"the ubiquitous pull becomes even worse when the last thing a student wants to do is read a boring math text. I'm less inclined to simply blame the student - is it really their fault?"
Of course not. It's the parents' fault. Even today, I know plenty of kids who were raised without video games or (gasp!) television in the home. It is possible.
That said, yes, it's still a virtue to be able to read a "boring" math text. And not just in the abstract, back-in-my-day, walked-uphill-both-ways sense of the word "virtue," either. Some things are hard to learn, and take dedication and study. No amount of pointy-clicky technology magic will change that fact.
I say this as someone who spent two-thirds of last year grading some of the most attrociously-written papers you can imagine from junior and senior undergraduates. By my estimation, only 10 percent of my students were more than functionally literate. As my students will prove to you when you encounter them in the workplace, an extensive knowledge of Microsoft Word doesn't teach you how to write....
"The supposed "showdown" on Jay Leno was a highly unscientific and inaccurate test which pitted the world's fasted morse coder using very expensive morse equipment against a teenager using a cheap cell phone with a membrane keypad."
Where the heck did you get this? I watched the video, and at no point were the morse guys introduced as the "world's fastest" anything. And honestly, I know morse, I know a lot of old-school Ham radio guys, and those guys on Leno weren't sending at any particularly blazing rate of speed. It sounded like 20-30 WPM, give or take. There are guys out there who can copy at nearly twice that rate.
"If the pro-morser had been forced to enter morse on a phone keypad instead of his $200 morsing 'bug' then I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have won."
IIRC, the guys in the video were using a straight key, not a "bug". Nevertheless, you're kidding yourself if you think the type of key being used gave them an unfair advantage. What gave them an advantage is the fact that morse requires one button, and therefore can be sent without even looking at the keys. Even the best telephone keypad requires a certain amount of delay while switching buttons....
First off, there's absolutely no reason that Tay-Sachs, a disease caused by mutations in a single gene, couldn't have developed independently in multiple populations. But even if it were, you're drawing a conclusion on data (however questionable) regarding "Jews in America," which is a lot different than "Ashkenazi Jews".
Second, your argument concerning French Canadians is specious. A logical fallacy. So what if they have the same prevalance as Askenazi Jews? Why does this invalidate the original claim?
First off, if you're looking for quality research literature on the automated analysis of 2D protein gels, you're reading the wrong journal (Journal of Orthopaedic Science).
Rather than posting your question to slashdot, head over to PubMed (still better than google scholar for this type of thing), and search for, say "image analysis algorithm protein gel" and poof! You'll have 38 links, about a quarter of which are seem to be on precisely this topic.
Second, the whole premise of your question is underinformed. Any scientist involved in proteomics who wants her funding renewed knows enough not to rely on a single computational approach to pick spots from 2D protein gels. Or, if they do, they're usually doing some high-throughput method that feeds into tandem mass-spec, or some other validating experimental approach.
In short, why are you asking slashdot about this? Go to the library!
"they used TAP method which is outdated and inefficient. Predictive text input is much faster."
Well, first off, I didn't see that requirement anywhere. The SMS guy was introduced as the "fastest text messenger" in the country -- they didn't say what input method he used.
But, whatever. Having used both "predictive" text input on a cellphone, and CW transciever, I can tell you which one will win most of the time. The guys who are good at CW are almost zen-like in their ability to "speak" in Morse -- their thoughts are translated almost directly into imperceptible muscle movements on the key. It's rather spooky.
Contrast this with even the best predictive text system, and you'll see the relative clunkiness of the keypad approach -- you tap-tap-tap to get a letter, then you look at the screen and read the suggested completion, then you tap again to select the word, or even tap-tap-tap to get another letter...each time re-reading the screen, thinking about what it says, interpreting the result....totally inelegant.
"Fortran's longevity has come because...there have already been a ton of subroutine libraries to draw from, that have been built up over time by many coders."...and that, as a result of FORTRAN's absolutely neolithic language ''features'', are usually a collection of the ugliest, least-maintainable, magical ''black box" routines that you've ever encountered.
As a scientific coder, I would estimate that 80-90% of the real reason that no one wants to update large FORTRAN libraries, is that the legacy code is fundamentally unmaintainable. No one understands what it does, and nobody wants to devote the man-years necessary to decipher the mess.
We should be replacing these systems, not glorifying them....
Well, here in Seattle, a number of researchers are being paid by the Gates' Foundation to conduct applied research into malaria infection.
Given that malaria is one of the biggest third-world killers, and that very few drug companies are willing to invest research money into drugs for poor people, I think the Gates' are actually doing some good work in this area.
I suppose you could tie that to an "agenda," but you'd have to be awfully cynical.
I realize that you're joking, but there's a serious point here: when you're miles away from civilization, with only a tiny shack or a bit of nylon protecting you from the elements, it is very useful to know what kind of weather is heading in your direction.
As any serious camper/hiker/climber knows, a few hours' notice of a storm is enough to save your life.
Diesel fuel has skyrocketed in price relative to gasoline recently, and it doesn't look like prices will go down.
And remember -- biodiesel is only cheap when nobody wants it. Once the producers of food oils realize that there is significant demand for their waste product, they will begin to charge for it, and the price structure for biodiesel will change. Biodiesel prices are already rising in Seattle (though that could well be a supply problem, given the number of totalitarian environmental freaks in this town).
"Most journals, in contrast, employ copy editors to clean up the English, make sure that everything is formatted just so, make sure that all the citations are complete and in the correct format, etc."
Har. In my own experience, these "copy editors" have the approximate technical skill level of a McDonald's fry-cook trainee...I know many researchers whose manuscipts have actually had errors introduced by the copy-editing process.
In my own field (computational biology), the vast majority of the thinking work (peer review, subject-matter editing) is done gratis by professors, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. And when we publish, we pay dearly for the privelege of submitting our manuscripts and figures on a website, waiting several months for comments (from the volunteer reviewers), and signing over our copyrights to the publisher upon acceptance. Then you get to pay dearly to read the article we've written!
Given that most journal access is electronic these days, I think the entire process is a racket, propped up by the notoriously conservative nature of peer-review and scientific reputation. If we could just agree that the mainstream publishers are useless, there'd be no need to support them. But of course, they're not useless (they're the arbiters of scientific quality, for better or worse), and therefore we pay for their "services"....
Actually, they've been discussing ways to cut the amount of money that each people takes for years because of the decreasing ratio of people paying in to people being paid. Everything from increasing the retirement age to decreasing benefits. That covers poit A for the people.
...and insurance companies have, since time immemorial, adjusted their benefits, their deductables and their rates to accomodate for demographic changes (read: things like the Baby Boom). And when they do, moronic conservatives do not flap their arms and scream that the insurance industry is Fundamentally Flawed and that we should all quit paying insurance and invest in Personal Risk Accounts.
I can make the same argument for banks, pension funds and a slew of other financial institutions. And do you know why I can make this argument? Because they are not pyramid schemes. Nor is Social Security. It is a guaranteed PENSION FUND, managed by the federal government, and secured by the Federal Treasury. It's not a matter of semantics!
If you can't see the difference between this and a pyramid scheme (Amway, "make money from home opening letters!", "lose weight now! ask me how!"), and why it's not just a "rigid definition" (facts are annoyingly non-relative, aren't they?), you truly are one of the Special People.
a) is true because the greater number of people paying in per retiring worker benefits the people on top (ie the retiring person).
Except, there is no "person on top," and current retirees don't get any more money if more people are "at the bottom" paying in. Social Security surpluses are invested into treasury bills (by law), and are redeemed whenever the system runs a deficit.
The payments are benefited by bringing in more people into the system (having more children) to pay for the people on their way to retirement.
The system may benefit, but individual social security recipients do not. If you want to call this arrangement a pyramid scheme, well, I guess you'll have to say the same thing about insurance, banks, pension funds, the federal reserve, and a million other well-respected financial institutions. Right up there with Amway, doncha know....
b) there comes a point where this can't be sustained and the current workers (the people on the bottom) get hosed.
Uhm...no. Because benefits are not granted conditionally based on the number of people you bring into the system, you can't make the same argument that you would make for a true pyramid scheme. Contrary to duhbyah's rhetoric, there is no inherent flaw to the method of Social Security (well, not yet, anyway. He's working on it.)
sorry to burst your bubble.
No problem. You've practically made my argument for me. That's worth a bubble or two....
Wikipedia: "A pyramid scheme is a business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, usually without any product or service being delivered."
So now, Kaptain Klueless, could you back up your (inexplicably highly moderated) assertion that "Social Security is a pyramid scheme" with a logical, fact-based interpretation of Social Security, and how it either:
a) leads to benefit payments primarily for enrolling other people, and/or b) refuses to pay benefits to those who invest
It's a sad day when silly, uninformed ideology like your own is rated as "insightful" or "informative" by even a handful of intelligent human beings.
Look, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you're taking pictures of your puppy, WalMart is fine. They'll take your 2 megapixel snapshot, and turn it into an acceptable 5x7.
If you're like most "keen amateur photographers," you'll also go to WalMart, because you're too cheap, or too indiscriminate to use anything better. Many "keen amateur photographers" don't print much at all, actually -- they post their pretty pictures of sunsets and bugs online to photo.net, and they're happy. When they have to make the occasional print for Uncle Frank, they go to WalMart, and Uncle Frank doesn't know the difference.
For the "keen amateur photographers" who actually care about the quality of the images they produce -- I'm thinking of artists, and people who enjoy the craft of photography -- it is probably cheaper to produce inkjet prints than to use traditional photographic processes. For these people, sending prints to WalMart isn't an option. They want control over the printing process, and the pimply kid behind the counter at the local fotomat isn't going to make the cut.
Sure, these people could pay a master printer to make their prints, and the results would be fantastic. But, guess what? Master printers don't work at WalMart, and they don't come cheaply.
Other than the "I need it right now so I'll pay twice the price for a bad quality picture which fades fast too" factor, why would anybody pay a ton of money for a printer and then pay again in EXPENSIVE consumables, when they have a better choice.
If you're printing snapshots of your dog, you're right, you'll go to Costco. However, I don't think this article was targeted to you.
People who know what they're doing can make massively superior prints on an ink-jet printer, when compared to those shoveled out of a high-throughput fotomat. And they can usually do it more cheaply than a pro-quality lab can produce a fine-art print.
Ultimately, your jab at inkjet prints isn't very informed -- fotomat prints are actually about as shitty as their price reflects. You just don't realize it until you see the quality of a good print, done by a skilled professional. The difference is dramatic.
If you have a rich relative offering to pay, and you can go to MIT without going into debt, then yeah, of course you should transfer. But if, like most of us, you're going to pay for college, you should choose the best accredited undergraduate education that will leave you financially stable (read: debt-free) afterward.
You'll hear lots of people telling you about the value of name schools, the need for "networking" and other such hoo-hah. And often, they'll try to convince you that it's worth $30,000 in debt to get a top-tier undergraduate education. Don't buy it.
Remember -- at the undergraduate level, most schools will teach you the same things (oftentimes, from the same books). So why pay out the nose for an education that can be obtained for a fraction of the cost of a top-tier university?
Save your money, keep yourself out of debt, and you'll have more options later on. That's doubly important today, where Punjab's willingness to work for 30 cents an hour will almost invariably trump an expensive diploma....
I'm a graduate student. I do computational biology research, as do many of my colleagues. I know scores of people who are involved in genome analysis, drug design, and fundamental forms of biomedical research. And when you look at the tools that we use, you find that we're increasingly dependent upon open source software -- from operating systems to compilers to scripting languages, our work is fundamentally enabled by the efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
It's quite humbling, actually. I probably couldn't do my research without open source. At the very least, the people who pay me probably couldn't afford to pay the same number of students/faculty/staff if they had to shell out for millions of dollars in proprietary software (to say nothing of the compatability problems that proprietary software usually creates).
The people who develop open source software help to make biomedical research possible. Is that heroism? I don't know, but it's certainly not a trivial thing....
for people who hold your viewpoint, there's no ethical dilemma here....For people who do not hold your viewpoint, knowing whether or not a treatment is based on research done on embryonic or fetal stem cells is quite important, regardless of whether the embryo in question would have been taken to term or not. It means they are profiting from the death of a sentient being if they accept a treatment that did come from embryonic/fetal stem cell research.
If you have an ethical concern regarding stem-cell therapies, don't use the treatments. Those of us who have adopted a non-medieval viewpoint on the issue (one supported by scientific evidence, if not proven by our knowledge) can utilize the results from this research. Ethics are individual.
The problem is not a matter of ethics -- the problem is that a significant portion of our society consists of backwards-thinking neo-luddites, who will attempt to suppress virtually any scientific advance on the grounds that it possibly violates their "beliefs". Indeed, nobody cares if you, personally, have a problem with fetal stem cell therapy, or genetically modified foods, or eating meat, or the idea that the earth orbits about the sun. But when you attempt to outlaw research into an idea, you prevent the rest of society from believing that idea. That's an imposition of your (goofy sense of) ethics on our way of life, and that has a slew of ethical concerns of its own.
(footnote: all use of "your" is considered royal -- if you were just playing devil's advocate, don't take it personally. If you were sersious, well, there's not much I can do for you....)
What you describe is a classic example of "mommy" thinking -- absolutely preventing the use of a feature which might be immensely valuable (or essential!) 10% of the time, because there is a chance that someone, somewhere will misuse it. It's the computational equivalent of forcing everyone to use safety scissors -- after all, someone might hurt themselves!
I do program in C++, and I know that it's one of the most flexible, expressive, and efficient programming languages that you'll ever find. It is a language for professional programmers who do not wish to be told how they must do something, in favor of being allowed to just do whatever it is that they're trying to do. So-called "ugly" languages (like Perl) share this philosophy. It's part of the reason that they're so widely used.
Coding in Java is a bit like trying to go through your life wearing nothing on your hands but Big Fluffy Mittens. There's nothing wrong with Big Fluffy Mittens, per se, and Big Fluffy Mittens are undeniably wonderful when you're making a snowman. Still, they kind of suck for brain surgery.
"People can choose to live in cities. Some -- like Seattle, Boston, New York and Portland -- are especially viable for a car-less lifestyle."
I live in Seattle, and let me be the first to say that it is NOT the city to live in if you want to give up your car. Indeed, in King County, cars outnumber people.
Neighborhoods differ, of course, but in general, there is no single neighborhood that would allow you to buy everything (or nearly everything) that you need to survive within walking/biking distance of your house. And bus service here (while better than many cities) simply isn't comprehensive enough to take you where you need to go on a reasonable schedule.
Seattle doesn't even remotely compare to New York or Boston in terms of urban livability -- we have most of the inconveniences and hassle of urban life (overcrowding, filth, awful traffic, ridiculous amounts of panhandling) with very few of the benefits (convenience, culture, sophistication).
If anything, Seattle is a city of spoiled yuppies who make poor urban planning decisions and call the resulting mess an inevitability of the "urban lifestyle".
Slashdot Mirror
"the ubiquitous pull becomes even worse when the last thing a student wants to do is read a boring math text. I'm less inclined to simply blame the student - is it really their fault?"
Of course not. It's the parents' fault. Even today, I know plenty of kids who were raised without video games or (gasp!) television in the home. It is possible.
That said, yes, it's still a virtue to be able to read a "boring" math text. And not just in the abstract, back-in-my-day, walked-uphill-both-ways sense of the word "virtue," either. Some things are hard to learn, and take dedication and study. No amount of pointy-clicky technology magic will change that fact.
I say this as someone who spent two-thirds of last year grading some of the most attrociously-written papers you can imagine from junior and senior undergraduates. By my estimation, only 10 percent of my students were more than functionally literate. As my students will prove to you when you encounter them in the workplace, an extensive knowledge of Microsoft Word doesn't teach you how to write....
run by 100000 lines of code
Can I have that number in standard Libraries of Congress units, please?
"The supposed "showdown" on Jay Leno was a highly unscientific and inaccurate test which pitted the world's fasted morse coder using very expensive morse equipment against a teenager using a cheap cell phone with a membrane keypad."
Where the heck did you get this? I watched the video, and at no point were the morse guys introduced as the "world's fastest" anything. And honestly, I know morse, I know a lot of old-school Ham radio guys, and those guys on Leno weren't sending at any particularly blazing rate of speed. It sounded like 20-30 WPM, give or take. There are guys out there who can copy at nearly twice that rate.
"If the pro-morser had been forced to enter morse on a phone keypad instead of his $200 morsing 'bug' then I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have won."
IIRC, the guys in the video were using a straight key, not a "bug". Nevertheless, you're kidding yourself if you think the type of key being used gave them an unfair advantage. What gave them an advantage is the fact that morse requires one button, and therefore can be sent without even looking at the keys. Even the best telephone keypad requires a certain amount of delay while switching buttons....
Sigh...
First off, there's absolutely no reason that Tay-Sachs, a disease caused by mutations in a single gene, couldn't have developed independently in multiple populations. But even if it were, you're drawing a conclusion on data (however questionable) regarding "Jews in America," which is a lot different than "Ashkenazi Jews".
Second, your argument concerning French Canadians is specious. A logical fallacy. So what if they have the same prevalance as Askenazi Jews? Why does this invalidate the original claim?
First off, if you're looking for quality research literature on the automated analysis of 2D protein gels, you're reading the wrong journal (Journal of Orthopaedic Science).
Rather than posting your question to slashdot, head over to PubMed (still better than google scholar for this type of thing), and search for, say "image analysis algorithm protein gel" and poof! You'll have 38 links, about a quarter of which are seem to be on precisely this topic.
Second, the whole premise of your question is underinformed. Any scientist involved in proteomics who wants her funding renewed knows enough not to rely on a single computational approach to pick spots from 2D protein gels. Or, if they do, they're usually doing some high-throughput method that feeds into tandem mass-spec, or some other validating experimental approach.
In short, why are you asking slashdot about this? Go to the library!
"they used TAP method which is outdated and inefficient. Predictive text input is much faster."
Well, first off, I didn't see that requirement anywhere. The SMS guy was introduced as the "fastest text messenger" in the country -- they didn't say what input method he used.
But, whatever. Having used both "predictive" text input on a cellphone, and CW transciever, I can tell you which one will win most of the time. The guys who are good at CW are almost zen-like in their ability to "speak" in Morse -- their thoughts are translated almost directly into imperceptible muscle movements on the key. It's rather spooky.
Contrast this with even the best predictive text system, and you'll see the relative clunkiness of the keypad approach -- you tap-tap-tap to get a letter, then you look at the screen and read the suggested completion, then you tap again to select the word, or even tap-tap-tap to get another letter...each time re-reading the screen, thinking about what it says, interpreting the result....totally inelegant.
Hmmm. Most bands I've been in had bass players.
Yeah, but that starts to stink after a while.
oh. wait...
"Fortran's longevity has come because...there have already been a ton of subroutine libraries to draw from, that have been built up over time by many coders." ...and that, as a result of FORTRAN's absolutely neolithic language ''features'', are usually a collection of the ugliest, least-maintainable, magical ''black box" routines that you've ever encountered.
As a scientific coder, I would estimate that 80-90% of the real reason that no one wants to update large FORTRAN libraries, is that the legacy code is fundamentally unmaintainable. No one understands what it does, and nobody wants to devote the man-years necessary to decipher the mess.
We should be replacing these systems, not glorifying them....
Well, here in Seattle, a number of researchers are being paid by the Gates' Foundation to conduct applied research into malaria infection.
Given that malaria is one of the biggest third-world killers, and that very few drug companies are willing to invest research money into drugs for poor people, I think the Gates' are actually doing some good work in this area.
I suppose you could tie that to an "agenda," but you'd have to be awfully cynical.
They don't necessarily have to go anywhere. Preparations could be as simple as reinforcing their shelter against strong winds, or tying down supplies.
Of course, I would imagine that these guys could be rescued by air, should they have advance notice of any really serious weather.
I realize that you're joking, but there's a serious point here: when you're miles away from civilization, with only a tiny shack or a bit of nylon protecting you from the elements, it is very useful to know what kind of weather is heading in your direction.
As any serious camper/hiker/climber knows, a few hours' notice of a storm is enough to save your life.
Diesel fuel has skyrocketed in price relative to gasoline recently, and it doesn't look like prices will go down.
And remember -- biodiesel is only cheap when nobody wants it. Once the producers of food oils realize that there is significant demand for their waste product, they will begin to charge for it, and the price structure for biodiesel will change. Biodiesel prices are already rising in Seattle (though that could well be a supply problem, given the number of totalitarian environmental freaks in this town).
"Most journals, in contrast, employ copy editors to clean up the English, make sure that everything is formatted just so, make sure that all the citations are complete and in the correct format, etc."
Har. In my own experience, these "copy editors" have the approximate technical skill level of a McDonald's fry-cook trainee...I know many researchers whose manuscipts have actually had errors introduced by the copy-editing process.
In my own field (computational biology), the vast majority of the thinking work (peer review, subject-matter editing) is done gratis by professors, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. And when we publish, we pay dearly for the privelege of submitting our manuscripts and figures on a website, waiting several months for comments (from the volunteer reviewers), and signing over our copyrights to the publisher upon acceptance. Then you get to pay dearly to read the article we've written!
Given that most journal access is electronic these days, I think the entire process is a racket, propped up by the notoriously conservative nature of peer-review and scientific reputation. If we could just agree that the mainstream publishers are useless, there'd be no need to support them. But of course, they're not useless (they're the arbiters of scientific quality, for better or worse), and therefore we pay for their "services"....
Actually, they've been discussing ways to cut the amount of money that each people takes for years because of the decreasing ratio of people paying in to people being paid. Everything from increasing the retirement age to decreasing benefits. That covers poit A for the people.
...and insurance companies have, since time immemorial, adjusted their benefits, their deductables and their rates to accomodate for demographic changes (read: things like the Baby Boom). And when they do, moronic conservatives do not flap their arms and scream that the insurance industry is Fundamentally Flawed and that we should all quit paying insurance and invest in Personal Risk Accounts.
I can make the same argument for banks, pension funds and a slew of other financial institutions. And do you know why I can make this argument? Because they are not pyramid schemes. Nor is Social Security. It is a guaranteed PENSION FUND, managed by the federal government, and secured by the Federal Treasury. It's not a matter of semantics!
If you can't see the difference between this and a pyramid scheme (Amway, "make money from home opening letters!", "lose weight now! ask me how!"), and why it's not just a "rigid definition" (facts are annoyingly non-relative, aren't they?), you truly are one of the Special People.
a) is true because the greater number of people paying in per retiring worker benefits the people on top (ie the retiring person).
Except, there is no "person on top," and current retirees don't get any more money if more people are "at the bottom" paying in. Social Security surpluses are invested into treasury bills (by law), and are redeemed whenever the system runs a deficit.
The payments are benefited by bringing in more people into the system (having more children) to pay for the people on their way to retirement.
The system may benefit, but individual social security recipients do not. If you want to call this arrangement a pyramid scheme, well, I guess you'll have to say the same thing about insurance, banks, pension funds, the federal reserve, and a million other well-respected financial institutions. Right up there with Amway, doncha know....
b) there comes a point where this can't be sustained and the current workers (the people on the bottom) get hosed.
Uhm...no. Because benefits are not granted conditionally based on the number of people you bring into the system, you can't make the same argument that you would make for a true pyramid scheme. Contrary to duhbyah's rhetoric, there is no inherent flaw to the method of Social Security (well, not yet, anyway. He's working on it.)
sorry to burst your bubble.
No problem. You've practically made my argument for me. That's worth a bubble or two....
Do you know what a pyramid scheme actually is?
Wikipedia: "A pyramid scheme is a business model that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, usually without any product or service being delivered."
So now, Kaptain Klueless, could you back up your (inexplicably highly moderated) assertion that "Social Security is a pyramid scheme" with a logical, fact-based interpretation of Social Security, and how it either:
a) leads to benefit payments primarily for enrolling other people, and/or
b) refuses to pay benefits to those who invest
It's a sad day when silly, uninformed ideology like your own is rated as "insightful" or "informative" by even a handful of intelligent human beings.
Look, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you're taking pictures of your puppy, WalMart is fine. They'll take your 2 megapixel snapshot, and turn it into an acceptable 5x7.
If you're like most "keen amateur photographers," you'll also go to WalMart, because you're too cheap, or too indiscriminate to use anything better. Many "keen amateur photographers" don't print much at all, actually -- they post their pretty pictures of sunsets and bugs online to photo.net, and they're happy. When they have to make the occasional print for Uncle Frank, they go to WalMart, and Uncle Frank doesn't know the difference.
For the "keen amateur photographers" who actually care about the quality of the images they produce -- I'm thinking of artists, and people who enjoy the craft of photography -- it is probably cheaper to produce inkjet prints than to use traditional photographic processes. For these people, sending prints to WalMart isn't an option. They want control over the printing process, and the pimply kid behind the counter at the local fotomat isn't going to make the cut.
Sure, these people could pay a master printer to make their prints, and the results would be fantastic. But, guess what? Master printers don't work at WalMart, and they don't come cheaply.
Let me just say that the last thing you want is to emulate is the style of C++!
Perhaps next you'll tell me it has the speed of Python and the type-safety of perl....
Other than the "I need it right now so I'll pay twice the price for a bad quality picture which fades fast too" factor, why would anybody pay a ton of money for a printer and then pay again in EXPENSIVE consumables, when they have a better choice.
If you're printing snapshots of your dog, you're right, you'll go to Costco. However, I don't think this article was targeted to you.
People who know what they're doing can make massively superior prints on an ink-jet printer, when compared to those shoveled out of a high-throughput fotomat. And they can usually do it more cheaply than a pro-quality lab can produce a fine-art print.
Ultimately, your jab at inkjet prints isn't very informed -- fotomat prints are actually about as shitty as their price reflects. You just don't realize it until you see the quality of a good print, done by a skilled professional. The difference is dramatic.
If you have a rich relative offering to pay, and you can go to MIT without going into debt, then yeah, of course you should transfer. But if, like most of us, you're going to pay for college, you should choose the best accredited undergraduate education that will leave you financially stable (read: debt-free) afterward.
You'll hear lots of people telling you about the value of name schools, the need for "networking" and other such hoo-hah. And often, they'll try to convince you that it's worth $30,000 in debt to get a top-tier undergraduate education. Don't buy it.
Remember -- at the undergraduate level, most schools will teach you the same things (oftentimes, from the same books). So why pay out the nose for an education that can be obtained for a fraction of the cost of a top-tier university?
Save your money, keep yourself out of debt, and you'll have more options later on. That's doubly important today, where Punjab's willingness to work for 30 cents an hour will almost invariably trump an expensive diploma....
You're being tremendously unfair.
I'm a graduate student. I do computational biology research, as do many of my colleagues. I know scores of people who are involved in genome analysis, drug design, and fundamental forms of biomedical research. And when you look at the tools that we use, you find that we're increasingly dependent upon open source software -- from operating systems to compilers to scripting languages, our work is fundamentally enabled by the efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
It's quite humbling, actually. I probably couldn't do my research without open source. At the very least, the people who pay me probably couldn't afford to pay the same number of students/faculty/staff if they had to shell out for millions of dollars in proprietary software (to say nothing of the compatability problems that proprietary software usually creates).
The people who develop open source software help to make biomedical research possible. Is that heroism? I don't know, but it's certainly not a trivial thing....
for people who hold your viewpoint, there's no ethical dilemma here....For people who do not hold your viewpoint, knowing whether or not a treatment is based on research done on embryonic or fetal stem cells is quite important, regardless of whether the embryo in question would have been taken to term or not. It means they are profiting from the death of a sentient being if they accept a treatment that did come from embryonic/fetal stem cell research.
If you have an ethical concern regarding stem-cell therapies, don't use the treatments. Those of us who have adopted a non-medieval viewpoint on the issue (one supported by scientific evidence, if not proven by our knowledge) can utilize the results from this research. Ethics are individual.
The problem is not a matter of ethics -- the problem is that a significant portion of our society consists of backwards-thinking neo-luddites, who will attempt to suppress virtually any scientific advance on the grounds that it possibly violates their "beliefs". Indeed, nobody cares if you, personally, have a problem with fetal stem cell therapy, or genetically modified foods, or eating meat, or the idea that the earth orbits about the sun. But when you attempt to outlaw research into an idea, you prevent the rest of society from believing that idea. That's an imposition of your (goofy sense of) ethics on our way of life, and that has a slew of ethical concerns of its own.
(footnote: all use of "your" is considered royal -- if you were just playing devil's advocate, don't take it personally. If you were sersious, well, there's not much I can do for you....)
What you describe is a classic example of "mommy" thinking -- absolutely preventing the use of a feature which might be immensely valuable (or essential!) 10% of the time, because there is a chance that someone, somewhere will misuse it. It's the computational equivalent of forcing everyone to use safety scissors -- after all, someone might hurt themselves!
I do program in C++, and I know that it's one of the most flexible, expressive, and efficient programming languages that you'll ever find. It is a language for professional programmers who do not wish to be told how they must do something, in favor of being allowed to just do whatever it is that they're trying to do. So-called "ugly" languages (like Perl) share this philosophy. It's part of the reason that they're so widely used.
Coding in Java is a bit like trying to go through your life wearing nothing on your hands but Big Fluffy Mittens. There's nothing wrong with Big Fluffy Mittens, per se, and Big Fluffy Mittens are undeniably wonderful when you're making a snowman. Still, they kind of suck for brain surgery.
"People can choose to live in cities. Some -- like Seattle, Boston, New York and Portland -- are especially viable for a car-less lifestyle."
I live in Seattle, and let me be the first to say that it is NOT the city to live in if you want to give up your car. Indeed, in King County, cars outnumber people.
Neighborhoods differ, of course, but in general, there is no single neighborhood that would allow you to buy everything (or nearly everything) that you need to survive within walking/biking distance of your house. And bus service here (while better than many cities) simply isn't comprehensive enough to take you where you need to go on a reasonable schedule.
Seattle doesn't even remotely compare to New York or Boston in terms of urban livability -- we have most of the inconveniences and hassle of urban life (overcrowding, filth, awful traffic, ridiculous amounts of panhandling) with very few of the benefits (convenience, culture, sophistication).
If anything, Seattle is a city of spoiled yuppies who make poor urban planning decisions and call the resulting mess an inevitability of the "urban lifestyle".
indeed. that's mostly what you find serving coffee in seattle....