Thursday, May 25, 2006

Lets censor things

"School District to Monitor Student Blogs", that is the name of the article I just finished reading. This was released by the associated press and can be found here.

This article talks about how a schoolboard in Illinois has voted to:
require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

Some may say that this is uncalled for. To this the Associate Superintendent said :
The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

I will be quick to agree that the schoolboard has every right to snoop through students myspace pages which are public. However requiring students to agree to be disciplined for things the schoolboard may find inappropriate is another thing. This is where I draw the line. So now we are limiting what High School students can post on their on webpage? How much longer before we start limiting what college students are allowed to post on their websites? I mean while we are at it should anyone be able to post on their website what someone else may find offensive? Probably not, thank goodness big brother is here to save us from ourselves. Whatever would we do??

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

My favorite bookstore and why

I like to buy books. I like to read books as well but, sometimes I find myself with more money than time. Regardless I try to shop around and find the best prices I can when I buy things. For books, the best way that I have found to get them at a lower than retail price involves Borders. A while back when at my local borders store I allowed the lady who was checking me out to sign me up for the Borders Reward Program. After that almost every Thursday I would receive an e-mail from Borders. This e-mail usually has things like new releases in books and music, it also includes a coupon. The coupons are usually between 20-30% off. From my experience Borders seems to sell most books for list or retail prices. Amazon.com has many books from 20-30% without the use of a coupon. However the shipping is what stops me from buying much from Amazon these days. Even if the price is the same for the book, I am going to have to pay at $3 in shipping and wait 3-5 days. For the impatient/impulse buyers out there, this time frame is not acceptable. Besides anything that my local Borders does not have in stock they will order for free. So when I decide on a new book there are a few steps I take.


1. Check amazon.com and read reviews to make sure that I really want book

2. Goto Isbn.nu and search for the book and find the lowest price possible, if it is only a couple dollars lower I usually choose to buy it local.

3. Goto Borderstores.com and search my local Borders to see if the book is available there or at a Borders in a close by city.

4. If the book that I want is in stock then I simply wait till Thursday to receive my coupon in my e-mail. I sometimes even reserve the book if I am worried about it being there in a day or two.

5. After that I purchase my new book for usually 20-30% less then suggested retail.

Also sometimes on the receipt from Borders there will be a coupon. I am planning on using this system for buying books for college in the fall.


"A room without books is like a body without a soul." - Cicero

 

"Perhaps your grip on reality is not quite as firm as you might have hoped" - Todd Connelly


"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment. -Learned Hand, jurist (1872-1961)

What does all of this do to the best minds among the students? Most of them endure their college years with the teeth-clenched determination of serving out a jail sentence. The psychological scars they acquire in the process are incalculable. But they struggle as best they can to preserve their capacity to think, sensing dimly that the essence of the torture is an assault on their mind. And what they feel toward their school ranges from mistrust to resentment to contempt to hatred – intertwined with a sense of exhaustion and excruciating boredom.

--Ayn Rand Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal