Eh. I hated the exams in CS, and was good at the programming (which is a weird reversal for me, but I digress).
The point is, if you could do okay on the exams, and good on the programs, you'd do fine in the class. The exams were usually nothing but book theory and pseudo-code. The programs were take home work. It would be trivial to go to a coder-for-hire board and outsource it.
Judging by the performance of my peers, I think many CS majors didn't learn a damn thing about programming in school. This would explain why.
Shrug. I think it'd be more work to fake your way through a liberal arts class than a big math/science class. I took classes that had more than 1000 students in the section, where the exams were given by TA's who'd probably never seen you before.
For the price of a fake student ID, you could have someone take the exams FOR you. Easy. I once took a geology class where I only came to class for the exams, and aced the whole course. I did roughly the same for physics (I went to the practicums religiously, but never to class). I never saw my TA at the exams, and, indeed, I took the exams at the wrong location every time, due to a scheduling conflict. My professor might have been there, but I don't know because I didn't know what he looked like.
In short, just because this guy specializes in liberal arts, doesn't mean there aren't people out there who can churn out easy science classes. And saying that, "Well you couldn't do hard science classes" misses the point: the people who do this stuff are doing it to knock off course requirements. It'd be equally hard to bluff your way through higher level liberal arts classes, with maybe 10 other students, and a heavy dependence on class participation.
Agreed. If your class has a written component, your exam should have a written component. IF you put them both together, it should be obvious who is having their papers ghostwritten.
Most writing-heavy classes I took had short essay midterms and finals, with 2-3 papers. I'm not sure why this isn't the case anymore...Even in the old days, frats, sports teams, whatever, would keep papers from their older members, and recycle them after a few years. If you don't make the student do some work in front of you, how do you know for sure they're doing any work at all?
Shrug. It's perfectly valid to end up an ethical relativist after taking an ethics class. Or a utilitarian. Neither one would see anything wrong with writing term papers for a living.
I've taken a ton of ethics classes; none of them have any component that deals with how you ought to live your life. They deal with various theories, what they say, and what their flaws are.
Shrug. If he's written any papers on ethics, he'll probably know that most modern ethical theory is relativist: you may think he's wrong, but your opinion carries no more weight than his. It's been more than a hundred years since a good moral absolutist entered the scene.
That's pretty much why I stopped taking ethics classes.
Frankly you can get in trouble if it's too good in college. You don't want something that will stand out, especially if you're not going to buy ALL your papers.
There are valuable humanities courses, but yea, there is a lot of bullshit as well. I was a Cog. Sci. major (Philosophy, Comp Sci, Neuroanatomy), so I was forever dealing with people on both sides of the fence.
Math people largely think that all humanities are a complete waste, and extra-ordinarily easy: then they take a hard class, do poorly, and claim that this proves it's all bullshit, rather than proving that there are actual skills involved and they don't have them.
Humanities people by and large think that heavy science loads are inapplicable to the "real world" and only useful if you're going to be doing it for a living. They get bitter if you try to make them take those courses, and therefore there are always a few easy science classes out there for the humanities people.
I went to a school that required 2 math, 2 science, 2 english, and 2 sociology classes to graduate, regardless of your major. It was a good thing. You could tell because EVERYONE hated it.
The final for my highest logic course had only one problem, open book, open notes, books from the library, whatever. The goal was to prove A && ~A from three givens, and I did it in 2 hours, with 92 steps, which was four better than the professors answer.
And all the guys in comp sci mocked me because philosophy was "useless" and couldn't understand why I was the better coder.
In short, I don't see how bringing a grad would help in a logic exam (even less than a math exam, because you always know the answer, since you're either proving something is true or false) and despite philosophies reputation, no logic prof I had would have allowed any such nitpickery.
Well they should let these fuckers know. That was the last time I bought a game there (no loss, since their selection sucks). I don't remember the exact time, but it was when F3 was new, so about 2 years ago?
My take on it was that they had no right to fucking ask in the first place, as there is no law that says that they're allowed to demand ID for those in the first place.
And also, according to their investor relations page, they absolutely still card, as of this year.
With that premise, Best Buy recognizes the concerns regarding the content of certain video and PC games. It's why the company currently has a "mature" product sales policy in place that prohibits the sale of video and computer games rated M (as defined by the Entertainment Software Rating Board) to customers under the age of 17 years old. The policy requires employees to check the age of any customer purchasing M-rated video or computer games who appears to be under the age of 21. All store employees are required to read the policy and sign an acknowledgement of the policy on their first day of employment. Failure to follow the policy results in discipline, which may include termination.
"Do you enjoy being able to nip down to the shop to buy a game?"
I don't know where you shop, but I can get anally violated without lube for free. 90% of brick and mortar retailers deserve to die. The 10% that don't aren't going to go down because of this.
"Do you enjoy being able to resell software?"
No. I don't resell books either. Or music. Or movies. Or food. Why is this always considered to be a huge negative? I never resold my college textbooks for the same exact reason: some sweaty resaler with a fuck-you grin, knowing they're going to make 300% off my ass without having to lift a finger. Fuck them. You don't want to pay a lot of money for it, just wait a few months or a year.
I kinda wish steam would do more DLC...They tend to get it eventually, but until they do you're dealing with the developer, and that's a pain in the ass. Waiting for the game to connect to the developer ON TOP of your steam connection, to validate the dlc isn't cool.
Pssh. One of the last games I bought as physical media was Fallout 3, and the fucking hoops I had to jump through for that were a goddamn joke, from the annoying ass clerk at best buy (Card ME? ME? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm fucking OLD!), to microsofts DLC hoops, which were vastly more annoying than dealing with steam.
Why the hell wouldn't I just use Steam? The one time my internet went down for any length of time, the playing experience was as good or better.
Complaining about excessive taxes today is absurd. They're as low as they've ever been.
My take on the stupid healthcare bill is that, now that they've finally broken the taboo, more meaningful legislation is possible in the name of "fixing" the bill which everyone agrees is a crappy compromise.
Hard to throw down too hard on the stimulus, given that things did even out and improve after it was put in place. Yea, a lot of the money went out as loans to the states, so they wouldn't have to cut programs. That's life. It's easy to say, "OMG they paid for (thing that accounted for 1/1000000000th of the spending), what a WASTE!" but its not very honest, intellectually.
I've got a fucking annoying "shovel ready" project down the street from my house right now. So there are some.
Bush was the economists anti-christ. Defending the crap that dug us in the hole we're in, and complaining about other peoples attempts to get us out? I can't abide that. I wish things were going differently, but I know exactly how we got where we are.
Complaining about the bank bailout is pretty foolish at this point, considering it's on pace to make money. The only thing that irritated me about it is that the government loaned the idiots money, instead of just buying them outright for a fraction of the cost (in early 2008 we gave tens of billions to banks whose value on the market was depressed to less than 10 billion!)
Sure the conservatives would have screamed "SOCIALISM!" but that's the perfect way to deal with "too big to fail." Buy it up, and then dismantle it back into the private sector for a profit. Instead we just bought the shitty assets...Which wasn't a bad deal, mind. They'll break even with change to spare...but it was stupid.
Mind you, I don't agree with this as far as the auto companies go: they should have been allowed to tank. Bailing them out just makes them weak.
Apple does the things it does because Jobs isn't afraid of shit. It's not like other companies don't hate Adobe as well, but only Steve-o would be willing to drop his pants and scream "Suck my diiiiiick!" at Adobe.
And good on him. I don't think the web as a whole is ready to move off Adobe products, but Apple has a history of driving those sorts of migrations (floppy whats?) and advertisers and websites can't afford to ignore millions of iPhone/iPad owners, who are, by definition, possessed of more money than sense.
Actually, Keynes' reputation was made by the great depression, as well as by his book "The Consequences of the Peace" which predicted World War II 20 years in advance, just based on the economics of the situation.
It wasn't until the 70's when Friedman began to get traction...Traction that he held right up until 2007, when the bottom dropped out.
Rationally speaking, neither system is wholly correct. Friedman is correct that you can do a lot by manipulating the velocity of currency, but Keynes is correct that only the government has the power to spend when everyone else is afraid to.
Shrug. I think stimulus spending is a valid part of a response to an economic downturn, especially in the current situation, where the Fed had kept rates so low for so long (fueling the inevitable crash) that when the crash came, their power to adjust rates to stimulate lending was largely blunted.
Likewise, tax rates are exceptionally low right now (lower than Reagan!), so cutting taxes (especially taxes on the wealthy) isn't likely to have much effect either.
Lot of businesses in this country are keeping their money in their mattresses, even as we speak. We have a large rebound in profitability that isn't matched by hiring. At the same time, retail and tax-driven government services are forced to cut workers (due to shrinking revenues and/or tax base) and that's prolonging the problem.
Finally, I think that we're in dire need of infrastructure spending anyway and this is a way to build what is needed and stimulate the economy at the same time.
As far as the healthcare thing goes, my buiggest problem with it is that it perpetuates the effective monopoly of insurance companies, so in that we agree. I think that a public option, and the granting the ability for insurance companies to collectively negotiate against pharmaceutical companies would help immensely.
I disagree. Stimulus spending is considered by economists to be essential in pulling out of recessions. Putting the war spending IN the budget, instead of dishonestly pushing through money during the year is far better than the previous administrations policy. Healthcare is something that needs to be addressed, and while I think the bill sucks, at least it does SOMETHING.
Frankly, I can't think of anything more fiscally irresponsible than going to war without raising taxes (indeed, while LOWERING taxes).
While I wish that both sides were more fiscally conservative, I cannot support the idea that Obama is worse than Bush as far as spending goes.
Actually, it's exactly the opposite. If you get enough signatures to get on the ballot, then you qualify for public funding. So third parties are on an equal footing for funding, which would give them a much better chance.
Easier fix: all funding must come from the gov't, in equal (and relatively small) amounts for each candidate. Offer each candidate who gets the required number of signatures to be on the ballot, a set amount of TV time, a set amount of ad money, and tell everyone else to butt the fuck out of the process.
As long as you can win by drowning your opponent in money, the system is fucked.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh. I hated the exams in CS, and was good at the programming (which is a weird reversal for me, but I digress).
The point is, if you could do okay on the exams, and good on the programs, you'd do fine in the class. The exams were usually nothing but book theory and pseudo-code. The programs were take home work. It would be trivial to go to a coder-for-hire board and outsource it.
Judging by the performance of my peers, I think many CS majors didn't learn a damn thing about programming in school. This would explain why.
Shrug. I think it'd be more work to fake your way through a liberal arts class than a big math/science class. I took classes that had more than 1000 students in the section, where the exams were given by TA's who'd probably never seen you before.
For the price of a fake student ID, you could have someone take the exams FOR you. Easy. I once took a geology class where I only came to class for the exams, and aced the whole course. I did roughly the same for physics (I went to the practicums religiously, but never to class). I never saw my TA at the exams, and, indeed, I took the exams at the wrong location every time, due to a scheduling conflict. My professor might have been there, but I don't know because I didn't know what he looked like.
In short, just because this guy specializes in liberal arts, doesn't mean there aren't people out there who can churn out easy science classes. And saying that, "Well you couldn't do hard science classes" misses the point: the people who do this stuff are doing it to knock off course requirements. It'd be equally hard to bluff your way through higher level liberal arts classes, with maybe 10 other students, and a heavy dependence on class participation.
Agreed. If your class has a written component, your exam should have a written component. IF you put them both together, it should be obvious who is having their papers ghostwritten.
Most writing-heavy classes I took had short essay midterms and finals, with 2-3 papers. I'm not sure why this isn't the case anymore...Even in the old days, frats, sports teams, whatever, would keep papers from their older members, and recycle them after a few years. If you don't make the student do some work in front of you, how do you know for sure they're doing any work at all?
Shrug. It's perfectly valid to end up an ethical relativist after taking an ethics class. Or a utilitarian. Neither one would see anything wrong with writing term papers for a living.
I've taken a ton of ethics classes; none of them have any component that deals with how you ought to live your life. They deal with various theories, what they say, and what their flaws are.
Shrug. If he's written any papers on ethics, he'll probably know that most modern ethical theory is relativist: you may think he's wrong, but your opinion carries no more weight than his. It's been more than a hundred years since a good moral absolutist entered the scene.
That's pretty much why I stopped taking ethics classes.
Frankly you can get in trouble if it's too good in college. You don't want something that will stand out, especially if you're not going to buy ALL your papers.
There are valuable humanities courses, but yea, there is a lot of bullshit as well. I was a Cog. Sci. major (Philosophy, Comp Sci, Neuroanatomy), so I was forever dealing with people on both sides of the fence.
Math people largely think that all humanities are a complete waste, and extra-ordinarily easy: then they take a hard class, do poorly, and claim that this proves it's all bullshit, rather than proving that there are actual skills involved and they don't have them.
Humanities people by and large think that heavy science loads are inapplicable to the "real world" and only useful if you're going to be doing it for a living. They get bitter if you try to make them take those courses, and therefore there are always a few easy science classes out there for the humanities people.
I went to a school that required 2 math, 2 science, 2 english, and 2 sociology classes to graduate, regardless of your major. It was a good thing. You could tell because EVERYONE hated it.
The final for my highest logic course had only one problem, open book, open notes, books from the library, whatever. The goal was to prove A && ~A from three givens, and I did it in 2 hours, with 92 steps, which was four better than the professors answer.
And all the guys in comp sci mocked me because philosophy was "useless" and couldn't understand why I was the better coder.
In short, I don't see how bringing a grad would help in a logic exam (even less than a math exam, because you always know the answer, since you're either proving something is true or false) and despite philosophies reputation, no logic prof I had would have allowed any such nitpickery.
Well they should let these fuckers know. That was the last time I bought a game there (no loss, since their selection sucks). I don't remember the exact time, but it was when F3 was new, so about 2 years ago?
My take on it was that they had no right to fucking ask in the first place, as there is no law that says that they're allowed to demand ID for those in the first place.
And also, according to their investor relations page, they absolutely still card, as of this year.
With that premise, Best Buy recognizes the concerns regarding the content of certain video and PC games. It's why the company currently has a "mature" product sales policy in place that prohibits the sale of video and computer games rated M (as defined by the Entertainment Software Rating Board) to customers under the age of 17 years old. The policy requires employees to check the age of any customer purchasing M-rated video or computer games who appears to be under the age of 21. All store employees are required to read the policy and sign an acknowledgement of the policy on their first day of employment. Failure to follow the policy results in discipline, which may include termination.
"Do you enjoy being able to nip down to the shop to buy a game?"
I don't know where you shop, but I can get anally violated without lube for free. 90% of brick and mortar retailers deserve to die. The 10% that don't aren't going to go down because of this.
"Do you enjoy being able to resell software?"
No. I don't resell books either. Or music. Or movies. Or food. Why is this always considered to be a huge negative? I never resold my college textbooks for the same exact reason: some sweaty resaler with a fuck-you grin, knowing they're going to make 300% off my ass without having to lift a finger. Fuck them. You don't want to pay a lot of money for it, just wait a few months or a year.
I kinda wish steam would do more DLC...They tend to get it eventually, but until they do you're dealing with the developer, and that's a pain in the ass. Waiting for the game to connect to the developer ON TOP of your steam connection, to validate the dlc isn't cool.
Pssh. One of the last games I bought as physical media was Fallout 3, and the fucking hoops I had to jump through for that were a goddamn joke, from the annoying ass clerk at best buy (Card ME? ME? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm fucking OLD!), to microsofts DLC hoops, which were vastly more annoying than dealing with steam.
Why the hell wouldn't I just use Steam? The one time my internet went down for any length of time, the playing experience was as good or better.
Mine says:
"Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 48,245 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours."
Vanilla XP install, FF, Noscript, etc. Better than I would have thought. Hmmm.
Lol. I switched to IE8 (default config) and got:
"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 1,254,460 tested so far."
Open Source bias?
I can't stand browsing without Noscript, and there is no equivalent for Chrome. That's pretty much it for me.
Well yea. Everyone who is on the SC would have to agree, and that's probably not going to happen.
What tax has he added?
Complaining about excessive taxes today is absurd. They're as low as they've ever been.
My take on the stupid healthcare bill is that, now that they've finally broken the taboo, more meaningful legislation is possible in the name of "fixing" the bill which everyone agrees is a crappy compromise.
Hard to throw down too hard on the stimulus, given that things did even out and improve after it was put in place. Yea, a lot of the money went out as loans to the states, so they wouldn't have to cut programs. That's life. It's easy to say, "OMG they paid for (thing that accounted for 1/1000000000th of the spending), what a WASTE!" but its not very honest, intellectually.
I've got a fucking annoying "shovel ready" project down the street from my house right now. So there are some.
Bush was the economists anti-christ. Defending the crap that dug us in the hole we're in, and complaining about other peoples attempts to get us out? I can't abide that. I wish things were going differently, but I know exactly how we got where we are.
Complaining about the bank bailout is pretty foolish at this point, considering it's on pace to make money. The only thing that irritated me about it is that the government loaned the idiots money, instead of just buying them outright for a fraction of the cost (in early 2008 we gave tens of billions to banks whose value on the market was depressed to less than 10 billion!)
Sure the conservatives would have screamed "SOCIALISM!" but that's the perfect way to deal with "too big to fail." Buy it up, and then dismantle it back into the private sector for a profit. Instead we just bought the shitty assets...Which wasn't a bad deal, mind. They'll break even with change to spare...but it was stupid.
Mind you, I don't agree with this as far as the auto companies go: they should have been allowed to tank. Bailing them out just makes them weak.
Apple does the things it does because Jobs isn't afraid of shit. It's not like other companies don't hate Adobe as well, but only Steve-o would be willing to drop his pants and scream "Suck my diiiiiick!" at Adobe.
And good on him. I don't think the web as a whole is ready to move off Adobe products, but Apple has a history of driving those sorts of migrations (floppy whats?) and advertisers and websites can't afford to ignore millions of iPhone/iPad owners, who are, by definition, possessed of more money than sense.
Actually, Keynes' reputation was made by the great depression, as well as by his book "The Consequences of the Peace" which predicted World War II 20 years in advance, just based on the economics of the situation.
It wasn't until the 70's when Friedman began to get traction...Traction that he held right up until 2007, when the bottom dropped out.
Rationally speaking, neither system is wholly correct. Friedman is correct that you can do a lot by manipulating the velocity of currency, but Keynes is correct that only the government has the power to spend when everyone else is afraid to.
Shrug. I think stimulus spending is a valid part of a response to an economic downturn, especially in the current situation, where the Fed had kept rates so low for so long (fueling the inevitable crash) that when the crash came, their power to adjust rates to stimulate lending was largely blunted.
Likewise, tax rates are exceptionally low right now (lower than Reagan!), so cutting taxes (especially taxes on the wealthy) isn't likely to have much effect either.
Lot of businesses in this country are keeping their money in their mattresses, even as we speak. We have a large rebound in profitability that isn't matched by hiring. At the same time, retail and tax-driven government services are forced to cut workers (due to shrinking revenues and/or tax base) and that's prolonging the problem.
Finally, I think that we're in dire need of infrastructure spending anyway and this is a way to build what is needed and stimulate the economy at the same time.
As far as the healthcare thing goes, my buiggest problem with it is that it perpetuates the effective monopoly of insurance companies, so in that we agree. I think that a public option, and the granting the ability for insurance companies to collectively negotiate against pharmaceutical companies would help immensely.
I disagree. Stimulus spending is considered by economists to be essential in pulling out of recessions. Putting the war spending IN the budget, instead of dishonestly pushing through money during the year is far better than the previous administrations policy. Healthcare is something that needs to be addressed, and while I think the bill sucks, at least it does SOMETHING.
Frankly, I can't think of anything more fiscally irresponsible than going to war without raising taxes (indeed, while LOWERING taxes).
While I wish that both sides were more fiscally conservative, I cannot support the idea that Obama is worse than Bush as far as spending goes.
It'd at least be a good start to restrict the candidate's spending of their own money. But yea, it's a thorny problem.
Actually, it's exactly the opposite. If you get enough signatures to get on the ballot, then you qualify for public funding. So third parties are on an equal footing for funding, which would give them a much better chance.
Easier fix: all funding must come from the gov't, in equal (and relatively small) amounts for each candidate. Offer each candidate who gets the required number of signatures to be on the ballot, a set amount of TV time, a set amount of ad money, and tell everyone else to butt the fuck out of the process.
As long as you can win by drowning your opponent in money, the system is fucked.