I would think that, if you ever attempted something like a wireless monitor, you'd make the connection dumb like existing wired video connections -- the data gets sent and it's up to the monitor to figure out how to sync up and use it. If you wanted to do some sort of comm I'd think you'd do it on another channel.
I know modern VGA combines the (very limited) comm into the same cable, but that comm doesn't directly affect the video signal; current monitor signalling is out-of-band already, and I don't see any reason you'd want to change that.
Maybe you're not saying it isn't their right, but some people are. Jack Thompson, for instance.
I agree that we should discourage retailers from making sales policy decisions based on misleading or false information. But it's also important to acknowledge that their sales policies, if based on acurate information, can be reasonable even if you don't agree.
The game *is* about school violence. It doesn't necessarily encourage school violence, but that is one of the themes in gameplay. School violence *is* a hot topic. It may not be a new topic, and the discussion may not be terribly insightful, but it is a touchy subject for some people. So it's not totally unreasonable for a store to decide not to sell this game; it may in fact be a good overall sales strategy, depending on their target market. A large bit of sales is the direct result of pandering. You may not like that, but it's a fact of life.
Now if you wanted to whine about the people who want to be pandered to, and who would praise a retailer for making choices like this I'd be behind you 100%. I just don't think we should hold retailers to a higher degree of social responsibility than we do the customers that shop there.
China, for all its faults, is both stable and predictable (as far as partly-industrialized countries go). Iran isn't much of either.
Think of it this way: would you rather have a nasty neighbor that made loud noises for 10 minutes every day at 3 AM or one that made loud noise for 5 minutes, about twice a day, but at unpredictable intervals? Sure, they're both making the same amount of noise, and the unpredictable noise might even happen when you're awake or away, but the predictable one is much easier to handle.
That's not to say there's no hypocrisy here -- part of the reason Iran is less stable than China is because they have limited choice in trading partners and good -- just that there are differences.
PVRs make that distinction meaningless. Using a PVR I watch the handful of shows I like whenever I want, stopping them if anything more important happens while I'm watching. In use it's just like DVDs, but the information is beamed into my home instead of delivered on a shinny disk.
It's not that I disagree that it might be nice to have a separate format for things with forms, but what do you propose that be? I'm not aware of anything else that's suitable as a replacement.
Word/OpenOffice are certainly not the right choice. For one thing, if you tell people to use Word to make forms they actually use the Word forms feature, which imposes at least as many restrictions as PDF forms do and it doesn't even guarantee page layout. Even if they didn't use the Word forms feature, there are a variety of forms -- let's say your WI Form 3, which has 3 columns of 150 items each on it -- that simply don't translate well to word-processor layouts.
Yes, you could fill out the forms by hand, but when there are 450 items to fill out over 3 pages it's sometimes nice to use the computer to enforce alignment and legibility of text. It's like having a typewritter but without spending $50 on a giant machine that I'd only use twice a year.
Now if the people producing PDF-with-forms documents offered such forms in a real online version and rendered my submission to a non-forms PDF output file (or even just HTML) I'd be all for that. But that requires actual programing, as opposed to the PDF-with-forms creation that can be done by anyone who can do page layout.
They take up all sorts of board space (which you may not value but I do), the connectors are expensive (as far as motherboard components go), and most importantly, the motherboard still has low-speed I/O channels to support such silly things.
Moreover it's easy to find cheap, fairly reliable USB floppy drives, parallel port, and PS/2 adapters. So if you did actually need one of those things you could add it; adding a bit of ancient hardware to the 1/1000 systems that need it seems much more cost effective than shipping 999 systems with extra, useless parts.
Explain to me how shipping food to a country without the will, intent or capability to distribute it will get people feed. Remember ? We tried that there and it didn't work at all. If we give Kim a ship full of grain the easiest thing for him to do is unload it to the dock and let it sit there. In a relatively short time it will rot and no one will want it. Seriously, we've seen this (or theft, etc.) happen before in Africa. It leaves us with no one is fed (who wasn't already) and down one ship of grain. Not to mention the fact that Kim could simply refuse to let ships dock. It is his country after all.
I'd rather not starve people, but it's not as if their land couldn't produce food, it's just that Dear Leader doesn't do that with it. Presumably at least some people in NK understand this, and being hungry could motivate them to revolt. I agree, it's not an ideal plan, but like I said, I haven't heard anything better in the last 50 years.
I have, and I hate them. I'll take Word 5.1 over Word 2003 any day. Why on earth would a professional writer be trying to do print layout in a tool designed to produce formatted text? God forbid we separate the functions of content production and layout into two tools to meet the different workflows of text editing and layout.
Seriously, why do you think tools like InDesign and PageMaker and Quark exist? *Those* are layout tools. *Those* are what professionals use to create print-ready documents. If you really wanted to use just one tool, you can type from withing a layout tool. But there's 10+ years of industry behind the workflow of "produce content in word processor, import content into layout program" and it has worked out just fine.
The fact the "modern word processors" have jammed a bunch of half-working layout tools into their code does not make it a good idea. If one-tool-did-everything was a good plan MS Works would have won out over office.
They are trying to clear up some prime medium-long-range comm channels tht have been tied up for 60 years by companies that aren't paying nearly what those channels are worth in modern times.
There's no "shift" of the burden here -- consumers would have needed new equipment when their favorite channels changed whether it was mandatory or not. It's quite possible that TV stations would, because of that very fact, have never given up their analog bandwidth. Hence the mandatory change for broadcasters.
You might be able to sell me on the "bad idea" part, I just don't see where the "shift of burden" comes in.
I agree, and that's unfortunate, but I really don't see any other choice. And I'm not alone in the opinion -- many people have come to the same conclusion over the last 50 years. I would be ecstatic if someone came up with a plan other than "starve them out until the people revolt or Dear Leader kicks and someone more rational comes along", but I really can't see what that would be short of invasion.
Why a processional writer would expect a word processor to do anything other than very basic, inexact layout is beyond me. I would much rather see them make a completely separate compiles-to-pdf layout tool than to smash those features into a word processor. Then you could link your formatted text documents into a layout program to get things like exact margins and arbitrary headers, just like on the desktop.
Yes. My argument, in essence, is that we should have the bare minimum number of laws required to protect and punish. But not only because it's a futile endeavor -- it also restricts our freedoms more than is required. Your analogy medicine is flawed because I'm not suggesting we allow parents to kill their children because we can't stop them all, merely that, since we already have laws in place to prevent homicide, adding more laws is not our best use of resources. To take it back to medicine, it would be like spending money to cure polio. Yes, it could help some people, but since a vaccine is readily available, and infection rates are so low, it would be better to focus our research efforts elsewhere.
I believe that adding laws necessarily reduces our freedoms. So I take exception to adding laws when I believe that existing law is sufficient to provide the protections we seek. You may be willing to give up your rights to protect a girl who doesn't know hers. I think you're silly for doing so, but it's your choice and I won't try to stop you. But I will try to stop you from giving up *my* rights to protect a girl who doesn't know hers. It's unfortunate that some people don't know their rights, but adding more laws only confuses the issue further.
We can't protect people who don't know or refuse to enforce their rights, at least not without taking freedoms away from otherwise law-abiding citizens. And having more laws is actually detrimental toward the goal of having people know their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Again it's unfortunate that not everyone knows their rights, but the state *mandates* education that includes basic civics, and we cannot reasonably protect people who do not know their rights and responsibilities as citizens. If you wanted to improve civics education to help abortion-seeking teens learn their rights, I'd be all for that. I'm just opposed to double-coverage laws.
It's not the network capability I want you to buy, it's standard, well-defined, drivers-built-in-to-every-OS print engine. The network interface is just a handy way to get that. I'm not denying that you can print more cheaply without such a system, just suggesting that the added flexibility, robustness, and ease-of-use are, at least to me, well worth the additional cost.
First I'll restate the easy-of-use point: you don't need to do anything to any modern OS to make it print to a PS printer. No additional drivers, no installing, no downloads; nothing. Just tell CUPS/LPD/Windows/etc. where the thing is and that it has a PS engine and you're good to go.
The second is that, in a year or so when a couple new printer models are out, Samsung (or whoever else maintains your drivers) will stop updating the drivers for your printer. That won't bother you right away, but when you move to a new OS and/or a new machine in say 3-4 years, the old drivers won't work properly due to 64-bit-ness or any of 15 other driver-related changes liable to happen in that time. You'll either have to hobble together some way to use the old drivers or get a new printer. That simply doesn't happen with a standard PS system -- every modern OS is capable of printing to a PS printer out-of-the-box, and the PPD system allows very simple, text-based definitions of extra printer features that don't need to change even when the underlying driver does.
Finally there's the additional flexibility of a stand-alone printer. Sure, you only want to print from one machine now, but if/when you get another machine, or have someone come over with a laptop that network interface will be handy. I know it's not the only way to share a printer, but it's hard to deny that it's the easiest. Or let's say you move and there's no longer a good place to have your computer and printer side-by-side. Having a network interface lets you hide the printer in the hall closet.
How about #3, where the parents are highly volatile and liable to react violently and, having lived with them for 15 years, the girl knows this and asks someone else for help -- like say the police -- as any responsible citizen would do when they had reasonable fear for the personal safety. This is something we teach children from the time they are 6. There are already laws to protect people that are in legitimate fear of personal harm, even if that harm is coming from their parents, even if they are planning to have an abortion.
What makes aborition the special case? If your parents are highly volitale and liable to react violently, what's to say that you being in a car accident wouldn't cause a similar reaction? Should we have a law that "protects" children from their parents by not requiring that they report car accidents? There are many, many other similar situations one could imagine -- do they each get their own law?
If the student's intent was malicious and not just to be funny, they could easily put the teacher's job in a situation for review.
And in fact, that's the legal standard. If they had malicious intent it's libel. If they reasonably believed it to be true, or intended it to be satirical, then it's not libel. Proving intent in either direction is difficult, but malice is required for a successful libel claim.
She could face serious repurcussions. Not just, say, a grounding or stern talking to, but being thrown out of the house, beating, maiming, and even murder are not beyond the realm of possibility.
All those things are already illegal in their own right, without any consideration of abortion. Adding laws to protect us from things that the law already protects us from is redundant, inefficient, and can only harm our civil liberties by complicating the law.
In general we don't allow minors to seek medical treatment on their own behalf -- it requires parental consent. So long as we're treating abortion as a medical procedure, why is it any different?
You people and your directly connected printers. Anything between ASCII and PS/PCL is just asking for trouble IMHO.
Save yourself some headaches and spend an extra $75 to get the exact same printer you already own except with a PS engine and a network interface. It will work with all your computers without any extra software. Heck, you don't even have to download the PPD except to use the fancier features.
I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?
How about academic lectures in MP3 format? Try google if you don't believe me. Thousands of lectures of academic merit on various topics are available for free on the web as MP3s. Not to mention access to general-interest items like news broadcasts. The same sorts of things can also be found on sites like YouTube and Google Video. Certainly there are non-academic items available; I'll even grant you that most of the MP3 downloads, YouTube, and Google Video content is not particularly useful from an academic standpoint, but you'd got to be high to conclude that there's nothing useful in a video or audio format on the web.
...most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way.
Have you ever even logged in to FaceBook? Searching for people by course with access to their picture is an incredibly handy way to find someone's name and contact information, which I personally have used in this situation: I'm in class of 400 students. We are assigned into groups of 5, and given only each other's names. I could attempt to find your 4 partners after class without having ever seen them before, while 399 other people are trying to do the same thing. Or I could log on to Facebook, click on the list of people in my course, find my partners and their pictures and contact information, and even send them a note about a meeting location. Certainly I could find them without Facebook, but Facebook sure makes it easier, and that seems like a valid academic use to me. There are other similarly valuable uses related to the intersection of the social and academic worlds on sites such as Facebook; dismissing the idea of social networking just because it isn't exclusively academic is as silly as blocking access to audio and video content.
I get that you don't have a lot of bandwidth. What I fail to understand why traditional bandwidth management wouldn't be more appropriate than web filtering. What do you get from web filtering that you couldn't get from simple bandwidth management? Prioritizing "important" traffic and then enforcing limits or sharing on a per-user basis would ensure that everyone can get access what they want, even with limited bandwidth, and even if you personally don't think it's important.
I'd argue that political correctness is distinctly opposed to both free-expression and critical thought. As long as you're discussing either of those it seems relevant to me.
As the patent sites, this functionality is already available even in OS X. Heck, this functionality is basically just a login hook to mount your home directory where the system expects it. It's not exactly complicated.
As far as OS portability goes, OS X is portable too, and the machines that run it even have a friendly graphical boot-disk selection system. Install 10.4 on a USB drive, go to any machine that will run it, attach the drive and reboot holding down the option key. Frankly, any sane OS is "portable" among machines of the same architecture. It's just the popularity of certain fragile OSes that makes you think otherwise.
It does syncronization over any sort of socket or locally; it defaults to using SSH. It runs in ocaml so it works anywhere there's an ocaml runtime -- Windows/OS X/linux/etc.
It presents a simple copy left/copy right/skip interface for files with conflicts. Or you can run in batch mode to skip conflicts silently. Or you can set it to prefer one source for conflicts and always resolve in that direction.
It can be set to ignore files or folders with a simple or regex expression list.
You can configure several different sink sets and run them individually. I use this feature so that my desktop and documents get synced every time you're online, but my music folder only syncs when I'm on the local network.
It supports prioritizing sync traffic by size, name, modification time, etc., so you can decide what files get synced first, which is handy on slow links. It also uses the rsync partial-binary transfer so that changes in large binary files don't require copying the entire file.
It can copy permissions and ownership verbatim (process permissions permitting), or you can specify exactly what permissions are copied or not.
There is a little work to be done in setting it up, but in general I find that a couple of unison batches in an hourly cron job plus one manual sync per week let me switch between my desktop and laptop without even thinking about it.
I've actually done it, both on a removable-disk and network basis. It's a simple as a login/logout script that makes a symlink. Seriously, this is a retarded patent. I'm all for Apple and portable home directories, but this should not be patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that, if you ever attempted something like a wireless monitor, you'd make the connection dumb like existing wired video connections -- the data gets sent and it's up to the monitor to figure out how to sync up and use it. If you wanted to do some sort of comm I'd think you'd do it on another channel.
I know modern VGA combines the (very limited) comm into the same cable, but that comm doesn't directly affect the video signal; current monitor signalling is out-of-band already, and I don't see any reason you'd want to change that.
Maybe you're not saying it isn't their right, but some people are. Jack Thompson, for instance.
I agree that we should discourage retailers from making sales policy decisions based on misleading or false information. But it's also important to acknowledge that their sales policies, if based on acurate information, can be reasonable even if you don't agree.
The game *is* about school violence. It doesn't necessarily encourage school violence, but that is one of the themes in gameplay. School violence *is* a hot topic. It may not be a new topic, and the discussion may not be terribly insightful, but it is a touchy subject for some people. So it's not totally unreasonable for a store to decide not to sell this game; it may in fact be a good overall sales strategy, depending on their target market. A large bit of sales is the direct result of pandering. You may not like that, but it's a fact of life.
Now if you wanted to whine about the people who want to be pandered to, and who would praise a retailer for making choices like this I'd be behind you 100%. I just don't think we should hold retailers to a higher degree of social responsibility than we do the customers that shop there.
China, for all its faults, is both stable and predictable (as far as partly-industrialized countries go). Iran isn't much of either.
Think of it this way: would you rather have a nasty neighbor that made loud noises for 10 minutes every day at 3 AM or one that made loud noise for 5 minutes, about twice a day, but at unpredictable intervals? Sure, they're both making the same amount of noise, and the unpredictable noise might even happen when you're awake or away, but the predictable one is much easier to handle.
That's not to say there's no hypocrisy here -- part of the reason Iran is less stable than China is because they have limited choice in trading partners and good -- just that there are differences.
Hence the democratic republic -- specifically designed to help protect the minority from the majority.
PVRs make that distinction meaningless. Using a PVR I watch the handful of shows I like whenever I want, stopping them if anything more important happens while I'm watching. In use it's just like DVDs, but the information is beamed into my home instead of delivered on a shinny disk.
It's not that I disagree that it might be nice to have a separate format for things with forms, but what do you propose that be? I'm not aware of anything else that's suitable as a replacement.
Word/OpenOffice are certainly not the right choice. For one thing, if you tell people to use Word to make forms they actually use the Word forms feature, which imposes at least as many restrictions as PDF forms do and it doesn't even guarantee page layout. Even if they didn't use the Word forms feature, there are a variety of forms -- let's say your WI Form 3, which has 3 columns of 150 items each on it -- that simply don't translate well to word-processor layouts.
Yes, you could fill out the forms by hand, but when there are 450 items to fill out over 3 pages it's sometimes nice to use the computer to enforce alignment and legibility of text. It's like having a typewritter but without spending $50 on a giant machine that I'd only use twice a year.
Now if the people producing PDF-with-forms documents offered such forms in a real online version and rendered my submission to a non-forms PDF output file (or even just HTML) I'd be all for that. But that requires actual programing, as opposed to the PDF-with-forms creation that can be done by anyone who can do page layout.
They take up all sorts of board space (which you may not value but I do), the connectors are expensive (as far as motherboard components go), and most importantly, the motherboard still has low-speed I/O channels to support such silly things.
Moreover it's easy to find cheap, fairly reliable USB floppy drives, parallel port, and PS/2 adapters. So if you did actually need one of those things you could add it; adding a bit of ancient hardware to the 1/1000 systems that need it seems much more cost effective than shipping 999 systems with extra, useless parts.
Explain to me how shipping food to a country without the will, intent or capability to distribute it will get people feed. Remember ? We tried that there and it didn't work at all. If we give Kim a ship full of grain the easiest thing for him to do is unload it to the dock and let it sit there. In a relatively short time it will rot and no one will want it. Seriously, we've seen this (or theft, etc.) happen before in Africa. It leaves us with no one is fed (who wasn't already) and down one ship of grain. Not to mention the fact that Kim could simply refuse to let ships dock. It is his country after all.
I'd rather not starve people, but it's not as if their land couldn't produce food, it's just that Dear Leader doesn't do that with it. Presumably at least some people in NK understand this, and being hungry could motivate them to revolt. I agree, it's not an ideal plan, but like I said, I haven't heard anything better in the last 50 years.
I have, and I hate them. I'll take Word 5.1 over Word 2003 any day. Why on earth would a professional writer be trying to do print layout in a tool designed to produce formatted text? God forbid we separate the functions of content production and layout into two tools to meet the different workflows of text editing and layout.
Seriously, why do you think tools like InDesign and PageMaker and Quark exist? *Those* are layout tools. *Those* are what professionals use to create print-ready documents. If you really wanted to use just one tool, you can type from withing a layout tool. But there's 10+ years of industry behind the workflow of "produce content in word processor, import content into layout program" and it has worked out just fine.
The fact the "modern word processors" have jammed a bunch of half-working layout tools into their code does not make it a good idea. If one-tool-did-everything was a good plan MS Works would have won out over office.
They are trying to clear up some prime medium-long-range comm channels tht have been tied up for 60 years by companies that aren't paying nearly what those channels are worth in modern times.
There's no "shift" of the burden here -- consumers would have needed new equipment when their favorite channels changed whether it was mandatory or not. It's quite possible that TV stations would, because of that very fact, have never given up their analog bandwidth. Hence the mandatory change for broadcasters.
You might be able to sell me on the "bad idea" part, I just don't see where the "shift of burden" comes in.
Digital channels are numbered like the old channels, in theory to ease the transition, but it's an entirely different band.
I agree, and that's unfortunate, but I really don't see any other choice. And I'm not alone in the opinion -- many people have come to the same conclusion over the last 50 years. I would be ecstatic if someone came up with a plan other than "starve them out until the people revolt or Dear Leader kicks and someone more rational comes along", but I really can't see what that would be short of invasion.
Why a processional writer would expect a word processor to do anything other than very basic, inexact layout is beyond me. I would much rather see them make a completely separate compiles-to-pdf layout tool than to smash those features into a word processor. Then you could link your formatted text documents into a layout program to get things like exact margins and arbitrary headers, just like on the desktop.
Yes. My argument, in essence, is that we should have the bare minimum number of laws required to protect and punish. But not only because it's a futile endeavor -- it also restricts our freedoms more than is required. Your analogy medicine is flawed because I'm not suggesting we allow parents to kill their children because we can't stop them all, merely that, since we already have laws in place to prevent homicide, adding more laws is not our best use of resources. To take it back to medicine, it would be like spending money to cure polio. Yes, it could help some people, but since a vaccine is readily available, and infection rates are so low, it would be better to focus our research efforts elsewhere.
I believe that adding laws necessarily reduces our freedoms. So I take exception to adding laws when I believe that existing law is sufficient to provide the protections we seek. You may be willing to give up your rights to protect a girl who doesn't know hers. I think you're silly for doing so, but it's your choice and I won't try to stop you. But I will try to stop you from giving up *my* rights to protect a girl who doesn't know hers. It's unfortunate that some people don't know their rights, but adding more laws only confuses the issue further.
We can't protect people who don't know or refuse to enforce their rights, at least not without taking freedoms away from otherwise law-abiding citizens. And having more laws is actually detrimental toward the goal of having people know their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Again it's unfortunate that not everyone knows their rights, but the state *mandates* education that includes basic civics, and we cannot reasonably protect people who do not know their rights and responsibilities as citizens. If you wanted to improve civics education to help abortion-seeking teens learn their rights, I'd be all for that. I'm just opposed to double-coverage laws.
It's not the network capability I want you to buy, it's standard, well-defined, drivers-built-in-to-every-OS print engine. The network interface is just a handy way to get that. I'm not denying that you can print more cheaply without such a system, just suggesting that the added flexibility, robustness, and ease-of-use are, at least to me, well worth the additional cost.
First I'll restate the easy-of-use point: you don't need to do anything to any modern OS to make it print to a PS printer. No additional drivers, no installing, no downloads; nothing. Just tell CUPS/LPD/Windows/etc. where the thing is and that it has a PS engine and you're good to go.
The second is that, in a year or so when a couple new printer models are out, Samsung (or whoever else maintains your drivers) will stop updating the drivers for your printer. That won't bother you right away, but when you move to a new OS and/or a new machine in say 3-4 years, the old drivers won't work properly due to 64-bit-ness or any of 15 other driver-related changes liable to happen in that time. You'll either have to hobble together some way to use the old drivers or get a new printer. That simply doesn't happen with a standard PS system -- every modern OS is capable of printing to a PS printer out-of-the-box, and the PPD system allows very simple, text-based definitions of extra printer features that don't need to change even when the underlying driver does.
Finally there's the additional flexibility of a stand-alone printer. Sure, you only want to print from one machine now, but if/when you get another machine, or have someone come over with a laptop that network interface will be handy. I know it's not the only way to share a printer, but it's hard to deny that it's the easiest. Or let's say you move and there's no longer a good place to have your computer and printer side-by-side. Having a network interface lets you hide the printer in the hall closet.
How about #3, where the parents are highly volatile and liable to react violently and, having lived with them for 15 years, the girl knows this and asks someone else for help -- like say the police -- as any responsible citizen would do when they had reasonable fear for the personal safety. This is something we teach children from the time they are 6. There are already laws to protect people that are in legitimate fear of personal harm, even if that harm is coming from their parents, even if they are planning to have an abortion.
What makes aborition the special case? If your parents are highly volitale and liable to react violently, what's to say that you being in a car accident wouldn't cause a similar reaction? Should we have a law that "protects" children from their parents by not requiring that they report car accidents? There are many, many other similar situations one could imagine -- do they each get their own law?
If the student's intent was malicious and not just to be funny, they could easily put the teacher's job in a situation for review.
And in fact, that's the legal standard. If they had malicious intent it's libel. If they reasonably believed it to be true, or intended it to be satirical, then it's not libel. Proving intent in either direction is difficult, but malice is required for a successful libel claim.
She could face serious repurcussions. Not just, say, a grounding or stern talking to, but being thrown out of the house, beating, maiming, and even murder are not beyond the realm of possibility.
All those things are already illegal in their own right, without any consideration of abortion. Adding laws to protect us from things that the law already protects us from is redundant, inefficient, and can only harm our civil liberties by complicating the law.
In general we don't allow minors to seek medical treatment on their own behalf -- it requires parental consent. So long as we're treating abortion as a medical procedure, why is it any different?
In the vaugely related light of compatibility:
You people and your directly connected printers. Anything between ASCII and PS/PCL is just asking for trouble IMHO.
Save yourself some headaches and spend an extra $75 to get the exact same printer you already own except with a PS engine and a network interface. It will work with all your computers without any extra software. Heck, you don't even have to download the PPD except to use the fancier features.
I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?
How about academic lectures in MP3 format? Try google if you don't believe me. Thousands of lectures of academic merit on various topics are available for free on the web as MP3s. Not to mention access to general-interest items like news broadcasts. The same sorts of things can also be found on sites like YouTube and Google Video. Certainly there are non-academic items available; I'll even grant you that most of the MP3 downloads, YouTube, and Google Video content is not particularly useful from an academic standpoint, but you'd got to be high to conclude that there's nothing useful in a video or audio format on the web.
Have you ever even logged in to FaceBook? Searching for people by course with access to their picture is an incredibly handy way to find someone's name and contact information, which I personally have used in this situation: I'm in class of 400 students. We are assigned into groups of 5, and given only each other's names. I could attempt to find your 4 partners after class without having ever seen them before, while 399 other people are trying to do the same thing. Or I could log on to Facebook, click on the list of people in my course, find my partners and their pictures and contact information, and even send them a note about a meeting location. Certainly I could find them without Facebook, but Facebook sure makes it easier, and that seems like a valid academic use to me. There are other similarly valuable uses related to the intersection of the social and academic worlds on sites such as Facebook; dismissing the idea of social networking just because it isn't exclusively academic is as silly as blocking access to audio and video content.
I get that you don't have a lot of bandwidth. What I fail to understand why traditional bandwidth management wouldn't be more appropriate than web filtering. What do you get from web filtering that you couldn't get from simple bandwidth management? Prioritizing "important" traffic and then enforcing limits or sharing on a per-user basis would ensure that everyone can get access what they want, even with limited bandwidth, and even if you personally don't think it's important.
I'd argue that political correctness is distinctly opposed to both free-expression and critical thought. As long as you're discussing either of those it seems relevant to me.
As the patent sites, this functionality is already available even in OS X. Heck, this functionality is basically just a login hook to mount your home directory where the system expects it. It's not exactly complicated.
As far as OS portability goes, OS X is portable too, and the machines that run it even have a friendly graphical boot-disk selection system. Install 10.4 on a USB drive, go to any machine that will run it, attach the drive and reboot holding down the option key. Frankly, any sane OS is "portable" among machines of the same architecture. It's just the popularity of certain fragile OSes that makes you think otherwise.
`fink install unison` There's even a X11 GUI for it if you're into that sort of thing. (And a website: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/index.ht ml)
It does syncronization over any sort of socket or locally; it defaults to using SSH. It runs in ocaml so it works anywhere there's an ocaml runtime -- Windows/OS X/linux/etc.
It presents a simple copy left/copy right/skip interface for files with conflicts. Or you can run in batch mode to skip conflicts silently. Or you can set it to prefer one source for conflicts and always resolve in that direction.
It can be set to ignore files or folders with a simple or regex expression list.
You can configure several different sink sets and run them individually. I use this feature so that my desktop and documents get synced every time you're online, but my music folder only syncs when I'm on the local network.
It supports prioritizing sync traffic by size, name, modification time, etc., so you can decide what files get synced first, which is handy on slow links. It also uses the rsync partial-binary transfer so that changes in large binary files don't require copying the entire file.
It can copy permissions and ownership verbatim (process permissions permitting), or you can specify exactly what permissions are copied or not.
There is a little work to be done in setting it up, but in general I find that a couple of unison batches in an hourly cron job plus one manual sync per week let me switch between my desktop and laptop without even thinking about it.
I've actually done it, both on a removable-disk and network basis. It's a simple as a login/logout script that makes a symlink. Seriously, this is a retarded patent. I'm all for Apple and portable home directories, but this should not be patentable.
Technically, absent a lead->gold trick, most oils don't turn to steam at all, no matter how long you irradiate them.