With the combination of this and search engines trying to tailor results to individual users, can we expect to see even more polarization between supporters of the major parties?
I doubt that; email is pretty versatile, and sometimes the latency is a good thing. Consider the following:
I can download some email, then read and reply to those emails when I do not have Internet access.
Sometimes I need some time to think about how to answer a message, and instant messaging systems encourage quick answers (and people sometimes worry if you take too long to reply).
Email does not require any particular kind of network or even infrastructure to send; there are places in the world where email is propagated on thumb drives carried by couriers, and only makes it to the Internet if the courier can find access somewhere.
So yeah, I think email is going to stick around for a long time, probably forever, without merging with instant messaging. IM is great for low-latency conversations, but there is more to communication than that.
Third, consumers also need to know if they are getting Champagne or lesser sparkling wine. If it is not full Internet, it shouldnâ(TM)t be marketed as such; perhaps it shouldnâ(TM)t be marketed as âoeInternetâ at all, at least not without any upfront qualification. Regulators should have that kind of control over how ISPs market the service.
(Emphasis mine)
Sounds to me like no ISP in any country that orders a block on, say, TBP, should be able to market itself as providing Internet access under this proposal.
It is a more complicated explanation than, "The people who wrote that passage did not know about Pi or that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is constant and that therefore only one measurement is needed." Nowhere does the bible talk about significant digits; nor does the bible take the time to explain how the measurements were taken, which would go a long way toward justifying such large margins of error.
Let me guess -- ISPs cannot restrict access to websites in order to profit, but governments can order ISPs to restrict access to websites to protect the profits of entertainment companies?
How many scientists pull a copy of Hansel and Gretel off the shelf when they want to calculate the BTU output of a gas stove?
The same number that pull a copy of the bible off the shelf when they want to know the age of the Earth. That is exactly my point: there is nothing wrong with the bible as an ancient Jewish storybook, but it is absurd to point to the bible whenever someone talks about the Earth being billions of years old. People who give complicated explanations about why the biblical measurements of round objects are acceptable do so because they are absolutely unwilling to admit that the bible is just a storybook and not an accurate description of the physical world.
What's so bad about describing an object as roughly 10 units across and 30 units around?
The fact that you are giving both the circumference and the diameter of a circle; only one is necessary, and it is impossible to accurately give both. I am not blaming the authors of the bible for giving such a description, though, since I doubt they were familiar with geometry or anything beyond the most rudimentary math.
It certainly isn't exact but it's not too bad if you're just approximating for story telling purposes.
My point is that there are plenty of people who say that the bible is not just "for story telling purposes" and that it is the "perfect word of God." When you stop using the bible as a way to illustrate moral precepts and start trying to say that scientific results must be false if they do not agree with what the bible says, then giving a rough and mathematically unsound measurement of an object is most certainly problematic. Again, the people who say that the theory of evolution is the work of Satan do not respond to objects about the measurements given in Kings and Chronicles by saying that it is OK for a story to give such measurements; they respond with convoluted explanations that attempt to justify the measurements as given.
Ironically, Occam's Razor is basically rejected by today's "bible-believing" Christians (this is ironic because the man after whom Occam's Razor is named was a bible believer himself). They will jump through as many hoops as necessary to justify their belief. A typical example is the approach to the issue of why the bible describes a circular object that is 30 units around and 10 units across; all sorts of convoluted answers are given, ranging from "well the 10 units were for the inside, and the 30 units were for the outside" to claims that by analyzing the letters in the original Hebrew passage, you can find hundreds of digits of Pi. At no point are they willing to accept the simplest answer: the authors of that passage were not mathematicians.
The Internet is not just some fancy cable TV system; websites are not channels, "access devices" (read: personal computers) are not "view only," and BitTorrent is not some service that can be shut down. Millions of people want to share and download their entertainment; I would guess that they outnumber the people running the various businesses that are still struggling to adapt to this "new" technology. How about instead of fighting a battle that can never be won, we tell the copyright industry that they need to adapt or die?
about 52% of those enroled in computer science were women
Which is basically irrelevant since IT is not CS, and computer scientists go into many more jobs than IT. It could be that all those women in your CS courses went on to work in programming jobs or for some financial company (which would not surprise me, given how we focus on people's salaries post-graduation). Maybe they went into a field that has nothing to do with their major; my mother majored in math and wound up working a blue collar job on a railroad.
Maybe the real issue is that women are not interested in "hacker" type jobs, and would rather be in jobs where they work fixed hours and then go home and not code. Plenty of men prefer such jobs, but maybe women are unwilling to work in IT jobs -- jobs where they might be called out to fix something in the middle of the night, jobs that attract people who live in rooms that look like a scene from The Matrix...
Back to IT, and your comments on women potentially being unfairly forced away from it, I feel that sexual harassment is a major, major problem with discouraging girls and women from being interested
Is there any evidence of this, or is it just a conjecture based on the (admittedly reasonable) assumption that if people are harassed enough they will stay away? There are certainly women who can respond to sexual harassment with harassment of their own, like mother did when she worked on a railroad...
The geek ought to have learned by now that not everyone shares his love of complexity --- or his need for or access to broadband services.
That is irrelevant to this discussion and you know it -- AOL's customer base mostly (in the sense of a majority of their customers) people who simply do not understand that they do not need to pay for AOL in order to use their DSL or cable modem service. This is not a matter of costs or users choosing to stick with dialup; AOL's former executives have basically admitted that most of AOL's customers are paying for a service they neither need nor use:
Did you notice the part where the majority of AOL's profit comes from people who are paying for broadband service? How about the part where AOL's executives are fully aware of that fact?
not to defend AOL, but it is really NOT their responsibility to determine whether their service is needed by their customers
Except that if you actually read the link that I posted, you would see that AOL's managers already know that their service is not needed by a majority of their customers. This is not a matter of legal responsibility, it is a matter of ethics -- and AOL is as far from the moral high ground as they can get. Here you have a company whose executives know that most of their customers already have broadband, but are so confused about exactly they are paying for that they continue to pay for dialup service that they neither need nor use. There is really no defense of that, at least outside of a philosophy that says that any profit is good (in a moral sense), regardless of how that profit was realized.
I am not claiming that AOL has a legal obligation to inform its customers that they have no actual need for the service or that they are not realizing any actual benefit by paying for that service. My point is that anyone who works for AOL has to convince themselves that failing to do so is OK just to sleep at night, and that it would be hard for anyone working for AOL to not be aware that the majority of their customers are paying for a service that the neither need nor benefit from. The post I was replying to suggested that working at an AOL office must be depressing; I like to think that people have an inborn sense of right and wrong, and I was therefore confirming that point, inasmuch as it must be depressing for anyone other than a psychopath to work for a company that is knowingly ripping people off.
No offense, but yes, only a psychopath could knowingly charge people for a service they neither need nor use without at least feeling some sort of guilt or remorse.
AOL is still around, and there are still people paying for dialup service with them -- oftentimes people who are also paying for broadband service. AOL's brand is so strong among the technically illiterate that some people actually thing that AOL is the "Internet," is "Email," is "instant messenger," etc.
We are talking about people who are so helplessly uninformed that they are paying for dialup service despite already paying for broadband. Working for AOL is basically working for a scam that is tricking older, less technically literate people out of their money.
Stable...and much, much lower. That is why most of these people will be unhappy: they bought into the Bitcoin system late in the game, and are going to see the value of their Bitcoins decline substantially. A lot of the market value of Bitcoin is based on hype and dubious promises.
I've actually been relatively open-minded about Bitcoin in general, but this really does make them look like they're trying to cut everyone off and make off with the money
No surprises there. Bitcoin was one trading at like $0.10, and the people who joined the scam back then made lots and lots of (real) money. People have been calling Bitcoin a scam for years at this point.
But similar organizations are still needed to do all the things that journal publishers do now OTHER than printing and distributing paper journals
Really, the only thing that needs to be done is to select the reviewers and editors; this is not something that requires some huge bureaucracy, nor does it require a publishing company. Everything else can be done over the Internet.
using open access journals is going to have to lead to some serious cuts to library funding and fees universities skim off grants for services.
We can dream, but my guess is that universities will still take as much grant money as they can. They can always claim that we get to sit at their desks, and must therefore give them a boatload of money for that privilege...
I disagree on this point; I think that it is possible with today's technology to do away with publishing companies entirely and to basically put all published research in the public domain (where it really should be). In the absence of a need to publish bound copies of journals, publishing companies really act as a trusted party that anonymizes submissions and reviewers, as well as randomly (and hopefully in an unbiased way) selecting reviewers for papers. I think the following building blocks could be used to completely replace that trusted party:
Mix networks -- to anonymize the submissions
Group signatures -- to anonymize reviews and to allow readers to verify that the paper actually passed the peer review process
Commitment schemes -- so that author names can be revealed once a paper passes peer review, without revealing those names to the reviewers
A system for securely choosing random reviewers; this is at least theoretically possible (e.g. using garbled circuits) and can probably done in a practical way (it is not all that different from the secure auction system for sugar beet contracts in Denmark).
I may be missing a step here, but the process would look like this: each month, some group of research institutions chooses reviewers from a given field to participate in peer review; this should be done before papers are submitted, to reduce the chance of a conflict of interest. When authors submit papers, they send the paper through a mix network, along with an encryption key; when it is received, a random subset of reviewers is selected to review the paper. Each paper's reviews are then encrypted with the corresponding key, and are all posted on a commonly accessible website. Authors can then (possibly through an anonymity system) download all the encrypted reviews, but will only be able to decrypt the review corresponding to their own paper. When a paper passes the peer review process, the reviewers certify that by producing a group signature for the paper; upon receiving this signature, the authors open their commitments, and the paper can be published (at this point, it makes no difference where, since the digital signature certifies that the paper passed peer review; one difficulty is that an unscrupulous author could refuse to open their name, but will still have the signature, although this may not be a big deal -- the paper could be published by the institutions supporting the process without any name).
Clearly this is a cryptography-heavy solution, but I think the technology is there -- none of the primitives I mentioned are too impractical to be used, although they are still pretty cutting edge.
Slashdot Mirror
My bad.
With the combination of this and search engines trying to tailor results to individual users, can we expect to see even more polarization between supporters of the major parties?
So yeah, I think email is going to stick around for a long time, probably forever, without merging with instant messaging. IM is great for low-latency conversations, but there is more to communication than that.
Third, consumers also need to know if they are getting Champagne or lesser sparkling wine. If it is not full Internet, it shouldnâ(TM)t be marketed as such; perhaps it shouldnâ(TM)t be marketed as âoeInternetâ at all, at least not without any upfront qualification. Regulators should have that kind of control over how ISPs market the service.
(Emphasis mine)
Sounds to me like no ISP in any country that orders a block on, say, TBP, should be able to market itself as providing Internet access under this proposal.
Why limit yourself to legalizing only one drug? How about ending the war on drugs entirely?
It is a more complicated explanation than, "The people who wrote that passage did not know about Pi or that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is constant and that therefore only one measurement is needed." Nowhere does the bible talk about significant digits; nor does the bible take the time to explain how the measurements were taken, which would go a long way toward justifying such large margins of error.
Let me guess -- ISPs cannot restrict access to websites in order to profit, but governments can order ISPs to restrict access to websites to protect the profits of entertainment companies?
How many scientists pull a copy of Hansel and Gretel off the shelf when they want to calculate the BTU output of a gas stove?
The same number that pull a copy of the bible off the shelf when they want to know the age of the Earth. That is exactly my point: there is nothing wrong with the bible as an ancient Jewish storybook, but it is absurd to point to the bible whenever someone talks about the Earth being billions of years old. People who give complicated explanations about why the biblical measurements of round objects are acceptable do so because they are absolutely unwilling to admit that the bible is just a storybook and not an accurate description of the physical world.
What's so bad about describing an object as roughly 10 units across and 30 units around?
The fact that you are giving both the circumference and the diameter of a circle; only one is necessary, and it is impossible to accurately give both. I am not blaming the authors of the bible for giving such a description, though, since I doubt they were familiar with geometry or anything beyond the most rudimentary math.
It certainly isn't exact but it's not too bad if you're just approximating for story telling purposes.
My point is that there are plenty of people who say that the bible is not just "for story telling purposes" and that it is the "perfect word of God." When you stop using the bible as a way to illustrate moral precepts and start trying to say that scientific results must be false if they do not agree with what the bible says, then giving a rough and mathematically unsound measurement of an object is most certainly problematic. Again, the people who say that the theory of evolution is the work of Satan do not respond to objects about the measurements given in Kings and Chronicles by saying that it is OK for a story to give such measurements; they respond with convoluted explanations that attempt to justify the measurements as given.
Ironically, Occam's Razor is basically rejected by today's "bible-believing" Christians (this is ironic because the man after whom Occam's Razor is named was a bible believer himself). They will jump through as many hoops as necessary to justify their belief. A typical example is the approach to the issue of why the bible describes a circular object that is 30 units around and 10 units across; all sorts of convoluted answers are given, ranging from "well the 10 units were for the inside, and the 30 units were for the outside" to claims that by analyzing the letters in the original Hebrew passage, you can find hundreds of digits of Pi. At no point are they willing to accept the simplest answer: the authors of that passage were not mathematicians.
The Internet is not just some fancy cable TV system; websites are not channels, "access devices" (read: personal computers) are not "view only," and BitTorrent is not some service that can be shut down. Millions of people want to share and download their entertainment; I would guess that they outnumber the people running the various businesses that are still struggling to adapt to this "new" technology. How about instead of fighting a battle that can never be won, we tell the copyright industry that they need to adapt or die?
about 52% of those enroled in computer science were women
Which is basically irrelevant since IT is not CS, and computer scientists go into many more jobs than IT. It could be that all those women in your CS courses went on to work in programming jobs or for some financial company (which would not surprise me, given how we focus on people's salaries post-graduation). Maybe they went into a field that has nothing to do with their major; my mother majored in math and wound up working a blue collar job on a railroad.
Maybe the real issue is that women are not interested in "hacker" type jobs, and would rather be in jobs where they work fixed hours and then go home and not code. Plenty of men prefer such jobs, but maybe women are unwilling to work in IT jobs -- jobs where they might be called out to fix something in the middle of the night, jobs that attract people who live in rooms that look like a scene from The Matrix...
Back to IT, and your comments on women potentially being unfairly forced away from it, I feel that sexual harassment is a major, major problem with discouraging girls and women from being interested
Is there any evidence of this, or is it just a conjecture based on the (admittedly reasonable) assumption that if people are harassed enough they will stay away? There are certainly women who can respond to sexual harassment with harassment of their own, like mother did when she worked on a railroad...
The geek ought to have learned by now that not everyone shares his love of complexity --- or his need for or access to broadband services.
That is irrelevant to this discussion and you know it -- AOL's customer base mostly (in the sense of a majority of their customers) people who simply do not understand that they do not need to pay for AOL in order to use their DSL or cable modem service. This is not a matter of costs or users choosing to stick with dialup; AOL's former executives have basically admitted that most of AOL's customers are paying for a service they neither need nor use:
http://www.techspot.com/news/42121-60-of-aols-profits-come-from-misinformed-customers.html
Did you notice the part where the majority of AOL's profit comes from people who are paying for broadband service? How about the part where AOL's executives are fully aware of that fact?
not to defend AOL, but it is really NOT their responsibility to determine whether their service is needed by their customers
Except that if you actually read the link that I posted, you would see that AOL's managers already know that their service is not needed by a majority of their customers. This is not a matter of legal responsibility, it is a matter of ethics -- and AOL is as far from the moral high ground as they can get. Here you have a company whose executives know that most of their customers already have broadband, but are so confused about exactly they are paying for that they continue to pay for dialup service that they neither need nor use. There is really no defense of that, at least outside of a philosophy that says that any profit is good (in a moral sense), regardless of how that profit was realized.
I am not claiming that AOL has a legal obligation to inform its customers that they have no actual need for the service or that they are not realizing any actual benefit by paying for that service. My point is that anyone who works for AOL has to convince themselves that failing to do so is OK just to sleep at night, and that it would be hard for anyone working for AOL to not be aware that the majority of their customers are paying for a service that the neither need nor benefit from. The post I was replying to suggested that working at an AOL office must be depressing; I like to think that people have an inborn sense of right and wrong, and I was therefore confirming that point, inasmuch as it must be depressing for anyone other than a psychopath to work for a company that is knowingly ripping people off.
No offense, but yes, only a psychopath could knowingly charge people for a service they neither need nor use without at least feeling some sort of guilt or remorse.
AOL is still around, and there are still people paying for dialup service with them -- oftentimes people who are also paying for broadband service. AOL's brand is so strong among the technically illiterate that some people actually thing that AOL is the "Internet," is "Email," is "instant messenger," etc.
Especially when you consider this:
http://www.techspot.com/news/42121-60-of-aols-profits-come-from-misinformed-customers.html
We are talking about people who are so helplessly uninformed that they are paying for dialup service despite already paying for broadband. Working for AOL is basically working for a scam that is tricking older, less technically literate people out of their money.
Stable...and much, much lower. That is why most of these people will be unhappy: they bought into the Bitcoin system late in the game, and are going to see the value of their Bitcoins decline substantially. A lot of the market value of Bitcoin is based on hype and dubious promises.
There are plenty of people who are trying to use Bitcoin as currency. They are really going to be unhappy when the hype dies down...
Maybe anarchists are not as good at managing currency as professional bankers?
I've actually been relatively open-minded about Bitcoin in general, but this really does make them look like they're trying to cut everyone off and make off with the money
No surprises there. Bitcoin was one trading at like $0.10, and the people who joined the scam back then made lots and lots of (real) money. People have been calling Bitcoin a scam for years at this point.
Is there a no-javascript version, or some way to read over the technical details without needing to go through layers of javascript?
That editor can be paid by a journal company
But similar organizations are still needed to do all the things that journal publishers do now OTHER than printing and distributing paper journals
Really, the only thing that needs to be done is to select the reviewers and editors; this is not something that requires some huge bureaucracy, nor does it require a publishing company. Everything else can be done over the Internet.
using open access journals is going to have to lead to some serious cuts to library funding and fees universities skim off grants for services.
We can dream, but my guess is that universities will still take as much grant money as they can. They can always claim that we get to sit at their desks, and must therefore give them a boatload of money for that privilege...
journals still serve a valuable function
I disagree on this point; I think that it is possible with today's technology to do away with publishing companies entirely and to basically put all published research in the public domain (where it really should be). In the absence of a need to publish bound copies of journals, publishing companies really act as a trusted party that anonymizes submissions and reviewers, as well as randomly (and hopefully in an unbiased way) selecting reviewers for papers. I think the following building blocks could be used to completely replace that trusted party:
I may be missing a step here, but the process would look like this: each month, some group of research institutions chooses reviewers from a given field to participate in peer review; this should be done before papers are submitted, to reduce the chance of a conflict of interest. When authors submit papers, they send the paper through a mix network, along with an encryption key; when it is received, a random subset of reviewers is selected to review the paper. Each paper's reviews are then encrypted with the corresponding key, and are all posted on a commonly accessible website. Authors can then (possibly through an anonymity system) download all the encrypted reviews, but will only be able to decrypt the review corresponding to their own paper. When a paper passes the peer review process, the reviewers certify that by producing a group signature for the paper; upon receiving this signature, the authors open their commitments, and the paper can be published (at this point, it makes no difference where, since the digital signature certifies that the paper passed peer review; one difficulty is that an unscrupulous author could refuse to open their name, but will still have the signature, although this may not be a big deal -- the paper could be published by the institutions supporting the process without any name).
Clearly this is a cryptography-heavy solution, but I think the technology is there -- none of the primitives I mentioned are too impractical to be used, although they are still pretty cutting edge.
You wanna go into business?
Thanks for the offer, but what I am trying to do is take the entire business aspect out of this ;-)