The first is that our cities are a lot further apart than Europe's, for the most part. The second is that it takes an absolutely enormous capital expense up front to build high-speed rail, and U.S. taxpayers are reluctant to front the money. The third is that we do actually kind of have high-speed rail on some of the routes where it'd be more reasonable.
To get more specific, these are the top four (by passenger volume) domestic air routes in the United States: 1. Boston - New York City 2. Los Angeles - San Francisco 3. Washington, D.C. - New York City 4. New York City - Los Angeles
Of these, #4 is totally unreasonable for high-speed rail, for fairly obvious reasons.
Of the others, #1 and #3 already have service on the Acela Express, which is fairly high speed (top speed 150 mph, averages more in the 80s), though significantly slower than the European standard. It's slowly being upgraded so it can travel its top speed for more of the route, and both routes are gaining passengers, especially as flying gets to be more of a hassle.
The remaining one, #2, is perennially talked about as a good candidate for high-speed rail, but it's just far enough, and has just enough mountains along the route, to be extremely expensive to build the line--estimates are somewhere around $30 billion. Nonetheless it's still officially being planned and preliminary work is underway.
If you had a MS in EE from a top-10 engineering school, you could have your pick of $70k+ jobs. Industry is wary of PhDs in general, because they figure that even if you agree to take a job where you do "real" work, your only interest is research and you'll jump ship as soon as you can.
If I wanted to live like it were 1955, I could live a lot more cheaply than I do. There were fewer than half as many cars per family in 1955; the average house and apartment was much half the size; few people had air conditioning; nobody had computers or cable television; almost nobody could fly anywhere; very few people had clothes dryers; the microwave oven didn't exist; etc.; etc.
The reason productivity goes up without the work week therefore going down is that, instead of working less to buy the same total amount of stuff, we're buying a lot more stuff than we were 50 years ago. If you want to go from a 1955 house (average size: 1100 sq ft for a 4-person family) to a 2008 house (average size: 2350 sq ft for a 4-person family), plus you now want to air-condition it, supply it with cable television and internet access, and who knows what else, you're going to have to get the money to do that from somewhere.
The only two high-profile Guantanamo-related cases to get to the Supreme Court, for example, have both gone against the government---in 2004 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld held that detainees have a right to challenge their detention judicially, and in 2006 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld held that the military commission trials Bush had initiated were illegal.
More recently, there doesn't seem to be much serious belief that the courts would, for example, side with the administration on the issue of illegal wiretapping by AT&T and others. The bigger threat there is that Congress will grant them immunity.
A study published in 1999, with the excellent title "Disability Associated With Psychiatric Comorbidity and Health Status in Bosnian Refugees Living in Croatia", found that 39.2% of refugees surveyed suffered from clinical depression. Now, regardless of your position on depression in general as a bona-fide illness necessitating pharmacological treatment with e.g. antidepressants, it seems a bit unreasonable to assume that Bosnian refugees who are depressed are suffering from some sort of medical illness. Rather, the main reason for their exceedingly pessimistic outlook on life is that they fled a war zone and are now living in a refugee camp.
Were I a psychologist, I might prescribe treatments such as "get them out of a refugee camp and back into some semblance of normal life" and "get everyone to stop killing their friends and relatives".
An inquiry started a few weeks ago in which he's being accused of failing to disclose that he was being paid by tort lawyers to conduct the study, as well as of conducting invasive procedures that were not in the interests of the patients involved in the study.
Now granted, a humanities professor trying to make a name for himself with a major book is going to publish it through a major academic press, not POD. But especially in the sciences (where books don't really "count" as publications nearly as much), and especially with established authors, POD is becoming an increasingly used alternative. The main reason is that traditional publishers charge exhorbitant prices for small-print-run academic books. So for many, your choices are basically: 1) traditional publication, sticker price of around $200, basically only libraries buy it; 2) informal distribution, e.g. only as spiral-bound course packets; 3) free online distribution via PDFs; or 4) POD. Of those options, #4 is often a good one.
Apple has been an enemy of openness in general for decades now, so it's not that surprising they'd be opposed here. Back when Wozniak had say in how things were run it wasn't quite the same, but since the mid-80s at the latest they've been an all-proprietary shop, with aggressive efforts to prevent third-party anything from even interoperating with their products. Back when the IBM PC was de facto open, the Mac was the proprietary, locked-in platform, and not that much has changed since then.
Especially in the western regions, Chinese authoritarianism is mainly directed at preserving Han-Chinese supremacy over separatism among other ethnic groups, such as the Tibetans (in Tibet) and Turkic groups (in Xinjiang). This involves both the sort of direct control and suppression we see here, and more subtly and long-term, a program of sending Han Chinese settlers into those regions to dilute the non-Han majority.
As you might expect, you get different views on this issue if you talk to Han vs. non-Han Chinese citizens.
When it comes to computers, there's quite fast deflation. You can buy a lot more computing for $1800 today than in the past. More importantly, you can get a lot of good machines for a lot less than $1800, and an $1800 laptop is in the upper portion of the price range for mainstream machines---so needs to compete against other things in that price range, like Apple's higher-end products.
The dollar had a huge run-up in value versus European currencies from about 1950 to the mid 1990s. It's now lost some of those gains, but is still higher than its historical values.
For example, today's "low" U.S. dollar is worth about 0.50 British pounds. In 1980, it was worth... around 0.45 British pounds. So it's up 10% on what it was in 1980. True, that's not as good as being up 50% on its 1980 value, which at its peak it was, but it's still better than if you had kept your money in pounds.
I usually use xpdf or evince, but on occasion I fire up acroread mainly to fill out PDF forms. If you install the EScript plugin (also available for Linux), it even will do auto-form-population correctly (e.g. keeping a "total" field up to date), or at least the same as it does on Windows.
There's a long-running dispute over this, which isn't helped by the fact that it's caught up in a turf war between psychiatrists and psychologists. Psychiatrists generally can prescribe drugs, and come from a pharmacology-heavy M.D. background, and tend to play up the role of drugs in treatment. Psychologists cannot prescribe drugs except in a few limited circumstances, come from a therapy-heavy Ph.D. background, and tend to play down the role of drugs in treatment. There are both cultural and economic reasons for the turf war there.
But in any case you can find a bunch of conflicting studies on whether therapy, drugs, some combination, or neither are the best treatment method in a variety of cases.
A proper double-blind study in such cases will use "active placebos", which are placebos that attempt to mimic the drug's side-effects well enough that neither the patient nor their doctor can tell from the side-effects alone whether the patient has gotten the real drug or the placebo.
Unfortunately they're not used that often, partly because it significantly increases the expense of the study to develop and use an active placebo, and partly because it makes it less likely that the study will show a positive outcome.
A common term is "self-archiving", and it's been widespread in physics and comp sci at least since the early to mid 1990s, and by now most journals have given in and officially allow it---it was so widespread already that their only choice was to bless it, or to try to put the genie back in the bottle by C&D'ing their own authors. I'm starting to see it more and more commonly mentioned in other fields as well; many statistics and math journals now allow self-archiving, for example, and one even generates and submits the preprints to arxiv.org itself.
The purpose of the bill is not to keep the telecomms from paying damages. That could be done by having the government agree to cover the damages, or capping the damages at something small, or various other means.
Rather, the purpose of the bill is to keep this from coming to trial at all. Why? Because a trial, and the subpoenas and revelations it would bring, would embarrass a lot of people. Probably mainly Republicans, especially in the administration, but probably also some Democrats who knew about this but didn't say anything, and who knows what other Washington types.
From the perspective of Washington insiders in both parties, this is a big mess that's better swept under the rug and never aired in open court.
To generalize a bit, my experience is that the more "high art" a school views itself as, the less useful its students are for applied stuff like graphic design. If they spend all their time reading theoretical treatises and visiting modern-art galleries, they're not learning the same skills that a webdesigner needs. A local institution which I'm familiar (left nameless to protect the guilty), for example, is almost actively opposed to what they see as the "vocationalization" of their field, and sort of goes out of their way to make it a Real Art School For Real Serious Artists. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but their students aren't likely to be good web designers, unless they learned additional skills elsewhere.
Yes, SOM/DSOM had some good points. However, it was also pretty horribly complex. Especially to implement, and even in many ways to use. As a result, almost all other approaches have gone for something simpler rather than trying to recreate it. One of the better ones IMO was NeXT's Portable Distributed Objects (PDO), which was so dirt-simple to use that NeXT engineers developed an infamous reputation in the 90s for writing letters to the editor in response to CORBA articles showing how to do the same thing in PDO in some ludicrously small fraction of the code. It was also incredibly fast. GNUstep has a reimplementation of PDO, though I don't think it's broken out into a nicely reusable library (I could be wrong).
Basically: weighing all the pros and cons, nobody else reached the conclusion that writing their own version of SOM/DSOM was the best option available, so they all did different things. I don't know if this was necessarily the right conclusion, but it's hardly that SOM/DSOM is some magical bit of code that nobody else could've reimplemented had they wanted to.
I realize this has a fairly small chance of actually being passed, what with Bush being a lame-duck president and most spending increases most likely going to an "economic stimulus package" and worthy causes like bailing out real-estate and bond speculators, but it would be pretty good for computer science research, especially the sort of basic research that DARPA doesn't fund (DARPA funds mainly short-term, deployment-focused R&D).
The "20% hikes for math and physical sciences, engineering, and computer sciences" is the main highlight, since NSF funding for computer science has been declining for the past few years. In addition, "a 25% increase in the number of graduate research fellowships" will free up money for professors to spend what grant money they do get on actual research instead of on paying grad-students' tuition and stipends. I may also help to increase the attractiveness of CS/engineering/science graduate school for U.S. students, among whom enrollments have been declining hugely (it's not a huge carrot, but an NSF fellowship pays $30k/year, versus the usual ~$18-22k grad-student stipend, so is substantially more attractive).
The short answer is: it's not entirely clear what the law on this is, because not enough cases have come to court anywhere.
A longer answer:
Nearly all countries recognize some form of trademark protection, and some egregious examples of typosquatting would be illegal anywhere the trademark is registered. However countries differ on what particularly is required for a trademark claim. In some countries, sitting on the domain name and putting some ads there wouldn't be infringement, because it isn't competing with the original mark, and trademark law is at its strongest and most consistent in prohibiting competition using the mark. For example, you can't start a company MacDonald's that sells hamburgers in competition with the McDonald's chain, and put your website at macdonalds.com. But can you register macdonalds.com and put ads there? Depends on the country. Does it depend on whether the ads are related to hamburgers or not? Also depends on the country, and even within countries, possibly on the judge.
Within the United States claims are somewhat easier, based on the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999, which explicitly outlaws cybersquatting and typosquatting done with "a bad faith intent to profit from that mark". So registering a typo site and putting up a rant there is ok---the owner of fallwell.com won his case against Jerry Falwell. But profiting from it in "bad faith" is not, and this is usually taken to include typosquatting with GoogleAds.
Now can that be enforced against foreign companies? Possibly. If they're making their money from GoogleAds, the court can pretty trivially seize that income stream, since Google is a U.S. company, and possibly order Google to stop serving ads on that site. More controversially, the Act authorizes courts to order that a domain name registration be canceled or transfered to the trademark owner. Although the internet itself is international, this might be enforceable if the domain name is in a registry like.com where the registrar is U.S.-based and therefore subject to U.S. law.
Slashdot Mirror
The first is that our cities are a lot further apart than Europe's, for the most part. The second is that it takes an absolutely enormous capital expense up front to build high-speed rail, and U.S. taxpayers are reluctant to front the money. The third is that we do actually kind of have high-speed rail on some of the routes where it'd be more reasonable.
To get more specific, these are the top four (by passenger volume) domestic air routes in the United States:
1. Boston - New York City
2. Los Angeles - San Francisco
3. Washington, D.C. - New York City
4. New York City - Los Angeles
Of these, #4 is totally unreasonable for high-speed rail, for fairly obvious reasons.
Of the others, #1 and #3 already have service on the Acela Express, which is fairly high speed (top speed 150 mph, averages more in the 80s), though significantly slower than the European standard. It's slowly being upgraded so it can travel its top speed for more of the route, and both routes are gaining passengers, especially as flying gets to be more of a hassle.
The remaining one, #2, is perennially talked about as a good candidate for high-speed rail, but it's just far enough, and has just enough mountains along the route, to be extremely expensive to build the line--estimates are somewhere around $30 billion. Nonetheless it's still officially being planned and preliminary work is underway.
If you had a MS in EE from a top-10 engineering school, you could have your pick of $70k+ jobs. Industry is wary of PhDs in general, because they figure that even if you agree to take a job where you do "real" work, your only interest is research and you'll jump ship as soon as you can.
If I wanted to live like it were 1955, I could live a lot more cheaply than I do. There were fewer than half as many cars per family in 1955; the average house and apartment was much half the size; few people had air conditioning; nobody had computers or cable television; almost nobody could fly anywhere; very few people had clothes dryers; the microwave oven didn't exist; etc.; etc.
The reason productivity goes up without the work week therefore going down is that, instead of working less to buy the same total amount of stuff, we're buying a lot more stuff than we were 50 years ago. If you want to go from a 1955 house (average size: 1100 sq ft for a 4-person family) to a 2008 house (average size: 2350 sq ft for a 4-person family), plus you now want to air-condition it, supply it with cable television and internet access, and who knows what else, you're going to have to get the money to do that from somewhere.
The only two high-profile Guantanamo-related cases to get to the Supreme Court, for example, have both gone against the government---in 2004 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld held that detainees have a right to challenge their detention judicially, and in 2006 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld held that the military commission trials Bush had initiated were illegal.
More recently, there doesn't seem to be much serious belief that the courts would, for example, side with the administration on the issue of illegal wiretapping by AT&T and others. The bigger threat there is that Congress will grant them immunity.
I've tried posting on kuro5hin too, but there's this guy there that tries pimping his music so frequently that I don't know how I can go on living.
A study published in 1999, with the excellent title "Disability Associated With Psychiatric Comorbidity and Health Status in Bosnian Refugees Living in Croatia", found that 39.2% of refugees surveyed suffered from clinical depression. Now, regardless of your position on depression in general as a bona-fide illness necessitating pharmacological treatment with e.g. antidepressants, it seems a bit unreasonable to assume that Bosnian refugees who are depressed are suffering from some sort of medical illness. Rather, the main reason for their exceedingly pessimistic outlook on life is that they fled a war zone and are now living in a refugee camp.
Were I a psychologist, I might prescribe treatments such as "get them out of a refugee camp and back into some semblance of normal life" and "get everyone to stop killing their friends and relatives".
that cannot be reasonably justified in a free and democratic society
An inquiry started a few weeks ago in which he's being accused of failing to disclose that he was being paid by tort lawyers to conduct the study, as well as of conducting invasive procedures that were not in the interests of the patients involved in the study.
Now granted, a humanities professor trying to make a name for himself with a major book is going to publish it through a major academic press, not POD. But especially in the sciences (where books don't really "count" as publications nearly as much), and especially with established authors, POD is becoming an increasingly used alternative. The main reason is that traditional publishers charge exhorbitant prices for small-print-run academic books. So for many, your choices are basically: 1) traditional publication, sticker price of around $200, basically only libraries buy it; 2) informal distribution, e.g. only as spiral-bound course packets; 3) free online distribution via PDFs; or 4) POD. Of those options, #4 is often a good one.
Apple has been an enemy of openness in general for decades now, so it's not that surprising they'd be opposed here. Back when Wozniak had say in how things were run it wasn't quite the same, but since the mid-80s at the latest they've been an all-proprietary shop, with aggressive efforts to prevent third-party anything from even interoperating with their products. Back when the IBM PC was de facto open, the Mac was the proprietary, locked-in platform, and not that much has changed since then.
From a programming languages viewpoint, there's no fundamental distinction between a "description" language and a "programming" language.
Especially in the western regions, Chinese authoritarianism is mainly directed at preserving Han-Chinese supremacy over separatism among other ethnic groups, such as the Tibetans (in Tibet) and Turkic groups (in Xinjiang). This involves both the sort of direct control and suppression we see here, and more subtly and long-term, a program of sending Han Chinese settlers into those regions to dilute the non-Han majority.
As you might expect, you get different views on this issue if you talk to Han vs. non-Han Chinese citizens.
When it comes to computers, there's quite fast deflation. You can buy a lot more computing for $1800 today than in the past. More importantly, you can get a lot of good machines for a lot less than $1800, and an $1800 laptop is in the upper portion of the price range for mainstream machines---so needs to compete against other things in that price range, like Apple's higher-end products.
The dollar had a huge run-up in value versus European currencies from about 1950 to the mid 1990s. It's now lost some of those gains, but is still higher than its historical values.
For example, today's "low" U.S. dollar is worth about 0.50 British pounds. In 1980, it was worth... around 0.45 British pounds. So it's up 10% on what it was in 1980. True, that's not as good as being up 50% on its 1980 value, which at its peak it was, but it's still better than if you had kept your money in pounds.
I usually use xpdf or evince, but on occasion I fire up acroread mainly to fill out PDF forms. If you install the EScript plugin (also available for Linux), it even will do auto-form-population correctly (e.g. keeping a "total" field up to date), or at least the same as it does on Windows.
There's a long-running dispute over this, which isn't helped by the fact that it's caught up in a turf war between psychiatrists and psychologists. Psychiatrists generally can prescribe drugs, and come from a pharmacology-heavy M.D. background, and tend to play up the role of drugs in treatment. Psychologists cannot prescribe drugs except in a few limited circumstances, come from a therapy-heavy Ph.D. background, and tend to play down the role of drugs in treatment. There are both cultural and economic reasons for the turf war there.
But in any case you can find a bunch of conflicting studies on whether therapy, drugs, some combination, or neither are the best treatment method in a variety of cases.
A proper double-blind study in such cases will use "active placebos", which are placebos that attempt to mimic the drug's side-effects well enough that neither the patient nor their doctor can tell from the side-effects alone whether the patient has gotten the real drug or the placebo.
Unfortunately they're not used that often, partly because it significantly increases the expense of the study to develop and use an active placebo, and partly because it makes it less likely that the study will show a positive outcome.
As the recent independence of Kosovo (a few years following the 1999 US-led bombing campaign) shows, the U.S. is still the world's policeman.
A common term is "self-archiving", and it's been widespread in physics and comp sci at least since the early to mid 1990s, and by now most journals have given in and officially allow it---it was so widespread already that their only choice was to bless it, or to try to put the genie back in the bottle by C&D'ing their own authors. I'm starting to see it more and more commonly mentioned in other fields as well; many statistics and math journals now allow self-archiving, for example, and one even generates and submits the preprints to arxiv.org itself.
The purpose of the bill is not to keep the telecomms from paying damages. That could be done by having the government agree to cover the damages, or capping the damages at something small, or various other means.
Rather, the purpose of the bill is to keep this from coming to trial at all. Why? Because a trial, and the subpoenas and revelations it would bring, would embarrass a lot of people. Probably mainly Republicans, especially in the administration, but probably also some Democrats who knew about this but didn't say anything, and who knows what other Washington types.
From the perspective of Washington insiders in both parties, this is a big mess that's better swept under the rug and never aired in open court.
To generalize a bit, my experience is that the more "high art" a school views itself as, the less useful its students are for applied stuff like graphic design. If they spend all their time reading theoretical treatises and visiting modern-art galleries, they're not learning the same skills that a webdesigner needs. A local institution which I'm familiar (left nameless to protect the guilty), for example, is almost actively opposed to what they see as the "vocationalization" of their field, and sort of goes out of their way to make it a Real Art School For Real Serious Artists. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but their students aren't likely to be good web designers, unless they learned additional skills elsewhere.
Yes, SOM/DSOM had some good points. However, it was also pretty horribly complex. Especially to implement, and even in many ways to use. As a result, almost all other approaches have gone for something simpler rather than trying to recreate it. One of the better ones IMO was NeXT's Portable Distributed Objects (PDO), which was so dirt-simple to use that NeXT engineers developed an infamous reputation in the 90s for writing letters to the editor in response to CORBA articles showing how to do the same thing in PDO in some ludicrously small fraction of the code. It was also incredibly fast. GNUstep has a reimplementation of PDO, though I don't think it's broken out into a nicely reusable library (I could be wrong).
Basically: weighing all the pros and cons, nobody else reached the conclusion that writing their own version of SOM/DSOM was the best option available, so they all did different things. I don't know if this was necessarily the right conclusion, but it's hardly that SOM/DSOM is some magical bit of code that nobody else could've reimplemented had they wanted to.
I realize this has a fairly small chance of actually being passed, what with Bush being a lame-duck president and most spending increases most likely going to an "economic stimulus package" and worthy causes like bailing out real-estate and bond speculators, but it would be pretty good for computer science research, especially the sort of basic research that DARPA doesn't fund (DARPA funds mainly short-term, deployment-focused R&D).
The "20% hikes for math and physical sciences, engineering, and computer sciences" is the main highlight, since NSF funding for computer science has been declining for the past few years. In addition, "a 25% increase in the number of graduate research fellowships" will free up money for professors to spend what grant money they do get on actual research instead of on paying grad-students' tuition and stipends. I may also help to increase the attractiveness of CS/engineering/science graduate school for U.S. students, among whom enrollments have been declining hugely (it's not a huge carrot, but an NSF fellowship pays $30k/year, versus the usual ~$18-22k grad-student stipend, so is substantially more attractive).
The short answer is: it's not entirely clear what the law on this is, because not enough cases have come to court anywhere.
.com where the registrar is U.S.-based and therefore subject to U.S. law.
A longer answer:
Nearly all countries recognize some form of trademark protection, and some egregious examples of typosquatting would be illegal anywhere the trademark is registered. However countries differ on what particularly is required for a trademark claim. In some countries, sitting on the domain name and putting some ads there wouldn't be infringement, because it isn't competing with the original mark, and trademark law is at its strongest and most consistent in prohibiting competition using the mark. For example, you can't start a company MacDonald's that sells hamburgers in competition with the McDonald's chain, and put your website at macdonalds.com. But can you register macdonalds.com and put ads there? Depends on the country. Does it depend on whether the ads are related to hamburgers or not? Also depends on the country, and even within countries, possibly on the judge.
Within the United States claims are somewhat easier, based on the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999, which explicitly outlaws cybersquatting and typosquatting done with "a bad faith intent to profit from that mark". So registering a typo site and putting up a rant there is ok---the owner of fallwell.com won his case against Jerry Falwell. But profiting from it in "bad faith" is not, and this is usually taken to include typosquatting with GoogleAds.
Now can that be enforced against foreign companies? Possibly. If they're making their money from GoogleAds, the court can pretty trivially seize that income stream, since Google is a U.S. company, and possibly order Google to stop serving ads on that site. More controversially, the Act authorizes courts to order that a domain name registration be canceled or transfered to the trademark owner. Although the internet itself is international, this might be enforceable if the domain name is in a registry like
but that video was clearly not posted first, so is off-topic for this thread!