I once had a class where, day one, the professor said something like, “If you don’t want to buy the book, that’s fine with me. I can’t tell you where to find a copy, but maybe one of your classmates can.” Someone raised their hand and started rattling off a few useful websites.
Unfortunately many courses now give assignments through sites that are only accessible by purchasing a textbook with a unique access code
So in every other country if they tried something like that, students would kick up shit, government would step in and sort it
So it’s either, too pussy to stand up for yourselves, or you’re living in a dictatorship
Which is it? 😂
Even worse, they are gaslighted into thinking intellectual property exctracting rent is completely fine and actually desirable.
North American here. Funny how it’s very much less “which is it?” And more “Yeah. Basically.”
We’ve been culturally domesticated to not cause trouble for our bosses / schools / etc. If the State steps in after you cause trouble for enterprise, it’s usually to kick you back into your place.
We might not live in a State dictatorship, but that only matters so far, because that State enables many tiny, petty dictatorships that more directly affect your life and run amok unopposed.
Somehow people accept petty tyranny in everything from corporations to universities to shifts at the burger joint. They’ll get all riled up that some politician they never met is bawking about foreign policy, but their tail is tucked firmly when their company tells them they can’t get sick days and arriving a minute late is a fireable offense.
Many have bought the lies of rugged individualism and competition. “An insult to one is…well, that really sucks for you but I told you to just stay quiet. I’m just working hard doing what I’m told.”
Like someone said before me: Even the most rebellious in us think twice about making our move, because many people simply think “That’s how it is.” And don’t believe it can get any better.
There’s not a lot of examples of collective action winning in recent history, so a lot of people don’t even know how to begin to push back in the first place, besides writing an angry tweet or two.
Selfishness and greed. Anyone that stands up stands alone, and the others are quick to lick a boot as they grovel for scraps. For some inconceivable reason too many consider this preferable to standing together and working to make things better.
It’s not selfishness and greed so often as it is fear and ignorance. Education remedies the ignorance and steels people against the fear that keeps them from working together against a seemingly more powerful force.
i don’t know who’s downvoting you. As an american who had to go through that shit, you’re not at all wrong.
A professor at my university tried that, but the students quite quickly made a huge fuss, got the principals office involved, and the universities lawyers informed said professor that what she was doing was illegal, and that she should stop before she got any more trouble. She stopped.
Where was this? The practice described above is common in US universities.
Your university has a principal’s office?
God bless this professor. Piracy is a victimless crime!
Piracy is a victimless crime, most of the time.
Like punching someone in the dark!
J/K, I have a pavlovian response to the phrase “victimless crime”
Aaar, matey.
The name of my Plex server has been “The Pirate’s Booty” for about a decade 😂
A professor of mine sent me a similar email when I said I was having trouble accessing some journals through the University library portal:
“One should definitely not use Sci-hub, if you catch my drift.”
Too bad it doesn’t have the latest papers. annas-archive is supposed to be growing that database, though.
The California Community College I went to allowed you to filter classes in the schedule by whether they offered ZTC - Zero Textbook Cost or OER - Open Educational Resource.
I have had uni professors sign books to make sure people actually bought new books and not used ones (he wrote them); unfortunately for him i had access to toluene to get pen ink off; did the same to all of my peers; Fuck those kind of professors
What an absolute buffoon.
Do what happened if you bring a book to class already signed?
He threatened you to either buy a new book or he would make your uni career hell, one of my mates did it, at the last exam he sent him back 5 times, the last time he went to take the exam the coordiator said “what else have you got to ask to him; he told you everything in your course; [insert name] give me the paper” he signed the paper and sent him off; the prof. Still gave him only 60/100.
I still want to slap that piece of shit.
After that i teached other people in the uni to do that; he tried to mitigate by writing over the printed title of the book; hoping that any tampering would be evident; toluene didn’t touch the toner, so it didn’t work
That should be illegal. If not illegal, then worthy of a random thug stabbing.
hi 👋
just fyi:
“teach” is one of those words in English that has a different suffix for it’s past-tense: it is “taught”.
Eg. “They taught me to sew.”
“teached” is improper.Note: not to be confused with “taut” which is pronounced the same.
:)
Thank you for pointing out a mistake in a very polite way while being informative. You deserve an applesauce for making a better internet 👏.
I had originally wrote taught but i confused it with “pulling something tight” so i went with what would get the point across even if it was wrong.
Edit: fixed it now
No judgment, I think its interesting the little high-stakes decisions we make like this though.
“Oh no which spelling is it? Is there time to search it up? Oh no my train of thought is fading! Send send send!”
Do Italian professors know their students’ names? Over here, two countries to the North, no professor knows anything about their students.
If you mean Germany: Depends. At my smaller university quite a few professors knew my name and others had something I would consider a friendship.
Sounds like a pos.
Also that sounds very illegal, no complaints have been filled or anything?
Here in italy no one gives a quater of a fuck about that kind of shit. Good thing is that the same can be said when after the last exams he always needs to call a tow truck since he won’t have tires, not even cameras were able to stop them, and i’m quite sure other professors turn a blind eye to them since they also hate him.
I knew you were italian as soon as I read that lol. Basically my uni life too
Buy/collect used books off students after they finish the course… Remove the ink, resell undercutting him by a ton and make a huge profit!
Nah I’m fine with spreading how to remove the sign, there are already enough people capitalizing on instruction here
Time to sell toluene! ~taps temple~
You know what I also hate? When professors take your phone while in class. I had a professor that did that back in my days of gender studies college and he saw nudes of my they/them girlfriend at the time. Mannn it was an awkward rest of the class and he didn’t tell anyone, but I really showed him, ended up taking the day off next day and nailed his wife. Dude never found out or anything, turns out her wife has had countless orgies with several other guys while he’s busy at school teaching students. Still never confirmed whether he found out or not.
Overall, lost my train of thought, in response to your comment they do it to be sure you have the most recent information in the book, don’t see an issue tbh.
The specific case here was the professor had a financial stake in new books being sold.
I do agree updated editions with new information could be important, but again when theres a financial incentive to sell new books, the obvious lean will be towards making new versions even if there is no new information.
Since the books can be required, they should be required to show proof they have substantially added to their edition or else relegate it to a minor revision (maybe adding sub-editions like 1.0, 1.1, 1.2; where you only need the first number to be current). Right now its a whole lot of, “Trust us you need this book and the only pre-owned versions are out of date”.
As a side thought, this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if they use the book costs to weed out those that will not allow themselves to be abused to that degree. This would leave only those who would conform to their leader/manager/teacher and are less likely to try to change the system.
Version 3 is ToTaLlY different from v2, i switched all the chapters around
Cue someone creating a script to convert the new chapters to the old ones!
Side note: to anyone looking to follow this method, please try to limit the amount of toluene you are exposed to by wearing gloves and working in a well ventilated space. It can do dirty shit to your nervous system and I’ve seen chemists start to experience them from relatively little exposure to the fumes.
In general if you can get a respirator or at least an n95 mask if you still have them from covid; also make tries on an old book before going on the good one, at least if you mess up it isn’t another hole punched in your wallet
A respirator with an organic vapor trap will work, but an N95 will do essentially nothing for chemical vapors besides give you a false sense of safety.
If you have nothing, do your work outside and don’t work with your face directly over areas with the toluene.
Fuck Pearson
I bought some university textbooks for university.
Ended up not using most of them.
Most computers science student are used to computers, internet and StackOverflow.
Not paper.
Textbooks that are good references are great. Textbooks that are just another class and withhold the answers are garbage.
There’s nothing wrong with paper books.
I never said there’s something wrong with paper books.
I’m even reading one right now. Lord of Rings paper version.
But for computer science students textbooks, it’s heavy, inconvenient and spacey.
The internet or even PDFs are better.
Why?
It’s easier to do research, CTRL+F and copy/paste some programming code.
If you’re copy pasting code you’re not learning a whole lot.
You’re clearly not a programmer lol
I found this in my first and second year so I stopped buying them.
Half the time it was just “recommended reading” and the book wasn’t even used in class.
Yep, not gonna shell out $120 per book for “recommend reading”
The best investment I made in textbooks was the class that wanted a Schaum’s Outline book, $15 brand new and still a book I use for occasional linear algebra reference.
Here is a PDF of the book you need for this course, you may not share it and the file will self destruct the day after finals. Thanks for the $150
The younger teachers were doing something similar to this. Teachers have to follow certain sets of rules to not get fired.
It was mostly the oldest, gray-haired teachers that were requiring textbooks. Stuck in their old ways.
At least you OWN the text book and can reference it years later. That PDF scam was a real piss off
That might work in other domains other than computer sciences.
But from my experience, nobody cared about books and papers in computer science. Everyone is more comfortable with technology.
You can easily Google or find things on the internet.
The professor that taught my algorithms & data structures course said if we were going to keep one book it should be the one for that course. I followed that advice and it’s the one textbook I still have. It’s been 8 years since graduation and I haven’t opened it once. I tend to just read Wikipedia if I need to understand a particular algorithm or data structure.
Exactly lol. If I were you, I’d try to sell it.
If it’s still relevant, you could also give it to younger students.
Asus had some different ideas about libgen.rs 😯
Yo control your router lol (freshtomato or openwrt or something might be good options)
Seconding the recommendation for OpenWRT - I’ve been using it for years on my routers.
I loved AsusWRT-Merlin back when I used an Asus router.
It’s running Merlin, works pretty well. Then again, all it does is NAT and DHCP (and apparently the parent control thing)
To be fair it might actually be possible to find smut there.
You’re probably correct. It’s the Internet. The Internet is for porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It is one of the rules I think, the 34th?
That professor is legendary
based professor
I had a professor who kept all the materials from the books that he wrote on his website. He was cool with students printing the html pages and bringing it to class.
My fighting my instinct to say * Hello. Based department? *
I often usually post the chapters we use for my classes in case students haven’t bought the book yet. I also have a hard $60 limit for books that I use.
Sites like that saved me thousands getting my psych degree. God bless professors like this. Also the ones who were like, “the new edition of the book you need for this semester is $500, but you can get the previous edition for $5 at this site. Here’s copies of the pages that were changed.” or “I photocopied every page you need for this semester from the book for all of you.”
My Analysis professor once did basically the same thing in class. She said that we should never go to these websites, since they were illegal. Based lady.
