12345? That's the stupidest zip code I've ever heard in my life. That's the kind of code an idiot would have on their luggage.

"Is the movie 2012 a documentary ?"

Yeah, its a depiction of what happens when Palin/Beck win the upcoming election.

HEY! Cover your mouth when you cough!

Bad comparison. De-pussification is not the same as butchering.

That's OK, you should see how the Japanese butcher our words.

"Slashdot also reported study on mislabeling in 2008"

If by "reported" you actually mean "linked to an article in the NY Times which reported on".

"Let's see how far this lawsuit gets before the Supreme Court plays its wildcard in the Bilski case, which we have been discussing for a while now"

Um, if they make it all the way to the Supreme Court, then doesn't that, by definition, mean that they've made it pretty far? I mean, in legal matters, the SC is pretty much almost as far as one can possibly make it.

"Most IT work is like a janitor (Sysadmin) or a construction worker (programmer)."

You forgot Digital Buttwiper.

Tuition has outpaced inflation in publicly funded institutions because of shrinking state appropriations. Its pretty simple really. Somebody has to pay for education. If its not going to be the state, then tuition has to rise.

Can universities cut costs? Is there some degree of waste on some campuses? Absolutely, but you can only squeeze so much blood from a stone.

The reason why state funded schools are relatively cheap and private schools are relatively expensive is because of the difference in government funding, not because of some sort of wasteful spending, marketing, or evil scheming. Its because education is hard to do, and expensive to do right, and nobody wants to pay for it.

Incidentally, nobody really is bitching about private schools raising tuition.

Oh yeah, that's definitely the explanation. Tuition is high because the president of the college sits around in his office all day and lights his cuban cigars with rolls of hundred dollar bills, while wearing a tophat and monocle and scheming how to bilk the hapless freshman.

It couldn't possibly be that the cost of maintaining a university as a dedicated place of learning is just naturally expensive, what with the hundreds of content experts they employ and the hundreds of buildings they maintain. And it definitely is not linked in any way to publicly funded institutions having their appropriations from the state yanked back to pre-1993 levels.

Exactly. Schools don't sell content. They sell perspective on content. Almost any knowledge taught at any university is more or less publicly available if you know where and how to look. The questions are a.) which knowledge do you study, b.) what do you do with that knowledge, how do you separate the important bits out, and c.) how do we (everybody who you tell that you have a degree in X) know that what you learned is correct?

I think that this model can work for some people who naturally do better in self study, but I think the market for those people is much smaller than everybody realizes. Places like straighterline may succeed in their niche, but this is not ever going to replace the traditional university.

For the assessment piece alone, people who self study have a special problem that is much less prevalent in traditional institutions: People who don't have experience in a topic tend not to know if what they are doing to study it is correct, and that the learning outcome is correct. The learning outcome can be clouded by everything from lack of experience to misunderstanding a key concept to letting your beliefs about intelligent design and or the flying spaghetti monster get in the way. To work around this, assessment is key, and assessment across institutions is not easy, which is why it doesn't surprise me that your options to transfer credits from straighterline are somewhat limited.

Its also worth noting that MIT has had alot of its course materials online for years, completely for free. The only real difference is that you don't get credit for using MIT's stuff, but the same principles apply: you can use their stuff to do the grunt work cheaply and then maximize your time on the

"There's little doubt that Dre should be held accountable for this. "

WHOA WHOA WHOA! Leave Dr. Dre out of this!

"Wow, I totally disagree. First of all, they may not understand that "Hotmale.com" isn't the same as "Hotmail.com""

Holy shit. This explains alot!

Right on. In Philadelphia its around 50% white to like 45% black. In y town 3 hours outside Phila. by car, its 99% white. Why would people give a damn about the distribution over the entire country? You might as well be asking what the distribution is over the northern hemisphere, or the entire world. Basically useless trivia.