As I see it, the problem is not that university researchers and facilities are being used to further corporate ends (and being paid for it). The problem is that the universities have other obligations, the most important of which is the education of their students. It's wonderful that some courses can be subsidized by private companies and more students can learn because of the increased revenue.
Things get sticky when the issue of education becomes distorted by corporate money. If University X gets $200M for its electrical engineering department, and zippo for its education department, how do we know that adequate resources are being allocated to the education of our future teachers? Is one area of study more important, simply on the basis of greater financial returns? At some level, the possibility of becoming an electrical engineer depends upon having been taught to read. Having electrical engineers who know enough not to become fascists depends upon having been taught history.
Playing free-market bingo with our higher education system will remake universities into entities that aren't any good at educating people. To use the free marketers' own logic: if the market wanted for-profit universities, they would already be here. We already have private research firms. Maybe it's the cheap grad student labor.
Exactly. It used to be that academics fought one another tooth-and-nail, over...tenure and reputation, some of them bending the rules, some breaking them. Now that corporations are shoveling money at academics, we'll wind up with more of them who are less qualified and willing to subject scientific rigor and peer review to the pull of big bucks.
While I agree that more people doing more work is a good thing, there will need to be some real oversight. In years past, science was self-regulating in terms of quality and method. With zillions of $ at stake, in the future, someone is going to have to pick up the slack.
How would you rate the effectiveness of rigorous training in medical/journalist/research ethics when corporate money is dangling in front of everyone's nose. Think it'll work?
At 5.5% inflation, it would have taken 15 years to go from a vinyl price of 7.99 to $18. We haven't had 5.5% inflation, and the CD's haven't been around for 15 years. At 4% inflation, it would have taken 21 years. Try again.
Just becuase a product MIGHT be abused doesn't mean that it will.
Ok, it's not axiomatic that it will be abused, but it is inevitible that it will. Imagine that this device begins to be used in, say, court facilities, and that the law regarding its use keeps irrelevant information (i.e., medical conditions, as opposed to weapons/bomb possession) from being collected or used. The next time someone who has recently been to a courthouse dies as a result of an illness that could have been detected, there will be a public outcry over a 'tragic death' that 'could have been prevented,' and the politicians will immediately move that medical checks be done. Same goes for drugs and anything else that could conceivably affect anyone.
I've said it before: information is power, and people are petty. Imagining that abuse of information that can be gained via such a device is hopelessly naive.
Hold on, muchacho. The man asked you a question: What is your solution? Well, what is it? Be specific. Tell us what we should be doing, instead of blasting SETI and telling us how terribly wrong we all are.
Plain and simple, he hopes to get more money out of this.
Absolutely right. I worked for several years at King's publisher, and we let him go because we were losing money on his books. They'd sell 1.3 to 1.5 million copies, but, after we'd paid him and all the contractually-obligated promotional costs, there'd be nothing left. Remember The Green Mile? We took a bath on it, bigtime.
His next publisher came up with a different method of getting him to sign, moving more of the payments onto the royalty end of things. From the buzz I hear, they're not making any money, either.
King is definitely interested in money, not only for its own sake, but also to see to it that he's among the most highly paid. It's an ego thing. Now that publishers are balking at blindly signing him up in hopes of making a few measly dollars from backlist sales 10 years down the road, he's pursuing alternate means of distributing his product. As seems obvious to everyone here, it won't work.
We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets. We would, of course, have to decide for ourselves on the credibility of said news outlets.
For one thing, we wouldn't be losing most of the newspapers in the country, and, more importantly, we wouldn't lose the courts. There would suddenly be a huge vacuum in the news biz, and a big incentive for up-and-comers to get their stories straight.
What if, in the absence of any media conglomerates, in a world of thousands of independent media and news stations, companies and outlets, we were still bombarded with tv's and movies that basically amounted to watching people more attractive than us make out with other people more attractive that us, and complain about the difficulties of being attractive and popular?
Ever heard of independent film? That's were we typically don't see the above, it having been replaced with something interesting.
You make a good point, though. I think if the media corporations disappeared, Mr. and Mrs. USA would be seriously disoriented when their pabulum levels dropped suddenly.
But I'm wondering, the press release mentions that it's got a new display cable/connector. Does this mean it won't work with my nice 19-inch Trinitron? Do I have to buy one from Apple? This could be another pr disaster for them.
To paraphrase is not to misquote. It is usually a reduction to decrease complexity or a best-guess in the face of incomplete memory. In any event, it is an honest attempt to render the meaning intended in the original quote. To a lot of us, magic is an explanation for the irrational which will eventually be debunked, and God is an explanation for the irrational that (sadly) cannot be debunked. There is a difference!
Like nobody saw this one coming? This is news? The precedent is in the process of being set: either the net is a public domain-type equal-use utility, or it will become explicitly the property of the same big corporate interests now gobbling up everything else. Sounds like an antitrust litigator's wet dream to me.
We have thousands of nerve fibers running (for example) to our pinkie toes. Quite likely, there are motor neurons in us which have no function. The thing to do would be to connect a small subset of the toe-fibers to a control module, and use intensive biofeedback until the user got complete conscious control over the range of possible actions of the nerve fiber.
Control over computers and such would not be the same as having it read your mind, but, assuming a good MUI (Motor User Interface), one could have very considerable control. I imagine that, if conditioned young enough, a child could learn to "type" at well over the fastest currently possible speeds, for one example. The possibilities are endless and, unlike having computers read our minds or brain waves, this seems a lot more likely to be a reality in the next ten years.
...to having companies like M$ dictating to the rest of us from the position of dominant standard. With the source available and "compatibility" rights in place for other makers, maybe we could get some _real_ innovation in mainstream software development. This formulation could also be a good counterweight to the sweeping intellectual property rights being granted to software companies (in the US, anyway).
Spam is a logical consequence of the marketing-saturated economy we live in. Keep in mind that capitalism requires growth to survive. It can't be in equilibrium with anything else - it must constantly grow.
Anyone else seeing the direct parallels between marketing and cancer?
Right on about having to zero the RAM after a crash--bad data there's the reason a system goes down in the first place. It's not the instant-on capability of MRAM that's the big whoop, but rather the reduced power consumption and possible 30x (!) increase in speed. As usual, Wired got its emphasis wrong.
The reason that minors in this country have limited constitutional rights is that they are deemed incapable of looking out for their own best interests. It is assumed that parents, guardians, or other parties *interested in the ultimate welfare of the child* will use their increased powers over the children for the latter's ultimate benefit. School officials, although not directly interested in children's welfare, are bound by a tight web of legal constraints that is meant to prevent them from doing too much harm. What constraints are to be put on the Pinkerton psychological reviewers? What guidelines? What would be put in place to moderate their profit motive? I know *I* would be caught dead wearing one of those caps. What are they thinking?
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Things get sticky when the issue of education becomes distorted by corporate money. If University X gets $200M for its electrical engineering department, and zippo for its education department, how do we know that adequate resources are being allocated to the education of our future teachers? Is one area of study more important, simply on the basis of greater financial returns? At some level, the possibility of becoming an electrical engineer depends upon having been taught to read. Having electrical engineers who know enough not to become fascists depends upon having been taught history.
Playing free-market bingo with our higher education system will remake universities into entities that aren't any good at educating people. To use the free marketers' own logic: if the market wanted for-profit universities, they would already be here. We already have private research firms. Maybe it's the cheap grad student labor.
While I agree that more people doing more work is a good thing, there will need to be some real oversight. In years past, science was self-regulating in terms of quality and method. With zillions of $ at stake, in the future, someone is going to have to pick up the slack.
Ok, it's not axiomatic that it will be abused, but it is inevitible that it will. Imagine that this device begins to be used in, say, court facilities, and that the law regarding its use keeps irrelevant information (i.e., medical conditions, as opposed to weapons/bomb possession) from being collected or used. The next time someone who has recently been to a courthouse dies as a result of an illness that could have been detected, there will be a public outcry over a 'tragic death' that 'could have been prevented,' and the politicians will immediately move that medical checks be done. Same goes for drugs and anything else that could conceivably affect anyone.
I've said it before: information is power, and people are petty. Imagining that abuse of information that can be gained via such a device is hopelessly naive.
Absolutely right. I worked for several years at King's publisher, and we let him go because we were losing money on his books. They'd sell 1.3 to 1.5 million copies, but, after we'd paid him and all the contractually-obligated promotional costs, there'd be nothing left. Remember The Green Mile? We took a bath on it, bigtime.
His next publisher came up with a different method of getting him to sign, moving more of the payments onto the royalty end of things. From the buzz I hear, they're not making any money, either.
King is definitely interested in money, not only for its own sake, but also to see to it that he's among the most highly paid. It's an ego thing. Now that publishers are balking at blindly signing him up in hopes of making a few measly dollars from backlist sales 10 years down the road, he's pursuing alternate means of distributing his product. As seems obvious to everyone here, it won't work.
For one thing, we wouldn't be losing most of the newspapers in the country, and, more importantly, we wouldn't lose the courts. There would suddenly be a huge vacuum in the news biz, and a big incentive for up-and-comers to get their stories straight.
What if, in the absence of any media conglomerates, in a world of thousands of independent media and news stations, companies and outlets, we were still bombarded with tv's and movies that basically amounted to watching people more attractive than us make out with other people more attractive that us, and complain about the difficulties of being attractive and popular?
Ever heard of independent film? That's were we typically don't see the above, it having been replaced with something interesting.
You make a good point, though. I think if the media corporations disappeared, Mr. and Mrs. USA would be seriously disoriented when their pabulum levels dropped suddenly.
But I'm wondering, the press release mentions that it's got a new display cable/connector. Does this mean it won't work with my nice 19-inch Trinitron? Do I have to buy one from Apple? This could be another pr disaster for them.
fp
Control over computers and such would not be the same as having it read your mind, but, assuming a good MUI (Motor User Interface), one could have very considerable control. I imagine that, if conditioned young enough, a child could learn to "type" at well over the fastest currently possible speeds, for one example. The possibilities are endless and, unlike having computers read our minds or brain waves, this seems a lot more likely to be a reality in the next ten years.
We've got to come up with another venue for the kiddies to get their fame. Maybe we can bring back graffiti.
how'll they keep pigeons out of the laser path?
...to having companies like M$ dictating to the rest of us from the position of dominant standard. With the source available and "compatibility" rights in place for other makers, maybe we could get some _real_ innovation in mainstream software development. This formulation could also be a good counterweight to the sweeping intellectual property rights being granted to software companies (in the US, anyway).
Anyone else seeing the direct parallels between marketing and cancer?
Right on about having to zero the RAM after a crash--bad data there's the reason a system goes down in the first place. It's not the instant-on capability of MRAM that's the big whoop, but rather the reduced power consumption and possible 30x (!) increase in speed. As usual, Wired got its emphasis wrong.
...is it we need another format for audio? Is it so certain desperately boring people can claim "early adopter" status?
The reason that minors in this country have limited constitutional rights is that they are deemed incapable of looking out for their own best interests. It is assumed that parents, guardians, or other parties *interested in the ultimate welfare of the child* will use their increased powers over the children for the latter's ultimate benefit. School officials, although not directly interested in children's welfare, are bound by a tight web of legal constraints that is meant to prevent them from doing too much harm. What constraints are to be put on the Pinkerton psychological reviewers? What guidelines? What would be put in place to moderate their profit motive? I know *I* would be caught dead wearing one of those caps. What are they thinking?