any decent football programs brings in millions more than they spend. just in case you thought it was wasted money, it usually is not.
While that condition is true for only (roughly) 36-48 universities and colleges nation-wide, I do not argue that those who have a prominent place in, say, the NCAA (US football org) can rake in megabucks per year. (Everyone else scrapes by as best they can, or they simply do without).
Meanwhile, we have, as perfect example, these beasties (PDF). Don't ask about the price tags.
Granted that at least half of these are working hospitals, but the majority of the inbound dough isn't coming out of the Ute football program, nor is the majority coming from private/alumni donations... them thar's your tuition (and tax) monies at work. This is the same UofU that has one hell of a large business and IP incubation program, and a 300+ acre, 37-building complex referred to as Research Park. Note that I'm not picking on the UofU per se, but it is a place that I am highly familiar with, as it is a fellow BoR member as my former employer's of long ago.
(by the by, the UofU is also incidentally one of the very first nodes on what eventually became the Internet - the other node was at UC Berkeley).
W
You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free.
As someone who once was a collegiate instructor and employee, I can say for certain that no self-respecting board-of-regents-member college would even think of lowering tuition, for any reason. Scholarships, sure... as long as the money comes out of somebody else's wallet. Student financial aid? Again, they love it - but on the same premise as Scholarships. Work-Study programs? Okay, but it's the equivalent of getting offshore-priced labor on their part.
No, my friend... no way in Hell you'd ever see a Uni drop tuition pricing in response to a flush of patent-money. They'd rather spend the dough on a new football stadium, or on perks for the tenured and administration.
The one and only condition that would see a tuition price drop is in response to a drop in head-count, or in response to any new competition (e.g. University of Phoenix opening a new campus in the same town or city...)
Re:Circuit City shoppers are the Slashdot standard
on
Hostile ta Vista, Baby
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Dunno... all his whining aside, there is a valid point buried in there: Why can't Vista check it on IPv4 if IPv6 is broke at a given destination? Hell, I see Fedora Core and RHEL do it every time I run a kickstart install on something... it tries IPv6 first, and if it doesn't get the IPv6 love, it drops to IPv4 and tries again (yes, you can force it to IPv4 only, but it's harmless).
I grok the general push to IPv6 and all, but you'd think they would have at least tried to follow the (what I thought to be) common 'check first then fail gracefully' behavior...
What does surprise me is that my company allows me to use Outlook Web Interface which 1) works in Linux & 2) works in Firefox 2.0. Most surprisingly it's quite slick!
Meh - I use Evolution to do that (with the exchange-connector package). I still have the corp-issued 'doze laptop, but the only use it gets nowadays is the occasional rdesktop session for some ActiveX-based web tools that some items (e.g. one of our NetApp SAN rigs) stupidly insist on.
(Now if I can only rig up Pidgin to replace Communicator, I'd be golden...:) )
I love the one from Cadence that required a license key which in turn ties into a specific MAC address before it'll start up... hope the NIC doesn't die (I'm currently stuck with seeing if I can get a VM instance going and fake the same MAC for a migration... not looking good, and not a day goes by that I don't curse my predecessor for installing that POS in the first place).
Hell, my management fears vendor lock-in more than they fear Death itself (which probably explains why we're a very heavy Linux shop)...
I realize that a lot of PHB's couldn't care less (and an alarming # of CIO's and IT management don't either), but we're far enough along now that it's starting to bite a lot of accountants and IT critters square in the ass.
IMHO, it does matter, and it explains why a lot of shops are moving away from proprietary solutions, going to Linux/BSD and such.
Now if only we can definitively tackle the two biggest examples of attempted vendor lock-in alive (Exchange and MS Office), we'd be set.
But to make this business model work, it requires that the entire planet changes the way it does things and I get to control when, how or *if* how you use the stuff I sell to you. Sound good to you?
Can't - I sent off the patent for it five minutes after I saw your post. You'll have to pay me royalties if you want that kind of omnipotence.
( I know, I know... prior art: but those were mere attempts by the likes of Mussolini, Hitler, Tojo, Napoleon, Caesar, Lenin, etc etc... so they don't count ).
True, but the idea is that if he's working from a SAM or shadow file written to pilfered backup tape, or got the password DB by use of a whole host of tools designed to suck out a Windows AD SAM from a server to your laptop over, say, a wifi network connection made in the parking lot or somesuch... e.g. you have the hash file, but don't have a clue as to what it contains. A lot of tools are designed to exploit holes in Windows' Active directory to get a copy of the SAM without all the bother of logging in (most required physical access to the box and a reboot, but IIRC there were some that didn't, depending on the exploit used).
In the corporate espionage type break-ins, it makes more sense to not poke around too much and break stuff as you go, but instead concentrate on finding the means by which you can return to the network with your presence all dressed up as a legit user or three. This way, you have relatively more time and leisure with which to poke around in. If you add your own account (modify a file) and give it privs, you're liable to get someone's attention (self-audits, internal file integrity sweeps such as AFICK provides, etc...). If you merely copy a file, there's less of a potential fuss.
The tangents and possibilities can go on and on, mostly because security and breaking-in can become less of a science, and more of an art form.:)
/P (who sees bits and pieces of it from time to time)
Well, since you asked, yes, you would probably be guilty here in my country, Norway.
In that case, when do we see Google banned (specifically, Google cache)? And the Wayback Machine while we're at it?
I'm not saying it to pick a fight, but it stands to reason that Google's cache and archive.org can be modified easily enough by anyone with the right know-how (basically, you just modify the site that either one is caching). Will the IFPI demand their removal next?
The whole Child Porn thing is IMHO a red herring. Child Pornography is direct evidence of a criminal act (namely, the sexual abuse of a minor), and blocking such things is done in deference to the victims, not because it's liable to bring civil charges. TPB, even if all it ever did was IP violation, contains zero evidence of any crime (IP and copyright violations are civil acts, not criminal ones - it only becomes criminal when you try to sell the copies).
In this case, we're talking about a court bending over backwards to satisfy the civil demands of a cartel, and in the process do two things:
1) create bad precedents, and
2) perform collateral blockage (I think the legal term is "estoppel"?) against legitimate distributors who use/rely on that particular torrent tracker.
It isn't that TPB is some great big illegal operation (it is perfectly legal within the framework of their jurisdiction), nor that they act as a torrent tracker (they are, for torrents regardless of content*).
The big deal is that there is a great big precedent where information is blocked due to content.
We often praise people who find ways to break past China and Saudi Arabia's forms of Internet censorship... why all the sudden do you cheer the same censorship in an EU member state?
Do you realize that all I would need to do to shut down a torrent tracker in Denmark now is to post a link or four leading to some IFPI-owned content, then pack off a C&D notice? I have no kick against someone wanting to control stuff that they have rights to, but the route they took to do so is appalling, to say the least. I don't poison a noisy neighborhood dog to get him quiet, I go to the dog's owner and see about getting him to keep his animal quiet. The IFPI did the equivalent of setting out buckets of antifreeze in this analogy... and it is IMHO wrong.
/P
* this does include a rather large amount of links leading to legal/legit content, such as: WoW patches, Linux distros/updates, FOSS binaries, artist-permitted multimedia distribution, and various other items of a perfectly IP-respecting nature).
The tech support load I didn't think of... and you're right ab't that.
OTOH, they can deflect the 'aiding and abetting' charge by saying it has nothing to do with TPB. Simply post a news/press release about how it's part of a super-secret networking efficiency R&D project that Tele2 has going (or somesuch)... as long as the proxies are legit and legally open (e.g. no compromised machines), IMHO it would be fairly litigation-proof.
Now if anyone were to build a toolbar(?) that any ol' user could install and automatically seek and use legit open proxies upon hitting a single on-off button, then stupid rulings like this would be impossible.
Tele2 can post a list of legal open proxies on their website, and instructions on how to set one up? They can still comply with the court order, but meanwhile stick by their principles.
The original SST project (US) never got off the ground, and the Concorde was nothing more than a status symbol for those who could afford the ungodly high ticket price for the NYC-London (or Paris) run. The Soviet version (TU-144?) only had a limited set of routes as well, and Aeroflot killed it off (IIRC) about the same time the USSR crashed.
The issues boiled down to two things that no amount of tech could alleviate: Noise issues (property owners near the airports got highly vocal about having to replace cracked windows from the occasional sonic booms), and price ($25k 1st class from NYC to Paris? And now you get to suffer the indignities of airport security too? Sounds like a masochist's dream come true...)
Unless/until they solve at least those two issues (in spite of public pronouncement, it doesn't look like they have IMHO - yet), they're going to have a hard time with it's initial public image, fuel economy be damned.
Sure the economics of volume may drop the price, and sure the noise problem can be solved through strict pilot discipline (e.g. no cracking the sound barrier until you're x miles away and at y altitude), but that won't change public perception that Concorde planted firmly in the public mind back during the 1970's).
OTOH, the tech is cool, and I can see a very solid use for it for trans-pacific passengers... Seattle to Tokyo in 3 hours instead of 12? Frickin' awesome...
I have no kick against funding basic research at all...
My problem is that this funding goes from being a benevolent grant to a research institution, to becoming a perceived right and entitlement.
Note that this doesn't apply to just research grants, either - everything from corporate welfare programs to Medicare becomes an annual contest to see who can squeeze the most milk out of the governmental teat. What were once programs designed as social safety nets and promotional programs, have become horrific and competing demands for more, more more...
don't boost Medicare as much as the AARP demands? Why, you beast you! How DARE you leave the elderly to die!
don't boost educational funding as much as demanded by the teacher unions and school districts? "You're hurting our kids!" (in spite of the fact that education was once a completely state and locally-funded thing...)
don't boost (insert corporate welfare program here) by as much as (insert lobbyist org here) demanded? You're killing off (insert industry here)!
Meanwhile? You, me, and most other rational human beings know full well that for the most part, we're spending (m/b)illions more this year than we did last year. Nobody is going to die, no business collapses, no school fails - but each year the hyperbole comes marching along.
You know? 100 years ago, congress-critters would compete for re-election by bragging about how they kept the government out of everyones' lives. Now they do it by bragging on how much pork they managed to drag home to their respective constituencies.
Again, I have no kick against funding things such as research, industry promotional programs, and social safety net programs. However, I think that each and every one of them should --with damned few exceptions-- have to either get a set non-renewable amount for a set period of time (and not a dime more), or they must re-compete each year for the same level of funding they got the year before. Then we have a non-political panel at the OMB go over each program with a scalpel, and start hacking/slashing those programs that have no provable value at all (e.g. corporate welfare). The savings get rolled into next year's budget.
Actually, that doesn't (or at least shouldn't) matter. If you're given a grant (or series thereof) for x amount, you shouldn't expect "x plus inflation", but instead only plan for spending just "x". That way you're not surprised when you get the same amount next year that you got last year.
A grant or federal funding isn't a paycheck or living-expense-qualified income - it's a set amount that you should plan against, and only for the period that it is given to you.
(and yeah, I'd love to find a job like Congress where I can vote in my own pay raises too, but... Say, does either house of Congress need a sysadmin?)
or studies into the effectiveness of abstinence, as a method of HIV prevention.
It works 100% of the time. Why would there need to be a study?
Err, because HIV, as a liquid-borne virus, can be transmitted through many more routes than just sex?
(e.g ask anyone still alive who got it from a tainted blood transfusion back in the 1980's).
I fear that your response was almost something for a researcher to point at as actual justification for having such a study and publishing it... (e.g. transmission prevention via various sexual protections vs. transmission through other common forms of human-to-human liquid transmission, etc).
Err, I disagree with some bits of it...
1. Some research is so basic that there's no near-term mass-market application.
IIRC there's currently a shedload of funding (albeit belated) into the basics of eco-friendly energy solutions... from major players in the energy industry.
2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped.
Bell Labs, XEROX (and PARC), and for more recent and tech-relevant examples - IBM, Novell, Sun (which hasn't seen a dime of profit off of OOo). Are you sure about that being true? (especially in light of the fact that damned near anything can be monetized nowadays).
3. Most countries have some kind of nationalized R&D AND economic planning to sell the R&D. This model appears gets about the same results as the looser American style.
Kinda got confused here - is R&D for profit good, or bad?
4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation.
Sorry, but I disagree. We only hear about it so much because it makes sexier news when, a corp steals something than when a corp actually comes up with something.
At first, it's cool that you can get hold of some, then it becomes a godsend, then it's a desperately needed commodity that you must have more and more of, at any cost and damn the consequences...
If you implement this I will drop you for Internet and cable TV in a heartbeat.
Even Verizon FiOS is looking good at this rate if that's the case. But then, I'd be leaving one rapacious asshat corp for another ever-so-slightly less rapacious...
Where in the hell can one find a decent non-rapacious internet hookup around Portland, OR, anyway? Utah had (still has I think) Sprint Broadband, which was damned nice - save for a bit of lag, they were pretty much everything I ever wanted an ISP to be - unobtrusive, decently priced, and always on.
Slashdot Mirror
While that condition is true for only (roughly) 36-48 universities and colleges nation-wide, I do not argue that those who have a prominent place in, say, the NCAA (US football org) can rake in megabucks per year. (Everyone else scrapes by as best they can, or they simply do without).
Meanwhile, we have, as perfect example, these beasties (PDF). Don't ask about the price tags.
Granted that at least half of these are working hospitals, but the majority of the inbound dough isn't coming out of the Ute football program, nor is the majority coming from private/alumni donations... them thar's your tuition (and tax) monies at work. This is the same UofU that has one hell of a large business and IP incubation program, and a 300+ acre, 37-building complex referred to as Research Park. Note that I'm not picking on the UofU per se, but it is a place that I am highly familiar with, as it is a fellow BoR member as my former employer's of long ago.
(by the by, the UofU is also incidentally one of the very first nodes on what eventually became the Internet - the other node was at UC Berkeley).
As someone who once was a collegiate instructor and employee, I can say for certain that no self-respecting board-of-regents-member college would even think of lowering tuition, for any reason. Scholarships, sure... as long as the money comes out of somebody else's wallet. Student financial aid? Again, they love it - but on the same premise as Scholarships. Work-Study programs? Okay, but it's the equivalent of getting offshore-priced labor on their part.
No, my friend... no way in Hell you'd ever see a Uni drop tuition pricing in response to a flush of patent-money. They'd rather spend the dough on a new football stadium, or on perks for the tenured and administration.
The one and only condition that would see a tuition price drop is in response to a drop in head-count, or in response to any new competition (e.g. University of Phoenix opening a new campus in the same town or city...)
(sorta like how I can't buy a MacBook Pro with FC8 or SuSE (or even Windows) pre-installed on it ;) ).
locate (whatever name, even a partial name)
whereis (whatever name)
I grok the general push to IPv6 and all, but you'd think they would have at least tried to follow the (what I thought to be) common 'check first then fail gracefully' behavior...
Meh - I use Evolution to do that (with the exchange-connector package). I still have the corp-issued 'doze laptop, but the only use it gets nowadays is the occasional rdesktop session for some ActiveX-based web tools that some items (e.g. one of our NetApp SAN rigs) stupidly insist on.
(Now if I can only rig up Pidgin to replace Communicator, I'd be golden... :) )
(...and what if you're allergic to feathers? )
My thanks for the tip :)
Hell, my management fears vendor lock-in more than they fear Death itself (which probably explains why we're a very heavy Linux shop)...
I realize that a lot of PHB's couldn't care less (and an alarming # of CIO's and IT management don't either), but we're far enough along now that it's starting to bite a lot of accountants and IT critters square in the ass.
IMHO, it does matter, and it explains why a lot of shops are moving away from proprietary solutions, going to Linux/BSD and such.
Now if only we can definitively tackle the two biggest examples of attempted vendor lock-in alive (Exchange and MS Office), we'd be set.
Can't - I sent off the patent for it five minutes after I saw your post. You'll have to pay me royalties if you want that kind of omnipotence.
( I know, I know... prior art: but those were mere attempts by the likes of Mussolini, Hitler, Tojo, Napoleon, Caesar, Lenin, etc etc... so they don't count ).
True, but the idea is that if he's working from a SAM or shadow file written to pilfered backup tape, or got the password DB by use of a whole host of tools designed to suck out a Windows AD SAM from a server to your laptop over, say, a wifi network connection made in the parking lot or somesuch... e.g. you have the hash file, but don't have a clue as to what it contains. A lot of tools are designed to exploit holes in Windows' Active directory to get a copy of the SAM without all the bother of logging in (most required physical access to the box and a reboot, but IIRC there were some that didn't, depending on the exploit used).
In the corporate espionage type break-ins, it makes more sense to not poke around too much and break stuff as you go, but instead concentrate on finding the means by which you can return to the network with your presence all dressed up as a legit user or three. This way, you have relatively more time and leisure with which to poke around in. If you add your own account (modify a file) and give it privs, you're liable to get someone's attention (self-audits, internal file integrity sweeps such as AFICK provides, etc...). If you merely copy a file, there's less of a potential fuss.
The tangents and possibilities can go on and on, mostly because security and breaking-in can become less of a science, and more of an art form. :)
Well, since you asked, yes, you would probably be guilty here in my country, Norway.
In that case, when do we see Google banned (specifically, Google cache)? And the Wayback Machine while we're at it?
I'm not saying it to pick a fight, but it stands to reason that Google's cache and archive.org can be modified easily enough by anyone with the right know-how (basically, you just modify the site that either one is caching). Will the IFPI demand their removal next?
The whole Child Porn thing is IMHO a red herring. Child Pornography is direct evidence of a criminal act (namely, the sexual abuse of a minor), and blocking such things is done in deference to the victims, not because it's liable to bring civil charges. TPB, even if all it ever did was IP violation, contains zero evidence of any crime (IP and copyright violations are civil acts, not criminal ones - it only becomes criminal when you try to sell the copies).
In this case, we're talking about a court bending over backwards to satisfy the civil demands of a cartel, and in the process do two things:
1) create bad precedents, and
2) perform collateral blockage (I think the legal term is "estoppel"?) against legitimate distributors who use/rely on that particular torrent tracker.
If you sell pirated and legal CDs out of the trunk of your car - you are still guilty of selling illegal copies.
Sorta blasts your argument apart right there, doesn't it?
It isn't that TPB is some great big illegal operation (it is perfectly legal within the framework of their jurisdiction), nor that they act as a torrent tracker (they are, for torrents regardless of content*).
The big deal is that there is a great big precedent where information is blocked due to content.
We often praise people who find ways to break past China and Saudi Arabia's forms of Internet censorship... why all the sudden do you cheer the same censorship in an EU member state?
Do you realize that all I would need to do to shut down a torrent tracker in Denmark now is to post a link or four leading to some IFPI-owned content, then pack off a C&D notice? I have no kick against someone wanting to control stuff that they have rights to, but the route they took to do so is appalling, to say the least. I don't poison a noisy neighborhood dog to get him quiet, I go to the dog's owner and see about getting him to keep his animal quiet. The IFPI did the equivalent of setting out buckets of antifreeze in this analogy... and it is IMHO wrong.
* this does include a rather large amount of links leading to legal/legit content, such as: WoW patches, Linux distros/updates, FOSS binaries, artist-permitted multimedia distribution, and various other items of a perfectly IP-respecting nature).
OTOH, they can deflect the 'aiding and abetting' charge by saying it has nothing to do with TPB. Simply post a news/press release about how it's part of a super-secret networking efficiency R&D project that Tele2 has going (or somesuch)... as long as the proxies are legit and legally open (e.g. no compromised machines), IMHO it would be fairly litigation-proof.
Now if anyone were to build a toolbar(?) that any ol' user could install and automatically seek and use legit open proxies upon hitting a single on-off button, then stupid rulings like this would be impossible.
The issues boiled down to two things that no amount of tech could alleviate: Noise issues (property owners near the airports got highly vocal about having to replace cracked windows from the occasional sonic booms), and price ($25k 1st class from NYC to Paris? And now you get to suffer the indignities of airport security too? Sounds like a masochist's dream come true...)
Unless/until they solve at least those two issues (in spite of public pronouncement, it doesn't look like they have IMHO - yet), they're going to have a hard time with it's initial public image, fuel economy be damned.
Sure the economics of volume may drop the price, and sure the noise problem can be solved through strict pilot discipline (e.g. no cracking the sound barrier until you're x miles away and at y altitude), but that won't change public perception that Concorde planted firmly in the public mind back during the 1970's).
OTOH, the tech is cool, and I can see a very solid use for it for trans-pacific passengers... Seattle to Tokyo in 3 hours instead of 12? Frickin' awesome...
My problem is that this funding goes from being a benevolent grant to a research institution, to becoming a perceived right and entitlement.
Note that this doesn't apply to just research grants, either - everything from corporate welfare programs to Medicare becomes an annual contest to see who can squeeze the most milk out of the governmental teat. What were once programs designed as social safety nets and promotional programs, have become horrific and competing demands for more, more more...
- don't boost Medicare as much as the AARP demands? Why, you beast you! How DARE you leave the elderly to die!
- don't boost educational funding as much as demanded by the teacher unions and school districts? "You're hurting our kids!" (in spite of the fact that education was once a completely state and locally-funded thing...)
- don't boost (insert corporate welfare program here) by as much as (insert lobbyist org here) demanded? You're killing off (insert industry here)!
Meanwhile? You, me, and most other rational human beings know full well that for the most part, we're spending (m/b)illions more this year than we did last year. Nobody is going to die, no business collapses, no school fails - but each year the hyperbole comes marching along.You know? 100 years ago, congress-critters would compete for re-election by bragging about how they kept the government out of everyones' lives. Now they do it by bragging on how much pork they managed to drag home to their respective constituencies.
Again, I have no kick against funding things such as research, industry promotional programs, and social safety net programs. However, I think that each and every one of them should --with damned few exceptions-- have to either get a set non-renewable amount for a set period of time (and not a dime more), or they must re-compete each year for the same level of funding they got the year before. Then we have a non-political panel at the OMB go over each program with a scalpel, and start hacking/slashing those programs that have no provable value at all (e.g. corporate welfare). The savings get rolled into next year's budget.
A grant or federal funding isn't a paycheck or living-expense-qualified income - it's a set amount that you should plan against, and only for the period that it is given to you.
(and yeah, I'd love to find a job like Congress where I can vote in my own pay raises too, but... Say, does either house of Congress need a sysadmin?)
Err, because HIV, as a liquid-borne virus, can be transmitted through many more routes than just sex?
(e.g ask anyone still alive who got it from a tainted blood transfusion back in the 1980's).
I fear that your response was almost something for a researcher to point at as actual justification for having such a study and publishing it... (e.g. transmission prevention via various sexual protections vs. transmission through other common forms of human-to-human liquid transmission, etc).
IIRC there's currently a shedload of funding (albeit belated) into the basics of eco-friendly energy solutions... from major players in the energy industry.
2. If the research can't become a profit center, it's dropped.Bell Labs, XEROX (and PARC), and for more recent and tech-relevant examples - IBM, Novell, Sun (which hasn't seen a dime of profit off of OOo). Are you sure about that being true? (especially in light of the fact that damned near anything can be monetized nowadays).
3. Most countries have some kind of nationalized R&D AND economic planning to sell the R&D. This model appears gets about the same results as the looser American style.Kinda got confused here - is R&D for profit good, or bad?
4. Corporate R&D is mostly stealing ideas from someone else who cannot afford litigation.Sorry, but I disagree. We only hear about it so much because it makes sexier news when, a corp steals something than when a corp actually comes up with something.
At first, it's cool that you can get hold of some, then it becomes a godsend, then it's a desperately needed commodity that you must have more and more of, at any cost and damn the consequences...
Sorta like Cocaine in a way.
Even Verizon FiOS is looking good at this rate if that's the case. But then, I'd be leaving one rapacious asshat corp for another ever-so-slightly less rapacious...
Where in the hell can one find a decent non-rapacious internet hookup around Portland, OR, anyway? Utah had (still has I think) Sprint Broadband, which was damned nice - save for a bit of lag, they were pretty much everything I ever wanted an ISP to be - unobtrusive, decently priced, and always on.