In fact, didn't congress squash legistation for participating in the lan mine ban this year? So not only are land mines not illegal, we won't vote to make them illegal.
But the AC might have been refering to other laws in the Nicaragua case, perhaps, and i'm just guessing here, it's not cool to mine international waters?
I (and my co-workers) used the BlackBox 4 port switches with a varity of PC's (Linux and Win), Suns, and HP workstations (the HP's aren't really supported though). They are pretty pricy > $400 but they work well enough that you shouldn't get flicker or wierdness, even at high resolution.
If you're someone who is bothered by refresh less than 75 or faint shadowing, then you should also spring for high end shielded cables (at least for the monitor and your main machine). They are also pricy > $40 but they make a big difference.
But, in general, it isn't always easy to vote w/ your dollars. 1st you have to know that the issue exists. Then you have to figure out if the company you're dealing with is producing the product or service in the way you want.
This can get really tricky when local, national and global politics get involved. Industries lobby to hide information from the consumers when full disclosure would cost sales.
ben and jerries had to fight to be allowed to mark their ice cream as "bovine growth hormone free" since such labeling had been made illegal in the US.
but remember that the world trade organization has been getting heavily involved in this area and has gloal juristiction, so canada isn't completely safe from this madness
quite a few US companies require a "pre-employment drug screening" from everyone (even engineers). but there are plenty that don't.
it seems really common in big huge corporations that adopted lame assed hysterical policies in the 80's and haven't updated them to match the geek shortage of the 90's.
don't worry though, they would tell you about it before you were hired, so you wouldn't get stuck in a position where you accept a job and then are suprised with a drug test down the road. you would have ample oppertunity to reject their offer and tell them exactly why.
fyi, i haven't head of engineers getting the "periodic, random, at-any-point-in-the-future" type tests. so you'll always have the option of "selling-out" and submiting to the one-time test, if you're desperate for a job. (so long as you can keep it cool for a few weeks)
I agree that CMU could nuke connections for any reason, but just because they could kill connections, dosen't mean they had to. CMU could have also chosen a less heavy handed approach, such as warning the students first, or nuking connections for a short period of time. They had a lot of choices.
The fact of the matter is that the CMU administration, when setting policies, consistantly chooses to give little or no wieght to the student perspective. The students were invloved in illegal activity, and the school had a right to pull connectivity, but if I was paying through the nose for dorm housing (500/mo to live in 1 room with 1-3 other people, sharing a bathroom with 2-20 other people and sharing a kitchenette w/ 100+ people is pretty bad for the area) (oh, and freshmen can't opt out of dorm housing) Where was I? Oh, so if i were paying through the nose for housing, and depended on computer access to do my homework (for a CS the hours on line can *really* add up), and the public computer clusters were totally maxed out during "crunch-times", and I didn't have the option of using a private ISP, and lost connectivity for a month for maintaining a public Dilbert archive, well I might be a little bitter.
(although they did wait till after mid-terms before pulling the plug)
As an alum, the attitude of the administration really resonnates with me. It's a shame since there are some really great faculty and labs there.
Ever see that commercial where the guy is in the grocery store shoving items in his pockets and then exits through an arch in the front of the store? The punchline is that the security guard yells "Excuse me sir... you forgot your receipt", producing the slip of paper from the aforementioned arch.
Well, I mention it because if someone develops a cheap way for a "smart fridge" to know what items are in it, something simmilar to the arch in the commercial, then when arranging your grocery delivery online from work (which I sometimes do), you can answer burning questions like "Am I out of milk?" And if your grocery delivery supported your fridge, you could let the grocer figure out if you need milk.
Silly, perhaps. But if I happened to be in the market for a new fridge anyway, I'd pay some extra $$$ (probably not more than $100 extra) for that kind of thing. It would take a lot of spoiled milk to make it pay for itself, but people who cook a lot would get a lot of convienece for the buck.
Another one I can think of is the VCR. If you've ever really wanted to tape some show and realize after you've left that you forgot to set the VCR, then you might appreciate some sort of VCR network interface.
Again, this is a silly luxury, and wouldn't sell well unless it could be delivered pretty cheaply.
In general, people won't have every appliance networked, but the appliance manufacturers who can develop really useful and cool network options will make some money off of it. It's just like web pages, there are thousands of comanies with useless web sites... and no one cares. But the few who really offer something useful and well suited to the web, make a killing.
MS hasn't been found guilty of a crime yet, but the judges statement implies that he feels that he will find them guilty of some monopoly related crime. Now that doesn't mean jack sh*t legally, but it is a stern warning: play nice or we'll nail your ass to the wall, bill.
"Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products"
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm mistaken, but if you have a monopoly and use your position to mainain a monoploly, then that's a crime. I doubt that the judge would make so strong a statement if he wasn't pretty confident. After all, he could have said that MS is capable of using it's position, instead of saying that MS has demonstrated that it will use it's position.
While the UXes are quite viable (and preferable) in the server market, WINTEL dominates the desktop market. I don't think even the hardcore slashdotters think that Linux will dominate the desktop in the next few years.
My original post (which you jummped all over) mearly stated that 1) market forces don't mean shit in this case (i.e. when all the blind people boycott AOL they'll be sorry... yeah, right) and 2) Running a buisiness requires a licence/charter from the state your running it in, and AFAIK that has been the case for a very long time.
If permission to run a buisiness is granted by a state, then it can also be taken away, so it is entirely possible for states to enforce an ADA. I believe you said somewhere that you would have no problem with a state ADA law either.
Now, I didn't realize until this thread that the ADA is enforced by the feds, and that is odd, to say the least. But I'm not all that concerned with the state vs. federal power struggle. It seems that the states' rights issue is *very* important to you. That's cool, but I think that you're looking for a debate that isn't there. I never claimed that the federal govenment has rights not granted in the constitution, nor do I want to.
I do like the general concept of the ADA and would vote for something simmilar if it were raised as a state referendum.
Anyway, if you want to see an interseting article on states revoking corporate charters check out:
"You may like to think that laize-fair (SP?) economics is an constitutional right, but it isn't."
And then you said:
"Actually you'd be mistaken there. The right to own private property IS a constitutional one, and it is this that is the foundation for the free market."
Which is where the confusion comes in, see, I said that free market economy isn't in the constitution and you said that I was wrong, which implies that you belive free market to be in it, so I and the AC pointed out that the constitution makes no mention of a right to unfettered commerce.
The offensive tone you take in claiming that you made no such implication is a common troll tactic. But a smart guy like you already knows that.
The AC did a very good job of responding to this rant, but I'll add a few words of my own.
The ADA dosn't infringe on private property rights, you can build your private house/workshop/etc. as inaccessably as you want, you can build a freakin tree house, no one cares. Same goes for your private homepage. Simmilarly, neither the federal nor state govenment can make you wash you hands before cooking dinner in your house or force you to allow people of other races to visit.
Only when you make a commercial building/website/etc. do govenment rules apply. The constitution may protect private property rights but it does not give the right to unfettered commerce.
The constitution does specifically state that the federal govenment can control interstate commerce and many of the existing the state govenments had already begun regulating intrastate commerce before the constitution was drafted.
In short, states have regulated buisinesses within the state even *before* the constitution.
One of the main goals of the constitution was to have a central body for regulating commerce that crossed state borders (they were having problems with having to pay a seperate tax for each state that you transport your goods through).
Private companies have been regulated in the US since the first colonies.
It is this regulation of buisineses that is the basis for require buisinesses to charge sales tax, be built with ramps, have clean kitchens and not discriminate.
If a state can charge sales tax, then why can't that state also make other demands? You may not like it, but it's the same use of authority.
Now, I never said that the state is obligated to protect the disabled. I said that if the state didn't protect the disabled, then the disabled would have a lower quality of life. This seemed like a pretty obvious point to me, but the person I was originally responding to seemed to think that some sort of free market miracle would take care of everything.
We can choose to have the state use it's power to protect the disabled, or we could choose to have the state keep out of it. The power has always been there, the ADA just uses it in a new way. If you don't like the ADA, then you should complain to your representative. Who knows, maybe you can get it struck down, but if you do it won't be because of constitutional concerns.
We can either require accessability or leave it to market forces.
There simply aren't enough disabled people to have the kind of market impact needed to make accessability a high priority. No one's gonna go out of buisiness because they've lost the blind or handicaped consumer (well, except for disability related products)
So, if we leave it to market forces, perhaps a few nice companies will make themselves accessable, and disabled people can hunt around for the few places with ramps, braile and wide bathroom stalls. Or we can require accessability so that diabled people can live some sort of independent life.
Running a buisiness requires a licence granted by the state (not the feds). The law has been like this for some time (at least 150 years) so it's not like there is an unalienable right to run a buisiness in a given state. In fact, at the turn of the (last) century, there were cases where states revoked licences from buisiness that were grossly negligent (i think it was over worker safety).
You may like to think that laize-fair (SP?) economics is an constitutional right, but it isn't.
It is totally possible and common for blind people to have software that reads the text to them. That's why it is important to include alt tags and provide some form of non-gui navigation.
There is actually a lot of software and hardware out there.
People buying high-end workstations and servers generally don't build their own. Most people with 3+ grand to blow on a machine are doing it because they really need a high end workstation/server for work and don't have time to mess around with DYI. Corporate customers buy assembled boxes from known companies, usually with service contracts. Even if you can get motherboards, AMD can't live off of the super duper hard core gamers market (i.e. the guys who'll blow a few grand building the ultimate quake box).
A quick look at http://www.zdnet.com/computershopper/ (not where i shop but where lots of "tyical" customers shop) shows the following brands of PIII Xenon Workstations: Compaq, HP, IBM, MidWestMicro and SGI and for servers: Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, MidWestMicro and Vision Computers.
for Athelon Workstations the list is a bit different: 1st ACS Computers, Amtron, Axis Systems, Cyber Max, Micro Trends, MidwestMicro, Multiwave Technology, Royal Computer and Xxera. And there is no listing of Athelon Servers.
My point was: given the choice between making the patent process more or less expensive, I'd prefer less expensive.
I'm not saying that I like the current IP trends. I'm not saying that like all the software patents. And I never said anything bad about the GPL. But given the current state of IP law, I would prefer to see "the little guy" have a few viable choices.
We can advocate for free software and we can advocate for gutting the software patent system, but we can also advocate to make the existing system a bit more accessable.
For the record, given a choice, I like the GPL option the best, but employers often require developers to give up this choice.
This is kinda like the tort reform that was floating around capitol hill last year...
Big companies can always manage to pay the fines, it's individuals and small groups who would find a 10K fine devistating. And there is no gaurentee that your patent application, no matter how well intended, won't get fined. And it's not like the patent process needs any help being totally inaccessable to the average individual.
They do invent something and they develop it enough to demonstrate the idea, but they don't put in the level of investment needed to actually release it as a product. You can invent something without actually selling it to the public.
It takes a lot of money to get something throught the patent process. You can easily spend on the order of 10's of thousands on lawyers and research (have to ensure that on one else patented it before you).
And it takes years to find out of you actually got the patent. And it could all be for nothing if someone else submitted the same thing a day before you did (you can't find out what patents are in the 2-3 year processing pipe, you can only find out about them after they're approved/rejected).
So big companies can afford to "invest" in an agressive patent policy (i.e. getting patents for things just to keep competitors from making them, even though the patent holder will never create the patented stuff). Meanwhile, any person or group who isn't totally rich could get nailed to the wall if they develop some cool software without heavy VC backing.
Does this mean that a future Carmack could have his Doom engine patented out from under him?
CMU does have a pretty misreable attrition rate, although the assembly-line undergrad education is a problem to some extent at many major universities. It is very dishaertning to see that universities are buisinesses that are primarily concerened with the bottom line (i.e. corporate research money). (Note that the drama department also has a notorious impact on attrition as well)
The CMU School of Computer Science (SCS) has been making improvements to the undergrad CS expirence and the undergrad dean (props to Mark Stehlik!) is *extremly* dedicated to this goal. He has driven major changes in the intro to CS class, making them more accessable, with a special intro lab (on macs, so the freshmen don't have to worry about picking up UNIX when they are trying to grok function and var) and TA's are on duty in the into lab all evening and weekend. These days, (if memory serves) undergrads are admitted directly into SCS, so they start out with Mark as their advisor right away. If you are having trouble w/ a class, he'll arrange to pay another student to tutor you. And he does advocate to keep the class size small, although SCS is it's own college and has improved autonomy, ultimately the university controlls admissions. (and I doubt that Mark would reccomend skipping calc 1 w/ a 3, I had a hard time getting permission to skip CS 1 w/ a 5)
While there are some truly evil administrators in the university, and at times it can be pretty miserable (and don't get me started on the food), but for CS I would HIGHLY recommend CMU. You will learn so much, and have the opportunity to see some really cool research, and the quality of the degree is very much recognized in the industry.
I can't speak for the other departments, but I would be reluctant to attend CMU for humanities (you'll spend all your time down the street at PITT if you need to use a real library) and some of the engieering programs seem to treat the undergrads like cattle.
Ultimately, I think that a lot of kids start college without knowing how to work it. Thus, universities get away w/ over admitting because they still percieve school as something that *they make you do* whne the reality is that you have to be driven and demand resources. Unfortunately, if you don't want to or don't know how to use the university to your advantage, you can either go to a lameo school and pass without learning anything or go to a hard school and either flunk out or get your shit together.
Granted, they haven't been at it (mp3 releases that is) anywhere near as long as TMBG, but it was in the news recently so you'd think the fickle mind of the press would remember.
But maybe it's that TMBG and PE didn't do this in conjunction with a "leading record company"?
But I'm under the impression that TMBG and PE coudn't give a sh*t about any "leading record company". While DB didn't go from from being very near bankruptcy in the late 70's to being richer than Paul McCartney today, by thumbing his nose at the recording industry.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, didn't congress squash legistation for participating in the lan mine ban this year? So not only are land mines not illegal, we won't vote to make them illegal.
But the AC might have been refering to other laws in the Nicaragua case, perhaps, and i'm just guessing here, it's not cool to mine international waters?
I'm actually pleasantly suprised that the pentagon is concerned enough about these issues to reasearch and address them.
...
If they really want to avoid violating international law, they are wise to make that perfectly clear.
of course, it could be a smokescreen
I (and my co-workers) used the BlackBox 4 port switches with a varity of PC's (Linux and Win), Suns, and HP workstations (the HP's aren't really supported though). They are pretty pricy > $400 but they work well enough that you shouldn't get flicker or wierdness, even at high resolution.
If you're someone who is bothered by refresh less than 75 or faint shadowing, then you should also spring for high end shielded cables (at least for the monitor and your main machine). They are also pricy > $40 but they make a big difference.
But, in general, it isn't always easy to vote w/ your dollars. 1st you have to know that the issue exists. Then you have to figure out if the company you're dealing with is producing the product or service in the way you want.
This can get really tricky when local, national and global politics get involved. Industries lobby to hide information from the consumers when full disclosure would cost sales.
ben and jerries had to fight to be allowed to mark their ice cream as "bovine growth hormone free" since such labeling had been made illegal in the US.
but remember that the world trade organization has been getting heavily involved in this area and has gloal juristiction, so canada isn't completely safe from this madness
quite a few US companies require a "pre-employment drug screening" from everyone (even engineers). but there are plenty that don't.
it seems really common in big huge corporations that adopted lame assed hysterical policies in the 80's and haven't updated them to match the geek shortage of the 90's.
don't worry though, they would tell you about it before you were hired, so you wouldn't get stuck in a position where you accept a job and then are suprised with a drug test down the road. you would have ample oppertunity to reject their offer and tell them exactly why.
fyi, i haven't head of engineers getting the "periodic, random, at-any-point-in-the-future" type tests. so you'll always have the option of "selling-out" and submiting to the one-time test, if you're desperate for a job. (so long as you can keep it cool for a few weeks)
If MS made a stratiegic alliance with SuperCuts.
(o.k. a cheap shot, I couldn't resist)
in this case i think it's because no one else cares.
i wonder if MSNBC is *obligated* to hype every lame MS press release.
how bout a dunce cap with the caption "really obvious sh*t"
I agree that CMU could nuke connections for any reason, but just because they could kill connections, dosen't mean they had to. CMU could have also chosen a less heavy handed approach, such as warning the students first, or nuking connections for a short period of time. They had a lot of choices.
The fact of the matter is that the CMU administration, when setting policies, consistantly chooses to give little or no wieght to the student perspective. The students were invloved in illegal activity, and the school had a right to pull connectivity, but if I was paying through the nose for dorm housing (500/mo to live in 1 room with 1-3 other people, sharing a bathroom with 2-20 other people and sharing a kitchenette w/ 100+ people is pretty bad for the area) (oh, and freshmen can't opt out of dorm housing) Where was I? Oh, so if i were paying through the nose for housing, and depended on computer access to do my homework (for a CS the hours on line can *really* add up), and the public computer clusters were totally maxed out during "crunch-times", and I didn't have the option of using a private ISP, and lost connectivity for a month for maintaining a public Dilbert archive, well I might be a little bitter.
(although they did wait till after mid-terms before pulling the plug)
As an alum, the attitude of the administration really resonnates with me. It's a shame since there are some really great faculty and labs there.
Do you need to network your fridge? Of couse not!
...
... you forgot your receipt", producing the slip of paper from the aforementioned arch.
... and no one cares. But the few who really offer something useful and well suited to the web, make a killing.
Would you want to network your fridge, perhaps
Ever see that commercial where the guy is in the grocery store shoving items in his pockets and then exits through an arch in the front of the store? The punchline is that the security guard yells "Excuse me sir
Well, I mention it because if someone develops a cheap way for a "smart fridge" to know what items are in it, something simmilar to the arch in the commercial, then when arranging your grocery delivery online from work (which I sometimes do), you can answer burning questions like "Am I out of milk?" And if your grocery delivery supported your fridge, you could let the grocer figure out if you need milk.
Silly, perhaps. But if I happened to be in the market for a new fridge anyway, I'd pay some extra $$$ (probably not more than $100 extra) for that kind of thing. It would take a lot of spoiled milk to make it pay for itself, but people who cook a lot would get a lot of convienece for the buck.
Another one I can think of is the VCR. If you've ever really wanted to tape some show and realize after you've left that you forgot to set the VCR, then you might appreciate some sort of VCR network interface.
Again, this is a silly luxury, and wouldn't sell well unless it could be delivered pretty cheaply.
In general, people won't have every appliance networked, but the appliance manufacturers who can develop really useful and cool network options will make some money off of it. It's just like web pages, there are thousands of comanies with useless web sites
"Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products"
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm mistaken, but if you have a monopoly and use your position to mainain a monoploly, then that's a crime. I doubt that the judge would make so strong a statement if he wasn't pretty confident. After all, he could have said that MS is capable of using it's position, instead of saying that MS has demonstrated that it will use it's position.
But this still could drag on forever ...
While the UXes are quite viable (and preferable) in the server market, WINTEL dominates the desktop market. I don't think even the hardcore slashdotters think that Linux will dominate the desktop in the next few years.
If permission to run a buisiness is granted by a state, then it can also be taken away, so it is entirely possible for states to enforce an ADA. I believe you said somewhere that you would have no problem with a state ADA law either.
Now, I didn't realize until this thread that the ADA is enforced by the feds, and that is odd, to say the least. But I'm not all that concerned with the state vs. federal power struggle. It seems that the states' rights issue is *very* important to you. That's cool, but I think that you're looking for a debate that isn't there. I never claimed that the federal govenment has rights not granted in the constitution, nor do I want to.
I do like the general concept of the ADA and would vote for something simmilar if it were raised as a state referendum.
Anyway, if you want to see an interseting article on states revoking corporate charters check out:
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/charter/death.h tml
You'll probably hate it :)
OK so I said:
"You may like to think that laize-fair (SP?) economics is an constitutional right, but it isn't."
And then you said:
"Actually you'd be mistaken there. The right to own private property IS a constitutional one, and it is this that is the
foundation for the free market."
Which is where the confusion comes in, see, I said that free market economy isn't in the constitution and you said that I was wrong, which implies that you belive free market to be in it, so I and the AC pointed out that the constitution makes no mention of a right to unfettered commerce.
The offensive tone you take in claiming that you made no such implication is a common troll tactic. But a smart guy like you already knows that.
The AC did a very good job of responding to this rant, but I'll add a few words of my own.
The ADA dosn't infringe on private property rights, you can build your private house/workshop/etc. as inaccessably as you want, you can build a freakin tree house, no one cares. Same goes for your private homepage. Simmilarly, neither the federal nor state govenment can make you wash you hands before cooking dinner in your house or force you to allow people of other races to visit.
Only when you make a commercial building/website/etc. do govenment rules apply. The constitution may protect private property rights but it does not give the right to unfettered commerce.
The constitution does specifically state that the federal govenment can control interstate commerce and many of the existing the state govenments had already begun regulating intrastate commerce before the constitution was drafted.
In short, states have regulated buisinesses within the state even *before* the constitution.
One of the main goals of the constitution was to have a central body for regulating commerce that crossed state borders (they were having problems with having to pay a seperate tax for each state that you transport your goods through).
Private companies have been regulated in the US since the first colonies.
It is this regulation of buisineses that is the basis for require buisinesses to charge sales tax, be built with ramps, have clean kitchens and not discriminate.
If a state can charge sales tax, then why can't that state also make other demands? You may not like it, but it's the same use of authority.
Now, I never said that the state is obligated to protect the disabled. I said that if the state didn't protect the disabled, then the disabled would have a lower quality of life. This seemed like a pretty obvious point to me, but the person I was originally responding to seemed to think that some sort of free market miracle would take care of everything.
We can choose to have the state use it's power to protect the disabled, or we could choose to have the state keep out of it. The power has always been there, the ADA just uses it in a new way. If you don't like the ADA, then you should complain to your representative. Who knows, maybe you can get it struck down, but if you do it won't be because of constitutional concerns.
We can either require accessability or leave it to market forces.
There simply aren't enough disabled people to have the kind of market impact needed to make accessability a high priority. No one's gonna go out of buisiness because they've lost the blind or handicaped consumer (well, except for disability related products)
So, if we leave it to market forces, perhaps a few nice companies will make themselves accessable, and disabled people can hunt around for the few places with ramps, braile and wide bathroom stalls. Or we can require accessability so that diabled people can live some sort of independent life.
Running a buisiness requires a licence granted by the state (not the feds). The law has been like this for some time (at least 150 years) so it's not like there is an unalienable right to run a buisiness in a given state. In fact, at the turn of the (last) century, there were cases where states revoked licences from buisiness that were grossly negligent (i think it was over worker safety).
You may like to think that laize-fair (SP?) economics is an constitutional right, but it isn't.
It is totally possible and common for blind people to have software that reads the text to them. That's why it is important to include alt tags and provide some form of non-gui navigation.
There is actually a lot of software and hardware out there.
For example:
http://www.artictech.com/
People buying high-end workstations and servers generally don't build their own. Most people with 3+ grand to blow on a machine are doing it because they really need a high end workstation/server for work and don't have time to mess around with DYI. Corporate customers buy assembled boxes from known companies, usually with service contracts. Even if you can get motherboards, AMD can't live off of the super duper hard core gamers market (i.e. the guys who'll blow a few grand building the ultimate quake box).
A quick look at http://www.zdnet.com/computershopper/ (not where i shop but where lots of "tyical" customers shop) shows the following brands of PIII Xenon Workstations: Compaq, HP, IBM, MidWestMicro and SGI
and for servers: Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, MidWestMicro and Vision Computers.
for Athelon Workstations the list is a bit different: 1st ACS Computers, Amtron, Axis Systems, Cyber Max, Micro Trends, MidwestMicro, Multiwave Technology, Royal Computer and Xxera.
And there is no listing of Athelon Servers.
My point was: given the choice between making the patent process more or less expensive, I'd prefer less expensive.
I'm not saying that I like the current IP trends. I'm not saying that like all the software patents. And I never said anything bad about the GPL. But given the current state of IP law, I would prefer to see "the little guy" have a few viable choices.
We can advocate for free software and we can advocate for gutting the software patent system, but we can also advocate to make the existing system a bit more accessable.
For the record, given a choice, I like the GPL option the best, but employers often require developers to give up this choice.
This is kinda like the tort reform that was floating around capitol hill last year ...
Big companies can always manage to pay the fines, it's individuals and small groups who would find a 10K fine devistating. And there is no gaurentee that your patent application, no matter how well intended, won't get fined. And it's not like the patent process needs any help being totally inaccessable to the average individual.
They do invent something and they develop it enough to demonstrate the idea, but they don't put in the level of investment needed to actually release it as a product. You can invent something without actually selling it to the public.
It takes a lot of money to get something throught the patent process. You can easily spend on the order of 10's of thousands on lawyers and research (have to ensure that on one else patented it before you).
And it takes years to find out of you actually got the patent. And it could all be for nothing if someone else submitted the same thing a day before you did (you can't find out what patents are in the 2-3 year processing pipe, you can only find out about them after they're approved/rejected).
So big companies can afford to "invest" in an agressive patent policy (i.e. getting patents for things just to keep competitors from making them, even though the patent holder will never create the patented stuff). Meanwhile, any person or group who isn't totally rich could get nailed to the wall if they develop some cool software without heavy VC backing.
Does this mean that a future Carmack could have his Doom engine patented out from under him?
CMU does have a pretty misreable attrition rate, although the assembly-line undergrad education is a problem to some extent at many major universities. It is very dishaertning to see that universities are buisinesses that are primarily concerened with the bottom line (i.e. corporate research money). (Note that the drama department also has a notorious impact on attrition as well)
The CMU School of Computer Science (SCS) has been making improvements to the undergrad CS expirence and the undergrad dean (props to Mark Stehlik!) is *extremly* dedicated to this goal. He has driven major changes in the intro to CS class, making them more accessable, with a special intro lab (on macs, so the freshmen don't have to worry about picking up UNIX when they are trying to grok function and var) and TA's are on duty in the into lab all evening and weekend. These days, (if memory serves) undergrads are admitted directly into SCS, so they start out with Mark as their advisor right away. If you are having trouble w/ a class, he'll arrange to pay another student to tutor you. And he does advocate to keep the class size small, although SCS is it's own college and has improved autonomy, ultimately the university controlls admissions. (and I doubt that Mark would reccomend skipping calc 1 w/ a 3, I had a hard time getting permission to skip CS 1 w/ a 5)
While there are some truly evil administrators in the university, and at times it can be pretty miserable (and don't get me started on the food), but for CS I would HIGHLY recommend CMU. You will learn so much, and have the opportunity to see some really cool research, and the quality of the degree is very much recognized in the industry.
I can't speak for the other departments, but I would be reluctant to attend CMU for humanities (you'll spend all your time down the street at PITT if you need to use a real library) and some of the engieering programs seem to treat the undergrads like cattle.
Ultimately, I think that a lot of kids start college without knowing how to work it. Thus, universities get away w/ over admitting because they still percieve school as something that *they make you do* whne the reality is that you have to be driven and demand resources. Unfortunately, if you don't want to or don't know how to use the university to your advantage, you can either go to a lameo school and pass without learning anything or go to a hard school and either flunk out or get your shit together.
The Kinder Zorb!
The Perfect Babysitting Tool!
Granted, they haven't been at it (mp3 releases that is) anywhere near as long as TMBG, but it was in the news recently so you'd think the fickle mind of the press would remember.
But maybe it's that TMBG and PE didn't do this in conjunction with a "leading record company"?
But I'm under the impression that TMBG and PE coudn't give a sh*t about any "leading record company". While DB didn't go from from being very near bankruptcy in the late 70's to being richer than Paul McCartney today, by thumbing his nose at the recording industry.