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Comment Let me get this right (Score 3, Insightful) 159

TFA claims that he's going to simplify everything by clarifying partial ownership, making how payment works more ambiguous, and allowing parts of the standard to be disabled. Right. If the "solution" is actually less complicated than what they're currently offering, I can see why AOM has already won. To me, this here MPEG nonsense is kryptonite to anyone needing a sustainable solution.

Comment Re:Bad move. (Score 1) 102

Probably tenure-related. She was an Assistant Professor, which is traditionally non-tenured, but probably tenure-track; most likely, she was up for tenure soon. She talks to another professor who was "since promoted". A professorial promotion procedure has quite a bit of bureaucratic inertia, and so I imagine it has to have been already on the books by this point. So let's say that's two professors up for tenure, imagine the following situation:

The email reset happens, and Prof. Jass first posts to FB about it, then goes poking around in the emails of Mr. President (Docking) and Ms. Vice-President (Caldwell), probably to find out what's up with the tenure dossiers. She finds that Ms. VP is looking to hatchet some junior faculty she doesn't like, including her friend (and possibly herself), and she finds that the President is discussing some presidential stuff. Someone in this is alleging that Jass saw material protected by attorney-client privilege, so if we connect one dot too many, we can say that one of the "academic staff in need of mentoring and improvement" was the subject of an inquiry by the president concerning how he should treat public/personal relations with a member academic staff. Jass has lunch with her friend and says, "hey, remember that email breach? Well, I got this Mr. President's email. He's gonna accept Ms. VP's recommendation that they deny you (and me) tenure. But after class he's secretly slipping Adjunct Professor X the tenure track." [alternatively, the "crookedness" could be denying tenure for purely economic reasons, while giving everything the color of academic grounds. But that's boring]

An even better scenario: The "whistleblower" Professor was the one with the President. Ms. VP is furious that Mr. President is endangering the college's integrity, and fires off an angry email, relating the problems that such an event has for the promotion procedure, and using some choice words to describe the whistleblower. Prof. Jass has lunch with the whistleblower.
However it happens, Ms. Vice President takes a job somewhere else soon after. The possibilities are endless, and we'll see how far the college collaborates in the investigation, and how hard they try to keep those emails confidential. Academics are notorious gossips.

The professor, since promoted, learned this during a lunch meeting with Jass on May 3 at an Adrian cafe. The two talked of academic staff in need of improvement and mentoring, Jass revealed the document on her cell phone, and told her associate it was from the accounts of Docking and Caldwell. "During the conversation, Jass commented to (the professor) that Caldwell did not like her and that Docking was 'crooked,'" states the report, obtained this week through a Freedom of Information Act request "Based on the tone used... (the fellow professor) stated that she felt like the information was being downloaded for blackmail although this was never verbalized."

Comment Re: What liberal arts actually means (Score 2) 420

The Liberal Arts are originally those pursuits (arts) deemed worthy of a late-Roman free (hence Liberal) man. Taken up in the nineteenth century, the idea is applied to free citizens in a free society (and some skools run by abolitionists were very aggressive in their application of the ideal). The 6th-century codification of the liberal arts that formed the original "undergraduate" curriculum at the first universities was: Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy To which they added Physics and Metaphysics So, yeah, it was all what they called "philosophy" Engineering? That's for slaves. In short, a Liberal Arts degree is by definition not a degree for a career, but someone with a Liberal Arts degree has the critical skills and interests to be a valuable asset. The rest you'd have to train anyway.

Comment Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score 1) 259

Sure, only in this case, they've been extinct a long time. It used to be, I used Skype's landline call feature to talk to the 'rents. I even used that (voice only, mind) to talk to them on my Nokia n800, swearing up and down that 4-7 inch ARM-equipped tablets were the future. Now, my parents call me on Skype. I've spent maybe two bucks of the last I gave Skype, three years ago. The only thing stopping me from giving up entirely is my parents, and even my Mom prefers Whatsapp

Comment Re:What is the point of the Windows Store? (Score 1) 209

Well, the chief advantage is that Microsoft can force its practical monopoly on gaming OSs to run Steam and GOG out of business. Then again, Valve has built up enough cash that they probably could make SteamOS into a serious contender, with a free office suite that actually had a UI that made sense.* In short, they've continually done wrong by gamers to the degree that, if they make a serious effort to move from "Windows DXnn -- Required for serious gaming" to "Windows UWP App store -- Required for PC gaming", then those who've made piles of cash from gamers will realize that they have to adapt or die, and to adapt, all they need is to produce a decent office suite and let Adobe do their thing. And Microsoft has been dropping the ball for so long, it'll be a cakewalk. *Consider the instructions to turn off the autoformatting that continually screws up your text in Word: Click on the File Pane, in the column ont he left, click on the Options icon-button. In the window that pops up, select in the left+colum the "Proofing" option (note: this is not the same as the "Proofing" field on the review Pane). Under the field "AutoCorrect" Options, press the button labeled "AutoCorrect Options". This will bring up a (Word XP, if not 6.0) dialogue. Click on the tab "AutoFormat As You Type" and de-select everything. In short, to make the program work for most of us, you need to navigate through the thirty-year history of the program, and every single UI change they made. Well, that's not entirely true. Thank God those variable drop-menus were dumped. But that just goes to show that Microsoft's cash cow has been vulnerable to a revolution for a long time, as Office has been the inefficient "Only Choice in Town". On the other hand, MS has never been good at the gaming market, simply because they can't overcome their B2B mentality and adopt one of fanatics.

Comment Failure Rate (Score 1, Interesting) 147

Look, it's like this: Microsoft Office products get things right 80% of the time. Windows (or MacOS) also gets things right 80% of the time. Printer Drivers get stuff right 80% of the time. So half the time, things go wrong, and figuring out why takes way too much time. LibreOffice has some kind of nuisance/showstopper fault 40% of the time (so "Gets stuff right" 60% of the time). Every time I've run a presentation through Impress, some slides have been seriously screwed up (after all, go to a random site, get a random computer, and tell me it's going to render the Liberation font correctly). The last time I used LibreOffice for a publicly-read paper, I had it printed on-site right before I went on. I got handed the text, and went live. Somehow, each word was printed backwards, in some horrific pitch. I don't care whose fault it was, the result was not readable. The paper I presented, of course, was one of my best -- the printed version should only be a prop, dudes. But using LO to prepare stuff for print? I have to switch between Word and LO, and LO keeps throwing tabs into my footnotes. What's up with that?

Comment So you believe the Koran predates the Prophet? (Score 4, Informative) 622

I mean, hold on a second. Slashdot links to an article that copies from another article a report of carbon dating of "545-568" for a piece of parchment from a codex of the Qu'ran. People in this thread immediately act all smarmy about religious folks and their crazy beliefs. Some even claim historians will "just give you the facts" or some horsecrap. Here's what a historian does: A. Looks at article. B. Follows link to article they stole that from. C. Follows their link to the article they stole it from. D. Hits a paywall and goes to Wikipedia. E. Finally gets the point: two bifolios of a really old Qu'ran were discovered (by Alba Fedeli) in a Birmingham codex, Radiocarbon analysis (by the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit) dated the animal from which the parchment came to between 568-645 with 95.4% confidence -- in other words, there's a 19 chances of out 20 that the animal was alive when Mohammad was. The verses were copied onto it sometime after the animal was killed. This should all be backed up by consulting the sources linked in Wikipedia, but I'm doing this for an internet rant, thank you very much. So, guess what? If you actually study the sources, you find that 1) no "scholar" has produced a coherent argument using this evidence as the key proof that the Koran predated Mohammad, 2) Antetexts are an entirely different matter, 3) plenty of people are willing to blindly follow their faith on this matter. Most of those seem to be those who proclaim the loudest about the superiority of "science" without having any knowledge of what "science" is and a fundamental confusion of what constitutes faith and what constitutes reason. Hint: if you believe it, 'cos you read it on the interwebs and it matches what you think of the world, it ain't reason.

Comment Consoles and couches (Score 2, Interesting) 147

Let's get the obligatory stuff out of the way: the author there seems to think that Halo is some sort of masterpiece. It ain't.
Even in terms of mechanics, consoles are lousy for FPSs: controller vs. K+M; the mouse always wins. From a PC-superiority perspective, the best way to do an FPS is therefore Keyboard and Mouse, which means one player sitting in front of a screen. Consoles can't beat PCs on technical specs.
The result, someone who wants a "serious FPS" is going to do it alone in a darkened room in front of the same device that delivers pornography.

Consoles, on the other hand, are hooked up to huge screens and are played on couches. There are often other people around, which is what can drive sales. So, yeah, split screen makes more than sense, it makes sales.

Of course, the way all consoles are selling now, their target demographic is fast becoming married men who only get to play for an hour or two late at night after the spouse and kids have gone to bed.

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