I was quite serious (and not trolling) - I was put out by the whole dream-team thing. To me, it was crass marketing.
I guess there is something I like about the concept of amateur athletes. But I guess this has been dead since at least the '50s (especially during the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union). Still, I could pretend, but the dream team just smashed that option away as well:(
Part of it, is that the Olympics are an opportunity to watch interesting sports I don't normally see. I don't care much for televised basketball, football, etc. But once every four years I can see gymnastics, diving, bobsledding, etc. I see the dream team at the Olympics and it's just NBA cont, only with less interesting opponents.
I guess it depends on what the Olympics are for. If the goal is to provide something for everyone, then bring on the golf, bocci ball, cricket, bare-knuckle fighting, and red-rover games. Someone enjoys it.
To me, though, the Olympics were about a sort-of core group of sports, all of which demanded a high-degree of overall physical fitness, and a incredible degree of capability in a specific area.
Further, it's moving away from "Sports" (I define a sport as any game that you cannot play with one hand, while holding a beer in the other, and where you sweat from exertion. Thus, golf, curling, chess, bridge, and ping-pong are not sports:)
I don't know if that's a bad thing, or I'm just becoming a cantankerous old man. Time will tell:)
With the continuing addition of new sports to the Olympics, I think that they may find themselves with an overly diluted brand-name.
These sports tend to be ever-smaller niche sports (MTB bike races, curling, white-water rafting etc.) Will more and more "I won the gold in underwater basket weaving!" bring down the overall "greatness" of the Olympics in the eyes of the masses? Or does the inclusion of a broader selection of sports improve the games overall?
(for the record, I like MTB biking and WW-rafting; I just don't think they should be Olympic sports)
Actually, the NBA superstars have *everything* to prove. They are paid multi-millions, are spokespersons for major companies, and are in huge games on national TV weekly. They are considered the best of the best in the world.
If they *don't* play perfectly, if they lose, or even falter to any other team, they will be humiliated. Personally and nationally and professionally. It would be like the Brazilian soccer team losing a game to a local high school team. They would be a laughing-stock.
I think they have much to lose a little to gain except more ego a shiny gold medal. An amateur has much to lose (he's spent his life training for this), but much to gain (fame, fortune, validation, etc.)
I almost with you here. I was disgusted with the decision to bring in the NBA superstars for the US Olympic team a few years ago. These guys make millions, play on national TV weekly for years, and are generally considered heroes, or representatives of their towns & states. What business do they have in the Olympics?
However, I still enjoy other sports: Gymnastics, swimming, diving, bobsled, luge, alpine skiing. And I am glad that Mega Corp. broadcasts those, because otherwise I would never see them.
"How about kickbacks and under-the-table deals, the way they've been doing it for the past few decades? "
That's a problem, but it's a separate issue. Even if the IOC was pristine, they still might choose to ban 'net broadcasts until they can find a way to do it without harming their other sponsors.
I largely concur. The cost of infrastructure, plus athlete's training, equipment, time, etc. is quite expensive. If companies give money for these efforts, they may want a way to recoup or even profit on their expenditure.
IOC is trying to guarantee NBC can profit from their investment. If IOC allowed anyone to broadcast anything, neither NBC nor anyone else would pay for marketing rights. And with everyone broadcasting, advertisers would demand lower rates. In the end, less money would go to the Olympics, and subsequently to the athletes. I don't think that's a good outcome.
Currently, the non-net decision is largely a non-issue here in the States. If I want to watch some Olympics, I don't want it to be hurky-jerky, compressed 2"x2" video on my monitor. I'll watch TV.
Yep - once they have your credit card, they've got all your financial info if they want it.
And since you have the products shipped to you, you must give them your address. Now they know where you live.
Currently, online shopping is fundamentally un-private.
This could change, with two developments:
1) Using a secondary payment service, that you pay anonymously via cashier's check. Thus, your name is not connected at all to the payment of a product.
2) BestBuy.com allows you to order an item online and then pick it up at a local store, using a confirmation # emailed to you. Using a Yahoo-like email, and picking it up at the store, they don't have your "real" email address nor your home address.
But realistically, online shopping will always be un-private.
(Oh dearie me, will anyone see me way down here?:)
I'm quite skeptical about the existence of ET life. (I also have issues with naturalistic evolution, but that's another issue). For the sake of argument, I'll concede both for now.
Evolution is kinda like an unguided maximum-descent optimizer. A system exists. It is perturbed randomly. If the change improves the merit function, it stays, otherwise it is tossed. Wash, rinse, repeat for 5 billion years.
This kind of optimization finds local minima (best solution compared to "nearby" options) but can't guarantee global minima (absolute best result). Sharks illustrate this. The great white shark is unchanged from 100 million years ago. Why? Its construction is a "local minima." No random mutation imparts sufficient benefit to get it onto a new optimization track. The shark is stuck, as perfect as it can be without a huge mutation or catastrophic change in its environment (which would as likely destroy it, as move it further along).
Life may never become intelligent. It may get stuck in one of the great many non-sentient local minima.
Dinosaurs also show this. They ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, but never progressed past dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks. It took a catastrophe for mammals to get a chance to succeed the reptiles, and then develop intelligence. And so far, there's only been one type of intelligent mammal; slim pickin's from the great bio-diversity here. It seems to have beat the odds in not settling into a non-sentient adaptation.
What about communication? We can't even communicate with ants. They share our planet, our history, our fundamental biology. What if someplace developed intelligent jellyfish. Could we talk with it? What hope is there we can do it with some other entity that may be radically different?
Just some random thoughts. I may be totally off base.
I assumed time-travel is not possible because we haven't met any time travelers.
Contrary to all the movies, books, and high-ideals, if us humans get ahold of time-travel, we're going to be all over the place...err...time.
The clincher, is that someone will go back in time, make video-recordings, and then systematically go through all time periods saying, "See! I have proof that Jesus/Moses/Mohammed/Confucious/etc. does/does-not exist!"
If I submitted news on a party for my research department I'm going to, do you think they'd post it? It involves scientists, beer, and a city most people can't get to in time for the party. That seems the be the criteria for this post.
If you read the article, you'll se the author has little understanding of economics, the stock-market, or life in the real world.
1) This kind of business-city dealings have been going on for years, and written about in business 'zines, discussing whether it's a good idea or not. If the city thought it would be a raw deal, they could have told Dell "No" to its demands.
2) "...preferring to bring in desperate workers from non-computer fields who cannot find any other kind of work. " Those bast**ds! How dare they hire people who would otherwise be unemployed! And then having the audacity to pay them >$20k/yr in a state with a low cost of living! Really, if these jobs are truly the "third-world assembly work" the author claims, does he really believe that "sharp, well-educated people who have computer experience" would want them? No, they go for the high-tech, high-pay first-world information-age jobs. Duh.
3) "Dell is in the assembly business, not the high-tech business...Dell pretends he is running a high-tech company...But Wall Street knows better...Dell's stock has dropped from 55 to 35. This is what happens when people figure out that [Dell is just a manufacturing plant]. " This is just wrong. Investors have not suddenly realized that Dell is *gasp* a manufacturer of PCs. Hello! This company has been doing the same thing for about 20 years now. Their business model and implementation is not just now being understood. The reason the stock price has dropped is because the commodization of PCs (caused by the low RAM, HD, CPU prices) has created a significant sub-$1000 PC market, which has much lower margins than the mid- and high-end systems, which historically provided the real corporate profits. Dell has been trying to figure out, along with *every other* PC seller, how to make money from low-cost, low-profit systems. Everyone has been dinged due to profit problems in the transition from the past several months. Furthermore, there was a sympathy effect with the drop of MS stock (from the DOJ action) than impacted everyone for a while. Furthermore, investors might also think Dell is making bad decisions with this TN plant, or with the Linux moves. But it's not because they suddenly figured out that Dell builds PCs.
3b) This is a facetious argument regardless, because manufacturing is a non-trivial operation. To create a manufacturing plant with a huge capacity, very low error rate, in which every system can be customized, and the components are fragile, is a challenge. You need smart people who know know about manufacturing process, analysis, finances, and technology. I doubt Dell has a bunch of monkeys grabbing parts from bins and throwing them into cases. I would wager that they have a rather sophisticated assembly line, developed by smart, well-paid people.
4) "It's pretty obvious that Dell's slickmeisters have taken these country boys real good." Yep, that smooth-talking, well-heeled Texas boy sure did pull a fast one on those inbred, knuckle-dragging, TN red-necks. Good argument; when things go wrong, accuse the other guy of being smarter than you. Man, I hate smart people! Always using their intelligence to their advantage!
In the final analysis, the author has two real gripes. The first is that rich Michael Dell got a sweet deal from TN, and hasn't yet fulfilled his promises. Well, if the TN people are so stupid as to give mucho benefits to a company with no guaranteed benefit to themselves, I have trouble feeling sorry for them. His other gripe is that the introduction of a large business has negatively impacted the surrounding areas. That's a real issue that cities and states have been and still are grappling with for a while. But it's not Dell's fault. It's Nashville's fault. They invited them in, and now they have to deal with the consequences.
While the raw materials of the card cost about $0.20 (it's all sand and plastic, basically:) there are other factors involved.
There is the chip yield at the fab. They are using the fastest clocked processor and memory chips in a graphic card to date IIRC. If yields are low, price is high.
There's also the need to not kill their current sales of old boards.
And then there is recouping any "hidden" research costs associated with the new card.
And then there is the need for a healthy profit to enable further development and keep shareholders happy.
Besides - if they are priced too high, they will get sales, and then prices will come down. In a competitive market, consumers keep things priced right;)
Getting off-topic, but you raise a very interesting point. I'm approaching 30 (shudder), and I think I saw the transition of legos from wholly generic to specialized. The space sets came out when I was a kid, as well as the first motor (big, black brick), and then the technics, and there compact motor. Generally, though, even with space sets and such, you got mostly generic bricks, with a few special types, but even those could be used for many things.
Over the years, it seems the specialization continued to where legos are hyper-specialized. A set comes with a few normal bricks and many specialty items that don't have many uses.
Now, maybe it's reversing, with the greater amounts of generic pieces in the mindstorms and such sets, despite highly-specified star-wars, castle, and rock war sets.
Having grown up on legos, I thought the Mindstorms looked really cool when I heard about them, but I didn't get to play with them until this past Easter. I spent the day with friends in town from church, and their H.S. son had a set. We spent about 2 hrs after dinner fixing code and getting his project working. Way cool stuff. Makes me want to get married and have kids so I can buy them some:)
"I figured it'd be a lot safer than heroin...:)"
Legos may be safer, but heroin is cheaper.:)
What's really interesting is that AOL doesn't "get it". According to techpages, this was given to them from an anonymous contact, who think they is at AOL. They imply that this is not sanctioned software from AOL. (but perhaps they are wrong, and AOL is "getting it" and moving towards Linux support.)
It's not an official AOL release. It's a secret release from un-named sources. AOL does not acknowledge this software's existence (according to the techpages.com info). It's to show AOL's lax security.
I had the same thoughts at first. But if you read the article, you see that the primary purpose was to indisputably show security holes in AOL software which AOL refuses to acknowledge (allegedly).
To whit: "This proves AOL has done very little to fix there security problems."
But there could be larger implications. Many are complaining about "AOHell" and "AOLusers" and such. It's this narrow-minded, pseudo-elitist attitude that prevents Linux from becoming mainstream more rapidly. When Linux offers mainstream solutions to mainstream problems, then mainstream users will be interested. You can't get any more mainstream than AOL.
Until then, it's just another bit player losing to the commercial big boys
(mod the previous poster up)
Well done! Case solved.
That's what I had hoped. So, in the end, we got all riled up for nothing, it seems. They are just serving as a "front-end" for the regular thesis distribution company. And they have the rights to sell the thesis because of the paper work the author signs when he submits, as well as the university's policy.
You can also order reprints from the university (and probably from the archival services - theses are usually archived on micro-fiche).
The question in my mind is, whether Contentville is paying royalties (or whatever) to the universities or did they just grab the theses, and are re-selling them. The former seems ok, the latter is of dubious legality in my mind.
Hmmm...it's Napster for Theses... Theses want to be free... maybe Natalie Portman will buy a copy of your Thesis (Beowulf Cluser of Hot Grits)... (did I miss any cliches?)
Seriously, as someone else mentioned, research work is normally partly, if not wholly, owned by the university. If you produce work that can be patented and/or sold, the university receives part of the proceeds.
Copyright - there is a defacto copyright that you get just by adding Copyright 2000 Joe Schmoe to your work. But it's not "official". For greater security, you can register it with the Library of Congress, I believe ($25 - $50).
Sorry for the fuzziness on the details - I've see both of these things at work (a friend trying to license his research, and another friend copyrighted his thesis since there may be future commercial uses).
How does this apply to Contentville? Well, the University could license the works to them. Also, all theses are archived on micro-fiche, which are accessible through archival places. It's very possible these works are licensed through the Univ. or through an archival service for distribution.
Excellent points, esp. (1). When I first read their method, I thought, "Air is a great insulator; that'll never work." I was quite surprised when they said the MB was cooled, but your suggestion the probe wasn't mounted correctly is probably correct.
To reiterate - non-circulating air is one of the best thermal insulators. That's why home insulation is generally fluffy spun fibers. The material has many small pockets of trapped air, and the trapped air is the actual insulator.
These guys did the same thing. They had a bubble of air around their CPU inside the bag, which probably significantly reduced any cooling to be gained from the dry ice & alcohol
If their own site is like that, I would not want them to make one for me:) (stupid front-page redirect, trying to hold me hostage! And forcing an itty-bitty panel with scroll arrows? Hello, 17" monitor and browser scroll bars! Harumph.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was quite serious (and not trolling) - I was put out by the whole dream-team thing. To me, it was crass marketing.
:(
I guess there is something I like about the concept of amateur athletes. But I guess this has been dead since at least the '50s (especially during the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union). Still, I could pretend, but the dream team just smashed that option away as well
Part of it, is that the Olympics are an opportunity to watch interesting sports I don't normally see. I don't care much for televised basketball, football, etc. But once every four years I can see gymnastics, diving, bobsledding, etc. I see the dream team at the Olympics and it's just NBA cont, only with less interesting opponents.
I guess it depends on what the Olympics are for. If the goal is to provide something for everyone, then bring on the golf, bocci ball, cricket, bare-knuckle fighting, and red-rover games. Someone enjoys it.
:)
:)
To me, though, the Olympics were about a sort-of core group of sports, all of which demanded a high-degree of overall physical fitness, and a incredible degree of capability in a specific area.
Further, it's moving away from "Sports" (I define a sport as any game that you cannot play with one hand, while holding a beer in the other, and where you sweat from exertion. Thus, golf, curling, chess, bridge, and ping-pong are not sports
I don't know if that's a bad thing, or I'm just becoming a cantankerous old man. Time will tell
I merely state various thoughts. You may connect the dots in whatever order you'd like :)
I'm glad to hear it's illegal.
As a social commentary, I like it a great deal.
As an actual attempt to profit off of your vote, I consider it treason.
Hopefully, it's the former, and not the latter.
With the continuing addition of new sports to the Olympics, I think that they may find themselves with an overly diluted brand-name.
These sports tend to be ever-smaller niche sports (MTB bike races, curling, white-water rafting etc.) Will more and more "I won the gold in underwater basket weaving!" bring down the overall "greatness" of the Olympics in the eyes of the masses? Or does the inclusion of a broader selection of sports improve the games overall?
(for the record, I like MTB biking and WW-rafting; I just don't think they should be Olympic sports)
Actually, the NBA superstars have *everything* to prove. They are paid multi-millions, are spokespersons for major companies, and are in huge games on national TV weekly. They are considered the best of the best in the world.
If they *don't* play perfectly, if they lose, or even falter to any other team, they will be humiliated. Personally and nationally and professionally. It would be like the Brazilian soccer team losing a game to a local high school team. They would be a laughing-stock.
I think they have much to lose a little to gain except more ego a shiny gold medal. An amateur has much to lose (he's spent his life training for this), but much to gain (fame, fortune, validation, etc.)
I almost with you here. I was disgusted with the decision to bring in the NBA superstars for the US Olympic team a few years ago. These guys make millions, play on national TV weekly for years, and are generally considered heroes, or representatives of their towns & states. What business do they have in the Olympics?
However, I still enjoy other sports: Gymnastics, swimming, diving, bobsled, luge, alpine skiing. And I am glad that Mega Corp. broadcasts those, because otherwise I would never see them.
"How about kickbacks and under-the-table deals, the way they've been doing it for the past few decades? "
That's a problem, but it's a separate issue. Even if the IOC was pristine, they still might choose to ban 'net broadcasts until they can find a way to do it without harming their other sponsors.
I largely concur. The cost of infrastructure, plus athlete's training, equipment, time, etc. is quite expensive. If companies give money for these efforts, they may want a way to recoup or even profit on their expenditure.
IOC is trying to guarantee NBC can profit from their investment. If IOC allowed anyone to broadcast anything, neither NBC nor anyone else would pay for marketing rights. And with everyone broadcasting, advertisers would demand lower rates. In the end, less money would go to the Olympics, and subsequently to the athletes. I don't think that's a good outcome.
Currently, the non-net decision is largely a non-issue here in the States. If I want to watch some Olympics, I don't want it to be hurky-jerky, compressed 2"x2" video on my monitor. I'll watch TV.
Yep - once they have your credit card, they've got all your financial info if they want it.
And since you have the products shipped to you, you must give them your address. Now they know where you live.
Currently, online shopping is fundamentally un-private.
This could change, with two developments:
1) Using a secondary payment service, that you pay anonymously via cashier's check. Thus, your name is not connected at all to the payment of a product.
2) BestBuy.com allows you to order an item online and then pick it up at a local store, using a confirmation # emailed to you. Using a Yahoo-like email, and picking it up at the store, they don't have your "real" email address nor your home address.
But realistically, online shopping will always be un-private.
(Oh dearie me, will anyone see me way down here? :)
I'm quite skeptical about the existence of ET life. (I also have issues with naturalistic evolution, but that's another issue). For the sake of argument, I'll concede both for now.
Evolution is kinda like an unguided maximum-descent optimizer. A system exists. It is perturbed randomly. If the change improves the merit function, it stays, otherwise it is tossed. Wash, rinse, repeat for 5 billion years.
This kind of optimization finds local minima (best solution compared to "nearby" options) but can't guarantee global minima (absolute best result). Sharks illustrate this. The great white shark is unchanged from 100 million years ago. Why? Its construction is a "local minima." No random mutation imparts sufficient benefit to get it onto a new optimization track. The shark is stuck, as perfect as it can be without a huge mutation or catastrophic change in its environment (which would as likely destroy it, as move it further along).
Life may never become intelligent. It may get stuck in one of the great many non-sentient local minima.
Dinosaurs also show this. They ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, but never progressed past dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks. It took a catastrophe for mammals to get a chance to succeed the reptiles, and then develop intelligence. And so far, there's only been one type of intelligent mammal; slim pickin's from the great bio-diversity here. It seems to have beat the odds in not settling into a non-sentient adaptation.
What about communication? We can't even communicate with ants. They share our planet, our history, our fundamental biology. What if someplace developed intelligent jellyfish. Could we talk with it? What hope is there we can do it with some other entity that may be radically different?
Just some random thoughts. I may be totally off base.
I assumed time-travel is not possible because we haven't met any time travelers.
:)
Contrary to all the movies, books, and high-ideals, if us humans get ahold of time-travel, we're going to be all over the place...err...time.
The clincher, is that someone will go back in time, make video-recordings, and then systematically go through all time periods saying, "See! I have proof that Jesus/Moses/Mohammed/Confucious/etc. does/does-not exist!"
That hasn't happened, ergo, no time-travel
My thoughts exactly.
If I submitted news on a party for my research department I'm going to, do you think they'd post it? It involves scientists, beer, and a city most people can't get to in time for the party. That seems the be the criteria for this post.
As Mel Brooks once said, "It's good to be King!"
If you read the article, you'll se the author has little understanding of economics, the stock-market, or life in the real world.
1) This kind of business-city dealings have been going on for years, and written about in business 'zines, discussing whether it's a good idea or not. If the city thought it would be a raw deal, they could have told Dell "No" to its demands.
2) "...preferring to bring in desperate workers from non-computer fields who cannot find any other kind of work. " Those bast**ds! How dare they hire people who would otherwise be unemployed! And then having the audacity to pay them >$20k/yr in a state with a low cost of living! Really, if these jobs are truly the "third-world assembly work" the author claims, does he really believe that "sharp, well-educated people who have computer experience" would want them? No, they go for the high-tech, high-pay first-world information-age jobs. Duh.
3) "Dell is in the assembly business, not the high-tech business...Dell pretends he is running a high-tech company...But Wall Street knows better...Dell's stock has dropped from 55 to 35. This is what happens when people figure out that [Dell is just a manufacturing plant]. " This is just wrong. Investors have not suddenly realized that Dell is *gasp* a manufacturer of PCs. Hello! This company has been doing the same thing for about 20 years now. Their business model and implementation is not just now being understood. The reason the stock price has dropped is because the commodization of PCs (caused by the low RAM, HD, CPU prices) has created a significant sub-$1000 PC market, which has much lower margins than the mid- and high-end systems, which historically provided the real corporate profits. Dell has been trying to figure out, along with *every other* PC seller, how to make money from low-cost, low-profit systems. Everyone has been dinged due to profit problems in the transition from the past several months. Furthermore, there was a sympathy effect with the drop of MS stock (from the DOJ action) than impacted everyone for a while. Furthermore, investors might also think Dell is making bad decisions with this TN plant, or with the Linux moves. But it's not because they suddenly figured out that Dell builds PCs.
3b) This is a facetious argument regardless, because manufacturing is a non-trivial operation. To create a manufacturing plant with a huge capacity, very low error rate, in which every system can be customized, and the components are fragile, is a challenge. You need smart people who know know about manufacturing process, analysis, finances, and technology. I doubt Dell has a bunch of monkeys grabbing parts from bins and throwing them into cases. I would wager that they have a rather sophisticated assembly line, developed by smart, well-paid people.
4) "It's pretty obvious that Dell's slickmeisters have taken these country boys real good." Yep, that smooth-talking, well-heeled Texas boy sure did pull a fast one on those inbred, knuckle-dragging, TN red-necks. Good argument; when things go wrong, accuse the other guy of being smarter than you. Man, I hate smart people! Always using their intelligence to their advantage!
In the final analysis, the author has two real gripes. The first is that rich Michael Dell got a sweet deal from TN, and hasn't yet fulfilled his promises. Well, if the TN people are so stupid as to give mucho benefits to a company with no guaranteed benefit to themselves, I have trouble feeling sorry for them. His other gripe is that the introduction of a large business has negatively impacted the surrounding areas. That's a real issue that cities and states have been and still are grappling with for a while. But it's not Dell's fault. It's Nashville's fault. They invited them in, and now they have to deal with the consequences.
While the raw materials of the card cost about $0.20 (it's all sand and plastic, basically :) there are other factors involved.
;)
There is the chip yield at the fab. They are using the fastest clocked processor and memory chips in a graphic card to date IIRC. If yields are low, price is high.
There's also the need to not kill their current sales of old boards.
And then there is recouping any "hidden" research costs associated with the new card.
And then there is the need for a healthy profit to enable further development and keep shareholders happy.
Besides - if they are priced too high, they will get sales, and then prices will come down. In a competitive market, consumers keep things priced right
Getting off-topic, but you raise a very interesting point. I'm approaching 30 (shudder), and I think I saw the transition of legos from wholly generic to specialized. The space sets came out when I was a kid, as well as the first motor (big, black brick), and then the technics, and there compact motor. Generally, though, even with space sets and such, you got mostly generic bricks, with a few special types, but even those could be used for many things.
Over the years, it seems the specialization continued to where legos are hyper-specialized. A set comes with a few normal bricks and many specialty items that don't have many uses.
Now, maybe it's reversing, with the greater amounts of generic pieces in the mindstorms and such sets, despite highly-specified star-wars, castle, and rock war sets.
Thoughts?
Having grown up on legos, I thought the Mindstorms looked really cool when I heard about them, but I didn't get to play with them until this past Easter. I spent the day with friends in town from church, and their H.S. son had a set. We spent about 2 hrs after dinner fixing code and getting his project working. Way cool stuff. Makes me want to get married and have kids so I can buy them some :)
:)"
:)
"I figured it'd be a lot safer than heroin...
Legos may be safer, but heroin is cheaper.
What's really interesting is that AOL doesn't "get it". According to techpages, this was given to them from an anonymous contact, who think they is at AOL. They imply that this is not sanctioned software from AOL. (but perhaps they are wrong, and AOL is "getting it" and moving towards Linux support.)
It's not an official AOL release. It's a secret release from un-named sources. AOL does not acknowledge this software's existence (according to the techpages.com info). It's to show AOL's lax security.
I had the same thoughts at first. But if you read the article, you see that the primary purpose was to indisputably show security holes in AOL software which AOL refuses to acknowledge (allegedly). To whit: "This proves AOL has done very little to fix there security problems." But there could be larger implications. Many are complaining about "AOHell" and "AOLusers" and such. It's this narrow-minded, pseudo-elitist attitude that prevents Linux from becoming mainstream more rapidly. When Linux offers mainstream solutions to mainstream problems, then mainstream users will be interested. You can't get any more mainstream than AOL. Until then, it's just another bit player losing to the commercial big boys
(mod the previous poster up)
:)
Well done! Case solved.
That's what I had hoped. So, in the end, we got all riled up for nothing, it seems. They are just serving as a "front-end" for the regular thesis distribution company. And they have the rights to sell the thesis because of the paper work the author signs when he submits, as well as the university's policy.
Next problem, please.
You can also order reprints from the university (and probably from the archival services - theses are usually archived on micro-fiche).
The question in my mind is, whether Contentville is paying royalties (or whatever) to the universities or did they just grab the theses, and are re-selling them. The former seems ok, the latter is of dubious legality in my mind.
Hmmm...it's Napster for Theses... Theses want to be free... maybe Natalie Portman will buy a copy of your Thesis (Beowulf Cluser of Hot Grits)... (did I miss any cliches?)
Seriously, as someone else mentioned, research work is normally partly, if not wholly, owned by the university. If you produce work that can be patented and/or sold, the university receives part of the proceeds.
Copyright - there is a defacto copyright that you get just by adding Copyright 2000 Joe Schmoe to your work. But it's not "official". For greater security, you can register it with the Library of Congress, I believe ($25 - $50).
Sorry for the fuzziness on the details - I've see both of these things at work (a friend trying to license his research, and another friend copyrighted his thesis since there may be future commercial uses).
How does this apply to Contentville? Well, the University could license the works to them. Also, all theses are archived on micro-fiche, which are accessible through archival places. It's very possible these works are licensed through the Univ. or through an archival service for distribution.
Excellent points, esp. (1). When I first read their method, I thought, "Air is a great insulator; that'll never work." I was quite surprised when they said the MB was cooled, but your suggestion the probe wasn't mounted correctly is probably correct.
To reiterate - non-circulating air is one of the best thermal insulators. That's why home insulation is generally fluffy spun fibers. The material has many small pockets of trapped air, and the trapped air is the actual insulator.
These guys did the same thing. They had a bubble of air around their CPU inside the bag, which probably significantly reduced any cooling to be gained from the dry ice & alcohol
If their own site is like that, I would not want them to make one for me :) (stupid front-page redirect, trying to hold me hostage! And forcing an itty-bitty panel with scroll arrows? Hello, 17" monitor and browser scroll bars! Harumph.)