Harsh punishments don't work. Because the punishments are so drastic, instructors become reluctant to give them out to "good kids" who made "one mistake." Lax punishment becomes to de facto standard, and of a rogue instructor tries to apply the penalties as written, his students and his peers look at him as a monster and exert considerable pressure to loosen up.
Your mentality is the reason schools no longer teach grammar. Some students are bad at it and complain: they're "bad test takers", or "the class doesn't reflect real-world tasks", or they're "bored".
That's bullshit. Educators knew it and students knew it. (And laughed to their friends about "getting out" of things with excuses like that.) But I imagine educators tired of an endless cavalcade of students try to wiggle out of actually learning, and realizing that students who don't want to be taught can't be taught, dropped the class.
You're merely applying the same thought toward removing rigor from the computer science curriculum. Most of the tasks you mentioned should have separate programs. Are you seriously suggesting that someone who can't code be able to graduate from a CS program because he's good at accepting user feedback?
It was 2010, and everyone was finally lol im bored can I haz degree nao?
I apologize for the long post. The issue of cheating is very dear to me. It was the single most frustrating part of my education, and I often felt as if I were the only honest student in my undergraduate program.
As another poster mentioned, blame can be pinned on both instructors and students. But "blame" is only useful when it can be used to fix the original problem, and this problem is too big to fix by pointing fingers and admonishing each other. It's a cultural shift toward the worst, and we're powerless to stop it.
You can only deal with cheaters when cheating is uncommon and has an attached stigma. We've come to the point where cheating is so common that accusations of plagiarism are just met with "so, lol?".
Really, what we have here is a failure to take life seriously. In school, everything is a joke, a show. Nobody earnestly attends class, or does homework. People who ask questions in class are either trying to delay the lesson or merely stroke their ego by one-upping the professor. (I've been accused of both.)
At least in my experience, the typical student doesn't even seem to consider the idea that someone might want to actually learn. Learning is a chore, class an ordeal, and the professor the enemy. As a result, shameless, rampant cheating is rampant in the "I can haz degree nao?" generation.
My favorite example involves a project to build a userspace filesystem "driver". It was simple enough, and the professor even gave us interface specifications.
The reaction was catastrophic. Students complained that the assignment was too hard, that they didn't know the algorithms, and that half a semester was too little time. They talked in the hallway in hushed tones of outrage and asked whether they could appeal to the dean.
The real issue behind the complains is that the assignment would make them think, and most of them had no idea how to do anything beyond compile code fed to them with a spoon. The assignment involved analytic thought, which my fellow students appeared to consider Herculean.
"Poor students whine about having to do real work for once," you might say.
Except that the TAs for the class shared this adversarial, anti-intellectual mentality. In recitations, the TAs provided "sample code" sufficient for the whole project. Crisis averted, right? A grades were handed out to people I personally knew had no idea of when to use a loop instead of a function call.
These people graduated with degrees in CS, but they're completely unable to develop original software. Tasked with an assignment, they'll just copy code from the internet or ask on IRC, laughing about it the whole time. They'll choose systems based not on their technical merits, but on "documentation" --- meaning they'll choose the system that has the easiest-looking introductory tutorial. Their code will have bugs because they have no idea how to code, and their programs are chimeras of copy-and-pasted examples.
We're all worse off for these imbeciles running around, and those of us who consider this profession a craft, and who take pride in our work, and impoverished by having to share a degree with people who want to avoid thinking at any cost, and who laugh at the idea of serious work. The laughter is what bothers me most. It's how I know we're doomed.
*Never mind that the "operating systems" class never involved leaving ring 3.
I agree. Internet gambling, like all gambling, is a terrible idea. Because the odds are always tilted in the house's favor, you lost the moment you type in a URL or cross the physical threshold. Gambling preys on the poor, the weak, and the stupid, and I don't like the idea of living in a society where it's not only right, but justifiable to take advantage of another man's desperation.
That said, banning gambling itself causes harm: it leads to intrusive regulation, jail sentences for otherwise-productive people, and resentment of the government. The harm caused by the ban exceeds the harm of gambling itself, and so reluctantly and grudgingly, I'm forced to oppose the ban.
That said, there are things we can do to discourage gambling without banning it outright. The tax code is part of the solution. I'd also be in favor of levying a special tax on gambling houses (physical or online), and using that money to run anti-gambling advertisements, and to fund gambling addiction programs.
People are panicking over a trace amount of tritium that cannot possibly harm them, while on the other hand ignoring, say, leaking gas station storage tanks that can actually poison them.
Of the laptops I've had, the one with the best form factor was the 12.1" iBook. Its keyboard was just big enough for my hands, and it fit into most spaces designed for letter-sized notebooks and papers. The screen's size was good enough for me. I got a lot of work done on that machine.
My current 13" MacBook is cumbersome by comparison: it's too long, and the extra keyboard and screen area doesn't do anything for me. It's still a good machine, but not as elegantly portable as my old iBook (RIP --- it died of an LCD fracture in a car accident.)
We mod you down because we've been indoctrinated into a vast left-wing conspiracy to cripple the economy on the pretext of saving the environment; or
we mod you down because you're wrong, and every reputable scientist disagrees with you
Occam's razor shows that we should go with #2 until you can support your opposition to 50 years of climate research with something more substantial than the latest easily debunked talking point.
You're not entitled to your own interpretation of the facts. Climate change is real. Tax cuts aren't an economic panacea. Obama's health care plan will not kill people. The Great Depression was not prolonged by the New Deal. Evolution by natural selection, not intelligent design, explains the complexity of life.
If you differ about policy choices within the framework of well-established facts, great. We can talk about that. But if instead, you obstinately deny any facet of reality that's hostile to your theory, then there no choice left but to moderate you into oblivion and make room for people mature enough to face the world as it is, not as they think it ought to be.
You're the Easter Islander complaining about the whiners who say you need to stop building so many statues and let the trees regrow. Good logs are getting harder and harder to find.
But there have always been good years and bad years. Can the whiners prove you're running out of trees? There's a trend, but there's no evidence that chopping down trees makes them harder to find. And you still have your statues. Everything is perfectly okay.
It's very cold out at Pluto's distance, which slows down particles in the atmosphere and makes them easier to keep. That's why Titan has such a thick atmosphere, too, despite its small size.
I fondly recall playing Fallout and Fallout 2, but still haven't tried Fallout 3. Between that game being 3D and real time on the one hand, and moralistically limiting actions (no killing children, for example) on the other, I'm afraid it won't be the same, or even that it'll somehow ruin the first couple games.
So, I'm asking anyone who's played all three games: is Fallout 3 really Fallout? Will this new game be?
Placing code under an open-source license is not the same as putting it in the "public domain". Code under an open source license still has conditions attached to it (even if minimal ones) while code placed in the public domain has no restrictions placed on it of any sort. Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
Personally, I see the whole "physics is the ultimate science" as a con to graft in more grad students.
The world is not a nasty, nasty, vile thing that's out to get you. Take a deep breath. Sometimes, really, people mean what they say. Sometimes they act in earnest. Sometimes there is no ulterior motive.
Is it so difficult to let go of your cynicism for five minutes?
Doesn't everyone know that X in 24 hours books neither teach you X, nor do it in 24 hours? They're super low-end guides generally that contain outdated information that could just as easily have been gleaned from tutorials. Meh.
I can't believe Slashdot ran an ad^H^H^H^H review of this book.
Actually, "it's me" has been attested for centuries. The prescription of "It's I" is an unnatural imposition on the language, and the people who say it are just affected. Besides: in French, the phrase is C'est moi, where moi is accusative just like "me".
Some idiotic grammatical prescriptions, such as those against splitting infinitives, beginning sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions, are nonsense. They don't clarify the language.
As Winston Churchill famously said, "this is something up with which I will not put!"
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but do they need to be put in the same program? Computer science is about theory, not vocational training.
Fuck you. You are what's wrong with this profession.
Harsh punishments don't work. Because the punishments are so drastic, instructors become reluctant to give them out to "good kids" who made "one mistake." Lax punishment becomes to de facto standard, and of a rogue instructor tries to apply the penalties as written, his students and his peers look at him as a monster and exert considerable pressure to loosen up.
Your mentality is the reason schools no longer teach grammar. Some students are bad at it and complain: they're "bad test takers", or "the class doesn't reflect real-world tasks", or they're "bored".
That's bullshit. Educators knew it and students knew it. (And laughed to their friends about "getting out" of things with excuses like that.) But I imagine educators tired of an endless cavalcade of students try to wiggle out of actually learning, and realizing that students who don't want to be taught can't be taught, dropped the class.
You're merely applying the same thought toward removing rigor from the computer science curriculum. Most of the tasks you mentioned should have separate programs. Are you seriously suggesting that someone who can't code be able to graduate from a CS program because he's good at accepting user feedback?
It was 2010, and everyone was finally lol im bored can I haz degree nao?
I apologize for the long post. The issue of cheating is very dear to me. It was the single most frustrating part of my education, and I often felt as if I were the only honest student in my undergraduate program.
As another poster mentioned, blame can be pinned on both instructors and students. But "blame" is only useful when it can be used to fix the original problem, and this problem is too big to fix by pointing fingers and admonishing each other. It's a cultural shift toward the worst, and we're powerless to stop it.
You can only deal with cheaters when cheating is uncommon and has an attached stigma. We've come to the point where cheating is so common that accusations of plagiarism are just met with "so, lol?".
Really, what we have here is a failure to take life seriously. In school, everything is a joke, a show. Nobody earnestly attends class, or does homework. People who ask questions in class are either trying to delay the lesson or merely stroke their ego by one-upping the professor. (I've been accused of both.)
At least in my experience, the typical student doesn't even seem to consider the idea that someone might want to actually learn. Learning is a chore, class an ordeal, and the professor the enemy. As a result, shameless, rampant cheating is rampant in the "I can haz degree nao?" generation.
My favorite example involves a project to build a userspace filesystem "driver". It was simple enough, and the professor even gave us interface specifications.
The reaction was catastrophic. Students complained that the assignment was too hard, that they didn't know the algorithms, and that half a semester was too little time. They talked in the hallway in hushed tones of outrage and asked whether they could appeal to the dean.
The real issue behind the complains is that the assignment would make them think, and most of them had no idea how to do anything beyond compile code fed to them with a spoon. The assignment involved analytic thought, which my fellow students appeared to consider Herculean.
"Poor students whine about having to do real work for once," you might say.
Except that the TAs for the class shared this adversarial, anti-intellectual mentality. In recitations, the TAs provided "sample code" sufficient for the whole project. Crisis averted, right? A grades were handed out to people I personally knew had no idea of when to use a loop instead of a function call.
These people graduated with degrees in CS, but they're completely unable to develop original software. Tasked with an assignment, they'll just copy code from the internet or ask on IRC, laughing about it the whole time. They'll choose systems based not on their technical merits, but on "documentation" --- meaning they'll choose the system that has the easiest-looking introductory tutorial. Their code will have bugs because they have no idea how to code, and their programs are chimeras of copy-and-pasted examples.
We're all worse off for these imbeciles running around, and those of us who consider this profession a craft, and who take pride in our work, and impoverished by having to share a degree with people who want to avoid thinking at any cost, and who laugh at the idea of serious work. The laughter is what bothers me most. It's how I know we're doomed.
*Never mind that the "operating systems" class never involved leaving ring 3.
You're both right: like every other technology since fire, TPM can be used for good or for ill. It's a tool. Tools are amoral.
I agree. Internet gambling, like all gambling, is a terrible idea. Because the odds are always tilted in the house's favor, you lost the moment you type in a URL or cross the physical threshold. Gambling preys on the poor, the weak, and the stupid, and I don't like the idea of living in a society where it's not only right, but justifiable to take advantage of another man's desperation.
That said, banning gambling itself causes harm: it leads to intrusive regulation, jail sentences for otherwise-productive people, and resentment of the government. The harm caused by the ban exceeds the harm of gambling itself, and so reluctantly and grudgingly, I'm forced to oppose the ban.
That said, there are things we can do to discourage gambling without banning it outright. The tax code is part of the solution. I'd also be in favor of levying a special tax on gambling houses (physical or online), and using that money to run anti-gambling advertisements, and to fund gambling addiction programs.
Preach it brother.
People are panicking over a trace amount of tritium that cannot possibly harm them, while on the other hand ignoring, say, leaking gas station storage tanks that can actually poison them.
Of the laptops I've had, the one with the best form factor was the 12.1" iBook. Its keyboard was just big enough for my hands, and it fit into most spaces designed for letter-sized notebooks and papers. The screen's size was good enough for me. I got a lot of work done on that machine.
My current 13" MacBook is cumbersome by comparison: it's too long, and the extra keyboard and screen area doesn't do anything for me. It's still a good machine, but not as elegantly portable as my old iBook (RIP --- it died of an LCD fracture in a car accident.)
Let's examine two hypothesis:
Occam's razor shows that we should go with #2 until you can support your opposition to 50 years of climate research with something more substantial than the latest easily debunked talking point.
You're not entitled to your own interpretation of the facts. Climate change is real. Tax cuts aren't an economic panacea. Obama's health care plan will not kill people. The Great Depression was not prolonged by the New Deal. Evolution by natural selection, not intelligent design, explains the complexity of life.
If you differ about policy choices within the framework of well-established facts, great. We can talk about that. But if instead, you obstinately deny any facet of reality that's hostile to your theory, then there no choice left but to moderate you into oblivion and make room for people mature enough to face the world as it is, not as they think it ought to be.
You're the Easter Islander complaining about the whiners who say you need to stop building so many statues and let the trees regrow. Good logs are getting harder and harder to find.
But there have always been good years and bad years. Can the whiners prove you're running out of trees? There's a trend, but there's no evidence that chopping down trees makes them harder to find. And you still have your statues. Everything is perfectly okay.
Why? If an organization can stifle me, and does so, what difference does it make whether that organization is a company or a government?
They said that before World War I too.
Even if beginning with the best of intentions, a censor will always, eventually, come to use his power to censor to benefit himself.
It's very cold out at Pluto's distance, which slows down particles in the atmosphere and makes them easier to keep. That's why Titan has such a thick atmosphere, too, despite its small size.
I fondly recall playing Fallout and Fallout 2, but still haven't tried Fallout 3. Between that game being 3D and real time on the one hand, and moralistically limiting actions (no killing children, for example) on the other, I'm afraid it won't be the same, or even that it'll somehow ruin the first couple games.
So, I'm asking anyone who's played all three games: is Fallout 3 really Fallout? Will this new game be?
Placing code under an open-source license is not the same as putting it in the "public domain". Code under an open source license still has conditions attached to it (even if minimal ones) while code placed in the public domain has no restrictions placed on it of any sort. Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
My karma is stratospheric, but I receive mod points infrequently, and in bunches of five.
The world is not a nasty, nasty, vile thing that's out to get you. Take a deep breath. Sometimes, really, people mean what they say. Sometimes they act in earnest. Sometimes there is no ulterior motive.
Is it so difficult to let go of your cynicism for five minutes?
That's stupid: it protects against transient faults and hardware problems, but not logic bugs. What if all three have the same bug?
Doesn't everyone know that X in 24 hours books neither teach you X, nor do it in 24 hours? They're super low-end guides generally that contain outdated information that could just as easily have been gleaned from tutorials. Meh.
I can't believe Slashdot ran an ad^H^H^H^H review of this book.
Actually, I think prescription is correct there (in the sense of there being a positive rule against), though "proscription" could certainly work too.
Actually, "it's me" has been attested for centuries. The prescription of "It's I" is an unnatural imposition on the language, and the people who say it are just affected. Besides: in French, the phrase is C'est moi, where moi is accusative just like "me".
You're clearly the kind of person who doesn't think more than one move ahead in chess.
(Or more likely, checkers.)
And that's not a problem.
Some idiotic grammatical prescriptions, such as those against splitting infinitives, beginning sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions, are nonsense. They don't clarify the language.
As Winston Churchill famously said, "this is something up with which I will not put!"