I'm not sure why you're using Star Wars for analogies, Star Trek would be far better... In any case there are pros and cons to both. The biggest problem with self-study resides in the problem of not knowing what you don't know. The biggest problem with being taught by a professor is that you don't know what the professor doesn't know. Both self-study as well as academic study are essential together. It is rare individual that would choke down the advanced mathematics and theoretical subjects on their own. It is also equally rare for your course work to polish off the rough edges and fill in the missing gaps between theory and practical implementation that self-study will bring. However, I would assert that it would be better still if you were to bring someone from the professional field you intend to go into into the mix and sit at their feet in addition to the other two.
Whether to go to grad school for comp sci depends largely on what you plan on doing once you get out. If all you want to be is a sweat shop code-monkey then of course not. If you can hack some sh*t PHP/Python and JavaScript together your golden. But on the other side of the pendulum you have the R&D and/or embedded device (particularly DoD contractor) type jobs where you won't even be considered absent 5-6 years of prior or a master's/PhD..
Where you go for your undergraduate work is largely meaningless. If you're concerned about wasting money then just don't. Save it for your graduate work at such a university.
No they don't. Their staffers take care of their representation on Facebook and the like. Ted Stevens represented the most knowledgeable politician with respect to the Internet.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
GPS, radio triangulation, etc. attached to a map, or other such service. Yeh, that's never been done before. Certainly not by NASA, the military at large, air traffic control, etc. etc. I wonder which it was, hookers and blow, or just plain gross incompetence? Hell if you allow the interpretation of "distributed network" to include a "network of people" then you've got this dating back to at least WWII.
Hey no worries. Thanks to FRB inflating our money supply that's only 103% of GDP. Bernanke says I should be comfortable with that number. Besides, there are 13 other countries ahead of us in the world...
It makes much more sense to think of digital goods as a service.
Distribution mechanisms sure, but in most cases definitely not once possessed. In most cases trying to spin digital goods as a service is an argument of convenience for the benefit of the distributor/producer trying to extract maximum profit from the consumer. But considering that broad categories of physical goods are being replaced by digital ones there is a larger issue that should be being weighed. By possessing a physical good we know that that good will always be around (barring theft) and always be available for our use. Once we've paid for it its ours, we don't have to pay someone to use it.
Now take that physical device into the digital realm, lets say a typewriter to a word processor. Now all of a sudden I don't own that typewriter analog. I have a subscription service that cost me $y to set up which provides me with a word processor but I have to pay them $x/month for access to it. My friend Joe loses his job. He needs to update his resume but can't afford the service himself he asks if he can borrow my account but I regrettably have to inform him that the terms of service prevent me from doing that.
Perhaps the example is somewhat contrived but surely you can see the parallels to what's presently going on. More and more we are "renting" instead of owning. Even when we do "own" it it's more correctly stated as "licensed" to use it. The corporations are trying to tell me I can't loan anything to anyone. I can't loan them my book, I can't loan them a selection of my music collection. I can't loan them my word processor. etc. etc.. This isn't about fairly compensating businesses, this goes well beyond fair compensation. These are only the "excuses" of the day. The real motivation is to extract as much money as is possible and keep finding new ways to extract yet even more. They could care less about the harm being done. They could care less about making people pay for the service known as life. If someone could find a way to force people to pay for the oxygen they breath they would. This mindset that people should serve business rather than business, people needs to end.
That's cute and all but this is a matter of law, not executive authority. This is a matter settled in courts, legislated if desired, from the legislative branch and hopefully not the judicial.
You're exchanging a use license. If the original user continues to use the data then they--so the theory goes--would be the violator and subject to litigation. I suspect this company is largely an attempt to test the laws regarding digital property rights. Along the way they probably hope to make some money to pay for the lawyers and with any luck continue the business model having won the recognition that digital and physical property rights may be considered one in the same.
Maybe we'll actually get it decided once and for all whether digital goods may be considered equivalent to physical goods. Then again, that'd actually straighten out all manner ambiguity related to digital property rights from ebooks, movies, musics, etc.. Since business must always prevail regardless of merit for that to happen we'd be stuck with a pro-business interpretation. So I suppose that means the judge will either punt or screw us over. God bless our plutocracy!
That is probably part of the driver for a tablet and stylus vs. keyboard, though I'd love to see a study between the two. I suspect they might actually not have much difference--at least for people that grew up with a keyboard attached to their fingers. To my understanding it's largely an issue of attaching mnemonics to what is heard and probably doesn't make much of a difference. I forget the particulars but I recall hearing a while back about how an environment smells can affect learning proficiency.
We float on a bed of molten rock, just as a boat bobs up and down on the water so too do land masses. There is no place that's completely earthquake free. To keep the analogy going; just some places that happen to be sheltered from the "rough chop," harbors, coves and the like.
They also said "outside our planet." That still leaves wide open the whole "ancient astronauts from Earth" camp. Better still, we now have a leading statement that provides additional credibility to the theory. Call us crazies will you? Hah! One day, we'll prove that the last ice age was caused by nuclear winter from our ancient ancestors. These aliens don't keeping telling us nukes are bad for no good reason. They lived through what could happen!
Replacement technology whose makers will inevitably draw lawsuits from the big incumbent publishers for "inducing" copyright infringement. It tends to happen every time there's such a disruptive development.
There will never be a bloodless war. Businesses have been given personhood, the actors comprising it operate much as any organ in a body. Self-preservation is a strong instinct. Simply because businesses will fight anything perceived as threat does not mean we the consumer should back down. We must fight, we must accept casualties, remain in the fight and press on. Again, if it wasn't for Napster, if it wasn't for the Pirate Bay, if it wasn't for the original Usenet (the real reason why we have base 64 encoding BTW) content providers would not have ceded ground and allowed legitimate companies like Netflix, iTunes, etc. to exist. If it were not for those pioneers to show the masses the way things "could" be and willingly risk the consequences thereof we'd still be stuck on the damn disc and no one would have even heard of an iPod. Can you imagine? People at one time used to carry backpacks filled with CDs just so they could listen to music on the go. They were stuck with one disc at a time and 10 lbs of plastic containing a tiny fraction of the selection an average iPod on the street holds now. Someone said "f-this and damn the consequences" and wrote first software to rip CDs for playback on their computer. The rest is history.
You say you send letters, you vote, etc. but you are a lone voice crying in the wilderness against a well entrenched establishment supported sometimes knowingly but mostly otherwise by innumerable cattle that regularly vote and send letters. If we are to win this fight we cannot be discouraged, we must fight on, we must Occupy or otherwise find ways to be recognized so that we may enjoin and create solidarity with the cattle. The necessary momentum will not be accumulated overnight, but it is accumulating, the global Occupy campaign is demonstration of this.
Neither I nor do most people hold the belief that authorship should be taken for granted (free). Supporting authorship is good and necessary. Supporting the middlemen that falsely claim to support authorship is wrong. Authorship should not receive the very minor fraction of proceeds from their labor but they are. They are because irrelevant, unnecessary middlemen are claiming the majority. Get rid of the middle men. Support and promote "self-publishing" and fair payment to authorship. Cost to consumers will fall and everyone relevant will be happy. My support of open-source/free technology and content isn't a dismissal of their paid for counterparts but a tool to communicate the reality of distribution to the masses in a very tangible way just as Napster showed the masses the reality what is really necessary and what isn't in the distribution of music.
Well, first off recognize that there isn't a quick way to solve this problem. While the Occupy campaigns are both amusing and inspiring they will not have the slightest effect on the business world nor government except in the "quite" passing of new laws that will provide new tools for controlling these groups. They do however have the potential to generate solidarity with the common people at this may later be useful momentum.
Further:
Hasten the obsolescence of these "middlemen" by promoting and developing replacement technology
Become politically relevant. The population that does the voting, sends letters to their representatives, etc. are not from the generation that grew up with nor fully utilizes these technologies. They do not understanding nor do the advocate laws supporting them. Politicians first order of business is being elected to the next term. Make them fear you by providing a threat of being voted out of office for not representing your interests.
Support and promote open-source/free technology and content. People that have a mindset that things easily created should be easily obtain will be less inclined to support the business status quo. This mindset is the only reason we have services like Netflix and the iTunes.
Promote and support learning. Stupid people are cattle.
While an amusing argument relative to present day technology I wouldn't dismiss the possibility later. However, a dog isn't exactly the kind "product" I was imagining given the context.
It is the legal distinction which I am calling specious. The legal verbiage codifying our intellectual property laws come from an age before a digital world existed. The principles behind the rights and restrictions spelled out in our IP laws are being ignored when it comes to the digital world not because digital IP does not merit the same rights and restrictions. The principles are being ignored because businesses are able to make legal arguments circumventing them on the grounds that the language chosen did not conceive of the existence of digital IP. Instead of adapting laws to apply the same principles to digital IP as are to physical IP draconian laws are being written to be completely one sided in favor of business taking no consideration for the consumer like the law did/does for physical IP.
I chose the term "middlemen" specifically for a reason. I am using it to mean someone/thing standing in between a source and a product. Just as people--such as salesmen--are middlemen being replaced by automated systems be they robots or software so too whole businesses being essentially middlemen will be replaced. Presently digital technology is replacing traditional publishers. It is no longer technologically necessary for a business to exist whose sole activity is to take a copy of a work and produce and distribute additional copies of it. So too personal manufacturing will eventually make it no longer technologically necessary for a business to exist whose sole activity is to transform raw material into finished goods. They will likewise become "middlemen." This is why I make the claim that there is no difference between physical and digital IP. The technology within which it is "fixed" is irrelevant. Businesses are being as absurd as scribes arguing against movable type printing presses--which they did. We didn't accept their arguments then nor should we now, unfortunately we are.
A 3D printer still needs raw materials
Yes. Of course, just as the digital world requires raw materials, electrons. The providers of which however are not what I'm calling middlemen.
There is no difference between a physical good and a virtual one. Both can be copied and both are being provided to consumers with obstacles to that copying. The arguments being put up by publishers and their supporters are specious and meant solely to hold back the inevitable tide that will soon wash away their business model.
Soon there will be precious little need for most of the present middle men residing in our economy. Manufacturers, service providers, salesmen, etc. all are becoming obsolete in this age of digital goods and service providers (software/robotics), the coming age of personal manufacture (3D printing) and beyond. If we don't kill ourselves first it is a foregone conclusion. This fact needs to be recognized and accepted. The real question is how severely are we going to allow the actors behind these dying business models to corrupt our laws and harm our citizens as they fight in desperation against inevitability. Unlike humans, businesses should not have a right to exist nor should they have a right to cause harm to humans. Businesses should be nothing more than tools, vehicles used in support of society as its servants not its masters. Businesses should be able to be readily replaced after obsolescence, not artificially and detrimentally propped up through laws and other government supports.
Hmm. That's interesting for one can witness countless businesses playing that game. It rather seemed to me that that was a principle reason for creating a so called "shell" corp. Parent creates a shell, does dirty work through it, collects profits. Shell eventually collapses (bankruptcy, etc.), parent creates new shell, rinse repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure why you're using Star Wars for analogies, Star Trek would be far better... In any case there are pros and cons to both. The biggest problem with self-study resides in the problem of not knowing what you don't know. The biggest problem with being taught by a professor is that you don't know what the professor doesn't know. Both self-study as well as academic study are essential together. It is rare individual that would choke down the advanced mathematics and theoretical subjects on their own. It is also equally rare for your course work to polish off the rough edges and fill in the missing gaps between theory and practical implementation that self-study will bring. However, I would assert that it would be better still if you were to bring someone from the professional field you intend to go into into the mix and sit at their feet in addition to the other two.
Whether to go to grad school for comp sci depends largely on what you plan on doing once you get out. If all you want to be is a sweat shop code-monkey then of course not. If you can hack some sh*t PHP/Python and JavaScript together your golden. But on the other side of the pendulum you have the R&D and/or embedded device (particularly DoD contractor) type jobs where you won't even be considered absent 5-6 years of prior or a master's/PhD..
Where you go for your undergraduate work is largely meaningless. If you're concerned about wasting money then just don't. Save it for your graduate work at such a university.
Free speech only works if it's pro M.I.C..
No they don't. Their staffers take care of their representation on Facebook and the like. Ted Stevens represented the most knowledgeable politician with respect to the Internet.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
GPS, radio triangulation, etc. attached to a map, or other such service. Yeh, that's never been done before. Certainly not by NASA, the military at large, air traffic control, etc. etc. I wonder which it was, hookers and blow, or just plain gross incompetence? Hell if you allow the interpretation of "distributed network" to include a "network of people" then you've got this dating back to at least WWII.
Alas in this case what The Onion meant as parody is more likely an actual tragedy.
Hey no worries. Thanks to FRB inflating our money supply that's only 103% of GDP. Bernanke says I should be comfortable with that number. Besides, there are 13 other countries ahead of us in the world...
I can't speak for your employer but Wall Street sure as hell does.
It makes much more sense to think of digital goods as a service.
Distribution mechanisms sure, but in most cases definitely not once possessed. In most cases trying to spin digital goods as a service is an argument of convenience for the benefit of the distributor/producer trying to extract maximum profit from the consumer. But considering that broad categories of physical goods are being replaced by digital ones there is a larger issue that should be being weighed. By possessing a physical good we know that that good will always be around (barring theft) and always be available for our use. Once we've paid for it its ours, we don't have to pay someone to use it.
Now take that physical device into the digital realm, lets say a typewriter to a word processor. Now all of a sudden I don't own that typewriter analog. I have a subscription service that cost me $y to set up which provides me with a word processor but I have to pay them $x/month for access to it. My friend Joe loses his job. He needs to update his resume but can't afford the service himself he asks if he can borrow my account but I regrettably have to inform him that the terms of service prevent me from doing that.
Perhaps the example is somewhat contrived but surely you can see the parallels to what's presently going on. More and more we are "renting" instead of owning. Even when we do "own" it it's more correctly stated as "licensed" to use it. The corporations are trying to tell me I can't loan anything to anyone. I can't loan them my book, I can't loan them a selection of my music collection. I can't loan them my word processor. etc. etc.. This isn't about fairly compensating businesses, this goes well beyond fair compensation. These are only the "excuses" of the day. The real motivation is to extract as much money as is possible and keep finding new ways to extract yet even more. They could care less about the harm being done. They could care less about making people pay for the service known as life. If someone could find a way to force people to pay for the oxygen they breath they would. This mindset that people should serve business rather than business, people needs to end.
That's cute and all but this is a matter of law, not executive authority. This is a matter settled in courts, legislated if desired, from the legislative branch and hopefully not the judicial.
You're exchanging a use license. If the original user continues to use the data then they--so the theory goes--would be the violator and subject to litigation. I suspect this company is largely an attempt to test the laws regarding digital property rights. Along the way they probably hope to make some money to pay for the lawyers and with any luck continue the business model having won the recognition that digital and physical property rights may be considered one in the same.
Maybe we'll actually get it decided once and for all whether digital goods may be considered equivalent to physical goods. Then again, that'd actually straighten out all manner ambiguity related to digital property rights from ebooks, movies, musics, etc.. Since business must always prevail regardless of merit for that to happen we'd be stuck with a pro-business interpretation. So I suppose that means the judge will either punt or screw us over. God bless our plutocracy!
That is probably part of the driver for a tablet and stylus vs. keyboard, though I'd love to see a study between the two. I suspect they might actually not have much difference--at least for people that grew up with a keyboard attached to their fingers. To my understanding it's largely an issue of attaching mnemonics to what is heard and probably doesn't make much of a difference. I forget the particulars but I recall hearing a while back about how an environment smells can affect learning proficiency.
Simple, he performed some useful math for us to gain perspective. You did not... :P
I haven't had time to ponder any analogies, I was too busy pondering a Beowolf cluster of these things...
We float on a bed of molten rock, just as a boat bobs up and down on the water so too do land masses. There is no place that's completely earthquake free. To keep the analogy going; just some places that happen to be sheltered from the "rough chop," harbors, coves and the like.
They also said "outside our planet." That still leaves wide open the whole "ancient astronauts from Earth" camp. Better still, we now have a leading statement that provides additional credibility to the theory. Call us crazies will you? Hah! One day, we'll prove that the last ice age was caused by nuclear winter from our ancient ancestors. These aliens don't keeping telling us nukes are bad for no good reason. They lived through what could happen!
Replacement technology whose makers will inevitably draw lawsuits from the big incumbent publishers for "inducing" copyright infringement. It tends to happen every time there's such a disruptive development.
There will never be a bloodless war. Businesses have been given personhood, the actors comprising it operate much as any organ in a body. Self-preservation is a strong instinct. Simply because businesses will fight anything perceived as threat does not mean we the consumer should back down. We must fight, we must accept casualties, remain in the fight and press on. Again, if it wasn't for Napster, if it wasn't for the Pirate Bay, if it wasn't for the original Usenet (the real reason why we have base 64 encoding BTW) content providers would not have ceded ground and allowed legitimate companies like Netflix, iTunes, etc. to exist. If it were not for those pioneers to show the masses the way things "could" be and willingly risk the consequences thereof we'd still be stuck on the damn disc and no one would have even heard of an iPod. Can you imagine? People at one time used to carry backpacks filled with CDs just so they could listen to music on the go. They were stuck with one disc at a time and 10 lbs of plastic containing a tiny fraction of the selection an average iPod on the street holds now. Someone said "f-this and damn the consequences" and wrote first software to rip CDs for playback on their computer. The rest is history.
You say you send letters, you vote, etc. but you are a lone voice crying in the wilderness against a well entrenched establishment supported sometimes knowingly but mostly otherwise by innumerable cattle that regularly vote and send letters. If we are to win this fight we cannot be discouraged, we must fight on, we must Occupy or otherwise find ways to be recognized so that we may enjoin and create solidarity with the cattle. The necessary momentum will not be accumulated overnight, but it is accumulating, the global Occupy campaign is demonstration of this.
Neither I nor do most people hold the belief that authorship should be taken for granted (free). Supporting authorship is good and necessary. Supporting the middlemen that falsely claim to support authorship is wrong. Authorship should not receive the very minor fraction of proceeds from their labor but they are. They are because irrelevant, unnecessary middlemen are claiming the majority. Get rid of the middle men. Support and promote "self-publishing" and fair payment to authorship. Cost to consumers will fall and everyone relevant will be happy. My support of open-source/free technology and content isn't a dismissal of their paid for counterparts but a tool to communicate the reality of distribution to the masses in a very tangible way just as Napster showed the masses the reality what is really necessary and what isn't in the distribution of music.
Well, first off recognize that there isn't a quick way to solve this problem. While the Occupy campaigns are both amusing and inspiring they will not have the slightest effect on the business world nor government except in the "quite" passing of new laws that will provide new tools for controlling these groups. They do however have the potential to generate solidarity with the common people at this may later be useful momentum.
Further:
While an amusing argument relative to present day technology I wouldn't dismiss the possibility later. However, a dog isn't exactly the kind "product" I was imagining given the context.
It is the legal distinction which I am calling specious. The legal verbiage codifying our intellectual property laws come from an age before a digital world existed. The principles behind the rights and restrictions spelled out in our IP laws are being ignored when it comes to the digital world not because digital IP does not merit the same rights and restrictions. The principles are being ignored because businesses are able to make legal arguments circumventing them on the grounds that the language chosen did not conceive of the existence of digital IP. Instead of adapting laws to apply the same principles to digital IP as are to physical IP draconian laws are being written to be completely one sided in favor of business taking no consideration for the consumer like the law did/does for physical IP.
I chose the term "middlemen" specifically for a reason. I am using it to mean someone/thing standing in between a source and a product. Just as people--such as salesmen--are middlemen being replaced by automated systems be they robots or software so too whole businesses being essentially middlemen will be replaced. Presently digital technology is replacing traditional publishers. It is no longer technologically necessary for a business to exist whose sole activity is to take a copy of a work and produce and distribute additional copies of it. So too personal manufacturing will eventually make it no longer technologically necessary for a business to exist whose sole activity is to transform raw material into finished goods. They will likewise become "middlemen." This is why I make the claim that there is no difference between physical and digital IP. The technology within which it is "fixed" is irrelevant. Businesses are being as absurd as scribes arguing against movable type printing presses--which they did. We didn't accept their arguments then nor should we now, unfortunately we are.
A 3D printer still needs raw materials
Yes. Of course, just as the digital world requires raw materials, electrons. The providers of which however are not what I'm calling middlemen.
There is no difference between a physical good and a virtual one. Both can be copied and both are being provided to consumers with obstacles to that copying. The arguments being put up by publishers and their supporters are specious and meant solely to hold back the inevitable tide that will soon wash away their business model.
Soon there will be precious little need for most of the present middle men residing in our economy. Manufacturers, service providers, salesmen, etc. all are becoming obsolete in this age of digital goods and service providers (software/robotics), the coming age of personal manufacture (3D printing) and beyond. If we don't kill ourselves first it is a foregone conclusion. This fact needs to be recognized and accepted. The real question is how severely are we going to allow the actors behind these dying business models to corrupt our laws and harm our citizens as they fight in desperation against inevitability. Unlike humans, businesses should not have a right to exist nor should they have a right to cause harm to humans. Businesses should be nothing more than tools, vehicles used in support of society as its servants not its masters. Businesses should be able to be readily replaced after obsolescence, not artificially and detrimentally propped up through laws and other government supports.
Hmm. That's interesting for one can witness countless businesses playing that game. It rather seemed to me that that was a principle reason for creating a so called "shell" corp. Parent creates a shell, does dirty work through it, collects profits. Shell eventually collapses (bankruptcy, etc.), parent creates new shell, rinse repeat.
Not while eating them, just before and probably after--since you're hoping for more...