Do not make an ultimatum. You WILL be subject to disciplinary procedures, and probably prosecuted.
If speaking to the campus technology people responsible (and I mean speaking to the people who are *really* responsible - the managers, not the helpdesk) for these systems and networks about your concerns produces only indifference, you should drop the F-bomb - FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Under FERPA, your school may be both liable to you (and theoretically face loss of federal funds) for unauthorized disclosure of your educational records and other personally-identifiable information like SSN. (Directory information, such as your name, and the fact that you're a student, is not automatically protected from discloseure by default, but you may request that such info not be disclosed to third parties.)
I guarantee the IT managers will have heard of FERPA, and they should snap to attention when you remind them of their responsibilities under the act.
Consult an attorney licensed to practice in your jurisdiction for more information on your rights. I also recommend judicious use of Google.
Ever heard of a brand called Asprin? They didn't protect their trademark, now it's generic and they've lost it.
No. The German chemical firm Bayer lost their trademarks and patents on aspirin and heroin per the Treaty of Versailles; they were surrendered as reparations for World War I. See http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blasp irin.htm or just search for aspirin and versailles on google.
To the best of my knowledge, no company in recent memory has lost a trademark due to dilution from generic usage. Not Xerox, not Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kleenex brand facial tissues), not Johnson & Johnson (makers of Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages).
Referring to another reply, yes, it is VERY painful to know that Swiffer is using "Whip it" to sell to housewives. I only hope it's some sort of sick, jocko-homo joke by the spudboys on all of us...
They're not just using "Whip It" - they had Mutato Muzika create the "Swiffer" version.
This is entirely precedented; Devo has, as a band, shilled for Diet Coke and Honda Scooters. Mark Mothersbaugh and later, Mutato Muzika (the corporate child of Devo, run by Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale) have done many, many commercial jingles in addition to TV and movie scores.
M. Mothersbaugh's quote re: the Swiffer commercials was that they didn't mind making them because the very concept was so absurd and Devo. (The fat, fat checks couldn't have hurt)
Are the 800/850 frequencies the wave of the future?
Wave of the past, as in US analog frequency allocations being re-used for digital cel service.
GSM 900 isn't going anywhere. If your phone doesn't support GSM 900, don't expect to use it many places outside the US. It's that simple. GSM 1800 is the new kid on the block in Europe (like GSM 850 in the US), and is hardly available outside major cities elsewhere.
Basically, the GSM 900/1900 phone will work in many, many more places than the 1900/1800/850. The latter, however, will have better coverage within the US.
You should, however, make sure the Blackberry devices will function the way you want outside your normal coverage area. I don't know that you'll get the push email you expect in Sydney or Beiruit.
Serious gamers don't even use optical mice (with the exception of Logitech's dual-sensor models), to say nothing of gyroscopic wireless hoo-ha. Optical mice don't track well when you make lots of fast twitch movements.
No, this thing is targeted squarely at the PowerPoint set. (Not that I'd turn one down; it'd be perfect for an HTPC setup.)
I can't remember, so help me out here, people: is "artist" (with quote marks) what you get to call yourself when you waste four years at college on an Art History degree and end up thoroughly unemployed (see also "artsy-fartsy") or is "artist" just an all-purpose label for unattractive whiners who spoil every opportunity to do something meaningful by calling lame political commentary "art" (with quotes) thereby ensuring that the product of one's life is measured in the number of coffee refills served while working at the doughnut shop rather than creating something of beauty or meaning?
Jenny Holzer seems to be doing pretty well for herself; hardly unemployed or pushing doughnuts. I recommend you look her up.
Personally, I like her art. But then, I have a sense of humor.
I recently purchased a Fujitsu P Series Lifebook that uses a TM processor (see their site for details). It's pretty slick. Don't have a CD/DVD drive, but I'm using my unit for remote admin work so I love being able to go wireless, grab a wired connection, or even use GPRS via a PC Card. The touch screen is great as well.
While I love my Lifebook P, it's not in the same size class as this device. This is more like a modern version of the IBM PC110 (complete with touchpad and thumb-positioned trackpoint). It's half the size as the P1000 series, with a faster processor.
This reminds me of when people give Adobe the credits to developing Display Postcript and NeXT just licensed it. DUH! Without NeXT it wouldn't have come about, let alone Display PDF, etc. Let's give credit for ideas and code where they are due.
NeWS eventually was absorbed into Sun's OpenLook environment. To this day, Sun's X server supports Display PostScript, as anyone who uses a Sun workstation knows. (A logo to this effect is displayed when the X server starts.)
I don't mean to belittle NeXT here - I've been a NeXT user for a decade and still have a working NeXTStation TurboColor and NeXTLaser Printer. Display PostScript wasn't really a NeXT innovation, however. (Objective-C on the other hand, was all NeXT)
Just a simple question really, but where do we study the long term affects of weightlessness necessary for the Mars mission without the space station?
Mir. You know, that old space station? The one where people lived for over a year at a time, far longer than any ISS mission?
We already know what we need to know about the long-term effects of weightlessness. The ISS is worthless, simply providing a destination for the shuttle. With 2 crew members aboard, there's not even time for science - it takes 2 crew just to run the thing.
I agree with this article that the only thing worth bringing the shuttle out of retirement for is a Hubble servicing mission. The STS and ISS programs aren't fit to hold the Space Telescope's jock.
P.S. And no, film is not a viable option, especially long term, considering that major companies like Kodak are going to stop selling film.
Keep believing that, buddy.
Digital can't touch the light sensitivity or color gamut of film. If you're willing to drop 10 grand on a digital 4x5 back, you can approach the resolution of medium-format film, but those are only good for still life, as they're scanning backs, not giant full-frame sensors.
Kodak, Fuji, et al are not "going to stop selling film" anytime soon. Probably not in my lifetime.
Plus, Disk drives have a mean time to failure of what???...18 months or so? We can now remaster analog tapes from the 50s with no problem. Try to get the original tracks for a linkin park session in 50 or 60 years..good luck.
We can only hope that it's impossible to get the original tracks from a linkin park session in 50 or 60 years. Hell, I'm hoping they're gone already.
Quake 3 has been out for Mac OS for years. Lots of big-name franchises are available for Mac - Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights, UT2003, Rainbow 6, Medal of Honor, etc. etc.
The biggest glaring omission from the Mac gaming world is Half Life (and, by extension, Counter-Strike). It does really suck not to be able to play Counter-Strike.
I'd check out www.insidemacgames.com to see what's available and what's coming soon. Note: I'm not affiliated with this site. It was just the first site that came up when I did a Google search for "mac games."
And as far as that goes, CNN, as a "neutral" news source really had no business airing it.
Right, what was CNN thinking, let other voices on the air. (I mean, voices besides "Buy this stuff!") Their job is to be the "neutral" mouthpiece of Time Warner.
whats to gain by going lower then Zip code? nothing.
Wrong
TiVo:"hey this address watches Bud Commercials, call budwieser and let them know! this way budwieser can try to sell this ONE houshold beer. Of course since it is so individual, it will cost $5000 a six pack."
Nope. Try:
Tivo: "Hey, who wants to buy a list of all the addresses whose viewing habits indicate an interest in home improvement?"
Lender: "Me!"
Not all direct marketing is on a per-zip basis.
Just wait until insurers start crunching numbers to correlate TV viewing habits with actuarial data. I'm sure your life/health insurer would love to know how many hours you sit on the couch watching TV.
Any anonymization Tivo claims to perform on data uploaded by an individual's Tivo unit is rendered utterly and totally worthless by the medium by which the data is transferred - a landline. Only an idiot would believe that Tivo doesn't use ANI information to tie data to individual users, even if the actual clickstream data being uploaded doesn't have include a serial number.
The marketing opportunities are too valuable to the company for them to ignore the possibility of selling detailed, individual viewer data as a revenue stream.
And if you read the posts by people who have investigated this it is anonymous. The data that contains key presses, show info, etc. is sent without any identifying information whatsoever.
Yeah, from YOUR phone number. Thanks to ANI, they know exactly who you are, even if your unit's serial number isn't sent in the data. Tada. Your data is not anonymous.
Of course, all modern cable boxes record and report similar information to your cable provider and every satellite TV box requires a land line to phone home, so Tivo's not really doing anything outside the mainstream.
You can't dance with the devil and keep your privacy. The only way to truly keep your viewing habits to yourself is to watch only broadcast tv and videos you've bought with cash. Otherwise, you have to accept the fact that everyone who cares already knows everything you watch, and will try to use that information to sell you more crap.
Thank you for posting that, but Ugh! How can Yahoo!/AP run a news article about a web site that links everything **EXCEPT** the web site?! These bozos just don't understand "teh intarnet"!
Because you might click the link and leave their site. Then they can't rack up more ad impressions from your visit.
They understand teh intarnet quite well; certainly well enough to understand how little most of their readers understand it. Why would they provide a link when at the very least they could show a few more ads on their search pages should the reader decide to search for the site. I've met plenty of people who didn't know you could type an address directly into the URL bar before I told them.
What about Palm OS? Every single person I know with a "smart phone" has a Treo (mostly 600s, though I know a couple of early adopters with 180s and 300s).
Maybe I'm misconstruing the definition of a "smart phone" - my Motorola i90 has a (useless) Java VM and some (crapulent) PIM apps like a datebook and memo pad. Does that make it a "smart phone"? If so, color me unimpressed. It's totally useless, as far as I can tell, and can't replace my Tungsten E.
...except for the part about multiplying the volume of air freight, and making travel logistics way more complicated.
...as well as increasing the passenger capacity of planes.
Are we going to start packing passengers into the cargo hold now? And where are these extra passengers going to come from, now that your plan has made flying even more of a hassle?
The rate of piracy among Mac users is significantly lower than for among Windows users. Maybe the high price of Mac hardware reduces the number of deadbeats.
The point is that the survey results were necessarily inconsistent with the true results for the general population (30% voter turnout vs. 10%). Whether the sample is biased (by nonparticipation in the poll) or the answers were biased (by lying to the poll taker) is irrelevant -- the poll contains obvious inconsistencies.
What? The poll data for voter turnout are only (potentially) valid for the actual respondents. Anyhow, using a survey to determine voter turnout alone is less than useless - one can simply count the actual votes to determine the actual turnout. It seems likely that this survey was an exit poll for preliminary results. The question "did you vote" and resulting data would, in that case, be only ancillary to the follow-up question "for whom did you vote" (and possibly "why?")
The latter question(s) is(are) probably the point of the poll, and are more likely to reflect the actual outcome of the election.
A poll is only valuable to the extent that it is consistent with and representative of the general population. This example illustrates how wrong the results can be despite clever calculations of the statistical margin of error.
No, this example shows an inappropriate and unnecessary application of statistical sampling. There's no need to take a survey to measure voter turnout, and those the number of survey respondents who claim to have voted aren't relevant to anything. Furthermore, the "value" of a poll is not necessarily, or even often, related to how "consistent with and representative" its results are of "the general population." There's a reason political pollsters winnow their samples down to "likely voters" only - nearly half of eligable voters don't bother to vote in presidential elections, and less half again that number bother to vote in non-national elections. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what "the general population" thinks of a political candidate - only the opinions of people who will vote for or against said candidate matter.
Selecting the sample is important for all sorts of polling. I'm not going to give anyone a useful opinion on denture fixatives, tampons, or brands of electric razors because I buy none of these products, and a student who didn't vote in the campus elections has nothing to add to an exit poll. If the student newspaper latched on to the percentage of survey respondents who did vote, and reported that as the voter turnout, then it's the newspaper's fault for misrepresenting the data. It doesn't make the survey irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
I guarantee the IT managers will have heard of FERPA, and they should snap to attention when you remind them of their responsibilities under the act.
Consult an attorney licensed to practice in your jurisdiction for more information on your rights. I also recommend judicious use of Google.
-Isaac
No. The German chemical firm Bayer lost their trademarks and patents on aspirin and heroin per the Treaty of Versailles; they were surrendered as reparations for World War I. See http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blasp irin.htm or just search for aspirin and versailles on google.
To the best of my knowledge, no company in recent memory has lost a trademark due to dilution from generic usage. Not Xerox, not Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kleenex brand facial tissues), not Johnson & Johnson (makers of Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages).
-Isaac
They're not just using "Whip It" - they had Mutato Muzika create the "Swiffer" version.
This is entirely precedented; Devo has, as a band, shilled for Diet Coke and Honda Scooters. Mark Mothersbaugh and later, Mutato Muzika (the corporate child of Devo, run by Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale) have done many, many commercial jingles in addition to TV and movie scores.
M. Mothersbaugh's quote re: the Swiffer commercials was that they didn't mind making them because the very concept was so absurd and Devo. (The fat, fat checks couldn't have hurt)
-Isaac
freedom.gov
root.edu
'nuff said
-Isaac
Crass, poorly written, pandering to its target audience. In other words, your standard UPN show.
Fail!
-Isaac
Wave of the past, as in US analog frequency allocations being re-used for digital cel service.
GSM 900 isn't going anywhere. If your phone doesn't support GSM 900, don't expect to use it many places outside the US. It's that simple. GSM 1800 is the new kid on the block in Europe (like GSM 850 in the US), and is hardly available outside major cities elsewhere.
Basically, the GSM 900/1900 phone will work in many, many more places than the 1900/1800/850. The latter, however, will have better coverage within the US.
You should, however, make sure the Blackberry devices will function the way you want outside your normal coverage area. I don't know that you'll get the push email you expect in Sydney or Beiruit.
-Isaac
Lord no! The plumbing in my building sucks. Overflows and dropped packets all over the place.
-Isaac
Serious gamers don't even use optical mice (with the exception of Logitech's dual-sensor models), to say nothing of gyroscopic wireless hoo-ha. Optical mice don't track well when you make lots of fast twitch movements.
No, this thing is targeted squarely at the PowerPoint set. (Not that I'd turn one down; it'd be perfect for an HTPC setup.)
-Isaac
We've known there's plenty of water on Mars for years, in the polar ice caps. (No, they're not all frozen CO2.)
The excitement is over finding liquid water (or evidence of same). -Isaac
Jenny Holzer seems to be doing pretty well for herself; hardly unemployed or pushing doughnuts. I recommend you look her up.
Personally, I like her art. But then, I have a sense of humor.
-Isaac
While I love my Lifebook P, it's not in the same size class as this device. This is more like a modern version of the IBM PC110 (complete with touchpad and thumb-positioned trackpoint). It's half the size as the P1000 series, with a faster processor.
-Isaac
Then you should credit Sun. Their NeWS client-server windowing system (which began development in 1985) used PostScript to describe objects on the screen, but predated NeXT and Adobe's Display PostScript. See http://www.postscript.org/FAQs/language/node73.htm l
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS for corroboration.
NeWS eventually was absorbed into Sun's OpenLook environment. To this day, Sun's X server supports Display PostScript, as anyone who uses a Sun workstation knows. (A logo to this effect is displayed when the X server starts.)
I don't mean to belittle NeXT here - I've been a NeXT user for a decade and still have a working NeXTStation TurboColor and NeXTLaser Printer. Display PostScript wasn't really a NeXT innovation, however. (Objective-C on the other hand, was all NeXT)
-Isaac
Mir. You know, that old space station? The one where people lived for over a year at a time, far longer than any ISS mission?
We already know what we need to know about the long-term effects of weightlessness. The ISS is worthless, simply providing a destination for the shuttle. With 2 crew members aboard, there's not even time for science - it takes 2 crew just to run the thing.
I agree with this article that the only thing worth bringing the shuttle out of retirement for is a Hubble servicing mission. The STS and ISS programs aren't fit to hold the Space Telescope's jock.
-Isaac
Keep believing that, buddy.
Digital can't touch the light sensitivity or color gamut of film. If you're willing to drop 10 grand on a digital 4x5 back, you can approach the resolution of medium-format film, but those are only good for still life, as they're scanning backs, not giant full-frame sensors.
Kodak, Fuji, et al are not "going to stop selling film" anytime soon. Probably not in my lifetime.
-Isaac
We can only hope that it's impossible to get the original tracks from a linkin park session in 50 or 60 years. Hell, I'm hoping they're gone already.
-Isaac
Quake 3 has been out for Mac OS for years. Lots of big-name franchises are available for Mac - Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights, UT2003, Rainbow 6, Medal of Honor, etc. etc.
The biggest glaring omission from the Mac gaming world is Half Life (and, by extension, Counter-Strike). It does really suck not to be able to play Counter-Strike.
I'd check out www.insidemacgames.com to see what's available and what's coming soon. Note: I'm not affiliated with this site. It was just the first site that came up when I did a Google search for "mac games."
-Isaac
-Isaac
Right, what was CNN thinking, let other voices on the air. (I mean, voices besides "Buy this stuff!") Their job is to be the "neutral" mouthpiece of Time Warner.
-Isaac
Wrong
Nope. Try:
Tivo: "Hey, who wants to buy a list of all the addresses whose viewing habits indicate an interest in home improvement?" Lender: "Me!"
Not all direct marketing is on a per-zip basis.
Just wait until insurers start crunching numbers to correlate TV viewing habits with actuarial data. I'm sure your life/health insurer would love to know how many hours you sit on the couch watching TV.
We are in the infancy of data mining.
-Isaac
Any anonymization Tivo claims to perform on data uploaded by an individual's Tivo unit is rendered utterly and totally worthless by the medium by which the data is transferred - a landline. Only an idiot would believe that Tivo doesn't use ANI information to tie data to individual users, even if the actual clickstream data being uploaded doesn't have include a serial number.
The marketing opportunities are too valuable to the company for them to ignore the possibility of selling detailed, individual viewer data as a revenue stream.
"Tivo: It's like Gator, for TV!"
-Isaac
Yeah, from YOUR phone number. Thanks to ANI, they know exactly who you are, even if your unit's serial number isn't sent in the data. Tada. Your data is not anonymous.
Of course, all modern cable boxes record and report similar information to your cable provider and every satellite TV box requires a land line to phone home, so Tivo's not really doing anything outside the mainstream.
You can't dance with the devil and keep your privacy. The only way to truly keep your viewing habits to yourself is to watch only broadcast tv and videos you've bought with cash. Otherwise, you have to accept the fact that everyone who cares already knows everything you watch, and will try to use that information to sell you more crap.
-Isaac
Because you might click the link and leave their site. Then they can't rack up more ad impressions from your visit.
They understand teh intarnet quite well; certainly well enough to understand how little most of their readers understand it. Why would they provide a link when at the very least they could show a few more ads on their search pages should the reader decide to search for the site. I've met plenty of people who didn't know you could type an address directly into the URL bar before I told them.
-Isaac
What about Palm OS? Every single person I know with a "smart phone" has a Treo (mostly 600s, though I know a couple of early adopters with 180s and 300s).
Maybe I'm misconstruing the definition of a "smart phone" - my Motorola i90 has a (useless) Java VM and some (crapulent) PIM apps like a datebook and memo pad. Does that make it a "smart phone"? If so, color me unimpressed. It's totally useless, as far as I can tell, and can't replace my Tungsten E.
-Isaac
Are we going to start packing passengers into the cargo hold now? And where are these extra passengers going to come from, now that your plan has made flying even more of a hassle?
-Isaac
Because it's profitable.
The rate of piracy among Mac users is significantly lower than for among Windows users. Maybe the high price of Mac hardware reduces the number of deadbeats.
-Isaac
What? The poll data for voter turnout are only (potentially) valid for the actual respondents. Anyhow, using a survey to determine voter turnout alone is less than useless - one can simply count the actual votes to determine the actual turnout. It seems likely that this survey was an exit poll for preliminary results. The question "did you vote" and resulting data would, in that case, be only ancillary to the follow-up question "for whom did you vote" (and possibly "why?")
The latter question(s) is(are) probably the point of the poll, and are more likely to reflect the actual outcome of the election.
No, this example shows an inappropriate and unnecessary application of statistical sampling. There's no need to take a survey to measure voter turnout, and those the number of survey respondents who claim to have voted aren't relevant to anything. Furthermore, the "value" of a poll is not necessarily, or even often, related to how "consistent with and representative" its results are of "the general population." There's a reason political pollsters winnow their samples down to "likely voters" only - nearly half of eligable voters don't bother to vote in presidential elections, and less half again that number bother to vote in non-national elections. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what "the general population" thinks of a political candidate - only the opinions of people who will vote for or against said candidate matter.
Selecting the sample is important for all sorts of polling. I'm not going to give anyone a useful opinion on denture fixatives, tampons, or brands of electric razors because I buy none of these products, and a student who didn't vote in the campus elections has nothing to add to an exit poll. If the student newspaper latched on to the percentage of survey respondents who did vote, and reported that as the voter turnout, then it's the newspaper's fault for misrepresenting the data. It doesn't make the survey irrelevant.
-Isaac