I am sick of all the people justifying the cheaters.
The fact is that the cheaters are cheapening the value of your degree. What you are paying for when you pay the big bucks for the tuition is the reputation of the school. When some dumbass cheater gets out without knowing what they are supposed to know, they harm the school's reputation that is on your diploma. They are cheapenng your degree.
Yes, make all the stupid justifications that you don't need what they are teaching and the assignments are meaningless. You seem to miss the function that universities provide. Their business is not teaching. Their function is certifying that that you learned what you say you did. There is nothing that you cannot learn by just going to the library and reading it yourself and observing the world around you on your own. Their true responsibility begins and ends with putting the grade on the gradebook. Sometimes you get a great instructor that is a good teacher, sometimes you get one that sucks. Luck of he draw. It is not their responsibility to teach. It is your responsibility to learn.
You say that they are using the student's papers without compensation? Any tool that they use to weed out the slackers makes your degree that much more valuable.
Give me a degree from an institution that it is free from the cheating losers. That is true value.
that people don't read the articles and don't even bother to link them.
The only problem with an opensource program forking is deciding which fork to follow. Time is also on on the side of the adopters as they have the same code base for quite a while anyway. It takes time to make those changes that caused the rift.
One solution is for not everyone to be able to run a mail server.
Have a network of Authorized Servers to start. These can communicate through SSL or any number of encrypted and authenticated systems.
You want to start a mail server into the "club", you have two choices, get a sponser (ie: your ISP) or put real money in an escrow account.
You get a rating in the group as to the the kind and amount of mail you send. If you get too many complaints about your mail, you lose points. If you behave well long enough without problems, you gain points. Operate long enough without problems, and your account is split off to become your own entity seperate from your sponsor.
If you are sponsored, you not only lose points from your mail domain, your sponsor gets points deducted as well. If you are self sponsored, you lose money from your escrow account.
This will have two main benefits. You make it hurt (expensive) for people sending mail that people do not want. You also make this reputation for managed content a bankable commodity. An ISP for instance can have some "four star" (as an example, probably tradmarked scoring would be needed) rating as an enticement to get people to send mail through them.
Corrolary benefit: Takes away the temptation for the ISP that would look the other way for a price and let people send bulk mailings.
Could be expanded to do things like limit amount of mail that you could send until you recieved sufficient ranking. This could build in several levels. X number of points and you could send over 10 mails/ day. More points and your cap goes up to 100. More points and you can operate a listserv. Final level is you are a peer that is unrestricted.
The individual rules could be set by the sponsoring ISP. Don't like their policy, get another provider for mail. Another selling point for the ISP.
The whole point of it is to make it more attractive to be well behaved and to have a way to make it too expensive to send unwanted mail.
I have not focused in on either spam or email viruses. Treat them the same. Poorly managed email is poorly managed email.
Do you think that the RIAA is more worried about the filesharing of music that is already on their labels or (as I believe) that they are using it as a means of blocking independant artists from bypassing them as the main distributor of the artists work?
It's not about the money. The whole idea is to set a precident. The only way that the closed source system can fight back the loosing battle is to muddy the water about licensing.
They can't beat it on performance. They can't beat it on price. They can't beat it on stability.
What else do they have?
There were people using SCO unix for low end systems in shops that couldn't afford "The Big Boys". SCO has no market left. There is no point to them doing anything but a last ditch effort to save some small niche market from people afraid of any possibility of license issues. They don't have the support of Open Source development to aid their commercial product (Like some BSD). They don't have any high dollar hardware to bundle with (IBM, Sun, SGI). The only thing they might have is some customer loyalty from those who they treated well with support (I have no idea, never dealt with them). There is nothing left. Either they show enough promise to dump some stock or they bully a few reluctant customers. Its sure that if their customers are happy with their product, they are surely looking towards the free stuff that can at the very least equal what they have been paying top dollar for.
Anyway, They are not long for this world. Even if they muddied the water with Linux, FreeBSD would welcome us with open arms. (Maybe not wide open, they are dying you know.;)
Unfortunately, it does not work that way. Whether we like the idea or not, we have a worldwide economy.
Personally, I would rather give my business to some "underdeveloped" country with a good product than worry about "Buy USA" with the business practices that we have here. Remember, all this outourcing overseas is not being done by foreign companies. The biggest problem was when we decided that corporations had the same rights as people. People are often bound by morality or at least fear of reprisal. We now have corporations that are a mechanism to do things that we as individuals would be outraged or afraid to do ourselves. As long as our investments are getting good returns, we look the other way at what the company is doing. We diversify our portfolios so that the odds of losing are less if one gets caught with their pants down. If they want to do something that is against the laws in one country, they just move that portion offshore.
If you want to boycott somethng, make it a general principle to not deal with companies that do things you disagree with. If you just flock to the company with the best bottom line, you get the likes of Enron and Worldcom. As long as these companies can lobby and otherwise subvert the system they can look good on some ledger (the public one) and make a quick buck, even if it is a scam. Making the executives of the company liable is a good start. It should however go much deeper into all levels of management.
So what? You think that your elite skills should be worth the world forever? Get a grip on reality. If you are not constantly on the ball making sure that you are employable, you deserve what you get. Hmm, tech sector has been taking a dive and you have been watching your co-workers getting the axe for several years and you just sat on your ass hoping you were not next without reworking your skillset? You deserve what you get.
Missed the target when you didn't get your QWERT and ASDF certifications and they are what everyone wants? Opps, missed it.
Got the JKLP Certification or the BSXY degree and the jobs are all out there for the PSSPA Certification and the MSABLMNOP degree? Hmm, the world still owes you a killer salary for even though you made the wrong choice?
Most people go through several major career changes. Think it was that they got bored with the work they were doing for big bucks? Try going through 4 or 5 totally unrelated unrelated career changes and come back and whine that your high dollar job went away and now you are back at the bottom of the food chain.
It is your responsibility to keep yourself employable and valuable. As long as you are relying on other people to give you money and cool toys, its your job to make sure that they want to keep giving them to you. Thats the way the world works. Get used to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have not seen the latest editions but I suggest reading the book:
Looking Good in Print by Roger C. Parker
It is predominantly oriented towards publishing but web pages are a similar enough medium.
I am sick of all the people justifying the cheaters.
The fact is that the cheaters are cheapening the value of your degree. What you are paying for when you pay the big bucks for the tuition is the reputation of the school. When some dumbass cheater gets out without knowing what they are supposed to know, they harm the school's reputation that is on your diploma. They are cheapenng your degree.
Yes, make all the stupid justifications that you don't need what they are teaching and the assignments are meaningless. You seem to miss the function that universities provide. Their business is not teaching. Their function is certifying that that you learned what you say you did. There is nothing that you cannot learn by just going to the library and reading it yourself and observing the world around you on your own. Their true responsibility begins and ends with putting the grade on the gradebook. Sometimes you get a great instructor that is a good teacher, sometimes you get one that sucks. Luck of he draw. It is not their responsibility to teach. It is your responsibility to learn.
You say that they are using the student's papers without compensation? Any tool that they use to weed out the slackers makes your degree that much more valuable.
Give me a degree from an institution that it is free from the cheating losers. That is true value.
that people don't read the articles and don't even bother to link them.
The only problem with an opensource program forking is deciding which fork to follow. Time is also on on the side of the adopters as they have the same code base for quite a while anyway. It takes time to make those changes that caused the rift.
One solution is for not everyone to be able to run a mail server.
Have a network of Authorized Servers to start. These can communicate through SSL or any number of encrypted and authenticated systems.
You want to start a mail server into the "club", you have two choices, get a sponser (ie: your ISP) or put real money in an escrow account.
You get a rating in the group as to the the kind and amount of mail you send. If you get too many complaints about your mail, you lose points. If you behave well long enough without problems, you gain points. Operate long enough without problems, and your account is split off to become your own entity seperate from your sponsor.
If you are sponsored, you not only lose points from your mail domain, your sponsor gets points deducted as well. If you are self sponsored, you lose money from your escrow account.
This will have two main benefits. You make it hurt (expensive) for people sending mail that people do not want. You also make this reputation for managed content a bankable commodity. An ISP for instance can have some "four star" (as an example, probably tradmarked scoring would be needed) rating as an enticement to get people to send mail through them.
Corrolary benefit: Takes away the temptation for the ISP that would look the other way for a price and let people send bulk mailings.
Could be expanded to do things like limit amount of mail that you could send until you recieved sufficient ranking. This could build in several levels. X number of points and you could send over 10 mails/ day. More points and your cap goes up to 100. More points and you can operate a listserv. Final level is you are a peer that is unrestricted.
The individual rules could be set by the sponsoring ISP. Don't like their policy, get another provider for mail. Another selling point for the ISP.
The whole point of it is to make it more attractive to be well behaved and to have a way to make it too expensive to send unwanted mail.
I have not focused in on either spam or email viruses. Treat them the same. Poorly managed email is poorly managed email.
Do you think that the RIAA is more worried about the filesharing of music that is already on their labels or (as I believe) that they are using it as a means of blocking independant artists from bypassing them as the main distributor of the artists work?
It's not about the money. The whole idea is to set a precident. The only way that the closed source system can fight back the loosing battle is to muddy the water about licensing.
;)
They can't beat it on performance.
They can't beat it on price.
They can't beat it on stability.
What else do they have?
There were people using SCO unix for low end systems in shops that couldn't afford "The Big Boys". SCO has no market left. There is no point to them doing anything but a last ditch effort to save some small niche market from people afraid of any possibility of license issues. They don't have the support of Open Source development to aid their commercial product (Like some BSD). They don't have any high dollar hardware to bundle with (IBM, Sun, SGI). The only thing they might have is some customer loyalty from those who they treated well with support (I have no idea, never dealt with them). There is nothing left. Either they show enough promise to dump some stock or they bully a few reluctant customers. Its sure that if their customers are happy with their product, they are surely looking towards the free stuff that can at the very least equal what they have been paying top dollar for.
Anyway, They are not long for this world. Even if they muddied the water with Linux, FreeBSD would welcome us with open arms. (Maybe not wide open, they are dying you know.
Unfortunately, it does not work that way. Whether we like the idea or not, we have a worldwide economy.
Personally, I would rather give my business to some "underdeveloped" country with a good product than worry about "Buy USA" with the business practices that we have here. Remember, all this outourcing overseas is not being done by foreign companies. The biggest problem was when we decided that corporations had the same rights as people. People are often bound by morality or at least fear of reprisal. We now have corporations that are a mechanism to do things that we as individuals would be outraged or afraid to do ourselves. As long as our investments are getting good returns, we look the other way at what the company is doing. We diversify our portfolios so that the odds of losing are less if one gets caught with their pants down. If they want to do something that is against the laws in one country, they just move that portion offshore.
If you want to boycott somethng, make it a general principle to not deal with companies that do things you disagree with. If you just flock to the company with the best bottom line, you get the likes of Enron and Worldcom. As long as these companies can lobby and otherwise subvert the system they can look good on some ledger (the public one) and make a quick buck, even if it is a scam. Making the executives of the company liable is a good start. It should however go much deeper into all levels of management.
So what? You think that your elite skills should be worth the world forever? Get a grip on reality. If you are not constantly on the ball making sure that you are employable, you deserve what you get. Hmm, tech sector has been taking a dive and you have been watching your co-workers getting the axe for several years and you just sat on your ass hoping you were not next without reworking your skillset? You deserve what you get.
Missed the target when you didn't get your QWERT and ASDF certifications and they are what everyone wants? Opps, missed it.
Got the JKLP Certification or the BSXY degree and the jobs are all out there for the PSSPA Certification and the MSABLMNOP degree? Hmm, the world still owes you a killer salary for even though you made the wrong choice?
Most people go through several major career changes. Think it was that they got bored with the work they were doing for big bucks? Try going through 4 or 5 totally unrelated unrelated career changes and come back and whine that your high dollar job went away and now you are back at the bottom of the food chain.
It is your responsibility to keep yourself employable and valuable. As long as you are relying on other people to give you money and cool toys, its your job to make sure that they want to keep giving them to you. Thats the way the world works. Get used to it.