Emphasis mine. You've conveniently split your peers up into 3 categories - two 'bad' categories, complete with cutting descriptions, and a third that you happen to belong to. It's human nature to value your own worldview above other peoples, but I think it's worth pointing out what we're all reading here.
True. I appreciate your cynicism. It's a strange form of enlightenment to apply cynicism to yourself.
You go on to say that those other people are binging you down and making education worse for you. But I say those other points of view are quite valid, and the world doesn't revolve around your needs and desires.
I never said it does. I said that these groups of people need different things and need different experiences and I never really said that they were good or bad, although I could easily see you my terminology could cause you to believe that. Further, I do not claim (although did not explicitly state) to be part of the intellectual group, although I strive to be a part of it. I do however believe that the goal of promoters of general education wish to transform the "robots" into intellectuals and I believe that their approaches are not working well. The other groups do not bring quality down, the failure to tailor education has brought down quality.
We need to come to terms as a society that formal education is just for getting letters in front of your name, and to stop expecting so much from it.
I agree that formal education has become that, but as a student, I am trying to get the most out of my education. I figure, if I'm paying so much for it, I ought to milk it for all that its worth - connections, ideas, experiences, everything. So it's not a matter of expectations but a matter of personal ROI optimization that you're seeing here.
Here is my personal philosophy: the best we can hope for is to introduce someone to a topic that sparks their interest. The best work will come from personal study, no professors or classmates required. And if someone wants to have a beer and watch football instead, there is nothing wrong with that either.
Agreed. I wish we as a society could reach an agreement on these issues, but we will not. The reason is that fundamentally your statement is a statement that it is ok to "slack" in life - it's fundamentally a statement about the purpose of life. That's a question that philosophers have argued over for basically all of history.
Energy isn't getting any cheaper.
Stop. Fact ignored. Solar energy prices fall 9% per year continuously. The amount of energy available from the sun is extreme, you can power the consumption of a US suburban family's life off of the energy hitting their roof with 20% efficient (typical) solar. The issue is mainly a manufacturing/cost reduction issue.
There is nothing else. Fossil fuels were a one time windfall for humanity. We squandered it and there's nothing we can do about it.
Using gasification and synthesis technology, we can foresee many potential solutions, including the diverse schemes that have been proposed and demonstrated for the conversion of CO2 and H2O in to oil using solar energy.
But the OSS community went and said Ohh look their Bad lets make GPL3 that stops these evil money making people from using OSS in that way.
Because we don't care about market share. We don't give a damn about companies using our software. We care about freedom, of us and our users. Suppose you fought for freedom and democracy, and as an ancillary effect, painted stuff blue. Then a world dictator offered to paint the whole world blue. Would you want that? No, because you really don't care about painting stuff blue (having people use Linux). What you really care freedom and democracy (freedom to modify software), which is incompatible with the existence of the dictator. What good is having a free and open system if you can't make use of your freedoms?
At work I had to be sure I never imported a GPL Library, because the rules would conflict with the companies business model.
Yes, it's a shame you can't take software without paying for it. However, IANAL, but for the most part this is ok with LGPL'd code. It really depends on the details, but LGPL'd libraries, (most useful libs are LGPL) are not GPL'd. You also can call out to a GPL'd program within proprietary code, AFAIK. For example, you could run a GPL'd "ls" shell command and read back the results and that would be ok.
Elliptic paraboloids for sale.