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There is certainly a connection between scientists and mystics; Mystics are scientists.

Consider the following questions:

• How do things work?
• How does consciousness work?
• Does consciousness ever work differently?
• How is it that we are aware?

These are questions that scientists and other technically minded people ask, and they are questions that mystics ask as well. Note that the word "Gnostic", used in this Slashdot intro, means "Understanding".

Of all religious devotees, Mystics are the most scientific, since they constantly try to find the truth through observation, trial, and error. Mystics generally find that the the written word takes second place to first hand repeatable experiments, usually in the form of meditation.

If there is any one thing that would make a mystic out of a scientifically minded person (assuming that the scientist hasn't already taking Socrates' advice to heart and studying their own awareness), it would have to be the hard problem of consciousness, which is essentially, the problem of how we are ever aware of anything at all; why it is that there is something like to be a person (or a butterfly).

If you can explain the universe, but can't explain how it is that you're even aware of it in the first place, you may have just as well just explained a very nice and very neat little dream. Universes are probably a dime a dozen.

Let me put it a completely different way:

If you were a computer programmer, electronics enthusiast, or some other kind of tinkerer, and you come across these concepts of awareness, something called "God", different dimensions, and this mystery of light and sound, which of the following would appeal most to you:

1. Get a book telling you what the truth is, and then say, "Oh, okay; I'll just go along with what this says here."
2. Give up, and say that the problems too hard for you; let someone else bother with such things.
3. Get yourself a DSL connection with the spirit world, have a few chat sessions with God, play around with some different dimensions, and try and figure out what the hell is going on and try to have have some fun.

(Necessary plug: Personally, I practice Surat Shabda Yoga).

There is certainly a connection between scientists and mystics; Mystics are scientists.

Consider the following questions:

• How do things work?
• How does consciousness work?
• Does consciousness ever work differently?
• How is it that we are aware?

These are questions that scientists and other technically minded people ask, and they are questions that mystics ask as well. Note that the word "Gnostic", used in this Slashdot intro, means "Understanding".

Of all religious devotees, Mystics are the most scientific, since they constantly try to find the truth through observation, trial, and error. Mystics generally find that the the written word takes second place to first hand repeatable experiments, usually in the form of meditation.

If there is any one thing that would make a mystic out of a scientifically minded person (assuming that the scientist hasn't already taking Socrates' advice to heart and studying their own awareness), it would have to be the hard problem of consciousness, which is essentially, the problem of how we are ever aware of anything at all; why it is that there is something like to be a person (or a butterfly).

If you can explain the universe, but can't explain how it is that you're even aware of it in the first place, you may have just as well just explained a very nice and very neat little dream. Universes are probably a dime a dozen.

Let me put it a completely different way:

If you were a computer programmer, electronics enthusiast, or some other kind of tinkerer, and you come across these concepts of awareness, something called "God", different dimensions, and this mystery of light and sound, which of the following would appeal most to you:

1. Get a book telling you what the truth is, and then say, "Oh, okay; I'll just go along with what this says here."
2. Give up, and say that the problems too hard for you; let someone else bother with such things.
3. Get yourself a DSL connection with the spirit world, have a few chat sessions with God, play around with some different dimensions, and try and figure out what the hell is going on and try to have have some fun.

(Necessary plug: Personally, I practice Surat Shabda Yoga).

Most of the managers I've worked for, the good ones at any rate, preferred to hire software engineers who had degrees in subjects other than Computer Science, because they knew that they would bring a richer mix of experience and creativity to their work.

Some schools (I'm partial to harvey mudd college, great school, well rounded education) go out of their way to ensure that a broad education even in specialized majors. For instance, CS majors at my school have to take almost as many humanities (history, govt, art, etc) classes as technical classes, which ensures not only an outstanding technical background, but humanitarian insight as to what your technical skills might produce. This humanities background tends to lessen the potential for immoral business practices.

I would say there are certain fields in which having a degree helps more than a certification. Being a software architect does require experience designing large systems, but it helps a lot to have formal software design courses under your belt. Perhaps most importantly, you have reasonable expectations about how long it will take to write a given program. Something that most programmers fail to comprehend unless they've seen the research or done it a half-dozen times: Time spent actually writing the code should be well under 20% of the time budgeted for the entire project. I know it sounds painful, but in terms of programmer hours, companies spend the majority of time in design, fixing defects (bugs to those who regard them as inevitable rather than the product of poor design), and maintenance. This is just an example of the kind of thing you learn in a degree program. Most companies and certifications don't bother with a strong software engineering component, and I think it really contributes to the buggy code we all see every day. Having to take software design as a course and practice doing it right helps.

Also, if your idea of a fun job is to explore things that no one has ever done before, a degree and some research experience is very beneficial. Rather than go work for established software companies, I choose to take my BS from (shameless plus) Harvey Mudd and do research. While most places that are doing research require at least a BS as a standard thing, it makes sense because they don't want to be stuck with someone who has no experience in pursuing open-ended problems with no known solution. If you think you're in a research job, and you don't discover at least occaisonally that what you've been trying to do for the last week has been proved to be impossible, you're not doing research. Having a degree gets you experience with that sort of thing.

Walt

--Ben

*This is not to say that nuclear weapons were the wrong thing at the time but too many of the scientists involved weren't considering the outcome of their work.

--

Usually i dont get into the whole Kharma whoring arguement, but you, sir, are a fucking moron.

I live in california. I live in a state where elections involve literally millions of people, of which 18-24 year olds make up less than 5% of the voting population. I dont know if you read political news, but the politicians in california care about three basic things: 1) rich white vote, that's where their money comes from; 2) minority vote, trying to win over the so far un-swayed mexican voters (who cares if they just crossed the border, they still get to vote because we're too stupid to regulate it); and 3) local voters. Since non of the senatorial candidates are from my area, that throws out option three. I'm white, but far from rich (i owe my college quite a bit), so there goes options one and two... so, how, sir, am i supposed to get the politicians to give a flying fuck about my vote? hmmmmmmm? Your demographics are exactly why my votes dont matter... now all this being said, i do still plan on voting, and who supports napster has nothing to do with my candidates of choice.


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If ignorance is bliss, wipe the smile off my face

I think the problem is you generalize all universities together. Some of us do attend universities where QM is taught to first year undergrads, in the same class as classical mechanics, specifically to avoid the problems that this entire thread seems to be experiencing.

Furthermore, my college adds a few classes involving relativity to further understanding of abstract ideas and prevent us from making moronic (although probably troll-induced) comments such as (i'm paraphrasing) light is a wave and has no momentum. So I think the really big problem here isn't backwards teaching, its over generalizations, not only with these posts, but with the science behind the posts.

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If ignorance is bliss, wipe the smile off my face

The department had continued problems, though, with students too lazy to install ssh clients on their own desktops who would telnet into one of the other campus Unix machines and then ssh into the CS servers. Of course, this completely defeats the security. Warnings and reprimands didn't work; the staff eventually had to implement automatic filtering to stop people from doing this.

Poorly-behaved users will make any security scheme worthless. The most important thing IT departments can do to improve their security is help users understand why it's important, and what they can do to help. Many students don't realize that when they leave their own box insecure or broadcast their own password over the network, they are not only endangering themselves. A single weak point on a LAN endangers everyone, and makes it easier for an attacker to breach every other box on the network. Keeping your own accounts and connections secure is part of being a good neighbor to those whose systems you share.

While SunOS is certainly a better choice than Linux for the big server, I think it would be nice to have Linux available on at least some of the graphics workstations. Not only does Linux have some advantages over SunOS, especially on a workstation (I personally would rather have the GNU tools available by default than Sun's proprietary versions), it would also provide a more diverse environment and allow us to develop programs on multiple OSs and architectures.

Countries with stricter porn laws, for example, will need to code computers to recognize the naked human (animal?) form, and ban such images/sites.

Believe it or not, this is actually an area of research in computer vision. e.g. See 'Naked people skin filter'. The opportunity for commercial exploitation of an effective porn search tool is ... great.

The following site deals with this issue. It doesn't necessarily have an unbiased opinion, but it does back up its statements with references and is pretty good WRT history and what is currently going on.

http://www3.hmc.edu/~pboothe/bio

Enjoy.

--bitemysquirrel

The people who say "get a real education in the foundations of CS" are right. Trade schools are short-term. A fundamental education will last you a lifetime.

If you want a really tough school that specializes in educating the smartest scientists and engineers in the country, you might consider Harvey Mudd College. We're expensive (though financial aid is available, like most places) and we're hard to get into and hard to get through. But if you can cut the mustard, I think we offer a better undergrad education than CMU, MIT, or Caltech. (If you can get into HMC, you can probably get into any of the other three, so it's your choice.)

Disclaimer: I'm on the faculty, so I might be the teensiest bit prejudiced. :-)

The people who say "get a real education in the foundations of CS" are right. Trade schools are short-term. A fundamental education will last you a lifetime.

If you want a really tough school that specializes in educating the smartest scientists and engineers in the country, you might consider Harvey Mudd College. We're expensive (though financial aid is available, like most places) and we're hard to get into and hard to get through. But if you can cut the mustard, I think we offer a better undergrad education than CMU, MIT, or Caltech. (If you can get into HMC, you can probably get into any of the other three, so it's your choice.)

Disclaimer: I'm on the faculty, so I might be the teensiest bit prejudiced. :-)

Gimp
X-Accountant (Quicken Clone)
Quicken for linux?
Flight Gear

One educational program:
Nightfall

look before you speak, this took my 3 minutes to find. :)

A geophysics profesor here at Harvey Mudd does topology mapping with GPS. Some details are at. HMC Geodesy Page