I bought the $80 kindle last week. At checkout, amazon offered me another $40 off if I'd apply for an amazon credit card. I did that, so I got a $40 device for reading public-domain books while traveling. I will never buy a DRM'd book from amazon.
Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.
Total deaths from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami: about 19,000. Total deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster: 0.
Ecologically, the Chernobyl meltdown was a mixed bag. Some species were harmed, but many species benefited from it. The beneficial effects came because humans left the area. Dense human habitation is the worst possible thing that can happen to any ecosystem.
Interesting link. Thanks for posting that! I hadn't realized that music sold on Amazon had such a restrictive EULA, forbidding resale. Unfortunately Google's new service sees to have the same problem. Presumably they both have these terms because they were imposed on them by the record companies.
It's really annoying how so many slashdot summaries these days are plagiarized directly from TFA. (I'm assuming that fergus07 is not the same person as Loz Blain.) Cutting and pasting withour giving proper attribution to the author is plagiarism.
An even more pathetic example was this one, which was, ironically, about academic dishonesty.
And let's say for the sake of argument that fergus07 *is* the same person as Loz Blain, and "an anonymous reader" *is* the same person as Kirk Klocke; then they should reveal that, rather than slyly plugging their own story under an alias.
The Supreme Court seems to think that their rulings supersede what's actually written in the Constitution. They are wrong. When they cannot enforce the Constitution as written, they endanger the legitimacy of our government.
But of course different people have different opinions about the meaning of "what's actually written in the Constitution." The first amendment says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." There is nothing "actually written" in the constitution about sleeping in a public park. If you equate sleeping in a park to "assembl[y]," you're stretching the meaning of what was "actually written." In this particular case, the Supreme Court *is* reading it as "actually written," and you're not.
I have a PhD in physics, and my field (back when I was doing research) was experimental low-energy nuclear physics (not specifically nuclear engineering, etc.). There is no secret about how, e.g., neutron-induced fission works, what the cross-sections are, or what is critical mass for a given enrichment. When I saw the title, "Identifying Nuclear Scientists Willing To Sell Their Knowledge," I thought, sure that's me. I'm willing to sell my nuclear knowledge. In fact, I do sell my nuclear knowledge. I teach physics at a college. That's what the taxpayers pay me to do. Is there some reason why I would not want to do my job properly in some very large subfield of physics such as nuclear physics? Of course not. It happens to be my specialty, so I'll probably do a better job teaching it than any other topic.
This isn't civil disobedience. This is a constitutionally protected peaceable assembly. The ones breaking the law here are the city governments and police.
Well, everyone's entitled to their opinions about how the constitution should be interpreted. However, the opinion that really matters is the opinion of the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court doesn't seem to agree with your interpretation, even in the case of a normal public park. (Zucotti Park is more complicated because it's a privately owned public park.) Here is a nice analysis by a lawyer sympathetic to the protesters.
Wasn't this pretty predictable? I can't see how anyone participating in these protests could have imagined that they would be allowed to stay indefinitely without getting rousted by the cops. It's a form of civil disobedience. What is the point of arguing about whether DHS and FBI are involved, about details of the law, about various mayors' secret motivations, etc.? If you do civil disobedience, you expect to get hauled off to jail.
Contamination has been a huge issue in human cell research. A line called HeLa contaminated a large number of experiments, meaning that basically all the research on human cells in vitro from an entire era was called into doubt. The story of the HeLa line is remarkable; they are immortal cancer cells from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. The cells weren't just contaminants; they played a major positive role in a lot of science. Lacks was never asked her permission, and her family never knew for decades afterward that her cells had made such a contribution to medicine.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this! It wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't push everything else down so you don't see it, or if you could turn it off.
NSF statistics show that in 2006, 2.2% of masters degrees in electrical engineering were awarded to people who described themselves as "black, non-Hispanic." This is compared to 13% of the population that is black. This goes a long way toward explaining why "About 1% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of last year are black,[...]" This applies to any field where you're talking about a group being underrepresented; you have to look at the talent pool. If the group is underrepresented in the talent pool, then it's too late to fix the problem. They're simply going to be underrepresented in the field.
And why is it necessarily a problem if a particular group is underrepresented or overrepresented in a particular field? There are a lot of Jewish doctors out there. Is that bad? It's only bad if the underrepresentation is the result of injustice. What if some of it is the result of culture, preferences, or factors such as becoming a dentist because your mom is a dentist?
It would be extremely interesting to know what fraction of entrepreneurs who receive venture capital come from families with below-median incomes. I'll bet you a nickel the figure is much, much lower than 50%. But the US is allergic to talking about class. We only want to talk about race.
Remember, the goal isn't to try to be scary. Rather, the goal is to have enough to convince the other guy that he absolutely cannot win under any circumstance, so he shouldn't even think about it. We had that in the past.
You mean like during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Kennedy and Khrushchev both believed that they were going to destroy civilization, and yet they were both on the brink of pushing the button anyway.
Quit with the massively overblown hyperbole. If what you were saying was true, and about 2000 warheads was enough to "destroy the world several hundred times over", the would would have been dead and gone a long time ago. [...]Honestly, 2000 warheads is barely enough for a credible deterrent at all.
Well, you're partly right and partly wrong. You're right that the GP poster was using inaccurate and hyperbolic language. However, you're wrong that 2000 warheads is a minimal credible deterrent. For a nation-state such as, say, Iran, that is contemplating a nuclear first strike against the US, four submarine-based missiles are plenty of deterrent. That's enough to destroy Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, and Tabriz. That would kill 20 million Iranians, and eliminate the country's political and economic structures. Iran has no way of knocking out a US nuclear sub, and neither does Russia or any other country int he world. Iran has no missile defense capable of stopping incoming US missiles, and neither does Russia or any other country in the world.
The big thing that's missing from your post is any mention of nuclear winter. Because predictions of nuclear winter are based on climate modeling, and climate modeling is full of huge uncertainties, we don't really know how many kilotons it would take to start a nuclear winter that would stop agriculture for long enough to kill, say, 99% of the world's population, resulting in the destruction of our modern technological civilization. Given that uncertainty, it would be prudent to get strategic arsenals down to the lowest level that would provide a deterrent -- so that if the deterrent gets used, we might only kill, say, 10% of the world's population, and civilization might survive.
Because the one thing all politicians can agree on is that they want more of your money.
Maybe you missed the existence of the Republican party? The party at the national level is very clear on not being willing to raise federal taxes. This bill does not constitute an exception to that. It will result in increased taxes collected by the states. "They" (the federal-government politicians who wrote this bill) are not getting any more of your money.
BTW, I typically vote Libertarian, never Republican -- but let's be accurate rather than glib.
The main reason being that people in general are stupid.
You left out selfish and shortsighted.
I live in California, which has lots of direct democracy: initiative, recall, etc. If you want a perfect demonstration of what's wrong with too much direct democracy, California is it.
We have one of the longest constitutions in the world, and one of the reasons is that initiatives are often written as constitutional amendments. A particular problem is all the constitutional stuff that requires that a certain amount of tax revenue be given to certain purposes, combined with other constitutional restrictions that make it basically impossible to raise taxes. The result is that it's essentially a constitutional impossibility to balance the budget.
All of our direct democracy in this state was originally intended to allow the people to fight back against railroad barons. Now guess where all the initiatives on the ballot come from? Yep, they're funded by rich people and big corporations, who can afford to pay signature gatherers $1 a signature to get on the ballot, and who can then afford TV ads to convince people to vote for their initiatives.
What we need is *less* direct democracy, not more.
The slashdot summary is attributed to Soulskill, but parts of it are taken directly from TFA. Using quoted material without attribution...kind of ironic, given the topic.
TFA, including the parts copied into the summary, is so poorly written as to be unintelligible, and if you want to look at the article, only the abstract is available without going through a paywall. So...not much to discuss, is there?
Well, "Department of Homeland Security," to me, implies a department that's responsible for keeping US territory (the fifty states) safe. You know, defending it. So I would propose that we call it the "Department of Defense." Oh, wait, there's a problem because we already have some other department called that. But that department isn't really concerned with defending US soil, and it hasn't been since 1945. So I would propose that we do the following:
The thing currently called the Department of Homeland Security becomes the Department of Defense.
The thing currently called the Department of Defense becomes the Department of Invading Asia and the Middle-East.
Once we have the names straightened out, we can cut funding for anything being being done by the new Department of Defense (former DHS) that does not defend US territory. Oh, wait, that would imply defunding the whole thing.
>>Some universities in my country have too many freshmen so they deliberately try to make half of them drop out.
>Which is not a bad strategy when you consider the alternative: absurdly high entrance requirements. That's the strategy that medical schools have adopted, at least up here in Canada, and it's pretty clear that trying to separate the top 1% from the top 10% for admissions doesn't make for more successful students. If anything, it selects for the hyper-competitive, the resume-builders, and/or the lucky.
Med school admissions are a completely different case than undergraduate admissions.
Statistically, undergraduate schools in the US with higher entrance requirements don't actually have higher success rates in freshman STEM classes. Presumably what happens is that a school with high entrance requirements, e.g., Berkeley, makes their freshman STEM classes harder, because they know they have a well prepared student population.
If you have to weed out students, the your selection process isn't working: you are waisting time and resources to do something that had to be done before students enrolled in your class.
Community colleges don't have selective admissions.
Also, I haven't read the book you mentioned, but you have to acknowledge the fact that today's student have to handle a larger and harder curriculum.
Freshman physics isn't any harder or easier than it was 50 years ago.
I teach physics at a community college in California, so I'm one of the gatekeepers who washes out STEM majors. It's my job to do that. Society can't afford to have anesthesiologists who can't convert grams to milligrams, or civil engineers who can't add force vectors. A lot of the people who don't succeed in my class are very nice, sincere people. It's just that their talent lies somewhere else than in math and science. The sooner they find that out, the sooner they can find a more appropriate major.
In addition to the good but untalented students described above, there are many who don't succeed for other reasons. There's a book called Academically Adrift, by Arum and Roksa, which is summarized here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand . One of their findings is that the average time studying has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years. The average number of hours per week was 25 in 1961, 20 in 1981, and 13 in 2003. This drop is still present when you control for the fact that different people go to college now than in 1961.
Another finding, which has been replicated by others, is that students' critical thinking and writing skills show extremely small improvements over the course of a college education. The improvements are so small that they are undetectable on the individual level, and still quite small even when you average over a large number of students. Well, maybe we shouldn't expect critical thinking and writing skills to increase so much. Maybe they're innate talents, or maybe they're fixed at an earlier age. But if you get a degree in a field like English or philosophy, essentially the only thing the school *claims* you're getting out of it is critical thinking and writing skills. And greater improvement in these areas is found to be correlated with faculty's high expectations, high standards, and approachability; the fact that there is so little improvement on average suggests that the lack of improvement is caused by faculty's low expectations, low standards, and lack of approachability. For example, a third of college students report that by the time they graduate, they have *never* taken a course that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week.
The thing is, in STEM, you can't just BS your way through your term paper. There are right and wrong answers. We can't just lower standards the way the humanities have done.
A lot of students are urged by their parents to go into STEM because they think the kids will make a lot of money. Once the kids are in college, they often realize that if their only goal is to make a lot of money, they are much better off getting an undergraduate degree in business. Unless you're in particular subfields such as finance, business is by far the easiest major.
The author of the article knew the difference between DRM and Copy Protection. Given the context of the article being about content no longer playing, wanting a history of copy protection in this article is like asking for an article about unpopular cars to include a history of the horse-drawn carriage.
I'd claim that the only significant difference is the name. In 1983, I could buy "content" (software), it would stop working when the floppy died, and I'd be out of luck, because I'd have no way to back it up. In 2011, I can buy "content" (which could be software, music, or a book), it will stop working, and I'll be out of luck, because I have no way to back it up. Your point would be more persuasive if all copy protection used to work a certain way, and if all DRM currently worked a certain way, which was different -- but that's not the case. For example, some people distribute PDF files that are supposed to be viewable but not printable; this is pure security through obscurity, just like a typical copy-protection scheme used in the 80's.
However, the state's statute of limitations expired, and the federal prosecutors could find no *federal* laws being broken.
It's also not really clear that any state laws were broken. Texas law gives parents pretty broad leeway. The law allows corporal punishment provided that the child is not exposed to a substantial risk of harm, the force is not deadly, the child is under 18, and to the extent that the parent believes the punishment to be necessary. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_spanking_legal_in_Texas All of these legal phrases are clearly open to pretty wide interpretation, e.g., if the kid ends up with a bruise, is that "substantial" harm?
If people who are upset about this are living in Texas, then what they're really upset about is their own state law, and they need to work on advocating changes in that law.
TFA only goes back to 1998. The history of DRM goes back much, much further than that, the only difference being that it was called "copy protection" rather than DRM. In the early 1980's, there was the first wave of mass-marketed personal computers: Apple II, TRS-80, etc. Software houses often sold games, for example, on 5" floppies in a format designed to make it possible to play the game, but to make it hard to copy the disk using the OS's standard tools. Computer users voted against copy protection with their feet. For one thing, there was no other backup format besides those unreliable 5" floppies, so if you couldn't copy it to another floppy, you were basically just paying to be able to run the software for as many years as the floppy was readable. Software houses started to realize how much users hated copy protection, so they stopped doing it.
Now we're just going through all the same stuff again, but with a new name, "DRM," and a new generation of computer users that hasn't wised up yet. They need to have their first experience of losing their investment in software, music, or whatever, and then they'll realize that they don't want to touch DRM with a 10-foot pole.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought the $80 kindle last week. At checkout, amazon offered me another $40 off if I'd apply for an amazon credit card. I did that, so I got a $40 device for reading public-domain books while traveling. I will never buy a DRM'd book from amazon.
Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.
Total deaths from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami: about 19,000. Total deaths from the Fukushima nuclear disaster: 0.
Ecologically, the Chernobyl meltdown was a mixed bag. Some species were harmed, but many species benefited from it. The beneficial effects came because humans left the area. Dense human habitation is the worst possible thing that can happen to any ecosystem.
Interesting link. Thanks for posting that! I hadn't realized that music sold on Amazon had such a restrictive EULA, forbidding resale. Unfortunately Google's new service sees to have the same problem. Presumably they both have these terms because they were imposed on them by the record companies.
It's really annoying how so many slashdot summaries these days are plagiarized directly from TFA. (I'm assuming that fergus07 is not the same person as Loz Blain.) Cutting and pasting withour giving proper attribution to the author is plagiarism.
An even more pathetic example was this one, which was, ironically, about academic dishonesty.
And let's say for the sake of argument that fergus07 *is* the same person as Loz Blain, and "an anonymous reader" *is* the same person as Kirk Klocke; then they should reveal that, rather than slyly plugging their own story under an alias.
The Supreme Court seems to think that their rulings supersede what's actually written in the Constitution. They are wrong. When they cannot enforce the Constitution as written, they endanger the legitimacy of our government.
But of course different people have different opinions about the meaning of "what's actually written in the Constitution." The first amendment says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." There is nothing "actually written" in the constitution about sleeping in a public park. If you equate sleeping in a park to "assembl[y]," you're stretching the meaning of what was "actually written." In this particular case, the Supreme Court *is* reading it as "actually written," and you're not.
I have a PhD in physics, and my field (back when I was doing research) was experimental low-energy nuclear physics (not specifically nuclear engineering, etc.). There is no secret about how, e.g., neutron-induced fission works, what the cross-sections are, or what is critical mass for a given enrichment. When I saw the title, "Identifying Nuclear Scientists Willing To Sell Their Knowledge," I thought, sure that's me. I'm willing to sell my nuclear knowledge. In fact, I do sell my nuclear knowledge. I teach physics at a college. That's what the taxpayers pay me to do. Is there some reason why I would not want to do my job properly in some very large subfield of physics such as nuclear physics? Of course not. It happens to be my specialty, so I'll probably do a better job teaching it than any other topic.
This isn't civil disobedience. This is a constitutionally protected peaceable assembly. The ones breaking the law here are the city governments and police.
Well, everyone's entitled to their opinions about how the constitution should be interpreted. However, the opinion that really matters is the opinion of the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court doesn't seem to agree with your interpretation, even in the case of a normal public park. (Zucotti Park is more complicated because it's a privately owned public park.) Here is a nice analysis by a lawyer sympathetic to the protesters.
Wasn't this pretty predictable? I can't see how anyone participating in these protests could have imagined that they would be allowed to stay indefinitely without getting rousted by the cops. It's a form of civil disobedience. What is the point of arguing about whether DHS and FBI are involved, about details of the law, about various mayors' secret motivations, etc.? If you do civil disobedience, you expect to get hauled off to jail.
Contamination has been a huge issue in human cell research. A line called HeLa contaminated a large number of experiments, meaning that basically all the research on human cells in vitro from an entire era was called into doubt. The story of the HeLa line is remarkable; they are immortal cancer cells from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. The cells weren't just contaminants; they played a major positive role in a lot of science. Lacks was never asked her permission, and her family never knew for decades afterward that her cells had made such a contribution to medicine.
Awesome!!!!!!!!! Thanks!!!!!!!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this! It wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't push everything else down so you don't see it, or if you could turn it off.
NSF statistics show that in 2006, 2.2% of masters degrees in electrical engineering were awarded to people who described themselves as "black, non-Hispanic." This is compared to 13% of the population that is black. This goes a long way toward explaining why "About 1% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of last year are black,[...]" This applies to any field where you're talking about a group being underrepresented; you have to look at the talent pool. If the group is underrepresented in the talent pool, then it's too late to fix the problem. They're simply going to be underrepresented in the field.
And why is it necessarily a problem if a particular group is underrepresented or overrepresented in a particular field? There are a lot of Jewish doctors out there. Is that bad? It's only bad if the underrepresentation is the result of injustice. What if some of it is the result of culture, preferences, or factors such as becoming a dentist because your mom is a dentist?
It would be extremely interesting to know what fraction of entrepreneurs who receive venture capital come from families with below-median incomes. I'll bet you a nickel the figure is much, much lower than 50%. But the US is allergic to talking about class. We only want to talk about race.
Remember, the goal isn't to try to be scary. Rather, the goal is to have enough to convince the other guy that he absolutely cannot win under any circumstance, so he shouldn't even think about it. We had that in the past.
You mean like during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Kennedy and Khrushchev both believed that they were going to destroy civilization, and yet they were both on the brink of pushing the button anyway.
Quit with the massively overblown hyperbole. If what you were saying was true, and about 2000 warheads was enough to "destroy the world several hundred times over", the would would have been dead and gone a long time ago. [...]Honestly, 2000 warheads is barely enough for a credible deterrent at all.
Well, you're partly right and partly wrong. You're right that the GP poster was using inaccurate and hyperbolic language. However, you're wrong that 2000 warheads is a minimal credible deterrent. For a nation-state such as, say, Iran, that is contemplating a nuclear first strike against the US, four submarine-based missiles are plenty of deterrent. That's enough to destroy Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, and Tabriz. That would kill 20 million Iranians, and eliminate the country's political and economic structures. Iran has no way of knocking out a US nuclear sub, and neither does Russia or any other country int he world. Iran has no missile defense capable of stopping incoming US missiles, and neither does Russia or any other country in the world.
The big thing that's missing from your post is any mention of nuclear winter. Because predictions of nuclear winter are based on climate modeling, and climate modeling is full of huge uncertainties, we don't really know how many kilotons it would take to start a nuclear winter that would stop agriculture for long enough to kill, say, 99% of the world's population, resulting in the destruction of our modern technological civilization. Given that uncertainty, it would be prudent to get strategic arsenals down to the lowest level that would provide a deterrent -- so that if the deterrent gets used, we might only kill, say, 10% of the world's population, and civilization might survive.
Because the one thing all politicians can agree on is that they want more of your money.
Maybe you missed the existence of the Republican party? The party at the national level is very clear on not being willing to raise federal taxes. This bill does not constitute an exception to that. It will result in increased taxes collected by the states. "They" (the federal-government politicians who wrote this bill) are not getting any more of your money.
BTW, I typically vote Libertarian, never Republican -- but let's be accurate rather than glib.
The main reason being that people in general are stupid.
You left out selfish and shortsighted.
I live in California, which has lots of direct democracy: initiative, recall, etc. If you want a perfect demonstration of what's wrong with too much direct democracy, California is it.
We have one of the longest constitutions in the world, and one of the reasons is that initiatives are often written as constitutional amendments. A particular problem is all the constitutional stuff that requires that a certain amount of tax revenue be given to certain purposes, combined with other constitutional restrictions that make it basically impossible to raise taxes. The result is that it's essentially a constitutional impossibility to balance the budget.
All of our direct democracy in this state was originally intended to allow the people to fight back against railroad barons. Now guess where all the initiatives on the ballot come from? Yep, they're funded by rich people and big corporations, who can afford to pay signature gatherers $1 a signature to get on the ballot, and who can then afford TV ads to convince people to vote for their initiatives.
What we need is *less* direct democracy, not more.
Oops, actually the article is attributed to "an anonymous reader," not Soulskill. Maybe this is the same person, Kirk Klocke, who wrote TFA?
The slashdot summary is attributed to Soulskill, but parts of it are taken directly from TFA. Using quoted material without attribution...kind of ironic, given the topic.
TFA, including the parts copied into the summary, is so poorly written as to be unintelligible, and if you want to look at the article, only the abstract is available without going through a paywall. So...not much to discuss, is there?
Well, "Department of Homeland Security," to me, implies a department that's responsible for keeping US territory (the fifty states) safe. You know, defending it. So I would propose that we call it the "Department of Defense." Oh, wait, there's a problem because we already have some other department called that. But that department isn't really concerned with defending US soil, and it hasn't been since 1945. So I would propose that we do the following:
The thing currently called the Department of Homeland Security becomes the Department of Defense.
The thing currently called the Department of Defense becomes the Department of Invading Asia and the Middle-East.
Once we have the names straightened out, we can cut funding for anything being being done by the new Department of Defense (former DHS) that does not defend US territory. Oh, wait, that would imply defunding the whole thing.
>>Some universities in my country have too many freshmen so they deliberately try to make half of them drop out.
>Which is not a bad strategy when you consider the alternative: absurdly high entrance requirements. That's the strategy that medical schools have adopted, at least up here in Canada, and it's pretty clear that trying to separate the top 1% from the top 10% for admissions doesn't make for more successful students. If anything, it selects for the hyper-competitive, the resume-builders, and/or the lucky.
Med school admissions are a completely different case than undergraduate admissions.
Statistically, undergraduate schools in the US with higher entrance requirements don't actually have higher success rates in freshman STEM classes. Presumably what happens is that a school with high entrance requirements, e.g., Berkeley, makes their freshman STEM classes harder, because they know they have a well prepared student population.
If you have to weed out students, the your selection process isn't working: you are waisting time and resources to do something that had to be done before students enrolled in your class.
Community colleges don't have selective admissions.
Also, I haven't read the book you mentioned, but you have to acknowledge the fact that today's student have to handle a larger and harder curriculum.
Freshman physics isn't any harder or easier than it was 50 years ago.
I teach physics at a community college in California, so I'm one of the gatekeepers who washes out STEM majors. It's my job to do that. Society can't afford to have anesthesiologists who can't convert grams to milligrams, or civil engineers who can't add force vectors. A lot of the people who don't succeed in my class are very nice, sincere people. It's just that their talent lies somewhere else than in math and science. The sooner they find that out, the sooner they can find a more appropriate major.
In addition to the good but untalented students described above, there are many who don't succeed for other reasons. There's a book called Academically Adrift, by Arum and Roksa, which is summarized here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand . One of their findings is that the average time studying has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years. The average number of hours per week was 25 in 1961, 20 in 1981, and 13 in 2003. This drop is still present when you control for the fact that different people go to college now than in 1961.
Another finding, which has been replicated by others, is that students' critical thinking and writing skills show extremely small improvements over the course of a college education. The improvements are so small that they are undetectable on the individual level, and still quite small even when you average over a large number of students. Well, maybe we shouldn't expect critical thinking and writing skills to increase so much. Maybe they're innate talents, or maybe they're fixed at an earlier age. But if you get a degree in a field like English or philosophy, essentially the only thing the school *claims* you're getting out of it is critical thinking and writing skills. And greater improvement in these areas is found to be correlated with faculty's high expectations, high standards, and approachability; the fact that there is so little improvement on average suggests that the lack of improvement is caused by faculty's low expectations, low standards, and lack of approachability. For example, a third of college students report that by the time they graduate, they have *never* taken a course that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week.
The thing is, in STEM, you can't just BS your way through your term paper. There are right and wrong answers. We can't just lower standards the way the humanities have done.
A lot of students are urged by their parents to go into STEM because they think the kids will make a lot of money. Once the kids are in college, they often realize that if their only goal is to make a lot of money, they are much better off getting an undergraduate degree in business. Unless you're in particular subfields such as finance, business is by far the easiest major.
The author of the article knew the difference between DRM and Copy Protection. Given the context of the article being about content no longer playing, wanting a history of copy protection in this article is like asking for an article about unpopular cars to include a history of the horse-drawn carriage.
I'd claim that the only significant difference is the name. In 1983, I could buy "content" (software), it would stop working when the floppy died, and I'd be out of luck, because I'd have no way to back it up. In 2011, I can buy "content" (which could be software, music, or a book), it will stop working, and I'll be out of luck, because I have no way to back it up. Your point would be more persuasive if all copy protection used to work a certain way, and if all DRM currently worked a certain way, which was different -- but that's not the case. For example, some people distribute PDF files that are supposed to be viewable but not printable; this is pure security through obscurity, just like a typical copy-protection scheme used in the 80's.
However, the state's statute of limitations expired, and the federal prosecutors could find no *federal* laws being broken.
It's also not really clear that any state laws were broken. Texas law gives parents pretty broad leeway. The law allows corporal punishment provided that the child is not exposed to a substantial risk of harm, the force is not deadly, the child is under 18, and to the extent that the parent believes the punishment to be necessary. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_spanking_legal_in_Texas All of these legal phrases are clearly open to pretty wide interpretation, e.g., if the kid ends up with a bruise, is that "substantial" harm?
If people who are upset about this are living in Texas, then what they're really upset about is their own state law, and they need to work on advocating changes in that law.
Oh, so he abuses his children and then also doesn't support them financially, sounds like a real winner!
She's an adult now, age 23 or 24, so he's not obliged to support her financially.
TFA only goes back to 1998. The history of DRM goes back much, much further than that, the only difference being that it was called "copy protection" rather than DRM. In the early 1980's, there was the first wave of mass-marketed personal computers: Apple II, TRS-80, etc. Software houses often sold games, for example, on 5" floppies in a format designed to make it possible to play the game, but to make it hard to copy the disk using the OS's standard tools. Computer users voted against copy protection with their feet. For one thing, there was no other backup format besides those unreliable 5" floppies, so if you couldn't copy it to another floppy, you were basically just paying to be able to run the software for as many years as the floppy was readable. Software houses started to realize how much users hated copy protection, so they stopped doing it.
Now we're just going through all the same stuff again, but with a new name, "DRM," and a new generation of computer users that hasn't wised up yet. They need to have their first experience of losing their investment in software, music, or whatever, and then they'll realize that they don't want to touch DRM with a 10-foot pole.