The Electoral College is not obsolete. The winner-take-all system of awarding electors is horribly dated and should be done away with in every state. (I personally prefer assigning by congressional district with the two electors corresponding to the senators being awarded to the winner of the state-wide popular vote.) People all over the world need to remember that the United States was formed as a loose federation of states. Prior to the adoption of the Constitution, these states even had their own currencies! Even under the Constitution, we have a federal system of government. The federal government has few powers, some are reserved to the states, and the rest to the people. Despite what some people might lead you to believe now days, states have rights to determine certain things without the federal government being involved. I doubt that the founders ever envisioned a federal government as powerful as the one we have today, particularly as large as the country is. For example, it took a constitutional amendment in order for the federal government to levy an income tax against every citizen without regard to the decennial census. The states choose their electors, who in turn choose the president. Plain and simple. The constitution guarantees a minimum amount of representation for every state, regardless of population, so perhaps an electoral vote from North Dakota and Wyoming might represent fewer citizens than an electoral vote from California, but such is the nature of our republic. Those of us who vote in the small states do not get a bigger vote than you do, we get one vote in our state just like everyone else. By your argument, Congress is horribly broken as well and California, New York, and Texas should just decide the laws for every state in the country. That wouldn't work, plain and simple.
Finally, if you have a problem with the current electoral system, rather than griping about the Electoral College, a system that you won't be able to get rid of because of the following list of states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, Delaware, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Hawaii, and Rhode Island. All of those states have three or four electoral votes, and thus would not give up their citizens' right to be involved in choosing the president by getting rid of the Electoral College. (Because that's what would happen. No one would care about how people vote in those states, because they just don't have enough people to matter in the popular vote.) There are twelve states in that list (and probably several five-vote states could be added to it). Twelve states is all it takes to block a constitutional amendment. If you've got a problem with the Electoral College, start pushing for something you can change: the demise of the winner-take-all system of distributing electoral votes.
Looks like/. is off jumping the gun and running into wild off-topic "discussions" again. I tried to read the article, but became disgusted with the poor quality of it early on. Just a couple of points that made me give up are (1) a blatant lie claiming that Georgia doesn't have absentee voting and (2) their wild and faulty assumption that 90% of all votes cast are cast on electronic machines. North Dakota is finally getting optical scan ballots state-wide, and I think they're likely to stay with them a long time, because they're cheap and reliable and not such a big change. Lots of other states are in the same situation, so assuming 90% is ludicrous. Also, an increasing number of votes are being cast early using absentee ballots or paper early ballots, so it's unlikely that in the future 90% of votes will ever be cast on election day.
I applaud these Yalue undergraduates for trying, but there's not much to see here. Let's move along.
Have you ever had your home broken into? My apartment was robbed just this past Tuesday, and it's not the fact that they got away with my TV, DVD player, DVDs, checkbook, fireproof safe, digital camera, and two old laptops that bothers me the most. It's the fact that they were IN MY HOME rummaging through my things. They took the pillow cases off my bed to carry off their loot. They took a few clothes from my closet. They took the mostly-used bottle of shampoo from my shower. They took my deodorant. That pretty clearly indicates that they were all over my apartment rummaging through things. It's a very disconcerting feeling to know that someone's been in your home and you don't know exactly where they've been.
I really wish that I'd had some sort of camera hooked up to get pictures of the thieves. (I keep using the plural because hauling off my 27" TV would not be an easy job for one person, let alone getting out of the building with the rest of the stuff they took without arousing too much suspicion.) The one possible lead is the fact that they passed a bad check for $335 AT MY BANK. That's got to be one of the dumbest moves I've ever heard of, as banks have security cameras, and everyone with 10 brain cells should know it. Still waiting to hear back from them to see if they can isolate some footage to give to the police.
What you have understand is that Turing didn't know about push down automata (PDA) when he developed the Turing machine (TM). Turing formulated the TM as a way to show that our formal axiomatic system for mathematics was undecidable (that is, there are statements whose truth values cannot be determined algorithmically). When he designed it, the states of the machine were compared to human states of mind. Finite automata (FA) and PDAs are things that logicians and theoretical computer scientists have developed over the years as simpler models of computation. By teaching about them in an automata theory class, students are more prepared for the concepts of the TM. If I just plopped the general definition of a TM down in front of a person, they'd probably run screaming from the room or at least be horribly confused until examples of simpler devices were presented. (Also, FAs and PDAs have the nice property of recognizing regular and context-free languages, respectively, which allows a discussion of formal languages and their recognition to progress in a natural manner.)
I guess that my point is that the way we are taught mathematics (and that's what the theory of computation is) does not always coincide with the order in which the ideas were developed, no matter how natural the order they are taught in might seem. (For another example, consider that most calculus texts develop differentiation before integration, which is historically backward. The only text that I know of that presents calculus in the historically-correct order is Tom M. Apostol's Calculus. However, in his Mathematical Analysis, he follows the traditional order of differentiation first.)
The Linux search has been there for at least four years now. It might not have been linked, but Google: Linux has been on my bookmarks bar for a long time now.
NSA's program was called the Undergraduate Training Program, but is now the Stokes Educational Training Program. I know someone who's in the program, and it's a pretty good deal. Pays for school, gives you a job when you get out, and you have summer jobs throughout school. Now it's for more than just people who are good at math as well.
False. Fair use allows an individual to make one copy of part of a book or journal or magazine for their own "fair use". If an instructor wishes to distribute an entire chapter or article to the entire class, royalties are due to the author and/or publisher. Yeah, it seems like a loophole, but there's a difference between putting a book on reserve and allowing students to photocopy the relevant chapter and handing out 30 copies to an entire class.
Before we all start blaming the bookstores for this, let me make it clear that I have worked with shipping/receiving/pricing textbooks, and I know that the publishers set the prices. My campus bookstore has about at 23% margin on textbooks, which basically covers paying rent to the Union, paying employees, and paying for the shipping costs to get the books. They are fortunate enough to be under the Division of Student Affairs, which means that they have a mandate to get as many used books as possible. They also pay well for used books that are needed.
OK, so now we get to the blame part. I, too, have purchased several texts from the UK (usually Blackwell's, but I always search AddAll first to find the best price. I don't know why the publishers can afford to sell things for 50% of the US price overseas, but it's atrocious. There's a comment on here about International Editions, the cheap paperback reprints sold in the Asian market, and I should be clear that the ones from the UK are the same quality hardbacks (with the exact same content) as the US editions. However, publishers have started catching onto the fact that US students are importing the books, and now there are some books that they won't let UK retailers export (e.g., Haviland's Anthropology). The publishers are a bunch of money-grubing bastards, and most of them aren't even US-owned, so it makes it even more fun.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. BLAME THE PUBLISHERS, not your campus bookstore. The best thing you can do is to search for these deals and take advantage of them. Be warned that the shipping time to the interior of the US (say, North Dakota) can be a little long, even with Air Mail, since it's no longer Air Mail when the USPS gets its hands on it.
I'm at NDSU in Fargo (insert obligatory joke here), and for once ITS had a semi-intelligent solution. They found some way (haven't had a chance to ask for specifics) to find out when a computer was infected (or even vulnerable, I hear), and then they just denied that MAC address an IP from the DHCP server. Once it's cleaned up, you call or email them and they put you on the list to be reactivated. Of course, it's a bit bothersome when you have to wait overnight to get a PC back online, but it's better then losing all network access while you wait for them to check everything. (Of course, this solution only came about when they didn't get the patch rolled out in the computer clusters and most of them were shut down to getting infected.)
I'm the SysAdmin for the math department, and we're still facing sporadic infection on computers that didn't get patched when I sent out an email this summer. (Would have patched them myself, but I was 1500 miles away.) Fortunately, our lab got patched the night before Blaster was triggered, so we were safe there. Only a couple faculty members who could wait a day or two to get back online.
Here, here! It is definitely the publisher's fault. I've worked as a student employee at North Dakota State's Varsity Mart Bookstore, and I know that the high prices are the fault of the publisher. Our store only marks things up enough to pay freight costs, labor costs, and space rent to the Union. If they do make a profit (and I think that's probably only on supplies, clothes, and tradebooks), the University uses it to pay off debts for new construction. (One local school, I think it's Minnesota State University-Moorhead will actually begin returning profits to students as dividends based on how much they purchase each year starting this fall.)
Publishers are out to make money and hate, hate, hate used books. Thus, they come out with oodles of packages with worthless CDs or website access codes or quickly-replaceable flimsy materials. Our bookstore usually works with profs to get around most of the package things. (Bookstore: "Do you really need the CD?" Prof.: "There's a CD with the book? No, they don't need that thing." is the usual conversation.) However, we have one prof who writes the Intro to Public Speaking text for our campus who thinks she needs a new edition every single year. However, I honestly think that we're going to get the administration to put a stop to that in the near future.
One reason that campus bookstores often wind up ripping students off is that they are placed within the Business/Finance branch of the University. A couple years ago, they moved the VMart under Student Affairs, and there have been a lot more used books in the store since then. They're under strict orders from the administration to get as many used books as possible. (Oh, pricing is sell used at 75% of new price, buy back (if needed for the next term) at 60% of new price, so it's a good deal for students, except when going wholesale to MBS, Nebraska Book Company, Budgetext, or Follet, based on who's there for that buy.) Of course, buying used books from the wholesalers pisses the publishers off, and they'll often threaten to withhold ancillaries (instructor's edition, test bank, transparencies, etc.) from the adopting department. This year, our math department switched to a different text for Intro to Ordinary Differential Equations, and the bookstore got about 160 used, which was all they needed. Of course, the publisher (Thomson) got upset and basically forced the store to order 25 new copies, which I'm sure they'll be promptly returning once all the books are purchased this fall.
In summary, don't blame the bookstore until you've been on the inside. Don't blame the profs, unless they're writing the book or getting kickbacks (see an article in the June Chronicle of Higher Education) from the publishers, they've got your best interest at heart. Buy online when possible, but watch out ofr those crappy paperback international editions. Finally, BLAME THE PUBLISHERS! (Except Springer Verlag, publisher of many excellent, reasonably priced mathematics books.)
Don't know if you're trying to claim that US tax dollars go towards the USPS, but they've been a self-sufficient entity for some time now. They're essentially run like a private business, but with all the bureaucracy of the government. The worst thing that could happen here is that the cost of sending a letter goes up, and we're getting by so cheap as it is in that regard that I can't complain unless they do something like raise the cost to an amount other than $0.40.
Re:Understanding the symbols
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Imagining Numbers
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· Score: 4, Informative
Part of the problem of mathemtics is that there is only a finite symbol set available to us (at least with TEX), so we tend to use the same symbol to mean different things in different fields. I'd try to pick up a book that has an index of notation. (Most have them, you just have to remember to look.) Otherwise, start with an introductory advanced math text (Eggen, Smith, and St. Andre, A Transition to Advanced Mathematics comes to mind), and that should give you the foundations to move onto other books, as any good book will introduce any specialized notation. Another good resource is MathWorld. You can't exactly type in the symbols that you want, but you can search on terms that are appearing around the symbol to try to get a topic, and then things are well cross-referenced, so you can back up to a lower level of understanding if needed.
Um, what programs are you using that create these crappy PDFs? MikTeX is a real TeX/LaTeX implementation for Windows, and there are all sorts of great things for doing TeX on other platforms. I can create very high-quality PDFs with these FREE packages. You want hyperlinks? You've got them. You want color? You've got it. Since discovering TeX (I'm a mathematician, so I really didn't have any choice), I've given up on all other word-processing packages, even for writing humanities papers.
If you don't have competition for your local telco, you must be living in the wrong state. Here in North Dakota the state allows local telcos (mostly rural telephone coops that are expanding into other services) to compete with the bells in offering local telephone service. I guess I'm only reall familiar with Dickinson, where Consolidated Telcom competes with the former monopolizer. (I believe it's Qwest.) However, they met with great success simply because they're a local company where you can actually go in and talk to a real live person if you have problems. Anyway, it's not the feds fault if you don't have a choice for local service, it's your state. Go hound your version of what we call the Public Services Commission.
A while back I wrote to my credit card provider about their worthless website, which I can only use in Netscrape 4.7?. Even with the Mozilla UserAgent string changed to something more "standard," they won't let me past the homepage. They claim that my browser doesn't support proper encryption or something. Additionally, their damn menus don't work in Mozilla or Opera. Below is the oh so friendly and helpful email they sent back. It sounds so canned that I can't help but assume that they get a lot of these complaints. Why on earth don't they change their ways if they get so many complaints? There are fewer security problems with Mozilla than IE. I really should take my business elsewhere, but the interest rate is keeping me with them for now.
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I would have to say that you just went to a bad university. I'm an undergraduate at North Dakota State and am currently in the mathematics REU at Louisiana State, and I couldn't disagree with you more about reducing mathematics to rote memorization. I TA'ed a trigonometry class last fall, and our students were expected to understand how things worked and were given problems that required them to apply the trig they learned to a tangible problem. Yes, introductory mathematics courses do require a lot of "memorization," but that memorization should be accompanied by understanding. Sure it's one thing to know a theorem's statement, but to understand how to use it is another thing altogether.
I'm not really sure if the person asking the question just wants a familiarity with mathematics through, say, calculus or if abstract mathematics is a desired area to learn. However, starting at a CC is probably adviseable to get through college algebra, trig, and calculus. After that, I'd suggest at least a couple courses from a university. An introduction to mathematical logic and proof (and set theory) is important for any further reading. Most universities have the so-called "bridge courses" and they vary in their worth. However, if you've been out of school for awhile, it would be worth it to find and take one. After that, I (being a dedicated discrete mathematician) would suggest an area of discrete math such as graph theory or combinatorics. (There are several good books out there, or you could find classes to take.) They're very approachable, even if they have too many definitions. After that, head onto some other math along the lines of abstract algebra and real analysis (this is where you really learn what calculus is all about).
Mathematics is a fascinating subject with many diverse areas to explore. Check them out, find out what you like, and then pursue it. If you're not going for a degree, steer clear of areas that don't interest you, but don't hesitate to read a book or take an intro course in that area. You might be surprised that you like it.
From the syllabus (Prof. D. Bruce Erickson) for the Comp. Sci. II course at North Dakota State University:
You are to work independently on projects, writing projects, and exams. Generally, interpret this to mean that you may ask general questions of other students about homework, and those students may answer questions with pencil and paper. You are not to look at other students' program files or other students' solutions to any homework problem (project, or writing project) or exam problem (until after the exam is returned graded). Violating this requirement puts you at risk of a failing grade on the project, or even a failing grade for the class. While you may work together on labs, you are strongly encouraged to ensure that you understand all parts of the work, and contribute to the group in which you work.
Each of the labs mentioned above count as two percent of a student's grade for the term, and they're set up as learning experiences so that people learn the material like the guy at Georgia Tech was trying to do. People argue that Georgia Tech's policy was trying to "weed out" the ones that won't be able to cut it, but I think they're going overboard. Dr. Erickson's classes have projects that kill people and make them flee from Computer Science, and if that doesn't work Dr. John C. Martin III takes care of them in the two semester Theory of Computation sequence. It works quite well, and we don't need to run around accusing people of cheating just because, God forbid, they wanted to develop communication skills and talk to other students, something that doesn't happen enough in CS departments.
IMHO, Sun doesn't care about the linux crowd. StarOffice is probably only available to linux users because it budded from open Office and therefore was already on linux.
Yes, Sun doesn't care about the Linux crowd. That's why they continue to produce Linux versions and released the source for Star Office to start the Open Office project. Where do you get the idea that Star Office "budded from Open Office"? Star Division had been producing Linux versions of Star Office for a number of years before Sun bought them out. I seem to recall using Star Office 4 on Linux. (Yes, it had far more German left in it than most people could use, but it worked.)
Why don't you go check your facts and come back when you're well-informed?
I think that you underestimate the size of our larger cities here in the Dakotas. The first part about small towns is quite accurate. However, I don't think anyone really considers the 5,000-15,000 person cities to be "'big' urban areas". The objection I have to your comments is that you classed Bismarck in the less than 15,00 range, when in fact it has more than FIFTY thousand people. This is in fact around the size of Rapid City South Dakota as well. The Fargo/Moorhead metro area is almost twice the size that you have quoted, coming in around 175,000. I understand that you may have lived here, but get your facts right and don't make our cities look smaller than they actually are!
Wonderful choices! I was just about to post something about Solzhenitsyn when I got to your post. I would suggest One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as well. I had had no exposure to Solzhenitsyn before my honors English course in college, and Ivan Denisovich was the last book we read in the term. We'd read several depressing books so far, and I was ready for another one. I was in for a big surprise, however; it was powerful, but it had a sense of hope throughout it that made it a wonderful read. If only I had enough time to read for pleasure right now, I'd go after some of Solzhenitsyn's other works. As it stands right now, I'm finishing The Hobbit before I start on LotR. (I know, I know, seems awfully late to be reading these for the first time, but I was sheltered as a child.)
Heller is also wonderful. He is a master of the English language, and it really shows in Catch-22. That was another one I read for class (well, still haven't finished it, but I definitely will), and I can't understand why it took me so long to discover it. Who could forget characters such as Doc Daneeka and Major Major Major Major?
Here at North Dakota State, I just completed the first-year CS sequence taught in Java (Computing Concepts with Java 2 Essentials by Horstmann for CS I and Data Structures and Other Objects Using Java by Main for CS II). This is the second year that NDSU has used Java, and the professors seem to like it. They can focus on concepts instead of drilling on C++'s strange syntax. I also loved the fact that I could do my Java homework on my Linux box while the rest of the class used Windows, and nobody was the wiser.
I also took a "self-paced" C++ course this spring and I was really glad that I already had the concepts down. The strange syntax items in C++ seemed to get in the way all the time, and I can't imagine how complete beginners would handle things.
As for your comment on moving to LISP later on, my professor had a great way of exposing us to a second programming language. He gave us a program in LISP that would solve the
farmer-wolf-goat-cabbage problem and told us to translate it into Java. The only guidance that he gave was pointing to an on-line copy of Common LISP: The Langauge. It was a challenge, but most of us got it figured out. After that experience, all the LISP I did in Comparative Languages was a breeze.
Right in the section where they talk about what you have to do to earn prizes, it says (as previously quoted)
By submitting bids that request PC systems without an Operating System due to a Microsoft site license, you can earn points and win!
Sure sounds like they only want RFQ's where the company actually says that they have a site license. Yes, their motives may not be completely pure, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt this time and save the bashing for something truly heinous.
Re:POV (mine and the movie's)
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'Thirteen Days'
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· Score: 1
Just wanted to correct your comment about not ever seeing any Russians. I can think of FOUR off the top of my head...the UN Ambassador in the Security Council scene, the Ambassador to the US when he makes the deal with Bobby, the top spy that met with the reporter to send a message from JFK back to Kruschev (sp?), and the woman that was outside the office where Bobby and the ambassador met. Not only did we see these people, we heard three of them (maybe all four, not sure about the woman) talk.
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The Electoral College is not obsolete. The winner-take-all system of awarding electors is horribly dated and should be done away with in every state. (I personally prefer assigning by congressional district with the two electors corresponding to the senators being awarded to the winner of the state-wide popular vote.) People all over the world need to remember that the United States was formed as a loose federation of states. Prior to the adoption of the Constitution, these states even had their own currencies! Even under the Constitution, we have a federal system of government. The federal government has few powers, some are reserved to the states, and the rest to the people. Despite what some people might lead you to believe now days, states have rights to determine certain things without the federal government being involved. I doubt that the founders ever envisioned a federal government as powerful as the one we have today, particularly as large as the country is. For example, it took a constitutional amendment in order for the federal government to levy an income tax against every citizen without regard to the decennial census. The states choose their electors, who in turn choose the president. Plain and simple. The constitution guarantees a minimum amount of representation for every state, regardless of population, so perhaps an electoral vote from North Dakota and Wyoming might represent fewer citizens than an electoral vote from California, but such is the nature of our republic. Those of us who vote in the small states do not get a bigger vote than you do, we get one vote in our state just like everyone else. By your argument, Congress is horribly broken as well and California, New York, and Texas should just decide the laws for every state in the country. That wouldn't work, plain and simple.
Finally, if you have a problem with the current electoral system, rather than griping about the Electoral College, a system that you won't be able to get rid of because of the following list of states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, Delaware, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Hawaii, and Rhode Island. All of those states have three or four electoral votes, and thus would not give up their citizens' right to be involved in choosing the president by getting rid of the Electoral College. (Because that's what would happen. No one would care about how people vote in those states, because they just don't have enough people to matter in the popular vote.) There are twelve states in that list (and probably several five-vote states could be added to it). Twelve states is all it takes to block a constitutional amendment. If you've got a problem with the Electoral College, start pushing for something you can change: the demise of the winner-take-all system of distributing electoral votes.
Looks like /. is off jumping the gun and running into wild off-topic "discussions" again. I tried to read the article, but became disgusted with the poor quality of it early on. Just a couple of points that made me give up are (1) a blatant lie claiming that Georgia doesn't have absentee voting and (2) their wild and faulty assumption that 90% of all votes cast are cast on electronic machines. North Dakota is finally getting optical scan ballots state-wide, and I think they're likely to stay with them a long time, because they're cheap and reliable and not such a big change. Lots of other states are in the same situation, so assuming 90% is ludicrous. Also, an increasing number of votes are being cast early using absentee ballots or paper early ballots, so it's unlikely that in the future 90% of votes will ever be cast on election day.
I applaud these Yalue undergraduates for trying, but there's not much to see here. Let's move along.
Have you ever had your home broken into? My apartment was robbed just this past Tuesday, and it's not the fact that they got away with my TV, DVD player, DVDs, checkbook, fireproof safe, digital camera, and two old laptops that bothers me the most. It's the fact that they were IN MY HOME rummaging through my things. They took the pillow cases off my bed to carry off their loot. They took a few clothes from my closet. They took the mostly-used bottle of shampoo from my shower. They took my deodorant. That pretty clearly indicates that they were all over my apartment rummaging through things. It's a very disconcerting feeling to know that someone's been in your home and you don't know exactly where they've been.
I really wish that I'd had some sort of camera hooked up to get pictures of the thieves. (I keep using the plural because hauling off my 27" TV would not be an easy job for one person, let alone getting out of the building with the rest of the stuff they took without arousing too much suspicion.) The one possible lead is the fact that they passed a bad check for $335 AT MY BANK. That's got to be one of the dumbest moves I've ever heard of, as banks have security cameras, and everyone with 10 brain cells should know it. Still waiting to hear back from them to see if they can isolate some footage to give to the police.
What if you need 1.25 cups of flour? Do you keep a different sized 'cup' for every common part-cup?
Yes. In my kitchen, I have dry measuring cups in 1 cup, 1/2 cup, 1/4 cup, and 1/3 cup sizes. That should cover most of the combinations needed.
What you have understand is that Turing didn't know about push down automata (PDA) when he developed the Turing machine (TM). Turing formulated the TM as a way to show that our formal axiomatic system for mathematics was undecidable (that is, there are statements whose truth values cannot be determined algorithmically). When he designed it, the states of the machine were compared to human states of mind. Finite automata (FA) and PDAs are things that logicians and theoretical computer scientists have developed over the years as simpler models of computation. By teaching about them in an automata theory class, students are more prepared for the concepts of the TM. If I just plopped the general definition of a TM down in front of a person, they'd probably run screaming from the room or at least be horribly confused until examples of simpler devices were presented. (Also, FAs and PDAs have the nice property of recognizing regular and context-free languages, respectively, which allows a discussion of formal languages and their recognition to progress in a natural manner.)
I guess that my point is that the way we are taught mathematics (and that's what the theory of computation is) does not always coincide with the order in which the ideas were developed, no matter how natural the order they are taught in might seem. (For another example, consider that most calculus texts develop differentiation before integration, which is historically backward. The only text that I know of that presents calculus in the historically-correct order is Tom M. Apostol's Calculus. However, in his Mathematical Analysis, he follows the traditional order of differentiation first.)
The Linux search has been there for at least four years now. It might not have been linked, but Google: Linux has been on my bookmarks bar for a long time now.
NSA's program was called the Undergraduate Training Program, but is now the Stokes Educational Training Program. I know someone who's in the program, and it's a pretty good deal. Pays for school, gives you a job when you get out, and you have summer jobs throughout school. Now it's for more than just people who are good at math as well.
False. Fair use allows an individual to make one copy of part of a book or journal or magazine for their own "fair use". If an instructor wishes to distribute an entire chapter or article to the entire class, royalties are due to the author and/or publisher. Yeah, it seems like a loophole, but there's a difference between putting a book on reserve and allowing students to photocopy the relevant chapter and handing out 30 copies to an entire class.
Before we all start blaming the bookstores for this, let me make it clear that I have worked with shipping/receiving/pricing textbooks, and I know that the publishers set the prices. My campus bookstore has about at 23% margin on textbooks, which basically covers paying rent to the Union, paying employees, and paying for the shipping costs to get the books. They are fortunate enough to be under the Division of Student Affairs, which means that they have a mandate to get as many used books as possible. They also pay well for used books that are needed.
OK, so now we get to the blame part. I, too, have purchased several texts from the UK (usually Blackwell's, but I always search AddAll first to find the best price. I don't know why the publishers can afford to sell things for 50% of the US price overseas, but it's atrocious. There's a comment on here about International Editions, the cheap paperback reprints sold in the Asian market, and I should be clear that the ones from the UK are the same quality hardbacks (with the exact same content) as the US editions. However, publishers have started catching onto the fact that US students are importing the books, and now there are some books that they won't let UK retailers export (e.g., Haviland's Anthropology ). The publishers are a bunch of money-grubing bastards, and most of them aren't even US-owned, so it makes it even more fun.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. BLAME THE PUBLISHERS, not your campus bookstore. The best thing you can do is to search for these deals and take advantage of them. Be warned that the shipping time to the interior of the US (say, North Dakota) can be a little long, even with Air Mail, since it's no longer Air Mail when the USPS gets its hands on it.
I'm at NDSU in Fargo (insert obligatory joke here), and for once ITS had a semi-intelligent solution. They found some way (haven't had a chance to ask for specifics) to find out when a computer was infected (or even vulnerable, I hear), and then they just denied that MAC address an IP from the DHCP server. Once it's cleaned up, you call or email them and they put you on the list to be reactivated. Of course, it's a bit bothersome when you have to wait overnight to get a PC back online, but it's better then losing all network access while you wait for them to check everything. (Of course, this solution only came about when they didn't get the patch rolled out in the computer clusters and most of them were shut down to getting infected.)
I'm the SysAdmin for the math department, and we're still facing sporadic infection on computers that didn't get patched when I sent out an email this summer. (Would have patched them myself, but I was 1500 miles away.) Fortunately, our lab got patched the night before Blaster was triggered, so we were safe there. Only a couple faculty members who could wait a day or two to get back online.
Here, here! It is definitely the publisher's fault. I've worked as a student employee at North Dakota State's Varsity Mart Bookstore, and I know that the high prices are the fault of the publisher. Our store only marks things up enough to pay freight costs, labor costs, and space rent to the Union. If they do make a profit (and I think that's probably only on supplies, clothes, and tradebooks), the University uses it to pay off debts for new construction. (One local school, I think it's Minnesota State University-Moorhead will actually begin returning profits to students as dividends based on how much they purchase each year starting this fall.)
Publishers are out to make money and hate, hate, hate used books. Thus, they come out with oodles of packages with worthless CDs or website access codes or quickly-replaceable flimsy materials. Our bookstore usually works with profs to get around most of the package things. (Bookstore: "Do you really need the CD?" Prof.: "There's a CD with the book? No, they don't need that thing." is the usual conversation.) However, we have one prof who writes the Intro to Public Speaking text for our campus who thinks she needs a new edition every single year. However, I honestly think that we're going to get the administration to put a stop to that in the near future.
One reason that campus bookstores often wind up ripping students off is that they are placed within the Business/Finance branch of the University. A couple years ago, they moved the VMart under Student Affairs, and there have been a lot more used books in the store since then. They're under strict orders from the administration to get as many used books as possible. (Oh, pricing is sell used at 75% of new price, buy back (if needed for the next term) at 60% of new price, so it's a good deal for students, except when going wholesale to MBS, Nebraska Book Company, Budgetext, or Follet, based on who's there for that buy.) Of course, buying used books from the wholesalers pisses the publishers off, and they'll often threaten to withhold ancillaries (instructor's edition, test bank, transparencies, etc.) from the adopting department. This year, our math department switched to a different text for Intro to Ordinary Differential Equations, and the bookstore got about 160 used, which was all they needed. Of course, the publisher (Thomson) got upset and basically forced the store to order 25 new copies, which I'm sure they'll be promptly returning once all the books are purchased this fall.
In summary, don't blame the bookstore until you've been on the inside. Don't blame the profs, unless they're writing the book or getting kickbacks (see an article in the June Chronicle of Higher Education) from the publishers, they've got your best interest at heart. Buy online when possible, but watch out ofr those crappy paperback international editions. Finally, BLAME THE PUBLISHERS! (Except Springer Verlag, publisher of many excellent, reasonably priced mathematics books.)
Don't know if you're trying to claim that US tax dollars go towards the USPS, but they've been a self-sufficient entity for some time now. They're essentially run like a private business, but with all the bureaucracy of the government. The worst thing that could happen here is that the cost of sending a letter goes up, and we're getting by so cheap as it is in that regard that I can't complain unless they do something like raise the cost to an amount other than $0.40.
Part of the problem of mathemtics is that there is only a finite symbol set available to us (at least with TEX), so we tend to use the same symbol to mean different things in different fields. I'd try to pick up a book that has an index of notation. (Most have them, you just have to remember to look.) Otherwise, start with an introductory advanced math text (Eggen, Smith, and St. Andre, A Transition to Advanced Mathematics comes to mind), and that should give you the foundations to move onto other books, as any good book will introduce any specialized notation. Another good resource is MathWorld. You can't exactly type in the symbols that you want, but you can search on terms that are appearing around the symbol to try to get a topic, and then things are well cross-referenced, so you can back up to a lower level of understanding if needed.
Um, what programs are you using that create these crappy PDFs? MikTeX is a real TeX/LaTeX implementation for Windows, and there are all sorts of great things for doing TeX on other platforms. I can create very high-quality PDFs with these FREE packages. You want hyperlinks? You've got them. You want color? You've got it. Since discovering TeX (I'm a mathematician, so I really didn't have any choice), I've given up on all other word-processing packages, even for writing humanities papers.
If you don't have competition for your local telco, you must be living in the wrong state. Here in North Dakota the state allows local telcos (mostly rural telephone coops that are expanding into other services) to compete with the bells in offering local telephone service. I guess I'm only reall familiar with Dickinson, where Consolidated Telcom competes with the former monopolizer. (I believe it's Qwest.) However, they met with great success simply because they're a local company where you can actually go in and talk to a real live person if you have problems. Anyway, it's not the feds fault if you don't have a choice for local service, it's your state. Go hound your version of what we call the Public Services Commission.
When in doubt, go with the old standby of webmaster@capitalone.com. That's where I sent to, and that's where the great response came from.
A while back I wrote to my credit card provider about their worthless website, which I can only use in Netscrape 4.7?. Even with the Mozilla UserAgent string changed to something more "standard," they won't let me past the homepage. They claim that my browser doesn't support proper encryption or something. Additionally, their damn menus don't work in Mozilla or Opera. Below is the oh so friendly and helpful email they sent back. It sounds so canned that I can't help but assume that they get a lot of these complaints. Why on earth don't they change their ways if they get so many complaints? There are fewer security problems with Mozilla than IE. I really should take my business elsewhere, but the interest rate is keeping me with them for now.
I would have to say that you just went to a bad university. I'm an undergraduate at North Dakota State and am currently in the mathematics REU at Louisiana State, and I couldn't disagree with you more about reducing mathematics to rote memorization. I TA'ed a trigonometry class last fall, and our students were expected to understand how things worked and were given problems that required them to apply the trig they learned to a tangible problem. Yes, introductory mathematics courses do require a lot of "memorization," but that memorization should be accompanied by understanding. Sure it's one thing to know a theorem's statement, but to understand how to use it is another thing altogether.
I'm not really sure if the person asking the question just wants a familiarity with mathematics through, say, calculus or if abstract mathematics is a desired area to learn. However, starting at a CC is probably adviseable to get through college algebra, trig, and calculus. After that, I'd suggest at least a couple courses from a university. An introduction to mathematical logic and proof (and set theory) is important for any further reading. Most universities have the so-called "bridge courses" and they vary in their worth. However, if you've been out of school for awhile, it would be worth it to find and take one. After that, I (being a dedicated discrete mathematician) would suggest an area of discrete math such as graph theory or combinatorics. (There are several good books out there, or you could find classes to take.) They're very approachable, even if they have too many definitions. After that, head onto some other math along the lines of abstract algebra and real analysis (this is where you really learn what calculus is all about).
Mathematics is a fascinating subject with many diverse areas to explore. Check them out, find out what you like, and then pursue it. If you're not going for a degree, steer clear of areas that don't interest you, but don't hesitate to read a book or take an intro course in that area. You might be surprised that you like it.
Mitch
From the syllabus (Prof. D. Bruce Erickson) for the Comp. Sci. II course at North Dakota State University:
You are to work independently on projects, writing projects, and exams. Generally, interpret this to mean that you may ask general questions of other students about homework, and those students may answer questions with pencil and paper. You are not to look at other students' program files or other students' solutions to any homework problem (project, or writing project) or exam problem (until after the exam is returned graded). Violating this requirement puts you at risk of a failing grade on the project, or even a failing grade for the class. While you may work together on labs, you are strongly encouraged to ensure that you understand all parts of the work, and contribute to the group in which you work.
Each of the labs mentioned above count as two percent of a student's grade for the term, and they're set up as learning experiences so that people learn the material like the guy at Georgia Tech was trying to do. People argue that Georgia Tech's policy was trying to "weed out" the ones that won't be able to cut it, but I think they're going overboard. Dr. Erickson's classes have projects that kill people and make them flee from Computer Science, and if that doesn't work Dr. John C. Martin III takes care of them in the two semester Theory of Computation sequence. It works quite well, and we don't need to run around accusing people of cheating just because, God forbid, they wanted to develop communication skills and talk to other students, something that doesn't happen enough in CS departments.
Yes, Sun doesn't care about the Linux crowd. That's why they continue to produce Linux versions and released the source for Star Office to start the Open Office project. Where do you get the idea that Star Office "budded from Open Office"? Star Division had been producing Linux versions of Star Office for a number of years before Sun bought them out. I seem to recall using Star Office 4 on Linux. (Yes, it had far more German left in it than most people could use, but it worked.)
Why don't you go check your facts and come back when you're well-informed?
I think that you underestimate the size of our larger cities here in the Dakotas. The first part about small towns is quite accurate. However, I don't think anyone really considers the 5,000-15,000 person cities to be "'big' urban areas". The objection I have to your comments is that you classed Bismarck in the less than 15,00 range, when in fact it has more than FIFTY thousand people. This is in fact around the size of Rapid City South Dakota as well. The Fargo/Moorhead metro area is almost twice the size that you have quoted, coming in around 175,000. I understand that you may have lived here, but get your facts right and don't make our cities look smaller than they actually are!
Heller is also wonderful. He is a master of the English language, and it really shows in Catch-22. That was another one I read for class (well, still haven't finished it, but I definitely will), and I can't understand why it took me so long to discover it. Who could forget characters such as Doc Daneeka and Major Major Major Major?
I also took a "self-paced" C++ course this spring and I was really glad that I already had the concepts down. The strange syntax items in C++ seemed to get in the way all the time, and I can't imagine how complete beginners would handle things.
As for your comment on moving to LISP later on, my professor had a great way of exposing us to a second programming language. He gave us a program in LISP that would solve the farmer-wolf-goat-cabbage problem and told us to translate it into Java. The only guidance that he gave was pointing to an on-line copy of Common LISP: The Langauge. It was a challenge, but most of us got it figured out. After that experience, all the LISP I did in Comparative Languages was a breeze.
By submitting bids that request PC systems without an Operating System due to a Microsoft site license, you can earn points and win!
Sure sounds like they only want RFQ's where the company actually says that they have a site license. Yes, their motives may not be completely pure, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt this time and save the bashing for something truly heinous.
Just wanted to correct your comment about not ever seeing any Russians. I can think of FOUR off the top of my head...the UN Ambassador in the Security Council scene, the Ambassador to the US when he makes the deal with Bobby, the top spy that met with the reporter to send a message from JFK back to Kruschev (sp?), and the woman that was outside the office where Bobby and the ambassador met. Not only did we see these people, we heard three of them (maybe all four, not sure about the woman) talk.