I don't know what particular form of QE denial DavidHumus has run across, but what I've seen usually (like most denialisms) starts with some critical misunderstanding of QE: e.g "QE lets you transmit information faster than the speed of light"; then concludes "you can't transmit information faster than c, thus QE is bunk!".
Presumably, the ability to shoot a beam of light >250 miles, without needing to build a 250-mile-long evacuated beamline, is a major advantage gained. The Earth is surrounded by this annoying thing called "the atmosphere," which wreaks havoc with light traveling only a few miles; the faster you can get out of the atmosphere (by, e.g., shooting straight up), the easier it'll be to get any useful amount of light to the other end.
Considering how loudly the Washington "deficit hawks" whine whenever they catch some researcher getting a $10k grant to do something they don't understand, it's amazing how quickly they discount doing things that fix *HALF THE ANNUAL DEFICIT* in one swoop. Obama losing $500,000,000 on Solyndra a few years back? That's only a drop in the bucket compared to annual defense spending of ~$1,000,000,000,000, yet guess which of these issues has the "fiscally responsible" crowd up in arms. When we're spending more that the next 10 countries combined, we could cut back an awful lot (e.g. a thousand "Solyndras per yer"), and make a heck of a lot more progress on the budget deficit than stripping some teacher's pension benefits. But when it comes to the military, the "every drop counts" attitude of the Austerity-lovers magically vanishes.
Same for taxing the rich (and there's plenty if you go not only after income, which can be easily moved to other areas, but also capital gains, transactions, and even the wealth they've trickled up from the rest of the population over the past several decades) --- strange how solutions that chop tens of percent at a time off the deficit are called "too small to matter," usually in the same breath used to recommend a handful of 0.1% budget trimmings off the backs of the poor and middle class.
I'm guessing they didn't just hack this together from a broken LaserWriter II. They can basically use the same UV laser optics technology that regular lithography systems use to make "normal" chips. I doubt they'd start at the very bleeding edge 22nm process, but lots of chips are made far more coarsely than that.
Letting families starve if family members refuse to perform acts which they would, were their family's lives not held hostage, consider immoral == Immorality == Capitalism.
So the person setting it up is lulled into thinking that the default "4nk^&nW3)(&" is secure and doesn't need to be reset (despite any attacker being just one web search away from learning the "better" default)? Using a default of '1234' is a great way of reminding even minimally competent people that the password needs to be changed from default *right now.* Unfortunately, there are enough people out there not even minimally competent about security that this continues to be a problem.
When I go to the store, I don't see boxes of "Monsanto(tm) Corn Flakes (now with 30% more Bacillus thuringiensis toxin!)". Monsanto markets to the agribusiness end of production, not directly to the consumer. Aside from products specifically marketed on the basis of *not* being made with whatever crap Monsanto is pushing, consumers are unlikely to see labeling and make purchasing decisions based on Monsanto's branding/marketing/labeling.
You shouldn't have had those custom calcium-fluoride and fused quartz windows installed. Most normal glass (such as is used in car windows) cuts off rather steeply just outside the visible range, blocking pretty much all UV-B radiation (the type that causes skin reddening / sunburn symptoms). UV-A is still transmitted, and can cause genetic damage and long-term cancer increase, but won't give you sunburn symptoms; you were likely experiencing skin irritation due to other factors related to being cooped up in a car for an extended period, rather than actual sunburn.
The peer review "filter" certainly has its false positives (and negatives) in sieving out the publication-worthy. In the broader context of this discussion thread, the question is whether this would be improved by transitioning to a more "open, crowd-sourced, public, un-credentialed, Wikipedia-style" approach, or rather by continuing to push for reform and improvement within academia. Ask a hard-core Wikipedia contributor whether the system always selects the good edits and rejects the bad --- I suspect you'll get a similar earful to your complaints about bad referees, about how groups of ignorant territorial goons can drive away better informed editors from particular topics. In my opinion, I don't think Wikipedia particularly solves the types of issues that lousy referees introduce to academic publishing --- you just lower the bar from having people who don't believe in M-estimators review your work to people who can't grok a "y=m*x+b" least-squares fit. I think there's lots of room for improvement and education within the scientific community on how to be a good referee (and procedural changes to better route around failures). I don't think that "opening the floodgates" to members of the public unwilling to climb over existing low barriers (e.g. by befriending an established researcher) will magically solve academia's institutional problems (but it sure can introduce a lot more problems of its own).
Hey, I see you've run into somewhat dickish reviewers, too --- guess what, everyone who publishes sometimes encounters this. That's why it's doubly useful to work with a published scientist, who will be there to have a laugh with you at the reviewer (and help you shrug off the criticism and deal with the revisions, instead of sulking in rage). Probably buried in the review, there are (implicitly) a couple good points, too. For example, in your "review," it appears that --- as clever and advanced as you may be --- you have trouble communicating in terms that someone else in the field can understand, which ruins the whole point of a paper (papers aren't to prove how smart you are, they're to communicate ideas to others in the field); add more explanatory text and references to help guide a reader through the unfamiliar and advanced parts. Shrug off the disappointment, make a few minor changes to appease the reviewer, and send the paper back. The review process clearly isn't an insurmountable obstacle, since papers do get published (after a round or two of peer-reviewed revisions).
Planet-to-planet to a couple places within one solar system is feasible. However, if we end up discovering that not every potentially habitable niche in our own solar system is (or at least has been within recent geological history, prior to some particular ecological disaster) absolutely teeming with life, then the interstellar hypothesis becomes quite unlikely. If life-supporting planets are spewing out space-hardy life seeds at a high enough rate to chance upon planets in solar systems several light-years away, then all the bodies within our own solar system should be absolutely drenched by colonizing life-forms. If we don't start finding life-forms nearly everywhere we look in our own solar system, then the argument for exchange with other stars is seriously undercut.
Fortunately, science isn't about always being right, but how well you can correct things that are wrong. Erroneous publications --- whether from fraud or honest mishap --- get rapidly and thoroughly countered (in the same reputable journals) as soon as better scientific evidence is available. Anyone searching for these topics will immediately stumble across their later "resolution" in highly-visible journal articles.
On the other hand, the crap paper languishing in a fake journal will likely never get directly refuted --- no one competent enough to know it is wrong will ever read it (because they don't waste their time reading scam journals), or, if it does get noticed, will be below contempt to bother refuting (no reputable journal is going to waste pages refuting articles in J. Crackpot Quack Res. Meth.). Thus, any reader later stumbling across it will not be provided the proper context to evaluate its claims in light of later research.
Analysis of the "connectivity matrix" between inter-journal referencing will indicate that these are in their own isolated group. What you can do is calculate Impact Factor relative to a few known "good" journals: start with, e.g., Science and Nature, and expand your list to all journals moderately frequently referenced by these two and the journals they reference. No matter how many cross-referenced links the fake journal cluster have with each other, it will show poor "connectivity" to the group of legitimate journals that include key reputable publications in their own referencing cluster.
SEO spam works because Google doesn't necessarily "know" which neighborhoods of the internet are the "right" ones for your search (since the internet developed in a much more sparsely connected and decentralized manner, with a huge number of locally-closely-linked neighborhoods). With scientific journals, however, there is only one "good" interlinked neighborhood that contains the reputable journals --- if you aren't in the same "cluster" as the top publications in your field, you're in the wrong place.
One important difference between academic journals and Britannica/"Old Media journalism" are the mechanisms for accepting new content. Britannica has its staff of writers, and then will seek out a specific expert in a field for extra information --- if they don't "find" you, then you aren't getting published in Britannica. Same for news agencies: you get published because you're already on their staff. Journals, however, are specifically set up to process articles from basically anyone who submits --- often, from names the editorial staff has never seen before. Most journal websites have a "submit" button somewhere --- if you've done your own great outside-of-academia research, you can just send it right in, and it'll generally get reviewed fairly to the same standards as all other submissions.
Of course, just sending your home-made paper in probably won't work. It'll get quickly rejected, with a terse and inscrutable rejection letter that leads you to assume that the Academic Cabal is prejudiced against your lack of fancy titles. This is actually unlikely to be the case: your paper probably actually isn't as hot stuff as you think it is; it's obviously amateurish, ignorant of prior literature in the field, methodologically poor, and badly formatted. But, underneath the lack of academic polish, you've actually done some original and worthwhile research. What should you do?
Well, instead of trying to be a lone outsider railing against the Ivory Tower,... if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I bet there's an academic institution of some sort near where you live, with professionals studying in your area of interest. Go talk to them; make friends with them; most of them don't bite. Show your interest in the area; tell them what you've already done; be willing to work with and learn from them (don't go in with a chip on your shoulder about being better for doing science without academic credentials). They can probably help you turn your research into something that will be publishable. I know a lot of "uncredentialed" scientists (formerly myself included) who, as high school and college kids, are published (co)authors without any high degrees; in some fields (like astronomy), amateur observers often contribute to important published results.
One can hope that Elsevier's "real" reputable journals will stay "clean" because (a) their own journal-level management team are actually conscientious scientists, and (b) they are constantly subject to close scrutiny by experts --- every issue they publish gets read by the top minds in the field, so they'd be in hot water fast if they tried to pull any funny business. Reason (b) is something that didn't apply to Elsevier's fake Australian pharmaceutical journals: these were not intended to attract the interest/scrutiny of researchers in the field, but to provide realistic-looking "peer reviewed research" references that the drug companies could use in the regulatory approval process or for marketing blurbs ("proven 70% more effective according to research in...!"). Elsevier is a nasty problem in the world of publishing; they are a for-profit enterprise (unlike most other major reputable journals, which are non-profit foundations) which has (over their long history) accumulated many reputable journals, but also has amoral profiteering scumbags for their top management (the type of folks who would aid and abet drug companies in potential mass murder by shoddily-tested drugs when they think they can make a buck and get away with it).
A third class is politically/ideologically/commercially motivated journals, like the young-earth-creationism journal in the pharyngula link, or Elsevier's fake pharmaceutical journals. These will publish "research" supporting particular unscientific bullshit that serves the interests of a particular group, so that unqualified/uniformed decision makers (think, e.g., right-wing politicians wanting justification for unregulated pollution or teaching "creation science") can be handed "sciency-looking" reference to back up their policies, so they have something "equal" to fire back with when the "other side" brings actual scientific facts to the table.
Probably both. The cross section for Rayleigh scattering (scattering from things smaller than light's wavelength, like atoms in the atmosphere) goes as 1/lambda^4, so longer wavelengths scatter much less strongly. This scattering is what makes distant landscapes look hazy, and the sky away from the sun look blue (scattering bluer light back towards the earth instead of letting it pass straight through); as you move to the red and near IR, you can get much clearer views of distant objects (thus also more effectively laser-zorch them).
Given that the article is about understanding life forms deep in the Earth's crust (which provides an analogous habitat to Mars' crust), what different meaning of "intraterrestrial" do you think the authors should be aware of?
How do you know the redaction failed "everything they were trying to achieve"? If the goal of the redaction was to prevent people from being able to figure out what the words were, it obviously failed; but that (based on the obvious failure) probably wasn't the redactor's goal. If the goal was to replace some occurrences of the letters "uc", "ic", and "as" with "**" (or a gray box, in the image), it was a complete success. If the goal was to avoid offending people who, for their own idiosyncratic and possibly irrational reasons, prefer not to see swear words printed in full, then the redactor succeeded, too. If the goal was to offend folks like you (by teasingly leaving you with less "donkey dick fucking your ass" than you apparently desire), it was a success also.
And if your goal is to police how everyone else should think and feel, and insist that they take or not take offense according only to your own considerations of what is and is not efficacious, then you're as bad as the most puritanical enforcers of political correctness (who would likely argue that fully spelling out "donkey dick fucking your ass" doesn't particularly achieve any useful end either). Let your own speech be as vulgar as you want, and allow others to choose their own modes of expression (not subject to the whims of your authoritarian drive for efficiency).
The government has been doing quite a lot of jobs; like providing roads, communications systems, schools, universities, legal systems, parks, environmental quality oversight, labor protections, military support, innovative fundamental research, etc. Now, I don't think they're always doing the best possible job (and in some areas, like murderous foreign wars and torture camps, they're downright terrible). If you don't like the job our government does, you're free to pack up and head over to the competition --- move to Canada, or Somalia, or whoever else you think is doing a better job. On the whole, the government does a lot of fairly decent work that earns its salary; certainly a lot more in comparison than many megacorporations do for the amount of money they rake in.
Nope. Jealous would mean that I wished academic researchers would be paid millions and millions, and be able to rule over all the peons below. That's not the outcome I want. I just don't think multimillionaire profiteers should be granted such societal power, either, especially when they're only doing a less efficient job of what academic researchers do with far lower wasted margins.
The big question isn't so much whether brain research is good and needed (I think it is), but whether handing out wads of cash to private profiteers is actually the most effective way to do research. There are plenty of highly qualified, smart, and innovative academic researchers who would be glad to get grants without tacking on a fat profit bonus for investors. Private business is great at self-promotion and sucking up cash from public coffers into private pockets, but it's doubtful whether those massive added inefficiencies are balanced by equal or greater gains in quality of results over publicly-funded non-profit research.
You waste your own time by reading/responding; don't blame others for your failings.
I suppose I mistakenly assumed that you were against censorship for any sort of free speech concern. Given that you want to micro-manage how others spend their own time and choose to communicate, you can't be much of an advocate for freedom. What a pity, if only Slashdot posters didn't waste all their f**king time censoring swears, they'd surely use that saved time to cure cancer! If we made 'loufoque' dictator of the universe, he'd make sure not a second was wasted on bleeping out words, so we'd have that super-productive time to read all about "donkey d**k f*****ng your a**" in un-redacted glory!
Good point. I suggested a side view for ease of unobstructed view, assuming that the 1D information would be sufficient. I think this is still likely to be a good assumption. In a more advanced choir, every fine nuance of the conductor's instruction can be critical; however, given that the blind singer is mostly able to keep up with the choir (despite zero direct info from the conductor), and hasn't been kicked out for unacceptable performance, I'm guessing that this is a more relaxed hobbyist choir that's not a "finely tuned instrument" responsive to the finest directorial nuances. In this case, reliable 1D information should be a big improvement, and likely provide the blind singer with a comparable level of awareness of the director to his/her peers.
If 2D info is important, this can easily be provided on the input side by simply re-positioning the camera. The difficulty, however, comes on the "output" side; clearly portraying coordinated 2-dimensional movements to the singer is going to be more difficult than, e.g., stereo phasing a click to the left and right. If, as the poster suggested, a device for tracing out 2-D shapes on the skin is already actually available, this might be an easy solution; however, if this was only a hypothetical (requiring costly purchases or lots of R&D), the task is more difficult.
Suppose the darkest inner circles of government intelligence agencies actually can crack widely-used and trusted encryption like PGP. If you're merely an international drug dealer and child slave trader (or peaceful anti-war protestor, whichever the FBI loathes more), the tiny cabal of people within the FBI who have the clearance to know about the PGP crack aren't going to do anything that remotely risks leaking such information. Your secrets are perfectly safe with them, because they've got more important targets (like all the Top-Secret-equivalent info from foreign governments and corporations) that they'd lose covert access to if even a vaguely credible hint of a PGP crack leaked to lower levels of government law enforcement (and from there to other countries' intelligence operatives). A PGP crack would simply be too important an asset for covert intelligence to risk exposing on whatever mildly nefarious plots your encrypted emails are hiding.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what particular form of QE denial DavidHumus has run across, but what I've seen usually (like most denialisms) starts with some critical misunderstanding of QE: e.g "QE lets you transmit information faster than the speed of light"; then concludes "you can't transmit information faster than c, thus QE is bunk!".
Presumably, the ability to shoot a beam of light >250 miles, without needing to build a 250-mile-long evacuated beamline, is a major advantage gained. The Earth is surrounded by this annoying thing called "the atmosphere," which wreaks havoc with light traveling only a few miles; the faster you can get out of the atmosphere (by, e.g., shooting straight up), the easier it'll be to get any useful amount of light to the other end.
Considering how loudly the Washington "deficit hawks" whine whenever they catch some researcher getting a $10k grant to do something they don't understand, it's amazing how quickly they discount doing things that fix *HALF THE ANNUAL DEFICIT* in one swoop. Obama losing $500,000,000 on Solyndra a few years back? That's only a drop in the bucket compared to annual defense spending of ~$1,000,000,000,000, yet guess which of these issues has the "fiscally responsible" crowd up in arms. When we're spending more that the next 10 countries combined, we could cut back an awful lot (e.g. a thousand "Solyndras per yer"), and make a heck of a lot more progress on the budget deficit than stripping some teacher's pension benefits. But when it comes to the military, the "every drop counts" attitude of the Austerity-lovers magically vanishes.
Same for taxing the rich (and there's plenty if you go not only after income, which can be easily moved to other areas, but also capital gains, transactions, and even the wealth they've trickled up from the rest of the population over the past several decades) --- strange how solutions that chop tens of percent at a time off the deficit are called "too small to matter," usually in the same breath used to recommend a handful of 0.1% budget trimmings off the backs of the poor and middle class.
I'm guessing they didn't just hack this together from a broken LaserWriter II. They can basically use the same UV laser optics technology that regular lithography systems use to make "normal" chips. I doubt they'd start at the very bleeding edge 22nm process, but lots of chips are made far more coarsely than that.
Letting families starve if family members refuse to perform acts which they would, were their family's lives not held hostage, consider immoral == Immorality == Capitalism.
So the person setting it up is lulled into thinking that the default "4nk^&nW3)(&" is secure and doesn't need to be reset (despite any attacker being just one web search away from learning the "better" default)? Using a default of '1234' is a great way of reminding even minimally competent people that the password needs to be changed from default *right now.* Unfortunately, there are enough people out there not even minimally competent about security that this continues to be a problem.
When I go to the store, I don't see boxes of "Monsanto(tm) Corn Flakes (now with 30% more Bacillus thuringiensis toxin!)". Monsanto markets to the agribusiness end of production, not directly to the consumer. Aside from products specifically marketed on the basis of *not* being made with whatever crap Monsanto is pushing, consumers are unlikely to see labeling and make purchasing decisions based on Monsanto's branding/marketing/labeling.
You shouldn't have had those custom calcium-fluoride and fused quartz windows installed. Most normal glass (such as is used in car windows) cuts off rather steeply just outside the visible range, blocking pretty much all UV-B radiation (the type that causes skin reddening / sunburn symptoms). UV-A is still transmitted, and can cause genetic damage and long-term cancer increase, but won't give you sunburn symptoms; you were likely experiencing skin irritation due to other factors related to being cooped up in a car for an extended period, rather than actual sunburn.
The peer review "filter" certainly has its false positives (and negatives) in sieving out the publication-worthy. In the broader context of this discussion thread, the question is whether this would be improved by transitioning to a more "open, crowd-sourced, public, un-credentialed, Wikipedia-style" approach, or rather by continuing to push for reform and improvement within academia. Ask a hard-core Wikipedia contributor whether the system always selects the good edits and rejects the bad --- I suspect you'll get a similar earful to your complaints about bad referees, about how groups of ignorant territorial goons can drive away better informed editors from particular topics. In my opinion, I don't think Wikipedia particularly solves the types of issues that lousy referees introduce to academic publishing --- you just lower the bar from having people who don't believe in M-estimators review your work to people who can't grok a "y=m*x+b" least-squares fit. I think there's lots of room for improvement and education within the scientific community on how to be a good referee (and procedural changes to better route around failures). I don't think that "opening the floodgates" to members of the public unwilling to climb over existing low barriers (e.g. by befriending an established researcher) will magically solve academia's institutional problems (but it sure can introduce a lot more problems of its own).
Hey, I see you've run into somewhat dickish reviewers, too --- guess what, everyone who publishes sometimes encounters this. That's why it's doubly useful to work with a published scientist, who will be there to have a laugh with you at the reviewer (and help you shrug off the criticism and deal with the revisions, instead of sulking in rage). Probably buried in the review, there are (implicitly) a couple good points, too. For example, in your "review," it appears that --- as clever and advanced as you may be --- you have trouble communicating in terms that someone else in the field can understand, which ruins the whole point of a paper (papers aren't to prove how smart you are, they're to communicate ideas to others in the field); add more explanatory text and references to help guide a reader through the unfamiliar and advanced parts. Shrug off the disappointment, make a few minor changes to appease the reviewer, and send the paper back. The review process clearly isn't an insurmountable obstacle, since papers do get published (after a round or two of peer-reviewed revisions).
Planet-to-planet to a couple places within one solar system is feasible. However, if we end up discovering that not every potentially habitable niche in our own solar system is (or at least has been within recent geological history, prior to some particular ecological disaster) absolutely teeming with life, then the interstellar hypothesis becomes quite unlikely. If life-supporting planets are spewing out space-hardy life seeds at a high enough rate to chance upon planets in solar systems several light-years away, then all the bodies within our own solar system should be absolutely drenched by colonizing life-forms. If we don't start finding life-forms nearly everywhere we look in our own solar system, then the argument for exchange with other stars is seriously undercut.
Fortunately, science isn't about always being right, but how well you can correct things that are wrong. Erroneous publications --- whether from fraud or honest mishap --- get rapidly and thoroughly countered (in the same reputable journals) as soon as better scientific evidence is available. Anyone searching for these topics will immediately stumble across their later "resolution" in highly-visible journal articles.
On the other hand, the crap paper languishing in a fake journal will likely never get directly refuted --- no one competent enough to know it is wrong will ever read it (because they don't waste their time reading scam journals), or, if it does get noticed, will be below contempt to bother refuting (no reputable journal is going to waste pages refuting articles in J. Crackpot Quack Res. Meth.). Thus, any reader later stumbling across it will not be provided the proper context to evaluate its claims in light of later research.
Analysis of the "connectivity matrix" between inter-journal referencing will indicate that these are in their own isolated group. What you can do is calculate Impact Factor relative to a few known "good" journals: start with, e.g., Science and Nature, and expand your list to all journals moderately frequently referenced by these two and the journals they reference. No matter how many cross-referenced links the fake journal cluster have with each other, it will show poor "connectivity" to the group of legitimate journals that include key reputable publications in their own referencing cluster.
SEO spam works because Google doesn't necessarily "know" which neighborhoods of the internet are the "right" ones for your search (since the internet developed in a much more sparsely connected and decentralized manner, with a huge number of locally-closely-linked neighborhoods). With scientific journals, however, there is only one "good" interlinked neighborhood that contains the reputable journals --- if you aren't in the same "cluster" as the top publications in your field, you're in the wrong place.
One important difference between academic journals and Britannica/"Old Media journalism" are the mechanisms for accepting new content. Britannica has its staff of writers, and then will seek out a specific expert in a field for extra information --- if they don't "find" you, then you aren't getting published in Britannica. Same for news agencies: you get published because you're already on their staff. Journals, however, are specifically set up to process articles from basically anyone who submits --- often, from names the editorial staff has never seen before. Most journal websites have a "submit" button somewhere --- if you've done your own great outside-of-academia research, you can just send it right in, and it'll generally get reviewed fairly to the same standards as all other submissions.
Of course, just sending your home-made paper in probably won't work. It'll get quickly rejected, with a terse and inscrutable rejection letter that leads you to assume that the Academic Cabal is prejudiced against your lack of fancy titles. This is actually unlikely to be the case: your paper probably actually isn't as hot stuff as you think it is; it's obviously amateurish, ignorant of prior literature in the field, methodologically poor, and badly formatted. But, underneath the lack of academic polish, you've actually done some original and worthwhile research. What should you do?
Well, instead of trying to be a lone outsider railing against the Ivory Tower, ... if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I bet there's an academic institution of some sort near where you live, with professionals studying in your area of interest. Go talk to them; make friends with them; most of them don't bite. Show your interest in the area; tell them what you've already done; be willing to work with and learn from them (don't go in with a chip on your shoulder about being better for doing science without academic credentials). They can probably help you turn your research into something that will be publishable. I know a lot of "uncredentialed" scientists (formerly myself included) who, as high school and college kids, are published (co)authors without any high degrees; in some fields (like astronomy), amateur observers often contribute to important published results.
One can hope that Elsevier's "real" reputable journals will stay "clean" because (a) their own journal-level management team are actually conscientious scientists, and (b) they are constantly subject to close scrutiny by experts --- every issue they publish gets read by the top minds in the field, so they'd be in hot water fast if they tried to pull any funny business. Reason (b) is something that didn't apply to Elsevier's fake Australian pharmaceutical journals: these were not intended to attract the interest/scrutiny of researchers in the field, but to provide realistic-looking "peer reviewed research" references that the drug companies could use in the regulatory approval process or for marketing blurbs ("proven 70% more effective according to research in ...!"). Elsevier is a nasty problem in the world of publishing; they are a for-profit enterprise (unlike most other major reputable journals, which are non-profit foundations) which has (over their long history) accumulated many reputable journals, but also has amoral profiteering scumbags for their top management (the type of folks who would aid and abet drug companies in potential mass murder by shoddily-tested drugs when they think they can make a buck and get away with it).
A third class is politically/ideologically/commercially motivated journals, like the young-earth-creationism journal in the pharyngula link, or Elsevier's fake pharmaceutical journals. These will publish "research" supporting particular unscientific bullshit that serves the interests of a particular group, so that unqualified/uniformed decision makers (think, e.g., right-wing politicians wanting justification for unregulated pollution or teaching "creation science") can be handed "sciency-looking" reference to back up their policies, so they have something "equal" to fire back with when the "other side" brings actual scientific facts to the table.
Probably both. The cross section for Rayleigh scattering (scattering from things smaller than light's wavelength, like atoms in the atmosphere) goes as 1/lambda^4, so longer wavelengths scatter much less strongly. This scattering is what makes distant landscapes look hazy, and the sky away from the sun look blue (scattering bluer light back towards the earth instead of letting it pass straight through); as you move to the red and near IR, you can get much clearer views of distant objects (thus also more effectively laser-zorch them).
Given that the article is about understanding life forms deep in the Earth's crust (which provides an analogous habitat to Mars' crust), what different meaning of "intraterrestrial" do you think the authors should be aware of?
How do you know the redaction failed "everything they were trying to achieve"? If the goal of the redaction was to prevent people from being able to figure out what the words were, it obviously failed; but that (based on the obvious failure) probably wasn't the redactor's goal. If the goal was to replace some occurrences of the letters "uc", "ic", and "as" with "**" (or a gray box, in the image), it was a complete success. If the goal was to avoid offending people who, for their own idiosyncratic and possibly irrational reasons, prefer not to see swear words printed in full, then the redactor succeeded, too. If the goal was to offend folks like you (by teasingly leaving you with less "donkey dick fucking your ass" than you apparently desire), it was a success also.
And if your goal is to police how everyone else should think and feel, and insist that they take or not take offense according only to your own considerations of what is and is not efficacious, then you're as bad as the most puritanical enforcers of political correctness (who would likely argue that fully spelling out "donkey dick fucking your ass" doesn't particularly achieve any useful end either). Let your own speech be as vulgar as you want, and allow others to choose their own modes of expression (not subject to the whims of your authoritarian drive for efficiency).
The government has been doing quite a lot of jobs; like providing roads, communications systems, schools, universities, legal systems, parks, environmental quality oversight, labor protections, military support, innovative fundamental research, etc. Now, I don't think they're always doing the best possible job (and in some areas, like murderous foreign wars and torture camps, they're downright terrible). If you don't like the job our government does, you're free to pack up and head over to the competition --- move to Canada, or Somalia, or whoever else you think is doing a better job. On the whole, the government does a lot of fairly decent work that earns its salary; certainly a lot more in comparison than many megacorporations do for the amount of money they rake in.
Nope. Jealous would mean that I wished academic researchers would be paid millions and millions, and be able to rule over all the peons below. That's not the outcome I want. I just don't think multimillionaire profiteers should be granted such societal power, either, especially when they're only doing a less efficient job of what academic researchers do with far lower wasted margins.
The big question isn't so much whether brain research is good and needed (I think it is), but whether handing out wads of cash to private profiteers is actually the most effective way to do research. There are plenty of highly qualified, smart, and innovative academic researchers who would be glad to get grants without tacking on a fat profit bonus for investors. Private business is great at self-promotion and sucking up cash from public coffers into private pockets, but it's doubtful whether those massive added inefficiencies are balanced by equal or greater gains in quality of results over publicly-funded non-profit research.
You waste your own time by reading/responding; don't blame others for your failings.
I suppose I mistakenly assumed that you were against censorship for any sort of free speech concern. Given that you want to micro-manage how others spend their own time and choose to communicate, you can't be much of an advocate for freedom. What a pity, if only Slashdot posters didn't waste all their f**king time censoring swears, they'd surely use that saved time to cure cancer! If we made 'loufoque' dictator of the universe, he'd make sure not a second was wasted on bleeping out words, so we'd have that super-productive time to read all about "donkey d**k f*****ng your a**" in un-redacted glory!
Good point. I suggested a side view for ease of unobstructed view, assuming that the 1D information would be sufficient. I think this is still likely to be a good assumption. In a more advanced choir, every fine nuance of the conductor's instruction can be critical; however, given that the blind singer is mostly able to keep up with the choir (despite zero direct info from the conductor), and hasn't been kicked out for unacceptable performance, I'm guessing that this is a more relaxed hobbyist choir that's not a "finely tuned instrument" responsive to the finest directorial nuances. In this case, reliable 1D information should be a big improvement, and likely provide the blind singer with a comparable level of awareness of the director to his/her peers.
If 2D info is important, this can easily be provided on the input side by simply re-positioning the camera. The difficulty, however, comes on the "output" side; clearly portraying coordinated 2-dimensional movements to the singer is going to be more difficult than, e.g., stereo phasing a click to the left and right. If, as the poster suggested, a device for tracing out 2-D shapes on the skin is already actually available, this might be an easy solution; however, if this was only a hypothetical (requiring costly purchases or lots of R&D), the task is more difficult.
Suppose the darkest inner circles of government intelligence agencies actually can crack widely-used and trusted encryption like PGP. If you're merely an international drug dealer and child slave trader (or peaceful anti-war protestor, whichever the FBI loathes more), the tiny cabal of people within the FBI who have the clearance to know about the PGP crack aren't going to do anything that remotely risks leaking such information. Your secrets are perfectly safe with them, because they've got more important targets (like all the Top-Secret-equivalent info from foreign governments and corporations) that they'd lose covert access to if even a vaguely credible hint of a PGP crack leaked to lower levels of government law enforcement (and from there to other countries' intelligence operatives). A PGP crack would simply be too important an asset for covert intelligence to risk exposing on whatever mildly nefarious plots your encrypted emails are hiding.