Another long time Gator fan here. I believe what's driving this decision is that the SEC held on to their digital rights from the big multi-billion dollar deals with ESPN and CBS. Not only are they currently trying to ban twitter, facebook, et al., they are also "prohibiting" digital broadcasts of the games, since they are starting the SEC Digital Network.
And I think you've hit on what this is all about.
Nobody is going to give a flip if you twitter "OMG Gators recover fumble!" at a game. How could they even hope to enforce it? And how does that endanger the SEC revenue stream?
But what they will try to stop is the inevitable "pirate broadcaster". It is just a matter of time before you'll see people with tiny cameras on their hats or shoulders, running an HD video stream through a wireless connection. The technology is already there; it just needs to be scaled down in size and cost, but within 10 years at the outside you'll have channels all over the web with people attending concerts, movies, and sporting events, and generating their own live digital broadcasts on sites like Ustream. You could even network a group of people together and provide multi-camera angles.
This is going to be the next big battleground for digital rights. People have often rationalized piracy by saying "Bands can make their money from live concerts!", but what happens when pirate broadcasters start undermining that revenue stream as well? It is going to happen as surely as the sun will rise.
My prediction: Sometime within the next 10 years, laws in the U.S. will be changed to allow jamming of WiFi and cell phone signals in public and private venues, to head off the booming growth of live pirate feeds.
If he were really allergic to Wi-Fi, wouldn't he have an extreme allergic reaction to microwave ovens too?
Absolutely. Yet if he does use a microwave oven, and you were to point this out to him, he would quickly declare that the WiFi transmissions must have some additional quality that makes them "bad" as compared to microwave oven radiation.
You must always keep in mind that you are dealing with people suffering from a psychological disorder. Logical arguments means nothing to them; they'll simply ignore what you're saying, or rationalize their behavior in one way or another. I've heard that some drugs for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder can be helpful in extreme cases, but these people are completely convinced that their ailments have physical causes, and will reject any suggestion that "it's all in your head".
Put him into a room. Randomly switch on and off a WiFi-net and ask him to tell if it is on or off. If he manages to get more than 50 % right there might be something to it. He would also be the first person to manage this in years and years of testing.
Quite right. People who claim to be "allergic" to modern technology invariably fail to prove it in properly designed double-blind scientific tests. In extreme cases, you find people who claim to be allergic to anything "artificial", be it synthetic fibers, plastics, electronic equipment, automobiles, or any one of a thousand other modern conveniences. Their complaints are real, but the root cause is psychological, not physical.
Some EHS (electro-hypersensitivity) sufferers go so far as to line their rooms and clothing with aluminum foil to supposedly "shield" themselves. In the most extreme cases, they move out into the country and adopt a 19th century lifestyle to completely divorce themselves from the modern world. Of course, they're still being exposed to EM radiation even in remote areas, as AM and shortwave radio transmissions span the globe, not to mention the EM radiation emitted by the sun. But once they believe they are safe from EM radiation, their symptoms abate.
So that's basically a mechanically implemented low-pass filter, right? I would think that it would be easier and cheaper to implement electronic low-pass filters at each wall outlet. Especially if you're worried about someone plugging a sniffer into one of the facility's interior power outlets.
But it wouldn't be cheaper, and it would definitely be less secure. With a mechanical low-pass filter, you have one central node you have to maintain. You have a big capital outlay, but once built, the motor-generator combo is very, very reliable, and needs little maintenance. It is practically impossible for a lone attacker to compromise it. With electronic low-pass filters at each outlet, you have hundreds (if not thousands) of nodes to monitor and maintain (consider the ongoing expense of that), and it becomes very easy for a single person to compromise one of those nodes using just a screwdriver.
Good security is never just a matter of money. It's a matter of understanding how attackers behave, knowing how people and equipment can be compromised, and then spending money wisely, even if not frugally.
Interesting that you should say that. My father-in-law suffered from dementia before he died, and he was paranoid that someone was going to take his shoes from him. He was constantly looking for them if he wasn't wearing them. The strange thing is that his father also suffered from dementia, and had the same obsession about shoes before his death.
So I think the folks at GTX Corporation are on to something. Even if people with dementia wander off, most of them are probably going to remember to put their shoes on first.
I've been working in academia for years, and gaming of the USN&WR rankings is hardly news to us. Talk to any college administrator off the record, and he or she can rattle off the names of peer institutions that are almost certainly fudging the numbers.
The USN&WR numbers are self-reported by each university, with no verification by the USN&WR staff. With so much funding and prestige riding on the rankings, who is surprised that some schools play fast and loose with the facts?
What is unfortunate is that USN&WR has manipulated itself into the position of being the arbiter of school "quality", through no other action than being the first to create the poll. A news magazine shouldn't have that kind of influence over the entire U.S. educational system, especially when it can't even be bothered to check the numbers that it publishes.
Or to put it another way, twitter is the sound of millions of people collectively discovering they have nothing important to say.
Have you ever watched shows about tribes of baboons or chimps on PBS? And how they spend so much time grooming each other by picking the lice out of each others' hair?
That's the mental image I get with any social network site. Lots of monkeys, picking the lice out of each others' hair. Except with Twitter, the monkeys shriek about who has found the biggest and juiciest lice, right before they eat them.
It was partly as a counter-point to Starship Troopers. I think it went too far in the other direction and got a little stupid. Being an actual combat vet myself, I can say that the training and doctrine portrayed in ST was a hell of a lot more realistic that TFW. TFW was more like a snide caricature of what anti-war people think military training and tactics are like. And topping it off, TFW bizarrely had only "genius IQ" types being conscripted, which is completely asinine. Geniuses don't make good soldiers... at all. Still, TFW was an interesting read once you got past the silly axe-grinding to the story.
Yes, the asinine military "training" was the most cringeworthy part of the novel. You draft the best and the brightest from Earth, spend untold billions to equip them, then hold live fire exercises deliberately intended to kill off many of them and demoralize the survivors, just to toughen the troops up? That's not to say that some military commanders don't do stupid things that get their soldiers killed, but it generally happens on the battlefield, not during boot camp!
However, IMHO an even bigger issue in the novel is how the government decides to handle population control - by encouraging people to be homosexual, i.e. as if it was a conscious choice that could be made. I can just imagine how that plot point could play into anti-gay sentiment if the movie becomes popular, i.e. "See? Children can be recruited into the gay lifestyle - The Forever War shows it happening!" I doubt that the "humanity turns gay" subplot will make it to the final script.
The most interesting aspect of the novel is definitely the "man out of time" theme, as Mandella realizes he has nothing in common with the future Earth he keeps returning to, and re-enlists because the military is the only thing left that he can make sense of. Unfortunately, I'm guessing that Hollywood will screw TFW up just about as badly as it screwed up Starship Troopers. You'll have lots of exploding spaceships and dead aliens, but not much else.
It doesn't really matter if we cannot travel faster than the speed of light so long as we can live long enough to get there.
Who cares if it takes 50 years to fly to Alpha Centauri if we can engineer ourselves to live for a thousand!
Ah, but you could travel to the stars without immortality at FTL speeds - at least from the point of view of a ship's occupants - as long as you choose not to go home again. A constant acceleration drive would enable you to cross the galaxy in a few years of ship time, thanks to time dilation. Take along a large enough group of people to form a stable society, and for all practical purposes those people will be traveling at superluminal speeds. Relativity will make it impossible for them to return home (at least to the home they remember), but as long as the passengers are willing to accept a one-way trip, effective FTL is absolutely attainable.
Do we really want to foster a scenario in which people have to close themselves off to everybody in order to protect themselves from strangers with cameras? What Google is doing isn't wrong, but it isn't nice either. There's no law against being not nice, but I certainly don't think it properly coincides with Google's vow not to be evil.
Maybe so, but these protestors remind me so much of the RIAA - they're fighting a technological innovation they cannot put a stop to, no matter how hard they try. The day is coming (and in the not-too-distant future) when ultra-cheap, high-quality cameras and video recorders will be so ubiquitous that everyone will be using them. Everyone will constantly monitor their property, and their neighbors' property. People will routinely walk around with tiny videocameras clipped to their shirts and hats, and record everything 24/7. Every business and every government building will record everyone who sets foot on their property, or walks past on a public street.
In ten years, those same protestors will have a web of cameras and sensors around their respective homes that will put Google Street View to shame. But of course, what is evil for Google will be fine for them, because they will rationalize that they won't abuse it - although inevitably some of them will.
Shifting to ARM will simply ensure the death of the OLPC project, because being able to run real windows is an underappreciated benefit of x86.
Or for that matter, being able to run OS X. For example, by all accounts the Dell Mini 9 can be turned into an excellent low-cost Hackintosh.
But you are correct about the effect of the netbook market on the OLPC project. The OLPC was a visionary idea, but visionaries rarely outlast the revolutions they help create.
On one side, the NSA are the smartest guys in the room, successfully, surreptitiously and often illegally monitoring nearly every telephone call on the planet. They push supercomputers to the envelope and optimize ever CPU cycle. Yet simultaneously, these smart guys are simply pawns of a small group of Israeli intelligence agents who have managed to develop and get their software on various NSA projects.
That's the problem with all conspiracy theories - you have to simultaneously portray the conspirators as both genius masterminds and utterly incompetent idiots. Conspiracy theorists are incapable of recognizing their own cognitive dissonance from embracing both viewpoints.
I always find it amusing that the same brilliant government overlords who are supposedly micromanaging every detail of our lives can't seem to even get the mail delivered reliably, or a single branch of the government running efficiently, or even bother to cover up the most blatant evidence of their supposed plots.
Am I depriving the community? Or providing a service? If no one was using that frequency anyway, who cares?
How do you know no one is using the frequency? What if a licensed low power station 100 miles away is using it? You can't hear it, but when you put your pirate transmitter on the air, suddenly you're interfering with his signal. He paid the licensing fees for that spectrum. What are you doing to his rights to use the airwaves?
Thank goodness we don't have to license our websites. I can reach a far greater number of people with my websites than I ever could with a transmitter. And yeah, I am "depriving" others the use of the domain names I've acquired.
Wrong analogy. Internet bandwidth is essentially limitless - all you have to do is install the extra fiber and cables. The same with domain names - even at the peak of domain name squatting, no one ever had difficulties thinking of a new name and registering it.
The public airwaves represent a limited set of resources that must be shared by potentially millions of people at the same time. You can't "add" to the spectrum as needed. It has to be regulated, or it will be worthless.
I would do with the airwaves what I do with my websites -- provide free information, free commentary, and the like. The "benefit" to me is not described in terms of money, but in being able to make a tiny difference in the world I live in, which, in theory at least, should benefit all.
And what if I then decide that I want to squat on top of your frequency with my bigger transmitter, and provide my own news, commentary, information, etc.? What then? Do we duel it out in the streets? Gather our respective gangs of anarchists and take axes to each others' equipment?
A world of people who thought like you, and who each felt they had the "right" to use the airwaves as they saw fit, would make the electromagnetic spectrum completely useless. You'd have nothing but 24/7 jamming, interference, and constant battles as everyone tried to outshout each other with bigger transmitters.
Sorry, but when it comes to the public spectrum, you have to have government regulation, else you will have nothing but anarchy and waste.
People love consistency. We geeks want to analyze and pick apart everything, change it and tweak. Your average person DOES NOT CARE! They want something that works. Until we get that through our oversized brain/ego/whatever then Linux is not likely to take off in a really big way.
As others have pointed out before, the best way Linux could help itself gain market share would be if it had a UI option as close to that of Windows 2000/XP as possible. Blasphemy, yes, but people want what's familiar, without having to bother with what's under the hood.
In that respect the Vista debacle actually works in Linux's favor - Vista has broken enough of the 2000/XP UI paradigm that many people would probably be more comfortable with a Linux-based XP lookalike. Toss in WINE to run any needed Microsoft software, and 90% of your average consumer base would barely notice the difference - beyond that fact that botnet infections would plummet.
As so many others have pointed out, It doesn't matter if the switchover happens 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years, or 30 years from now - you're going to have millions of people, most of them elderly or low income, who are going to turn on their TVs and say "What's wrong with this damn thing?" They don't read the news, they have no clue the switchover is coming, and they will scream bloody murder when it does.
The ONLY way to keep that from happening would be for the U.S. government to send teams of technicians to every household in America to verify the converter boxes were installed. Even then you'd have a lot of elderly shut-ins who would call the police to arrest the "intruders" at their door.
Time to bite the bullet and switch over NOW - waiting any longer will do nothing but delay the inevitable.
Re:Bad Logic
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Less Is Moore
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Microsoft is notorious for ignoring customer desires to fix what they have and offering unprompted additions and UI changes.
Yes, and as so many have pointed out, their history of doing so is now backfiring on them in a big way. And it's not just with Vista, it's with Office as well.
Case in point - several months ago my department bought upgrade licenses to Office 2008. I was perfectly happy with Office 2004, but I installed Office 2008 because I knew that if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to read whatever new formats that Office 2008 supported. It had happened with every other Office upgrade cycle in my experience - you either upgraded or you'd be unable to exchange documents with your peers.
But something funny happened this time - I have yet to receive a.docx,.xlsx, or.pptx file from anyone. I have quite consciously chosen to save every document in.doc,.xls, or.ppt "compatibility" format. Everybody I talk to says they're doing exactly the same thing. Everyone now knows the game that Microsoft plays, and no one is willing to play it anymore. I could have stayed with Office 2004 and never noticed the difference. So what motivation will I have to upgrade to the next version of Office?
If it weren't for Microsoft's OEM licensing deals, Vista would have a tiny fraction of its current market share. XP is "good enough". But Microsoft doesn't push Office onto new machines the way it does Windows, the older Office formats are also "good enough", and you have open source alternatives like OpenOffice if Microsoft tries to deliberately break Office compatibility on the next version. I fully expect Microsoft's Office revenues to take a steep dive in the next few years. The Vista debacle is only the beginning.
If i understand correctly , the problem is the some students cheat by copying over the tests and homework.
All the teacher has to do is give different tests and homework for each class. How hard can that be ? My teachers always worked this way.
I avoid any problems with word files on campus by making copies of the last 5 years of my midterm exams available for download. Everyone is on a level playing field. Fortunately the courses I teach (circuits) make it fairly easy to generate unique exams every semester.
Homework is a different matter, because that's tied to the textbook, and the PDF solutions manuals for nearly every textbook in existence are available for download from a dozen different websites. (Try explaining that to a textbook sales rep and watch the shocked look on his/her face.) I just tell students that homework is intended to prepare them for exams, and using a solutions manual will only cause them to fail the course, since homework is only worth 10% of the semester grade.
Of course, that doesn't stop some students. Every semester I wind up failing a couple of students with excellent homework grades and horrible exam grades. Some people insist on learning every lesson the hard way.
This sounds like the kind of "look what the libruls are doing *now*" sort of email that circulates among my Christian/conservative acquaintances.
Exactly. In particular, note this part:
The teacher turned red, started to stammer, so my son stopped talking.
In other words, the wise conservative student outwits the mush-brained liberal professor and humiliates him in front of everyone, just by stating the facts! In reality, of course, the professor would just steamroller over any argument or fact thrown at him, and keep right on going. Anyone who has met the type knows exactly what I mean.
This sounds like something right out of Snopes. I'll bet I could find a variant of this exact story if I looked hard enough.
The teacher turned red, started to stammer, so my son stopped talking. By the end of the day, he had been notified that he had been removed from the class.
I've been teaching at public and private universities for many years, and I have yet to see or hear of a undergraduate class where a professor could arbitrarily drop a student from that class without that student's permission, just because the student said something politically incorrect.
So tell me, what university was this? And what reason did your son claim was given for this supposed drop? And why didn't he raise holy hell with the administration for such a flagrant and prejudicial abuse of faculty power, assuming such power even exists?
I call shennanigans. I suggest you contact the dean's office and find out the real reason your son dropped the class.
No. Laptops that work well in full sunlight and are rugged and low power are not being built by anyone, and won't be.
Sure they will, but only if it's economical to do so. Those are all desirable qualities in any laptop computer - why would anyone not want them? But buyers choose price over features most of the time.
The problem is this - any manufacturing process that could create an OLPC for $100 could just as easily create a bare-bones Linux laptop without the OLPC's bells and whistles for $50 or less. If you're a Third World consumer, what are you going to choose - an OLPC, or a netbook for half the price that is "good enough"? And the netbooks are going to get much better, much faster than the OLPC ever could.
This is why trickle down economics doesn't work.
This statement makes no sense. The entire OLPC concept was the result of "trickle down" economics. It would never have been possible without the manufacturing processes developed for First World computing, which have subsequently caused better and better technology to trickle down to lower price points.
Congratulations, you crushed a competitor and, at the same time, destroyed hope for millions of needy people.
You're giving Intel and Microsoft way too much credit. It was ASUS that destroyed the OLPC, by creating the netbook market when it released the first Eee PC. ASUS is already on its third generation of the Eee, not to mention the tooth-and-nail competition from Dell and HP, and the OLPC has barely gotten out of the starting gate. The OLPC couldn't possibly compete, even if the world economy hadn't tanked.
I firmly believe you're going to see plenty of sub-$100 Linux laptops being sold in the Third World within the next 3 years, but they're going to be coming from a half-dozen Chinese manufacturers fighting like mad to outsell each other, not the OLPC project. Microsoft and Intel won't be able to do much to stop that trend. The OLPC was a visionary idea, but like so many other visionary ideas it has been swept aside by its successors.
At my university, the administration makes it very clear that any IP rights for student inventions due to a classroom assignment belong to the student. A purely academic "student", by definition, is not an employee of the university.
A graduate research assistant is another matter entirely. A GRA is an employee of the university, paid by the university, and subject to the same IP regulations as the faculty and staff. In that respect my university is, in my opinion, extremely generous compared to private companies, as it allows faculty to have joint ownership of the IP, to develop as they see fit as long as the university receives a reasonable royalty. Considering the millions of dollars worth of capital equipment the university has placed at my disposal, I consider that quite a bargain.
Mr. Leiberman will never get a better deal for an idea he developed on someone else's dime for as long as he lives. If he can't afford the $75K upfront fee, he should talk to the MIT IP lawyers and see if he can negotiate a reduction in return for a slightly higher royalty rate. He might be surprised how willing they are to work with him.
The harm, I think, is that he's not a well-enough-known crackpot; a respectable publisher (Elsevier) has given him a journal as his own private playground. This makes it more difficult for non-crackpots trying to enter the field (e.g. grad students) to sort the wheat from the chaff. It also allows other crackpots to come off as more credible by citing crackpot articles which have a veneer of respectability. Imagine if a computer science "journal" based on Hollywood's portrayal of how computers work were being published by the ACM, and you have some idea of how big a problem this is.
And it gets worse when money becomes involved. Pseudoscientists and crackpots often try to find "investors" for their schemes, and even a layman who performs due diligence can be fooled when publishers like Elsevier become enablers for pseudoscience. When the paper shows up in an INSPEC or Web of Science search, how is the person being scammed supposed to know that the paper isn't really legitimate?
Many "free energy" scam artists already have patents for their nonsensical inventions, thanks to the laxity of the USPTO. It'll get worse unless these "pseudo-journals" are exposed and publicized to the greater science and engineering community, as well as the public at large. I had never heard of El Naschie before today, because I'm not a mathematician; thanks to this article, more people like me will now keep an eye out for his future "work".
If you have power to an entire room, your cell phone and mobile devices can charge in your pocket without you worrying, bringing the real convenience.
It will never happen in the United States, mainly because a huge group of attorneys will be standing by, eagerly rubbing their hands and waiting for the first group of plaintiffs who will claim that midrange wireless power systems are responsible for headaches, arthritis, brain cancer, birth defects, leukemia, high blood pressure, etc.
Has everyone forgotten the legal battles over claims that electromagnetic fields from high-voltage power lines cause leukemia? And how about the current debate over cell phones causing brain cancer? And those are applications where the electromagnetic field strength is far below what a mid-range wireless power system would require!
There's no way any manufacturer is going to volunteer to be a target for the inevitable multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits. It doesn't matter that the "power lines and cell phones cause cancer" nonsense is junk science; what does count is that any mid-range wireless power system would attract lawsuits like sugar attracts flies. No one is going to touch it.
Slashdot Mirror
And I think you've hit on what this is all about.
Nobody is going to give a flip if you twitter "OMG Gators recover fumble!" at a game. How could they even hope to enforce it? And how does that endanger the SEC revenue stream?
But what they will try to stop is the inevitable "pirate broadcaster". It is just a matter of time before you'll see people with tiny cameras on their hats or shoulders, running an HD video stream through a wireless connection. The technology is already there; it just needs to be scaled down in size and cost, but within 10 years at the outside you'll have channels all over the web with people attending concerts, movies, and sporting events, and generating their own live digital broadcasts on sites like Ustream. You could even network a group of people together and provide multi-camera angles.
This is going to be the next big battleground for digital rights. People have often rationalized piracy by saying "Bands can make their money from live concerts!", but what happens when pirate broadcasters start undermining that revenue stream as well? It is going to happen as surely as the sun will rise.
My prediction: Sometime within the next 10 years, laws in the U.S. will be changed to allow jamming of WiFi and cell phone signals in public and private venues, to head off the booming growth of live pirate feeds.
Absolutely. Yet if he does use a microwave oven, and you were to point this out to him, he would quickly declare that the WiFi transmissions must have some additional quality that makes them "bad" as compared to microwave oven radiation.
You must always keep in mind that you are dealing with people suffering from a psychological disorder. Logical arguments means nothing to them; they'll simply ignore what you're saying, or rationalize their behavior in one way or another. I've heard that some drugs for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder can be helpful in extreme cases, but these people are completely convinced that their ailments have physical causes, and will reject any suggestion that "it's all in your head".
Quite right. People who claim to be "allergic" to modern technology invariably fail to prove it in properly designed double-blind scientific tests. In extreme cases, you find people who claim to be allergic to anything "artificial", be it synthetic fibers, plastics, electronic equipment, automobiles, or any one of a thousand other modern conveniences. Their complaints are real, but the root cause is psychological, not physical.
Some EHS (electro-hypersensitivity) sufferers go so far as to line their rooms and clothing with aluminum foil to supposedly "shield" themselves. In the most extreme cases, they move out into the country and adopt a 19th century lifestyle to completely divorce themselves from the modern world. Of course, they're still being exposed to EM radiation even in remote areas, as AM and shortwave radio transmissions span the globe, not to mention the EM radiation emitted by the sun. But once they believe they are safe from EM radiation, their symptoms abate.
But it wouldn't be cheaper, and it would definitely be less secure. With a mechanical low-pass filter, you have one central node you have to maintain. You have a big capital outlay, but once built, the motor-generator combo is very, very reliable, and needs little maintenance. It is practically impossible for a lone attacker to compromise it. With electronic low-pass filters at each outlet, you have hundreds (if not thousands) of nodes to monitor and maintain (consider the ongoing expense of that), and it becomes very easy for a single person to compromise one of those nodes using just a screwdriver.
Good security is never just a matter of money. It's a matter of understanding how attackers behave, knowing how people and equipment can be compromised, and then spending money wisely, even if not frugally.
Interesting that you should say that. My father-in-law suffered from dementia before he died, and he was paranoid that someone was going to take his shoes from him. He was constantly looking for them if he wasn't wearing them. The strange thing is that his father also suffered from dementia, and had the same obsession about shoes before his death.
So I think the folks at GTX Corporation are on to something. Even if people with dementia wander off, most of them are probably going to remember to put their shoes on first.
I've been working in academia for years, and gaming of the USN&WR rankings is hardly news to us. Talk to any college administrator off the record, and he or she can rattle off the names of peer institutions that are almost certainly fudging the numbers.
The USN&WR numbers are self-reported by each university, with no verification by the USN&WR staff. With so much funding and prestige riding on the rankings, who is surprised that some schools play fast and loose with the facts?
What is unfortunate is that USN&WR has manipulated itself into the position of being the arbiter of school "quality", through no other action than being the first to create the poll. A news magazine shouldn't have that kind of influence over the entire U.S. educational system, especially when it can't even be bothered to check the numbers that it publishes.
Have you ever watched shows about tribes of baboons or chimps on PBS? And how they spend so much time grooming each other by picking the lice out of each others' hair?
That's the mental image I get with any social network site. Lots of monkeys, picking the lice out of each others' hair. Except with Twitter, the monkeys shriek about who has found the biggest and juiciest lice, right before they eat them.
Yes, the asinine military "training" was the most cringeworthy part of the novel. You draft the best and the brightest from Earth, spend untold billions to equip them, then hold live fire exercises deliberately intended to kill off many of them and demoralize the survivors, just to toughen the troops up? That's not to say that some military commanders don't do stupid things that get their soldiers killed, but it generally happens on the battlefield, not during boot camp!
However, IMHO an even bigger issue in the novel is how the government decides to handle population control - by encouraging people to be homosexual, i.e. as if it was a conscious choice that could be made. I can just imagine how that plot point could play into anti-gay sentiment if the movie becomes popular, i.e. "See? Children can be recruited into the gay lifestyle - The Forever War shows it happening!" I doubt that the "humanity turns gay" subplot will make it to the final script.
The most interesting aspect of the novel is definitely the "man out of time" theme, as Mandella realizes he has nothing in common with the future Earth he keeps returning to, and re-enlists because the military is the only thing left that he can make sense of. Unfortunately, I'm guessing that Hollywood will screw TFW up just about as badly as it screwed up Starship Troopers. You'll have lots of exploding spaceships and dead aliens, but not much else.
Especially when you read the Terms of Service on Mr. Mooney's own StalkDaily website, e.g.:
7. You must not modify, adapt or hack StalkDaily.com or modify another website so as to falsely imply that it is associated with StalkDaily.com.
8 You must not create or submit unwanted email to any StalkDaily members ("Spam").
9. You must not transmit any worms or viruses or any code of a destructive nature.
Talk about having a "Do as I say, not as I do" morality. At least it's refreshing to see that hypocrisy is not restricted to people over 30.
Ah, but you could travel to the stars without immortality at FTL speeds - at least from the point of view of a ship's occupants - as long as you choose not to go home again. A constant acceleration drive would enable you to cross the galaxy in a few years of ship time, thanks to time dilation. Take along a large enough group of people to form a stable society, and for all practical purposes those people will be traveling at superluminal speeds. Relativity will make it impossible for them to return home (at least to the home they remember), but as long as the passengers are willing to accept a one-way trip, effective FTL is absolutely attainable.
Maybe so, but these protestors remind me so much of the RIAA - they're fighting a technological innovation they cannot put a stop to, no matter how hard they try. The day is coming (and in the not-too-distant future) when ultra-cheap, high-quality cameras and video recorders will be so ubiquitous that everyone will be using them. Everyone will constantly monitor their property, and their neighbors' property. People will routinely walk around with tiny videocameras clipped to their shirts and hats, and record everything 24/7. Every business and every government building will record everyone who sets foot on their property, or walks past on a public street.
In ten years, those same protestors will have a web of cameras and sensors around their respective homes that will put Google Street View to shame. But of course, what is evil for Google will be fine for them, because they will rationalize that they won't abuse it - although inevitably some of them will.
Or for that matter, being able to run OS X. For example, by all accounts the Dell Mini 9 can be turned into an excellent low-cost Hackintosh.
But you are correct about the effect of the netbook market on the OLPC project. The OLPC was a visionary idea, but visionaries rarely outlast the revolutions they help create.
That's the problem with all conspiracy theories - you have to simultaneously portray the conspirators as both genius masterminds and utterly incompetent idiots. Conspiracy theorists are incapable of recognizing their own cognitive dissonance from embracing both viewpoints.
I always find it amusing that the same brilliant government overlords who are supposedly micromanaging every detail of our lives can't seem to even get the mail delivered reliably, or a single branch of the government running efficiently, or even bother to cover up the most blatant evidence of their supposed plots.
How do you know no one is using the frequency? What if a licensed low power station 100 miles away is using it? You can't hear it, but when you put your pirate transmitter on the air, suddenly you're interfering with his signal. He paid the licensing fees for that spectrum. What are you doing to his rights to use the airwaves?
Wrong analogy. Internet bandwidth is essentially limitless - all you have to do is install the extra fiber and cables. The same with domain names - even at the peak of domain name squatting, no one ever had difficulties thinking of a new name and registering it.
The public airwaves represent a limited set of resources that must be shared by potentially millions of people at the same time. You can't "add" to the spectrum as needed. It has to be regulated, or it will be worthless.
And what if I then decide that I want to squat on top of your frequency with my bigger transmitter, and provide my own news, commentary, information, etc.? What then? Do we duel it out in the streets? Gather our respective gangs of anarchists and take axes to each others' equipment?
A world of people who thought like you, and who each felt they had the "right" to use the airwaves as they saw fit, would make the electromagnetic spectrum completely useless. You'd have nothing but 24/7 jamming, interference, and constant battles as everyone tried to outshout each other with bigger transmitters.
Sorry, but when it comes to the public spectrum, you have to have government regulation, else you will have nothing but anarchy and waste.
As others have pointed out before, the best way Linux could help itself gain market share would be if it had a UI option as close to that of Windows 2000/XP as possible. Blasphemy, yes, but people want what's familiar, without having to bother with what's under the hood.
In that respect the Vista debacle actually works in Linux's favor - Vista has broken enough of the 2000/XP UI paradigm that many people would probably be more comfortable with a Linux-based XP lookalike. Toss in WINE to run any needed Microsoft software, and 90% of your average consumer base would barely notice the difference - beyond that fact that botnet infections would plummet.
As so many others have pointed out, It doesn't matter if the switchover happens 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years, or 30 years from now - you're going to have millions of people, most of them elderly or low income, who are going to turn on their TVs and say "What's wrong with this damn thing?" They don't read the news, they have no clue the switchover is coming, and they will scream bloody murder when it does.
The ONLY way to keep that from happening would be for the U.S. government to send teams of technicians to every household in America to verify the converter boxes were installed. Even then you'd have a lot of elderly shut-ins who would call the police to arrest the "intruders" at their door.
Time to bite the bullet and switch over NOW - waiting any longer will do nothing but delay the inevitable.
Yes, and as so many have pointed out, their history of doing so is now backfiring on them in a big way. And it's not just with Vista, it's with Office as well.
Case in point - several months ago my department bought upgrade licenses to Office 2008. I was perfectly happy with Office 2004, but I installed Office 2008 because I knew that if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to read whatever new formats that Office 2008 supported. It had happened with every other Office upgrade cycle in my experience - you either upgraded or you'd be unable to exchange documents with your peers.
But something funny happened this time - I have yet to receive a .docx, .xlsx, or .pptx file from anyone. I have quite consciously chosen to save every document in .doc, .xls, or .ppt "compatibility" format. Everybody I talk to says they're doing exactly the same thing. Everyone now knows the game that Microsoft plays, and no one is willing to play it anymore. I could have stayed with Office 2004 and never noticed the difference. So what motivation will I have to upgrade to the next version of Office?
If it weren't for Microsoft's OEM licensing deals, Vista would have a tiny fraction of its current market share. XP is "good enough". But Microsoft doesn't push Office onto new machines the way it does Windows, the older Office formats are also "good enough", and you have open source alternatives like OpenOffice if Microsoft tries to deliberately break Office compatibility on the next version. I fully expect Microsoft's Office revenues to take a steep dive in the next few years. The Vista debacle is only the beginning.
I avoid any problems with word files on campus by making copies of the last 5 years of my midterm exams available for download. Everyone is on a level playing field. Fortunately the courses I teach (circuits) make it fairly easy to generate unique exams every semester.
Homework is a different matter, because that's tied to the textbook, and the PDF solutions manuals for nearly every textbook in existence are available for download from a dozen different websites. (Try explaining that to a textbook sales rep and watch the shocked look on his/her face.) I just tell students that homework is intended to prepare them for exams, and using a solutions manual will only cause them to fail the course, since homework is only worth 10% of the semester grade.
Of course, that doesn't stop some students. Every semester I wind up failing a couple of students with excellent homework grades and horrible exam grades. Some people insist on learning every lesson the hard way.
Exactly. In particular, note this part:
In other words, the wise conservative student outwits the mush-brained liberal professor and humiliates him in front of everyone, just by stating the facts! In reality, of course, the professor would just steamroller over any argument or fact thrown at him, and keep right on going. Anyone who has met the type knows exactly what I mean.
This sounds like something right out of Snopes. I'll bet I could find a variant of this exact story if I looked hard enough.
I've been teaching at public and private universities for many years, and I have yet to see or hear of a undergraduate class where a professor could arbitrarily drop a student from that class without that student's permission, just because the student said something politically incorrect.
So tell me, what university was this? And what reason did your son claim was given for this supposed drop? And why didn't he raise holy hell with the administration for such a flagrant and prejudicial abuse of faculty power, assuming such power even exists?
I call shennanigans. I suggest you contact the dean's office and find out the real reason your son dropped the class.
Sure they will, but only if it's economical to do so. Those are all desirable qualities in any laptop computer - why would anyone not want them? But buyers choose price over features most of the time.
The problem is this - any manufacturing process that could create an OLPC for $100 could just as easily create a bare-bones Linux laptop without the OLPC's bells and whistles for $50 or less. If you're a Third World consumer, what are you going to choose - an OLPC, or a netbook for half the price that is "good enough"? And the netbooks are going to get much better, much faster than the OLPC ever could.
This statement makes no sense. The entire OLPC concept was the result of "trickle down" economics. It would never have been possible without the manufacturing processes developed for First World computing, which have subsequently caused better and better technology to trickle down to lower price points.
You're giving Intel and Microsoft way too much credit. It was ASUS that destroyed the OLPC, by creating the netbook market when it released the first Eee PC. ASUS is already on its third generation of the Eee, not to mention the tooth-and-nail competition from Dell and HP, and the OLPC has barely gotten out of the starting gate. The OLPC couldn't possibly compete, even if the world economy hadn't tanked.
I firmly believe you're going to see plenty of sub-$100 Linux laptops being sold in the Third World within the next 3 years, but they're going to be coming from a half-dozen Chinese manufacturers fighting like mad to outsell each other, not the OLPC project. Microsoft and Intel won't be able to do much to stop that trend. The OLPC was a visionary idea, but like so many other visionary ideas it has been swept aside by its successors.
At my university, the administration makes it very clear that any IP rights for student inventions due to a classroom assignment belong to the student. A purely academic "student", by definition, is not an employee of the university.
A graduate research assistant is another matter entirely. A GRA is an employee of the university, paid by the university, and subject to the same IP regulations as the faculty and staff. In that respect my university is, in my opinion, extremely generous compared to private companies, as it allows faculty to have joint ownership of the IP, to develop as they see fit as long as the university receives a reasonable royalty. Considering the millions of dollars worth of capital equipment the university has placed at my disposal, I consider that quite a bargain.
Mr. Leiberman will never get a better deal for an idea he developed on someone else's dime for as long as he lives. If he can't afford the $75K upfront fee, he should talk to the MIT IP lawyers and see if he can negotiate a reduction in return for a slightly higher royalty rate. He might be surprised how willing they are to work with him.
And it gets worse when money becomes involved. Pseudoscientists and crackpots often try to find "investors" for their schemes, and even a layman who performs due diligence can be fooled when publishers like Elsevier become enablers for pseudoscience. When the paper shows up in an INSPEC or Web of Science search, how is the person being scammed supposed to know that the paper isn't really legitimate?
Many "free energy" scam artists already have patents for their nonsensical inventions, thanks to the laxity of the USPTO. It'll get worse unless these "pseudo-journals" are exposed and publicized to the greater science and engineering community, as well as the public at large. I had never heard of El Naschie before today, because I'm not a mathematician; thanks to this article, more people like me will now keep an eye out for his future "work".
It will never happen in the United States, mainly because a huge group of attorneys will be standing by, eagerly rubbing their hands and waiting for the first group of plaintiffs who will claim that midrange wireless power systems are responsible for headaches, arthritis, brain cancer, birth defects, leukemia, high blood pressure, etc.
Has everyone forgotten the legal battles over claims that electromagnetic fields from high-voltage power lines cause leukemia? And how about the current debate over cell phones causing brain cancer? And those are applications where the electromagnetic field strength is far below what a mid-range wireless power system would require!
There's no way any manufacturer is going to volunteer to be a target for the inevitable multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits. It doesn't matter that the "power lines and cell phones cause cancer" nonsense is junk science; what does count is that any mid-range wireless power system would attract lawsuits like sugar attracts flies. No one is going to touch it.