It all comes down to degrees. Competition is good, but too much fragmentation can be bad for everyone involved, including the companies doing so basicly painting themselves into a corner. Fragmentation, once it settles in, can be very difficult to undo.
On the other hand, consumers tend to get frustrated with maintaining multiple (even inexpensive) subscriptions. They tend to want one source with one bill for unlimited access.
You can always keep the system both distributed and closed, just have multiple states/agencies/etc all using the same blockchain, but not have it open to outside entities to mine. It could actually make a rather clever distributed backup system.
Well, yes. It would be something like git implemented using a particular type of math that provides a nice strong audit trail. With something like git, you can still go in and slice up the middle to delete or change historical information. A blockchain makes that process more difficult... but yes, it would more closely resemble version control or content management systems than a cryptocurency, but blockchains themselves are about as well suited to either type of problem.
Keep in mind, one thing blockchains provide is a historical audit trail. Even if the single authorized writer can change values, all the previous inserts and changes are still examinable. This actually makes it a pretty good tool for public records since you can both see what currently is and what it looked like at every historical point.
This is not exactly a new, they put out these proposal requests all the time. They select some problem of interest, or more often a whole bag of problems and post a request for proposals, then see what various groups think they can accomplish along those lines. The actual research is a lot less dramatic than pieces like this suggest, and really just represent DARPA giving seed grants based off some theme to a bunch of teams and seeing what they come up with.
So much of their creation was rooted in people lamenting about how much more wonderful things were in the past, without understanding what went wrong then. So yeah.. amatures recreating mistakes professionals dealt with 200 years ago.
So a group of professors took advantage of a trust based system in order to make a political point by submitting hoax papers for peer review. Yay persecuted heros?
Seriously, the guy was an ass who did not like a particular type of paper so he wrote a bunch of fake papers on the subject and held up their acceptance into various publications as proof at how bad academia is, when the whole point of publishing is to have a minimal mechanical review filting papers so they can be read by people in the field and responded to. He is basically complaining that academic censorship isn't stringent enough because he was able to 'fool' people who generally try to give authors the benefit of the doubt.
No wonder the university doesn't want him working with human research subjects... but of course he is a slashdot hero now because academics in anything other than making cool tech are bad and omg the liberals are coming for our penes!
Think of the intent this way. He was being ignored. He didn't like being ignored, so he kept contacting people. In that department, 'engineer' caries a specific legal weight were ignoring them CAN result in liability, their title actually means something legally distinct. So he capitalized on that professional caution to keep getting people's attention.
A better analogy might be like he was calling various military offices claiming to be 'captain someone', and every time they found out that he did not mean 'captain in their military' they hung up, so he called someone else claiming to be 'captain someone'. Maybe he was a captain in another nation's army, maybe he a captain of a pleasure ship, maybe he was a captain in his own private militia, what he was isn't actually important... what matters was that he knows full well he isn't a captain in the US Army but is hoping that people who are accustomed to patching officers through will not realize that.. and then got away with it since he never _techically_ said he was a US Army Captain.
Not malicious, but shady and self centered as hell.
If he had tried to do the same thing to the judge, the person would have come down pretty hard on him. Judges take personation of a BAR certified lawyer very seriously. But since he was only upsetting engineers, the judge didn't care.
The board asked him to stop because he kept messaging different people within the organization. So people tracking his pattern of behavior knew, but individuals he kept presenting himself as an engineer to did not.
I do not really think his intent was malicious, but he was trying to contact as many people as possible using his 'sounds like a credential but isn't' title in the hopes that someone would take him seriously. In short, when he did not get the respect he thought he deserved, he kept trying using ambiguous credentials to see if someone would acknowledge him. Which is why he has become such a poster child to those who feel slighted when professions do not take them as one of them.
HIs defenders are an excellent example of why he was throwing around 'engineer' an an attempt to sound authoritative. His work must be right, after all, he is an engineer! Unlike those actual experts, which were obviously lesser engineers. (something I see EEs do to CivEs way too much)
The problem in this case was that he was corresponding with staff in a civil engineering institution. So the staff normally only see certified professional engineers referring to themselves as engineers within their messages. So yeah, he was not actually lying, but fudging the truth a bit. Kinda like messaging people at a hospital calling yourself doctor someone when you have PhD in some non-medical field... leaving the details of his authoritativeness a little blank in the hopes that staff will fill it in such that they will give him more time and respect then he would get otherwise.
So.. while this is the most extreme escalated case I can think of, I keep hearing stories like this involving EEs and I wonder if there is something weird going on in our community. Engineers in general can be bad about believing themselves experts in everything, but EEs seem to be esp prone to feeling they are experts in any random engineering problem in other disciplines and get pissy when presenting themselves as 'an engineer' to domain experts in that other engineering field does not get them the authority they believe it should.
In a weird way, 'engineer' is a good example of what happens when you fail to protect your words carefully enough. The usage of the word has exploded over the last century, it used to be much narrower and much more regulated, but then all sorts of professions wanted to call themselves 'engineer' too because it sounded cool.. and today disciplines that have called themselves that for hundreds of years and enjoyed government/guild protection are increasingly having to confront they have LONG lost control of the word.
The thing that made this case messy was that he was pretty close to doing the former but not quite. He was capitalizing on his 'engineer' title to employees of a company that normally work with licensed engineers and conveniently leaving out that he was not actually a licensed engineer so they would take him more seriously. He is one of those slimy people that kept his coorsponances just truthful enough not be fraud, but leaving out just the right amount of information for his purposes.
Something that keeps getting left out of the coverage of this case, esp to tech communities, is that they guy kept referring to himself as an engineer in correspondences with the board of engineers and its staff, after repeatedly being asked not to (and at one point even agreeing, but then starting up again).... so he was REALLY blurring the lines between simply calling himself an engineer an 'practicing' in that he was using his title to sound authoritative to people who professionally interact with licensed people.
The classic problem with the simple model is, regardless of rhetoric about rationality, it only really works if you have consumers and producers, with no additional layers or competing interests. After that it quickly starts looking more like feudal systems or international diplomacy.
I completely agree that a lot of creativity goes into writing non-fiction, even mundane things like business documents or manuals. I was mostly commenting that the author of the original piece sounded like they were mostly interested in either writing fiction or things adjacent to it, and they self identified as a creative writing teacher.
No, the point of learning a technique is to learn the technique and show that you are capable of using it. Even in engineering, if you go and say take coursework in python, teachers are not going to accept assignments written in perl, and employers are not going to be impressed with 'well, I can solve the same problem using this other language'. Even within a language class, if a teacher asks you to implement a linked list, they are not going to be amused if you solve the problem some other way. Similarly, if a boss or a team lead wants a solution that follows a particular pattern, they are not going to be amused if you can not follow instructions and do it some other way.
Slashdot Mirror
So... the solution is a single middleman then? That is pretty much all an 'open platform' is, a middleman with 'open' thrown in.
It all comes down to degrees. Competition is good, but too much fragmentation can be bad for everyone involved, including the companies doing so basicly painting themselves into a corner. Fragmentation, once it settles in, can be very difficult to undo.
Well.. here is a comment I am saving for later use.
On the other hand, consumers tend to get frustrated with maintaining multiple (even inexpensive) subscriptions. They tend to want one source with one bill for unlimited access.
A lightly used fork of Etherium got hit with a 51% hack, just like many other minor alt-coins.
You can always keep the system both distributed and closed, just have multiple states/agencies/etc all using the same blockchain, but not have it open to outside entities to mine. It could actually make a rather clever distributed backup system.
Well, yes. It would be something like git implemented using a particular type of math that provides a nice strong audit trail. With something like git, you can still go in and slice up the middle to delete or change historical information. A blockchain makes that process more difficult... but yes, it would more closely resemble version control or content management systems than a cryptocurency, but blockchains themselves are about as well suited to either type of problem.
Keep in mind, one thing blockchains provide is a historical audit trail. Even if the single authorized writer can change values, all the previous inserts and changes are still examinable. This actually makes it a pretty good tool for public records since you can both see what currently is and what it looked like at every historical point.
It is neither.
This is not exactly a new, they put out these proposal requests all the time. They select some problem of interest, or more often a whole bag of problems and post a request for proposals, then see what various groups think they can accomplish along those lines. The actual research is a lot less dramatic than pieces like this suggest, and really just represent DARPA giving seed grants based off some theme to a bunch of teams and seeing what they come up with.
So much of their creation was rooted in people lamenting about how much more wonderful things were in the past, without understanding what went wrong then. So yeah.. amatures recreating mistakes professionals dealt with 200 years ago.
So a group of professors took advantage of a trust based system in order to make a political point by submitting hoax papers for peer review. Yay persecuted heros?
Seriously, the guy was an ass who did not like a particular type of paper so he wrote a bunch of fake papers on the subject and held up their acceptance into various publications as proof at how bad academia is, when the whole point of publishing is to have a minimal mechanical review filting papers so they can be read by people in the field and responded to. He is basically complaining that academic censorship isn't stringent enough because he was able to 'fool' people who generally try to give authors the benefit of the doubt.
No wonder the university doesn't want him working with human research subjects... but of course he is a slashdot hero now because academics in anything other than making cool tech are bad and omg the liberals are coming for our penes!
Think of the intent this way. He was being ignored. He didn't like being ignored, so he kept contacting people. In that department, 'engineer' caries a specific legal weight were ignoring them CAN result in liability, their title actually means something legally distinct. So he capitalized on that professional caution to keep getting people's attention.
A better analogy might be like he was calling various military offices claiming to be 'captain someone', and every time they found out that he did not mean 'captain in their military' they hung up, so he called someone else claiming to be 'captain someone'. Maybe he was a captain in another nation's army, maybe he a captain of a pleasure ship, maybe he was a captain in his own private militia, what he was isn't actually important... what matters was that he knows full well he isn't a captain in the US Army but is hoping that people who are accustomed to patching officers through will not realize that.. and then got away with it since he never _techically_ said he was a US Army Captain.
Not malicious, but shady and self centered as hell.
If he had tried to do the same thing to the judge, the person would have come down pretty hard on him. Judges take personation of a BAR certified lawyer very seriously. But since he was only upsetting engineers, the judge didn't care.
They were staffers he was trying to trick into believing he was someone with legal weight behind his title.
Yeah, he was always careful to not technically lie, just present something that could be misinterpreted to his advantage.
The board asked him to stop because he kept messaging different people within the organization. So people tracking his pattern of behavior knew, but individuals he kept presenting himself as an engineer to did not.
I do not really think his intent was malicious, but he was trying to contact as many people as possible using his 'sounds like a credential but isn't' title in the hopes that someone would take him seriously. In short, when he did not get the respect he thought he deserved, he kept trying using ambiguous credentials to see if someone would acknowledge him. Which is why he has become such a poster child to those who feel slighted when professions do not take them as one of them.
HIs defenders are an excellent example of why he was throwing around 'engineer' an an attempt to sound authoritative. His work must be right, after all, he is an engineer! Unlike those actual experts, which were obviously lesser engineers. (something I see EEs do to CivEs way too much)
The problem in this case was that he was corresponding with staff in a civil engineering institution. So the staff normally only see certified professional engineers referring to themselves as engineers within their messages. So yeah, he was not actually lying, but fudging the truth a bit. Kinda like messaging people at a hospital calling yourself doctor someone when you have PhD in some non-medical field... leaving the details of his authoritativeness a little blank in the hopes that staff will fill it in such that they will give him more time and respect then he would get otherwise.
So.. while this is the most extreme escalated case I can think of, I keep hearing stories like this involving EEs and I wonder if there is something weird going on in our community. Engineers in general can be bad about believing themselves experts in everything, but EEs seem to be esp prone to feeling they are experts in any random engineering problem in other disciplines and get pissy when presenting themselves as 'an engineer' to domain experts in that other engineering field does not get them the authority they believe it should.
In a weird way, 'engineer' is a good example of what happens when you fail to protect your words carefully enough. The usage of the word has exploded over the last century, it used to be much narrower and much more regulated, but then all sorts of professions wanted to call themselves 'engineer' too because it sounded cool.. and today disciplines that have called themselves that for hundreds of years and enjoyed government/guild protection are increasingly having to confront they have LONG lost control of the word.
The thing that made this case messy was that he was pretty close to doing the former but not quite. He was capitalizing on his 'engineer' title to employees of a company that normally work with licensed engineers and conveniently leaving out that he was not actually a licensed engineer so they would take him more seriously. He is one of those slimy people that kept his coorsponances just truthful enough not be fraud, but leaving out just the right amount of information for his purposes.
Something that keeps getting left out of the coverage of this case, esp to tech communities, is that they guy kept referring to himself as an engineer in correspondences with the board of engineers and its staff, after repeatedly being asked not to (and at one point even agreeing, but then starting up again).... so he was REALLY blurring the lines between simply calling himself an engineer an 'practicing' in that he was using his title to sound authoritative to people who professionally interact with licensed people.
The classic problem with the simple model is, regardless of rhetoric about rationality, it only really works if you have consumers and producers, with no additional layers or competing interests. After that it quickly starts looking more like feudal systems or international diplomacy.
I completely agree that a lot of creativity goes into writing non-fiction, even mundane things like business documents or manuals. I was mostly commenting that the author of the original piece sounded like they were mostly interested in either writing fiction or things adjacent to it, and they self identified as a creative writing teacher.
No, the point of learning a technique is to learn the technique and show that you are capable of using it. Even in engineering, if you go and say take coursework in python, teachers are not going to accept assignments written in perl, and employers are not going to be impressed with 'well, I can solve the same problem using this other language'. Even within a language class, if a teacher asks you to implement a linked list, they are not going to be amused if you solve the problem some other way. Similarly, if a boss or a team lead wants a solution that follows a particular pattern, they are not going to be amused if you can not follow instructions and do it some other way.