Reputation isn't the whole deal, but it is part of the deal. Engineering might be different, but a degree in the humanities, or even a job in software development, can take a hit from where you went to school. Consider a job candidate from Mass Bay Community College vs MIT. I've seen that difference noted and used in hiring decisions.
Drive and Discipline after college does indeed impact success, I agree wholeheartedly. Luck also plays a role, as does how well your education prepares you for adaptation, good work habits, and relevant skills. Then there is also networking - some schools get you in touch with the right people at the right places.
I think choosing to go to a state university vs a community college is far from a vanity choice.
It often isn't, but sometimes is. It depends on what you are interviewing for. In some markets graduates of highly regarded schools get an automatic one-up over everyone else, regardless of experience. I've encountered this on both sides of the hiring table. +1 on your American Reality quote!
I hear what you are saying, I don't count professors who can't teach as quality. And I know some community colleges do have excellent teachers. I lucked out. I had in demand profs who spent most of their time teaching, and teaching well. I didn't major in education, but I learned how to teach from watching them at work. I also had some in demand professors who I got to work with on their research. At a community college I would not have gotten that kind of opportunity.
Mod parent down. I went to a state school which saw budget cuts and associated tuition and fee raises. Even with loans and scholarships, my undergrad cost a lot. Why did I go to a state university and not the local state college? Because like it or not where you get your degree does matter - a lot. People look at the reputation of your school when it comes to jobs or graduate school. Different schools offer different majors, different classes, internship opportunities, and other "perks" that can change the course of your career. Higher quality professors tend to get recruited by the more expensive schools, even the public ones. If you want to get involved in research your best bet is at a University with a graduate school, not a community college. Those "dreams of grandeur" you speak of are simply the dreams of students looking to have a career - which in other countries they manage to do without crippling loans because higher education is subsidized more heavily than here. Those "ridiculous" student loans can take forever to pay back. Look at median income and average income, and then figure in a $40k loan. That's $10k a year. How long would it take someone at the median income to pay that back? How about average income? How about your income. Now keep in mind some of the crazier loans are not for undergraduate but for graduate school - especially medical and law. Not everyone who gets a law degree graduates into a 6 figure salary at a corporation. Some work for nonprofits or in law-enforcement pulling in far less, but with loans no less high. Now get the hell off your privileged high horse and stop telling Americans that the American Dream is still alive - just not for them. Tell anyone who cannot afford a decent college degree to go be a plumber, or to go to a community college that doesn't have the courses in any of the subjects they want because they cannot afford to go to University. Myself? I'm going to advocate for making college cheaper without shattering the backbone of US financial aid like Mr Ron Paul seems set on doing.
Offtopic. The US tax code and product liability laws are completely unrelated to this story. You might make an interesting argument that governments world wide are moving further and further away from trusting their citizens, and this is yet another salvo in that battle. A relevant example from the US would be the Senators who are making noises about removing the ability to directly elect Congress.
+1. Your innovation, your profit. That's entirely fair. I'm all for stopping corporate abuse of individual rights, but we need to remember creators are individuals too.
You can major in something other than CS and get a job. I've worked in a number of tech companies with positions from developer to project manager filled admirably by people with psychology, philosophy, and english degrees. But what really smells about your argument is the idea that college NEEDS to be a 4 year vocational school. What smells even worse is it ignores the arguments from the article itself: A lot of the truly crippling college debt comes from students who - in order to get jobs in their fields - go to graduate school. Not all lawyers and doctors enjoy large salaries - but most of them enjoy large debts.
But so what if your argument DID hold true, and some people just made a mistake in what they studied? This attitude of "you screwed up so you deserve to suffer" is cruel and impractical. It is cruel to flush someone's life down the drain for what they studied in school, cruel to tell them in high school majoring in a problematic major is a good idea, and cruel to market college as "their only path to success". It is impractical because if we let everyone who stumbles fall, then our consumer driven economy will falter further, and society will lose out on a generation of potential.
Why not approach it like the EU, and require Amazon to provide users with a simple choice screen when they first use the new Kindle? "Welcome to Amazon Silk! Would you like to speed your browsing by sending all of your requests through our servers, or would you prefer to use Silk in a conventional manner?". Opt-Out tends to leave non technical users in the dust. That said, Amazon is starting to lack credibility when it comes to privacy issues. Their actions regarding 1984 + Kindle left a dark stain on their reputation. "Opt-Out" privacy isn't going to help.
With the end of the desktop, it makes sense that the end of "programmable computing" is at hand (followed surely by the year of linux on the desktop). That said, imagine how amusing it would be if there was a union to protect programmers (hah, no more 100 hour weeks!). I can see them working to protect the jobs this inevitable innovation will extinguish. Whatever, onto the next thing, until every useful human task including innovation itself is taken over by the machines. At which point we'll still bright futures as investment bankers and politicians.
Can someone explain why "you are the product" translates to carte blanche for facebook to do what they want with your data? If the FBI maintains a file on me, using purely public information, do I not have a right to that information? I don't understand why "you are using this for free" translates to "you deserve whatever they do to you". If Facebook charged for their service, would I suddenly be entitled to more? So do products (aka users) have zero rights? Should we?
I think the difference is between whether science is the target or the tool. In most cases, political goals trump scientific reality: science is the target, politics the tool. In this case, a political goal was furthered by using science as a positive beacon of trusted authority: science is the tool, politics the target. Its a fairly remarkable (though not by any means new) thing, given the increasingly hostile-to-science political landscape in the US.
You've swallowed quite a lot of what Ron Paul is selling. Using folksy language and insisting on "facts" while you present misinformed distortions is not an effective argument. Your misconception that the Civil Rights act was against the Constitution is stunningly ignorant (and blissfully devoid of a single link to back it up). Ron Paul has quite the record (http://www.issues2000.org/tx/Ron_Paul.htm) on abortion. His dance around "state's rights" on gay rights and civil rights doesn't fool most Americans, even if it has fooled you.
What more do we want? How about a candidate who doesn't throw up a ton of red flags? Source: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/27-1
I could also go into his obsessive desire to return to the "gold standard". The man has correctly diagnosed our financial system as lousy, but it hardly takes a doctor to recognize a patient with a visible outbreak of zombie-plague.
Its becoming a race to the bottom, with all three branches of government at both the federal and state level pushing each other to invade privacy and erode rights further and further. Putting either a Democrat or Republican in office doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. What exactly does that leave? Who do we replace them with (when voting them out is even an option). Several members of the Supreme Court have indicated they sit on the bench to further corporate interests at the expense of individual rights. What recourse do we have?
"Mozilla is advising Firefox users to disable the latest version of its browser software, saying that it could cause 'stability or security problems.' Firefox 7, which ships with some minor updates despite the major version number increase, is designed to fix a number of memory issues. But according to Mozilla it has an unintended side-effect: It can cause itself to crash... a lot."
I'd love to know the answer to that question. Is this from a study they ran? Is Windows sending back usage data to Microsoft?
I'm guessing the latter:
Microsoft 7 Privacy Statement:
The personal information we collect from you will be used by Microsoft and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates to enable the features you use and provide the services or carry out the transactions you have requested or authorized. The information may also be used to analyze and improve Microsoft products and services.
The parent comment deserves to be modded way up. It isn't that Nuclear tech is unsafe inherently, it is that we need to ensure the companies building and maintaining the plants are not cutting costs at the expense of safety. That is the lesson of Fukushima.
It isn't a question of speed gains, but a question of stability. Under normal user patterns, will the browser crash? How many users have multiple tabs open (with slashdot, facebook, youtube, and gmail all open at once)? How many users leave their computer running at night, with the browser open to a few articles they wanted to read, but won't get to until tomorrow?
I've found in these situations (on Linux Mint or Ubuntu), Chrome keeps chugging along, and Firefox inevitably (as of versions 6 and 7) crashes or experiences a UI freeze. Therein lies the real world relevance: "Can I trust my browser not to crash while I am using it?"
I'd love to see a multi-platform (where possible) stability benchmark across the major browsers:
Opening the same site in 10 tabs. in 100. At what point does the browser crash? What is the memory usage?
Now open the same youtube video in 10 tabs. In 100. Repeat the above.
Do the same with trailers.apple.com.
Next, open a youtube video in 10 tabs for each browser, and log how long that pid remains active. Is it still there after a day? After a week? Or does it crash with no user interaction?
I wonder where Firefox would stand in the ranks after tests like the above.
Police violence against civilians is becoming an increasingly expected occurrence. Will the officers involved in these incidents be punished in a way that discourages future abuse? Can the public reasonably expect to see that punishment? Can the public trust police officers? I've been to protests where I've seen officers calm down the situation, and situations where officers escalated or created a dangerous situation (at the same protest!). Couple incidents like these with recent stories involving misuse of tasers and general police brutality, and the issue is the police are moving from our trusted protectors to our abusive jailors in the public eye. That is horribly dangerous for everyone, including the police.
The problem isn't what you may or may not post under a profile with your real name (or a fake name). What happens when a friend of yours decides to tag you at a political protest, or tags a non pg-rated picture with your name? Does it matter whether its really you? Or whether the "friend" who tagged it is really a friend? The article mentions "racially insensitive" material is a flag - what if you are a stand up comic on the side? It mentions "sexually explicit" - who determines what that line is?
So there are several lines you could cross to get flagged, and you don't even need to actually cross it yourself to get flagged in Social Intelligence Corp's system. Good on Franken and Blumenthal for looking into this and raising the issue.
Do they have to be mutually exclusive? I'd like to see socialized medicine and the tiered FDA approval. Why not allow individuals who are properly informed to try beta trials of new procedures or drugs? That way we keep our stricter regulation and still give people more choice.
Americans look to Canada for drugs to avoid the price fixing set by the drug companies here (note that Adam Smith opposed the idea of monopolies, yet you need more than an invisible hand to shake those particular economic monsters from their stranglehold on the flow of resources). With regards to Mexico, I'm just seeing stories about Americans going south for cost reasons (perhaps because we don't have socialized medicine? Nah, can't be).
As noted above (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2434238&cid=37439428), some of the rush to Europe has to do with trying procedures that have enjoyed less rigorous testing than here (which has its good and bad sides. I don't understand why allergy drops are not yet mainstream treatment in the US, but the risks of certain kinds of stem cell treatment does make sense).
Not to take away from your other points.
policy set by science-illiterate representatives voted into their positions by a science-ignorant public for decades
Now THAT is a valid concern indeed. There's no need to whip up Adam Smith or economics as the boogey man here, since it lack of regulation of drug company pricing, lack of socialized medicine coupled with strong regulation of new medical procedures and over regulation of medical research (stem cell research) are all the source of the medical tourism being described. (Excessive litigation has nothing to do with it, and it is getting annoying seeing that card played over and over again).
In other words, it isn't something as simple as "the market is winning, we need less regulation".
If a private company gropes you, public opinion forces them to change or they go out of business from driving away airport travelers. If the government gropes you, they tell you "tough shit," which is what the TSA has been saying for the last 12 months.
Bullshit. If a private company messes with you, even with competition (Verizion is a great example), they can still say "tough shit".
The remedy to the gropings is the same whether it is the government or a private corporation doing it, pursue as doggedly as possible through the courts, public opinion, and legislation to protect travelers.
In the meantime we are stuck with Republicans cynically trying to use the groping as an excuse to privatize more government, and libertarians gobbling it up uncritically.
Slashdot Mirror
Reputation isn't the whole deal, but it is part of the deal. Engineering might be different, but a degree in the humanities, or even a job in software development, can take a hit from where you went to school. Consider a job candidate from Mass Bay Community College vs MIT. I've seen that difference noted and used in hiring decisions.
Drive and Discipline after college does indeed impact success, I agree wholeheartedly. Luck also plays a role, as does how well your education prepares you for adaptation, good work habits, and relevant skills. Then there is also networking - some schools get you in touch with the right people at the right places.
I think choosing to go to a state university vs a community college is far from a vanity choice.
It often isn't, but sometimes is. It depends on what you are interviewing for. In some markets graduates of highly regarded schools get an automatic one-up over everyone else, regardless of experience. I've encountered this on both sides of the hiring table. +1 on your American Reality quote!
I hear what you are saying, I don't count professors who can't teach as quality. And I know some community colleges do have excellent teachers. I lucked out. I had in demand profs who spent most of their time teaching, and teaching well. I didn't major in education, but I learned how to teach from watching them at work. I also had some in demand professors who I got to work with on their research. At a community college I would not have gotten that kind of opportunity.
Mod parent up - Now is the time to publish any and all of the leaks they have on financial institutions. Fight back!
Mod parent down. I went to a state school which saw budget cuts and associated tuition and fee raises. Even with loans and scholarships, my undergrad cost a lot. Why did I go to a state university and not the local state college? Because like it or not where you get your degree does matter - a lot. People look at the reputation of your school when it comes to jobs or graduate school. Different schools offer different majors, different classes, internship opportunities, and other "perks" that can change the course of your career. Higher quality professors tend to get recruited by the more expensive schools, even the public ones. If you want to get involved in research your best bet is at a University with a graduate school, not a community college. Those "dreams of grandeur" you speak of are simply the dreams of students looking to have a career - which in other countries they manage to do without crippling loans because higher education is subsidized more heavily than here. Those "ridiculous" student loans can take forever to pay back. Look at median income and average income, and then figure in a $40k loan. That's $10k a year. How long would it take someone at the median income to pay that back? How about average income? How about your income. Now keep in mind some of the crazier loans are not for undergraduate but for graduate school - especially medical and law. Not everyone who gets a law degree graduates into a 6 figure salary at a corporation. Some work for nonprofits or in law-enforcement pulling in far less, but with loans no less high. Now get the hell off your privileged high horse and stop telling Americans that the American Dream is still alive - just not for them. Tell anyone who cannot afford a decent college degree to go be a plumber, or to go to a community college that doesn't have the courses in any of the subjects they want because they cannot afford to go to University. Myself? I'm going to advocate for making college cheaper without shattering the backbone of US financial aid like Mr Ron Paul seems set on doing.
Offtopic. The US tax code and product liability laws are completely unrelated to this story. You might make an interesting argument that governments world wide are moving further and further away from trusting their citizens, and this is yet another salvo in that battle. A relevant example from the US would be the Senators who are making noises about removing the ability to directly elect Congress.
+1. Your innovation, your profit. That's entirely fair. I'm all for stopping corporate abuse of individual rights, but we need to remember creators are individuals too.
You can major in something other than CS and get a job. I've worked in a number of tech companies with positions from developer to project manager filled admirably by people with psychology, philosophy, and english degrees. But what really smells about your argument is the idea that college NEEDS to be a 4 year vocational school. What smells even worse is it ignores the arguments from the article itself: A lot of the truly crippling college debt comes from students who - in order to get jobs in their fields - go to graduate school. Not all lawyers and doctors enjoy large salaries - but most of them enjoy large debts.
But so what if your argument DID hold true, and some people just made a mistake in what they studied? This attitude of "you screwed up so you deserve to suffer" is cruel and impractical. It is cruel to flush someone's life down the drain for what they studied in school, cruel to tell them in high school majoring in a problematic major is a good idea, and cruel to market college as "their only path to success". It is impractical because if we let everyone who stumbles fall, then our consumer driven economy will falter further, and society will lose out on a generation of potential.
(Accidentally posted this as an AC).
Why not approach it like the EU, and require Amazon to provide users with a simple choice screen when they first use the new Kindle? "Welcome to Amazon Silk! Would you like to speed your browsing by sending all of your requests through our servers, or would you prefer to use Silk in a conventional manner?". Opt-Out tends to leave non technical users in the dust. That said, Amazon is starting to lack credibility when it comes to privacy issues. Their actions regarding 1984 + Kindle left a dark stain on their reputation. "Opt-Out" privacy isn't going to help.
With the end of the desktop, it makes sense that the end of "programmable computing" is at hand (followed surely by the year of linux on the desktop). That said, imagine how amusing it would be if there was a union to protect programmers (hah, no more 100 hour weeks!). I can see them working to protect the jobs this inevitable innovation will extinguish. Whatever, onto the next thing, until every useful human task including innovation itself is taken over by the machines. At which point we'll still bright futures as investment bankers and politicians.
Can someone explain why "you are the product" translates to carte blanche for facebook to do what they want with your data? If the FBI maintains a file on me, using purely public information, do I not have a right to that information? I don't understand why "you are using this for free" translates to "you deserve whatever they do to you". If Facebook charged for their service, would I suddenly be entitled to more? So do products (aka users) have zero rights? Should we?
I think the difference is between whether science is the target or the tool. In most cases, political goals trump scientific reality: science is the target, politics the tool. In this case, a political goal was furthered by using science as a positive beacon of trusted authority: science is the tool, politics the target. Its a fairly remarkable (though not by any means new) thing, given the increasingly hostile-to-science political landscape in the US.
You've swallowed quite a lot of what Ron Paul is selling. Using folksy language and insisting on "facts" while you present misinformed distortions is not an effective argument. Your misconception that the Civil Rights act was against the Constitution is stunningly ignorant (and blissfully devoid of a single link to back it up). Ron Paul has quite the record (http://www.issues2000.org/tx/Ron_Paul.htm) on abortion. His dance around "state's rights" on gay rights and civil rights doesn't fool most Americans, even if it has fooled you.
What more do we want? How about a candidate who doesn't throw up a ton of red flags? Source: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/27-1 I could also go into his obsessive desire to return to the "gold standard". The man has correctly diagnosed our financial system as lousy, but it hardly takes a doctor to recognize a patient with a visible outbreak of zombie-plague.
Its becoming a race to the bottom, with all three branches of government at both the federal and state level pushing each other to invade privacy and erode rights further and further. Putting either a Democrat or Republican in office doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. What exactly does that leave? Who do we replace them with (when voting them out is even an option). Several members of the Supreme Court have indicated they sit on the bench to further corporate interests at the expense of individual rights. What recourse do we have?
"Mozilla is advising Firefox users to disable the latest version of its browser software, saying that it could cause 'stability or security problems.' Firefox 7, which ships with some minor updates despite the major version number increase, is designed to fix a number of memory issues. But according to Mozilla it has an unintended side-effect: It can cause itself to crash... a lot."
The parent comment deserves to be modded way up. It isn't that Nuclear tech is unsafe inherently, it is that we need to ensure the companies building and maintaining the plants are not cutting costs at the expense of safety. That is the lesson of Fukushima.
It isn't a question of speed gains, but a question of stability. Under normal user patterns, will the browser crash? How many users have multiple tabs open (with slashdot, facebook, youtube, and gmail all open at once)? How many users leave their computer running at night, with the browser open to a few articles they wanted to read, but won't get to until tomorrow?
I've found in these situations (on Linux Mint or Ubuntu), Chrome keeps chugging along, and Firefox inevitably (as of versions 6 and 7) crashes or experiences a UI freeze. Therein lies the real world relevance: "Can I trust my browser not to crash while I am using it?"
I'd love to see a multi-platform (where possible) stability benchmark across the major browsers:
Opening the same site in 10 tabs. in 100. At what point does the browser crash? What is the memory usage?
Now open the same youtube video in 10 tabs. In 100. Repeat the above.
Do the same with trailers.apple.com.
Next, open a youtube video in 10 tabs for each browser, and log how long that pid remains active. Is it still there after a day? After a week? Or does it crash with no user interaction?
I wonder where Firefox would stand in the ranks after tests like the above.
Police violence against civilians is becoming an increasingly expected occurrence. Will the officers involved in these incidents be punished in a way that discourages future abuse? Can the public reasonably expect to see that punishment? Can the public trust police officers? I've been to protests where I've seen officers calm down the situation, and situations where officers escalated or created a dangerous situation (at the same protest!). Couple incidents like these with recent stories involving misuse of tasers and general police brutality, and the issue is the police are moving from our trusted protectors to our abusive jailors in the public eye. That is horribly dangerous for everyone, including the police.
The problem isn't what you may or may not post under a profile with your real name (or a fake name). What happens when a friend of yours decides to tag you at a political protest, or tags a non pg-rated picture with your name? Does it matter whether its really you? Or whether the "friend" who tagged it is really a friend? The article mentions "racially insensitive" material is a flag - what if you are a stand up comic on the side? It mentions "sexually explicit" - who determines what that line is?
So there are several lines you could cross to get flagged, and you don't even need to actually cross it yourself to get flagged in Social Intelligence Corp's system. Good on Franken and Blumenthal for looking into this and raising the issue.
Do they have to be mutually exclusive? I'd like to see socialized medicine and the tiered FDA approval. Why not allow individuals who are properly informed to try beta trials of new procedures or drugs? That way we keep our stricter regulation and still give people more choice.
As noted above (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2434238&cid=37439428), some of the rush to Europe has to do with trying procedures that have enjoyed less rigorous testing than here (which has its good and bad sides. I don't understand why allergy drops are not yet mainstream treatment in the US, but the risks of certain kinds of stem cell treatment does make sense).
Not to take away from your other points.
Now THAT is a valid concern indeed. There's no need to whip up Adam Smith or economics as the boogey man here, since it lack of regulation of drug company pricing, lack of socialized medicine coupled with strong regulation of new medical procedures and over regulation of medical research (stem cell research) are all the source of the medical tourism being described. (Excessive litigation has nothing to do with it, and it is getting annoying seeing that card played over and over again).
In other words, it isn't something as simple as "the market is winning, we need less regulation".
Bullshit. If a private company messes with you, even with competition (Verizion is a great example), they can still say "tough shit".
The remedy to the gropings is the same whether it is the government or a private corporation doing it, pursue as doggedly as possible through the courts, public opinion, and legislation to protect travelers.
In the meantime we are stuck with Republicans cynically trying to use the groping as an excuse to privatize more government, and libertarians gobbling it up uncritically.