> The original author should be able to claim copyright over his/her material for as long as he/she wishes!
For as long as he/she wishes??? No!
The point of copyright is not to provide a steady salary for the life of the author!
The intent is to protect the initial investment of artists so their creation is not stolen before they have a chance to make some money from it.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
Not true. Cord blood stem cells can be stored indefinitely: The New York State Health Department Guidelines for cord blood banking state that umbilical stem cells can be stored indefinitely under liquid nitrogen. The policy states, "There is no evidence at present that cells stored at -196C in an undisturbed manner lose either in-vitro determined viability or biologic activity. Therefore, at the current time, no expiration date need be assigned to cord blood stored continuously under liquid nitrogen." Current data reflects that cord blood cells that have been stored for fifteen years have the same composition as they did at the time of storage.(3) All science involving cryogenic storage of cells also indicates that the cells should remain viable indefinitely.
> the amount of blood in one umbilical cord isn't enough to treat an adult with
Also not true. The cord blood CAN be used by adults: To date, umbilical cord blood has been used in more than 8,000 transplants for children and adults. In many cases, the cord blood was used by the baby's sibling. Other transplants have occurred for the newborn himself, the newborn's mother, father, and the newborn's cousin.
Some other poster said they couldn't be used for much, but CBR lists close to 100 diseases you can use cord blood treatments for.
And on the topic of the AAP article about why private banking is bad, this is from the AAP site: . What is the difference between private cord blood banking and public cord blood banking?
Private cord blood banking is storing the baby's cord blood for his/her own future use or use for a family member should the need arise. Alternatively, public cord blood banking, or donating, means that the baby's cord blood is stored in a cord blood bank and is available to anyone in need of a transplant or may be used research purposes.
So the big difference is that if you donate it to a public bank, you might not get it back. Versus if you store it privately, it is yours forever.
Don't blame the private banks for the lack of cord blood in the public ones. There would be plenty of cord blood to go around if the hospitals banked it themselves: Currently, only a small percentage of the four million births every year in the U.S. result in family-banked cord blood, and even if that percentage increases, there will always be a generous cord blood supply for the public banks-if funding is available. More than 90 percent of families do not have access to a public cord blood bank that accepts donations. Other factors also significantly limit cord blood donation eligibility, such as maternal exposure to viruses, tattoos, and international travel. In fact, recent reports from public banks convey that only 30 percent of donated cord blood ends up being banked. The limited cord blood supply in public banks is 100 percent due to lack of funding-not private banks.
Here are the options that I would say you base your decision on:
1. Do you have the funds?
2. If your kid gets sick later in life and you didn't have it, will you be ok or will you freak out and obsess over not having banked it?
3. Are you ok with the odds that your kid won't get sick? The odds are that you WON'T need it, so if you're not a #2, then you will probably be ok.
4. What's your opinion on stem cell research? If you think it's bad, then pay for your own private stem cell storage. Otherwise vote YES on laws making it legal for states to do stem cell research so the hospitals a
W3C might move fast, but not in an "evolutionary environment".
I believe by this they're implying slowness in adopting mutations outside of the W3C's own developments, hence the other con listed as the "ivory tower" perception.
There's a big difference between de jure standards and de facto standards.
Browser market share defines what standards are de facto, and the W3C defines what standards are de jure.
I prefer the de facto route honestly, let companies come up with new developments themselves and let the consumers be the judge of whether to use the browser.
The original intent of copyright law was to help stimulate scientific and artistic development by protecting an artist's initial investment, not to provide them income for the rest of their lives.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was an ISO standard, I only meant that corporations may be storing their ISO process documentation in the new.docx file formats.
I believe OOXML has been adopted as an ECMA standard, but not ISO.
Funny, there is now a slashdot article about this very topic!
People might get PO'd that they can't open these formats in older versions of office, but then again it also might force everybody still hanging on to Office 97 to finally upgrade so they can view the latest ISO documents.
The "vocational" or "trade school" remark has been around since early in the 1900s when the tool & dye market was booming. People that wanted to go off and just be "thinkers" went to college, and people that wanted specific applicable skills went to trade school.
Nowadays it's really an empty offering, because a trade school education won't get you the technical skills you need either, and employers don't respect a trade school certification anyways, they want to see a degree.
So we all line up, pay our tuition and they spoon feed us the BS that you're getting a REAL education, even though many of the required topics and classes have been outdated since the 80s.
I don't believe that universities should just mass produce employees for the business sector, but they need to be more dynamic and quicker to adopt relevant new technologies.
Wouldn't it be nice if a university algorithms class was advanced enough that they would show you something like PageRank as a real world example?
What does deciding to study something like computaional theory, OS design, AI, scalable protocol design, algorithmic analysis, etc. etc. have to do with jobs...
Absolutely nothing.
Maybe 1% of people CS degrees find careers in the above list.
The other 99% find careers in IT.
That's why people are discussing whether CS is important towards seeking an IT career.
I think you need to run your spellchecker through your turing machine again.
Or maybe spelllling is NP-hard for you?
You're absolutely right, and that's a big part of the problem.
Lots of CS graduates get out of college and don't even know how to do any web, database or network programming all because decades ago somebody decided that learning about whether a program was Turing Complete was more important than having actual usable skills in the world after graduation.
CS students should first be taught how to program, but universities do a disservice to both the educational and business sector if they fail to stay current on technology.
No CS student should graduate without these basic skills: 1 - Programming core (variables, functions, control structures, data structures) 2 - GUI programming (forms & windows) 3 - Client server programming (Web pages and PC based) 4 - Network programming (Programming TCP/IP requests) 5 - Database programming (Using an ACTUAL database, not teaching what BCNF means!) 6 - Hardware programming (loading hardware programs onto a board to make something happen) 7 - Basic computer manipulation skills for multiple OS's (Windows, MacOS, *nix)
If schools really want to teach computational theory, make it a master's program.
I've been going to college for about 14 years now and working as an IT programmer for almost 10, and I can say confidently that a CS degree is definitely still worth the effort.
1. If you plan to graduate and pursue a career in IT, no other degree gives you a solid programming background and is more respected by IT companies. Very few self taught programmers REALLY get what OOP is, but if you pay attention and eat your vegetables you might just figure it out in college.
2. If you plan to continue in the educational sector, a CS degree is a great lead in to graduate programs involving AI, genetic algorithms, linguistics, etc. Even a business masters tacked on to a CS degree can make for a great career.
That said, there are MANY problems with the courses taught at many universities. I've seen colleges teach FORTRAN and C++ using VI as an editor, PASCAL on a VAX, and Borland C++ on a Win 95 machine. You won't find any jobs at Monster.com with these skills.
Some colleges are finally starting to teach Java or C#, but university curriculum changes move VERY slowly.
In the Detroit area it is so hard for IT and engineering people to find jobs that lots (and lots) of people are moving out of state. People are leaving so fast the housing market was just declared the worst in the nation because everyone is selling but no one is buying.
The US auto companies (and their labor suppliers like EDS / Compuware) have been laying people off by the thousands, so if you're looking for some fresh talent you're bound to find some in a talent pool of that size.
Google apparently is interested, they're opening an office in A^2.
Aside from that, a lot of people that didn't jump jobs for higher salaries in the dot com boom saw all of their friends go unemployed when those fancy companies went under. So you can understand if a lot of people are hesitant to leave their current stable-ish job.
Canada has 178, Venezuala has 77, Russia 60, Iran 125, Iraq 115, Kuwait 101, and of course the king: Saudi Arabia - 261. Hell, even the US has more oil reserves than Norway at 22.
Besides, is that really anything to be proud of??
Shouldn't Norway get on another high horse and proclaim that they'll be free of all fossil fuels by 2009 or something?
Kudos for their efforts with taking a stand, but we'll see how long it lasts.
The EU is already rolling over to the smell of MS greenbacks.
Yeah!
You could take that old P75 with it's 300MB hard drive and... well... you could put like 5 or 6 CDs on it.
Ok, so you buy a new hard drive and video card to replace the ones you gutted out of it for your new PC, a network card since the old PC only had a modem, and by the time you've spent all that money your neighbor has an iPod one tenth the size that does the job way better!
I've got a PILE of old computer stuff I'd love to do something with, but it's so obsolete it's not worth it.
I just don't have the heart to throw away that old 300 baud modem!
Maybe the FCC is just PO'd about having an acronym that sounds like the F-Bomb if you try to pronounce it.
Sort of like a kid with the last name of "Bush" who always got made fun so he partners up with a guy named "Dick" and goes on to become president to try and to ban all profanity.
Except for the fact that the spammer is rarely the businessman.
In most cases the click throughs and the response emails are to businesses who contracted spammers to email to thousands of people.
Worst case scenario on this is that with all the click throughs and no purchases, businesses may realize that spamming isn't profitable, but most businesses don't do that level of research on the returns of their investments.
I've tried in the past to make several legitimate home and car insurance claims and been rejected outright by the claims representative.
They LIE.
They LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE!
Anybody that tells you they don't... is LYING!
Maybe they don't -all- lie, but most of them do!
Basically their first line of defense is:
Lie about it, and tell the person making the claim that it's not covered.
In fact, be a complete asshole to them, and do whatever you have to to keep them from calling back.
A BIG gas pipe in our house broke once.
We all made it out of the house fine, and after it was all plugged up we spent about $1,000 fixing the pipe that broke and all the other pipes that it wrenched loose when it fell.
The insurance company said that "worn or damaged" pipes aren't covered, that's wear and tear.
But if the whole HOUSE would have blown up... they would have covered that.
Genius, I tell ya!
These people even went so far as to berate my wife for even calling, and told her how she should know better, etc.
Assholes!!
Read "The Rainmaker" by John Grisham for a good "get that mean old insurance company" story.
Slashdot Mirror
> The original author should be able to claim copyright over his/her material for as long as he/she wishes!
For as long as he/she wishes??? No!
The point of copyright is not to provide a steady salary for the life of the author!
The intent is to protect the initial investment of artists so their creation is not stolen before they have a chance to make some money from it.
From Article I, Section 8 of the constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
> The blood only keeps for ten years
Not true. Cord blood stem cells can be stored indefinitely:
The New York State Health Department Guidelines for cord blood banking state that umbilical stem cells can be stored indefinitely under liquid nitrogen. The policy states, "There is no evidence at present that cells stored at -196C in an undisturbed manner lose either in-vitro determined viability or biologic activity. Therefore, at the current time, no expiration date need be assigned to cord blood stored continuously under liquid nitrogen." Current data reflects that cord blood cells that have been stored for fifteen years have the same composition as they did at the time of storage.(3) All science involving cryogenic storage of cells also indicates that the cells should remain viable indefinitely.
> the amount of blood in one umbilical cord isn't enough to treat an adult with
Also not true. The cord blood CAN be used by adults:
To date, umbilical cord blood has been used in more than 8,000 transplants for children and adults. In many cases, the cord blood was used by the baby's sibling. Other transplants have occurred for the newborn himself, the newborn's mother, father, and the newborn's cousin.
Some other poster said they couldn't be used for much, but CBR lists close to 100 diseases you can use cord blood treatments for.
And on the topic of the AAP article about why private banking is bad, this is from the AAP site:
. What is the difference between private cord blood banking and public cord blood banking?
Private cord blood banking is storing the baby's cord blood for his/her own future use or use for a family member should the need arise. Alternatively, public cord blood banking, or donating, means that the baby's cord blood is stored in a cord blood bank and is available to anyone in need of a transplant or may be used research purposes.
So the big difference is that if you donate it to a public bank, you might not get it back. Versus if you store it privately, it is yours forever.
Don't blame the private banks for the lack of cord blood in the public ones. There would be plenty of cord blood to go around if the hospitals banked it themselves:
Currently, only a small percentage of the four million births every year in the U.S. result in family-banked cord blood, and even if that percentage increases, there will always be a generous cord blood supply for the public banks-if funding is available. More than 90 percent of families do not have access to a public cord blood bank that accepts donations. Other factors also significantly limit cord blood donation eligibility, such as maternal exposure to viruses, tattoos, and international travel. In fact, recent reports from public banks convey that only 30 percent of donated cord blood ends up being banked. The limited cord blood supply in public banks is 100 percent due to lack of funding-not private banks.
Here are the options that I would say you base your decision on:
1. Do you have the funds?
2. If your kid gets sick later in life and you didn't have it, will you be ok or will you freak out and obsess over not having banked it?
3. Are you ok with the odds that your kid won't get sick? The odds are that you WON'T need it, so if you're not a #2, then you will probably be ok.
4. What's your opinion on stem cell research? If you think it's bad, then pay for your own private stem cell storage. Otherwise vote YES on laws making it legal for states to do stem cell research so the hospitals a
But then Mega Bloks can come out with a competing format OBF (Open Block Format) and get it fast tracked through ECMA! (See ooxml vs. odf)
It's fine to go off and develop your own office suite and pull someone else's from one of your packages.
But doing it in secret with no information about when or why? Totally evil.
IMO Google's main flaw is their lack of support and closed mouth policy about their decisions.
Isn't it obvious??
CmdrTaco doesn't want the Slashdot community to go out and vote today, so he posted this to keep us busy with flame wars all day!!
Conspiracy!!
W3C might move fast, but not in an "evolutionary environment".
I believe by this they're implying slowness in adopting mutations outside of the W3C's own developments, hence the other con listed as the "ivory tower" perception.
There's a big difference between de jure standards and de facto standards.
Browser market share defines what standards are de facto, and the W3C defines what standards are de jure.
I prefer the de facto route honestly, let companies come up with new developments themselves and let the consumers be the judge of whether to use the browser.
The original intent of copyright law was to help stimulate scientific and artistic development by protecting an artist's initial investment, not to provide them income for the rest of their lives.
The first Copyright Act in 1790 only provided protection for 14 years:
How do you get from 14 to 95???
Wikipedia has a good doc outlining the difference between OOXML and ODF:
c ument_and_Microsoft_XML_formats
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDo
It may not be an ISO standard, but it's a heck of a lot better than the completely proprietary older formats.
How about a good "atta boy" for Microsoft at least?
Oops. Sorry about that, wrong article link:
2 2243&from=rss
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/18/14
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was an ISO standard, I only meant that corporations may be storing their ISO process documentation in the new .docx file formats.
6 14770
I believe OOXML has been adopted as an ECMA standard, but not ISO.
Funny, there is now a slashdot article about this very topic!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17
Whether it was a good idea or not, the new document formats (docx, xlsx) are all part of a new open standard called Office Open XML (OOXML).
Wikipedia OOXML
People might get PO'd that they can't open these formats in older versions of office, but then again it also might force everybody still hanging on to Office 97 to finally upgrade so they can view the latest ISO documents.
I couldn't agree more.
The "vocational" or "trade school" remark has been around since early in the 1900s when the tool & dye market was booming. People that wanted to go off and just be "thinkers" went to college, and people that wanted specific applicable skills went to trade school.
Nowadays it's really an empty offering, because a trade school education won't get you the technical skills you need either, and employers don't respect a trade school certification anyways, they want to see a degree.
So we all line up, pay our tuition and they spoon feed us the BS that you're getting a REAL education, even though many of the required topics and classes have been outdated since the 80s.
I don't believe that universities should just mass produce employees for the business sector, but they need to be more dynamic and quicker to adopt relevant new technologies.
Wouldn't it be nice if a university algorithms class was advanced enough that they would show you something like PageRank as a real world example?
Sorry I didn't mean to offend you, I didn't know you went to DeVry.
I think xkcd said it best: http://xkcd.com/c114.html
What does deciding to study something like computaional theory, OS design, AI, scalable protocol design, algorithmic analysis, etc. etc. have to do with jobs ...
Absolutely nothing.
Maybe 1% of people CS degrees find careers in the above list.
The other 99% find careers in IT.
That's why people are discussing whether CS is important towards seeking an IT career.
I think you need to run your spellchecker through your turing machine again.
Or maybe spelllling is NP-hard for you?
You're absolutely right, and that's a big part of the problem.
Lots of CS graduates get out of college and don't even know how to do any web, database or network programming all because decades ago somebody decided that learning about whether a program was Turing Complete was more important than having actual usable skills in the world after graduation.
CS students should first be taught how to program, but universities do a disservice to both the educational and business sector if they fail to stay current on technology.
No CS student should graduate without these basic skills:
1 - Programming core (variables, functions, control structures, data structures)
2 - GUI programming (forms & windows)
3 - Client server programming (Web pages and PC based)
4 - Network programming (Programming TCP/IP requests)
5 - Database programming (Using an ACTUAL database, not teaching what BCNF means!)
6 - Hardware programming (loading hardware programs onto a board to make something happen)
7 - Basic computer manipulation skills for multiple OS's (Windows, MacOS, *nix)
If schools really want to teach computational theory, make it a master's program.
I've been going to college for about 14 years now and working as an IT programmer for almost 10, and I can say confidently that a CS degree is definitely still worth the effort.
1. If you plan to graduate and pursue a career in IT, no other degree gives you a solid programming background and is more respected by IT companies. Very few self taught programmers REALLY get what OOP is, but if you pay attention and eat your vegetables you might just figure it out in college.
2. If you plan to continue in the educational sector, a CS degree is a great lead in to graduate programs involving AI, genetic algorithms, linguistics, etc. Even a business masters tacked on to a CS degree can make for a great career.
That said, there are MANY problems with the courses taught at many universities.
I've seen colleges teach FORTRAN and C++ using VI as an editor, PASCAL on a VAX, and Borland C++ on a Win 95 machine. You won't find any jobs at Monster.com with these skills.
Some colleges are finally starting to teach Java or C#, but university curriculum changes move VERY slowly.
Maybe you're just looking in the wrong place.
In the Detroit area it is so hard for IT and engineering people to find jobs that lots (and lots) of people are moving out of state.
People are leaving so fast the housing market was just declared the worst in the nation because everyone is selling but no one is buying.
The US auto companies (and their labor suppliers like EDS / Compuware) have been laying people off by the thousands, so if you're looking for some fresh talent you're bound to find some in a talent pool of that size.
Google apparently is interested, they're opening an office in A^2.
Aside from that, a lot of people that didn't jump jobs for higher salaries in the dot com boom saw all of their friends go unemployed when those fancy companies went under.
So you can understand if a lot of people are hesitant to leave their current stable-ish job.
That's just the production & export.
Check out the Reserves.
Norway comes in at a whopping 8 billion barrells.
Canada has 178, Venezuala has 77, Russia 60, Iran 125, Iraq 115, Kuwait 101, and of course the king: Saudi Arabia - 261. Hell, even the US has more oil reserves than Norway at 22.
Besides, is that really anything to be proud of??
Shouldn't Norway get on another high horse and proclaim that they'll be free of all fossil fuels by 2009 or something?
Kudos for their efforts with taking a stand, but we'll see how long it lasts.
The EU is already rolling over to the smell of MS greenbacks.
Boy, that FBI couldn't catch terrorists flying two planes into skyscrapers in downtown New York, or a truck bomb down in OKC...
BUT BY GOD THEY'LL FRY EVERY DAMN KID THAT STEALS A SONG FROM THE RIAA!!!
What the fuck is wrong with this country.
Yeah!
You could take that old P75 with it's 300MB hard drive and... well... you could put like 5 or 6 CDs on it.
Ok, so you buy a new hard drive and video card to replace the ones you gutted out of it for your new PC, a network card since the old PC only had a modem, and by the time you've spent all that money your neighbor has an iPod one tenth the size that does the job way better!
I've got a PILE of old computer stuff I'd love to do something with, but it's so obsolete it's not worth it.
I just don't have the heart to throw away that old 300 baud modem!
Maybe the FCC is just PO'd about having an acronym that sounds like the F-Bomb if you try to pronounce it.
Sort of like a kid with the last name of "Bush" who always got made fun so he partners up with a guy named "Dick" and goes on to become president to try and to ban all profanity.
Gullibility is a national epidemic, not just restricted to politicians or 5th graders.
When "The Man Show" was first starting out, the guys put up a booth and were trying to get women to sign a petition to help stop women's suffrage.
They got quite a few naive women of all ages stopping by and even telling them how great it was that they were doing such a wonderful thing.
Chances are our gullibility epidemic has something to do with the fact that teachers are paid like indentured servants in this country.
Except for the fact that the spammer is rarely the businessman.
In most cases the click throughs and the response emails are to businesses who contracted spammers to email to thousands of people.
Worst case scenario on this is that with all the click throughs and no purchases, businesses may realize that spamming isn't profitable, but most businesses don't do that level of research on the returns of their investments.
Especially not the ones who hire spammers.
What would happen if they put it in a womb?
Just ask Primus!
"I am gopher boy pondering reality, I am Gopher Boy, who will buy my raspberries?"
(Mephisto and Kevin -- Chef Aid: The South Park Album -- Primus)
I've tried in the past to make several legitimate home and car insurance claims and been rejected outright by the claims representative.
They LIE.
They LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE!
Anybody that tells you they don't... is LYING!
Maybe they don't -all- lie, but most of them do!
Basically their first line of defense is:
Lie about it, and tell the person making the claim that it's not covered.
In fact, be a complete asshole to them, and do whatever you have to to keep them from calling back.
A BIG gas pipe in our house broke once.
We all made it out of the house fine, and after it was all plugged up we spent about $1,000 fixing the pipe that broke and all the other pipes that it wrenched loose when it fell.
The insurance company said that "worn or damaged" pipes aren't covered, that's wear and tear.
But if the whole HOUSE would have blown up... they would have covered that.
Genius, I tell ya!
These people even went so far as to berate my wife for even calling, and told her how she should know better, etc.
Assholes!!
Read "The Rainmaker" by John Grisham for a good "get that mean old insurance company" story.