The power of GA's, and of most AI research that has ever led to anything useful, is simply to search through spaces that are too large for brute force or heuristic algorithms to cover exhaustively. GA's work very well for optimizing problems with large numbers of dimensions, but in the end, it's just a hill climbing algorithm, albeit a really cool one. In this regard, you're right. We usually only use GA's when we have no clue how to optimize a complicated multi-variable problem using standard algorithms.
By mimicking biological evolution, it adds the ability to effectively climb several 'hills' simultaneously, as well as explore new 'hills'. This increases the probability that one of these hills has the highest 'peak'. Without that randomness, the population would never leave the hills they are on, and would almost certainly miss an optimal solution if it existed on another hill.
If your system failed to converge, I would hesitate to blame the GA. It's more likely that your parameters for how much randomness (mutation, crossover) you used in the system was far too large in proportion to your population size.
Raymond Scott was an electronic music genius, but he was criticized for shunning the improvisational aspects of Jazz. The world of electronic synthesis has improved dramatically due to Scott's work, but it turns out that the improvisational aspect is the hardest part to simulate.
I wrote my masters thesis on AI that attempts to improvise (Sorry, I'd post a link, but my server would shut down immediately if both of you that cared were to download it at once. Email at lkeagleATgmail if interested). I used a framework called Starcat written by my adviser to attempt to model the thought process of a jazz improviser. It just outputs MIDI, but it performed surprisingly well with just basic musical knowledge. I wish I didn't have to work for a living, or I'd still be working on it.
Al Biles at the University of Rochester has also made some really impressive inroads using genetic algorithms. People interested in computer improvisation should find it very interesting. Google is your friend.
Some of the images from the Codex Seriphinianus have long graced the workplaces of computer scientists for decades. I see fewer these days, but there was a time when every office had one lucky soul who owned a copy of the book and was willing to make xeroxes for people.
Sorry, I still don't buy it. I think your analogy is worse than the one you're complaining about.
The question is whether URLs are public. I believe they are, and none of the arguments I've heard so far have compelled me to believe otherwise.
You want bad analogy? Here you go:
The internet is like a public park. Your website is like a public drinking fountain. It's only purpose is to supply water, or in the web world, information. It's not the thirsty people's fault that someone made their drinking fountain out of gold and that it spits out champagne instead of water...
I respectfully disagree both in terms of spoken and computer languages.
The language itself is simply spelling, punctuation, and syntax. There are some rules for grammar (fairly loose rules in some spoken languages, apparently). The 'culture' behind a spoken language is more related to the idioms and patterns used in a programming language.
I don't think that culture is lost if a language is no longer spoken. Both spoken languages and programming languages are extensible, so new concepts can be created at any point. In fact, they commonly are. I think the task is usually called 'programming'.
If there are cultural aspects that are important to a society, they will be reflected in whatever language is spoken. If detail is lost in translation, then new words have to be invented and integrated into the language in order to reflect those details. This happens all the time too, they're called 'dialects'. Dialects are much less of a barrier to communication than language.
I think the people who want us all to speak a common language aren't really that extreme. I bet these people are already perfectly capable of communicating in several different dialects, so that's not a problem. I think what they're really saying is that they want everyone to speak a similar grammar, and preferable a similar base vocabulary. If a culture wants to integrate words into their vocabulary to describe certain things, they're free to do so. Look at the 'languages' that pop up in certain sports circles, for example. Skateboarding and snowboarding have a complete vocabulary describing every single little maneuver, and new words are being invented daily.
No one is saying that they want to throw away culture. They're just stating their belief (poorly) that our inability to communicate is a more important issue. I for one don't believe that culture and language are inseparable, it's just that some things don't translate well at first.
Now for the flames about how some languages are better than others for certain tasks... I'll remind you that very few things are actually 'impossible' in any language. It's always a matter of translation.
1) If you think we have anything close to a 'free market', and you truly think that that's best for our country, stop reading now. You're not my kind of person, and I stopped talking to you one sentence ago.
2) My point was that people don't think enough about the ramifications of their desires. I don't think the people making these statements know many farmers. Perhaps the bigger producers will be able to keep in business with the loss of cheap labor, but almost all of the smaller farmers will have to switch to crops that require less labor in order to stay in business. It has deeper ramifications than just replacing Mexican workers with American workers.
On the other hand, the left-wing liberal thinking suffers from the same problem on issues like gun control. If we take away our right to own or possess a firearm, then we have no way to protect ourselves against our own government.
I'm not saying that there isn't a solution to the problem that involves cracking down on illegal immigration, but none of the solutions presented so far address or admit the consequences. I'm just saying that maybe it's not as big a problem as people think.
I've never met a Mexican immigrant demanding that I speak Spanish... They're not exactly trying to bring attention to themselves. They know there's bigoted freaks out there that would like nothing more than to see them all rounded up on a bus and dumped in a desert south of the border.
That was true all the way up to the first edition of Kings Quest 4.
It was only after the KQ4 update patch (for machines with 512kb of RAM!!!!) that they added in the prompt window that paused the game while typing. Before that you had to make judicious use of pretyping a command, and using F2 to repeat it quickly.
This does not mean that he broke the law, which means he can't be arrested. The police may have authority, but it's their responsibility to use that authority only when absolutely necessary. This isn't Iraq, and they're not the army, and that kid did not do anything that deserved being dragged out of the room and tased. If the police walked up to me, grabbed me, and told me I was under arrest for no apparent reason, I would be just as paranoid and incredulous, if not more so.
His question was relevant, and I would have wanted to hear the answer straight from the horse's mouth as well. He may have gotten a little worked up about it, but he still did nothing that warranted that kind of treatment. I don't care if you think the kid was the most annoying asshole you've ever seen. I don't care if he was only there to deliver political rhetoric. I don't care if he got agitated and swung his book around. The point is he was not threatening or harming anyone in the building, and therefore the police had no right to react as they did.
I still think that there is more to this story. The police had to have been signaled in some way to react how they did, and I refuse to believe that it was the kid's statements and antics that were the cause. Kerry graciously tried to defuse the situation by offering to answer his question, and the mic was already off. At that point, the police had absolutely no reason to continue. Look at the people in the audience, do they look in any way threatened to you? Watch the video, do you actually think that the kid was trying to attack the police?
All I saw was a guy who rightfully had no understanding why people were grabbing him and carrying him out of the room. I would resist, and I bet you would too.
YES, the cops ARE supposed to wait. Not until someone gets hurt, though. They're supposed to wait until there is a credible threat to public safety. I watched this kid from every angle that someone was recording from, and at no point were the police ever justified in removing him.
This was a public forum. You have a time alloted for your question. That's time for *your question*, not for the senator's answer. Just like in the senate, when you are given the floor, you're allowed to use it *however* you please. Go ahead and read Dr. Seuss, if you want. This kid has the right to do exactly the same. It's a valid political statement, and in a public forum it's very common.
It seems to me that the only person in that room qualified to determine whether the kid's statements were worth consideration was Mr. Kerry, and he stated that the question was very important and that they should let the kid go so he could answer it.
They're MAKING money by me visiting their site. If their only source of income from the site is a flawed business model, they need help. Maybe they should try selling something other than screen space.
It was noted above that television commercials are the exact same phenomenon. Advertisers would like nothing more than to be able to turn off the screen if you're not viewing their commercials. Hence, why 1/3 of the screen is now taken up by advertisements *during* the show. It's pure desperation, and the only reason that the business model works for the time being is that there isn't sufficient technology to disable it on the side of the viewer.
Now there is technology for the web, and I think everyone should start using it immediately. That is the only thing that will stimulate the growth of web pages that concentrate on content and services, instead of just generic, unrelated advertising revenue. I would pay more for television and internet without ads, except that there is no direct, safe route for my pennies to go directly to the company providing the service.
Advertising is simply a form of market manipulation. The intent is to direct consumer attention to your product/service. To compare that with the willful destruction of the personal property of another is depressing. If you tear up my lawn, I will sue you for damages.
There is no law saying that I have to watch advertisements. However, there ARE laws that protect consumers from hidden, undisclosed charges, as well as "Lemon" laws that protect the consumer against intentionally defective products. The case can be made that advertisements are an illegal hidden cost to consumers, because they have no disclosure of the bandwidth costs before loading the page.
The opposite doesn't hold true. From the point of view of the content server, blocking users who don't read advertisements will defeat the purpose of your site -- that is, to provide your information/services to the viewer. Furthermore, filling up your page with annoying large banner-ads is similarly self-defeating, as you will again lose viewership and demand for your information.
I want iTunes to be able to handle distributed libraries. I have a large collection of music that I've painstakingly organized by genre (lots of classical and jazz). It's stored on a central media server, which I access locally via my TiVo, and remotely via GnuMP3d. I only used iTunes to sync with my iPod. I now use Anapod, because it does exactly what I want it to do with no fuss.
There are other users in my home that have their own iTunes libraries, which they let iTunes organize. I don't want their music on my media server, but I want them to have transparent access to my library so they can add that music to their iPods without having to create a separate library. All iTunes has to do is have one more level of nesting in their library xml file in order to indicate that a group of songs is not meant to be organized by iTunes. Or better yet, take the development time to allow multiple libraries to be accessed at the same time...
Wait, why am I explaining this to you?? You don't work for Apple!! Or do you?!?!?
Man, it's late...
and yes, I DID use iTunes for a very long time, until my frustrations led me to pay for software that is far more useful for my needs.
You've obviously never had a shared music library that needs to be accessed outside of iTunes.
The missing point here is that not everyone uses iTunes. Once iTunes takes over your music library, you've lost the ability to organize your music based on your specifications. If you ever decide to switch to another music player, or heaven forbid, put your music on a device other than an iPod, you now have to rebuild your layout how you like it. Luckily there are some tools available to organize your filesystem based on MP3 tags, but they don't work for everything.
All I want from Apple is the ability to specify multiple libraries in various locations, and to have the ability to switch off iTunes organizational capabilities at the library level. If I have all my media on a media server, I don't want iTunes to touch the layout of the files on that server.
On another note, I want iTunes to actually alter the MP3 tags when I change song information, rather than simply altering the data in the XML library file.
You're confusing "Expert" programmers with egotistical programmers. Expert programmers are skilled craftsmen with excellent communication skills.
Real experts are looked up to by management and by other programmers as a role model for knowledge and productivity, and they increase morale by getting the entire team out of scary binds and quagmires.
There is nothing about an expert programmer that you should ever be able to place a negative point on except for their cost. Your confusion on the issue makes it obvious that you don't care to have people working for you that are smarter than yourself.
When I moved away from college I somehow lost a box full of audio cables. I needed to hook up my stereo, but I couldn't find any of my fiber cables. My receiver did, however, have coaxial inputs as well. Luckily, I had read someone else's genius solution on a newsgroup a couple years prior. I simply unwound a metal coat hanger and shoved the unshielded, unterminated ends directly into the RCA jacks.
The only reason I ever replaced it was because I was worried about the bare wire accidentally touching the chassis of some other piece of equipment. That and it was a pretty ghetto solution...
No one ever got better at anything by sitting on the sidelines. Sure some people may be hurt by their inability do perform, but the better lesson to learn is to try and fail.
I can't think of a single *college* textbook that wasn't full of errors, let alone high-school or lower texts, which are already oversimplified to the point of being outright lies.
Come to think of it, I hadn't had many teachers before college that could be considered any kind of 'expert' in any field but classroom discipline, so why should we consider them a flawless source of information?
I would say that kids could learn quite a bit more from Wikipedia than they could from any 25-year old out-of-print science or history textbook. Wikipedia may not be the place to go first for current events, but it can at least get you started on the right foot with just about any science/history question you have. In fact, seeing [citation needed] every few lines on Wikipedia will probably make it even *more* clear to a student that what they're reading should be taken with a grain of salt.
How many compilers do you need? There's not many chips out there these days that don't have some compiler support. I only need one smart guy to work on optimizing my C code into assembly. I don't have time to do that myself, and I'm willing to bet that the other 99% of C programmers will agree.
If you're actually trying to get a product to market, you should be thinking about assembly as an optimization tool, and a last resort at that. Any category of software that allows you to spend your time fidgeting with assembly is definitely a niche domain. BTW, embedded programming and kernel level driver development is NOT an everyday task that all programmers need to be adept at. I think the embedded programmers and driver designers will agree.
Also, whenever I read assembly for debugging purposes, I always tend to find that it was something I borked at a much higher level that was causing the problem. Perhaps assembler debugging could be alleviated by more verbose compiler warnings?
There have been more studies linking musical education with higher cognitive abilities than I can ever hope to read. Studying music teaches discipline, creativity, virtuosity, competition, spatial reasoning, dexterity, language skills, and more. And when you're done, you have something to show for it. You have the joy of expression instead of a piece of paper with a letter on it.
If we put a huge focus on music in all grade levels, students will begin to excel in every other subject. It doesn't even matter if they like music, they have to learn it anyway. In fact, even if they hate music with a passion, it will cause them to look forward to all of their other classes more, and they will be better prepared to deal with them.
Slashdot Mirror
The power of GA's, and of most AI research that has ever led to anything useful, is simply to search through spaces that are too large for brute force or heuristic algorithms to cover exhaustively. GA's work very well for optimizing problems with large numbers of dimensions, but in the end, it's just a hill climbing algorithm, albeit a really cool one. In this regard, you're right. We usually only use GA's when we have no clue how to optimize a complicated multi-variable problem using standard algorithms.
By mimicking biological evolution, it adds the ability to effectively climb several 'hills' simultaneously, as well as explore new 'hills'. This increases the probability that one of these hills has the highest 'peak'. Without that randomness, the population would never leave the hills they are on, and would almost certainly miss an optimal solution if it existed on another hill.
If your system failed to converge, I would hesitate to blame the GA. It's more likely that your parameters for how much randomness (mutation, crossover) you used in the system was far too large in proportion to your population size.
Oops! You're right! I was writing from memory... Shame on me.
Which is the better school? Maybe it was an accidental compliment??
If anyone still is in contact with him, tell him his work was a huge inspiration for my research.
Raymond Scott was an electronic music genius, but he was criticized for shunning the improvisational aspects of Jazz. The world of electronic synthesis has improved dramatically due to Scott's work, but it turns out that the improvisational aspect is the hardest part to simulate.
I wrote my masters thesis on AI that attempts to improvise (Sorry, I'd post a link, but my server would shut down immediately if both of you that cared were to download it at once. Email at lkeagleATgmail if interested). I used a framework called Starcat written by my adviser to attempt to model the thought process of a jazz improviser. It just outputs MIDI, but it performed surprisingly well with just basic musical knowledge. I wish I didn't have to work for a living, or I'd still be working on it.
Al Biles at the University of Rochester has also made some really impressive inroads using genetic algorithms. People interested in computer improvisation should find it very interesting. Google is your friend.
Some of the images from the Codex Seriphinianus have long graced the workplaces of computer scientists for decades. I see fewer these days, but there was a time when every office had one lucky soul who owned a copy of the book and was willing to make xeroxes for people.
http://www.archimedes-lab.org/Serafi/C_serafini.html
The 'Fish Eyes' comes to mind as one of the most popular images from the tome.
Sorry, I still don't buy it. I think your analogy is worse than the one you're complaining about.
The question is whether URLs are public. I believe they are, and none of the arguments I've heard so far have compelled me to believe otherwise.
You want bad analogy? Here you go:
The internet is like a public park. Your website is like a public drinking fountain. It's only purpose is to supply water, or in the web world, information. It's not the thirsty people's fault that someone made their drinking fountain out of gold and that it spits out champagne instead of water...
It's just like FOSS. It's hard to trust someone who isn't open about how they perform their calculations.
Clinton = Security Through Obscurity;
I respectfully disagree both in terms of spoken and computer languages.
The language itself is simply spelling, punctuation, and syntax. There are some rules for grammar (fairly loose rules in some spoken languages, apparently). The 'culture' behind a spoken language is more related to the idioms and patterns used in a programming language.
I don't think that culture is lost if a language is no longer spoken. Both spoken languages and programming languages are extensible, so new concepts can be created at any point. In fact, they commonly are. I think the task is usually called 'programming'.
If there are cultural aspects that are important to a society, they will be reflected in whatever language is spoken. If detail is lost in translation, then new words have to be invented and integrated into the language in order to reflect those details. This happens all the time too, they're called 'dialects'. Dialects are much less of a barrier to communication than language.
I think the people who want us all to speak a common language aren't really that extreme. I bet these people are already perfectly capable of communicating in several different dialects, so that's not a problem. I think what they're really saying is that they want everyone to speak a similar grammar, and preferable a similar base vocabulary. If a culture wants to integrate words into their vocabulary to describe certain things, they're free to do so. Look at the 'languages' that pop up in certain sports circles, for example. Skateboarding and snowboarding have a complete vocabulary describing every single little maneuver, and new words are being invented daily.
No one is saying that they want to throw away culture. They're just stating their belief (poorly) that our inability to communicate is a more important issue. I for one don't believe that culture and language are inseparable, it's just that some things don't translate well at first.
Now for the flames about how some languages are better than others for certain tasks... I'll remind you that very few things are actually 'impossible' in any language. It's always a matter of translation.
I certainly do understand it. Two points:
1) If you think we have anything close to a 'free market', and you truly think that that's best for our country, stop reading now. You're not my kind of person, and I stopped talking to you one sentence ago.
2) My point was that people don't think enough about the ramifications of their desires. I don't think the people making these statements know many farmers. Perhaps the bigger producers will be able to keep in business with the loss of cheap labor, but almost all of the smaller farmers will have to switch to crops that require less labor in order to stay in business. It has deeper ramifications than just replacing Mexican workers with American workers.
On the other hand, the left-wing liberal thinking suffers from the same problem on issues like gun control. If we take away our right to own or possess a firearm, then we have no way to protect ourselves against our own government.
I'm not saying that there isn't a solution to the problem that involves cracking down on illegal immigration, but none of the solutions presented so far address or admit the consequences. I'm just saying that maybe it's not as big a problem as people think.
I wanna see how your back feels after spending a day kneeling over picking strawberries...
Or how your wallet feels when produce prices triple.
It's not like they're not doing anything over here.
I've never met a Mexican immigrant demanding that I speak Spanish... They're not exactly trying to bring attention to themselves. They know there's bigoted freaks out there that would like nothing more than to see them all rounded up on a bus and dumped in a desert south of the border.
That was true all the way up to the first edition of Kings Quest 4.
It was only after the KQ4 update patch (for machines with 512kb of RAM!!!!) that they added in the prompt window that paused the game while typing. Before that you had to make judicious use of pretyping a command, and using F2 to repeat it quickly.
Wrong,
I have the right to be heard.
You have the right not to listen.
These are sometimes mutually exclusive.
This does not mean that he broke the law, which means he can't be arrested. The police may have authority, but it's their responsibility to use that authority only when absolutely necessary. This isn't Iraq, and they're not the army, and that kid did not do anything that deserved being dragged out of the room and tased. If the police walked up to me, grabbed me, and told me I was under arrest for no apparent reason, I would be just as paranoid and incredulous, if not more so.
His question was relevant, and I would have wanted to hear the answer straight from the horse's mouth as well. He may have gotten a little worked up about it, but he still did nothing that warranted that kind of treatment. I don't care if you think the kid was the most annoying asshole you've ever seen. I don't care if he was only there to deliver political rhetoric. I don't care if he got agitated and swung his book around. The point is he was not threatening or harming anyone in the building, and therefore the police had no right to react as they did.
I still think that there is more to this story. The police had to have been signaled in some way to react how they did, and I refuse to believe that it was the kid's statements and antics that were the cause. Kerry graciously tried to defuse the situation by offering to answer his question, and the mic was already off. At that point, the police had absolutely no reason to continue. Look at the people in the audience, do they look in any way threatened to you? Watch the video, do you actually think that the kid was trying to attack the police?
All I saw was a guy who rightfully had no understanding why people were grabbing him and carrying him out of the room. I would resist, and I bet you would too.
YES, the cops ARE supposed to wait. Not until someone gets hurt, though. They're supposed to wait until there is a credible threat to public safety. I watched this kid from every angle that someone was recording from, and at no point were the police ever justified in removing him.
This was a public forum. You have a time alloted for your question. That's time for *your question*, not for the senator's answer. Just like in the senate, when you are given the floor, you're allowed to use it *however* you please. Go ahead and read Dr. Seuss, if you want. This kid has the right to do exactly the same. It's a valid political statement, and in a public forum it's very common.
It seems to me that the only person in that room qualified to determine whether the kid's statements were worth consideration was Mr. Kerry, and he stated that the question was very important and that they should let the kid go so he could answer it.
Wrong.
We're talking about advertising and Spam here.
They're MAKING money by me visiting their site. If their only source of income from the site is a flawed business model, they need help. Maybe they should try selling something other than screen space.
It was noted above that television commercials are the exact same phenomenon. Advertisers would like nothing more than to be able to turn off the screen if you're not viewing their commercials. Hence, why 1/3 of the screen is now taken up by advertisements *during* the show. It's pure desperation, and the only reason that the business model works for the time being is that there isn't sufficient technology to disable it on the side of the viewer.
Now there is technology for the web, and I think everyone should start using it immediately. That is the only thing that will stimulate the growth of web pages that concentrate on content and services, instead of just generic, unrelated advertising revenue. I would pay more for television and internet without ads, except that there is no direct, safe route for my pennies to go directly to the company providing the service.
What a horrible analogy...
Advertising is simply a form of market manipulation. The intent is to direct consumer attention to your product/service. To compare that with the willful destruction of the personal property of another is depressing. If you tear up my lawn, I will sue you for damages.
There is no law saying that I have to watch advertisements. However, there ARE laws that protect consumers from hidden, undisclosed charges, as well as "Lemon" laws that protect the consumer against intentionally defective products. The case can be made that advertisements are an illegal hidden cost to consumers, because they have no disclosure of the bandwidth costs before loading the page.
The opposite doesn't hold true. From the point of view of the content server, blocking users who don't read advertisements will defeat the purpose of your site -- that is, to provide your information/services to the viewer. Furthermore, filling up your page with annoying large banner-ads is similarly self-defeating, as you will again lose viewership and demand for your information.
OK, I'll clarify.
I want iTunes to be able to handle distributed libraries. I have a large collection of music that I've painstakingly organized by genre (lots of classical and jazz). It's stored on a central media server, which I access locally via my TiVo, and remotely via GnuMP3d. I only used iTunes to sync with my iPod. I now use Anapod, because it does exactly what I want it to do with no fuss.
There are other users in my home that have their own iTunes libraries, which they let iTunes organize. I don't want their music on my media server, but I want them to have transparent access to my library so they can add that music to their iPods without having to create a separate library. All iTunes has to do is have one more level of nesting in their library xml file in order to indicate that a group of songs is not meant to be organized by iTunes. Or better yet, take the development time to allow multiple libraries to be accessed at the same time...
Wait, why am I explaining this to you?? You don't work for Apple!! Or do you?!?!?
Man, it's late...
and yes, I DID use iTunes for a very long time, until my frustrations led me to pay for software that is far more useful for my needs.
You've obviously never had a shared music library that needs to be accessed outside of iTunes.
The missing point here is that not everyone uses iTunes. Once iTunes takes over your music library, you've lost the ability to organize your music based on your specifications. If you ever decide to switch to another music player, or heaven forbid, put your music on a device other than an iPod, you now have to rebuild your layout how you like it. Luckily there are some tools available to organize your filesystem based on MP3 tags, but they don't work for everything.
All I want from Apple is the ability to specify multiple libraries in various locations, and to have the ability to switch off iTunes organizational capabilities at the library level. If I have all my media on a media server, I don't want iTunes to touch the layout of the files on that server.
On another note, I want iTunes to actually alter the MP3 tags when I change song information, rather than simply altering the data in the XML library file.
You're confusing "Expert" programmers with egotistical programmers. Expert programmers are skilled craftsmen with excellent communication skills.
Real experts are looked up to by management and by other programmers as a role model for knowledge and productivity, and they increase morale by getting the entire team out of scary binds and quagmires.
There is nothing about an expert programmer that you should ever be able to place a negative point on except for their cost. Your confusion on the issue makes it obvious that you don't care to have people working for you that are smarter than yourself.
Please do not hire me. You won't like it.
When I moved away from college I somehow lost a box full of audio cables. I needed to hook up my stereo, but I couldn't find any of my fiber cables. My receiver did, however, have coaxial inputs as well. Luckily, I had read someone else's genius solution on a newsgroup a couple years prior. I simply unwound a metal coat hanger and shoved the unshielded, unterminated ends directly into the RCA jacks.
The only reason I ever replaced it was because I was worried about the bare wire accidentally touching the chassis of some other piece of equipment. That and it was a pretty ghetto solution...
Mod parent up.
No one ever got better at anything by sitting on the sidelines. Sure some people may be hurt by their inability do perform, but the better lesson to learn is to try and fail.
Your statement = your name
I can't think of a single *college* textbook that wasn't full of errors, let alone high-school or lower texts, which are already oversimplified to the point of being outright lies.
Come to think of it, I hadn't had many teachers before college that could be considered any kind of 'expert' in any field but classroom discipline, so why should we consider them a flawless source of information?
I would say that kids could learn quite a bit more from Wikipedia than they could from any 25-year old out-of-print science or history textbook. Wikipedia may not be the place to go first for current events, but it can at least get you started on the right foot with just about any science/history question you have. In fact, seeing [citation needed] every few lines on Wikipedia will probably make it even *more* clear to a student that what they're reading should be taken with a grain of salt.
How many compilers do you need? There's not many chips out there these days that don't have some compiler support. I only need one smart guy to work on optimizing my C code into assembly. I don't have time to do that myself, and I'm willing to bet that the other 99% of C programmers will agree.
If you're actually trying to get a product to market, you should be thinking about assembly as an optimization tool, and a last resort at that. Any category of software that allows you to spend your time fidgeting with assembly is definitely a niche domain. BTW, embedded programming and kernel level driver development is NOT an everyday task that all programmers need to be adept at. I think the embedded programmers and driver designers will agree.
Also, whenever I read assembly for debugging purposes, I always tend to find that it was something I borked at a much higher level that was causing the problem. Perhaps assembler debugging could be alleviated by more verbose compiler warnings?
The only truly important subject is...
Music.
There have been more studies linking musical education with higher cognitive abilities than I can ever hope to read. Studying music teaches discipline, creativity, virtuosity, competition, spatial reasoning, dexterity, language skills, and more. And when you're done, you have something to show for it. You have the joy of expression instead of a piece of paper with a letter on it.
If we put a huge focus on music in all grade levels, students will begin to excel in every other subject. It doesn't even matter if they like music, they have to learn it anyway. In fact, even if they hate music with a passion, it will cause them to look forward to all of their other classes more, and they will be better prepared to deal with them.
"instead of having 1 package for some function, you have 1^n packages for that same function"
What is this math you speak of? I do not think it means what you think it means...