Broken American Higher Education System Encourages Illegal Activities

Jeremiah Mondello was a damn good software salesman. While he was still in college, he started a backyard eBay business that earned  him some $300,000 in three years, mostly shipping Intuit's Quicken financial software at the rock-bottom price of about $30 a pop.

His secret? He pirated the software, burned it onto counterfeit discs and laundered his profits through a series of PayPal accounts established under stolen identities. This week a federal judge sentenced the 23-year-old to four years in prison for identity theft, copyright violation and mail fraud, in a prosecution hailed by the Justice Department as a warning shot to software counterfeiters.

"I just sold a few to pay for gas and lunch. I was on financial aid. I didn't want to take out any more student loans," he said. "That was the starting motivation. Later, I guess I kind of decided I thought it would be a good idea to save some money and start my own business and do some travel."

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Poor Standardized Test Questions

This question is a practice question for the ERB (fourth-grade standardized) tests in America:

Sara wants to measure how much applesauce she made this fall. If she uses metric, which unit should she use?

A) gram
B) liter
C) kilogram
D) centimeter

See the discussion here on just how bad of a question this is. It really reflects poorly on how good of an understanding even the writer has of the SI system of measurement (which has been taught in the US since the passage of the Education Amendments in 1974).