Just think one day we can grow massive "pillars" in the earth, and these "pillars" can sequester carbon and be powered by the sun as they grow. Then as they reach a certain height and are no longer as efficient as they once were, we can take them down and use them as fuel. We can then plant new pillars to grow and use the by products from old burnt "pillars" to help the new ones grow. Perhaps then if we properly manage these "pillar farms" and modify the "pillars" just right we can have them absorb more carbon from the air than they release when burned for fuel.
How to be social.
1) Talk to strangers. Despite what your parents told you this is the first step to meting peope and making friends. The key is to talk about stuff that doesn't make you look silly or crazy and knowing when it is time to stop talking.
2) Lose your inhibitions and don't be afraid to embarrass yourself. Be bold and confidence will follow.
3) Be yourself and know who you are. You need to know you to introduce others to you.
4) Know when you are not wanted and are being annoying.
5) Hit the strip clubs. Don't waste money and tip too much or get dances, but buy a dancer or two drinks and use them to practice talking to. IF you act dumb or whatever have them tell you and use it as a learning experience. This will prepare you for talking to half naked single moms in normal clubs also.
Where to meet people.
1) Go to a church and some church events. Summer socials are often fun.
2) Find a local gaming group. Comic shops and places like rpgnet are a good start.
3) Hang out at a coffee shop or all night dinner and observe people and how they interact. It is a good start to ease into real social interaction. Also you will be bale to have conversations with the "regulars" over time.
4) Start a workplace softball or basketball team. Even a bowling league or dart team would work.
5) Find some friends and go to a club or bar.
6) Also check out socialweb.net to find places to meet people.
How to meet girls.
1) Good hygiene. Clean man parts get touched more often.
2) Have confidence or act like you do.
3) Take action. Don't be a wall flower. If you meet a girl; talk.
4) Prepare for rejection and learn from your mistakes.
5) Read the book "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists"
*If you are not the church going or not the religious type you can look for a Universal Unitarian church they take all faiths and even atheist.
What is the benefit of this new technology over traditional books and human interaction and how will this project help the fundamental problems that lead to illiteracy (poverty, lack of family literacy, and learning disabilities)?
Oddly enough, the comments are much easier to read if you turn the page style off. In fire fox just go to the view > page style > No Style to get a plain yet non-eye bleeding slashdot.
Actually this is very similar to what most cable stations offer now with pay-per-view. You get a 24-48 hour window to watch a movie and can watch it as often as you like within that period. Some digital cable boxes even allow you to pause, rewind, and so forth during the movie. Also most of those cable boxes don't require a phone line and shows can be ordered from a special menu on your TV.
Inflection or not, people will interprit a message based more on their emotional state than the content of the message.
No matter how you emphasise "I didn't steal the money" the recipient will respond based on their emotional/mental state.
Depending on who reads it, you just as likely to get any one of the following responses:
Well who did steal the money?
I didn't steal the money, why are you accusing me?
Don't call me a thief.
Yes you did.
What did you steal?
What money?
I didn't think you did.
I like tacos.
This is because most people have poor listening skills and even poorer reading skills.
I remember back in high school when we would read a book for English class. Almost every student had a different take on what they read. They each interpreted the material differently. Even with classical works of literature, none of us got the same meaning from the books. It wasn't until the teacher explained things that most (not all) of the class was able to come to the same page so to speak.
IF we look at things like the bible, it is easy to see how many different people can get a wide variety of meaning from the same text.
The "educated" people are simply following a set of literary conventions they and their peers have been trained to recognize has having specific meaning. Yet even when following such conventions their meaning is still misunderstood on occasion.
If you only buy the rights, the nhow cna music stores buy used CDs? Are they buying the licence from you or is it considered an illegal sale?
Also why couldn't msic companies simply include mp3 versions of their songs on the dic. Then they could have the songs already covered under something like Apple's Fairplay oe some other copy limiting drm.
Companies are already looking to place products in reruns of older shows, going as far as to insert digial products.
Video-technology company Princeton Video Image has for years used digital imaging to insert virtual first-down lines (with corporate logos) in football games and completely photorealistic but nonexistent "signs" behind home plate at baseball games. Now it wants to move into reruns, with technology that can seamlessly insert 3-D objects into video footage-a Pepsi on a desktop, a Lexus at a curbside, a box of Tide on a countertop-where there was nothing before. PVI is negotiating to do placements in reruns of Law & Order and hopes to strike deals with other syndicators and even first-run shows. "You could sell a box of cereal in the kitchen one [airing]," says PVI vice president Paul Slagle, "and dish soap in the next." PVI's Holy Grail: customizing insertions using interactive-TV technology-which is still distant and speculative-that would store viewer information (demographic details, even interactive purchases) as Web browsers do. Your TV would figure, Slagle says, "whether you're riper for a Cadillac or a Saturn."http://www.time.com/time/pacific/magazine/20010625 /tv.html
Some people are not adept at language. In my travels I've noticed that every country/natonality has a sizable porton that cannot speak propper (insert dominate language of the region here). Not everyone has the talent to learn to speak a new language. I for one have a hearing problem that makes speaking or understading tonal languages (and some accents) very difficult.
From a buisness standpoint, you often do not have the time to learn a new language, especially to the extent needed when dealing wih complex buisness negotiations and terms that are very subtle. Also professional translators are not always on hand, or some information is too sensitive for anyone but the people involved to hear.
In the beginning I'm sure this kind of technology is not going to be as good as learning the language or having a translator on hand, but is good for those situations when the other options are not feasible.
It will take time before we have the universal translator type devices that do fairly decent translations on the fly, but something that is simple, easy, and allows buisness to get done or the tourist to find their hotel is good start.
As Game a Writer/Playtester/and player who is also friends with a number of people who work in the industry (from writing to owning bookstores), I can say that Table-top Roleplaying has NOT had a big year. Wizards of the Coast and some of the larger game companies have faired alright, but have not had that great of sales. Overall, the industry has had a mediocure year at best.
Yes the larger companies have released a few books. But the books mentione in the story are by no means "important" to most gamers. Sales and turnout from August's Gen Con Indianapolis were not that great, and there were few products released, let alone many signifigant ones.
The new Mage game from White Wolf was a flop at GenCon, as were most the games premiered. The Serenity RPG (which you could have signed by Ron Glass) sold out and has done well.
This article looks liek nothign more than another advertisement for Wizards of teh Coast. The earlier/. article on GenCon was also nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to kiss Wizard's ass.
The industry is still seeing hard times. People are playing as much if not more than they ever were, but are purchasing less.
From a player/GM perspective it is hard to incorperate a new book a month into your game. For a GM with a life, you may not have time even read a book a month.
OK my rant over.
Re:Sounds like things aren't going as planned
on
Set PHASRs On Stun
·
· Score: 1
It seems more like a responce to public pressure to not kill the enemy. If we would just let our troops do their job and use lethal force at their discretion (rather than the discretion of the media/public) maybe they would have been back by now.
War is a bloody, violent, horrible thing. There is no honor is war, and when you attempt to interject civility into blood shed you simply shed more of your own blood.
Perhaps all the people who don't have years of political experience, military experience, experience with world cultures, and access to all the data (including classified info) on the war should be quiet and let the experts do their job without uninformed, non-constructive critisism.
You would think people in the tech fields would understand how difficult it is to do a job while being criticised by those who know little to nothing of your job (but often seem to think they know what is best).
No, the article says "The Spirit was about 100 miles off Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to get onboard."
The pirates from the description and common snese were pulled along side the ship.
The ship was 100 miles away from shore, and the pirates right next to ship.
No where does it say the pirates were 100 miles away from the ship.
All this does is shift the buisness model for television. Instead of traditional ratings, they can simply look at the number of downloads and with the help of apple see what demographics are downloading which shows.
As it is, Nielsen ratings (according to what we learned in broadcasting classes) are from those people who have cable. They don't account for people that still use rabbit ears (or other parts) to get a signal.
Also the time where the vast majority of people have highspeed internet is still a bit off. (wow 3 sentences that started with an "a") So I don't see this has hurting local affiliates for a good while. In the mean time they should probably look to merging with cable companies/ISPs. The internet in this case has simply changed the way content gets to consumer, and it seems is becoming the delivery method that television, movies, and radio are/were.
I for one wouldn't be surprised if future televison downloads included comercials. Only a small fraction of the ads aired durring most netwrok shows are local ads that generate revenue for the local affiliate. Most the ads make money for the network.
I wouldn't mind having ads in downloaded television shows. Sometimes there are ads that are amusing, sometimes I see a preview for a movie I've some how overlooked elsewhere, or I see a preview for a show that I some how hadn't noticed or didn't really know much about and were too lazy to go look up/download.
Over the years the power has shifted between affiliates and the networks. Used to be a network could dictate everything an affiliate showed and when, then over time affiliates could actually pick and chose what to show, which network (or networks) to carry.
I find it odd that Apple has simply looked at what people do for free online and then offer that service (legaly) for a price. First it was software from the apple store, then music, now TV, next it will probbaly be movies.
why do you block ads?
I block ads because they usually get in the way of the pages I'm trying to view. All too often they are loud, annoying, slow to load, and take up a signifigant amount of screen space. Also a number of them are just ugly and make the site look bad.
And with what?
It depends on which machine I'm on. Most of the time I just use the ad blocking extension for firefox.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
Yes, I do view them differently. TV ads are less intrusive. TV ads don't cause my PIP to come on (i.e. a pop up window). I can avoid TV ads by changing the channel, going to the bathroom, or some other activity until they are through. I can also fast forward through them if I tape the show on my VCR (or skip them with a tivo). Also the more important thing is that with some TV shows, the commercials factor into the pacing of the show, and in some cases the breaks add to the show. Finally, TV ads are more entertaining than web ads. A good number of people watch the superbowl each year for the commercials.
What about in a magazine?
Yes, I do view them differently. In a magazine I can avoid a good number of the ads by flipping the page. A number of magazine ads are often pleasent to look at depending on the magazine. The magazine ads I don't like are the ones that have a fragrance sample on them. Those usually smell up the whole magazine or prompt people to rub the paper on their skin. Either way it makes me not want to pick that issue up. It also makes me glad that web advertisers can't make me smell things (yet).
Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
I haven't avoided a magazine just because it had too many ads. I have stopped reading some magazines because their Ad to content ratio increased as the page count of the magazine decreased. This is especially true with the fashion and "female oriented" magazines.
One of things I found when I was in engineering school was that high school did little to prepare any of us for college. Even the advanced/AP physics, chemistry, and calculus classes in highshcool were nothing like what we were doing right out of the gate in college.
In most high schools the smart kids don't really have to do much homework or really try to get an A. I know when i was in school you could sleep all day and still ace the test if you just skimmed the book right before the test. The high school ciriculum just isn't up to the standards of the top engineering schools.
Often students think the subject is easy and possibly even fun because it requires so little work to understand and use in high school only walk into a university and be overwhelmed by the subject matter they thought they understood.
High schools need to step up their sciences to a higher level to make the transition smoother. Having the universities dumb down their ciriculum is just silly.
Part of the problem too was the way the college classes were taught. Often in a subject (most notoriously physics) we would jump around as to doing things algebra based one chapter, then physics based the next reguarless of whic hwas more appropreate for that chapter. Often we would be using a style of math that was coutner productive to what we were doing, but had to do it certain way to make the professors happy.
Another problem is that in the univerity setting the subjects of engineering are often abstract, limited to examples in textbooks and drawing on the dry erase board. Univerities need to introduce the students sooner into more of a working type setting.
Each major should have at least one class per quarter that is all about the application of what the students are learning in a semi real world way.
I know the ME and EE students really got more out of building the solar racers in their spare time than they got out of all their classes their first two years. Actually seeing how the math was applied to a real world problem often was what made the subjects they were studying click.
I know the CS majors learned more making games and actual projects that had real implementation than the stupid example programs in the books that had no real world uses.
Not all anime licenced is done like this, and some of the licencing deals are a package deal. For example the Gundam series (iirc) was a package where the licencing company had to aquire all the gundam shows or none at all.
Shows that are licenced before they ever air are generally either part of a package deal or were seen by the people incharge of licencing at a trade show or through another preview opportunity (such as a dvd of the show sent to them).
The companies that licence anime in america do roughly the same thing. They watch the fan sub community for what is popular, then licence it and sell it.
I remember back when I was a kid, we used to copy cassets and make mixed tapes of the songs we liked all the time. We also used to record music from the radio onto a casset and share music between friends.
I don't recall the music industry raiding homes and sueing kids over "pirated" music back in the 80's.
If anything it was these mix-tapes that got us to listen to more types of music and eventually buy a full tape if we liked what we heard.
I would kind of like to see the numbers between sales pre/post casset tapes and pre/post cd-r.
Working in a somewhat corporate environment, I've noticed that the requirements for IT professionals in a number of places usually involve Microsoft certifications and knowledge of windows apps, but little to no knowledge of linux. A number of Universities that give degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering and even networking offer little training in using linux.
In the Tommy case it is probably that none of the IT guys have the linux background to customize thier distro to the needs (or wants) of the company.
It came down to being easier and faster to just pay for windows in this case. The alternative could have been spending months to retrain current staff in linux or months to hire new people. That is time the company just didn't want to invest.
Unfortunantly knowing linux is not a requirement for getting a degree or a job within the IT field.
Slashdot Mirror
Just think one day we can grow massive "pillars" in the earth, and these "pillars" can sequester carbon and be powered by the sun as they grow. Then as they reach a certain height and are no longer as efficient as they once were, we can take them down and use them as fuel. We can then plant new pillars to grow and use the by products from old burnt "pillars" to help the new ones grow. Perhaps then if we properly manage these "pillar farms" and modify the "pillars" just right we can have them absorb more carbon from the air than they release when burned for fuel.
How to be social. 1) Talk to strangers. Despite what your parents told you this is the first step to meting peope and making friends. The key is to talk about stuff that doesn't make you look silly or crazy and knowing when it is time to stop talking. 2) Lose your inhibitions and don't be afraid to embarrass yourself. Be bold and confidence will follow. 3) Be yourself and know who you are. You need to know you to introduce others to you. 4) Know when you are not wanted and are being annoying. 5) Hit the strip clubs. Don't waste money and tip too much or get dances, but buy a dancer or two drinks and use them to practice talking to. IF you act dumb or whatever have them tell you and use it as a learning experience. This will prepare you for talking to half naked single moms in normal clubs also. Where to meet people. 1) Go to a church and some church events. Summer socials are often fun. 2) Find a local gaming group. Comic shops and places like rpgnet are a good start. 3) Hang out at a coffee shop or all night dinner and observe people and how they interact. It is a good start to ease into real social interaction. Also you will be bale to have conversations with the "regulars" over time. 4) Start a workplace softball or basketball team. Even a bowling league or dart team would work. 5) Find some friends and go to a club or bar. 6) Also check out socialweb.net to find places to meet people. How to meet girls. 1) Good hygiene. Clean man parts get touched more often. 2) Have confidence or act like you do. 3) Take action. Don't be a wall flower. If you meet a girl; talk. 4) Prepare for rejection and learn from your mistakes. 5) Read the book "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists" *If you are not the church going or not the religious type you can look for a Universal Unitarian church they take all faiths and even atheist.
What is the benefit of this new technology over traditional books and human interaction and how will this project help the fundamental problems that lead to illiteracy (poverty, lack of family literacy, and learning disabilities)?
Oddly enough, the comments are much easier to read if you turn the page style off. In fire fox just go to the view > page style > No Style to get a plain yet non-eye bleeding slashdot.
Actually this is very similar to what most cable stations offer now with pay-per-view. You get a 24-48 hour window to watch a movie and can watch it as often as you like within that period. Some digital cable boxes even allow you to pause, rewind, and so forth during the movie. Also most of those cable boxes don't require a phone line and shows can be ordered from a special menu on your TV.
Inflection or not, people will interprit a message based more on their emotional state than the content of the message. No matter how you emphasise "I didn't steal the money" the recipient will respond based on their emotional/mental state. Depending on who reads it, you just as likely to get any one of the following responses: Well who did steal the money? I didn't steal the money, why are you accusing me? Don't call me a thief. Yes you did. What did you steal? What money? I didn't think you did. I like tacos. This is because most people have poor listening skills and even poorer reading skills.
I remember back in high school when we would read a book for English class. Almost every student had a different take on what they read. They each interpreted the material differently. Even with classical works of literature, none of us got the same meaning from the books. It wasn't until the teacher explained things that most (not all) of the class was able to come to the same page so to speak. IF we look at things like the bible, it is easy to see how many different people can get a wide variety of meaning from the same text. The "educated" people are simply following a set of literary conventions they and their peers have been trained to recognize has having specific meaning. Yet even when following such conventions their meaning is still misunderstood on occasion.
Loss of audio quality won't matter. By the time the format becomes obsolete most the current users will be old and hard of hearing anyway :P
Does this mean that documents will now contain pop-up ads and loud flash content?
If you only buy the rights, the nhow cna music stores buy used CDs? Are they buying the licence from you or is it considered an illegal sale? Also why couldn't msic companies simply include mp3 versions of their songs on the dic. Then they could have the songs already covered under something like Apple's Fairplay oe some other copy limiting drm.
Companies are already looking to place products in reruns of older shows, going as far as to insert digial products. Video-technology company Princeton Video Image has for years used digital imaging to insert virtual first-down lines (with corporate logos) in football games and completely photorealistic but nonexistent "signs" behind home plate at baseball games. Now it wants to move into reruns, with technology that can seamlessly insert 3-D objects into video footage-a Pepsi on a desktop, a Lexus at a curbside, a box of Tide on a countertop-where there was nothing before. PVI is negotiating to do placements in reruns of Law & Order and hopes to strike deals with other syndicators and even first-run shows. "You could sell a box of cereal in the kitchen one [airing]," says PVI vice president Paul Slagle, "and dish soap in the next." PVI's Holy Grail: customizing insertions using interactive-TV technology-which is still distant and speculative-that would store viewer information (demographic details, even interactive purchases) as Web browsers do. Your TV would figure, Slagle says, "whether you're riper for a Cadillac or a Saturn." http://www.time.com/time/pacific/magazine/20010625 /tv.html
d s.everywhere.ap/
g /Pitch/1-hi/product_placing.htm
5 29039,00.html
6 457&seqNum=2
t m
Also the whole Tivo increasing product placemnet is nothing new. Here are a few articles from as far back as 2001:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/18/apontv.a
http://webserve.govst.edu/users/ghrank/Advertisin
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=17
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0124-02.h
And here is Buisness Week's product placment hall of fame from 1998: http://www.businessweek.com/1998/25/b3583062.htm
Some people are not adept at language. In my travels I've noticed that every country/natonality has a sizable porton that cannot speak propper (insert dominate language of the region here). Not everyone has the talent to learn to speak a new language. I for one have a hearing problem that makes speaking or understading tonal languages (and some accents) very difficult. From a buisness standpoint, you often do not have the time to learn a new language, especially to the extent needed when dealing wih complex buisness negotiations and terms that are very subtle. Also professional translators are not always on hand, or some information is too sensitive for anyone but the people involved to hear. In the beginning I'm sure this kind of technology is not going to be as good as learning the language or having a translator on hand, but is good for those situations when the other options are not feasible. It will take time before we have the universal translator type devices that do fairly decent translations on the fly, but something that is simple, easy, and allows buisness to get done or the tourist to find their hotel is good start.
As Game a Writer/Playtester/and player who is also friends with a number of people who work in the industry (from writing to owning bookstores), I can say that Table-top Roleplaying has NOT had a big year. Wizards of the Coast and some of the larger game companies have faired alright, but have not had that great of sales. Overall, the industry has had a mediocure year at best. Yes the larger companies have released a few books. But the books mentione in the story are by no means "important" to most gamers. Sales and turnout from August's Gen Con Indianapolis were not that great, and there were few products released, let alone many signifigant ones. The new Mage game from White Wolf was a flop at GenCon, as were most the games premiered. The Serenity RPG (which you could have signed by Ron Glass) sold out and has done well. This article looks liek nothign more than another advertisement for Wizards of teh Coast. The earlier /. article on GenCon was also nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to kiss Wizard's ass.
The industry is still seeing hard times. People are playing as much if not more than they ever were, but are purchasing less.
From a player/GM perspective it is hard to incorperate a new book a month into your game. For a GM with a life, you may not have time even read a book a month.
OK my rant over.
It seems more like a responce to public pressure to not kill the enemy. If we would just let our troops do their job and use lethal force at their discretion (rather than the discretion of the media/public) maybe they would have been back by now. War is a bloody, violent, horrible thing. There is no honor is war, and when you attempt to interject civility into blood shed you simply shed more of your own blood. Perhaps all the people who don't have years of political experience, military experience, experience with world cultures, and access to all the data (including classified info) on the war should be quiet and let the experts do their job without uninformed, non-constructive critisism. You would think people in the tech fields would understand how difficult it is to do a job while being criticised by those who know little to nothing of your job (but often seem to think they know what is best).
No, the article says "The Spirit was about 100 miles off Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to get onboard." The pirates from the description and common snese were pulled along side the ship. The ship was 100 miles away from shore, and the pirates right next to ship. No where does it say the pirates were 100 miles away from the ship.
All this does is shift the buisness model for television. Instead of traditional ratings, they can simply look at the number of downloads and with the help of apple see what demographics are downloading which shows. As it is, Nielsen ratings (according to what we learned in broadcasting classes) are from those people who have cable. They don't account for people that still use rabbit ears (or other parts) to get a signal. Also the time where the vast majority of people have highspeed internet is still a bit off. (wow 3 sentences that started with an "a") So I don't see this has hurting local affiliates for a good while. In the mean time they should probably look to merging with cable companies/ISPs. The internet in this case has simply changed the way content gets to consumer, and it seems is becoming the delivery method that television, movies, and radio are/were. I for one wouldn't be surprised if future televison downloads included comercials. Only a small fraction of the ads aired durring most netwrok shows are local ads that generate revenue for the local affiliate. Most the ads make money for the network. I wouldn't mind having ads in downloaded television shows. Sometimes there are ads that are amusing, sometimes I see a preview for a movie I've some how overlooked elsewhere, or I see a preview for a show that I some how hadn't noticed or didn't really know much about and were too lazy to go look up/download. Over the years the power has shifted between affiliates and the networks. Used to be a network could dictate everything an affiliate showed and when, then over time affiliates could actually pick and chose what to show, which network (or networks) to carry. I find it odd that Apple has simply looked at what people do for free online and then offer that service (legaly) for a price. First it was software from the apple store, then music, now TV, next it will probbaly be movies.
why do you block ads?
I block ads because they usually get in the way of the pages I'm trying to view. All too often they are loud, annoying, slow to load, and take up a signifigant amount of screen space. Also a number of them are just ugly and make the site look bad.
And with what?
It depends on which machine I'm on. Most of the time I just use the ad blocking extension for firefox.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
Yes, I do view them differently. TV ads are less intrusive. TV ads don't cause my PIP to come on (i.e. a pop up window). I can avoid TV ads by changing the channel, going to the bathroom, or some other activity until they are through. I can also fast forward through them if I tape the show on my VCR (or skip them with a tivo). Also the more important thing is that with some TV shows, the commercials factor into the pacing of the show, and in some cases the breaks add to the show. Finally, TV ads are more entertaining than web ads. A good number of people watch the superbowl each year for the commercials.
What about in a magazine?
Yes, I do view them differently. In a magazine I can avoid a good number of the ads by flipping the page. A number of magazine ads are often pleasent to look at depending on the magazine. The magazine ads I don't like are the ones that have a fragrance sample on them. Those usually smell up the whole magazine or prompt people to rub the paper on their skin. Either way it makes me not want to pick that issue up. It also makes me glad that web advertisers can't make me smell things (yet).
Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
I haven't avoided a magazine just because it had too many ads. I have stopped reading some magazines because their Ad to content ratio increased as the page count of the magazine decreased. This is especially true with the fashion and "female oriented" magazines.
One of things I found when I was in engineering school was that high school did little to prepare any of us for college. Even the advanced/AP physics, chemistry, and calculus classes in highshcool were nothing like what we were doing right out of the gate in college. In most high schools the smart kids don't really have to do much homework or really try to get an A. I know when i was in school you could sleep all day and still ace the test if you just skimmed the book right before the test. The high school ciriculum just isn't up to the standards of the top engineering schools. Often students think the subject is easy and possibly even fun because it requires so little work to understand and use in high school only walk into a university and be overwhelmed by the subject matter they thought they understood. High schools need to step up their sciences to a higher level to make the transition smoother. Having the universities dumb down their ciriculum is just silly. Part of the problem too was the way the college classes were taught. Often in a subject (most notoriously physics) we would jump around as to doing things algebra based one chapter, then physics based the next reguarless of whic hwas more appropreate for that chapter. Often we would be using a style of math that was coutner productive to what we were doing, but had to do it certain way to make the professors happy. Another problem is that in the univerity setting the subjects of engineering are often abstract, limited to examples in textbooks and drawing on the dry erase board. Univerities need to introduce the students sooner into more of a working type setting. Each major should have at least one class per quarter that is all about the application of what the students are learning in a semi real world way. I know the ME and EE students really got more out of building the solar racers in their spare time than they got out of all their classes their first two years. Actually seeing how the math was applied to a real world problem often was what made the subjects they were studying click. I know the CS majors learned more making games and actual projects that had real implementation than the stupid example programs in the books that had no real world uses.
Not all anime licenced is done like this, and some of the licencing deals are a package deal. For example the Gundam series (iirc) was a package where the licencing company had to aquire all the gundam shows or none at all. Shows that are licenced before they ever air are generally either part of a package deal or were seen by the people incharge of licencing at a trade show or through another preview opportunity (such as a dvd of the show sent to them).
The companies that licence anime in america do roughly the same thing. They watch the fan sub community for what is popular, then licence it and sell it.
I remember back when I was a kid, we used to copy cassets and make mixed tapes of the songs we liked all the time. We also used to record music from the radio onto a casset and share music between friends. I don't recall the music industry raiding homes and sueing kids over "pirated" music back in the 80's. If anything it was these mix-tapes that got us to listen to more types of music and eventually buy a full tape if we liked what we heard. I would kind of like to see the numbers between sales pre/post casset tapes and pre/post cd-r.
Working in a somewhat corporate environment, I've noticed that the requirements for IT professionals in a number of places usually involve Microsoft certifications and knowledge of windows apps, but little to no knowledge of linux. A number of Universities that give degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering and even networking offer little training in using linux. In the Tommy case it is probably that none of the IT guys have the linux background to customize thier distro to the needs (or wants) of the company. It came down to being easier and faster to just pay for windows in this case. The alternative could have been spending months to retrain current staff in linux or months to hire new people. That is time the company just didn't want to invest. Unfortunantly knowing linux is not a requirement for getting a degree or a job within the IT field.