Actually, there is one. Cribbed from Apple's MacOS X 10.1 page:
"Using iDisk is easier by default, as well. Under Mac OS X version 10.1, iDisk uses the WebDAV protocol built into the operating system as part of its state-of-the-art Internet capabilities. WebDAV uses the same language as your web browser, which means it only connects to your iDisk when it needs to. No more server disconnect messages from your iDisk for not using it often enough. And because it uses standard web protocols, you'll be able to access your iDisk at school or the office, even from behind a firewall."
Don't read Dave's proposal without also giving
XNS-org's a twirl as well. They seem to have thought out most of the obvious and many of the less obvious problems.
Dave suggests that he's got XNS on his radar, so he might have some of this in his head, but not yet on paper...
Contractors for the university I work at inadvertently built a 10 story building rotated 180 degrees from it's designed orientation, thereby placing the loading doors on the opposite side of the building from the loading dock.
The irony? It's the original Engineering building...
Dave Winer is closing in on this with his just released Radio Userland product. It's a fairly generic product that uses XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc. to exchange information between clients and client-server. It doesn't much matter whether it's headlines, mp3 files, quicktime movies, news stories, html templates, whatever. It has the plug-in archtecture and a built-in database, scripting language, web client and server. I don't see any reason why it couldn't also work as a CPU sharing mechanism as with Seti@home. I could probably write such a plug-in for his product in a day.
I have some first-hand knowledge on this. I have a role in admissions at a UC and a role in assessing whether these admissions criteria work or not.
There are two problems with SATs:
1) SAT scores correlate very strongly with ethnicity and with income. Income matters because of the presence of Kaplan, etc. which offers intensive test preparation for $400-$600. Not every parent can afford this for their child, and as a result, lower income students are at a disadvantage. Consider that a 20% improvement on SAT over 6 months in not uncommon. Now tell me that that student is 20% more likely to succeed as a result... uh huh.
Race matters because there have been some very well executed studies which show that, for example, the perception that african americans do more poorly in standardized tests actually results in african americans doing more poorly. The mere presence of that knowledge appears to cause students to second-guess their abilities, resulting in lower scores. In controlled situations, every ethnic group could be caused to underperform in this manner. Caucasian students told that asians did better on a test would essentially meet the expectations laid before them.
2) It's *absurd* that we place equal value on the results of a 3 hour exam relative to results built over 4 years of classroom study. Aptitude helps in success at college, but far and away responsibility, perseverence, diligence, and simple interest have more to do with success.
I know for a fact that verbal SAT correlates very poorly to retention in science majors and that math SAT correlates slightly, but hardly enough to justify the level of attention given to it. High-school GPA and SAT-II (Achivement Tests) correlate much more strongly.
Now, as to the issue of quality of GPA scores... Not every 4.0 is created equal. UC *unweights* high-school GPAs to some degree - reducing the amount of extra credit given to honors courses. Not every high school offers these courses.
What people need to understand about the UCs is that their charter is very different from many universities. UC is responsible for servicing the top 12.5% of high school graduates in California. Cal State serves the top 25%. Now, how we measure who is in the top 12.5% is a matter of debate and changes over time. Right now, the trend is moving toward admitting the top 12.5% of each high-school in the state regardless of relative quality. The thinking here (which I agree with) is that students shouldn't be penalized for where they live. I live in a city with extremely well regarded high schools. Students here have a wide assortment of honors courses and go to college in amazingly high rates. Just one city away students will never see a calculus course, a latin course, physics, or any one of a few dozen honors courses offered in my city - this is just 5 miles away!
Now, there is no question that the students in my city will start in more advanced courses, but a top student in the next city over is NO LESS LIKELY TO GRADUATE COLLEGE AT THE SAME LEVEL AS ONE IN MY CITY. That is, students there will be just as competent as students here after college, but they may need a few extra courses to catch up (probably no more than 4)
So, in my experience, I've found that students that are motivated and work hard do well. That's pretty much it. The question is how do you assess that? 4 years of high-school coursework seems as good a measure as I can think of...
CS is probably too theoretical - better if you want to work in a pushing-the-envelope type of job like developing new video codecs. These aren't exactly common.
CIS is, IMO, pretty unremarkable. A good degree, good jobs, but in a market downturn, you'll look like anyone with 3 yrs. job experience.
CS and Engineering has a more engineering focus and integrates hardware. This gives you a nice balance and is a bit more unique. This would put you in a good position for embedded programming - which is much more sensitive to hardware concerns than the usual PC/server level programmer.
Software Engineering is a newish field for basically applying traditional engineering practices found in industrial engineering specifically to software. Systems engineering is similar, but more broad including hardware and equipment, network infrastructure, etc.
Software engineers are trained to build very robust, mission critical, or highly distributed systems. Boeing primarily looks for SE and CSE for tasks such as programming the 777, missle systems, air traffic control systems, etc.
Should a serious market slowdown occur in the next 5 years (some people are predicting this, others aren't) I have doubts that either a CS or CIS degree will be worth much. The people with the most general degrees and experience are the first to be left behind in such circumstances. Don't try to 'get by'. Do the hard work, just in case...
Even now, we're starting to see some slowdown in CS hiring. It's tough to gauge because some industries are getting clobbered (necessarily and unnecessarily) and others aren't - yet. We've just entered the big hiring season and only the really big guns (IBM, Boeing, GM) have snapped up their 2001 grads. The next 6 months will be very telling...
Everyone is focusing on releasing Windows source code on the internet or basing products on that code. These I think are unlikely.
Instead, what if a good hacker decided to drop a few dozen lines of code in amongst the 10s of millions or so lines in Windows to make it easier for *them* to hack. Why hunt down security holes, when you can code them into the product yourself.
With everyone and their sister using Windows these days, this could give a hacker access to most every industry out there. And given the loose security between MS products, the new code could be in Office, Explorer, Outlook, almost anything. So the hacker downloads heaps of source code from a variety of MS products, finds a good location to insert this code and then modifies and sends a bit back. In amongst all the code that MS has to manage - most of which I'm sure they rarely look at, who would notice? How hard would it be to find?
Has the next MS product you plan to buy already been compromised? This I think is where the concern should really lie...
It costs money, so students won't use it. And none of the solutions are compatable with each other. Some will have floppies, others not. Some will have Zip, SuperDrive, CD-RW, etc. You can't cover all of them.
But everyone will have basic internet access. With 20,000 students (the same as the university I work for) give iDrive or one of the other services a call and ask them what it would cost for accounts for all of your students, faculty, staff.
It's less than you might think, and 50MB of storage, always available, with guest access is perfect for a student. No losing a disk between the lab and the dorm, no corruption, nearly total compatability, and multiple people can access simultaneously - it can even stream MP3s.
We have iDrive accounts for everyone through a custom portal for our campus. Accounts are automatically created and authenticated using the persons campus account info. The account names are easy to remember since they are the same as a persons email address without the host. It's by far the best solution I've seen.
Major Party Candidates: The Republican Party platform seems to generally trust an individual to better manage their tax dollars than the government, but doesn't trust them to better manage their private lives than the government. The Democratic Party platform seems to be the reverse, trusting individuals with their private lives, but not with their tax dollars.
Please justify these conflicting policies on behalf of your party, and please identify specific examples where you disagree with these policies.
Since I'll eventually have to explain this to students and have basic understanding of the rules within UC, I'll chime in with what I think is going on. [IANAL]
A UC instructor has commented on his opinion on this matter and is correct on a number of points. Copyright is, by default, held by the instructor and not the university. The syllabus for the course is a legal document that sometimes grants students non-commerical duplication rights for personal use. But nweaver fails to address the case of handwritten notes.
There's a loophole here that I think the legislature is trying to plug:
Pertinent bits from the above:
"Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work."
Given that abridgements, compilations, dramas based on novels, sculptures based on drawings, and so on serve as examples of derivative works, lecture notes don't seem like much of a stretch.
So, I don't really think there is anything new here. However, there seems to be nothing stating definitively that lecture notes are in fact derivative works. So rather than test this in court over and over, legislating it would seem prudent. It's now in black and white, and penalties attached.
This strikes me as a pre-emptive move against problems that will likely crop up when the UC and CSU have to fully invest in distance learning. The 9 UC campuses have been warned that they'll have to absorb an additional 70,000 students over the next 10 years (the equivalent of Berkeley and UCLA combined), and the entire public higher education system in CA will have to take about 700,000 over what they currently serve (roughly the total population of Delaware).
Now, given that the dear taxpayers of California (of which I am one) are likely unwilling to build the equivalent of twenty major universities over the next 10 years, alternatives will have to be found - and distance learning will be a big component of that.
With 2 million students enrolled in higher ed in California in 2010, the low cost of distribution thanks to the internet, and the (hopefully) ease of electronic payment by that time, there's a hell of a big market here for people to tap for distribution of lecture notes, papers, and so on. Watch for more legislation to come...
I'm a Student Affairs Director at an engineering school and send a number of my students to do unix internships - more, in fact, than to MS (though MS is more visible). Sun, and other big unix vendors, mostly - but some smaller firms as well.
We use JobTrak, as do many other universities. They have a stronger focus on students than Monster, and have a lot of jobs, internships that don't require experience (and jobs that do, for alums).
The universities like them since they provide feedback on how their students and alums fare and where they go. That's good because if we send a pile of students to Sun, we'd start talking to them and form stronger relations.
Do you think Harvard, MIT, and UC have such noble intentions?
Yep. As an administrator at a UC I can assure you that we do not consider students to be customers, per se. The majority of funding at UC and certain other public universities does not come from students. We do have a business to protect, but the threats to this business are very far removed from Napster and it's consequences. I came to the university from industry and though there are some self-serving administrators I'd have to say the vast majority reasonably balance student, faculty, and community interests.
Most funding for UCs comes from industry, public grants (NSF, NEA, etc.), and taxpayers (and taxpayers are only about 1/4 of the total funding...). Students are a part of this funding, but UCs don't grow as a result of student dollars.
Universities both public and private concern themselves very much with freedom of speech issues. It's what allow faculty to challenge students and expand their fields. It's what allows universities themselves to operate through the sometimes bizarre beliefs and ideas of legislators, industry and politicians.
Universities unfortunately haven't always taken advantage of this freedom, but they usually do protect it dearly.
I don't speak on behalf of UC on this matter. These are my opinions only.
Er, infinities and Real Life mix just fine, thank you,
Finite and quantized are not equivalent. The set of cardinal numbers is a quantized set and at the same time infinite.
You only need intermediate values if your set is doubly bounded. If you need infinite values between two discrete states, then you can't have a quantized set. That doesn't seem to apply here...
The iMac suits seemed to depend on whether or not the consumer might confuse the two products. That is, the eOne did look an awful lot like the iMac, and mistaken identity alone could take away from Apple's sales.
As for the Cube, I think you'd need to be both blind and stupid to mistake the two. The colors are totally different, the Cube is considerably taller, the Qube indicator light is in no way reproduced, the only resemblance is the basic shape (which is a common shape, unlike the iMac) and size. I don't think you could confuse these two...
Apple might also be able to argue the Cube is a derivative of the NeXT Cube which Apple should still hold the rights to. The only difference there is the size...
There is nothing in the physical world that definitively suggests that dimensions are infinite. However, we use mathematical models to describe this physical world which usually are open-ended. After all, there is often no point in introducing a model which is more limited than the real thing.
That said, models such as an S2 (a two-sphere) which ship navigators would describe using only longitude and latitude (since ships as a matter of normal operation wouldn't have useful altitude from sea level) can have size. Imagine squeezing the earth down so that a great circle about the equator was only a 1m circumference but a great circle about the poles was 10,000 Km. You could use measurements within that space to determine that one dimension had a longer transit (time to return to origin) than another. It would be 'bigger' than the other, though you could not reach the end of either, since you'd constantly be retracing locations.
The size of a S2 universe could be infinite if you imagine it expanding like a balloon. But it could be mixed, where some dimensions expand, and others contract. So a S2 universe which was spherical at creation could mature (that is, change according to a linear dimension R - time - so we'd call it RxS2) whereby the equator contracts and the poles expand. The equator could contract to such an extent that the universe begins to resemble a S1 - a circle, where you would travel up the meridian and down the date line, but a 'left turn' would bring you to your current location so quickly that you wouldn't notice. (It's a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea) There'd be no visible concept of latitude, only longitude.
So classically we wouldn't measure latitude because it'd be so small, however it is still there. Now consider that subatomic particles, who are more sensitive to small numbers, would seem to behave strangely because in measuring them, latitude would have a big effect. Particles would seemingly blink in and out of existance as they crossed your line of longitude if they moved along a line of latitude. They might appear to wiggle, or vibrate. They would be hard to measure because there'd be this uncertain measurement, latitude, which we've never dealt with before. Their velocity would be strange in the same way. Forces that drop off over distance would still be affected by the latitude measurement whether we recognize it or not.
This general theory has been around for a rather long time, but the specifics have never really been nailed down. Typically we deal with models that are well behaved: S1, S3, S7, etc. S2 is not well behaved because our mapping breaks at the poles (when you are at the north pole you are at 90 degrees N latitude and at every longitude, which is a problem...) S1 (a circle) is well behaved because there is a 1-1 mapping between actual locations and coordinates. S2 maps the north pole to an infinite number of coordinates.
Scientists have looked at universes with 10 and 11 dimensions, where one is linear (time), 3 are expanding and provide our spacial measurements, and the remainder are contracting and provide for the hodge-podge of forces and interactions that we see.
Until a better file/data system is divised, the UI will not improve.
Right. The UI that we have was created in a time when just about the largest single body of information to organize was an 800k floppy disk. File management was easy because the computer was so limited in what it could offer and the needs were small and simple. But things have changed so much. I have thousands of files and even a hierarchical structure with links is cumbersome and difficult to maintain.
The future UI needs to deal with data soup as the primary element. Automatic indexing of content, free-form open data storage and retrieval, remote connectivity, and some way to hook all of this crap together and make it work.
MS is hinting in this direction with.NET, but honestly, I don't think they have the brass ones to do it right. Everyone has bits and pieces of it but nobody has bothered to hook everything together and treat it as anything but a utility.
It's not a matter of thinking like computers, but thinking like you would with paper. The computer UI mimics the paper world. That's gotta change. My thousands of paper files are just as hard to organize as my thousands of electronic ones - why use that as a model?
My brain organizes things differently: "Hey, that green sign reminds me that I need to call Steve who's car is the same color." Why does my brain relate that information? Who knows, but the fact that it does allows me to function efficiently. We count on arbitrary relationships between bits of information to keep everything in your head accessable.
When we can deal with data as a soup, as your brain would, file management will be largely non-essential and the UI will change radically.
As for 3D - crap. Give me 2D+1, a flat environment with a time variable - an unlimited undo for everything which will allow me to selectively move things in time.
When individuals are trade music privately, and on a one-to-one basis, it (legally) is not piracy.
Napster doesn't facilitate trading. In fact, it doesn't even provide for the functionality. It facilitates duplication since the original file remains after the file is downloaded. Change this, and the act clearly becomes legal.
Uh, this IS hacking. English lesson #314: In the english language, words will occasionally convey more than one meaning, sometimes contradictory. For example, 'fast' can suggest very rapid movement as in 'that is a fast car' or it can suggest strong resistance as in 'that has a fast grip' or 'this has fast colors'. So in the case of 'hacking' we find: hack together vt. [common] To throw something together so it will work. Unlike `kluge together' or cruft together, this does not necessarily have negative connotations. Given that the satellites were not designed for this purpose and that the functionality is clearly an afterthought, it's proper to say it was 'hacked together'. It suggests nothing about the ingenuity or quality of the resulting product. Thanks for playing. Please come again.
Anonymity has nothing to do with privacy. When privacy laws aren't working, the tempation is to demand anonymity to make up for the shortfall.
There is no right to anonymity. In fact the US constitution infers otherwise that the accused should have the right to face those that are accusing them. Anonymity IS the cloak behind which tyranny hides, not the other way around. You fail to recognize that those inclined toward tyranny will always have greater resources than the people. That is, YOUR anonymity won't hold since they will have the resources to find you, but THEIR anonymity will hold because you will never have the opportunity or ability to uncover their actions. The 4th estate exists to keep the latter in check in general, but not for specific cases. Keep in mind that they DID find the unabomber in spite of his attempts to remain anonymous. The government did find the resources needed to get him...
What you are inviting the the following:
T: 'You committed this crime' V: 'What evidence do you have?' T: 'A number of anonymous people reported you doing this. We're going to send you to jail' V: 'But I think they are mistaken, can't we challenge this?' T: 'No, they would no longer be anonymous then'
That people demand anonymity only underscores that privacy laws don't work. There is nothing wrong with any of you knowing my name, so long as I am reasonably sure that you can not invade my privacy because of it.
With identity comes accountability, and we should not demand a loss of accountability. It's one of the underlying priniciples which the US was founded on, but seems to be eroding. Don't accelerate it...
No, that's what 'default' was invented for. The mouse should default to simply being a one button mouse. If you are sufficiently capable to realize that the mouse could do more, you should be sufficiently capable to then find the controls to customize it to do all of these whizzy things. Geez, people. It's called 'scalability'. (BTW, getting rid of floppy disks had nothing to do with confusion, and everything to do with the fact that almost nobody used them and Apple needed to stimulate the peripheral market for their new baby)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is one. Cribbed from Apple's MacOS X 10.1 page:
"Using iDisk is easier by default, as well. Under Mac OS X version 10.1, iDisk uses the WebDAV protocol built into the operating system as part of its state-of-the-art Internet capabilities. WebDAV uses the same language as your web browser, which means it only connects to your iDisk when it needs to. No more server disconnect messages from your iDisk for not using it often enough. And because it uses standard web protocols, you'll be able to access your iDisk at school or the office, even from behind a firewall."
Don't read Dave's proposal without also giving XNS-org's a twirl as well. They seem to have thought out most of the obvious and many of the less obvious problems.
Dave suggests that he's got XNS on his radar, so he might have some of this in his head, but not yet on paper...
Drywall in the wrong place? Hell, that's nothin'
Contractors for the university I work at inadvertently built a 10 story building rotated 180 degrees from it's designed orientation, thereby placing the loading doors on the opposite side of the building from the loading dock.
The irony? It's the original Engineering building...
Actually, it really isn't too simplistic.
Dave Winer is closing in on this with his just released Radio Userland product. It's a fairly generic product that uses XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc. to exchange information between clients and client-server. It doesn't much matter whether it's headlines, mp3 files, quicktime movies, news stories, html templates, whatever. It has the plug-in archtecture and a built-in database, scripting language, web client and server. I don't see any reason why it couldn't also work as a CPU sharing mechanism as with Seti@home. I could probably write such a plug-in for his product in a day.
I have some first-hand knowledge on this. I have a role in admissions at a UC and a role in assessing whether these admissions criteria work or not.
There are two problems with SATs:
1) SAT scores correlate very strongly with ethnicity and with income. Income matters because of the presence of Kaplan, etc. which offers intensive test preparation for $400-$600. Not every parent can afford this for their child, and as a result, lower income students are at a disadvantage. Consider that a 20% improvement on SAT over 6 months in not uncommon. Now tell me that that student is 20% more likely to succeed as a result... uh huh.
Race matters because there have been some very well executed studies which show that, for example, the perception that african americans do more poorly in standardized tests actually results in african americans doing more poorly. The mere presence of that knowledge appears to cause students to second-guess their abilities, resulting in lower scores. In controlled situations, every ethnic group could be caused to underperform in this manner. Caucasian students told that asians did better on a test would essentially meet the expectations laid before them.
2) It's *absurd* that we place equal value on the results of a 3 hour exam relative to results built over 4 years of classroom study. Aptitude helps in success at college, but far and away responsibility, perseverence, diligence, and simple interest have more to do with success.
I know for a fact that verbal SAT correlates very poorly to retention in science majors and that math SAT correlates slightly, but hardly enough to justify the level of attention given to it. High-school GPA and SAT-II (Achivement Tests) correlate much more strongly.
Now, as to the issue of quality of GPA scores...
Not every 4.0 is created equal. UC *unweights* high-school GPAs to some degree - reducing the amount of extra credit given to honors courses. Not every high school offers these courses.
What people need to understand about the UCs is that their charter is very different from many universities. UC is responsible for servicing the top 12.5% of high school graduates in California. Cal State serves the top 25%. Now, how we measure who is in the top 12.5% is a matter of debate and changes over time. Right now, the trend is moving toward admitting the top 12.5% of each high-school in the state regardless of relative quality. The thinking here (which I agree with) is that students shouldn't be penalized for where they live. I live in a city with extremely well regarded high schools. Students here have a wide assortment of honors courses and go to college in amazingly high rates. Just one city away students will never see a calculus course, a latin course, physics, or any one of a few dozen honors courses offered in my city - this is just 5 miles away!
Now, there is no question that the students in my city will start in more advanced courses, but a top student in the next city over is NO LESS LIKELY TO GRADUATE COLLEGE AT THE SAME LEVEL AS ONE IN MY CITY. That is, students there will be just as competent as students here after college, but they may need a few extra courses to catch up (probably no more than 4)
So, in my experience, I've found that students that are motivated and work hard do well. That's pretty much it. The question is how do you assess that? 4 years of high-school coursework seems as good a measure as I can think of...
CS is probably too theoretical - better if you want to work in a pushing-the-envelope type of job like developing new video codecs. These aren't exactly common.
CIS is, IMO, pretty unremarkable. A good degree, good jobs, but in a market downturn, you'll look like anyone with 3 yrs. job experience.
CS and Engineering has a more engineering focus and integrates hardware. This gives you a nice balance and is a bit more unique. This would put you in a good position for embedded programming - which is much more sensitive to hardware concerns than the usual PC/server level programmer.
Software Engineering is a newish field for basically applying traditional engineering practices found in industrial engineering specifically to software. Systems engineering is similar, but more broad including hardware and equipment, network infrastructure, etc.
Software engineers are trained to build very robust, mission critical, or highly distributed systems. Boeing primarily looks for SE and CSE for tasks such as programming the 777, missle systems, air traffic control systems, etc.
Should a serious market slowdown occur in the next 5 years (some people are predicting this, others aren't) I have doubts that either a CS or CIS degree will be worth much. The people with the most general degrees and experience are the first to be left behind in such circumstances. Don't try to 'get by'. Do the hard work, just in case...
Even now, we're starting to see some slowdown in CS hiring. It's tough to gauge because some industries are getting clobbered (necessarily and unnecessarily) and others aren't - yet. We've just entered the big hiring season and only the really big guns (IBM, Boeing, GM) have snapped up their 2001 grads. The next 6 months will be very telling...
Everyone is focusing on releasing Windows source code on the internet or basing products on that code. These I think are unlikely.
Instead, what if a good hacker decided to drop a few dozen lines of code in amongst the 10s of millions or so lines in Windows to make it easier for *them* to hack. Why hunt down security holes, when you can code them into the product yourself.
With everyone and their sister using Windows these days, this could give a hacker access to most every industry out there. And given the loose security between MS products, the new code could be in Office, Explorer, Outlook, almost anything. So the hacker downloads heaps of source code from a variety of MS products, finds a good location to insert this code and then modifies and sends a bit back. In amongst all the code that MS has to manage - most of which I'm sure they rarely look at, who would notice? How hard would it be to find?
Has the next MS product you plan to buy already been compromised? This I think is where the concern should really lie...
Forget removable.
It costs money, so students won't use it. And none of the solutions are compatable with each other. Some will have floppies, others not. Some will have Zip, SuperDrive, CD-RW, etc. You can't cover all of them.
But everyone will have basic internet access. With 20,000 students (the same as the university I work for) give iDrive or one of the other services a call and ask them what it would cost for accounts for all of your students, faculty, staff.
It's less than you might think, and 50MB of storage, always available, with guest access is perfect for a student. No losing a disk between the lab and the dorm, no corruption, nearly total compatability, and multiple people can access simultaneously - it can even stream MP3s.
We have iDrive accounts for everyone through a custom portal for our campus. Accounts are automatically created and authenticated using the persons campus account info. The account names are easy to remember since they are the same as a persons email address without the host. It's by far the best solution I've seen.
Major Party Candidates: The Republican Party platform seems to generally trust an individual to better manage their tax dollars than the government, but doesn't trust them to better manage their private lives than the government. The Democratic Party platform seems to be the reverse, trusting individuals with their private lives, but not with their tax dollars.
Please justify these conflicting policies on behalf of your party, and please identify specific examples where you disagree with these policies.
Since I'll eventually have to explain this to students and have basic understanding of the rules within UC, I'll chime in with what I think is going on. [IANAL]
A UC instructor has commented on his opinion on this matter and is correct on a number of points. Copyright is, by default, held by the instructor and not the university. The syllabus for the course is a legal document that sometimes grants students non-commerical duplication rights for personal use. But nweaver fails to address the case of handwritten notes.
There's a loophole here that I think the legislature is trying to plug:
Copyright law protects the preparation of derivative works.
Pertinent bits from the above:
"Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work."
Given that abridgements, compilations, dramas based on novels, sculptures based on drawings, and so on serve as examples of derivative works, lecture notes don't seem like much of a stretch.
So, I don't really think there is anything new here. However, there seems to be nothing stating definitively that lecture notes are in fact derivative works. So rather than test this in court over and over, legislating it would seem prudent. It's now in black and white, and penalties attached.
This strikes me as a pre-emptive move against problems that will likely crop up when the UC and CSU have to fully invest in distance learning. The 9 UC campuses have been warned that they'll have to absorb an additional 70,000 students over the next 10 years (the equivalent of Berkeley and UCLA combined), and the entire public higher education system in CA will have to take about 700,000 over what they currently serve (roughly the total population of Delaware).
Now, given that the dear taxpayers of California (of which I am one) are likely unwilling to build the equivalent of twenty major universities over the next 10 years, alternatives will have to be found - and distance learning will be a big component of that.
With 2 million students enrolled in higher ed in California in 2010, the low cost of distribution thanks to the internet, and the (hopefully) ease of electronic payment by that time, there's a hell of a big market here for people to tap for distribution of lecture notes, papers, and so on. Watch for more legislation to come...
I'm a Student Affairs Director at an engineering school and send a number of my students to do unix internships - more, in fact, than to MS (though MS is more visible). Sun, and other big unix vendors, mostly - but some smaller firms as well.
We use JobTrak, as do many other universities. They have a stronger focus on students than Monster, and have a lot of jobs, internships that don't require experience (and jobs that do, for alums).
The universities like them since they provide feedback on how their students and alums fare and where they go. That's good because if we send a pile of students to Sun, we'd start talking to them and form stronger relations.
Do you think Harvard, MIT, and UC have such noble intentions?
Yep. As an administrator at a UC I can assure you that we do not consider students to be customers, per se. The majority of funding at UC and certain other public universities does not come from students. We do have a business to protect, but the threats to this business are very far removed from Napster and it's consequences. I came to the university from industry and though there are some self-serving administrators I'd have to say the vast majority reasonably balance student, faculty, and community interests.
Most funding for UCs comes from industry, public grants (NSF, NEA, etc.), and taxpayers (and taxpayers are only about 1/4 of the total funding...). Students are a part of this funding, but UCs don't grow as a result of student dollars.
Universities both public and private concern themselves very much with freedom of speech issues. It's what allow faculty to challenge students and expand their fields. It's what allows universities themselves to operate through the sometimes bizarre beliefs and ideas of legislators, industry and politicians.
Universities unfortunately haven't always taken advantage of this freedom, but they usually do protect it dearly.
I don't speak on behalf of UC on this matter. These are my opinions only.
Er, infinities and Real Life mix just fine, thank you,
Finite and quantized are not equivalent. The set of cardinal numbers is a quantized set and at the same time infinite.
You only need intermediate values if your set is doubly bounded. If you need infinite values between two discrete states, then you can't have a quantized set. That doesn't seem to apply here...
(IANAL)
The iMac suits seemed to depend on whether or not the consumer might confuse the two products. That is, the eOne did look an awful lot like the iMac, and mistaken identity alone could take away from Apple's sales.
As for the Cube, I think you'd need to be both blind and stupid to mistake the two. The colors are totally different, the Cube is considerably taller, the Qube indicator light is in no way reproduced, the only resemblance is the basic shape (which is a common shape, unlike the iMac) and size. I don't think you could confuse these two...
Apple might also be able to argue the Cube is a derivative of the NeXT Cube which Apple should still hold the rights to. The only difference there is the size...
That suggests that perhaps there will be a breakout box to hook it to more standard configs.
Apple really has gotten away from non-standard hardware, so I believe there will be something coming to balance this out.
Dimensions do not have a size.
Don't confuse math and physics.
There is nothing in the physical world that definitively suggests that dimensions are infinite. However, we use mathematical models to describe this physical world which usually are open-ended. After all, there is often no point in introducing a model which is more limited than the real thing.
That said, models such as an S2 (a two-sphere) which ship navigators would describe using only longitude and latitude (since ships as a matter of normal operation wouldn't have useful altitude from sea level) can have size. Imagine squeezing the earth down so that a great circle about the equator was only a 1m circumference but a great circle about the poles was 10,000 Km. You could use measurements within that space to determine that one dimension had a longer transit (time to return to origin) than another. It would be 'bigger' than the other, though you could not reach the end of either, since you'd constantly be retracing locations.
The size of a S2 universe could be infinite if you imagine it expanding like a balloon. But it could be mixed, where some dimensions expand, and others contract. So a S2 universe which was spherical at creation could mature (that is, change according to a linear dimension R - time - so we'd call it RxS2) whereby the equator contracts and the poles expand. The equator could contract to such an extent that the universe begins to resemble a S1 - a circle, where you would travel up the meridian and down the date line, but a 'left turn' would bring you to your current location so quickly that you wouldn't notice. (It's a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea) There'd be no visible concept of latitude, only longitude.
So classically we wouldn't measure latitude because it'd be so small, however it is still there. Now consider that subatomic particles, who are more sensitive to small numbers, would seem to behave strangely because in measuring them, latitude would have a big effect. Particles would seemingly blink in and out of existance as they crossed your line of longitude if they moved along a line of latitude. They might appear to wiggle, or vibrate. They would be hard to measure because there'd be this uncertain measurement, latitude, which we've never dealt with before. Their velocity would be strange in the same way. Forces that drop off over distance would still be affected by the latitude measurement whether we recognize it or not.
This general theory has been around for a rather long time, but the specifics have never really been nailed down. Typically we deal with models that are well behaved: S1, S3, S7, etc. S2 is not well behaved because our mapping breaks at the poles (when you are at the north pole you are at 90 degrees N latitude and at every longitude, which is a problem...) S1 (a circle) is well behaved because there is a 1-1 mapping between actual locations and coordinates. S2 maps the north pole to an infinite number of coordinates.
Scientists have looked at universes with 10 and 11 dimensions, where one is linear (time), 3 are expanding and provide our spacial measurements, and the remainder are contracting and provide for the hodge-podge of forces and interactions that we see.
Until a better file/data system is divised, the UI will not improve.
.NET, but honestly, I don't think they have the brass ones to do it right. Everyone has bits and pieces of it but nobody has bothered to hook everything together and treat it as anything but a utility.
Right. The UI that we have was created in a time when just about the largest single body of information to organize was an 800k floppy disk. File management was easy because the computer was so limited in what it could offer and the needs were small and simple. But things have changed so much. I have thousands of files and even a hierarchical structure with links is cumbersome and difficult to maintain.
The future UI needs to deal with data soup as the primary element. Automatic indexing of content, free-form open data storage and retrieval, remote connectivity, and some way to hook all of this crap together and make it work.
MS is hinting in this direction with
It's not a matter of thinking like computers, but thinking like you would with paper. The computer UI mimics the paper world. That's gotta change. My thousands of paper files are just as hard to organize as my thousands of electronic ones - why use that as a model?
My brain organizes things differently: "Hey, that green sign reminds me that I need to call Steve who's car is the same color." Why does my brain relate that information? Who knows, but the fact that it does allows me to function efficiently. We count on arbitrary relationships between bits of information to keep everything in your head accessable.
When we can deal with data as a soup, as your brain would, file management will be largely non-essential and the UI will change radically.
As for 3D - crap. Give me 2D+1, a flat environment with a time variable - an unlimited undo for everything which will allow me to selectively move things in time.
When individuals are trade music privately, and on a one-to-one basis, it (legally) is not piracy.
Napster doesn't facilitate trading. In fact, it doesn't even provide for the functionality. It facilitates duplication since the original file remains after the file is downloaded. Change this, and the act clearly becomes legal.
Uh, this IS hacking. English lesson #314: In the english language, words will occasionally convey more than one meaning, sometimes contradictory. For example, 'fast' can suggest very rapid movement as in 'that is a fast car' or it can suggest strong resistance as in 'that has a fast grip' or 'this has fast colors'. So in the case of 'hacking' we find: hack together vt. [common] To throw something together so it will work. Unlike `kluge together' or cruft together, this does not necessarily have negative connotations. Given that the satellites were not designed for this purpose and that the functionality is clearly an afterthought, it's proper to say it was 'hacked together'. It suggests nothing about the ingenuity or quality of the resulting product. Thanks for playing. Please come again.
Anonymity has nothing to do with privacy. When privacy laws aren't working, the tempation is to demand anonymity to make up for the shortfall.
There is no right to anonymity. In fact the US constitution infers otherwise that the accused should have the right to face those that are accusing them. Anonymity IS the cloak behind which tyranny hides, not the other way around. You fail to recognize that those inclined toward tyranny will always have greater resources than the people. That is, YOUR anonymity won't hold since they will have the resources to find you, but THEIR anonymity will hold because you will never have the opportunity or ability to uncover their actions. The 4th estate exists to keep the latter in check in general, but not for specific cases. Keep in mind that they DID find the unabomber in spite of his attempts to remain anonymous. The government did find the resources needed to get him...
What you are inviting the the following:
T: 'You committed this crime'
V: 'What evidence do you have?'
T: 'A number of anonymous people reported you doing this. We're going to send you to jail'
V: 'But I think they are mistaken, can't we challenge this?'
T: 'No, they would no longer be anonymous then'
That people demand anonymity only underscores that privacy laws don't work. There is nothing wrong with any of you knowing my name, so long as I am reasonably sure that you can not invade my privacy because of it.
With identity comes accountability, and we should not demand a loss of accountability. It's one of the underlying priniciples which the US was founded on, but seems to be eroding. Don't accelerate it...
No, that's what 'default' was invented for. The mouse should default to simply being a one button mouse. If you are sufficiently capable to realize that the mouse could do more, you should be sufficiently capable to then find the controls to customize it to do all of these whizzy things. Geez, people. It's called 'scalability'. (BTW, getting rid of floppy disks had nothing to do with confusion, and everything to do with the fact that almost nobody used them and Apple needed to stimulate the peripheral market for their new baby)