It sounds like your noise generator needs adjustment. Ours shuts off at 7PM every day, and when it does, I can clearly hear conversations several aisles away. When it's one, the range is much shorter, but still long enough that I can hear conversations about one "cube pod radius" away. (Facilities was fiddling with it one day, and we could clearly tell when they borked it up, and it did indeed make it hard to hear.)
The generator may also be set to the wrong frequency set. It should be set to "pink" noise, not white noise.
In any case, I understand where you are coming from on the issue of distractions. We have small enclosed rooms where you can flee if you have some extended (several hour) block of work you need to get done.
However, in a support group like the one I work for, we are largely "interrupt-driven"; it's not like development where you need an extended block of time to "get in the groove". My longest-length single task during the day might take a 1/2 hour; most of my day involves extensive multitasking (I have about 30 browser tabs and an equal number of windows open at any one time.) And with the complexity and size of our product set (literally everything my (large) company sells or support that attaches to a Fibre Channel port) Skype and screen-sharing simply would not cut the proverbial mustard.
MS Paint? You must be kidding. Even the most crude drawing takes several times longer to complete in MS Paint (or any mouse-driven program) vs. a ballpoint pen or whiteboard.
And that OTS tablet app is also a non-starter in a corporate environment, which requires all confidential information to transit our corporate network/VPN, and only the corporate network. Any app that involves you logging in via phone number is probably routing data through a central (non-corporate) server.
Not to mention that tablets, while not overwhelmingly expensive these days, still aren't exactly standard equipment.
I work for a close-knit high-level support group. Our problems are complex and varied enough that I cannot imagine working from home routinely. Nothing beats overhearing somebody in an adjacent cube mumble something about an issue that you dealt with vaguely six months ago, and then you hop up, scrawl something on a whiteboard, and then call over another couple people to check it out with you.
Yes, all this is theoretically possible via IM, (even the sketching, with special equipment), but things like overhearing others, and the instant, high-speed collaboration just isn't possible remotely. (I can talk much faster than I type, and there isn't any concept of "overhearing" a colleague discuss something if you are on other sides of the country.)
While some individuals within banks do sometimes purposefully facilitate money laundering, it is very rare for an institution as a whole to condone it. The fines involved if the bank gets caught are simply enormous, and well out of proportion with whatever profit they might have derived from it. Prosecutors love money laundering cases because the payoff is huge, and the burden of proof much easier than, say, dodgy mortgages.
Chronic violators get cut off from SWIFT and IBAN, which is pretty much a bank death sentence.
One other thing bitcoin is good for: Like any other somewhat stable currency or commodity, it can be used as an investment hedge. The downside to using Bitcoins as a hedge is their limited supply - if a significant percentage of Bitcoins are owned by investors and they all try to sell at once, well, that's not good for the investors. But as a small part of a much larger currency hedge, it has value.
BitCoins are NOT "somewhat stable". If the USD, EUR, or pretty much any other currency on the planet fluctuated on a daily basis anywhere near as much as BitCoins do, it'd be considered an economic apocalypse. You'd have to be utterly nucking futs to consider BtC's a "currency hedge." (A highly speculative investment sure, but it wouldn't a hedge against anything.)
This instability also makes it pretty useless as a general-purpose currency. The only way to ensure you don't completely lose your shirt is to "sweep" your BitCoins into the national currency of your choice pretty much as soon as you receive the things. If you are going to go to all that trouble, most people will just use normal currency to begin with because of the transaction fees. The instability also introduces a hidden "transaction fee" on every BtC transfer if you actually want to trade outside the "Bitcoin economy."
Yes, BitCoins are useful if you want to keep your transactions anonymous, but that "economy" is sufficiently small and trouble-prone that Visa/MC won't miss it one bit. (The pre-paid debit cards that would be useful for such a thing are only a tiny fraction of their business.)
It's their search engine/payment mechanism/bank/whatever. They can decide what it is used for. They ARE the law, when it comes to the services that they themselves run. They don't need to ask a court's permission to verify if something is or isn't illegal.
If BitCoin becomes the "currency" of choice for the "underground economy" (a position for which it is well suited... about the only thing it's well-suited for), I don't think it's going to terrify Google or Visa/MC all that much. They don't WANT that business; it causes too many legal/regulatory hassles.
So, are you telling me that prior to modern anti-poverty programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, welfare, etc. nobody starved to death or died for lack of access to medical care? And that vast tracts of parkland were cheerfully secured, maintained, and opened to the public?
If that's your position, you need to go back and read your history books some more.
I'm not saying any of those programs are perfect or not subject to abuse. But it most certainly is NOT correct to say that starvation and homelessness were nearly unheard of prior to the "welfare state." Or that private enterprise did a particularly good job with parks.
If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that, as if by magic, citizens voluntarily donate enough of their income to feed, clothe, and house those that are poor through no fault of their own. They purchase, build, and staff a full parks system out of the goodness of their hearts.
They are willing to lay their lives down, free of charge (and provide weapons and ammo, no less!) for their country/planet/space station. Everybody is cool with the idea that murder is a civil matter to be dealt with by heirs, who will gladly pay for the investigation. (And, by unspoken extension, if you don't have any heirs that like you, your life isn't worth $hit.) As long as you can pay the economic damages for your doings, well, you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Works as designed.
Easy to ubderstand.
Easy to maintain.
You can't say there aren't rules, and then turn around and cite some. If you, modern programmer with experience with modern languages, were forced to use COBOL for a new IT code project, you'd run away screaming in short order. You'd wonder what demons had possessed your management to commit such an act of lunacy. That's not exactly the hallmark of a language considered "good" by any stretch of the imagination.
If that's your starting point, (and indeed, they are the starting point for guidelines for programming language design), then COBOL is indeed a failure (in comparison to modern languages; at the time it was state-of-the-art.) COBOL must be twisted and turned to perform much basic work... the only reason it works at all is through thousands of man-years of programming effort producing work at a pace that would make the most green IT code jockey look like a super-productive-genius. A superficial "COBOL 101" tutorial is easy to understand, but production COBOL code generally is not. And it's certainly NOT easy to maintain; the modularity we take for granted today simply isn't present.
Perl was, and remains, staggeringly useful for the tasks for which it was originally designed: as a sysadmin's "swiss army knife." By modern standards COBOL doesn't even work well for what it was designed for, but there weren't any alternatives at the time.
Again, as I stated in my original post, in comparison to the other languages of the time (besides assembler, there were all of two of them: LISP and FORTRAN, both of them in their infancy, and neither targeting towards the same problem set) COBOL was a revelation/revolution. But if it was a quality language by modern standards, it'd still be in use for new projects, yet it's virtually never used for new work.
Viewed through the eyes of a modern programmer, COBOL is indeed a joke. A horrible one. It violates nearly every single principle of good language design in what appears to be a misguided attempt to make programming "friendly." A CS undergrad would get a poor grade turning in something like COBOL as a Programming Languages 101 project.
But for a language first specified in 1959 (when computing didn't even have the Integrated Circuit yet), it's a work of staggering genius; they didn't HAVE all those rules of good language design to fall back on! At the time, FORTRAN had been out for all of two years and LISP for one; hardly enough time to have much experience with knowing what not to do, and neither of those languages targeted the same problem domain.
COBOL made modern computing accessible and useful to businesses. It's programs have maintained decent backwards compatibility for about half a century. And for all it's foibles, all those hundreds of millions of lines of COBOL actually work. They may be a disgusting kludge, a result of decades of compromises, but these gigantic black boxes of spaghetti Work. And there's no reason to think they'll stop doing so any time soon. Nor any reason to believe that replacing them would be in any way cost-effective.
To paraphrase the famous by Churchill saying about government: "It has been said that the mouse model is worst way to perform easy, cheap, repeatable medical tests. Except for all others that have been tried."
The researchers that use mice in experiments are not blithering idiots. They have indeed gotten the memo that mice are not people. But they also have research to perform, a limited budget to perform it with, and no viable alternative.
The Researchers did not warn that "Drug Testing in Mice May Be a Waste of Time"; they suggested that Drug testing for drugs for sepsis, trauma, and burns may be a waste of time. The discovery was that the process that induces death in humans for those problems (capillary leakage leading to uncontrollable blood pressure loss) works differently in mice vs. humans, and therefore, for those specific conditions, the mouse model is of limited usefulness. The discovery was NOT: "Drug tests in mice are pointless."
It has been known for some time that the mouse model is not universally applicable; it's finding those times when it's not that is tricky. We still use mice because they are much cheaper than the alternatives... using the alternatives when not necessary would drive up research costs.
It sounds like you had a Visa-branded debit card, not a credit card. Visa/MC Debit cards serve no use other than to enrich the bank, the merchant fees are much higher than PIN-debit. And, as you have learned, if a thief gets a hold of your number, your bank account is empty and your bills bouncing while you argue with the bank.
It's far better to get a credit card and simply pay off the bill every month. That way, if it gets emptied, you argue with the bank about THEIR money. (With a Visa/MC Debit, you argue with the bank about YOUR money. Guess which dispute gets more attention?
And yes, the bank should have paid up the bounced check fees... might as well dump this loser of a bank entirely and sign up with a Credit Union.
One thing to keep in mind is that professors are not, for the most part, trained teachers. They are experts in their own field, but that does not necessarily imply a particularly good ability to pass that knowledge to others. By the time they become professors, most have of course taught some classes, but that is not the primary criteria used to anoint new professors.
I agree with some of the sentiments in the article that technology can be useful for your prototypical large lecture class. Anything better than the current situation of 200+ bored students and a one-way lecture that could just as easily have been posted online as a video would be an improvement. But for regular-sized classes (which was most of mine, outside of the "everybody takes these" classes), I don't see technology as enhancing the experience much. The smaller class size induces the back-and-forth conversation that makes advanced technology more of a distraction than anything else.
When I was in school (the latter '90's) my Programming Languages professor deliberately chose a textbook that was issued in 1985. He did this not because it was his book and he wanted the money (it wasn't his book, and only used copies were available), or because he had some particular fondness for the languages presented therein. (Pseudo Machine Language/Assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL, Ada, Smalltalk, and PROLOG, IIRC.) He used an outdated textbook because he wanted us concentrating on the actual point of the course, which was to learn to be able to analyze any computer language, suss out what was important to look for, and thereby learn any computer language with reasonable skill in a very short period of time, along with spotting the strengths and weaknesses of the language.
That would have been considerably more difficult if he had used a language (such as C) with which a reasonable number of the students would already be familiar.
Just because you are in a CS program, (which has never been a "vocational" degree program), does not prevent you from picking up whatever other skills you desire. As you pointed out, the CS program puts you in the "programmer mindset"; you've keyed on to the actual purpose of a CS program, which is NOT teaching you the "language of the month." They are trying to give you the skills you need to be able to pick up the language of the month on your own far more rapidly than you might be able to otherwise.
Just like a vet would be well served by obtaining a zoology degree prior to entering veterinary school, many people find that a CS degree well-serves their educational goals in addition to the constant "self-education" that is a fundamental part of any computer career.
I can certainly see the monetary value in producing cell-phone coverage reports. And I have a hard time arguing with this method of collecting it. The user gets information that they find valuable (phone radiation emitted) in return for that information (with PII stripped, one would hope) being used for what the business would like to make money off of.
As long as they aren't actually asserting any conclusions as to the user's health, it's not even particularly misleading.
It penalizes those in low-margin business, such as commodities, while rewarding those in high-margin, highly-leveraged, businesses. To what end? The bankruptcy of Exxon (with lots of easily-liquidated assets) would harm the economy a lot less than the failure of, say, Goldman Sachs. It doesn't make any sense to distinguish between the two in effective tax rates.
So, you are proposing that mistakes should now be a crime, if committed by legislators? If you think we have a bunch of power-hungry clowns in office NOW, imagine the crazies we'd attract (or, rather, the smart people that would be driven off), if the penalty for a "failed" law was jail.
(And, what, precisely, is a "failed" law anyway? I would think it would be one found to be unconstitutional, but that doesn't apply to either of your examples.)
The companies most responsible for imperiling the financial system have relatively low revenues (but large, highly-leveraged assets.) Large companies whose collapse wouldn't endanger a damn thing like commodity businesses would be punished. (If, say, Exxon, were to go bankrupt, they have plenty of "hard-dollar" assets that would be eagerly scooped up by somebody else with little to no disruption to production.)
If you like the Verizon network, but don't want to pay Verizon prices, they've "rented" their network out to Page Plus for years now. All I use is voice service, and if purchased in $80 chunks, minutes are 4 cents, and the monthly fee to have a number is fifty cents. All you have to do is supply the phone; any 2G or 3G non-pre-paid Verizon phone will work. For the plans mentioned in the article, Page Plus has had essentially the same available for some time for far less money.
Why can Computer Science only include the mathematical aspects of the discipline? You are essentially trying to draw a line between theoretical and applied science and insisting Computer Science only includes the theoretical half. The study of historical applications is part of Human/Computer interaction, which most certainly is a branch of CS.
It's true that the practice of software development is more properly called Software (not Computer) Engineering, but in practice few US schools break that out into a separate course of study. (Which is really quite a shame; most practicing software developers would be a lot better off knowing more about Software Architecture and less about, say, compiler design. And I dare say that the CS department would be much better teaching it than the blundering that goes on in the Business School under the rubric of "Information Management" courses.)
P.S. If you seriously thought a CompE was the person to talk to about software development, you apparently don't know many, if any, CompE's. In my school, we were roughly 1/2 CompSci, and 1/2 EE's, with more electives than either. We certainly didn't have any more requirements in Software Development than the CompSci majors did.
Shorter summary: Amazon creates mobile-optimized from which you can buy MP3's.
As many others have pointed out, this is what Apple has said for years companies should do if they don't want to go through the app store. Amazon didn't "find it" It's not a sneaky loophole or unique, innovative, or new. I'm puzzled why this is even a story at all, much less worthy of a Slashdot article.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like your noise generator needs adjustment. Ours shuts off at 7PM every day, and when it does, I can clearly hear conversations several aisles away. When it's one, the range is much shorter, but still long enough that I can hear conversations about one "cube pod radius" away. (Facilities was fiddling with it one day, and we could clearly tell when they borked it up, and it did indeed make it hard to hear.)
The generator may also be set to the wrong frequency set. It should be set to "pink" noise, not white noise.
In any case, I understand where you are coming from on the issue of distractions. We have small enclosed rooms where you can flee if you have some extended (several hour) block of work you need to get done.
However, in a support group like the one I work for, we are largely "interrupt-driven"; it's not like development where you need an extended block of time to "get in the groove". My longest-length single task during the day might take a 1/2 hour; most of my day involves extensive multitasking (I have about 30 browser tabs and an equal number of windows open at any one time.) And with the complexity and size of our product set (literally everything my (large) company sells or support that attaches to a Fibre Channel port) Skype and screen-sharing simply would not cut the proverbial mustard.
MS Paint? You must be kidding. Even the most crude drawing takes several times longer to complete in MS Paint (or any mouse-driven program) vs. a ballpoint pen or whiteboard.
And that OTS tablet app is also a non-starter in a corporate environment, which requires all confidential information to transit our corporate network/VPN, and only the corporate network. Any app that involves you logging in via phone number is probably routing data through a central (non-corporate) server.
Not to mention that tablets, while not overwhelmingly expensive these days, still aren't exactly standard equipment.
I work for a close-knit high-level support group. Our problems are complex and varied enough that I cannot imagine working from home routinely. Nothing beats overhearing somebody in an adjacent cube mumble something about an issue that you dealt with vaguely six months ago, and then you hop up, scrawl something on a whiteboard, and then call over another couple people to check it out with you.
Yes, all this is theoretically possible via IM, (even the sketching, with special equipment), but things like overhearing others, and the instant, high-speed collaboration just isn't possible remotely. (I can talk much faster than I type, and there isn't any concept of "overhearing" a colleague discuss something if you are on other sides of the country.)
While some individuals within banks do sometimes purposefully facilitate money laundering, it is very rare for an institution as a whole to condone it. The fines involved if the bank gets caught are simply enormous, and well out of proportion with whatever profit they might have derived from it. Prosecutors love money laundering cases because the payoff is huge, and the burden of proof much easier than, say, dodgy mortgages.
Chronic violators get cut off from SWIFT and IBAN, which is pretty much a bank death sentence.
One other thing bitcoin is good for: Like any other somewhat stable currency or commodity, it can be used as an investment hedge. The downside to using Bitcoins as a hedge is their limited supply - if a significant percentage of Bitcoins are owned by investors and they all try to sell at once, well, that's not good for the investors. But as a small part of a much larger currency hedge, it has value.
BitCoins are NOT "somewhat stable". If the USD, EUR, or pretty much any other currency on the planet fluctuated on a daily basis anywhere near as much as BitCoins do, it'd be considered an economic apocalypse. You'd have to be utterly nucking futs to consider BtC's a "currency hedge." (A highly speculative investment sure, but it wouldn't a hedge against anything.)
This instability also makes it pretty useless as a general-purpose currency. The only way to ensure you don't completely lose your shirt is to "sweep" your BitCoins into the national currency of your choice pretty much as soon as you receive the things. If you are going to go to all that trouble, most people will just use normal currency to begin with because of the transaction fees. The instability also introduces a hidden "transaction fee" on every BtC transfer if you actually want to trade outside the "Bitcoin economy."
Yes, BitCoins are useful if you want to keep your transactions anonymous, but that "economy" is sufficiently small and trouble-prone that Visa/MC won't miss it one bit. (The pre-paid debit cards that would be useful for such a thing are only a tiny fraction of their business.)
It's their search engine/payment mechanism/bank/whatever. They can decide what it is used for. They ARE the law, when it comes to the services that they themselves run. They don't need to ask a court's permission to verify if something is or isn't illegal.
If BitCoin becomes the "currency" of choice for the "underground economy" (a position for which it is well suited... about the only thing it's well-suited for), I don't think it's going to terrify Google or Visa/MC all that much. They don't WANT that business; it causes too many legal/regulatory hassles.
So, are you telling me that prior to modern anti-poverty programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, welfare, etc. nobody starved to death or died for lack of access to medical care? And that vast tracts of parkland were cheerfully secured, maintained, and opened to the public?
If that's your position, you need to go back and read your history books some more.
I'm not saying any of those programs are perfect or not subject to abuse. But it most certainly is NOT correct to say that starvation and homelessness were nearly unheard of prior to the "welfare state." Or that private enterprise did a particularly good job with parks.
If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that, as if by magic, citizens voluntarily donate enough of their income to feed, clothe, and house those that are poor through no fault of their own. They purchase, build, and staff a full parks system out of the goodness of their hearts.
They are willing to lay their lives down, free of charge (and provide weapons and ammo, no less!) for their country/planet/space station. Everybody is cool with the idea that murder is a civil matter to be dealt with by heirs, who will gladly pay for the investigation. (And, by unspoken extension, if you don't have any heirs that like you, your life isn't worth $hit.) As long as you can pay the economic damages for your doings, well, you can pretty much do whatever you want.
If the code:
Works as designed.
Easy to ubderstand.
Easy to maintain.
You can't say there aren't rules, and then turn around and cite some. If you, modern programmer with experience with modern languages, were forced to use COBOL for a new IT code project, you'd run away screaming in short order. You'd wonder what demons had possessed your management to commit such an act of lunacy. That's not exactly the hallmark of a language considered "good" by any stretch of the imagination.
If that's your starting point, (and indeed, they are the starting point for guidelines for programming language design), then COBOL is indeed a failure (in comparison to modern languages; at the time it was state-of-the-art.) COBOL must be twisted and turned to perform much basic work... the only reason it works at all is through thousands of man-years of programming effort producing work at a pace that would make the most green IT code jockey look like a super-productive-genius. A superficial "COBOL 101" tutorial is easy to understand, but production COBOL code generally is not. And it's certainly NOT easy to maintain; the modularity we take for granted today simply isn't present.
Perl was, and remains, staggeringly useful for the tasks for which it was originally designed: as a sysadmin's "swiss army knife." By modern standards COBOL doesn't even work well for what it was designed for, but there weren't any alternatives at the time.
Again, as I stated in my original post, in comparison to the other languages of the time (besides assembler, there were all of two of them: LISP and FORTRAN, both of them in their infancy, and neither targeting towards the same problem set) COBOL was a revelation/revolution. But if it was a quality language by modern standards, it'd still be in use for new projects, yet it's virtually never used for new work.
Viewed through the eyes of a modern programmer, COBOL is indeed a joke. A horrible one. It violates nearly every single principle of good language design in what appears to be a misguided attempt to make programming "friendly." A CS undergrad would get a poor grade turning in something like COBOL as a Programming Languages 101 project.
But for a language first specified in 1959 (when computing didn't even have the Integrated Circuit yet), it's a work of staggering genius; they didn't HAVE all those rules of good language design to fall back on! At the time, FORTRAN had been out for all of two years and LISP for one; hardly enough time to have much experience with knowing what not to do, and neither of those languages targeted the same problem domain.
COBOL made modern computing accessible and useful to businesses. It's programs have maintained decent backwards compatibility for about half a century. And for all it's foibles, all those hundreds of millions of lines of COBOL actually work. They may be a disgusting kludge, a result of decades of compromises, but these gigantic black boxes of spaghetti Work. And there's no reason to think they'll stop doing so any time soon. Nor any reason to believe that replacing them would be in any way cost-effective.
In many cases the mouse model IS quite useful.
To paraphrase the famous by Churchill saying about government: "It has been said that the mouse model is worst way to perform easy, cheap, repeatable medical tests. Except for all others that have been tried."
The researchers that use mice in experiments are not blithering idiots. They have indeed gotten the memo that mice are not people. But they also have research to perform, a limited budget to perform it with, and no viable alternative.
Mice are cheap, ubiquitous, readily available, and have very low genetic variation between samples (unless variation is purposefully induced.)
The Researchers did not warn that "Drug Testing in Mice May Be a Waste of Time"; they suggested that Drug testing for drugs for sepsis, trauma, and burns may be a waste of time. The discovery was that the process that induces death in humans for those problems (capillary leakage leading to uncontrollable blood pressure loss) works differently in mice vs. humans, and therefore, for those specific conditions, the mouse model is of limited usefulness. The discovery was NOT: "Drug tests in mice are pointless."
It has been known for some time that the mouse model is not universally applicable; it's finding those times when it's not that is tricky. We still use mice because they are much cheaper than the alternatives... using the alternatives when not necessary would drive up research costs.
It sounds like you had a Visa-branded debit card, not a credit card. Visa/MC Debit cards serve no use other than to enrich the bank, the merchant fees are much higher than PIN-debit. And, as you have learned, if a thief gets a hold of your number, your bank account is empty and your bills bouncing while you argue with the bank.
It's far better to get a credit card and simply pay off the bill every month. That way, if it gets emptied, you argue with the bank about THEIR money. (With a Visa/MC Debit, you argue with the bank about YOUR money. Guess which dispute gets more attention?
And yes, the bank should have paid up the bounced check fees... might as well dump this loser of a bank entirely and sign up with a Credit Union.
One thing to keep in mind is that professors are not, for the most part, trained teachers. They are experts in their own field, but that does not necessarily imply a particularly good ability to pass that knowledge to others. By the time they become professors, most have of course taught some classes, but that is not the primary criteria used to anoint new professors.
I agree with some of the sentiments in the article that technology can be useful for your prototypical large lecture class. Anything better than the current situation of 200+ bored students and a one-way lecture that could just as easily have been posted online as a video would be an improvement. But for regular-sized classes (which was most of mine, outside of the "everybody takes these" classes), I don't see technology as enhancing the experience much. The smaller class size induces the back-and-forth conversation that makes advanced technology more of a distraction than anything else.
When I was in school (the latter '90's) my Programming Languages professor deliberately chose a textbook that was issued in 1985. He did this not because it was his book and he wanted the money (it wasn't his book, and only used copies were available), or because he had some particular fondness for the languages presented therein. (Pseudo Machine Language/Assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL, Ada, Smalltalk, and PROLOG, IIRC.) He used an outdated textbook because he wanted us concentrating on the actual point of the course, which was to learn to be able to analyze any computer language, suss out what was important to look for, and thereby learn any computer language with reasonable skill in a very short period of time, along with spotting the strengths and weaknesses of the language.
That would have been considerably more difficult if he had used a language (such as C) with which a reasonable number of the students would already be familiar.
Just because you are in a CS program, (which has never been a "vocational" degree program), does not prevent you from picking up whatever other skills you desire. As you pointed out, the CS program puts you in the "programmer mindset"; you've keyed on to the actual purpose of a CS program, which is NOT teaching you the "language of the month." They are trying to give you the skills you need to be able to pick up the language of the month on your own far more rapidly than you might be able to otherwise.
Just like a vet would be well served by obtaining a zoology degree prior to entering veterinary school, many people find that a CS degree well-serves their educational goals in addition to the constant "self-education" that is a fundamental part of any computer career.
I can certainly see the monetary value in producing cell-phone coverage reports. And I have a hard time arguing with this method of collecting it. The user gets information that they find valuable (phone radiation emitted) in return for that information (with PII stripped, one would hope) being used for what the business would like to make money off of.
As long as they aren't actually asserting any conclusions as to the user's health, it's not even particularly misleading.
It penalizes those in low-margin business, such as commodities, while rewarding those in high-margin, highly-leveraged, businesses. To what end? The bankruptcy of Exxon (with lots of easily-liquidated assets) would harm the economy a lot less than the failure of, say, Goldman Sachs. It doesn't make any sense to distinguish between the two in effective tax rates.
So, you are proposing that mistakes should now be a crime, if committed by legislators? If you think we have a bunch of power-hungry clowns in office NOW, imagine the crazies we'd attract (or, rather, the smart people that would be driven off), if the penalty for a "failed" law was jail.
(And, what, precisely, is a "failed" law anyway? I would think it would be one found to be unconstitutional, but that doesn't apply to either of your examples.)
The companies most responsible for imperiling the financial system have relatively low revenues (but large, highly-leveraged assets.) Large companies whose collapse wouldn't endanger a damn thing like commodity businesses would be punished. (If, say, Exxon, were to go bankrupt, they have plenty of "hard-dollar" assets that would be eagerly scooped up by somebody else with little to no disruption to production.)
If you like the Verizon network, but don't want to pay Verizon prices, they've "rented" their network out to Page Plus for years now. All I use is voice service, and if purchased in $80 chunks, minutes are 4 cents, and the monthly fee to have a number is fifty cents. All you have to do is supply the phone; any 2G or 3G non-pre-paid Verizon phone will work. For the plans mentioned in the article, Page Plus has had essentially the same available for some time for far less money.
Why can Computer Science only include the mathematical aspects of the discipline? You are essentially trying to draw a line between theoretical and applied science and insisting Computer Science only includes the theoretical half. The study of historical applications is part of Human/Computer interaction, which most certainly is a branch of CS.
It's true that the practice of software development is more properly called Software (not Computer) Engineering, but in practice few US schools break that out into a separate course of study. (Which is really quite a shame; most practicing software developers would be a lot better off knowing more about Software Architecture and less about, say, compiler design. And I dare say that the CS department would be much better teaching it than the blundering that goes on in the Business School under the rubric of "Information Management" courses.)
P.S. If you seriously thought a CompE was the person to talk to about software development, you apparently don't know many, if any, CompE's. In my school, we were roughly 1/2 CompSci, and 1/2 EE's, with more electives than either. We certainly didn't have any more requirements in Software Development than the CompSci majors did.
Shorter summary: Amazon creates mobile-optimized from which you can buy MP3's.
As many others have pointed out, this is what Apple has said for years companies should do if they don't want to go through the app store. Amazon didn't "find it" It's not a sneaky loophole or unique, innovative, or new. I'm puzzled why this is even a story at all, much less worthy of a Slashdot article.