Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:add a deposit (Score 1) 39

Indeed many journals have publication fees. Very few pass any share of those fees to the reviewers, which could expedite and improve reviews. (granted, it's hard to design a system that is robust to intention to subvert from its participants.... I've seen AI-generated reviews, and payments to reviewers could encourage more of that).

Comment Re:Why is US public education so bad? (Score 1) 155

Second, there seems to be an irrational resentment of public school teachers in the USA. American teachers express much lower job satisfaction and much more pessimism than Canadian teachers.

Shouldn't teachers bear significant responsibility for the education of children? Why shouldn't they be resented if they aren't delivering on that bargain-- tenure, pensions, etc in return for a good education? When there is more per-pupil spending and worse outcomes, I think the quality of teaching must be related. Surely not the only factor, but an important one in my eyes. The truth is that much of the increased per-pupil spending doesn't make it to the classroom, not only because of administration costs, but also because of the high and growing costs of teachers' health and retirement plans, which is a bigger systemic issue in the USA generally.

Comment Re:Credit monitoring? (Score 1) 28

It's worth something to the credit monitoring services! Nice gig for them, they get paid to release the data, and to monitor releases of the data. I don't know why or when it became the default compensation. Now they can come out on top of every breach -- even their own -- making money on selling more credit monitoring services.

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 121

Is this comment made in bad faith? Why would you have to make a copy to view a digital file? They served images of the books, not downloads. Functionally I don't see the difference if they had set up a kiosk with a webcam and robot to turn the pages so 1 person at a time could log in remotely and view an item in the collection?

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 121

I can't believe that you used it very much then for mainstream published books. I've got dozens on the list of 500,000 removed titles in my history that used to open to a 1-hour borrow option (all of which now say "unavailable to borrow" per https://help.archive.org/help/...). Of course, users could upload copyrighted material and not flag it as such, or older books flagged as public domain (correctly or incorrectly).

Comment Re:Risks No Longer Allowed - Consequences! (Score 1) 47

I remember it somewhat differently. I started gaming at the end of text based adventures (first game I remember was 1983's graphical adventure The Dark Crystal). I remember the 1990s in particular as a very turbulent time with many great games, but also game studios that closed left and right, even when they made great games time after time. They frequently would run out of money in development and get acquired or something. Interplay, Black Isle, Dynamix, Microprose, Apogee, Sierra... I think all ended up folding eventually acquired by conglomerates. Yet amazingly -- they still made innovative, risky games in hope for profit but also for the love of it. The economics of good games didn't work then either, even when it cost $50 for a big box at CompUSA.

Comment Re:The computer equivalent of... (Score 1) 27

For those curious, the hammer was only $435, practically a bargain! /s.

When you actually look into it, this is not the price paid for a hammer, but a result of the way the Pentagon accounting worked. They weren't itemizing their accounting but dividing the total cost of a package of equipment equally across each item in the kit, including the gear plus the labor and R&D. As if you bought a kit with a screwdriver and one screw for $4, and then said that the driver and the screw each cost $2. Now you can say that's dumb, but you can understand why they might be packaged together: if you need to send a specific list of gear to a bunch of locations, it would be foolish to send it all separately. So in the end it's a much more nuanced story than just a meme about government being dumb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

Comment Re:For what purpose? (Score 1) 17

IANA Marketer, but I would love to have one of these if it could be shipped in a suitcase and easily set up in flexible locations. My use case would be guest lectures. There was a conference paper that found students responded favorably to a life size projection (DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.85528). That system is relatively cheap, but the other obstacles (need a studio, don't wear black, etc) are just too much to expect to work smoothly, but someday I would love to be able to ship this around in a suitcase to conference speakers and not have to do flights + hotels to get guest lecturers from far away.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT

Working...