What we don't seem to have in either TFA or the/. summary is a careful analysis of the issue.
I've been arrested in California (more than once). IIRC the process typically included a search and taking away stuff like my wallet and house keys. It certainly seems reasonable to me that if the cops are going to arrest someone, they might want to make sure he doesn't have a gun or a knife on him. This involves a search.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that if the cops had tried to use my arrest as a pretext to search my safe-deposit box, the bank would have said, "No, not without a warrant."
So is clicking around on your cell more like taking away the contents of your pocket, or is it more like searching your safe-deposit box?
The/. summary talks about looking at your contacts. How is this different from looking at what phone numbers you have written down on a card in your wallet?
Could we maybe get some analysis from someone who knows about California criminal law, constitutional law, etc., rather than just some cheerleading? BTW, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
I teach physics at a community college, and I get a few students now and then who are young teens; because of their age, it can be more practical for them to take community college courses than to head straight to a university at age 14 or 15. I started college (at a university) at 16 myself, and I think it worked out positively for me. I was pretty immature at 16, and living on my own, cooking, doing my laundry, etc., helped me to become more mature. Because of my own experiences, I'm predisposed to be sympathetic to these kids.
However, I've noticed several negative things that can happen.
One is that parents, and other adults who deal with these kids, have a tendency to exaggerate their capabilities. Their high school principal may not be comfortable with basic algebra, so to him/her, anything the kid does mathematically seems like it's superduper incredible. This clearly seems to be happening here, if you read between the lines in the article. The article claims that he's already studied string theory, but it also says that he's currently taking linear algebra. Well, people don't really learn string theory until they've got a *lot* more math under their belt than that, and even extremely smart grad students tend to take about 6 years to master the techniques of string theory. (This is one reason why many people tell bright physics grad students not to go into string theory, because it takes them such a long time to become fluent enough to start research.) So I think what really happened here was that he read a popularization such as Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, and now the adults around him describe him as having studied string theory. I think parents also start to exaggerate about their kid's abilities because their own egos get tied up in it. It's the same type of psychology that says it's not enough for your kid to win the Contra Costa County beauty pageant, she has to be the most beautiful in California, or the United States.
Another negative is that the parents are too involved in their kids' stuff. I've had parents stop me in the halls and try to talk to me about how it's really a problem that their kid is getting a B in physics instead of an A, it's not fair because their kid is a genius, it's going to be my fault because their kid isn't going to get into Harvard, etc. Parents should not be driving to the college to drop off a homework paper that their kid forgot to bring to school. This is the age where the kid needs to make his/her own mistakes, experience the consequences, and become more mature.
A third negative is that kids tend not to be intellectually mature at 14 or 15. With some of them, there's the risk that they are learning about Newton's laws or Shakespeare at a superficial level, not at the level they really need as a foundation if they are going to go on with upper-division work. Maybe they haven't had the life experiences they need in order to understand Shakespeare at a deep level. Or maybe their brains just haven't developed to the point where they're really ready to grasp Newton's laws, and instead they understand physics as a set of problem-solving procedures. Or maybe they are capable of deep understanding in one subject, which is where their talent lies, but in another subject they're not really getting a college-level education.
I'm in favor of letting parents and kids make their own decisions, but I think sometimes the decisions are really made by the parents, and they're the wrong decisions.
This significantly improves my opinion of banks. I knew that they were full of the kind of people who would hold the economy hostage and demand a bailout from the federal government because they were too big to fail. I knew they were full of the kind of people who would robo-sign documents fraudulently, sometimes causing families to be kicked out of their houses by mistake. I knew they were full of the kind of people who would convince working people to sign mortgages that the banks knew they could never repay, based on income information that the banks knew was fraudulent.
Now I find out that that isn't the only kind of person who works at banks. There are apparently some who aren't criminal masterminds, just workaday crooks. Small-time white-collar criminals who deal with Russian gangsters during the week to make an extra buck, but on the weekends go home and coach their kids' soccer teams. Very refreshing.
I'm thinking that this is just an excuse to spend money on "hi-tech" for the school district. Follow the money. Who's getting paid for it?
I don't know about Washington, but here in California, schools get paid based on how many students show up. The party that stands to gain financially here is probably the school district, because they're hoping it will increase attendance.
On most traditionally published paper books, the author gets only a very small percentage of the retail price. That makes some sense. A bunch of people need to get paid: acquisitions editor, copy editor, truck driver, checkout clerk... The publisher is also taking a financial risk by publishing the book, and a small number of very profitable books are subsidizing the much larger number of relatively unprofitable or completely unprofitable ones.
But how does it make sense for Amazon to take 65 cents on the sale of a 99-cent book? Amazon has basically zero cost to recoup. OK, they take a loss on the kindle right now in order to get people locked into their system. But it's kind of pathetic if this ends up being a permanent arrangement and they manage to levy a 65-cent tax until the end of time. Most book authors would actually be pretty happy with a 99-cent price -- if they got all of it.
That's not true, that's only true if you create the materials on their time, otherwise you own it, not the school. Unless the school is giving the OP time off in which to create the materials or is paying overtime, the proper owner of the materials would be the employee.
Neither university teachers nor K-12 teachers are factory workers who punch a clock. They are professionals who basically manage themselves and set a lot of their own work hours. This makes "on their time" a vague concept, and that's why I believe no schools actually use that as a criterion. Typically the teacher owns what the teacher writes, and the school owns any patents.
this comes up all the time. go look at any university's IP disclaimers. If you invented it in your role as an employee, they own it. It doesn't matter who funds the school - the school funds you.
Sloppy analogy. Patents are not the most common case of IP at the K-12 level, and at the university level there are other types of IP that are *not* owned by the school. For example, the school does not own the textbook that a professor writes.
"While doing work for the school" needs to be better defined. Teachers "do work for the school" at home as well as on campus. They are professionals, and the boundary between what they are required to do and what they do because they want to is not always clear. If a teacher writes a textbook, this is not "work for the school." If a teacher writes a lesson plan, it probably is "work for the school." There is no clear boundary between these two things.
"Ideally, both the school and the creator(s) would be able to retain rights to the use of the product." What does "use of" mean? If the teacher writes a textbook, the teacher should not just be able to "use" it in his/her own classroom, he/she should be able to sell it and exploit it commercially.
If the principal writes an employee handbook, then clearly the employee handbook is a work made for hire, and the school should own it.
Asking what license to use is the wrong question. If the employee owns the copyright, then the choice of license is up to the employee, not you.
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
Yep. The OP describes this as a company that outsourced the coding of their "flagship project" to incompetent developers, and is now not willing to pay enough to hire people in-house with the level of experience and skills needed to clean up the mess. This kind of corporate behavior is the opposite of showing loyalty to the company's employees. It's not the OP's fault that they're dependent on him. They're dependent on him because they're treating labor as a commodity that they want to save money on.
The arxiv blog recently had a roundup of papers discussing this: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27212/ They fall into three groups: (1) Suggestions of how the experiment might have given a wrong result. (2) Theoretical arguments that constrain the interpretation and make the result seem implausible if taken at face value. (3) Theoretical papers saying what it could mean if it really was new physics. The Nature article seems to show that the Contaldi paper was based on a misunderstanding of how the experiment was done. However, the Nature article points to a new paper by Henri that wasn't included in the arxiv roundup: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0239
History is replete with examples of libertarian paradises where the job-creators built wealth unfettered by regulation and the fruits of their labor enriched everyone! Why, there's Somalia, and Libya, and...
I'm not aware of any knowledgeable academic or journalist who has suggested that Somalia's system of government since 1991 could be described as libertarian. You may be confusing libertarianism with anarchism. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that says that the government should basically do nothing more than protect private property, enforce contracts, and keep people from killing each other. Anarchism is a political philosophy that says that there should be no government at all, and in particular that there should be no such thing as a right to private property that is protected by a government. So Somalia, which has had no functioning government, courts, police, etc., since 1991, is certainly not a libertarian society. There is some debate as to whether it's an anarchist society.
Libya -- I can't imagine what you think you're talking about here. I assume you're referring to Libya under Qaddafi? Under Qaddafi, Libya was a military dictatorship organized along lines of tribal loyalty. No resemblance whatsoever to libertarianism.
the guy was calling for the destruction of the US Constitution and the implementation of Sharia law.
The people who have been destroying the US Constitution are George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and virtually all Republican and Democratic members of Congress.[1], [2], [3]
It would be hard to argue that a leader in a group that the US has effectively declared war on (including resolutions of Congress that authorize military force) is not a legitimate military target.
I love how you use that word "effectively." It seems very convenient.
Usenet was decaying slowly for years, but the big hit was in 2008 when Andrew Cuomo scored political points by getting ISPs to drop parts of the usenet hierarchy that he claimed were full of child pornography. What ended up happening was that ISPs just started dropping usenet service completely. A ton of people gave up on usenet at that point rather than pay a provider. You could use web interfaces, but they sucked. After that, I basically no longer could use usenet to communicate with the people I wanted to communicate with, because so many of them had left.
Any site that allows people to "bulk upload" reviews will be inundated with spam reviews and reviews by shills and sockpuppets. Amazon, which is much more restrictive, nevertheless has this problem to some extent with reviewers like Harriet Klausner, who can't possibly read all the books she reviews. I run a site that catalogs free books and collects users' reviews of them (see my sig), and I find that a decent fraction of user-submitted reviews are obviously authors reviewing their own books. (E.g., the reviewer's name is the same as the author's, or the review is identical to a blurb on the book's web site.) This is against the rules on my site, and I delete these reviews. But on a site that reviewed as many different kinds of things as the OP is asking for, and that allowed people to upload and download them in bulk, it would become extremely difficult and time-consuming to deal with this. Amazon has the advantage here of knowing that their reviewers are individuals with credit cards whose names match the names on the cards, and who have bought something from Amazon using the card. (You can review a book on Amazon without having bought that particular book on Amazon, but you have to have bought something from Amazon at least once.) This helps them to avoid, e.g., sockpuppet reviews.
I sympathize with the OP's desire to have a reviewing site that's not a handmaiden of commerce, but Amazon does have a massive network effect working in their favor. I would never have bothered making my own site if there had been any overlap between my mission and Amazon's -- but there isn't, since Amazon doesn't accept reviews of free books.
I'm ok with being denied service based on my wages for a lot of things but when it comes to life saving medicine I don't see that as a "would be nice" feature.
This goes back to the "Do you let them die?" question. Should a hospital let someone bleeding to death die in their Emergency Room if they have no insurance? I think except for at republican debates the answer is "no".
I'm ok with being denied service based on my wages for a lot of things but when it comes to food I don't see that as a "would be nice" feature. This goes back to the "Do you let them die?" question. Should a supermarket let someone who's starving to death die in their checkout line? I think except for at republican debates the answer is "no".
What's broken about healthcare in the US is its inefficiency. We spend far more than any other industrialized country, and our health outcomes are worse.
The article is long on vague opinion, short on facts. Many of the facts it does give are wrong.
"Yet lack of funding isn't the only reason that the traditional universities and colleges aren't responding with their own strategic acquisitions. In all industries it's hard to convince successful incumbents that innovations at the low end of the market really matter." Except that this isn't true. For example, I teach physics at a community college in California. We have a ton of online classes. The school is 98 years old, so it's certainly "traditional."
"Physical campuses and prestige will always matter at the top end of the higher education market, so the most elite traditional institutions will survive competitive disruption. Many of them are developing their own sophisticated online education capabilities. MIT, with its OpenCourseWare initiative, and Cornell, with its profitable e-Cornell subsidiary, are only two of the most visible examples." Except that this is grossly misleading. MIT's OpenCourseWare isn't meant to provide an online education. MIT's students still show up to class and get their education while breathing the same air as their professor and the other students.
"The real disruptive threat is to the hundreds of institutions that emulate the elite few at the top. Many of them lack the prestige to hold off for-profit competition and the money that the elites can spend on online curriculum." Except that this is grossly misleading when applied to any state in the US that has a decent state university system. For example, California has UC, Cal State, and community colleges. None of these systems are worried about for-profit competition, because they're cheaper than for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix.
Some realities of online classes:
Online classes don't save money. Costs in education are virtually all labor. The labor cost to offer an online class is the same as the labor cost to offer a meatspace class. The huge cost savings comes from hiring lots of part-timers rather than tenured faculty, and that became a fait accompli ca. 1970-1980.
Online classes don't work very well. At my school, typically the success rates in online classes are much lower than in meatspace classes. Faculty say they basically don't see the same level of commitment from students in online classes.
Online classes aren't suitable for many purposes. You can't teach a physics lab online. You can't teach a music performance class online. You can't really have a good student discussion online, since the students are all online at different times.
The author talks credulously about the University of Phoenix, which is a pathetic diploma mill. The author talks credulously about Khan Academy, but Khan Academy is aimed at the intellectual level of high school students, not college students.
The article doesn't contain what the/. summary says it contains. The article is actually a come-on for a promised series of blog entries which are supposed to substantiate the claims it makes. The article claims that within about 20 years (i.e., soon enough to "steal your job"), a whole bunch of intellectually demanding professions (including writing magazine articles and doing scientific research) will be automated. It offers no evidence for that claim. Maybe he believes that strong AI is coming within 20 years. Maybe he believes that computers can do these jobs without strong AI. Neither of those predictions seems plausible to me, and since he doesn't give the slightest hint of what he has in mind, there's not much to discuss.
As a reality check, maybe we should compare with what happens at the college level. At US research universities, you get profs and TAs who are there because of their research. Many of them have strong accents. With grad students, it's common to assign the ones with really unintelligible accents to grade papers rather than to TA discussion sections or labs. When it comes to profs, I'm sure you can find people who will recount horror stories of unintelligible lecturers, but in reality I think that's very uncommon. It's not unusual to find profs who have strong accents, and in some cases they may be strong enough that they are initially difficult to understand, but in almost all cases students learn to understand their accents fairly rapidly. The key here is that these people are highly educated, they've usually done most or all of their higher education in English, and they use English all day long. They may pronounce "th" as "d," but they are smart people who know how to use words precisely. It works. Nothing bad happens (except in a tiny minority of cases).
So if it's good enough for Berkeley or Harvard, why is it not good enough for an elementary school in Phoenix?
Of course the answer is that this isn't really about the quality of teaching, it's about xenophobia.
BTW, kids don't emulate their teachers' accents. They generally make fun of them. They get their accents from their friends, from TV, from music, and, to a lesser extent, from the people they interact with in the community.
The real issue is whether these teachers use correct grammar and diction, know how to punctuate a sentence, etc. That has nothing to do with their accents. We already have mechanisms for making sure that people who teach our kids to write an essay are able to write a good essay themselves. These mechanisms don't always work (mainly because market forces make it impossible to set the bar too high), but that has nothing to do with accents.
The slashdot story's comparison with Indian call center workers is ridiculous. When you're on the phone with someone you've never met, it's much harder to understand that person's accented speech than it would be in person with someone you were familiar with. The call center workers' job consists of nothing but talking to people on the phone, all day. Of course it's a bigger deal for them to have neutral accents.
A few dollars a month for a desktop...A few thousand dollars a month for an office full of desktops? The average office worker doesn't do a lot with their computer, and has been doing much the same thing for years... The only thing stopping them from using 10 year old hardware is modern bloated software which is intentionally incompatible with older versions.
In principle I'm in sympathy with you, but in reality there are a lot of problems with your argument.
You're suggesting using 10-year-old x86 hardware in a medium-sized business environment. This is different from ARM hardware, which is what this discussion was originally about.
In this type of environment, the total cost of ownership probably consists of something like 50% support, 25% software licensing, 20% hardware, and 5% electricity. If you use ARM-based machines, the first thing I can guarantee you is that some people are going to complain that there's some piece of software they need in order to do their job, and it's not available on ARM. That means you're probably going to need a mixed x86/ARM hardware inventory. That's going to be massively more complex to support than pure x86.
Suppose instead that you keep a homogeneous x86 inventory, but you keep using machines as old as 10 years. Statistically, your business is probably running Windows. With that hardware mix, you're going to be forced to support lots of different versions of Windows, Office, etc. Again, this makes support more complex and expensive. Since support is the biggest chunk of your TCO, this isn't a good business decision.
When you use 10 year old hardware, you get all kinds of other issues coming in. E.g., a machine that old may not have a CD drive.
The truth is that hardware is cheap, and workers are expensive. It doesn't make sense to make your workers even 5% less productive in order to save some tiny amount of money on electricity.
What would really make sense these days for a medium to large business would be to stop paying $2000 for every machine and start supplying 80% of their users with new x86 machines in the $500 price range, on a 4-year replacement cycle. What I've observed where I work, however, is that this is difficult to do, for a variety of reasons. Workers who haven't had a hardware upgrade in 10 years feel like when their time comes to finally get an upgrade, this is their one big chance, and they're going to be stuck with their new machine for 10 years into the future -- so they argue for higher-end hardware. IT wants standardization of hardware to make their jobs easier, and since 20% of users do need higher-end hardware, you can't standardize on the low end. Psychologically, IT wants to work with shiny new toys.
I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me.
Post a digital copy online. Problem solved. As long as a digital copy is available for free online, others will have access to it, regardless of its copyright status. If you're in a field like physics, you could post it on arxiv.org. If you're in a field that doesn't have anything like arxiv, just post it on your own site, or on a site such as scribd.
Have you tried using spreadsheets to run numerical simulations?
Some people do use spreadsheets for that. This disadvantages IMO are: (1) Spreadsheets can't be easily read by another person. That means I can't present them to the students, and they can't turn in their work to me in a form that I can read. (2) Spreadsheet languages are basically all proprietary. Life is too short to learn proprietary languages. (It's true that, e.g., Excel and OOo are quite similar, but that's not the same as having a real, open standard.)
I'll lay out my specific use case, but basically the question is this: who's going to come up with a decent browser-based environment for people to use in order to learn how to program?
My use case: I teach physics for a living, and I teach my students to do simple numerical simulations as an alternative to limiting them to the kinds of problems that can be solved in closed form using paper and pencil. These folks are not sophisticated about computer programming, and my goal is not to teach them to program; basically I only expect them to get to the level where they can make modifications to a program in the book so that it can be applied to a different problem.
I use python for this, and currently the best option I've found is to have them use ideone.com, which is a free-as-in-beer service that runs their code server-side, through a web interface. What sucks about it is that ideone is totally closed source, and if they stop providing their service tomorrow, I'm out of luck.
Up until now, the best alternative I'd found was a REPL for a language called coffeescript: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ . (Click on TRY COFFEESCRIPT.) The language is close enough to python in syntax that it wouldn't be a big deal to me to switch. Performance is very good. The main disadvantage is poor error handling, which is a big deal to beginners.
The repl.it system looks nice. (a) It's open-source, so if I hitch my wagon to it, I won't have to switch to something else five years from now. (b) The performance is decent, although not as good as the other two systems I've described above. (c) Error handling seems good (apparently the same error handling as in the standard python implementation, because apparently that's what you're using, through an emulation layer).
I clicked through google's material on how it's supposed to work. I'm left with zero interest in the idea.
Here are some of the problems with the way things presently work:
1. I have too many cards to carry around in my wallet: a credit card, driver's license, health insurance cards,...
2. It's annoying having to carry coins around.
3. If you use a debit card or ATM card, banks have exploitative practices designed to maximize how many fees you pay them.
4. If you use a debit card or ATM card, you aren't protected against fraud or theft.
5. If you use a credit card, you're hurting merchants by siphoning off their profits to a bank. This is why I only use credit cards at places like chain restaurants, not mom-and-pop businesses.
6. Stores have loyalty programs where they expect you to carry around a card, which is a hassle.
7. Everybody wants to fill a database with information about what I buy. Some businesses (supermarkets) are honest about it, give me a choice, and give me significant financial incentives to let them have my info. Other businesses aren't honest about it and don't give me a choice.
As far as I can tell from google's info, they solve precisely zero of these problems.
They don't solve problem 1, because the phone is much, much bulkier than the single credit card that it replaces.
They don't solve 2, because if it's a transaction where I want to use cash, it's still a transaction where I want to use cash.
They don't solve 3, 4, or 5, because apparently it's purely a credit card deal, which will work the same way credit cards currently work.
Re 6, they specifically mention that it's supposed to allow you to use certain stores' loyalty programs without having to carry around a card. Well, the only one that really counts for a significant amount of money for me is the supermarket one, and that one I can do by typing my phone number into the terminal.
Google doesn't solve 7. In fact, they'll make it worse, because they'll be collecting the information about how much I spend on vodka, cigarettes, and kinky lingerie and using it to show me ads in my browser later.
Slashdot Mirror
What we don't seem to have in either TFA or the /. summary is a careful analysis of the issue.
I've been arrested in California (more than once). IIRC the process typically included a search and taking away stuff like my wallet and house keys. It certainly seems reasonable to me that if the cops are going to arrest someone, they might want to make sure he doesn't have a gun or a knife on him. This involves a search.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that if the cops had tried to use my arrest as a pretext to search my safe-deposit box, the bank would have said, "No, not without a warrant."
So is clicking around on your cell more like taking away the contents of your pocket, or is it more like searching your safe-deposit box?
The /. summary talks about looking at your contacts. How is this different from looking at what phone numbers you have written down on a card in your wallet?
Could we maybe get some analysis from someone who knows about California criminal law, constitutional law, etc., rather than just some cheerleading? BTW, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU.
I teach physics at a community college, and I get a few students now and then who are young teens; because of their age, it can be more practical for them to take community college courses than to head straight to a university at age 14 or 15. I started college (at a university) at 16 myself, and I think it worked out positively for me. I was pretty immature at 16, and living on my own, cooking, doing my laundry, etc., helped me to become more mature. Because of my own experiences, I'm predisposed to be sympathetic to these kids.
However, I've noticed several negative things that can happen.
One is that parents, and other adults who deal with these kids, have a tendency to exaggerate their capabilities. Their high school principal may not be comfortable with basic algebra, so to him/her, anything the kid does mathematically seems like it's superduper incredible. This clearly seems to be happening here, if you read between the lines in the article. The article claims that he's already studied string theory, but it also says that he's currently taking linear algebra. Well, people don't really learn string theory until they've got a *lot* more math under their belt than that, and even extremely smart grad students tend to take about 6 years to master the techniques of string theory. (This is one reason why many people tell bright physics grad students not to go into string theory, because it takes them such a long time to become fluent enough to start research.) So I think what really happened here was that he read a popularization such as Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, and now the adults around him describe him as having studied string theory. I think parents also start to exaggerate about their kid's abilities because their own egos get tied up in it. It's the same type of psychology that says it's not enough for your kid to win the Contra Costa County beauty pageant, she has to be the most beautiful in California, or the United States.
Another negative is that the parents are too involved in their kids' stuff. I've had parents stop me in the halls and try to talk to me about how it's really a problem that their kid is getting a B in physics instead of an A, it's not fair because their kid is a genius, it's going to be my fault because their kid isn't going to get into Harvard, etc. Parents should not be driving to the college to drop off a homework paper that their kid forgot to bring to school. This is the age where the kid needs to make his/her own mistakes, experience the consequences, and become more mature.
A third negative is that kids tend not to be intellectually mature at 14 or 15. With some of them, there's the risk that they are learning about Newton's laws or Shakespeare at a superficial level, not at the level they really need as a foundation if they are going to go on with upper-division work. Maybe they haven't had the life experiences they need in order to understand Shakespeare at a deep level. Or maybe their brains just haven't developed to the point where they're really ready to grasp Newton's laws, and instead they understand physics as a set of problem-solving procedures. Or maybe they are capable of deep understanding in one subject, which is where their talent lies, but in another subject they're not really getting a college-level education.
I'm in favor of letting parents and kids make their own decisions, but I think sometimes the decisions are really made by the parents, and they're the wrong decisions.
This significantly improves my opinion of banks. I knew that they were full of the kind of people who would hold the economy hostage and demand a bailout from the federal government because they were too big to fail. I knew they were full of the kind of people who would robo-sign documents fraudulently, sometimes causing families to be kicked out of their houses by mistake. I knew they were full of the kind of people who would convince working people to sign mortgages that the banks knew they could never repay, based on income information that the banks knew was fraudulent.
Now I find out that that isn't the only kind of person who works at banks. There are apparently some who aren't criminal masterminds, just workaday crooks. Small-time white-collar criminals who deal with Russian gangsters during the week to make an extra buck, but on the weekends go home and coach their kids' soccer teams. Very refreshing.
I'm thinking that this is just an excuse to spend money on "hi-tech" for the school district. Follow the money. Who's getting paid for it?
I don't know about Washington, but here in California, schools get paid based on how many students show up. The party that stands to gain financially here is probably the school district, because they're hoping it will increase attendance.
On most traditionally published paper books, the author gets only a very small percentage of the retail price. That makes some sense. A bunch of people need to get paid: acquisitions editor, copy editor, truck driver, checkout clerk... The publisher is also taking a financial risk by publishing the book, and a small number of very profitable books are subsidizing the much larger number of relatively unprofitable or completely unprofitable ones.
But how does it make sense for Amazon to take 65 cents on the sale of a 99-cent book? Amazon has basically zero cost to recoup. OK, they take a loss on the kindle right now in order to get people locked into their system. But it's kind of pathetic if this ends up being a permanent arrangement and they manage to levy a 65-cent tax until the end of time. Most book authors would actually be pretty happy with a 99-cent price -- if they got all of it.
That's not true, that's only true if you create the materials on their time, otherwise you own it, not the school. Unless the school is giving the OP time off in which to create the materials or is paying overtime, the proper owner of the materials would be the employee.
Neither university teachers nor K-12 teachers are factory workers who punch a clock. They are professionals who basically manage themselves and set a lot of their own work hours. This makes "on their time" a vague concept, and that's why I believe no schools actually use that as a criterion. Typically the teacher owns what the teacher writes, and the school owns any patents.
this comes up all the time. go look at any university's IP disclaimers. If you invented it in your role as an employee, they own it. It doesn't matter who funds the school - the school funds you.
Sloppy analogy. Patents are not the most common case of IP at the K-12 level, and at the university level there are other types of IP that are *not* owned by the school. For example, the school does not own the textbook that a professor writes.
"While doing work for the school" needs to be better defined. Teachers "do work for the school" at home as well as on campus. They are professionals, and the boundary between what they are required to do and what they do because they want to is not always clear. If a teacher writes a textbook, this is not "work for the school." If a teacher writes a lesson plan, it probably is "work for the school." There is no clear boundary between these two things.
"Ideally, both the school and the creator(s) would be able to retain rights to the use of the product." What does "use of" mean? If the teacher writes a textbook, the teacher should not just be able to "use" it in his/her own classroom, he/she should be able to sell it and exploit it commercially.
If the principal writes an employee handbook, then clearly the employee handbook is a work made for hire, and the school should own it.
Asking what license to use is the wrong question. If the employee owns the copyright, then the choice of license is up to the employee, not you.
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
Yep. The OP describes this as a company that outsourced the coding of their "flagship project" to incompetent developers, and is now not willing to pay enough to hire people in-house with the level of experience and skills needed to clean up the mess. This kind of corporate behavior is the opposite of showing loyalty to the company's employees. It's not the OP's fault that they're dependent on him. They're dependent on him because they're treating labor as a commodity that they want to save money on.
The arxiv blog recently had a roundup of papers discussing this: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27212/ They fall into three groups: (1) Suggestions of how the experiment might have given a wrong result. (2) Theoretical arguments that constrain the interpretation and make the result seem implausible if taken at face value. (3) Theoretical papers saying what it could mean if it really was new physics. The Nature article seems to show that the Contaldi paper was based on a misunderstanding of how the experiment was done. However, the Nature article points to a new paper by Henri that wasn't included in the arxiv roundup: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0239
History is replete with examples of libertarian paradises where the job-creators built wealth unfettered by regulation and the fruits of their labor enriched everyone! Why, there's Somalia, and Libya, and...
I'm not aware of any knowledgeable academic or journalist who has suggested that Somalia's system of government since 1991 could be described as libertarian. You may be confusing libertarianism with anarchism. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that says that the government should basically do nothing more than protect private property, enforce contracts, and keep people from killing each other. Anarchism is a political philosophy that says that there should be no government at all, and in particular that there should be no such thing as a right to private property that is protected by a government. So Somalia, which has had no functioning government, courts, police, etc., since 1991, is certainly not a libertarian society. There is some debate as to whether it's an anarchist society.
Libya -- I can't imagine what you think you're talking about here. I assume you're referring to Libya under Qaddafi? Under Qaddafi, Libya was a military dictatorship organized along lines of tribal loyalty. No resemblance whatsoever to libertarianism.
the guy was calling for the destruction of the US Constitution and the implementation of Sharia law.
The people who have been destroying the US Constitution are George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and virtually all Republican and Democratic members of Congress.[1], [2], [3]
It would be hard to argue that a leader in a group that the US has effectively declared war on (including resolutions of Congress that authorize military force) is not a legitimate military target.
I love how you use that word "effectively." It seems very convenient.
Usenet was decaying slowly for years, but the big hit was in 2008 when Andrew Cuomo scored political points by getting ISPs to drop parts of the usenet hierarchy that he claimed were full of child pornography. What ended up happening was that ISPs just started dropping usenet service completely. A ton of people gave up on usenet at that point rather than pay a provider. You could use web interfaces, but they sucked. After that, I basically no longer could use usenet to communicate with the people I wanted to communicate with, because so many of them had left.
This sounds like a bad idea to me.
Any site that allows people to "bulk upload" reviews will be inundated with spam reviews and reviews by shills and sockpuppets. Amazon, which is much more restrictive, nevertheless has this problem to some extent with reviewers like Harriet Klausner, who can't possibly read all the books she reviews. I run a site that catalogs free books and collects users' reviews of them (see my sig), and I find that a decent fraction of user-submitted reviews are obviously authors reviewing their own books. (E.g., the reviewer's name is the same as the author's, or the review is identical to a blurb on the book's web site.) This is against the rules on my site, and I delete these reviews. But on a site that reviewed as many different kinds of things as the OP is asking for, and that allowed people to upload and download them in bulk, it would become extremely difficult and time-consuming to deal with this. Amazon has the advantage here of knowing that their reviewers are individuals with credit cards whose names match the names on the cards, and who have bought something from Amazon using the card. (You can review a book on Amazon without having bought that particular book on Amazon, but you have to have bought something from Amazon at least once.) This helps them to avoid, e.g., sockpuppet reviews.
I sympathize with the OP's desire to have a reviewing site that's not a handmaiden of commerce, but Amazon does have a massive network effect working in their favor. I would never have bothered making my own site if there had been any overlap between my mission and Amazon's -- but there isn't, since Amazon doesn't accept reviews of free books.
I'm ok with being denied service based on my wages for a lot of things but when it comes to food I don't see that as a "would be nice" feature. This goes back to the "Do you let them die?" question. Should a supermarket let someone who's starving to death die in their checkout line? I think except for at republican debates the answer is "no".
What's broken about healthcare in the US is its inefficiency. We spend far more than any other industrialized country, and our health outcomes are worse.
Unison: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
The article is long on vague opinion, short on facts. Many of the facts it does give are wrong.
"Yet lack of funding isn't the only reason that the traditional universities and colleges aren't responding with their own strategic acquisitions. In all industries it's hard to convince successful incumbents that innovations at the low end of the market really matter." Except that this isn't true. For example, I teach physics at a community college in California. We have a ton of online classes. The school is 98 years old, so it's certainly "traditional."
"Physical campuses and prestige will always matter at the top end of the higher education market, so the most elite traditional institutions will survive competitive disruption. Many of them are developing their own sophisticated online education capabilities. MIT, with its OpenCourseWare initiative, and Cornell, with its profitable e-Cornell subsidiary, are only two of the most visible examples." Except that this is grossly misleading. MIT's OpenCourseWare isn't meant to provide an online education. MIT's students still show up to class and get their education while breathing the same air as their professor and the other students.
"The real disruptive threat is to the hundreds of institutions that emulate the elite few at the top. Many of them lack the prestige to hold off for-profit competition and the money that the elites can spend on online curriculum." Except that this is grossly misleading when applied to any state in the US that has a decent state university system. For example, California has UC, Cal State, and community colleges. None of these systems are worried about for-profit competition, because they're cheaper than for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix.
Some realities of online classes:
The article doesn't contain what the /. summary says it contains. The article is actually a come-on for a promised series of blog entries which are supposed to substantiate the claims it makes. The article claims that within about 20 years (i.e., soon enough to "steal your job"), a whole bunch of intellectually demanding professions (including writing magazine articles and doing scientific research) will be automated. It offers no evidence for that claim. Maybe he believes that strong AI is coming within 20 years. Maybe he believes that computers can do these jobs without strong AI. Neither of those predictions seems plausible to me, and since he doesn't give the slightest hint of what he has in mind, there's not much to discuss.
As a reality check, maybe we should compare with what happens at the college level. At US research universities, you get profs and TAs who are there because of their research. Many of them have strong accents. With grad students, it's common to assign the ones with really unintelligible accents to grade papers rather than to TA discussion sections or labs. When it comes to profs, I'm sure you can find people who will recount horror stories of unintelligible lecturers, but in reality I think that's very uncommon. It's not unusual to find profs who have strong accents, and in some cases they may be strong enough that they are initially difficult to understand, but in almost all cases students learn to understand their accents fairly rapidly. The key here is that these people are highly educated, they've usually done most or all of their higher education in English, and they use English all day long. They may pronounce "th" as "d," but they are smart people who know how to use words precisely. It works. Nothing bad happens (except in a tiny minority of cases).
So if it's good enough for Berkeley or Harvard, why is it not good enough for an elementary school in Phoenix?
Of course the answer is that this isn't really about the quality of teaching, it's about xenophobia.
BTW, kids don't emulate their teachers' accents. They generally make fun of them. They get their accents from their friends, from TV, from music, and, to a lesser extent, from the people they interact with in the community.
The real issue is whether these teachers use correct grammar and diction, know how to punctuate a sentence, etc. That has nothing to do with their accents. We already have mechanisms for making sure that people who teach our kids to write an essay are able to write a good essay themselves. These mechanisms don't always work (mainly because market forces make it impossible to set the bar too high), but that has nothing to do with accents.
The slashdot story's comparison with Indian call center workers is ridiculous. When you're on the phone with someone you've never met, it's much harder to understand that person's accented speech than it would be in person with someone you were familiar with. The call center workers' job consists of nothing but talking to people on the phone, all day. Of course it's a bigger deal for them to have neutral accents.
A few dollars a month for a desktop...A few thousand dollars a month for an office full of desktops? The average office worker doesn't do a lot with their computer, and has been doing much the same thing for years... The only thing stopping them from using 10 year old hardware is modern bloated software which is intentionally incompatible with older versions.
In principle I'm in sympathy with you, but in reality there are a lot of problems with your argument.
The truth is that hardware is cheap, and workers are expensive. It doesn't make sense to make your workers even 5% less productive in order to save some tiny amount of money on electricity.
What would really make sense these days for a medium to large business would be to stop paying $2000 for every machine and start supplying 80% of their users with new x86 machines in the $500 price range, on a 4-year replacement cycle. What I've observed where I work, however, is that this is difficult to do, for a variety of reasons. Workers who haven't had a hardware upgrade in 10 years feel like when their time comes to finally get an upgrade, this is their one big chance, and they're going to be stuck with their new machine for 10 years into the future -- so they argue for higher-end hardware. IT wants standardization of hardware to make their jobs easier, and since 20% of users do need higher-end hardware, you can't standardize on the low end. Psychologically, IT wants to work with shiny new toys.
I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me.
Post a digital copy online. Problem solved. As long as a digital copy is available for free online, others will have access to it, regardless of its copyright status. If you're in a field like physics, you could post it on arxiv.org. If you're in a field that doesn't have anything like arxiv, just post it on your own site, or on a site such as scribd.
Have you tried using spreadsheets to run numerical simulations?
Some people do use spreadsheets for that. This disadvantages IMO are: (1) Spreadsheets can't be easily read by another person. That means I can't present them to the students, and they can't turn in their work to me in a form that I can read. (2) Spreadsheet languages are basically all proprietary. Life is too short to learn proprietary languages. (It's true that, e.g., Excel and OOo are quite similar, but that's not the same as having a real, open standard.)
I'll lay out my specific use case, but basically the question is this: who's going to come up with a decent browser-based environment for people to use in order to learn how to program?
My use case: I teach physics for a living, and I teach my students to do simple numerical simulations as an alternative to limiting them to the kinds of problems that can be solved in closed form using paper and pencil. These folks are not sophisticated about computer programming, and my goal is not to teach them to program; basically I only expect them to get to the level where they can make modifications to a program in the book so that it can be applied to a different problem.
I use python for this, and currently the best option I've found is to have them use ideone.com, which is a free-as-in-beer service that runs their code server-side, through a web interface. What sucks about it is that ideone is totally closed source, and if they stop providing their service tomorrow, I'm out of luck.
Up until now, the best alternative I'd found was a REPL for a language called coffeescript: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ . (Click on TRY COFFEESCRIPT.) The language is close enough to python in syntax that it wouldn't be a big deal to me to switch. Performance is very good. The main disadvantage is poor error handling, which is a big deal to beginners.
The repl.it system looks nice. (a) It's open-source, so if I hitch my wagon to it, I won't have to switch to something else five years from now. (b) The performance is decent, although not as good as the other two systems I've described above. (c) Error handling seems good (apparently the same error handling as in the standard python implementation, because apparently that's what you're using, through an emulation layer).
I clicked through google's material on how it's supposed to work. I'm left with zero interest in the idea.
Here are some of the problems with the way things presently work:
As far as I can tell from google's info, they solve precisely zero of these problems.
They don't solve problem 1, because the phone is much, much bulkier than the single credit card that it replaces.
They don't solve 2, because if it's a transaction where I want to use cash, it's still a transaction where I want to use cash.
They don't solve 3, 4, or 5, because apparently it's purely a credit card deal, which will work the same way credit cards currently work.
Re 6, they specifically mention that it's supposed to allow you to use certain stores' loyalty programs without having to carry around a card. Well, the only one that really counts for a significant amount of money for me is the supermarket one, and that one I can do by typing my phone number into the terminal.
Google doesn't solve 7. In fact, they'll make it worse, because they'll be collecting the information about how much I spend on vodka, cigarettes, and kinky lingerie and using it to show me ads in my browser later.