Crime rule #1: If you're going to do crime, don't do crime with anyone you haven't known since high school. Doing crime with random strangers over the Internet is just fcking stupid.

Any discipline that can list its core ideas in a short Slashdot post isn't worth studying.

Yes, but. This isn't entirely a binary scientific question. If the question were "are open-access journals worse than traditional journals?", you'd obviously need a control. But "Is the peer review process at open-access journals acceptable?" is not a scientific question, but one of values and personal preference. Most people would decide that a 50% failure rate is not acceptable, control or no control.

Now, we're all *very* curious to know whether traditional journals fare better than open ones, and Science is showing bias and intellectual dishonesty by avoiding that question, BUT that doesn't mean that this study has no value.

The problem is that serious decisions are made by people who have no idea which journals are top quality. Bad tenure decisions, bad engineering choices, and god forbid bad medical decisions are being made daily on the basis of nothing more than "hey, the European Journal of Chemistry sounds legit."

Wow, clearly I should avoid publishing in those no-name open journals, and stick to big-name proprietary journals like Science!

Science is just a liiitttle bit biased here. I don't doubt the result, but I'd like to hear it from a neutral source.

In hindsight, Rockstar probably shouldn't have decided to split the costs of a datacenter with healthcare.gov.

I hear they're having some weird server issues, too. GTA players are signing up for the bronze healthcare plan, hoping that if they do well enough on it the game will bump them up to silver or gold. And uninsured people are signing up for catastrophic care plans that teleport them to the nearest hospital and take away their guns when they get hurt.

Wow, what a coincidence that the Canadian authorities happened to open just the right package. A lucky break for them!

There are three reasons to make your text boxes only a couple inches across.

A, because you plan to fill the rest of the screen with ads, in which case, fuck you.

B, because you can't figure out how to make separate layouts for phones vs PCs, in which case fuck you.

C, because you figure your readers will get bored if they have to read a line of text more than five words long, in which case, fuck you.

Let me tell all of you from outside the U.S. that our government's excuse "hey, we're only spying on foreigners, not Americans" would be disgusting even if it weren't a pack of lies.

Who are you to try to censor what people should read and in what order. Everybody learns differently, there is no one textbook or method to rule them all.

Not censorship, just some advice from someone who does this professionally. Maybe you're different, go ahead and give the Feynman lectures a shot. But don't say I didn't tell you so.

Besides, even if you dont 'get' what Feynmann says first go, you can still pick up on the infectious enthusiasm he has for his subject.

Feynman would be horrified at the idea, but if that's your goal you can get it from other Feynman works. "Surely you're joking", for example. Or his short book of lectures on quantum electrodynamics, which is no more difficult than Lectures on Physics, but much more rewarding and better for impressing the ladies (or gentlemen, if you prefer.)

You do realize that the lectures were used to teach physics to undergraduate freshman at Caltech?

Yes. Feynman himself admitted that that class did not go well, and those students were some of the brightest minds in the country (compliment intended).

Hi. I teach undergraduate physics. If you're a clever high school or early college student interested in physics, you may have heard of Feynman, and you may have heard physics people give rave reviews of the Feynman lectures. And hey, he intended these lectures as a first-year college physics course, so that's perfect for you, right?

Wrong. This is not the right place to start learning physics. Feynman has some beautiful insights about how introductory physics concepts connect to "real" modern physics, and a way of cutting through the red tape to elegantly explain concepts in ways that make experienced physicists drool. But that's not what you need. You need the red tape. You need to learn to apply concepts to real situations, you need to get buried in the algebra, trig and calculus and dig your way back out again. Feynman won't help you about that.

Feynman's Lectures on Physics represent how an experienced modern physicist would teach introductory physics to a roomful of other professional physicists. Feynman was a genius, but his lectures are designed to impress, not to teach. You should absolutely read it, and you will love it, later in your career. But start with a more traditional textbook.

"quitting", not quitting.

There's a major design problem here: what happens when the plate has no cell reception?
* If it keeps displaying the plate number, then a car thief, murderer, or whatever can cover the plate with a transparent conductive film to create a Faraday cage, and keep on driving.
* If it automatically switches off, or changes to read "NO SIGNAL" or something, then every law-abiding citizen in a cell coverage hole will be driving around with no license plate.

Also, there are some technology issues with the display. License plates are not just pieces of painted metal: they have retro-reflective glass spheres embedded in them so that they're visible in headlights. E-ink displays use some clever optical tricks that I think won't work with retroreflective coatings.

The summary pushes this as a way to make plate readers even worse, but really smart plates are kind of the opposite of plate readers, and each makes the other less useful. You can either make the plates smart so critical data can be read by "dumb" human readers, or you can make the readers smart enough to read critical info from dumb plates. The "STOLEN" message can be e-printed on the plate, or it can pop up on the police cruiser's screen as the car drives by. Doing both is redundant.

The main difference is that an e-ink plate can be read by people who aren't cops, while the plate reader can give a lot more information to the cops, whether you're breaking the law or not. If "neither" is not an option, smart plates come out ahead on civil liberties grounds. But see my post below on technical problems.