Was this by any chance something you did as an assignment for a class at Princeton? It sounds very familiar.
That said, the difference between the simulated and the compiled circuits is analagous to difference between an interpreted language and compiled code, not a compiled language. It's more like Java vs. assembly than C vs. assembly.
Actually, the rising cost of health care relative to goods shouldn't be so hastily blamed on government or bureaucracy - without any government interference, the cost of health care should be expected to rise rapidly over time. This is due to an exconomic phenomenon known as the "cost disease of the service sector," also known as Baumol's disease.
Baumol's disease is named after William Baumol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Princeton University and current Professor of Economics an New York University, who deduced that labor productivity rises much faster - and therefore prices should fall faster - in the manufacturing sector than in the services sector (the services sector being where the product being sold is provided directly by a person, like a doctor or a teacher, rather than indirectly through physical goods). Health care is, of course, part of the services sector. Your expectation that health care, left alone over time, should stay the same price relative to wages is actually incorrect.
For a great explanation of Baumol's disease and its application to education (which, like health care, is part of the services sector), see this New York times article.
That's not to say that regulation hasn't created a mess of health care. But then again, you can also blame lack of government regulation for letting HMOs become oligopsonies (a few slightly-distinct buyers of a good, as opposed to a oligopoly which is just a fre sellers of a good; note that in this case oligopsony/oligopoly are only a few steps above monopsony/monopoly), or for letting the drug companies become monopolies (while they still hold the exclusive patent over a new drug) or monopsonies (when their patent expires and the limited generic competition comes into play).
You're leaving out some important details. I recall that MP3.com lost the case because they didn't own each and every one of the 10k CDs that they had put online.
There still hasn't been any ruling to say whether it's illegal for you to download songs you own (I suspect not), or whether it's illegal for you to provide songs you own (probably yes, because 99% of the people downloading them are doing it illegally and that's no secret to you), or in particular whether it's legal for person X who owns CD Y, upon verifying that person Z also owns CD Y, to provide the MP3s of that CD to Z (which seems that it should fit fair use, but the verification step is tough and might not convince a court to back it).
See also Slate's Take, which makes a case similar to yours (that the real problem here is Yale's insecure system). Furthermore, it would appear that Yale had no intention of making any public accusations until after they found out that the story was going to go public the next (courtesy of the Yale Daily Herald, a student-run publication). At that point, they realized that publically blaming Princeton would distract attention from their negligence in using such an obviously flawed system.
This was neither hacking nor cracking. The admissions officers didn't have to hack past any security, because there wasn't any security. They just plugged in name, date of birth, and social security number into Yale's online form. That's like entering a room that isn't locked, but does have a closed door. Try to get the police to arrest the perpetrator for breaking and entering - if property was stolen, they might; but otherwise, they're just going to laugh you off.
The obsession with the word "hacking" -- which you're further propagating with your post -- is exactly why the sensationalist media labeled this a hacking incident. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While I do agree that what LeMenger and others does warrant disciplinary action, I think that if you read the full findings of the investigation, you might realize that what took place was not nearly as bad as you make it out to be, and I daresay even understandable. The full story can be found in President Tilghman's statement. Here's a better summary that I posted somewhere else yesterday:
The statement explains each of the accesses, which basically comes down to LeMenager testing Yale's security and getting in, then showing how he did it to others three times, then 8 accesses by "junior" members who then thought it was OK and were interested in whether certain students were accepted, and one more access they're not clear on (actually, they mention a total of 14 accesses from the admissions office, but I only count them explaining 13?). As expected, all of the accesses were _after_ the decisions letters were dropped off at the post office. More interestingly, LeMenager isn't being fired (on account of his 20 years of experience, it seems), but he is being moved out of the admissions office. For now, he's being moved to the Communications Office, and according to a local paper (this isn't in Tilghman's statement) his salary will remain the same as it was before.
According to the full findings, LeMenager first entered the information because he wanted to see what he expected was a step 2 of the sign-in process, which would likely be a PIN number or password - wound up it wasn't there. Three more accesses were LeMenager showing his superior, Dean Hargadon, and others how it worked. The some junior staff members, seeing this, though it was ok to check the site themselves, thus leading to a total of 14 accesses - all of which are justifiable, even if they still deserve punishment.
Furthermore, there was a very interesting take on the fiasco published on Slate yesterday; go ahead and read the full story there. The independent author makes a strong case saying that the only reason Yale bothered to accuse Princeton of wrongdoing was that the Yale Daily Herald had discovered what was happened, and was about to make the report public; Yale wanted to distract attention away from their inadequate security, and did so by blaming Princeton.
There's plenty of evidence to back Princeton's excuse that they were just "testing" the system. Princeton doesn't have any system up to inform students of their admissions decisions online; Yale does. Princeton IS evaluating ways to do this, and it would appear that they were actually testing how well Yale's system works. In doing so, they found that Yale's system did NOT work so well.
And what did they do? Like the responsible hackers who merely hack to test for security holes and whose stories are sometimes linked here on Slashdot, they tried to tell the Yale people that their system was insecure. How does Yale respond? Do they thank Princeton for the warning? No, they report them to the police! If this were any "normal" hacker warning of security holes they found, everyone here would be up in arms!
OK, so what Princeton did was obviously stupid, immoral, and probably illegal, and certainly deserving of punishment. But while the Yale Daily Herald does mention Princeton's explanation/excuse, they do so in very dismissive terms, and several friends of mine who read the article entirely missed the excuse and thought that this hacking was purely malicious. It was NOT, and it would be nice if that were noted. Then again, this is Slashdot, which isn't exactly famous for its impartiality =)
(Disclaimer: I was one of the students who got into Princeton this year, so I'm biased. Any other current students or incoming freshmen here?)
Speaking as someone who's had a TI-89 with full CAS since taking Algebra II, they can be a great help as an _aid_ to learning. I had one when learning the formulae for circles, ellipses, etc, and yes, it was great to be able to play around with changing the numbers in whatever spots and see how the graph changed. I've always been a math person, but near real-time visualization of the concepts definitely helps a lot of people learn.
That said, this is dependent on the student using the calculator only as an _aid_ to learning, not a replacement for it. After I bought mine, I watched as students in courses as simple as (remedial) Algebra I bought 89s, and the calculators solved the problems for them. Then even students in the honors sequence bought them when first getting to limits -- and I do know quite a few students who didn't know how to do limits by hand, yes passed tests solely by using their calculators.
But for someone like me, who actually learns the concepts before resorting to the calculator, it's a great help. Got a tricky integral for homework that you're having trouble with? Check the calculator's answer, and often the "form" of the answer will hint at how to solve it, and the next time you have a problem like that, you'll know how to solve it. Does your homework have even-numbered problems that don't have answers in the back of the book? Use the calculator to check your answers, and if you know you got one wrong, you can go back and figure out why.
Fast forward a few years, and I've just finished up Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra at a well-known US university, and the calculator was still a great help. Test and Quizzes were all done by hand, so a calculator won't get you through the course. But I can now check my homework bit-by-bit as I go through it, so a little mistake in matrix multiplication in the first step of a long problem won't result in a completely wrong answer 20-minutes later. It's saved me a lot of time and a lot of frustration, and of course I learn where I commonly make mistakes and can correct them. And you can extend the geometry comment made by this teacher to higher level math, like graphing quadratic forms -- after solving one, I could graph it and see the eigenvectors/principal axes, the signular values, etc. And I was able to take some of those 3d shapes that I had to integrate to find the volume and use the 3d grapher to see what they look like. And the calculator has quite a bit of differential equation functionality that I don't fully know how to use yet, but no doubt it will come in useful in the future.
So the calculators in and of themselves aren't bad; it's those who abuse and overuse them. Can anything be done about that? Well, having calculators banned on all tests did wonders for my math-by-hand skills. Let students use the calculators when learning the concepts, but when it comes to testing their application of those concepts, make sure you're testing the student and not the calculator.
TI has made a very preliminary announcement of Organizer software for the TI-89, TI-92+, and TI Voyage 200 graphing calculators at this page.
Unfortunately, TI hasn't officially provided much information, but having been involved in the TI dev scene quite a while, I've had the opportunity to play with beta versions of these apps quite a bit. They're slightly limited when compared to Palm because they don't have touchscreen input, although the 92+/Voyage 200 calculators have a full qwerty keyboard. The software is quite nice, and I've been using it full time since my Clie broke a few weeks ago. I'll have the Clie repaired under warrantee, but for the target demographics of TI's calculators (mostly students), the Organizer software is more than powerful enough to make somebody who purchases one of these calcs reconsider whether they need to carry around a PDA as well. And trust me, consolidating the two devices and freeing up a pocket is definitely something to look forward to.
The TI-89 and TI-92/92+ and the coming TI Voyage 200 (a souped-up 92+) all run plain vanilla 68000 processors at either 10 or 12 MHz. These have no math coprocessor, either; all floating point math is done with 10-byte BCD numbers and software. And the CAS on these calculators is a scaled-down version of Derive (both were designed by Soft Warehouse, Inc, which TI has since bought out).
So a powerful CAS is absolutely possible to run on PDAs, especially ones with ARM processors. It's just not too easy to write a full-fledged symbolic CAS, so nobody's gotten around to doing it yet. But it's entirely possible.
> > PPA, the girl next door. > > May I have your phone-number, please? I'd like to propose ASAP.
Dude, she told you she lives "next door." I know that many slashdot geeks shy away from personal contact, but you may find walking one house over much more effective than using the phone.
I'll second that recommendation. I bought the demotivators calendar for 2002, it's great, both for the pictures/slogans (this month: "Elitism -- It's lonely at the top. But it's comforting to look down upon everyone at the bottom). I'll be starting college this fall, and I'll be taking that with me.
Another neat item that I'll take along is my lava lamp. IMHO, no college dorm is complete without one; it just conveys the right attitude. They're not too expensive, either. Be sure to pick a color combination that fits the student's personality, too.
You are; MS has never made a HotSync coduit for either Outlook or Entourage on the PC or the Mac. There are a few third parties that make conduits to do this, but the pigs will be flying before MS even considers supporting Palm, which not only competes with them, but is _winning_ in the handheld market.
I think what the article means is a version of ActiveSync (that's what Microsoft's PocketPCs use) for Mac, because there currently isn't one. ActiveSync syncs to Outlook/Entourage, so it makes sense that this functionality would come with an Office X update.
the GPL allows him to charge a "distribution fee", which the license doesn't even say must be reasonable
Here's the section of the GPL you're refering to:
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange;
Notice that the "distribution fee" is limited. It cannot be more than it physically takes to distribute the code, so the person/company distributing it cannot make a profit or hide the source that way. The maximum they could charge in your example would be the price of making the CD and the price of mailing it.
As much as I'd like to believe you -- you appear to be the article's author, although there's always the chance that you're a troll imposter =) -- we've heard that same exact line about Westwood games too many times before. The first articles about Tiberian Sun and Renegade both swore that the magazines/websites had seen the game running and that they were actual screenshots -- and those were all lies. The later excuse was that the screenshots were created to "match the features we expected to be in the final product," but that goes against everything the early previews said.
And do I trust GameSpot? While I don't know offhand how often GameSpot has written articles using doctored screenshots, I do know that GameSpot acquired GameCenter. GameCenter was the first site to have a preview of SimCity 3000 (must have been a long time ago now), and they were proudly showing off a whole bunch of screenshots of a full-3d SimCity and writing about how beautiful it truly was. A few weeks later, Maxis backpedaled and announced that SC3k would only be 2d -- they admitted that a fully 3d simcity was beyond the capabilities of current hardware, even the top-of-the-line dual Pentium Pro 200s (I ran a very popular fan site - may it RIP - and received a copy of that official announcement from Aimee Howe at Maxis, back in February 98). So if Maxis says it won't run on their hardware, how could GameCenter claim that Maxis came to their office and ran it on their computers? In fact, the article had a whole page on whatever tech Maxis supposedly developed to make the 3d possible by scaling the amount of detail to the hardware capability. The answer is simple -- GameCenter, like so many other game-hype-publications, outright lied to its readers. So while the reasons I'm doubtful here are purely circumstantial, I've seen this total lack of integrity among simial publications too often to fall for it again.
I hate to break it to you, but Westwood has a history of faking development screenshots and lying about what features have already been implemented. They did it for Tiberian Sun and they did it for Renegade, and all of the gaming magazines and websites (including Gamespot) will happily fall for it when they get a chance to have "exclusive" news. And the poor saps reading this probably won't realize they've been duped until it takes 4 years for the game to come out (Renegade) or the final version of the game has inferior graphics and fewer features than the article says WW has _already_ developed (Tiberian Sun). I'll believe this when I see it.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, the difference between the simulated and the compiled circuits is analagous to difference between an interpreted language and compiled code, not a compiled language. It's more like Java vs. assembly than C vs. assembly.
Baumol's disease is named after William Baumol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Princeton University and current Professor of Economics an New York University, who deduced that labor productivity rises much faster - and therefore prices should fall faster - in the manufacturing sector than in the services sector (the services sector being where the product being sold is provided directly by a person, like a doctor or a teacher, rather than indirectly through physical goods). Health care is, of course, part of the services sector. Your expectation that health care, left alone over time, should stay the same price relative to wages is actually incorrect.
For a great explanation of Baumol's disease and its application to education (which, like health care, is part of the services sector), see this New York times article.
That's not to say that regulation hasn't created a mess of health care. But then again, you can also blame lack of government regulation for letting HMOs become oligopsonies (a few slightly-distinct buyers of a good, as opposed to a oligopoly which is just a fre sellers of a good; note that in this case oligopsony/oligopoly are only a few steps above monopsony/monopoly), or for letting the drug companies become monopolies (while they still hold the exclusive patent over a new drug) or monopsonies (when their patent expires and the limited generic competition comes into play).
There still hasn't been any ruling to say whether it's illegal for you to download songs you own (I suspect not), or whether it's illegal for you to provide songs you own (probably yes, because 99% of the people downloading them are doing it illegally and that's no secret to you), or in particular whether it's legal for person X who owns CD Y, upon verifying that person Z also owns CD Y, to provide the MP3s of that CD to Z (which seems that it should fit fair use, but the verification step is tough and might not convince a court to back it).
frist again! whoop-de-doo...
frist psot? yes, I think so!
See also Slate's Take, which makes a case similar to yours (that the real problem here is Yale's insecure system). Furthermore, it would appear that Yale had no intention of making any public accusations until after they found out that the story was going to go public the next (courtesy of the Yale Daily Herald, a student-run publication). At that point, they realized that publically blaming Princeton would distract attention from their negligence in using such an obviously flawed system.
The obsession with the word "hacking" -- which you're further propagating with your post -- is exactly why the sensationalist media labeled this a hacking incident. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Furthermore, there was a very interesting take on the fiasco published on Slate yesterday; go ahead and read the full story there. The independent author makes a strong case saying that the only reason Yale bothered to accuse Princeton of wrongdoing was that the Yale Daily Herald had discovered what was happened, and was about to make the report public; Yale wanted to distract attention away from their inadequate security, and did so by blaming Princeton.
And what did they do? Like the responsible hackers who merely hack to test for security holes and whose stories are sometimes linked here on Slashdot, they tried to tell the Yale people that their system was insecure. How does Yale respond? Do they thank Princeton for the warning? No, they report them to the police! If this were any "normal" hacker warning of security holes they found, everyone here would be up in arms!
OK, so what Princeton did was obviously stupid, immoral, and probably illegal, and certainly deserving of punishment. But while the Yale Daily Herald does mention Princeton's explanation/excuse, they do so in very dismissive terms, and several friends of mine who read the article entirely missed the excuse and thought that this hacking was purely malicious. It was NOT, and it would be nice if that were noted. Then again, this is Slashdot, which isn't exactly famous for its impartiality =)
(Disclaimer: I was one of the students who got into Princeton this year, so I'm biased. Any other current students or incoming freshmen here?)
two in three days?
Please don't be second again, please don't be second again...
That said, this is dependent on the student using the calculator only as an _aid_ to learning, not a replacement for it. After I bought mine, I watched as students in courses as simple as (remedial) Algebra I bought 89s, and the calculators solved the problems for them. Then even students in the honors sequence bought them when first getting to limits -- and I do know quite a few students who didn't know how to do limits by hand, yes passed tests solely by using their calculators.
But for someone like me, who actually learns the concepts before resorting to the calculator, it's a great help. Got a tricky integral for homework that you're having trouble with? Check the calculator's answer, and often the "form" of the answer will hint at how to solve it, and the next time you have a problem like that, you'll know how to solve it. Does your homework have even-numbered problems that don't have answers in the back of the book? Use the calculator to check your answers, and if you know you got one wrong, you can go back and figure out why.
Fast forward a few years, and I've just finished up Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra at a well-known US university, and the calculator was still a great help. Test and Quizzes were all done by hand, so a calculator won't get you through the course. But I can now check my homework bit-by-bit as I go through it, so a little mistake in matrix multiplication in the first step of a long problem won't result in a completely wrong answer 20-minutes later. It's saved me a lot of time and a lot of frustration, and of course I learn where I commonly make mistakes and can correct them. And you can extend the geometry comment made by this teacher to higher level math, like graphing quadratic forms -- after solving one, I could graph it and see the eigenvectors/principal axes, the signular values, etc. And I was able to take some of those 3d shapes that I had to integrate to find the volume and use the 3d grapher to see what they look like. And the calculator has quite a bit of differential equation functionality that I don't fully know how to use yet, but no doubt it will come in useful in the future.
So the calculators in and of themselves aren't bad; it's those who abuse and overuse them. Can anything be done about that? Well, having calculators banned on all tests did wonders for my math-by-hand skills. Let students use the calculators when learning the concepts, but when it comes to testing their application of those concepts, make sure you're testing the student and not the calculator.
Unfortunately, TI hasn't officially provided much information, but having been involved in the TI dev scene quite a while, I've had the opportunity to play with beta versions of these apps quite a bit. They're slightly limited when compared to Palm because they don't have touchscreen input, although the 92+/Voyage 200 calculators have a full qwerty keyboard. The software is quite nice, and I've been using it full time since my Clie broke a few weeks ago. I'll have the Clie repaired under warrantee, but for the target demographics of TI's calculators (mostly students), the Organizer software is more than powerful enough to make somebody who purchases one of these calcs reconsider whether they need to carry around a PDA as well. And trust me, consolidating the two devices and freeing up a pocket is definitely something to look forward to.
So a powerful CAS is absolutely possible to run on PDAs, especially ones with ARM processors. It's just not too easy to write a full-fledged symbolic CAS, so nobody's gotten around to doing it yet. But it's entirely possible.
> > PPA, the girl next door.
>
> May I have your phone-number, please? I'd like to propose ASAP.
Dude, she told you she lives "next door." I know that many slashdot geeks shy away from personal contact, but you may find walking one house over much more effective than using the phone.
Another neat item that I'll take along is my lava lamp. IMHO, no college dorm is complete without one; it just conveys the right attitude. They're not too expensive, either. Be sure to pick a color combination that fits the student's personality, too.
w00t. I've got karma to burn.
Are we up to over 323,000 users already? Wow.
in honor of seis de mayo!
breaking the blackout
I think what the article means is a version of ActiveSync (that's what Microsoft's PocketPCs use) for Mac, because there currently isn't one. ActiveSync syncs to Outlook/Entourage, so it makes sense that this functionality would come with an Office X update.
got karma to burn. . .
And do I trust GameSpot? While I don't know offhand how often GameSpot has written articles using doctored screenshots, I do know that GameSpot acquired GameCenter. GameCenter was the first site to have a preview of SimCity 3000 (must have been a long time ago now), and they were proudly showing off a whole bunch of screenshots of a full-3d SimCity and writing about how beautiful it truly was. A few weeks later, Maxis backpedaled and announced that SC3k would only be 2d -- they admitted that a fully 3d simcity was beyond the capabilities of current hardware, even the top-of-the-line dual Pentium Pro 200s (I ran a very popular fan site - may it RIP - and received a copy of that official announcement from Aimee Howe at Maxis, back in February 98). So if Maxis says it won't run on their hardware, how could GameCenter claim that Maxis came to their office and ran it on their computers? In fact, the article had a whole page on whatever tech Maxis supposedly developed to make the 3d possible by scaling the amount of detail to the hardware capability. The answer is simple -- GameCenter, like so many other game-hype-publications, outright lied to its readers. So while the reasons I'm doubtful here are purely circumstantial, I've seen this total lack of integrity among simial publications too often to fall for it again.
I hate to break it to you, but Westwood has a history of faking development screenshots and lying about what features have already been implemented. They did it for Tiberian Sun and they did it for Renegade, and all of the gaming magazines and websites (including Gamespot) will happily fall for it when they get a chance to have "exclusive" news. And the poor saps reading this probably won't realize they've been duped until it takes 4 years for the game to come out (Renegade) or the final version of the game has inferior graphics and fewer features than the article says WW has _already_ developed (Tiberian Sun). I'll believe this when I see it.