I happened to move from Europe to US. There is a huge difference in how US functions and how Europe functions - the difference is mainly in distance. The US economy spans such a distance, that it's impossible to effectively produce anything with high transportation costs. US manufacturers rely on cheap transport, whatever that might be.
The distances apply also to personal space. Just look at how much distance everyone has to cover here to work or to buy groceries. Driving 20 miles to work is nothing, and 50 miles is quite acceptable. In Europe 50 miles is sometimes about the distance of half a coutry. While people still do such trips on daily basis, there is many more different means of transportation than here, because it would be near to impossible to actually accomodate all SUVs. If you've never lived there, you just can't picture the difference it makes here to have suburbs of one city spreading over half a state.
Japan is even more drastic case, as their space is far more limited than European.
So, altogether, yes - it's comparing apples to oranges, and the rest of the world should not be so hasty to critisize it. However I do think that US for some unknown reason tries to desperately maintain the status quo instead of developing more efficient means of mass transportation.
Cheap bandwidth is a temporary thing of the present. In the normal market, the increased demand will generate the increased prices and effectively all those offshoring companies may find themselves at some point at the mercy of telecom companies. The only thing that prevents it at the moment is even bigger supply. But even that hasn't actually eliminated all problems related to offshoring. For example, Motorola (after all a company that makes good telecom stuff) folded up at least some of their offshore shops and moved everyone to US because of the communication problems (multilanguage translation, time zones, etc...) Bandwidth doesn't eliminate any of those problems.
Back to demand/supply of bandwidth. At the moment there is also another factor that prevents oligopoly in telecommunications: innovation. So happens that existing telecom companies are stretched almost to the limits of their productivity and can't really see any place for reasonable reaserch in the domain. So the progress is made mostly by outsiders. However, I think we might be reaching the point where any further easy progress by outsiders is impossible since it would require disproportionate investment without any guarantee of reasonable return on it. Telecom industry right now is in a quagmire. Quagmire of overcompetitive market (compared to required investments), quagmire caused by explosion of services delivered to people (just several years ago it was a phone service, only - and US regulations made it either local or long-distance, not both; now we've got phone, a long list of networking solutions, wireless, cable tv, and a host of other options more or less related to telephony), quagmire of massive layoffs just conducted by virtually every single company, and quagmire of bankrupcies. It will take time to sort all of that out, and in the meantime offshoring might be a good idea. But sooner or later, the market will stabilize again and then offshoring won't be such a wonderful idea anymore.
Now, to the machines writing code: one problem is interesting here. Say a machine "invents" an interesting piece of code. Who has the copyright on that? And if we assume the current patent situation, who should be eligible to be an author of that code?
One more thing: I've seen GA in work and one thing is certain, it'll never be nearly an efficient way to find solutions to known problems. It's basically pretty much a brute force programming - instead of a monkey hitting random keys from A-Z, imagine a keyboard with various pieces of code hooked to different keys - we might have even a million of those keys - and said monkey hitting the keys that produce that code. Is that any better than the former solution? Well, it will produce more reasonably looking code, of course. But whether that's going to be useful to solve anything important and outperform a person using decent tools, I doubt.
The big problem of programming is that it basically hasn't evolved since it was first invented. We got OO and aspects, and other sorts of things like that, but we are still stuck to writing for and while loops. All paradigms are basically reduced to different organization of the code (well, maybe with one little exception for patterns - which are probably one and the only serious addition to programming since the for loop). But we do not have tools that would eliminate the need for writing loops and conditions and such. Again one little exception are GUI and simple database applications, where for the former we've got some fabulous WYSIWYG tools (easy here to do, since we're talking about the visual aspect of an application), and the latter has some great generators backed by CASE tools. But the rest of the field has been pretty much stagnant since 1960s.
If the field is ever to evolve, we need to lift programming to another level of abstraction and create tools that will eliminate mundane typing of same code again and again. Does it mean we will be able to forget the loops and such? Maybe, maybe not. Depends how we solve the problem. The real solution should make it possible to actually forget about those.
GA used as such a tool might just do the trick, but trying to put too much on its shoulders will end with a big smoking stack of junk that nobody will want to touch for years in fear of getting burned.
Whether it's vandalism or not, it incurs a monetary cost that the chalker is unwilling or unable to pay for.
No, it does not. All you have to do is wait for the next bigger rain or two weeks whichever is earlier. No cost on you.
The problem with this as with any other quantum mechanism, is that here they are talking about singular atoms, while in practice QM works statistically and there is a huge (exponential) impact of the distance on the effectiveness of QM mechanisms.
I think "boycott" is a one big nonsense in this case. MPAA and RIAA charge free market prices for their products. Unlike some other things, seeing a movie or hearing a song is not a life-critical necessity, so if I don't think something is worth the price, I don't buy it - very, very simple. In case of movies, I might wait until it shows on Netflix, for example, and maybe, maybe rent it then - for lower price, without the hype. Now and then there are some productions worth seeing for the money they want for them and I'm not going to boycott anything. Now, I go to the movies about twice a year, because there isn't much more that I'd like to see right away.
I don't think industry gains anything by rising the prices of records or movies. The point is that people have just so much money to spend on entertainment and the whole difference is they will buy one record, or two. If we talk about distributors only, they gain a tiny little bit because they pay royalties and costs on just one record, if people buy one.
The whole economic model is completely screwed, because different distributors compete for a fixed amount of money by driving up the prices of a single record to the point that people who want to buy them, can efford just that one record from that particular distributor. Ironically, lowering prices will increase profits of the competition, because I, as a customer, don't need two exact same CDs, so for the remaining money, I'm going to buy some other CD, possibly from the competition. Paradoxically, in spite of what it seems from looking at the $1bln mark in the story, this would be more of an example of high demand with limited cash.
No, I don't assume that. However, multiple webs of trust require some sort of bridging between them, which creates effectively one big one. If you talk about disjoint ones, you can just as well talk about disjoint ones that contain just one person only - the sender.
Headers forged or not - it doesn't eliminate anything. What sort of advantage does it give me that I know for sure that getyourviagra.com sent that particular email? Viruses and other worms will thrive just as well, since they actually use legitimate computers to send mails. SPF/Sender ID will only spur more active worm/virus development - we will see more of that stuff specifically targetted for sending spam - from legitimate computers through perfectly legitimate SMTP servers - personally, for that reason I'm totally against SPF and any sort of ideas like that.
In my opinion, the only real solution is a strict policy on unsolicited commercial messaging followed by actual enforcement of it, and charging spammers real costs of distribution of their emails. The reason why it is so popular is that it's so cheap. If spammers had to pay for all resources used by particular email, most likely the problem would be gone in a minute - unfortunately that can hardly be done in the way the Internet operates at the moment, and any sort of solution of the kind would basically be very crude. Detailed billing would require almost totally different network architecture.
Reason: there is no *open* replacement that would fix the flaws.
By open I mean something that can receive a message from a person you haven't had a contact with before.
Any system that would eliminate the spam requires some sort of "web of trust". To establish a web of trust, you need to close the system and limit it only to trusted users. Apart from all possible problems related to the web of trust, the system will be always either too restrictive, if it's effective, or too ineffective, if it's not so restrictive.
IM is already taken over by spammers in some degree - it's just a matter of time and the number of users for that process to accelerate. Anything else will suffer from the same problems - you let unknown people call/message/email you - you get spam. You restrict yourself only to known people, you filter spam out, but lock out everyone who might potentially need to contact you but doesn't belong to your personal web of trust.
So, the bottom line is that every new application will suffer from either spam or restriction, and because of that it doesn't pay off to switch to a different system.
PS: Viruses are not anything that started with email. Email just happens to be a convenient medium of the time, but they were proliferating quite fine with floppy disks, as they are now with email. P2P will (already has in many cases) the exact same problem - people sending around unchecked files, viruses taking over control of P2P programs and multiplying themselves, and so on and so forth.
Not mentioning that the vast majority of what is being published currently is complete jibberish and won't be read by anyone (including authors) except for reviewers (sometimes even those not that thoroughly) - conclusion from one of articles in IEEE Communications Magazine about a year ago.
Current model of scientific journalism relies on the fact that publications are necessary to obtain funding for more or (mostly) less innovative research projects, and that a lot of institutions rely on research money to supplement their teaching environment.
As long as that lasts, the publishing model that we have currently, will also last - since free journals rarely have enough weight to be considered something worthy mentioning in grant proposals.
Note that "free journals" model is hardly a new idea - it existed before in many places as "technical report" idea - usually internal, but sometimes quite widely distributed piece of paper. Usually not peer-reviewed, but the demand from outside on particular issue could be some sort of measurement how important that particular idea is. Also several years back a number of electronic scientific journals started their existance, but we've got to see yet the first reknowned one, that would actually count towards yearly reports and grant proposals.
People who don't care that much about their need to report their articles here and there, publish them anywhere, and get the permission to republish on the net (say after some time). One notable effect of that is citation rank of articles that are published on the web is usually higher than those only in the journals. Basic reason is that articles accessible through the web are subject to text search and much easier to fish from those literally millions of scientific articles published every year - free accessability to everyone is another factor.
But really, current problem is less in what sort of license there is, but how to make funding less dependent on publications. Current situation is total absurd - last ICC conference received, AFAIR, around 4000 submitions - total nonsense. And that is just one (although admittedly one of the largest) conference. Noone will tell me that there were over 4000 significant ideas in communications.
If the funding didn't rely on articles published, most authors would just as gladly choose electronic journals or self publish on the web - really easy after you attain certain level of reknown or work in reknowned institution. I'm sure regular journals would still have enough clients to exist - although maybe there wouldn't be that many around. In any case, for most people they could choose freely between all possible media and the whole licensing discussion wouldn't have place. Also, paper journals would be much more willing to let authors publish articles on the web in addition to paper submition.
In this stupid context services like Google are illegal, because all website content is copyrighted and google indexes pages with largest number of hits. If you don't believe me, click on "Cached" link by any entry that you find with Google. Effectively they reproduce and republish your website. In fact it works even for websites that have been taken down (sometimes for "cease and desist" reasons so it might have legal implications, although not to the owner of the website, since they have no control over Google cache).
Now, what Google does is in fact worse than the plagiarism detection service in question, because they don't allow open access to their database of articles, while google does. For Google, some defense might be if you submit your website manually, but in practice they will index you whether you submit or not, as long as there is at least one website they have already in index that links to your page. Also, Google is a for-profit company and a large score of people lives from keeping the count of indexed pages as high as possible.
I use a system where I give interim exams and grade them and give them back to students, while I don't count those results into the final grade. The final exam covers the whole term. That is explained to the students at the first meeting and on every request. I found it to work very well and generally improved performance of the students - both subjectively observed and objectively measured as their grades. Students who don't take those interim exams (even though they have no impact) are rare exceptions. Most students treat them as real exams that count and prepare seriously for them. The results aren't very poor either - maybe a tiny little bit lower than they would be normally. I think subconciously every student thinks about it just as a test and wants to perform, whether it counts or not. Just like players on the field want to win whether the game has impact or not on the team's final standing. Certainly, it's not perfect, but it's the best I could think of and checked out in practice.
Copyright is yours whether you get it "granted" by the policy or not.
I made the effort of check UofA to see how it is handled and for example in the case of master thesis, every student must sign a "Library Release Form" basically granting unlimited rights to use single copies of the thesis in whatever way the university wishes.
Release forms are customary with all publishers - submitting any material to any publisher you must sign a release form and University acts as a publisher in this case.
As far as I can tell, it was only so because it was a take-home exam - a clear situation where you are supposed to come up with the work individually. In any other case, it might have been different.
Also, another poster was wrong - nobody can take your copyright away - you create it, you have copyright (with one explicit exception of works created under contract for compensation). University can reserve certain rights (there is code binding students and claiming that you haven't read it is not a valid excuse - ignorance doesn't supersede law), but since they don't compensate you for your work and there is no prior contract agreeing to what kind of work you are going to do for the university for what kind of compensation and in what timeframe, you and whoever else participated in creation of that work own the copyright.
The problem is, that university provides usually the environment for creating works, and that means that in usual case they at least have partial copyright on everything you do for your classes.
In case of individual works reported as assignments (sometimes self-selected by students), it is your laziness (maybe lack of time, but generally carelessness about legal consequences) and that simply shouldn't be done period. As mentioned before, most institutions bind students with the code and students are supposed to know that code - if they don't, it's like with everything else - their fault. Owning copyright doesn't mean that university doesn't have any rights to the work you report. You are turning it in as an assignment and in the light of the student code that binds you, you are agreeing that the university has rights to do whatever it wishes with your work. You can do the same thing, but by turning in the works, you are giving certain rights to the university. No sane university would operate without such a clause, because that would open them to all sorts of litigations (that you haven't permitted them to this or that - say keep it in their library for future students). They don't need copyright for that, just the clause that permits them to do that with all works submitted as assignments.
Thus the answer of the legal department was correct, but gave you the false sense of security that the university can't do anything with what they get from you.
Formally, most of the schools reserve rights to works written as assignments, usually making works public domain. Stanford was being probably very nice allowing you to be an exception. I know a lot of people who did their master thesis in their companies and in that case they usually didn't turn the code in - they wrote an analysis and design of it as actual master thesis or something similar, they might have even presented it during the defense, but the code wasn't included with the dissertation.
Also, depending on your particular situation and how you made the development, you might not have owned the exclusive rights to the code you are talking about. You might have consulted people from the university about it, you might have used university equipment at some stages. There might be other aspects I don't remember about right now. In that case the copyright is shared. Thus your statement that the particular copy was illegal might have had little legal founding and consequences, since first of all you were not able to determine that alone.
But have no fear;-) Bill Gates did just that thing with his first commercial product - Basic interpretter. Coded it on university equipment and used university resources, then assumed ownership and sold it exclusively (as far as I know). University was grumbling but he cared little. At least you got away with a diploma.;-)
I happen to teach Computer Networks and related subjects at University of Pittsburgh. While I don't trust my students in 100%, I don't really see a big problem with cheating. Simply put, if they cheat it is first of all their problem. I'm young enough to remember my grad school and I was usually the source and there were "sponges" all around. Sponges had later pretty hard time finding a good job and when they did, they had pretty hard time getting into it, because they had to learn all (or at least a lot of) what they missed in the grad school. That experience carries me through my teaching - I don't make cheating overly easy, but I'm not paranoid about checking my students. While that might not be so clear in arts majors, in science majors it is pretty straightforward relationship - the paper by itself means pretty much nothing (and now it's sharp and crystal clear after dot com and telecom bubbles...) I can see that majority of students have a very good sense of what awaits them after the school.
Another thing: turnitin.com and similar services are simply an easy way for instructors of doing their job. Within my time, I've never repeated questions on final exams. By now I've created pretty good number of them and still making more. Same with projects - there are new projects every term and I make sure to put something unique that cannot be easily downloaded fromt the web. It is very simple. So, I have the comfort that my students actually have to make the effort themselves and don't have play a Cerber.
I require my students to submit their work electronically because of following reasons:
1) programs are usually hard to check on the paper when they start to exceed two pages,
2) any kind of information is much easier to manage electronically than on the paper,
3) returned homeworks are confidential - people don't have to fear being laughed at by someone who accidentally finds their paper/program in my office or whereever else.
Especially the latter point makes to me a lot of sense, because in my opinion that sort of security is essential to enable some of those students to come to me with their actual problems. (Besides, it doesn't seem economical to waste paper on something that has such a short lifespan.)
Actually they happen to be about the same. Copper wire speeds vary between 0.4 and 0.95c, depending on the desing of the cable. Typical assumption is 0.66c. Fiber optics propogation speeds vary, too. However the most common assumption is 0.66c, because SiO2 (silica glass) has just that factor (approximately).
You are right, however you are wrong;-) Well, speed of light is not the only problem. One of the major complications in electrical wiring is that at high frequencies even a couple inches turns into long distance telecommunications and you have to construct actual transmission lines with matching impedances. Using optics eliminates this problem. Now if you talk about speed of light, at the distances of inches that's far less relevant than you think. Typically much more problem is with the transmission rate and synchronization than actual propagation delay.
Inside single chip the situation is different, because the maximum delay pretty much determines clock rate.
This is great. It's not to do computations. Really, silicon is good and fast enough for that right now (of course it would be real cool if possible, but that won't work). However, couple this effect with phototransistors which already are in the domain of high frequency (at least theoretical results suggest so - 10 GHz here) and you end of with the dream of board engineers - forget wiring chips with metal. Interconnect them with fiber! Certainly with germanium it's gonna bit a bit difficult, but it's worth it: all you need to wire to chips is power, end of distance limit between chips, and forget problems of spilling something on the board! Even with current germanium version it'll work perfect for connectors between boards.
Up to patch 1.09 Diablo II didn't have a much randomness at all in what kind of monsters you meet where. In 1.10 (introducted two weeks ago, they added 'guest monsters' - yes! that's what they call it - go figure with your randomness). I've been playing it all time possible since and I've got to see my first 'guest monster' yet.
Diablo II has only one kind of randomness - what sort of equipment you can get from a monster. And that goes way over the top. If they randomized monsters more and fixed equipment to the monster a little bit more, that would be an RPG. Now, it's a hack-&-slash timesink.
Well, I have a lot of experience with that since I've been doing numerical computations for last 7 years.
First of all, it's not all that bad. With 64 bit 'double' in C, you get around 15 decimal digits of accuracy (theoretically 18, but in practice don't count on the end). You have to understand that numbers are stored in logarithmic format: mantissa and a factor to multiply it (in computers exponent of 2). If there is no overlap between two numbers in addition (that is for example one number is 1.234*2^64, and the other is 1.234*2^-15), the smaller one is always lost. The are two ways to get around it:
extend mantissa so there is enough overlap - usually involves some kind of multiple precision libraries like mentioned in other post GNU MP and many others. I've implemented one for my own use, too. Generally means lots of overhead since there will be less than 5% of operations actually benefitting from greater precision.
postpone such operations until there is overlap - store such numbers together and do operations on them together, too. Sometimes additions in loops will add up small parts so actually there will be overlap with big part and additions can be done with enough precision.
On a side, interesting thing is that in computers multiplications and divisions are better (that is more accurate) than additions and subtractions because of logarithmic format.
I know that Sun was working on a variable precision floating-point CPU. I'm not sure how that project is going and what the end effect is, but I remember it being an interesting idea.
Multiple precision libraries are usually decent with only one problem, they are always slower by a couple orders of magnitude than regular CPU operations, so using them is just such a pain.
I don't think age matters here
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
Young guys might hear a response that they are too young, old might hear that they are too old. I heard in one of my interviews that I not enough engineering oriented (I've graduated from computer engineering and happen to have "Eng." title on my card). All of that is just a cover.
"Your resume gets 15 seconds and you get 90 seconds to make impression". There was a recent discussion on Slashdot that it actually takes less than that. Personally, I agree with that. Quite often it takes just a glance to get an impression that will impact a relationship with a person. What they say later, it usually just confirms the impression. Excuse that you are not hired because you are too young or too old is just an excuse. The manager you interviewed with might not be able to pinpoint why exactly they decided this way or the other. Scott Adams has a few books on that, too.;-) If they are intelligent, they will invent an excuse like "ageism".
Slashdot Mirror
Shoulda been:
She lied to me!
I told you she'd never consciously betray the rebelion.
Terminate her! Immediately!
The distances apply also to personal space. Just look at how much distance everyone has to cover here to work or to buy groceries. Driving 20 miles to work is nothing, and 50 miles is quite acceptable. In Europe 50 miles is sometimes about the distance of half a coutry. While people still do such trips on daily basis, there is many more different means of transportation than here, because it would be near to impossible to actually accomodate all SUVs. If you've never lived there, you just can't picture the difference it makes here to have suburbs of one city spreading over half a state.
Japan is even more drastic case, as their space is far more limited than European.
So, altogether, yes - it's comparing apples to oranges, and the rest of the world should not be so hasty to critisize it. However I do think that US for some unknown reason tries to desperately maintain the status quo instead of developing more efficient means of mass transportation.
Back to demand/supply of bandwidth. At the moment there is also another factor that prevents oligopoly in telecommunications: innovation. So happens that existing telecom companies are stretched almost to the limits of their productivity and can't really see any place for reasonable reaserch in the domain. So the progress is made mostly by outsiders. However, I think we might be reaching the point where any further easy progress by outsiders is impossible since it would require disproportionate investment without any guarantee of reasonable return on it. Telecom industry right now is in a quagmire. Quagmire of overcompetitive market (compared to required investments), quagmire caused by explosion of services delivered to people (just several years ago it was a phone service, only - and US regulations made it either local or long-distance, not both; now we've got phone, a long list of networking solutions, wireless, cable tv, and a host of other options more or less related to telephony), quagmire of massive layoffs just conducted by virtually every single company, and quagmire of bankrupcies. It will take time to sort all of that out, and in the meantime offshoring might be a good idea. But sooner or later, the market will stabilize again and then offshoring won't be such a wonderful idea anymore.
Now, to the machines writing code: one problem is interesting here. Say a machine "invents" an interesting piece of code. Who has the copyright on that? And if we assume the current patent situation, who should be eligible to be an author of that code?
One more thing: I've seen GA in work and one thing is certain, it'll never be nearly an efficient way to find solutions to known problems. It's basically pretty much a brute force programming - instead of a monkey hitting random keys from A-Z, imagine a keyboard with various pieces of code hooked to different keys - we might have even a million of those keys - and said monkey hitting the keys that produce that code. Is that any better than the former solution? Well, it will produce more reasonably looking code, of course. But whether that's going to be useful to solve anything important and outperform a person using decent tools, I doubt.
The big problem of programming is that it basically hasn't evolved since it was first invented. We got OO and aspects, and other sorts of things like that, but we are still stuck to writing for and while loops. All paradigms are basically reduced to different organization of the code (well, maybe with one little exception for patterns - which are probably one and the only serious addition to programming since the for loop). But we do not have tools that would eliminate the need for writing loops and conditions and such. Again one little exception are GUI and simple database applications, where for the former we've got some fabulous WYSIWYG tools (easy here to do, since we're talking about the visual aspect of an application), and the latter has some great generators backed by CASE tools. But the rest of the field has been pretty much stagnant since 1960s.
If the field is ever to evolve, we need to lift programming to another level of abstraction and create tools that will eliminate mundane typing of same code again and again. Does it mean we will be able to forget the loops and such? Maybe, maybe not. Depends how we solve the problem. The real solution should make it possible to actually forget about those.
GA used as such a tool might just do the trick, but trying to put too much on its shoulders will end with a big smoking stack of junk that nobody will want to touch for years in fear of getting burned.
Whether it's vandalism or not, it incurs a monetary cost that the chalker is unwilling or unable to pay for.
No, it does not. All you have to do is wait for the next bigger rain or two weeks whichever is earlier. No cost on you.
The problem with this as with any other quantum mechanism, is that here they are talking about singular atoms, while in practice QM works statistically and there is a huge (exponential) impact of the distance on the effectiveness of QM mechanisms.
I think "boycott" is a one big nonsense in this case. MPAA and RIAA charge free market prices for their products. Unlike some other things, seeing a movie or hearing a song is not a life-critical necessity, so if I don't think something is worth the price, I don't buy it - very, very simple. In case of movies, I might wait until it shows on Netflix, for example, and maybe, maybe rent it then - for lower price, without the hype. Now and then there are some productions worth seeing for the money they want for them and I'm not going to boycott anything. Now, I go to the movies about twice a year, because there isn't much more that I'd like to see right away.
I don't think industry gains anything by rising the prices of records or movies. The point is that people have just so much money to spend on entertainment and the whole difference is they will buy one record, or two. If we talk about distributors only, they gain a tiny little bit because they pay royalties and costs on just one record, if people buy one.
The whole economic model is completely screwed, because different distributors compete for a fixed amount of money by driving up the prices of a single record to the point that people who want to buy them, can efford just that one record from that particular distributor. Ironically, lowering prices will increase profits of the competition, because I, as a customer, don't need two exact same CDs, so for the remaining money, I'm going to buy some other CD, possibly from the competition. Paradoxically, in spite of what it seems from looking at the $1bln mark in the story, this would be more of an example of high demand with limited cash.
Right - then it turns into a Weapon of Mass SelfDesctruction.
No, I don't assume that. However, multiple webs of trust require some sort of bridging between them, which creates effectively one big one. If you talk about disjoint ones, you can just as well talk about disjoint ones that contain just one person only - the sender.
Headers forged or not - it doesn't eliminate anything. What sort of advantage does it give me that I know for sure that getyourviagra.com sent that particular email? Viruses and other worms will thrive just as well, since they actually use legitimate computers to send mails. SPF/Sender ID will only spur more active worm/virus development - we will see more of that stuff specifically targetted for sending spam - from legitimate computers through perfectly legitimate SMTP servers - personally, for that reason I'm totally against SPF and any sort of ideas like that.
In my opinion, the only real solution is a strict policy on unsolicited commercial messaging followed by actual enforcement of it, and charging spammers real costs of distribution of their emails. The reason why it is so popular is that it's so cheap. If spammers had to pay for all resources used by particular email, most likely the problem would be gone in a minute - unfortunately that can hardly be done in the way the Internet operates at the moment, and any sort of solution of the kind would basically be very crude. Detailed billing would require almost totally different network architecture.
Reason: there is no *open* replacement that would fix the flaws.
By open I mean something that can receive a message from a person you haven't had a contact with before.
Any system that would eliminate the spam requires some sort of "web of trust". To establish a web of trust, you need to close the system and limit it only to trusted users. Apart from all possible problems related to the web of trust, the system will be always either too restrictive, if it's effective, or too ineffective, if it's not so restrictive.
IM is already taken over by spammers in some degree - it's just a matter of time and the number of users for that process to accelerate. Anything else will suffer from the same problems - you let unknown people call/message/email you - you get spam. You restrict yourself only to known people, you filter spam out, but lock out everyone who might potentially need to contact you but doesn't belong to your personal web of trust.
So, the bottom line is that every new application will suffer from either spam or restriction, and because of that it doesn't pay off to switch to a different system.
PS: Viruses are not anything that started with email. Email just happens to be a convenient medium of the time, but they were proliferating quite fine with floppy disks, as they are now with email. P2P will (already has in many cases) the exact same problem - people sending around unchecked files, viruses taking over control of P2P programs and multiplying themselves, and so on and so forth.
Not mentioning that the vast majority of what is being published currently is complete jibberish and won't be read by anyone (including authors) except for reviewers (sometimes even those not that thoroughly) - conclusion from one of articles in IEEE Communications Magazine about a year ago.
Current model of scientific journalism relies on the fact that publications are necessary to obtain funding for more or (mostly) less innovative research projects, and that a lot of institutions rely on research money to supplement their teaching environment.
As long as that lasts, the publishing model that we have currently, will also last - since free journals rarely have enough weight to be considered something worthy mentioning in grant proposals.
Note that "free journals" model is hardly a new idea - it existed before in many places as "technical report" idea - usually internal, but sometimes quite widely distributed piece of paper. Usually not peer-reviewed, but the demand from outside on particular issue could be some sort of measurement how important that particular idea is. Also several years back a number of electronic scientific journals started their existance, but we've got to see yet the first reknowned one, that would actually count towards yearly reports and grant proposals.
People who don't care that much about their need to report their articles here and there, publish them anywhere, and get the permission to republish on the net (say after some time). One notable effect of that is citation rank of articles that are published on the web is usually higher than those only in the journals. Basic reason is that articles accessible through the web are subject to text search and much easier to fish from those literally millions of scientific articles published every year - free accessability to everyone is another factor.
But really, current problem is less in what sort of license there is, but how to make funding less dependent on publications. Current situation is total absurd - last ICC conference received, AFAIR, around 4000 submitions - total nonsense. And that is just one (although admittedly one of the largest) conference. Noone will tell me that there were over 4000 significant ideas in communications.
If the funding didn't rely on articles published, most authors would just as gladly choose electronic journals or self publish on the web - really easy after you attain certain level of reknown or work in reknowned institution. I'm sure regular journals would still have enough clients to exist - although maybe there wouldn't be that many around. In any case, for most people they could choose freely between all possible media and the whole licensing discussion wouldn't have place. Also, paper journals would be much more willing to let authors publish articles on the web in addition to paper submition.
... debee, debee, not debug...
In this stupid context services like Google are illegal, because all website content is copyrighted and google indexes pages with largest number of hits. If you don't believe me, click on "Cached" link by any entry that you find with Google. Effectively they reproduce and republish your website. In fact it works even for websites that have been taken down (sometimes for "cease and desist" reasons so it might have legal implications, although not to the owner of the website, since they have no control over Google cache).
Now, what Google does is in fact worse than the plagiarism detection service in question, because they don't allow open access to their database of articles, while google does. For Google, some defense might be if you submit your website manually, but in practice they will index you whether you submit or not, as long as there is at least one website they have already in index that links to your page. Also, Google is a for-profit company and a large score of people lives from keeping the count of indexed pages as high as possible.
I use a system where I give interim exams and grade them and give them back to students, while I don't count those results into the final grade. The final exam covers the whole term. That is explained to the students at the first meeting and on every request. I found it to work very well and generally improved performance of the students - both subjectively observed and objectively measured as their grades. Students who don't take those interim exams (even though they have no impact) are rare exceptions. Most students treat them as real exams that count and prepare seriously for them. The results aren't very poor either - maybe a tiny little bit lower than they would be normally. I think subconciously every student thinks about it just as a test and wants to perform, whether it counts or not. Just like players on the field want to win whether the game has impact or not on the team's final standing. Certainly, it's not perfect, but it's the best I could think of and checked out in practice.
Copyright is yours whether you get it "granted" by the policy or not.
I made the effort of check UofA to see how it is handled and for example in the case of master thesis, every student must sign a "Library Release Form" basically granting unlimited rights to use single copies of the thesis in whatever way the university wishes.
Release forms are customary with all publishers - submitting any material to any publisher you must sign a release form and University acts as a publisher in this case.
As far as I can tell, it was only so because it was a take-home exam - a clear situation where you are supposed to come up with the work individually. In any other case, it might have been different.
Also, another poster was wrong - nobody can take your copyright away - you create it, you have copyright (with one explicit exception of works created under contract for compensation). University can reserve certain rights (there is code binding students and claiming that you haven't read it is not a valid excuse - ignorance doesn't supersede law), but since they don't compensate you for your work and there is no prior contract agreeing to what kind of work you are going to do for the university for what kind of compensation and in what timeframe, you and whoever else participated in creation of that work own the copyright.
The problem is, that university provides usually the environment for creating works, and that means that in usual case they at least have partial copyright on everything you do for your classes.
In case of individual works reported as assignments (sometimes self-selected by students), it is your laziness (maybe lack of time, but generally carelessness about legal consequences) and that simply shouldn't be done period. As mentioned before, most institutions bind students with the code and students are supposed to know that code - if they don't, it's like with everything else - their fault. Owning copyright doesn't mean that university doesn't have any rights to the work you report. You are turning it in as an assignment and in the light of the student code that binds you, you are agreeing that the university has rights to do whatever it wishes with your work. You can do the same thing, but by turning in the works, you are giving certain rights to the university. No sane university would operate without such a clause, because that would open them to all sorts of litigations (that you haven't permitted them to this or that - say keep it in their library for future students). They don't need copyright for that, just the clause that permits them to do that with all works submitted as assignments.
Thus the answer of the legal department was correct, but gave you the false sense of security that the university can't do anything with what they get from you.
Formally, most of the schools reserve rights to works written as assignments, usually making works public domain. Stanford was being probably very nice allowing you to be an exception. I know a lot of people who did their master thesis in their companies and in that case they usually didn't turn the code in - they wrote an analysis and design of it as actual master thesis or something similar, they might have even presented it during the defense, but the code wasn't included with the dissertation.
Also, depending on your particular situation and how you made the development, you might not have owned the exclusive rights to the code you are talking about. You might have consulted people from the university about it, you might have used university equipment at some stages. There might be other aspects I don't remember about right now. In that case the copyright is shared. Thus your statement that the particular copy was illegal might have had little legal founding and consequences, since first of all you were not able to determine that alone.
But have no fear ;-) Bill Gates did just that thing with his first commercial product - Basic interpretter. Coded it on university equipment and used university resources, then assumed ownership and sold it exclusively (as far as I know). University was grumbling but he cared little. At least you got away with a diploma. ;-)
I happen to teach Computer Networks and related subjects at University of Pittsburgh. While I don't trust my students in 100%, I don't really see a big problem with cheating. Simply put, if they cheat it is first of all their problem. I'm young enough to remember my grad school and I was usually the source and there were "sponges" all around. Sponges had later pretty hard time finding a good job and when they did, they had pretty hard time getting into it, because they had to learn all (or at least a lot of) what they missed in the grad school. That experience carries me through my teaching - I don't make cheating overly easy, but I'm not paranoid about checking my students. While that might not be so clear in arts majors, in science majors it is pretty straightforward relationship - the paper by itself means pretty much nothing (and now it's sharp and crystal clear after dot com and telecom bubbles...) I can see that majority of students have a very good sense of what awaits them after the school.
Another thing: turnitin.com and similar services are simply an easy way for instructors of doing their job. Within my time, I've never repeated questions on final exams. By now I've created pretty good number of them and still making more. Same with projects - there are new projects every term and I make sure to put something unique that cannot be easily downloaded fromt the web. It is very simple. So, I have the comfort that my students actually have to make the effort themselves and don't have play a Cerber.
I require my students to submit their work electronically because of following reasons: 1) programs are usually hard to check on the paper when they start to exceed two pages, 2) any kind of information is much easier to manage electronically than on the paper, 3) returned homeworks are confidential - people don't have to fear being laughed at by someone who accidentally finds their paper/program in my office or whereever else. Especially the latter point makes to me a lot of sense, because in my opinion that sort of security is essential to enable some of those students to come to me with their actual problems. (Besides, it doesn't seem economical to waste paper on something that has such a short lifespan.)
Actually they happen to be about the same. Copper wire speeds vary between 0.4 and 0.95c, depending on the desing of the cable. Typical assumption is 0.66c. Fiber optics propogation speeds vary, too. However the most common assumption is 0.66c, because SiO2 (silica glass) has just that factor (approximately).
You are right, however you are wrong ;-) Well, speed of light is not the only problem. One of the major complications in electrical wiring is that at high frequencies even a couple inches turns into long distance telecommunications and you have to construct actual transmission lines with matching impedances. Using optics eliminates this problem. Now if you talk about speed of light, at the distances of inches that's far less relevant than you think. Typically much more problem is with the transmission rate and synchronization than actual propagation delay.
Inside single chip the situation is different, because the maximum delay pretty much determines clock rate.
This is great. It's not to do computations. Really, silicon is good and fast enough for that right now (of course it would be real cool if possible, but that won't work). However, couple this effect with phototransistors which already are in the domain of high frequency (at least theoretical results suggest so - 10 GHz here) and you end of with the dream of board engineers - forget wiring chips with metal. Interconnect them with fiber! Certainly with germanium it's gonna bit a bit difficult, but it's worth it: all you need to wire to chips is power, end of distance limit between chips, and forget problems of spilling something on the board! Even with current germanium version it'll work perfect for connectors between boards.
Up to patch 1.09 Diablo II didn't have a much randomness at all in what kind of monsters you meet where. In 1.10 (introducted two weeks ago, they added 'guest monsters' - yes! that's what they call it - go figure with your randomness). I've been playing it all time possible since and I've got to see my first 'guest monster' yet. Diablo II has only one kind of randomness - what sort of equipment you can get from a monster. And that goes way over the top. If they randomized monsters more and fixed equipment to the monster a little bit more, that would be an RPG. Now, it's a hack-&-slash timesink.
Rosalind Franklin passed away by the time they got the idea of giving Nobel prize for DNA structure. The rules of Noble prize forbid awarding it posthumously.
extend mantissa so there is enough overlap - usually involves some kind of multiple precision libraries like mentioned in other post GNU MP and many others. I've implemented one for my own use, too. Generally means lots of overhead since there will be less than 5% of operations actually benefitting from greater precision.
postpone such operations until there is overlap - store such numbers together and do operations on them together, too. Sometimes additions in loops will add up small parts so actually there will be overlap with big part and additions can be done with enough precision.
On a side, interesting thing is that in computers multiplications and divisions are better (that is more accurate) than additions and subtractions because of logarithmic format.
I know that Sun was working on a variable precision floating-point CPU. I'm not sure how that project is going and what the end effect is, but I remember it being an interesting idea.
Multiple precision libraries are usually decent with only one problem, they are always slower by a couple orders of magnitude than regular CPU operations, so using them is just such a pain.
Young guys might hear a response that they are too young, old might hear that they are too old. I heard in one of my interviews that I not enough engineering oriented (I've graduated from computer engineering and happen to have "Eng." title on my card). All of that is just a cover. ;-) If they are intelligent, they will invent an excuse like "ageism".
"Your resume gets 15 seconds and you get 90 seconds to make impression". There was a recent discussion on Slashdot that it actually takes less than that. Personally, I agree with that. Quite often it takes just a glance to get an impression that will impact a relationship with a person. What they say later, it usually just confirms the impression. Excuse that you are not hired because you are too young or too old is just an excuse. The manager you interviewed with might not be able to pinpoint why exactly they decided this way or the other. Scott Adams has a few books on that, too.