If you don't like aircraft or aircraft noise, don't live in a house near an airfield. Aircraft must descend below 1000 feet to take off and land, and the rules explicitly allow aircraft to fly over congested areas as low as they need for the purposes of taking off and landing.
I grew up in Virginia Beach, only a mile or two from NAS Oceana. For the first 18 years of my life, "normal" was the sound of an A-6, A-4, F-14, or F-18 screaming overhead at all hours. People complained by the thousands; the Navy even had a dedicated office to handle complaints. They almost shut the base down several times because of the high population density. When I went away to college, I was always surprised about how quiet it was.
What does a new version of Android do that an older version couldn't? It's not like you're missing a whole lot with an older version of Android, especially considering that most apps out there aren't version specific.
Bluetooth, for one. A fully functioning Bluetooth API wasn't released until Android 2.0, despite all Android 1.x phones having Bluetooth hardware. Even Bluetooth contact sharing wasn't added until 2.2. If you want to know everything that's changed, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history. There are many more significant improvements.
oh i can buy other phones, but there is no signal at my house for anyone but verizon
Not even a land line? I thought that's what the universal service fee was for: to get land-line coverage up to 100%.
Where I live, the land line choices are Verizon... and Verizon. There was even an article in the local paper today about how Verizon is letting its copper infrastructure go to waste, so if you live in a place that doesn't have FTTx, you're definitely screwed.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
There's only one, or at most very few, right answers. There's innumerable wrong answers. Consensus would be mixing the right answers with the wrong answers. That leaves you with a wrong answer.
See Ensemble Learning: in theory, even if each person votes "correctly" 51% of the time, with a large enough sample size, you'll still get a correct consensus. As long as people roughly vote for what's in their best interest, the right decisions will be made. Of course, when we're talking politics and legislation, there isn't really any ground truth that defines what "correct" actually is.
Well, more likely Congress would simply refuse to cooperate. I've long said it, that if Ron Paul were president, he'd be spending a lonely four years in the White House with a Congress that would refuse to work with him. It's not like most of what he proposes he can actually do anyways.
I'm very curious about this. Most presidents propose some measure of change as part of their campaigns, change which usually fails miserably. My guess is that Ron Paul would succeed in getting at least one of these federal departments cut or reduced somewhat, but definitely at nowhere near the scale he proposes.
I'll bet that most of this "kill everything" rhetoric will die off quickly if he makes it past the primaries, much less gets elected. What kinds of measures does Ron Paul introduce and/or support in his current capacity as a representative? Do these meet fierce opposition? I don't know since I don't live in Texas and don't hear many specifics, but I'll wager a guess that most of the bills he champions aren't that radical.
I'm saying that local entities are only responsible to their local constituents. If a local entity is 100% in charge, they can let their section of the road go 100% to ruin if they don't want it there.
This is exactly what is happening where I live in Virginia. Funding for rural secondary roads comes entirely from state revenue, and where I live, many of those roads are being churned up into gravel because there isn't enough money to go around. Virginia is known for its balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility but it comes at the expense of stuff like road maintenance. If there wasn't federal highway funding, the interstates in Virginia would suffer the same fate -- admittedly some of them are getting quite close to gravel as it is.
Anyone that still believes that America's colleges and universities are "non-profit" institutions, should think again at this. For two of the most obvious examples, I cite you the "Bowl Championship Series" and most college sports in general (namely football and basketball), as well as the fact that student dormitories and student unions have largely been turned into country clubs, with just about every one of them having a Starbucks (heck, that's in the library now, too), and having such amenities as rock climbing walls, gyms with workout equipment that rival Gold's Gym, and many schools are giving every student their own iPad these days. Plus, when most schools in Division I pay their football or basketball coach twenty times the salary of the average professor, and four times the salary of the university president, you know something's fouled up,. ..
When the school has TV ads, non-profit goes out the window as far as I'm concerned. At the school I attend as a grad student, things have changed remarkably in the past few years. Massive construction projects and renovations, loft-style dorms, the same gym with rock climbing wall you speak of, and countless new student clubs and services including concerts from popular bands every weekend. If it weren't for scholarships and fellowships, I wouldn't be here.
At most universities, sports are revenue positive (even after coaches' salaries, stadium construction, etc.) and education is revenue negative based on tuition alone.
This isn't true. There are only about 10-15 Division 1 schools that are revenue positive. Most athletic funding at universities comes from alumni endowments with athletic tuition fees making up the remainder.
*Disclaimer: I was a D1 athlete who was fortunate enough to have my undergrad education paid for through an (alumni funded) athletic scholarship.
I think the biggest issue here is that the manufacturers and wireless carriers are responsible for the updates to the OS.
Wireless carriers _want_ to be responsible so they can force their custom OS and bloatware on customers. Indeed, there are costs to do this, but ultimately, it's about control. It really ought to be like a PC where the Android phone calls home to Google and asks for daily updates and bug fixes.
This fragmentation everyone talks about isn't a problem of hardware diversity, it is really a consequence of allowing wireless carriers to control Android updates.
Surely someone better at programming than myself has either produced or is working on a simple set of software that will fill these databases with false information, rendering the whole thing unreliable.... The fakes could even base their profile on real profiles, altering things like school graduation year, and selecting a subset of contacts from various 'friends' of the real profile.
This particular technique has been proposed in research circles as a way to maintain privacy in participatory applications and social networking. However, instead of the fake information being used to throw off the aggregate trends, the fake information is generated based on the real data. The idea is that with enough fake profiles mixed in with the real ones, it is difficult or impossible to identify which users are real and which are not.
You can even go a step further and use the aggregated fake and real information from other users to perturb data of individual users and make it less personally identifiable but keep the general trends intact.
I was waiting for someone to point this out. Very true, sir. This has nothing to do with computers specifically. What Facebook is doing is called 'asking around' about you. That would have been the way you found out about someone before computers, or even writing, had existed - you went around and asked people about him.
Like 'Hey, I'm looking for this guy, I hear he's living in this village, could you point me to his house? Is he at his home right now, do you know?' and so on. The fact is, you're not the only one who knows about you. There are people who know about you, and they can give information about you just as good as you can.
The troublesome part is that this is aggregating knowledge about you from essentially everyone who ever met you or knew about you. It's not asking one person who knew of you, it's asking everyone who knew of you simultaneously and instantaneously. One person can only give a few small fragments but a collective can paint an entire picture of your life, inside and out.
Many inferences can now be made about people that were not possible when information was incomplete (finding and asking everyone about you in person or via email would be impossible).
It's going to get to the point where Facebook users (and non-users) won't even have to do anything to add information about themselves. Data mining techniques can suss out each user's personal information from the internet and aggregate it on the profile page. People with smartphones will have their locations and current activities automatically updated to their news feeds. Camera phones will automatically snap pictures and upload them to Facebook where people in them will be tagged via facial recognition algorithms.
At this point, why even bother allowing Facebook users to modify their own information? Why even bother with accounts and logins?
It's best not to have the mindset that you shouldn't have nice things because someone might steal it.
In an ideal world, this would be true. Unfortunately, the reality is that any place that attracts travelers also attracts thieves. Thinking that nobody is going to try and rip you off while traveling is a big mistake to make, even if you try do to all the right things to protect yourself.
Incidents like these are one good reason I use a cheap netbook when on travel. Not only are they light and get substantial battery life, but if it breaks or gets stolen, I'm only out $300.
I also find that I rarely get much actual work done when on travel, so I don't have the need for a more substantial laptop. I guess if you've really got the need to travel with a full sized laptop, you could mod the case to make it look scuffed and dated and hence not worth stealing. Either that, or get a ThinkPad -- even the latest versions look 10 years old.
Spam is not profitable if you include his "partners" in the equation.
Namely, the owners of the computers that are infected and drafted into the botnet the spammer is using.
I bet that if the spammer had to send all the email himself on his own dime it would be very much not profitable.
It only works because they steal resources belonging to other people.
That isn't any different than the issue in TFA. In this case, the resources being stolen are money, not computing power and internet access. If the fraudsters were buying electronics with their own money and selling them for 30% of the retail price, they wouldn't be profitable either.
So wait, all I have to do is respond to some douche's ad on craigslist, and he'll start sending me expensive electronics? All I have to do is tell them I'll reship them?
Seems rather amazing to me that nobody is stepping in and just receiving the items without reshipping them. Or shipping boxes filled with junk instead of the electronics.
Disclaimer: I do not suggest doing this, and wish to strongly emphasize that any stolen merchandise received by anyone should be immediately returned to the store it was stolen from.
The electronics are paid for with a stolen credit card, so if a few of the reshippers don't forward what they are shipped, there isn't much of a monetary loss. I guess it's kind of like spam. Even though tens of thousands of people get the same spam email, if only a small number take the bait, the spammer still profits.
I can prove that P and Q are both part of set K. I can prove that Q has some property. I then make a proof that all parts of set K have this property because of something to do with how I proved Q has it. Therefore, I can prove that P has this same property.
Proof by similarity. Not a proper name, really. And not exactly the same as analogies, since analogies don't really work the same as set theory. So I guess we can say, by this proof, we've proven that "analogies set theory" is only approximately true.
It makes more sense when you say it like that; it is a direct proof. I guess the specific example is this: All phones (P) and all cars (Q) are physical property (K). Any element in K is subject to laws regarding stolen property. We have evidence that anyone who steals an element in Q will be busted under said laws. Therefore, if you steal an element in Q, you will be busted.
Actually, I don't think we even need to bring cars into the picture. That phones are physical property (all P are K) is sufficient.
That's why you can't argue with liberals. It was a very simple question that your unable to answer. I used the terms survival and disease. Your using Skype and web page load times. Billions go to funding the post office, and your excuse is paying bills online? Last chance, prove that liberals are capable of answering the most basic questions without character attacks or dodging the question all together...
You've gone off the rails and completely lost me here.
I'm arguing that high speed internet is a de facto necessity that is more important than the telephone. Communication in today's society is very difficult without it, much like the telephone was 50 years ago. It's time the existing telephone subsidy be put towards providing high speed internet. Somehow, you're going on a rant about "liberals" and "character attacks."
I can answer those! woot. I drink water to survive, I use a sewer to to keep diseases from spreading (latrine in the backyard is illegal here). I ask again, what are they going to use the broadband for again? Oh, and yes, checking the ole' W-2, paying my share for water/sewage. Now answer my question please.
An internet connection, especially a high speed one, is just as essential today as other public utilities. It's more valuable than a telephone. If you're stuck with satellite or dialup, you're the connectivity equivalent of using an outhouse. Try loading any webpage with a dialup connection and see how long it takes. Even mundane tasks like paying the bills or surfing the web are almost impossible with a slow connection. You can pretty much forget about Skype conversations or any cloud-based services like Google Docs or Dropbox.
If you don't think it's needed, why don't you try going back to a dialup connection?
Your asking me to pay for your in-laws broadband internet access. Please tell me why they *need* it, thanks. I mean, you gotta come up with something better than, "I need to raise your taxes so it's faster to fix my in-laws laptop... heh.
You're asking me to pay for your water and sewer. Please tell me why you need it when you can just dig a latrine in the backyard. You need to come up with something better than "I need to raise your taxes (or utility rates) so you don't freeze your butt off in winter when nature calls."
"The Orion design would have worked by dropping small shaped charge fission or thermonuclear explosives (referred to as pulse units) out the rear of a vehicle, detonating them 200 feet (60 m) out, and catching the blast with a thick steel or aluminum pusher plate."
I've had to sign over the copyright for each of the papers I've published. Fortunately, I'm usually allowed to disseminate my work for educational purposes, so I can post my papers on my personal webpage. However, there are plenty of publications that do not allow this and you've got to fork over the big bucks just to read a single article. While my university has the resources to maintain subscriptions to all the big journals and conference proceedings in my field, plenty of others aren't so lucky.
If other schools follow Princeton, this will certainly level the playing field. Maybe it will get more people interested in research since they won't have to be associated with a major university to read the state of the art.
Trademarks should be used not to try to destroy large businesses who come up with names that may be vaguely similar to the name of an unrelated product, but to protect consumers against fraud. No one in their right mind thinks that Timelines.com and Facebook are in any way related. Trademarks are designed for the purpose so that I know what I'm buying, for example, if I order an Xbox 360 game console, I should receive an Xbox 360 game console and no other makers of game consoles other than Microsoft (or who are affiliated with Microsoft) can make a console called the Xbox 360.
This is definitely the benefit of trademarks to society. Of course, like copyrights and patents, the core concept is abused to the point that it has a negative impact, favoring corporations and wealthy individuals.
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If you don't like aircraft or aircraft noise, don't live in a house near an airfield. Aircraft must descend below 1000 feet to take off and land, and the rules explicitly allow aircraft to fly over congested areas as low as they need for the purposes of taking off and landing.
I grew up in Virginia Beach, only a mile or two from NAS Oceana. For the first 18 years of my life, "normal" was the sound of an A-6, A-4, F-14, or F-18 screaming overhead at all hours. People complained by the thousands; the Navy even had a dedicated office to handle complaints. They almost shut the base down several times because of the high population density. When I went away to college, I was always surprised about how quiet it was.
What does a new version of Android do that an older version couldn't? It's not like you're missing a whole lot with an older version of Android, especially considering that most apps out there aren't version specific.
Bluetooth, for one. A fully functioning Bluetooth API wasn't released until Android 2.0, despite all Android 1.x phones having Bluetooth hardware. Even Bluetooth contact sharing wasn't added until 2.2. If you want to know everything that's changed, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history. There are many more significant improvements.
oh i can buy other phones, but there is no signal at my house for anyone but verizon
Not even a land line? I thought that's what the universal service fee was for: to get land-line coverage up to 100%.
Where I live, the land line choices are Verizon... and Verizon. There was even an article in the local paper today about how Verizon is letting its copper infrastructure go to waste, so if you live in a place that doesn't have FTTx, you're definitely screwed.
Consensus is not a good thing.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
There's only one, or at most very few, right answers. There's innumerable wrong answers. Consensus would be mixing the right answers with the wrong answers. That leaves you with a wrong answer.
See Ensemble Learning: in theory, even if each person votes "correctly" 51% of the time, with a large enough sample size, you'll still get a correct consensus. As long as people roughly vote for what's in their best interest, the right decisions will be made. Of course, when we're talking politics and legislation, there isn't really any ground truth that defines what "correct" actually is.
Well, more likely Congress would simply refuse to cooperate. I've long said it, that if Ron Paul were president, he'd be spending a lonely four years in the White House with a Congress that would refuse to work with him. It's not like most of what he proposes he can actually do anyways.
I'm very curious about this. Most presidents propose some measure of change as part of their campaigns, change which usually fails miserably. My guess is that Ron Paul would succeed in getting at least one of these federal departments cut or reduced somewhat, but definitely at nowhere near the scale he proposes.
I'll bet that most of this "kill everything" rhetoric will die off quickly if he makes it past the primaries, much less gets elected. What kinds of measures does Ron Paul introduce and/or support in his current capacity as a representative? Do these meet fierce opposition? I don't know since I don't live in Texas and don't hear many specifics, but I'll wager a guess that most of the bills he champions aren't that radical.
I'm saying that local entities are only responsible to their local constituents. If a local entity is 100% in charge, they can let their section of the road go 100% to ruin if they don't want it there.
This is exactly what is happening where I live in Virginia. Funding for rural secondary roads comes entirely from state revenue, and where I live, many of those roads are being churned up into gravel because there isn't enough money to go around. Virginia is known for its balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility but it comes at the expense of stuff like road maintenance. If there wasn't federal highway funding, the interstates in Virginia would suffer the same fate -- admittedly some of them are getting quite close to gravel as it is.
Anyone that still believes that America's colleges and universities are "non-profit" institutions, should think again at this. For two of the most obvious examples, I cite you the "Bowl Championship Series" and most college sports in general (namely football and basketball), as well as the fact that student dormitories and student unions have largely been turned into country clubs, with just about every one of them having a Starbucks (heck, that's in the library now, too), and having such amenities as rock climbing walls, gyms with workout equipment that rival Gold's Gym, and many schools are giving every student their own iPad these days. Plus, when most schools in Division I pay their football or basketball coach twenty times the salary of the average professor, and four times the salary of the university president, you know something's fouled up,. . .
When the school has TV ads, non-profit goes out the window as far as I'm concerned. At the school I attend as a grad student, things have changed remarkably in the past few years. Massive construction projects and renovations, loft-style dorms, the same gym with rock climbing wall you speak of, and countless new student clubs and services including concerts from popular bands every weekend. If it weren't for scholarships and fellowships, I wouldn't be here.
At most universities, sports are revenue positive (even after coaches' salaries, stadium construction, etc.) and education is revenue negative based on tuition alone.
This isn't true. There are only about 10-15 Division 1 schools that are revenue positive. Most athletic funding at universities comes from alumni endowments with athletic tuition fees making up the remainder.
*Disclaimer: I was a D1 athlete who was fortunate enough to have my undergrad education paid for through an (alumni funded) athletic scholarship.
I think the biggest issue here is that the manufacturers and wireless carriers are responsible for the updates to the OS.
Wireless carriers _want_ to be responsible so they can force their custom OS and bloatware on customers. Indeed, there are costs to do this, but ultimately, it's about control. It really ought to be like a PC where the Android phone calls home to Google and asks for daily updates and bug fixes.
This fragmentation everyone talks about isn't a problem of hardware diversity, it is really a consequence of allowing wireless carriers to control Android updates.
Surely someone better at programming than myself has either produced or is working on a simple set of software that will fill these databases with false information, rendering the whole thing unreliable. ... The fakes could even base their profile on real profiles, altering things like school graduation year, and selecting a subset of contacts from various 'friends' of the real profile.
This particular technique has been proposed in research circles as a way to maintain privacy in participatory applications and social networking. However, instead of the fake information being used to throw off the aggregate trends, the fake information is generated based on the real data. The idea is that with enough fake profiles mixed in with the real ones, it is difficult or impossible to identify which users are real and which are not.
You can even go a step further and use the aggregated fake and real information from other users to perturb data of individual users and make it less personally identifiable but keep the general trends intact.
I was waiting for someone to point this out. Very true, sir. This has nothing to do with computers specifically. What Facebook is doing is called 'asking around' about you. That would have been the way you found out about someone before computers, or even writing, had existed - you went around and asked people about him.
Like 'Hey, I'm looking for this guy, I hear he's living in this village, could you point me to his house? Is he at his home right now, do you know?' and so on. The fact is, you're not the only one who knows about you. There are people who know about you, and they can give information about you just as good as you can.
The troublesome part is that this is aggregating knowledge about you from essentially everyone who ever met you or knew about you. It's not asking one person who knew of you, it's asking everyone who knew of you simultaneously and instantaneously. One person can only give a few small fragments but a collective can paint an entire picture of your life, inside and out.
Many inferences can now be made about people that were not possible when information was incomplete (finding and asking everyone about you in person or via email would be impossible).
It's going to get to the point where Facebook users (and non-users) won't even have to do anything to add information about themselves. Data mining techniques can suss out each user's personal information from the internet and aggregate it on the profile page. People with smartphones will have their locations and current activities automatically updated to their news feeds. Camera phones will automatically snap pictures and upload them to Facebook where people in them will be tagged via facial recognition algorithms.
At this point, why even bother allowing Facebook users to modify their own information? Why even bother with accounts and logins?
It's best not to have the mindset that you shouldn't have nice things because someone might steal it.
In an ideal world, this would be true. Unfortunately, the reality is that any place that attracts travelers also attracts thieves. Thinking that nobody is going to try and rip you off while traveling is a big mistake to make, even if you try do to all the right things to protect yourself.
Incidents like these are one good reason I use a cheap netbook when on travel. Not only are they light and get substantial battery life, but if it breaks or gets stolen, I'm only out $300.
I also find that I rarely get much actual work done when on travel, so I don't have the need for a more substantial laptop. I guess if you've really got the need to travel with a full sized laptop, you could mod the case to make it look scuffed and dated and hence not worth stealing. Either that, or get a ThinkPad -- even the latest versions look 10 years old.
Spam is not profitable if you include his "partners" in the equation.
Namely, the owners of the computers that are infected and drafted into the botnet the spammer is using.
I bet that if the spammer had to send all the email himself on his own dime it would be very much not profitable.
It only works because they steal resources belonging to other people.
That isn't any different than the issue in TFA. In this case, the resources being stolen are money, not computing power and internet access. If the fraudsters were buying electronics with their own money and selling them for 30% of the retail price, they wouldn't be profitable either.
So wait, all I have to do is respond to some douche's ad on craigslist, and he'll start sending me expensive electronics? All I have to do is tell them I'll reship them?
Seems rather amazing to me that nobody is stepping in and just receiving the items without reshipping them. Or shipping boxes filled with junk instead of the electronics.
Disclaimer: I do not suggest doing this, and wish to strongly emphasize that any stolen merchandise received by anyone should be immediately returned to the store it was stolen from.
The electronics are paid for with a stolen credit card, so if a few of the reshippers don't forward what they are shipped, there isn't much of a monetary loss. I guess it's kind of like spam. Even though tens of thousands of people get the same spam email, if only a small number take the bait, the spammer still profits.
I can prove that P and Q are both part of set K. I can prove that Q has some property. I then make a proof that all parts of set K have this property because of something to do with how I proved Q has it. Therefore, I can prove that P has this same property.
Proof by similarity. Not a proper name, really. And not exactly the same as analogies, since analogies don't really work the same as set theory. So I guess we can say, by this proof, we've proven that "analogies set theory" is only approximately true.
It makes more sense when you say it like that; it is a direct proof. I guess the specific example is this: All phones (P) and all cars (Q) are physical property (K). Any element in K is subject to laws regarding stolen property. We have evidence that anyone who steals an element in Q will be busted under said laws. Therefore, if you steal an element in Q, you will be busted.
Actually, I don't think we even need to bring cars into the picture. That phones are physical property (all P are K) is sufficient.
Proof by similarity is a valid mathematical process.
First I've heard of this.
Yeah, dammit! I wanna buy a nuclear missile but the damned government is infringing upon my right to bear arms by not allowing it.
Is a nuclear missile not an armament or am I missing something here?
This is about as good as it gets.
That's why you can't argue with liberals. It was a very simple question that your unable to answer. I used the terms survival and disease. Your using Skype and web page load times. Billions go to funding the post office, and your excuse is paying bills online? Last chance, prove that liberals are capable of answering the most basic questions without character attacks or dodging the question all together...
You've gone off the rails and completely lost me here.
I'm arguing that high speed internet is a de facto necessity that is more important than the telephone. Communication in today's society is very difficult without it, much like the telephone was 50 years ago. It's time the existing telephone subsidy be put towards providing high speed internet. Somehow, you're going on a rant about "liberals" and "character attacks."
I can answer those! woot. I drink water to survive, I use a sewer to to keep diseases from spreading (latrine in the backyard is illegal here). I ask again, what are they going to use the broadband for again? Oh, and yes, checking the ole' W-2, paying my share for water/sewage. Now answer my question please.
An internet connection, especially a high speed one, is just as essential today as other public utilities. It's more valuable than a telephone. If you're stuck with satellite or dialup, you're the connectivity equivalent of using an outhouse. Try loading any webpage with a dialup connection and see how long it takes. Even mundane tasks like paying the bills or surfing the web are almost impossible with a slow connection. You can pretty much forget about Skype conversations or any cloud-based services like Google Docs or Dropbox.
If you don't think it's needed, why don't you try going back to a dialup connection?
Your asking me to pay for your in-laws broadband internet access. Please tell me why they *need* it, thanks. I mean, you gotta come up with something better than, "I need to raise your taxes so it's faster to fix my in-laws laptop... heh.
You're asking me to pay for your water and sewer. Please tell me why you need it when you can just dig a latrine in the backyard. You need to come up with something better than "I need to raise your taxes (or utility rates) so you don't freeze your butt off in winter when nature calls."
From Wikipedia:
"The Orion design would have worked by dropping small shaped charge fission or thermonuclear explosives (referred to as pulse units) out the rear of a vehicle, detonating them 200 feet (60 m) out, and catching the blast with a thick steel or aluminum pusher plate."
I've had to sign over the copyright for each of the papers I've published. Fortunately, I'm usually allowed to disseminate my work for educational purposes, so I can post my papers on my personal webpage. However, there are plenty of publications that do not allow this and you've got to fork over the big bucks just to read a single article. While my university has the resources to maintain subscriptions to all the big journals and conference proceedings in my field, plenty of others aren't so lucky.
If other schools follow Princeton, this will certainly level the playing field. Maybe it will get more people interested in research since they won't have to be associated with a major university to read the state of the art.
Trademarks should be used not to try to destroy large businesses who come up with names that may be vaguely similar to the name of an unrelated product, but to protect consumers against fraud. No one in their right mind thinks that Timelines.com and Facebook are in any way related. Trademarks are designed for the purpose so that I know what I'm buying, for example, if I order an Xbox 360 game console, I should receive an Xbox 360 game console and no other makers of game consoles other than Microsoft (or who are affiliated with Microsoft) can make a console called the Xbox 360.
This is definitely the benefit of trademarks to society. Of course, like copyrights and patents, the core concept is abused to the point that it has a negative impact, favoring corporations and wealthy individuals.