I agree adverse possession is stupid. Except IP owners continually try to gain all the advantages of property law. If they get the advantages, they should get the disadvantages too.

You just made my overall point - people are making stupid decisions. But they are doing it in public, private, and for profit schools. And the for profits shouldnt be singled out when the problem is endemic to the entire system/industry.

Average nationwide tuition at a 4 year public school is 7.6k per year (30k total)
4 year private school averages 30k per year (120k! total!)
google says ITT costs 30k per year
google says devry costs 14k per year

Traditionally people at public/private schools are also going to pay for room and board as well, which many places double the cost. However, Since everyone has the option to stay at home or rent we can ignore that.

So these schools are more expensive than state school, and up to as expensive as the average private school (but significantly less than the elite private schools)

So i will admit my cost estimates were off, but I still hold that job prospects for the public school people are pretty bad too. For the masses/sheeple, going to community college or straight out into the workforce is quite often cost effective.

Those who can specialize in areas with shortages will be better off.

I absolutely agree that education leads to higher earnings and better employment options. My point (perhaps poorly made) was that even accounting for your 2-3x better job prospects, employment in the chosen field (especially for "soft" degrees) is still bad (even though you are better off than someone with no degree), and the cost of that degree was huge.

My fiance has a masters in art history and metalsmithing. 80k in debt, and her one department (highly ranked and respected) turns out about 10-15 people like her every year. A few thousand of them across the country.

Nationwide, there are a handful of (mostly academic) positions, some industrial positions, and the rest are the proverbial "starving artist"

Other departments like english, the humanities, womens studies, etc are the same, except they don't have the industrial positions.

I agree, and this somewhat reinforces my point.

Liberal arts colelges, for the most part, dump out hundreds of thousands of interchangeable people with no real skills. There are of course exceptions. Doctors, engineers, some of the scientists (although many are just recycled into faculty), some of the tech people (although in my experience any person with a masters or phd in comp sci is 100% worthless on the job)

Tech schools are focusing on areas where there are more shortages of workers (or at least the impression of shortages of workers). Now, they of course have a perverse incentive to make the shortage appear worse than it is, and continue its existence even after the shortage is no longer there. But they are responding to at least some level of market dynamics, which by and large traditional schools are insulated from completely.

There is a reason all schools (private and public) do not publish good salary or job sector data. They just give the number of people having any job. You might have gone to school for engineering, and be serving fries - thats a win to the school

But you also can't trust public colleges, and for the same reason.

Public colleges in general cost SIGNIFICANTLY more than these tech schools, and the job prospects for 4 year grads are dismal. Go to grad school (especially in something like English, Art, and the Humanities), and your only job prospects are probably working for the same school that gave you the degree.

Even formally "instant upper class" things like law school are not a good payout anymore.

Sometimes it's tough being the only one who's right.

With misinformation common on the Internet, and with the difficulty of hunting down honest answers that'll confirm the truth or otherwise of any statement, users very often feel it necessary to base their opinions on the personalities of the arguers themselves. This very often leads to a situation where an argument can appear foolish simply because of the anger of the person making it, and in many cases a combined might of reasonable people assuming the more argumentative person is in the wrong, and posting as such, can overwhelmingly go against someone whose views may be right, but are obscured by hyperbolic allegations and confused, angry, rants.

This quagmire of people basing their views on the person whose statements seem most reasonable, rather than on the correctness of those statements, will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.

You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them your concerns about the ability to tell right from wrong on the basis of personalities. Warn them that hot button issues on the Internet typically enrage people and result in many undermining their own arguments through their own anger. Tell them this is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by organizations like Slashdot to provide free forums in which to discuss important topics but that without calm, collected, and reasonable arguments, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how vicious, angry, arguments undermines all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on Internet anger.

You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

One way to mitigate all the nuttiness that lazy developers put into Perl is to take the suggestions from a script called 'perlcritic' on the -harsh setting.

Doc for Perl::Critic

On our team, we have developers that are hackers to college interns. This stops the hackers from writing illegible punctuation explosion code and stops interns from making common mistakes.