Issue #1: Open and free journals vs. traditional for fee journals
I think open and free journals have a place. However I don't think they should instantly be elevated to the level of creditability that the traditional journals currently enjoy without proving their worth. I don't think anyone who is not employed by a traditional journal is dismissing the possibility of a free and open journal. In fact, I know some colleagues who are looking forward to them. However it will take more than activists cheerleading for open journals like the article above to make it mainstream with professionals. I think it will happen. I do not think it will happen as fast as some outside of the profession would like.
Issue #2: Tax payer funded research making results public.
Most projects I'm affiliated with make their data available to the public as soon as feasible. Some of the researchers post their papers on their personal websites some time after it's been published in a journal. The non-free journals are searchable and readable/printable at some (probably most) university libraries. I don't see an epidemic of data being hoarded from the people that funded the research.
Personally I believe that, as research engineers and scientists, we investigate, record and theorize what is happening around us and are obligated to provide this knowledge to society in order to advance our understanding of the universe around us. Since none of this research has any traditional commercial value, it is up to the government to provide funding for this research. I didn't say that this data should be available simply because my tax dollars subsidized it. It should be available because it is a moral obligation. Not all governmental research has this type of obligation, but those types of research is in the minority.
That said. People who say that they are entitled to all government funded data oversimplify a complex issue. Just because an embattled president is desperate to appear populist by answering every internet petition or by creating more sound bites by touting yet another idea that he has no interest in following through on doesn't automatically make it a reality or even correct.
I think he read it fine. The problem is that an "open an free" journal should prove itself just as reputable and worthy as the privately operated peer-review journals.
I'm all for an open and free alternative peer reviewed journal, but I should want to use it because of its overall value and reputation not because I was forced to do it or because "open and free" magically equate to the traditional journals. The private journals had to prove their worth when they started, the open journals are just going to have to do the same.
No I didn't. I started off saying that we should minimize waste in the government. I used "1%" to refer to priority of republican budget decisions, not the amount of sequestration. The "1%" value was purely coincidental.
I guess I'm curious why you think I'm a republican
I make no assumptions about your political affiliation nor do I think it is any of my business. We currently have a two-party system. The president is a democrat and the majority of the house of representatives is republican. I simply stated that you accused the president of targeting the 1% cut to coincide with his party's ideology and pointed out that the republicans are doing the same. I never accused you of being a republican,
Which is why he has to make the cut hurt. Instead of minimizing waste (reducing travel budgets, etc.) he's going to cut positions with that 1%...
Pot meet kettle. I think we all can agree that minimizing waste in the government should be a high priority. Unfortunately both parties color their cuts with their ideology. Instead of making across the board cuts and making agencies make do with less, they target specific programs. You accuse the democrats of singling out the 1% with their revenue increases and cuts in subsidies to corporations, yet the republicans aim their cuts almost exclusively on social programs.
Sadly this fact becomes more apparent everyday when the house republicans use the bush era temporary tax cuts as a "line in the sand" instead of taking any compromise on the position. Neither party can claim any moral high ground, but the republicans in particular are making their unwillingness to make across the board compromises apparent to all who ask. If only we had a real third political party.
The thing that gets me is how Obama got away with raising a regressive tax like the payroll tax and didn't get slaughtered in the media for raising taxes on the poor and middle class.
Nice revisionist history there. The temporary payroll tax reduction act was allowed to expire by the dysfunctional house of representatives. They used it as a bargaining chip in their attempt to renew the temporary tax relief package that directly benefits the top 1% of income earners. Of course hypocrisy surfaced after the "fiscal conservatives" used the need to reduce the budget deficit as an excuse for letting this tax reduction expire even though these same individuals are still actively pushing to make their own temporary tax relief act permanent.
I single out one lobbyist in particular - Grover Norquist. True to form, he actually argued that the expiration of the payroll relief bill was NOT a tax increase, whereas the expiration of the Bush tax cut for the wealthy is undeniably a tax increase.
It takes some balls to place blame on solely Obama for increasing the payroll tax despite the fact that there are overwhelming amount of written and recorded documentation that shows it was the opposition at fault.
Oh please, we all know the Constitution is "just a piece of paper" and "isn't a suicide pact."
Politicians treat it like a Bible but not in a good way. They will quote only the sections that are agreeable to their argument while completely ignoring the rest. Let's take the political debate over gun control. Opponents to gun control speak of the sanctity of the 2nd amendment and how any restrictions, regardless of how reasonable, weaken the amendment and take rights away from the citizens.
Unfortunately most of these opponents turn a blind eye to the other amendments and have proposed or passed laws and restrictions to the "Freedom of speech, religion, and press" (1st), "Unreasonable search and seizures" (4th), "Due Process" (5th), "Fair and speedy public trial" (6th), "Civil cases trial by Jury" (7th), "Excessive fines as cruel and unusual punishment" (8th), "Citizenship" (14th), "Direct elections of senators" (17th - Yes there is talk of repealing this one), and the annual submission of a bill from Jose Serrano "Term limits for the president" (22nd).
Your examples could have easily be done with open source software and if they were implemented well would still give the exact same results. Unless of course you want to argue that security by obscurity is better than security by being open for review.
Disregarding my previous gross error of thinking that this was to protect Comcast's safe harbor status, I still believe this is directly related to the DMCA. Commercial ISPs are doing this to save them money that they would otherwise spend on answering court orders to provide subscriber information.
The educational route seems less draconian than just having the violations reach a level where it now is worth the MPAA/RIAA's time to collect damages. As a parent, I would gladly risk $35 to contest continuing copyright violations than to have a lawyer serve with me a subpoena for a civil case with a much higher expense. I think the theory that copyright violations are happening without the parent's knowledge is a good way to eliminate a large number of P2P nodes operated by teenagers.
You are correct. I was looking at 17-512(c) of the DMCA and not the more applicable 17-512(a). The injunctions set forth in 17-512(j) all begin with a court order.
Of course Comcast is free to do as it wishes when it comes to the service agreement and I may add that Comcast isn't explicitly looking at your traffic out of some decency on their part. It is so that they can claim limited liability as provided 17-512(a). Section 17-512(c) which provides a legal framework for takedown notices only applies to the web hosting and file storage portion of Comcast and not P2P related activity.
Interestingly enough, if Comcast is actually monitoring our internet traffic then it seems that 17-512(c) would be more applicable. This would make sense if they continued interfering with P2P communications or otherwise disqualify themselves from the limited liability that comes with claiming to having no knowledge or control of what happens on their networks.
There is no relation at all between this agreement and DCMA. DCMA excludes the ISPs of any responsibility and never applied to the end users.
The "Safe Harbor" provision of the DCMA only applies to the online service providers and ISPs. The copyright alert system that is being called "Six Strikes" is a mechanism being used by the participating ISPs in order to comply with "Safe Harbor" status as given in Title II of the DCMA (part of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitations Act).
In other words, YES "Six Strikes" is a policy being used to satisfy the terms of Title II of DCMA (OCILLA) law. So semantics won't win this discussion.
By the way, "end users" enjoy no such "Safe Harbor" protections.
Good catch. Technically it is a policy to give you six chances to stay in compliance with an actual law DMCA.
In Comcast's case I just read their accepted use policy (shocking I know) and they state that they don't actually monitor your traffic. They only notify you when someone files a claim of copyright violation against you using two possible methods: (1) In-browser popup notification and/or (2) Email to the main subscription email account. Comcast also claims that termination of service is not part of their copyright alert system (CAS) and that they claim that "CAS was designed so that content owners will not have access to any customer’s personal information."
That's one way. I had an issue with Comcast that caused computers to be redirected to the modem registration page for no apparent reason. The only computer that wasn't affected was my computer which used Google DNS. They eventually fixed it, but if it wasn't for my daughter's computer defaulting to Comcast DNS, I would have never known there was an issue.
Another way is that they could just simply redirect HTTP requests via you cable modem.
I know, folks are penny wise and pound foolish with some of the Chrome book.... of course there's a silver lining here - it will make Chrome OS more usable outside of a dumb terminal for the cloud.
I think Google has slipped up a little here. They were making a compelling argument for Chrome books by offering inexpensive notebooks and selling the power of the Google web infrastructure to provide always up-to-date applications with no need for backups. Of course, this technology is far from being new and it wasn't even invented by Google, but their dominance on the Web could be the push this architecture needs to get it close to mainstream.
Unfortunately Google may have muddied their message a bit with the Pixel laptop. They are obviously getting impatient and need to make a laptop with specs comparable to the MacBookPro and UltraBooks, however in doing so they abandoned their message that inexpensive could be just as powerful. Also this hack shows that their goal of a standards based web computing platform may not actually be achievable.
So now we have Google pushing an expensive laptop with ChromeOS that does less than comparable laptops running traditional OS. To try to "right the ship" Google is doing a hack to make an office web application that is more palatable on the Pixel. In doing this we are wondering if Google would have been better off running Android OS on the Pixel instead of or in addition to ChromeOS.
You can "unlock" the device, assuming you have a mac to run the dev kit for 99 bucks a year.
I should have expounded a little more. Unlocking means being able to use the phone with a carrier other than the one where you purchased the phone. Jailbreaking is the ability to load third-party binaries from a source other than the "blessed" source (e.g. App Store).
In a healthy wireless market we would be paying a lower price for service as well as paying a reasonable price for a phone. The market is unhealthy on two fronts.
Unlocking is not the same as jailbreaking. You can buy an unlocked phone from Apple at the unsubsidized price. However you can not purchase a jailbroken phone.
Jailbreaking is only important for a small percentage of users. It's about the same percentage as Android phone owners rooting their phone.
As much money as you paid for that phone, I sure hope you do get your money's worth. It appears that you did. This is what everyone should expect from their phone regardless of manufacturer or OS.
LG is free to create a fork with their fork becoming proprietary since they own the copyright.
Re:Review Ruby for the perl enthusiast please
on
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
1. Ruby is not a toy not suitable for 'serious' programs,
This double negative tripped me up a little. Once I put my glasses on I understood you meant to say "Ruby is not a toy. It is as suitable for 'serious' programmers as Python".;)
Anyway I really want to reply to this:
... frankly the differences are not huge, Perl is slightly gnarlier, Python slightly stricter, Ruby slightly more anarchic...
Perl is the "strictest". I love "use strict" (more accurately: use strict "vars") and wish that Python and Ruby had something similar to it. Sure you can't use a variable until it is assigned a value, but why not have the ability to catch assignments to misspelled variables during the compile phase?
Also Ruby shares its anarchic roots with Perl since TIMTOWTDI (There is more than one way to do it).
Re:Review Ruby for the perl enthusiast please
on
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Perl is way faster. Like twice as fast. Check out my test:
% time (echo | ruby)
( echo | ruby; ) 0.01s user 0.00s system 91% cpu 0.016 total
% time (echo | perl)
( echo | perl; ) 0.00s user 0.00s system 84% cpu 0.007 total
So if I tolerate an additional 9 ms of startup time, I could write slightly faster interpreted code in a language with enough syntactic sugar to make mixing OO code with functional code less painful? Cool.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are confusing two issues.
Issue #1: Open and free journals vs. traditional for fee journals
I think open and free journals have a place. However I don't think they should instantly be elevated to the level of creditability that the traditional journals currently enjoy without proving their worth. I don't think anyone who is not employed by a traditional journal is dismissing the possibility of a free and open journal. In fact, I know some colleagues who are looking forward to them. However it will take more than activists cheerleading for open journals like the article above to make it mainstream with professionals. I think it will happen. I do not think it will happen as fast as some outside of the profession would like.
Issue #2: Tax payer funded research making results public.
Most projects I'm affiliated with make their data available to the public as soon as feasible. Some of the researchers post their papers on their personal websites some time after it's been published in a journal. The non-free journals are searchable and readable/printable at some (probably most) university libraries. I don't see an epidemic of data being hoarded from the people that funded the research.
Personally I believe that, as research engineers and scientists, we investigate, record and theorize what is happening around us and are obligated to provide this knowledge to society in order to advance our understanding of the universe around us. Since none of this research has any traditional commercial value, it is up to the government to provide funding for this research. I didn't say that this data should be available simply because my tax dollars subsidized it. It should be available because it is a moral obligation. Not all governmental research has this type of obligation, but those types of research is in the minority.
That said. People who say that they are entitled to all government funded data oversimplify a complex issue. Just because an embattled president is desperate to appear populist by answering every internet petition or by creating more sound bites by touting yet another idea that he has no interest in following through on doesn't automatically make it a reality or even correct.
I think he read it fine. The problem is that an "open an free" journal should prove itself just as reputable and worthy as the privately operated peer-review journals.
I'm all for an open and free alternative peer reviewed journal, but I should want to use it because of its overall value and reputation not because I was forced to do it or because "open and free" magically equate to the traditional journals. The private journals had to prove their worth when they started, the open journals are just going to have to do the same.
No I didn't. I started off saying that we should minimize waste in the government. I used "1%" to refer to priority of republican budget decisions, not the amount of sequestration. The "1%" value was purely coincidental.
I make no assumptions about your political affiliation nor do I think it is any of my business. We currently have a two-party system. The president is a democrat and the majority of the house of representatives is republican. I simply stated that you accused the president of targeting the 1% cut to coincide with his party's ideology and pointed out that the republicans are doing the same. I never accused you of being a republican,
Pot meet kettle. I think we all can agree that minimizing waste in the government should be a high priority. Unfortunately both parties color their cuts with their ideology. Instead of making across the board cuts and making agencies make do with less, they target specific programs. You accuse the democrats of singling out the 1% with their revenue increases and cuts in subsidies to corporations, yet the republicans aim their cuts almost exclusively on social programs.
Sadly this fact becomes more apparent everyday when the house republicans use the bush era temporary tax cuts as a "line in the sand" instead of taking any compromise on the position. Neither party can claim any moral high ground, but the republicans in particular are making their unwillingness to make across the board compromises apparent to all who ask. If only we had a real third political party.
Nice revisionist history there. The temporary payroll tax reduction act was allowed to expire by the dysfunctional house of representatives. They used it as a bargaining chip in their attempt to renew the temporary tax relief package that directly benefits the top 1% of income earners. Of course hypocrisy surfaced after the "fiscal conservatives" used the need to reduce the budget deficit as an excuse for letting this tax reduction expire even though these same individuals are still actively pushing to make their own temporary tax relief act permanent.
I single out one lobbyist in particular - Grover Norquist. True to form, he actually argued that the expiration of the payroll relief bill was NOT a tax increase, whereas the expiration of the Bush tax cut for the wealthy is undeniably a tax increase.
It takes some balls to place blame on solely Obama for increasing the payroll tax despite the fact that there are overwhelming amount of written and recorded documentation that shows it was the opposition at fault.
Politicians treat it like a Bible but not in a good way. They will quote only the sections that are agreeable to their argument while completely ignoring the rest. Let's take the political debate over gun control. Opponents to gun control speak of the sanctity of the 2nd amendment and how any restrictions, regardless of how reasonable, weaken the amendment and take rights away from the citizens.
Unfortunately most of these opponents turn a blind eye to the other amendments and have proposed or passed laws and restrictions to the "Freedom of speech, religion, and press" (1st), "Unreasonable search and seizures" (4th), "Due Process" (5th), "Fair and speedy public trial" (6th), "Civil cases trial by Jury" (7th), "Excessive fines as cruel and unusual punishment" (8th), "Citizenship" (14th), "Direct elections of senators" (17th - Yes there is talk of repealing this one), and the annual submission of a bill from Jose Serrano "Term limits for the president" (22nd).
Your examples could have easily be done with open source software and if they were implemented well would still give the exact same results. Unless of course you want to argue that security by obscurity is better than security by being open for review.
So we devolved into picking the lesser of two evils rather than picking based on principle?
Well since CNET is the source that really isn't saying much.
Disregarding my previous gross error of thinking that this was to protect Comcast's safe harbor status, I still believe this is directly related to the DMCA. Commercial ISPs are doing this to save them money that they would otherwise spend on answering court orders to provide subscriber information.
The educational route seems less draconian than just having the violations reach a level where it now is worth the MPAA/RIAA's time to collect damages. As a parent, I would gladly risk $35 to contest continuing copyright violations than to have a lawyer serve with me a subpoena for a civil case with a much higher expense. I think the theory that copyright violations are happening without the parent's knowledge is a good way to eliminate a large number of P2P nodes operated by teenagers.
You are correct. I was looking at 17-512(c) of the DMCA and not the more applicable 17-512(a). The injunctions set forth in 17-512(j) all begin with a court order.
Of course Comcast is free to do as it wishes when it comes to the service agreement and I may add that Comcast isn't explicitly looking at your traffic out of some decency on their part. It is so that they can claim limited liability as provided 17-512(a). Section 17-512(c) which provides a legal framework for takedown notices only applies to the web hosting and file storage portion of Comcast and not P2P related activity.
Interestingly enough, if Comcast is actually monitoring our internet traffic then it seems that 17-512(c) would be more applicable. This would make sense if they continued interfering with P2P communications or otherwise disqualify themselves from the limited liability that comes with claiming to having no knowledge or control of what happens on their networks.
You may want to read the part of the DCMA where it states the requirements for an ISP to claim "Safe Harbor" status.
The "Safe Harbor" provision of the DCMA only applies to the online service providers and ISPs. The copyright alert system that is being called "Six Strikes" is a mechanism being used by the participating ISPs in order to comply with "Safe Harbor" status as given in Title II of the DCMA (part of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitations Act).
In other words, YES "Six Strikes" is a policy being used to satisfy the terms of Title II of DCMA (OCILLA) law. So semantics won't win this discussion.
By the way, "end users" enjoy no such "Safe Harbor" protections.
Good catch. Technically it is a policy to give you six chances to stay in compliance with an actual law DMCA.
In Comcast's case I just read their accepted use policy (shocking I know) and they state that they don't actually monitor your traffic. They only notify you when someone files a claim of copyright violation against you using two possible methods: (1) In-browser popup notification and/or (2) Email to the main subscription email account. Comcast also claims that termination of service is not part of their copyright alert system (CAS) and that they claim that "CAS was designed so that content owners will not have access to any customer’s personal information."
That's one way. I had an issue with Comcast that caused computers to be redirected to the modem registration page for no apparent reason. The only computer that wasn't affected was my computer which used Google DNS. They eventually fixed it, but if it wasn't for my daughter's computer defaulting to Comcast DNS, I would have never known there was an issue.
Another way is that they could just simply redirect HTTP requests via you cable modem.
I think he means that will become the accepted norm.
Well in this case, Comcast can say that they are complying with the six-strike law by using this method of notification.
I think Google has slipped up a little here. They were making a compelling argument for Chrome books by offering inexpensive notebooks and selling the power of the Google web infrastructure to provide always up-to-date applications with no need for backups. Of course, this technology is far from being new and it wasn't even invented by Google, but their dominance on the Web could be the push this architecture needs to get it close to mainstream.
Unfortunately Google may have muddied their message a bit with the Pixel laptop. They are obviously getting impatient and need to make a laptop with specs comparable to the MacBookPro and UltraBooks, however in doing so they abandoned their message that inexpensive could be just as powerful. Also this hack shows that their goal of a standards based web computing platform may not actually be achievable.
So now we have Google pushing an expensive laptop with ChromeOS that does less than comparable laptops running traditional OS. To try to "right the ship" Google is doing a hack to make an office web application that is more palatable on the Pixel. In doing this we are wondering if Google would have been better off running Android OS on the Pixel instead of or in addition to ChromeOS.
I should have expounded a little more. Unlocking means being able to use the phone with a carrier other than the one where you purchased the phone. Jailbreaking is the ability to load third-party binaries from a source other than the "blessed" source (e.g. App Store).
In a healthy wireless market we would be paying a lower price for service as well as paying a reasonable price for a phone. The market is unhealthy on two fronts.
Unlocking is not the same as jailbreaking. You can buy an unlocked phone from Apple at the unsubsidized price. However you can not purchase a jailbroken phone.
Jailbreaking is only important for a small percentage of users. It's about the same percentage as Android phone owners rooting their phone.
As much money as you paid for that phone, I sure hope you do get your money's worth. It appears that you did. This is what everyone should expect from their phone regardless of manufacturer or OS.
LG is free to create a fork with their fork becoming proprietary since they own the copyright.
This double negative tripped me up a little. Once I put my glasses on I understood you meant to say "Ruby is not a toy. It is as suitable for 'serious' programmers as Python". ;)
Anyway I really want to reply to this:
Perl is the "strictest". I love "use strict" (more accurately: use strict "vars") and wish that Python and Ruby had something similar to it. Sure you can't use a variable until it is assigned a value, but why not have the ability to catch assignments to misspelled variables during the compile phase?
Also Ruby shares its anarchic roots with Perl since TIMTOWTDI (There is more than one way to do it).
So if I tolerate an additional 9 ms of startup time, I could write slightly faster interpreted code in a language with enough syntactic sugar to make mixing OO code with functional code less painful? Cool. ;)
Ask your debian/ubuntu package maintainer. You could just use RVM or rbenv-build.