This is a normal scenario for any situation where the act of creation has a large up-front cost, but the actual implementation is more incremental.
Normal in what world? Certainly not in high dollar-high risk R&D areas like drugs, aerospace, semiconductor design and the like. Sure, basic R&D is funded by the government, but application level is done by private companies, at least here in the US.
State sponsored R&D isn't always the best approach anyway. For basic R&D it rocks since the payoff horizon is too far for most companies, but development level often sucks rocks. See the Concorde and the Japanese 5th gen computer project for good examples. Airbus couldn't survive without government subsidies, and it still has a hard time competing with Boeing. And of course we can look at the huge number of new drugs turned out by state supported research in Canada and Europe. I'm sure I'll think of one eventually.[1]
And of course, you really want to add a multi-billion dollar line item into the government budget? Merck's R&D budget was $2.3 billion last year. Total up Pfizers', Glaxo's and the other few hundred drug companies budgets out there. Even allowing for overlap, it's a huge amount.
Eric
[1] Of course, we end up with problems with this approach as well. For example, little research dollars into malaria, which is probably the single worst disease in terms of productivity lost in the world.
Hey, no offense, but that drugco you worked for could spend 50% more on R&D, charge 50% less for its drugs, and realize substantially more profit, if it would simply cut marketing expenditures by roughly 50% (preferably more).
Not even close. Look at the figures sometime and you'll realize that cutting marketing expenses out entirely would only drop the price by 25%. R&D expenditures are at least as large as marketing, so you can't increase them anywhere near that much.
I don't like the marketing expenses either: I'm all for banning ads for prescription drugs. But the dollar figures are nowhere near what people think they are. R&D and making the drug are most of the cost, and always will be.
Fucking profit monger subhuman drugco overlords really make me wanna McVeigh every headquarters and lab they own
And how would you run them? If you understand anything at all about the drug business you'd realize that very few drugs are profitable: Merck, Pfizer and the like survive on a few profitable ones like Vioxx and Tagamet while losing money on virtually everything else. (The plant I worked at had to keep a bunch of horses: the only US supply of black widow spider antivenom. Think that makes them a dime?)
Worse, you have no assurances that any future drugs will even work, much less make you money. Without serious cash reserves you could end up drugless and have no money for R&D. What then? You can't make much of anything off of things that aren't patented: generics will kill you on price since they do no R&D.
Drug companies have become whipping boys since they make a lot of money. But they also have immense expenses and the possibility of having R&D fail. How would you do it?
Bullshit. Research must ALWAYS be done if you want your company to have an edge over the competition.
Get out into the real world someday and see how wrong you are.
I used to work for one of those evil drug companies. It costs roughly $100-250 million and 8-12 years of time to get a drug on the market. What possible incentive is there to spend that kind of bucks if a generic drug maker can copy it the day it becomes legal? You have no edge whatsoever over your competition by doing all this work: all you get are the costs.
Patent is utterly necessary for this kind of work. Banning it would stop most research in its tracks.
You assume that either your God or no god exists. Personally, I believe in ZZQRE, a God who hates all evangelicals and consigns them to listen to Amy Grant music for all eternity while showering scientists and others who used their ZZQRE-given minds with wonders.
Evidence for ZZQRE? About the same as for the Christian God.
Sure, I'm being satiric, but there are plenty of other belief systems out there besides yours.
They didn't? Gee, I suppose watching them do exactly that was a figment of my imagination?
simply because you don't really understand something until you have to teach it to someone else
Another gross misconception; an academic cliche if you will. Every time I hear that my brain translates it into proper English: "Your professor is lazy."
Methinks you've never done much teaching. Someday maybe you will, but until then trust those of us who do it for a living. How do I know this? Simple: I see it in myself, and in the strong students in my class. (And if you think I was being lazy, it took far more effort for me to create the projects than a simple lecture would have taken me.)
I was asked far better questions by the students who helped others
That's because we know what you want. We ask hard questions because it will get us a good grade,
Not in my class it doesn't. I have no grade for class participation and my grades are totally numerical. Try again.
I learned the least from group think pseudo-philosopher teachers with an agenda other than that of teaching the subject at hand.
So, a group project focusing on the relationship between the wavefunction and probability density, or another to come up with the spectrum of a hypothetical system is "group-think pseudo-philosophy"? Ok, whatever you think.
I realize you don't much like group projects. Some people don't. But perhaps you're so busy tarring them with a wide brush you never actually consider they might be a bit different from your experience?
describing how an airplane wing works. It's pretty cut and dried
Ok, how does it work?
And before you say "Bernoulli's effect", consider that planes can fly upside down. If Bernoulli's effect was the cause, the plane would fall to earth rapidly when flying upside down.
Every academic discipline has them now (especially colleges of Education and Business) with the supposed goal of "teaching the students to work in groups".
Speaking as a professor who introduced group projects into his PChem course this semester, I think you miss the real point of them.
I used them so that students could teach each other. I wanted the strong students to help the weak, simply because you don't really understand something until you have to teach it to someone else.
Did the weak students benefit from the stronger ones helping them? Of course. But IMHO the strong students benefit even more: I was asked far better questions by the students who helped others.
Are you sure you've understood the reviewer's role right?
I've reviewed scientifically brilliant but grammatically hideous papers
Note my previous comment about incorrect facts in/. articles. I'd reject a paper for that in a heartbeat. I've seen gramatically hideous papers that I've tried to fix (or indicate they should be sent to someone who can fix them), but I've also gotten some which simply aren't understandable. I'll reject those as well. Papers should be reviewed first on content, of course, but also on understandability.
In general, compare the writing in even the worst published paper to a typical +5 slashdot comment. There's no contest: the academic paper will be better written, in part because good reviewers take time to point out bad English. It also has a much better chance of being correct, have the conclusions follow the data and the like.
Myabe they could learn from/.'s moderation system?
Dear God, let's hope not.
Academic peer review bears no resemblance to/.'s. A decent reviewer will go over a paper with a fine tooth comb: I've taken well over a full day to review papers before, adding numerous comments, correcting mistakes, making suggestions to add citations and the like./. reviewers might take 30 seconds, if that. The horrible grammar, bad spelling and incorrect facts that litter/. articles never seem to prevent them from being modded to +5. An academic reviewer would return such articles with "Do not publish" written all over them.
Academic reviewers are also experts in their field. You don't get to review until your grad advisor thinks you should, and you probably won't get much until you have a publication record that other scientists respect. Here, I can make comments about articles I don't even understand and get modded up if I agree with the majority.
There's no reason to have the ISS, much less an improved but still mostly useless copy
Firstly, one thing mentioned in the article is orbital inclination. There are things you can only do from certain orbital inclinations and heights, like observe parts of the earth
We have unmanned satellites for that. They've been doing the job just fine for years. A space station can't do a lot of that: too much vibration from the humans for the big scopes.
launch and retrieve probes and satellites
You're joking, right? The shuttle is bad enough: a virtually non-manuverable space station would be just dreadful at capture, and to launch you need to get into orbit in the first place. Since that's where all the cost is anyway, what possible benefit does a manned station have?
examine solar particles. There may also be experiments which can be performed using 2 stations, for example using interferometry.
That's what satellites do, and have been doing for years.
There's only one experiment that space stations are remotely good at: learning about long term human adaptation to space. They're useless for anything else, save perhaps as a tourist stop for billionaires. (Yes, I'd like to go, but lets be serious: I'll never have that kind of dough.)
Microgravity experiments on Mir were pointless: the US tried sending an isolation mount up with one of the science modules since Mir vibrated so badly.
If the Russians were smart they'd pile the cash into cheap launch vehicles, SSTO if possible. Until the cost of Earth -> orbit flight comes way, way down the ISS and its cousins are just ways to keep astronauts employed.
I ran Alpha Centauri on a Pentium 200 laptop for a long time. Not the speediest thing in the world, but turn off most of the sound/music options and it's quite playable. PPro200 won't have any problems at all unless the port is really bad.
Yes, the great junkyard seeding question. See
The NERDS website for details
In short: most cars in a junkyard will run fine. Most are gotten rid of when a part fails, the body rusts through or the car hits a tree and it's not worth fixing. Most junkyards pull the engines on the car since it's generally more valuable than the body: JW just leaves them in. There are a lot of other odd things you wouldn't expect to find there.
However, the yard is seeded with certain items that are required for safety or that couldn't be found or hacked up. Examples: the rocket motors and the steam boilers and engines. You can't get a profesionally built steam boiler certified in England in less than ten hours, much less a hack job.
Given some of the amazing bodge jobs I do see (cutting a propellor out of a chunk of wood with a chainsaw, or a 3000 RPM water pump made from a brake rotor and some welded on bits.) I'm willing to cut them slack
Sigh: Boucher's my current rep, and having read his responses here I'm even happier I voted for him last election. Too bad I'm leaving the area...
Any politician that can admit in a public forum that he or she doesn't know enough about an issue to discuss it is a real keeper. Add to that the work he's done over the past years and I'd rank him with Tom Campbell as one of the most clueful politicians out there.
Many of us remember the LP-CD transition. There was serious concern about the size of a CD: simply putting in a jewel case into the slots that used to hold an LP in music stores wasn't an option. Forcing every music store to change all their shelving was expensive.
Thus was born the wasteful cardboard box, designed to make the CD the same height as an LP. But how long did that really last?
I seem to recall they were gone fast (1-2 years), especially in the "hip" music stores that wanted to show they were with it. Expect the same here: it will take a few months before stores start changing over, assuming the new format takes off.
It won't stop the real threat: Bin Laden or someone else buying/stealing a bomb from the FUSSR states and shipping it over. How is your $60B NMD going to defuse a bomb sitting in NY harbor? MAD works well for states: do you really think the Chinese leadership will risk Beijing becoming a glowing crater? It doesn't work at all well against terrorists. Terrorists don't have missiles, or capital cities. They don't need them.
It doesn't work. Last year, in a series of carefully managed tests, where a single missile was fired on a known trajectory at a known time, the system still managed to miss more than hit. (It managed 1 intercept, maybe, in a series of misses.) You really, honestly think this is something we should put into operation?
NMD is the single stupidest boondoggle on the government's plate right now.
Ok, Diablo is Nethack+graphics (and networking) but Planetscape?! You've never played it, have you? If you'd spent 15 minutes with it, you'd realize that Planetscape is not a dungeon crawl at all- it's an interactive novel. The vast majority of your time is spent talking to people: it's possible to go hours without drawing a weapon.
I've never watched the show, but it sounded kind of interesting... until now.
Watch before judging. For example in the hovercraft episode, we got to watch someone make a roughly 4' diameter propeller from a block of wood and a chainsaw. The NERDS last year made a 3000rpm centrifugal water pump out of a brake rotor and some scrap metal. The Long Brothers invented the Styro-lathe out of a electric drill and a knife to turn the pieces for their rocket: 3 Revs a Minute fashioned up a hot-wire to cut their styrofoam into a proper airfoil for their bomber. And if you saw Bowser's walking table or the famous (albeit too fragile) Brick Muncher, you wouldn't believe that they were put together in 10 hours.
Yeah, some stuff is seeded. Go read the NERDS webpage for just how much work was involved in getting Frobette, their steam car running despite having a boiler and engine given to them.
I don't like MS, i'd rather not use their software, but have to. Why? B/c there is software that i want to use that only runs with windows.
Then buy Windows. Otherwise, you're just a thief. All your attempts at flimsy rationalizations are just that.
You have Open Source all wrong..
Open Source isn't about being free
No, I have it right. You're the one stealing from a company you hate because you aren't able to do what you want with Open Source/Free Software tools. That's not what the movement is about: it's just "GimmeGimmeGimme".
If I was him I would have taken it back and got a linux supported joystickEXACTLY! Buy something supported by Linux, or by Win95 which he already has a copy of.
Everything else is the flimsy rationalization of a thief.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all just bits and bytes and copying hurts nobody.
Doesn't matter. The original poster's intent is simply juvenile. Don't like MS? Don't use the software. Can't do something with Linux or BE that you can under Windows? Too fucking bad: code it yourself or go without. Isn't that the whole point of the Open Source movement?
Or is it "Steal from anyone we don't like because the free stuff isn't good enough"?
Warning!!! Sarcasm and non-/. approved opinions ahead.
I steal Ford cars. I have no qualms about it. They charge obscene prices for crappy products, and pull planned obsolescence tricks to force you to upgrade.
Boy, isn't rationalization fun!
Bottom line: if you hate the company so much DON'T USE THE DAMN PRODUCT. Whining about the horrible folks at MS while stealing their products shows the maturity of a 6-year old.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a normal scenario for any situation where the act of creation has a large up-front cost, but the actual implementation is more incremental.
Normal in what world? Certainly not in high dollar-high risk R&D areas like drugs, aerospace, semiconductor design and the like. Sure, basic R&D is funded by the government, but application level is done by private companies, at least here in the US.
State sponsored R&D isn't always the best approach anyway. For basic R&D it rocks since the payoff horizon is too far for most companies, but development level often sucks rocks. See the Concorde and the Japanese 5th gen computer project for good examples. Airbus couldn't survive without government subsidies, and it still has a hard time competing with Boeing. And of course we can look at the huge number of new drugs turned out by state supported research in Canada and Europe. I'm sure I'll think of one eventually.[1]
And of course, you really want to add a multi-billion dollar line item into the government budget? Merck's R&D budget was $2.3 billion last year. Total up Pfizers', Glaxo's and the other few hundred drug companies budgets out there. Even allowing for overlap, it's a huge amount.
Eric
[1] Of course, we end up with problems with this approach as well. For example, little research dollars into malaria, which is probably the single worst disease in terms of productivity lost in the world.
Not even close. Look at the figures sometime and you'll realize that cutting marketing expenses out entirely would only drop the price by 25%. R&D expenditures are at least as large as marketing, so you can't increase them anywhere near that much.
I don't like the marketing expenses either: I'm all for banning ads for prescription drugs. But the dollar figures are nowhere near what people think they are. R&D and making the drug are most of the cost, and always will be.
Fucking profit monger subhuman drugco overlords really make me wanna McVeigh every headquarters and lab they own
And how would you run them? If you understand anything at all about the drug business you'd realize that very few drugs are profitable: Merck, Pfizer and the like survive on a few profitable ones like Vioxx and Tagamet while losing money on virtually everything else. (The plant I worked at had to keep a bunch of horses: the only US supply of black widow spider antivenom. Think that makes them a dime?)
Worse, you have no assurances that any future drugs will even work, much less make you money. Without serious cash reserves you could end up drugless and have no money for R&D. What then? You can't make much of anything off of things that aren't patented: generics will kill you on price since they do no R&D.
Drug companies have become whipping boys since they make a lot of money. But they also have immense expenses and the possibility of having R&D fail. How would you do it?
Eric
Bullshit. Research must ALWAYS be done if you want your company to have an edge over the competition.
Get out into the real world someday and see how wrong you are.
I used to work for one of those evil drug companies. It costs roughly $100-250 million and 8-12 years of time to get a drug on the market. What possible incentive is there to spend that kind of bucks if a generic drug maker can copy it the day it becomes legal? You have no edge whatsoever over your competition by doing all this work: all you get are the costs.
Patent is utterly necessary for this kind of work. Banning it would stop most research in its tracks.
Eric
False dichotomy.
You assume that either your God or no god exists. Personally, I believe in ZZQRE, a God who hates all evangelicals and consigns them to listen to Amy Grant music for all eternity while showering scientists and others who used their ZZQRE-given minds with wonders.
Evidence for ZZQRE? About the same as for the Christian God.
Sure, I'm being satiric, but there are plenty of other belief systems out there besides yours.
Eric
Umm, were you in my class? Somehow, I doubt it.
The caring students didn't help the uncaring.
They didn't? Gee, I suppose watching them do exactly that was a figment of my imagination?
simply because you don't really understand something until you have to teach it to someone else
Another gross misconception; an academic cliche if you will. Every time I hear that my brain translates it into proper English: "Your professor is lazy."
Methinks you've never done much teaching. Someday maybe you will, but until then trust those of us who do it for a living. How do I know this? Simple: I see it in myself, and in the strong students in my class. (And if you think I was being lazy, it took far more effort for me to create the projects than a simple lecture would have taken me.)
I was asked far better questions by the students who helped others
That's because we know what you want. We ask hard questions because it will get us a good grade,
Not in my class it doesn't. I have no grade for class participation and my grades are totally numerical. Try again.
I learned the least from group think pseudo-philosopher teachers with an agenda other than that of teaching the subject at hand.
So, a group project focusing on the relationship between the wavefunction and probability density, or another to come up with the spectrum of a hypothetical system is "group-think pseudo-philosophy"? Ok, whatever you think.
I realize you don't much like group projects. Some people don't. But perhaps you're so busy tarring them with a wide brush you never actually consider they might be a bit different from your experience?
Eric
Ok, how does it work?
And before you say "Bernoulli's effect", consider that planes can fly upside down. If Bernoulli's effect was the cause, the plane would fall to earth rapidly when flying upside down.
Eric
I'd rather have the students think about the answer than sit there pushing buttons on the magic box and taking whatever it gives as the truth.
Eric
Every academic discipline has them now (especially colleges of Education and Business) with the supposed goal of "teaching the students to work in groups".
Speaking as a professor who introduced group projects into his PChem course this semester, I think you miss the real point of them.
I used them so that students could teach each other. I wanted the strong students to help the weak, simply because you don't really understand something until you have to teach it to someone else.
Did the weak students benefit from the stronger ones helping them? Of course. But IMHO the strong students benefit even more: I was asked far better questions by the students who helped others.
Eric
Are you sure you've understood the reviewer's role right?
I've reviewed scientifically brilliant but grammatically hideous papers
Note my previous comment about incorrect facts in /. articles. I'd reject a paper for that in a heartbeat. I've seen gramatically hideous papers that I've tried to fix (or indicate they should be sent to someone who can fix them), but I've also gotten some which simply aren't understandable. I'll reject those as well. Papers should be reviewed first on content, of course, but also on understandability.
In general, compare the writing in even the worst published paper to a typical +5 slashdot comment. There's no contest: the academic paper will be better written, in part because good reviewers take time to point out bad English. It also has a much better chance of being correct, have the conclusions follow the data and the like.
Eric
Myabe they could learn from /.'s moderation system?
Dear God, let's hope not.
Academic peer review bears no resemblance to /.'s. A decent reviewer will go over a paper with a fine tooth comb: I've taken well over a full day to review papers before, adding numerous comments, correcting mistakes, making suggestions to add citations and the like. /. reviewers might take 30 seconds, if that. The horrible grammar, bad spelling and incorrect facts that litter /. articles never seem to prevent them from being modded to +5. An academic reviewer would return such articles with "Do not publish" written all over them.
Academic reviewers are also experts in their field. You don't get to review until your grad advisor thinks you should, and you probably won't get much until you have a publication record that other scientists respect. Here, I can make comments about articles I don't even understand and get modded up if I agree with the majority.
Eric
There's no reason to have the ISS, much less an improved but still mostly useless copy
Firstly, one thing mentioned in the article is orbital inclination. There are things you can only do from certain orbital inclinations and heights, like observe parts of the earth
We have unmanned satellites for that. They've been doing the job just fine for years. A space station can't do a lot of that: too much vibration from the humans for the big scopes.
launch and retrieve probes and satellites
You're joking, right? The shuttle is bad enough: a virtually non-manuverable space station would be just dreadful at capture, and to launch you need to get into orbit in the first place. Since that's where all the cost is anyway, what possible benefit does a manned station have?
examine solar particles. There may also be experiments which can be performed using 2 stations, for example using interferometry.
That's what satellites do, and have been doing for years.
There's only one experiment that space stations are remotely good at: learning about long term human adaptation to space. They're useless for anything else, save perhaps as a tourist stop for billionaires. (Yes, I'd like to go, but lets be serious: I'll never have that kind of dough.) Microgravity experiments on Mir were pointless: the US tried sending an isolation mount up with one of the science modules since Mir vibrated so badly.
If the Russians were smart they'd pile the cash into cheap launch vehicles, SSTO if possible. Until the cost of Earth -> orbit flight comes way, way down the ISS and its cousins are just ways to keep astronauts employed.
Eric
In short: most cars in a junkyard will run fine. Most are gotten rid of when a part fails, the body rusts through or the car hits a tree and it's not worth fixing. Most junkyards pull the engines on the car since it's generally more valuable than the body: JW just leaves them in. There are a lot of other odd things you wouldn't expect to find there.
However, the yard is seeded with certain items that are required for safety or that couldn't be found or hacked up. Examples: the rocket motors and the steam boilers and engines. You can't get a profesionally built steam boiler certified in England in less than ten hours, much less a hack job.
Given some of the amazing bodge jobs I do see (cutting a propellor out of a chunk of wood with a chainsaw, or a 3000 RPM water pump made from a brake rotor and some welded on bits.) I'm willing to cut them slack
Eric
Any politician that can admit in a public forum that he or she doesn't know enough about an issue to discuss it is a real keeper. Add to that the work he's done over the past years and I'd rank him with Tom Campbell as one of the most clueful politicians out there.
Eric
Thus was born the wasteful cardboard box, designed to make the CD the same height as an LP. But how long did that really last?
I seem to recall they were gone fast (1-2 years), especially in the "hip" music stores that wanted to show they were with it. Expect the same here: it will take a few months before stores start changing over, assuming the new format takes off.
Eric
NMD is the single stupidest boondoggle on the government's plate right now.
Ok, Diablo is Nethack+graphics (and networking) but Planetscape?! You've never played it, have you? If you'd spent 15 minutes with it, you'd realize that Planetscape is not a dungeon crawl at all- it's an interactive novel. The vast majority of your time is spent talking to people: it's possible to go hours without drawing a weapon.
I've never watched the show, but it sounded kind of interesting... until now.
Watch before judging. For example in the hovercraft episode, we got to watch someone make a roughly 4' diameter propeller from a block of wood and a chainsaw. The NERDS last year made a 3000rpm centrifugal water pump out of a brake rotor and some scrap metal. The Long Brothers invented the Styro-lathe out of a electric drill and a knife to turn the pieces for their rocket: 3 Revs a Minute fashioned up a hot-wire to cut their styrofoam into a proper airfoil for their bomber. And if you saw Bowser's walking table or the famous (albeit too fragile) Brick Muncher, you wouldn't believe that they were put together in 10 hours.
Yeah, some stuff is seeded. Go read the NERDS webpage for just how much work was involved in getting Frobette, their steam car running despite having a boiler and engine given to them.
Eric
I think I speak for everyone when I tell you to go fuck yourself, you fucking miserable fuckwad :^)
Eric, who was once told by a crewmate "You like that word, don't you?"
"Rats. I am most displeased with the repair job depot maintenance did on this jeep." translates cleanly in NCO jargon to
"Fuck! The fucking fuckers fucked the fucking fuck up!"
Eric Fucking Remy
I don't like MS, i'd rather not use their software, but have to. Why? B/c there is software that i want to use that only runs with windows.
Then buy Windows. Otherwise, you're just a thief. All your attempts at flimsy rationalizations are just that.
You have Open Source all wrong.. Open Source isn't about being free
No, I have it right. You're the one stealing from a company you hate because you aren't able to do what you want with Open Source/Free Software tools. That's not what the movement is about: it's just "GimmeGimmeGimme".
If I was him I would have taken it back and got a linux supported joystick EXACTLY! Buy something supported by Linux, or by Win95 which he already has a copy of.
Everything else is the flimsy rationalization of a thief.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all just bits and bytes and copying hurts nobody.
Doesn't matter. The original poster's intent is simply juvenile. Don't like MS? Don't use the software. Can't do something with Linux or BE that you can under Windows? Too fucking bad: code it yourself or go without. Isn't that the whole point of the Open Source movement?
Or is it "Steal from anyone we don't like because the free stuff isn't good enough"?
Eric
In fact the more I think about it, I'd better head for the hills right now. *Shudder* :^)
Eric
Warning!!! Sarcasm and non-/. approved opinions ahead.
I steal Ford cars. I have no qualms about it. They charge obscene prices for crappy products, and pull planned obsolescence tricks to force you to upgrade.
Boy, isn't rationalization fun!
Bottom line: if you hate the company so much DON'T USE THE DAMN PRODUCT. Whining about the horrible folks at MS while stealing their products shows the maturity of a 6-year old.
Eric