It's a fair point - I'm in law school, so I'm paying good (borrowed) money to become an asshole. I wrote the response to point out that your over-education didn't save you from using the expression "very not alone." Obviously, this is slashdot so we don't expect the Queen's English.

I think most people can agree that some, if not most, of the crap they learned in college has no direct applicability to their job. I think that the real problem is that most jobs are designed to be filled a by a class of people - think "Ruby Programmers" over "A Ruby Programmer Who Writes Code Just Like You Do." When your average PHB looks looks at the stack of resumes on his desk he has to differentiate them by some objective standard - a degree in anything is one of the ways that they do it. Is it the right thing to do? Probably not, but it does show that you can get through a varied amount of material, including stuff that you find boring. Perhaps he is going to take you off an (interesting) accounting project and move you to project that involves making easy-to-use software for sociologists (boring). One way to make sure you that you are going to stick around for both the interesting and boring projects is to see that you were able to survive [insert stupid course topic here]. Your general premise, that much of the stuff you learn in college has no practical value, is spot on though.

Did you say that you tested out of the required English classes?

"Honed" might be an exageration.

Anonymous.... OR INVISIBLE??!?!?

I guess it would be worse if your name was James Brown...

Well said. One issue that everyone seems to be missing here is that the lawyer was paid from a settlement. So before we start throwing out angry calls to reform the legal system and even a few tortured comparisons to universal healthcare, let's remember that the school district's lawyers agreed to that amount. The money wasn't mandated by a back-room middle-of-the-night-passsed-by-Congress law. It was agreed to by the losing party (the school), probably because they thought that they would lose even more money if a jury had to come up with a number.

Most slashdotters agree that this was the verdict was correct and if we had been collectively sitting on the jury we would probably award a big number to punish the elected officials who approved this program. The school board has the headache of finding money to pay off their mistake. In the next school board election, you can rest assured that anyone who runs against an incumbent is going to use this settlement to beat their opponent over the head.

It learned to spell from Slashdot's editors!

Actually, that is the way it has been since nearly the beginning. Or at least 1824.

Here in America, the term "government experiments" has a totally different meaning. Now, if you excuse me, I have to adjust my tinfoil chin strap.

Puff, puff, give!

Ha ha ha - you're other comment is correct. It is important to keep an eye out for spin when you hear the term "patent troll."

While all patent trolls may be non-practicing entities (NPEs), not all NPEs are patent trolls. Individual inventors, the kind that don't have the spare four or five billion dollars necessary to build a processor lab, are NPEs and often unfairly get labelled trolls. Also, don't forget universities and government laboratories. Under the parent's definition of troll, anyone who invents something but doesn't follow through with marketing a product must necessarily be a troll. The intellectual property world is more complicated than that. Real trolls can be NPEs or companies trying to squeeze their competitors - in fact, the latter is much more common than the former.

Even if the patent is not included in the standard, the standard might still infringe upon it. I think the scenario you are thinking of is similar to what happened with Rambus a few years ago - they massaged the standard to cover patents that they owned and then sued after it was adopted. A more realistic scenario is that my tiny telecommunications company owns a patent on compressing audio that gets included in a larger standard. The company may not have any representatives involved in the standard - in fact, they might not even know that there is an infringing proposal.

I think the latter scenario is a lot more common and of course, the standards organization is still (rightfully) on the hook for liability.

You make a good point, but I would argue that we need to drop scripted applications wholesale. I realize that I am probably in the minority, but I see scripted apps as an analog to the advent of Visual BASIC. (Yes, I'm old.) Prior to the VB days, you had to know something about programming to spit out an application. VB helped a lot of people write a lot of applications, but it lowered the bar for what we consider an "application" or even a "programmer." A scripted app is great for something quick and dirty, but when it comes down making something you want to sell or rely upon, scripted apps are limited not by the host operating system, but by the most limited operating system which your player supports.

Before Apple sunk their teeth into flash, a lot of the posters here also bashed it. It is ironic that as soon as an 800 lb gorilla attacks it, taco and dawson rush to defend it as a superior alternative. Does everyone remember what a pain in the ass it was to get flash support on linux systems? Now that it is available, it is just another user-approved attack vector. H.264 is not perfect, or "free" at all but every criticism Jobs has made of flash is spot on: flawed security, resource pig AND THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR for cross platform development. For God's sake, can we please just flash die for a more modern alternative?

Right. Except for the virtualization part.

"+4 Informative"? Really? What the Hell is wrong with you people?

"+4 Funny", sure.
"+4 Deadpan", ok, I'd go with it.
"+4 Is-This-Guy-My-Brother-In-Law?", absolutely.

It isn't informative guys. Look for the joke.