To wit: Giving someone a 4.0 because they did the work and did 4.0-level work is totally different than giving someone a 4.0 for not showing up to class as you originally claimed.
Okay, I think you seriously need to go back and re-read what you wrote. Because what you're saying now and what you said before are two very different things.
Contrast:
Universities generally don;t like putting highly expereinced business people in classrooms where their woried the student actually trumps the professor in knowledge. Many professors who recognize this where the university doesn't will simply give you the 4.0 for the promise you don't show up to class...
With:
Why is giving a 4.0 to someone who completes the major projects and scores a 90% on a final exam a problem?
Universities are typically more interested in simply getting your tuition, and if you qualify, and are above 30 years old, they'll typically be more than willing to take your money and still sell your seat in the class to another applicant. Universities generally don;t like putting highly expereinced business people in classrooms where their woried the student actually trumps the professor in knowledge. Many professors who recognize this where the university doesn't will simply give you the 4.0 for the promise you don't show up to class...
I have three degrees. A BSc in Comp Eng, an MSc in ECE, and an MBA.
Never once have I ever seen anything like this. It's incredibly unethical for one thing, and for another, it assumes that the professor can't handle a student challenging him or her.
I don't know what programs in which schools you've seen this occur in, but can you let me know so I know to never hire anyone who's graduated from them?
Maximum historical temperature in Bangladesh is >40C; what kind of place is this server going to be stored? Move to different locations? No climate control? I can easily see requiring >85C handling.
Rainy season means high humidity.
The 5W power requirement is flexible, but remember that adding 1W of power increases your solar power costs -- to the tune of $22 or so in panelling (in Bangladesh), not including any secondary costs.
Dusty? Okay, use fans if you really want to. Be prepared for frequent failures, or a regular routine of cleaning and replacing filters.
Unreliable power and using solar? Yeah, you're going to want to gracefully handle some really nasty transients.
No, my requirements are not exactly the same as his. But the point is that he's running in a really hostile environment, like I am, and it's going to cost him.
If you can show me a laptop that can handle -40C to 85C, high levels of humidity, draws no more than 5W of power, needs no fans for cooling, and reasonably gracefully handles transients associated with lightning strikes for less than $1500, I'll gladly buy it.
The leftist "fair lending" CRA idiocy is the single biggest cause of the current problems.
Heh, I keep hearing that meme, but when I ask actual bankers about it, their comment is, paraphrased: "Bullshit."
I attended a talk by a rather prominent community banker (who also sat on the Fed Board), who basically said that nobody ever made an unsound loan because of the CRA, and that this is just a bunch of politicians making hay.
Read the CRA some time. Notice that there are ironclad defenses against its provisions, one of which is, paraphrased, "unacceptably risky loans."
Additionally, when I look at the data surrounding sub-prime loans and MBS's, I have to call "Bullshit."
You want to know the biggest contributor? MBS' themselves. MBS' immunize the originator against the riskiness of loans; if you're just going to turn around and sell the loan, it doesn't matter if the debtor can't pay. So, all that matters is (1) finding someone to take out a loan and (2) finding some sucker to take it off your hands.
This is made even easier when the bond ratings agencies work for you -- which they did. The MBS issuers paid the ratings agencies, and guess what? They got good ratings. And if they didn't get good ratings, they paid someone else.
Contrast this with the pre-MBS loan process, in which a bank actually held a mortgage to maturity. It really matters if the debtor can pay in that case.
Now toss in a bunch of banks who are levered up using these MBS pools as security for the leverage. The market goes south a bit, and they have to unwind the leverage. But wait, they can't -- now everyone knows that the MBS ratings are trash, and because nobody can value them, nobody is willing to buy them. Hooray, sell at a deep discount. Wait, your equity in the margin account just went down in value because of that discount? Margin call! Sell more MBS' at a discount. Wait, your equity in the margin account just went down because of that discount? Margin call!... Repeat until bankruptcy or bailout.
Seriously, quit with the CRA drum-banging. You're wrong.
Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a reference book FOR reference books. You often see comments in kernel and critical software which says "Knuth's TAOCP says this is the best way to do this". He states how math underlies Computer Science which is probably why I'm still stuck on the first few pages of Volume 1. Maybe I'll go back to after I take a course in discrete math and calculus.
You're not kidding. I've read Vol I and about half of Vol II. It hurt. A lot.
One of the nice things about the government being able to cause inflation is that they can use it to enact monetary policy.
Lots of figures are sticky, especially debt and wages.
Don't like your nation's debt status? Well, if you were smart (and your citizens were), you got a fixed interest rate on your debt. Cause some inflation, and your real debt went down.
Wages too high in your private sector? They tend to be sticky too -- cause just a little inflation, and all your employers have to do is not give raises this year, and they've effectively had a pay cut.
Price stability in the 19th century my ass. Inflation isn't the only way prices can change, you know. The 19th century saw significant and protracted periods of deflation. That ain't price stability, and it causes it's own rather nasty problems regarding people's ability to service their debt.
Parts of the New Deal didn't help -- mostly the ones restricting price movements which would have allowed the market to move back to equilibrium -- but liquidity wasn't one of them.
There are studies which show evidence that the severity and length of each nation's Depression experience is directly correlated to how long they stayed on the gold standard.
And the very, very best part of the gold standard is the fact that speculators can bust your currency. The world market was and is still much larger than any gold reserve any nation can muster. All it takes is a group of speculators who want to take a shot at you, and they can either bust your gold backing or force you off the gold standard. This happened multiple times in the Depression, and is THE REASON more than a few countries got off the gold standard -- they simply couldn't sustain it in the face of the market betting against them.
Gold standard is an awful flipping idea with the way markets work these days.
They're underpaid compared to the wage level that would stimulate supply enough that this "shortage" would go away.
It's simply market economics -- if you want something and you can't find it, offer to pay more. As the price (wages) goes up, competitors will be incentivized to enter the market until supply and demand equalize.
So in other words, there is no shortage, only a "shortage" at the price businesses are willing to pay.
Actually, while I belittle them, I don't consider them incompetent.
I belittle them because I consider them deceitful, lying ****bags with politicians in their pockets.
I was sort of subtly pointing at that with the post-post-script, what with President Bush (and other Republicrats) running his lying, whore mouth about how Americans don't want to do "those jobs."
If the paper your degree was printed on is good for more than wiping your posterior, you took a basic course in microeconomics.
As such, you should know that increasing profits (in this case, wages) tend to have a stimulative effect on supply. Decreasing real wages -- which are what we are experiencing what with flat wages and an inflationary economy -- tend to have the opposite effect.
Please apply the education you spent tens of thousands of dollars, and recognize the truth: If you can't find enough engineers at the price you want to pay, it's most likely because the price you want to pay is too low.
Sincerely,
An engineer who recently took a microeconomics course in his MBA program.
PPS: On a related note, Americans DO want to do those jobs, just not at the wages you want to pay. Economics, yes? kthnxbye.
So, take their $10K and raise the rest. Good for you for looking for FOSS scholarships. Don't stop with just that. There are plenty other sources of funding, you just have to take the time to look under every rock you can find.
Your brother didn't look hard enough, or wasn't very well qualified. Or wasn't willing to take enough of the burden on himself in the form of loans and sweat.
Same.
College ain't high school kid, sure there's plenty of stupid folks at both, but pick a hard major and take the hard classes at any reasonable, accredited college -- even the lower tier public ones -- and pretty soon you'll find that there aren't so many of them. It ain't very often that I'm the stupid person in the room, but it happened when I decided to take the highest level EE courses my university offered. I knew I was in deep shit when half the class (all graduate students) dropped out in the first 3 weeks, and everyone left (except me) were 2nd/3rd year PhD students with 3 hours of lecture and 6 hours of dissertation.
College professors ain't public school teachers kiddo. As a rule, they all have PhD's, and are an expert in at least their own field (their field being the subject of their dissertation). There are exceptions of course, mostly at the worst universities, but by and large, even at any given flagship state school, you can learn something from all of them. The only reason you wouldn't is because you didn't want to.
Meh.
Call them anyway. Apply, and figure out the funding later. If you want to go badly enough, your financial situation will not stop you.
Heh, whether you have a college degree or not has nothing to do with whether you get put in the line of fire. Every officer in the military has a college degree -- are you saying that not one of them gets put in the line of fire? No, of course not. That's silly.
But no, joining up doesn't automatically mean you're going to Iraq, but there's never any guarantee that you won't. I know a guy who joined the Navy and ended up in the sandbox managing munitions. That's right -- he joined the Navy and ended up in a desert. You never know where you'll end up, except that you'll end up anywhere they want to send you.
(Politically connected individuals excepted, of course.)
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
But to big business, I have been shocked at times at how the law is treated at times more like for example, the rules in Formula 1 racing cars, where they can twist and exploit the definitions of the law to suit themselves and how the government plays the same games back at them. In a business, compliance and non-compliance can generally be reduced to a cost. Clearly, the business has a profit motive to behave in whichever fashion is more profitable.
This is where ethics should come in, but obviously, ethics are often wanting.
The law at that level, isn't an absolute line, the way most of us interpret it. The law should never be viewed as an absolute line. Laws are written by politicians, and as such, sometimes require disobedience. Never confuse ethics and morality with the law. They are separate entities.
Slashdot Mirror
To wit: Giving someone a 4.0 because they did the work and did 4.0-level work is totally different than giving someone a 4.0 for not showing up to class as you originally claimed.
Okay, I think you seriously need to go back and re-read what you wrote. Because what you're saying now and what you said before are two very different things.
Contrast:
Universities generally don;t like putting highly expereinced business people in classrooms where their woried the student actually trumps the professor in knowledge. Many professors who recognize this where the university doesn't will simply give you the 4.0 for the promise you don't show up to class...
With:
Why is giving a 4.0 to someone who completes the major projects and scores a 90% on a final exam a problem?
I'm referring specifically to receiving a letter grade in a class for not coming to class (like you originally stated).
Waiving a requirement is one thing. Giving a grade for not showing up, on the other hand, is unethical in the extreme.
Universities are typically more interested in simply getting your tuition, and if you qualify, and are above 30 years old, they'll typically be more than willing to take your money and still sell your seat in the class to another applicant. Universities generally don;t like putting highly expereinced business people in classrooms where their woried the student actually trumps the professor in knowledge. Many professors who recognize this where the university doesn't will simply give you the 4.0 for the promise you don't show up to class...
I have three degrees. A BSc in Comp Eng, an MSc in ECE, and an MBA.
Never once have I ever seen anything like this. It's incredibly unethical for one thing, and for another, it assumes that the professor can't handle a student challenging him or her.
I don't know what programs in which schools you've seen this occur in, but can you let me know so I know to never hire anyone who's graduated from them?
Read his environmental description.
Maximum historical temperature in Bangladesh is >40C; what kind of place is this server going to be stored? Move to different locations? No climate control? I can easily see requiring >85C handling.
Rainy season means high humidity.
The 5W power requirement is flexible, but remember that adding 1W of power increases your solar power costs -- to the tune of $22 or so in panelling (in Bangladesh), not including any secondary costs.
Dusty? Okay, use fans if you really want to. Be prepared for frequent failures, or a regular routine of cleaning and replacing filters.
Unreliable power and using solar? Yeah, you're going to want to gracefully handle some really nasty transients.
No, my requirements are not exactly the same as his. But the point is that he's running in a really hostile environment, like I am, and it's going to cost him.
The ideal human interface for my needs is console to an RS-232, so annoying rubberized keypads don't matter to me.
Doesn't meet the temperature or power requirements.
Close, but not quite.
If you can show me a laptop that can handle -40C to 85C, high levels of humidity, draws no more than 5W of power, needs no fans for cooling, and reasonably gracefully handles transients associated with lightning strikes for less than $1500, I'll gladly buy it.
To give you some sense of what I'm getting at:
I pay about $1500 for a ruggedized setup like you're talking about -- except it's a pentium class processor with 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash.
Yeah, not breaking the bank isn't going to be an option here, I'm afraid.
The trade-offs a person may be willing to make to earn $1M likely wouldn't remain justified after 75% is cut away by taxes.
I have found that, generally speaking, the type of person making $1M in the first place is internally motivated more so than externally.
That is to say, in my experience, they bust their asses just as hard whether they're earning $50k or $750k.
The fact that they do this is, in large part, why they progressed to make $750k at all.
The leftist "fair lending" CRA idiocy is the single biggest cause of the current problems.
Heh, I keep hearing that meme, but when I ask actual bankers about it, their comment is, paraphrased: "Bullshit."
I attended a talk by a rather prominent community banker (who also sat on the Fed Board), who basically said that nobody ever made an unsound loan because of the CRA, and that this is just a bunch of politicians making hay.
Read the CRA some time. Notice that there are ironclad defenses against its provisions, one of which is, paraphrased, "unacceptably risky loans."
Additionally, when I look at the data surrounding sub-prime loans and MBS's, I have to call "Bullshit."
You want to know the biggest contributor? MBS' themselves. MBS' immunize the originator against the riskiness of loans; if you're just going to turn around and sell the loan, it doesn't matter if the debtor can't pay. So, all that matters is (1) finding someone to take out a loan and (2) finding some sucker to take it off your hands.
This is made even easier when the bond ratings agencies work for you -- which they did. The MBS issuers paid the ratings agencies, and guess what? They got good ratings. And if they didn't get good ratings, they paid someone else.
Contrast this with the pre-MBS loan process, in which a bank actually held a mortgage to maturity. It really matters if the debtor can pay in that case.
Now toss in a bunch of banks who are levered up using these MBS pools as security for the leverage. The market goes south a bit, and they have to unwind the leverage. But wait, they can't -- now everyone knows that the MBS ratings are trash, and because nobody can value them, nobody is willing to buy them. Hooray, sell at a deep discount. Wait, your equity in the margin account just went down in value because of that discount? Margin call! Sell more MBS' at a discount. Wait, your equity in the margin account just went down because of that discount? Margin call! ... Repeat until bankruptcy or bailout.
Seriously, quit with the CRA drum-banging. You're wrong.
Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is a reference book FOR reference books. You often see comments in kernel and critical software which says "Knuth's TAOCP says this is the best way to do this". He states how math underlies Computer Science which is probably why I'm still stuck on the first few pages of Volume 1. Maybe I'll go back to after I take a course in discrete math and calculus.
You're not kidding. I've read Vol I and about half of Vol II. It hurt. A lot.
But it made me smarter.
One of the nice things about the government being able to cause inflation is that they can use it to enact monetary policy.
Lots of figures are sticky, especially debt and wages.
Don't like your nation's debt status? Well, if you were smart (and your citizens were), you got a fixed interest rate on your debt. Cause some inflation, and your real debt went down.
Wages too high in your private sector? They tend to be sticky too -- cause just a little inflation, and all your employers have to do is not give raises this year, and they've effectively had a pay cut.
etc, etc.
Price stability in the 19th century my ass. Inflation isn't the only way prices can change, you know. The 19th century saw significant and protracted periods of deflation. That ain't price stability, and it causes it's own rather nasty problems regarding people's ability to service their debt.
Parts of the New Deal didn't help -- mostly the ones restricting price movements which would have allowed the market to move back to equilibrium -- but liquidity wasn't one of them.
There are studies which show evidence that the severity and length of each nation's Depression experience is directly correlated to how long they stayed on the gold standard.
And the very, very best part of the gold standard is the fact that speculators can bust your currency. The world market was and is still much larger than any gold reserve any nation can muster. All it takes is a group of speculators who want to take a shot at you, and they can either bust your gold backing or force you off the gold standard. This happened multiple times in the Depression, and is THE REASON more than a few countries got off the gold standard -- they simply couldn't sustain it in the face of the market betting against them.
Gold standard is an awful flipping idea with the way markets work these days.
False. Electrical engineers solve this problem every day with statistical filters and/or cross-correlation.
They're underpaid compared to the wage level that would stimulate supply enough that this "shortage" would go away.
It's simply market economics -- if you want something and you can't find it, offer to pay more. As the price (wages) goes up, competitors will be incentivized to enter the market until supply and demand equalize.
So in other words, there is no shortage, only a "shortage" at the price businesses are willing to pay.
Actually, while I belittle them, I don't consider them incompetent.
I belittle them because I consider them deceitful, lying ****bags with politicians in their pockets.
I was sort of subtly pointing at that with the post-post-script, what with President Bush (and other Republicrats) running his lying, whore mouth about how Americans don't want to do "those jobs."
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Oil_Prices_Medium_Term.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Oil_Prices_Medium_Term.png
Dear Mister Manager with an MBA,
If the paper your degree was printed on is good for more than wiping your posterior, you took a basic course in microeconomics.
As such, you should know that increasing profits (in this case, wages) tend to have a stimulative effect on supply. Decreasing real wages -- which are what we are experiencing what with flat wages and an inflationary economy -- tend to have the opposite effect.
Please apply the education you spent tens of thousands of dollars, and recognize the truth: If you can't find enough engineers at the price you want to pay, it's most likely because the price you want to pay is too low.
Sincerely,
An engineer who recently took a microeconomics course in his MBA program.
PPS: On a related note, Americans DO want to do those jobs, just not at the wages you want to pay. Economics, yes? kthnxbye.
Blame Canada! Blame Canada! Damn Canuks and Frogs! We don't need none of them 'round here!@# :D
Heh, whether you have a college degree or not has nothing to do with whether you get put in the line of fire. Every officer in the military has a college degree -- are you saying that not one of them gets put in the line of fire? No, of course not. That's silly.
But no, joining up doesn't automatically mean you're going to Iraq, but there's never any guarantee that you won't. I know a guy who joined the Navy and ended up in the sandbox managing munitions. That's right -- he joined the Navy and ended up in a desert. You never know where you'll end up, except that you'll end up anywhere they want to send you.
(Politically connected individuals excepted, of course.)
This is where ethics should come in, but obviously, ethics are often wanting. The law at that level, isn't an absolute line, the way most of us interpret it. The law should never be viewed as an absolute line. Laws are written by politicians, and as such, sometimes require disobedience. Never confuse ethics and morality with the law. They are separate entities.