Also from living in the uk what I have found is people born in the country tend to not care so much about education as people who's family immigrated from other country's (normally third world) however this changes from culture to culture.
One point I've heard to explain that is that a country's emigrants are the people with the drive and ability to move out, while a country's goobers and losers end up staying in the home country. It makes sense.
I believe this is being done for two reasons, shock value "look at what Michigan has done"
Yeah, but I think that shock and sentiment is working the wrong way. Given the general state of the State, as well as the schools, and the relative uselessness (especially given costs) of iPods in education, this just comes off as mind-blowingly idiotic more than anything forward-thinking, especially when the gov't has been putting forth cuts and finagling tax hikes claiming poverty.
I could even see buying eBooks or something like that-- at least those have more educational use than a trumped-up portable drive.
"Look what Michigan has done... dumped a whole bunch of money from a struggling economy into ooh-shiny electronics." Now I (a Michigan resident) get to be thought of either as part of the people who thought "iPods" and "education" were a natural combo, or the people who apparently can be cowed and placated by throwing shiny things at them.
Something that provided simple sensory input (like the direction-finding belt) would also, I imagine, take much less attention after much less training than something like cell-phone usage. Cell-phone usage requires not only sensory use, but constant monitoring of changing and unanticipatable data (listening so you don't miss anything), interpretation of the sense into meaning, storage into memory, and formation of responses.
But for all of the people who ask "what Apple ever does", or "how do they innovate", here's yet another answer.
Where is that other answer? Missed that. Apple started making noise just ahead of the popular-opinion wave hitting, and the press that can't see past the blinding Apple glare hyped it up as the next, first, and only time DRMless media had ever been proposed.
I'll still be sticking with the services that never had DRM in the first place. I'm not about to give anyone a standing ovation just because they finally unbolted the restrictions that they put there in the first place.
I think that's similar to eMusic's model, although it looks like you're looking for something unlimited. Unfortunately, the frugality of customers and the prices of purchased music will never meet at the price point where this is possible. This has even been tried (eMusic Unlimited*) and proven unfeasable (it hemhorraged money, even backed by Vivendi Universal, until they sold it to someone economically saner).
* I keep citing them because I know a lot of the background. I imagine there're others.
Well, I was going to say that it's up to the artists and their agents to decide what's best for themselves, but I suppose that since we have an unimpeachable expert here on what ultimately "should be", then everybody can go home, and we can all just get right on that, right?
The catch is that they can't check for plagarism without a database of current papers.
There may be some useful room in there if the service scanned a privately held and compiled collection of that school's students' own past work, combined with a Web crawl of publicly-available documents, although the system would end up being much less robust.
Still, though, it does fall under the "A problem with your business model does not constitute and emergency on my part." idea.
I see what you're saying, although that's only true as long as ad-blocking software doesn't become commonplace enough to taint server-hit numbers in common perception.
I don't follow you as to the "value". If ads are blocked, there's not even an "impression" made. The goodwill and pulling in other unblocking viewers might bring in some new revenue, but I doubt that would counteract the server usage from the lost hits.
Offering only a front-end service that uses modified GPLv2 code on the back-end (IIRC) does not constitute "distribution". Renting a device could be seen as similar-- they're giving you a black box, with a front end interface, that you don't own. It just happens to be connected by a shorter length of wire.
The problem isn't about self-described pornographic websites trying to decieve, it's about works that might be considered by some to be pornographic, but by the owners to have some other use (artistic, literary, informative). By forcing the.xxx classification, it creates a swath of de facto universal censorship, controlled the whims of whoever is making the "porn" distinction. Viewing choice and classification should be made by the viewer, or by agents of the viewer (filtering software), not by a ruling organization that cannot possibly speak for everyone.
For a 'professional' job, reporting your hours CAN be quite stifling to your work flow, particularly if it's a job where you perform creative tasks - like programming or design.
Amen to that!
(Still need to write up those timesheets for the last... err... month. Salaried, but it's a billable-time business.)
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you have similar reservations, but the biggest problem with direct democracy, especially in a nation as big as the US, is of losing any accountability. With representation, at least there's a person who can be held accountable if it's found that they voted poorly on some submarine legislation.
With direct voting, any amount of lousy legislation could be mixed into the crapstream, and directly passed by interest groups who are the only ones apparently interested in them. It's like the PTA meetings where the greater world doesn't care, until some group wants some treatment, then they pack the house for the night of that vote.
Of course, there might be safeguards in a practical system that I don't know about. Hmm?
Do I have to whip out the sig again? I suppose I'm just not posting on Slashdot enough.
You're talking about information. That's free (USA, YMMV). The freedom to reproduce and disseminate raw information-- facts-- is protected by fair use, the First Amendment, and countless court cases, even to the point of precedent being that you can copy things like the telephone book-- which have taken time and effort to compile-- because it consists of simple facts ordered in an unpatently-obvious format.
This information-sharing is legal because the law and the government believe that information is too integral to allow it be suppressed by the mechanisms of copyright.
What is NOT free to reproduce and disseminate is the specific expression of those facts. For instance: I could give an in-depth review of a song, listing off its influences, narrative plot, and music features-- I could even quote passages to an extent to expound upon my analysis. However, I am legally prohibited from redistributing the song itself, because the specific arrangement is purely entertainment gravy upon any simple facts that may exist the song. Entertainment and presentation are not integral or important enough to freedom or society to be afforded the special treatment of unfettered distribution.
It only looks like you can't distribute information because you're mistaking information for presentation. Most music, for instance, would contain a sentence or two, if even that, if distilled down to simple information-- KNOWLEDGE that you actually LEARN from the content of the piece. "An unnamed 'she' loves the singer. The singer is happy."
Well, let's see, it's been proven time and time again that anything relating to computers can be analogized to a car... we just need to find which part.
I'm with you there regarding sampling. I suppose, playing Devil's Advocate, that a case could be made that using well-known samples is something akin to a trademark infringement-- trading on the goodwill and well-knownedness of the original song to unfairly bolster your own work's value. Still, though, even that argument is rather petty.
That's one thing that's always bugged me-- that touch-ups are considered a re-copyrightable work. I understand it's a lot of work, but regardless of that, it's not CREATION OF CONTENT, which is the domain of Copyright's facilitation and protection.
I'd say this is the big problem with RIAA vs. filesharing, as well. The effort required to track down sharers, and the futility of a single bust, means that they have to drop the nuke whenever they succeed in order to have any effect at all.
IMO, the best thing to happen would be for Congress to step in with a statutory licensing mechanism akin to ASCAP/BMI compulsory licensing (in response to piano-roll piracy). Unfortunately, this is an obvious loss and a serious compromise for anyone who values control along with profit, so it's doubtful that anything would come of it. Of course, there's also the fact that even at market rates (say, US$0.50 per song to be light), many people's collections would still cost into the stratosphere even under compulsory automated licensing.
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Also from living in the uk what I have found is people born in the country tend to not care so much about education as people who's family immigrated from other country's (normally third world) however this changes from culture to culture.
One point I've heard to explain that is that a country's emigrants are the people with the drive and ability to move out, while a country's goobers and losers end up staying in the home country. It makes sense.
The option for public schooling is always open.
I believe this is being done for two reasons, shock value "look at what Michigan has done"
Yeah, but I think that shock and sentiment is working the wrong way. Given the general state of the State, as well as the schools, and the relative uselessness (especially given costs) of iPods in education, this just comes off as mind-blowingly idiotic more than anything forward-thinking, especially when the gov't has been putting forth cuts and finagling tax hikes claiming poverty.
I could even see buying eBooks or something like that-- at least those have more educational use than a trumped-up portable drive.
"Look what Michigan has done... dumped a whole bunch of money from a struggling economy into ooh-shiny electronics." Now I (a Michigan resident) get to be thought of either as part of the people who thought "iPods" and "education" were a natural combo, or the people who apparently can be cowed and placated by throwing shiny things at them.
Perhaps, but put "people" in quotes, too, and the whole argument falls apart.
Something that provided simple sensory input (like the direction-finding belt) would also, I imagine, take much less attention after much less training than something like cell-phone usage. Cell-phone usage requires not only sensory use, but constant monitoring of changing and unanticipatable data (listening so you don't miss anything), interpretation of the sense into meaning, storage into memory, and formation of responses.
But for all of the people who ask "what Apple ever does", or "how do they innovate", here's yet another answer.
Where is that other answer? Missed that. Apple started making noise just ahead of the popular-opinion wave hitting, and the press that can't see past the blinding Apple glare hyped it up as the next, first, and only time DRMless media had ever been proposed.
I'll still be sticking with the services that never had DRM in the first place. I'm not about to give anyone a standing ovation just because they finally unbolted the restrictions that they put there in the first place.
if you're using the right software.
Don't leave me hangin'... such as?
Yes, but now you can format-shift without technical hurdles and legal prohibitions.
Yes, but Route AB is hellishly boring.
I think that's similar to eMusic's model, although it looks like you're looking for something unlimited. Unfortunately, the frugality of customers and the prices of purchased music will never meet at the price point where this is possible. This has even been tried (eMusic Unlimited*) and proven unfeasable (it hemhorraged money, even backed by Vivendi Universal, until they sold it to someone economically saner).
* I keep citing them because I know a lot of the background. I imagine there're others.
Well, I was going to say that it's up to the artists and their agents to decide what's best for themselves, but I suppose that since we have an unimpeachable expert here on what ultimately "should be", then everybody can go home, and we can all just get right on that, right?
The catch is that they can't check for plagarism without a database of current papers.
There may be some useful room in there if the service scanned a privately held and compiled collection of that school's students' own past work, combined with a Web crawl of publicly-available documents, although the system would end up being much less robust.
Still, though, it does fall under the "A problem with your business model does not constitute and emergency on my part." idea.
I see what you're saying, although that's only true as long as ad-blocking software doesn't become commonplace enough to taint server-hit numbers in common perception.
I don't follow you as to the "value". If ads are blocked, there's not even an "impression" made. The goodwill and pulling in other unblocking viewers might bring in some new revenue, but I doubt that would counteract the server usage from the lost hits.
Offering only a front-end service that uses modified GPLv2 code on the back-end (IIRC) does not constitute "distribution". Renting a device could be seen as similar-- they're giving you a black box, with a front end interface, that you don't own. It just happens to be connected by a shorter length of wire.
Yes. That would be active infrared, presumably with some sort of IR floodlights.
The problem isn't about self-described pornographic websites trying to decieve, it's about works that might be considered by some to be pornographic, but by the owners to have some other use (artistic, literary, informative). By forcing the .xxx classification, it creates a swath of de facto universal censorship, controlled the whims of whoever is making the "porn" distinction. Viewing choice and classification should be made by the viewer, or by agents of the viewer (filtering software), not by a ruling organization that cannot possibly speak for everyone.
For a 'professional' job, reporting your hours CAN be quite stifling to your work flow, particularly if it's a job where you perform creative tasks - like programming or design.
Amen to that!
(Still need to write up those timesheets for the last... err... month. Salaried, but it's a billable-time business.)
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you have similar reservations, but the biggest problem with direct democracy, especially in a nation as big as the US, is of losing any accountability. With representation, at least there's a person who can be held accountable if it's found that they voted poorly on some submarine legislation.
With direct voting, any amount of lousy legislation could be mixed into the crapstream, and directly passed by interest groups who are the only ones apparently interested in them. It's like the PTA meetings where the greater world doesn't care, until some group wants some treatment, then they pack the house for the night of that vote.
Of course, there might be safeguards in a practical system that I don't know about. Hmm?
Do I have to whip out the sig again? I suppose I'm just not posting on Slashdot enough.
You're talking about information. That's free (USA, YMMV). The freedom to reproduce and disseminate raw information-- facts-- is protected by fair use, the First Amendment, and countless court cases, even to the point of precedent being that you can copy things like the telephone book-- which have taken time and effort to compile-- because it consists of simple facts ordered in an unpatently-obvious format.
This information-sharing is legal because the law and the government believe that information is too integral to allow it be suppressed by the mechanisms of copyright.
What is NOT free to reproduce and disseminate is the specific expression of those facts. For instance: I could give an in-depth review of a song, listing off its influences, narrative plot, and music features-- I could even quote passages to an extent to expound upon my analysis. However, I am legally prohibited from redistributing the song itself, because the specific arrangement is purely entertainment gravy upon any simple facts that may exist the song. Entertainment and presentation are not integral or important enough to freedom or society to be afforded the special treatment of unfettered distribution.
It only looks like you can't distribute information because you're mistaking information for presentation. Most music, for instance, would contain a sentence or two, if even that, if distilled down to simple information-- KNOWLEDGE that you actually LEARN from the content of the piece. "An unnamed 'she' loves the singer. The singer is happy."
Well, let's see, it's been proven time and time again that anything relating to computers can be analogized to a car... we just need to find which part.
Damn, it's probably a hose or a pipe.
I can see that, in a sort of non-anticipatibally-codifiable-but-logical-upon-ex amination way.
I'm with you there regarding sampling. I suppose, playing Devil's Advocate, that a case could be made that using well-known samples is something akin to a trademark infringement-- trading on the goodwill and well-knownedness of the original song to unfairly bolster your own work's value. Still, though, even that argument is rather petty.
That's one thing that's always bugged me-- that touch-ups are considered a re-copyrightable work. I understand it's a lot of work, but regardless of that, it's not CREATION OF CONTENT, which is the domain of Copyright's facilitation and protection.
I'd say this is the big problem with RIAA vs. filesharing, as well. The effort required to track down sharers, and the futility of a single bust, means that they have to drop the nuke whenever they succeed in order to have any effect at all.
IMO, the best thing to happen would be for Congress to step in with a statutory licensing mechanism akin to ASCAP/BMI compulsory licensing (in response to piano-roll piracy). Unfortunately, this is an obvious loss and a serious compromise for anyone who values control along with profit, so it's doubtful that anything would come of it. Of course, there's also the fact that even at market rates (say, US$0.50 per song to be light), many people's collections would still cost into the stratosphere even under compulsory automated licensing.