The situation here isn't a pay-as-you-go situation is a pay-for-access situation. I don't pay each time I need police service, I pay a flat fee (i.e. taxes) for access to as much police service as I need. Same goes for all the other stuff. I've never called 911, but I still happily pay for the service to exist.

To be honest, if you expect your house to catch fire more than once every 1000 years, then the $75/year fee is a win for you if your house is worth at least $75,000. The long and short of it is that the homeowner in this situation is a COMPLETE MORON with no sense of where the services that make up society come from and the fact that these services must be paid for.

In a country where drug lords rule, you want to spend how much money on this technology? How about using that cash to support basic infrastructure like roads and potable water?

It's not that someone could google to get the answer, it's that they could communicate with another thinking being that is willing and able to do the problem for them. The professor doesn't have a problem with a beefy calculator that can store an arbitrarily large amount of static information, he just wants to make certain that the student is the one to retrieve and process that information.

I'm a past math teacher, and the real cruelty is a student that gets a D in Algebra. They pass, so they can't take it again, but they don't know enough to pass any other math classes.

I did a lot of mastery-based stuff, so if a student couldn't show mastery of a particular subtopic, they would get a 0 on the quiz for it. If they could show mastery, they got a 9 or 10 (out of 10). An 8 meant they could try again with a different version of the quiz.

So a student that gets a D in my class has actually mastered a solid 60%-70% of the material, and they're not auto-screwed for later classes because they can pick up a couple of missed topics later.

There were other things that bifurcated the students into sub-D or C-or-better. I could do this mostly undetected because I'm very good with the numbers. TFA's school is just not hiding it.

I gave out a lot of F's. Those students get to try the whole thing over, and perhaps learn enough the second time around.

I'm still a fan of the "a D means you can't count it as a prerequisite, but you get credit for it."

A senior who gets a D in biology isn't going to be doing anything with it anyway, and preventing him from graduating isn't doing anybody any favors.

On the SAT, the range of scores is from 200 to 800, so 500 is 50%, not 62.5%

"Although it was a project that would take a complete amateur no more than 5 minutes to perfect in MS Word..."

If that was the case, don't you think the woman with the lost cat would have done this?

Microsoft was walking across the street in a hurry and accidentally dropped $200,000,000.00 on the ground.

It didn't notice.

I haven't done any statistical research into this. It's just my personal observation based on anecdotal evidence.

I have a couple of friends (without degrees) who've had successful careers, but haven't seen projects through to conclusion. When the going gets rough, they jump ship at the company where they're working, and move on. It limits their success, but since they're still doing well, why change?

I have other friends with degrees who've stayed with companies that were floundering when maybe they should've moved on to find something better. I also have friends with degrees who stuck with companies that were going through a rough patch, and when they came out the other side, they were much better off for it.

I know a lot of people who consider themselves smart, but never finished college. It still bothers them, and it limits what kind of success they can enjoy.

Not having a 4-year degree doesn't say anything at all about your intelligence.

It does, however, often say a great deal about your ability to see a long-term project through to completion.

A great deal of getting a 4-year degree is simply managing time effectively, especially when there are so many distractions that are far more interesting.

If you look at popular magazine articles about global warming, they're 50-50 for supporting it or dissenting from it.

If you look at peer reviewed scientific articles, it's a slightly different balance. There's almost one article saying that global warming isn't happening. We'll call it zero. There are hundreds supporting global warming, with the major differences being in cause and extent and severity of future trends.

But most people don't read the peer reviewed articles. They read Time and Cosmopolitan and watch Fox News [sic]. Most people aren't qualified to have an educated opinion about global warming, because they aren't reading research, they're reading the words of people that don't know anything. I don't care how many times you tell me that, in your opinion, d(x^2)/dx = 3x. You're still wrong. I don't care how many people agree with you either. You're all wrong.

Climate Science isn't a popularity contest. It's science.

I get consistently better reception (full 1080p) on most major channels with an antenna on my roof than friends get with cable. I'm watching a football game or something at home, leave to go to their house, and the picture is worse for what they're paying for. Seems silly to me.

I happily pay for Netflix because their customer service is awesome. The couple of times I've had problems with a DVD, it's been fixed instantly (or close enough as is reasonable) with no questions asked. I pay for a 7Mb internet connection, and complain when it's not performing. I'd pay for faster if I thought it'd be more reliable and truly faster.

I took a CS course some time ago in C. The instructor told us that it was perfectly okay to get help from another student on the assignment, because of how he constructed the exams: He would give you one additional feature to add to the program in class, and you had until the end of class to complete it. That way he would know if you really knew what you were doing, or whether you really copied someone else's work.

I helped another student with some of the assignments, including the last one. I knew what I was doing, they didn't. I went to check my grades a couple of weeks after the end of the semester, and there was a notification to come into the departmental office. It seems that the final assignment I turned in was very similar to another student's. My implementation of the final project was clean and quick, and adding the final feature took all of about 5 minutes. I said that the other student had cheated off of me, and I knew what I was doing: they didn't. Unfortunately, the other student had left town, already having a BS from another university (not in CS). This was a community college. The teacher himself never confronted me or made any comments that what was going on wasn't okay. In fact, he had specifically stated in class that it was okay, but the department chair said that he was 'on vacation, so unavailable'. I was furious, and fought it, but lost. I got an F on the final project, and my grade in the class was lowered an additional letter. It's been more than 10 years, and it still makes my blood boil.

I was talking to a friend who still lives in the same town recently and he told me that he has now heard this story 7 times from 7 different people who all had the same thing happen: no comments were made during the semester, and so while the teacher was on summer break, they had cheating charges leveled against them. It was the same teacher. His name is Scott Badman. He taught at Parkland Community College in Champaign, IL, and I think he's now finally retired.

So, did I cheat?

This wasn't a meteor. It must have been a satellite. Meteors/meteorites move VERY fast and explode quickly. There are no extra-terrestrial objects that would match the velocity of the earth to within a few hundred mph (and not get accelerated to beyond that by gravity). That thing had to have been man-made.

Why is this news? Microsoft doesn't follow any standards, and never has. It's part of their strategy. Since they're bigger than everyone else, everyone has to adhere to their (non) standards, which means everyone else is always playing catchup, and can never get ahead. This way implementation is never judged on speed or size, but instead judged on "how Microsoft-like" it is. Microsoft always wins that comparison.