Google had lots of competition with big money when it got started. It focused on Search and Google has been doing Search better than anyone else, overall, since long before it became a household name. Google has one major piece of intellectual property: the PageRank algorithm. It was and is a truly novel way of generating fast, practical, useful search results. Google has leveraged its market presence extremely well. It is great at providing Search and that has required it to build an infrastructure that works well with largely unstructured data so that it can be indexed in a meaningful way. That is a very impressive technical feat that others either didn't think was worthwhile (stupid gits!) or didn't figure out how to do it anywhere near as well.
Google has taken its technical prowess and used it to provide nice tools that other companies and ordinary people use daily. Like Microsoft, Google does buy tech elsewhere, but when you look at the research Google is sponsoring in areas like genetics, you get a sense that it is dedicated to Big Science in a way that the bean counters at Microsoft never have been. I can easily see Google leveraging its involvement in genetics research into a successful foray into the field of biomedical technology.
I will be surprised if the notion of getting/being physically lost isn't as quaint in just a few years as the idea of actually crank starting your car or asking an telephone switchboard operator to connect you to your sister across town is now. I expect Google products and services to somehow be central to the information systems we will take for granted when we live in a world full of smart human artifacts that communicate with us and each other all of the time (except, hopefully, when we want our privacy.)
What technical feat has Microsoft ever done better than anyone else without just buying someone else's company, tech, or intellectual property? Bill Gates got lucky way back when, by being on the ball and snagging IBM as a big, nay *HUGE* customer when IBM was busy legitimizing the PC and changing it from the (occasionally educational) toy that the Apple II was and the struggling business system the TRS-80 was into a serious computing platform that people began to appreciate. Microsoft would be nowhere today if it hadn't snagged the contract to provide PC-DOS. Everything else Microsoft has done is largely mediocre from a technical perspective, given the massive amount of resources Microsoft throws at its major projects, and the buggy bloatware that results and which it foists upon the marketplace not by technical superiority but by its stranglehold on the PC operating system and office productivity software standards. There is absolutely nothing better about the Microsoft way of doing things than there is from the way one can accomplish those things using products from Linux vendors, Oracle, IBM, Sun, HP/Compaq, etc. The PC grew beyond the IBM way of doing things and Microsoft is trying not to let the core PC software industry do something similar.
I expect Microsoft to remain an impediment to technological progress the way it has been for years, just the way IBM was when it not only dominated the computing environment, but defined it or the way AT&T was in the telecom world before it was broken up. IBM, AT&T, 3M, Xerox, and many other corporate giants have made heaps of money but were wise/responsible enough to contribute to human knowledge in very significant ways without being completely greedy about it. I see Google as following in their footsteps when it comes to major research projects it does or sponsors. Google is still a very young company run by a pair of young geeks and a more experienced CEO who is savvy enough to deal with the business end of things while not FUBARing the things that have made Google great. I hope that Google management doesn't get as shortsighted and greedy as Microsoft's is. Google is very motivated by the fact that people can switch search engines very easily. It is difficult and expensive to switch computing platforms so Microsoft can remain monopolistic more easily.
"Apple sold 529,000 desktops during the quarter and 798,000 notebooks."
I wonder if Apple will ever bring another really innovative computer to market? It hasn't done so since the Apple II and the orignal Mac lines of PCs. Apple's customer base seems to be the technically challenged artsy-fartsy crowd and people wanting to look hip. There is a reason Apple has never been the market leader with PCs, even back in the Apple II days when it had some chance of doing so. IBM was smart. It went with a non-proprietary, open standard, so everyone was encouraged to not only grab a slice of the pie, but to make the pie larger.
Apple is well advised to stick to selling MP3 players to iPodiots...the losers who will buy crap if it has an Apple logo on it.
Exactly what scientific breakthroughs or novel technology has Microsoft produced with its multi-billion dollar R&D budget? From what I can get, Microsoft is very good at making things that are bloated and often broken. Maybe you can tell me of something revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary and based on other's fundamental research and development) that has come out of Microsoft Labs?
Xerox PARC is what I think of when I associate nearly pure R&D with the personal computing industry. Apple and Microsoft are just techno-leeches where Xerox PARC is concerned. Microsoft Labs seems to be working on incremental, evolutionary R&D projects based on concepts and technology from other sources that M$ simply buys (licenses). Pardon me while I yawn...
What happened, as best I can tell, is that shortsighted corporate executives forgot that (applied) R&D rarely produces new fundamental knowledge about the universe while that is the main goal of pure research. A lot of great research is done when true scientists are given a budget that has already been written off by the bean counters, as IBM and (the old AT&T's) Bell Labs demonstrated many times.
The problem is that such research tends to be very expensive and non-geeks just aren't interested in results they can't understand. The only reason we have nuclear power today is that the United States was willing to spare no expense to develop a bigger and better bomb in order to win WWII quickly an decisively. Nazi Germany sponsored a lot of good science and then took some of the results with military potential and did a tremendous amount of R&D to create amazing new military technologies...tech that just happens to have had amazing commercial potential. Jet aircraft and booster rockets come to mind.
You will hear NASA fans gripe because now that the Cold War is over, NASA has to justify whatever it does to the drones in government who get paid to eliminate government waste. NASA is no longer a great source of new scientific and technical knowledge, but it probably could be again. So could a lot of private enterprises if NASA and other parts of the U.S. government didn't have a practical monopoly on many interesting areas of research.
For major research projects to get significant funding now, they either have to have tremendous (and fairly obvious) commercial potential, or be extremely trendy, in a politically correct sort of way. No expense (to the taxpayers) is spared protecting "endangered species" that (AFAIK) have no real significance except that they are about to succumb to Darwin's Law -- despite all the bleating of the ecowackos, wasting money on the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker is not going to produce new knowledge or improve the chances of Man surviving another century. Having plentiful, cheap sources of energy would.
But try to get money on the scale of the Manhattan Project for the purpose of finally developing nuclear fusion power plants... That is not by any means pure research, but the amount of pure research that can only be done with the kind of energy a large fusion plant could produce is staggering. But why stop with fusion? Total conversion seems about as likely to be a practical source of energy now as utilizing light pipes and orbital spacecraft as the backbone of a worldwide communications network did during WWII.
Do you think the U.S. might have fusion power plants online and/or total conversion reactors in the lab by now if such projects had received oh, say $100 BILLION dollars in additional research funding since WWII? That's a Big Pile O' Money! It also happens to be roughly what the U.S. has wasted on handouts to Israel since that nation was created by fiat in 1948. Why not just cut all foreign aid for non-humanitarian purposes (Israel gets only about 1/3 of the U.S.'s foreign aid largess, after all) and use the proceeds to fund a pure research lab or ten that are operated by private sector organizations that have track records of doing cutting edge research and producing useful knowledge?
Stop real government waste and use the savings to fund hard science research projects that short-sighted bean counters consider waste because they know no better, ignorant touchy-feely nitwits in search of warm fuzzies and/or vote generating pork-barrel projects that they are.
I just don't like self-checkouts...
1) Take the elderly and/or handicapped shopping! Church groups and nursing homes often have vans or buses available for such adventures. Make sure to have the folks spread themselves as evenly as possible across the self-serve checkout lanes. Have a hidden video camera (or three! -- with mics!) handy to record whatever transpires. Wally-World dares not complain when geezers and gimps are clogging up the oh-so-efficient automated checkouts that they can't figure out or have difficulty dealing with for physical reasons.
2) Start a rumor among your favorite gossips and paranoid acquaintences that Wal-Mart is using all of those "spycams" (security cameras) at the self-serve checkout aisles to record people's PINs whenever they use payment cards that require PINs. Don't bother mentioning the fact that all the checkouts and the rest of the store is under Wallly-World surveillance...just focus on the annoying self-serve checkouts with your rumor.
3) Point out to other shoppers at Wally-World that a good cashier in a regular checkout lane can process more customers with purchases faster than an automated setup can, because most people don't practice using automated checkout systems 40 hours a week and don't get as good at "ringing items up" as even a slightly motivated human cashier is after a week or two on the job. Mention this in letters to the editor of your local newspaper and hosts of your favorite radio shows, griping about the awkward, slow automated checkout lanes in some of todays bigger stores.
To add inuslt to injury, there has been no conclusive proof that disabling services improves performance one iota.
Microsoft Windows is horribly inefficent in terms of memory space. Swap files expand memory by mapping it onto one or more relatively ponderous disk drives and create more work for the processor when they are used.
It takes significant time to swap crap in and out of RAM from/to slower magnetic storage. It takes some finite amount of time (overhead) to switch tasks. Memory that is being used by some lame Winblows service that you aren't actually utilizing productively is wasted and forces the programs you are really using to make due with less. What part of finite resources do you not understand?
For people with 2+GHz PCs with 1+GB of RAM, the performance gained by cutting down on the bloated nature of Microsloth Winblows may not be all that significant, but it is always measurable on any machine; which proves you wrong and I can now sleep better having done my good deed for today.:-)
Realistically, it is often better to let users know that they are not being treated like a bunch of slaves, crooks, children or sheep at the workplace, but that management and IT administration have the right and ability to lock things down at any time for any reason. More importantly, it helps to let users know how public some of the activities they naively think are private actually are.
Pointing out to a user that her favorite screensaver or wallpaper image comes from an external (to the organization) source that is not to be trusted, and showing her a relatively easy to read headline article on a major Web site she's heard of that details how such external connections cause real problems serves a couple of major purposes. It shows that you aren't making rules just because you can (or enjoy lording them over hapless users) and also encourages her to learn more about computers, how they work on the 'Net, and computer security.
I prefer education to enforcement as my primary means of preventing internally generated IT hassles. If users have to be treated like dumb and/or malicious animals, why would one want to be working in IT for such an organization? Most organizations, unlike public schools and correctional institutions, do not have to allow just anybody more than guest access to their systems. Don't expect to get much useful work out of users who are treated like school kids or convicts, but do expect to see them strive for excellence as they develop innovative ways to get around your rules/edicts, just as children and felons do in other areas of real life.
Oh, yeah, a good system administrator should study Sun Tzu's The Art of War, everything I posted above notwithstanding...just in case it comes to that.
I always find it amusing when you have IT people developing features for Windows that really don't understand IT in the real world. Then they release something and are shocked when IT managers are furious over it. One would think MS would have a real good understanding of the IT environment and what is and is not a good idea.
Many IT administrators are barely-in-the-closet fascists. They enjoy making sure that their user bases have no privacy, cannot use their organizations phones or computers for anything that isn't "strictly business", are constantly under surveillance at the workplace, etc. These admins are usually on power trips -- they are usually hated by the users of the systems they (supposedly) support and those users often take pleasure in working against them in subtle (or at least anonymous) ways. These "Users versus IT Gestapo" situations are often entertaining to observe, as long as one isn't part of the problem.
At the other extreme are the system and network administrators who allow (even encourage) users to do (or install) whatever they damn well please on their workstations (unless the action is obviously malicious or illegal). These admins must be masochistic -- the more computer illiterate the user base, the more likely it will figure out ways to create problems which require a week's worth of IT's time to correct, on a daily or even hourly basis. These nearly anarchistic computing environments are a lot of fun while they last -- which is rarely for longer than it takes for an oh-so-clever user to crash a server, delete someone else's files, sell organizational secrets, buy a drop-in pr0n site package and run it on the facilities at the workplace, make (what she thinks are) anonymous death threats, etc.
Somewhere in the middle are the administrators who can usually leave their work at the office at the end of the day but who don't mind if users want to access and maybe save personal email messages or other files from work (where the spiffy color laser printer sometimes gets used to print pictures of a worker's newborn baby or a photo that an employee wants to hand in his cube), and realize that most sane people don't truly compartmentalize their work and personal lives; that overlap is normal and natural, usually inevitable, and often beneficial -- that most folks want/expect some personal privacy in the workplace and to be cut a little slack when using office resources for personal reasons.
As someone who has tried to fall into that third, loosely defined group of IT administrators/managers when I've held such positions, I find it to be worth the effort to do the balancing/juggling act. Then again, I'm a practical libertarian and not a compulsively anal authoritarian by nature.
Of course you have to consider the flip side. If the loser must pay, the little guy may not bring a legitimate complaint to court for fear of going bankrupt with the court costs if he loses...
That is why lawyers often take cases on contingency -- if the case has real merit and is over a non-trivial matter (usually measured in money damages), there are almost certainly willing to take it on. Besides, there is always small claims court for those cases that don't involve a defendant with deep pockets, where neither party can afford to get lawyered up.
One problem with our legal system (there are many) is that plaintiffs tend to go venue shopping. This is especially true when they are backed by special interest groups or just plenty of lawyers hoping to find a courtroom where the case will stick. The legal system does absolutely nothing to discourage this behavior pattern, unless you consider that most judges do not like to be bitch slapped by appellate courts (have such courts overturn their rulings on appeal).
Another problem lies in the fact that many (usually but not always left wing) judges enjoy legislating from the bench. That, combined with the way jurors are stifled by the system (Google "jury nullification") if they try to actually do their job and ignore bad laws, creates an environment where trial lawyers who are motivated by greed will just use plaintiffs as fodder in their battle to get rich or promote (their backers') agendas.
That is what the rabid anti-smokers and greedy trial lawyers did to the tobacco companies.
There is a problem with a system where plaintiffs and keep flooding the courts with cases against any person or organization with deep pockets, hoping to strike it rich by eventually getting lucky in some particular venue. This is where a "loser pays" system would have some real merit.
I am not saying that different people shouldn't be able to file separate (in time and/or location) lawsuits against a particualr party on essentially the same grounds, but that the number of such suits out to be finite, preferably small, before the burden of court costs and legal fees starts to shift over to plaintiffs.
Yeah, that's very fuzzy, but the idea seems sound to me. Suing ought not to be a fishing expedition.
Hey, where can I find the best Virtual Tutor for WoW? I'm a newbie at it and have only 8.5 days left on my free trial subscription.
Note Essential Skills Used: disrupting the class (posting off topic), disrespect for authority (flaunting it), CYA (trying to make this post somehow related to the topic of the original article), and amusing one's self in public (don't ask).
I guess knowing how (loudly) and when (quickly) to whine to the authorities or to the public (via the media) is an essential skill, too! From 0 to +5 in what, ~2100 seconds?
When little Johnny can't read, his parents call a greedy, publicity-seaking trial lawyer! When all the fuss is over, little Johnny still can't read... How will Virtual Schools change that?
What Bill Gates is not admitting is the fact that Microsoft foists the hard part of testing and correcting Vista (and other Microsoft Buggy Bloatware)) off on major applications developers and other organizations that have a huge vested interest in having computers running an OS that works, at least much of the time.
Microsoft sets the bar very low. Ask any Linux kernel hacker how often an OS has to be restarted after applications are installed/upgraded, maintenance is done, or someone with user-level access pulls a newbie stunt. heavily used Unix/Linux and (Open)VMS systems I am familiar with often stay up for months at a time. I frequently read about platforms running those OSes having uptimes measured in YEARS. I have never encountered a Microsoft operating system, be it DOS or Windows, that didn't crash or require a restart every few days (sometimes much more frequently) if it was serving any more important role than that of inefficient space heater. I *could* leave most of the NT/2000/XP boxes I've owned or administered on for many weeks or months on end, but not while doing the proper maintenance such systems require or if I tried to do anything that actually put Office or major 3rd party apps through their paces.
That Winblows needs to be rebooted for ordinary maintenance is a glaring example of how incompetent Microsoft's OS designers are. The registry is another. Then there are the sheer number of bugs that need to be fixed, security holes that need to be patched, etc. Let's not forget how slowly (and awkwardly) Winblows boots compared to most Linux systems... Do Microsoft's developers get their credentials by sending in cereal box tops, or what?
Let's face it, support from Microsoft amounts to paying them to maybe resolve a very narrowly defined (usually by them) problem -- not fixing what is broken so you can get things done. Mostly, Microsoft takes your money and keeps finding reasons to charge you more or sell you stuff you shouldn't buy (because that stuff, too, is buggy and has has grossly overpriced, low-quality support from Microsoft.)
I can't think of a single instance where I felt I got a fair deal from Microsoft support -- now I avoid it unless someone else is footing the bill and they insist it might expedite things. (They'd already paid for it and had bought into Microsoft Hype enough to think it might help instead of waste more time.) I consider it a rip-off. With the Web and today's powerful search engines, better (and often free) technical solutions can usually be had for Microsoft Problems than those provided by Microsoft support for outrageous prices.
I must say it's quite hilarious that you spent all that time replying to my one liner.
Some peeps are easily amused... It isn't as if that took me long to write. IP happens to be something that matters to me and others who enjoy critical thinking. I guess that is why I find discussions about it on/.
I'm guessing this essay is a seed for [Krause's] next book.
When can I pre-order a copy? Will it remain untitled?:-)
I have long been aware that the idea of energy (matter) springing out of nothingness is an established concept in modern physics. I would like to read more...
FZ> Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message.
Pb> Yeah, they might actually make sense.
One often has to dumb things down for clueless Lefties...to the least common denominator -- it is usually safe to assume they have a pulse. But even their dead often vote often in some locales, just not wisely.
Ayn Rand's novels are meant to convey some very strong, obviously controversial messages. They also happen to be really good works of fiction that have been turned into feature films and could be made into great modern movies now that Hollywierd has the ability to handle the FX and is better able to deal with the SciFi format (see "Gattaca", "The Matrix", "Independence Day", etc.) I suspect the trustees of Ayn Rand's estate would not let you buy a million copies of one of her novels, edit them down for safe consumption by mindless socialists, and sell them as cheap thrillers. I hope not, anyway. The problem is, that could be done. You could take the message out of either of those novels and still have a great book or movie.
Just hacking out words or scenes to suit prissy people's sensibilities is taking the original creators' images and ideas out of context. Do you want me republishing things you post and quoting YOU out of context while crediting you as the author? Trust me, the results would be entertaining...but probably not for you.
I have no problem with the notion of you selling parodies of someone else's work, labelled as such if it isn't glaringly obvious (think "Bored of the Rings"). Even buying a zillion copies and bowdlerizing them for your drooling kiddies and overly sensitive friends, as long as you do not redistribute them for profit or given them away as being anything like the original works is fine by me. Taking such actions and distributing the results widely (especially for profit) to people who might not realize they are not reading the original, without the author's or artist's permission seems like plagiarism and/or fraud to me.
Copyrighted works can be kept out of the public domain until long after the creators' deaths. That is why you probably won't see George Orwell's "1984" or "Animal Farm" distorted and redistributed as pro-government propaganda pieces anytime soon, I think.
I really don't care what the end user does with a copy he has purchased. I am concerned about people who buy one work and alter it then represent it as being substantially the same work as they resell/distribute it.
For you, taking out the "swears" may be no big deal. For others, it may completely warp and twist the meaning and intent of the original work. Monetary loss is not the (only) point here. I can think of a lot of books and movies that were written/made to make a statement. That statement should remain unaltered unless the creators agree otherwise.
I can think of examples where even the ads shown during a network presentation of an original movie might change the message. Think of Animal House interspersed with commercial breaks for D.A.R.E PSAs and other nonsense.
Taking a work and altering it to suit one's whims then reselling it is plagarism, fraud, and other Bad Things(tm) in my book, unless one is granted permission by the people who created the original work.
Do you have a right to edit out the references to sex and violence from videos of modern productions of Shakespeare's plays just because some people/organizations you sell the videos to (say grade schools) might find some parts a bit too "mature" for their audiences? Shakespeare wrote plays and knew they would be interpreted to some extent every time they were performed. That is not true of movies. The original work is available and comes the way it does for a reason, presumably, and that reason might not be limited to monetary gain.
How do you "scrub" a video of George Carlin's show that contains "The Seven Dirty Words" routine without totally destroying the message? How do you capture the insightful humor in his description of the word "fuck"'s role in the English language without rendering it meaningless? (The word or the routine about it...)
I would hope that most any creative individual with a spine would think to include some clause in any contracts regarding his/her works that gives him/her final say over just how the original work may be modified and how altered versions must be labelled to indicate what has been changed and that they are derivatives.
I am all for the notion that movies, music, literature, etc. ought to be distributed "as is" by default, with any variations subject to approval from all sources of creative input unless they've relinquished that right by contract.
Just look at all the politically correct versions of classic nursery rhymes, for god's sake! How do you expect A Clockwork Orange to be sanitized without destroying the message the cut scenes were meant help to convey?
You miss the point. Think of how sanitizing many films that are critical of censorship would change their message. Think of how the message of Apocalypse Now would be changed if it were edited so as to pass the Gray-Haired, Born-Again, Little Old Prude test. To state the obvious: some movies are MEANT to shock and/or offend. They were made that way to try and make sheeple think for a change.
I'm just as offended when famous works of art that happen to portray human genitalia have been censored so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of prudes. Someone has mentioned Monty Python. As a little kid, I fixed up a broken 25" color TV so I could watch Monty Python (the BBS TV series) in the basement, because my mother just didn't get it. A lot of Monty Python humor was based on shock value. Remove the naughty bits and the message is lost.
I suppose I wouldn't mind if all of the people listed in the credits of a movie had signed contracts saying that they consented to its being sold in modified formats for different media outlets. Most older movie contracts didn't contain such cluases, AFAIK.
One person's careful censorship of only the truly offensive is another person's hatchet job.
I think I can see where the harm is. Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message. The problem is that they would (presumably) be sold as the same novels written by the same author, something I am sure she would disapprove of if she were still alive today.
A little editing can be a very dangerous thing. How hard would it be to edit a few sections out of Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" to make the unionized workers in Flint look like stupid, incompetent crybabies? That film is a wonderful piece of propaganda that would be horribly distorted if it was edited in a malicious manner.
Almost any non-trivial creative work contains/conveys some sort of message(s) that can easily be lost or damaged by clever (or simply bad) editing. I know I do not want a lot of things I write edited down and posted out of context as being written by me, even though that does happen all too often to people a lot more famous than I will ever be.
What doesn't surprise me is that their solution involved optics. I would expect that some sort of traditional laser plus lens/prism/mirror setup, combined with a diffraction grating and/or Fresnel lens arrangement might enable quite a variety of optical media format's to be handled by the same R/W mechanism with a physically fixed laser assembly.
It seems to me that it ought to be faster and easier to manipulate a beam of coherent light than to physically aim a laser light source to reflect just the right way off moving media onto a sensor/reader.
A nice approach, given the affordability of gigabytes of memory these days, would be to have a system where you insert a DVD (even some flavor of HD optical disc) and read it into (also portable) flash RAM. A typical workstation might have one or more ports for 32GB flash RAM sticks and a ~64GB R/W super HD optical drive. I'm talking about maybe three to five years from now, when 8GB of fast RAM will be routine on a $500 PC with a multi-core 64-bit CPU clocked at ~10GHz.
The point is that the storage/memory required to hold all the data from several movies or a few weeks worth of playlist will be able to be transferred from relatively large and slow optical media to/from smaller, faster, move portable removable memory sticks, and from there directly to/from working memory as needed. Media and memory capacity are no longer major constraints and will become almost trivial factors in the near future, I think.
Whenever the government claims to be doing something "for the children" you can be sure it is up to no good. Legislation that obviously benefits children doesn't usually need to be labelled/touted as such. Having school officials searching kids lockers, frisking them at school entrances, confiscating their cell phones, etc. is exactly the sort of thing one would expect in a police state.
I would hope that enough parents whould be aware enough of their Consitutional rights to fight back against these offensive actions by the Gestapo wannabes at their kids' schools.
I recall when it was the "War on [Some] Drugs" that was an excuse for many violations of people's rights and liberties by Big Brother. Look at how the gun grabbers use "For the children" as a shield to protect their statist anti-2nd-Amendment agenda. The government has a long history of creating crises and then stating that the only way to deal with the crises is to restrict our rights and limit our liberties. George Orwell was right.
How hard is it to get a cell phone that requires a person to ID him/her-self in order to use it? (I imagine a simple password or biometric system would suffice.) When some nosy school official wants to snoop around the information in little Johnny's cell phone, she can't do so. Little Johnny has been told that the cell phone is his to use but remains the property of his parents and they don't want anyone else to use it or access any information it contains. They have expressly forbidden him to allow any school official to do so... Blah, blah, blah. The point is that many parents do like for their kids to be able to keep in touch and want their kids to have cell phones.
Wiser parents want to protect their kids' rights under the Constitution. I think that simple security technology coupled with greedy lawyers who will cheerfully sue school systems might just solve the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Google had lots of competition with big money when it got started. It focused on Search and Google has been doing Search better than anyone else, overall, since long before it became a household name. Google has one major piece of intellectual property: the PageRank algorithm. It was and is a truly novel way of generating fast, practical, useful search results. Google has leveraged its market presence extremely well. It is great at providing Search and that has required it to build an infrastructure that works well with largely unstructured data so that it can be indexed in a meaningful way. That is a very impressive technical feat that others either didn't think was worthwhile (stupid gits!) or didn't figure out how to do it anywhere near as well.
Google has taken its technical prowess and used it to provide nice tools that other companies and ordinary people use daily. Like Microsoft, Google does buy tech elsewhere, but when you look at the research Google is sponsoring in areas like genetics, you get a sense that it is dedicated to Big Science in a way that the bean counters at Microsoft never have been. I can easily see Google leveraging its involvement in genetics research into a successful foray into the field of biomedical technology.
I will be surprised if the notion of getting/being physically lost isn't as quaint in just a few years as the idea of actually crank starting your car or asking an telephone switchboard operator to connect you to your sister across town is now. I expect Google products and services to somehow be central to the information systems we will take for granted when we live in a world full of smart human artifacts that communicate with us and each other all of the time (except, hopefully, when we want our privacy.)
What technical feat has Microsoft ever done better than anyone else without just buying someone else's company, tech, or intellectual property? Bill Gates got lucky way back when, by being on the ball and snagging IBM as a big, nay *HUGE* customer when IBM was busy legitimizing the PC and changing it from the (occasionally educational) toy that the Apple II was and the struggling business system the TRS-80 was into a serious computing platform that people began to appreciate. Microsoft would be nowhere today if it hadn't snagged the contract to provide PC-DOS. Everything else Microsoft has done is largely mediocre from a technical perspective, given the massive amount of resources Microsoft throws at its major projects, and the buggy bloatware that results and which it foists upon the marketplace not by technical superiority but by its stranglehold on the PC operating system and office productivity software standards. There is absolutely nothing better about the Microsoft way of doing things than there is from the way one can accomplish those things using products from Linux vendors, Oracle, IBM, Sun, HP/Compaq, etc. The PC grew beyond the IBM way of doing things and Microsoft is trying not to let the core PC software industry do something similar.
I expect Microsoft to remain an impediment to technological progress the way it has been for years, just the way IBM was when it not only dominated the computing environment, but defined it or the way AT&T was in the telecom world before it was broken up. IBM, AT&T, 3M, Xerox, and many other corporate giants have made heaps of money but were wise/responsible enough to contribute to human knowledge in very significant ways without being completely greedy about it. I see Google as following in their footsteps when it comes to major research projects it does or sponsors. Google is still a very young company run by a pair of young geeks and a more experienced CEO who is savvy enough to deal with the business end of things while not FUBARing the things that have made Google great. I hope that Google management doesn't get as shortsighted and greedy as Microsoft's is. Google is very motivated by the fact that people can switch search engines very easily. It is difficult and expensive to switch computing platforms so Microsoft can remain monopolistic more easily.
"Apple sold 529,000 desktops during the quarter and 798,000 notebooks."
I wonder if Apple will ever bring another really innovative computer to market? It hasn't done so since the Apple II and the orignal Mac lines of PCs. Apple's customer base seems to be the technically challenged artsy-fartsy crowd and people wanting to look hip. There is a reason Apple has never been the market leader with PCs, even back in the Apple II days when it had some chance of doing so. IBM was smart. It went with a non-proprietary, open standard, so everyone was encouraged to not only grab a slice of the pie, but to make the pie larger.
Apple is well advised to stick to selling MP3 players to iPodiots...the losers who will buy crap if it has an Apple logo on it.
Exactly what scientific breakthroughs or novel technology has Microsoft produced with its multi-billion dollar R&D budget? From what I can get, Microsoft is very good at making things that are bloated and often broken. Maybe you can tell me of something revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary and based on other's fundamental research and development) that has come out of Microsoft Labs?
Xerox PARC is what I think of when I associate nearly pure R&D with the personal computing industry. Apple and Microsoft are just techno-leeches where Xerox PARC is concerned. Microsoft Labs seems to be working on incremental, evolutionary R&D projects based on concepts and technology from other sources that M$ simply buys (licenses). Pardon me while I yawn...
What happened, as best I can tell, is that shortsighted corporate executives forgot that (applied) R&D rarely produces new fundamental knowledge about the universe while that is the main goal of pure research. A lot of great research is done when true scientists are given a budget that has already been written off by the bean counters, as IBM and (the old AT&T's) Bell Labs demonstrated many times.
The problem is that such research tends to be very expensive and non-geeks just aren't interested in results they can't understand. The only reason we have nuclear power today is that the United States was willing to spare no expense to develop a bigger and better bomb in order to win WWII quickly an decisively. Nazi Germany sponsored a lot of good science and then took some of the results with military potential and did a tremendous amount of R&D to create amazing new military technologies...tech that just happens to have had amazing commercial potential. Jet aircraft and booster rockets come to mind.
You will hear NASA fans gripe because now that the Cold War is over, NASA has to justify whatever it does to the drones in government who get paid to eliminate government waste. NASA is no longer a great source of new scientific and technical knowledge, but it probably could be again. So could a lot of private enterprises if NASA and other parts of the U.S. government didn't have a practical monopoly on many interesting areas of research.
For major research projects to get significant funding now, they either have to have tremendous (and fairly obvious) commercial potential, or be extremely trendy, in a politically correct sort of way. No expense (to the taxpayers) is spared protecting "endangered species" that (AFAIK) have no real significance except that they are about to succumb to Darwin's Law -- despite all the bleating of the ecowackos, wasting money on the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker is not going to produce new knowledge or improve the chances of Man surviving another century. Having plentiful, cheap sources of energy would.
But try to get money on the scale of the Manhattan Project for the purpose of finally developing nuclear fusion power plants... That is not by any means pure research, but the amount of pure research that can only be done with the kind of energy a large fusion plant could produce is staggering. But why stop with fusion? Total conversion seems about as likely to be a practical source of energy now as utilizing light pipes and orbital spacecraft as the backbone of a worldwide communications network did during WWII.
Do you think the U.S. might have fusion power plants online and/or total conversion reactors in the lab by now if such projects had received oh, say $100 BILLION dollars in additional research funding since WWII? That's a Big Pile O' Money! It also happens to be roughly what the U.S. has wasted on handouts to Israel since that nation was created by fiat in 1948. Why not just cut all foreign aid for non-humanitarian purposes (Israel gets only about 1/3 of the U.S.'s foreign aid largess, after all) and use the proceeds to fund a pure research lab or ten that are operated by private sector organizations that have track records of doing cutting edge research and producing useful knowledge?
Stop real government waste and use the savings to fund hard science research projects that short-sighted bean counters consider waste because they know no better, ignorant touchy-feely nitwits in search of warm fuzzies and/or vote generating pork-barrel projects that they are.
I just don't like self-checkouts... 1) Take the elderly and/or handicapped shopping! Church groups and nursing homes often have vans or buses available for such adventures. Make sure to have the folks spread themselves as evenly as possible across the self-serve checkout lanes. Have a hidden video camera (or three! -- with mics!) handy to record whatever transpires. Wally-World dares not complain when geezers and gimps are clogging up the oh-so-efficient automated checkouts that they can't figure out or have difficulty dealing with for physical reasons. 2) Start a rumor among your favorite gossips and paranoid acquaintences that Wal-Mart is using all of those "spycams" (security cameras) at the self-serve checkout aisles to record people's PINs whenever they use payment cards that require PINs. Don't bother mentioning the fact that all the checkouts and the rest of the store is under Wallly-World surveillance...just focus on the annoying self-serve checkouts with your rumor. 3) Point out to other shoppers at Wally-World that a good cashier in a regular checkout lane can process more customers with purchases faster than an automated setup can, because most people don't practice using automated checkout systems 40 hours a week and don't get as good at "ringing items up" as even a slightly motivated human cashier is after a week or two on the job. Mention this in letters to the editor of your local newspaper and hosts of your favorite radio shows, griping about the awkward, slow automated checkout lanes in some of todays bigger stores.
To add inuslt to injury, there has been no conclusive proof that disabling services improves performance one iota.
:-)
Microsoft Windows is horribly inefficent in terms of memory space. Swap files expand memory by mapping it onto one or more relatively ponderous disk drives and create more work for the processor when they are used.
It takes significant time to swap crap in and out of RAM from/to slower magnetic storage. It takes some finite amount of time (overhead) to switch tasks. Memory that is being used by some lame Winblows service that you aren't actually utilizing productively is wasted and forces the programs you are really using to make due with less. What part of finite resources do you not understand?
For people with 2+GHz PCs with 1+GB of RAM, the performance gained by cutting down on the bloated nature of Microsloth Winblows may not be all that significant, but it is always measurable on any machine; which proves you wrong and I can now sleep better having done my good deed for today.
Realistically, it is often better to let users know that they are not being treated like a bunch of slaves, crooks, children or sheep at the workplace, but that management and IT administration have the right and ability to lock things down at any time for any reason. More importantly, it helps to let users know how public some of the activities they naively think are private actually are.
Pointing out to a user that her favorite screensaver or wallpaper image comes from an external (to the organization) source that is not to be trusted, and showing her a relatively easy to read headline article on a major Web site she's heard of that details how such external connections cause real problems serves a couple of major purposes. It shows that you aren't making rules just because you can (or enjoy lording them over hapless users) and also encourages her to learn more about computers, how they work on the 'Net, and computer security.
I prefer education to enforcement as my primary means of preventing internally generated IT hassles. If users have to be treated like dumb and/or malicious animals, why would one want to be working in IT for such an organization? Most organizations, unlike public schools and correctional institutions, do not have to allow just anybody more than guest access to their systems. Don't expect to get much useful work out of users who are treated like school kids or convicts, but do expect to see them strive for excellence as they develop innovative ways to get around your rules/edicts, just as children and felons do in other areas of real life.
Oh, yeah, a good system administrator should study Sun Tzu's The Art of War, everything I posted above notwithstanding...just in case it comes to that.
I always find it amusing when you have IT people developing features for Windows that really don't understand IT in the real world. Then they release something and are shocked when IT managers are furious over it. One would think MS would have a real good understanding of the IT environment and what is and is not a good idea.
Many IT administrators are barely-in-the-closet fascists. They enjoy making sure that their user bases have no privacy, cannot use their organizations phones or computers for anything that isn't "strictly business", are constantly under surveillance at the workplace, etc. These admins are usually on power trips -- they are usually hated by the users of the systems they (supposedly) support and those users often take pleasure in working against them in subtle (or at least anonymous) ways. These "Users versus IT Gestapo" situations are often entertaining to observe, as long as one isn't part of the problem.
At the other extreme are the system and network administrators who allow (even encourage) users to do (or install) whatever they damn well please on their workstations (unless the action is obviously malicious or illegal). These admins must be masochistic -- the more computer illiterate the user base, the more likely it will figure out ways to create problems which require a week's worth of IT's time to correct, on a daily or even hourly basis. These nearly anarchistic computing environments are a lot of fun while they last -- which is rarely for longer than it takes for an oh-so-clever user to crash a server, delete someone else's files, sell organizational secrets, buy a drop-in pr0n site package and run it on the facilities at the workplace, make (what she thinks are) anonymous death threats, etc.
Somewhere in the middle are the administrators who can usually leave their work at the office at the end of the day but who don't mind if users want to access and maybe save personal email messages or other files from work (where the spiffy color laser printer sometimes gets used to print pictures of a worker's newborn baby or a photo that an employee wants to hand in his cube), and realize that most sane people don't truly compartmentalize their work and personal lives; that overlap is normal and natural, usually inevitable, and often beneficial -- that most folks want/expect some personal privacy in the workplace and to be cut a little slack when using office resources for personal reasons.
As someone who has tried to fall into that third, loosely defined group of IT administrators/managers when I've held such positions, I find it to be worth the effort to do the balancing/juggling act. Then again, I'm a practical libertarian and not a compulsively anal authoritarian by nature.
Of course you have to consider the flip side. If the loser must pay, the little guy may not bring a legitimate complaint to court for fear of going bankrupt with the court costs if he loses...
That is why lawyers often take cases on contingency -- if the case has real merit and is over a non-trivial matter (usually measured in money damages), there are almost certainly willing to take it on. Besides, there is always small claims court for those cases that don't involve a defendant with deep pockets, where neither party can afford to get lawyered up.
One problem with our legal system (there are many) is that plaintiffs tend to go venue shopping. This is especially true when they are backed by special interest groups or just plenty of lawyers hoping to find a courtroom where the case will stick. The legal system does absolutely nothing to discourage this behavior pattern, unless you consider that most judges do not like to be bitch slapped by appellate courts (have such courts overturn their rulings on appeal).
Another problem lies in the fact that many (usually but not always left wing) judges enjoy legislating from the bench. That, combined with the way jurors are stifled by the system (Google "jury nullification") if they try to actually do their job and ignore bad laws, creates an environment where trial lawyers who are motivated by greed will just use plaintiffs as fodder in their battle to get rich or promote (their backers') agendas.
...sue, and sue again!
That is what the rabid anti-smokers and greedy trial lawyers did to the tobacco companies.
There is a problem with a system where plaintiffs and keep flooding the courts with cases against any person or organization with deep pockets, hoping to strike it rich by eventually getting lucky in some particular venue. This is where a "loser pays" system would have some real merit.
I am not saying that different people shouldn't be able to file separate (in time and/or location) lawsuits against a particualr party on essentially the same grounds, but that the number of such suits out to be finite, preferably small, before the burden of court costs and legal fees starts to shift over to plaintiffs.
Yeah, that's very fuzzy, but the idea seems sound to me. Suing ought not to be a fishing expedition.
Hey, where can I find the best Virtual Tutor for WoW? I'm a newbie at it and have only 8.5 days left on my free trial subscription. Note Essential Skills Used: disrupting the class (posting off topic), disrespect for authority (flaunting it), CYA (trying to make this post somehow related to the topic of the original article), and amusing one's self in public (don't ask).
I guess knowing how (loudly) and when (quickly) to whine to the authorities or to the public (via the media) is an essential skill, too! From 0 to +5 in what, ~2100 seconds? When little Johnny can't read, his parents call a greedy, publicity-seaking trial lawyer! When all the fuss is over, little Johnny still can't read... How will Virtual Schools change that?
What Bill Gates is not admitting is the fact that Microsoft foists the hard part of testing and correcting Vista (and other Microsoft Buggy Bloatware)) off on major applications developers and other organizations that have a huge vested interest in having computers running an OS that works, at least much of the time.
Microsoft sets the bar very low. Ask any Linux kernel hacker how often an OS has to be restarted after applications are installed/upgraded, maintenance is done, or someone with user-level access pulls a newbie stunt. heavily used Unix/Linux and (Open)VMS systems I am familiar with often stay up for months at a time. I frequently read about platforms running those OSes having uptimes measured in YEARS. I have never encountered a Microsoft operating system, be it DOS or Windows, that didn't crash or require a restart every few days (sometimes much more frequently) if it was serving any more important role than that of inefficient space heater. I *could* leave most of the NT/2000/XP boxes I've owned or administered on for many weeks or months on end, but not while doing the proper maintenance such systems require or if I tried to do anything that actually put Office or major 3rd party apps through their paces.
That Winblows needs to be rebooted for ordinary maintenance is a glaring example of how incompetent Microsoft's OS designers are. The registry is another. Then there are the sheer number of bugs that need to be fixed, security holes that need to be patched, etc. Let's not forget how slowly (and awkwardly) Winblows boots compared to most Linux systems... Do Microsoft's developers get their credentials by sending in cereal box tops, or what?
Let's face it, support from Microsoft amounts to paying them to maybe resolve a very narrowly defined (usually by them) problem -- not fixing what is broken so you can get things done. Mostly, Microsoft takes your money and keeps finding reasons to charge you more or sell you stuff you shouldn't buy (because that stuff, too, is buggy and has has grossly overpriced, low-quality support from Microsoft.)
I can't think of a single instance where I felt I got a fair deal from Microsoft support -- now I avoid it unless someone else is footing the bill and they insist it might expedite things. (They'd already paid for it and had bought into Microsoft Hype enough to think it might help instead of waste more time.) I consider it a rip-off. With the Web and today's powerful search engines, better (and often free) technical solutions can usually be had for Microsoft Problems than those provided by Microsoft support for outrageous prices.
I must say it's quite hilarious that you spent all that time replying to my one liner.
/.
Some peeps are easily amused... It isn't as if that took me long to write. IP happens to be something that matters to me and others who enjoy critical thinking. I guess that is why I find discussions about it on
I'm guessing this essay is a seed for [Krause's] next book.
:-)
When can I pre-order a copy? Will it remain untitled?
I have long been aware that the idea of energy (matter) springing out of nothingness is an established concept in modern physics. I would like to read more...
FZ> Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message.
Pb> Yeah, they might actually make sense.
One often has to dumb things down for clueless Lefties...to the least common denominator -- it is usually safe to assume they have a pulse. But even their dead often vote often in some locales, just not wisely.
Ayn Rand's novels are meant to convey some very strong, obviously controversial messages. They also happen to be really good works of fiction that have been turned into feature films and could be made into great modern movies now that Hollywierd has the ability to handle the FX and is better able to deal with the SciFi format (see "Gattaca", "The Matrix", "Independence Day", etc.) I suspect the trustees of Ayn Rand's estate would not let you buy a million copies of one of her novels, edit them down for safe consumption by mindless socialists, and sell them as cheap thrillers. I hope not, anyway. The problem is, that could be done. You could take the message out of either of those novels and still have a great book or movie.
Just hacking out words or scenes to suit prissy people's sensibilities is taking the original creators' images and ideas out of context. Do you want me republishing things you post and quoting YOU out of context while crediting you as the author? Trust me, the results would be entertaining...but probably not for you.
I have no problem with the notion of you selling parodies of someone else's work, labelled as such if it isn't glaringly obvious (think "Bored of the Rings"). Even buying a zillion copies and bowdlerizing them for your drooling kiddies and overly sensitive friends, as long as you do not redistribute them for profit or given them away as being anything like the original works is fine by me. Taking such actions and distributing the results widely (especially for profit) to people who might not realize they are not reading the original, without the author's or artist's permission seems like plagiarism and/or fraud to me.
Copyrighted works can be kept out of the public domain until long after the creators' deaths. That is why you probably won't see George Orwell's "1984" or "Animal Farm" distorted and redistributed as pro-government propaganda pieces anytime soon, I think.
FractalZone http://esotriv.blogspot.com/
I really don't care what the end user does with a copy he has purchased. I am concerned about people who buy one work and alter it then represent it as being substantially the same work as they resell/distribute it.
For you, taking out the "swears" may be no big deal. For others, it may completely warp and twist the meaning and intent of the original work. Monetary loss is not the (only) point here. I can think of a lot of books and movies that were written/made to make a statement. That statement should remain unaltered unless the creators agree otherwise.
I can think of examples where even the ads shown during a network presentation of an original movie might change the message. Think of Animal House interspersed with commercial breaks for D.A.R.E PSAs and other nonsense.
Taking a work and altering it to suit one's whims then reselling it is plagarism, fraud, and other Bad Things(tm) in my book, unless one is granted permission by the people who created the original work.
Do you have a right to edit out the references to sex and violence from videos of modern productions of Shakespeare's plays just because some people/organizations you sell the videos to (say grade schools) might find some parts a bit too "mature" for their audiences? Shakespeare wrote plays and knew they would be interpreted to some extent every time they were performed. That is not true of movies. The original work is available and comes the way it does for a reason, presumably, and that reason might not be limited to monetary gain.
OK, let's get down to cases:
How do you "scrub" a video of George Carlin's show that contains "The Seven Dirty Words" routine without totally destroying the message? How do you capture the insightful humor in his description of the word "fuck"'s role in the English language without rendering it meaningless? (The word or the routine about it...)
I would hope that most any creative individual with a spine would think to include some clause in any contracts regarding his/her works that gives him/her final say over just how the original work may be modified and how altered versions must be labelled to indicate what has been changed and that they are derivatives.
I am all for the notion that movies, music, literature, etc. ought to be distributed "as is" by default, with any variations subject to approval from all sources of creative input unless they've relinquished that right by contract.
Just look at all the politically correct versions of classic nursery rhymes, for god's sake! How do you expect A Clockwork Orange to be sanitized without destroying the message the cut scenes were meant help to convey?
You miss the point. Think of how sanitizing many films that are critical of censorship would change their message. Think of how the message of Apocalypse Now would be changed if it were edited so as to pass the Gray-Haired, Born-Again, Little Old Prude test. To state the obvious: some movies are MEANT to shock and/or offend. They were made that way to try and make sheeple think for a change.
I'm just as offended when famous works of art that happen to portray human genitalia have been censored so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of prudes. Someone has mentioned Monty Python. As a little kid, I fixed up a broken 25" color TV so I could watch Monty Python (the BBS TV series) in the basement, because my mother just didn't get it. A lot of Monty Python humor was based on shock value. Remove the naughty bits and the message is lost.
I suppose I wouldn't mind if all of the people listed in the credits of a movie had signed contracts saying that they consented to its being sold in modified formats for different media outlets. Most older movie contracts didn't contain such cluases, AFAIK.
One person's careful censorship of only the truly offensive is another person's hatchet job.
When the time trials count how much time competitors spend "adjusting" their members...
I think I can see where the harm is. Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message. The problem is that they would (presumably) be sold as the same novels written by the same author, something I am sure she would disapprove of if she were still alive today.
A little editing can be a very dangerous thing. How hard would it be to edit a few sections out of Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" to make the unionized workers in Flint look like stupid, incompetent crybabies? That film is a wonderful piece of propaganda that would be horribly distorted if it was edited in a malicious manner.
Almost any non-trivial creative work contains/conveys some sort of message(s) that can easily be lost or damaged by clever (or simply bad) editing. I know I do not want a lot of things I write edited down and posted out of context as being written by me, even though that does happen all too often to people a lot more famous than I will ever be.
What doesn't surprise me is that their solution involved optics. I would expect that some sort of traditional laser plus lens/prism/mirror setup, combined with a diffraction grating and/or Fresnel lens arrangement might enable quite a variety of optical media format's to be handled by the same R/W mechanism with a physically fixed laser assembly.
It seems to me that it ought to be faster and easier to manipulate a beam of coherent light than to physically aim a laser light source to reflect just the right way off moving media onto a sensor/reader.
A nice approach, given the affordability of gigabytes of memory these days, would be to have a system where you insert a DVD (even some flavor of HD optical disc) and read it into (also portable) flash RAM. A typical workstation might have one or more ports for 32GB flash RAM sticks and a ~64GB R/W super HD optical drive. I'm talking about maybe three to five years from now, when 8GB of fast RAM will be routine on a $500 PC with a multi-core 64-bit CPU clocked at ~10GHz.
The point is that the storage/memory required to hold all the data from several movies or a few weeks worth of playlist will be able to be transferred from relatively large and slow optical media to/from smaller, faster, move portable removable memory sticks, and from there directly to/from working memory as needed. Media and memory capacity are no longer major constraints and will become almost trivial factors in the near future, I think.
It was inevitable. Ricoh is not the firm I expected to announce such a gadget first, however.
Whenever the government claims to be doing something "for the children" you can be sure it is up to no good. Legislation that obviously benefits children doesn't usually need to be labelled/touted as such. Having school officials searching kids lockers, frisking them at school entrances, confiscating their cell phones, etc. is exactly the sort of thing one would expect in a police state.
I would hope that enough parents whould be aware enough of their Consitutional rights to fight back against these offensive actions by the Gestapo wannabes at their kids' schools.
I recall when it was the "War on [Some] Drugs" that was an excuse for many violations of people's rights and liberties by Big Brother. Look at how the gun grabbers use "For the children" as a shield to protect their statist anti-2nd-Amendment agenda. The government has a long history of creating crises and then stating that the only way to deal with the crises is to restrict our rights and limit our liberties. George Orwell was right.
How hard is it to get a cell phone that requires a person to ID him/her-self in order to use it? (I imagine a simple password or biometric system would suffice.) When some nosy school official wants to snoop around the information in little Johnny's cell phone, she can't do so. Little Johnny has been told that the cell phone is his to use but remains the property of his parents and they don't want anyone else to use it or access any information it contains. They have expressly forbidden him to allow any school official to do so... Blah, blah, blah. The point is that many parents do like for their kids to be able to keep in touch and want their kids to have cell phones.
Wiser parents want to protect their kids' rights under the Constitution. I think that simple security technology coupled with greedy lawyers who will cheerfully sue school systems might just solve the problem.