The older generation just needs to be reminded that sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching people play with balls and/or pucks is no different than video games of any type. It's all idle waste and God will surely punish us all to an eternity in hell.
Equally cynical but it makes all their applicants seem unqualified, and can be used to justify outsourcing and the enormous "labor shortage" we all hear about. The company I work for, which is very large, claims it was only able to net 30 people after a year of "serious recruiting" in the US (hint: over 600 people quit in that same year). Needless to say, their recruiting was none too serious, and their offers were bare bones "meet your current salary plus 2%" and the attrition is bad for a reason. But it's a number that can be used to justify the increased offshoring, which is really what they want.
If you advertised a 100gpm, always on plan, and sold it to both customers, then no, I would not. I'd say "I do not need 100gpm, I need 10gpm, do you have a cheaper 10gpm plan". In a free market, someone would pop up to answer the needs of the 10gpm customer if no plan existed. Or, alternatively you could buy the 100gpm plan and resell it in 10gpm chunks to 9 others maybe making a buck in the process. In a monopoly, this doesn't happen. Instead they advertise something they don't intend to deliver and only a small fraction of customers actually take them up on the offer. They then call these users "hogs" and start a smear campaign designed to blame their inability to deliver on promises on a few "bandwidth hogs" in the network. They call you a criminal if you resell their bandwidth and tell you that you "have no right" to do so.
Also in a free market, there would be competition between providers, holding prices of both plans in check. In a monopoly market, this force is not felt as it's just as easy to raise prices to the point where a small fraction of customers are hostile, but not so many as to change the position of their local elected official who you are simultaneously lying to and bribing by giving trumped up "operating expenses", misleading stories about bandwidth hogs, and money via lobbyists to encourage him to believe and propogate the lies.
The only guild I've ever been in was an EQ Uberguild. The only interaction I had, or desired, from them was raid progression. Most of them were not people I wanted to really know anyway. We were bound together by a common goal, committed to doing our best to achieve it, and had some ego associated with being better than other guilds AT THE GAME. I came to WoW precisely because such guilds were too needy (upset that some of us couldn't log on for 6 hours a night to sit in a heal chain, every night). WoW is more casual, the time commitment is less, but it is still a game with clear objectives. I guess if I ever felt compelled to raid in WoW I'd join a guild that just wanted to be good raiders (or PvPers), not start a political action committee. Penny Arcade is really an example of my point, those guys and their readers are really in to gaming, they're united by that one cause, and that's why it works. I doubt their readers are homogenous in any other way, that is exactly the kind of attitude that belongs.
I don't see how GLBT, or any other RL junk-topic has any place in WoW, that's for IRC, IM,/., blogs etc. It would seem any policy that Blizzard adopts on the subject is suitable, provided it reinforces a positive competitive dynamic. This stuff does not belong in the game, can quickly turn it poisonous, and only hurts. While it would be correct to ban any guild not centered around the GAME, it's probably only practical to target the biggest offenders (which from what I see are GLBT and Christian Guilds). Really if you're playing the game yet still identifying so strongly with some RL concept, it tells me the game is not interesting to you and you aren't going to take it seriously. Like any other game, the only time you really can play BADLY is if you aren't trying your best. Sensible people, except maybe the jocks we all hated in school, can tolerate and even defend people who don't play well, but have 0 tolerance of those who show up to waste time. I can't see why Blizzard, who has to maintain the integrity of the game including the inter-player dynamics that are built by guilds, would take any other stance except turn a total blind eye to it and hope that hatred will cause all the malcontents to eventually quit.
Personally I think the wiser choice is to be public and firm before people get too entrenched. Some will quit, but they're probably going to quit anyway. Better to see that few go before they get supporters, or worse, copy cats in other guilds.
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
To think, eventually very many people would eventually go on to make not only better compilers, but entire operating systems, applications, and utilities, totally for free, with source included, just for the hell of it. Not only would they not make money on it, but they'd give the fruits of their labor away, get slammed by the business world, get chased around by lawyers and only get more determined.
Don't get me wrong, he makes a valid point. I'm guessing there is another side, including that his software was probably overpriced, probably more than what hobbyists really needed, and probably could have been more profitable if these things were taken into account before someone started coding. That doesn't make the situation right, but it does indicate a miscalculation; he probably could not have made money on that product, period, why bitch about it and alienate people?
By the same logic as the GLBT ban, a Christian friendly guild should not be permitted to recruit in general chat. Not everyone is christian, many people actively hate Christians, further muslims, jews and especially agnostics will feel alienated. Immature "anti-christian" people may feel compelled to bring their views into the game.
I'm just curious why people feel the need to bring any of this nonsense into the game. I don't have time to talk about who i'm having sex with or what I worship, there's too many things that need to die, die die. (or too much stuff to farm farm farm)
Maybe in the end it's all Blizzard's fault for not having enough content to keep everyone busy on the game.
Lucky you. I got that at consumer prices with Speakeasy. Now that I'm in an area where Speakeasy & other independents can't enter, I have to pay SBC business prices for that. I can't even get that service from Time Warner for any price.
I'm not sure that business class DSL comes with bandwidth guarantees.
They've gone up for me. Where as i used to be able to get speakeasy for about $50/mo, I have to pay $80 with SBC to get identical service. Forget cable, they don't offer a service where I can get static IPs.
Yes I believe the words I say, and in fact I voted for Bush, he was clearly the only true leader of the lot. The question has always been whether he'd lead us to a place that's better for all of us, or just some of us.
Bush has tremendous power of distraction and controls the public eye with skill, if he were really a believer in what he claims he could fix this. I have been disallusioned with him as he appears to be behaving as a charlatan. If he were serious about spreading freedom, he wouldn't be allowing all this China nonsense to continue.
I'd be willing to pay more monthly for access to a real time network with guarantees about latency. I would not like to see my current service degrade so that this happens. This would require service providers set up networks to end corporations providing real time services such that latency could be managed end to end. The technology for this exists, but it's screwed up by carriers being hard to deal with.
But the bottom line is this: ATT/Verizon/etc. do not get to establish these contracts. Their job is to run the network. I want a group of 3rd party ISPs to each independently build their own real time networks and sell the services to customers who can chose amongst ISPs to get the best service. The ISPs will then give the carriers instructions about how the network is to be set up, and pay them for their troubles. The INTERFACE to customers, and to the network, must be public, non-proprietary and transparent, like IPv4 is. Customers must be able to monitor and ensure their contract is being upheld. No proprietary set top boxes or any premises equipment, period.
The guy who owns the wire must stop being the guy who provides the service. That model doesn't work. Further we need to see more REAL competition as much as we can. We can't ever see competition over wires, two or three wires does not a competitive market make. So reduce their role by force, and abstract it.
You are almost certainly not getting 2 MB/s (16Mb/s) unless you have VDSL and live within about 1kfoot of the central office or a remote terminal, and you're almost certainly not even getting 2Mb/s at all times of the day. The first hop in your path through their network is an aggregation step with your neighbors. Small DSLAMs have something like 40 customers on an OC-3, large DSLAMs have something like 500 customers on 4 OC-3s.
They don't promise you bandwidth, just service. You share your bandwidth with other customers and now, their whim.
Most likely, and I've been out of telecom for a year, they'll upgrade your DSLAM with a gigE connection, but enable priority queueing. What they're going to do is put video on a higher priority queue, thus your internet packets may be held up (or dropped during high traffic hours) in favor of ensuring video packets get through within so many milliseconds of arriving in the queue. You probably won't see a loss of bandwidth (except at peak hours), but if you play real time games, or run real time traffic (IP phone), you will experience additional round trip delays or maybe more lost packets.
Networks do need some real time capabilities, but letting Verizon/ATT proxy those is not the right thing to do. These companies do not work and play well with others. There are better ways of adding those services without allowing monopolies to grow their scope of control.
Used games require a previous owner who played, got bored, and sold the game. That says the game sucked. Make better games. If a game is good, people are going to fall all over themselves to get a copy, new, used or otherwise.
There's a fundamental disconnect at Telco's with consumers. We think we pay our monthly DSL bill for 1.544Mbps down/ 384K up (depending on where you live). They think we're paying for a service that transfers packets, a byproduct of which involves our packets entering and leaving their network faster at some times than others. The reality is we share a single DSLAM with 250-500 of our neighbors that has a tiny little link to their core network, and at many times of the day, we cannot hope to achieve maximum throughput. Thus if they wish to saturate that link with video, they feel we have no say in the matter, as we're not actually paying for bandwidth.
In a better world, we'd of course shift our money from competitor to competitor, settling on the service that offers the best bang for the buck. Of course they know that in most parts of the country, there is only one competitor, and their service sucks in its own unique ways.
Now enter a big business friendly government. Let's not even say friendly, let's say that someone in the government has bent over and offered himself to the monopoly gods. As part of this relationship, the government uses the FCC to ensure that telco's and cable operators get their chance to make insane profits, while the rest of us bicker about Iraq, Intelligent Design, and whether the president has the authority to spy on citizens.
Speaking in generalities (since any chip company requires NDAs once they give you stuff) I can say that while there is truth in your statement, it is not absolute. No corporation I've worked for has ever directly paid for tools or eval boards from any chip company, ever. We've sent a small number packing, but they're the exception rather than the rule and probably had something to hide. I would argue that it is almost insulting for a salesman to try to ask you to pay for it; if they want you to sell their chips, they will give you all the tools and support you need to be successful, period. Big companies with high volumes can do that.
However if you're a hobbyist, or a company without a sigificant volume of selling products, it changes. They can and will charge you thousands of dollars for eval boards, tools, support, etc. There's no point in crying, they won't listen because you're too high a financial risk.
Unfortunately I think it's almost a physical rule of the universe that innovation can't happen in large companies. The killer app that upsets the norm and makes someone rich probably won't come from there.
Beyond MS and the XBox, this practice is pretty common in both the HW and SW industries. If you've ever: tried to synthesize FPGA code, get a compiler for a up,uc that's not mainstream, tried to get an eval board, tried to get API info, tried to program for any console or handheld, you've come across this practice.
Most of that stuff is FREE to corporate customers, companies will voluntarily lose money just to get people to try to use their product. However for people on the street, or companies too small to be "real", they will charge thousands upon thousands of dollars for these materials, if they will let you have them at all.
On one hand they're right, true hobbyists often have day jobs that are not in the industry (since those in the industry often gank this stuff from work) and can generate a lot of cost by a multitude of questions and misunderstandings. On the other hand, one persons hobby could turn into a good business, if their idea or project becomes interesting. By discouraging this, they are effectively discouraging innovation in anything less than a rather well funded start-up.
Liberal education has nothing whatever to do with being a liberal, except sometimes a proclivity towards taking up random worthless subjects in serious study.
Liberal education is a forced requirement that probably still exists as part of science, engineering and medical degree requirements in many universities. It's a blatant excuse to make people who actually have a goal in life spend tuition money on classes they either have no interest in, or are at least distracting and detrimental to their end goals. Some believe such survey courses should have already been taken care of in lower (public) education where they did not directly waste an individuals money. "Forced" seems hyperbolic, as no guns or threats are involved, but anyone completing his education in number of credits and grade point average yet does not have the credits in his "liberal education" category, does not get a degree. Since a degree in these fields is a prerequisite to getting a job, it is quite a powerful compulsion.
Liberals are people who are defined as not being conservative. Conservatives are people who define themselves as not being liberal. There are other definitions, but from the standpoint of American politics, those are most accurate and descriptive. (And that is the source of problems with our democracy, I'd disagree the entire world suffers from this) I consider myself conservative, although somehow the republican party has the least in common with my value systems which have nothing at all to do with religion or a strong, authoritarian government. Hence I reject the idea that the words mean anything at all, except labels people apply to ideas they don't like. Therefore if he were a conservative, labelling an idea he did not like as liberal is actually completely appropriate. I can agree, because I think I'm conservative and hate liberal arts classes, thus it must be a vast left wing conspiracy. You, on the other hand, may label it as conservative because you clearly have some notion of being a liberal. I'd be disgusted of course that you'd apply such a good name to such a bad class, but we could still be in agreement at the same time. Confused? Good.
I think we agree that it's all complete bullshit, no matter what you call it.
In fact that is a large CAUSE of problems. Everything around IT has to be so process oriented to make sure our outsourced slaves are doing their jobs correctly.
In a similar light, my own corporation has a complete clusterfuck of an IT department, since it is centered entirely on being as cheap as possible. Not only do we have the India effect, we have a security model centered on making sure every employees laptop runs a particular OS image that has a virus scanner fundamentally attached to the ON button (slight exaggeration) so that a virus does not somehow sneak into a factory image. This way there is only one network to maintain and thus we are "cheaper". (similarly websites are "banned" for being not work related, to save bandwidth you see) This also means no linux boxes, no stray equipment on the network (in a HW dev company, this is a real bitch since most test equipment can dump data to the network), etc. Try to convince them to build a better security model that relies less on "good citizens" and they try to get you fired.
I am the source of the world problems, and I refuse to feel guilty. I was informed in the self-same class, that I can't help it, that white man is born evil and cannot change.
Thus by definition, I am what I am. I think Indians may have inspired Calvinism.
Now my brief excursion into a forced month of "Native American Studies" (tought by a real live injun activist!) would lead me to believe that Indians never killed humans until white man brought the notion of violence to them. They were a peaceful, vegetarian people who worshipped the land and it's bounty. Your portrayal of Apache's as warlike and hostile is clearly an inaccurate view constructed from evil European values and social degeneration brought on by Christopher Columbus, The Anti-Christ.
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The older generation just needs to be reminded that sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching people play with balls and/or pucks is no different than video games of any type. It's all idle waste and God will surely punish us all to an eternity in hell.
Equally cynical but it makes all their applicants seem unqualified, and can be used to justify outsourcing and the enormous "labor shortage" we all hear about. The company I work for, which is very large, claims it was only able to net 30 people after a year of "serious recruiting" in the US (hint: over 600 people quit in that same year). Needless to say, their recruiting was none too serious, and their offers were bare bones "meet your current salary plus 2%" and the attrition is bad for a reason. But it's a number that can be used to justify the increased offshoring, which is really what they want.
If you advertised a 100gpm, always on plan, and sold it to both customers, then no, I would not. I'd say "I do not need 100gpm, I need 10gpm, do you have a cheaper 10gpm plan". In a free market, someone would pop up to answer the needs of the 10gpm customer if no plan existed. Or, alternatively you could buy the 100gpm plan and resell it in 10gpm chunks to 9 others maybe making a buck in the process. In a monopoly, this doesn't happen. Instead they advertise something they don't intend to deliver and only a small fraction of customers actually take them up on the offer. They then call these users "hogs" and start a smear campaign designed to blame their inability to deliver on promises on a few "bandwidth hogs" in the network. They call you a criminal if you resell their bandwidth and tell you that you "have no right" to do so.
Also in a free market, there would be competition between providers, holding prices of both plans in check. In a monopoly market, this force is not felt as it's just as easy to raise prices to the point where a small fraction of customers are hostile, but not so many as to change the position of their local elected official who you are simultaneously lying to and bribing by giving trumped up "operating expenses", misleading stories about bandwidth hogs, and money via lobbyists to encourage him to believe and propogate the lies.
The only guild I've ever been in was an EQ Uberguild. The only interaction I had, or desired, from them was raid progression. Most of them were not people I wanted to really know anyway. We were bound together by a common goal, committed to doing our best to achieve it, and had some ego associated with being better than other guilds AT THE GAME. I came to WoW precisely because such guilds were too needy (upset that some of us couldn't log on for 6 hours a night to sit in a heal chain, every night). WoW is more casual, the time commitment is less, but it is still a game with clear objectives. I guess if I ever felt compelled to raid in WoW I'd join a guild that just wanted to be good raiders (or PvPers), not start a political action committee. Penny Arcade is really an example of my point, those guys and their readers are really in to gaming, they're united by that one cause, and that's why it works. I doubt their readers are homogenous in any other way, that is exactly the kind of attitude that belongs.
/., blogs etc. It would seem any policy that Blizzard adopts on the subject is suitable, provided it reinforces a positive competitive dynamic. This stuff does not belong in the game, can quickly turn it poisonous, and only hurts. While it would be correct to ban any guild not centered around the GAME, it's probably only practical to target the biggest offenders (which from what I see are GLBT and Christian Guilds). Really if you're playing the game yet still identifying so strongly with some RL concept, it tells me the game is not interesting to you and you aren't going to take it seriously. Like any other game, the only time you really can play BADLY is if you aren't trying your best. Sensible people, except maybe the jocks we all hated in school, can tolerate and even defend people who don't play well, but have 0 tolerance of those who show up to waste time. I can't see why Blizzard, who has to maintain the integrity of the game including the inter-player dynamics that are built by guilds, would take any other stance except turn a total blind eye to it and hope that hatred will cause all the malcontents to eventually quit.
I don't see how GLBT, or any other RL junk-topic has any place in WoW, that's for IRC, IM,
Personally I think the wiser choice is to be public and firm before people get too entrenched. Some will quit, but they're probably going to quit anyway. Better to see that few go before they get supporters, or worse, copy cats in other guilds.
To think, eventually very many people would eventually go on to make not only better compilers, but entire operating systems, applications, and utilities, totally for free, with source included, just for the hell of it. Not only would they not make money on it, but they'd give the fruits of their labor away, get slammed by the business world, get chased around by lawyers and only get more determined.
Don't get me wrong, he makes a valid point. I'm guessing there is another side, including that his software was probably overpriced, probably more than what hobbyists really needed, and probably could have been more profitable if these things were taken into account before someone started coding. That doesn't make the situation right, but it does indicate a miscalculation; he probably could not have made money on that product, period, why bitch about it and alienate people?
By the same logic as the GLBT ban, a Christian friendly guild should not be permitted to recruit in general chat. Not everyone is christian, many people actively hate Christians, further muslims, jews and especially agnostics will feel alienated. Immature "anti-christian" people may feel compelled to bring their views into the game.
I'm just curious why people feel the need to bring any of this nonsense into the game. I don't have time to talk about who i'm having sex with or what I worship, there's too many things that need to die, die die. (or too much stuff to farm farm farm)
Maybe in the end it's all Blizzard's fault for not having enough content to keep everyone busy on the game.
Do they let you download custom ring-tones yet, or does this somehow 'require' paying verizon?
I don't know about you, but I don't WANT to be on TV. I like to win though. Confusing.
...when Apple was the ONLY option in US education. What happened? Can it happen again if we all jump on the bandwagon?
Sure it will, it's a closed system.
Lucky you. I got that at consumer prices with Speakeasy. Now that I'm in an area where Speakeasy & other independents can't enter, I have to pay SBC business prices for that. I can't even get that service from Time Warner for any price. I'm not sure that business class DSL comes with bandwidth guarantees.
They've gone up for me. Where as i used to be able to get speakeasy for about $50/mo, I have to pay $80 with SBC to get identical service. Forget cable, they don't offer a service where I can get static IPs.
Yes I believe the words I say, and in fact I voted for Bush, he was clearly the only true leader of the lot. The question has always been whether he'd lead us to a place that's better for all of us, or just some of us.
Bush has tremendous power of distraction and controls the public eye with skill, if he were really a believer in what he claims he could fix this. I have been disallusioned with him as he appears to be behaving as a charlatan. If he were serious about spreading freedom, he wouldn't be allowing all this China nonsense to continue.
I'd be willing to pay more monthly for access to a real time network with guarantees about latency. I would not like to see my current service degrade so that this happens. This would require service providers set up networks to end corporations providing real time services such that latency could be managed end to end. The technology for this exists, but it's screwed up by carriers being hard to deal with.
But the bottom line is this: ATT/Verizon/etc. do not get to establish these contracts. Their job is to run the network. I want a group of 3rd party ISPs to each independently build their own real time networks and sell the services to customers who can chose amongst ISPs to get the best service. The ISPs will then give the carriers instructions about how the network is to be set up, and pay them for their troubles. The INTERFACE to customers, and to the network, must be public, non-proprietary and transparent, like IPv4 is. Customers must be able to monitor and ensure their contract is being upheld. No proprietary set top boxes or any premises equipment, period.
The guy who owns the wire must stop being the guy who provides the service. That model doesn't work. Further we need to see more REAL competition as much as we can. We can't ever see competition over wires, two or three wires does not a competitive market make. So reduce their role by force, and abstract it.
The same government that "blasts" them for censorship, is encouraging US companies to send jobs and money to China. It's a pretty mixed message.
You are almost certainly not getting 2 MB/s (16Mb/s) unless you have VDSL and live within about 1kfoot of the central office or a remote terminal, and you're almost certainly not even getting 2Mb/s at all times of the day. The first hop in your path through their network is an aggregation step with your neighbors. Small DSLAMs have something like 40 customers on an OC-3, large DSLAMs have something like 500 customers on 4 OC-3s.
They don't promise you bandwidth, just service. You share your bandwidth with other customers and now, their whim.
Most likely, and I've been out of telecom for a year, they'll upgrade your DSLAM with a gigE connection, but enable priority queueing. What they're going to do is put video on a higher priority queue, thus your internet packets may be held up (or dropped during high traffic hours) in favor of ensuring video packets get through within so many milliseconds of arriving in the queue. You probably won't see a loss of bandwidth (except at peak hours), but if you play real time games, or run real time traffic (IP phone), you will experience additional round trip delays or maybe more lost packets.
Networks do need some real time capabilities, but letting Verizon/ATT proxy those is not the right thing to do. These companies do not work and play well with others. There are better ways of adding those services without allowing monopolies to grow their scope of control.
Used games require a previous owner who played, got bored, and sold the game. That says the game sucked. Make better games. If a game is good, people are going to fall all over themselves to get a copy, new, used or otherwise.
Duh.
There's a fundamental disconnect at Telco's with consumers. We think we pay our monthly DSL bill for 1.544Mbps down/ 384K up (depending on where you live). They think we're paying for a service that transfers packets, a byproduct of which involves our packets entering and leaving their network faster at some times than others. The reality is we share a single DSLAM with 250-500 of our neighbors that has a tiny little link to their core network, and at many times of the day, we cannot hope to achieve maximum throughput. Thus if they wish to saturate that link with video, they feel we have no say in the matter, as we're not actually paying for bandwidth.
In a better world, we'd of course shift our money from competitor to competitor, settling on the service that offers the best bang for the buck. Of course they know that in most parts of the country, there is only one competitor, and their service sucks in its own unique ways.
Now enter a big business friendly government. Let's not even say friendly, let's say that someone in the government has bent over and offered himself to the monopoly gods. As part of this relationship, the government uses the FCC to ensure that telco's and cable operators get their chance to make insane profits, while the rest of us bicker about Iraq, Intelligent Design, and whether the president has the authority to spy on citizens.
Speaking in generalities (since any chip company requires NDAs once they give you stuff) I can say that while there is truth in your statement, it is not absolute. No corporation I've worked for has ever directly paid for tools or eval boards from any chip company, ever. We've sent a small number packing, but they're the exception rather than the rule and probably had something to hide. I would argue that it is almost insulting for a salesman to try to ask you to pay for it; if they want you to sell their chips, they will give you all the tools and support you need to be successful, period. Big companies with high volumes can do that.
However if you're a hobbyist, or a company without a sigificant volume of selling products, it changes. They can and will charge you thousands of dollars for eval boards, tools, support, etc. There's no point in crying, they won't listen because you're too high a financial risk.
Unfortunately I think it's almost a physical rule of the universe that innovation can't happen in large companies. The killer app that upsets the norm and makes someone rich probably won't come from there.
This is the price of doing the right thing (most of the time).
Beyond MS and the XBox, this practice is pretty common in both the HW and SW industries. If you've ever: tried to synthesize FPGA code, get a compiler for a up,uc that's not mainstream, tried to get an eval board, tried to get API info, tried to program for any console or handheld, you've come across this practice.
Most of that stuff is FREE to corporate customers, companies will voluntarily lose money just to get people to try to use their product. However for people on the street, or companies too small to be "real", they will charge thousands upon thousands of dollars for these materials, if they will let you have them at all.
On one hand they're right, true hobbyists often have day jobs that are not in the industry (since those in the industry often gank this stuff from work) and can generate a lot of cost by a multitude of questions and misunderstandings. On the other hand, one persons hobby could turn into a good business, if their idea or project becomes interesting. By discouraging this, they are effectively discouraging innovation in anything less than a rather well funded start-up.
Liberal education has nothing whatever to do with being a liberal, except sometimes a proclivity towards taking up random worthless subjects in serious study.
Liberal education is a forced requirement that probably still exists as part of science, engineering and medical degree requirements in many universities. It's a blatant excuse to make people who actually have a goal in life spend tuition money on classes they either have no interest in, or are at least distracting and detrimental to their end goals. Some believe such survey courses should have already been taken care of in lower (public) education where they did not directly waste an individuals money. "Forced" seems hyperbolic, as no guns or threats are involved, but anyone completing his education in number of credits and grade point average yet does not have the credits in his "liberal education" category, does not get a degree. Since a degree in these fields is a prerequisite to getting a job, it is quite a powerful compulsion.
Liberals are people who are defined as not being conservative. Conservatives are people who define themselves as not being liberal. There are other definitions, but from the standpoint of American politics, those are most accurate and descriptive. (And that is the source of problems with our democracy, I'd disagree the entire world suffers from this) I consider myself conservative, although somehow the republican party has the least in common with my value systems which have nothing at all to do with religion or a strong, authoritarian government. Hence I reject the idea that the words mean anything at all, except labels people apply to ideas they don't like. Therefore if he were a conservative, labelling an idea he did not like as liberal is actually completely appropriate. I can agree, because I think I'm conservative and hate liberal arts classes, thus it must be a vast left wing conspiracy. You, on the other hand, may label it as conservative because you clearly have some notion of being a liberal. I'd be disgusted of course that you'd apply such a good name to such a bad class, but we could still be in agreement at the same time. Confused? Good.
I think we agree that it's all complete bullshit, no matter what you call it.
In fact that is a large CAUSE of problems. Everything around IT has to be so process oriented to make sure our outsourced slaves are doing their jobs correctly.
In a similar light, my own corporation has a complete clusterfuck of an IT department, since it is centered entirely on being as cheap as possible. Not only do we have the India effect, we have a security model centered on making sure every employees laptop runs a particular OS image that has a virus scanner fundamentally attached to the ON button (slight exaggeration) so that a virus does not somehow sneak into a factory image. This way there is only one network to maintain and thus we are "cheaper". (similarly websites are "banned" for being not work related, to save bandwidth you see) This also means no linux boxes, no stray equipment on the network (in a HW dev company, this is a real bitch since most test equipment can dump data to the network), etc. Try to convince them to build a better security model that relies less on "good citizens" and they try to get you fired.
I am the source of the world problems, and I refuse to feel guilty. I was informed in the self-same class, that I can't help it, that white man is born evil and cannot change.
Thus by definition, I am what I am. I think Indians may have inspired Calvinism.
Now my brief excursion into a forced month of "Native American Studies" (tought by a real live injun activist!) would lead me to believe that Indians never killed humans until white man brought the notion of violence to them. They were a peaceful, vegetarian people who worshipped the land and it's bounty. Your portrayal of Apache's as warlike and hostile is clearly an inaccurate view constructed from evil European values and social degeneration brought on by Christopher Columbus, The Anti-Christ.
I believe everything college professors tell me.
The missile system is designed to protect the US against rogue states that might like to buy their missiles...if we don't pay up our protection money.