You can give that time back to the community by reviewing papers for other, open-access, venues. That way you fulfill your community obligations while also helping support open-access publishing.
I had to go recheck the Stanford course numbering system - looks like a 200-level is "advanced undergraduate/beginning graduate". So we're both right.
I agree that people might interpret the grades in the way you say, and that it could be a PR issue for Stanford, but I don't think it would actually be indicative of deep flaws in Stanford admissions (and here I mean undergrad admissions - my understanding is that admissions to the professional masters program mostly consist of "can you breathe, and does your employer have an enormous wad of cash for us?"). The objective function that Stanford is optimizing contains a lot of terms that are not reflected in someone's CS221 performance, so you'd only expect them to be somewhat correlated. Could all of the outside high-scorers also do well in a Stanford English class, do they have anything to contribute to the college community artistically, athletically, or in terms of their background (whether poor black kid from the south or non-native speaker from Japan, most elite schools put a lot of admissions resources into making their campus a mini-melting-pot on the theory that it's good for society and good for their students), and were they taking a bunch of other tough classes at the same time while playing in the orchestra and being involved in a bunch of student groups? (of course many outsiders would have real-world jobs; it would depend on the job and the Stanford student who actually had the tougher time) And of course some of the successful outsiders could be 40yo engineers who went to MIT or wherever back in the day, so it's not as if they're "excluded" from the elite education system.
Basically, I agree that it's possible this could expose that the Stanford admissions filter does not perfectly select for raw CS talent. But I don't think they ever claimed to do that, and I don't think there are many good arguments that they should.
You're right that most game AI doesn't use very sophisticated techniques, but just for the record it's not true that the Berkeley Overmind team found building a "true AI" (whatever that means) for Starcraft to be "beyond infeasible". They focused on mutas because they're easier to do micro with, but the higher-level strategic code is AFAIK pretty much race-agnostic. There's a build-order planner which can work with any set of building constraints you feed it, there's strategy selection which leverages results of scouting and just needs to know the basic details of units and buildings (e.g. if you observe the enemy building a Stargate, then as long as the AI has been told that Stargates produce air units and that Goliaths (say) can attack air units, then it will shift production towards Goliaths), there's a fair amount of prediction of when/where enemies will expand or attack that has to work for enemies of all races, and so on. The Overmind is certainly not a perfect rational agent (or even a perfect bounded-rational agent, which would be a more realistic goal), but it's much more sophisticated than a bunch of hacks around a mutalisk-micro script.
Source: I'm a Berkeley CS grad student, and I know a bunch of the Overmind authors and have been to a few of their meetings, though I didn't personally contribute code.
Stanford undergrad tuition is essentially free if your family makes less than $100k/yr. Need-based financial aid policies mean that the $55k number is an upper bound, typically paid in full only by families making $200k and above (with various exceptions, of course, but that's the general pattern). In any case, this is a grad course, so the price of undergrad tuition is not really relevant to the discussion.
Stanford CS PhD students generally have their tuition, as well as an additional stipend for living expenses, fully funded by research grant money, so they don't pay a cent. The only students taking this class who would actually be charged full tuition are likely those in the professional master's degree program, which is basically Stanford's way of siphoning money from Silicon Valley tech companies: the companies send their employees for training and pay Stanford to do it.
This is all to say that I don't think Stanford's trying to rip anyone off here (quite the contrary, since they're providing the course for free). But it's also a rare course which can be taught in this way. It's easy to write an autograder that runs programs submitted to it and checks to see if they produce the correct output; it's much harder to automatically provide feedback on an English paper or a mathematical proof. Similarly, it's easy to record your lectures and put them up on Youtube; it's much harder to replicate a classroom discussion facilitated by a true expert. So, a few large-lecture CS classes aside, the vast majority of classroom experiences (at Stanford or anywhere else) are going to be very difficult to replicate at a web scale, now and for the foreseeable future.
To respond to the first part of your comment, obviously "what a person can afford to pay" is subjective, and lots of families still don't find their education "cheap" (I have a friend who got roughly $51k of financial aid on a $52k bill, so his family's contribution was only $1k/yr - they still struggled to pay that). But most top schools don't expect students to take out student loans of any form (see this list on wikipedia), and I think most poor / middle-class families will find that their tuition bill at an elite school is smaller than it would be at a good state school; for example Berkeley tuition is $13k/yr for in-state students (not including room and board) and more than double that for out-of-state/international students, while Stanford just down the street has free tuition for any family earning less than $100k/yr. So again, you can argue that elite schools aren't the most needy targets for charitable donations (do we really need to help Stanford extend their free tuition offer up to families earning $150k?), but I don't think it's fair to say that they're actively trying to bleed their students.
I can't speak for Princeton directly, but I think top-tier university finances and top-tier LAC finances are similar enough that my experience at Williams might be relevant. Williams spends about $80k per student per year (roughly a $160M budget divided by 2k students). Nominal tuition is about $50k including room and board, and financial aid discounting means that the average student pays about $30k (some students pay the full $50k, but others pay nothing, and most pay somewhere in between). So the average student is getting about $50k spent on them that they're not paying for; that difference is funded primarily from endowment returns. I think this situation is similar at Harvard/Princeton/MIT - even full-fare students are paying less than the total amount that's being spent on them.
Where does that money go? At Williams it mostly goes towards people: a 7:1 student-faculty ratio and something like a 2.5:1 staff-student ratio. Williams employs 800 staff for 2000 students, which sounds ridiculous and probably is pretty ridiculous, but that includes everything from chefs and dining employees, to secretaries and departmental administrative assistants, to IT support, to mechanics and janitors and groundskeepers, to doctors and nurses and psych counselors and chaplains, to athletic coaches, to campus life coordinators and deans. I'm now in grad school at a much larger and less-well-funded state school (UC Berkeley), and it's amazing to see the contrast between the two institutions. A lot of kids get decent educations at Berkeley, and some do really well. But where at Williams I was taking classes with 20, 10, or even 2 students in them, Berkeley undergrad class sizes are in the hundreds. At Williams I was working on a research project with a prof by the end of my freshman year; at Berkeley most undergrads don't ever get a chance to get involved with research. And so on. You just don't get the same level of personal attention at a large state school (and Berkeley is one of the best large state schools!) as you do at a small private school. That level of attention is expensive to provide.
I've seen the studies about educational outcomes at elite schools before, and I believe them to a certain extent, but you have to be at least a bit careful interpreting their conclusions. I'm pretty sure I would have ended up "successful" by most metrics if I'd gone to a large state school like Berkeley, in the sense that I would have gotten decent grades and graduated and found a decent-paying job somewhere that I would have been happy with. But I probably wouldn't have gotten involved in research and ended up at a top grad school. I probably wouldn't have met nearly as diverse a group of friends from all around the country and around the world. I probably wouldn't have gotten to meet and have lengthy conversations with people like Dan Dennett and Steve Strogatz, and I probably wouldn't have had a whole bunch of other experiences that have made my life richer in ways that are not going to be measured by a few survey questions as to my "success".
You can certainly get a great education at a lot of schools (heck, if you're the right sort of student you can get a great education sitting at home with a textbook), though I dispute that your average "Springfield State School" has anywhere near the same level of amazing people and opportunities as a top-tier university (case in point: I was going to check out the course offerings of the SUNY Cortland computer science department to see how they compared to CS programs I'm familiar with, but it looks like they don't actually have a computer science department, just a minor in "computer applications"). But if you're lucky enough to be able to get into one of the elite schools, there are experiences you'll be able to get there that you just won't have at your average state school. I don't know if supporting elite schools is the best use of my money as a potential alumni donor, because obviously there are a lot of other worthy causes in the world. But I do think th
Some schools might. But as I said, the top tier of American universities are need-blind and guarantee to meet full financial need for all students, domestic and international. One of my best friends from college is from Bangalore, not from the slums but certainly not a rich family, and he paid $0 in tuition for four years at the number-one-ranked undergrad school in the US (Williams College, which has nominal tuition of $50k/yr, but which guarantees to meet full need for all students and is just a couple of technicalities away from being the seventh entry on my list above), so it does happen. And it's not even a rare thing; the majority of my international student friends paid little or no tuition (and of course, neither do many domestic students).
People don't understand that in the top tier of American education, it's not about money. Harvard is swimming in so much money they've actually seriously debated whether they should eliminate tuition entirely and just become free for all applicants; the only reason they haven't done this is that they're already free or very cheap for basically any middle-class family, so the only people who would benefit from such a change are the people who are rich enough to not need it. MIT is not quite that rich, but they're rich enough to offer very generous aid to any international student they admit. And that's exactly what they do, because their reputation as one of the best schools in the world is very much dependent on their having the best students in the world, and that means making sure people can come regardless of their ability to pay.
Just curious, what school did you go to? My experience from friends at wide range of schools is that there are a lot of mid-tier American schools which do make an effort to squeeze their students dry, but the schools at the very top tend to be wealthy enough (thanks to alumni donations) that they can afford to have very generous financial aid policies. MIT in particular is one of only six American schools that do need-blind admissions for all students and which guarantee to meet full financial need (the others are Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Amherst). That means that no one at MIT looks at how much money you have when they decide whether to admit you, and once you're admitted you're guaranteed whatever financial aid is necessary to allow you to attend based on your family's financial documents. I think MIT's financial aid policies are slightly less generous than, say, Harvard, which is actually free if your family earns under $60k/yr, but that's only because Harvard's endowment is more than three times as large.
Basically, the argument that schools like MIT make to their alumni is that when you donate to MIT, you're not giving your money to a large faceless entity with a $8 billion endowment staffed with administrators who light their cigars with $100 bills. You're giving it to a poor kid from the slums of Bangalore who is able to come to MIT and fulfill his/her potential because of generous alumni like you, who have allowed MIT to provide a $300k education for free to anyone who can qualify. Obviously you can believe this sort of thing to varying degrees, but apparently Bose's experiences working at MIT for several decades came to convince him that it is, as an institution, overall a force for good in the world.
Dude, no offense, but did you read the statement you linked to? Google has a simple process for removing imagery from Street View, which the property owners chose not to use. Google's not fighting to keep the photos up (since they would have happily taken them down if asked, and I think they might have done it anyway by now); they're fighting to avoid having to pay damages. It's hard to see how any damage was caused, since photos of the same house from street level were already publicly available online through their realtor's site (as well as satellite imagery, etc.), and the house is on a street that is not clearly marked as private.
Sure, Google probably shouldn't have taken the picture in the first place, but it's hard to argue that this is the beginning of some nefarious plan to start indexing the world's private property. One of their drivers made a mistake, drove down a private lane that was not clearly marked as such, and now they're trying to avoid paying large sums of money to a couple who suffered no real damages and are clearly not acting in good faith.
Maybe because the private property in question wasn't actually marked? From your link:
"In its dismissal motion, Google noted that it intends to prove that there was "no clearly marked 'Private Road' sign at the beginning" of the Borings's street."
I don't know about you, but I tend to assume that roads connecting to public roads are themselves public unless otherwise noted, especially when there are multiple homes connected to the same "driveway".
Those restrictions only applies to commercial emails, as is implied by the header on the page you linked to ("Facts for Business"). The text of the bill confirms this:
(1) PROHIBITION OF FALSE OR MISLEADING TRANSMISSION INFORMATION- It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission, to a protected computer, of a commercial electronic mail message, or a transactional or relationship message, that contains, or is accompanied by, header information that is materially false or materially misleading. For purposes of this paragraph--
(A) header information that is technically accurate but includes an originating electronic mail address, domain name, or Internet Protocol address the access to which for purposes of initiating the message was obtained by means of false or fraudulent pretenses or representations shall be considered materially misleading;
(B) a `from' line (the line identifying or purporting to identify a person initiating the message) that accurately identifies any person who initiated the message shall not be considered materially false or materially misleading; and
(C) header information shall be considered materially misleading if it fails to identify accurately a protected computer used to initiate the message because the person initiating the message knowingly uses another protected computer to relay or retransmit the message for purposes of disguising its origin.
First, and again, I know him, which means I know something of his character. "He is the real deal" has become my favorite new phrase. Everything about him, personally, is what you would dream a candidate should be. Integrity, brilliance, warmth, humor and most importantly, commitment. They all say they're all this. But for me, this part is easy, because about this one at least, I know.
Second, I believe in the policies. Clearly on the big issues -- the war and corruption. Obama has made his career fighting both. But also on the issues closest to me. As the technology document released today reveals, to anyone who reads it closely, Obama has committed himself to important and importantly balanced positions.
First the importantly balanced: You'll read he's a supporter of Net Neutrality. No surprise there. But read carefully what Net Neutrality for Obama is. There's no blanket ban on offering better service; the ban is on contracts that offer different terms to different providers for that better service. And there's no promise to police what's under the technical hood (beyond the commitment already articulated by Chairman Powell): This is a sensible and valuable Net Neutrality policy that shows a team keen to get it right -- which includes making it enforceable in an efficient way, even if not as radical as some possible friends would like.
Second, on the important: As you'll read, Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works. The small part of that is simple efficiency -- the appointment with broad power of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology systems of government actually work.
But the big part of this is a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn't just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington.
After the debacle that is the last 7 years, the duty is upon the Democrats to be something different. I've been wildly critical of their sameness (remember "Dems to the Net: Go to hell" which earned me lots of friends in the Democratic party). I would give my left arm to be able to celebrate their difference. This man, Mr. Obama, would be that difference. He has as much support as I can give.
Firstly, fair enough not being to uninstall an update to a product, but surely you'd expect to be able to fix the problem by uninstalling QuickTime? Is this problem caused by Apple virtually integrating it into the OS on Macs?
That's like saying you should be able to fix a problem caused by a bad version of libc simply by uninstalling libc. It doesn't work that way. Quicktime isn't screwing up the way other apps process video; Quicktime is the way those apps process video.
"Possibly the most massive, energetic, and powerful particles in the universe, the hardon exhibits an incredibly long decay time. While most particles decay after a few microseconds, the hardon tends to last 10-15 minutes. Hardons are formed by interactions of hitons ("sex" bosons), but can also be found in the presence of high energy partyons.
Hardons can decay quickly when subjected to bombardment by negative leadons. When a hardon interaction occurs and a leadon is present, the hardon emits a lot of energy and emits a comeon (guilt boson).
The hardon has a relatively common antiparticle, nominally called the tampon, which will annihilate with the hardon producing tremendous amounts of heat energy in process cosmologists call the "big lack of bang." Energy emitted in this process is detectable only in erenkov counters.
The discovery of the hardon proved to be the most significant discovery in recent particle physics. After the research team of Herzog, Walter, and Chandler made their discovery, they began work on a Sex-Death-Guilt Unification Theory. While their new theory has not been published, it has already made an impact on the scientific community, and hormone levels in labs around the world have soared to record levels."
Contrary to what a bunch of people here seem to think, a jury does NOT have the option of totally ignoring the law.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure they do (although most likely the court(s) you served in tried to convince you otherwise). A jury cannot be punished for their verdict, and the accused cannot be retried (double jeopardy). Thus the jury can base their decisions on whatever the fuck they want and there's nothing anyone can do about it. This is quite well established; look up "jury nullification" on Wikipedia for some basic references.
Tracking software doesn't just recompile cleanly across OSs. They'd almost certainly have to rewrite the whole thing, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
That's because a cheap digital camera five years ago was $400 and 3MP. Now it's $120 and 7MP. You can't really compare the two because of course some sacrifices have to be made to get that kind of resolution at that price. But for the price of your last "cheap" camera you can now get a top-of-the-line camera that would blow it away.
The supply of tickets for big-name acts was artificially limited by artists themselves relying on copyright royalties rather than working a regular gig year round. The big-names were getting money from record sales. Now, if they want to make the same amount of money they used to do, they can do three or ten times as many live shows as they used to, rather than lounge around for most of the year living the good life. And they can do shows in smaller more intimate venues too.
I guess that depends on the artist. My last concert was Roger Waters a few weeks ago in Boston at the Banknorth Center. He's been touring more or less constantly for the past two years, this was his third show in Boston in that time, and yet it was still sold out and even the decent tickets cost $100 (and were well worth it, by the way). Front-row seats (through scalpers) were going for much, much more.
What more could you possibly expect him to do to lower prices? Traveling to a new city every day and putting on a show every night is extremely taxing and very few people can keep it up for any extended period of time. Even ignoring the stresses of performance, touring takes artists away from their families and distracts them from writing and recording new music. Sure, most musicians enjoy performing, but you've got to have downtime too. It's extremely impressive if an artist can pull 100 shows a year, and that won't even cover North America/Europe once over with any thoroughness.
Besides, the idea that musicians owe you anything in terms of a number of performances is a little bit ridiculous. If I'm a successful musician and I want to take ten years off for myself to build a family, go back to school, whatever, and I've earned the cash to do that, who the hell are you to stop me? Would you then berate me for high ticket prices if I decided to put on the occasional concert? Also, keep in mind that playing smaller venues only increases ticket prices, since the experience is better and the seats are even more limited.
Just create an eight-character password with one number and one capital letter. It will work just about anywhere (you might need a spot of punctuation on rare occasions, in which case just stick a period on the end). Password requirements may be inconsistent in borderlines cases, but if you just stay away from the borderline there's no problem.
No offense, but you and everyone who modded you up are ignorant of basic economics. It's unfortunate that the market price of big-name concert tickets has gotten so high, but there's not much that artists (or anyone) can do about it: concert seats are a limited resource. Artists can charge market value for those seats, ensuring that anyone who wants to pay can get one, or they can lower prices and create an artificial shortage because there would be far more people wanting to buy seats than there are seats available, which seems to be what you're advocating.
The problem is that this doesn't actually lower the market value of those seats. Nothing Elton John can do (short of sabotaging performance quality) will change the fact that there are enough people to fill a hall willing to pay $150 to see him. Even if he lowers prices, these people will still want tickets, and they'll still be willing to pay top dollar for them; this is a scalper's dream. Every possible non-market-based system for allocating limited tickets is exploitable by scalpers, and if Elton decided to lower prices to $30/seat, scalpers would snatch up every ticket and then start reselling them for $150. A few normal people might manage to get cheap seats, but the net effect would be that most seats would still go for $150 or more, and it'd be the scalpers getting the profit instead of the musicians/techs/venue/etc. That's not really good for anyone except the scalpers.
Re:Bad arguments and bad reasoning
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The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's a fallacious way to rephrase things because "break" has several meanings, and "breaking" a law is not the same thing as "breaking" DRM. One important difference: If someone breaks a law, the law still stands and can be effective in other cases. OTOH, once DRM is hacked (or "broken" if you must confuse terms), it's effectively useless - it only takes one exploited flaw for decrypted media to end up on p2p networks.
Slashdot Mirror
You can give that time back to the community by reviewing papers for other, open-access, venues. That way you fulfill your community obligations while also helping support open-access publishing.
I had to go recheck the Stanford course numbering system - looks like a 200-level is "advanced undergraduate/beginning graduate". So we're both right.
I agree that people might interpret the grades in the way you say, and that it could be a PR issue for Stanford, but I don't think it would actually be indicative of deep flaws in Stanford admissions (and here I mean undergrad admissions - my understanding is that admissions to the professional masters program mostly consist of "can you breathe, and does your employer have an enormous wad of cash for us?"). The objective function that Stanford is optimizing contains a lot of terms that are not reflected in someone's CS221 performance, so you'd only expect them to be somewhat correlated. Could all of the outside high-scorers also do well in a Stanford English class, do they have anything to contribute to the college community artistically, athletically, or in terms of their background (whether poor black kid from the south or non-native speaker from Japan, most elite schools put a lot of admissions resources into making their campus a mini-melting-pot on the theory that it's good for society and good for their students), and were they taking a bunch of other tough classes at the same time while playing in the orchestra and being involved in a bunch of student groups? (of course many outsiders would have real-world jobs; it would depend on the job and the Stanford student who actually had the tougher time) And of course some of the successful outsiders could be 40yo engineers who went to MIT or wherever back in the day, so it's not as if they're "excluded" from the elite education system.
Basically, I agree that it's possible this could expose that the Stanford admissions filter does not perfectly select for raw CS talent. But I don't think they ever claimed to do that, and I don't think there are many good arguments that they should.
You're right that most game AI doesn't use very sophisticated techniques, but just for the record it's not true that the Berkeley Overmind team found building a "true AI" (whatever that means) for Starcraft to be "beyond infeasible". They focused on mutas because they're easier to do micro with, but the higher-level strategic code is AFAIK pretty much race-agnostic. There's a build-order planner which can work with any set of building constraints you feed it, there's strategy selection which leverages results of scouting and just needs to know the basic details of units and buildings (e.g. if you observe the enemy building a Stargate, then as long as the AI has been told that Stargates produce air units and that Goliaths (say) can attack air units, then it will shift production towards Goliaths), there's a fair amount of prediction of when/where enemies will expand or attack that has to work for enemies of all races, and so on. The Overmind is certainly not a perfect rational agent (or even a perfect bounded-rational agent, which would be a more realistic goal), but it's much more sophisticated than a bunch of hacks around a mutalisk-micro script.
Source: I'm a Berkeley CS grad student, and I know a bunch of the Overmind authors and have been to a few of their meetings, though I didn't personally contribute code.
Stanford undergrad tuition is essentially free if your family makes less than $100k/yr. Need-based financial aid policies mean that the $55k number is an upper bound, typically paid in full only by families making $200k and above (with various exceptions, of course, but that's the general pattern). In any case, this is a grad course, so the price of undergrad tuition is not really relevant to the discussion.
Stanford CS PhD students generally have their tuition, as well as an additional stipend for living expenses, fully funded by research grant money, so they don't pay a cent. The only students taking this class who would actually be charged full tuition are likely those in the professional master's degree program, which is basically Stanford's way of siphoning money from Silicon Valley tech companies: the companies send their employees for training and pay Stanford to do it.
This is all to say that I don't think Stanford's trying to rip anyone off here (quite the contrary, since they're providing the course for free). But it's also a rare course which can be taught in this way. It's easy to write an autograder that runs programs submitted to it and checks to see if they produce the correct output; it's much harder to automatically provide feedback on an English paper or a mathematical proof. Similarly, it's easy to record your lectures and put them up on Youtube; it's much harder to replicate a classroom discussion facilitated by a true expert. So, a few large-lecture CS classes aside, the vast majority of classroom experiences (at Stanford or anywhere else) are going to be very difficult to replicate at a web scale, now and for the foreseeable future.
To respond to the first part of your comment, obviously "what a person can afford to pay" is subjective, and lots of families still don't find their education "cheap" (I have a friend who got roughly $51k of financial aid on a $52k bill, so his family's contribution was only $1k/yr - they still struggled to pay that). But most top schools don't expect students to take out student loans of any form (see this list on wikipedia), and I think most poor / middle-class families will find that their tuition bill at an elite school is smaller than it would be at a good state school; for example Berkeley tuition is $13k/yr for in-state students (not including room and board) and more than double that for out-of-state/international students, while Stanford just down the street has free tuition for any family earning less than $100k/yr. So again, you can argue that elite schools aren't the most needy targets for charitable donations (do we really need to help Stanford extend their free tuition offer up to families earning $150k?), but I don't think it's fair to say that they're actively trying to bleed their students.
I can't speak for Princeton directly, but I think top-tier university finances and top-tier LAC finances are similar enough that my experience at Williams might be relevant. Williams spends about $80k per student per year (roughly a $160M budget divided by 2k students). Nominal tuition is about $50k including room and board, and financial aid discounting means that the average student pays about $30k (some students pay the full $50k, but others pay nothing, and most pay somewhere in between). So the average student is getting about $50k spent on them that they're not paying for; that difference is funded primarily from endowment returns. I think this situation is similar at Harvard/Princeton/MIT - even full-fare students are paying less than the total amount that's being spent on them.
Where does that money go? At Williams it mostly goes towards people: a 7:1 student-faculty ratio and something like a 2.5:1 staff-student ratio. Williams employs 800 staff for 2000 students, which sounds ridiculous and probably is pretty ridiculous, but that includes everything from chefs and dining employees, to secretaries and departmental administrative assistants, to IT support, to mechanics and janitors and groundskeepers, to doctors and nurses and psych counselors and chaplains, to athletic coaches, to campus life coordinators and deans. I'm now in grad school at a much larger and less-well-funded state school (UC Berkeley), and it's amazing to see the contrast between the two institutions. A lot of kids get decent educations at Berkeley, and some do really well. But where at Williams I was taking classes with 20, 10, or even 2 students in them, Berkeley undergrad class sizes are in the hundreds. At Williams I was working on a research project with a prof by the end of my freshman year; at Berkeley most undergrads don't ever get a chance to get involved with research. And so on. You just don't get the same level of personal attention at a large state school (and Berkeley is one of the best large state schools!) as you do at a small private school. That level of attention is expensive to provide.
I've seen the studies about educational outcomes at elite schools before, and I believe them to a certain extent, but you have to be at least a bit careful interpreting their conclusions. I'm pretty sure I would have ended up "successful" by most metrics if I'd gone to a large state school like Berkeley, in the sense that I would have gotten decent grades and graduated and found a decent-paying job somewhere that I would have been happy with. But I probably wouldn't have gotten involved in research and ended up at a top grad school. I probably wouldn't have met nearly as diverse a group of friends from all around the country and around the world. I probably wouldn't have gotten to meet and have lengthy conversations with people like Dan Dennett and Steve Strogatz, and I probably wouldn't have had a whole bunch of other experiences that have made my life richer in ways that are not going to be measured by a few survey questions as to my "success".
You can certainly get a great education at a lot of schools (heck, if you're the right sort of student you can get a great education sitting at home with a textbook), though I dispute that your average "Springfield State School" has anywhere near the same level of amazing people and opportunities as a top-tier university (case in point: I was going to check out the course offerings of the SUNY Cortland computer science department to see how they compared to CS programs I'm familiar with, but it looks like they don't actually have a computer science department, just a minor in "computer applications"). But if you're lucky enough to be able to get into one of the elite schools, there are experiences you'll be able to get there that you just won't have at your average state school. I don't know if supporting elite schools is the best use of my money as a potential alumni donor, because obviously there are a lot of other worthy causes in the world. But I do think th
Some schools might. But as I said, the top tier of American universities are need-blind and guarantee to meet full financial need for all students, domestic and international. One of my best friends from college is from Bangalore, not from the slums but certainly not a rich family, and he paid $0 in tuition for four years at the number-one-ranked undergrad school in the US (Williams College, which has nominal tuition of $50k/yr, but which guarantees to meet full need for all students and is just a couple of technicalities away from being the seventh entry on my list above), so it does happen. And it's not even a rare thing; the majority of my international student friends paid little or no tuition (and of course, neither do many domestic students).
People don't understand that in the top tier of American education, it's not about money. Harvard is swimming in so much money they've actually seriously debated whether they should eliminate tuition entirely and just become free for all applicants; the only reason they haven't done this is that they're already free or very cheap for basically any middle-class family, so the only people who would benefit from such a change are the people who are rich enough to not need it. MIT is not quite that rich, but they're rich enough to offer very generous aid to any international student they admit. And that's exactly what they do, because their reputation as one of the best schools in the world is very much dependent on their having the best students in the world, and that means making sure people can come regardless of their ability to pay.
Basically, the argument that schools like MIT make to their alumni is that when you donate to MIT, you're not giving your money to a large faceless entity with a $8 billion endowment staffed with administrators who light their cigars with $100 bills. You're giving it to a poor kid from the slums of Bangalore who is able to come to MIT and fulfill his/her potential because of generous alumni like you, who have allowed MIT to provide a $300k education for free to anyone who can qualify. Obviously you can believe this sort of thing to varying degrees, but apparently Bose's experiences working at MIT for several decades came to convince him that it is, as an institution, overall a force for good in the world.
Sure, Google probably shouldn't have taken the picture in the first place, but it's hard to argue that this is the beginning of some nefarious plan to start indexing the world's private property. One of their drivers made a mistake, drove down a private lane that was not clearly marked as such, and now they're trying to avoid paying large sums of money to a couple who suffered no real damages and are clearly not acting in good faith.
"In its dismissal motion, Google noted that it intends to prove that there was "no clearly marked 'Private Road' sign at the beginning" of the Borings's street."
I don't know about you, but I tend to assume that roads connecting to public roads are themselves public unless otherwise noted, especially when there are multiple homes connected to the same "driveway".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb
An excerpt:
That's like saying you should be able to fix a problem caused by a bad version of libc simply by uninstalling libc. It doesn't work that way. Quicktime isn't screwing up the way other apps process video; Quicktime is the way those apps process video.
Have you ever lived near a paper mill? There's some nasty, nasty stuff going on in those places.
"Possibly the most massive, energetic, and powerful particles in the universe, the hardon exhibits an incredibly long decay time. While most particles decay after a few microseconds, the hardon tends to last 10-15 minutes. Hardons are formed by interactions of hitons ("sex" bosons), but can also be found in the presence of high energy partyons.
Hardons can decay quickly when subjected to bombardment by negative leadons. When a hardon interaction occurs and a leadon is present, the hardon emits a lot of energy and emits a comeon (guilt boson).
The hardon has a relatively common antiparticle, nominally called the tampon, which will annihilate with the hardon producing tremendous amounts of heat energy in process cosmologists call the "big lack of bang." Energy emitted in this process is detectable only in erenkov counters.
The discovery of the hardon proved to be the most significant discovery in recent particle physics. After the research team of Herzog, Walter, and Chandler made their discovery, they began work on a Sex-Death-Guilt Unification Theory. While their new theory has not been published, it has already made an impact on the scientific community, and hormone levels in labs around the world have soared to record levels."
Contrary to what a bunch of people here seem to think, a jury does NOT have the option of totally ignoring the law.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure they do (although most likely the court(s) you served in tried to convince you otherwise). A jury cannot be punished for their verdict, and the accused cannot be retried (double jeopardy). Thus the jury can base their decisions on whatever the fuck they want and there's nothing anyone can do about it. This is quite well established; look up "jury nullification" on Wikipedia for some basic references.
You can do exactly that, but it's really slow and hurts the Tor network by holding up legitimate traffic.
Tracking software doesn't just recompile cleanly across OSs. They'd almost certainly have to rewrite the whole thing, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
That's because a cheap digital camera five years ago was $400 and 3MP. Now it's $120 and 7MP. You can't really compare the two because of course some sacrifices have to be made to get that kind of resolution at that price. But for the price of your last "cheap" camera you can now get a top-of-the-line camera that would blow it away.
The supply of tickets for big-name acts was artificially limited by artists themselves relying on copyright royalties rather than working a regular gig year round. The big-names were getting money from record sales. Now, if they want to make the same amount of money they used to do, they can do three or ten times as many live shows as they used to, rather than lounge around for most of the year living the good life. And they can do shows in smaller more intimate venues too.
I guess that depends on the artist. My last concert was Roger Waters a few weeks ago in Boston at the Banknorth Center. He's been touring more or less constantly for the past two years, this was his third show in Boston in that time, and yet it was still sold out and even the decent tickets cost $100 (and were well worth it, by the way). Front-row seats (through scalpers) were going for much, much more.
What more could you possibly expect him to do to lower prices? Traveling to a new city every day and putting on a show every night is extremely taxing and very few people can keep it up for any extended period of time. Even ignoring the stresses of performance, touring takes artists away from their families and distracts them from writing and recording new music. Sure, most musicians enjoy performing, but you've got to have downtime too. It's extremely impressive if an artist can pull 100 shows a year, and that won't even cover North America/Europe once over with any thoroughness.
Besides, the idea that musicians owe you anything in terms of a number of performances is a little bit ridiculous. If I'm a successful musician and I want to take ten years off for myself to build a family, go back to school, whatever, and I've earned the cash to do that, who the hell are you to stop me? Would you then berate me for high ticket prices if I decided to put on the occasional concert? Also, keep in mind that playing smaller venues only increases ticket prices, since the experience is better and the seats are even more limited.
As in, insanely popular and used all over the web?
Just create an eight-character password with one number and one capital letter. It will work just about anywhere (you might need a spot of punctuation on rare occasions, in which case just stick a period on the end). Password requirements may be inconsistent in borderlines cases, but if you just stay away from the borderline there's no problem.
No offense, but you and everyone who modded you up are ignorant of basic economics. It's unfortunate that the market price of big-name concert tickets has gotten so high, but there's not much that artists (or anyone) can do about it: concert seats are a limited resource. Artists can charge market value for those seats, ensuring that anyone who wants to pay can get one, or they can lower prices and create an artificial shortage because there would be far more people wanting to buy seats than there are seats available, which seems to be what you're advocating.
The problem is that this doesn't actually lower the market value of those seats. Nothing Elton John can do (short of sabotaging performance quality) will change the fact that there are enough people to fill a hall willing to pay $150 to see him. Even if he lowers prices, these people will still want tickets, and they'll still be willing to pay top dollar for them; this is a scalper's dream. Every possible non-market-based system for allocating limited tickets is exploitable by scalpers, and if Elton decided to lower prices to $30/seat, scalpers would snatch up every ticket and then start reselling them for $150. A few normal people might manage to get cheap seats, but the net effect would be that most seats would still go for $150 or more, and it'd be the scalpers getting the profit instead of the musicians/techs/venue/etc. That's not really good for anyone except the scalpers.
That's a fallacious way to rephrase things because "break" has several meanings, and "breaking" a law is not the same thing as "breaking" DRM. One important difference: If someone breaks a law, the law still stands and can be effective in other cases. OTOH, once DRM is hacked (or "broken" if you must confuse terms), it's effectively useless - it only takes one exploited flaw for decrypted media to end up on p2p networks.