Personally, I hold a degree in mathematics, but I was unable to find any work at all in that field and have seen very few job posting specifically working for a BS in Mathematics (job postings for a MS in Mathematics are slightly more common, but not exactly a high demand there either.) Presently, I am working outside the field I earned my degree in as a SQL DBA. I cannot speak for other areas in science, but if there is a glut of jobs for mathematics I have yet to find it.
(For the sake of accuracy, I shall point out that mathematics is not technically a science, but they are often grouped and discussed together and its closer to science than it is to any other human endeavor.)
I completely agree. Corporations are very good at conducting and sponsoring research into products and sciences likely to lead to products, but they are not so good at sponsoring fundamental research and it seems well withing governments roll to sponsor that.
More to the point, people are bad at estimating certain types of risks, and they are focused on certain types of risk. Historically, people are most worried about immediate threats to life and limb. Naturally that will always be a concern, but in an era where there is (comparatively) little immediate threat to life, we are not overly prepared to deal with subtle threats to information or technology. We are prepared to react to predators that want to eat us and starvation, but ill prepared to deal with people that want to defraud us and steal possessions that may not be immediately with us.
And you and they would be quite right, but that misses the point of the article.
The main point of the article is that many system reject both the idea of biological evolution and systems as wikipedia because they are inherently uncomfortable with how they work. This article provides demonstrations that they work and an explanation about why they work. It never claims that evolutionary systems are necessarily the best way to approach any given problem, just that they are a way that works.
As another point, this article points out correctly that showing these people that these systems work in other cases and how and why they work will help people to better understand and accept biological evolution. It is a way to address peoples discomfort and rejections of the technique of evolution first before entering the more emotionally charged area of biological evolution.
Well, you might want OpenOffice even if you already paid for office because:
A. It works on Linux, which is a big issue for those of us with dual boot systems.
B. There is a portable version that fits nicely on a decent sized thumbdrive, which is nice if you often use computers other than your primary one and want to know you will be able to open your files.
C. Have an outdated version of MS Office and don't want to pay the exorbitant upgrade fees.
And of course, if you haven't paid for MSOffice, OpenOffice has all the functionality that most end users need at no cost.
But, while I am a huge fan of the program, I do primarily save in.doc just like the survey said. I need to know that the people I send the file too will also be able to read it, and for the time being.doc is much more readily accepted than odf.
IT cannot be overstressed the importance of practice. As others have said, Math is not a spectator sport. One good source of practice material is a book called Chapter 0. It covers the fundamentals on which everything else is built. Also, try Algebra Through Problem Solving. It is available both in print and for free online. It is little more than a set of interesting problems set at around the level of an advanced college freshman.
While everything you say is absolutely correct, there are specific, commonly accepted preferences within the academic and business worlds, and the overlap between the two makes them virtually indistinguishable. This is the type of language normally taught deliberately in schools. Most people trying to move beyond the working class need to at least regularly interact with the academic and business communities, and they would find that interaction smoothed by speaking the academic/business dialect.
So, while you are right that you cannot improperly speak your native language, when most people refer to speaking properly they are talking about the academic/business dialect which does have prescribed rules, spellings, and to a lesser extent pronounciations. While it too is a living, changing dialect, it changes more slowly and in a more predictable way than many other vernaculars.
As did I. Those were my favorite video games when I was child, and Quest For Glory III is probably my favorite video game of all time. They combined humor, adventure, and a sense of exploration that especially appealed to me when I was younger.
Resident Evil was indeed a fine and horrifying game, and most of its sequels where awesome as well, but for me personally a game is not scary. I cannot totally suspend disbelief as I must always think about what I will do next in terms of it being game. With a movie, I can suspend disbelief far more fully.
You have an excellent point that it is meant as a sarcastic attack on that lifestyle, but sarcasm flies over the heads of many children (and all too many adults). I should have been more clear in my post, the song is definitely not glorifying it in its totallity, but snippets without examination can seem to be, and that is more than enough pause for some parents. I am certainly not saying that it should be censored, I have a child myself and he hears the uncensored version on my playlist all the time, but I can understand why parents and radio stations react to it.
I am not a lawyer, (IANAL), but I understand for something to be libel it must be presented as fact and untrue in a way that the accused libeler should have known them to be untrue. Personal opinions expressed as such cannot be libel regardless of how they are published and being factually accurate is a defense against a libel charge.
I have not read this book so I will not comment on it directly, and again, IANAL, but I would understand that if someone has engaged in pseudoscience and continues to defend it then it is factually accurate that they a "crackpot" in its colloquial meaning. Engaging in intellectual speculation no matter how outlandish does not make you a pseudoscientist as long as the speculation is clearly identified as such. Engaging in speculation presented as fact or appearing to be presented as fact at least makes you misleading and depending on the degree could easily be enough to be qualified as pseudoscience and its author as a "crackpot."
While I do not know enough details to discuss this particular case, I will say that most book reviews are primarily opinion and that someone reading them is primarily looking for the author of reviews reasoned opinion. It seems making it legally dangerous to post your honest and reasoned opinion whether it is favorable or not is very dangerous to public discourse in this country, and it should not be allowed to proceed. This could be achieved by raising the bar in legally claiming libel. It might also be at least worth considering making it possible for the courts to fine litigants that are clearly bringing frivolous lawsuits.
First, I must respectfully disagree that it is not glorifying drugs. While not over the top in my opinion, they are talking about everyone having immediate access to drug dealers. That is at the very least making it seem like dealing with drug dealers as drug dealers is normal, which is quite close enough to glorifying them for many parents.
This begs two questions that perhaps someone else can answer. Is that censorship in compliance with government regulations in some way or from the radio stations themselves? And did Nickelback have the option of refusing to let them do it?
I am greatly opposed to any government censorship, but if the radio station as a private entity wants to censor it and the artist agrees, I do not find that quite so egregarious.
I miss Quest for Glory (AKA Hero's Quest) personally. I played every game in the series and loved all of them (even if they had a few bugs.) They had direct combat, but it was not a dominant theme and they also had numerous puzzles set in a high fantasy setting. I don't think there were any games I ever enjoyed more. I also liked Police Quest.
I certainly do not understand it. When I went to college I and others used numerous types of removable media and all we had to do was accept that the system did automatic virus checking. If you trust your users and you aren't working with sensitive data (I never did in college), why is this an issue at all?
The one thing you do not mention is that with GPLed code with a sengle author (or equivalently a single point of contact which can speak for all authors) you still have the option of contacting them and negotiating a separate license. Releasing code under the GPL does not cause the original author to lose their copyright and their ability to release the code under multiple licenses to multiple people.
Naturally, this fails or at least becomes more complicated if you are drawing from a piece with multiple authors, but it is an option a large percentage of the time.
I would dare to say that you are wrong. They are standards, much like TCP/IP for humans, which make communications both more effective and more artful. But even if you are right, keep in mind that you say it derives from the upper class, which tends to be the group that hires, fires, and promotes. Thus, even if you are right, proper spelling and grammar will be requisite in a great many of the better jobs...
The real question is in how diligent the customer was. If someone who should have known better deliberately (if ignorantly) hands over all their pertinent details through open e-mail, then that is at least partially if not wholly the customer's fault.
On the other hand, in the case of a more sophisticated scheme where the customer was deceived despite reasonable dilligence, then while it is ultimately the fraudsters fault, it is right for the institution to shoulder at least most of the loss. For instance, a key logging program that came in an otherwise legitimate program could easily be on computers even with diligent owners and the customer should not then bear that responsibility.
First, I'd like to point out as I mentioned in my post that the ISPs have more than those to options, but to consider them.
1. They cannot reduce everyone's basic speed. They have an advertised speed, and while no one expects that burst speed to be met all (or even some, in some cases) of the time, if they DELIBERATELY reduce it they are breaking their own contracts. If they haven't written the contracts so they can change it, they will likely be sued. If they have, people are still likely to get annoyed and start looking for alternatives, and in major cities at least there are many alternatives.
2. If the price per megabyte is low, then this one is not bad. And it is definitely fair. Those who use more pay for it, and those who use less can enjoy full speed and pay less. Keep in mind that if the price per megabyte is low, many customers would pay less than the do under standard plans. And if you are downloading so much that you would pay more, you may be lumped in with the "abusers" even if its not from bittorrent in particular. But once again, its not abuse to use what you paid for. If I pay for 24/7 access to a certain bandwidth, its my right to use it. I may not use all of it, but its not abuse if I do.
I don't know which university you work for, but many universities will let you audit a course either for free or nearly free. Most universities don't charge for the content of the course so much as they charge for the labor that goes into the more personalized interaction. The information is cheap, the time of the professor (or TA) in answering questions, grading, and the universities name in saying the student successfully completed the course are expensive. If you are going through the trouble of posting it anyway, there's no reason not to make it publicly available from a business standpoint.
As for truancy, if it is an issue the university can challenge that by taking attendance and docking grades for missing. In my university, most freshman classes took attendance. Most classes beyond the freshmen year didn't. In the classes I felt I needed to attend, I attended devoutly, where I thought it would benefit me little, I skipped liberally. I do not see a reason to try to enforce attendance personally, but if you do there are better ways to do it than trying to restrict the downloads.
You have a good point, most ISPs, and indeed many service industries in general oversell on the expectation that enough people will not make full use of it that it will work out.
The catch for the ISP is that when a service industry does this, they are taking a risk in doing this. Normally it makes financial sense to take this risk, but on occassion it backfires, and when it does it is their responsibility to compensate the consumer for their failure and then to institute a real fix, not to try to downgrade the service at the same price.
Look at airlines. They often overbook on purpose, and normally it works out for them. But now and then too many people show up. In those cases, they will make an offer for people to wait for a later time in exchange for some form of compensation such as upgrades to first class or hard cash. I've heard the offers made many times in larger airports like the one in Las Vegas.
Once the bandwidth is paid for, the service provider should have no right to restrict your use of it and no right to care about what the actual traffic is(possible exceptions for genuinely illegal activity are a separate topic). If they genuinely need to make adjustments because too many people are using too much bandwidth, then when it is time to renew contracts they can offer to move people to a tiered service or move to a metered service that charges for bandwidth actually used, but they should not try to restrict types of access, only amounts and then only when they are not already bound by a contract saying they won't do that.
Your question starts out with false premises, or at least implied false premises. First, you are implying that the situation you describe now does not presently exist. Granted, DRM does exist now, however I am not aware of any DRM yet brought out that hasn't been cracked, and fairly quickly at that. Thus, technically, you can create that infinite number of copies and distribute them easily. Yet content industries have not yet collapsed, in fact they all seem to be doing quite well.
Second, you imply that without DRM virtually everyone would make use of these freely available copies. You have posited that DRM vanished, not that copyright vanished. While there are some hardcore filesharers out there that refuse to buy anything, a very large percentage of people consider such copying wrong and avoid it on moral grounds, and there is another group that will consider it a morally grey area and use it to sample some and then go out and buy the ones they really like. If DRM were removed(recall that DRM is relatively new, it was very recently quite easy to copy a VHS tape to another, for instance), it would have very little impact on the later two groups in terms of how much they buy. Only that first group of hardcore filesharers would download more than they already do.
Let us put those aside though and posit a world with neither copyright(in the legal or moral sense) nor DRM. In this situation everyone could and would share their media freely, easily, legally and morally. This still would require a major shift in the content creation industry, but still would not destroy it. First, presentation can be sold. In movies, this would mean theaters, which could still be required to provide a percentage to the content producers. For music, it would mean emphasizing the concerts as moneymakers with the recordings being advertising for the concerts. Second, packaging and convenience. Strange as some may find it, a lot of people like the feeling of owning something and packaging matters in retail very much. Even if they knew they could legally make a copy of a DVD, many people would still buy it if it were well packaged and presented.
Finally, do not forget the patronage system. Most of history's art, music, and many of the plays were formed with the primary financial support being a rich lord paying the creators a stipend to permit them to do their artistic work. The old system exactly as it was could be used for music still. Movies, due to their extreme cost, would need something more complicated, but a combination of soliciting funds from multiple patrons(perhaps even a donation system for the masses) and reducing the absurd cost of movies(particularly some of the salaries) would accomplish it.
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Personally, I hold a degree in mathematics, but I was unable to find any work at all in that field and have seen very few job posting specifically working for a BS in Mathematics (job postings for a MS in Mathematics are slightly more common, but not exactly a high demand there either.) Presently, I am working outside the field I earned my degree in as a SQL DBA. I cannot speak for other areas in science, but if there is a glut of jobs for mathematics I have yet to find it.
(For the sake of accuracy, I shall point out that mathematics is not technically a science, but they are often grouped and discussed together and its closer to science than it is to any other human endeavor.)
I completely agree. Corporations are very good at conducting and sponsoring research into products and sciences likely to lead to products, but they are not so good at sponsoring fundamental research and it seems well withing governments roll to sponsor that.
I find it scary that 89% didn't say they would. How much longer must we suffer through using our hands?
More to the point, people are bad at estimating certain types of risks, and they are focused on certain types of risk. Historically, people are most worried about immediate threats to life and limb. Naturally that will always be a concern, but in an era where there is (comparatively) little immediate threat to life, we are not overly prepared to deal with subtle threats to information or technology. We are prepared to react to predators that want to eat us and starvation, but ill prepared to deal with people that want to defraud us and steal possessions that may not be immediately with us.
And you and they would be quite right, but that misses the point of the article.
The main point of the article is that many system reject both the idea of biological evolution and systems as wikipedia because they are inherently uncomfortable with how they work. This article provides demonstrations that they work and an explanation about why they work. It never claims that evolutionary systems are necessarily the best way to approach any given problem, just that they are a way that works.
As another point, this article points out correctly that showing these people that these systems work in other cases and how and why they work will help people to better understand and accept biological evolution. It is a way to address peoples discomfort and rejections of the technique of evolution first before entering the more emotionally charged area of biological evolution.
Well, you might want OpenOffice even if you already paid for office because:
.doc just like the survey said. I need to know that the people I send the file too will also be able to read it, and for the time being .doc is much more readily accepted than odf.
A. It works on Linux, which is a big issue for those of us with dual boot systems.
B. There is a portable version that fits nicely on a decent sized thumbdrive, which is nice if you often use computers other than your primary one and want to know you will be able to open your files.
C. Have an outdated version of MS Office and don't want to pay the exorbitant upgrade fees.
And of course, if you haven't paid for MSOffice, OpenOffice has all the functionality that most end users need at no cost.
But, while I am a huge fan of the program, I do primarily save in
IT cannot be overstressed the importance of practice. As others have said, Math is not a spectator sport. One good source of practice material is a book called Chapter 0. It covers the fundamentals on which everything else is built. Also, try Algebra Through Problem Solving. It is available both in print and for free online. It is little more than a set of interesting problems set at around the level of an advanced college freshman.
The beauty of irony. I wonder if Sony sees the irony in all of this?
While everything you say is absolutely correct, there are specific, commonly accepted preferences within the academic and business worlds, and the overlap between the two makes them virtually indistinguishable. This is the type of language normally taught deliberately in schools. Most people trying to move beyond the working class need to at least regularly interact with the academic and business communities, and they would find that interaction smoothed by speaking the academic/business dialect.
So, while you are right that you cannot improperly speak your native language, when most people refer to speaking properly they are talking about the academic/business dialect which does have prescribed rules, spellings, and to a lesser extent pronounciations. While it too is a living, changing dialect, it changes more slowly and in a more predictable way than many other vernaculars.
As did I. Those were my favorite video games when I was child, and Quest For Glory III is probably my favorite video game of all time. They combined humor, adventure, and a sense of exploration that especially appealed to me when I was younger.
Resident Evil was indeed a fine and horrifying game, and most of its sequels where awesome as well, but for me personally a game is not scary. I cannot totally suspend disbelief as I must always think about what I will do next in terms of it being game. With a movie, I can suspend disbelief far more fully.
You have an excellent point that it is meant as a sarcastic attack on that lifestyle, but sarcasm flies over the heads of many children (and all too many adults). I should have been more clear in my post, the song is definitely not glorifying it in its totallity, but snippets without examination can seem to be, and that is more than enough pause for some parents. I am certainly not saying that it should be censored, I have a child myself and he hears the uncensored version on my playlist all the time, but I can understand why parents and radio stations react to it.
I am not a lawyer, (IANAL), but I understand for something to be libel it must be presented as fact and untrue in a way that the accused libeler should have known them to be untrue. Personal opinions expressed as such cannot be libel regardless of how they are published and being factually accurate is a defense against a libel charge.
I have not read this book so I will not comment on it directly, and again, IANAL, but I would understand that if someone has engaged in pseudoscience and continues to defend it then it is factually accurate that they a "crackpot" in its colloquial meaning. Engaging in intellectual speculation no matter how outlandish does not make you a pseudoscientist as long as the speculation is clearly identified as such. Engaging in speculation presented as fact or appearing to be presented as fact at least makes you misleading and depending on the degree could easily be enough to be qualified as pseudoscience and its author as a "crackpot."
While I do not know enough details to discuss this particular case, I will say that most book reviews are primarily opinion and that someone reading them is primarily looking for the author of reviews reasoned opinion. It seems making it legally dangerous to post your honest and reasoned opinion whether it is favorable or not is very dangerous to public discourse in this country, and it should not be allowed to proceed. This could be achieved by raising the bar in legally claiming libel. It might also be at least worth considering making it possible for the courts to fine litigants that are clearly bringing frivolous lawsuits.
First, I must respectfully disagree that it is not glorifying drugs. While not over the top in my opinion, they are talking about everyone having immediate access to drug dealers. That is at the very least making it seem like dealing with drug dealers as drug dealers is normal, which is quite close enough to glorifying them for many parents.
This begs two questions that perhaps someone else can answer. Is that censorship in compliance with government regulations in some way or from the radio stations themselves? And did Nickelback have the option of refusing to let them do it?
I am greatly opposed to any government censorship, but if the radio station as a private entity wants to censor it and the artist agrees, I do not find that quite so egregarious.
I miss Quest for Glory (AKA Hero's Quest) personally. I played every game in the series and loved all of them (even if they had a few bugs.) They had direct combat, but it was not a dominant theme and they also had numerous puzzles set in a high fantasy setting. I don't think there were any games I ever enjoyed more. I also liked Police Quest.
I certainly do not understand it. When I went to college I and others used numerous types of removable media and all we had to do was accept that the system did automatic virus checking. If you trust your users and you aren't working with sensitive data (I never did in college), why is this an issue at all?
The one thing you do not mention is that with GPLed code with a sengle author (or equivalently a single point of contact which can speak for all authors) you still have the option of contacting them and negotiating a separate license. Releasing code under the GPL does not cause the original author to lose their copyright and their ability to release the code under multiple licenses to multiple people.
Naturally, this fails or at least becomes more complicated if you are drawing from a piece with multiple authors, but it is an option a large percentage of the time.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. " -- Oscar Wilde.
The trick is to find the people who are not like that, and associate with them. Its hard, but they can be found on my space and in life.
I would dare to say that you are wrong. They are standards, much like TCP/IP for humans, which make communications both more effective and more artful. But even if you are right, keep in mind that you say it derives from the upper class, which tends to be the group that hires, fires, and promotes. Thus, even if you are right, proper spelling and grammar will be requisite in a great many of the better jobs...
The real question is in how diligent the customer was. If someone who should have known better deliberately (if ignorantly) hands over all their pertinent details through open e-mail, then that is at least partially if not wholly the customer's fault.
On the other hand, in the case of a more sophisticated scheme where the customer was deceived despite reasonable dilligence, then while it is ultimately the fraudsters fault, it is right for the institution to shoulder at least most of the loss. For instance, a key logging program that came in an otherwise legitimate program could easily be on computers even with diligent owners and the customer should not then bear that responsibility.
Its not smart to insult Chuck Norris.
Remember, once there were Dragons. Then, Chuck Norris decided dragons tasted good. Now there are no Dragons.
First, I'd like to point out as I mentioned in my post that the ISPs have more than those to options, but to consider them. 1. They cannot reduce everyone's basic speed. They have an advertised speed, and while no one expects that burst speed to be met all (or even some, in some cases) of the time, if they DELIBERATELY reduce it they are breaking their own contracts. If they haven't written the contracts so they can change it, they will likely be sued. If they have, people are still likely to get annoyed and start looking for alternatives, and in major cities at least there are many alternatives. 2. If the price per megabyte is low, then this one is not bad. And it is definitely fair. Those who use more pay for it, and those who use less can enjoy full speed and pay less. Keep in mind that if the price per megabyte is low, many customers would pay less than the do under standard plans. And if you are downloading so much that you would pay more, you may be lumped in with the "abusers" even if its not from bittorrent in particular. But once again, its not abuse to use what you paid for. If I pay for 24/7 access to a certain bandwidth, its my right to use it. I may not use all of it, but its not abuse if I do.
Why try to stop it?
I don't know which university you work for, but many universities will let you audit a course either for free or nearly free. Most universities don't charge for the content of the course so much as they charge for the labor that goes into the more personalized interaction. The information is cheap, the time of the professor (or TA) in answering questions, grading, and the universities name in saying the student successfully completed the course are expensive. If you are going through the trouble of posting it anyway, there's no reason not to make it publicly available from a business standpoint.
As for truancy, if it is an issue the university can challenge that by taking attendance and docking grades for missing. In my university, most freshman classes took attendance. Most classes beyond the freshmen year didn't. In the classes I felt I needed to attend, I attended devoutly, where I thought it would benefit me little, I skipped liberally. I do not see a reason to try to enforce attendance personally, but if you do there are better ways to do it than trying to restrict the downloads.
You have a good point, most ISPs, and indeed many service industries in general oversell on the expectation that enough people will not make full use of it that it will work out.
The catch for the ISP is that when a service industry does this, they are taking a risk in doing this. Normally it makes financial sense to take this risk, but on occassion it backfires, and when it does it is their responsibility to compensate the consumer for their failure and then to institute a real fix, not to try to downgrade the service at the same price.
Look at airlines. They often overbook on purpose, and normally it works out for them. But now and then too many people show up. In those cases, they will make an offer for people to wait for a later time in exchange for some form of compensation such as upgrades to first class or hard cash. I've heard the offers made many times in larger airports like the one in Las Vegas.
Once the bandwidth is paid for, the service provider should have no right to restrict your use of it and no right to care about what the actual traffic is(possible exceptions for genuinely illegal activity are a separate topic). If they genuinely need to make adjustments because too many people are using too much bandwidth, then when it is time to renew contracts they can offer to move people to a tiered service or move to a metered service that charges for bandwidth actually used, but they should not try to restrict types of access, only amounts and then only when they are not already bound by a contract saying they won't do that.
Your question starts out with false premises, or at least implied false premises. First, you are implying that the situation you describe now does not presently exist. Granted, DRM does exist now, however I am not aware of any DRM yet brought out that hasn't been cracked, and fairly quickly at that. Thus, technically, you can create that infinite number of copies and distribute them easily. Yet content industries have not yet collapsed, in fact they all seem to be doing quite well.
Second, you imply that without DRM virtually everyone would make use of these freely available copies. You have posited that DRM vanished, not that copyright vanished. While there are some hardcore filesharers out there that refuse to buy anything, a very large percentage of people consider such copying wrong and avoid it on moral grounds, and there is another group that will consider it a morally grey area and use it to sample some and then go out and buy the ones they really like. If DRM were removed(recall that DRM is relatively new, it was very recently quite easy to copy a VHS tape to another, for instance), it would have very little impact on the later two groups in terms of how much they buy. Only that first group of hardcore filesharers would download more than they already do.
Let us put those aside though and posit a world with neither copyright(in the legal or moral sense) nor DRM. In this situation everyone could and would share their media freely, easily, legally and morally. This still would require a major shift in the content creation industry, but still would not destroy it. First, presentation can be sold. In movies, this would mean theaters, which could still be required to provide a percentage to the content producers. For music, it would mean emphasizing the concerts as moneymakers with the recordings being advertising for the concerts. Second, packaging and convenience. Strange as some may find it, a lot of people like the feeling of owning something and packaging matters in retail very much. Even if they knew they could legally make a copy of a DVD, many people would still buy it if it were well packaged and presented.
Finally, do not forget the patronage system. Most of history's art, music, and many of the plays were formed with the primary financial support being a rich lord paying the creators a stipend to permit them to do their artistic work. The old system exactly as it was could be used for music still. Movies, due to their extreme cost, would need something more complicated, but a combination of soliciting funds from multiple patrons(perhaps even a donation system for the masses) and reducing the absurd cost of movies(particularly some of the salaries) would accomplish it.