mojonixon

Frankly, that sounds like a bullshit policy, and certainly doesn't apply to all universities. Students are paying for access to the resources of the university and shouldn't be giving up IP. UMich has a much more reasonable policy here: http://www.techtransfer.umich.edu/resources/policies.php

........

The University will not generally claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students. (A “student” is a person enrolled in University courses for credit except when that person is an Employee.) However, the University does claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students in their capacity as Employees. Such students shall be considered to be Employees for the purposes of this Policy. Students and others may, if agreeable to the student and OTT, assign their Intellectual Property rights to the University in consideration for being treated as an Employee Inventor under this Policy.

........

" I have no idea how insurance companies and employers ended up married like that"

I believe the short answer is WWII. Price controls meant employers needed to find a way other than higher wages to attract workers.

If you're uninsured you get price gouged. A simple trip to the doctor with some basic tests can be a months rent. I have catastrophic health insurance; $5k deductible 20% copay to $50k. It won't pay for anything, but it will give me insurance group rates. Where is this magical free basic healthcare? Does not exist. Medicaid is only free if you've already become bankrupt.

Wired had a long but interesting article about Xanadu back in 1995: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//3.06/xanadu.html?person=... In many ways the story of Xanadu is sad and depressing.

Of course, Xanadu is (or would be) a digital remake of Vannevar Bush's memex: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush Frankly, I'm not sure Ted Nelson has added much to the original concept with Xanadu.

You can download Xanadu(R) Space(TM), a user interface demo, from here: http://xanarama.net/ Windows only, but I got it to work in WINE. Ted Nelson really likes his trademarks, probably because it's as tangible as Xanadu has become after 40 years.

Long term, higher education is screwed. There's no real way to improve the efficiency of 1prof:10-100 students. Most attempts just result in an inferior product. Increasing productivity in all other areas means that professor and the resulting education gets more and more expensive (everything else gets cheaper in comparison).

If you're interested in how the pros do it, about 5 years ago I temped at a bulk mailer--mostly medicare checks to doctors--using pitney bowes(IIRC) equipment. The machine I was running was organized in an L shape 20'x20'. One side would strip the letter off the continuous paper stack, collate it, fold it, and seal it in an envelope. The second side would stamp it and stack it in postal bins. A bad day I would do about 20,000 but if I had everything calibrated and the guy on the shift before didn't muck things up too bad I could get close to 50000 in an 8 hour shift. The system I was using rather old and temperamental, so I wouldn't be surprised if modern equipment is an order of magnitude faster.

Once the machine was running I didn't have to do much besides put envelopes in the hopper, but the noise, paper cuts, and opportunity to lose a finger while clearing a jam made it a horrible job.

Shakers? Quakers are the religious group that prefer the warm fuzzy feelings to dogma. Shakers were the celibate sect.

The autocorrect is maddening. I've been researching Riak recently. It's new so there isn't a lot available. Paired with another search term I frequently get results only for "risk." Let me know if I might have made a typo, but don't assume I'm an idiot and do something different than what I told you to do.

Dropping keywords also annoys me. If the keywords don't exist then tell me that so I can adjust my search. Don't give me a long list of results that I have to click through before realizing you screwed up the search.

The only reason the google search bar is still my default is because I use it as a quick and easy calculator.

He is not your employee, he is your son. If he doesn't want to play football, he shouldn't play football. It is not the obligation of our children to make us proud. Frankly, this is just fraked up.

It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, written for academics. I suspect most faculty, Harvard faculty included, do not wish to be intellectual caddies for the rich kids at the country club.

Kids have always needed instruction on how to play. "be nice!" "share!" "don't hit!" I find it encouraging that we're finding ways to impart these lessons in less coercive ways.

Wyoming has oil, which probably pushes out investment in other industries (why invest in a startup when you can invest in an oil well?). It may have a localized version of the Dutch disease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

god I hate PR flacks. "As the [pr] plan was constructed, Johnson & Johnson's top management put customer safety first, before they worried about their companies profit and other financial concerns." Do it for PR, not because its the right thing to do!

Because UNESCO isn't thoroughly politicized.

Why do some of the ads get run more often than others? Seems like google would run the one with the highest click through rate more often. I'm not convinced all of these are statistically significant anyway, but I don't have R at the moment.

Both of these posts, Atwood's and Braude's, are complete messes. Braude tries to compare the development of entire desktop applications with the UI development/document presentation of web applications. Web UI development should be compared to UI development on the desktop. I wish I could use Swing/GTK/Qt for my web UIs, or write my blog with Word, but instead we have to use HTML and DOM scripting. The web is a crappy UI framework with an excellent distribution method. The internal differences of desktop applications and web applications are typically a matter of scale.

"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Dear god, no! The browser is not the web. The future is not photoshop in a browser, it's a photoshop UI (hopefully developed with a rational desktop GUI framework) with a network connection (HTTP?) to a processing server. Of course, that's not particularly new, it's X11.

There are multiple Univ. of Maryland campuses, so it is quite possible he really does have an MIS. Even still his resume is a bit light.

But he's a political appointee. None of them are appointed for their expertise. The head of the EPA was the chief of staff for the New Jersey governor. Appointments are made for political reasons, and not much else. The mark of a good appointment is someone who doesn't get in the way of their career staff.

David Brooks, the great fellater of power.

Maybe they should get rid of the adless login/register interstitial first (read: stop bouncing readers before they serve an ad). I don't know if they can make it with just ads, but with the way they're doing it they are doomed to failure. A while back there was a post about how plentyoffish had ads on nytimes.com. So plentyoffish is stickier/has higher cpms than nytimes? Pathetic. A lot of their articles they don't even provide a comments section (easy page view doubler). Their UI looks like it was designed by a 19th century type-setter. I know they're trying not to stray from the brand, but the brand is good writing, not ancient design.

Global Gaming Factory X doesn't appear to be a real company. It seems to just be some legal maneuvering by TPB crew. The punks fight dirty. I approve. This is the real news. "TorrentFreak was informed by TPB’s Peter Sunde that the site will soon decentralize and quit running a properietary BitTorrent tracker, instead encouraging its user base to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents."

Even if NextBus "owned" the data, it's unlikely any claims they made on it would be enforceable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...

I am not a lawyer, and neither is wikipedia.

thesis: the only measure that matters in auto transport is energy density, and you can't do better than gasoline so there can't be any big disruptive technology as far as Exxon is concerned.

He's right about the energy density but makes a lot of crappy assumptions. He assumes auto transport is preferable to begin with (as do the politicians that choose highway funds over mass transit). He also doesn't consider that at a certain price (at the pump or environmental externalities), energy density becomes a less critical variable in the transportation equation.

There's also some general weirdness in the article. "The essence of digital-silicon technology is that more and more information can be stored and transported in ever smaller, profoundly less energy-intensive ways. Millions, soon billions, of ever tinier information engines (a.k.a. transistors) are etched onto a sliver of silicon." ok

"On top of this, software engineers use clever mathematical codes made ever more powerful by microprocessors, to parse, slice, and shrink information itself, compressing it without loss of essence. The combination is powerful. Compared to the dawn of computing, today’s information-moving hardware consumes one million times less energy for a logic operation and can store data in a physical space 100 million times smaller. And progress continues." uh, what? has compression really improved in the past 20 years? If anything, software engineers are doing there best to waste the efficiency gains in hardware.

"OIL IS A REMARKABLE ENERGY SOURCE that is also uniquely easy to transport and store."[emphasis his] Oil is not an energy source, it's a transport and storage mechanism; storing millions of years of solar power.

Oh, the guy wrote "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy" (he means that literally). He spent most of the article going on about the physical limitations of renewable resources. He's a maroon.

IBM has manyeyes http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/

Some naive comments. Might makes right, especially when it comes to the law. If PB has found a way to kick the motherfrackers in the shins, more power to them.

check out erowid.org.

It's basically impossible to overdose on acid, but it's certainly possible to take too much and have a bad trip. Since you've taken salvia you should be able to handle it though.

Make sure you have a day or two afterwards to relax. LSD completely alters perception of reality. You'll need a day or two to reconstruct what it means to be a normal human, preferably not spent in a cubicle.

I strongly recommend getting a sitter, someone you trust who can quietly keep an eye on you.

have fun, stay safe. and remember

frankly, I suspect as soon as you start tripping you'll lose all motivation to perform experiments. /so ive heard

1. real estate brokers are typically state licensed. State licensing boards often have online databases with good contact info. 2. he probably owns real estate. if you can narrow it down to a county, check that county's property records (also often on the net). Nexis/Lexis or Westlaw also has decent nationwide searches. 3. some counties also keep records on personal property, i.e. cars. he's probably run to a relative, is his car in their driveway? 4. +1 to the previous recommendation to send him an email containing a link, to get his IP. 5. zabasearch for established addresses (does he have a second home? relatives?)

Frankly, this type of thing is a lot harder than it seems. Although, law enforcement should be able to run his social security and credit card numbers to find him. Once he settles somewhere and his new info has time to get into the "system" it will be easier for you to find him.

I can't tell if you're joking or not. GM paid dividends up until last year, decades after it was known that they had large health care obligations. Divert a couple years of dividends in keeping their side of the bargain, and GM is in good shape. GM management made a deal they were unwilling to keep.

AMD employs 15,000. GM directly employees 240,000 and suppliers employ millions more. These companies are not easily replaceable. If they were, another company would have replaced them by now. Setting up an operation of that magnitude requires decades of experience and huge capital expenditures.

Raw execution speed matters when dealing with Google sized data sets, but Google and organizations with similar requirements can just throw more hardware at it.

more work, less circle jerk

Not even the homeless are moving into the city. The poor and desperate can't afford to leave. Sell your grandfather's house for 10k and go where? Once houses really become worthless, even more people will begin to walk away.