At my university, one of the first to sign an exclusive soda contract (with Coca Cola), there is a battle brewing over the renewal of the 10 year contract this summer (it's no coincidence that it was signed, and will be resigned, when students are away from campus). It didn't help that the university and Coke refused, for ten years, to discuss specifics of the contract, where money was going, etc. The Napster deal is pretty bad, but it's fairly sickening to have your school turn into a marketing arm of Coca Cola ("Always Rutgers-- Always Coca Cola"). As other posts have noted, most things involving students are an all-or-nothing proposition. Dining halls, particularly, are run this way (and it is also no coincidence that they, for the most part, are awful). What it comes down to is, is this something that the university should really be deciding for its students? Is this essential? Dining halls, yes. Bus service, sure. What brand of soda? Online music downloads? Hrmm.
It doesn't matter. Being able to detect it would be like buying an extra powerball ticket: it doesn't substantially improve your chances of winning. So what if you go from having a 1 in a bazillion chance of picking the right box to a 20 or 30 in a bazillion chance? With the pepsi bottle itunes thing it was different, because you had a reasonable chance to begin with. I don't know how many SUVs they are giving away but I doubt the odds are so good that you can actually improve your lot this way.
Lightning travels from the ground up, where the free electrons are. The cell phones, presumably, have no ground so they're not susceptible to being hit by lightning. This is the same reason the space shuttle can't fly in inclement weather: the exhaust creates a ground column that the lightning surge can travel up, and bam: there goes the shuttle.
"This is something even the greatest of technophobes could understand and use with ease."
Overstating a bit much? There are people out there, a surprising amount no doubt, that would have trouble using a system that consisted of one giant button on the screen if you didn't walk them through it. Most 'technophobes', and a great deal many of your average users probably as well, don't install software at all. Their computer comes with office, and a web browser, and an email program, and that's all they use. Or, if they do get around to installing something, it sits on their computer until the end of time. Once again this is an overstimation of how similar your typical technically knowledgeable linux user is to the average user, and in this case your average technophobe.
The multiple divisions follow various athletics policies, number of teams, attendence at games, etc standards. One big difference is that Division 1 schools have to award a minimum amount of "athletic scholarships". Division 3 schools do not award such 'scholar'ships. Division 1 schools have to field 11 teams, Division 3 schools: 5. Division 1 is where all the alleged money is. In reality it's mostly the networks and the NCAA organization itself that makes money.Because of cost restraints and other institutional characteristics you mainly see large reseach doctoral institutions in the Division 1 (for a really good explanation of why that is so, read Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus).
A conference is merely a collection of teams that regularly play each other. They typically are constructed based on traditional opponents and regionality, but with the onset of commercialzed big time athletics Division 1A conferences are motivated by other matters.
Well, the Ivy League is one sports conference (Division 1-AA I believe). Your school is in the Patriot Leage, which is Division III. What that means is, for the most part, those schools in your division don't whore themselves out to their athletics departments and the requisite boosters. Typically a school "regularly" (ie, each once a year) plays the teams in their own conference. However, as schedules are negotiated by Athletics Directors, it's not unusual to regularly play a non-conference school. Especially, for instance, in the case of rivalries or traditional games. For instance, my school (Rutgers), regularly played the anniversary game against Princeton (which was, of course, the oldest football rivalry at the time), even after Princeton joined the Ivy League and Rutgers opted not to. Unfortunately Rutgers then decided to start "big time" play and ended the annual game. Not coincidently they also decided to commence a steady fall into mediocrity that still continues to this day. But that's an entirely different conversation. The bottom line is yes the Ivy League teams play other schools. They are simply organized based around the athletics policies they decided to institute amongst themselves.
That's not a completely unusual practice. Teams play non-conference games all the time. However, there's no denying that the Ivy League is a sports conference and that the official organization of the Ivy League was around the issue of sports. Perhaps I'm missing your point, was there anything in particular I said that you take issue with?
Indeed true. The main origins of the Ivy League are their age and proximity to each other. All are in the northeast, and except for Cornell they represent all the colonial colleges save for two. Basically they're old football buddies. Rice is dramatically removed both in terms of geography and age (not coming into even premature existance until the turn of the 20th century).
Not that the comparison is necessarily unjustified, of course. Rice is one of the few Division 1 schools that doesn't completely neglect undergradate education. The corrupting influence of which was the impetus for the creation of the Ivy League.
I agree. Especially in states where the state constitution provides an explicit right to privacy (for example, Alaska, a notoriously libertarian state). There is a big, big difference between filtering internet content and monitoring an individual. I recall when I was a freshman in high school the ELP (gifted program) lab computers had a program to take a screenshot every so many seconds and save them to be reviewed. It turns out that it was a student "administrator" who had installed it and who reviewed the screenshots. THAT was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Colleges and universities have pretty cleanly divided up the "education and research" responsibilities. Mainly, the colleges have the former, and the universities the latter.
Believe it or not the universities probably do provide the broadband for exactly this sort of student use. It's the same reason they ignore rampant alcohol use on campus, and the same reason they overemphasize sports teams. Major universities these days provide cardboard standup undergraduate educations, and seek mainly to entertain and divert their undergraduates' attentions, while they use their tuition dollars to build "research prestige".
For a good book on this subject, and the plight of higher education in America, pick up a copy of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Ruining Undergraduate Education. Though it views the issue through the lense of sports (obviously), the main focus is on the downward spiral that is undergraduate education at most American research universities (which, coincidently (wink), tend to correspond with the NCAA Division 1-A).
Well the concept of a species might not be the best example. Two individuals are generally recognized to be of the same species if they can mate and produce fertile offspring. So, for the most part it's not simply arbitrary set determination.
This sort of reminds me of something my idiot brother once did to my parents computer. My mom was complaining that the computer was acting strangely, so I went down there one weekend to take a look at it. Somehow someone had managed to trick the computer into showing the same partition twice. With different partition sizes. And if you deleted files in one of the partitions, it would delete it in the other (but would only show up after you rebooted). So I swore at my brother up and down, backed up the data, and reformatted. Worst weekend ever.
No, they'll learn not to let you touch the shiny objects next time, lest they get a repeat of LAST year's incident.
But seriously, these people (dishonest vendors) are like tubes of toothpaste... if you want them to do something it's not enough to squeeze them where they are at right now, cause they'll just go somewhere else where you don't want them. You have to squeeze them EVERYWHERE that you don't want them, and that's going to take a lot of time, and a lot of toothpaste. or something.
Well, there is "no market" or "clamor" for consumer grade 10 gigahertz processors, or terabyte hard disks, but thats not going to stop research into faster processors and larger hard drives. Microsoft might be laughing themselves till they pee and patting themselves on the back for coming up with that "innovation" line, but it does actually happen now and then. And no market for low power LCD displays? Are you insane? With todays laptops you're lucky if you break 2 hours of battery life. A lot of that is powering that backlight behind the display. Cutting the power the display takes will do wonders for battery life. And that there is a market for.
Actually, in retrospect, I was probably too rash. I just reviewed the article and it's not entirely clear if they're simply comparing the 1.8 tons to the actual weight of the car, or comparing the 1.8 tons to the equivalent material cost of a car. Though, my knowledge of cars is limited, but I'm inclined to consider the latter, as I recall hearing a lot about "full ton" pickups and '3/4 ton' pickups and the like, so I doubt a consumer car is 1.8 tons.
Insurance rates do not skyrocket from lawsuits. There has not been a significant rise in number of suits or in total rewards.
Why then, do premiums rise so dramatically? The answer is simply because insurance companies are required to keep a certain percentage of their total coverages as a reserve. Certain amounts of this has to be in cash, but a good percentage can be in a stock or other market portfolio. That's right: a lot of this legally mandated reserve is in stocks. Guess what happens when the stock market crashes? That reserve evaporates. Can anyone remember anything like that happening recently?
So what happens when 80% of your reserve disappears? You have to get the money somehow, it's required. Legally. So what else can you put into the reserve, if not your now worthless stock portfolio? Cash. How do you get cash? Premiums. Premiums went up beceause insurance companies stock portfolios plumetted and they needed the cash to fill their reserve.
The Cell Phone hand crank article wasn't too clear, but can you only wind for 6 minutes of call time at once? The way i see it, if 30 seconds of cranking gets you 6 minutes of call time, then why don't I just crank for 5 minutes and get a whole hour? The article, however, kind of implies that you gotta crank it everytime you want to make a short call. Which would suck.
I recently broke my cell phone charger (cheap POS from sony ericcson seperated, leaving the plug in the phone and the leads not). I'm too cheap to replace it, and the car charger is too inconvenient (I don't drive much). Something like this would be terribly convenient, except replacing my real charger would probably be cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, those dinosaurs did great... which is why they are... extinct... and all. Yeah.
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Everyone knows that nothing dies until netcraft confirms it.
At my university, one of the first to sign an exclusive soda contract (with Coca Cola), there is a battle brewing over the renewal of the 10 year contract this summer (it's no coincidence that it was signed, and will be resigned, when students are away from campus). It didn't help that the university and Coke refused, for ten years, to discuss specifics of the contract, where money was going, etc. The Napster deal is pretty bad, but it's fairly sickening to have your school turn into a marketing arm of Coca Cola ("Always Rutgers-- Always Coca Cola"). As other posts have noted, most things involving students are an all-or-nothing proposition. Dining halls, particularly, are run this way (and it is also no coincidence that they, for the most part, are awful). What it comes down to is, is this something that the university should really be deciding for its students? Is this essential? Dining halls, yes. Bus service, sure. What brand of soda? Online music downloads? Hrmm.
It doesn't matter. Being able to detect it would be like buying an extra powerball ticket: it doesn't substantially improve your chances of winning. So what if you go from having a 1 in a bazillion chance of picking the right box to a 20 or 30 in a bazillion chance? With the pepsi bottle itunes thing it was different, because you had a reasonable chance to begin with. I don't know how many SUVs they are giving away but I doubt the odds are so good that you can actually improve your lot this way.
It's all relative.
Lightning travels from the ground up, where the free electrons are. The cell phones, presumably, have no ground so they're not susceptible to being hit by lightning. This is the same reason the space shuttle can't fly in inclement weather: the exhaust creates a ground column that the lightning surge can travel up, and bam: there goes the shuttle.
Ooh, ooh: FireLind. Or, better yet, LindFox.
"This is something even the greatest of technophobes could understand and use with ease."
Overstating a bit much? There are people out there, a surprising amount no doubt, that would have trouble using a system that consisted of one giant button on the screen if you didn't walk them through it. Most 'technophobes', and a great deal many of your average users probably as well, don't install software at all. Their computer comes with office, and a web browser, and an email program, and that's all they use. Or, if they do get around to installing something, it sits on their computer until the end of time. Once again this is an overstimation of how similar your typical technically knowledgeable linux user is to the average user, and in this case your average technophobe.
The multiple divisions follow various athletics policies, number of teams, attendence at games, etc standards. One big difference is that Division 1 schools have to award a minimum amount of "athletic scholarships". Division 3 schools do not award such 'scholar'ships. Division 1 schools have to field 11 teams, Division 3 schools: 5. Division 1 is where all the alleged money is. In reality it's mostly the networks and the NCAA organization itself that makes money.Because of cost restraints and other institutional characteristics you mainly see large reseach doctoral institutions in the Division 1 (for a really good explanation of why that is so, read Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus).
A conference is merely a collection of teams that regularly play each other. They typically are constructed based on traditional opponents and regionality, but with the onset of commercialzed big time athletics Division 1A conferences are motivated by other matters.
Well, the Ivy League is one sports conference (Division 1-AA I believe). Your school is in the Patriot Leage, which is Division III. What that means is, for the most part, those schools in your division don't whore themselves out to their athletics departments and the requisite boosters. Typically a school "regularly" (ie, each once a year) plays the teams in their own conference. However, as schedules are negotiated by Athletics Directors, it's not unusual to regularly play a non-conference school. Especially, for instance, in the case of rivalries or traditional games. For instance, my school (Rutgers), regularly played the anniversary game against Princeton (which was, of course, the oldest football rivalry at the time), even after Princeton joined the Ivy League and Rutgers opted not to. Unfortunately Rutgers then decided to start "big time" play and ended the annual game. Not coincidently they also decided to commence a steady fall into mediocrity that still continues to this day. But that's an entirely different conversation. The bottom line is yes the Ivy League teams play other schools. They are simply organized based around the athletics policies they decided to institute amongst themselves.
That's not a completely unusual practice. Teams play non-conference games all the time. However, there's no denying that the Ivy League is a sports conference and that the official organization of the Ivy League was around the issue of sports. Perhaps I'm missing your point, was there anything in particular I said that you take issue with?
Indeed true. The main origins of the Ivy League are their age and proximity to each other. All are in the northeast, and except for Cornell they represent all the colonial colleges save for two. Basically they're old football buddies. Rice is dramatically removed both in terms of geography and age (not coming into even premature existance until the turn of the 20th century).
Not that the comparison is necessarily unjustified, of course. Rice is one of the few Division 1 schools that doesn't completely neglect undergradate education. The corrupting influence of which was the impetus for the creation of the Ivy League.
You ned to upgrade to monkeyfox for the bug fix.
I agree. Especially in states where the state constitution provides an explicit right to privacy (for example, Alaska, a notoriously libertarian state). There is a big, big difference between filtering internet content and monitoring an individual. I recall when I was a freshman in high school the ELP (gifted program) lab computers had a program to take a screenshot every so many seconds and save them to be reviewed. It turns out that it was a student "administrator" who had installed it and who reviewed the screenshots. THAT was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Colleges and universities have pretty cleanly divided up the "education and research" responsibilities. Mainly, the colleges have the former, and the universities the latter.
Believe it or not the universities probably do provide the broadband for exactly this sort of student use. It's the same reason they ignore rampant alcohol use on campus, and the same reason they overemphasize sports teams. Major universities these days provide cardboard standup undergraduate educations, and seek mainly to entertain and divert their undergraduates' attentions, while they use their tuition dollars to build "research prestige".
For a good book on this subject, and the plight of higher education in America, pick up a copy of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Ruining Undergraduate Education . Though it views the issue through the lense of sports (obviously), the main focus is on the downward spiral that is undergraduate education at most American research universities (which, coincidently (wink), tend to correspond with the NCAA Division 1-A).
Well the concept of a species might not be the best example. Two individuals are generally recognized to be of the same species if they can mate and produce fertile offspring. So, for the most part it's not simply arbitrary set determination.
See: Mule
Just glue two of the suckers back to back
This sort of reminds me of something my idiot brother once did to my parents computer. My mom was complaining that the computer was acting strangely, so I went down there one weekend to take a look at it. Somehow someone had managed to trick the computer into showing the same partition twice. With different partition sizes. And if you deleted files in one of the partitions, it would delete it in the other (but would only show up after you rebooted). So I swore at my brother up and down, backed up the data, and reformatted. Worst weekend ever.
No, they'll learn not to let you touch the shiny objects next time, lest they get a repeat of LAST year's incident.
But seriously, these people (dishonest vendors) are like tubes of toothpaste... if you want them to do something it's not enough to squeeze them where they are at right now, cause they'll just go somewhere else where you don't want them. You have to squeeze them EVERYWHERE that you don't want them, and that's going to take a lot of time, and a lot of toothpaste. or something.
Well, there is "no market" or "clamor" for consumer grade 10 gigahertz processors, or terabyte hard disks, but thats not going to stop research into faster processors and larger hard drives. Microsoft might be laughing themselves till they pee and patting themselves on the back for coming up with that "innovation" line, but it does actually happen now and then. And no market for low power LCD displays? Are you insane? With todays laptops you're lucky if you break 2 hours of battery life. A lot of that is powering that backlight behind the display. Cutting the power the display takes will do wonders for battery life. And that there is a market for.
Do you typically play doom in a specially constructed fake house?
Actually, in retrospect, I was probably too rash. I just reviewed the article and it's not entirely clear if they're simply comparing the 1.8 tons to the actual weight of the car, or comparing the 1.8 tons to the equivalent material cost of a car. Though, my knowledge of cars is limited, but I'm inclined to consider the latter, as I recall hearing a lot about "full ton" pickups and '3/4 ton' pickups and the like, so I doubt a consumer car is 1.8 tons.
Regardless, I apologize for the tone of my reply.
It has the environmental impact of a midsized vehicle. I only skimmed the beginning of the article and i gleaned that much from it, come on.
Insurance rates do not skyrocket from lawsuits. There has not been a significant rise in number of suits or in total rewards.
Why then, do premiums rise so dramatically? The answer is simply because insurance companies are required to keep a certain percentage of their total coverages as a reserve. Certain amounts of this has to be in cash, but a good percentage can be in a stock or other market portfolio. That's right: a lot of this legally mandated reserve is in stocks. Guess what happens when the stock market crashes? That reserve evaporates. Can anyone remember anything like that happening recently?
So what happens when 80% of your reserve disappears? You have to get the money somehow, it's required. Legally. So what else can you put into the reserve, if not your now worthless stock portfolio? Cash. How do you get cash? Premiums. Premiums went up beceause insurance companies stock portfolios plumetted and they needed the cash to fill their reserve.
The Cell Phone hand crank article wasn't too clear, but can you only wind for 6 minutes of call time at once? The way i see it, if 30 seconds of cranking gets you 6 minutes of call time, then why don't I just crank for 5 minutes and get a whole hour? The article, however, kind of implies that you gotta crank it everytime you want to make a short call. Which would suck.
I recently broke my cell phone charger (cheap POS from sony ericcson seperated, leaving the plug in the phone and the leads not). I'm too cheap to replace it, and the car charger is too inconvenient (I don't drive much). Something like this would be terribly convenient, except replacing my real charger would probably be cheaper.