One more thing.. the money saved can help improve the salaries of teachers, thus attracting better skilled and capable people. There are a lot of good teachers, but there are also some lemons (as with any profession). Being able to pay teachers and school administrators will help improve academics overall in this country.
I wonder if there is already enough documentation on history online that one could effectively roll up an index of web sites / pages to read that collectively make up a textbook. The major issue with an online media index as I propose is that there is no control of the content to which it points. The history records literally can change and the teacher has no knowledge of it unless they continually review it.
It would be a slick idea though to have a means for teachers to produce their own curriculum that meets certain requirements but provides them the freedom to be the most effective based on their own style of teaching and the personalities of the students in their classrooms. Imagine a tailored textbook that reads like you need it to read in order to best comprehend it. The basic facts you are taught can be the same, but the presentation can be tailored to your learning style.
Certainly it will cost money to host all that material reliably and provide it to classrooms across America, but it should cost only a fraction of what is being spent on hard copy textbooks. I have done a lot of work in IT hosting. I understand the costs of infrastructure hardware and software, hardware and software support contracts, highly skilled people to maintain and administer the environment, networking, security, etc. I think this is absolutely worth pursuing and commend McNealy for pushing it forward. Even testing and grading can be done online with a system like this, taking even more workload off the teachers who are already stretched beyond reasonable limits.
What online textbooks can't do is the direct student-teacher interaction where problems are worked on a whiteboard or via overhead projector with question/answer dialogue that meets the individual needs of each student and fosters student-student and student-teacher interaction.
Technically, any text that an individual writes on Facebook is copyrighted as their own creative work, like it or not. Redistributing it in whole would violate that individual's copyrights on their own text. Anonymous, aggregated statistics probably would not be governed by that. Whether the Facebook TOS could be imposed on anonymous crawling of the site is the real legal question one would have to answer, I guess. Is crawling the site and copying the data comparable to viewing the site? Facebook might argue that it is, and then might argue therefore that their TOS are enforceable.
Are you a US citizen? Are your parents old enough to draw social security, and use the medicare benefits? Do they use them? Have you looked at the cost of your parent's prescriptions? Could they afford them without Medicare and Social Security? I'm generally a fiscal conservative and opposed to raising taxes, more government, etc. I didn't vote for Obama. There are some programs that make sense, and these definitely help out people who need them. My mother-in-law would not have had the care she needed for multiple sclerosis had it not been for Medicare and Medicaid. She suffered from multiple sclerosis for 20 years. and was disabled and could not work for nearly a decade of her 20-year struggle with the disease prior to her death from complications related to MS.
By the way, your figures appear to be incorrect. Remember that social security and medicare are "pay as you go" programs where what is paid in by employers and employees gets paid out to current recipients. It isn't a savings account for you to bank on later. According the Obama's budget summary, social security will run $696B (not $14T), medicare will run $452B (not $76T + $18.6T). That website you quote doesn't even provide a reference to their sources of information. I looked at the President's actual budget. Don't believe everything you read on websites that try to convince you they have "the facts". Always look at where their "facts" are sourced. My numbers are from the White House web page on the President's budget at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Summary_Tables/.
There are plenty of places where Congress should chop. Take a look at the pork barrel projects in your own state that your own Senators and Representatives toss in to get funding. Take a look at the numerous failed social programs. Take a look at the Federal procurement guidelines and how much it cost us to make an actual procurement. There are so many ways that the Federal procurement process alone could be simplified that would eliminate an enormous amount of wasted spending. For example, a private sector company can by $100,000 in IT assets and have it delivered in a week or two. It takes six months in the Federal government, and reams of paper. The larger the price tag, the more paperwork and time required to make the acquisition. I've worked in both arenas and speak from first hand experience.
Also take a look at the money the US hands out all over the world, as well as the programs inside the US. There are great causes we should support. There are countries who need help. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of beneficiaries who should not be getting a dime but they have friends in high places.
The Federal income tax revenue, and income from foreign loan interest and import tariffs, is tens of trillions of dollars annually. It isn't that we don't have enough money to fund the things we need. It is that we fund too many things we don't need. That being said, social security, medicare and medicaid are not in the list of programs "we don't need". If your parents are recipients of any of these programs, ask them how they would be impacted without them.
Microsoft will never use such a technology. Imagine how long it would take for the next release of Windows if Microsoft had to prove it met all of its specifications as documented? Oh, and imagine if Microsoft actually had to prove that they implemented a standard as specified by an authoritative, recognized standards body (i.e. LDAP, HTML5, JavaScript, etc)? I think this is great for embedded systems where failure can equal catastrophe. How long will it take to apply this formal methodology to an end-user operating system like OS X, Linux or Windows?
The preview site http://www.office2010themovie.com/index-hd.html requires Silverlight. I refuse to install yet another plug-in. Hope Microsoft doesn't require Silverlight to use Office 2010.
The definition of plaigarism is that one passes another's work off as their own. It has nothing to do with whether they had permission to do so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
In addition, Google is providing the content of the book to the world. TurnItIn is only providing the paper content to the individual teacher. TurnItIn is making money from a service provided to the education community. Google is making money from advertisements to a world wide audience who were attracted by the book content which is commercial use of the book content with no other purpose.
Is it possible that Sun finally decided to open-source Solaris in hopes the OSS community would help them port it to more platforms? The user gets the "stability" of a commercial operating system with the "compatibility" of an open source operating system. Sun may also brag about the enhanced security that Open Solaris provides because of all the eyes allowed to poke into it, discover the holes, and close them.
Modern professional cameras can capture 14 bits of information. Most monitors display 8 bits or less. We can only see an approximation of what we capture. The more bits of information that can be displayed, the closer we get to seeing the actual camera data.
Of course, most print today is still in CMYK color space, which is a much smaller gamut than the information we can capture with cameras.
Exactly! People who work in color managed work flows need exact color representation and will want this. We need to know that what we see is what will be in a publication.
I would say the entry price is a bit steep, except that pro photographers will spend twice as much on a camera body alone. They will keep that camera body for less time than they will keep this monitor.
Are we sure this isn't already being done in some way? Perhaps not in the exact manner you describe. Why assume they are not already working with these hardware and software manufacturers?
Finally someone with knowledge of the subject and the laws governing it. Kudos to you! The US, in fact, is the only country in the WORLD with Fair Use laws. I am a professional photographer and have researched this at great length so that I can defend my copyrights from jerks who think any image on a website is public domain. WRONG!
I disagree with the person who suggested copyright be limited to 20 years. Any individual who creates an original work should be able to exploit that work exclusively for the rest of their lives. They took the risk, invested their creative energies, and invested their own money. They should reap all the rewards. If they are paid a regular salary by someone else to spend all their time researching and developing products, then the company who pays them should own what they create. The company took the financial risk. The company should reap the financial reward.
Granting exclusive rights for 70 years after death gives individuals something to pass on to children and grandchildren. Few individuals become wealthy from their creations. Those that do generally did so by turning into a corporation or selling their creation to a corporation who can afford to take it to the next level. Corporations are not granted the same period of exclusivity granted to individuals. Drug companies only get a fixed number of years of exclusivity before the generics can start selling. It isn't like individuals passing on intellectual property rights are creating wealthy heirs like Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, William Randolph Hurst, J.D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, or even a modern business mogul like Warren Buffet, Jack Welch, Donald Trump or Steve Wynn.
How many individual intellectual property creators get rich? How many bands, artists, photographers, composers, writers are there vs. those that get rich? Less than 1 percent. The term "starving artist" is not a meaningless phrase. Are you jealous of ones that do like Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger, Annie Leibovitz? Ansel Adam's work has earned more money in the 24 years since his death in 1984 than he earned over his entire life. Do you think his heirs should be robbed of that?
I own every recording in my possession. No you don't, unless you wrote it. You purchased a license from the copyright owner to have a copy in your possession for personal use. The song writer, musician, or record label "owns" the recording.
Passwords are not copyrighted. They are a right of privacy. News Corp was protecting the privacy of its users, which it has a legal responsibility to do.
I also second iView Media Pro. I am a professional photographer. Nothing beats it. I have looked at many of the other tools mentioned (iMatch, ThumbsPlus, Extensis Portfolio). iView simply beats them all, and works on Mac and Windows. It supports a lot more types of digital assets than just image files. It will let you catalog your movie files, PDFs, documents, pretty much every image file type (including practically every raw file format), adobe DNG, and so much more.
One of the most powerful features of iView is that it can write all of the metadata back to your original files, making it easy to migrate from iView to any other catalog system at a future date. This feature is also nice because some PHP gallery packages like Coppermine and Gallery 2 can import this data and automatically populate picture data in your online photo gallery. So you key the info in one time and you are done.
iView also has a free catalog reader. You can export portions of your image catalog to a separate catalog file, and share it via the read-only reader. iView can also export its database in many formats.
What percent of pages actually visited have porn?
on
Internet Only 1% Porn
·
· Score: 1
Let's assume it is true that only 1 percent of all web pages in existence contain porn. What percent of all web pages actually visited contain porn? I bet that is higher than 1 percent.
Why is Microsoft proposing yet another image file format? Because they want control of the specifications. They have no interest in open, cross-platform standards. Even if they publish their specifications and call them "open", they own them so they will have sole control over them. And when has Microsoft ever gotten an "open" specification right? They can't even implement LDAP right. They have to bastardize it and call it Active Directory.
Why not support the PNG file format (http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/ - Portable Network Graphics? Note that PNG is never mentioned anywhere in the Windows Media Photo specification document. PNG is patent free, widely supported, uses lossless compression and supports most all of the features of the proposed WMPhoto format. I see no benefit of the WMPhoto format over PNG. The only benefit I see is for Microsoft to control the specification and sell software that supports it. It is yet another way that Microsoft is trying to monopolize the desktop and make everything be about Windows. They even put Windows in the format specification name. If they wanted it to be open, they would not have included that in the name. This pisses me off.
Read the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA on the NSA. It has links to a lot of information. One interesting note in the ECHELON section is the suggestion that the NSA "end runs" around privacy by reciprocating spying activities with other countries. Ask another country to spy on someone in the US and we will spy on someone in their country in return. Through semantics, they can argue that they are not spying on US citizens. No concrete evidence is offered. It merely suggests that is happening.
Slashdot Mirror
One more thing .. the money saved can help improve the salaries of teachers, thus attracting better skilled and capable people. There are a lot of good teachers, but there are also some lemons (as with any profession). Being able to pay teachers and school administrators will help improve academics overall in this country.
I wonder if there is already enough documentation on history online that one could effectively roll up an index of web sites / pages to read that collectively make up a textbook. The major issue with an online media index as I propose is that there is no control of the content to which it points. The history records literally can change and the teacher has no knowledge of it unless they continually review it.
It would be a slick idea though to have a means for teachers to produce their own curriculum that meets certain requirements but provides them the freedom to be the most effective based on their own style of teaching and the personalities of the students in their classrooms. Imagine a tailored textbook that reads like you need it to read in order to best comprehend it. The basic facts you are taught can be the same, but the presentation can be tailored to your learning style.
Certainly it will cost money to host all that material reliably and provide it to classrooms across America, but it should cost only a fraction of what is being spent on hard copy textbooks. I have done a lot of work in IT hosting. I understand the costs of infrastructure hardware and software, hardware and software support contracts, highly skilled people to maintain and administer the environment, networking, security, etc. I think this is absolutely worth pursuing and commend McNealy for pushing it forward. Even testing and grading can be done online with a system like this, taking even more workload off the teachers who are already stretched beyond reasonable limits.
What online textbooks can't do is the direct student-teacher interaction where problems are worked on a whiteboard or via overhead projector with question/answer dialogue that meets the individual needs of each student and fosters student-student and student-teacher interaction.
How hypocritical for a site that bases it whole business model on copyright infringement, and advocates it, would then blackmail you for it.
If using an apache web server, one can use .htaccess to explicitly control content access. That still doesn't discern intent or use of the content.
Technically, any text that an individual writes on Facebook is copyrighted as their own creative work, like it or not. Redistributing it in whole would violate that individual's copyrights on their own text. Anonymous, aggregated statistics probably would not be governed by that. Whether the Facebook TOS could be imposed on anonymous crawling of the site is the real legal question one would have to answer, I guess. Is crawling the site and copying the data comparable to viewing the site? Facebook might argue that it is, and then might argue therefore that their TOS are enforceable.
Wow. A market cap of a whopping $2.1M now.
Since the walled garden (iPhone) doesn't have an SD card slot, we would not be affected. So the walled garden does protect us.
Are you a US citizen? Are your parents old enough to draw social security, and use the medicare benefits? Do they use them? Have you looked at the cost of your parent's prescriptions? Could they afford them without Medicare and Social Security? I'm generally a fiscal conservative and opposed to raising taxes, more government, etc. I didn't vote for Obama. There are some programs that make sense, and these definitely help out people who need them. My mother-in-law would not have had the care she needed for multiple sclerosis had it not been for Medicare and Medicaid. She suffered from multiple sclerosis for 20 years. and was disabled and could not work for nearly a decade of her 20-year struggle with the disease prior to her death from complications related to MS.
By the way, your figures appear to be incorrect. Remember that social security and medicare are "pay as you go" programs where what is paid in by employers and employees gets paid out to current recipients. It isn't a savings account for you to bank on later. According the Obama's budget summary, social security will run $696B (not $14T), medicare will run $452B (not $76T + $18.6T). That website you quote doesn't even provide a reference to their sources of information. I looked at the President's actual budget. Don't believe everything you read on websites that try to convince you they have "the facts". Always look at where their "facts" are sourced. My numbers are from the White House web page on the President's budget at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Summary_Tables/.
There are plenty of places where Congress should chop. Take a look at the pork barrel projects in your own state that your own Senators and Representatives toss in to get funding. Take a look at the numerous failed social programs. Take a look at the Federal procurement guidelines and how much it cost us to make an actual procurement. There are so many ways that the Federal procurement process alone could be simplified that would eliminate an enormous amount of wasted spending. For example, a private sector company can by $100,000 in IT assets and have it delivered in a week or two. It takes six months in the Federal government, and reams of paper. The larger the price tag, the more paperwork and time required to make the acquisition. I've worked in both arenas and speak from first hand experience.
Also take a look at the money the US hands out all over the world, as well as the programs inside the US. There are great causes we should support. There are countries who need help. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of beneficiaries who should not be getting a dime but they have friends in high places.
The Federal income tax revenue, and income from foreign loan interest and import tariffs, is tens of trillions of dollars annually. It isn't that we don't have enough money to fund the things we need. It is that we fund too many things we don't need. That being said, social security, medicare and medicaid are not in the list of programs "we don't need". If your parents are recipients of any of these programs, ask them how they would be impacted without them.
Microsoft will never use such a technology. Imagine how long it would take for the next release of Windows if Microsoft had to prove it met all of its specifications as documented? Oh, and imagine if Microsoft actually had to prove that they implemented a standard as specified by an authoritative, recognized standards body (i.e. LDAP, HTML5, JavaScript, etc)? I think this is great for embedded systems where failure can equal catastrophe. How long will it take to apply this formal methodology to an end-user operating system like OS X, Linux or Windows?
The preview site http://www.office2010themovie.com/index-hd.html requires Silverlight. I refuse to install yet another plug-in. Hope Microsoft doesn't require Silverlight to use Office 2010.
The definition of plaigarism is that one passes another's work off as their own. It has nothing to do with whether they had permission to do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
In addition, Google is providing the content of the book to the world. TurnItIn is only providing the paper content to the individual teacher. TurnItIn is making money from a service provided to the education community. Google is making money from advertisements to a world wide audience who were attracted by the book content which is commercial use of the book content with no other purpose.
Is it possible that Sun finally decided to open-source Solaris in hopes the OSS community would help them port it to more platforms? The user gets the "stability" of a commercial operating system with the "compatibility" of an open source operating system. Sun may also brag about the enhanced security that Open Solaris provides because of all the eyes allowed to poke into it, discover the holes, and close them.
Just a thought.
Modern professional cameras can capture 14 bits of information. Most monitors display 8 bits or less. We can only see an approximation of what we capture. The more bits of information that can be displayed, the closer we get to seeing the actual camera data.
Of course, most print today is still in CMYK color space, which is a much smaller gamut than the information we can capture with cameras.
Exactly! People who work in color managed work flows need exact color representation and will want this. We need to know that what we see is what will be in a publication.
I would say the entry price is a bit steep, except that pro photographers will spend twice as much on a camera body alone. They will keep that camera body for less time than they will keep this monitor.
I completely agree with you. Better quality is cheaper over time in my experience as well, be it computers, cars, furniture, houses, tools, etc.
Are we sure this isn't already being done in some way? Perhaps not in the exact manner you describe. Why assume they are not already working with these hardware and software manufacturers?
Finally someone with knowledge of the subject and the laws governing it. Kudos to you! The US, in fact, is the only country in the WORLD with Fair Use laws. I am a professional photographer and have researched this at great length so that I can defend my copyrights from jerks who think any image on a website is public domain. WRONG!
I disagree with the person who suggested copyright be limited to 20 years. Any individual who creates an original work should be able to exploit that work exclusively for the rest of their lives. They took the risk, invested their creative energies, and invested their own money. They should reap all the rewards. If they are paid a regular salary by someone else to spend all their time researching and developing products, then the company who pays them should own what they create. The company took the financial risk. The company should reap the financial reward.
Granting exclusive rights for 70 years after death gives individuals something to pass on to children and grandchildren. Few individuals become wealthy from their creations. Those that do generally did so by turning into a corporation or selling their creation to a corporation who can afford to take it to the next level. Corporations are not granted the same period of exclusivity granted to individuals. Drug companies only get a fixed number of years of exclusivity before the generics can start selling. It isn't like individuals passing on intellectual property rights are creating wealthy heirs like Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, William Randolph Hurst, J.D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, or even a modern business mogul like Warren Buffet, Jack Welch, Donald Trump or Steve Wynn.
How many individual intellectual property creators get rich? How many bands, artists, photographers, composers, writers are there vs. those that get rich? Less than 1 percent. The term "starving artist" is not a meaningless phrase. Are you jealous of ones that do like Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger, Annie Leibovitz? Ansel Adam's work has earned more money in the 24 years since his death in 1984 than he earned over his entire life. Do you think his heirs should be robbed of that?
Passwords are not copyrighted. They are a right of privacy. News Corp was protecting the privacy of its users, which it has a legal responsibility to do.
I also second iView Media Pro. I am a professional photographer. Nothing beats it. I have looked at many of the other tools mentioned (iMatch, ThumbsPlus, Extensis Portfolio). iView simply beats them all, and works on Mac and Windows. It supports a lot more types of digital assets than just image files. It will let you catalog your movie files, PDFs, documents, pretty much every image file type (including practically every raw file format), adobe DNG, and so much more.
One of the most powerful features of iView is that it can write all of the metadata back to your original files, making it easy to migrate from iView to any other catalog system at a future date. This feature is also nice because some PHP gallery packages like Coppermine and Gallery 2 can import this data and automatically populate picture data in your online photo gallery. So you key the info in one time and you are done.
iView also has a free catalog reader. You can export portions of your image catalog to a separate catalog file, and share it via the read-only reader. iView can also export its database in many formats.
Let's assume it is true that only 1 percent of all web pages in existence contain porn. What percent of all web pages actually visited contain porn? I bet that is higher than 1 percent.
Why not support the PNG file format (http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/ - Portable Network Graphics? Note that PNG is never mentioned anywhere in the Windows Media Photo specification document. PNG is patent free, widely supported, uses lossless compression and supports most all of the features of the proposed WMPhoto format. I see no benefit of the WMPhoto format over PNG. The only benefit I see is for Microsoft to control the specification and sell software that supports it. It is yet another way that Microsoft is trying to monopolize the desktop and make everything be about Windows. They even put Windows in the format specification name. If they wanted it to be open, they would not have included that in the name. This pisses me off.
Read the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA on the NSA. It has links to a lot of information. One interesting note in the ECHELON section is the suggestion that the NSA "end runs" around privacy by reciprocating spying activities with other countries. Ask another country to spy on someone in the US and we will spy on someone in their country in return. Through semantics, they can argue that they are not spying on US citizens. No concrete evidence is offered. It merely suggests that is happening.