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Comment This isn't an article, it's an Opinion piece (Score 5, Interesting) 78

It's copied from The Atlantic, and right away, the opinion author's assertions run into trouble.

"For the overwhelming majority of graduates, the returns on going to college more than offset the cost of tuition. ". That's news to all the grads drowning in debt they'll never pay off.

"After factoring in financial aid, the cost of attending a public four-year college has fallen by more than 20 percent since 2015, even before adjusting for inflation." What? Seriously?

Many more things like that. And she never even addresses the issue of enrollment now being overwhelmingly female, with majors that are money losers in the job markets. Nor does she address the fact that a growing number of students are foreign, sent here by their families or governments to gain technical and business knowledge to take back home after graduation. The whole thing reads like a PR piece for colleges.

Comment Re:Also, Itanium (Score 1) 135

With the end of 2025, the last commercial support obligations for Itanium hardware have ended as well. Essentially, Itanium finally, officially died 4 days ago.

Negative, Ghostrider. While standard support is up, HPE has an extended support system called "mature support" covering HP 9000 and Integrity servers until 2028, including HP-UX support . So it's not truly dead just yet.

Comment Re:For the fastest and most convenient way... (Score 1) 92

This impacts virtually everyone, indirectly.

No it doesn't. Virtually no one has ever activated windows by phone.

Everyone that buys Windows licenses from those El Cheapo Google Marketplace vendors has to as the licenses tend to be pro licenses pulled from machines that won't activate over MS's web method.

Comment Re:Educators (Score 1) 122

I remember suffering through Great Expectations in High School. It is a great book, but it says nothing to a modern teenager. If you want people to read books, you need to give them material that is relevant to their lives, not great literature.

It's not an education if you only assign stuff "relevant to their lives" (which is a crapshoot decision in any case; what books are really going be relevant to modern teenagers?). Part of what you're supposed to be getting in school is knowledge of the foundations of your civilization, which is why colleges have a Great Books program in the first place. High Schools typically don't burden students with all that many difficult old books anyway. I had to suffer through Wuthering Heights but I also got to discover Lord of the Flies.

Comment Re:Shocker (Score 4, Insightful) 93

Another place right wingers bitch and scream like toddlers is biased against them and silencing their views is actually tilted in their favor, but anything short of blatant extremist propaganda and hate speech entirely divorced from reality simply isn't "fair".

Might it be that the Beeb relies on groups like the Spectator for guests as an opposite to it's own party line, and thus drive the outrage demo to boost ratings? A' La the old CNN crossfire route? What else would they do? Bring on, say, the Guardian every night and basically just agree on everything?

Comment Re:The first of many (Score 4, Interesting) 31

Just being honest, the newspaper print format is obsolete.

The daily format, yes. The Internet has killed that.

But I think there's still some room for print journalism under certain conditions, and profitably so as well, if done right.

Many moons ago, I used to get the Washington Post's Weekly Edition. I don't know if they do it anymore, but it was a newspaper, mailed to your home once a week, that had longer, more in-depth investigative stories and analysis on the issues of the day than you'd find in the daily papers, as well as an opinion and editorial section. I think something along these lines, combined with certain elements of the old Sunday paper format... cartoons, ads, local events and notices, arts coverage.... could sell as part of a larger digital subscription that gives you daily access.

Comment Re:Dating apps for jobs? (Score 1) 41

An interesting idea, but what if you're a non-skinny woman, or a man under six feet?

More to the point, dating apps already suck for young men. It's hard enough for them to get a match of any kind, and the apps are notorious for women ghosting men or going out with men just to get a free meal or monetary favor of some kind. Now imagine finding out that the only reason a woman goes out with you was to use you for your work connections. How is this not a kind of catfishing or fraud?

I tell my sons to avoid these apps like the plague. This kind of stuff only reinforces that.

Comment Re:Sounds like a prison. (Score 1) 101

Society: trending down.

Schools are just too big. More local schools with smaller buildings and a hell of a lot less administration department. All this weapon detection and eyes everywhere just says school buildings have become too big to manage in any reasonable way. I'm not saying we should go back to the little schoolhouse in every neighborhood, but almost.

I don't disagree, but all that ignores the fact the the problem with schools is the student body itself: there are too many walking the halls that belong in reform school instead of real school.

Comment Re:Education Funding (Score 2, Insightful) 101

Imagine if those millions of dollars were spent on teaching students.

I'm sure the district would love to spend the money that way, but we live in a society that values easy access to guns more than it values safety, so the district's hand is forced.

We've had "easy access to guns" for 250 years. High Schools used to have firing ranges and shooting teams (including girls shooting teams). It was not uncommon to see rifle racks in the back windows of trucks in my high school parking lot. Somehow we managed to not shoot anyone. What's changed is the introduction of ghetto thug culture into schools. If you had a problem with a guy when I was in school, you arranged to meet out back after 3 PM and settle it with fists. Now kids "pop a cap" into students and teachers for "dissing" them. Then there's the constant, roving gang fights in schools, typically with a bunch of kids cornering one kid and beating him bloody, all while recording it on their phones and bragging.

It's ironic, because in the 1970's, French philosopher Michel Foucault kicked up a storm when he wrote that, architecturally, schools looked like prisons because they served a similar function. Modern school systems are buying mass surveillance systems precisely because modern students act like prison gangs, and have to be managed the same way.

Comment Good. Screen Culture was a plague. (Score 3, Insightful) 31

Screen Culture in particular was spamming YT with fake trailers years before AI really blew up, and labeled them very, very deceptively ("Official Trailer Release", and such). YouTube should have banned them years ago, and the studios should have sued. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Comment Re:China is still a developing country (Score 1) 54

They aren't clones, they are just the optimal shape. The USSR's Buran had similar claims made against it, but it was very different to the Shuttle. No main engines, larger, different mission profile, and much faster turn-around times. It's just that the best shape for a spaceplane is the shape that the Shuttle is, so every other one looks like a "clone" of it.

Yep. Similar to aircraft. There's a reason why planes that perform a specific function at specific performance parameters tend to look alike. Because the parameters demands certain shapes, airflow, capacity, etc, and you end up with planes doing the same mission but designed by different teams yet look alike. See the DC-10/L-1011 airliner situation.

Comment Re:Plasma and fusion science is pointless (Score 2, Informative) 64

The stable genius jr. has concluded that fusion technology is pointless anyway. Coal and oil are the future! Soon also on Mars.

Oh FFS. Trump is the most pro-nuclear president in four decades, including supporting fusion research and exploring new reactor designs: Trump Bets Big on Nuclear

"United States President Donald Trump is putting his money where his mouth is as he doubles down on efforts to accelerate the expansion of the country’s nuclear energy sector. The government will spend billions in public funding to reinvigorate U.S. nuclear power, following decades of underinvestment. Unlike renewable energy, Trump views nuclear power as key to expanding the U.S. electricity generation capacity and recently announced the target of quadrupling nuclear capacity by 2050.
In May, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the U.S. to develop 10 new large nuclear reactors by the end of the decade. In addition, several tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, are providing billions in private funding to restart old nuclear plants, upgrade existing ones, and deploy new reactor technology to meet the growing demands from the data centres powering advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) loan office will dedicate significant funds to the nuclear energy industry to support the development of new reactors. This week, the Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “We have significant lending authority at the loan programme office By far the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants — to get those first plants built.”

Comment Re:good (Score 0, Troll) 24

Probably a good thing, handling CNN to the Ellisons before midterms would have really bad outcomes

It wouldn't do jack shit, because no one watches CNN. Travelers used to be stuck with their network, as CNN used to pay airports to display their network, but that ended in 2021 as mobile devices took away that information monopoly, and CNN lost that ad revenue. CNN has half the viewers of MS Now, and only a quarter the viewers of Fox. CNN is way past their glory days, and essentially has become an Also Ran. And cable news doesn't have nearly the reach that the traditional US Big 3 news networks does. All the major cable news players combined still make up less viewers than the lowest rated Big 3 player, CBS, with 4+ million viewers. Which, btw, pales in comparison to ABC, with 8+ million viewers, and NBC with 6+ million. The idea that the Ellisons would "take over" American media is laughable on its face, even if they got Warner Bros. They'd still be a distant third in broadcast reach behind Disney and Comcast, hysterical wailing to the contrary.

Comment Re:I said it before and I'll say it again (Score 4, Insightful) 57

The worst case scenarios are going to happen. Or worse.

OK. When? Because I've been hearing worst case scenarios all my adult life, and most of them are now past their predicted dates. Beginning with Paul Erlich's infamous predictions of mass-starvation in the 60's and 70's, nearly every year the press is filled with credentialed experts that tell us the end is nigh and that the point of no return is almost here. If you want to know why most of the public is so Meh about these doomsday predictions, it's because we've been inundated with the Boy Crying Wolf all of our lives. Would you like a timeline of all the point of no return predictions over the years? It's readily available.

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