One of my favorite ways of wasting time, Hulu.com, is offering a multitude of free programs and movies available in high definition for a limited time. Plus, no commercial! What a great way to use that super-fast college Internet you have been wasting.
Hulu is a site we have previously talked about owned by Universal (NBC) and News Corp. (Fox) so a lot of your favorite shows like Heros, Lost, and Prison Break were already there.
According to a recent story published in the New York Times, Ansett Australia, an Australian airline company, does not allow gay people on their flights:
While I was in high school, one of my best friends had the shock of almost losing her brother due to some death-defying mountain climbing. Fortunately, her brother Travis lived, though he lost the ability to move his legs. Some recent research developments in China have the opportunity to help him walk again. After so many years, this would be a miracle. Help this wonderful family achieve this dream by assisting them to reach the target donation of $20,000 for the operation. Every little bit counts. If you can donate $2, do so instead of eating that unhealthy McBurger for lunch.
Donate to the fund set up by Travis’ best friend Peter by sending money through PayPal to travis_fund@hotmail.com.
A few years back, Travis was involved in a horrific accident, falling about 50 feet off a cliff and into a waterfall. Luckily, his cell phone worked even though it had been completely submerged in the water, and he was able to call for help. However, he paid quite a price — He is now paralyzed from the waist down after his legs were crushed by the fall.
Textbook piracy, though not even closely as prevent as music and movies, has been around since PDFs were invented. The New York Times has recently discovered that it exists:
AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. (The contributor’s message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)
Though it is needed to say that the Pirate Bay does not actually post the illegal files, but instead users of the site do.
How do publishers establish that textbooks should cost so much? I remember back in my high school days, I bought my Gardner’s 1,000-page Art History book for about $50. Now, my 200 page physics book is going to cost $200? I don’t see the rationality behind it. Aren’t college students supposed to be poor like me, or is there something I do not know.
I have always liked owning my own books. I even buy them new for the extra cleanliness. But after seeing my textbooks are going to cost almost $900 for this next semester, I am almost inclined to go on the Pirate Bay and search for every single one of them.
At 47 years of age, Randy Pausch, the famous Carnegie Mellon professor, has just died last night at 4am many months pasted his due date. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has outliving all expectations. He was famous for his “Last Lecture” which we have previously written about here at College Being. His life lessons should influence every one of us and in his own words, it is a shame that he had to be a dying man in his forties for us to acknowledge this. Buy his book titled “The Last Lecture” or view the actual last lecture below.
