There are still a billion people in the world living on "a dollar a day," and at that rate of resource consumption, you're not exactly "living" so much as "dying slowly." These people can't be taught to fish, because they have no fishing poles, no bait, no nearby fishing holes, and too little time and strength to invest in any skills that would improve their long-term prospects. Such people can't be said to be on the ladder of economic development at all. In order to be on the ladder, they need to have enough for their day-to-day needs, so that they can make long-term investments in things like new technologies and new skills.
What these people need: food assistance, mosquito netting, access to clean water, vaccines.
How we can give it to them: direct assistance, debt forgiveness (so the governments can spend some money on infrastructure, rather than blowing it all servicing past debt), unilaterally dropping all tarriffs on goods from countries with the lowest GDPs, programs to promote good governance. Oh, and nuke the IMF from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The laptops are headed for a different class of people: people whose daily nutritional and shelter needs are being met, and who are ready to take the next step. Giving fish and teaching fishing are two different strategies that are best suited to different groups.
That's generally only the case when the drug is actually intended to treat the disease the patient is dying of. For example, if you were dying of AIDS, you might get experimental AIDS drugs, but certainly not a cold vaccine.
Under most circumstances, they start by testing on healthy individuals, to discover the side-effects without the disease getting in the way.
If you have a 401k or a pension plan you are a stockholder.
Counterpoint:
While much has been made in recent years about growing stock ownership across the entire population, the top one percent of stock owners in the United States still hold almost half of all stocks, while the bottom 80 percent own just 4.1 percent. Almost two-thirds of all households have stock holdings worth 5,000 dollars or less.[src]
Which is to say, this argument you're putting forth is the one the truly wealthy use to draw our attention away from the fact that corporate misbehavior is undermining our entire society. Sure, they're destroying the environment and our health, exploiting third-world workers and wreaking havoc on their economies, putting dangerous products on the market, and so on. But they need to be able to do this to turn your $100K retirement fund into a $104K retirement fund.
The poor bear most of the costs of these behaviors, and only the truly wealthy really benefit from them. The trick here is that they want you convinced that you're in the "benefitting" camp when you're actually in the "getting screwed" camp.
If corporations adopted personal responsibility for themselves, rather than demanding it from the rest of society, we'd all be a lot better off, corporations included.
I never said everything was "just peachy," and neither my smiley-face or my condolences are fake. If you have a family you've discovered you can't rely on, then I really do feel bad for you.
But you say that because family is made of people, they're just as likely to fuck over their family members as anyone else. Not true. It's an evolutionary fact that people are generally more predisposed to helping out family than they are other people. Even if a family is made of losers and users, there's still usually some feeling of mutual obligation involved.
The sister *was* being an ass... according to the description by the person who wrote the Ask Slashdot. I doubt he intended it that way, because if he really felt as unappreciated as you seem to think he ought to be, he'd be letting his sister figure it out for herself, rather than coming to our schitzophrenic hive mind for advice on making life easier on them both.
I never said all families are perfect. But I do believe that they're more reliable than most of the people you deal with, and that you're not doing anyone any favors by encouraging them to treat their relations as selfishly as they would treat anyone else.
Counterpoint: Being an adult today is in some ways a much more complicated affair than being an adult back in the bad ol' days. Not more dangerous, just more complicated.
How hard was getting married back then? Your parents selected your mate, helped you build your own little shack, and then the two of you might set about running the farm until you both died of dysentery. Or there was a war, in which case your menfolk were handed crude weapons and told to run towards the other menfolk with their crude weapons and do their best to kill them. Only the rich and the professional soldiers really had the leisure time to learn to truly master their weapons.
For other skills, you generally inherited the trade of your father. This made a certain sense, because you'd probably seen the trade done your entire life.
What I'm saying is, everyone was dirt poor, so out of necessity life was kept simple enough that a clever twelve year old could thoroughly master it. We couldn't afford to have kids sitting around, getting thoroughly educated. We needed them to be immediately productive: fetching wood and water, building things, running at menfolk with crude weapons.
In modern times, success in life comes from... well, inherited wealth, but that's a rant for another time. But we have an absurdly complex society, running on technologies and social innovations that are absolute magic to most people. But we desperately need people to understand these systems, not only for the benefits they can bring to society, but also the dangers.
Take the social innovation of credit. Credit has probably been around in one form or another since before we could technically be considered "human". But these days there are such a wide variety of vehicles for credit that it would take years to truly understand them. But every adult needs to understand something about credit, and we see the harm that comes when people are loaned more money than they have the capacity to repay. We have kids leaving college with tens of thousands in credit card debt. We have creditors making risky housing loans in booming housing markets, hoping that the families have to default in a few years so the creditors can sell the house at its new, inflated value. We have creditors encouraging people to take out home equity loans to finance vacations (the stupidest thing you can do this side of setting your own hair on fire).
Even reasonable, well-educated people can make huge mistakes with credit, and that's just one of the many pitfalls you need to know about before you can truly function in this society. Since the ability to function as an equal participant in society is pretty much the working definition of adulthood, and society has become vastly more complicated, I think it's fair to say that the age of adulthood is rising dramatically.
Food choices are another one of those things that has gotten vastly more complicated over the last few hundred years. It used to be that there were a relatively small number of food choices available. You learned how to prepare those, and then you ate them. That summary glosses over a lot of hard work and a lot of skill, but there weren't many decisions to make. Now--at least in the developed world--we have more calories sloshing around than we know what to do with. Getting the necessary calories for survival has become absolutely dirt cheap.
But we've put the responsibility of food production into the hands of people who are required to maximize profits instead of human health. This fact leads to a few odd conclusions: While food production is made as cheap as possible, food consumption must be made as expensive as possible. This means adding "value" to the food manufacturing process by adding steps that increase the price and amount of food being sold. For example, you can sell a person twenty pounds of corn, or you can use the corn as feed to produce one pound of beef. Or you can turn it into high-fructose corn syrup to put in anything you want people to gobble u
Re:Yes, because being marketed to is the only free
on
Big Mother Is Watching
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Hear hear!
Oh, wait.
That was sarcasm, wasn't it?
NSA, put a tracer on this one. He's doubleplusungood as they get.
You do that. Then twenty or thirty years down the road, when you two are trying to figure out how to split the responsibilities of caring for your aging parents, you can say, "remember all those times *I* bailed *you* out?"
And she'll just say, "No."
I was raised to believe that family is the one thing in this world you can count on. When one of us is in trouble, it's time for the rest of us to dig in and smooth things out for them. The moment you step back and start demanding to know "What's in it for me?" you lose something more valuable than your time or her money.
Maybe your family isn't like that. My condolences.
Everyone's body works somewhat differently, and it would be rude of me to even speculate on how you came to gain or lose those excess pounds. But I would point out a few objections to your arguments:
A "high protein diet" doesn't require eating more meat or dairy.
Your post makes it sound like diet and exercise are either/or decisions, when they're really not.
Even in extreme cases, I doubt any nutritionist would sign off on a plan where the patient was intending to lose 5-7 pounds a week.
If we follow the reasoning by which you dismiss diet studies which you disagree with, nobody would ever have to believe anything they didn't want to believe. We would truly be entering the age of truthiness.
Well, I was going to point out the numerous articles linking diets high in animal fats to strokes, heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, etc. But your link to a non-peer-reviewed article by an author who uses all his footnotes to quote his own research totally set me straight. Screw this vegetarian stuff, I'm gonna go eat me a cow or two.
Of course, in order to create enough meat to feed everyone a basically carnivorous diet, we'd probably need to quintuple our agricultural output, with all the associated environmental problems.
Finally, Jared Diamond said exactly what I expected him to say. Rather than attributing the poor health of agricultural societies to a lack of meat in the diet, he attributes it to three other factors. First, agrarians ate a less varied diet. Second, there were more people living closer together and trading diseases. Third, because of the previous two factors, it was much rougher on a society when a single crop failed.
So, no, I'm not buying this whole "we need to eat more meat" line you're selling.
I was going to argue with you, because I'd assumed he was taking out some sort of interest-free student loan. In that situation, it seems like a no-brainer to put some of the money in a safe investment rather than letting it sit in the bank. On re-reading, I honestly can't make heads or tails of his situation.
You're absolutely right about not borrowing money to invest. But you really could stop with your savvier-than-thou act, and recognize that a single, possibly moronic question doesn't prove that he's a singular, definite moron. It's good to give everyone the benefit of the doubt the first time through. There are enough morons in this world that you're guaranteed ample opportunities to flame them later.
But when you judge too soon that a person is a complete nitwit, you sometimes get surprised, and end up having to reevaluate your 1337 judging skillz. It's a humbling experience.
I think they do both have a certain charm, when you consider the fact that the country is screwed up in several very fundamental ways, neither major party has any ideas for fixing them, and both have vested interest in maintaining the system as is.
There is simply no way to do the fundamental reforms that could really strengthen democracy without doing some extreme things. For the record, I would include among "fundamental refomrs" the following: condorcet voting, publicly financed elections, rolling back the powers of corporations and financial interest, and breathing new life into the labor movement.
How is he supposed to identify your weaknesses and give your code individual attention when he has to spend all his time poking at the binary, making sure it gives the outputs it's supposed to? There's no reason to resent a teacher or TA trying to reduce the busywork associated with grading dozens of submissions. It's a simple fact of life that most all of us are trying to do too much with too few resources, and if you can free up that much instruction time by simply formatting your outputs properly, then it's a valuable investment for your time.
You're either paid to shill for WebCT, or you must just really, really hate the guy who wrote the original question. As in "he killed my family and I'm out for revenge" hate.
Why not just hunt the guy down, blind him, chop off a few extremities, and leave him in a ditch? It would be a kindness in comparison to WebCT.
I haven't had the best experiences with their software.
Laziness? Automation isn't laziness. There is no virtue in spending hours doing something that can easily be automated, and it's a shameful waste if the time could be used more productively. In this case, time spent verifying inputs and outputs could be better spent reading and critiquing student code, meeting with students to answer their questions, or maybe just not sitting around scanning over reams of student program output, making sure the right answers are hidden somewhere in there.
Now if he'd asked about the best way to farm the work out to a TA in India....
I disagree with your evaluation of the "importance" of following a specification. Specifications are often crucial to making programs interoperate, and if the specification says you can't have blank space at the beginning of the first line following such-and-such declaration, then having blank space there really does constitute an error in your program.
Automatic graders are better for both students and teachers, because the teacher/TA can focus on the essence of your program, and let the machine worry about the repetitive grunge work that ensures input A delivers output B. That should mean that the teacher can actually talk about your algorithm, coding practices, etc.
I do agree that it's frustrating to get docked for seemingly "nitpicky" things. Out of fairness, I think a teacher using an automatic grader ought to provide some data sets and the expected output. Even better, provide a reference implementation, so that the students can come up with their own test cases. But in real life not every standard has a reference implementation, and then your only recourse is to obsess and nitpick your way to conformance.
Actually, the absolute worst case is if the police confiscate your computer, then either decide you must be guilty, or that they'll benefit from a conviction. So they load you up with "evidence." It's probably a rare thing, but I've always figured that once you're involved with the legal system, all bets are off.
It's interesting how I'm so often defending government "intrusion" into our lives, but I don't trust police for jack.
Well, it's not like Lieberman is doing much for the Democrats anyways. I think he's much too kind to big business.
You say "nanny state" like it's a bad thing, but in fact, it describes exactly what our government was set up to do: promote the general welfare. People like you naively assume that all the government has to do in order to accomplish this is to get out of our collective way, and let the free market generate all the blessings of prosperity. There are times when this works, and times when it doesn't. Monopolies harm the free market. Extreme differences in wealth and power harm the free market. Unequal access to information harm the free market. When any of these things occur, it is to the benefit of the people for the government to step in.
I'll provide just one example to illustrate my position: unequal access to information. Assume that you live in a free-market utopia. You're shopping for just one of the many hundreds of things you have to make decisions about in your life: a car seat for your one year old. Assume you're at Wal-Mart, because you really don't have any alternatives within a fifty mile radius. That part isn't really relevant to the story, but I thought I'd point it out.
You're faced with the decision of which of twenty car seats to buy. Each of them claims to be very safe, but since the government doesn't have a role in ensuring the safety of carseats or ensuring that product claims be truthful, these claims don't help you. The twenty models run the gamut of prices, from $20 to $400, and the $20 looks incredibly flimsy, so one down, nineteen to go. Four of the seats are certified by the "Safe Baby Coalition," five of them are certified by the "Independent Safety Auditors of America," and six are certified by the "Safe Consumer Product Association". You've never heard of any of these groups, and have no idea what it takes to get their certifications, so they're absolutely no help.
So you put off the decision, and hit the Internet. Which, being the Internet, is no help whatsoever. You find all sorts of message boards with all sorts of opinions, some obviously written for hire.
This is a case where each of the manufacturers knows exactly how safe their product is, and since consumers are willing to pay a premium for safe car seats, the unsafe ones try like hell to appear safe.
How much easier would this decision be if the government simplified the decision by saying that all car seats must pass a minimum, acceptable standard of safety before they can be sold? Infinitely easier. Now, instead of thinking, "Okay, which one won't snap my kid's neck," you can start thinking in terms of "the blue one is just darling." Less stress for the consumer, fewer dangerous products on the market, and--most important--a higher rate of crash survival. All this because the government steps in and closes the information gap between manufacturers and consumers.
No voluntary system could have the same effect, so long as there was money to be gained by gaming the system. If one group of manufacturers decides to create an independent certification board, to prove once and for all that their products are safe, then less scrupulous manufacturers can create their own certification board with lower standards.
You have the same principles in play when it comes to things like worker safety and food and water quality. Smart regulations can bring value to the market by eliminating uncertainty. If you're going to buy a house, it's a complicated enough decision without trying to figure out whether the tapwater in this neighborhoods will give you cancer, or whether you're better off going with the house that has 25% less benzene but 30% more lead. Safe food and drinking water allow people to spend their time worrying about other things, but someone has to guarantee that safety. If that's "nanny-statism," then I'd like to see more of it.
Oh, and despite what I think is a rather calm and collected rejoinder to your mindless, dittohead caricat
Point 1: Contrary to your assertion, I think many of society's problems exist because "Big Evil Scary Government" isn't doing nearly enough to protect average people from their own stupidity, while in the same breath spending billions of taxpayer dollars protecting big companies from theirs.
Point 2: If you haven't even encrypted your connection, I don't need to "break in" to know this. All I have to do is turn my laptop on somewhere in receiving range. It shows me a friendly little icon representing your network, with no key slapped over it. No violation of your privacy is occurring.
I'm against this proposal because I think the benefits of sharing Internet connections outweigh the risks.
I agree that it is opportunist to jump on a disease as a way to reinforce morals, but it's also kind of silly to pretend that human choices have nothing to do with the spread of this disease.
I don't think anyone is pretending anything. We all know that HIV is transmitted by sex, and that there are lots of people engaging in risky behaviors. In my mind, the debate is over whether we should write off people because they don't strictly adhere to one individual's moral code. Those who argue that we can do a lot to lower my opinion of religious people in general.
I also believe that a lot of people don't have much choice about getting AIDS. Just a few examples: babies infected at birth. Women who have been raped. Men who spend time in prison. People who are strictly faithful to people who are not. The woman who knows her husband is sleeping around, but is more afraid of losing his support than of HIV.
Nobody is disputing that personal choices lead to many cases of HIV. What we are disputing is the conclusion that messages of personal responsibility are therefore the solution. We see it much the same way we see the distinction between abstinence and "abstinence-based education." When someone defends abstinence-ed by pointing out the effectiveness of abstinence itself, I regard them as having completely missed the point.
Furthermore, the only way these people would be helped is if you could develop a cheap, effective, therapeutic HIV vaccine that needs to be given only once. The chances of that happening are negligible.
And where did you come up with this little tidbit of information? The reports I've heard indicate that, given access to anti-HIV medications, people in the third world are very good about following whatever medical routine the people at the clinic recommend. After all, their lives depend on it.
I'm especially curious about the "given only once" condition. You sound like you're assuming that the poor are automatically too shiftless and irresponsible to remember to come in and get a booster shot in six weeks. This leads me to believe that it makes you feel more comfortable to believe that the poor are responsible for their lot in life, because it absolves you of any responsibilities or obligations. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this one statement, but given the number of people who actually think this way, I don't feel too guilty about that.
Slashdot Mirror
There are still a billion people in the world living on "a dollar a day," and at that rate of resource consumption, you're not exactly "living" so much as "dying slowly." These people can't be taught to fish, because they have no fishing poles, no bait, no nearby fishing holes, and too little time and strength to invest in any skills that would improve their long-term prospects. Such people can't be said to be on the ladder of economic development at all. In order to be on the ladder, they need to have enough for their day-to-day needs, so that they can make long-term investments in things like new technologies and new skills.
What these people need: food assistance, mosquito netting, access to clean water, vaccines.
How we can give it to them: direct assistance, debt forgiveness (so the governments can spend some money on infrastructure, rather than blowing it all servicing past debt), unilaterally dropping all tarriffs on goods from countries with the lowest GDPs, programs to promote good governance. Oh, and nuke the IMF from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The laptops are headed for a different class of people: people whose daily nutritional and shelter needs are being met, and who are ready to take the next step. Giving fish and teaching fishing are two different strategies that are best suited to different groups.
I really doubt there is a market for four million new spammers. ....
Okay, on second thought, I can't defend this statement without resorting to "The American public just can't be that stupid." So never mind.
That's generally only the case when the drug is actually intended to treat the disease the patient is dying of. For example, if you were dying of AIDS, you might get experimental AIDS drugs, but certainly not a cold vaccine.
Under most circumstances, they start by testing on healthy individuals, to discover the side-effects without the disease getting in the way.
Article: Paraxel may have administered the tests in a grossly negligent way.
You: Why are you criticizing them for testing their drugs before putting them on the market? Don't you know how dangerous it would be if they didn't?
Me: I fear you're missing the point.
Counterpoint:
Which is to say, this argument you're putting forth is the one the truly wealthy use to draw our attention away from the fact that corporate misbehavior is undermining our entire society. Sure, they're destroying the environment and our health, exploiting third-world workers and wreaking havoc on their economies, putting dangerous products on the market, and so on. But they need to be able to do this to turn your $100K retirement fund into a $104K retirement fund.
The poor bear most of the costs of these behaviors, and only the truly wealthy really benefit from them. The trick here is that they want you convinced that you're in the "benefitting" camp when you're actually in the "getting screwed" camp.
If corporations adopted personal responsibility for themselves, rather than demanding it from the rest of society, we'd all be a lot better off, corporations included.
But it's not an either/or thing. You can mete out the punishment, while explaining your reasons for doing so.
Which you probably do.
Which is cool.
I never said everything was "just peachy," and neither my smiley-face or my condolences are fake. If you have a family you've discovered you can't rely on, then I really do feel bad for you.
But you say that because family is made of people, they're just as likely to fuck over their family members as anyone else. Not true. It's an evolutionary fact that people are generally more predisposed to helping out family than they are other people. Even if a family is made of losers and users, there's still usually some feeling of mutual obligation involved.
The sister *was* being an ass... according to the description by the person who wrote the Ask Slashdot. I doubt he intended it that way, because if he really felt as unappreciated as you seem to think he ought to be, he'd be letting his sister figure it out for herself, rather than coming to our schitzophrenic hive mind for advice on making life easier on them both.
I never said all families are perfect. But I do believe that they're more reliable than most of the people you deal with, and that you're not doing anyone any favors by encouraging them to treat their relations as selfishly as they would treat anyone else.
Counterpoint: Being an adult today is in some ways a much more complicated affair than being an adult back in the bad ol' days. Not more dangerous, just more complicated.
How hard was getting married back then? Your parents selected your mate, helped you build your own little shack, and then the two of you might set about running the farm until you both died of dysentery. Or there was a war, in which case your menfolk were handed crude weapons and told to run towards the other menfolk with their crude weapons and do their best to kill them. Only the rich and the professional soldiers really had the leisure time to learn to truly master their weapons.
For other skills, you generally inherited the trade of your father. This made a certain sense, because you'd probably seen the trade done your entire life.
What I'm saying is, everyone was dirt poor, so out of necessity life was kept simple enough that a clever twelve year old could thoroughly master it. We couldn't afford to have kids sitting around, getting thoroughly educated. We needed them to be immediately productive: fetching wood and water, building things, running at menfolk with crude weapons.
In modern times, success in life comes from... well, inherited wealth, but that's a rant for another time. But we have an absurdly complex society, running on technologies and social innovations that are absolute magic to most people. But we desperately need people to understand these systems, not only for the benefits they can bring to society, but also the dangers.
Take the social innovation of credit. Credit has probably been around in one form or another since before we could technically be considered "human". But these days there are such a wide variety of vehicles for credit that it would take years to truly understand them. But every adult needs to understand something about credit, and we see the harm that comes when people are loaned more money than they have the capacity to repay. We have kids leaving college with tens of thousands in credit card debt. We have creditors making risky housing loans in booming housing markets, hoping that the families have to default in a few years so the creditors can sell the house at its new, inflated value. We have creditors encouraging people to take out home equity loans to finance vacations (the stupidest thing you can do this side of setting your own hair on fire).
Even reasonable, well-educated people can make huge mistakes with credit, and that's just one of the many pitfalls you need to know about before you can truly function in this society. Since the ability to function as an equal participant in society is pretty much the working definition of adulthood, and society has become vastly more complicated, I think it's fair to say that the age of adulthood is rising dramatically.
Food choices are another one of those things that has gotten vastly more complicated over the last few hundred years. It used to be that there were a relatively small number of food choices available. You learned how to prepare those, and then you ate them. That summary glosses over a lot of hard work and a lot of skill, but there weren't many decisions to make. Now--at least in the developed world--we have more calories sloshing around than we know what to do with. Getting the necessary calories for survival has become absolutely dirt cheap.
But we've put the responsibility of food production into the hands of people who are required to maximize profits instead of human health. This fact leads to a few odd conclusions: While food production is made as cheap as possible, food consumption must be made as expensive as possible. This means adding "value" to the food manufacturing process by adding steps that increase the price and amount of food being sold. For example, you can sell a person twenty pounds of corn, or you can use the corn as feed to produce one pound of beef. Or you can turn it into high-fructose corn syrup to put in anything you want people to gobble u
Hear hear!
Oh, wait.
That was sarcasm, wasn't it?
NSA, put a tracer on this one. He's doubleplusungood as they get.
You do that. Then twenty or thirty years down the road, when you two are trying to figure out how to split the responsibilities of caring for your aging parents, you can say, "remember all those times *I* bailed *you* out?"
And she'll just say, "No."
I was raised to believe that family is the one thing in this world you can count on. When one of us is in trouble, it's time for the rest of us to dig in and smooth things out for them. The moment you step back and start demanding to know "What's in it for me?" you lose something more valuable than your time or her money.
Maybe your family isn't like that. My condolences.
Well, I was going to point out the numerous articles linking diets high in animal fats to strokes, heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, etc. But your link to a non-peer-reviewed article by an author who uses all his footnotes to quote his own research totally set me straight. Screw this vegetarian stuff, I'm gonna go eat me a cow or two.
Of course, in order to create enough meat to feed everyone a basically carnivorous diet, we'd probably need to quintuple our agricultural output, with all the associated environmental problems.
Finally, Jared Diamond said exactly what I expected him to say. Rather than attributing the poor health of agricultural societies to a lack of meat in the diet, he attributes it to three other factors. First, agrarians ate a less varied diet. Second, there were more people living closer together and trading diseases. Third, because of the previous two factors, it was much rougher on a society when a single crop failed.
So, no, I'm not buying this whole "we need to eat more meat" line you're selling.
I was going to argue with you, because I'd assumed he was taking out some sort of interest-free student loan. In that situation, it seems like a no-brainer to put some of the money in a safe investment rather than letting it sit in the bank. On re-reading, I honestly can't make heads or tails of his situation.
You're absolutely right about not borrowing money to invest. But you really could stop with your savvier-than-thou act, and recognize that a single, possibly moronic question doesn't prove that he's a singular, definite moron. It's good to give everyone the benefit of the doubt the first time through. There are enough morons in this world that you're guaranteed ample opportunities to flame them later.
But when you judge too soon that a person is a complete nitwit, you sometimes get surprised, and end up having to reevaluate your 1337 judging skillz. It's a humbling experience.
I think they do both have a certain charm, when you consider the fact that the country is screwed up in several very fundamental ways, neither major party has any ideas for fixing them, and both have vested interest in maintaining the system as is.
There is simply no way to do the fundamental reforms that could really strengthen democracy without doing some extreme things. For the record, I would include among "fundamental refomrs" the following: condorcet voting, publicly financed elections, rolling back the powers of corporations and financial interest, and breathing new life into the labor movement.
How is he supposed to identify your weaknesses and give your code individual attention when he has to spend all his time poking at the binary, making sure it gives the outputs it's supposed to? There's no reason to resent a teacher or TA trying to reduce the busywork associated with grading dozens of submissions. It's a simple fact of life that most all of us are trying to do too much with too few resources, and if you can free up that much instruction time by simply formatting your outputs properly, then it's a valuable investment for your time.
You're either paid to shill for WebCT, or you must just really, really hate the guy who wrote the original question. As in "he killed my family and I'm out for revenge" hate.
Why not just hunt the guy down, blind him, chop off a few extremities, and leave him in a ditch? It would be a kindness in comparison to WebCT.
I haven't had the best experiences with their software.
Laziness? Automation isn't laziness. There is no virtue in spending hours doing something that can easily be automated, and it's a shameful waste if the time could be used more productively. In this case, time spent verifying inputs and outputs could be better spent reading and critiquing student code, meeting with students to answer their questions, or maybe just not sitting around scanning over reams of student program output, making sure the right answers are hidden somewhere in there.
Now if he'd asked about the best way to farm the work out to a TA in India....
I disagree with your evaluation of the "importance" of following a specification. Specifications are often crucial to making programs interoperate, and if the specification says you can't have blank space at the beginning of the first line following such-and-such declaration, then having blank space there really does constitute an error in your program.
Automatic graders are better for both students and teachers, because the teacher/TA can focus on the essence of your program, and let the machine worry about the repetitive grunge work that ensures input A delivers output B. That should mean that the teacher can actually talk about your algorithm, coding practices, etc.
I do agree that it's frustrating to get docked for seemingly "nitpicky" things. Out of fairness, I think a teacher using an automatic grader ought to provide some data sets and the expected output. Even better, provide a reference implementation, so that the students can come up with their own test cases. But in real life not every standard has a reference implementation, and then your only recourse is to obsess and nitpick your way to conformance.
Thanks for saving me a post. I owe you ten minutes of my life.
Actually, the absolute worst case is if the police confiscate your computer, then either decide you must be guilty, or that they'll benefit from a conviction. So they load you up with "evidence." It's probably a rare thing, but I've always figured that once you're involved with the legal system, all bets are off.
It's interesting how I'm so often defending government "intrusion" into our lives, but I don't trust police for jack.
Well, it's not like Lieberman is doing much for the Democrats anyways. I think he's much too kind to big business.
You say "nanny state" like it's a bad thing, but in fact, it describes exactly what our government was set up to do: promote the general welfare. People like you naively assume that all the government has to do in order to accomplish this is to get out of our collective way, and let the free market generate all the blessings of prosperity. There are times when this works, and times when it doesn't. Monopolies harm the free market. Extreme differences in wealth and power harm the free market. Unequal access to information harm the free market. When any of these things occur, it is to the benefit of the people for the government to step in.
I'll provide just one example to illustrate my position: unequal access to information. Assume that you live in a free-market utopia. You're shopping for just one of the many hundreds of things you have to make decisions about in your life: a car seat for your one year old. Assume you're at Wal-Mart, because you really don't have any alternatives within a fifty mile radius. That part isn't really relevant to the story, but I thought I'd point it out.
You're faced with the decision of which of twenty car seats to buy. Each of them claims to be very safe, but since the government doesn't have a role in ensuring the safety of carseats or ensuring that product claims be truthful, these claims don't help you. The twenty models run the gamut of prices, from $20 to $400, and the $20 looks incredibly flimsy, so one down, nineteen to go. Four of the seats are certified by the "Safe Baby Coalition," five of them are certified by the "Independent Safety Auditors of America," and six are certified by the "Safe Consumer Product Association". You've never heard of any of these groups, and have no idea what it takes to get their certifications, so they're absolutely no help.
So you put off the decision, and hit the Internet. Which, being the Internet, is no help whatsoever. You find all sorts of message boards with all sorts of opinions, some obviously written for hire.
This is a case where each of the manufacturers knows exactly how safe their product is, and since consumers are willing to pay a premium for safe car seats, the unsafe ones try like hell to appear safe.
How much easier would this decision be if the government simplified the decision by saying that all car seats must pass a minimum, acceptable standard of safety before they can be sold? Infinitely easier. Now, instead of thinking, "Okay, which one won't snap my kid's neck," you can start thinking in terms of "the blue one is just darling." Less stress for the consumer, fewer dangerous products on the market, and--most important--a higher rate of crash survival. All this because the government steps in and closes the information gap between manufacturers and consumers.
No voluntary system could have the same effect, so long as there was money to be gained by gaming the system. If one group of manufacturers decides to create an independent certification board, to prove once and for all that their products are safe, then less scrupulous manufacturers can create their own certification board with lower standards.
You have the same principles in play when it comes to things like worker safety and food and water quality. Smart regulations can bring value to the market by eliminating uncertainty. If you're going to buy a house, it's a complicated enough decision without trying to figure out whether the tapwater in this neighborhoods will give you cancer, or whether you're better off going with the house that has 25% less benzene but 30% more lead. Safe food and drinking water allow people to spend their time worrying about other things, but someone has to guarantee that safety. If that's "nanny-statism," then I'd like to see more of it.
Oh, and despite what I think is a rather calm and collected rejoinder to your mindless, dittohead caricat
Point 1: Contrary to your assertion, I think many of society's problems exist because "Big Evil Scary Government" isn't doing nearly enough to protect average people from their own stupidity, while in the same breath spending billions of taxpayer dollars protecting big companies from theirs.
Point 2: If you haven't even encrypted your connection, I don't need to "break in" to know this. All I have to do is turn my laptop on somewhere in receiving range. It shows me a friendly little icon representing your network, with no key slapped over it. No violation of your privacy is occurring.
I'm against this proposal because I think the benefits of sharing Internet connections outweigh the risks.
You must be new here. Welcome to America.
I also believe that a lot of people don't have much choice about getting AIDS. Just a few examples: babies infected at birth. Women who have been raped. Men who spend time in prison. People who are strictly faithful to people who are not. The woman who knows her husband is sleeping around, but is more afraid of losing his support than of HIV.
Nobody is disputing that personal choices lead to many cases of HIV. What we are disputing is the conclusion that messages of personal responsibility are therefore the solution. We see it much the same way we see the distinction between abstinence and "abstinence-based education." When someone defends abstinence-ed by pointing out the effectiveness of abstinence itself, I regard them as having completely missed the point.
I'm especially curious about the "given only once" condition. You sound like you're assuming that the poor are automatically too shiftless and irresponsible to remember to come in and get a booster shot in six weeks. This leads me to believe that it makes you feel more comfortable to believe that the poor are responsible for their lot in life, because it absolves you of any responsibilities or obligations. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this one statement, but given the number of people who actually think this way, I don't feel too guilty about that.