Actually, this isn't always true. Sometimes, if the warranties are provided by the manufacturer for a fee, it can be cheaper to buy their extended warranty than to run the risk of your hardware failing. Although this doesn't make sense at first glance, it does for many consumer electronics where buying replacement parts to fix them is extremely expensive, as no market for them exists. The only choice is getting the original manufacturer to fix the product at a massively inflated price. In these instances, the manufacturers often have warranties available that could be less than the projected cost of fixing the failures yourself.

With something like a laptop, if it's 2 years old, out of warranty and the logic board dies, it's often about the same price to buy a new laptop as it is to replace your logic board. If this happens to even 1/10 laptops (not counting other problems that are likely to occur), a warranty costing 1/10th of the price of the machine is a worthwhile purchase. In reality, the numbers are likely even higher than this, and many of the manufacturer extended warranties are worth it simply because the cost of getting them to fix your product otherwise is completely unreasonable.

Of course, Best Buy and other stores warranties rarely operate under these principals, and I largely view them as a ripoff. However, I will say buying them isn't always a bad idea. Sure you'll end up behind in the long run, but it's the same with buying any insurance, even HEALTH insurance. You buy the insurance not because it's a good deal, but because the cost of fixing a potential problem is too great to take on on your own.

Phil

The first part that you propose is COMPLETELY unreasonable There is no way conferences or journals would remotely be able to "peer review" source code as part of their review process. You must think that scientific peer review is that strong, it really isn't. They read over the papers, and much of their decision is based on their own biases, although your ability to sell your idea in a paper can help it get in. I know conferences, and likely many journals have papers with grammatical errors in them (have you ever read some of the foreign submissions to these things?), they get the most glaringly bad ones out most of the time, but they don't remove them all. The lack of citations is sometimes seen, but not all reviewers know of all the relevant work that is out there. Often times as a submitter to a conference or journal, you look at who will likely be on your review committee, and ensure that you are citing their work, even if the work is only tangentially relevant.

As far as "peer review" for correctness goes, that tends to be a joke depending on the field. Scientists aren't trying to reproduce your experiments before seeing if they should accept or reject a paper. They have to take it on face value that the work you do is real. Occasionally you'll hear stories about students who have been faking results for years, getting multiple publications etc. It's not until years later when this gets revealed, and the papers get invalidated. This can often ruin careers of relatively innocent bystanders, such as professors who trusted that their student was doing the work they said they were doing. There just isn't time to do all the fact checking necessary. Trying to add a code review to the process is akin to asking a scientist to stand behind another scientist whenever they're doing field or lab work to verify that their procedures are correct. Some things are taken at face value as being accurately done or not.

As for simulations, at least in my field (roughly computer architecture), the simulator you use or base your research on can greatly influence what people think of your results. Using older less detailed simulators will get your work knocked down pretty quick. However, I will say that credit is MOST DEFINITELY given to the authors of the simulators used. This is generally done through the citations when describing the simulation infrastructure, or methodology of the work. Most simulators have a single paper written describing how it works etc. This is normally written a few years after the simulator was developed, and the group that developed the simulator has already gotten most of the use they could get out of the base infrastructure.

Phil

Actually, I'm pretty sure everyone is fairly close with the current data they're generating to prevent other groups from beating you out the door with your idea. The exceptions to this rule are when professors trust one another, and know that the other wouldn't use the information you're supplying them with to do the same research you are already working on.

As a graduate student, you definitely don't want to share code you've developed immediately. You may spend 2 or 3 years of a PhD writing code, and get a couple papers out of it, but with the code base in place you plan on getting a handful more. More to the point, these papers become relatively easy to generate, because you spent those years developing the program that allows you to do it. Writing papers, and generating results, analyzing them etc takes time, so you can't do everything at once. Releasing your code too early means other groups can do these other experiments, and you, the grad student who spent so many years setting up the code or experiment for them, still wouldn't be able to graduate, because you have not produced enough original research, and instead only developed the tools others used to pump out results.

As a student nears graduation, they might be more willing to release their code, as then competition is less of a concern. Someone won't pick up your code and be releasing a paper based on it in 2 or 3 months, it just takes too long to get up to speed. However, the BIGGEST impediment to releasing software in academia is the support that you have to give to your software if anyone is going to use it. You first need to audit and clean up your code, a non-trivial task. You have to supply documentation on how to use the software, another non trivial task, and then provide documentation on the basics of how it works etc. All of this stuff takes a lot of time, and doesn't tend to help a student graduate. Also, once code is released, there's an expectation that you'll be providing some level of help with questions. Granted that normally rarely happens (as the author has gone on to do other things, and hasn't touched the code in years). It just becomes a difficult thing to do.

Phil

I'm pretty sure it has to meet the US definition of treason. For instance Robert Hanssen was sentenced to treason for spying for the Russian government, and betraying the US government. As far as I know we were never officially at war with the Soviets.

Looking at the UC constitution, treason is defined as follows:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

It only states adhering to the country's enemies, and NOT specifically countries we are at war with. Otherwise the definition of treason would end up being pretty ridiculous.

Phil

Except, under a free market, lobbying wouldn't be nearly as beneficial, because the government wouldn't enact laws that would shoot down your competitors. Big business tends to love big government and big regulations. Regulations make it much harder for the little guy to compete. It's why many big companies are behind government actions which would "hurt" their profits (pollution controls etc). Although they increase their costs of doing business, it often makes it much more difficult for someone else to get involved in the market, or keeps them out of it entirely. This means the company can increase the price they charge, more than offsetting the costs of complying with whatever regulations the government made, allowing them to profit the most.

Of course, how it often works is these big companies take it a step further, getting antipollution (or whatever) bills through congress, and then getting special exemptions for themselves that are justified on the grounds of saving 100s of jobs etc. So these companies get the effect of limiting competition without the harm of the measures that were supposed to do something in the first place.

Phil

Uh.. actually, if you run a PERSONAL business, many of these things can be written off if they are BUSINESS expenses. The government chooses not to tax operating costs of businesses, because if they charged revenue and not profit, then it would A) push all businesses to be vertical monopolies (the same reason many governments use VATs and not sales taxes), and B) it would make it ridiculously hard to make a profit in certain low margin businesses. In effect, businesses that operate best under a free market economy (many competitors driving down costs) would be penalized the most under a tax like this. I wouldn't want to imagine the havoc this would wreck on the economy.

Phil

There are so many things wrong with your post, I don't really know where to begin. First, Communism is not a form of government, but an economic system. Unlike Capitalism however, communism only tends to survive when supports by an authoritarian regime, and normally they tend to be more totalitarian than anything. This is because economics permeates everybody's day-to-day lives, and dictating how the economy works requires dictating how day-to-day lives work.

On another note, you mention that it is IMMORAL for a corporation or any foreigner to own land in another country, and yet, you blame the US for the embargo.... This does not compute. First, the whole premise of free trade essentially requires that foreigners can own land, or own "something" in another country. Otherwise, why would they trade with the other country? What would they get back in return. Currency needs to be backed by something, and normally it is based on the countries economy, and being able to buy things from the economy. By your own logic, China is an evil immoral country, not because of their human rights violation, but because the government and the people/corporations in the country own huge chunks of land in the US, as well as trillions of dollars in government debt. Do you think the US should be allowed to write off the debt, never paying it back because they don't want another country to own so much of our country? In my view, that is stealing (what a government does best), and is immoral. It would also likely result in a huge war with china.

I agree that many US policies were constructed in fear, but I don't think we're the reason cuba is a disaster. Unlike Cuba, China threw away much of their communist control over the economy, and has reaped the rewards. If China was still a highly communist country, the fact that they are pulling Avatar wouldn't surprise anyone. It would have been more surprising that Avatar was played in their theaters in the first place.

Also, your argument of: "If the Cuban people want to try communism, that's their right." implies that the Cuban people wanted the system Castro through in place. Like many communist revolutions, the Cuban people wanted changed from Batista, as he was doing some bad things. Many of them desired freedom, and a free form of government, and Castro, at the time of the revolution praised those ideals. Batista got toppled, and Castro took control with an iron fist, quickly jailing many of the same people who helped put him into power because they wished for a limited government, and the freedoms associated with that. Some of the people may have wanted what Castro wanted, but I doubt the majority of those who fought for the revolution would have if they realized that A) Castro would retain power for the next 50 years or so, and B) the ideals of freedom would quickly be dropped, etc. This is a case of people making a bad decision, acting rashly and making a bad situation much worse. Governments are quite good at doing that.

Phil

You don't think that just maybe if the TSA (or whoever) finds explosives on a single passenger for a given flight they might oh... I don't know cancel the flight, or at the minimum delay it significantly re-screening every other passenger on the flight. I'm pretty sure there are procedures in place, and the agencies involved aren't stupid enough to let a plane go off without a hitch if someone attempted to board it with explosive materials.

I'm pretty sure trying to spread explosives to multiple people getting on the same plane would greatly increase the chances of them stopping your attempts. I imagine at enough airports if multiple explosives got found in a day they might just halt all flights until they figure out what is going on.

Phil

I suppose it's less true with TAs, but with RAs, the government is paying for both the results and the education. I'm also an RA, and know what it's like. It's a lot of work, the pay isn't very great, but it's still not cheap. And the cost of an RA is NOWHERE near $30k/year, at least not here. Salary alone is 18k, tuition costs are another $24k or so, health insurance etc are probably at least $5k-$6k, and then you factor in the fact that at most universities half of all grant money goes straight to the department/college/university costs. That works out to about $100k of grant money to pay for one year of school. While you're getting paid almost nothing of that, that is what the costs involved are. As far as the NSF etc paying for results or for education, it's a bit of both. Sure, they want the results, but PhD students aren't really the cheapest way to get results. It's not until the last two or three years of a PhD where most people start getting useful results, and making progress. So that's at least 2 or 3 years of paying them when little is getting "done". By the time most RAs are producing good results, they're graduating and getting out of there. The real truth of the matter is much of the work done at universities is spent training future scientists. Some will go to national labs, some into industry, others will stay in academia, etc. The benefit of most PhD's thesis does not work out to the price tag that is often associated with it. However, the training of these people to go on to do greater things throughout their careers is.

Phil

I was mostly referring to people from less industrialized countries such as china, india, pakistan etc. In those countries the cost of living is often even cheaper, but the pay they get in the US is much greater. I also don't think people from first world countries like the UK, Germany, France, Spain, etc have as hard of a problem getting visas.

Phil

Actually, this notion is only partially true. Many of them were educated elsewhere, but in many of the poorer countries universal education isn't free. Mostly it's the richer people who can afford to go, even if schooling itself is free. But even then, many of the ones that eventually immigrate to the US go here for graduate school. While many get their undergraduate degrees in their native country, a number of them travel here for one as well. The one who travel here for an undergraduate education often pay a large sum of money to do it, and are obviously from relatively wealthy families. However, with graduate schools, things are different. In engineering graduate schools, it's common for well over 50% of doctoral students to be foreigners. It's also extremely common for the vast majority of these students to be funded as either TAs, RAs, PAs etc. This funding (particularly RAs and PAs) tends to come from the federal government via NSF grants. For a 5 year PhD (which is really fast), that's about $500k of taxpayer money that has gone into educating these people (Assuming a single RA costs a professor ~$50k/year, and half their grant money is turned over to the university to pay for overhead expenses). To turn around and say that they can't work in the US is ridiculous. We will pay huge sums of money to educate someone, but then say that you can't work here.

Phil

It's funny, if your comment had any merit of truth to it, the free market would adjust itself, and the highly skilled workforce would MOVE to another country where they can work for more. Are you suggesting that these people brought in on a visa would be paid more in their home country? Somehow, I think they're getting a better deal moving to the US, which means that the US is paying these people more than other countries (or other countries have laws in place preventing them from working there). Either way, what you are advocating in preventing these visas is " to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else". By this I mean that people in the USA are richer than the vast majority of people in the world. You only want to pay people who grew up rich lots of money to work here, thus keeping the wealth isolated to our country. The intelligent and skilled workers of other countries can stay where they are getting paid LESS money (otherwise why would they want to move here), and thus ensure that the rich keep getting richer.

Your logic on this matter is DEEPLY flawed. Only through a free market on labor can everyone get paid what they deserve.

Phil

obviously, you haven't played Civ 4... not to the same extreme, but much of the same stuff. They gave a very loose high level view of religion.

Personally, my views on religion are nowhere near as cynical. There are those in it for the money/power/glory, but I think there are other leaders who truly believe what they preach, and have reasons for believing it. Of course, the more they ask of their congregations, the lessI tend to believe that their motives are "pure".

Phil

or the fact that the people who run linux are the "computer geeks" who see playing with their computer, and securing it as a hobby, whereas Windows users tend to see a computer as a tool to do XYZ, and get annoyed when anything gets in the way of them accomplishing their task.

Phil

It would increase "security" (through obscurity) for the same reason it would make everyone's life a living nightmare. It would be a royal pain to get anything to run properly on more than a small group of people's machines. While Microsoft has many versions of their OS out in the wild, they do a MUCH better job than the linux community does of preserving backward compatibility. If you wanted to install a new version of gimp or some application on a version of redhat from 10 years ago, you'd likely have to replace half the system. However, installing gimp on Windows XP works fine... It would probably even install fine on Windows 98....

Phil