratuitously.
The worst case scenario for OO/LO and other FOSS is that a day will come when it's no longer actively developed by a community with critical mass. In that case the code base doesn't disappear, and nothing that you rely upon becomes unavailable. The same cannot be said for when a closed-source software vendor goes belly-up, or sells out to a different company intent on driving a harder bargain with tied-in users.
As others point out here, this response to the takeover by Oracle is a demonstration of the strength and resiliency of Open Source, not a harbinger of risk.
I'll assume you're serious for the moment.
Rules may be rules, but senseless, pointless rules, if never challenged, will accumulate and ultimately strangle the society that enshrines them. Rather than being prescriptions on behavior that are necessary to keep the machine running smoothly, they become traditional vestiges with no rhyme or reason, to be followed because pappy did, as did grandpappy before him.
But that's the great liberal/conservative divide, isn't it? Reason, sometimes errant but able to correct itself, vs. tradition, often mindless and always without a rudder.
A better comparison would be to the "colonization" of Antarctica, except that Antarctica is far, far more hospitable a place than Mars. Not only is it much warmer than Mars, but the atmosphere contains lots of oxygen, and there's plenty of water lying about. It's not cheap to get your gear and supplies there, but it doesn't cost a bazillion dollars per kilo, either.
Conversely, anyone volunteering to go to Mars - permanently or not - ought to be required to live by themselves in some remote outpost in Antarctica for several years, with only a ton or two of materials and supplies with which to build shelter and sustain themselves for the duration. If you can't figure out how to do that, you have no business on Mars.
Gear.
They know something you don't, they want you to know it, and they want to keep it that way for as long as possible...
Well, you can't do anything without first having a Theory of Ghosts from which you can make predictions about what things you should expect to observe if ghosts do indeed exist. It isn't sufficient (or even valid) just to observe phenomena that you can't easily explain and conclude that ergo there be ghosts.
And thereby do we traverse the tortuous path from intelligence to wisdom...
Umm... I don't think anyone here is arguing that they don't have the legal right to file a lawsuit. The point is precisely as you say: "hey don't use these guys, they're litigious jerks." So what's the problem? We all like our daily righteous indignation.
And why, more generally, is there always someone in every thread like this who suggests that no valid criticism can be made of behavior - however reprehensible - that violates no laws?
Consider also that a result being significant to 95% confidence simply means that you would expect that same result 5% of the time purely by chance.
But I suspect the larger problem stems from the career aspect of modern science. Sometimes the failure of a promising experiment can set you back by months or even years, not to mention clouding the horizon for future funding. It's not surprising that some will do whatever is needed to present their results in a positive light, even if that crosses ethical lines.
...that these attacks "in support of Wikileaks" are what they are represented to be? Or is it possible that at least some of them could be false flag attacks designed to make the case later that breaching government secrecy is somehow tantamount to terrorism? Just asking... I really have no idea, but neither do I expect things always to be what they appear.
Warning, gizmag features really intrusive advertising
Well, let's not link to it, then.
On the other hand, fragment sizing is exactly how traditional Sanger sequencing is done. If you could use this to rapidly size a sufficient sample of fragments from each of the four sequencing reactions -- instead of waiting for them to separate electrophoretically -- it could still be quite useful.
Hmmm... My quick scan of this failed to turn up any mention of progress toward differentiating between the 4 bases (A,C,G,T) as the DNA strand exits the pore. That's going to be quite a challenge, especially with unlabeled DNA, but it's pretty fundamental to this being used directly for sequencing. Looks like it might be great for fragment sizing in the shorter term, though.
Realistically, you're usually working with reagents that are only 99% (or so) pure, as well. In that case using more than 3 significant digits is pretty meaningless.
Congratulations for getting through the first 3 weeks of Econ 101. If you show up next week too, you'll learn about oligopoly and cartels, which, while impossible (or benign) in the libertarian fantasy universe, are actually more the rule than the exception in modern capitalism.
Texting services are nearly costless for the telecomms, so you'd think that at least one would offer it to customers at no (additional) charge to gain market share, wouldn't you? Price equals marginal cost to maximize profit, right? But they all know that if they did so, all of the others would have to follow, hence killing the goose that laid the golden egg and leaving them all worse off than they were before. That's the way things work when only a few companies dominate an industry.
Score:6, Insightful
And now we get to the crux of the matter. When government and the corporate sector join forces, they don't have to throw you in jail; they can simply deny you the opportunity to earn a living. That's the way it worked back in the 50s during the McCarthy witchhunt, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more of it in the future.
F/OSS products which scratch an individual or a small group of peoples' itch generally get developed to a certain point and then stagnate.
Indeed. I use it extensively, and have noticed that they always forget to put in the malware, nagware, and crapware parts.
I suppose you could adopt a business model whereby you'd put those things in there and charge a premium just like closed-source software, but since you'd have to make the source available somebody could just take it out again. Why anyone would want to, I don't know.
If you judge each character -- God, the winner, and Satan, the loser -- by their acts alone, it certainly gives you cause to wonder.
I doubt that this thought is worrisome for very many, though, since the proportion of people who are able to reason their way out of what they were taught as children is somewhere down there in single digits...
Al Queda is 90% myth. It exists, in a sense, because loosely-organized terrorist groups get a lot of publicity and notoriety mileage for nothing but calling themselves that. Any group of dickheads in any country can do it and be taken seriously.
Western governments - and the US in particular - encourage the myth because it gives the public a mysterious and sinister enemy to focus on, like THRUSH or CHAOS. That's a prerequisite if you're going to use terrorism as a pretext for spending $trillions on war and your friends in the private sector who help you wage it.
i never gave anything up.
I'll be looking for you in the next airport security line, then.
Most people don't feel it (at first) when their rights are taken away, because they're submissive to authority and have no desire to attract its wrath by rocking the boat. As humiliations mount, they justify them by thinking, "Well, this is necessary to protect us from the terrorists."
Are your rights intact because you're standing up for them, or because you're not planning on using them anyway?
They wouldn't have won if the cowards who think all these trampling of our rights were "necessary" to be safe.
The weird thing is that most of the conservative "nuke-em" tough-guys I know are the same ones screaming for someone else to kill the scary spider they just found in the bathtub. They're "tough" because they want it killed, and don't care what damage is done in the process.
I'd mod you up, just to encourage good modding.
That was the strategy exactly. Ironic, isn't it, that we're now doing to ourselves the very thing that we did to bring down the USSR? We're even using the same country (Afghanistan) for a good part of it!
Let's face it, I don't know if the Terrorists have "won", but we have surely lost.
Depends on who you mean by "we". Maybe these days we're fighting wars and engaging in self-damaging security theater not in spite of the cost, but rather because of it. Every cost to the public is income to somebody, and clearly the interests of those particular somebodies now outweighs any "public" interest.
As Eisenhower (a republican, no less) warned, when war comes to be perceived as profitable, we're going to see a lot more of it. The same can be said for security, prisons, etc...