Yes, and they still would, except this is not just easier, but simply better. It is impossible to keep an up-to-date e-mail contact list of all students that might want to visit. Active subjects are easy, students under my supervision - more dynamic, but still possible. But these are not all students that might want to know! New candidates for my supervision, students of parallel groups in a subject whose teacher is unavailable for a few days, even non-students (e.g. coworkers with a short question) etc, etc.

E-mailing everyone who could potentially be interested is spamming. Static announcements on a web page don't work any better than a card on the door - people only check once they've arrived and I'm not there. Publish-subscribe is the exact right model for this case.

News? Obsolete, and creating a new group just for one person seems overkill. Facebook, etc? Overkill, besides, I refuse to use it. E-mail list server - well... that would actually work and I'll assume that that was what you actually meant by emails.

Except the process of creating a new group at the university server is too bothersome and unclear, running my own is easy but not as robust, the email-controlled subscription interface is not that intuitive to students who rarely use anything like that, etc. Yes, it would work, but using Twitter is much easier for me and most of the students. It's simply the right tool for the job, get over it.

E.g. enables me to announce cancellation/rescheduling etc. of my consultation hours to my students. Simple, fast, ubiquitous publish-subscribe platform for short text messages. No need to keep contact list up-to-date anymore. Just works, on any platform. Globally - no problem if e.g. the link to my country is horribly slow (like during my last trip in my hotel). Works great!

That's all I use it for. Same with some of my students, who only created an account to follow my tweets. For that one tweet every couple of weeks. For others it's just one of many uses, they're even more happy that I decided to do it like that.

So... I'm very happy with this service, but I don't think my use case is one that would keep the investors happy...

As someone who has worked for many, many years at a european university (part-time) I'm strongly sceptical about the ability of university staff to do this exact kind of work well. Not to mention the grad students, who will likely be assigned the actual work. Also, it hardly seems like something universities should really do.

By the way, do you have any idea how long this "occasional" call would take? This is EU, with all the regulations. Weeks to prepare the call. At least a month for the call, preferably at least two. A few months for the review and grant agreement preparation. Typically 8-12 months total. Alternative? Public tender. Also months, but not so many. But how do you make sure you can trust the company? It's the era of globalization, if you want to know whether software from eg. a US/russian company is secure (as in some real chance of detecting NSA/FSB modifications), last thing you want is a european branch of another company with ties there. Difficult to ensure with a public tender.

Solution? Have your own small but good team that can do this in less time than a tender or call would take.

Yes it does. So, fund it! Pushing routine work like this on us limits our ability to do new things which is the essence of "research". And we will take any work that is called "research" and offers money, that's how universities get money afterall.

I've done my share of work which should never have been given to a university. Routine software development, code review, testing, etc. Practically zero publishable results. Plus, universities do not give the same quality and warranty as a software company in this case. Still, this is a growing trend - throwing such tasks into "research programmes". Expected TRL is growing. Instead of building fascinating prototypes and leaving the conversion to product to spin-offs, universities waste time and talent doing routine work themselves (in consortia, to make things worse). But it's too tempting - instead of allocating budget for something, you just call it a research project and fund it from the science budget. Bingo!

So firefighters should only be recruited when there actually is an emergency? Some jobs have variable workloads, deal with it. And I would be careful with the word "bloat" not knowing how large the team is. For example, having two or three analysts in an organization of this size is hardly bloat.

What makes you think this would be the same group that runs around installing printers? All IT jobs/tasks are not equivalent. This sort of pro-bono work is exactly a good way of keeping your team of 2-3 security audit guys away from such work and doing exactly what they were hired for. Yes, that team can formally be a part of your "IT services". No, it does not mean they have to be simple support guys with a new task, very much exceeding their competence level.

Not necessarily, it depends on their goals.

Looks like they want to keep a strong IT capable of doing effective security audits for them on demand, but the workload is not constant. Projects like this are a great idea. You do something "pro bono", actually useful for you and your society. At the same time you keep the team funded, ready for when you need them more. And, most importantly - you keep them busy doing their actual job, the best form of training there is.

So what if they retrieve it? We have cellphones now. I definitely wouldn't leave before calling the bank to block the card. Then, even if they get the card, online payment won't work. Offline might, up to the (low) limit, but the bank will swallow those losses.

I don't know about you, but I have paid for the system I use. It's a paid copy of Windows. If they think it was too cheap to not force a new ad platform (which 10 basically is) on me - they should have priced it higher, too late to change your mind now.

Right now, from my point of view, MS is just not fulfilling their part of the contract. I was promised a feed of security updates. A feed I now cannot use, because it is used to push telemetry and the upgrade with an unacceptable EULA.

I only bought this system as a gaming platform. It did the job. For other uses I was happy with Linux and can easily switch back. There will be no upgrade. Or another purchase. Sorry, you've just lost a client.

Too bad Linux is going through an equally braindead period with systemd taking the role of gwx. Still, there is slack, I've used it for several years, time to get back to it after the bad experiences with ubuntu and others...

Exactly. I don't have a FB account. That doesn't really make anything difficult. It's even getting easier, as companies start realizing that FB-only online presence requiring an account is too limiting. Two years ago things were looking more bleak - everyone was moving to FB and many pages were blocked from non-logged in users.

And a word of advice. If people stop talking to you because you don't have a facebook account... Great! Nice friend-filter. Why would you wan't to talk to people who do that?

It does have its quirks, it can't be blindly trusted. A few years ago it was useless for many directions in my city, due to four facts:

• for two or so years it kept directing me through one road, which was permanently closed due to construction work. Yet, it was absolutely convinced that another road was closed all this time (due to the same construction work) - it wasn't, they put some temporary tarmac through the middle.
• yes, there's hardly any traffic on this brigde - perhaps because it's mass transport-only, closed to private cars? But yes, technicly the bridge isn't "closed", just closed to me.
• no, it is not faster to take the highway if it doesn't exist yet! (it was finished 3 or 4 years later, as planned; this made GPS useless for SO many trips...)
• no, I'm not flying over the river, there's a new bridge here...

Ok, that last one was just a case of old maps, easily fixed. But the one before - WTF?!?

In short - one function I want on a GPS is the ability to mark a place on the map, or a section of the road, and say "never direct me through this place, period", or "avoid this place for this trip only". No, the "alternative route" button does not work, because it has no idea why I want a different solution. It assumes that the road is blocked for some reason and tries to get you around that and back on the original route ASAP, which is useless if half of that route is in fact closed.

Given that even an IP address has been successfully presented as personally identifiable information, you are wrong. No, you can't really send anything without the user's consent. There's a multitude of ways in which this rule can be stretched, but on the base level you are wrong. No, even if you heve never logged in, unless you consented in some way, the system should not send even one telemetry packet, since that already lets the receiver know that the user of that IP address is using this type of system.

Overboard? Maybe. But personally, I'm OK with going a bit overboard with this type of regulations in a world of "public by default", where your personal information is taken for granted as a part of the payment for any service.

> Ultimately the question is going to be "why is the academic position being rejected by popular writers?"

Umm... Because it's reinforced by Wikipedia? A well-meaning author will check the facts in the most accessible source he has - the Wikipedia - and consider that enough. After all, he's not writing an academic paper, spending days on research would be overkill. Then his writing will support the current content of Wikipedia against the academic consensus. Perpetuum mobile.

> Ultimately the best way for the specialist to affect Wikipedia would be t write a piece of popular literature on the topic and thus destroy the popular consensus around Y.

You're joking, right? The set of skills required for being a specialist in the field and a good popular writer do not necessarily overlap. One piece of popular literature is not going to "destroy the popular consensus", especially if it is a widely spread myth. And a really good specialist in the field, any field, is likely to have a lot of work, far more than mediocre ones. The hours spent on Wikipedia are a much more significant commitment than the no-life editors realize. Writing a piece of popular literature and getting it published is likely too much effort and not going to happen.

Wikipedia is going down due to this, it's just not going down very fast.

No worries though. It will be replaced. Probably by something that will repeat this cycle, since it's the natural lifecycle of a human effort.

Easy, it's just a matter of illusion. You see, if you think the opponent is going in the Wrong Direction, limiting their abilities, and that they are finally going to realize that and either restart from scratch or do an awful lot of changes, while you've been moving in the Right, Blessed Direction all that time... Suddenly you will be in the lead! So, speed doesn't matter that much as long as the heathens are following their heretic ways and you stay on the One True Path..

It makes sense if you buy into that illusion. If you have a more engineering-type "whatever works" approach, it's complete BS.

Dear mods. How the HELL is the older one (695) funny?!? It's right up there with Mufasa!

Tried technology... Funny, but I think you just nailed the problem. And it's more within the scope of philosophy of science than anything else. The point is: our civilisation still has no idea how to fund applied science.

There are three main areas of science. Two are well understood and funding for them is well organized. The third one, perhaps most interesting, is a big unknown from the management side.

Disclaimer: I'm looking at this from the other side of the pond and applying my local experience. I wish to do applied science but have no funding mechanisms available for that.

We know how to deal with basic science. You have an idea, a hypothesis, whatever, you want to research it. You have no idea whether it's useful for anything - it's not really important to you. OK! Show that it will expand our general knowledge in a meaningful way. Funding is generally civilian (through the government in most cases). The results are judged using your publications. If you can get published and others cite you, you have increased our knowledge, congrats. Someday someone may build something useful that would be impossible without your work. Cool. The hypothesis is the core.

We know how to deal with R&D. You have an idea how to do something well known better using new technology. Or something new, using known technology. Show that you have a good chance of succeeding, then you get the funding. You might get some funding from the government, from the military, commercial R&D also fit here. If it seems to be a likely success, you get the money. The funding is based on weighing ROI (or other metrics) against the risk of the project - higher, if the technology is new. You may fail, that's accepted, but the risk should be relatively low - you know what you are doing. The application is the core.

Then we have the applied science. You have an idea that some well grounded scientific theory might be useful for a certain application. There's nothing out there proving that yet. You want to find out whether your idea is right. The application is clear, the theoretical side is clear (you need a theory here, not just a hypothesis, otherwise it's basic science), but neither is the core. The risk of failure is very high - if you knew it will work it would be R&D - but you focus on the application, not just gathering knowledge, it might not be very publishable, it might not increase general knowledge much - so, not basic science either.

We have no idea how to fund and manage something like this. Even though this is the road towards real breakthroughs. R&D is only incremental. Basic science has no direct application. Applied science is what moves us ahead. The risktakers mostly lose, but the ones who succeed move us forward to the next era of technology.

In this case the Pentagon seems to have decided that R&D is unlikely to provide the required advantage. R&D is predictable. It is a part of the race between armor and weapon. Protection gets better, but threats develop as well. The only thing that could jump ahead is a radical new idea. Something new that would be very hard to counter. Applied science. But the Pentagon had no management tools, procedures, etc. to handle something like that. So, procedures aimed at R&D were used. A prototype was required from the start - wrong. The decision on whether to continue funding the project was delayed until a prototype could be tested - wrong again.

It is a far more general problem. We need to learn how to conduct applied science in a responsible way. How to create research milestones that make sense and that allow the project to be halted (without prejudice - as a sunk cost) as soon as it becomes obvious that the proposed approach does not show a good chance of success. There are counterexamples, but in general this is something we don't seem to be able to do in a consistent way.

That's the only reason the money could be called "wasted". It made perfect sense to try these approaches. But letting them go this far and generate such costs - that's a proof that management of this type of projects is an art we simply haven't grasped yet.

Do you even know anything about cab service here? I live in the very centre of the city, the densest area there is. Still, under 15 minutes, less than 10 minutes for most calls. Cab companies have car age requirements just as Uber does. The company I use - 6 years max (after yesterday's trip I just wish they would also ban overuse of air fresheners, the guy must have had a non-functioning nose). I don't even know what a Crown Vic is (now I do, thanks, Google), this is Europe. And trip time is really a small part of the price, distance is far more important (in my experience traffic changes the price by at most 10%).

In other words - thanks for confirming my point, your license system is broken.

Then your license system is broken. Where I live, the average waiting time is - in my experience - well under 15 minutes. The driver knows the city well (2M city, over 500 km^2). The fare is posted on the door, clear and predictable. The quality of the car depends on the choice of company - more pricey ones tend to have much better cars, the cheapest are not so good, but still, average. No room for Uber in my opinion.

There are pathologies, of course. There are ways to cheat the system and operate without a license (you need to do this "occasionally"), so a bit like Uber. I've tried those a few times, they are indeed a bit cheaper but only one driver knew how to get to my destination (a fairly well-known street) without a GPS and most of them drove extremely carelessly and, when traffic allows, way too fast. There are also some licensed drivers tampering with meters (they are risking very high fines). Some (non-company) licensed taxis have prices set to the official maximum and hunt for foreigners in most popular places - fully legal, but not really moral. But if you know all that... Why Uber? Get rid of the knowledge of the city guaranteed by the exam, the requirement of a good car, etc?