While I'm sure that people liked the ad revenue that they got from their video being viewed (anyone have any idea how much they get?), my understanding of LPs is that they are almost always a labor of love, not of cash. So Nintendo taking away the ad revenue might discourage some that were using it as a business (though if your business relied entirely on one company's completed product, protected under copyright, you need to rethink your business plan), but the majority will probably continue doing what they do.
More than a redirection of where the advertisement money goes, the problem is that ads will be added even if you didn't have them before. So if you had a nice, viewer-friendly ad-free channel, with a policy of no "monetization", you will suddenly look like you've sold out your viewers after all.
You can contest this, though, by filing a counter-notice, which will then be followed (pretty much automatically, I hear) by the company making a DMCA-claim, and you having to make a counter-claim (if you don't you are back in the situation where you started, except that you now have a copyright strike against you, which will prevent you from uploading videos longer than 15 min, among other things, apparently). This makes the whole process rather scary. I personally have a gameplay video this happened to, and made sure that my video was fair use. Sadly fair use is a bit wooly, but factors that play into it are:
1. Whether the work is transformative enough (yes is good)
2. Whether it can be used as a stand-in for the original (no is good)
3. Whether it is non-commercial (no is good)
4. Whether it could be expected to have a negative imapct on the original (no is good)
5. Whether it is used as political commentary, parody or similar (yes is good)
and there might have been others too. These do not all have to be fulfilled, one is enough in principle, but the more the better. I convinced myself 90% that my video is actually fair use, but that is not enough that I want to risk a lawsuit about one little video. Neither do I want the effort and expense to track down a lawyer, meet him, explain the issue, and pay his not-insignificant salary, for a video like this.
The upshoot is that fair use is risky and hard to assert on Youtube, and copyright infridgement is an accuser's game, with the accuser (being a big, rich company), facing no risk from accusing, while the defendant has everything to lose.
LibreOffice is being developed in the hopes that it will be useful to people, not for profit. Hence not having room to grow would not be a problem, even if it were true. For some programs, the popularity itself is a large part of their usefulness. This is mostly the case for protocols and networking services, such as ipv6, www, freenet and facebook. But LibreOffice does not fall into this category. It uses standard formats that can be read by many other programs, and would be useful even if you were the only person using it.
This is similar to making a DVD player without region locks - it makes the player much more useful for its actual users, but pisses off the movie distributers because they want to control how the DVDs are used. In this case, Microsoft has created a youtube player that is better for the user in two important ways (no ads, which the user doesn't want to see, and the ability to store the video for later). This is something I would have expected the open source world to provide; I'm amazed to see a company like Microsoft do it. But I'm sure the programmers responsible for making this user-friendly (in the right sense of the word, not the "ooh shiny" sense) program will soon be punished for his obstinacy.
The ability to block advertisements and download movies is provided by web browser addons, so people championing Google in its fight against this windows phone program would also have to come out against those addons. I hope that isn't as prevalent a view here as it seems from most of the comments so far.
Do you really want to be sold on political ideas the same way you're sold on products? With appeals to the subconscious and general trickery, rather than rational argument? If no, then adverts are a bad idea.
Well said. In fact, I don't want to be sold products this way either. Advertisements should be greatly reduced in all forms, not just in politics.
Thanks for the detailed information. My intuition regarding the various units for measuring ionizing radiation isn't that good, but apparently 1.2 kBq/kg is the allowed radioactivity limit in food in the USA, which I guess goes to say that 1 Bq is a very small unit. 25 kBq/kg does sound pretty much, though. It is a bit odd that the Japanese limit seems to be 10 times lower that in the USA.
1 billion dollar in fishing losses is a big (though not catastrophic) deal. But are these losses due to the radioactivity making the fish unsafe to eat (I guess not, looking at the smaller than the average level in the USA. And this is already measured in equivalent dose, which takes into account the different effects of different types of radioactivity. So these numbers should be directly comparable.
Unless I've completely misunderstood something here, it seems like the evacuated area is still completely safe to live in. If so, the admittedly huge $250 to $500 billion in damage the evacuation resulted in was not due to the Fukushima accident, but rather due to the unreasonably low safety limit. I won't contest that the aftermath of the accident has cost Japan a great deal, but it seems to me (though I'm definitely no radiation specialist) that these expenses were due to the overreaction, and not the radioactivity.
Hopefully I haven't messed up my units here somehow.
Youtube can say whatever they want. Whether it is enforceable is another matter.
Of course it's enforceable. You are assuming you have a legal right to view YouTube videos, but you very much do not. If Google *chooses* to send you the video *THEN* you have the right to "time shift" it all you want. But the former is very much not a legal right. If Google decides to cut off your YouTube access there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Aren't there laws against arbitrary denial of service? I'm not sure how far you can go, but if youtube refused to serve members of certain political parties, or people based on their religion or descent, I'm pretty sure there is plenty that could be done about that. I'm not sure how far those laws go, and it probably varies from country to country. But it wouldn't surprise me if refusing to serve people who exersise a right guaranteed by law would be grounds for a successful lawsuit.
Engineering time, designer time, bandwidth costs, server costs, etc...
YouTube.com didn't just magically appear and run itself completely free of charge.
Youtube probably costs a lot of money to maintain, and hence I understand why google wants to put advertisements on it. Most of these costs probably deal with the hardware for distributing and encoding video.
It should be possible, though technically challenging, to do this in a peer-to-peer manner, where storage, distribution and encoding is farmed transparentl out to the users. Such distributed storage and distribution already exists with Freenet, but it is terribly slow and inefficient. However, freenet has the additional requirement of anonymity and resistance to censorship, which prevents it from routing efficiently. So I think a distributed youtube replacement coould potentially have much better performance than freenet, perhaps enough to make it viable.
I'm not saying that it would be able to out-compete youtube as it is, but if youtube were to disappear due to ad-blocking or similar, it could potentially be replaced by a Free alternative.
How are you supposed to use youtube if you aren't allowed to download anything? Do they mean "download and then not delete soon after"? Perhaps they define this some other place in the TOS, but as it is that clause makes it impossible to follow their TOS without completely blocking youtube.
As a follow up, I'll note that I work in one of the arXiv-heavy fields (astronomy), and I never read any of the journals - nor does anybody I know. Instead we check for new articles ono the arXiv in the morning, where they appear the day after they were uploaded by the authors. There are usually 10-50 such papers per day in my field, depending on how narrow I want to be, and looking for interesting papers based on their titles and abstracts only takes a few minutes per day.
The immediacy this implies is a huge advantage which greatly speeds up the rate at which science is done. For example, a while ago a controversial paper was published on the arXiv claiming evidence for an exotic theory, and after 3 weeks 3independentteams had attempted to reproduce their results and found no evidence for the claim. This turnaround is completely unprecedented in fields which rely on traditional journals, where one must expect to wait 6 months or so for the paper to be published.
While we don't read journals in my field, we still submit our papers to them, and do our best to have them published, because the journals still provide one important service: They coordinate the process of peer review. Sure, the peers are just other researchers like us, who do not get paid for their reviews, just like the journals do not pay us for our articles (in fact we have to pay quite a lot in page charges when our papers are published), but as it is, journals are the only way peer review is organized. Or put another way, peer review is the thin string in which the life of the traditional journals hangs.
The ideal solution for us in arXiv-dominated fields would be dedicated peer review services which would take over the role of coordinating peer review, but do so for free (after all, that coordination is less work than the free peer review itself), and which would digitally sign papers that have passed review. ArXiv could then display an icon on the pages of these papers, indicating which peer review service has signed the paper.
If this were put into place, and managed to get over the initial hurdle of building up a good reputation, then the traditional journals could be banished completely from our field.
The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.
I recommend looking at the figures in the paper too. And also reading it, it is not very techincal, and is easy to read.
Germany trades electricity with Norway, which has huge hydropower magazines. These can also serve to even out the variability of wind and solar, though I'm not sure to which extent this is done, and how much can be offloaded this way.
No, I am saying it would be a valid comparison between OSS and proprietary code if programs that perform the same function were tested in each category. OSS quality has no impact on proprietary quality, and vice versa; but if you compare OSS and proprietary web browsers tehn it would be a reasonable comparison of teh quality of each vs the other.
I would agree if representative sample sets from each category were selected. The problem is that the self-selection effect might make the proprietary sample set non-representative.
Not really; especially a the high end where there are relatively few products in each category. There aren't that many commercial choices in many of the categories; and also relatively few OSS as well. As a result it is less likely all the bad ones got left out, if they were you wouldn't have much of a data set.
Actually, you don't need to leave out all the bad ones for this to result in a bias. It is enough that bad ones are slightly underrepresented. The effect will be bigger the more extreme this is, and your example is the most extreme version of this. That would result in a huge bias, but I don't think anything that extreme will be happening here.
The size of the data set does not affect the importance of systematic effects like these. Statistical estimates have two main error sources: Statistical errors and systematic errors. Statistical errors are due to limited sample size, and basically quantify the probability that what you see are simply due to random chance rather than being a real effect. The more data you have, the easier is is to exclude this possibility, so statistical errors decrease with sample size. Systematic errors, on the other hand, are errors due to faults in your model and uncorrected biases, etc. The only way to reduce these errors is to improve your analysis - they don't go away just because you throw more data at them. Conversely, they aren't any bigger if you have few samples either.
In my field (astronomical data analysis) we often report our estimates like a = 5.512 +- 1.2(stat) +- 0.7(syst), which indicates both the best estimate and the statistic and systematic uncertainty of this estimate. It would have been nice if Coverity had done that here too. Right now we're left at guessing what these errors might be, which isn't very useful.
I am not saying there is no bias and without seeing specifically what comprised the test data we don't know what and how big any bias is. I take issue with comments that the results are invalid because people assume all OSS was tested but proprietary was cherry picked. They don't like the results so the immediate reaction is to claim they are false.
I agree that we don't know how big the bias is, or whether any attemt was made to quantify and compensate for it. But selection bias is definitely a reasonable bias to look for in this case. Note that people aren't claiming that Coverity cherry picked which experiments to analyse. They are claiming that mature projects confident in their code quality would be more likely to submit their code to Coverity for checking in the first case. That said, I think the numbers that were reported are good news even as they are. They show that OSS is on par with proprietary software in terms of code quality, despite many pointy haired bosses' insistance that it must be much worse.
Is there any evidence that high P2P exposure has a negative effect on the number of sales? I could imagine it going both ways depending on the balance of extra sales by word of mouth advertisement, try-before-you buy and extra fame vs. people not needing to buy it because they have already downloaded it. It would be very interesting to see some statistics about this!
For the record, I don't care for the view that it's OK to pirate content you don't want to pay for, regardless of the reason.
Actually, in this case a better argument would probably be that if somebody wants to boycott Card, they should not pirate it either because piracy induces secondary purchases through word of mouth and other network effects. (For example, you download it, read it, and then say something like "I pirated Enders Game because I don't want to give Card any money, but it was actually quite good. Too bad the author is such an asshole", then you might well tempt others into getting it for themselves, and some of those might even get it through legal means.
The effect would probably be smaller than normal in this case, though, since word of mouth from a person who hates the author probably wouldn't be as effective advertisement as from somebody neutral to the author.)
Even then not a reasonable comparison. The ability for the scanned proprietary softwares' teams to decide on inclusion feels to me like it would really influence the stats.
Would you expect there to exist any correlation between how shoddy software is and how likely the authors are to share information about how shoddy their software is? I would expect some correlation.
Let's accept the premise that proprietary vendors only submitted what they considered their best code. If the code bases tested matched similar function OSS codebases, then it is a valid comparison of similar types of software.
I don't see how you're answering the grandparent's concern here. Are you assuming that the code quality is only a function of the function of the code? Otherwise, why would an OSS project in category X be better than average just because a better-than-average proprietary X was submitted?
Let's make this a bit more concrete: Imagine that the defect density of proprietary projects is normal-distributed with a mean of 0.6 and a standard deviation of 0.1. Then you would expect the defect density to vary between less than 0.5 and more than 0.7, with 68% lying between those numbers. If high quality projects are preferentially submitted for review, then the mean of that subset will obviously be lower than 0.6. Let's say that the projects that were sent in were a web browser (0.55), a pdf reader (0.49) and a video player (0.50). You're saying that it would be fair if we compared this with open source web browsers, pdf readers and video players. But just as these categories happened to fluctuate low in error density in the proprietary side, these categories may just as well happen to have atypically high error rates on the OSS side. In fact, unless the quality of the project is strongly correlated with the category it is in, then you would expect the mean on the OSS web browsers, pdf readers and video players to be the same as the total mean, since *they were not selected based on their own quality*, unlike the proprietary software.
Your argument about comparisons of similar types of software would only make sense if there were only one proprietary program of the type in question, and that is the one that was submitted for testing. Otherwise, you would expect to be comparing a better-than-average properietary foo with an average OSS foo.
I think the grandparent is completely correct that there is a potential bias here. But I have no idea how large it is.
Because if there are other people in the room, and you're really that concerned that they'll be snooping at your root password, they can just as easily look at your hands on the keyboard.
To read the password from your hands, they need to watch you undetected during the whole password entry. Reading which keys people press is also error-prone and requires you to be very nearby to have full view of the keyboard. To read the password from the screen, you only need a single glance at it near the end of the entry process, and it can be done from further away.
Imagine a competition where two teams have to try to detect a password without being discovered, but for one team, the password is masked, and for the other it is shown directly on screen. Now you have to bet on which team would get most passwords. I think it should be pretty obvious to everybody that the plaintext team would have a huge advantage - it wouldn't really be a competition at all.
The compromise suggested in TFA, with all but the previously entered character being masked, gets rid of the single glance problem, but still allows the password to be snooped from relatively far away. I think the former problem is the most serious, though, so it is probably a good tradeoff.
You know what they say - it is impossible to be sarcastic on the internet without somebody taking you seriously. My sarcasm detectors were poorly calibrated today.
Maybe because people who say "twice as cold" do not use the Kelvin scale, they use Fahrenheit (typically). So if it's 40 degrees F outside, and someone says 'it'll be twice as cold overnight", they might mean 20 degrees F (278K), but almost certainly do not mean 139 degrees K ( which == -210F).
That makes sense. I agree that it all becomes a bit iffy in that case case. It is much clearer with something like speed, where everybody agrees on the reference point.
You and a whole horde of other slashdotters have had the idea of ease-of-measurement bias - a large fraction of the posts on this article mention it. Thankfully, the researchers who study these planets have also thought of it. They have even measured how large it is, and corrected for it. One result of this is that even though we see a large number of hot jupiters, we know know that planets get more common the smaller they are. That is actually one of the main points of the article. I guess this goes to show how many actually read it.
Coldness is the inverse of hotness, just as slowness is the inverse of being fast. If something is 100 K hot, then being twice as hot would make it 200 K. Its coldness is 1/(100K), and being twice as cold would make is 2/(100K), which corresponds to a temperature of 50 K. Which is exactly what people mean when they use expressions like "twice as cold". Similarly, ten times as slow as 100 m/s would be 10 m/s. This is unambiguous, mathematically well defined, and intuitively understood by most people even without thinking in terms of inverses. What is your problem with it?
The classification of Ceres is completely irrelevant to exoplanet searches because the definition used for exoplanets does not include the planet/dwarf planet distinction that is used in the solar system. The reason why you don't hear about Ceres-size planets around other stars is not that people are choosing to ignore them, but that they cannot be detected with current means (actually that only applies to planets around normal stars. Objects even smaller than Ceres have been detected in orbit around pulsars).
Furthermore, even if we could see other solar systems in as much detail as we can see our own, and decided to split their objects into planets, dwarf planets, etc. that does not mean that all the stuff that isn't a major planet would be ignored in any way.
Imagine how many more planets we'd be able to discover if we'd just liberalize the definition of a planet.
You know what? We do discover those objects. And study them. Just as much as we do major planets. Nobody says things like "Oh, I would study object X if only it were a planet. But since it's only a dwarf planet, it is beneath my notice." The one who is being discriminatory here is you, who implicitly claims that only planets count.
The actual article is much better than the one linked in the story. A version very close to the one published in Science can be found here, at the public preprint archive (arXiv). The article should be relatively easy to read even for non-scientists. Note that our knowledge of the distribution of planets is marred by the biased sample we have access to: It is much easier to observe planets if they are close to their parent star, and heavy. Most of the statistics provided in the article attempts to correct for this bias, so we can say pretty confidently that small planets are much more common than large ones*. But the other claim in the summary, that most planetary systems are much more compact than the solar system, doesn't seem to be supported in the article itself. But perhaps I missed something.
Anyway, the Science article is readable, and if nothing else the figures are quite interesting.
It's not the party that gets 15% of the vote that concern me. It's the one that gets 2%, gets 5 seats and then effects significant shifts in national policy as other major parties solicit its support.
But would the amount of influence they gain that way be more than the 2% influence they deserve? Would a party with 10 seats instead of 5 seats have less than twice the influence? I don't think this will be the case on average, but I don't have any numbers to back it up with.
While "winner take all" election systems do encourage larger parties, they also encourage more inclusive parties that have broad platforms that encompass the numerous issues needed to rule a country. Proportional representation encourages single issue, or regional parties that.
You're probably right about that. But I think there are two different ways in which a party can be inclusive. One is that they cover a broad range of subjects in their program. Another is that they contain people with a broad range of (possibly conflicting) opinions on those subjects. The former is necessary for any large party (though a single issue party would still be effective representatives of singe-issue voters), and is an advantage, as you say. But the latter is a disadvantage in my opinion.
With many small parties, each party can have a well-defined opinion because it consists of people who share that opinion. Since there are many parties, and actually feasible to start new ones, politicians can join a party they agree with rather than needing to be shoehorned into a huge, diffuse entity where they certainly aren't going to agree with everything. Hence, reaching a consensus inside a party in a many-party-system is actually feasible, unlike in a two-party system.
If you don't vote the way the party leader instructs you, then come next election you'll find yourself way down the list.
Yes, I think this is a real issue for the politicians (though I'm not sure it is an important issue for the voters). But it will be a smaller issue the more homogeneous the parties are, and as I argued above, a many-party-system should lead to more homogeneous parties due to less shoehorning.
Ultimately since it is politicians that vote in their respective houses or parliments, I would rather have the ability to vote for a person, rather than the abstract concept of the party
I think you can have your cake and eat it too, here, if we are willing to give up the concept of "one representative, one vote". What if you could vote for the representative you chose, and each representative had a number of votes in congress equal to the number of votes he himself received? That would be a proportional system. So party lists are not needed to achieve proportionality.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm sure that people liked the ad revenue that they got from their video being viewed (anyone have any idea how much they get?), my understanding of LPs is that they are almost always a labor of love, not of cash. So Nintendo taking away the ad revenue might discourage some that were using it as a business (though if your business relied entirely on one company's completed product, protected under copyright, you need to rethink your business plan), but the majority will probably continue doing what they do.
More than a redirection of where the advertisement money goes, the problem is that ads will be added even if you didn't have them before. So if you had a nice, viewer-friendly ad-free channel, with a policy of no "monetization", you will suddenly look like you've sold out your viewers after all.
You can contest this, though, by filing a counter-notice, which will then be followed (pretty much automatically, I hear) by the company making a DMCA-claim, and you having to make a counter-claim (if you don't you are back in the situation where you started, except that you now have a copyright strike against you, which will prevent you from uploading videos longer than 15 min, among other things, apparently). This makes the whole process rather scary. I personally have a gameplay video this happened to, and made sure that my video was fair use. Sadly fair use is a bit wooly, but factors that play into it are:
1. Whether the work is transformative enough (yes is good)
2. Whether it can be used as a stand-in for the original (no is good)
3. Whether it is non-commercial (no is good)
4. Whether it could be expected to have a negative imapct on the original (no is good)
5. Whether it is used as political commentary, parody or similar (yes is good)
and there might have been others too. These do not all have to be fulfilled, one is enough in principle, but the more the better. I convinced myself 90% that my video is actually fair use, but that is not enough that I want to risk a lawsuit about one little video. Neither do I want the effort and expense to track down a lawyer, meet him, explain the issue, and pay his not-insignificant salary, for a video like this.
The upshoot is that fair use is risky and hard to assert on Youtube, and copyright infridgement is an accuser's game, with the accuser (being a big, rich company), facing no risk from accusing, while the defendant has everything to lose.
LibreOffice is being developed in the hopes that it will be useful to people, not for profit. Hence not having room to grow would not be a problem, even if it were true. For some programs, the popularity itself is a large part of their usefulness. This is mostly the case for protocols and networking services, such as ipv6, www, freenet and facebook. But LibreOffice does not fall into this category. It uses standard formats that can be read by many other programs, and would be useful even if you were the only person using it.
Well said!
This is similar to making a DVD player without region locks - it makes the player much more useful for its actual users, but pisses off the movie distributers because they want to control how the DVDs are used. In this case, Microsoft has created a youtube player that is better for the user in two important ways (no ads, which the user doesn't want to see, and the ability to store the video for later). This is something I would have expected the open source world to provide; I'm amazed to see a company like Microsoft do it. But I'm sure the programmers responsible for making this user-friendly (in the right sense of the word, not the "ooh shiny" sense) program will soon be punished for his obstinacy.
The ability to block advertisements and download movies is provided by web browser addons, so people championing Google in its fight against this windows phone program would also have to come out against those addons. I hope that isn't as prevalent a view here as it seems from most of the comments so far.
Do you really want to be sold on political ideas the same way you're sold on products? With appeals to the subconscious and general trickery, rather than rational argument? If no, then adverts are a bad idea.
Well said. In fact, I don't want to be sold products this way either. Advertisements should be greatly reduced in all forms, not just in politics.
Thanks for the detailed information. My intuition regarding the various units for measuring ionizing radiation isn't that good, but apparently 1.2 kBq/kg is the allowed radioactivity limit in food in the USA, which I guess goes to say that 1 Bq is a very small unit. 25 kBq/kg does sound pretty much, though. It is a bit odd that the Japanese limit seems to be 10 times lower that in the USA.
1 billion dollar in fishing losses is a big (though not catastrophic) deal. But are these losses due to the radioactivity making the fish unsafe to eat (I guess not, looking at the smaller than the average level in the USA. And this is already measured in equivalent dose, which takes into account the different effects of different types of radioactivity. So these numbers should be directly comparable.
Unless I've completely misunderstood something here, it seems like the evacuated area is still completely safe to live in. If so, the admittedly huge $250 to $500 billion in damage the evacuation resulted in was not due to the Fukushima accident, but rather due to the unreasonably low safety limit. I won't contest that the aftermath of the accident has cost Japan a great deal, but it seems to me (though I'm definitely no radiation specialist) that these expenses were due to the overreaction, and not the radioactivity.
Hopefully I haven't messed up my units here somehow.
Youtube can say whatever they want. Whether it is enforceable is another matter.
Of course it's enforceable. You are assuming you have a legal right to view YouTube videos, but you very much do not. If Google *chooses* to send you the video *THEN* you have the right to "time shift" it all you want. But the former is very much not a legal right. If Google decides to cut off your YouTube access there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Aren't there laws against arbitrary denial of service? I'm not sure how far you can go, but if youtube refused to serve members of certain political parties, or people based on their religion or descent, I'm pretty sure there is plenty that could be done about that. I'm not sure how far those laws go, and it probably varies from country to country. But it wouldn't surprise me if refusing to serve people who exersise a right guaranteed by law would be grounds for a successful lawsuit.
What exactly is being stolen from Google?
Engineering time, designer time, bandwidth costs, server costs, etc...
YouTube.com didn't just magically appear and run itself completely free of charge.
Youtube probably costs a lot of money to maintain, and hence I understand why google wants to put advertisements on it. Most of these costs probably deal with the hardware for distributing and encoding video.
It should be possible, though technically challenging, to do this in a peer-to-peer manner, where storage, distribution and encoding is farmed transparentl out to the users. Such distributed storage and distribution already exists with Freenet, but it is terribly slow and inefficient. However, freenet has the additional requirement of anonymity and resistance to censorship, which prevents it from routing efficiently. So I think a distributed youtube replacement coould potentially have much better performance than freenet, perhaps enough to make it viable.
I'm not saying that it would be able to out-compete youtube as it is, but if youtube were to disappear due to ad-blocking or similar, it could potentially be replaced by a Free alternative.
How are you supposed to use youtube if you aren't allowed to download anything? Do they mean "download and then not delete soon after"? Perhaps they define this some other place in the TOS, but as it is that clause makes it impossible to follow their TOS without completely blocking youtube.
As a follow up, I'll note that I work in one of the arXiv-heavy fields (astronomy), and I never read any of the journals - nor does anybody I know. Instead we check for new articles ono the arXiv in the morning, where they appear the day after they were uploaded by the authors. There are usually 10-50 such papers per day in my field, depending on how narrow I want to be, and looking for interesting papers based on their titles and abstracts only takes a few minutes per day.
The immediacy this implies is a huge advantage which greatly speeds up the rate at which science is done. For example, a while ago a controversial paper was published on the arXiv claiming evidence for an exotic theory, and after 3 weeks 3 independent teams had attempted to reproduce their results and found no evidence for the claim. This turnaround is completely unprecedented in fields which rely on traditional journals, where one must expect to wait 6 months or so for the paper to be published.
While we don't read journals in my field, we still submit our papers to them, and do our best to have them published, because the journals still provide one important service: They coordinate the process of peer review. Sure, the peers are just other researchers like us, who do not get paid for their reviews, just like the journals do not pay us for our articles (in fact we have to pay quite a lot in page charges when our papers are published), but as it is, journals are the only way peer review is organized. Or put another way, peer review is the thin string in which the life of the traditional journals hangs.
The ideal solution for us in arXiv-dominated fields would be dedicated peer review services which would take over the role of coordinating peer review, but do so for free (after all, that coordination is less work than the free peer review itself), and which would digitally sign papers that have passed review. ArXiv could then display an icon on the pages of these papers, indicating which peer review service has signed the paper.
If this were put into place, and managed to get over the initial hurdle of building up a good reputation, then the traditional journals could be banished completely from our field.
It would be interesting to see if there is a difference in citation rank between paywalled papers on arxiv, and those that are not.
Ask and ye shall receive.
A quote from the abstract:
The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.
I recommend looking at the figures in the paper too. And also reading it, it is not very techincal, and is easy to read.
Was the evacuation necessary? How serious is the groundwater contamination? How elevated are the radiation levels in sea life after this?
Were the consequences that large, actually? I thought the expected number of deaths from this was about one or something like that.
Germany trades electricity with Norway, which has huge hydropower magazines. These can also serve to even out the variability of wind and solar, though I'm not sure to which extent this is done, and how much can be offloaded this way.
No, I am saying it would be a valid comparison between OSS and proprietary code if programs that perform the same function were tested in each category. OSS quality has no impact on proprietary quality, and vice versa; but if you compare OSS and proprietary web browsers tehn it would be a reasonable comparison of teh quality of each vs the other.
I would agree if representative sample sets from each category were selected. The problem is that the self-selection effect might make the proprietary sample set non-representative.
Not really; especially a the high end where there are relatively few products in each category. There aren't that many commercial choices in many of the categories; and also relatively few OSS as well. As a result it is less likely all the bad ones got left out, if they were you wouldn't have much of a data set.
Actually, you don't need to leave out all the bad ones for this to result in a bias. It is enough that bad ones are slightly underrepresented. The effect will be bigger the more extreme this is, and your example is the most extreme version of this. That would result in a huge bias, but I don't think anything that extreme will be happening here.
The size of the data set does not affect the importance of systematic effects like these. Statistical estimates have two main error sources: Statistical errors and systematic errors. Statistical errors are due to limited sample size, and basically quantify the probability that what you see are simply due to random chance rather than being a real effect. The more data you have, the easier is is to exclude this possibility, so statistical errors decrease with sample size. Systematic errors, on the other hand, are errors due to faults in your model and uncorrected biases, etc. The only way to reduce these errors is to improve your analysis - they don't go away just because you throw more data at them. Conversely, they aren't any bigger if you have few samples either.
In my field (astronomical data analysis) we often report our estimates like a = 5.512 +- 1.2(stat) +- 0.7(syst), which indicates both the best estimate and the statistic and systematic uncertainty of this estimate. It would have been nice if Coverity had done that here too. Right now we're left at guessing what these errors might be, which isn't very useful.
I am not saying there is no bias and without seeing specifically what comprised the test data we don't know what and how big any bias is. I take issue with comments that the results are invalid because people assume all OSS was tested but proprietary was cherry picked. They don't like the results so the immediate reaction is to claim they are false.
I agree that we don't know how big the bias is, or whether any attemt was made to quantify and compensate for it. But selection bias is definitely a reasonable bias to look for in this case. Note that people aren't claiming that Coverity cherry picked which experiments to analyse. They are claiming that mature projects confident in their code quality would be more likely to submit their code to Coverity for checking in the first case. That said, I think the numbers that were reported are good news even as they are. They show that OSS is on par with proprietary software in terms of code quality, despite many pointy haired bosses' insistance that it must be much worse.
Is there any evidence that high P2P exposure has a negative effect on the number of sales? I could imagine it going both ways depending on the balance of extra sales by word of mouth advertisement, try-before-you buy and extra fame vs. people not needing to buy it because they have already downloaded it. It would be very interesting to see some statistics about this!
For the record, I don't care for the view that it's OK to pirate content you don't want to pay for, regardless of the reason.
Actually, in this case a better argument would probably be that if somebody wants to boycott Card, they should not pirate it either because piracy induces secondary purchases through word of mouth and other network effects. (For example, you download it, read it, and then say something like "I pirated Enders Game because I don't want to give Card any money, but it was actually quite good. Too bad the author is such an asshole", then you might well tempt others into getting it for themselves, and some of those might even get it through legal means.
The effect would probably be smaller than normal in this case, though, since word of mouth from a person who hates the author probably wouldn't be as effective advertisement as from somebody neutral to the author.)
Even then not a reasonable comparison. The ability for the scanned proprietary softwares' teams to decide on inclusion feels to me like it would really influence the stats.
Would you expect there to exist any correlation between how shoddy software is and how likely the authors are to share information about how shoddy their software is? I would expect some correlation.
Let's accept the premise that proprietary vendors only submitted what they considered their best code. If the code bases tested matched similar function OSS codebases, then it is a valid comparison of similar types of software.
I don't see how you're answering the grandparent's concern here. Are you assuming that the code quality is only a function of the function of the code? Otherwise, why would an OSS project in category X be better than average just because a better-than-average proprietary X was submitted?
Let's make this a bit more concrete: Imagine that the defect density of proprietary projects is normal-distributed with a mean of 0.6 and a standard deviation of 0.1. Then you would expect the defect density to vary between less than 0.5 and more than 0.7, with 68% lying between those numbers. If high quality projects are preferentially submitted for review, then the mean of that subset will obviously be lower than 0.6. Let's say that the projects that were sent in were a web browser (0.55), a pdf reader (0.49) and a video player (0.50). You're saying that it would be fair if we compared this with open source web browsers, pdf readers and video players. But just as these categories happened to fluctuate low in error density in the proprietary side, these categories may just as well happen to have atypically high error rates on the OSS side. In fact, unless the quality of the project is strongly correlated with the category it is in, then you would expect the mean on the OSS web browsers, pdf readers and video players to be the same as the total mean, since *they were not selected based on their own quality*, unlike the proprietary software.
Your argument about comparisons of similar types of software would only make sense if there were only one proprietary program of the type in question, and that is the one that was submitted for testing. Otherwise, you would expect to be comparing a better-than-average properietary foo with an average OSS foo.
I think the grandparent is completely correct that there is a potential bias here. But I have no idea how large it is.
Because if there are other people in the room, and you're really that concerned that they'll be snooping at your root password, they can just as easily look at your hands on the keyboard.
To read the password from your hands, they need to watch you undetected during the whole password entry. Reading which keys people press is also error-prone and requires you to be very nearby to have full view of the keyboard. To read the password from the screen, you only need a single glance at it near the end of the entry process, and it can be done from further away.
Imagine a competition where two teams have to try to detect a password without being discovered, but for one team, the password is masked, and for the other it is shown directly on screen. Now you have to bet on which team would get most passwords. I think it should be pretty obvious to everybody that the plaintext team would have a huge advantage - it wouldn't really be a competition at all.
The compromise suggested in TFA, with all but the previously entered character being masked, gets rid of the single glance problem, but still allows the password to be snooped from relatively far away. I think the former problem is the most serious, though, so it is probably a good tradeoff.
You know what they say - it is impossible to be sarcastic on the internet without somebody taking you seriously. My sarcasm detectors were poorly calibrated today.
Maybe because people who say "twice as cold" do not use the Kelvin scale, they use Fahrenheit (typically). So if it's 40 degrees F outside, and someone says 'it'll be twice as cold overnight", they might mean 20 degrees F (278K), but almost certainly do not mean 139 degrees K ( which == -210F).
That makes sense. I agree that it all becomes a bit iffy in that case case. It is much clearer with something like speed, where everybody agrees on the reference point.
You and a whole horde of other slashdotters have had the idea of ease-of-measurement bias - a large fraction of the posts on this article mention it. Thankfully, the researchers who study these planets have also thought of it. They have even measured how large it is, and corrected for it. One result of this is that even though we see a large number of hot jupiters, we know know that planets get more common the smaller they are. That is actually one of the main points of the article. I guess this goes to show how many actually read it.
Coldness is the inverse of hotness, just as slowness is the inverse of being fast. If something is 100 K hot, then being twice as hot would make it 200 K. Its coldness is 1/(100K), and being twice as cold would make is 2/(100K), which corresponds to a temperature of 50 K. Which is exactly what people mean when they use expressions like "twice as cold". Similarly, ten times as slow as 100 m/s would be 10 m/s. This is unambiguous, mathematically well defined, and intuitively understood by most people even without thinking in terms of inverses. What is your problem with it?
The classification of Ceres is completely irrelevant to exoplanet searches because the definition used for exoplanets does not include the planet/dwarf planet distinction that is used in the solar system. The reason why you don't hear about Ceres-size planets around other stars is not that people are choosing to ignore them, but that they cannot be detected with current means (actually that only applies to planets around normal stars. Objects even smaller than Ceres have been detected in orbit around pulsars).
Furthermore, even if we could see other solar systems in as much detail as we can see our own, and decided to split their objects into planets, dwarf planets, etc. that does not mean that all the stuff that isn't a major planet would be ignored in any way.
Imagine how many more planets we'd be able to discover if we'd just liberalize the definition of a planet.
You know what? We do discover those objects. And study them. Just as much as we do major planets. Nobody says things like "Oh, I would study object X if only it were a planet. But since it's only a dwarf planet, it is beneath my notice." The one who is being discriminatory here is you, who implicitly claims that only planets count.
The actual article is much better than the one linked in the story. A version very close to the one published in Science can be found here, at the public preprint archive (arXiv). The article should be relatively easy to read even for non-scientists. Note that our knowledge of the distribution of planets is marred by the biased sample we have access to: It is much easier to observe planets if they are close to their parent star, and heavy. Most of the statistics provided in the article attempts to correct for this bias, so we can say pretty confidently that small planets are much more common than large ones*. But the other claim in the summary, that most planetary systems are much more compact than the solar system, doesn't seem to be supported in the article itself. But perhaps I missed something.
Anyway, the Science article is readable, and if nothing else the figures are quite interesting.
It's not the party that gets 15% of the vote that concern me. It's the one that gets 2%, gets 5 seats and then effects significant shifts in national policy as other major parties solicit its support.
But would the amount of influence they gain that way be more than the 2% influence they deserve? Would a party with 10 seats instead of 5 seats have less than twice the influence? I don't think this will be the case on average, but I don't have any numbers to back it up with.
While "winner take all" election systems do encourage larger parties, they also encourage more inclusive parties that have broad platforms that encompass the numerous issues needed to rule a country. Proportional representation encourages single issue, or regional parties that.
You're probably right about that. But I think there are two different ways in which a party can be inclusive. One is that they cover a broad range of subjects in their program. Another is that they contain people with a broad range of (possibly conflicting) opinions on those subjects. The former is necessary for any large party (though a single issue party would still be effective representatives of singe-issue voters), and is an advantage, as you say. But the latter is a disadvantage in my opinion.
With many small parties, each party can have a well-defined opinion because it consists of people who share that opinion. Since there are many parties, and actually feasible to start new ones, politicians can join a party they agree with rather than needing to be shoehorned into a huge, diffuse entity where they certainly aren't going to agree with everything. Hence, reaching a consensus inside a party in a many-party-system is actually feasible, unlike in a two-party system.
If you don't vote the way the party leader instructs you, then come next election you'll find yourself way down the list.
Yes, I think this is a real issue for the politicians (though I'm not sure it is an important issue for the voters). But it will be a smaller issue the more homogeneous the parties are, and as I argued above, a many-party-system should lead to more homogeneous parties due to less shoehorning.
Ultimately since it is politicians that vote in their respective houses or parliments, I would rather have the ability to vote for a person, rather than the abstract concept of the party
I think you can have your cake and eat it too, here, if we are willing to give up the concept of "one representative, one vote". What if you could vote for the representative you chose, and each representative had a number of votes in congress equal to the number of votes he himself received? That would be a proportional system. So party lists are not needed to achieve proportionality.