>>The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them. There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools, and quite literally - we have most massacres occurring at schools. It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.

Bullshit

As a university professor who graduated from the UW - Madison I watched in horror as the events in WI unfolded. I would like to note, however, that declining state support for public institutions is not new.

My father-in-law, who also graduated from the UW, worked his way through college in the 50s and 60s on a 10 hour per week work study job. On the other hand I worked my way through college in the 90s by working 40+ hours per week on second and third shift at a company with a decent tuition reimbursement program. Both of us came from relatively poor families that didn't contribute to our education, but we managed to graduate with little debt (my father-in-law graduated debt free; I only racked up $6,000 over the course of my 9 years!)

It seems now our system is designed to produced indentured servants who will have little choice in what they study and where they will work.

Welcome to Serfdom 2.0!

Thank you – I agree whole-heartedly! We're so self-referential sometimes it's nauseating.

Yes, yes, yes. Copyrighted material should be respected. Yada Yada Yada. It's all a very sad (and somewhat humorous) story.

I can't help but wonder how many of you ripping the woman from Cooks Source (as wrong as she was) have songs you did not purchase on your iPods, copied and submitted without proper citation someone else's text in your research papers, etc.

Bunch of hypocrites. Really.

The problem with your argument is many clients (new / small businesses) don't know the value of working WITH a designer. This is kinda like when a person walks into Wal-Mart to buy a socket set. It looks shiny in their toolbox, and they don't know any better until it strips out / twists / breaks when they need to put some real pressure on it.

Wal-Mart has driven countless small local businesses into bankruptcy while making a mint selling this crap.

Personally, I think this means that as design becomes just another commodity you are going to see serious downward pressure on the fees that all but the largest firms can command (think of Dell, HP, etc as the commodity side of that equation and Apple (ironically) as the high end). After all, I read an article about companies outsourcing design to India (I'm looking for the article - I'll post later).

I second inviolet's post.

My wife and I homeschool precisely because we were disgusted with both the quality and the direction of the public school in our district. Before making that decision we attended school board meetings, met with our children's teachers, and had private meetings with both the past and present superintendent. While not too surprised what we found was indifference at just about all levels. Both my wife and I are college grads - I majored in the humanities and my wife in the sciences - and neither of us are religious.

Evolution was too controversial, but letting a community church onto school grounds so they could proselytize and pass out bibles to our kids as they got off the bus and walked into the school building was no big deal. Our children were at the top of their classes, but gifted programming was eschewed for individualized learning plans -- a nice idea except all it meant to the teacher was letting our kids finish their work then tutor the other kids. Classrooms of 25 - 30+ kids in 1st grade were not an issue to be concerned about.

What really surprised us were the supportive phone calls we got from teachers after we pulled our kids out. Teachers know things aren't right, but when their job depends upon keeping their mouth shut during these tough times what's a teacher to do?

Now in our second year of homeschooling things are going great. Science and math are an integral part of our homeschooling, our kids have been exploring another language thanks to some decent support materials on DVD and the web, history is as accurate as we can make it, and we don't have to worry about some other parent complaining that the dictionaries in the library define oral sex. As for extra curricular activities our kids are involved in at least one sport every season through the YMCA and YWCA (in our area they're merged). They have friends who they occasionally spend the night with and vice versa. Their bright, inquisitive, social and aren't afraid of science and math (ok - I'm a proud parent too ;-).

I wouldn't characterize us as Luddites. Rather, I would say understanding the technology we have a healthy respect and even enthusiasm for its potential but well-informed concern for its liabilities.