Some of their statements are way off. Liberal arts is not the reason you go to university, unless you want to be a writer. If you get a liberal arts (sort of) degree in a technical field you are woefully underprepared. An employer in a technical field wants you to be able to communicate, but other than that they could care less about other non-technical stuff. If you're a programmer, they want you to program and not sound like an idiot when you talk in front of people/with people.

The focus on research is a valid

whenever the senate states you must use XYZ product as a critical subcomponent in a large engineering project before it's started, you know there are going to be problems.

Exactly, start looking at the major databases that do exist.

Journal articles are easily searchable, even by Google Scholar if you want a decent, use anywhere search engine. Get the authors/institutions from the papers, not by randomly searching school webpages.

After you locate an interesting person, determine how that department does it's admissions. Some admit students then let them find advisors. Some pair up advisors and students at admission time. It depends on the school and on department.

Be sure to find out if the potential advisor is a douche too. Nothing makes grad school worse than an advisor who is a pain in the ass. When I was still in school, those of us who get along well with our advisors generally liked the entire experience while those that didn't were constantly unhappy and hated it.

If you run a massive user generated content site with a couple hunderd MB or more upload every minute, you'd be an absolute fool to not realize that someone, somewhere on your site will be uploading an infringing piece of content. You'd also be a fool to think that there is not a possibility for a significant portion of it to contain infringing content (since everything "artistic" ever made is copyrighted by someone).

They have no way of definitively telling what is or is not infringing. Say I upload some Taylor Swift concert video, the site has zero way of knowing whether that is authorized or not. They can imply, but they don't KNOW if I'm her agent, or I work for her record label, or am a promoter for her next show in DC and I have permission to do it.

You're exactly right IMO. The ruling was perfectly appropriate and completely consistent with the law. It is not possible or logical for a 3rd party to be held legally responsible for determining whether party A is infringing on party B's copyright. Youtube did everything required of it by law.

The RIAA just wants ISPs (and other 3rd parties) to do the hard leg work for them so the bad publicity and financial burden goes to the 3rd party.

I'm with you on the penalties for abuse of the system as well. The takedown-notice scheme is probably the best way to go about removing content that is infringing and balancing both parties rights. The only issue is that, as currently constructed, there is no real motivator for the accuser to be accurate. Realistically, a false accusation is not going to result in the "uploader" suing for damages. It's just not practical given the huge legal costs and outcome being a crap-shoot.

This sounds like the best security bill yet.

It doesn't mandate government takeover of anything. Institutions can work with the government if they want. And the government sets up a office to assist the requestion institutions with issues and provide information to them. It helps to centralize the protection of computer networks into one office, but is much less draconian in it's view of the internet and doesn't force the internet to bend to the governments will.

It is a million times better than the Leiberman bill.

Exactly, the quality of a law is not judged on how well it does what it was supposed to do, but how robust it is to abuse.

And as someone earlier said, 120 days is about 117-119 days too long (assuming the power is needed in the first place).

Overall, it's not too hard. Affiliations aren't all that important to the process and professorship/etc doesn't matter. Most of the time, the reviews and such are done blind.

1. The first thing you need to do is research the current state of the field and have a good idea how yours relates.

2. Next, pick a journal that is in your field and is appropriate. IEEE may be a good place to start, but with your research you'll find what similar papers are published in. You won't be published in Science.

3. Write it up and submit it. Follow the style given by the journal, they're sticklers for it. It'll either be in Word or LaTeX format. You should have someone (somewhat) knowledgeable read through it first to make the process easier. It doesn't need to be an expert, but has to be someone who understands what you're talking about.

4. Get reviews back from the journal. Every paper that is submitted gets reviewed by 2 people in the field. Some conferences use only 1. You'll get comments back that will need to be addressed.

Expect the submission process to take 6-12 months or so before it will be published, depending on the journal and comments received.

You can't publish it verbatim from a conference to a journal, but there are quite a few people who publish essentially the same thing in a conference and a journal. You just have to rewrite it with a different spin or maybe a little more work/discussion/etc. Say in one, you focus on the accuracy of your model/method and the other focuses on speed vs. other methods.

Ok, that is a good take home also. ;)

It is exaggerated and as all "effect on the economy" estimations, it is wildly dependent on the assumptions. But it uses a methodology similar to what is known of the MPAA/RIAA methodology. The MPAA/RIAA are not real forthcoming with how they came up with their numbers though, while at least this study does list out where all the numbers came from. Even the GAO criticized the MPAA/RIAA funded studies as being entirely secretive with no way of verifying the results.

The important take home is that IP/copyright exceptions matter a great deal to people as does what is covered by copyright/IP law

You are not going to be able to buy a SR-71, in current dollars, for $35 million each after accounting for R&D money. As comparison, the "affordable" F-35 is estimated at around $150 million each, in large quantities for a military aircraft (on the order of 2500 to the U.S.).

The costs of maintaining a set of missiles is not going to be vastly different than for a wing of aircraft. The aircraft can do a hell of a lot more though, and can continue to do it after 1 mission.

The "trust us, it's not nuclear" is not going to work. It's better than nothing. However, North Korea told you that they only put nuclear missiles on the west coast and the east coast houses conventional only, are you going to believe them?

No, you're right. A ballistic weapon is going to be much harder to intercept and nobody can reliably do it currently (or is really trying). That's it's primary benefit balanced out with a ton of negatives.

There are methods of infiltrating enemy airspace that are moderately reliable though.

This idea is bad on many levels.

1. It looks like a nuclear ballistic missile launch. Every time you fire one, you're risking nuclear war. Russia, China, and any other enemy will see the launch and has to make a very quick decision on what to do. Chances are, it probably wont' be misidentified as a nuclear first strike. Do you really want to take that risk though??? If you have to notify them first, the entire quick strike goes out the window and the entire point of the technology is lost.

2. It's fucking expensive. Having a 1 time use ballistic missile is going to cost 100s of millions to a billion dollars a shot. That figure doesn't even count the R&D money for the program. To allow for quick strike capability, they have to be manned at all times, and ready to fire, so the ongoing "maintenance costs" on it are very high. This is going to be an insanely expensive system.

3. Why? Who are you realistically going to strike with it. Anywhere in the middle east, North Korea, and most of Europe is currently within fighter range and can be hit in relatively short time from conventional fighter/bombers.