So, to get at the reason behind this, you have to understand NPR's revenue model. If you think "*Public*" means government supported, you're almost certainly wrong - only 2% of total revenues come from government grants, and a good portion of the rest comes from local member stations which pay the national arm for programming like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
So given that member stations rely on their listerners to pitch in to the basket so they can fund the national programming, how do you think the local stations would feel about MP3s or podcasts of the entirety of the flagship programs being put up on the internet (potentially, on the west coast, hours before they actually air)?
NPR relies on its local stations to raise funds, and the local stations rely in turn for NPR's quality programming for their local audience, particularly during commute times when an iPod plugged into a car stereo would be a viable alternative. Unless NPR's internet revenue streams vastly increase in the near future (when's the last time you bought a tote bag from the npr.org shop?), their decentralized fundraising model pretty much guarentees that the most you're going to get from the flagship shows online are streaming audio.
The fallacy implied here is that the success rate is the only important measure of how risky the manned space flight program is. A better gauge would be to assess would be the gap between absolute risk and marginal benefit.
Absolute risk isn't a percentage - it's the average amount of money you have on the line each time you launch a shuttle, which would be something like the failure rate times the expense of the orbiter, plus however much you value the lives of your astronauts.
Marginal benefit would be how much money you would save by performing the science by humans in space that could otherwise be done by robots, plus whatever value you place on the experiments you can't do without humans in space.
The problem is that we have a net deficit, on the risk side. The shuttle program is a non-way to do science - projects like Hubble and ISS were designed largely as a way to justify the shuttle's continued operation, which is why their servicing is crippled without it. With the new Delta IV rocket, there's no question we could launch a payload the size of Hubble, and if properly designed, it won't need servicing over its useful scientific lifetime anyways. There's absolutely no reason to send a human up into space to do science, when virtually everything we send up could be automated with proper design.
And so this is where we come to the risk. Whereas the whole of American economy depends on automobiles, and the absolute loss from any given accident is minimal in comparison to the benefits that we recieve from their usage, the absolute risk from each launch of the shuttle is enormous.
What the shuttle program is tantamount to is giving a select number of people who are willing to risk their lives for a joyride the opportunity to take one. Is that worth billions of dollars that could be spent on real science?
Has anyone given thought to a way to provide legitimacy to Wikipedia entires? Suppose EB thinks that they are superior because their articles are written and vetted by "experts" in their respective fields. Why not open Wikipedia to some method of academic validation? An "expert" in the field could attach their name to any given version of a wikipedia article, without comprimising anything that makes the system work, because anyone could still change the entry, so long as a copy of the last validated version remained avaiblable.
Academics could register with Wikipedia using their.edu e-mail addresses, since these are fairly tightly controlled, in a manner similar to thefacebook. Probably for extra security, a staff member or trusted volunteer could review credentials by matching.edu e-mail adddresses against university faculty and/or graduate student directories before turning on moderation privileges.
The articles would then be as good as the reputations of the people who authorized them, not unlike the EB's 11th edition, which contained articles from Einstein, Muir, etc. Could anyone think of a reason this might not work?
I agree, ucsdsucks.com is clearly protected, because it is clearly criticism/parody. Youcsd.edu, however, is not, because it is not clearly parody (although the content itself most definetly is criticism). Copyright law does not protect a critic of McDonald's from registering mccdonalds.com and using it for criticism. Be careful about confusing the content of the site in question and the root-level domain that they have taken. They are afforded the protection of the former under the law, but the latter has far less protection because the domain by itself could be construed as misleading.
I don't think that, at least for UC San Diego, this is particularly a matter of censorship of critical opinions, or even obscene content. In my four years at UCSD, there were a number of "free speech" rights incidents, and the university seems to be more concerned with protecting trademark rather than silencing any voices. For example:
1. The Koala: An associated student funded organization which constantly used its funds to print obscene material, including an issue called "The Jizzlam" featuring women in burqas superimposed on porn images. The paper has been accused of racism and anti-semitism many times over, and yet the UCSD administration has not shut it down despite the fact it is printed with student funds.
2. The Che Cafe linking fiasco. Details here in an article I wrote at the time. This is actually a DeCSS case where the university invoked the principle that hyperlinking to terrorist groups was tantomount to supporting terrorism, but ultimately backed down once it was clear that the Che was only linking to other groups and not hosting any material. The douse of national media attention probably helped a bit as well.
3. The UCSD Livejournal community. Embarresingly enough, I actually precipitated this one with this article. Shortly after this was written, the university demanded that the LJ community change it's name to the "unofficial UCSD livejournal community."
The consistent tone among all of this is that the university is willing to tolerate both terrorist and obscene content, and even content highly critical of the university (as is shown in many AS-funded student newspapers, along with the LJ community). What they are not fine with is:
1. Bad publicity - which is probably why they won't censor things based on content.
2. Being associated with any media: critical of the administration or not, without big "UNOFFICIAL" and "INDEPENDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY" stickers slapped on it, especially on the internet. This is because they do not want their trademark diluted, which is entirely understandable, because if they don't enforce it, they lose it.
The short response: things aren't always as simple as they seem. Not every large institution thinks stilfing dissent is the path to peace. The record shows the university isn't trying to muzzle anyone; it just wants to protect itself and its assets.
I installed ATI drivers on Fedora Core 2 last week, and while it required a bit of patching here and there that wasn't documented anywhere on the ATI site, a quick google search for "Fedora Core 2" and "ATI" pretty much did the trick. It was astonishly simple, at least in comparison to the hoops I used to have to jump through (I've kept the same distro on the same Linux box since 2001 without updating it at all, just because it was working and there was no reason to mess with it).
This is all to say that it seems the problem the author has with the drivers is that they're proprietary, and thus makes some end users have to do some wacky patching depending on how esoteric their distro is. It seems if you're using a popular enough distribution, it's relatively easy to find a forum post at Rage3D that documents the steps any bozo can take, using patch -p1 to the original ATI distribution, to get things working. In short, so long as you're reasonably close to the mainstream, there's a whole hell of a lot of user support out there. And if you're not, well... that's why you've installed a bleeding-edge distribution, right?
Maybe it's just my memories of installing netatalk (one of the more horrendous file servers I've ever set up, by pure neccesity), but raising a fuss and making sardonic comments over ATI's lack of commitment seems rather ill-tempered when they seem to be releasing Linux drivers quite regularly. Would you rather they open-source the drivers once and stop supporting them and leave it to the community?
I graduated summa cum laude in CSE and physics with my laptop in class every day. I found that sitting in the back and surfing during class helped me stay awake while bothering no one, because before I brought my laptop to class I'd sleep through at least 10 mintues of every class (I have a weird habit of "micro-napping"). So the laptop actually improved my lecture retention rate.
Furthermore, if I didn't understand something the professors said the first time through, wikipedia was right there. Conversely, if the professor was on an interesting topic, but was droning on for the benefit of others in the class who needed extra examples/repetition, I could easily look up the topic at hand for more depth.
is the one the on your door. Virtually everyone I knew who had anything stolen from them freshman year in my dorm had left their doors unlocked or open - even for a second to go to the bathroom. If you have an incompetent roommate, then I'd hide your laptop whenever you leave the room - prefereably in your underwear drawer. Or better yet, take it with you and surf in class if you're lucky enough to have a 802.11b school (like mine).
When less than two dozen congressional seats are actually contested at any given election due to gerrymandering, and the electoral college system restricts the salient portion of the electorate to less than a dozen states, one wonders why Americans are so apathetic when so many of them are clearly disenfranchised out of the federal electoral process by an archaic voting system (the electoral college), or partisan state legislatures that draw ridiculously shaped congressional districts.
My theory is that the media, with its constant attention on "poll numbers" and the presidency, neither of which have any bearing on actual electoral results, have conditioned the many Americans who didn't pay attention in history class that we actually live in a direct democracy instead of a representative one.
On the other hand, in some ways its difficult to argue "disenfranchisment" - after all, California still counts, despite the fact that the Republicans have no chance there, and so does Texas. So does voting for an individual legislator - but only if no one else does. Unlike in Hong Kong, we are afforded a democracy. The distinction here is that it takes far more attention than the average person has, be they American, Chinese, or North Korean to realize how arbitrary and disproportionate our democracy is.
While a lot of people will say that screaming about insecure voting machines is a bunch of FUD, I think there is a legitimate reason to be far more scared of insecurities in digital voting than in the traditional kind. The nice thing about paper/punchcards/crayon is that the scale of fraud is limited by the physical nature of the medium. It's tough to dispose of a lot of votes without anyone noticing a precinct is missing, and it's difficult to make much of a differece forging individual ballots.
The problem with electronic voting is that like every other industry that's gone digital (accounting to spreadsheets for example), the scale and efficiency of mundane tasks is amplified by many orders of magnitude. It's tough to make much of a dent in an election by registering under ten names and voting ten times. It's easy (if you have an exploit) to to click once to change 10,000 votes in a manner that looks utterly plausible.
So for all the talk of just giving red meat to the media to have another thing to panic about, I'd say why the heck can't we force Florida to print paper reciepts?
Slashdot Mirror
So, to get at the reason behind this, you have to understand NPR's revenue model. If you think "*Public*" means government supported, you're almost certainly wrong - only 2% of total revenues come from government grants, and a good portion of the rest comes from local member stations which pay the national arm for programming like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
So given that member stations rely on their listerners to pitch in to the basket so they can fund the national programming, how do you think the local stations would feel about MP3s or podcasts of the entirety of the flagship programs being put up on the internet (potentially, on the west coast, hours before they actually air)?
NPR relies on its local stations to raise funds, and the local stations rely in turn for NPR's quality programming for their local audience, particularly during commute times when an iPod plugged into a car stereo would be a viable alternative. Unless NPR's internet revenue streams vastly increase in the near future (when's the last time you bought a tote bag from the npr.org shop?), their decentralized fundraising model pretty much guarentees that the most you're going to get from the flagship shows online are streaming audio.
The fallacy implied here is that the success rate is the only important measure of how risky the manned space flight program is. A better gauge would be to assess would be the gap between absolute risk and marginal benefit. Absolute risk isn't a percentage - it's the average amount of money you have on the line each time you launch a shuttle, which would be something like the failure rate times the expense of the orbiter, plus however much you value the lives of your astronauts. Marginal benefit would be how much money you would save by performing the science by humans in space that could otherwise be done by robots, plus whatever value you place on the experiments you can't do without humans in space. The problem is that we have a net deficit, on the risk side. The shuttle program is a non-way to do science - projects like Hubble and ISS were designed largely as a way to justify the shuttle's continued operation, which is why their servicing is crippled without it. With the new Delta IV rocket, there's no question we could launch a payload the size of Hubble, and if properly designed, it won't need servicing over its useful scientific lifetime anyways. There's absolutely no reason to send a human up into space to do science, when virtually everything we send up could be automated with proper design. And so this is where we come to the risk. Whereas the whole of American economy depends on automobiles, and the absolute loss from any given accident is minimal in comparison to the benefits that we recieve from their usage, the absolute risk from each launch of the shuttle is enormous. What the shuttle program is tantamount to is giving a select number of people who are willing to risk their lives for a joyride the opportunity to take one. Is that worth billions of dollars that could be spent on real science?
Has anyone given thought to a way to provide legitimacy to Wikipedia entires? Suppose EB thinks that they are superior because their articles are written and vetted by "experts" in their respective fields. Why not open Wikipedia to some method of academic validation? An "expert" in the field could attach their name to any given version of a wikipedia article, without comprimising anything that makes the system work, because anyone could still change the entry, so long as a copy of the last validated version remained avaiblable. Academics could register with Wikipedia using their .edu e-mail addresses, since these are fairly tightly controlled, in a manner similar to thefacebook. Probably for extra security, a staff member or trusted volunteer could review credentials by matching .edu e-mail adddresses against university faculty and/or graduate student directories before turning on moderation privileges.
The articles would then be as good as the reputations of the people who authorized them, not unlike the EB's 11th edition, which contained articles from Einstein, Muir, etc. Could anyone think of a reason this might not work?
Whoops, please note youcsd.com, rather than .edu above. I've typed in my alma mater's domain in far too many times.
I agree, ucsdsucks.com is clearly protected, because it is clearly criticism/parody. Youcsd.edu, however, is not, because it is not clearly parody (although the content itself most definetly is criticism). Copyright law does not protect a critic of McDonald's from registering mccdonalds.com and using it for criticism. Be careful about confusing the content of the site in question and the root-level domain that they have taken. They are afforded the protection of the former under the law, but the latter has far less protection because the domain by itself could be construed as misleading.
I don't think that, at least for UC San Diego, this is particularly a matter of censorship of critical opinions, or even obscene content. In my four years at UCSD, there were a number of "free speech" rights incidents, and the university seems to be more concerned with protecting trademark rather than silencing any voices. For example:
1. The Koala: An associated student funded organization which constantly used its funds to print obscene material, including an issue called "The Jizzlam" featuring women in burqas superimposed on porn images. The paper has been accused of racism and anti-semitism many times over, and yet the UCSD administration has not shut it down despite the fact it is printed with student funds.
2. The Che Cafe linking fiasco. Details here in an article I wrote at the time. This is actually a DeCSS case where the university invoked the principle that hyperlinking to terrorist groups was tantomount to supporting terrorism, but ultimately backed down once it was clear that the Che was only linking to other groups and not hosting any material. The douse of national media attention probably helped a bit as well.
3. The UCSD Livejournal community. Embarresingly enough, I actually precipitated this one with this article. Shortly after this was written, the university demanded that the LJ community change it's name to the "unofficial UCSD livejournal community."
The consistent tone among all of this is that the university is willing to tolerate both terrorist and obscene content, and even content highly critical of the university (as is shown in many AS-funded student newspapers, along with the LJ community). What they are not fine with is:
1. Bad publicity - which is probably why they won't censor things based on content.
2. Being associated with any media: critical of the administration or not, without big "UNOFFICIAL" and "INDEPENDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY" stickers slapped on it, especially on the internet. This is because they do not want their trademark diluted, which is entirely understandable, because if they don't enforce it, they lose it.
The short response: things aren't always as simple as they seem. Not every large institution thinks stilfing dissent is the path to peace. The record shows the university isn't trying to muzzle anyone; it just wants to protect itself and its assets.
I installed ATI drivers on Fedora Core 2 last week, and while it required a bit of patching here and there that wasn't documented anywhere on the ATI site, a quick google search for "Fedora Core 2" and "ATI" pretty much did the trick. It was astonishly simple, at least in comparison to the hoops I used to have to jump through (I've kept the same distro on the same Linux box since 2001 without updating it at all, just because it was working and there was no reason to mess with it). This is all to say that it seems the problem the author has with the drivers is that they're proprietary, and thus makes some end users have to do some wacky patching depending on how esoteric their distro is. It seems if you're using a popular enough distribution, it's relatively easy to find a forum post at Rage3D that documents the steps any bozo can take, using patch -p1 to the original ATI distribution, to get things working. In short, so long as you're reasonably close to the mainstream, there's a whole hell of a lot of user support out there. And if you're not, well... that's why you've installed a bleeding-edge distribution, right? Maybe it's just my memories of installing netatalk (one of the more horrendous file servers I've ever set up, by pure neccesity), but raising a fuss and making sardonic comments over ATI's lack of commitment seems rather ill-tempered when they seem to be releasing Linux drivers quite regularly. Would you rather they open-source the drivers once and stop supporting them and leave it to the community?
I graduated summa cum laude in CSE and physics with my laptop in class every day. I found that sitting in the back and surfing during class helped me stay awake while bothering no one, because before I brought my laptop to class I'd sleep through at least 10 mintues of every class (I have a weird habit of "micro-napping"). So the laptop actually improved my lecture retention rate.
Furthermore, if I didn't understand something the professors said the first time through, wikipedia was right there. Conversely, if the professor was on an interesting topic, but was droning on for the benefit of others in the class who needed extra examples/repetition, I could easily look up the topic at hand for more depth.
is the one the on your door. Virtually everyone I knew who had anything stolen from them freshman year in my dorm had left their doors unlocked or open - even for a second to go to the bathroom. If you have an incompetent roommate, then I'd hide your laptop whenever you leave the room - prefereably in your underwear drawer. Or better yet, take it with you and surf in class if you're lucky enough to have a 802.11b school (like mine).
When less than two dozen congressional seats are actually contested at any given election due to gerrymandering, and the electoral college system restricts the salient portion of the electorate to less than a dozen states, one wonders why Americans are so apathetic when so many of them are clearly disenfranchised out of the federal electoral process by an archaic voting system (the electoral college), or partisan state legislatures that draw ridiculously shaped congressional districts.
My theory is that the media, with its constant attention on "poll numbers" and the presidency, neither of which have any bearing on actual electoral results, have conditioned the many Americans who didn't pay attention in history class that we actually live in a direct democracy instead of a representative one.
On the other hand, in some ways its difficult to argue "disenfranchisment" - after all, California still counts, despite the fact that the Republicans have no chance there, and so does Texas. So does voting for an individual legislator - but only if no one else does. Unlike in Hong Kong, we are afforded a democracy. The distinction here is that it takes far more attention than the average person has, be they American, Chinese, or North Korean to realize how arbitrary and disproportionate our democracy is.
While a lot of people will say that screaming about insecure voting machines is a bunch of FUD, I think there is a legitimate reason to be far more scared of insecurities in digital voting than in the traditional kind. The nice thing about paper/punchcards/crayon is that the scale of fraud is limited by the physical nature of the medium. It's tough to dispose of a lot of votes without anyone noticing a precinct is missing, and it's difficult to make much of a differece forging individual ballots. The problem with electronic voting is that like every other industry that's gone digital (accounting to spreadsheets for example), the scale and efficiency of mundane tasks is amplified by many orders of magnitude. It's tough to make much of a dent in an election by registering under ten names and voting ten times. It's easy (if you have an exploit) to to click once to change 10,000 votes in a manner that looks utterly plausible. So for all the talk of just giving red meat to the media to have another thing to panic about, I'd say why the heck can't we force Florida to print paper reciepts?