For starters there really are some professions, not just Wall Street, where you have to have a degree from an accredited institution in order to work. Medicine for example, or engineering, or law, are all going to require the proper degrees in order to get certified to work in the field. You may not find that work interesting but clearly a lot of people do and pursue those careers by getting the education required to get started. Higher ed isn't just a bunch of handwaving and bullshit designed to fool HR into interviewing you.

The crippling debt thing is such an overblown myth too, but maybe you'd realize that if you'd actually gone to college. Just like any other investment or major purchase there are smart ways of buying and education and stupid ways of doing it. Even with rising tuition you can get a good education at a state school and come out with a little or no debt if you keep a job and live within your means while a student. I finished my Bachelors with only $5K in student loan debt for example.

Students and their parents just have to keep in mind that higher ed is an investment, not some extended fantasy camp for spoiled kids which seems to be the universal failing of most families you hear interviewed about crushing debt burdens from higher ed. "Oh my precious Tiffany would've been heartbroken if I'd told her we couldn't afford for her to go to Vanderbilt for her degree in underwater basket weaving... so we took out 150K in loans a year and are now fucked because she's only earning 8.50 an hour as a part-time docent at a folk-art museum in bum fuck Oklahoma" That makes for a great news story some how but really isn't representative of most people's college experience.

There's generally two smart ways to approach your college investment, assuming you don't have rich parents. One is simply to go to your local state college, work part time and live frugally while studying. You'll come out of it with manageable debt and a leg up starting your career. Or if you're smart, driven and talented enough you can bet big, pay out the ass for a prestigious degree and home the gamble pays off with a rock-star job that'll make the $200K in student loans manageable. I know exactly one person who's pulled that off, she went straight from Stanford law to a job with a top ten law firm making around $180k/year to start. You don't take on that sorta of risk without a clear plan for a payoff.

Of course as has already been pointed out a lot of the examples listed in the summary were of tech billionaires that went to college, made the connections they needed to be a success and started their businesses before graduating. They dropped out because their college investment had already paid off without the degree.

So does Agora know we're organizing an event there or are we just showing up and making some room for ourselves?

I'm assuming you'll be setup inside somewhere a little early with a sign or something obvious enough for us to spot you?

Looking forward to the geekness tonight :)

-Josh

>> $20 billion AUS dollars

>And how much is that in real money?

About $20,484,000,000 USD.

You're both right.

E. Coli naturally lives in the bovine digestive track and older strains of it had no tolerance to a highly acidic environments - a grass fed ruminate's stomachs have a fairly neutral pH - and so weren't a threat to humans if we consumed any. Feeding cattle a lot of corn lowers the pH in their stomachs enough that E. Coli strains have now evolved enough of an acid tolerance to survive in our guts and do bad things to us.

Cattle get sick a lot easier with the more acidic stomachs, since they never evolved a digestive track capable of handling strong acids, which is only exacerbated by the conditions they live in at the feedlot so they have to fed antibiotics by the shovel full every day just to survive long enough to be slaughtered. Thus the now acid tolerant E. Coli also gets a chance to evolve tolerance to a wide array of antibiotics.

Finally modern slaughter houses run so fast, mostly with untrained immigrant labor, that they can't even be bothered to butcher the animals carefully enough to avoid getting shit all over the meat. The shit contains E. Coli and when you eat this meat (especially meat ground at the factory) you end up eating some of this infected shit.

Cheers,

In my experience the only people who have a positive opinion of the TSA are people that don't ever come into contact with them, i.e. people that don't fly. Experienced travelers pretty nearly universally hate the TSA and think the agency is a waste of resources that does nothing to improve their safety.

Cheers,

Public
Service
Announcement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_service_announcement

Cheers,

I applaud the EFF's efforts here but I seriously doubt this will make a difference on the ground in China, even if Cisco were to see the light and speak up on behalf the dissidents. I also think the EFF is mistaken about which way influence flows in the CCP-Cisco relationship. Like any Western company doing major business with China, Cisco has had to jump through all sorts of hoops, hand over a large amount control of local operations to party apparatchiks and work under contracts that change significantly and frequently after being signed.

Cisco's position in China is so compromised at this point that I don't see how they could stand up to the CCP in this case without pulling out of the Chinese market entirely and I just don't mean stop selling in China. They have suppliers, production facilities, hundreds of directly employees not to mention billions of dollars of IP in China. All of that is vulnerable to CCP action if Cisco were to get on their bad side. China isn't like the West, the government won't need warrants or due process to arrest Cisco employers, seize facilities and IP or just choke off Cisco's supply train like they did with rare earths a few months ago.

Cisco is in too deep to take a stand at this point, they have more to lose than the CCP does. The CCP has demonstrated repeatedly that human rights aren't a concern for them and given their hostile reaction whenever a Western government or NGO (Nobel Committee) explicitly or implicitly criticizes their human rights record they aren't exactly concerned about their international image either. Cisco on the other hand pretty much can't win this no matter what they do. Just like most any Western company doing big business in China these days.

Cheers,

Josh

When hurricane Ike made landfall in Houston in 2008 most of the city was without electricity for a good two weeks. I spent several hours a night reading paper books by the light of oil lamps. No one was burning books for fuel or looting homes for paper books to wipe their asses with.

Believe it or not even in the USA it's possible to loose electrical service long enough to drain the batteries in all your toys for reasons other than the zombie apocalypse.

I can't speak for the OP but I'm just not that into group/party/social video games, or console style games in general for that matter. When people are over we're usually to busy eating and drinking and bullshitting with each other to bother with a game. If anyone feels like playing a something, board games and card games are a lot more fun (for me) at a party than video games.

When I feel like playing video games I just prefer to reboot my PC into windows and find something in steam to play on my own. For me video games are something I spend time on when I don't feel like being productive or social, which is pretty rare actually.

Cheers,

Josh

Same here in Houston actually, except for downtown during the work week but it's not confined to AT&T. My co-workers that refused to switch to AT&T to get an iPhone because the shitty network had a very hard landing when they got to work with there new Verizon iPhones and encountered the reality of oversaturated cell towers on their network as well. Even just walking a mile outside of downtown drastically improves services here. At home, about 10 miles out of downtown, AT&T data and voice service is just spiffy. Of course YMMV depending on where you live...

Which is probably why Houston didn't get one of the retired shuttles or the Enterprise. JSC does indeed play an important role in manned spaceflight operations but Space Center Houston is a bit sad compared the Air and Space Museum or Kennedy Space Center. When I first moved down here - please someone help me escape! - I was shocked to see the Saturn V just sitting out by the side of the road falling apart. It's in better shape now but the hangar they built for it looks like a very large pre-fab "Tuff Shed" from the home improvement store, not really what I'd call inspiring. The rest of the Space Center's visitor activities are likewise in pretty sad shape and most of it of Springfield Elementary School field trip grade to begin with.

Yeah I noticed that when they showed Comcast at the top of the heap for my area with 50-100mbps. Which is a fucking joke, I never got those speeds with them even when the connection was working...

I hadn't realized Ubuntu was now the bad Linux, thanks random article from tech website I've never heard of! I'll go wipe this scourge from my desktop and replace it with an even trendier distro right away!

Wait before I do that can anyone tell me who or what the hell itmanagement.earthweb.com is and why should I give two shits what they say about Ubuntu or any other distro? I really have to discount the ramblings of any 'publication' that has the following headline anywhere on it's site "53 Open Source Replacements to Spice Up Your Desktop" which appears in the related stories box for this article. What is this Cosmo for penguin fetishists? Shouldn't crap like this be on idle or something?

Cheers,

Josh

Or even more idiot proof - don't turn the phone on / plug it into the bomb until you're ready to start the bombing run...

To keep the suicide bomber from getting cold feet and walking away at the last minute.