Do you really believe there are a lot of Shakespeare-spouting extemporaneous haiku poets who get played by the "dihydrogen monoxide" gag? Science and math are included amongst the liberal arts, you know.
Ah, whatever. I get tired of being condescended to by engineers who would never hack it in a rigorous liberal arts program. The world needs engineers, yes, but if you look at the architects who designed Chicago, or the scientists who built the atom bomb... these were not narrowly educated men. They studied art, music, literature. social science. If all you aspire to be is a draftsman, then fine, go to trade school. University degrees are devalued when they're given to people who haven't really studied anything beyond a narrow career specialty.
You know what the world doesn't need? More drones who are trained to produce X quantity of widgets, but who lack the broad education to fully participate as citizens in a democracy.
Look at any thriving democracy and it becomes clear: The majority of its citizens have good liberal arts educations, and are not merely trained for what their employers require.
Huh? Northwestern is divided into separate "colleges," but they're all on the same campus and students can take courses from all of them. There is nothing (aside from lack of social skills) preventing a student in Tech from spending most of his free time with theater majors.
Of course the theater / Radio / TV / Film majors tend to drop out and head to Hollywood after a year, so there's that.
...unless you want to say something that might get you in trouble with your boss, your family, someone's lawyer, the government, or anyone else. Then you should just shut your mouth if you know what's good for you.
I doubt the authors of the Constitution meant for the right to free speech and press to be conditional on identifying oneself--given that their their letters advocating the Constitution were penned anonymously.
I think in the USA, a lot of the on-campus housing was built 30 to 100 years ago, when the university was considered a surrogate parent for the still impressionable students ("in loco parentis").
Times have changed--dorms are now mostly coed, for instance, and there is usually no "house mother" watching to make sure everyone gets in by curfew--but we still have these old buildings, and we've run out of space to build new ones, and living on campus for at least a year or two is considered a mark of a good quality undergraduate experience. If all of the double rooms were converted to singles, it would be harder to fit everyone on campus.
When I went to school in the '90s, I shared a room for my freshman year, moved to a single room in my sophomore year, then moved to a shared apartment off campus as an upperclassmen. I think this is still a fairly typical arrangement.
In hindsight, though, I can't believe I survived sharing a room for even one year. "My girlfriend's coming over, can you find somewhere else to sleep?" seemed like just a normal conversation at the time, but in hindsight, I was paying a lot of money for that room I only had the use of for 4-5 nights a week!
...to accept a friend request from someone they've never heard of? Is this why all the kids have 600 FB friends despite their actually pretty limited social circles?
For a while there, everybody used the Netscape browser and the Netscape portal page was the first thing everyone saw. That is, until Microsoft got around to making a better browser and the Apache server ate Netscape server's lunch. I believe Mark Zuckerberg was around 10 years old at the time.
Remember when they were trying to guilt their users into upgrading to Netscape Gold for like $30-40? Hilarious!
The most significant portions of the fantasy worlds cited (Middle Earth, Westeros) clearly take inspiration from the British Isles. That is why the characters speak with British accents.
When the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire leave Westeros, the indigenous populations speak with other accents. I don't think anyone would confuse Kal Drogo with an English schoolboy.
In an era where the rich are able to get by paying so few taxes in the U.S., I think that those who still CHOOSE to help our ailing schools should be praised, not chastised,
Oh bullshit. This is part of a scheme the very wealthy have been imposing on us over decades. Defund the government, then let the privatizers ride in on their white horse to save the day. To hell with democracy, to hell with one person one vote, you'll take their charity and do as they say, and if you disagree then there's the door.
Fuck this shit, and fuck Bill Gates. He is a college dropout. He had some special skills and opportunities that enabled him to found a wildly successful business, but he would not have gotten anywhere without public school graduates who completed their educations in the conventional way.
Tax the rich and fund the schools adequately. Listen to the teachers. Believe it or not, belonging to a union does not make them all stupid and greedy. Most of them actually do have some idea of how to do their jobs, and have some insight into what isn't working. We do not need some narcissistic, hubristic tech billionaires to ride in to save the day. All we need is the money. Hand it over. Thanks.
I lived in SF for 5 years without a car, commuting to locations in the city, in Berkeley, and in Daly City. I'm not aware of having lacked flexibility to stop somewhere. In a lot of ways I had more flexibility. If I needed to go shopping, for instance, the place where I transferred from BART to Muni was underneath the largest shopping mall west of the Mall of America. There were at least 3 grocery stores on my route home. All I had to do was pick one and get off the bus there. Getting back on the bus, not a problem. Just a 5-10 minute wait usually. A small sacrifice to make compared to all the inconvenience and expense of owning a car.
The East-West bus routes are reliable, frequent, and overcrowded. At rush hour, you might not be able to get on and will have to wait for the next one, which hopefully will be there within 8 minutes. If there are too many people crammed in at the front, it is perfectly acceptable to board the 38 Geary from the rear door, no matter what any dumb newspaper columnist tells you. (This newspaper columnist lives in the suburbs and telecommutes. What does he know?)
The North-South bus routes are unreliable, infrequent, and uncrowded. Count your lucky stars if the 43 bus comes within 20 minutes. Maybe consider hailing a taxi?
There is probably more than one bus you can take. The 38 isn't here yet? The 1 and the 2 will probably get you there also, or within a couple blocks.
If you are in the small part of the city where you can take BART (E.g., from the Ferry Building to the Mission) for God's sake take it. Also, the subway Muni (light rail) cars around Market Street. You can actually get around Market Street pretty quickly this way. Unless you need to transport more stuff than you can carry, there is no reason to bring a car around this area.
There are plenty of poor and middle class people who commute into San Francisco every day on BART, AC Transit, or Caltrain. A car is absolutely not necessary. And you'd be crazy to drive into work in the Financial District every day. It costs like $20 to park.
And as much as people like to gripe about Muni, it is one of the most comprehensive public transportation systems in the country. Nowhere in the city is more than two blocks from a bus stop, and some of the lines run 24/7. Is it slow and overcrowded? Yeah. Can you manage to get around on it if you can't afford a car? Sure.
Also, what do you do if you live in SF but regularly leave the city? Mass transit is OK for specific things, but Caltrain and BART can only get you so far. I work in Mountain View but will soon need to commute to Campbell a day or two a week. To take mass transit I'd have to take multiple Muni buses or trains or take one and walk a mile, take Caltrain, and then get on VTA somewhere in South Bay. At best my commute will be 2 hours one way and if there's any hiccup and I miss the 5 minute transfer window between Caltrain and VTA it's closer to 2 1/2 to 3 hours. When I can drive down 280 in an hour or so this becomes unacceptable as much as I would prefer to be on a train.
Take transit 4 days a week and drive on the day you commute to Campbell?
Although maybe a better idea would be for the cities on the Peninsula to become livable enough so that people don't feel a need to live in SF and commute an hour to two hours a day.
FWIW, I lived in SF and commuted 3 days a week to San Jose for a couple years. Most of the time I drove, but I also was able to get there on Muni -> Caltrain -> Free employer shuttle. It's a pain in the ass, but it can be done. Which is remarkable when you consider what a sprawling mess most of the Peninsula is.
From the submitter: The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website.
Actually this "lame" excuse is completely plausible. Perhaps there was a less ham-handed way to stop the spam, but that would have taken up an IT person's time, and there are 70-heptillion other sites on the Internet to be whacked when they start consuming too many IT resources.
Universities should be bastions of free speech, of course. But their IT Depts. have resources and a mission more in line with a medium-sized corporation that doesn't specialize in IT. And a lot of the time, their junior positions are staffed by undergraduates who work part-time, so there's that too. I guarantee you, if the IT Dept. at the company where you worked noticed a lot of resources being consumed by a site employees don't need to do their jobs, they'd block it too. Ideology has nothing to do with it.
This reminds me of a debate when I was in college, and the university decided to stop distributing alt.binaries.* Usenet groups (Get off my lawn!) "Censorship!" the (mostly male) undergraduates cried. Dude, nobody at the university cared whether you were looking at titties. Alt.binaries was sucking up like 90% of the school's bandwidth. The right to free porn is not without limits.
What was done to Turing was just wrong, period, and would be wrong regardless of his contributions to the war effort. Pardoning Turing would be like saying they should have given him a break from the unjust persecution they were inflicting on others--which misses the point. If we were to pardon everyone ever convicted under any unjust law in all of history, we'd be pardoning people for a long time. Better to admit wrongdoing and move on. Save the legal system for the living.
...from the moment John Cleese's divorce was final and his ex-wife got half of everything. Woo hoo! Shortly after there was a new Monty Python documentary, and now this.
Segway was a failure because it's too goddamned expensive. Six grand? I only spent ten on my car. When the patents run out and they're a hundred bucks each, everybody will have one.
Also, many cities--including mine, San Francisco--have banned their use on sidewalks. If I could buy the original Segway for under $2,000 and take it down the sidewalk, it would be a nice way to get around in a dense city with a lot of hills.
I'm sure Doctors without Borders is great, but where are they when an apartment building in your city burns down and its residents need emergency clothing and shelter? I never knew it until they helped a friend of mine, but the Red Cross helps out in all kinds of disasters that are barely mentioned on the news, not just in major disasters and war zones. Comparing the two organizations is like comparing a 747 to a container ship. Both have their uses.
Siemens, Samsung, Toyota, Sony, Toyota... these are all huge corporations that have been huge for decades. Silicon Valley spawns Google, Amazon, Ebay, Genentech, Yahoo!, Netscape. This is what sets Silicon Valley apart. New companies, new industries, funded by venture capital unmatched anywhere else.
I should mention Facebook, Zynga, and Pets.com, but doing so makes me feel dirty.
German contributions to American rocket science notwithstanding, there is no equivalent to Silicon Valley anywhere in the world. I'm not just talking about talent and risk-taking, but the intersection of talent, risk-taking, and tens of billions of dollars in venture capital. And let's be blunt: of those three, the tens of billions of dollars in venture capital is the decisive factor. The pool of venture capital in Silicon Valley is several times that of its nearest competitors in Boston and New York. No one else even comes close.
Foreign engineers may get their training at Stanford then return home to work for their government, or for a major conglomerate making incremental improvements. But if they want to start a new business--or even an entire new industry--they're better off renting an overpriced apartment on the Peninsula and heading hat-in-hand over to Sand Hill Road.
...all us job-seekers who are already familar with several other languages and/or frameworks should read the Wikipedia page for Hadoop, bullshit our way past the HR person, then learn Hadoop on the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really believe there are a lot of Shakespeare-spouting extemporaneous haiku poets who get played by the "dihydrogen monoxide" gag? Science and math are included amongst the liberal arts, you know.
Ah, whatever. I get tired of being condescended to by engineers who would never hack it in a rigorous liberal arts program. The world needs engineers, yes, but if you look at the architects who designed Chicago, or the scientists who built the atom bomb... these were not narrowly educated men. They studied art, music, literature. social science. If all you aspire to be is a draftsman, then fine, go to trade school. University degrees are devalued when they're given to people who haven't really studied anything beyond a narrow career specialty.
You know what the world doesn't need? More drones who are trained to produce X quantity of widgets, but who lack the broad education to fully participate as citizens in a democracy.
Look at any thriving democracy and it becomes clear: The majority of its citizens have good liberal arts educations, and are not merely trained for what their employers require.
Huh? Northwestern is divided into separate "colleges," but they're all on the same campus and students can take courses from all of them. There is nothing (aside from lack of social skills) preventing a student in Tech from spending most of his free time with theater majors.
Of course the theater / Radio / TV / Film majors tend to drop out and head to Hollywood after a year, so there's that.
...unless you want to say something that might get you in trouble with your boss, your family, someone's lawyer, the government, or anyone else. Then you should just shut your mouth if you know what's good for you.
There's this thing called the First Amendment?
I doubt the authors of the Constitution meant for the right to free speech and press to be conditional on identifying oneself--given that their their letters advocating the Constitution were penned anonymously.
I think in the USA, a lot of the on-campus housing was built 30 to 100 years ago, when the university was considered a surrogate parent for the still impressionable students ("in loco parentis").
Times have changed--dorms are now mostly coed, for instance, and there is usually no "house mother" watching to make sure everyone gets in by curfew--but we still have these old buildings, and we've run out of space to build new ones, and living on campus for at least a year or two is considered a mark of a good quality undergraduate experience. If all of the double rooms were converted to singles, it would be harder to fit everyone on campus.
When I went to school in the '90s, I shared a room for my freshman year, moved to a single room in my sophomore year, then moved to a shared apartment off campus as an upperclassmen. I think this is still a fairly typical arrangement.
In hindsight, though, I can't believe I survived sharing a room for even one year. "My girlfriend's coming over, can you find somewhere else to sleep?" seemed like just a normal conversation at the time, but in hindsight, I was paying a lot of money for that room I only had the use of for 4-5 nights a week!
...to accept a friend request from someone they've never heard of? Is this why all the kids have 600 FB friends despite their actually pretty limited social circles?
For a while there, everybody used the Netscape browser and the Netscape portal page was the first thing everyone saw. That is, until Microsoft got around to making a better browser and the Apache server ate Netscape server's lunch. I believe Mark Zuckerberg was around 10 years old at the time.
Remember when they were trying to guilt their users into upgrading to Netscape Gold for like $30-40? Hilarious!
The most significant portions of the fantasy worlds cited (Middle Earth, Westeros) clearly take inspiration from the British Isles. That is why the characters speak with British accents.
When the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire leave Westeros, the indigenous populations speak with other accents. I don't think anyone would confuse Kal Drogo with an English schoolboy.
You'd think the Kuwaitis could afford to license the appropriate music rather than snarfing it off the Internet.
You want me to pay more for the remote than I paid for the television? Nuts to that.
In an era where the rich are able to get by paying so few taxes in the U.S., I think that those who still CHOOSE to help our ailing schools should be praised, not chastised,
Oh bullshit. This is part of a scheme the very wealthy have been imposing on us over decades. Defund the government, then let the privatizers ride in on their white horse to save the day. To hell with democracy, to hell with one person one vote, you'll take their charity and do as they say, and if you disagree then there's the door.
Fuck this shit, and fuck Bill Gates. He is a college dropout. He had some special skills and opportunities that enabled him to found a wildly successful business, but he would not have gotten anywhere without public school graduates who completed their educations in the conventional way.
Tax the rich and fund the schools adequately. Listen to the teachers. Believe it or not, belonging to a union does not make them all stupid and greedy. Most of them actually do have some idea of how to do their jobs, and have some insight into what isn't working. We do not need some narcissistic, hubristic tech billionaires to ride in to save the day. All we need is the money. Hand it over. Thanks.
I lived in SF for 5 years without a car, commuting to locations in the city, in Berkeley, and in Daly City. I'm not aware of having lacked flexibility to stop somewhere. In a lot of ways I had more flexibility. If I needed to go shopping, for instance, the place where I transferred from BART to Muni was underneath the largest shopping mall west of the Mall of America. There were at least 3 grocery stores on my route home. All I had to do was pick one and get off the bus there. Getting back on the bus, not a problem. Just a 5-10 minute wait usually. A small sacrifice to make compared to all the inconvenience and expense of owning a car.
Rules of thumb:
The East-West bus routes are reliable, frequent, and overcrowded. At rush hour, you might not be able to get on and will have to wait for the next one, which hopefully will be there within 8 minutes. If there are too many people crammed in at the front, it is perfectly acceptable to board the 38 Geary from the rear door, no matter what any dumb newspaper columnist tells you. (This newspaper columnist lives in the suburbs and telecommutes. What does he know?)
The North-South bus routes are unreliable, infrequent, and uncrowded. Count your lucky stars if the 43 bus comes within 20 minutes. Maybe consider hailing a taxi?
There is probably more than one bus you can take. The 38 isn't here yet? The 1 and the 2 will probably get you there also, or within a couple blocks.
If you are in the small part of the city where you can take BART (E.g., from the Ferry Building to the Mission) for God's sake take it. Also, the subway Muni (light rail) cars around Market Street. You can actually get around Market Street pretty quickly this way. Unless you need to transport more stuff than you can carry, there is no reason to bring a car around this area.
There are plenty of poor and middle class people who commute into San Francisco every day on BART, AC Transit, or Caltrain. A car is absolutely not necessary. And you'd be crazy to drive into work in the Financial District every day. It costs like $20 to park.
And as much as people like to gripe about Muni, it is one of the most comprehensive public transportation systems in the country. Nowhere in the city is more than two blocks from a bus stop, and some of the lines run 24/7. Is it slow and overcrowded? Yeah. Can you manage to get around on it if you can't afford a car? Sure.
Also, what do you do if you live in SF but regularly leave the city? Mass transit is OK for specific things, but Caltrain and BART can only get you so far. I work in Mountain View but will soon need to commute to Campbell a day or two a week. To take mass transit I'd have to take multiple Muni buses or trains or take one and walk a mile, take Caltrain, and then get on VTA somewhere in South Bay. At best my commute will be 2 hours one way and if there's any hiccup and I miss the 5 minute transfer window between Caltrain and VTA it's closer to 2 1/2 to 3 hours. When I can drive down 280 in an hour or so this becomes unacceptable as much as I would prefer to be on a train.
Take transit 4 days a week and drive on the day you commute to Campbell?
Although maybe a better idea would be for the cities on the Peninsula to become livable enough so that people don't feel a need to live in SF and commute an hour to two hours a day.
FWIW, I lived in SF and commuted 3 days a week to San Jose for a couple years. Most of the time I drove, but I also was able to get there on Muni -> Caltrain -> Free employer shuttle. It's a pain in the ass, but it can be done. Which is remarkable when you consider what a sprawling mess most of the Peninsula is.
From the submitter:
The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website.
Actually this "lame" excuse is completely plausible. Perhaps there was a less ham-handed way to stop the spam, but that would have taken up an IT person's time, and there are 70-heptillion other sites on the Internet to be whacked when they start consuming too many IT resources.
Universities should be bastions of free speech, of course. But their IT Depts. have resources and a mission more in line with a medium-sized corporation that doesn't specialize in IT. And a lot of the time, their junior positions are staffed by undergraduates who work part-time, so there's that too. I guarantee you, if the IT Dept. at the company where you worked noticed a lot of resources being consumed by a site employees don't need to do their jobs, they'd block it too. Ideology has nothing to do with it.
This reminds me of a debate when I was in college, and the university decided to stop distributing alt.binaries.* Usenet groups (Get off my lawn!) "Censorship!" the (mostly male) undergraduates cried. Dude, nobody at the university cared whether you were looking at titties. Alt.binaries was sucking up like 90% of the school's bandwidth. The right to free porn is not without limits.
What was done to Turing was just wrong, period, and would be wrong regardless of his contributions to the war effort. Pardoning Turing would be like saying they should have given him a break from the unjust persecution they were inflicting on others--which misses the point. If we were to pardon everyone ever convicted under any unjust law in all of history, we'd be pardoning people for a long time. Better to admit wrongdoing and move on. Save the legal system for the living.
...from the moment John Cleese's divorce was final and his ex-wife got half of everything. Woo hoo! Shortly after there was a new Monty Python documentary, and now this.
Segway was a failure because it's too goddamned expensive. Six grand? I only spent ten on my car. When the patents run out and they're a hundred bucks each, everybody will have one.
Also, many cities--including mine, San Francisco--have banned their use on sidewalks. If I could buy the original Segway for under $2,000 and take it down the sidewalk, it would be a nice way to get around in a dense city with a lot of hills.
I'm sure Doctors without Borders is great, but where are they when an apartment building in your city burns down and its residents need emergency clothing and shelter? I never knew it until they helped a friend of mine, but the Red Cross helps out in all kinds of disasters that are barely mentioned on the news, not just in major disasters and war zones. Comparing the two organizations is like comparing a 747 to a container ship. Both have their uses.
I accidentally deleted the "(ok, sometimes they don't last that long)" from behind "Netscape."
But then you listed Sony as if in recent history they've made products that don't suck, so I'd call that even.
Siemens, Samsung, Toyota, Sony, Toyota... these are all huge corporations that have been huge for decades. Silicon Valley spawns Google, Amazon, Ebay, Genentech, Yahoo!, Netscape. This is what sets Silicon Valley apart. New companies, new industries, funded by venture capital unmatched anywhere else.
I should mention Facebook, Zynga, and Pets.com, but doing so makes me feel dirty.
German contributions to American rocket science notwithstanding, there is no equivalent to Silicon Valley anywhere in the world. I'm not just talking about talent and risk-taking, but the intersection of talent, risk-taking, and tens of billions of dollars in venture capital. And let's be blunt: of those three, the tens of billions of dollars in venture capital is the decisive factor. The pool of venture capital in Silicon Valley is several times that of its nearest competitors in Boston and New York. No one else even comes close.
Foreign engineers may get their training at Stanford then return home to work for their government, or for a major conglomerate making incremental improvements. But if they want to start a new business--or even an entire new industry--they're better off renting an overpriced apartment on the Peninsula and heading hat-in-hand over to Sand Hill Road.
...all us job-seekers who are already familar with several other languages and/or frameworks should read the Wikipedia page for Hadoop, bullshit our way past the HR person, then learn Hadoop on the job.