I'd never heard of Greenfield, but I stopped reading after the article stated she'd written an article on her theories for the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is at best the British tabloid version of Fox News. Not exactly the place legitimate science gets published.
If you're looking for examples of "successful software created entirely inside universities' labs", you're never going to find anything. University research is fundamentally different from product development. While a grad student or faculty member might do research on a hard problem and write some software to solve it and publish a paper, that software is going to be enormously buggy, perpetually incomplete, and probably require constant support in order to work at all.
But there's another side to it, which is that nobody's going to pay for that team of developers either. Even an R01 grant (the classic "run a research lab" grant) is around $250k/year in direct costs. You can't hire a full time.NET or Java developer (let alone a team of them) and pay your own salary and tuition for a couple grad students on that budget. Even if you could, you'd have a hard time justifying it as a research expense to the federal government.
So how does stuff end up on the market? Spin-offs, collaborations, and cross-licensing. Universities have smartly become much more willing to license out technology developed on campus, even when done 100% on University time & money. Having that flexibility encourages your smart people to think big, and discourages the best people from leaving to do it.
I think it's more likely a calculated decision on the part of the publisher. Given what the NYTimes and Guardian both reported when they had to put up with him for the cable releases, Assange seems like the kind of person who would actually try to take the money without really considering the potential consequences.
I'm sure they're confident that the character alone is well-known enough by now to sell at least a couple hundred thousand copies... even if the writing itself is first-draft quality. And I'm sure the free PR from the whole debacle can't hurt either.
I was in 10th grade German class when we got the announcement. I remember not grasping the significance of the news until I saw the look of fear on my teacher's face. I hopped on the school network to try to get updates. I was moderately successful... most sites were down, CNN was a 50/50 shot, and so much of my news that day came in through reading updates and comments on Slashdot, at least until we were allowed to go to the library (the one place in our school that had cable TV).
I'm fearful that we've squandered quite a bit of the opportunity (not the right word, I know) that the tragedy bought us in the following months and years. Instead of making amends with the world, I fear we've gotten involved in three endless wars and brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy, both fiscally and morally.
I feel kind of uncomfortable judging anyone about what they may have/have not done for charity. Jobs is a relatively private person when it comes to his personal life and a pretty deep thinker. Yes, he has no public record of philanthropy. Who's to say he doesn't do it privately or hasn't set up his will for postmortem charitable contributions?
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet bank on their reputations as front men for their charitable organizations. That's their right and they do a lot of good work. But that's not the only way to do it.
Regardless of what you think of Mr. Jobs' company's products, you must admit the man had an almost unparalleled vision for the future.
In a hyper-connected world of ethics-free corporate drones apathetic about anything past this quarter's profits and stock price, Jobs stood apart by having a 5, 10, perhaps even 20 year plan for Apple that he ruthlessly pursued at the expense of anything standing in the way (be it under-performing employees or products). As a commenter last week put it, he set out to make a dent in the universe, and actually did it.
Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Jobs, you've bloody well earned it.
And kind of creepy as well. I would be perfectly comfortable with a teacher being fired for friending his students on facebook. I don't think it should rise to the level of criminality in and of itself though, and criminalizing the act itself is of questionable legality.
I'm not quite sure when we equated "friends" on a web site with "friends" in real life. If we're really that concerned about a teacher's ability to properly manage social relationships and moderate their behavior around children, shouldn't it disturb us that the teacher gets to spend 6 hours a day in a room with them?
And for what it's worth, if you think firing a teacher is a lower level action than a criminal prosecution, you haven't taken a close look at teacher tenure laws recently. At least in my state, the cost of outright firing a teacher is in the six-figure range. Far more common is to "pass the trash" between schools/districts, hoping they'll get discouraged enough to leave on their own.
You can legislate the process, or you can legislate the outcome. But you can't do both. The problem is, most of our Congress critters write school legislation the same way they write the tax code. It doesn't work that way. When you mandate the state curriculum and direct teachers to spent their classroom time in specific ways, you remove their ability to use their own judgement and skills in a field that desperately requires that level of micromanagement.
So, in our fear of the unquantifiable, we've removed yet another useful new tool for teachers to reach out and connect with their students. We've now legislated the process, and we're stuck with whatever (bad) outcome we end up with.
Back when I was in college, I aspired to be a high school teacher (writing software was a temp gig). Today I wouldn't dream of going into teaching having seen the clusterf*** NCLB has made of it.
Re:As much Deisseroth at Stanford as Boyden at MIT
on
The Birth of Optogenetics
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Article does mention Karl Deisseroth, just mainly by first name. But yes, Deisseroth's research group pioneered most of this research, which truly is spectacularly cool.
I've been lucky enough to see Deisseroth speak a couple of times (always in a packed auditorium). The pace at which he displays his results and the value of the results themselves is almost mind-boggling. He'll talk about a really great result they got with an experiment inhibiting fear in mice (if I recall, they targeted the amygdala and then showed the animal hiding in corners of the cage until they turn on the laser and he runs across the open space) and then before you can wrap your brain around it he's already moved on to talking about revolutionizing Parkinson's research by selectively inhibiting dopaminergic neurons.
As if inventing a groundbreaking technique and using it to solve all kinds of interesting problems isn't enough, Deisseroth has also been very proactive about sharing his techniques and methods, to the point that his lab actually holds workshops for other neuroscientists to learn how to do similar work. A pretty awesome guy all around, and I suspect he'll be the recipient of a Nobel Prize before too long.
The only reason I'm wary of just calling Verizon and talking to customer care is that there are a number of anecdotes floating around about how customer care people are mostly clueless about international issues or (worse) will tell you what you want to hear, rather than the real truth, and then can't help you when you get the $1k bill a month later.
The only bit I can find on Verizon's site is $30 for 75 megabytes. It's not quite highway robbery, but it's a pretty bum deal. I'd be really hesitant to agree to take any deal they offered me verbally, over the phone, without any printed guarantee anywhere.
Thanks. Please don't misunderstand, I do take time to enjoy the wilderness! Heck, my personal vacation back in February was to drive cross-country and bag a couple Colorado Fourteeners. Without a cell phone or netbook.
But, chaperoning kids isn't a vacation (at least, doing it well isn't) and technology for keeping fragile parents sane or finding the nearest ice cream spot for the group when we're out biking means I have more time for the relaxing things. As always, your mileage may vary.
Interesting. I didn't even think to check Virgin Mobile. That might work. I'll have to check coverage to be sure, but being able to order online would sure make life easier, since the Rogers/Bell stuff apparently requires you to go to a brick-and-mortar store and even then is pretty hit or miss on whether you get a salesperson with a clue about how data plans work. Activation might still be a problem, though luckily I live an hour from the US/CA border, so I can always just drive there some afternoon and try it in advance.
Only a few short years ago, parents got along just fine when the kids went off to summer camp, and didn't worry that the kids wouldn't trouble them with phone calls home and constant SMSs and emails. Matter of fact, Mom and Dad would usually call this time period "vacation".
I don't disagree, but I take it you haven't taken a group of kids camping recently. The truth (for better or worse) is that most parents are wary of not having any communication from their children for longer than a day, let alone a week. Particularly in the high-tech college town I'm from. Like it or not, a daily email update is the modern version of a postcard from camp. And at least for us, it's an adult-written thing; so it's not like the kids are spending time sitting in front of a screen instead of camping. You could argue that adds stress to my life, but honestly, keeping parents in the loop preemptively reduces the likelihood of them bothering me to figure out what's going on.
The other piece is that it's fun for the kids to read months or years after the trip, and institutionalizes the good stories instead of relying on fading memories.
I was never a comic book fan, and I saw Green Lantern on Friday only because a group of friends who are fans wanted to see it. I knew I was in trouble when a dramatic voiceover introduced us to a solid dozen names and places, including the happy planet of intergalactic peacekeepers and the main arch-villain, who's names I promptly forgot.
Not only did the story come with an enormous amount of baggage, but it made quite a mess of a story going forward. It seemed like the setting was driving the narrative instead of the other way around. As if some screenwriter was standing by with a stopwatch worrying that the audience will lose interest since Hal hasn't flown anywhere off planet for over two minutes.
The never-ending fight scenes were made less dramatic by virtue of the fact that Hal's limitations were never really explained or explored. It wasn't even clear whether he knew himself. That really spoiled the movie for me more than anything else -- when Batman was pinned by Liam Neeson in the EL-train car, you knew that he was vulnerable, and it was that collateral of mortality that defined the character. Here, when the main character had no problem flying across the galaxy for a quick meeting with his idiot boss and was literally dodging asteroids in the climax, it wasn't so clear.
Those darn infrared sensors ruin my day when I'm at a concert and need to transfer data with my IrDA port on my PowerBook 5300. I've been thinking about upgrading to 802.11a, but I've never really thought of myself as an early adopter and I'm really upset that Apple pulls these stunts to make us upgrade all the time.
This is a very nicely written and researched article, which, unfortunately, only shows in detail one horrific case study of what could soon be a widespread occurrence if the big telecom corps get what they want: to go after the government/educational market (now that the consumer market is completely saturated) and offer them half the service at twice the price.
Organizations like WiscNet provide a fantastic public service, and the notion of dismantling them for private industry to make a buck is just reprehensible. I'm from Michigan, not Wisconsin, but I could very easily see this happening here, as we have the same issues in play: Merit Network, a non-profit co-op founded for the same reasons as WiscNet, provides Internet access to almost all the schools in the state. It would be a huge loss for our corrupt legislature to squeeze them out (never underestimate the evil of the Michigan Legislature, look up the Michigan "promise scholarship" if you don't believe me). I'm sure other states are in similar situations.
My dad's a public school teacher, and my Internet access growing up was through Merit's dialup, which they offered free to teachers at the time. Unlike most commercial offerings back in the mid-90s (or even now) there was no monthly time allotment or bandwidth cap. I shudder to think how my experiences building web sites and learning to code would have changed had AT&T run that system. I do biomed research now, and I'm posting this from a Merit network connection that we use to collaborate with other labs across the country. Try doing that on a 250GB monthly cap.
Hey Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association: Go to hell, and take your bandwidth caps with you.
long hours, potentially hazardous working conditions (get splashed with 1 mol sulfuric acid.), and heavy work loads.
Yeah, there is a reason I gave up my career and degree in chemistry for IT.
Long hours of menial tasks (how many times is it possible to jam the same printer anyway?), angry users (not my fault you didn't backup), and heavy work loads.
Yeah, there is a reason I gave up my career in IT and got a degree in physics.
I work as a research associate at a name brand school. I've seen this article cited a few times, usually by discouraged graduate students.
For me, I guess it all comes down to what you want out of life. Greenspun's argument basically comes down to the fact that science/tech is at risk of being outsourced, and people should instead be real-estate agents, doctors, and lawyers. Well, news flash, lawyers are being replaced with software, many doctors want a career switch, and real-estate agents, well, I'm not even going to go there. I just find it too insulting to compare somebody who's chosen to advance humanity's exploration of the world we live in with somebody who wants to make a quick buck by match-making sellers and buyers. Hell, if anything, the last decade should have taught us that the internet is rapidly doing away with middlemen. Go ask your local bookstore/pawnshop/consumer electronics store how business has been recently.
Most people find it easier to follow in the footsteps of others (teachers at school, professional parents, etc) rather than ask the hard questions: "What am I good at?" "Will somebody pay me to do it?" "Can I be the best at what I do?"
Work is work, and nobody said work is entirely fun. If you have a job you truly enjoy every minute of every day, congratulations. Most people go their whole life without finding it. But, there is a big difference between a job with some enjoyable aspects and rewards vs. a job you truly despise.
I suppose, but if you're competing on price floor, that old PC in the closet is free. Long as it has a PCIe graphics slot, grab yourself a $20 Radeon HD card and you're there.
You don't need 4 gigs of ram and a dual-core processor to watch Hulu.
I did something like this last year. Wasn't really willing to pay $1000 for a "Media PC", so I bought a Dell from circa 2005 at a local resale shop, P4 2ghz or some such, for $50. Then got an ATI Radeon HD 4000-something off NewEgg for $20. The Radeon 4000 is, AFAIK, the lowest-end card that supports 1080p hardware decoding. ("DXVA support" is the Microsoft buzzword that you need on the hardware + software side for this to work.) 2TB hard drive + USB enclosure for $100. Threw in a cheap BD-ROM drive just for fun ($50).
Total cost: $220. Less if I'd had the parts lying around.
On the software side, with MakeMKV + Media Player Classic, the box can rip + play Blu-Rays at full resolution with 0% processor utilization. Synergy to control from my laptop while sitting on the coach.
The final kicker was that the Adobe Flash team finally got off their collective butts and included support for hardware decoding in Flash 10.2. Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix all look fantastic.
I wouldn't dream of ever going back to cable and trying to program a DVR. Too much work.
I do neuroscience research for a living, and I can definitely say that I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for Hollywood. I remember watching computer-glorifying movies like "Flight of the Navigator", "Tron", and "Star Wars" when I was in first grade in the early '90s. That was an era when we didn't have a VCR at home and going out to the movies was something of a treat. Since today's elementary school kids all have iPods to take to school and DVD players in the family minivan, it's easy to remember that it wasn't that long ago that movies and computers weren't so commonplace. I grew up in a middle class, college educated family, and we had only one television in the house and didn't even have a family computer until the mid '90s, except for my father's Apple IIGS that he used for work. To say that movies inspired me would be an understatement. I was a Star Wars nut for a long time, and Flight of the Navigator made a huge impression on me, too. Funnily enough, I only saw FotN once, but remembered vivid scenes from it for over a decade later (and when I rewatched it last year I was amazed how accurate my memory was).
By second grade, I was teaching myself how to program BASIC on the school DOS 4/286 boxes. Heck, in third grade I taught the teacher how to use Applesoft Basic on her IIGS. Learning the math to write programs put me into advanced placement math the next year, and by sixth grade I was teaching the other students how to write programs to solve their algebra homework. By high school I was doing database and IT work for the local university that I later graduated from.
Somewhere in there, my parents took me to see "Apollo 13". That spurred another interest in space physics and engineering, which led to reading books about the disaster and spaceflight in general. Eventually, my 7th grade teacher loaned me her copy of Kip Thorne's book "Black holes and time warps". Bottom line, I ended up with a degree in physics. IT work paid well, but was boring as hell, so I made the switch into doing real science and worked my way up to lab manager.
For a document release that was supposed to "reshape world history", it's actually been a pretty disappointing ride thus far. Embarrassing, sure, but by no means earth-shattering. No international corruption rings, not even a single assassination plot (Hollywood screenwriters hoping for some free inspiration must be sooo disappointed right now). Some spying sure, and amusing adjectives about various world leaders, but not much that wasn't already known or assumed at some level (if you needed the Wikileaks cable leak to learn facts like: Putin is Russia's power broker, China hacked Google, and Colonel Qaddafi is mentally unstable, then you haven't been paying attention).
If anything, it's actually strengthened my faith a bit in the US Government. No real smoking guns, and the Obama administration seems to have acted reasonably responsibly with respect to the multitude of issues in the Middle East, and even in accordance with their public policy. Yeah, I know it doesn't include "top secret" information, but still, most of it is of no particular interest except for world historians and a day of news entertainment for the masses.
I'm still solidly in the middle about the justification of release, and the lack of substantive information is pushing me back to thinking it's not justifiable. Yes, I think government should be transparent, but let me say, as someone who manages a small organization, I do talk about people behind their backs, often in email. Making snap judgments of other people based on limited encounters, subjective and unfair as it is, is how we manage our day to day lives.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd never heard of Greenfield, but I stopped reading after the article stated she'd written an article on her theories for the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is at best the British tabloid version of Fox News. Not exactly the place legitimate science gets published.
If you're looking for examples of "successful software created entirely inside universities' labs", you're never going to find anything. University research is fundamentally different from product development. While a grad student or faculty member might do research on a hard problem and write some software to solve it and publish a paper, that software is going to be enormously buggy, perpetually incomplete, and probably require constant support in order to work at all.
But there's another side to it, which is that nobody's going to pay for that team of developers either. Even an R01 grant (the classic "run a research lab" grant) is around $250k/year in direct costs. You can't hire a full time .NET or Java developer (let alone a team of them) and pay your own salary and tuition for a couple grad students on that budget. Even if you could, you'd have a hard time justifying it as a research expense to the federal government.
So how does stuff end up on the market? Spin-offs, collaborations, and cross-licensing. Universities have smartly become much more willing to license out technology developed on campus, even when done 100% on University time & money. Having that flexibility encourages your smart people to think big, and discourages the best people from leaving to do it.
I think it's more likely a calculated decision on the part of the publisher. Given what the NYTimes and Guardian both reported when they had to put up with him for the cable releases, Assange seems like the kind of person who would actually try to take the money without really considering the potential consequences.
I'm sure they're confident that the character alone is well-known enough by now to sell at least a couple hundred thousand copies... even if the writing itself is first-draft quality. And I'm sure the free PR from the whole debacle can't hurt either.
Ironic given the level of unrest in the USA today... about the new FB interface, that is.
"People in most countries use Facebook to protest their government. People in the USA use Facebook to protest Facebook."
I was in 10th grade German class when we got the announcement. I remember not grasping the significance of the news until I saw the look of fear on my teacher's face. I hopped on the school network to try to get updates. I was moderately successful... most sites were down, CNN was a 50/50 shot, and so much of my news that day came in through reading updates and comments on Slashdot, at least until we were allowed to go to the library (the one place in our school that had cable TV).
I'm fearful that we've squandered quite a bit of the opportunity (not the right word, I know) that the tragedy bought us in the following months and years. Instead of making amends with the world, I fear we've gotten involved in three endless wars and brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy, both fiscally and morally.
As one commenter put it, in perhaps the most chillingly precognitive Slashdot comment of all time: "The biggest casualty will probably be our Constitution. Whenever a tragedy likes this occurs, the government always announces a get tough on terrorists policy that will have no effect on the psychopaths who do this, but will severely limit our rights.
"The huge loss of life is bad enough. The subsequent loss of what truly represents what this country stands for will be intolerable."
I feel kind of uncomfortable judging anyone about what they may have/have not done for charity. Jobs is a relatively private person when it comes to his personal life and a pretty deep thinker. Yes, he has no public record of philanthropy. Who's to say he doesn't do it privately or hasn't set up his will for postmortem charitable contributions?
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet bank on their reputations as front men for their charitable organizations. That's their right and they do a lot of good work. But that's not the only way to do it.
Regardless of what you think of Mr. Jobs' company's products, you must admit the man had an almost unparalleled vision for the future.
In a hyper-connected world of ethics-free corporate drones apathetic about anything past this quarter's profits and stock price, Jobs stood apart by having a 5, 10, perhaps even 20 year plan for Apple that he ruthlessly pursued at the expense of anything standing in the way (be it under-performing employees or products). As a commenter last week put it, he set out to make a dent in the universe, and actually did it.
Enjoy your retirement, Mr. Jobs, you've bloody well earned it.
Closer than you're comfortable with, and colder than you can possibly imagine.
And kind of creepy as well. I would be perfectly comfortable with a teacher being fired for friending his students on facebook. I don't think it should rise to the level of criminality in and of itself though, and criminalizing the act itself is of questionable legality.
I'm not quite sure when we equated "friends" on a web site with "friends" in real life. If we're really that concerned about a teacher's ability to properly manage social relationships and moderate their behavior around children, shouldn't it disturb us that the teacher gets to spend 6 hours a day in a room with them?
And for what it's worth, if you think firing a teacher is a lower level action than a criminal prosecution, you haven't taken a close look at teacher tenure laws recently. At least in my state, the cost of outright firing a teacher is in the six-figure range. Far more common is to "pass the trash" between schools/districts, hoping they'll get discouraged enough to leave on their own.
You can legislate the process, or you can legislate the outcome. But you can't do both. The problem is, most of our Congress critters write school legislation the same way they write the tax code. It doesn't work that way. When you mandate the state curriculum and direct teachers to spent their classroom time in specific ways, you remove their ability to use their own judgement and skills in a field that desperately requires that level of micromanagement.
So, in our fear of the unquantifiable, we've removed yet another useful new tool for teachers to reach out and connect with their students. We've now legislated the process, and we're stuck with whatever (bad) outcome we end up with.
Back when I was in college, I aspired to be a high school teacher (writing software was a temp gig). Today I wouldn't dream of going into teaching having seen the clusterf*** NCLB has made of it.
Article does mention Karl Deisseroth, just mainly by first name. But yes, Deisseroth's research group pioneered most of this research, which truly is spectacularly cool.
Here's a Wired article from last year that explains optogenetics in prose more familiar to the average Slashdot user. And a YouTube video of Deisseroth giving an overview of his work.
I've been lucky enough to see Deisseroth speak a couple of times (always in a packed auditorium). The pace at which he displays his results and the value of the results themselves is almost mind-boggling. He'll talk about a really great result they got with an experiment inhibiting fear in mice (if I recall, they targeted the amygdala and then showed the animal hiding in corners of the cage until they turn on the laser and he runs across the open space) and then before you can wrap your brain around it he's already moved on to talking about revolutionizing Parkinson's research by selectively inhibiting dopaminergic neurons.
As if inventing a groundbreaking technique and using it to solve all kinds of interesting problems isn't enough, Deisseroth has also been very proactive about sharing his techniques and methods, to the point that his lab actually holds workshops for other neuroscientists to learn how to do similar work. A pretty awesome guy all around, and I suspect he'll be the recipient of a Nobel Prize before too long.
The only reason I'm wary of just calling Verizon and talking to customer care is that there are a number of anecdotes floating around about how customer care people are mostly clueless about international issues or (worse) will tell you what you want to hear, rather than the real truth, and then can't help you when you get the $1k bill a month later.
The only bit I can find on Verizon's site is $30 for 75 megabytes. It's not quite highway robbery, but it's a pretty bum deal. I'd be really hesitant to agree to take any deal they offered me verbally, over the phone, without any printed guarantee anywhere.
Thanks. Please don't misunderstand, I do take time to enjoy the wilderness! Heck, my personal vacation back in February was to drive cross-country and bag a couple Colorado Fourteeners. Without a cell phone or netbook.
But, chaperoning kids isn't a vacation (at least, doing it well isn't) and technology for keeping fragile parents sane or finding the nearest ice cream spot for the group when we're out biking means I have more time for the relaxing things. As always, your mileage may vary.
Approx 45.087, -78.299
Both Rogers and Telus/Bell theoretically cover it according to their maps, but it's definitely on the fringe.
Interesting. I didn't even think to check Virgin Mobile. That might work. I'll have to check coverage to be sure, but being able to order online would sure make life easier, since the Rogers/Bell stuff apparently requires you to go to a brick-and-mortar store and even then is pretty hit or miss on whether you get a salesperson with a clue about how data plans work. Activation might still be a problem, though luckily I live an hour from the US/CA border, so I can always just drive there some afternoon and try it in advance.
Only a few short years ago, parents got along just fine when the kids went off to summer camp, and didn't worry that the kids wouldn't trouble them with phone calls home and constant SMSs and emails. Matter of fact, Mom and Dad would usually call this time period "vacation".
I don't disagree, but I take it you haven't taken a group of kids camping recently. The truth (for better or worse) is that most parents are wary of not having any communication from their children for longer than a day, let alone a week. Particularly in the high-tech college town I'm from. Like it or not, a daily email update is the modern version of a postcard from camp. And at least for us, it's an adult-written thing; so it's not like the kids are spending time sitting in front of a screen instead of camping. You could argue that adds stress to my life, but honestly, keeping parents in the loop preemptively reduces the likelihood of them bothering me to figure out what's going on.
The other piece is that it's fun for the kids to read months or years after the trip, and institutionalizes the good stories instead of relying on fading memories.
I was never a comic book fan, and I saw Green Lantern on Friday only because a group of friends who are fans wanted to see it. I knew I was in trouble when a dramatic voiceover introduced us to a solid dozen names and places, including the happy planet of intergalactic peacekeepers and the main arch-villain, who's names I promptly forgot.
Not only did the story come with an enormous amount of baggage, but it made quite a mess of a story going forward. It seemed like the setting was driving the narrative instead of the other way around. As if some screenwriter was standing by with a stopwatch worrying that the audience will lose interest since Hal hasn't flown anywhere off planet for over two minutes.
The never-ending fight scenes were made less dramatic by virtue of the fact that Hal's limitations were never really explained or explored. It wasn't even clear whether he knew himself. That really spoiled the movie for me more than anything else -- when Batman was pinned by Liam Neeson in the EL-train car, you knew that he was vulnerable, and it was that collateral of mortality that defined the character. Here, when the main character had no problem flying across the galaxy for a quick meeting with his idiot boss and was literally dodging asteroids in the climax, it wasn't so clear.
Those darn infrared sensors ruin my day when I'm at a concert and need to transfer data with my IrDA port on my PowerBook 5300. I've been thinking about upgrading to 802.11a, but I've never really thought of myself as an early adopter and I'm really upset that Apple pulls these stunts to make us upgrade all the time.
This is a very nicely written and researched article, which, unfortunately, only shows in detail one horrific case study of what could soon be a widespread occurrence if the big telecom corps get what they want: to go after the government/educational market (now that the consumer market is completely saturated) and offer them half the service at twice the price.
Organizations like WiscNet provide a fantastic public service, and the notion of dismantling them for private industry to make a buck is just reprehensible. I'm from Michigan, not Wisconsin, but I could very easily see this happening here, as we have the same issues in play: Merit Network, a non-profit co-op founded for the same reasons as WiscNet, provides Internet access to almost all the schools in the state. It would be a huge loss for our corrupt legislature to squeeze them out (never underestimate the evil of the Michigan Legislature, look up the Michigan "promise scholarship" if you don't believe me). I'm sure other states are in similar situations.
My dad's a public school teacher, and my Internet access growing up was through Merit's dialup, which they offered free to teachers at the time. Unlike most commercial offerings back in the mid-90s (or even now) there was no monthly time allotment or bandwidth cap. I shudder to think how my experiences building web sites and learning to code would have changed had AT&T run that system. I do biomed research now, and I'm posting this from a Merit network connection that we use to collaborate with other labs across the country. Try doing that on a 250GB monthly cap.
Hey Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association: Go to hell, and take your bandwidth caps with you.
long hours, potentially hazardous working conditions (get splashed with 1 mol sulfuric acid.), and heavy work loads.
Yeah, there is a reason I gave up my career and degree in chemistry for IT.
Long hours of menial tasks (how many times is it possible to jam the same printer anyway?), angry users (not my fault you didn't backup), and heavy work loads.
Yeah, there is a reason I gave up my career in IT and got a degree in physics.
I work as a research associate at a name brand school. I've seen this article cited a few times, usually by discouraged graduate students.
For me, I guess it all comes down to what you want out of life. Greenspun's argument basically comes down to the fact that science/tech is at risk of being outsourced, and people should instead be real-estate agents, doctors, and lawyers. Well, news flash, lawyers are being replaced with software, many doctors want a career switch, and real-estate agents, well, I'm not even going to go there. I just find it too insulting to compare somebody who's chosen to advance humanity's exploration of the world we live in with somebody who wants to make a quick buck by match-making sellers and buyers. Hell, if anything, the last decade should have taught us that the internet is rapidly doing away with middlemen. Go ask your local bookstore/pawnshop/consumer electronics store how business has been recently.
Most people find it easier to follow in the footsteps of others (teachers at school, professional parents, etc) rather than ask the hard questions: "What am I good at?" "Will somebody pay me to do it?" "Can I be the best at what I do?"
Work is work, and nobody said work is entirely fun. If you have a job you truly enjoy every minute of every day, congratulations. Most people go their whole life without finding it. But, there is a big difference between a job with some enjoyable aspects and rewards vs. a job you truly despise.
> A "media PC" costs $300, not $1000.
I suppose, but if you're competing on price floor, that old PC in the closet is free. Long as it has a PCIe graphics slot, grab yourself a $20 Radeon HD card and you're there.
You don't need 4 gigs of ram and a dual-core processor to watch Hulu.
I did something like this last year. Wasn't really willing to pay $1000 for a "Media PC", so I bought a Dell from circa 2005 at a local resale shop, P4 2ghz or some such, for $50. Then got an ATI Radeon HD 4000-something off NewEgg for $20. The Radeon 4000 is, AFAIK, the lowest-end card that supports 1080p hardware decoding. ("DXVA support" is the Microsoft buzzword that you need on the hardware + software side for this to work.) 2TB hard drive + USB enclosure for $100. Threw in a cheap BD-ROM drive just for fun ($50).
Total cost: $220. Less if I'd had the parts lying around.
On the software side, with MakeMKV + Media Player Classic, the box can rip + play Blu-Rays at full resolution with 0% processor utilization. Synergy to control from my laptop while sitting on the coach.
The final kicker was that the Adobe Flash team finally got off their collective butts and included support for hardware decoding in Flash 10.2. Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix all look fantastic.
I wouldn't dream of ever going back to cable and trying to program a DVR. Too much work.
I do neuroscience research for a living, and I can definitely say that I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for Hollywood. I remember watching computer-glorifying movies like "Flight of the Navigator", "Tron", and "Star Wars" when I was in first grade in the early '90s. That was an era when we didn't have a VCR at home and going out to the movies was something of a treat. Since today's elementary school kids all have iPods to take to school and DVD players in the family minivan, it's easy to remember that it wasn't that long ago that movies and computers weren't so commonplace. I grew up in a middle class, college educated family, and we had only one television in the house and didn't even have a family computer until the mid '90s, except for my father's Apple IIGS that he used for work. To say that movies inspired me would be an understatement. I was a Star Wars nut for a long time, and Flight of the Navigator made a huge impression on me, too. Funnily enough, I only saw FotN once, but remembered vivid scenes from it for over a decade later (and when I rewatched it last year I was amazed how accurate my memory was).
By second grade, I was teaching myself how to program BASIC on the school DOS 4/286 boxes. Heck, in third grade I taught the teacher how to use Applesoft Basic on her IIGS. Learning the math to write programs put me into advanced placement math the next year, and by sixth grade I was teaching the other students how to write programs to solve their algebra homework. By high school I was doing database and IT work for the local university that I later graduated from.
Somewhere in there, my parents took me to see "Apollo 13". That spurred another interest in space physics and engineering, which led to reading books about the disaster and spaceflight in general. Eventually, my 7th grade teacher loaned me her copy of Kip Thorne's book "Black holes and time warps". Bottom line, I ended up with a degree in physics. IT work paid well, but was boring as hell, so I made the switch into doing real science and worked my way up to lab manager.
For a document release that was supposed to "reshape world history", it's actually been a pretty disappointing ride thus far. Embarrassing, sure, but by no means earth-shattering. No international corruption rings, not even a single assassination plot (Hollywood screenwriters hoping for some free inspiration must be sooo disappointed right now). Some spying sure, and amusing adjectives about various world leaders, but not much that wasn't already known or assumed at some level (if you needed the Wikileaks cable leak to learn facts like: Putin is Russia's power broker, China hacked Google, and Colonel Qaddafi is mentally unstable, then you haven't been paying attention).
If anything, it's actually strengthened my faith a bit in the US Government. No real smoking guns, and the Obama administration seems to have acted reasonably responsibly with respect to the multitude of issues in the Middle East, and even in accordance with their public policy. Yeah, I know it doesn't include "top secret" information, but still, most of it is of no particular interest except for world historians and a day of news entertainment for the masses.
I'm still solidly in the middle about the justification of release, and the lack of substantive information is pushing me back to thinking it's not justifiable. Yes, I think government should be transparent, but let me say, as someone who manages a small organization, I do talk about people behind their backs, often in email. Making snap judgments of other people based on limited encounters, subjective and unfair as it is, is how we manage our day to day lives.