In general this is true, but remember that there are a significant number of adds in most journals. It usually isn't anywhere near as bad as what you find in Time or Newsweek, but adds are certainly there. Also, while it's true that the circulation of a journal is usually much lower than a magazine, you have to remember that often the potential pay-off is very high due to the enormous cost of scientific/technical equipment. If a company can sell even one extra NMR spectroscopy machine, or whatever, then it will probably more than pay for the cost of the add. Personally, I would really like to see a detailed breakdown of the expenses and advertising revenues for the major journals. I suspect that they make more from advertisements than most people realize.
One of the main duties of a journal is to act as an intermediate between reviewers and authors. You need someone to make sure that if a reviewer rejects a paper it's for legitimate reasons, rather than because the reviewer is working on a similar project and wants to be able to publish first. Also, when you get into really advanced technical topics there's often only a few hundred experts in the world who are really qualified to act as reviewers, and a lot of them will know each other from conferences and other meetings. So you need to have someone to make sure that the reviewer isn't just rejecting the paper because they personally dislike the author.
Having a "meta-moderation" system to police that sort of thing wouldn't be sufficient, since keeping a paper in your field from being published so that you can publish first could potentially ruin someone's career and/or make you famous. The stakes are simply too high to trust that a meta-moderation system would somehow "work the bugs out".
Another, somewhat less important (but still expensive) service that journals deal with is translating things. Usually when someone in Germany or Japan submits a paper to an English journal it will be written well enough that reviewers etc. can understand what the paper's saying, but it won't be anywhere near professional, publishable quality writing, so lots of work has to be done on it. I assume that foreign journals have the same problem when an American tries to write something in Japanese.
"Now back up a few months in time to your initial interview with that same boss. He can not ask you in that interview if you visit strip bars after work."
Yeah, actually he COULD ask you that. There are a very few things that are explicilty illegal for someone to ask you in an interview, but an employer can still ask almost anything they want. Unless there's some sort of kooky state law where you live, there's no reason someone couldn't ask you about visiting strip bars in an interview.
Are there fundamental weaknesses in enigma-style algorithms? From what I understand, the Allies were able to break the Enigma codes because they were able to find out the rotor diagrams through spying, AND because the Germans would always begin each message with the same short sequence repeated twice.
Would a virtual enigma machine with thousands of rotors that contained all 256 ascii characters be secure?
I suspect (but of course can't provide any real evidence) that the vast majority of computer break-ins are by young people who are simply looking for any system to break into, not targeting a specific company. Most 'crackers' probably just pick a known vulnerability and search around for a system that hasn't fixed it yet. They don't particularly care who they break into, so long as they're breaking into somewhere.
These social engineering attacks that Mitnick has built a career warning people about seem more relevant to situations were the cracker has some very specific goal in mind regarding a specific organization - dedicated industrial spies who want specific information from a particular company, etc. While I'm sure that sort of threat is a concern for many companies, I don't think it's typical of how and why computers usually get hacked into.
Obviously this won't be free - people will be forced to pay for it via taxes. If there is enough demand for wi-fi to justify building a network in a town, then a company will probably do it. If there isn't enough demand, then the government will end up charging everyone for a service that only a few people are interested in - basically forcing everyone (including poor people who don't even own a computer) to subsidize a luxury service for a few lucky nerds.
being a geek is not just about not fitting in
on
Ask mc chris
·
· Score: 1
Being a geek isn't just about "not fitting in". There are all sorts of people who don't fit in, yet would not qualify as geeks; goths, crazy cult members, people with social anxiety disorder, or many dug addicts for example. There's a relatively well-defined set of things that qualifies one as a geek, like a preoccupation with video games, Dungeons & Dragons, sci-fi, and other things. It's true that not fitting in well is a classic geek characteristic, but it's hardly the sole criteria for differentiating a geek from a non-geek.
MC-Chris is currently extremely popular with geeks. It's fine for you to have never heard of him, bit it's evidence that you aren't very geeky.
I am a researcher who is currently working on "nanotechnology"; 2-dimensional films that are a single molecule thick, to be precise. I'm puzzled by exactly what sorts of unique risks people think might be associated with nanotechnology. The BBC article summed it up very well:
"Nanotech manipulates molecules and even atoms to make novel materials. This precision engineering exploits unusual electrical, optical and other properties."
That's it. No one is trying to make swarms of tiny robots that devour everything in their path. Even if someone wanted to do that, no one would have even the faintest idea of how to go about doing it. The mere fact that nanotechnology involves very small particles doesn't mean that it poses some sort of unique health risk. The world is already teaming with nanoparticles of all sorts. Specks of dust, tiny flakes of rock or mineral material, all sorts of plant spores, bits of soot from car emissions...we've always been surrounded by nanomaterials.
The problem with "loser pays" systems is that not all lawsuits are clear-cut cases of someone trying to screw over someone else. Although you don't generally hear about them on Slashdot, there are plenty of disputes that end up in court where it's genuinely unclear which party is in the right, and neither side is engaging in outrageous behavior.
Since when is wi-fi in the same category as roads and schools? Wi-fi isn't a necessity, it's a luxury. I agree that it's cool to be able to check your email from the park, but it hardly falls into the category as roads.
I think a lot of people that are part of the internet-addicted slashdot crowd forget that the internet in general (let alone high speed wi-fi) isn't at all essential to living a happy, productive, informed life. It might seem that way to you, but the vast majority of people only use the internet occasionally, and usually use it for relatively trivial things. There are plenty of people (particularly in the over-40 crowd) who never use it at all.
Blockbuster's position is that they will not punish you for accidentally keeping the movie out past the due date. You're still supposed to make a good-faith effort to retutn it on time. It's not supposed to be a net-flix style "keep the movie as long as you want" deal.
Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. What if a reporter learns that the president of the non-profit "Society for objectively studying the environment" used to be an executive for Evil Polluting Corp? What if a reporter learns that a politician has secret bank accounts where huge sums of money are regularly received? Is that information protected by your "Habeas Data" right? I certainly hope not.
Rather than taking extreme measures to ensure that social security numbers are kept private, people need to simply stop pretending that a social security number is some sort of magic password that can be used to prove that someone is who they claim to be. SSNs should be treated about the same as phone numbers; assume that everyone has one, but also assume that everyone knows it.
I have to ask...where, exactly, do you feel that this "right to internet access" comes from? Is it a Jeffersonian natural right, like the right to life and freedom? Was the right to internet access socially ordained in some charter of right that I haven't heard about? Or do you just believe that people have a right to anything that is useful to them?
Isn't the gravity on Mars only something like 1/3 that of earth? Is that enough to support a breathable atmosphere? Our air here on earth is 21% oxygen, so to obtain the same partial pressure I assume we would need something like a 60% oxygen atmosphere. Wouldn't everything (including us?) be really dangerously flammable?
I can see why people would think that the bank should have checked with this guy before they wired so much money out of the country, especially to Eastern Europe. But on the other hand, if I ordered an urgently-needed wire transfer of a large amount of money and the bank refused to do it because I wasn't conveniently available when they tried to contact me for verification I would certainly be pissed, and might sue if their refusal to transfer the money seriously hurt me or my finances badly enough.
Although the article says that this woman was computer illiterate and "objected to having computers," it never actually says that there wasn't a computer in her house. It's curious that although the article spends a lot of time talking about how she didn't like/know about them, it never explicitly states that she didn't have one in the house. It also states that she had family members living with her, and that she has 24 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren. Odds are that one of them were using her internet account for file-sharing, so she was busted for it. The fact that they filed the suit even though they had already received a copy of the death certificate can be attributed to the ordinary bureaucratic mix-ups that happen routinely in large offices, and shouldn't surprise anyone who has ever worked for a company with more than ten employees.
Here's how I see this going: The town opens a city-owned wireless service, and everyone gets a better deal than they could get from a commercial provider. The service eventually begins to stagnate/deteriorate as city officials stop funding it properly, or refuse to increase funds to add features and/or take advantage of new technology. As budgets are cut (by inflation if nothing else) the service starts to suck, but everyone is still required by law to buy the service via taxes. Finally people will end up being over-charged for a bloated/inefficient/broken down service that they could get a much better deal on if they went with a private company - but there aren't any private companies in the area, because no one wants to bother trying to compete with a service that people are already forced to by somewhere else; rather like trying to open a GM dealership in a town where everyone is required by law to buy a Kia. What kind of service do you think you'll get at the town Kia dealership if the employees there know that you have to buy from them whether you like it or not?
There was almost no real useful information in this article. It basically amounted to "EULAs are enforceable, usually, so long as the conditions aren't outrageous." It doesn't answer any of the really hard questions about EULAs. What happens when someone who isn't old enough to enter into a legal contract (which is to say, probably half of everyone who plays these games) clicks through an EULA? What if I don't like the EULA, but the store/company doesn't want to give me my money back? What if I find a way to install and run the game without ever reading the EULA - am I still in violation of it, even though I never saw it or agreed to it? If I don't agree to the EULA, can their copyrights restrict my use of their software for private, non-commercial purposes?
You are hereby notified that by archiving the copyrighted text of this posting on any sort of digital storage device you agree to pay me $10.
Also, Google is hereby informed that by archiving the text of this post in any form for internet search purposes they agree to pay me $100,000.
Further, anyone who replies to this post hereby agrees to pay me $100.
Just as long as we're clear on that...
How can they "agree to the EULA" if they've never even seen it? Remember, this is all done automatically by robots. If I put "Google agrees that by accessing and archiving my web page for search purposes they agree to pay me $1 million," could I actually sue Google? I somehow doubt it.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems outlandish to me that simply stating "By accessing this web page you have automatically agreed to the following conditions..." in the text of your web page constitutes any sort of legally binding agreement. Perhaps if there was some sort of click-through process like with software EULAs I could buy it, but simply saying "Welcome to my web page - hey, guess what you just agreed to!" sounds pretty far-fetched.
I'm pretty sure that if I tried to sue people who had accessed my web page that said "By accessing this web page you have agreed to send me $50" I would be laughed out of court. I don't really see what the difference is. Simply viewing a contract doesn't imply that you've accepted it.
They are similar in that they both involve large, important roads - however, the entire point of the proposed megahighway is to allow people to avoid densely-populated urban areas when traveling long distances.
Perhaps no one hears about these 'mega-tsunamis' much from the media because most scientists agree it could never happen? From http://www.sthjournal.org/media.htm: Here are a set of facts, agreed on by committee members, about the claims in these reports:
- While the active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on Las Palma is expected to erupt again, it will not send a large part of the island into the ocean, though small landslides may occur. The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.
- No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history.
- The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores. Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake.
- The U.S. volcano observatory, situated on Kilauea, near the current eruption, states that there is no likelihood of that part of the island breaking off into the ocean.
- These considerations have been published in journals and discussed at conferences sponsored by the Tsunami Society.
Some papers on this subject include:
"Evaluation of the threat of Mega Tsunami Generation From....Volcanoes on La Palma... and Hawaii", George Pararas-Carayannis, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol 20, No.5, pages 251-277, 2002.
"Modeling the La Palma Landslide Tsunami", Charles L. Mader, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 19, No. 3, pages 160-180, 2001.
"Volcano Growth and the Evolution of the Island of Hawaii", J.G. Moore and D.A.Clague, in the Geologic Society of America Bulletin, 104, 1992.
Slashdot Mirror
In general this is true, but remember that there are a significant number of adds in most journals. It usually isn't anywhere near as bad as what you find in Time or Newsweek, but adds are certainly there. Also, while it's true that the circulation of a journal is usually much lower than a magazine, you have to remember that often the potential pay-off is very high due to the enormous cost of scientific/technical equipment. If a company can sell even one extra NMR spectroscopy machine, or whatever, then it will probably more than pay for the cost of the add. Personally, I would really like to see a detailed breakdown of the expenses and advertising revenues for the major journals. I suspect that they make more from advertisements than most people realize.
One of the main duties of a journal is to act as an intermediate between reviewers and authors. You need someone to make sure that if a reviewer rejects a paper it's for legitimate reasons, rather than because the reviewer is working on a similar project and wants to be able to publish first. Also, when you get into really advanced technical topics there's often only a few hundred experts in the world who are really qualified to act as reviewers, and a lot of them will know each other from conferences and other meetings. So you need to have someone to make sure that the reviewer isn't just rejecting the paper because they personally dislike the author.
Having a "meta-moderation" system to police that sort of thing wouldn't be sufficient, since keeping a paper in your field from being published so that you can publish first could potentially ruin someone's career and/or make you famous. The stakes are simply too high to trust that a meta-moderation system would somehow "work the bugs out".
Another, somewhat less important (but still expensive) service that journals deal with is translating things. Usually when someone in Germany or Japan submits a paper to an English journal it will be written well enough that reviewers etc. can understand what the paper's saying, but it won't be anywhere near professional, publishable quality writing, so lots of work has to be done on it. I assume that foreign journals have the same problem when an American tries to write something in Japanese.
"Now back up a few months in time to your initial interview with that same boss. He can not ask you in that interview if you visit strip bars after work."
Yeah, actually he COULD ask you that. There are a very few things that are explicilty illegal for someone to ask you in an interview, but an employer can still ask almost anything they want. Unless there's some sort of kooky state law where you live, there's no reason someone couldn't ask you about visiting strip bars in an interview.
Are there fundamental weaknesses in enigma-style algorithms? From what I understand, the Allies were able to break the Enigma codes because they were able to find out the rotor diagrams through spying, AND because the Germans would always begin each message with the same short sequence repeated twice.
Would a virtual enigma machine with thousands of rotors that contained all 256 ascii characters be secure?
I suspect (but of course can't provide any real evidence) that the vast majority of computer break-ins are by young people who are simply looking for any system to break into, not targeting a specific company. Most 'crackers' probably just pick a known vulnerability and search around for a system that hasn't fixed it yet. They don't particularly care who they break into, so long as they're breaking into somewhere.
These social engineering attacks that Mitnick has built a career warning people about seem more relevant to situations were the cracker has some very specific goal in mind regarding a specific organization - dedicated industrial spies who want specific information from a particular company, etc. While I'm sure that sort of threat is a concern for many companies, I don't think it's typical of how and why computers usually get hacked into.
Obviously this won't be free - people will be forced to pay for it via taxes. If there is enough demand for wi-fi to justify building a network in a town, then a company will probably do it. If there isn't enough demand, then the government will end up charging everyone for a service that only a few people are interested in - basically forcing everyone (including poor people who don't even own a computer) to subsidize a luxury service for a few lucky nerds.
Being a geek isn't just about "not fitting in". There are all sorts of people who don't fit in, yet would not qualify as geeks; goths, crazy cult members, people with social anxiety disorder, or many dug addicts for example. There's a relatively well-defined set of things that qualifies one as a geek, like a preoccupation with video games, Dungeons & Dragons, sci-fi, and other things. It's true that not fitting in well is a classic geek characteristic, but it's hardly the sole criteria for differentiating a geek from a non-geek.
MC-Chris is currently extremely popular with geeks. It's fine for you to have never heard of him, bit it's evidence that you aren't very geeky.
I am a researcher who is currently working on "nanotechnology"; 2-dimensional films that are a single molecule thick, to be precise. I'm puzzled by exactly what sorts of unique risks people think might be associated with nanotechnology. The BBC article summed it up very well:
"Nanotech manipulates molecules and even atoms to make novel materials. This precision engineering exploits unusual electrical, optical and other properties."
That's it. No one is trying to make swarms of tiny robots that devour everything in their path. Even if someone wanted to do that, no one would have even the faintest idea of how to go about doing it. The mere fact that nanotechnology involves very small particles doesn't mean that it poses some sort of unique health risk. The world is already teaming with nanoparticles of all sorts. Specks of dust, tiny flakes of rock or mineral material, all sorts of plant spores, bits of soot from car emissions...we've always been surrounded by nanomaterials.
The problem with "loser pays" systems is that not all lawsuits are clear-cut cases of someone trying to screw over someone else. Although you don't generally hear about them on Slashdot, there are plenty of disputes that end up in court where it's genuinely unclear which party is in the right, and neither side is engaging in outrageous behavior.
Since when is wi-fi in the same category as roads and schools? Wi-fi isn't a necessity, it's a luxury. I agree that it's cool to be able to check your email from the park, but it hardly falls into the category as roads.
I think a lot of people that are part of the internet-addicted slashdot crowd forget that the internet in general (let alone high speed wi-fi) isn't at all essential to living a happy, productive, informed life. It might seem that way to you, but the vast majority of people only use the internet occasionally, and usually use it for relatively trivial things. There are plenty of people (particularly in the over-40 crowd) who never use it at all.
Blockbuster's position is that they will not punish you for accidentally keeping the movie out past the due date. You're still supposed to make a good-faith effort to retutn it on time. It's not supposed to be a net-flix style "keep the movie as long as you want" deal.
Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. What if a reporter learns that the president of the non-profit "Society for objectively studying the environment" used to be an executive for Evil Polluting Corp? What if a reporter learns that a politician has secret bank accounts where huge sums of money are regularly received? Is that information protected by your "Habeas Data" right? I certainly hope not.
Rather than taking extreme measures to ensure that social security numbers are kept private, people need to simply stop pretending that a social security number is some sort of magic password that can be used to prove that someone is who they claim to be. SSNs should be treated about the same as phone numbers; assume that everyone has one, but also assume that everyone knows it.
I have to ask...where, exactly, do you feel that this "right to internet access" comes from? Is it a Jeffersonian natural right, like the right to life and freedom? Was the right to internet access socially ordained in some charter of right that I haven't heard about? Or do you just believe that people have a right to anything that is useful to them?
Isn't the gravity on Mars only something like 1/3 that of earth? Is that enough to support a breathable atmosphere? Our air here on earth is 21% oxygen, so to obtain the same partial pressure I assume we would need something like a 60% oxygen atmosphere. Wouldn't everything (including us?) be really dangerously flammable?
I can see why people would think that the bank should have checked with this guy before they wired so much money out of the country, especially to Eastern Europe. But on the other hand, if I ordered an urgently-needed wire transfer of a large amount of money and the bank refused to do it because I wasn't conveniently available when they tried to contact me for verification I would certainly be pissed, and might sue if their refusal to transfer the money seriously hurt me or my finances badly enough.
Although the article says that this woman was computer illiterate and "objected to having computers," it never actually says that there wasn't a computer in her house. It's curious that although the article spends a lot of time talking about how she didn't like/know about them, it never explicitly states that she didn't have one in the house. It also states that she had family members living with her, and that she has 24 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren. Odds are that one of them were using her internet account for file-sharing, so she was busted for it. The fact that they filed the suit even though they had already received a copy of the death certificate can be attributed to the ordinary bureaucratic mix-ups that happen routinely in large offices, and shouldn't surprise anyone who has ever worked for a company with more than ten employees.
I don't see the point of this being on slashdot.
Here's how I see this going: The town opens a city-owned wireless service, and everyone gets a better deal than they could get from a commercial provider. The service eventually begins to stagnate/deteriorate as city officials stop funding it properly, or refuse to increase funds to add features and/or take advantage of new technology. As budgets are cut (by inflation if nothing else) the service starts to suck, but everyone is still required by law to buy the service via taxes. Finally people will end up being over-charged for a bloated/inefficient/broken down service that they could get a much better deal on if they went with a private company - but there aren't any private companies in the area, because no one wants to bother trying to compete with a service that people are already forced to by somewhere else; rather like trying to open a GM dealership in a town where everyone is required by law to buy a Kia. What kind of service do you think you'll get at the town Kia dealership if the employees there know that you have to buy from them whether you like it or not?
There was almost no real useful information in this article. It basically amounted to "EULAs are enforceable, usually, so long as the conditions aren't outrageous." It doesn't answer any of the really hard questions about EULAs. What happens when someone who isn't old enough to enter into a legal contract (which is to say, probably half of everyone who plays these games) clicks through an EULA? What if I don't like the EULA, but the store/company doesn't want to give me my money back? What if I find a way to install and run the game without ever reading the EULA - am I still in violation of it, even though I never saw it or agreed to it? If I don't agree to the EULA, can their copyrights restrict my use of their software for private, non-commercial purposes?
Any time I start to develop the slightest faith in the goodness of my fellow man, I just type /list into IRC. That clears it right up.
You are hereby notified that by archiving the copyrighted text of this posting on any sort of digital storage device you agree to pay me $10. Also, Google is hereby informed that by archiving the text of this post in any form for internet search purposes they agree to pay me $100,000. Further, anyone who replies to this post hereby agrees to pay me $100. Just as long as we're clear on that...
How can they "agree to the EULA" if they've never even seen it? Remember, this is all done automatically by robots. If I put "Google agrees that by accessing and archiving my web page for search purposes they agree to pay me $1 million," could I actually sue Google? I somehow doubt it.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems outlandish to me that simply stating "By accessing this web page you have automatically agreed to the following conditions..." in the text of your web page constitutes any sort of legally binding agreement. Perhaps if there was some sort of click-through process like with software EULAs I could buy it, but simply saying "Welcome to my web page - hey, guess what you just agreed to!" sounds pretty far-fetched.
I'm pretty sure that if I tried to sue people who had accessed my web page that said "By accessing this web page you have agreed to send me $50" I would be laughed out of court. I don't really see what the difference is. Simply viewing a contract doesn't imply that you've accepted it.
They are similar in that they both involve large, important roads - however, the entire point of the proposed megahighway is to allow people to avoid densely-populated urban areas when traveling long distances.
Perhaps no one hears about these 'mega-tsunamis' much from the media because most scientists agree it could never happen? From http://www.sthjournal.org/media.htm :
....Volcanoes on La Palma ... and Hawaii", George Pararas-Carayannis, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol 20, No.5, pages 251-277, 2002.
Here are a set of facts, agreed on by committee members, about the claims in these reports:
- While the active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on Las Palma is expected to erupt again, it will not send a large part of the island into the ocean, though small landslides may occur. The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.
- No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history.
- The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores. Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake.
- The U.S. volcano observatory, situated on Kilauea, near the current eruption, states that there is no likelihood of that part of the island breaking off into the ocean.
- These considerations have been published in journals and discussed at conferences sponsored by the Tsunami Society.
Some papers on this subject include:
"Evaluation of the threat of Mega Tsunami Generation From
"Modeling the La Palma Landslide Tsunami", Charles L. Mader, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 19, No. 3, pages 160-180, 2001.
"Volcano Growth and the Evolution of the Island of Hawaii", J.G. Moore and D.A.Clague, in the Geologic Society of America Bulletin, 104, 1992.