I'm working on my phd in a department related to Cultural Studies and I'm going to school because I like going to school and I want to be a professor. I can't imagine getting a phd or masters just to go do something unrelated to education. I think it would incredibly frustrating to wait up until an extra 6 years to start your real job.
As it is, I'm kind of already doing what I'm going to do for the rest of my life: teaching, writing, grading, reading. The only difference is that my reading has been in classes instead of on my own and most of my writing has been for classes not publication. However, they do encourage us to go to conferences and get published (I don't want to even try to get a job until I get something published in English (I have an article published in a language I can't even speak, so that is something, but a publication in English that potential employers could read would be better). The only thing that is really missing is stupid committee meetings.
The real question is, "Is it worth it to you?" I went into my masters not exactly sure what I was going to focus on. But I came into my phd program knowing exactly what I wanted to write my diss on and I think that helped immensely. I don't know about other disciplines but in the Humanities, you better like to read. When I got back to grad school after taking a year off between my masters and phd, for the first few months I had occasional eye spasms from reading so much. Reading around 3 theory heavy books a week in addition to grading student papers can drive you crazy. there is ALWAYS something you should be doing. Half of what you learn in grad school is how to deal with the stress of always having more to do than you have time. Like Bob Seger sang, "Deadlines and commitments. What to leave in, what to leave out."
However, I must say that for me it beats the Hell out of a 9 to 5 job with a time clock or a job where I'm expected to shave and wear a tie every day. After doing this for nearly 6 years, however, I will say that I am tired of being poor and taking out student loans. When half of my students have much newer vehicles than me, and have xbox 360s, it can be a bit frustrating.
It is very rare to pay your own way through graduate school in most programs. You either teach or grade for the lower level courses or you are a research assistant for a professor. At least in the departments I have been in and the associated departments I've known people in (humanities) if you aren't a grad assistant or research assistant and are paying your own way, people kind of assume your research sucks because as a graduate student you are much closer to the faculty and they talk about you to each other so even if you didn't initially have some funding and they liked your work they would try to find some money for you somewhere.
There's a bunch of links floating around Digg, Ars Technica, etc. for Beta 1 RCs. Please don't download these. These are internal builds we're using to test out Beta 1 before releasing it. The ones out there are already obsolete, they won't auto-update to anything in the future, and worst, this stuff isn't on the mirror network, so people are kind of DDOSing the Mozilla FTP server. Just be patient and we'll hopefully have Beta 1 out within the week.
Subscription price is a LOT in the USA. You can get it at Barnes and Noble for $8.99 which today is £4.88. A subscription from Edge is £72.00 or $132 a year. I don't care how good Edge is, I can't afford to subscribe to it. If there was a digital version that was substantially cheaper, I would subscribe without a second thought. As it is, I pick up an issue every couple of months. When you can subscribe to US gaming mags for less than $10 a year by buying the subscriptions on ebay, it is hard to justify $132.
I have no problems with these services. Honestly, they are just the modern equivelent of things that went on at local theaters for years. I distinctly remember going to see the Blues Brothers at a drive-in with my parents as a kid. Whenever they cussed, the sound was turned off. I remember people booing every time the sound cut out and asking my parents about it. They told me they cut the cussing out so it would be rated PG.
However, on a personal level, I wonder if such services are morally ambiguous. If someone objects to the language or other aspects of the film on moral gorunds, then isn't buying or renting the films rewarding them for things that person sees as morally objectionable?
Personally, I have no problem with cussing or anything. I like horror movies, but there is a famous film Cannibal Ferox where there are animals killed on screen. I refuse to see it because of that. Even if they cut those scenes out I wouldn't want to see it because I would feel like I was still putting money intheir pockets.
Is renting or buying a copy of a film with cussing or nudity cut out morally and different than watching the uncut film?
I'm not a law-talking guy, so I don't know about the legality of what they are doing. However, let's look at their justifications for doing it:
The policy, administrators say, is to improve security and stop the sale of drugs and stolen goods,
Therefore, it seems the question is, are violence and drugs a serious problem at that school? Maybe this school is different, or maybe things have changed in the last couple years, however, don't statistics show that teen drug use and school violence have both been going down? If that is the case, then their justifications are not valid and the administrators are either paranoid or lying.
It seems that, as in most cases where law is involved, looking at the validity of the justifications is easier and simpler than looking at the legality. It would take a judge to determine the legality of their actions, but anyone can look into things and see if violence and drugs are a serious problem at the school.
Proving actions of the school are illegal: expensive.
Proving school administrators are lying: priceless.
Reading doesn't equal being able to spell. My parents read to me constantly as a kid. In 4th or 5th grade we took standardized tests that said I already had 12th grade reading level. I got the highest SAT scores in my (admittedly very small) graduating class. I was an English major in college. Now I'm getting a PhD in cultural studies. I can't spell for shit. I REALLY can't spell out loud without writing it down first. Whenever we had spelling bees in grade school I was always out in the first or second round. Being able to read or even write has little or nothing to do with spelling.
Whaaaaat???? You mean that there are universities out there that are using tax payer and student money to buy services that students don't want? Next you will be saying that there are entire businesses that exist just to sell universities crap that they don't need. In the USA, universities have all the baggage that comes with being large corporations as well as being government organizations like the pentagon who would never buy a hammer off the shelf when they can buy one for $500... Take academic publishing for example. Part of the job description of may professors is that they publish articles in their field. However, in order to get published in academic journals you usually have to 1)join the crappy organization that puts out the journal and 2) subscribe to the journal. Then, 3) you have to give the journal copyright on your article. Now, in most cases, the journals will then sell access to their articles to article databases like ebsco or whatever. Then universities have to pay to subscribe to those databases. Think about that. Universities are paying people to write articles and then have to turn around and pay to get access to those very same articles. If that isn't a scam I don't know what is. (Sure the univerities are paying to get access to the work of thousands and thousands of articles that are written by people not at that university, but the fact remains they are paying twice, no matter how little, to get the articles...)
It looks like Maestro is a Mastercard brand and Visa Electron is obviously a Visa brand, so I would imagine that they would work (In the US nearly all debit cards now just have the Mastercard or Visa logo on them).
Check out this blog Bank Deals.
While a lot of the CD specials on there are for local credit unions, there are also a lot of great online bank deals. Etrade, for example, currently has 3-month CD at 4.75% and the longer-term CDs going up from there.
Wow, it must depend on where you live. Where I grew up I got called into jury duty at least 4 times in 10 years. I was out of the county for three of those times. The fourth time I had gotten the day off work to go down to the courthouse only to have them call me the day before and told me I didn't need to come in.
All the stuff that Amazon and (to the best of my knowledge) target sell is prepackaged, isn't it? So even if there are germs all over the boxes, it doesn't do anything to the actual food, does it? Even if cashiers at grocery stores use disinfectant regularly, there still isn't any guarantee a customer didn't take that food item and get flu germs or worse all over it. I'd be a lot more concerned with what other customers might have done to food than the people working there.
I have my entertainment system on two power strips that it turn off every night and it hasn't affected any of them. The two things i do leave plugged directly into the wall is my old (pre-remote) tv and the cable box since both of them take a long time to restart once the power has been off. Other than that all the rest of the stuff remembers my settings. My dvd recorder doesn't keep the time, but i never use it as a timer, so it doesn't matter to me. It may not save much electricity, but it is a habit I got into back in college when I lived in the dorms and I could hear everything humming in standby mode when I tried to go to sleep.
When I first heard about this, I also thought was that they might be fakes. However, after the first few fossils were discovered by people working in stone quarries and such, trained western archeologists started conducting their own digs in China. So unless these professional archeologists are in on the deception, I think its likely that most, if not all, of these discoveries are legit.
Whenever this argument comes up, inevitably someone will claim that in the USA films ratings are government regulated. This is not true. In the USA films are rated by the film industry just like videogames are rated by the videogame industry. This is exactly why such anti-videogame laws are not only unconstitutional, but are also nothing more than moral panics. If such laws pass, videogames would be the only medium in the USA that are regulated by law.
Simply put, the reason why they don't, "simply apply the same rules that currently apply to the distribution of R-rated movies on DVD" is that there are no rules. There a policies enforced by the industry (in this case the film industry) just like the current policies on games are enforced by the videogame industry.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat and ranking member of the subcommittee, criticized Wal-Mart for the ease with which consumers under age 17 can buy explicit games on its Web site simply by checking a box certifying they are the proper age.
"That age verification is a joke," in an era when 13-year-olds can be issued credit cards and other children have access to their parents' cards, she said.
Wow, I know that if I were under 18 and had a credit card that the first thing I would buy online would be violent videogames. Because we all know that there isn't any pornography online or anything or even places where you could buy things you could use to commit real violent acts if you wanted to. Besides videogames the internet is all rainbows and puppies...
Such statements indicate that Rep Schakowsky is either totally clueless and incompetent or just fear mongering and will say anything to look "pro-family" and not at all concerned with real problems.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat and ranking member of the subcommittee, criticized Wal-Mart for the ease with which consumers under age 17 can buy explicit games on its Web site simply by checking a box certifying they are the proper age.
"That age verification is a joke," in an era when 13-year-olds can be issued credit cards and other children have access to their parents' cards, she said.
Wow, I know that if I were under 18 and had a credit card that the first thing I would buy online would be violent videogames. Because we all know that there isn't any pornography online or anything or even places where you could buy things you could use to commit real violent acts if you wanted to. Besides videogames the internet is all rainbows and puppies...
Such statements indicate that Rep Schakowsky is either totally clueless and incompetent or just fear mongering and will say anything to look "pro-family" and not at all concerned with real problems.
Now, I've heard that changes in industry due to global warming will hurt businesses because they will have to spend so much to change things. But isn't spending money good for the economy? Seriously, what are the downsides of whoelheartedly throwing our economby behind making less polluting technologies? Seriously, I want to know. Is there really a non-cynical answer that doesn't involve the government being in the pocket of the oil companies? If anyone can explain why acting on the assumption that global warming is occuring is a bad thing, I would appreciate hearing about it.
I don't want to debate law here, but I would really like to see some evidence that Faces of Dead is regulated anywhere in the USA. I've never heard of such a thing and I've looked at several online retailers and none of them mention any sort of age restriction.
There are numerous local and state restrictions on sexual content, to teh best of my knowledge, there are none on violent content to the best of my knowledge. If someone can point to some documented evidence to non-videogame related anti-violent media legislation that is on the books (and at least somewhat actively enforced rather than one of those old laws like it is illegal to take a bath outside on a Tuesday) please let me know.
The fact is that every one of these anti-violent videogame laws have been overturned on the basis that they are violations of the first amendment (search for videogames and first amendment and numerous articles support this claim). There is no reason to believe that this law will be any different.
It becomes more and more difficult to take into consideration anything Chris Crawford says. He is the gaming industry's grumpy old man. Everything he says basically ammounts to, "These damn kids these days!" While even the boy who cried wolf was eventually right, no one paid attention to him because he cried wolf so many times. Whenever I see a statement from him I know it will be about how bad he thinks gaming is today. Just once I would love to see a statement from Crawford that was positive. His constant negativity just makes me want to discount him entirely, which probably isn't fair. Even the best song gets boring without variety.
In the USA the Faces of Death videos are not and were not regulated by the government. They were advertized as banned in several countries, but those claims, like many of the deaths themselves, were fake. So remove that and what remains in your list? things having to do with sex. Then how is violent videogames in the same category as things having to do with sex?
Whenever this argument comes up, inevitably someone will claim that in the USA films ratings are government regulated. This is not true. In the USA films are rated by the film industry just like videogames are rated by the videogame industry. This is exactly why such anti-videogame laws are not only unconstitutional, but are also nothing more than moral panics. If such laws pass, videogames would be the only medium in the USA that are regulated by law.
As I understand it, most companies that operate internationally have seperate companies that are oncorporated in that country. They may either be wholy owned by the parent company or a joint venture with someone in that country be it another country or in some cases, the government itself. This is why we have people interviewing the president of Sony of America or Nintendo of America. They are legally different than plain old Sony and Nintendo.
I'm curious as to what exactly you mean by "cinematically interactive." In the past I've asked what people mean when they say a game is cinematic and haven't gotten a decent answer. When people say something is "cinematic" what do they mean? The only time I've ever thought a game was cinematic was when it was forcing me to watch a long cut scene. So to talk about Half-Life, a game which doesn't have cut scenes, as cinematic, is a bit puzzling to me.
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I'm working on my phd in a department related to Cultural Studies and I'm going to school because I like going to school and I want to be a professor. I can't imagine getting a phd or masters just to go do something unrelated to education. I think it would incredibly frustrating to wait up until an extra 6 years to start your real job.
As it is, I'm kind of already doing what I'm going to do for the rest of my life: teaching, writing, grading, reading. The only difference is that my reading has been in classes instead of on my own and most of my writing has been for classes not publication. However, they do encourage us to go to conferences and get published (I don't want to even try to get a job until I get something published in English (I have an article published in a language I can't even speak, so that is something, but a publication in English that potential employers could read would be better). The only thing that is really missing is stupid committee meetings.
The real question is, "Is it worth it to you?" I went into my masters not exactly sure what I was going to focus on. But I came into my phd program knowing exactly what I wanted to write my diss on and I think that helped immensely. I don't know about other disciplines but in the Humanities, you better like to read. When I got back to grad school after taking a year off between my masters and phd, for the first few months I had occasional eye spasms from reading so much. Reading around 3 theory heavy books a week in addition to grading student papers can drive you crazy. there is ALWAYS something you should be doing. Half of what you learn in grad school is how to deal with the stress of always having more to do than you have time. Like Bob Seger sang, "Deadlines and commitments. What to leave in, what to leave out."
However, I must say that for me it beats the Hell out of a 9 to 5 job with a time clock or a job where I'm expected to shave and wear a tie every day. After doing this for nearly 6 years, however, I will say that I am tired of being poor and taking out student loans. When half of my students have much newer vehicles than me, and have xbox 360s, it can be a bit frustrating.
It is very rare to pay your own way through graduate school in most programs. You either teach or grade for the lower level courses or you are a research assistant for a professor. At least in the departments I have been in and the associated departments I've known people in (humanities) if you aren't a grad assistant or research assistant and are paying your own way, people kind of assume your research sucks because as a graduate student you are much closer to the faculty and they talk about you to each other so even if you didn't initially have some funding and they liked your work they would try to find some money for you somewhere.
You might want to try K-Meleon or Opera.
Subscription price is a LOT in the USA. You can get it at Barnes and Noble for $8.99 which today is £4.88. A subscription from Edge is £72.00 or $132 a year. I don't care how good Edge is, I can't afford to subscribe to it. If there was a digital version that was substantially cheaper, I would subscribe without a second thought. As it is, I pick up an issue every couple of months.
When you can subscribe to US gaming mags for less than $10 a year by buying the subscriptions on ebay, it is hard to justify $132.
I have no problems with these services. Honestly, they are just the modern equivelent of things that went on at local theaters for years. I distinctly remember going to see the Blues Brothers at a drive-in with my parents as a kid. Whenever they cussed, the sound was turned off. I remember people booing every time the sound cut out and asking my parents about it. They told me they cut the cussing out so it would be rated PG.
However, on a personal level, I wonder if such services are morally ambiguous. If someone objects to the language or other aspects of the film on moral gorunds, then isn't buying or renting the films rewarding them for things that person sees as morally objectionable?
Personally, I have no problem with cussing or anything. I like horror movies, but there is a famous film Cannibal Ferox where there are animals killed on screen. I refuse to see it because of that. Even if they cut those scenes out I wouldn't want to see it because I would feel like I was still putting money intheir pockets.
Is renting or buying a copy of a film with cussing or nudity cut out morally and different than watching the uncut film?
Therefore, it seems the question is, are violence and drugs a serious problem at that school? Maybe this school is different, or maybe things have changed in the last couple years, however, don't statistics show that teen drug use and school violence have both been going down? If that is the case, then their justifications are not valid and the administrators are either paranoid or lying.
It seems that, as in most cases where law is involved, looking at the validity of the justifications is easier and simpler than looking at the legality. It would take a judge to determine the legality of their actions, but anyone can look into things and see if violence and drugs are a serious problem at the school.
Proving actions of the school are illegal: expensive.
Proving school administrators are lying: priceless.
Reading doesn't equal being able to spell. My parents read to me constantly as a kid. In 4th or 5th grade we took standardized tests that said I already had 12th grade reading level. I got the highest SAT scores in my (admittedly very small) graduating class. I was an English major in college. Now I'm getting a PhD in cultural studies.
I can't spell for shit. I REALLY can't spell out loud without writing it down first. Whenever we had spelling bees in grade school I was always out in the first or second round.
Being able to read or even write has little or nothing to do with spelling.
Whaaaaat???? You mean that there are universities out there that are using tax payer and student money to buy services that students don't want? Next you will be saying that there are entire businesses that exist just to sell universities crap that they don't need.
In the USA, universities have all the baggage that comes with being large corporations as well as being government organizations like the pentagon who would never buy a hammer off the shelf when they can buy one for $500...
Take academic publishing for example. Part of the job description of may professors is that they publish articles in their field. However, in order to get published in academic journals you usually have to 1)join the crappy organization that puts out the journal and 2) subscribe to the journal. Then, 3) you have to give the journal copyright on your article. Now, in most cases, the journals will then sell access to their articles to article databases like ebsco or whatever. Then universities have to pay to subscribe to those databases. Think about that. Universities are paying people to write articles and then have to turn around and pay to get access to those very same articles. If that isn't a scam I don't know what is. (Sure the univerities are paying to get access to the work of thousands and thousands of articles that are written by people not at that university, but the fact remains they are paying twice, no matter how little, to get the articles...)
It looks like Maestro is a Mastercard brand and Visa Electron is obviously a Visa brand, so I would imagine that they would work (In the US nearly all debit cards now just have the Mastercard or Visa logo on them).
Check out this blog Bank Deals. While a lot of the CD specials on there are for local credit unions, there are also a lot of great online bank deals. Etrade, for example, currently has 3-month CD at 4.75% and the longer-term CDs going up from there.
Wow, it must depend on where you live. Where I grew up I got called into jury duty at least 4 times in 10 years. I was out of the county for three of those times. The fourth time I had gotten the day off work to go down to the courthouse only to have them call me the day before and told me I didn't need to come in.
All the stuff that Amazon and (to the best of my knowledge) target sell is prepackaged, isn't it? So even if there are germs all over the boxes, it doesn't do anything to the actual food, does it?
Even if cashiers at grocery stores use disinfectant regularly, there still isn't any guarantee a customer didn't take that food item and get flu germs or worse all over it. I'd be a lot more concerned with what other customers might have done to food than the people working there.
I have my entertainment system on two power strips that it turn off every night and it hasn't affected any of them. The two things i do leave plugged directly into the wall is my old (pre-remote) tv and the cable box since both of them take a long time to restart once the power has been off. Other than that all the rest of the stuff remembers my settings. My dvd recorder doesn't keep the time, but i never use it as a timer, so it doesn't matter to me.
It may not save much electricity, but it is a habit I got into back in college when I lived in the dorms and I could hear everything humming in standby mode when I tried to go to sleep.
When I first heard about this, I also thought was that they might be fakes. However, after the first few fossils were discovered by people working in stone quarries and such, trained western archeologists started conducting their own digs in China. So unless these professional archeologists are in on the deception, I think its likely that most, if not all, of these discoveries are legit.
Such statements indicate that Rep Schakowsky is either totally clueless and incompetent or just fear mongering and will say anything to look "pro-family" and not at all concerned with real problems.
Now, I've heard that changes in industry due to global warming will hurt businesses because they will have to spend so much to change things. But isn't spending money good for the economy?
Seriously, what are the downsides of whoelheartedly throwing our economby behind making less polluting technologies? Seriously, I want to know. Is there really a non-cynical answer that doesn't involve the government being in the pocket of the oil companies?
If anyone can explain why acting on the assumption that global warming is occuring is a bad thing, I would appreciate hearing about it.
I don't want to debate law here, but I would really like to see some evidence that Faces of Dead is regulated anywhere in the USA. I've never heard of such a thing and I've looked at several online retailers and none of them mention any sort of age restriction.
There are numerous local and state restrictions on sexual content, to teh best of my knowledge, there are none on violent content to the best of my knowledge. If someone can point to some documented evidence to non-videogame related anti-violent media legislation that is on the books (and at least somewhat actively enforced rather than one of those old laws like it is illegal to take a bath outside on a Tuesday) please let me know.
The fact is that every one of these anti-violent videogame laws have been overturned on the basis that they are violations of the first amendment (search for videogames and first amendment and numerous articles support this claim). There is no reason to believe that this law will be any different.
It becomes more and more difficult to take into consideration anything Chris Crawford says. He is the gaming industry's grumpy old man. Everything he says basically ammounts to, "These damn kids these days!" While even the boy who cried wolf was eventually right, no one paid attention to him because he cried wolf so many times.
Whenever I see a statement from him I know it will be about how bad he thinks gaming is today. Just once I would love to see a statement from Crawford that was positive. His constant negativity just makes me want to discount him entirely, which probably isn't fair. Even the best song gets boring without variety.
In the USA the Faces of Death videos are not and were not regulated by the government. They were advertized as banned in several countries, but those claims, like many of the deaths themselves, were fake.
So remove that and what remains in your list? things having to do with sex. Then how is violent videogames in the same category as things having to do with sex?
Whenever this argument comes up, inevitably someone will claim that in the USA films ratings are government regulated. This is not true. In the USA films are rated by the film industry just like videogames are rated by the videogame industry. This is exactly why such anti-videogame laws are not only unconstitutional, but are also nothing more than moral panics. If such laws pass, videogames would be the only medium in the USA that are regulated by law.
As I understand it, most companies that operate internationally have seperate companies that are oncorporated in that country. They may either be wholy owned by the parent company or a joint venture with someone in that country be it another country or in some cases, the government itself. This is why we have people interviewing the president of Sony of America or Nintendo of America. They are legally different than plain old Sony and Nintendo.
I'm curious as to what exactly you mean by "cinematically interactive." In the past I've asked what people mean when they say a game is cinematic and haven't gotten a decent answer. When people say something is "cinematic" what do they mean? The only time I've ever thought a game was cinematic was when it was forcing me to watch a long cut scene. So to talk about Half-Life, a game which doesn't have cut scenes, as cinematic, is a bit puzzling to me.