What is the usual chorus of self-justification we hear from pirates?
"I pirate to try out bands for free - I buy new bands all the time by discovering them this way, so I should be allowed to pirate because the artist makes money!" "I only get stuff I wouldn't have paid for anyway, so no one's losing money anyway." "I want to listen to music where I want, and if I can't pay and maintain all my rights, then I won't pay and will simply pirate the music!"
Well, since this is free and semi-portable (i.e. any web-accessable computer, but not your car/at the beach), none of the above arguements hold water - you can try out bands for free (I'm not taking the bait on arguements over what version of the word 'free' we're using...), you can try out stuff you wouldn't have paid for anyway, and while you can't listen to it anyplace-in-space, you aren't losing rights you paid for (since you didn't pay.)
This looks like a good thing, and a smart play from the music industry - attack piracy justifications by making them irrelevant. If it's less-than-perfect by your definition, you don't have to play, and the topography of the game doesn't change (other than undercutting piracy justifiactions.)
Keep in mind that piracy!=filesharing!=breaking DRM - all those aspects are separate (and I'd argue, straw men against this specific point.)
Personally, I'm more interested in seeing justice served than a particular outcome (i.e., Microsoft getting slapped). That's how the game is supposed to work. If we don't like the outcome, we need to examine the rules. Calling for particular outcomes against someone because you don't like them/their approach to X/their politics is the root of partisan politics/hackery, and so (while you may agree with what I'm saying broadly, but were speaking from frustration with MS), I'm calling you on it.
Yes, I think it's fair to say "need to deliver". Their terms of service are a contract - they provide x, I provide $. Failure on either of our parts is a breach of that contract. In the end, the only recourse most consumers have is changing services (if possible) - litigation is effectively pointless given the effort:gain ratio.
That said, I'm all for the companies not bundling services I don't need or use (I'll be sticking to my university account). But, if it's included in the contract I signed, I want the option of utilizing it. And if it doesn't work as advertised, it doesn't work. That's my point of view.
That sounds suspiciously like "you paid for a running car, not a working horn or radio." If they advertise a service bundle, they need to deliver.
Your DIY/hire a craftsman approach to this problem is certainly one way to handle it, but the average user has a right to expect the entire purchased service bundle to work.
"Oddly enough, the pop scientists are often teachers because they love the idea of instilling a copy of themselves into the mainstream. But they also cater to the lowest common denominator, hence their writings to the public."
This characterization is altogether too common, and from my point of view, flat-out wrong. Einstein and Feynman both knew how to break down complex and current science in such a way that folks from outside the field were able to understand most (if not always all) of it. Does that make them lesser scientists? And are we really so elitist that we have to call any explanation below the journal article level "LCD"?
In the end, it was the lack of public understanding of hot-button topics such as stem cells and anything with the word "nuclear" (why do you think it's called an MRI at the hospital, not a nuclear MRI which would be more proper) that made the science so hard to sell. It would be an idyllic research world if scientists never had to worry about money - I've been working in basic research for 3 years now on an unfunded project, so I have a full appreciation of how important even a trickle of money can be. If we as scientists were more effective more often at communicating with Joe Sixpack (and please, remove all traces of condesention from your mind's voice when you read that), maybe we wouldn't be complaining so much about his uninformed voting on the matters.
"In closing, a pop scientist craves public attention and recognition. A real scientist craves knowledge and nothing more. Which one of these two are you most like?"
Learning without dissemination isn't science - it's a hobby. But dissemination can funnel into directions other than solely into articles. I agree that peer-review is a critical part of how we do business, and if a researcher goes straight to the New York Times instead of Science, that's a red flag. But what's wrong with books and lectures aimed at the masses? Here in Pittsburgh, the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh holds the Faraday memorial lecture every winter aimed at explaining science a wider audience, following in his footsteps. It's unfortunate that so many of these books slide in to the 'Let's Dumb It Down' paradigm, because an effective communicator can simultaneously distill a complex topic down to its essentials while remaining true to the fact that the science contains many nuances.
The server's already as hot as the PVR must get, so I don't know if it answered my musing... What kind of signal quality is it getting? I can't imagine the owner sprung for digital cable x11 lines, so there must be some kind of split. I'd like to see how the signal-to-noise is being held up. Ok, I'm done musing.
That's completely the wrong way to look at it. The authors have not proved their results to be correct, thus the cloning has not been proven at all. Your post implies that the world must show their results to be fake - especially with groundbreaking research, it is the duty of the authors to give an accurate, unbiased (as far as they can), and complete presentation of their research.
Research is not 'innocent until proven guilty' - it's 'erroneous unless otherwise demonstrated'.
I think most of us know how to operate a steering wheel. Many also know how to connect a car radio. I suspect few of us (myself included) can write a page off the cuff on the construction of our car's alternator cap, or know the gear ratio of our transmission. Or, for the matter, the workings of an automatic transmission and the torque converter.
However, we do understand the Han Solo School of Repair (whack it and see if it works). Good tech eventually becomes seamless enough that you only need to understand the interface to operate it. Design of good tech, well, that's why I'm after a professorship - education = good, and that's the step that takes some learnin'.
More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat.
I can't wait for the day when science writers actually know a tiny bit about their covered subject. Now, I'm no chemist (actually, holy cow, I AM!) but it seems to me that neither silicon nor sodium is hydrogen, so the powder is not being converted. It may be consumed by the reaction, but not converted. I teach this concept in general chemistry - it's called conservation of mass. I also see it taught in 7th grade public school classrooms. (Perhaps we should revisit the education reform posting of a few days ago...)
Re:Hmmmmm...
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, explaining various behaviors of water is one of the hardest problems remaining in science. Water is less dense when frozen (ice floats) but this is the opposite of most solid/liquid pairs. Water has a 'critical point' at 4C, where its density is at a maximum (even more impressive is that it has a density maximum and minimum within 4C!) If you remember chemistry, you always treated acids as making H+, or maybe they were more rigorous and wrote H3O+. In actuallity, we don't know how many water molucles are surrounding the H+ from the acid - I've seen papers that strongly suggest 13, and others suggesting more and less. Because of its small size, water molcules exchange very quickly - I can't recall the exact value this early on a Saturday, but if a particular water molecule stays around an object for more than a nanosecond, it would be the first time - waters exchange on the order of femtosconds (10^-12 s). Large dipole, small molecule, hydrogen bonding, big symmetry - all this makes water one heck of a wierd special case.
In the end, it all depends how you use it and what you want it to be.
Scifinder Scholar (no relation to the Google service, despite the lawsuit) and Beilstein are probably the two most-used indexes used in chemistry. I'll use Web of Science once in a while, as well. They are all very good at what they do (some annoying twitches of each aside), which is why my University is shelling out lot of money for them. The problem with site-licensed databases is they need an on-campus IP address, which sucks when I'm working in a coffee shop.
Google Scholar is nice because I can find citations fairly reliably - I still have to use the web-based VPN to be 'on-campus' to then get the article, but it works.
Yeah, but that's not really a killer feature, either, if you install PDFCreator - in any program, just choose PDFCreator as if it were a connected printer. www.sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Good enough for me, at least (grad level chemist).
My knee-jerk response was that smaller businesses would find this useful, but I think I have to agree with you. At $50/yr, you would have to want 17 articles from the NYT alone. I'm sure there's still a niche for that sort of cost-balance, but I also suspect it's going to be a small one.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for news outlets below the wire-service tier to become truely focused outlets ala weekly trade journals.
But really? Why comment? Both sides are inherently dogmatic - no one's going to change anyone else's mind via a comment here. I know my religious views (or the lack of - I refuse to specify) aren't about to change because of JoeBlow37's +5 insightful scythe of either side of the issue.
More importantly to discuss - isn't this a great opportunity to begin PROPERLY teaching scientific process in the schools in a meaningful and relevent way? I'm a research chemist who works in an inner-city public school 2 days a week (thanks NSF!!!!) - I've been using this debate to demonstrate that all arguements should be supported (don't bother calling me contradictory here - I see the arguable dichotomy the evolutionists claim the creationists possess here and reject it - the point here is the dialogue), should attempt to address the point where they break down (for example: creationist - evidence demonstrating evolution at work; evolutionist - statistical inprobability of non-protected evolution), and should attempt predictive power (worthy of note - many creationists believe in the process of evolution, just not evolution-as-genesis).
Comments welcome on the educational opportunities afforded by this discussion - but please, if you want to scream about your side/call me biased toward one side or the other/etc., for the love of god/not god, do it in someone else's thread! Otherwise, why comment?!?!
Strecker Synthesis type reactions, if I recall correctly, are what you're referring to here. Yeah, you can make amino acids with the right mix and a bolt of lightning. But proteins denature pretty easily with changes in pH or temperature - the major advantage complex organisms have over single-cellular life is the ability to create/maintain homeostasis. If we're talking about primordial soup, there's a good chance that anything that gets made then breaks. And even if you get amino acids, what then? That's not life. Amino acids can form proteins - to use the body-as-computer analogy, even if we assume DNA was formed and maintained at stable/favorable conditions, you've got the equivalent of a hard drive with an OS installed - but you have no motherboard to read it with yet... I'm not saying evolution didn't happen - the probabilty of all the conditions lining up like dominoes is unlikely, but no worse than most hypotheses out there - these kids MUST learn that science is acheived by consensus, theories are simply our 'best model' (you didn't learn statistical mechanics in grade school, but you probably learned the Bohr model - a model advances but is still useful within its boundary conditions), and that all theories/hypotheses MUST be critically examined.
Right, back to my beer now.
Actually, it's right either way - sub300.com appears to be the US site, and sub500.com to be the Canadian one. (I thought the exchange rate was better than that...)
Actually, if you look far enough back there was the Atari 7800. I don't know about anyone else, but when it came out, I tossed the 'ole 2600 into the cloest, and enjoyed my favorite games from 2600 while playing the fancy new 7800 games (wow, they were pretty). So, yeah, backwards compatability is always a good thing. I kept me from worrying too much about that silly old gray Nintendo thing for a while (so I can't see the First Mover advantage being an advantage at all here)...
Slashdot Mirror
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/30/143324 2
What is the usual chorus of self-justification we hear from pirates?
"I pirate to try out bands for free - I buy new bands all the time by discovering them this way, so I should be allowed to pirate because the artist makes money!"
"I only get stuff I wouldn't have paid for anyway, so no one's losing money anyway."
"I want to listen to music where I want, and if I can't pay and maintain all my rights, then I won't pay and will simply pirate the music!"
Well, since this is free and semi-portable (i.e. any web-accessable computer, but not your car/at the beach), none of the above arguements hold water - you can try out bands for free (I'm not taking the bait on arguements over what version of the word 'free' we're using...), you can try out stuff you wouldn't have paid for anyway, and while you can't listen to it anyplace-in-space, you aren't losing rights you paid for (since you didn't pay.)
This looks like a good thing, and a smart play from the music industry - attack piracy justifications by making them irrelevant. If it's less-than-perfect by your definition, you don't have to play, and the topography of the game doesn't change (other than undercutting piracy justifiactions.)
Keep in mind that piracy!=filesharing!=breaking DRM - all those aspects are separate (and I'd argue, straw men against this specific point.)
Personally, I'm more interested in seeing justice served than a particular outcome (i.e., Microsoft getting slapped). That's how the game is supposed to work. If we don't like the outcome, we need to examine the rules. Calling for particular outcomes against someone because you don't like them/their approach to X/their politics is the root of partisan politics/hackery, and so (while you may agree with what I'm saying broadly, but were speaking from frustration with MS), I'm calling you on it.
Yes, I think it's fair to say "need to deliver". Their terms of service are a contract - they provide x, I provide $. Failure on either of our parts is a breach of that contract. In the end, the only recourse most consumers have is changing services (if possible) - litigation is effectively pointless given the effort:gain ratio.
That said, I'm all for the companies not bundling services I don't need or use (I'll be sticking to my university account). But, if it's included in the contract I signed, I want the option of utilizing it. And if it doesn't work as advertised, it doesn't work. That's my point of view.
That sounds suspiciously like "you paid for a running car, not a working horn or radio." If they advertise a service bundle, they need to deliver.
Your DIY/hire a craftsman approach to this problem is certainly one way to handle it, but the average user has a right to expect the entire purchased service bundle to work.
"Oddly enough, the pop scientists are often teachers because they love the idea of instilling a copy of themselves into the mainstream. But they also cater to the lowest common denominator, hence their writings to the public."
This characterization is altogether too common, and from my point of view, flat-out wrong. Einstein and Feynman both knew how to break down complex and current science in such a way that folks from outside the field were able to understand most (if not always all) of it. Does that make them lesser scientists? And are we really so elitist that we have to call any explanation below the journal article level "LCD"?
In the end, it was the lack of public understanding of hot-button topics such as stem cells and anything with the word "nuclear" (why do you think it's called an MRI at the hospital, not a nuclear MRI which would be more proper) that made the science so hard to sell. It would be an idyllic research world if scientists never had to worry about money - I've been working in basic research for 3 years now on an unfunded project, so I have a full appreciation of how important even a trickle of money can be. If we as scientists were more effective more often at communicating with Joe Sixpack (and please, remove all traces of condesention from your mind's voice when you read that), maybe we wouldn't be complaining so much about his uninformed voting on the matters.
"In closing, a pop scientist craves public attention and recognition. A real scientist craves knowledge and nothing more. Which one of these two are you most like?"
Learning without dissemination isn't science - it's a hobby. But dissemination can funnel into directions other than solely into articles. I agree that peer-review is a critical part of how we do business, and if a researcher goes straight to the New York Times instead of Science, that's a red flag. But what's wrong with books and lectures aimed at the masses? Here in Pittsburgh, the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh holds the Faraday memorial lecture every winter aimed at explaining science a wider audience, following in his footsteps. It's unfortunate that so many of these books slide in to the 'Let's Dumb It Down' paradigm, because an effective communicator can simultaneously distill a complex topic down to its essentials while remaining true to the fact that the science contains many nuances.
My $0.02 as a chemist and an educator.
The server's already as hot as the PVR must get, so I don't know if it answered my musing... What kind of signal quality is it getting? I can't imagine the owner sprung for digital cable x11 lines, so there must be some kind of split. I'd like to see how the signal-to-noise is being held up. Ok, I'm done musing.
That's completely the wrong way to look at it. The authors have not proved their results to be correct, thus the cloning has not been proven at all. Your post implies that the world must show their results to be fake - especially with groundbreaking research, it is the duty of the authors to give an accurate, unbiased (as far as they can), and complete presentation of their research.
Research is not 'innocent until proven guilty' - it's 'erroneous unless otherwise demonstrated'.
I think most of us know how to operate a steering wheel. Many also know how to connect a car radio. I suspect few of us (myself included) can write a page off the cuff on the construction of our car's alternator cap, or know the gear ratio of our transmission. Or, for the matter, the workings of an automatic transmission and the torque converter.
However, we do understand the Han Solo School of Repair (whack it and see if it works). Good tech eventually becomes seamless enough that you only need to understand the interface to operate it. Design of good tech, well, that's why I'm after a professorship - education = good, and that's the step that takes some learnin'.
More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat.
I can't wait for the day when science writers actually know a tiny bit about their covered subject. Now, I'm no chemist (actually, holy cow, I AM!) but it seems to me that neither silicon nor sodium is hydrogen, so the powder is not being converted. It may be consumed by the reaction, but not converted. I teach this concept in general chemistry - it's called conservation of mass. I also see it taught in 7th grade public school classrooms. (Perhaps we should revisit the education reform posting of a few days ago...)
Actually, explaining various behaviors of water is one of the hardest problems remaining in science. Water is less dense when frozen (ice floats) but this is the opposite of most solid/liquid pairs. Water has a 'critical point' at 4C, where its density is at a maximum (even more impressive is that it has a density maximum and minimum within 4C!) If you remember chemistry, you always treated acids as making H+, or maybe they were more rigorous and wrote H3O+. In actuallity, we don't know how many water molucles are surrounding the H+ from the acid - I've seen papers that strongly suggest 13, and others suggesting more and less. Because of its small size, water molcules exchange very quickly - I can't recall the exact value this early on a Saturday, but if a particular water molecule stays around an object for more than a nanosecond, it would be the first time - waters exchange on the order of femtosconds (10^-12 s). Large dipole, small molecule, hydrogen bonding, big symmetry - all this makes water one heck of a wierd special case.
In the end, it all depends how you use it and what you want it to be. Scifinder Scholar (no relation to the Google service, despite the lawsuit) and Beilstein are probably the two most-used indexes used in chemistry. I'll use Web of Science once in a while, as well. They are all very good at what they do (some annoying twitches of each aside), which is why my University is shelling out lot of money for them. The problem with site-licensed databases is they need an on-campus IP address, which sucks when I'm working in a coffee shop. Google Scholar is nice because I can find citations fairly reliably - I still have to use the web-based VPN to be 'on-campus' to then get the article, but it works.
Yeah, but that's not really a killer feature, either, if you install PDFCreator - in any program, just choose PDFCreator as if it were a connected printer./
www.sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator
Good enough for me, at least (grad level chemist).
The US stopped playing 'Where's Charlie" sometime in 1973.
Hmm... maybe this time, someone shoots at Jar-Jar first... Naw, that won't happen... -sigh-
My knee-jerk response was that smaller businesses would find this useful, but I think I have to agree with you. At $50/yr, you would have to want 17 articles from the NYT alone. I'm sure there's still a niche for that sort of cost-balance, but I also suspect it's going to be a small one.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for news outlets below the wire-service tier to become truely focused outlets ala weekly trade journals.
But really? Why comment? Both sides are inherently dogmatic - no one's going to change anyone else's mind via a comment here. I know my religious views (or the lack of - I refuse to specify) aren't about to change because of JoeBlow37's +5 insightful scythe of either side of the issue.
More importantly to discuss - isn't this a great opportunity to begin PROPERLY teaching scientific process in the schools in a meaningful and relevent way? I'm a research chemist who works in an inner-city public school 2 days a week (thanks NSF!!!!) - I've been using this debate to demonstrate that all arguements should be supported (don't bother calling me contradictory here - I see the arguable dichotomy the evolutionists claim the creationists possess here and reject it - the point here is the dialogue), should attempt to address the point where they break down (for example: creationist - evidence demonstrating evolution at work; evolutionist - statistical inprobability of non-protected evolution), and should attempt predictive power (worthy of note - many creationists believe in the process of evolution, just not evolution-as-genesis).
Comments welcome on the educational opportunities afforded by this discussion - but please, if you want to scream about your side/call me biased toward one side or the other/etc., for the love of god/not god, do it in someone else's thread! Otherwise, why comment?!?!
Strecker Synthesis type reactions, if I recall correctly, are what you're referring to here. Yeah, you can make amino acids with the right mix and a bolt of lightning. But proteins denature pretty easily with changes in pH or temperature - the major advantage complex organisms have over single-cellular life is the ability to create/maintain homeostasis. If we're talking about primordial soup, there's a good chance that anything that gets made then breaks. And even if you get amino acids, what then? That's not life. Amino acids can form proteins - to use the body-as-computer analogy, even if we assume DNA was formed and maintained at stable/favorable conditions, you've got the equivalent of a hard drive with an OS installed - but you have no motherboard to read it with yet... I'm not saying evolution didn't happen - the probabilty of all the conditions lining up like dominoes is unlikely, but no worse than most hypotheses out there - these kids MUST learn that science is acheived by consensus, theories are simply our 'best model' (you didn't learn statistical mechanics in grade school, but you probably learned the Bohr model - a model advances but is still useful within its boundary conditions), and that all theories/hypotheses MUST be critically examined. Right, back to my beer now.
Got any citations for those numbers? "[H]undreds of thousands if not millions of acts of racist sexual sadism" sounds a bit high to me.
Actually, it's right either way - sub300.com appears to be the US site, and sub500.com to be the Canadian one. (I thought the exchange rate was better than that...)
Actually, if you look far enough back there was the Atari 7800. I don't know about anyone else, but when it came out, I tossed the 'ole 2600 into the cloest, and enjoyed my favorite games from 2600 while playing the fancy new 7800 games (wow, they were pretty). So, yeah, backwards compatability is always a good thing. I kept me from worrying too much about that silly old gray Nintendo thing for a while (so I can't see the First Mover advantage being an advantage at all here)...