Juries are relatively unpaid or underpaid, and I can't imagine any of them devoting serious time to so many different points.
From my experience as being in jury duty, I disagree with this generalization. YMMV obviously, but in the end, this is just a generalization.
Although, I guess it depends on one's integrity.
At the risk of engaging into a generalization myself, people that show up to jury duty and get selected might have a bit or two of integrity. Most people simply ignore or forget to go to a jury duty row call. And of those who show, a lot do the most innane of things to avoid getting selected. Things I've seen:
1. A guy saying he didn't believe in the US legal system, and that he felt getting a US citizenship was one of his biggest mistakes.
2. A guy asking if he needs to read stuff because he really didn't like reading
3. Gratuitous mentioning of using drugs
Some people have genuine reasons to ask not being selected (say a doctor, a struggling businessman, or a parent.) But you get some shitheads showing up saying the most bestial of things just to skip jury duty. Those who stay know they'll lose salary and convenience, and still try to remain honest and useful (myself included.) My experience has been that jurors do their best to judge the evidence at hand and to follow the judge's instructions.
Again, YMMV.
As a side note, and I realize I'll get modded down as off-topic, should jurors get paid minimum wage?
Yes. Or maybe not. But it will be unreasonable for the state to compensate everyone at their daily rates for doing a civil service (which is a responsibility that comes with all the rights we have in a civil society.)
Factor in how many hours are being stolen from their lives,
Stolen? Why stolen? Society gives you a lot of rights and safegards, infrastructures and services, and above all, the right to trial by a jury of your peers (as opposed to jury by the sole hand of a despot or potentate.) In return, you are asked to give a service in return. That service, which is a small token in the grand scheme of things, will cost something in return (inconvenience and loss of some of your salary.)
And no one really forces you to participate if you are really, really cash strapped. You can always ask the selection process to give you a green light to go because of financial duress.
So it is absolutely fucking stupid to use the word "stolen" when it is something that is, much more often than not, a voluntary thing by people who thing it is a fair thing to give back to society some of their time for a very important fabric of civil society: a trial by peers.
and how little that should really cost given the expenseof everything else involved in the judicial process.
The judicial process is already expensive to begin with. It is not unreasonable to ask willing citizens to give some of their time at a lower cost as part of their civic duty to society (in exchange of the many, many, many other things we get.)
Which means nothing on its own. How should we account for the quality of care, taxes paid by each person recieving care, etc?
That's a different argument/question from the one you originally posted. As Voltaire used to say, define your terms in the discussion. Other countries whose economies are not tanking due to their health care systems: Singapore, Israel, Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, Rwanda, Chile to name a few.
These countries are either doing well as developed nations or on the verge of becoming ones. As for Japan's economic woes, they have everything to do with an aging population, lack of women's participation in the workforce, and little economic expansion due to the 90's economic crisis. But even with all that, the average Japanese's purchasing power and lifestyle have not deteriorated (compare that to us.)
So if you are going to argue that any significant woes (or even tanking) on any of these countries are predominantly a function of their health care systems, you better come up with some citations. Hand waving does not count.
I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
^^ This. A million times this.
Now, I'm sure the cloud will come along and tell everyone they need a thin-client instead, but we're not there yet
Chances are we will never get there, for a multitude of logistic problems. We will have network-centric applications, but the idea of returning back to the thin-client paradigm, cloudy or not, I don't see that happening now or in the near/mid future.
Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea.
There is used to be a time, not long ago where the following (listed in reverse chronological order) were considered "silly ideas"
1. tablets,
2. phones with cameras,
3. e-commerce,
4. personal computers
Sooner or later (probably sooner than you think), technology will catch up to make such an idea (a content-producing tablet) a realistic alternative. These silly ideas have merit, and would fit a future need. I don't really care any other way, but to call it "silly", well, that's silly.
Sometimes out of necessity, we have to hit the meat grinder and simply do a death march, say near the end of a product release. Or, in other circumstances, you might have a development/deployment cycle of, say, 4-8 weeks, and the last 1-2 weeks involve a lot of grunt work that burns the midnight oil. Or in case of emergencies.
In those cases, yes, a 12-16 hour workday, or a week or two weeks like that will be productive. It will not be productive if you measure your hourly productivity on those weeks compared to your regular work week (if there were such a way to measure personal productivity on an hourly/daily basis.) But it is productive to the project and employer (to whom we are responsible) in the sense that we get shit done.
The world is not perfect, and plans certainly are not. Things happen along the way, so at some point, we need to get shit done no matter what (which is why we get paid waaaaaaay above average salaries.)
Having said that, if your regular workweek is always 60 hours or more, there is something wrong with your productivity (or lack thereof) or your work environment. It is simply not sustainable. People might be able to be productive with such amount of work hours when their productivity is measured in units produced (say in a manufacturing conveyor belt.)
People are very strong animals - I use the word "animal" in a natural/biological sense. People are built for endurance, and they can simply push through extended conditions of physical activity that will kill most animals. Zone out if you will (one of the reasons we became apex, cursorial pack predators.)
But when it comes to creativity and engineering, that productivity does not translate linearly with the amount of hours put to work. Our minds did not evolve to do that (and Nature in its mysterious ways must have a really good reason for that.)
One of the main keys of this is motivation. If you are forced to work 60 hours or more week after week, chances are you don't like your work at all (who would under such conditions.) So there is no motivation to keep going productively (a key ingredient in creative/engineering work.)
Contrast this with enterpreneurs/business owners or people climbing a technical/managerial ladder. They'll push through 60 hours or more for years and still remain productive. Why? Because they have a personal stake.
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In projects that require long, prolonged death marches (cue images of French soldiers crossing trenches in Verdum), you see that a function of management failure. Other factors will include the quality of workmanship, processes, products, and to a great degree, professional ethic. In such a situation, people (sane people that is) find themselves prisoners of such conditions, and will not have a personal stake on their labor.
They have to put the hours, but the key motivators are missing. So productivity goes to shit. Worse still, quality degrades, and the company or project would have been better off working less hours.
So, in summary, it depends. Do you work long hours because you want to, because you have a personal stake on it? Or because you are being ordered from the top or because the product you work on (or the conditions therein) are so shitty that you don't find any other way to get things done (correct or otherwise) than to perform death marches week after week?
Wrong. People buy just the assets of companies and leave behind the debt and liabilities all the time to the original owners.
No, they don't. Barring a bankrupcy, you simply cannot just buy the assets w/o inheriting the liabilities. I'm sure a lot of people and companies would like thta to be true, but under the lawy, itt doesn't work like that at all.
The Civil War, if one takes the long view, was a horrible mistake rather than a righteous Crusade.
The South would eventually have given up slavery, the North would have prospered through trade with the South, and fewer Southerners would pollute the American political landscape. We could have had a much improved North as a separate country too weak to chase dreams of Empire.
The US is simply too large to make a good nation. Diversity of viewpoints is best catered by smaller nations which can self-segregate regionally, politically, ethnically, and religiously.
Instead, the victory of the North begat the Globalist Corporate Republic we have today. It's a net loss for the world.
That knowledge would have brought a lot of confort to the slaved populations and the groups that morally opposed slavery like the Quakers. But who cares. Let's indulge in amoral hypotheticals just to prop up an ideological point.
The idiocy is not only in the south. I was checking out the local private schools for my daughter in an upstate NY city of over 200,000 people. I asked the new principal at one of the Catholic schools what science curriculum they used. He said, "Well, you know, we teach the idea of evolution, but it is mostly religious based." That was the end of that visit.
That doesn't make any sense given that Catholic doctrine states clearly that evolution is a scientific fact. Maybe the principal is one of the Mel Gibson/Santorum type of Catholics (you know, the type who resent the Catholic church doesn't use Latin anymore or Father George Lematrie's Big Bang Theory.) Either that or this story is made up. There are a lot of things wrong with the Catholic church nowadays, but obcurantism towards evolution and astrophysics are not one of them.
Top-down control when taken to its logical conclusion also means having Congress order you to install thermostats in your home which they can turn-off at any point (like on a hot day when the power grid is overloading... goodbye A/C). Or ordering you to buy a Prius or similar hybrid. Or outlawing SUVs. Or ordering you to buy a Windows PC so you can do online voting/polling. And so on.
That's not the "logical conclusion". That's called "reductio ad absurdum".
Bingo. Unfortunately the nuisance is missed to most.
This is the thinking that, amongst others, lead to the destruction of the British motorbike and electronics industries. In the US you are going to lose your car industry in the same way if you are not careful. Watch as 60 years behind, becomes 6 years, then 6 months, then because they are at par and cheaper, your industries will crumble.
We in the US don't have to look at the Brits to see the consequences of such thinking. The US used to mock the Japanese as "cheap camera manufacturers" until they swiftly took the entire semi-conductor industry during the PC revolution. The US has never recovered from that (and the way it goes, never will.)
It is true that Indian (and Chinese) technology is shit compared to ours. How could it not be considering they only have a fraction of the experienced found in the US or in countries like Russia or Japan??? And yet, unlike us, India and China keep pushing forward while we kill our neurons watching the Kardashians or the latest antics of Ochocinco. And they will get better (just as the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans have.)
We are having a whole bunch of fucking Sputnik moments, but we are too busy being arrogant assholes, smelling our own farts while ensuring ourselves that our competitors are troglodytes who make square tires out of shit. The whole fucking world is improving and catching up, and we do not pay notice, not doing anything at all to preserve our advantage. And that's how we will lose.
a) Deceased mother, deceased because she sacrificed her life to get her son out of that regime's control
Irrelevant. After the mother's tragic end, Elian's father had/has all paternity rights over the child. Elian's father demanded the child to be returned to his custody, which was his right. At no point did Elian's father gave away custody. Au contraire, he pretty much made it clear he wanted the kid back.
I'm not saying that Elian's mother's death was inconsequential. I sympathize with her because I myself escaped from a Communist regime (Nicaragua in this case). But once her fate was tragically sealed, custody goes to the father.
The father's custody rights are not subject to his political affiliations. And that's what makes America great compared to the Cuban or old Nicaraguan governments. If you want to make parental rights subject to political affiliations, get the hell out of the USA (or any democratic country for that matter) and move to Cuba, Iran or wherever.
b) Custody battle doesn't need M16's pointed at children's heads.
First of all, in this case it did. There were people who very publicly said they were going to shoot people up before giving the kid back to his rightful father. I lived in Miami. I was there. We all saw it, and we all heard it. Let's not pretend it did not happen. The moment someone makes realistic violent claims, law officers have a right and obligation to use weapons if necessary. You don't want cops showing up with M16s, then don't make threats of violence. That's how civilized countries operate.
Secondly, it wasn't a custody battle because there was no custody case. One parent dies. The other parent is alive. Living parent has custody. End of the story.
c) Elian was NEVER in danger with the relatives he was with.
Non sequitur. For starters no one ever made that claim. Secondly, it doesn't fucking matter. Those relatives did not have more right over the child than his father. These relatives violated the father's rights over the child. Children belong with their parents. Period. How much more fucking obtuse can you people get?
Reminds me of that little Cuban boy who was "NOT" seized from his family at gun point by SWAT police...until the photo was released that showed just that.
His family? You mean the deceased mother's 2nd and 3rd relatives and a bunch of right-wing Cuban-American celebrities and politicians? His family was his father (his living and breathing father) to whom the swat team delivered the boy.
His family was his father, who was asking Elian Gonzales (the boy) to be returned to his care. His mother and husband at the time took him out of Cuba in a raft in complete violation of the father's shared custody rights. His family was not the people who held Elian Gonzales (the boy in question) refusing to deliver him to his father just because he didn't want to leave Cuba. It was all political, a disgraceful spectacle that we in Miami had to endure at the hand of those nutjobs.
The swat team had to intervene because the people holding Elian were treating to retaliate with violence. Get your facts straight buddy.
What I'm more curious about is why people even bother plagiarizing at all. If you don't want to do an assignment, can't you just not do it, since there are no consequences to failing to do it? Are people hoping to use the "completed Coursera course" certificate on their CV or something, making it worth the effort of cheating to obtain it?
Yes. Believe it or not, that is the motivation. Plagiarism is rampant in the CS/IT sector. This is one of the reasons more and more companies (at least companies that care) are demanding live code interviews.
True story from a company that I interviewed a couple of years ago. They needed quite desperately to fill a senior position that became vacant. How it became vacant? Well, the person who was in it apparently couldn't code himself out of a wet paper bag. During his hiring process, the applicant, who was in another country, went through all the phone interviews, answering questions flawlessly. The company decided to pick him for the position and paid all relocation expenses.
Fast-track a few weeks later and the guy was unceremoniously kicked out. He simply couldn't code at all. To this day management is 100% convinced the person they interviewed was not the same person who actually showed up for the job. And this is very common. Having learned their lesson, any applicant must go through a battery of live tests, and then more tests in person. This obviously increases the expense of hiring, but that is always cheaper than getting an incompetent code monkey on a critical senior position.
It wasn't like this before when the number of professionals weren't that many, nor computer systems were so ubiquitious. You gotta give thanks to the dot-com for opening the gates. Computer systems have become ubiquitous, which is great. But the bad side of the coin is that you get any savant idiot trying to weasel his way into a good salary without paying the academic/work-related dues.
There are simply no ethics in our industry. None at all, a reflection of society, both ours and globalized. So now that people know companies will look into the coursera or udacity results, you bet they'll try to fit themselves in, like an badly made cog lubricated with pig shit.
I never saw it coming, but I should have given everything I've seen in this industry.
"So now, real-world projects that use C++ for the useful things it does provide have to maintain coding guidelines to avoid shooting themselves in the foot too often."
How is that not the case for _any_ modern language? Anyone write terrible code in any language. I've seen some Python that made me want to rip my eyeballs out (used tons of esoteric functionality... coupled with a design that made me question the person's sanity).
Coding guidelines are a good idea no matter the language. Keep everything consistent and make sure that the code remains maintainable into the future...
You are missing the point. Most languages, if not all, have coding guidelines, but compare guidelines for, say, Java, Python, or even C, with existing coding guidelines in C++. You'll see the difference in how much the later cuts through what is available in C++.
Pretty much most C++ coding guidelines (in particular for systems and mission-critical development) cut away templates, STL, i/o streams and exceptions. Boost and RTTI are certainly the most banned of things.
So you end up with a C-like language with native support for object-orientation, which is really not a bad thing. If you are lucky, you might get some limited usage of templates (limited in the sense that you have to demonstrate, but really demonstrate your usage will not *explode* into code bloat via template hoisting or what not). A few of the most used STL template classes, string, auto_ptr, map and list are typically permitted. In many cases, the later three are restricted to instances parameterized to void* or to references to a very restricted, audited set of subclasses.
The lack of exceptions forces a design based on error codes. The later is really not a great choice, but the semantics are clear, far clearer than exceptions as implemented in C++. And that's why sometimes people, out of painful experience, end up choosing C with simulated inheritance as a safer, more cost effective alternative.
One typical counter-argument is that people aren't intelligent enough to use C++ safe. Maybe so, but mental effort should be saved to harness a language most effectively in solving problems in a particular domain, not on knowing how not to blow your toes to pieces.
I know a man who got a job at Skunkworks and he only has a high school diploma. I know a drop-out with a GED who got a job at NASA. Getting a degree does not guarantee you a job. It's all about timing and your qualifications at the time.
>Is a Ph.D. a near-guarantee of a spot in a skunkworks type of job (Microsoft Research and the like)?
Ha ha ha, no. I know Ph.Ds who are working as regular software developers. Unless your coursework and Ph.D thesis is about something that somebody actually cares about, you're just cannon fodder like everyone else, albeit more educated.
Graduate degree are worthless. All they help is on the resume filter that is HR.
Depends on your education, what kind of work you do, and what kind of companies/contracts you apply for and your professional aspirations. Almost every job I've had since I left grad school has been thanks of my grad education and my research on security and distributed computing. So, YMMV obviously.
Smart people do just as well without them.
That's an unquantifiable oxymoron. Smart people do well with or without them. Most smart people get them. Less intelligent/capable people do not, so...
Average people likely the same.
Because average is the new sexy</rolls eyes>
Newsflash: chances are the poster is not average (simply by demonstrating a desire to continue with his formal education.) Average people do not take the reins in their career choices, preferring to go with the flow. Nothing wrong with that, but it is as risky as the alternative (which is to be above average.)
Since you stated that your goal may be to obtain a research job, maybe you should start by searching for jobs at Microsoft Research, HP Labs, etc. or other national laboratories. At least just to see what the requirements are.
A lot of those jobs probably do require a PhD, but depending on your experiences and skills, maybe you can convince them to hire you. Then you don't have to go through the typical 5-7 years of schooling to get there.
Monetarily, I would say it is not worth it to get a PhD. But it may be worth it intellectually. Even better if you have the finances to support it.
From what I've seen, MS Research typically considers Ph.D and post-grads first (or almost exclusively.) It is better to get a Masters and then get a job at one of the Department of Energy labs (say Lawrence Livermore or Sandia). Having a MS with a focus on security, robotics or parallel computing (GPU stuff is getting hot) opens a lot of doors. Then, said places provide college reimbursement for people who want to pursue a grad education (in this hypothetical case, a Ph.D.)
How would an MBA help with the submitter's goal of moving towards skunkworks development?
I'm not being sarcastic here - on the face of it I can't see an MBA making him/her more desirable for those type of jobs, where as even if a PhD didn't help directly it would help with networking with the people involved in that kind of development.
It can when it goes alongside a MS degree (in particular with a kick-ass master thesis.) Sunkworks programs are always in need of extremelly tech-proficient engineering program managers (not project managers, but program managers.)
The guy (who already has an undergraduate degree and a decade of software development work experience) is asking about going to grad school (and possibly getting a Ph.D.
And you go "hai frendz, tries teh Khan, kthxbye"????
The multi-billion dollar software company I worked for 15 years did not keep many PHd s around for long. They always tended to be far to academic in their approaches and not practical in any way. If we had years to release product, they may have worked out. Instead we needed people to find simple, smart solutions to roll out releases regularly.
There are multi-billion dollar software companies like SAP or Infosys (if you think of a software consulting firm as a software company, which you should), and there are multi-billion dollar software companies like Google or to an extend Lockheed Martin (if you think about the later's obscene amounts of software they have to write for the systems they develop.)
That is, multi-billion dollar software companies are not created equally.
A PhD doesn't really guarantee you anything. It can also be detrimental depending on what you want to do as some companies consider it too much or too expensive. You'll be better off starting in a Masters program and then deciding if you you really see a need or feel the desire to go for the PhD. A PhD is a LOT of work and time.
Really unless you plan to go into academia or hard core research I'd steer clear.
Not really. I'd say for a person looking to go back to grad school, he/she'd be better off finishing the MS degree, then force his way into a company like Google or Lockheed Martin. That is, big engineering firms known for having in-house career development programs and fat school reimbursement benefits. Use the MS studies to prepare to the interviews, and try and try until you get there. Then work your way to anything resemble a R&D program and begin your studies for a Ph.D.
In particular with companies like these mentioned above, a person can work himself up to a position of Principal Engineer, Chief Scientist or Architect or Engineering Program Manager (not project manager, but program manager.) My suggestion is always to go for the Ph.D but only with a clear vision of what type of role (not work, but role) you want to do.
Also, one should take into account that such plans of actions are to be made with a 10-15 year timespan. Some cringe at this. Others do not. I certainly do not (and I'm about to turn 43.) 10-15 years will come to pass anyways, so I might as well do something with it (provided the limited time available due to family, etc.)
This is not for the people who only wants to make money, but for someone having a passion or seeking one. To make money, lots of money, it only suffices to be a code monkey, charging a lot for badly coded shit, walking away without taking responsibility. This is the typical modus operandi in the software industry.
Or one can try doing good work while surrounded by code monkeys.
Or one can try going as far as possible with a corporate-sponsored grad education at an engineering firm that is known for building awesome crap.
The later is the only reasonable target for people thinking of going back to school for a Ph.D.
One might succeed, or might not. As Michael Jordan once said: "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
Different educational institutions have different goals. If you want to go be a programmer and hack source code to make games, apps, real world things, etc. than traditional University education is probably not for you.
Real world things? Like database engines, operating system kernels, compilers, enterprise distributed systems, parallel computing, algo-trading, animation/rendering engines that must run in uber-clusters? Yeah, sure, a CS education is not probably not for you </rolls eyes>
Unless you are writing a physics engine from scratch, your use of math is probably limited and often CS degrees require a lot of math.
Been working on software (both commercial/enterprise, systems development and for the defense sector), and in each I've had to constantly use CS-related mathematics to do my work. Even on the commercial sector, I've had to use numerical analysis (Lagrance interpolation polynomials to approximate performance behavior as a function of incoming traffic), probability/statistics and what not. The careful selection of algorithms is something that you can do blindfolded if you have a good grasp of limits, convergence and divergence, and pretty much the bulk of discrete mathematics and combinatorics.
Barring the commonly trivial, like slapping a web page on front a db table, Unless the most complex thing you ever do is slapping web pages on front of a database table, you cannot simply do that in the real world without a grasp on CS mathematics. Heck, one doesn't even need a BS degree for that. I know that because I started my coding career with a AA (and worked my way towards a BS in CS and the grad school.)
Once the level of complexity or size (or system longevity) increases, a firm notion, however implicit, of CS-math is essential. And it is typically lacking "in the streets". And that is why we see so much underperforming crap in the so-called real world despite the facts that we have known for more than two decades how to do coding of a sufficient quality.
Oh nooo, we do not need mathematics to work in the real world. And then these code monkeys cannot understand why cartesian SQL queries are a no-no; or why using a retardedly synchronized java.util.HashTable is a goddamned stupid idea when a java.util.HashMap; or why their clustered applications flood the network with UDP packets (a combinatorial problem).
The nicest (or actually stupidest) comment I've seen is when people tell me that if they do unit testing on everything, then their code is bug-free, or better yet, that their code is bug free because testing didn't find any bugs. Or, wait, it gets even better when these same folks ensure others that they have a process that allows their code to be bug free. Which is fucking impossible, mathematically impossible.
And so on they go, coding crap, like code monkeys flinging shit at their monitors, and packaging/selling whatever sticks. Fixing that crap makes for a good living in terms of OT (because someone has to be hired to do the cleanup, and it's a good pay). But by God, it does makes working with software a living nightmare sometimes.
Remember that the S in CS stands for science. This is where the University education plays a role. They want to mould students to become scientists, researchers, and professors.
No, they want to mold people, be it Computer Scientists or Software Engineers (and/or both) who can code themselves out of invariant-executing for-loops.
A good portion of the science and research material requires strong mathematical backgrounds and im my experience doesn't require the ability to be a super elite programmer.
Barring the naturally gifted (most of us aren't), there is no such thing as a super-elite programmer who does not have an explicit or implicit mathematical background. There are people who can write a lot of code and get shit done, but only for the immedia
CoffeeScript. Granted, it introduces an additional dependency (CoffeeScript) on what is otherwise the simplest and easiest development platform. Which leads me to the following:
You already have a browser that runs Javascript, regardless if you're on MacOS, *nix, or Windows (or whatever system you use most likely), now all you need is a text editor, which is built in on most systems. I don't know of any other language that doesn't require you to download and install some sort of compiler, interpreter, SDK, or whatever, all of which are barriers to entry. Plus, you have the advantage of using one of the most widely used languages on a platform that can distribute your code very easily and very portably.
You may not like Javascript--and granted, as a language, it's got plenty of warts. (Note that you can fix a great deal of these warts on modern browsers by simply including a "use strict" declaration at the top of your code). But it's a great language to start out in, if for no other reason than that the start-up cost is very close to negligible, and it's a useful language that enjoys a level of ubiquity that most other languages only dream of.
^^^ This. This is the reason (a really good reason) to use JavaScript as an introductory programming language with virtually zero barrier of entry (in terms of development env. setup.)
Obviously, people will complain - argh, real devlupers use <insert toolchain> with <insert IDE/editor/whatever>. And on a real CS-oriented, full-blown and complete programming course, this is true. But we need to notice that Khan's materials are not full-blown courses, but tutorials with the explicit aim of being as accessible to the masses as possible.
Whether this (and/or the choice of JavaScript) will turn people unsuitable for programming into legions of useless code monkeys is a non-issue. After all, the typical CS programs at brick-n-mortar universities have been producing useless code monkeys since the dot-com.
What a system of programming tutorials as implemented by Khan's academy will do, however, is to make the learning of programming more accessible to those that already have the potential of being good developers. Perhaps this could reach them early on before they finish their secondary education (or allow currently enrolled CS-students to use them as add-ons to their formal curriculum.)
JavaScript is a god-awful language, but its development setup makes it a decent first-language. Yes, it does not have true OO, but neither did BASIC. And good and bad developers will become so whether they use JavaScript, BASIC or Haskell (yes, there are atrocious Haskell programmers.)
Slashdot Mirror
Juries are relatively unpaid or underpaid, and I can't imagine any of them devoting serious time to so many different points.
From my experience as being in jury duty, I disagree with this generalization. YMMV obviously, but in the end, this is just a generalization.
Although, I guess it depends on one's integrity.
At the risk of engaging into a generalization myself, people that show up to jury duty and get selected might have a bit or two of integrity. Most people simply ignore or forget to go to a jury duty row call. And of those who show, a lot do the most innane of things to avoid getting selected. Things I've seen:
1. A guy saying he didn't believe in the US legal system, and that he felt getting a US citizenship was one of his biggest mistakes.
2. A guy asking if he needs to read stuff because he really didn't like reading
3. Gratuitous mentioning of using drugs
Some people have genuine reasons to ask not being selected (say a doctor, a struggling businessman, or a parent.) But you get some shitheads showing up saying the most bestial of things just to skip jury duty. Those who stay know they'll lose salary and convenience, and still try to remain honest and useful (myself included.) My experience has been that jurors do their best to judge the evidence at hand and to follow the judge's instructions.
Again, YMMV.
As a side note, and I realize I'll get modded down as off-topic, should jurors get paid minimum wage?
Yes. Or maybe not. But it will be unreasonable for the state to compensate everyone at their daily rates for doing a civil service (which is a responsibility that comes with all the rights we have in a civil society.)
Factor in how many hours are being stolen from their lives,
Stolen? Why stolen? Society gives you a lot of rights and safegards, infrastructures and services, and above all, the right to trial by a jury of your peers (as opposed to jury by the sole hand of a despot or potentate.) In return, you are asked to give a service in return. That service, which is a small token in the grand scheme of things, will cost something in return (inconvenience and loss of some of your salary.)
And no one really forces you to participate if you are really, really cash strapped. You can always ask the selection process to give you a green light to go because of financial duress.
So it is absolutely fucking stupid to use the word "stolen" when it is something that is, much more often than not, a voluntary thing by people who thing it is a fair thing to give back to society some of their time for a very important fabric of civil society: a trial by peers.
and how little that should really cost given the expenseof everything else involved in the judicial process.
The judicial process is already expensive to begin with. It is not unreasonable to ask willing citizens to give some of their time at a lower cost as part of their civic duty to society (in exchange of the many, many, many other things we get.)
and your definition of tanking is when the tv tells you they are?
What are you babbling about?
a new strategy is needed, now anon...
That has silence of the lambs written all over it.
Which means nothing on its own. How should we account for the quality of care, taxes paid by each person recieving care, etc?
That's a different argument/question from the one you originally posted. As Voltaire used to say, define your terms in the discussion. Other countries whose economies are not tanking due to their health care systems: Singapore, Israel, Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, Rwanda, Chile to name a few.
These countries are either doing well as developed nations or on the verge of becoming ones. As for Japan's economic woes, they have everything to do with an aging population, lack of women's participation in the workforce, and little economic expansion due to the 90's economic crisis. But even with all that, the average Japanese's purchasing power and lifestyle have not deteriorated (compare that to us.)
So if you are going to argue that any significant woes (or even tanking) on any of these countries are predominantly a function of their health care systems, you better come up with some citations. Hand waving does not count.
I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
^^ This. A million times this.
Now, I'm sure the cloud will come along and tell everyone they need a thin-client instead, but we're not there yet
Chances are we will never get there, for a multitude of logistic problems. We will have network-centric applications, but the idea of returning back to the thin-client paradigm, cloudy or not, I don't see that happening now or in the near/mid future.
Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea.
There is used to be a time, not long ago where the following (listed in reverse chronological order) were considered "silly ideas"
1. tablets,
2. phones with cameras,
3. e-commerce,
4. personal computers
Sooner or later (probably sooner than you think), technology will catch up to make such an idea (a content-producing tablet) a realistic alternative. These silly ideas have merit, and would fit a future need. I don't really care any other way, but to call it "silly", well, that's silly.
Are 12-16 Hour Workdays Productive?
Sometimes out of necessity, we have to hit the meat grinder and simply do a death march, say near the end of a product release. Or, in other circumstances, you might have a development/deployment cycle of, say, 4-8 weeks, and the last 1-2 weeks involve a lot of grunt work that burns the midnight oil. Or in case of emergencies.
In those cases, yes, a 12-16 hour workday, or a week or two weeks like that will be productive. It will not be productive if you measure your hourly productivity on those weeks compared to your regular work week (if there were such a way to measure personal productivity on an hourly/daily basis.) But it is productive to the project and employer (to whom we are responsible) in the sense that we get shit done.
The world is not perfect, and plans certainly are not. Things happen along the way, so at some point, we need to get shit done no matter what (which is why we get paid waaaaaaay above average salaries.)
Having said that, if your regular workweek is always 60 hours or more, there is something wrong with your productivity (or lack thereof) or your work environment. It is simply not sustainable. People might be able to be productive with such amount of work hours when their productivity is measured in units produced (say in a manufacturing conveyor belt.)
People are very strong animals - I use the word "animal" in a natural/biological sense. People are built for endurance, and they can simply push through extended conditions of physical activity that will kill most animals. Zone out if you will (one of the reasons we became apex, cursorial pack predators.)
But when it comes to creativity and engineering, that productivity does not translate linearly with the amount of hours put to work. Our minds did not evolve to do that (and Nature in its mysterious ways must have a really good reason for that.)
One of the main keys of this is motivation. If you are forced to work 60 hours or more week after week, chances are you don't like your work at all (who would under such conditions.) So there is no motivation to keep going productively (a key ingredient in creative/engineering work.)
Contrast this with enterpreneurs/business owners or people climbing a technical/managerial ladder. They'll push through 60 hours or more for years and still remain productive. Why? Because they have a personal stake.
. In projects that require long, prolonged death marches (cue images of French soldiers crossing trenches in Verdum), you see that a function of management failure. Other factors will include the quality of workmanship, processes, products, and to a great degree, professional ethic. In such a situation, people (sane people that is) find themselves prisoners of such conditions, and will not have a personal stake on their labor.
They have to put the hours, but the key motivators are missing. So productivity goes to shit. Worse still, quality degrades, and the company or project would have been better off working less hours.
So, in summary, it depends. Do you work long hours because you want to, because you have a personal stake on it? Or because you are being ordered from the top or because the product you work on (or the conditions therein) are so shitty that you don't find any other way to get things done (correct or otherwise) than to perform death marches week after week?
Wrong. People buy just the assets of companies and leave behind the debt and liabilities all the time to the original owners.
No, they don't. Barring a bankrupcy, you simply cannot just buy the assets w/o inheriting the liabilities. I'm sure a lot of people and companies would like thta to be true, but under the lawy, itt doesn't work like that at all.
The Civil War, if one takes the long view, was a horrible mistake rather than a righteous Crusade.
The South would eventually have given up slavery, the North would have prospered through trade with the South, and fewer Southerners would pollute the American political landscape. We could have had a much improved North as a separate country too weak to chase dreams of Empire.
The US is simply too large to make a good nation. Diversity of viewpoints is best catered by smaller nations which can self-segregate regionally, politically, ethnically, and religiously.
Instead, the victory of the North begat the Globalist Corporate Republic we have today. It's a net loss for the world.
That knowledge would have brought a lot of confort to the slaved populations and the groups that morally opposed slavery like the Quakers. But who cares. Let's indulge in amoral hypotheticals just to prop up an ideological point.
The idiocy is not only in the south. I was checking out the local private schools for my daughter in an upstate NY city of over 200,000 people. I asked the new principal at one of the Catholic schools what science curriculum they used. He said, "Well, you know, we teach the idea of evolution, but it is mostly religious based." That was the end of that visit.
That doesn't make any sense given that Catholic doctrine states clearly that evolution is a scientific fact. Maybe the principal is one of the Mel Gibson/Santorum type of Catholics (you know, the type who resent the Catholic church doesn't use Latin anymore or Father George Lematrie's Big Bang Theory.) Either that or this story is made up. There are a lot of things wrong with the Catholic church nowadays, but obcurantism towards evolution and astrophysics are not one of them.
Top-down control when taken to its logical conclusion also means having Congress order you to install thermostats in your home which they can turn-off at any point (like on a hot day when the power grid is overloading... goodbye A/C). Or ordering you to buy a Prius or similar hybrid. Or outlawing SUVs. Or ordering you to buy a Windows PC so you can do online voting/polling. And so on.
That's not the "logical conclusion". That's called "reductio ad absurdum".
Bingo. Unfortunately the nuisance is missed to most.
This is the thinking that, amongst others, lead to the destruction of the British motorbike and electronics industries. In the US you are going to lose your car industry in the same way if you are not careful. Watch as 60 years behind, becomes 6 years, then 6 months, then because they are at par and cheaper, your industries will crumble.
We in the US don't have to look at the Brits to see the consequences of such thinking. The US used to mock the Japanese as "cheap camera manufacturers" until they swiftly took the entire semi-conductor industry during the PC revolution. The US has never recovered from that (and the way it goes, never will.)
It is true that Indian (and Chinese) technology is shit compared to ours. How could it not be considering they only have a fraction of the experienced found in the US or in countries like Russia or Japan??? And yet, unlike us, India and China keep pushing forward while we kill our neurons watching the Kardashians or the latest antics of Ochocinco. And they will get better (just as the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans have.)
We are having a whole bunch of fucking Sputnik moments, but we are too busy being arrogant assholes, smelling our own farts while ensuring ourselves that our competitors are troglodytes who make square tires out of shit. The whole fucking world is improving and catching up, and we do not pay notice, not doing anything at all to preserve our advantage. And that's how we will lose.
a) Deceased mother, deceased because she sacrificed her life to get her son out of that regime's control
Irrelevant. After the mother's tragic end, Elian's father had/has all paternity rights over the child. Elian's father demanded the child to be returned to his custody, which was his right. At no point did Elian's father gave away custody. Au contraire, he pretty much made it clear he wanted the kid back.
I'm not saying that Elian's mother's death was inconsequential. I sympathize with her because I myself escaped from a Communist regime (Nicaragua in this case). But once her fate was tragically sealed, custody goes to the father.
The father's custody rights are not subject to his political affiliations. And that's what makes America great compared to the Cuban or old Nicaraguan governments. If you want to make parental rights subject to political affiliations, get the hell out of the USA (or any democratic country for that matter) and move to Cuba, Iran or wherever.
b) Custody battle doesn't need M16's pointed at children's heads.
First of all, in this case it did. There were people who very publicly said they were going to shoot people up before giving the kid back to his rightful father. I lived in Miami. I was there. We all saw it, and we all heard it. Let's not pretend it did not happen. The moment someone makes realistic violent claims, law officers have a right and obligation to use weapons if necessary. You don't want cops showing up with M16s, then don't make threats of violence. That's how civilized countries operate.
Secondly, it wasn't a custody battle because there was no custody case. One parent dies. The other parent is alive. Living parent has custody. End of the story.
c) Elian was NEVER in danger with the relatives he was with.
Non sequitur. For starters no one ever made that claim. Secondly, it doesn't fucking matter. Those relatives did not have more right over the child than his father. These relatives violated the father's rights over the child. Children belong with their parents. Period. How much more fucking obtuse can you people get?
Reminds me of that little Cuban boy who was "NOT" seized from his family at gun point by SWAT police...until the photo was released that showed just that.
His family? You mean the deceased mother's 2nd and 3rd relatives and a bunch of right-wing Cuban-American celebrities and politicians? His family was his father (his living and breathing father) to whom the swat team delivered the boy.
His family was his father, who was asking Elian Gonzales (the boy) to be returned to his care. His mother and husband at the time took him out of Cuba in a raft in complete violation of the father's shared custody rights. His family was not the people who held Elian Gonzales (the boy in question) refusing to deliver him to his father just because he didn't want to leave Cuba. It was all political, a disgraceful spectacle that we in Miami had to endure at the hand of those nutjobs.
The swat team had to intervene because the people holding Elian were treating to retaliate with violence. Get your facts straight buddy.
What I'm more curious about is why people even bother plagiarizing at all. If you don't want to do an assignment, can't you just not do it, since there are no consequences to failing to do it? Are people hoping to use the "completed Coursera course" certificate on their CV or something, making it worth the effort of cheating to obtain it?
Yes. Believe it or not, that is the motivation. Plagiarism is rampant in the CS/IT sector. This is one of the reasons more and more companies (at least companies that care) are demanding live code interviews.
True story from a company that I interviewed a couple of years ago. They needed quite desperately to fill a senior position that became vacant. How it became vacant? Well, the person who was in it apparently couldn't code himself out of a wet paper bag. During his hiring process, the applicant, who was in another country, went through all the phone interviews, answering questions flawlessly. The company decided to pick him for the position and paid all relocation expenses.
Fast-track a few weeks later and the guy was unceremoniously kicked out. He simply couldn't code at all. To this day management is 100% convinced the person they interviewed was not the same person who actually showed up for the job. And this is very common. Having learned their lesson, any applicant must go through a battery of live tests, and then more tests in person. This obviously increases the expense of hiring, but that is always cheaper than getting an incompetent code monkey on a critical senior position.
It wasn't like this before when the number of professionals weren't that many, nor computer systems were so ubiquitious. You gotta give thanks to the dot-com for opening the gates. Computer systems have become ubiquitous, which is great. But the bad side of the coin is that you get any savant idiot trying to weasel his way into a good salary without paying the academic/work-related dues.
There are simply no ethics in our industry. None at all, a reflection of society, both ours and globalized. So now that people know companies will look into the coursera or udacity results, you bet they'll try to fit themselves in, like an badly made cog lubricated with pig shit.
I never saw it coming, but I should have given everything I've seen in this industry.
"So now, real-world projects that use C++ for the useful things it does provide have to maintain coding guidelines to avoid shooting themselves in the foot too often."
How is that not the case for _any_ modern language? Anyone write terrible code in any language. I've seen some Python that made me want to rip my eyeballs out (used tons of esoteric functionality... coupled with a design that made me question the person's sanity).
Coding guidelines are a good idea no matter the language. Keep everything consistent and make sure that the code remains maintainable into the future...
You are missing the point. Most languages, if not all, have coding guidelines, but compare guidelines for, say, Java, Python, or even C, with existing coding guidelines in C++. You'll see the difference in how much the later cuts through what is available in C++.
Pretty much most C++ coding guidelines (in particular for systems and mission-critical development) cut away templates, STL, i/o streams and exceptions. Boost and RTTI are certainly the most banned of things.
So you end up with a C-like language with native support for object-orientation, which is really not a bad thing. If you are lucky, you might get some limited usage of templates (limited in the sense that you have to demonstrate, but really demonstrate your usage will not *explode* into code bloat via template hoisting or what not). A few of the most used STL template classes, string, auto_ptr, map and list are typically permitted. In many cases, the later three are restricted to instances parameterized to void* or to references to a very restricted, audited set of subclasses.
The lack of exceptions forces a design based on error codes. The later is really not a great choice, but the semantics are clear, far clearer than exceptions as implemented in C++. And that's why sometimes people, out of painful experience, end up choosing C with simulated inheritance as a safer, more cost effective alternative.
One typical counter-argument is that people aren't intelligent enough to use C++ safe. Maybe so, but mental effort should be saved to harness a language most effectively in solving problems in a particular domain, not on knowing how not to blow your toes to pieces.
I know a man who got a job at Skunkworks and he only has a high school diploma. I know a drop-out with a GED who got a job at NASA. Getting a degree does not guarantee you a job. It's all about timing and your qualifications at the time.
Le'ts leave everything to faith then.
>Is a Ph.D. a near-guarantee of a spot in a skunkworks type of job (Microsoft Research and the like)?
Ha ha ha, no. I know Ph.Ds who are working as regular software developers. Unless your coursework and Ph.D thesis is about something that somebody actually cares about, you're just cannon fodder like everyone else, albeit more educated.
What a terrible faith!!!
Graduate degree are worthless. All they help is on the resume filter that is HR.
Depends on your education, what kind of work you do, and what kind of companies/contracts you apply for and your professional aspirations. Almost every job I've had since I left grad school has been thanks of my grad education and my research on security and distributed computing. So, YMMV obviously.
Smart people do just as well without them.
That's an unquantifiable oxymoron. Smart people do well with or without them. Most smart people get them. Less intelligent/capable people do not, so...
Average people likely the same.
Because average is the new sexy</rolls eyes>
Newsflash: chances are the poster is not average (simply by demonstrating a desire to continue with his formal education.) Average people do not take the reins in their career choices, preferring to go with the flow. Nothing wrong with that, but it is as risky as the alternative (which is to be above average.)
Since you stated that your goal may be to obtain a research job, maybe you should start by searching for jobs at Microsoft Research, HP Labs, etc. or other national laboratories. At least just to see what the requirements are.
A lot of those jobs probably do require a PhD, but depending on your experiences and skills, maybe you can convince them to hire you. Then you don't have to go through the typical 5-7 years of schooling to get there.
Monetarily, I would say it is not worth it to get a PhD. But it may be worth it intellectually. Even better if you have the finances to support it.
From what I've seen, MS Research typically considers Ph.D and post-grads first (or almost exclusively.) It is better to get a Masters and then get a job at one of the Department of Energy labs (say Lawrence Livermore or Sandia). Having a MS with a focus on security, robotics or parallel computing (GPU stuff is getting hot) opens a lot of doors. Then, said places provide college reimbursement for people who want to pursue a grad education (in this hypothetical case, a Ph.D.)
How would an MBA help with the submitter's goal of moving towards skunkworks development? I'm not being sarcastic here - on the face of it I can't see an MBA making him/her more desirable for those type of jobs, where as even if a PhD didn't help directly it would help with networking with the people involved in that kind of development.
It can when it goes alongside a MS degree (in particular with a kick-ass master thesis.) Sunkworks programs are always in need of extremelly tech-proficient engineering program managers (not project managers, but program managers.)
Why not? It's, at least, free. http://www.khanacademy.org/about
The guy (who already has an undergraduate degree and a decade of software development work experience) is asking about going to grad school (and possibly getting a Ph.D.
And you go "hai frendz, tries teh Khan, kthxbye"????
Dumbest. Thing. Ever.
The multi-billion dollar software company I worked for 15 years did not keep many PHd s around for long. They always tended to be far to academic in their approaches and not practical in any way. If we had years to release product, they may have worked out. Instead we needed people to find simple, smart solutions to roll out releases regularly.
There are multi-billion dollar software companies like SAP or Infosys (if you think of a software consulting firm as a software company, which you should), and there are multi-billion dollar software companies like Google or to an extend Lockheed Martin (if you think about the later's obscene amounts of software they have to write for the systems they develop.)
That is, multi-billion dollar software companies are not created equally.
A PhD doesn't really guarantee you anything. It can also be detrimental depending on what you want to do as some companies consider it too much or too expensive. You'll be better off starting in a Masters program and then deciding if you you really see a need or feel the desire to go for the PhD. A PhD is a LOT of work and time. Really unless you plan to go into academia or hard core research I'd steer clear.
Not really. I'd say for a person looking to go back to grad school, he/she'd be better off finishing the MS degree, then force his way into a company like Google or Lockheed Martin. That is, big engineering firms known for having in-house career development programs and fat school reimbursement benefits. Use the MS studies to prepare to the interviews, and try and try until you get there. Then work your way to anything resemble a R&D program and begin your studies for a Ph.D.
In particular with companies like these mentioned above, a person can work himself up to a position of Principal Engineer, Chief Scientist or Architect or Engineering Program Manager (not project manager, but program manager.) My suggestion is always to go for the Ph.D but only with a clear vision of what type of role (not work, but role) you want to do.
Also, one should take into account that such plans of actions are to be made with a 10-15 year timespan. Some cringe at this. Others do not. I certainly do not (and I'm about to turn 43.) 10-15 years will come to pass anyways, so I might as well do something with it (provided the limited time available due to family, etc.)
This is not for the people who only wants to make money, but for someone having a passion or seeking one. To make money, lots of money, it only suffices to be a code monkey, charging a lot for badly coded shit, walking away without taking responsibility. This is the typical modus operandi in the software industry.
Or one can try doing good work while surrounded by code monkeys.
Or one can try going as far as possible with a corporate-sponsored grad education at an engineering firm that is known for building awesome crap.
The later is the only reasonable target for people thinking of going back to school for a Ph.D.
One might succeed, or might not. As Michael Jordan once said: "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
Different educational institutions have different goals. If you want to go be a programmer and hack source code to make games, apps, real world things, etc. than traditional University education is probably not for you.
Real world things? Like database engines, operating system kernels, compilers, enterprise distributed systems, parallel computing, algo-trading, animation/rendering engines that must run in uber-clusters? Yeah, sure, a CS education is not probably not for you </rolls eyes>
Unless you are writing a physics engine from scratch, your use of math is probably limited and often CS degrees require a lot of math.
Been working on software (both commercial/enterprise, systems development and for the defense sector), and in each I've had to constantly use CS-related mathematics to do my work. Even on the commercial sector, I've had to use numerical analysis (Lagrance interpolation polynomials to approximate performance behavior as a function of incoming traffic), probability/statistics and what not. The careful selection of algorithms is something that you can do blindfolded if you have a good grasp of limits, convergence and divergence, and pretty much the bulk of discrete mathematics and combinatorics.
Barring the commonly trivial, like slapping a web page on front a db table, Unless the most complex thing you ever do is slapping web pages on front of a database table, you cannot simply do that in the real world without a grasp on CS mathematics. Heck, one doesn't even need a BS degree for that. I know that because I started my coding career with a AA (and worked my way towards a BS in CS and the grad school.)
Once the level of complexity or size (or system longevity) increases, a firm notion, however implicit, of CS-math is essential. And it is typically lacking "in the streets". And that is why we see so much underperforming crap in the so-called real world despite the facts that we have known for more than two decades how to do coding of a sufficient quality.
Oh nooo, we do not need mathematics to work in the real world. And then these code monkeys cannot understand why cartesian SQL queries are a no-no; or why using a retardedly synchronized java.util.HashTable is a goddamned stupid idea when a java.util.HashMap; or why their clustered applications flood the network with UDP packets (a combinatorial problem).
The nicest (or actually stupidest) comment I've seen is when people tell me that if they do unit testing on everything, then their code is bug-free, or better yet, that their code is bug free because testing didn't find any bugs. Or, wait, it gets even better when these same folks ensure others that they have a process that allows their code to be bug free. Which is fucking impossible, mathematically impossible.
And so on they go, coding crap, like code monkeys flinging shit at their monitors, and packaging/selling whatever sticks. Fixing that crap makes for a good living in terms of OT (because someone has to be hired to do the cleanup, and it's a good pay). But by God, it does makes working with software a living nightmare sometimes.
Remember that the S in CS stands for science. This is where the University education plays a role. They want to mould students to become scientists, researchers, and professors.
No, they want to mold people, be it Computer Scientists or Software Engineers (and/or both) who can code themselves out of invariant-executing for-loops.
A good portion of the science and research material requires strong mathematical backgrounds and im my experience doesn't require the ability to be a super elite programmer.
Barring the naturally gifted (most of us aren't), there is no such thing as a super-elite programmer who does not have an explicit or implicit mathematical background. There are people who can write a lot of code and get shit done, but only for the immedia
Name a language that is easier to get started in.
CoffeeScript. Granted, it introduces an additional dependency (CoffeeScript) on what is otherwise the simplest and easiest development platform. Which leads me to the following:
You already have a browser that runs Javascript, regardless if you're on MacOS, *nix, or Windows (or whatever system you use most likely), now all you need is a text editor, which is built in on most systems. I don't know of any other language that doesn't require you to download and install some sort of compiler, interpreter, SDK, or whatever, all of which are barriers to entry. Plus, you have the advantage of using one of the most widely used languages on a platform that can distribute your code very easily and very portably.
You may not like Javascript--and granted, as a language, it's got plenty of warts. (Note that you can fix a great deal of these warts on modern browsers by simply including a "use strict" declaration at the top of your code). But it's a great language to start out in, if for no other reason than that the start-up cost is very close to negligible, and it's a useful language that enjoys a level of ubiquity that most other languages only dream of.
^^^ This. This is the reason (a really good reason) to use JavaScript as an introductory programming language with virtually zero barrier of entry (in terms of development env. setup.)
Obviously, people will complain - argh, real devlupers use <insert toolchain> with <insert IDE/editor/whatever>. And on a real CS-oriented, full-blown and complete programming course, this is true. But we need to notice that Khan's materials are not full-blown courses, but tutorials with the explicit aim of being as accessible to the masses as possible.
Whether this (and/or the choice of JavaScript) will turn people unsuitable for programming into legions of useless code monkeys is a non-issue. After all, the typical CS programs at brick-n-mortar universities have been producing useless code monkeys since the dot-com.
What a system of programming tutorials as implemented by Khan's academy will do, however, is to make the learning of programming more accessible to those that already have the potential of being good developers. Perhaps this could reach them early on before they finish their secondary education (or allow currently enrolled CS-students to use them as add-ons to their formal curriculum.)
JavaScript is a god-awful language, but its development setup makes it a decent first-language. Yes, it does not have true OO, but neither did BASIC. And good and bad developers will become so whether they use JavaScript, BASIC or Haskell (yes, there are atrocious Haskell programmers.)