"You're wrong. It is perfectly clear what needs to be published openly: whatever is necessary for someone to confirm that the total analysis is valid."

This is not what is under discussion. To confirm the total analysis, you need access to all the raw bits, all the calibration data underlying the analysis, all the computer codes used, copies of any written information in logs and lab books, and all the laboratory equipment as it was at the time the data was collected. Plus, you need to have all the knowledge that is in the researcher's head. And all of this tells you absolutely nothing about the validity of the research--the real question is whether the technique applied is a correct way to measure the phenomena.

"That is the fundamental principle required for scientific progress."

No it isn't. The fundamental principles are that results can be reproduced and that results can be used to make predictions.

If you demand all this, the question is whether governments are going to increase their research budgets by a factor of 10 or simply eliminate all publicly-funded research.

Good to hear. Unfortunately, it does happen in other fields. (Should have said "can lead...")

Unfortunately, it has been shown already that the few details relevant to medical studies can often be used to uniquely identify individuals even after name and address are removed. "Yaniv Erlich shows how research participants can be identified from 'anonymous' DNA" http://www.nature.com/news/pri...

Same will be true for various kinds of employment data and census data.

"There are plenty of scientists out there who poach free online data sets and mine them for additional findings."

Right. This leads to a two-class system where the scientists that collect the data (and understand the techniques and limitations) are treated as technicians while those that perform high-level analysis of others' results get the publications. This can lead to unsound, unproductive science in may cases. Those who understand the details are not motivated, and the superficial understanding of those that write the publications leads to errors.

"petabytes of extremely complex, hard to understand data"

The point seems to be missed by a lot of people. RAW DATA IS USELESS. You can make available a thousand traces of voltage vs. time on your detector pins, but that is of no value whatsoever to anyone. The interpretation of these depends on the exact parameters describing the experimental equipment and procedure. How much information would someone require to replicate CERN from scratch?

Some (maybe most, but not all) published research results can be thought of as a layering of interpretations. Something like detector output is converted to light intensity which is converted to frequency spectra and the integrated amplitudes of the peaks are calculated and are fit to a model and the parameters fit giving you a result that the amplitude of a certain emission scales with temperature squared. Which of these layers is of any value to anyone? Should the sequence of 2-byte values that comes out of the digitizer be made public?

It is not possible to make a general statement about which layer of interpretation is the right one to be made public. Higher levels, closer to the final results, are more likely to be reusable by other researchers. However, higher levels of interpretation provide the least information for someone attempting to confirm that the total analysis is valid.

If you sit in a jury and the plaintiff claims that the defendant is a witch...

Claims by the plaintiff are not evidence. They are not the same as factual evidence presented by the plaintiff or expert testimony. The defendant needs to rebut evidence presented by the other side, but not unsupported assertions.

Just because we don't know the identity of the poster doesn't mean /.'s servers don't contain enough information to identify him.

I think you are saying that if states, counties, and cities all rewrote their tax laws to be easier to enforce, then they wouldn't get much opposition from internet retailers. Eminently true.

> Is it better to have to look down at your dash to view your navigation than to have it
> displayed in the corner of your vision?

Yes, because it doesn't distract me. I only see it when I consciously look at it. Things in my range of sight that flash and change are very distracting.

But that's just my opinion. Some real tests of what is safer would be nice to have.

Absolutely! What I found made it especially interesting is that it is focused on a single time period and a specific location. I feel like I was able to gain something of a picture of the web of predator and prey in the megafauna of prehistoric SoCal. Most museums instead treat you to their most spectacular fossils from any time in the last several hundred million years.

Your numbers are not in line with what people who work with large publishers have been saying for the past few years. I have been reading that physical production costs are 5-10%, not 30%. There's a big difference whether 20% of the publisher's take goes for manufacturing or 60%. These were the numbers from genre fiction authors who might expect a run in the low 100k or at least several 10s of thousands of books working with the largest publishers. I would expect different numbers for different types of books, different size runs, etc.

"I am a bit surprised at the number of people who fight for the cause of remote X."

Well, people use their computers for different things. If you have a hundred people sharing TBs of data and looking at it using massive complex home-grown analysis and modeling packages, remote X makes sense. It's the difference between shipping a few plot windows across the network vs. GB of data. (And X performance can be fine on a wired LAN when you have ping times in ms and no dropped connections. Again, depends on your own personal situation.)

Sure, this is a use case that only applies to a tiny fraction of users, but for those users it is absolutely necessary.

Exactly, and the reply is always from the point of view of the developer. They want to talk about what style of protocol or something that remote apps will use--I don't care. I want to know whether I can run programs the same way that I do now.

A subset of people like me use their desktop as primarily a terminal to connect to more powerful servers. I want to know if Wayland will let me "ssh me@oldserver-running-X xterm" and then use the remote xterm to start a bunch of programs that open their own windows. I don't want to know how it does it, only if it will work.

If the Wayland developers don't want to commit to making something like this work, that's fine. It just means Wayland isn't designed for me. If they *are* going to make it work, I would feel more comfortable is they would come and say for certain that they are committed to supplying this functionality.

This same point comes up again and again. I think that the developers at some level don't understand the question, because there never seems to be an answer that is straightforward and pitched at the level of the user. (Not that anyone *owes* me an answer. I am just making a request.)

There is a major clutter problem. Have you ever looked at a browser on a small 16:9 screen? Count the number of lines of menus/tabs/messages/titles there are on the top and bottom of the already-too-short screen. (Heaven help you if you're also using gnome2.) It's a UI disaster. My solution is to stick with 3:4 screens (and not use gnome), but someday duct tape will not be enough to hold that old thinkpad together.

There are three of us still using seamonkey? More than I thought.