As an Immunologist with a PhD and academic, industry and post-doctoral experience, I can assure you that an understanding in Latin would be of very little help in understanding a college level science curriculum. Two years of Latin might help the first year student pick up a few key terms a bit faster, but to be honest, 30 minutes with flash cards would be far more beneficial and time efficient.
As a scientist, I'll tell you what language is useful - Spanish. The vast majority of the janitorial staff where I have worked speaks Spanish as their first language. The ability to communicate "Don't clean this room" or "Please lock the door" is far more useful (even critical at times) than the ability to read and write Latin.
However the large scale professional piracy enterprises are a whole different beast than the college student downloading a few songs on their computer. Professional piracy is a huge industry and is a problem. Unfortunately the music and movie industry tends to lump the professional and college student together and uses the damages caused by the professional to justify crucifying a small segment that, I believe, causes relative little harm.
6. Counterfeit Pharmaceutical -- Here's another place that the retail and distributor can excel at. Don't trust your distributor? Shop at one that's insured and bonded against dispensing dangerous drugs, or knock-off ones.
I don't believe you truly understand the problems that counterfeit pharmaceuticals are causing - this goes far beyond some crook cheating a patient or someone sticking it to the 'rich pharmaceutical companies', but is a problem that creates disease pandemics and kills thousands.
To give you one example, counterfeit antimalarial drugs are a huge problem at the moment and are threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia and Africa. Often times the pharmacies themselves aren't aware that they're selling counterfeits - in fact the proliferation of counterfeits is so bad in some areas that a large pharmacy unknowingly sold 100,000 counterfeit antimalarials and in a separate incident the entire stock of one Burmese hospital was found to be counterfeit. Simply shopping at a distributor that's "insured and bonded against dispensing dangerous drugs, or knock-off ones" doesn't appear to be a realistic solution.
Simply testing whether the drug is a counterfeit is not necessarily a trustworthy precaution either. Due to the proliferation of counterfeit antimalarials, testing procedures were put into place. The counterfeiters got smart however, so they started to include low levels of the real drug in with their fakes. Now not only do we have drugs on the market that test as 'real' but don't provide enough of a dose to effectively treat patients, but these low levels of drug are rapidly creating drug-resistant malaria strains. Unless we're somehow able to stop this black market industry, soon we won't have any drugs left to treat malaria. How is this not murder of innocents for profit?
While you may think that stopping counterfeit pharmaceuticals is 'ridiculous' and that it's a 'non-violent', 'non-crime', I most certainly do not.
It is ridiculous to think that the various States of the world are fighting these issues, most of them are non-crimes and in most cases not even violent crimes.
I've been to Thailand three times in the past five years, and while I've never been pick-pocketed, after all three trips mysterious people tried to make fraudulent charges to the credit card that I used for that particular trip. I know two coworkers who have had people attempt to make fraudulent charges on their credit card (from inside the US in each case) even though neither credit card was physically stolen.
These 'old days' you talk about ended long, long ago. These 'new days' you predict started decades ago. I'm far more worried about the minimum wage employee handling my credit card info or someone digging through improperly discarded credit card receipts than I am of a technophile taking the time and effort to build a mobile card reader. A stolen credit card is a stolen credit card, regardless how it's done - and we already have measures to counter this. I fail to see how this 'new world' is any different than today's status quo.
I've come to believe that open source works if you're a programmer, but for the rest of the world the promises fall flat.
I can't read code - it means absolutely nothing to me. So this whole point on OSS being transparent and knowing what the software really does, doesn't apply to me. Hell, if someone were to show me the source code to both Windows and Linux, I probably wouldn't even be able to tell which OS was which. All I care about is whether the software does what I need it to do; I don't plan on spending any evenings curled up to the fire reading source code.
So this leads us to the next pro-OSS argument, that if the program doesn't do what you want you can either make a solution or hire someone to do it for you. I've tried this (several times in fact), and it didn't work. Since I don't program I have to go out and hire someone to code the solution I want. Never mind that finding a coder can often be a royal pain, but each and every time not only has (or would have) it been more expensive to hire someone to code the solution, but it took longer than had I gone out and bought a commercial closed source package (or two) that did do what I want.
Lastly, I keep hearing how OSS programs are more nimble and should a bug or needed feature be identified, 'the community' will solve the problem much faster than a closed source solution. That may be for popular projects like Linux or Firefox, but in my experience I find the OSS programs to be less responsive to requests and needs than the closed source solutions.
As a scientist, I'm all for transparency and free flowing information. However, when push comes to shove, I need programs that work, and, while I really hate to say this, the OSS programs have always fallen short.
Peter Jackson was heavily involved with the making of King Kong. I'd say he knows at least a little bit about the gaming industry - definitely a more than me. I'm willing to listen.
You pay for the opportunity to attend lectures, learn, and be graded. You pay for the opportunity to earn a degree. People also pay to take the CPA exam or to sit for the Bar - paying for the exam does not guarantee that one will pass. The same goes for college and high school.
Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?
No. Do you think the vast majority even looked at the papers ever again after they turned them in? I certainly didn't - even the ones in my field. In fact, I've never even looked back at my thesis, arguably the most important and original paper I wrote while in college.
If the students were truly concerned about IP, they should welcome this service. From my understanding the point of IP is to encourage innovation and creativity by protecting the author. Seems to me that this service does exactly that.
I certainly would have. When I attended college, I put a tremendous amount of time and work into my papers. Right or wrong, it was incredibly frustrating to see someone who you knew didn't write their paper and still obtained the same grade as you (or better). We knew because some students would admit cheating over beers ("look how clever I was!"), others weren't aware of what they had written, while other papers were clearly well above the level of the previous performance of the particular student. Cheating especially impacted the other students when the class was curved. As much as I believe that learning is an individual responsibility and you get out what you put in, the fact of the situation is that grades do matter - especially if you're applying to scholarships (some of us need them to attend school, not just for ego) and some job (especially the competitive ones) do seriously take grades into account. I would have welcomed this service with open arms.
So how is this different from Google simply being a venture capitalist? There are already plenty of venture capital firms who specialize in specifically funding clean technology, disease research, and other 'social good'. While I welcome Google's investment, this 'for profit charity' sounds more like nothing more than a spin-doctoring PR stunt.
So now a candidate must show good credit? WTF? And if a candidate is in this financial situation because he (she) can't get a job, an employer who dismisses such candidate because they have bad credit perpetuates their situation. Shame on them!
Sure, a candidate may have bad credit due to lack of a job, medical costs, or a number of other legitimate reasons. However, to be honest, these are the vast minority from what I've seen (and I worked with cancer patients for several years, and credit did come up). By far, the people I've seen with bad credit have been those who maxed out their credit cards and got in too deep. I can think of a handful of people who overspent planning in advance to negotiate with the credit card companies figuring that they weren't going to buy a house in the near future anyway, so what the heck. While I think eliminating applicants due their credit scores is a piss-poor thing to do, I would be very interested in how many people with poor credit scores are there due to situations out of their control, or because of their own ineptitude/selfishness. Also, before we get all up in arms, do we have any clue as to what other companies are running credit checks and for what positions? TFA gave one example (and very little info at that). Are the credit checks run on the peanut gallery (how much does it cost for a credit check? Would it really be cost effective?) or for people who are applying for high end positions in companies where they could have the opportunity to embezzle. This article really doesn't give us enough information to get piss off... yet.
I was under the impression that 'open source' meant that the code was freely available - not that the project had no leader or organizational structure. What I think you're dancing around though is the concept of an employee owned company - where, in theory, the employees become the 'merciless shareholders.
Personally, if I were a terrorist I'd want my attacks to fall around election time. I'd want every hawk running to get that political boost and better their chance to get elected. The terrorists need a Jihad, and the further they can draw America into a fight the further they advance towards their goal.
I'm absolutely stunned by the number of people who are on one hand saying "This is evil! We must protect privacy!" and yet at the same time have downloaded the list and commented on the information therein.
PhDs cost tons of money and are prohibitively expensive to persue without having worked first. Students also often need a job to pay off the debts they accrue from their BS too. People also sometimes like to have money to spend on things like real food, and living space.
In the sciences, and this includes mathematics, the student gets paid to go to school. For example, we pay our students (biosciences) $2,600 per month (plus extra to cover tuition), which is about average across the top tier schools. Regarding debt, student loans are deferred for four years while pursuing a PhD.
Speaking as an Immunologist, we're screaming for bioinformaticists at the moment and it's certainly an area that I would look at if I was in your position. Throw in some side work as a statistician, and you're set.
I think you'll find the bioinformatics field to be broad enough to meet just about any interest that you may have - work ranges from programming pattern recognition/alignment software (for protein or DNA work) to mathematical modeling of protein networks. Don't worry if biology isn't your greatest strength as you'll be working as a programmer/mathematician solving a biological problem, not as a biologist working with computers (in fact, graduate level programs in bioinformatics tend to recruit computer science majors as the biology/biochem/etc majors don't have the required background).
The unauthorized installation or use of cameras in private places isn't the issue here. According to the article, Mr. Gannon owned the land so the video recording device wasn't unauthorized since he installed it. The issue at hand (according the police) is that New Hampshire is a two-party consent state, meaning that all parties have to consent before the conversation can be intercepted or recorded. The officer didn't provide his concent prior to Mr. Gannon recording (and I'm not convinced that posting signs works as implied concent).
What I'm curious about is how security systems fall under this law (which this was). If someone had broken into Mr. Gannon's house would the video tape be inadmissible in court simply because the burgler didn't give his/her consent to be video recorded?
But there's no way they're going to succeed in politics when they've named themselves the "Pirate Party". I don't think I even need to ask whether they realize that they're giving their opponents fodder for later complaints and insults.
Please. It's not like they're even going to get that far. This is nothing more than a couple of no-names who decided to set up a web page and call themselves a political party because they thought it was cool. Bring in a leader with teeth and some money and we'll talk.
"A year-and-a-half ago, pricing of DSL and cable modem service was roughly the same. But over the past year, the phone companies have launched an aggressive assault by dropping prices... AT&T has twice lowered the price of its DSL service and now offers its 1.5Mbps service for $12.99 for the first year."
Over the past three years I've received two letters from SBC notifying me that my DSL rates are increasing. Meanwhile I've noticed that the rates for the first year of service have steadily dropped. I used to think that I was just getting hammered because here in Dallas, my options were pretty much limited to SBC and Comcast (with a touch of Earthlink and a couple of more expensive options). Nope. My parents in Spokane suffered a rate increase in the past year. My sister in San Francisco had a rate increase in the past two years. My brother in New York has also experienced a rate increase recently.
Meanwhile while (unsuccessfully) looking around for a new provider, I've noticed that the rates for the first year of service have steadily dropped (just as the article claimed). The ISPs are monopolistic crack dealers - and they know it. For being a free market, I don't feel so free.
In cases like this, I'm all in favor of the editors modifying the submitter's links. Not only does Aaron Hockley's blog offer no more information than what he submitted to Slashdot, but in his "Blogging" cattegory he clearly states that he's actively engaging in this sort of activity for his own personal benefit (don't bother, it's not worth the look nor the additional clicks to his 'blog').
The creator of Katamari Damacy essentially stated that games are a luxury. Games are only around when the game player is in a peaceful situation. If we could somehow get games to everyone all around the world, it would lead to peace by osmosis.
People play games for entertainment and to escape. Soldiers have been playing games for centuries, whether they be games of dice, cards, or on the GBA. Besides, when I was younger, my siblings and I fought over the Nintendo far more than anything else.
I couldn't agree more. I love games, while my wife is not much of a gamer at all (she loved the original NES, but games have advanced to a point that they're just not enjoyable to her). However, we'll spend just about every evening together playing the "Monkey Race DX" in Super Monkey Ball Deluxe. The game is very simple, you control the monkey with a joystick and use one button to fire - there aren't any "power slides", super ultra-cool combos, or any "must win" moves that one needs to learn. Additionally, you can pick up weapons to fire at each other, which usually favors the player who is behind, and you can toggle a "handicap" option giving losing players a slight speed boost. I've looked for years for a game that both my wife and I could play, and to date this is the only one that has worked. My wife is hooked. My friends are hooked (both the gamers and non-gamers). Even my parents are hooked. The game sells for ~$20 - I strongly recommend the submitter to check it out.
Most all major research institutions these days have their own transgenic core in-house. As long as you provide the vectors, they'll subsequently transform the stem cells and generate the chimeric mouse. From there it's the PI's responsibility to back-cross the mouse and maintain the colony.
Slashdot Mirror
As an Immunologist with a PhD and academic, industry and post-doctoral experience, I can assure you that an understanding in Latin would be of very little help in understanding a college level science curriculum. Two years of Latin might help the first year student pick up a few key terms a bit faster, but to be honest, 30 minutes with flash cards would be far more beneficial and time efficient.
As a scientist, I'll tell you what language is useful - Spanish. The vast majority of the janitorial staff where I have worked speaks Spanish as their first language. The ability to communicate "Don't clean this room" or "Please lock the door" is far more useful (even critical at times) than the ability to read and write Latin.
However the large scale professional piracy enterprises are a whole different beast than the college student downloading a few songs on their computer. Professional piracy is a huge industry and is a problem. Unfortunately the music and movie industry tends to lump the professional and college student together and uses the damages caused by the professional to justify crucifying a small segment that, I believe, causes relative little harm.
I don't believe you truly understand the problems that counterfeit pharmaceuticals are causing - this goes far beyond some crook cheating a patient or someone sticking it to the 'rich pharmaceutical companies', but is a problem that creates disease pandemics and kills thousands.
To give you one example, counterfeit antimalarial drugs are a huge problem at the moment and are threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia and Africa. Often times the pharmacies themselves aren't aware that they're selling counterfeits - in fact the proliferation of counterfeits is so bad in some areas that a large pharmacy unknowingly sold 100,000 counterfeit antimalarials and in a separate incident the entire stock of one Burmese hospital was found to be counterfeit. Simply shopping at a distributor that's "insured and bonded against dispensing dangerous drugs, or knock-off ones" doesn't appear to be a realistic solution.
Simply testing whether the drug is a counterfeit is not necessarily a trustworthy precaution either. Due to the proliferation of counterfeit antimalarials, testing procedures were put into place. The counterfeiters got smart however, so they started to include low levels of the real drug in with their fakes. Now not only do we have drugs on the market that test as 'real' but don't provide enough of a dose to effectively treat patients, but these low levels of drug are rapidly creating drug-resistant malaria strains. Unless we're somehow able to stop this black market industry, soon we won't have any drugs left to treat malaria. How is this not murder of innocents for profit?
While you may think that stopping counterfeit pharmaceuticals is 'ridiculous' and that it's a 'non-violent', 'non-crime', I most certainly do not. It is ridiculous to think that the various States of the world are fighting these issues, most of them are non-crimes and in most cases not even violent crimes.
These 'old days' you talk about ended long, long ago. These 'new days' you predict started decades ago. I'm far more worried about the minimum wage employee handling my credit card info or someone digging through improperly discarded credit card receipts than I am of a technophile taking the time and effort to build a mobile card reader. A stolen credit card is a stolen credit card, regardless how it's done - and we already have measures to counter this. I fail to see how this 'new world' is any different than today's status quo.
I can't read code - it means absolutely nothing to me. So this whole point on OSS being transparent and knowing what the software really does, doesn't apply to me. Hell, if someone were to show me the source code to both Windows and Linux, I probably wouldn't even be able to tell which OS was which. All I care about is whether the software does what I need it to do; I don't plan on spending any evenings curled up to the fire reading source code.
So this leads us to the next pro-OSS argument, that if the program doesn't do what you want you can either make a solution or hire someone to do it for you. I've tried this (several times in fact), and it didn't work. Since I don't program I have to go out and hire someone to code the solution I want. Never mind that finding a coder can often be a royal pain, but each and every time not only has (or would have) it been more expensive to hire someone to code the solution, but it took longer than had I gone out and bought a commercial closed source package (or two) that did do what I want.
Lastly, I keep hearing how OSS programs are more nimble and should a bug or needed feature be identified, 'the community' will solve the problem much faster than a closed source solution. That may be for popular projects like Linux or Firefox, but in my experience I find the OSS programs to be less responsive to requests and needs than the closed source solutions.
As a scientist, I'm all for transparency and free flowing information. However, when push comes to shove, I need programs that work, and, while I really hate to say this, the OSS programs have always fallen short.
Peter Jackson was heavily involved with the making of King Kong. I'd say he knows at least a little bit about the gaming industry - definitely a more than me. I'm willing to listen.
You pay for the opportunity to attend lectures, learn, and be graded. You pay for the opportunity to earn a degree. People also pay to take the CPA exam or to sit for the Bar - paying for the exam does not guarantee that one will pass. The same goes for college and high school.
No. Do you think the vast majority even looked at the papers ever again after they turned them in? I certainly didn't - even the ones in my field. In fact, I've never even looked back at my thesis, arguably the most important and original paper I wrote while in college.
If the students were truly concerned about IP, they should welcome this service. From my understanding the point of IP is to encourage innovation and creativity by protecting the author. Seems to me that this service does exactly that.
I certainly would have. When I attended college, I put a tremendous amount of time and work into my papers. Right or wrong, it was incredibly frustrating to see someone who you knew didn't write their paper and still obtained the same grade as you (or better). We knew because some students would admit cheating over beers ("look how clever I was!"), others weren't aware of what they had written, while other papers were clearly well above the level of the previous performance of the particular student. Cheating especially impacted the other students when the class was curved. As much as I believe that learning is an individual responsibility and you get out what you put in, the fact of the situation is that grades do matter - especially if you're applying to scholarships (some of us need them to attend school, not just for ego) and some job (especially the competitive ones) do seriously take grades into account. I would have welcomed this service with open arms.
Sure they do - they earn a degree.
So how is this different from Google simply being a venture capitalist? There are already plenty of venture capital firms who specialize in specifically funding clean technology, disease research, and other 'social good'. While I welcome Google's investment, this 'for profit charity' sounds more like nothing more than a spin-doctoring PR stunt.
Sure, a candidate may have bad credit due to lack of a job, medical costs, or a number of other legitimate reasons. However, to be honest, these are the vast minority from what I've seen (and I worked with cancer patients for several years, and credit did come up). By far, the people I've seen with bad credit have been those who maxed out their credit cards and got in too deep. I can think of a handful of people who overspent planning in advance to negotiate with the credit card companies figuring that they weren't going to buy a house in the near future anyway, so what the heck. While I think eliminating applicants due their credit scores is a piss-poor thing to do, I would be very interested in how many people with poor credit scores are there due to situations out of their control, or because of their own ineptitude/selfishness. Also, before we get all up in arms, do we have any clue as to what other companies are running credit checks and for what positions? TFA gave one example (and very little info at that). Are the credit checks run on the peanut gallery (how much does it cost for a credit check? Would it really be cost effective?) or for people who are applying for high end positions in companies where they could have the opportunity to embezzle. This article really doesn't give us enough information to get piss off... yet.
I was under the impression that 'open source' meant that the code was freely available - not that the project had no leader or organizational structure. What I think you're dancing around though is the concept of an employee owned company - where, in theory, the employees become the 'merciless shareholders.
Personally, if I were a terrorist I'd want my attacks to fall around election time. I'd want every hawk running to get that political boost and better their chance to get elected. The terrorists need a Jihad, and the further they can draw America into a fight the further they advance towards their goal.
I'm absolutely stunned by the number of people who are on one hand saying "This is evil! We must protect privacy!" and yet at the same time have downloaded the list and commented on the information therein.
In the sciences, and this includes mathematics, the student gets paid to go to school. For example, we pay our students (biosciences) $2,600 per month (plus extra to cover tuition), which is about average across the top tier schools. Regarding debt, student loans are deferred for four years while pursuing a PhD.
I think you'll find the bioinformatics field to be broad enough to meet just about any interest that you may have - work ranges from programming pattern recognition/alignment software (for protein or DNA work) to mathematical modeling of protein networks. Don't worry if biology isn't your greatest strength as you'll be working as a programmer/mathematician solving a biological problem, not as a biologist working with computers (in fact, graduate level programs in bioinformatics tend to recruit computer science majors as the biology/biochem/etc majors don't have the required background).
Some links for further information:
International Society for Computational Biology
National Institute of Health
UCSD
Stanford
IBM
The unauthorized installation or use of cameras in private places isn't the issue here. According to the article, Mr. Gannon owned the land so the video recording device wasn't unauthorized since he installed it. The issue at hand (according the police) is that New Hampshire is a two-party consent state, meaning that all parties have to consent before the conversation can be intercepted or recorded. The officer didn't provide his concent prior to Mr. Gannon recording (and I'm not convinced that posting signs works as implied concent).
What I'm curious about is how security systems fall under this law (which this was). If someone had broken into Mr. Gannon's house would the video tape be inadmissible in court simply because the burgler didn't give his/her consent to be video recorded?
Please. It's not like they're even going to get that far. This is nothing more than a couple of no-names who decided to set up a web page and call themselves a political party because they thought it was cool. Bring in a leader with teeth and some money and we'll talk.
Over the past three years I've received two letters from SBC notifying me that my DSL rates are increasing. Meanwhile I've noticed that the rates for the first year of service have steadily dropped. I used to think that I was just getting hammered because here in Dallas, my options were pretty much limited to SBC and Comcast (with a touch of Earthlink and a couple of more expensive options). Nope. My parents in Spokane suffered a rate increase in the past year. My sister in San Francisco had a rate increase in the past two years. My brother in New York has also experienced a rate increase recently. Meanwhile while (unsuccessfully) looking around for a new provider, I've noticed that the rates for the first year of service have steadily dropped (just as the article claimed). The ISPs are monopolistic crack dealers - and they know it. For being a free market, I don't feel so free.
In cases like this, I'm all in favor of the editors modifying the submitter's links. Not only does Aaron Hockley's blog offer no more information than what he submitted to Slashdot, but in his "Blogging" cattegory he clearly states that he's actively engaging in this sort of activity for his own personal benefit (don't bother, it's not worth the look nor the additional clicks to his 'blog').
The funny thing is, that's exactly what the article was all about. Kudos.
People play games for entertainment and to escape. Soldiers have been playing games for centuries, whether they be games of dice, cards, or on the GBA. Besides, when I was younger, my siblings and I fought over the Nintendo far more than anything else.
I couldn't agree more. I love games, while my wife is not much of a gamer at all (she loved the original NES, but games have advanced to a point that they're just not enjoyable to her). However, we'll spend just about every evening together playing the "Monkey Race DX" in Super Monkey Ball Deluxe. The game is very simple, you control the monkey with a joystick and use one button to fire - there aren't any "power slides", super ultra-cool combos, or any "must win" moves that one needs to learn. Additionally, you can pick up weapons to fire at each other, which usually favors the player who is behind, and you can toggle a "handicap" option giving losing players a slight speed boost. I've looked for years for a game that both my wife and I could play, and to date this is the only one that has worked. My wife is hooked. My friends are hooked (both the gamers and non-gamers). Even my parents are hooked. The game sells for ~$20 - I strongly recommend the submitter to check it out.
Most all major research institutions these days have their own transgenic core in-house. As long as you provide the vectors, they'll subsequently transform the stem cells and generate the chimeric mouse. From there it's the PI's responsibility to back-cross the mouse and maintain the colony.