Allow me to dissent.

"A Game of Thrones" suffers from an excess of underdeveloped characters. I counted 10-12 major characters, plus dozens of supporting cast. Daenerys, the exiled dragon princess, seemed interesting, as did Arya, the waterdancer-in-training. However, I finished the book without really caring about any of them.

In some ways, the whole book felt like nothing more than background for plot lines that won't be developed until well into the second or third novels. For example, the very first chapter introduces the the undead ghouls who are evidently gathering to invade from the North, but they're barely mentioned for the rest of the book's 800 pages, appearing only briefly in the Jon Snow arc. Likewise, the extended story of Daenerys' marriage into the Dothraki tribes seems like wind-up for an invasion from the south by the dispossessed heir, evidently for one of the later books. Though the Daenerys plot struck me as the most interesting part of the book, it really had little or nothing to do with the main plot. With so very many characters to track, there was little time to develop a rapport with any of them.

The landscape and cultures are, for the most part, stock. One glance at the map in the front will have any mildly educated person thinking "Oh, they're England and Scotland divided by Hadrian's Wall." The Dothraki are clearly based on the Mongols, only slightly more hedonistic; whereas the culture of the Seven Kingdoms is stock High Middle Ages.

In short, the material was handled poorly, with little imagination, and at much greater length than it needed. The book could have benefited greatly from the tender attentions of a stern editor.

I went on to read two or three more books in the series (checked out from the library) and finally gave up in disgust when he put an explanatory note at the end of a volume saying that he'd wound up splitting the book in two because there were so very many characters to follow. I take that as a sign of poor discipline. If the book has grown too far beyond its bounds, the correct response is to murder your darlings.

I was disappointed. Some of his other work I've enjoyed very much, particularly "Tuf Voyaging" and (to a lesser extent) "Windhaven", and I'm a major fantasy fan, so I was expecting it to be enjoyable, and it wasn't. Bummer.

That's right! The iPhone really IS better than any other product on the market, regardless of function! No matter what task comes to hand, the iPhone will see me through.

Why, I use my iPhone to puree tomatoes all the time. And it's SOOO handy when I want to brush my teeth. And just ask my girlfriend what she thinks of its penis enlargement capabilities. Truly, the iPhone is the pinnacle of technological development!

I stand corrected! In future I shall be sure to write my grocery lists like cheap thrillers.

"This is a dark city. (Item: lightbulbs, 3, flourescent.) I was cleaning up from my last job (Item: Clorox; item: new scrubbie sponges; item: nitric acid) and contemplating what I'd have for dinner (Items: 5 steaks, 1 bottle steak sauce, a nice Cabernet Rosso, 1 bag potatoes, garlic, broccoli, rice) when I looked up and there she was: redheaded, green-eyed, a short compact frame and legs that went all the way down. (Item: Trojans, more Cabernet Rosso, maybe some flowers.) "Hi, gorgeous," I said. "You need anything at the grocery store?" She cocked her head prettily, and said "We're out of hand soap in the upstairs bathroom, there are only two cans of cat food left, and the kids need more pencils for school -- someone discovered our stash and reduced them all to stubs in the electric sharpener." Rinsing my hands, I asked "Are there any suspects in the case?" She glanced over her shoulder and said "The culprit, I believe, goes by the code name 'Junior.'" I nodded, checked my wallet, jotted a few notes, and headed for the door. "Well, I'll investigate, and if guilty this fiend shall be punished."

"Oh, you dashing fellow," she replied. "Don't forget the milk."

But it also has a major downside in the fact that it's not clear who owns what. Also, the lack of registration has extended copyright over basically everything. The grocery list I jotted down this afternoon is subject to copyright. Heck, this post is subject to copyright.

And it's not as if registration is an inherently bad idea. There are two issues to address with it -- the cost, and the difficulty of processing registrations. The last time we tried mandatory registration, the price was set by the government, and the processing had to be done by hand on paper. We can do better than that.

I would prefer mandatory registration similar to the way the domain name system works. Thus:

1. The Copyright Office determines what information is needed for a copyright registration.
2. The Copyright Office creates a database to track that information.
3. The Copyright Office does not gather registration information itself. Instead, it accredits registrars to do so.
4. The accredited copyright registrars compete with one another to offer the lowest prices and the most convenient service for registering copyrights.
5. An author (or corporation) selects a registrar, pays whatever fee that registrar has settled on, and gives the registrar the required information.
6. The registrar transmits the information to the Copyright Office, where it is logged in the database.

In this way, we get a definitive record of who owns which copyright, and exactly when the work was registered. Because the registrars are in competition with one another, we get cheap registration fees and convenient service. And by making registration mandatory once again, we have ensured that copyright is only applied in cases where the author wants it.

It's obviously not a perfect system. I imagine we'd probably have to deal with fraudulent or competing copyright registrations. But we already have those anyway.

A bigger concern would be whether or not the market for copyright registration services would be large enough to sustain itself. Copyright terms are very, very long. The lifetime of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years for corporately owned works. Say I'm the owner of H. K. Fessenscheimer & Daughters, Copyright Registrar. If one author registers a book, that's one sale. Then I don't get any more business from that author till they've created something new to copyright, which could take years, or might never happen.

So in order to generate enough business to sustain a strongly competitive registration market, we'd probably have to require renewal at shorter intervals. Say, a copyright registration lasts for five or ten years, and then you (or your estate) has to re-register. If you don't, then you get a grace period of maybe six months, and then the copyright expires and cannot be renewed.

Of course, large institutions which do a lot of copyright registrations (corporations, universities) would be free to establish in-house registrars which would handle all registrations and renewals for their own copyrights without involving a third party. Hell, they could even write their own software to do it. Amortized over time, their costs for registering and renewing copyrights would be extremely low.

I'm sure that the existing copyright holders will scream bloody murder at the idea. They worked really hard to get rid of registration. They wouldn't be happy to see it come back.

Also, we might not be able to do anything like this without violating the Berne Treaty. So perhaps it's just a fantasy. But I really wish we could.

This is exactly right, and I'm giving up mod points to say so. Education is a reciprocal experience. Particularly with more abstract concepts. When one of my students is having a difficult time understanding a concept, I have to explain it again, but differently. It's not unusual to explain the same concept six or seven different ways before it clicks. During that time I rely on cues from the student (or students), many of which are non-verbal. Looks of puzzlement, rolled eyes, pursed lips, glazed eyes, eyebrow furrows, impatient twitches, overall body posture -- take those away and it gets a lot harder to reformulate explanations.

It can be done in a strictly online environment, but it's freaking hard. Writing messages online strips away so much of the non-verbal feedback I rely on.

Video chat might be able to help, but it might also cause problems. When I'm in a room with 25 freshmen, I can watch them easily enough. If I were confronted with a screen full 25 different video windows, and every student is in a different location, that's going to be difficult to use. At current screen resolutions, the amount of details I would see of each student's face would be vastly reduced. The bandwidth requirements would be pretty stiff. If every student is in a different location, that's 25 different contexts to keep track of, and what happens when Susy O's cat jumps on the computer and knocks her webcam into the trash can?

I've been teaching in classrooms equipped with computers for each student the last few years, and I love it. The pedagogical approaches that enables are really cool. Completely online classes are good, and useful, particularly for adult education. But they're basically like correspondence courses -- useful, but not a viable replacement for face-to-face instruction in the near future.

I'm in Austin, so I stand to be affected by this in the near future.

I wouldn't be opposed to a metered plan if it was really a metered plan.

The electric company doesn't care how many toasters I own, or how often I make toast, or anything. They charge me an activation fee when I start service, and then they bill me for the electricity I use. THAT is a metered plan. If I could do that with bandwidth (at a reasonable rate per GB), I'd be perfectly happy.

This Time Warner crap is NOT like that. They want to charge me an activation fee, a monthly usage fee, AND a dollar per gigabyte for every GB over their arbitrarily imposed limit. That's NOT cool.

The basic point of the pricing structure appears to be to control my behavior online, and it irritates me no end.

You've already received a formal takedown notice from a genuine lawyer; you need to consult a lawyer of your own. ASAP. The Slashdot community's thoughts may well be interesting/insightful/flamebait/overrated, but they're no substitute for trained legal counsel.

Look up your local bar and see if you can find an IP lawyer with reasonable rates for a consultation. Failing that, contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation; perhaps they can help, or at least point you in the right direction.

I think this really depends on the program. I've done three masters degrees now, and they've been all over the map. The second one was the hardest. It was a medieval literature course; I was enrolled for a PhD but opted to turn it into a master's at the end of a couple years and switch to library school.

Typical reading loads consisted of 1000-1200 pages of assigned reading per week, some of which was in dead languages. Then you'd have to do research for term papers, above and beyond the assigned reading. The papers were typically 20-30 pages each, though in two terms I reached a total of 120 pages of written work for three classes.

Then there was teaching. In order to support themselves, the graduate students teach introductory level composition classes, which means you have to find time to plan lessons, conduct them, hold office hours, answer student emails, and do the grading.

The grading is always the hardest part. The freshmen who can write well tend to get exempted from the requirement to take a basic composition course, so the students who wind up actually taking the classes are the ones who really need help. Which means that plowing through a batch of essays is a truly painful experience, particularly since you usually have to read them more than once. I adopted the approach of reading each one three times -- once quickly for an initial impression (5 minutes), once slowly writing comments in the margins (15 minutes), and once to write final comments at the end and assign a grade (5 minutes). That's only 25 minutes per essay, which means in a class of 25 you can get through it in just under eleven hours, barring interruptions or particularly difficult cases.

Library school, by contrast, has been highly uneven. Some of it's interesting and challenging. I'm enrolled in one class right now which is proving an interesting challenge; I'm working on digital archiving of source code from an obscure late '90s children's game, and it's quite complex.

But many of the other classes have not been. In my Intro to Reference Service class, the teacher once spent an hour explaining to us what an encyclopedia is. He was a sweet old guy, but I don't think his syllabus had been updated in the last twenty years. Some of the other classes were painfully badly taught, including a memorable Information Architecture course consisting of student presentations in every class all term.

So the workload varies considerably from program to program.

I've never noticed any particular disparity in the racial breakdown of DIA employees, and I go through there on a regular basis (family in Denver). I like watching the bag handlers at work after landing, and from what I can recall they were mostly hispanic, with a mixture of blacks and whites in. Also, my uncle works for DIA -- he delivers baggage that got lost in transit to its owners -- and he's so white it's a wonder he doesn't get sunburned under fluorescent lights.

So the black baggage crew is probably a shift scheduling thing. But I suspect that it's probably also a class thing, with some demographics as well. Blacks tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to economic opportunities, and Colorado's no exception.

The demographic part is that there just aren't many blacks living in Colorado. According to the US Census Quickfacts for Colorado, blacks comprise only 4.2% of the population of Colorado. It was never a slave state, and was pretty undeveloped and largely lawless during the early parts of the 19th century -- not an attractive destination for runaways.

It's an interesting observation you made, though. I'll pay more attention to the racial breakdown of the employees the next time I pass through.

Agreed. Her goal is to prevent cheating. That may be laudable in and of itself, but this is a stupid way to go about it, for all kinds of reasons. It's probably illegal. And ineffective at stopping cheating.

Also, the teacher has put herself into a lousy position. If she gives the student a poor grade at the end of the term, then he can file a grievance claiming that she actively prevented him from earning a higher grade by destroying his notes. That's solid grounds for a complaint. Furthermore, it sounds as if she did this to the entire class. They've all got grounds for that claim.

By destroying the notes, the teacher has also destroyed any trust the students might have had in her, and seriously undermined her own credibility. She's lost any claim to impartiality here. No one can teach effectively under those circumstances, even an otherwise good teacher. It's stupid.

And worse, it's destructive. She's actively preventing her students from learning. As a college teacher myself, I am outraged. This is not acceptable professional conduct.

The student should immediately file a formal complaint with the teacher's department and the dean. I strongly suspect that the teacher will be removed from the class and replaced by someone else, as she is in no position to finish out the term now.

It's too early to file a legal challenge, but the student would be well advised to consult a lawyer immediately to discover what the legal options are in case things go badly.

The New Scientist article on this topic is more informative. Among other things, it's got a video of the test mini-robot boat in action.

The water in the testing tank is very still -- there are few or no ripples. I wonder if the approach will actually work on, say, the ocean? If your propulsion system depends on steady contact with the water surface, waves are going to be a problem.

I agree that it's important to learn to copy files properly. I do require them to use FTP to publish their sites when working outside of a lab environment, and I've written a detailed tutorial for them. It runs just over two pages in length, and I have a small homework assignment near the beginning of the term where they have to log in from home, download a file, change its contents, and upload a fresh copy. Sometimes it takes them a little while to get the hang of it, but by the end of the term they know how it's done.

I'm also perfectly happy to teach them file copying stuff during office hours, either via FTP or using the shared folder approach (which only works in the lab, of course, due to security restrictions).

It's just that I'd prefer not to do it in class. It takes away time from the other things I'm trying to teach them.