At my university, which shall remain nameless, the use of P2P is a cause for terminating your contract (if you're an employee like me) or revoking your right to study (if you're a student).
It's banned because most of the traffic is illegal and the harm to the legal filetrading is negligible. If you want to transfer large files from your dorm computer to another computer on the campus, you can always use scp/ftp. I can't say that I disagree with this logic.
I bet some people were saying similar things about the Japanese car-industry - which eventually went out to beat the crap out of the original US car manufacturers.
And why is that? Developing space technology can only be a good thing.
If the US and Russia are too lazy to get off their collective asses and meet the challenge, it's their fault - not China's, India's or other more innovative countries fault.
With a cellphone (and a working network) you can make a call anywhere, anytime. You're also available whenever you choose to be and you don't have to sit by the phone waiting for an important call.
Furthermore, SMS/texting is a truly wonderful for short, non-urgent messages like telling a friend where to meet you.
Owning a cellphone has nothing to do with coolness. That phase passed already in the 1990s.
Now everybody from kids to senior citizens have a cellphone or two at home.
Having an experimental setup that no-one else in the world has is certainly a one way of getting a Nature of Science paper. However, to say that it's easier is quite an overstatement - unless you think it's easy to get funding for a prototype system costing several millions of USD.
I don't think theory is evil. I'm just pissed off because experimentalists in general get dissed by the theoreticians because we "don't really understand the physics" (ie. we can't write down the equations on the spot or do calculations which, as everybody knows, the real physics is all about).
And you will hopefully agree that superconductivity as such is quite important.
It has potential to be quite important. That potential is still mostly un
can admire in a theoretician; in some sense, he is above this world: shy with other people and bold in developing new theories (and very british).
Pure experimentalists may be useful, but without theoretical grasp they are no great physicists.
I don't quite know what to make of this sentence.
Firstly, what would you qualify as "theoretical grasp"? In the course of my PhD studies (in solid state physics as well) I took serious postgrad courses in theoretical quantum physics which was my favourite subject. Today, several years after defending my PhD thesis, I've noticed that most experimentalists tend to have melded all this knowledge into a "physical intuition". While we couldn't write down the equations on the spot, we have developed a very good hunch of how the nature behaves (in general) under various circumstances and have learnt how test/eliminate our ideas experimentally so that the results are unambiguous. When you get unambiguous results, you don't need to do any further calculations.
Secondly, let's twist your sentence a bit. Let's say "Pure theoreticians may be useful, but without any grasp of the experiments they are no great physicists". How does that sound to you? All physics comes down to comparing theoretical predictions to experimental observations - how can you do such a comparision if you have no idea how to measure things?
I have utmost respect for a theoretician who takes time to understand the experimental process. They are, however, extremely hard to find.
One need to have an theoretical understanding of how the different tissues influence the magnetic field they are in, a theory to seperate the noise from the relevant signals
Wasn't this years Nobel Price in Medicine given just for this particular theory?
My point was: how did this years Physics Nobel Prize winner's theory benefit the whole mankind?
I have no trouble with this winner if the theory can be used, for instance, to predict something concrete such as for predicting which materials would be good high TC superconductors. Then it has clearly benefitted the mankind.
It seems as if some experimentalists carry a large chip on the shoulder???
It's because we face unfair competition from the theoretical groups. This, incidentally, is driving us to corporate money which, in large amounts, always damages your objectivity. See what has happened to the biochem/drug research.
Theory and Experiment (and today also computational physics) should be COMPLEMENTARY to each other.
I fully agree with this. Yet, if you pick up a copy of Phys. Rev. B or even PRL and compare the number of purely theoretical papers to the number of purely empirical papers you'll note that the purely theoretical papers are in a significant majority.
I've submitted several purely empirical papers to PRB and a couple papers to PRL and, with one exception, they came back with a requirement to include DFT calculations - just to "strengthen the discussion". Huh? As if one could just simply go and start doing ab initio calculations. For some reason, the same rules do not seem to apply to purely theoretical papers. No-one's asking these guys to go and conduct some experiments just to "strengthen their discussion".
"I measured this and look how cute it is".
Which is not a good experimental paper.
Of course you'll have to discuss the physics behind the phenomena, but the point is that you shouldn't always need to do actual calculations yourself. Journal papers are supposed to inspire further research, so why should an experimentalist be required to carry out calculations when a theoretician, after reading the paper, can do the same? In an empirical paper, discussion based on simple, well established physical principles should be more than sufficient.
I haven't read the book, but at first glance it sounds rather odd thing to say that physical science is becoming impossible. There are vast gaps in the very fundamentals of even a venerable field such as the solid state physics. New techniques have such as femtosecond laser spectroscopy and coincidence electron spectroscopies are being developed. I do not see any practical reasons to say that empirical science is dying. If there are practical problems with the more esoteric fields such as cosmology or fundamental particles research, they've probably surfaced simply because our instrumentation has not yet matured to the required level.
One financial threat that I've personally seen and felt is that all physical science is accountable for what has been achieved by the given funding. In other words: scientists must be able to show "profitability". The problem is that scientific profitability is hard to measure in an objective way. In practise, it is often calculated by summing the number of your publications, supervised theses and various other activity such as organizing conferences with ad hoc weight factors. In more enlightened systems the number of publications is weighed by a quality factor such as journal's impact factor (again one may argue that impact factors do not tell the whole truth) but not everywhere.
The trouble here is that how can you compare the profitability of a theoretical and an experimental group? It's hard to measure anything today without spending several millions of USD on hardware and salaries. Computing, on the other hand, is cheap and most theoretically oriented groups simply have to worry about their salaries - the local university or a national computing centre will give them all the CPU time in the world for small change. Basically it boils down to this: if you do theoretical work you don't have to pay for the infrastructure.
So, when an empirical group and a theoretical group apply for money how do you compare the proposals fairly? The empirical group may require the salaries for, let's say, 5 scientists and they need $800,000 for new hardware to publish anything at all. That's over 1 million USD. Theoretical group's infrastructure, on the other hand, will require funding for the salaries and a few inexpensive Linux PCs ($500-$1000) to submit jobs to the supercomputer.
Which group do you think will be the first one to publish anything, which one will produce more papers per year and which one of them has more potential for growth in the near future?
Nobel Prize winners should be people whose invention "benefitted the whole mankind". Did these guys theoretical research achieve that?
MRI is a great application but how much it is due to the actual theory? Incidently, the inventors of MRI already got their prize this year.
I think this prize was given out too early anyway. The jury is still out when it comes to the widespread applicability of high temperature superconductors.
** BEGIN RANT **
On a completely another note, I must confess that it often feels like that the term Physics has come to mean - at least in the layman's mind - a theoretician scribbling away on a blackboard or crunching numbers. I keep running into 3rd-4th year Physics majors who think that you're not doing real Physics unless you write and solve equations. As an experimentalist this annoys me to no end. Maths is only a language and the most elegant Physics papers are those in which the experimental results themselves speak for themselves. What is the added-value in complicated calculations in such studies? Yet, if you submit good purely experimental papers to respected journals the reviewers will bitch at you for not doing any theoretical calculations "to gain a holistic view". That's total bullshit. When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?
Perhaps GIMP's weird menu system is more logical, but to most people it's confusing.People in general tend to see confusing GUIs as a bad and unconfortable.
A good GUI is the one with which most of the people are already familiar with. Tweak it slightly and the customers will follow, but radical changes will only serve to annoy people.
If you want to develop your GUI do it like you'd boil a frog - slowly.
Re:SVG a Huge plus
on
GIMP goes SVG
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
it is because it's what they are used to, not because of any inherent advantage to it.
I'm constantly amazed by this argument.
As if there was an objective way of comparing user interfaces. The only real measure of how good an interface is is how comfortable people feel while using it.
There's nothing wrong in liking a GUI because you're used to it. However, trying to coerce people to start using "a better GUI" (be it Gimp vs. Photoshop or X desktop vs. Win GUI) is wrong. There's no "better GUI" than the one you're already familiar with!
Slashdot Mirror
Calm down, think of Hilary Rosen and tell us a) who is Bryanna, b) what does she look like and c) why would it bed to get reamed by your boss?
All P2P. No exceptions because most files traded will be illegal.
However, equations will not convert properly in either direction and I had to drop it.
It's banned because most of the traffic is illegal and the harm to the legal filetrading is negligible. If you want to transfer large files from your dorm computer to another computer on the campus, you can always use scp/ftp. I can't say that I disagree with this logic.
Looks like at least two moderators need to get the sand out of their vagina today...
At least I can't resize the skinned mode window when I'm watching DVD or DivX. I have to use either the full mode or watch video in the encoded size.
Use ZoomPlayer instead of Windows Media Player.
Evil nations should not have access to space.
Only the good nations should have access to space.
That, if something, is inane sophistry.
I bet some people were saying similar things about the Japanese car-industry - which eventually went out to beat the crap out of the original US car manufacturers.
And why is that? Developing space technology can only be a good thing.
If the US and Russia are too lazy to get off their collective asses and meet the challenge, it's their fault - not China's, India's or other more innovative countries fault.
Maybe we can get the space race started again.
I'd add these: "Has Dolts", "Halt Sods", "Stash Old" and "Ass Ltd Ho".
Read more about Operation Northwoods on Google.
Furthermore, SMS/texting is a truly wonderful for short, non-urgent messages like telling a friend where to meet you.
Owning a cellphone has nothing to do with coolness. That phase passed already in the 1990s. Now everybody from kids to senior citizens have a cellphone or two at home.
Having an experimental setup that no-one else in the world has is certainly a one way of getting a Nature of Science paper. However, to say that it's easier is quite an overstatement - unless you think it's easy to get funding for a prototype system costing several millions of USD.
I don't think theory is evil. I'm just pissed off because experimentalists in general get dissed by the theoreticians because we "don't really understand the physics" (ie. we can't write down the equations on the spot or do calculations which, as everybody knows, the real physics is all about).
Yes, it is an ego thing, too. So what?
It has potential to be quite important. That potential is still mostly un
can admire in a theoretician; in some sense, he is above this world: shy with other people and bold in developing new theories (and very british).
Pure experimentalists may be useful, but without theoretical grasp they are no great physicists.
I don't quite know what to make of this sentence.
Firstly, what would you qualify as "theoretical grasp"? In the course of my PhD studies (in solid state physics as well) I took serious postgrad courses in theoretical quantum physics which was my favourite subject. Today, several years after defending my PhD thesis, I've noticed that most experimentalists tend to have melded all this knowledge into a "physical intuition". While we couldn't write down the equations on the spot, we have developed a very good hunch of how the nature behaves (in general) under various circumstances and have learnt how test/eliminate our ideas experimentally so that the results are unambiguous. When you get unambiguous results, you don't need to do any further calculations.
Secondly, let's twist your sentence a bit. Let's say "Pure theoreticians may be useful, but without any grasp of the experiments they are no great physicists". How does that sound to you? All physics comes down to comparing theoretical predictions to experimental observations - how can you do such a comparision if you have no idea how to measure things?
I have utmost respect for a theoretician who takes time to understand the experimental process. They are, however, extremely hard to find.
Wasn't this years Nobel Price in Medicine given just for this particular theory?
My point was: how did this years Physics Nobel Prize winner's theory benefit the whole mankind?
I have no trouble with this winner if the theory can be used, for instance, to predict something concrete such as for predicting which materials would be good high TC superconductors. Then it has clearly benefitted the mankind.
It's because we face unfair competition from the theoretical groups. This, incidentally, is driving us to corporate money which, in large amounts, always damages your objectivity. See what has happened to the biochem/drug research.
Theory and Experiment (and today also computational physics) should be COMPLEMENTARY to each other.
I fully agree with this. Yet, if you pick up a copy of Phys. Rev. B or even PRL and compare the number of purely theoretical papers to the number of purely empirical papers you'll note that the purely theoretical papers are in a significant majority.
I've submitted several purely empirical papers to PRB and a couple papers to PRL and, with one exception, they came back with a requirement to include DFT calculations - just to "strengthen the discussion". Huh? As if one could just simply go and start doing ab initio calculations. For some reason, the same rules do not seem to apply to purely theoretical papers. No-one's asking these guys to go and conduct some experiments just to "strengthen their discussion".
"I measured this and look how cute it is".
Which is not a good experimental paper.
Of course you'll have to discuss the physics behind the phenomena, but the point is that you shouldn't always need to do actual calculations yourself. Journal papers are supposed to inspire further research, so why should an experimentalist be required to carry out calculations when a theoretician, after reading the paper, can do the same? In an empirical paper, discussion based on simple, well established physical principles should be more than sufficient.
I haven't read the book, but at first glance it sounds rather odd thing to say that physical science is becoming impossible. There are vast gaps in the very fundamentals of even a venerable field such as the solid state physics. New techniques have such as femtosecond laser spectroscopy and coincidence electron spectroscopies are being developed. I do not see any practical reasons to say that empirical science is dying. If there are practical problems with the more esoteric fields such as cosmology or fundamental particles research, they've probably surfaced simply because our instrumentation has not yet matured to the required level.
One financial threat that I've personally seen and felt is that all physical science is accountable for what has been achieved by the given funding. In other words: scientists must be able to show "profitability". The problem is that scientific profitability is hard to measure in an objective way. In practise, it is often calculated by summing the number of your publications, supervised theses and various other activity such as organizing conferences with ad hoc weight factors. In more enlightened systems the number of publications is weighed by a quality factor such as journal's impact factor (again one may argue that impact factors do not tell the whole truth) but not everywhere.
The trouble here is that how can you compare the profitability of a theoretical and an experimental group? It's hard to measure anything today without spending several millions of USD on hardware and salaries. Computing, on the other hand, is cheap and most theoretically oriented groups simply have to worry about their salaries - the local university or a national computing centre will give them all the CPU time in the world for small change. Basically it boils down to this: if you do theoretical work you don't have to pay for the infrastructure.
So, when an empirical group and a theoretical group apply for money how do you compare the proposals fairly? The empirical group may require the salaries for, let's say, 5 scientists and they need $800,000 for new hardware to publish anything at all. That's over 1 million USD. Theoretical group's infrastructure, on the other hand, will require funding for the salaries and a few inexpensive Linux PCs ($500-$1000) to submit jobs to the supercomputer.
Which group do you think will be the first one to publish anything, which one will produce more papers per year and which one of them has more potential for growth in the near future?
Ah, yes, would you go as far as saying that the interpretation is incomplete unless it is formulated mathematically?
Are you trying to say that they would not be fair and balanced?
MRI is a great application but how much it is due to the actual theory? Incidently, the inventors of MRI already got their prize this year.
I think this prize was given out too early anyway. The jury is still out when it comes to the widespread applicability of high temperature superconductors.
** BEGIN RANT **
On a completely another note, I must confess that it often feels like that the term Physics has come to mean - at least in the layman's mind - a theoretician scribbling away on a blackboard or crunching numbers. I keep running into 3rd-4th year Physics majors who think that you're not doing real Physics unless you write and solve equations. As an experimentalist this annoys me to no end. Maths is only a language and the most elegant Physics papers are those in which the experimental results themselves speak for themselves. What is the added-value in complicated calculations in such studies? Yet, if you submit good purely experimental papers to respected journals the reviewers will bitch at you for not doing any theoretical calculations "to gain a holistic view". That's total bullshit. When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?
** END RANT **
Perhaps GIMP's weird menu system is more logical, but to most people it's confusing.People in general tend to see confusing GUIs as a bad and unconfortable.
A good GUI is the one with which most of the people are already familiar with. Tweak it slightly and the customers will follow, but radical changes will only serve to annoy people. If you want to develop your GUI do it like you'd boil a frog - slowly.
I'm constantly amazed by this argument.
As if there was an objective way of comparing user interfaces. The only real measure of how good an interface is is how comfortable people feel while using it.
There's nothing wrong in liking a GUI because you're used to it. However, trying to coerce people to start using "a better GUI" (be it Gimp vs. Photoshop or X desktop vs. Win GUI) is wrong. There's no "better GUI" than the one you're already familiar with!
Ever since W2K Windows has been an exceedingly stable desktop platform.