At first I thought this was about Google image search and artists having problems with that but I don't really understand why this is newsworthy. Google called asked and got turned down, seems perfectly reasonable and unobtrusive to me. Now I'm not an artist but if Google called me and asked to feature something I've coded I'd be absolutely thrilled if I was (well I am) an unknown struggling coder.
What you are saying for about kids working is definitely not true for my part of Europe. I've had plenty of friends from rich families growing up and if anything they tend to be more likely to get a summer job and I can't in the slightest imagine anyone getting embarrassed over their children having a blue collar summer job.
Just because you are rich it doesn't mean you get everything you point at and even still it's quite satisfying for any young person to know hes earned something.
I on the other hand come from the lower classes, pretty much as low as it gets in Sweden and I've never felt the need to have a summer job because of income.
My observation is that richer kids do find jobs more easily because they and their parents usually have plenty of connections. They usually do this so they would have more money to party :-).
Also regulation in many places in Europe effectively limits teenage employment - until I turned 18 I had to either get something like 9 documents or work for money paid under the table for someone I knew before.
Please remember that Europe is far from homogeneous, so observations may vary wildly. :-)
I'm surprised by the operating systems graph, I didn't think Mac OS would have gone up that much and I especially thought "Other" would be much higher or at least increasing by any amount.
I wonder how that relates to what type of school University of Virginia is as I know nothing about it. It would be interesting to see how that compares to Stanford, MIT and the like.
As a student who is in that dataset, I think it makes sense. Basically, UVa is a pretty preppy school and Macs are really trendy right now. From my friends and what I see on grounds, I'm surprised that the Mac ownership is not numerically higher. We also focus on the liberal arts, which helps Mac. Linux is a real pain to get to work on the network. The decline in "other" is probably in a large part the result of Mac OS providing a very decent Unix/programming environment. I do see CS professors pretty split between Mac and Linux.
I'd imagine that schools that are more engineering focused schools would probably use more Linux, but I would not be surprised if Mac has converted a lot of them as well.
For the record, I had three computers windows, linux, and mac for most of last year, and I was one of the 8 "others" on that chart.
I think you're remiss in not mentioning that UVA has very strong science and engineering programs.
(This is a bit surreal, as I did my undergrad at Virginia Tech, my Master's at W&M, and now my PhD back at Tech. I've never cared for the rivalries, but I didn't think I'd ever feel compelled to defend UVA to one of its own students.)
Silverlight or not I think most of will live without all the secret knowledge contained in those videos unless we want to fork out a $600 tuition fee to see more than three of them according to: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/05/20/stanford-videos-...
It's not like you've got six democratic or republican parties in government in a giant pit fighting each other it's more like you've got two blocks with an internal cease fire that yell at the other group and occasionally slip and complain about a block partys politics.
Are you kidding, how many ministers did the current government go through in the first couple of weeks in power because of scandals? I know I lost count.
Then there's the whole case with the tsunami tapes going missing.
The case with bodströms possibly advocating direct control of the police to raid TPBs hosting company.
I remember a whole array of ministers getting kicked out head first because of various visits to strip clubs in the 90's.
Then you've got Mona Sahlin cheating on her taxes as well as a wide array of scandals with Gudrun Schyman and alcohol.
That's just the things I can remember on the top of my head and I have just about barely payed attention to local news for the last couple of years until recently.
I think that we might be less sensationalist and have a shorter memory but we do have plenty of scandals. You have to realize though that we are only made up of 9 million people, their scandals should be both greater size and of greater numbers.
As for the two opinions thing, Americans are much more extrovert than Sweeds are. They like to yell at things, it's their thing. We like to sit and whine about things, that's our thing. I do think however that our politicians don't blatantly lie as much, our minister of finance isn't standing there telling us everything is great when it's obvious we hurting and going down deeper.
Now I happened to find Swedish media pretty boring, but that's another thing entirely.
You have a point about individual ministers' personal lives. :-)
The press do seem to have different standards for different politicians.
(I didn't follow the dance around foreign minister Bildt, but remember a journalist complaining that it was a democracy problem that Bildt had his own blog so he could get his own version out...)
That is hardly the same as leaking embarrassing internal papers (which have showed up quite often in Washington Post/NY Times).
Leaking of papers did happen with the Muslim Brotherhood guys that were sent back (and tortured) in Egypt. But how many more times?
The press has for decades gotten direct subsidies from the state here -- and I've seen notes that acknowledge influences, but note exactly how much...
As a student that uses Google scholar quite often "almost everyone" is a lot lower than you think it is. At least in computer science and related fields, I have to use my schools access to journals almost every time.
That's odd. I'm a computer scientist who uses Google scholar quite often, and I can't remember when I last needed to read a paper which Google couldn't find for me.
Maybe the situation is different in my fields (algorithms and cryptography) than in yours?
I can imagine a non-lethal version of that could be pitched to prisons in the future assuming it could be made to be reliable. No need for giant walls and several layers of perimeter when you have a virtual walls to keep the inmates from escaping.
I'd imagine implanted chips are more easily removed then it is to get out of a walled prison. Prisoners have devised clever ways to hide and remove things from their body in the past.
Prisons beta-test surveillance/confinement/contraband policies for airports. Airports beta-test for schools. Schools beta-test for everywhere, in the next generation.
