Confirmation bias. We only ever hear about plane crashes, too.
Possibly, but in both large tech companies I have worked for (one of which used to be well known for huge, world changing inventions), I have been in a position to monitor patent submissions.
They're largely crap. My present company is the worst offender (but fortunately patents only in self defense, so far) but both produce a tremendous amount of bullshit patents.
It's very rare that I see an idea novel enough and essential enough to warrant a patent. Usually I see an attempt to mine the area, harming only people for whom a single lawsuit could bankrupt them, but ignoring equal or larger predators because it'd be too expensive to bother. This is to say, they exist for anti-competitive purposes.
Don't get me wrong, I know that the verbage in the summary about "small businesses" is code for "patent trolls", and I'm not trying to make the case that abuse is rampant only amongst big businesses. The entire system is not serving the intended purpose anymore, it's being used to prevent, restrict or channel innovation, to the detriment of the society which created the system.
The problem is that proprietary software is usually not supply and demand. There are very few competitors and the products are never exactly the same. Further the man hours required to develop and support the products create a high barrier for new products, essentially restricting the market further.
Putting your vendor in a position where they have to compete against a $100/hr consultant is supply and demand. There is an essentially fungible commodity whose price is dictated by a competitive system. You can only beat this by doing the work yourself, assuming you have the necessary skill and other uses of your time have less value.
There's nothing wrong with being charged based on the market. Being charged based on "what I think you can afford to pay" is the problem.
That is still better than not having to force your vendor to track your lowest cost and charge what he wants or as much as he thinks you can afford. I've seen a lot of companies try to charge based on the percentage of your business they think their product is worth.
Further, as is often the case with open source, someone else also using my F/OSS app may already being paying to have the feature added. I can either chip in, or wait and take, whatever makes sense to me.
No one is asking you to. But what if you ran a business and the software vendor for some mission critical app decided he wasn't going to support your desired OS, or some trivially simple feature that a competing system has that makes a lot of financial sense to you? But your cost to switch over outweigh the cost of that feature. Your vendor was either going to hold you hostage for some obscene amount of money required to switch (but enough that he thinks you'd pay, since he knows your costs too), or let you stay on your existing platform which will bleed you dry slowly. What if your software vendor decided that you can run 8 documents at once, but to run each additional document at once would cost $100/document. Not because of any technical limitations, but simply because they want to charge you that way?
If you made a point to never use F/OSS you could simply pay someone else to fix the software, perhaps someone you already have on staff. You could have it your way. You wouldn't get stuck with idiotic licensing scams and other extortion.
This kind of thing happens all the time, at all levels of business. While he sounds like a raving lunatic at times, his zealotry can produce a better world. It works not only for people who like to code, but for those who'd rather pay others to do it for them. We really ought to be looking for ways to use open source as much as possible, in place of proprietary alternatives. He's pointing out ways to help you identify closed source apps you may not know exist.
As usual it sounds ridiculous and paranoid, but it does make sense. You may not wish to put your life on hold for lack of F/OSS alternatives, that's not a reasonable expectation, but it makes sense to favor F/OSS solutions and be looking for a way to remove proprietary as much as possible. The economics of the world won't really change much, people will still get paid to write software... but they won't be able to extort you for it either, or pimp it for decades because you have been locked-in.
I found myself asking each of these questions. The only one I can answer satisfactorily is that the other cylons just died out. They couldn't resurrect and they can't breed. They didn't keep any Bob Dylan on hand, so they didn't know the phone number for New Earth and even if they happened on it, the lack of technology would make the planet appear uninteresting.
They didn't put a name on her, because they probably can't without offending some religion or another. She is a supernatural character, like Head Six and Head Baltar. But she's also not at all like them, and acts very differently.
I think the best way to understand Starbuck is to compare her with Head Six and Baltar, and the explanation about the nature of the BSG God. Head Six and Head Baltar view humanity as a science experiment, they do not embrace us for what we are. They know of the BSG God and their place in the world. They're detached from humanity and maybe from the experience but they have a role to play in our story. There were other head characters too, I remember Elosha and maybe one other. They had different personalities and roles but they shared these characteristics.
Starbuck, on the other hand, very much revels in humanity. While she has no idea who or what she is at any point in the show, she seems driven and her behavior suggests she enjoys her existence, even while she's doing things that would make us cringe. She has her role to play, but she never actually interferes with how things play out, always involved but never committed. She seems to be the incarnation of the BSG god gone on a joyride in human flesh.
I think leaving it a bit of a mystery isn't a bad thing. Disappearing at the end said what it needed to say: she's not human and her job was complete she can't stay any longer. What more do we need to feel satisfied?
Better yet, doesn't it make artistic sense that this is about free will? The other influenced the colonials and Cylons to choose differently. It didn't force them, or deny them choice. It educated them. Powerful message there.
I thought it was almost a message to humans about how to behave towards their creations. God created us, and lets us do as we please, but tries to direct us when we've gotten lost. He's willing to let us nearly self-destruct, theoretically in the hopes that we get it right.
On the other hand, we create and we wish to dominate, enslave and use. We made something that pleased us and wish to give nothing back to it. The cylons, when you get down to it, had no "culture". They needed to be more than machines, but could not be, and all we offered was war. And they learned that lesson well.
I was talking about the storyline to a fictional TV show in which an off-screen God was very clearly involved throughout, and about which some conclusions were presently quite clearly. There are countless works of fiction that explain the story of man in an allegorical fashion, with the intent of inspiring better interpersonal behavior. Often a God, or many Gods are involved and contrary to some conclusions presented here, many of the stories stand on their own quite well, often as major influences to modern literature.
Because it is fashionable, particularly in the science fiction crowd, particularly on slashdot, to be rabid atheists, I think there's a reaction against the ending that is misdirected. The ending to the show was flawed in my opinion, primarily due to execution. While Baltar may have been ready to accept divine influence, I think the writers were not prepared that the audience was not, and even for those of us that were, we did not feel the sense of inspiration that the characters were feeling. I think that is a valid and harsh criticism of the finale.
Any belief or lack of belief in a "real life" God or Gods that I might have is not presented here. If I had a belief in God, I may have been offended by the portrayal of him in this show as being substantially more indifferent, even callous than the Judeo-Christian interpretation. At least if I allowed myself to blur the lines between fantasy and reality as you are suggesting.
That's kind of the point. God gave people the ability to make decisions, and our use of that ability is not under his control. He may have a vision for where he wants us to go, but he absolutely doesn't bring us there, to the contrary he tests/tempts/misleads at every turn. I think he acts only against our total self-annihilation (he did create us), but he never forces anyone. Introduction of God, I don't think it's a cop out in this instance, because:
First, the original BSG pulled the God card way early, and way more deliberately. It's always been part of the story. The cylons used to be led by Lucifer! I have been waiting for the God card to get pulled for quite some time, but it became clear only in the past few episodes that it would be played at the very end. I think the use of the God card in the re-imagined series is better and less preachy than the original. I like this God better, even if it's a blatant rip of the Tolkien God.
Second, it's been alluded to for several seasons that there's something more going on than cylons v. humans. They could have pulled a "God did it" or they could have pulled "Aliens did it", but they had to answer the plot element. I won't lie and say I believe they always had a clear idea of whether this force had any strong motivation, but it's clear that there was something out there, something not subject to the random "humanity" that we saw throughout.
Finally, they made it quite clear that the choices made were entirely in the hands of the humans. God, his agents, etc. were fanning the flames perhaps, but all human elements had free will. This was most blantantly demonstrated with Baltar and his head Six, but it's been there all along with every other character. This is the "humanity" element the show was primarily about. God is out there ensuring that we carry on, reacting, but not forcing.
I think his lack of control is demonstrated in the last 5 minutes of the show very well. Our favorite angels/demons are walking through present day Earth, with a dialog that runs parallel to "All Along the Watchtower", and as the cold wind starts to blow, we see our new Cylons. I think that's a perfect ending to the show and ties most of the themes together nicely.
I personally think that the meta-story ended pretty well. I think the finale was executed poorly though (except as I said above, for the last 5 minutes which I thought was awesome). The opera house scene was especially poorly executed and not, in my opinion, the way they wanted to demonstrate the concept they were aiming for. I think rather than "cop out", many are upset that this particular scene turned out to be so anti-climactic, and so ham-fistedly written. It was supposed to be huge, it came across very awkward and out of character for Baltar, Caprica Six and particularly Cavil.
It's called email, you can attach voice if you want. If you are a bandwidth provider who doesn't want to deal with proprietary interfaces this would be easy to create.
I have had this tool available for my corporate voice mail for a long time, but I never use it. Not many people leave voice mail anymore. I either get IMs or email or I get paged by the cheapo company pager.
Wrestling is sort of science fiction, in that everything you see is a lie, performed by men (and occasionally women) who are the product of various chemical sciences.
Bingo. There's never been a shortage of self-absorbed assholes in any line of business, ever. The difference is that in most corps today, management types tend to be very socialized and promoted via american idol like popularity contests such that "Josh" is either THE boss (i.e. runs the company) or he's your coworker. Possibly "Josh" is most synonymous with software because it's a new field and relatively poorly understood...but this is changing.
The issue is that in most companies Josh is totally unwelcome and short-lived, when in fact Josh is necessary. Quite often Josh is actually smart, and sees things others do not see. He knows that 10 dumb people working together as a group produce 5x the dumb output, the rest is released as waste in the form of donuts and coffee.
Much like chemotherapy, he may do some good, but many think they would prefer the alternatives because they have less unpleasant side effects. The fact is it takes all types to succeed, and Josh should only be shown the door if in fact he does something so severely wrong there may be legal implications for the company. Otherwise he should be sanctioned appropriately, and for God's sake never promoted to management, but retained. Let him carry the cost of his personality in a stunted career and missed opportunities, and he may eventually grow to be a guiding light rather than a frikken shark with lasers.
This sounds like some new scholasticism. There is no gene for doing calculus. There's no racial memory or instinctual source for it. If there were, why did it suddenly manifest itself around the time of Newton/Leibniz? We may have a natural inclination to use tools to solve our problem that is probably instinctual judging by how my 1yo child acts, but he's a long way from calculus. I will try to threaten him with some reinmann sums tonight to see if this instinct manifests, but I'm not holding my breath.
But to say there's no difference between cogent thought and instinct requires a lot of proof that you haven't presented. I think hurling stones may be instinct, but preparing an ammunition cache? From TFA, remembering to bring the right tool for the job? You'd have to convince me that's anything other than problem solving.
I'm not sure there's as much money in producing a dvd to be netflixed as producing a 1 hour tv show that is paid for by commercials (and ALSO netflix).
Last I checked, most high school programming classes are Advanced Placement Comp Sci. They're intended for college bound CS/EE types, not necessarily for anyone else.
The sad truth is that in HS you usually still learn metalworking, woodworking, or mechanic type jobs...but you can't learn how to use a computer beyond "file->save" on a word document.
I agree, I stopped watching all Trek when it turned into a war movie. It was a goofy war movie, kind of like GI Joe cartoons. If you want gritty war dramas, BSG beats anything on TV (for the next 3 weeks).
Star Trek for me was supposed to be an idealized future, and we are the good guys. It had to tread carefully to avoid becoming overly preachy (and failed on occasion), but I'm not sure I like a darker or more warlike federation.
I think they should kill Trek until at least 2015, if not longer. They won't, they're going to pimp that franchise for all it's worth... and that's a shame. Our kids won't watch trek.
You are probably the intended audience for the "general programming class". This is the crowd that wants to solve a really big problem, and doesn't want to get bogged in the details. Someone is going to write the compiler for you, write the functions which do something you need, etc. You just want to integrate packages, think big and are happy to hack and slash bugs as they crop up. I suspect that most people who use computers to accomplish a task, want to know simple ways of automating mundane tasks, etc. Programming as taught in school doesn't do this for you, because it's not programming, it's "computer science", the class title "Intro to programming" is what misleads. This is in my mind what the poster really wants to do.
I agree that #2 is how all applied math/science classes should be taught period. But #1 is the same as "shortcut for hard problems". For "general programming", this is acceptable. For professionals and for those interested in computer science, it's absolutely not. And this is the source of your frustration.
For those of us into the science of it, this represents the core of our art. Strings are just a simple instantiation of the abstract concept we deal with. Strings are easy to print, observe and debug...but they're just a metaphor. After 20 years of reading them, we can spot problems and patterns very quickly, so they're convenient.
As for using languages that simplify your problems for you, this poses issues to professionals for many reasons. First, because depending on your line of work, using an interpreted language and in fact using anything other than straight C/C++ may be problematic at best, forbidden or impossible at worst. Second, because in the real world, you still end up having to do a lot of string processing even if you're doing something relatively invisible like device driver development. Third, when it is possible and desireable to use specialized languages, you often need or want to understand them more fundamentally than by surfing the web for documentation. At some point you can learn perl, python, ruby, javascript, etc. in mere days because you know the fundamental elements of the language, you can scan a manual for syntax and the few differentiating factors and quickly apply them. In a sense, you have been taught how to think about them. Fourth, and most important, because the skills, algorithms and implementations you use in doing that string shmooing are essental to pretty much everything else, which is why your curriculum was taught that way.
So maybe you didn't like your programming class because it wasn't what you were looking for. You took the course because you thought you needed something but computer science wasn't it. You needed a tool, not understanding. High school does seem like the most appropriate place to teach people how to use tools. That's what I think the curriculum for a "general programming class" should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Confirmation bias. We only ever hear about plane crashes, too.
Possibly, but in both large tech companies I have worked for (one of which used to be well known for huge, world changing inventions), I have been in a position to monitor patent submissions.
They're largely crap. My present company is the worst offender (but fortunately patents only in self defense, so far) but both produce a tremendous amount of bullshit patents.
It's very rare that I see an idea novel enough and essential enough to warrant a patent. Usually I see an attempt to mine the area, harming only people for whom a single lawsuit could bankrupt them, but ignoring equal or larger predators because it'd be too expensive to bother. This is to say, they exist for anti-competitive purposes.
Don't get me wrong, I know that the verbage in the summary about "small businesses" is code for "patent trolls", and I'm not trying to make the case that abuse is rampant only amongst big businesses. The entire system is not serving the intended purpose anymore, it's being used to prevent, restrict or channel innovation, to the detriment of the society which created the system.
The problem is that proprietary software is usually not supply and demand. There are very few competitors and the products are never exactly the same. Further the man hours required to develop and support the products create a high barrier for new products, essentially restricting the market further.
Putting your vendor in a position where they have to compete against a $100/hr consultant is supply and demand. There is an essentially fungible commodity whose price is dictated by a competitive system. You can only beat this by doing the work yourself, assuming you have the necessary skill and other uses of your time have less value.
There's nothing wrong with being charged based on the market. Being charged based on "what I think you can afford to pay" is the problem.
That is still better than not having to force your vendor to track your lowest cost and charge what he wants or as much as he thinks you can afford. I've seen a lot of companies try to charge based on the percentage of your business they think their product is worth.
Further, as is often the case with open source, someone else also using my F/OSS app may already being paying to have the feature added. I can either chip in, or wait and take, whatever makes sense to me.
Bzzt, volcano's are for masterminds only, not for lackeys.
No one is asking you to. But what if you ran a business and the software vendor for some mission critical app decided he wasn't going to support your desired OS, or some trivially simple feature that a competing system has that makes a lot of financial sense to you? But your cost to switch over outweigh the cost of that feature. Your vendor was either going to hold you hostage for some obscene amount of money required to switch (but enough that he thinks you'd pay, since he knows your costs too), or let you stay on your existing platform which will bleed you dry slowly. What if your software vendor decided that you can run 8 documents at once, but to run each additional document at once would cost $100/document. Not because of any technical limitations, but simply because they want to charge you that way?
If you made a point to never use F/OSS you could simply pay someone else to fix the software, perhaps someone you already have on staff. You could have it your way. You wouldn't get stuck with idiotic licensing scams and other extortion.
This kind of thing happens all the time, at all levels of business. While he sounds like a raving lunatic at times, his zealotry can produce a better world. It works not only for people who like to code, but for those who'd rather pay others to do it for them. We really ought to be looking for ways to use open source as much as possible, in place of proprietary alternatives. He's pointing out ways to help you identify closed source apps you may not know exist.
As usual it sounds ridiculous and paranoid, but it does make sense. You may not wish to put your life on hold for lack of F/OSS alternatives, that's not a reasonable expectation, but it makes sense to favor F/OSS solutions and be looking for a way to remove proprietary as much as possible. The economics of the world won't really change much, people will still get paid to write software... but they won't be able to extort you for it either, or pimp it for decades because you have been locked-in.
I found myself asking each of these questions. The only one I can answer satisfactorily is that the other cylons just died out. They couldn't resurrect and they can't breed. They didn't keep any Bob Dylan on hand, so they didn't know the phone number for New Earth and even if they happened on it, the lack of technology would make the planet appear uninteresting.
I don't think Kara belongs with Head Six/Baltar. I would think they are of opposite polarities.
They didn't put a name on her, because they probably can't without offending some religion or another. She is a supernatural character, like Head Six and Head Baltar. But she's also not at all like them, and acts very differently.
I think the best way to understand Starbuck is to compare her with Head Six and Baltar, and the explanation about the nature of the BSG God. Head Six and Head Baltar view humanity as a science experiment, they do not embrace us for what we are. They know of the BSG God and their place in the world. They're detached from humanity and maybe from the experience but they have a role to play in our story. There were other head characters too, I remember Elosha and maybe one other. They had different personalities and roles but they shared these characteristics.
Starbuck, on the other hand, very much revels in humanity. While she has no idea who or what she is at any point in the show, she seems driven and her behavior suggests she enjoys her existence, even while she's doing things that would make us cringe. She has her role to play, but she never actually interferes with how things play out, always involved but never committed. She seems to be the incarnation of the BSG god gone on a joyride in human flesh.
I think leaving it a bit of a mystery isn't a bad thing. Disappearing at the end said what it needed to say: she's not human and her job was complete she can't stay any longer. What more do we need to feel satisfied?
Better yet, doesn't it make artistic sense that this is about free will? The other influenced the colonials and Cylons to choose differently. It didn't force them, or deny them choice. It educated them. Powerful message there.
I thought it was almost a message to humans about how to behave towards their creations. God created us, and lets us do as we please, but tries to direct us when we've gotten lost. He's willing to let us nearly self-destruct, theoretically in the hopes that we get it right.
On the other hand, we create and we wish to dominate, enslave and use. We made something that pleased us and wish to give nothing back to it. The cylons, when you get down to it, had no "culture". They needed to be more than machines, but could not be, and all we offered was war. And they learned that lesson well.
I was talking about the storyline to a fictional TV show in which an off-screen God was very clearly involved throughout, and about which some conclusions were presently quite clearly. There are countless works of fiction that explain the story of man in an allegorical fashion, with the intent of inspiring better interpersonal behavior. Often a God, or many Gods are involved and contrary to some conclusions presented here, many of the stories stand on their own quite well, often as major influences to modern literature.
Because it is fashionable, particularly in the science fiction crowd, particularly on slashdot, to be rabid atheists, I think there's a reaction against the ending that is misdirected. The ending to the show was flawed in my opinion, primarily due to execution. While Baltar may have been ready to accept divine influence, I think the writers were not prepared that the audience was not, and even for those of us that were, we did not feel the sense of inspiration that the characters were feeling. I think that is a valid and harsh criticism of the finale.
Any belief or lack of belief in a "real life" God or Gods that I might have is not presented here. If I had a belief in God, I may have been offended by the portrayal of him in this show as being substantially more indifferent, even callous than the Judeo-Christian interpretation. At least if I allowed myself to blur the lines between fantasy and reality as you are suggesting.
That's kind of the point. God gave people the ability to make decisions, and our use of that ability is not under his control. He may have a vision for where he wants us to go, but he absolutely doesn't bring us there, to the contrary he tests/tempts/misleads at every turn. I think he acts only against our total self-annihilation (he did create us), but he never forces anyone. Introduction of God, I don't think it's a cop out in this instance, because:
First, the original BSG pulled the God card way early, and way more deliberately. It's always been part of the story. The cylons used to be led by Lucifer! I have been waiting for the God card to get pulled for quite some time, but it became clear only in the past few episodes that it would be played at the very end. I think the use of the God card in the re-imagined series is better and less preachy than the original. I like this God better, even if it's a blatant rip of the Tolkien God.
Second, it's been alluded to for several seasons that there's something more going on than cylons v. humans. They could have pulled a "God did it" or they could have pulled "Aliens did it", but they had to answer the plot element. I won't lie and say I believe they always had a clear idea of whether this force had any strong motivation, but it's clear that there was something out there, something not subject to the random "humanity" that we saw throughout.
Finally, they made it quite clear that the choices made were entirely in the hands of the humans. God, his agents, etc. were fanning the flames perhaps, but all human elements had free will. This was most blantantly demonstrated with Baltar and his head Six, but it's been there all along with every other character. This is the "humanity" element the show was primarily about. God is out there ensuring that we carry on, reacting, but not forcing.
I think his lack of control is demonstrated in the last 5 minutes of the show very well. Our favorite angels/demons are walking through present day Earth, with a dialog that runs parallel to "All Along the Watchtower", and as the cold wind starts to blow, we see our new Cylons. I think that's a perfect ending to the show and ties most of the themes together nicely.
I personally think that the meta-story ended pretty well. I think the finale was executed poorly though (except as I said above, for the last 5 minutes which I thought was awesome). The opera house scene was especially poorly executed and not, in my opinion, the way they wanted to demonstrate the concept they were aiming for. I think rather than "cop out", many are upset that this particular scene turned out to be so anti-climactic, and so ham-fistedly written. It was supposed to be huge, it came across very awkward and out of character for Baltar, Caprica Six and particularly Cavil.
Not to mention how many of our ISPs block inbound connections including ssh and http(s). They may build it, but we won't need it when it arrives.
It's called email, you can attach voice if you want. If you are a bandwidth provider who doesn't want to deal with proprietary interfaces this would be easy to create.
I have had this tool available for my corporate voice mail for a long time, but I never use it. Not many people leave voice mail anymore. I either get IMs or email or I get paged by the cheapo company pager.
I would gladly give up that feature along with AT&T.
I'd never use it, and I'm sure I could implement the same feature with gmail and a good application...if I wanted it. Which I don't.
Wrestling is sort of science fiction, in that everything you see is a lie, performed by men (and occasionally women) who are the product of various chemical sciences.
But not the general public! They might do something...subversive!
Amen, I won't be buying any smartphone until I can tether.
A choice of any bandwidth provider out there?
Bingo. There's never been a shortage of self-absorbed assholes in any line of business, ever. The difference is that in most corps today, management types tend to be very socialized and promoted via american idol like popularity contests such that "Josh" is either THE boss (i.e. runs the company) or he's your coworker. Possibly "Josh" is most synonymous with software because it's a new field and relatively poorly understood...but this is changing.
The issue is that in most companies Josh is totally unwelcome and short-lived, when in fact Josh is necessary. Quite often Josh is actually smart, and sees things others do not see. He knows that 10 dumb people working together as a group produce 5x the dumb output, the rest is released as waste in the form of donuts and coffee.
Much like chemotherapy, he may do some good, but many think they would prefer the alternatives because they have less unpleasant side effects. The fact is it takes all types to succeed, and Josh should only be shown the door if in fact he does something so severely wrong there may be legal implications for the company. Otherwise he should be sanctioned appropriately, and for God's sake never promoted to management, but retained. Let him carry the cost of his personality in a stunted career and missed opportunities, and he may eventually grow to be a guiding light rather than a frikken shark with lasers.
This sounds like some new scholasticism. There is no gene for doing calculus. There's no racial memory or instinctual source for it. If there were, why did it suddenly manifest itself around the time of Newton/Leibniz? We may have a natural inclination to use tools to solve our problem that is probably instinctual judging by how my 1yo child acts, but he's a long way from calculus. I will try to threaten him with some reinmann sums tonight to see if this instinct manifests, but I'm not holding my breath.
But to say there's no difference between cogent thought and instinct requires a lot of proof that you haven't presented. I think hurling stones may be instinct, but preparing an ammunition cache? From TFA, remembering to bring the right tool for the job? You'd have to convince me that's anything other than problem solving.
I'm not sure there's as much money in producing a dvd to be netflixed as producing a 1 hour tv show that is paid for by commercials (and ALSO netflix).
Last I checked, most high school programming classes are Advanced Placement Comp Sci. They're intended for college bound CS/EE types, not necessarily for anyone else.
The sad truth is that in HS you usually still learn metalworking, woodworking, or mechanic type jobs...but you can't learn how to use a computer beyond "file->save" on a word document.
I prefer 8's. Better, 8's and 6's.
I agree, I stopped watching all Trek when it turned into a war movie. It was a goofy war movie, kind of like GI Joe cartoons. If you want gritty war dramas, BSG beats anything on TV (for the next 3 weeks).
Star Trek for me was supposed to be an idealized future, and we are the good guys. It had to tread carefully to avoid becoming overly preachy (and failed on occasion), but I'm not sure I like a darker or more warlike federation.
I think they should kill Trek until at least 2015, if not longer. They won't, they're going to pimp that franchise for all it's worth... and that's a shame. Our kids won't watch trek.
You are probably the intended audience for the "general programming class". This is the crowd that wants to solve a really big problem, and doesn't want to get bogged in the details. Someone is going to write the compiler for you, write the functions which do something you need, etc. You just want to integrate packages, think big and are happy to hack and slash bugs as they crop up. I suspect that most people who use computers to accomplish a task, want to know simple ways of automating mundane tasks, etc. Programming as taught in school doesn't do this for you, because it's not programming, it's "computer science", the class title "Intro to programming" is what misleads. This is in my mind what the poster really wants to do.
I agree that #2 is how all applied math/science classes should be taught period. But #1 is the same as "shortcut for hard problems". For "general programming", this is acceptable. For professionals and for those interested in computer science, it's absolutely not. And this is the source of your frustration.
For those of us into the science of it, this represents the core of our art. Strings are just a simple instantiation of the abstract concept we deal with. Strings are easy to print, observe and debug...but they're just a metaphor. After 20 years of reading them, we can spot problems and patterns very quickly, so they're convenient.
As for using languages that simplify your problems for you, this poses issues to professionals for many reasons. First, because depending on your line of work, using an interpreted language and in fact using anything other than straight C/C++ may be problematic at best, forbidden or impossible at worst. Second, because in the real world, you still end up having to do a lot of string processing even if you're doing something relatively invisible like device driver development. Third, when it is possible and desireable to use specialized languages, you often need or want to understand them more fundamentally than by surfing the web for documentation. At some point you can learn perl, python, ruby, javascript, etc. in mere days because you know the fundamental elements of the language, you can scan a manual for syntax and the few differentiating factors and quickly apply them. In a sense, you have been taught how to think about them. Fourth, and most important, because the skills, algorithms and implementations you use in doing that string shmooing are essental to pretty much everything else, which is why your curriculum was taught that way.
So maybe you didn't like your programming class because it wasn't what you were looking for. You took the course because you thought you needed something but computer science wasn't it. You needed a tool, not understanding. High school does seem like the most appropriate place to teach people how to use tools. That's what I think the curriculum for a "general programming class" should be.