Fair use can extend beyond making a backup copy. Off the top of my head I can think of:
Movie reviews. Sure, Siskel and Ebert (or at least whichever of the two isn't dead) can get permission to play a clip, what about a non-corporate sponsered reviewer?
Movie technique critiques. Think of a class that examines the details of film making technique: camera panning, film choice, framing, lighting etc. An accurate representation of a segment of film is required for this in order to develop an understanding of the directors intent.
Re:Security for Mac Users
on
Cracking OSX
·
· Score: 5
By default MacOS X is going to come up only as a client to the internet, so by default it will be pretty secure. The biggest weakness will most likely be the web browser since Internet Explorer will be the most common one.
That the majority of the Mac world is clueless about security can also be extended to the majority of the Windows, Linux and any other operating systems world.
I've been studying this in far too much detail recently:).
Apparently not enough detail or not enough time though. Ignoring short channel effects (which really can't be ignored unfortunately) the current that a transistor can provide is also proportional to the square of the difference between the gate to source voltage and the threshold voltage.
i = K(vgs - Vt)^2 - in the saturation region
When I started designing circuits for pay Vgs was approximately 1.8 volts, now I'm designing with a Vgs of approximately 1.2 volts. Things are excaberated by the fact that Vt hasn't decreased proportionaly. Still, ignoring Vt I've got 44% of the drive strength that I had a couple years ago given the same width/length ratio. The feature size has shrunk from 1.8 to 1.3 microns which offers some relief on the capicitance but has the opposite effect on resistance.
Yes, I can make faster circuits but its not nearly as easy as just shrinking the technology.
A huge number of other problems are being ignored here, but this really was just a top of my head ramble with what I'm seeing right now on real circuits.
Most speed improvement is through architectural techniques and not smaller transistor size. Smaller transistors might enable the improvements since you can put more in a given area, but by and large a smaller feature size at this point in the game doesn't win much, if any speed.
Transistors and the interconnection between them are three dimensional constructs. All of the dimensions have scaled downwards thought not all at the same rate. There are a number of things that impact real world circuit performance as a result of this. Wire for instance has a smaller cross section, the resistance of a wire is inversely proportional to this cross section (think of how water flows through a straw v.s how water flows through a garden hose). The capacitance is inversely proportional to its distance from ground, and this distance has shrunk. It's also proportional to the surface area which would tend to lower the capacitance. The neighbouring wires are also closer however, which is more capacitance. What this means is that signals are travelling over a highly resistive capacitive network. Making sharp transitions (required for 'fast' digital circuits) is very difficult, sort of like trying to shake a skipping rope and making a square wave.
The transistor itself is smaller, but again the capacitance isn't necessarily decreasing but the ability of the transistor to drive current is. The current required from a transistor is proportional to the transition rate of the signals. Since we're trying to run faster we need more current, but our devices are physically smaller. This is why in high speed circuits, such as in the front side bus on the PIII or PIV, you'll typically see very large transistors and much wider wire.
There are other effects as well, such as higher electric fields in the drain and source of the transistor. There is a voltage difference between
drain or source of the transistor and the body, since this difference is happening over less 'distance' the electric field is much stronger. This is why voltages keep dropping (which in turn makes the gain harder to get too!)
The funny part about this is that they're shooting themselves in the foot in my opinion. They've got a community of people, skilled in the relevant practice and theory, who've said "your algorithm is weak". They could use an open forum (like anybody serious about using cryptography would) to harden their algorithms. Instead they want to silence the research instead.
So, even if it wasn't too late (the paper itself is already on the net and has shown up on gnutella) they'd still have a weak algorithm. An algorithm that will be scrutinzed by a large number of programmers and cryptography afficionados. It might take this community longer but it still would end up with any weaknesses uncovered.
A few wealthy groups of people who's interests will be harmed by this insane lack of due diligence need to sue the RIAA. Make the RIAA pay out of its pockets for supporting, endorsing and using these progress killing clauses in the DMCA.
The reason for this is so that you can't stick a camcorder in your bathroom, record your sister-in-law and distribute the photos to the net. Yeah, the pictures were taken in your house but under the circumstances there should be some agreement before you post them to RedClouds for others to get their jollies off on.
An important part of the publishing is being able to say "this was published with the approval of my peers". Something could be set up based around the web, but it would necessarily involve more than attaching your paper and clicking submit.
Yes, they're a tool and shouldn't be banned. But people should know how to use their tools and just like any real non-trivial tool it should be possible to weed out some people who just shouldn't have it. A handguns only real purpose is to maim or kill a person. There should be some mechanism for weeding out people who:
Can't hit what they think they're aiming at
Are likely to aim at inappropriate things (whether animate or inanimate)
Are mentally unstable
People can agree that similar rules are a good idea when governing who can call themselves a pilot but can't agree on the same approach for guns. Crimes with guns should be penalized severely. Use a gun in a robbery? Let's start with a life sentence. Threatened your wife with a gun? Life.
The responsibility required of people should be proportional to the power of the tool. Guns are tools that are designed to take a life, the responsibility should be proportional to it.
I'm not an expert, I'm an electrical engineer, not nuclear. Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I was an expert, just that I've heard a lot of the arguments pro and con nuclear and have tried to understand and categorize them. I wouldn't take a job that would put me at undo risk, so I needed to do my own homework to determine the risk.
Anyway, I've done a bit of reading on this as well and experiments with this have been done, albeit I think pumping in radioactive liquid waste. This had the unfortunate side effect of lubricating the plates and causing slip. Plate slip is an earthquake.
My understanding is that containment isn't completely impossible and that present containment vessels are insanely overengineered. (Which is good, I'm all for overengineering and think its a bit of a misnomer if the risks are high enough).
There are a few difficulties though, one is that not all the radiation is contained, particles escape and if they're deadly enough (think plutonium) cancer is going to happen. This is true for coal fired plants as well though, and cancer incidence around a coal fired plant is higher than around a nuclear plant. Another is public involvement. It's sort of like prisons, lots of people think that the war on drugs is a good thing even if it means a few more prisons. Nobody wants the new prison in their neighbourhood though. The same goes for actually transporting the waste through neighbourhoods.
Actually no, its the acceleration that makes you woozy. Now getting to the 30 ft/sec might make you woozy but if they design it to accelerate slowly enough it won't be that bad.
Think of riding in a car driving at 60 MPH, or 88 ft/sec. The drive itself can be comfortable as long as you don't do a lot of accelerating (stop and go traffic, busy highway or lots of turns)
Also, there are social implications - unemployment and the death of an industry. Do we really want to cause the death of an industry for the sake of cheap electricity? The millions of people who work in electricity plants, where nuclear reactors are used responsibly by the government, will beg to differ on that one.
This is a horrendous concept, holding back innovation because of the workers. Times change, jobs become obsolete, deal with it. This wouldn't be the first example of a new technology stomping out an occupation.
The automobile was invented, marketed and became pervasive. This had a huge negative impact on passenger trains. This in turn all but destroyed an occupation: porters.
Prior to municipal waste plants people relied on outhouses for their facilities. This technology killed a couple of occupations as well. First, there was the person who's task in life was emptying out the holding trays of the outhouses. Second was the person who would take this effluent and produce pottasium nitrate from it.
Skeptisism is a good thing, but being a luddite isn't. There are a huge number of reasons to worry about nuclear power as well as a huge number of reasons on why its actually cleaner and safer than traditional coal fired plants. I'm not sure where my personal stance is at this point, though I have worked in a nuclear reactor (a CANDU reactor at Pickering Ontario) and probably am familiar with more of both sides of the equation than most people.
I don't think this will be as ineffective as you think if they're succesful. Even in large cities you've only got a couple choices of broadband access. This makes the connection itself a tangible value to the people sharing files. Is sharing the file worth the potential that I will lose broadband?
The MPAA doesn't need to give a damn about people sharing material over AOL. AOL is 56k kilobits/s, movies are on the order of 1/2 a gigabyte. Sure, some people would still offer uploads and some people would still do downloads but you're talking almost a day of transfer time. Figure in disconnects and the impacts on the bandwidth due to all the people polling you to get in your download queue as soon as a slot opens up.
Prediction: Within a couple of years we'll all see an additional tax on broadband to save the starving artists. The various media companies will still have their panties in a bunch over pirated media though.
I don't know for sure how old they are, but in about 1993 I was using a gesture based interface (the normal GUI and CLI interfaces were still there though) for circuit design. Cadence would allow you to use gestures with the mouse to do certain simple operations. Want to zoom in on a circuit? Draw a Z over the area you want blown up. There were other commands but I don't remember them.
It actually worked well in my opinion, I'm not sure if it isn't supported any more or just isn't enabled at my current company. Time to drag out the manuals to see and maybe relearn SKILL.
I read in the National Enquierer (.. I know..) about some mad american scientist who wanted to blow a huge chunk off the moon
Alexander Abian is the nutcase, err... scientist. He thought that the earth was in an imperfect orbit and that this was the caue of war, disease, famine and other sundry bad things. The reason for the imperfect orbit was the moon. Blow it up and then we'd be all better.
I agree that they deserve protection, but I have had horrible experiences with unions. Like many people I had to pay my own way through university, I lived in an auto industry town, so there were fairly well paying jobs available in the automotive industry. I worked in security, but rather than sitting all day and developing extra butt cheeks I got to work confined space safety. This was kind of fun if you liked working at heights or other hazardous things, which I did.
Anyway, we'd also work accidents and injuries. Automotive plants are pretty dangerous places, we'd often catch drunk or stoned workers and send them home. I don't give a damn if somebody harms themselves but I don't think people should be allowed to harm others through their stupidity. The unions most important job was to get these morons back on the job pronto. In one particular case a very high heavy machinery operator nailed somebody with a forklift. Somehow serious injuries were avoided. He was sent home and back on the job the next day thanks to the union. Meanwhile if any worker decided to say they smelled something funny they could shut down a line. We'd come, test the air and usually find nothing. Hey, if somebody honestly thought they smelled something I had no problem. Oddly enough Friday's were the usual time to smell something though.
So the union is more than willing to fight for worker safety as long as it screws the auto company in the process. If it interferes with a dues paying member than they're deaf, dumb and blind.
I won't even go into the details of the union-sponsored threats (and one actual attempt on my life, fortunately by an epsilon-minus) during contract negotations, even though we were theoretically in the union, afterall we were forced to pay dues.
I dunno, but the DJ's I listen to seem pretty pissed off that they're being forced to stop net broadcasting. Good DJ's are not a dime a dozen, they're in control of their contracts and so they could refuse to do net broadcasts if that floated their boats. Bad DJ's can broadcast to the net all they want, they'll still be at the bottom of the market.
This is just another example of why in general unions are horrid things, even if I respect peoples rights to form unions.
Re:Drat - those budget cuts to NASA has really hur
on
Microbat
·
· Score: 1
I'd think some would get eaten, assuming they were flown outdoors. A lot of the things that predators eat are based mostly on motion and a tiny bit on shape or colour. Take a look at fishing lures some time, they're not terribly fish or bug looking to most of us.
The article has some interesting points to make, but it does look as if someone has played buzzword bingo with a
highlighter pen on it.
The highlighted words weren't buzzwords, read it again, the highlighted words were the portions of the exchange that a computer could understand and act on. None of the actual article was highlighted in that fashion, but the illustrative story was highlighted differently to show which parts of speech were useful instructions to a computer system.
The Matrix was a fun movie, the special effects were great. It shouldn't be used as a caution against artificial intelligence or evolutionary computing though. It was a story, the story revolved around technology gone awry. It wasn't even a terribly realistic story. Everybody who uses Jurassic Park as a trump card against genetic engineering or cloning, or similar popular pulp paperback movie really needs to learn to think for themselves. It's hard work, it actually involves reading, learning and critical thought as opposed to being spoon fed information from an entertainment source.
Before anybody brings up the current movie which uses a message against a technology imagine the other side of the coin. Somebody using a comic book (which is what most of these movies really are) such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an argument in favour of genetic engineering.
There are a lot of reasons to be cautious when extending almost any technology as well as reasons in favour of advancing the technology. Listen to evidence as opposed to propoganda or fiction and determine your own standings on it.
isn't their weak passphrase, its the location of their private keyring. I know a lot of people that keep their private keyring on an NFS mounted filesystem. This is both true now that I'm in the working world and was true when I was a student. I feel worse about the students who practice this. Most of them use PGP because it seems subversive and they can pretend they're cryptoanarchists. They talk the talk, obviously they don't walk the walk. Most of the people who use it at work use it due to a corporate mandate, or clauses in an intellectual property sharing agreement. They're just doing what they're told, not pretending that they're authorities on cryptography.
Keeping your keyring on a media like a hard drive or floppy strikes me as a weakness in itself, but you don't need to compound it by storing it on a stored medium. If I were really serious about encryption (I'm only semi-serious, I encrypt things like password files and account details, keep my keyring on a floppy but don't routinely encrypt email) I'd want to see a memory card type technology with a quick and absolute method of destroying the key along with a proven secure method (protocol and technology) of transmitting data back and forth between the card.
They've removed a post I did as an anonymous coward, two actually. In H2G2: Back At Last, With Moderation timothy commented in the article writeup that people will like even a "bowdlerized Hitchhiker's Guide". I pointed out that slashdot was guilty of the same thing itself, and everything2, which they seemed to hold up as a bastion of free speech, also has censored.
So, slashdot removed the scientology articles, understandable in a panty-waste kind of way. Everything2 removed an article that I posted there about Chris Kuivenhoven, who has on a number of occasions offered to host peoples machines then run away with the hardware.
They also removed the article where I said that everything2 was bowdlerized because they removed the entry about Chris Kuivenhoven. It wasn't moderated down, I didn't get email asking for proof, it was removed.
Slashdot itself removed the article I posted pointing out that everything2 was censored as well as a reply to it commenting on the URL.
Well, students already have access to all the former examinations. At my particular university the local student branch of the IEEE provided them to their clique and they'd propogate after that. I never used them (and benefited greatly from not using then when the professor would throw a curveball). If anything this will level the playing field, or even better, beat professors with a cluestick and make them realize that relying on the same questions for 15 years is a bad thing.
Keeping the web page up to date will be a burden, but only a heavy burden the first time through the course. Most disciplines, especially at the undergraduate level, don't radically change every year. In fact, in the case of engineering, at least in Canada, accreditation guarantees that this is not the case. After that its mostly a matter of updating material as you better organize the class. The professors I know that would most likely bitch about it are actually the ones who would have the easiest job of it. Blow the dust off their 20 year old course notes and have a graduate slave scan them in. One other note, one professor I know quite well greatly improved his course by preparing it for the computer. It forced him to organize things properly, stick to a few points per page and allowed him to fairly easily integrate feedback from the class (how glazed over are their eyes today?) to reinforce difficult concepts.
Students should get mad at professors who don't keep things up to date, regardless if its web content or other material. Unfortunately students are the only group of consumers who in general are happier when they get shitty service. If material isn't covered they rejoice (in general, there are exceptions) rather than gripe.
There will be a gap between students who have computers and those that don't. This is your only valid argument and is only valid in a minor way. Most universities provide decent access to public computers, so you're inconvenienced by having to leave your dorm room, not crippled. If MIT does their curriculum right then you don't need a gaming PC to access it. Get a used beater PC thats a couple of generations old. It'd be less of an expense than a couple of pricey text books. Stanford seems to do this right, from what I can see, other than streaming via Windows Media Player. Notes are stored in PDF documents which is pretty ubiquitous.
Remember, this is the same country where you can fly in a MiG-29 jet fighter. Sure, there is talk about screening to make sure you don't croak but from reviews of the experience its more of a formality. I'm not against people paying there way into space, but I don't know that the ISS is the right place for it. It's a scientific mission, and as we've seen with the recent U.S. submarine disaster civilians and expensive military or other hardware don't necessarily mix well.
Slashdot Mirror
That the majority of the Mac world is clueless about security can also be extended to the majority of the Windows, Linux and any other operating systems world.
I'll remember this the next time I design fictional circuits. Sorry, unless your whole world is spice simulations the voltage ramps down.
i = K(vgs - Vt)^2 - in the saturation region
When I started designing circuits for pay Vgs was approximately 1.8 volts, now I'm designing with a Vgs of approximately 1.2 volts. Things are excaberated by the fact that Vt hasn't decreased proportionaly. Still, ignoring Vt I've got 44% of the drive strength that I had a couple years ago given the same width/length ratio. The feature size has shrunk from 1.8 to 1.3 microns which offers some relief on the capicitance but has the opposite effect on resistance.
Yes, I can make faster circuits but its not nearly as easy as just shrinking the technology.
A huge number of other problems are being ignored here, but this really was just a top of my head ramble with what I'm seeing right now on real circuits.
Transistors and the interconnection between them are three dimensional constructs. All of the dimensions have scaled downwards thought not all at the same rate. There are a number of things that impact real world circuit performance as a result of this. Wire for instance has a smaller cross section, the resistance of a wire is inversely proportional to this cross section (think of how water flows through a straw v.s how water flows through a garden hose). The capacitance is inversely proportional to its distance from ground, and this distance has shrunk. It's also proportional to the surface area which would tend to lower the capacitance. The neighbouring wires are also closer however, which is more capacitance. What this means is that signals are travelling over a highly resistive capacitive network. Making sharp transitions (required for 'fast' digital circuits) is very difficult, sort of like trying to shake a skipping rope and making a square wave.
The transistor itself is smaller, but again the capacitance isn't necessarily decreasing but the ability of the transistor to drive current is. The current required from a transistor is proportional to the transition rate of the signals. Since we're trying to run faster we need more current, but our devices are physically smaller. This is why in high speed circuits, such as in the front side bus on the PIII or PIV, you'll typically see very large transistors and much wider wire.
There are other effects as well, such as higher electric fields in the drain and source of the transistor. There is a voltage difference between drain or source of the transistor and the body, since this difference is happening over less 'distance' the electric field is much stronger. This is why voltages keep dropping (which in turn makes the gain harder to get too!)
Sorry if this is a bit of a ramble.
So, even if it wasn't too late (the paper itself is already on the net and has shown up on gnutella) they'd still have a weak algorithm. An algorithm that will be scrutinzed by a large number of programmers and cryptography afficionados. It might take this community longer but it still would end up with any weaknesses uncovered.
A few wealthy groups of people who's interests will be harmed by this insane lack of due diligence need to sue the RIAA. Make the RIAA pay out of its pockets for supporting, endorsing and using these progress killing clauses in the DMCA.
The reason for this is so that you can't stick a camcorder in your bathroom, record your sister-in-law and distribute the photos to the net. Yeah, the pictures were taken in your house but under the circumstances there should be some agreement before you post them to RedClouds for others to get their jollies off on.
An important part of the publishing is being able to say "this was published with the approval of my peers". Something could be set up based around the web, but it would necessarily involve more than attaching your paper and clicking submit.
- Can't hit what they think they're aiming at
- Are likely to aim at inappropriate things (whether animate or inanimate)
- Are mentally unstable
People can agree that similar rules are a good idea when governing who can call themselves a pilot but can't agree on the same approach for guns. Crimes with guns should be penalized severely. Use a gun in a robbery? Let's start with a life sentence. Threatened your wife with a gun? Life.The responsibility required of people should be proportional to the power of the tool. Guns are tools that are designed to take a life, the responsibility should be proportional to it.
Anyway, I've done a bit of reading on this as well and experiments with this have been done, albeit I think pumping in radioactive liquid waste. This had the unfortunate side effect of lubricating the plates and causing slip. Plate slip is an earthquake.
My understanding is that containment isn't completely impossible and that present containment vessels are insanely overengineered. (Which is good, I'm all for overengineering and think its a bit of a misnomer if the risks are high enough).
There are a few difficulties though, one is that not all the radiation is contained, particles escape and if they're deadly enough (think plutonium) cancer is going to happen. This is true for coal fired plants as well though, and cancer incidence around a coal fired plant is higher than around a nuclear plant. Another is public involvement. It's sort of like prisons, lots of people think that the war on drugs is a good thing even if it means a few more prisons. Nobody wants the new prison in their neighbourhood though. The same goes for actually transporting the waste through neighbourhoods.
Think of riding in a car driving at 60 MPH, or 88 ft/sec. The drive itself can be comfortable as long as you don't do a lot of accelerating (stop and go traffic, busy highway or lots of turns)
The automobile was invented, marketed and became pervasive. This had a huge negative impact on passenger trains. This in turn all but destroyed an occupation: porters.
Prior to municipal waste plants people relied on outhouses for their facilities. This technology killed a couple of occupations as well. First, there was the person who's task in life was emptying out the holding trays of the outhouses. Second was the person who would take this effluent and produce pottasium nitrate from it.
Skeptisism is a good thing, but being a luddite isn't. There are a huge number of reasons to worry about nuclear power as well as a huge number of reasons on why its actually cleaner and safer than traditional coal fired plants. I'm not sure where my personal stance is at this point, though I have worked in a nuclear reactor (a CANDU reactor at Pickering Ontario) and probably am familiar with more of both sides of the equation than most people.
The MPAA doesn't need to give a damn about people sharing material over AOL. AOL is 56k kilobits/s, movies are on the order of 1/2 a gigabyte. Sure, some people would still offer uploads and some people would still do downloads but you're talking almost a day of transfer time. Figure in disconnects and the impacts on the bandwidth due to all the people polling you to get in your download queue as soon as a slot opens up.
Prediction: Within a couple of years we'll all see an additional tax on broadband to save the starving artists. The various media companies will still have their panties in a bunch over pirated media though.
It actually worked well in my opinion, I'm not sure if it isn't supported any more or just isn't enabled at my current company. Time to drag out the manuals to see and maybe relearn SKILL.
Anyway, we'd also work accidents and injuries. Automotive plants are pretty dangerous places, we'd often catch drunk or stoned workers and send them home. I don't give a damn if somebody harms themselves but I don't think people should be allowed to harm others through their stupidity. The unions most important job was to get these morons back on the job pronto. In one particular case a very high heavy machinery operator nailed somebody with a forklift. Somehow serious injuries were avoided. He was sent home and back on the job the next day thanks to the union. Meanwhile if any worker decided to say they smelled something funny they could shut down a line. We'd come, test the air and usually find nothing. Hey, if somebody honestly thought they smelled something I had no problem. Oddly enough Friday's were the usual time to smell something though.
So the union is more than willing to fight for worker safety as long as it screws the auto company in the process. If it interferes with a dues paying member than they're deaf, dumb and blind.
I won't even go into the details of the union-sponsored threats (and one actual attempt on my life, fortunately by an epsilon-minus) during contract negotations, even though we were theoretically in the union, afterall we were forced to pay dues.
This is just another example of why in general unions are horrid things, even if I respect peoples rights to form unions.
I'd think some would get eaten, assuming they were flown outdoors. A lot of the things that predators eat are based mostly on motion and a tiny bit on shape or colour. Take a look at fishing lures some time, they're not terribly fish or bug looking to most of us.
Before anybody brings up the current movie which uses a message against a technology imagine the other side of the coin. Somebody using a comic book (which is what most of these movies really are) such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an argument in favour of genetic engineering.
There are a lot of reasons to be cautious when extending almost any technology as well as reasons in favour of advancing the technology. Listen to evidence as opposed to propoganda or fiction and determine your own standings on it.
Keeping your keyring on a media like a hard drive or floppy strikes me as a weakness in itself, but you don't need to compound it by storing it on a stored medium. If I were really serious about encryption (I'm only semi-serious, I encrypt things like password files and account details, keep my keyring on a floppy but don't routinely encrypt email) I'd want to see a memory card type technology with a quick and absolute method of destroying the key along with a proven secure method (protocol and technology) of transmitting data back and forth between the card.
So, slashdot removed the scientology articles, understandable in a panty-waste kind of way. Everything2 removed an article that I posted there about Chris Kuivenhoven, who has on a number of occasions offered to host peoples machines then run away with the hardware.
They also removed the article where I said that everything2 was bowdlerized because they removed the entry about Chris Kuivenhoven. It wasn't moderated down, I didn't get email asking for proof, it was removed.
Slashdot itself removed the article I posted pointing out that everything2 was censored as well as a reply to it commenting on the URL.
This is where the message, were it not deleted, would be.
Keeping the web page up to date will be a burden, but only a heavy burden the first time through the course. Most disciplines, especially at the undergraduate level, don't radically change every year. In fact, in the case of engineering, at least in Canada, accreditation guarantees that this is not the case. After that its mostly a matter of updating material as you better organize the class. The professors I know that would most likely bitch about it are actually the ones who would have the easiest job of it. Blow the dust off their 20 year old course notes and have a graduate slave scan them in. One other note, one professor I know quite well greatly improved his course by preparing it for the computer. It forced him to organize things properly, stick to a few points per page and allowed him to fairly easily integrate feedback from the class (how glazed over are their eyes today?) to reinforce difficult concepts.
Students should get mad at professors who don't keep things up to date, regardless if its web content or other material. Unfortunately students are the only group of consumers who in general are happier when they get shitty service. If material isn't covered they rejoice (in general, there are exceptions) rather than gripe.
There will be a gap between students who have computers and those that don't. This is your only valid argument and is only valid in a minor way. Most universities provide decent access to public computers, so you're inconvenienced by having to leave your dorm room, not crippled. If MIT does their curriculum right then you don't need a gaming PC to access it. Get a used beater PC thats a couple of generations old. It'd be less of an expense than a couple of pricey text books. Stanford seems to do this right, from what I can see, other than streaming via Windows Media Player. Notes are stored in PDF documents which is pretty ubiquitous.
defenestration (d-fn-strshn) n. An act of throwing someone or something out of a window. [From de- + Latin fenestra, window.]
Remember, this is the same country where you can fly in a MiG-29 jet fighter. Sure, there is talk about screening to make sure you don't croak but from reviews of the experience its more of a formality. I'm not against people paying there way into space, but I don't know that the ISS is the right place for it. It's a scientific mission, and as we've seen with the recent U.S. submarine disaster civilians and expensive military or other hardware don't necessarily mix well.