As the summer wanes, the days get shorter, and the wind starts hinting of fall, you’ll naturally ask, what’s hawt in curriculum this year? Forget sex ed and intelligent design, the latest educational brawl is copyright!

Curriculums are being shipped to thousands of schools across America to teach our children all about intellectual property—every lesson plan authored by a lobbying group or industry association. It’s even legally required now in California’s famously overfunded schools.

I’m pretty into this copyright thing, but I still try to drop by the real world on occasion, just to see how it’s going. In real life, schools are struggling with larger classes and fewer resources. Now, instead of music or art (or my favorite elective, ninjutsu), we’re going to have our overworked teachers inculcating children about one side or the other of the copyfight? Great.

Continue reading after the jump.

When can a file encapsulate more than one type of data? When it’s a metafile, wrapper, or container file. You might think of a container file as a package or envelope in which other files are housed. Zip files, which can contain documents, photos, videos, software programs, and many other types of files, are one type of container that you encounter frequently.

We’ll limit our discussion here to media container formats. A pure container file specifies how the data is stored, but it doesn’t necessarily know how it was compressed or encoded or even what is required to play back those files. This can lead to confusion when dealing with container files wrapped around media because there’s a chance that the media player you’re using is capable of opening the container but not equipped with the algorithm required to decode the files inside. Although a container can theoretically hold any type of data, most are optimized during development to wrap around particular data groups, e.g., digital audio for music; static images for digital photographs; or digital video interleaved with digital audio, plus subtitles, closed-caption information, and chapter data for movies. Container formats that support video also include the information required to synchronize the various data streams in the file during playback.

Continue reading after the jump.

My system keeps freezing. The cursor doesn’t move and Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn’t bring up Task Manager. The system won’t respond to anything. It either spontaneously reboots or I have to shut down manually. Checking the event log does not show any system errors. Is there another location for a system error log?

This system has a 1,600MHz bus-speed processor and memory. Intel does not have a single stick of compatible 1,600MHz RAM in its compatible memory list. I asked its tech support about this but have not received a response. How can a manufacturer claim to have a board with a 1,600MHz FSB yet not have compatible memory?

This build consists of an Intel DX48BT2 Extreme mobo, a QX9770 quad-core CPU, two XFX GeForce 9800 GPUs, two 2GB Corsair DDR2/1600 modules, and a Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W PSU, all running XP SP3. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Read our suggestions for Lucas after the jump.

My 6-year-old computer is extremely slow and sometimes takes 20 minutes just to start up. The other day it caught a virus, which masqueraded as a firewall and installed itself onto my computer, changing the background to a picture that said I have spyware on my computer. I tried to open my virus-scan program (AOL) but it would not open. I have tried everything I can think of. I took out my hard drive so that it could not get to my files. Now, I have to use my son’s computer for emails. He is a big gamer so it’s really hard to get in the time to use it. Should I wait for Windows 7 to come out before getting a new computer?

Read the answer to Jim's question after the jump.