The facts are that teachers' top 2 problems 50-75 years ago in schools were students chewing gum and talking in class. Today, the top 3 are drugs, suicide, and weapons in the schools.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Littleton is a southern suburb of Denver, and it's in the middle of the biggest cluster of shopping malls and apartments you have ever seen. And it's less than a thirty-minute drive from downtown Denver. Property values aren't quite Silicon Valley in that area, but rents in Aurora, 20 miles further away from the center of town, are $800 for a 600-square foot apartment. The metro area population, last I checked, approached 2 million.
I love this kind of myth. It rings particularly well with people because they like to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. Whether you recall any shootings then or not is really quite irrelevant. You haven't brought up any statistics to back it up. See here for a really good example of how people's view of "better days" in the past, particularly relating to public school conditions, can be largely mythical.
Note that I haven't provided any statistics of my own. That's because I'm not making the claim. It is up to you to find statistics on school violence since it is you who are claiming it is more prevalent now than in the past. But I do have a copy of a novel of the era in question (the 70's) written by one Richard Bachman, also known as Stephen King. The novel is Rage, and it describes a school shooting and the events leading up to it quite accurately. While a fictional account is by no means a statistic, it might give you food for thought to realize that the presence of a gun in a school setting was plausible enough for a 20-something Stephen King to write a rather vivid novel about nearly thirty years ago. Personally, given what I see about other myths circulating, that the only thing in our society that has changed is that violent acts have been more sensationalized in the press than ever before, because the press has degenerated into a ratings frenzy as their viewer and readership plummets. These are statistics that can be readily checked and causes that can be easily demonstrated, and without doing much else I find it a far more likely explanation of the so-called "wave" of school shootings taking place.
Because you know like everyone else who has put two minutes' thought into this that the real issue has never been "piracy" but the existence of an alternative distribution system which does not require the labels' massive resources to operate, thus allowing unrestrained competition with the recording industry cartel. This measure would allow them to end that competition -- but all it's really doing is pissing millions of music lovers off and driving the system underground from whence it cannot be litigated at, retrieved, or reasoned with. Goodbye riaa. We won't miss you.
This makes me wonder whether this could actually benefit indie and small artists in the long run by helping their music reach the ears of the big record companies early on so that they can have their big break
The answer would be an unqualified no. The big record companies have plenty of chances to expose themselves to independent music. They don't do it now. This would just be like the slush pile at a publishing house. They'd ignore it more steadfastly than before. Go to Salon and read this article for more edification. The opportunity already exists and is not taken. Independent records do exist and are made. They are not, however, marketed at all. Putting the shit online will solve nothing and make the recording industry an unstoppable monolith. For a truly independent artist such as myself, this system would be a disaster.
I saw about four cartoons cast from the same mold as JabberJaw. Talking animal with three or four "cool kids" who were clearly traced over the top of the Scooby-Doo set. And I mean this is just recently that I caught these on Cartoon Network -- late at night usually. They must have been pouring that shit into a churn
I always hesitated over checking that box, and now I'm glad of it. My essential mistrust of the system turned out to be intuitively correct. Though Verisign says its so, there's no real way for me to know that Verisign has done their homework. Which, they haven't.
What's good about this is that now PC manufacturers are responsible not only for putting the software on the PC, but making sure it works correctly. I bet that they're just all a-thrill about this new responsibility, and the legal liability to which they've been exposed. Doesn't Compaq operate out of Texas?
Um, I've done this. In fact, I've learned the bass lines and chord structures and all the words to about 50% of all the CD's I own. You can't say I haven't analyzed them in depth. I can notate them for you in excruciating detail.
That doesn't mean I don't want to be able to back them up, or re-arrange them to my tastes, or keep a copy at home safe, and one in my car. Some of them are out of print, some of them will no doubt go out of print, and some are simply really hard to find and I don't care to pay twice for them.
Well let's see: my son uses my CD's as hockey pucks from time to time. For that matter, so do I. When I had LP's as my only source of music, my first act was typically to pop the LP onto the player, pop a tape into the recorder, and dupe the LP so I could listen to it in the car. I then put the LP away and didn't get it out again until the tape quality deteriorated to the unacceptable.
I frequently do the same things with CD's, except this time I get a clean copy. For example, the recent Rush live album Different Strings contains a previously unreleased 1978 performance that will not be on future compilations. I'd like to dupe that so I can always have a copy. It would be a shame if it were scratched or destroyed in normal use. The point is, we are allowed to make copies for personal use and not only is this technology infringing on our rights as consumers, it is also fucking up our equipment, and forcing us to by converters just to use them the way we want. I think the best way to fight it is to make sure everyone knows it's there, that it fucks up the sound, and it forces them to go back time after time to buy the same thing they already own just to be able to listen to it. After all, once SoundSafe players become the standard, they will drop support for regular CD's and make you buy your whole collection again. Or does anyone else remember the switch to CD in the late 80's?
There was a high-frequency tone put on the end of Sgt Pepper's, as a joke from John Lennon. He wanted dogs to have something to listen to on a Beatles Album. Documented in George Martin's "The Making of Sgt. Pepper." Other than that, I seriously doubt there was any other such attempt. I taped many Beatles albums when they were on vinyl, as well as CD. Never heard any such thing.
The question is not whether they are making money. It's whether we are encouraging useful artistic creations by allowing them this monopoly. And the answer is No. Walt Disney, the only person who really should have had any financial stake in Mick Mouse, died over thirty years ago. The Disney ultraconglomerate is now just squatting on his legacy. They are not being encouraged to come up with anything new. Their recent movies have all been crap -- and I might add, almost without exception a rip-off of a PUBLIC DOMAIN work that they would not have access to if that work were owned by an 18th or 19th-century entertainment megacorp. In the case of Disney, copyright is quite obviously discouraging the production of new, useful, or valuable contributions to our culture. Instead they're just pimping the ideas of other authors and the work of some Korean animators, and oh, maybe a couple of famous American or English voiceovers. Their formula is dreadful. I don't take my kids to Disney movies because they're not of any measurable quality anymore. The most interesting Disney productions of the last 10 years were the Toy Story movies, for which Pixar had to fight tooth and nail to gain a glimmer of creative independence.
So any reasonable debate over the usefulness of infinite copyrights ought to start with the deplorable quality of Disney Dreck. They are in desperate need of a financial incentive to come up with new stuff that isn't shit. And if they can't it is NOT OUR SOCIAL RESPONSIBLITY to keep them in business by artifically extending their monopoly over an animated mouse. We as a society do not owe them a guaranteed income. I do not understand how that concept got worked into the social contract.
I was standing in Comp USA a few weeks ago and a woman was debating whether to buy the twice as expensive "music" blank CD's or the regular blank CD's. I told her there was no fundamental difference -- from personal experience I've burned dozens of music CD's onto regular data media and there is no damn difference. But she was convinced that they would somehow be more compatible. Whatever.
Hey, my ass has proven time and again to be a remarkable mnemonic storage device. And if you will look to the parent comment, you may discover that unlike yourself I actually checked out my facts, and aside from the misidentification of the mega-corp that owns the rights to the song, my story was in every other detail correct.
Memory sure is a funny thing. I followed your link and found:
The writers of "Happy Birthday to You," sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, were kindergarten and Sunday school teachers in Louisville, Kentucky during the 1890's and later taught at Columbia University in New York City. The song was originally written as "Good Morning to You." With the later addition of the birthday lyrics, the song was copyrighted as "Happy Birthday to You" in 1935. Published by Warner-Chappell, it is almost universally recognized as the official birthday song, and continues to be used extensively in films, television and theater.
I then searched on Google and found at this place:
Happy Birthday to You was copyrighted in 1935 and renewed in 1963.
The song was apparently written in 1893, but first copyrighted in 1935
after a lawsuit (reported in the New York Times of August 15, 1934, p.19
col. 6)
In 1988, Birch Tree Group,
Ltd. sold the rights of the song to Warner Communications (along with all
other assets) for an estimated $25 million (considerably more than a song).
(reported in Time, Jan 2, 1989 v133 n1 p88(1)
So even though I got a couple of the details wrong, the essential background is UNCHANGED. Why is someone making money hand over fist off of the rights to this item when the authors are most certainly dead and in a hole in the ground, and of what possible benefit is this to the original authors, when both patent and copyright are meant to encourage and promote the arts? What are we encouraging and promoting with this charade?
Thank you.
also note this article which discusses happy birthday in your favorite restaurant.
It doesn't have to be China that does it. If enough stupid patents are granted, and enough people decide they are simply to be ignored, you could find major business plans failing because the investors can't afford to sue everyone who's violating their patent on one-click typing.
The classic example of this kind of thing is an article I read many many years ago (almost 10, I believe) regarding the copyright to "Happy Birthday." The song is 103 years old, having been written in 1898 by two Kentucky schoolteachers. Somehow, the Walt Disney company acquired the copyright to it (how I don't know -- it's just one of those things that make you realize how corrupt and foolish the system is), and would routinely send a $12,000 royalty bill to television shows and films found using the song. And quoted in the article were several people who quite openly said that they'd told Disney to take a fukin' hike.
The reason Disney didn't make a big stink, of course, was because the resulting media exposure would have no doubt caused the public to start questioning #1) Why does Disney own the copyright to a song that was written before Walt Disney was born? and #2) How does that promote the usefulness of their arts? and #3)How come this copyright didn't expire with the authors, and #4)When is my Congressman going to do something about this out-of-control situation? See, everybody sings Happy Birthday at birthdays. Imagine people fuming about the $12,000 that Disney would want to bill them. Whether that was true or not, it would make quite a stench.
The point is, if the law is absurd enough, and enough people ignore it, it will become meaningless and unenforcable. If some dork patents the wheel, he'll spend the rest of his life in court with Firestone, then B.F. Goodrich, then G.M., and so on. It would never end. So I expect at some point the patent office will eat itself. Probably the patented patent-generating machine will be its downfall.
Well, the real problem with software patents, at least the problem that I have, is that it's essentially impossible to do anything truly original with a computer. I was recently interviewed for a software developer's job where I was asked the question, "Do you have any patents?" and I really had to go over in my mind how badly I wanted the job, and how I would feel about working for a company that was clearly interested in software patents. And it finally came down to me imagining how I would explain the absurdity of a software patent to someone who could fire me.
Basically, I choose an analogy here: patenting software algorithm is similar, in my view, to patenting fiction plots. I have several other interests in life, and I've written three novels of fiction, and one of the old grinds in fiction writing is that there are only about five or so plots that most novels tend towards, and one of the first things you must accustom yourself to as an author is that your storyline will in all likelyhood not be original to you. Having read about five thousand books in my lifetime I can attest that this is by and large true. For every 2001: A Space Odddity there are 100 stories just like it, and they already existed beforehand. Maybe the characters looked a lot different, but when you boil a story down to its fundamental elements there are only so many things that catch people's interest as a drama, and they can all be found in Greek plays and Shakespeare.
So to move this over to the software world, you have to realize that every piece of software you write is created in a language, which is contstrained to a finite number of commands. The language was written, furthermore, by human beings who despite their often-towering genius cannot be too much smarter than you the programmer who is using the language. This may or may not be an important point; the point about there being a fininte number of operations in a language is. That means there are only so many ways in which a function can be expressed.
Computers are complex machines that operate in layers; otherwise we wouldn't be able to use them at all. Below the layer of the user interface is the programming language the interface was written in. Below the layer of the programming language is often the processor instructions which the language translates for the programmer. These are also finite in number; a processor contains only the instruction sets designed into it by the manufacturer, who is also human. These may or may not be patented, but regardless, they are clearly in existence before the software is written; in fact, they must be implemented in a compiler before software can be written to take advantage of them, unless you're writing in assembler.
Therefore, in my view, no software that is written, ever can qualify as unique technology. It is using through two or more layers of abstraction, technology that already had to exist prior to its creation. The only time a software patent would be valid, in my opinion, is if it drove a device that was never previously connected to a computer and does something that has never been done with a computer before.
Anyway, pick apart as you please. This is something I'd like to refine and send to my representative as ammunition for banning software patents period.
those seeking frivolous patents will be encouraged by the utter abdication of authority on the part of an already weak-kneed PTO
What's delicious about this is that eventually, the patent system will overwhelm the courts, as people doing what they've always done discover that some asshole has patented it. Soon, the only way to enforce the ridiculousness will be to have a Secret Patent Police Force examine everything that is done and made. Since such would be insupportable, people will flagrantly ignore patent laws and patents will invalidate themselves through this kind of dilution. Sure, like the article says "the patent system will correct itself." It may do so by correcting itself out of existence, until no one pays any attention to it at all.
Free education isn't an unalienable right; it's probably a privilege more on order with a driver's license
WRONG. Education is required for freedom to work. IF we cannot read and write how the hell are we supposed to fill out our ballots, or for that matter read the pamphlets, right or wrong, which our politicians use to campaign for or against one another with. If you think of education as a privledge you've bought the fucked-up idea that this is some sort of meritocracy and we only get the rights we deserve. That's horseshit.
You aren't required by law to go to the university. Your university is mostly run by tuition fees, not taxpayer money. Your university is not a government institution.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are these facts coming from? Is it this mythological study?
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Littleton is a southern suburb of Denver, and it's in the middle of the biggest cluster of shopping malls and apartments you have ever seen. And it's less than a thirty-minute drive from downtown Denver. Property values aren't quite Silicon Valley in that area, but rents in Aurora, 20 miles further away from the center of town, are $800 for a 600-square foot apartment. The metro area population, last I checked, approached 2 million.
I love this kind of myth. It rings particularly well with people because they like to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. Whether you recall any shootings then or not is really quite irrelevant. You haven't brought up any statistics to back it up. See here for a really good example of how people's view of "better days" in the past, particularly relating to public school conditions, can be largely mythical.
Note that I haven't provided any statistics of my own. That's because I'm not making the claim. It is up to you to find statistics on school violence since it is you who are claiming it is more prevalent now than in the past. But I do have a copy of a novel of the era in question (the 70's) written by one Richard Bachman, also known as Stephen King. The novel is Rage, and it describes a school shooting and the events leading up to it quite accurately. While a fictional account is by no means a statistic, it might give you food for thought to realize that the presence of a gun in a school setting was plausible enough for a 20-something Stephen King to write a rather vivid novel about nearly thirty years ago. Personally, given what I see about other myths circulating, that the only thing in our society that has changed is that violent acts have been more sensationalized in the press than ever before, because the press has degenerated into a ratings frenzy as their viewer and readership plummets. These are statistics that can be readily checked and causes that can be easily demonstrated, and without doing much else I find it a far more likely explanation of the so-called "wave" of school shootings taking place.
Because you know like everyone else who has put two minutes' thought into this that the real issue has never been "piracy" but the existence of an alternative distribution system which does not require the labels' massive resources to operate, thus allowing unrestrained competition with the recording industry cartel. This measure would allow them to end that competition -- but all it's really doing is pissing millions of music lovers off and driving the system underground from whence it cannot be litigated at, retrieved, or reasoned with. Goodbye riaa. We won't miss you.
The answer would be an unqualified no. The big record companies have plenty of chances to expose themselves to independent music. They don't do it now. This would just be like the slush pile at a publishing house. They'd ignore it more steadfastly than before. Go to Salon and read this article for more edification. The opportunity already exists and is not taken. Independent records do exist and are made. They are not, however, marketed at all. Putting the shit online will solve nothing and make the recording industry an unstoppable monolith. For a truly independent artist such as myself, this system would be a disaster.
Yes, they're missing distortion and noise in the signal. It's not something that you need to enjoy the music.
I saw about four cartoons cast from the same mold as JabberJaw. Talking animal with three or four "cool kids" who were clearly traced over the top of the Scooby-Doo set. And I mean this is just recently that I caught these on Cartoon Network -- late at night usually. They must have been pouring that shit into a churn
I'm sorry, you must have a different sense of humor than I. I have never even come close to laughing at the Flinstones. Vomiting, yes.
I always hesitated over checking that box, and now I'm glad of it. My essential mistrust of the system turned out to be intuitively correct. Though Verisign says its so, there's no real way for me to know that Verisign has done their homework. Which, they haven't.
What's good about this is that now PC manufacturers are responsible not only for putting the software on the PC, but making sure it works correctly. I bet that they're just all a-thrill about this new responsibility, and the legal liability to which they've been exposed. Doesn't Compaq operate out of Texas?
Um, I've done this. In fact, I've learned the bass lines and chord structures and all the words to about 50% of all the CD's I own. You can't say I haven't analyzed them in depth. I can notate them for you in excruciating detail.
That doesn't mean I don't want to be able to back them up, or re-arrange them to my tastes, or keep a copy at home safe, and one in my car. Some of them are out of print, some of them will no doubt go out of print, and some are simply really hard to find and I don't care to pay twice for them.
Well let's see: my son uses my CD's as hockey pucks from time to time. For that matter, so do I. When I had LP's as my only source of music, my first act was typically to pop the LP onto the player, pop a tape into the recorder, and dupe the LP so I could listen to it in the car. I then put the LP away and didn't get it out again until the tape quality deteriorated to the unacceptable.
I frequently do the same things with CD's, except this time I get a clean copy. For example, the recent Rush live album Different Strings contains a previously unreleased 1978 performance that will not be on future compilations. I'd like to dupe that so I can always have a copy. It would be a shame if it were scratched or destroyed in normal use. The point is, we are allowed to make copies for personal use and not only is this technology infringing on our rights as consumers, it is also fucking up our equipment, and forcing us to by converters just to use them the way we want. I think the best way to fight it is to make sure everyone knows it's there, that it fucks up the sound, and it forces them to go back time after time to buy the same thing they already own just to be able to listen to it. After all, once SoundSafe players become the standard, they will drop support for regular CD's and make you buy your whole collection again. Or does anyone else remember the switch to CD in the late 80's?
There was a high-frequency tone put on the end of Sgt Pepper's, as a joke from John Lennon. He wanted dogs to have something to listen to on a Beatles Album. Documented in George Martin's "The Making of Sgt. Pepper." Other than that, I seriously doubt there was any other such attempt. I taped many Beatles albums when they were on vinyl, as well as CD. Never heard any such thing.
So any reasonable debate over the usefulness of infinite copyrights ought to start with the deplorable quality of Disney Dreck. They are in desperate need of a financial incentive to come up with new stuff that isn't shit. And if they can't it is NOT OUR SOCIAL RESPONSIBLITY to keep them in business by artifically extending their monopoly over an animated mouse. We as a society do not owe them a guaranteed income. I do not understand how that concept got worked into the social contract.
I'm going to have to call my Friday nights something else. I don't want to confuse the girls.
I was standing in Comp USA a few weeks ago and a woman was debating whether to buy the twice as expensive "music" blank CD's or the regular blank CD's. I told her there was no fundamental difference -- from personal experience I've burned dozens of music CD's onto regular data media and there is no damn difference. But she was convinced that they would somehow be more compatible. Whatever.
You must make a lot of money then. I for one am expecting exactly dick from the tax break. Maybe enough to put gas in my car for a week. Woohoo!
Hey, my ass has proven time and again to be a remarkable mnemonic storage device. And if you will look to the parent comment, you may discover that unlike yourself I actually checked out my facts, and aside from the misidentification of the mega-corp that owns the rights to the song, my story was in every other detail correct.
The writers of "Happy Birthday to You," sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, were kindergarten and Sunday school teachers in Louisville, Kentucky during the 1890's and later taught at Columbia University in New York City. The song was originally written as "Good Morning to You." With the later addition of the birthday lyrics, the song was copyrighted as "Happy Birthday to You" in 1935. Published by Warner-Chappell, it is almost universally recognized as the official birthday song, and continues to be used extensively in films, television and theater.
I then searched on Google and found at this place:
Happy Birthday to You was copyrighted in 1935 and renewed in 1963.
The song was apparently written in 1893, but first copyrighted in 1935
after a lawsuit (reported in the New York Times of August 15, 1934, p.19
col. 6)
In 1988, Birch Tree Group,
Ltd. sold the rights of the song to Warner Communications (along with all
other assets) for an estimated $25 million (considerably more than a song).
(reported in Time, Jan 2, 1989 v133 n1 p88(1)
So even though I got a couple of the details wrong, the essential background is UNCHANGED. Why is someone making money hand over fist off of the rights to this item when the authors are most certainly dead and in a hole in the ground, and of what possible benefit is this to the original authors, when both patent and copyright are meant to encourage and promote the arts? What are we encouraging and promoting with this charade?
Thank you.
also note this article which discusses happy birthday in your favorite restaurant.
It doesn't have to be China that does it. If enough stupid patents are granted, and enough people decide they are simply to be ignored, you could find major business plans failing because the investors can't afford to sue everyone who's violating their patent on one-click typing.
The classic example of this kind of thing is an article I read many many years ago (almost 10, I believe) regarding the copyright to "Happy Birthday." The song is 103 years old, having been written in 1898 by two Kentucky schoolteachers. Somehow, the Walt Disney company acquired the copyright to it (how I don't know -- it's just one of those things that make you realize how corrupt and foolish the system is), and would routinely send a $12,000 royalty bill to television shows and films found using the song. And quoted in the article were several people who quite openly said that they'd told Disney to take a fukin' hike.
The reason Disney didn't make a big stink, of course, was because the resulting media exposure would have no doubt caused the public to start questioning #1) Why does Disney own the copyright to a song that was written before Walt Disney was born? and #2) How does that promote the usefulness of their arts? and #3)How come this copyright didn't expire with the authors, and #4)When is my Congressman going to do something about this out-of-control situation? See, everybody sings Happy Birthday at birthdays. Imagine people fuming about the $12,000 that Disney would want to bill them. Whether that was true or not, it would make quite a stench.
The point is, if the law is absurd enough, and enough people ignore it, it will become meaningless and unenforcable. If some dork patents the wheel, he'll spend the rest of his life in court with Firestone, then B.F. Goodrich, then G.M., and so on. It would never end. So I expect at some point the patent office will eat itself. Probably the patented patent-generating machine will be its downfall.
Maybe you meant "obvious," but I prefer to believe you meant "odious."
Well, the real problem with software patents, at least the problem that I have, is that it's essentially impossible to do anything truly original with a computer. I was recently interviewed for a software developer's job where I was asked the question, "Do you have any patents?" and I really had to go over in my mind how badly I wanted the job, and how I would feel about working for a company that was clearly interested in software patents. And it finally came down to me imagining how I would explain the absurdity of a software patent to someone who could fire me.
Basically, I choose an analogy here: patenting software algorithm is similar, in my view, to patenting fiction plots. I have several other interests in life, and I've written three novels of fiction, and one of the old grinds in fiction writing is that there are only about five or so plots that most novels tend towards, and one of the first things you must accustom yourself to as an author is that your storyline will in all likelyhood not be original to you. Having read about five thousand books in my lifetime I can attest that this is by and large true. For every 2001: A Space Odddity there are 100 stories just like it, and they already existed beforehand. Maybe the characters looked a lot different, but when you boil a story down to its fundamental elements there are only so many things that catch people's interest as a drama, and they can all be found in Greek plays and Shakespeare.
So to move this over to the software world, you have to realize that every piece of software you write is created in a language, which is contstrained to a finite number of commands. The language was written, furthermore, by human beings who despite their often-towering genius cannot be too much smarter than you the programmer who is using the language. This may or may not be an important point; the point about there being a fininte number of operations in a language is. That means there are only so many ways in which a function can be expressed.
Computers are complex machines that operate in layers; otherwise we wouldn't be able to use them at all. Below the layer of the user interface is the programming language the interface was written in. Below the layer of the programming language is often the processor instructions which the language translates for the programmer. These are also finite in number; a processor contains only the instruction sets designed into it by the manufacturer, who is also human. These may or may not be patented, but regardless, they are clearly in existence before the software is written; in fact, they must be implemented in a compiler before software can be written to take advantage of them, unless you're writing in assembler.
Therefore, in my view, no software that is written, ever can qualify as unique technology. It is using through two or more layers of abstraction, technology that already had to exist prior to its creation. The only time a software patent would be valid, in my opinion, is if it drove a device that was never previously connected to a computer and does something that has never been done with a computer before.
Anyway, pick apart as you please. This is something I'd like to refine and send to my representative as ammunition for banning software patents period.
What's delicious about this is that eventually, the patent system will overwhelm the courts, as people doing what they've always done discover that some asshole has patented it. Soon, the only way to enforce the ridiculousness will be to have a Secret Patent Police Force examine everything that is done and made. Since such would be insupportable, people will flagrantly ignore patent laws and patents will invalidate themselves through this kind of dilution. Sure, like the article says "the patent system will correct itself." It may do so by correcting itself out of existence, until no one pays any attention to it at all.
WRONG. Education is required for freedom to work. IF we cannot read and write how the hell are we supposed to fill out our ballots, or for that matter read the pamphlets, right or wrong, which our politicians use to campaign for or against one another with. If you think of education as a privledge you've bought the fucked-up idea that this is some sort of meritocracy and we only get the rights we deserve. That's horseshit.
You aren't required by law to go to the university. Your university is mostly run by tuition fees, not taxpayer money. Your university is not a government institution.