Passenger trains (Amtrak) stops for shipping rail because the tracks are owned by companies like Union Pacific who ship stuff on the rails, and Amtrak just leases the track time.
I wonder if anyone has tried the "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" defense.
Imagine this: You are in line waiting for your turn to have your bags checked and you get to the front and are one of the lucky ones to be randomly selected even though you are calm, rational, and don't raise any sort of flags. The TSA agent looks like they are having a bad day, grumpy, nervous, whatever. They explain the pat-down procedure and then you comment "Hey you look kind of nervous there are you sure you're a TSA agent? It looks like you might have something hidden under your shirt. I'm just going to go ahead and give you a pat-down, you don't mind do you? I am a trained peace officer myself and know how to do it properly without groping."
Do you think the TSA would go along with this? I have no way to tell they aren't a terrorist other than they are wearing a uniform and have an ID card. If its good enough for them, it should be good enough for me right.
General education requirements can be met by a number of courses. It doesn't require you to take literature or ancient Chinese history. Most schools have a wide variety of courses and the requirements can be met that way.
Example: I have a BS in Mechanical Engineering. The majority of my classes in college were degree related because in high school I took Advanced Placement (AP) tests allowing me to test out of Biology, Government, Economics, History. Instead of shelling out university fees for the public speaking and lower division English I took those at a community college during the summer.
As a result a lot of my GE requirements were already completed and I only needed an advanced English course, and a couple of social science course which I took a business class and a psychology. The advanced English class was a technical writing class. I don't know if they teach technical writing in the high school equivalent in Europe but in the US they don't. Psychology and business were easy courses for me, but I took away some nuggets of information that will stay with me.
Without any AP tests I think my degree required 6 GE courses which amounted to about 1.5 quarters of instructions (assuming 4 classes is a normal load) out of 12 quarters being the expected number to graduate (though I hear a lot of engineers are taking 5 years instead of 4 now). For those that don't know the quarter system has periods of instruction that are 10 weeks long and there are normally 3 quarters in a year (the 4th is a summer quarter that a lot of people don't take).
What I would like to see in colleges is a couple of trade school like classes that deal with specific topics (technical electives don't always fit the bill). I have friends that are electrical engineers and have gotten a job working for the Navy working on radar systems and there aren't classes dealing with radars in school. You have to pick it up on the job. Likewise for me I had heat transfer but a lot of subject matter uses simplified models and teaches you the theory. But I have not come across a problem where I need to find the temperature across solid plate with a perfect source and sink. Instead I get problems where I have heat generated the processor of a circuit board and power supply in an enclosed 3D space and I need to make sure the temperature won't rise above X degrees. It's excellent that we have software to assist with this, but it would have been nice to come into the work place already have learned that software as well. Maybe some of the colleges like MIT or Caltech have that, but UC Davis didn't (sorry for the rant there).
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Passenger trains (Amtrak) stops for shipping rail because the tracks are owned by companies like Union Pacific who ship stuff on the rails, and Amtrak just leases the track time.
I wonder if anyone has tried the "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" defense.
Imagine this:
You are in line waiting for your turn to have your bags checked and you get to the front and are one of the lucky ones to be randomly selected even though you are calm, rational, and don't raise any sort of flags. The TSA agent looks like they are having a bad day, grumpy, nervous, whatever. They explain the pat-down procedure and then you comment "Hey you look kind of nervous there are you sure you're a TSA agent? It looks like you might have something hidden under your shirt. I'm just going to go ahead and give you a pat-down, you don't mind do you? I am a trained peace officer myself and know how to do it properly without groping."
Do you think the TSA would go along with this? I have no way to tell they aren't a terrorist other than they are wearing a uniform and have an ID card. If its good enough for them, it should be good enough for me right.
General education requirements can be met by a number of courses. It doesn't require you to take literature or ancient Chinese history. Most schools have a wide variety of courses and the requirements can be met that way.
Example:
I have a BS in Mechanical Engineering. The majority of my classes in college were degree related because in high school I took Advanced Placement (AP) tests allowing me to test out of Biology, Government, Economics, History. Instead of shelling out university fees for the public speaking and lower division English I took those at a community college during the summer.
As a result a lot of my GE requirements were already completed and I only needed an advanced English course, and a couple of social science course which I took a business class and a psychology. The advanced English class was a technical writing class. I don't know if they teach technical writing in the high school equivalent in Europe but in the US they don't. Psychology and business were easy courses for me, but I took away some nuggets of information that will stay with me.
Without any AP tests I think my degree required 6 GE courses which amounted to about 1.5 quarters of instructions (assuming 4 classes is a normal load) out of 12 quarters being the expected number to graduate (though I hear a lot of engineers are taking 5 years instead of 4 now). For those that don't know the quarter system has periods of instruction that are 10 weeks long and there are normally 3 quarters in a year (the 4th is a summer quarter that a lot of people don't take).
What I would like to see in colleges is a couple of trade school like classes that deal with specific topics (technical electives don't always fit the bill). I have friends that are electrical engineers and have gotten a job working for the Navy working on radar systems and there aren't classes dealing with radars in school. You have to pick it up on the job. Likewise for me I had heat transfer but a lot of subject matter uses simplified models and teaches you the theory. But I have not come across a problem where I need to find the temperature across solid plate with a perfect source and sink. Instead I get problems where I have heat generated the processor of a circuit board and power supply in an enclosed 3D space and I need to make sure the temperature won't rise above X degrees. It's excellent that we have software to assist with this, but it would have been nice to come into the work place already have learned that software as well. Maybe some of the colleges like MIT or Caltech have that, but UC Davis didn't (sorry for the rant there).