Meh, given the quotations from him in the article summary, I'm wondering whether the reason for him being beaten had more to do with him being an asshole than because of his beliefs.
Except that Creationists are more likely to be native to the US than to the Vatican.
Creationists are almost universally in one of the Protestant denominations. (And no, I don't mean the specific Protestant Church, but the number of sects who've decided to schism away from the Catholic Church) And no, they have no particular love for the Pope. Heck, some of the Baptists see Catholics as being worse than pagans...
Other favourites include Capital by Marx, Crime & Punishment by Dostoeyevsky, Also Spracht Zarathustra (Nietzsche), The Fountainhead (Rand), The heart of a dog (Bulgakov) and Dubliners (Joyce).
I had to read The Fountainhead for English in high school and I have decidedly mixed feelings. On one hand, it was interesting to read from an architectural perspective. The characters, on the other hand, exist not as people but as archetypes. But then again, that's the case in almost all of Ayn Rand's literature. We're currently in rehearsal for The Night of January 16th and some of the rhetoric she has characters spew out... I wasn't altogether kosher on the glorification of Roark's rape of Dominique.
Another good book (good series, actually) is the Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman. In my opinion, it's an excellent example of building a fantasy world which has a rational reasoning for magic working and not technology.
The only reason compulsive handwashing isn't an addiction is because the actor does not receive pleasure from it. Obsessive-compulsive actions are done to relieve anxiety, not gain pleasure.
That's true for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. There's also Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder which is largely distinguished by the person in question deriving pleasure from the act. You know, the people who take great pleasure in having their desk set up just right.
As a Christian, I completely agree. There are some literal parts and there are some metaphorical parts. And a large amount of it is a human mind trying to explain the divine which obviously doesn't work altogether well.
Ah, and there is one of the most fun parts of discussing the Bible, how many things people "know" but aren't really in there. The fruit being an apple (although I like Ivor Bigguns "Cucumber Number" version too, "In the garden of Eden Eve started to fall / but the fruit that she fancied weren't an apple at all / It was Adam's cucumber..."), the "Three Kings", Mary riding into Nazareth on a donkey... They're all things which have crept into the narrative over time and now they've become "facts" that people rabidly believe until they actually read the text in question.
I remember reading somewhere that the earliest illustrations they have tied to Genesis and the fruit involve a mushroom. Which do grow on trees in some varieties and I'm sure some people would argue that certain mushrooms do grant cosmic insight. Makes more sense than an apple in a lot of ways.
I personally think it's a control issue. Saying "rocks fall, everyone dies" leaves the world as a tremendously random and scary place where it doesn't much matter what you do because things will just happen. Ascribing the events to magic or the like makes the phenomenon something that's potentially controllable. You can negotiate with a god. You can't negotiate with a tornado.
And if you think we've risen past that, witness how many people still have "a lucky shirt" or pass around chain letters. *grumble* Even members of the church can be quite guilty of talismanic behavior. They start revering Bibles and crosses and forget that objects and prayers have no power; God alone has power.
The problem is that thinking of "explanations" for the myths is easy, but verifying them is all but impossible.
Easy to explain them. You make them fit, however it takes, same as psychology.
Technically speaking, the MPAA (or whoever owns the lyrics) makes money by licensing out the songs to the karaoke CD creator and the owners of the music make money off of mechanical licensing for each CD made. BMI/ASCAP/a few small fry make money by charging the karaoke bar for the right to broadcast music from their catalog. Technically speaking, if the CD+G is from a legit company and the bar has the right to broadcast that music (the latter is generally not checked because most bars have a BMI and an ASCAP license which covers 99% of the music. The bars have this so that they can legally have a jukebox), everyone who needs to be paid has been paid. If the karaoke operator started selling CDs of the performance, or giving them away for that matter, he would have to pay a mechanical licensing fee per song per CD. Interestingly enough, the RIAA doesn't factor into karaoke at all except perhaps as the eventual receiver of mechanical licensing fees.
Hell, at least going after bands who sing, and get paid for, cover versions, makes some sense. It might, indeed, be counter-productive in the long run, but it makes sense in the short term: If you want to sing covers, you pay for the rights to perform the music.
Different animals entirely. I'll admit I made the same mistake you did, seeing AA at the end and assuming it was everyone's favorite download-hating entity. This is the MPAA. They're not involved in bands singing cover songs. Basically, the MPAA worries about if they're stealing the sheet music or lyrics of the cover. The RIAA worries about the band copying the original CD so everyone has a practice copy. BMI/ASCAP/a couple others worry about whether the bar has the right to broadcast the music if it's in their catalogue. And, well, the copyright office handles the compulsory licensing of recording a cover of the music if you don't negotiate with the publisher or through the Harry Fox Agency of New York.
The MPAA has a point in that none of us are saying "Hey, I look up song lyrics so that I can buy sheet music of it." Rather, we're saying we get the song lyrics to buy CDs, which profits the RIAA.
Of course, if the theory is, without printed music, no one can ever sing the music, they've just shot themselves in the torso. Because, if that were true, no one would ever buy performance rights, because they don't know how well they can sing the damn song.
I am not a musician, but I am sure that every single person who has ever paid to sing someone's song has first attempted singing it at least once before paying for it, if only to themselves. Probably many times. It would be really stupid to pay for the rights to sing it, and then discover that they don't really like it.
You do realize that one doesn't have to buy a performance license per song, right? As long as the venue you're at (county fair, bar, etc) has the rights to air the music in question (typical licenses allow all songs within a catalog with BMI and ASCAP sharing the market 50/50), you can perform it all you like. And if you're not performing in a business venue or for money, you can sing all you like. They haven't shut that down (yet...). Now, to stamp CDs of your cover, or sell digital copies, then you need a Mechanical License or Digital License and the price comes per unit, per song. It's about 9 cents per song per unit, often cheaper if you negotiate with the companies. You can license it at that rate whether they like it or not.
Lyrics, on the other hand, are more controlled. Publishing the lyrics themselves in a book or on a CD+G requires permission from the owner of the lyrics, who may not be the music owner. And they can refuse to grant you the right. Interesting situation, eh?
I was going to respond back with a detailed answer on how karaoke and music licensing works, but honestly I'm more mystified than ever after having looked it up. I found a site that had laws regarding karaoke, but I'm still mighty confused. The licensing for performance of karaoke seems to come under the generic performance royalities rules which any business which transmits music, whether it's jukebox, personal CD player, or FM radio, must use. The production of the karaoke CDs comes under Mechanical Rights which is a flat fee for each "product" involving a cover of a song. Basically, for every time you stamp a CD with the cover of a song, or have a track downloaded (whether you sell it or offer it for free), you are compelled to pay a small fee to the licensing company, about 9 cents IIRC. You are allowed to license any song in this manner whether the publisher wants you to or not. The lyrics, on the other hand, are under stricter copyright laws and are not legally associated with the music. To publish lyrics, you have to license it from the copyright holders, who may or may not be the same people who have the license on the music. And, interestingly enough, lyrics can be withheld whereas music cannot.
As for karaoke and drunk people... yeah, it generally takes alcohol for people to have the courage to get up there and, quite frankly, I've found that it generally takes alcohol to make listening to some of them bearable. Every year, I give up alcohol for Lent and I find that going to karaoke during that time period is actually rather painful...
As a side note, it's kind of a shame that karaoke is largely only offered in bars. If they offered it in a location more conducive to voice health like maybe a coffee shop, you might get more talented singers up there. As it is, anyone with a trained voice generally avoids those smoke-filled dens like the plague.
The Patrician had it right. He preferred reading the sheet music because it was so much more pure and perfect, not involving all of that icky sweat and spit that actual performances do.
*sigh* Fact of the matter is, though, the lyrics are copyrighted material so really, it is illegal to post them verbatim. Not that I agree with the RIAA, but they've got pretty solid legal grounds here. I think they're cutting their own throat, but they have grounds.
What they need to do, of course, is produce authoritative lyrics sites of their own. The various lyrics sites are often done by people transcribing what they here, so you get amusing mondegreens and a lot of general disagreement over similar sounding words. Och, and then there's Louie Louie... the song for Freudian word association. ("No really! The song says, 'he shot a wad into her hair.' It's all about sex, man...")
So you like paying big money for a degree? Jeezus man you've got OSU, Miami of Ohio, Univ of Cinci and a host of other schools around (with the exception of Wright State.. wrong university) along with Purdue next door in IN and you went there?
Actually, I'm from Kentucky. And my top choices were actually MIT and CMU. UD was my backup school which my parents had me apply to because they wanted me to apply to at least one Catholic school. *sheepish grin* And I got my applications in late for MIT and CMU. In the end, it worked out. UD is not a top tier school for engineering, particularly in the area of computing, but they do have strong ties with the Air Force, so getting hired upon leaving school was not difficult. And as for cost of schooling, I had all of my school loans paid off within a year of getting out, so I'd say that the job I received upon leaving was up to compensating for the cost of education.
I think the key thing here is the importance of security for you and for them. Why should they care if their porn site access is compromised? It doesn't affect them at all if someone else views pictures under their user name. From their point of view, you're the ones obstructing access by changing their password on them. Of course, from your point of view, the compromised accounts are lost revenue. It's all relative, you see. Especially on those incest sites...
What HTML was great for, and what I feel is gradually being lost with CSS, frames, and Flash, is the accessibility. HTML was built to convey information. An EM tag meant emphasis. It might show up as italics, underscores around the item, or a stress in a voice-reading program. There was no guarentee that it would display the same for everyone, but the same meaning was to be conveyed. This meant that any browser, even the text-based ones, would convey the same information. That simplicity has been lost and along with it, accessibility. Many sites, you can't use TAB to navigate the page. Heck, on Flash-based sites, you can't even use the keyboard half the time. And goodness only knows how accessibile the average web page is for someone who can't see, or has limitted input capability...
Your problem seems to be the method by which the school is achieving this. It's simple: sports bring in money, and engineering doesn't. Look at the enrollment figures for engineering lately: they suck. Students aren't going into engineering any more, and for very good reason: it's a shitty profession. It has somewhat ok starting pay, but it ends quickly: there's no such thing as a raise, there's no such thing as long-term employment, and there's no such thing as greater experience making you more valuable. In a nutshell, our society has decided that it simply doesn't value engineering as a profession, or the work that engineers do, in order to pay them well, so in return less people are choosing this profession.
I disagree on so many points of what you're saying that I'm not going to even try to take this point by point. I do agree that engineers don't bring in as much money as sports, but I don't think it's due to engineering being a dead-end job or a low-paying one. Firstly, sports bring in money while the students are still in school while engineering generally doesn't. This is important because I wager that a large number of people, once they leave school, don't give a second thought about it outside of proudly proclaiming their "alma mater," keeping in touch with a few friends, and maybe attending the odd reunion. Secondly, there's a different dynamic to things. Team sports tend to build a strong (rabid?) community. You have people returning for Homecoming games and you have former players who want to relive their glory days before they got old and fat. Engineers... quite frankly, most of them tend to have their small circle of friends who they keep in contact with for years after. More importantly, that circle of friends is largely not associated with the campus itself. The friendship matters more than that they happened to attend the same school. Thirdly, and this one is more out on a limb then the rest, I think a lot of engineering students feel that their tuition and other fees was due payment for their degree and don't feel the need to keep pumping money into the school after graduating. They're thinking more intellectually about their college experience than emotionally. But, like I said, that last bit is a bit out on a limb.
As for engineering being a dead-end or low-paying job, I'm not sure where you're getting your statistics. All of the engineers I've kept up with after graduating are doing quite nicely for themselves. They got well-paying jobs after school, often with companies they interned with, and paid off all of their student loans within a year of graduating. I do know there are people who don't succeed, but I wonder how many of those people entered engineering not because they enjoyed it, but because they heard it was high-paying or that engineers are "always in demand." Too, I know some people who initially had trouble after graduating because they approached their engineering classes more from a theoretical standpoint than a practical one. *wry grin* As one of my Circuits professors said, "there's no such thing as an ideal resistor and wires do have resistance, inductance, and capacitance." The one friend I had in engineering who ran into that is now on his doctorate and will probably be a professor, God help him...
As for "there's no such thing as greater experience making you more valuable," I don't know that I could disagree with you more. Greater experience is really the majority of what makes you hireable in the engineering job market. The problem most engineers (or at least those who haven't been co-oping or doing a part-time job on the side) have on graduating is a lack of experience. And once you become an expert on a system, you will always be able to find a job so long as that system continues to exist. Heck, my Granddad still earns a decent sum each year being an expert witness on a particular series of boilers. You also, of course, have to pick up new knowledge so that you can adapt when the system you're expert on retires, particularly if you're determined t
Switching gears, as an alumnus, what does this say about my degree? does this mean it's worthless? if so, i want a refund, mr. cowen. every single penny i've given to the university. every single bit of blood, sweat, and tears i gave to earn my degree and try to make the university and the community a better place for it. every year you complain that alumni donation rates are down. it adversely affects your precious us news and world report rankings. want to know why we alumni aren't giving the university a dime? because of shit like this. i'm tired of being alienated at every turn.
First of all, unless you're either from one of the top engineering schools like MIT or CMU, or one of the degree mill programs, employers really don't care which university you graduated from. They're looking at the fact that you have a degree, maybe your GPA, and mainly checking your skillset against a checklist. Secondly, you graduated a year ago. You have industry experience now. Prospective employers are much more likely to look at your job history than your college history. First of all, it's the more recent experience. Secondly, it's more relevant for them. College proves you can get a degree. Work experience proves you can hold a job.
I actually went through a scare similar to this in my college career. The University of Dayton's Computer Engineering program had not been fully accreditted by ABET in my sophomore year. Theoretically, if our program had not passed muster with the inspectors, I may have had to either scrap two years of study, or switch to a major like *shudder* Electrical Engineering or Computer Science. *sardonic grin* As it is, we passed the ABET examination and I just had to deal with department fine-tuning of the classes which led to many students have to spend an extra year chasing the changing plan of courses for the degree.
Much agreeance there. That was actually one of the reasons I bought a copy of Microsoft Streets and Trips a couple years ago. Whether it's because you don't know the address, the maps aren't quite up to date, or that you're trying to get around some data wonkiness (Ever been in one of those cities which has four streets with the same name, but in different parts of the city and entirely unconnected to each other?). The slightly transparent directions pad gets a thumbs-down from me though. The transparency is just enough to create a visual distraction in the background, not enough that you can actually see relevant details behind it.
I've never had card declined, but I have received phone calls after I made one purchase in Ohio and the next in Missouri. Interestingly enough, among the usual information about maiden names and the like, I was asked whether I paid typically the minimum or full balance on my cards. I'll admit that my first reaction was to ask them questions to try to prove their legitimacy, as that started sounding more like a survey than a credit fraud call, but it turns out it's being used more often for identity checks because things like payment schedules and types are fairly unique to customers and it's less likely that an attempted defrauder would learn such things by dumpster diving.
Bottom line, using the fraud alert didn't really do anything, positive or negative. I expected to get a request for some additional ID from the CSR at Home Depot, but instead she just said "You've been approved" after a couple of minutes and handed me my temporary credit info.
"Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to human stupidity." It's also possible that the cashier ignored or bypassed the message. Her pay isn't likely to be influenced either way by it and if multiple people are putting on "fraud alert" alarms on their credit records, it's entirely possible she gets so many bogus alerts that she doesn't even think twice before dismissing the dialogue. *grumble* I really wish I had the URL to that study someone posted on Slashdot... they were ostensibly heavily involved with the "photo ID on a credit card" concept at its first inception and he posted a nice long summary of his results. Basically, it didn't matter what the picture looked like; the cashiers passed the card. They even tried people of the wrong gender and it didn't make a difference. They then tried adding alerts, first a notification that popped up to ask the cashier to check the picture, then a dialogue which asked them to call into the credit agency, which required using a bypass key to dismiss. The rates of checking the picture were actually lower because the dialogue would get automatically dismissed without thinking about it.
Come to think of it, I think that article was in something about biometrics... someone was publishing instructions on how to fake fingerprints using gelatin and he was commenting on other failed security features.
Unless the companies who lost the information are willing to be liable for any and all damages caused by the identity theft, not limitted to damaged credit ratings, credibility damage, and all monetary losses, they should definitely inform consumers. That would be like not informing people of airplane safety measures "because very few planes actually crash."
generally, you can recreate Hamlet in about 3 months with a team of 10 monkeys working 8 hours a day.
On the off chance you're serious, I disagree. There's one simulation on the web for infinite monkeys trying to write Shakespeare and the current record is 28 letters. Also, lacking a cite, but Slashdot at one point ran an article tracking an actual case of trying to get monkeys to write Shakespeare by introducing a computer into a cage. Mainly the monkeys smeared feces on it, but otherwise, they had a decidedly non-random tendency to type the same letter over and over again.
Live performances just can't compare. Go vinyl, go!
^_^ Wish I could remember the exact line, but there was a wonderful bit in one of the Discworld books about how the Patrician prefers to read sheet music rather than listen to it "because the idea of it being performed by people, with all the sweat and saliva involved, strikes him as distasteful."
At a conference I'm just about to fly back from, one of the talks detailed how one metabolic mutation was carried by 10% of Caucasians, this fell to 4% in Chinese populations, and only 1% in Japanese.
Plenty of those genes. Just look at lactose intolerance. Those of western Eurasian descent can generally drink milk after weaning. The rest generally cannot. *wry grin* Unofrtunately, I'm one of the few of Eurasian descent who can't, although it's something that's developed as I get older and I produce enough lactase for about half a glass a milk at a meal, enough that I don't have to worry about checking for the presence of lactose in the ingredients of a meal.
*grumble* Messed up closing the EM tag, forgot a virgule.
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Meh, given the quotations from him in the article summary, I'm wondering whether the reason for him being beaten had more to do with him being an asshole than because of his beliefs.
Except that Creationists are more likely to be native to the US than to the Vatican.
Creationists are almost universally in one of the Protestant denominations. (And no, I don't mean the specific Protestant Church, but the number of sects who've decided to schism away from the Catholic Church) And no, they have no particular love for the Pope. Heck, some of the Baptists see Catholics as being worse than pagans...
I had to read The Fountainhead for English in high school and I have decidedly mixed feelings. On one hand, it was interesting to read from an architectural perspective. The characters, on the other hand, exist not as people but as archetypes. But then again, that's the case in almost all of Ayn Rand's literature. We're currently in rehearsal for The Night of January 16th and some of the rhetoric she has characters spew out... I wasn't altogether kosher on the glorification of Roark's rape of Dominique.
Another good book (good series, actually) is the Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman. In my opinion, it's an excellent example of building a fantasy world which has a rational reasoning for magic working and not technology.
The only reason compulsive handwashing isn't an addiction is because the actor does not receive pleasure from it. Obsessive-compulsive actions are done to relieve anxiety, not gain pleasure.
That's true for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. There's also Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder which is largely distinguished by the person in question deriving pleasure from the act. You know, the people who take great pleasure in having their desk set up just right.
As a Christian, I completely agree. There are some literal parts and there are some metaphorical parts. And a large amount of it is a human mind trying to explain the divine which obviously doesn't work altogether well.
I remember reading somewhere that the earliest illustrations they have tied to Genesis and the fruit involve a mushroom. Which do grow on trees in some varieties and I'm sure some people would argue that certain mushrooms do grant cosmic insight. Makes more sense than an apple in a lot of ways.
And if you think we've risen past that, witness how many people still have "a lucky shirt" or pass around chain letters. *grumble* Even members of the church can be quite guilty of talismanic behavior. They start revering Bibles and crosses and forget that objects and prayers have no power; God alone has power.
The problem is that thinking of "explanations" for the myths is easy, but verifying them is all but impossible.
Easy to explain them. You make them fit, however it takes, same as psychology.
Technically speaking, the MPAA (or whoever owns the lyrics) makes money by licensing out the songs to the karaoke CD creator and the owners of the music make money off of mechanical licensing for each CD made. BMI/ASCAP/a few small fry make money by charging the karaoke bar for the right to broadcast music from their catalog. Technically speaking, if the CD+G is from a legit company and the bar has the right to broadcast that music (the latter is generally not checked because most bars have a BMI and an ASCAP license which covers 99% of the music. The bars have this so that they can legally have a jukebox), everyone who needs to be paid has been paid. If the karaoke operator started selling CDs of the performance, or giving them away for that matter, he would have to pay a mechanical licensing fee per song per CD. Interestingly enough, the RIAA doesn't factor into karaoke at all except perhaps as the eventual receiver of mechanical licensing fees.
Different animals entirely. I'll admit I made the same mistake you did, seeing AA at the end and assuming it was everyone's favorite download-hating entity. This is the MPAA. They're not involved in bands singing cover songs. Basically, the MPAA worries about if they're stealing the sheet music or lyrics of the cover. The RIAA worries about the band copying the original CD so everyone has a practice copy. BMI/ASCAP/a couple others worry about whether the bar has the right to broadcast the music if it's in their catalogue. And, well, the copyright office handles the compulsory licensing of recording a cover of the music if you don't negotiate with the publisher or through the Harry Fox Agency of New York.
The MPAA has a point in that none of us are saying "Hey, I look up song lyrics so that I can buy sheet music of it." Rather, we're saying we get the song lyrics to buy CDs, which profits the RIAA.
I am not a musician, but I am sure that every single person who has ever paid to sing someone's song has first attempted singing it at least once before paying for it, if only to themselves. Probably many times. It would be really stupid to pay for the rights to sing it, and then discover that they don't really like it.
You do realize that one doesn't have to buy a performance license per song, right? As long as the venue you're at (county fair, bar, etc) has the rights to air the music in question (typical licenses allow all songs within a catalog with BMI and ASCAP sharing the market 50/50), you can perform it all you like. And if you're not performing in a business venue or for money, you can sing all you like. They haven't shut that down (yet...). Now, to stamp CDs of your cover, or sell digital copies, then you need a Mechanical License or Digital License and the price comes per unit, per song. It's about 9 cents per song per unit, often cheaper if you negotiate with the companies. You can license it at that rate whether they like it or not.
Lyrics, on the other hand, are more controlled. Publishing the lyrics themselves in a book or on a CD+G requires permission from the owner of the lyrics, who may not be the music owner. And they can refuse to grant you the right. Interesting situation, eh?
As for karaoke and drunk people... yeah, it generally takes alcohol for people to have the courage to get up there and, quite frankly, I've found that it generally takes alcohol to make listening to some of them bearable. Every year, I give up alcohol for Lent and I find that going to karaoke during that time period is actually rather painful...
As a side note, it's kind of a shame that karaoke is largely only offered in bars. If they offered it in a location more conducive to voice health like maybe a coffee shop, you might get more talented singers up there. As it is, anyone with a trained voice generally avoids those smoke-filled dens like the plague.
*sigh* Fact of the matter is, though, the lyrics are copyrighted material so really, it is illegal to post them verbatim. Not that I agree with the RIAA, but they've got pretty solid legal grounds here. I think they're cutting their own throat, but they have grounds.
What they need to do, of course, is produce authoritative lyrics sites of their own. The various lyrics sites are often done by people transcribing what they here, so you get amusing mondegreens and a lot of general disagreement over similar sounding words. Och, and then there's Louie Louie... the song for Freudian word association. ("No really! The song says, 'he shot a wad into her hair.' It's all about sex, man...")
So you like paying big money for a degree? Jeezus man you've got OSU, Miami of Ohio, Univ of Cinci and a host of other schools around (with the exception of Wright State.. wrong university) along with Purdue next door in IN and you went there?
Actually, I'm from Kentucky. And my top choices were actually MIT and CMU. UD was my backup school which my parents had me apply to because they wanted me to apply to at least one Catholic school. *sheepish grin* And I got my applications in late for MIT and CMU. In the end, it worked out. UD is not a top tier school for engineering, particularly in the area of computing, but they do have strong ties with the Air Force, so getting hired upon leaving school was not difficult. And as for cost of schooling, I had all of my school loans paid off within a year of getting out, so I'd say that the job I received upon leaving was up to compensating for the cost of education.
I think the key thing here is the importance of security for you and for them. Why should they care if their porn site access is compromised? It doesn't affect them at all if someone else views pictures under their user name. From their point of view, you're the ones obstructing access by changing their password on them. Of course, from your point of view, the compromised accounts are lost revenue. It's all relative, you see. Especially on those incest sites...
What HTML was great for, and what I feel is gradually being lost with CSS, frames, and Flash, is the accessibility. HTML was built to convey information. An EM tag meant emphasis. It might show up as italics, underscores around the item, or a stress in a voice-reading program. There was no guarentee that it would display the same for everyone, but the same meaning was to be conveyed. This meant that any browser, even the text-based ones, would convey the same information. That simplicity has been lost and along with it, accessibility. Many sites, you can't use TAB to navigate the page. Heck, on Flash-based sites, you can't even use the keyboard half the time. And goodness only knows how accessibile the average web page is for someone who can't see, or has limitted input capability...
I disagree on so many points of what you're saying that I'm not going to even try to take this point by point. I do agree that engineers don't bring in as much money as sports, but I don't think it's due to engineering being a dead-end job or a low-paying one. Firstly, sports bring in money while the students are still in school while engineering generally doesn't. This is important because I wager that a large number of people, once they leave school, don't give a second thought about it outside of proudly proclaiming their "alma mater," keeping in touch with a few friends, and maybe attending the odd reunion. Secondly, there's a different dynamic to things. Team sports tend to build a strong (rabid?) community. You have people returning for Homecoming games and you have former players who want to relive their glory days before they got old and fat. Engineers... quite frankly, most of them tend to have their small circle of friends who they keep in contact with for years after. More importantly, that circle of friends is largely not associated with the campus itself. The friendship matters more than that they happened to attend the same school. Thirdly, and this one is more out on a limb then the rest, I think a lot of engineering students feel that their tuition and other fees was due payment for their degree and don't feel the need to keep pumping money into the school after graduating. They're thinking more intellectually about their college experience than emotionally. But, like I said, that last bit is a bit out on a limb.
As for engineering being a dead-end or low-paying job, I'm not sure where you're getting your statistics. All of the engineers I've kept up with after graduating are doing quite nicely for themselves. They got well-paying jobs after school, often with companies they interned with, and paid off all of their student loans within a year of graduating. I do know there are people who don't succeed, but I wonder how many of those people entered engineering not because they enjoyed it, but because they heard it was high-paying or that engineers are "always in demand." Too, I know some people who initially had trouble after graduating because they approached their engineering classes more from a theoretical standpoint than a practical one. *wry grin* As one of my Circuits professors said, "there's no such thing as an ideal resistor and wires do have resistance, inductance, and capacitance." The one friend I had in engineering who ran into that is now on his doctorate and will probably be a professor, God help him...
As for "there's no such thing as greater experience making you more valuable," I don't know that I could disagree with you more. Greater experience is really the majority of what makes you hireable in the engineering job market. The problem most engineers (or at least those who haven't been co-oping or doing a part-time job on the side) have on graduating is a lack of experience. And once you become an expert on a system, you will always be able to find a job so long as that system continues to exist. Heck, my Granddad still earns a decent sum each year being an expert witness on a particular series of boilers. You also, of course, have to pick up new knowledge so that you can adapt when the system you're expert on retires, particularly if you're determined t
First of all, unless you're either from one of the top engineering schools like MIT or CMU, or one of the degree mill programs, employers really don't care which university you graduated from. They're looking at the fact that you have a degree, maybe your GPA, and mainly checking your skillset against a checklist. Secondly, you graduated a year ago. You have industry experience now. Prospective employers are much more likely to look at your job history than your college history. First of all, it's the more recent experience. Secondly, it's more relevant for them. College proves you can get a degree. Work experience proves you can hold a job.
I actually went through a scare similar to this in my college career. The University of Dayton's Computer Engineering program had not been fully accreditted by ABET in my sophomore year. Theoretically, if our program had not passed muster with the inspectors, I may have had to either scrap two years of study, or switch to a major like *shudder* Electrical Engineering or Computer Science. *sardonic grin* As it is, we passed the ABET examination and I just had to deal with department fine-tuning of the classes which led to many students have to spend an extra year chasing the changing plan of courses for the degree.
Much agreeance there. That was actually one of the reasons I bought a copy of Microsoft Streets and Trips a couple years ago. Whether it's because you don't know the address, the maps aren't quite up to date, or that you're trying to get around some data wonkiness (Ever been in one of those cities which has four streets with the same name, but in different parts of the city and entirely unconnected to each other?). The slightly transparent directions pad gets a thumbs-down from me though. The transparency is just enough to create a visual distraction in the background, not enough that you can actually see relevant details behind it.
I've never had card declined, but I have received phone calls after I made one purchase in Ohio and the next in Missouri. Interestingly enough, among the usual information about maiden names and the like, I was asked whether I paid typically the minimum or full balance on my cards. I'll admit that my first reaction was to ask them questions to try to prove their legitimacy, as that started sounding more like a survey than a credit fraud call, but it turns out it's being used more often for identity checks because things like payment schedules and types are fairly unique to customers and it's less likely that an attempted defrauder would learn such things by dumpster diving.
"Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to human stupidity." It's also possible that the cashier ignored or bypassed the message. Her pay isn't likely to be influenced either way by it and if multiple people are putting on "fraud alert" alarms on their credit records, it's entirely possible she gets so many bogus alerts that she doesn't even think twice before dismissing the dialogue. *grumble* I really wish I had the URL to that study someone posted on Slashdot... they were ostensibly heavily involved with the "photo ID on a credit card" concept at its first inception and he posted a nice long summary of his results. Basically, it didn't matter what the picture looked like; the cashiers passed the card. They even tried people of the wrong gender and it didn't make a difference. They then tried adding alerts, first a notification that popped up to ask the cashier to check the picture, then a dialogue which asked them to call into the credit agency, which required using a bypass key to dismiss. The rates of checking the picture were actually lower because the dialogue would get automatically dismissed without thinking about it.
Come to think of it, I think that article was in something about biometrics... someone was publishing instructions on how to fake fingerprints using gelatin and he was commenting on other failed security features.
Unless the companies who lost the information are willing to be liable for any and all damages caused by the identity theft, not limitted to damaged credit ratings, credibility damage, and all monetary losses, they should definitely inform consumers. That would be like not informing people of airplane safety measures "because very few planes actually crash."
generally, you can recreate Hamlet in about 3 months with a team of 10 monkeys working 8 hours a day.
On the off chance you're serious, I disagree. There's one simulation on the web for infinite monkeys trying to write Shakespeare and the current record is 28 letters. Also, lacking a cite, but Slashdot at one point ran an article tracking an actual case of trying to get monkeys to write Shakespeare by introducing a computer into a cage. Mainly the monkeys smeared feces on it, but otherwise, they had a decidedly non-random tendency to type the same letter over and over again.
Live performances just can't compare. Go vinyl, go!
^_^ Wish I could remember the exact line, but there was a wonderful bit in one of the Discworld books about how the Patrician prefers to read sheet music rather than listen to it "because the idea of it being performed by people, with all the sweat and saliva involved, strikes him as distasteful."
Plenty of those genes. Just look at lactose intolerance. Those of western Eurasian descent can generally drink milk after weaning. The rest generally cannot. *wry grin* Unofrtunately, I'm one of the few of Eurasian descent who can't, although it's something that's developed as I get older and I produce enough lactase for about half a glass a milk at a meal, enough that I don't have to worry about checking for the presence of lactose in the ingredients of a meal.
*grumble* Messed up closing the EM tag, forgot a virgule.