Except that the Constitution Party is actually a bunch of fascists. No taxes, but no personal freedom either. Sort of a religious right anarchist police state. Where society spontaneously enforces its own laws by muzzling any antireligion talk and by stoning pornographers, adulterers, and abortionists.
Both parties may be equally culpable, but at least the Democrats are occaisionally open about how they think big government isn't a bad thing always. The Republicans seem more hypocritical in that way - how are they even conservative any more? Doesn't that imply some sort of conservation or resistance to change? I want conservatives back! Annoying old white guys in suits always asking "and how are you gonna pay for that, son?" not these new nutjobs insisting that deficits don't matter.
Right - I was apparently unclear. Christian conservatives seem to feel that other peoples' sins somehow affect their own chances at heaven, but that's not something supported in the bible. It's just a cultural thing, and one that is peculiar to America and our inheritance from Puritanism.
Really? All of the non-hippie religious organizations I have dealt with have described it as "bad but necessary", which is still against that whole commandment they claim to believe.
As far as I know, the current thinking is not that your neighbor's sins affect you, but that you, as a good christian, should get them to stop sinning.
Of course, that's based on reading the actual bible. What they teach in various churches can often vary a whole lot. Like teaching that "Don't kill" means "War with Iraq is good". So really, I have no idea what current thinking is. Based on how people in power here seem to be into banning immoral behavior, I would say that there is at least some notion of inheriting your neighbor's sins - at least in America. Other countries are more or less into these ideas, and there seems to be some loose correlation with christianity, but not overly strong.
I'm pretty sure it's much more that we are inheriting the Puritan tradition.
I think the best option is to pretend you never saw it, until it gets published. That's what I try to do.
I think I will do exactly that. My advisor hemmed and hawed a little, but basically said exactly the same thing you did. I really liked the paper and gave my advisor a positive review of it, and it's a conference paper, so it should be coming out relatively soon if it actually gets in. Which means that it's not a multi-year wait or anything stupid like that.
I'm currently in a PhD program in computer science, doing research in graph theory and the internet, and the other grad students who have reviewed papers that I know of are in physics. I have heard that it also occurs in chemistry and math, but that's more hearsay.
Grad students reviewing papers is an interesting issue - one of the physicists I talked to about this brought up the point that often the grad students aremore up on the most current lab techniques, etc, and so might actually be the best qualified to judge on many points. But the advisor always read the paper as well, and had veto power over the review's contents.
Interestingly, in the same conversation, one physicist expressed the same shock and surprise you are, while another (from a different school) thought it was the normal thing to do. It clearly varies strongly by school, department, and discipline.
Myself, I don't see anything wrong with it as long as the student understands that the paper and its results are to remain confidential, there is a relatively close advisor-advisee relationship (so it's not like giving the paper to a class, but instead is like showing it to a knowledgeable friend), and the advisor maintains veto power and reads the paper themself.
BTW, what's the right thing to do when you read a paper for review and it's relevant to your current research? How do you cite something you read as an anonymous reviewer? I'm about to ask my advisor this, but I'd like to get your opinion as well, since I imagine this is not a new problem and you are coming at these things from a different angle...
That depends - are we talking their costs, or their revenues? The industry's revenues are, as the other poster noted, 4 billion/year. Their costs are unknown.
I've heard allegations that their profit margin is obscene, but have no data to confirm or deny that beyond my own suspicion that if major research universities can't afford to carry the full feed, then their prices are too high.
I think $1/paper/year isn't unreasonable - the IEEE publishes a LOT of papers and journals. But I confess that I could be off by an order of magnitude or so when I guess how many they publish. I think we should look to citeseer and see what their hosting costs are, as they are already performing a similar service.
I'm pretty sure that citeseer has not cost more than $716,797 in hosting and bandwidth costs, but it indexes that many papers. Now, many of these papers aren't peer-reviewed, but that's a simple thing to grep out of the database, and the IEEE back catalog has many entries. Given them a huge grant for the intital setup and then be done with it.
How about arXiv? Their preprint servers host far more content than the IEEE publishes in a year, and I bet their yearly costs are less than 1 million dollars, and from checking out their statistics pages they serve hunderds of thousands of pages a day.
If all of these services can operate effectively on the cheap, then why can't the ACM and IEEE and Elsevier do the same once the initial review costs are paid for?
PS. Grad students don't review papers? I was being overly cynical with my "rubber stamp" comment, but every grad student I know in every department helps their advisor review papers. It's understood that these papers and results need to be kept in confidence, but I thought that leveraging your advisees to help you review was an accepted practice...
What are their costs exactly? The peer review is done for free by professors (usually their grad students and then rubber staamped by the professor), the submitters generally submit camera-ready.pdf files, and bandwidth and hosting can't be too much of a problem - archive.org does much more with much less.
Why should it cost more than ~$200 per article for the lifetime of the article? I estimate that there is approximately $100 in costs in sending out the stuff to review (stamps and the like), and then $1 / year should be enough to host the average paper in perpetuity forever, and it's really easy to invest the remaining $100 to make $1 per year.
Perhaps they are more interested in perpetuating the IEEE as large bureaucracy when open access hits them, rather than than in open access per se...
Chop a wire and measure it from A to B, read that number in binary, and there is your data
So if the Plank length is the smallest unit of space that we can measure, then how long does a wire need to be to measure a megabyte?
Well, let's do the math - for 1 Meg, we need to have 8 bits/byte * 1e6 bytes/meg * 1 binary digit/bit = 8e6 binary digits required. Well, 8 million binary digits means that your length has to be on the order of 2^8e6 units, so let's make our units plank length and figure out how many meters that is.
Which, in meters, is 1e2408239 plank_lengths * 1.6e-35 meters / plank length = 1.6e2408204 meters
Now how big is 1.6 * 10^2408204 meters?
Well, the answer is VERY BIG. As in, it's a number that has no meaning big. I can't describe it's biggitude. Space is peanuts compared to IT. Much larger than the diameter of the universe. Much larger than anything ever imagined ever. Much larger than everything imagined ever all put together.
Heilein's ideas were definitely stuck in a pre-quantum model of the universe. We can't encode one megabyte this way, much less a CD/DVD/Encyclopedia or anything else like that.
(Not a physicist, but I have a deep love of Fermi problems)
You should check out the Internet Bookmobile and any interview with Brewster Kahle. That's some awesome stuff that, if you think PG is important, you might be really into.
Just CPU actually, and we have that to spare - and you don't even need to explicitly gzip it now that mod_gzip is widespread on both the client and server end.
Nuclear power is so heavily subsidized that an accurate assessment of its price per watt is essentially impossible. It's an interesting thing, and perhaps pebble bed reactors will enable us to move away from the old crappy subsidization model, but it's not the cheap panacaea it is often played as.
Well, they've been sued many times over illegal predatory pricing. They always seem to win on appeal the end - but they do have more resources than 155 countries put together. Globalization and its Discontents by a former director of the World Bank - or maybe chief economist, I forget - Joseph Stieglitz (Nobel Prize winner in economics) has a section on WalMart that claims exactly what I said, but it's not an online source.
I also recall one study done in Georgia on WalMart pricing about how once the local stores closed, WalMart's "transportation cost" increased. But I can't dig that up, so either it's been lost to the annals of history, or it never existed in the first place
So really, I can't find any online sources that will satisfy you - the closest I can come is a study about how WalMart is socializing costs by forcing its wages so low that its employees qualify for various social programs and by union busting really really aggressively (http://www.mape.org/pages_news/execdirector/exdir ector100604.htm). But that wasn't my original claim.
> So how come I've never heard of Abu Ghraib style prisoner abuse going on in civilian prisons and jails in the US? It certainly isn't lack of opportunity; the US incarcerates over 2 million people.
Because nobody talks about it and cameras aren't allowed. When gang rape is such a problem in prison that it is a recurring joke, even for California's Director of Prisons (or some title like that), it is a pretty shameful thing. The fact that we don't do anything about the horrendous nature of the US prison system is largely because most people feel that if you are in prison, then you must have done something to deserve what you get.
But prisoner abuse is rampant in the US - it's so common that it is simply NOT NEWS.
Because wikis are so easy to use, they encourage people who would otherwise not write anything at all down - programmers, busy nurses, and the like - to at least put something down.
They are better than nothing, and nothing is exactly what the alternative is.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but I have typed rm -Rf * when in the root directory, by mistyping a previous cd. That sucked a lot, even though I caught it in 15 seconds.
Thanks! Another performance tip is to turn all software instruments into real instruments in the preferences menu.
Between the two of those, I think I've got it...
Except that the Constitution Party is actually a bunch of fascists. No taxes, but no personal freedom either. Sort of a religious right anarchist police state. Where society spontaneously enforces its own laws by muzzling any antireligion talk and by stoning pornographers, adulterers, and abortionists.
Both parties may be equally culpable, but at least the Democrats are occaisionally open about how they think big government isn't a bad thing always. The Republicans seem more hypocritical in that way - how are they even conservative any more? Doesn't that imply some sort of conservation or resistance to change? I want conservatives back! Annoying old white guys in suits always asking "and how are you gonna pay for that, son?" not these new nutjobs insisting that deficits don't matter.
Right - I was apparently unclear. Christian conservatives seem to feel that other peoples' sins somehow affect their own chances at heaven, but that's not something supported in the bible. It's just a cultural thing, and one that is peculiar to America and our inheritance from Puritanism.
The local flavors of evangelical protestantism. The Catholic Church never came to my door, so I don't know them.
Really? All of the non-hippie religious organizations I have dealt with have described it as "bad but necessary", which is still against that whole commandment they claim to believe.
As far as I know, the current thinking is not that your neighbor's sins affect you, but that you, as a good christian, should get them to stop sinning.
Of course, that's based on reading the actual bible. What they teach in various churches can often vary a whole lot. Like teaching that "Don't kill" means "War with Iraq is good". So really, I have no idea what current thinking is. Based on how people in power here seem to be into banning immoral behavior, I would say that there is at least some notion of inheriting your neighbor's sins - at least in America. Other countries are more or less into these ideas, and there seems to be some loose correlation with christianity, but not overly strong.
I'm pretty sure it's much more that we are inheriting the Puritan tradition.
>> fake nerds. What is the word for that?
> I nominate "fnord"
I don't know what that means, and I don't like it.
So you are buying your residence, and using the fact that you are buying it under some weird rent-to-own deal to say that renting is good?
It sounds like you are saying that buying is good, but you've found a way to call it renting in your own head...
I think the best option is to pretend you never saw it, until it gets published. That's what I try to do.
I think I will do exactly that. My advisor hemmed and hawed a little, but basically said exactly the same thing you did. I really liked the paper and gave my advisor a positive review of it, and it's a conference paper, so it should be coming out relatively soon if it actually gets in. Which means that it's not a multi-year wait or anything stupid like that.
I'm currently in a PhD program in computer science, doing research in graph theory and the internet, and the other grad students who have reviewed papers that I know of are in physics. I have heard that it also occurs in chemistry and math, but that's more hearsay.
Grad students reviewing papers is an interesting issue - one of the physicists I talked to about this brought up the point that often the grad students aremore up on the most current lab techniques, etc, and so might actually be the best qualified to judge on many points. But the advisor always read the paper as well, and had veto power over the review's contents.
Interestingly, in the same conversation, one physicist expressed the same shock and surprise you are, while another (from a different school) thought it was the normal thing to do. It clearly varies strongly by school, department, and discipline.
Myself, I don't see anything wrong with it as long as the student understands that the paper and its results are to remain confidential, there is a relatively close advisor-advisee relationship (so it's not like giving the paper to a class, but instead is like showing it to a knowledgeable friend), and the advisor maintains veto power and reads the paper themself.
BTW, what's the right thing to do when you read a paper for review and it's relevant to your current research? How do you cite something you read as an anonymous reviewer? I'm about to ask my advisor this, but I'd like to get your opinion as well, since I imagine this is not a new problem and you are coming at these things from a different angle...
That depends - are we talking their costs, or their revenues? The industry's revenues are, as the other poster noted, 4 billion/year. Their costs are unknown.
I've heard allegations that their profit margin is obscene, but have no data to confirm or deny that beyond my own suspicion that if major research universities can't afford to carry the full feed, then their prices are too high.
I think $1/paper/year isn't unreasonable - the IEEE publishes a LOT of papers and journals. But I confess that I could be off by an order of magnitude or so when I guess how many they publish. I think we should look to citeseer and see what their hosting costs are, as they are already performing a similar service.
I'm pretty sure that citeseer has not cost more than $716,797 in hosting and bandwidth costs, but it indexes that many papers. Now, many of these papers aren't peer-reviewed, but that's a simple thing to grep out of the database, and the IEEE back catalog has many entries. Given them a huge grant for the intital setup and then be done with it.
How about arXiv? Their preprint servers host far more content than the IEEE publishes in a year, and I bet their yearly costs are less than 1 million dollars, and from checking out their statistics pages they serve hunderds of thousands of pages a day.
If all of these services can operate effectively on the cheap, then why can't the ACM and IEEE and Elsevier do the same once the initial review costs are paid for?
PS. Grad students don't review papers? I was being overly cynical with my "rubber stamp" comment, but every grad student I know in every department helps their advisor review papers. It's understood that these papers and results need to be kept in confidence, but I thought that leveraging your advisees to help you review was an accepted practice...
What are their costs exactly? The peer review is done for free by professors (usually their grad students and then rubber staamped by the professor), the submitters generally submit camera-ready .pdf files, and bandwidth and hosting can't be too much of a problem - archive.org does much more with much less.
Why should it cost more than ~$200 per article for the lifetime of the article? I estimate that there is approximately $100 in costs in sending out the stuff to review (stamps and the like), and then $1 / year should be enough to host the average paper in perpetuity forever, and it's really easy to invest the remaining $100 to make $1 per year.
Perhaps they are more interested in perpetuating the IEEE as large bureaucracy when open access hits them, rather than than in open access per se...
Real world project comments...
Your comments are giving me flashbacks.
Chop a wire and measure it from A to B, read that number in binary, and there is your data
So if the Plank length is the smallest unit of space that we can measure, then how long does a wire need to be to measure a megabyte?
Well, let's do the math - for 1 Meg, we need to have 8 bits/byte * 1e6 bytes/meg * 1 binary digit/bit = 8e6 binary digits required. Well, 8 million binary digits means that your length has to be on the order of 2^8e6 units, so let's make our units plank length and figure out how many meters that is.
2^8000000 plank lengths = (10 ^ log_10(2)^8000000 plank lengths =~ 10 ^ 2408239 plank lengths
Which, in meters, is 1e2408239 plank_lengths * 1.6e-35 meters / plank length = 1.6e2408204 meters
Now how big is 1.6 * 10^2408204 meters?
Well, the answer is VERY BIG. As in, it's a number that has no meaning big. I can't describe it's biggitude. Space is peanuts compared to IT. Much larger than the diameter of the universe. Much larger than anything ever imagined ever. Much larger than everything imagined ever all put together.
Heilein's ideas were definitely stuck in a pre-quantum model of the universe. We can't encode one megabyte this way, much less a CD/DVD/Encyclopedia or anything else like that.
(Not a physicist, but I have a deep love of Fermi problems)
1 out of 8 black males has been convicted of a felony. http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Black-Felony-Votin g22sep00.htm
That's more than enough to have swung FLA in 2000, or OH in 2004.
You should check out the Internet Bookmobile and any interview with Brewster Kahle. That's some awesome stuff that, if you think PG is important, you might be really into.
Just CPU actually, and we have that to spare - and you don't even need to explicitly gzip it now that mod_gzip is widespread on both the client and server end.
Nuclear power is so heavily subsidized that an accurate assessment of its price per watt is essentially impossible. It's an interesting thing, and perhaps pebble bed reactors will enable us to move away from the old crappy subsidization model, but it's not the cheap panacaea it is often played as.
Well, they've been sued many times over illegal predatory pricing. They always seem to win on appeal the end - but they do have more resources than 155 countries put together. Globalization and its Discontents by a former director of the World Bank - or maybe chief economist, I forget - Joseph Stieglitz (Nobel Prize winner in economics) has a section on WalMart that claims exactly what I said, but it's not an online source.
r ector100604.htm). But that wasn't my original claim.
I also recall one study done in Georgia on WalMart pricing about how once the local stores closed, WalMart's "transportation cost" increased. But I can't dig that up, so either it's been lost to the annals of history, or it never existed in the first place
So really, I can't find any online sources that will satisfy you - the closest I can come is a study about how WalMart is socializing costs by forcing its wages so low that its employees qualify for various social programs and by union busting really really aggressively (http://www.mape.org/pages_news/execdirector/exdi
True. Wal Mart is merely a figment of all our imaginations.
Your second version, with the probabilities, is a Markov Chain - http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MarkovChain.html
> So how come I've never heard of Abu Ghraib style prisoner abuse going on in civilian prisons and jails in the US? It certainly isn't lack of opportunity; the US incarcerates over 2 million people.
Because nobody talks about it and cameras aren't allowed. When gang rape is such a problem in prison that it is a recurring joke, even for California's Director of Prisons (or some title like that), it is a pretty shameful thing. The fact that we don't do anything about the horrendous nature of the US prison system is largely because most people feel that if you are in prison, then you must have done something to deserve what you get.
But prisoner abuse is rampant in the US - it's so common that it is simply NOT NEWS.
Because wikis are so easy to use, they encourage people who would otherwise not write anything at all down - programmers, busy nurses, and the like - to at least put something down.
They are better than nothing, and nothing is exactly what the alternative is.