Your math doesn't make much sense. Let's start from the other end and see how things end up. First question, why are you taking so many classes?
With a 2:1 ratio, spending 12 hours every weekday (no weekend time) on schoolwork means that you're taking a 20 credit-hour classload (12 * 5 / (2 + 1)). Try a 15 credit-hour load, which results in about 45 hours per week spent in class or homework/prep time for a class. Often, you can knock out a decent fraction of that on the weekend, meaning that you're spending less time during the week than someone working at a full time job. If you can't manage that, you've may have issues once you hit the real world.
If you're trying to work a 20 hour/week job on top of a 20 credit hour classload, you'll need more than good time management skills to succeed at both, you'll need a time machine. 80 hours a week is a guaranteed burnout. When I had a part-time job, I wouldn't take more than 14 credit-hours and I tried to keep it down to 12.
Why people don't do this sort of simple planning before signing up for classes makes no sense to me. I see graduate students taking five! 4 credit classes (which is a nearly impossible classload since graduate level classes often require 3+ hours per hour of classroom time) and working as a TA or RA to pay the bills. When they burn out and/or get 'C's in their classes, they all express frustration that teachers wanted too much of their time and there wasn't any way to get it all done. Of course there wasn't enough time! Basic math skills would tell you that!
So go back and try your math again. See if you can come up with a way to balance your life while giving yourself enough time to succeed in class. Your last attempt wasn't all that effective.
Trying to engage with a classroom where even a small number are "elsewhere", whether reading a paper, IM'ing with friends, checking phone messages, sleeping, etc. is extremely difficult and many times almost impossible.
Don't get me started on cell phones.
Reminding people to mute their laptops each and every time they come to class gets old real fast. And having two or three confrontations about laptop/cell noises per class is it's own serious disruption of the learning environment. Getting it all out of the way on the first day with a "no laptops" rule and a "phone rings, leave the classroom immediately" rule just makes it clear where your priorities are: in the classroom.
Finally, for the few people who actually want to be there and who intend to take notes on a laptop, transcribing written notes into your computer is much more effective than simply typing notes in the first place (assuming you most effectively learn from notes/note taking). If you haven't made this observation so far, consider my classroom an opportunity to test it out for yourself.
On attendance policies, it depends on the subject area. If the class is a discussion-type class, attendance is important and should be part of the grade. On the other hand, if the class can be self-taught (where the lectures are more Q&A sessions), then attendance policies force people who have no desire to be there to attend and be bored, interfering with the students who really want to be there.
I don't have time to read the 40+ pages for each topic to get the 2 or 3 pages the professor is actually planning to cover.
Since when is preparing 40 pages some sort of undue burden? In microelectronics, which had the most densely packed book in my undergraduate education, we usually had to cover one or two chapters per lecture (40 pages might have been a minimum). Preparing meant spending at most two hours on (1) a fifteen minute skim over the material (2) an in-depth reading of a few topics to the point that I could get started on the chapter questions.
For a liberal arts subject, 100+ pages of Conrad might make for a challenge, but most of the time, I could read and go back over 100 pages of anything but the most difficult writers in again: two hours.
For 90% of my undergraduate classes, if the homework wasn't the prep, I could get ready for the next lecture in about 30 minutes. Some of my peers labelled me a brown-noser simply because I was one of the few students who was actually carrying on a discussion with the teacher in the classroom. What crap.
Oh, I know I havn't assigned homework in a couple of weeks, so do problems 47 through 92 by the next class period. Great, that's probably 6 hours of work
In general, professors at my school assigned work that they expected would take 2 hours per hour of classroom time. Bigger assignments mean longer deadlines. Any professor that pulled a stunt like you describe would get a question raised about the due date in class and call from the ombudsman's office that night if the deadline didn't get pushed back.
But its a university, the students are expected to take the responsibility of ensuring their understanding. Banning laptops is simply patronizing. If somebody wants to focus on rote transcription, that's his perogative, and she should let him be.
What about the person who is focusing on the web or personal business, reading news, the web, IM'ing with friends, updating their MySpace background...
The professor in this case is being charitable with her stated reasons. Most laptops are distractions from the learning environment and most students could use a little patronizing if it succeeds in adjusting their behavior and making the classroom a better learning environment for everyone who actually wants to be there.
As a student I've run into professors like you. Unfortunately not all of us roll over quite so easily. On the contrary, some of us are quite vocal and will work to make things change our way. I led a petition drive that successfully reverted a policy change implemented mid-semester; similar to this case. I was also an RA at the time and went to bat for several students who were getting pushed over by manipulative professors.
Any sane ombudsman will see right through the "I'm paying your salary" bullshit and side with the professor who threw out a disruptive student. On the other hand, professors who grade people who disagree with them lower (especially in contentious topics) should be roundly smacked around by that same ombudsman. Each case will be different, and just because you've met some awful professors in your day doesn't mean that the gp is one of them.
The teacher is responsible for maintaining a learning environment for everyone in the class. One spoiled child can and should be thrown out of a class in order to restore a decent learning environment for the rest of the class. Even more on-topic, ubiquitous wireless internet means that most students with laptops are not paying attention, but are browsing the web, taking care of personal business, etc. If you aren't participating in the class, take yourself elsewhere. Removing the laptops from the classroom is just about the only way to limit that sort of highly disruptive behavior and actually give other students what they're paying for.
Of course not. Japan has eaten through it's tree population and is not having to import every square inch of wood.
Actually, Japan has the highest percentage of forestation of any first world country (almost 70%).
As for other imports of Japan, you are more correct: they import much of their food, including staples like rice and seafood. This puts the population of the island at risk in the event of instability of their trading network. The modern economic environment, however, means that the population of Japan is not at risk as long as the world remains somewhat stable and demand for their products remains strong.
The declining birth rate there and in most developed countries is one of the few pieces of good news in the long-term story of human survival on this planet. IMO anyway.
If MS Access is good enough, PostgreSQL would have been massive overkill.
Good for you for getting that right. A lot of skilled devs won't use anything but the tools they already know, even if there is an astonishingly simpler tool that will get the job done in 10% of the time.
Personally, I think of everything as Java + PostgreSQL, so I've still got a lot of room to grow:o)
Most people pronounce the name "postgres" (with a silent QL). A brief history of the name is here.
Even more briefly: Starting in 1986, there was a database named POSTGRES developed at Berkeley by a team led by Professor Michael Stonebraker. In 1994, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen strapped a SQL front-end on the database and called the result "Postgres95". Since that name wouldn't last very long, it was renamed "PostgreSQL" in 1996 and it's stuck since then.
If you say "postgres" in most dev shops, they'll know what you mean (yes, even if they're using something else).
I think it bears pointing out that virtually all libraries that are accessible to the general public are publicly provided. Not formal, perhaps, but definitely tax-supported, at least in the United States.
You are, of course, completely correct. However, I wasn't arguing against tax-supported institutions, just observing that the "free" public education system in the US isn't the best or only way to learn enough to participate in our democracy.
The original argument was that you can't exercise free speech without a free education... Which has been thoroughly rebutted.
I would like to see you enter the job market with the "I taught myself" mentality - yes it has worked for some who have formed their own companies and been in the right place at the right time, however for anything you say to be taken seriously, you need to back yourself up with some form of credentials.
So, unless I provide you some form of concrete identity, you won't believe that each year, thousands upon thousands of highly gifted people find fulfilling work and lives after dropping out of high school? Why not look it up for yourself and stop making my point for me?
As for my story, I acquired a diploma from a public high school, and earned a bachelor's degree from a state university, then started learning most of the skills I use in my day-to-day work. Since then, I've started two companies (a consulting firm and a web-services company), both of which were profitable from day one.
On the other hand, my fiance dropped out of high school, completed her GED, got an associate's degree, a teaching credential, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and is now working on the dissertation of her PhD. After high school, she paid the tuition for all of that being a elementary school teacher, tutor, etc. (well, I'm paying for the Ph.D., but it's our money). She started being an effective autodidact long before I did...
Secondly, the last time I checked they did not have a public-use lab at any of the places you mentioned (computer lab does not count) not to mention adequate access to scientific journals (larger public libraries do, however nowhere near the range offered at most tertiary institutions) Thirdly, it is far harder to get a research grant acting as an individual.
Did you think I argued that self-learners avoid universities? You didn't read the Wikipedia article I linked to. Universities are very important and useful to lots of kinds of people, autodidacts included. As an aside, an autodidact probably won't get the same thing as someone attending because their parents expect them to and are footing the bill...
Most importantly, universities (1) aren't freely provided and (2) you don't need to attend one in order to have a political identity or express a political opinion (i.e. attending a university only contradicts the original post, not my rebuttal).
At the end of the day, I just wanted to say that the US isn't as great as it is cracked up to be - the year that I lived there really opened my eyes up as to how my own country is way better and the only reason that I would ever return (to the US) is to see my family (grandparents etc).
You may be suprised to find that my family and I are looking to emigrate from the US in the next few years and we're not alone. Personally, I'm not all that happy with recent trends in this country and I don't think I'll be able to influence things for the better. There's a lot of talk about liberty and freedom around here, but less and less actual liberty and freedom every year. I want to leave while I'm still able to, but there are a few responsibilities I need to take care of first.
you need a free education in order to have something intelligent to say
You're radically overstating the value of formal education, let alone publically provided formal education. To counter what appears to be a serious reality distortion field in your vicinity, I suggest you look up the definition of autodidact.
Libraries, my family's bookshelves, and now the internet have provided me more education than any public school ever did. BTW, my definition for autodidact: someone who hasn't had the hunger for learning burned out of them by public schooling.
you need free healthcare to be able to live long enough to be heard
Yeah, cause in the US, where almost everyone has to pay for their healthcare, nobody lives to be thirty. No wait, that's not right either...
Your arguments seem to put a lot of responsibility for your fundamental abilities on other people (teachers and medical professionals in these two sentences alone). I suggest you look inward and attempt to build up an ability to speak for yourself without all the external scaffolding. At least at that point, you'll be certain that what you're saying is all yours.
The wife already gets upset if I take the laptop to the crapper.
Buy the wife her own laptop. Make it a little nicer than the one you already have. Then you can take your laptop to the crapper and nobody should be upset in the slightest.
Can you point to any high quality off the shelf software that was agiled?
I do happen to know of a few cases:
Quicken uses agile processes for many of their retail products, though I can't say for certain exactly which retail products are definitely agile and which are not.
Symantec and McAfee both heavily rely on XP practices for their various products, including their anti-virus offerings.
Almost all of the linux distributions that you can buy have thousands of open-source sub-projects, the vast majority of which are agile to one degree or another.
(please do not consider mention on this list a recommendation of any product, I don't particularly care for Norton or McAfee Anti-Virus)
I personally feel that retail boxed software is a relic of a bygone era, of the same source that gifted us with software engineering. I usually walk right by those sections in stores, preferring to browse online for downloadable software, and usually choosing an open-source offering over anything I have to pay for.
The only retail software products I've bought in the last five years were all Adobe Photoshop (7, CS, CS2). And I have no idea how agile Adobe is.
Engineering died in the last decade (or maybe it's just in a coma) and things like agile (which is really just a formal declaration that engineering is hard so we're not going to do it) have really taken hold.
Software engineering was an unfortunate experiment that attempted to segregate the value of high-level design from low-level design from coding. It's a bad plan because it makes poor assumptions about what software development really is (hint: it's not similar to either making widgets or building a bridge).
I prefer agile processes to engineering processes because lots of up-front effort does not mitigate the actual risks of delivering a web service, or many other classes of modern application. The risk is fast moving competitors, and if you wait to code until you've designed, and wait to design until you've got all the requirements, I've just eaten your lunch.
There is this culture of non-engineering surrounding rails, there is almost contempt for it.
Be careful that you don't confuse "non-engineering" with "non-designed". Though I happen to agree with you in this case for either meaning, there's a subtext running throughout your post which assumes that anyone who disdains "software engineering" is also against skilled and effective design. Personally, I feel that effective design is the first skill of software development (and you already know what I think about software engineering:).
Further, this awareness of the importance of design is widespread. Advocates of agile processes acknowledge that agile projects absolutely depend on experienced and highly skilled designers in order to have any chance at success. What agile processes don't do is require designers to create a design document which can be passed on to the coders. (The designers are also the coders, and important info about the design may be written down somewhere, but only if that's known to be a useful practice.)
An ounce of gold today buys about the same thing that an ounce of gold did in 1800 and an ounce of gold in 0 AD.
This statement is only true for a very carefully selected group of products (and almost no services). While an ounce of gold will still buy a nice men's suit of about the same relative quality as you might buy in 1800, for pretty much everything else, an ounce of gold will not buy you the same things you could get in 1800. This is due to relative changes in value of purchasables, especially the value of human services as compared to physical goods. The comparison to 0AD prices is that much more crazy (just because you can find one product that could be traded for about the same gold does not mean that there's equal value behind an ounce of gold over time).
Even more importantly, your assertion about the consistency of value behind an ounce of gold glosses over huge currency to value changes (hyper inflation and deflation) that have disrupted local economies and created great misery until things restabilized.
If the available interest rate of savings accounts is above the inflation rate, there is an incentive to save. Yet the available interest rate is set by the same organization that prints the new paper currency!
Actually, a particular consumer bank's savings account interest rate is not set by the federal reserve and only bears the slightest relationship to any of the interest rates they do set. The biggest problem is that banks earn a lot more money from debt than from savings and are disincented from providing savings services, except as necessary to maintain their fractional reserves. How to correct this imbalance of incentives? It's more complex than you think.
My money is stable, and I don't fear stock market fluctuations, war, imperialism or a global loss of faith in the dollar.
Gold ended up being devalued hugely in the late '70's and early '80's (from about $800/oz to $300/oz in 1976 USD) and many people who thought like you do lost substantial fractions of their savings because they had fearfully put all of their money in gold as a hedge against disaster. Which turned out to be disastrous for them once the oil crisis passed.
Is your future safe?
Actually, pretty risky. Almost all of my money is in my home and will soon be in my own entrepreneurial venture. But I'm convinced that that's the best place for it, despite the risk that the company could fail. The independence and potential upside are too compelling to ignore.
would you mind reading just one free tiny e-book that covers mine? http://www.mises.org/money.asp This is Rothbard's basic book regarding money and what government has done to destroy the economy.
I went ahead and read it, and the author makes the same mistake that all advocates of the gold standard make: they fail to understand that currency and value are separate. Further, the author completely misunderstands the role of the central bank (The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank) in a paper money economy: which is to stabilize the relationship between currency and value. This deliberate stabilization is impossible in a gold standard economy (more precisely, there are too many players who can influence the quantity of currency in circulation in a gold standard economy to know who they are, let alone understand their motivations).
I admit, most people don't understand why certain pieces of paper are more valuable than others, but that lack of understanding does not mean that we should revert to the gold standard (which has an equally misunderstood relationship between currency and value). All the gold standard buys you is less control.
Government destroyed our currency by getting off of a 100% reserve system in 1913. It has destroyed any reason to save (the best way to create a strong economy is through savings, not public credit),
This statement presupposes that inflation alone is a disincentive to savings. Which is false.
The incentive to save is based on relative returns. If the available interest rate of savings accounts is above the inflation rate, there is an incentive to save. At the moment, this is not true. After taxes, bank interest rates on savings accounts, most CD's and most money markets are below the inflation rate. But this inversion of returns, and the problematic incentives that provides is a recent (over the last 20 years) event, not stretching back to 1913.
You'll have to come up with another theory. I agree that bank regulation is to blame, but to describe a new set of regulations that provide for banks to make a profit on savings and to offer a competitive interest rate is beyond my limited knowledge of economics and monetary theory.
But in regards to nuclear weapons, I support complete nuclear disarmament... If private citizens are not allowed to own nuclear weapons, then I think governments should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons either.
I REALLY like this argument. It takes all of the specious nonsense of the nuclear weapon argument and turns it on it's head.
DSL capacity is also oversold by most(all) ILEC providers (SWB and Verizon in my area). In order to get guaranteed bandwidth, you have to go to a CLEC and usually, you'll pay more. Finally, those CLECs are quickly disappearing with the newer rules, leaving everyone with the same oversold DSL capacity.
Because if I know for a fact my cell phone has excellent coverage in an area, and I can't call 9-1-1 cause my grandad has a heart attack in the theatre and we didn't know the cell was being jammed beforehand, I will sue their asses off.
Especially if the theater staff forcibly silences you when you call out for a doctor and for someone to call 911. That will really give you a reason to sue them. It will help your suit still more if you start frequenting theaters that deliberately block the whole building instead of just the theater areas, and then for the icing on the cake, you need to find a theater that doesn't have any wired phones on the premises. After all, if you were able to yell out for another patron or employee and have them make the 911 call for you, your grandad might live, and keep you from your rightfully earned wrongful death lawsuit.
If you can find such a combination of circumstances, sue away. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. The extra ten seconds to leave the theater that it will take to make a call to 911 is a complete non issue and for you to be pretending that it might make a difference in a medical emergency is beyond ridiculous.
Based on the clueless ranting in this topic, an uninformed reader might feel that there was no way to communicate with others before the invention of the mobile phone. I, personally, find it amazing that people were actually able to live in those days...
As much as it'll be a shame, I can't wait until someone dies in a movie theater, and everyone there claims they couldn't get any reception to reach 911.
Yeah, because then they'll all be labelled freaking idiots for (1) not yelling for a doctor, (2) not leaving the theater to make a call on a mobile phone, (3) not asking one of the theater's staff to make a call on any wired telephone and (4) not leaving the theater and asking a manager to (a) stop the movie, (b) turn on the lights and (c) disable the fully controllable RF-blocking nanopaint.
Anyone getting their panties in a twist over this (or mobile phone jamming in general) needs a serious reality check. How did the world ever get by before mobile phones? A puzzle for the ages, to be sure.
At best, there will need to be a sign outside the theater that cell phones will not function during the feature. Any doctor on call will then know that they shouldn't see a movie in this theater while they're on call. Any parent can call the babysitter from the lobby and provide them the number for the theater instead (if they weren't smart enough to do this.
I don't own an active jammer yet, but I'm more and more tempted to get and use one (1) in the car and (2) when I go to movies. Fucking idiots who think their phone call is more important than everything else around them.
I hate to sound like a World Vision commercial, but how the hell can we justify trying to use food as a fuel for our cars when there are millions of people in the world starving?
There is a substantial surplus of calories today, and the world has never had a higher number of calories per person as this year. The problem that leads to starvation in some areas of the world is a failure of distribution, usually because local despots create an economy where all resources go towards military superiority, leaving nothing for other economic interests.
At this point, we would have to dedicate about 60% of current US agricultural output to alcohol & oil production to eliminate dependance on external oil. Eliminating the various subsidies for farmers while dramatically expanding the markets for farm crops would almost certainly eliminate much/most of the wastage while increasing farmer income, and eliminate a looming problem the US is about to have with the WTO.
How much we could actually reduce our dependance on foreign oil? There's not enough information yet. Be interesting to give it a shot.
'Biofuels' are not only an incredibly inefficient use of farming land
Really? Are you sure? Estimates and system designs I've read about state that you can run a 10,000 acre farm on biodiesel if you dedicate about 250 acres to rapeseed and have a decent biodiesel plant (the various saleable products from the biodiesel process just about offset the supplies needed to produce biodiesel from seed oil).
Don't know how you're measuring efficiency, but that sounds pretty efficient to me.
they are also a startling example of just how completely oblivious we are to the needs of human beings unfortunate enough not to live in modern technologically advanced nations.
Again, this isn't a problem of production. It's a problem of distribution. Those people can't pay for the grain/beans/etc. and when you try to give it to them for free, the local warlord takes the grain/beans/etc. and trades it for guns. Not exactly a strong incentive to give more.
It's a frustrating situation, I agree. But not using the grain for biofuels because there are people starving (who won't get the grain either) sounds a lot like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I read that list (drugs, poverty, crime or terrorists) as things the government claims it's trying to stop, but routinely fails to actually stop.
I did not read it as a list of things that the government should be trying to stop. Actually, the way that list was presented would lead me to believe that the gp doesn't think the government should be trying to stop drugs, poverty, or terrorism, and that the government is simply doing a bad job with crime.
Assuming you've actually successfully completed the experiment the gp described, you've got a front page New York Times article, and probably a paper in Nature if you like. Don't know about speaking engagements, but I suspect that there will be a number of lawyers who would like to have you as a material witness in the new group of class action law suits that would be filed immediately following the publication of your articles.
Beyond that point, who knows. If you've got a head that can reliably detect cellphone radiation, Letterman will have you on...
Basically, though, we (most of the replies to your messages) doubt you've actually conducted a double-blind experiment like the one the gp described and that the cause of the headache is something other than the phone (i.e. you).
Slashdot Mirror
Your math doesn't make much sense. Let's start from the other end and see how things end up. First question, why are you taking so many classes?
With a 2:1 ratio, spending 12 hours every weekday (no weekend time) on schoolwork means that you're taking a 20 credit-hour classload (12 * 5 / (2 + 1)). Try a 15 credit-hour load, which results in about 45 hours per week spent in class or homework/prep time for a class. Often, you can knock out a decent fraction of that on the weekend, meaning that you're spending less time during the week than someone working at a full time job. If you can't manage that, you've may have issues once you hit the real world.
If you're trying to work a 20 hour/week job on top of a 20 credit hour classload, you'll need more than good time management skills to succeed at both, you'll need a time machine. 80 hours a week is a guaranteed burnout. When I had a part-time job, I wouldn't take more than 14 credit-hours and I tried to keep it down to 12.
Why people don't do this sort of simple planning before signing up for classes makes no sense to me. I see graduate students taking five! 4 credit classes (which is a nearly impossible classload since graduate level classes often require 3+ hours per hour of classroom time) and working as a TA or RA to pay the bills. When they burn out and/or get 'C's in their classes, they all express frustration that teachers wanted too much of their time and there wasn't any way to get it all done. Of course there wasn't enough time! Basic math skills would tell you that!
So go back and try your math again. See if you can come up with a way to balance your life while giving yourself enough time to succeed in class. Your last attempt wasn't all that effective.
Regards,
Ross
Trying to engage with a classroom where even a small number are "elsewhere", whether reading a paper, IM'ing with friends, checking phone messages, sleeping, etc. is extremely difficult and many times almost impossible.
Don't get me started on cell phones.
Reminding people to mute their laptops each and every time they come to class gets old real fast. And having two or three confrontations about laptop/cell noises per class is it's own serious disruption of the learning environment. Getting it all out of the way on the first day with a "no laptops" rule and a "phone rings, leave the classroom immediately" rule just makes it clear where your priorities are: in the classroom.
Finally, for the few people who actually want to be there and who intend to take notes on a laptop, transcribing written notes into your computer is much more effective than simply typing notes in the first place (assuming you most effectively learn from notes/note taking). If you haven't made this observation so far, consider my classroom an opportunity to test it out for yourself.
On attendance policies, it depends on the subject area. If the class is a discussion-type class, attendance is important and should be part of the grade. On the other hand, if the class can be self-taught (where the lectures are more Q&A sessions), then attendance policies force people who have no desire to be there to attend and be bored, interfering with the students who really want to be there.
Regards,
Ross
I don't have time to read the 40+ pages for each topic to get the 2 or 3 pages the professor is actually planning to cover.
Since when is preparing 40 pages some sort of undue burden? In microelectronics, which had the most densely packed book in my undergraduate education, we usually had to cover one or two chapters per lecture (40 pages might have been a minimum). Preparing meant spending at most two hours on (1) a fifteen minute skim over the material (2) an in-depth reading of a few topics to the point that I could get started on the chapter questions.
For a liberal arts subject, 100+ pages of Conrad might make for a challenge, but most of the time, I could read and go back over 100 pages of anything but the most difficult writers in again: two hours.
For 90% of my undergraduate classes, if the homework wasn't the prep, I could get ready for the next lecture in about 30 minutes. Some of my peers labelled me a brown-noser simply because I was one of the few students who was actually carrying on a discussion with the teacher in the classroom. What crap.
Oh, I know I havn't assigned homework in a couple of weeks, so do problems 47 through 92 by the next class period. Great, that's probably 6 hours of work
In general, professors at my school assigned work that they expected would take 2 hours per hour of classroom time. Bigger assignments mean longer deadlines. Any professor that pulled a stunt like you describe would get a question raised about the due date in class and call from the ombudsman's office that night if the deadline didn't get pushed back.
Regards,
Ross
But its a university, the students are expected to take the responsibility of ensuring their understanding. Banning laptops is simply patronizing. If somebody wants to focus on rote transcription, that's his perogative, and she should let him be.
What about the person who is focusing on the web or personal business, reading news, the web, IM'ing with friends, updating their MySpace background...
The professor in this case is being charitable with her stated reasons. Most laptops are distractions from the learning environment and most students could use a little patronizing if it succeeds in adjusting their behavior and making the classroom a better learning environment for everyone who actually wants to be there.
Regards,
Ross
As a student I've run into professors like you. Unfortunately not all of us roll over quite so easily. On the contrary, some of us are quite vocal and will work to make things change our way. I led a petition drive that successfully reverted a policy change implemented mid-semester; similar to this case. I was also an RA at the time and went to bat for several students who were getting pushed over by manipulative professors.
Any sane ombudsman will see right through the "I'm paying your salary" bullshit and side with the professor who threw out a disruptive student. On the other hand, professors who grade people who disagree with them lower (especially in contentious topics) should be roundly smacked around by that same ombudsman. Each case will be different, and just because you've met some awful professors in your day doesn't mean that the gp is one of them.
The teacher is responsible for maintaining a learning environment for everyone in the class. One spoiled child can and should be thrown out of a class in order to restore a decent learning environment for the rest of the class. Even more on-topic, ubiquitous wireless internet means that most students with laptops are not paying attention, but are browsing the web, taking care of personal business, etc. If you aren't participating in the class, take yourself elsewhere. Removing the laptops from the classroom is just about the only way to limit that sort of highly disruptive behavior and actually give other students what they're paying for.
Regards,
Ross
Of course not. Japan has eaten through it's tree population and is not having to import every square inch of wood.
Actually, Japan has the highest percentage of forestation of any first world country (almost 70%).
As for other imports of Japan, you are more correct: they import much of their food, including staples like rice and seafood. This puts the population of the island at risk in the event of instability of their trading network. The modern economic environment, however, means that the population of Japan is not at risk as long as the world remains somewhat stable and demand for their products remains strong.
The declining birth rate there and in most developed countries is one of the few pieces of good news in the long-term story of human survival on this planet. IMO anyway.
Regards,
Ross
As a surgeon, I've stopped going out to lunch because...
eating reduces my cutting time.
(I'm not a surgeon)
If MS Access is good enough, PostgreSQL would have been massive overkill.
:o)
Good for you for getting that right. A lot of skilled devs won't use anything but the tools they already know, even if there is an astonishingly simpler tool that will get the job done in 10% of the time.
Personally, I think of everything as Java + PostgreSQL, so I've still got a lot of room to grow
Regards,
Ross
It's pronounced "postgres". The "Q" and "L" are silent.
Most of the time anyway.
Regards,
Ross
Most people pronounce the name "postgres" (with a silent QL). A brief history of the name is here.
Even more briefly: Starting in 1986, there was a database named POSTGRES developed at Berkeley by a team led by Professor Michael Stonebraker. In 1994, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen strapped a SQL front-end on the database and called the result "Postgres95". Since that name wouldn't last very long, it was renamed "PostgreSQL" in 1996 and it's stuck since then.
If you say "postgres" in most dev shops, they'll know what you mean (yes, even if they're using something else).
Regards,
Ross
I think it bears pointing out that virtually all libraries that are accessible to the general public are publicly provided. Not formal, perhaps, but definitely tax-supported, at least in the United States.
You are, of course, completely correct. However, I wasn't arguing against tax-supported institutions, just observing that the "free" public education system in the US isn't the best or only way to learn enough to participate in our democracy.
The original argument was that you can't exercise free speech without a free education... Which has been thoroughly rebutted.
Regards,
Ross
I would like to see you enter the job market with the "I taught myself" mentality - yes it has worked for some who have formed their own companies and been in the right place at the right time, however for anything you say to be taken seriously, you need to back yourself up with some form of credentials.
So, unless I provide you some form of concrete identity, you won't believe that each year, thousands upon thousands of highly gifted people find fulfilling work and lives after dropping out of high school? Why not look it up for yourself and stop making my point for me?
As for my story, I acquired a diploma from a public high school, and earned a bachelor's degree from a state university, then started learning most of the skills I use in my day-to-day work. Since then, I've started two companies (a consulting firm and a web-services company), both of which were profitable from day one.
On the other hand, my fiance dropped out of high school, completed her GED, got an associate's degree, a teaching credential, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and is now working on the dissertation of her PhD. After high school, she paid the tuition for all of that being a elementary school teacher, tutor, etc. (well, I'm paying for the Ph.D., but it's our money). She started being an effective autodidact long before I did...
Secondly, the last time I checked they did not have a public-use lab at any of the places you mentioned (computer lab does not count) not to mention adequate access to scientific journals (larger public libraries do, however nowhere near the range offered at most tertiary institutions) Thirdly, it is far harder to get a research grant acting as an individual.
Did you think I argued that self-learners avoid universities? You didn't read the Wikipedia article I linked to. Universities are very important and useful to lots of kinds of people, autodidacts included. As an aside, an autodidact probably won't get the same thing as someone attending because their parents expect them to and are footing the bill...
Most importantly, universities (1) aren't freely provided and (2) you don't need to attend one in order to have a political identity or express a political opinion (i.e. attending a university only contradicts the original post, not my rebuttal).
At the end of the day, I just wanted to say that the US isn't as great as it is cracked up to be - the year that I lived there really opened my eyes up as to how my own country is way better and the only reason that I would ever return (to the US) is to see my family (grandparents etc).
You may be suprised to find that my family and I are looking to emigrate from the US in the next few years and we're not alone. Personally, I'm not all that happy with recent trends in this country and I don't think I'll be able to influence things for the better. There's a lot of talk about liberty and freedom around here, but less and less actual liberty and freedom every year. I want to leave while I'm still able to, but there are a few responsibilities I need to take care of first.
Regards,
Ross
you need a free education in order to have something intelligent to say
You're radically overstating the value of formal education, let alone publically provided formal education. To counter what appears to be a serious reality distortion field in your vicinity, I suggest you look up the definition of autodidact.
Libraries, my family's bookshelves, and now the internet have provided me more education than any public school ever did. BTW, my definition for autodidact: someone who hasn't had the hunger for learning burned out of them by public schooling.
you need free healthcare to be able to live long enough to be heard
Yeah, cause in the US, where almost everyone has to pay for their healthcare, nobody lives to be thirty. No wait, that's not right either...
Your arguments seem to put a lot of responsibility for your fundamental abilities on other people (teachers and medical professionals in these two sentences alone). I suggest you look inward and attempt to build up an ability to speak for yourself without all the external scaffolding. At least at that point, you'll be certain that what you're saying is all yours.
Regards,
Ross
The wife already gets upset if I take the laptop to the crapper.
Buy the wife her own laptop. Make it a little nicer than the one you already have. Then you can take your laptop to the crapper and nobody should be upset in the slightest.
Worked for me.
Regards,
Ross
I do happen to know of a few cases:
(please do not consider mention on this list a recommendation of any product, I don't particularly care for Norton or McAfee Anti-Virus)
I personally feel that retail boxed software is a relic of a bygone era, of the same source that gifted us with software engineering. I usually walk right by those sections in stores, preferring to browse online for downloadable software, and usually choosing an open-source offering over anything I have to pay for.
The only retail software products I've bought in the last five years were all Adobe Photoshop (7, CS, CS2). And I have no idea how agile Adobe is.
Regards,
Ross
Engineering died in the last decade (or maybe it's just in a coma) and things like agile (which is really just a formal declaration that engineering is hard so we're not going to do it) have really taken hold.
:).
Software engineering was an unfortunate experiment that attempted to segregate the value of high-level design from low-level design from coding. It's a bad plan because it makes poor assumptions about what software development really is (hint: it's not similar to either making widgets or building a bridge).
I prefer agile processes to engineering processes because lots of up-front effort does not mitigate the actual risks of delivering a web service, or many other classes of modern application. The risk is fast moving competitors, and if you wait to code until you've designed, and wait to design until you've got all the requirements, I've just eaten your lunch.
There is this culture of non-engineering surrounding rails, there is almost contempt for it.
Be careful that you don't confuse "non-engineering" with "non-designed". Though I happen to agree with you in this case for either meaning, there's a subtext running throughout your post which assumes that anyone who disdains "software engineering" is also against skilled and effective design. Personally, I feel that effective design is the first skill of software development (and you already know what I think about software engineering
Further, this awareness of the importance of design is widespread. Advocates of agile processes acknowledge that agile projects absolutely depend on experienced and highly skilled designers in order to have any chance at success. What agile processes don't do is require designers to create a design document which can be passed on to the coders. (The designers are also the coders, and important info about the design may be written down somewhere, but only if that's known to be a useful practice.)
Regards,
Ross
An ounce of gold today buys about the same thing that an ounce of gold did in 1800 and an ounce of gold in 0 AD.
This statement is only true for a very carefully selected group of products (and almost no services). While an ounce of gold will still buy a nice men's suit of about the same relative quality as you might buy in 1800, for pretty much everything else, an ounce of gold will not buy you the same things you could get in 1800. This is due to relative changes in value of purchasables, especially the value of human services as compared to physical goods. The comparison to 0AD prices is that much more crazy (just because you can find one product that could be traded for about the same gold does not mean that there's equal value behind an ounce of gold over time).
Even more importantly, your assertion about the consistency of value behind an ounce of gold glosses over huge currency to value changes (hyper inflation and deflation) that have disrupted local economies and created great misery until things restabilized.
If the available interest rate of savings accounts is above the inflation rate, there is an incentive to save.
Yet the available interest rate is set by the same organization that prints the new paper currency!
Actually, a particular consumer bank's savings account interest rate is not set by the federal reserve and only bears the slightest relationship to any of the interest rates they do set. The biggest problem is that banks earn a lot more money from debt than from savings and are disincented from providing savings services, except as necessary to maintain their fractional reserves. How to correct this imbalance of incentives? It's more complex than you think.
My money is stable, and I don't fear stock market fluctuations, war, imperialism or a global loss of faith in the dollar.
Gold ended up being devalued hugely in the late '70's and early '80's (from about $800/oz to $300/oz in 1976 USD) and many people who thought like you do lost substantial fractions of their savings because they had fearfully put all of their money in gold as a hedge against disaster. Which turned out to be disastrous for them once the oil crisis passed.
Is your future safe?
Actually, pretty risky. Almost all of my money is in my home and will soon be in my own entrepreneurial venture. But I'm convinced that that's the best place for it, despite the risk that the company could fail. The independence and potential upside are too compelling to ignore.
Regards,
Ross
would you mind reading just one free tiny e-book that covers mine? http://www.mises.org/money.asp This is Rothbard's basic book regarding money and what government has done to destroy the economy.
I went ahead and read it, and the author makes the same mistake that all advocates of the gold standard make: they fail to understand that currency and value are separate. Further, the author completely misunderstands the role of the central bank (The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank) in a paper money economy: which is to stabilize the relationship between currency and value. This deliberate stabilization is impossible in a gold standard economy (more precisely, there are too many players who can influence the quantity of currency in circulation in a gold standard economy to know who they are, let alone understand their motivations).
I admit, most people don't understand why certain pieces of paper are more valuable than others, but that lack of understanding does not mean that we should revert to the gold standard (which has an equally misunderstood relationship between currency and value). All the gold standard buys you is less control.
Government destroyed our currency by getting off of a 100% reserve system in 1913. It has destroyed any reason to save (the best way to create a strong economy is through savings, not public credit),
This statement presupposes that inflation alone is a disincentive to savings. Which is false.
The incentive to save is based on relative returns. If the available interest rate of savings accounts is above the inflation rate, there is an incentive to save. At the moment, this is not true. After taxes, bank interest rates on savings accounts, most CD's and most money markets are below the inflation rate. But this inversion of returns, and the problematic incentives that provides is a recent (over the last 20 years) event, not stretching back to 1913.
You'll have to come up with another theory. I agree that bank regulation is to blame, but to describe a new set of regulations that provide for banks to make a profit on savings and to offer a competitive interest rate is beyond my limited knowledge of economics and monetary theory.
Regards,
Ross
But in regards to nuclear weapons, I support complete nuclear disarmament... If private citizens are not allowed to own nuclear weapons, then I think governments should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons either.
I REALLY like this argument. It takes all of the specious nonsense of the nuclear weapon argument and turns it on it's head.
Regards,
Ross
DSL capacity is also oversold by most(all) ILEC providers (SWB and Verizon in my area). In order to get guaranteed bandwidth, you have to go to a CLEC and usually, you'll pay more. Finally, those CLECs are quickly disappearing with the newer rules, leaving everyone with the same oversold DSL capacity.
Still better than cable...
Regards,
Ross
Because if I know for a fact my cell phone has excellent coverage in an area, and I can't call 9-1-1 cause my grandad has a heart attack in the theatre and we didn't know the cell was being jammed beforehand, I will sue their asses off.
Especially if the theater staff forcibly silences you when you call out for a doctor and for someone to call 911. That will really give you a reason to sue them. It will help your suit still more if you start frequenting theaters that deliberately block the whole building instead of just the theater areas, and then for the icing on the cake, you need to find a theater that doesn't have any wired phones on the premises. After all, if you were able to yell out for another patron or employee and have them make the 911 call for you, your grandad might live, and keep you from your rightfully earned wrongful death lawsuit.
If you can find such a combination of circumstances, sue away. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. The extra ten seconds to leave the theater that it will take to make a call to 911 is a complete non issue and for you to be pretending that it might make a difference in a medical emergency is beyond ridiculous.
Based on the clueless ranting in this topic, an uninformed reader might feel that there was no way to communicate with others before the invention of the mobile phone. I, personally, find it amazing that people were actually able to live in those days...
Ross
As much as it'll be a shame, I can't wait until someone dies in a movie theater, and everyone there claims they couldn't get any reception to reach 911.
Yeah, because then they'll all be labelled freaking idiots for (1) not yelling for a doctor, (2) not leaving the theater to make a call on a mobile phone, (3) not asking one of the theater's staff to make a call on any wired telephone and (4) not leaving the theater and asking a manager to (a) stop the movie, (b) turn on the lights and (c) disable the fully controllable RF-blocking nanopaint.
Anyone getting their panties in a twist over this (or mobile phone jamming in general) needs a serious reality check. How did the world ever get by before mobile phones? A puzzle for the ages, to be sure.
At best, there will need to be a sign outside the theater that cell phones will not function during the feature. Any doctor on call will then know that they shouldn't see a movie in this theater while they're on call. Any parent can call the babysitter from the lobby and provide them the number for the theater instead (if they weren't smart enough to do this.
I don't own an active jammer yet, but I'm more and more tempted to get and use one (1) in the car and (2) when I go to movies. Fucking idiots who think their phone call is more important than everything else around them.
Ross
I hate to sound like a World Vision commercial, but how the hell can we justify trying to use food as a fuel for our cars when there are millions of people in the world starving?
There is a substantial surplus of calories today, and the world has never had a higher number of calories per person as this year. The problem that leads to starvation in some areas of the world is a failure of distribution, usually because local despots create an economy where all resources go towards military superiority, leaving nothing for other economic interests.
At this point, we would have to dedicate about 60% of current US agricultural output to alcohol & oil production to eliminate dependance on external oil. Eliminating the various subsidies for farmers while dramatically expanding the markets for farm crops would almost certainly eliminate much/most of the wastage while increasing farmer income, and eliminate a looming problem the US is about to have with the WTO.
How much we could actually reduce our dependance on foreign oil? There's not enough information yet. Be interesting to give it a shot.
'Biofuels' are not only an incredibly inefficient use of farming land
Really? Are you sure? Estimates and system designs I've read about state that you can run a 10,000 acre farm on biodiesel if you dedicate about 250 acres to rapeseed and have a decent biodiesel plant (the various saleable products from the biodiesel process just about offset the supplies needed to produce biodiesel from seed oil).
Don't know how you're measuring efficiency, but that sounds pretty efficient to me.
they are also a startling example of just how completely oblivious we are to the needs of human beings unfortunate enough not to live in modern technologically advanced nations.
Again, this isn't a problem of production. It's a problem of distribution. Those people can't pay for the grain/beans/etc. and when you try to give it to them for free, the local warlord takes the grain/beans/etc. and trades it for guns. Not exactly a strong incentive to give more.
It's a frustrating situation, I agree. But not using the grain for biofuels because there are people starving (who won't get the grain either) sounds a lot like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Regards,
Ross
I read that list (drugs, poverty, crime or terrorists) as things the government claims it's trying to stop, but routinely fails to actually stop.
I did not read it as a list of things that the government should be trying to stop. Actually, the way that list was presented would lead me to believe that the gp doesn't think the government should be trying to stop drugs, poverty, or terrorism, and that the government is simply doing a bad job with crime.
But maybe I'm projecting too much...
Regards,
Ross
Assuming you've actually successfully completed the experiment the gp described, you've got a front page New York Times article, and probably a paper in Nature if you like. Don't know about speaking engagements, but I suspect that there will be a number of lawyers who would like to have you as a material witness in the new group of class action law suits that would be filed immediately following the publication of your articles.
Beyond that point, who knows. If you've got a head that can reliably detect cellphone radiation, Letterman will have you on...
Basically, though, we (most of the replies to your messages) doubt you've actually conducted a double-blind experiment like the one the gp described and that the cause of the headache is something other than the phone (i.e. you).
Regards,
Ross