Entire job categories will soon be wiped out. Taxi drivers will go first, followed by truckers.
Don't forget car manufacturers. People buy cars and use them for only 1 to 2 hours a day, typically. We don't share cars right now because other drivers may abuse it. With driverless cars, you can't abuse the engine easily, so sharing cars makes sense economically. Almost anyone would be able to afford a 2 hours/day timeshare from a shared pool of thousands of cars for $500/year.
Don't forget insurance. And the billions they spend on advertising.
Saying that drone warfare is not particularly good at decapitating an institutional terrorist organization like Al Qaeda is missing the point. Or at least a key point. Drone warfare has made large scale terrorist training largely impossible. The boot camps and months long, practical courses in guerrilla warfare that used to be an Al Qaeda staple are now just very visible, attractive targets for drones. Drone warfare occasionally knocks out a head, but it really undermines the base.
In all force, there is some deterrence power. For some technologies, the deterrence is the whole point. For example, land mines aren't meant to be a good way to blow up people, they're meant to be a good way to prevent groups of people from traversing an area once you advertise that it's full of mines. Here, drones are useful for rapid, cheap attacks of opportunity... but the fact that they are almost always ready means long-term, open-air training camps are suicide.
Here you're assuming that Al Queda is not defeatable but only suppressible.
So, a perpetual war on terror, perpetual deterrence by drone killings.
So the Nazi's were a large, bureaucratic organization, and despite that it seems like our 'winning strategy' was to kill large numbers of lower level people, and smaller numbers of higher ranking people, and yet it seems to have worked in the end? The claims made by this paper seem very silly.
WWW2 ended and we won. However, in this case, we are perpetually doing drone attacks with no end in sight.
Unless you define "winning strategy" as perpetually killing.
You're a complete moron, in no country will the police not shoot someone who has raised a gun at them. What do you want the police to do, let the dude shoot them?
There is no video showing that the guy raised his gun. Note that he didn't actually fire, just raised his gun.
Police will shoot and kill first and then say yeah, he raised his gun. Then, people like you will say, umm, its justified and be happy.
The thief was killed because he raised a gun to an officer, not because he was tracked down by GPS.
Can we mod a submission as "-1 TROLL"?
After the police kill someone, they will always say the suspect raised a gun at an officer or tried to use some other deadly force.
The point is that the police knew where he was and he didn't know that the police knew. Instead of dealing with the situation where nobody gets hurt, the police decided to just kill the guy. Maybe he was in traffic driving and the police didn't want to risk a deadly chase.
What if in the future, a robber takes the GPS and then throws it in some other person's car. What if the police then kill the other person by mistake? The police have nothing but a GPS location and will kill at even the slightest gesture that they perceive to be a threat.
CS degrees aren't the only game in town. Lots of programmers come from C.E., E.E., or Math degrees. I would say the number of programmers, in total, are going up, just that CS degrees are less prestigious or desirable.
I think getting a CS degree to become programmer is overkill. It is like getting a Mechnical Engineering degree to be a mechanic.
Anyway computer science degrees as it is right now is disappointing. There simply isn't four years worth of material to be learned. There is a lot of fluff that is half outdated and half not used anymore. There are courses on compiler design, OS design, computer graphics that is difficult it is more of using tools rather than learning some CS fundamental. Since a lot of programmers want to get the CS degree, most departments water down the degree and it is the middle of being a science degree and a technical degree. I would think that automata theory, information theory, machine learning would be essential CS but they are mostly relegated to graduate courses.
One option that our local university does is to make computer science and electrical engineering into one single degree. There are lots of jobs out there that aren't pure software development but need to work closely with hardware.
The other option is to let students get a minor in computer programming so they can study engineering, math, psychology, biology etc and still get lots of programming experience. Someone with a minor in computer programming or maybe a two year degree in computer programming should be looked as viable for working as a programmer.
Assuming it can become the norm everywhere (huge assumption there)...
I imagine we will replace our coal plants with large battery plants to store all the extra power we get during the day so that these things can function well at night (having to only power sections of road with vehicles on them would probably make that very feasible).
Then the electricity bill wouldn't be for the actual electricity. It'd be for maintaining these large battery store houses and maintaining these roads. I mean really, if we laid out a ton of this stuff across the US (the desert regions specifically), I figure electricity would be dirt cheap if not free (aside from the aforementioned maintenance).
The only way I can see this actually happening is if the solar panel roads become ubiquitous, which as I said, is a huge assumption. The oil industry won't have it, and getting the capital to produce enough panels to make it worth while, then lay them across major highways would be massive. Then there's building the battery centers so that they can actually function at night (or we can shift to coal power for night time).
I think this is something that would definitely pay off in the long run, but probably won't happen for the same reasons other things similar to it didn't happen. i.e. big business and lobbyists.
If electricity was super cheap during the day, I'm sure there will be lots of ways that will be used up instead of being stored in batteries. I'm sure data centers see most traffic during the day and so can turn off their data centers at night. Factories can also shut down at night.
The basic fact is that solar panels aren't efficient enough. The day solar panel becomes efficient, all these axillary technologies will bloom. Otherwise, oil industry won't have to even worry about it.
I think this would make for an excellent driveway/sidewalk material. It could have motions detectors and be used as lights. During the day, it would work as solar panels. Sidewalks and driveways cost around $5/sq ft for concrete and $10/sq ft for bricks. I think it they cost around $15/sq ft I think a lot of people would go for it, esp if they already have other solar equipment in the house.
I'm sure lots of specialty uses are possible - like casinos or paving Main St with this so it looks really fancy.
I know road budgets are astronomical and so, I would think it would depend a lot on how much these cost to make, maintain and replace. In most cases, labor is at least half the cost and so, it would depend on how much more expensive these are than asphalt.
And then market economic reality kicked in, and it's nuclear WW3 for resources again.
Market economics are the alternative to fighting for resources. Instead of grabbing what you want by force, you just buy it. The market based world order of the Pax Americana is far more peaceful than the age of imperialism and mercantilism that preceded it.
Market economics is what happens when everyone has nukes. You can't grab what you want by force because nuking makes nothing worth it.
I personally hate using voice command with eletronics because they can't talk back to me but some people like it, couldn't they have left the mic in? How expensive even is the mic?
Because the mic hardware was originally part of Kinnect. MS would have to create and manufacture a dedicated peripheral device with only a mic instead of the cameras + mic, and then include that or sell it separately. And since all current software was assuming that having a Kinnect meant both the mic and cameras were there, that would have meant rewriting many assumptions that the software is probably currently making, so there's even more cost.
In short, it's not at all practical or cost-effective, especially not for the likely few people who wanted a mic but NOT a camera. The entire point of this move is to shave off costs for those that want nothing to do with the Kinnect. Given the fact that the Kinnect has already proven to be rather unpopular, this sort of investment would simply be throwing good money after bad. If you want voice control (and I mean that in a generic sense, as you've acknowledged that you personally wouldn't even want that feature), get a Kinnect.
Or, or they could just allow USB mics like the Guitar Hero/Rock Band type of mics.
Can someone explain to me what dumping piles and piles of computers into Africa is going to accomplish?
In Africa I see waves of ethnic turmoil coupled with basic infrastructure problems, all played by the governments to keep a few powerful folks in power.
Are we trying to turn Africa into our next call center and need to get the kids up to speed with computers? I don't think that is going to happen until something resembling stability (i.e. taking care of food, clothing and shelter for entire years without fear of a machete attack) takes hold.
What they are hoping to accomplish is that the will all be able to connect to sites like MIT Opencourseware, learn science and engineering and find the cure to cancer and invent technology for cheap limitless renewable energy.
The result will probably be lot less but how much less is what is up for debate. Since we can't see the future, we don't know.
So, the point is, somebody is doing something to help. Be constructive and lend help if you can. Snarking isn't helping anyone.
Well, duh, don't connect them to the Internet. Unplug them from the wall when they are not in use, and cover over camera lenses with tape. But you should do that already.
Most smartTVs use wireless connection. Even if you disable it, it can be hacked to work while looking like it is disabled.
One of the most astounding thing I encounter with "OB-city" threads is that everyone seems to know the solution to cure obesity. Do this and do this and do this. Everyone has their own pet theory that they think is absolutely right.
Well, here's my pet theory to cure obesity. Fund obesity researchers and let them conduct scientific experiments.
I have bat-shiat crazy theories on this. Walk barefoot in the hook-worm infested latrines in Africa. Seriously, that is one of them. Our ancestors ate raw food and lived with parasites and so should we!
ATM, who know what is right. Maybe the latrine-walking is better advice than the doctor recommended 20 minute exercise per week or whatever. But, maybe we should let researchers figure that out. At the same time, researchers got here in the first place with cholesterol and saturated fat bullshit.
What do you mean subsidized? Accept students on financial aid? Have some government research grants? Why would any of those preclude the university from selling an invention?
If this research was funded by a government grant then the university would not own the IP. That is clearly not the case here or this would have died in court 5 years ago....
It was partially supported by NSF. From the patent:
This invention was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECD-8907068. The United States Government has certain rights in this invention.
It is very hard to tell what is going on in the patent. Seems like it is an method inside an error correcting algorithm for hard drives. Error correcting is statistical in hard disks and it seems like they found a new method for some error correlation for turbo codes. I'm not an expert in this field so I don't know how much of an impact this had on error coding.
The present invention is directed to a method of determining branch metric values in a detector. The method includes receiving a plurality of time variant signal samples, the signal samples having one of signal-dependent noise, correlated noise, and both signal dependent and correlated noise associated therewith. The method also includes selecting a branch metric function at a certain time index and applying the selected function to the signal samples to determine the metric values.
The present invention represents a substantial advance over prior sequence detectors. Because the present invention takes into account the correlation between noise samples in the readback signal, the detected data sequence is detected with a higher degree of accuracy. Those advantages and benefits of the present invention, and others, will become apparent from the Detailed Description of the Invention hereinbelow.
I feel I don't have a lot of time left over to play with margins and get the typesetting and hyperlinked references all working. The layout work actually is valuable. Yes, new tech makes it easier, but there's still the research to do.
Really? Type-setting can be learned in half an hour. When you submit you PhD dissertation, you have to typeset it to the specs of the graduate school and nobody helps you. So, most PhDs already know how to typeset.
Additionally, some journals have staff that help with the review process. Peer review is done by people busy with other things who often miss a lot, espeically well executed fraud. Many of the biology-related publishers perform text and image analysis of submitted articles to look for evidence of fraud. They find duplications, square edges where square edges are never found (introduced through deletions), etc.
Again, this is easily done with html forms and there are plenty of fraud checking software out there.
I suppose this COULD be done by a volunteer army by it's important enough to pay to have it done well. These are the archives of our knowledge. This may look cheap and easy to the IT crowd but other disciplines don't fall so easily into having 1 server at MIT and some volunteers. It doesn't and shouldn't be as expensive and bound up in copyright as it is (PLoS lets me keep the copyright and it's so nice not to have to ask for permission to use my own figures) but there is probably a happy middle ground as is already been explored by more and more open access journals.
Volunteer army? A company hosting thousands of websites with 99.99% availability doesn't need even need an army to do the job. Just a small group of people can do it. Every university has websites to run and popping a few extra websites for journals and a few gigabytes of data is drop in the ocean. There are open journal systems that is open source software for hosting a journal. If you really wanted, you could get an open journal up and running tomorrow.
The problem is that people like you find crazy notions to justify these journals and prices. The real barrier isn't technology or time savings or whatnot, it is simply organization. If you got a few dozen people on an open journal committee in your field, you could easily start an open journal. It would be free and the information would be available to anyone online. The problem is that people will say I'm too busy to take part in a journal and just want to do research and someone should else should take care of that.
Not only will you remember your lectures, you will have constant intrusive thoughts. So much so that you will underperform your current tasks because of the constant intrusive thoughts from remembering your lectures!
Seriously, why in the world would you want to remember everything? You only remember something until the task is done and forget about it. That is how the brain works. You only need to remember the lectures until the finals and then the brain flushes it out.
Remembering lots of stuff is like trying to fit everything into the CPU cache. Just the amount of faults will kill your performance.
Another dirty secret of universities is that professors never ever take a class in education or teaching. They are just expected to stand in front of a class and start blabbering. Most professors have very little clue about what they are doing. Most classes I have attended (or given) have a hodgepodge of the textbook content, random things that the lecturer is personally interested in and filler - stuff there is absolutely no need to remember at all. Most professors are teaching stuff that are so out of date that the only time you will ever encounter it is in books that haven't been checked out for decades. Why the hell would you want to remember this crap?
They were targeting the individual who ripped their shows from a cable TV broadcast. It probably seemed logical to them that someone who has cable TV signed a contract in order to get it.
As they found out, people who make a career out of torrenting tend to live in their parents basement (and thus use their parents' cable subscription) so the "fraud" and "breach of contract" will likely be dropped.
He probably torrented it after downloading it from somewhere else. Turning a TV broadcast into a torrentable file takes some work.
Click-N-Ship is for priority only. Also, it's poorly named... at the very least it should be called click-click-click-create-account-click-click-some-more-etc-etc-etc-then-maybe-one-day-ship.
Click-N-Ship is also for first class parcel, media mail and express mail (among others).
You can create labels for regular first class mail in Microsoft Word.
Contrary to what some small government people claim, the USPS is the envy of the world. The overhead is near non-existent and the delivery network is world class in efficiency. Private companies can't come near the efficiency of the post office. The reason we have a system so efficient is that the natural monopoly was recognized and non-profit corporation beholden to government was created. It's a good thing that the post office recognizes that the customers paying the bills are the junk mailers. It's also a good thing that the USPS is overseen by government regulators (except of course congresses attempt to kill the USPS by mandating that they contribute 75 years worth of retirement in 10 years). That government regulations guarantees that it's a crime for anyone to open my mail, and that the courts have precedence putting searching the mail as equivalent to breaking into your house and reading your diary. This "service" would be a field day for the NSA because the digital records would not have the same protection that he physical envelope does.
The "envy of the world" is totally made up. I'm not qualified to evaluate if you made up the rest of the stuff or not.
I get it you like the USPS but it is presumptuous to say that USPS is the paragon of efficiency. I have shipped many many items with USPS. They have so many idiotic and inefficient rules and regulations. For example, they had the stupid delivery confirmation for a decade (now changed to USPS tracking thankfully). Have you ever tried to use USPS insurance? Most frequent shippers have to get around idiotic rules in the online label creation system - like printed postage being valid for a day only, UPS and FedEx seem like the "envy of the world" when compared to USPS's stupidity.
If private run companies like UPS were doing first class mail the delivery charge for a first class letter would be several dollars.
Technically, it doesn't cost several dollars because there is no accountability. USPS could lose your letter and there is no way to know. If you wanted even a basic form of tracking on that first class mail, you will have to spend several dollars for an "upgraded" service. Tracking is not allowed in first class envelopes - it is only allowed for first class package and priority mail both starting at least several dollars.
I think it'd help to mention that temporary means 3-6 years, and that losing your job means losing your legal immigration status in the US. It's also very difficult for H-1B's to change jobs. They're wonderfully captive labor.
H1Bs are not temporary visa. They are visa meant for immigration and has a path leading to a green card. The only problem is that getting the green card for Indian and Chinese nationals is hard because 95% of H1B applicants are from India and China and the US has a 9% limit on the number of immigrants granted from one single country. If you are from say a country like England, you can get H1B to green card under 1 year. India and China can be as long as 5-10 years.
Also, losing your job part has been fixed over one and half decades ago. You can get a new job on the same visa. There actually is a huge incentive for recruiters to find unhappy H1B workers because they have passed through the difficult culture shock part and have gained experience making them more valuable.
There is a considerable amount of favoritism in the job market. I know US citizens who came through the path of H1Bs from India or China will seek to find people from the same paths of life after they become managers and senior engineers when they should clearly only use H1B as a final resort after not finding absolutely any local talent. But, that exists in every job market. I have seen development groups that are all exclusively Chinese or all exclusively Indian precisely for that reason. But, if it functions well for the company then I guess its fine.
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Don't forget car manufacturers. People buy cars and use them for only 1 to 2 hours a day, typically. We don't share cars right now because other drivers may abuse it. With driverless cars, you can't abuse the engine easily, so sharing cars makes sense economically. Almost anyone would be able to afford a 2 hours/day timeshare from a shared pool of thousands of cars for $500/year.
Don't forget insurance. And the billions they spend on advertising.
At least put in a CD / CD changer.
Use headphones
What happens if the electronics are disrupted by hacking or EMP?
Insurance will cover it.
No thanks, wouldn't want a car that I can't manually override when shit happens.
You can buy a USB steering wheel and put it in the car for that.
Saying that drone warfare is not particularly good at decapitating an institutional terrorist organization like Al Qaeda is missing the point. Or at least a key point. Drone warfare has made large scale terrorist training largely impossible. The boot camps and months long, practical courses in guerrilla warfare that used to be an Al Qaeda staple are now just very visible, attractive targets for drones. Drone warfare occasionally knocks out a head, but it really undermines the base.
In all force, there is some deterrence power. For some technologies, the deterrence is the whole point. For example, land mines aren't meant to be a good way to blow up people, they're meant to be a good way to prevent groups of people from traversing an area once you advertise that it's full of mines. Here, drones are useful for rapid, cheap attacks of opportunity... but the fact that they are almost always ready means long-term, open-air training camps are suicide.
Here you're assuming that Al Queda is not defeatable but only suppressible.
So, a perpetual war on terror, perpetual deterrence by drone killings.
So the Nazi's were a large, bureaucratic organization, and despite that it seems like our 'winning strategy' was to kill large numbers of lower level people, and smaller numbers of higher ranking people, and yet it seems to have worked in the end? The claims made by this paper seem very silly.
WWW2 ended and we won. However, in this case, we are perpetually doing drone attacks with no end in sight.
Unless you define "winning strategy" as perpetually killing.
You're a complete moron, in no country will the police not shoot someone who has raised a gun at them. What do you want the police to do, let the dude shoot them?
There is no video showing that the guy raised his gun. Note that he didn't actually fire, just raised his gun.
Police will shoot and kill first and then say yeah, he raised his gun. Then, people like you will say, umm, its justified and be happy.
The thief was killed because he raised a gun to an officer, not because he was tracked down by GPS.
Can we mod a submission as "-1 TROLL"?
After the police kill someone, they will always say the suspect raised a gun at an officer or tried to use some other deadly force.
The point is that the police knew where he was and he didn't know that the police knew. Instead of dealing with the situation where nobody gets hurt, the police decided to just kill the guy. Maybe he was in traffic driving and the police didn't want to risk a deadly chase.
What if in the future, a robber takes the GPS and then throws it in some other person's car. What if the police then kill the other person by mistake? The police have nothing but a GPS location and will kill at even the slightest gesture that they perceive to be a threat.
CS degrees aren't the only game in town. Lots of programmers come from C.E., E.E., or Math degrees. I would say the number of programmers, in total, are going up, just that CS degrees are less prestigious or desirable.
I think getting a CS degree to become programmer is overkill. It is like getting a Mechnical Engineering degree to be a mechanic.
Anyway computer science degrees as it is right now is disappointing. There simply isn't four years worth of material to be learned. There is a lot of fluff that is half outdated and half not used anymore. There are courses on compiler design, OS design, computer graphics that is difficult it is more of using tools rather than learning some CS fundamental. Since a lot of programmers want to get the CS degree, most departments water down the degree and it is the middle of being a science degree and a technical degree. I would think that automata theory, information theory, machine learning would be essential CS but they are mostly relegated to graduate courses.
One option that our local university does is to make computer science and electrical engineering into one single degree. There are lots of jobs out there that aren't pure software development but need to work closely with hardware.
The other option is to let students get a minor in computer programming so they can study engineering, math, psychology, biology etc and still get lots of programming experience. Someone with a minor in computer programming or maybe a two year degree in computer programming should be looked as viable for working as a programmer.
Assuming it can become the norm everywhere (huge assumption there)...
I imagine we will replace our coal plants with large battery plants to store all the extra power we get during the day so that these things can function well at night (having to only power sections of road with vehicles on them would probably make that very feasible).
Then the electricity bill wouldn't be for the actual electricity. It'd be for maintaining these large battery store houses and maintaining these roads. I mean really, if we laid out a ton of this stuff across the US (the desert regions specifically), I figure electricity would be dirt cheap if not free (aside from the aforementioned maintenance).
The only way I can see this actually happening is if the solar panel roads become ubiquitous, which as I said, is a huge assumption. The oil industry won't have it, and getting the capital to produce enough panels to make it worth while, then lay them across major highways would be massive. Then there's building the battery centers so that they can actually function at night (or we can shift to coal power for night time).
I think this is something that would definitely pay off in the long run, but probably won't happen for the same reasons other things similar to it didn't happen. i.e. big business and lobbyists.
If electricity was super cheap during the day, I'm sure there will be lots of ways that will be used up instead of being stored in batteries. I'm sure data centers see most traffic during the day and so can turn off their data centers at night. Factories can also shut down at night.
The basic fact is that solar panels aren't efficient enough. The day solar panel becomes efficient, all these axillary technologies will bloom. Otherwise, oil industry won't have to even worry about it.
I think this would make for an excellent driveway/sidewalk material. It could have motions detectors and be used as lights. During the day, it would work as solar panels. Sidewalks and driveways cost around $5/sq ft for concrete and $10/sq ft for bricks. I think it they cost around $15/sq ft I think a lot of people would go for it, esp if they already have other solar equipment in the house.
I'm sure lots of specialty uses are possible - like casinos or paving Main St with this so it looks really fancy.
I know road budgets are astronomical and so, I would think it would depend a lot on how much these cost to make, maintain and replace. In most cases, labor is at least half the cost and so, it would depend on how much more expensive these are than asphalt.
And then market economic reality kicked in, and it's nuclear WW3 for resources again.
Market economics are the alternative to fighting for resources. Instead of grabbing what you want by force, you just buy it. The market based world order of the Pax Americana is far more peaceful than the age of imperialism and mercantilism that preceded it.
Market economics is what happens when everyone has nukes. You can't grab what you want by force because nuking makes nothing worth it.
I personally hate using voice command with eletronics because they can't talk back to me but some people like it, couldn't they have left the mic in? How expensive even is the mic?
Because the mic hardware was originally part of Kinnect. MS would have to create and manufacture a dedicated peripheral device with only a mic instead of the cameras + mic, and then include that or sell it separately. And since all current software was assuming that having a Kinnect meant both the mic and cameras were there, that would have meant rewriting many assumptions that the software is probably currently making, so there's even more cost.
In short, it's not at all practical or cost-effective, especially not for the likely few people who wanted a mic but NOT a camera. The entire point of this move is to shave off costs for those that want nothing to do with the Kinnect. Given the fact that the Kinnect has already proven to be rather unpopular, this sort of investment would simply be throwing good money after bad. If you want voice control (and I mean that in a generic sense, as you've acknowledged that you personally wouldn't even want that feature), get a Kinnect.
Or, or they could just allow USB mics like the Guitar Hero/Rock Band type of mics.
Can someone explain to me what dumping piles and piles of computers into Africa is going to accomplish? In Africa I see waves of ethnic turmoil coupled with basic infrastructure problems, all played by the governments to keep a few powerful folks in power. Are we trying to turn Africa into our next call center and need to get the kids up to speed with computers? I don't think that is going to happen until something resembling stability (i.e. taking care of food, clothing and shelter for entire years without fear of a machete attack) takes hold.
What they are hoping to accomplish is that the will all be able to connect to sites like MIT Opencourseware, learn science and engineering and find the cure to cancer and invent technology for cheap limitless renewable energy.
The result will probably be lot less but how much less is what is up for debate. Since we can't see the future, we don't know.
So, the point is, somebody is doing something to help. Be constructive and lend help if you can. Snarking isn't helping anyone.
Well, duh, don't connect them to the Internet. Unplug them from the wall when they are not in use, and cover over camera lenses with tape. But you should do that already.
Most smartTVs use wireless connection. Even if you disable it, it can be hacked to work while looking like it is disabled.
One of the most astounding thing I encounter with "OB-city" threads is that everyone seems to know the solution to cure obesity. Do this and do this and do this. Everyone has their own pet theory that they think is absolutely right.
Well, here's my pet theory to cure obesity. Fund obesity researchers and let them conduct scientific experiments.
I have bat-shiat crazy theories on this. Walk barefoot in the hook-worm infested latrines in Africa. Seriously, that is one of them. Our ancestors ate raw food and lived with parasites and so should we!
ATM, who know what is right. Maybe the latrine-walking is better advice than the doctor recommended 20 minute exercise per week or whatever. But, maybe we should let researchers figure that out. At the same time, researchers got here in the first place with cholesterol and saturated fat bullshit.
Closing cities to all automobile traffic. This is it.
I tried to get one street closed for rush hour for one day of the week and have it reserved for only bicycle traffic and that was next to impossible.
What do you mean subsidized? Accept students on financial aid? Have some government research grants? Why would any of those preclude the university from selling an invention?
If this research was funded by a government grant then the university would not own the IP. That is clearly not the case here or this would have died in court 5 years ago....
It was partially supported by NSF. From the patent:
This invention was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECD-8907068. The United States Government has certain rights in this invention.
The link to the actual patent -> http://www.google.com/patents/US6438180
It is very hard to tell what is going on in the patent. Seems like it is an method inside an error correcting algorithm for hard drives. Error correcting is statistical in hard disks and it seems like they found a new method for some error correlation for turbo codes. I'm not an expert in this field so I don't know how much of an impact this had on error coding.
The present invention is directed to a method of determining branch metric values in a detector. The method includes receiving a plurality of time variant signal samples, the signal samples having one of signal-dependent noise, correlated noise, and both signal dependent and correlated noise associated therewith. The method also includes selecting a branch metric function at a certain time index and applying the selected function to the signal samples to determine the metric values. The present invention represents a substantial advance over prior sequence detectors. Because the present invention takes into account the correlation between noise samples in the readback signal, the detected data sequence is detected with a higher degree of accuracy. Those advantages and benefits of the present invention, and others, will become apparent from the Detailed Description of the Invention hereinbelow.
I feel I don't have a lot of time left over to play with margins and get the typesetting and hyperlinked references all working. The layout work actually is valuable. Yes, new tech makes it easier, but there's still the research to do.
Really? Type-setting can be learned in half an hour. When you submit you PhD dissertation, you have to typeset it to the specs of the graduate school and nobody helps you. So, most PhDs already know how to typeset.
Additionally, some journals have staff that help with the review process. Peer review is done by people busy with other things who often miss a lot, espeically well executed fraud. Many of the biology-related publishers perform text and image analysis of submitted articles to look for evidence of fraud. They find duplications, square edges where square edges are never found (introduced through deletions), etc.
Again, this is easily done with html forms and there are plenty of fraud checking software out there.
I suppose this COULD be done by a volunteer army by it's important enough to pay to have it done well. These are the archives of our knowledge. This may look cheap and easy to the IT crowd but other disciplines don't fall so easily into having 1 server at MIT and some volunteers. It doesn't and shouldn't be as expensive and bound up in copyright as it is (PLoS lets me keep the copyright and it's so nice not to have to ask for permission to use my own figures) but there is probably a happy middle ground as is already been explored by more and more open access journals.
Volunteer army? A company hosting thousands of websites with 99.99% availability doesn't need even need an army to do the job. Just a small group of people can do it. Every university has websites to run and popping a few extra websites for journals and a few gigabytes of data is drop in the ocean. There are open journal systems that is open source software for hosting a journal. If you really wanted, you could get an open journal up and running tomorrow.
The problem is that people like you find crazy notions to justify these journals and prices. The real barrier isn't technology or time savings or whatnot, it is simply organization. If you got a few dozen people on an open journal committee in your field, you could easily start an open journal. It would be free and the information would be available to anyone online. The problem is that people will say I'm too busy to take part in a journal and just want to do research and someone should else should take care of that.
The Zeigarnik Effect
Not only will you remember your lectures, you will have constant intrusive thoughts. So much so that you will underperform your current tasks because of the constant intrusive thoughts from remembering your lectures!
Seriously, why in the world would you want to remember everything? You only remember something until the task is done and forget about it. That is how the brain works. You only need to remember the lectures until the finals and then the brain flushes it out.
Remembering lots of stuff is like trying to fit everything into the CPU cache. Just the amount of faults will kill your performance.
Another dirty secret of universities is that professors never ever take a class in education or teaching. They are just expected to stand in front of a class and start blabbering. Most professors have very little clue about what they are doing. Most classes I have attended (or given) have a hodgepodge of the textbook content, random things that the lecturer is personally interested in and filler - stuff there is absolutely no need to remember at all. Most professors are teaching stuff that are so out of date that the only time you will ever encounter it is in books that haven't been checked out for decades. Why the hell would you want to remember this crap?
They were targeting the individual who ripped their shows from a cable TV broadcast. It probably seemed logical to them that someone who has cable TV signed a contract in order to get it.
As they found out, people who make a career out of torrenting tend to live in their parents basement (and thus use their parents' cable subscription) so the "fraud" and "breach of contract" will likely be dropped.
He probably torrented it after downloading it from somewhere else. Turning a TV broadcast into a torrentable file takes some work.
Click-N-Ship is for priority only. Also, it's poorly named... at the very least it should be called click-click-click-create-account-click-click-some-more-etc-etc-etc-then-maybe-one-day-ship.
Click-N-Ship is also for first class parcel, media mail and express mail (among others).
You can create labels for regular first class mail in Microsoft Word.
The "envy of the world" is totally made up. I'm not qualified to evaluate if you made up the rest of the stuff or not.
I get it you like the USPS but it is presumptuous to say that USPS is the paragon of efficiency. I have shipped many many items with USPS. They have so many idiotic and inefficient rules and regulations. For example, they had the stupid delivery confirmation for a decade (now changed to USPS tracking thankfully). Have you ever tried to use USPS insurance? Most frequent shippers have to get around idiotic rules in the online label creation system - like printed postage being valid for a day only, UPS and FedEx seem like the "envy of the world" when compared to USPS's stupidity.
If private run companies like UPS were doing first class mail the delivery charge for a first class letter would be several dollars.
Technically, it doesn't cost several dollars because there is no accountability. USPS could lose your letter and there is no way to know. If you wanted even a basic form of tracking on that first class mail, you will have to spend several dollars for an "upgraded" service. Tracking is not allowed in first class envelopes - it is only allowed for first class package and priority mail both starting at least several dollars.
I think it'd help to mention that temporary means 3-6 years, and that losing your job means losing your legal immigration status in the US. It's also very difficult for H-1B's to change jobs. They're wonderfully captive labor.
H1Bs are not temporary visa. They are visa meant for immigration and has a path leading to a green card. The only problem is that getting the green card for Indian and Chinese nationals is hard because 95% of H1B applicants are from India and China and the US has a 9% limit on the number of immigrants granted from one single country. If you are from say a country like England, you can get H1B to green card under 1 year. India and China can be as long as 5-10 years.
Also, losing your job part has been fixed over one and half decades ago. You can get a new job on the same visa. There actually is a huge incentive for recruiters to find unhappy H1B workers because they have passed through the difficult culture shock part and have gained experience making them more valuable.
There is a considerable amount of favoritism in the job market. I know US citizens who came through the path of H1Bs from India or China will seek to find people from the same paths of life after they become managers and senior engineers when they should clearly only use H1B as a final resort after not finding absolutely any local talent. But, that exists in every job market. I have seen development groups that are all exclusively Chinese or all exclusively Indian precisely for that reason. But, if it functions well for the company then I guess its fine.