If this weren't Slashdot I'd swear you were a thirty something husband hunter.
The best correlation with birthrate is female education. That strongly suggests that it's the women who want to defer (or skip entirely) having kids in favour of building careers.
Okay. I've had four $2000 notebooks. The first one apparently died (I had bequeathed it to someone else), but it was seven or eight years old at the time. The screen went, requiring a $150 inverter to repair, but it wasn't worth it. Of the others, one is five years old and still fine (it's had a new battery), another was stolen at the age of three (I can't say whether it's still going or not) and the current one is now two and a half years old and has travelled the equivalent of around the world three and a half times. The lab I used to work in also went through about a dozen notebooks, all of which got surplused at around 5 or 6, in good working order.
These were all Macs though, so possibly spending $2000 on a Windows notebook doesn't buy you reliability.
Many problems, such as the travelling salesman problem, can be posed as decision problems, and when people talk about those being in NP, they are talking about the decision problem formulation.
Huh. My father was a big Dell fan. He bought himself one, then my mother one, then my sister one. All the batteries died, and the replacements too. He has a macbook pro now. My sister is currently using a Toshiba. And my mother has an iPad.
"AND when the crap goes south in a year, after the warranty is gone, you won't be as heart broken as if you spent upwards of $2000 for a really really nice laptop with all the bells and whistles."
Hm. I think I'll stick to paying $2000, enjoying the bells and whistles, and not having to go through the headache of having things go south every year, thank you.
Insightful? Pretty much everything you say is wrong. You can run whatever you want, however you want, wherever you want on a macbook. Including Windows or Linux. If you ARE using OS X you can still run whatever, wherever and however you want, there is currently very little malware that attacks the mac.
Anyway, the guy asking the question was complaining about product line fragmentation and difficult to find specs. Apple DEFINITELY doesn't have that problem.
That's because power is a non-intuitive unit. It's like if you talked about speed in terms of gargleflaps. My car can do 220 gargleflaps. If I drive 100 gargleflaps I can make it in two hours. Instead we use intuitive units, like km/h. J/h would be a much better common measure of power but somehow we got stuck on watts. And then we go and do completely insane things like talk about kilowatt hours.
"Well most places have property tax." There are places that have no property tax. You also don't get any services.
"there are a lot of those laws." There are more laws regarding what you as an individual can do in general. Does that mean you're only leasing your body?
"And the government can take back that land if it needs it, and will pay you for it of course." Thus not a lease. If it were a lease, they could just dissolve the lease or wait for it to expire. But they can't, so they have to buy it from you.
You're just being silly, or pushing some silly anti-government philosophy when you try to redefine property ownership as a lease. It violates every part of the definition of a lease.
"Really, the only thing that needs to be done is to select the reviewers and editors;"
And maintain archives, and run the web site making everything available, and provide the reputation, etc. It doesn't require a huge bureaucracy, but it does require some organization, as the existing open source journals demonstrate.
You can wave your hands all you want, but EVERYTHING requires someone to organize things. Usually more somebodies than you'd think.
Because in a vacuum the beam is already travelling at the maximum possible speed. The photons can only slow down when they enter the object.
That's the reason according to the GP's explanation. I don't think his explanation is actually correct (although it would work in limited circumstances).
"Google's main source of revenue is through ads..." just like Facebook.
"that includes mobile and video ads." Facebook also has mobile ads. They don't seem to have gotten into video ads yet, but that's not a big deal. Give them time. Also, anyone who sends video ads to my mobile finds themselves avoided like the plague.
"Google has a vast array of projects/services and is constantly developing new ones" Most of which are noble experiments but money sinks, and don't last very long. Of the ones that are successful, virtually all are just a means of selling more ads.
"How can this be compared to a company that lets users add photos to a webpage to showboat about themselves or their family." Neither Facebook nor Google are about the content. They have to make the content compelling enough to get you to use their services, but that's it, and both do a good enough job at it. Both make actual money through getting you to look at ads. And that's harder to do on a small, mobile screen.
"One is the designer and developer of the most popular smartphone + tablet OS..." which they gave away for free.
Google doesn't make any money off Android, and since its open source if they tried to aggressively monetize it, everybody would just use forked versions (which is already starting to happen).
Google and Facebook both depend almost entirely on ads to make money. Both are great big advertising companies with strong sidelines in snooping.
Why do you keep talking about cryptography? There isn't really a problem verifying that someone is who they say they are. The problem is that somebody has to do the organizational work, and no, your computer won't replace a good editor. That editor can be paid by a journal company, or by a university. It doesn't really matter, but there are some advantages to having some arm's length organizations, not the least being that most universities are already huge, bloated and inefficient.
"Publishing" companies will either change or die because their primary function, publishing and distributing paper journals, has disappeared. But similar organizations are still needed to do all the things that journal publishers do now OTHER than printing and distributing paper journals. Moving the whole thing under the auspices of universities won't change anything, and neither will some cryptographic signatures.
Incidentally, using open access journals is going to have to lead to some serious cuts to library funding and fees universities skim off grants for services. Which leaves control of the money in the researchers' hands, which I think is a good thing, but the librarians and university administrators probably won't like it.
Clearly you don't know much about scientific publishing.
Coordinating reviewers and authors is non-trivial. The journals all have computer systems that try to do it, and more often than not something doesn't work right and the actual live editor has to step in.
The (paid) editor makes the publish/no publish decision. Not the reviewers. Not whatever a "program committee" is. The reviewers make (frequently contradictory) recommendations. The editor looks at what the reviewers said, what the authors said, and makes a decision based on that. Quite often you have an idiot reviewer who would sink the publication of a paper if not for an editor who recognizes the reviewer is an idiot.
The existing open access journals have technical reviewers, do all of the things he listed, and charge hefty fees for publication to pay for it all. So they prove something, all right, but not what you think they do.
You're just replacing journals with universities. And universities a) don't want to run journals, b) can't run anything else effectively anyway, c) have a built in conflict of interest and d) journals accept papers from people who aren't affiliated with universities.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's talent.
If this weren't Slashdot I'd swear you were a thirty something husband hunter.
The best correlation with birthrate is female education. That strongly suggests that it's the women who want to defer (or skip entirely) having kids in favour of building careers.
"Japan"
Your definition of "long history" seems a little... short.
Okay. I've had four $2000 notebooks. The first one apparently died (I had bequeathed it to someone else), but it was seven or eight years old at the time. The screen went, requiring a $150 inverter to repair, but it wasn't worth it. Of the others, one is five years old and still fine (it's had a new battery), another was stolen at the age of three (I can't say whether it's still going or not) and the current one is now two and a half years old and has travelled the equivalent of around the world three and a half times. The lab I used to work in also went through about a dozen notebooks, all of which got surplused at around 5 or 6, in good working order.
These were all Macs though, so possibly spending $2000 on a Windows notebook doesn't buy you reliability.
P, NP etc. DOES apply solely to decision problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP_(complexity). The definition requires it.
Many problems, such as the travelling salesman problem, can be posed as decision problems, and when people talk about those being in NP, they are talking about the decision problem formulation.
This is not a decision problem so the P-NP complexity classes do not apply.
Huh. My father was a big Dell fan. He bought himself one, then my mother one, then my sister one. All the batteries died, and the replacements too. He has a macbook pro now. My sister is currently using a Toshiba. And my mother has an iPad.
"AND when the crap goes south in a year, after the warranty is gone, you won't be as heart broken as if you spent upwards of $2000 for a really really nice laptop with all the bells and whistles."
Hm. I think I'll stick to paying $2000, enjoying the bells and whistles, and not having to go through the headache of having things go south every year, thank you.
Insightful? Pretty much everything you say is wrong. You can run whatever you want, however you want, wherever you want on a macbook. Including Windows or Linux. If you ARE using OS X you can still run whatever, wherever and however you want, there is currently very little malware that attacks the mac.
Anyway, the guy asking the question was complaining about product line fragmentation and difficult to find specs. Apple DEFINITELY doesn't have that problem.
"It's sad but your tools matter as much as your suit."
Why is that sad?
There are lots of places that pump water into reservoirs for storage, then let it fall through turbines when they want the energy out.
Hm. I've been to Germany. And to the US. Guess which one involves me getting felt up on entering?
That's because power is a non-intuitive unit. It's like if you talked about speed in terms of gargleflaps. My car can do 220 gargleflaps. If I drive 100 gargleflaps I can make it in two hours. Instead we use intuitive units, like km/h. J/h would be a much better common measure of power but somehow we got stuck on watts. And then we go and do completely insane things like talk about kilowatt hours.
Yes, I think reviews should be done in the open. But it still doesn't eliminate the need for a professional arbiter. Morons will always be morons.
"Or perhaps just let more people read the articles and vote on whether they found them useful or not."
Yes, that works just wonderfully. Slashdot comments. YouTube comments. Etc.
"Well most places have property tax."
There are places that have no property tax. You also don't get any services.
"there are a lot of those laws."
There are more laws regarding what you as an individual can do in general. Does that mean you're only leasing your body?
"And the government can take back that land if it needs it, and will pay you for it of course."
Thus not a lease. If it were a lease, they could just dissolve the lease or wait for it to expire. But they can't, so they have to buy it from you.
You're just being silly, or pushing some silly anti-government philosophy when you try to redefine property ownership as a lease. It violates every part of the definition of a lease.
"Really, the only thing that needs to be done is to select the reviewers and editors;"
And maintain archives, and run the web site making everything available, and provide the reputation, etc. It doesn't require a huge bureaucracy, but it does require some organization, as the existing open source journals demonstrate.
You can wave your hands all you want, but EVERYTHING requires someone to organize things. Usually more somebodies than you'd think.
Because in a vacuum the beam is already travelling at the maximum possible speed. The photons can only slow down when they enter the object.
That's the reason according to the GP's explanation. I don't think his explanation is actually correct (although it would work in limited circumstances).
Why shouldn't it spread out? Perfectly collimated laser light wouldn't spread out, but such a thing is impossible, so it does.
The AC you replied to isn't very nice, but he's right.
Maybe he's talking about the 34 billion that Google brings in from things other than mobile ad revenue.
"Google's main source of revenue is through ads..."
just like Facebook.
"that includes mobile and video ads."
Facebook also has mobile ads. They don't seem to have gotten into video ads yet, but that's not a big deal. Give them time. Also, anyone who sends video ads to my mobile finds themselves avoided like the plague.
"Google has a vast array of projects/services and is constantly developing new ones"
Most of which are noble experiments but money sinks, and don't last very long. Of the ones that are successful, virtually all are just a means of selling more ads.
"How can this be compared to a company that lets users add photos to a webpage to showboat about themselves or their family."
Neither Facebook nor Google are about the content. They have to make the content compelling enough to get you to use their services, but that's it, and both do a good enough job at it. Both make actual money through getting you to look at ads. And that's harder to do on a small, mobile screen.
"One is the designer and developer of the most popular smartphone + tablet OS..." which they gave away for free.
Google doesn't make any money off Android, and since its open source if they tried to aggressively monetize it, everybody would just use forked versions (which is already starting to happen).
Google and Facebook both depend almost entirely on ads to make money. Both are great big advertising companies with strong sidelines in snooping.
Why do you keep talking about cryptography? There isn't really a problem verifying that someone is who they say they are. The problem is that somebody has to do the organizational work, and no, your computer won't replace a good editor. That editor can be paid by a journal company, or by a university. It doesn't really matter, but there are some advantages to having some arm's length organizations, not the least being that most universities are already huge, bloated and inefficient.
"Publishing" companies will either change or die because their primary function, publishing and distributing paper journals, has disappeared. But similar organizations are still needed to do all the things that journal publishers do now OTHER than printing and distributing paper journals. Moving the whole thing under the auspices of universities won't change anything, and neither will some cryptographic signatures.
Incidentally, using open access journals is going to have to lead to some serious cuts to library funding and fees universities skim off grants for services. Which leaves control of the money in the researchers' hands, which I think is a good thing, but the librarians and university administrators probably won't like it.
Clearly you don't know much about scientific publishing.
Coordinating reviewers and authors is non-trivial. The journals all have computer systems that try to do it, and more often than not something doesn't work right and the actual live editor has to step in.
The (paid) editor makes the publish/no publish decision. Not the reviewers. Not whatever a "program committee" is. The reviewers make (frequently contradictory) recommendations. The editor looks at what the reviewers said, what the authors said, and makes a decision based on that. Quite often you have an idiot reviewer who would sink the publication of a paper if not for an editor who recognizes the reviewer is an idiot.
The existing open access journals have technical reviewers, do all of the things he listed, and charge hefty fees for publication to pay for it all. So they prove something, all right, but not what you think they do.
You're just replacing journals with universities. And universities a) don't want to run journals, b) can't run anything else effectively anyway, c) have a built in conflict of interest and d) journals accept papers from people who aren't affiliated with universities.