On the other side, it seems like this should fund more research into methods to deflect the path of gamma radiation or transform its state. We know the Earth's atmosphere can do it, so why not develop our own deflection field? After all, we know where most of the gamma rays are coming from, and the rest of them would be just as random as they are here on earth. No need to "block" gamma radiation with something earth-sized; just deflect it enough that it is much less likely to hit a human, and provide a mechanism that will also render some of it non-ionizing by adjusting its moment or frequency. We know that energy can phase shift into matter and back, so why not use this knowledge to our advantage? Shift, bend, and let it shift back, pointing in a safer direction.

I think you misunderstood "acceptance" -- the GP was talking about accepting it for publishing; even if the methodology was not at the appropriate level to publish it. So now the only choice is to publish it, at which point the researchers will be judged based on work that likely needed refinement and so isn't up to the level of other published work, and the publishers will be judged on releasing a lower quality of research.

But it's possible that the research can stand on its own, and that a new reviewer is all it needs to get tweaked and ready for publication -- in which case, science will roll on as usual.

That's a good link -- and to me it highlights something different: selection bias. Not of the people in the experiment, but of the people designing the experiment.

Instead of looking at it as "this person's a feminist, they're going to be biased to feminist results," look at it as "people who think to ask questions in this way tend to get this set of results, repeatedly. This will likely lead to them accepting the associated ideology." So instead of the studies proving the pre-conceived notions of the experimenters, what we could be seeing is the experiments selecting the appropriate experimenters. Since someone is unlikely to widely vary their methodology from one study to the next, they are likely to replicate the same "bias" purely because they are the same person going about things the same way.

To really break this cycle, you need to add some randomness from some outside force, such that a single person or group of people does not control the entire methodology of the study. Even if they are using methods to avoid bias, they are likely to always use the same methods, and so always get "affirming" results. In this, the single reviewer was correct, even though his assumptions of WHY he was correct are likely way off.

And yes, this line of thought completely affirms your comment about male vs female being incredibly stupid. If there's selection bias based on methodology, you're going to find men and women coming down on both sides -- there might be some clustering based on social norms of men vs. women, but that's a really fuzzy boundary at the best of times.

So they got Dr. Silver to comment on novel discoveries of how silver affects bacteria. Cute.

I'd like to know how quickly their other costs will be recouped at that price point... R&D, marketing, development, setting up new production systems, etc.

At that markup it will probably only take a couple of years, assuming people buy the thing. But I'd still like to know.

Has most console cheating actually been eradicaated, or is it just that people aren't being caught anymore?

Also, consoles are closed systems, whereas a desktop computer is an open system. I see eSports going the way of car racing: different events test different skills. We all know that cars can go faster than human reflexes can manage. Enter Formula racing, which is kind of analogous to console racing: everyone gets the same basic hardware, and can only tweak within those constraints. By comparison, PC eSports are more like a cannonball run, where everything goes as long as you can afford it and don't get caught.

I can actually see mobile gaming becoming more of a sport, as the hardware is both more limited and more standardized. Then, of course, you'll get people running Android under emulation under some supercomputer with a bunch of system-level tweaks. But stuff like this can be investigated for winners (just like sports drug testing). And if they're not winning, why is it a problem?

...and then the country with less population, land mass, and wealth that's going to be completely flooded by what everyone else wants to do decides to stop the plans -- because they've got nuclear arms.

See, the thing is, they have nothing to lose, and no reason to play the voting game, which they know they will always lose. Sure, the entire country could move somewhere else -- but people tend to be resistant to that sort of idea unless it's backed with force.

This is why you see major dams flooding areas of countries that don't hold the power to topple the government. But the world is big enough that you're going to find people with the capabilities to destroy large parts of it pretty much everywhere.

Not every right, just copy right.

I haven't traced back what the GP said, so I'm not exactly sure of the point of the parent.

However, where I come from, forests are for the most part public property. I grew up not only picking berries, but also picking mushrooms, and selling those on to distributors. Does this mean I was stealing for profit? Others were unable to pick those mushrooms after I did. However, I made sure to cut them appropriately so that a new bunch would grow back, and I put in the actual work of picking, sorting and transporting the mushrooms. My picking was only depriving other people of immediate mushroom gratification/profits from doing what I had done.

Now, if you live in a place where all forests are owned by individuals and corporations, then picking berries/mushrooms would indeed be theft/poaching. But I'd argue that "owning" that forest could be considered theft from people at large as well -- just like "owning" a public event such that any re-depiction of that event afterwards by anyone other than you is cultural theft. Yes, I'm talking about DIsney/IOC/etc. here.

Really?
First part is false if you live in the UK: format shifting is considered infringement, as it deprives the author of funds they could have gathered by providing it to you in that format.

"Just download it and do the same" -- are you saying that my iTunes downloads don't give me the same freedom to format shift as if I bought a CD?

"you are taking money out of his pocket just the same as if you lifed a bag of chips from 7-11" -- No. If I downloaded something without paying when I would have gladly paid $10 if the free version hadn't been available, I am depriving the author of potential profit. If I walk out of 7-11 without paying for physical goods, I've taken something with tangible value and deprived the store of it (and deprived them of selling it to someone else who would be willing to pay the $2.50).

Look at it this way: if an audio track is on a website next to a "donate" icon, anyone in the world can download it and donate. The cost is the cost to serve the bits, plus the sunk cost of producing the audio track.

If a bag of chips is sitting on a shelf next to a "donate" jar, anyone who is locally present can take the bag of chips. Once that's done, all that is left is the jar, possibly with some money in it.

Where things break down is that we have a concept built around the exchange of value. I might have a bag of chips, you might know how to fix a leaky faucet. In exchange for the bag of chips, I could a) fix your leaky faucet (this is exchange of goods for services) or b) tell you how to fix your faucet (exchange of goods for information). Music is exactly like the second one of these, even though some people conflate it with the first.

If I told you "you can't tell anyone else how to fix a leaky faucet without paying me first" you'd probably just ignore me.

Many music contracts are, however, written up this way, so that the distributor gets the right to say who can tell who (and how) how to fix that faucet. If someone breaks their agreement not to tell, and then tells a bunch of other people how to fix the faucet, are those other people suddenly taking money out of the pocket of the guy who sold this information to the distributor?

Think about that.

And as someone who has produced both software and music, I agree 100% with the parent on this. And I'm not posting AC :)

I get paid for what I produce, not for what other people experience/consume. This is the case for most developers of intellectual property. It's the next level up: the lawyers/distributors/vendors that require payment for distribution of intellectual property. A lot of their work would vanish if Congress made such a move, because their jobs are artificially created.

Anyone who actually produces intellectual property who would feel threatened by things becoming free needs to take a hard look at why they feel threatened. Do they feel like they are currently being paid more than what they develop is actually worth on an open market?

You forgot about recording, producing, post-producing and distributing -- these all have copyright law attached to them too.

This is actually why recording companies exist -- they navigate the legal morass so that individuals don't have to.

However, it seems to me it'd make more sense these days to incorporate an entity for each album you produce, so that if someone takes umbrage with your composition/writing/performance/format/recording/production/post-production/distribution, you can just dissolve that incorporation and your own livelihood and the fate of all other music is still protected. And you wouldn't end up being beholden to a recording company who does pretty much the same thing, but takes most of the profits.

I think people are coming at this from two sides. On the one side, there's the possibility of trusted CAs issuing duplicate certs for the same namespace. You can't really avoid this if you accept those CAs as trusted; the risk is the same no matter which CA you actually use.

However, on the other side, you have CAs being beholden to a local government, looking at rejection of certs, not acceptance. If I have a cert signed by a CA in a country that disagrees with something I post on my website, they can revoke my cert, preventing all access to my site without even going through the domain registrars.

And if you look at it this way, you can see that the upcoming CA issues will go down the exact same path Domain Registrars have walked for the past 20 years. From a deployment standpoint, there's really no difference between the two: they both involve a federated central authority that assigns a specific value to a specific grantee, to enable others to access said grantee. As the cost decreases, the abuse increases, as seen recently with such things as .ninja domains and their abuse. Free certs will be abused in similar ways.

So the only real benefit is that your encrypted data will be hidden amongst other encrypted data in transit, making on-the-wire (or on-the-wifi) analysis much more difficult. Verifying the endpoints and avoiding certificate abuse will become much more difficult, as there will be much more data to sort through. Even crowd-sourcing the reputation of certs can be gamed, if the abusers are anticipating it.

Yeah; I never said it was a good thing; just exploring possible reasoning for doing it.

However, in this case it would be more like "we called up some German doctors" -- knowing that there was a strong likelihood they had Nazi ties, but focusing on their shared research instead of actively searching out those who are outside their ethical boundaries.

Slippery slopes, and all that.

More likely they worked together to develop various psychological models that had nothing to do with torture, but could easily be applied to them. They could also have been working together to answer the question "Where is the line in the sand between interrogation and torture?" This would be important to the APA as well, as they have very specific rules about what kind of experiments can be run by their members. Defining that border area by consulting with a group that doesn't have their restrictions would allow them to be clearer in laying out their own guidelines, to prevent their members from doing things that could cause lasting psychological or physical harm to those they're testing.