And ask the Hopi. They've been saying all along they've been here for that long. Their history fills in a lot of blanks that anthropologists appear to want left blank.
For instance, yes it's true: People came to North America across the Bering land bridge. The Hopi know because they were there. They had traveled to the far north, and met some new people coming south. For self-apparent reasons, the Hopi called these people "They who hit you with rocks" because that's all the weapons they had. These people were the Dine'/Dene', which split, leaving one group in Canada, and another moving south and becoming the Hopi's neighbors in the southwest US, the Navajo.
The Dine' word for the Hopi is Anasazi, meaning "ancient ones". The Anasazi did not die out, no matter how many national park signs tell you otherwise.
While you're visiting Hotevilla, bring along a picture of the "mysterious" Nazca Plains markings. The Hopi can tell you exactly what they mean, and which of their clans during which of their migration cycles were involved. Same for Snake Mound and many other 'artifacts' of 'Mississippian' and other hypothesized cultures.
But, I suppose the future would be bleak for anthropology if they suddenly had lots of answers -- funding would get scarce with fewer questions needing answered.
Knowing they're going under, SCO has launched an effort to gather capital from people willing to bet on a long shot by starting this ridiculous action. They had good reason to suspect it'd work. Not that they'd win; chances were always slim for that. But the slim chances attracts the long shot bettors/investors. And with the influx of cash, the price goes up. And when the shit comes down, they'll be able to sell out at a higher price. Even the loser takes home a purse.
I bet they're real nervous now. They probably expected to be bought out by now by IBM or someone just to stop the irritation.
In my happy place I dream of the judge taking SCO away from Darel and company (after sentencing them to an ethics treatment center and changing their names to include 'Bonehead'), and appointing EFF to administrate it on behalf of its new owners, OSDL.
They knew they were involved. They know they were being monitored. They were participating in yet another replication of the Hawthorne studies http://www.mtsu.edu/~pmccarth/io_hist.htm (halfway down).
All they needed to know was someone was watching (they signed consent forms) and be told what to do (they received emails).
Now, redesign it in the form of Stanley Milgram's Harvard experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) and have the emails say "Locate the spammer that sent this, and remove any one of their major organs through any existing orifice", and you've got my interest.
"the Sun's radial positive electric field"...... exists half the time. The other half, it's negative. The solar wind changes in predominant charge two cycles per rotation, or roughly one switch per week.
If the comets were negatively charged, we'd no doubt have noticed them dancing in their orbits. And if the sub had a constant positive charge apart from the solar wind, we'd have noticed the fluctuations in it also.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, you are least likely to get in an accident when travelling 5 to 10 MPH over the speed limit. This is because most other traffic is. It is the common rate of flow. Going at a different speed violates other drivers' expectations and they will guess your trajectory as compared to their incorrectly. Unless they install these on every vehicle, those with them will be at higher risk of collision.
Of course once they're installed, then people will die when they can't speed up to avoid a potential accident, or get to hospital quickly with a life threatening injury or illness.
So people die. The point is to relieve congestion. This would serve the purpose.
But help me out here. Isn't congestion people going too slow?
Now, come up with a box that forces all vehicles to go the speed limit, moderated by distance to the vehicles in front and behind, with an override controlled by something like a built in 911 (UK 999) call and you've got something.
Technology depends on ecomonimcs. When the next greatest thing is in sight before the previous greatest thing is out of R&D, it forces technology to try to pre-empt or co-opt science. And still technology can't afford to herd up and pay off all the scientists.
"What we need is a Manhattan Project for dumping flash memory data directly to DVD in one flash." Figure the odds.
Mod Original Submission Funny
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 1
"Ever wonder how ice melts?... An understanding of how it works is crucial to gaining a _firm_ _grasp_ on the physical world."
"Grab ahold of that ice!" "I can't! It's slippery!" "QUICK! Somebody do some SCIENCE!"
mbrother (739193) sez: "At this time in tech history, I think it's to a writer's advantage to give away their work online"
Unless things have changed a great deal recently, at this time in legel history it's all but necessary for writers to keep their work off the net unless the publisher releases it for that.
Almost all writers' contracts require that they sign over e-rights to the publisher as part of their contract, whether or not the publisher intends to do anything with them. The writer signs away the e-rights, or doesn't sign the contract.
Note that e-rights are rights to publish, not ownership. The writer still owns them.
Along comes the work, posted online. The author has to make an effort to protect the work, because signing the e-rights gave the publisher the right to release it. If the writer doesn't, they are in violation of their contract and the whole thing can be cancelled.
A few writers like Harlan can afford to take on a case like this themselves, and can afford to refuse to have an e-rights clause in their contract. Most can't. If they want to get the contract, they sign the whole thing, and they're stuck having to do their own police work.
If a writer has signed a publishing contract for the work that includes an e-rights clause they can't publish it on line, and they have to try to prevent others from doing so.
At least that's the way it was explained to me by Charlie Petit, Harlan's lawyer during the lawsuit, while I was serving as material witness and slated as expert witness. Harlan was protecting his own work because he wanted to, not because he had to, because he didn;t have to contend with these silly e-rights issues in contracts. He also did so because newer authors didn't have the resources to be doing things like this all the time, and he wanted to see this made public so they wouldn't get screwed out of being able to be authors.
At the 2003 FTC Spam Conference, his conclusion was "What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." ID theft is lots worse. I'd like to see him suggestion for this. We need more ass kicking gummint people like him.
That's how long it took to get a machine at Yale loaded with 2K or XP, and get it online to download the required security fixes (and this was the required way to do it). The machines were compromised before the security fixes were downloaded. This wasn't one time. We tried several times. 7 seconds was an average.
No color, no RAM expanision, no slots of even liftable lid.
The Mac didn't have these for the simple reason that these were the things that Woz built into the Apple II and II Plus against Jobs' suggestions. The basis of the separatism of the "pirates" at Apple, and much of their design philosophy, was Jobs' petulance over lost arguments. This is where the "Who would ever need more than X RAM?" question comes from, and what it resulted in.
I ended up getting a fully tricked out Apple IIgs because it didn't have any designed in limitations.
I still can't figure out what all this right honourable MR. MP sir business, and its correctness or incorrectness, has to do with Jedi. Am I missing the datum, or has eevryone neglected the point of the article in favor of niggling peripheral details?
"In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
Fine, let's see the math. Let's see the trajectory calculations. How about those calculating the space? Calculating the number of dimensions the space has, and how fast that number changes over time?
40 years ago brain scientists realized that computer architecture made a good metaphor for how the brain works. (They did NOT assume there was no feedback, contrary to the article). It made a handy and productive way to look at things so they could figure out more about what was really going on.
10 years ago brain scientists realized that they could use the way cool chaos stuff the describe the way the brain works. Believe me, I know; I've been to the Santa Fe Institute twice. It worked particularly well for me because I'm essentially a signal analyst -- I HAVE to define a set of variables, estimate how well they work, and decide how many of my arbitrary variables to keep or throw out.
It's still only a metaphor. And unlike the specific specific processes described by cognitive science, the dynamic system stuff remains nebulous. It claims a mathematical legitimacy which it can really claim only in concept because the actual math of the acutal operations are is beyond the abilities of anyone making the claims. The fact that it *can* be described this way is no less trivial than the fact that processes can ge grouped according to the traditional cognitive science concepts.
Trajectories on phase space are soooooooo sexy. But if it's any good, it'll result in something more concrete than more people picking up this flag and waving it while shouting the new slogans and buzzwords. Until that happens I peg this with the study that "calculated" the "fractal dimension" of the cortex just because it has fold and folds in the folds.... so fsking what.
AKAImBatman (238306) sez: "What about those of us here in the US who *paid* for JDS and were promised major upgrades every quarter?"
We're disposable. Why should we matter? It's a free OS. We can do anything else we want to.
As long companies that could make a difference with Linux vs. Microsoft take such a Hokey-Pokey (you put the left foot in, you take the left foot out...) attitude towards the market, there will be no major progress. There will only continue to be piecemeal progress done by users with the occasional company riding on their backs.
Can't say as I'm surprised about this. I had JDS from the release date, and throught the support has been among the worst I've ever gotten. I don't think they ever seriously expected it to go anywhere.
Hopefully they'll now let it go for free. It's worth that.
First, try thinking about it in the terms Bucky Fuller suggested: energy is the real value, and money is just an abstraction of it. They are interchangeable because they're inseperable.
Of course it's ineffecient. If it were efficient, it'd be cheap, and nobody could make money doing it, and so wouldn't do it on a scale useful to a population which is incapable of doing it for themselves.
Unaddressed is the complete cost of its use in terms of cleaning up the biosphere mess after. It's unaddressed because it's the same for both ethanol and petroleum, and so wouldn't serve his purpose. It'd make everything look equally bad. It's these after-costs that are the big hit against nuclear power, and the manufacturing costs (direct and long-term indirect) are frequently ignored by clean/green energy. What's it take to produce an acre of solar panels? A hundred windmills?
Why is it so surpising to people that thermodyamics works, and insists on the entire system be included?
Ginsberg's Theorem (The modern statement of the three laws of thermodynamics) 1. You can't win. 2. You can't even break even. 3. You can't get out of the game.
Well, you personally can get out of the game. But your organic molecules can't. They have to stay and get recycled in the constant fight against entropy. And here is where such biased reporting and reporters could be of use. Recycle all that paper they marked up, and their organic molecules. I mean, they DO want to make a difference, right?
Sushant Bhatia asks: "So what does the Slashdot crowd use when they need to secure their Linux and Windows servers? Does it cost less than US$100?"
You want a perfect firewall. You want to pay peanuts for it.
You could take over the university, set up an empire, and take 10 years and 800,000 people to build the Great Firewall. But then, the Mongols managed to get around the Great Wall without undue trouble. Why are you letting the Mongols stay?
The Mongols were eventually thrown out when the Manchus offered to help the Ming throw the Mongols out and in the process took control of China.
I suggest you offer to help the administration in all the departments to rid themselves of the problems (after having documented for them exactly what the problem is and where), and when they agree (or else going on record denying responsibility for the problems going on under them, which will serve the same purpose) set up a policy whereby you cut the miscreants' heads off. As a modern homage to this traditionally effective corrective action, you could pull the zombies' plugs and keep them that way until the owners fixed them and their administrators notified that the fix was in place.
You probably have a layer of IT between you and the top administration, as well as IT below them in the departments. They have jobs to do, and jobs they should be doing. They too should be held responsible for doing them, or not. Doing everything above the board and in public makes it hard for people to deny their responsibility.
"The skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy." -- Sun Tzu
On the other hand: "All analogies fail. There is nothing 'like' the net." -- Unit IV, SPUTUM. Fortunately few people realize this and live as though it's not true, and the use of analogy provides adequate direction against them.
"What Universities out there will allow me to publish (otherwise patentable) software under the GPL?"
All of them. It's called publishing your research, something they also require. Write it up and send it to a journal. They require that you turn over copyright of the article to them. Make the code available under GPL and write the URL into the article. If the university wants to fight about it, let them fight with the journal and in the process make it clear to all their employed academics that publishing their work will get them problems. Won't happen.
You can also team up with someone from a different university and publish collaboration, and let the universities fight for the rights whether they have the same or different policies.
Also, they cannot prove you invented something while there unless you say so and document it as such for them. I have been involved in research with others, including works in progress and undeveloped ideas, for quite some time. I can honestly tell them that I can't honestly sign such a thing without an equally binding document that says my previous work and collaborations, no matter how much or little completed, don't fall under their 100%. I've successfully used this in commercial settings, and they're much more stringent than universities.
There's not likely to be a useful comprehensive list of best practices because too many would be industry or company dependent making much of the list useless to others.
There's an organization based on improving customer service, but you have to join to get access to most pf their material: http://www.socap.org/
It took me years to figure out why my father came home in a bad mood every night from his TV repair shop. All the phone calls he receives were from people who were (1) angry because their TV was broken, (2) angry because their TV wasn't fixed yet, or (3) angry because their TV was fixed but cost so much. People call customer service because they're upset about something. Many will remain so regardless of how good the customer service is. Using them as a metric for satisfaction makes as little sense as letting the companies rate themselves.
However, if people get good enough cusomer service to remember it long enough to want to tell others publically, then customer service awards sites like The WOW! Awards Website http://www.thewowawards.co.uk/ would at least provide a listing of companies that obtained enough good reports, and one would assume such awards would give the rationale for each case. Hardly comprehensive, but then it'd be simpler to read up on companies in a similar business than try to sort through a long list of variable applicability.
Antonymous Flower (848759) sez: "It's mostly a literature review, which obviously attempts to use the 'majority must be right' fallacy to some mysterious end. The guy's an 'industrial psychologist,' though, so go figure."
and
"On average, smarter people learn quicker, make fewer errors, and are more productive," McDaniel said.
He is an industrial psychologist. He makes his money telling companies how to make more money. His definition of intelligence is "good employee".
On the other hand, cognitive psychologists, whose business it is to study intelligence, have known for years that something about the brain differs in people who do well in school, but they can't agree on what; greater folding, greater synaptic density, greater grey to white ratio, etc. Nor can they agree on what is meant by 'intelligence'. But then they're just trying to answer that question, not use it as a means to convince companies to may them money so they can tell the companies how to make more money.
As with most poorly done research reporting, attention is paid to averages, and none to variances. The former means nothing without the latter.
There are more variations in smarts and MRIs, Horatio, than are dreamt up by your self-serving hypotheses.
It would be horrible if all the cookies from those nice folks at doubleclick etc. somehow got cross linked with other files on my drive. Why, when they went to help me understand my marketing needs by peeking into my cookie stash, they might end up accidently slurping down the_shaggs-my_pal_foot_foot.mp3 or something.
They're not injecting antifreeze, they're injecting a food additive. Ethylene glycol is antifreeze. Polyethylene glycol is what makes your Mountain Dew syrupy.
He can't seriously expect an economic system to develop out of such transitory technology. There's not nearly enough stability available, with technologies that are so quickly obselesced for agreement on value to spread significantly.
My money says he was just needing to get his name heard again and grabbed at the available straws, hoping they'd be there long enough for this to become true.
Sevceral times hye uses the phrase "wildly popular Apple II". One of the biggest reasons it became so was third party support. Apple did what they do best with the Apple II, and let others build on that and make their own fortunes.
One of those others was Microsoft. Besides producing several programming and software packages for the Apple II, they wrote a portion of the machine's ROM. Look inside an Apple II; the ROM chips have a Microsoft copyright.
Apple couldn't "be" Microsoft. They could have, however, maintained the sort of relationship they'd had, and used Microsoft to continue support and further development of their line. Unfortunately Jobs saw fit to take yet another opportunity to try to prove Woz wrong. Now, Apple has a small fraction of the market share they did before Jobs did so.
Slashdot Mirror
And ask the Hopi. They've been saying all along they've been here for that long. Their history fills in a lot of blanks that anthropologists appear to want left blank.
For instance, yes it's true: People came to North America across the Bering land bridge. The Hopi know because they were there. They had traveled to the far north, and met some new people coming south. For self-apparent reasons, the Hopi called these people "They who hit you with rocks" because that's all the weapons they had. These people were the Dine'/Dene', which split, leaving one group in Canada, and another moving south and becoming the Hopi's neighbors in the southwest US, the Navajo.
The Dine' word for the Hopi is Anasazi, meaning "ancient ones". The Anasazi did not die out, no matter how many national park signs tell you otherwise.
While you're visiting Hotevilla, bring along a picture of the "mysterious" Nazca Plains markings. The Hopi can tell you exactly what they mean, and which of their clans during which of their migration cycles were involved. Same for Snake Mound and many other 'artifacts' of 'Mississippian' and other hypothesized cultures.
But, I suppose the future would be bleak for anthropology if they suddenly had lots of answers -- funding would get scarce with fewer questions needing answered.
Knowing they're going under, SCO has launched an effort to gather capital from people willing to bet on a long shot by starting this ridiculous action. They had good reason to suspect it'd work. Not that they'd win; chances were always slim for that. But the slim chances attracts the long shot bettors/investors. And with the influx of cash, the price goes up. And when the shit comes down, they'll be able to sell out at a higher price. Even the loser takes home a purse.
I bet they're real nervous now. They probably expected to be bought out by now by IBM or someone just to stop the irritation.
In my happy place I dream of the judge taking SCO away from Darel and company (after sentencing them to an ethics treatment center and changing their names to include 'Bonehead'), and appointing EFF to administrate it on behalf of its new owners, OSDL.
... all the way from 1924.
They knew they were involved. They know they were being monitored. They were participating in yet another replication of the Hawthorne studies http://www.mtsu.edu/~pmccarth/io_hist.htm (halfway down).
All they needed to know was someone was watching (they signed consent forms) and be told what to do (they received emails).
Now, redesign it in the form of Stanley Milgram's Harvard experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) and have the emails say "Locate the spammer that sent this, and remove any one of their major organs through any existing orifice", and you've got my interest.
"the Sun's radial positive electric field" ... ... exists half the time. The other half, it's negative. The solar wind changes in predominant charge two cycles per rotation, or roughly one switch per week.
If the comets were negatively charged, we'd no doubt have noticed them dancing in their orbits. And if the sub had a constant positive charge apart from the solar wind, we'd have noticed the fluctuations in it also.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, you are least likely to get in an accident when travelling 5 to 10 MPH over the speed limit. This is because most other traffic is. It is the common rate of flow. Going at a different speed violates other drivers' expectations and they will guess your trajectory as compared to their incorrectly. Unless they install these on every vehicle, those with them will be at higher risk of collision.
Of course once they're installed, then people will die when they can't speed up to avoid a potential accident, or get to hospital quickly with a life threatening injury or illness.
So people die. The point is to relieve congestion. This would serve the purpose.
But help me out here. Isn't congestion people going too slow?
Now, come up with a box that forces all vehicles to go the speed limit, moderated by distance to the vehicles in front and behind, with an override controlled by something like a built in 911 (UK 999) call and you've got something.
than technology can keep up.
Technology depends on ecomonimcs. When the next greatest thing is in sight before the previous greatest thing is out of R&D, it forces technology to try to pre-empt or co-opt science. And still technology can't afford to herd up and pay off all the scientists.
"What we need is a Manhattan Project for dumping flash memory data directly to DVD in one flash." Figure the odds.
"Ever wonder how ice melts? ... An understanding of how it works is crucial to gaining a _firm_ _grasp_ on the physical world."
"Grab ahold of that ice!"
"I can't! It's slippery!"
"QUICK! Somebody do some SCIENCE!"
mbrother (739193) sez: "At this time in tech history, I think it's to a writer's advantage to give away their work online"
Unless things have changed a great deal recently, at this time in legel history it's all but necessary for writers to keep their work off the net unless the publisher releases it for that.
Almost all writers' contracts require that they sign over e-rights to the publisher as part of their contract, whether or not the publisher intends to do anything with them. The writer signs away the e-rights, or doesn't sign the contract.
Note that e-rights are rights to publish, not ownership. The writer still owns them.
Along comes the work, posted online. The author has to make an effort to protect the work, because signing the e-rights gave the publisher the right to release it. If the writer doesn't, they are in violation of their contract and the whole thing can be cancelled.
A few writers like Harlan can afford to take on a case like this themselves, and can afford to refuse to have an e-rights clause in their contract. Most can't. If they want to get the contract, they sign the whole thing, and they're stuck having to do their own police work.
If a writer has signed a publishing contract for the work that includes an e-rights clause they can't publish it on line, and they have to try to prevent others from doing so.
At least that's the way it was explained to me by Charlie Petit, Harlan's lawyer during the lawsuit, while I was serving as material witness and slated as expert witness. Harlan was protecting his own work because he wanted to, not because he had to, because he didn;t have to contend with these silly e-rights issues in contracts. He also did so because newer authors didn't have the resources to be doing things like this all the time, and he wanted to see this made public so they wouldn't get screwed out of being able to be authors.
Call in FTC Commissioner Orson Swindell.
At the 2003 FTC Spam Conference, his conclusion was "What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." ID theft is lots worse. I'd like to see him suggestion for this. We need more ass kicking gummint people like him.
That's how long it took to get a machine at Yale loaded with 2K or XP, and get it online to download the required security fixes (and this was the required way to do it). The machines were compromised before the security fixes were downloaded. This wasn't one time. We tried several times. 7 seconds was an average.
No color, no RAM expanision, no slots of even liftable lid.
The Mac didn't have these for the simple reason that these were the things that Woz built into the Apple II and II Plus against Jobs' suggestions. The basis of the separatism of the "pirates" at Apple, and much of their design philosophy, was Jobs' petulance over lost arguments. This is where the "Who would ever need more than X RAM?" question comes from, and what it resulted in.
I ended up getting a fully tricked out Apple IIgs because it didn't have any designed in limitations.
I still can't figure out what all this right honourable MR. MP sir business, and its correctness or incorrectness, has to do with Jedi. Am I missing the datum, or has eevryone neglected the point of the article in favor of niggling peripheral details?
"In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
Fine, let's see the math. Let's see the trajectory calculations. How about those calculating the space? Calculating the number of dimensions the space has, and how fast that number changes over time?
40 years ago brain scientists realized that computer architecture made a good metaphor for how the brain works. (They did NOT assume there was no feedback, contrary to the article). It made a handy and productive way to look at things so they could figure out more about what was really going on.
10 years ago brain scientists realized that they could use the way cool chaos stuff the describe the way the brain works. Believe me, I know; I've been to the Santa Fe Institute twice. It worked particularly well for me because I'm essentially a signal analyst -- I HAVE to define a set of variables, estimate how well they work, and decide how many of my arbitrary variables to keep or throw out.
It's still only a metaphor. And unlike the specific specific processes described by cognitive science, the dynamic system stuff remains nebulous. It claims a mathematical legitimacy which it can really claim only in concept because the actual math of the acutal operations are is beyond the abilities of anyone making the claims. The fact that it *can* be described this way is no less trivial than the fact that processes can ge grouped according to the traditional cognitive science concepts.
Trajectories on phase space are soooooooo sexy. But if it's any good, it'll result in something more concrete than more people picking up this flag and waving it while shouting the new slogans and buzzwords. Until that happens I peg this with the study that "calculated" the "fractal dimension" of the cortex just because it has fold and folds in the folds.... so fsking what.
AKAImBatman (238306) sez: "What about those of us here in the US who *paid* for JDS and were promised major upgrades every quarter?"
We're disposable. Why should we matter? It's a free OS. We can do anything else we want to.
As long companies that could make a difference with Linux vs. Microsoft take such a Hokey-Pokey (you put the left foot in, you take the left foot out...) attitude towards the market, there will be no major progress. There will only continue to be piecemeal progress done by users with the occasional company riding on their backs.
Can't say as I'm surprised about this. I had JDS from the release date, and throught the support has been among the worst I've ever gotten. I don't think they ever seriously expected it to go anywhere.
Hopefully they'll now let it go for free. It's worth that.
First, try thinking about it in the terms Bucky Fuller suggested: energy is the real value, and money is just an abstraction of it. They are interchangeable because they're inseperable.
Of course it's ineffecient. If it were efficient, it'd be cheap, and nobody could make money doing it, and so wouldn't do it on a scale useful to a population which is incapable of doing it for themselves.
Unaddressed is the complete cost of its use in terms of cleaning up the biosphere mess after. It's unaddressed because it's the same for both ethanol and petroleum, and so wouldn't serve his purpose. It'd make everything look equally bad. It's these after-costs that are the big hit against nuclear power, and the manufacturing costs (direct and long-term indirect) are frequently ignored by clean/green energy. What's it take to produce an acre of solar panels? A hundred windmills?
Why is it so surpising to people that thermodyamics works, and insists on the entire system be included?
Ginsberg's Theorem (The modern statement of the three laws of thermodynamics)
1. You can't win.
2. You can't even break even.
3. You can't get out of the game.
Well, you personally can get out of the game. But your organic molecules can't. They have to stay and get recycled in the constant fight against entropy. And here is where such biased reporting and reporters could be of use. Recycle all that paper they marked up, and their organic molecules. I mean, they DO want to make a difference, right?
Sushant Bhatia asks: "So what does the Slashdot crowd use when they need to secure their Linux and Windows servers? Does it cost less than US$100?"
You want a perfect firewall. You want to pay peanuts for it.
You could take over the university, set up an empire, and take 10 years and 800,000 people to build the Great Firewall. But then, the Mongols managed to get around the Great Wall without undue trouble. Why are you letting the Mongols stay?
The Mongols were eventually thrown out when the Manchus offered to help the Ming throw the Mongols out and in the process took control of China.
I suggest you offer to help the administration in all the departments to rid themselves of the problems (after having documented for them exactly what the problem is and where), and when they agree (or else going on record denying responsibility for the problems going on under them, which will serve the same purpose) set up a policy whereby you cut the miscreants' heads off. As a modern homage to this traditionally effective corrective action, you could pull the zombies' plugs and keep them that way until the owners fixed them and their administrators notified that the fix was in place.
You probably have a layer of IT between you and the top administration, as well as IT below them in the departments. They have jobs to do, and jobs they should be doing. They too should be held responsible for doing them, or not. Doing everything above the board and in public makes it hard for people to deny their responsibility.
"The skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy." -- Sun Tzu
On the other hand: "All analogies fail. There is nothing 'like' the net." -- Unit IV, SPUTUM. Fortunately few people realize this and live as though it's not true, and the use of analogy provides adequate direction against them.
"What Universities out there will allow me to publish (otherwise patentable) software under the GPL?"
All of them. It's called publishing your research, something they also require. Write it up and send it to a journal. They require that you turn over copyright of the article to them. Make the code available under GPL and write the URL into the article. If the university wants to fight about it, let them fight with the journal and in the process make it clear to all their employed academics that publishing their work will get them problems. Won't happen.
You can also team up with someone from a different university and publish collaboration, and let the universities fight for the rights whether they have the same or different policies.
Also, they cannot prove you invented something while there unless you say so and document it as such for them. I have been involved in research with others, including works in progress and undeveloped ideas, for quite some time. I can honestly tell them that I can't honestly sign such a thing without an equally binding document that says my previous work and collaborations, no matter how much or little completed, don't fall under their 100%. I've successfully used this in commercial settings, and they're much more stringent than universities.
There's not likely to be a useful comprehensive list of best practices because too many would be industry or company dependent making much of the list useless to others.
There's an organization based on improving customer service, but you have to join to get access to most pf their material: http://www.socap.org/
It took me years to figure out why my father came home in a bad mood every night from his TV repair shop. All the phone calls he receives were from people who were (1) angry because their TV was broken, (2) angry because their TV wasn't fixed yet, or (3) angry because their TV was fixed but cost so much. People call customer service because they're upset about something. Many will remain so regardless of how good the customer service is. Using them as a metric for satisfaction makes as little sense as letting the companies rate themselves.
However, if people get good enough cusomer service to remember it long enough to want to tell others publically, then customer service awards sites like The WOW! Awards Website http://www.thewowawards.co.uk/ would at least provide a listing of companies that obtained enough good reports, and one would assume such awards would give the rationale for each case. Hardly comprehensive, but then it'd be simpler to read up on companies in a similar business than try to sort through a long list of variable applicability.
All we need to do is discover oil there.
'Funny' mods accepted at only 1/2 regular rate.
I'm only half kidding.
"Hacking in its pure form is to show what you can do."
May I please have a spammer and an axe? I'd like to show what I can do.
Antonymous Flower (848759) sez: "It's mostly a literature review, which obviously attempts to use the 'majority must be right' fallacy to some mysterious end. The guy's an 'industrial psychologist,' though, so go figure."
and
"On average, smarter people learn quicker, make fewer errors, and are more productive," McDaniel said.
He is an industrial psychologist.
He makes his money telling companies how to make more money.
His definition of intelligence is "good employee".
On the other hand, cognitive psychologists, whose business it is to study intelligence, have known for years that something about the brain differs in people who do well in school, but they can't agree on what; greater folding, greater synaptic density, greater grey to white ratio, etc. Nor can they agree on what is meant by 'intelligence'. But then they're just trying to answer that question, not use it as a means to convince companies to may them money so they can tell the companies how to make more money.
As with most poorly done research reporting, attention is paid to averages, and none to variances. The former means nothing without the latter.
There are more variations in smarts and MRIs, Horatio, than are dreamt up by your self-serving hypotheses.
It would be horrible if all the cookies from those nice folks at doubleclick etc. somehow got cross linked with other files on my drive. Why, when they went to help me understand my marketing needs by peeking into my cookie stash, they might end up accidently slurping down the_shaggs-my_pal_foot_foot.mp3 or something.
They're not injecting antifreeze, they're injecting a food additive. Ethylene glycol is antifreeze. Polyethylene glycol is what makes your Mountain Dew syrupy.
He can't seriously expect an economic system to develop out of such transitory technology. There's not nearly enough stability available, with technologies that are so quickly obselesced for agreement on value to spread significantly.
My money says he was just needing to get his name heard again and grabbed at the available straws, hoping they'd be there long enough for this to become true.
Sevceral times hye uses the phrase "wildly popular Apple II". One of the biggest reasons it became so was third party support. Apple did what they do best with the Apple II, and let others build on that and make their own fortunes.
One of those others was Microsoft. Besides producing several programming and software packages for the Apple II, they wrote a portion of the machine's ROM. Look inside an Apple II; the ROM chips have a Microsoft copyright.
Apple couldn't "be" Microsoft. They could have, however, maintained the sort of relationship they'd had, and used Microsoft to continue support and further development of their line. Unfortunately Jobs saw fit to take yet another opportunity to try to prove Woz wrong. Now, Apple has a small fraction of the market share they did before Jobs did so.