The reason why government should be insisting manufacturers label their products as others have urged is because food manufacturers refuse to answer consumers' questions about what is in their products, especially where cloning technology is involved. Suppressing information about cloning technology in products denies consumers their natural right to choose different products and gives the wrong impression that there is something bad which must be hidden from consumers. It opens a door to the Luddites shouting "cloneburgers". The answer is that the manufacturers should be proudly labelling their products which use cloning technology. The products already have labels with brand and nutrition information, etc. Adding a little extra bit of information to a label costs the manufacturer essentially nothing, and lets the consumer decide whether to buy different products.
So, take the idea as a thought experiment for an even better laser tv. Imagine the absolutely perfect color reproduction in a display built from a tunable laser that monochromatically illuminates each pixel as a MEMS-mirror-on-a-chip scans the laser beam across the display, one pixel at a time, frequency modulated by the chrominance signals. Anyone developing a tunable laser capable of frequency modulation at several MHz and a tuning range of 300nm?
But this particular product is a television, not a computer display. The colour of each pixel on a television is controlled by chrominance signals. Chrominance spans the entire u,v (for PAL TV) or i,q (for NTSC TV) colour spaces. This is one reason why chrominance is a useful way of representing colour.
If you look at a light source consisting of a single wavelength of light (monochromatic light), you will see one colour from the rainbow of visible colours. Interestingly, the human eye can be fooled into seeing the same colour by creating an additive mixture of three different colours of light. You might think the mixture needs to contain the same wavelength as the monochromatic light, but in fact by varying the proportions of the three different colours in the mixture, it is possible to create a mixture that appears to be the same colour as the monochromatic light, even if the three different wavelengths of light in the mixture are all different from the wavelength of the monochromatic light. This is all part of colour theory.
Current displays including LCD, plasma, and CRT are all based on each pixel creating coloured light by mixing light from three separate colour sources. The generic problem with colour mixtures is that for any given triple of colour light sources, there are always certain colours that cannot be created by any mixture of the three light sources.
The new laser tv display is different because each pixel is created by light from a tunable laser . The tunable laser can emit light at any wavelength in the spectrum of visible light. Each pixel gets precisely the correct wavelength for the particular colour that is required at that pixel, thus avoiding the problem of the limited set of colours that can be created by light mixtures of three different sources
Look at these vegetation maps. Who exports more grain - USA or Europe? Which region of the US accounts for over 80% of total US agricultural production? Which map do you prefer?
I second the parent comment. I very much prefer "-1, Nested, Highest Scores First" because it gets all the comments displayed in one click. That's really very convenient, especially when reading as a moderator, and yet you won't be able to do it in D2. The new "D2" comment browsing mode forces you to click too many times if you want to get all the comments displayed.
Although I can see why D2 is handy and bandwidth-efficient for browsing selectively, please keep D1 around permanently at least as a login option. If you don't keep D1, I'll write and publish a perl script workaround that gives me and everyone else who also wants it "-1, Nested, Highest Scores First" even in D2, using up more or less the same bandwidth as if I were still browsing using D1.
"The Eastern Sahara of Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Chad was home to nomadic people who followed rains that turned the desert into grassland. [...] Humid conditions prevailed until about 6000 years ago, when the Sahara abruptly dried out. There was then a gradual exodus of people to the Nile Valley..."
1. "My experience has been that reviewing other people's work has not helped me a bit in terms of reputation nor career prospects."
Such an absolute exclusion seems objectively very unlikely. One's academic reputation is ordinarily comprised of the totality of all the usual professional academic activities including reviewed publications, editorships, chairmanships, admin. duties, peer reviewing, scholarly society memberships, prizes, awards, grants, etc. Every selection committee in my experience considers all aspects of this totality when assessing candidates' curriculum vitae for promotions and new appointments.
2. "If spending my time reviewing someone else's work could be a problem for me later, I simply would not do it."
It depends what you mean by "problem for me later". Feedback on the reviewer would not need to be made public, and assuming it is done double-blind, it would not directly affect career prospects. However, if a person refuses in principle to accept any feedback from peers on the quality of their reviewing -- whether it be praise or constructive criticism -- I think it must put their suitability as a reviewer in question. Directly accepting full responsibility for our reviewing is essential to the integrity of the peer-review process.
3. "I think I'm a very fair reviewer, but [my emphasis] sometimes I get papers that are very poor quality."
Why the disjunction? Whether or not you are a fair reviewer is a logically separate issue from whether or not some of the papers you review are of very poor quality. Let's stay with the original issue of judging the fairness of individual reviewers. Firstly, systematic cross-forum monitoring of the fairness of reviewers' reviews simply does not happen because nobody has been given the resources to do it across all the many different journals and conferences in which each reviewer participates as a reviewer. Secondly, a reviewer, whether that be you, me or anybody else, cannot possibly be expected to judge absolutely impartially whether or not their reviewing is fair. Such judgments must involve an independent anonymous (thus excluding well-known journal editors) peer; the whole process of meta review should also be double blind.
4. "But maybe the authors of these papers think the reviews are unfair?"
They might think that about your reviews, but whether or not they are correct is something that you, the reviewer, cannot judge impartially.
5. "This is why the reviews are done anonymously."
I think what you meant, to be more precise, is that reviews are done anonymously only to prevent authors being able to influence the reviewers during the review process or in other ways outside the review process, not to stop authors from having opinions about the fairness of the reviews themselves.
6. "Authors and reviewers ARE peers. If you are a good author, you will be asked to be a reviewer."
Not all good authors become reviewers in any particular peer community, and not all reviewers are good authors in that peer community. Good authors who are never reviewers are effectively excluded as peers. I think we would all accept that most reviewers do a good job and the quality of their reviews is generally high, but at the same time it has to be admitted that there is variation and this is something we should be trying to improve. A system of double-blind meta review would provide for systematic monitoring of and feedback on the fairness of reviews. As both an author and a reviewer, I think this would be a good thing for authors and reviewers.
7. "As I said before, a good editor knows what's going on. The technical committee in charge of a conference also know if reviews are unfair."
I disagree. Good editors and review committees by themselves are not enough because systematically monitoring the fair
"If potential harm (to your career) could come from going out of your way to be helpful, would you still be helpful?"
I certainly don't agree that it is ok to be more worried about the harm to a reviewer's career from feedback on the fairness of their reviewing, and less worried about the harm to career development for a person whose papers are unreasonably rejected by an unfair reviewer. We are talking about a process that is meant to be peer review; authors and reviewers should be peers. Reviewers currently occupy a very privileged position (giving their time freely, but also boosting their reputation and career prospects as a function of their reviewing experience) and ought to be reviewed by their peers to stop the abuses that do occur quite frequently -- peer review^2 if you will. It is also arguably fairer to use double-blind anonymous peer review.
"Also, kanji isn't as hard as you imply. Most kanji have common shapes in them that appear all over the place, and so you learn very quickly."
I don't think that is generally true. Most foreign students of Japanese find learning kanji difficult. Bear in mind these quotes from two highly qualified Japanese language teachers with 19 and 31 years' experience, respectively:
"Japanese seems to be a very hard language for most Westerners to learn -- especially the kanji."
"Kanji are very difficult to learn. It takes 10 years of full-time education for Japanese children to learn them [jouyou kanji and other common kanji like names]. Very few foreign students ever learn kanji to that level without entering full-time study."
Learning the kanji is a lifelong activity. Even the most highly literate Japanese adults have trouble remembering certain jouyou kanji, kanji compounds and the stroke orders.
I wouldn't be so rabidly macho skeptical regarding negative effects of toxoplasma and cats. The toxoplasma gondii parasite is not a one-off infection event relevant only to pregnant women catching it. Once infected, you are infected for the rest of your life because our bodies are unable to get rid of the parasite, remaining in a state of latent toxoplasmosis. There is published, peer-reviewed evidence that people with latent toxoplasmosis have up to 5% slower reaction times and are more likely to suffer traffic accidents.
Yes, of course that was part of your purpose -- and that's much appreciated -- but the issue is that there is and has been no regular place for users to direct their concerns about slashdot in an on-topic way, except privately to you and the other editors via email and IM. Articles like this are great because they are an effective way of getting a quick overview from a properly moderated discussion of what are the key current issues from the users' points of view, courtesy of the moderation system. Unfortunately this sort of discussion is all too rare, which is partly why frontpage articles have been regularly attracting so many off-topic complaints about slashdot editorial policy, article submitters, etc.
There should be a general place for any sort of moderated discussion about slashdot itself to happen on a daily basis and in its own space. It could be in a dedicated section linked from the side-menu on the frontpage, containing a special daily "article" called something like "Topical Slashdot Issues/Feedback" (whose content would be regularly deleted, perhaps at the end of every day) where users can discuss current issues and problems relating specifically to slashdot, thus removing the tendency for such discussions to creep into frontpage articles where they are off-topic. Providing a regular place would be useful whether or not you or any other slashdot editor spends time taking part in it because it encourages users to discuss their concerns about slashdot there, rather than as off-topic discussion in the main frontpage articles. This sort of idea has been suggested before:
Creating a Questions+Comments Page for Slashdot
(Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Thu Jun 03, 1999 04:05 PM (#1867986)
There is nowhere permanent on Slashdot to post topical comments, suggestions or questions about Slashdot itself, e.g. how many people read Slashdot today, how best to use Slashdot via my firewall, who's CmdrTaco, what text clients do people use for reading Slashdot, where is Slashdot, etc. This would be a place for discussion. It could be called something like "The Slashdot Comments/Questions Page" linked from the home page slashdot.org/comments.htm where people can discuss current Slashdot issues.
Quite apart from its natural appeal to luddites, there are actually valid technical reasons to consider analog tv superior to digital tv at least in terms of its generally much greater robustness to weak reception conditions; the picture quality of analog tv, compared to that of digital tv, degrades much more gracefully over more than an order-of-magnitude larger range of received signal strength and for various types of interference. The picture quality of digital tv is generally almost perfect only within a limited range of received signal strength, and, below the lower limit of that range, the picture quality falls very rapidly to zero, which is obviously useless to the viewer. The picture quality of analog tv gets gradually and progressively worse as the received signal strength decreases, and there is still a viewable picture -- albeit degraded -- even far beyond the level at which digital tv totally fails to be able to produce any picture. A second problem with digital tv is that it is considerably more vulnerable to the effects of impulsive noise from electrical storms, poorly suppressed motors etc, recognisable by the times when the picture "freezes" for a few moments which can be very irritating when it happens e.g. during a live sports match. For the same average total energy of impulsive noise, an analog tv picture generally gets a number of isolated white speckles, which are not really distracting because they are tiny and have no consistent position. Digital tv is more spectrum efficient than analog tv but only at the cost of its much lower robustness to poor reception conditions.
Years before this discovery was made, stomach ulcers like so many other health problems always used to be labelled by the doctors as a "stress" or "lifestyle" related condition, without any proof that anything more definite than that was really directly responsible. Even to this day, it is amazing that medicine still has literally thousands of loosely-defined medical "conditions" and "syndromes" which have no known specific cause but which are nonetheless given proper names for doctors to use as convenient diagnostic labels. Doctors are still trained to diagnose these "conditions", rather than to think harder about possible underlying cause(s). The two scientists in this story were brave enough to challenge the conventional wisdom of their peers that stress and lifestyle factors cause stomach ulcers. It's interesting to wonder how many other "conditions" are actually caused by undetected bacteria or viruses which are waiting to be discovered by scientists prepared to challenge the prevailing dogma.
"Since I live about 12,000 feet from my exchange, remote DSLAMs / FTTx are my main hope for more than 512Kbps"
My office is over 18000 feet (5.5km) from the exchange -- literally on the limit for ADSL service -- and yet I was able to get 1Mbps ADSL.
What is intriguing is that on several occasions my line has temporarily been able to boosted to around 2Mbps according to speed tests based on downloading 20MByte test files created from/dev/random. According to a telco engineer the telco had been doing experiments of some sort during tests of long line capabilities.
It seems to me there is a real risk in Trolltech's going public that another larger company with objectives that are not really compatible with open source could buy a controlling stake in Trolltech and then be in a position to implement a number of closed-source strategies which might include making Qt closed-source, making the Qt development tools closed source, or even ending all Qt development.
Thanks, that's a good method for certain situations. However, having a -d option in scp, thus avoiding the need to use any external helper programs like tar and rsync, would be even more convenient in general. It would also have the benefit of making scp more similar to cp.
The current workarounds for not having a -d option in scp tend to be problematic in various ways. For example, using tar becomes quite tedious when you want to copy only files in a particular directory, without recursively copying any sub-directories and their contents.
Another issue is that using a script or alias to run the tar command causes it to be re-run from scratch every time the script gets re-started following an interruption, e.g. a network problem, which can be extremely wasteful when copying large numbers of files, compared to using a carefully implemented -d option in scp which could reasonably decide not to copy files again that already exist at the destination, e.g. because they were previously successfully copied, unless you request scp -f to forcefully copy the files again, clobbering the existing destination files.
Having a -d option in scp is obviously not anything like a critical need. It would be simply be very handy and logical by comparison with cp to have that functionality inside a single command.
Thanks, that's another good way of doing the same thing. My point is simply that it would be more convenient to have a -d option in scp but it's certainly not an essential thing to have in view of the many workarounds that are available.
I'd really like to see a -d option added to scp for copying symbolic links as symbolic links rather than the files to which the sym.links point. The cp command has it (see man cp for details).
As a workaround you can wrap all the remote files in a temporary tar file to protect any sym.links etc, then scp the tar file and untar the tar file after the transfer but it would be much quicker and simpler if you could use scp to do this.
Diamond, graphite and fullerenes are actually allotropes, not polymers. Allotropes are different physical forms of the same element. Polymers are large molecules built from long chains of connected monomers -- repeating small groups of atoms. An allotrope by definition always has atoms of one element only, whereas polymers can have atoms of several different elements.
My point is that "synthetic diamond" is a valid, well-established term in materials science; it is wrong to criticise it, as you did in your original post, for being an oxymoron. An oxymoron is a deliberate combination for rhetorical purposes of two terms whose meanings are contradictory. However, none of the meanings implicit in "synthetic diamond" are contradictory, so there is no oxymoron; similarly, "fake diamond" is not an oxymoron.
The primary definition and most commonly intended meaning of "synthetic" is combination of separate components, literally coming from the ancient Greek word suntithenai for "put together"; any other meanings of "synthetic" in both American and British English are secondary - see synthesis and synthetic in AHDEL, 4th ed. (2000), and synthesis and synthetic in COED (2005).
"Synthetic diamond" is not an oxymoron; it simply means diamond that has been synthesised by an artificial process, rather than by a naturally occurring process.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why government should be insisting manufacturers label their products as others have urged is because food manufacturers refuse to answer consumers' questions about what is in their products, especially where cloning technology is involved. Suppressing information about cloning technology in products denies consumers their natural right to choose different products and gives the wrong impression that there is something bad which must be hidden from consumers. It opens a door to the Luddites shouting "cloneburgers". The answer is that the manufacturers should be proudly labelling their products which use cloning technology. The products already have labels with brand and nutrition information, etc. Adding a little extra bit of information to a label costs the manufacturer essentially nothing, and lets the consumer decide whether to buy different products.
So, take the idea as a thought experiment for an even better laser tv. Imagine the absolutely perfect color reproduction in a display built from a tunable laser that monochromatically illuminates each pixel as a MEMS-mirror-on-a-chip scans the laser beam across the display, one pixel at a time, frequency modulated by the chrominance signals. Anyone developing a tunable laser capable of frequency modulation at several MHz and a tuning range of 300nm?
But this particular product is a television, not a computer display. The colour of each pixel on a television is controlled by chrominance signals. Chrominance spans the entire u,v (for PAL TV) or i,q (for NTSC TV) colour spaces. This is one reason why chrominance is a useful way of representing colour.
Current displays including LCD, plasma, and CRT are all based on each pixel creating coloured light by mixing light from three separate colour sources. The generic problem with colour mixtures is that for any given triple of colour light sources, there are always certain colours that cannot be created by any mixture of the three light sources.
The new laser tv display is different because each pixel is created by light from a tunable laser . The tunable laser can emit light at any wavelength in the spectrum of visible light. Each pixel gets precisely the correct wavelength for the particular colour that is required at that pixel, thus avoiding the problem of the limited set of colours that can be created by light mixtures of three different sources
A. Gulf Stream OFF image of US vegetation (Ice Age conditions)
or
B. Gulf Stream ON image of US vegetation (present day conditions)
Although I can see why D2 is handy and bandwidth-efficient for browsing selectively, please keep D1 around permanently at least as a login option. If you don't keep D1, I'll write and publish a perl script workaround that gives me and everyone else who also wants it "-1, Nested, Highest Scores First" even in D2, using up more or less the same bandwidth as if I were still browsing using D1.
Here is the sixth result from BBC News:
Since the official download page is currently down, here is another place to download the recent source version 0.5.2
Such an absolute exclusion seems objectively very unlikely. One's academic reputation is ordinarily comprised of the totality of all the usual professional academic activities including reviewed publications, editorships, chairmanships, admin. duties, peer reviewing, scholarly society memberships, prizes, awards, grants, etc. Every selection committee in my experience considers all aspects of this totality when assessing candidates' curriculum vitae for promotions and new appointments.
It depends what you mean by "problem for me later". Feedback on the reviewer would not need to be made public, and assuming it is done double-blind, it would not directly affect career prospects. However, if a person refuses in principle to accept any feedback from peers on the quality of their reviewing -- whether it be praise or constructive criticism -- I think it must put their suitability as a reviewer in question. Directly accepting full responsibility for our reviewing is essential to the integrity of the peer-review process.
Why the disjunction? Whether or not you are a fair reviewer is a logically separate issue from whether or not some of the papers you review are of very poor quality. Let's stay with the original issue of judging the fairness of individual reviewers. Firstly, systematic cross-forum monitoring of the fairness of reviewers' reviews simply does not happen because nobody has been given the resources to do it across all the many different journals and conferences in which each reviewer participates as a reviewer. Secondly, a reviewer, whether that be you, me or anybody else, cannot possibly be expected to judge absolutely impartially whether or not their reviewing is fair. Such judgments must involve an independent anonymous (thus excluding well-known journal editors) peer; the whole process of meta review should also be double blind.
They might think that about your reviews, but whether or not they are correct is something that you, the reviewer, cannot judge impartially.
I think what you meant, to be more precise, is that reviews are done anonymously only to prevent authors being able to influence the reviewers during the review process or in other ways outside the review process, not to stop authors from having opinions about the fairness of the reviews themselves.
Not all good authors become reviewers in any particular peer community, and not all reviewers are good authors in that peer community. Good authors who are never reviewers are effectively excluded as peers. I think we would all accept that most reviewers do a good job and the quality of their reviews is generally high, but at the same time it has to be admitted that there is variation and this is something we should be trying to improve. A system of double-blind meta review would provide for systematic monitoring of and feedback on the fairness of reviews. As both an author and a reviewer, I think this would be a good thing for authors and reviewers.
I disagree. Good editors and review committees by themselves are not enough because systematically monitoring the fair
I certainly don't agree that it is ok to be more worried about the harm to a reviewer's career from feedback on the fairness of their reviewing, and less worried about the harm to career development for a person whose papers are unreasonably rejected by an unfair reviewer. We are talking about a process that is meant to be peer review; authors and reviewers should be peers. Reviewers currently occupy a very privileged position (giving their time freely, but also boosting their reputation and career prospects as a function of their reviewing experience) and ought to be reviewed by their peers to stop the abuses that do occur quite frequently -- peer review^2 if you will. It is also arguably fairer to use double-blind anonymous peer review.
I don't think that is generally true. Most foreign students of Japanese find learning kanji difficult. Bear in mind these quotes from two highly qualified Japanese language teachers with 19 and 31 years' experience, respectively:
Learning the kanji is a lifelong activity. Even the most highly literate Japanese adults have trouble remembering certain jouyou kanji, kanji compounds and the stroke orders.
I wouldn't be so rabidly macho skeptical regarding negative effects of toxoplasma and cats. The toxoplasma gondii parasite is not a one-off infection event relevant only to pregnant women catching it. Once infected, you are infected for the rest of your life because our bodies are unable to get rid of the parasite, remaining in a state of latent toxoplasmosis. There is published, peer-reviewed evidence that people with latent toxoplasmosis have up to 5% slower reaction times and are more likely to suffer traffic accidents.
There should be a general place for any sort of moderated discussion about slashdot itself to happen on a daily basis and in its own space. It could be in a dedicated section linked from the side-menu on the frontpage, containing a special daily "article" called something like "Topical Slashdot Issues/Feedback" (whose content would be regularly deleted, perhaps at the end of every day) where users can discuss current issues and problems relating specifically to slashdot, thus removing the tendency for such discussions to creep into frontpage articles where they are off-topic. Providing a regular place would be useful whether or not you or any other slashdot editor spends time taking part in it because it encourages users to discuss their concerns about slashdot there, rather than as off-topic discussion in the main frontpage articles. This sort of idea has been suggested before:
Quite apart from its natural appeal to luddites, there are actually valid technical reasons to consider analog tv superior to digital tv at least in terms of its generally much greater robustness to weak reception conditions; the picture quality of analog tv, compared to that of digital tv, degrades much more gracefully over more than an order-of-magnitude larger range of received signal strength and for various types of interference. The picture quality of digital tv is generally almost perfect only within a limited range of received signal strength, and, below the lower limit of that range, the picture quality falls very rapidly to zero, which is obviously useless to the viewer. The picture quality of analog tv gets gradually and progressively worse as the received signal strength decreases, and there is still a viewable picture -- albeit degraded -- even far beyond the level at which digital tv totally fails to be able to produce any picture. A second problem with digital tv is that it is considerably more vulnerable to the effects of impulsive noise from electrical storms, poorly suppressed motors etc, recognisable by the times when the picture "freezes" for a few moments which can be very irritating when it happens e.g. during a live sports match. For the same average total energy of impulsive noise, an analog tv picture generally gets a number of isolated white speckles, which are not really distracting because they are tiny and have no consistent position. Digital tv is more spectrum efficient than analog tv but only at the cost of its much lower robustness to poor reception conditions.
Years before this discovery was made, stomach ulcers like so many other health problems always used to be labelled by the doctors as a "stress" or "lifestyle" related condition, without any proof that anything more definite than that was really directly responsible. Even to this day, it is amazing that medicine still has literally thousands of loosely-defined medical "conditions" and "syndromes" which have no known specific cause but which are nonetheless given proper names for doctors to use as convenient diagnostic labels. Doctors are still trained to diagnose these "conditions", rather than to think harder about possible underlying cause(s). The two scientists in this story were brave enough to challenge the conventional wisdom of their peers that stress and lifestyle factors cause stomach ulcers. It's interesting to wonder how many other "conditions" are actually caused by undetected bacteria or viruses which are waiting to be discovered by scientists prepared to challenge the prevailing dogma.
My office is over 18000 feet (5.5km) from the exchange -- literally on the limit for ADSL service -- and yet I was able to get 1Mbps ADSL.
What is intriguing is that on several occasions my line has temporarily been able to boosted to around 2Mbps according to speed tests based on downloading 20MByte test files created from /dev/random. According to a telco engineer the telco had been doing experiments of some sort during tests of long line capabilities.
It seems to me there is a real risk in Trolltech's going public that another larger company with objectives that are not really compatible with open source could buy a controlling stake in Trolltech and then be in a position to implement a number of closed-source strategies which might include making Qt closed-source, making the Qt development tools closed source, or even ending all Qt development.
Will we be able to twist a Readius into a Moebius?
The current workarounds for not having a -d option in scp tend to be problematic in various ways. For example, using tar becomes quite tedious when you want to copy only files in a particular directory, without recursively copying any sub-directories and their contents.
Another issue is that using a script or alias to run the tar command causes it to be re-run from scratch every time the script gets re-started following an interruption, e.g. a network problem, which can be extremely wasteful when copying large numbers of files, compared to using a carefully implemented -d option in scp which could reasonably decide not to copy files again that already exist at the destination, e.g. because they were previously successfully copied, unless you request scp -f to forcefully copy the files again, clobbering the existing destination files.
Having a -d option in scp is obviously not anything like a critical need. It would be simply be very handy and logical by comparison with cp to have that functionality inside a single command.
Thanks, that's another good way of doing the same thing. My point is simply that it would be more convenient to have a -d option in scp but it's certainly not an essential thing to have in view of the many workarounds that are available.
As a workaround you can wrap all the remote files in a temporary tar file to protect any sym.links etc, then scp the tar file and untar the tar file after the transfer but it would be much quicker and simpler if you could use scp to do this.
Diamond, graphite and fullerenes are actually allotropes , not polymers. Allotropes are different physical forms of the same element. Polymers are large molecules built from long chains of connected monomers -- repeating small groups of atoms. An allotrope by definition always has atoms of one element only, whereas polymers can have atoms of several different elements.
My point is that "synthetic diamond" is a valid, well-established term in materials science; it is wrong to criticise it, as you did in your original post, for being an oxymoron. An oxymoron is a deliberate combination for rhetorical purposes of two terms whose meanings are contradictory. However, none of the meanings implicit in "synthetic diamond" are contradictory, so there is no oxymoron; similarly, "fake diamond" is not an oxymoron.
The primary definition and most commonly intended meaning of "synthetic" is combination of separate components, literally coming from the ancient Greek word suntithenai for "put together"; any other meanings of "synthetic" in both American and British English are secondary - see synthesis and synthetic in AHDEL, 4th ed. (2000), and synthesis and synthetic in COED (2005).
"Synthetic diamond" is not an oxymoron; it simply means diamond that has been synthesised by an artificial process, rather than by a naturally occurring process.