"Sure i'll need to take everything with a grain of salt and follow it up further but in general the articles are a great introduction to any topic."
Sure, that's what Wikipedia is good at. And you don't need actual experts for it. If, instead, you want accountability then you DO need experts, and you can't use a Wikipedia model. The two are complementary.
"Perhaps many of these people claiming things along the lines "arrogant bastards reverted my edits. I know better than them! I'm an academic!" are themselves the arrogant bastards?"
No, at worst they misunderstand what Wikipedia is, as, it seems, the Wikipedia founders do. Wikipedia doesn't want experts to write articles. Their founding principles essentially say so. So the entire Wikipedia system is hostile to experts.
'Since when has a University Professors role been "intellectuals working for the public good"?'
Every reputable university I know of, and the general professional ethics of academia require that professors teach and mentor students, contribute to human knowledge, and perform an outreach role to the community.
There are some professors who hold teaching positions. Others don't really "teach" much (and aren't really paid for it). Their teaching contribution comes from supervising their grad students. But most professors do some kind of public outreach. Most just feel their time is better used doing things like talking at schools and mentoring science fair students than writing things more or less anonymously on Wikipedia.
Journals do a wee bit more than that. The editor is often a referee, taking the reviewer's comments (they often disagree) into account when making a decision on whether or not to accept the paper. Editors also act as a first line of defense, rejecting obvious nonsense and things that are inappropriate for the journal. Someone has to check to make sure reviewers are reasonably appropriate, and handle retractions, scandals and things like that when they happen. It costs a wee bit more to do online publishing when you're vouching for the quality.
There are free journals that publish on the web, but they tend to be expensive (yes, you have to pay) to publish in. Fees for PLOS journals range from $1350 to $2900 (US) per paper.
Don't forget the encouraging effect of some smartass Slashdot submitter talking about "academic ego."
Most professors don't contribute to Wikipedia because they don't have time, it's a headache, and it doesn't gain them anything. But doesn't everyone like to bring their work home and then have to argue about it with thirteen year olds on the Internet?
I can list some if you want. The "anti-tivoization" provision in the GPL 3 means if you're putting the software onto a hardware device, the GPL dictates your hardware design. The hardware MUST support software updates, by the end user. That might mean an extra port (expensive) and will probably mean support headaches. Special exceptions had to be made to this clause for things like medical scanners. That's great... if you're building an excepted device.
The patent clauses scare a lot of businesses too. By releasing GPL3ed software you can potentially nullify your own patents.
Add in that the terms of the license are untested (not just 3, but 2 as well) and open to differing interpretation (is liking kosher? Static vs. dynamic?) and you've got a potential landmine.
We recently released a demo library of some software that's generally intended to be used in embedded systems, even burned directly onto ASICs. In the latter case the terms of the GPL 3 are completely unsatisfiable, and in the former very nearly so. So the demo library is freely distributable and researchers can use it for free, but if anybody in industry wants to actually build a device using the software they pretty much have to buy a commercial, non GPL license.
Apple certainly seems to think it's true. They were quite happy to contribute to gcc and Samba while they were GPL v2, but they switched to other products when they became GPL v3.
There are all sorts of things in GPL v3 that make anybody doing commercial work want to stay away from it.
Macs aren't locked to a single OS. They run Windows or Linux or whatever else just fine. The issue seems to be that you either run OS X, as distributed, or you run something else. And the license for one component, Samba, conflicts with that. So Apple is going to make their own.
Or are services like Pandora, Spotify, and even iTunes giving the customers what they want at a price they want and thus helping to drive pirating down?
That sort of thinking is what got the music industry in trouble in the first place.
It's tough to talk about just one of the three spatial dimensions individually, because there are three. Presumably if we experienced more than one time dimension we'd have trouble talking about past and future in the context of just one of them.
The point is that if you want to get rid of time as a dimension by defining "interval" as a property of a space, then you should also be open to getting rid of spatial dimensions by defining distance (in any one of them) as a property of space... but when you run out of spatial dimensions you suddenly have no space left to have properties!
The universe is a big particle accelerator. Cosmic rays are one of the biggest dangers and they're mostly protons or helium nuclei, which can certainly be deflected by electric or magnetic fields. Likewise, the solar wind is mostly protons and electrons, both of which are charged and can be deflected.
The early termination fee in your contract doesn't cover the cost of the phone. Perhaps it should, but carriers in the US have opted to go with locking the phone and having low ETFs instead.
Count yourself lucky. Carriers in Canada have realistic ETFs AND lock the phones.
If you don't like it, don't rent a phone from the carrier. Buy it.
You're quite correct about rooted phones. Locking them up that way probably has a few motivations - controlling what you can do on their network, forcing you to upgrade your phone because you can't get OS updates, selling you "features" that your phone already has but are disabled, and eventually I suspect the carriers will force you to use their app stores. That little gem is worth too much money for them to ignore.
Again, if you don't like it, buy your phone instead of renting it.
"and we're all locked into contracts that cost more than a new car to escape from."
Really? I was under the impression that getting out of a cell contract was a couple hundred dollars max in the US. That doesn't even cover the cost of the phone.
Getting out of my contract in Canada is about $500-$600, which DOES cover the cost of the phone. It's not prorated though, so it's only a break even thing (for both you and the carrier) if you do it immediately after signing up. After that you're getting screwed.
Because it's not your phone. You're renting-to-own it from your carrier. If it weren't locked you might be more tempted to skip out on your contract early.
"I have seen many outstanding programmers who struggled with calculus and never really got it."
There's the key word. Programmers should be educated in a tech school for a year or two then kicked out into industry. Software architects and systems analysts should take a degree in software engineering. Computer science graduates should be scientists, not engineers or programmers. The whole debate stems from the weird absence in the US of proper software engineering and information technology programs.
How thick is it? What's it made of? Pick it up by one side, how much does it flex? Drop it on a corner, does anything chip off? Does it dent? Whack it with a hammer, etc.
They'd post the latest Dell or HP, which was usually some kind of limited time or limited availability sale, while completely ignoring that the Dell/HP was made of plastic, twice as thick, half again as heavy, had a battery that lasted half as long and was ad-supported: so crammed with crapware the first thing you have to do is format it.
Maybe they were getting kickbacks, maybe they're just adept at reading technology spec sheets and not much else.
Did you match features like weight? Case construction? Have a look at the higher end notebooks from other manufacturers and you'll see they match up fairly closely with Apple's. These are things that a lot of people seem to be willing to compromise on in a notebook, but less so in a tablet.
You wouldn't like it, because it would be incredibly high latency. And incredibly low bandwidth.
Besides, you have unlimited SMS just like other people have unlimited data. It's "unlimited" on while you use it in a way that the carrier defines as normal.
If you use a crappy feature phone on a crappy network that likes to bill for features individually you might pay specially for IM services. They're usually WAY cheaper than texting though, and frequently belong to unlimited plans, making them cheaper than general data.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sure i'll need to take everything with a grain of salt and follow it up further but in general the articles are a great introduction to any topic."
Sure, that's what Wikipedia is good at. And you don't need actual experts for it. If, instead, you want accountability then you DO need experts, and you can't use a Wikipedia model. The two are complementary.
"Perhaps many of these people claiming things along the lines "arrogant bastards reverted my edits. I know better than them! I'm an academic!" are themselves the arrogant bastards?"
No, at worst they misunderstand what Wikipedia is, as, it seems, the Wikipedia founders do. Wikipedia doesn't want experts to write articles. Their founding principles essentially say so. So the entire Wikipedia system is hostile to experts.
'Since when has a University Professors role been "intellectuals working for the public good"?'
Every reputable university I know of, and the general professional ethics of academia require that professors teach and mentor students, contribute to human knowledge, and perform an outreach role to the community.
There are some professors who hold teaching positions. Others don't really "teach" much (and aren't really paid for it). Their teaching contribution comes from supervising their grad students. But most professors do some kind of public outreach. Most just feel their time is better used doing things like talking at schools and mentoring science fair students than writing things more or less anonymously on Wikipedia.
Journals do a wee bit more than that. The editor is often a referee, taking the reviewer's comments (they often disagree) into account when making a decision on whether or not to accept the paper. Editors also act as a first line of defense, rejecting obvious nonsense and things that are inappropriate for the journal. Someone has to check to make sure reviewers are reasonably appropriate, and handle retractions, scandals and things like that when they happen. It costs a wee bit more to do online publishing when you're vouching for the quality.
There are free journals that publish on the web, but they tend to be expensive (yes, you have to pay) to publish in. Fees for PLOS journals range from $1350 to $2900 (US) per paper.
Don't forget the encouraging effect of some smartass Slashdot submitter talking about "academic ego."
Most professors don't contribute to Wikipedia because they don't have time, it's a headache, and it doesn't gain them anything. But doesn't everyone like to bring their work home and then have to argue about it with thirteen year olds on the Internet?
I can list some if you want. The "anti-tivoization" provision in the GPL 3 means if you're putting the software onto a hardware device, the GPL dictates your hardware design. The hardware MUST support software updates, by the end user. That might mean an extra port (expensive) and will probably mean support headaches. Special exceptions had to be made to this clause for things like medical scanners. That's great... if you're building an excepted device.
The patent clauses scare a lot of businesses too. By releasing GPL3ed software you can potentially nullify your own patents.
Add in that the terms of the license are untested (not just 3, but 2 as well) and open to differing interpretation (is liking kosher? Static vs. dynamic?) and you've got a potential landmine.
We recently released a demo library of some software that's generally intended to be used in embedded systems, even burned directly onto ASICs. In the latter case the terms of the GPL 3 are completely unsatisfiable, and in the former very nearly so. So the demo library is freely distributable and researchers can use it for free, but if anybody in industry wants to actually build a device using the software they pretty much have to buy a commercial, non GPL license.
Press the control key. Or alt. Or whatever it is.
The right mouse button drag to open a menu when you stopped has always been highly annoying, and definitely not worth buying a whole new machine for.
Apple certainly seems to think it's true. They were quite happy to contribute to gcc and Samba while they were GPL v2, but they switched to other products when they became GPL v3.
There are all sorts of things in GPL v3 that make anybody doing commercial work want to stay away from it.
Macs aren't locked to a single OS. They run Windows or Linux or whatever else just fine. The issue seems to be that you either run OS X, as distributed, or you run something else. And the license for one component, Samba, conflicts with that. So Apple is going to make their own.
Or are services like Pandora, Spotify, and even iTunes giving the customers what they want at a price they want and thus helping to drive pirating down?
That sort of thinking is what got the music industry in trouble in the first place.
Windows. Sun. Photoshop. Illustrator. Red Hat. Android.
All anticompetitive?
I believe they call them hydrogen bombs.
It's tough to talk about just one of the three spatial dimensions individually, because there are three. Presumably if we experienced more than one time dimension we'd have trouble talking about past and future in the context of just one of them.
The point is that if you want to get rid of time as a dimension by defining "interval" as a property of a space, then you should also be open to getting rid of spatial dimensions by defining distance (in any one of them) as a property of space... but when you run out of spatial dimensions you suddenly have no space left to have properties!
"Up-down" can exist alongside any number of other dimensions as well. Is it a geometric property of any space that supports upness and downness?
Tell that to your boss when you're telling him where (but not when) the meeting is.
The universe is a big particle accelerator. Cosmic rays are one of the biggest dangers and they're mostly protons or helium nuclei, which can certainly be deflected by electric or magnetic fields. Likewise, the solar wind is mostly protons and electrons, both of which are charged and can be deflected.
The early termination fee in your contract doesn't cover the cost of the phone. Perhaps it should, but carriers in the US have opted to go with locking the phone and having low ETFs instead.
Count yourself lucky. Carriers in Canada have realistic ETFs AND lock the phones.
If you don't like it, don't rent a phone from the carrier. Buy it.
You're quite correct about rooted phones. Locking them up that way probably has a few motivations - controlling what you can do on their network, forcing you to upgrade your phone because you can't get OS updates, selling you "features" that your phone already has but are disabled, and eventually I suspect the carriers will force you to use their app stores. That little gem is worth too much money for them to ignore.
Again, if you don't like it, buy your phone instead of renting it.
"and we're all locked into contracts that cost more than a new car to escape from."
Really? I was under the impression that getting out of a cell contract was a couple hundred dollars max in the US. That doesn't even cover the cost of the phone.
Getting out of my contract in Canada is about $500-$600, which DOES cover the cost of the phone. It's not prorated though, so it's only a break even thing (for both you and the carrier) if you do it immediately after signing up. After that you're getting screwed.
Because it's not your phone. You're renting-to-own it from your carrier. If it weren't locked you might be more tempted to skip out on your contract early.
"The last one, on January 26 1700 IIRC (that would be 350 years ago...."
New math, or did I REALLY sleep in this morning?
"I have seen many outstanding programmers who struggled with calculus and never really got it."
There's the key word. Programmers should be educated in a tech school for a year or two then kicked out into industry. Software architects and systems analysts should take a degree in software engineering. Computer science graduates should be scientists, not engineers or programmers. The whole debate stems from the weird absence in the US of proper software engineering and information technology programs.
How thick is it? What's it made of? Pick it up by one side, how much does it flex? Drop it on a corner, does anything chip off? Does it dent? Whack it with a hammer, etc.
They'd post the latest Dell or HP, which was usually some kind of limited time or limited availability sale, while completely ignoring that the Dell/HP was made of plastic, twice as thick, half again as heavy, had a battery that lasted half as long and was ad-supported: so crammed with crapware the first thing you have to do is format it.
Maybe they were getting kickbacks, maybe they're just adept at reading technology spec sheets and not much else.
Did you match features like weight? Case construction? Have a look at the higher end notebooks from other manufacturers and you'll see they match up fairly closely with Apple's. These are things that a lot of people seem to be willing to compromise on in a notebook, but less so in a tablet.
You wouldn't like it, because it would be incredibly high latency. And incredibly low bandwidth.
Besides, you have unlimited SMS just like other people have unlimited data. It's "unlimited" on while you use it in a way that the carrier defines as normal.
They don't "detect."
If you use a crappy feature phone on a crappy network that likes to bill for features individually you might pay specially for IM services. They're usually WAY cheaper than texting though, and frequently belong to unlimited plans, making them cheaper than general data.