How much testing have you done with Sun's Linux Java version? Hmmm? Don't make up crap to try to make a point. Sun's Java runs great on Linux and many of the server apps we run have better overall performance on a Linux box vs an MS windows box,
Server apps run fine pretty much everywhere. Making server apps cross-platform isn't hard.
The trouble areas with Java on Linux are in areas such as graphics, desktop support, user interfaces, and device access. I have done plenty of testing there, and you can believe me: Java doesn't even come close to fulfilling its cross-platform promise.
Huh? So you have talked to "most" developers to see what they care about? I somehow doubt that. I see Open Source growing very well on Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X. I bet a goal of many of those projects are to be cross-platform.
Look at the statistics on Sourceforge or Freshmeat: the vast majority of open source projects and LOCs are not cross platform.
Yes, it currently runs on Mono until the next IronPython change, Mono get tweaked, IronPython change, lather-rinse-repeat.
Yeah, just like Jython currently runs on Sun Java, Sun Java gets changed, Jython has to follow suit, etc. Oh, actually there is a difference: we can tweak Mono, we can't tweak Sun Java because it's proprietary.
Also, since IronPython is open source, if Microsoft doesn't pay enough attention to Mono compatibility, IronPython would simply get forked. Even if it needed to be forked, it would still represent a contribution of many man-years of useful development effort to the open source community.
Most of Microsoft's.Net is not an ECMA spec, so IronPython, which is sponsored by Microsoft, is not cross-platform just because it currently runs in mono.
At least a big part of.NET actually has an official standard and there are two open source implementation of it. The Java specifications, in contrast, are completely proprietary.
Write an IronPython GUI app with Microsoft's non-ECMA Winforms and see how well it does on non-MS platforms.
About as far as I get running Jython Swing apps on non-Sun implementations of Java--they sort of work, but not always. Both Winforms and Swing are proprietary APIs, and in both cases, open source implementations have to go through a lot of trouble to try to keep up with the proprietary vendors.
Sorry but I am not a Sun fanboy.
Yes, you are. You're also either deliberately spreading FUD, or simply very misinformed. And it's insulting that you imply that Jim Hugunin, the guy who has given so much to the open source community, including Jython, and who runs the IronPython project at Microsoft, supports some nefarious Microsoft purpose with this work.
IronPython is what it is: an open source implementation of the Python language for the CLR, and it's enormously useful at that. How it will evolve in the long term, who will maintain the Mono version, etc., remains to be seen, but that doesn't change how useful it is.
Firefox is a big, old, hairy C++ program, and for a big, old, hairy C++ program, that's not so bad.
While Firefox is important right now, the open source community really needs to start working on a successor in parallel. And, no, that doesn't mean another big, hairy C++ program.
Why don't companies care about privacy? Because there's not enough money to be made from securing sensitive customer information, says Jeff Rothfeder
Well, duh. Does he have any other brilliant insights? Like that there's not enough money to be made from decent working conditions, proper financial disclosures, or from protecting the environment?
That's why we have laws and penalties. What we need is stiffer penalties for privacy violations by companies. And, unlike child pornographers and murderers, who tend to be insensitive to the potential penalties, companies really do respond to penalties that hurt the bottom line.
I actually find the multi-language of of the CLR to be a negative.
That's not unique to the CLR runtime: the Java runtime and the C runtime both support multi-language programming, and it's widely used. In particular, every platform needs at least one decent dynamic language in addition to a static language, and Python one of the better choices.
When Sun did Java, they put the effort in to make the most important part, the framework, cross-platform. I wish MS did the same.
Please stop this Sun fanboy-ism. Sun has gone out of their way to make life miserable for open source platforms, and Sun's Java implementations for Linux are stil much worse than their implementations for Windows. I think that barely counts as cross-platform, not that most developers even give a damn about cross-platform.
Why would someone want to kill Python by making it MS-Only?
Even if IronPython were MS-only, how would that "kill" the language? Did the creation of a Microsoft C compiler "kill" C?
But you're wrong on your facts anyway: IronPython is not Microsoft-only, it runs on Mono and that is the intent of the developers.
The big trouble with focusing on eye candy is that GNOME has still got so much to do in terms of usability. [...] Personally I use GNOME because I use Ubuntu but I find it so bloody hard to do anything productive due to it missing so many simple, easy to implement, features that it usually send me swearing back to Windows to get things done. I'm so fed up with Nautilus that I now share my home folder on the network and do all my file management from Windows Explorer.
Well, all you have given us is a rant and pointed out some potential areas for improvement (some of which I don't even agree with). Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Gnome has more usability problems than Windows? Do you have any evidence that to support your assertion that Gnome is less consistent than Windows? Note that examples don't count as evidence for your assertions since there are plenty examples of badly designed Windows features as well. Evidence would be actual user testing or some other unbiased evaluation.
In any case, if there are specific features that you think are missing, then submit bug reports. The Gnome developers will evaluate your bug reports and prioritize them. However, if you're just going to submit a rant like the one you posted here, I can guarantee you that they won't do anything, because basically all you have said is "it doesn't work the way I am used to, so go change it". That's not an argument for getting a feature adopted.
So enough with the eye candy already. Get the cake properly baked before you start adding fancy icing.
That's a strategy that nobody in industry is following. Products must look good even if they aren't perfect in other ways. In fact, products must look especially good if they are less than perfect in other ways.
That only goes to show that the term "nanotechnology" is greatly misapplied today. Originally, it was referring to the use of nanomachines: little, active, mechanical devices. It would have been meaningless ot define the term as referring to the use of any nanoscale structures because many nanoscale structures have indeed been used for thousands of years and they didn't need a new term.
As for "being safe", the Romans probably lived to the ripe old age of 35 on average. They used lead compounds to sweeten their wine. I don't think that "the Romans used it, too, so it's safe" is a very persuasive argument.
In my line of work, I have scheduling conflicts all the time for meetings or training sessions while trying to continue to actually produce a product/service.
What gets you fired is choosing not to attend meetings because you don't like the instructor or having a second job interfere with your duties on the first. You don't have that freedom in the real world, and there is no reason you should have that freedom at university.
I'm arguing that if a university decides to record and disperse a lecture, they should do so freely. My second argument is that universities should seriously consider doing this for all lectures (or for lectures in high demand) because it's a very good idea.
In any case, I'm sorry that apparently your educational experience was limited to lectures that could be recorded. All lectures I attended after freshman year were in classes with fewer than 20 students with plenty of interactivity, both during and after class, and it wouldn't have made much sense to record them.
The market may dictate that things go as you described UNTIL enough folks band together to enact a change.
The market doesn't "dictate", the market reflects demand. Demand exists apparently for both kinds of universities, those that record, and those that value presence. Given that both kinds of universities exist, what are you complaining about?
But it's not a matter of opinion; it's a simple fact that many lectures aren't recorded and that you (obviously) have not been able to do anything about it.
Isn't that the whole debate that's going on here? We're talking about students having the right to choose whether or not to attend classes or get the lecture in some other format.
Saying "I have a right to" isn't persuading.
I'm also suggesting that students, i.e., the market, should persuade the administration(s) that it would be benefitial to relax the "you must attend the class" requirements because it's rather oxymoronic to call it higher education when you treat the students like they're in elementary school.
That's not much of an argument.
First of all, many students obviously choose colleges where attendance is mandatory or where lectures aren't recorded (you apparently did yourself), so the market seems to have decided.
Second, attendance is mandatory not just in elementary school, but for many meetings, educational and otherwise, in adult life. I mean, what do you think would happen in the real world if you worked at Circuit City and told your manager that you wouldn't be attending their training sessions because you don't like the instructor or because you had another training session at Radio Shack at the same time? Get real.
I guess the point I'm trying to make (not the issue of whether or not I had a hard life) is that the college should offer students, i.e., the market, what the students are demanding -- especially considering that we're footing the bill. After all, we're the ones footing the bill, so we should have some say as to how we choose to receive our material.
You have complete say about how you receive the material: there are hundreds of colleges offering material in a form completely suitable for people in the workforce. But you do not have a right to force changes in the program you are in; all you can do is to try and persuade them.
It's their right to not offer the product, and it's my right to reject their services.
Yes, but that's not what you did: you accepted a service, but you're retroactively complaining that the service you yourself selected didn't work differently.
It should be my right to decide if I'm going to waste my time and skip, or to attend class, or to work and view the lecture at a later time. I paid for that "spot" in the lecture, so it's up to me whether or not I choose to utilize it.
Nobody can force you to go, but the college is free not to give you a degree or kick you out if you don't.
It's their right to not offer the product, and it's my right to reject their services.
Indeed: you could have transferred out of that college any time you chose.
But at the same time, if the market decided to vote against that limited product set, where would the college be?
Well, evidently, the market hasn't decided to vote against their product, because otherwise they wouldn't still be around.
Computer software or hardware that is not compatible with common forensic tools will automatically be deemed to be evidence of child pornography or terrorist activity.
I'm sorry that you have had a tough life, but what does that have to do with what we're talking about?
The college you attended offered you a product: a course of study designed for 12 credit hours and designed for students able to spend full time on it. You knew that ahead of time and still chose that product. You just decided to use it differently from the way it was designed. It's good for you that you made it work for you, but the fact that it was probably tough isn't the college's responsibility, it's yours. And you actually had alternatives: there are plenty of good degree programs designed for people who work. My mother got her degree that way.
And, no, my parents didn't save for college either, and I received some financial aid and worked part time. But I never skipped lectures because of work. My college also had firm rules about conflicting classes (not permitted), and extra credit hours (take them if you like, but you won't graduate any earlier), excellent rules in my opinion.
Personally, I skipped the classes I wasn't getting anything out of.
So have I (they were mostly the ones that were supposedly "well taught" and were moving so slowly that they were boring me to tears). But in that case, having video tapes or podcasts won't help you either.
I really wish we could figure out a better way to hire college professors.
Some colleges focus on excellence in teaching, others focus on research and let the chips fall where they may when it comes to undergraduate education. There are plenty of publications telling you which is which.
In grad school I needed tenured professors that knew the industry. Sophomore year I needed a good teacher who knew a little about circuits. Why is there no seperation?
Sounds to me like you wanted the reputation of a good research university on your resume, but didn't like what that meant for undergraduate teaching. I think it's quite likely that what you call "bad teaching" is part of what makes a good research university good in the first place.
even if they can't speak or write english, and have obvsiouly zero interest in teaching.
Funny, those were always the professors I enjoyed most in college: they knew their stuff inside out, they loved the subject, and "didn't like teaching" really meant that they hated having to spoon-feed and sugar-coat the subject for students who would otherwise complain about "bad teaching". Some of them had thick Chinese or Russian accents and were tough to understand, but who cares if the subject matter is great, they present it in a logical order, and relate insights into the subject that only come from years of experience?
There are programs for people like you: part-time programs, degree programs for working professionals, and long distance degree programs. If you're in a full-time program, however, the program is designed for people who have the time to attend every lecture, participate in every group, and do all the homework. If you can't make it to lectures because of conflicts or work, then chances are you are missing out on other parts of the program as well that can't be video taped.
So, it sounds like you're simply in the wrong program. The solution is for you to switch to a different program, not for the university to change their full-time program into a program for part-time students like you.
Also, IANAS (I am not a statistician) but I can say that a high percentage of the professors I've had, and the professors my friends have had, don't ask questions, or encourage any interaction from the audience at all. In fact, many I have frown upon it.
Whether people interact in lecture is not the main point (although there is still plenty of interactivity even if you just sit there and look bored). You presumably interact in the smaller groups that accompany most lectures, and in order to contribute to those, you need to be prepared.
More importantly, courses are paced so that an average student can keep up with the workload if he participates steadily; if students start skipping classes with the intent of catching up later on video, they won't be prepared for the groups, and they won't have enough time towads the end of the semester to do the reading and homework anymore before the exam.
Now, you may say that really smart students can skip the lecture and then catch up in a short amount of time at the end. Well, if they can do that, they don't need the lectures on video either. Students who would actually view the lectures on video might as well come to class.
Let me ask the reverse question: why would you not come to lectures at the scheduled times? You're in school, you're paying good money for it, the curriculum is designed to enable you to take the courses without conflicts, and the courses are designed for steady, regular attendence. What earthly reason would there be to skip classes except in cases of dire emergency?
First, a sample of two is not enough to determine this. Second, "random" is not the same as "equiprobable". Third, people are bad judges of what is random and what is not; it's hard even with statistical tests. Fourth, searches are explicitly not equiprobable: there are behaviors and backgrounds that greatly increase your probability of getting searched.
He violated the rules of a game. If the game is part of legal gambling, then that may be a crime. But this is presumably not a gambling operation. So, if it's not a gambling operation, then violating the rules is roughly like cheating at Scrabble or Monopoly.
In any case, the appropriate punishment for virtual fraud is to demand virtual restitution from the virtual character and put the virtual character into virtual prison. That is, unless the virtual world is supposed to be lawless or anarchic, in which case he did exactly what he was supposed to.
A "freak accident" is if you get killed by a sting ray in your bath tub. When you go diving with sting rays, it's more like a calculated risk that didn't work out.
The right to refuse the exchange of goods is as fundamental as the right to exchange goods freely. If someone can't refuse the exchange, then it's not a free market anymore.
You're confusing a free market with anarchy. In fact, there are plenty of regulations on who you do business with, in the US and elsewhere; free market economies couldn't function otherwise.
If someone discriminates against your height, your weight, your skin colour, your eyes, your gender, your language, or your opinion, then choose to do business with someone else.
Well, maybe you naively wish things to be that way, but our economy wouldn't have worked as well as it did if that were actually the law. In real life, if you're discriminated against based on some of those characteristics, you can obtain both relief and damages through the courts.
From what? The over-70 folks are still legally competent until declared otherwise by a court of law.
and last time I checked a free market economy allowed a company to decide with whom they'd like to do business
You are very much mistaken. Not only is discrimination based on age specifically illegal in many countries (including the US), who can do business with whom is indeed subject to many legal regulations. A free market economy is not the same as anarchy.
People just can't pull stuff out their ass and if asked how they know just say: I don't but it was probably so
No, what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what Jobs saw: the Mac was released several years after Apple had hired several Xerox employees and after Xerox had published a lot of their ideas. Attempting to portray it as if all that mattered was what Jobs saw is itself dishonest, both on your and Horn's part.
Xerox was a far bigger and way more powerful company back then. And they got the payment they asked for.
Of course, they fulfilled their legal obligations; that's not the point. The point is that Apple has consistently ripped off the industry and academia for ideas and then had the brazenness to present it as their innovation. Cocoa, Quartz, Dashboard, Spotlight, Darwin, Objective-C, WYSIWYG, windows, Quicktime, whatever, none of the underlying technologies were invented at Apple, Apple just tweaked them and marketed them.
Furthermore, Apple simply does not invest significantly in research, and when they invent something, they don't share it. So, not only is Apple the biggest user of other people's inventions, they contribute almost nothing themselves.
That's why Apple is doing so well financially, while the companies that actually invented most of the technologies--SRI, Bell Labs, Xerox, etc.--are in deep trouble. What point is there in investing in new research if companies like Apple are just going to rip you off before you can make it to market?
Apple's wealth has been built on intellectual theft from day one--maybe not in the legal sense, but certainly in the ethical sense.
Says who? Have you been there? Even Adele Goldberg talks of "a demo of the Smalltalk System".
Jobs probably saw a lot more, but, in any case, what he saw is simply is not relevant to the question of what Apple invented themselves for the Mac.
The Lisa was released in 1983 and the Mac in 1984; Apple had access to pretty much all of Xerox's ideas for their development: not only was much of it published and commercially released by Xerox by then, Apple hired Bruce Horn away from Xerox in 1981 to work on Macintosh (and probably other people, too), and those people took all their experience, knowledge, and the ideas that had been kicking around Xerox with them. The notion that any aspect of Apple's work was independent of Xerox is a complete fairy-tale.
But Xerox got paid in stock options. Apple didn't go public then and Xerox surely gained from those.
We're not talking about legal responsibilities here, we are talking about taking credit and responsibilities to the industry and community as a whole. And Apple's behavior is consistent: they keep ripping off people to this very day and they keep not living up to their responsibility of contributing to the body of knowledge of computer science. Even when Apple employees have an original idea (it happens), they just don't write it up and publish it.
Yeah, the aliens of the Aliens movies are kind of neat, but they seem to defy conservation of mass: they sometimes grow enormously quickly without obvious food sources. Also, for a parasite that wants to use a human host to spawn, they are killing their hosts too quickly.
The Aliens movie also have serious problems with space travel: the colony is apparently 2 lightweeks from Earth, but it is far too warm and too light for that.
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How much testing have you done with Sun's Linux Java version? Hmmm? Don't make up crap to try to make a point. Sun's Java runs great on Linux and many of the server apps we run have better overall performance on a Linux box vs an MS windows box,
.Net is not an ECMA spec, so IronPython, which is sponsored by Microsoft, is not cross-platform just because it currently runs in mono.
.NET actually has an official standard and there are two open source implementation of it. The Java specifications, in contrast, are completely proprietary.
Server apps run fine pretty much everywhere. Making server apps cross-platform isn't hard.
The trouble areas with Java on Linux are in areas such as graphics, desktop support, user interfaces, and device access. I have done plenty of testing there, and you can believe me: Java doesn't even come close to fulfilling its cross-platform promise.
Huh? So you have talked to "most" developers to see what they care about? I somehow doubt that. I see Open Source growing very well on Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X. I bet a goal of many of those projects are to be cross-platform.
Look at the statistics on Sourceforge or Freshmeat: the vast majority of open source projects and LOCs are not cross platform.
Yes, it currently runs on Mono until the next IronPython change, Mono get tweaked, IronPython change, lather-rinse-repeat.
Yeah, just like Jython currently runs on Sun Java, Sun Java gets changed, Jython has to follow suit, etc. Oh, actually there is a difference: we can tweak Mono, we can't tweak Sun Java because it's proprietary.
Also, since IronPython is open source, if Microsoft doesn't pay enough attention to Mono compatibility, IronPython would simply get forked. Even if it needed to be forked, it would still represent a contribution of many man-years of useful development effort to the open source community.
Most of Microsoft's
At least a big part of
Write an IronPython GUI app with Microsoft's non-ECMA Winforms and see how well it does on non-MS platforms.
About as far as I get running Jython Swing apps on non-Sun implementations of Java--they sort of work, but not always. Both Winforms and Swing are proprietary APIs, and in both cases, open source implementations have to go through a lot of trouble to try to keep up with the proprietary vendors.
Sorry but I am not a Sun fanboy.
Yes, you are. You're also either deliberately spreading FUD, or simply very misinformed. And it's insulting that you imply that Jim Hugunin, the guy who has given so much to the open source community, including Jython, and who runs the IronPython project at Microsoft, supports some nefarious Microsoft purpose with this work.
IronPython is what it is: an open source implementation of the Python language for the CLR, and it's enormously useful at that. How it will evolve in the long term, who will maintain the Mono version, etc., remains to be seen, but that doesn't change how useful it is.
Firefox is a big, old, hairy C++ program, and for a big, old, hairy C++ program, that's not so bad.
While Firefox is important right now, the open source community really needs to start working on a successor in parallel. And, no, that doesn't mean another big, hairy C++ program.
Are they really violations?
They are violations of privacy. They may not yet be a violation of privacy laws, but hopefully we can change that.
Why don't companies care about privacy? Because there's not enough money to be made from securing sensitive customer information, says Jeff Rothfeder
Well, duh. Does he have any other brilliant insights? Like that there's not enough money to be made from decent working conditions, proper financial disclosures, or from protecting the environment?
That's why we have laws and penalties. What we need is stiffer penalties for privacy violations by companies. And, unlike child pornographers and murderers, who tend to be insensitive to the potential penalties, companies really do respond to penalties that hurt the bottom line.
I actually find the multi-language of of the CLR to be a negative.
That's not unique to the CLR runtime: the Java runtime and the C runtime both support multi-language programming, and it's widely used. In particular, every platform needs at least one decent dynamic language in addition to a static language, and Python one of the better choices.
When Sun did Java, they put the effort in to make the most important part, the framework, cross-platform. I wish MS did the same.
Please stop this Sun fanboy-ism. Sun has gone out of their way to make life miserable for open source platforms, and Sun's Java implementations for Linux are stil much worse than their implementations for Windows. I think that barely counts as cross-platform, not that most developers even give a damn about cross-platform.
Why would someone want to kill Python by making it MS-Only?
Even if IronPython were MS-only, how would that "kill" the language? Did the creation of a Microsoft C compiler "kill" C?
But you're wrong on your facts anyway: IronPython is not Microsoft-only, it runs on Mono and that is the intent of the developers.
The big trouble with focusing on eye candy is that GNOME has still got so much to do in terms of usability. [...] Personally I use GNOME because I use Ubuntu but I find it so bloody hard to do anything productive due to it missing so many simple, easy to implement, features that it usually send me swearing back to Windows to get things done. I'm so fed up with Nautilus that I now share my home folder on the network and do all my file management from Windows Explorer.
Well, all you have given us is a rant and pointed out some potential areas for improvement (some of which I don't even agree with). Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Gnome has more usability problems than Windows? Do you have any evidence that to support your assertion that Gnome is less consistent than Windows? Note that examples don't count as evidence for your assertions since there are plenty examples of badly designed Windows features as well. Evidence would be actual user testing or some other unbiased evaluation.
In any case, if there are specific features that you think are missing, then submit bug reports. The Gnome developers will evaluate your bug reports and prioritize them. However, if you're just going to submit a rant like the one you posted here, I can guarantee you that they won't do anything, because basically all you have said is "it doesn't work the way I am used to, so go change it". That's not an argument for getting a feature adopted.
So enough with the eye candy already. Get the cake properly baked before you start adding fancy icing.
That's a strategy that nobody in industry is following. Products must look good even if they aren't perfect in other ways. In fact, products must look especially good if they are less than perfect in other ways.
That only goes to show that the term "nanotechnology" is greatly misapplied today. Originally, it was referring to the use of nanomachines: little, active, mechanical devices. It would have been meaningless ot define the term as referring to the use of any nanoscale structures because many nanoscale structures have indeed been used for thousands of years and they didn't need a new term.
As for "being safe", the Romans probably lived to the ripe old age of 35 on average. They used lead compounds to sweeten their wine. I don't think that "the Romans used it, too, so it's safe" is a very persuasive argument.
In my line of work, I have scheduling conflicts all the time for meetings or training sessions while trying to continue to actually produce a product/service.
What gets you fired is choosing not to attend meetings because you don't like the instructor or having a second job interfere with your duties on the first. You don't have that freedom in the real world, and there is no reason you should have that freedom at university.
I'm arguing that if a university decides to record and disperse a lecture, they should do so freely. My second argument is that universities should seriously consider doing this for all lectures (or for lectures in high demand) because it's a very good idea.
Neither of those are arguments.
In any case, I'm sorry that apparently your educational experience was limited to lectures that could be recorded. All lectures I attended after freshman year were in classes with fewer than 20 students with plenty of interactivity, both during and after class, and it wouldn't have made much sense to record them.
The market may dictate that things go as you described UNTIL enough folks band together to enact a change.
The market doesn't "dictate", the market reflects demand. Demand exists apparently for both kinds of universities, those that record, and those that value presence. Given that both kinds of universities exist, what are you complaining about?
Like I said, we'll have to disagree.
But it's not a matter of opinion; it's a simple fact that many lectures aren't recorded and that you (obviously) have not been able to do anything about it.
Isn't that the whole debate that's going on here? We're talking about students having the right to choose whether or not to attend classes or get the lecture in some other format.
Saying "I have a right to" isn't persuading.
I'm also suggesting that students, i.e., the market, should persuade the administration(s) that it would be benefitial to relax the "you must attend the class" requirements because it's rather oxymoronic to call it higher education when you treat the students like they're in elementary school.
That's not much of an argument.
First of all, many students obviously choose colleges where attendance is mandatory or where lectures aren't recorded (you apparently did yourself), so the market seems to have decided.
Second, attendance is mandatory not just in elementary school, but for many meetings, educational and otherwise, in adult life. I mean, what do you think would happen in the real world if you worked at Circuit City and told your manager that you wouldn't be attending their training sessions because you don't like the instructor or because you had another training session at Radio Shack at the same time? Get real.
I guess the point I'm trying to make (not the issue of whether or not I had a hard life) is that the college should offer students, i.e., the market, what the students are demanding -- especially considering that we're footing the bill. After all, we're the ones footing the bill, so we should have some say as to how we choose to receive our material.
You have complete say about how you receive the material: there are hundreds of colleges offering material in a form completely suitable for people in the workforce. But you do not have a right to force changes in the program you are in; all you can do is to try and persuade them.
It's their right to not offer the product, and it's my right to reject their services.
Yes, but that's not what you did: you accepted a service, but you're retroactively complaining that the service you yourself selected didn't work differently.
It should be my right to decide if I'm going to waste my time and skip, or to attend class, or to work and view the lecture at a later time. I paid for that "spot" in the lecture, so it's up to me whether or not I choose to utilize it.
Nobody can force you to go, but the college is free not to give you a degree or kick you out if you don't.
It's their right to not offer the product, and it's my right to reject their services.
Indeed: you could have transferred out of that college any time you chose.
But at the same time, if the market decided to vote against that limited product set, where would the college be?
Well, evidently, the market hasn't decided to vote against their product, because otherwise they wouldn't still be around.
Computer software or hardware that is not compatible with common forensic tools will automatically be deemed to be evidence of child pornography or terrorist activity.
I'm sorry that you have had a tough life, but what does that have to do with what we're talking about?
The college you attended offered you a product: a course of study designed for 12 credit hours and designed for students able to spend full time on it. You knew that ahead of time and still chose that product. You just decided to use it differently from the way it was designed. It's good for you that you made it work for you, but the fact that it was probably tough isn't the college's responsibility, it's yours. And you actually had alternatives: there are plenty of good degree programs designed for people who work. My mother got her degree that way.
And, no, my parents didn't save for college either, and I received some financial aid and worked part time. But I never skipped lectures because of work. My college also had firm rules about conflicting classes (not permitted), and extra credit hours (take them if you like, but you won't graduate any earlier), excellent rules in my opinion.
Personally, I skipped the classes I wasn't getting anything out of.
So have I (they were mostly the ones that were supposedly "well taught" and were moving so slowly that they were boring me to tears). But in that case, having video tapes or podcasts won't help you either.
I really wish we could figure out a better way to hire college professors.
Some colleges focus on excellence in teaching, others focus on research and let the chips fall where they may when it comes to undergraduate education. There are plenty of publications telling you which is which.
In grad school I needed tenured professors that knew the industry. Sophomore year I needed a good teacher who knew a little about circuits. Why is there no seperation?
Sounds to me like you wanted the reputation of a good research university on your resume, but didn't like what that meant for undergraduate teaching. I think it's quite likely that what you call "bad teaching" is part of what makes a good research university good in the first place.
even if they can't speak or write english, and have obvsiouly zero interest in teaching.
Funny, those were always the professors I enjoyed most in college: they knew their stuff inside out, they loved the subject, and "didn't like teaching" really meant that they hated having to spoon-feed and sugar-coat the subject for students who would otherwise complain about "bad teaching". Some of them had thick Chinese or Russian accents and were tough to understand, but who cares if the subject matter is great, they present it in a logical order, and relate insights into the subject that only come from years of experience?
There are programs for people like you: part-time programs, degree programs for working professionals, and long distance degree programs. If you're in a full-time program, however, the program is designed for people who have the time to attend every lecture, participate in every group, and do all the homework. If you can't make it to lectures because of conflicts or work, then chances are you are missing out on other parts of the program as well that can't be video taped.
So, it sounds like you're simply in the wrong program. The solution is for you to switch to a different program, not for the university to change their full-time program into a program for part-time students like you.
Also, IANAS (I am not a statistician) but I can say that a high percentage of the professors I've had, and the professors my friends have had, don't ask questions, or encourage any interaction from the audience at all. In fact, many I have frown upon it.
Whether people interact in lecture is not the main point (although there is still plenty of interactivity even if you just sit there and look bored). You presumably interact in the smaller groups that accompany most lectures, and in order to contribute to those, you need to be prepared.
More importantly, courses are paced so that an average student can keep up with the workload if he participates steadily; if students start skipping classes with the intent of catching up later on video, they won't be prepared for the groups, and they won't have enough time towads the end of the semester to do the reading and homework anymore before the exam.
Now, you may say that really smart students can skip the lecture and then catch up in a short amount of time at the end. Well, if they can do that, they don't need the lectures on video either. Students who would actually view the lectures on video might as well come to class.
Let me ask the reverse question: why would you not come to lectures at the scheduled times? You're in school, you're paying good money for it, the curriculum is designed to enable you to take the courses without conflicts, and the courses are designed for steady, regular attendence. What earthly reason would there be to skip classes except in cases of dire emergency?
Trouble is: by the time they have figured out that they ought to have come to lecture, it's too late.
And it's not just about physical presence in the lecture hall, it's also about the pacing.
First, a sample of two is not enough to determine this. Second, "random" is not the same as "equiprobable". Third, people are bad judges of what is random and what is not; it's hard even with statistical tests. Fourth, searches are explicitly not equiprobable: there are behaviors and backgrounds that greatly increase your probability of getting searched.
He violated the rules of a game. If the game is part of legal gambling, then that may be a crime. But this is presumably not a gambling operation. So, if it's not a gambling operation, then violating the rules is roughly like cheating at Scrabble or Monopoly.
In any case, the appropriate punishment for virtual fraud is to demand virtual restitution from the virtual character and put the virtual character into virtual prison. That is, unless the virtual world is supposed to be lawless or anarchic, in which case he did exactly what he was supposed to.
A "freak accident" is if you get killed by a sting ray in your bath tub. When you go diving with sting rays, it's more like a calculated risk that didn't work out.
The right to refuse the exchange of goods is as fundamental as the right to exchange goods freely. If someone can't refuse the exchange, then it's not a free market anymore.
You're confusing a free market with anarchy. In fact, there are plenty of regulations on who you do business with, in the US and elsewhere; free market economies couldn't function otherwise.
If someone discriminates against your height, your weight, your skin colour, your eyes, your gender, your language, or your opinion, then choose to do business with someone else.
Well, maybe you naively wish things to be that way, but our economy wouldn't have worked as well as it did if that were actually the law. In real life, if you're discriminated against based on some of those characteristics, you can obtain both relief and damages through the courts.
The ISP was legally covering their asses,
From what? The over-70 folks are still legally competent until declared otherwise by a court of law.
and last time I checked a free market economy allowed a company to decide with whom they'd like to do business
You are very much mistaken. Not only is discrimination based on age specifically illegal in many countries (including the US), who can do business with whom is indeed subject to many legal regulations. A free market economy is not the same as anarchy.
Well, I wanna gold plated toilet, but that's just not in the cards, is it?
People just can't pull stuff out their ass and if asked how they know just say: I don't but it was probably so
No, what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what Jobs saw: the Mac was released several years after Apple had hired several Xerox employees and after Xerox had published a lot of their ideas. Attempting to portray it as if all that mattered was what Jobs saw is itself dishonest, both on your and Horn's part.
Xerox was a far bigger and way more powerful company back then. And they got the payment they asked for.
Of course, they fulfilled their legal obligations; that's not the point. The point is that Apple has consistently ripped off the industry and academia for ideas and then had the brazenness to present it as their innovation. Cocoa, Quartz, Dashboard, Spotlight, Darwin, Objective-C, WYSIWYG, windows, Quicktime, whatever, none of the underlying technologies were invented at Apple, Apple just tweaked them and marketed them.
Furthermore, Apple simply does not invest significantly in research, and when they invent something, they don't share it. So, not only is Apple the biggest user of other people's inventions, they contribute almost nothing themselves.
That's why Apple is doing so well financially, while the companies that actually invented most of the technologies--SRI, Bell Labs, Xerox, etc.--are in deep trouble. What point is there in investing in new research if companies like Apple are just going to rip you off before you can make it to market?
Apple's wealth has been built on intellectual theft from day one--maybe not in the legal sense, but certainly in the ethical sense.
Says who? Have you been there? Even Adele Goldberg talks of "a demo of the Smalltalk System".
Jobs probably saw a lot more, but, in any case, what he saw is simply is not relevant to the question of what Apple invented themselves for the Mac.
The Lisa was released in 1983 and the Mac in 1984; Apple had access to pretty much all of Xerox's ideas for their development: not only was much of it published and commercially released by Xerox by then, Apple hired Bruce Horn away from Xerox in 1981 to work on Macintosh (and probably other people, too), and those people took all their experience, knowledge, and the ideas that had been kicking around Xerox with them. The notion that any aspect of Apple's work was independent of Xerox is a complete fairy-tale.
But Xerox got paid in stock options. Apple didn't go public then and Xerox surely gained from those.
We're not talking about legal responsibilities here, we are talking about taking credit and responsibilities to the industry and community as a whole. And Apple's behavior is consistent: they keep ripping off people to this very day and they keep not living up to their responsibility of contributing to the body of knowledge of computer science. Even when Apple employees have an original idea (it happens), they just don't write it up and publish it.
Yeah, the aliens of the Aliens movies are kind of neat, but they seem to defy conservation of mass: they sometimes grow enormously quickly without obvious food sources. Also, for a parasite that wants to use a human host to spawn, they are killing their hosts too quickly.
The Aliens movie also have serious problems with space travel: the colony is apparently 2 lightweeks from Earth, but it is far too warm and too light for that.