jebus989

Yeah, you are not. Say someone writes a contract saying that they can slap me in the face and each time they do I must pay $100, if I carefully read and then sign that contract, and they then slap me three times — have I been assaulted or do I owe $300, or both?

British guy problems but I thought someone was blogging about a very small financial loss on a game they made. lbs would help.

I don't buy that this three-guy operation has the means for such litigation and this post gives no indication they've had any consultation with a relevant legal professional thus far.

Maybe too late to see this now but to answer your Q I'm at Edinburgh; IMO an ok university but not prestigious. Most EU PhDs are 3.5-4 years, I have a friend with dual US-UK citizenship that chose to do his PhD over here for this reason.

I agree wrt differences between similarly ranked institutions. I'd say similarly that the variance within groups at a top 5 school is greater than the variance between groups when compared with slightly lower ranking institutes.

Overhead, I'm on a fast-track 3yr EU PhD admittedly the US system is a different animal in this regard. Is it the only way to become an expert, of course not and I don't think anyone is making that argument.

Yes I did read the article. So you're equating "job prospects" with "chance of being a tenured professor in a specific field", more usually it means the opportunity to enter a well-paying or otherwise respectable career of any type.

Costs, sure I imagine I would earn more as a technician in industry with an MSc but if you're driven by immediate-term financial gain I'd agree a PhD is not for you.

Prestige, at PhD level it matters less about the institution than your specific advisor. Also I'd argue science is ahead of most careers in being a meritocracy, the quality of your publications should count for more than your institute's ranking. Should people care about the level of research of their institute as judged by an independent group of peers, probably yes.

> The overhead,

Vague

> the poor job prospects

Relative to whom?

> the cost

If you're paying a dime to do a PhD you're doing it wrong — I get paid an ok amount and my fees are covered.

> the obsession with prestige

Not sure what you mean by this.

I've got to query this, I don't believe antibiotics like penicillin cause any motor/visual impairment

Anyone can make a redirect to anything, generally they don't face much scrutiny because "redirects are cheap" [0]. Though there has been some discussion about deleting those that are just emojis e.g. [1-2]. Here's a category of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Redirect...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_are_cheap

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discus...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirects_for_discus...

> We could study it for years and would only know a small fraction of what's going on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAIN_Initiative

edit: should clarify, I agree with your premise. My point is only that we are studying it in these two huge projects

A more computational crowd might enjoy "You're not allowed bioinformatics anymore": http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/youre-not-allo...

The way I've heard this story in the past was specifically that anon did the unswirl and then tipped off the police. But seeing as that isn't mentioned on wiki (and not uber keen to google about), I guess it's probably not the case.

Police == 4chan?

To those using it: How are apps running under XQuartz, especially w/ multi-monitor?

Interesting topics but relatively poor pieces, the above is a featured article no less!

Still present: https://twitter.com/MeanTXLawyer/status/483692810684493825

Not sure the account is legit however.

Sounds like you last used ubuntu in 2006?

See also the UK service Pact: https://www.pactcoffee.com/ This is just another "me too" business, scoop a few beans into a brown paper bag and post it out with a huge margin.

Just saw this but yes that's it! Many thanks

I don't think this is a strong argument, how is everything win-win? What if I get hit by a car on the way home, is that win-win?Likewise getting fair compensation for a task, do boring/hard chores get money, isn't win-win it's zero-sum.

Re: the last sentence, welcome to capitalism where we don't typically evenly share out the earnings from anything.

I don't think that's how the world works, you don't go from "I blogged at the Huffington Post" to President, but maybe it gets you a paid journalism gig, or a book deal, or it just fractionally helps the pagerank of your own site. Maybe it just looks slightly more interesting on a résumé than your wordpress blog. What do you expect to get out of writing about your interests in your free time?

Anecdotal example: I'm essentially a nobody but was approached by a literary agent after a HP blog post.

With HuffPo, you retain ownership of your work and are free to publish it anywhere else.

The same guy contacted me and I've submitted a couple of pieces since. He was very upfront and clear about what was being offered, i.e. submit the things you're writing anyway to us, and subject to editorial discretion they may be featured on some hugely-trafficked section, else just archived on "the blog".

For doing this they offer you a small profile with various links: to your amazon books, your website, twitter, an RSS feed as well as the "exposure" and (ever decreasing in value) bragging rights of writing (well, blogging) for the Huffington Post. You give them doctored versions of the blog posts you're writing anyway with a slight risk of hurting your own SEO.

I think everyone is privy to their business model but IMO it's win-win unless you're in a position where others are already keen to pay for your work.

I just googled but couldn't hit it (+at work) but I remember an instance of someone editing Wikipedia claiming some known person had been found dead a day or so before it happened. Police investigated and found it was just a freak coincidence — just some guy vandalising the page. Kind of "a million monkeys" in practice: given there's loads of nonsense additions, at some point over a few years they will accurately predict future events.

I guess it's mildly amusing someone actually bought a .club gTLD

Presumably there's some Durden-esque equation for costing this, wherein increased earnings from customer retention and goodwill more than offset estimated losses through fraud.

This is absolutely a fair comment, coders but not software engineers, and is the same problem that's permeated bioinformatics for the last decade or so. (As an aside, it's fun hearing grand claims about data science revolutionising medicine in 10 years [0], when the same claims were made about bioinformatics 10 years ago.)

[0] https://twitter.com/HanChenNZ/status/473825783874859008

I've never met a statistician who either uses excel or has a "disdain for programming". R or Matlab are basic tools of the trade

Always relevant in these discussions: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye

I guess the tl;dr is that community churn is healthy, expected. Leaving essays may be of limited use depending on how many axes to author has to grind or how generally-applicable their comments are to the rest of the community.

Maybe it's obvious to those with a better understanding of the game but can explain that "no shame" comment at 11:44?

It's not "their" classification, you pick the race you self-identify as.