In fact, these programs are focusing on high school textbooks, not university textbooks, i.e. they'll mostly serve to help poor school districts, although some counties may reduce property taxes, or give local politicians more hookers & booze.
There are other programs focussed on university level textbooks. For math and physics, one big obstacle for placing textbooks online is simply that academics don't use version control for their research publications. All the early large OSS projects might have failed too without diff, patch, and cvs.
Imho, the best approach would be developing an online collaborative editing environment based upon git like github, but designed for latex and offering introductory wiki-like features for people who don't know git. There are literally hundreds of unfinished math and physics textbooks lying around academia, but ALL are written in latex, which still beats all other typesetting systems anyways. So you let professors upload their existing unfinished book, they get reenergized by other editors, initially editing in wiki mode, and eventually moving to fully using git.
We're talking about high school mathematics here, meaning school boards not teachers pick the textbooks. I'll humor you however by explaining the university situation :
There are basic university courses like calculous where students buy oodls of books. Those books however are written by professors at small lower tier collages who aren't well connected with the research community.. probably not even well connected with the mathematics education community.
You see, it's actually the publishers who make all the big money off issuing new editions by rearranging the exercises, so they need some stooge lacking normal levels of self respect.. and they easily make up for his lack of prestige thorough more advertising.
You might see a respected professor write say a linear algebra textbook, but usually he does so for largely "pedagogical exploration", which usually means the book kinda sucks.
There are also advanced university courses taught using books written by academics you actually know. There is however an usually some hierarchy for the quality of such books once you've narrowed down the course material, leaving almost no wiggle room for choosing friend's books.
For example, Sipser is basically always the best choice for teaching an introductory course on the theory of computation, others need not apply.
In fact, the vast majority of electric vehicles are owned by corporations : buggies, delivery vehicles, and especially forklifts. If you add quick battery swapping, electric vehicles work well for police, postal services, etc.
All those middle men are not ripping off their artists. They are ripping YOU off.
In the arts, powerful middle men sell fame to artists, and sell product to consumers. Artists get an acceptable deal if they reach the end of their contract while remanning creative, as they'll sell more shit for vastly more then.
Yet *some* artists would achieve fame anyways, maybe very different artists. YOU are deprived of them because some middle man made another choice about who becomes famous.
And middle men are ripping off the best artists by preventing an egalitarian competition for fame, obviously.
If geeks made full use of an open standard social networking site, like say friend-to-friend file sharing, yeah I think people will join. And open source might play some role because you'll never get the people if you don't deploy freind-to-friend file sharing. Why is file sharing legal here? Well, why is sharing your family videos legal? duh.
Facebook cannot easily be killed, true. If however there are other massive communities that cannot easily be subsumed into facebook, well that'll put a damper on their party. Facebook cannot facilitate music & movie piracy.
Ideally, you want some OpenID like web site account based system for joining with some non-web site affiliated alternative client that supplies friend-to-friend file sharing. I'm sure you'll eventually get all the "also ran" facebook's like Hi5 on board with sharing producing some OpenId network of web accounts. The issue will be letting users forward their accounts elsewhere, especially without giving the original host any new data, and especially^2 forwarding to their own P2P clients.
In fact, the motorcycle driver already plead guilty to speeding and paid his fine, that part's all settle, his recklessness is no longer relevant.
Ideally, the police department should get tagged for much larger quantities for malicious prosecution for charging him for the video taping. The cops fucked up maliciously, they should pay out big time.
A security researcher has no particular duty to users either, but some may assume one for themselves. If so, releasing depends upon whether you're suspicious that exploits exist in the wild.
If bugs are actively being exploited, they are most likely being exploited by the worst people, so publicly enabling all mostly harmless the script kiddies will help matters by forcing the developer to issue faster fixes, possible in multiple stages. If a bug isn't be exploited, fine just tell the developer, and publish in 60 days.
Don't worry, you chose wisely. You know all those classmates with 5th grade reading level? Yeah, they are why a University of Phoenix degree is worse than no degree.;)
You most likely were not doing anything interesting enough during your brick & mortar 2.5 years. I'd have been bored studying computer science for undergrad, so I studied math instead, much fun.
There are decades of education research showing that education is largely a social activity for most students, see the Berkeley’s Professional Development Program by Uri Treisman and Leon Henkin for example. Any online school offers very little interaction, thus disrupting the education process for most students.
You'll learn more if you study with better students and/or better professors, but an online school gets weaker students and faculty, especially for-profit schools.
Also, graduate work requires understanding material that isn't well laid out in the literature, meaning you'll never learn it on your own, only by combining reading and doing with talking to more experienced people. OP doesn't say if he's after grad or undergrad, just saying.
To answer the OPs question, yes you'r online degree program may very well suck ass, especially if it's a for-profit institution. In fact, an online degree from a for-profit school like University of Phoenix will often be viewed as worse than no degree.
You don't have any right to know you are being recorded in a public place, witness the recent case Girls Gone Wild won. Maryland's law will be overturned eventually.
Btw, you'll notice that many federal politicians live in Maryland. I'd imagine the original subtext behind this law was making it easier for politicians to accept bribes.
In fact, the legal criteria is a reasonable expectation of privacy, which your neighbors have inside their own home, but not on the street. I'd expect the ACLU will win based upon those grounds, plus maybe some first amendment journalism point.
Just fyi, Americans have very little right to privacy when their in a public place, witness the recent lawsuit Girls Gone Wild won. ACLU will win this case either directly, if the judge follows precedent, or on appeal, if this judge is corrupt.
We'd prefer the police department ended up paying Anthony Graber some settlement for malicious prosecution of course, but who knows.
In fact, you don't have much right to privacy when your in a public place. U.S. laws are fairly clear about this point.
Entertainers usually ask for waivers before using your images, but that just helps eliminating lawsuits, they don't actually need them to win the law suits. For example, a girl recently lost her lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild because her girlfriend pull down her shirt in front of their cameras and they used the footage. She'd probably have won if a GGW staffer had pull down her shirt. And obviously GGW would have saved themselves lawyer fees if they'd asked for waivers from anyone entering the bar, although maybe that'd ruin the mood.
News organizations usually don't even bother with the wavers because they've much stronger rights.
I'd imagine the ACLU will eventually in this case, but they may need to appeal up to a non-corrupt judge.
Yes, it's a very good idea, but not likely for audio or visual media. Indeed, all this will more likely just convince studios the must lock down their contracts even tighter.
I'll stick mostly with pirated or print books however, given prices haven't dropped much, and amazon isn't the ideal vender.
Liars often make mistakes, such as not employing statisticians. So yes the issue lies entirely with making sure that correct information gets out.
There are news organizations staffed by true believers like Mother Jones that'll do much investigative legwork. And there are people like Nate Silver that'll do intelligent drudge work. Both require data. Your average journalism major isn't suitable for either one, plus they lack the will and intelligence to process raw data.
An italian friend of mine was hired by a French defense contractor as basically a highly paid concierge for dictators who came to buy weapons, not exactly a deep job, but it required a French security clearance. He's not French, but he's an EU citizen, fair enough.
In fact, he only got the job because his idiot boss wanted to hire a Chinese girl. I shit you not, the idiot boss lady wanted to give a French security clearance to a Chinese national. Not even a dual citizen who spoke French as well as Chinese, but an honest to god Chinese national.
Of course, the French government said no dice, and my Italian friend got the job. Guess what? bitch fired him after a while, she then tried another Chinese national. Not sure how that panned out.
To me, you're "modest proposal" fails for being way too close to the truth.
Yes & no, they've discouraged many and offended many, but there are still oodls of qualified people, they just need to pay them more to : compensate for their smaller numbers and the distrust the government has distilled in them, plus you cannot smoke pot if you've a security clearance.
The NSA pays people roughly $100k even for PhDs, not much for that people working that level. If you ratchet that up to $250k+ for serious security types, you'll see black hat conferences disappear as people dump their pot habits, line up, and take some oath.
It's just capitalism, pure and simple, but the people exist.
There is no shortage, geeks love security issues, they're just not paying them enough. In fact, we might have more people going into security if they'd ignored kids that got their hands dirty in the 80s and 90s, but there are still oodls of people loving the field. You know, all those black hats would happily take an NSA jobs if the salary was high enough, but we're talking like 250k, not the 100k paid by the NSA.
If they're leaving journalism, maybe the next generation will learn form their mistakes, and avoid journalism degrees.
In fact, we've got very serious problems with journalist simply being ignorant buffoons today. All the real digging gets covered by a few well educated blogs by domain experts, like say 538. We must ensure those independent sources get legit information by protecting groups like wikileaks, zerohedge, etc.
I bought an N900 almost entirely because skype and sip were properly integrated into the dialer, along with AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. I wanted the whole open source phone for moral reason, but I needed some killer app before spending $500, well I knew I'd never really use latex or an sql client on my phone despite declaring those as requirements years ago.
I then however become extremely happy with the widgets, absolutely convinced me that Apple's menu oriented interface for the iPhone is suboptimal for power users.
In my case, a single glance at my primary desktop gives me the titles of recent unread emails, most recent sms or im, weather, and schedule, along with shortcuts for notes, contacts, sms/ims, and dialer. I'm sure I'd never even check the weather if I owned an iPhone, as I never checked the weather before, just got wet.
Another desktop houses facebook statuses, rss feeds, and useful tools, all that shit serves mostly to help prevent me checking slashdot, facebook, etc. And the two remaining desktops are frequent contact shortcuts, which double as online status for skype, msn, and aim.
Point being, there really is a difference between power users and consumers. There will always be people will fit any solid product into any given aspect of their lives, but good overall market targeting matters.
We'll see what phone introduces integrated print spooling first, definitely a critical feature for devices with tiny screens.
iPhones support VPNs only because so many wifi configurations require a VPN.
Apple knows their target market backwards and forwards, that market excludes business men. A western business phone requires physical a keyboard, multitasking, universal generic cut & paste, clean SIP integration, tethering, exchange support, etc. You don't need any of that shit if your selling a combo phone and games platform like Google and Apple.
Yes, some people like yourself fit the iPhone into their business life, fine, you're a minority.
Btw, I'm very happy that my phone lets me keep multiple pdf viewer windows open simultaneously, but I'm still rather annoyed the phone doesn't support printing.
I felt the N900 was rather ra before PR1.2, which fixed the lack video calling for skype and sip, and corrected the major stabilities issues. Yes, USSD was an issue, but the USSD widget is pretty cool.
Afaik, MMS isn't a high priority feature for most smartphones, probably demographics. Yeah, normal video calling sounds like an issue, but not sure that ever caught one much either.
Imho, the missing features are encrypted SIP calls via ZRTP/SRTP, encrypted email via gpg, full Ovi maps, and printing. Why? Well, these are features that appeal to business users.
I've no idea why people who might want fancy features like VoIP on the phone are still buying phones from these asshats. We all needed to hack our phones once upon a time, but now we've got the N900 that comes out of the box with terminal, sype & voip integration, etc.
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In fact, these programs are focusing on high school textbooks, not university textbooks, i.e. they'll mostly serve to help poor school districts, although some counties may reduce property taxes, or give local politicians more hookers & booze.
There are other programs focussed on university level textbooks. For math and physics, one big obstacle for placing textbooks online is simply that academics don't use version control for their research publications. All the early large OSS projects might have failed too without diff, patch, and cvs.
Imho, the best approach would be developing an online collaborative editing environment based upon git like github, but designed for latex and offering introductory wiki-like features for people who don't know git. There are literally hundreds of unfinished math and physics textbooks lying around academia, but ALL are written in latex, which still beats all other typesetting systems anyways. So you let professors upload their existing unfinished book, they get reenergized by other editors, initially editing in wiki mode, and eventually moving to fully using git.
We're talking about high school mathematics here, meaning school boards not teachers pick the textbooks. I'll humor you however by explaining the university situation :
There are basic university courses like calculous where students buy oodls of books. Those books however are written by professors at small lower tier collages who aren't well connected with the research community.. probably not even well connected with the mathematics education community.
You see, it's actually the publishers who make all the big money off issuing new editions by rearranging the exercises, so they need some stooge lacking normal levels of self respect.. and they easily make up for his lack of prestige thorough more advertising.
You might see a respected professor write say a linear algebra textbook, but usually he does so for largely "pedagogical exploration", which usually means the book kinda sucks.
There are also advanced university courses taught using books written by academics you actually know. There is however an usually some hierarchy for the quality of such books once you've narrowed down the course material, leaving almost no wiggle room for choosing friend's books.
For example, Sipser is basically always the best choice for teaching an introductory course on the theory of computation, others need not apply.
In fact, the vast majority of electric vehicles are owned by corporations : buggies, delivery vehicles, and especially forklifts. If you add quick battery swapping, electric vehicles work well for police, postal services, etc.
All those middle men are not ripping off their artists. They are ripping YOU off.
In the arts, powerful middle men sell fame to artists, and sell product to consumers. Artists get an acceptable deal if they reach the end of their contract while remanning creative, as they'll sell more shit for vastly more then.
Yet *some* artists would achieve fame anyways, maybe very different artists. YOU are deprived of them because some middle man made another choice about who becomes famous.
And middle men are ripping off the best artists by preventing an egalitarian competition for fame, obviously.
I donno, maybe, maybe not.
If geeks made full use of an open standard social networking site, like say friend-to-friend file sharing, yeah I think people will join. And open source might play some role because you'll never get the people if you don't deploy freind-to-friend file sharing. Why is file sharing legal here? Well, why is sharing your family videos legal? duh.
Facebook cannot easily be killed, true. If however there are other massive communities that cannot easily be subsumed into facebook, well that'll put a damper on their party. Facebook cannot facilitate music & movie piracy.
Ideally, you want some OpenID like web site account based system for joining with some non-web site affiliated alternative client that supplies friend-to-friend file sharing. I'm sure you'll eventually get all the "also ran" facebook's like Hi5 on board with sharing producing some OpenId network of web accounts. The issue will be letting users forward their accounts elsewhere, especially without giving the original host any new data, and especially^2 forwarding to their own P2P clients.
In fact, the motorcycle driver already plead guilty to speeding and paid his fine, that part's all settle, his recklessness is no longer relevant.
Ideally, the police department should get tagged for much larger quantities for malicious prosecution for charging him for the video taping. The cops fucked up maliciously, they should pay out big time.
A security researcher has no particular duty to users either, but some may assume one for themselves. If so, releasing depends upon whether you're suspicious that exploits exist in the wild.
If bugs are actively being exploited, they are most likely being exploited by the worst people, so publicly enabling all mostly harmless the script kiddies will help matters by forcing the developer to issue faster fixes, possible in multiple stages. If a bug isn't be exploited, fine just tell the developer, and publish in 60 days.
Don't worry, you chose wisely. You know all those classmates with 5th grade reading level? Yeah, they are why a University of Phoenix degree is worse than no degree. ;)
You most likely were not doing anything interesting enough during your brick & mortar 2.5 years. I'd have been bored studying computer science for undergrad, so I studied math instead, much fun.
There are decades of education research showing that education is largely a social activity for most students, see the Berkeley’s Professional Development Program by Uri Treisman and Leon Henkin for example. Any online school offers very little interaction, thus disrupting the education process for most students.
You'll learn more if you study with better students and/or better professors, but an online school gets weaker students and faculty, especially for-profit schools.
Also, graduate work requires understanding material that isn't well laid out in the literature, meaning you'll never learn it on your own, only by combining reading and doing with talking to more experienced people. OP doesn't say if he's after grad or undergrad, just saying.
To answer the OPs question, yes you'r online degree program may very well suck ass, especially if it's a for-profit institution. In fact, an online degree from a for-profit school like University of Phoenix will often be viewed as worse than no degree.
You don't have any right to know you are being recorded in a public place, witness the recent case Girls Gone Wild won. Maryland's law will be overturned eventually.
Btw, you'll notice that many federal politicians live in Maryland. I'd imagine the original subtext behind this law was making it easier for politicians to accept bribes.
In fact, the legal criteria is a reasonable expectation of privacy, which your neighbors have inside their own home, but not on the street. I'd expect the ACLU will win based upon those grounds, plus maybe some first amendment journalism point.
Just fyi, Americans have very little right to privacy when their in a public place, witness the recent lawsuit Girls Gone Wild won. ACLU will win this case either directly, if the judge follows precedent, or on appeal, if this judge is corrupt.
We'd prefer the police department ended up paying Anthony Graber some settlement for malicious prosecution of course, but who knows.
In fact, you don't have much right to privacy when your in a public place. U.S. laws are fairly clear about this point.
Entertainers usually ask for waivers before using your images, but that just helps eliminating lawsuits, they don't actually need them to win the law suits. For example, a girl recently lost her lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild because her girlfriend pull down her shirt in front of their cameras and they used the footage. She'd probably have won if a GGW staffer had pull down her shirt. And obviously GGW would have saved themselves lawyer fees if they'd asked for waivers from anyone entering the bar, although maybe that'd ruin the mood.
News organizations usually don't even bother with the wavers because they've much stronger rights.
I'd imagine the ACLU will eventually in this case, but they may need to appeal up to a non-corrupt judge.
Yes, it's a very good idea, but not likely for audio or visual media. Indeed, all this will more likely just convince studios the must lock down their contracts even tighter.
I'll stick mostly with pirated or print books however, given prices haven't dropped much, and amazon isn't the ideal vender.
Liars often make mistakes, such as not employing statisticians. So yes the issue lies entirely with making sure that correct information gets out.
There are news organizations staffed by true believers like Mother Jones that'll do much investigative legwork. And there are people like Nate Silver that'll do intelligent drudge work. Both require data. Your average journalism major isn't suitable for either one, plus they lack the will and intelligence to process raw data.
An italian friend of mine was hired by a French defense contractor as basically a highly paid concierge for dictators who came to buy weapons, not exactly a deep job, but it required a French security clearance. He's not French, but he's an EU citizen, fair enough.
In fact, he only got the job because his idiot boss wanted to hire a Chinese girl. I shit you not, the idiot boss lady wanted to give a French security clearance to a Chinese national. Not even a dual citizen who spoke French as well as Chinese, but an honest to god Chinese national.
Of course, the French government said no dice, and my Italian friend got the job. Guess what? bitch fired him after a while, she then tried another Chinese national. Not sure how that panned out.
To me, you're "modest proposal" fails for being way too close to the truth.
Yes & no, they've discouraged many and offended many, but there are still oodls of qualified people, they just need to pay them more to : compensate for their smaller numbers and the distrust the government has distilled in them, plus you cannot smoke pot if you've a security clearance.
The NSA pays people roughly $100k even for PhDs, not much for that people working that level. If you ratchet that up to $250k+ for serious security types, you'll see black hat conferences disappear as people dump their pot habits, line up, and take some oath.
It's just capitalism, pure and simple, but the people exist.
There is no shortage, geeks love security issues, they're just not paying them enough. In fact, we might have more people going into security if they'd ignored kids that got their hands dirty in the 80s and 90s, but there are still oodls of people loving the field. You know, all those black hats would happily take an NSA jobs if the salary was high enough, but we're talking like 250k, not the 100k paid by the NSA.
If they're leaving journalism, maybe the next generation will learn form their mistakes, and avoid journalism degrees.
In fact, we've got very serious problems with journalist simply being ignorant buffoons today. All the real digging gets covered by a few well educated blogs by domain experts, like say 538. We must ensure those independent sources get legit information by protecting groups like wikileaks, zerohedge, etc.
I bought an N900 almost entirely because skype and sip were properly integrated into the dialer, along with AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. I wanted the whole open source phone for moral reason, but I needed some killer app before spending $500, well I knew I'd never really use latex or an sql client on my phone despite declaring those as requirements years ago.
I then however become extremely happy with the widgets, absolutely convinced me that Apple's menu oriented interface for the iPhone is suboptimal for power users.
In my case, a single glance at my primary desktop gives me the titles of recent unread emails, most recent sms or im, weather, and schedule, along with shortcuts for notes, contacts, sms/ims, and dialer. I'm sure I'd never even check the weather if I owned an iPhone, as I never checked the weather before, just got wet.
Another desktop houses facebook statuses, rss feeds, and useful tools, all that shit serves mostly to help prevent me checking slashdot, facebook, etc. And the two remaining desktops are frequent contact shortcuts, which double as online status for skype, msn, and aim.
Point being, there really is a difference between power users and consumers. There will always be people will fit any solid product into any given aspect of their lives, but good overall market targeting matters.
We'll see what phone introduces integrated print spooling first, definitely a critical feature for devices with tiny screens.
Afaik, iPhone's use an external SIP client with separate address book, not an internal client integrated into the normal dialer. Android same right?
iPhones support VPNs only because so many wifi configurations require a VPN.
Apple knows their target market backwards and forwards, that market excludes business men. A western business phone requires physical a keyboard, multitasking, universal generic cut & paste, clean SIP integration, tethering, exchange support, etc. You don't need any of that shit if your selling a combo phone and games platform like Google and Apple.
Yes, some people like yourself fit the iPhone into their business life, fine, you're a minority.
Btw, I'm very happy that my phone lets me keep multiple pdf viewer windows open simultaneously, but I'm still rather annoyed the phone doesn't support printing.
I felt the N900 was rather ra before PR1.2, which fixed the lack video calling for skype and sip, and corrected the major stabilities issues. Yes, USSD was an issue, but the USSD widget is pretty cool.
Afaik, MMS isn't a high priority feature for most smartphones, probably demographics. Yeah, normal video calling sounds like an issue, but not sure that ever caught one much either.
Imho, the missing features are encrypted SIP calls via ZRTP/SRTP, encrypted email via gpg, full Ovi maps, and printing. Why? Well, these are features that appeal to business users.
I've no idea why people who might want fancy features like VoIP on the phone are still buying phones from these asshats. We all needed to hack our phones once upon a time, but now we've got the N900 that comes out of the box with terminal, sype & voip integration, etc.
Internet access is a right. If you make it significantly more expensive, you're impinging upon that right.
Are you worried about piracy now, really? why?