It's equally as simple. Probably simpler - never used an Android phone. Both are opt-out from your description, and the SmartScreen functionality seems to be outright presented as an option on installation.
I am also pretty sure that Chrome does, in fact, come standard on Chrome OS and I assume that the default web browser on Androids is Chrome or some variant thereof that sends your URLs to Google same as Chrome does.
Should Linux repositories, the Apple App Store, the Google Store, and the Microsoft store provide a similar warning, since they actually glean more information from what you download there?
I mean, all Microsoft gets from this is a filename and a hash. Unless Microsoft has a hash of every program in existence, that doesn't do them much good for spying purposes. On the other hand, they know everything about the app you're downloading from their store.
I'd rather it be done locally as well. I suppose the reason it's done remotely is so the blacklist can be updated and maintained on the server side. That's a perfectly good reason - Chrome sends all your URLs to check against a server-side blacklist as well - and it is probably better from the security standpoint.
Long-term, though, I think the remote check opens up a potential for vector for invading privacy in the future, which I'd rather not have.
Do you opt-in to Chrome sending your URLs to Google?
Because that would be the equivalent analogy. SmartScreen sends URLs and file hashes to Microsoft, the exact same way Google's anti-malware sends URLs to Google to compare against a blacklist.
And besides, that, Google "collects" information about what you download through their store, in the same sense - you can't download the app without them knowing your IP, which is the same information Microsoft is getting. If you really cared about this kind of privacy, the app-store model is a much bigger threat than some file hashes being sent to Microsoft.
Just read the Ars Technica article. The Slashdot headline is ridiculously slanted, as was the previous story.
While I disagree with it in principle - I'd rather it be local, like how Firefox uses a local version of the bad-sites list, this is not in any way unusual or awful behavior, and it's mostly a good idea, and Microsoft has been completely open about how and why they're doing this and giving you an easy way to turn it off. It is not some privacy invading nightmare. Microsoft is not keeping track of what programs you download (unless, obviously, you get them through the Microsoft store.)
Slashdot stories are becoming more and more ridiculous. The summaries are never even worth reading anymore.
You think that might have anything to do with the massive rise in income inequality the US has experienced in the past 50 years? Richer rich people and more poor people?
Maybe your numbers are misleading and Politifact is (more-or-less, it does have real problems) right.
Nearly everything our government does is important to someone but it's clear from our high taxes and massive deficit that we just can't afford it all. Cutting waste will help but it won't enough
Our "high taxes"? The same ones that are lower than they've been in generations?
Our deficit? Why don't you tell us where that deficit is coming from? The fact is, if you cut out the recession (lowers tax receipts, increased spending on unemployment, etc.), rolled back the Bush tax cuts, and ended the wars, there would be NO DEFICIT. Zip. Zero. Check the CBO numbers.
The whole idea that "rampant government spending" is some kind of problem budget-wise is a huge non sequitur and strawman. If you genuinely believe that government shouldn't be playing the role it does - fine, I disagree with you, but there are legitimate philosophical arguments you can have there. The idea that our deficit is caused by some kind of crazy government spending though, is not legitimate. It is completely untrue.
It is astounding to me that people can get away with claiming government spending is a problem when in fifteen years, the Bush tax cuts will be responsible for fifty percent of the total US debt.
I play back at 1.5x simply because you barely notice the difference when you get used to it, and you save that much time. 2x is stretching it, but depending on the show, and what's happening, it's doable.
This is the biggest problem Mozilla has. They listen to everybody and everything, and so they can't win because surprise, people don't agree.
People were pushing hard for Firefox to have a more minimalist UI like Chrome. Mozilla acquiesced. Then all the people who use their browser as a tool and not a lifestyle got a big surprise when the update came down the pipeline and got irritated about it.
People are pushing hard for Firefox to update more often - this was probably legitimate, since it was taking a year plus between releases. They did. Then another group of people got irate about rapid releases.
People were pushing hard for Firefox to reduce memory usage. Mozilla reduced Firefox's memory usage. Now people complain that Firefox is a bit slower and uses more CPU because less is cached in memory.
The only notification you get is when you don't close the browser for days after an update has been downloaded. I assume Chrome has a similar notification window since Chrome updates also cannot be applied until a restart.
No, there pretty much were no problems. Mozilla developers tried to do everything they could to get rid of the image of Firefox as memory-hungry, so now Firefox is the leanest browser memory-wise, yes. And now I have to wait for my 50 tabs to load one by one when I restart and switch to them, because of you people. Thanks.
And despite their frenetic efforts, Firefox still has a public perception of using too much memory.
The problem is actually that Mozilla isn't forcing their updates upon users. Someone who doesn't check it "about Firefox" box in a while easily gets 6 versions behind in no time.
Yes, they do, unless they disable automatic updates in their configuration. Firefox updates happen silently. The only way you'll even know one happens is sometimes you when open the browser, or if you leave it open for too long and Firefox eventually notifies you that you need to restart to apply updates.
Honestly, this is why I don't read Slashdot much anymore. Half the posters don't even know what they're talking about. I don't know if they just make it up as they go along or what.
I guess it's too much trouble to actually read Krugman - or even know the facts.
I assume you're referring to "everything he espouses" to be the straw-puppet of "government spending good," and since Greece, Spain, and Portugal are running massive deficits and are in a debt crises, Krugman is obviously a dummy.
Well, Spain was actually running a budget surplus, so it's a bad example to begin with. And Krugman correctly predicted the Euro crises. He correctly predicted the response to the Euro crises austerity. And thus far, he has been correct about his predictions about the effect of the response to the Euro crises. And Krugman doesn't advocate deficit spending in boom times to begin with.
And as for leading Enron into an abyss, he served on an irrelevant advisory panel for Enron for four days. While I have no idea what he told Enron, he was arguing in public for increased regulation of energy companies at the time.
Krugman's exactly the kind of ivory-tower asshat who believes that there's such a thing as a good war.
No, he doesn't. He's said the right kind of war would help the economy, not that any war is a good thing. Krugman is consistently anti-war. He's also said an arms built-up to fight an alien invasion would be good for the economy and have great secondary effects (from research and whatnot.) He's also not seriously advocated that we arm up to fight an imaginary alien invasion.
But you can sit their in your smug, self-righteous libertarianism and keep pretending Krugman is a hack who hasn't consistently made very accurate predictions and the Nobel prize in economics is a fraud
...and that's the beauty of the book. Most people who come into it knowing that Dostoevsky was a Christian will come out of it thinking that it is a pro-religion story, especially because what you said about Alyosha is true. However, all brothers, even Alyosha, are guilty to varying degrees of enabling Fyodor Karamazov's death.
I'd disagree with that - Alyosha is the one innocent in the story. But I think that one of the points of the story is that we're all responsible for each other, so I can see how that argument could be made. I find it difficult though to see how you could read it, with Zosima and Alyosha, and not see that as an authorial endorsement of a particular brand of Christianity.
Rather than seeing it as a pro-Christian novel with some dark characters, I see it as an all-encompassing story that people from all beliefs and walks of life could use to better understand human nature.
Well, absolutely. Heck, Nietzsche had some very high praise for Dostoevsky and his stories, and he was certainly from a non-Christian walk of life. (Does this qualify as understatement of the year?)
I remember thinking that after reading the book, had I not known that Dostoevsky was a Christian, I would have thought him to be an atheist(I still believe that he was a closet atheist, a guilt-ridden sinner desperately grasping at salvation).
I think - if we're taking, say, Ivan to be evidence for this - that one might as well make the case Milton was a Satanist for his portrayal of Satan.:) I don't know Dostoyevsky's biographical details, but I would definitely suspect that he seriously questioned his faith - but Alyosha was his argument against those doubts, which is not at all rational, but that's the point, I think.
Also, I disagree with your labeling of Ivan and Dmitri as "not the good guys." Ivan(my favorite character) is your classic rationalist tortured by his intelligence, his logical mind refusing to allow religion to fill the void in his soul. Dmitri is your classic reckless hedonist. Again, they are not evil, only human. The only genuine bad guy out of all the brothers is Smerdyakov.
I was oversimplifying because I suspected that the original poster never read the entire book, but just The Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor, which are often published separately. Calling them evil is going too far, but their attitudes and beliefs are leading them on a path of self-destruction, even if there is possible redemption for them at the end - including Ivan, who is going insane. Alyosha alone is exempt; he's the good example for everyone else - I think I remember Ivan even mentioning that a couple of time.
I don't think even Smerdyakov is evil per se, but well, he did murder his dad.
At any rate, my main point is just that to take The Grand Inquisitor as the message of the book is a serious misrepresentation - Alyosha even "refutes" it right after Ivan finishes telling it - and that seemed to be what some in the thread were implying. Of course, whether you find the refutation convincing is another matter.
While we're at it, his representation of The Grand Inquisitor is quite a bit off too...he was not worried that Jesus was "bad for business," he sincerely felt that Jesus was wrong and that he and the Church had to "correct his work," not out of a mere desire for power, but for the sake of mankind.
But anyway, that whole homoerotic claim baffled me, so here's an excerpt for the passerby.
"I meant to end it like this. When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old
It definitely didn't - Ivan, the character in the novel who made up the story of the Grand Inquisitor, is not the hero or protagonist - the man he is speaking to, Alyosha, is. Alyosha is the "good" Karamazov, named after Dostoevsky's dead son, and he is very religious - he's a novice at the local monastery.
That said, Ivan makes what I think is the most compelling and heartbreaking telling of the argument from evil in the leadup to the Grand Inquisitor as he is speaking to Alyosha, so it's understandable that it could be the GP's takeaway from the book. But it was certainly not Dostoevsky's message at all - Ivan and Dmitri are not the good guys, and their views, beliefs, and attitudes are contrasted unfavorably with Alyosha's, who is identified explicitly as the hero.
Finally, and you have a CS degree, and you're working at a pizza place. Dude, unless your Dad owned the pizza place there's something not right here
Was. I quit the pizza place my last month of school, went job searching, and now work for a consulting firm.
I hate saying this, but the whole thing stinks. Are you an Astroturfer? Anyone got the time/skill to trace back this guys comments and ids? I hate to say it, but it wouldn't be the first time I've tangled with an Astroturfer on/.... If you're really not, you need to start getting pissed off. You've been taken advantage of. You're being oppressed
Who would I be astroturfing for? The Man?
I never said the situation was ideal or even good. I don't think it is. My point was only that it isn't impossible to pay for college without being amazingly lucky (relatively lucky I will accept), having rich parents, or getting loans. I think the whole system needs dramatic reform. But the original claim was an exaggeration of the (bad enough) reality.
$2700 per quarter, $11,200 per year. I don't know of any accredited school with tuitions that low.
All the state universities in my home state and in the state I attended university have tuition much lower than that. A full-time graduate (I still got the in-state tuition rate because I lived in the service area) load (10 hours) was $3000 a semester my last semester - undergrad was slightly cheaper even at 16 hours. Living in the dorms and the mandatory meal plan put me at approximately 11k a year. If I was otherwise hungry, I ate at work.
And my college is not especially cheap for the region. I quickly checked six other public universities in the region, and they were all about at that same rate. I don't know about the others, but my CS program was ABET accredited and declared a CAE. And there are plenty of people that live in college towns and so could live with their parents and commute to college, unlike me, which would save even more money.
A 60 hour work week at $7.25/hr (current federal min wage) is $20,880 GROSS.
Time-and-a-half.
If you don't have kids you pay about 12% of that in taxes just to state & fed, to say nothing of sales tax (Phoenix AZ taxes food you know).
I don't remember how much I worked out that I paid in taxes - my state also taxes food, though - but you can deduct college expenses.
You also probably had a supervisor happy to be supportive because he/she is looking forward to getting someone with a Masters Degree w/o having to engage HR.
My primary job was working at a pizza place. I don't think he really cared about my computer science degree. The owner was very supportive, though - I didn't write my own schedule, but close enough to it. To some degree the owner was supportive of that in general since he mostly hired kids and to some degree I earned it by doing my best.
Later on I worked two jobs, the other one being an assistantship. Technically, you weren't supposed to have another job if you were given an assistantship, but I didn't tell.
One thing that did save me a significant amount of money in the long run was attending a community college for the first two years, though, and making sure that I was taking classes that would transfer and count towards my degree at the "real" university.
Try taking compilers or operating systems while working 60 hours a week.
I was only working 40 during school, and it went fine.
Maybe you're one of them. But if that's the case you're where you are today because of good fortune, dumb luck and the roll of the die. The other option is you went to a diploma mill that doesn't teach anything.
Well, I need 9-10 hours of sleep a night, personally, so I didn't luck out there. But yes, I got a lucky roll of the dice. I was born in America, and not North Korea. I won the genetic lottery to some degree. I was raised in an environment conducive to learning and education. But these are largely social issues that wouldn't be fixed if we could wave a magic wand and make college free.
And while I don't think my college was super-duper rigorous, it's definitely no diploma mill. It was maybe more theoretical than technical, but we still wrote compilers, and doing a "real" project for a client in industry or in the faculty was a prerequisite for graduation. The program was ABET accredited and declared a CAE by the NSA - though for all I know, diploma mills can get all that too, I just know they liked bragging about it.;)
This is something I just can't get the right wing (who are the ones that bring this argument up the most) to get: The lives of People who make minimum wage are a never ending wave of problems. Life is different when you can't just fix stuff when it breaks, buy ice cream for your kid when they get hurt. You end up trying to make up for the lack of money with time and effort. If you're one of those rare people whose genetics makes it easy for you, well then bully for you.
I don't think anyone has ever suggested that I was right wing before. I'm a proud big-government tax-and-spend liberal.
I agree with what you're saying. If my parents had made minimum wage, chances are things would have worked out so that I never went to college, even though they didn't directly financially support my education. If I had been kicked out at 16, I likely would have never gone. Going to college is too hard and too expensive, and I think everyone should have a college education even if it has nothing to do with their job.
But the claim was that "nobody could pay for college without loans or wealthy parents" and that was flat-out wrong, because I did. Is it much harder than it needs to be? Yes. Does the difficulty and cost present a barrier to entry for huge swaths of the population?
Unfortunately, to do what you were able to do cannot be done in 2012. It would take someone many years to do and if they're going for a techical degree where credits are only good for 5 years, you wouldn't be able to do it by working your through college - as soon as you had enough for tuition, you'd be retaking Chemistry, physics, and any other engineering class.
Uh. I worked through college and paid for it in cold hard cash, without a penny from loans or my parents, and I graduated last December. With my Master's. I graduated only a semester "late" because my advisor didn't want me to take 18 hours my senior undergrad year, so it took me altogether six years, but I came out with a 4.0.
So yes, it is quite possible, I did it. That's not to say that there isn't a problem with the cost of college tuition, and that I didn't do my fair share of grumbling about the tuition/fee increases that came nearly every year I was there (including an extra $250 a semester because my school decided it needed a football team and an extra $700 a semester when mean plans were suddenly made mandatory to pay for a new dining hall), but it's an overbroad generalization to say "nobody can pay for college without rich parents or student loans." Yes, you can. You can even do it on minimum wage, if you're willing to work overtime and save up before you get there.
The cost of college is a problem, and it's only going to get worse, but let's not exaggerate.
The killer of me switching now would be that it doesn't have synch built in, and with the number of Chrome installs I have (5), that is a bit of a PITA. Presumably there are extensions to do that, but right now I'm not fussed.
Firefox does have Sync built in - it has since version 4, I think. It can sync history, bookmarks, etc. It's right there on whatever they call the orange menu.
I wasn't big on it at first, but "Open Tabs From A Different Computer" is probably the best browser UI idea in a while.
Um, this is Microsoft we're talking about; they do that all the time. And I'm not just saying that to be snotty, there's a whole history of examples: Windows 1 & 2, Windows Me, Windows Vista, the Zune, the first several versions of IE, the first several iterations of WinCE/PocketPC/Mobile. Microsoft often gets it right eventually, but getting a sub-standard product to market and then trying to fix it is a time-honored tradition with them.
The Zune was certainly a commercial flop, but there was nothing substandard about it. Except maybe the color on the original Zune.;)
There were two reasons the Zune didn't crush the iPod: marketing, and the iPod came out first. The Zune was technically a little better than the iPod, but not oh-my-gosh-gotta-buy-it-now. I think it did have a much better interface - maybe I'm retarded, but the older iPods were the most confounding things I've ever used, and the scroll wheels sucked for precision. And the Zune software made iTunes look like a bloated, unintuitive mess. But that alone certainly wasn't enough to overcome the momentum of the iPod, especially with Microsoft's tepid marketing and crazy business decisions (no open App Store for Zune HDs?!.)
Slashdot Mirror
Flip the checkbox to turn SmartScreen off then.
It's equally as simple. Probably simpler - never used an Android phone. Both are opt-out from your description, and the SmartScreen functionality seems to be outright presented as an option on installation.
I am also pretty sure that Chrome does, in fact, come standard on Chrome OS and I assume that the default web browser on Androids is Chrome or some variant thereof that sends your URLs to Google same as Chrome does.
Should Linux repositories, the Apple App Store, the Google Store, and the Microsoft store provide a similar warning, since they actually glean more information from what you download there?
I mean, all Microsoft gets from this is a filename and a hash. Unless Microsoft has a hash of every program in existence, that doesn't do them much good for spying purposes. On the other hand, they know everything about the app you're downloading from their store.
I'd rather it be done locally as well. I suppose the reason it's done remotely is so the blacklist can be updated and maintained on the server side. That's a perfectly good reason - Chrome sends all your URLs to check against a server-side blacklist as well - and it is probably better from the security standpoint.
Long-term, though, I think the remote check opens up a potential for vector for invading privacy in the future, which I'd rather not have.
Do you opt-in to Chrome sending your URLs to Google?
Because that would be the equivalent analogy. SmartScreen sends URLs and file hashes to Microsoft, the exact same way Google's anti-malware sends URLs to Google to compare against a blacklist.
And besides, that, Google "collects" information about what you download through their store, in the same sense - you can't download the app without them knowing your IP, which is the same information Microsoft is getting. If you really cared about this kind of privacy, the app-store model is a much bigger threat than some file hashes being sent to Microsoft.
Just read the Ars Technica article. The Slashdot headline is ridiculously slanted, as was the previous story.
While I disagree with it in principle - I'd rather it be local, like how Firefox uses a local version of the bad-sites list, this is not in any way unusual or awful behavior, and it's mostly a good idea, and Microsoft has been completely open about how and why they're doing this and giving you an easy way to turn it off. It is not some privacy invading nightmare. Microsoft is not keeping track of what programs you download (unless, obviously, you get them through the Microsoft store.)
Slashdot stories are becoming more and more ridiculous. The summaries are never even worth reading anymore.
You think that might have anything to do with the massive rise in income inequality the US has experienced in the past 50 years? Richer rich people and more poor people?
Maybe your numbers are misleading and Politifact is (more-or-less, it does have real problems) right.
Our "high taxes"? The same ones that are lower than they've been in generations?
Our deficit? Why don't you tell us where that deficit is coming from? The fact is, if you cut out the recession (lowers tax receipts, increased spending on unemployment, etc.), rolled back the Bush tax cuts, and ended the wars, there would be NO DEFICIT. Zip. Zero. Check the CBO numbers.
The whole idea that "rampant government spending" is some kind of problem budget-wise is a huge non sequitur and strawman. If you genuinely believe that government shouldn't be playing the role it does - fine, I disagree with you, but there are legitimate philosophical arguments you can have there. The idea that our deficit is caused by some kind of crazy government spending though, is not legitimate. It is completely untrue.
It is astounding to me that people can get away with claiming government spending is a problem when in fifteen years, the Bush tax cuts will be responsible for fifty percent of the total US debt.
I play back at 1.5x simply because you barely notice the difference when you get used to it, and you save that much time. 2x is stretching it, but depending on the show, and what's happening, it's doable.
Then it sounds like you have automatic updates disabled. Maybe you did this in the distant pas, I don't know.
Options > Advanced > Update and reselect the default option, which is "install updates automatically."
Thanks!
Addons are automatically set to be compatible and, at least in my case, I've never noticed any that weren't.
I haven't noticed any UI changes since 4. Doesn't mean they weren't there - I'm inattentive - but the UI is not "completely different."
This is the biggest problem Mozilla has. They listen to everybody and everything, and so they can't win because surprise, people don't agree.
People were pushing hard for Firefox to have a more minimalist UI like Chrome. Mozilla acquiesced. Then all the people who use their browser as a tool and not a lifestyle got a big surprise when the update came down the pipeline and got irritated about it.
People are pushing hard for Firefox to update more often - this was probably legitimate, since it was taking a year plus between releases. They did. Then another group of people got irate about rapid releases.
People were pushing hard for Firefox to reduce memory usage. Mozilla reduced Firefox's memory usage. Now people complain that Firefox is a bit slower and uses more CPU because less is cached in memory.
How do you know Firefox updates are happening?
The only notification you get is when you don't close the browser for days after an update has been downloaded. I assume Chrome has a similar notification window since Chrome updates also cannot be applied until a restart.
No, there pretty much were no problems. Mozilla developers tried to do everything they could to get rid of the image of Firefox as memory-hungry, so now Firefox is the leanest browser memory-wise, yes. And now I have to wait for my 50 tabs to load one by one when I restart and switch to them, because of you people. Thanks.
And despite their frenetic efforts, Firefox still has a public perception of using too much memory.
Yes, they do, unless they disable automatic updates in their configuration. Firefox updates happen silently. The only way you'll even know one happens is sometimes you when open the browser, or if you leave it open for too long and Firefox eventually notifies you that you need to restart to apply updates.
Honestly, this is why I don't read Slashdot much anymore. Half the posters don't even know what they're talking about. I don't know if they just make it up as they go along or what.
I guess it's too much trouble to actually read Krugman - or even know the facts.
I assume you're referring to "everything he espouses" to be the straw-puppet of "government spending good," and since Greece, Spain, and Portugal are running massive deficits and are in a debt crises, Krugman is obviously a dummy.
Well, Spain was actually running a budget surplus, so it's a bad example to begin with. And Krugman correctly predicted the Euro crises. He correctly predicted the response to the Euro crises austerity. And thus far, he has been correct about his predictions about the effect of the response to the Euro crises. And Krugman doesn't advocate deficit spending in boom times to begin with.
And as for leading Enron into an abyss, he served on an irrelevant advisory panel for Enron for four days. While I have no idea what he told Enron, he was arguing in public for increased regulation of energy companies at the time.
No, he doesn't. He's said the right kind of war would help the economy, not that any war is a good thing. Krugman is consistently anti-war. He's also said an arms built-up to fight an alien invasion would be good for the economy and have great secondary effects (from research and whatnot.) He's also not seriously advocated that we arm up to fight an imaginary alien invasion.
But you can sit their in your smug, self-righteous libertarianism and keep pretending Krugman is a hack who hasn't consistently made very accurate predictions and the Nobel prize in economics is a fraud
I'd disagree with that - Alyosha is the one innocent in the story. But I think that one of the points of the story is that we're all responsible for each other, so I can see how that argument could be made. I find it difficult though to see how you could read it, with Zosima and Alyosha, and not see that as an authorial endorsement of a particular brand of Christianity.
Well, absolutely. Heck, Nietzsche had some very high praise for Dostoevsky and his stories, and he was certainly from a non-Christian walk of life. (Does this qualify as understatement of the year?)
I think - if we're taking, say, Ivan to be evidence for this - that one might as well make the case Milton was a Satanist for his portrayal of Satan. :) I don't know Dostoyevsky's biographical details, but I would definitely suspect that he seriously questioned his faith - but Alyosha was his argument against those doubts, which is not at all rational, but that's the point, I think.
I was oversimplifying because I suspected that the original poster never read the entire book, but just The Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor, which are often published separately. Calling them evil is going too far, but their attitudes and beliefs are leading them on a path of self-destruction, even if there is possible redemption for them at the end - including Ivan, who is going insane. Alyosha alone is exempt; he's the good example for everyone else - I think I remember Ivan even mentioning that a couple of time.
I don't think even Smerdyakov is evil per se, but well, he did murder his dad.
At any rate, my main point is just that to take The Grand Inquisitor as the message of the book is a serious misrepresentation - Alyosha even "refutes" it right after Ivan finishes telling it - and that seemed to be what some in the thread were implying. Of course, whether you find the refutation convincing is another matter.
While we're at it, his representation of The Grand Inquisitor is quite a bit off too...he was not worried that Jesus was "bad for business," he sincerely felt that Jesus was wrong and that he and the Church had to "correct his work," not out of a mere desire for power, but for the sake of mankind.
But anyway, that whole homoerotic claim baffled me, so here's an excerpt for the passerby.
It definitely didn't - Ivan, the character in the novel who made up the story of the Grand Inquisitor, is not the hero or protagonist - the man he is speaking to, Alyosha, is. Alyosha is the "good" Karamazov, named after Dostoevsky's dead son, and he is very religious - he's a novice at the local monastery.
That said, Ivan makes what I think is the most compelling and heartbreaking telling of the argument from evil in the leadup to the Grand Inquisitor as he is speaking to Alyosha, so it's understandable that it could be the GP's takeaway from the book. But it was certainly not Dostoevsky's message at all - Ivan and Dmitri are not the good guys, and their views, beliefs, and attitudes are contrasted unfavorably with Alyosha's, who is identified explicitly as the hero.
Was. I quit the pizza place my last month of school, went job searching, and now work for a consulting firm.
Who would I be astroturfing for? The Man?
I never said the situation was ideal or even good. I don't think it is. My point was only that it isn't impossible to pay for college without being amazingly lucky (relatively lucky I will accept), having rich parents, or getting loans. I think the whole system needs dramatic reform. But the original claim was an exaggeration of the (bad enough) reality.
All the state universities in my home state and in the state I attended university have tuition much lower than that. A full-time graduate (I still got the in-state tuition rate because I lived in the service area) load (10 hours) was $3000 a semester my last semester - undergrad was slightly cheaper even at 16 hours. Living in the dorms and the mandatory meal plan put me at approximately 11k a year. If I was otherwise hungry, I ate at work.
And my college is not especially cheap for the region. I quickly checked six other public universities in the region, and they were all about at that same rate. I don't know about the others, but my CS program was ABET accredited and declared a CAE. And there are plenty of people that live in college towns and so could live with their parents and commute to college, unlike me, which would save even more money.
Time-and-a-half.
I don't remember how much I worked out that I paid in taxes - my state also taxes food, though - but you can deduct college expenses.
My primary job was working at a pizza place. I don't think he really cared about my computer science degree. The owner was very supportive, though - I didn't write my own schedule, but close enough to it. To some degree the owner was supportive of that in general since he mostly hired kids and to some degree I earned it by doing my best.
Later on I worked two jobs, the other one being an assistantship. Technically, you weren't supposed to have another job if you were given an assistantship, but I didn't tell.
One thing that did save me a significant amount of money in the long run was attending a community college for the first two years, though, and making sure that I was taking classes that would transfer and count towards my degree at the "real" university.
I was only working 40 during school, and it went fine.
Well, I need 9-10 hours of sleep a night, personally, so I didn't luck out there. But yes, I got a lucky roll of the dice. I was born in America, and not North Korea. I won the genetic lottery to some degree. I was raised in an environment conducive to learning and education. But these are largely social issues that wouldn't be fixed if we could wave a magic wand and make college free.
And while I don't think my college was super-duper rigorous, it's definitely no diploma mill. It was maybe more theoretical than technical, but we still wrote compilers, and doing a "real" project for a client in industry or in the faculty was a prerequisite for graduation. The program was ABET accredited and declared a CAE by the NSA - though for all I know, diploma mills can get all that too, I just know they liked bragging about it. ;)
I don't think anyone has ever suggested that I was right wing before. I'm a proud big-government tax-and-spend liberal.
I agree with what you're saying. If my parents had made minimum wage, chances are things would have worked out so that I never went to college, even though they didn't directly financially support my education. If I had been kicked out at 16, I likely would have never gone. Going to college is too hard and too expensive, and I think everyone should have a college education even if it has nothing to do with their job.
But the claim was that "nobody could pay for college without loans or wealthy parents" and that was flat-out wrong, because I did. Is it much harder than it needs to be? Yes. Does the difficulty and cost present a barrier to entry for huge swaths of the population?
Uh. I worked through college and paid for it in cold hard cash, without a penny from loans or my parents, and I graduated last December. With my Master's. I graduated only a semester "late" because my advisor didn't want me to take 18 hours my senior undergrad year, so it took me altogether six years, but I came out with a 4.0.
So yes, it is quite possible, I did it. That's not to say that there isn't a problem with the cost of college tuition, and that I didn't do my fair share of grumbling about the tuition/fee increases that came nearly every year I was there (including an extra $250 a semester because my school decided it needed a football team and an extra $700 a semester when mean plans were suddenly made mandatory to pay for a new dining hall), but it's an overbroad generalization to say "nobody can pay for college without rich parents or student loans." Yes, you can. You can even do it on minimum wage, if you're willing to work overtime and save up before you get there.
The cost of college is a problem, and it's only going to get worse, but let's not exaggerate.
Firefox does have Sync built in - it has since version 4, I think. It can sync history, bookmarks, etc. It's right there on whatever they call the orange menu.
I wasn't big on it at first, but "Open Tabs From A Different Computer" is probably the best browser UI idea in a while.
The Zune was certainly a commercial flop, but there was nothing substandard about it. Except maybe the color on the original Zune. ;)
There were two reasons the Zune didn't crush the iPod: marketing, and the iPod came out first. The Zune was technically a little better than the iPod, but not oh-my-gosh-gotta-buy-it-now. I think it did have a much better interface - maybe I'm retarded, but the older iPods were the most confounding things I've ever used, and the scroll wheels sucked for precision. And the Zune software made iTunes look like a bloated, unintuitive mess. But that alone certainly wasn't enough to overcome the momentum of the iPod, especially with Microsoft's tepid marketing and crazy business decisions (no open App Store for Zune HDs?!.)