PA Sues Online 'University' For Spamming 313
CousinLarry writes "Online 'university' Trinity Southern University (Google cache of disabled site homepage) has been sued by the state of Pennsylvania." Besides spamming, this self-described school has, as another reader points out, "awarded an MBA to a cat owned by an undercover Pennsylvania deputy attorney general." I bet my cat could get a PhD.
Real Victim (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens when you don't force accreditation (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:uce@ftc.gov (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What happens when you don't force accreditation (Score:3, Insightful)
As for employees most don't worry about it. Thier is a set of books which they use, they look up the school and can check who it is a accedited by and dates. The human resource department does this, at the same time it is verifing that the person actually graduated.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What happens when you don't force accreditation (Score:4, Insightful)
With your great education have you even looked at education beyond your own borders? Do you think other governments aren't capable of recognising the place for rewarding success? Do you think governments are incapable of intervening when they see failure?
In the UK there's no obligation to go to your local school, you can pick any as long as you have the grades to get accepted - and others in Europe can pick one of our universities too. Yet in the US if you don't have the necessary cash you may well be forced to stay in state and go to a local school rather than explore the best that should be available to your academic ability.
I would still take a mediocre private education over the best our Government can offer, thanks.
Ever head of Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Glasgow, Edinburgh? If your government can't offer better perhaps it's time you elect a new government? Free market education determines that access is based as much on wealth as it is on academic ability. That's plain wrong.
Re:What happens when you don't force accreditation (Score:3, Insightful)
It harms the reputation of ALL online schools, and American schools in general. If a person is born poor, and works his ass off to go to a good school that he can afford...one that isn't well known...then that school is much more likely to be dismissed as worthless by a prospective employer now.
The point isn't that the people who started this online "school" might (since its only "might") go to prison, the point is that the damage is already done, and for every one of these you remove, another dozen will have found a loophole in the unrestrainted market and will be doing the same thing again. A cat got a degree? Ok, so the next fake online school will simply have you verify age, and species. Maybe take a test that any 4th grader could pass, and give you a "MBA" if you pass it. Tada.
The damage is still done. Maybe not to those who can afford to go to internationally reknown Ivy league schools...but not everyone can afford to go to those. There is a happy medium between complete government control, and none at all.
Re:Real Victim (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real Victim (Score:1, Insightful)
Depends on what you expect from one (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people seem to like the unconditional obedience of an animal hard-coded to obey the pack leader. Even if the "pack leader" is a human.
In that case it's "Bowser is soo smart. He comes here when I call him!" And typically also "bah, cats are dumb/evil/etc because they can't be bothered to obey."
Some of us, on the other hand, have no need for basically a biological Tamagochi hard-wired to obey.
We like a cat precisely _because_ it's independent and doesn't need a "master". Cats are not pack animals, so they really have neither a "master", nor "servants" or "staff". You may be a cat's room mate, or friend, or a danger to be avoided, or (in rare cases) even an enemy. Either way, you can know that it's the cat's genuine assessment of you, and not some hard-wired reflex kicking in.
So we tend to generalize and anthropomorphise the other way around. "Yay, Fluffy is so smart because she can think for herself and doesn't need a master." And conversely "Dogs are complete retards for _needing_ to be someone's slave."
In reality, both points of view are false and based on false premises.
An animal's intelligence is what helps it stay alive in its natural environment, _not_ how well it fits your emotional need. In that aspect, both felines and dogs/wolves are "smart", just in different ways.
Wolves have perfected survival by hunting larger prey in packs, so teamwork and having a pack leader is essential. A lone wolf can't kill, say, a deer, so acting as a pack is what their very survival depends on. So for the pack to work, the animals are basically hard-wired to follow and obey the leader. It's a survival trait.
Felines on the other hand, with some exceptions (e.g., lions), live on prey they can kill one-on-one. Not only they don't need a pack to hunt, and not only there isn't enough meat on their prey to feed a whole pack, but a pack would also get in the way of stealth. If you've watched a cat hunt a mouse, you've noticed that it relies on not being seen until it gets within relatively short range. Trying to do that as a whole pack of cats, would just dramatically increase the chances of being detected early.
Hence, for cats the survival trait was to _not_ follow someone else.
Both approaches work, so they're both intelligent.
The real criminal (Score:2, Insightful)
Trinity is the victim of fraud. Not that they appear to work very hard to avoid it, but why is the DAG working so hard to entrap them?