We've got fairly sane copyright legislation from Brazil recently too. South America has been tooling under European and then American hegemony ever since the Spanish conquistadors. Brazil was the country that ensured sane prices for aids medications throughout the world by threatening to break American patents. China otoh does extreme long term harm by paying lip service while ignoring all the content. We'll all have better lives if South American, India, and Eastern Europe replace China for any given economic activity currently outsourced to China.
Btw : Did you ever try sleeping with a Spanish woman? You know they're currently still kinda in their 70s after their 60s after their dictator Franko died, right? I'm just saying, if I had any influence over my boss for his choice of outsourcing destinations, then I'd be mentioning Chile.
In fact, most universities lost money on their football teams, see : http://www.jstor.org/pss/40251010 http://www.knightcommissionmedia.org/images/President_Survey_FINAL.pdf
Instead, athletics programs justify the expense as bringing alumni contributions, while football programs are in-fact usually redirecting alumni contributions away from academic pursuits.
Also, Europeans are fucking insane about sports fandom, way beyond Americans casual television based involvement. Yet no serous money making inter collegiate athletics? hmm
Athletics programs are also justified as attracting additional applicants, but usually they are not attracting very high level applicants, so the value there depends entirely upon your existing academic standing.
I've found only one plausible benefit for continually losing money on football, namely "any publicity is good publicity" (for your graduates). In other words, if your institution always gets the snot beat out of them whenever they play some more important team whose games get airtime, well that creates more people who've heard of your institution, and that may translate into positive reactions form HR people for your graduates.
Yes, the major football powers obviously make money on ticket sales, never mind the television rights, but those are an anomaly.
p.s. If your university has already gone $200 million into debt expanding your football stadium, like say Rutgers University, well yes you must exploit the resources into which you've invested. You might however find more rapid recoupment if you prioritized massive concerts over football of course.
I never much liked sports during high school and university. I'm still displeased by how universities lose money on their football teams just so their president can launder state funds and tuition into his pet projects and his friend's pockets.
I've learned however that sports offers one incredible benefit to society : perfect objectivity. African Americans were first accepted among elite athletes largely because a players RBI is a perfectly objective measure. Pro-athletes earn small fortunes today because they are actually better than other people and that extra skill translates into winning games and greater ticket sales. etc.
Musicians are almost completely fungible commodities for record companies and even consumers, much like say academic faculty for your average liberal arts collage. Add lock-in making the record companies absolutely non-fungible for the musicians, well your salary will drop through the $40k floor for liberal arts collage professors. etc.
You could always make money in the music business if you were into the business side like Madonna and DeFranco, but we're not really sure there are enough organizations like Righteous Babe or Magnatune for ordinary people to also make a living.
Yes, last authors are traditionally the older scientist who runs the laboratory, i.e. the guy who paid most everybody else. All the middle authors could be anything from other primary researchers or other grant holders or lab techs or just buddies of the author.
Imho, the first authorship system doesn't work very well because often two people put equal work into a paper but you cannot have two first authors.
In mathematics, we assume that all authors contribute significantly to the research, and all authors are almost always listed alphabetically. You are not usually awarded any authorship position merely for holding the grant that paid for the salaries of other researchers, although some grant holders have tried that trick.
Mathematicians are usually prevented from adding their name onto the research of their students and postdocs because solo author papers are critical for career advancement. In other words, if you add your name to your students work, then you'll hurt their job prospects, which'll hurt your reputation indirectly.
There are people around with amazing personalities, definitely not all top level academics are this dedicated, but they exist. Anyone who's done a PhD and postdoc(s) at top tier research universities will have spent time schmoozing with several.
Obama got this guy largely because he asked. If a president doesn't get high level people, he's very likely got a reason he doesn't want them. Bush (cough)
You ever hear about hollywood accounting? Virtually anyone important enough that they'll receive "points" has been defrauded by their own studio/label.
You'll figure out why the RIAA/MPAA are so anti-piracy as soon as you grok that single fact. Any distribution channel or even publicity that doesn't trace back to efforts they may label their own will create a scenario where they face more serious lawsuits from their talent, plus more talent founding competitors.
It's time to put this dog to sleep. Don't buy their shit. Don't talk about their shit. Don't even watch their shit pirated unless you absolutely must based upon your childhood comic book consumption.
The next two time you feel like watching a movie, try Let The Right One In and Primer. I promise you they're both better than anything released by Hollywood during the last 5 years.
We should restrict copyright for software to require publication of the source code. You could still sell custom software without releasing the source code for everybody, but you'd be required to release the source code to your customers if you wanted copyright protections.
In fact, we need some new internet radio protocol based around mixing software and bittorrent. A radio stations publish their playlist for the next 24 hours along with torrent files for albums containing the songs they'll play and mixing instructions. Your radio software fires up the torrents for all songs scheduled during the next 24 hours for all stations you've set active. You radio software's AI follows the mixing instructions broadcast by those stations as well as possible given what songs downloaded successfully.
Your radio software naturally keeps an enormous cache of songs played regularly by stations you like. You might instruct it to keep songs permanently, or even download whole albums.
I don't buy the article's conclusions. Ghana has cats? fine. Turkey has mucho cats everywhere! A cat might even shit on your head while you eat in a fancy restaurant in Taksim. All middle eastern countries have oodles of cats, afaik. Yet they suck ass at soccer?
Germany is a dog country, very few cats here. Brazil doesn't have street cats like Turkey either. etc.
Raves often cream both major concerts and bar shows for raw fun. Bar shows are usually more fun than concerts because you're there with friends and/or you make friends.
I'd happily attend a Rush concert, but I'd never manage to drag along my girlfriend, or even local male friends probably. There are some people like Lady Gaga that I'd attend for political reasons, assuming my girlfriend had proposed the idea, which isn't likely.
I've been seeing like 1 or 2 shows per week for the past years without paying anything, alright not Metallica or Springsteen, but damn fine musicians. I'm also supporting the bar who pays the band by buying drinks of course. Oh but yeah I'll actually like see friends at the bar, flirt with girls, etc. I've also been know to enjoy local raves which usually have far better music bars or stadium concerts, well assuming you like electronic music.
I've no clue what morons actually buy tickets for shows controlled by ticketmaster, presumably largely pre-teens who've only discovered one or two mega popular bands, but not really yet experienced the world.
Another key concerns is that the advisorial relationship must necessarily be rather personal. You shouldn't assume you'll end up doing your PhD with the luminary in whatever specialization you initially approached. There are therefore several important criteria that matter when choosing a graduate program, which I'll list in rough order of importance :
(1) institution reputation, (2) faculty size, (3) faculty student ratio, (4) teaching workload, (5) faculty areas of interests, and (6) how much pay you.
Examples : You should not attend graduate schools like Perdue that require an insane teaching load, well you'd get stuck there for like 7+ years. You obviously should pick an institution with the significantly better name too, even if they don't carry your specialization. You should however be careful about institutions like Harvard with a tiny faculty and many students per professor, although choose them if your areas of interest match.
Debit cards are substantially more dangerous than credit cards since debit cards are EFTs, although some banks offer equivalent protections.
Imagine your bank sends you a new card because yours will expire soon, but some kids steals your mail and used your card. You never noticed the card went missing since you rarely use it. Kid makes small charges initially but makes larger purchases over 60 days later. You eventually notice the fraudulent activity and tell the card company they are morons for sending an activated card, not noticing unusual activity, etc. If you had a credit card, well they might try making you pay, but ultimately you'll successfully contest the lines they add to your credit report. If you had a debit card, well you've already lost the money, and they won't fix it if they first fraudulent charges were 60 days ago.
HSBC does not pay nearly the same costs for fraud when the card is a debit card, instead customers pay far more.
It's entirely possible that you'll never notice the missing card for 60 days, given banks usually send cards unsolicited when nearing expiration. If so, all the money taken from the account, even after those 60 days will not be reimbursed by your bank.
Credit cards offer more protection largely because you're spending the banks money, therefore banks usually don't make this mistake with credit cards.
MeeoGo will only become the OS for Nokia's flagship smart phones. In fact, Symbian's market share will only increase over the next 5 years as Nokia roles out smaller mid- to low-level smartphones. You'll never see Apple selling an iPhone for only $25. Android has no intrinsic distaste for inexpensive phones, but all that java code eats cpu cycles.
All your Nokia and Symbian fan boys are also major fans of raw hardware specs, which means they're annoyed at choosing between owning the beefy power phone funning unfamiliar MeeGo, or the slimmer cuter more generic phone running Symbian. In fact, your most die hard Symbian fanatics will likely benefit by gaining phones analogous to an N95 with far greater batter life, but many won't like not owning the flagship device.
Symbian easily goes toe-to-toe with iPhoneOS and Android functionality and usability wise, but iPhoneOS and Android offer more friendly and familiar development environments. MeeGo arguably offers an even better development environment than iPhoneOS and Android, given you may leverage existing OSS, but that's only super appealing for Linux heads who know the available OSS.
We'll likely see some new applications developed for Maemo/MeeGo which then get ported to Symbian & Qt, which gives developers a more gentile route to Nokia's enormous market share. If you however develop an app worth selling for Maemo/MeeGo, then two days later some kid will develop a fully open source version, destroying your market share. Nice little Catch 22, eh?
Btw, dialer, conversations, and contacts integration is the killer feature of Maemo/MeeGo that lacking in other platforms. Phone, Skype, SIP, etc. calls are all handled exactly alike. I'd hope that native srtp/zrtp integration isn't far behind. Afaik, all IM protocols are supported using various extensions.
You cannot claim the moral high ground once you've engaged steadily in immoral behavior, that includes you're leaders and agents.
Gandhi and MLK took and held the moral high ground absolutely. IRA, ETA, Palestinians, etc. are always happy talking about peace when they think the peaceniks might help them, but then sacrifice any wider moral support by committing murder for internal political reasons. MLK helped insure his victory by rejecting people like Malcom X.
In this case, Apple and Amazon took advantage of the chaos claiming for themselves an enormous slice of the pie analogous to brick and mortar retailers. Congrats morons, you just gave away all the financial gains that cutting costs through digital distributions brings.
Ahh, thank you! You've just explained the biggest problem with UK education!
In the US, the best engineering schools are usually quite ruthless, sure maybe MIT and CalTech can only take the best of the best, but Berkeley and Georgia Tech fail out students by the truckload.
We're more likely seeing several separate effects :
(1) Britain has far too much immigration for their population size, reducing job availability. All the immigration has then depressed salaries for high tech workers particularly, making those jobs less desirable.
(2) A few top institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, etc. have remarkably clever students, but other UK institutions are usually accepting far weaker students than correspondingly ranked places in France, Germany, etc.
(3) I've afraid that social class remains extremely important for British people, so a "working degree" like engineering or CS may attract people with less educated family backgrounds.
We've now got synergies between these three issues creating a vicious cycle.
There are also some possible confounding factors the study may ignore :
(4) You've got separate immigration and emigration issues at the student level which complicate counting people.
For example, a few bright indian and asian kids might take the high grades outside Oxbridge, and the good non Oxbridge jobs, but they're ignored by this study. Alternatively, good British student may seriously consider finding better & cheaper schools in France, Geramny, etc. if they don't get into Oxbridge.
(5) And the study may simply not count people who take jobs abroad correctly, which may differ among different fields.
Zoho only writes very basic online office applications. I'd imagine they've got people who know some statistics working on those functions for their spreadsheet, but otherwise we're not talking very advanced programming work. Imagine you're writing a Farmville knockoff, would you hire a PhD or a high school kid?
Google otoh sees themselves on a mission to change the world by making all human knowledge accessible. Ain't so surprising they want PhDs even when just building web applications now is it?
Slashdot Mirror
We've got fairly sane copyright legislation from Brazil recently too. South America has been tooling under European and then American hegemony ever since the Spanish conquistadors. Brazil was the country that ensured sane prices for aids medications throughout the world by threatening to break American patents. China otoh does extreme long term harm by paying lip service while ignoring all the content. We'll all have better lives if South American, India, and Eastern Europe replace China for any given economic activity currently outsourced to China.
Btw : Did you ever try sleeping with a Spanish woman? You know they're currently still kinda in their 70s after their 60s after their dictator Franko died, right? I'm just saying, if I had any influence over my boss for his choice of outsourcing destinations, then I'd be mentioning Chile.
In fact, most universities lost money on their football teams, see :
http://www.jstor.org/pss/40251010
http://www.knightcommissionmedia.org/images/President_Survey_FINAL.pdf
Instead, athletics programs justify the expense as bringing alumni contributions, while football programs are in-fact usually redirecting alumni contributions away from academic pursuits.
Also, Europeans are fucking insane about sports fandom, way beyond Americans casual television based involvement. Yet no serous money making inter collegiate athletics? hmm
Athletics programs are also justified as attracting additional applicants, but usually they are not attracting very high level applicants, so the value there depends entirely upon your existing academic standing.
I've found only one plausible benefit for continually losing money on football, namely "any publicity is good publicity" (for your graduates). In other words, if your institution always gets the snot beat out of them whenever they play some more important team whose games get airtime, well that creates more people who've heard of your institution, and that may translate into positive reactions form HR people for your graduates.
Yes, the major football powers obviously make money on ticket sales, never mind the television rights, but those are an anomaly.
p.s. If your university has already gone $200 million into debt expanding your football stadium, like say Rutgers University, well yes you must exploit the resources into which you've invested. You might however find more rapid recoupment if you prioritized massive concerts over football of course.
I never much liked sports during high school and university. I'm still displeased by how universities lose money on their football teams just so their president can launder state funds and tuition into his pet projects and his friend's pockets.
I've learned however that sports offers one incredible benefit to society : perfect objectivity. African Americans were first accepted among elite athletes largely because a players RBI is a perfectly objective measure. Pro-athletes earn small fortunes today because they are actually better than other people and that extra skill translates into winning games and greater ticket sales. etc.
Musicians are almost completely fungible commodities for record companies and even consumers, much like say academic faculty for your average liberal arts collage. Add lock-in making the record companies absolutely non-fungible for the musicians, well your salary will drop through the $40k floor for liberal arts collage professors. etc.
Ani DeFranco recently said The business is distilling in a way to where those who can make it by performing can make a living. As records become less a way of making money, the real performers will make it. We're all gonna be folk singers by the time this is over.
You could always make money in the music business if you were into the business side like Madonna and DeFranco, but we're not really sure there are enough organizations like Righteous Babe or Magnatune for ordinary people to also make a living.
Yes, last authors are traditionally the older scientist who runs the laboratory, i.e. the guy who paid most everybody else. All the middle authors could be anything from other primary researchers or other grant holders or lab techs or just buddies of the author.
Imho, the first authorship system doesn't work very well because often two people put equal work into a paper but you cannot have two first authors.
In mathematics, we assume that all authors contribute significantly to the research, and all authors are almost always listed alphabetically. You are not usually awarded any authorship position merely for holding the grant that paid for the salaries of other researchers, although some grant holders have tried that trick.
Mathematicians are usually prevented from adding their name onto the research of their students and postdocs because solo author papers are critical for career advancement. In other words, if you add your name to your students work, then you'll hurt their job prospects, which'll hurt your reputation indirectly.
There are people around with amazing personalities, definitely not all top level academics are this dedicated, but they exist. Anyone who's done a PhD and postdoc(s) at top tier research universities will have spent time schmoozing with several.
Obama got this guy largely because he asked. If a president doesn't get high level people, he's very likely got a reason he doesn't want them. Bush (cough)
You ever hear about hollywood accounting? Virtually anyone important enough that they'll receive "points" has been defrauded by their own studio/label.
You'll figure out why the RIAA/MPAA are so anti-piracy as soon as you grok that single fact. Any distribution channel or even publicity that doesn't trace back to efforts they may label their own will create a scenario where they face more serious lawsuits from their talent, plus more talent founding competitors.
It's time to put this dog to sleep. Don't buy their shit. Don't talk about their shit. Don't even watch their shit pirated unless you absolutely must based upon your childhood comic book consumption.
The next two time you feel like watching a movie, try Let The Right One In and Primer. I promise you they're both better than anything released by Hollywood during the last 5 years.
If you don't provide your customers with the source, then you should have implicitly revoked your claim of copyright, pure and simple.
Software and business method patents should simply be eliminated outright of course.
We should restrict copyright for software to require publication of the source code. You could still sell custom software without releasing the source code for everybody, but you'd be required to release the source code to your customers if you wanted copyright protections.
In fact, we need some new internet radio protocol based around mixing software and bittorrent. A radio stations publish their playlist for the next 24 hours along with torrent files for albums containing the songs they'll play and mixing instructions. Your radio software fires up the torrents for all songs scheduled during the next 24 hours for all stations you've set active. You radio software's AI follows the mixing instructions broadcast by those stations as well as possible given what songs downloaded successfully.
Your radio software naturally keeps an enormous cache of songs played regularly by stations you like. You might instruct it to keep songs permanently, or even download whole albums.
Artists retain almost no rights over their own music unless they're working with magnatune or similar.
I don't buy the article's conclusions. Ghana has cats? fine. Turkey has mucho cats everywhere! A cat might even shit on your head while you eat in a fancy restaurant in Taksim. All middle eastern countries have oodles of cats, afaik. Yet they suck ass at soccer?
Germany is a dog country, very few cats here. Brazil doesn't have street cats like Turkey either. etc.
Raves often cream both major concerts and bar shows for raw fun. Bar shows are usually more fun than concerts because you're there with friends and/or you make friends.
I'd happily attend a Rush concert, but I'd never manage to drag along my girlfriend, or even local male friends probably. There are some people like Lady Gaga that I'd attend for political reasons, assuming my girlfriend had proposed the idea, which isn't likely.
I've been seeing like 1 or 2 shows per week for the past years without paying anything, alright not Metallica or Springsteen, but damn fine musicians. I'm also supporting the bar who pays the band by buying drinks of course. Oh but yeah I'll actually like see friends at the bar, flirt with girls, etc. I've also been know to enjoy local raves which usually have far better music bars or stadium concerts, well assuming you like electronic music.
I've no clue what morons actually buy tickets for shows controlled by ticketmaster, presumably largely pre-teens who've only discovered one or two mega popular bands, but not really yet experienced the world.
Boats? Fine. Why are they banning photographers from taking photos from the shorelines?
See BP Fails Booming School 101 (mirror one, mirror two)
This.
Another key concerns is that the advisorial relationship must necessarily be rather personal. You shouldn't assume you'll end up doing your PhD with the luminary in whatever specialization you initially approached. There are therefore several important criteria that matter when choosing a graduate program, which I'll list in rough order of importance :
(1) institution reputation, (2) faculty size, (3) faculty student ratio, (4) teaching workload, (5) faculty areas of interests, and (6) how much pay you.
Examples : You should not attend graduate schools like Perdue that require an insane teaching load, well you'd get stuck there for like 7+ years. You obviously should pick an institution with the significantly better name too, even if they don't carry your specialization. You should however be careful about institutions like Harvard with a tiny faculty and many students per professor, although choose them if your areas of interest match.
Debit cards are substantially more dangerous than credit cards since debit cards are EFTs, although some banks offer equivalent protections.
Imagine your bank sends you a new card because yours will expire soon, but some kids steals your mail and used your card. You never noticed the card went missing since you rarely use it. Kid makes small charges initially but makes larger purchases over 60 days later. You eventually notice the fraudulent activity and tell the card company they are morons for sending an activated card, not noticing unusual activity, etc. If you had a credit card, well they might try making you pay, but ultimately you'll successfully contest the lines they add to your credit report. If you had a debit card, well you've already lost the money, and they won't fix it if they first fraudulent charges were 60 days ago.
HSBC does not pay nearly the same costs for fraud when the card is a debit card, instead customers pay far more.
It's entirely possible that you'll never notice the missing card for 60 days, given banks usually send cards unsolicited when nearing expiration. If so, all the money taken from the account, even after those 60 days will not be reimbursed by your bank.
Credit cards offer more protection largely because you're spending the banks money, therefore banks usually don't make this mistake with credit cards.
MeeoGo will only become the OS for Nokia's flagship smart phones. In fact, Symbian's market share will only increase over the next 5 years as Nokia roles out smaller mid- to low-level smartphones. You'll never see Apple selling an iPhone for only $25. Android has no intrinsic distaste for inexpensive phones, but all that java code eats cpu cycles.
All your Nokia and Symbian fan boys are also major fans of raw hardware specs, which means they're annoyed at choosing between owning the beefy power phone funning unfamiliar MeeGo, or the slimmer cuter more generic phone running Symbian. In fact, your most die hard Symbian fanatics will likely benefit by gaining phones analogous to an N95 with far greater batter life, but many won't like not owning the flagship device.
Symbian easily goes toe-to-toe with iPhoneOS and Android functionality and usability wise, but iPhoneOS and Android offer more friendly and familiar development environments. MeeGo arguably offers an even better development environment than iPhoneOS and Android, given you may leverage existing OSS, but that's only super appealing for Linux heads who know the available OSS.
We'll likely see some new applications developed for Maemo/MeeGo which then get ported to Symbian & Qt, which gives developers a more gentile route to Nokia's enormous market share. If you however develop an app worth selling for Maemo/MeeGo, then two days later some kid will develop a fully open source version, destroying your market share. Nice little Catch 22, eh?
Btw, dialer, conversations, and contacts integration is the killer feature of Maemo/MeeGo that lacking in other platforms. Phone, Skype, SIP, etc. calls are all handled exactly alike. I'd hope that native srtp/zrtp integration isn't far behind. Afaik, all IM protocols are supported using various extensions.
This.
You cannot claim the moral high ground once you've engaged steadily in immoral behavior, that includes you're leaders and agents.
Gandhi and MLK took and held the moral high ground absolutely. IRA, ETA, Palestinians, etc. are always happy talking about peace when they think the peaceniks might help them, but then sacrifice any wider moral support by committing murder for internal political reasons. MLK helped insure his victory by rejecting people like Malcom X.
In this case, Apple and Amazon took advantage of the chaos claiming for themselves an enormous slice of the pie analogous to brick and mortar retailers. Congrats morons, you just gave away all the financial gains that cutting costs through digital distributions brings.
If you wanted you own project, you might consider developing useful open source stuff for Android or Maemo (Nokia N900).
Ahh, thank you! You've just explained the biggest problem with UK education!
In the US, the best engineering schools are usually quite ruthless, sure maybe MIT and CalTech can only take the best of the best, but Berkeley and Georgia Tech fail out students by the truckload.
We're more likely seeing several separate effects :
(1) Britain has far too much immigration for their population size, reducing job availability. All the immigration has then depressed salaries for high tech workers particularly, making those jobs less desirable.
(2) A few top institutions like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, etc. have remarkably clever students, but other UK institutions are usually accepting far weaker students than correspondingly ranked places in France, Germany, etc.
(3) I've afraid that social class remains extremely important for British people, so a "working degree" like engineering or CS may attract people with less educated family backgrounds.
We've now got synergies between these three issues creating a vicious cycle.
There are also some possible confounding factors the study may ignore :
(4) You've got separate immigration and emigration issues at the student level which complicate counting people.
For example, a few bright indian and asian kids might take the high grades outside Oxbridge, and the good non Oxbridge jobs, but they're ignored by this study. Alternatively, good British student may seriously consider finding better & cheaper schools in France, Geramny, etc. if they don't get into Oxbridge.
(5) And the study may simply not count people who take jobs abroad correctly, which may differ among different fields.
Zoho only writes very basic online office applications. I'd imagine they've got people who know some statistics working on those functions for their spreadsheet, but otherwise we're not talking very advanced programming work. Imagine you're writing a Farmville knockoff, would you hire a PhD or a high school kid?
Google otoh sees themselves on a mission to change the world by making all human knowledge accessible. Ain't so surprising they want PhDs even when just building web applications now is it?