It is my experience that many academics these days are pushed into "pork" activities, that is industry oriented work that brings in money for the university, but has little or no academic value.
In the UK it is particularly common that research fellows are hired for specific pork-based projects on short-term contracts, and also has to cover teaching due to a shortage or unwillingness of staff on higher pay-grades. Actual research you're meant to do on your spare time.
Well screw that. These days an academic career gives you less pay, longer work hours and less job security than an industry job. You're much more likely to get a permanent job in industry. In academia you have to go through 4-5 short term contracts before you're likely to get a permanent job.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the sacked academics has been pressurised into pork work for years and then get let go when the bacon runs out, because they've been too deep in pig fat to publish.
If the library had a little adult section where people could go borrow their first amendment supported material, fine.
But watching porn in public with non-interested people around you is inconsiderate, off-putting and a really creepy thing to do.
I'm all for free speech, but that doesn't mean the public have to help you being an asshole. If you want to shout insults to people on the streets, then perhaps that has to be allowed, but that doesn't mean you have to buy them a box to stand on and a megaphone.
If Sony is really trying to "rewrite Busybox" -- which makes it sound like they're going to look at the Busybox code and write a new version that does the same thing in a different way -- then surely that's a derivative work of Busybox and it's a copyright violation.
No. Being "inspired" by other code is not copyright violation. Clean room implementations are about making your intentions clear and removing doubt.
Two programmers may well write similar code because they share similar views or education and copyright violations can be hard to decide upon in court. If you're writing a replacement for something else it becomes particularly important to remove doubt and avoid unnecessary litigation.
.. Since that is about reimplementation, not copying, but GPL enforcements should be taken as far as it can.
Seriously, if you don't care enough to sue for copyright violation or even to let others do so on your or the communities behalf, then why are you licensing under the GPL to begin with?
I really don't care for arguments that everyone should BSD license their work, the argument is often self-serving and not everyone is ok with others profitting of your work with nothing given in return.
On the other hand, if you dont care about that a permissive license is most definitely the right choice.
.. before someone crazy enough to release such a virus is capable of creating one. At least up until now, the people capable tend to have a mind reasonable enough to show restraint about it.
If it gets easier to do, this may no longer be the case, and so there may be only a matter of time. That doesn't mean we have to help it along by publishing the information necessary to create one in public access journals. If censoring these articles delays the inevitable by just a few months, that is either a few months that can be spent trying to combat it, or even just a few months of extra life for hundreds of millions of people.
there was another thread about this same subject a few weeks ago, and there was no "new strain of the virus", just a virus sharing one of the proteins that help the virii attach to cells
while we have lots of resistant bacterias living in our hospitals (and by our mean "all the hospitals in the world"), we're getting hype over this... not sure any more it's hysterics or histrionics... maybe Netherlands needs pretexts to wipe out chicken farms somewhere
I'm not sure I understand your point here. In the link you posted yourself, there is nothing about this being hysterics. On the contrary it seems to confirm the parent posters argument that this is research so dangerous it shouldn't have been performed, let alone published. Flu is very different from the resistant bacteria that bring up.
Look I'm not saying this as a "flag burning" hater of America, but what is this Once Great Nation you're talking about? Was there ever a single time in American history where a great atrocity wasn't occurring?
The country was created from genocide of native Americans, built upon the rock of slavery and may perhaps have started becoming "free" for a large part of the population in the 1960s. You had your own concentration camps for the Japanese and McCarthyism showed that even as a white middle class male, your freedoms were severely limited.
Don't get me wrong, many great things have been achieved in America, but this "once great nation" stuff requires an awful lot of white washing of history. This is no different from most countries that have played a big role in history, but you are probably the best in the western world at ignoring large parts of your history so you can call yourselves great.
"This should have been: The Headaches of Cross-Platform Development. It's not just a mobile thing. Today, if you're developing any kind of client-facing software then it's not just Android vs. iOS vs. WinPhone vs. BlackBerry."
True, but for desktops, cross-platform development is considerably easier, and is, in many ways a solved problem. I.e. Qt. However, for Android and iOS development, you have to deal with different programming languages for the UI.
For Windows Phone 7, this is even worse. On both iOS and Android you can at least develop a core engine in C++ and write native UIs in Objective-C on iOS and Java on Android. This is not possible with Windows Phone 7. In their infinite wisdom, MS decided that Silverlight and.NET/C# was your only alternative.
Given the absolutely minuscule market share that Windows Phone 7 has, the added effort may simply not be worth it.
"Only the UI? Your app on iOS was coded in Objective-C, or so I presume. You can abstract data and business layers, but still, it's written in Objective-C."
You are not required to use Objective-C for everything on iOS, only the GUI interaction (Cocoa). You can develop libraries in C or C++ and reuse these from Objective-C using Objective-C++.
I hear you. But it would be preferable if we could spend our effort on something more constructive than dealing with idiosyncrasies of different platforms. This could be a solved problem if the different platforms weren't more interested in vendor lock-in than advancing the state of the art.
If I can only see the back of the dude in front of me, it is because I'm standing on the shoulder of a midget.
It is impossible to prove that something is impossible, but I'd you're right, it should be easy for you to find examples of cross platform mobile apps that are as good as natively developed ones.
This has indeed been pondered! We're pretty sure that all life that presently exists all comes from one root, however. If there ever were alternative life-starting events, they didn't survive. The reason for this is that all extant organisms share a number of completely arbitrary decisions called chirality (if you know any physics, that's left-handed vs. right-handed molecular symmetry.) Chirality is completely random in the chemical reactions that produce amino acids and nucleotides, but absolutely fixed, in the same way, in every living organism we've studied. A number of environmental tests have been conducted specifically to look for organisms of contrary chirality, but we haven't found anything yet.
Fascinating. However, is it possible that the alternative life didn't survive because they were different? I mean, if there was already a fairly large base of life out there that shared this chirality, couldn't it be an evolutionary advantage to be part of this? Would a different set of decisions make it difficult/impossible to join in with the chemical processes that supports the established type of life?
You can probably tell I don't know that much about this!
First. Thank you for a very interesting post which provides insight that is still understandable by those of us who are not molecular biophysicists. This is not always easy to do.
I may now be able to provide some insight into Slashdot's science discussions, which you may or may not have discovered yet....
A good scientist (which I'm sure you are) will read new research with an open mind combined with healthy scepticism. He/she won't automatically discard papers due to confirmation bias, and they won't shout "CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION" every single time they read reporting of a paper which suggests some correlation, because they realise that demonstrating correlation is often a necessary first step towards establishing causation and as such it is still novel and useful to publish papers that suggests correlation.
Slashdot, however, is home to some brilliant scientists who are completely drowned out by the masses of cynical, semi-clever "know-it-alls" who love to demonstrate their cleverness by shooting down any new research, often without bothering to read it first. They will shout "bad science" at the top of their lungs as a knee-jerk reaction to any perceived short coming, even if this short coming is just a limitation in scope of a paper or simply just ignorance on their own part. If the paper doesn't fully answer every possible question, it is worthless.
"My colleague at the Clear Channel site right next to our FM on Red Mountain in Birmingham has video of a guy jumping the fence, clipping a handful of copper, and then gracefully jumping back over the fence, into his car and down the hill -- all in less than a minute. By the time the cops arrived, he was long gone."
If the thief only got a handful of copper and he was escaping by car, what is the chance that it actually cost him about as much in fuel and car maintenance to steal that copper as he got in scrap value? At the very least he would have made considerably more per hour to work in McDonalds.
Your job security and desirability as a programmer is more about domain knowledge than anything else. C++ and engineering knowledge will still carry you much much further than C# and fuck all.
Seriously, if you know C++ and you're thinking it might be outdated, by all means start looking at more modern languages, but the one thing that will ensure your success is to know more about the field you're working in.
The example amateur astronomer website you list point either to specific constellations or features of our earth's atmosphere or tilt, not features of the universe visible from the northern hemisphere versus features of the universe visible from the southern. This demonstrates that you still don't understand this argument.
So you actually jumped into an argument without fully understanding it, and then berate me for jumping to conclusions about your understanding of science.
My whole argument is this: If you're trying to understand the universe, by sampling galaxies and looking at the features of them, the light frequencies, the clustering, etc. you have a near infinite amount of information available to you, because the Sky is extremely dense with information, and there is absolutely no hope that mankind, let alone you, will be able to catalogue all the information available to us in one hemisphere in our lifetime, let alone both.
So, if you're not studying a specific galaxy, you may not have any need for studying the southern hemisphere. And of course the two hemispheres are statistically representative of each other. Anything else would mean that our own earth's orientation has had a measurable impact on the development of the universe.
Our left and right brain side has physical significance in the data itself. The atlantic vs. the indian ocean is actual physical changes in the data itself. Which hemisphere a part of the sky is visible from is only a difference in the observer, it is a consequence of our earth's orientation. I hope you can see the difference.
So if you're attempting to validate theory, by observing a random sample of the visible universe, it is unlikely that choosing random samples from only the northern hemisphere would have significant impact on your results. Any effects on the results from passing through the earth's atmosphere (i.e. light refraction, rotation) can be taken into account.
And don't forget what the article, for which the reporter asked Moglen help, was all about: banks investigating using Facebook for loan/credit applications.
When you post a drunken photo of a friend and tag this with their name, you might be causing them all sorts of harm, which may start with failed job applications and may include failure to get a mortgage, or your medical insurance company refusing to pay out, because they claim you drink to much.
And I am saying this as a Facebook user who is starting to question whether the convenience offered by Facebook is worth it. The Moglen interview was certainly a bit of an eye-opener.
I had a calculus tutor in high school, he was retired and had to have been at least 70, but he was brilliant and his analytical skills don't seem to have declined at all.
Did you know him when he was 35? Perhaps his analytical skills were even higher?
In any case people tend to compensate through knowledge and experience.
"So, maybe we should only study the Atlantic ocean? Or, just study the left part of our brains? No, you don't do that, it's poor science."
I don't think you understand science and you completely failed to understand my "as long as you can make the reasonable assumption that the two halves are statistically representative of the other".
Very little science has the luxury of exhaustively testing every possible combination of possible inputs and almost always relies on data samples. The requirement is that the sample is representative of the population. When it comes to the left side of the brain or the Atlantic ocean, they are clearly not necessarily representative of the right side of the brain and any ocean respectively. However, it is extremely unlikely that "being visible from the earth's Northern hemisphere" is going to impose some special meaning on objects in our universe.
Of course if you want to study a specific galaxy, you have to be able to see it, but that was not my point at all.
"*Ahem* you don't know a thing about ALS, do you ? He was probably perfectly healthy until 21, at which point 1 diagnosis was (and is) pretty much all that could be done. As for disability aids, those were designed, operated and built by his "employer". And as far as I believe that house he has as part of his position comes complete with a butler (read : he gets to hire someone for that)."
Rather than speculate, let us read Stephen Hawking's own words about his debt to the NHS.
The telling paragraph: "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," he said. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."
I would say the last sentence qualifies as evidence for the parent's statement about Stephen Hawking owing his life to the NHS.
"Or use a site at the equator. Its useless arguing between north and south poles. Each can only see half the sky."
This depends on what you're after. Having only half of a near limitless supply of information may not be a problem to you, as long as you can make the reasonable assumption that the two halves are statistically representative of the other.
A bigger problem may be that just as they both have one very long winter night, they also one very long summer day (clearly neither are endless).
Slashdot Mirror
It is my experience that many academics these days are pushed into "pork" activities, that is industry oriented work that brings in money for the university, but has little or no academic value.
In the UK it is particularly common that research fellows are hired for specific pork-based projects on short-term contracts, and also has to cover teaching due to a shortage or unwillingness of staff on higher pay-grades. Actual research you're meant to do on your spare time.
Well screw that. These days an academic career gives you less pay, longer work hours and less job security than an industry job. You're much more likely to get a permanent job in industry. In academia you have to go through 4-5 short term contracts before you're likely to get a permanent job.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the sacked academics has been pressurised into pork work for years and then get let go when the bacon runs out, because they've been too deep in pig fat to publish.
You are completely missing the point. Of course malware authors aren't averse to pirating software.
In fact you'd sort of expect them to use pirated software rather than FOSS.
The point here is that the malware authors to some extent seem to deliberately share their code and findings with other malware authors.
You are missing my point. People have a right to free speech, but the public has no obligation to help them financially to do so.
If the library had a little adult section where people could go borrow their first amendment supported material, fine.
But watching porn in public with non-interested people around you is inconsiderate, off-putting and a really creepy thing to do.
I'm all for free speech, but that doesn't mean the public have to help you being an asshole. If you want to shout insults to people on the streets, then perhaps that has to be allowed, but that doesn't mean you have to buy them a box to stand on and a megaphone.
If Sony is really trying to "rewrite Busybox" -- which makes it sound like they're going to look at the Busybox code and write a new version that does the same thing in a different way -- then surely that's a derivative work of Busybox and it's a copyright violation.
No. Being "inspired" by other code is not copyright violation. Clean room implementations are about making your intentions clear and removing doubt.
Two programmers may well write similar code because they share similar views or education and copyright violations can be hard to decide upon in court. If you're writing a replacement for something else it becomes particularly important to remove doubt and avoid unnecessary litigation.
.. Since that is about reimplementation, not copying, but GPL enforcements should be taken as far as it can.
Seriously, if you don't care enough to sue for copyright violation or even to let others do so on your or the communities behalf, then why are you licensing under the GPL to begin with?
I really don't care for arguments that everyone should BSD license their work, the argument is often self-serving and not everyone is ok with others profitting of your work with nothing given in return.
On the other hand, if you dont care about that a permissive license is most definitely the right choice.
Actually, I was to quick about it and I apologise. Please mod down my parent post as it is nonsense.
.. before someone crazy enough to release such a virus is capable of creating one. At least up until now, the people capable tend to have a mind reasonable enough to show restraint about it.
If it gets easier to do, this may no longer be the case, and so there may be only a matter of time. That doesn't mean we have to help it along by publishing the information necessary to create one in public access journals. If censoring these articles delays the inevitable by just a few months, that is either a few months that can be spent trying to combat it, or even just a few months of extra life for hundreds of millions of people.
there was another thread about this same subject a few weeks ago, and there was no "new strain of the virus", just a virus sharing one of the proteins that help the virii attach to cells
while we have lots of resistant bacterias living in our hospitals (and by our mean "all the hospitals in the world"), we're getting hype over this ... not sure any more it's hysterics or histrionics ... maybe Netherlands needs pretexts to wipe out chicken farms somewhere
I'm not sure I understand your point here. In the link you posted yourself, there is nothing about this being hysterics. On the contrary it seems to confirm the parent posters argument that this is research so dangerous it shouldn't have been performed, let alone published. Flu is very different from the resistant bacteria that bring up.
Look I'm not saying this as a "flag burning" hater of America, but what is this Once Great Nation you're talking about? Was there ever a single time in American history where a great atrocity wasn't occurring?
The country was created from genocide of native Americans, built upon the rock of slavery and may perhaps have started becoming "free" for a large part of the population in the 1960s. You had your own concentration camps for the Japanese and McCarthyism showed that even as a white middle class male, your freedoms were severely limited.
Don't get me wrong, many great things have been achieved in America, but this "once great nation" stuff requires an awful lot of white washing of history. This is no different from most countries that have played a big role in history, but you are probably the best in the western world at ignoring large parts of your history so you can call yourselves great.
After decades of overselling the North Star, is there any wonder there's so little of it left?
"This should have been: The Headaches of Cross-Platform Development. It's not just a mobile thing. Today, if you're developing any kind of client-facing software then it's not just Android vs. iOS vs. WinPhone vs. BlackBerry."
True, but for desktops, cross-platform development is considerably easier, and is, in many ways a solved problem. I.e. Qt. However, for Android and iOS development, you have to deal with different programming languages for the UI.
For Windows Phone 7, this is even worse. On both iOS and Android you can at least develop a core engine in C++ and write native UIs in Objective-C on iOS and Java on Android. This is not possible with Windows Phone 7. In their infinite wisdom, MS decided that Silverlight and .NET/C# was your only alternative.
Given the absolutely minuscule market share that Windows Phone 7 has, the added effort may simply not be worth it.
"Only the UI? Your app on iOS was coded in Objective-C, or so I presume. You can abstract data and business layers, but still, it's written in Objective-C."
You are not required to use Objective-C for everything on iOS, only the GUI interaction (Cocoa). You can develop libraries in C or C++ and reuse these from Objective-C using Objective-C++.
I hear you. But it would be preferable if we could spend our effort on something more constructive than dealing with idiosyncrasies of different platforms. This could be a solved problem if the different platforms weren't more interested in vendor lock-in than advancing the state of the art.
If I can only see the back of the dude in front of me, it is because I'm standing on the shoulder of a midget.
It is impossible to prove that something is impossible, but I'd you're right, it should be easy for you to find examples of cross platform mobile apps that are as good as natively developed ones.
This has indeed been pondered! We're pretty sure that all life that presently exists all comes from one root, however. If there ever were alternative life-starting events, they didn't survive. The reason for this is that all extant organisms share a number of completely arbitrary decisions called chirality (if you know any physics, that's left-handed vs. right-handed molecular symmetry.) Chirality is completely random in the chemical reactions that produce amino acids and nucleotides, but absolutely fixed, in the same way, in every living organism we've studied. A number of environmental tests have been conducted specifically to look for organisms of contrary chirality, but we haven't found anything yet.
Fascinating. However, is it possible that the alternative life didn't survive because they were different? I mean, if there was already a fairly large base of life out there that shared this chirality, couldn't it be an evolutionary advantage to be part of this? Would a different set of decisions make it difficult/impossible to join in with the chemical processes that supports the established type of life?
You can probably tell I don't know that much about this!
First. Thank you for a very interesting post which provides insight that is still understandable by those of us who are not molecular biophysicists. This is not always easy to do.
I may now be able to provide some insight into Slashdot's science discussions, which you may or may not have discovered yet....
A good scientist (which I'm sure you are) will read new research with an open mind combined with healthy scepticism. He/she won't automatically discard papers due to confirmation bias, and they won't shout "CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION" every single time they read reporting of a paper which suggests some correlation, because they realise that demonstrating correlation is often a necessary first step towards establishing causation and as such it is still novel and useful to publish papers that suggests correlation.
Slashdot, however, is home to some brilliant scientists who are completely drowned out by the masses of cynical, semi-clever "know-it-alls" who love to demonstrate their cleverness by shooting down any new research, often without bothering to read it first. They will shout "bad science" at the top of their lungs as a knee-jerk reaction to any perceived short coming, even if this short coming is just a limitation in scope of a paper or simply just ignorance on their own part. If the paper doesn't fully answer every possible question, it is worthless.
"My colleague at the Clear Channel site right next to our FM on Red Mountain in Birmingham has video of a guy jumping the fence, clipping a handful of copper, and then gracefully jumping back over the fence, into his car and down the hill -- all in less than a minute. By the time the cops arrived, he was long gone."
If the thief only got a handful of copper and he was escaping by car, what is the chance that it actually cost him about as much in fuel and car maintenance to steal that copper as he got in scrap value? At the very least he would have made considerably more per hour to work in McDonalds.
Your job security and desirability as a programmer is more about domain knowledge than anything else. C++ and engineering knowledge will still carry you much much further than C# and fuck all.
Seriously, if you know C++ and you're thinking it might be outdated, by all means start looking at more modern languages, but the one thing that will ensure your success is to know more about the field you're working in.
The example amateur astronomer website you list point either to specific constellations or features of our earth's atmosphere or tilt, not features of the universe visible from the northern hemisphere versus features of the universe visible from the southern. This demonstrates that you still don't understand this argument.
So you actually jumped into an argument without fully understanding it, and then berate me for jumping to conclusions about your understanding of science.
My whole argument is this:
If you're trying to understand the universe, by sampling galaxies and looking at the features of them, the light frequencies, the clustering, etc. you have a near infinite amount of information available to you, because the Sky is extremely dense with information, and there is absolutely no hope that mankind, let alone you, will be able to catalogue all the information available to us in one hemisphere in our lifetime, let alone both.
So, if you're not studying a specific galaxy, you may not have any need for studying the southern hemisphere. And of course the two hemispheres are statistically representative of each other. Anything else would mean that our own earth's orientation has had a measurable impact on the development of the universe.
Our left and right brain side has physical significance in the data itself. The atlantic vs. the indian ocean is actual physical changes in the data itself. Which hemisphere a part of the sky is visible from is only a difference in the observer, it is a consequence of our earth's orientation. I hope you can see the difference.
So if you're attempting to validate theory, by observing a random sample of the visible universe, it is unlikely that choosing random samples from only the northern hemisphere would have significant impact on your results. Any effects on the results from passing through the earth's atmosphere (i.e. light refraction, rotation) can be taken into account.
And don't forget what the article, for which the reporter asked Moglen help, was all about: banks investigating using Facebook for loan/credit applications.
When you post a drunken photo of a friend and tag this with their name, you might be causing them all sorts of harm, which may start with failed job applications and may include failure to get a mortgage, or your medical insurance company refusing to pay out, because they claim you drink to much.
And I am saying this as a Facebook user who is starting to question whether the convenience offered by Facebook is worth it. The Moglen interview was certainly a bit of an eye-opener.
I had a calculus tutor in high school, he was retired and had to have been at least 70, but he was brilliant and his analytical skills don't seem to have declined at all.
Did you know him when he was 35? Perhaps his analytical skills were even higher?
In any case people tend to compensate through knowledge and experience.
"So, maybe we should only study the Atlantic ocean? Or, just study the left part of our brains? No, you don't do that, it's poor science."
I don't think you understand science and you completely failed to understand my "as long as you can make the reasonable assumption that the two halves are statistically representative of the other".
Very little science has the luxury of exhaustively testing every possible combination of possible inputs and almost always relies on data samples. The requirement is that the sample is representative of the population. When it comes to the left side of the brain or the Atlantic ocean, they are clearly not necessarily representative of the right side of the brain and any ocean respectively. However, it is extremely unlikely that "being visible from the earth's Northern hemisphere" is going to impose some special meaning on objects in our universe.
Of course if you want to study a specific galaxy, you have to be able to see it, but that was not my point at all.
"*Ahem* you don't know a thing about ALS, do you ? He was probably perfectly healthy until 21, at which point 1 diagnosis was (and is) pretty much all that could be done. As for disability aids, those were designed, operated and built by his "employer".
And as far as I believe that house he has as part of his position comes complete with a butler (read : he gets to hire someone for that)."
Rather than speculate, let us read Stephen Hawking's own words about his debt to the NHS.
The telling paragraph:
"I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," he said. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."
I would say the last sentence qualifies as evidence for the parent's statement about Stephen Hawking owing his life to the NHS.
"Or use a site at the equator. Its useless arguing between north and south poles. Each can only see half the sky."
This depends on what you're after. Having only half of a near limitless supply of information may not be a problem to you, as long as you can make the reasonable assumption that the two halves are statistically representative of the other.
A bigger problem may be that just as they both have one very long winter night, they also one very long summer day (clearly neither are endless).