I don't get it... What's so bad about being called a "materialist"? Mind you, I have only passing knowledge of the philosophical meanings, I've never really studied it (my philosophy professor was lacking... she seemed to believe that philosophy was about who could better ridicule opposing point of views), and I end up conflating materialism and physicalism together.

I don't think that /makes/ you a materialist, but your overall post makes me think that you are nonetheless.

Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker, so I may just be lost with the "colloquial" meaning of the word. This is kind of the point of my question :D. For comparison, where I come from, "materialism" refers just to the philosophical definition (afaik), but "idealism" ranges from the philosophical meaning to a colloquial "complete disregard of the reality around you to the point of believing that thinking about it will be enough to change it".

This is offtopic (modders: please mod me offtopic!) but... it seems you are a awesome dad. I have no children yet, but I sometimes worry about them having some kind of disability and not knowing how to act if that happened. Your post, short as it was, is inspiring. Thank you for sharing it! And of course... keep up the good work.

I think I'm feeding a troll, so I will stop now. You seem to be too dense to understand that if you put something private in a location where it is expected that people will see it, say, a web server, a public folder, or painted in giant letters at the front of your house, and someone sees it, he will not even know he is not supposed to be seeing it until after he sees it. That's not taking anything from anyone.

Just to drive the point through: I'm posting this on a public forum, but I'm explicitly NOT AUTHORIZING YOU to read it. So, if you even read this post (let alone reading this sentence), you are already "taking shit that doesn't belong to you". What's that, you didn't know it? Tough luck, according to you, that doesn't matter, you accessed my post anyway. That's a weird situation... if you reply, you'll be disproving your own point!

You are arguing that the mere act of accessing a public document on a public folder is wrong. I'm saying that it is not the act of accessing it what is wrong (because anyone could have accessed it, without any warning or notice that it was out of limits, despite it being in a public place), but what they did with it afterwards. That's what's wrong. Who is the dense one?

For crying out loud, can you be any more stupid? Not only I'm not the one who posted that analogy, my posts have been about how unnecessary and intellectually weak it is to resort to analogies for something so trivial as this.

Please tell (or not), who authorized you to read this slashdot post? Or to visit slashdot in the first place? And how do you know if that authorization is valid? Or, when you clicked on the link to see my post, did you just assume that you were authorized to access it?

Btw, if you put your desk with all your private information in the middle of a busy sidewalk, where you expect people to walk by and look (the closest analogy I can think with a desk and a public web server, but really, no stupid analogies are necessary, given that you, /right now/, are just assuming that you are authorized to read slashdot), but don't want anyone to look at it... you have serious mental issues. Use some common sense. Put the desk inside the house. Don't hang your private information in a public space and expect the rest of the world to just know that we can't look that way (even if the law supports it).

Another analogy... You really can't understand withtout them, right?

Because it was a file with an innocuous name, sitting in a public folder, together with other public files, and didn't know what it was until months later, and when I learned, I did bring it to their attention? You really can't read, huh?

Yes, that really takes the cake indeed. How do you propose to use common sense about the contents of the file before seeing said file? Is the concept really all that difficult to understand? (And, to make the cake even better... before now, you were not claiming that the issue was with saving the file, but merely with accessing it. If you decide to change your claim to "not take extra steps to keep it once you notice that it was not for public access", then we may be in agreement. But that was not your position until now.)

Having a tyrannical police force following stupid laws is not something to be proud of. It would be dumb to "do it and try your arguments out", but that still doesn't mean that you are right.

Let me introduce you to the Continuum fallacy. Just because one can't draw a line, it doesn't mean that there is no difference. Typing a publicly accessible URL in a browser and having the server return the data referenced by that URL is not hacking, even if the owner "wanted" to keep it private but never told you. Conversely, finding a SQL injection and using it to get a dump of the database is wrong, even if the attack could be executed by just typing parameters in the URL bar. Where do you draw the line? There is no line! These two examples are remarkably similar.

If they found the file, noticed the "potential", and decided to blackmail, then no, their intent wasn't to gather and use the data, their intent was just blackmail. But if they wanted to blackmail and went looking for something private to use, and typed the URL hoping to get the private data, then yes, they knew they weren't authorised and accessed it anyway - they are in the wrong both for accessing it and for the blackmail. In any case, they are on the hook for blackmail, so I have no problem with letting a jury decide their intent as well.

Did you not read the post you just replied to? I read it twice, but found no mention of any car with a wad of twenties. Is it that you can't understand his reasoning and you need to make up flawed analogies to make your point?

There is no difference between typing "http://amazon.com" in your browser, and typing "http://some/url/that/is/supposed/to/be/private". The server has a very precise way of informing you whether you are authorised or not to access the document: via status codes, and of course, denying access. If the server, for whatever reason, fails to deny access, a reasonable user has no way of knowing that he wasn't supposed to be accessing that document, until he sees it, but at that time, he already has it. The ethical issue is what he does with it afterwards, even if he typed the url on purpose ("what would happen if I type this url? / Oh, crap, it gave me the file!").

To use them? No. To take them? In your own example, if I click on a link and end up with a bunch of credit cards, whether I had authorisation or not is a moot point: I have no way of knowing whether I'm authorised or not to access that data until either I'm denied access, or I receive the data and judge for myself.

I suppose that in your view, the Internet is a very scary place to be. Every time you click on a link, you risk hacking into someone else's server!

Personal anecdote: back in the days of dial-up BBSs, around the time I installed linux for the first time, I was logged in to my provider composing an email. Trying to attach a file, I found another called "shadow~" and sent it to myself. It just had a bunch of usernames with some garbage after it, so I ignored it. A couple of months later I had learned much more, and I remembered the file, so I went back to see if it was still there and if it really was the shadow file. It was, world-readable, and updated very recently! I guess that makes me, in your eyes, a criminal. Fortunately, not in the ISP's eyes: I called them, managed to get in touch with the technical staff, told them what I had found, and an hour later I got a thank you email with an explanation (a daily backup script was leaving a copy in the wrong place) and an invite to visit their campus to burn a copy of their RedHat disks because mine were outdated. If it were up to you, they should have jailed me instead for "stealing" a file that, at the time, had no idea of what it was.

(The GP also made the point that unfortunately, the laws favour your views instead of common sense, so clicking on a link can very well be scary. Ironically, that attitude makes us all less secure: I can't even try to see whether the data I give to the provider is minimally secure, and if by some freak accident I discover that it isn't, I would have to keep quiet and hope no one knows that I know)

He didn't ask if it was legal. He asked if it was acceptable. If you claim that it isn't, please, enlighten us.

Thus proving nurb432's original comment:

Cuban here. How about just not trying to make the people of that country missplace the blame in the government in hopes that they will raise against it? If it is were so bad, we would just raise without your pressure, and maybe even ask you for support (arguably, the fact that the sanction exists just shows the population that "you" are not the good guys, regardless of our opinion regarding the government - and if you are clearly trying to oppress us, most of us wont side with your "cause"). If it isn't so bad, then why intervene in the first place? It's one thing to refuse to sell weapons and torture devices and to encourage others to do the same. It's quite another (to give an example that should be familiar to slashdot) to interfere with the country's ability to connect to the Internet and at the same time, complain that the horrible dictator wont let us browse the web out of fear.

One of the reasons that Cuban dissidents are not popular isn't fear of the government... Is that those who are known are clearly paid (in the form of "prizes" won) to follow an US agenda, or can't distinguish between not being free and being poor (cue the ones "exiled" to Spain last year protesting for lack of "freedom" after the spanish government cut their subsidies). The second group are dumb, the first one can't be trusted, and the ones in neither group are silenced... by both national and international media.

(Full disclosure: I left Cuba mainly for economic reasons, though I also had my dislikes about the government. I suspect that the reason why I only had "dislikes" were the sanctions - it is stupid to blame the Castros for everything when a powerful third party is explicitly trying to make you despair. Given that from here I still can't see any mention of a dissident with a coherent platform, I'm starting to suspect there isn't one.)

TL;DR: if the only options you are considering are to starve the population, or to outright kill them in an invasion... you are not the "good" guys.

The question is, would you be able to? Translating a paper is not just passing it through google translate. It requires a great deal of work, and it has tremendous benefits for the scientists that speak the target language better than the original. But if you are able to do it (as in, the paper should pass peer review in the target language), by all means, go ahead. I'm reasonably fluent in english, and I'm obviously decent in my native language, but I haven't been able to produce a coherent translation of my own works yet (in either direction). Believe me, I've tried. I admire the few people I know who can do it. If you can... I admire you too.

That's the point, you are assuming that it is a "ruse" and that I would try to hide the fact that it is a translation. I wouldn't. I wouldn't just list "original paper" and "translated paper" and try to make them seem different. One of them, the most "important" one (whatever that means), would get its space in the CV as the new work. The other one would get a subtitle below that one ("Also published as 'target language title' in 'target language journal'"). Btw, I do this as well with conferences/papers, i.e, if I write a paper and present it at a conference, workshop (or vice-versa), I don't try to pass them off as different works. As I said, if I value translations so much, there is no way I would try to hide that I made one.

Just out of curiosity, where do you draw the line? What if the seminar is open to the public? What if you presented at the "internal seminar" of another institution? What if it was a minor conference, or a conference at a minor university? Or a conference that didn't publish the proceedings? What if they did publish the proceedings, but just hidden somewhere with low visibility, or even behind a paywall? Would the quality of the research have any bearing on your decision? I'm aware that you don't need to have a line, and I'm not implying that not having a definite line means that there is no distinction (that would be a fallacy), but you do seem to have a pretty strong opinion and a very well defined line. You can bet that at any chance I have, I /will/ try to submit papers to conferences in my home country, not because I want to "pad" my CV, but because I want to do the very little I can to change the "status quo" (a lot of researchers from my country wont publish locally, because doing so would disqualify them from publishing in an "important" venue, which in turn makes the local venues even less important. The "important" venues are obviously very pleased with that arrangement). Whether to accept the "duplicate" presentation should be a decision of the host venue, based on whether the quality of the paper warrants another talk and whether the target audience is likely to have been exposed to that work and/or will gain by being exposed again. To disregard it without that consideration is, IMHO, irresponsible towards the goal of disseminating science.

And now the reason why I didn't reply to the rest of your post. It seems that we are mostly in agreement: the difference is that I consider what you list also to be a duplicate submission: there is only one "research", you are not "extending" the work to add new stuff for the other journals, rather, you are hiding part of the results from the other journals (with good reason). So if I work in more than one paper (I just "solved" one of the physics problems! Yay!), I will not consider them to be different works. I would even classify it as "salami", if that weren't a necessary evil given the three different audiences. So, naturally, I assumed that in your view they were the also same as well and that you would reject the second one without a second thought. I still disagree with your statement that the benefits are only "very few", and with coherence of the original claim ("the goal is to disseminate knowledge... so if I find someone publishing more than once, I will reject it")

But that's really the problem, isn't it? Is not the so-called "self plagiarising" itself. The problem is that researchers commit fraud to pad their CVs and reports because the metrics used to measure them are lacking (but oh, very convenient to the publishers). You are measured by how important are the journals you publish in, rather by the impact of the research. A much better measure would be the raw number of citations or a derivative of that measure (and if it happens that you get higher number of citations by going to a high impact journal, go there by all means). I've never opened an issue of "Nature" to see if there is something of my interest, unlike with specialised journals (I have just followed links to it)... yet a paper in Nature would be worth more for my CV that one in those that I actually consult and cite from. The problem of authors trying to pass old works as new (and several others that are actually more damaging) would become irrelevant if the metrics didn't assign a high value to the "number" of publications. In absence of that metric, publishing a paper in more than one journal, even if it is verbatim, would lead to one of two outcomes: either the number of citations increases (in which case, it increased awareness of the paper, thus serving to disseminate science), or it doesn't (in which case it should have zero effect in your CV, regardless of how many times you've tried to publish it). You seem to respect the metric, and actions that put it at risk are unethical in your view (that's why I accused of siding with the publishers. I apologise for insulting you). I despise the metric and believe that it is damaging, so I just play the game when I have to. Then again, I'm just a phd student with very few results (some of them with tiny "also in..." subtitles), I've never been in a position of hiring someone else, and my only instances of evaluating someone else's performance have not been based on the length of their CV but in the papers I've had to read.

(I didn't really have any coherent place where to put this, so I'll just drop it here. I'll grant you the point that the reviewers' time is a finite resource. You are, obviously, correct. But I don't think that with sane editors there would too be much waste.)