But, you have no way to test the phone to see if it really/still works.
Sure you do.
You can test that the phone physically works just by trying to call any number. If you get a (voice) message that you don't have service, or get redirected to an operator, then you know the phone physically works and the local network can accomodate it.
As for actually making a 911 call, just wait until you see a car accident or something dangerous that needs fixing like debris in the road or something. You don't need to make an emergency up, but we all see emergencies from time to time and don't report them because we assume that somebody else did. The people at 911 would rather have something reported ten times than zero times, so if it really does require that a cop/ambulance be dispatched right away, use the phone, even if you think somebody else has already reported it. (And I wonder if 311 calls (if your area has them) generally work? That would open up even more possibilities -- see a traffic light that's out (but isn't an emergency because there's others)? Report it!)
All we want is a cellphone for the car for emergencies
If you can get away with having a phone that works for bonafide emergencies, any old cell phone will do -- you don't need service at all. By law, cell phone companies (in the US) have to permit calls to 911 from any phone, even if it doesn't have service.
I don't think they'll appreciate a 911 call to ask if the wife wants catsup or ketchup, however:)
whilst the rest of us get in fact different treatment
To be fair, over 99% of people who upload/download music illegaly don't get any sort of `treatment' at all -- they don't get sued, they don't get arrested, they probably don't even get lectured by their parents. They just get their music.
Assuming this to be true (and I believe it to be so, but cannot prove it), it seems reasonable to believe that the punishment his children received as a result of their downloading was certainly worse than the median punishment, and probably worse than the average punishment received by all offenders as well.
It's funny that his kids got caught illegally (?) downloading music, in a karmic sort of way, but I'm not going to join the call for his (or their) crucifixion. I'll just let out with a Nelson laugh (`ha ha!') and move on.
The RIAA would probably love to sue everybody, but it would backfire greatly and they know it.
ould it be worse than getting a bullet in the eye? I'm guessing it's probably not.
No, but it would probably be used in a lot of situations where a cop would not use a gun with standard ammo. Think of the taser -- cops will use them in a lot of situations they'd never consider shooting somebody in -- but yet people have died from tasers too.
The less lethal it is, the less care the authorities will take in (ab)using it -- history has pretty well established that.
And 90 GHz microwaves would probably burn skin nicely -- and eyes. This thing may make your skin uncomfortable, but it would do even worse to your eyes. People have gone blind from poking their head into a microwave dish -- it made their skin warm (and in fact soliders in Russia used to stand in front of microwave dishes just to stay warm) but made their eyes hot almost immediately, causing all sorts of problems.
Would you rather be dead or blind? Well, probably blind, but blind is still REALLY BAD.
China has quite a lot of leverage over the USA because of our fiscal problems.
Yes, though of course if the USA was really at war with China this leverage would immediately dry up.
Either way, if the USA and China were really at war, a real war, both sides would lose. Even if it didn't go nuclear, it would be devastating to both sides and to the economy of the entire world. (And if it did go nuclear, more than just the world economy would lose...)
In any event, this game may not be realistic, but it sounds like the norm for RTS games nowadays -- weak AI, inability to learn, communications are never jammed (or if they are jammed, it's in some `cute' way, like the Borg attack in Star Trek Armada 2 that sends parts of your GUI flying across the screen), etc.
The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Exactly so, and that's what I thought the moment I saw the summary.
However, it's possible that they've just created a more efficient thermocouple/heat pump/etc. equivilent, and the person writing the story didn't realize that heat had to flow from somewhere to somewhere to create electricity.
Of course, what you forgot to mention is Windows (on any drive)... Geek cred -2.
And I'm not sure that using an old drive is worth geek cred points at all, though I guess if it's all that's needed for your particular application, then I guess it's worth a little -- but a full point? Not unless it's ESDI, RLL or MFM!
(Perhaps by dumping all your trash only when over a specific area of the planet?)
Just in case anybody gets the wrong idea from this, the trash won't *stay* over that specific area of the planet. Instead, it'll orbit along with the ISS, slowly losing altitude and drifting away (I imagine that initially it would drift behind the ISS, but as it lost altitude and fell into a lower altitude it would get ahead of the ISS.) The rate of altitude loss would vary depending on the drag and weight of each piece of trash.
In any event, as long as the velocity and position (relative to the Earth, including altitude) of the ISS is approximately the same at each trash dump, the trash would take similar paths down, and NASA could easily calculate this path and keep track of it. (And for the larger bits of trash, NORAD could track them via RADAR.) There would be an ever increasing error in the paths of their calculcated (not measured) paths of trash, but I imagine they could be accurate enough to be able to launch the shuttle to avoid possible (but incredibly unlikely) collisions.
I can't believe this is 2006, people have been going into space for more than 40 years now, and they still are throwing trash overboard even though they know the danger. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
It's not stupid at all.
ISS is in a rare (unique?) position as far as satellites go -- it's very low, only about 200 miles up. At this altitude, atmosphere drag is a signifigant force, and will make sure that any trash let out of the ISS will not stay in the vicinity of the ISS for long. If you were to push a bit of trash out of the back of the ISS, there's basically zero chance that it could ever hit the ISS, as it would slowly lose altitude and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. And there's nothing below the ISS to hit except for shuttles coming up to it, and that's easily managed. (Perhaps by dumping all your trash only when over a specific area of the planet?)
Also, relative to the ISS, any trash they do let out will have very little relative velocity. What NASA is really worried about regarding debris in space isn't a wrench hitting the ISS at 0.5 m/s -- it's a wrench (or something else) hitting the ISS at 10,000 m/s -- but that's not a concern if the wrench CAME from the ISS.
If you ask me, dumping the trash overboard is a good idea for economic reasons -- but only because the ISS's low orbit ensures that it won't stay up for long. If we put a space station in geosychnronous or geostationary orbit, simply throwing your trash out the door would be a very poor policy -- it would stay up there with you forever.
That's like forcing Mom & Pop stores having to hire operators to be on standby so deaf people can call the store.
Well, it was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, though there is some merit to the idea.
However, if one were to take the idea seriously, it could be implemented by merely expanding the job of the people who provide the TDD relay. They could have computers and could browse web pages for blind people and read the pages to them, describe the graphics seen, etc.
I'm not saying this is a good idea -- I can just imagine kids calling this service up, saying they need somebody to go to a youtube URL (and trying to give the URL over the phone would be a pain in the ass by itself) and then the page comes up with a picture of some kid talking with his butt -- but it could be done.
Yeah, cause it's nearly impossible for deaf people to navigate a website...
No, but I suspect that being deaf (or merely having your speakers off, or using a browser/OS that won't make noise simply because the web page asked it to) makes many myspace pages that much less unpleasant.
Nope. Deaf dude calls relay operator, relay operator calls store and "translates" between.
Of course, this might be a solution to Target's problem right here -- have operators standing by to navigate their website for the benefit of blind people.
RMS's opinion about Linux has changed somewhat in the last few years. When Linux first came out, he was very critical -- he felt that the Hurd was the future, and Linux was just a passing fad, not really a worthy contender to the GNU OS throne. (Or at least he made it sound like that was how he felt.)
As Linux became more popular and more functional, RMS started to pay more attention to it, and whether he liked it or not, he (or the GNU/FSF movement, take your pick) started taking some credit for it -- hence the `lignux' and later GNU/Linux names. He may not like the Linux kernel itself, but he knows it's the probably the OS (or the kernel of the OS) out there that's getting GPL/FSF software in front of the most people (though Windows and MacOS might be big contenders there too, though they usually have less GPL/FSF software but are installed on more computers.) In any event, even if RMS hates Linux, he's not going to publically that, at least not in so many words, lest he alienate too many more GPL/FSF/GNU `customers'.
In any event, I doubt he hates Linux. But I'll bet he'd really have preferred that the Hurd have won instead of Linux. (Though if Linux had never existed, I'll bet FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD would be taking much of it's place in the marketplace now rather than the Hurd.)
as I understand it truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel. If that is the case, then any statement which is worded so as to express an opinion cannot be considered libel, as the statement (the existance of the opinion itself) must be true; the only one who could claim otherwise, in any event, would be the defendant. AFAIK there are no defamations laws regarding opinions, whether true or false, and the statement itself describes the opinion, not the plaintiff.
Sounds reasonable. Here's more on what I was talking about. Search for `opinion' in the document. This page on Wikipedia talks about it more as well.
Though this page on the EFF site probably explains what I'm saying best of all --
Can my opinion be defamatory?
No -- but merely labeling a statement as your "opinion" does not make it so. Courts look at whether a reasonable reader or listener could understand the statement as asserting a statement of verifiable fact. (A verifiable fact is one capable of being proven true or false.) This is determined in light of the context of the statement. A few courts have said that statements made in the context of an Internet bulletin board or chat room are highly likely to be opinions or hyperbole, but they do look at the remark in context to see if it's likely to be seen as a true, even if controversial, opinion ("I really hate George Lucas' new movie") rather than an assertion of fact dressed up as an opinion ("It's my opinion that Trinity is the hacker who broke into the IRS database").
Until you wrap your head around that, you're a mental cripple.
Alas, this claim was found on the Internet. Therefore, according to your own criteria, it does not represent reality.
Fortunately, I'm able to make a pretty good guess at the accuracy of things I find on the Internet, and so far, I've found that most of what I read is mostly correct -- not all, but most. (And I generally don't read myspace at all.) But thanks for your concern.
Either way, slander/libel law is usually based on what a mythical `reasonable person' would believe. A reasonable person (which I think includes me, but not you, at least not based on your post) generally believes most of what they read on the Internet. Most, not all, and they probably also realize that the more outlandish the claim, the more likely that it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. And this mythical `reasonable person', if they found a myspace page that said `I can break bricks with my mind', they're probably not going to take this claim seriously -- but a `Sexual orientation: lesbian' claim, well, that's a lot more reasonable. Sure, it might be a wrong, but unless you know the person personally you really have little reason to automatically assume it it's a lie.
A principal in a public school is a public figure.
Fair enough. But even though public figures have somewhat less protection against libel than `normal' people, they still have some.
How is this not protected by the Flynt vs. Falwell?
In that case, a reasonable person was not supposed to believe the claims that Hustler magazine made. You'll also note that that case went all the way to the Supreme Court -- obviously the situation wasn't as cut and dried as one might want to believe.
I haven't seen the myspace page in question, but if I see a myspace page that says that `I am a lesbian' and has a name and picture and such, I would probably tend to believe that this person is a lesbian. If they aren't a lesbian, and somebody else put the page up with their name and picture, it sounds like libel to me, and I don't think anybody will successfully argue that the Fallwell vs. Hustler thing applies.
if they said "it is my opinion she's a cum guzzling gutter slut", well, there's not alot she can do then, is there?
IANAL, but I don't think you can avoid libel charges merely by prefacing something with `it is my opinion that...'. Instead, I think the idea is that if you project the idea that you have some special knowledge of something (and by saying that she's a cum guzzling slut, this suggests that you have knowledge of her guzzling cum) then it's not going to be seen as an opinion anymore, even if you say it is.
Either way, the kids screwed up, as kids often do, and this isn't likely to end up in their favor.
It seems to me the solution of disrupting peoples network connections who're hogging the bandwidth is a perfect solution for all involved
For all? Even the p2p user?
Personally, I'd call it a DoS attack, and would believe that the perpetrator (the person intentionally disrupting other people's connections) is a criminal and should be treated as such. It's also possible that merely sniffing the network (arguably to see where all the bandwidth is going) is violating the law.
And yes, BT can suck up most (not all!) of the available bandwidth, but who are you to decide that your application (WoW no less!) is more important than theirs?
The proper response is for the people providing the service (not just some user) to do something -- either block BT entirely, lay down policies on it's use and enforce them, put some sort of QoS into place, bill per byte of bandwidth used (this requires locking down the AP somewhat, of course)...
It's just a hunch, but I'm guessing that the hospital would want to put WoW into the same lower QoS category. Which wouldn't gain the WoW player much.
Ultimately, this sounds like another case of `what I want to do (WoW, and I'll throw in some things that sound like work too) is more important than what you want to do (Bittorrent, but who knows what else would be included.)'. I believe the general problem has been explored in great detail over the years under the name
tragedy of the commons.
I'm not sure you realize my fictional lawn is my property.
Well, it's your fictional property anyways.
In any event, I thought I made it clear, but the lawn mowing I was referring to was real -- a real man with a real lawn mower mowed my real lawn, and asked my wife for real money.
Did I owe him money? Perhaps an issue for the courts to decide, but at the time since I didn't ask for my lawn to be mowed, I decided I didn't. But as I mentioned earlier, in retrospect, I should have paid him -- not because I legally owed him money, but just because since I think it was an honest mistake, it would have been the right thing to do.
He sent them a bill. That's not so generous. Generous would be finding the issues, letting them know, and not asking for money. (Though people have been arrested and I assume convicted for things like this too.)
I had a guy show up and mow our yard, then knock on the door and asked to be paid. My wife, not really sure what to do, called me (I was at work) and asked if I really did hire this guy to mow our yard. I did not. Should we have paid him?
Did it matter that he seemed to barely know English and seemed genuinely confused when we told him we never asked anybody to come mow our yard? An honest mistake or a good con job? Ultimately, we did not pay him, though in retrospect I suspect he needed the money more than we did and I came to believe that it really was an honest mistake, but I didn't think so at the time. That, and my yard DID really need mowing! If I could go back in time and pay him, I would.
Also, I've had a NiMH battery short in my pocket from touching spare change, and It got hot enough to burn me.
I've had this happen a few times myself -- usually due to my keychain shorting it out.
But the keychain never makes a very good connection, so it's not a complete short. Some creative hammering on the battery itself could probably make a much more effective short circuit. But either way, it just gets hot -- it doesn't generally catch fire.
The one downside would be the inability to prove that a match isn't a false positive...
Well, that's only one of several possible downsides.
Other downsides? Suppose you change your algorithm for detecting copied works? Without the original old papers, you can't `reindex' (for lack of a better word) the old papers into the new system, so you'd have to keep old papers under the old system (which might not be as accurate or fast or something) and new papers under the new system (or worse, under both systems, depending on how things work.) I imagine there's others as well, but they're not as obvious.
The justification of that is that today no single engineer or inventor could ever produce something new in those fields because the research requires such expensive equipment that only huge corporations can afford it
No, the justification is that you're working for IBM, so the fruits of your labor belong to IBM.
It gets a little more murky when you design and patent something in your own time, and then IBM claims that they own that invention as well due to a clause in your employment contract that says they do, but in that case it's your own fault for not properly reading and then negotiating your employment contract.
In any event, individuals DO invent and patent things on their own. Not everything is patented by large corporations, though legal issues regarding patents have certainly led corporations to patent everything under the sun, often simply to protect themselves from some other corporation doing the same thing.
So, work produced using unversity resources is the same - it belongs to the university.
I might agree with this if you were a professor, working for and being paid by the university. But as a student, where you pay the university to teach you? No way. And if a university requires that you sign a contract that says they own everything you create, I'd suggest either 1) negotiation to remove the clause (or just blacking it out when you sign it, if you can get away with that), or 2) going somewhere else.
Either way, it all boils down to contracts. When you're asked to sign a contract, read it and understand it, no matter how unimportant it seems at the time -- or it may bite you later.
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You can test that the phone physically works just by trying to call any number. If you get a (voice) message that you don't have service, or get redirected to an operator, then you know the phone physically works and the local network can accomodate it.
As for actually making a 911 call, just wait until you see a car accident or something dangerous that needs fixing like debris in the road or something. You don't need to make an emergency up, but we all see emergencies from time to time and don't report them because we assume that somebody else did. The people at 911 would rather have something reported ten times than zero times, so if it really does require that a cop/ambulance be dispatched right away, use the phone, even if you think somebody else has already reported it. (And I wonder if 311 calls (if your area has them) generally work? That would open up even more possibilities -- see a traffic light that's out (but isn't an emergency because there's others)? Report it!)
I don't think they'll appreciate a 911 call to ask if the wife wants catsup or ketchup, however
Assuming this to be true (and I believe it to be so, but cannot prove it), it seems reasonable to believe that the punishment his children received as a result of their downloading was certainly worse than the median punishment, and probably worse than the average punishment received by all offenders as well.
It's funny that his kids got caught illegally (?) downloading music, in a karmic sort of way, but I'm not going to join the call for his (or their) crucifixion. I'll just let out with a Nelson laugh (`ha ha!') and move on.
The RIAA would probably love to sue everybody, but it would backfire greatly and they know it.
The less lethal it is, the less care the authorities will take in (ab)using it -- history has pretty well established that.
And 90 GHz microwaves would probably burn skin nicely -- and eyes. This thing may make your skin uncomfortable, but it would do even worse to your eyes. People have gone blind from poking their head into a microwave dish -- it made their skin warm (and in fact soliders in Russia used to stand in front of microwave dishes just to stay warm) but made their eyes hot almost immediately, causing all sorts of problems.
Would you rather be dead or blind? Well, probably blind, but blind is still REALLY BAD.
Either way, if the USA and China were really at war, a real war, both sides would lose. Even if it didn't go nuclear, it would be devastating to both sides and to the economy of the entire world. (And if it did go nuclear, more than just the world economy would lose
In any event, this game may not be realistic, but it sounds like the norm for RTS games nowadays -- weak AI, inability to learn, communications are never jammed (or if they are jammed, it's in some `cute' way, like the Borg attack in Star Trek Armada 2 that sends parts of your GUI flying across the screen), etc.
However, it's possible that they've just created a more efficient thermocouple/heat pump/etc. equivilent, and the person writing the story didn't realize that heat had to flow from somewhere to somewhere to create electricity.
And I'm not sure that using an old drive is worth geek cred points at all, though I guess if it's all that's needed for your particular application, then I guess it's worth a little -- but a full point? Not unless it's ESDI, RLL or MFM!
In any event, as long as the velocity and position (relative to the Earth, including altitude) of the ISS is approximately the same at each trash dump, the trash would take similar paths down, and NASA could easily calculate this path and keep track of it. (And for the larger bits of trash, NORAD could track them via RADAR.) There would be an ever increasing error in the paths of their calculcated (not measured) paths of trash, but I imagine they could be accurate enough to be able to launch the shuttle to avoid possible (but incredibly unlikely) collisions.
ISS is in a rare (unique?) position as far as satellites go -- it's very low, only about 200 miles up. At this altitude, atmosphere drag is a signifigant force, and will make sure that any trash let out of the ISS will not stay in the vicinity of the ISS for long. If you were to push a bit of trash out of the back of the ISS, there's basically zero chance that it could ever hit the ISS, as it would slowly lose altitude and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. And there's nothing below the ISS to hit except for shuttles coming up to it, and that's easily managed. (Perhaps by dumping all your trash only when over a specific area of the planet?)
Also, relative to the ISS, any trash they do let out will have very little relative velocity. What NASA is really worried about regarding debris in space isn't a wrench hitting the ISS at 0.5 m/s -- it's a wrench (or something else) hitting the ISS at 10,000 m/s -- but that's not a concern if the wrench CAME from the ISS.
If you ask me, dumping the trash overboard is a good idea for economic reasons -- but only because the ISS's low orbit ensures that it won't stay up for long. If we put a space station in geosychnronous or geostationary orbit, simply throwing your trash out the door would be a very poor policy -- it would stay up there with you forever.
However, if one were to take the idea seriously, it could be implemented by merely expanding the job of the people who provide the TDD relay. They could have computers and could browse web pages for blind people and read the pages to them, describe the graphics seen, etc.
I'm not saying this is a good idea -- I can just imagine kids calling this service up, saying they need somebody to go to a youtube URL (and trying to give the URL over the phone would be a pain in the ass by itself) and then the page comes up with a picture of some kid talking with his butt -- but it could be done.
(Or they could just make a .html version, but ...)
RMS's opinion about Linux has changed somewhat in the last few years. When Linux first came out, he was very critical -- he felt that the Hurd was the future, and Linux was just a passing fad, not really a worthy contender to the GNU OS throne. (Or at least he made it sound like that was how he felt.)
As Linux became more popular and more functional, RMS started to pay more attention to it, and whether he liked it or not, he (or the GNU/FSF movement, take your pick) started taking some credit for it -- hence the `lignux' and later GNU/Linux names. He may not like the Linux kernel itself, but he knows it's the probably the OS (or the kernel of the OS) out there that's getting GPL/FSF software in front of the most people (though Windows and MacOS might be big contenders there too, though they usually have less GPL/FSF software but are installed on more computers.) In any event, even if RMS hates Linux, he's not going to publically that, at least not in so many words, lest he alienate too many more GPL/FSF/GNU `customers'.
In any event, I doubt he hates Linux. But I'll bet he'd really have preferred that the Hurd have won instead of Linux. (Though if Linux had never existed, I'll bet FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD would be taking much of it's place in the marketplace now rather than the Hurd.)
Though this page on the EFF site probably explains what I'm saying best of all --
Fortunately, I'm able to make a pretty good guess at the accuracy of things I find on the Internet, and so far, I've found that most of what I read is mostly correct -- not all, but most. (And I generally don't read myspace at all.) But thanks for your concern.
Either way, slander/libel law is usually based on what a mythical `reasonable person' would believe. A reasonable person (which I think includes me, but not you, at least not based on your post) generally believes most of what they read on the Internet. Most, not all, and they probably also realize that the more outlandish the claim, the more likely that it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. And this mythical `reasonable person', if they found a myspace page that said `I can break bricks with my mind', they're probably not going to take this claim seriously -- but a `Sexual orientation: lesbian' claim, well, that's a lot more reasonable. Sure, it might be a wrong, but unless you know the person personally you really have little reason to automatically assume it it's a lie.
I haven't seen the myspace page in question, but if I see a myspace page that says that `I am a lesbian' and has a name and picture and such, I would probably tend to believe that this person is a lesbian. If they aren't a lesbian, and somebody else put the page up with their name and picture, it sounds like libel to me, and I don't think anybody will successfully argue that the Fallwell vs. Hustler thing applies.
IANAL.
I'm not familiar with that abbreviation.Either way, the kids screwed up, as kids often do, and this isn't likely to end up in their favor.
Personally, I'd call it a DoS attack, and would believe that the perpetrator (the person intentionally disrupting other people's connections) is a criminal and should be treated as such. It's also possible that merely sniffing the network (arguably to see where all the bandwidth is going) is violating the law.
And yes, BT can suck up most (not all!) of the available bandwidth, but who are you to decide that your application (WoW no less!) is more important than theirs?
The proper response is for the people providing the service (not just some user) to do something -- either block BT entirely, lay down policies on it's use and enforce them, put some sort of QoS into place, bill per byte of bandwidth used (this requires locking down the AP somewhat, of course) ...
Ultimately, this sounds like another case of `what I want to do (WoW, and I'll throw in some things that sound like work too) is more important than what you want to do (Bittorrent, but who knows what else would be included.)'. I believe the general problem has been explored in great detail over the years under the name tragedy of the commons.
In any event, I thought I made it clear, but the lawn mowing I was referring to was real -- a real man with a real lawn mower mowed my real lawn, and asked my wife for real money.
Did I owe him money? Perhaps an issue for the courts to decide, but at the time since I didn't ask for my lawn to be mowed, I decided I didn't. But as I mentioned earlier, in retrospect, I should have paid him -- not because I legally owed him money, but just because since I think it was an honest mistake, it would have been the right thing to do.
I had a guy show up and mow our yard, then knock on the door and asked to be paid. My wife, not really sure what to do, called me (I was at work) and asked if I really did hire this guy to mow our yard. I did not. Should we have paid him?
Did it matter that he seemed to barely know English and seemed genuinely confused when we told him we never asked anybody to come mow our yard? An honest mistake or a good con job? Ultimately, we did not pay him, though in retrospect I suspect he needed the money more than we did and I came to believe that it really was an honest mistake, but I didn't think so at the time. That, and my yard DID really need mowing! If I could go back in time and pay him, I would.
But the keychain never makes a very good connection, so it's not a complete short. Some creative hammering on the battery itself could probably make a much more effective short circuit. But either way, it just gets hot -- it doesn't generally catch fire.
Other downsides? Suppose you change your algorithm for detecting copied works? Without the original old papers, you can't `reindex' (for lack of a better word) the old papers into the new system, so you'd have to keep old papers under the old system (which might not be as accurate or fast or something) and new papers under the new system (or worse, under both systems, depending on how things work.) I imagine there's others as well, but they're not as obvious.
It gets a little more murky when you design and patent something in your own time, and then IBM claims that they own that invention as well due to a clause in your employment contract that says they do, but in that case it's your own fault for not properly reading and then negotiating your employment contract.
In any event, individuals DO invent and patent things on their own. Not everything is patented by large corporations, though legal issues regarding patents have certainly led corporations to patent everything under the sun, often simply to protect themselves from some other corporation doing the same thing.
I might agree with this if you were a professor, working for and being paid by the university. But as a student, where you pay the university to teach you? No way. And if a university requires that you sign a contract that says they own everything you create, I'd suggest either 1) negotiation to remove the clause (or just blacking it out when you sign it, if you can get away with that), or 2) going somewhere else.Either way, it all boils down to contracts. When you're asked to sign a contract, read it and understand it, no matter how unimportant it seems at the time -- or it may bite you later.