As someone who lived most of his life outside the US, and now teaches outside the US in a University, but got my B.S. in a US University, I say the following:
Pros: - Flexibility: I LOVE the idea of choosing classes! Great concept, too bad not every system has this - 1 per class per day: obvious? Great that in the US system you get your 5 hours of math at 1 per day.. not all together! - Exams not the only consideration: in the US system many techniques are used to evaluate, not just exams - Focused towards the masses: the US system is less elitist than other systems around the world. Everybody is expected to graduate! (not true in some countries where the graduation rate is at MOST 10%) - Tough admissions: on the opposite end, you need to compete to get in - Cheating is considered a capital offence: in some countries it is tolerated far too much - Options: in large US universities you can study just about anything.. that's cool! - Alternatives: if you really don't like a class or a teacher, wait till the next semester/quarter - Quarter system: I love the quarter system. Annual systems stink. Semesters are better but quarter system rules!
Cons: - Cost - Cost again - Tough for foreign students (though I wasn't one) - Stupid SATs, GREs that measure test preparation and test taking skill more than knowledge - Hard to sometimes justify the cost (did I mention cost?)
But I often recommend the US System over all others. I honestly think it is the best. (Though I'm biased somewhat)
The bug in this article is that he's not saying that pixels are squares.. He's saying that we digitize as if they were squares. Instead he'd like to digitize in irregular shape. Its like an adaptive compression algorithm.
Of course, if we digitize better, the information gathered will be closer to the original so the image should more like the original.
(What I wonder though, is if there aren't intelligent digitization algorithms that are already doing this.. I'd be surprised if they weren't)
Degrees aren't everything. They are a mass teaching mechanism. There is no guarantee you'll get a lot out of your degree. On the other hand it does make it easier for a lot of people to cover a certain set of information deemed to be important for a given profession.
However, this doesn't mean someone can't self-study their way into knowing as much as or even more than college graduates. Many professionals know that they've learnt a LOT more after college than during college.
However, doing things in a non-conventional way can make it harder for you to prove your worth later on in life.. like when you are 40 or 50 and out of a job because of a recesion or some other circumstance outside of your control. Not every country values experience above degrees. In many countries a degree is worth a LOT more than experience (I don't agree with that.. but it is the way it is). Not having a degree can create a lot of limitations in later in life.
So just because some of our remote ancestors behaved like giant douchebags it's okay to let people repeat it, especially if it's in the name of religion.
What happened to learning from history to avoid repeating its mistake? Or did i miss some clause detailing exceptions to this?
Exactly.
Fundamentalists all over the world (regardless of religion), having seen that the world is morally bankrupt, think that the solution is to revert to the past.
It shows a lack of imagination.. and more seriously, a lack of understanding of their own faith.
Muhammad didn't want the Islamic world to revert back to violent tribes that kill each other and perpetrate violence against their women and are morally and intellectually bankrupt! (that is exactly what he spent his whole life battling) Quite the opposite and a fair reading of history basically proves that.
But many fundamentalist movements today see WAR as the solution. (Much the same way the Jews expected a warrior Messiah but instead got Jesus Christ)
When you follow the rites and superstitions brought down from your forefathers instead of understanding a Faiths true purpose you are prone to become fanatical and superstitious.
What do you really expect for a religion literally meaning "submission" and where the very founder spread it at the point of a sword..
That is not entirely accurate. During Muhammad's lifetime there were several battles that happened because the Meccans attacked Medina (a city state where Muhammad was mayor). In that battle ridden society it was only natural for them to defend themselves against those who would do them harm. What's more, it was a duty to defend your city that way.
Remember also, that Moses and Abraham were also engaged in several battles. In fact, the Isrealites took over Canaan by force under the direction of Joshua. Also, the 10 Commandments prescribed DEATH to anyone who violated one of these commandments including for crimes such as adultery or robbery. What Islam did was bring back some of those laws for the wild Arab tribes of the 6th Century. In fact, many of the laws were much softer than the Old Testament laws.
The reality is that in th 6th Century there were wars. Violence was common and a part of government. Islamic civilization brought peace to a region ridden by war and brought the people under its empire relative peace and prosperty (especially when compared to the West).
As for "submission". Submission refers to the will of God, not some twisted guy's idea of God. It means following the beliefs like prayer, charity, piety and living a good life. This is no different than other religions. And you're twisting the notion here.
Having said that. The current behavior of fanatics that have a twisted and narrow interpretation of Islam. And yes, there are far too many of them.:)
They want to regress society back to the 6th Century. Clearly this is an extreme and impractical solution, and what they are doing is causing more harm and insult to Muhammad than any drawing competition ever did.
That being said.. I don't think insulting the founders of a major religion is in any way productive. And doing so is just rude. Muslims don't like portraying their founder in pictures as an act of reverence. One that should be commended. There's nothing wrong with that. If only the fanatics had equal respect for human life and for sensibility they would make great strides in showing respect to their founder.
Shouting "God is Great" while killing an innocent victim is the biggest insult to both God and Muhammad, and as believers they should know better.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 1
Well.. if I'm driving a car negligently and hit an old lady I may well be held responsible personally.
If my army commits acts of genocide and they are under my command I may well be held responsible personally (even if I didn't make the command to do it).
So for very great environmental accidents maybe some personal accountability is warranted.
I hear a lot of complaints about Universities here. But the original article talks about a student that worked her way through college relying on her classmates to do all her work. The reality is that you can fool just about any system and you can always be mediocre. This is not necessarily the fault of the school, but of the student herself!!
Other people here complain that new grads don't know how a debugger works or what the object relational impedence mismatch is.. but when I think about it I think most of these terms are what people learn when reading stuff on the internet or from books. Not necessarily from classes. When I went to school, there wasn't much web programming going on yet.. so it is impossible for the University to have taught me about such things. But today I know because I continue to read.
So I wouldn't base a hiring decision of a junior person on whether they know or don't know a fixed set of skills, but rather try to gauge what skills they HAVE successfully acquired and whether they have the capacity to learn.
For example, many people may know how to join tables together like this: select * from t1, t2 where t1.id = t2.id But not like this: select * from t1 inner join t2 on t1.id = t2.id
If the person is applying to be a college professor this may be a show stopper.. but as a programmer I can just show him the new way and in 5 mins he should be able to pick it up.
Different people get different skills out of college. It is important that they show they have some skills and that they can learn. But to expect them to know that it is good to step through your code with a debugger (a la Steve McGuire) or to have experience in estimating code is a bit unreasonable because College assignments rarely have time to emphasize such aspects of professional life.
A junior programmer is someone you are hiring as an apprentice! But a CS degree proves to be invaluable over time because the person as she gains experience starts correlating what she learned w/the real world work and can go over it again and become a better developer over time. Also, a CS graduate can often look at a paper and learn something new (the wonders of skip lists, the marvels or randomized binary trees, random cache eviction) and understand the theoretical pros and cons better than someone that doesn't have those skills.
"a VERY low level language, that can easily be used to demonstrate underlying Computer Science concepts"
Memory addressing, networking and operating systems are not the underlying concepts of computer science!
Computer Science is about algorithms, theory of computation, computer language theory, etc.. Not some particular Von Neumann abstraction that we used 40 years ago to represent computation!
A much better language to teach the "underlying concepts of Computer Science" would be Scheme, OCaml, or Haskell. Or even Ruby, Erlang or Smalltalk.
"Low level" programming in C is not that relevant these days and not very high tech.
The first course is "Introduction to PROGRAMMING" not Pascal. It doesn't matter too much what the language is.. what matters is the concepts that are taught. That being said some languages are very good for teaching the basic concepts some are less so.
Pascal was great for its time because it taught: - well organized procedural style coding - modularity - static typing - top-down programming
Such concepts are fundamental programming concepts and what you use to teach them just depends. Today some Universities use Alice as an Intro to programming. Clearly nobody is going to use Alice as a commercial programming class.
As any experienced programmer knows, learning a language is no big deal. The most important thing is to learn the basic concepts like programming in the small, OO, functional programming, etc..
Cheating is usually easy to spot. Because not only do they use the same algorithms and the same sequence of code, but also the same spacing. For example:
x = x +1; printf(" %d", x);
Notice no space between +1, and 2 spaces between " , x". When you see this combined with the same essential algorithms. A high degree of similarity in the strings and in the comments.. the user has copied the code.
Most students don't do a great job of covering it up.
The article also mentions foreign students as being more likely to cheat. Note that cheating is fairly commonplace in high schools and even in Universities in many countries. Not all countries penalize students very harshly when caught. In some cases they only get points deducted or get an F in the assignment. So a culture of cheating emerges.
(I know.. I'm an instructor in South America..:) )
Beginning when my daughter was 3, I would play "classroom" with her. I taught her letters, later at 4 I taught her how to count and add little drawings of things to make totals. By the time she was 4.5 she could add and subtract simple numbers with symbols.
But all this was done with MAX 10 sessions of one on one 10-30 games.
Then my daughter went to preschool, kindergarten, first grade, and only in second grade did she start learning new things. (Boy they teach sooooo slowly in school and so innefficiently!!)
I don't think the idea this man had is totally crazy. It probably makes sense. Arithmetic is poorly taught (I think we can agree on that).
The real purpose of Arithmetic (and math in general) is to describe (model) things precisely. So students should be taught how to do that. First with language, later with symbolic math tools. But they must never lose site of the real purpose.
Too many students wonder "what is this good for". Math is presented very abstractly. And the algorithms of addition, subtraction, division, square root are presented by example (so the students have to guess the algorithm).. instead they should be taught how to think.
The "recitation" in the article seems to promote thinking as opposed to mechanistic thinking. So the idea is not totally kookie!
(I'll try it on my 2 year old.. and let you guys know how it went)
Re:Smalltalk and LISP for the History Major
on
Metaprogramming Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Very true. Smalltalk is a better Ruby than Ruby.. Ruby is still clunky by comparison.
What we need is to create a new language called.. hmm.. Diamond.. that works like this:
object.message
(instead of ST's: object message)
then you can pass parameters like so:
object.message(key1:value, key2:value) (instead of ST's: object key1:value key2:value)
etc..
Ie.. just redefine the syntax so nobody can tell that its just ST (because people fear ST).
The problem w/ST was that it was ahead of its time. In some respects it is still ahead of THIS time!
"I had interviews with every company I spoke to at the job fair, and job offers from all three that I pursued. They were 40k, 43k and 50k (but ~50% travel required). I negotiated the 43k up to 47k.
I was pissed."
Wow.. now ask friends who majored in Education, History, English, etc.. what they made out of college. 47k won't sound so bad.
I don't think it is bad to reuse other people's lesson plans. You can often learn a lot from that.
Creating materials to teach a class is very difficult. Learning from what others have done can make you more effective. I only teach college level, but I've seen many teachers at big Universities share material. It only makes them better and makes the class more efficient.
Why should reinventing the wheel be necessary? Obviously some adaption while delivering the material is good.
I beg your pardon, but programmers have to analyze the problem given, come up with a solution and write the code.. they don't just clean toilets. And they DO have to understand the problem.
My biggest rant about most of these new languages: garbage collection is useless! I still have to write destructors that clean up all the pointers to an object, and all garbage collection does is force me to call the destructor as a function, rather than a more clear 'delete' statement. Worse, it takes away my most powerful speed optimization tool: careful memory layout for best cache hit rates. I can write simple graph traversal code that is 10X faster in carefully designed C/C++ than in any garbage collected language for large graphs.
Wow! Your obsolete 80s mentality is mind-boggling.
GC is awesome.. it increases application throughput inmensely.. and removes the need for destructors (in most cases).
For most server based applications, GC increases the time you do actual work and reduces the amount of time doing book keeping.
But don't listen to me.. ignorance is bliss. Have a happy life in C++. The rest of the world has mostly evolved beyond that.
I'm happy they are here, but they followed the proper procedure of filling-out a Visa. Anyone who does not follow that procedure should (IMHO) be jailed and deported, the same way you arrest an intruder you find in your living room. The intruder does not belong.
I hope you never find yourself in a desparate situation in which you have to leave your family and travel accross the globe in dangerous conditions to try to make them some money because they are living in misery or in a war torn situation. It is easy to sit back and judge people from your comfortable computer. But the reality is that many "illegal" immigrants would much rather stay home with their family and children then go away in dangerous conditions to try to get their family out of misery.
I know several people in this situation. Even "legal" immigrants. They rather stay home with their families. The problems that cause people to take these desparate steps go beyond stupid local legislation in the US. And the dumb little laws people set or don't set in the US don't have a great effect over this. However, working with other countries to improve the situation back home and recognizing the importance of immigrants to the US economy (even guest workers) is a step to releiving the conditions that cause this problem.
Americans are fortunate to live in a country were hard work is rewarded. That is not the case in a lot of Latin American countries and other countries around the world where people face prejudice because of social class. Just as most US citizens came to the country escaping unfair or disadvantageous conditions back home, current illegal immigrants do so as well.
mod parent up.. an interesting question.. maybe the cable can't handle it but adding copper cable segments with electricity? seems simpler than laser power for 60 0000 Km
Slashdot Mirror
Salaries go up?
What do you mean? Teachers make 25k-30K. Programmers make 60K-150K. Salaries are already up!
As someone who lived most of his life outside the US, and now teaches outside the US in a University, but got my B.S. in a US University, I say the following:
Pros:
- Flexibility: I LOVE the idea of choosing classes! Great concept, too bad not every system has this
- 1 per class per day: obvious? Great that in the US system you get your 5 hours of math at 1 per day.. not all together!
- Exams not the only consideration: in the US system many techniques are used to evaluate, not just exams
- Focused towards the masses: the US system is less elitist than other systems around the world. Everybody is expected to graduate! (not true in some countries where the graduation rate is at MOST 10%)
- Tough admissions: on the opposite end, you need to compete to get in
- Cheating is considered a capital offence: in some countries it is tolerated far too much
- Options: in large US universities you can study just about anything.. that's cool!
- Alternatives: if you really don't like a class or a teacher, wait till the next semester/quarter
- Quarter system: I love the quarter system. Annual systems stink. Semesters are better but quarter system rules!
Cons:
- Cost
- Cost again
- Tough for foreign students (though I wasn't one)
- Stupid SATs, GREs that measure test preparation and test taking skill more than knowledge
- Hard to sometimes justify the cost (did I mention cost?)
But I often recommend the US System over all others. I honestly think it is the best. (Though I'm biased somewhat)
The bug in this article is that he's not saying that pixels are squares.. He's saying that we digitize as if they were squares. Instead he'd like to digitize in irregular shape. Its like an adaptive compression algorithm.
Of course, if we digitize better, the information gathered will be closer to the original so the image should more like the original.
(What I wonder though, is if there aren't intelligent digitization algorithms that are already doing this.. I'd be surprised if they weren't)
Degrees aren't everything. They are a mass teaching mechanism. There is no guarantee you'll get a lot out of your degree.
On the other hand it does make it easier for a lot of people to cover a certain set of information deemed to be important for a given profession.
However, this doesn't mean someone can't self-study their way into knowing as much as or even more than college graduates. Many professionals know that they've learnt a LOT more after college than during college.
However, doing things in a non-conventional way can make it harder for you to prove your worth later on in life.. like when you are 40 or 50 and out of a job because of a recesion or some other circumstance outside of your control. Not every country values experience above degrees. In many countries a degree is worth a LOT more than experience (I don't agree with that.. but it is the way it is). Not having a degree can create a lot of limitations in later in life.
I hate scifi/horror.. there are far too few well done scifi movies.. why mess them up w/horror?
I'd pay if they let me use it Internationally.
So just because some of our remote ancestors behaved like giant douchebags it's okay to let people repeat it, especially if it's in the name of religion.
What happened to learning from history to avoid repeating its mistake? Or did i miss some clause detailing exceptions to this?
Exactly.
Fundamentalists all over the world (regardless of religion), having seen that the world is morally bankrupt, think that the solution is to revert to the past.
It shows a lack of imagination.. and more seriously, a lack of understanding of their own faith.
Muhammad didn't want the Islamic world to revert back to violent tribes that kill each other and perpetrate violence against their women and are morally and intellectually bankrupt! (that is exactly what he spent his whole life battling) Quite the opposite and a fair reading of history basically proves that.
But many fundamentalist movements today see WAR as the solution. (Much the same way the Jews expected a warrior Messiah but instead got Jesus Christ)
When you follow the rites and superstitions brought down from your forefathers instead of understanding a Faiths true purpose you are prone to become fanatical and superstitious.
What do you really expect for a religion literally meaning "submission" and where the very founder spread it at the point of a sword. .
That is not entirely accurate. During Muhammad's lifetime there were several battles that happened because the Meccans attacked Medina (a city state where Muhammad was mayor). In that battle ridden society it was only natural for them to defend themselves against those who would do them harm. What's more, it was a duty to defend your city that way.
Remember also, that Moses and Abraham were also engaged in several battles. In fact, the Isrealites took over Canaan by force under the direction of Joshua. Also, the 10 Commandments prescribed DEATH to anyone who violated one of these commandments including for crimes such as adultery or robbery. What Islam did was bring back some of those laws for the wild Arab tribes of the 6th Century. In fact, many of the laws were much softer than the Old Testament laws.
The reality is that in th 6th Century there were wars. Violence was common and a part of government. Islamic civilization brought peace to a region ridden by war and brought the people under its empire relative peace and prosperty (especially when compared to the West).
As for "submission". Submission refers to the will of God, not some twisted guy's idea of God. It means following the beliefs like prayer, charity, piety and living a good life. This is no different than other religions. And you're twisting the notion here.
Having said that. The current behavior of fanatics that have a twisted and narrow interpretation of Islam. And yes, there are far too many of them. :)
They want to regress society back to the 6th Century. Clearly this is an extreme and impractical solution, and what they are doing is causing more harm and insult to Muhammad than any drawing competition ever did.
That being said.. I don't think insulting the founders of a major religion is in any way productive. And doing so is just rude. Muslims don't like portraying their founder in pictures as an act of reverence. One that should be commended. There's nothing wrong with that. If only the fanatics had equal respect for human life and for sensibility they would make great strides in showing respect to their founder.
Shouting "God is Great" while killing an innocent victim is the biggest insult to both God and Muhammad, and as believers they should know better.
Well.. if I'm driving a car negligently and hit an old lady I may well be held responsible personally.
If my army commits acts of genocide and they are under my command I may well be held responsible personally (even if I didn't make the command to do it).
So for very great environmental accidents maybe some personal accountability is warranted.
I hear a lot of complaints about Universities here. But the original article talks about a student that worked her way through college relying on her classmates to do all her work. The reality is that you can fool just about any system and you can always be mediocre. This is not necessarily the fault of the school, but of the student herself!!
Other people here complain that new grads don't know how a debugger works or what the object relational impedence mismatch is.. but when I think about it I think most of these terms are what people learn when reading stuff on the internet or from books. Not necessarily from classes. When I went to school, there wasn't much web programming going on yet.. so it is impossible for the University to have taught me about such things. But today I know because I continue to read.
So I wouldn't base a hiring decision of a junior person on whether they know or don't know a fixed set of skills, but rather try to gauge what skills they HAVE successfully acquired and whether they have the capacity to learn.
For example, many people may know how to join tables together like this: select * from t1, t2 where t1.id = t2.id
But not like this: select * from t1 inner join t2 on t1.id = t2.id
If the person is applying to be a college professor this may be a show stopper.. but as a programmer I can just show him the new way and in 5 mins he should be able to pick it up.
Different people get different skills out of college. It is important that they show they have some skills and that they can learn. But to expect them to know that it is good to step through your code with a debugger (a la Steve McGuire) or to have experience in estimating code is a bit unreasonable because College assignments rarely have time to emphasize such aspects of professional life.
A junior programmer is someone you are hiring as an apprentice! But a CS degree proves to be invaluable over time because the person as she gains experience starts correlating what she learned w/the real world work and can go over it again and become a better developer over time. Also, a CS graduate can often look at a paper and learn something new (the wonders of skip lists, the marvels or randomized binary trees, random cache eviction) and understand the theoretical pros and cons better than someone that doesn't have those skills.
"a VERY low level language, that can easily be used to demonstrate underlying Computer Science concepts"
Memory addressing, networking and operating systems are not the underlying concepts of computer science!
Computer Science is about algorithms, theory of computation, computer language theory, etc.. Not some particular Von Neumann abstraction that we used 40 years ago to represent computation!
A much better language to teach the "underlying concepts of Computer Science" would be Scheme, OCaml, or Haskell. Or even Ruby, Erlang or Smalltalk.
"Low level" programming in C is not that relevant these days and not very high tech.
The Java virtual machine is much more high tech.
Peopleware by Tom DeMarco!
That is what the living rooms are for..
The office is for concentrating.. the living rooms for chatting..
Also, you can go to someone else's office and chat to your heart's delight. But at least you'll only be interrupting 1 person.
I can't believe some people actually believe that these open floor plans are a good idea!
Wow.. you're saying this as if it were news.
I know that 10 years ago Microsoft and many other companies in the northwest had a 1 person per office policy (when it came to developers).
The reason is that people had read Tom DeMarco's "Peopleware"!
The first course is "Introduction to PROGRAMMING" not Pascal. It doesn't matter too much what the language is.. what matters is the concepts that are taught. That being said some languages are very good for teaching the basic concepts some are less so.
Pascal was great for its time because it taught:
- well organized procedural style coding
- modularity
- static typing
- top-down programming
Such concepts are fundamental programming concepts and what you use to teach them just depends. Today some Universities use Alice as an Intro to programming. Clearly nobody is going to use Alice as a commercial programming class.
As any experienced programmer knows, learning a language is no big deal. The most important thing is to learn the basic concepts like programming in the small, OO, functional programming, etc..
Cheating is usually easy to spot. Because not only do they use the same algorithms and the same sequence of code, but also the same spacing. For example:
x = x +1;
printf(" %d", x);
Notice no space between +1, and 2 spaces between " , x". When you see this combined with the same essential algorithms. A high degree of similarity in the strings and in the comments.. the user has copied the code.
Most students don't do a great job of covering it up.
The article also mentions foreign students as being more likely to cheat. Note that cheating is fairly commonplace in high schools and even in Universities in many countries. Not all countries penalize students very harshly when caught. In some cases they only get points deducted or get an F in the assignment. So a culture of cheating emerges.
(I know.. I'm an instructor in South America.. :) )
Here's my own personal experience.
Beginning when my daughter was 3, I would play "classroom" with her. I taught her letters, later at 4 I taught her how to count and add little drawings of things to make totals. By the time she was 4.5 she could add and subtract simple numbers with symbols.
But all this was done with MAX 10 sessions of one on one 10-30 games.
Then my daughter went to preschool, kindergarten, first grade, and only in second grade did she start learning new things. (Boy they teach sooooo slowly in school and so innefficiently!!)
I don't think the idea this man had is totally crazy. It probably makes sense. Arithmetic is poorly taught (I think we can agree on that).
The real purpose of Arithmetic (and math in general) is to describe (model) things precisely. So students should be taught how to do that. First with language, later with symbolic math tools. But they must never lose site of the real purpose.
Too many students wonder "what is this good for". Math is presented very abstractly. And the algorithms of addition, subtraction, division, square root are presented by example (so the students have to guess the algorithm).. instead they should be taught how to think.
The "recitation" in the article seems to promote thinking as opposed to mechanistic thinking. So the idea is not totally kookie!
(I'll try it on my 2 year old.. and let you guys know how it went)
Very true. Smalltalk is a better Ruby than Ruby.. Ruby is still clunky by comparison.
What we need is to create a new language called.. hmm.. Diamond.. that works like this:
object.message
(instead of ST's: object message)
then you can pass parameters like so:
object.message(key1:value, key2:value)
(instead of ST's: object key1:value key2:value)
etc..
Ie.. just redefine the syntax so nobody can tell that its just ST (because people fear ST).
The problem w/ST was that it was ahead of its time. In some respects it is still ahead of THIS time!
"I had interviews with every company I spoke to at the job fair, and job offers from all three that I pursued. They were 40k, 43k and 50k (but ~50% travel required). I negotiated the 43k up to 47k.
I was pissed."
Wow.. now ask friends who majored in Education, History, English, etc.. what they made out of college. 47k won't sound so bad.
We used to be the best at everything.
Then we lost our position in the world as upholders of human rights.
Followed by our economy going down the drain.
Then the dollar lost its place as best currency.
Now we're losing our position as Spam leaders?!
There's nothing left.. I'm jumping out of the sinking ship!
I don't think it is bad to reuse other people's lesson plans. You can often learn a lot from that.
Creating materials to teach a class is very difficult. Learning from what others have done can make you more effective. I only teach college level, but I've seen many teachers at big Universities share material. It only makes them better and makes the class more efficient.
Why should reinventing the wheel be necessary? Obviously some adaption while delivering the material is good.
Programmers are like janitors.
I beg your pardon, but programmers have to analyze the problem given, come up with a solution and write the code.. they don't just clean toilets. And they DO have to understand the problem.
My biggest rant about most of these new languages: garbage collection is useless! I still have to write destructors that clean up all the pointers to an object, and all garbage collection does is force me to call the destructor as a function, rather than a more clear 'delete' statement. Worse, it takes away my most powerful speed optimization tool: careful memory layout for best cache hit rates. I can write simple graph traversal code that is 10X faster in carefully designed C/C++ than in any garbage collected language for large graphs.
Wow! Your obsolete 80s mentality is mind-boggling.
GC is awesome.. it increases application throughput inmensely.. and removes the need for destructors (in most cases).
For most server based applications, GC increases the time you do actual work and reduces the amount of time doing book keeping.
But don't listen to me.. ignorance is bliss. Have a happy life in C++. The rest of the world has mostly evolved beyond that.
I'm happy they are here, but they followed the proper procedure of filling-out a Visa. Anyone who does not follow that procedure should (IMHO) be jailed and deported, the same way you arrest an intruder you find in your living room. The intruder does not belong.
I hope you never find yourself in a desparate situation in which you have to leave your family and travel accross the globe in dangerous conditions to try to make them some money because they are living in misery or in a war torn situation. It is easy to sit back and judge people from your comfortable computer. But the reality is that many "illegal" immigrants would much rather stay home with their family and children then go away in dangerous conditions to try to get their family out of misery.
I know several people in this situation. Even "legal" immigrants. They rather stay home with their families. The problems that cause people to take these desparate steps go beyond stupid local legislation in the US. And the dumb little laws people set or don't set in the US don't have a great effect over this. However, working with other countries to improve the situation back home and recognizing the importance of immigrants to the US economy (even guest workers) is a step to releiving the conditions that cause this problem.
Americans are fortunate to live in a country were hard work is rewarded. That is not the case in a lot of Latin American countries and other countries around the world where people face prejudice because of social class. Just as most US citizens came to the country escaping unfair or disadvantageous conditions back home, current illegal immigrants do so as well.
mod parent up..
an interesting question.. maybe the cable can't handle it but adding copper cable segments with electricity? seems simpler than laser power for 60 0000 Km