Insurance means basically that they charge you enough to offset the chance that it would break and so they can reimburse you. That's what actuary work is for.
The first insurance is already included in the price of the package. Then they have you pay another insurance that is useless.
So basically, they're charging you more than they should be doing (which is normal profit) but they justify it as insurance (which is fraud).
There is that but I guess it is also because you don't need to be near the great centers to do special effects and animations.
One of the things you might want to do is try to find a relatively new company with good ideas but that haven't had the time to realise all of them. I don't know about NY, but here in Montréal, softimage (their software did Jurassic Park and Titanic among others). It was founded in 1986 and is now one of the industry leader, but they're still young enough to try new cool stuff, instead of only perfecting the old.
Intellectual property is a touchy issue when a professor is concerned because that's how they earn their money (by teaching also, but they wouldn't be teaching if they didn't have a bunch of publications behind them).
I understand their concern about that, but courses usually fall out of that because of the level of the courses in question. I'm pretty sure most of the courses they have on that site are low-level courses since there is a lot more people who have to take them compared to very advanced and specialised courses.
That knowledge doesn't really come from the teacher himself, but from books and what he was taught when he was a student himself. This isn't stuff that they discovered or invented usually. Then they paid for the books and for their tutions before that, but can't we say the same thing about the students? Where does a student stops using the teacher's knowledge and starts uusing his own?
Here the note-taking service is handled completely by the student associations. The note-takers are paid and everything and nobody complains (except when they make mistakes in it...). The teachers see it as being an help for studying and some review them afterward because they want their students to succeed.
The impression I get is that they want to avoid a bad precedent more than anything. If they didn't react, then people could start to take course notes and publish it in some form and say it is theirs. After all if those students can get paid from it and attach their names to those notes then they are their property, right?
Anyway, we'll see what happens afterward. Right now, I'd say the reaction is pretty standard and doesn't mean anything else than a knee-jerk reflex. If they really go ahead and try to sue them then we'll see just how low we're sinking here.
A little note about Canada (and Quebec in particular, where I live): the taxes are pretty high so you could expect to loose around 40% of that to taxes (I think anything over 50K CDN is pretty much taxes at 50%). You also have to deal with 13% sales taxes.
But then education's a lot cheaper and hospitalisation's free (but you usually have a good health insurance when you get hired in the States). The cost of living is also a lot less. And social security can keep you afloat for longer in case of trouble (but that isn't very relevant in this case).
Fact is, you can get by with less than you would need in the States, even if the salaries are higher.
The way I see it, you can probably afford to live a little better with the base salary in the States than here in Canada. The difference would increase when you get more experience I think since I haven't heard of many jobs offering monstrous amounts of money around here.
The idea of making a portal out of it is interesting but BLAST has been around for some time and lets you find information about other sequences. NCBI's ENTREZ gives you the opportunity to research information about proteins and other things. I admit those are a little difficult to use, but I doubt everyone would need to know what such and such sequence represents.
The web has become very important to anyone doing research in those areas and is the main source of information since it is far simpler and everyone can have access to the information.
I haven't seen the portal (login reasons) but I'd be curious to see how they would make it understandable to someone who doesn't have a lot of genetic background and such. All of this can be very cool and interesting but a gene sequence is about as dry as a looking at machine language and the information about the sequences isn't always easy to understand, especially since a lot of the sequencing now isn't puclished like it was before so all you have is the name of the gene. Even when it is published, there isn't a lot of efforts made to make it easier to understand (unless it's in a Nature or something like that where you want the journalists to tell about it).
Anyway, if they can make it more available and more interesting, all the better. Genetic is surely one of the areas where people could use a little more background (no changing one gene won't make you live 300 years, nor will it make you immune to cancer) and also one of the more interesting fields around now (ok I'm biased because that's what I'm studying in, but it's still true).
You have to be very careful when you consider the right of animals/humans/babies. These rules are human created in the most part. There is no real effect on nature if you kill an animal, species have evolved to be able to survive even if this happens. It is possible to change that balance if you kill a lot of individuals, but this is not what we're talking about here.
The rights of a living things depends on the vale we decide to give to them, either by laws or morality. This is a matter of choice on where you decide to draw the line.
Saying that all beings have equal rights does not really make any sense, because we don't see all of them the right way. Anyone wanting to do that HAS to draw the line at some point. Do lemmings have the same right, how about frogs, mosquitoes, or even bacteria.
Saying that all beings are equal by nature is wrong. Nature makes, and whatever is fit enough and lucky enough to survive does. Humans have pretty much went over these by virtue of thinking. We can now make our own choices which may or may not ressemble what nature would make, but the choice is still ours and nature is but one of the bases we could use.
There is no real base for making that choice but the whatever we decide, both as individuals and as society. What was proposed is one "valid" opinion, but not really right or wrong by its own virtue, only by what people think about it.
There is a difference between the legitimate use of that software and the possible abuse of it.
There are certainly a lot of horrible things that can be done with it, but they won't send it to everybody: you need to have people to decode that stuff afterward too.
What's the point of wasting more man-hours going over the data than whatever could be "wasted" by breaks and such.
On the other hand if you suspect an employee is stealing information from your company (see the examples listed in the article), then it's worth it to go over his whole day of work to see if he really did it or not.
Universities are based mostly on practival compromises. They must often choose between the least of two evils in may things. Exams evolved as the a practical way of seeing if the student knows the material, even if it ends up with the student spending a few sleepless nights. Most of the material is forgotten over the next few days, partly because you need to cram the material for the next exam.
But it often degenerates in bureaucracy where you set up a set of rules and expect everyone to follow them. So you don't know the material unless you followed the course and was graded on it. Professors have some leeway on that, but they don't use it that often for various reasons (easier that way, need to for everyone to follow the rules, etc.).
And politics still plays for far too much in this. I once asked to one of me teachers why so many of the introductory courses in biological sciences cover the same material and the answer was that each department has to have enough enrollment to justify its budget. This means several required courses with roughly the same material .
University is like the rest of our society in this. It doesn't work all that well but it works. But it is based mostly on self-interest, not on what is good for the student/society. The need for improvement is very real but a lot of people seem to think that this is good enough and if it worked for them then it can work for others too. Of course these are the people who went to university successfully and have to loose if it changed.
Just one problem in the reasoning. We don't know what was Palpatine's plan.
From what we've seen, it's been mostly to force Naboo to sign a treaty with the Trade Federation. And after that either come back and say this wrong or simply use it to build is power base and pile up the atrocities.
He took advantage of having Amidala arriving in Coruscant but this is not necessarily what he wanted and what he had originally planned to do.
We have the choice between someone who can either see the future, or someone who is forced to act earlier and takes advantage of it.
And the main reasons why the Jedi were not presented as proofs of the atrocities, I would guess that several of the senators would not have trusted them. I mean, they have quasi-magical powers, they are pretty much independant from any temporal power. And being all-good does not really inclines rulers to try to trust you (I doubt a lot of them have clear consciences, at least from a Jedi's POV).
Of course, there are holes in the scenario, but that doesn't mean that this excuse should be used whenever you don't understand (or course the reverse is also true).
And as for what matters or not, the point is that everything matters. Everything you do changes the outcome for the better or for worse and usually for both. But you can look at pretty much every events and see how it could have turned better or worse depending on what happened.
And not to forget that one of the lessons there is to always try to do what you should be doing, not to tell yourself that it doesn't matter, because you never know when it's going to matter or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance means basically that they charge you enough to offset the chance that it would break and so they can reimburse you. That's what actuary work is for.
The first insurance is already included in the price of the package. Then they have you pay another insurance that is useless.
So basically, they're charging you more than they should be doing (which is normal profit) but they justify it as insurance (which is fraud).
There is that but I guess it is also because you don't need to be near the great centers to do special effects and animations.
One of the things you might want to do is try to find a relatively new company with good ideas but that haven't had the time to realise all of them. I don't know about NY, but here in Montréal, softimage (their software did Jurassic Park and Titanic among others). It was founded in 1986 and is now one of the industry leader, but they're still young enough to try new cool stuff, instead of only perfecting the old.
Intellectual property is a touchy issue when a professor is concerned because that's how they earn their money (by teaching also, but they wouldn't be teaching if they didn't have a bunch of publications behind them).
I understand their concern about that, but courses usually fall out of that because of the level of the courses in question. I'm pretty sure most of the courses they have on that site are low-level courses since there is a lot more people who have to take them compared to very advanced and specialised courses.
That knowledge doesn't really come from the teacher himself, but from books and what he was taught when he was a student himself. This isn't stuff that they discovered or invented usually. Then they paid for the books and for their tutions before that, but can't we say the same thing about the students? Where does a student stops using the teacher's knowledge and starts uusing his own?
Here the note-taking service is handled completely by the student associations. The note-takers are paid and everything and nobody complains (except when they make mistakes in it...). The teachers see it as being an help for studying and some review them afterward because they want their students to succeed.
The impression I get is that they want to avoid a bad precedent more than anything. If they didn't react, then people could start to take course notes and publish it in some form and say it is theirs. After all if those students can get paid from it and attach their names to those notes then they are their property, right?
Anyway, we'll see what happens afterward. Right now, I'd say the reaction is pretty standard and doesn't mean anything else than a knee-jerk reflex. If they really go ahead and try to sue them then we'll see just how low we're sinking here.
A little note about Canada (and Quebec in particular, where I live): the taxes are pretty high so you could expect to loose around 40% of that to taxes (I think anything over 50K CDN is pretty much taxes at 50%). You also have to deal with 13% sales taxes.
But then education's a lot cheaper and hospitalisation's free (but you usually have a good health insurance when you get hired in the States). The cost of living is also a lot less. And social security can keep you afloat for longer in case of trouble (but that isn't very relevant in this case).
Fact is, you can get by with less than you would need in the States, even if the salaries are higher.
The way I see it, you can probably afford to live a little better with the base salary in the States than here in Canada. The difference would increase when you get more experience I think since I haven't heard of many jobs offering monstrous amounts of money around here.
The idea of making a portal out of it is interesting but BLAST has been around for some time and lets you find information about other sequences. NCBI's ENTREZ gives you the opportunity to research information about proteins and other things. I admit those are a little difficult to use, but I doubt everyone would need to know what such and such sequence represents.
The web has become very important to anyone doing research in those areas and is the main source of information since it is far simpler and everyone can have access to the information.
I haven't seen the portal (login reasons) but I'd be curious to see how they would make it understandable to someone who doesn't have a lot of genetic background and such. All of this can be very cool and interesting but a gene sequence is about as dry as a looking at machine language and the information about the sequences isn't always easy to understand, especially since a lot of the sequencing now isn't puclished like it was before so all you have is the name of the gene. Even when it is published, there isn't a lot of efforts made to make it easier to understand (unless it's in a Nature or something like that where you want the journalists to tell about it).
Anyway, if they can make it more available and more interesting, all the better. Genetic is surely one of the areas where people could use a little more background (no changing one gene won't make you live 300 years, nor will it make you immune to cancer) and also one of the more interesting fields around now (ok I'm biased because that's what I'm studying in, but it's still true).
You have to be very careful when you consider the right of animals/humans/babies. These rules are human created in the most part. There is no real effect on nature if you kill an animal, species have evolved to be able to survive even if this happens. It is possible to change that balance if you kill a lot of individuals, but this is not what we're talking about here.
The rights of a living things depends on the vale we decide to give to them, either by laws or morality. This is a matter of choice on where you decide to draw the line.
Saying that all beings have equal rights does not really make any sense, because we don't see all of them the right way. Anyone wanting to do that HAS to draw the line at some point. Do lemmings have the same right, how about frogs, mosquitoes, or even bacteria.
Saying that all beings are equal by nature is wrong. Nature makes, and whatever is fit enough and lucky enough to survive does. Humans have pretty much went over these by virtue of thinking. We can now make our own choices which may or may not ressemble what nature would make, but the choice is still ours and nature is but one of the bases we could use.
There is no real base for making that choice but the whatever we decide, both as individuals and as society. What was proposed is one "valid" opinion, but not really right or wrong by its own virtue, only by what people think about it.
There is a difference between the legitimate use of that software and the possible abuse of it.
There are certainly a lot of horrible things that can be done with it, but they won't send it to everybody: you need to have people to decode that stuff afterward too.
What's the point of wasting more man-hours going over the data than whatever could be "wasted" by breaks and such.
On the other hand if you suspect an employee is stealing information from your company (see the examples listed in the article), then it's worth it to go over his whole day of work to see if he really did it or not.
Universities are based mostly on practival compromises. They must often choose between the least of two evils in may things. Exams evolved as the a practical way of seeing if the student knows the material, even if it ends up with the student spending a few sleepless nights. Most of the material is forgotten over the next few days, partly because you need to cram the material for the next exam.
But it often degenerates in bureaucracy where you set up a set of rules and expect everyone to follow them. So you don't know the material unless you followed the course and was graded on it. Professors have some leeway on that, but they don't use it that often for various reasons (easier that way, need to for everyone to follow the rules, etc.).
And politics still plays for far too much in this. I once asked to one of me teachers why so many of the introductory courses in biological sciences cover the same material and the answer was that each department has to have enough enrollment to justify its budget. This means several required courses with roughly the same material .
University is like the rest of our society in this. It doesn't work all that well but it works. But it is based mostly on self-interest, not on what is good for the student/society. The need for improvement is very real but a lot of people seem to think that this is good enough and if it worked for them then it can work for others too. Of course these are the people who went to university successfully and have to loose if it changed.
From what we've seen, it's been mostly to force Naboo to sign a treaty with the Trade Federation. And after that either come back and say this wrong or simply use it to build is power base and pile up the atrocities.
He took advantage of having Amidala arriving in Coruscant but this is not necessarily what he wanted and what he had originally planned to do.
We have the choice between someone who can either see the future, or someone who is forced to act earlier and takes advantage of it.
And the main reasons why the Jedi were not presented as proofs of the atrocities, I would guess that several of the senators would not have trusted them. I mean, they have quasi-magical powers, they are pretty much independant from any temporal power. And being all-good does not really inclines rulers to try to trust you (I doubt a lot of them have clear consciences, at least from a Jedi's POV).
Of course, there are holes in the scenario, but that doesn't mean that this excuse should be used whenever you don't understand (or course the reverse is also true).
And as for what matters or not, the point is that everything matters. Everything you do changes the outcome for the better or for worse and usually for both. But you can look at pretty much every events and see how it could have turned better or worse depending on what happened.
And not to forget that one of the lessons there is to always try to do what you should be doing, not to tell yourself that it doesn't matter, because you never know when it's going to matter or not.