Sound like science fiction? That’s because it is. People aren’t actually implanting computers into their brains just yet. But they are sharing almost everything they do on a computer with organizations across the world, often without even realizing it.

Every time a person opens up an Internet browser, that person engages in a transaction. No money changes hands; the Internet user simply trades a reasonable expectation of privacy for access to an almost unlimited supply of data. That exchange enables the Internet to progress rapidly while, at the same time, allowing people of various economic backgrounds more or less equal access to vast stores of information. Everyone has some measure of control over their privacy, and everyone also has the authority to give their privacy away. Personal privacy becomes a commodity.

Soon, the new HTML5 programming language will go even further. Theoretically, HTML5 will allow companies to enable more cookies and consumer tracking capabilities. However, the new coding will also allow users to view multimedia without plug-ins like Flash and to browse the Internet more quickly.

The recent prominence of HTML5 in the news and an investigation by the Wall Street Journal into the tracking habits of Internet companies have caused a wave of alarmist outcries concerning the erosion of Internet privacy. Fox Entertainment and NBC, along with other companies, have faced class-action lawsuits concerning Internet privacy issues in the past months.

House Energy and Commerce Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher recently announced that Internet privacy legislation will be introduced during the next session of Congress. House Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chairman Bobby Rush introduced a bill that would allow users to opt out of having their information collected on the Internet as well as allow users to sue Internet companies for breach of privacy. The bill would also prevent companies from selling consumer information to third-party advertisers.

It’s as though people have forgotten that “Internet privacy” never existed in the first place. The Internet is not free; users must pay for their information with their privacy. Advertisers fund websites in exchange for data about the people who visit those sites. If laws require sites to stop collecting that data and allow users to opt out of sharing their information, the Internet will no longer be able to depend on advertisers to exist.

If you aren’t comfortable with that transaction, turn off the computer and pay cash for a book.

With his 6-foot-3-inch, 335-pound body frame, it’s easy to see why Ohio State defensive tackle Johnathan Hankins goes by the nickname “Big Hank.”

Hankins, a native of Detroit, is six games into his freshman campaign and has already made his presence felt, recording 10 tackles and a sack. As Hankins continues to give OSU productive minutes, his role in the defensive line rotation will only increase.

“You’re going to start hearing his named called a little bit more because he’s going to get a few more reps as the year goes on,” said ESPN analyst and former OSU linebacker Chris Spielman on 97.1 WBNS’s “Sunday

Sports Brunch,” following the Indiana game.

Hankins presents a tough matchup for opposing offensive linemen, not only because of his size, but also because of his deceptive speed.

Hankins can run, OSU defensive coordinator Jim Heacock said.

Perhaps just as important as his physical skills is Hankins’ understanding of the importance of taking advantage of every opportunity he has on the field.

“You can’t take off because if you take off one play, anything can happen,” Hankins said.

Playing with intensity every play will be crucial for not only Hankins, as well as the rest of the football team, as the Buckeyes are ranked No. 1 in every major college football poll. Hankins understands OSU will play with a target on its back the rest of the season.

“It’s going to be tough,” he said. “Teams are going to be coming out fighting, ready to knock us off, but we have to hold our ground.”

Here lies another woefully tragic case of rugged boy meets plaid-skirted girl meets the baby that will bring them all together.

The synopsis of this movie sounds more like a pitch for a dated sitcom: Holly “Control Freak” Berenson (Katherine Heigl) and Eric “Manchild” Messer (Josh Duhamel) are two bickering friends-of-friends who, after a disastrous blind date, vow to disdain each other for all of eternity. But after a horrendous car accident leaves the couple best-friendless and little Sophie “She’s-Your-Child-Now” Novak orphaned, hijinks ensue.

You can already see where this is going, can’t you?

For some reason unbeknownst to logic or sense, the deceased parents decide it’s best to leave adorable baby Sophie in the care of her godparents: two incompatible sworn enemies.

Okay, okay … so it turns out to be a miraculous coming together of Holly and Messer, a cornucopia of beauty, family and lessons learned…but therein lies the rub. Holly and Messer never actually hated each other.

Holly is a bakery manager and caterer, ever distracted with her job and her nonexistent love life. Heigl, slipping comfortably back into safe and easy territory, offers little to no difference in this role as she does in “Knocked Up,” “27 Dresses” or “The Ugly Truth”. Again she plunges headfirst into a pretty-but-not-too-pretty, intelligent, stylish, relatable-but-not, semi-successful firecracker.

Messer, on the other hand, is a fun-loving playboy who, when not taking reckless rides on his Harley, enjoys a flourishing career as a TV sports technical director. He’s coarse, childish and sexist, but this is all forgivable due to his good looks and sensitive side.

Do you see what the writers did there?

The “total opposites” and “odd couple” gag is a tired one, and if not done just right, should not be done at all. Holly and Messer’s relationship takes a stab at satisfyingly frustrating love-hate tension, but without witticism or bite.

The pair never once believably loathe each other. From the beginning the audience is left to count down the minutes before the protagonists finally lock lips. Their “blossoming” love is not only already there but obviously so.

Heigl and Duhamel have the petulant chemistry of two lovestruck teenagers, but lack the mystery required for a proper romantic comedy. Their silliness is admittedly entertaining but does little to convince the viewer of a tangible clash between them.

It’s safe to say that the best actor in this movie was baby Sophie. She brings truth and ingenuity to this cliché tale by just being her sweet self, and the expressions she delivers are worth the ticket price. Because let’s face it: Sophie is the glue that keeps this film from falling to bits, just as she holds fast to Holly and Messer.

To counter such sentiments, the film is underwhelming and ridiculous. On the whole, “Life As We Know It” isn’t too bad for a two-hour-long romantic comedy based solely on a will-they-won’t-they (of-course-they-will) romance.

Grade: C

It was a strange weekend in Oregon football, leaving some Oregon fans in a quandary.

The Ducks left Pullman with a 20-point victory over a Washington State team that many expected to roll over at the sight of the nation’s most prolific offense. The Cougars have been notoriously outmatched in the Pac-10 Conference in recent history, but their showing on Saturday gave Oregon fans something to mull over heading into a much-appreciated bye week.

The first concern on everyone’s mind has been the state of sophomore running back Kenjon Barner. The scary scene with Barner’s teammates, coaches and family members down on the field left many hoping for the best, but anticipating the worst, as Barner lay motionless on the turf at Martin Stadium.

Barner was released from the Pullman Regional Hospital with a concussion on Sunday, though his status for the remainder of the season is still unclear. This brings into question the possible redshirt removal of true freshmen running backs Dontae Williams and Lache Seastrunk.

Oregon coach Chip Kelly told reporters Sunday that the coaching staff had yet to discuss that scenario, but a move will likely be made before next Thursday’s matchup with UCLA if Barner is unable to return.

In addition to Barner’s concussion, issues surrounding sophomore quarterback Darron Thomas’ shoulder are still in question. Though Thomas mentioned he could have finished up the Washington State game, if necessary, the extent of his shoulder pain is still a mystery.

A slew of other injuries that sidelined many key Oregon players will be cleared up following the Ducks’ first open practice of the bye week on Saturday, Oct. 16.

Duck fans had other reasons to celebrate the arrival of the midway point this season, even with the bitter taste left after Oregon’s 43-23 win. Oregon enters a welcomed 12-day break from game play as the second-ranked team in the nation behind top-ranked Ohio State.

“It’s a long season,” Kelly told the Register-Guard on Sunday. “As you learn from Alabama, it means nothing if you go out and lose.”

“What we can control is how well we prepare for our next opponent … The task at hand is UCLA,” he said.

For the fifth straight week, Oregon finds itself in the top five in at least one major poll, coming in at No. 2 in both the AP and USA Today top-25 polls this week. Oregon received 15 first-place votes in the AP poll and six in the USA Today standings. The Ducks have never been ranked first, coming closest when they finished second in the final regular-season poll in 2001. They also ascended to No. 2 after defeating back-to-back top-10 teams in USC and Arizona State back in 2007.

Also in the national rankings, Oregon sits first in scoring (54.3 points) and total offense (567.0 yards) per game, while sophomore LaMichael James is the nation’s leading rusher with 169.6 yards per outing.

James is second in total rushing yards to Michigan’s Denard Robinson, whose tallied 991 yards and nine touchdowns to James’ 848 yards and nine scores.

Also in the top five nationally for that category are Nevada’s Vai Taua (837 yards, 11 scores) Connecticut’s Jordan Todman (761 yards, eight scores) and Nebraska’s Taylor Martinez (737 yards, 12 scores).

James, who recorded at least 25 carries for the third straight game on Saturday, will use the bye week the same way most of his Oregon teammates will – recovering. James nursed a toe injury that caused him noticeable discomfort against the Cougars, along with several other Duck players that left the game banged up.

Starting cornerback Anthony Gildon (knee), tight end Brandon Williams (hand), quarterback Daryle Hawkins (knee) and offensive tackle Everett Benyard III (ankle) will all continue to work their way back to full health in the coming week.

“It’s going to be a good week for us to get healthy,” senior wide receiver Jeff Maehl told the Register-Guard.

The team spent Monday watching film and dedicated some time in the weight room, then will practice in full pads Tuesday and Wednesday, and have a day off on Thursday, before returning to meetings and film sessions on Friday. The normal practice preparations for the Oct. 21 meeting with UCLA will begin on Saturday.

It was already bad enough.

There were ill-timed penalties, missed tackles and even a blocked field goal for good measure.

Perhaps worst of all for the Wolverines, the one player they had come to rely on didn’t have a tremendous game against Michigan State. In fact, sophomore sensation Denard Robinson was mediocre by his own standards. The early Heisman frontrunner looked human.

We don’t need to dwell on Robinson’s stats from last week or last month. We know what we saw — an incredible athlete blessed with faster-than-everyone-on-the-field speed and improved passing ability.

He was on pace to shatter college football records, re-define the position of quarterback and beg the question: Pat White who?

Robinson’s early critics cried out about his fragility. Could he carry the ball 20-plus times per outing and survive the 12-game regular season? Through a few big hits and five games, the answer was yes.

The critics changed tactics — they argued that Robinson hadn’t faced a good defense yet. Michigan State would be his first test.

I’m no professor, but I don’t think I’d give him an A+.

Yes, he accounted for 301 yards (215 passing, 86 rushing) and ran for a touchdown. That’s a pretty good day for any quarterback, especially when you consider he didn’t break any big runs.

But Robinson also threw three interceptions (after throwing just one through the first five games), two of which were in Michigan State’s endzone. That’s 14 points right there, not to mention a blow to Robinson’s confidence.

“It’s frustrating to see him struggle because I know he was trying so hard,” offensive coordinator Calvin Magee said.

After the game, Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez reminded the media of Robinson’s youth. Saturday’s game was only his sixth start, and that explains some of the missed reads. Robinson said he was too excited at times, particularly when he overthrew Darryl Stonum in the endzone early in the game.

If there was one thing to take away from the coaching staff and players in the postgame press conferences and interviews, it’s this: Nobody is concerned about Robinson. His coaches think he’ll learn from his missed reads, and his teammates think he’ll grow from his struggles.

Robinson addressed his teammates in the locker room after the game, according to slot receiver Kelvin Grady.

“He told the guys he doesn’t like this feeling. He doesn’t ever want to feel this way again,” Grady said. “I really liked that. It showed a lot about him. I think he’s really growing as a quarterback and as a person.”

Grady refused to call Robinson’s performance a “letdown” and challenged fans who expect record-breaking numbers from their quarterback every weekend.

“This doesn’t take away from anything he’s done,” Grady said. “He’s doing well, and he did fine. He had a couple of mistakes but it happens. It’s football.”

But there’s still a problem when you’ve got an offense that relies so heavily on one player, particularly with a shaky defense. That one player must play great every week because even good isn’t good enough to carry the team on his shoulders.

When Robinson accounted for 94 percent of the Wolverines’ offense against Notre Dame a month ago, it was astonishing — almost laughable. But nobody’s laughing now. Michigan learned in an all-too-painful way that it can’t have a one-player team with no backup plan. Upcoming opponents will watch the tape of Saturday’s game, and they will mimic Michigan State’s defensive strategies.

“I’m not the only weapon on offense,” Robinson said.

There’s a difference between a handgun and a butter knife, though, and Michigan needs to have some more weapons in between.

Walking away from college debt free may seem like a dream for some, but for one senior – and new book author – it won’t be.

Zac Bissonnette, author of “Debt-Free U: How I paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching Off My Parents” explained how debt is detrimental to students. According to his book, there are other answers for the overwhelming cost of college outside the bonds of student loans.

With warrant, readers could  ask how a 21-year-old U. Massachusetts senior, studying art history, knows anything about the academic financial sector. But Bissonnette has done his research.

In interviews, he weighed the pros and cons of attending expensive, prestigious universities to that of less-expensive, state-run schools during high school. He found the school name on the diploma didn’t mean nearly as much as the individual’s work ethic, he wrote.

His work ethic and his compilation of statistics on debt led the way for Bissonnette to become a financial blogger for AOL during his senior year of high school. Because of his research, CNN, NBC and Fox have interviewed him  about the economy’s influence on college students and recent graduates, and financial gurus like Suze Orman have endorsed him.

The research presented in his book, primarily collected while still in high school, cracks down on how loans hinder more than help. In moments of financial crisis, student loans cannot be discharged if a person declares bankruptcy, unlike credit card debt.

He wrote debt at any point creates risk, and many of his statistics conclude that assuming someone can pay it later barricades his or her career and life goals.

“I think there’s a problem in thinking that college has to be the best four years of your life,” Bissonnette said in an interview with Adam Daniels, a journalism student at U. Minnesota. “Well, if the best four years of your life puts you in so much debt that you can’t pursue the career that you want, you can’t have a family, you can’t buy a house, then that’s the worst four years of your life.”

Jared Mar, a U. Nebraska-Lincoln student, has similar feelings about student debt. Mar is a freshman Spanish major in the Marine Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

“You should not go into debt for your undergrad,” Mar said. “You should try to counteract it with all other possibilities like scholarships, working or something like the ROTC.”

Mar said he worked all summer to make sure his 18-credit-hour school year would be less financially stressful.

One of Bissonnette’s resolutions to avoid loans is making monthly payments for his student bill. Most state-owned universities, UNL included, allow parents and students to pay monthly installments. This lightens the smothering per-semester cost and allows for monetary flexibility.

At UNL, these monthly payment plans are under-used, said Craig Munier, director of the Office for Scholarships and Financial Aid.

About 62 percent of students who graduated last May had used at least one school loan throughout their education.

The average amount of the debt among these undergraduates was $18,208.

Munier said he worries about the consequences of entirely avoiding debt.

“Working to excess may keep debt down; however, it can also be a detriment to realizing the full benefit of going to college,” he said. “Working, especially off-campus, can be a significant distraction to having the full college experience. So, while you may graduate with less debt, you may also cheat yourself out of many of the reasons why we go to college in the first place.”

Munier also expressed concerns about lower-income families avoiding debt and that it might lead students to dropping out of school entirely.

However, Bissonnette argued in his book that this is the time to build a foundation, and preventing debt gives a greater chance in the playing field of life.

The book’s conversational text guides readers through a web of well-documented statistics that shed light on his views.

While Bissonnette wants to enlighten, he doesn’t use a pair of pliers to crank his audiences’ mouths open and force his ideas down their throats; in fact he promotes the opposite:

“I’m a 21-year-old student at a large public university. You’d have to be out of your mind to take my word for anything! But what you should do is look at the data and draw your own conclusions,” he wrote.

For a topic that seems sticky and complicated, Bissonnette makes it very palatable. Having the vantage point of a fellow college student who will graduate without any debt added gravity to his perspective.

Bissonnette’s book encourages students to remain in college debt-free so they can have the careers they want without creditors knocking on the door 10 to 20 years after graduation.

Five months ago, Lincoln voters approved a $344 million bond that kick-started a three-year plan to build a downtown arena. On Friday, Nebraska’s Athletic Department declared it’s far from finished with upgrading its facilities.

NU Athletic Director Tom Osborne announced plans to add 5,000 more seats to Memorial Stadium, an ambitious project that would cost $55.5 million and, more importantly, help Nebraska compete with its new big-budget, big-stadium foes in the Big Ten Conference.

Osborne also unveiled a $4.75 million project that would give Nebraska’s baseball and softball teams a new practice facility, and he admitted a $20 million project to renovate the Bob Devaney Sports Center and make it the new home of Husker volleyball is in the works.

The University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents will be asked to approve those first two projects during their meeting on Friday in Omaha. Osborne said the board likely would receive a formal proposal on the Devaney plan in December.

The Memorial Stadium project would be built behind and over the East Stadium balcony and would be completed for the 2013 season. The baseball facility would be located at Haymarket Park and would include batting cages, pitching mounds and a full-turf infield for practice.

Osborne is well aware of how the $80.25 million in proposed spending on facility upgrades might come off to some. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln must make serious budget cuts for the eighth time in 11 years, and the state’s legislature is facing a revenue shortfall of more than $600 million.

“I can see people saying, ‘How can you do this?'” Osborne said. “The reason we’re doing it is we think, as we move into the Big Ten, we need to be competitive.”

Nebraska’s athletic department won’t use any state dollars or student fees to fund the projects, and Osborne said it has built up a reserve of funding in recent years that will allow NU to pay “for at least half of all of these projects” with money it has saved up.

More than $40 million of the money for the Memorial Stadium work will come from private donations, and the remaining $15 million will come from bond revenues. All of the funding for the proposed 22,000-square-foot indoor baseball facility would come from the athletic department.

That the project won’t use state money is a key reason why Regent Tim Clare said he’ll defend the proposal at Friday’s meeting.

“I was skeptical as to the timing,” Clare said. “But at the end of the day, after considering all the benfits of what it would do and considering what the athletic department gives back to the university itself, I think it’s something that’s very worthwhile.”

Memorial Stadium’s official capacity is 81,067, but its average attendance this year through three games is 85,620.

That 5.6 percent average overcapacity this season is second-best in the nation among big-stadium schools behind defending national champion Alabama.

The proposed Memorial Stadium expansion plan calls for between 2,000 and 2,500 new club seats, 30 skyboxes and up to 2,800 general seats, all located on the eastern portion of the stadium. The stadium was last expanded in 2006, a renovation that focused primarily on the North Stadium.

As much as the program would profit off more seating, such an expansion would also give more Husker fans a chance at landing the season tickets they’ve long coveted.

“We’ve had waiting lists of about 3,000 people who want season tickets if they ever became available,” Paul Meyers, NU associated athletic director for development, said in June.

But there is some risk in building onto a stadium that was already revamped only five years ago.

The biggest concern with expanding is the risk of ending Nebraska’s record-setting sellout streak.

Since 1962 and through 307 games so far, every seat in the stadium has been sold.

“It doesn’t make much difference if you have 110,000 seats if 20,000 of them are empty,” Osborne said.

Reaching the 90,000-person plateau would put NU in the top 10 nationally in home attendance, but Big Ten schools Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State each have stadiums that hold more than 100,000 fans. In fact, Michigan just completed a $226 million project that increased its stadium capacity to an NCAA-best 109,901.

And those three powerhouses have far more than that – they each also tout annual athletic department budgets of more than $100 million.

Nebraska’s is approximately $75 million this year, and Osborne said the $7 million in new annual revenue that the East Stadium seats would offer can help close that gap.

“I really don’t particularly subscribe to the theory that you’ve got to keep up with the Joneses all the time,” Osborne said, “but you better at least be in their league.”

“As we start competing with some of those schools in the Big Ten, (the new revenue) won’t necessarily get us all the way there, but it’ll certainly move us in that direction.”