Here is a video from an attempt with crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmea3odVgDE#! it seems repaired.

Anant Agarwal recently reported that at the course MIT 6.002 where textbooks are freely available for students, the textbook sales have gone through the roof. Publishers currently learn from such cases. This patent is complete nonsense. No teacher would make financial payments linked to grades.

These correlations are hardly a surprise If you are healthy, wealthy you are more likely to live longer. And its easier to have a good sense of humor and optimisitic you are settled well. It is also more likely that you have a larger social network then. The correlation between healthy and living longer is trivial. The correlation between wealthy and living longer is no secret since health systems are already selective. If you are padded well you more likely will get an experienced surgeon for example or get a vital organ faster.

the study is rather limited since 216 students is a small sample. And how did they get the students? If it was voluntarily, then the sample was already biased from the beginning. They could not have monitored the internet use of a random sample without their consent without violating basic guidelines for using human subjects in research. The later rather severe in academic setups. It must have been rather difficult to get these students also because who would agree to have all their online activities monitored and analyzed.

It will not only be important to estimate what "value" really is but how robust it is. If you make a technological leap which needs a lot of research investment and which is difficult to copy, then this is value which is robust. Real resources like oil or level of education are such robust values. FB has generated a lot of robust value in building up all the infrastructure and code. But the value of FB includes also networks of people which is also value but is fragile because it is based also on reputation and coolness. If you sit on a real goldmine, you do not have to be cool. You will make money. If you sit on a virtual goldmine like FB, you have to remain popular to please investors and make money. This makes me side more with Steve Blank in the economist opening statement. However, facebook now also has the power to grab and crush smaller competitors and harvaest their talent. The fact that they get the best in the industry might mean that they will start entering more robust markets like entertaining, news etc. This makes me believe also Ben Horowitz. We will have to wait and see.

this is the main reason, why I do not have important things only on the laptop, nor use cloud services. Both are vulnerable. The former since a laptop can so easily disappear, the later because the company could go belly up or lose the data. Backing up on hard drives and store regularly encrypted versions in a safe place looks still like the best option. My personal backup has not changed since decades: sync regularly (via cron scripts) between multiple desktop machines at multiple locations, retire old harddrives regularly and have physical harddrive backups at multiple locations too which are not overwrritten. (Adding a mac desktop in the sync loop allows to use time machine also when primarily working in linux). I also work more and more on a laptop but always sync before and after using it for some work. Yes, it is a bit expensive but the financial pain pales when comparing to the agony to lose old work.

First of all, it must be said that the word "mac fan boy" is one of the most ingenious PR actions against apple. The statement of Microsoft that "macs are not safe" is a too obvious PR spin along the same lines. Any operating system is vulnerable as long as users can modify operating systems. This is not for discussion. What matters is how fast these vulnerabilities are handled and communicated and corrected. Apple as well as Linux distributions have handled vulnerabilities in the past pretty well and I feel quite safe both using a mac or using linux boxes.

javascript is the best option. I would trust it more than any other implementation because is a language which by nature open source, i.e. http://www.peoplesliberationfront.net/anonpaste/lib/sjcl.js http://www.peoplesliberationfront.net/anonpaste/lib/base64.js All the encryption is done in the users browser and not on the server and one can see the code. So, download all the source files first, analyze whether there is something strange in the source and then everytime, before using the tool, check whether the source has changed.

What I do not understand however is for what this could be useful.

it has to be said once: there is no faster and better program for unix and gimp developers are my heroes. I I use it since gimp 1.0 and could not be happier. Sure, one has to get used to it, but things are done with the gimp before photoshop even starts up. I even prefer it on my macs, where photoshop is installed.

TV has become almost unbearable indeed. I guess that this evolution will repeat with streaming too. We see the trend also in youtube. First it was completely free, then adds appeared at the begnning. the next step is to have adds to appear during play or interrupt the movie for ads.Once TV is less relevant and streaming the only possibility, the crap will creap in too. The movies will be interupted regularly for advertisements, or adds will be injected into the movies and show and on will only be able to get rid of it by paying more.

Why not post the documents in a format which is accessible instead of zoomable small windows? Even to watch small documents like the grades of Einstein at highschool, one needs to zoom in and watch the document at differentheights just to read the grades. I understand that such institutions want to protect their exhibit from being copied, but in this case the archiv is almost useless. Its certainly work in progress also since when accessing the database most is not linked to the actual documents. Simplicity would be key here: make one page with a list of all the documents and let google do the rest.

I use linux as my main work platform since 15 years. Here are a few reasons why I still use a mac. Here are the tools, I use regularly where I did not find analogues.

• dead simple and robust video editing with quicktime pro (copy paste) which is able to read and export in essentially any format
• screen recording which allows to archive any video which is visible on the screen.
• pages, to quickly make a flyer, syllabus which looks great.
• garage band which just works and does not need to be learned because one can just plug into the epiano and work.
• PDF manipulation: preview is a fantastic tool to rearrange, copy paste pages in PDF files. Nothing like this exists. I use Adobe professional to reduce the size of PDF files (especially from scanned books). Most of the time the space reduction is a factor of 10.
• Scanning: with a Fujitsu scanner, I can get a digital version of a book (cut the spine and throw it into the scanner, push one button). The result is a perfectly OCRd PDF file. No hassels, no time waste. Nothing like this seems to exist on linux.
• presentation software. The simplicity and robustness of keynote is fantastic, especially if you want to play embedded videos.
• digitizing DVD's. With handbreak, it is trivial to get a nice video file from a DVD. Throw in the DVD, push a button and wait.
• Backup. I even use time machine to backup some linux directories. Sync them over to the mac, where things are archived nicely.
• hardware: since a couple of years it is virtually impossible to get reasonably prized displays. The imac has 2560x1440. Almost all monitors one can buy now have only ridiculous 1920x1080. Even the ipad has with 2048x1536 pixels twice as many. Also the macbook air is unmatched.

Why do I use linux then?

• Have complete control about the machine
• Have a second leg just in case.
• Not to be dependent on a vendor, who might just one day decide to discontinue with operating systems because it is not profitable. (I do not believe that to happen with the Mac, but I had been burned several times in my life, like with Next). This is not going to happen to me again.
• Have a fast machine. Lag and delays (even fractions of seconds) drive me nuts. Linux allows me to customize my machine so that this never ever happens. Its like going with a racing car. I use a minimal windows manager (blackbox) and disable anything which is not needed, and also regularly buy a decent new CPU. On the mac, especially with "versions", things can become frustrating. open a document for a moment, then close preview, delete the document, then open preview. The program tries to find the old document and blocks the machine. An operating system never should slow down the user.
• Fun. I like to tune things but do not like to do too much sysadmin. Typically, I do not have to do anything once things are running.

I do not know how broadband will be able to cope with this. No thanks, I try to keep independent and use good old rsync to keep my machines in sync. If things continue as they are we soon have bandwidth caps. Relying then on the cloud could become very expensive. Not only because of prize hikes in the cloud once the public is hooked, but also because faster internet service is needed.

OCR for videos are not developed so well so far. (For text, there are several open source projects). There is a well developed industry working on translating movies into 3D content like the structure from motion problem which makes space and camera path reconstruction from a movie. It is only a matter of time until these captchas are broken too. An other hurdle is that the examples use Flash which allows to script pictures using actionscript. The OCR task is not given a movie (a sequence of pictures at first). What the Captcha decoder will have to do is "film" the flash animation first to render it into a sequence of pictures which then can be analyzed.

I make the same experience that it is harder to finish a book on a ebook reader, also due to distraction by other books. There are different reasons to read although. A library of books at my fingertip to look up something and not have to carry around a library. Not only for books. I used to photocopy every article remotely interesting to me. Its nice to have all these sources on one place now. Also for articles, distraction can kick in. While I used to carry around some few articles with me for months absorbing them to the latest detail, this is harder now. The electronic file goes into the electronic library, often not to be touched again.