His address, income (stock sales) and political contributions ARE a matter of public record, and I am very glad they were publicized this way. Google's CEO should be glad, too, because it's a lot easier for the company to 'do evil' if stock prices, residences and political contributions aren't out in the open.
Only one problem with this. It is also a lot easier for people to do evil against the people who have their information publisized. Now all of a sudden Googles CEO has to worry a whole lot more about his kids (if he has any) getting kidnaped and held for ransom since everyone now knows where he and his children live. Same goes for members of his family and himself. Same pretty much goes for every other person who is worth a couple mil and up. Having everyone know you are worth a few (m/b)illion and everyone knowing where you live makes you a big target.
Celebrities and millionaires may not like us finding out where they live, etc. But they have the resources to insulate themselves from the scrutiny- as obviously they are trying to do, so it is reasonably in the public interest to know this stuff.
How is it in the publics interest to know Tom Cruise's home address? Or some random CEOs? I would think that their safety and privacy would trump any possible public interest. If you can think of a good enough reason, let me know.
I do not see "If the founders move to India, the investors should know that." as good enough reason for knowing the exact home address. If they sell of all their stock, they should know that. This would be made public anyway under current SEC requirements, but does not require knowing their address. In the case of Google, we really NEED to know that because their entire market could crash if they lose faith in the own stock. Again, this would be knowledge of the stock sale (which again by the SEC would be required to be made public) but no reason for knowing hte address. Their political contributions are important to avoid conflicts of interest
This one again does not require the address to be made public. Also, under election funding requirements anyone who donates over a certain ammount (not sure how much) must be listed and reported. This again does not required detailed information about where they live.
The main thing I am concerned about is detailed private information that serves no public interest when it is revealed. No one needs to know his exact home address, home phone number, cell phone number, his license plates, what kind of car he drives, or a whole host of other information that if revealed could serve to help people either harass or threaten him with no "public interest" reasons.
My advice would be that if you're a student, you NOT avoid any internship in your field! Any experience will be greatly beneficial in helping you get your next internship / real job. If its between lifeguarding and taking a crappy job in your field, I'd take the crappy job in your field.
My first internship in my field paid $6/hour. Halfway through the summer the funding ran out under the internship account (Was for 250 hours only) and they kept me on. At $10/hour (nice pay raise for 2.5 months work). The next year I was graduating and I was getting ready to call them and find out if I could do it again since I wasn't having any luck finding a job. They called me first. Money ran out in 2.5 months again. They kept me on at $12.50/hour. A few months later I was highered as a full time employee with benefits and all.
Low paying internships can turn into full time jobs. So yes, definitely take any internship in your field. Even if it only pays minimum wage (or even nothing at all in some cases).
Question: Can a method of finding that information be classified, while the information itself is not? What about a list of sources?
I'd have to check. I'll try to remember to post something later when I find out.
Now, back on the original topic, it's not ethical to assemble personal information from public sources and publish it. But then, it's not smart to have that information publically available. Kind of like how it's not ethical to leave your house unlocked or your wifi wide-open, but you've got no one to blame but yourself if you get burgled or 0wned.
Lets try something slightly different. Signatures & Credit Card/account numbers. We use them many places. It's not something we can easily avoid if we want to use a credit card or do banking. However, if someone gets a hold of one. (In this case a store/bank employee) They could really use it to screw up my life.
We leave pieces of information everywhere. And other people collect it and index it. For an example of getting someones home address. Starting with information Google put out there you know his:
Name, Where he works, the general location of where he lives.
Now, you can then get out your trusty electronic phone book (which oh so many places have digitized for easy searching) and find all people with the same name as him in the country. Narrow it down to the state and expected telephone exchange and you have maybe a few dozen at most. Now eliminate possibilities based on what else you may know. Then you can call the places and check or narrow it down further until you have one person left.
it's not ethical to assemble personal information from public sources and publish it. But then, it's not smart to have that information publically available
Sometimes we have no controll over what is available or we don't know we have controll over it. How many people think they need to have themselves unlisted from the phone book? (Aside from hollywood stars that is) You don't have to conciously put information online in order for it to get there. Someone else may do it for you.
I think the SUV thing largely depends on where you live within the US. Here in Idaho, SUVs and trucks are everywhere.
Interesting. Is it one of the places where you really need one? I have been in places where the people who live there need an SUV to get around. In West Virginia it is bad enough driving on dirt roads while they are dry. It gets much worse in the winter. Not sure how bad Idaho is. How much snow do you get in winter and how necessary is 4 wheel drive?
I know many people will respond with "Well I can do it, so it's ok, because if it's possible to find out, it's public, and there's no difference between information being buried in the net and it being collected in one place and published as a news story". No, it isn't ok and yes there is a difference.
There was a grad student a few years ago that collected a whole bunch of public information on powerlines, phone lines and fibre and internet lines. He sifted through it and made a very detailed map. The information contained therin could basically be used to take out a whole lot of critical infrastructure in the US.
In the government/military such works, even having come from public sources, can be classified due to the sheer amount of critical information in them. This does not mean the sources are classified, merely that the sifted sorted analyzed information is.
The fact some people do not subscribe to the notion of there being a reasonable expectation of privacy does not mean that people should just blast out personal facts about others willy nilly, solicited or unsolicited.
I can follow someone home, get their address, habits, realtionship status etc... From that I can get a bit more information using publicly available information (say, the phone book and the library) and after a bit I would be able to know a lot about them. This does not mean I then go and publish the information all over the internet along with all the information I found out.
Have you actually been paying attention to Japanese technology at all? Take a look at the size of mobile phones. Historically, they have been smaller than phones from the US, and they get smaller every year.
I remember seeing two phones that I'm not sure could get much smaller.
1) A watch phone just like dick tracy/inspector gadget had. The antenna went on the thumb (along with the earpiece) and you talked into your pinky. The watch contained the dialpad.
2) (This one belongs to friend of mine in Connecticut) It is about 1.25" by 0.5" by 2.5"-3". I'm not sure how much smaller they can get without losing them too easily.
Or how about Japanese cars? While Americans drive around in their gigantic, fuel-guzzling SUVs, Japanese drive VERY compact cars needed to navigate roads that are sometimes only 2.5-3 meters wide.
Where does this myth come from that everyone in the US drives an SUV? Most of us in the US drive sedans. I personally drive a Honda Accord (Hint, the car is Japanese). So where does this thing about everyone in the US driving a 3 meter wide SUV come from?
Second, on road width. 2.5-3 meters is 8.2 to 9.84 feet. I just drove down a street getting to work that had lanes 8 feet wide. We have just as narrow streets in the US. The "wide lanes" are on the interstates with speeds over 100km/h that have a 3 meter lane width.
A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it. Light travels at 300,000km/s so the travel time for a message is ~166ms. multiply by 4 (a->sat, sat->b, b->sat, sat->a) gives ~666ms, the latency of the beast;-).
OK, not the greatest but pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK so it's not as good but then not terrible either.
There is one additional source of delay that you are failing to take into account. When encoding and decoding the bitstream into RF, there is some delay. The transmitting end has less than the receiving end. On the receiving end, the RF signal has to be digitized, run through some form of Fast Fourier Transform and decoded to get the bitstream. This will add some time to the pings.
On a different note, I'm currious as to how they are going to get 100mbit out there. On a 36Mhz ku band transponder, the maximum throughput is probably close to 200mbit using DVB-S2 (the latest and greatest satelite transmission codes). They are going to need a lot of transponders/bandwidth to provide satelite broadband to the boonies.
One thing on the ping times though. For regular downloading of webpages, What if they set up on the ISPs end a cache manager that would take your request for a web page, cache all content on that web page (and a few surrounding links) and then forward you the web page along with all associated images all at once so you weren't requesting everything a packet at a time?
Based on this, we can take a huge bite out of that 32.8% publication cost. Make it 15%
Could be right, Editorial costs are going to remain as long as we want correct books. Though that doesn't prevent us from finding errors in the books after publishing.
The 10.2% general is also interesting. It's not clear from this what taxes are being paid.
Genernal administrative is "people overhead". From secretaries and costs for paperwork to all the other people that are paid at a publisher, but don't do anything that contribute directly to the publication of a book. The taxes also includes property tax, tax on the building, the equipment, taxes on the profits of the company and a few other things. That's my guess, anyway.
The 15.6% "marketing costs" isn't broken out, but it does mention cost of free copies given out to professors. So that can probably be reduced a little bit but I won't guess at how much.
I'm not sure how much this could be reduced. Marketing to a proffessor usually entails sending a copy of the book along with some info on it. There are other costs involved sucj as getting the mailing list of proffessors, but that is something else entirely.
The main thing I'm not sure of is if the Proffessors would read a non hard-copy version of the book. Also, as long as they are doing dual publishing of the book and the ebook, the professors would probably preffer the hard-copy version. I know I would, I preffer paper for long reading over CRTs and LCDs. Maybe when electronic paper gets to print quality we will be able to use that, until then, regular paper is still superior to me.
More importantly, if this issue isn't nipped in the bud firmly and immediately, we couold find ourselves on a slippery slope of truly brobdingnagian proportions. Imagine a world where you are under constant surveillance by law enforcement...not because you have a history of violent crime, but because you have a genetic predisposition to violence
I seem to recall a court case (that made it onto Law and Order [but I'm pretty sure it was a real court case first]) where someone tried to argue "not guilty by reason of a genetic predisposition towards X". The judge threw out that line of defence.
That said, I personally don't believe that you can have a genetic predisposition towards some things, a chunk of what falls under criminal behavior being some of it. I personally think that anyone that tries to argue "my genes made me do it" should be laughed out of court. But that is me. Anyone else?
Oddly enough, the Atlas V acually uses Russian engines in the 1st stage. Ironic for a rocket that was originally an ICBM.
One thing I've always wanted to seen done. Take all the US and Russian engineers, put them together, give them a blank check and the goal of colonizing space along with permission to use any and all knowlege (including classified) that they posses. And just wait to see how long it is until I'm living in orbit.
Re:Sometimes, we're just worried about students
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I was an Computer Engineering student myself (in case you don't know, that is Electrical Engineering with some digital and CS stuff thrown in). I'd have to check to see how old som of my used class books were. However, the 'core' books don't update that often. Ones on Resistors, transistors, capacitors, and such. A seond year book for a course caled "digital logic" had a new edition come out in 2001/2 ( my sophmore year). The second edition I bought for a summer program I took at a local college in high school summer before 10th grade (summer 1997). It had been in print for a few years at that point (copyright 1995). (Just checked, professor is still using same 3rd edition this fall semester).
So in summary, we have a book that was in use for 6 years for the 2nd and the 3rd has so far been in use for 4 years. [book:Digital Design
by M. Morris Mano]
Also, most (but not all) universities have hoops to jump through before a professor can use his own book. These tend to involve giving up the royalties or proving that there is no viable alternative.
I think this has to do with ethics. Universities don't want proffessors coming out with books to (on purpose) sell to their students and get some extra money that way. They are supposed to be making a living off what the university pays them, not by charging an addition "fee" (royalties) to the students to take the class. I'm not saying that is what most professors would do, just what some ethics boards could construe it to be (and I wouldn't be surprised if a few professors had done this with a purpose to make some extra money before).
Ity seems that all the books in my fields (statistics, economics) have gone to a three year cycle, with no purpose other than to defeat used textbooks.
Having talked to some other professors, this does appear to be the only reason. Exceptions being course books that students tend to keep such as non-freshmen year Engineering/Sciences course books and reference books that students tend to keep and not sell back.
If the publisher expects to sell 20,000 copies, (Number of copies taken from an example here, assuming first year cost recovery only) then if the $80 book still carries say $60 worth of "U" costs (Because R is essentially 0 for electronic formats) then that's a total of $1.2M paid for the production of the book.
Here's a link (warning, PDF) Summary breakdown:
%32.8 Publishers paper, printing, editorial costs.
%11.8 Authors Income
%10.2 Publishers general administrative
%15.6 Publishers marketing costs
%7.2 Publishers Income
%11.0 College store personel
%1.0 Freight/shipping
%6.3 College Store operations
%4.1 College store income
Total: 100%
%65.8 To the Publisher
%11.8 To the Author
%21.4 To the Store
%1.0 Shipping
So how much does a publisher buy the rights to a book for?
A publisher doesn't buy the rights to a book. It pays roylaties on the copies sold. See that %11.8 above.
Original Source In a link on this page a group talks about what can be done to reduce costs (California Public Interest Research Group's (PIRG) much-cited January 2004 report Rip-off 101(pdf)). Should be an interesting read. Main problem seems to stem from printing new editions and extras.
Never mind prior art claims between these patents, it's only the inclusion of the words 'portable media player', or similar, that stops the whole stack from being toppled by very clear prior art... This system is clearly ridiculous.
In other words, the whole thing should be thrown out under the "non-obvious" clause.
No one is required to buy the eBooks... yet. Or rather, they are still offering the printed versions because they want to see if they can get away with all electronic versions without too many headaches. If they can sell you a printed book for $100 (With like $70 profit) they will gladly sell you a $80 eBook for nearly $80 profit, since cost of duplication and distribution is virtually nil. You'll buy it because you'll save $20.
Ok, lets take a basic economics class here. There are two kinds of costs associated with creating any kind of product. I'll call them 'upfront' and 'recuring'. Upfront in the case is the cost of proffreading the books, making sure the material is correct, someone setting up the placement of all the text and pictures, paying people on staff and several other things. Also setting up of the presses, doing proofs to make sure everything is correct and some other things with "re-tooling" the production line
Then there is the recuring. Which is essnetially royalities, cost of materials and shipping.
We'll call the upfront cost 'U' and the recuring cost 'R' and the number of books sold 'X'. Profit shall be 'P'
This sets the individual cost of a book ('C') at C=(U/X)+R+C. Now, generally the upfront costs 'U' are fairly high and run in the thousands for amature books and much higher for more proffesional books that are generally used in colleges. As the production run of a book increases, the cost associated with an individual copy go down. However, eventually no matter how many are produced it will hit a rock bottom price of R+C+some small minute amount. (E.G. trade paperbacks)
So no, it is not 'nearly $80' in profit that they are making off of the e-books. I would be more likely to believe that the $20 reduction in you example is the costs associated with the physical manufacture of the material itself.
Re:Stallman was right up to this point ...
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Part of the problem is that, in the US, a lot of professors make serious cash by writing a textbook, producing a "new, improved version" every year (actually the old version with the questions rearranged a bit) and standardising on it for their course. This approach even locks out old versions of the textbook, let alone competing "open" textbooks.
The UK seems not to have this problem. This is one of the (comparatively few) areas where the USA would benefit from taking our lead.
Actually, there are many proffessors in the USA who will stick with one book and keep requiring the exact same version (saves on having to re-write course notes and such). This was in the Engineering courses, though.
From experience, it has been the freshmen level "101" courses that this occurs in (chem 101, bio 101, phy 101) and some various writing courses. I did not come across any upper level engineering courses where the books changed all that often. In one case, a professor was going back to an older version because she like it better.
So, it's not all the courses that have this, just the ones where the used market gets flooded every year. You know, those classes that everybody has to take where you're probably not ever going to use the books again unless you are majoring in the subject.
This means that an RF signal propagating through the atmosphere at a freq. of 60 GHz will be severly attenuated (up to 10,000 dB/km!)
I think you miss read what the article you linked to says. It says "10.000 db/km" not "10,000 db/km" (it's a decimal point, not a comma). Very large difference there.
I am 39 years old and am pleasantly amused at all this talk about laptops. I didn't grow up with laptops, so perhaps I am an "old fogey" about this, but I find it interesting that we are talking about things for children that I as an adult can't justify buying.
I'm 23 now (graduated and in a real job) and I feel like an "old fogey" comapred to most of the kids nowadays. I've had plenty of reasons to buy a laptop. Primarly being that I don't have to lug a desktop around and can get work done on the business trips. For back in school, I used it so I could get out of my room (where my main desktop was a distraction [ie games/internet/slashdot/roommate]) and go to someplace else with fewer distractions (dining hall, even if a band was playing).
But the main reason is cost. A decent laptop is $2000 or so (and that includes the MS tax),
I'm buying a pretty decent laptop this week that costs $1400, decent as in, 512MB ram, 40GB HD, 1.6 Pentium M, 64MB dedicated video NVIDIA Card, laptop is supposed to be good enough to play Doom 3 on. 2k+ is way over for that. That said, what a student would need (as in word processing, basic games and surfing_ could pretty much be accomplished by a sub $600 laptop I saw the other day, or a $250 computer from HP.
If the laptop is stolen or lost, who has to pay?
Either the school or the insurance agency. Depends on what is going on
I'm sure there are parents who are worried that their son/daughter is walking around with a device almost as expensive as a car that they did not have to pay for
Since when did a $500 laptop (which is about all that they need here) become as valuable as a $15,000 car? (and that is a cheap car).
How can students use this? The best use is campus wireless access (BTW, I live in Houston, where wifi access royally sucks). Notetaking perhaps, but that's an expensive fancy pencil there. I can imagine cases where it would be easy to swap files inside the classroom, where you can work outside or in small groups.
Writing up their papers. Most teachers I have known have required papers to be typed. This includes biology, chemistry and physics along with english. Second, handouts. Some handouts are easier to give out as a file rather than as printouts (where you lose color) or for handing out a copy of a presentation (where you lose color and any images presented [note, not all images show up well on printouts either]).
Educationally, let's look at the classroom benefits.
Chat--BFD, unless you are communicating with the astronauts
doing research--well, sure, but school machines could fulfill this purpose just as well
transporting schoolwork to/from school: hey, what about yahoo My Briefcase (20$ a year)? what about USB flash keychains?
See above about a few things. Typing papers, getting the notes, come math courses require a program called Maple, but that is calculus and above. I highly doubt they will be doing any chatting or research while in class. That said, sometimes it has been easier to bring my own laptop and present it that way than to use the teachers computer, especially when I don't know for sure if they have some of the programs I do (and sometimes for when I have a 40MB+ presentation to give).
Then there are some of the more specialized courses such as programming and CAD. Along with other various programs that you can get for classwork today. Think about some of the helper applications you can get to help with Chemistry, physics and biology. (Hint, refernce programs are easier to use than a reference book sometimes).
the tendency to teach concepts in terms of MS Office and Adobe products. From what I hear, quite a number of junior high students give Powerpoint presentations in their class.That is bad. We are simply creating MS customers (and I'll be reluctant to endorse any new technology unless the school district s
Interestingly enough, as a kid I made my own alcohol fueled rocket motor, based around a bottle filled with a alcohol/oxygen mix, a small orifice, and an ignition source.
Taking a large swig of 190 proof vodka, putting a lighter up to your mouth, and spitting out the vodka does not count as building your own rocket motor.;)
Or it could be the the mainstream media considers news as "entertainment". They want ratings, and that means covering news at the lowest common denominator. Hence reality TV shows (among other things). Nothing to do with censorship.
Remember the saying "Sex Sells". If it isn't sexy, it will get pushed back behind other stuff.
Okay- say what you will about deregulation, whatever. The issue to me, is that these lines are on public property, and in public airspace... Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines? If not, it seems that the phone companies should have to share/lease them out at a fair price.
So long as the cable company is also required to share at a fair price. The main problem right now is that cable internet is classified differently from DSL. Yet not much difference. Either way, treat them the same.
That said, a "fair price" is often up for debate. Is it "at cost"? Is it "at cost" plus "maintenance", is it "at cost" plus "maintenance" plus enough to recoup the initial investment and make some money off of it? It is a very gray area in most situations.
Slashdot Mirror
His address, income (stock sales) and political contributions ARE a matter of public record, and I am very glad they were publicized this way. Google's CEO should be glad, too, because it's a lot easier for the company to 'do evil' if stock prices, residences and political contributions aren't out in the open.
Only one problem with this. It is also a lot easier for people to do evil against the people who have their information publisized. Now all of a sudden Googles CEO has to worry a whole lot more about his kids (if he has any) getting kidnaped and held for ransom since everyone now knows where he and his children live. Same goes for members of his family and himself. Same pretty much goes for every other person who is worth a couple mil and up. Having everyone know you are worth a few (m/b)illion and everyone knowing where you live makes you a big target.
Celebrities and millionaires may not like us finding out where they live, etc. But they have the resources to insulate themselves from the scrutiny- as obviously they are trying to do, so it is reasonably in the public interest to know this stuff.
How is it in the publics interest to know Tom Cruise's home address? Or some random CEOs? I would think that their safety and privacy would trump any possible public interest. If you can think of a good enough reason, let me know.
I do not see "If the founders move to India, the investors should know that." as good enough reason for knowing the exact home address.
If they sell of all their stock, they should know that. This would be made public anyway under current SEC requirements, but does not require knowing their address.
In the case of Google, we really NEED to know that because their entire market could crash if they lose faith in the own stock. Again, this would be knowledge of the stock sale (which again by the SEC would be required to be made public) but no reason for knowing hte address.
Their political contributions are important to avoid conflicts of interest
This one again does not require the address to be made public. Also, under election funding requirements anyone who donates over a certain ammount (not sure how much) must be listed and reported. This again does not required detailed information about where they live.
The main thing I am concerned about is detailed private information that serves no public interest when it is revealed. No one needs to know his exact home address, home phone number, cell phone number, his license plates, what kind of car he drives, or a whole host of other information that if revealed could serve to help people either harass or threaten him with no "public interest" reasons.
My advice would be that if you're a student, you NOT avoid any internship in your field! Any experience will be greatly beneficial in helping you get your next internship / real job. If its between lifeguarding and taking a crappy job in your field, I'd take the crappy job in your field.
My first internship in my field paid $6/hour. Halfway through the summer the funding ran out under the internship account (Was for 250 hours only) and they kept me on. At $10/hour (nice pay raise for 2.5 months work). The next year I was graduating and I was getting ready to call them and find out if I could do it again since I wasn't having any luck finding a job. They called me first. Money ran out in 2.5 months again. They kept me on at $12.50/hour. A few months later I was highered as a full time employee with benefits and all.
Low paying internships can turn into full time jobs. So yes, definitely take any internship in your field. Even if it only pays minimum wage (or even nothing at all in some cases).
Question: Can a method of finding that information be classified, while the information itself is not? What about a list of sources?
The sources themselves would not become classified. However, it is possible that the list of sources might (depending on the list) become classified.
Aren't there laws about making absolutely unreasonable legal threats towards someone? ...
Yes. It can fall under extortion and harrasment, among others.
Question: Can a method of finding that information be classified, while the information itself is not? What about a list of sources?
I'd have to check. I'll try to remember to post something later when I find out.
Now, back on the original topic, it's not ethical to assemble personal information from public sources and publish it. But then, it's not smart to have that information publically available. Kind of like how it's not ethical to leave your house unlocked or your wifi wide-open, but you've got no one to blame but yourself if you get burgled or 0wned.
Lets try something slightly different. Signatures & Credit Card/account numbers. We use them many places. It's not something we can easily avoid if we want to use a credit card or do banking. However, if someone gets a hold of one. (In this case a store/bank employee) They could really use it to screw up my life.
We leave pieces of information everywhere. And other people collect it and index it.
For an example of getting someones home address. Starting with information Google put out there you know his:
Name, Where he works, the general location of where he lives.
Now, you can then get out your trusty electronic phone book (which oh so many places have digitized for easy searching) and find all people with the same name as him in the country. Narrow it down to the state and expected telephone exchange and you have maybe a few dozen at most. Now eliminate possibilities based on what else you may know. Then you can call the places and check or narrow it down further until you have one person left.
it's not ethical to assemble personal information from public sources and publish it. But then, it's not smart to have that information publically available
Sometimes we have no controll over what is available or we don't know we have controll over it. How many people think they need to have themselves unlisted from the phone book? (Aside from hollywood stars that is) You don't have to conciously put information online in order for it to get there. Someone else may do it for you.
I think the SUV thing largely depends on where you live within the US. Here in Idaho, SUVs and trucks are everywhere.
Interesting. Is it one of the places where you really need one? I have been in places where the people who live there need an SUV to get around. In West Virginia it is bad enough driving on dirt roads while they are dry. It gets much worse in the winter. Not sure how bad Idaho is. How much snow do you get in winter and how necessary is 4 wheel drive?
To add some:
I know many people will respond with "Well I can do it, so it's ok, because if it's possible to find out, it's public, and there's no difference between information being buried in the net and it being collected in one place and published as a news story". No, it isn't ok and yes there is a difference.
There was a grad student a few years ago that collected a whole bunch of public information on powerlines, phone lines and fibre and internet lines. He sifted through it and made a very detailed map. The information contained therin could basically be used to take out a whole lot of critical infrastructure in the US.
In the government/military such works, even having come from public sources, can be classified due to the sheer amount of critical information in them. This does not mean the sources are classified, merely that the sifted sorted analyzed information is.
The fact some people do not subscribe to the notion of there being a reasonable expectation of privacy does not mean that people should just blast out personal facts about others willy nilly, solicited or unsolicited.
I can follow someone home, get their address, habits, realtionship status etc... From that I can get a bit more information using publicly available information (say, the phone book and the library) and after a bit I would be able to know a lot about them. This does not mean I then go and publish the information all over the internet along with all the information I found out.
Have you actually been paying attention to Japanese technology at all? Take a look at the size of mobile phones. Historically, they have been smaller than phones from the US, and they get smaller every year.
I remember seeing two phones that I'm not sure could get much smaller.
1) A watch phone just like dick tracy/inspector gadget had. The antenna went on the thumb (along with the earpiece) and you talked into your pinky. The watch contained the dialpad.
2) (This one belongs to friend of mine in Connecticut) It is about 1.25" by 0.5" by 2.5"-3". I'm not sure how much smaller they can get without losing them too easily.
Or how about Japanese cars? While Americans drive around in their gigantic, fuel-guzzling SUVs, Japanese drive VERY compact cars needed to navigate roads that are sometimes only 2.5-3 meters wide.
Where does this myth come from that everyone in the US drives an SUV? Most of us in the US drive sedans. I personally drive a Honda Accord (Hint, the car is Japanese). So where does this thing about everyone in the US driving a 3 meter wide SUV come from?
Second, on road width. 2.5-3 meters is 8.2 to 9.84 feet. I just drove down a street getting to work that had lanes 8 feet wide. We have just as narrow streets in the US. The "wide lanes" are on the interstates with speeds over 100km/h that have a 3 meter lane width.
In Japan they have to zigzag the cables across insanely steep ravines because the country is so mountainous
In other words it's like West Virginia and Colorado with the population density of Wyoming?
A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it. Light travels at 300,000km/s so the travel time for a message is ~166ms. multiply by 4 (a->sat, sat->b, b->sat, sat->a) gives ~666ms, the latency of the beast ;-).
OK, not the greatest but pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK so it's not as good but then not terrible either.
There is one additional source of delay that you are failing to take into account. When encoding and decoding the bitstream into RF, there is some delay. The transmitting end has less than the receiving end. On the receiving end, the RF signal has to be digitized, run through some form of Fast Fourier Transform and decoded to get the bitstream. This will add some time to the pings.
On a different note, I'm currious as to how they are going to get 100mbit out there. On a 36Mhz ku band transponder, the maximum throughput is probably close to 200mbit using DVB-S2 (the latest and greatest satelite transmission codes). They are going to need a lot of transponders/bandwidth to provide satelite broadband to the boonies.
One thing on the ping times though. For regular downloading of webpages, What if they set up on the ISPs end a cache manager that would take your request for a web page, cache all content on that web page (and a few surrounding links) and then forward you the web page along with all associated images all at once so you weren't requesting everything a packet at a time?
Based on this, we can take a huge bite out of that 32.8% publication cost. Make it 15%
Could be right, Editorial costs are going to remain as long as we want correct books. Though that doesn't prevent us from finding errors in the books after publishing.
The 10.2% general is also interesting. It's not clear from this what taxes are being paid.
Genernal administrative is "people overhead". From secretaries and costs for paperwork to all the other people that are paid at a publisher, but don't do anything that contribute directly to the publication of a book. The taxes also includes property tax, tax on the building, the equipment, taxes on the profits of the company and a few other things. That's my guess, anyway.
The 15.6% "marketing costs" isn't broken out, but it does mention cost of free copies given out to professors. So that can probably be reduced a little bit but I won't guess at how much.
I'm not sure how much this could be reduced. Marketing to a proffessor usually entails sending a copy of the book along with some info on it. There are other costs involved sucj as getting the mailing list of proffessors, but that is something else entirely.
The main thing I'm not sure of is if the Proffessors would read a non hard-copy version of the book. Also, as long as they are doing dual publishing of the book and the ebook, the professors would probably preffer the hard-copy version. I know I would, I preffer paper for long reading over CRTs and LCDs. Maybe when electronic paper gets to print quality we will be able to use that, until then, regular paper is still superior to me.
should be "('C') at C=(U/X)+R+P."
Gah, I really hate typos.
More importantly, if this issue isn't nipped in the bud firmly and immediately, we couold find ourselves on a slippery slope of truly brobdingnagian proportions. Imagine a world where you are under constant surveillance by law enforcement...not because you have a history of violent crime, but because you have a genetic predisposition to violence
I seem to recall a court case (that made it onto Law and Order [but I'm pretty sure it was a real court case first]) where someone tried to argue "not guilty by reason of a genetic predisposition towards X". The judge threw out that line of defence.
That said, I personally don't believe that you can have a genetic predisposition towards some things, a chunk of what falls under criminal behavior being some of it. I personally think that anyone that tries to argue "my genes made me do it" should be laughed out of court. But that is me. Anyone else?
Oddly enough, the Atlas V acually uses Russian engines in the 1st stage. Ironic for a rocket that was originally an ICBM.
One thing I've always wanted to seen done. Take all the US and Russian engineers, put them together, give them a blank check and the goal of colonizing space along with permission to use any and all knowlege (including classified) that they posses. And just wait to see how long it is until I'm living in orbit.
I was an Computer Engineering student myself (in case you don't know, that is Electrical Engineering with some digital and CS stuff thrown in). I'd have to check to see how old som of my used class books were. However, the 'core' books don't update that often. Ones on Resistors, transistors, capacitors, and such. A seond year book for a course caled "digital logic" had a new edition come out in 2001/2 ( my sophmore year). The second edition I bought for a summer program I took at a local college in high school summer before 10th grade (summer 1997). It had been in print for a few years at that point (copyright 1995). (Just checked, professor is still using same 3rd edition this fall semester).
So in summary, we have a book that was in use for 6 years for the 2nd and the 3rd has so far been in use for 4 years. [book:Digital Design by M. Morris Mano]
Also, most (but not all) universities have hoops to jump through before a professor can use his own book. These tend to involve giving up the royalties or proving that there is no viable alternative.
I think this has to do with ethics. Universities don't want proffessors coming out with books to (on purpose) sell to their students and get some extra money that way. They are supposed to be making a living off what the university pays them, not by charging an addition "fee" (royalties) to the students to take the class. I'm not saying that is what most professors would do, just what some ethics boards could construe it to be (and I wouldn't be surprised if a few professors had done this with a purpose to make some extra money before).
Ity seems that all the books in my fields (statistics, economics) have gone to a three year cycle, with no purpose other than to defeat used textbooks.
Having talked to some other professors, this does appear to be the only reason. Exceptions being course books that students tend to keep such as non-freshmen year Engineering/Sciences course books and reference books that students tend to keep and not sell back.
If the publisher expects to sell 20,000 copies, (Number of copies taken from an example here, assuming first year cost recovery only) then if the $80 book still carries say $60 worth of "U" costs (Because R is essentially 0 for electronic formats) then that's a total of $1.2M paid for the production of the book.
Here's a link (warning, PDF) Summary breakdown:
%32.8 Publishers paper, printing, editorial costs.
%11.8 Authors Income
%10.2 Publishers general administrative
%15.6 Publishers marketing costs
%7.2 Publishers Income
%11.0 College store personel
%1.0 Freight/shipping
%6.3 College Store operations
%4.1 College store income
Total: 100%
%65.8 To the Publisher %11.8 To the Author %21.4 To the Store %1.0 Shipping
So how much does a publisher buy the rights to a book for?
A publisher doesn't buy the rights to a book. It pays roylaties on the copies sold. See that %11.8 above.
Original Source In a link on this page a group talks about what can be done to reduce costs (California Public Interest Research Group's (PIRG) much-cited January 2004 report Rip-off 101(pdf)). Should be an interesting read. Main problem seems to stem from printing new editions and extras.
Never mind prior art claims between these patents, it's only the inclusion of the words 'portable media player', or similar, that stops the whole stack from being toppled by very clear prior art... This system is clearly ridiculous.
In other words, the whole thing should be thrown out under the "non-obvious" clause.
No one is required to buy the eBooks... yet. Or rather, they are still offering the printed versions because they want to see if they can get away with all electronic versions without too many headaches. If they can sell you a printed book for $100 (With like $70 profit) they will gladly sell you a $80 eBook for nearly $80 profit, since cost of duplication and distribution is virtually nil. You'll buy it because you'll save $20.
Ok, lets take a basic economics class here. There are two kinds of costs associated with creating any kind of product. I'll call them 'upfront' and 'recuring'. Upfront in the case is the cost of proffreading the books, making sure the material is correct, someone setting up the placement of all the text and pictures, paying people on staff and several other things. Also setting up of the presses, doing proofs to make sure everything is correct and some other things with "re-tooling" the production line
Then there is the recuring. Which is essnetially royalities, cost of materials and shipping.
We'll call the upfront cost 'U' and the recuring cost 'R' and the number of books sold 'X'. Profit shall be 'P'
This sets the individual cost of a book ('C') at C=(U/X)+R+C. Now, generally the upfront costs 'U' are fairly high and run in the thousands for amature books and much higher for more proffesional books that are generally used in colleges. As the production run of a book increases, the cost associated with an individual copy go down. However, eventually no matter how many are produced it will hit a rock bottom price of R+C+some small minute amount. (E.G. trade paperbacks)
So no, it is not 'nearly $80' in profit that they are making off of the e-books. I would be more likely to believe that the $20 reduction in you example is the costs associated with the physical manufacture of the material itself.
Part of the problem is that, in the US, a lot of professors make serious cash by writing a textbook, producing a "new, improved version" every year (actually the old version with the questions rearranged a bit) and standardising on it for their course. This approach even locks out old versions of the textbook, let alone competing "open" textbooks.
The UK seems not to have this problem. This is one of the (comparatively few) areas where the USA would benefit from taking our lead.
Actually, there are many proffessors in the USA who will stick with one book and keep requiring the exact same version (saves on having to re-write course notes and such). This was in the Engineering courses, though.
From experience, it has been the freshmen level "101" courses that this occurs in (chem 101, bio 101, phy 101) and some various writing courses. I did not come across any upper level engineering courses where the books changed all that often. In one case, a professor was going back to an older version because she like it better.
So, it's not all the courses that have this, just the ones where the used market gets flooded every year. You know, those classes that everybody has to take where you're probably not ever going to use the books again unless you are majoring in the subject.
This means that an RF signal propagating through the atmosphere at a freq. of 60 GHz will be severly attenuated (up to 10,000 dB/km!)
I think you miss read what the article you linked to says. It says "10.000 db/km" not "10,000 db/km" (it's a decimal point, not a comma). Very large difference there.
I am 39 years old and am pleasantly amused at all this talk about laptops. I didn't grow up with laptops, so perhaps I am an "old fogey" about this, but I find it interesting that we are talking about things for children that I as an adult can't justify buying.
I'm 23 now (graduated and in a real job) and I feel like an "old fogey" comapred to most of the kids nowadays. I've had plenty of reasons to buy a laptop. Primarly being that I don't have to lug a desktop around and can get work done on the business trips. For back in school, I used it so I could get out of my room (where my main desktop was a distraction [ie games/internet/slashdot/roommate]) and go to someplace else with fewer distractions (dining hall, even if a band was playing).
But the main reason is cost. A decent laptop is $2000 or so (and that includes the MS tax),
I'm buying a pretty decent laptop this week that costs $1400, decent as in, 512MB ram, 40GB HD, 1.6 Pentium M, 64MB dedicated video NVIDIA Card, laptop is supposed to be good enough to play Doom 3 on. 2k+ is way over for that. That said, what a student would need (as in word processing, basic games and surfing_ could pretty much be accomplished by a sub $600 laptop I saw the other day, or a $250 computer from HP.
If the laptop is stolen or lost, who has to pay?
Either the school or the insurance agency. Depends on what is going on
I'm sure there are parents who are worried that their son/daughter is walking around with a device almost as expensive as a car that they did not have to pay for
Since when did a $500 laptop (which is about all that they need here) become as valuable as a $15,000 car? (and that is a cheap car).
How can students use this? The best use is campus wireless access (BTW, I live in Houston, where wifi access royally sucks). Notetaking perhaps, but that's an expensive fancy pencil there. I can imagine cases where it would be easy to swap files inside the classroom, where you can work outside or in small groups.
Writing up their papers. Most teachers I have known have required papers to be typed. This includes biology, chemistry and physics along with english. Second, handouts. Some handouts are easier to give out as a file rather than as printouts (where you lose color) or for handing out a copy of a presentation (where you lose color and any images presented [note, not all images show up well on printouts either]).
Educationally, let's look at the classroom benefits. Chat--BFD, unless you are communicating with the astronauts doing research--well, sure, but school machines could fulfill this purpose just as well transporting schoolwork to/from school: hey, what about yahoo My Briefcase (20$ a year)? what about USB flash keychains?
See above about a few things. Typing papers, getting the notes, come math courses require a program called Maple, but that is calculus and above. I highly doubt they will be doing any chatting or research while in class. That said, sometimes it has been easier to bring my own laptop and present it that way than to use the teachers computer, especially when I don't know for sure if they have some of the programs I do (and sometimes for when I have a 40MB+ presentation to give).
Then there are some of the more specialized courses such as programming and CAD. Along with other various programs that you can get for classwork today. Think about some of the helper applications you can get to help with Chemistry, physics and biology. (Hint, refernce programs are easier to use than a reference book sometimes).
the tendency to teach concepts in terms of MS Office and Adobe products. From what I hear, quite a number of junior high students give Powerpoint presentations in their class.That is bad. We are simply creating MS customers (and I'll be reluctant to endorse any new technology unless the school district s
Interestingly enough, as a kid I made my own alcohol fueled rocket motor, based around a bottle filled with a alcohol/oxygen mix, a small orifice, and an ignition source.
;)
Taking a large swig of 190 proof vodka, putting a lighter up to your mouth, and spitting out the vodka does not count as building your own rocket motor.
Or it could be the the mainstream media considers news as "entertainment". They want ratings, and that means covering news at the lowest common denominator. Hence reality TV shows (among other things). Nothing to do with censorship.
Remember the saying "Sex Sells". If it isn't sexy, it will get pushed back behind other stuff.
And how this is different from what the cable companies did?
Okay- say what you will about deregulation, whatever. The issue to me, is that these lines are on public property, and in public airspace... Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines? If not, it seems that the phone companies should have to share/lease them out at a fair price.
So long as the cable company is also required to share at a fair price. The main problem right now is that cable internet is classified differently from DSL. Yet not much difference. Either way, treat them the same.
That said, a "fair price" is often up for debate. Is it "at cost"? Is it "at cost" plus "maintenance", is it "at cost" plus "maintenance" plus enough to recoup the initial investment and make some money off of it? It is a very gray area in most situations.