Certainly propulsion systems (that are impratical for Earth to LEO flights... or even downright hazardous) would include the following:
Nuclear Rocketry (superheating some gaseous substance for very high ISP)
Nuclear Rocketry (Orion-like with genuine nuclear bombs as the "fuel")
Solar Sails
Ion propusion systems (again very high ISP with low but steady thrust)
Gravity Assist flights (aka like the Voyager spacecraft doing the "grand tour")
I would agree that if you are going to use pure chemical rockets such as those used for the Apollo program, the Moon is just about the limit of what you can go using that sort of technology.
BTW, all of the above technologies have been tested on actual flight hardware in one way or another (including surprisingly the Orion-like nukes...with actual nukes!). While certainly some more R&D can go into these propulsion methods, they only need engineering to refine rather than some major break-through in basic physics, which is what will be needed to do interstellar flight.
So the real point you are trying to make here is that if you want to get to Mars in any reasonable amount of time, of course you are going to need to spend quite a bit of energy accelerating and then decelerating to make the journey. There may be some ways to transfer this kinetic energy you have spent so much effort to accumulate to a productive end, but that would take some very advanced technology.
I just found an interesting page here that goes into some interesting price/cost analysis figures for passenger costs when using air travel.
Of note is a remark talking about the original Pan-Am Pacific Clipper service that on average cost about $4/mile (inflation adjusted to 2004 dollars). Assuming that you went from San Francisco to Tokyo, that would have cost the equivalent of about $10,000-$20,000.
By comparing that to what Virgin Galactic is asking here, it doesn't seem so far fetched.
In addition, there were several people who around 1900 also financed expeditions to Antarctica and attempts at going through the "northwest passage" north of North America. Many of these were wealthy millionaires, including I might add the founder of the Orteig Prize that the X-Prize was modeled after.
So while prices in the early airline industry weren't quite on the same level, there certainly were prices that were close to the same general order of magnitude as many of the current prices for commercial manned spaceflight.
Virgin Galatic has suggested sub-orbital flight between California and Japan as an eventual option, with costs in the range of about $10,000-$20,000. How is that for coincidence.
I don't think the comparison between this tax proposal and one for local schools is valid.
First of all, this is going from zero to something instead of huge to even larger. There is no existing spaceport authority to show they have mis-managed tax dollars in the past, something which many school districts can be accused of doing.
If you think about it, a teacher can only be supported by a finite number of families. Yes, taxing wealthy people does have an impact, but if you tax the wealthy too much, they simply move out. If the average class size is 30 students, and families have on average 3 kids, that means you can only have 10 families support one teacher. The salary of that teacher is directly tied to the salaries/wages/income of those 10 families and raising or lowering taxes only redistributes that basic support base.
If you think of preschools/daycare centers, this number is reduced even more, so it is a clear demonstration that day care centers will never make significant money except when catering to the very wealthy.
The same could be said about policemen, firefighters, and other typical municipal workers and to explain why they make the money that they do.
Why this is so completely different is that we aren't talking about what one small community must support, but what kind of financial support and revenue could result that would be of a regional or even a continental level of income. The number of communities that are competing on this level right now is precisely two (New Mexico and Virginia) with two other potential suitors (Florida and Texas). At the very least, New Mexico will be a regional center for the entire western USA for this kind of activity.
Raising the tax rate for funding local schools (which may or may not have merit) isn't going to give a local region a significant advantage over any other region of the country. At best it will help fix some long term problem that may need a solution that doesn't require money as well.
In this particular case the appeal was to personal self-interest. At least the philosophy was that by approving this sort of modest tax increase (it is only 0.25%... although I will admit those are the worst kind because of this very arguement) they will get some very tangible benefits in the long run.
As has been pointed out in the article, this is a largely undeveloped part of the USA where the dot-com bubble/bust/recovery never even happened at all. By all accounts it is a pretty sleepy part of America where national events pretty much pass them by, except perhaps the issue of illegal immigration (due to their proximity to Mexico).
There are some residents who are willing to take a modest gamble of raising taxes for a few years on the off chance that this whole idea of creating an interplanetary spaceport might turn their little hamlet into something similar to O'Hare airport in Chicago, where this could be one of the major if not supreme launch sites for interplanetary trade. Even in the relatively short term this means some significant high-tech jobs including launch technicians and other professionals who would bring in some significant income, which translates into people spending money at local auto dealers, grocery stores, building contractors, and the whole range of the local economy, not to mention a rise in the local tax base by wealthy individuals.
I'll also like to point out some geographical observations: Look at where big cities (and even smaller cities) are located at? They are at trans-shipment places between one form of transportation to another. New York City is a shipping transfer area originallly for moving ocean going traffc to riverboat traffic, and to ground shipments. With the invention of the railroad and later the airplane, these other transportation modes are also integral to New York City and has made it become the huge center of international trade that it has become. Even smaller cities throughout the Midwestern USA were often transshipment centers to and from the railroad where merchants could easily get their goods and sell them cheaply, and provided a synergy to encourage growth. Some of the larger cities in the midwest are even located on larger rivers, and this is more than just a coincidence. Add in interstate highways and you got yet another major trans-shipment point to encourge/discourage growth of a city.
So here you have the opportunity to potentially be at still another different transportation system, and one that requries as much manual handling of cargo as going between sea and land transportation systems. Even if other U.S. cities get involved with this, the number of potential sites is going to be rather limited. And in this case, because of lattitude, New York City is going to be left out of the early running this time. People from New York are going to be going to New Mexico because of this spaceport.
Of course if you are of the attitude that this sleepy hamlet in New Mexico has the lifestyle you like already and you want to keep it that way, this whole idea of massive growth and millions of people moving in as neighbors may not seem as a good idea. It is also a good possibility that this whole thing may be a premature pipe-dream and that other cities (like in Texas or Virginia) might make better spaceports. And with that all of this extra tax money is just pouring money needlessly down a bureaucratic black hole.
I would say that you are mistaken on the R&D efforts of manufacturers of "illicit drugs". THC levels in marijuana plants has been consistently rising over the past several decades, and other "experimental" drugs do some and go in the underground drug market as well. That they use human subject testing that would normally be banned by the FDA is also unfortunately true as well. I wouldn't even say that I agree with all of the R&D methods of those involved in this level of drug trade, but you can't dismiss so openly that no effort is done to expand this sort of drug market. There are, unfortunately, some bright people involved with developing and improving these kinds of drugs, and for many reasons.
As far as herbal medicines being patented, I will also agree that there are some compounds that can be extracted from some herbs and have them classified as a patentable product. But 90%+ of the herbal medicine market does not use patented products. They do exist in marketable quantities and are commercially sold without requiring any kind of patent protection as well. And even for more "normal" pharmaceutical drugs there is a huge market already in place that also doesn't require any sort of patent protection. Ever hear of "generic" drugs?
The argument about permitting pharmaceutical patents is strictly about those more marginal drugs that do require some significant R&D to develop (including a huge amount of bureaucratic government red tape), but at the same time those drugs are really only effective for a limited number of situations where there may not be enough of a market to recover the costs. Patents merely provide a way to reduce the market size required for economic viability. At the same time, there may be other ways to cope with the R&D costs, of which many are already government sponsored or have other non-profit and even commercial groups offering financial support.
Do you really think a plea from a group like the March of Dimes who claims to have a drug idea that would elminate birth defects by 10% among all births in the USA would not get R&D funding without patents? Or a new cancer drug for breast cancer? I happen to know of one multi-billionaire who lives near my home that has offered nearly a blank check for cancer research and doesn't expect to get even a single penny back, other than perhaps the remote possibility that he and his posterity (kids and grandkids especially) might not have to deal with dying of cancer. Drug development is explicitly a part of the foundation's mission that he set up as a part of the endowed trust. And it is a nine-figure endowment. This trust isn't even the only one of its kind in the USA, as there are groups with even more money that have been involved with similar kinds of medical research.
The drug company example is something I think is heavily over used and abused. And as a matter of actual practice, I don't see that it is necessarily a big deal anyway.
Amature pharmacologists have been improving their products and developing new drugs for many years, without legal patent protections and other such nonsense. Of course the products they sell usually go under the names of things like "Meth", "Speed", "LSD", "Crack" and other imaginative names and are often explicitly even illegal to sell. Yet even with strong negative pressures to come up with these products including no patents and even explicit police units that are specifically designed to shut down these sort of drug manufacturers, they not only come up with new ideas but even have been substantially profitable. Some exceedingly profitable.
There are additional groups who sell "herbal medicines" that have been able to somehow dig up grants and other modest funding to for even drug trials where there is no promise for any sort of patent protection, as herbal medicines simply are unpatentable. And in many cases the studies prove that not only are these herbal medicines as good if not better than similar commercial products, but are also cheaper to manufacture. And don't tell me that herbal medicine is unprofitable.
There certainly are problems that need to be addressed in term of who pays for drug research and bringing new drug concepts to market. But at the same time there is a huge problem where due to the huge profits that can be made from the manufacturing of drugs that their use also distorts the whole medical community. The difference between "Viagra" and "Crack" isn't nearly as big as you would be lead to believe from publicly traded for-profit drug corporations.
Re:Software patents = bad. Other patents, though?
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The End for Vonage?
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The only people that I have ever seen highly supportive of patents in general are patent attorneys and perhaps patent examiners. This is their bread and butter, so they have to at least believe somehow that the idea is useful.
For myself, I see absolutely no redeeming value to the current patent system at all, and nearly any fix to try and improve things is as likely to make things worse as it is to make any reasonable progress in helping out.
I have offered this challenge before, but I am serious here: Can you find even one tinkerer who has played around in their "garage", is not a lawyer or has not teamed up with lawyers as a part of a business plan, patented something, and have actually made money off of their invention due to the patent? I'm talking mainly in the last 10 years or so, even if you can find some traditional examples like Edison (who is more the archtype of corporate America than the garage inventor).
Far, far too many patents are issued to some dreamer who tries to patent his idea, only to see thousands of dollars go into the patent search and legal fees, and the only person who made any money off of the process was his patent attorney. Or the book publishers and "inventor" groups and conventions who push this crazy idea that you can actually make money this way. There is a whole industry of people trying to suck up hope and money from these dreamers, where only a very few even break even once they actually sell their idea.
In the real world, companies do not buy patents for the purpose of manufacturing something cool or innovative. They buy them (or encourage their employees to file for them) mainly as a way to avoid getting sued by their competitors in a manner that Vontage here is getting screwed over. Had Vontage been smart several years ago, they would have been building up a suite of patents about their service and covering things that their employees had actually come up with over time, slowing building up insulation against these sort of florid legal attacks.
If they had been able to build up such a suite of patents, they would have been able to counter-sue Verizon and forced this whole thing into a cross-license patent settlement. Perhaps some money would have exchanged, but it would have been pretty quite. Esentially just like what happened between Microsoft and Novell. There might have been some head scratching by outside observers, but neither company would have gone down in flames.
I find this utter BS that this situation even exists at all, but it is unfortunately a part of the reality of the modern business world. Software and business method patents are all the more ways to screw you over, but even patents for what is arguably mechanical engineering are just as bad in most instances.
I take it you havn't tried to cancel AOL or any other ISP. Or for that matter tried to get out of a cell phone contract.
I agree that your situation here is unconscionable and something that should never happen, but unfortunately in this era of highly competitive communications systems your example here is far more typical than you may realize. And it is an indication that Vontage is desperate to keeping customers (as you have pointed out).
Frankly in some cases, the best way to keep from having extra fees to be asessed is to simply cancel the credit card or checking account that you have been paying for this service with, and forcing these companies to go after you if they want to have these fees paid. Of course that thrashes you credit rating, but it does give you some ability to try and fight these fees, and the ability to find a forum (like a courtroom) where you might actually be heard if you think this is an injustice.
Certainly if you compare this to a more typical example with an electric power utility, all they can do is to shut down the power to your house if you stop making payments. If that was your intention all along, that you didn't want to keep paying, the point is noted and you don't have to pay any more. Of course if you want to get reconnected to the grid you have to pay back fees and penalties, but that is something you have to consider if you go that route. And most electric utilities are not so much of a pain to schedule a termination of service, such as if you are moving out of your house.
My response to this is if you are being such a pain to the legal system that you are trying to hide nearly all proof of your existance, do you really think a judge is going to care one little bit that you can crack a public key?
I hardly think this is ever going to work if somebody wants to yank the domain and try to do so through the court system. Mathematical games are cute for philosophical discussions, but it wouldn't reach the level of legal proof that is necessary here. And only if you did such a proof that also ended up being something of critical national security issue would a judge be likely to back down and not give the domain to any random stranger.
Otherwise, don't try this trick if this is the only way you can offer proof of ownership over a domain. You won't win.
It sounds like you have an outstanding educational experience. I hope you realize how fortunate you really are.
And like I'm trying to say here, for you as an individual you should still try to do as best as you can and work to earn the degree. And as you have pointed out, there are individual professors who are indeed very interested in trying to see their students succeed not only in the academic setting but also in the professional setting once you have graduated.
Companies like this don't hire lawyers to work for free. Of course "they know" who is paying for the domain. Either that or this is the actual owner of the domain. The company (or individual) who hired them to perform this service has certainly paid something like a credit card or check, and the invoice has gone to a legitimate address.
While you might get away with something like this for a short time by using a stolen credit card or hiding behind some anonymizing service, you would more than likely see your domain yanked from under you if you couldn't be contacted too easily. Depending on how important it is for you to maintain the domain, that may mean something. Yanking a domain from somebody who is anonymous is very easy to accomplish, as trying to prove that you are this anonymous individual is an impossible task if you want to keep it.
I wouldn't complain too much about this "speedbump" service here to block all but serious enquiries about domain information. If you want to find out, you can get this information from the legal service listed on this domain registration.
Having just made a new domain myself, there is all kinds of garbage stuff that gets sent your way in terms of junk mail and spam which goes to any information listed on the domain registration. There are very legitimate reasons beyond trying to evade the law or trying to conduct a shady business that would suggest going with a legal service like this. Privacy is the chief of them, as the DNS records, which you have demonstrated, are published in public forums.
There is a risk to these services, however, as this sort of proxy registration now gives complete legal control over the domain to this service. If there is a billing dispute or some other problem with them, they have the upper hand to keep the domain from you until the issue is settled or it is taken to court. Think here if that company goes bankrupt.... who will own the domain at that point? Can your website be down for two to three months while you try to get the domain back? If you don't mind giving up that kind of control and you can trust the business (or the domain isn't really worth that much to you anyway), this kind of a service may be useful to you.
A presiding judge certainly can issue an injunction about discussing the case, but on a practical matter most attorneys will also tell their clients to also stay quiet as well.
Almost anything you say, including "the sky is blue and the grass is green", can and mostly will be brought into court and portrayed in as negative of a light as possible. So even through you have the "freedom of speech", you really don't have that freedom on a practical level once such a lawsuit is filed and the judge agrees to hear the case.
If you want to be a jackass and kill any chance of a lawsuit succeeding (as has been mentioned that Darl McBride and other at SCO were often doing), you certainly can open your mouth. But there are legal consequences of doing that which go way beyond contempt of court violations. Darl's comments surly would have been ran through the mud if there weren't so many other things wrong with the SCO case that it wasn't even worth the effort of bring up his comments made elsewhere.
If SCO's case even had a small chance of succeeding, McBride's comments surely torpedoed any chance after that and is a clear demonstration that all the lawsuit was about was to gain some P.R. points, not to establish any legal merit.
Windows ME wasn't really all that bad, but it was advertised as something it wasn't.
All Windows ME represented was the final version of MS-DOS and Windows 1.0/2.0/3.1/'95 and that line of development. In many ways ME was way better than '95, but the computer industry had simply gone on. And Windows NT (based on a completely different line of development and even a separate development team) turned out to be so much better that it blew ME away on nearly every issue, once NT had worked out its own bugs. It didn't hurt that the NT development teams had started out designing other real-world operating systems like VMS either (where the threading software for NT is nearly code compatable with VMS, and even uses some of the same constants).
As far as how ME was marketed... all I can say is that many products are marketed just as poorly and have similar problems. Especially when there are competing products within the same company that arguably are of better quality. That by itself should have killed the product, but sometimes companies get so large that you have competing bureaucracies that are hard to let go away without a strong CEO stepping in and killing it. NT was the side bet and not considered the bread and butter, so it wasn't taken as seriously.
The largest problem with DIVX was the internal resistance to the idea from within the DVD-Video development community, and the fact that the DVD-Video licensing bodies openly opposed the proposal as going against established standards.
There were other technical problems with the format that also caused huge problems, not to mention a completely separate video player that was incompatible with DVD-Video equipment that also made adoption difficult. Think here Betamax vs. VHS all over again, but with DIVX having not only the short end of the stick and starting out much later, but also not having the huge bucks from major backers (like DVD-Video had... including Time-Warner as a content provider) and questions about patent violations as well.... which were also owned by the DVD-Video guys.
DIVX claimed to be using DVD-Video technology (and there were indeed many similarities), but they didn't really stick to the standard in any meaningful way. It even needed entirely different authoring software, so the Beta vs. VHS goes even further than just two different player formats.
About the only thing going for DIVX was the harder encryption and the business model that some studios did like (notably Disney). You should note that even now Disney doesn't use the "DVD-Video" logo on any of its products, but instead uses a "Disney DVD" logo to advertise it is DVD-compatable. Grab a Disney video on DVD and check. This isn't accidental and is something left over from the DIVX days. You will find the "DVD-Video" logo on anything made by Time-Warner, however, and most other "major" Hollywood studios.
It will be interesting if the alt.space groups get their act together and make very affordable LEO spaceflight possible, how this might impact a decision to expand/replace Iridium service. Certainly the electronics that went into the original Iridium satellites has improved significantly in the decades since it was first sent up, and other raw manufacturing costs of nearly all of the other components (except for the metal cases themselves) has also dropped significantly, including solar cells and even batteries with control circuits that could withstand the environment of Low-Earth Orbit.
If you could reduce the launch costs to under $5 million per satellite, improved bandwidth, and cheaper satellites as well, I think you could make a business case to simply replace the Iridium system entirely. The problem with Iridium satellites is that they are using 1980's technology and launch costs exceeding $100 million per satellite. In other words, it was a premature idea, not necessarily something that won't ever work.
The "DAT tax" that was pushed onto all compatible media also killed this as a consumer product. IMHO this above all else is what made this product a "flop" in terms of consumer products. The royalties that were demanded by the recording industry on blank media were way too high for what was arguably a new medium and audio format, and pushed it over what most consumers were willing to pay for the product. You simply couldn't mass produce "singles" in DAT format at a price that would compete with the old 45 rpm records, much less cassette tapes. And this at a time when the CD was just starting to really take off as well.
Certainly in places like recording studios and in professional settings this wasn't an issue, and it did turn out to have the niche applications like you are talking about here. And many of the cheaper audio mixers that a garage band or part-time audio engineer could afford did have DAT recording media as well. But it could have been something so much bigger but was deliberately killed by the RIAA. And gave the RIAA a taste of blood thinking they could do the same thing to P2P software and other forms of electronic distribution. I would dare say that most of the current problems with the RIAA started with DAT and the attempt to kill this as a distribution media. As well as the government reaction to the RIAA endorsing this kind of behavior.
I would have to agree with you here. The paperless office isn't around yet in part because those who are in "control" don't understand how to interact with it.
At my former employer, they had secretaries who would actually take e-mails to the president, print them out and put them into the normal corporate mail system, have the president respond with some hand written notes and have the secretary type them back into the e-mail account for a reply.
Come to think about it, this was the system for the whole board of directors and senior (VP and above) officers in the company.
I worked in a sub-division on the other side of the country, where e-mail, Linux servers, and broadband networks were already in place even before it was acquired by the parent company, and that made for an interesting clash of corporate cultures. But on the whole I would agree with you that this is a generational issue as much as anything else. It just isn't making the "buzz" like it did in the 1980's.
I would also like to point out that prior to this lawsuit that it was a common mantra of FUD that the GPL had not ever made it into court to be tested, so it was unknown what its status in court would ever hold.
This lawsuit changed all of that, and has shown that the GPL is far stronger than ever... especially GPL v 2.0 (the 3.0 debate will open this FUD up all over again, but at least the principles have already been tested).
Now when somebody tries to sue based on the "unconstitutionality" of the GPL or comes up with all other kinds of crazy ideas that the GPL is legal BS, you can simply show them SCO and a graph of their stock price after they filed their lawsuit, and mention that SCO is one of the most heavily shorted stocks ever in the history of NASDAQ. The only reason their price goes up at all is because people are trying to "cover" their short sell, which requires actual purchase of shares.
Send such a graph to major investors of a company suing based on the GPL, and I'm sure they will stand up and take notice. The only possible reason to keep something like that going is if (like SCO) the investors are from other companies who don't care if the "investment" goes straight into the toilet and have other political goals in mind.
The last word about the SCO lawsuit has yet to be written, and this is going to be very interesting where it will go once SCOX is delisted and the SEC gets into the mess. I'm sure they will at some point.
No, but there are tangible assets that can be dealt with in the case of an ISP or even a simple website. Certainly you have the domain "owner" that ought to have a legal address somewhere. You can at the very least trace the owner of the IP block, find out the ISP, subpoena billing records, and eventually trace it to the "owner" if they put something as their address for the DNS records as "somewhere on Utopia Planatia, Mars". You can be found.... although certainly it is not necessarily something easy.
And if you are a domain owner and allowing random people to use your website without the ability to find out exactly who they are, you are setting yourself up for a liability issue on that one point alone. Again, you don't have to go out of your way to disclose exactly who everybody is, but information about an individual is often available even if the website owner is not publicly disclosing that information.
If you are hyper-paranoid about privacy, you can connect to websites using an anonymous proxy and use a throw-away e-mail address from someplace like yahoo or hotmail where you register with fictional information. While not perfect (you are depending that the proxy logs are getting wiped regularly) it is possible. Unfortunately (or fortunate for most law enforcement types), most people are lazy and don't go through those steps. Especially if you use an on-line personna for any length of time, some personal details are going to come out one way or another.
As far as "free speech", while there are technicalities all over the place and it does get complicated with judges also claiming that you don't "lose your rights" when stuff happens like this, I would have to agree with you on a practical level. Once you have a lawsuit filed, you pretty much have to shut up.
Of course there is explicit legislation that is designed to stop this sort of behavior by "activist groups" and others who are clearly on a political campaign and have previously been exercising their 1st amendment rights prior to a lawsuit that attempts to shut them up: http://www.thefirstamendment.org/antislappresource center.html
While SCO here is screwed financially as it is, normally this is something that is dangerous as the group (like PJ from Groklaw) which is sued, as long as they are on the safe side of libel laws, can counter sue for incredible amounts of money. In the arena of public opinion, it is also a P.R. nightmare to lose a SLAPP suit, not to mention it may have serious negative consequences if you are involved with other legal matters.
So, I guess you've never heard of the "stairstep" method of grading. In other words, you take a bunch of tests/papers/projects and toss them up in a stairwell. Those who land on the top step get an "A", the next ones down get a "B" and so forth.
This and more does happen at many schools. If you havn't seen it, you are simply lucky.
I will admit that some technical courses can be difficult, but I would also respond here that a very good instructor also makes a huge difference. And in particular university professors are hardly hired on their ability to teach anything. They don't even have professional teaching credentials for the most part, other than their "PhD" which supposedly grants them infinite knowledge on how to transfer their learning to somebody else. I have had plenty of professors that knew the topic very well, but taught it in such a way that unless you already knew the topic, there is no way you could understand what it was that they were talking about.
Or as I mentioned as well, I have had several instructors who could hardly speak English. Being only able to speak Chinese in an areas that is mainly English and Spanish speakers is not going to really help get the message out to the students. Complaints about this one point at the school I attended were so rampant (especially with TA's, but sometimes even with full professors) that a formal memo about the topic was sent out by the college dean that he was going to try and fix the problem. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the problem only got worse because the fundamental issues that lead to this being an issue in the first place never got fixed.
Nothing personal about the Dean at your college, but think about this in about 10-20 years from now after you have left and then see what you think about this (admittedly cynical) viewpoint about college education. And pay attention to especially the discussion of publicly funded institutions and the legislative bodies that provide that funding. I hope it opens your eyes a bit here. Even if he toughens up the requirements for your schools, other schools will open up promising huge rewards for people trying to become a "E.E." instead. At least if the money is there. Your school has independent reasons in terms of marketing and recruitment strategy for trying to tighten standards, and I would also suggest your dean may also be facing a bit of a budget crunch as well that has nothing to do the quality of the students currently attending your school.
I'm not saying that college is a complete waste of money or time, and you do learn some stuff while there, but if you are not paying attention to what the real game is about, you are missing out on understanding other similar kinds of games that are playing out in other areas of life.
I hope you read the rest of what I wrote there. The purpose of the school is not to educate but to control the number of people who make it thorugh the program. Depending on very political considerations, the schools will make the course requirements harder or easier for students to pass or fail the classes.
Don't tell me that Princeton's efforts to curb grade inflation had anything to do with trying to prepare better students. It is an overt political act, like most of what is done at a university on that level.
Yes, you as an individual can work hard, try to pass courses, and try to earn your degree. And if you are competing with dozens or even hundreds of other students, there are enough lazy individuals that hard work alone might just get you through the program. And learning knowledge instead of learning how to game the college system to pass the course work in order to graduate will have a long-term benefit in terms of your future employer (who plays a completely different game).
I admit this is a very cynical viewpoint, but you can't really believe that all universities are intending to pump you full of knowledge. That is not the purpose of their business, or how they get funding. Even tuition is just a minor part of the overall funding picture for most universities.
I guess it did help that this professor I was talking about was already tenured and in fact was the department chair, but yeah, I understand that the internal politics can be an issue. Particularly for a new hire that is trying to somehow convince the rest of the department that they belong at the university.
This is of course one of the reasons why student evaluations are sometimes ignored... even by the students themselves. Or why some universities try to get rid of them. And that is when the students themselves are even bothering to take the evaluations seriously and not treat it as some kind of cruel game.
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I would agree that if you are going to use pure chemical rockets such as those used for the Apollo program, the Moon is just about the limit of what you can go using that sort of technology.
BTW, all of the above technologies have been tested on actual flight hardware in one way or another (including surprisingly the Orion-like nukes...with actual nukes!). While certainly some more R&D can go into these propulsion methods, they only need engineering to refine rather than some major break-through in basic physics, which is what will be needed to do interstellar flight.
So the real point you are trying to make here is that if you want to get to Mars in any reasonable amount of time, of course you are going to need to spend quite a bit of energy accelerating and then decelerating to make the journey. There may be some ways to transfer this kinetic energy you have spent so much effort to accumulate to a productive end, but that would take some very advanced technology.
I just found an interesting page here that goes into some interesting price/cost analysis figures for passenger costs when using air travel.
Of note is a remark talking about the original Pan-Am Pacific Clipper service that on average cost about $4/mile (inflation adjusted to 2004 dollars). Assuming that you went from San Francisco to Tokyo, that would have cost the equivalent of about $10,000-$20,000.
By comparing that to what Virgin Galactic is asking here, it doesn't seem so far fetched.
In addition, there were several people who around 1900 also financed expeditions to Antarctica and attempts at going through the "northwest passage" north of North America. Many of these were wealthy millionaires, including I might add the founder of the Orteig Prize that the X-Prize was modeled after.
So while prices in the early airline industry weren't quite on the same level, there certainly were prices that were close to the same general order of magnitude as many of the current prices for commercial manned spaceflight.
Virgin Galatic has suggested sub-orbital flight between California and Japan as an eventual option, with costs in the range of about $10,000-$20,000. How is that for coincidence.
I don't think the comparison between this tax proposal and one for local schools is valid.
First of all, this is going from zero to something instead of huge to even larger. There is no existing spaceport authority to show they have mis-managed tax dollars in the past, something which many school districts can be accused of doing.
If you think about it, a teacher can only be supported by a finite number of families. Yes, taxing wealthy people does have an impact, but if you tax the wealthy too much, they simply move out. If the average class size is 30 students, and families have on average 3 kids, that means you can only have 10 families support one teacher. The salary of that teacher is directly tied to the salaries/wages/income of those 10 families and raising or lowering taxes only redistributes that basic support base.
If you think of preschools/daycare centers, this number is reduced even more, so it is a clear demonstration that day care centers will never make significant money except when catering to the very wealthy.
The same could be said about policemen, firefighters, and other typical municipal workers and to explain why they make the money that they do.
Why this is so completely different is that we aren't talking about what one small community must support, but what kind of financial support and revenue could result that would be of a regional or even a continental level of income. The number of communities that are competing on this level right now is precisely two (New Mexico and Virginia) with two other potential suitors (Florida and Texas). At the very least, New Mexico will be a regional center for the entire western USA for this kind of activity.
Raising the tax rate for funding local schools (which may or may not have merit) isn't going to give a local region a significant advantage over any other region of the country. At best it will help fix some long term problem that may need a solution that doesn't require money as well.
In this particular case the appeal was to personal self-interest. At least the philosophy was that by approving this sort of modest tax increase (it is only 0.25%... although I will admit those are the worst kind because of this very arguement) they will get some very tangible benefits in the long run.
As has been pointed out in the article, this is a largely undeveloped part of the USA where the dot-com bubble/bust/recovery never even happened at all. By all accounts it is a pretty sleepy part of America where national events pretty much pass them by, except perhaps the issue of illegal immigration (due to their proximity to Mexico).
There are some residents who are willing to take a modest gamble of raising taxes for a few years on the off chance that this whole idea of creating an interplanetary spaceport might turn their little hamlet into something similar to O'Hare airport in Chicago, where this could be one of the major if not supreme launch sites for interplanetary trade. Even in the relatively short term this means some significant high-tech jobs including launch technicians and other professionals who would bring in some significant income, which translates into people spending money at local auto dealers, grocery stores, building contractors, and the whole range of the local economy, not to mention a rise in the local tax base by wealthy individuals.
I'll also like to point out some geographical observations: Look at where big cities (and even smaller cities) are located at? They are at trans-shipment places between one form of transportation to another. New York City is a shipping transfer area originallly for moving ocean going traffc to riverboat traffic, and to ground shipments. With the invention of the railroad and later the airplane, these other transportation modes are also integral to New York City and has made it become the huge center of international trade that it has become. Even smaller cities throughout the Midwestern USA were often transshipment centers to and from the railroad where merchants could easily get their goods and sell them cheaply, and provided a synergy to encourage growth. Some of the larger cities in the midwest are even located on larger rivers, and this is more than just a coincidence. Add in interstate highways and you got yet another major trans-shipment point to encourge/discourage growth of a city.
So here you have the opportunity to potentially be at still another different transportation system, and one that requries as much manual handling of cargo as going between sea and land transportation systems. Even if other U.S. cities get involved with this, the number of potential sites is going to be rather limited. And in this case, because of lattitude, New York City is going to be left out of the early running this time. People from New York are going to be going to New Mexico because of this spaceport.
Of course if you are of the attitude that this sleepy hamlet in New Mexico has the lifestyle you like already and you want to keep it that way, this whole idea of massive growth and millions of people moving in as neighbors may not seem as a good idea. It is also a good possibility that this whole thing may be a premature pipe-dream and that other cities (like in Texas or Virginia) might make better spaceports. And with that all of this extra tax money is just pouring money needlessly down a bureaucratic black hole.
I would say that you are mistaken on the R&D efforts of manufacturers of "illicit drugs". THC levels in marijuana plants has been consistently rising over the past several decades, and other "experimental" drugs do some and go in the underground drug market as well. That they use human subject testing that would normally be banned by the FDA is also unfortunately true as well. I wouldn't even say that I agree with all of the R&D methods of those involved in this level of drug trade, but you can't dismiss so openly that no effort is done to expand this sort of drug market. There are, unfortunately, some bright people involved with developing and improving these kinds of drugs, and for many reasons.
As far as herbal medicines being patented, I will also agree that there are some compounds that can be extracted from some herbs and have them classified as a patentable product. But 90%+ of the herbal medicine market does not use patented products. They do exist in marketable quantities and are commercially sold without requiring any kind of patent protection as well. And even for more "normal" pharmaceutical drugs there is a huge market already in place that also doesn't require any sort of patent protection. Ever hear of "generic" drugs?
The argument about permitting pharmaceutical patents is strictly about those more marginal drugs that do require some significant R&D to develop (including a huge amount of bureaucratic government red tape), but at the same time those drugs are really only effective for a limited number of situations where there may not be enough of a market to recover the costs. Patents merely provide a way to reduce the market size required for economic viability. At the same time, there may be other ways to cope with the R&D costs, of which many are already government sponsored or have other non-profit and even commercial groups offering financial support.
Do you really think a plea from a group like the March of Dimes who claims to have a drug idea that would elminate birth defects by 10% among all births in the USA would not get R&D funding without patents? Or a new cancer drug for breast cancer? I happen to know of one multi-billionaire who lives near my home that has offered nearly a blank check for cancer research and doesn't expect to get even a single penny back, other than perhaps the remote possibility that he and his posterity (kids and grandkids especially) might not have to deal with dying of cancer. Drug development is explicitly a part of the foundation's mission that he set up as a part of the endowed trust. And it is a nine-figure endowment. This trust isn't even the only one of its kind in the USA, as there are groups with even more money that have been involved with similar kinds of medical research.
The drug company example is something I think is heavily over used and abused. And as a matter of actual practice, I don't see that it is necessarily a big deal anyway.
Amature pharmacologists have been improving their products and developing new drugs for many years, without legal patent protections and other such nonsense. Of course the products they sell usually go under the names of things like "Meth", "Speed", "LSD", "Crack" and other imaginative names and are often explicitly even illegal to sell. Yet even with strong negative pressures to come up with these products including no patents and even explicit police units that are specifically designed to shut down these sort of drug manufacturers, they not only come up with new ideas but even have been substantially profitable. Some exceedingly profitable.
There are additional groups who sell "herbal medicines" that have been able to somehow dig up grants and other modest funding to for even drug trials where there is no promise for any sort of patent protection, as herbal medicines simply are unpatentable. And in many cases the studies prove that not only are these herbal medicines as good if not better than similar commercial products, but are also cheaper to manufacture. And don't tell me that herbal medicine is unprofitable.
There certainly are problems that need to be addressed in term of who pays for drug research and bringing new drug concepts to market. But at the same time there is a huge problem where due to the huge profits that can be made from the manufacturing of drugs that their use also distorts the whole medical community. The difference between "Viagra" and "Crack" isn't nearly as big as you would be lead to believe from publicly traded for-profit drug corporations.
The only people that I have ever seen highly supportive of patents in general are patent attorneys and perhaps patent examiners. This is their bread and butter, so they have to at least believe somehow that the idea is useful.
For myself, I see absolutely no redeeming value to the current patent system at all, and nearly any fix to try and improve things is as likely to make things worse as it is to make any reasonable progress in helping out.
I have offered this challenge before, but I am serious here: Can you find even one tinkerer who has played around in their "garage", is not a lawyer or has not teamed up with lawyers as a part of a business plan, patented something, and have actually made money off of their invention due to the patent? I'm talking mainly in the last 10 years or so, even if you can find some traditional examples like Edison (who is more the archtype of corporate America than the garage inventor).
Far, far too many patents are issued to some dreamer who tries to patent his idea, only to see thousands of dollars go into the patent search and legal fees, and the only person who made any money off of the process was his patent attorney. Or the book publishers and "inventor" groups and conventions who push this crazy idea that you can actually make money this way. There is a whole industry of people trying to suck up hope and money from these dreamers, where only a very few even break even once they actually sell their idea.
In the real world, companies do not buy patents for the purpose of manufacturing something cool or innovative. They buy them (or encourage their employees to file for them) mainly as a way to avoid getting sued by their competitors in a manner that Vontage here is getting screwed over. Had Vontage been smart several years ago, they would have been building up a suite of patents about their service and covering things that their employees had actually come up with over time, slowing building up insulation against these sort of florid legal attacks.
If they had been able to build up such a suite of patents, they would have been able to counter-sue Verizon and forced this whole thing into a cross-license patent settlement. Perhaps some money would have exchanged, but it would have been pretty quite. Esentially just like what happened between Microsoft and Novell. There might have been some head scratching by outside observers, but neither company would have gone down in flames.
I find this utter BS that this situation even exists at all, but it is unfortunately a part of the reality of the modern business world. Software and business method patents are all the more ways to screw you over, but even patents for what is arguably mechanical engineering are just as bad in most instances.
I take it you havn't tried to cancel AOL or any other ISP. Or for that matter tried to get out of a cell phone contract.
I agree that your situation here is unconscionable and something that should never happen, but unfortunately in this era of highly competitive communications systems your example here is far more typical than you may realize. And it is an indication that Vontage is desperate to keeping customers (as you have pointed out).
Frankly in some cases, the best way to keep from having extra fees to be asessed is to simply cancel the credit card or checking
account that you have been paying for this service with, and forcing these companies to go after you if they want to have these fees paid. Of course that thrashes you credit rating, but it does give you some ability to try and fight these fees, and the ability to find a forum (like a courtroom) where you might actually be heard if you think this is an injustice.
Certainly if you compare this to a more typical example with an electric power utility, all they can do is to shut down the power to your house if you stop making payments. If that was your intention all along, that you didn't want to keep paying, the point is noted and you don't have to pay any more. Of course if you want to get reconnected to the grid you have to pay back fees and penalties, but that is something you have to consider if you go that route. And most electric utilities are not so much of a pain to schedule a termination of service, such as if you are moving out of your house.
My response to this is if you are being such a pain to the legal system that you are trying to hide nearly all proof of your existance, do you really think a judge is going to care one little bit that you can crack a public key?
I hardly think this is ever going to work if somebody wants to yank the domain and try to do so through the court system. Mathematical games are cute for philosophical discussions, but it wouldn't reach the level of legal proof that is necessary here. And only if you did such a proof that also ended up being something of critical national security issue would a judge be likely to back down and not give the domain to any random stranger.
Otherwise, don't try this trick if this is the only way you can offer proof of ownership over a domain. You won't win.
It sounds like you have an outstanding educational experience. I hope you realize how fortunate you really are.
And like I'm trying to say here, for you as an individual you should still try to do as best as you can and work to earn the degree. And as you have pointed out, there are individual professors who are indeed very interested in trying to see their students succeed not only in the academic setting but also in the professional setting once you have graduated.
Companies like this don't hire lawyers to work for free. Of course "they know" who is paying for the domain. Either that or this is the actual owner of the domain. The company (or individual) who hired them to perform this service has certainly paid something like a credit card or check, and the invoice has gone to a legitimate address.
While you might get away with something like this for a short time by using a stolen credit card or hiding behind some anonymizing service, you would more than likely see your domain yanked from under you if you couldn't be contacted too easily. Depending on how important it is for you to maintain the domain, that may mean something. Yanking a domain from somebody who is anonymous is very easy to accomplish, as trying to prove that you are this anonymous individual is an impossible task if you want to keep it.
I wouldn't complain too much about this "speedbump" service here to block all but serious enquiries about domain information. If you want to find out, you can get this information from the legal service listed on this domain registration.
Having just made a new domain myself, there is all kinds of garbage stuff that gets sent your way in terms of junk mail and spam which goes to any information listed on the domain registration. There are very legitimate reasons beyond trying to evade the law or trying to conduct a shady business that would suggest going with a legal service like this. Privacy is the chief of them, as the DNS records, which you have demonstrated, are published in public forums.
There is a risk to these services, however, as this sort of proxy registration now gives complete legal control over the domain to this service. If there is a billing dispute or some other problem with them, they have the upper hand to keep the domain from you until the issue is settled or it is taken to court. Think here if that company goes bankrupt.... who will own the domain at that point? Can your website be down for two to three months while you try to get the domain back? If you don't mind giving up that kind of control and you can trust the business (or the domain isn't really worth that much to you anyway), this kind of a service may be useful to you.
A presiding judge certainly can issue an injunction about discussing the case, but on a practical matter most attorneys will also tell their clients to also stay quiet as well.
Almost anything you say, including "the sky is blue and the grass is green", can and mostly will be brought into court and portrayed in as negative of a light as possible. So even through you have the "freedom of speech", you really don't have that freedom on a practical level once such a lawsuit is filed and the judge agrees to hear the case.
If you want to be a jackass and kill any chance of a lawsuit succeeding (as has been mentioned that Darl McBride and other at SCO were often doing), you certainly can open your mouth. But there are legal consequences of doing that which go way beyond contempt of court violations. Darl's comments surly would have been ran through the mud if there weren't so many other things wrong with the SCO case that it wasn't even worth the effort of bring up his comments made elsewhere.
If SCO's case even had a small chance of succeeding, McBride's comments surely torpedoed any chance after that and is a clear demonstration that all the lawsuit was about was to gain some P.R. points, not to establish any legal merit.
Windows ME wasn't really all that bad, but it was advertised as something it wasn't.
All Windows ME represented was the final version of MS-DOS and Windows 1.0/2.0/3.1/'95 and that line of development. In many ways ME was way better than '95, but the computer industry had simply gone on. And Windows NT (based on a completely different line of development and even a separate development team) turned out to be so much better that it blew ME away on nearly every issue, once NT had worked out its own bugs. It didn't hurt that the NT development teams had started out designing other real-world operating systems like VMS either (where the threading software for NT is nearly code compatable with VMS, and even uses some of the same constants).
As far as how ME was marketed... all I can say is that many products are marketed just as poorly and have similar problems. Especially when there are competing products within the same company that arguably are of better quality. That by itself should have killed the product, but sometimes companies get so large that you have competing bureaucracies that are hard to let go away without a strong CEO stepping in and killing it. NT was the side bet and not considered the bread and butter, so it wasn't taken as seriously.
The largest problem with DIVX was the internal resistance to the idea from within the DVD-Video development community, and the fact that the DVD-Video licensing bodies openly opposed the proposal as going against established standards.
There were other technical problems with the format that also caused huge problems, not to mention a completely separate video player that was incompatible with DVD-Video equipment that also made adoption difficult. Think here Betamax vs. VHS all over again, but with DIVX having not only the short end of the stick and starting out much later, but also not having the huge bucks from major backers (like DVD-Video had... including Time-Warner as a content provider) and questions about patent violations as well.... which were also owned by the DVD-Video guys.
DIVX claimed to be using DVD-Video technology (and there were indeed many similarities), but they didn't really stick to the standard in any meaningful way. It even needed entirely different authoring software, so the Beta vs. VHS goes even further than just two different player formats.
About the only thing going for DIVX was the harder encryption and the business model that some studios did like (notably Disney). You should note that even now Disney doesn't use the "DVD-Video" logo on any of its products, but instead uses a "Disney DVD" logo to advertise it is DVD-compatable. Grab a Disney video on DVD and check. This isn't accidental and is something left over from the DIVX days. You will find the "DVD-Video" logo on anything made by Time-Warner, however, and most other "major" Hollywood studios.
Amen. I couldn't have said it better!
It will be interesting if the alt.space groups get their act together and make very affordable LEO spaceflight possible, how this might impact a decision to expand/replace Iridium service. Certainly the electronics that went into the original Iridium satellites has improved significantly in the decades since it was first sent up, and other raw manufacturing costs of nearly all of the other components (except for the metal cases themselves) has also dropped significantly, including solar cells and even batteries with control circuits that could withstand the environment of Low-Earth Orbit.
If you could reduce the launch costs to under $5 million per satellite, improved bandwidth, and cheaper satellites as well, I think you could make a business case to simply replace the Iridium system entirely. The problem with Iridium satellites is that they are using 1980's technology and launch costs exceeding $100 million per satellite. In other words, it was a premature idea, not necessarily something that won't ever work.
The "DAT tax" that was pushed onto all compatible media also killed this as a consumer product. IMHO this above all else is what made this product a "flop" in terms of consumer products. The royalties that were demanded by the recording industry on blank media were way too high for what was arguably a new medium and audio format, and pushed it over what most consumers were willing to pay for the product. You simply couldn't mass produce "singles" in DAT format at a price that would compete with the old 45 rpm records, much less cassette tapes. And this at a time when the CD was just starting to really take off as well.
Certainly in places like recording studios and in professional settings this wasn't an issue, and it did turn out to have the niche applications like you are talking about here. And many of the cheaper audio mixers that a garage band or part-time audio engineer could afford did have DAT recording media as well. But it could have been something so much bigger but was deliberately killed by the RIAA. And gave the RIAA a taste of blood thinking they could do the same thing to P2P software and other forms of electronic distribution. I would dare say that most of the current problems with the RIAA started with DAT and the attempt to kill this as a distribution media. As well as the government reaction to the RIAA endorsing this kind of behavior.
I would have to agree with you here. The paperless office isn't around yet in part because those who are in "control" don't understand how to interact with it.
At my former employer, they had secretaries who would actually take e-mails to the president, print them out and put them into the normal corporate mail system, have the president respond with some hand written notes and have the secretary type them back into the e-mail account for a reply.
Come to think about it, this was the system for the whole board of directors and senior (VP and above) officers in the company.
I worked in a sub-division on the other side of the country, where e-mail, Linux servers, and broadband networks were already in place even before it was acquired by the parent company, and that made for an interesting clash of corporate cultures. But on the whole I would agree with you that this is a generational issue as much as anything else. It just isn't making the "buzz" like it did in the 1980's.
I would also like to point out that prior to this lawsuit that it was a common mantra of FUD that the GPL had not ever made it into court to be tested, so it was unknown what its status in court would ever hold.
This lawsuit changed all of that, and has shown that the GPL is far stronger than ever... especially GPL v 2.0 (the 3.0 debate will open this FUD up all over again, but at least the principles have already been tested).
Now when somebody tries to sue based on the "unconstitutionality" of the GPL or comes up with all other kinds of crazy ideas that the GPL is legal BS, you can simply show them SCO and a graph of their stock price after they filed their lawsuit, and mention that SCO is one of the most heavily shorted stocks ever in the history of NASDAQ. The only reason their price goes up at all is because people are trying to "cover" their short sell, which requires actual purchase of shares.
Send such a graph to major investors of a company suing based on the GPL, and I'm sure they will stand up and take notice. The only possible reason to keep something like that going is if (like SCO) the investors are from other companies who don't care if the "investment" goes straight into the toilet and have other political goals in mind.
The last word about the SCO lawsuit has yet to be written, and this is going to be very interesting where it will go once SCOX is delisted and the SEC gets into the mess. I'm sure they will at some point.
No, but there are tangible assets that can be dealt with in the case of an ISP or even a simple website. Certainly you have the domain "owner" that ought to have a legal address somewhere. You can at the very least trace the owner of the IP block, find out the ISP, subpoena billing records, and eventually trace it to the "owner" if they put something as their address for the DNS records as "somewhere on Utopia Planatia, Mars". You can be found.... although certainly it is not necessarily something easy.
And if you are a domain owner and allowing random people to use your website without the ability to find out exactly who they are, you are setting yourself up for a liability issue on that one point alone. Again, you don't have to go out of your way to disclose exactly who everybody is, but information about an individual is often available even if the website owner is not publicly disclosing that information.
If you are hyper-paranoid about privacy, you can connect to websites using an anonymous proxy and use a throw-away e-mail address from someplace like yahoo or hotmail where you register with fictional information. While not perfect (you are depending that the proxy logs are getting wiped regularly) it is possible. Unfortunately (or fortunate for most law enforcement types), most people are lazy and don't go through those steps. Especially if you use an on-line personna for any length of time, some personal details are going to come out one way or another.
As far as "free speech", while there are technicalities all over the place and it does get complicated with judges also claiming that you don't "lose your rights" when stuff happens like this, I would have to agree with you on a practical level. Once you have a lawsuit filed, you pretty much have to shut up.
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Of course there is explicit legislation that is designed to stop this sort of behavior by "activist groups" and others who are clearly on a political campaign and have previously been exercising their 1st amendment rights prior to a lawsuit that attempts to shut them up: http://www.thefirstamendment.org/antislappresourc
While SCO here is screwed financially as it is, normally this is something that is dangerous as the group (like PJ from Groklaw) which is sued, as long as they are on the safe side of libel laws, can counter sue for incredible amounts of money. In the arena of public opinion, it is also a P.R. nightmare to lose a SLAPP suit, not to mention it may have serious negative consequences if you are involved with other legal matters.
So, I guess you've never heard of the "stairstep" method of grading. In other words, you take a bunch of tests/papers/projects and toss them up in a stairwell. Those who land on the top step get an "A", the next ones down get a "B" and so forth.
This and more does happen at many schools. If you havn't seen it, you are simply lucky.
I will admit that some technical courses can be difficult, but I would also respond here that a very good instructor also makes a huge difference. And in particular university professors are hardly hired on their ability to teach anything. They don't even have professional teaching credentials for the most part, other than their "PhD" which supposedly grants them infinite knowledge on how to transfer their learning to somebody else. I have had plenty of professors that knew the topic very well, but taught it in such a way that unless you already knew the topic, there is no way you could understand what it was that they were talking about.
Or as I mentioned as well, I have had several instructors who could hardly speak English. Being only able to speak Chinese in an areas that is mainly English and Spanish speakers is not going to really help get the message out to the students. Complaints about this one point at the school I attended were so rampant (especially with TA's, but sometimes even with full professors) that a formal memo about the topic was sent out by the college dean that he was going to try and fix the problem. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the problem only got worse because the fundamental issues that lead to this being an issue in the first place never got fixed.
Nothing personal about the Dean at your college, but think about this in about 10-20 years from now after you have left and then see what you think about this (admittedly cynical) viewpoint about college education. And pay attention to especially the discussion of publicly funded institutions and the legislative bodies that provide that funding. I hope it opens your eyes a bit here. Even if he toughens up the requirements for your schools, other schools will open up promising huge rewards for people trying to become a "E.E." instead. At least if the money is there. Your school has independent reasons in terms of marketing and recruitment strategy for trying to tighten standards, and I would also suggest your dean may also be facing a bit of a budget crunch as well that has nothing to do the quality of the students currently attending your school.
I'm not saying that college is a complete waste of money or time, and you do learn some stuff while there, but if you are not paying attention to what the real game is about, you are missing out on understanding other similar kinds of games that are playing out in other areas of life.
I hope you read the rest of what I wrote there. The purpose of the school is not to educate but to control the number of people who make it thorugh the program. Depending on very political considerations, the schools will make the course requirements harder or easier for students to pass or fail the classes.
Don't tell me that Princeton's efforts to curb grade inflation had anything to do with trying to prepare better students. It is an overt political act, like most of what is done at a university on that level.
Yes, you as an individual can work hard, try to pass courses, and try to earn your degree. And if you are competing with dozens or even hundreds of other students, there are enough lazy individuals that hard work alone might just get you through the program. And learning knowledge instead of learning how to game the college system to pass the course work in order to graduate will have a long-term benefit in terms of your future employer (who plays a completely different game).
I admit this is a very cynical viewpoint, but you can't really believe that all universities are intending to pump you full of knowledge. That is not the purpose of their business, or how they get funding. Even tuition is just a minor part of the overall funding picture for most universities.
I guess it did help that this professor I was talking about was already tenured and in fact was the department chair, but yeah, I understand that the internal politics can be an issue. Particularly for a new hire that is trying to somehow convince the rest of the department that they belong at the university.
This is of course one of the reasons why student evaluations are sometimes ignored... even by the students themselves. Or why some universities try to get rid of them. And that is when the students themselves are even bothering to take the evaluations seriously and not treat it as some kind of cruel game.