The thing is, tenure is earned by outstanding scholarship over years of teaching and research.
You clearly don't work in academia. It is surprisingly easy to publish, and tenure committees tend to look at quantity over quality.
Such protections are needed, else the relatively low pay and long hours of professors would hardly seem worth it
I don't know, I think I'm paid about right. As long as I show up to teach my classes, supervise students, and bring in grant money, nobody really cares what I do. Example: Today I had scheduled a couple of hours of off-site meetings, so I decided to work the rest of the day from home. Try doing that at Motorola.
What really astonishes me is that open source has made such great leaps in other areas yet there's no apparent replacement for Outlook & Exchange. For a huge number of folk in business, having an open office suite is useless if they don't have calendar sharing, resource scheduling and email/contact sharing amongst groups. Is this really so difficult to achieve?
Probably not, but perhaps open source developers are not interested in providing such a solution.
The flip side of "Linus is inhibited by greed" is that "Linux is not responsive to the needs of the marketplace". There are no dollars on the line for linux.
using airburst nukes to try and take out your opponents missiles in the upper atmosphere
Apparently this is already a design criterion. I recently came across this paper, concerning the re-entry characteristics of the Galileo atmospheric probe at Jupiter. Check out Figure 7, where we read, "Galileo stagnation region heating is equivalent to the combined heating of an ICBM warhead flying through a thermonuclear explosion."
I think MAD only works when both sides are somewhat rational and realize how much they stand to lose.
MAD doesn't really work. Or, at least, that's not how a nuclear war would most likely play out in real life: massive attack followed by massive retaliation. MAD hasn't been a part of US strategic nuclear doctrine since the sixties.
A real nuclear war would likely involve a series of escalating attacks on either side, probably starting with an exchange of battlefield weapons, escalating to supply depots, then military targets near cities, then larger-scale "counterforce" attacks. Each time there would be a rational reason to continue: there's no reason to expect a massive response to a limited attack, since MAD means that a massive attack would mean suicide for the attacker.
We're just lucky that nobody has stepped across the first line yet, although the world was about 24 hours away from exactly this scenario during the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was about to order an invasion of Cuba when a last-minute deal was struck to remove the missiles. What the US military did not know was that the Soviet commanders had tactical nuclear weapons at their disposal, and -- for the first time in Soviet history -- had been pre-authorized to use them in the event of an attack. From there it would have been a short mental leap to nuclear bombardment of targets in Florida and the southwest, which would have been supporting the invasion.
Of course the united states would never go for this as nuclear weapons are big business. so basically we're screwed.
Yes. Only the United States is to blame. India, Israel, the UK, and France would gladly give up their nukes because the only thing they are afraid of is an American attack.
Yeah, because the security threats to facilities come from the general public which gets its aerial imagery free from these years-old databases, not from corporate, governement or international orgs with budgets for the plentiful (even cheap) aerial/satellite products with recent updates, higher resolution, GIS overlays, even realtime observations. Or their own aircraft/satellites to generate their own custom data.
So you're saying we should pay no attention to the simplest and easiest of security measures because a potential adversary could take more agressive action. That's like saying it's okay to have a sticky note with the root password on a critical server as long as you keep the firewall updated.
"Years-old databases"? It's not like the design of a nuclear power plant changes on a day-to-day basis.
They already are. For example, arXiv was hosted at Los Alamos National Laboratory until recently, and many state employees (i.e., university professors) devote time and energy to the proper functioning of free journals. (Most professors are required to devote a small portion of their time to "administration", which can include editorships of journals.)
Although that is true, I'm not convinced that "free" publishing entities such as PLoS have demonstrated that they are archivable, which is a much bigger issue that free exchange of information (which we already have -- I can go to my local university library and read as much as I want).
A paper published today in a journal should continue to be available for as long as possible in the future, or the notion of a "journal" is meaningless. If nobody is paying the bills, it means that nobody is making money off of back issues, and so there is less incentive to store them.
I'm not saying PLoS is incapable of archiving -- I'm saying that one has reason to be skeptical.
an example of a prestigious journal published by a for-profit company? My impression is that for-profit journals only exist for the purpose of giving second-tier researchers a place to publish garbage. (All the prestigious journals in my field are published by the non-profit IEEE.)
Just do what Stephen Colbert did, and tell your audience the edits you want to see!
It's much better, much more subtle, and much smarter than that.
Colbert basically encouraged every jackass in the universe to run over to Wikipedia and replace the page on elephants with "ELUPHUNTS R AWWQSOMEzors!!!!!1!!one!1". This is very easy to detect and stop.
Microsoft is encouraging people who are eloquent and well-spoken, and possibly already respected contributors to Wikipedia, to subtly modify entries to cast it in a more favorable light. This is much harder to detect, and could be impossible to stop.
One of two things will happen. Microsoft will either get away with it, or a NPOV holy war will break out, causing serious damage to Wikipedia. Either way, Microsoft wins.
Much as most people believe in a right to "intellectual property", everyone also seems to believe in an inherent human right to form corporations, and they cry out in horror when you suggest that granting the privilege of incorporation unfettered is a bad idea. I can only conclude from this that people are idiots.
Actually, the grandparent denounced corporations while acknowledging the necessity of a corporation-like object by saying: A way of gathering investment money needs to exist, in order to fund things that need massive startup costs (for example, processor design).
It's incredibly short-sighted to say "X sucks and should be banned", when X provides a useful service, and when no alternative is proposed. Say we banned corporations. Because of the necessity of a corporation-like object, it is very likely that such an object would quickly appear, and over time would evolve into something indistinguishable from today's corporation.
It's appropriate that you likened the argument to the argument over intellectual property. Again, IP sucks in many ways, but has useful consequences. If IP laws were repealed, and nothing replaced them, it is likely that content creators would re-create something similar to the IP system using complicated contracts (e.g., you would have to sign a lengthy agreement prior to purchasing an album at a music store).
Apparently, he thinks that everyone should have root. Even Uncle Bob and Aunt Mabel in Pahrump, who have neither the expertise nor the interest in using all the possible capabilities of their computer.
It's not okay to say that people should write reliable code (because they don't), or that users should behave responsibly (I'm of the opinion that if something intuitive, like opening an attachment, has far-reaching negative implications, then it's the software's fault, not the user's.)
Existing approaches to security, and the notion that everyone should just learn to use a computer, are both arrogant and unhelpful. You don't need to know thermodynamics to drive your car, nor should you if you don't want to.
I would like for someone to point out to me Stallman's allegedly pragmatic views on computer security, especially on the internet. Within the next ten years, computer security will become the most important issue in commerce, whether it's due to one spectacular event or a large number of slowly escalating little ones.
The analogy is apt if you live in a country like mine, where there is no real shortage of land. In the absence of title, I would not necessarily be deprived of land, but it would suck to lose the improvements that I choose to make to that land.
They see the coming collapse of the entire patent system and would rather have some capability of holding monopolies than lose any chance of it.
Should the patent system collapse? Would that really be a good thing?
Patents work like land title.
Would it be possible to build a house without title? Sure, the same way it's possible to build a tech business without patents.
Would there be benefits to abolishing title? Sure, you couldn't "hold" land you didn't use, as someone would build on it and you would be out of luck. Much like you wouldn't be able to "hold" an idea and get license fees as a patent troll.
Will I be first in line at the county office to tear up my title deed and usher in this utopian future? OF COURSE NOT! Why? Because there's a serious risk that someone would bulldozer my house while I'm on vacation and build something else. The title system takes the risk out of land development, much like the patent system takes the risk out of technological development.
I do wonder how they'll sort the facts from the fud.
What part of "wiki" do you not understand? How else would today's children know that the elephant population is skyrocketing and President Taft was eaten by wolves?
If there's anything that Web 2.0 has taught us, it's that you can't believe what you read in newspapers, but everything posted anonymously to the internet is true.
The problem is that people and expertise can quit and walk out the door. I would rather the company hold a patent than for them to impose some onerous non-compete clause.
Slashdot Mirror
(Meanwhile, in the parallel universe where these things actually were bombs)
COME ON! It's a huge pile of electronics with a display that's giving you the finger! What retard would possibly not know it's a bomb?
The thing is, tenure is earned by outstanding scholarship over years of teaching and research.
You clearly don't work in academia. It is surprisingly easy to publish, and tenure committees tend to look at quantity over quality.
Such protections are needed, else the relatively low pay and long hours of professors would hardly seem worth it
I don't know, I think I'm paid about right. As long as I show up to teach my classes, supervise students, and bring in grant money, nobody really cares what I do. Example: Today I had scheduled a couple of hours of off-site meetings, so I decided to work the rest of the day from home. Try doing that at Motorola.
many of the developers don't get paid
This is my point. Developers who do things in their spare time don't like to write boring software, even if that's what most people would use.
What really astonishes me is that open source has made such great leaps in other areas yet there's no apparent replacement for Outlook & Exchange. For a huge number of folk in business, having an open office suite is useless if they don't have calendar sharing, resource scheduling and email/contact sharing amongst groups. Is this really so difficult to achieve?
Probably not, but perhaps open source developers are not interested in providing such a solution.
The flip side of "Linus is inhibited by greed" is that "Linux is not responsive to the needs of the marketplace". There are no dollars on the line for linux.
Sorry to reply again. You're right but that's not what I argued.
Let A = object is a bomb and let B = object looks like a bomb. My argument is : If A then B, so if not B, then not A, which is correct.
Just because A implies B does not mean that not A implies not B.
Correct. I'm surprised by the "insightful", I was going for "funny".
There's being cautious and there's being retarded.
So we have that:
1. Anything that looks like a bomb is not a bomb, because nobody would call attention to their bomb.
2. A bomb looks like a bomb, by definition.
3. From 2, anything that doesn't look like a bomb is not a bomb.
4. From 1 and 3, the existence of bombs is a contradiction. Thus we are safe forever. QED
Now we'll never know if ants can sort tiny screws in space!
using airburst nukes to try and take out your opponents missiles in the upper atmosphere
Apparently this is already a design criterion. I recently came across this paper, concerning the re-entry characteristics of the Galileo atmospheric probe at Jupiter. Check out Figure 7, where we read, "Galileo stagnation region heating is equivalent to the combined heating of an ICBM warhead flying through a thermonuclear explosion."
I think MAD only works when both sides are somewhat rational and realize how much they stand to lose.
MAD doesn't really work. Or, at least, that's not how a nuclear war would most likely play out in real life: massive attack followed by massive retaliation. MAD hasn't been a part of US strategic nuclear doctrine since the sixties.
A real nuclear war would likely involve a series of escalating attacks on either side, probably starting with an exchange of battlefield weapons, escalating to supply depots, then military targets near cities, then larger-scale "counterforce" attacks. Each time there would be a rational reason to continue: there's no reason to expect a massive response to a limited attack, since MAD means that a massive attack would mean suicide for the attacker.
We're just lucky that nobody has stepped across the first line yet, although the world was about 24 hours away from exactly this scenario during the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was about to order an invasion of Cuba when a last-minute deal was struck to remove the missiles. What the US military did not know was that the Soviet commanders had tactical nuclear weapons at their disposal, and -- for the first time in Soviet history -- had been pre-authorized to use them in the event of an attack. From there it would have been a short mental leap to nuclear bombardment of targets in Florida and the southwest, which would have been supporting the invasion.
Of course the united states would never go for this as nuclear weapons are big business. so basically we're screwed.
Yes. Only the United States is to blame. India, Israel, the UK, and France would gladly give up their nukes because the only thing they are afraid of is an American attack.
Yeah, because the security threats to facilities come from the general public which gets its aerial imagery free from these years-old databases, not from corporate, governement or international orgs with budgets for the plentiful (even cheap) aerial/satellite products with recent updates, higher resolution, GIS overlays, even realtime observations. Or their own aircraft/satellites to generate their own custom data.
So you're saying we should pay no attention to the simplest and easiest of security measures because a potential adversary could take more agressive action. That's like saying it's okay to have a sticky note with the root password on a critical server as long as you keep the firewall updated.
"Years-old databases"? It's not like the design of a nuclear power plant changes on a day-to-day basis.
Can they be funded by the government
They already are. For example, arXiv was hosted at Los Alamos National Laboratory until recently, and many state employees (i.e., university professors) devote time and energy to the proper functioning of free journals. (Most professors are required to devote a small portion of their time to "administration", which can include editorships of journals.)
They're just looking out for themselves.
Although that is true, I'm not convinced that "free" publishing entities such as PLoS have demonstrated that they are archivable, which is a much bigger issue that free exchange of information (which we already have -- I can go to my local university library and read as much as I want).
A paper published today in a journal should continue to be available for as long as possible in the future, or the notion of a "journal" is meaningless. If nobody is paying the bills, it means that nobody is making money off of back issues, and so there is less incentive to store them.
I'm not saying PLoS is incapable of archiving -- I'm saying that one has reason to be skeptical.
an example of a prestigious journal published by a for-profit company? My impression is that for-profit journals only exist for the purpose of giving second-tier researchers a place to publish garbage. (All the prestigious journals in my field are published by the non-profit IEEE.)
Just do what Stephen Colbert did, and tell your audience the edits you want to see!
It's much better, much more subtle, and much smarter than that.
Colbert basically encouraged every jackass in the universe to run over to Wikipedia and replace the page on elephants with "ELUPHUNTS R AWWQSOMEzors!!!!!1!!one!1". This is very easy to detect and stop.
Microsoft is encouraging people who are eloquent and well-spoken, and possibly already respected contributors to Wikipedia, to subtly modify entries to cast it in a more favorable light. This is much harder to detect, and could be impossible to stop.
One of two things will happen. Microsoft will either get away with it, or a NPOV holy war will break out, causing serious damage to Wikipedia. Either way, Microsoft wins.
Much as most people believe in a right to "intellectual property", everyone also seems to believe in an inherent human right to form corporations, and they cry out in horror when you suggest that granting the privilege of incorporation unfettered is a bad idea. I can only conclude from this that people are idiots.
Actually, the grandparent denounced corporations while acknowledging the necessity of a corporation-like object by saying: A way of gathering investment money needs to exist, in order to fund things that need massive startup costs (for example, processor design).
It's incredibly short-sighted to say "X sucks and should be banned", when X provides a useful service, and when no alternative is proposed. Say we banned corporations. Because of the necessity of a corporation-like object, it is very likely that such an object would quickly appear, and over time would evolve into something indistinguishable from today's corporation.
It's appropriate that you likened the argument to the argument over intellectual property. Again, IP sucks in many ways, but has useful consequences. If IP laws were repealed, and nothing replaced them, it is likely that content creators would re-create something similar to the IP system using complicated contracts (e.g., you would have to sign a lengthy agreement prior to purchasing an album at a music store).
Does his mother make his bed for him still?
Are you saying you're in favor of an OS being insecure out of the box because it teaches personal responsibility?
...Big Pharma would do it for the betterment of all mankind -- no profit in that!
Yeah, it really sucked when the patent expired on Aspirin. Now nobody can buy one because businesses can't make money off it.
Memo: Something that flatters your prejudices is not the same as news.
Pragmatic eh? Where's Stallman on security?
Apparently, he thinks that everyone should have root. Even Uncle Bob and Aunt Mabel in Pahrump, who have neither the expertise nor the interest in using all the possible capabilities of their computer.
It's not okay to say that people should write reliable code (because they don't), or that users should behave responsibly (I'm of the opinion that if something intuitive, like opening an attachment, has far-reaching negative implications, then it's the software's fault, not the user's.)
Existing approaches to security, and the notion that everyone should just learn to use a computer, are both arrogant and unhelpful. You don't need to know thermodynamics to drive your car, nor should you if you don't want to.
I would like for someone to point out to me Stallman's allegedly pragmatic views on computer security, especially on the internet. Within the next ten years, computer security will become the most important issue in commerce, whether it's due to one spectacular event or a large number of slowly escalating little ones.
However, ignorance is no defence. Stressing your body always incurs a serious risk.
Right, so the hell with exercise.
The analogy is apt if you live in a country like mine, where there is no real shortage of land. In the absence of title, I would not necessarily be deprived of land, but it would suck to lose the improvements that I choose to make to that land.
They see the coming collapse of the entire patent system and would rather have some capability of holding monopolies than lose any chance of it.
Should the patent system collapse? Would that really be a good thing?
Patents work like land title.
Would it be possible to build a house without title? Sure, the same way it's possible to build a tech business without patents.
Would there be benefits to abolishing title? Sure, you couldn't "hold" land you didn't use, as someone would build on it and you would be out of luck. Much like you wouldn't be able to "hold" an idea and get license fees as a patent troll.
Will I be first in line at the county office to tear up my title deed and usher in this utopian future? OF COURSE NOT! Why? Because there's a serious risk that someone would bulldozer my house while I'm on vacation and build something else. The title system takes the risk out of land development, much like the patent system takes the risk out of technological development.
I do wonder how they'll sort the facts from the fud.
What part of "wiki" do you not understand? How else would today's children know that the elephant population is skyrocketing and President Taft was eaten by wolves?
If there's anything that Web 2.0 has taught us, it's that you can't believe what you read in newspapers, but everything posted anonymously to the internet is true.
The problem is that people and expertise can quit and walk out the door. I would rather the company hold a patent than for them to impose some onerous non-compete clause.