It seems to me that this is less indicative of the progress of technology than of the decadence of thought. The difficulty of writing a genuinely correct grammar -- much less a grammar checker -- taints any such product technically. The general theory that "grammar doesn't matter" is only a response to the incorrect grammars invented by pedants.
But content is worse. Anyone who has read college essays knows that most are hackneyed and even foolish -- it's not much better than reading Slashdot with a low threshhold. Whatever may be popular, there are right and wrong ideas; in literary analysis, for instance, one might rightly posit that "we can draw a conclusion" from a text, but it takes a much better argument to establish genuine authorial intent. But while this software might track the structure of trivial arguments, and though it might compare it to certain standards and external content, I cannot believe that it holds a high standard. Likely it punishes advanced thought and structure.
Unless I see otherwise, I shall hold that its use should keep students away, for they know by it that standards are low and that they're dumping their money away. But then, that's true of most schools.
Money represents whatever you will let it represent. Each of us is free to determine what we consider wealth, but sometimes the picture gets skewed -- as with open source without the GPL.
If I have released open source with no strings attached, I clearly don't value it as wealth -- that is, as commensurate to, say, cars and gems. But if someone else then sells it and buys the car I wanted -- driving up the price for me -- he has effectively used my code to take my wealth. If I described the entire transaction based on my values, he has made me pay him to let him use my code. In real life this probably amounts to pennies, but even so.
The GPL avoids this. Other strings could work, but I think Mr Schwartz just likes charging us to write code for him.
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It seems to me that this is less indicative of the progress of technology than of the decadence of thought. The difficulty of writing a genuinely correct grammar -- much less a grammar checker -- taints any such product technically. The general theory that "grammar doesn't matter" is only a response to the incorrect grammars invented by pedants.
But content is worse. Anyone who has read college essays knows that most are hackneyed and even foolish -- it's not much better than reading Slashdot with a low threshhold. Whatever may be popular, there are right and wrong ideas; in literary analysis, for instance, one might rightly posit that "we can draw a conclusion" from a text, but it takes a much better argument to establish genuine authorial intent. But while this software might track the structure of trivial arguments, and though it might compare it to certain standards and external content, I cannot believe that it holds a high standard. Likely it punishes advanced thought and structure.
Unless I see otherwise, I shall hold that its use should keep students away, for they know by it that standards are low and that they're dumping their money away. But then, that's true of most schools.
Money represents whatever you will let it represent. Each of us is free to determine what we consider wealth, but sometimes the picture gets skewed -- as with open source without the GPL.
If I have released open source with no strings attached, I clearly don't value it as wealth -- that is, as commensurate to, say, cars and gems. But if someone else then sells it and buys the car I wanted -- driving up the price for me -- he has effectively used my code to take my wealth. If I described the entire transaction based on my values, he has made me pay him to let him use my code. In real life this probably amounts to pennies, but even so.
The GPL avoids this. Other strings could work, but I think Mr Schwartz just likes charging us to write code for him.