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Comment Stop it! (Score 1) 823

Easy: Stop trying. Get some paper and a nice pencil. I went a little overkill and got one of those smartpens. Either way, paper > computer in this case. Spend less time thinking about writing/input and more time about the problems at hand.

Education

Student Loan Interest Rankles College Grads 1259

theodp writes "Like many recent college grads, Steven Lee finds himself unemployed in one of the roughest job markets in decades and saddled with a big pile of debt — he owes about $84,000 in student loans for undergrad and grad school. But what's really got Lee angry are the high interest rates on his government-backed student loans. 'The rate for a 30-year mortgage is around 5%,' Lee said. 'Why should anyone have to pay 8.5%? The government has bailed out homeowners. It's bailed out big businesses. Why can't it also help students?' Not only that, federal student loans are the only loans in the nation that are largely non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, have no statutes of limitations, and can't be refinanced after consolidation, so Lee can forget about pulling a move out of the GM playbook. And unlike mortgages on million-dollar vacation homes, student loans have very limited tax deductability. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education blamed Congress for the rates which she conceded 'may seem high today,' but suggested that students are a credit-unworthy lot who should thank their lucky stars that rates aren't 12% or higher. Makes one long for the good-old-days of 3% student loans, doesn't it?"

Comment 2 ideas (Score 1) 266

Contact some modern art facilities like Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, they often have 'new media' as part of their holdings and must have some sort of solution for this sort of work that they use when they obtain them. Lastly, contact the Internet Archive folks and see if you can work out a deal for it to be put into storage in wait for when it will hit public domain. Perhaps they could hold it for public domain use for free if you were willing to voluntarily reduce your copyright term to something more reasonable than a habajillion years past death. :)

Comment Hah! Pitfalls! (Score 1) 296

You've never written software for airplanes, missile or missile defense, or nuclear plants, then! I'd wager that each of those have actual pitfalls rated in human death rather than merely some pissed off administrators because the money wasn't pushed around they way they want it to.

Comment Re:Still Important (Score 1) 571

Because they can't. If you've never dealt with PTC, wolfram, matlab, etc. You don't know how obtuse these licensing agreements are. I remember one of them saying you had to use all the active licenses within a X mile radius of the center of campus, etc.

Comment Find the top 10 users (Score 1) 640

in the past given month, find the top 10, assume these cause the vast majority of the congestion and ask them to find ways to knock it off or they'll have to upgrade to a professional tier of bandwidth. Then, in theory if you keep doing this every month there will be less of the problem of congestion.

Otherwise, implement some sort of automated controls to ratelimit those who cause congestion. Do it based on total traffic volume, not by service.

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