Why are we keeping these journals alive? We could set up a more open, more collaborative system of publishing by using the Internet and the immense computing resources that typical research institutions have. The fact that Elsevier withdrew support for a particular controversial act is a minor footnote compared to the broader issue: Elsevier keeps published researched behind paywalls and ensures that only "insiders" at universities and research labs can access it. It is a system that needs to be killed, and killed soon.
This is true and unfortunate, but there is a serious lack of more accurate means of measurement. I'm curious - what do you suggest as a better way to compare 400 candidates applying for 4 jobs? Don't forget the most important constraint: you are not an expert in any of their fields.
A simple but effective metric: how many citations do their publication get, on average, and how does that compare to prominent researchers in their field of research? Good research, innovative work, etc. will be widely cited.
Naturally, this is not the only metric that should be used. It is a whole lot better than the name of the journal that a paper was published in. I have seen papers that have not been published in any journal receive citations; I have even seen journals publish papers that are nothing more than incremental improvements on papers that were posted on some researcher's web page.
The entire academic publishing system needs to be overhauled; we should start by scrapping the journal system and moving to something better. Universities should be paying the cost of hosting research papers instead of paying for subscriptions to journals, and they should be making those papers available to anyone who wishes to read them. Sadly, the focus is more on CV building, so real progress toward open access is slow and painful.
You don't understand the academic journal market. You don't publish articles in prestigious journals for the sake of publishing, or to make money, you publish articles in prestigious journals so that others read your work.
That's a great theory, but in practice people publish in prestigious journals because those journals are prestigious, and it looks good on a CV, during tenure review, etc. People reading a researcher's work often comes secondary to people reading the list of journals where a researcher has published their work.
Really though, your argument is specious. If the goal of publishing research was truly to get as many readers as possible, why not make use of the global nature of the Internet, and set up a system where publications happen entirely online? Peer review is already done by volunteers, so I cannot imagine there would be much of a problem with the peer review process. Journals were a way to reach a wide audience 30 years ago; times have changed, and we need to change with the times.
The academic journals deliver an audience of readers, and that is what you want - you want other prestigious academics to read your work.
This could be done by way of a mailing list. Journals are not necessary if that is the goal.
And a big part of how professors are judged for tenure is how many good articles did they publish in prestigious journals.
Bingo -- that is why it is hard to get researchers to stop feeding these monsters. Prestigious names look good, plain and simple; we live in a publish-or-perish world, and publishing in a big name journal is better than publishing on arXiv.
Clearly they have no idea what they are talking about if they do not make any mention of TeX. No discussion of bounding boxes or kerning? What sort of technical writers are not worried about overfull hboxes?
Yet Apple took the time to remove hundreds of pornography apps and numerous political cartoon hats. It is not paranoia -- it actually did happen, it was widely reported here on Slashdot, and if you are not aware of it at this point then you are sorely uninformed.
Well, we can ignore the fact that some people (e.g. students) are forced to use Apple's products if you want -- there are plenty of arguments about whether or not students should even be allowed to program school computers in arbitrary ways. Sure, people can choose to buy other tablets, but how is it unfair to criticize Apple for including a "feature" the prevents users from running unsigned code? If I were asked, "Do you recommend an iPad?" why should I not answer, "No, because your computer will be controlled by Apple, and Apple is known to use that control in ways that have a negative impact on its users?"
I do not agree that a computer maker is in the right when they create a computer that works against the interests of its users, or which remains under the control of its creator even after the ownership of the computer is transferred to someone else. Computers are basically the most important communications tools ever developed, and what Apple is doing with iPads and related devices is to prevent people from using those tools in the way that suits them. Apple has basically taken back the freedom and control that people had over their PCs, and whatever possible technical argument there might have been (e.g. they just want to prevent people from installing malware) has been obliterated by their overt censorship policy.
Apple is careful to hide how they make use of the power they retain over tablets. Nobody tells you that your tablet is designed to prevent you from installing a pornography app or a political cartoon app. The "Apple retains control" feature is not something Apple talks about when they lobby for their tablets to be used in schools, or when they advertise their tablets to consumers. Apple knows this is not a feature that people want, and they push it on their customers anyway. Nobody expects Apple to advertise features that people do not want; we expect Apple not to include the features in the first place.
Do you defend government censorship, because it is the "government's freedom?" Nobody speaks about China's freedom to censor its population and to work against the interests of various ethnic groups in China, except perhaps for shills employed by the Chinese government. Why should we speak of Apple's freedom to censor its users, to sneak features in that its users do not want, or to abuse the power it has over its users? America's economic system, like everything else promoted by the US government, is supposed to serve the people best -- so why should we not criticize Apple for failing to do so?
They would still lose the App Store revenue if they were to allow people to install unapproved software, and they would still not be able to prevent people from install pornography or political cartoons on iPads etc. The purpose of the lock down is to control what users are able to do with their computers, so that those users do not do anything that runs counter to Apple's own interests. That could mean damaging Apple's public image by installing pornography breaking the family-friendly image of tablets that Apple has tried to push (and indeed, it would be much harder to push tablets in schools if people generally associated tablets with pornography), it could mean paying for software without also paying Apple, or it could mean installing software that undermines the interests of key media partners.
So you are suggesting that it increases "freedom" to prevent users from installing political cartoon apps on their tablets? How is providing a switch that allows users to unlock their tablets restricting anyone's freedom?
Oh wait, this is the old "if corporations want to screw their customers, they should have the freedom to do so" argument. User freedoms should come second to corporations', right? It is not as though users should have any expectation of being able to install the software they want to install on their tablets, if the corporation that produces those tablets says they are not supposed to be doing so, right?
....because they make lots of money from the App Store, and they can appease various friendly politicians by banning political cartoons, banning pornography, etc. Why would Apple want to give up that sort of control? It is not as if the company were founded as part of a movement to free computer users from that sort of control or anything like that...
Except that the NSA also employs a variety of operational security measures to prevent break-ins. A windows machine that is not connected to the Internet is not going to be infected with viruses (yes I know someone could walk up to it and infect it; that is beside the point, there is no such thing as perfect security).
Damned if they do, damned if they don't, I suppose.
False dichotomy; they could have just shipped tablets that were not locked down, or as you yourself suggest, tablets which can be unlocked by the user.
They're far bulkier than my smart phone, so they're not very good on the go.
Well, I find that the larger screen is more convenient for reading journal articles and conference papers, and I like the fact that I am not being coerced into buying a ridiculously overpriced data plan. For quickly checking my email, quickly looking something up, etc. a tablet can be useful.
Now, there is no way that a tablet is going to replace a laptop or desktop. It is too hard to enter data into a tablet, too hard to create new software, and so forth. By the same token, I do not think a laptop could really replace a tablet -- too much weight, too long to resume from suspend, etc. Both have their place.
There are plenty of issues with the current state of affairs with tablets, starting with the no-unapproved-software model that so many vendors are pushing, but utility is not one of them.
Exceptions as they exist in C++ are bad. The Lisp way is better: find the exception handler, then (possibly) unwind the stack. When throwing an exception could cause the program to abort, there is no way that you can use exceptions in any large project.
Exceptions make it very hard to figure out what will happen. When an exception is raised, program flow branches to an unknown location; you could call the same function twice, with the same arguments, and end up in two totally unrelated exception handlers.
Now, in practice exceptions are better than the known alternatives, for the simple reason that large amounts of code are simple hacked together without formal development methods. Still, I have seen projects that simple do not use exceptions, because they had too many problems with the weirdness that exceptions cause (although I suspect that if C++ and Java had Lisp-like exceptions, where the stack is left intact for the exception handler, things would be different).
My understanding is that the best publicly known general cryptanalytic attacks on AES are only marginally better than brute-force
That is what you are missing.
So we can then assume that NSA has a general attack on AES that makes it many, many orders of magnitude easier to break than the best known published attacks? Or is this more likely to be disinformation spread to make people *think* that AES is broken by NSA? My understanding was that NSA is generally somewhat but not extremely far beyond the academic state of the art these days.
How would we even know? The NSA will always have an advantage over public research: they have access to all the public research, as well as classified expertise.
We use our signals intelligence capability to pass the trade secrets of foreign companies on to our own domestic companies; there is plenty of money to be made from being able to decrypt messages that the NSA intercepts.
second, i don't know so just a thought. could you create an encryption method that generates a new encryption key for every new message.
Sure, but you have to be more specific. A one time pad might meet your definition, as might standard hybrid public/private encryption (which is widely used).
Well there are enough laws on the books that for any given person, you can find at least one felony offense that they have committed. Look it up yourself if you do not believe me -- not only are there numerous overly broad laws, but there are so many laws in effect right now that the government itself has actually lost count:
The attorney general's office has the power to declare laws, and then to enforce the laws that it declares
The police now meet the definition of a paramilitary force, and get large amounts of surplus military equipment from the US military each year.
Law enforcement agencies in America have vast, secret intelligence operations
Law enforcement agencies in New York are now known to have secretly monitored innocent people, for no reason other than their religion
There are so many laws in effect that the police can arrest almost anyone on a whim -- they are nearly guaranteed to find a violation it they simply watch a person go about their daily business. People have even been arrested and prosecuted solely for resisting arrest.
There are more prisoners in the United States than in any other country, including authoritarian countries with larger populations (China). Only the USSR and Nazi Germany had larger prison populations.
Do you really need to ask why people are opposed to further increases in police power?
I'm curious how many people who are generally considered to be law-abiding citizens have a misdemeanor at some point in their past which did not lead to later felonies
Considering how everyone will commit at least one felony in their lifetime....
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we keeping these journals alive? We could set up a more open, more collaborative system of publishing by using the Internet and the immense computing resources that typical research institutions have. The fact that Elsevier withdrew support for a particular controversial act is a minor footnote compared to the broader issue: Elsevier keeps published researched behind paywalls and ensures that only "insiders" at universities and research labs can access it. It is a system that needs to be killed, and killed soon.
This is true and unfortunate, but there is a serious lack of more accurate means of measurement. I'm curious - what do you suggest as a better way to compare 400 candidates applying for 4 jobs? Don't forget the most important constraint: you are not an expert in any of their fields.
A simple but effective metric: how many citations do their publication get, on average, and how does that compare to prominent researchers in their field of research? Good research, innovative work, etc. will be widely cited.
Naturally, this is not the only metric that should be used. It is a whole lot better than the name of the journal that a paper was published in. I have seen papers that have not been published in any journal receive citations; I have even seen journals publish papers that are nothing more than incremental improvements on papers that were posted on some researcher's web page.
The entire academic publishing system needs to be overhauled; we should start by scrapping the journal system and moving to something better. Universities should be paying the cost of hosting research papers instead of paying for subscriptions to journals, and they should be making those papers available to anyone who wishes to read them. Sadly, the focus is more on CV building, so real progress toward open access is slow and painful.
You don't understand the academic journal market. You don't publish articles in prestigious journals for the sake of publishing, or to make money, you publish articles in prestigious journals so that others read your work.
That's a great theory, but in practice people publish in prestigious journals because those journals are prestigious, and it looks good on a CV, during tenure review, etc. People reading a researcher's work often comes secondary to people reading the list of journals where a researcher has published their work.
Really though, your argument is specious. If the goal of publishing research was truly to get as many readers as possible, why not make use of the global nature of the Internet, and set up a system where publications happen entirely online? Peer review is already done by volunteers, so I cannot imagine there would be much of a problem with the peer review process. Journals were a way to reach a wide audience 30 years ago; times have changed, and we need to change with the times.
The academic journals deliver an audience of readers, and that is what you want - you want other prestigious academics to read your work.
This could be done by way of a mailing list. Journals are not necessary if that is the goal.
And a big part of how professors are judged for tenure is how many good articles did they publish in prestigious journals.
Bingo -- that is why it is hard to get researchers to stop feeding these monsters. Prestigious names look good, plain and simple; we live in a publish-or-perish world, and publishing in a big name journal is better than publishing on arXiv.
Clearly they have no idea what they are talking about if they do not make any mention of TeX. No discussion of bounding boxes or kerning? What sort of technical writers are not worried about overfull hboxes?
I...I am not even sure what say to that...
Yet Apple took the time to remove hundreds of pornography apps and numerous political cartoon hats. It is not paranoia -- it actually did happen, it was widely reported here on Slashdot, and if you are not aware of it at this point then you are sorely uninformed.
Thus explaining their ban on political cartoons. Yeah, really combating malware with that one.
Well, we can ignore the fact that some people (e.g. students) are forced to use Apple's products if you want -- there are plenty of arguments about whether or not students should even be allowed to program school computers in arbitrary ways. Sure, people can choose to buy other tablets, but how is it unfair to criticize Apple for including a "feature" the prevents users from running unsigned code? If I were asked, "Do you recommend an iPad?" why should I not answer, "No, because your computer will be controlled by Apple, and Apple is known to use that control in ways that have a negative impact on its users?"
I do not agree that a computer maker is in the right when they create a computer that works against the interests of its users, or which remains under the control of its creator even after the ownership of the computer is transferred to someone else. Computers are basically the most important communications tools ever developed, and what Apple is doing with iPads and related devices is to prevent people from using those tools in the way that suits them. Apple has basically taken back the freedom and control that people had over their PCs, and whatever possible technical argument there might have been (e.g. they just want to prevent people from installing malware) has been obliterated by their overt censorship policy.
Apple is careful to hide how they make use of the power they retain over tablets. Nobody tells you that your tablet is designed to prevent you from installing a pornography app or a political cartoon app. The "Apple retains control" feature is not something Apple talks about when they lobby for their tablets to be used in schools, or when they advertise their tablets to consumers. Apple knows this is not a feature that people want, and they push it on their customers anyway. Nobody expects Apple to advertise features that people do not want; we expect Apple not to include the features in the first place.
Do you defend government censorship, because it is the "government's freedom?" Nobody speaks about China's freedom to censor its population and to work against the interests of various ethnic groups in China, except perhaps for shills employed by the Chinese government. Why should we speak of Apple's freedom to censor its users, to sneak features in that its users do not want, or to abuse the power it has over its users? America's economic system, like everything else promoted by the US government, is supposed to serve the people best -- so why should we not criticize Apple for failing to do so?
They would still lose the App Store revenue if they were to allow people to install unapproved software, and they would still not be able to prevent people from install pornography or political cartoons on iPads etc. The purpose of the lock down is to control what users are able to do with their computers, so that those users do not do anything that runs counter to Apple's own interests. That could mean damaging Apple's public image by installing pornography breaking the family-friendly image of tablets that Apple has tried to push (and indeed, it would be much harder to push tablets in schools if people generally associated tablets with pornography), it could mean paying for software without also paying Apple, or it could mean installing software that undermines the interests of key media partners.
So you are suggesting that it increases "freedom" to prevent users from installing political cartoon apps on their tablets? How is providing a switch that allows users to unlock their tablets restricting anyone's freedom?
Oh wait, this is the old "if corporations want to screw their customers, they should have the freedom to do so" argument. User freedoms should come second to corporations', right? It is not as though users should have any expectation of being able to install the software they want to install on their tablets, if the corporation that produces those tablets says they are not supposed to be doing so, right?
....because they make lots of money from the App Store, and they can appease various friendly politicians by banning political cartoons, banning pornography, etc. Why would Apple want to give up that sort of control? It is not as if the company were founded as part of a movement to free computer users from that sort of control or anything like that...
What does it do for the average consumer? Answer: nothing.
What does escaping for the USSR do for the average Soviet citizen? It is not like there was any censorship on the part of the Sovie^H^H^H^H^HApple:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/194387/apple_rejects_pulitzer_prize_winners_app.html
Except that the NSA also employs a variety of operational security measures to prevent break-ins. A windows machine that is not connected to the Internet is not going to be infected with viruses (yes I know someone could walk up to it and infect it; that is beside the point, there is no such thing as perfect security).
Damned if they do, damned if they don't, I suppose.
False dichotomy; they could have just shipped tablets that were not locked down, or as you yourself suggest, tablets which can be unlocked by the user.
They're far bulkier than my smart phone, so they're not very good on the go.
Well, I find that the larger screen is more convenient for reading journal articles and conference papers, and I like the fact that I am not being coerced into buying a ridiculously overpriced data plan. For quickly checking my email, quickly looking something up, etc. a tablet can be useful.
Now, there is no way that a tablet is going to replace a laptop or desktop. It is too hard to enter data into a tablet, too hard to create new software, and so forth. By the same token, I do not think a laptop could really replace a tablet -- too much weight, too long to resume from suspend, etc. Both have their place.
There are plenty of issues with the current state of affairs with tablets, starting with the no-unapproved-software model that so many vendors are pushing, but utility is not one of them.
you still see people thinking exceptions are bad
Well, there are two things at work here:
Now, in practice exceptions are better than the known alternatives, for the simple reason that large amounts of code are simple hacked together without formal development methods. Still, I have seen projects that simple do not use exceptions, because they had too many problems with the weirdness that exceptions cause (although I suspect that if C++ and Java had Lisp-like exceptions, where the stack is left intact for the exception handler, things would be different).
My understanding is that the best publicly known general cryptanalytic attacks on AES are only marginally better than brute-force
That is what you are missing.
So we can then assume that NSA has a general attack on AES that makes it many, many orders of magnitude easier to break than the best known published attacks? Or is this more likely to be disinformation spread to make people *think* that AES is broken by NSA? My understanding was that NSA is generally somewhat but not extremely far beyond the academic state of the art these days.
How would we even know? The NSA will always have an advantage over public research: they have access to all the public research, as well as classified expertise.
We use our signals intelligence capability to pass the trade secrets of foreign companies on to our own domestic companies; there is plenty of money to be made from being able to decrypt messages that the NSA intercepts.
second, i don't know so just a thought. could you create an encryption method that generates a new encryption key for every new message.
Sure, but you have to be more specific. A one time pad might meet your definition, as might standard hybrid public/private encryption (which is widely used).
Why fix security problems when you can just prosecute people?
Well there are enough laws on the books that for any given person, you can find at least one felony offense that they have committed. Look it up yourself if you do not believe me -- not only are there numerous overly broad laws, but there are so many laws in effect right now that the government itself has actually lost count:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304319804576389601079728920.html
Based on the amount of traffic on the Triborough and Whitestone bridges, I would have to say the guy from Albany...
</sarcasm>
Do you really need to ask why people are opposed to further increases in police power?
For most of the Rich they are not breaking Criminal Laws
[citation needed]
I'm curious how many people who are generally considered to be law-abiding citizens have a misdemeanor at some point in their past which did not lead to later felonies
Considering how everyone will commit at least one felony in their lifetime....