In my experience, the more often I teach a particular lecture, the smoother and more effective it will be. Forcing someone to change a lecture because the students expect it is unreasonable. Granted, some changes are simple (PowerPoint instead of overhead slides, lecture video available for download, electronic copies of handouts, etc.), but really, a halfway decent lecturer will understand where improvements can be made, and no amount of technology will make a bad teacher much better.

Besides, anyone who thinks college courses are intended to prepare you for the real world either never went to college or never had a real job.

My iPhone dropped about 12 inches, if that, to a sidewalk, and the screen shattered. It looked like I'd hit it with a hammer. I caught a ride to the airport from family for an early flight, and fell asleep in the passenger seat. The phone slipped out of my pants pocket, and when I opened the door to get out it fell and hit the sidewalk.

AT&T has a 30 day warranty on the iPhone. Anything beyond that, you're out of luck and you have to talk to Apple. I'd had the phone for maybe 3-4 days beyond that period. AT&T refused to do anything. I went to the Genius Bar at an Apple store, and they told me that, gosh, it's safety glass. It's not supposed to break like that. I said, "And yet..." They told me to talk to AT&T and see if they'd do anything. I got the sense that since I didn't buy Applecare, they didn't give a shit about me. I loved my iPhone, but the royal buttfucking Apple gave me over a product that they as much as admitted to me was defective completely took away any of the respect I had for their brand. The only Apple product I might consider buying now is an iMac, because I'm a musician. When I get one, I'll be getting it used, and Apple won't see a dime of my money.

Apple has jumped the shark as a company, and no longer feel like they have any responsibility to their customers. Pull the wool off your eyes and realize they're like any other big corp.

I knew we should have installed a factory reset button on the internet.

I keep thinking about the parallels of this with the older digital media of hand-copied books. Computers are much better than humans at copying data exactly, but much worse at understanding data once a small part of it has been corrupted.

We don't have to trust one neurotic monk anymore, but it's still possible for small corruptions to leak in. I wonder which has better data integrity: paintings inside a dark, windless cave, or a bunch of computers yelling ON and OFF at each other.

about so many groups using the same toolkit is that if you find a weakness in the toolkit then you can clear up multiple attacks all at once.

I'm not going to presuppose what Exxon knows or thinks -- but this is called hedging your bets. Aside from maybe being pathological, it's completely rational to fund both a "debunk global warming" campaign and a "deal with global warming" program, especially if the latter stands to earn you money. (Hell, they're just companies. They don't really care if in the future they can't sell oil, as long as by then they have a bigger revenue stream.)

There's no need to qualify that with "geological". It's absurdly hard to get an experiment to give you "pure", accurate results. Real world data is an exercise in pain.

any third party means anyone

so the cool diablo 3 background is not a piece of art?

drawings, paintings, sculptures are more present in your daily life, than you think. even if they are painted for promotion, they do have to be painted or be drawn - and get paid for.

also, painting with a digital stick to draw a digital image compared to an oilpainting is only different, because digital sticks are still new.

you are right about your differentiation between investor and sponsor, however it is not true, that paintings, sculptures are not made for money, as it is not true, that games/video/music is made for money only.

A while back I tried to start a trend by tagging such stories with "pimpmyblog", but it never really caught on.

I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.

Ah, but those ten seconds of pure unadulterated anarcho-capitalism, before someone with power and money realizes that no rules means they get to make the rules, would be fucking sweet. =)

Legislation, yes, but not this kind of legislation. If I buy, for example, a fridge or a washing machine in the EU, there will be a sticker like this one on the front telling me how energy efficient it is. This tells me how much energy it uses in one year, and I can multiply this by my energy cost per kWh and know how much it will cost me to operate annually. I can then do the same thing with the fridge next to it and see if it's worth buying a slightly cheaper one, and if I buy the more expensive one how long it will take to recoup the price difference. Most electrical goods come with a similar sticker now. No products needed to be banned, you just make consumers aware of the total cost ownership, and the market sorts it out. It's now difficult to find anything new with a poor energy rating because people just don't buy them.

Maybe I'm not giving the general public enough credit, but I don't think any solution that requires people to do math in their heads is going to work. On top of that, for most people, money you have to spend over the next 5-10 years is not the same as money you have to spend at purchase time, even though it should be.

Glad i don't live there. ( and hope their stupidity doesn't spread ).

The economics of this situation is more complicated than "costs more money = bad." People don't take energy efficiency into account when they make a big purchase like this. That means it's in the best interest of the manufacturer to save 5 bucks on manufacturing costs, even it means an extra $100 in electricity bills for the consumer. Legislation is the only really effective way to balance out the costs in a case like this, unless you can figure out how to make people pay for the electricity up front.

I'm pretty sure this would be a huge blow to the adult website industry. How many people would willingly visit those sites if they knew their name and identification was being taken down every time? It wouldn't eliminate every visitor, obviously, since a lot of people pay for those things with credit cards, but it would be enough to cause some serious damage.

Just because it wasn't available in the US doesn't make it prior art. Prior art has no such restrictions.

Yes it does. 35 USC 102(b) refers to inventions in use or offered for sale in the US only. You can maybe get around that if the owner's manual or service manual was available to the public and addressed the relevant features, since publications don't have that restriction; but as for the car itself, only domestic availability counts.