I said he is qualified to talk about these issues, not that he is infallible on them. Obviously the remarks themselves are fair game. The Slashdot readers I intended to criticise are those posting "lol what does this joker know" and assuming he's a standard clueless industry guy because he happens to align with them on this issue.

He had permission to use the studio. This is quite well-known.

Re: copying and success, he did the giveaway albums after the multi-platinum record and before the Hollywood soundtracks so... I don't really understand what you're trying to say?

Made a breakthrough album in his free time while working as a studio engineer. Made some more important records. Legendary live performer. Made a couple of film soundtracks. Ran his own label. Had bust-ups with his labels. Told Australian fans to steal his album Year Zero because the prices in the shops were too high. Released an album under Creative Commons NC and made money off the deluxe editions. Released another project under "pay something or don't, up to you". Released an album for free online. Makes remix stems available to all and hosts a site for community remixes. He's probably one of the most qualified people out there to talk about music production and distribution. And Slashdotters are going to ignore that because they don't like what he's saying.

Org-mode is the answer. Start with basic outlining features and build from there. If there's something you want to do: a) RTFM, there's a good chance it already exists, otherwise b) contact the mailing list. They're very helpful and feature requests are picked up quickly.

I am a researcher in the UK, and this is pretty much happening here. It's required by the national body which the government uses to fund research (some info here) and that requirement gets passed on to the subject area-specific research councils.

Basically, work I publish needs to at least be available on a University-level preprint server ("green" open-access); many publications allow this now. For publishers that don't, the research councils have arrangements with research institutes to pay the fees for the final published versions to be publicly available ("gold" open-access). It's not ideal as we're still overpaying the publishers, but it's a compromise that sets a pretty clear direction. In addition, I'm required to make research data readily available. Rumour has it that my research council will soon be picking random papers, trying to get the data, and kicking buttocks where they encounter a problem.

I don't think legislation is necessary; policy at the funding level seems to be doing the trick, and is a bit more flexible.

"seedbox"

This. Right here. Every time I come up with a password that is both strong and memorable.

The music analogy is more correct than they realise. A huge proportion of music is poorly served by cherry-picking the most appealing tracks; any kind of suite or conceptual work is much better understood when you experience the whole structure. If you can pick a couple of tracks from an album and get a comparable or better experience than someone who listened to the whole thing, it probably wasn't a very good album to start with. Similarly, a course with light depth and populist subjects might be well-suited to cherry-picking, but this would be a symptom of a shallow course.

The solution of course is to create analogous "Double A-Side" and "EP" courses, which are short, stand alone, and add some breadth to the student experience at a reasonable level of quality. The standard should still be the LP.

Hi, I use research supercomputers. There are rarely many idle cores, as they use queue systems to allow many researchers to simultaneously submit multiple jobs with different requirements. Scheduling software attempts to manage the parallel job sizes to minimise unused nodes. When there are idle cores it is usually for a reason (i.e. running down certain queues at certain times to support certain patterns of use) and it wouldn't be possible to easily squeeze in a little bitcoin crunching.

I don't buy it, but I do use it. The UK academic supercomputer ARCHER has a handy cost calculator:
http://www.archer.ac.uk/access/au-calculator

150,000 USD is about 90,000 GBP; playing with the numbers here that would buy a non-partner research council about 1200 hours of 3072-core jobs; about 3.7 million core hours on 2.7 GHz 12-core Ivy Bridge CPUs with 64GB of RAM per 2-CPU node. A non-trivial amount of computer time!

Given that this is what would be charged to national and European and academic research projects, and is run by a UK research funding council which will have taken some national funds to set up the facility in the first case, I doubt the pricing is wholly unreasonable. It's a shame the article is not clearer on this point, but the most obvious assumption would be that they are talking about $150k at research council rates. In which case the 'fantasy' is in the form of ignored subsidies to capital costs.

If only there were some kind of universal character set that included all these scripts

PlayOnLinux also makes it pretty easy, and explicitly supports a lot of GOG installers... Currently enjoying Neverwinter Nights from the GOG Insomnia sale on my Linux music production rig. Still, native versions are nice, and I won't buy a game from them if I have reason to suspect a native version is available.

Welcome to Slashdot 2014: news for professionals, stuff that you're being paid to care about

I have no idea, and that's the scary part.

I didn't realise that arguments could be invalidated by mere unpopularity.