This has been true for a long time, and it becomes increasingly true as tuitions continue to skyrocket.
Increasingly, the point of college isn't to educate a person, but to provide vocational training. There's a place for vocational training, but vocational training is always open to abuse. Many professions have non-college certification mills, and training and testing companies frequently make extraordinary profits from it.
Maybe the era of a "classic" education is gone forever, but it still puzzles me when colleges today have so few general education requirements and yet one of them ISN'T media literacy.
I lived in an apartment complex with other residents who were NOTORIOUS for leaving stuff in the dryer overnight. After it happened multiple times, I put their clothes in a bag, did my own laundry, and then when I came to get mine out of the dryer and the bag was still there, I sorted out all the women's undies and carefully and neatly folded them and put them in a pile.
Problem solved, it didn't occur again until months later when a new resident moved in and started doing the same thing. The same approach worked again.
I don't have a stranger underwear fetish, but I figured it would creep people out without actually doing them any harm, to the point where they might not let their stuff sit overnight (or even over TWO nights), and apparently it did.
I'm reminded of the mortgage company where I worked where loan officers pulling in monthly commissions of $10,000 a month and higher were "incentivized" by awarding the top sales every month perks like a $500 gift certificate for a golf shop, and the people who did the most work (hourly and salary employees) were incentivized by the knowledge that, if the owner ever needed to make a payment on his BMW SLK and his finances were tight, the money the company and owners saved from firing any of those employees would be more than enough to offset the burden.
This notion really needs more attention that it gets. Copyright law is a ruinous no-man's-land whose primary function is to denude the public domain of anything that some publisher might squeeze value out of, when it was intended to do quite the opposite.
Publishing companies want to turn culture into something we consume rather than participate in.
I'm not sure why, if I am not due a share of my grandfather's income as "royalties" for his farm or factory work, I am somehow due a share of royalties for a book he wrote. If he left the only copy with me and I'm the first person to take it to a publisher, it can be argued that that is a slightly different matter.
Maybe Princeton shouldn't be in the business of playing gatekeeper to a dead man's paranoiac death wishes about publication. If Salinger was a serial killer or a despot, would Princeton feel morally obliged to follow his wishes about what he wanted published after his death?
The fact that copyright lasts for the author's life "+ X years" where X gets increased every time it nearly expires means that we have infinite copyright, which is blatantly unconstitutional, and definitely contrary to the original stated purpose of US copyright law.
If Salinger wanted to keep his precious manuscripts away from the public eye, instead of granting precious sanctimonious access of it through an agreement with Princeton, maybe he should have entrusted it to a private individual, or an institution without a duty to higher learning, such as a legal firm or a publishing house.
Just stop. Mind you, I'd be happy with a country-wide single-time-zone if and only if either I were at the western edge of it, or if we just pushed the clock ahead 2-2.5 hours ahead before standardizing it.
All of the "just change your schedule instead of the time" arguments come from a naive understanding of what it's actually like to hold a regular job like most people have: your employer is pretty much the one and only determiner of your schedule for the majority of your week and your life. "Hey, I'm just going to come into work a few minutes later each day in the winter, and I'll start to float back the opposite way once spring kicks in" presumes the corporate world gives a damn about your scheduling needs. Most of the working world does not have the luxury of a job that, if they arrive 30 minutes late as a regular basis, they will not be fired from. Many people who work in workplaces with a time clock will get fired if they're a few minutes late from the employer-mandated start time more than a few minutes per month.
Also, many detractors of DST obviously don't have to schedule their work life with the starting times of their children's schools. "Well, if everyone floated,they could all float the same!" That's simply not happening. Workplaces like standardized time for a reason: because it places the burden of scheduling the workplace on the employer without having to have complicated time shifts every day (or every few weeks). If you have a job and children, and they shift time expectations in blocks independent of one another, the problem persists.
Many DST-detractors also seem to presume that, if you have children, getting them to school is simply a matter of getting them up in time to catch the bus, or to walk. Most areas of the country either do not have dependable public transportation where children can learn to commute themselves, nor live within walking distance of their school, and an increasing number of parents have to drive their children to school every year precisely because tight education budgets means something has to get cut, and school busing is one of the first to go - and it's easy to justify, because the logic is that if the parents don't approve a busing millage, they're the only ones who will be inconvenienced by it, anyway. Admittedly, this is a political failure where the citizen is somehow given collective veto power over the funding of schools, police, and fire services, but can't disapprove "millages" for any meaningful government spending such as corporate tax breaks and military weapon systems.
As far as California goes, some of its tech service sector effectively works from 5 to 5 precisely because they have to serve the needs of a country whose major business hubs are either in Eastern Time, Central Time, or Pacific Time. Mountain Time is said to exist, but I have deliberately chosen to forget it does.
Moving to one time zone wouldn't be impossible, of course. China does it and they are, roughly speaking, as wide as the mainland US.
Whatever the solution is, if it means that most Americans who leave work after 5PM get almost no useful daylight time for much of the year, it's a dead letter, and that won't change regardless of how many slashdotters who make their own hours tell them to "just" adjust their schedules.
Finally, an underpowered smart phone that is already as dated as the existing smartphone I have, and will struggle with heavy app usage. But it's FLOSS and that makes it better.
While I certainly agree that most well-written webpages should look good in half screen mode, this isn't an excuse for them to look bad in fullscreen mode, with either large blocks of space going unused, or for text-heavy websites, long lines that result in readability nightmare.
Amen. I find 16:9 to be too cramped, and this is compounded by the fact that a lot of web developers are still making content that assumes we're back in the age of non-widescreen monitors, meaning more scrolling. Or in the case of 16:9 monitors, MORE more scrolling.
16:10 is a compromise I can live with, and it disappoints me that 1920x1080 has somehow become dominant merely because of a video distribution standard. Don't shackle me in your 16:9 chains.
Frankly, I'd rather see a move to higher-resolution mainstream monitors with higher pixel density (again, at 16:10) than anything else as far as video improvement goes.
This is only astonishing if you're unfamiliar with the increasingly dizzying prices of textbooks. I presume that South Africa is little different than the US in this regard, though this presumption is unchecked.
Ouch. I don't envy them. Of course, ditch 21" CRTs for 27" LCDs didn't really save me any physical desktop space. Clutter multiplies to fit its container.
A tangent, but frankly, given the choice between 4K monitors that I couldn't afford an a return to widespread availability of a 16:10 option at 1920x1200, I'd take the latter. 16:9 is less ideal to me.
Given how few CRT monitors there are in the wild (let alone on those computers that are running new hardware), I'm not sure why the CRT vs LCD distinction was noteworthy.
...as actually having anything to do with "yetis".
I don't think we need DNA evidence to demonstrate that people are perfectly capable of making up monster folklore without anything more convincing than a tall tale.
Replacing a non-existent creature of folklore with a purported half breed of a creature that occurs nowhere near a specific location really isn't accomplishing much, especially when people have long been motivated to produce "evidence" before the advent of DNA testing. The polar bear doesn't live anywhere near the Himalays, yet intrepid explorers who wanted to engage in a prank or to fool a foundation to donate money to their expedition were certainly capable of bringing part of a polar bear to create "evidence" for their "discovery".
This is like finding a South African cent in my change and coming to the conclusion that the United States used to be a South African possession. There are easier ways to explain this "evidence" than purporting the yeti myth to be a misunderstood bear that didn't live anywhere near the reported location: people make shit up, and people want to believe in monster myths.
So do you dispute that Sharia law is specifically enjoined on all Muslims according to the Koran, and that Sharia law forbids a Muslim from ever rejecting Islam? Because if you're willing to dispute that, you're either confused or lying.
The Koran and Sharia law. Pakistan does not comply fully with Sharia law. Contrast with Saudi Arabia. Again, the Koran is very specific about all of this, despite your apologist posturing.
So tell me more about the rights to publicly worship in a faith other than Islam according the the Koran. To discuss with Muslims the virtues of another faith and try to convert them. The right of Muslims to convert. The rights of Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists and Jains to worship as they please.
Because none of these rights exist, and are specifically countermanded by the Koran, which is the "official word of god" which pre-existed the creation of the world. Even though that makes no sense given the actual contents.
Ah yes, the Islamic assertion that the Koran is the unaltered work of god. This has no historical basis, and is a provably incorrect assertion of faith.
Please read the Koran:
(4:89) - "They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks."
(5:33) - "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement"
(8:12) - "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them"
(8:39) - "And fight with them until there is no more fitna (disorder, unbelief) and religion should be only for Allah"
(9:29) - "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
I'm done. It goes on and on. In Islam, one has no "human rights" in the modern understanding, and one certainly has no "human rights" with regards to the freedom of religion. Without the freedom to believe or disbelieve as one chooses, one has no freedom at all.
And don't get me started on the "People of the Book" nonsense, as if being slightly less awful to Jews and Christians is all it takes to ignore the fact that Buddhists and Jains and Hindus and other polytheists and pantheists have no such "protection".
While Arab scholars did indeed preserve important works, the degree to which this was a "golden age" is largely an invention of 18th and 19th century "orientalists" who saw in Islam a foil to point out the flaws in Christendom, and is hardly a useful measure of human rights during the era. Most Islamic history in non-Arab countries is treated as if it began with the Arab invasions and that nothing useful happened before.
These Orientalist apologists for Islam also paint a far too rosy picture of the human rights enjoyed by "people of the book", ignoring the fact that they were subject to huge fines, massive discrimination, torture, and forced conversions.
This white-washing of history is well-established, and while I'm sorry that you've fallen victim to it (as had I when I was first learning about Arab-Islamic civilization in school), there is a cure: modern historians who have managed to paint a far more objective picture of Classical Islamic culture.
The plight of the Jews in particular is apt, as the fate of the Jews in al-Andalus and the Turkish portions of the empire are often painted as a sort of multicultural haven. In fact, the Jews were subject to the whim of the ruler and had no recourse to law if the ruler decided to forcibly convert them, confiscate their lands, economically cripple them, or kill them. That this was true in the Abassid empire should not, however, be used to paint a rosy picture of Jews in Christian Europe, as the exact same thing was true there. Leaders of nations - both Islamic and Christendom - tolerated Jews at their whim, and had more to do with whether or not the ruler needed their influence or financial backing, and whether or not public sentiment against them was worth the benefit of toleration.
While the Crusades were an awful abuse of Christians over Muslims, it must be fairly stated that neither civilization treated the members of the other with any real tolerance, and that there was plenty of Muslim abuse of Christian communities. To be even *more* intellectually honest, it must be recognized that the Christians were pretty good at finding reasons to abuse one another during the Crusades, as several of them made it nowhere near the Caliphate before wreaking havoc.
Arab-Islamic culture is very good at "forgetting" much of its own history, through imperialism, whitewashing, tortuous apologetics, and outright revisionist history.
By paying the correct toll at the correct tollbooth, and tacitly agreeing that culture is something you "buy" and not "participate in".
> Tim Berners-Lee: DRMed HTML least of all evils
No, Tim, DRMed HTML is a pretty big evil, in that it sabotages an open, readable format by saddling it to an unnecessary rights management monkey.
Let stakeholders in DRM do their own dirty work and see if the public embraces it. The fact that they are going to do so doesn't make it incumbent on web developers and standards bodies to make it more easy for them to do so in a more universal manner.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been true for a long time, and it becomes increasingly true as tuitions continue to skyrocket.
Increasingly, the point of college isn't to educate a person, but to provide vocational training. There's a place for vocational training, but vocational training is always open to abuse. Many professions have non-college certification mills, and training and testing companies frequently make extraordinary profits from it.
Maybe the era of a "classic" education is gone forever, but it still puzzles me when colleges today have so few general education requirements and yet one of them ISN'T media literacy.
Tangental story:
I lived in an apartment complex with other residents who were NOTORIOUS for leaving stuff in the dryer overnight. After it happened multiple times, I put their clothes in a bag, did my own laundry, and then when I came to get mine out of the dryer and the bag was still there, I sorted out all the women's undies and carefully and neatly folded them and put them in a pile.
Problem solved, it didn't occur again until months later when a new resident moved in and started doing the same thing. The same approach worked again.
I don't have a stranger underwear fetish, but I figured it would creep people out without actually doing them any harm, to the point where they might not let their stuff sit overnight (or even over TWO nights), and apparently it did.
I'm reminded of the mortgage company where I worked where loan officers pulling in monthly commissions of $10,000 a month and higher were "incentivized" by awarding the top sales every month perks like a $500 gift certificate for a golf shop, and the people who did the most work (hourly and salary employees) were incentivized by the knowledge that, if the owner ever needed to make a payment on his BMW SLK and his finances were tight, the money the company and owners saved from firing any of those employees would be more than enough to offset the burden.
This happened more than once.
They took it down because it was causing them problems. What.cd certainly doesn't actually care about "respect" for a dead author's wishes.
This notion really needs more attention that it gets. Copyright law is a ruinous no-man's-land whose primary function is to denude the public domain of anything that some publisher might squeeze value out of, when it was intended to do quite the opposite.
Publishing companies want to turn culture into something we consume rather than participate in.
I'm not sure why, if I am not due a share of my grandfather's income as "royalties" for his farm or factory work, I am somehow due a share of royalties for a book he wrote. If he left the only copy with me and I'm the first person to take it to a publisher, it can be argued that that is a slightly different matter.
Maybe Princeton shouldn't be in the business of playing gatekeeper to a dead man's paranoiac death wishes about publication. If Salinger was a serial killer or a despot, would Princeton feel morally obliged to follow his wishes about what he wanted published after his death?
The fact that copyright lasts for the author's life "+ X years" where X gets increased every time it nearly expires means that we have infinite copyright, which is blatantly unconstitutional, and definitely contrary to the original stated purpose of US copyright law.
If Salinger wanted to keep his precious manuscripts away from the public eye, instead of granting precious sanctimonious access of it through an agreement with Princeton, maybe he should have entrusted it to a private individual, or an institution without a duty to higher learning, such as a legal firm or a publishing house.
http://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/map-china-us_superimposed.jpg
Just stop. Mind you, I'd be happy with a country-wide single-time-zone if and only if either I were at the western edge of it, or if we just pushed the clock ahead 2-2.5 hours ahead before standardizing it.
All of the "just change your schedule instead of the time" arguments come from a naive understanding of what it's actually like to hold a regular job like most people have: your employer is pretty much the one and only determiner of your schedule for the majority of your week and your life. "Hey, I'm just going to come into work a few minutes later each day in the winter, and I'll start to float back the opposite way once spring kicks in" presumes the corporate world gives a damn about your scheduling needs. Most of the working world does not have the luxury of a job that, if they arrive 30 minutes late as a regular basis, they will not be fired from. Many people who work in workplaces with a time clock will get fired if they're a few minutes late from the employer-mandated start time more than a few minutes per month.
Also, many detractors of DST obviously don't have to schedule their work life with the starting times of their children's schools. "Well, if everyone floated,they could all float the same!" That's simply not happening. Workplaces like standardized time for a reason: because it places the burden of scheduling the workplace on the employer without having to have complicated time shifts every day (or every few weeks). If you have a job and children, and they shift time expectations in blocks independent of one another, the problem persists.
Many DST-detractors also seem to presume that, if you have children, getting them to school is simply a matter of getting them up in time to catch the bus, or to walk. Most areas of the country either do not have dependable public transportation where children can learn to commute themselves, nor live within walking distance of their school, and an increasing number of parents have to drive their children to school every year precisely because tight education budgets means something has to get cut, and school busing is one of the first to go - and it's easy to justify, because the logic is that if the parents don't approve a busing millage, they're the only ones who will be inconvenienced by it, anyway. Admittedly, this is a political failure where the citizen is somehow given collective veto power over the funding of schools, police, and fire services, but can't disapprove "millages" for any meaningful government spending such as corporate tax breaks and military weapon systems.
As far as California goes, some of its tech service sector effectively works from 5 to 5 precisely because they have to serve the needs of a country whose major business hubs are either in Eastern Time, Central Time, or Pacific Time. Mountain Time is said to exist, but I have deliberately chosen to forget it does.
Moving to one time zone wouldn't be impossible, of course. China does it and they are, roughly speaking, as wide as the mainland US.
Whatever the solution is, if it means that most Americans who leave work after 5PM get almost no useful daylight time for much of the year, it's a dead letter, and that won't change regardless of how many slashdotters who make their own hours tell them to "just" adjust their schedules.
Finally, an underpowered smart phone that is already as dated as the existing smartphone I have, and will struggle with heavy app usage. But it's FLOSS and that makes it better.
While I certainly agree that most well-written webpages should look good in half screen mode, this isn't an excuse for them to look bad in fullscreen mode, with either large blocks of space going unused, or for text-heavy websites, long lines that result in readability nightmare.
Amen. I find 16:9 to be too cramped, and this is compounded by the fact that a lot of web developers are still making content that assumes we're back in the age of non-widescreen monitors, meaning more scrolling. Or in the case of 16:9 monitors, MORE more scrolling.
16:10 is a compromise I can live with, and it disappoints me that 1920x1080 has somehow become dominant merely because of a video distribution standard. Don't shackle me in your 16:9 chains.
Frankly, I'd rather see a move to higher-resolution mainstream monitors with higher pixel density (again, at 16:10) than anything else as far as video improvement goes.
This is only astonishing if you're unfamiliar with the increasingly dizzying prices of textbooks. I presume that South Africa is little different than the US in this regard, though this presumption is unchecked.
> Firstly, corporate sovereignty has been decreasing for decades.
I am interested in your alternate history novel. Please tell me more.
Ouch. I don't envy them. Of course, ditch 21" CRTs for 27" LCDs didn't really save me any physical desktop space. Clutter multiplies to fit its container.
A tangent, but frankly, given the choice between 4K monitors that I couldn't afford an a return to widespread availability of a 16:10 option at 1920x1200, I'd take the latter. 16:9 is less ideal to me.
Given how few CRT monitors there are in the wild (let alone on those computers that are running new hardware), I'm not sure why the CRT vs LCD distinction was noteworthy.
...as actually having anything to do with "yetis".
I don't think we need DNA evidence to demonstrate that people are perfectly capable of making up monster folklore without anything more convincing than a tall tale.
Replacing a non-existent creature of folklore with a purported half breed of a creature that occurs nowhere near a specific location really isn't accomplishing much, especially when people have long been motivated to produce "evidence" before the advent of DNA testing. The polar bear doesn't live anywhere near the Himalays, yet intrepid explorers who wanted to engage in a prank or to fool a foundation to donate money to their expedition were certainly capable of bringing part of a polar bear to create "evidence" for their "discovery".
This is like finding a South African cent in my change and coming to the conclusion that the United States used to be a South African possession. There are easier ways to explain this "evidence" than purporting the yeti myth to be a misunderstood bear that didn't live anywhere near the reported location: people make shit up, and people want to believe in monster myths.
So what you're saying is that you can't dispute that:
1 - Sharia is the law imposed on Muslims.
2 - Sharia law imposes great sanction - including death in this life and damnation in the next - for those that reject the faith.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam
I'm done with you. You are at best deluded, and at worst, disingenuous.
So do you dispute that Sharia law is specifically enjoined on all Muslims according to the Koran, and that Sharia law forbids a Muslim from ever rejecting Islam? Because if you're willing to dispute that, you're either confused or lying.
The Koran and Sharia law. Pakistan does not comply fully with Sharia law. Contrast with Saudi Arabia. Again, the Koran is very specific about all of this, despite your apologist posturing.
So tell me more about the rights to publicly worship in a faith other than Islam according the the Koran. To discuss with Muslims the virtues of another faith and try to convert them. The right of Muslims to convert. The rights of Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists and Jains to worship as they please.
Because none of these rights exist, and are specifically countermanded by the Koran, which is the "official word of god" which pre-existed the creation of the world. Even though that makes no sense given the actual contents.
They are from the Koran, which is considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God, and are not contingent in time or circumstance.
But you already know this, don't you?
Ah yes, the Islamic assertion that the Koran is the unaltered work of god. This has no historical basis, and is a provably incorrect assertion of faith.
Please read the Koran:
(4:89) - "They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks."
(5:33) - "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement"
(8:12) - "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them"
(8:39) - "And fight with them until there is no more fitna (disorder, unbelief) and religion should be only for Allah"
(9:29) - "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
I'm done. It goes on and on. In Islam, one has no "human rights" in the modern understanding, and one certainly has no "human rights" with regards to the freedom of religion. Without the freedom to believe or disbelieve as one chooses, one has no freedom at all.
And don't get me started on the "People of the Book" nonsense, as if being slightly less awful to Jews and Christians is all it takes to ignore the fact that Buddhists and Jains and Hindus and other polytheists and pantheists have no such "protection".
While Arab scholars did indeed preserve important works, the degree to which this was a "golden age" is largely an invention of 18th and 19th century "orientalists" who saw in Islam a foil to point out the flaws in Christendom, and is hardly a useful measure of human rights during the era. Most Islamic history in non-Arab countries is treated as if it began with the Arab invasions and that nothing useful happened before.
These Orientalist apologists for Islam also paint a far too rosy picture of the human rights enjoyed by "people of the book", ignoring the fact that they were subject to huge fines, massive discrimination, torture, and forced conversions.
This white-washing of history is well-established, and while I'm sorry that you've fallen victim to it (as had I when I was first learning about Arab-Islamic civilization in school), there is a cure: modern historians who have managed to paint a far more objective picture of Classical Islamic culture.
The plight of the Jews in particular is apt, as the fate of the Jews in al-Andalus and the Turkish portions of the empire are often painted as a sort of multicultural haven. In fact, the Jews were subject to the whim of the ruler and had no recourse to law if the ruler decided to forcibly convert them, confiscate their lands, economically cripple them, or kill them. That this was true in the Abassid empire should not, however, be used to paint a rosy picture of Jews in Christian Europe, as the exact same thing was true there. Leaders of nations - both Islamic and Christendom - tolerated Jews at their whim, and had more to do with whether or not the ruler needed their influence or financial backing, and whether or not public sentiment against them was worth the benefit of toleration.
While the Crusades were an awful abuse of Christians over Muslims, it must be fairly stated that neither civilization treated the members of the other with any real tolerance, and that there was plenty of Muslim abuse of Christian communities. To be even *more* intellectually honest, it must be recognized that the Christians were pretty good at finding reasons to abuse one another during the Crusades, as several of them made it nowhere near the Caliphate before wreaking havoc.
Arab-Islamic culture is very good at "forgetting" much of its own history, through imperialism, whitewashing, tortuous apologetics, and outright revisionist history.
By paying the correct toll at the correct tollbooth, and tacitly agreeing that culture is something you "buy" and not "participate in".
> Tim Berners-Lee: DRMed HTML least of all evils
No, Tim, DRMed HTML is a pretty big evil, in that it sabotages an open, readable format by saddling it to an unnecessary rights management monkey.
Let stakeholders in DRM do their own dirty work and see if the public embraces it. The fact that they are going to do so doesn't make it incumbent on web developers and standards bodies to make it more easy for them to do so in a more universal manner.
Check your mandate, Tim.