I know a lot of academics are becoming annoyed by the publishers and their business models. Frankly its a disgrace that most research isn't freely available to the general public. More often than not they have paid for it via taxation and university fees (most research, at least in europe where i am, is taxpayer funded). Add to that the fact that the academics do the work, write the papers, review the papers (for free i might add) and mostly act as journal editors (for free again), and its hard to see really what the publishers are doing beyond hosting the PDF.
I'll divide my response to this into two categories: journals published by nonprofit academic societies, and for-profit journals.
For the most part, the for-profits can, in my opinion, go die in a fire. So there's that.
The non-profits are much more complicated. These organizations aren't spending lots of money on yachts for CEOs, they're using their funds for (in many cases) education, running conferences, scholarships, and the costs of running and organizing the journals. If you reduce the costs of the journals, a laudable goal of course, you reduce the funds available for their other goals. Also, I doubt highly it's as easy to operate a well-run organization as you portray. It takes copy editors, layout editors, graphics people, and people to simply keep the gears turning. Academics do not do these things.
So basically, the answer is "it's complicated, and it's harder than you think."
They won't even need to know what a DNS is. They'll just download the 'get your free music' extension for firefox. Which will, of course, require them to download a browser that isn't IE, but their nephew/sister/uncle/cool geek in their dorm knows how to do that stuff so its OK.
Sort of lowers the technical bar for circumventing this crap. It'll also move the fight from DNS to the browser level, which will be fuggin' awesome.
That's a very good synopsis. It seems very dysfunctional that the USPTO can't accomplish what a message board can - namely, accumulate a number of folks with depth of experience who can rattle off prior art from the tops of their heads.
It seems to me that the patent system should contain a component of peer review. Allow any interested parties to submit 1-page briefs over a 1-month period, limit one per company to prevent DoSing of the poor inventor. Then allow inventor to respond to the briefs as to how his invention doesn't run afoul of the claims in the briefs. Independent (and blind) to that, a USPTO staffer does a cursory search of existing patents and a general internet search, using maybe half a day including report. That report and the briefs are submitted to the reviewer, who assesses whether the invention deserves a patent.
Seems to me that kind of approach would allow all stakeholders to provide input before the patent is granted, and would significantly reduce the workload on the USPTO.
Search for the term "Aluminum Celmet" and all the returns are from the last month or so, all reference the company mentioned here, and are either press releases, stories on tech sites made from press releases, or astroturf on forums. The term "celmet" appears to be a trademark of the company.
I'm very interested in novel battery research, but this one tastes like Ovaltine.
While you make good points about the lack of any actual harm due to NK's chairmanship, it's probably due more to the general uselessness of this sort of activity than the design of the committee. Nuclear disarmament will not arise due to committee hearings at the UN. Hell, nothing of any political significance will come from UN committees, save for sternly worded declarations aimed at tyrants who could care less. Let NK lead this committee permanently if keeps the nutjobs occupied.
You're right about the blood pressure being wasted on this, but possibly for different reasons than you intended.
I don't know enough about the technology - and the linked article wasn't informative - but do the right/left eye lines differ by more than just the depth? If they also contain additional detail, then this sort of like 1080i with your brain doing the interleaving, right?
Internships are like poison to a meritocracy based society..... They allow richer parents to use both their money and connections to manoeuvre their children into jobs that have wealth, power or both. This comes at the expense of poorer and middle class children who can not bankroll their children in adulthood or do not move in the right social circles.
180 degrees the wrong way, speaking from experience. Internships allow talented undergrads the chance to get the contacts that they never made growing up, not being rich and not having had the opportunity to get into blue-blood colleges.
It worked for me. I grew up on the low end of middle class. My parents knew nobody of use from a 'connection' standpoint. I did good work, and got attention from my profs. I worked with them. They were kind enough to use *their* connections to get me a good internship, which (combined with my abilities) got me into any grad school I wanted.
So really, you're dead wrong. The rich kids don't need the internships. You do. Use them.
Honestly, without an internship, how do you think you're getting a decent job upon graduation? From an employer's standpoint, we don't relish hiring kids straight out of college, because the arrogance/experience ratio is usually way out of whack. They think they know everything, whereas they usually know little about how the real world works. The first year out of college is usually worthless to an employer because of the time they spend training a new hire. Getting real experience before graduating is a good way to show that you know how to work in a real employment environment.
Caveat: as stated, do be careful with unpaid internships, which can obviously be exploitive.
"Intended career?" Are you fucking kidding? This isn't 1950. The average American changes jobs/job categories every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s. "Intended career" is BS from job placement offices at Unis that are behind the curve. Unless you want to become a physician etc., you need to prepare yourself for work in a variety of fields which are themselves changing, not an "intended career" in a field that won't even exist in five years.
That's a bullshit statistic. People don't just toss in the towel on that lucrative chemical engineering career to go run a gas station. When people 'change careers', it's either because A) their new career is highly related to their old one (hence not much of a change), B) their old career disappeared, C) they sucked at their old career, or D) their old career wasn't much of a career.
So if you intend to have a career, yes, *you need real experience before you graduate*. Internships are a great way to get that. THough I would strongly recommend trying to get one that pays something, even if it's not much, because it makes the employer have skin in the game.
For that, an internship as a paid slave is worth... exactly how much?
If it gives you experience, contacts, and an advantage over the other inexperienced college grads in the employment pool, it's worth a great deal indeed. I mean, what's your alternate plan? Graduate with a middling GPA, no experience, no contacts, and head straight for the unemployment line? This isn't 1998 anymore.
As is the attitude that people don't deserve better until they're up the ladder pissing down on little people. It takes everyone from the laborer to the CEO to make a successful company and ALL of these people deserve a fair deal and some dignity.
You deserve what you're worth. If this guy is worth more, he should certainly go take a better offer.
For example: contacting or ridiculing teachers in an inappropriate way (yes, these are employees and they have rights)
There is no right to not be ridiculed. In fact, satire is protected speech under the First Amendment, as identified in Falwell v. Flynt, among other decisions.
Unless the speech moves into the realm of illegal harassment or libel/slander, then the school suspended him for doing something *legal* while not at school. That does indeed sound preposterous.
Honest question. Are they open-sourcing the language spec (and what does that even mean)? Are they open-sourcing the compiler? The libraries used to actually build the code?
I thought the whole point of a command line was that you didn't have to look at it while it was doing its automated thing
Some people (like me) prefer it because they can type known commands faster than they can navigate a series of menus. This would be a great addition to currently available terminals for folks like me. I would enjoy the extended graphical capabilities while still being able to type commands.
Note I said 'addition' - I sure as heck want my old-school terminal around at times. The density of text is nice for scrolling back through commands and system output, among other things.
...and grandchildren of artists who recorded songs 60 years ago. They're entitled to an undeserved life of comfort based on modern, perpetually-temporary copyright terms! After all, what do you want them to do - go get a job or something?
Sony alleges that 'Anonymous' did it; that clearly implies the flavor of the group that has become surprisingly centralized for such a decentralized organization. That core group is presumably the one that responded. Within this context, 'Anonymous' must mean the somewhat centrally led version, otherwise the central question ('Did Anonymous do this?') isn't even well posed.
Put another way, if the allegation itself can't even be properly bounded, it doesn't really need to responded to. And if Sony can't do better than 'Anonymous did it', they certainly won't get to issuing subpoenas, asset seizures, or criminal charges anyway, making the point moot anyway.
Basically, put up or shut up, Sony. You need better evidence than 'Kilroy was here'.
I've heard this before about visual languages, in a couple of different field, but it never pans out. National Instruments tries it with LabVIEW, for example. Unfortunately, dragging around boxes and drawing wire is an even clunkier substitute for odd-looking but simple code like "x=power(10,2)"
Labview is the most gawdawful scourge released upon the computing world. Once I installed Labview on a machine with the defective Pentium chip running Windows Me. It disappeared instantly in a puff of smoke and brimstone. 12 hours later, I got an email from Satan himself telling me that he just got his first computer. I can only draw conclusions.
Yeah, this is a tough one, too. Since no evidence exists for alternative universes, either preceding or parallel, these things cannot be tested. Just because a parent universe could exist doesn't mean it did exist. The only evidence available is that the universe we live in is the only universe that does or has ever existed.
Well, that's something this experiment would be designed to answer, actually. If a black hole can - through exceedingly careful experimentation - be proven to predate the universe, that would be evidence there. Besides, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It simply means that we don't know, because, absent the possibilities raised in the article, the notion of parallel universes doesn't appear to be testable.
So when ordering possibilities, the parent universe and a lineage of universes falls lower in likelihood than the current universe is the only one, ever.
By the same reasoning you provided above, you also have no evidence by which to handicap that race. We simply don't know. If nothing else, you're left with the very sticky question of 'where the hell did the universe come from'?
Just because this universe expands forever, doesn't mean its parent did. Could just be this particular universe is the end of the line of its lineage. So I think the question is still quite relevant.
Bush didn't Clinton didn't, Reagan didn't Carter didn't. non of the other white guys have ha to do it. you get a non white guy with a non anglo saxon name in office and all the racists start a birther movement because they can't believe a non white guy was born here. Think about it why was Obama singled out above all others? was it name? was it color? the fear was irrational and stupid.
Or maybe the fact that one of his parents was born overseas, and his parents lived overseas a fairly substantial amount of time before he was born? I mean, let's make sure to run in and play the race card before observing the obvious. Given his circumstances, it's quite reasonable that the circumstances of his birth would be subjected to a bit more rigor.
Note I'm not claiming he was or wasn't born in Hawaii/overseas, but I can understand the desire to take a good look at it and check.
The people who died that day were liberal and conservative, but all were American. Bin Laden hated us all, just because we were American. So please, no political games here. This isn't about left and right, this is about a cowardly attack on all of us, as Americans. As a hardcore liberal, I embrace my fellow Americans who are conservative on this good news for us all.
This is the God's honest truth. Too much fucking sniping lately (lately=last 15 years or so). So long as neither side tries to use it for political gain, just let it be what it is. And I say this as a Chaotic Libertarian (if D&D made political classes).
From a practical standpoint, I don't know how much this actually makes us more or less safe. AQ has been marginalized for quite a number of years as an international force anyway. On the other hand, might there be reprisals? But it's still nice to finish the damn job 10 years later.
Thanks for the story too. Very sobering story, but it helps us remember that all this petty shit we deal with means nothing. I still have my copy of WSJ from 9/11 as well as 9/12. It's fascinating to look at the headlines from 9/11 and to see how completely meaningless all of it was. 4 hours later, none of it mattered.
Slashdot Mirror
I know a lot of academics are becoming annoyed by the publishers and their business models. Frankly its a disgrace that most research isn't freely available to the general public. More often than not they have paid for it via taxation and university fees (most research, at least in europe where i am, is taxpayer funded). Add to that the fact that the academics do the work, write the papers, review the papers (for free i might add) and mostly act as journal editors (for free again), and its hard to see really what the publishers are doing beyond hosting the PDF.
I'll divide my response to this into two categories: journals published by nonprofit academic societies, and for-profit journals.
For the most part, the for-profits can, in my opinion, go die in a fire. So there's that.
The non-profits are much more complicated. These organizations aren't spending lots of money on yachts for CEOs, they're using their funds for (in many cases) education, running conferences, scholarships, and the costs of running and organizing the journals. If you reduce the costs of the journals, a laudable goal of course, you reduce the funds available for their other goals. Also, I doubt highly it's as easy to operate a well-run organization as you portray. It takes copy editors, layout editors, graphics people, and people to simply keep the gears turning. Academics do not do these things.
So basically, the answer is "it's complicated, and it's harder than you think."
I think it would be better to accuse him of truifying evidence.
They won't even need to know what a DNS is. They'll just download the 'get your free music' extension for firefox. Which will, of course, require them to download a browser that isn't IE, but their nephew/sister/uncle/cool geek in their dorm knows how to do that stuff so its OK.
Sort of lowers the technical bar for circumventing this crap. It'll also move the fight from DNS to the browser level, which will be fuggin' awesome.
That's a very good synopsis. It seems very dysfunctional that the USPTO can't accomplish what a message board can - namely, accumulate a number of folks with depth of experience who can rattle off prior art from the tops of their heads.
It seems to me that the patent system should contain a component of peer review. Allow any interested parties to submit 1-page briefs over a 1-month period, limit one per company to prevent DoSing of the poor inventor. Then allow inventor to respond to the briefs as to how his invention doesn't run afoul of the claims in the briefs. Independent (and blind) to that, a USPTO staffer does a cursory search of existing patents and a general internet search, using maybe half a day including report. That report and the briefs are submitted to the reviewer, who assesses whether the invention deserves a patent.
Seems to me that kind of approach would allow all stakeholders to provide input before the patent is granted, and would significantly reduce the workload on the USPTO.
Search for the term "Aluminum Celmet" and all the returns are from the last month or so, all reference the company mentioned here, and are either press releases, stories on tech sites made from press releases, or astroturf on forums. The term "celmet" appears to be a trademark of the company.
I'm very interested in novel battery research, but this one tastes like Ovaltine.
While you make good points about the lack of any actual harm due to NK's chairmanship, it's probably due more to the general uselessness of this sort of activity than the design of the committee. Nuclear disarmament will not arise due to committee hearings at the UN. Hell, nothing of any political significance will come from UN committees, save for sternly worded declarations aimed at tyrants who could care less. Let NK lead this committee permanently if keeps the nutjobs occupied.
You're right about the blood pressure being wasted on this, but possibly for different reasons than you intended.
I don't know enough about the technology - and the linked article wasn't informative - but do the right/left eye lines differ by more than just the depth? If they also contain additional detail, then this sort of like 1080i with your brain doing the interleaving, right?
Internships are like poison to a meritocracy based society..... They allow richer parents to use both their money and connections to manoeuvre their children into jobs that have wealth, power or both. This comes at the expense of poorer and middle class children who can not bankroll their children in adulthood or do not move in the right social circles.
180 degrees the wrong way, speaking from experience. Internships allow talented undergrads the chance to get the contacts that they never made growing up, not being rich and not having had the opportunity to get into blue-blood colleges.
It worked for me. I grew up on the low end of middle class. My parents knew nobody of use from a 'connection' standpoint. I did good work, and got attention from my profs. I worked with them. They were kind enough to use *their* connections to get me a good internship, which (combined with my abilities) got me into any grad school I wanted.
So really, you're dead wrong. The rich kids don't need the internships. You do. Use them.
Honestly, without an internship, how do you think you're getting a decent job upon graduation? From an employer's standpoint, we don't relish hiring kids straight out of college, because the arrogance/experience ratio is usually way out of whack. They think they know everything, whereas they usually know little about how the real world works. The first year out of college is usually worthless to an employer because of the time they spend training a new hire. Getting real experience before graduating is a good way to show that you know how to work in a real employment environment.
Caveat: as stated, do be careful with unpaid internships, which can obviously be exploitive.
"Intended career?" Are you fucking kidding? This isn't 1950. The average American changes jobs/job categories every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s. "Intended career" is BS from job placement offices at Unis that are behind the curve. Unless you want to become a physician etc., you need to prepare yourself for work in a variety of fields which are themselves changing, not an "intended career" in a field that won't even exist in five years.
That's a bullshit statistic. People don't just toss in the towel on that lucrative chemical engineering career to go run a gas station. When people 'change careers', it's either because A) their new career is highly related to their old one (hence not much of a change), B) their old career disappeared, C) they sucked at their old career, or D) their old career wasn't much of a career.
So if you intend to have a career, yes, *you need real experience before you graduate*. Internships are a great way to get that. THough I would strongly recommend trying to get one that pays something, even if it's not much, because it makes the employer have skin in the game.
For that, an internship as a paid slave is worth... exactly how much?
If it gives you experience, contacts, and an advantage over the other inexperienced college grads in the employment pool, it's worth a great deal indeed. I mean, what's your alternate plan? Graduate with a middling GPA, no experience, no contacts, and head straight for the unemployment line? This isn't 1998 anymore.
As is the attitude that people don't deserve better until they're up the ladder pissing down on little people. It takes everyone from the laborer to the CEO to make a successful company and ALL of these people deserve a fair deal and some dignity.
You deserve what you're worth. If this guy is worth more, he should certainly go take a better offer.
as well as being the safest addictive substance known to man.
Caffeine. And take your sock puppet with you on the way out.
Try to vet your opinions against actual court decisions. The first amendment rights of students, particularly in public schools, are well respected.
I am grateful that our founding fathers didn't share your opinion that the First Amendment should be completely meaningless.
For example: contacting or ridiculing teachers in an inappropriate way (yes, these are employees and they have rights)
There is no right to not be ridiculed. In fact, satire is protected speech under the First Amendment, as identified in Falwell v. Flynt, among other decisions.
Unless the speech moves into the realm of illegal harassment or libel/slander, then the school suspended him for doing something *legal* while not at school. That does indeed sound preposterous.
Honest question. Are they open-sourcing the language spec (and what does that even mean)? Are they open-sourcing the compiler? The libraries used to actually build the code?
Article was pretty short on details there.
I thought the whole point of a command line was that you didn't have to look at it while it was doing its automated thing
Some people (like me) prefer it because they can type known commands faster than they can navigate a series of menus. This would be a great addition to currently available terminals for folks like me. I would enjoy the extended graphical capabilities while still being able to type commands.
Note I said 'addition' - I sure as heck want my old-school terminal around at times. The density of text is nice for scrolling back through commands and system output, among other things.
...and grandchildren of artists who recorded songs 60 years ago. They're entitled to an undeserved life of comfort based on modern, perpetually-temporary copyright terms! After all, what do you want them to do - go get a job or something?
Not to interrupt the "I was online before you" dick waving that inevitably results from stories like this
I developed a protocol to run an early version of TCP over my umbilical cord in the mid 70s. What do you think about that, smart guy?
Does anyone else see this as being very similar to how the USA beat the USSR?
Yes. Bin Laden did. As kindly mentioned in the article summary.
Sony alleges that 'Anonymous' did it; that clearly implies the flavor of the group that has become surprisingly centralized for such a decentralized organization. That core group is presumably the one that responded. Within this context, 'Anonymous' must mean the somewhat centrally led version, otherwise the central question ('Did Anonymous do this?') isn't even well posed.
Put another way, if the allegation itself can't even be properly bounded, it doesn't really need to responded to. And if Sony can't do better than 'Anonymous did it', they certainly won't get to issuing subpoenas, asset seizures, or criminal charges anyway, making the point moot anyway.
Basically, put up or shut up, Sony. You need better evidence than 'Kilroy was here'.
I've heard this before about visual languages, in a couple of different field, but it never pans out. National Instruments tries it with LabVIEW, for example. Unfortunately, dragging around boxes and drawing wire is an even clunkier substitute for odd-looking but simple code like "x=power(10,2)"
Labview is the most gawdawful scourge released upon the computing world. Once I installed Labview on a machine with the defective Pentium chip running Windows Me. It disappeared instantly in a puff of smoke and brimstone. 12 hours later, I got an email from Satan himself telling me that he just got his first computer. I can only draw conclusions.
Yeah, this is a tough one, too. Since no evidence exists for alternative universes, either preceding or parallel, these things cannot be tested. Just because a parent universe could exist doesn't mean it did exist. The only evidence available is that the universe we live in is the only universe that does or has ever existed.
Well, that's something this experiment would be designed to answer, actually. If a black hole can - through exceedingly careful experimentation - be proven to predate the universe, that would be evidence there. Besides, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It simply means that we don't know, because, absent the possibilities raised in the article, the notion of parallel universes doesn't appear to be testable.
So when ordering possibilities, the parent universe and a lineage of universes falls lower in likelihood than the current universe is the only one, ever.
By the same reasoning you provided above, you also have no evidence by which to handicap that race. We simply don't know. If nothing else, you're left with the very sticky question of 'where the hell did the universe come from'?
Just because this universe expands forever, doesn't mean its parent did. Could just be this particular universe is the end of the line of its lineage. So I think the question is still quite relevant.
Bush didn't Clinton didn't, Reagan didn't Carter didn't. non of the other white guys have ha to do it. you get a non white guy with a non anglo saxon name in office and all the racists start a birther movement because they can't believe a non white guy was born here. Think about it why was Obama singled out above all others? was it name? was it color? the fear was irrational and stupid.
Or maybe the fact that one of his parents was born overseas, and his parents lived overseas a fairly substantial amount of time before he was born? I mean, let's make sure to run in and play the race card before observing the obvious. Given his circumstances, it's quite reasonable that the circumstances of his birth would be subjected to a bit more rigor.
Note I'm not claiming he was or wasn't born in Hawaii/overseas, but I can understand the desire to take a good look at it and check.
The people who died that day were liberal and conservative, but all were American. Bin Laden hated us all, just because we were American. So please, no political games here. This isn't about left and right, this is about a cowardly attack on all of us, as Americans. As a hardcore liberal, I embrace my fellow Americans who are conservative on this good news for us all.
This is the God's honest truth. Too much fucking sniping lately (lately=last 15 years or so). So long as neither side tries to use it for political gain, just let it be what it is. And I say this as a Chaotic Libertarian (if D&D made political classes).
From a practical standpoint, I don't know how much this actually makes us more or less safe. AQ has been marginalized for quite a number of years as an international force anyway. On the other hand, might there be reprisals? But it's still nice to finish the damn job 10 years later.
Thanks for the story too. Very sobering story, but it helps us remember that all this petty shit we deal with means nothing. I still have my copy of WSJ from 9/11 as well as 9/12. It's fascinating to look at the headlines from 9/11 and to see how completely meaningless all of it was. 4 hours later, none of it mattered.
I sit here, 90 miles above the polar circle in the northernmost city in Sweden...Bask in my smugness, etc.
I thought that was just the reflection off your eternally vampire-pale skin.