This position that the university has taken will have definite chilling effects on academic freedom. It is clearly inconsistent with their mission as a research university, and I sincerely hope they reconsider this policy.

My wife is a software engineer and uses sublime exclusively. I am an academic, and have used only emacs for the past 20 years. Guess which of us makes more money...

I for one welcome our new crunchy green overlords.

Don't be so cynical. I say, let's aim for 200% coverage!

Nah. Whoever wrote that wasn't very bright.

It's been said elsewhere in this thread that the textbook publishing industry is nothing more than a racket. The publishers routinely release "new" editions to textbook which only differ in having the problem numbers rearranged to attempt to make old editions useless for current classes. The prices in the textbooks are gouged beyond belief. The publisher makes more profit off of a class of students than the instructor does, which makes no sense on margin.

Part of the problem is that students can't vote with their wallets. The people that make the buying decisions are the professors, or worse the departments. Even without the occasional conflict of interests, these agents have no economic incentive to reduce costs for students. Students' only option to "vote with their wallets" is to look for a different academic program or school, which is rather absurd to regard as an "option". It is only out of the good will of the professor that costs for the students can realistically be minimized, but there are no real incentives to support this at most institutions.

Once upon a time, there was value added in having a publisher. But this is the 21st century, and there are ways for textbook authors to publish without imposing onerous costs on students. There are even some good publishers that will provide manuscript services at fairly minimal cost. So as I see it, the big textbook publishers have become nothing more than rent collectors in the style of the RIAA/MPAA, leeching off of the work of others. The good news is that academic culture seems to be changing. The younger generation of teachers is sensitive to these issues, and open source publishing looks poised to take off. I personally would view it as an ethical imperative to publish any textbook of my own under Creative Commons, and I think this attitude is becoming increasingly popular.

Only in the same way that it is impossible to "observe" a True Scotsman.

And I want a pink unicorn.

Or at least it was then.

But you need to be careful about the large amounts of dihydrogen monoxide present in some homeopathic preparations. Although this can be helpful in treating certain conditions, like dehydration, in sufficient quantities it is quite dangerous.

Shouldn't it be "think of how stupid the median person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider"

Judging by the quotation in the summary, we can presumably infer that someone who has been dead for less than two hours is only mostly dead. Interesting....

Nice try, except scientists have considered creationism. For instance, Stephen Jay Gould has written screeds analyzing creationism scientifically. The issue isn't a lack of consideration, but rather that such scientists have thoroughly refuted creationism. I actually wouldn't mind a series scientifically analyzing creationism in principle, perhaps along the lines of some of Gould's work, but I somehow doubt that such a public flaying would satisfy the good folks at AiG.

This looks eerily like the US justification for the Iraq War.

I hate to ruin your little libertarian fantasy narrative, but there are private and charter schools in the United States, so it's not a government monopoly by any stretch. A "government monopoly" would more closely resemble the situation in Taiwan, which is one of the countries discussed favorably in TFA, where the schools are all run by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

I have no idea what planet this idea came from.

The United States actually scores very low in indices that measure social mobility. Moreover, this study finds that in the US out of all the sampled countries, one's PISA score in science is more likely than any other country to be influenced by parental background.