I guess my information is a bit dated, but what I have read at least covers this through the Second World War.
Regardless, there are plenty of noncombat arms jobs in the modern army(and other branches for that matter) that generally keep you in the back lines but still let you see the world.
Not unless they have changed things since the material I read was published. Field medics so far as I know are defined as noncombatants under the geneva convention, just like chaplains, this means they cannot carry or use a weapon in battle or they will loose that noncombat status. Of course, for the same reason, they do not receive combat pay while in combat.
Can anyone with actual current experience verify this?
Personally, I do trust our millitary. Every war we have fought this century has been a just one in my opinion. The millitary does expect obedience to all lawful orders, but there is no law of physics saying you must obey if they order an atrocity and an abomination to your soul. And if the order was illegal you won't even be in the stockade too long if you can prove it to the court martial.
And if you really want to go in the army without the risk of being ordered to do something against your morals, go in the nurses corp or become a combat medic. They hold noncombat status under the geneva conventions, are never assigned weapons, and never ordered to kill.
I am a big fan of the Peace Corps and respect them immensely(though I've never been in), but I'm always a very big fan of the millitary. I joined two weeks ago and I ship out on November 6th to basic.
This is so much rubbish. Have they considered that part of the reason people aren't going to theaters for the same movie again and again is that they aren't making anything worth going again and again for? I like to watch some movies that I like to watch repeatedly, but they are(at least to me) the very best out there. For everything else, its boring after you've seen it once(or sometimes even during the first viewing) and most of the movies I truly love are older(Spiderman being the only recent exception....)
Another thing they have to remember is that even if the economicists say we are coming out of it(or even deny we were ever in it) we still have a lot or recession-type effects. I for one lost my main job to a layoff very recently. When the job market is bad, people save more, spend less. That means going to a movie only once, or not at all
People, especially legislators, do need to remember that copyright and patents should be for a limited time.
Unlike the David that wrote that, I do believe copyright and patents were a good idea as originally implemented and should not be done away with. But they have been vastly expanded and misused. Above all, they need to be for a limited time. Personally, I think 10 years is the right number, but the point is that it should be a definite number(not some bizarre author's life+75 if I remember right now), and it should be a small number(I've heard 7, which I think is too small but in the right range. It should definitely be less than 25 which would be enough for the author to have children and have them grow to adulthood before the copyright expired).
And remember the good that comes from works being in the public domain. How many movies and books(good and bad) would not have been made if Dracula were under copyright? What about Romeo and Juliet? Wasn't Romeo and Juliet itself based loosely on an even older legend?
I strongly believe in copyright for a limited time, but it exists to reward individual creators for their effort, not to help enright already bloated and right corporations and help them maintain control forever.
It amuses me that no one has mentioned the one time pad. Granted, because the Key is as long or longer than the message being transmitted it is very, very rarely useful in practice, but it is a conventional cryptosystem which is unbreakable even with quantumn computing.
http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/one-time-pad.ht ml
Personally, I would disagree. Maybe what would you say is true for large weddings, but I had a nice small wedding at which my mother and father played photographers. Especially my mother made certain that nice shots with a variety ofgroups were made, and while not at proffessional levels are certainly more than adequate.
I will also mention that should I ever need to hire a photographer(I probably won't, but we'll see), I personally would insist on a contract that gave me license to do as will with the photographs. Regardless of what they think they normally do in a legal or copyright sense, for me they're job would be to create and then hand over the image. If they do not agree to that, than I am not their customer. But I would make certain it was an explicit agreement and I would advise everyone, regadless of what they think the law says to have explicit agreements. Even if the law defaults to favoring what you want(whichever side of the case you may be on....) having an explicit agreement avaids misunderstandings and protects everyone involved, both the photographer and the client.
I partially agree that the patent problem is a larger threat to the society and should be dealt with, but that does not mean we should forgo the copyright battle and it does not mean this is not a good thing.
Also, patents primarily affect industry. That does not mean they do not affect the consumer and individuals indirectly, but their primary direct effect is on other companies in an industry. Overlyrestrictive copyright laws and DRM copyright protection does affect the consumer directly as well as indirectly.
This sounds like the loosers in the Linux business who cannot compete whining and nothing more.
Red Hat is winning, but that is the only way they are like Microsoft. Most of the software they distribute is GPL, there is no product activation, they are not in the BSA. They are not behaving anything like Microsoft.
Even the idea they could make a monopoly out of Linux is ridiculous, because the barrier for entry is low. For one thing, the barrier of entry is low. If Red Hat somehow becomes the only commercial Linux distro and you are unhappy with them, then go take a copy of Debian, tune it to your corporate environment and sell it as your own distro. Also, they have tons of competition that is not going to go away from sources lik Microsoft, Apple, BSD, etc which make comparable products(Last I checked, BSD will even run most Linux binaries....)
This whole idea is ludicrous and attacking Red Hat simply because Red Hat succeeds.
What always amuses and confuses me is that there is a huge outcry against e-mail spam, but not against paper advertising.
Personally, I don't like either(I don't know of anyone who does), but I find paper advertising a whole lot more annoying than e-mail spam. With e-mail spam, I can normally tell with certainty its spam before I read it, if I'm not certain all I have to do is click on the e-mail and I get the preview. If it is spam, one touch of my delete key and its gone. I can also set filters on my e-mail client fairly easily to trash a lot of the truly obvious spam without me ever seeing it and to highlight the obviously important messages.
I don't have any of these with paper, physical marketing. Sometimes I can tell its obviously marketing without opening the envelope, but not always, so I often have to physically open the envelope. Then if it is trash, physically put it in my waste paper basket and eventually physically empty the trash.
I hate e-mail spam, but I can tolerate it more easily than I tolerate physical ads in my mail.
Capitalism works perfectly well for IP as long as it is allowed to work in a (relatively) level playing field
That means that the government should work to keep the playing field level as it was intended to be. Patents should be offered for true innovation in the hardware world where no prior art existed and enforced properly when offered properly. Copyright while in existence should gauruntee the author the ability to make a profit and avoid having their works horribly abused, but the copyright protections should be limited while they exist and of limited duration, not extended perpetually.
As a side not, the dot com bubble was not capitalism failing, it was capitalism working beautifully coupled with idiot investors who overvalued entirely too much. The solid internet commpanies such as ebay thrive to this day, the ones with good prospects such as amazon.com and netflix.com are still around with time to prove themselves, and the weak one(who really wants to buy cheese graters or petfood online at a specialty website????) died as they should have. The only little glitch in the bubble was caused by mass stupidity and rampant overvaluing, which are not problems in the system itself.
It is not legal to make a copy of a DVD now. Everything people are doing legally today, they'll be able to do legally tomorrow," says Valenti.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but right now I believe it is legal to copy a DVD under a lot of circumstances. You cannot distribute those copies, but last I checked, you could make and hold those copies as archives legally.
Having a law that explicitly states caching proxies are permissible is a good thing, but I still say it is cleanest to repeal the entire DMCA. For one, I think that caching proxies would easily be covered under fair use and other legal doctrines making their explicit permission nice but unnecessary. For another, I would rather see that as a separate matter.
Regardless, I agree, you cannot go too far in repealing the DMCA. Removing the vile portions is a priority, removing the rest of it I believe would do no harm.
You are partially right, we should design things to be as simple as possible, but we cannot design them to be simpler than is possible. When you come up with a simpler, easier to learn one-handed keyboard, I'll buy it.
Until then, a learning curve is a fact of life. Adapt or die
When I started writing math intensive papers, I learned LaTeX. There were easier to learn ways to do what I needed(word would do all of it from drop down menus, for instance), but none of the others could match the input speed I had with LaTeX(pure typing, no mouse), and none of the others gave me as much control as LaTeX did. I gladly traded time put in mastering the technique and overcoming the learning curve in order to get that speed and that control.
I hate it when interface designers make things more complicated than they have to be, but when they do have to be that complicated to get the full benefit, then so be it. Once this is commercially available, I'll happily deal with the learning curve for the benefits I think it would bring.
I, and most slashdotters I've dealt with, are not hostile towards patents, we are(well, many of us) hostile towards the way the patent system is implemented.
To mention one already said, I generally disagree with software patents. I am also very worried about overly general patents on even hardware inventions and on their complete inability to find prior art even when it is obvious to those in the field(I know, most of the patent clerks aren't really in the field that any particular patent is in, but that fact is the source of the problem....) I'm also a bit quesy about gene patents. I won't come right out against them until I can give the matter further thought, but I'm not comfortable with the idea presently.
However, patents in general can be a good thing. I don't think most slashdotters want to get rid of patents, I think we want to get rid of software patents and then overhaul the process a little.
And now for something slightly off topic, I want one of these keyboards. It could let me pace freely while I type, and I could use my mouse left handed to get a full featured mouse without ever taking my hand off the keyboard. That would save a fair bit of time. If they get a pointing device I'm happy with in there too(he mentions he's working on it) I could use my full desktop with its nice monitor and be freed from the desk. I want one.
I tend to move around when using my phone, but most people using PDAs and lap tops are quite content to be in one place, and I think that hurt Rabbit.
I do agree that the charging issue might make commercial WiFi fairly rare, but if prices keep falling I see a fairly large enthusiast group that will have free WiFi in a lot of urban areas, and I think that places like Hotels, Clubs with either admission/membership fees, Airports, and perhaps more exclusive coffee shops will be willing to spring for it as a way to attract/keep customers
I agree with some of the other posts that WiFi will survive as long as there is no affordable, always on equivalent covering wide areas.(And for the forseeable future in America at least, there won't be....)
Incidentally, this is off on a tangent, but the idea that the millitary overcompensates its people is insane. My father was enlisted in the air force for 21 years and he did make enough to keep us comfortable, but he worked very hard to do it, made a lot of sacrafices to be in the millitary in the first place, and he worked for many years and got several promotions before I was born in order to get to a rank where he was paid enough to keep him comfortable.
The higher ranking officers are of course much more comfortable than my father ever was, but they work very very hard to get there(I'm applying to OTS at the moment myself) and then make a lot of sacrafices to serve their country and to get promotions. I know two officers personally that have been helping me and they both have multiple degrees and while they are very comfortable in their compensation they could make a lot more money in industry with their qualifications.
This is very true, but the fact is that it was true before to a lesser degree. Whenever you expose any information to anyone, that other person has the ability to pass it along, and you should be conscious of this before you give them that information.
Moreover, unless you do something to explicitly indicate that the information is confidential they have neither moral nor legal reason not to pass it along.
You have always had to watch what you say for fear it would come back to haunt you, it is simply that the internet has made it easier for it to come back and bite you later.
It's kind of funny ( in a really warped kind of way ) that several of the top people on the Manhattan Project were Jewish, some of them from Germany. If Hitler had picked someone else to try and exterminate ( or waited until after he won ) they would have been working on his project and he might have gotten it first.
You are precisely right about everything you have said here.
The problem is that all of this means that article is largely wrong. It was not the technology that brought down Stalinism, it was the way it was used and the fact that America and Europe got it first. If the Stallinists had developped some of the technology earlier, we may have a very different world. If the Nazis had developped some of the technology earlier, in particular if they had won the race to the Nuclear bomb, we would have had a very different world indeed.
If you are looking at this as something to enhance your career, or help start a new career, then you need it on your transcript, and getting into a course will be worth it, even if you have to pay out the nose.
If this is a hobby, then I suggest you avoid the college. A lot of people learn better by themselves, but more importantly, you play with the things you want to play with. Colleges hand you curriculums and expect you to pass tests over what they consider important, etc.
On your own, you can study bizarre things that few colleges touch(and won't touch at an undergrad level) not because they are hard, but because they are nontraditional. Surreal numbers are fascinating and not hard at all with a solid high school background, but I've never seen a formal college course use them much less teach them. Fractals and Chaos theory are slowly becoming mainstream, but right now they are hard to find, and while you won't master them without a strong grasp of a lot of calculus and number theory, you can get your feet wet with them in high school(I did....) Game theory is the same way.
And if you don't know what type of math you are interested in, pick up some of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Recreations books(he has a whole series.) They generally are written at the college freshmen level and they touch on a lot of bizarre and interesting types of math that most colleges don't formally deal with, and they are targeted at people doing this recreationally.....
It has now gotten to the point where building a PC component by component is more expensive than ordering a prebuilt because of lack of bulk rate discounts, etc.
However, I would still recommend customer building it. It gives you greater control and it avoids having everything onboard the motherboard, as well as giving you piece by piece warranties which are often more friendly than warranties on complete system(as my father found out when just one component of his prebuilt system died and they wanted him to send the whole thing back or receive no assistance at all....)
Also, if you have never done it before, the experience is well worth both your time and money to acquire.
I agree that developers should work to make most software crash resistant in the face of user error. But after a certain points there are trade offs between giving the user power and making it crash resistant.
Take the old IMacs with OS9 on them as an example. They were very, hard to crash. But you couldn't change the hardware, and the software wasn't up for much customization in general.
Given the option, I'd rather have the power and control and flexibitility even at the price of SOME stability. You have to have a balance though.
Personally, I use linux as my primary system, and I prefer it for a lot of reasons. But I still use windows for gaming, and they force me to use it at work, and it does what I need it to. Not as well as Linux does IMHO, but it does it.
And I think most of the crashes people encounter are user errors. Win 98 is not Linux, I've never had it run for weeks and weeks on end without a crash, but if I turn my work computer off at night and boot it in the morning, I can normally get through the day with no major crashes, and I seriously abuse my system at work.
I'm fully aware of it, but they accomplish that by bundling a lot of things on the motherboard and by buying in huge volume an average customer can't. The volume discounts you just have to loose if you build your own, but I find the control and the fact every piece is separate and not on board with full manuals, software bundles, etc to be worth it personally.
But that doesn't change anything. If the current cost of an equivalent prebuilt system is lower than the components alone, the end user certainly has nothing to complain about regarding being harmed by microsofts pricing
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my information is a bit dated, but what I have read at least covers this through the Second World War.
Regardless, there are plenty of noncombat arms jobs in the modern army(and other branches for that matter) that generally keep you in the back lines but still let you see the world.
Not unless they have changed things since the material I read was published. Field medics so far as I know are defined as noncombatants under the geneva convention, just like chaplains, this means they cannot carry or use a weapon in battle or they will loose that noncombat status. Of course, for the same reason, they do not receive combat pay while in combat.
Can anyone with actual current experience verify this?
Personally, I do trust our millitary. Every war we have fought this century has been a just one in my opinion. The millitary does expect obedience to all lawful orders, but there is no law of physics saying you must obey if they order an atrocity and an abomination to your soul. And if the order was illegal you won't even be in the stockade too long if you can prove it to the court martial.
And if you really want to go in the army without the risk of being ordered to do something against your morals, go in the nurses corp or become a combat medic. They hold noncombat status under the geneva conventions, are never assigned weapons, and never ordered to kill.
I am a big fan of the Peace Corps and respect them immensely(though I've never been in), but I'm always a very big fan of the millitary. I joined two weeks ago and I ship out on November 6th to basic.
This is so much rubbish. Have they considered that part of the reason people aren't going to theaters for the same movie again and again is that they aren't making anything worth going again and again for? I like to watch some movies that I like to watch repeatedly, but they are(at least to me) the very best out there. For everything else, its boring after you've seen it once(or sometimes even during the first viewing) and most of the movies I truly love are older(Spiderman being the only recent exception....)
Another thing they have to remember is that even if the economicists say we are coming out of it(or even deny we were ever in it) we still have a lot or recession-type effects. I for one lost my main job to a layoff very recently. When the job market is bad, people save more, spend less. That means going to a movie only once, or not at all
Unlike the David that wrote that, I do believe copyright and patents were a good idea as originally implemented and should not be done away with. But they have been vastly expanded and misused. Above all, they need to be for a limited time. Personally, I think 10 years is the right number, but the point is that it should be a definite number(not some bizarre author's life+75 if I remember right now), and it should be a small number(I've heard 7, which I think is too small but in the right range. It should definitely be less than 25 which would be enough for the author to have children and have them grow to adulthood before the copyright expired).
And remember the good that comes from works being in the public domain. How many movies and books(good and bad) would not have been made if Dracula were under copyright? What about Romeo and Juliet? Wasn't Romeo and Juliet itself based loosely on an even older legend?
I strongly believe in copyright for a limited time, but it exists to reward individual creators for their effort, not to help enright already bloated and right corporations and help them maintain control forever.
It amuses me that no one has mentioned the one time pad. Granted, because the Key is as long or longer than the message being transmitted it is very, very rarely useful in practice, but it is a conventional cryptosystem which is unbreakable even with quantumn computing.
t ml
http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/one-time-pad.h
Personally, I would disagree. Maybe what would you say is true for large weddings, but I had a nice small wedding at which my mother and father played photographers. Especially my mother made certain that nice shots with a variety ofgroups were made, and while not at proffessional levels are certainly more than adequate.
I will also mention that should I ever need to hire a photographer(I probably won't, but we'll see), I personally would insist on a contract that gave me license to do as will with the photographs. Regardless of what they think they normally do in a legal or copyright sense, for me they're job would be to create and then hand over the image. If they do not agree to that, than I am not their customer. But I would make certain it was an explicit agreement and I would advise everyone, regadless of what they think the law says to have explicit agreements. Even if the law defaults to favoring what you want(whichever side of the case you may be on....) having an explicit agreement avaids misunderstandings and protects everyone involved, both the photographer and the client.
I partially agree that the patent problem is a larger threat to the society and should be dealt with, but that does not mean we should forgo the copyright battle and it does not mean this is not a good thing.
Also, patents primarily affect industry. That does not mean they do not affect the consumer and individuals indirectly, but their primary direct effect is on other companies in an industry. Overlyrestrictive copyright laws and DRM copyright protection does affect the consumer directly as well as indirectly.
This sounds like the loosers in the Linux business who cannot compete whining and nothing more.
Red Hat is winning, but that is the only way they are like Microsoft. Most of the software they distribute is GPL, there is no product activation, they are not in the BSA. They are not behaving anything like Microsoft.
Even the idea they could make a monopoly out of Linux is ridiculous, because the barrier for entry is low. For one thing, the barrier of entry is low. If Red Hat somehow becomes the only commercial Linux distro and you are unhappy with them, then go take a copy of Debian, tune it to your corporate environment and sell it as your own distro. Also, they have tons of competition that is not going to go away from sources lik Microsoft, Apple, BSD, etc which make comparable products(Last I checked, BSD will even run most Linux binaries....)
This whole idea is ludicrous and attacking Red Hat simply because Red Hat succeeds.
What always amuses and confuses me is that there is a huge outcry against e-mail spam, but not against paper advertising.
Personally, I don't like either(I don't know of anyone who does), but I find paper advertising a whole lot more annoying than e-mail spam. With e-mail spam, I can normally tell with certainty its spam before I read it, if I'm not certain all I have to do is click on the e-mail and I get the preview. If it is spam, one touch of my delete key and its gone. I can also set filters on my e-mail client fairly easily to trash a lot of the truly obvious spam without me ever seeing it and to highlight the obviously important messages.
I don't have any of these with paper, physical marketing. Sometimes I can tell its obviously marketing without opening the envelope, but not always, so I often have to physically open the envelope. Then if it is trash, physically put it in my waste paper basket and eventually physically empty the trash.
I hate e-mail spam, but I can tolerate it more easily than I tolerate physical ads in my mail.
Capitalism works perfectly well for IP as long as it is allowed to work in a (relatively) level playing field
That means that the government should work to keep the playing field level as it was intended to be. Patents should be offered for true innovation in the hardware world where no prior art existed and enforced properly when offered properly. Copyright while in existence should gauruntee the author the ability to make a profit and avoid having their works horribly abused, but the copyright protections should be limited while they exist and of limited duration, not extended perpetually.
As a side not, the dot com bubble was not capitalism failing, it was capitalism working beautifully coupled with idiot investors who overvalued entirely too much. The solid internet commpanies such as ebay thrive to this day, the ones with good prospects such as amazon.com and netflix.com are still around with time to prove themselves, and the weak one(who really wants to buy cheese graters or petfood online at a specialty website????) died as they should have. The only little glitch in the bubble was caused by mass stupidity and rampant overvaluing, which are not problems in the system itself.
It is not legal to make a copy of a DVD now. Everything people are doing legally today, they'll be able to do legally tomorrow," says Valenti.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but right now I believe it is legal to copy a DVD under a lot of circumstances. You cannot distribute those copies, but last I checked, you could make and hold those copies as archives legally.
Having a law that explicitly states caching proxies are permissible is a good thing, but I still say it is cleanest to repeal the entire DMCA. For one, I think that caching proxies would easily be covered under fair use and other legal doctrines making their explicit permission nice but unnecessary. For another, I would rather see that as a separate matter.
Regardless, I agree, you cannot go too far in repealing the DMCA. Removing the vile portions is a priority, removing the rest of it I believe would do no harm.
You are partially right, we should design things to be as simple as possible, but we cannot design them to be simpler than is possible. When you come up with a simpler, easier to learn one-handed keyboard, I'll buy it.
Until then, a learning curve is a fact of life. Adapt or die
When I started writing math intensive papers, I learned LaTeX. There were easier to learn ways to do what I needed(word would do all of it from drop down menus, for instance), but none of the others could match the input speed I had with LaTeX(pure typing, no mouse), and none of the others gave me as much control as LaTeX did. I gladly traded time put in mastering the technique and overcoming the learning curve in order to get that speed and that control.
I hate it when interface designers make things more complicated than they have to be, but when they do have to be that complicated to get the full benefit, then so be it. Once this is commercially available, I'll happily deal with the learning curve for the benefits I think it would bring.
I, and most slashdotters I've dealt with, are not hostile towards patents, we are(well, many of us) hostile towards the way the patent system is implemented.
To mention one already said, I generally disagree with software patents. I am also very worried about overly general patents on even hardware inventions and on their complete inability to find prior art even when it is obvious to those in the field(I know, most of the patent clerks aren't really in the field that any particular patent is in, but that fact is the source of the problem....) I'm also a bit quesy about gene patents. I won't come right out against them until I can give the matter further thought, but I'm not comfortable with the idea presently.
However, patents in general can be a good thing. I don't think most slashdotters want to get rid of patents, I think we want to get rid of software patents and then overhaul the process a little.
And now for something slightly off topic, I want one of these keyboards. It could let me pace freely while I type, and I could use my mouse left handed to get a full featured mouse without ever taking my hand off the keyboard. That would save a fair bit of time. If they get a pointing device I'm happy with in there too(he mentions he's working on it) I could use my full desktop with its nice monitor and be freed from the desk. I want one.
I tend to move around when using my phone, but most people using PDAs and lap tops are quite content to be in one place, and I think that hurt Rabbit.
I do agree that the charging issue might make commercial WiFi fairly rare, but if prices keep falling I see a fairly large enthusiast group that will have free WiFi in a lot of urban areas, and I think that places like Hotels, Clubs with either admission/membership fees, Airports, and perhaps more exclusive coffee shops will be willing to spring for it as a way to attract/keep customers
I agree with some of the other posts that WiFi will survive as long as there is no affordable, always on equivalent covering wide areas.(And for the forseeable future in America at least, there won't be....)
Incidentally, this is off on a tangent, but the idea that the millitary overcompensates its people is insane. My father was enlisted in the air force for 21 years and he did make enough to keep us comfortable, but he worked very hard to do it, made a lot of sacrafices to be in the millitary in the first place, and he worked for many years and got several promotions before I was born in order to get to a rank where he was paid enough to keep him comfortable.
The higher ranking officers are of course much more comfortable than my father ever was, but they work very very hard to get there(I'm applying to OTS at the moment myself) and then make a lot of sacrafices to serve their country and to get promotions. I know two officers personally that have been helping me and they both have multiple degrees and while they are very comfortable in their compensation they could make a lot more money in industry with their qualifications.
This is very true, but the fact is that it was true before to a lesser degree. Whenever you expose any information to anyone, that other person has the ability to pass it along, and you should be conscious of this before you give them that information.
Moreover, unless you do something to explicitly indicate that the information is confidential they have neither moral nor legal reason not to pass it along.
You have always had to watch what you say for fear it would come back to haunt you, it is simply that the internet has made it easier for it to come back and bite you later.
It's kind of funny ( in a really warped kind of way ) that several of the top people on the Manhattan Project were Jewish, some of them from Germany. If Hitler had picked someone else to try and exterminate ( or waited until after he won ) they would have been working on his project and he might have gotten it first.
That is entirely too true, sadly.
You are precisely right about everything you have said here. The problem is that all of this means that article is largely wrong. It was not the technology that brought down Stalinism, it was the way it was used and the fact that America and Europe got it first. If the Stallinists had developped some of the technology earlier, we may have a very different world. If the Nazis had developped some of the technology earlier, in particular if they had won the race to the Nuclear bomb, we would have had a very different world indeed.
If you are looking at this as something to enhance your career, or help start a new career, then you need it on your transcript, and getting into a course will be worth it, even if you have to pay out the nose.
If this is a hobby, then I suggest you avoid the college. A lot of people learn better by themselves, but more importantly, you play with the things you want to play with. Colleges hand you curriculums and expect you to pass tests over what they consider important, etc.
On your own, you can study bizarre things that few colleges touch(and won't touch at an undergrad level) not because they are hard, but because they are nontraditional. Surreal numbers are fascinating and not hard at all with a solid high school background, but I've never seen a formal college course use them much less teach them. Fractals and Chaos theory are slowly becoming mainstream, but right now they are hard to find, and while you won't master them without a strong grasp of a lot of calculus and number theory, you can get your feet wet with them in high school(I did....) Game theory is the same way.
And if you don't know what type of math you are interested in, pick up some of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Recreations books(he has a whole series.) They generally are written at the college freshmen level and they touch on a lot of bizarre and interesting types of math that most colleges don't formally deal with, and they are targeted at people doing this recreationally.....
It has now gotten to the point where building a PC component by component is more expensive than ordering a prebuilt because of lack of bulk rate discounts, etc.
However, I would still recommend customer building it. It gives you greater control and it avoids having everything onboard the motherboard, as well as giving you piece by piece warranties which are often more friendly than warranties on complete system(as my father found out when just one component of his prebuilt system died and they wanted him to send the whole thing back or receive no assistance at all....)
Also, if you have never done it before, the experience is well worth both your time and money to acquire.
I agree that developers should work to make most software crash resistant in the face of user error. But after a certain points there are trade offs between giving the user power and making it crash resistant.
Take the old IMacs with OS9 on them as an example. They were very, hard to crash. But you couldn't change the hardware, and the software wasn't up for much customization in general.
Given the option, I'd rather have the power and control and flexibitility even at the price of SOME stability. You have to have a balance though.
I have to agree.
Personally, I use linux as my primary system, and I prefer it for a lot of reasons. But I still use windows for gaming, and they force me to use it at work, and it does what I need it to. Not as well as Linux does IMHO, but it does it.
And I think most of the crashes people encounter are user errors. Win 98 is not Linux, I've never had it run for weeks and weeks on end without a crash, but if I turn my work computer off at night and boot it in the morning, I can normally get through the day with no major crashes, and I seriously abuse my system at work.
I'm fully aware of it, but they accomplish that by bundling a lot of things on the motherboard and by buying in huge volume an average customer can't. The volume discounts you just have to loose if you build your own, but I find the control and the fact every piece is separate and not on board with full manuals, software bundles, etc to be worth it personally.
But that doesn't change anything. If the current cost of an equivalent prebuilt system is lower than the components alone, the end user certainly has nothing to complain about regarding being harmed by microsofts pricing