Personally this is rather opportune, after years of cramping my hands taking notes in lectures and hammering on keys, recently the arthritis I suffered as a child has reoccured. Though not crippling at the moment, I can only type for a little while before discomfort sets in, not very portentous for begining a CS degree. Thus Im looking for ways to mitigate things.
Anyway Ive started looking at Voice Reccognition:
IBM have made there Via Voice SDK freely available, which is being made use of in the rather interesting looking XVoice, though its been passed between developers, the most current page is here ang the mailing list here. However training hasnt been implimented yet, but Via Voice Dictation for Linux compares rather favourably at ~ $50 compared to several hundred for the windows version.
If you're after a thoughtful, satirical war movie with strong characters go see No Man's Land. Its touted as one of the strongest releases of the year.
Certainly, however what about next time? As a Red Hat customer would you want to bit hit by an exploit that another vendor had discovered and patched, in the time it took for Red Hat to catch up. Is the loss of such cooperation and posibily kicking of the escalation of a patch war really such a good idea? Are you certain that Red Hat will be first every time? Want to watch this escalate and cause problems elsewhere?
"Yep, I bet its just the pre-graduation blues. Its like: this is it?? Now, you release me upon the unsuspecting world? Now, i know all there is to know??!? There HAS to be more to it than that".
I agree whole heartedly, I managed to burn myself out doing a zoology degree, spending 18 hours a day split between study, working in the library and conducting/helping with research work. Grinds one down after a while. I thought Id could stick it, for a while getting out of the university and just walking in a nearby forest helped reaffirm my inspiration for the field, and throughout the research I worked on helped. Though that was a two edge sword in and of itself, it just help to illustrate how irrelevant my studies where. Anyway I plugged away and ended up with a degree certificate I wouldnt even use in the lavatory and Im not talking about hanging it there either.
"I like the Prozac recommendation. I mean, i totally flipped out my last semester in school".
Id recommend caution over just hoping popping a pill will wash those blues away, with out some deeper examination of the problem, it will just treat the symptoms without addressing the causes. And the side effects of antidepressants arent much fun at all. Talking to a profesional might be a better solution, Cognitive Therapy and so forth.
I'd reccomend taking a year out, talk to your tutor and explain the situation, the university should oblige, after all its in their interests too to see you do well. Then go and do something inspirational, why not offer your services to that guy trying to set up net access in the Himalayas, or some other interesting voluntary work. Id caution against just working for the year.
Then after completing your degree, why not do a masters 'conversion' course to another subject to an aim to work in interdisciplinary manner with researches whatever in that field. Be it helping ecologists with their modelling/stats, writing embedded software for medical implants, stuff to analyse ECG data, and so forth.
After spending a year pondering what I want to do with myself Im just about to embark on a computer science degree with a potential aim to approach my former subject from another angle.
Whatever, just letting it fester, doing nothing and hoping to just plug your way through to the end of your degree is the worst course.
"If I'm going to play games, I'm not going to run them through an emulator. I keep 3 machines on my desk at work"...
Thats very nice for you and for those in your situation, an ideal solution. 'Heres the thing, though' Im a student, and while I have enough disposable capital for games and the odd rare hardware upgrade, I certainly couldnt afford OS dedicated machines.
Now while perhaps on an indvidual basis you are a much more interesting consumer, as a representative of a wider income range cohort, whom do you think might be a more attractive target?
"...Since then I have been trying to find ways and means to get a telephone line good enough to get the internet in the village..."
If you take the time to read the item you'll note that he has the computers set up (though no doub t more for other schools etc would be greatly apprecaited) what hes after (and the bbc has a comment box to submit suggestions) are suggestions on how to get net access for the school./. has covered similar topics a couple of times, but if you've actual experience of setting up such a network and the pros and cons of various methods please comment on the orriginal story where it may get back to Mahabir Pun rather than preaching to the choir here on/.
Hmm, so am I liable for linking to them here if their server flops over? Im just speculating here and in the above comment, hopefully prompting someone (as you yourself did) with more insight to illuminate matters.
Say I set up a little park bench on my lawn, a place for my neighbours, the occasional visitor and I to sit upon, then someone comes along and parks an elephant on top of it. Not right that I should request that they pay for a replacement?
Kernel.org and so forth awknowledge, accept and take messures for such load? So is my little 486 on a 56k modem that might happen to catche the attention of/. in the same league?
"They've already answered the questions about caching pages."
Personally if I were to run a little website that was/.'ed and thus incured huge commercial rate data transmition fees, Taco/VA would be hearing form my solicitors/lawyers. Why can Google do what/. cant be bothered? Its not as if page impression data cant be passed back to the site in question or perhaps an account opened with the main adbanner companies, and fresh banner impressions made through the 'cache' credited to the orriginal website author.
Obviously there are legal issues to be addressed, but frankly how does/.'ed compare against a DOS attack, one is mediated malicously over IRC or some such and the other via what a cohort of geeks think is cool, or is that the other way around.:)
Perhaps we should just tack on something to the next HTML standard, rather than robots.txt, slashdot_sod_off.txt.:)
This is a rural location, your figures are probably based upon a suburban/city situation where conduits exist, even if just a chunk of tarmak and stuff exits to easy installing cable. Securing the right to lay such along roads/farmland/hourses, Digging multi kilometre long trenches and preparing such is going to cost signficant more. The infrastructure to assist laying cable just doesnt exist. Heh, our house insnt even connected up to a sewer, and the phone line drops each time an owl bonces upon it.
Thankyou for the illumination, and it deservers a few more positive mod points in my humble opinion.
How resiliant are Antrax spores? Would the range of energy used in radiation sterilization used for medical equipment, perisable foods and so forth be enough to denature the spores? Cost is a factor, but as long as you can give an overkill dose to the mail, quality assurance testing would be minimal, thus the process not too expenisve?
The powder is to prevent clumping, protect the spores to during transport?, and ease the formation of a dusty aerosol to make it more likely that someone will inhale the spores upon disturbing the power through opening the mail.
Moreover by making this visible powder a chracteristic of such attacks one can then interspead fake attacks with ones that really do contain the spores, all will generate the same panic, require the same decomtamination upheaval.
Certainly, its a question of how resiliant the anthrax spores are to such and how much it would cost to roll out. I can at least provide a little insight on the latter, over here in the UK there was a 'big fuss' over the introduction of such sterilization by some big supermarket chains to extend the shelf of fod stuffs.
Such is already used for surgical instruments and other stuff. As long as one can just provide a good overkill dose and avoid anything beyond quality asurance, its apparently realtively low cost. Perhaps more citically its public acceptance that is the critical factor.
Oh, didnt know that. My brief flirtation with research ended a couple of years ago. Though that may have been the discounted student rate to get reprints from a central source in the UK, rather than direct from the journal in question.
Thanks for the info.
Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.
An illustration...
Step 1) Come up with nifty idea
Step 2) Decide whether you want to do it yourself, or hive it off to a phd student [see 2i].
Step 2i) Apply to department for a phd student, hoping that your prior publishing record is strong enough to secure the funding for such from the department, dependent on the number of papers and the ammount of research funding you bring in, department infighting and so forth.
Step 3) Write a Proposal to the relevant Research Council/Charity/etc. There a commitee of experts in that field decide on your worth, the idea's worth, whether it conflicts with how they want to help push forward their particular field, whether they got out of bed from the wrongside, whether you've pissed them off in the past.
Step 3i) Get the funding! Yay! Now try to keep your department from getting their fingers on it.
Step 3ii) Fail to secure funding, back to 1 and take step further towards being pushed towards teaching, away from the stars of the department who have a light/nonexistant load and spend all their time researching.
Step 4 Do the work, avoid any fellows ripping it off (and that includes your superrvisor if you're a phd student). Many long repetative and perhaps futile days ahead.
Step 5) Poster/Conference time. Yay! an opportunity to meet up with your peers and consume a variety of toxic to edible food stuffs with them. Incidentally an opportunity to listen to others talk about their research, hopefully being selected yourself to give a talk or a poster.
Step 6) The results look good, hopefully you thought about their potential analysis before you started actual experiments, chat to fellows in department about such, hoiping the head of department will recognise your potential brilliance and renew your short term contract.
Step 7)Write it all up. This may be a combination of work of a couple of your fellows whom you've spent the last three years or so working very closely with: decide who gets the top billing, primary authorship, oh and yeah you'll have to tack on your head of department/supervisor even if they didnt lift a finger to help.
Step 8)Choose which journal you would like to try and get published in. In the world of academia such are much more presdigious than others, on some weird relative scale worth more points if it were to publish in, are the heights of Nature for you? Perhaps a more specialist journal, or something really obscure (oh well)?
Step 9)Send of your paper to the editor of that journal, along with the fee for such. He then flicks briefly with your paper and decides whether its worth his time, whether its suitable for his journal. If so he selects a couple of people whom are friends/experts in the field/owes a favour too and sends of a copy of your paper to them.
Step 10)Your paper is peer reviewed, by at this time by a small number (1-3) hopefully knowledgeable, impartial anonymous experts in the field poor over your work, looking for any flaws or areas which need to be explored further. Hopefully they're not too red pen happy! Now choose either 10i, 10ii, or 10iii
Step10i) Yay! Your paper is excepted without question. This is the buzz the reason your spent months crouched over hazardous/smelly/expensive chemicals/creatures/equipment for! Time to break out the champaign. Recieve a pat on the head from the Head of Department and take a step towards dropping your teaching load! Woot! Procede to 11
Step 10ii)Erk, red pen, flaws in your work! Hopefully it just means you need to reanalyse something, change a graph, though you may have to go back and do some more research. Resubmit to the editor once you are done: goto 9
Step 10iii)Paper rejected, try an less popular journal: goto 9 or break out the shedder.
Step 11)Time to cough up the goods and pay the editor per page, graph and so forth to include your paper in their journal! Order some reprints (at your expense) so if some freeloaders, I mean fellow scientists write to you directly you can send them a copy of your paper directly and something to pin to the board outside your office, a talisman against the damoclean sword of dismissal (we're reorganising the department... yes thankyou for your 40 years working for us... sod off now, clear your office by Monday...)
Step 12) Presuming you've got your paper in a journal your university has payed (a lot!) to subscribe to, bask in the glow of you work being perused by your fellows and students in the library reading room.
Step 13) Other researchers read you paper, muse on it, write letters to the editors pointing out potential flaws, embark upon their own reasearch to either demonstrate the flaws in your hypothesis, or push the field you've opened up a little futher. This is the gist of peer review. Goto 1
A summary of the problem:
Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.
"...And the CIA put dictators at the governement (just look at Pinochet or the Taliban)..."
No they did not. Treating the mujahedin uprising against soviet occupation as an oppotunity to pay the soviets back for Vietnam, together with Pakistan intelligence the CIA funded, trained and equiped the disparate groups of the mujahedin. After the soviets withdrew they managed to eventually capture the cities overthrowing what was left of the local soviet administration. Then they spent the next few years fighting amougst themselves, already some elements pressing for a more orthodox extreme interpretation of Islam.
And then from near the border with Pakistan from the madrasah? the religous schools, a more inward looking, ultra orthodox, anti modern group, from another ethnic group (Pastun) emerged, the Taliban. They swept through the country, eventually forcing out the persian speaking mujahedin, who regrouped to form the Nothern Aliance.
The came a Saudi dissident, a former
mujahedin with an international perspective and a hatred of the West, Bin Laden
The west is guilty of much, we fought a war with proxy with the soviets for revenge for Veitnam, then left the people of Afghanistan to scrabble about in the rubble of their country. And though there has been UN aid, much much more is needed. Without picture of of a starving mother a child needed to spur the bandwagon of muscicians there has been little public recognition of the terrible crisis going on in the region.
So put a sock in it, or get your facts straight, becuase your argument is all the weaker for it.
Its a matter of scale. Authors have made much of the impact that learning that there is (well has? by the time a signal would reach us) another civilisation out there. However in the shorter timeframe there are perhaps more pressing and worthwhile projects, be it looking at protein self assembly and nanotechnology, modelling global warming and so forth. Anyway, its your computer to use as you see fit and its up to various projects to press thier case for you idle time.
I hope someone can correct me, but for the forseable future, any new drug will involve a stage that animals are subject to experimenting with. As the researcher pointed out such use of computer modelling will reduce this number via modeling the potential predicted biochemical activity, thus those which do not show promise can be discard, reducing the numbers of animals that have to be used at this stage. However this still wont effect the stage where drugs have to be tested on animals for any toxicity.
Unless we as a society are willing to accept the risks ourselves, to acknowledge that the notion of a doctor as a miracle work )whom with one wave of thier stethoscope can heal with out risk), to throw out the scapegoating of medical practitioners when errors occur (taking a more systems approach) and generally get a lot less legal suit slap happy and its a price, a sin if you wish, that has to be bourn. Thanks to such we have the LD50s of distilled water and paper, such more a ridiculous worthless value I can not fathom, being closer to the maximal volume of the rats stomach than any significant value.
Consider it in this perspextive, by chosing to contribute to are making the best of a bad situation, animals are going to be used whatever, you can just help minimise the number.
You're missing the point of the project, this bunch of hippies that missed out on the 60-70's set out to experiment with various forms of 'alternative' techonology, turning a former slate slag strewn hill into a proof of concept, educating the public that some iffy notion of being 'green' is far from unrealistic and pointless. Their inovation is education. Much of 'their' technology is stuff that has been imported from third world countries which lack the luxury of the wests disposable lifestyle.
...are nothing to sniff at, though given the state of some of our schools one has to wonder about the posible motives. Anyway for more info on a broad range of building techniques and other alternative stuff take a look at these guys: Centre for Alternative Technology. They have some rather impressive buildings made from a range of materials. Including a Straw bale theater and a new visitor center made from rammed earth columns.
I remember chatting to someone about this when Opera introduced this. Rather more technically inclined he mentioned that "Cueless piemenuing systems"? are nothing new, that some other (cad?) app has had such for some time. Kudos to Opera though for applying such to browsers.
Certainly, whatever works for you and Im fortunate to have quite a deep desk. Perhaps its just that Im the hazy area of almost being able to touch type, but as you say the left hand rests easily vaguely over left of the keyboard for ctrl, alt, meta, tab and so forth and the right with the mouse. However, I think such an arrangement would be much more awkward if one was left handed, and thus controled the mouse with that hand. But then perhaps you could take the time to configure keybinds to somethings more convienent. Whatever, as others have pointed out a certain redundancy in the interface isnt always a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway Ive started looking at Voice Reccognition:
IBM have made there Via Voice SDK freely available, which is being made use of in the rather interesting looking XVoice, though its been passed between developers, the most current page is here ang the mailing list here. However training hasnt been implimented yet, but Via Voice Dictation for Linux compares rather favourably at ~ $50 compared to several hundred for the windows version.
Alternately, there is the Freespeach/Open Mind Speach project, gpl and makes use of the Overflow language/enviroment.
Not really aware of any active projects beyond such, hopefully this ask slashdot will prove to be interesting reading.
A few random blurbs:
http://www.filmomh.com/r74.htm
http://www.upcomingmovies.com/nomansland.html
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilm/product/film_info/0,3 69 9,2406267,00.html
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movie-1111144/
Certainly, however what about next time? As a Red Hat customer would you want to bit hit by an exploit that another vendor had discovered and patched, in the time it took for Red Hat to catch up. Is the loss of such cooperation and posibily kicking of the escalation of a patch war really such a good idea? Are you certain that Red Hat will be first every time? Want to watch this escalate and cause problems elsewhere?
"Yep, I bet its just the pre-graduation blues. Its like: this is it?? Now, you release me upon the unsuspecting world? Now, i know all there is to know??!? There HAS to be more to it than that".
I agree whole heartedly, I managed to burn myself out doing a zoology degree, spending 18 hours a day split between study, working in the library and conducting/helping with research work. Grinds one down after a while. I thought Id could stick it, for a while getting out of the university and just walking in a nearby forest helped reaffirm my inspiration for the field, and throughout the research I worked on helped. Though that was a two edge sword in and of itself, it just help to illustrate how irrelevant my studies where. Anyway I plugged away and ended up with a degree certificate I wouldnt even use in the lavatory and Im not talking about hanging it there either.
"I like the Prozac recommendation. I mean, i totally flipped out my last semester in school".
Id recommend caution over just hoping popping a pill will wash those blues away, with out some deeper examination of the problem, it will just treat the symptoms without addressing the causes. And the side effects of antidepressants arent much fun at all. Talking to a profesional might be a better solution, Cognitive Therapy and so forth.
I'd reccomend taking a year out, talk to your tutor and explain the situation, the university should oblige, after all its in their interests too to see you do well. Then go and do something inspirational, why not offer your services to that guy trying to set up net access in the Himalayas, or some other interesting voluntary work. Id caution against just working for the year.
Then after completing your degree, why not do a masters 'conversion' course to another subject to an aim to work in interdisciplinary manner with researches whatever in that field. Be it helping ecologists with their modelling/stats, writing embedded software for medical implants, stuff to analyse ECG data, and so forth.
After spending a year pondering what I want to do with myself Im just about to embark on a computer science degree with a potential aim to approach my former subject from another angle.
Whatever, just letting it fester, doing nothing and hoping to just plug your way through to the end of your degree is the worst course.
"If I'm going to play games, I'm not going to run them through an emulator. I keep 3 machines on my desk at work"...
Thats very nice for you and for those in your situation, an ideal solution. 'Heres the thing, though' Im a student, and while I have enough disposable capital for games and the odd rare hardware upgrade, I certainly couldnt afford OS dedicated machines.
Now while perhaps on an indvidual basis you are a much more interesting consumer, as a representative of a wider income range cohort, whom do you think might be a more attractive target?
"...Since then I have been trying to find ways and means to get a telephone line good enough to get the internet in the village..."
If you take the time to read the item you'll note that he has the computers set up (though no doub t more for other schools etc would be greatly apprecaited) what hes after (and the bbc has a comment box to submit suggestions) are suggestions on how to get net access for the school. /. has covered similar topics a couple of times, but if you've actual experience of setting up such a network and the pros and cons of various methods please comment on the orriginal story where it may get back to Mahabir Pun rather than preaching to the choir here on /.
Ack, sorry about that unclosed link, its early.
Hmm, so am I liable for linking to them here if their server flops over? Im just speculating here and in the above comment, hopefully prompting someone (as you yourself did) with more insight to illuminate matters.
Id look closely (well I would ask to consider the case) at whether I could recover my costs against the money they made from ad impressions.
Say I set up a little park bench on my lawn, a place for my neighbours, the occasional visitor and I to sit upon, then someone comes along and parks an elephant on top of it. Not right that I should request that they pay for a replacement?
Kernel.org and so forth awknowledge, accept and take messures for such load? So is my little 486 on a 56k modem that might happen to catche the attention of /. in the same league?
"They've already answered the questions about caching pages."
Personally if I were to run a little website that was /.'ed and thus incured huge commercial rate data transmition fees, Taco/VA would be hearing form my solicitors/lawyers. Why can Google do what /. cant be bothered? Its not as if page impression data cant be passed back to the site in question or perhaps an account opened with the main adbanner companies, and fresh banner impressions made through the 'cache' credited to the orriginal website author.
Obviously there are legal issues to be addressed, but frankly how does /.'ed compare against a DOS attack, one is mediated malicously over IRC or some such and the other via what a cohort of geeks think is cool, or is that the other way around. :)
Perhaps we should just tack on something to the next HTML standard, rather than robots.txt, slashdot_sod_off.txt. :)
The BBC have a timely interview here with Bertrand Hartman of Omnired, describing his rollout of internet access to a rural town in Argentina.
Also theres this describing such done by the Peace Corps for Luki, Bulgaria.
Finally, a former Ask /.:Internet Connectivity Options in Mozambique? may be of interest.
This is a rural location, your figures are probably based upon a suburban/city situation where conduits exist, even if just a chunk of tarmak and stuff exits to easy installing cable. Securing the right to lay such along roads/farmland/hourses, Digging multi kilometre long trenches and preparing such is going to cost signficant more. The infrastructure to assist laying cable just doesnt exist. Heh, our house insnt even connected up to a sewer, and the phone line drops each time an owl bonces upon it.
Thankyou for the illumination, and it deservers a few more positive mod points in my humble opinion.
How resiliant are Antrax spores? Would the range of energy used in radiation sterilization used for medical equipment, perisable foods and so forth be enough to denature the spores? Cost is a factor, but as long as you can give an overkill dose to the mail, quality assurance testing would be minimal, thus the process not too expenisve?
I thought they were using powder.
The powder is to prevent clumping, protect the spores to during transport?, and ease the formation of a dusty aerosol to make it more likely that someone will inhale the spores upon disturbing the power through opening the mail.
Moreover by making this visible powder a chracteristic of such attacks one can then interspead fake attacks with ones that really do contain the spores, all will generate the same panic, require the same decomtamination upheaval.
Certainly, its a question of how resiliant the anthrax spores are to such and how much it would cost to roll out. I can at least provide a little insight on the latter, over here in the UK there was a 'big fuss' over the introduction of such sterilization by some big supermarket chains to extend the shelf of fod stuffs.
Such is already used for surgical instruments and other stuff. As long as one can just provide a good overkill dose and avoid anything beyond quality asurance, its apparently realtively low cost. Perhaps more citically its public acceptance that is the critical factor.
Oh, didnt know that. My brief flirtation with research ended a couple of years ago. Though that may have been the discounted student rate to get reprints from a central source in the UK, rather than direct from the journal in question. Thanks for the info.
Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.
An illustration...
Step 1) Come up with nifty idea
Step 2) Decide whether you want to do it yourself, or hive it off to a phd student [see 2i].
Step 2i) Apply to department for a phd student, hoping that your prior publishing record is strong enough to secure the funding for such from the department, dependent on the number of papers and the ammount of research funding you bring in, department infighting and so forth.
Step 3) Write a Proposal to the relevant Research Council/Charity/etc. There a commitee of experts in that field decide on your worth, the idea's worth, whether it conflicts with how they want to help push forward their particular field, whether they got out of bed from the wrongside, whether you've pissed them off in the past.
Step 3i) Get the funding! Yay! Now try to keep your department from getting their fingers on it.
Step 3ii) Fail to secure funding, back to 1 and take step further towards being pushed towards teaching, away from the stars of the department who have a light/nonexistant load and spend all their time researching.
Step 4 Do the work, avoid any fellows ripping it off (and that includes your superrvisor if you're a phd student). Many long repetative and perhaps futile days ahead.
Step 5) Poster/Conference time. Yay! an opportunity to meet up with your peers and consume a variety of toxic to edible food stuffs with them. Incidentally an opportunity to listen to others talk about their research, hopefully being selected yourself to give a talk or a poster.
Step 6) The results look good, hopefully you thought about their potential analysis before you started actual experiments, chat to fellows in department about such, hoiping the head of department will recognise your potential brilliance and renew your short term contract.
Step 7)Write it all up. This may be a combination of work of a couple of your fellows whom you've spent the last three years or so working very closely with: decide who gets the top billing, primary authorship, oh and yeah you'll have to tack on your head of department/supervisor even if they didnt lift a finger to help.
Step 8)Choose which journal you would like to try and get published in. In the world of academia such are much more presdigious than others, on some weird relative scale worth more points if it were to publish in, are the heights of Nature for you? Perhaps a more specialist journal, or something really obscure (oh well)?
Step 9)Send of your paper to the editor of that journal, along with the fee for such. He then flicks briefly with your paper and decides whether its worth his time, whether its suitable for his journal. If so he selects a couple of people whom are friends/experts in the field/owes a favour too and sends of a copy of your paper to them.
Step 10)Your paper is peer reviewed, by at this time by a small number (1-3) hopefully knowledgeable, impartial anonymous experts in the field poor over your work, looking for any flaws or areas which need to be explored further. Hopefully they're not too red pen happy! Now choose either 10i, 10ii, or 10iii
Step10i) Yay! Your paper is excepted without question. This is the buzz the reason your spent months crouched over hazardous/smelly/expensive chemicals/creatures/equipment for! Time to break out the champaign. Recieve a pat on the head from the Head of Department and take a step towards dropping your teaching load! Woot! Procede to 11
Step 10ii)Erk, red pen, flaws in your work! Hopefully it just means you need to reanalyse something, change a graph, though you may have to go back and do some more research. Resubmit to the editor once you are done: goto 9
Step 10iii)Paper rejected, try an less popular journal: goto 9 or break out the shedder.
Step 11)Time to cough up the goods and pay the editor per page, graph and so forth to include your paper in their journal! Order some reprints (at your expense) so if some freeloaders, I mean fellow scientists write to you directly you can send them a copy of your paper directly and something to pin to the board outside your office, a talisman against the damoclean sword of dismissal (we're reorganising the department... yes thankyou for your 40 years working for us... sod off now, clear your office by Monday...)
Step 12) Presuming you've got your paper in a journal your university has payed (a lot!) to subscribe to, bask in the glow of you work being perused by your fellows and students in the library reading room.
Step 13) Other researchers read you paper, muse on it, write letters to the editors pointing out potential flaws, embark upon their own reasearch to either demonstrate the flaws in your hypothesis, or push the field you've opened up a little futher. This is the gist of peer review. Goto 1
A summary of the problem:
Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.
Fun-fun.
"...And the CIA put dictators at the governement (just look at Pinochet or the Taliban)..."
No they did not. Treating the mujahedin uprising against soviet occupation as an oppotunity to pay the soviets back for Vietnam, together with Pakistan intelligence the CIA funded, trained and equiped the disparate groups of the mujahedin. After the soviets withdrew they managed to eventually capture the cities overthrowing what was left of the local soviet administration. Then they spent the next few years fighting amougst themselves, already some elements pressing for a more orthodox extreme interpretation of Islam.
And then from near the border with Pakistan from the madrasah? the religous schools, a more inward looking, ultra orthodox, anti modern group, from another ethnic group (Pastun) emerged, the Taliban. They swept through the country, eventually forcing out the persian speaking mujahedin, who regrouped to form the Nothern Aliance.
The came a Saudi dissident, a former mujahedin with an international perspective and a hatred of the West, Bin Laden
The west is guilty of much, we fought a war with proxy with the soviets for revenge for Veitnam, then left the people of Afghanistan to scrabble about in the rubble of their country. And though there has been UN aid, much much more is needed. Without picture of of a starving mother a child needed to spur the bandwagon of muscicians there has been little public recognition of the terrible crisis going on in the region.
So put a sock in it, or get your facts straight, becuase your argument is all the weaker for it.
Its a matter of scale. Authors have made much of the impact that learning that there is (well has? by the time a signal would reach us) another civilisation out there. However in the shorter timeframe there are perhaps more pressing and worthwhile projects, be it looking at protein self assembly and nanotechnology, modelling global warming and so forth. Anyway, its your computer to use as you see fit and its up to various projects to press thier case for you idle time.
Unless we as a society are willing to accept the risks ourselves, to acknowledge that the notion of a doctor as a miracle work )whom with one wave of thier stethoscope can heal with out risk), to throw out the scapegoating of medical practitioners when errors occur (taking a more systems approach) and generally get a lot less legal suit slap happy and its a price, a sin if you wish, that has to be bourn. Thanks to such we have the LD50s of distilled water and paper, such more a ridiculous worthless value I can not fathom, being closer to the maximal volume of the rats stomach than any significant value.
Consider it in this perspextive, by chosing to contribute to are making the best of a bad situation, animals are going to be used whatever, you can just help minimise the number.
...What is CAT's next great innovation?...
You're missing the point of the project, this bunch of hippies that missed out on the 60-70's set out to experiment with various forms of 'alternative' techonology, turning a former slate slag strewn hill into a proof of concept, educating the public that some iffy notion of being 'green' is far from unrealistic and pointless. Their inovation is education. Much of 'their' technology is stuff that has been imported from third world countries which lack the luxury of the wests disposable lifestyle.
...are nothing to sniff at, though given the state of some of our schools one has to wonder about the posible motives. Anyway for more info on a broad range of building techniques and other alternative stuff take a look at these guys: Centre for Alternative Technology. They have some rather impressive buildings made from a range of materials. Including a Straw bale theater and a new visitor center made from rammed earth columns.
Ah well, if you recognise the power of the Dark Side? and convert to KDE you can use Kgesture to control/open/close/etc apps via DCOP.
"Face recognition useless for crowd surveillance"
"Face-scan outfit rushes to exploit WTC atrocity"
I remember chatting to someone about this when Opera introduced this. Rather more technically inclined he mentioned that "Cueless piemenuing systems"? are nothing new, that some other (cad?) app has had such for some time. Kudos to Opera though for applying such to browsers.
Certainly, whatever works for you and Im fortunate to have quite a deep desk. Perhaps its just that Im the hazy area of almost being able to touch type, but as you say the left hand rests easily vaguely over left of the keyboard for ctrl, alt, meta, tab and so forth and the right with the mouse. However, I think such an arrangement would be much more awkward if one was left handed, and thus controled the mouse with that hand. But then perhaps you could take the time to configure keybinds to somethings more convienent. Whatever, as others have pointed out a certain redundancy in the interface isnt always a bad thing.