I suspect that the White House's threat of a veto was an effort to boost one or another of the Senate proposals. That scares me about what is in the Senate proposals that we have not been paying attention to. I have found it hard to even identify what the Senate proposals are.
I wonder if Elsevier will use the classic "think of the corn farmers in Iowa" defense. It isn't very original, but Elsevier doesn't seem like a company that comes up with a lot of original ideas.
I am very familiar with the series and am a participating member of the Dragonmount community. I am well acquainted with the situation with Harriet and completion of the series.
If you notice my original post split the comment about estates into a separate paragraph. I meant it as a general comment, not applying to the WOT series. My apologies for not being clearer. I was typing on my phone which is not friendly to fat fingers, and I was keeping my comment brief. Apparently too brief.
Now if we could just get Tor to give up on windowing. Tor will be releasing the last book in the Wheel of Time series in print months before the ebook. In fairness to Tor, that might be due to a decision by the Jordan estate.
It seems that in a lot of cases an author's estate is a lot more copyright-crazy than the author ever was.
Most consumer and small business communications complaints could be at least partly solved with more competition.
Right now we have one cable company in our city, and the DSL service is so terrible that even people who know nothing about technology want nothing to do with it. We have a fiber company that has the city ringed with fiber funded using some rural-only funding an authority from the state. The fiber company wants to lay fiber in the city itself now, and the local cable company is fighting that at insane levels. Even the threat of competition has been good for consumers; the local cable company has not raised rates recently, and has started offering some new package plans to existing customers that are actually attractive.
A lot of right-wingers were making a big deal about the need to emulate Finnish schools until they realized that the Finnish school system ran counter to just about every principle of right wing education. Teachers are well paid with no merit pay. Private schools are rare, but even private schools follow the state curriculum. Funding is basically equal and paid mostly by the central government.
Oh, and schools don't compete in sports. They do have competitions in academics, but things like soccer and basketball are community based.
But ad-hominem arguments are about all the trolls have left to them. Most of their favorite statistics and "facts" have been shot full of so many holes that even the trolls won't use them.
If their popularity continues to grow it is likely that one of the established parties will adopt a substantial part of the Pirate Party's platform as its own. That kills off a lot of new parties, but it is still a win if the established party embraces its message.
They do a marvelous job of illustrating why they have adapted to the Internet so poorly. They appear to be even more clueless than I had thought they were.
>>as long as money is the major motivator they will never stop.
True, money does rule politics, and the MPAA right now represents a lot of money right now.
But I think there is another thing that might stop ACTA/SOPA types of anti-piracy laws. Those laws were based on the traditional content industry's assumption that piracy means lost money. There are some people in the traditional content industry that are recognizing that the fight against piracy is costing and lot, and it will pay them back very little. There are also some politicians who are explaining the realities of anti-piracy legislation to their corporate overlords. Getting the content industry to change direction is about as difficult as turning around a supertanker, but there has been at least a little bit of movement that suggests a change in direction is possible.
How dare you suggest that Jack and Jill had no social value. After all, it was the first movie in history to win all 10 categories of the Razzie awards! If not for that single film, the judges would have faced the challenge of trying to decide between several other films from major studios that would have been clear candidates for Razzie awards in years when there was no film of Jack and Jill's calibre.
With almost 30 years of faculty experience under my belt I have to say that textbook prices and policies intended to jack up textbook prices are one of my biggest irritants. It is so bad that textbook prices now rank higher than clueless administrators and the entire athletic department on my list of things that make my life difficult.
My reaction to the article is that even if the accusations against Boundless are true, what they did isn't much different than what the big four textbook companies have been doing to each other for years, especially in the core courses. When reviewing textbooks for 100 level courses it isn't uncommon to find essentially the same diagrams and figures in different texts.
>>"I knew several students that would buy english version of textbooks that are sold outside of the US, because they were so much cheaper for the exact same book."
This is a common situation. One thing that textbook publishers do to thwart the used book market (a racket in itself) is to thrash books with multiple editions. The big four typically produce new editions every year, often with laughably small changes. One book I was using went through and changed the data in all of the end-of-chapter assignments and made a few typo changes; that was it. These tactics are intended to force students to buy new instead of used books, but what really happens is that in a single class you will have students working out of multiple editions and various international, abridged, comprehensive, illustrated, and annotated copies of the books. You can no longer say "Turn to page 83" or "Do exercises 5 through 20 on page 153" because you are typically dealing with students who have several different versions of the text.
An even bigger problem is that a lot of students can't even afford to buy books in any edition. In some courses that severely limits the progress they can make in the class.
Boundless and similar efforts like http://openstaxcollege.org/ are attractive to me because they let me make sure that all of my students have textbooks and that they are using the same edition.
Wouldn't most of these patents be pretty old? If they are from the early years of Netscape they must be approaching expiration in a few years. It seems to me there would also be some laches issues with the patents.
You raise some good points, but it isn't that simple in most courses. On occasion I have skipped using a textbook and have substituted material I have prepared myself along with a bibliography of web sites and library references. But that does not work very often.
I will break the situation down into lower level and upper level courses and highlight the "no textbook" problem in each category. Please understand that these are very broad categories and that I am over simplifying both.
Lower level courses are often about specific languages or tools. These are things like Java, JavaScript, HTML, some flavor of SQL, or productivity software. There are abundant sources of online tutorials on all of these topics. Rarely is there a single, high-quality tutorial series that covers all of the topics we need to cover in a course. Most of them are task oriented and they rarely do the type of comprehensive coverage of a topic that we need to cover. You can try to stitch together several different tutorials to get a more comprehensive perspective on a topic, but every tutorial is written using different idiosyncrasies and with different assumptions about the user's background. People can get themselves productive using on-line tutorials and reference books, but it takes a lot of time and a willingness to try, fail, explore followed by more searching and experimenting. We don't have time for that in most courses.
Another problem with going textbook-free in lower level courses is that students want textbooks. Students in lower level courses don't tend to regard the teacher as an expert, and they are often intolerant of the frustrations that come from ad-hoc resources. I'm tenured and have thick enough skin to plow through regardless of student attitudes, but lower level courses are often taught by young, inexperienced faculty. They often need the security of a textbook as much as the students do.
Alternative sources for lower level courses have a couple of things going for them that encourage development. They have volume and relatively consistent content requirements. Most CS-1 Java textbooks are going to cover the same basic material, and there are a lot of people out there who can use it. You have a lot of faculty members willing to contribute things like test backs and end-of-chapter problems that are important to textbooks but a pain to prepare.
Upper level courses are often more amenable to ad-hoc resources, but they often present their own problems. Upper level courses are more likely to be on broad concepts such as Compiler Theory, Operations Research, Operating System Design, or Security. Like lower division courses, it is often very desirable to have one central source of information that has some consistency throughout the course. However, historically upper division courses frequently reference other sources. The students have more maturity and technical experience, and they are much better at dealing with different perspectives and authors's various styles.
There are some alternative upper level textbooks that are coming along nicely, but most lack comprehensiveness. My most recent experience was looking at Operating Systems textbooks. Most of the authors of the books only write chapters for content they cover in their courses. This leaves some big gaps for everyone else. There are some more comprehensive projects with contributions for multiple authors, but these are sorely lacking in cohesion. My hope for this type of textbook is that we will see some strong editors emerge who can put together a team of authors who will work toward producing unified and relatively comprehensive resources.
I am a faculty member, and I do use alternative texts whenever possible. The quality of the offerings is slowly improving, but a lot of material is still lacking. In a few years it might be possible to do an entire Computer Science program using alternative textbook sources.
What artists should be suing the labels about is all the takedowns they do. The labels use takedowns to keep artists in obscurity and keep their fans angry.
On the post: Microsoft Slowly Backing Away From CISPA Support; Worries About Privacy Issues
On the post: Even Harvard Can't Afford Subscriptions To Academic Journals; Pushes For Open Access
Re:
On the post: Tor Listens To Authors And Readers And Ditches DRM
Re: Re: Re:
If you notice my original post split the comment about estates into a separate paragraph. I meant it as a general comment, not applying to the WOT series. My apologies for not being clearer. I was typing on my phone which is not friendly to fat fingers, and I was keeping my comment brief. Apparently too brief.
On the post: Tor Listens To Authors And Readers And Ditches DRM
It seems that in a lot of cases an author's estate is a lot more copyright-crazy than the author ever was.
On the post: Hurt Locker Producers Now Understand The Copyright Troll Shakedown Better: Sue 2,514 More Defendants
Re: Re: Re:
Right now we have one cable company in our city, and the DSL service is so terrible that even people who know nothing about technology want nothing to do with it. We have a fiber company that has the city ringed with fiber funded using some rural-only funding an authority from the state. The fiber company wants to lay fiber in the city itself now, and the local cable company is fighting that at insane levels. Even the threat of competition has been good for consumers; the local cable company has not raised rates recently, and has started offering some new package plans to existing customers that are actually attractive.
On the post: French Tweeters Get Around Ban On Tweeting Election Results Using WWII-Era Codes
On the post: French Tweeters Get Around Ban On Tweeting Election Results Using WWII-Era Codes
On the post: DailyDirt: Wuzzle Means To Mix. Sculch Is Junk. Alate Means To Have Wings. A Baloo Is A Bear....
Oh, and schools don't compete in sports. They do have competitions in academics, but things like soccer and basketball are community based.
On the post: Canadian Universities Have One Week To Stop A Disastrous Copyright Licensing Deal
Yes, I know the lemmings running off cliffs is a myth, but the analogy still holds.
On the post: Another Error By US Officials May Kill Megaupload Prosecution
Re: Re:
On the post: Pirate Parties Continue To Grow In Europe As People Get Sick Of Politics As Usual
On the post: Facebook Blocking Stories About Richard O'Dwyer's Fight Against Extradition To The US
Re: Updated: Non-story - it works now.
On the post: Cargo Cult Reverse Activism: Maximalists Think That If They Use Social Media They Can Counteract Public Concerns
On the post: EU Rapporteur Deals Major Blow To ACTA: Recommends Rejection By European Parliament
Re: Re: The criminals will just find another way
True, money does rule politics, and the MPAA right now represents a lot of money right now.
But I think there is another thing that might stop ACTA/SOPA types of anti-piracy laws. Those laws were based on the traditional content industry's assumption that piracy means lost money. There are some people in the traditional content industry that are recognizing that the fight against piracy is costing and lot, and it will pay them back very little. There are also some politicians who are explaining the realities of anti-piracy legislation to their corporate overlords. Getting the content industry to change direction is about as difficult as turning around a supertanker, but there has been at least a little bit of movement that suggests a change in direction is possible.
On the post: Paramount's Post-SOPA 'Outreach' To Law Students About 'Content Theft' Still Shows An Out Of Touch Operation
Reference: http://www.razzies.com/history/12winners.asp
On the post: Open Textbook Startup Sued For Allegedly Copying 'Distinctive Selection, Arrangement, and Presentation' Of Facts From Existing Titles
My reaction to the article is that even if the accusations against Boundless are true, what they did isn't much different than what the big four textbook companies have been doing to each other for years, especially in the core courses. When reviewing textbooks for 100 level courses it isn't uncommon to find essentially the same diagrams and figures in different texts.
>>"I knew several students that would buy english version of textbooks that are sold outside of the US, because they were so much cheaper for the exact same book."
This is a common situation. One thing that textbook publishers do to thwart the used book market (a racket in itself) is to thrash books with multiple editions. The big four typically produce new editions every year, often with laughably small changes. One book I was using went through and changed the data in all of the end-of-chapter assignments and made a few typo changes; that was it. These tactics are intended to force students to buy new instead of used books, but what really happens is that in a single class you will have students working out of multiple editions and various international, abridged, comprehensive, illustrated, and annotated copies of the books. You can no longer say "Turn to page 83" or "Do exercises 5 through 20 on page 153" because you are typically dealing with students who have several different versions of the text.
An even bigger problem is that a lot of students can't even afford to buy books in any edition. In some courses that severely limits the progress they can make in the class.
Boundless and similar efforts like http://openstaxcollege.org/ are attractive to me because they let me make sure that all of my students have textbooks and that they are using the same edition.
On the post: AOL Sells Its Patents To Microsoft For $1 Billion: Microsoft Now Owns Netscape IP
On the post: The Biggest 'Pirates' And 'Freeloaders' Of Them All? College Professors And Librarians
Re: Re: Re:
You raise some good points, but it isn't that simple in most courses. On occasion I have skipped using a textbook and have substituted material I have prepared myself along with a bibliography of web sites and library references. But that does not work very often.
I will break the situation down into lower level and upper level courses and highlight the "no textbook" problem in each category. Please understand that these are very broad categories and that I am over simplifying both.
Lower level courses are often about specific languages or tools. These are things like Java, JavaScript, HTML, some flavor of SQL, or productivity software. There are abundant sources of online tutorials on all of these topics. Rarely is there a single, high-quality tutorial series that covers all of the topics we need to cover in a course. Most of them are task oriented and they rarely do the type of comprehensive coverage of a topic that we need to cover. You can try to stitch together several different tutorials to get a more comprehensive perspective on a topic, but every tutorial is written using different idiosyncrasies and with different assumptions about the user's background. People can get themselves productive using on-line tutorials and reference books, but it takes a lot of time and a willingness to try, fail, explore followed by more searching and experimenting. We don't have time for that in most courses.
Another problem with going textbook-free in lower level courses is that students want textbooks. Students in lower level courses don't tend to regard the teacher as an expert, and they are often intolerant of the frustrations that come from ad-hoc resources. I'm tenured and have thick enough skin to plow through regardless of student attitudes, but lower level courses are often taught by young, inexperienced faculty. They often need the security of a textbook as much as the students do.
Alternative sources for lower level courses have a couple of things going for them that encourage development. They have volume and relatively consistent content requirements. Most CS-1 Java textbooks are going to cover the same basic material, and there are a lot of people out there who can use it. You have a lot of faculty members willing to contribute things like test backs and end-of-chapter problems that are important to textbooks but a pain to prepare.
Upper level courses are often more amenable to ad-hoc resources, but they often present their own problems. Upper level courses are more likely to be on broad concepts such as Compiler Theory, Operations Research, Operating System Design, or Security. Like lower division courses, it is often very desirable to have one central source of information that has some consistency throughout the course. However, historically upper division courses frequently reference other sources. The students have more maturity and technical experience, and they are much better at dealing with different perspectives and authors's various styles.
There are some alternative upper level textbooks that are coming along nicely, but most lack comprehensiveness. My most recent experience was looking at Operating Systems textbooks. Most of the authors of the books only write chapters for content they cover in their courses. This leaves some big gaps for everyone else. There are some more comprehensive projects with contributions for multiple authors, but these are sorely lacking in cohesion. My hope for this type of textbook is that we will see some strong editors emerge who can put together a team of authors who will work toward producing unified and relatively comprehensive resources.
On the post: The Biggest 'Pirates' And 'Freeloaders' Of Them All? College Professors And Librarians
Re:
On the post: Weird Al Wonders Why Sony Music Never Gave Him His White & Nerdy Cut Of YouTube's Equity Payout
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