I agree. I have spent some time in Central America. Observations: No-existent police network (ok, they exist, but won't do anything to protect you). Every public official, from a village mayor to the minister president surrounded by cronies who steal right and left by millions.. no comparison. The 'crimes' of the American legislators for which they went down in the Jack Abramoff affair were laughable in comparison.
and coupled with the rise in inflation every time washington prints more money
Obviously, you have not taken your principles of economics in college. During recessions, there are deflationary pressures, so increasing supply of money does not do much if at all to increase inflation. On the other hand, there is a serious threat of deflation, which most economists agree is worse than having a light inflation.
That gas taxes are too low is not a problem in itself. The problem is that low gas prices encourage others to pollute _my_ environment. Those who pollute, are not paying right now the full cost (to society) of their decision to pollute more with a large 'light truck' or SUV.
I think a lot of posters, like you, do not seem to understand the economics of externalities. If every dog in your neighborhood came to shit in your front yard, you probably wouldn't have liked it. However, for some reason, it's ok to drive around in a land barge that gets 14mpg in a city and pollutes the air that we all breathe. Realize that the price you pay for gas right now does not represent the full cost (to the society) of that gas. Of course, no one is saying that you should _have_ to stop driving an SUV. If can continue driving whatever you want, but you need to pay the full cost of making this decision.
I don't buy the argument that 'many' can't afford to switch to newer more fuel efficient cars, and therefore fuel taxes are bad. Last time I have checked, USA has a GDP per capita of over $40,000. Anyone with a full-time job should be able to afford to buy/lease something more compact with reasonable fuel efficiency. Heck, even a 10 year old Corolla should work. If you can't afford one, go get a Geo Metro from a junk yard (tied with older Prius for mpg)
I have driven in snow and ice in my sedan and honestly don't see why SUVs are supposed to be better for this duty. The funny thing is once it starts snowing or raining, it seems like SUV or light truck will be the first vehicle I see in a ditch upside down. However, if you choose to live in a place where driving an SUV is required then THAT is part of the cost of your decision to live where you live.
I have completed a double major in economics and math. By now I am almost certain that completing a double major in any subjects is a waste of time.
So you're eager to learn more than what's offered by one major and you think second major will help. Bad idea! Having to complete a second major will fill up your schedule and make it almost impossible to take interesting electives from departments outside of your major departments. At the same time, you will probably realize that not all required courses from your "second major" are cool and rosy and you wish you didn't have to take them. From my experience, my "second" major was math. When I declared it I was too naive to realize that not all required math courses are interesting or useful to me. For example, I absolutely hated taking courses like Abstract Algebra and Complex Analysis. At the same time, I wish I had more time to take courses like Measure Theory, Numerical Analysis, Probability, Optimization, and Statistics. 2nd major was a bad idea. If you have too much spare time in college just cherry pick the best classes offered from other departments. Don't tie yourself to a second department.
For an analogy, you should take a look at idtech3 game engine users. Gametracker.com 2 months ago reported about 700 active Quake 3 servers (many empty of course). Lots of people still enjoy this game, and having access to source code engine is an advantage to them. Other games that use the free idtech3 engine are Urban Terror (up to version 4.2), Tremulous, Smokin Guns, and World of Padman. Granted, I think only UrbanTerror is a widely played game among these (game tracker reports over 1000 live servers) and the next version is switching to a fork of a closed source engine. There are also games based on idtech1 and idtech2 engines. Quite often the developers of the above games had been discussing switching their game engine to something else. Often those discussions ended with "let the idtech4 be released, and then we'll see"
The cost of switching to Linux will be far more expensive than the cost of Windows/MacOS licenses. I had worked as a sysadmin before. No one pays sticker prices for Windows, not OEMs and not the enterprise users. The license cost is cheaper than you think. At the same time, Linux does not come entirely free. First is the cost of transition and retraining users. Next, a lot of enterprise users want an "enterprise" OS with associated support, and this stuff does not come free. (Take a look at support contracts for RedHat Enterprise Linux)
Liberal Arts education is meant to make you into a more well rounded person, either on your job or elsewhere. If you don't want to go through liberal arts education curriculum, then BA/BS is not for you. BA or BS means a lot more than a certain number of hours of coursework in the subject of your degree. If all you want is to have some piece of paper to show to your prospective employee at the interviews, then get a certificate in.. whatever is relevant. If you want to obtain more than that, get a normal BA or BS degree at a traditional (rear, not online crap) institution.
This _IS_ bad news for systems using such password hashing...IMO.
To me, computer security is always about erecting as many walls and layers against things you want to protect. If you think your hash database is so well protected, why not go further and store it in plain text?
My understanding is that CS is effectively a branch of applied mathematics. Therefore, it's puzzling to me how CS can be taught without any math, which is some people want to advocate. However, it does seem strange that a lot of CS programs require their students to study Calculus, differential equations, and other continuous math subjects. Discrete math is a lot more useful in CS. Calculus should probably be taught only up to differentiation and integration (just one semester) and then followed by discrete math course to build up math intuition for algorithms courses.
If dropping support for or delaying the release of some obscure and outdated CPU architecture makes releases faster, I'd say that's great. Debian always supported more architectures than other mainstream distributions, but they clearly placed more emphasis on hardware that most people actually use. There is still NetBSD and some other niix-like distributions for people with more outdated hardware.
The funny thing is, my engineering friends who graduated from top public university EECS programs, never spent time looking for a job. Most have job offers before they start looking for a job. 5 years out of college, most make low six figure salary while doing what they LOVE doing...
Now regarding finance, unless you're a well connected Ivy League graduate, the best way to break into high flight finance jobs is again.. engineering. In fact, once again, those mathematical finance jobs are overflowing with the French, Asians, Russians, and so on. Something is wrong with Americans. Engineering offers great opportunities. They just refuse to go into it. They prefer a major in Mass Communications or Comparative Literature in order to become later on paper movers in corporations and governments. I'd blame a the culture and a mediocre education system that can't teach students math and science properly.
That animal carcasses or meat are sprayed by chemicals is just plain not true. But industrially produced mean, specially American beef and poultry, do contain a lot of antibiotics and other crap that may affect not only taste but also human health. True. However, in the end, it's not the industrial meat produces should be blamed. It's us! Simply stated, Americans want everything to be cheap and they want it to come in BIG portions. Just look at our cars, SUVs, meals, and McMansions. Quality and finesse take a back seat to price and size. Until people's attitudes change, you're not going to see better things sold at an average grocery store. Do note however, that there are plenty of grocery stores selling organic meat and vegetables, at least in coastal states.
I know the US has gotten a lot of bad rap for Iraq WMD fiasco, and is viewed as a more evil entity right now. However, it's also the other force in the world that is trying to counter truly mad regimes of the world. Just look at the potential conflict areas today, North Korea and Iran. These two countries are literally blackmailing the rest of the world. The other NATO members are too broke to be taken seriously. USA is the only country that bears the cost of containing those two regimes. But I do get your point. There is so much waste in military spending. Just look at the F-22 and the C-17 programs that seems to be impossible to terminate. Our military-industrial complex has too much influence over the congress. Otherwise, we could easily maintain a military as strong as right now AND spend more money on science.
A lot of states have terrific public universities. Just to name a few: California, Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Washington, Arizona, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Maryland, and a few others have top public schools that are exceptionally good. The most important thing though is to have a focus on your career goals from early on. Set a goal from early on, and work on it. Don't wander around lecture halls and departments until your the end of junior year to find a major that fits you and then pick some lib arts major like political science or history. You'll end up with a lousy career. Think of a career path you like, think about subjects that you like, and think about how being in college can help you get there.
Sun is history because they failed to adapt to the fast commodidation of the computing marketplace. They failed to embrace Linux when everyone else was jumping onto it around year 2000. They failed to embrace Intel/AMD platform at the time when IMB, HP, and Compaq were more than glad to sell you either RISC or CISC system, as long as you bought their stuff. They canceled Solaris on x86 at the time when it was probably last moment to prop up Solaris on x86 and thus make the platform more mainstream. Instead, they bought storagetek (does buying a tape backup company seem like a way to become a leader in unix market place? no!) Now they reaping the results. They weren't worth more. They spent a decade with not much results. Even on the high end, they couldn't beat IBM or any serious storage vendors. It's entirely deserved that Oracle picked them up for a song. Sun couldn't have been worth more.
I am about to buy a stereo unit for my car with bluetooth phone receiver. The phone will connect wirelessly to my stereo allow me to be on the cell phone completely hands free. I will be no more distracted than any other driver who is talking to his passengers. How is this dangerous, and why does the government want to disable this tech innovation?
In my opinion, the greatest value of math is in college preparation. Based on my conversations with students at several college campuses, fear of math seems like the number one reason a lot of people do not go into engineering or science majors in college. It's part of the reason we have so many people going into liberal arts majors like mass communication or political science instead of CS, engineering, or sciences. While one needs just some knowledge of algebra for real life applications, it's really important that as many kids as possible are taught pre-calculus, and even calculus in high school, and that they're taught it well. Just my $0.02.
PS: I think your concern should probably apply more to UK and other European countries, which slashed their military budgets based on assumptions that Western European warfare is a thing of the past, and the Soviet Union is no longer foe. Their "military" capability is reduced to delivering humanitarian supplies to places like Haiti and peacekeeping operations (it's assumed that US will do the fighting from now on). Just look at UK. They can't even afford to have two aircraft carriers. If there is anyone who is still in position to wage a war on the scale of WWII it's clearly US, and China will be getting there some time in this century too. And Russia is paper giant, with a 1 million armed force, out of which at best a quarter can get themselves out of their barracks.
I can remember that even as far back as 1999 I saw this issue with Linux. This is not bad only for the desktop, but also for the server. I have also experience with Solaris workstations and servers, and it usually doesn't behave this way.
It's a myth that to make Linux usable, one has to recompile the kernel. I haven't had to recompile a Linux kernel since around 1999*, and I was a full time Linux system administrator! RedHat/CentOS/Fedora kernels always had everything in a modular and usable form.
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I agree. I have spent some time in Central America. Observations: No-existent police network (ok, they exist, but won't do anything to protect you). Every public official, from a village mayor to the minister president surrounded by cronies who steal right and left by millions.. no comparison. The 'crimes' of the American legislators for which they went down in the Jack Abramoff affair were laughable in comparison.
and coupled with the rise in inflation every time washington prints more money
Obviously, you have not taken your principles of economics in college. During recessions, there are deflationary pressures, so increasing supply of money does not do much if at all to increase inflation. On the other hand, there is a serious threat of deflation, which most economists agree is worse than having a light inflation.
That gas taxes are too low is not a problem in itself. The problem is that low gas prices encourage others to pollute _my_ environment. Those who pollute, are not paying right now the full cost (to society) of their decision to pollute more with a large 'light truck' or SUV.
I think a lot of posters, like you, do not seem to understand the economics of externalities. If every dog in your neighborhood came to shit in your front yard, you probably wouldn't have liked it. However, for some reason, it's ok to drive around in a land barge that gets 14mpg in a city and pollutes the air that we all breathe. Realize that the price you pay for gas right now does not represent the full cost (to the society) of that gas. Of course, no one is saying that you should _have_ to stop driving an SUV. If can continue driving whatever you want, but you need to pay the full cost of making this decision.
I don't buy the argument that 'many' can't afford to switch to newer more fuel efficient cars, and therefore fuel taxes are bad. Last time I have checked, USA has a GDP per capita of over $40,000. Anyone with a full-time job should be able to afford to buy/lease something more compact with reasonable fuel efficiency. Heck, even a 10 year old Corolla should work. If you can't afford one, go get a Geo Metro from a junk yard (tied with older Prius for mpg)
I have driven in snow and ice in my sedan and honestly don't see why SUVs are supposed to be better for this duty. The funny thing is once it starts snowing or raining, it seems like SUV or light truck will be the first vehicle I see in a ditch upside down. However, if you choose to live in a place where driving an SUV is required then THAT is part of the cost of your decision to live where you live.
Walter White can live in peace until the Season 5 starts.
Probably a lot will vote for him again if the republicans can't come up with a strong candidate.
I have completed a double major in economics and math. By now I am almost certain that completing a double major in any subjects is a waste of time.
So you're eager to learn more than what's offered by one major and you think second major will help. Bad idea! Having to complete a second major will fill up your schedule and make it almost impossible to take interesting electives from departments outside of your major departments. At the same time, you will probably realize that not all required courses from your "second major" are cool and rosy and you wish you didn't have to take them. From my experience, my "second" major was math. When I declared it I was too naive to realize that not all required math courses are interesting or useful to me. For example, I absolutely hated taking courses like Abstract Algebra and Complex Analysis. At the same time, I wish I had more time to take courses like Measure Theory, Numerical Analysis, Probability, Optimization, and Statistics. 2nd major was a bad idea. If you have too much spare time in college just cherry pick the best classes offered from other departments. Don't tie yourself to a second department.
For an analogy, you should take a look at idtech3 game engine users. Gametracker.com 2 months ago reported about 700 active Quake 3 servers (many empty of course). Lots of people still enjoy this game, and having access to source code engine is an advantage to them. Other games that use the free idtech3 engine are Urban Terror (up to version 4.2), Tremulous, Smokin Guns, and World of Padman. Granted, I think only UrbanTerror is a widely played game among these (game tracker reports over 1000 live servers) and the next version is switching to a fork of a closed source engine. There are also games based on idtech1 and idtech2 engines. Quite often the developers of the above games had been discussing switching their game engine to something else. Often those discussions ended with "let the idtech4 be released, and then we'll see"
The cost of switching to Linux will be far more expensive than the cost of Windows/MacOS licenses. I had worked as a sysadmin before. No one pays sticker prices for Windows, not OEMs and not the enterprise users. The license cost is cheaper than you think. At the same time, Linux does not come entirely free. First is the cost of transition and retraining users. Next, a lot of enterprise users want an "enterprise" OS with associated support, and this stuff does not come free. (Take a look at support contracts for RedHat Enterprise Linux)
Liberal Arts education is meant to make you into a more well rounded person, either on your job or elsewhere. If you don't want to go through liberal arts education curriculum, then BA/BS is not for you. BA or BS means a lot more than a certain number of hours of coursework in the subject of your degree. If all you want is to have some piece of paper to show to your prospective employee at the interviews, then get a certificate in .. whatever is relevant. If you want to obtain more than that, get a normal BA or BS degree at a traditional (rear, not online crap) institution.
This _IS_ bad news for systems using such password hashing...IMO.
To me, computer security is always about erecting as many walls and layers against things you want to protect. If you think your hash database is so well protected, why not go further and store it in plain text?
My understanding is that CS is effectively a branch of applied mathematics. Therefore, it's puzzling to me how CS can be taught without any math, which is some people want to advocate. However, it does seem strange that a lot of CS programs require their students to study Calculus, differential equations, and other continuous math subjects. Discrete math is a lot more useful in CS. Calculus should probably be taught only up to differentiation and integration (just one semester) and then followed by discrete math course to build up math intuition for algorithms courses.
If dropping support for or delaying the release of some obscure and outdated CPU architecture makes releases faster, I'd say that's great. Debian always supported more architectures than other mainstream distributions, but they clearly placed more emphasis on hardware that most people actually use. There is still NetBSD and some other niix-like distributions for people with more outdated hardware.
Much less.. they make profit? What a blast from the past..
The funny thing is, my engineering friends who graduated from top public university EECS programs, never spent time looking for a job. Most have job offers before they start looking for a job. 5 years out of college, most make low six figure salary while doing what they LOVE doing...
Now regarding finance, unless you're a well connected Ivy League graduate, the best way to break into high flight finance jobs is again.. engineering. In fact, once again, those mathematical finance jobs are overflowing with the French, Asians, Russians, and so on. Something is wrong with Americans. Engineering offers great opportunities. They just refuse to go into it. They prefer a major in Mass Communications or Comparative Literature in order to become later on paper movers in corporations and governments. I'd blame a the culture and a mediocre education system that can't teach students math and science properly.
That animal carcasses or meat are sprayed by chemicals is just plain not true. But industrially produced mean, specially American beef and poultry, do contain a lot of antibiotics and other crap that may affect not only taste but also human health. True. However, in the end, it's not the industrial meat produces should be blamed. It's us! Simply stated, Americans want everything to be cheap and they want it to come in BIG portions. Just look at our cars, SUVs, meals, and McMansions. Quality and finesse take a back seat to price and size. Until people's attitudes change, you're not going to see better things sold at an average grocery store. Do note however, that there are plenty of grocery stores selling organic meat and vegetables, at least in coastal states.
I know the US has gotten a lot of bad rap for Iraq WMD fiasco, and is viewed as a more evil entity right now. However, it's also the other force in the world that is trying to counter truly mad regimes of the world. Just look at the potential conflict areas today, North Korea and Iran. These two countries are literally blackmailing the rest of the world. The other NATO members are too broke to be taken seriously. USA is the only country that bears the cost of containing those two regimes. But I do get your point. There is so much waste in military spending. Just look at the F-22 and the C-17 programs that seems to be impossible to terminate. Our military-industrial complex has too much influence over the congress. Otherwise, we could easily maintain a military as strong as right now AND spend more money on science.
A lot of states have terrific public universities. Just to name a few: California, Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Washington, Arizona, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Maryland, and a few others have top public schools that are exceptionally good. The most important thing though is to have a focus on your career goals from early on. Set a goal from early on, and work on it. Don't wander around lecture halls and departments until your the end of junior year to find a major that fits you and then pick some lib arts major like political science or history. You'll end up with a lousy career. Think of a career path you like, think about subjects that you like, and think about how being in college can help you get there.
Sun is history because they failed to adapt to the fast commodidation of the computing marketplace. They failed to embrace Linux when everyone else was jumping onto it around year 2000. They failed to embrace Intel/AMD platform at the time when IMB, HP, and Compaq were more than glad to sell you either RISC or CISC system, as long as you bought their stuff. They canceled Solaris on x86 at the time when it was probably last moment to prop up Solaris on x86 and thus make the platform more mainstream. Instead, they bought storagetek (does buying a tape backup company seem like a way to become a leader in unix market place? no!) Now they reaping the results. They weren't worth more. They spent a decade with not much results. Even on the high end, they couldn't beat IBM or any serious storage vendors. It's entirely deserved that Oracle picked them up for a song. Sun couldn't have been worth more.
I am about to buy a stereo unit for my car with bluetooth phone receiver. The phone will connect wirelessly to my stereo allow me to be on the cell phone completely hands free. I will be no more distracted than any other driver who is talking to his passengers. How is this dangerous, and why does the government want to disable this tech innovation?
In my opinion, the greatest value of math is in college preparation. Based on my conversations with students at several college campuses, fear of math seems like the number one reason a lot of people do not go into engineering or science majors in college. It's part of the reason we have so many people going into liberal arts majors like mass communication or political science instead of CS, engineering, or sciences. While one needs just some knowledge of algebra for real life applications, it's really important that as many kids as possible are taught pre-calculus, and even calculus in high school, and that they're taught it well. Just my $0.02.
PS: I think your concern should probably apply more to UK and other European countries, which slashed their military budgets based on assumptions that Western European warfare is a thing of the past, and the Soviet Union is no longer foe. Their "military" capability is reduced to delivering humanitarian supplies to places like Haiti and peacekeeping operations (it's assumed that US will do the fighting from now on). Just look at UK. They can't even afford to have two aircraft carriers. If there is anyone who is still in position to wage a war on the scale of WWII it's clearly US, and China will be getting there some time in this century too. And Russia is paper giant, with a 1 million armed force, out of which at best a quarter can get themselves out of their barracks.
I can remember that even as far back as 1999 I saw this issue with Linux. This is not bad only for the desktop, but also for the server. I have also experience with Solaris workstations and servers, and it usually doesn't behave this way.
It's a myth that to make Linux usable, one has to recompile the kernel. I haven't had to recompile a Linux kernel since around 1999*, and I was a full time Linux system administrator! RedHat/CentOS/Fedora kernels always had everything in a modular and usable form.