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The process of earning your profit can easily counteract the effects of spending your profit on charity, however. The wealthy often realize this paradox when they begin "giving back". The Gates Foundation itself has been accused many times of investing in things that completely undermine its goals. This editorial from 2014 is just one example.; I recall hearing similar claims about investments in totally different industries almost 10 years ago

How you get your profit makes a big difference in what net accomplishments your money can achieve. If your earning provides great support to systems that keep poor countries unstable or work against universal improvements for humanity, but then you wish to spend your profits on humanist goals, then what was the point? I'd rather you'd just become a janitor instead of digging holes in human society and then desperately filling them back in, hoping you might create mountains in the process.

Exactly. The intro to programming class at Stanford (CS106A) is one of the most popular classes offered - something like 20% of the undergrad class takes it each year. And there really isn't that much attrition.

As you say, the reason it's so popular (besides the fact that it is a trendy subject right now) is that the course is very well designed and has excellent, engaging teachers. I'm sure it has attracted a lot more students to computer science than it has scared away.

Then again, the majority of undergrads have already taken AP Calculus, English Lit, Spanish/French, etc in high school, so it's silly to think they would not be able to "grasp" Java. Like it enough to pursue a CS degree? Maybe not. Understand it? Come on...

Google itself, which largely went along with China's censorship in order to gain market share

I'm sorry, but I can't let this attempt to re-write history pass. Google did not "largely [go] along with China's censorship". They withdrew from Chain after the Chinese government meddling got too much for them. They withdrew from they know will almost certainly be the world's largest market on a point of principle for pete's sake - the very principle you are claiming they happily went along with.

Stanford computer science enrollment of undergraduates more less tracks IPO fever in SIlicon Valley with peaks in the late 1990s and now . The same trend was observed at MIT. In both places 85% of the undergraduates are US citizens and 65% are women and/or minorities. This seems to say that quick money is the draw.

In the ivies 20% to 40% of undergraduates take jobs in financial services, with the number directly tracking the salaries offered in these fields too. The mid 2000s was a peak, late 2000s a low.

I am not a lawyer, so this isn't legal advice, just my experience. I have sued a number of times (and won) in small claims court, including in Santa Clara County -- where Mountain View is located as it happens. I know of someone in Florida who files small claims spam cases in California and flies in for the hearing. Nolo Press has a great book dedicated to small claims court in California Incidentally, in California lawyers aren't allowed to represent clients in small claims cases, although they are allowed for the re-trial if the defendant appeals a loss. As far as collections goes, handily enough VeriSign is also in Santa Clara County. So rather than chase down a spammer in some far off state to collect, you can just threaten to go down the road and seize a non-paying defendant's business property i.e. their .com domain name if they don't pay.

As the Nolo Press book explains, you can file two $7500 small claims lawsuits a year and an unlimited number of $2500 suits. California law awards $1000 per illegal spam. Santa Clara county even has specific rules for filing two or more small claims cases at the same time. So for example I filed simultaneously two lawsuits both against the defendants for 8 spam each per lawsuit. The two cases were heard at the same time and ultimately I collected $16000 plus interest. (In the course of the cases I also raised $40,000 for Second Harvest and the Darfur Stove Project charities...)

When I was in graduate school/postdoc, I wrote for the Stanford Daily a couple of times for fun as way to practice my writing skills. One of the articles I wrote was on this research. Interestingly, I interviewed Nobel winner Douglas Osheroff and he shared his thoughts with me on this research. If memory serves me, he thought it was interesting, but prematurely published.

Interesting to look back on this in light of this finding.

Ever since it was Exposed that Mr. Cringely blatantly lied about having a PhD and being Stanford professor, I don't think anybody cares about his opinion anymore.

cringely claims a lot of things, but you shouldn't always believe him.

actually he crossed the line to troll a long time ago when it was revealed he lied about having a PhD..

instead of a cringely topic in the prefs, how about a "liars" topic?

Acknowledging that undergraduate advising and mentoring programs at the university fall "below the standards" set in other undergraduate education reforms, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman announced several new initiatives that should significantly alter the experience for students and their advisers. ...

Bravman cited a number of issues that have contributed to disappointing experiences for many.

-Faculty participation in advising has dropped from as much as 48 percent in the late 1970s to 12 to 15 percent today, partly due to ever-increasing demands on their time.

-Some advisers complained that they were matched with groups of students with nothing in common with each other or their adviser and felt uncomfortable participating in the standard socialization events. He said some faculty also complained about having too much information to digest when they became advisers.

-Many students do not take full advantage of advising opportunities or resources. He said his own experience since 1992 has shown that 23 percent of students who had scheduled appointments with him didn't show up.

-Students are increasingly arriving at the university with complex personal issues, including many who take psychotropic medications, which add another challenge to a sound advising program.

-Too many over-corrective efforts for advising have resulted in too many specialized groups and a general sense of confusion for many students. Bravman said programs have been offered through residential education, the advising center and the office of the Dean of Freshmen and Transfer Students, as an example.

"We have added layer upon layer upon layer and one of the results of that is that there's a total information overload and a total block about where to go to get even the most basic questions answered," Bravman said.

Sounds like they don't know what they are doing.

President John Hennessy looks like he'll get even richer in this Stanford Daily article of May 21, 2004, by Michael Miller (emphasis mine, not in the original article):

In a separate development, University President John Hennessy took a position on the board of Google in late April, as one of three company outsiders that Google added to its corporate board before its IPO. Hennessy was granted 65,000 shares of stock when he joined the board. These shares could potentially be worth millions of dollars, depending on the eventual stock value.

Hennessy took the position--his third corporate board membership--based on his experience with Silicon Valley and technology companies, Stanford spokesperson Gordon Earle said. Hennessy cofounded MIPS Computer Systems in 1984, and he now also serves on the boards of Cisco Systems and Atheros Communications. Earle added that Hennessy would remove himself from any dealings that connect Google and Stanford.

Does anybody seriously believe that there's no conflict of interest? Hennessey's textbook (coauthored with Dave Patterson of the University of California, Berkeley) on computer architecture is taught using MIPS assembly language (MIPS is Hennessey's company). So in addition to earning something like $461,656 a year (http://advancement.sdsu.edu/marcomm/news/clip

There are two things that could be at work here. First, scientists may hate everything to do with cold fusion and not want to see it go anywhere. And/Or, Two, the media may be fueling the perception that scientists don't want anything to do with it.

I spoke with a nobel laureate physicist about cold fusion. I found that while he didn't think there was much to cold fusion (it isn't his primary area of research, but if he can't comment on it, who can?), I didn't get the feeling he held the anomosity usually attributed to the scientific community at large. (I frankly don't either) I think that the media plays a significant role in blackening the field. Kind of like the kid on the playground who eggs on fights, but never participates in them.

Scientists believe in publication, in particular good ones. If cold fusion-ites publish interesting/good research on the subject, they will be recognized. As pointed out in the above link, there was a seemingly cold fusion-like experiment that was published in science quite recently (it isn't quite cold fusion, because the events themselves are hot and very small).

Most scientists deal with skeptical peers regularly, this isn't just a property of the cold fusion community. That said, just because there is a conference on it doesn't make it real or even interesting. I personally find it interesting, but I wouldn't bet on seeing commercial applications of this in our lifetimes.

-Sean

Slashdot isn't journalism. Kuro5hin isn't journalism.

You make some pretty broad statements here, and, IMO they suggest you either make these statements too lightly or you really don't understand journalism. On some level articles written by journalists are simply an array of collected facts, organized in such a way as to tell a story.

/.'s (and to a lesser extent k5) problem is that often the story is one fact and the link is simply to a single other piece of journalism. When multiple links are collected, as is also often the case, the story enters a gray area.

I am not a journalist. I am a scientist. I have, however, written several stories for the stanford daily as an interesting side project.

K5 stories are often researched and contain many facts pulled together into a new and interesting way.

Just because you link something on the web doesn't make it *not* journalism. BTW - As much as some /.'ers don't like to admit it, Jon Katz is the closest thing /. has to a journalist.

-Sean