I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters a bunch of years ago, and subsequently have seen its accuracy disparaged a number of times, but never with any details.
Does anyone have an informed opinion on its failings?
Every MSDS looks that scary -- here's the one for sodium chloride.
Genomics labs used to routinely use mineral oil at 95 C to prevent evaporation of PCR plates -- there's no real respiratory hazard, and your CPU shouldn't be running even that hot. (Although for all I know, maybe the new ones do...)
Gee, you're certainly an imaginative fellow. Unfortunately, you never got around to your personal conspiracy theory. The guy I responded to thinks Fox wanted to "destroy something popular". Presumably you have imagined some equally insane alternative to network executives uncomfortable with the shows they were getting and trying to run the ones they thought were best, even if out of sequence.
Fox really hates it when people thwart it's best efforts to destroy something popular.
Oh, for heaven's fucking sake:
What is so difficult about the notion that while you enjoy a TV show, most of the world didn't want to watch it? Can't you people just accept that there weren't enough people out there who share your taste, instead of imagining some Illuminati conspiracy to keep profitable shows off the air for no logical reason?
Look, I'd love to be watching the hockey World Championship, which, if it's available at all in the US, isn't accessible to me. The reality is that the vast majority of "sports" fans would rather watch poker, World Championship Poker, Celebrity Poker or Endlessly Rebroadcast Poker. I find it baffling, but that's how it is.
[I]t's hard to avoid breaking the law nearly every day,... sharing movies via P2P or with friends.
Yeah, in general it's hard to avoid breaking the law nearly every day, whether stealing milk trucks or burglarizing orphanages. (Yes, I elided two-thirds of that. Is it really impossible to tape TV shows or rip CDs in Australia without breaking the law?
Wired News is not retracting any of these stories. Rather, we are appending notes to the stories, indicating what we have been unable to confirm about them and editing them, as noted, where appropriate. By keeping these stories posted and clearly marked, we hope that our readers can help identify any sources whom we cannot track down.
And while normally I'd applaud her attempt to shove a PowerBook into the picture regardless of the actual topic, in this case Mac zealotry probably should have counseled some restraint...
Absolutely true -- I was simplifying for brevity. My point was that there's nothing unusual or improper about rejecting submissions without going to peer review at all.
I think that both '"Analyists say that "Dell - neither the person nor the company - is interested in acquiring Red Hat"' and "A fight against their competence in the server market?" make sense in Spanish but mean the opposite in English of what you intended. Obviously you're not a native speaker, so I apologize for being overly hasty to bitch at you.
That said, I still doubt this news has anything to do with Dell Inc., and probably has very little to do with Michael Dell.
Actually, he is facing that suppression. The journal editor said that if he'd known it was being published as an ad, he'd have canceled it. Despite the standard ethical journalism policy of separating editors from publishers (ad managers), to prevent bias of editors by knowing who's paying the rent.
1) I don't consider the failure to buy his way into a particular journal to be "total suppression".
2) Perhaps you've never seen a scientific journal -- with some very rare exceptions, they have 2-4 pages of ad space for equipment or reagent makers. Small journals don't have elaborate policies of editorial/advertising separation (although some major ones do, as the article notes).
3) In any case, what's at issue here isn't advertising driving editorial content, it's the opposite. I don't see the problem with an editor keeping his journal from turning into a laughingstock by printing "articles" from any nut with some money.
The Dow study, which exonerated Dow in the statistically impossible cancer rate among their asbestos-exposed workers, was interesting enough to publish.
You don't seem to understand what happened here. The original study was published in a different, marginal journal. Almost by definition, a criticism of it doesn't rate a reviewed article in a better journal -- it rarely rates a reviewed article in the original journal.
How you've reached such strong conclusions about the original study and the response to it, I'm not certain.
A fight against their competence in the server market?
I underestimated you guys! I'd have thought that this move, which seems to be his investment group making an arbitrage play, would be overspun as a ringing endorsement of Red Hat by Dell, and Michael Dell. Instead we get "It's a plot!!! A plot to destroy Lunix!!!!"
I also like the way the submitter managed to completely invert the statement about how analysts _do_ _not_ believe this is takeover attempt.
In other words, he argued that the industry funded paper was a lie, but had a hard time getting his arguments published.
Here's an analogy to what he did: let's say you read something in your local newspaper that you think is improperly argued. You write up your objection and ask the New York Times to run it as a bylined piece. They return it and tell you to try it as a letter to the editor in the newspaper that ran the original story.
The guy isn't facing total suppression of his work by The Man; he's insisting on publishing it in a far more prestigious form than any reasonable person could think it warrants.
Since you're the only person commenting on the subject, I'll stick my points here:
1) Peer review is there to determine scientific correctness, not whether a paper should be published or not. There is nothing inappropriate about editorial prescreening for fit and impact -- otherwise the peer review system would be overrun. This manuscript was a criticism of a paper in a different, obscure journal and it's not in the least surprising that it was rejected before review. It should have been submitted as an unreviewed letter to the original journal.
2) Any additional exposure his paper may have gained through this stunt is more than balanced out by the fact that Egilman will now permanently be known in the field as "the nut who ran his stupid letter as an advertisement".
3) The "indirect ties" thing is ludicrous. Anyone who works in a field has "indirect ties" of that degree. Egilman, as I said, is a paranoid nut but the real idiot here is the editor at International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health who used this as an opportunity to throw dirt at a competitor. As though his journal has never rejected a paper about which a similarly far-fetched conspiracy theory could have been made.
I don't think his point is so much that he wants to be told what to think (although in this post-Michael Sims era, we're all a little lost without his condescending admonitions on every story). It's more wondering why "No need to worry! There's only 14 common viruses!" is supposed to be reassuring.
I'd also add that it might be a good idea to send letters/emails of appreciation to your co-workers and the clients of your company.
You bring up an important point I haven't seen others mention -- not burning bridges isn't just about you and your boss, it's about everyone else involved, any of whom might be in a position to help or hurt you down the road.
In seriousness, I'm sure that's partly true -- schools that switch to open-source are obviously a non-random sample.
Nonetheless, I can believe these numbers. Libraries and elementary schools are no-brainers for using Linux and free software apps. Anyway, this is an improvement on the usual hypothetical TCO numbers pulled out of one side's ass or the other's.
Care to back up your empty assertion with some facts? I'd really like to see them.
Yes, only one very simple fact: Gore was not in Congress when the Internet was created, and could not possibly have done anything that could reasonably be construed as "taking the initative in creating it".
There is no number of extraneous facts that you (and Vint Cerf) can sling that can displace the single relevant one, as far as the accuracy of his claim is concerned.
I think you're overnerding this a bit. The analogy is between storage capacity for the images and the number of characters in a book, and it's intended to give a sense of order of magnitude. It's not intended to be a comparison of file formats.
That said, I don't quite get how they get 20. A typical novel has roughly 50,000 words, for, say, 250,000 characters. It's not clear to me how analogizing characters to either bits or bytes gets you to a megabyte book.
Yup! Also, Google has announced Google This, Google That and Google Something Else. Now you're caught up for the last six months -- pay attention from here on!
That may or may not be a good idea, but do you think it would result in people bitching at them any less? It's not like an anonymous poster at OSNews has a burning need to look at Solaris' scheduler code.
And Arthur Andersen was completely obliterated for actions that the vast majority of its employees knew nothing about. That and Dow certainly aren't the cases I'd pick to illustrate how cushioned and secure corporate life is.
Stuff still catches fire, tens of thousands years after the technology came into use. (Or whenever the hell it was -- I'm not a freaking archeologist.) You try to be careful, and fire safety has certainly improved over that time, but ultimately there's a background level that will always have to be dealt with, by insurance and by just sucking it up.
There's always going to be data compromise. One should be careful, and precautions should be kept in place but the long-term answer is that consumers will be protected like they are with credit card theft, the losses will become another background cost and you're going to have to live with the possibility that someone will know what movies you rent.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone have an informed opinion on its failings?
Genomics labs used to routinely use mineral oil at 95 C to prevent evaporation of PCR plates -- there's no real respiratory hazard, and your CPU shouldn't be running even that hot. (Although for all I know, maybe the new ones do...)
Gee, you're certainly an imaginative fellow. Unfortunately, you never got around to your personal conspiracy theory. The guy I responded to thinks Fox wanted to "destroy something popular". Presumably you have imagined some equally insane alternative to network executives uncomfortable with the shows they were getting and trying to run the ones they thought were best, even if out of sequence.
Oh, for heaven's fucking sake:
What is so difficult about the notion that while you enjoy a TV show, most of the world didn't want to watch it? Can't you people just accept that there weren't enough people out there who share your taste, instead of imagining some Illuminati conspiracy to keep profitable shows off the air for no logical reason?
Look, I'd love to be watching the hockey World Championship, which, if it's available at all in the US, isn't accessible to me. The reality is that the vast majority of "sports" fans would rather watch poker, World Championship Poker, Celebrity Poker or Endlessly Rebroadcast Poker. I find it baffling, but that's how it is.
Yeah, in general it's hard to avoid breaking the law nearly every day, whether stealing milk trucks or burglarizing orphanages. (Yes, I elided two-thirds of that. Is it really impossible to tape TV shows or rip CDs in Australia without breaking the law?
Looking at it again, I think you're right. Sorry about the moderation...
And while normally I'd applaud her attempt to shove a PowerBook into the picture regardless of the actual topic, in this case Mac zealotry probably should have counseled some restraint...
1) Linking an MP3 on some guy's personal site from Slashdot is unhelpful!
2) Microsoft thinks that a theme song with some lyric about "boobs" isn't something they want their name associated with!
Absolutely true -- I was simplifying for brevity. My point was that there's nothing unusual or improper about rejecting submissions without going to peer review at all.
That said, I still doubt this news has anything to do with Dell Inc., and probably has very little to do with Michael Dell.
1) I don't consider the failure to buy his way into a particular journal to be "total suppression".
2) Perhaps you've never seen a scientific journal -- with some very rare exceptions, they have 2-4 pages of ad space for equipment or reagent makers. Small journals don't have elaborate policies of editorial/advertising separation (although some major ones do, as the article notes).
3) In any case, what's at issue here isn't advertising driving editorial content, it's the opposite. I don't see the problem with an editor keeping his journal from turning into a laughingstock by printing "articles" from any nut with some money.
The Dow study, which exonerated Dow in the statistically impossible cancer rate among their asbestos-exposed workers, was interesting enough to publish.
You don't seem to understand what happened here. The original study was published in a different, marginal journal. Almost by definition, a criticism of it doesn't rate a reviewed article in a better journal -- it rarely rates a reviewed article in the original journal.
How you've reached such strong conclusions about the original study and the response to it, I'm not certain.
I underestimated you guys! I'd have thought that this move, which seems to be his investment group making an arbitrage play, would be overspun as a ringing endorsement of Red Hat by Dell, and Michael Dell. Instead we get "It's a plot!!! A plot to destroy Lunix!!!!"
I also like the way the submitter managed to completely invert the statement about how analysts _do_ _not_ believe this is takeover attempt.
Here's an analogy to what he did: let's say you read something in your local newspaper that you think is improperly argued. You write up your objection and ask the New York Times to run it as a bylined piece. They return it and tell you to try it as a letter to the editor in the newspaper that ran the original story.
The guy isn't facing total suppression of his work by The Man; he's insisting on publishing it in a far more prestigious form than any reasonable person could think it warrants.
Since you're the only person commenting on the subject, I'll stick my points here:
1) Peer review is there to determine scientific correctness, not whether a paper should be published or not. There is nothing inappropriate about editorial prescreening for fit and impact -- otherwise the peer review system would be overrun. This manuscript was a criticism of a paper in a different, obscure journal and it's not in the least surprising that it was rejected before review. It should have been submitted as an unreviewed letter to the original journal.
2) Any additional exposure his paper may have gained through this stunt is more than balanced out by the fact that Egilman will now permanently be known in the field as "the nut who ran his stupid letter as an advertisement".
3) The "indirect ties" thing is ludicrous. Anyone who works in a field has "indirect ties" of that degree. Egilman, as I said, is a paranoid nut but the real idiot here is the editor at International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health who used this as an opportunity to throw dirt at a competitor. As though his journal has never rejected a paper about which a similarly far-fetched conspiracy theory could have been made.
At least that's the part I'm wondering about...
You bring up an important point I haven't seen others mention -- not burning bridges isn't just about you and your boss, it's about everyone else involved, any of whom might be in a position to help or hurt you down the road.
No, it's literally an intro-level homework exercise. It's a code snippet copied out of a textbook.
Nonetheless, I can believe these numbers. Libraries and elementary schools are no-brainers for using Linux and free software apps. Anyway, this is an improvement on the usual hypothetical TCO numbers pulled out of one side's ass or the other's.
Yes, only one very simple fact: Gore was not in Congress when the Internet was created, and could not possibly have done anything that could reasonably be construed as "taking the initative in creating it".
There is no number of extraneous facts that you (and Vint Cerf) can sling that can displace the single relevant one, as far as the accuracy of his claim is concerned.
That said, I don't quite get how they get 20. A typical novel has roughly 50,000 words, for, say, 250,000 characters. It's not clear to me how analogizing characters to either bits or bytes gets you to a megabyte book.
Yup! Also, Google has announced Google This, Google That and Google Something Else. Now you're caught up for the last six months -- pay attention from here on!
That may or may not be a good idea, but do you think it would result in people bitching at them any less? It's not like an anonymous poster at OSNews has a burning need to look at Solaris' scheduler code.
And Arthur Andersen was completely obliterated for actions that the vast majority of its employees knew nothing about. That and Dow certainly aren't the cases I'd pick to illustrate how cushioned and secure corporate life is.
There's always going to be data compromise. One should be careful, and precautions should be kept in place but the long-term answer is that consumers will be protected like they are with credit card theft, the losses will become another background cost and you're going to have to live with the possibility that someone will know what movies you rent.