The way to kill religion is to laugh and ridicule it to death.
Why do you suppose there is only one way, and what makes you think that one is the most effective? How about acknowledge the points your opponent has right so the debate becomes about the remainder that your opponent cannot defend? All this screaming at each other with neither side listening is why it is taking so darn long. This debate should have been over a century ago.
Why can't the people in charge of making the career decisions for academics take the few days a year to read and judge papers themselves rather the relying on the peer review system to do it for them.
Most places that hire people with PhDs want to cover lots of topics. Hence, none of the doctors are qualified to evaluate each other, and all of them are too busy to take the time to become qualified in each others' areas.
That covers just about everything we object to.
Could you be a little more specific with your plural pronouns? I object to many things this does not cover.
... Apple finds a loophole and sues this developer into oblivion?
...if only there was a similar situation we could use to predict how it might go.
...radical a suggestion as granting copyright protection for the limited times needed to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
...radical a suggestion as doing what the Constitution says.
*I shake my head slowly.
how is the GPL "good" in this case?
Your are looking at it from the perspective of the company that did NOT write the code and is NOT interested in contributing. The GPL is not good for them. The GPL is "good" for everyone else. It is "good" for the whole world because it is NOT good for moochers. Yeah, it would be nice if we could let everyone, including moochers, use our open source code, but then we would accomplish less good overall. So, it is "good" that the GPL is so bad for NVIDIA.
Or you can vote third party.
As a Libertarian, I spent many years preaching that people should vote for a third party. Over time, I started to realize that it wasn't really so much of a social problem as a technical problem. Specifically, plurality voting has a known weakness, and it is gamed by considering only the two most-likely parties, and picking among only them. In other words, even if you manage to bring a third party into popularity, plurality voting will soon "fix" the situation until only two dominant parties remain.
So, the answer, it turns out, is not to try to bring a third party into popularity. It is to pick one of the parties and work to reform it. Yeah, I know, it sounds imppossible, but hey, it's more possible than bringing a third party into popularity (without revising the constitution). You really do have more sway in the primaries than in the main election anyway. So, pick one of the big two, and get active in their primaries. Then don't even waste your time voting among the final two contenders--you cannot make a difference there.
...The academic community needs to find another metric for researcher quality other than papers published...
such as?
Number of citations? No, it would take a 30-year probationary period before the trend was reliable.
Have experts evaluate your efforts? No, that would require extra effort on the part of expensive tenured experts.
Roll some dice? Hmm, maybe that could work.
And what evidence is there that proves the safety of those cars, other than taking Google's word for it?
You haven't yet proven that you are unbiased. Please prove that you do not work for Microsoft. Then, please prove that you are an American. We cannot have foreign nations influencing our laws. Then prove that you didn't steal someone else's Slashdot credentials to make that post. Please also prove that you regularly make useful contributions to the world (as Google has) so that we will have some reason to consider your suggestions. Then, perhaps we will consider what you have to say.
The answer to waste in a program isn't always to shut down the program. Sometimes you should get rid of the waste within the program.
If you remove waste, it will return in another form. If you create incentive to reduce waste, it will stay gone. Private industry already has that incentive. Can it really be created withing government programs? The precedent is mixed.
Scientists will study your brain to learn more about your distant cousin, Man.
