Everybody can check the source.... But because most users/people generally are not qualified to do so,
Why do people keep saying this? It equates "I can't verify" with "no one can verify". Not really. Regardless, when you take the whole sentence, then it definitely doesn't ring home close. As it equates "I can't verify" with "it takes some time, if ever, before I am sure whether it is safe or not".
As long as there's the possibility of someone verifying, people who can't personally verify have much better reason to trust it. Not at all. For one, I would have to know IF it has been verified, and then WHO verified it and whether they have done an adequate job on it. Without knowing that, there is no real reason to trust it at all.
There's a parallel here Believing before seeing/confirming and assuming it will happen one day is more like a religious stance IMO.
And second, it's more likely that closed source programs have a real company behind them instead of someone's OS IT hobby project. Either way, it's generally easier to trust people who have more to lose than those who don't, open source or not.
Are you aware this is *CLOSED SOURCE* software? AND it WAS found by a third party even though it is closed source. My point was open source software is likely to have problems like this FOUND FASTER than closed source. Ack, sorry. I simply assumed it was open source since he was peeking at the source. My bad:/
1) A third party usually looks at open source software, and if something like this was found then word would get around fast. In this case it is 1700 user accounts later and not found by a third party. You're not making a very compelling case IMO.
2) Not sure what your point is My point is that in terms of accountability/ damage control: you get what you pay: nothing.
John Terry, of the G-Archiver software had left his own email information in the code Yes, because getting your own gmail account is so hard these days.
Yes, the G-archiver forwarded a record of the account information of everyone who used the app to that mailbox, but if you look at the screenshot, none of those emails has been flagged as read by gmail (but maybe that's an artifact of a POP connection?). What is missing in the article is this guy checking whether that gmail account has been set to "auto forward incoming emails to x account while leaving a copy behind". In that case, he could simply read these e-mails from a dif email account with none the wiser.
I wouldn't call gaining the login information of 1,7k gmail accounts as 'the worse attempt at spyware in history'. As long as there are results, it may not be bad to play the fool. They can easily run away with an excuse going "look, it wasn't even hidden well, it was an honest mistake" excuse. I mean, they at least seem to have fooled you.
Against: (1) But because most users/people generally are not qualified to do so, there is a significant risk of damage being done already by the time the qualified users/people do. (2) IT quacks can cause such loopholes and there really aren't many, if any at all, people around to be accountable for it.
Immediacy - According to you all theaters in the world were closed in 1995, then burned to the ground. Theaters aren't popular because they have things fast IMO, they are mostly popular because of the whole atmosphere/big screen surrounding them. That's why peeps can and will still go to theaters after DVD's are out (and why theaters are still hosting those movies).
Personalization - Using your limited imagination as a starting point for judgment of someone else's ideas is well... silly.:P Oh... and books with multiple endings exist for years. Just because something has existed for years, doesn't mean it's financially profitable. Especially not when their standard cousins (normal books) are still around and making money. Your examples are part of a significantly small minority. OS has existed for years, most projects aren't making money at all, they are in fact being funded by their commercial jobs.
Interpretation - Again... your lack of imagination. Can't help you there. Did you ever take a payed course in say... MS Office? Thousands if not millions do. Thousands and millions, indeed. But it's still just one product, one example. SAP is also one good example. But how many examples can you think of, compared to the billions of products out there that don't need people to train you to use the products?
Authenticity - Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so. Not only do you lack imagination, but also any logic or comprehension of the world we live in? Wow! Sooo... fans are idiots for liking a particular BAND who created the song instead of realizing that its just a song and it does not matter if it is played by Metallica or "Your Local Trio of Drunks" using their armpits as only instruments? No, that's not what he's trying to say. He's saying that this has never been an issue, how many mass complaints have you observed going "I downloaded the wrong song waaaaah"? Again, it's just a small portion of peeps, and they will find the right ones sooner or later. And who cares who plays it? If they like it it's good.
And say someone comes along, hits you on the head with a large rubber dildo and steals your keychain. My... it sure would be handy if all that hard to collect information was easily accessible. Then he'd still have the collection on his computer? And what if the server breaks down and they lose everything? Or they get hacked? They mess up their back ups?
And oh... How do you check your e-mail in the middle of the ocean? Or in the middle of Sahara? Or on the bottom of the coal mine? Hmmm... what was that word again? How is this different when the stuff is hosted online? You can access one location online but not another? Never heard of ftp servers/VPN?
Wow... you almost have a clue this time. Seeing how you describe it I can only guess that you are either 11 years old or that your lack of said imagination is a big bad mind block again. You're rather mature yourself.
Patronage makes sense, but there's nothing new/thought provoking about that. And let's face it, there aren't that many people earning their bread with developing OS compared to their commercial cousins. Most of them are being funded out of their own wallets, from their commercial jobs.
Findability - Those are free now, but in the future they will become for pay, according to him. Soo... amazon and eBay are making $0.00 according to you? He mentions those, you disregard them. Amazon and eBay are actually bad examples IMO, because the products they can "find" aren't free at all. You are paying for the product + their fees. If the products were free you'd simply google them and download them, just like what most are doing with free software etc. now. If google or wiki start charging for their search results THEN you'd have a case. And how much room for google like search engines do you think the market has anyway?
So I gotta say, that guy makes more sense than you and the guy who wrote this essay.
Portal is intellectually challenging with its puzzles, but the coordination required makes it hard for a lot of people to play it. Some people might also be put off by the screaming robotic voices when you destroy them. Or when that robotic monotone voice keeps telling you it is going to kill you, and tries to. Or the sound you make during and when you hit the ground after being hit by some shiny energy ball.
What I do care about is blind partisanship and what it does to the country. And there most likely is, but on this particular topic, you're a bit off.
Assuming that Clinton would have been available to order the strike on Bin Laden back then had he not been busy with impeachment, that puts a huge amount of responsibility on Republicans concerning 9-11. Well, I wouldn't go THAT far. It did strike me as funny how they accused Clinton of shifting the attention away from the impeachment thing by launching a strike on Iraq as retaliation for breaking the CF's, though.
It seems to me that Bush reached across the aisle when he left those attorneys on, and he drew back a bloody nub. It could be a political game for all you know. Throughout his speeches, he made it clear that there are 2 sides (like when he said the republicans will keep the house and senate blablabla), and he belonged on the republican side.
Bush was elected twice. Let him do is fucking job for the next 9 months and let him retire in peace. Being criticized is part of the job. And if you ask me it's one of the handy things that keep stuff sharp and in line. Such as the senate vote that "corrected" that particular "loophole" in the Patriot Act. The democratic party lacks the backbone to impeach him or cheney or anything of the sort, anyway. So as I said, you're being over dramatic. Yet, it's also true that they remain human, whichever party they find themselves in, and humans can be very ugly for very selfish reasons. Thus, your longing for a big happy family is impossible with the 2 party system you currently have. I can't imagine this being very different on any politic playground in any other part of the world, though.
On a side note: did you know you have someone following you around modding +1 whenever and wherever you post? That is almost freaky.
And I find your attempt to make a big deal out of nothing equally disgusting. I guess we'll agree to disagree. This would be a boring place if we all agreed. Err, to be consistent with that sob story of yours, don't you think you should at least pretend to care more about US attorneys being fired for reasons they refuse to share or even be responsible for but still have them replaced without the Senate's approval? Ah well, you dropped your "What about clinton" act rather fast, so we are indeed done here.
You're being particularly dramatic considering most, if not all, of them got their jobs because of their party affiliations in the first place. It comes with the job, they all knew this was the risk they faced when presidents/parties change.
Noting pisses me off more when I am not considered for a job because of my last job. You prefer being fired for no stated reason after being hired? Who cares if some of them weren't expectedly fired based on their party affiliations but now unexpectedly fired for what seems to be doing their jobs? While attempting to circumvent the senate's approval? Your reply conveniently missed that part.
I find your attempt to downsize the seriousness of this act a bit disgusting.
I think you missed my point. If that is what you call your witch hunt rant, then I doubt it.
The thing is, legally, what's the difference? Well, if we must be picky, what about the fact that the appointed candidates by Clinton all had to get the Senate's full approval before they landed the job? And guess who did not need the senate's approval for replacements at the time of firing those attorneys thanks to what we know as the patriot act? Speaking of which http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/21/us.attorneys.firings/index.html
The Senate on Tuesday voted 94-2 to pass a bill that cancels a provision of the Patriot Act that allowed federal prosecutors to be appointed and serve without confirmation by the Senate.
So what happens to a president that judges men NOT by their party affiliation, but by the content of their character [americanrhetoric.com]? He gets subpoenaed. That IS the point of your so called "witch hunt": WHY were they fired? You are simply assuming it was not based on their party affiliation, but their "character" (huh?). Truth is, nobody even has the guts to take responsibility for that, so how can you possibly argue their well reasoned decisions for the firings when we have yet to find someone mature enough to come out and admit they did it? And FYI, having mr gonzalez go "I don't recall" +70 times is not a well motivated argument for firing them based on "character".
---------------
So you stop spinning, and start providing facts for your claims that bush has fired/not fired them based on their "character" rather than politics.
Like the Clintons didn't fire anyone? They fired all the lawyers as soon as they took office, 100% of them. Interesting how you mention that he fired them at the beginning of his term (as customary) while you conveniently forgot to mention that on the topic of how bush did it way in his presidency a couple posts up. I would say it is normal for presidents to choose whom they feel comfortable working with. And if you don't think the lawyers have such things as RECORDS for which they can be checked whether they qualify for that or not, then/. may not be the place for you to hang out.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200703150001
"But while both Clinton and Bush dismissed nearly all U.S. attorneys upon taking office following an administration of the opposite party, The Washington Post reported in a March 14 article that "legal experts and former prosecutors say the firing of a large number of prosecutors in the middle of a term appears to be unprecedented and threatens the independence of prosecutors."
Stuart M. Gerson, assistant attorney general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, observed, "It is customary for a President to replace U.S. attorneys at the beginning of a term." Gerson added that "Ronald Reagan replaced every sitting U.S. attorney when he appointed his first Attorney General." -------------
They didn't even give them a chance to prove their worth or even review their qualifications. Interesting, but when democrats try to find out why they got fired way in his presidency, you called it a "witch hunt". Hypocrite much?
It's funny when people don't see their own hyperpartisanship You are right, that IS kind of funny:)
Unless they can ID people who have already declined assistance these bots will fail. Version 2 is specially designed to solve this issue: they come equipped with RFID chips that will be stapled onto your hand while asking whether you're lost. Version 3 will come with a tranquilizer.
I've heard of Open Access, but it hasn't exactly taken off yet. Well, Green Open Access (self-archiving in (institutional) repositories and making them OA) has gone a long way even in the last few years, thankfully.
2007: The European Research Council (ERC) requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication
In 2005, many major research funders, including the Wellcome Trust, National Institutes for Health (NIH), and the Research Councils UK (RCUK), set out their position in a number of statements. Of particular note was the stipulation that authors receiving grants must deposit their final manuscript in an open access forum within 6-12 months of publication. NIH and the Wellcome Trust have been joined by many of the world's major funders in biomedical research [Glover et al., 2006].
President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.
The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. But certainly the road to full Open Access journals (Gold Open Access) still requires time and work. But it's hopefully only a matter of time.
I agree all government funded research should be freely accessable, and the "big journals" (Nature, Science, Biochemistry, JBC) could probably still sell subscriptions with additional editorial content, pretty pictures etc. They still would get paid for peer reviews and stuff (third party, fair system so nothing has to change there), it's just that their revenues will go down in favor of universities and whoever was paying them for content.
If it doesn't remain too fragmented into lots of small e-journals little better than science blogs for articles rejected elsewhere. Hehe, well there's that danger. But then again, authors and/or their institutions are paying for this out of their own pockets, so the rules that go "pick the best viewed journal" are still very much valid. In fact, when it's free, there is even a bigger emphasis on picking the best journals, since there's so much content out there, making quality filters by journals that much more important, if the journals want to have viewers. As journals are making costs just like commercial journals, if they can't get/publish quality content even they too have to shut down. Which will automatically weed out the "lesser" OA journals in the end.
Then you have also never heard of Open Access, because then you would certainly know what PLoS ONE is. A shame you've never heard of it, because it is a very significant and rapidly growing movement within the scientific community. It puts the emphasis on opening up the access of scientific literature to everyone by switching from reader-pays to author-pays models. And with that said, it is very likely that scholars select PLoS ONE or other OA journals (peer reviewed of course) to show that they believe in the Open Access concept and let everyone with a digital connection have access to it.
As I understand it, OA is essentially shifting the funding from publishers (who get their revenue from scientific parties) to authors-institutions (the scientific parties) and opening up access to them.
It doesn't in fact touch the peer review process at all. OA does not improve, nor worsen the quality of the peer review process, nor the articles undergoing that process. Journals can still and likely will exist even with 100% OA. Their role could and will still be mediating authors and referees through the peer review process, and becoming a somewhat credible quality indicator.
Open Access is not like Open Source, as there IS funding available for Open Access, but it's simply being used in the wrong way. Once libraries stop paying for subscriptions, they can pay for funding the journals, and have them go OA. The effect would be the same, only that more people can access the literature, and publishers will have to find a different source of revenue.
Open access publishing is seen as one possible solution to these problems. It is very much akin to open source software. Research something. (Scratch an itch.) Write about it. (Document your software.) Deposit it in an archive and give it away (Make it available for download). Wait for comments. (Support your software.) Repeat, and enjoy the acknowledgement of your peers. You're talking about preprints and peer commentary. OA Literature is about opening up peer reviewed literature. So what you're saying here isn't exactly accurate. It gives an incomplete view of what the strength is of OA literature: them being the same credibility but with changes in the funding and accessibility. To be more precise, the shifting of funding and more accessibility.
If I have to summarize that page (copy/paste), it'd basically go like this:
(1) PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL-ARTICLE AUTHORS GIVE JOURNALS THEIR ARTICLES FOR FREE: NO ROYALTIES.
The authors' research and writings are funded by government research grants and/or by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).
(2) PEERS REVIEW FOR FREE.
The peers' reviewing work and time are funded by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).
(3) PUBLISHER REVENUES FROM INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE CURRENTLY PAYING THE FULL COST OF MANAGING THE PEER REVIEW, SEVERAL TIMES OVER.
That is the status quo today: The costs of managing peer review are covered, many times over, by selling -- mostly to the authors' institutions -- paper and online access to the articles donated for free by the authors, with the peer review donated for free by the peers.
(4) IF INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE EVER CANCELED, PEER REVIEW MANAGEMENT COSTS WILL BE PAID OUT OF THE INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION CANCELLATION SAVINGS.
If and when institutional subscriptions were ever canceled unsustainably as a consequence of Green OA, the cost of peer review could easily be paid for directly by institutions, on behalf of their employees, per paper submitted, out of just a fraction of the very same funds they have saved from their institutional subscription cancellations. All access and archiving would then be provided by the network of institutional OA repositories instead of the publisher, who would only provide the peer review. This is called "OA publishing" or "Gold OA." With Gold OA still somewhat being farfetched, the OA movement is currently striving for Green OA, which means that the commercial publishers do their normal routine, but allow the authors to deposit their peer reviewed and for publication accepted paper in their institutional repository immediately after its publication, where the institutional repository in question will follow certain protocols ( e.g. Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotoc ol.html#Introduction) so the contents will be made searchable in various search engines (like google scholar, and others).
Hey I have an idea for innovation: an edit button! Woohoo!
[quote]And not an abundance of IDEAS (which really are just thoughts everybody can have, so why wouldn't it be in abundance?) but the right (project) methodologies and the funding to carry out said ideas.[/quote]
And the amount of IDEAS (which really are just thoughts everybody can have, so why wouldn't it be in abundance?) are apparently not the problem, but the lack of the right (project) methodologies and the funding to carry out said ideas.
Oh and btw, starvation is not a pleasant feeling for many, would you say you ate to not starve? Is that one way of eating "for pleasure"? Would that go against your feelgood stance of eating for a predetermined purpose and not by freewill?
It is just me or does this article have a high "So what?" factor?
The point of INVESTMENTS, because that's what the topic really is about, is the Return on Investment (ROI). Wow, never heard THAT one before.
And not an abundance of IDEAS (which really are just thoughts everybody can have, so why wouldn't it be in abundance?) but the right (project) methodologies and the funding to carry out said ideas. Well, given that the majority of IT projects are not written off as "success" (however they wish to define it), I'm not reading anything new either.
Oh, and while talking about IDEAS: they are certainly NOT to be confused with GOOD ideas that can actually effectively and efficiently address a certain issue in a certain environment, and with at least a conceptual planning to realize that good idea in the right context to tackle said issues. As everybody can write a paper, but not everybody can write a paper with a significant/original subject, sound (carried out) methodology, and a well written report of all that and have it go through peer reviews and accepted for publication.
As for weird short speech about goals being overrated: goals are by definition the purpose of the thing you do. So to say something as ridiculous as goals being overrated, and enjoying the process and effort is a bit silly. Process of what? Effort in what? To achieve an objective, a goal. That's what. People eat with survival as goal. You apparently eat food because you simply enjoy eating (thus your goal would be consuming something for the sake of feeling good) and apparently while not being hungry (thus your goal is not to still your hunger).
Wouldn't it make more sense to actually start at the highest threshold, and then move down the price based on how popular it is? Essentially creating a chain reaction of making songs that seem not so popular very popular to try?
And as incentive for those who bought the first ones, since they were the guys that discovered and pushed the price down in the first place (and made it more popular), give them credits for their next purchases?
Wouldn't that be a natural filter for crappy music and boost good music?
[quote]That's a common excuse used, but it rarely holds any water.[/quote]
Not necessarily.
[quote]If you weren't going to buy it anyway then why did someone spend the time to download it in the first place?[/quote]
Because they are in fact 2 totally different things? There's no relation here at all.
[quote]Obviously they're interested in the music so if P2P sites weren't available it is likely many more people would have bought it.[/quote]
Or they might not have even known about it at all. Like this guy's brother story: their popularity is rising because they got free versions available. Why expect that to increase sales? It's like borrowing money and pretending you're richer. You're not, everything is the same, you just have the impression that it's better. Course the extra publicity is nice and could potentially lead to (new) sources of revenue, but if your popularity is based on a free ride, why expect to get money?
Also, just because you work hard doesn't mean the end product is going to be good. Especially when it comes to music. Some people have talent for creating original and/or catchy music, and others can spend a lifetime trying to compensate for that lack of talent and never find/get it. You may think you're good and popular, but when your garage band disappears, in your place 20 other garage bands just to fill in that spot in some bar.
His brother did get nicked by piracy, but what really screwed him over is his naivety that sacrificing everything to gamble on his "talent" would make him popular enough to have people fork over the cash for his cd's, and he seems to be wrong. No different than people putting their entire life savings on a poker game and blaming the casino for their loss. It was his own choice to gamble on his talent, like gamblers on their luck and their abilities to win more than they lose, and he/they paid the price for it.
If you can, always work hard and smart. If you can't, at least work smart. If that's not a possibility, work hard towards working smart, and if you can't even do that, just work hard and pray you get lucky.
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Why do people keep saying this? It equates "I can't verify" with "no one can verify". Not really. Regardless, when you take the whole sentence, then it definitely doesn't ring home close. As it equates "I can't verify" with "it takes some time, if ever, before I am sure whether it is safe or not". As long as there's the possibility of someone verifying, people who can't personally verify have much better reason to trust it. Not at all. For one, I would have to know IF it has been verified, and then WHO verified it and whether they have done an adequate job on it. Without knowing that, there is no real reason to trust it at all. There's a parallel here Believing before seeing/confirming and assuming it will happen one day is more like a religious stance IMO.
And second, it's more likely that closed source programs have a real company behind them instead of someone's OS IT hobby project. Either way, it's generally easier to trust people who have more to lose than those who don't, open source or not.
Indeed, a good case for Open Source then
I wouldn't call gaining the login information of 1,7k gmail accounts as 'the worse attempt at spyware in history'. As long as there are results, it may not be bad to play the fool. They can easily run away with an excuse going "look, it wasn't even hidden well, it was an honest mistake" excuse. I mean, they at least seem to have fooled you.
For: Everybody can check the source.
Against:
(1) But because most users/people generally are not qualified to do so, there is a significant risk of damage being done already by the time the qualified users/people do.
(2) IT quacks can cause such loopholes and there really aren't many, if any at all, people around to be accountable for it.
Sucky blow for OS.
Oh... and books with multiple endings exist for years. Just because something has existed for years, doesn't mean it's financially profitable. Especially not when their standard cousins (normal books) are still around and making money. Your examples are part of a significantly small minority. OS has existed for years, most projects aren't making money at all, they are in fact being funded by their commercial jobs. Interpretation - Again... your lack of imagination. Can't help you there. Did you ever take a payed course in say... MS Office? Thousands if not millions do. Thousands and millions, indeed. But it's still just one product, one example. SAP is also one good example. But how many examples can you think of, compared to the billions of products out there that don't need people to train you to use the products? Authenticity - Is there a big problem with people downloading a song by, say, Metallica, only to realize that it was actually performed by some other band? I don't think so.
Not only do you lack imagination, but also any logic or comprehension of the world we live in? Wow!
Sooo... fans are idiots for liking a particular BAND who created the song instead of realizing that its just a song and it does not matter if it is played by Metallica or "Your Local Trio of Drunks" using their armpits as only instruments? No, that's not what he's trying to say. He's saying that this has never been an issue, how many mass complaints have you observed going "I downloaded the wrong song waaaaah"? Again, it's just a small portion of peeps, and they will find the right ones sooner or later. And who cares who plays it? If they like it it's good. And say someone comes along, hits you on the head with a large rubber dildo and steals your keychain. My... it sure would be handy if all that hard to collect information was easily accessible. Then he'd still have the collection on his computer? And what if the server breaks down and they lose everything? Or they get hacked? They mess up their back ups? And oh... How do you check your e-mail in the middle of the ocean? Or in the middle of Sahara? Or on the bottom of the coal mine? Hmmm... what was that word again? How is this different when the stuff is hosted online? You can access one location online but not another? Never heard of ftp servers/VPN? Wow... you almost have a clue this time. Seeing how you describe it I can only guess that you are either 11 years old or that your lack of said imagination is a big bad mind block again. You're rather mature yourself.
Patronage makes sense, but there's nothing new/thought provoking about that. And let's face it, there aren't that many people earning their bread with developing OS compared to their commercial cousins. Most of them are being funded out of their own wallets, from their commercial jobs. Findability - Those are free now, but in the future they will become for pay, according to him.
Soo... amazon and eBay are making $0.00 according to you? He mentions those, you disregard them. Amazon and eBay are actually bad examples IMO, because the products they can "find" aren't free at all. You are paying for the product + their fees. If the products were free you'd simply google them and download them, just like what most are doing with free software etc. now. If google or wiki start charging for their search results THEN you'd have a case. And how much room for google like search engines do you think the market has anyway?
So I gotta say, that guy makes more sense than you and the guy who wrote this essay.
On a side note: did you know you have someone following you around modding +1 whenever and wherever you post? That is almost freaky.
I find your attempt to downsize the seriousness of this act a bit disgusting.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/21/us.attorneys.firings/index.html The Senate on Tuesday voted 94-2 to pass a bill that cancels a provision of the Patriot Act that allowed federal prosecutors to be appointed and serve without confirmation by the Senate. So what happens to a president that judges men NOT by their party affiliation, but by the content of their character [americanrhetoric.com]? He gets subpoenaed. That IS the point of your so called "witch hunt": WHY were they fired? You are simply assuming it was not based on their party affiliation, but their "character" (huh?). Truth is, nobody even has the guts to take responsibility for that, so how can you possibly argue their well reasoned decisions for the firings when we have yet to find someone mature enough to come out and admit they did it? And FYI, having mr gonzalez go "I don't recall" +70 times is not a well motivated argument for firing them based on "character".
---------------
So you stop spinning, and start providing facts for your claims that bush has fired/not fired them based on their "character" rather than politics.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200703150001 "But while both Clinton and Bush dismissed nearly all U.S. attorneys upon taking office following an administration of the opposite party, The Washington Post reported in a March 14 article that "legal experts and former prosecutors say the firing of a large number of prosecutors in the middle of a term appears to be unprecedented and threatens the independence of prosecutors."
Stuart M. Gerson, assistant attorney general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, observed, "It is customary for a President to replace U.S. attorneys at the beginning of a term." Gerson added that "Ronald Reagan replaced every sitting U.S. attorney when he appointed his first Attorney General." ------------- They didn't even give them a chance to prove their worth or even review their qualifications. Interesting, but when democrats try to find out why they got fired way in his presidency, you called it a "witch hunt". Hypocrite much? It's funny when people don't see their own hyperpartisanship You are right, that IS kind of funny
Can't say I blame them. I know I am impatiently waiting in line with my Gisele Bündchen collection.
The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. But certainly the road to full Open Access journals (Gold Open Access) still requires time and work. But it's hopefully only a matter of time. I agree all government funded research should be freely accessable, and the "big journals" (Nature, Science, Biochemistry, JBC) could probably still sell subscriptions with additional editorial content, pretty pictures etc. They still would get paid for peer reviews and stuff (third party, fair system so nothing has to change there), it's just that their revenues will go down in favor of universities and whoever was paying them for content. If it doesn't remain too fragmented into lots of small e-journals little better than science blogs for articles rejected elsewhere. Hehe, well there's that danger. But then again, authors and/or their institutions are paying for this out of their own pockets, so the rules that go "pick the best viewed journal" are still very much valid. In fact, when it's free, there is even a bigger emphasis on picking the best journals, since there's so much content out there, making quality filters by journals that much more important, if the journals want to have viewers. As journals are making costs just like commercial journals, if they can't get/publish quality content even they too have to shut down. Which will automatically weed out the "lesser" OA journals in the end.
[quote]I never heard of "PLoS ONE"[/quote]
Then you have also never heard of Open Access, because then you would certainly know what PLoS ONE is. A shame you've never heard of it, because it is a very significant and rapidly growing movement within the scientific community. It puts the emphasis on opening up the access of scientific literature to everyone by switching from reader-pays to author-pays models. And with that said, it is very likely that scholars select PLoS ONE or other OA journals (peer reviewed of course) to show that they believe in the Open Access concept and let everyone with a digital connection have access to it.
As I understand it, OA is essentially shifting the funding from publishers (who get their revenue from scientific parties) to authors-institutions (the scientific parties) and opening up access to them.
It doesn't in fact touch the peer review process at all. OA does not improve, nor worsen the quality of the peer review process, nor the articles undergoing that process. Journals can still and likely will exist even with 100% OA. Their role could and will still be mediating authors and referees through the peer review process, and becoming a somewhat credible quality indicator.
Open Access is not like Open Source, as there IS funding available for Open Access, but it's simply being used in the wrong way. Once libraries stop paying for subscriptions, they can pay for funding the journals, and have them go OA. The effect would be the same, only that more people can access the literature, and publishers will have to find a different source of revenue.
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&
If I have to summarize that page (copy/paste), it'd basically go like this: (1) PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL-ARTICLE AUTHORS GIVE JOURNALS THEIR ARTICLES FOR FREE: NO ROYALTIES.
The authors' research and writings are funded by government research grants and/or by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).
(2) PEERS REVIEW FOR FREE.
The peers' reviewing work and time are funded by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).
(3) PUBLISHER REVENUES FROM INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE CURRENTLY PAYING THE FULL COST OF MANAGING THE PEER REVIEW, SEVERAL TIMES OVER.
That is the status quo today: The costs of managing peer review are covered, many times over, by selling -- mostly to the authors' institutions -- paper and online access to the articles donated for free by the authors, with the peer review donated for free by the peers.
(4) IF INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE EVER CANCELED, PEER REVIEW MANAGEMENT COSTS WILL BE PAID OUT OF THE INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION CANCELLATION SAVINGS.
If and when institutional subscriptions were ever canceled unsustainably as a consequence of Green OA, the cost of peer review could easily be paid for directly by institutions, on behalf of their employees, per paper submitted, out of just a fraction of the very same funds they have saved from their institutional subscription cancellations. All access and archiving would then be provided by the network of institutional OA repositories instead of the publisher, who would only provide the peer review. This is called "OA publishing" or "Gold OA." With Gold OA still somewhat being farfetched, the OA movement is currently striving for Green OA, which means that the commercial publishers do their normal routine, but allow the authors to deposit their peer reviewed and for publication accepted paper in their institutional repository immediately after its publication, where the institutional repository in question will follow certain protocols ( e.g. Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesproto
Hey I have an idea for innovation: an edit button! Woohoo!
[quote]And not an abundance of IDEAS (which really are just thoughts everybody can have, so why wouldn't it be in abundance?) but the right (project) methodologies and the funding to carry out said ideas.[/quote]
And the amount of IDEAS (which really are just thoughts everybody can have, so why wouldn't it be in abundance?) are apparently not the problem, but the lack of the right (project) methodologies and the funding to carry out said ideas.
Oh and btw, starvation is not a pleasant feeling for many, would you say you ate to not starve? Is that one way of eating "for pleasure"? Would that go against your feelgood stance of eating for a predetermined purpose and not by freewill?
Goals overrated? Puh lease!
It is just me or does this article have a high "So what?" factor?
The point of INVESTMENTS, because that's what the topic really is about, is the Return on Investment (ROI). Wow, never heard THAT one before.
And not an abundance of IDEAS (which really are just thoughts everybody can have, so why wouldn't it be in abundance?) but the right (project) methodologies and the funding to carry out said ideas. Well, given that the majority of IT projects are not written off as "success" (however they wish to define it), I'm not reading anything new either.
Oh, and while talking about IDEAS: they are certainly NOT to be confused with GOOD ideas that can actually effectively and efficiently address a certain issue in a certain environment, and with at least a conceptual planning to realize that good idea in the right context to tackle said issues. As everybody can write a paper, but not everybody can write a paper with a significant/original subject, sound (carried out) methodology, and a well written report of all that and have it go through peer reviews and accepted for publication.
As for weird short speech about goals being overrated: goals are by definition the purpose of the thing you do. So to say something as ridiculous as goals being overrated, and enjoying the process and effort is a bit silly. Process of what? Effort in what? To achieve an objective, a goal. That's what. People eat with survival as goal. You apparently eat food because you simply enjoy eating (thus your goal would be consuming something for the sake of feeling good) and apparently while not being hungry (thus your goal is not to still your hunger).
Goals are not overrated at all, perspectives are.
Ah there's that. Good point. Ugh, ad hoc thinking isn't really good :p
Wouldn't it make more sense to actually start at the highest threshold, and then move down the price based on how popular it is? Essentially creating a chain reaction of making songs that seem not so popular very popular to try?
And as incentive for those who bought the first ones, since they were the guys that discovered and pushed the price down in the first place (and made it more popular), give them credits for their next purchases?
Wouldn't that be a natural filter for crappy music and boost good music?
[quote]That's a common excuse used, but it rarely holds any water.[/quote]
Not necessarily.
[quote]If you weren't going to buy it anyway then why did someone spend the time to download it in the first place?[/quote]
Because they are in fact 2 totally different things? There's no relation here at all.
[quote]Obviously they're interested in the music so if P2P sites weren't available it is likely many more people would have bought it.[/quote]
Or they might not have even known about it at all. Like this guy's brother story: their popularity is rising because they got free versions available. Why expect that to increase sales? It's like borrowing money and pretending you're richer. You're not, everything is the same, you just have the impression that it's better. Course the extra publicity is nice and could potentially lead to (new) sources of revenue, but if your popularity is based on a free ride, why expect to get money?
Also, just because you work hard doesn't mean the end product is going to be good. Especially when it comes to music. Some people have talent for creating original and/or catchy music, and others can spend a lifetime trying to compensate for that lack of talent and never find/get it. You may think you're good and popular, but when your garage band disappears, in your place 20 other garage bands just to fill in that spot in some bar.
His brother did get nicked by piracy, but what really screwed him over is his naivety that sacrificing everything to gamble on his "talent" would make him popular enough to have people fork over the cash for his cd's, and he seems to be wrong. No different than people putting their entire life savings on a poker game and blaming the casino for their loss. It was his own choice to gamble on his talent, like gamblers on their luck and their abilities to win more than they lose, and he/they paid the price for it.
If you can, always work hard and smart. If you can't, at least work smart. If that's not a possibility, work hard towards working smart, and if you can't even do that, just work hard and pray you get lucky.