dragoncortez - Slashdot User

Submission + - Universities will be 'irrelevant' by 2020 (deseretnews.com)

Submitted by dragoncortez on Tuesday April 21, 2009 @12:10PM

dragoncortez writes: According to this Deseret News article, University classrooms will be obsolete by 2020. BYU professor David Wiley envisions a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. He says, "Higher education doesn't reflect the life that students are living. . .today's colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed." In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you'd have to be a paying customer. Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for $30.

Comment Slicers (Score 2, Interesting) 586

by dragoncortez on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @01:25PM (#27573157) Attached to: What Do You Call People Who "Do HTML"?

At a previous job, we had a team of people - called slicers - that received .psd files from the graphic designers and cut them into html for the programmers to integrate into a database driven backend. It was basically an assembly line for cheap websites.

Comment Re:Stuck in the old ways (Score 1) 522

by dragoncortez on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @04:11PM (#27508665) Attached to: Why the CAPTCHA Approach Is Doomed

That's great for now, but if that approach becomes more common, it will be just as easy to overcome as today's CAPTCHAs. The article is saying that we need systems that take automation out of the picture. Caps on number of messages/emails sent. Heuristic "profiling" on accounts. Reverse spam filtering. Methods that catch the bots after registering, rather than relying on the registration form as your sole defense.

Journal Journal: I think I got my first Troll mod

Journal by dragoncortez on Thursday March 19, 2009 @10:44AM

It's been a while since I posted frequently enough for this to happen, but I'm pretty sure I just got a comment modded troll for the first time ever.

Is this really surprising? (Score:0, Troll)

Comment Re:Is this really surprising? (Score 1) 921

by dragoncortez on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @04:08PM (#27246683) Attached to: Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest

Awesome! I got modded troll for giving a sarcastic response to a troll that was modded Interesting. If only there were a "don't feed the trolls" option.

Comment Re:Is this really surprising? (Score 0, Troll) 921

by dragoncortez on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @03:42PM (#27246229) Attached to: Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest

Probably get modded down for this.. for "religion" has always struck me as a haven for the fearful, those who lack self-esteem, or narcissistic personalities looking for external justification for their insane behaviour.

When such an individual is confronted with the prospect of death.. all that doubt, self-loathing and regret must really be a lot to suddenly bear when they "know" they're about to face the final judge.

lol and slashdot is a haven for fat slobs living in their parents' basement making up lies about their sex lives to post on the intertron.

Comment Re:Bzzzttt!!! (Score 2, Informative) 785

by dragoncortez on Wednesday December 31, 2008 @01:04PM (#26281577) Attached to: Microsoft Zunes Committing Mass Suicide

lol, how's the Wall Street Journal for you? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123050978162738293.html

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