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.

[Source: New York Times]

Note: College Being does not directly support downloading of illegal material. We only subtlety mention all the positives about it.

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.

Resources:
Randy’s Website
Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch Memorial Fund

The famous Last Lecture:

Sex may not always be as glamorous and clean as Hollywood makes it out to be nor as energetic or dirty as the porn industry depicts. Here is the first semi-accurate depiction of sex outside of your roommate’s amateur footage he hides under his bed. Semi NSFW.

The news. Is it a source of information, or just a means of massive mind manipulation? When should we listen and when should we click the off button? Does it truly do the function it is meant to do: inform, and allow for a democratic society, or is it just a mask behind a homogenous group of control? Does the news stimulate positive reactions full of hope, joy, and happiness, or does it stimulate fear? Fear as the perfect weapon for control. Who is behind this massive mind control?

These are questions I have posed again and again. I am befuddled, till this day. I turn on the television and read the newspaper and all I see and all I hear is a repetition of the same events again and again and again, events that always seem to evoke all fear possible within my veins. A fifteen year old girl raped and killed, a seventeen year boy holding the gun, an old man strangling his family, a young baby dead on the floor. If it does not involve kidnapping, killing, rapping, drugs, and crimes the news would be no news at all.

Is what is truly happening in the world this devastating? Has the world always been this violent? I seem to think it has. But why does it give the impression that the world is always about to fall into a deep black whole? If it is not global warming, if it is not war, if it is not oil availability and prices of oil, or if it isn’t this talk of recession, we would have little to look for in the future. Is the truth that humans seek conflicts and need such conflicts during the entirety of our existence? Do we get excited in the name of conflicts? Or is the true nature of our species one that seeks to find the conflicts in order to fix them? Are we killing gorillas or are we saving them? Do we pollute the world or do we invest to save it? Do we destroy or do we heal?

The truth is, that it is neither. News tells us it’s both, in very appealing ways making us believe it is the same non-controversial idea. The news maneuvers our mind to think about all these things and join causes. Save Darfur. Save the environment. But does it make a difference? Did we in fact land on the moon? Is the United States going to launch a mission to mars soon with actual human beings or is it a preparation to continue “news” after this political surge ceases in a few months following November?

Is there an actual war? Or is this another 1984? I could have sworn we were against terrorism here. And wasn’t there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Or was that Iran? Sorry, I forget it’s the same country, and Afghanistan the capital. And while we think and wonder about the success of the war, and protest against it while others praise it, and while men die in battle and failure of establishing a stable democratic political system, the “news” is going and going and going. Shut it up. Shut it up. But then again, who to shut up? Who is behind this homogenous spread of “truth”?