College is, regrettably, probably the most productive place for me to be. And this state school that I go to is the cheapest college... probably gives me the most "bang for the buck."
It's good that college really worked out for you, and that you were able to manage a social life/athletic life and academic life at the same time... it sounds like you had a balance that really fit your personality.
However, not everyone works well with the standard educational model, and there are few institutions of higher education that deviate from this standard.
College is a necessary evil for me. A college degree is the new high school diploma: everyone has one these days, and it's probably a requirement for any decent job.
I hate to sound like I'm whining (well, maybe I am), but I don't think that you should assume that if someone isn't having the best 4 years of their life, that they only have themselves to blame. Just because you found a comfortable niche doesn't mean everyone else will, or even that there exists such a niche.
It probably helped that you weren't such a nerd in college.
I think I see where you're coming from. College provides a good environment for helping students excel at learning things by producing interesting projects. I don't doubt that's the case at some colleges, maybe even most, but it hasn't been my experience.
This summer I'm actually working for one of my professors (who failed me last semester, incidentally), and I'm having a great time working on programming a web app (previously I had no experience with web development, and I've had to learn a ton), and I'm getting paid.
Contrast this with last semester, where I was bored to tears, had no energy and was paying money to learn.
The bottom line is: why should I paying a ton of money to be in this learning environment when I suspect that an environment with similar factors could be created with a lot less money?
Why not just get a group of your friends together, and start an open-source program? Or start a book-group/philosophy group, etc., etc. Why are there no apprenticeships, like in the middle ages? Why can't you apprentice yourself to a microbiologist when you get out of highschool (or even before!), and help them with their research as they teach you the necessities of their job?
If you could have bought you college experience for less, would it still be worth every cent you paid?
Wow, you got modded as troll. I must've hit the nail on the head. Anyway, I'll probably finish my college degree, but I won't be resentful of you. Envious of you for finding a path to success that avoids college, though.
I get really irritated when people talk about how valuable college is, because: I'm here, and I'm not seeing it. I guess you could say that "College is what you make of it," but I know that I could be making a lot more of my education if it wasn't for those pesky classes sapping my energy and desire to learn.
Even for the average Joe, I really don't think college is that valuable. Most people learn things when they can find the information personally revelant, and the material in college is usually taught in such a dry, abstracted way that it's very difficult to find an immediate application in your own life. Also, what you don't use, you forget... and 4 years gives you plenty of time to forget.
There are so many people that disagree with me about my views that it's hard not to think that I may be mistaken somewhere... but I really haven't heard any good reasons for why college is worth the cost, other than the fact that employers assume that a degree is a prerequisite to a position in their company (And that also may just be a rumor... I think studies have shown experience is more important than education for increasing your chance of getting hired).
one man's insightful is another's flamebait. Personally, think that many people are just resentful of the fact that intelligent people do not need to go to school to get ahead.
This question bothered me. Possibly because I have considered myself to have AS in the past, and now I'm not sure.
When you say excuse their antisocial behavior, do you mean behavior that is annoying or offensive to other people?
I think my behavior is antisocial, but just because I am so quiet and introverted.
A lot of nerdy people who may lack a few social skills tend to join nerd social groups based on nerdy activities like LARPing, Anime, etc. However, there are some people who may not even fit in (or not care to interact with others) even when exposed to these nerd social groups. Social outcasts who don't seem desperate for friends... these types of people may be Aspies.
Whether or not I have AS myself, I feel I can identify more strongly with Aspies than with most NeuroTypicals. As long as I am friendly, I don't think anyone should object to my anti-social aloofness.
"it's job is to instill critical thinking, knowledge, and ethics."
Ok, I know many education apologists like to give this line, but are schools really held accountable to these lofty goals?
Knowledge is a given, if you don't come out of school with SOME kind of knowledge there is something seriously wrong with you. But how can you possibly test if students have been instilled with enough (and the right kind of) critical thinking and ethics?
This is the best, most concise argument against intellectual property that I have heard. I have long thought along similar lines, but haven't been able to clarify my thoughts as much as you have.
I will now copy your post and send it to a bunch of IP partisans.
You could believe that intellectual property is purely wrong, but for pragmatic reasons, code licensed under the GPL should be protected to encourage movement to a world where all information is freely shared.
As long as you're not talking about fairness (which is purely a subjective concept), I think you can utilize laws laws that you don't believe in to your advantage without being a hypocrite. But I admit I don't have much with which to back this position up.
I agree that using multiple anti-spyware programs at once is a good idea. However, there have been instances of one program detecting another's malware library and classifying it as real spyware. If I was a less-knowlegeable user, I'd be likely to think that somehow adaware/spybot/whatever had been hijacked, and delete it, or maybe go so far as to never trust it again.
Also, I don't see how running zonealarm would increase your "uptime".
It's people like you that make the computing world "scary" and "difficult".
Computing is either or both for many people. I don't think you're very good at relating to those less knowlegeable than you. It sounds like you'd be more likely to treat them with contempt.
I have known for a while that OSC was LDS, and have wondered what his opinions on homosexuality were.
I think that he is pretty fair and rational in these articles, except for the obvious, his casting of unrepressed homosexuals as sinners.
But really, if you're homosexual, why would you ever want acceptance by the Mormon community? It irritates me that people want equal status wherever they find themselves, without giving into their society's accepted codes. Give people the right to discriminate, because they'll do it anyway, and there's no practical way to use the arm of the law to stop them.
I don't care what people think the definition of marriage is; definitions, especially culturally loaded ones, are constantly changing. OSC shouldn't be upset about the Massachusetts supreme court deciding to make marriage legal between gays, but I do agree with him that social legislation is bad. The only good solution I see is to stop the government from recognising ALL marriage between anyone.
.. is that if there is a disagreement on what constitutes a worst abuse, microsoft is going to win. They'll never classify anything they do as an abuse.
Plus, I hate the system we have of jury-rigging the law. We say, "Well, people should be rewarded for good ideas, and the patent system was an attempt at doing this... so even though it's not working very well right now, all we have to do is tweak it a little." Good. Just add some more watered down legal code to the process of determining what is a "new" and "valuable" idea.
No, we should leave the US patent system as it is, and let it grow so absurd that it collapses under its own weight.
Sure, microsoft may be spending a ton on legal fees.
But having a big arsenal of patents gives them the ability to make very convincing threats to their competitors, and probably gives them increased control over their markets.
Microsoft is a big business. Although perhaps a couple of employees there may object to our current patent system for ethical reasons, I think that the company as a whole has to love our patent system.
You weren't thinking the name of the game was innovation or serving the customer instead of money, were you?
I suspect, as others have said, that much of what microsoft is saying is political spin, perhaps with an eye towards the EU.
that just means you can't store an infinite amount of data... if you round the fraction down, you're just truncating the data set... what you're left with may be incomplete, but it is valid
that's annoying... posting something like that and not explaining it. There's nothing on wikipedia about impossible numbers, and a quick google search comes up with nothing relevant.
Anyway, why should some numbers exist and others not? I posit that no numbers exist. They are purely an abstraction of the real world.
isn't it possible that microsoft does see firefox/opera as a legitimate threat, but can't do anything about it because IE code is such a huge mess that they have to rebuild it from scratch (which they are doing anyway for longhorn)?
I'm 23, and already I can see my mind slipping away into senility.
Dementia isn't only about short-term memory loss, it's about a general stagnation in thinking. We try and cram more into our existing architectures of thought, and explain things in terms of our established beliefs in stead of trying to deduce structures from raw data. Eventually the world moves on, and our reality becomes obsolete. Anything that doesn't fit with the daily routine doesn't get remembered, and memories of the daily routine could be today, yesterday, or 5 years ago.
I can't wait to have kids so that I can know what real intelligence is again.
Black Box Voting, a group researching voting fraud, is basically in agreement with you.
They are very concerned about stories like this that may derail public outrage from legitimate investigations to unrealistic conspiracy theories that are easily discredited.
They are looking for recommendations on migrating their forums to something more secure, and to a better service provider, since they have been compromised several times. If anyone on slashdot could recommend solutions to them, I think they'd appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
College is, regrettably, probably the most productive place for me to be. And this state school that I go to is the cheapest college... probably gives me the most "bang for the buck."
It's good that college really worked out for you, and that you were able to manage a social life/athletic life and academic life at the same time... it sounds like you had a balance that really fit your personality.
However, not everyone works well with the standard educational model, and there are few institutions of higher education that deviate from this standard.
College is a necessary evil for me. A college degree is the new high school diploma: everyone has one these days, and it's probably a requirement for any decent job.
I hate to sound like I'm whining (well, maybe I am), but I don't think that you should assume that if someone isn't having the best 4 years of their life, that they only have themselves to blame. Just because you found a comfortable niche doesn't mean everyone else will, or even that there exists such a niche.
It probably helped that you weren't such a nerd in college.
I think I see where you're coming from. College provides a good environment for helping students excel at learning things by producing interesting projects. I don't doubt that's the case at some colleges, maybe even most, but it hasn't been my experience.
This summer I'm actually working for one of my professors (who failed me last semester, incidentally), and I'm having a great time working on programming a web app (previously I had no experience with web development, and I've had to learn a ton), and I'm getting paid.
Contrast this with last semester, where I was bored to tears, had no energy and was paying money to learn.
The bottom line is: why should I paying a ton of money to be in this learning environment when I suspect that an environment with similar factors could be created with a lot less money?
Why not just get a group of your friends together, and start an open-source program? Or start a book-group/philosophy group, etc., etc. Why are there no apprenticeships, like in the middle ages? Why can't you apprentice yourself to a microbiologist when you get out of highschool (or even before!), and help them with their research as they teach you the necessities of their job?
If you could have bought you college experience for less, would it still be worth every cent you paid?
Wow, you got modded as troll.
I must've hit the nail on the head.
Anyway, I'll probably finish my college degree, but I won't be resentful of you. Envious of you for finding a path to success that avoids college, though.
I get really irritated when people talk about how valuable college is, because: I'm here, and I'm not seeing it. I guess you could say that "College is what you make of it," but I know that I could be making a lot more of my education if it wasn't for those pesky classes sapping my energy and desire to learn.
Even for the average Joe, I really don't think college is that valuable. Most people learn things when they can find the information personally revelant, and the material in college is usually taught in such a dry, abstracted way that it's very difficult to find an immediate application in your own life. Also, what you don't use, you forget... and 4 years gives you plenty of time to forget.
There are so many people that disagree with me about my views that it's hard not to think that I may be mistaken somewhere... but I really haven't heard any good reasons for why college is worth the cost, other than the fact that employers assume that a degree is a prerequisite to a position in their company (And that also may just be a rumor... I think studies have shown experience is more important than education for increasing your chance of getting hired).
one man's insightful is another's flamebait.
Personally, think that many people are just resentful of the fact that intelligent people do not need to go to school to get ahead.
Sure, if you never read comments
what if being creative and persistent are part of having A.S?
I was diagnosed with a learning disability. I, in turn, diagnosed the U.S. education system with a teaching disability.
This question bothered me. Possibly because I have considered myself to have AS in the past, and now I'm not sure.
When you say excuse their antisocial behavior, do you mean behavior that is annoying or offensive to other people?
I think my behavior is antisocial, but just because I am so quiet and introverted.
A lot of nerdy people who may lack a few social skills tend to join nerd social groups based on nerdy activities like LARPing, Anime, etc. However, there are some people who may not even fit in (or not care to interact with others) even when exposed to these nerd social groups. Social outcasts who don't seem desperate for friends... these types of people may be Aspies.
Whether or not I have AS myself, I feel I can identify more strongly with Aspies than with most NeuroTypicals. As long as I am friendly, I don't think anyone should object to my anti-social aloofness.
"it's job is to instill critical thinking, knowledge, and ethics."
Ok, I know many education apologists like to give this line, but are schools really held accountable to these lofty goals?
Knowledge is a given, if you don't come out of school with SOME kind of knowledge there is something seriously wrong with you. But how can you possibly test if students have been instilled with enough (and the right kind of) critical thinking and ethics?
This is the best, most concise argument against intellectual property that I have heard. I have long thought along similar lines, but haven't been able to clarify my thoughts as much as you have.
I will now copy your post and send it to a bunch of IP partisans.
good book, but not as good as Snow Crash
sweet, succulent jesus!
You could believe that intellectual property is purely wrong, but for pragmatic reasons, code licensed under the GPL should be protected to encourage movement to a world where all information is freely shared.
As long as you're not talking about fairness (which is purely a subjective concept), I think you can utilize laws laws that you don't believe in to your advantage without being a hypocrite. But I admit I don't have much with which to back this position up.
I agree that using multiple anti-spyware programs at once is a good idea. However, there have been instances of one program detecting another's malware library and classifying it as real spyware. If I was a less-knowlegeable user, I'd be likely to think that somehow adaware/spybot/whatever had been hijacked, and delete it, or maybe go so far as to never trust it again.
Also, I don't see how running zonealarm would increase your "uptime".
It's people like you that make the computing world "scary" and "difficult".
Computing is either or both for many people. I don't think you're very good at relating to those less knowlegeable than you. It sounds like you'd be more likely to treat them with contempt.
I have known for a while that OSC was LDS, and have wondered what his opinions on homosexuality were.
I think that he is pretty fair and rational in these articles, except for the obvious, his casting of unrepressed homosexuals as sinners.
But really, if you're homosexual, why would you ever want acceptance by the Mormon community? It irritates me that people want equal status wherever they find themselves, without giving into their society's accepted codes. Give people the right to discriminate, because they'll do it anyway, and there's no practical way to use the arm of the law to stop them.
I don't care what people think the definition of marriage is; definitions, especially culturally loaded ones, are constantly changing. OSC shouldn't be upset about the Massachusetts supreme court deciding to make marriage legal between gays, but I do agree with him that social legislation is bad. The only good solution I see is to stop the government from recognising ALL marriage between anyone.
.. is that if there is a disagreement on what constitutes a worst abuse, microsoft is going to win. They'll never classify anything they do as an abuse.
Plus, I hate the system we have of jury-rigging the law. We say, "Well, people should be rewarded for good ideas, and the patent system was an attempt at doing this... so even though it's not working very well right now, all we have to do is tweak it a little." Good. Just add some more watered down legal code to the process of determining what is a "new" and "valuable" idea.
No, we should leave the US patent system as it is, and let it grow so absurd that it collapses under its own weight.
Sure, microsoft may be spending a ton on legal fees.
But having a big arsenal of patents gives them the ability to make very convincing threats to their competitors, and probably gives them increased control over their markets.
Microsoft is a big business. Although perhaps a couple of employees there may object to our current patent system for ethical reasons, I think that the company as a whole has to love our patent system.
You weren't thinking the name of the game was innovation or serving the customer instead of money, were you?
I suspect, as others have said, that much of what microsoft is saying is political spin, perhaps with an eye towards the EU.
that just means you can't store an infinite amount of data... if you round the fraction down, you're just truncating the data set... what you're left with may be incomplete, but it is valid
that's annoying... posting something like that and not explaining it. There's nothing on wikipedia about impossible numbers, and a quick google search comes up with nothing relevant.
Anyway, why should some numbers exist and others not? I posit that no numbers exist. They are purely an abstraction of the real world.
isn't it possible that microsoft does see firefox/opera as a legitimate threat, but can't do anything about it because IE code is such a huge mess that they have to rebuild it from scratch (which they are doing anyway for longhorn)?
I'm 23, and already I can see my mind slipping away into senility.
Dementia isn't only about short-term memory loss, it's about a general stagnation in thinking. We try and cram more into our existing architectures of thought, and explain things in terms of our established beliefs in stead of trying to deduce structures from raw data. Eventually the world moves on, and our reality becomes obsolete. Anything that doesn't fit with the daily routine doesn't get remembered, and memories of the daily routine could be today, yesterday, or 5 years ago.
I can't wait to have kids so that I can know what real intelligence is again.
Black Box Voting, a group researching voting fraud, is basically in agreement with you.
They are very concerned about stories like this that may derail public outrage from legitimate investigations to unrealistic conspiracy theories that are easily discredited.
They are looking for recommendations on migrating their forums to something more secure, and to a better service provider, since they have been compromised several times. If anyone on slashdot could recommend solutions to them, I think they'd appreciate it.
That's funny
I am turning in a paper tomorrow that cites the wikipedia as a source. I suppose if I attended a less-crappy university, I might care.
I think that the information I used was accurate enough. It was about voting systems.
I hope that you are able to surmount all of your difficulties.