However, for sake of argument, let's just pretend that potential games somehow become real games (by magic, we must assume). Then what? Will people want to run them on a slow console? Why? Because it's $99?
Of course!:-)
Or you expect me to waste 600USD on a state of the art console to play these cheap games?;-)
OUYA will not steal high end console's market. OUYA will succeed only if a latent low profile gaming market is out there, waiting to be discovered and exploited, I mean, explored.:-)
Not only that, but you're paying through the nose for increasingly locked-down consoles designed with the EA mentality of bleeding your bank account dry while you play. Personally I'm done with Nintendo/Sony/MS consoles and their push to lock you into some sort of on-line somethingaverse where you spend Itchy and Scratchy money on stuff that should have been included with the $60 game that is locked to your specific console for no justifiable reason. And as someone that travels between countries, don't get me started on region locking and the "helpful feature" of switching to the language of whatever country your IP address originated from. I don't care about on-line multiplayer, I don't want to create an avatar, I'm not interested in being called a faggot by some preteen with too much free time, I don't want to have to sign in to a server to play a single player game, and I will only tolerate DRM that is as unobtrusive as Steam... and by that I mean I'm willing to pay because Steam is actually easier than pirating.
Big point missed: it's supposidly built to run XBMC really well. It does have multiple purposes.
And that is why I ordered one. XBMC runs amazingly well on my Tegra 3 tablet; I want a little Android box that can hide behind my TV and run XBMC. Bonus for a dedicated "remote" (and navigating XBMC with a game controller is a pleasure.) Gaming is certainly a feature, but I already have a PC for that.
OT prediction: If it turns out that the act was committed by an American nutjob, as with the Oklahoma City bombing the media and political system will quickly forget about it. If it turns out that it was done by a "furriner", we'll hear lots about those awful "terrists" for some time, everyone will make vicious pronouncements, and they won't forget about it. In either case, little if anything will be done that's relevant to preventing future such acts.
This bombing is similar to the foiled MLK day bombing in Seattle that turned out to be some crazy neo-Nazi. And by "foiled" I mean someone basically stumbled on the bomb before it went off in the middle of a very crowded parade.
As a former resident of Boston, that city will always have a special place in my heart. Attacking the marathon is just the lowest of lows. I hope they catch whomever did this and lock them up for good in the rapiest prison they can find and don't turn it into some empty-headed left versus right shouting match on cable news.
For discrete molecules, you can only win a "composition of matter" patent on something that does not exist naturally. You can, however, patent a method for extracting, manipulating, packaging a natural product or even a specific use for it. The courts seem to have created a distinction between polynucleotides and small molecules; i.e., awarding a patent for a sequence of DNA is basically the same as awarding a composition of matter patent on a natural product and should not be allowed. If anything, they should treat unique, non-natural sequences under copyright law like we do with patterns of symbols/widgets that represent information. Any idiot can make DNA--I'm doing it right now--but any idiot cannot design a sequence of DNA that folds into a smiley face.
Drug companies may exchange the anion of a salt or use an ethyl group instead of a propyl group, but to get the composition of matter patent, they must prove that the new molecule rises to the level of "intellectual property" in that it changes the properties and is non-obvious to an expert. Over the years, "non-obvious" has been fairly rigorously defined by trial and error and the input of a lot of experts. Thus, I really don't see how the Supreme Court needs to get involved in this case. They are scientifically illiterate and susceptible to irrelevant philosophical arguments about life, evolution, etc. A better fix, IMHO, is to treat all polynucleotides as natural products and only allow patents on the methodology of their isolation/use/etc. If a company really, truly comes up with a crazy break-through based on a heretofore unknown sequence of DNA/RNA, then treat it like a trade secret. It works for Coke.
The current system for awarding patents for what is basically a series of A, C, G T/U that you dug out of a longer series encoded in a polymer unquestionably stifles innovation because it allows companies to block anything involving a particular gene. (They already exclude personal use for obvious reasons, i.e., you can't tell your cells to stop expressing a specific gene.) A trickier issue arises with organisms that have been designed for particular experiments, like a strain of yeast, or a mouse with a particular set of genes knocked out or a bacteria that is programmed to insert a section of DNA from a specific plasmid template. The designers of these organisms put a lot of work into them, but the final product can be cloned, not unlike an MP3 of a song. Unlike an MP3, however, they will do it themselves (given enough Barry White), so you can buy one and then just keep a population going in the lab. So how do you balance the rights of the inventor to profit without competition for a limited time (i.e., incentive) against the slippery slope of patenting entire organisms? Last I checked, they limit these patents to organisms whose genes were manipulated artificially, but it won't be long until humans fall into that category.
If you are just starting out in a tenure-track position, you have about five years to show that you are capable of pulling in funding, getting talks accepted to conferences, and publishing papers that get cited. It's easy to say that fake journals are simple to spot because "everyone" knows what the real journals are, and besides, I wouldn't waste time publishing anywhere but in the best journals... True if you are still a PhD student or postdoc, but wait until your adviser's name no longer appears on your author list. Suddenly results that you know you could have published in a top journal are being scrutinized by referees at a bread-and-butter "specialty journal" who have no reason to believe in your competence.
Now imagine you get an email from a shiny new open-access journal asking you to be on their editorial board. You think "gee, I'd like to support open-access" and hey, look at that, someone I know is already on the editorial board. Suddenly you are getting phone calls asking for the title of the talk that you have been invited to give at a conference in Vegas (for which you are certain to be billed after the fact). And you find out that your job as an editor is to submit papers to their journal. You of course don't want to, because a paper with zero citations is worse in many ways than no paper at all. But your doe-eyed grad student, who has just had a string of bad luck, really needs a paper for their CV. You feel responsible for this person's future and guilty that their project isn't producing ground-breaking papers every other week. So you let them write up a paper for this crappy journal, which is when you find out that they charge even their editorial board for "publication fees." And the best part is that, when you politely explain to them that you can't afford $3000 to publish a paper no one will ever read, they start negotiating the price with you! Classy.
Then there are the legitimate journals and conferences that are put together by, for example, a bunch of foreigners that you have never heard of. It's neigh impossible to determine the legitimacy of such things and, because of your recent experience serving on an editorial board, you are extremely skeptical. The end result is that we are right back where we started; only participating when we see other scientists who we know and respect. But, see problem above--they only need to con one person into lending their name before it cascades. (And good luck getting your name removed from their editorial board.) It creates a chilling effect for unknown/up-and-coming/young scientists to organize conferences or to try to innovate in the publication/conference sphere.
Fake journals are a symptom of a broader problem, which is for lack of a better term the "neoliberalization" of science. Each science has a few gatekeeper publishers who we all trust and who therefore has editors that we've all heard of. We read them, we cite them, and we know that any new journals they roll out will likewise be active and highly cited. If you want to have access to such journals, you must be at an academic institution that can afford massive subscription fees to thousands of journals. Papers are, however, the currency of academic science, so academics will expend enormous effort to get grant money to do research to ultimately publish a paper. These fake journals have spotted a nice opportunity to skim some of that money the same way spammers work, by relying on that 1-2% that gets duped into publishing a paper, once, or agreeing to serve on an editorial board, once, or agreeing to an "invited talk," once. And the closer they are to an industry, the worse the problem. Drug manufacturers, for example, have a profit motive to publish garbage in pseudo-peer-reviewed journals with real-sounding names.
Fake journals, the publish-or-perish model, the evaporation of research funding, the over-production of PhD scientists, etc. have combined with the power of the Internet and digital publishing to, ironically, push science back to exactly wh
Take a look at whatever latest OS you are currently running. Is it bug and exploit free? If you think it is, then come back in a year and there likely will be a long list of vulnerabilities found during that time. And they didn't just magically appear, most of these vulnerabilities are in your OS RIGHT NOW and there is a good chance the bad guys have known about them for quite a while too.
You're not kidding. I periodically take a look at logs and network traffic on my home server and it is a constant barrage of disease-ridden hookerbots soliciting my innocent electronics. An un-patched OS doesn't stand a chance.
Despite the claimed superiority of Windows security - only the tech savvy seem to maintain a healthy Windows environment. But, a housewife who doesn't understand the differences between file systems can keep a Linux installation running for years, with very little technical support from anyone else.
I gave an old laptop to a co-worker who is not even remotely tech savvy. I put a fresh Ubuntu installation on it because it was less resource intensive than Windows 7. At first she and her husband balked at the new interface, but now that they know which program to use for which task, they love it and have even switched their desktop over.
Meanwhile, I have trouble keeping my Win7 partition smooth and bloat-free and I use it literally only for Steam and games. I bitched about it on/. and was lampooned for not being willing to "just wipe the partition and reinstall Windows" every n months. I think Windows users have Stockholm syndrome.
Junk science says "hey, no problem, our model can explain that too".
You mean like the way the AGW people suddenly realized that adding energy to the atmosphere meant more extreme weather, both hotter and colder, after we had some extra-cold winters? I can't say it's not reasonable, but I would have found it much more impressive if any of them had suggested this before it happened, rather than patching their theory to explain something that otherwise didn't fit.
Svante Arrhenius correctly predicted the greenhouse effect by empirical observation in the 19th Century, and he was not alone. In the 1970's climate models were already predicting catastrophic shifts in weather, which were increasingly being validated by ice core samples, etc. About that time, people with no business wading into a scientific debate (e.g., oil companies) starting muddying the waters and throwing around baseless accusations like "junk science." And now people with no scientific background whatsoever attack details of climate modelling that they don't understand.
Let me reiterate; the mechanistic underpinnings of global climate change have been known since the 19th Century. What we are arguing about now is the ability of incredibly complex models to make hyper-accurate predictions in an unfathomably complex system. Does anyone care that the Standard Model of physics has no idea what gravity is? I mean, if they can't understand something as simple as gravity, and are continually refining their models to account for new observations, should we not dismiss all of theoretical physics as "junk science?"
What fascinates me about the ignorant people who fall for this type of FUD is how little they care about any other field of science. Where are all the skeptics pushing back against the Higgs Boson research coming out of CERN? How about the debate that surrounded RNA silencing? Why don't I read articles in the popular press about the validity of Landauer approximation with respect to single-molecule (ballistic) contacts? How about the formation of charge-transfer states at donor/acceptor interfaces in excitonic solar cells? I'm sure Rush Limbaugh has an opinion about that debate, which is currently raging in the scientific literature.
Perhaps we don't drag every little detail of scientific research into the mainstream of debate because such complex issues should be left to people with decades of training and experience. It is simply impossible for a layman to seriously debate climate science because they have no fundamental understanding of how science works, what scientific debate looks like, how models of complex systems are validated and, importantly, have no idea that they are picking the same type of knits that surrounded the scientific debates that lead to all important discoveries throughout history. The very process of scientific discovery is rooted in the ability to undermine existing hypothesis with new observations until a consensus is reached. And there will always be dissenting opinions and data. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011 is a microcosm of this phenomenon.
This isn't a scientific question, it isn't in a scientific arena, and any scientist thinking they can 'win' the debate/bet is on shaky ground. Not because the science is bad, but because it isn't about science at all...
And that is the trap that many people fall into, particularly the more science inclined, who get sucked into arguments with people whose minds are not open to change. It's like trying to dig a hole in water. Science/religion is a false dichotomy; you don't see mathematicians trying to disprove Shakespeare. Yet somehow it makes intuitive sense to many people that science should have to defend its methodology in the context of the bible, presumably because it was there first. (To be clear, I mean people on both sides of the non-debate--plenty of science-minded people feel a reflexive obligation, that I have never understood, to disprove religious accounts of history.) But we also can't escape the fact that some religious elements view science as an evil (in the biblical sense) force that undermines the word of God.
I look at it like Star Wars. Darth Vader (the church) started out as a good guy, eventually having Luke and Lea (science, which was originally fostered by the church to understand the world God created). But when Vader became evil (pick your religious atrocity) it was up to Luke and Lea to team up and stop him, with Luke eventually killing him... but not before turning him back to the light side (we're still waiting for the rational wing of the Christian faith to marginalize the fundamentalists.) At the end of the day they were both Jedi of sorts, but they were pitted against each other by the Emperor and had no real reason to hate each other. Vader even wanted to rule the galaxy as father and son, which was a nice sentiment, but also highlights how they could have worked well together; it really wasn't in either of their best interests to fight. Look at all the collateral damage: the wage slaves on the Death Star, the poor, uneducated moisture farmers that got sucked into the rebellion, even the Hutts.
I happen to be a scientist and have worked with plenty of rational Christians who still take the old view of science as trying to better understand God through empirical observation of the natural world. So I know they exist. But I'm not holding my breath for the Christian Taliban to realize the futility of arguing with people who aren't arguing back.
The implication isn't so much that someone can say "I'm looking for openfrog" and then find you through your cell phone habits. Law enforcement can easily just ask your cell carrier "where is openfrog" and they instantly know the last cell tower that you were on and track you in real time. This practice is akin to dusting for prints or checking last known addresses; it happens when there is a reason to look for an individual.
The privacy implication is that data that are considered "anonymized" are valuable commodities that drive the Big Data economy. What this research suggests is that such data are not at all anonymous and therefore probably shouldn't be treated as such. We make an implicit deal at the moment to let cell carriers monetize anonymous statistics for, in theory, lower prices, just like we agree to use "free" websites by sacrificing some personal information. But if those data can so easily be used to reveal the identities of random people, that implicit deal is invalid, and I would imagine that the majority of people would not agree to be tracked by their cell phone companies just so they can make an extra buck. I for one would find it creepy to start seeing targeted ads in GMail for the specific businesses that I pass on my way to work.
It also raises questions about regulating such data. "Anonymous usage statistics" probably aren't that closely regulated, controlled, or protected. But if a criminal organization got a hold of them they could effectively case hundreds or thousands of homes remotely, with a high degree of certainty, and with no chance of being caught (as opposed, for example, to being parked in a van across the street for a week.)
In other words, it not really about the identity of a specific individual, it is about the ability to resolve the identities of large numbers of individuals at random. It would be like having all of the usernames on/. suddenly replaced with real names.
I grew up in a "religiously oriented" part of the US and had so many Darwin fish vandalized or removed from my pickup that I eventually switched to sticker on the inside of the rear window. After that I just got nasty notes and middle fingers from other drivers.
So this surprises you, somehow? You freely acknowledge that you grew up in an area with a lot of fundamentalists, and are surprised that people might be offended by you loudly advertising your belief in something that disagrees with their beliefs?
You're as bad as the Christians, if you don't understand why they may be offended by that.
No, you inferred surprise. At the time I was a teenager and felt the need to distinguish my truck from all the Jesus fish, bumper stickers telling me I was going to hell, crucifixes hanging from rearview mirrors, etc. Now I don't own a car and live in a town that is ~80% atheist/non-religious.
And no, I'm not as bad as the Christians because I never vandalized their cars, accosted them on the street, kicked them out of the Boy Scouts, got the middle school science teacher fired, or protected the pedophile gym teacher because of their religious views. Personally I think that it is childish to flip off a stranger because something on their car offends you.
This detail difference is a strong indicator as to the motivations behind what is going on. In short, "unprofessional behavior." With all the troubles the USPS is having, these professionals should be more concerned about delivering value in the service they provide. Instead, the political affiliations (religion is politics, don't kid yourself) of participants entrusted with delivery are affecting how well they do their jobs.
Unless the "lost" packages are the result of "concerned citizens" swiping them off of porches/out of mailboxes and tossing them in the trash (or into the book-burning-mobile). I grew up in a "religiously oriented" part of the US and had so many Darwin fish vandalized or removed from my pickup that I eventually switched to sticker on the inside of the rear window. After that I just got nasty notes and middle fingers from other drivers.
I gather the way it works in Multinational Corporation Land is that the holding company with the cash is a "subsidiary" that is a PO Box in Ireland that buys a $100,000,000 asset from the USA-based parent company for $30,000,000. The USA-based company then buys the app for $30,000,000 from a third party, sells it to the subsidiary for $1 and claims a $69,999,999 loss to the IRS. The subsidiary then licenses the app back to the parent company for 110% of the revenue generated by the app in a package deal that includes transferring the $100,000,000 asset back to the USA-based company (companies can be tough negotiators with themselves). All the profits are booked in Ireland and the losses in the US and the headline is "USA-Based Company Buys $30,000,000 App." Then again, maybe I just don't understand all this complex business stuff, which is why senior executives make 400X my salary.
Free Market companies have one overriding interest; to make profits for their shareholders, that is the only reason they exist.
Not really. First, there is no such thing as a "Free Market company" because markets don't exist without rules to define them, not to mention all the legal and fiduciary infrastructure that supports and defends the ability of a private entity to extract a profit from an activity. The "Free Market" is an unobtainable ideological goal, like Nirvana (the state of being, not the band). Second, the mandates of a corporation are defined in their corporate charter, which is in turn defined by the governing body under which it was issued. There is no God of Commerce that handed down a stone tablet, "thou shall only seek profit for thy shareholders."
To avoid plugging a particular website, try searching for "corporate charters public good." One of the founding principles of the United States was to get out from underneath the tyranny of the British corporate structure, which essentially stated that corporations could do whatever they wanted in the name of profit (so long as they paid taxes to the crown). Even the Boston Tea Party was a manifestation of this desire; it was just a much a protest against the tax-exempt status of tea imported by the British East India Company as it was a protest against taxes on the colonists. As a result, American corporate charters used to put "benefit of the public good" as the first priority of a corporate entity, above even profit-making. Corporate charters also used to define a fixed life-span of a corporation to ensure that it didn't do what Google is doing, i.e., turn into an evil autocracy despite the best intentions of its founders.
I think you misunderstood; everyone under 30 uses the Internet because they grew up with it--obviously there are people over 30 on the Internet (us, for example). Boomers don't download TV shows--though they may use computers--because they didn't grow up with the Internet. And yes, Boomers are old folks now. As a younger member of Gen X (who does not work in IT), I can tell you that the vast majority of my peers are computer illiterate, don't know how to type, and never had a computer at home growing up (nor did I). Even as late as the 90's being "into computers" was still a thing, and a nerdy thing... until internet billionaires became a thing. Nowadays toddlers have smart phones.
In other words, only the segment of the population seeding/leeching torrents that is over 30 is biased towards the tech savvy. The rest are just young, which skews the predictive power of anything that measures downloads or online reviews towards young people, not computer savvy people, as would have been the case in 1998.
I have no idea. I only know that it was parodied on How I Met Your Mother, endlessly pushed at NPR pledge drives, and casually referenced in various media to which I am exposed... do young people give money to NPR?
Yep, maybe I'm just old, but I've never used any of "Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet" to watch tv. I don't know who Hannah Horvath is (and no I'm not going to google it, and not interested in anyone responding to this post to enlighten me about who she is), I've never watched an episode of Downton Abbey, ever visited Tumblr, and I don't have a twitter account. Also, I have no idea what a "kibitz with Facebook friends" is.
I'm right there with you, and I'm not even that old... young enough that I feel peer pressure to watch Downton Abbey just to get all the references to it in other shows. But I don't watch OTA TV either--I use a HTPC.
The demographic that gets/views torrents is skewed towards the technologically minded.
Then explain to me the popularity of Jersey Shore on the Pirate Bay.
The bias is not towards technologically minded people (what is this 1998?), it's towards people who use the Internet, i.e., everyone under 30. The Boomers are not likely to download torrents because they grew up with TV sets and, by and large, aren't very tech savvy. They might get DVDs of Mad Men through Netflix, but that's about it. Someone born in 1994 grew up with the Internet and is much more likely to be sitting in a dorm room downloading TV shows. (And we all know that young people have terrible taste in TV, movies, and especially music and have no respect for front lawns.)
As a technologically minded, but not-so-young-anymore consumer of media, I've notice that "online ratings" frequently give low scores to shows/movies about raising kids, getting old, dealing with mid-life issues, etc., but love crap like Pokeymon and the Jersey Shore. I'm always fascinated by the critic/audience split on Rotten Tomatoes for that reason; who actually rates stuff on Rotten Tomatoes? No one that remembers the Sixties, I bet. I haven't quantified it or anything, I just know that something that is popular on Reddit is bound to make me feel old.
Bottom line: it is ludicrous-speed absurd to prosecute somebody for publicizing already public information. If a newspaper accidentally prints the names and addresses of its entire subscriber base in the classifieds, and I call them to report it, can I then be held accountable for "releasing" the information?
"A PhD student has the right to expect a project that generates a decent body of work within those four years."
For a Masters degree, this is acceptable. For a PhD, they had better be coming up with their own idea, a plan, funding, and then have their advisor and committee evaluate during the prospectus defense. Having their topic/project dropped in their lap so they can turn the crank is not what a PhD is all about.
Funding?
There are areas of physics where the cycle time for proposals is 2 years (from announcement to release of funds) with a success rate of less than 10% for even senior people (NIH has an even lower funding rate, and an expectation that most things get proposed a couple times before being funded). Many, if not most, graduate students in science can easily get funding to cover their salary through fellowships/RA positions/TA positions, etc, but the chances of a grad student writing their own grant proposal in most subfields is pretty small. Sure, there are areas where you can do good science with dimestore materials (and a few places that specialize in that), but that's a pretty narrow slice of science in almost any field. Some of the most successful faculty I've known at one of the top science/engineering universities in the world are successful because they let their post-docs be PI on proposals (which is relatively uncommon). Then if the project is awarded the post-doc starts the work as a post-doc and manages to spin it into a faculty job.
Given the recent surge in "professional grant writing consultants" you'd have to be insane to let someone write a proposal for their own PhD research (in the US that means a bachelors student!). With funding rates around 10% excellent, well-written proposals are already routinely rejected. Being able to ask postdocs to write proposals is a luxury of being a professor at a top school where you can attract postdocs that are that competent.
A big part of the problem is that there are few negative results in scientific literature. Ever found a paper with a clear negative outcome? I didn't. This "positive bias" in scientific publications is probably causing a major blow to the efficiency of scientific research.
I think the problem is that there aren't any reputable journals that publish negative results. If you could drive your h-index publishing all the stuff that didn't work, the paucity of negative results in the literature would vanish overnight. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem to make that happen.
The easiest way to enforce that is for the awarding institution to say that if it isn't done in 4 years, it will be taken as a complete failure.
No, that rule would result in a lot of thesis committees approving completely crap theses. Believe it or not, thesis committee members are human and have a lot of difficulty telling kids that their last four (or five, or eight) years of work are worth no recognition and please leave. Thesis advisors become emotionally attached to their students and want to see the succeed/graduate, even if those students are incompetent. Sometimes you can compensate for the incompetence with time. Only rarely will a thesis committee 'over-rule' the advisor, with their input generally taking the form of 'this would become acceptable if the student adds [foo] over the next year or so.' Mandated time to completion is a recipe for diminishing the quality of theses and migrating a PhD from someone prepared for reasonably independent work to a glorified MS. Probably already moving in that direction, as many 'PhD's aren't really ready to work independently until they've finished two or more post-doctoral internships.
Except in systems where PhD contracts are fixed (e.g., most of Europe). When a PhD student starts with the certain knowledge that s/he will have to write a thesis in four years, they get super motivated to start pushing papers out around half-way through and advisers aren't so flippant about writing up results because they know they have a fixed amount of time to milk their students for results.
While you are theoretically correct, you are real-world dead-in-the-water. A big problem with getting science funding these days is what I'll call the Golden Fleece Award Effect (for Sen. William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award - wikipdeida it). While funding organizations are well aware that a solid negative result in a difficult research area is just as pertinent and useful as a positive one, Congress (the source of all funding) doesn't understand it and doesn't like it. Money out needs to be balanced by succes in. I know many researchers who do 90% of the research needed for a given NSF (or NASA) proposal before they propose it so they can (a) show it will indeed result in success, and (b) it will succeed so they can get more NSF funding. Nothing breeds lack of funding like failure. This is a dumb-ass way to do science, but since all funding comes from the Kingdom of the Dumbasses you get what you'd expect.
You hit the nail on the head.
With basic research, projecting milestones is impossible and everyone from the researchers to the project managers is well aware of that fact. Thus you end up with people proposing research that is already well past proof-of-concept (90% is atypical in my field because of the large overheads) and listing milestones for research that is already being written up. The absurdity is that these results had to be funded from another grant, where you promised to do other research that was already done, so you wind up committing fraud on two counts; 1) by doing research outside of what you proposed in order to seed results for your next grant and 2) by promising to do research that you've already done. (Problem 1 is exaserbated outside the US where continuing grants--renewals--are less common.) Open-ended, "prove your concept" funding is almost unheard of these days--everything is based on deliverables.
It's an absurd system to begin with because a funding body (Congress, the DoD, the European Commission, a parliament, a private company, whatever) are investing money in research with the expectation of seeing a return on their investment. While they can directly measure the return by looking at the commercial success of a technology that started with research grants, that process often takes decades and they cannot accurately estimate the investment. During the Cold War, Congress adopted the Infinite Horizon model that said that simply placing funds with qualified scientists was sufficient to drive discovery. But that time has passed, and we're left with an arbitrary set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to justify spending all this taxpayer money on research. Since science, by and large, hasn't changed (have idea, test idea, if it works, poop out some technology). Instead, scientists have had to change the way they construct proposals to make it appear that they are hitting KPIs. Thus you wind up in a situation where projects have to be stretched, compressed, or rearranged into bite-sized PhD theses with a postdoc sprinkled here and there that can generate papers at a regular rate. It's worse in countries with fixed PhD contracts than in the US where PhD projects are still flexible.
The root of the problem, as with most problems in modern science, is the publish or perish model. Combined with the lack of any high-impact "journals of negative results," you either have to play along or find another career; there is no room for principles in the Age of Austerity. And what's worse is that the funding agencies know exactly what is going on, all the way down to the level of project manager, but they look the other way... unless an audit comes down the pike, in which case the scientists are on the hook. It's an entire system where everyone obeys the letter of the rules while violating their spirit. The worse consequence, in my opinion, is the rise of "research for show" where projects get funded based on their ability to generate papers and media hype rather than their contributions to science. It also tends to lock people into successful (as in monetarily) lines of research instead of branching out or taking chances.
No, I'm not dismissing anyone who doesn't use Photoshop, but maybe I was conflating serious with professional, and there Photoshop is ubiquitous. If not Photoshop, then maybe Lightroom, or even Aperture for OSX users. Some kind of postprocessing is almost essential for high end photography - I see RAW files as akin to negatives that need development, and no matter how careful I am with my sensors there is always dust to edit out.
I'm sure Ken Rockwell shudders whenever someone types this phrase, but of course RAW files need postprocessing, you just don't need a pixel editor to do it. Adobe may rule the professional sphere, but there are a bunch of Lightroom/Aperture style RAW processors for every platform imaginable. I happen to use AfterShot Pro which has admittedly gone downhill since it was bought by Corel, but is still a great cross-platform RAW processor with super-fast batch output and GPU acceleration. But what works for me, works for me, you know? Some people like spending hours tweaking an image to perfection, I just slap on some curve/level adjustments and crop.
Slashdot Mirror
However, for sake of argument, let's just pretend that potential games somehow become real games (by magic, we must assume). Then what? Will people want to run them on a slow console? Why? Because it's $99?
Of course! :-)
Or you expect me to waste 600USD on a state of the art console to play these cheap games? ;-)
OUYA will not steal high end console's market. OUYA will succeed only if a latent low profile gaming market is out there, waiting to be discovered and exploited, I mean, explored. :-)
Not only that, but you're paying through the nose for increasingly locked-down consoles designed with the EA mentality of bleeding your bank account dry while you play. Personally I'm done with Nintendo/Sony/MS consoles and their push to lock you into some sort of on-line somethingaverse where you spend Itchy and Scratchy money on stuff that should have been included with the $60 game that is locked to your specific console for no justifiable reason. And as someone that travels between countries, don't get me started on region locking and the "helpful feature" of switching to the language of whatever country your IP address originated from. I don't care about on-line multiplayer, I don't want to create an avatar, I'm not interested in being called a faggot by some preteen with too much free time, I don't want to have to sign in to a server to play a single player game, and I will only tolerate DRM that is as unobtrusive as Steam... and by that I mean I'm willing to pay because Steam is actually easier than pirating.
Big point missed: it's supposidly built to run XBMC really well. It does have multiple purposes.
And that is why I ordered one. XBMC runs amazingly well on my Tegra 3 tablet; I want a little Android box that can hide behind my TV and run XBMC. Bonus for a dedicated "remote" (and navigating XBMC with a game controller is a pleasure.) Gaming is certainly a feature, but I already have a PC for that.
OT prediction: If it turns out that the act was committed by an American nutjob, as with the Oklahoma City bombing the media and political system will quickly forget about it. If it turns out that it was done by a "furriner", we'll hear lots about those awful "terrists" for some time, everyone will make vicious pronouncements, and they won't forget about it. In either case, little if anything will be done that's relevant to preventing future such acts.
This bombing is similar to the foiled MLK day bombing in Seattle that turned out to be some crazy neo-Nazi. And by "foiled" I mean someone basically stumbled on the bomb before it went off in the middle of a very crowded parade.
As a former resident of Boston, that city will always have a special place in my heart. Attacking the marathon is just the lowest of lows. I hope they catch whomever did this and lock them up for good in the rapiest prison they can find and don't turn it into some empty-headed left versus right shouting match on cable news.
For discrete molecules, you can only win a "composition of matter" patent on something that does not exist naturally. You can, however, patent a method for extracting, manipulating, packaging a natural product or even a specific use for it. The courts seem to have created a distinction between polynucleotides and small molecules; i.e., awarding a patent for a sequence of DNA is basically the same as awarding a composition of matter patent on a natural product and should not be allowed. If anything, they should treat unique, non-natural sequences under copyright law like we do with patterns of symbols/widgets that represent information. Any idiot can make DNA--I'm doing it right now--but any idiot cannot design a sequence of DNA that folds into a smiley face.
Drug companies may exchange the anion of a salt or use an ethyl group instead of a propyl group, but to get the composition of matter patent, they must prove that the new molecule rises to the level of "intellectual property" in that it changes the properties and is non-obvious to an expert. Over the years, "non-obvious" has been fairly rigorously defined by trial and error and the input of a lot of experts. Thus, I really don't see how the Supreme Court needs to get involved in this case. They are scientifically illiterate and susceptible to irrelevant philosophical arguments about life, evolution, etc. A better fix, IMHO, is to treat all polynucleotides as natural products and only allow patents on the methodology of their isolation/use/etc. If a company really, truly comes up with a crazy break-through based on a heretofore unknown sequence of DNA/RNA, then treat it like a trade secret. It works for Coke.
The current system for awarding patents for what is basically a series of A, C, G T/U that you dug out of a longer series encoded in a polymer unquestionably stifles innovation because it allows companies to block anything involving a particular gene. (They already exclude personal use for obvious reasons, i.e., you can't tell your cells to stop expressing a specific gene.) A trickier issue arises with organisms that have been designed for particular experiments, like a strain of yeast, or a mouse with a particular set of genes knocked out or a bacteria that is programmed to insert a section of DNA from a specific plasmid template. The designers of these organisms put a lot of work into them, but the final product can be cloned, not unlike an MP3 of a song. Unlike an MP3, however, they will do it themselves (given enough Barry White), so you can buy one and then just keep a population going in the lab. So how do you balance the rights of the inventor to profit without competition for a limited time (i.e., incentive) against the slippery slope of patenting entire organisms? Last I checked, they limit these patents to organisms whose genes were manipulated artificially, but it won't be long until humans fall into that category.
If you are just starting out in a tenure-track position, you have about five years to show that you are capable of pulling in funding, getting talks accepted to conferences, and publishing papers that get cited. It's easy to say that fake journals are simple to spot because "everyone" knows what the real journals are, and besides, I wouldn't waste time publishing anywhere but in the best journals... True if you are still a PhD student or postdoc, but wait until your adviser's name no longer appears on your author list. Suddenly results that you know you could have published in a top journal are being scrutinized by referees at a bread-and-butter "specialty journal" who have no reason to believe in your competence.
Now imagine you get an email from a shiny new open-access journal asking you to be on their editorial board. You think "gee, I'd like to support open-access" and hey, look at that, someone I know is already on the editorial board. Suddenly you are getting phone calls asking for the title of the talk that you have been invited to give at a conference in Vegas (for which you are certain to be billed after the fact). And you find out that your job as an editor is to submit papers to their journal. You of course don't want to, because a paper with zero citations is worse in many ways than no paper at all. But your doe-eyed grad student, who has just had a string of bad luck, really needs a paper for their CV. You feel responsible for this person's future and guilty that their project isn't producing ground-breaking papers every other week. So you let them write up a paper for this crappy journal, which is when you find out that they charge even their editorial board for "publication fees." And the best part is that, when you politely explain to them that you can't afford $3000 to publish a paper no one will ever read, they start negotiating the price with you! Classy.
Then there are the legitimate journals and conferences that are put together by, for example, a bunch of foreigners that you have never heard of. It's neigh impossible to determine the legitimacy of such things and, because of your recent experience serving on an editorial board, you are extremely skeptical. The end result is that we are right back where we started; only participating when we see other scientists who we know and respect. But, see problem above--they only need to con one person into lending their name before it cascades. (And good luck getting your name removed from their editorial board.) It creates a chilling effect for unknown/up-and-coming/young scientists to organize conferences or to try to innovate in the publication/conference sphere.
Fake journals are a symptom of a broader problem, which is for lack of a better term the "neoliberalization" of science. Each science has a few gatekeeper publishers who we all trust and who therefore has editors that we've all heard of. We read them, we cite them, and we know that any new journals they roll out will likewise be active and highly cited. If you want to have access to such journals, you must be at an academic institution that can afford massive subscription fees to thousands of journals. Papers are, however, the currency of academic science, so academics will expend enormous effort to get grant money to do research to ultimately publish a paper. These fake journals have spotted a nice opportunity to skim some of that money the same way spammers work, by relying on that 1-2% that gets duped into publishing a paper, once, or agreeing to serve on an editorial board, once, or agreeing to an "invited talk," once. And the closer they are to an industry, the worse the problem. Drug manufacturers, for example, have a profit motive to publish garbage in pseudo-peer-reviewed journals with real-sounding names.
Fake journals, the publish-or-perish model, the evaporation of research funding, the over-production of PhD scientists, etc. have combined with the power of the Internet and digital publishing to, ironically, push science back to exactly wh
Take a look at whatever latest OS you are currently running. Is it bug and exploit free? If you think it is, then come back in a year and there likely will be a long list of vulnerabilities found during that time. And they didn't just magically appear, most of these vulnerabilities are in your OS RIGHT NOW and there is a good chance the bad guys have known about them for quite a while too.
You're not kidding. I periodically take a look at logs and network traffic on my home server and it is a constant barrage of disease-ridden hookerbots soliciting my innocent electronics. An un-patched OS doesn't stand a chance.
Despite the claimed superiority of Windows security - only the tech savvy seem to maintain a healthy Windows environment. But, a housewife who doesn't understand the differences between file systems can keep a Linux installation running for years, with very little technical support from anyone else.
I gave an old laptop to a co-worker who is not even remotely tech savvy. I put a fresh Ubuntu installation on it because it was less resource intensive than Windows 7. At first she and her husband balked at the new interface, but now that they know which program to use for which task, they love it and have even switched their desktop over.
Meanwhile, I have trouble keeping my Win7 partition smooth and bloat-free and I use it literally only for Steam and games. I bitched about it on /. and was lampooned for not being willing to "just wipe the partition and reinstall Windows" every n months. I think Windows users have Stockholm syndrome.
Junk science says "hey, no problem, our model can explain that too". You mean like the way the AGW people suddenly realized that adding energy to the atmosphere meant more extreme weather, both hotter and colder, after we had some extra-cold winters? I can't say it's not reasonable, but I would have found it much more impressive if any of them had suggested this before it happened, rather than patching their theory to explain something that otherwise didn't fit.
Svante Arrhenius correctly predicted the greenhouse effect by empirical observation in the 19th Century, and he was not alone. In the 1970's climate models were already predicting catastrophic shifts in weather, which were increasingly being validated by ice core samples, etc. About that time, people with no business wading into a scientific debate (e.g., oil companies) starting muddying the waters and throwing around baseless accusations like "junk science." And now people with no scientific background whatsoever attack details of climate modelling that they don't understand.
Let me reiterate; the mechanistic underpinnings of global climate change have been known since the 19th Century. What we are arguing about now is the ability of incredibly complex models to make hyper-accurate predictions in an unfathomably complex system. Does anyone care that the Standard Model of physics has no idea what gravity is? I mean, if they can't understand something as simple as gravity, and are continually refining their models to account for new observations, should we not dismiss all of theoretical physics as "junk science?"
What fascinates me about the ignorant people who fall for this type of FUD is how little they care about any other field of science. Where are all the skeptics pushing back against the Higgs Boson research coming out of CERN? How about the debate that surrounded RNA silencing? Why don't I read articles in the popular press about the validity of Landauer approximation with respect to single-molecule (ballistic) contacts? How about the formation of charge-transfer states at donor/acceptor interfaces in excitonic solar cells? I'm sure Rush Limbaugh has an opinion about that debate, which is currently raging in the scientific literature.
Perhaps we don't drag every little detail of scientific research into the mainstream of debate because such complex issues should be left to people with decades of training and experience. It is simply impossible for a layman to seriously debate climate science because they have no fundamental understanding of how science works, what scientific debate looks like, how models of complex systems are validated and, importantly, have no idea that they are picking the same type of knits that surrounded the scientific debates that lead to all important discoveries throughout history. The very process of scientific discovery is rooted in the ability to undermine existing hypothesis with new observations until a consensus is reached. And there will always be dissenting opinions and data. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011 is a microcosm of this phenomenon.
So the burden of proof is on the person who questions someone who makes a statement without any sources?
I don't think things work like that.
You're a witch!
This isn't a scientific question, it isn't in a scientific arena, and any scientist thinking they can 'win' the debate/bet is on shaky ground. Not because the science is bad, but because it isn't about science at all...
And that is the trap that many people fall into, particularly the more science inclined, who get sucked into arguments with people whose minds are not open to change. It's like trying to dig a hole in water. Science/religion is a false dichotomy; you don't see mathematicians trying to disprove Shakespeare. Yet somehow it makes intuitive sense to many people that science should have to defend its methodology in the context of the bible, presumably because it was there first. (To be clear, I mean people on both sides of the non-debate--plenty of science-minded people feel a reflexive obligation, that I have never understood, to disprove religious accounts of history.) But we also can't escape the fact that some religious elements view science as an evil (in the biblical sense) force that undermines the word of God.
I look at it like Star Wars. Darth Vader (the church) started out as a good guy, eventually having Luke and Lea (science, which was originally fostered by the church to understand the world God created). But when Vader became evil (pick your religious atrocity) it was up to Luke and Lea to team up and stop him, with Luke eventually killing him... but not before turning him back to the light side (we're still waiting for the rational wing of the Christian faith to marginalize the fundamentalists.) At the end of the day they were both Jedi of sorts, but they were pitted against each other by the Emperor and had no real reason to hate each other. Vader even wanted to rule the galaxy as father and son, which was a nice sentiment, but also highlights how they could have worked well together; it really wasn't in either of their best interests to fight. Look at all the collateral damage: the wage slaves on the Death Star, the poor, uneducated moisture farmers that got sucked into the rebellion, even the Hutts.
I happen to be a scientist and have worked with plenty of rational Christians who still take the old view of science as trying to better understand God through empirical observation of the natural world. So I know they exist. But I'm not holding my breath for the Christian Taliban to realize the futility of arguing with people who aren't arguing back.
The implication isn't so much that someone can say "I'm looking for openfrog" and then find you through your cell phone habits. Law enforcement can easily just ask your cell carrier "where is openfrog" and they instantly know the last cell tower that you were on and track you in real time. This practice is akin to dusting for prints or checking last known addresses; it happens when there is a reason to look for an individual.
The privacy implication is that data that are considered "anonymized" are valuable commodities that drive the Big Data economy. What this research suggests is that such data are not at all anonymous and therefore probably shouldn't be treated as such. We make an implicit deal at the moment to let cell carriers monetize anonymous statistics for, in theory, lower prices, just like we agree to use "free" websites by sacrificing some personal information. But if those data can so easily be used to reveal the identities of random people, that implicit deal is invalid, and I would imagine that the majority of people would not agree to be tracked by their cell phone companies just so they can make an extra buck. I for one would find it creepy to start seeing targeted ads in GMail for the specific businesses that I pass on my way to work.
It also raises questions about regulating such data. "Anonymous usage statistics" probably aren't that closely regulated, controlled, or protected. But if a criminal organization got a hold of them they could effectively case hundreds or thousands of homes remotely, with a high degree of certainty, and with no chance of being caught (as opposed, for example, to being parked in a van across the street for a week.)
In other words, it not really about the identity of a specific individual, it is about the ability to resolve the identities of large numbers of individuals at random. It would be like having all of the usernames on /. suddenly replaced with real names.
I grew up in a "religiously oriented" part of the US and had so many Darwin fish vandalized or removed from my pickup that I eventually switched to sticker on the inside of the rear window. After that I just got nasty notes and middle fingers from other drivers.
So this surprises you, somehow? You freely acknowledge that you grew up in an area with a lot of fundamentalists, and are surprised that people might be offended by you loudly advertising your belief in something that disagrees with their beliefs?
You're as bad as the Christians, if you don't understand why they may be offended by that.
No, you inferred surprise. At the time I was a teenager and felt the need to distinguish my truck from all the Jesus fish, bumper stickers telling me I was going to hell, crucifixes hanging from rearview mirrors, etc. Now I don't own a car and live in a town that is ~80% atheist/non-religious.
And no, I'm not as bad as the Christians because I never vandalized their cars, accosted them on the street, kicked them out of the Boy Scouts, got the middle school science teacher fired, or protected the pedophile gym teacher because of their religious views. Personally I think that it is childish to flip off a stranger because something on their car offends you.
This detail difference is a strong indicator as to the motivations behind what is going on. In short, "unprofessional behavior." With all the troubles the USPS is having, these professionals should be more concerned about delivering value in the service they provide. Instead, the political affiliations (religion is politics, don't kid yourself) of participants entrusted with delivery are affecting how well they do their jobs.
Unless the "lost" packages are the result of "concerned citizens" swiping them off of porches/out of mailboxes and tossing them in the trash (or into the book-burning-mobile). I grew up in a "religiously oriented" part of the US and had so many Darwin fish vandalized or removed from my pickup that I eventually switched to sticker on the inside of the rear window. After that I just got nasty notes and middle fingers from other drivers.
I gather the way it works in Multinational Corporation Land is that the holding company with the cash is a "subsidiary" that is a PO Box in Ireland that buys a $100,000,000 asset from the USA-based parent company for $30,000,000. The USA-based company then buys the app for $30,000,000 from a third party, sells it to the subsidiary for $1 and claims a $69,999,999 loss to the IRS. The subsidiary then licenses the app back to the parent company for 110% of the revenue generated by the app in a package deal that includes transferring the $100,000,000 asset back to the USA-based company (companies can be tough negotiators with themselves). All the profits are booked in Ireland and the losses in the US and the headline is "USA-Based Company Buys $30,000,000 App." Then again, maybe I just don't understand all this complex business stuff, which is why senior executives make 400X my salary.
Free Market companies have one overriding interest; to make profits for their shareholders, that is the only reason they exist.
Not really. First, there is no such thing as a "Free Market company" because markets don't exist without rules to define them, not to mention all the legal and fiduciary infrastructure that supports and defends the ability of a private entity to extract a profit from an activity. The "Free Market" is an unobtainable ideological goal, like Nirvana (the state of being, not the band). Second, the mandates of a corporation are defined in their corporate charter, which is in turn defined by the governing body under which it was issued. There is no God of Commerce that handed down a stone tablet, "thou shall only seek profit for thy shareholders."
To avoid plugging a particular website, try searching for "corporate charters public good." One of the founding principles of the United States was to get out from underneath the tyranny of the British corporate structure, which essentially stated that corporations could do whatever they wanted in the name of profit (so long as they paid taxes to the crown). Even the Boston Tea Party was a manifestation of this desire; it was just a much a protest against the tax-exempt status of tea imported by the British East India Company as it was a protest against taxes on the colonists. As a result, American corporate charters used to put "benefit of the public good" as the first priority of a corporate entity, above even profit-making. Corporate charters also used to define a fixed life-span of a corporation to ensure that it didn't do what Google is doing, i.e., turn into an evil autocracy despite the best intentions of its founders.
I think you misunderstood; everyone under 30 uses the Internet because they grew up with it--obviously there are people over 30 on the Internet (us, for example). Boomers don't download TV shows--though they may use computers--because they didn't grow up with the Internet. And yes, Boomers are old folks now. As a younger member of Gen X (who does not work in IT), I can tell you that the vast majority of my peers are computer illiterate, don't know how to type, and never had a computer at home growing up (nor did I). Even as late as the 90's being "into computers" was still a thing, and a nerdy thing... until internet billionaires became a thing. Nowadays toddlers have smart phones.
In other words, only the segment of the population seeding/leeching torrents that is over 30 is biased towards the tech savvy. The rest are just young, which skews the predictive power of anything that measures downloads or online reviews towards young people, not computer savvy people, as would have been the case in 1998.
I have no idea. I only know that it was parodied on How I Met Your Mother, endlessly pushed at NPR pledge drives, and casually referenced in various media to which I am exposed... do young people give money to NPR?
Yep, maybe I'm just old, but I've never used any of "Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet" to watch tv. I don't know who Hannah Horvath is (and no I'm not going to google it, and not interested in anyone responding to this post to enlighten me about who she is), I've never watched an episode of Downton Abbey, ever visited Tumblr, and I don't have a twitter account. Also, I have no idea what a "kibitz with Facebook friends" is.
I'm right there with you, and I'm not even that old... young enough that I feel peer pressure to watch Downton Abbey just to get all the references to it in other shows. But I don't watch OTA TV either--I use a HTPC.
The demographic that gets/views torrents is skewed towards the technologically minded.
Then explain to me the popularity of Jersey Shore on the Pirate Bay.
The bias is not towards technologically minded people (what is this 1998?), it's towards people who use the Internet, i.e., everyone under 30. The Boomers are not likely to download torrents because they grew up with TV sets and, by and large, aren't very tech savvy. They might get DVDs of Mad Men through Netflix, but that's about it. Someone born in 1994 grew up with the Internet and is much more likely to be sitting in a dorm room downloading TV shows. (And we all know that young people have terrible taste in TV, movies, and especially music and have no respect for front lawns.)
As a technologically minded, but not-so-young-anymore consumer of media, I've notice that "online ratings" frequently give low scores to shows/movies about raising kids, getting old, dealing with mid-life issues, etc., but love crap like Pokeymon and the Jersey Shore. I'm always fascinated by the critic/audience split on Rotten Tomatoes for that reason; who actually rates stuff on Rotten Tomatoes? No one that remembers the Sixties, I bet. I haven't quantified it or anything, I just know that something that is popular on Reddit is bound to make me feel old.
Bottom line: it is ludicrous-speed absurd to prosecute somebody for publicizing already public information. If a newspaper accidentally prints the names and addresses of its entire subscriber base in the classifieds, and I call them to report it, can I then be held accountable for "releasing" the information?
They've gone to plaid!
"A PhD student has the right to expect a project that generates a decent body of work within those four years."
For a Masters degree, this is acceptable. For a PhD, they had better be coming up with their own idea, a plan, funding, and then have their advisor and committee evaluate during the prospectus defense. Having their topic/project dropped in their lap so they can turn the crank is not what a PhD is all about.
Funding?
There are areas of physics where the cycle time for proposals is 2 years (from announcement to release of funds) with a success rate of less than 10% for even senior people (NIH has an even lower funding rate, and an expectation that most things get proposed a couple times before being funded). Many, if not most, graduate students in science can easily get funding to cover their salary through fellowships/RA positions/TA positions, etc, but the chances of a grad student writing their own grant proposal in most subfields is pretty small. Sure, there are areas where you can do good science with dimestore materials (and a few places that specialize in that), but that's a pretty narrow slice of science in almost any field. Some of the most successful faculty I've known at one of the top science/engineering universities in the world are successful because they let their post-docs be PI on proposals (which is relatively uncommon). Then if the project is awarded the post-doc starts the work as a post-doc and manages to spin it into a faculty job.
Given the recent surge in "professional grant writing consultants" you'd have to be insane to let someone write a proposal for their own PhD research (in the US that means a bachelors student!). With funding rates around 10% excellent, well-written proposals are already routinely rejected. Being able to ask postdocs to write proposals is a luxury of being a professor at a top school where you can attract postdocs that are that competent.
A big part of the problem is that there are few negative results in scientific literature. Ever found a paper with a clear negative outcome? I didn't. This "positive bias" in scientific publications is probably causing a major blow to the efficiency of scientific research.
I think the problem is that there aren't any reputable journals that publish negative results. If you could drive your h-index publishing all the stuff that didn't work, the paucity of negative results in the literature would vanish overnight. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem to make that happen.
Four years? Ha! That's a good one!
The easiest way to enforce that is for the awarding institution to say that if it isn't done in 4 years, it will be taken as a complete failure.
No, that rule would result in a lot of thesis committees approving completely crap theses. Believe it or not, thesis committee members are human and have a lot of difficulty telling kids that their last four (or five, or eight) years of work are worth no recognition and please leave. Thesis advisors become emotionally attached to their students and want to see the succeed/graduate, even if those students are incompetent. Sometimes you can compensate for the incompetence with time. Only rarely will a thesis committee 'over-rule' the advisor, with their input generally taking the form of 'this would become acceptable if the student adds [foo] over the next year or so.' Mandated time to completion is a recipe for diminishing the quality of theses and migrating a PhD from someone prepared for reasonably independent work to a glorified MS. Probably already moving in that direction, as many 'PhD's aren't really ready to work independently until they've finished two or more post-doctoral internships.
Except in systems where PhD contracts are fixed (e.g., most of Europe). When a PhD student starts with the certain knowledge that s/he will have to write a thesis in four years, they get super motivated to start pushing papers out around half-way through and advisers aren't so flippant about writing up results because they know they have a fixed amount of time to milk their students for results.
While you are theoretically correct, you are real-world dead-in-the-water. A big problem with getting science funding these days is what I'll call the Golden Fleece Award Effect (for Sen. William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award - wikipdeida it). While funding organizations are well aware that a solid negative result in a difficult research area is just as pertinent and useful as a positive one, Congress (the source of all funding) doesn't understand it and doesn't like it. Money out needs to be balanced by succes in. I know many researchers who do 90% of the research needed for a given NSF (or NASA) proposal before they propose it so they can (a) show it will indeed result in success, and (b) it will succeed so they can get more NSF funding. Nothing breeds lack of funding like failure. This is a dumb-ass way to do science, but since all funding comes from the Kingdom of the Dumbasses you get what you'd expect.
You hit the nail on the head.
With basic research, projecting milestones is impossible and everyone from the researchers to the project managers is well aware of that fact. Thus you end up with people proposing research that is already well past proof-of-concept (90% is atypical in my field because of the large overheads) and listing milestones for research that is already being written up. The absurdity is that these results had to be funded from another grant, where you promised to do other research that was already done, so you wind up committing fraud on two counts; 1) by doing research outside of what you proposed in order to seed results for your next grant and 2) by promising to do research that you've already done. (Problem 1 is exaserbated outside the US where continuing grants--renewals--are less common.) Open-ended, "prove your concept" funding is almost unheard of these days--everything is based on deliverables.
It's an absurd system to begin with because a funding body (Congress, the DoD, the European Commission, a parliament, a private company, whatever) are investing money in research with the expectation of seeing a return on their investment. While they can directly measure the return by looking at the commercial success of a technology that started with research grants, that process often takes decades and they cannot accurately estimate the investment. During the Cold War, Congress adopted the Infinite Horizon model that said that simply placing funds with qualified scientists was sufficient to drive discovery. But that time has passed, and we're left with an arbitrary set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to justify spending all this taxpayer money on research. Since science, by and large, hasn't changed (have idea, test idea, if it works, poop out some technology). Instead, scientists have had to change the way they construct proposals to make it appear that they are hitting KPIs. Thus you wind up in a situation where projects have to be stretched, compressed, or rearranged into bite-sized PhD theses with a postdoc sprinkled here and there that can generate papers at a regular rate. It's worse in countries with fixed PhD contracts than in the US where PhD projects are still flexible.
The root of the problem, as with most problems in modern science, is the publish or perish model. Combined with the lack of any high-impact "journals of negative results," you either have to play along or find another career; there is no room for principles in the Age of Austerity. And what's worse is that the funding agencies know exactly what is going on, all the way down to the level of project manager, but they look the other way... unless an audit comes down the pike, in which case the scientists are on the hook. It's an entire system where everyone obeys the letter of the rules while violating their spirit. The worse consequence, in my opinion, is the rise of "research for show" where projects get funded based on their ability to generate papers and media hype rather than their contributions to science. It also tends to lock people into successful (as in monetarily) lines of research instead of branching out or taking chances.
No, I'm not dismissing anyone who doesn't use Photoshop, but maybe I was conflating serious with professional, and there Photoshop is ubiquitous. If not Photoshop, then maybe Lightroom, or even Aperture for OSX users. Some kind of postprocessing is almost essential for high end photography - I see RAW files as akin to negatives that need development, and no matter how careful I am with my sensors there is always dust to edit out.
I'm sure Ken Rockwell shudders whenever someone types this phrase, but of course RAW files need postprocessing, you just don't need a pixel editor to do it. Adobe may rule the professional sphere, but there are a bunch of Lightroom/Aperture style RAW processors for every platform imaginable. I happen to use AfterShot Pro which has admittedly gone downhill since it was bought by Corel, but is still a great cross-platform RAW processor with super-fast batch output and GPU acceleration. But what works for me, works for me, you know? Some people like spending hours tweaking an image to perfection, I just slap on some curve/level adjustments and crop.