Broadband penetration in rural counties is likely to plateau around 50% in the foreseeable future not for lack of supply but for lack of strong demand, especially when technical challenges will push the price considerably above dialup.
I know that/. is the wrong place to say this, but many people (myself absolutely not included) can get by with minimal internet usage. Insisting that they must secretly want to be like us is flattering, perhaps, but it's delusional and paternalistic.
Yet WITHOUT CHANGING OUT A SINGLE PIECE OF HARDWARE you can get a much higher cap simply by paying a much higher amount of money. Where did all that extra bandwidth come from
Wow, really? That's amazing! I also found out I can buy more minutes from my cell phone company without changing my phone either! You'd almost think that there's a fixed amount of bandwidth at each node/tower and that if everyone used it to the higher cap, the node wouldn't be able to keep up and they'd have to spend money upgrading.
The "extra" bandwidth came from the fact that if everyone saturates their 20/2 Mbit cable connection 24/7, we're all going to have 500 ms pings and never be able to browse YouTube.
Re:Rogue Wireless Carrier SysAdmin
on
Cellular Repo Man
·
· Score: 2, Funny
When HR comes around to fire Stu, he leaves his timebomb in place. The one that fires out the kill message to hundreds - nay - thousands of customers - and disables their leased laptops all at once.
Later that day, the company sues Stu for malicious destruction of property, lost business revenue, failure to fulfill a duty of care (remember, employees are actually expect to work for their employer, not against them). A few hours later, an injunction will issue requiring Stu to return the computer network to the state before he left pending further hearings. Stu will either comply or face escalating sanctions and then jail time until he complies with the court order (which the company is entitled to as a matter of black letter law).
The company will apologize profusely, give everyone a free week of service (maybe a month, depending on how the PR department sees this) and charge it off as a one-time freak expense. Finally, it will be posted on/. as a dupe of http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/18/2349242.
Fine, don't get a discount one. I went on the Dell webpage right now and priced this Studio 17 at $1,834 (no coupons, no DPA, no fatcash -- apparently those things are too hard for Mac users)
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T9550 (2.66GHz/1066Mhz FSB/6MB cache) **
Bright, Hi Resolution, glossy widescreen 17.0 inch RGB LED display (1920x1200)
4GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 800MHz
Size: 500GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
8X Slot Load CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive)
Fine, get the same processor on the Dell -- $375 upgrade (not worth it IMO, but whatever). It's still $1100 cheaper than the MBP. While we are at it, add $35 for 802.11n wireless, $20 for bluetooth, $55 for a creative expresscard sound solution (not that I believe you can hear the difference, but I'm humoring you guys here).
The Dell's wireless is a 802.11g card (so the antenna hangs out and uses up the card slot). The Mac's is 802.11n and is integrated leaving a free card slot.
(1) It's a $35 upgrade to 802.11n (2) Both options are internal, not expresscard. I don't know how in the hell you concluded otherwise, but nothing on the dell site says anything about that. (3) Bluetooth is $20 extra. (4) Optical audo is $55 extra (does, in fact, take up the expresscard slot that you thought was taken up by wifi).
So even after an extra $100 in options to settle your complaints, we are still $1500 ahead of the game here. Let's humor you and take the $375 processor upgrade, still $1100 ahead of the game.
In fact, there's really no way to get that Dell up to the MBP pros price at all, come to think of it.
These Apple vs. Dell competitions never account for the constant sales that Dell has on their products. They keep the list price relatively high so their salespeople can give "favorable pricing" to their corporate clients
Also, it doesn't hurt to charge the rubes that click straight through to Dell.com as much as you can. Same thing for folks that go into an Apple Store instead of buying from MacMall or Microcenter...
MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Resolution Glossy Widescreen Display (1920x1200)
You can keep trying to peddle that nonsense, but I think most/.ers are capable of comparing $1600 and $2800 and coming to their own conclusions. It's not even a close call.
In my experience, Macs are priced by Apple and rarely discounted much until they are EOLed for the next generation. Sometimes Microcenter or Macmall has $100 off or something like that.
Dell, on the other hand, changes their pricing and offers more often than I change my socks. I've found that you can get killer deals on them if you are willing to wait a few weeks until a deal rolls around. For instance (now expired), there were great deals for 17" laptops at 30-40% off what TFA paid:
Of course, if you are incapable of that kind of patience, preferring instant gratification, then Dell is more than willing to charge you a lot more if you are foolish enough to just go to dell.com and start clicking on things. [ Slightly OT Side Story: Ever since my boss found out that I know how to work the magic dell website, I've earned huge brownie points for buying the same equipment at basically half the great educational rates offered to my university. Actually, at one point I accosted the school's Dell Rep with a printout of the various orders I put in through Dell Home and asked if they would give an educational institution the same deals available to everyone -- no points for guessing the answer. ]
Bottom line: Dell's prices are volatile and the author of TFA is totally clueless on how to best work that.
If they don't like their business relationship (insofar as one exists), I'm sure The Guardian is big enough that Google will deign to send their VP for something-something out there to negotiate some better terms. That's what VPs are for -- they manage these sorts of business relationships.
I'm sure they can work out some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement...
If the DA fails to bring charges against the girls, would that open him up to a defamation lawsuit for tarnishing their image for so long?
Yes and No. Prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil suit for any activity "intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process", however, "absolute immunity may not apply when a prosecutor is not acting as an officer of the court, but is instead engaged in, say, investigative or administrative tasks." (both cites from [1])
In the years since Imbler, we have held that absolute immunity applies when a prosecutor prepares to initiate a judicial proceeding, Burns, supra, at 492, or appears in court to present evidence in support of a search warrant application, Kalina, supra, at 126. We have held that absolute immunity does not apply when a prosecutor gives advice to police during a criminal investigation, see Burns, supra, at 496, when the prosecutor makes statements to the press, Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, 509 U. S. 259, 277 (1993), or when a prosecutor acts as a complaining witness in support of a warrant application,
The weight of precedent goes in favor of absolute immunity for what he did -- there were credible charges that could have been brought and he had the right to threaten prosecution in an attempt to get a plea bargain. At the very minimum, it would be an uphill battle to find him liable.
Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers
hard to prove your innocence if you're not given the chance to.
This isn't a trial and nobody needs to prove anything at this stage, since no one has been charged with a crime. If he charged them, and if it went to trial, the pictures would be evidence that the girl's attorneys would be entitled to see at discovery. Just don't get too far ahead of yourself.
Now, whether or not it's ethical for a prosecutor to threaten prosecution like this is a longstanding debate in legal academia. He has every right to bring them to court an attempt to prove to the jury that they have violated the law -- that's what prosecutors do, they bring charges to court and attempt to prove them. Also in their power is the option of making a plea deal with the defendants -- which is what happened here -- he didn't want a trial so he made them an offer for some probation. They refused, now the DA has to put up or shutup (there's also this preemptive Federal lawsuit, which I think is destined to fail).
Of course, the real motivation here ought to be for the legislature to amend the law to define child pornography in a more sensible way but they have a good track record of messing these things up, so I'm not holding my breath. Oh, and if you live in that county, you could vote for a DA with better priorities. Maybe. I don't know who the other candidates are/were.
Finally, a word of advice to the kiddies: the law might be stupid, but you should probably follow it. To the letter. Many on/. will probably revile the idea that we ought to follow such stupid laws, but you have to chose your battles (something the DA ought to learn) and this one just doesn't seem worth taking a stand for.
Why is it that when some one finally tells us that we must do things the smart way instead of the wasteful way, we start screaming at them?
Because I am a fully functioning sentient human being both capable and deserving of the right to determine for myself what course of action is "smart".
If doing X is the smart thing to do, I invite you to attempt to persuade me by the overwhelming force of your reasonable arguments.
On the other hand, if you tell me I must do X at the point of a spear, I will quickly conclude that (1) you have little respect for my basic humanity and (2) your argument must not be that good in the first place.
As it happens, I enjoy driving fast ( I do own a small car, mostly for performance reason). It gives me pleasure to do so and I get to my destination sooner. I will gladly pick up the tab for the extra gas, which ought to include a carbon-tax that properly gauges the true cost to the environment. Why people insist on forbidding me from taking part in a simple pleasure on my own dime is entirely beyond me.
Hey, what about authors that have an interest in surrendering their copyright, paying page fees, being threatened if they dare post a copy of their own paper on their website, and doing peer review for free for for-profit journals?
I gladly do all those things for the kind of exposure that some journals offer your work. Like I said in my above post in more detail, without that exposure, no one is likely to read my work because no one is likely to know that it exists. In a perfect world where acquisition of information is not as costly as in this one, a free system would sort things out just fine. In this one, no one has enough time to read every paper thoroughly enough to decide if it's worth reading thoroughly.
PS: The journals let you post a link on your webpage to the full text (it expires after 500 clicks or something), I have no interest in my copyright (since I'm NIH, I have to publish it free in a year anyway) and I gladly do peer-review as part of my duty to help others get a good evaluation of the work.
After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
The editors do not work for free, and they (plus staff, also paid) do the majority of the filtering work. Most of the papers submitted don't make it to the reviewers. Without them, the reviewers cannot function due to much larger workload. Yes, I review articles for free. No, I will not review more than 2-3 per month -- each one takes days worth of work to really evaluate to the standard that I feel appropriate. If you are feeding me crap to review, I'd just as well not review at all.
I'm a small-fry researcher at a small-fry university. Without name recognition, what gets my research read is the fact that I can (occasionally, when it's worthy) get it into a name-brand journal where approval of the referees signifies real merit. Without that exposure, no matter how good my research is, it will be very difficult to get it widely read because evaluation of quality takes serious time and thought -- time that most researchers are not willing to spend on every paper on Arxiv posted by any yahoo.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. The most cursory reading of a novel scientific paper is ~10 minutes, and even then, I've probably just read the abstract, skimmed the figures and then jumped to the conclusion. You can't seriously expect me to do that for every vaguely relevant paper in the field -- I just can't. So if there is an important paper that I should read, I count on the journals to bring it to my attention.
IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works. Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
If I were a parent of a student at this school, I would be infinitely more concerned about children getting strip searched (for any reason) by school personnel than I would be worried about drugs.
Would you give up your right to sue if your kid was hurt in some fashion by drugs while at school?
If so, then fine -- I applaud your consistency. If not, then there are serious issues with how you intend for the school to achieve its mission of protecting students from hurting themselves.
Before you condemn the living shit out of the school district, try to remember that they have an affirmative responsibility to prevent students from harming themselves while in school. Courts have interpreted that to mean that they must take whatever steps are within their power as soon as they (meaning any employee of the school) becomes aware of a potential threat. Given that they thought they generally have the power to search students for drugs (for instance, had the drugs in question been crack rocks, there would be no question), they could have exposed themselves to massive liabilities had they allowed her to continue to possess the drugs and someone got hurt.
tl;dr version: It's not fair to make the school liable for every little fucking bump and scrape when we also want to impose ever more restrictions on their enforcement.
That all said, it's obvious that ibuprofen is not harmful and they should know the difference. On the other hand, million-dollar liability can cloud the judgment of even the most rational folks, of which very few are employed as school administrators. That liability makes them err on the side of caution, in this case, erring like crazy.
Cavil advocated nuking the planet and spending an infinite amount of time searching for earth.
That was Earth 1.0, the one that the final five lived on. Our earth is named in tribute to that one, but it was not the one he was looking for.
Plus, as RDM explained, all the Cavils were killed either initially in the civil war (Natalie does some "ethnic cleansing" on her basestars) or when the colony was destroyed. Without resurrection, which is now impossible given that Tory was killed, he is gone forever.
I also didn't find the universal acceptance of the "hey, let's discard every scrap of technology and be cavemen!" idea to be realistic or practical in the least.
After 4 years fleeing from genocidal, nuclear-armed, software-hacking, technological abominations chasing me through the empty expanse of space you might think differently. The survivors in BSG have been fighting against the fruits of technology, why would go right back to building a technological civilization?
Moreover, the fleet does not have the requisite technology to rebuild an entire civilization. It was already straining credulity that Adama continued to have whiskey and the doc continued to have cigarettes long after the supplies should have run out. They conveniently had a mining ship and a farming ship, ok I'll buy that for the time being, but their supply of the rudimentary things that make society keep going had to give out eventually. Shit, I was sort of pissed that they had a bunch of steel lying around to repair Galactica -- reminded me of Voyager where every episode a new shuttlecraft would appear.
That said, it would have been entirely appropriate if a few civilians decided to take their ships and jump off in some random direction.
So, basically, we have to determine how many "calculations per second" equivalent an average human can manage. Then we have to allow a range on either side of that since not everyone has the same capacity.
No, because humans think heuristically and therefore make a different kind of mistake than a computer that is crippled in such a fashion. That's the entire point of the article: there are different kinds of mistakes and it's challenging to create a model that reproduces the realistic ones.
For instance, in chess, a human being does not brute-force all the possible moves but instead looks at what positions he thinks are favorable (center control, good pawn arrangement) and looks for those. The kinds of mistake he makes in this are very different from simply telling a computer not to compute all the positive expected value from controlling the center.
If this were all true, how is it that the ARM Cortex-A9 chip is able to get four superscalar RISC cores on a 65nm chip running at over 1GHz
And how many actual instruction does that retire per second? Does its FPU perform at even a fraction of the equivalent x86 (I was surprised to see that it even had one -- I wrote a small program for my ARMv4 phone and spent a solid hour wondering why a program that runs in a few seconds on my desktop took many minutes on there. Punchline: don't do double-precision floating point math on your phone)? What about pagetables, interrupts, DMA and coherent cache? Memory controller? FSB/QPI?
ARM is a wonderful architecture for my mobile phone but it's never going to be enough for actual work. Maybe a netbook running a stripper version of 'nix, but I'd have to see it first to believe it.
..who were receiving millions in campaign donations from the "music" industry.
Funds they use to buy advertising that has a huge effect on undecided voters. If we stopped voting for the guy with the convincing advertisement, there would be no need use for any of that money.
Politicians get money because voters chose to be influenced by the things money buys. Fancy consultants, advertising gurus, branding specialists -- they pay big bucks for these things because they work, which is no one's fault but our own.
A democracy is defined by giving the populace the government that it richly deserves (credit to Mencken, I think).
At least the laws about copyright infringement here were passed by a popularly elected, semi-almost-functioning legislature. We should be blaming ourselves for electing politicians that pass laws mandating criminal penalties inthis instant.
Slashdot Mirror
Broadband penetration in rural counties is likely to plateau around 50% in the foreseeable future not for lack of supply but for lack of strong demand, especially when technical challenges will push the price considerably above dialup.
I know that /. is the wrong place to say this, but many people (myself absolutely not included) can get by with minimal internet usage. Insisting that they must secretly want to be like us is flattering, perhaps, but it's delusional and paternalistic.
Followup:
http://techliberation.com/2008/03/07/debunking-rural-broadband-myths/
http://voipservices.tmcnet.com/feature/articles/20381-rural-broadband-demand-not-supply-problem.htm
Yet WITHOUT CHANGING OUT A SINGLE PIECE OF HARDWARE you can get a much higher cap simply by paying a much higher amount of money. Where did all that extra bandwidth come from
Wow, really? That's amazing! I also found out I can buy more minutes from my cell phone company without changing my phone either! You'd almost think that there's a fixed amount of bandwidth at each node/tower and that if everyone used it to the higher cap, the node wouldn't be able to keep up and they'd have to spend money upgrading.
The "extra" bandwidth came from the fact that if everyone saturates their 20/2 Mbit cable connection 24/7, we're all going to have 500 ms pings and never be able to browse YouTube.
When HR comes around to fire Stu, he leaves his timebomb in place. The one that fires out the kill message to hundreds - nay - thousands of customers - and disables their leased laptops all at once.
Later that day, the company sues Stu for malicious destruction of property, lost business revenue, failure to fulfill a duty of care (remember, employees are actually expect to work for their employer, not against them). A few hours later, an injunction will issue requiring Stu to return the computer network to the state before he left pending further hearings. Stu will either comply or face escalating sanctions and then jail time until he complies with the court order (which the company is entitled to as a matter of black letter law).
The company will apologize profusely, give everyone a free week of service (maybe a month, depending on how the PR department sees this) and charge it off as a one-time freak expense. Finally, it will be posted on /. as a dupe of http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/18/2349242.
Fine, don't get a discount one. I went on the Dell webpage right now and priced this Studio 17 at $1,834 (no coupons, no DPA, no fatcash -- apparently those things are too hard for Mac users)
AND IT'S STILL $1000 CHEAPER THAN THE MACBOOK PRO. Normally I'd stack a $250 coupon on there to really sweeten the deal ...
** IMO, this is a huge waste of $375 upgrade the CPU but since the hecklers demand it, here it is. **
Fine, get the same processor on the Dell -- $375 upgrade (not worth it IMO, but whatever). It's still $1100 cheaper than the MBP. While we are at it, add $35 for 802.11n wireless, $20 for bluetooth, $55 for a creative expresscard sound solution (not that I believe you can hear the difference, but I'm humoring you guys here).
Still $1000 cheaper than the MBP.
The Dell's wireless is a 802.11g card (so the antenna hangs out and uses up the card slot). The Mac's is 802.11n and is integrated leaving a free card slot.
(1) It's a $35 upgrade to 802.11n
(2) Both options are internal, not expresscard. I don't know how in the hell you concluded otherwise, but nothing on the dell site says anything about that.
(3) Bluetooth is $20 extra.
(4) Optical audo is $55 extra (does, in fact, take up the expresscard slot that you thought was taken up by wifi).
So even after an extra $100 in options to settle your complaints, we are still $1500 ahead of the game here. Let's humor you and take the $375 processor upgrade, still $1100 ahead of the game.
In fact, there's really no way to get that Dell up to the MBP pros price at all, come to think of it.
These Apple vs. Dell competitions never account for the constant sales that Dell has on their products. They keep the list price relatively high so their salespeople can give "favorable pricing" to their corporate clients
Also, it doesn't hurt to charge the rubes that click straight through to Dell.com as much as you can. Same thing for folks that go into an Apple Store instead of buying from MacMall or Microcenter...
a) no, Macs are not significantly more expensive than PCs
$1600 Dell:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/913148
$2800 MacBook Pro:
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MB604LL/A?mco=MzA3MTE3NA
You can keep trying to peddle that nonsense, but I think most /.ers are capable of comparing $1600 and $2800 and coming to their own conclusions. It's not even a close call.
In my experience, Macs are priced by Apple and rarely discounted much until they are EOLed for the next generation. Sometimes Microcenter or Macmall has $100 off or something like that.
Dell, on the other hand, changes their pricing and offers more often than I change my socks. I've found that you can get killer deals on them if you are willing to wait a few weeks until a deal rolls around. For instance (now expired), there were great deals for 17" laptops at 30-40% off what TFA paid:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/913148
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/912911
Of course, if you are incapable of that kind of patience, preferring instant gratification, then Dell is more than willing to charge you a lot more if you are foolish enough to just go to dell.com and start clicking on things. [ Slightly OT Side Story: Ever since my boss found out that I know how to work the magic dell website, I've earned huge brownie points for buying the same equipment at basically half the great educational rates offered to my university. Actually, at one point I accosted the school's Dell Rep with a printout of the various orders I put in through Dell Home and asked if they would give an educational institution the same deals available to everyone -- no points for guessing the answer. ]
Bottom line: Dell's prices are volatile and the author of TFA is totally clueless on how to best work that.
If they don't like their business relationship (insofar as one exists), I'm sure The Guardian is big enough that Google will deign to send their VP for something-something out there to negotiate some better terms. That's what VPs are for -- they manage these sorts of business relationships.
I'm sure they can work out some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement ...
If the DA fails to bring charges against the girls, would that open him up to a defamation lawsuit for tarnishing their image for so long?
Yes and No. Prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil suit for any activity "intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process", however, "absolute immunity may not apply when a prosecutor is not acting as an officer of the court, but is instead engaged in, say, investigative or administrative tasks." (both cites from [1])
In the years since Imbler, we have held that absolute immunity applies when a prosecutor prepares to initiate a judicial proceeding, Burns, supra, at 492, or appears in court to present evidence in support of a search warrant application, Kalina, supra, at 126. We have held that absolute immunity does not apply when a prosecutor gives advice to police during a criminal investigation, see Burns, supra, at 496, when the prosecutor makes statements to the press, Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, 509 U. S. 259, 277 (1993), or when a prosecutor acts as a complaining witness in support of a warrant application,
The weight of precedent goes in favor of absolute immunity for what he did -- there were credible charges that could have been brought and he had the right to threaten prosecution in an attempt to get a plea bargain. At the very minimum, it would be an uphill battle to find him liable.
Cites:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=07-854
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=US&vol=424&invol=409&pageno=428
Similar case:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/sports/baseball/13clemens.html
Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers
hard to prove your innocence if you're not given the chance to.
This isn't a trial and nobody needs to prove anything at this stage, since no one has been charged with a crime. If he charged them, and if it went to trial, the pictures would be evidence that the girl's attorneys would be entitled to see at discovery. Just don't get too far ahead of yourself.
Now, whether or not it's ethical for a prosecutor to threaten prosecution like this is a longstanding debate in legal academia. He has every right to bring them to court an attempt to prove to the jury that they have violated the law -- that's what prosecutors do, they bring charges to court and attempt to prove them. Also in their power is the option of making a plea deal with the defendants -- which is what happened here -- he didn't want a trial so he made them an offer for some probation. They refused, now the DA has to put up or shutup (there's also this preemptive Federal lawsuit, which I think is destined to fail).
Of course, the real motivation here ought to be for the legislature to amend the law to define child pornography in a more sensible way but they have a good track record of messing these things up, so I'm not holding my breath. Oh, and if you live in that county, you could vote for a DA with better priorities. Maybe. I don't know who the other candidates are/were.
Finally, a word of advice to the kiddies: the law might be stupid, but you should probably follow it. To the letter. Many on /. will probably revile the idea that we ought to follow such stupid laws, but you have to chose your battles (something the DA ought to learn) and this one just doesn't seem worth taking a stand for.
Why is it that when some one finally tells us that we must do things the smart way instead of the wasteful way, we start screaming at them?
Because I am a fully functioning sentient human being both capable and deserving of the right to determine for myself what course of action is "smart".
If doing X is the smart thing to do, I invite you to attempt to persuade me by the overwhelming force of your reasonable arguments.
On the other hand, if you tell me I must do X at the point of a spear, I will quickly conclude that (1) you have little respect for my basic humanity and (2) your argument must not be that good in the first place.
As it happens, I enjoy driving fast ( I do own a small car, mostly for performance reason). It gives me pleasure to do so and I get to my destination sooner. I will gladly pick up the tab for the extra gas, which ought to include a carbon-tax that properly gauges the true cost to the environment. Why people insist on forbidding me from taking part in a simple pleasure on my own dime is entirely beyond me.
Hey, what about authors that have an interest in surrendering their copyright, paying page fees, being threatened if they dare post a copy of their own paper on their website, and doing peer review for free for for-profit journals?
I gladly do all those things for the kind of exposure that some journals offer your work. Like I said in my above post in more detail, without that exposure, no one is likely to read my work because no one is likely to know that it exists. In a perfect world where acquisition of information is not as costly as in this one, a free system would sort things out just fine. In this one, no one has enough time to read every paper thoroughly enough to decide if it's worth reading thoroughly.
PS: The journals let you post a link on your webpage to the full text (it expires after 500 clicks or something), I have no interest in my copyright (since I'm NIH, I have to publish it free in a year anyway) and I gladly do peer-review as part of my duty to help others get a good evaluation of the work.
After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
The editors do not work for free, and they (plus staff, also paid) do the majority of the filtering work. Most of the papers submitted don't make it to the reviewers. Without them, the reviewers cannot function due to much larger workload. Yes, I review articles for free. No, I will not review more than 2-3 per month -- each one takes days worth of work to really evaluate to the standard that I feel appropriate. If you are feeding me crap to review, I'd just as well not review at all.
I'm a small-fry researcher at a small-fry university. Without name recognition, what gets my research read is the fact that I can (occasionally, when it's worthy) get it into a name-brand journal where approval of the referees signifies real merit. Without that exposure, no matter how good my research is, it will be very difficult to get it widely read because evaluation of quality takes serious time and thought -- time that most researchers are not willing to spend on every paper on Arxiv posted by any yahoo.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. The most cursory reading of a novel scientific paper is ~10 minutes, and even then, I've probably just read the abstract, skimmed the figures and then jumped to the conclusion. You can't seriously expect me to do that for every vaguely relevant paper in the field -- I just can't. So if there is an important paper that I should read, I count on the journals to bring it to my attention.
IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works. Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
If I were a parent of a student at this school, I would be infinitely more concerned about children getting strip searched (for any reason) by school personnel than I would be worried about drugs.
Would you give up your right to sue if your kid was hurt in some fashion by drugs while at school?
If so, then fine -- I applaud your consistency. If not, then there are serious issues with how you intend for the school to achieve its mission of protecting students from hurting themselves.
Before you condemn the living shit out of the school district, try to remember that they have an affirmative responsibility to prevent students from harming themselves while in school. Courts have interpreted that to mean that they must take whatever steps are within their power as soon as they (meaning any employee of the school) becomes aware of a potential threat. Given that they thought they generally have the power to search students for drugs (for instance, had the drugs in question been crack rocks, there would be no question), they could have exposed themselves to massive liabilities had they allowed her to continue to possess the drugs and someone got hurt.
tl;dr version: It's not fair to make the school liable for every little fucking bump and scrape when we also want to impose ever more restrictions on their enforcement.
That all said, it's obvious that ibuprofen is not harmful and they should know the difference. On the other hand, million-dollar liability can cloud the judgment of even the most rational folks, of which very few are employed as school administrators. That liability makes them err on the side of caution, in this case, erring like crazy.
A database management system is nothing but a fancy filesystem with structured files, yet they are often used in servers and perform just fine.
The performance penalty from having both FUSE and a DB layer is additive.
Cavil advocated nuking the planet and spending an infinite amount of time searching for earth.
That was Earth 1.0, the one that the final five lived on. Our earth is named in tribute to that one, but it was not the one he was looking for.
Plus, as RDM explained, all the Cavils were killed either initially in the civil war (Natalie does some "ethnic cleansing" on her basestars) or when the colony was destroyed. Without resurrection, which is now impossible given that Tory was killed, he is gone forever.
I also didn't find the universal acceptance of the "hey, let's discard every scrap of technology and be cavemen!" idea to be realistic or practical in the least.
After 4 years fleeing from genocidal, nuclear-armed, software-hacking, technological abominations chasing me through the empty expanse of space you might think differently. The survivors in BSG have been fighting against the fruits of technology, why would go right back to building a technological civilization?
Moreover, the fleet does not have the requisite technology to rebuild an entire civilization. It was already straining credulity that Adama continued to have whiskey and the doc continued to have cigarettes long after the supplies should have run out. They conveniently had a mining ship and a farming ship, ok I'll buy that for the time being, but their supply of the rudimentary things that make society keep going had to give out eventually. Shit, I was sort of pissed that they had a bunch of steel lying around to repair Galactica -- reminded me of Voyager where every episode a new shuttlecraft would appear.
That said, it would have been entirely appropriate if a few civilians decided to take their ships and jump off in some random direction.
So, basically, we have to determine how many "calculations per second" equivalent an average human can manage. Then we have to allow a range on either side of that since not everyone has the same capacity.
No, because humans think heuristically and therefore make a different kind of mistake than a computer that is crippled in such a fashion. That's the entire point of the article: there are different kinds of mistakes and it's challenging to create a model that reproduces the realistic ones.
For instance, in chess, a human being does not brute-force all the possible moves but instead looks at what positions he thinks are favorable (center control, good pawn arrangement) and looks for those. The kinds of mistake he makes in this are very different from simply telling a computer not to compute all the positive expected value from controlling the center.
If this were all true, how is it that the ARM Cortex-A9 chip is able to get four superscalar RISC cores on a 65nm chip running at over 1GHz
And how many actual instruction does that retire per second? Does its FPU perform at even a fraction of the equivalent x86 (I was surprised to see that it even had one -- I wrote a small program for my ARMv4 phone and spent a solid hour wondering why a program that runs in a few seconds on my desktop took many minutes on there. Punchline: don't do double-precision floating point math on your phone)? What about pagetables, interrupts, DMA and coherent cache? Memory controller? FSB/QPI?
ARM is a wonderful architecture for my mobile phone but it's never going to be enough for actual work. Maybe a netbook running a stripper version of 'nix, but I'd have to see it first to believe it.
..who were receiving millions in campaign donations from the "music" industry.
Funds they use to buy advertising that has a huge effect on undecided voters. If we stopped voting for the guy with the convincing advertisement, there would be no need use for any of that money.
Politicians get money because voters chose to be influenced by the things money buys. Fancy consultants, advertising gurus, branding specialists -- they pay big bucks for these things because they work, which is no one's fault but our own.
A democracy is defined by giving the populace the government that it richly deserves (credit to Mencken, I think).
At least the laws about copyright infringement here were passed by a popularly elected, semi-almost-functioning legislature. We should be blaming ourselves for electing politicians that pass laws mandating criminal penalties inthis instant.