Ah, the classic argument of the intellectually incompetent: using a single case to prove a general principle.
But if really think that single examples prove something, let me use myself as a counterexample.
I'm the only person in my extended family who is in college right now -- and my college is very small and doesn't provide access to stuff like that from outside the intranet. There's only one person in my family who does research, and he and I don't speak. My friends in college were mostly lit and business students, and those who've graduated still aren't working in labs with access to research journals... for some reason.
Basically, your bizarre argument seems to boil down to one or more of the following:
Everyone on/. is in college.
Everyone on/. who isn't in college hangs out with people who are.
Everyone on/. works in a scientific field, because amateur interest in science is inconceivable.
It's entirely reasonable to expect people to have to break the law in order to participate meaningfully on/..
Yeah, because 100% of nerds (the target audience of slashdot) are in college.
I like how your moronic prejudice rules out anyone who is
a) still in high school
b) out of college
It's not like it's unusual to be so long out of college that one's entire peer group is also out of college. In fact, this typically happens with a few years of graduating. Which leaves an entire decade of nerd-life before one would have free access to journals, and five or six decades of nerd-life after the period in which one would have free access to journals.
Are you really so enormously stupid that you believe that all Slashdot readers are in college or have just recently graduated? Or are hanging out with college students right now when they want to read the article?
I hate to toss around insults, but that's really some circus-grade idiocy. I mean, WOW.
It's interesting how when you discuss religion with people who are taking these "balanced" views, it usually takes less than five minutes for them to start quoting from their holy scriptures and asserting that every word of it is true.
Something must be retained from death to birth, so that might as well be called a thetan.
And those "somethings" float around harassing the living and causing them to have psychiatric disorders? And sitting around staring at little electronic boxes that have been proven to have no biofeedback components at all... that will somehow rid us of those thetans? Thetans that, incidentally, are supposed to have come from another planet in Boeing DC8s?
Sorry, no. Scientology is ludicrous bullshit and only gullible idiots defend it.
If you want to talk about "plausible" religions (and I'm using the word plausible VERY loosely), try Greek mythology. I'm happy to believe that some big guy named Zeus lived on a mountain, killed his dad, went around fucking bulls and swans, ate a few of his children, and threw sharp pointy things at people who pissed him off. Hell, you can find people like that living in the US right now; is it so hard to believe that a degenerate redneck like that lived in Greece 4000 years ago?
But... alien ghosts being dumped in Earth's volcanoes to harass a race of homicidal apes by a galactic despot? That's rather less plausible. Frankly, any race powerful enough to locks ghosts in theatres and brainwash them by making them watching The Passion of the Christ over and over again, is probably powerful enough to dispose of those ghosts properly, rather than just leaving them around to inspire the aforementioned apes to challenge his authority?
Hey, I've got a religion based on the plot of Starship Troopers! Want to sign up? In it, WE live in the spirit world, ghosts of dead mobile infantrymen. Our pain and sadness is caused by the meta-ghosts of dead Arachnids. We can only find peace by arming, drilling, and training, until we're sufficiently disciplined and skilled to be recruited/promoted back into the realm of the living to take up arms against the bugs again.
Well, are you a Christian? If so, then you know what you must do.
Thankfully we live in a society where stone is cheap and abundant. I'm sure you can find a landscaping store that will sell you an entire truckload of appropriately-sized rocks, and then deliver them to wherever you and your church feel would be most appropriate for the event.
I think the logic there is that it worked so well with the USSR. The problem is that Russians already had a natural hatred of their leaders, extending back centuries. So blaming all of their problems on their own government wasn't a big leap for them. If necessary, they would have invented imaginary problems for which to blame their government. That's just how Russians are. Hence the need for Gulags, secret police, purges and whatnot, to keep the people in line.
Cubans and Persians, on the other hand, are much more patriotic. Cubans have remarkably high quality of life for such a poor nation; much higher than most of their neighbours (excluding the US). Communism works better at the small scale, and Cuba's success (or rather, their lack of complete failure) bears this out. Persians in particular adore their government for successfully defending them from Iraq during the war. Whatever else you might think of the Ayatollahs, they're rather more benevolent and progressive than Saddam Hussain. So the majority of Persians aren't very inclined to blame their own leaders for anything -- particularly when the USA is threatening to invade them or drop a few nukes to teach them a lesson.
It's always interesting to see how people with these genetic abnormalities cope. Some people seem to turn them into gifts, while others just suffer from them. Like autism -- the majority of people with autism seem to be disabled from it. But for a few people it enhances their other skills, sometimes to an extraordinary degree.
Of course, colourblindness comes in a variety of types. There's even some unconfirmed evidence of the opposite, a rare handful of people (exclusively women) who have an extra color receptor, and can distinguish colours that are isochromatic to the rest of us. Something about a mutated gene for the eye's cone cells, on one copy of the X-chromosome, which results in chimerism of the retina. Apparently it's difficult to do research on this, because the mutation (if it exists) only affects about 1-in-10,000 women.
Your father may have had something analogous that affected his ability to distinguish the brightness and saturation of colours that are isochromatic to the rest of us.
Well, the bible says that Christians are to obey the laws of whatever land they live in. What kind of pathetically hypocritical Christians are going to break the law and doom themselves to
The term "intellectual property" is quite useful for exactly the reason you object to it. It refers to property that is not tangible. It's useful to differentiate tangible property from intangible property no matter which side of the debate you are on. There are lots of different types of tangible property, from land to zebras, with all kinds of varying rules that apply to maintaining and transferring ownership, but we still consider all that stuff to be tangible property.
The laws you mention about real property are nothing more than tools for settling disputes. The concept of property transcends them. In virtually every culture on Earth that has ever been, from hunter gatherers right on up to modern day citizens of nation states, the notion that the physical objects on my person are mine is present. Even a child of two years old feels that he has been wronged if you take what he has.
But if that same child of two draws a picture, and one of his peers draws one that is similar, it is rare and unusual that he will feel he has suffered any kind of loss. He may think less of that peer, but he does not feel that same sense of loss as if his favourite crayon were stolen from him. If you look at primitive cultures, they didn't arrange for elaborate systems of punishment to deter one group of people from singing the songs invented by another. Duplicating books was considered to be a great social service that monks performed for free to better themselves and others. Before the invention of the printing press, most culture and knowledge was passed on exclusively through what we would now laughably refer to as "piracy".
Like it or not, anything intellectual is inherently the very opposite of property, because it can never be stolen (at least not without some very cunning neurosurgery or the application of a sturdy mallet to the cranium).
"Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence." -- Thomas Jefferson
But, if you truly believe that a set of rules invented by bureaucrats is more important than people's actual sense of what is right and what is wrong, go ahead. Your blind acceptance of law will make you a great sycophant to whatever corrupt and destructive government happens to be in power. You would have been one of the people who went around during the age of prohibition insisting that everyone should follow the law and accept it as "right", without even the tiniest shred of critical thought.
It's sad that the article has to explicitly state that copyright laws and trademark laws are different.
This is why the concept of "intellectual property" has to be dispensed with immediately. It creates the erroneous impression that trademarks, servicemarks, copyrights, and patents are all somehow related, and that they have something to do with the notion of real ownership of tangible things. But of course they are not related, and they having nothing to do with true ownership.
The concept of intellectual property is only useful for tricking stupid corporate sycophants into believing that corporations have the right to dictate what the rest of us think, say, and do.
So yes, they need to be concerned with their public image. The administration isn't doing its job properly if the school becomes so disreputable that no one will attend it. You can't pass on knowledge if all the quality students are going to other schools with better public images.
1. register as an individual, against the site TOS
You may not have noticed, but universities employ lots of individuals. Sure, if you despise education, it's easy to see schools as faceless monolithic machines. But they DO have real Human individuals working for them.
I can use my personal account on a forum to do research on behalf of my employer -- and I routinely do. Have I done something wrong? Of course not. Many employers will pay for their employees to have their own, individual accounts on forums and websites relevant to their work.
2. on a social networking site where a school has NOTHING to do whatsoever in the first place
Nearly every university and college in the English speaking world has groups on Facebook. My own college, a tiny little community college of less than a thousand students, is well represented on Youtube and Facebook.
When I searched for "Douglas College" on Youtube, 19 out of the 20 of the results on the first page were about my school. I didn't bother to check the second page, so there are almost certainly a lot more. If I were in a University administrator, I'd be a bit curious about them, and I'd be doing nothing wrong if I checked them out.
When I search for "Douglas College" on Facebook, I got three students (including my most recent ex), an employee, an application that allows the user to search the school's library, three groups, and an event... all just on the first page of results. Are you honestly stupid enough to believe that University administrators are morally obligated to remain ignorant of all of that?!
so as to check on students to see what they're writing about thewselves
Correction: to see what they're writing about the school, which is completely different. It's no different than checking the newspaper, to see what the paper's journalists have been writing about the school. Schools should be VERY interested in anything that's published about them.
Which they should treat as feedback, not possible tarnishing of their image.
No shit. What YOU'VE been claiming is that it should be illegal for Universities to collect that feedback in the first place. What the grownups have been saying is that the University shouldn't have reacted the way it did. You just can't see past your foaming rage and hatred towards education.
As for Uni a business - this has got to stop.
Even if education is free (as it should be), a university is a business. A state-run business, perhaps, but a business nonetheless. They have clients, budgets, revenue streams, marketing, public relations, stakeholders, and so on -- all the things that businesses have. Just look at the science department of any university with a decent research program; they almost invariably have patents on technologies that they develop for their research, and they license those patents to other businesses (including other universities) to produce revenue. They hire and fire people, they deal with unions, they try to recruit the best employees and students, and so on. They are, in every sense imaginable, businesses. In fact, most of them are corporations with charters, and the government typically owns them with limited liability. I don't just mean in the US either -- here in Canada and throughout much of Europe, it's the same way.
It's just None Of Their Business. Now if the guy has disruptive behaviors IN SCHOOL (e.g. wearing a shirt that reads "SHOOT ME I'M FAMOUS" under a portrait of JFK might be considered offensive) that's something else entirely.
How is a website less public than a t-shirt? If you post something with your name attached to it, then it's public, and it's fair game for ANYONE.
It's just None Of Their Business
My medical history is none of my school's business -- that's why I don't post it on the Internet. The same goes for my credit card number.
If I post my credit card number, expiry date, and my real name on an open forum, will "It's None of Their Business!!" protect me from credit card fraud? Will it stop the credit card company from laughing in my face and canceling my card? No, of course not -- because I've deliberately made it public and inherently given permission for everyone, without exception, to view it.
how can you include in your value system that it is GOOD that a school concerns itself with their students' private opinions
It is no longer a private opinion if you publish it. Once something is published, it's the exact opposite of private -- it's public. Complete, totally, and irrevocably public.
Besides, universities are BUSINESSES. You know what those are, right? In a free society, businesses are allowed to concern themselves with their public image. Any responsibly run business is very interested in what people think of them. They want to know what magazines, news sites, and bloggers are publishing about them. So they do, among things, Google searches on the name of the school.
Note well the ways in which this is different than doing an investigation into a student's private life. First, the thing being investigated is the university itself -- which is undeniably part of the purview of a university administrator. Second, the parts of the student's life that are being discovered aren't private -- they're statements that the student deliberately made public in the full knowledge that his University's administrators (among others) could read them.
Universities -- like the rest of -- routinely Google their own names.
And that's why you're a disgusting, pathetic Fascist asshole. Because you want to deny university administrators the right to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS by researching how their institution is perceived by the public.
Even high school is only mandatory up until the age of 14 in most places. Given that most people have no rights whatsoever until they're 18 (other than the right to not be beaten to death by their guardian), that's pretty liberal.
I understand that some American states have increased the mandatory attendance age as far as 18, but given that you can't even vote until you're 18, and can't engage in free trade until you're 21, that's still quite liberal by comparison.
They shoud have no right to do that on behalf of the school
School administrators have no right to be aware of what's been freely and openly published on the Internet? Are they also to be forbidden to own books? Hey, let's blindfold them too, so that they don't accidentally see a student, and become aware of the slogans on his t-shirt. After all, opening your eyes is a CRIME if happen to work for a university.
Do you HEAR yourself? Go back to Italy, Benito; The Blackshirts are calling to you.
I'm not just splitting hairs here -- an awful lot of Americans act as if they were once prisoners in a university, desperately planning their escape. It's pathetic and stupid. And some people's responses to this story have clearly demonstrated their profound and irrational hatred of education.
I'd rather like the school not to engage in background searches on their students.
We're not talking about them digging through a student's trash, checking his credit history, or interrogating his associates. We're talking about the school accessing information that the student deliberately went out of his way to make public.
If a student buys some billboard space and puts up a 15' x 20' poster detailing his opinions about the school, can he really hold the school administrators accountable for reading it as they drive home?
Likewise, if he puts his opinions up on a publicly viewable website which he KNOWS will be scanned by search engines, can he really hold the school administrators accountable for stumbling onto it when they Google for the University's name, something that any school with even the slightest interest in its public image will be doing on a regular basis?
Seriously: only the most deeply stupid neo-fascists believe that the university did anything wrong by becoming aware of the student's posting. It's how they RESPONDED TO IT that is inappropriate. See how that works? We can condemn what they did to him, rather than getting pissy about the fact that they happen to have the same freedoms as the everyone else.
Seriously -- what kind of evil moron believes that University administrators should be banned from reading the Internet -- simply because they might accidentally read something that a student was too stupid to post anonymously?
Because that's what copyright does - it lets people choose how to sell their work. It does not fix a price or determine terms and conditions or any other enforced way of doing business, it just expands the content producer's options.
You're not seeing the whole picture.
Copyright necessitates widespread government surveillance of communication.
It necessitates strict control over innovation, many technologies have to be made illegal, and there have to be extensive restrictions on the kinds of new technology that can be developed.
It requires stripping people of the right to free speech and free expression -- because, by definition, copyright law forbids people to express certain things.
It requires entrusting the government, of all things, with the power to prevent people from exercising their right to free expression. Of all the powers that governments shouldn't have, that's near the top.
It requires doing all of those things, even though the majority of people don't agree with copyright laws at all. And all just so that a small minority of people can make money from artificial scarcity.
You may not feel any particular attachment to freedom of expression, but a lot of people do. I don't feel that the government has any right to decide which bits travel over my LAN, which bits gets duplicated from my DVDs to my iPod, which bits travel over my usb cable from my laptop to my associate's laptop.
If Britney Spears needs there to be a government monitoring chip in my PC if she's to make money, then too bad for Britney Spears. If the existence of bittorrent means that Thomas Pynchon has to go out and start charging fans for autographs, tough. Frankly, the need of some rapper to buy himself a set of gold teeth just isn't worth it giving up my freedom, nor is it worth accepting constant government surveillance.
You're on the side of prohibition here. Too few people accept it, too few people benefit from it, and too many people would rather be free. ThePirateBay is a modern speakeasy, bootleggers ride on bittorrent, and DVD Jon is handing out homebrew kits for Zinfandel and Moonshine.
Some students I didn't even know personally were expelled...
So they were expelled... from a prison -- no wait, a Gulag was what you called it. They were forcibly evicted from a Gulag, and you fought for their right to stay. Do you realize how insane that sounds?
Guess again. I worked nearly full-time most of my time in school as a news reporter. If I had a massive trust fund, I wouldn't have had to battle traffic on I-95 the better part of the day driving to DC for a modestly-paying government contracting job.
So, in stark contrast to a Gulag -- which forces its occupants work for no money -- you worked at a job of your choosing and freely gave the money to institution that was supposedly holding you against your will and depriving you of your freedom.
I think you may have confused gulags with country clubs; it's a common mistake among deeply, deeply retarded people. A country club requires you to pay money just to be there, it might expel you for reasons that seem stupid and arbitrary, and in some cases it can be very difficult just to get inside in the first place A Gulag holds you against your will, it doesn't require you to pay anything at all to join, it may in fact induct you into its membership against your will, and it wont let you go no matter how bad your grades are. Which one of these two things sounds like a college to you?
I don't think anyone ever got kicked out of a Gulag for speaking poorly of its administration.
He posts online about it, but he might want his roommates not to know...
Then he's a moron -- a goddam fucking moron. If you post something publicly, you've posted it publicly -- end of story. Anyone can read it, simply by virtue of basic freedom. And that includes organizations. Wouldn't it be stupid if a corporation sued you for looking at one of their billboards? That's how stupid it is to get mad when your university looks at a website that you've published.
The school's response to his post is what's the problem here, not the fact that members of the University's administration read information that was posted freely for everyone to view. University administrators have exactly the same freedom to peruse publicly available information as anybody else. Frankly, it's terrifying that people like you don't acknowledge that freedom -- that you apparently want some kind of draconian monitoring system put in place to prevent anyone involved in the business of education from freely accessing documents that are openly published on the Internet.
Sunlight is the thing colleges fear the most, because it will show them to be gulags where freedom is only a faint notion.
So, an institution that one chooses to attend, and for which one must pay for the privilege, and which will forcibly expel anyone who doesn't perform at a satisfactory level, is somehow a Gulag? I've never heard of Gulags expelling lazy prisoners who spend too much drinking. Colleges are, if anything, the exact opposite of prisons.
How does someone come to despise education that much?! Did the FBI take you from your home, send you to MIT, and lock you in a dormitory where you were forced to matriculate?
Let me guess: you parents threatened to take away your trust-fund if you didn't finish college. I can see how that might make someone feel "imprisoned". Nevertheless, you were free to leave at any time.
Heh, nicely stated, and cogent. Online surveillance is bad and all, but this isn't a case of that. Administrative bodies should feel perfectly free to monitor any information that a person has deliberately made public.
In order to troubleshoot the system, I'll need to characterize the bug. What books were you reading? What type of portable audio device? Headphones -- were they ear-buds or the kind that cover the ears? What kind of music and at what volume?
Submit your data to our QA team, and an updated user's guide will be made available to you in time for the next minor version.
According to the stereotype, Canadians in general are more considerate than their American counterparts. But the simple fact is, many members of the species Homo hobo are very much like their canine counterparts: they can smell fear, and take liberties with those who don't establish their dominance using body language. The Method is based in part on that fact; demonstrating a total lack of awareness of the hobo's existence tends to be just intimidating enough to allow one to maintain personal boundaries.
Did you actually go to a university? If so, you must have somehow completely failed to notice the vast numbers of Literature, History, Womens Studies, and Philosophy -- all working hard and paying good money for little more than the satisfaction of learning. And of course, for opportunities to perform the reproductive act, one of the few tangible benefits of taking those programs.
Except for analyzing the assembly output of GCC, all of those things were included in the first two years of my CS degree. Actually, I don't think it was the knight's tour, I think it was the 3-lines-of-prolog N-Queens problem. If I hadn't switched to chemistry, I'd probably have gotten around to taking Compiler Design, which may very well have included analyzing the output of GCC.
A degree (at least one that isn't ridiculously shitty) is a good deal more than just the starting line. Some people even do research as part of their undergrad program; not necessarily ground-breaking, revolutionary stuff, but research nonetheless. Some undergrad science programs even require active participation in a research project.
Do more. Try doing your homework in haskell or lisp or hell, write in forth or postscript. It's a billion times easier to learn a language when you have someone else telling you what to do in it, and a billionth of the stress when your paycheck doesn't depend on it working.
Maybe I'm a little behind the times... but back when I was in school, we had assignments in every one of those languages.
AI was taught in prolog and perl.
Functional programming was taught in Haskell, Lisp (for some reason...), and some kind of weird micro-lisp that the professor invented.
Operating systems required C for the assignments, although they never bothered to teach anyone how to use it; they expected you to learn C, unix programming, how to use GCC, and the intricacies of pthreads completely on your own during the narrow window of time in which the lab was available.
Computer architecture used assembly and Verilog (does that count?) for computer architecture.
Graphics class used a touch of postscript for procedural graphics.
Database apps used VisualBasic and SQL.
Windows programming was taught in C++/MFC (frankly, every major C++ API is like it's own language; I suspect you're familiar with this).
Networking was done in Java and bash scripts.
I didn't even finish the degree (I switched to chemistry), and we covered all of that. Granted, that was at a university and not some little cow college. Still, I'm surprised that even the most basic of CS curricula wouldn't include SOMETHING other than Java.
Don't get me wrong -- Java's great, and I dig coding in it. But there are much more appropriate languages for many types development. And by knowing multiple languages, programmers gain a vastly deeper understanding of how programming is actually done, rather than just a bunch of syntactic tomfoolery that just happens to get the job done.
and like hell I'm going to show up at work and replace a production app with ruby for the hell of it
It doesn't have to be a production app. I've been learning the windows scripting shell, WMI, and Active Directory's COM automation stuff, just so that I can shave maybe 15 seconds off of my call-time. I do tech support; we're not timed or anything, but I'm deeply impatient. But I suppose it takes a very special kind of impatience to spend hours reading TechNet and inflicting VBScript upon oneself.
There is however some controversy regarding the federal poverty line, arguing that it either understates or overstates the problem of poverty. According to the United Nations, which defines poverty among high-income OECD countries as those earning less than 50% of the median, 17% of Americans lived in poverty between 1999 and 2002, the second highest percentage of any high-income OECD country.
It's easy to dupe yourself into believing that you're right when you only read one sentence from the source material. Particularly when that sentence is restating an irrelevant and discredited demographic.
It's particularly funny that you linked to "http://scitech.dot.gov/partners/accage/index.html", a page that is making exactly the same case that I am -- the case that the disabled and elderly depend heavily on public transit, and depend on public transit even more so in the relatively near future.
Are you freaking kidding me? That's $10k/year...
1. $100/mo buys a LOT of electricity and heat for someone living in a small apartment or basement suite. So we're not talking about someone living in a cold, unlit cave.
2. People making minimum wage rarely buy healthcare, especially if they're healthy, as is being assumed here. If they become seriously ill, they're just fucked. It's sad, but true.
3. Furniture, TVs, etc, can all be acquired at no cost for anyone who actually knows other people. Hell, people will practically PAY you take furniture and old TVs off their hands, and there are plenty of businesses that will charge you money to do exactly that. So our hypothetical apartment is reasonably well furnished and has basic entertainment facilities.
Adjusting your calculation for the healthcare realities of the US, our hypothetical subject has got a hearty $177 worth of gas money / disposable income for the month. There's no doubt a very interesting discussion lying dormant in the fact that the price of healthcare made such a big difference here; but the fact is, the poor aren't particularly likely to have access to healthcare of any kind, unless they're fortunate enough to live in... well, pretty much any western nation other than the US. And you know that perfectly well. Including it in your calculation was disingenuous at best.
Now, for extra hilarity:
48% of the poor own a vehicle
Your retarded standard for poverty -- the "poverty line" -- states that poverty for that single person we were talking about begins at an income $10,210. You ramble on about how impossible it is for someone earning $10000 to afford a car. And then you use this statistic that 48% of them have cars... you see the inconsistency here? All you've done is independently demonstrate how goddam stupid the American "Poverty Line" demographic is.
Children alone on a bus are a rarity, at least around here.
Ah, the anecdotal evidence again. How scientific. My own anecdotal evidence contradicts yours, except with regards to the hoard of children on a field trip that you mentioned; I see that kind of thing all the time. Not to mention children on the bus with their families. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find any statistics on exactly what percentage of parents buy the kind of ridiculous paranoia you mentioned. It's prudent to keep a 6 year old from riding the bus on his own; but a 14 year old? That's just insane. Cut the fuck
Slashdot Mirror
But if really think that single examples prove something, let me use myself as a counterexample.
I'm the only person in my extended family who is in college right now -- and my college is very small and doesn't provide access to stuff like that from outside the intranet. There's only one person in my family who does research, and he and I don't speak. My friends in college were mostly lit and business students, and those who've graduated still aren't working in labs with access to research journals... for some reason.
Basically, your bizarre argument seems to boil down to one or more of the following:
Yeah, because 100% of nerds (the target audience of slashdot) are in college. I like how your moronic prejudice rules out anyone who is a) still in high school b) out of college It's not like it's unusual to be so long out of college that one's entire peer group is also out of college. In fact, this typically happens with a few years of graduating. Which leaves an entire decade of nerd-life before one would have free access to journals, and five or six decades of nerd-life after the period in which one would have free access to journals. Are you really so enormously stupid that you believe that all Slashdot readers are in college or have just recently graduated? Or are hanging out with college students right now when they want to read the article? I hate to toss around insults, but that's really some circus-grade idiocy. I mean, WOW.
Sorry, no. Scientology is ludicrous bullshit and only gullible idiots defend it.
If you want to talk about "plausible" religions (and I'm using the word plausible VERY loosely), try Greek mythology. I'm happy to believe that some big guy named Zeus lived on a mountain, killed his dad, went around fucking bulls and swans, ate a few of his children, and threw sharp pointy things at people who pissed him off. Hell, you can find people like that living in the US right now; is it so hard to believe that a degenerate redneck like that lived in Greece 4000 years ago?
But ... alien ghosts being dumped in Earth's volcanoes to harass a race of homicidal apes by a galactic despot? That's rather less plausible. Frankly, any race powerful enough to locks ghosts in theatres and brainwash them by making them watching The Passion of the Christ over and over again, is probably powerful enough to dispose of those ghosts properly, rather than just leaving them around to inspire the aforementioned apes to challenge his authority?
Hey, I've got a religion based on the plot of Starship Troopers! Want to sign up? In it, WE live in the spirit world, ghosts of dead mobile infantrymen. Our pain and sadness is caused by the meta-ghosts of dead Arachnids. We can only find peace by arming, drilling, and training, until we're sufficiently disciplined and skilled to be recruited/promoted back into the realm of the living to take up arms against the bugs again.
Thankfully we live in a society where stone is cheap and abundant. I'm sure you can find a landscaping store that will sell you an entire truckload of appropriately-sized rocks, and then deliver them to wherever you and your church feel would be most appropriate for the event.
Then Christians are pretty fucked.
1 Peter 2:13.
Yes, Jesus DID say to pay your taxes like a good little prole.
But the Bible says a lot of other stuff too, like to obey any and all forms of government and authority.
1 Peter 2:13.
Cubans and Persians, on the other hand, are much more patriotic. Cubans have remarkably high quality of life for such a poor nation; much higher than most of their neighbours (excluding the US). Communism works better at the small scale, and Cuba's success (or rather, their lack of complete failure) bears this out. Persians in particular adore their government for successfully defending them from Iraq during the war. Whatever else you might think of the Ayatollahs, they're rather more benevolent and progressive than Saddam Hussain. So the majority of Persians aren't very inclined to blame their own leaders for anything -- particularly when the USA is threatening to invade them or drop a few nukes to teach them a lesson.
Fascinating.
It's always interesting to see how people with these genetic abnormalities cope. Some people seem to turn them into gifts, while others just suffer from them. Like autism -- the majority of people with autism seem to be disabled from it. But for a few people it enhances their other skills, sometimes to an extraordinary degree.
Of course, colourblindness comes in a variety of types. There's even some unconfirmed evidence of the opposite, a rare handful of people (exclusively women) who have an extra color receptor, and can distinguish colours that are isochromatic to the rest of us. Something about a mutated gene for the eye's cone cells, on one copy of the X-chromosome, which results in chimerism of the retina. Apparently it's difficult to do research on this, because the mutation (if it exists) only affects about 1-in-10,000 women.
Your father may have had something analogous that affected his ability to distinguish the brightness and saturation of colours that are isochromatic to the rest of us.
Well, the bible says that Christians are to obey the laws of whatever land they live in. What kind of pathetically hypocritical Christians are going to break the law and doom themselves to
But if that same child of two draws a picture, and one of his peers draws one that is similar, it is rare and unusual that he will feel he has suffered any kind of loss. He may think less of that peer, but he does not feel that same sense of loss as if his favourite crayon were stolen from him. If you look at primitive cultures, they didn't arrange for elaborate systems of punishment to deter one group of people from singing the songs invented by another. Duplicating books was considered to be a great social service that monks performed for free to better themselves and others. Before the invention of the printing press, most culture and knowledge was passed on exclusively through what we would now laughably refer to as "piracy".
Like it or not, anything intellectual is inherently the very opposite of property, because it can never be stolen (at least not without some very cunning neurosurgery or the application of a sturdy mallet to the cranium).
"Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence." -- Thomas Jefferson
But, if you truly believe that a set of rules invented by bureaucrats is more important than people's actual sense of what is right and what is wrong, go ahead. Your blind acceptance of law will make you a great sycophant to whatever corrupt and destructive government happens to be in power. You would have been one of the people who went around during the age of prohibition insisting that everyone should follow the law and accept it as "right", without even the tiniest shred of critical thought.
This is why the concept of "intellectual property" has to be dispensed with immediately. It creates the erroneous impression that trademarks, servicemarks, copyrights, and patents are all somehow related, and that they have something to do with the notion of real ownership of tangible things. But of course they are not related, and they having nothing to do with true ownership.
The concept of intellectual property is only useful for tricking stupid corporate sycophants into believing that corporations have the right to dictate what the rest of us think, say, and do.
I can use my personal account on a forum to do research on behalf of my employer -- and I routinely do. Have I done something wrong? Of course not. Many employers will pay for their employees to have their own, individual accounts on forums and websites relevant to their work.
Nearly every university and college in the English speaking world has groups on Facebook. My own college, a tiny little community college of less than a thousand students, is well represented on Youtube and Facebook.When I searched for "Douglas College" on Youtube, 19 out of the 20 of the results on the first page were about my school. I didn't bother to check the second page, so there are almost certainly a lot more. If I were in a University administrator, I'd be a bit curious about them, and I'd be doing nothing wrong if I checked them out.
When I search for "Douglas College" on Facebook, I got three students (including my most recent ex), an employee, an application that allows the user to search the school's library, three groups, and an event... all just on the first page of results. Are you honestly stupid enough to believe that University administrators are morally obligated to remain ignorant of all of that?!
Correction: to see what they're writing about the school, which is completely different. It's no different than checking the newspaper, to see what the paper's journalists have been writing about the school. Schools should be VERY interested in anything that's published about them.No shit. What YOU'VE been claiming is that it should be illegal for Universities to collect that feedback in the first place. What the grownups have been saying is that the University shouldn't have reacted the way it did. You just can't see past your foaming rage and hatred towards education. Even if education is free (as it should be), a university is a business. A state-run business, perhaps, but a business nonetheless. They have clients, budgets, revenue streams, marketing, public relations, stakeholders, and so on -- all the things that businesses have. Just look at the science department of any university with a decent research program; they almost invariably have patents on technologies that they develop for their research, and they license those patents to other businesses (including other universities) to produce revenue. They hire and fire people, they deal with unions, they try to recruit the best employees and students, and so on. They are, in every sense imaginable, businesses. In fact, most of them are corporations with charters, and the government typically owns them with limited liability. I don't just mean in the US either -- here in Canada and throughout much of Europe, it's the same way.If I post my credit card number, expiry date, and my real name on an open forum, will "It's None of Their Business!!" protect me from credit card fraud? Will it stop the credit card company from laughing in my face and canceling my card? No, of course not -- because I've deliberately made it public and inherently given permission for everyone, without exception, to view it.
It is no longer a private opinion if you publish it. Once something is published, it's the exact opposite of private -- it's public. Complete, totally, and irrevocably public.Besides, universities are BUSINESSES. You know what those are, right? In a free society, businesses are allowed to concern themselves with their public image. Any responsibly run business is very interested in what people think of them. They want to know what magazines, news sites, and bloggers are publishing about them. So they do, among things, Google searches on the name of the school.
Note well the ways in which this is different than doing an investigation into a student's private life. First, the thing being investigated is the university itself -- which is undeniably part of the purview of a university administrator. Second, the parts of the student's life that are being discovered aren't private -- they're statements that the student deliberately made public in the full knowledge that his University's administrators (among others) could read them.
Universities -- like the rest of -- routinely Google their own names.
And that's why you're a disgusting, pathetic Fascist asshole. Because you want to deny university administrators the right to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS by researching how their institution is perceived by the public.
I understand that some American states have increased the mandatory attendance age as far as 18, but given that you can't even vote until you're 18, and can't engage in free trade until you're 21, that's still quite liberal by comparison.
School administrators have no right to be aware of what's been freely and openly published on the Internet? Are they also to be forbidden to own books? Hey, let's blindfold them too, so that they don't accidentally see a student, and become aware of the slogans on his t-shirt. After all, opening your eyes is a CRIME if happen to work for a university.Do you HEAR yourself? Go back to Italy, Benito; The Blackshirts are calling to you.
I'm not just splitting hairs here -- an awful lot of Americans act as if they were once prisoners in a university, desperately planning their escape. It's pathetic and stupid. And some people's responses to this story have clearly demonstrated their profound and irrational hatred of education.
We're not talking about them digging through a student's trash, checking his credit history, or interrogating his associates. We're talking about the school accessing information that the student deliberately went out of his way to make public.If a student buys some billboard space and puts up a 15' x 20' poster detailing his opinions about the school, can he really hold the school administrators accountable for reading it as they drive home?
Likewise, if he puts his opinions up on a publicly viewable website which he KNOWS will be scanned by search engines, can he really hold the school administrators accountable for stumbling onto it when they Google for the University's name, something that any school with even the slightest interest in its public image will be doing on a regular basis?
Seriously: only the most deeply stupid neo-fascists believe that the university did anything wrong by becoming aware of the student's posting. It's how they RESPONDED TO IT that is inappropriate. See how that works? We can condemn what they did to him, rather than getting pissy about the fact that they happen to have the same freedoms as the everyone else.
Seriously -- what kind of evil moron believes that University administrators should be banned from reading the Internet -- simply because they might accidentally read something that a student was too stupid to post anonymously?
- Copyright necessitates widespread government surveillance of communication.
- It necessitates strict control over innovation, many technologies have to be made illegal, and there have to be extensive restrictions on the kinds of new technology that can be developed.
- It requires stripping people of the right to free speech and free expression -- because, by definition, copyright law forbids people to express certain things.
- It requires entrusting the government, of all things, with the power to prevent people from exercising their right to free expression. Of all the powers that governments shouldn't have, that's near the top.
It requires doing all of those things, even though the majority of people don't agree with copyright laws at all. And all just so that a small minority of people can make money from artificial scarcity.You may not feel any particular attachment to freedom of expression, but a lot of people do. I don't feel that the government has any right to decide which bits travel over my LAN, which bits gets duplicated from my DVDs to my iPod, which bits travel over my usb cable from my laptop to my associate's laptop.
If Britney Spears needs there to be a government monitoring chip in my PC if she's to make money, then too bad for Britney Spears. If the existence of bittorrent means that Thomas Pynchon has to go out and start charging fans for autographs, tough. Frankly, the need of some rapper to buy himself a set of gold teeth just isn't worth it giving up my freedom, nor is it worth accepting constant government surveillance.
You're on the side of prohibition here. Too few people accept it, too few people benefit from it, and too many people would rather be free. ThePirateBay is a modern speakeasy, bootleggers ride on bittorrent, and DVD Jon is handing out homebrew kits for Zinfandel and Moonshine.
I think you may have confused gulags with country clubs; it's a common mistake among deeply, deeply retarded people. A country club requires you to pay money just to be there, it might expel you for reasons that seem stupid and arbitrary, and in some cases it can be very difficult just to get inside in the first place A Gulag holds you against your will, it doesn't require you to pay anything at all to join, it may in fact induct you into its membership against your will, and it wont let you go no matter how bad your grades are. Which one of these two things sounds like a college to you?
I don't think anyone ever got kicked out of a Gulag for speaking poorly of its administration.
The school's response to his post is what's the problem here, not the fact that members of the University's administration read information that was posted freely for everyone to view. University administrators have exactly the same freedom to peruse publicly available information as anybody else. Frankly, it's terrifying that people like you don't acknowledge that freedom -- that you apparently want some kind of draconian monitoring system put in place to prevent anyone involved in the business of education from freely accessing documents that are openly published on the Internet.
How does someone come to despise education that much?! Did the FBI take you from your home, send you to MIT, and lock you in a dormitory where you were forced to matriculate?
Let me guess: you parents threatened to take away your trust-fund if you didn't finish college. I can see how that might make someone feel "imprisoned". Nevertheless, you were free to leave at any time.
Heh, nicely stated, and cogent. Online surveillance is bad and all, but this isn't a case of that. Administrative bodies should feel perfectly free to monitor any information that a person has deliberately made public.
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According to the stereotype, Canadians in general are more considerate than their American counterparts. But the simple fact is, many members of the species Homo hobo are very much like their canine counterparts: they can smell fear, and take liberties with those who don't establish their dominance using body language. The Method is based in part on that fact; demonstrating a total lack of awareness of the hobo's existence tends to be just intimidating enough to allow one to maintain personal boundaries.
Did you actually go to a university? If so, you must have somehow completely failed to notice the vast numbers of Literature, History, Womens Studies, and Philosophy -- all working hard and paying good money for little more than the satisfaction of learning. And of course, for opportunities to perform the reproductive act, one of the few tangible benefits of taking those programs.
A degree (at least one that isn't ridiculously shitty) is a good deal more than just the starting line. Some people even do research as part of their undergrad program; not necessarily ground-breaking, revolutionary stuff, but research nonetheless. Some undergrad science programs even require active participation in a research project.
I didn't even finish the degree (I switched to chemistry), and we covered all of that. Granted, that was at a university and not some little cow college. Still, I'm surprised that even the most basic of CS curricula wouldn't include SOMETHING other than Java.
Don't get me wrong -- Java's great, and I dig coding in it. But there are much more appropriate languages for many types development. And by knowing multiple languages, programmers gain a vastly deeper understanding of how programming is actually done, rather than just a bunch of syntactic tomfoolery that just happens to get the job done.
It doesn't have to be a production app. I've been learning the windows scripting shell, WMI, and Active Directory's COM automation stuff, just so that I can shave maybe 15 seconds off of my call-time. I do tech support; we're not timed or anything, but I'm deeply impatient. But I suppose it takes a very special kind of impatience to spend hours reading TechNet and inflicting VBScript upon oneself.From your own sources:
There is however some controversy regarding the federal poverty line, arguing that it either understates or overstates the problem of poverty. According to the United Nations, which defines poverty among high-income OECD countries as those earning less than 50% of the median, 17% of Americans lived in poverty between 1999 and 2002, the second highest percentage of any high-income OECD country.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
Many researchers believe that the official method of measuring poverty is flawed.
-- http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PovertyintheUnitedStates.html
It's easy to dupe yourself into believing that you're right when you only read one sentence from the source material. Particularly when that sentence is restating an irrelevant and discredited demographic.
It's particularly funny that you linked to "http://scitech.dot.gov/partners/accage/index.html", a page that is making exactly the same case that I am -- the case that the disabled and elderly depend heavily on public transit, and depend on public transit even more so in the relatively near future.
1. $100/mo buys a LOT of electricity and heat for someone living in a small apartment or basement suite. So we're not talking about someone living in a cold, unlit cave.
2. People making minimum wage rarely buy healthcare, especially if they're healthy, as is being assumed here. If they become seriously ill, they're just fucked. It's sad, but true.
3. Furniture, TVs, etc, can all be acquired at no cost for anyone who actually knows other people. Hell, people will practically PAY you take furniture and old TVs off their hands, and there are plenty of businesses that will charge you money to do exactly that. So our hypothetical apartment is reasonably well furnished and has basic entertainment facilities.
Adjusting your calculation for the healthcare realities of the US, our hypothetical subject has got a hearty $177 worth of gas money / disposable income for the month. There's no doubt a very interesting discussion lying dormant in the fact that the price of healthcare made such a big difference here; but the fact is, the poor aren't particularly likely to have access to healthcare of any kind, unless they're fortunate enough to live in ... well, pretty much any western nation other than the US. And you know that perfectly well. Including it in your calculation was disingenuous at best.
Now, for extra hilarity:
Your retarded standard for poverty -- the "poverty line" -- states that poverty for that single person we were talking about begins at an income $10,210. You ramble on about how impossible it is for someone earning $10000 to afford a car. And then you use this statistic that 48% of them have cars... you see the inconsistency here? All you've done is independently demonstrate how goddam stupid the American "Poverty Line" demographic is.
Ah, the anecdotal evidence again. How scientific. My own anecdotal evidence contradicts yours, except with regards to the hoard of children on a field trip that you mentioned; I see that kind of thing all the time. Not to mention children on the bus with their families. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find any statistics on exactly what percentage of parents buy the kind of ridiculous paranoia you mentioned. It's prudent to keep a 6 year old from riding the bus on his own; but a 14 year old? That's just insane. Cut the fuck