Beautiful photos... I was surprised by the swastika banners in the background of the last one though.
I'm not offended. I've got absolutely nothing against swatikas per se, whether in the context of the nazis, general history, or otherwise and I loathe the kind of censorship that bans their display.
Still, I'm not the general public and given the sensitivity of segments of the general public to this symbol I think it's intriguing that someone would go through the trouble of a) creating the banners, b) getting on a ladder and hanging them in a hanger bay, and c) taking a "romanticised" photo of the whole thing. From the perspective of documenting a piece of technology it was unnecessary though it does add to the artistic aesthetic of the photo.
Is it a brave decision? An insensitive one? Maybe the swastika simply doesn't hold the kind of meaning it did 60 years ago? I just find it somewhat peculiar.
Probably get modded down for this.. for "religion" has always struck me as a haven for the fearful, those who lack self-esteem, or narcissistic personalities looking for external justification for their insane behaviour.
When such an individual is confronted with the prospect of death.. all that doubt, self-loathing and regret must really be a lot to suddenly bear when they "know" they're about to face the final judge.
You say use an unpublished number to stay off a telemarketers list but then give examples of telemarketers calling your unpublished number and on more than one occasion at that. So what's the difference?
There is nothing magic about an unpublished number. It's simply a number that the phone company has agreed not to reveal details about. But not all telemarketers get their phone numbers from 'published' sources such as phone company records as your own examples clearly indicate. An unpublished number has just as much chance of being picked by a "random dialer" as any other with the exception of those numbers on the Do Not Call list which must be filtered out. So how is asking each individual telemarketer to remove you from their list better than them not being allowed to call in the first place?
If you're aiming for low hanging fruit just to establish credibility, then I may be inclined to think you don't have anything credible to contribute, period.
What wikipedia 'needs' and is failing to achieve, accordinging to the opinion in the link, are excellent quality articles in a few 'core' fields of knowledge that are considered necessary to be considered an encyclopedia. What does wikipedia does not need is yet another laymen with no specific area of expertise editing a lot of articles because he/she 'thinks' she writes well.
If you are an expert in a given and you contribute articles pertaining to your field then it will show. No need to worry about establishing 'street cred'. By the same token, if you're an expert in your field and articles have already written for the things you're an expert on you can still contribute by helping preserve article's original quality (for example, by removing the laymen garbage that inevitable creeps in). Or you can sit back and do nothing, comfortable in the knowledge that your field is adequately covered. After all, sometimes the best contribution is knowing when something is good enough and just leaving it alone.
what the hell? The reason you don't take a dump in the library is because its extremely anti-social! How would reading on the toilet even compare (excluding the example of the single toilet in a packed house/office/dorm/etc with a growing lineup)
You are assuming that most snipers likely to be encountered are professionally trained.
What's a pissed off farmer shooting at passing soldiers while hiding in his barn? Or say an Iraqi kid, hiding in a bombed out apartment flat, shooting at soldiers with a an abandoned AK Or a conscript cowering in fear amongst rubble taking pot shots with the rifle that was thrust into his hands. Hell, even a regular grunt who moves into a flanking position to try to pick off a few oppenonts while relatively concealed is a sniper.
I strongly suspect you're going to see far more of the above examples on the today's battlefield that the modern day ninja types glamourized by Hollywood and Discovery Channel.
While those stories are indeed disturbing, what makes them so is the lengths to which the US administration goes to hide these activities. They can and should be held accountable for this behaviour. But... that's the big difference here. The US administration IS ultimately accountable to its people for its actions. What is also significant is that the journalist who published those stories do not now have to live in fear of American retribution. You can find a lot of fault in some of the things done by the U.S., but they have long loooooong way to go before you can make honest comparisons between them and somebody like Iran.
No. Bill is right. Here's proof. A very serious and gut-wrenching documentary of the life of a typical young gamer. Episode 2 is especially illuminating. http://www.purepwnage.com/
You are absolutely right.. Consensus is not proof.
But this isn't a mathematical dissertation.
You are confusing authority with mis-placed authority. A group of scientific experts in consensus on a particular issue that falls within their field of expertise is indeed a good argument to make in a political forum.
Where appeal to authority is wrong is when the authority is not qualified to judge something or is a maverick alone in his/her opinions. Lance Armstrong is a great bicyclist, so should I listen accept legal advice from him?
But.. we are not all experts and that's ok. But we have to acknowledge that we aren't experts and be willing to heed to the words of those who ARE and therefore know better than us. Furthermore, if these scientists have done their experiments using the scientific methods and reach consensus... why would the rest of us not take that into consideration? Do every 6 billion of us need to physically duplicate the experiments before it becomes a valid? The scientific method is a self-correcting methodology and has come further in explaining the world and things in it (and off it) in the last 100 years than religion has in the last 10000. It's not perfect... but its orders of magnitude better than what we had before and get this.. knowledge produced by science gets more accurate as time goes on as its theories get refined with each new observation. Even when there are disagreements the overall trend is to move toward consensus as the one theory gains more credibility over others.
Religion? Everytime something new comes up that can't be explained or is at odds with the word of God... well... it was intrepreted wrong. It was an allegory. Oh.. that was made obsolete by this new testament from a later prophet here. Oh.. what do you mean you don't agree? You Heretic!
Point is: If the scientific community is in consensus on this issue (and I'm not sure they are, despite what the article says) then that is indeed something the rest of us need to heed. It may not be "proof" but its a lot more rational to put faith in something that can justify its opinions with concrete evidence than not.
IANAL Isn't florida, being an ex-Spanish colony, a "civil law" system? In civil law areas, Judges have a lot more leeway in interepreting the "intent" of a law. It's the "common law" areas where more emphasis is placed on the literal interpretation of law. The differences between civil and common law jurisdictions are also reflected in the way legislation is written. Civil law statutes tend toward minimal legalese with more emphasis on describing the "intent" while common law - being more literal-minded - tend to produce lengthy pieces of statute that try to cover all bases.
If Florida is indeed a civil law jurisdiction then the Judges decision would certainly be in-line with the intent of the legislation (as I understand it) and was therefore the correct decision.
Secondly:
I really don't understand all this "litmus test" rhetoric that the liberal left seems to throw around (the article - not you). This law was intended to protect minors from some of the most sick and dangerous elements of society. I don't know about the rest of you, but I personally judge a society by how well it protects the innocent, not by how pedantically it crafts its legislation. If the existing legislation (and court decision) were allowed to interpreted more broadly to evolutions in society we wouldn't need to revisit the same old issues over and over and over again with each new form of media that arises just because it's not exactly an identical implementation of something already covered. Whether its chiseling runes in stone or pressing send in your email reader the "intent" is the same: "Hello World!" The old copyright/fair use laws for print would have worked just as well today for digital media. The betamax decision would be just as applicable to DVD-Rs. The common-carrier precedence would apply as well to ISPs as it did to phone lines. And we'd all be richer for not having to pay taxes to fund redundant legislation!
Since when did Rumsfeld have anything to do with the strategy or leadership in the war? He was "Secretary" of Defense, not General. He may have set the agenda, but he certainly didn't draw up the plans. His way of running the wars wasn't altogether unlike Hitler vis-a-vis the german Generals: Brilliant strategists being dictated to by a clueless and egotistical idiot who ignored the advice of his Generals in favor of grandiose cock-stroking pipedreams. The fact the US did as well as they did in the initial stages is testament to the superiority of their firepower against a poorly trained under-motivated 3rd-world army caught with its pants down on the open plains. That situation didn't last too long, either in Afghanistan or Iraq. The tragedy is, they could probably have salvaged the situation in Afghanistan if they hadn't immediately thrown all the resources into Iraq, a war we all know was pointless.
But whatever. Maybe he "should" be given a minor field level command position in Iraq and send him straight to the front. Let him see the ugly truth of what he got America into up close.
Obviously, you didn't read the part where a naked Ballmer jumped out of the cake throwing gobs of it at everyone and screaming "I'll f***** destroy You!"
It's time to put this fucking McDonald's hot coffee case to rest: It's been held up to be a shining beacon of the spurious nature of litigation in America when in FACT it is NOT. 3rd degree burns is not spurious! - The plaintiff suffered 3rd degree burns over parts of her legs that required SKIN GRAFTS. - The plaintiff only sued because she couldn't afford the cost of prolonged hospitalization she required and McDonald's refused to assist. - McDonald's executives testified they KNEW their coffee was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns (burn occur over 130 degree, McDonalds was brewing their coffee as high as 205). - McDonald's ignored advice to post warnings about the possibility of burns as well has ignore the warnings given to fast food industry as a whole that they were brewing their coffee too hot. - The evidence showed McDonald's coffee was consistently 20 degrees hotter than the industry average.
The JUDGE AND JURY found McDonald's behaviour reckless, callous, and WILLFUL.
Furthermore... it's very easy for an ignoramous like yourself to be all righteous and disdainful when your livelihood is not at risk. People are mean to you at work? Boo fucking hoo! Are they depriving you of your ability to earn a living? Apparently not, so you're comparing apples to fridge magnets. Perhaps you find is amusing to see another wrongfully deprived of an income? How about if that person has a family to feed? Still funny? How about if your children are being picked on because of accusations made against you? Funnier still I bet, right? HA HA HA!
Libel is a crime. Period. It causes pain and anguish and loss of income. It is "assault". You're not so dimwitted and shallow to condone smacking someone upside the head with a bat are you? If so, post your address, you sociapathic fuck.
But...all these mishaps you just mentioned were serious.
"Seems innocuous" and serious are not mutually exclusive. In fact anything that does not seem innocuous has undoubtably been accounted for with quadruple redundancy backup preventative measures. All serious mishaps are thus likely the result of overlooking something small and innocuous.
I think a better question would be "Are the unaccountable and unpredicable points of failure threatening to overwhelm our ability to prepare for them potentially leading to the end of the space program?".
I hope not. Besides, the exploration of new frontiers have always involved some measure of luck and prayer. A "sure thing" just isn't good for the human spirit. If government won't do it (and should they?) then I believe there's plenty of private entrepeneurs who will step up to the plate.
Ahhh. And there's the catch.. from a purely statistical point of view what would lead to bigger skew: natural human counting errors at every poll station, or malicious skew introduced by one compromised machine (assuming that each machine must be compromised individually).
I guess it would depend upon sample size of course but it's not hard to imagine that the small chance of human error multiplied by thousands may surpass a single malicious machine.
However... human error can swing either way. A compromised machine would presumably show bias. Across a whole district or even a whole nation the accumulated results of human counting error would probably be negligble to the overall outcome whereas a single compromised machine would porbably make a significant difference.
So better security in this case is probably not a good thing. We want less security so that all the machine can be equally and effectively compromised. Assuming the political leanings of the "malicious hackers" are proportional to the overall population then an orgy of tampering would in the end have neglgible results on the outcome of the election.
Right "now" people are being hurt by globalization but what I think a point that a lot of people are missing is that in the "loooong" term... it won't matter. The pain is part of the global rebalancing that in the end should leave everyone on a level playing field.
Currently jobs are being lost because of the wage disparity between here and the places where jobs are being offshored to. But as more employment moves to these other countries the standard of living will rise, so will the demands for better working conditions. Wages will increase. Consumption will increase. It happend in the western industrialized democracies...why would it NOT happen elsewhere?
Today there's not much of an economic advantage to having your IT in Germany, versus France, versus Canada, versus the US... so too in the near future when everything evens out, will it not be any advantage to having services outsourced to India or China or Tuvalu versus here at home (wherever home may be). We'll all be on a level playing field and we'll all be better off for it. Or do you believe the west is entitled to a better level prosperity than anyone else?
The definitions have not changed, and neither has the use of superlatives and hyperbole to express emotion. People have been doing it for as long as people have been talking.
We use terms like genius and hero in a broader context than the dictionary definition warrants precisely because of the narrow dictionary definition. A more "general" word would lack the emotional punch otherwise. Like all things, it's all about context. The context of genius when talking excitedly about one's child's latest feat is quite different when comparing the IQs of historical figures.
One more point: You don't think Zsa Zsa Gabor is a star? Go stick your head in a toilet.
Many undergrad papers are basically 'book-report'-type things (albeit with several books and more difficult subject matter than grade school book reports).
Yes. Of course they are, especially in the first two years. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. Do you honestly expect 17 year-old kids fresh out of high-school to have the maturity or even the know-how to write a university level term paper?
However, as one progresses the expectation increases (at least it did in my school), to the point where the final year of studies the majority of one's grades comes from one or two written (either "code" or "prose") works. Those who weren't committed or couldn't do the work were gone by the end of the 2nd year and though I don't have anything to back it up, I would strongly suspect that it's in those first two years that the most cheating occurs.
Speaking from experience my undergrad class went from 120 in the first year to I think about 40-50 by the end of the fourth (in my major). My minor went from classrooms of 40-50 to seminars of 6-10 almost by the end of the second year however. Pretty hard to cheat there as you either "knew your shit" and contributed to the discussion or you didn't. The nice thing about written work is it's actually pretty hard to cheat (at the higher levels) when your professor knows all the literature inside and out. She/He will probably have a good idea of whose written work may be suspect simply by how much the individual was able to contribute in classroom discussion. Keep in mind the material on the net that a cheater may be inclined to plagiarize had to come from somewhere too, and very likely a source that a knowledgable professor is well acquainted with.
Slashdot Mirror
Beautiful photos... I was surprised by the swastika banners in the background of the last one though.
I'm not offended. I've got absolutely nothing against swatikas per se, whether in the context of the nazis, general history, or otherwise and I loathe the kind of censorship that bans their display.
Still, I'm not the general public and given the sensitivity of segments of the general public to this symbol I think it's intriguing that someone would go through the trouble of a) creating the banners, b) getting on a ladder and hanging them in a hanger bay, and c) taking a "romanticised" photo of the whole thing. From the perspective of documenting a piece of technology it was unnecessary though it does add to the artistic aesthetic of the photo.
Is it a brave decision? An insensitive one? Maybe the swastika simply doesn't hold the kind of meaning it did 60 years ago? I just find it somewhat peculiar.
Probably get modded down for this.. for "religion" has always struck me as a haven for the fearful, those who lack self-esteem, or narcissistic personalities looking for external justification for their insane behaviour.
When such an individual is confronted with the prospect of death.. all that doubt, self-loathing and regret must really be a lot to suddenly bear when they "know" they're about to face the final judge.
You say use an unpublished number to stay off a telemarketers list but then give examples of telemarketers calling your unpublished number and on more than one occasion at that. So what's the difference?
There is nothing magic about an unpublished number. It's simply a number that the phone company has agreed not to reveal details about. But not all telemarketers get their phone numbers from 'published' sources such as phone company records as your own examples clearly indicate. An unpublished number has just as much chance of being picked by a "random dialer" as any other with the exception of those numbers on the Do Not Call list which must be filtered out. So how is asking each individual telemarketer to remove you from their list better than them not being allowed to call in the first place?
would said compensation be taxable then?
If you're aiming for low hanging fruit just to establish credibility, then I may be inclined to think you don't have anything credible to contribute, period.
What wikipedia 'needs' and is failing to achieve, accordinging to the opinion in the link, are excellent quality articles in a few 'core' fields of knowledge that are considered necessary to be considered an encyclopedia. What does wikipedia does not need is yet another laymen with no specific area of expertise editing a lot of articles because he/she 'thinks' she writes well.
If you are an expert in a given and you contribute articles pertaining to your field then it will show. No need to worry about establishing 'street cred'. By the same token, if you're an expert in your field and articles have already written for the things you're an expert on you can still contribute by helping preserve article's original quality (for example, by removing the laymen garbage that inevitable creeps in). Or you can sit back and do nothing, comfortable in the knowledge that your field is adequately covered. After all, sometimes the best contribution is knowing when something is good enough and just leaving it alone.
what the hell? The reason you don't take a dump in the library is because its extremely anti-social! How would reading on the toilet even compare (excluding the example of the single toilet in a packed house/office/dorm/etc with a growing lineup)
You are assuming that most snipers likely to be encountered are professionally trained.
What's a pissed off farmer shooting at passing soldiers while hiding in his barn?
Or say an Iraqi kid, hiding in a bombed out apartment flat, shooting at soldiers with a an abandoned AK
Or a conscript cowering in fear amongst rubble taking pot shots with the rifle that was thrust into his hands.
Hell, even a regular grunt who moves into a flanking position to try to pick off a few oppenonts while relatively concealed is a sniper.
I strongly suspect you're going to see far more of the above examples on the today's battlefield that the modern day ninja types glamourized by Hollywood and Discovery Channel.
While those stories are indeed disturbing, what makes them so is the lengths to which the US administration goes to hide these activities. They can and should be held accountable for this behaviour. But... that's the big difference here. The US administration IS ultimately accountable to its people for its actions. What is also significant is that the journalist who published those stories do not now have to live in fear of American retribution. You can find a lot of fault in some of the things done by the U.S., but they have long loooooong way to go before you can make honest comparisons between them and somebody like Iran.
No. Bill is right.
Here's proof. A very serious and gut-wrenching documentary of the life of a typical young gamer.
Episode 2 is especially illuminating.
http://www.purepwnage.com/
You are absolutely right.. Consensus is not proof.
But this isn't a mathematical dissertation.
You are confusing authority with mis-placed authority. A group of scientific experts in consensus on a particular issue that falls within their field of expertise is indeed a good argument to make in a political forum.
Where appeal to authority is wrong is when the authority is not qualified to judge something or is a maverick alone in his/her opinions. Lance Armstrong is a great bicyclist, so should I listen accept legal advice from him?
But.. we are not all experts and that's ok. But we have to acknowledge that we aren't experts and be willing to heed to the words of those who ARE and therefore know better than us. Furthermore, if these scientists have done their experiments using the scientific methods and reach consensus... why would the rest of us not take that into consideration? Do every 6 billion of us need to physically duplicate the experiments before it becomes a valid? The scientific method is a self-correcting methodology and has come further in explaining the world and things in it (and off it) in the last 100 years than religion has in the last 10000. It's not perfect... but its orders of magnitude better than what we had before and get this.. knowledge produced by science gets more accurate as time goes on as its theories get refined with each new observation. Even when there are disagreements the overall trend is to move toward consensus as the one theory gains more credibility over others.
Religion? Everytime something new comes up that can't be explained or is at odds with the word of God... well... it was intrepreted wrong. It was an allegory. Oh.. that was made obsolete by this new testament from a later prophet here. Oh.. what do you mean you don't agree? You Heretic!
Point is: If the scientific community is in consensus on this issue (and I'm not sure they are, despite what the article says) then that is indeed something the rest of us need to heed. It may not be "proof" but its a lot more rational to put faith in something that can justify its opinions with concrete evidence than not.
And I bet the author wears funny looking pants too! LOL!
Two points to make:
IANAL
Isn't florida, being an ex-Spanish colony, a "civil law" system?
In civil law areas, Judges have a lot more leeway in interepreting the "intent" of a law. It's the "common law" areas where more emphasis is placed on the literal interpretation of law. The differences between civil and common law jurisdictions are also reflected in the way legislation is written. Civil law statutes tend toward minimal legalese with more emphasis on describing the "intent" while common law - being more literal-minded - tend to produce lengthy pieces of statute that try to cover all bases.
If Florida is indeed a civil law jurisdiction then the Judges decision would certainly be in-line with the intent of the legislation (as I understand it) and was therefore the correct decision.
Secondly:
I really don't understand all this "litmus test" rhetoric that the liberal left seems to throw around (the article - not you). This law was intended to protect minors from some of the most sick and dangerous elements of society. I don't know about the rest of you, but I personally judge a society by how well it protects the innocent, not by how pedantically it crafts its legislation. If the existing legislation (and court decision) were allowed to interpreted more broadly to evolutions in society we wouldn't need to revisit the same old issues over and over and over again with each new form of media that arises just because it's not exactly an identical implementation of something already covered. Whether its chiseling runes in stone or pressing send in your email reader the "intent" is the same: "Hello World!" The old copyright/fair use laws for print would have worked just as well today for digital media. The betamax decision would be just as applicable to DVD-Rs. The common-carrier precedence would apply as well to ISPs as it did to phone lines. And we'd all be richer for not having to pay taxes to fund redundant legislation!
Since when did Rumsfeld have anything to do with the strategy or leadership in the war? He was "Secretary" of Defense, not General. He may have set the agenda, but he certainly didn't draw up the plans. His way of running the wars wasn't altogether unlike Hitler vis-a-vis the german Generals: Brilliant strategists being dictated to by a clueless and egotistical idiot who ignored the advice of his Generals in favor of grandiose cock-stroking pipedreams. The fact the US did as well as they did in the initial stages is testament to the superiority of their firepower against a poorly trained under-motivated 3rd-world army caught with its pants down on the open plains. That situation didn't last too long, either in Afghanistan or Iraq. The tragedy is, they could probably have salvaged the situation in Afghanistan if they hadn't immediately thrown all the resources into Iraq, a war we all know was pointless.
But whatever. Maybe he "should" be given a minor field level command position in Iraq and send him straight to the front. Let him see the ugly truth of what he got America into up close.
Just watch out for the disabled ninjas who can turn link themselves together to form a ramp.
In fact, I don't think I've cut myself since dropping the shaving cream (~6 months ago).
You sure it was the cream and not Moore's Law turning into Murphy's Law?
The odds of any blade being defective... multiplied by the ever increasing number of blades....
Obviously, you didn't read the part where a naked Ballmer jumped out of the cake throwing gobs of it at everyone and screaming "I'll f***** destroy You!"
As you say, paper ballets have been around for centuries and work just fine.
Won't someone think of the TREES!
It's time to put this fucking McDonald's hot coffee case to rest: It's been held up to be a shining beacon of the spurious nature of litigation in America when in FACT it is NOT. 3rd degree burns is not spurious!
- The plaintiff suffered 3rd degree burns over parts of her legs that required SKIN GRAFTS.
- The plaintiff only sued because she couldn't afford the cost of prolonged hospitalization she required and McDonald's refused to assist.
- McDonald's executives testified they KNEW their coffee was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns (burn occur over 130 degree, McDonalds was brewing their coffee as high as 205).
- McDonald's ignored advice to post warnings about the possibility of burns as well has ignore the warnings given to fast food industry as a whole that they were brewing their coffee too hot.
- The evidence showed McDonald's coffee was consistently 20 degrees hotter than the industry average.
The JUDGE AND JURY found McDonald's behaviour reckless, callous, and WILLFUL.
Furthermore... it's very easy for an ignoramous like yourself to be all righteous and disdainful when your livelihood is not at risk. People are mean to you at work? Boo fucking hoo! Are they depriving you of your ability to earn a living? Apparently not, so you're comparing apples to fridge magnets. Perhaps you find is amusing to see another wrongfully deprived of an income? How about if that person has a family to feed? Still funny? How about if your children are being picked on because of accusations made against you? Funnier still I bet, right? HA HA HA!
Libel is a crime. Period. It causes pain and anguish and loss of income. It is "assault". You're not so dimwitted and shallow to condone smacking someone upside the head with a bat are you? If so, post your address, you sociapathic fuck.
Hmmmm.
So what you're saying is I should tell my daughter she's destined to be a crack addicted whore... so that she will hopefully do her homework?
But...all these mishaps you just mentioned were serious.
"Seems innocuous" and serious are not mutually exclusive. In fact anything that does not seem innocuous has undoubtably been accounted for with quadruple redundancy backup preventative measures. All serious mishaps are thus likely the result of overlooking something small and innocuous.
I think a better question would be "Are the unaccountable and unpredicable points of failure threatening to overwhelm our ability to prepare for them potentially leading to the end of the space program?".
I hope not. Besides, the exploration of new frontiers have always involved some measure of luck and prayer. A "sure thing" just isn't good for the human spirit. If government won't do it (and should they?) then I believe there's plenty of private entrepeneurs who will step up to the plate.
Ahhh. And there's the catch.. from a purely statistical point of view what would lead to bigger skew: natural human counting errors at every poll station, or malicious skew introduced by one compromised machine (assuming that each machine must be compromised individually).
I guess it would depend upon sample size of course but it's not hard to imagine that the small chance of human error multiplied by thousands may surpass a single malicious machine.
However... human error can swing either way. A compromised machine would presumably show bias. Across a whole district or even a whole nation the accumulated results of human counting error would probably be negligble to the overall outcome whereas a single compromised machine would porbably make a significant difference.
So better security in this case is probably not a good thing. We want less security so that all the machine can be equally and effectively compromised. Assuming the political leanings of the "malicious hackers" are proportional to the overall population then an orgy of tampering would in the end have neglgible results on the outcome of the election.
In this age of quantum..ness both pronunciations exist as possibilities until a listener hears the word and the probability wave collapses.
Right "now" people are being hurt by globalization but what I think a point that a lot of people are missing is that in the "loooong" term... it won't matter. The pain is part of the global rebalancing that in the end should leave everyone on a level playing field.
Currently jobs are being lost because of the wage disparity between here and the places where jobs are being offshored to. But as more employment moves to these other countries the standard of living will rise, so will the demands for better working conditions. Wages will increase. Consumption will increase. It happend in the western industrialized democracies...why would it NOT happen elsewhere?
Today there's not much of an economic advantage to having your IT in Germany, versus France, versus Canada, versus the US... so too in the near future when everything evens out, will it not be any advantage to having services outsourced to India or China or Tuvalu versus here at home (wherever home may be). We'll all be on a level playing field and we'll all be better off for it. Or do you believe the west is entitled to a better level prosperity than anyone else?
I disagree.
The definitions have not changed, and neither has the use of superlatives and hyperbole to express emotion. People have been doing it for as long as people have been talking.
We use terms like genius and hero in a broader context than the dictionary definition warrants precisely because of the narrow dictionary definition. A more "general" word would lack the emotional punch otherwise. Like all things, it's all about context. The context of genius when talking excitedly about one's child's latest feat is quite different when comparing the IQs of historical figures.
One more point: You don't think Zsa Zsa Gabor is a star? Go stick your head in a toilet.
Many undergrad papers are basically 'book-report'-type things (albeit with several books and more difficult subject matter than grade school book reports).
Yes. Of course they are, especially in the first two years. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. Do you honestly expect 17 year-old kids fresh out of high-school to have the maturity or even the know-how to write a university level term paper?
However, as one progresses the expectation increases (at least it did in my school), to the point where the final year of studies the majority of one's grades comes from one or two written (either "code" or "prose") works. Those who weren't committed or couldn't do the work were gone by the end of the 2nd year and though I don't have anything to back it up, I would strongly suspect that it's in those first two years that the most cheating occurs.
Speaking from experience my undergrad class went from 120 in the first year to I think about 40-50 by the end of the fourth (in my major). My minor went from classrooms of 40-50 to seminars of 6-10 almost by the end of the second year however. Pretty hard to cheat there as you either "knew your shit" and contributed to the discussion or you didn't. The nice thing about written work is it's actually pretty hard to cheat (at the higher levels) when your professor knows all the literature inside and out. She/He will probably have a good idea of whose written work may be suspect simply by how much the individual was able to contribute in classroom discussion. Keep in mind the material on the net that a cheater may be inclined to plagiarize had to come from somewhere too, and very likely a source that a knowledgable professor is well acquainted with.