Rand & Marx, two of the most overrated philosophers. They both ignore human behavior.

The problem isn't the loans in a practical sense. The real problem is companies driving degree inflation. Example: early Internet days, how many ISP technical personnel had 4 year degrees? I'm talking about the guys maintaining the lines / switches / routers. Not very many at all. The guys in charge often did, but even that wasn't guaranteed. I, personally and through company programs, trained many High School kids on the intricacies of R&S. Try getting in today without at least a 2 year degree. A 4 year degree will be preferred, if not required. Heck, even help desk which is entry level, often requires a 2 year.

Companies drove us here because a 4 year degree student is "better" even if it doesn't really matter.

The trouble is that it's chicken and egg. You cannot get rid of the loans until companies stop demanding 4 year degrees for jobs that do not really require them, and vice versa. The current situation is not tenable, heck even the technical degree system is getting overdone. We need a return to the apprentice system (adding technical fields), while parents need to allow hardcore discipline of their little snowflakes in school. Half the problem is that colleges have had to take over education that should have been done in high school, otherwise known as year 1 (of 5).

Considering the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray thing was a patent war, and nothing more, this might be true. Instead of one company (in this case Toshiba) you have the BDA (a consortium of many companies) dictating the terms. DVD Forum or not, Toshiba owned it, and made a classic mistake with HD-DVD. They tried to protect their DVD patents and it cost them CE manufacturers that were being offered pieces of the Blu-ray spec. So, in the end, it was a pretty much Toshiba alone vs the combined might of nearly everyone else.

Not much of a competition in some ways.

There are idiots in every age group. I was stuck listening (until the RL muted them) a couple of college guys playing so tough. I don't care if your gf is blowing you while you play WoW, it's not my concern.

Or the ever so impressive 15/16 year olds trying to act older and smarter than they really are (including the idiot hunter that manages to feign right by the f*cking healers every time)

Moral of the story, age isn't necessarily the determining fact.

Corporations can pay taxes too. All I can say is "hello transactional tax" and hopefully (but not likely) goodbye to many other taxes. You can't dodge a transactional tax unless you cease doing business in a country. Considering this would ruin most companies, not having transactions in the US, it would remove any incentive to move headquarters overseas. In actuality every country is slowly going to move towards a transactional tax anyway to stop the, shall we say less than positive intimations (read: Blackmail), companies try to pull now. The funny thing is while the US has a higher tax rate, it has a lower collected rate than most countries.

The plus here is that corporations are the ones that are going to f*ck themselves over. You see they need, and I mean NEED, the government. Yes, the same ebil gubbermint they complain about. China isn't exactly a haven for Intellectual Property (i.e. rampant theft), other countries can't project power to defend the corporations various holdings, other countries lack the legal mechanisms for corporate defense, et al. That's why corporations raise the hew and cry often, but do very little but lobby.

The right keeps using the words "Socialist", "Marxist", and "Fascist" to describe Obama. Those words do not mean what they mean think they mean. I mean, really, Obama is a _______ (fill in the blank)? Obviously the right has ZERO idea of how center-right Obama really is. Heck, in any "Socialist" country, Obama would be seen as a right-winger. Fascist? Yeah, right, let me know what the previous President's wonderful record on the Bill of Rights was, in particular the 4th amendment. Marxist? Puh-lease, let me know when Obama pulls a Reagan and sends troops in somewhere over a labor dispute.

Just goes to show you what a lack of perspective nets people.

End all tax "credits" and "exemptions" (including EITC and Mortgage tax credits) and government handouts to corporations. After 5 years of paying off debt, lower the marginal rate. Remember, no exemptions at all. This would sting at first, in fact it would have to be phased in, but then the country would have a tax system that is as "fair" as taxes can be.

Because a good switch will be able to tell the MAC address of the computer plugging into it is not authorized, record the attempt, and turn off the port.

Closer to reality (and my Business Class, unlimited usage) if you ask me.

Of course I'm a jerk that knows bandwidth isn't free no matter what the torrent kids want to think.

Well it was a NeoCon (St. Reagan) that privatized Freddie Mac and loosened many accounting rules.

Stupid tit for tat games... plenty of blame to go around.

How about "cue the Steam users?" Or the Hulu users? Or the PSN/Live users? Or the MSDN users? Or the FOSS users? In case you hadn't noticed, there are a plethora of perfectly legal ways to bust a 40 GB cap in a month. The problem is that a lot of these legal uses compete with the companies' other entertainment options. So they'll cap it so that the legit users can't get their entertainment from the 'tubes, then turn around and tell you that you shouldn't care because all those other guys were filthy pirates anyway.

If they actually gave a damn about your service quality, they'd be upgrading their network.

Truth be told, about 10% of the customers any ISP has will be screwed by this. I'm not going to deny that. Then again that 10% accounts for well over 80% of the network usage. Then again if you can get your heavy users to jump to your competitor, you've screwed them (your competitor) by being able to keep your prices low.

I don't agree with this 100%, but /.'ers are not representative of the average user on the internet. I'm guess this will also be their DOCSIS 3 deployment money. Not that it'll help too much. Just like VDSL, it's all limited at head shed.