Apple products are extremely well built but if they were well engineered they would not use last years CPUs and GPUs, the keyboard would have keys which moved and they would include some legacy ports to support existing peripherals without the need for bags of dongles. They would also update their machines more than once every 4 years. They are still selling a MacPro priced as if it were a new machine but which comes with a ~4-year-old CPU and GPU. The glory days of Steve Jobs are long gone. Apple is now coasting on inertia from past innovation and design. They could still pull off a U-turn but I've given up waiting for it and switched to Windows now it has a Linux subsystem.
The real test about whether this is warranted is whether other countries will adopt similar bans. The ban on devices from Middle Eastern countries had a half-hearted and variable adoption in the UK and Canada. I also wonder if this is not a ploy of the terrorists. The IRA (Irish terrorist group not a US retirement account) used to phone up the police with fake bomb warnings for major London train stations to cause widespread disruption without actually having to do anything other than once every few years leaving a real but small explosive device just so the police could never ignore their warnings.
It seems that the current breed of terrorists might be playing the same game. Talking about a laptop device to bring down a plane when they think it is likely to be picked up simply to cause widespread disruption while sticking to bombing open venues, driving lorries through crowds or whatever similarly evil but security avoiding schemes their warped minds can come up with.
Last I checked, Oxbridge was about 50% ex-private school
This is certainly not true for Cambridge. The year I went there (well over 20 years ago) was the first year that those of us from state schools were in the majority and it's now ~62% and there are 8 institutes with a higher percentage of private school intake than Cambridge. Even Oxford has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century and its intake is now over 50% from state schools.
So yes, private school gives you an advantage but it's the typical advantage of wealth: it makes things easier to achieve. So long as the advantage of wealth can be matched by additional hard work and effort on the part of those of us with less money then I've no problem with it. That certainly seems to be the case in the UK and Canada...and I say that as someone who went through a comprehensive state school and still managed to get into Cambridge and then academia.
Pay for the most expensive school, then load your CV with pay to publish articles, and eventually you will get grants and "win"!
The first assumption is only valid in the US. Top-ranked universities in many countries outside the US are generally no more expensive for national students than any other university (in the UK they even used to be free). They are very selective on grades to get in though but that is something which costs you time and effort to acquire.
Secondly, any institute who accepts this pay-to-publish articles in dodgy, predatory journals in the CV of a prospective faculty hire is not doing their job. As someone who has sat on several faculty hiring committees, we don't just look at the number of papers published but where they have published and what they are about. Serious candidates need to have publications in journals that those in the field know about and have a good impact factor and the area experts generally read a few of the papers. Having a large number of papers in a dodgy, predatory journal will kill any chance of being hired.
That's one of the nasty things about this. They target those hoping for an academic position but who are unlikely to get one (otherwise they would not need to publish in these predatory journals). These publishers fleece them for money that people at this stage of their careers don't really have and then give them something which is likely to harm whatever chances they have of a permanent job. That's the best case scenario - if they actually managed to persuade a youg, but naive, researcher with decent results to publish with them it would actively harm their careers because it would probably be discounted as a worthless, vanity paper.
Comcast's score fell from 62 to 58 on ACSI's 100-point scale
That's a drop of 4%. Yes, I know that a drop of 4 is 6% of 62 but when you are already using a percentage scale i.e. a 100-point scale the difference measures the percentage drop of the scale it is extremely confusing and rather disingenuous to call it a percentage drop: it's a percentage of a percentage drop in satisfaction NOT a percentage drop in satisfaction. Yes, it makes the number look bigger but even in Canada, we've heard you screaming how bad Comcast is so you really do not need to work any harder to make them look bad.
Medicine is the only profession where life-critical decisions are made based on personal expertise and opinion, rather than carefully specified standard operating procedure. It's a weird historical holdover.
There are lots of professions like this: engineering, airline pilots, police, firemen, military etc. Just like medicine there are standard procedures for "standard" situations and it is up to the people involved to determine which "standard" situation is most applicable and to adapt the procedures for it to the particular situation. This is not a "weird historical holdover" but the best way we have of doing thigs: train for standard situations and use your experience, knowledge and intelligence to cope with the rest.
Nobody in his right mind would ever go to a doctor if the odds were that high.
That depends on the nature of the "medical error". I expect that the vast majority of these cases are people who have a serious condition which is misdiagnosed or incorrectly treated and because the condition is not treated it eventually kills them i.e. they die from the condition. If true then going to the doctor results in a 67% chance of proper treatment and possible survival vs. no going which will be 100% fatal.
To be worse off going to the doctor there has to be a serious risk that the treatment of a minor condition is so seriously botched that it kills you when the condition itself would not. This seems far less likely.
It's an article in "The Sun". They don't know what most words mean especially if they have more than one syllable. It has been shown that reading The Sun or other tabloids results in a worse vocabulary than not reading any newspaper and if you want to gauge their level have a look at their toughest words in the dictionary quiz. It is frankly rather sad that Slashdot is linking to such a wholly unreliable source.
Someone could use this data to devise a new super-weapon.
Which is not an ethical concern when writing the code to analyse it because at that point you have no idea what the data will show. It's less ethically complex than crossing the road.
Maybe Arm & Hammer is fine, and maybe it will kill 90% of patients when administered internally.
90% seems a stretch given that people eat the stuff and if the alternative is a 100% chance of death then even 90% is better. Hence the argument to balance the risks.
So why not give the poor bastard with poisoning a spoonful of Arm&Hammer
That's assuming that the treatment for poisoning requires oral ingestion. I'm not a doctor and the article suggested that the typical uses required injection. It might be fine to eat commercial grade baking soda but if you are injecting it then I expect the risks are the same regardless of why you are injecting it.
Not every programming job is either technically or ethically complex. For example analysing particle physics data is a technically complex programming task but raises no ethical issues. In fact, I imagine there are not many ethically complex programming tasks - self-driving cars is one that comes to mind - since most of the ethics are concerned with how you use the program not how you wrote it.
I think we can all agree that the pharmaceutical grade is what hospitals should use. However, if they cannot get it then the potential risks of using a non-pharmaceutical grade product should be compared against not having the treatment which uses it.
For example, if it is used to treat poisoning and the patient will probably die without baking soda it might be worth the risk of commercial grade baking soda. Similarly, open heart surgery sounds pretty serious and might be something which is potentially very risky to delay so the risks of using a less-pure baking soda may be less than the risk of not doing the procedure which requires it.
To say civil disobedience never works, and the government should be petitioned instead, is to ignore history.
Agreed. But for civil disobedience to work as an agent for change it needs to have the backing of so many people that the authorities cannot keep up with arresting everyone. If just one person does it the impact will be minimal at best. Plus, as I said, in this case I don't see civil disobedience as being a particularly effective method in general - ultimately we have to change the minds of colleagues who publish in pay-walled journals either by peer pressure, the collapse in the impact of paid journals because we do not use and cite them or funding agency rules which require it.
...and at worst it is guilty of what it sets out to campaign against because it dismisses the idea that scientists should "remain apolitical and objective" as coming from "white men". This a violation of the basic rule of science that you consider ideas on their merits not based on who said them. Ironically it is also a textbook example of racism and sexism because it suggests we value an idea less because of the race and gender of the people suggesting it.
Her willingness to put her own personal beliefs before scientific values shows a complete lack of objectivity, This, together with her openly racist and sexist rant, does suggest that she might actually have a point though. This sort of behaviour is completely unacceptable for someone calling themselves a scientist and so if science is going to clean up its act giving her an education in basic scientific principles would be a good place to start.
Is this anything more than a stunt though? The only point of using a superconductor is to avoid the energy lost to heating the wires in transmission. While using a superconductor eliminates this if you have to spend far more energy cooling it to liquid nitrogen temperatures you have a net energy loss which would make this little more than a publicity stunt.
When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
...but the point here is nothing to do with the law. The point here is the scientific research should be freely available for all. This is not a beef about the evils of current IP law but rather an ideological belief that we should all have free access to scientific papers. Even if copyright laws were completely fair and reasonable there would still be an issue here.
What's more, it's even a belief that the vast majority of scientists and governments share which is why most of us now publish our research in open access journals where anyone can access it. So to use your Napster analogy it would be like Napster starting up now once we already have Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music etc. Hence my failing to understand exactly what SciHub is hoping to achieve.
I'd never heard of this site before but I agree with the goal of SciHub that the results of scientific research, especially that funded by governments, should be freely available to everyone. However, the way to achieve that is by lobbying governments to make it a requirement that all research they fund is published in open access journals (which is now largely the case). Simply breaking the law on a massive scale like this is not likely to end well nor, in the long-term, achieve the aim of making research freely available.
Nice try but fractional reserve banking still does not let you lend out money that you do not have! You still have to persuade people to give you their money before you can make a loan.
I believe this is now out of copyright, but it certainly was originally copyrighted. So length is not the sole criterion.
Correction: somebody claimed it was copyrighted. IANAL but unless that claim was tested in court it does not provide any evidence that length is not a factor in copyright law. Indeed there is strong evidence to the contrary since single words cannot be copyrighted. So all we know is that the length criterion is somewhere between one word and the lyrics to a song. However, I expect any length criterion depends strongly on context.
With a joke though things are different. The length does not matter because what is funny is the idea/situation the joke conveys and you cannot copyright ideas only an expression of that idea. So while you might be able to copyright the text of the original joke it would be easy to make very significant changes to the expression while preserving the idea.
This is exactly why small startup companies will not be overtaking the banks at their own game. To make loans you have to have a large bag of cash to hand out to people and it is very unlikely that someone will hand a new, unproven startup a huge pile of cash to lend out to people using new, unproven software to make the decisions.
I expect the more likely model is that startups will develop the software and then sell it to banks for them to use since they are the ones with the capital to lend out so the big banks will still dominate.
On Android, I've been pretty satisfied with RealCalc [google.com] as an RPN calculator (no graphing though).
Unfortunately, Android devices tend to have wireless communication built it which makes them extremely unsuitable for exams. The better solution for all this though is to simply not allow any sort of graphing calculator whatsoever. School kids should know how to plot the basic functions like parabolas, cubics, hyperbolics, straight lines etc. without a calculator doing it for them. You can then replace the $100+ graphing calculator with a $10+ basic scientific one AND improve the standard of education at the same time.
That's not a problem of the trailer it's a problem of Hollywood's inability to take risks with a plot. It's been over 10 years since I've seen a film which had an ending which I could not see coming well beforehand (and because of that it's one of my favourite films despite not being a "blockbuster"). The trailer is no different than the first few minutes of the film.
Once the characters have been established the plot follows with annoying predictability. Occasionally there may be the odd twist but even these now seemed picked from a predetermined list (character dies, bad guy turns out to be good, good guy turns out to be bad etc.). Not only don't they really affect the ending but they often feel the need to flag the twist in such an obvious fashion you can often see it coming a mile away too! So it's not a trailer that spoils a film, films are so predictable that they self-spoil.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple products are extremely well built but if they were well engineered they would not use last years CPUs and GPUs, the keyboard would have keys which moved and they would include some legacy ports to support existing peripherals without the need for bags of dongles. They would also update their machines more than once every 4 years. They are still selling a MacPro priced as if it were a new machine but which comes with a ~4-year-old CPU and GPU. The glory days of Steve Jobs are long gone. Apple is now coasting on inertia from past innovation and design. They could still pull off a U-turn but I've given up waiting for it and switched to Windows now it has a Linux subsystem.
The real test about whether this is warranted is whether other countries will adopt similar bans. The ban on devices from Middle Eastern countries had a half-hearted and variable adoption in the UK and Canada. I also wonder if this is not a ploy of the terrorists. The IRA (Irish terrorist group not a US retirement account) used to phone up the police with fake bomb warnings for major London train stations to cause widespread disruption without actually having to do anything other than once every few years leaving a real but small explosive device just so the police could never ignore their warnings.
It seems that the current breed of terrorists might be playing the same game. Talking about a laptop device to bring down a plane when they think it is likely to be picked up simply to cause widespread disruption while sticking to bombing open venues, driving lorries through crowds or whatever similarly evil but security avoiding schemes their warped minds can come up with.
Last I checked, Oxbridge was about 50% ex-private school
This is certainly not true for Cambridge. The year I went there (well over 20 years ago) was the first year that those of us from state schools were in the majority and it's now ~62% and there are 8 institutes with a higher percentage of private school intake than Cambridge. Even Oxford has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century and its intake is now over 50% from state schools.
So yes, private school gives you an advantage but it's the typical advantage of wealth: it makes things easier to achieve. So long as the advantage of wealth can be matched by additional hard work and effort on the part of those of us with less money then I've no problem with it. That certainly seems to be the case in the UK and Canada...and I say that as someone who went through a comprehensive state school and still managed to get into Cambridge and then academia.
Pay for the most expensive school, then load your CV with pay to publish articles, and eventually you will get grants and "win"!
The first assumption is only valid in the US. Top-ranked universities in many countries outside the US are generally no more expensive for national students than any other university (in the UK they even used to be free). They are very selective on grades to get in though but that is something which costs you time and effort to acquire.
Secondly, any institute who accepts this pay-to-publish articles in dodgy, predatory journals in the CV of a prospective faculty hire is not doing their job. As someone who has sat on several faculty hiring committees, we don't just look at the number of papers published but where they have published and what they are about. Serious candidates need to have publications in journals that those in the field know about and have a good impact factor and the area experts generally read a few of the papers. Having a large number of papers in a dodgy, predatory journal will kill any chance of being hired.
That's one of the nasty things about this. They target those hoping for an academic position but who are unlikely to get one (otherwise they would not need to publish in these predatory journals). These publishers fleece them for money that people at this stage of their careers don't really have and then give them something which is likely to harm whatever chances they have of a permanent job. That's the best case scenario - if they actually managed to persuade a youg, but naive, researcher with decent results to publish with them it would actively harm their careers because it would probably be discounted as a worthless, vanity paper.
Google Knows everything about everyone.
If that were even close to true they would easily know enough about politicians that requests like this would never see the light of day.
Well to give you a Quantum of Solace it's clear I'll Die Another Day. You Only Live Twice so I still have one left.
Comcast's score fell from 62 to 58 on ACSI's 100-point scale
That's a drop of 4%. Yes, I know that a drop of 4 is 6% of 62 but when you are already using a percentage scale i.e. a 100-point scale the difference measures the percentage drop of the scale it is extremely confusing and rather disingenuous to call it a percentage drop: it's a percentage of a percentage drop in satisfaction NOT a percentage drop in satisfaction. Yes, it makes the number look bigger but even in Canada, we've heard you screaming how bad Comcast is so you really do not need to work any harder to make them look bad.
Medicine is the only profession where life-critical decisions are made based on personal expertise and opinion, rather than carefully specified standard operating procedure. It's a weird historical holdover.
There are lots of professions like this: engineering, airline pilots, police, firemen, military etc. Just like medicine there are standard procedures for "standard" situations and it is up to the people involved to determine which "standard" situation is most applicable and to adapt the procedures for it to the particular situation. This is not a "weird historical holdover" but the best way we have of doing thigs: train for standard situations and use your experience, knowledge and intelligence to cope with the rest.
Nobody in his right mind would ever go to a doctor if the odds were that high.
That depends on the nature of the "medical error". I expect that the vast majority of these cases are people who have a serious condition which is misdiagnosed or incorrectly treated and because the condition is not treated it eventually kills them i.e. they die from the condition. If true then going to the doctor results in a 67% chance of proper treatment and possible survival vs. no going which will be 100% fatal.
To be worse off going to the doctor there has to be a serious risk that the treatment of a minor condition is so seriously botched that it kills you when the condition itself would not. This seems far less likely.
That's not what "brick" means.
It's an article in "The Sun". They don't know what most words mean especially if they have more than one syllable. It has been shown that reading The Sun or other tabloids results in a worse vocabulary than not reading any newspaper and if you want to gauge their level have a look at their toughest words in the dictionary quiz. It is frankly rather sad that Slashdot is linking to such a wholly unreliable source.
Someone could use this data to devise a new super-weapon.
Which is not an ethical concern when writing the code to analyse it because at that point you have no idea what the data will show. It's less ethically complex than crossing the road.
Maybe Arm & Hammer is fine, and maybe it will kill 90% of patients when administered internally.
90% seems a stretch given that people eat the stuff and if the alternative is a 100% chance of death then even 90% is better. Hence the argument to balance the risks.
So why not give the poor bastard with poisoning a spoonful of Arm&Hammer
That's assuming that the treatment for poisoning requires oral ingestion. I'm not a doctor and the article suggested that the typical uses required injection. It might be fine to eat commercial grade baking soda but if you are injecting it then I expect the risks are the same regardless of why you are injecting it.
Not every programming job is either technically or ethically complex. For example analysing particle physics data is a technically complex programming task but raises no ethical issues. In fact, I imagine there are not many ethically complex programming tasks - self-driving cars is one that comes to mind - since most of the ethics are concerned with how you use the program not how you wrote it.
I think we can all agree that the pharmaceutical grade is what hospitals should use. However, if they cannot get it then the potential risks of using a non-pharmaceutical grade product should be compared against not having the treatment which uses it.
For example, if it is used to treat poisoning and the patient will probably die without baking soda it might be worth the risk of commercial grade baking soda. Similarly, open heart surgery sounds pretty serious and might be something which is potentially very risky to delay so the risks of using a less-pure baking soda may be less than the risk of not doing the procedure which requires it.
To say civil disobedience never works, and the government should be petitioned instead, is to ignore history.
Agreed. But for civil disobedience to work as an agent for change it needs to have the backing of so many people that the authorities cannot keep up with arresting everyone. If just one person does it the impact will be minimal at best. Plus, as I said, in this case I don't see civil disobedience as being a particularly effective method in general - ultimately we have to change the minds of colleagues who publish in pay-walled journals either by peer pressure, the collapse in the impact of paid journals because we do not use and cite them or funding agency rules which require it.
...and at worst it is guilty of what it sets out to campaign against because it dismisses the idea that scientists should "remain apolitical and objective" as coming from "white men". This a violation of the basic rule of science that you consider ideas on their merits not based on who said them. Ironically it is also a textbook example of racism and sexism because it suggests we value an idea less because of the race and gender of the people suggesting it.
Her willingness to put her own personal beliefs before scientific values shows a complete lack of objectivity, This, together with her openly racist and sexist rant, does suggest that she might actually have a point though. This sort of behaviour is completely unacceptable for someone calling themselves a scientist and so if science is going to clean up its act giving her an education in basic scientific principles would be a good place to start.
Is this anything more than a stunt though? The only point of using a superconductor is to avoid the energy lost to heating the wires in transmission. While using a superconductor eliminates this if you have to spend far more energy cooling it to liquid nitrogen temperatures you have a net energy loss which would make this little more than a publicity stunt.
When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
What's more, it's even a belief that the vast majority of scientists and governments share which is why most of us now publish our research in open access journals where anyone can access it. So to use your Napster analogy it would be like Napster starting up now once we already have Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music etc. Hence my failing to understand exactly what SciHub is hoping to achieve.
I'd never heard of this site before but I agree with the goal of SciHub that the results of scientific research, especially that funded by governments, should be freely available to everyone. However, the way to achieve that is by lobbying governments to make it a requirement that all research they fund is published in open access journals (which is now largely the case). Simply breaking the law on a massive scale like this is not likely to end well nor, in the long-term, achieve the aim of making research freely available.
Nice try but fractional reserve banking still does not let you lend out money that you do not have! You still have to persuade people to give you their money before you can make a loan.
I believe this is now out of copyright, but it certainly was originally copyrighted. So length is not the sole criterion.
Correction: somebody claimed it was copyrighted. IANAL but unless that claim was tested in court it does not provide any evidence that length is not a factor in copyright law. Indeed there is strong evidence to the contrary since single words cannot be copyrighted. So all we know is that the length criterion is somewhere between one word and the lyrics to a song. However, I expect any length criterion depends strongly on context.
With a joke though things are different. The length does not matter because what is funny is the idea/situation the joke conveys and you cannot copyright ideas only an expression of that idea. So while you might be able to copyright the text of the original joke it would be easy to make very significant changes to the expression while preserving the idea.
This is exactly why small startup companies will not be overtaking the banks at their own game. To make loans you have to have a large bag of cash to hand out to people and it is very unlikely that someone will hand a new, unproven startup a huge pile of cash to lend out to people using new, unproven software to make the decisions.
I expect the more likely model is that startups will develop the software and then sell it to banks for them to use since they are the ones with the capital to lend out so the big banks will still dominate.
On Android, I've been pretty satisfied with RealCalc [google.com] as an RPN calculator (no graphing though).
Unfortunately, Android devices tend to have wireless communication built it which makes them extremely unsuitable for exams. The better solution for all this though is to simply not allow any sort of graphing calculator whatsoever. School kids should know how to plot the basic functions like parabolas, cubics, hyperbolics, straight lines etc. without a calculator doing it for them. You can then replace the $100+ graphing calculator with a $10+ basic scientific one AND improve the standard of education at the same time.
They tend to give away too much...
That's not a problem of the trailer it's a problem of Hollywood's inability to take risks with a plot. It's been over 10 years since I've seen a film which had an ending which I could not see coming well beforehand (and because of that it's one of my favourite films despite not being a "blockbuster"). The trailer is no different than the first few minutes of the film.
Once the characters have been established the plot follows with annoying predictability. Occasionally there may be the odd twist but even these now seemed picked from a predetermined list (character dies, bad guy turns out to be good, good guy turns out to be bad etc.). Not only don't they really affect the ending but they often feel the need to flag the twist in such an obvious fashion you can often see it coming a mile away too! So it's not a trailer that spoils a film, films are so predictable that they self-spoil.