Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest

The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is At Stake & What You Can Do

Posted by Soulskill in YRO • View
An anonymous reader writes "The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. and elsewhere, but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia). Michael Geist has a full rundown on what is at stake and what you can do, wherever you live."

Shut it down

By geekoid • Score: 3 • Thread

shut is all down.

How about a week long blackout?
Or a week of backhoe accidents.

Signing is only the start of the battle

By Elektroschock • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Signing does not mean a thing because the European Parliament still has to decide whether to give its consent, and when a single nation asks the European court of Justice, or the Constitutional court then it's dead, because it is against EU Treaties/constitutions. it's not too late to get involved.

White House "Petitions"

By oneiros27 • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Assuming that the White House actually takes the petitions seriously, the current ACTA related petitions are:

... and, not ACTA related, but as I'm an ALA member, there's also one that needs another 6k signatures by next week for funding for school libraries. (although, personally, I'd rather it go to regular public libraries, so they have access over the summer)

Bill Gates Gives $750M To AIDS Fund

Posted by Soulskill in Science • View
redletterdave writes "Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates pledged $750 million to the troubled global AIDS fund on Thursday and urged governments to continue their support to save lives. Since the fund was launched 10 years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $1.4 billion to the charity, having already contributed $650 million prior to the latest donation. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria accounts for around a quarter of international financing to fight HIV and AIDS, as well as the majority of funds to fight TB and malaria."

Yet Another Bill and GSK Collaboration.....

By segedunum • Score: 3 • Thread
Bill and his foundation and GSK did that whole malaria vaccination thing where they needed to buy the medicine and keep taking it along with the vaccination. Why cure someone when you can dip your hand in the scam that is the WHO?

Leopards do not change their spots and this is not philanthropy, be in no doubt.

Re:AIDS is easy to avoid

By allcoolnameswheretak • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Some people are born with aids.

Where Does the Money Actually Go Though?

By eldavojohn • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Even the general Slashdot feeling towards Microsoft, it is true that his (and Melinda's) work is great. Let's hope he keeps it up!

Well, I have an issue with this. From the article:

While that will give an immediate boost, more is needed from governments, which have provided the bulk of the $22.6 billion that has been raised by the Geneva-based organization to date for its work in 150 countries.

The commitment of governments was shaken last year when the fund reported "grave misuse of funds" in four recipient nations, prompting some donors such as Germany and Sweden to freeze their donations.

Why do coutnries pay into this foundation that invests primarily in American funds and stocks? Why do they not setup their own charities that invest in their own stocks or -- better yet -- give it directly to the institutions of medical research?

This perplexes me to no end. This foundation is at the mercy of the stock market and rely on money managers to post returns every year so that it can give those returns to the targeted countries and research -- right up until a crisis causes those funds to greatly shrink.

I have complained about this before and been called "full of bullshit" and I guess this is just one thing that my opinion and concern diverges on from the rest of the readers here. This is charity in the form of keeping the capital inside America's border and shaving off returns. The money stays at work in America and no such stock or company or infrastructure is built up in the countries that could truly use it and truly need it.

When you're talking billions of dollars, you're talking enough money to start internal institutions and programs that could create jobs or better education as well as do medical research. Instead this money stays in the coffers of rich Western companies and even after the returns are "given" to the countries, it is given in the form of purchased medicines often made by American companies. And that strategy of deciding where your donations gets spent doesn't always work out like you would expect.

It's great he donates all that money but that method is never going to change anything. The real winners here are the companies that get huge cash infusions from the foundation in the form of investment (like Monsanto) and Big Pharma who gets the revenue from all the AIDS medicine that is bought and shipped. Exactly why are foreign governments investing in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation instead of finding a better solution?

Bring on the "look a gift horse in the mouth" posts. They may be right but there has to be a better way to use this money to accomplish these goals. It's almost designed to be a perpetual medicine exporting machine.

Re:bill gates donates to charity, doesn't get canc

By Samantha Wright • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
In all fairness, and despite this being wildly off topic, Jobs died of cancer because he refused treatment.

Re:Good work

By b4dc0d3r • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

Bill contributed to an AIDS fund, not a "Stop AIDS" fund. Windows viruses were just the start of his reign of terror!

FBI Building App To Scrape Social Media

Posted by Soulskill in Management • View
Trailrunner7 writes "The FBI is in the early stages of developing an application that would monitor sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as various news feeds, in order to find information on emerging threats and new events happening at the moment. The tool would give specialists the ability to pull the data into a dashboard that also would include classified information coming in at the same time. One of the key capabilities of the new application, for which the FBI has sent out a solicitation, would be to 'provide an automated search and scrape capability for social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI/SIOC.'"

Prediction..

By goldaryn • Score: 3 • Thread
Now trending: #FBIbastards

Re:Can you get Facebook to delete your info?

By mr1911 • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
It isn't your data. It is their data about you. Read the TOS you agreed to when you made the account.

Scream about it all you want, but you accepted the terms.

Re:So. It begins.

By kiwimate • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

So what?

Yes, I sound cavalier, but I see so many people on /. blithely affirming that people should just know that what they put on the internet stays there forever, and should just know that their SSID is being broadcast and it's a good thing that it can be tracked and stored, and should be fine with people capturing anything whatsoever that's done outside the house, or in the house with the curtains open...

So I can't see that anyone on Slashdot has anything to complain about here. Or is it different because it's not Google doing it?

Privacy?

By liquidhokie • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Who thinks Facebook is private? The whole point is to *not* be private, right? Otherwise... what is the point of Facebook?

If the FBI was going to start monitoring encrypted email, VPNs, and other things where you are *trying* to be private, I would be concerned (yes, I know-- whole 'nuther can o' worms). But Facebook? You are giving the info away as a user, that is the purpose of having a Facebook account.

Wake Up Mr. President!

By tgeek • Score: 3 • Thread
We have have highly credible reports that Farmville is planning a sneak attack on Washington. Air Force One is fueled and ready.

Russian Rocket Fleet Grounded Again

Posted by Soulskill in Science • View
Velcroman1 writes "Failed pressure chamber tests have forced Russia to postpone two manned launches to the International Space Station — echoing a 2011 situation that left the country's space transport vehicles grounded and led to speculation that scientists may be forced to abandon the orbiting space base. Six astronauts are currently aboard the ISS including two Americans: Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineer Don Pettit. 'There is plenty of margin for the current space station crew to stay onboard longer, if necessary, and plenty of margin in our manifest for upcoming launches,' a NASA spokeswoman said. But Soyuz issues are scary nonetheless. 'This re-entry capsule now cannot be used for manned spaceflight,' an unnamed source told Interfax."

Re:This

By ColdWetDog • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

The weird thing is that we DO have significant launch capabilities. The Atlas and Delta systems have excellent safety records, they haven't been human rated for some odd reason. Seems like a good time to do some paperwork?

Year of the Dragon

By Sponge Bath • Score: 3 • Thread

From Space X's website : "Today marks the start of the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar, and this year, SpaceX's Dragon will become the first privately developed spacecraft to visit the International Space Station."

I hope so, or we may eventually have to rely on Chinese launch capabilities.

Re:This

By robot256 • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Already in the works, these articles from last summer, and at least two companies planning to use the man-rated Atlas 5 rocket

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_space_thewritestuff/2011/07/nasa-ula-look-to-man-rate-atlas-v.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1108/04boeingatlas/

http://www.sncspace.com/space_exploration.php

more complete comments from Alexei Krasnov

By ChrisCampbell47 • Score: 3 • Thread

Alexei Krasnov, chief of piloted programs:

"The malfunction was found in the service elements of the descent capsule....but no decision was taken to delay a forthcoming launch.

Krasnov acknowledged that several days ago some problems really emerged....but the problems are related to a service element, rather than the descent capsule,

Krasnov did not rule out that “the schedule of piloted missions will be revised,” but he sees no tragedy in this. “There are program reserves to deal with the emerged problem,” he underlined.

“It is very good that upon the results of the tests we received critical remarks before the spaceship was brought to the Baikonur spaceport, because we have some time and possibilities to examine everything in detail,” Krasnov concluded.

http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c32/328095.html

Title is misleading

By Mercano • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

The title of this story is misleading. It isn't the rockets that are grounded, its the spacecraft that sits on top of them.

Also, for what it's worth, the shuttle wouldn't have been help matters much if the Russian's can't fly a Soyuz. While the shuttle is fine for swapping crews (in fact, the shuttle's runway landings are gentler than the Soyuz's parachute landings, a good thing for people who have spent the last six months in 0g), the shuttle can only fly a two week mission, meaning without a Soyuz attached to the station, we'd have to leave people in orbit without an immediate way home, a risk that neither NASA nor Roscomos is willing to take. The Soyuz itself is only rated for six months in orbit, giving them a limited window to fix the problems before we have to talk about unmanning the station.

Mars Rover Opportunity Turns 8

Posted by Soulskill in Science • View
New submitter el borak writes "Never mind all the talk about the revival of the American auto industry. What may be the greatest car the U.S. has ever built is currently a tidy 78 million miles (125m km) away from this world — resting on the edge of Endeavour crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. It was on January 25, 2004 that the rover Opportunity bounced down on Mars for a mission designed to last a minimum of three months and a maximum of just a year or two."

the flipside of reliability

By Sebastopol • Score: 3 • Thread

I think it is great that the device was design to last max a year or two, and lasted 8, but on the flipside, this means they aren't really good engineers.

How can I say this?

The estimates were off by 400%~800%!!! Or more!!!

Just because they erred on the side of a good result doesn't mean the estimates are better. It means their methodology is HEAVILY padded, or if we assume +/-400~800%, they were just lucky that it didn't swing the other way. Given Phobos-Grunt, perhaps space engineering margin of error really is +/-400~800%. Although I suspect huge margins of error were thrown about in NASA>

If that's the case, huge design buffers, that means they don't understand the underlying physics/materials engineer, and had to heavily overdesign, which means there is a far more efficient design out there.

I'm not knocking NASA engineers, I'm just exploring how to shave down this margin so that they can make more efficient designs at lower cost that behave as expected.

Building something that behaves as expected is far, far, FAR more important than building something that blows away expectations by orders of magnitude. The former is good engineering, the latter is waste, or worse, dumb luck!

Discuss.

Re:Medals

By spidercoz • Score: 4, Funny • Thread
Those engineers have already been honored the American way, their jobs were outsourced.

Re:Great engineering!

By Pope • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?

Practically all of it, since I don't buy horribly-made cheap crap.

Pay for quality, get quality. Simple.

Re:Great engineering!

By edremy • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Still, we had a visitor to our local Astronomy club explain the one oversight which may ultimately doom Opportunity - dust build up on the Solar Panels. Next probe will probably have a little robotic arm and brush to sweep itself off now and then.

This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.

The next Mars rover is nuclear powered. There are no attempts at any kind of dust cleaning device- it would be far too heavy and fragile to be worth bothering with.

Re:Great engineering!

By lemur3 • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

Of course You can afford to

Pay for quality

You're the Pope!!

  you probably bathe in a golden bathtub..

ReDigi Defends Used Digital Music Market

Posted by Soulskill in YRO • View
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "ReDigi has fired back, opposing Capitol Records's motion for a preliminary injunction. In his opposition declaration, ReDigi's CTO Larry Rudolph explains in detail (PDF) how the technology employed by ReDigi's used digital music marketplace effects transfer of a music file without copying, but by modifying the record locator in an 'atomic transaction,' and how it verifies that only a single instance of a unique file can enter the ReDigi cloud system. ReDigi's opposition papers also point out plaintiff's own admissions that mp3 files are not 'material objects' or 'phonorecords' under the Copyright Act, and therefore not subject to the Copyright Act's distribution right, and defend ReDigi's used digital music marketplace and cloud storage system (PDF) on a number of grounds, including the First Sale exception to the distribution right applicable to a 'particular' copy, the Essential Step exception to the distribution right applicable to a copy essential to the running of a computer program, and Fair Use space shifting."

Re:"First sale" doesn't really apply.

By AcidPenguin9873 • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

What possible reason can you offer for suggesting that the rules are different simply because the storage mechanism is different?

It's the same reason that pro-piracy advocates use: IP goods are not the same as physical goods. If IP can't be stolen (it's merely being copied), then there's no way to enforce sale of a "used" IP either. There's absolutely no way to enforce that when you sell your copy of the IP, that you are selling the your original copy and not merely a copy of your copy.

All the pro-piracy advocates say that IP shouldn't try to operate using an artificial-scarcity business model to make it seem like a physical good. Well, without (artificial) scarcity, there is also no logically-consistent argument for sale of "used" IP either.

Pick one: artifical, government-enforced/DRM-managed scarcity + first-sale doctrine, or IP-should-be-free + no used sales. Those are your logically consistent options.

Re:Issues such as fair use & first sale

By Maximum Prophet • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

think the question of reselling digital music is absurd in the face of reality. It would take someone deeply convinced that people are buying digital music and spending tens of thousands of dollars on it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Quite an ability to delude themselves it what it would take. It probably says something about a lawyer willing to take on such a client as well.

It's not the government's job to prop up a dying business model. Aluminum used to be very expensive, even more so than silver. The top of the Washington monument is aluminum, at the time a precious metal. Should government have stepped in to guard the value of someone's aluminum store, when the Hall–Héroult process made it almost worthless?

The cost and value of creative works is being adjusted due to the Internet and cheap storage. Some businesses will thrive, and others die off.

Re:This is extremely laughable.

By dgatwood • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

You can't resell something that cannot be adequately protected through DRM, period.

Sure you can. It's actually quite easy. You're missing a fairly fundamental concept, which is this: what is necessary to prevent playback of copies is not required to merely prevent sale of those copies. To do the former, it must be impossible to get a decryption key without proving that you are the current owner. This is fundamentally impossible to do in an unbreakable way, and the harder you try, the worse the customer experience is. By contrast, to do the latter, you need only the ability to uniquely identify each sold copy of a file. This requires nothing more than a guarantee from the companies that sell the original tracks that there will never be two identical copies of the track, plus a verifiable, ideally signed marker of some sort to determine authenticity.

In other words, to support resale of commercially-sold tracks, you need only take advantage of the watermarks that most or all of those services put in the tracks to begin with. Tracks are usually sold with additional info in the track's metadata that ties it to a particular user's account so that if it gets pirated, it can be traced back to the person who illegally distributed it.

This means that every digital download is unique and trivially verifiable as authentic or inauthentic without the need for actual DRM that would limit your ability to play the file. Thus, all that is necessary is a central database that every reseller talks to, in which the current ownership of every track that gets sold is tracked based on which account purchased it originally.

At least I'm assuming this is how they're doing it. It's certainly the most straightforward and obvious way to do it.

What this does not do, of course, is prevent you from making a copy before you sell the track. However, resale of physical CDs and DVDs has exactly the same problem, making this argument largely irrelevant as far as drawing a legal distinction between the two types of resale.

Re:Issues such as fair use & first sale

By NewYorkCountryLawyer • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Thanks for posting regarding this story, Mr. Beckerman. I've followed such stories with great interest since a friend of mine had a ridiculous situation where he licensed a movie for showing in his venue then received a C&D the date of the showing. Please be aware that some of us truly appreciate the work you do and your communication with us here.

Thank you. The support of the Slashdot community means a great deal to me. We are living in an interesting time, where 10 large, politically connected corporations -- 4 record companies and 6 motion picture companies -- are on a rampage to save their dying business models and to deflect blame from their management for allowing their businesses to die. Instead of investing in the future, and building better technology, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on nonsensical litigation. Very sad. I look forward to the day when they have been beaten back.

Re:Issues such as fair use & first sale

By NewYorkCountryLawyer • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

It's not the government's job to prop up a dying business model. Aluminum used to be very expensive, even more so than silver. The top of the Washington monument is aluminum, at the time a precious metal. Should government have stepped in to guard the value of someone's aluminum store, when the Hallâ"Héroult process made it almost worthless? The cost and value of creative works is being adjusted due to the Internet and cheap storage. Some businesses will thrive, and others die off.

And I can think of a record company that is dying off, but not before it wastes even more of its money on frivolous litigation.

Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years

Posted by Soulskill in YRO • View
chrb writes "Asim Kauser, a 25-year-old British man, has been jailed for two years and three months for downloading recipes on how to make bombs and the toxin ricin. Police discovered the materials on a USB stick Asim's father gave to them following a burglary at the Kauser family home. Asim pled guilty and claimed that he only downloaded the materials because he was curious. A North West Counter-Terrorism Unit spokesman said, 'I also want to stress that this case is not about policing people's freedom to browse the Internet. The materials that were downloaded were not stumbled upon by chance — these had to be searched for and contained very dangerous information that could have led to an explosive device being built.'"

Re:Arrested for knowledge? WTF?

By citylivin • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

"what if he actually WAS planning on trying to make a bomb? Why should we wait until this person has actually killed potentially hundreds of people with a bomb or some similar device or act before acting against him?"

Yes of course we should wait till he commits an actual crime to charge him with one. But here i stupidly believe that one should have to commit an actual crime to go to jail. Of course i haven't been brainwashed by CSI and chuck bauer to believe that people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck this "thought crime" stuff.

If he is indeed a danger, they could you know, gather real evidence, get a court order to tap his phones, etc. Then they should have no problem proving in court that he was meeting with terrorists, or buying supplies for bomb making or whatever. He could simply be researching a book or something! Saying he is definitely a terrorist based on a few files on his hard drive is making quite a leap that would have been an un thinkable position in the mid 90s, when MOST of us had a floppy disk with the anarchists cookbook on it. I don't believe that "times have changed". Freedom never goes out of style.

Id rather have thousands of innocent people getting killed (even if i was one of them), than have one innocent person going to jail for a crime they have not even committed. I am sure we all wrote crazy stuff in our diaries in middle school which could be taken out of context by the right government official. So if those thousand people survived, and I was one of them, would I want my children growing up in a world where people can be rounded up based on the contents of a text file and nothing more?
Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils. Still the best American motto in my opinion.

Re:Arrested for knowledge? WTF?

By ChrisMaple • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Just to raise a finer point: the old USSR required internal passports to move about the country.

Re:Arrested for knowledge? WTF?

By gknoy • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

US WILL let you back in without one, they'll just hassle you a bit more. It's a violation of pretty well established international law to refuse to admit your own citizens, with or without a passport. And it's not, from what I've been able to gather, a crime to reenter the US without a passport, so no penalty for doing so.

I submit that it might be very unwise to operate on that assumption.

The US has a history or saying that the constitution doesn't apply at borders or customs (as you're not *IN* the US yet, legally), that international treaties don't apply to certain people we've detained, and so on. I have no desire to pass through the US border in either direction, but if I did I would be damned certain I had my passport. You say "they'll just hassle you more", and I read, "They might detain, search, or hassle you for as long as they want, and confiscate whatever they feel like, and you'll have no recourse".

Re:Arrested for knowledge? WTF?

By TheGratefulNet • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

in 5 yrs or less, TSA will convert 'drivers licenses' into internal US passports.

ie, they'll install themselves at every point where people change planes, busses, trains, etc. highways/tollboothes are not out of their reach, either, in their eyes.

so, to pass around in the US, you'll need to stay off this or that 'bad guy' list. move around in your own country? you'll have to reverify yourself.

but its all for our own safety, don't you know.

Re:Arrested for knowledge? WTF?

By Hatta • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

That's not clear intent, that's wishful thinking. Where and when did he intend to bomb? If there's no plan, there's no intent.

AT&T Threatening To Raise Rates After Merger Failure

Posted by Soulskill in Technology • View
An anonymous reader writes "In the quarterly earnings call following the defeat of his attempted acquisition of T-Mobile, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson was quick to lash out at the FCC, claiming that because his company was unable to acquire more spectrum to handle the explosion of mobile data users, AT&T would be forced to raise prices and take additional action against the highest data users. PCMag looked into the other side of the story, finding that 'The FCC spokesman ... pointed out that the FCC has approved more than 150 commercial mobile transaction applications in the past year and more than 300 in the past two years, "facts [that] were completely ignored in the [AT&T] conference call," he said.'"

Re:Corporate greed???

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

What I enjoy most is the retards that think the latter is somehow an excuse for the former.

I'm so heartily sick of people excusing anti-social behavior as "human nature", regardless of whether it's in an individual or organization. Just because there may be an instinctual drive to hoard more than one person needs to the detriment of others around you does not make it right. I have an instinctual urge to either beat the crap out of my boss or run from him screaming whenever he calls me to his office unexpectedly, but I doubt that very many people would just say "Eh, that's just human nature!" if I did either of those things next time I get a message from him.

Lucky for us, we have evolved a rational brain that helps us see beyond ourselves and our own situation. Maybe that's the problem? Maybe those greedy among us just haven't finished evolving beyond their own self-centeredness?

Re:Yeah, that will show...

By tripleevenfall • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

It'll teach their customers a lesson - to switch to another carrier.

The idea that AT&T could ask customers to pay even more while at the same time offering such a crappy data network is patently absurd.

Re:Ah, nothing like corporate greed

By PickyH3D • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

I think it's ridiculous that AT&T calls their HSPA+ as 4G, but, as an AT&T customer with a "4G" phone, I must say that it is noticeably faster than an iPhone 4, which is the more traditional 3G. It has also spread to a lot more places than 3G used to be at; it now blankets the town that I grew up in when 3G hardly even reached my parent's house before the "4G" rollout.

In fact, it actually got so good at my parent's house that their MicroCell (the internet powered, fake tower for your phones in your house when service isn't actually good enough as-is) became an issue because the real signal would fight it for control on the phone, which was killing their phone's batteries.

Also, since I have moved away from the iPhone 4, I have noticed that my dropped calls have gone away significantly, except in one dead zone near my [highly trafficked, and highly populated] local grocery store. That is to say, they're not gone entirely, but they have been significantly reduced.

Now, with all of that, I will turn around and say, "screw you, AT&T." Their entire reason for buying T-Mobile was to remove the only significant GSM competitor in the US. They have proven that they do not compete on price, rather Verizon and AT&T play a cat-and-mouse game of raising prices, while the other follows shortly afterward. First, they removed Unlimited Data before any other network because they had refused to upgrade their own network while making significant profits. Recently, they raised the stakes again by adding a GB for an extra $5, but removing the existing plans. So, we went from $30 Unlimited Data to $25 2GB data, to $30 3GB data in the course of a year and a half. Only AT&T and Verizon could think that is reasonable. And the low-end data is an aggressive slap to the face. Originally 200 MB for $15, to 300 MB for $20. The minimum cost of entry is $20 for a nearly worthless data plan? My mother, of all people, gets too close to 200-300 MB usage to make that a reasonable plan because overages cost as much as the data plan for the cheaper option, and $10/GB for the higher plan.

AT&T can compete without the merger, and they are doing quite well now that Verizon forced their hands by pushing LTE, which was only because, frankly, CDMA data speeds are garbage. They are just sticking it to the FCC so that people blame them when they raise rates. However, the fact is, anyone with any knowledge of the business knows that it is a bogus money grab that needs to be stopped before it gets even further out of hand.

Re:Bye Bye AT&T! -- Nope, Verizon raises price

By dkleinsc • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

What do you do about those industries that require such a huge investment of capital to get started and such high fixed running costs that it's basically impossible to start up a new company without prohibitively large amounts of capital?

Imagine, for instance, a world in which there are no regulations on telecoms other than the easements required to put lines on government-owned land. Now you want to start up a telecom company, but you don't have the startup capital to set up lines all around the country, so instead you create a plan to set them up all around your town. But the thing is, even if your service is somewhat cheaper or better, nobody wants to buy it, because they want to call people in both Boston and Los Angeles. You could set the price so low that people in your town would buy it, but then you'd be losing money every month (due to the high fixed running costs) and have already burnt through your startup capital. You could negotiate a peering agreement with the big companies that control the telecom backbone, but since your service is much less valuable to them as theirs is to yours, they're going to charge you more than you can afford. Being a shrewd businessperson, you make this analysis before spending cash setting up telephone lines in your town, and don't start the company. And since all other businesspeople in your universe make the same choice, there can be no new sellers in the market, leaving the oligopoly intact. Which leaves everyone else either doing without whatever the oligopoly is selling, or going with the least bad option, and the members of the oligopoly trying to ensure that the least bad option for the customers is lousy service at a way-too-high price.

That's real capitalism, not the bogus libertarian fantasy.

Re:Bye Bye AT&T! -- Nope, Verizon raises price

By Bill Dimm • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Oligopolies almost always suck in customer satisfaction, always have, and always will.

Which is exactly how America keeps getting it wrong - the government should do nothing to make their lives easier - keep a low bar to new companies/investors who want to enter the market and offer something new/better. That's real Capitalism, not this bogus Corporate Welfare system.

However, the American government is itself an oligopoly (two parties that will do their best to keep any others from getting into the game), so expect shitty customer (citizen) satisfaction, i.e. more of the same.

America's Future Is In Software, Not Hardware

Posted by Soulskill in Technology • View
New submitter tcjr2006 writes "Obama's State of the Union focused on the return of manufacturing jobs to America. This New Yorker story makes the case that the manufacturing jobs aren't going to come back, and he should be focusing on software. Quoting: 'Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum. That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop "an economy that’s built to last."'"

I have experience with this

By SmallFurryCreature • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

Or rather I have experience with cleaning up afterwards.

I seen it all and NEVER in a good way.

One project saw the creation of a game platform completly outsourced to India with just the content created locally. Delays ran into a year and a half (and in the online game industry that is roughly a century) and when it was done there were HUGE mistakes that took ages to fix. The code was piss poor with gigantic performance issues and a setup requirement that consisted of very specific product versions often not available anymore for download.

The "problem" was simple, the Indian developers could code but had absolutely no eye for quality beyond making it work for a single scripted demo.

I have gotten finished web projects from China with chinese comments in the code and every page of a website being its own page, so the menu code was copy pasted in every single page rather then an include. And the menu code had evolved over time so even search and replace couldn't fix it. Spend more on fixing that then it would have cost to develop it from scratch. But hey! Cheap chinese coders!

As for QA itself... I have seen tests being done by Russians where they completely failed to catch obvious bugs making you wonder what the fuck they tested. Well, the answer became clear, they tested they could run it and labelled anything that didn't work as "oh that probably wasn't finished yet so lets not do it"...

Are Russians, Indians and Chinese incompetetent and stupid?

YES, those that work in those kind of firms are. You see, why would ANY competent person work in one of these places? Russia, China, India, they got their own software industry, only the rejects from their own industry would work for foreigners for minimum wages. The idea that you can get the elilte of developing countries working in sweat shops is beyond insane.

The simple fact is that software development is something you buy around the world so WHY would a company that can deliver quality charge a far lower price just because it is located somewhere else? Since when is capatilism about charging the lowest price you can rather then charging as much as market is willing to bear?

If someone sells you software development at dump prices, that is probably a good indication of what you should do with the resulting code.

Re:Oh yes, software

By AdamThor • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

In all fairness, there is a heck of a lot more value in software than in hardware.

You know why? Artificial scarcity. The more America decides to make it's economy around software, the more software patents we're going to need to set up and defend. Don't Copy That Floppy! I've got a patent on 1-click checkout nobody else can do it! Get used that, if you want an economy based on software.

And in other news, this is one of the very very rare piece of wisdom to make it up the front page of slashdot in a long time.

This is a terrible idea. Manufacturing requires tooling and raw materials. And at the end is a physical thing that needs to be sent to wherever it is needed. And that all got sent overseas! All software needs is a computer. Oh, sure, and the knowledge to program it. The USA has an advantage there today, but there's no reason for it to persist. We have a head start over the Chinese, but they're not stupid. They'll have to transition from their cheap labor model to a well-educated labor model to become a software power. That's coming.

Easier than trying to control ideas (which is all software is anyway), would be to abandon the free trade that has moved out all our manufacturing anyway. Objects are easier to control than ideas. Taxes on imports would bring manufacturing back, and would also cut the power of international corporations over our government. It would be a huge change, and not an easy one. I think we'd be healthier for it though.

Re:Again with the visas

By MalleusEBHC • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

If you can't find a software development job in the Bay Area, the problem isn't foreigners, it's you. As a developer who just switched jobs in the past year, I can tell you that jobs are plentiful. Tech companies are doing well as a whole, and the success of the biggest employers (Google, Facebook, Apple) has put excellent pressure on the market, from an employee perspective. Yes, even considering their no poaching agreement, they're driving up wages across the valley.

Jobs are a necessary evil

By DanielRavenNest • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

The article assumes more jobs are a good thing. That is a last century concept. How many people actually want to work all day? Most people do it to get the things they really want: food, a decent home, etc. The job itself is a necessary evil, and if they could get the things they wanted without it, they would. We should aim for productivity so insanely high that people don't *have* to work for a living, just like the rich do now. Then the people who actually enjoy doing whatever it takes can take care of the remaining work.

This is the direction society has been heading in since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and obviously still has a way to go to reach that goal. Once places like India and China get developed enough, corporations will inevitably look for cheap labor elsewhere. These days that is mostly Africa, and a few other spots. Once *those* get developed, there will be no cheap labor left, and corporations will inevitably pursue automation. Who will buy their stuff then, when people get put out of work by automation? Either prices will fall due to competition, or governments will tax the remaining workers and businesses enough to pay basic subsistence for everyone else.

The alternate route is "home fabrication". Your robot gardener grows the food, the garage machine shop builds "stuff" based on downloaded plans. You still have to do a little work that can't be automated, but can otherwise goof off. It beats commuting and sitting in an office for 10 hours a day. I hope one of the above futures arrives sooner rather than later.

Re:Jobs are a necessary evil

By Grishnakh • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

Well, it depends how far into the future you go. Garbage collection should be pretty easy to automate really. Right now, my garbage is collected by a big truck that drives along the street and uses a mechanical arm to pick up each container and dump it in the back. The recyclables have a separate truck. We already have driverless cars almost working; making a driverless garbage truck should be easy. Now, if you're talking about dumping out each wastebasket, that can be done with robots; remember the Jetsons had a robotic housekeeper. Obviously, that's much farther into the future than the automated garbage truck, but it's still possible (remember too, back in the 80s, everyone thought we'd have robots like this in just a decade or two; remember the crappy movie "Runaway"?).

Law enforcement, too, can be automated with robots (this one's even farther ahead than the garbage-collecting robot). Remember THX-1148? Their cops were all robots. And really, society would be much better off with robotic cops too; the human ones do a terrible job, and can't be trusted. Just look at all the police brutality cases, and how the US government is censoring any journalism or video of these. Also look at Singapore: a lot of their cops are Gurkha soldiers from Nepal, because they have a reputation for impartiality, unlike any local people who would be expected to side with their ethnic faction. But most places don't have the practical ability to outsource their policing to impartial outsiders the way a small but very rich city-state can.

Iwata Confirms Nintendo Network, New Wii U Controller Functions

Posted by Soulskill in Games • View
New submitter DeanCubed writes "In a Nintendo investor meeting, CEO Satoru Iwata confirmed a new Nintendo Network for the company's 3DS and upcoming Wii U game systems. This includes multiple user accounts per console (not tied to hardware, a first for Nintendo) and digitally distributed retail software releases for their online store. Iwata also noted that the Wii U's tablet controller will feature NFC (Near Field Communication) functionality, allowing the ability to use figurines and cards to input visual data to the console. They are hoping to use this to make micro-transactions for paid DLC easier."

Online network OK. But what about the Wii-U?

By RogueyWon • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Having read both TFA and a few other more detailed articles out there (Eurogamer has a good one), the Nintendo Network looks like a good thing, albeit one which is many years overdue. It'll be good to have the it there, but it's hard to see anybody getting excited about it, given that at best it will bring functionality on a par with Xbox Live and the Playstation Network.

I think the Wii-U is a cause for greater concern. It's going to be launching in difficult economic times. The 3DS did that last year and its initial sales were poor. They've now recovered a bit (though they're still below forecast), but only at the expense of Nintendo having to sell the system at a loss. Now, selling at a loss isn't exactly a bad strategy (it worked wonders for Sony with the PS2), but it's very much counter to Nintendo's historic strategy. The Vita, also launching in difficult times, has had a poor Japanese launch despite a really quite good launch-games lineup. Having seen what the Vita can do, I very much want to own one - but I'll be surprised if its US and European sales don't fall well short of targets. I get the feeling that 2012 is going to be a really bad time to be launching a console - most people are unlikely to be feeling any kind of real economic recovery during the year. Microsoft and Sony have clearly decided to hold on and wait in the hope of a kinder economy; Nintendo, with Wii sales exhausted and their finances at an all-time low, don't have that option.

But more worrying still is the lack of a real public narrative around the Wii-U. The Wii had one of these. Motion control was easily grasped. You could watch somebody demonstrating one - or try a demo unit yourself - and "get" the concept instantly. If you actually used the thing more extensively, you'd come up against its limitations very quickly; the motion control was imprecise and in many cases placed a barrier between the player and the game that meant it ended up less immersive than traditional controllers. But by then, the sale was made. The Wii-U is a much harder concept to grasp. It's a home console which has some tablet-ish features. But how will it work with a room full of people? What will the tablet actually add to the games? And how is it going to be fun at a party with a room full of people with a few drinks inside them?

There are actually answers to those questions if you look around enough at the material that's been made available. But they're not simple answers and they're not easily communicated. On that basis, I just cannot see the Wii-U replicating the success of the Wii's early years. I'm also unsure that the pitch to the more traditional "gamer" crowd will work. There's a lot of frustration with the current generation's techological limitations. But I don't sense any confidence that Nintendo - who, let's not forget, have spent the time since the Wii's launch neglecting this demographic - are the people to usher in the next generation. I also find it hard to imagine developers doing much with the Wii-U's hardware - which is better than the current generation, but not by a huge margin - putting much resource into developing games for it that actually push it beyond what the 360 and PS3 can do. More likely, it will just get a lot of PS3/360 ports, which present little compelling reason for the "gamer" crowd to jump ship from their existing platforms until those get replaced.

The 3DS also suffered from a mis-managed message at launch. It was launched on the basis of "look 3d!" rather than "look, more powerful DS with better graphics". People weren't interested in 3d. A better DS is a stronger pitch and Nintendo have had more success with the 3DS since they switched to it. But I'm struggling to see what the pitch is with the Wii-U.

I've been wrong on calling "Nintendo are doomed" before. But I'm finding it very hard to see a convincing path to success for the Wii-U. The Wii was the right product at the right time (I admit it took me a while to recognise this). But for Nintendo to capitalise on that success, I think they needed to have a replacement ready by the back end of 2009 or early 2010 at the latest. As it is, they've endured a pretty grim second half of this console cycle and are in a very risky position now.

Disappointing with no Wii support

By edmicman • Score: 3 • Thread

I feel like the online component is a place where Nintendo had an opportunity to excel and they completely dropped the ball. The Wii had connectivity all along. It's storefront worked fine. But that was all. The Opera browser sucked, and still sucks. First they charged for it, but because it sucked they finally gave it away. You could add friends somehow, but it was some convoluted confusing manner of trading codes with each other and typing them in onscreen. They had downloadable games but no support for downloadable content (I'm looking at you, myriad of trivia games). Why? The Wii could have been a pioneer in living room web browsing and content but had nothing of it. It seems like Niintendo didn't thing this 'Internet' thing was going to take off or something.

And so now, they start to make an attempt at an online component but it's not going to be available to the millions of units already out there. Sigh....

Wii-U - Lots of opportunities

By StoneyMahoney • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

"The 3DS did that last year and its initial sales were poor."

The 3DS may have had sales figures that weren't as good as they were expecting, but having sold 15million units quicker than either that Wii or the DS, I have to wonder just what those forecasters were smoking at the time. The attach rate of the console was pretty poor at first but that was mainly because the hardware launched without any first-party titles alongside it.

"What will the tablet actually add to the games?"

Rephrase that question to what will the Wii-U bring to tablet games, and keep in mind how popular the touch screen has become as a gaming interface in the mobile arena. I think that's a smart angle to go for. Nintendo promised the world with motion controls, disappointed everyone at first, but then lived up to that promise (for a price) with MotionPlus. Considering that Wii-U works with Wiimotes, MotionPlus might get a chance to shine and revitalize enthusiasm for motion control like Kinect did.

"I'm struggling to see what the pitch is with the Wii-U."

That's probably because they haven't pitched it to us yet.

Re:Nintendo..

By Piata • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Crashed and burned? They have sold 95 million Wii's http://kotaku.com/5879478/the-wii-will-sell-a-hundred-million-eventually

Nintendo did dominate the Xbox and PS3 to the point where both Sony and Microsoft felt the need to incorporate motion controls. Nintendo also made money on every system and if the Xbox 720 rumours are true, Microsoft appears poised to follow in Nintendo's footsteps with the next console cycle. The Wii did fizzle out toward the end of it's life but it's still a great console that shook up the industry far more than the PS3 or Xbox could ever hope to.

If anything I'd argue the Wii U is the lacklustre console. The Wii is a pretty hard act to follow but this is Nintendo after all and they could easily pull off a SNES here. Only time will tell but as far as the Wii is concerned, I'd hardly call it the flop you imply it is.

Close Approach By Asteroid 2012 BX34

Posted by Soulskill in Science • View
An anonymous reader writes with news that asteroid 2012 BX34, 11 meters wide, is in the process of passing within 60,000km of Earth — about a fifth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. At that size, the asteroid would pose no danger even if it hit the Earth's atmosphere.

Re:Anyone feel like jumping off onto it?

By iggymanz • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

nope, stony asteroid has to be about 35 meters or more in diameter to "make a dent", otherwise it will just burn up in atmosphere.

Re:Anyone feel like jumping off onto it?

By iggymanz • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

also of interest, a 10 meter metal (e.g. iron-nickel) asteroid will have big fragments that will hit the ground, for example the one that hit Sikhote-Alin mountains in Siberia in February 1947, 150 tons of fragments hit the ground and one of them weighed 1.7 tons!

Discovery date

By Dan East • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

The asteroid was discovered two days ago on the 25th, and its closest approach occurs today. Not much time there to get the shuttle back from the Smithsonian, haul it down to Florida, refit it with all the stuff they took out, and launch Bruce Willis to destroy the asteroid. Good thing it's not a larger asteroid on an actual collision course. (Yeah, I know, the shuttle isn't actually at the Smithsonian yet)

It is common

By Torg • Score: 3, Interesting • Thread

The issue is we can only tell when one is about a day out. Many times we can only see them as they are leaving, not aproaching. It is actually a fairly common occorance. You can see them at http://www.spaceweather.com/. Since the begniing of the year there have been 5 that have come close enough to actually be of note.

Re:Good luck finding it...

By AdrianKemp • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

You might not find it interesting, but I do.

Just because it isn't software or hardware doesn't mean it isn't fitting for a nerd-news site. It's appropriately listed under Science and is a very interesting event. A small (seriously, 11 metres) object coming very close to Earth poses an interesting test of our local space awareness. If we can detect these things sooner and more accurately this is exactly the sort of thing that would be a candidate for capture once we have a proper space presence.

Graphene Membranes Superpermeable to Water

Posted by Soulskill in Science • View
Dr Max writes "Not only is graphene the strongest, thinnest and best conducting material known to man, it is now shown to have superpermeability with respect to water as well. This allows a membrane made with graphene to pass water right through it (PDF), while another atom or molecule (even helium) gets blocked. 'The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water,' said one of the researchers."

Re:Fresh water?

By chainsaw1 • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Spectroscopy grade [~99.9999%] water does leeches ions & salts from your blood into your throat, stomach, etc. via osmosis. This does not feel pleasant (i.e. you may puke). You won't be able to drink much

Not saying how I know this...

Re:Does this mean...

By slew • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

There has also been studies showing you can make a selective filter by making nanotubes with the right diameter to let water through but not larger molecules. In addition because the walls are so "smooth" there is much less pressure to flow the water through then expected.

Although I doubt this orientation will allow for filtering out "helium" as the original posting.

The mechanims that the original posting paper is speculating, it that the way they made the graphene oxide (not pure graphene) membrane, it is has embedded capilaries which when wet (filled with water) allow for nearly unimpeded transport of water, but when these capilaries dry out, their diameter constricts so that nothing gets through (even helium).

So to contrast, the "tubes" are not rigid and the walls are not so "smooth" in this case, the "tubes" are sort of like chinese finger puzzles. When filled with water, allow water to pass easily, but when you try to pull the last bit of water out of them, the diameter constricts and nothing can get past.. Well maybe the chinese finger puzzle analogy was a bad one, but I couldn't think of anything else...

Re:Fresh water?

By Russ1642 • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Informative? How about flamebait. This is simply not true. Absolutely insanely pure water is just water. Your body doesn't react to a 0.0001% difference in dissolved solids. After a microsecond in your mouth the water is far from pure.

Re:Fresh water?

By Rogerborg • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

Fresh water, salt, AND anchovies.

And mermaids. You ever had sex with a mermaid? Blows your mind, man. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to do a live one.

Re:Does this mean...

By Khyber • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Oxygen being in the center of a water molecule pretty much makes it larger than helium in ALL directions.

Judge Denies Dismissal of No-Poach Conspiracy Case

Posted by Soulskill in Technology • View
theodp writes "Testifying before Congress in 2007, Google's HR chief stated: 'We make great efforts to uncover the most talented employees we can find.' But according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Google actually went to some lengths to avoid uncovering some of tech's most talented employees, striking up agreements with Apple, Intel, and other corporations to avoid recruiting each other's employees. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled that Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Disney, Pixar, Intuit and Lucasfilm must face a lawsuit claiming they violated antitrust laws by entering into no-poaching agreements with each other. 'I don't want to see any obstruction on discovery,' Koh told lawyers during a hearing. According to the head attorney representing the plaintiffs, the total damages could exceed $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected."

Re:Antitrust?

By Anthony Mouse • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

... Google, Apple...

They aren't allies.

Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were actually good friends for a while. Schmidt was even on Apple's board, until he had to leave when Google bought Android and it created a conflict of interest. That was one of the reasons Jobs was so mad about Android -- he felt like it was busting up his friendship.

Incidentally, if you want to help me test a hypothesis, try paying attention to the media coverage of this story to see how much the MPAA-owned media cover this story with Google as the principal antagonist/coordinator of the scheme and Apple as a secondary or unimportant player now that Google has gone to bat for us against SOPA, even though it was Steve Jobs who started the ball rolling on this whole no poach thing. Pay special attention to News Corp coverage (e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) -- my hypothesis is that Murdoch has it in for Google now and is executing a campaign against them. Let's see if I'm right.

Re:Antitrust?

By dkleinsc • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

I guess you could say it isn't, but the threat of workers being poached (in *some* sense) is what keeps wages from falling to zero in the first place, protecting the worker.

You exaggerate a bit. The average wage you would get in a world without the threat of workers quitting or getting hired away is basically W = (R + T) / 40 + U, where W = annual wages, T is the cost of training the worker, R is the cost of providing the basic necessities of the future worker from birth to the start of their career, and U is the annual upkeep of the worker (food, shelter, water, clothing, health care, transportation to/from work and stores). The '40' is the length of the worker's career, generally assumed here to be something like 24-64.

For a software developer, that comes out to something like:
R = $270,000
T = $150,000
U = $20,000
W = ($270000+$150000) / 40 + $25000 = ($420000) / 40 + $25000 = $10500+$25000 = $35,500 annual after-tax income.
Which is still obviously way lower than the competitive salary of a developer.

Re:Antitrust?

By turkeyfish • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Shouldn't the best players in the league be paid more? Even sports teams have what are called free agents. If companies want to retain employees they need to get them to sign a contract that stipulates not only the amount of their pay, but also the duration. From a business perspective this would create more stability than trying to engage in non-poaching deals.

Re:Antitrust?

By s73v3r • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

No, no. It's ok to do that to the lower classes, because this keeps costs down, which lets the upper classes get more. This increase in wealth will eventually trickle down to the lower classes in the form of more shitty, underpaid jobs. Because, you know, companies just hire people out of the goodness of their hearts when they have more money. It has nothing to do with the level of demand at all.

Re:Antitrust?

By tnk1 • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

I see your point, but you sort of speak against yourself by bringing up the CEO pay example. After all, isn't the complaints about CEO pay by everyone just a plea for someone to collude to keep people with certain rare skills (Executive Management) from making as much as the market will bear? You may not think much of CEOs, but it's the same thing. The only difference is that you either simply don't like CEOs or you devalue their skill set, and while there are definitely some sociopaths out there in the CEO position, I'd argue that it is a position you need some very stong skills to do successfully.

In any event, people with rare skills are not the general worker population that unions and such would be working for. Unions tend to cut down people who try to use their skills to rise above the norm in terms of pay and benefits, instead, they usually insist on a seniority basis for any sort of increased compensation.

I'm not saying that I like that CEOs make as much as they do, but I often wonder if it even matters how much they make. Do lottery winners suddenly become threats to society with that money, simply because they have a lot of it? Honestly, this country isn't going to fall apart because some people make more money than others, it's going to fall apart due to our attitudes about what is good to do with that money, and that's something that reaches right down into the "lower" classes as well. We seem to care more about how much someone else makes and pay no attention to what we do with what we do make. After all, isn't that what the mortgage crisis was all about? People taking out loans they simply couldn't afford, just because some loan officer told them it was okay for them to spend as much money as they could?

There's always going to be someone like a CEO out there. If you abolish them, then the rich people will be the political leaders or the union leaders. If you abolish money or private ownership, then the rich people will be the Leaders of the Revolution. Pointing at these people is like pointing at the sun for being too hot and wondering why someone doesn't just take that big ball of gas down a notch.

Scientists Organize Elsevier Boycott

Posted by Soulskill in Science • View
An anonymous reader writes "The academic publisher Elsevier has attracted controversy for its high prices, the practice of bundling journals for sale to libraries and its support for legislation such as SOPA and the Research Works Act. Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers decided to go public with a blog post describing how he'll no longer have anything to do with Elsevier journals, and suggesting that a public website where mathematicians and scientists could register their support for an Elsevier boycott would further the cause. Such a website now exists, with hundreds of academics signing-up so far. John Baez has a nice write-up of the problem and possible solutions."

Re:What's the point of journals?

By ceoyoyo • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Journals are a filter. They're supposed to prevent some things from getting published - the low quality, scientifically dubious and shoddily done research. It's hard enough keeping up with the reviewed, edited and published work, never mind some kind of free for all "scientific" networking site that would probably be 90% drug and equipment supplier spam within a week and the other 10% long papers espousing crackpot theories.

And let's not forget: They endangered millions.

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 3, Interesting • Thread

Let's not forget, that Elsevier created two dozen completely fake magazines full of completely fake "articles", which were ads for pharma industry products disguised as medical studies. They then planted those in doctors' offices for doctors to read.
Doctors based their trust on that, assuming it was factually correct, and prescribed millions of pointless drugs to patients, often endangering their health.
All for the profit of the pharma industry. Which is clearly bordering on... how do you call that in English? Mass felony mayhem? Mass battery? (I mean "Massen-Körperverletzung")

Nobody will argue that that wasn't a huge crime, and that Elsevier should not be closed down and its management put in PMITA prison.

Re:Will referee?

By Defenestrar • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

...Refusing to participate in peer review with them just means they'll get someone else to do it, and poor papers may slip through.

Thus degrading the quality of the journal and after about 10 years people will learn to treat it as one of the trashier neighborhoods. The problem is the impact (factor and public) that the article will have in the transition period. Also, the editor will have to keep hitting up the scientists who don't refuse until they burn out. This can actually be a feedback loop where the reviewing scientist decides that they must get asked to review because they publish so often in that journal, so picking a journal with a lower review load may be worth looking into. Forgoing review is a nasty and dirty type of boycott which definitely flirts the line between dereliction of duty and the need to advance science by publishing in a public forum (which country-club nit-picky-HOA Elsevier is not). Most of those journals are good, and often the sale to Elsevier was to free up their editorial board and professional staff for the real work on the journal. This problem has been building for years and there's not much that will solve it outside of legislation and possibly international treaty. Even the US legislation which says papers written on research performed with public money should be free to access (perhaps with a 6 month delay) has too many loopholes for it to work well.

Re:Will referee?

By petermgreen • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Replacing an abandoned journal is rather different from trying to displace a journal by force. Setting up the website is easy, even finding reviewers is probablly not that hard. The difficult bit is convinving people to chose your journal over the established one. Oh and someone has to pay for your new journal (afaict reviewers do get paid even if it's only a nominal ammount) so if you are open access you will probablly have to charge authours to cover the cost of peer review. If you aren't open access and aren't affiliated with one of the big publishers (see below) you will have a hard time getting people to read your papers.

It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software (we do pay for some more specialised software out of our own budgets but windows, office, matlab, endnote and so on are all covered centrally). Those things are paid for centrally as part of block subscriptions. If academics actually had to pay the prices that are shown to the general public I suspect there would be a very quick move towards open access journals.

Re:Will referee?

By ceoyoyo • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

"Thus degrading the quality of the journal and after about 10 years people will learn to treat it as one of the trashier neighborhoods. The problem is the impact (factor and public) that the article will have in the transition period."

Sure. If you want to ruin a journal over the long term and you don't care about the quality of the science that gets published in the meantime, it's a great way to go. Most scientists DO care about the quality of the science that gets published though.

Pentagon Drafts Kids To Build Drones and Robots

Posted by samzenpus in News • View
MrSeb writes "In a world where warfare is fast becoming fielded by remote controlled and autonomous robots, innovation is the key to victory. The most technologically advanced superpower can see more, plan better, and attack from further away than its inferior adversaries. What better way to revolutionize the drone and robotics industry than use the brilliant minds of our children? That's what DARPA and the Defense Department's research and development arm thinks, anyway. The Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach Initiative, part of the Adaptive Vehicle Make project, is slated to reach a thousand schools in and out of the country, roping in the brightest minds to develop robotics and advance technology in new and interesting ways. Funded by the Department of Defense, the program comes with a steep cost: The DoD wants unlimited rights to everything the students build. It sounds almost like something Orson Scott Card would dream up."

The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt.

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent government that has ever existed. The U.S. government has 6 times the percentage of citizens in prison as European countries. The U.S. government has invaded or bombed or interfered destructively with 27 countries since the end of the 2nd world war. The U.S. government killed more people in Iraq than Saddam Hussein. The U.S. government believes it can torture or kill anyone at any time. The U.S. government can require executives of U.S. companies to take actions without disclosing what was done.

In comparison, taking intellectual property while giving little in return is a smaller crime, but it is a crime.

In what other country would Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush be considered a serious candidate for public office? They are or were candidates only because they deliver corruption.

All of that destructiveness will soon become much worse. The U.S. government is trying to arrange a war with Iran. That will benefit people like the Bush family who have investments in companies that profit from war. It will benefit Israelis who want U.S. taxpayers to pay for Israel's security. It will hurt U.S. taxpayers who will discover that their money will lose value even faster than before.

Re:Too much Hollywood for you??

By xclr8r • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
We call them drones because they do not do actions (other than stabilization or stay on course) without initiating the action by a human. Robots do things automatically without user intervention - i.e car manufacturing by a robot is completely automated via sensory/trigger input unless a an interrupt is encounter to stop. In actuality we should be calling the remote operated vehicles (ROV) but drone rolls off the tongue easier.

Re:That's crappy

By shadowrat • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

The problem comes when the kids grow up and decide to use this against their former masters

Yes, but when that happens, it's because those kids have to right the wrongs. they do noble things like find a new world for the hive queen to live on and learn the ways of the piggies, and redeem humanity. Though it's true, they are never quite as interesting as when they were kids.

Please re-read with Dramatic Anouncer voice.

By VortexCortex • Score: 3 • Thread

"In a world where warfare is fast becoming fielded by remote controlled and autonomous robots, innovation is the key to victory. The most technologically advanced superpower can see more, plan better, and attack from further away than its inferior adversaries. What better way to revolutionize the drone and robotics industry than use the brilliant minds of our children?"

Hollywood, listen up. I might actually want to see this movie.

On second thought, it might have to be an indie film due to the controversial nature -- Many people find brain extraction and cyberization quite offensive, especially when the minds of children are on the table...

Publicly funded research

By Maximum Prophet • Score: 3 • Thread

Funded by the Department of Defense, the program comes with a steep cost: The DoD wants unlimited rights to everything the students build.

How is this different that the call for all government funded University research to be publicly available?

Is the DoD asking for exclusive access, or just access? Will they be able to take a kid's research, classify it, and forbid that kid from ever working in that area again? (See Gordon Gould and his laser research for an example)