its impossible for a school to teach self work ethic. only parents can do that, and they have to start earlier than high school. the weakening 'no one left behind' shit in high school certainly doesn't help.

go look at the people actually graduating for ed degrees. I hate to say this (my mom was a teacher, and a good one), but the great majority of them graduate from ed because they wouldn't hack it in most other faculties. ed standards have falled a lot. not to say that teaching is a highly paid cakewalk - it isn't, and its largely unrewarding, but the calibre of graduates are not great.

the question is how employable are you right now? You need to be working EVERY SUMMER in either the field you're studying, or a closely related one. Then, when you go to get hired and are competing against the hundreds of people who graduated in your class, YOU'LL have work experience and they won't. The 4 months between semesters you do stuff on a job, even tedious, boring stuff, is very very important. go out and get a job.

the 'weak student elimination' is only another set of test criteria, and like any system there will be people who figure out how to study to pass it, even if they themselves have no engineering judgement.

you lucked out. architecture is probably one of the hardest hit industries due to economic troubles. very few people can afford it. There are literally hundreds of thousands of unemployed from the architecture-related umbrella that compete heavily for every job, and wages for jobs that are around are down across the board.

the issue isn't the data from the verizon tower - this is totally separate data from a fake cell tower that did not have a warrant.

an anarchist doesn't necessarily believe in no punishment - just not legal systems of punishment. if you automatically knew who was innocent and guilty you could punish the guilty without a legal system.

you misunderstand 'certification'. The certification is more about whether the OS will work, not at all about the hardware and how often if fails. You don't even have to get your device certified - you only do so if you want to use the 'android' brand name. otherwise just take the source code and go for it. http://source.android.com/faqs.html#is-compatibility-mandatory

There are hundreds of thousands of students being taught at for profit universities, and they're also the fastest growing segment. Private non-profit schools aren't the same segment at all. to see how rampant for-profit universities overcharging, making empty promises and outright fraud, all you have to do is spend two minutes looking it up on google. There have been documentaries about it. The default rate is high because many have call centers whose goal is to sign you up for student loans no matter what, and often for worthless diplomas that cost much more than the same thing at a community college. Get a clue.

benchmark masturbation. some people like this sort of thing. Its a good thing too, because it keeps them in their basements, away from the rest of us.

Apple would have a much easier time of it. They have a single line of phones, and lets say at any given time 3 supported models. Android is an open platform, and has been put onto dozens and dozens of different models of phones, so far. The sheer amount of resources, the testing time, etc for each handset is quite a bit. Its pretty unreasonable to put all the onus on google. Better would be that google standardize the requirements for phones to be officially 'google' phones, and include a minimum support period and a maximum time between android releases from google and handset manufacturers to release those updates to people.

the CEO and the board feel they can loot a fair bit more money in bonuses and severance pay before jumping ship and letting someone else try and loot money by disassembling the company a la HP.

HP is still screwing this up. They've tied Whitman's 'bonus' (ie her salary, since her official salary is only a dollar) to the stock price. She only gets paid if the stock price goes up 120%. Since stock price is market driven, and the market runs on fear, uncertainty, and the predictions of thousands of deranged analysts, it seems unlikely that she'd be motivated to look at long term company health when her income doesn't depend on that.

anyone whose played Civ can tell you this one:

“There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”

Henry Ford

It seems somewhere between Ford and outsourcing everything we can to india and china, industrialists became looters.

I got a touchpad from the firesale too. Its a good product @ $150 for 32gb, but it wasn't and still isn't worth $500. The problem is that: a) The OS is great (really, I really enjoy webos) but there aren't enough apps and the web browser sucks. b) Competing @ apple's price point is ridiculous. If I wanted a top notch tablet @ that price I'd buy an ipad. What I want is something thats good (not necessarily ipad good), but whose price more closely reflects its utility. So it's not really as good as an ipad, and was pretty much just as expensive. Why would I choose it over the ipad if it wasn't being sold for significantly less money?