“The House bill is dead on arrival in the Senate,”

The bill is estimated to be formally brought to the Senate as late as January 2010.

Pc Pro writes:

…but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own.

Just goes to show, you can’t destroy an ant hill by killing a few ants here and there.

The sense of wonder I feel about Oregon and its flagship university is as potent now as on my first day — the character of the people, the quality of the institution, the geography, the colors, the perfect temperatures and the fun peculiarities of this community. Only a great place can claim Wayne Morse and Bill Bowerman among its heroes, have a statue of Ken Kesey in its civic square and crown a Slug Queen each year. Eugene exudes innovation, originality and extraordinary excellence.

Do you see what he did there? Lariviere invoked all of Eugene’s major cultural touchstones: old hippies, track and field and endemic celebrations of our own counter-culture. Well played, sir.

In the rest of the guest commentary, Lariviere touts the University, its faculty and its mad research skills:

In 2008-09 fiscal year, our sponsored research programs brought in more than $100 million in grants and contracts, much of it directly related to research discoveries and commercial applications. External funding has consistently increased for the past decade. The University of Oregon is now among the top universities in the United States in terms of its return on research through licensing of technologies.

Beyond a passion for teaching and research that is second to none, there is a drive for innovation, collaboration and interdisciplinary exploration that I have not experienced on any other campus. A new academic plan, called “Big Ideas,” brings faculty and students together in new ways to answer broad questions about society and our world. This is another example of how the UO is on the leading edge in higher education.

Over at UO Matters, the author is nonplussed:

[N]ice words, but we got those from Frohnmayer all the time – prestigious AAU membership, extraordinary faculty, opportunity for students – yada yada. Reads like Frohnmayer’s speechwriter wrote it. (Yup, same guy.) This is just cheap talk. Lariviere needs to make some changes very soon or we really will have a union.

That’s what the makers of Raindrop, from Mozilla Labs- makers of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird free software, aim to accomplish with their new beta software.  To take all the social sites in your life and create one aggregate feed into a browser-based website that automatically filters out the stuff you don’t want.  The idea is similar to Trillian or Pidgin for creating an aggregate of all your instant messaging protocols.  Sounds simple, right?  Or maybe just too good to be true.

It separates your spam and social networking messages from robots or applications (Farmville, for example) and other detritus from the stuff you actually want like e-mails from your mother, or status updates from your friends.  All of the other types of messages are put into special folders you can easily access from the main page should you want them!

According to their website: “Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser (Firefox, Safari or Chrome).”  Their slogan is “Open messaging for an Open web”.

We’ll see what develops and how far they take this new technology.  I, for one, would love not having to visit five sites just to keep up with all that’s going on…

The NYT found that four-year public colleges raised tuition by an average of 6.5 percent last year.

The Register-Guard ran a version that included numbers from the University (sorry, no link available):

At the University of Oregon, tuition rose 15 percent, climbing this year to $7,428 for a full-time resident undergraduate from $6,435 last year, not including a $150 surcharge imposed during last spring term only. With room and board, the costs exceeds $16,000 this year.

The average cost at a four-year public university is $15,213. The article ends with this rather relevant nugget (emphasis added):

“Colleges need to be looking for ways to permanently restructure, not just cut their budgets,” said Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability. “A perfect example is furloughs, in hopes that eventually the work force can come back. But this isn’t a one-time problem, and eventually they’ll have to bite the bullet and reduce their work force.”

Health Center Announcement on the Emergency Alert System:

“These individuals have received antibiotic medication as a precaution.  The University staff is working with the patient’s roommate and friends to identify others who may need the medication.  The Health Center will administer the antibiotic to other members of the campus community who may be at risk for infection

Due to the severity of the illness, the Health Center is advising that individuals who may have had this level of contact see a health care professional and receive antibiotic medication to help prevent the illness.  The treatment comes in the form of a single pill.”

For more information call the Health Center at 541-346-2770.

The .NET Framework Assistant caused quite a stir when it was introduced earlier in this year, not because it did anything grand, mind you, but because it was installed without permission and was difficult to remove: An annoyance that most computer users took as personal offense; as an invasion of their privacy because Microsoft feels safe in assuming that they can modify your end-user experience regardless of what software you choose simply because you are using the Windows operating system.

Most users were left wondering what, exactly, this program did, and just who it reported your .NET statistics to judging by the 753 comments worth of nerd rage on the original Slashdot article.

According to the bug report, the problem lies in the Windows operating system and is available to be patched manually.  A formal Windows Update through the Windows Update program is expected to follow.  The bug was discovered three days ago and as such it is not expected to be fixed anytime soon.  There is no way to re-enable either add-on at this time, despite the fact that the problem was in the OS and not the plug-in.

UO economics professor Tim Duy, who monitors the state economy very closely, said that in addition to drops in higher ed funding, state revenue forecasts for the coming year are “trending down below expectations.”

Duy said the fundamental problem is the initial forecasts were too optimistic in how fast the labor market will rebound. But even then, “very rapid growth wouldn’t fix the gap between expenditures and revenue,” he said.

Sorry to rain a little more on everyone’s parade.