Ah, right. What would you think of peer-reviewers who clap their hands for an article critical of peer-review process? Who's going to pay for this? ;-)

Well, yes.

When we build distributed systems, the need to setup a distributed consensus algorithm is appearing in front of us, time and again. Leslie Lamport (of LaTeX & Time-Clocks fame) came up with a novel algorithm during early 90s about to solve this is a very competitive way (Paxos is its name). Sadly, the algorithm remained shunned for a number of years, due to rejection via the very same channel in which it was eventually published many years later. If you realise the immediate practical impact of that algorithm and what an 8 years delay means in the world of CS, and the cost putting all these together, the result is staggering and sobering at the same time.

So, yes, let's now all peer-review this statement: "peer-review systems are imperfect and provide no guarantee for any certain quality result".

Peer review is merely a compromise to increase throughput of papers, which are relatively median and more easily digestible, because this is what keeps the academia salary system in good lubrication. It provides no level of assurance that the most impactful paper gets noticed first, neither that it receives sufficient feedback in order to improve upon original concepts. In sort, human intellect won't be easily replaced via a procedural setup, yet.

Indeed, it sounds as ambitious and coherent as `X`!!!

...relevant... as in:
"nearly each pixel of your screen while reading this is rendered via either C, C++ or something that is written or compiled in C and derivatives".

That makes it sufficiently relevant, doesn't it?

Or, better, find an agent who can act on your behalf and provide for both, against some reasonable cost.
There is no reason to reinvent the wheel, unless you really need to.

hm... something interesting might be going on with email... in that case, google-plus-me, we are not all that much hidden in cyberspace!

Hi,

Perhaps you are the man; please, please, have a look at this talk by Hans Rosling: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_...

If you find it inspiring enough, kindly contact back at georgatos _at_ ewb-luxembourg _dot_ org ;
I play as the secretary of the board, at EWB Luxembourg organization (other mundane roles included).

no NSA project here, unless Digital Pine is a subsidiary? small world, isn't it?

... only hypothetically, via Pine Digital's business which prominently displays in wikileaks: https://www.wikileaks.org/spyf...

...the impact of this would be profound in energy distribution since it can potentially decouple real-time supply-demand constraints.

...for the rest of us who can only afford a 200$ project to hear the beeping sounds from all that craft above 30.000 feet!

http://satnogs.org/

Well, this makes for an interesting observation:
* If someone knows in advance the herd immunity of a specific ethnic group and happen to be able to calculate differentiated susceptibility rates, then that would count well as deliberate act, regardless even if the calculations were correct or not.

It would still be genocide if an alternative ethnic group was hit hard, as a result of deliberate attempt.

And even if it is not genocide, it is still a criminal act by needlessly exposing members of the public at risk, in a way which is totally avoidable.

And if so, what would stop people doing the same?

Live from the field: Octopus just barely escaped being in our menu today, while ordering seafood in a right-next-to-the-sea tavern, outside of Nafplion, Greece.

Well, fact is, octopus IS really admirable animal, among other reasons for passing the mirror test. For the record, dogs typically do not pass the mirror test, ie. cannot consistently recognise themselves in a mirror. Octopus is surprisingly intelligent for an animal that is apparently primitive!

That being said, it's very tasty, too. I'll spare you the details of the great ways to cook it and prepare delicious dishes in the greek cuisine; for one, I have been catching octopuses, even before I was a teenager, in a traditional millenium-old underwater manner using just a harpoon. Big thrill for any young child.

However, there IS a problem with how we catch octopus and much other marine life: it is seriously important to avoid catching/capturing the young animals and only collect the individuals of some age, after having passed from breeding cycle. This is an increasing concern with many fishes, also, and we should all frown upon the practice of catching really really young fish, which is considered a delicacy in some places (Yes, I'm looking at you, South Italy). The sea needs to be respected and cultivated with more seriousness than it is currently done. Human population and technical know-how for fishing have increased in a way that is unsustainable: the sooner we understand it, the better. The sea could and would provide, yet not for the greedy...

+1

Having been an avid bash user for almost as long as the bug existed, and written countless shell scripts in it for that matter, I cannot avoid agreeing with parent. Fact is, shell language definition is nowhere near high-quality BNF-defined syntactical structure, therefor it is unknown how many more fancy bugs are hidden in the parser. What worries me even more are the famous bashisms, of which we all fall victims sooner or later: *users* and subsequent sysadmins of our produced software may fall victims of such code, suffering from unneeded compatibility issues. Shell scripting is certainly a very kludgy area of modern unix systems and it takes great effort to keep things tidy and maintainable.

RedHat is far more economical than Windows, when you need a big population of nodes, because you can use fi. free Scientific Linux on your many compute nodes and just keep one or two for validation of bugs and formal support. Best of all, it is all legal as long as you don't misrepresent the facts!