Interestingly, many Universities are utilizing the Internet heavily for research activities.
Well that was its original purpose after all; not games, music or pron.
Re:College is more than listening to a lecture.
on
Should College Go Online?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sometimes the professors--depending on how much the school emphasizes teaching as opposed to research
In my experience most of the top universities, particularly in STEM degree programs, emphasize research and the government funding that goes with that. They want Nobel Prize winners who can attract federal grants and private corporations to foot the bills and enhance their research prestige. In such cases the undergraduates are mostly an afterthought until the more promising ones manage to crawl out of the muck and become PhD candidates or useful assistants for more research. In fact, I would argue that many community colleges have lower division instructors who are at least as good as any that are likely to be found in most four year universities. Perhaps my experience was unusual, I did attend a research university after all, but surely I wasn't the only one who noticed that some professors viewed teaching less as a profession and more as a necessary chore that distracted them from their true ambition; fully funded and self directed research.
Firstly, I don't consider myself to be a member of the Tea Party, even though I am sympathetic to some of their views. As far as I'm aware, I still retain the right of self identification when it comes to my affiliations and associations. Secondly, what makes you think that the Tea Party is in favor of oil, coal or nuclear subsidies? From all that I'm acquainted with them, most Tea Party members are opposed to subsidies of any kind, which they generally regard as unwarranted government intrusion into the free market. Is this not so?
Which amounts to giving Congress the power to issue just about any arbitrary order they wish to the citizenry under penalty of fine for failure to comply. If merely being alive has an effect on interstate commerce that falls under the power of Congress to regulate then so does almost every other practical detail of any citizens' life. What's next, high taxes on fatty foods because "they're bad for you". Fines for people who fail to adhere to a government mandated exercise program? Give me a break.
Has anyone else noticed that one of the major differences between the rich and the poor, or even the rich and the middle class, is that the rich negotiate while the poor and the middle class don't? The parent is right; stand up for yourself and negotiate. You have little to lose and much to gain. Even a moderately successful negotiation can be well worth the time and effort required to pursue it.
But mandatory automobile insurance is what, exactly?
Sigh, surely someone as intelligent as yourself knows well the flaws of that analogy. Suffice it say that driving is a choice and that it's not unreasonable, at a minimum, to require that those who elect to drive upon the public right of way show some minimal proof that they are both (a) competent to operate a motor vehicle and (b) able to take financial responsibility for the consequences of their actions, intended or not, upon third parties who stand to be directly impacted, pun intended, by their decision to drive. Health insurance insures only against consequences experienced by the individual making the choice to carry it or not. You might perhaps argue that parents are "irresponsible" for not insuring themselves and their children, but the courts have ruled time and again that parents have very wide latitude to decide how their children should be raised and thus intervene only rarely and under narrow circumstances; generally only when the life or welfare of the minor child is in immediate jeopardy of severe and lasting harm. In short, it's an apples and oranges comparison and you and I both know it.
When Joe the Plumber walks into the ER with a sick child and then can't pay the bill because he doesn't have insurance, the hospital doesn't eat that. It passes its costs on to the paying customers, the ones who do have insurance. I don't call that self determination, I call that mooching.
The emergency rooms is for real emergencies, not sick children who won't suffer permanent damage or die from their illness. As soon as it's determined that neither of these will be the case the emergency room staff should refer them to their family physician or the nearest walk-in clinic and send them on their way. If Joe the plumber insists upon pressing the issue than the hospital should demand payment upfront or take out a lien on his property or have his wages garnished until the debt is repaid.
The last time that I was admitted to hospital I paid the debt in full, even though it took me 6 months. Fortunately, I wasn't admitted through the emergency room so the costs were somewhat less, but even so I still carry health insurance for that eventuality. However, just because I choose to carry insurance of my own free will doesn't mean that I support the government forcing other people (or even myself) to do the same. You may not approve of other peoples' lifestyle choices, but that doesn't give you or the government the right to interfere with peoples' freedom to make them; even if those choices aren't the ones that you or the government think that they ought to be making.
When I need to use the hospital, my insurance company pays more, and in turn I pay more for the insurance, to cover the cost of the Joes in this country who don't have insurance.
Have you tried negotiating ahead of time in non-emergency situations? I have a health savings account myself and I find that hospitals and doctors are quite willing to negotiate when it's clear that the person with whom their speaking is a person of means with other treatment options. Even if you only manage to knock a few hundred or thousand dollars of the bill, that works out to several times that in terms of an hourly rate. That's almost certainly worth your time and what's the worst that can happen? The price remains unchanged and you can either agree or go someplace else. Medical care in most cases is a commodity service, not a monopoly franchise.
Why should I be footing the bill for Joe's inability to adequately care for himself and his family?
I remind you that the government created this problem by forcing hospital emergency rooms to admit and treat everyone, regardless of condition severity or ability to repay. It was government intervention which created the problem in the first place so what makes you think that more of the same will solve it? People must learn that
all my foo-foo fuzzy classes...were a blast to take online, i.e. a breeze and at my own leisure), giving me more focus on classes I actually cared about.
It has been a while now since I completed my degree, but I do recall that there was, and probably still is, a lot of politics between departments and schools regarding those "foo-foo fuzzy" classes. Indeed, the ongoing debates between the engineering, arts and humanities schools over just what constituted a "foo-foo fuzzy" class became quite heated at my university; flaring up from time to time when new students enrolled and rehashed the same arguments. Of course, the science and engineering students resented being forced to "waste time" with courses in the arts and humanities, with only grudging concessions made to the English department regarding basic undergraduate writing skills. These STEM students made good and logical points, but they never seemed to express them as well in writing or debate with the arts, humanities and philosophy students. Looking back on it, I have to admit that the liberal arts people did have some good arguments to make. Do we really want brilliant scientists and engineers roaming this earth with no sense of moral philosophy or human history? What sort of results would that yield? Remember that it was STEM people who built the bomb for Stalin, produced biological and chemical weapons for Saddam and are doing both now for the mullahs of Iran. So, despite my computer science background, I have to admit that courses outside the college of engineering weren't quite so useless after all; even though I didn't always see that at the time.
One of my lower division calculus professors was from Bulgaria and had learned math in the traditional Soviet style system. He shunned calculators and computers, but had an outstanding grasp of the material and an intuitive sense of whether or not the students were following him. He even used the alternative names for certain theorems. For example the "squeeze theorem", limit of a curve bounded by limits of two others, became the "two policemen theorem" because when Bulgaria was still communist and two policemen approached from opposite sides of the street, the goal was to squeeze between them and keep on walking; great sense of humor that guy.
I speak from some experience when I say that Indian style English generally takes more than 24 hours to get used to. In my previous experience it took me a couple of months before the Indians with whom I was working could speak at full speed in Indian accented English without the risk of losing me somewhere in the middle of their rapid cadence. Australians have less accent and are less likely to be uptight fast talkers as many Indians seem to be.
You are using the numbers in a misleading way. It's more accurate to say that the Chinese, while still less developed than the west, are rapidly adopting our worst habits for their own economic advantage. Indeed, Chinese production is actually more energy intensive per dollar of GDP because their industry and use of technology is less developed than in the advanced economies of Europe and the United States. The amount emitted per capita by China is increasing rapidly. In short, the Chinese currently emit less per capita, because millions of their citizens still live in rural agrarian poverty, but more per dollar of GDP because their industry is dirty and inefficient compared to the more advanced economies. I wouldn't exactly call that "environmentally friendly".
Yes. Nothing will change until large numbers of people voluntarily decide to make do with much less than they have become accustomed to. How many times has this happened in human history without lots of violence, societal disruption and strife? Answer: exactly zero. So why deny the inevitable or make meaningless sacrifices? Might as well enjoy what we have left while we're still around to enjoy it.
There's a difference between using the power of the state, which is to say the power of superior violence, to compel people to adopt certain lifestyle "choices" on the one hand and deciding how public money from taxes shall be spent on the other hand. For example making it unlawful to buy certain goods or services or unlawful to NOT buy other goods and services (i.e. mandatory private health insurance) is different from spending less public money on science. Most Americans understand that we should be careful and deliberate when enacting laws that could deprive citizens of life, liberty or property in pursuit of "public goods". The pursuit of the greatest "public good", regardless of cost, is the philosophy of the Utilitarians and it's one that's antithetical the philosophy that values freedom and respects the rights of individuals to meaningful self-determination.
Meanwhile the Chinese are building new coal plants, driving more automobiles and generally becoming a western style consumer culture. Any action which might be undertaken by individuals, like this carbon capture sun roof, is meaningless by way of comparison; it's spit in the ocean. I am now more convinced than ever that the target audiences of these products are wealthy European and American liberals who wish to absolve themselves of "green guilt" associated with their high carbon affluent lifestyles through purchases of what amounts to indulgences. I have no problem with this. Let everyone spend their own money as they choose. However, I do have a problem with these same liberals attempt to use the power of the state to force their bullshit green attitudes on the rest of us. The Chinese, Indians and everyone else laughs at how stupid these green Americans are while building more coal plants and driving around in dirty two-stroke diesels. Face it, environmental quality is a luxury good and its becoming a luxury that even wealthier Americans can no longer afford.
Like ethanol, this energy source also has the potential to be in conflict with a basic human need: fresh water. The world is already running short of fresh water even now, even though it doesn't yet make the news on a regular basis.Mixing fresh water with salt water to produce hydrogen on a large scale will be hard to contemplate while millions are dying of drought and thirst. Like most other "miracle" energy sources, there is always a fly in the ointment.
rather than not sending spam in the first place, they just ensure it comes from different mail servers and a different domain to their normal operations.
Even this has long since ceased being effective. Most legitimate hosting companies will cut off violators of their "terms of service" which generally include rules to the effect that sending out unsolicited emails (i.e. spam) from their address ranges is grounds for termination of contract. Look at it from their prospective, if even a few of their clients did this SpamHaus and others would very quickly black ball their entire address range so that all of their customers would see their outbound emails black-holed. The so-called "bullet proof" hosts are generally located overseas and have poor connections and worse reputations; they are also black balled regularly. In fact, many smaller businesses still blacklist all email coming from Asian countries and especially from China and Russia. The only way to reliably send mass email anymore is via botnet and even that is becoming more difficult due to effective counter-attacks on command and control servers and better client side Bayesian filtering. Spam is a losing game these days and only stupid managers send spam or hire spammers to do it for them.
It isn't even something people realise they are doing.
On the contrary, some of us realize precisely what we are doing. It's not possible to continue into the next century with the current levels of human population; the climate is almost certainly past the point where likely future food and energy requirements can be satisfied. We've already committed to a changed planet. We should do our best to adapt instead of wasting precious time and resources on increasingly desperate attempts to forestall the inevitable. Preserving the progress of humanity is more important than preserving every last one of us.
Here in the US, there's a rampant bullying problem in the schools that reinforces a negative view toward education, in general.
Which persists here in the US due in large part to a namby-pamby culture that exists in our public schools; where every child, whether deserving or not, is treated with kid gloves. The bullies get away with virtually anything they wish while their victims are punished instead. What needs to happen is for our children to be told early on about how society deals with those who can't or won't exercise self restraint. Tell them how uncivilized and uneducated thugs end up in federal prisons for some of the longest terms in the western world with those who are twice and thrice as tough as them. Inform them that legions of hungry and ambitious children in India and China are just itching for a chance to eat their collective lunches when they grow up. Finally, tell them all that if they fail to meet expectations, society will discard them without pity or mercy for being stupid or lazy. This is the truth and there is power in it for those who learn it early. Of course, the utter impotence of our teachers' unions and the liberal bullshit that is spoon fed to our children in public schools virtually ensures that only the children of the wealthy, who can afford an elite education in private schools with tutors, ever learn theses things soon enough to be competitive. The US is being soundly beaten in education because we fail to discipline our children and we waste vast sums of money ensuring that every student meets a low minimum standard instead of identifying the best and most worthy students early and advancing them fully for the future benefit of society, as the Indians and Chinese do, even at the expense of the "slow" ones. Not every child is going to become an entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, doctor or lawyer (we have too many lawyers anyway). An education system which recognizes this and allocates resources efficiently and effectively, by advancing the best and most worthy students while discarding the losers, benefits society more than one that's based upon equality of underachievement; as it is here in the United States. So tell the children the truth. Tell them that every one of them has a chance, but that outcomes aren't equal and only those who seize upon the opportunities and make the most of them will succeed in school or life.
Except that reading the patents, and most especially software patents, is a complete waste of time. You won't learn anything because patents are written by lawyers, perhaps in consultation with an engineer to help obfuscate with technical buzz words, to be (a) as broad and as general as possible with vague wording so as to enable as many interpretations as possible (b) completely useless to anyone actually trying to base an implementation off of the patent documents. Finally, actually searching for and reading patents exposes you to treble damages for willful infringement if you ever are sued. Patents are a waste of software engineers' time (and probably other engineers nowadays too, but I cannot speak to that directly); nothing good can come of searching or reading them unless you are an attorney who specializes in patent litigation.
Judges sometimes impose conditions in order to certify the class. For example, it might be required that a certain percentage of likely future of plaintiffs sign on before the class can be certified. It would probably be something like gathering signatures for a ballot initiative; costly, tedious and labor intensive. Another fly in the ointment is that many universities have a clause in their bylaws stating that they can never settle a lawsuit; it must be litigated until won or ultimately lost in court on appeal. For example, the UCs in California have that policy; no doubt to discourage frivolous lawsuits.
IMHO, not every work currently under copyright is worth the time, effort and expense required of society in order to catalog and preserve it. Indeed, most modern works are probably not worth preserving for the next hundred years or at least not in their original forms. For example, millions of used mass market paperbacks are pulped every year in the United States and it doesn't seem to be any great loss.
While I am neither attorney nor judge, it seems to me that since the dispute arose out of the digitization project undertaken by Google and given that the circumstances and arguments are likely to be identical or at least similar for any individual work; the Authors Guild could probably make a case that they represent a class of plaintiffs and stand a decent chance of being certified as plaintiffs representing that class. Of course, it might be difficult from a practical standpoint to track down enough individual members who agree to be certified into the class, especially given the large numbers of works involved, but it may be possible depending upon what requirements are imposed by the judge to certify the class.
Yes, but the "no add-ins" restriction, among others, make it a poor alternative for professionals. Of course, that was Microsoft's intention all along with the express line. Make it suitable for hobbyists and small time consultants, but unsuitable for serious developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, many Universities are utilizing the Internet heavily for research activities.
Well that was its original purpose after all; not games, music or pron.
Sometimes the professors--depending on how much the school emphasizes teaching as opposed to research
In my experience most of the top universities, particularly in STEM degree programs, emphasize research and the government funding that goes with that. They want Nobel Prize winners who can attract federal grants and private corporations to foot the bills and enhance their research prestige. In such cases the undergraduates are mostly an afterthought until the more promising ones manage to crawl out of the muck and become PhD candidates or useful assistants for more research. In fact, I would argue that many community colleges have lower division instructors who are at least as good as any that are likely to be found in most four year universities. Perhaps my experience was unusual, I did attend a research university after all, but surely I wasn't the only one who noticed that some professors viewed teaching less as a profession and more as a necessary chore that distracted them from their true ambition; fully funded and self directed research.
Firstly, I don't consider myself to be a member of the Tea Party, even though I am sympathetic to some of their views. As far as I'm aware, I still retain the right of self identification when it comes to my affiliations and associations. Secondly, what makes you think that the Tea Party is in favor of oil, coal or nuclear subsidies? From all that I'm acquainted with them, most Tea Party members are opposed to subsidies of any kind, which they generally regard as unwarranted government intrusion into the free market. Is this not so?
Which amounts to giving Congress the power to issue just about any arbitrary order they wish to the citizenry under penalty of fine for failure to comply. If merely being alive has an effect on interstate commerce that falls under the power of Congress to regulate then so does almost every other practical detail of any citizens' life. What's next, high taxes on fatty foods because "they're bad for you". Fines for people who fail to adhere to a government mandated exercise program? Give me a break.
Has anyone else noticed that one of the major differences between the rich and the poor, or even the rich and the middle class, is that the rich negotiate while the poor and the middle class don't? The parent is right; stand up for yourself and negotiate. You have little to lose and much to gain. Even a moderately successful negotiation can be well worth the time and effort required to pursue it.
But mandatory automobile insurance is what, exactly?
Sigh, surely someone as intelligent as yourself knows well the flaws of that analogy. Suffice it say that driving is a choice and that it's not unreasonable, at a minimum, to require that those who elect to drive upon the public right of way show some minimal proof that they are both (a) competent to operate a motor vehicle and (b) able to take financial responsibility for the consequences of their actions, intended or not, upon third parties who stand to be directly impacted, pun intended, by their decision to drive. Health insurance insures only against consequences experienced by the individual making the choice to carry it or not. You might perhaps argue that parents are "irresponsible" for not insuring themselves and their children, but the courts have ruled time and again that parents have very wide latitude to decide how their children should be raised and thus intervene only rarely and under narrow circumstances; generally only when the life or welfare of the minor child is in immediate jeopardy of severe and lasting harm. In short, it's an apples and oranges comparison and you and I both know it.
When Joe the Plumber walks into the ER with a sick child and then can't pay the bill because he doesn't have insurance, the hospital doesn't eat that. It passes its costs on to the paying customers, the ones who do have insurance. I don't call that self determination, I call that mooching.
The emergency rooms is for real emergencies, not sick children who won't suffer permanent damage or die from their illness. As soon as it's determined that neither of these will be the case the emergency room staff should refer them to their family physician or the nearest walk-in clinic and send them on their way. If Joe the plumber insists upon pressing the issue than the hospital should demand payment upfront or take out a lien on his property or have his wages garnished until the debt is repaid.
The last time that I was admitted to hospital I paid the debt in full, even though it took me 6 months. Fortunately, I wasn't admitted through the emergency room so the costs were somewhat less, but even so I still carry health insurance for that eventuality. However, just because I choose to carry insurance of my own free will doesn't mean that I support the government forcing other people (or even myself) to do the same. You may not approve of other peoples' lifestyle choices, but that doesn't give you or the government the right to interfere with peoples' freedom to make them; even if those choices aren't the ones that you or the government think that they ought to be making.
When I need to use the hospital, my insurance company pays more, and in turn I pay more for the insurance, to cover the cost of the Joes in this country who don't have insurance.
Have you tried negotiating ahead of time in non-emergency situations? I have a health savings account myself and I find that hospitals and doctors are quite willing to negotiate when it's clear that the person with whom their speaking is a person of means with other treatment options. Even if you only manage to knock a few hundred or thousand dollars of the bill, that works out to several times that in terms of an hourly rate. That's almost certainly worth your time and what's the worst that can happen? The price remains unchanged and you can either agree or go someplace else. Medical care in most cases is a commodity service, not a monopoly franchise.
Why should I be footing the bill for Joe's inability to adequately care for himself and his family?
I remind you that the government created this problem by forcing hospital emergency rooms to admit and treat everyone, regardless of condition severity or ability to repay. It was government intervention which created the problem in the first place so what makes you think that more of the same will solve it? People must learn that
all my foo-foo fuzzy classes...were a blast to take online, i.e. a breeze and at my own leisure), giving me more focus on classes I actually cared about.
It has been a while now since I completed my degree, but I do recall that there was, and probably still is, a lot of politics between departments and schools regarding those "foo-foo fuzzy" classes. Indeed, the ongoing debates between the engineering, arts and humanities schools over just what constituted a "foo-foo fuzzy" class became quite heated at my university; flaring up from time to time when new students enrolled and rehashed the same arguments. Of course, the science and engineering students resented being forced to "waste time" with courses in the arts and humanities, with only grudging concessions made to the English department regarding basic undergraduate writing skills. These STEM students made good and logical points, but they never seemed to express them as well in writing or debate with the arts, humanities and philosophy students. Looking back on it, I have to admit that the liberal arts people did have some good arguments to make. Do we really want brilliant scientists and engineers roaming this earth with no sense of moral philosophy or human history? What sort of results would that yield? Remember that it was STEM people who built the bomb for Stalin, produced biological and chemical weapons for Saddam and are doing both now for the mullahs of Iran. So, despite my computer science background, I have to admit that courses outside the college of engineering weren't quite so useless after all; even though I didn't always see that at the time.
One of my lower division calculus professors was from Bulgaria and had learned math in the traditional Soviet style system. He shunned calculators and computers, but had an outstanding grasp of the material and an intuitive sense of whether or not the students were following him. He even used the alternative names for certain theorems. For example the "squeeze theorem", limit of a curve bounded by limits of two others, became the "two policemen theorem" because when Bulgaria was still communist and two policemen approached from opposite sides of the street, the goal was to squeeze between them and keep on walking; great sense of humor that guy.
From My Cousin Vinny
Vinny Gambini: It is possible that the two yutes...
Judge Chamberlain Haller: ...Ah, the two what? Uh... uh, what was that word?
Vinny Gambini: Uh... what word?
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Two what?
Vinny Gambini: What?
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Uh... did you say 'yutes'?
Vinny Gambini: Yeah, two yutes.
Judge Chamberlain Haller: What is a yute?
Vinny Gambini: [beat] Oh, excuse me, your honor...
[exaggerated]
Vinny Gambini: Two YOUTHS.
I speak from some experience when I say that Indian style English generally takes more than 24 hours to get used to. In my previous experience it took me a couple of months before the Indians with whom I was working could speak at full speed in Indian accented English without the risk of losing me somewhere in the middle of their rapid cadence. Australians have less accent and are less likely to be uptight fast talkers as many Indians seem to be.
You are using the numbers in a misleading way. It's more accurate to say that the Chinese, while still less developed than the west, are rapidly adopting our worst habits for their own economic advantage. Indeed, Chinese production is actually more energy intensive per dollar of GDP because their industry and use of technology is less developed than in the advanced economies of Europe and the United States. The amount emitted per capita by China is increasing rapidly. In short, the Chinese currently emit less per capita, because millions of their citizens still live in rural agrarian poverty, but more per dollar of GDP because their industry is dirty and inefficient compared to the more advanced economies. I wouldn't exactly call that "environmentally friendly".
Yes. Nothing will change until large numbers of people voluntarily decide to make do with much less than they have become accustomed to. How many times has this happened in human history without lots of violence, societal disruption and strife? Answer: exactly zero. So why deny the inevitable or make meaningless sacrifices? Might as well enjoy what we have left while we're still around to enjoy it.
There's a difference between using the power of the state, which is to say the power of superior violence, to compel people to adopt certain lifestyle "choices" on the one hand and deciding how public money from taxes shall be spent on the other hand. For example making it unlawful to buy certain goods or services or unlawful to NOT buy other goods and services (i.e. mandatory private health insurance) is different from spending less public money on science. Most Americans understand that we should be careful and deliberate when enacting laws that could deprive citizens of life, liberty or property in pursuit of "public goods". The pursuit of the greatest "public good", regardless of cost, is the philosophy of the Utilitarians and it's one that's antithetical the philosophy that values freedom and respects the rights of individuals to meaningful self-determination.
Meanwhile the Chinese are building new coal plants, driving more automobiles and generally becoming a western style consumer culture. Any action which might be undertaken by individuals, like this carbon capture sun roof, is meaningless by way of comparison; it's spit in the ocean. I am now more convinced than ever that the target audiences of these products are wealthy European and American liberals who wish to absolve themselves of "green guilt" associated with their high carbon affluent lifestyles through purchases of what amounts to indulgences. I have no problem with this. Let everyone spend their own money as they choose. However, I do have a problem with these same liberals attempt to use the power of the state to force their bullshit green attitudes on the rest of us. The Chinese, Indians and everyone else laughs at how stupid these green Americans are while building more coal plants and driving around in dirty two-stroke diesels. Face it, environmental quality is a luxury good and its becoming a luxury that even wealthier Americans can no longer afford.
Like ethanol, this energy source also has the potential to be in conflict with a basic human need: fresh water. The world is already running short of fresh water even now, even though it doesn't yet make the news on a regular basis.Mixing fresh water with salt water to produce hydrogen on a large scale will be hard to contemplate while millions are dying of drought and thirst. Like most other "miracle" energy sources, there is always a fly in the ointment.
rather than not sending spam in the first place, they just ensure it comes from different mail servers and a different domain to their normal operations.
Even this has long since ceased being effective. Most legitimate hosting companies will cut off violators of their "terms of service" which generally include rules to the effect that sending out unsolicited emails (i.e. spam) from their address ranges is grounds for termination of contract. Look at it from their prospective, if even a few of their clients did this SpamHaus and others would very quickly black ball their entire address range so that all of their customers would see their outbound emails black-holed. The so-called "bullet proof" hosts are generally located overseas and have poor connections and worse reputations; they are also black balled regularly. In fact, many smaller businesses still blacklist all email coming from Asian countries and especially from China and Russia. The only way to reliably send mass email anymore is via botnet and even that is becoming more difficult due to effective counter-attacks on command and control servers and better client side Bayesian filtering. Spam is a losing game these days and only stupid managers send spam or hire spammers to do it for them.
It isn't even something people realise they are doing.
On the contrary, some of us realize precisely what we are doing. It's not possible to continue into the next century with the current levels of human population; the climate is almost certainly past the point where likely future food and energy requirements can be satisfied. We've already committed to a changed planet. We should do our best to adapt instead of wasting precious time and resources on increasingly desperate attempts to forestall the inevitable. Preserving the progress of humanity is more important than preserving every last one of us.
Here in the US, there's a rampant bullying problem in the schools that reinforces a negative view toward education, in general.
Which persists here in the US due in large part to a namby-pamby culture that exists in our public schools; where every child, whether deserving or not, is treated with kid gloves. The bullies get away with virtually anything they wish while their victims are punished instead. What needs to happen is for our children to be told early on about how society deals with those who can't or won't exercise self restraint. Tell them how uncivilized and uneducated thugs end up in federal prisons for some of the longest terms in the western world with those who are twice and thrice as tough as them. Inform them that legions of hungry and ambitious children in India and China are just itching for a chance to eat their collective lunches when they grow up. Finally, tell them all that if they fail to meet expectations, society will discard them without pity or mercy for being stupid or lazy. This is the truth and there is power in it for those who learn it early. Of course, the utter impotence of our teachers' unions and the liberal bullshit that is spoon fed to our children in public schools virtually ensures that only the children of the wealthy, who can afford an elite education in private schools with tutors, ever learn theses things soon enough to be competitive. The US is being soundly beaten in education because we fail to discipline our children and we waste vast sums of money ensuring that every student meets a low minimum standard instead of identifying the best and most worthy students early and advancing them fully for the future benefit of society, as the Indians and Chinese do, even at the expense of the "slow" ones. Not every child is going to become an entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, doctor or lawyer (we have too many lawyers anyway). An education system which recognizes this and allocates resources efficiently and effectively, by advancing the best and most worthy students while discarding the losers, benefits society more than one that's based upon equality of underachievement; as it is here in the United States. So tell the children the truth. Tell them that every one of them has a chance, but that outcomes aren't equal and only those who seize upon the opportunities and make the most of them will succeed in school or life.
good people can be found in China - not all of them are evil
Good or not they're competitors and rivals; we shouldn't fail to treat them as such.
Except that reading the patents, and most especially software patents, is a complete waste of time. You won't learn anything because patents are written by lawyers, perhaps in consultation with an engineer to help obfuscate with technical buzz words, to be (a) as broad and as general as possible with vague wording so as to enable as many interpretations as possible (b) completely useless to anyone actually trying to base an implementation off of the patent documents. Finally, actually searching for and reading patents exposes you to treble damages for willful infringement if you ever are sued. Patents are a waste of software engineers' time (and probably other engineers nowadays too, but I cannot speak to that directly); nothing good can come of searching or reading them unless you are an attorney who specializes in patent litigation.
Wasn't IBM the owner of the Jet Powered Surfboard Patent? I wonder if that was included in the deal...
Judges sometimes impose conditions in order to certify the class. For example, it might be required that a certain percentage of likely future of plaintiffs sign on before the class can be certified. It would probably be something like gathering signatures for a ballot initiative; costly, tedious and labor intensive. Another fly in the ointment is that many universities have a clause in their bylaws stating that they can never settle a lawsuit; it must be litigated until won or ultimately lost in court on appeal. For example, the UCs in California have that policy; no doubt to discourage frivolous lawsuits.
IMHO, not every work currently under copyright is worth the time, effort and expense required of society in order to catalog and preserve it. Indeed, most modern works are probably not worth preserving for the next hundred years or at least not in their original forms. For example, millions of used mass market paperbacks are pulped every year in the United States and it doesn't seem to be any great loss.
While I am neither attorney nor judge, it seems to me that since the dispute arose out of the digitization project undertaken by Google and given that the circumstances and arguments are likely to be identical or at least similar for any individual work; the Authors Guild could probably make a case that they represent a class of plaintiffs and stand a decent chance of being certified as plaintiffs representing that class. Of course, it might be difficult from a practical standpoint to track down enough individual members who agree to be certified into the class, especially given the large numbers of works involved, but it may be possible depending upon what requirements are imposed by the judge to certify the class.
Visual Studio Express is free today
Yes, but the "no add-ins" restriction, among others, make it a poor alternative for professionals. Of course, that was Microsoft's intention all along with the express line. Make it suitable for hobbyists and small time consultants, but unsuitable for serious developers.