Frankly, that sounds like a bullshit policy, and certainly doesn't apply to all universities. Students are paying for access to the resources of the university and shouldn't be giving up IP. UMich has a much more reasonable policy here: http://www.techtransfer.umich.edu/resources/policies.php
........
The University will not generally claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students. (A “student” is a person enrolled in University courses for credit except when that person is an Employee.) However, the University does claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students in their capacity as Employees. Such students shall be considered to be Employees for the purposes of this Policy. Students and others may, if agreeable to the student and OTT, assign their Intellectual Property rights to the University in consideration for being treated as an Employee Inventor under this Policy.
If you're uninsured you get price gouged. A simple trip to the doctor with some basic tests can be a months rent. I have catastrophic health insurance; $5k deductible 20% copay to $50k. It won't pay for anything, but it will give me insurance group rates. Where is this magical free basic healthcare? Does not exist. Medicaid is only free if you've already become bankrupt.
Of course, Xanadu is (or would be) a digital remake of Vannevar Bush's memex: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
Frankly, I'm not sure Ted Nelson has added much to the original concept with Xanadu.
You can download Xanadu(R) Space(TM), a user interface demo, from here: http://xanarama.net/ Windows only, but I got it to work in WINE. Ted Nelson really likes his trademarks, probably because it's as tangible as Xanadu has become after 40 years.
Long term, higher education is screwed. There's no real way to improve the efficiency of 1prof:10-100 students. Most attempts just result in an inferior product. Increasing productivity in all other areas means that professor and the resulting education gets more and more expensive (everything else gets cheaper in comparison).
If you're interested in how the pros do it, about 5 years ago I temped at a bulk mailer--mostly medicare checks to doctors--using pitney bowes(IIRC) equipment. The machine I was running was organized in an L shape 20'x20'. One side would strip the letter off the continuous paper stack, collate it, fold it, and seal it in an envelope. The second side would stamp it and stack it in postal bins. A bad day I would do about 20,000 but if I had everything calibrated and the guy on the shift before didn't muck things up too bad I could get close to 50000 in an 8 hour shift. The system I was using rather old and temperamental, so I wouldn't be surprised if modern equipment is an order of magnitude faster.
Once the machine was running I didn't have to do much besides put envelopes in the hopper, but the noise, paper cuts, and opportunity to lose a finger while clearing a jam made it a horrible job.
The autocorrect is maddening. I've been researching Riak recently. It's new so there isn't a lot available. Paired with another search term I frequently get results only for "risk." Let me know if I might have made a typo, but don't assume I'm an idiot and do something different than what I told you to do.
Dropping keywords also annoys me. If the keywords don't exist then tell me that so I can adjust my search. Don't give me a long list of results that I have to click through before realizing you screwed up the search.
The only reason the google search bar is still my default is because I use it as a quick and easy calculator.
He is not your employee, he is your son. If he doesn't want to play football, he shouldn't play football. It is not the obligation of our children to make us proud. Frankly, this is just fraked up.
It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, written for academics. I suspect most faculty, Harvard faculty included, do not wish to be intellectual caddies for the rich kids at the country club.
Kids have always needed instruction on how to play. "be nice!" "share!" "don't hit!" I find it encouraging that we're finding ways to impart these lessons in less coercive ways.
Wyoming has oil, which probably pushes out investment in other industries (why invest in a startup when you can invest in an oil well?). It may have a localized version of the Dutch disease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
god I hate PR flacks. "As the [pr] plan was constructed, Johnson & Johnson's top management put customer safety first, before they worried about their companies profit and other financial concerns." Do it for PR, not because its the right thing to do!
Why do some of the ads get run more often than others? Seems like google would run the one with the highest click through rate more often. I'm not convinced all of these are statistically significant anyway, but I don't have R at the moment.
Both of these posts, Atwood's and Braude's, are complete messes.
Braude tries to compare the development of entire desktop applications with the UI development/document presentation of web applications.
Web UI development should be compared to UI development on the desktop. I wish I could use Swing/GTK/Qt for my web UIs, or write my blog with Word, but instead we have to use HTML and DOM scripting. The web is a crappy UI framework with an excellent distribution method. The internal differences of desktop applications and web applications are typically a matter of scale.
"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Dear god, no! The browser is not the web. The future is not photoshop in a browser, it's a photoshop UI (hopefully developed with a rational desktop GUI framework) with a network connection (HTTP?) to a processing server. Of course, that's not particularly new, it's X11.
There are multiple Univ. of Maryland campuses, so it is quite possible he really does have an MIS. Even still his resume is a bit light.
But he's a political appointee. None of them are appointed for their expertise. The head of the EPA was the chief of staff for the New Jersey governor. Appointments are made for political reasons, and not much else. The mark of a good appointment is someone who doesn't get in the way of their career staff.
Maybe they should get rid of the adless login/register interstitial first (read: stop bouncing readers before they serve an ad). I don't know if they can make it with just ads, but with the way they're doing it they are doomed to failure. A while back there was a post about how plentyoffish had ads on nytimes.com. So plentyoffish is stickier/has higher cpms than nytimes? Pathetic. A lot of their articles they don't even provide a comments section (easy page view doubler). Their UI looks like it was designed by a 19th century type-setter. I know they're trying not to stray from the brand, but the brand is good writing, not ancient design.
Global Gaming Factory X doesn't appear to be a real company. It seems to just be some legal maneuvering by TPB crew. The punks fight dirty. I approve. This is the real news. "TorrentFreak was informed by TPB’s Peter Sunde that the site will soon decentralize and quit running a properietary BitTorrent tracker, instead encouraging its user base to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents."
........
The University will not generally claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students. (A “student” is a person enrolled in University courses for credit except when that person is an Employee.) However, the University does claim ownership of Intellectual Property created by students in their capacity as Employees. Such students shall be considered to be Employees for the purposes of this Policy. Students and others may, if agreeable to the student and OTT, assign their Intellectual Property rights to the University in consideration for being treated as an Employee Inventor under this Policy.
........