betajames

There’s also the problem of bit rot. As floppies, CDs, and cartridges age, holes show up in their data. But getting the games onto stable media is only half the battle. You still need to find devices that can access them. Even big firms are nervous about sharing codes and production details of complex games, which can involve scores of patents. Moreover, games for different consoles were sometimes written in different programming languages; how do you make them universally accessible?

Cutting and pasting shouldn’t be considered writing. And though “mixing” has a nice ring to it—what about blending? Or melding?—it doesn’t hide the dirty reality that someone is getting robbed.

Pla­gia­rism really only makes sense in a schol­arly or jour­nal­is­tic con­text. It’s a mis­take in the han­dling of sources, and can be mali­cious or non­ma­li­cious, and can com­pletely dam­age a work or be rel­a­tively inci­den­tal to it

The plagiarist attempts, as Clark puts it, "to soften the charge against them by misdirecting your attention and by muddying the core issues." These evasions allow the plagiarist to displace the key question of whether his copy was adequately sourced with the more delectable conversation about the plagiarist's mental state, his sloppy work practices, the unintended effects of modern technology, and the "meaning" of originality.

Now and again the busted plagiarist will claim "complete responsibility" for his act—but what that really means is that he wants everybody to leave him alone.

People who had replied to both surveys and had become fans ended up being DG’s best customers: Though they spent about the same amount of money per visit, they increased their store visits per month after becoming Facebook fans and generated more positive word of mouth than nonfans.

Moving around in Second Life can be so clunky that some professors and students have decided that it's just not worth the hassle. I regularly get stuck between pieces of virtual furniture, wander around aimlessly looking for the person I'm trying to meet up with, or lose patience as I wait for my online avatar to walk between virtual classrooms. If all you need to do is chat with far-flung students, there are many easier ways to do it.

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

In this conception of computing, the input and the output occupy the same space — unlike a conventional computer, in which the mouse and computer keyboard are separate from the screen, where the changes appear. Even the Nintendo Wii game console, which responds to gesture and motions, often projects that motion onto an on-screen figure.

Mr. Underkoffler said this gesture technology was already being used in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities, and he predicted that it would soon be available for consumers. “I think in five years’ time, when you buy a computer, you’ll get this,” he said.

But now everything he says must be written, either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing — it's like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone. It's not the food or the drink he worries about anymore — I went thru a period when I obsessed about root beer + Steak + Shake malts, he writes on a blue Post-it note — but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left. In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks. Here idle chatter doesn't exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning.

Wieseltier's beef is literally with a suite of communications technologies, and the fact that the people who use them are young and unschooled by his lights. "Leave aside the question of the relation of blogging to writing, of posting to publishing," he writes at one point, appearing to take seriously the idea the blogging and writing are different things, or that publication only occurs by virtue of some mystical alchemy of ink and paper. The only difference between the Wieseltier-approved forms of communication and the lowly digital variants are cultural. "Blogging" is done quickly by brats, "writing" is done in garrets or university libraries by people Wieseltier has heard of. "Posting" is a vulgar and lonely thing done by means of a button, "publishing" is a grand process paid for by publications Wieseltier reads. The former is a seedy affair to which virtually anyone has access; the latter is a privilege granted to those who've navigated a decades-old professional maze to Wieseltier's satisfaction.

Universities, as most people know, are hierarchies -- caste systems based in part on whether you've attained the dire-sounding "terminal degree" in your field -- usually the Ph.D. It takes eight or ten years beyond high school for most people to get a Ph.D., and at the end of it, usually they've produced the notorious dissertation that's supposed to be the biggest hurdle of academic achievement -- a book-length research or scholarly project. All this, obviously, is a major life commitment. And if and when they get a job -- no small feat these days -- they're subjected to another long series of hurdles, often mediated by geezers long past their productive years, many of whom have become embittered, pointlessly pompous and sadistic. It all seems far from the ideal many of us cherished about "higher education." It's not an easy life.