I always thought the cases WERE from tanks. I could have sworn an old HPUX box I used had 8" armor-plating. It certainly felt like it when trying to move it around.
Again, this is why I'd like to see additional information encoded in an extension to the book's ISBN number, such as a hash of the contents. Regardless of what the extension is, the split should permit you to identify "works that descend directly from a single work" plus "works that differ in content" (regardless of what they descend from). Then there would be no problem. You would be able to extract the level of information you wanted and no information would risk getting lost because such-and-such a group didn't think it important.
Also hardback vs. paperback, publishing in different regions as a distinct book, etc. Maybe ISBNs could be extended so that it encodes all these different fields in additional digits so that there is a component that is unique to a specific book (regardless of edition, publisher, etc), extra information that uniquely* identifies which specific edition/version/variant of the book it is and then yet more information that uniquely identifies which publisher circulated that book.
*A SHA-2 or SHA-3 hash of the book's contents + cover + publusher would probably be close enough to unique, given that it's rare that editions run into sufficient numbers that a collision is even remotely likely, and would avoid any arguments over which publisher had what number or how to identify which version was what - especially for older books where there may be no unique way to determine this or the information simply no longer exists. A hash will always work.
Ah, I'll clarify my point as I think there may have been some mis-communication on my part, to judge from your reply. If (and I grant it is a big "if") the gravitational constant is a value that is determined by pure logic and by logic alone, then it cannot vary. If pi has the value it has because of some specific property in geometry such that other geometries would have different values for pi AND those geometries are not inconsistent with what could physically exist then (and only then) could pi differ between universes in a multiverse. Whether a transform existed such that one geometry could be converted to another within a single universe is another problem entirely - and completely moot if constants like pi would be the same in all of them anyway.
In other words, if (and only if) it is the geometry that decides the specific value of pi AND other geometries exist AND constants like the gravitational constant or planck's length are decided by essentially identical mechanisms, then the gravitational constant is indeed in the same class as pi. If any of these is false, then they are not in the same class.
It is not my contention that this extremely narrow condition is true. Rather, it is my contention that Carl Sagan's ending to the book shows that he thought it might be true. Otherwise, given the constraints he placed on what he was willing to write, he would have used a different ending. As he is dead, it is unclear if anyone (even his wife) knows the actual reason for the ending or what alternatives he considered, but it's the only option that makes sense to me.
Yes, you are absolutely correct that he was not an expert in arithmetic (or, indeed, geometry). It is a general rule-of-thumb that scientists tread on dangerous ground when they speculate outside of their specialty, so it is entirely possible that by doing so he introduced a misunderstanding on his part. Alternatively, he may have written himself into a corner. Wanting to use the message motif at a deeper level and having absolutely no idea how to do it, merely used the first idea that popped into his head. I'm not as happy with those answers because of his statements concerning the scientific accuracy, but they are certainly possible.
You are also correct that is is a science fiction book. I've always been a bit borderline on that - there's a designation of "speculative fiction" for sci-fi that is still fiction but is totally correct to the science as known at the time. This isn't important to most people, it only matters to those who want to extrapolate from the book in some way, as it determines how they can extrapolate. The idea behind the various sub-categories is that there's a difference between novels where the emphasis is on the fiction rather than the science versus novels where the fiction is a vehicle to explore the consequences of differing laws of physics versus novels where the fiction is a vehicle to explore the implications of science fact.
If (and only if) Contact was in this final class, exploring the implications of science fact, is it meaningful to extrapolate anything about the real world. Books of this kind (which are very rare) are intended specifically to promote such extrapolation and investigation. There's not much point in writing a book so absolutely rigidly and checking every last detail if the story could have worked just as well in a completely fictional universe. Precisely because it does involve a lot of tedious work for relatively little gain (and virtually no audience as only a die-hard SF fanatic would find such a book readable), authors generally promote investigation by other means.
Probably the best-known method is to mix the dryest of speculative fiction with regular science fiction. Here, only the element of concern is adhered to absolutely rigidly, the rest of the universe is merely a device to convey the story. Thus, you have the absolute adherence to some real-world fact, but all other aspects of the story are entirely driven by the need to tell a good tale. "Flatland" would
Yeeeees, but there are degrees of randomness. If you assume that a strong of some length will exhibit some specific degree of randomness and that this can be quantified, and that ANY comparable-length string in Pi will have a similar degree of randomness, then if you were to find one specific strong of that length in Pi which exhibited an extremely different value (say, zero), then you have found something abnormal.
It reminds me some of the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert meets up with a troll generating random numbers by only saying "nine". On Dilbert asking if that was really random, the reply was that it's very hard to tell with random numbers. It is very hard and technically it is possible for a truly random number generator to only emit a specific constant within the lifetime of that generator. That's why there's a requirement by people studying randomness that things be random on a multitude of scales and not just overall and why tests for randomness are under constant development.
You are correct that it can be found algorithmically, though in defense of Carl Sagan, there were serious discussions at the time as to whether the fundamental constants were actually constant. As I recall, it was to get round some extremely messy and inconvenient issues with the extremely early universe. The values as they stand make things exceedingly messy and physicists hate messy. It also ties in with questions that Hawking and other cosmologists were arguing about at the time, which boiled down to a question of what aspects of mathematics and physics are invariant - if a multiverse did indeed exist, what things MUST be the same across all of them because logic alone dictates that is the way they must be?
My impression of the "message in Pi" was that Sagan was sympathetic to the idea that the fundamental constants were not necessarily dictated by logic alone. That if you were to actually create a universe by creating a region of sufficient energy density for inflationary theory to kick in that there were certain parameters you could feed in where some of those parameters would tweak those constants. Remember, he wanted his book to describe physics correctly (hence his debates with Professor Kip Thorne on wormholes), but "correct" can never be better than what is known at the time even if it is subsequently shown to be false. In this case, the discovery that you can find individual digits of Pi directly and algorithmically was unknown, and although there is still some uncertainty over the fundamental constants (certain forms of M-Theory allow different universes to have different constants), the debate over whether the values have changed seems to have died down. However, this is long after the book was written.
I think that if Sagan were alive today and were to re-write Contact that he would put the deeper message somewhere else, reflecting what is now known. However, since everything discussed in the book is cutting-edge physics, the theories are evolving too fast for ANY version of the book to have much staying-power in terms of what we believe is possible. There are now question-marks about wormholes that did not exist back then, for example.
There is nothing in the book to say that it was from God. Indeed, the aliens say that the wormhole transit system was created by some earlier race but in disrepair and abandoned, suggesting the message was from some extremely advanced civilization. It's impossible to be sure if Sagan was implying that this civilization created the universe (science at the time of the book's writing was predicting that it is possible to create a separate universe, not sure if it still does) or had modified the universe in some way as to alter the constants (there have been discussions, from time to time, as to whether fundamental constants have altered).
Nor was there anything in the book - as far as I recall - that said that there was only one message in any given constant. My impression was that the circle served the same purpose as the prime numbers in the alien message - a beacon to indicate that a deeper message existed.
If I recall, the actual message itself was not decyphered by the alien race. Whether this was because insufficient constants had been examined to sufficient depth, or whether this was because the purpose of the message was merely to show that there is something more and had no meaning beyond that, is unclear. Both explanations are hinted at.
My main objection is that the curator was interviewed by Slashdot many years ago but the interview results were never published. Damn bastards probably classified it.
Oh, I can certainly believe that. Though it might be... entertaining to see what happens if they were legally obliged to honor their claims before Congress.
As I have said elsewhere, this is the explanation the industry has (repeatedly) given. Don't go blaming me for their claims, especially when I state that the price reductions they claim are at best hypothetical.
You are correct, my argument mostly rested on this being the reasons given to Congress for the extremely high prices of CDs during the inquiry into whether there was gouging. However, your argument gives yet other factors that would alter the price, which also would have to be taken into consideration when determining losses from piracy. Since neither your points nor mine are included in any calculation, it is a foregone conclusion that those calculations must be wrong -- and must be quite substantially wrong at that.
Your point also raises the prospect that in certain markets (though I doubt the *AA would be amongst them), estimates for loss will be too low, which means that in those markets the legal remedies may be such that those who get caught will still make a profit and those who get compensated will still make a loss.
I believe that a "true" (as in "as complete as we'll ever likely get") model of the impact of piracy and counterfeiting on all kinds of industries and those industries that form part of that interdependency web would be valuable to assess how the system should be adjusted. I do not believe that politicians or industrialists (in any field) would consider such a model as being in their interest. Those who suffer from overestimation risk being pilloried and punished, those who suffer from underestimation risk being abandoned by investors once the true risk factors are known. As such, no such model is ever likely to be created.
Is it true that Congress is going to change copyright to expire 75 years after cryogenic containment fails or the sun explodes, whichever happens later?
You also have to consider that the market price is artificially inflated to "cover the damage" of piracy. Thus, if there was no piracy, the prices would (hypothetically) be lower. So not only do you have to consider the sales lost rather than the total pirated, but you also have to use the "real market value" not the inflated market value. Further, you would have to subtract from this total the amount lost per sale due to the devaluation.
If the value ends up negative, then the industry is actually making money from there being pirates, as counter-intuitive as this would seem. If they were unable to sustain a higher value per item, through a lack of justification, they would end up making less money even though they sold more products.
(This justification thing featured big time when the US and UK governments investigated the music business when it was discovered that prices for producing CDs had dropped dramatically, research had all been paid for, but consumers were actually spending more per disk. Before then, the main argument for the high prices for CDs was that it cost more to make them than it did vinyl. After the showdown with Congress and Parliament, it was all about piracy.)
I'm not saying that anyone IS making money from there being piracy, but it is something that has to be considered as a possibility.
Even after all that, there are still two more factors. The first is who is doing the pirating. Competitor A may well try pirating a product of Competitor B's, particularly on those occasions when you've a sales volume war going on. That is certainly money lost to piracy, but it is the industry itself doing it and you can't blame outsiders for that. Well, you can, as clearly they do.
The second factor to consider is unpaid royalties. We have no idea how much any given company is making in profit that it is NOT entitled to. However, this value has to be estimated, because you have to subtract not only the total illicit profit from a company from the damage caused by counterfeiting, but you THEN have to subtract the total illicit profit the company WOULD have earned had the sale happened through them. That is not money they should ever have counted.
I cannot see how any figure that exists today (or any other day) could even begin to take all this into account.
Depends on how you define "enough" and "filled". Classrooms are often understaffed and a healthy teacher getting good nutrition and good access to fresh material will teach better than an unhealthy teacher who survives on Burger King and hasn't seen a new idea in a decade.
I have a preference for a well-educated populace, with "well-educated" being defined as being the least-educated can function well in multiple branches of society (ie: nobody is deprived of a choice in life through circumstance), the average person has the ability to get into a middle-of-the-road University, and the brightest person is never deprived of the opportunity to learn, with the additional proviso that all people have the necessary knowledge, skills and means to make choices that are sensible for them if they so wish.
It is impossible to have a well-educated populace if you work purely on paying the least that will fill fewest positions you can get away with. In fact, it's almost impossible to educate people at all like that. It is impossible to have a well-educated populace if you work purely on paying the least but have just enough positions to actually teach sensibly. You will, however, likely get the least-able and even some of the average-able up to par.
If the pay was too low --- ummm, the pay isn't a hell of a lot more than burger-flippers get, for many teaching jobs. My first professional software engineering job paid more than my father's senior lecturer job at one of Britain's top Universities. Difference? He wanted to teach and he wanted to research. Those were his life-blood. When he retired (and he only semi-retired at that) he continued teaching and researching, just on his own time and out of his own house. Most people thought he'd die rather than quit. His final research papers went up online less than a month before he died of cancer.
Someone like that is not going to "work somewhere else" if they get paid too little. If they can keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, the rest of the world be damned. They're going to stay at what they love. And when it comes to something like teaching - unlike any other profession on Earth - that is an attitude that deserves respect, because that is the only attitude that can survive the stress, the politics, the noise, the abuse from those who complain teachers are all whiners, etc, ad nausium. It's the kind of attitude that allows one to teach and teach well, no matter what.
The reason a lot of modern teachers are crappy is that they do NOT have that attitude. They're in there to pick up a paycheck and keep their backsides (and the rest of their anatomy) covered from lawsuits. Those are not interested in teaching, but frankly they can't go out and get anything else either. They don't have the ability.
And that's the crux of it. Teachers are either damn good and pay is immaterial, or they're no good and pay is whatever they can get.
They probably were, so you were correct in saying that the war itself was not done for the profit of the US. To make the statement complete, though, it makes sense to point out that profits are being made and who by. (Since said warlords are likely contributing to the war continuing for so long.)
Nonono. The moon wasn't knocked out of orbit by a solar flare, it was the nuclear waste dump exploding after a build-up of magnetic radiation. I have the pilot episode of Space: 1999 if you don't believe me!
Well, not significantly more so than Swift nearly getting blinded by a gamma ray burst, surely. And once something becomes routine, can it really be called ironic any more? (Hey, California considers three strikes ever to be good enough, this is two in the same year!)
Slashdot Mirror
That, and the rest of the board probably deciding that they had to get rid of him to avoid exposing any of them to investigations.
I always thought the cases WERE from tanks. I could have sworn an old HPUX box I used had 8" armor-plating. It certainly felt like it when trying to move it around.
For Pi, that's easy. Everyone knows the last digit is e.
I think the Pink Floyd adaptation would involve "Pi has become... comfortably numb"
Again, this is why I'd like to see additional information encoded in an extension to the book's ISBN number, such as a hash of the contents. Regardless of what the extension is, the split should permit you to identify "works that descend directly from a single work" plus "works that differ in content" (regardless of what they descend from). Then there would be no problem. You would be able to extract the level of information you wanted and no information would risk getting lost because such-and-such a group didn't think it important.
Also hardback vs. paperback, publishing in different regions as a distinct book, etc. Maybe ISBNs could be extended so that it encodes all these different fields in additional digits so that there is a component that is unique to a specific book (regardless of edition, publisher, etc), extra information that uniquely* identifies which specific edition/version/variant of the book it is and then yet more information that uniquely identifies which publisher circulated that book.
*A SHA-2 or SHA-3 hash of the book's contents + cover + publusher would probably be close enough to unique, given that it's rare that editions run into sufficient numbers that a collision is even remotely likely, and would avoid any arguments over which publisher had what number or how to identify which version was what - especially for older books where there may be no unique way to determine this or the information simply no longer exists. A hash will always work.
Ah, I'll clarify my point as I think there may have been some mis-communication on my part, to judge from your reply. If (and I grant it is a big "if") the gravitational constant is a value that is determined by pure logic and by logic alone, then it cannot vary. If pi has the value it has because of some specific property in geometry such that other geometries would have different values for pi AND those geometries are not inconsistent with what could physically exist then (and only then) could pi differ between universes in a multiverse. Whether a transform existed such that one geometry could be converted to another within a single universe is another problem entirely - and completely moot if constants like pi would be the same in all of them anyway.
In other words, if (and only if) it is the geometry that decides the specific value of pi AND other geometries exist AND constants like the gravitational constant or planck's length are decided by essentially identical mechanisms, then the gravitational constant is indeed in the same class as pi. If any of these is false, then they are not in the same class.
It is not my contention that this extremely narrow condition is true. Rather, it is my contention that Carl Sagan's ending to the book shows that he thought it might be true. Otherwise, given the constraints he placed on what he was willing to write, he would have used a different ending. As he is dead, it is unclear if anyone (even his wife) knows the actual reason for the ending or what alternatives he considered, but it's the only option that makes sense to me.
Yes, you are absolutely correct that he was not an expert in arithmetic (or, indeed, geometry). It is a general rule-of-thumb that scientists tread on dangerous ground when they speculate outside of their specialty, so it is entirely possible that by doing so he introduced a misunderstanding on his part. Alternatively, he may have written himself into a corner. Wanting to use the message motif at a deeper level and having absolutely no idea how to do it, merely used the first idea that popped into his head. I'm not as happy with those answers because of his statements concerning the scientific accuracy, but they are certainly possible.
You are also correct that is is a science fiction book. I've always been a bit borderline on that - there's a designation of "speculative fiction" for sci-fi that is still fiction but is totally correct to the science as known at the time. This isn't important to most people, it only matters to those who want to extrapolate from the book in some way, as it determines how they can extrapolate. The idea behind the various sub-categories is that there's a difference between novels where the emphasis is on the fiction rather than the science versus novels where the fiction is a vehicle to explore the consequences of differing laws of physics versus novels where the fiction is a vehicle to explore the implications of science fact.
If (and only if) Contact was in this final class, exploring the implications of science fact, is it meaningful to extrapolate anything about the real world. Books of this kind (which are very rare) are intended specifically to promote such extrapolation and investigation. There's not much point in writing a book so absolutely rigidly and checking every last detail if the story could have worked just as well in a completely fictional universe. Precisely because it does involve a lot of tedious work for relatively little gain (and virtually no audience as only a die-hard SF fanatic would find such a book readable), authors generally promote investigation by other means.
Probably the best-known method is to mix the dryest of speculative fiction with regular science fiction. Here, only the element of concern is adhered to absolutely rigidly, the rest of the universe is merely a device to convey the story. Thus, you have the absolute adherence to some real-world fact, but all other aspects of the story are entirely driven by the need to tell a good tale. "Flatland" would
Actually, IIRC, Pi was shown not to be normal. Which makes sense. Geeks like Pi and how many normal geeks are there?
Yeeeees, but there are degrees of randomness. If you assume that a strong of some length will exhibit some specific degree of randomness and that this can be quantified, and that ANY comparable-length string in Pi will have a similar degree of randomness, then if you were to find one specific strong of that length in Pi which exhibited an extremely different value (say, zero), then you have found something abnormal.
It reminds me some of the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert meets up with a troll generating random numbers by only saying "nine". On Dilbert asking if that was really random, the reply was that it's very hard to tell with random numbers. It is very hard and technically it is possible for a truly random number generator to only emit a specific constant within the lifetime of that generator. That's why there's a requirement by people studying randomness that things be random on a multitude of scales and not just overall and why tests for randomness are under constant development.
You are correct that it can be found algorithmically, though in defense of Carl Sagan, there were serious discussions at the time as to whether the fundamental constants were actually constant. As I recall, it was to get round some extremely messy and inconvenient issues with the extremely early universe. The values as they stand make things exceedingly messy and physicists hate messy. It also ties in with questions that Hawking and other cosmologists were arguing about at the time, which boiled down to a question of what aspects of mathematics and physics are invariant - if a multiverse did indeed exist, what things MUST be the same across all of them because logic alone dictates that is the way they must be?
My impression of the "message in Pi" was that Sagan was sympathetic to the idea that the fundamental constants were not necessarily dictated by logic alone. That if you were to actually create a universe by creating a region of sufficient energy density for inflationary theory to kick in that there were certain parameters you could feed in where some of those parameters would tweak those constants. Remember, he wanted his book to describe physics correctly (hence his debates with Professor Kip Thorne on wormholes), but "correct" can never be better than what is known at the time even if it is subsequently shown to be false. In this case, the discovery that you can find individual digits of Pi directly and algorithmically was unknown, and although there is still some uncertainty over the fundamental constants (certain forms of M-Theory allow different universes to have different constants), the debate over whether the values have changed seems to have died down. However, this is long after the book was written.
I think that if Sagan were alive today and were to re-write Contact that he would put the deeper message somewhere else, reflecting what is now known. However, since everything discussed in the book is cutting-edge physics, the theories are evolving too fast for ANY version of the book to have much staying-power in terms of what we believe is possible. There are now question-marks about wormholes that did not exist back then, for example.
There is nothing in the book to say that it was from God. Indeed, the aliens say that the wormhole transit system was created by some earlier race but in disrepair and abandoned, suggesting the message was from some extremely advanced civilization. It's impossible to be sure if Sagan was implying that this civilization created the universe (science at the time of the book's writing was predicting that it is possible to create a separate universe, not sure if it still does) or had modified the universe in some way as to alter the constants (there have been discussions, from time to time, as to whether fundamental constants have altered).
Nor was there anything in the book - as far as I recall - that said that there was only one message in any given constant. My impression was that the circle served the same purpose as the prime numbers in the alien message - a beacon to indicate that a deeper message existed.
If I recall, the actual message itself was not decyphered by the alien race. Whether this was because insufficient constants had been examined to sufficient depth, or whether this was because the purpose of the message was merely to show that there is something more and had no meaning beyond that, is unclear. Both explanations are hinted at.
My main objection is that the curator was interviewed by Slashdot many years ago but the interview results were never published. Damn bastards probably classified it.
Oh, I can certainly believe that. Though it might be... entertaining to see what happens if they were legally obliged to honor their claims before Congress.
Let one who has understanding reckon the number of the Sony, for it is a gigabyte number, its number is six hundred and sixty seven.
As I have said elsewhere, this is the explanation the industry has (repeatedly) given. Don't go blaming me for their claims, especially when I state that the price reductions they claim are at best hypothetical.
You are correct, my argument mostly rested on this being the reasons given to Congress for the extremely high prices of CDs during the inquiry into whether there was gouging. However, your argument gives yet other factors that would alter the price, which also would have to be taken into consideration when determining losses from piracy. Since neither your points nor mine are included in any calculation, it is a foregone conclusion that those calculations must be wrong -- and must be quite substantially wrong at that.
Your point also raises the prospect that in certain markets (though I doubt the *AA would be amongst them), estimates for loss will be too low, which means that in those markets the legal remedies may be such that those who get caught will still make a profit and those who get compensated will still make a loss.
I believe that a "true" (as in "as complete as we'll ever likely get") model of the impact of piracy and counterfeiting on all kinds of industries and those industries that form part of that interdependency web would be valuable to assess how the system should be adjusted. I do not believe that politicians or industrialists (in any field) would consider such a model as being in their interest. Those who suffer from overestimation risk being pilloried and punished, those who suffer from underestimation risk being abandoned by investors once the true risk factors are known. As such, no such model is ever likely to be created.
Is it true that Congress is going to change copyright to expire 75 years after cryogenic containment fails or the sun explodes, whichever happens later?
You also have to consider that the market price is artificially inflated to "cover the damage" of piracy. Thus, if there was no piracy, the prices would (hypothetically) be lower. So not only do you have to consider the sales lost rather than the total pirated, but you also have to use the "real market value" not the inflated market value. Further, you would have to subtract from this total the amount lost per sale due to the devaluation.
If the value ends up negative, then the industry is actually making money from there being pirates, as counter-intuitive as this would seem. If they were unable to sustain a higher value per item, through a lack of justification, they would end up making less money even though they sold more products.
(This justification thing featured big time when the US and UK governments investigated the music business when it was discovered that prices for producing CDs had dropped dramatically, research had all been paid for, but consumers were actually spending more per disk. Before then, the main argument for the high prices for CDs was that it cost more to make them than it did vinyl. After the showdown with Congress and Parliament, it was all about piracy.)
I'm not saying that anyone IS making money from there being piracy, but it is something that has to be considered as a possibility.
Even after all that, there are still two more factors. The first is who is doing the pirating. Competitor A may well try pirating a product of Competitor B's, particularly on those occasions when you've a sales volume war going on. That is certainly money lost to piracy, but it is the industry itself doing it and you can't blame outsiders for that. Well, you can, as clearly they do.
The second factor to consider is unpaid royalties. We have no idea how much any given company is making in profit that it is NOT entitled to. However, this value has to be estimated, because you have to subtract not only the total illicit profit from a company from the damage caused by counterfeiting, but you THEN have to subtract the total illicit profit the company WOULD have earned had the sale happened through them. That is not money they should ever have counted.
I cannot see how any figure that exists today (or any other day) could even begin to take all this into account.
Teh intertoobs, where else? (This is also why newspapers often have typos, even in the digital age. It's cut-and-paste from a lolspeak site.)
Depends on how you define "enough" and "filled". Classrooms are often understaffed and a healthy teacher getting good nutrition and good access to fresh material will teach better than an unhealthy teacher who survives on Burger King and hasn't seen a new idea in a decade.
I have a preference for a well-educated populace, with "well-educated" being defined as being the least-educated can function well in multiple branches of society (ie: nobody is deprived of a choice in life through circumstance), the average person has the ability to get into a middle-of-the-road University, and the brightest person is never deprived of the opportunity to learn, with the additional proviso that all people have the necessary knowledge, skills and means to make choices that are sensible for them if they so wish.
It is impossible to have a well-educated populace if you work purely on paying the least that will fill fewest positions you can get away with. In fact, it's almost impossible to educate people at all like that. It is impossible to have a well-educated populace if you work purely on paying the least but have just enough positions to actually teach sensibly. You will, however, likely get the least-able and even some of the average-able up to par.
If the pay was too low --- ummm, the pay isn't a hell of a lot more than burger-flippers get, for many teaching jobs. My first professional software engineering job paid more than my father's senior lecturer job at one of Britain's top Universities. Difference? He wanted to teach and he wanted to research. Those were his life-blood. When he retired (and he only semi-retired at that) he continued teaching and researching, just on his own time and out of his own house. Most people thought he'd die rather than quit. His final research papers went up online less than a month before he died of cancer.
Someone like that is not going to "work somewhere else" if they get paid too little. If they can keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, the rest of the world be damned. They're going to stay at what they love. And when it comes to something like teaching - unlike any other profession on Earth - that is an attitude that deserves respect, because that is the only attitude that can survive the stress, the politics, the noise, the abuse from those who complain teachers are all whiners, etc, ad nausium. It's the kind of attitude that allows one to teach and teach well, no matter what.
The reason a lot of modern teachers are crappy is that they do NOT have that attitude. They're in there to pick up a paycheck and keep their backsides (and the rest of their anatomy) covered from lawsuits. Those are not interested in teaching, but frankly they can't go out and get anything else either. They don't have the ability.
And that's the crux of it. Teachers are either damn good and pay is immaterial, or they're no good and pay is whatever they can get.
Archimedes' textbooks might be useful, too. No, wait, they don't teach calculus or combinatorics at that age. Sorry.
They probably were, so you were correct in saying that the war itself was not done for the profit of the US. To make the statement complete, though, it makes sense to point out that profits are being made and who by. (Since said warlords are likely contributing to the war continuing for so long.)
Nonono. The moon wasn't knocked out of orbit by a solar flare, it was the nuclear waste dump exploding after a build-up of magnetic radiation. I have the pilot episode of Space: 1999 if you don't believe me!
Well, not significantly more so than Swift nearly getting blinded by a gamma ray burst, surely. And once something becomes routine, can it really be called ironic any more? (Hey, California considers three strikes ever to be good enough, this is two in the same year!)