I thought if it's Swedish, it's rape.

As someone who shipped a lot of packages through USPS, the solution is very simple. Get a real time tracking system in par with UPS and FedEx (not bullshit overnight updates) and make the insurance for package claims less of a joke than UPS and FedEx.

As bills and correspondence mails have gone down, online buying and selling has taken it's place. But, most people are uncomfortable sending their packages through USPS. The tracking is only delivery confirmation and that costs extra at the post office. With cell phone technology, it should be trivial to implement real time updates.

If a package is lost, the insurance system is a joke. It takes forever and you can only correspond by mail. The insurance is ridiculously expensive and when you need it, it's a massive headache.

If they just fix those above issues, then lots of business would come swarming to them from online shippers.

Another thing, their rates are kinda screwed up. For heavy packages, the rates are much much higher than UPS and FedEx. It comes down to only making sense to send packages by USPS for under 4-5 lbs. They probably should also do the sweetheart deals with big companies that UPS and FedEx do - like shipping for pennies on the dollar for large volume shippers.

And, there are some sink holes like in Bell, CA that if packages get there, they come out weeks later (famous for losing Oscar votes). There are a few of them across the country.

I think USPS should move towards being more geared towards packages. But, that's just my end of the pond where I shipped packages through USPS. Maybe junk mail is the cash cow, or certified mail.

Increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia

I think the opposite might be true in fields like computer science.

The PhD program is too focused on solving problems that Google or Microsoft kinds might also be tackling; like text data mining, network protocols characteristics, software engineering. Mostly conferences are heavily sponsored by industry and results that are of immediate use to the industry are present and the quality of a PhD is determined by the number of publications in such industry sponsored conferences.

Compare that to >90% in the lower tier universities.

My perspective is from the biomedical sciences, but still. Most are Chinese or Indian students and most of the American students are already planning for industry, consulting, or some other non-research job.

There are more graduate school positions available than American graduate students interested in them. Consequently, all American grad students flock to tier 1 universities while the lower tier universities get filled up with foreign students.

... have little choice other than to lay down thousands on machinery and materials ..

That's like saying you have to buy a T1 line and a server and networking equipment to host a web server.

I don't know what kind of manufacturing idea that you have but I sure can make a whole bunch of prototypes from a $100 worth of raw materials and some shop time. You can get a lot of metal, screws, fiberglass etc etc for $100. I know friends who make car parts prototypes that way.

I know people in SD are not machinist but you have to realize that things in your area of expertise look easier than others.

1. It's only on TV where engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists are shown contempt. TV has become such a big part of people's live since everyone is so compartmentalized that people believe the world operates like what they see on TV.
2. Bell Labs was possible because of all the excesses of the monopoly side of Bell.
3. Like what? The whole patent system was invented so that new ideas could be shared from which newer ideas could come from. If it's not a revolutionary idea, then it can be reverse engineered.
4. US has the best universities; very easy access to funds for education (loans, scholarships, assistantships) and schools that range from community colleges which are $80 per credit to private colleges. If planned properly, one could go from kindergarten to a doctorate without paying a penny.

I suppose all these questions only matter when you're going through the web-pages to modify the grades. If you had access to the database and could run SQL commands on them, then all these questions would be void. Passwords for databases don't get changed since it's assumed no-one but internal scripts use them.

On the other hand, the software that manages things like grades and such are big bloated turds that no-one wants to get their hands dirty with beside the minimum requirements. It could be just that nobody cared to analyze the logs until the anomalies just became too big. Just like you said, each procedure is a boring, tedious list of requirements that no-one wants to learn and follow and when things go wrong it's not obvious to anyone.

Leading to the next, if the guy hadn't gotten greedy and doing it for money, he would never have been caught. How many people out there change grades and are never caught? Grades are all hush hush and even if things get changed, nobody would really know.

I don’t really get (and the article didn’t really seem to explain) how these elite uploaders of the pirated content receive this ad-revenue. Are they saying that the people who post the bulk of the infringing torrents on various networks receive ad-revenue from the indexing sites (where the ads would be displayed)? I don’t understand how ad revenue flows from the indexing sites to the users who upload the content.

Because those 100 users are bots. Yes, they upload 75% of the content but it's a bot uploading from a release list. They don't create the content, torrent and make the bandwidth available.

Err...we do [amtrak.com]. Americans just don't like to use it. Probably because once you get there, you will most likely need a car once again. One D.C. to Orlando route addresses this by tacking on some extra cars to carry your automobiles [amtrak.com] with you. Guess which is the one Amtrak train I've ever personally taken?

Air travel is even worse when it comes to needing transportation. Airports have to be located 30-40 miles outside the city. This is solved by having rental car stations on the airport and have circling vans to take you to hotels. At least the train stations are downtown, though in the ghettos. Anyway, most Amtrak stations are also served by Greyhound buses where you can be picked up or if in a commercial area take a cab.

I took Amtrak during 9/11 when all planes were grounded. We spent 2 days in Montana. Needless to say, Amtrak is way too slow to be a feasible long distance transportation and too expensive to be feasible short distance transportation/commute.

Of course if Americans *did* like to use it, then we'd probably have to add all those security checks like the airlines have. For example, in India everyone uses the train system, and it has been a primary terrorist target for decades.

The freeway is used by most Americans but is never a terrorist target. Why? In India, the trains itself aren't targeted but passenger compartments at specific passengers. And you'd have to use broad sense of terrorism when it's one religious faction targeting another religious faction.

On one hand, the companies giving up their seed corn aren't being forced to literally at gun point. They're deciding that at this moment, they're better living another day and starving tomorrow. So in a sense it's a win-win scenario.

This is like going to the mechanic and saying that I would only let him service the car if he lets me watch how he does the service. In the future, I could myself become a mechanic and steal business away from him. Of course he can say it's not safe and against company policy to do but he know I can drive out of there and go to the next mechanic and offer him the same terms.

China has to make it's purchasing decisions with the highest value and the seller has to sell with it's own highest value. This is good old capitalism of making good old rational decisions. I suppose it can be argued that starving China of technical know how is good for us but they have money. We have happily clacking away at Chinese made keyboards and sitting on Chinese fabric and plastic all the while spewing vitriol that for all that China has provided, they dare ask for knowledge as trade.

So China wins here not by being more ingenious or creating new knowledge or technology, but by exploiting its ability to control the rules of the game. If you twist your vision enough, I suppose that what it is doing in this case might look like innovation.

If you're such an innovation romantic, then you first have to give China a level playing field. Holding all the technical know how and then berating for lack of innovation doesn't make sense. Of course, I'm assuming here that you're not of the school of philosophy that Asian can't innovate because of their culture.

This sounds to me more like savvy business wheeling and dealing. It's no different than what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans would do.

Yeah, this is surprising because everyone expects the Chinese to be the sick man of Asia and a third world run by a regime. They actually did good business. They didn't let one supplier control their train systems while at the same time they built up an indigenous train industry realizing it is vital to their country.

What is surprising that those companies were not able to bribe the select chiefs and get an unfair position, or that some dictator didn't just buy the whole train system and charge it to some world bank loan but though of the future - far far into the future of developing a domestic industry.

And, I wish we had trains for long distance travel in the US. Traveling by car at 70mph for hours and hours is tiring and there is always the prospect of a problem with a car and being stuck somewhere. Airplane travel is marred by the security checks and delays and long wait times.

I guess this would be a stern counter-example to the service industry philosophy. China isn't content on being the factory workhorse while the US controls the technology. China would like to catch up on technical know-how as well and build their own industry.

I don't think there is a way to tell from the depositing bank.

Some people say wait a month but banks say it can take up to 2-3 months for checks to clear.

The other way is to ask the bank that issues the check or money order to check if it has cleared. Obviously, this is a big problem if the issuer is outside the US.

And that is why this scam is popular. Once people put the check in the bank and the balance shows up, people think everything is legit and send money out of that balance.

My field is not biomedical research but I feel that research in academia and industry are not quite comparable.

Industrial research is about products or features whereas academic research is about exploring the nooks and crannies that industry would never justify paying someone a salary to look into.

Some scientists get very good at getting money and even after tenure when the research dries up and the grad students aren't there anymore, they still get the money out of things they did 10 years ago. On the other hand, some veteran scientists turn into brilliant managers getting the right research done by the right grad students or post-docs.

What was the big rush? If Wikileaks didn't have enough volunteers to vet the info carefully, why rush ahead and publish it anyway?

The longer the delay, the bigger the chances that the release of the documents will be blocked and Assange would be put under very difficult circumstances to make him not release the documents. Anybody sitting on a pile of classified documents would want it out there and gone from it causing personal risks.