"No, because China only copies others..... There just won't be much innovation."
Wasn't this the claim made about Japan in USA and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s? that they just produced inferior copies of Western goods and competed by selling poorer quality copies at cheaper prices? e.g. in the camera and automotive industries?
The counter argument was that they learnt production methods and began to understand the desires of the USA/European market and then went on to improve quality and offer innovations, while Western companies were complacent and said "we know what our people want, we'll continue to make the same kind of autos / cameras etc.". I'd be interested in opinions from Detroit for example ("Motor City").
Lawyers do seem to be crushing innovation in the USA. Do you think it's possible that innovation and the world's lead in technical developments will shift to places where inventors/creators/small start ups are less inhibited by patent/copyright etc laws, and new products get pushed out without so much risk of being crushed by established old organisations? I'm wondering if places where legal frameworks aren't so closely adhered to will take the lead in the near future and be tolerated by their national governments as a way of increasing their share of the world economy?
I work on collaborative academic research projects. Rightly or wrongly some of these use free tools like Google docs for information sharing.across organisations and countries. It might not just be undergrad students but also paid employees not able to access important shared documents.
I'd prefer it we used some better shared work environment but by crickey have you ever tried as a non computing specialist academic to persuade your central IT department that they should use the workspace environment that some other university's IT department wants to use instead of the local preference? Geek fight supreme. None of the IT departments in the different organisations want to back down and use somebody else's preferred option, and if your PhD isn't in Computing they sure aren't going to take your advice... so often academics say "sod the IT departments, let's all just use this free software we all know how to use and bypass the IT departments who aren't interested in supporting collaborations...
Read the article. It's not stupid, it's being focussed somewhere else. As the article notes, a senior professor considered a world expert in Aztec culture or hunting Higgs Boson might not be an expert in IT, or focussing closely on IT forms when they are trying to crack a tricky problem in their field.
I like it that you write off Oxford university academics and students as stupid. Mind you, to be fair I don't know where you got your education from;-)
Precisely. What do I want to do with a *virtual* 3D space? Or, what do *I* want to do with a 3D space.
Simulation of virtual spaces, games, showing 3D objects.I think this is what 3D might offer. Until now, quite poorly. But not a great deal of need for me to do that. I suspect for most people it's just not a bit deal. So there's no money in it. How's the income on your Second Life store these days? Selling many sports shoes / domestic electrical goods / holiday packages to Australia? Why *don't* 3D spaces work?
For the majority of the time, I use the web as an information gathering and dissemination environment so 2D is just fine. Searching for journal articles just works better in text, don't give me virtual bookshelves to fly around, they don't give me any advantages. Posting messages to my professional colleagues works in text. Finding out about the weather works in 2D graphics. I think people need to see some advantages that they can't get from 2D or in any other communication format to take up 3D.
I've played around with 3D spaces since the mid-90s (SGI Indigo2 can do 3d graphics! let's experiment!) up to having a go at Second Life a few years ago. The big question in my mind has always been "what does it give me that other formats don't give me?". Up to now, I've not seen the "killer app". Any thoughts on what it might be? I am still racking my brains. For an engineer building models, yes, but for general users... I am still looking.
I live in a real 3D space and interact as embodied being in this space. You are correct, I can conceptualise this kind of environment. But I do so because I have to, and it doesn't mean it's ideal for some tasks. If I could avoid long haul flights by pressing a button rather than catching a taxi, sitting on a train, waiting in an airport, sitting on a plane for 12 hours - great! You and others who believe in 3D need to come up with the advantages over 2D.
Very nice. But I'm really curious: why do video sims have this obsession with pretending to be shot on a physical camera (e.g. rain drops on the "lens", lens flare when looking at the sun)?
I understand it's an aesthetic but it comes over as insecurity: "hey I bet you couldn't tell this wasn't a real camera in a real world". I think sim designers should have more confidence and get over this 'trying to prove we're as good as the real world by simulating failings in cameras'. I think there's some really nice work and they should concentrate on improving their presentation of world rather than trying to reverse engineer the failings of old cameras.
Rain drops on the lens from video shot on real cameras is really annoying. Don't spend energy trying to simulate it, or lens flare. Spend your time improving your new format, do cool stuff the real film makers can't do and take advantage that you're not bound by their limitations. Please don't work on a virtual camera operator's hand cleaning your virtual lens with a virtual disposable tissue when it rains hard....
Plagarism exists in closed journals as well. It didn't start with the open access journals movement. You as an author can declare how you'd like your work to be protected (look up "creative commons licences" if this is new to you). Whatever licence you issue under, including the closed journal copyright agreements that are very restrictive, people may rip off your work.
Visible to all is what many people would like to achieve! Certainly, some of us don't like the idea that the tax payers pay for our work and then have to pay again to view the results of our work. They paid for it so they should be able to see what we write up...
For example the UK, where there's growing interesting in enquiry based learning - this links to a report by Ofsted, the government's "Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills".Enquiry learning (called inquiry learning in the USA) also has its champions in North America (e.g. Roy Pea). A quick look around suggests that this approach also has been tried with success in Scandinavia( "Context of teaching and learning school science in Finland: Reflections on PISA 2006 results" by Lavonen and Laaksonen).
I've heard a criticism of the Khan Academy pedagogic approach is that it is explanation based (effectively the old model: the teacher talks, the student listens, the student carries out an exercise, listens again) - while schools are moving towards exploration based learning (where students are encourage to try and approach problems from different angles supported by teacher-as-facilitator).
To what extent does Khan Academy replicate a very old fashioned rote-learning form of education (albeit delivered and presented via a new media with minor improvements like pause and rewind), and in what aspects does it offer significant new pedagogical advances in learning?
"Researchers don't generally care about their papers being open access or not."
- quite a blanket statement. Quite a few researchers in my area are very enthusiastic about open access journals from a philosophical standpoint rather than "because they are easy to get published in" (plenty of poor quality closed journals fit into that category, they spam us regularly).
Evidence please. Or we're just slinging personal anecdotes here. Which wouldn't get us published in a decent peer-reviewed journal;-)
My first thought was - great - we can save money and remove North Korea as a threat to world peace by employing lawyers to shut them down and save lots of money by reducing military forces.... but then... I got wondering... perhaps the lawyers cost more than battle fleets and jet planes and nuclear missiles?;-)
Perhaps the USA is more lax than other countries about labelling alcohol content / other ingredients? Depends from country to country. In the UK they are very strict: I think maybe something to do with the legal aspect of the public not being able to contest drunk driving charges "I didn't know how strong the beer was, if I had known I would have only drunk 2 not 12 of them, honest m'lud! I blame the beer company!".
Strict labelling has other positive aspects, I have friends who have to be gluten free, others who are peanut allergic and they are very grateful for required labelling of food products indicating whether or not the food products contain ingredients that might put them into hospital or not. Good to know that kind of thing before you take a taste of something.
From the summary: "Caffeine gets cleared from the body at different rates because of genetic variations, gender, and even whether a person is a smoker."
- isn't this also true of alcohol? Any slashdot readers with a bit of medical knowledge help me understand the difference between how the body processes the two different substances?
1. David Cameron and his merry free-market-philosophising pals announce "Bonfire of the Quangos": UK right-wing government makes big show of closing down "unnecessary bureaucracy" in government to save money and reduce "big government". This includes health inspectors visits to slaughterhouses. 2. Government celebrates cutting jobs, saving tax payers money. 3. People still want cheap beefburgers. 4. Invisible hand of the market decides! You want cheap beefburgers, we can get you cheap beefburgers. 5. Ah. Turns out sacking all the heath inspectors and reducing the number of visits to check up on what's happening in the meat processing industry not such a good idea after all....
Somewhat ironic you choose to post a provocative style message as AC. Did you choose to do so because it was easy, and not hard?;-) Re: "could we please start understanding how the human body works" - I think you'll find that there are many research institutions and universities carrying out a lot of biological research. Why don't answers appear quickly? Because it's hard. A good friend has just finished his PhD studying Huntingdon's disease, he has made some valuable but incremental progress to solving genetic problems in this area. This stuff is really tough to solve...
Well if you live anywhere with an urban infrastructure, chances are the water you had in your coffee / glass of tap water by your bed side has been recycled through other people too....
I didn't actually say I *wasn't happy* with citizens owning their own nukes and personal battleships, I was just seeking clarification from the parent poster as to whether they were arguing either a> laws should allow any weapon systems, or b> that the 2nd amendment is out of date and should be repealed
I am not a US citizen so not so relevant to me, 3000 miles across a lot of water so I probably personally won't be affected. But always curious to follow debates in other countries, they both indirectly affect us, and also give interesting insights into our friends' philosophies and forms of government. I'm from the UK so we have plenty of old laws that look decidedly long-in-the-tooth, having been created in very different times. Alas most of the fun ones turn out to be urban myths or have been temporary laws, or repealed...
1. Large host organisation / government body requires programming done 2. Subcontracting specialist organisation / other company/ freelancer / offers price to satisfy tasks 3. Subcontractor chosen, price agreed, task allocated 4. If task successfully completed than host organisation happy and continues with its bigger work, may call on smaller subcontractor for further work or even employ them on rolling contract
Seems to me like this is just how contracting works. The guy was asked to produce code and he did.
I can see there's a security issue here (unauthorised handing out of VPN) and *potential* legal issue (does his contract say he must do the work? if not then no legal issue perhaps), maybe a tax issue (were tax payments made to subcontractors etc. as should have been).......but generally it seems like he was just doing what lots of companies do, subcontracting work out to specialists and claiming a percentage for handling the work and taking the risk on its delivery.
Not a lot different from how big companies work? and lets face it, big companies would NEVER put data security at risk or look for loopholes to avoid paying tax to the government, would they ?;-)
"The very nature of the 2nd Amendment is such that the weapons that should be freely available to citizens must be weapons of quality which would permit them to resist and fight a foreign invader. "
I think you're saying that all US citizens should have the right to own their own battleships/ stealth bombers / personal nuclear weapons if they so choose... or that the Second Amendment is out of date and be repealed?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
"No, because China only copies others..... There just won't be much innovation."
Wasn't this the claim made about Japan in USA and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s? that they just produced inferior copies of Western goods and competed by selling poorer quality copies at cheaper prices? e.g. in the camera and automotive industries?
The counter argument was that they learnt production methods and began to understand the desires of the USA/European market and then went on to improve quality and offer innovations, while Western companies were complacent and said "we know what our people want, we'll continue to make the same kind of autos / cameras etc.". I'd be interested in opinions from Detroit for example ("Motor City").
Lawyers do seem to be crushing innovation in the USA. Do you think it's possible that innovation and the world's lead in technical developments will shift to places where inventors/creators/small start ups are less inhibited by patent /copyright etc laws, and new products get pushed out without so much risk of being crushed by established old organisations? I'm wondering if places where legal frameworks aren't so closely adhered to will take the lead in the near future and be tolerated by their national governments as a way of increasing their share of the world economy?
I work on collaborative academic research projects. Rightly or wrongly some of these use free tools like Google docs for information sharing.across organisations and countries. It might not just be undergrad students but also paid employees not able to access important shared documents.
I'd prefer it we used some better shared work environment but by crickey have you ever tried as a non computing specialist academic to persuade your central IT department that they should use the workspace environment that some other university's IT department wants to use instead of the local preference? Geek fight supreme. None of the IT departments in the different organisations want to back down and use somebody else's preferred option, and if your PhD isn't in Computing they sure aren't going to take your advice... so often academics say "sod the IT departments, let's all just use this free software we all know how to use and bypass the IT departments who aren't interested in supporting collaborations...
Read the article. It's not stupid, it's being focussed somewhere else. As the article notes, a senior professor considered a world expert in Aztec culture or hunting Higgs Boson might not be an expert in IT, or focussing closely on IT forms when they are trying to crack a tricky problem in their field.
I like it that you write off Oxford university academics and students as stupid. Mind you, to be fair I don't know where you got your education from ;-)
Just curious, "enemy" of what? Keeping slim? Keeping healthy? Dental health? other?
Precisely. What do I want to do with a *virtual* 3D space? Or, what do *I* want to do with a 3D space.
Simulation of virtual spaces, games, showing 3D objects.I think this is what 3D might offer. Until now, quite poorly. But not a great deal of need for me to do that. I suspect for most people it's just not a bit deal. So there's no money in it. How's the income on your Second Life store these days? Selling many sports shoes / domestic electrical goods / holiday packages to Australia? Why *don't* 3D spaces work?
For the majority of the time, I use the web as an information gathering and dissemination environment so 2D is just fine. Searching for journal articles just works better in text, don't give me virtual bookshelves to fly around, they don't give me any advantages. Posting messages to my professional colleagues works in text. Finding out about the weather works in 2D graphics. I think people need to see some advantages that they can't get from 2D or in any other communication format to take up 3D.
I've played around with 3D spaces since the mid-90s (SGI Indigo2 can do 3d graphics! let's experiment!) up to having a go at Second Life a few years ago. The big question in my mind has always been "what does it give me that other formats don't give me?". Up to now, I've not seen the "killer app". Any thoughts on what it might be? I am still racking my brains. For an engineer building models, yes, but for general users... I am still looking.
I live in a real 3D space and interact as embodied being in this space. You are correct, I can conceptualise this kind of environment. But I do so because I have to, and it doesn't mean it's ideal for some tasks. If I could avoid long haul flights by pressing a button rather than catching a taxi, sitting on a train, waiting in an airport, sitting on a plane for 12 hours - great! You and others who believe in 3D need to come up with the advantages over 2D.
The shop was in Wroxham Barns, near the city of Norwich. Both are in the county of Norfolk.
Very nice. But I'm really curious: why do video sims have this obsession with pretending to be shot on a physical camera (e.g. rain drops on the "lens", lens flare when looking at the sun)?
I understand it's an aesthetic but it comes over as insecurity: "hey I bet you couldn't tell this wasn't a real camera in a real world". I think sim designers should have more confidence and get over this 'trying to prove we're as good as the real world by simulating failings in cameras'. I think there's some really nice work and they should concentrate on improving their presentation of world rather than trying to reverse engineer the failings of old cameras.
Rain drops on the lens from video shot on real cameras is really annoying. Don't spend energy trying to simulate it, or lens flare. Spend your time improving your new format, do cool stuff the real film makers can't do and take advantage that you're not bound by their limitations. Please don't work on a virtual camera operator's hand cleaning your virtual lens with a virtual disposable tissue when it rains hard....
but are you managing those temperatures with big holes where your windows used to be? will you have your windows wide open at midnight tonight?
"the speed distribution of moshers closely matches that of molecules in a 2D gas at equilibrium"
I knew all along that metal fans were all airheads, now proven by science!
Plagarism exists in closed journals as well. It didn't start with the open access journals movement. You as an author can declare how you'd like your work to be protected (look up "creative commons licences" if this is new to you). Whatever licence you issue under, including the closed journal copyright agreements that are very restrictive, people may rip off your work.
Visible to all is what many people would like to achieve! Certainly, some of us don't like the idea that the tax payers pay for our work and then have to pay again to view the results of our work. They paid for it so they should be able to see what we write up...
For example the UK, where there's growing interesting in enquiry based learning - this links to a report by Ofsted, the government's "Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills".Enquiry learning (called inquiry learning in the USA) also has its champions in North America (e.g. Roy Pea). A quick look around suggests that this approach also has been tried with success in Scandinavia( "Context of teaching and learning school science in Finland: Reflections on PISA 2006 results" by Lavonen and Laaksonen).
I've heard a criticism of the Khan Academy pedagogic approach is that it is explanation based (effectively the old model: the teacher talks, the student listens, the student carries out an exercise, listens again) - while schools are moving towards exploration based learning (where students are encourage to try and approach problems from different angles supported by teacher-as-facilitator).
To what extent does Khan Academy replicate a very old fashioned rote-learning form of education (albeit delivered and presented via a new media with minor improvements like pause and rewind), and in what aspects does it offer significant new pedagogical advances in learning?
"Researchers don't generally care about their papers being open access or not."
- quite a blanket statement. Quite a few researchers in my area are very enthusiastic about open access journals from a philosophical standpoint rather than "because they are easy to get published in" (plenty of poor quality closed journals fit into that category, they spam us regularly).
Evidence please. Or we're just slinging personal anecdotes here. Which wouldn't get us published in a decent peer-reviewed journal ;-)
PLOS ONE seems to get by requiring articles to be CC-BY so some researchers are clearly ok with that licence.
My first thought was - great - we can save money and remove North Korea as a threat to world peace by employing lawyers to shut them down and save lots of money by reducing military forces.... but then... I got wondering... perhaps the lawyers cost more than battle fleets and jet planes and nuclear missiles? ;-)
Perhaps the USA is more lax than other countries about labelling alcohol content / other ingredients? Depends from country to country. In the UK they are very strict: I think maybe something to do with the legal aspect of the public not being able to contest drunk driving charges "I didn't know how strong the beer was, if I had known I would have only drunk 2 not 12 of them, honest m'lud! I blame the beer company!".
Strict labelling has other positive aspects, I have friends who have to be gluten free, others who are peanut allergic and they are very grateful for required labelling of food products indicating whether or not the food products contain ingredients that might put them into hospital or not. Good to know that kind of thing before you take a taste of something.
From the summary: "Caffeine gets cleared from the body at different rates because of genetic variations, gender, and even whether a person is a smoker."
- isn't this also true of alcohol? Any slashdot readers with a bit of medical knowledge help me understand the difference between how the body processes the two different substances?
Scientific thinking for how the mtDNA proves who the skeleton is can be found on the University of Leicester dedicated website.
1. David Cameron and his merry free-market-philosophising pals announce "Bonfire of the Quangos": UK right-wing government makes big show of closing down "unnecessary bureaucracy" in government to save money and reduce "big government". This includes health inspectors visits to slaughterhouses.
2. Government celebrates cutting jobs, saving tax payers money.
3. People still want cheap beefburgers.
4. Invisible hand of the market decides! You want cheap beefburgers, we can get you cheap beefburgers.
5. Ah. Turns out sacking all the heath inspectors and reducing the number of visits to check up on what's happening in the meat processing industry not such a good idea after all....
Somewhat ironic you choose to post a provocative style message as AC. Did you choose to do so because it was easy, and not hard? ;-)
Re: "could we please start understanding how the human body works" - I think you'll find that there are many research institutions and universities carrying out a lot of biological research. Why don't answers appear quickly? Because it's hard. A good friend has just finished his PhD studying Huntingdon's disease, he has made some valuable but incremental progress to solving genetic problems in this area. This stuff is really tough to solve...
Well if you live anywhere with an urban infrastructure, chances are the water you had in your coffee / glass of tap water by your bed side has been recycled through other people too....
I didn't actually say I *wasn't happy* with citizens owning their own nukes and personal battleships, I was just seeking clarification from the parent poster as to whether they were arguing either a> laws should allow any weapon systems, or b> that the 2nd amendment is out of date and should be repealed
I am not a US citizen so not so relevant to me, 3000 miles across a lot of water so I probably personally won't be affected. But always curious to follow debates in other countries, they both indirectly affect us, and also give interesting insights into our friends' philosophies and forms of government. I'm from the UK so we have plenty of old laws that look decidedly long-in-the-tooth, having been created in very different times. Alas most of the fun ones turn out to be urban myths or have been temporary laws, or repealed...
1. Large host organisation / government body requires programming done
2. Subcontracting specialist organisation / other company/ freelancer / offers price to satisfy tasks
3. Subcontractor chosen, price agreed, task allocated
4. If task successfully completed than host organisation happy and continues with its bigger work, may call on smaller subcontractor for further work or even employ them on rolling contract
Seems to me like this is just how contracting works. The guy was asked to produce code and he did.
I can see there's a security issue here (unauthorised handing out of VPN) and *potential* legal issue (does his contract say he must do the work? if not then no legal issue perhaps), maybe a tax issue (were tax payments made to subcontractors etc. as should have been).... ...but generally it seems like he was just doing what lots of companies do, subcontracting work out to specialists and claiming a percentage for handling the work and taking the risk on its delivery.
Not a lot different from how big companies work? and lets face it, big companies would NEVER put data security at risk or look for loopholes to avoid paying tax to the government, would they ? ;-)
"The very nature of the 2nd Amendment is such that the weapons that should be freely available to citizens must be weapons of quality which would permit them to resist and fight a foreign invader. "
I think you're saying that all US citizens should have the right to own their own battleships/ stealth bombers / personal nuclear weapons if they so choose... or that the Second Amendment is out of date and be repealed? ;-)