Textbooks are currently "proprietary" already. They cost a ton of money. A new edition is put out every couple of years, so a department or teacher has to choose weather or not to assign problems from different editions. If they don't, a student is forced to, if they have a previous edition, to compare the two editions problem by problem to see which ones are the same.

My professor, just yesterday, was talking about how, when an error is found, he must submit his questions to the publisher. Being somewhat cynical of textbook publishers motivations, I feel that their editing is not that stringent, so that it becomes "necessary" to publish new editions when enough errors are found by professors. I've taken chemistry in high school (10++ years ago), and am currently taking chemistry. Not much has changed between. Why the hell are several editions of a book necessary? Money.

Universities are slow bureaucratic beasts. They do not jump onto new technologies. My university currently uses Desire 2 Learn for it's online content. This is a significant improvement over Blackboard. It took them quite a while to make the switch. I am curious as to how much they paid for it. To have a free option using software many people are familiar with and likely have installed would save public universities, starved of funding, a nice chunk of change. The benefit seems good, but it will take a long time for universities to make the switch.

As for e-textbooks, PDFs suck for textbooks and turning pages and writin in the margins is great. But given the option of buying a paper book by a publisher squeezing every last cent out of students or buying a textbook online that a professor has made available (as long as it has gone through a peer reviewing process) I would jump at it. I can always print pages if necessary.

Kids love to pop in and out of the office. I can hear them though. .... what just broke?

You say you use PHP, because you don't want to program a user interface? What you see in the browser *is* a user interface. The mathematical operations available in PHP are disgustingly small. You must be talking about using PHP to view formatted data from a database.
While I agree that SQL is a must, if one must choose a scripting language, pick something that's more versatile than PHP. Something that can at least do command line.

This is the point I was waiting for. Her complaint should be discredited on the basis that she was transmitting her employer's non-disclosure and security information over an unsecured network. As you all know, credit card numbers would only be collected by google if they were transmitted insecurely. If I'm getting what happened right, the information wouldn't be stored as specifically named data, but as a line of seemingly random characters stored in a column or two.

from article. You should read the whole thing before posting.

No. He's saying open *standards* is different than open *source*. You can still follow standards and code in open source languages and have that code be closed.
You do know *why* Apple's source is closed right?

SF is *full* of scientist authors or authors who grok tech: Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Isaac Asimov, Aurthur C Clark, Peter F Hamilton, Neal Stephenson, Alistair Reynolds, Jules Verne.

And how can we say grok with even mentioning Heinlein?!
I thought you people were nerds.
Elizabeth feels like a stranger....

The other posts from military people didn't irritate me. I found them insightful. Yours with your silly little games comment irritated me. I think it's because you assume that people who haven't been in the military can't be embattled. You don't know the kind of life I had. You don't know why it is that I sometimes prefer the world of fantasy over real life. You don't know weather or not EVE players are from Afghanistan themselves trying to get away from their embattled lives. Any game, book, tv show, magazine, conversation about the weather is a kind of escape from the day to day. Weather your day to day is 9-5, war, or a family filled with alcoholics and nutjobs. Humans need to find enjoyment or happiness where they can or how they can.
You should find some too.
Elizabeth
PS Most people can't handle the shit I've seen, and I've never been in the military.