eBay needs help. They have alienated there sellers, gone to supporting "stores" more than hobby/small-time sellers, and they take almost 10% of sells.
The problem is that eBay quit being an auction site a long time ago, and now has become the world's biggest flea market. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that; I often will buy some inexpensive item from a "Buy It Now" power seller, but I gave up on actually bidding for items a long time ago. Between the scammers and the snipers, it's not worth the hassle. The power sellers are now eBay's true customer base, and that's who they cater to.
Nowadays I find that Craigslist typically provides a better selection of high-end merchandise, plus you deal with local sellers and buyers without the overhead. The real problem, I think, is that the online auction business model is slowly becoming obsolete - otherwise, you'd see legitimate competitors taking over the market segment that eBay has turned its back on.
I understand the desire to sell your product and keep the source code a secret, but no other aspect of human technology works that way. Every electronic component is documented. Every part in a car is documented. Every building is built with approved materials and is inspected. Every switch, nail, screw, and device is documented and open to public inspection. Why is not software? Why do we allow large corporations to sell us software that does not necessarily operate in our best interests?
Your examples are flawed. Almost every aspect of human technology works that way. If you think that every electronic component is documented, or every part of a car is documented, and open to public inspection, I suggest you contact the manufacturers and ask them for a copy of, say, the complete schematics or engineering diagrams of your PC or your automobile. They'll tell you to take a flying leap. Sure, you could open up your PC or automobile and reverse-engineer the design if you had unlimited money and time, but in fact the microprocessor in my laptop and the engine in my car are every bit as "closed source" as Windows XP. Without the manufacturer's help, you'll never be able to figure out precisely how many of the components in a modern piece of technology actually work.
Just because you can open something up and look inside doesn't mean it is "open" in the software sense. I can print out a complete hex dump of Windows XP and examine every byte to my heart's content. Does that make XP "open" as well?
Frankly I wonder why theater owners haven't tried placing infrared floodlights all around the screen, so that any cell phones or videocameras pointed at it will only record a washed-out image. I know that some researchers at Georgia Tech have tried building a system that targets cameras and blinds them with directed IR, but that's always struck me as overkill. Just brute-force it with lots of floodlights.
From my experience in academia, I think one of the best ways to reduce college debt would be to bring back co-op educational programs, particularly for IT and engineering majors. In recent years, American universities have transitioned almost completely from quarters to semesters, which has consequently destroyed co-op programs across the country. Thirty years ago, a student could work and go to school on alternating quarters, in many cases making enough money to cover most or all of his/her educational costs, and graduate in just 5 to 6 years. (The summer quarter was a regular teaching quarter just like fall, winter, and spring quarters.) Furthermore, the co-op student got absolutely invaluable experience while learning what industry was really like before graduation.
Now every school has transitioned to semesters, mainly to cut administrative costs. Consequently there are only two teaching semesters a year as opposed to four teaching quarters, resulting in a drastic reduction in course variety, and making co-op programs impossible to manage as many essential electives are now taught only once a year. And even if a school did offer a co-op program, a student would need 8 years to graduate!
So if you want to make college cheaper for more students and increase the number of graduating students in engineering, lobby for the return of the quarter system and the restoration of co-op programs. Too bad if the registrar's office now has to process course registration and grades four times a year instead of two. College programs should be structured for the benefit of the students, not the convenience of the administration.
To me, the most interesting aspect of these early, pre-Cambrian-Explosion fossils was that bilateral symmetry (which is the norm for practically all animal life today) was nothing special. You had lots of organisms that were radially symmetric or just plain asymmetric. Whatever mass extinction event wiped out the majority of the Ediacaran biota gave a foothold to the bilaterally symmetric ancestors of modern animal life, which then dominated the Cambrian Explosion. It is just a fluke of evolution that we are not radially symmetric or asymmetric. Shades of Niven & Pournelle's Moties!
My question is this: Why are the lines so long? I voted in the Canadian federal election a few weeks ago, I stood in line for no more than 10 minutes and I'm in a very large riding in downtown Montreal.
The long lines you've been reading about were for early voting in the U.S., not the regular election. On Election Day every voting precinct is open and manned, but for early voting you have only a handful of places you can cast your ballot. Consequently, if you wait until the last minute for early voting, you'll be in a long line.
I've never spent more than 15 minutes in line for a regular election. Frankly all of the people who wasted hours in line last week would have been better off if they'd waited until today to vote.
But goddamn it, when I'm in a bar chatting with friends, everywhere around is also buzzing with laughs and good times, why does the barman decide to pump his crappy music up to 110 decibels?
Any decent bar or restaurant (i.e. one that doesn't cater strictly to college students or rabid sports fans) uses closed captioning on its TVs and doesn't even attempt to turn up the volume. Every place I frequent is a place where everyone can have a conversation without yelling over the TV.
If you find that your desire for conversation now exceeds your desire for loud pounding music or blaring sports programs, then congratulations - you've joined the adult world. Time to move on from the old college hangouts and find a new place to drink beer.
It's been-around for 5000 years. It's a proven technology. It "just works" and was used in elections dating back to the 1700s. So what if it takes 12 hours to physically handcount the ballots? (Thrice for verification.) Do we really need to know, immediately, who won? This election has drug-on since Christmas of last year... one more half-day is not going to kill us.
Everyone seems to keep forgetting why we moved from paper ballots to electronic voting machines in the first place. It's not about speed - it's about avoiding spoiled ballots.
The problem with paper ballots is that a certain percentage of them are going to be spoiled. Even if you tell people "Put an X in one of these two boxes", you're going to have a small minority of voters who will be unable or unwilling to do it. Spoiled ballots are not a problem, however, so long as the winning margin of votes comfortably exceeds the number of spoiled ballots. But in a very close race, the margin of victory will fall within the range of the number of spoiled ballots. When that happens, both sides are going to fight to "interpret" those spoiled ballots in their favor. That's exactly what happened in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election.
The idea behind electronic voting machines was to solve the spoiled ballot problem once and for all. While you can argue about the effectiveness of the implementation of electronic voting, the intent was fundamentally a good one - to make every vote count in a completely unambiguous way, so that neither side could argue over the result. The problems with electronic voting are not insurmountable. They can be solved. We can add paper trails to the machines. We can run voting machines with auditable open-source code. It's just a matter of forcing our politicians to do so, and bit by bit that's the direction they're being pushed towards.
We can fix electronic voting, and we need to, because if we go back to paper and then have another major election that is decided by an interpretation of spoiled ballots, this entire chain of events will start all over again.
I never bothered to work out exactly what happened, but it seems some small difference in font rendering or spacing meant half the dates wrapped onto the next line, so the whole thing looked a mess.
But that's not just an OO to Office issue. It's also been an issue for every Office release compared to the one before it, at least on the Mac platform. Right now I can use Office 2008 to open up a.doc file that I created in Office 2004, and find line and tab spacing changes that completely screw up the formatting of a page. I saw the same issues when I migrated from Office X to Office 2004, and from Office 2001 to Office X. Ditto for opening up a.doc file created on a PC and viewing it on a Mac, or vice versa.
Moral: I learned long ago not to trust Microsoft's "compatability" and instead convert to PDF for publicly distributed documents.
While I don't necessarily accept the Hill's story as, let's say "accurate", the rolled-up map isn't so far fetched for a technologically advanced race. We're on the verge of having widely-available flexible displays and electronic paper, and it won't be long before you'll have a cell phone whose back folds out into an 8.5" x 11" display on which you can read the morning news, with full-motion video. It may be that the aliens who abducted Ms. Hill used something similar, and her description is just the best she could come up with using her 50's-era understanding of technology.
I would agree that "smart paper" might be used by a technologically advanced race, but that's not what Ms. Hill described. If she had said something like "The alien gestured, and suddenly the drawings and images on the map started to move around and change, just like a movie screen!" then we could say it was smart paper. But this "star chart" behaved just like a normal piece of paper. It didn't behave like smart paper or any other advanced display technology because Ms. Hill had never heard of such of a thing and wasn't able to think of it on her own. Also consider the book that the aliens gave Betty and Barney, and then took back. What? A regular book on paper, used by a spacefaring culture, instead of a "smart paper" text? It's laughable in light of modern technology, because Ms. Hill could only draw her references from movies and TV shows she had seen back in 1961.
And why wouldn't the aliens be using "enhanced reality" techniques rather than smart paper? It would have been more interesting if Ms. Hill had described how the aliens were pointing to objects and displays she couldn't even see, and behaving as if those things were real to them but not to her. The perfect description of ER, and something we'll probably be doing ourselves within the next 20 to 40 years, yet completely absent from her description. In fact, Ms. Hill makes no reference of any of the types of technologies that advanced computing systems would enable. The reason is simple - Ms. Hill couldn't dream up what she didn't understand.
I'm sorry, but this just doesn't seem very scientific. You obviously experienced something, but you've instantly correlated it to internal factors without any other supporting evidence? Do you frequently succumb to suggestion in this manner, or was this the first time? Have you experienced something due to suggestion since? What, other than your "rigorous education and scientific training" led you to this conclusion?
I submit that you probably lack the necessary information to support the conclusion that "psychological tricks of one's own brain" were at play here.
Well, I applied Occam's Razor to what happened. I had two possible explanations:
(1) Aliens or supernatural beings visited my mother, then visited me. Maybe they were working their way through my family tree?
(2) My mother's vivid recounting of her experience made a deep impression on me. She was really very concerned about what had happened to her and was more than a little frightened. She really didn't completely calm down until I explained the phenomenon of sleep paralysis to her. I spent a lot of time over the next couple of days thinking about what had happened to her, and reading more about sleep paralysis - and then, boom, I have an episode myself. So yes, I think the power of suggestion was clearly at work.
Either my mind was playing tricks on me, or aliens (or maybe devils) visited me in my bedroom. So which explanation sounds more plausible to you?
If it were possible right now, we'd have all kinds of people exploring the galaxy. Within the next 1,000 years, it will be possible to find planets that have a high chance of sustaining higher life forms and deliver some kind of observers to those planets for further study.
What would prevent there from being one or more alien races from undertaking a similar mission of exploration? Why would Earth automatically be disqualified as a target of such a mission?
Sure, it is certainly possible that we're being observed by an alien race. What makes no sense, however, is why they would be doing it the way the UFO believers think they're doing it, i.e. visiting us in spaceships and kidnapping random people for study.
UFO believers constantly weave their own preconceptions of how aliens "ought" to look and behave into their delusions. Just read the history of UFO abductions over the past 50 years, and notice how the stories and descriptions constantly evolve to match the technology and culture of the day. For example, the "abduction" of Betty and Barney Hill reads like a bad 50's sci-fi movie nowadays - which is almost certainly what inspired it.
Consider that an alien race would be literally centuries ahead of us in science and technology. If they've found an economical way to travel between the stars, then they would have an understanding of physics far beyond our own. The computing power at their disposal would be incomprehensibly greater than ours. They would have techniques for surveillance at their disposal that we could barely comprehend. My point is this: if aliens are actually monitoring us, we'd literally never know it.
Think of it this way: suppose you wanted to constantly monitor a tribe of chimpanzees. Within 20 or 30 years we'll probably be using small robotic probes to do just that. The probes will look like rocks, or insects, or a hundred other objects that will be indistinguishable from the normal environment of the chimps. The chimps will have no clue they're being watched. We'll even be able to obtain tissue and blood samples using robotic insects. Now extend those ideas by a few centuries of technological progress and you'll start to have a glimmering of how aliens would be observing humanity.
The whole idea of aliens flying around in spaceships, randomly kidnapping people, and subjecting them to bizarre physical examinations is laughable. It defies logic and reason. However, in the context of human psychology and sexual fantasies, the origin of such stories becomes perfectly clear.
We are human beings, we have awesome imaginations and a multitude of chemicals that effect them. I don't know what it's like to be coked out in an opium den or suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning but I think a lot of UFO stuff is pretty much a direct result of the human psyche, not extraterrestrials.
The older you get, the more you realize just how fallible human perception and memory truly are, and how amazingly easy it is to fall prey to self-delusion. That pretty much describes every UFO believer I've ever met.
What is actually very fascinating is to learn about (and sometime experience!) the psychological manifestations that have been attributed to alien visitation. True story: several years ago, my mother called me on the phone to tell me that she had experienced an episode of sleep paralysis. She had the classic symptoms: an inability to move coupled with hallucinations of someone (or something) being in the bedroom with her. She didn't know what had happened to her until I told her about the phenomenon, and how throughout history people had attributed sleep paralysis episodes to supernatural or extraterrestrial visitation.
What was truly bizarre is that I experienced my own episode of sleep paralysis just a few nights later. I awoke in a panic, unable to move and absolutely certain that something was in the room with me. After about 30 seconds I broke out of it and jumped out of bed. Even though I intellectually knew what had happened to me, I didn't go back to sleep until I had checked the house for intruders. The feeling of another presence in the room with me was that strong.
I knew what had happened to me by the next morning: my mother's description of her experience, coupled with the power of suggestion, had induced a similar experience in my own mind. Since then, neither my mother or I have suffered a second episode. It was a very sobering reminder to me that even rigorous education and scientific training are not always proof against the psychological tricks of one's own brain.
I would think that "Publish or Perish" must contribute to a lot of crappy papers getting published. Shovel it out the door, somebody else says it's wrong, write another grant for a study to verify that, shovel that one out the door, rinse, lather, repeat...
It does indeed. Thirty years ago an assistant professor could get tenure by publishing one good paper per year in an archival journal. Nowadays an assistant professor is expected to publish four or more journal papers per year. This leads to the well-known academic concept of the "MPU", i.e. the minimum publishable unit, or "just how many papers can I squeeze out of this one good idea?". This also leads to the backwards situation where a senior professor sitting on a Promotion & Tenure Committee may have fewer published papers (and fewer awarded research dollars) over his entire career than the assistant professor whose tenure he is voting on. Believe me when I say that the hypocrisy of this double standard is not lost on the junior faculty.
There's no doubt in my mind that the signal-to-noise ratio in archival journal papers has plummeted in the past two decades. 90% of all journal papers are superfluous, repetitive, or lacking in any significant advancement of the art, and I'll plainly admit that includes my own papers. Everyone in academia realizes what's going on, and knows it isn't good for the students or the faculty, but unfortunately that's the way the beans get counted in the academic world.
I felt as if I was a part of a "wild frontier", and had control and abilities that very few others possessed (and, I was probably right).
No, actually you were wrong. There are many, many bright people who have the ability to do what you did - far more than you realize. The difference was that they had something that you lacked - the moral judgment not to go breaking into other people's systems, and instead to do something productive with their abilities.
It's like a bunch of teenaged burglars thinking they're "special" because they can do something their peers don't do - break into houses and steal the belongings. But the truth is that almost anyone can become a burglar, provided they choose to do so. It's just that most people make better choices with their lives.
I've heard that the single biggest predictor of a college's ranking in the US News rankings is the endowment size. In other words, if you knew the size of the endowments of all colleges and ranked them in money order, you'll get a high fraction of the ranking consistent with US News.
That actually makes a great deal of sense. Large endowments are built from donations by loyal, successful, wealthy alumni who clearly believed they received a worthwhile education. Plus, big endowments can insulate a school from periodic economic hardships and the whims of state legislators, and continue to provide resources to faculty and students when government funding is cut. Those are VERY big advantages when choosing a college to attend.
Several of the metrics that U.S. News uses do seem to be arbitrarily weighted, leading to some bizarre contortions on the part of the various schools to enhance their ratings. Most of the data is self-reported by the universities, which clearly provides a powerful motivation to spin or "enhance" the numbers to one's advantage. I have no doubt that several colleges fudge the numbers to raise their rankings, leading to a lot of frustration at other schools that are playing by the rules but feel that they're being cheated in the rankings.
And some of the metrics make little sense. For example, engineering schools can raise their rankings by several places just by having one or more faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering. Yet NAE membership is essentially meaningless in terms of research and teaching, and hardly more prestigious than having faculty members who are Fellows in other established engineering societies. Yet U.S. News ignores the number of Fellows in IEEE, ASCE, ASME, etc., and focuses on NAE membership. So why the emphasis on NAE? Probably because the NAE told U.S. News that they were the most important engineering society, and U.S. News never questioned it, when in fact the NAE has almost negligible impact on higher education.
It always depresses me to see how many college students have no idea who they are, and just float about on the breeze of the moment, going for the buck instead of what they already see a passion for doing. They weren't reflecting upon their lives as a teenager, they weren't deciding what makes their hearts go faster, they were just assuming that someday their Fairy Career Mother would pop out of a cloud to tell them what they should do for the next forty years.
You're seeing the consequences of the modern philosophy that "every child should go to college", and the resulting dismantling of high school vocational education programs throughout the U.S. Based on my personal observations, I'd say that about half the freshmen entering college every year have no business being there. They have no clue why they're on campus (beyond the fact that everyone said they should be), they have no idea what they want to do after they graduate, and if they don't drop out they eventually switch to the easiest major they can find, even if that major has zero job prospects and doesn't interest them in the least. The college experience becomes just a four year extension of high school, but with more sex, drugs, and alcohol.
I would much prefer re-establishing strong vocational education programs that would take those directionless 18-year olds and give them a job. Let them grow up a little and decide what they want to do with their lives, and then (if they find a professional career passion) let them enroll in university programs designed for older students.
You can release an invention into the public domain. While patent trolls can still sue, they have to prove they came up with the invention first.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. If the patent troll sues, you have to countersue to get their patent declared invalid on the basis of prior art. Why should the troll have to validate his patent? The USPTO has already validated it by issuing the patent in the first place. It's up to you to overturn that validation in court. Don't think that making your product open source will protect you from litigation - quite the contrary.
On the other hand having a patent portfolio can be used as a weapon against others threat to sue. "You using our patent so unless you license this patent of yours we'll sue."
Exactly. One strategy is make a competitor back off is to threaten to countersue with your own portfolio. Or, if a patent troll threatens you, you can point to your own patent and say "We're not violating your patent. This is an implementation of our own patent." Then the shoe is on the other foot, and the patent troll must invalidate your patent. Hopefully, the added cost of litigation will make the troll back off.
A better solution to all this BS is to get rid of patents.
As far as business method patents and software patents are concerned, I'm in complete agreement. However, I realize that my wishes and desires do not change the reality that such patents exist, are granted weekly by the USPTO, and must be dealt with rather than ignored in the business world.
You should quietly smile at whatever they come up with and fail to participate in it. Patents, and particularly software patents, are a huge drain on tech industry and a net drain on society. Be part of the solution, not the problem.
This is not a helpful response. Regardless of how you personally feel about patents, you can't opt out of the game when the rules are made by Congress and the USPTO. A strong patent portfolio is a necessary legal defense in the modern business world. Without one, you're nothing but fresh meat to every sleazy lawyer looking to make a quick buck. If you don't bother to patent your own IP, you can rest assured that some patent troll will do it for you.
Your "solution" will do nothing but drag your employer through needless litigation, and quite possibly cost you your job if a multimillion dollar judgment is issued against the company. If you really want to be part of the solution, lobby Congress to reform the patent process itself. But until that happens, play the game the way it needs to be played.
Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet.
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LHC Flips On Tomorrow
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· Score: 5, Informative
I don't understand the whole "miniature black hole" thing. I think the naysayers have just been reading too much sci-fi. Microscopic black holes would evaporate in a very small amount of time due to Hawking radiation...they would leave a detectable energy signature so that we could tell they were there, but that's about it. The LHC won't be doing anything that isn't already happening in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic rays anyway.
One of the main fearmongers concerning the LHC is Otto Rossler. He's a 68-year-old biochemist whose initial career was respected and conventional, but in recent years has veered into promoting his own "Theory of Everything" that contradicts the Theory of Relativity. According to Rossler, (a) Hawking radiation doesn't exist, and (b) microscopic black holes created by cosmic rays are moving so fast that they pass right through the earth, whereas LHC black holes will be trapped by earth's gravity and destroy the planet.
What's really happening is that Rossler and others like him are using the LHC as a soapbox to promote their particular brands of pseudoscience. From what I've read, any debate with Rossler quickly leads to him promoting his own pet theories, rather than any rational examination of the risks.
Divx may be 0.5GB/hour but HD video is more like 10GB/hour (less for 720p, more for 1080p).
That means that someone who watches 1 hour of HD video every day (way less than a typical TV viewer) consumes 300GB a month or more if he uploads as well and would immediately run afoul the comcast cap.
What now, eh? I thought so...
You think what? Do you even use P2P? Take a look at Pirate Bay. Even HD video is encoded at 1 GB/hour at most. Who in the world is torrenting 10 GB/hour video files? Perhaps someone might attempt to seed a torrent that big, but who would be foolish enough to download it? XViD or DiVX compression is standard for TV and movie torrents.
Even if you're downloading nothing but 1 GB/hour files, you'd still have more than 40 hours of new video to watch every week without running afoul of Comcast. Again, what reasonable person really watches that much new stuff every week? If Comcast were capping users at 25 GB a month, you'd have an argument, but a 250 GB cap relative to standard XviD/DiVX file sizes is not unreasonable.
My argument still stands - a lot of P2P congestion occurs due to people who compulsively download far, far more content that they'll ever need or use. Don't argue straw men using file sizes that have no relation to 99.9% of what's actually being shared.
Now the problem with P2P is that it expands to fill all available bandwidth. At one time, after Kazaa first appeared we saw our lines starting to become congested, so we doubled our bandwidth. That relieved the problem for almost 10 days. Other ISP's I've talked to agree, increasing bandwidth doesn't solve the P2P/bandwidth hog problem.
Of course not. It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario. You'll always have someone who wants to utilize a shared resource to the maximum limit, regardless of how it hurts the community as a whole. What makes it worse (in my opinion) is that most P2P traffic is driven by compulsion rather than any reasonable personal need for the content. Consider that DiVX video requires about 0.5 GB per hour. If you downloaded and watched 12 hours of video per day, every day, you'd need about 270 GB of bandwidth a month (assuming you uploaded half of what you downloaded). Note that Comcast intends to cap users at 250 GB a month.
Now ask yourself what reasonable person watches that much TV, movies, etc., every day. It makes no sense until you realize that a small minority of P2P users are compulsive data collectors. They want to have a copy of every song, every movie, every TV show, every game. They have thousands of GB of content they've never even bothered to open. We all know someone like that, and it doesn't take very many people who behave that way to utilize every bit of available bandwidth.
It's been obvious for some time that ISPs will eventually be forced to go to something like the cell phone business model. You pay a flat rate for a certain number of GB per month, then a per-GB surcharge over the cap. This will force the obsessive P2P users to throttle back and make P2P more useful to everyone, without letting it become a compulsion that brings the net to its knees.
I'm not sure what the exact amount is, but the figure I've seen some fairly large numbers thrown around. I'm not sure what the real number is, I suspect that nobody really does, but it is a significant amount of money due to people like your former employers cheating the other taxpayers.
It's not that small business owners are natural crooks. They're just doing what they have to do to survive. If every small business owner paid all his taxes, the tax rate would be low. But if you cheat, and skim part of your income, the chances of being caught are practically zero as long as you're halfway careful. So of course, lots of people cheat, which gives them an advantage over their honest competition.
Consequently, the government raises its tax rates to compensate for the reduced revenue because of the cheaters. This puts the honest businesspeople at an even greater disadvantage. They have to start cheating, too, or they'd go out of business. So now we arrive at the present-day situation where every small business owner cheats, the tax rates are ridiculously high, and everyone plays a guessing game trying to figure out the minimum amount of revenue they can get away with reporting to the government.
It's certainly not a desirable situation, but that's how the game has to be played if you want to stay in business. I suspect the amount of revenue collected is roughly equivalent to what would be collected with lower tax rates and a completely honest citizenry. So the net effect is about the same to the government, but the game is fixed from the start.
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The problem is that eBay quit being an auction site a long time ago, and now has become the world's biggest flea market. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that; I often will buy some inexpensive item from a "Buy It Now" power seller, but I gave up on actually bidding for items a long time ago. Between the scammers and the snipers, it's not worth the hassle. The power sellers are now eBay's true customer base, and that's who they cater to.
Nowadays I find that Craigslist typically provides a better selection of high-end merchandise, plus you deal with local sellers and buyers without the overhead. The real problem, I think, is that the online auction business model is slowly becoming obsolete - otherwise, you'd see legitimate competitors taking over the market segment that eBay has turned its back on.
Your examples are flawed. Almost every aspect of human technology works that way. If you think that every electronic component is documented, or every part of a car is documented, and open to public inspection, I suggest you contact the manufacturers and ask them for a copy of, say, the complete schematics or engineering diagrams of your PC or your automobile. They'll tell you to take a flying leap. Sure, you could open up your PC or automobile and reverse-engineer the design if you had unlimited money and time, but in fact the microprocessor in my laptop and the engine in my car are every bit as "closed source" as Windows XP. Without the manufacturer's help, you'll never be able to figure out precisely how many of the components in a modern piece of technology actually work.
Just because you can open something up and look inside doesn't mean it is "open" in the software sense. I can print out a complete hex dump of Windows XP and examine every byte to my heart's content. Does that make XP "open" as well?
Frankly I wonder why theater owners haven't tried placing infrared floodlights all around the screen, so that any cell phones or videocameras pointed at it will only record a washed-out image. I know that some researchers at Georgia Tech have tried building a system that targets cameras and blinds them with directed IR, but that's always struck me as overkill. Just brute-force it with lots of floodlights.
From my experience in academia, I think one of the best ways to reduce college debt would be to bring back co-op educational programs, particularly for IT and engineering majors. In recent years, American universities have transitioned almost completely from quarters to semesters, which has consequently destroyed co-op programs across the country. Thirty years ago, a student could work and go to school on alternating quarters, in many cases making enough money to cover most or all of his/her educational costs, and graduate in just 5 to 6 years. (The summer quarter was a regular teaching quarter just like fall, winter, and spring quarters.) Furthermore, the co-op student got absolutely invaluable experience while learning what industry was really like before graduation.
Now every school has transitioned to semesters, mainly to cut administrative costs. Consequently there are only two teaching semesters a year as opposed to four teaching quarters, resulting in a drastic reduction in course variety, and making co-op programs impossible to manage as many essential electives are now taught only once a year. And even if a school did offer a co-op program, a student would need 8 years to graduate!
So if you want to make college cheaper for more students and increase the number of graduating students in engineering, lobby for the return of the quarter system and the restoration of co-op programs. Too bad if the registrar's office now has to process course registration and grades four times a year instead of two. College programs should be structured for the benefit of the students, not the convenience of the administration.
To me, the most interesting aspect of these early, pre-Cambrian-Explosion fossils was that bilateral symmetry (which is the norm for practically all animal life today) was nothing special. You had lots of organisms that were radially symmetric or just plain asymmetric. Whatever mass extinction event wiped out the majority of the Ediacaran biota gave a foothold to the bilaterally symmetric ancestors of modern animal life, which then dominated the Cambrian Explosion. It is just a fluke of evolution that we are not radially symmetric or asymmetric. Shades of Niven & Pournelle's Moties!
The long lines you've been reading about were for early voting in the U.S., not the regular election. On Election Day every voting precinct is open and manned, but for early voting you have only a handful of places you can cast your ballot. Consequently, if you wait until the last minute for early voting, you'll be in a long line.
I've never spent more than 15 minutes in line for a regular election. Frankly all of the people who wasted hours in line last week would have been better off if they'd waited until today to vote.
Any decent bar or restaurant (i.e. one that doesn't cater strictly to college students or rabid sports fans) uses closed captioning on its TVs and doesn't even attempt to turn up the volume. Every place I frequent is a place where everyone can have a conversation without yelling over the TV.
If you find that your desire for conversation now exceeds your desire for loud pounding music or blaring sports programs, then congratulations - you've joined the adult world. Time to move on from the old college hangouts and find a new place to drink beer.
Yeah, like all of those multimillionaires who made a fortune selling usernames on Friendster, and MySpace, and Facebook, and ... oh, wait ...
Everyone seems to keep forgetting why we moved from paper ballots to electronic voting machines in the first place. It's not about speed - it's about avoiding spoiled ballots.
The problem with paper ballots is that a certain percentage of them are going to be spoiled. Even if you tell people "Put an X in one of these two boxes", you're going to have a small minority of voters who will be unable or unwilling to do it. Spoiled ballots are not a problem, however, so long as the winning margin of votes comfortably exceeds the number of spoiled ballots. But in a very close race, the margin of victory will fall within the range of the number of spoiled ballots. When that happens, both sides are going to fight to "interpret" those spoiled ballots in their favor. That's exactly what happened in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election.
The idea behind electronic voting machines was to solve the spoiled ballot problem once and for all. While you can argue about the effectiveness of the implementation of electronic voting, the intent was fundamentally a good one - to make every vote count in a completely unambiguous way, so that neither side could argue over the result. The problems with electronic voting are not insurmountable. They can be solved. We can add paper trails to the machines. We can run voting machines with auditable open-source code. It's just a matter of forcing our politicians to do so, and bit by bit that's the direction they're being pushed towards.
We can fix electronic voting, and we need to, because if we go back to paper and then have another major election that is decided by an interpretation of spoiled ballots, this entire chain of events will start all over again.
But that's not just an OO to Office issue. It's also been an issue for every Office release compared to the one before it, at least on the Mac platform. Right now I can use Office 2008 to open up a .doc file that I created in Office 2004, and find line and tab spacing changes that completely screw up the formatting of a page. I saw the same issues when I migrated from Office X to Office 2004, and from Office 2001 to Office X. Ditto for opening up a .doc file created on a PC and viewing it on a Mac, or vice versa.
Moral: I learned long ago not to trust Microsoft's "compatability" and instead convert to PDF for publicly distributed documents.
I would agree that "smart paper" might be used by a technologically advanced race, but that's not what Ms. Hill described. If she had said something like "The alien gestured, and suddenly the drawings and images on the map started to move around and change, just like a movie screen!" then we could say it was smart paper. But this "star chart" behaved just like a normal piece of paper. It didn't behave like smart paper or any other advanced display technology because Ms. Hill had never heard of such of a thing and wasn't able to think of it on her own. Also consider the book that the aliens gave Betty and Barney, and then took back. What? A regular book on paper, used by a spacefaring culture, instead of a "smart paper" text? It's laughable in light of modern technology, because Ms. Hill could only draw her references from movies and TV shows she had seen back in 1961.
And why wouldn't the aliens be using "enhanced reality" techniques rather than smart paper? It would have been more interesting if Ms. Hill had described how the aliens were pointing to objects and displays she couldn't even see, and behaving as if those things were real to them but not to her. The perfect description of ER, and something we'll probably be doing ourselves within the next 20 to 40 years, yet completely absent from her description. In fact, Ms. Hill makes no reference of any of the types of technologies that advanced computing systems would enable. The reason is simple - Ms. Hill couldn't dream up what she didn't understand.
Well, I applied Occam's Razor to what happened. I had two possible explanations:
(1) Aliens or supernatural beings visited my mother, then visited me. Maybe they were working their way through my family tree?
(2) My mother's vivid recounting of her experience made a deep impression on me. She was really very concerned about what had happened to her and was more than a little frightened. She really didn't completely calm down until I explained the phenomenon of sleep paralysis to her. I spent a lot of time over the next couple of days thinking about what had happened to her, and reading more about sleep paralysis - and then, boom, I have an episode myself. So yes, I think the power of suggestion was clearly at work.
Either my mind was playing tricks on me, or aliens (or maybe devils) visited me in my bedroom. So which explanation sounds more plausible to you?
Sure, it is certainly possible that we're being observed by an alien race. What makes no sense, however, is why they would be doing it the way the UFO believers think they're doing it, i.e. visiting us in spaceships and kidnapping random people for study.
UFO believers constantly weave their own preconceptions of how aliens "ought" to look and behave into their delusions. Just read the history of UFO abductions over the past 50 years, and notice how the stories and descriptions constantly evolve to match the technology and culture of the day. For example, the "abduction" of Betty and Barney Hill reads like a bad 50's sci-fi movie nowadays - which is almost certainly what inspired it.
Consider that an alien race would be literally centuries ahead of us in science and technology. If they've found an economical way to travel between the stars, then they would have an understanding of physics far beyond our own. The computing power at their disposal would be incomprehensibly greater than ours. They would have techniques for surveillance at their disposal that we could barely comprehend. My point is this: if aliens are actually monitoring us, we'd literally never know it.
Think of it this way: suppose you wanted to constantly monitor a tribe of chimpanzees. Within 20 or 30 years we'll probably be using small robotic probes to do just that. The probes will look like rocks, or insects, or a hundred other objects that will be indistinguishable from the normal environment of the chimps. The chimps will have no clue they're being watched. We'll even be able to obtain tissue and blood samples using robotic insects. Now extend those ideas by a few centuries of technological progress and you'll start to have a glimmering of how aliens would be observing humanity.
The whole idea of aliens flying around in spaceships, randomly kidnapping people, and subjecting them to bizarre physical examinations is laughable. It defies logic and reason. However, in the context of human psychology and sexual fantasies, the origin of such stories becomes perfectly clear.
The older you get, the more you realize just how fallible human perception and memory truly are, and how amazingly easy it is to fall prey to self-delusion. That pretty much describes every UFO believer I've ever met.
What is actually very fascinating is to learn about (and sometime experience!) the psychological manifestations that have been attributed to alien visitation. True story: several years ago, my mother called me on the phone to tell me that she had experienced an episode of sleep paralysis. She had the classic symptoms: an inability to move coupled with hallucinations of someone (or something) being in the bedroom with her. She didn't know what had happened to her until I told her about the phenomenon, and how throughout history people had attributed sleep paralysis episodes to supernatural or extraterrestrial visitation.
What was truly bizarre is that I experienced my own episode of sleep paralysis just a few nights later. I awoke in a panic, unable to move and absolutely certain that something was in the room with me. After about 30 seconds I broke out of it and jumped out of bed. Even though I intellectually knew what had happened to me, I didn't go back to sleep until I had checked the house for intruders. The feeling of another presence in the room with me was that strong.
I knew what had happened to me by the next morning: my mother's description of her experience, coupled with the power of suggestion, had induced a similar experience in my own mind. Since then, neither my mother or I have suffered a second episode. It was a very sobering reminder to me that even rigorous education and scientific training are not always proof against the psychological tricks of one's own brain.
It does indeed. Thirty years ago an assistant professor could get tenure by publishing one good paper per year in an archival journal. Nowadays an assistant professor is expected to publish four or more journal papers per year. This leads to the well-known academic concept of the "MPU", i.e. the minimum publishable unit, or "just how many papers can I squeeze out of this one good idea?". This also leads to the backwards situation where a senior professor sitting on a Promotion & Tenure Committee may have fewer published papers (and fewer awarded research dollars) over his entire career than the assistant professor whose tenure he is voting on. Believe me when I say that the hypocrisy of this double standard is not lost on the junior faculty.
There's no doubt in my mind that the signal-to-noise ratio in archival journal papers has plummeted in the past two decades. 90% of all journal papers are superfluous, repetitive, or lacking in any significant advancement of the art, and I'll plainly admit that includes my own papers. Everyone in academia realizes what's going on, and knows it isn't good for the students or the faculty, but unfortunately that's the way the beans get counted in the academic world.
No, actually you were wrong. There are many, many bright people who have the ability to do what you did - far more than you realize. The difference was that they had something that you lacked - the moral judgment not to go breaking into other people's systems, and instead to do something productive with their abilities.
It's like a bunch of teenaged burglars thinking they're "special" because they can do something their peers don't do - break into houses and steal the belongings. But the truth is that almost anyone can become a burglar, provided they choose to do so. It's just that most people make better choices with their lives.
That actually makes a great deal of sense. Large endowments are built from donations by loyal, successful, wealthy alumni who clearly believed they received a worthwhile education. Plus, big endowments can insulate a school from periodic economic hardships and the whims of state legislators, and continue to provide resources to faculty and students when government funding is cut. Those are VERY big advantages when choosing a college to attend.
Several of the metrics that U.S. News uses do seem to be arbitrarily weighted, leading to some bizarre contortions on the part of the various schools to enhance their ratings. Most of the data is self-reported by the universities, which clearly provides a powerful motivation to spin or "enhance" the numbers to one's advantage. I have no doubt that several colleges fudge the numbers to raise their rankings, leading to a lot of frustration at other schools that are playing by the rules but feel that they're being cheated in the rankings.
And some of the metrics make little sense. For example, engineering schools can raise their rankings by several places just by having one or more faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering. Yet NAE membership is essentially meaningless in terms of research and teaching, and hardly more prestigious than having faculty members who are Fellows in other established engineering societies. Yet U.S. News ignores the number of Fellows in IEEE, ASCE, ASME, etc., and focuses on NAE membership. So why the emphasis on NAE? Probably because the NAE told U.S. News that they were the most important engineering society, and U.S. News never questioned it, when in fact the NAE has almost negligible impact on higher education.
You're seeing the consequences of the modern philosophy that "every child should go to college", and the resulting dismantling of high school vocational education programs throughout the U.S. Based on my personal observations, I'd say that about half the freshmen entering college every year have no business being there. They have no clue why they're on campus (beyond the fact that everyone said they should be), they have no idea what they want to do after they graduate, and if they don't drop out they eventually switch to the easiest major they can find, even if that major has zero job prospects and doesn't interest them in the least. The college experience becomes just a four year extension of high school, but with more sex, drugs, and alcohol.
I would much prefer re-establishing strong vocational education programs that would take those directionless 18-year olds and give them a job. Let them grow up a little and decide what they want to do with their lives, and then (if they find a professional career passion) let them enroll in university programs designed for older students.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. If the patent troll sues, you have to countersue to get their patent declared invalid on the basis of prior art. Why should the troll have to validate his patent? The USPTO has already validated it by issuing the patent in the first place. It's up to you to overturn that validation in court. Don't think that making your product open source will protect you from litigation - quite the contrary.
Exactly. One strategy is make a competitor back off is to threaten to countersue with your own portfolio. Or, if a patent troll threatens you, you can point to your own patent and say "We're not violating your patent. This is an implementation of our own patent." Then the shoe is on the other foot, and the patent troll must invalidate your patent. Hopefully, the added cost of litigation will make the troll back off.
As far as business method patents and software patents are concerned, I'm in complete agreement. However, I realize that my wishes and desires do not change the reality that such patents exist, are granted weekly by the USPTO, and must be dealt with rather than ignored in the business world.
This is not a helpful response. Regardless of how you personally feel about patents, you can't opt out of the game when the rules are made by Congress and the USPTO. A strong patent portfolio is a necessary legal defense in the modern business world. Without one, you're nothing but fresh meat to every sleazy lawyer looking to make a quick buck. If you don't bother to patent your own IP, you can rest assured that some patent troll will do it for you.
Your "solution" will do nothing but drag your employer through needless litigation, and quite possibly cost you your job if a multimillion dollar judgment is issued against the company. If you really want to be part of the solution, lobby Congress to reform the patent process itself. But until that happens, play the game the way it needs to be played.
One of the main fearmongers concerning the LHC is Otto Rossler. He's a 68-year-old biochemist whose initial career was respected and conventional, but in recent years has veered into promoting his own "Theory of Everything" that contradicts the Theory of Relativity. According to Rossler, (a) Hawking radiation doesn't exist, and (b) microscopic black holes created by cosmic rays are moving so fast that they pass right through the earth, whereas LHC black holes will be trapped by earth's gravity and destroy the planet.
What's really happening is that Rossler and others like him are using the LHC as a soapbox to promote their particular brands of pseudoscience. From what I've read, any debate with Rossler quickly leads to him promoting his own pet theories, rather than any rational examination of the risks.
You think what? Do you even use P2P? Take a look at Pirate Bay. Even HD video is encoded at 1 GB/hour at most. Who in the world is torrenting 10 GB/hour video files? Perhaps someone might attempt to seed a torrent that big, but who would be foolish enough to download it? XViD or DiVX compression is standard for TV and movie torrents.
Even if you're downloading nothing but 1 GB/hour files, you'd still have more than 40 hours of new video to watch every week without running afoul of Comcast. Again, what reasonable person really watches that much new stuff every week? If Comcast were capping users at 25 GB a month, you'd have an argument, but a 250 GB cap relative to standard XviD/DiVX file sizes is not unreasonable.
My argument still stands - a lot of P2P congestion occurs due to people who compulsively download far, far more content that they'll ever need or use. Don't argue straw men using file sizes that have no relation to 99.9% of what's actually being shared.
Of course not. It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario. You'll always have someone who wants to utilize a shared resource to the maximum limit, regardless of how it hurts the community as a whole. What makes it worse (in my opinion) is that most P2P traffic is driven by compulsion rather than any reasonable personal need for the content. Consider that DiVX video requires about 0.5 GB per hour. If you downloaded and watched 12 hours of video per day, every day, you'd need about 270 GB of bandwidth a month (assuming you uploaded half of what you downloaded). Note that Comcast intends to cap users at 250 GB a month.
Now ask yourself what reasonable person watches that much TV, movies, etc., every day. It makes no sense until you realize that a small minority of P2P users are compulsive data collectors. They want to have a copy of every song, every movie, every TV show, every game. They have thousands of GB of content they've never even bothered to open. We all know someone like that, and it doesn't take very many people who behave that way to utilize every bit of available bandwidth.
It's been obvious for some time that ISPs will eventually be forced to go to something like the cell phone business model. You pay a flat rate for a certain number of GB per month, then a per-GB surcharge over the cap. This will force the obsessive P2P users to throttle back and make P2P more useful to everyone, without letting it become a compulsion that brings the net to its knees.
It's not that small business owners are natural crooks. They're just doing what they have to do to survive. If every small business owner paid all his taxes, the tax rate would be low. But if you cheat, and skim part of your income, the chances of being caught are practically zero as long as you're halfway careful. So of course, lots of people cheat, which gives them an advantage over their honest competition.
Consequently, the government raises its tax rates to compensate for the reduced revenue because of the cheaters. This puts the honest businesspeople at an even greater disadvantage. They have to start cheating, too, or they'd go out of business. So now we arrive at the present-day situation where every small business owner cheats, the tax rates are ridiculously high, and everyone plays a guessing game trying to figure out the minimum amount of revenue they can get away with reporting to the government.
It's certainly not a desirable situation, but that's how the game has to be played if you want to stay in business. I suspect the amount of revenue collected is roughly equivalent to what would be collected with lower tax rates and a completely honest citizenry. So the net effect is about the same to the government, but the game is fixed from the start.