I tend to agree. I think the best thing that could happen to Adobe would be getting bought by somebody. Anybody. Except Autodesk. That would suck slightly worse than the current situation... but not much.
The best part is that at least as far as we know, none of this technically violates the Star Trek canon. See how easy it is to write cool stories that don't violate canon and yet are completely different from anything you've seen before?:-)
Oddly enough, the hardest thing about this post was not capitalizing canon. Guess I've been writing/reading too much about cameras lately. But I digress.
Extremely difficult. The US has deals with phone companies, operating system creators, and hardware manufacturers, to put backdoor systems into so many devices. They monitor so many email and phone companies. How can you be fully sure you didn't buy a machine that has a secret backdoor entry that the FBI or CIA can get into easily? How can you know that your PC isn't already set up for intercepts on all of your activity? You'd need to be an expert on computer software, hardware, intercept technology, and so many other things just to detect that you were being actively monitored. And being passively monitored like how the NSA just copies everything sent anywhere.
Not difficult at all. It's called an air gap. You buy a laptop specifically for the purpose of decrypting the messages. You set it up without connecting it to the Internet. You generate your private-public key pair on this machine and use a flash drive to manually copy the public key to a different machine so that you can provide it to whoever needs it. When you receive a message, you copy that to a flash drive, then copy it to the other machine, then extract it.
Ideally, the private key should also be stored on a (different) USB key that you carry with you, to reduce the risk of physical theft by (hopefully) ensuring that the key and the encrypted data are never in the same place except when you are decrypting that data. If you are really paranoid, you can split the key into pieces so that multiple key dongles held by separate people must be stolen or confiscated before encryption is compromised.
This is how high-security data handling works everywhere. If intercepting it could mean the end of (the|your) world, you build an air gap, and you ensure that the computers on the inside of that gap are never connected to the public Internet in any way, shape or form. And when you're done with the machine, you destroy its hard drive in accordance with DoD manual 5200.01.
Of course, this ignores TEMPEST/Van Eck phreaking; chances are, you aren't that important, but if you are, you should also take precautions to physically secure your air gap room against any EM emissions from the computer in question.
And I suspect that Adobe doesn't really care. If you buy a copy of Photoshop once every 4 - 5 years, you're not sending Adobe much love. So they don't send much back. If this works for the bigger shops / better customers than it's a win. Remember, if you don't sell to the hoi polli, you don't have to support the hoi polli.
The problem is, those bigger shops hire contractors who are suddenly not running an old copy of Photoshop, but instead running some competitor's products. The more this happens, the more their core business erodes as those companies say, "Hey, if they can get by with X, so can we," and one day, Adobe's CEO wakes up and realizes that nobody is forking over $240 per year for Photoshop anymore.
On the plus side, the term will always remain "shopped", because "mated" sounds very wrong. Perhaps in a couple of decades, Adobe can turn their trademark lawsuit team into a cost center.
I'm afraid that Corel and Pixelmator just don't have the ability to lift their products to near PS status.
Not sure about Corel. From my experimentation so far, I'm pretty impressed at how well Pixelmator is doing with Photoshop file format compatibility. They don't have some of the text layout stuff (per-character positioning, IIRC) working yet, but they just got CMYK, and I wouldn't be surprised to see 16-bit-per-channel support in the not-too-distant future. I suspect that in the long run, they will actually have a sizable advantage because they aren't dealing with a nearly thirty-year-old codebase like Adobe is.
$19/month and I get the latest version of whatever software I'm using, even if they do a number jump
But why do you care if you have the latest version? Unless you're working in the industry or using the apps on a daily basis, a three-year-old version is likely just as good as the current one.
Photoshop was the only game in town. They're losing the low end rather rapidly to other companies like Corel and Pixelmator. It's only a matter of time before that erosion eliminates their market.
Worse, Adobe's decision is having serious fallout for other communities like the photographer community that historically always used Photoshop for their touch-up work because it integrated well with Lightroom. Even though they haven't been stupid enough to make LR cloud-only, there are a lot of folks who are very unhappy with the current state of affairs.
I suspect that within two or three years, one of two things will happen: Adobe will back-pedal on the whole rental-only model or Pixelmator and Corel Paint will get significantly improved, fully native DNG support and photographers will dump Photoshop en masse, and along with it, quite possibly Lightroom. The current situation is simply unsustainable.
For Autodesk, I doubt anyone will care. From what I've seen, outside the corporate world, nobody in their right minds uses Autodesk's products unless they have no alternative, so you can safely assume that they're going to milk this for every penny it is worth until they eventually go belly up. Their goose is cooked; it's just a question of who is going to carve.
...Microsoft's future directions are so obvious. Microsoft needs to"
Spin off its apps division, because trying to keep Windows/Windows RT as the only mobile platform for Office A. results in fewer sales of Office, and B. is a crutch that partially prevents the OS team from feeling like they have to be the best. In short, the "synergy" only holds both teams back.
Radically redesign the RT UI without all the bright pastel buttons that make it look like it was designed for children.
Stop trying to unify Windows and Windows RT (though providing the ability to run RT apps on the desktop in a window would be fine) because it just pisses off both communities.
Take steps to gain developers on RT by creating better development tools that make it brain-dead simple to build both an RT and native Windows UI for an app and by providing an RT runtime for iOS and/or Android and/or vice-versa so that developers can rework their code once and target both RT and an OS that they're going to target anyway.
Give away all those extra Windows RT tablets to developers in exchange for a promise to deploy their app on the platform.
Deprecate and remove a metric f***ton of API from Windows, no matter who it breaks.
Make Windows RT hardware that is significantly better than an iPad, without compromises. This means that there must be models with built-in cellular service, for starters. The rear camera must be at least as good as the 5 MP iPad rear camera. The battery life must be as good or better. And so on. All of these things are currently significantly worse on the Surface RT; even the iPad Mini has a better rear camera. Yet the price wasn't dramatically cheaper. The only thing it wins on is the number of CPU cores, and that's just not a feature you can sell.
And so on. All of these things are obvious to a casual observer. Why they aren't obvious to Microsoft is beyond my comprehension. It is as though they have been managed by somebody who has been on vacation for the past decade, left to continue doing what they have always done, in the vain hope that somehow their previous offerings will become relevant again. They won't, and the longer Office is managed under the same bozos, the more likely it is to become completely irrelevant in the same way Windows has in the mobile space.
No place to go? It's an infinite universe with an infinite timeline. Therefore, there are an infinite number of things that could happen that don't involve interactions with anyone important and therefore don't affect the timeline. You could write a story about the war between the Vulcans and the Romulans, for one. That's never been explored in any depth. Heck, that could be an entire series by itself, with almost no risk of significantly violating the canon.
They could really screw with everybody and produce a timeline in which Richard Woolsey is frozen after getting seriously injured defending Earth from a replicator attack, the Stargate program is abandoned and forgotten about per an IOA mandate, and Woolsey ends up being discovered on a distant planet by the Enterprise.
The first one wasn't bad. The second one felt like a half-assed attempt at remaking Wrath of Khan, and didn't hold together very well, IMO. It lacked plausibility in many respects, and also lacked the emotional depth of Wrath, because they brought the main character back before the movie ended. It felt like a version of Star Trek crafted specifically for people with short attention spans and little ability to spot plot holes.
College has changed from 'The halls of higher learning' to the thing that every American HS school does because that is what you do to get ahead in life.
The irony being that because every high school student does it, they cannot, by definition, get ahead, because "ahead" is inherently relative.
One major problem is that our public K-12 system has completely failed to keep up with the times. Instead of teaching useful skills, it continues to teach the same things it did before, and at approximately the same pace. We still spend roughly an entire year teaching multiplication even though computers have advanced civilization to the point that no human being has needed to do multiplication in their heads or on paper for decades. Why are we wasting all that time? Spend a single 6-week period on the basics, explain what it means, how it is useful, then move on.
And we delay all of the interesting stuff so that by the time the kids are exposed to it, their brains are too hard-wired to learn it effectively. We should start teaching at least the basic fundamentals of algebra by first or second grade. Those of us who grew up learning programming at a young age know that this is doable. I remember getting into algebra and saying, "Oh. This is easy. I've been doing this for more than half a decade." If everyone had been given the opportunity to learn those concepts earlier (as opposed to just the few of us who taught ourselves how to program in first grade), high school could have been closer to what college is, and college wouldn't be necessary for most people.
Instead, we squander the first 13 years of education, wasting most of them on archaic and antiquated learning that does not serve students well, while delaying all of the interesting and fun stuff until college. Is it any wonder, then, that everyone wants to go to college, or that many people spend years grazing from major to major, exploring all of the possibilities denied to them in their pre-college years?
As someone whose parents both retired recently from teaching at four-year universities, I don't buy that explanation. At all. It's pure and utter bulls**t. The fact is, most universities are barely holding on financially, having to cut entire programs to keep from going under. Professors' salaries barely keep up with inflation most of the time, if that, and staff salaries don't fare much better. They rely more and more on adjunct instructors to cover classes because they can't afford to hire additional professors to cover the classes.
Why are the costs going up? The main reason is that the cost of living is going up, while the states keep cutting the portion of the tuition that they pay so that they can spend that money on other programs. Most universities are getting smaller and smaller portions of their operating budget from the state, which inevitably means that they have to charge higher and higher tuition to make up the difference. There's no market magic involved here. There's no supply and demand at work. The demand is fixed; everyone wants an education. The supply is also fixed; every school can handle only a certain number of people. There's no profit margin—most schools are purely nonprofit and cannot make money except as temporary savings towards future costs—therefore, the cost is purely driven by the cost of operation. Any statements to the contrary, at least as far as public universities are concerned, are just plain wrong.
This is not to say that there isn't bloat in the system; if you dig in, you can find lots of small places where costs could easily be cut, and together they add up to big inefficiencies. The problem is that those inefficiencies are hard to rout out without a concerted effort by someone who understands how to motivate people. For example, policies along the lines of "Any money your department doesn't spend by the end of the year is returned to the general budget and may result in a reduction in your budget next year" are a big part of why we have this bloat creep problem. Fixing those sorts of policies at a systemwide level and giving bonuses for finding ways to improve efficiency are what is needed. Unfortunately, that sort of thinking seems to be very contrary to the university culture, at least in the United States. And this is another reason why the cost of education (and government in general) keeps going up.
The problem is that you're taking an average where an average is useless. There are too many variables. Many popular schools charge outrageous tuition not because it costs a lot of money, but rather to limit the number of applicants. You can recognize these schools because their sports teams are regularly mentioned on ESPN.
Also, not all students pay the same amount. If you choose to attend a school in another state, you get to pay a much higher out-of-state tuition rate because you have to pay the portion of your tuition that would otherwise be paid by the state. This artificially inflates averages, particularly with highly popular schools.
Exclude the largest schools, exclude private schools (that cost more because the state isn't footing part of the bill), and exclude out-of-state tuition, and the numbers become a lot more reasonable. My undergrad alma mater, for example, is one of the smaller schools in the University of Tennessee system. Assuming you are either from the same state or from a nearby county in Kentucky (and thus are eligible for in-state tuition), going there costs only $3,528 per semester, for a grand total of a little over 28 grand for a four-year degree, without any scholarships, grants, etc.
Now admittedly, this is not the full picture. If you have to pay for room and board, depending on whether you live in a dorm, an on-campus apartment, or an off-campus apartment, you could pay anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 a semester in housing. Depending on your major, you could pay anywhere from $250 to $1,000 a semester in books. And so on. The correct question to ask is how many people asked for the $1,400 per semester dorms and were forced to choose the $3,000 per month on-campus apartments (or vice-versa)—a piece of information that cannot really be reflected by any sort of average.
And this is why averages are pretty much useless as a metric. Either way, you really have to question the wisdom of anyone paying anywhere close to $28,000 per year unless they're in a state where the cost of living is equally obscene, such as California or much of the eastern seaboard... and really, even then. I mean, that's 2.5 times the tuition for even some of the smaller UC schools.
It seems to be like it's only a 2.5D scanner. Trying to scan a bowl would result in a half-sphere model.
I think that might depend on how tall the bowl is. If it can see over the top, I would think that it could determine the shape of the inside, though if it only sees part of the inside, it might incorrectly make a bundt pan.:-)
That said, even assuming that it can scan the inside of such an object (and that's an absolute requirement for pretty much any of the things I'd do with something like this), I think I'll still wait for generation 2 (or 3, or 20). The things that I'd like to be able to scan all require more height than this is capable of handling—not because the object I want to produce has greater height, but because I need to replicate a portion of a real-world object, and there's no way to position that real-world object halfway through the rotating table.
They really should have put the camera on a set of vertical slides, with the ability to substitute posts of different lengths if desired (e.g. provide it with 6" posts, but offer 18" posts). It would not have increased the cost of the hardware significantly, and would have resulted in a much more useful piece of hardware. Of course, it would be even better if it had the ability to crawl vertically up those posts to reproduce the shape of more complex objects by adding vertical parallax.
The complete leak was resulting from a chain of errors. WikiLeaks screwed up and published the entire blob where anyone could download it. Then the Guardian screwed up and published a book containing the password. Without WikiLeaks screwing up to begin with, the password disclosure by the Guardian would have been a non-incident.
Also, IMO, it really doesn't matter if he tried some mainstream outlets first, nor does it matter how WikiLeaks handled it. What matters is that the moment WikiLeaks became involved, any credibility went out the window, because they are the journalistic equivalent of a tabloid, at best. At that moment, everything became suspect—became tainted. He should have kept trying major news organizations until he found someone willing to break the story. Period.
If he'd been smart enough to send the war crime data, and ONLY that, to the Hague etc then he'd likely have fared better than by doing a bulk data dump which included so much material he couldn't have checked it all.
You're correct. He would have been caught after sending only the first handful of reports, and he probably would have been tried for only one count of espionage instead of six. And any actual crimes that folks might have uncovered in the rest of the material would never have been uncovered.
That's the problem. At a fundamental level, whistleblower protection must cover public disclosure, because (with the exception of a single isolated incident here and there) if the organization against whom the whistle is being blown were capable of policing itself, the blowing would not have been necessary in the first place; blowing the whistle to an internal auditor is pretty much guaranteed to be useless. And once you release something to the public, chances are, the government knows who you are. Therefore, you get one shot at releasing everything that needs to be released. Anyone suggesting that there's another way is really kidding himself or herself.
This is not to say that he couldn't potentially have tried to be more selective about it, but there's also a time factor involved. The longer it takes from when a crime occurs to when the public knows about it, the more likely it is that the perpetrator will get off because of statutes of limitations. Therefore, if the goal actually is ensuring that those crimes get prosecuted, the best hope is distributing the information broadly to a large group of people who can then divide and conquer. The press is remarkably good at that. The only question is whether they can be trusted to be responsible about what they disclose.
Now disclosing it to a site like Wikileaks... is a different story. His mistake was not what he disclosed, nor was his mistake disclosing it to the press. His mistake was disclosing it through a dubious organization that operates on the fringes of the law rather than going directly to a reporter at a major news organization.
With my cynic hat on, I think this might actually be good if you're a criminal. IIRC, the statute of limitations for some crimes doesn't begin ticking until someone could reasonably have discovered the crime. I could see someone arguing that the police should have been able to determine based on this evidence that the person committed a crime, and therefore the clock began ticking earlier....
Far worse than just that. The first time I read the headline (half asleep), I read it as "Florida Town Loses License Plate Camera Images For Ten Years". The data mining and privacy loss potential is enormous, so there could be an enormous reward for anyone willing to... how shall I put this... inadvertently misplace a hard drive containing that data.
Remember that the more valuable the data you store electronically, the more likely it is to be stolen and used by the bad guys. At some point the value is so great that more of the data is likely to be used by the bad guys than the good guys. This is true for pretty much any definition of good/bad guys. For example, if I were a crook who knew a crooked cop, this would be a goldmine of information. With this data, I could figure out with a reasonable degree of probability when any given family is unlikely to be home, and use that to my advantage when planning robberies to drastically reduce the amount of stake-out time needed while still minimizing my chances of getting caught. And by looking at the makes of cars, I could gain further insight into the likelihood of the house having valuables in it, allowing me to choose my next target more quickly. Heck, somebody really enterprising could turn it into a black-market data mining business for other robbers and make a small fortune in no time flat.
IMO, even if we completely ignore any risks posed by police abusing the data, the data theft risk alone from keeping this much personally identifiable tracking data on nearly every single person in the state of Florida for such a long period of time far outweighs any possible benefit it could have. Heck, the risk of keeping it for more than about a week far outweighs any practical benefit, statistically speaking. The risk of keeping it for ten years far exceeds the entire benefit of having a police force.
Unless someone who receives the source is allowed to redistribute that source, it does not qualify as an Open Source license. Open Source requires that the redistribution rights flow downstream.
Copyrighted music, unless explicitly licensed in such a way to allow further redistribution by anyone who receives a copy, is more of a "shared source" or "licensed source access" model, in which certain distributors are explicitly authorized by the copyright holder to redistribute it under certain terms, but in which that right is not conferred downstream. While this provides some of the same benefits, it does not meet the minimum criteria for being an Open Source license.
The distinction between Open Source and Free is that the latter is not allowed to be redistributed in closed (binary) form without making the source available. A non-free music license would allow you to use it, modify it, and distribute recordings (binary form) without providing sheet music. A free license would require you to provide the altered sheet music upon request.
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I tend to agree. I think the best thing that could happen to Adobe would be getting bought by somebody. Anybody. Except Autodesk. That would suck slightly worse than the current situation... but not much.
The best part is that at least as far as we know, none of this technically violates the Star Trek canon. See how easy it is to write cool stories that don't violate canon and yet are completely different from anything you've seen before? :-)
Oddly enough, the hardest thing about this post was not capitalizing canon. Guess I've been writing/reading too much about cameras lately. But I digress.
Ooh. I know this. The probe destroys Earth, and all the whales leave, saying, "So long and thanks for all the fish." No, wait.
Look here.
Not difficult at all. It's called an air gap. You buy a laptop specifically for the purpose of decrypting the messages. You set it up without connecting it to the Internet. You generate your private-public key pair on this machine and use a flash drive to manually copy the public key to a different machine so that you can provide it to whoever needs it. When you receive a message, you copy that to a flash drive, then copy it to the other machine, then extract it.
Ideally, the private key should also be stored on a (different) USB key that you carry with you, to reduce the risk of physical theft by (hopefully) ensuring that the key and the encrypted data are never in the same place except when you are decrypting that data. If you are really paranoid, you can split the key into pieces so that multiple key dongles held by separate people must be stolen or confiscated before encryption is compromised.
This is how high-security data handling works everywhere. If intercepting it could mean the end of (the|your) world, you build an air gap, and you ensure that the computers on the inside of that gap are never connected to the public Internet in any way, shape or form. And when you're done with the machine, you destroy its hard drive in accordance with DoD manual 5200.01.
Of course, this ignores TEMPEST/Van Eck phreaking; chances are, you aren't that important, but if you are, you should also take precautions to physically secure your air gap room against any EM emissions from the computer in question.
And as always, Keep Calm and Carry a Towel.
The problem is, those bigger shops hire contractors who are suddenly not running an old copy of Photoshop, but instead running some competitor's products. The more this happens, the more their core business erodes as those companies say, "Hey, if they can get by with X, so can we," and one day, Adobe's CEO wakes up and realizes that nobody is forking over $240 per year for Photoshop anymore.
On the plus side, the term will always remain "shopped", because "mated" sounds very wrong. Perhaps in a couple of decades, Adobe can turn their trademark lawsuit team into a cost center.
Not sure about Corel. From my experimentation so far, I'm pretty impressed at how well Pixelmator is doing with Photoshop file format compatibility. They don't have some of the text layout stuff (per-character positioning, IIRC) working yet, but they just got CMYK, and I wouldn't be surprised to see 16-bit-per-channel support in the not-too-distant future. I suspect that in the long run, they will actually have a sizable advantage because they aren't dealing with a nearly thirty-year-old codebase like Adobe is.
But why do you care if you have the latest version? Unless you're working in the industry or using the apps on a daily basis, a three-year-old version is likely just as good as the current one.
Photoshop was the only game in town. They're losing the low end rather rapidly to other companies like Corel and Pixelmator. It's only a matter of time before that erosion eliminates their market.
Worse, Adobe's decision is having serious fallout for other communities like the photographer community that historically always used Photoshop for their touch-up work because it integrated well with Lightroom. Even though they haven't been stupid enough to make LR cloud-only, there are a lot of folks who are very unhappy with the current state of affairs.
I suspect that within two or three years, one of two things will happen: Adobe will back-pedal on the whole rental-only model or Pixelmator and Corel Paint will get significantly improved, fully native DNG support and photographers will dump Photoshop en masse, and along with it, quite possibly Lightroom. The current situation is simply unsustainable.
For Autodesk, I doubt anyone will care. From what I've seen, outside the corporate world, nobody in their right minds uses Autodesk's products unless they have no alternative, so you can safely assume that they're going to milk this for every penny it is worth until they eventually go belly up. Their goose is cooked; it's just a question of who is going to carve.
Sigh. Punctuation fail. My bad.
...Microsoft's future directions are so obvious. Microsoft needs to"
Give away all those extra Windows RT tablets to developers in exchange for a promise to deploy their app on the platform.
And so on. All of these things are obvious to a casual observer. Why they aren't obvious to Microsoft is beyond my comprehension. It is as though they have been managed by somebody who has been on vacation for the past decade, left to continue doing what they have always done, in the vain hope that somehow their previous offerings will become relevant again. They won't, and the longer Office is managed under the same bozos, the more likely it is to become completely irrelevant in the same way Windows has in the mobile space.
No place to go? It's an infinite universe with an infinite timeline. Therefore, there are an infinite number of things that could happen that don't involve interactions with anyone important and therefore don't affect the timeline. You could write a story about the war between the Vulcans and the Romulans, for one. That's never been explored in any depth. Heck, that could be an entire series by itself, with almost no risk of significantly violating the canon.
They could really screw with everybody and produce a timeline in which Richard Woolsey is frozen after getting seriously injured defending Earth from a replicator attack, the Stargate program is abandoned and forgotten about per an IOA mandate, and Woolsey ends up being discovered on a distant planet by the Enterprise.
The first one wasn't bad. The second one felt like a half-assed attempt at remaking Wrath of Khan, and didn't hold together very well, IMO. It lacked plausibility in many respects, and also lacked the emotional depth of Wrath, because they brought the main character back before the movie ended. It felt like a version of Star Trek crafted specifically for people with short attention spans and little ability to spot plot holes.
Start with all the blacklisted people in Hollywood and we'll go from there.
Up more than 6% at the moment.
The irony being that because every high school student does it, they cannot, by definition, get ahead, because "ahead" is inherently relative.
One major problem is that our public K-12 system has completely failed to keep up with the times. Instead of teaching useful skills, it continues to teach the same things it did before, and at approximately the same pace. We still spend roughly an entire year teaching multiplication even though computers have advanced civilization to the point that no human being has needed to do multiplication in their heads or on paper for decades. Why are we wasting all that time? Spend a single 6-week period on the basics, explain what it means, how it is useful, then move on.
And we delay all of the interesting stuff so that by the time the kids are exposed to it, their brains are too hard-wired to learn it effectively. We should start teaching at least the basic fundamentals of algebra by first or second grade. Those of us who grew up learning programming at a young age know that this is doable. I remember getting into algebra and saying, "Oh. This is easy. I've been doing this for more than half a decade." If everyone had been given the opportunity to learn those concepts earlier (as opposed to just the few of us who taught ourselves how to program in first grade), high school could have been closer to what college is, and college wouldn't be necessary for most people.
Instead, we squander the first 13 years of education, wasting most of them on archaic and antiquated learning that does not serve students well, while delaying all of the interesting and fun stuff until college. Is it any wonder, then, that everyone wants to go to college, or that many people spend years grazing from major to major, exploring all of the possibilities denied to them in their pre-college years?
As someone whose parents both retired recently from teaching at four-year universities, I don't buy that explanation. At all. It's pure and utter bulls**t. The fact is, most universities are barely holding on financially, having to cut entire programs to keep from going under. Professors' salaries barely keep up with inflation most of the time, if that, and staff salaries don't fare much better. They rely more and more on adjunct instructors to cover classes because they can't afford to hire additional professors to cover the classes.
Why are the costs going up? The main reason is that the cost of living is going up, while the states keep cutting the portion of the tuition that they pay so that they can spend that money on other programs. Most universities are getting smaller and smaller portions of their operating budget from the state, which inevitably means that they have to charge higher and higher tuition to make up the difference. There's no market magic involved here. There's no supply and demand at work. The demand is fixed; everyone wants an education. The supply is also fixed; every school can handle only a certain number of people. There's no profit margin—most schools are purely nonprofit and cannot make money except as temporary savings towards future costs—therefore, the cost is purely driven by the cost of operation. Any statements to the contrary, at least as far as public universities are concerned, are just plain wrong.
This is not to say that there isn't bloat in the system; if you dig in, you can find lots of small places where costs could easily be cut, and together they add up to big inefficiencies. The problem is that those inefficiencies are hard to rout out without a concerted effort by someone who understands how to motivate people. For example, policies along the lines of "Any money your department doesn't spend by the end of the year is returned to the general budget and may result in a reduction in your budget next year" are a big part of why we have this bloat creep problem. Fixing those sorts of policies at a systemwide level and giving bonuses for finding ways to improve efficiency are what is needed. Unfortunately, that sort of thinking seems to be very contrary to the university culture, at least in the United States. And this is another reason why the cost of education (and government in general) keeps going up.
The problem is that you're taking an average where an average is useless. There are too many variables. Many popular schools charge outrageous tuition not because it costs a lot of money, but rather to limit the number of applicants. You can recognize these schools because their sports teams are regularly mentioned on ESPN.
Also, not all students pay the same amount. If you choose to attend a school in another state, you get to pay a much higher out-of-state tuition rate because you have to pay the portion of your tuition that would otherwise be paid by the state. This artificially inflates averages, particularly with highly popular schools.
Exclude the largest schools, exclude private schools (that cost more because the state isn't footing part of the bill), and exclude out-of-state tuition, and the numbers become a lot more reasonable. My undergrad alma mater, for example, is one of the smaller schools in the University of Tennessee system. Assuming you are either from the same state or from a nearby county in Kentucky (and thus are eligible for in-state tuition), going there costs only $3,528 per semester, for a grand total of a little over 28 grand for a four-year degree, without any scholarships, grants, etc.
Now admittedly, this is not the full picture. If you have to pay for room and board, depending on whether you live in a dorm, an on-campus apartment, or an off-campus apartment, you could pay anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 a semester in housing. Depending on your major, you could pay anywhere from $250 to $1,000 a semester in books. And so on. The correct question to ask is how many people asked for the $1,400 per semester dorms and were forced to choose the $3,000 per month on-campus apartments (or vice-versa)—a piece of information that cannot really be reflected by any sort of average.
And this is why averages are pretty much useless as a metric. Either way, you really have to question the wisdom of anyone paying anywhere close to $28,000 per year unless they're in a state where the cost of living is equally obscene, such as California or much of the eastern seaboard... and really, even then. I mean, that's 2.5 times the tuition for even some of the smaller UC schools.
I think that might depend on how tall the bowl is. If it can see over the top, I would think that it could determine the shape of the inside, though if it only sees part of the inside, it might incorrectly make a bundt pan. :-)
That said, even assuming that it can scan the inside of such an object (and that's an absolute requirement for pretty much any of the things I'd do with something like this), I think I'll still wait for generation 2 (or 3, or 20). The things that I'd like to be able to scan all require more height than this is capable of handling—not because the object I want to produce has greater height, but because I need to replicate a portion of a real-world object, and there's no way to position that real-world object halfway through the rotating table.
They really should have put the camera on a set of vertical slides, with the ability to substitute posts of different lengths if desired (e.g. provide it with 6" posts, but offer 18" posts). It would not have increased the cost of the hardware significantly, and would have resulted in a much more useful piece of hardware. Of course, it would be even better if it had the ability to crawl vertically up those posts to reproduce the shape of more complex objects by adding vertical parallax.
The complete leak was resulting from a chain of errors. WikiLeaks screwed up and published the entire blob where anyone could download it. Then the Guardian screwed up and published a book containing the password. Without WikiLeaks screwing up to begin with, the password disclosure by the Guardian would have been a non-incident.
Also, IMO, it really doesn't matter if he tried some mainstream outlets first, nor does it matter how WikiLeaks handled it. What matters is that the moment WikiLeaks became involved, any credibility went out the window, because they are the journalistic equivalent of a tabloid, at best. At that moment, everything became suspect—became tainted. He should have kept trying major news organizations until he found someone willing to break the story. Period.
Like claiming copyright on public records. That's about as egregious as it gets.
You're correct. He would have been caught after sending only the first handful of reports, and he probably would have been tried for only one count of espionage instead of six. And any actual crimes that folks might have uncovered in the rest of the material would never have been uncovered.
That's the problem. At a fundamental level, whistleblower protection must cover public disclosure, because (with the exception of a single isolated incident here and there) if the organization against whom the whistle is being blown were capable of policing itself, the blowing would not have been necessary in the first place; blowing the whistle to an internal auditor is pretty much guaranteed to be useless. And once you release something to the public, chances are, the government knows who you are. Therefore, you get one shot at releasing everything that needs to be released. Anyone suggesting that there's another way is really kidding himself or herself.
This is not to say that he couldn't potentially have tried to be more selective about it, but there's also a time factor involved. The longer it takes from when a crime occurs to when the public knows about it, the more likely it is that the perpetrator will get off because of statutes of limitations. Therefore, if the goal actually is ensuring that those crimes get prosecuted, the best hope is distributing the information broadly to a large group of people who can then divide and conquer. The press is remarkably good at that. The only question is whether they can be trusted to be responsible about what they disclose.
Now disclosing it to a site like Wikileaks... is a different story. His mistake was not what he disclosed, nor was his mistake disclosing it to the press. His mistake was disclosing it through a dubious organization that operates on the fringes of the law rather than going directly to a reporter at a major news organization.
With my cynic hat on, I think this might actually be good if you're a criminal. IIRC, the statute of limitations for some crimes doesn't begin ticking until someone could reasonably have discovered the crime. I could see someone arguing that the police should have been able to determine based on this evidence that the person committed a crime, and therefore the clock began ticking earlier....
Far worse than just that. The first time I read the headline (half asleep), I read it as "Florida Town Loses License Plate Camera Images For Ten Years". The data mining and privacy loss potential is enormous, so there could be an enormous reward for anyone willing to... how shall I put this... inadvertently misplace a hard drive containing that data.
Remember that the more valuable the data you store electronically, the more likely it is to be stolen and used by the bad guys. At some point the value is so great that more of the data is likely to be used by the bad guys than the good guys. This is true for pretty much any definition of good/bad guys. For example, if I were a crook who knew a crooked cop, this would be a goldmine of information. With this data, I could figure out with a reasonable degree of probability when any given family is unlikely to be home, and use that to my advantage when planning robberies to drastically reduce the amount of stake-out time needed while still minimizing my chances of getting caught. And by looking at the makes of cars, I could gain further insight into the likelihood of the house having valuables in it, allowing me to choose my next target more quickly. Heck, somebody really enterprising could turn it into a black-market data mining business for other robbers and make a small fortune in no time flat.
IMO, even if we completely ignore any risks posed by police abusing the data, the data theft risk alone from keeping this much personally identifiable tracking data on nearly every single person in the state of Florida for such a long period of time far outweighs any possible benefit it could have. Heck, the risk of keeping it for more than about a week far outweighs any practical benefit, statistically speaking. The risk of keeping it for ten years far exceeds the entire benefit of having a police force.
Unless someone who receives the source is allowed to redistribute that source, it does not qualify as an Open Source license. Open Source requires that the redistribution rights flow downstream.
Copyrighted music, unless explicitly licensed in such a way to allow further redistribution by anyone who receives a copy, is more of a "shared source" or "licensed source access" model, in which certain distributors are explicitly authorized by the copyright holder to redistribute it under certain terms, but in which that right is not conferred downstream. While this provides some of the same benefits, it does not meet the minimum criteria for being an Open Source license.
The distinction between Open Source and Free is that the latter is not allowed to be redistributed in closed (binary) form without making the source available. A non-free music license would allow you to use it, modify it, and distribute recordings (binary form) without providing sheet music. A free license would require you to provide the altered sheet music upon request.