American military leadership preventing the Nazis then the Soviets from dominating Europe
The Soviets prevented the Nazis from dominating Europe. The US -- along with the UK and yes, damn it, France -- played an important secondary role, but secondary was all it was. Hitler's regime was doomed the moment he decided to invade Russia, not a moment before... and had he not made that decision, and the world had been treated to the entertaining spectacle of two paranoid dictators devoted to diametrically opposed ideologies pretending to be best friends for a few more years, the Western Allies wouldn't have had a prayer of beating him.
If Alice does not want to accept the responsibilities that go along with ownership of it, should it not go to the next rightful person?
There is no "next rightful person" in this scenario. If Alice chooses to assert ownership, that's her right. If she doesn't, nobody owns it -- certainly not Bob, and not Chuck or Dave either.
The patent system is meant to protect an inventor's rights.
The purpose of the patent system, in the US at least, is clearly spelled out in the Constitution. The phrase "inventor's rights" does not appear.
the patent system is so fundamentally screwed up
On this point, you and I are in total agreement.;)
The second person is not always a "patent troll." Sometimes they are merely a researcher unfortunate enough to be second.
Fair enough. And there's nobody stopping people who do their own research from publishing it. It may be a little more difficult to get research published in a field where others have already done lots of work, but it's by no means impossible. But the reality is that there are a hell of a lot of patent trolls out there, trying to make a buck off someone else's work and producing nothing of their own.
If the first researcher doesn't wish to accept the responsibility that comes with his invention, why not allow the second?
Because the first researcher is the only one who has that right. "Accepting responsibility" is a fine-sounding phrase, but in this case what it really means is "taking other people's money."
Allowing consumers to avoid licensing fees seems a selfish reason to me.
You could put it that way. You could also put it as "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts," which doesn't strike me as selfish at all.
The scenario I outlined above is a realistic one; it's played out, with minor variations, all the time (and very often reported here on Slashdot.) I'll say it again: nobody wins. Absolutely nobody benefits when patent trolls sit on other people's work, not even the trolls themselves unless they can con other people into going along with their crooked game. Working to change this, to provide a way for somebody to benefit, is to bring patent law more in line with its stated intent.
If Dave does get the patent overturned, who benefits then? Obviously he does, and Chuck does. If the product is successful, ultimately so does Alice -- the currency of academic researchers is prestige, and being known as "the inventor of this wonderful product from ChuckCo Inc." isn't going to do her career any harm. The only person who loses is Bob, who (a) didn't deserve anything in the first place, and (b) wasn't going to get any money anyway.
Allowing the patent to stand, whether or not the inventor of the prior art cares, is still wrong. Consider the following scenario: Alice, a researcher, publishes an article describing a useful invention, but neither patents the invention nor exploits it commercially. Bob, a patent troll, files a patent on the same invention, and whether through ignorance or intent doesn't mention the prior art. Chuck, a manufacturer, wants to make a product using the invention, but can't do so because of Bob's patent. Dave, a consumer who thinks that Chuck's product would be really useful and would like to buy it if it ever comes to market, contacts Alice to let her know about the situation. Alice says, "You know, I really don't care about that any more, and I'm working on something else these days." She may be telling the truth, or she may be lying out of fear of reprisal from Bob; either way, Chuck and Dave are SOL.
Nobody wins. Chuck's not going to pay Bob's exorbitant licensing fees, and Dave doesn't have the capacity to manufacture the product himself. So what's Dave supposed to do? Contacting the patent office seems like a reasonable response, and if Dave has reason to suspect that Alice will blow him off before the whole process starts, the patent office is really the first place he should go.
So I wonder sometimes where this persistent stereotype of the "techie" comes from.
To be fair, there are a lot of techies who kind of aggressively live down to the stereotype. I always want to tell them, "You know, it's okay to shower regularly and get some exercise and subsist on something other than Fritos and Mountain Dew. Nobody's going to take away your geek membership card. You'll still be smart!" But for the most part, the stereotype is imposed by people who have no useful skills whatsoever, technical or otherwise.
I see programmers who are convinced the "soft skills" of other professionals are easy to pick up and practice and they could be doing any job in the company.
Those skills aren't necessarily easy, but the contempt which many programmers display for people who brag about them is based on the absurdity of the idea that an MBA or the like confers those skills, which the evidence clearly shows isn't true. If you've spent the last several years of your life studying computer science, you're not necessarily going to be a good manager or salesman -- but you have just as good a shot at it as the guy who's spent an equal number years in b-school, and additionally you learned something useful, while he didn't. Or to put it more simply: put an MBA in a programmer's job for a day, and the programmer in the MBA's job, and which one do you think will figure out the new job faster?
I'm sorry, but as someone who has recently been exposed to pair programming I can say you're talking out of your backside. If a programmer can't deal with pair programming them they're a very poor programmer.
Or maybe they just don't want to deal with insulting twits who think that the latest and greatest buzzword is the One True Way to write code.
Well, frankly, you need to be able to communicate those details,
Yes.
so you _should_ be able to talk to somebody about the coding while you're doing it.
No.
Talking about your code while you're writing it is not the same thing as writing effective documentation, or even explaining the code verbally, after the fact. The latter is vital to to any non-trivial programming project; the former may be an effective technique on occasion, but most of the time it's utterly destructive to good programming. The best code is written by one programmer staring at the screen and thinking really hard -- specifically, thinking a lot more than typing or talking.
It is obvious from your description your main goal here was to screw over the person filing the patent as there is no way you would go to that effort otherwise
This may come as a shock to you, AC, but sometimes people do the right thing because it's the right thing. Sometimes they even put a fair amount of effort into it.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of a corporation, nor granting rights to same.
I'm all for getting rid of the stupid idea of corporate personhood, but I suspect your proposed amendment would make things worse, not better. Remember that "respecting" in the First Amendment, which you use as your boilerplate, doesn't mean "treating respectfully," which is how we usually use the word these days; it means "with respect to," i.e. "having to do with," which was the more common usage in the 18th c. Basically you'd be giving corporations the same legal status as churches have today. And a clever lawyer would argue -- and probably convince the courts -- that additionally, corporations would still have the legal rights of persons, because Congress doesn't "grant" rights, but rather rights are pre-existing. So we'd end up with corporations which have all the perks they currently enjoy, plus we couldn't tax them. No thanks.
Rule of law is a good thing; but a society heading down the path of "All that is not strictly and precisely forbidden is licit" is too sick to survive.
A society that does not embrace the idea of "All that is not strictly and precisely forbidden is licit" with regards to the law is a society of slaves.
Of course there are social mores. There are plenty of things you shouldn't do which aren't, and shouldn't be, illegal; and if you do those things, the people around you will let you know their disapproval. But when it comes to the law, the awesome power of the state wielded against the individual, that which is forbidden must be spelled out strictly and precisely, and we must be able to do anything which is not thus forbidden without legal penalty. There is no alternative for any society which wishes both to survive and to be free.
If I were buying a MBP right now, the model I'd get (15" display, 2.93 GHz Core Duo, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB HD) would cost $2800 US. The closest comparable Dell I could come up with on their site costs $2200 US. A comparable HP is $2300 US. So yeah, there's a "Mac premium," but it's nowhere near what you're making it out to be. Did I mention that I like having an OS that doesn't fight me? I think I did.
Murder rates were about 25% higher in 1989 than they are now. Google "US homicide rate by year" and you will find a ton of documentation.
parents weren't afraid to let their kids play outside
The mid-Eighties were the height of the "Satanic ritual child abuse" witch-hunt hysteria. By the late Eighties, the idea that the world was a horrible scary place waiting to eat the poor innocent children was firmly implanted in the public consciousness.
Heck, only a few short years before then...you could fsck all you wanted, and the worst you had to fear was getting a shot from the Dr. to clear up any STD you had.
AIDS was first identified in 1981, and HIV was identified as the pathogen responsible in 1983, IIRC. By 1989, the risks of heterosexual as well as homosexual transmission were well known... and the drugs available at the time would kill you faster than the disease itself would, as opposed to the current generation of AIDS drugs which, while they still have some pretty nasty side effects, do allow HIV-infected people to live relatively healthy lives for a number of years after infection.
we weren't being overrun by our neighbors from the south as badly as now
America has always gone through ebbs and flows of immigration, and corresponding bouts of hysteria about it. The current anti-immigrant dustup is no different from that which greeted the Scots-Irish, the Germans, the Irish Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the Poles, etc. Note that most of those people's grandkids and great-grandkids now speak English and call themselves Americans. As for the specific issue of immigration from Mexico, anyone who lives in the Southwest can tell you that it's not exactly a new phenomenon.
Sure, the tech today is SOOO much better, but, it wasn't being twisted and used by the govt. against us quite so badly.
There was this little thing back then called the "Cold War." Ever heard of it? I sure as hell did. I was stationed in Europe when the Wall came down. You want to talk about governments using technology against their citizens, well, holding most of the world's population in a giant game of nuclear "chicken" pretty much takes the cake.
You're not remembering the Eighties. You're remembering a mythical Golden Age, which always seems to occur somewhere between two decades and two centuries in the past. No matter who you talk to, in any country, in any era, there's always The Time When Things Were Better. Except if you go back and look at the facts, you'll see that it hardly ever was.
It depends on what you want to do with said laptop, of course.
For "standard" computer tasks -- web and e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, lightweight gaming -- pretty much all modern computers, desktops and laptops, Macs and PCs, even the cheapest ones, are wildly overpowered. I remember accomplishing all those things quite happily on 486 and 68040 CPU's with a few MB of RAM. If that's all you want to do, then it makes sense to buy the absolute cheapest laptop you can, use it until it breaks, and then buy another.
But if you want to do more? Me, I work in bioinformatics, and modern biological data sets are exploding to the point that I guarantee any machine I can buy with my own money, and keep in my own house, will be swamped. (Actually, any server my department can buy will also be swamped, just not quite as fast.) I need all the CPU speed, RAM, and HD space I can get. And while I'd no doubt get more bang for the buck with the combination of a cheap laptop and a headless desktop box stuffed to the gills with these various components, I like having a single machine I can use for all my work. I also like having an OS that doesn't fight me. Which means that a maxed-out MacBook is the right choice, for me, for what I do.
People do different things with computers. Not everyone has the same tasks, or accomplishes these tasks in the same way. Practically every type of computer that's on the market fulfills a need for somebody. This should be blindingly obvious, and I really don't understand why so much of the/. crowd doesn't get it.
Once a scientific theory is established, we should ignore any evidence that may disprove it because it has become the accepted truth?
There is absolutely no scientific evidence against evolution. Zero. None. It is not scientific debate to teach that there is such evidence; it is a lie.
I don't see how teaching evolution as "the truth" is significantly better than teaching intelligent design as "the truth". Science is not dogma.
In science classes for elementary school kids, the right thing to do is to teach generally accepted scientific knowledge, and right now evolution is as accepted as gravity. Some of those kids will become scientists themselves, and some tiny number of them may possibly, some day, come up with serious alternative theories. But there is no way in hell they're going to do it at age ten, sorry. "Teaching the controversy" about evolution is like teaching kids that there's serious scientific controversy over whether things fall when you drop them due to the gravitational attraction of the Earth, or because, per Aristotle, "they fall because it is in their nature to fall."
I agree with you my point is that you just can't say we won't discuss intelligent design because it's full of shit. If it is wrong or bad science or whatever it needs to be discussed and and an argument needs to be made as to why it is wrong.
There are literally thousands of creation myths out there. So should science teachers spend time debunking each and every one of them?
Oh, wait, that's right, your creation myth is special! It's different!
Um, no. It's not. As of right now, there is precisely one theory which accounts for the diversity of life on earth, and a whole bunch of anti-scientific religious propaganda. The former belongs in science classes, and the latter, in its numerous forms, does not.
Good Science is all about putting science theory and practice under scrutiny and peer review.
Which would be wonderful if that were what this is about. But it's not. It's about getting "intelligent design" propaganda, which has exactly zero to do with actual scientific scrutiny and peer review, into the classroom.
The vast majority of real-world programming jobs don't require much beyond addition, subtraction and multiplication. Most of us learned that in high school.
You waited until high school to learn basic arithmetic?;)
Seriously, a lot of programmers think this way -- until they run into something hard, at which point the ones without a good theoretical background tend to come up with some awful kludge. I've worked with some very talented programmers, who could have been great programmers with a better education, whose code ran ten or a hundred times slower than it should because of a few bad lines. No matter how great a hacker you are, without good formal training in CS, you will write bad programs. And you may have no idea you're doing it until someone more knowledgeable points it out.
A good manager doesn't necessarily need to be knowledgeable about technology; they need to trust the engineers working for them to make correct decisions.
Which, in the real world, means that good managers need to be knowledgeable about technology. Managers without technical backgrounds tend to be wilfully, aggressively ignorant, and they will always trust their fellow MBA's over the people such as the engineers and accountants who actually know what's going on.
Yes, I'm listing accounting as a technical field there. It's about the only course of study taught in b-school that involves any kind of real knowledge.
All that being said, a good MS program should involve some research -- not as much as a PhD obviously, but a decent amount, say 1/3 to 1/4 of the total program -- and being at a school known for research in an area you're interested in can be a big plus. I have two MS's, one in CS and one in biostatistics, and for both degrees I was lucky enough to have advisors who specialized in areas very close to my own interests. What I learned in the course of my RA and thesis research with them was enormously useful both for my work in industry and for my eventual return to grad school for my PhD. The academic usefulness is obvious. The industrial usefulness is maybe not so obvious, but I'd argue that a good programmer working at a good company is pretty much always engaged in research of some sort: you're always trying to figure out not only how to solve problems, but solve them well, and to do that you need the skills you learn in a rigorous, research-oriented academic environment.
This assumes you get a job at a good company, of course. I was lucky in that aspect too.:)
So further complicating the issue, (and no offense to people who have a BS or MS in IT) but I often hear that IT degrees are for people who couldn't make it in Computer Science.
Couldn't make it, or never even tried because they were scared off by the math curriculum. In other words, lousy programmers. If you're doing well in a competitive CS undergrad program, you're already better than this.
So does going from a competitive CS program to an IT program look like this?
Yes. Yes, it does.
Here's a question you might want to ask yourself: do you like your fellow students? That is, do you find CS people generally enjoyably to work with? If so, stay in CS. The theory you will learn in grad school will make you better at pretty much anything you want to do with computers, ever, and will last a hell of a lot longer than the currently-hot buzzwords you'll learn in IT (which may or may not be still hot when you graduate, of course.) Your fellow techies will recognize this and respect it. You'll have more options, and you'll work with a better class of people.
OTOH, if you can't stand your fellow techies and yearn to be a suit, by all means go for an MBA. You won't learn anything of any real value to anyone, of course, and it does seem that after the latest crash people may be waking up to this fact, but odds are the economy will recover and the con men will go back to doing what they do best. If you have no soul and can cheerfully face the idea of a career as a parasite subsisting on people who do actual work, go for it. Do be aware that every once in a while your hosts will turn on you, but if you can synergize your black-belt mission statement to leverage core black-belt stakeholder assets -- or whatever the buzzword bingo of the day is when you get out of school -- you'll get by.
Slashdot Mirror
American military leadership preventing the Nazis then the Soviets from dominating Europe
The Soviets prevented the Nazis from dominating Europe. The US -- along with the UK and yes, damn it, France -- played an important secondary role, but secondary was all it was. Hitler's regime was doomed the moment he decided to invade Russia, not a moment before ... and had he not made that decision, and the world had been treated to the entertaining spectacle of two paranoid dictators devoted to diametrically opposed ideologies pretending to be best friends for a few more years, the Western Allies wouldn't have had a prayer of beating him.
If Alice does not want to accept the responsibilities that go along with ownership of it, should it not go to the next rightful person?
There is no "next rightful person" in this scenario. If Alice chooses to assert ownership, that's her right. If she doesn't, nobody owns it -- certainly not Bob, and not Chuck or Dave either.
The patent system is meant to protect an inventor's rights.
The purpose of the patent system, in the US at least, is clearly spelled out in the Constitution. The phrase "inventor's rights" does not appear.
the patent system is so fundamentally screwed up
On this point, you and I are in total agreement. ;)
The second person is not always a "patent troll." Sometimes they are merely a researcher unfortunate enough to be second.
Fair enough. And there's nobody stopping people who do their own research from publishing it. It may be a little more difficult to get research published in a field where others have already done lots of work, but it's by no means impossible. But the reality is that there are a hell of a lot of patent trolls out there, trying to make a buck off someone else's work and producing nothing of their own.
If the first researcher doesn't wish to accept the responsibility that comes with his invention, why not allow the second?
Because the first researcher is the only one who has that right. "Accepting responsibility" is a fine-sounding phrase, but in this case what it really means is "taking other people's money."
Allowing consumers to avoid licensing fees seems a selfish reason to me.
You could put it that way. You could also put it as "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts," which doesn't strike me as selfish at all.
The scenario I outlined above is a realistic one; it's played out, with minor variations, all the time (and very often reported here on Slashdot.) I'll say it again: nobody wins. Absolutely nobody benefits when patent trolls sit on other people's work, not even the trolls themselves unless they can con other people into going along with their crooked game. Working to change this, to provide a way for somebody to benefit, is to bring patent law more in line with its stated intent.
If Dave does get the patent overturned, who benefits then? Obviously he does, and Chuck does. If the product is successful, ultimately so does Alice -- the currency of academic researchers is prestige, and being known as "the inventor of this wonderful product from ChuckCo Inc." isn't going to do her career any harm. The only person who loses is Bob, who (a) didn't deserve anything in the first place, and (b) wasn't going to get any money anyway.
Allowing the patent to stand, whether or not the inventor of the prior art cares, is still wrong. Consider the following scenario: Alice, a researcher, publishes an article describing a useful invention, but neither patents the invention nor exploits it commercially. Bob, a patent troll, files a patent on the same invention, and whether through ignorance or intent doesn't mention the prior art. Chuck, a manufacturer, wants to make a product using the invention, but can't do so because of Bob's patent. Dave, a consumer who thinks that Chuck's product would be really useful and would like to buy it if it ever comes to market, contacts Alice to let her know about the situation. Alice says, "You know, I really don't care about that any more, and I'm working on something else these days." She may be telling the truth, or she may be lying out of fear of reprisal from Bob; either way, Chuck and Dave are SOL.
Nobody wins. Chuck's not going to pay Bob's exorbitant licensing fees, and Dave doesn't have the capacity to manufacture the product himself. So what's Dave supposed to do? Contacting the patent office seems like a reasonable response, and if Dave has reason to suspect that Alice will blow him off before the whole process starts, the patent office is really the first place he should go.
Thank you. Maybe I shouldn't have replied to an insult with an insult, but I thought that was really the most honest way to make my point. ;)
So I wonder sometimes where this persistent stereotype of the "techie" comes from.
To be fair, there are a lot of techies who kind of aggressively live down to the stereotype. I always want to tell them, "You know, it's okay to shower regularly and get some exercise and subsist on something other than Fritos and Mountain Dew. Nobody's going to take away your geek membership card. You'll still be smart!" But for the most part, the stereotype is imposed by people who have no useful skills whatsoever, technical or otherwise.
I see programmers who are convinced the "soft skills" of other professionals are easy to pick up and practice and they could be doing any job in the company.
Those skills aren't necessarily easy, but the contempt which many programmers display for people who brag about them is based on the absurdity of the idea that an MBA or the like confers those skills, which the evidence clearly shows isn't true. If you've spent the last several years of your life studying computer science, you're not necessarily going to be a good manager or salesman -- but you have just as good a shot at it as the guy who's spent an equal number years in b-school, and additionally you learned something useful, while he didn't. Or to put it more simply: put an MBA in a programmer's job for a day, and the programmer in the MBA's job, and which one do you think will figure out the new job faster?
I'm sorry, but as someone who has recently been exposed to pair programming I can say you're talking out of your backside. If a programmer can't deal with pair programming them they're a very poor programmer.
Or maybe they just don't want to deal with insulting twits who think that the latest and greatest buzzword is the One True Way to write code.
Well, frankly, you need to be able to communicate those details,
Yes.
so you _should_ be able to talk to somebody about the coding while you're doing it.
No.
Talking about your code while you're writing it is not the same thing as writing effective documentation, or even explaining the code verbally, after the fact. The latter is vital to to any non-trivial programming project; the former may be an effective technique on occasion, but most of the time it's utterly destructive to good programming. The best code is written by one programmer staring at the screen and thinking really hard -- specifically, thinking a lot more than typing or talking.
It is obvious from your description your main goal here was to screw over the person filing the patent as there is no way you would go to that effort otherwise
This may come as a shock to you, AC, but sometimes people do the right thing because it's the right thing. Sometimes they even put a fair amount of effort into it.
Apple sells smugness. This is not really a debatable point ...
Mac users are smug because of people like you.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of a corporation, nor granting rights to same.
I'm all for getting rid of the stupid idea of corporate personhood, but I suspect your proposed amendment would make things worse, not better. Remember that "respecting" in the First Amendment, which you use as your boilerplate, doesn't mean "treating respectfully," which is how we usually use the word these days; it means "with respect to," i.e. "having to do with," which was the more common usage in the 18th c. Basically you'd be giving corporations the same legal status as churches have today. And a clever lawyer would argue -- and probably convince the courts -- that additionally, corporations would still have the legal rights of persons, because Congress doesn't "grant" rights, but rather rights are pre-existing. So we'd end up with corporations which have all the perks they currently enjoy, plus we couldn't tax them. No thanks.
Rule of law is a good thing; but a society heading down the path of "All that is not strictly and precisely forbidden is licit" is too sick to survive.
A society that does not embrace the idea of "All that is not strictly and precisely forbidden is licit" with regards to the law is a society of slaves.
Of course there are social mores. There are plenty of things you shouldn't do which aren't, and shouldn't be, illegal; and if you do those things, the people around you will let you know their disapproval. But when it comes to the law, the awesome power of the state wielded against the individual, that which is forbidden must be spelled out strictly and precisely, and we must be able to do anything which is not thus forbidden without legal penalty. There is no alternative for any society which wishes both to survive and to be free.
I think you have to go back and read the sentence you quoted.
If I were buying a MBP right now, the model I'd get (15" display, 2.93 GHz Core Duo, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB HD) would cost $2800 US. The closest comparable Dell I could come up with on their site costs $2200 US. A comparable HP is $2300 US. So yeah, there's a "Mac premium," but it's nowhere near what you're making it out to be. Did I mention that I like having an OS that doesn't fight me? I think I did.
Oh, God, where to start?
We didn't seem to have as much violence
Murder rates were about 25% higher in 1989 than they are now. Google "US homicide rate by year" and you will find a ton of documentation.
parents weren't afraid to let their kids play outside
The mid-Eighties were the height of the "Satanic ritual child abuse" witch-hunt hysteria. By the late Eighties, the idea that the world was a horrible scary place waiting to eat the poor innocent children was firmly implanted in the public consciousness.
Heck, only a few short years before then...you could fsck all you wanted, and the worst you had to fear was getting a shot from the Dr. to clear up any STD you had.
AIDS was first identified in 1981, and HIV was identified as the pathogen responsible in 1983, IIRC. By 1989, the risks of heterosexual as well as homosexual transmission were well known ... and the drugs available at the time would kill you faster than the disease itself would, as opposed to the current generation of AIDS drugs which, while they still have some pretty nasty side effects, do allow HIV-infected people to live relatively healthy lives for a number of years after infection.
we weren't being overrun by our neighbors from the south as badly as now
America has always gone through ebbs and flows of immigration, and corresponding bouts of hysteria about it. The current anti-immigrant dustup is no different from that which greeted the Scots-Irish, the Germans, the Irish Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the Poles, etc. Note that most of those people's grandkids and great-grandkids now speak English and call themselves Americans. As for the specific issue of immigration from Mexico, anyone who lives in the Southwest can tell you that it's not exactly a new phenomenon.
Sure, the tech today is SOOO much better, but, it wasn't being twisted and used by the govt. against us quite so badly.
There was this little thing back then called the "Cold War." Ever heard of it? I sure as hell did. I was stationed in Europe when the Wall came down. You want to talk about governments using technology against their citizens, well, holding most of the world's population in a giant game of nuclear "chicken" pretty much takes the cake.
You're not remembering the Eighties. You're remembering a mythical Golden Age, which always seems to occur somewhere between two decades and two centuries in the past. No matter who you talk to, in any country, in any era, there's always The Time When Things Were Better. Except if you go back and look at the facts, you'll see that it hardly ever was.
It depends on what you want to do with said laptop, of course.
For "standard" computer tasks -- web and e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, lightweight gaming -- pretty much all modern computers, desktops and laptops, Macs and PCs, even the cheapest ones, are wildly overpowered. I remember accomplishing all those things quite happily on 486 and 68040 CPU's with a few MB of RAM. If that's all you want to do, then it makes sense to buy the absolute cheapest laptop you can, use it until it breaks, and then buy another.
But if you want to do more? Me, I work in bioinformatics, and modern biological data sets are exploding to the point that I guarantee any machine I can buy with my own money, and keep in my own house, will be swamped. (Actually, any server my department can buy will also be swamped, just not quite as fast.) I need all the CPU speed, RAM, and HD space I can get. And while I'd no doubt get more bang for the buck with the combination of a cheap laptop and a headless desktop box stuffed to the gills with these various components, I like having a single machine I can use for all my work. I also like having an OS that doesn't fight me. Which means that a maxed-out MacBook is the right choice, for me, for what I do.
People do different things with computers. Not everyone has the same tasks, or accomplishes these tasks in the same way. Practically every type of computer that's on the market fulfills a need for somebody. This should be blindingly obvious, and I really don't understand why so much of the /. crowd doesn't get it.
It certainly hasn't been getting better over the past 20 years, that's for sure...
Do you remember twenty years ago? I do. Trust me, kid, you wouldn't want to live there.
Unfortunately, it was a complete fabrication by the reporter who ascribed the comment to the anonymous crowd.
No it wasn't. The "Kill him!" is clearly audible at thirteen seconds into the video.
Jackass.
Once a scientific theory is established, we should ignore any evidence that may disprove it because it has become the accepted truth?
There is absolutely no scientific evidence against evolution. Zero. None. It is not scientific debate to teach that there is such evidence; it is a lie.
I don't see how teaching evolution as "the truth" is significantly better than teaching intelligent design as "the truth". Science is not dogma.
In science classes for elementary school kids, the right thing to do is to teach generally accepted scientific knowledge, and right now evolution is as accepted as gravity. Some of those kids will become scientists themselves, and some tiny number of them may possibly, some day, come up with serious alternative theories. But there is no way in hell they're going to do it at age ten, sorry. "Teaching the controversy" about evolution is like teaching kids that there's serious scientific controversy over whether things fall when you drop them due to the gravitational attraction of the Earth, or because, per Aristotle, "they fall because it is in their nature to fall."
I agree with you my point is that you just can't say we won't discuss intelligent design because it's full of shit. If it is wrong or bad science or whatever it needs to be discussed and and an argument needs to be made as to why it is wrong.
There are literally thousands of creation myths out there. So should science teachers spend time debunking each and every one of them?
Oh, wait, that's right, your creation myth is special! It's different!
Um, no. It's not. As of right now, there is precisely one theory which accounts for the diversity of life on earth, and a whole bunch of anti-scientific religious propaganda. The former belongs in science classes, and the latter, in its numerous forms, does not.
Good Science is all about putting science theory and practice under scrutiny and peer review.
Which would be wonderful if that were what this is about. But it's not. It's about getting "intelligent design" propaganda, which has exactly zero to do with actual scientific scrutiny and peer review, into the classroom.
The vast majority of real-world programming jobs don't require much beyond addition, subtraction and multiplication. Most of us learned that in high school.
You waited until high school to learn basic arithmetic? ;)
Seriously, a lot of programmers think this way -- until they run into something hard, at which point the ones without a good theoretical background tend to come up with some awful kludge. I've worked with some very talented programmers, who could have been great programmers with a better education, whose code ran ten or a hundred times slower than it should because of a few bad lines. No matter how great a hacker you are, without good formal training in CS, you will write bad programs. And you may have no idea you're doing it until someone more knowledgeable points it out.
A good manager doesn't necessarily need to be knowledgeable about technology; they need to trust the engineers working for them to make correct decisions.
Which, in the real world, means that good managers need to be knowledgeable about technology. Managers without technical backgrounds tend to be wilfully, aggressively ignorant, and they will always trust their fellow MBA's over the people such as the engineers and accountants who actually know what's going on.
Yes, I'm listing accounting as a technical field there. It's about the only course of study taught in b-school that involves any kind of real knowledge.
All that being said, a good MS program should involve some research -- not as much as a PhD obviously, but a decent amount, say 1/3 to 1/4 of the total program -- and being at a school known for research in an area you're interested in can be a big plus. I have two MS's, one in CS and one in biostatistics, and for both degrees I was lucky enough to have advisors who specialized in areas very close to my own interests. What I learned in the course of my RA and thesis research with them was enormously useful both for my work in industry and for my eventual return to grad school for my PhD. The academic usefulness is obvious. The industrial usefulness is maybe not so obvious, but I'd argue that a good programmer working at a good company is pretty much always engaged in research of some sort: you're always trying to figure out not only how to solve problems, but solve them well, and to do that you need the skills you learn in a rigorous, research-oriented academic environment.
This assumes you get a job at a good company, of course. I was lucky in that aspect too. :)
So further complicating the issue, (and no offense to people who have a BS or MS in IT) but I often hear that IT degrees are for people who couldn't make it in Computer Science.
Couldn't make it, or never even tried because they were scared off by the math curriculum. In other words, lousy programmers. If you're doing well in a competitive CS undergrad program, you're already better than this.
So does going from a competitive CS program to an IT program look like this?
Yes. Yes, it does.
Here's a question you might want to ask yourself: do you like your fellow students? That is, do you find CS people generally enjoyably to work with? If so, stay in CS. The theory you will learn in grad school will make you better at pretty much anything you want to do with computers, ever, and will last a hell of a lot longer than the currently-hot buzzwords you'll learn in IT (which may or may not be still hot when you graduate, of course.) Your fellow techies will recognize this and respect it. You'll have more options, and you'll work with a better class of people.
OTOH, if you can't stand your fellow techies and yearn to be a suit, by all means go for an MBA. You won't learn anything of any real value to anyone, of course, and it does seem that after the latest crash people may be waking up to this fact, but odds are the economy will recover and the con men will go back to doing what they do best. If you have no soul and can cheerfully face the idea of a career as a parasite subsisting on people who do actual work, go for it. Do be aware that every once in a while your hosts will turn on you, but if you can synergize your black-belt mission statement to leverage core black-belt stakeholder assets -- or whatever the buzzword bingo of the day is when you get out of school -- you'll get by.
Here's the original Drudge posting. He's not reporting on Lewinsky; he's reporting on the MSM's reactions to the story.