Is your goal to have a degree because it would be useful to list on a résumé, or do you want the degree because you think the content of the BS in CS would be useful? If it's the latter, then independent study or auditing college courses might be the answer for you. If it's the former, though, you more or less have to accept that the BS is not just a vocational degree--it is a degree from a university that attests to you not only knowing the content of the major but also the gen-ed requirements.
Can anyone comment on how the Google wave protocol deals with spam? Does it have a method for dealing with the problem, or is it vulnerable in all the same ways that SMTP is vulnerable?
It's impossible for guarantee 100% storage integrity, just like it's impossible to guarantee 100% uptime. What you want to ask is what risk of data loss you are willing to take.
This page compares some of the options in terms of Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL). For the amount of space you're looking at (~500gb), a three-way mirror is probably sufficient to last for your lifetime.
But there's always the risk of fat-fingering "rm -rf" or having the building catch fire, so maybe you want to have two synchronized sets of mirrors, stored in different physical locations. Only you can decide if that's too paranoid for you (or not paranoid enough).
So does this discovery change the odds for the universe ending in a heat death or a big crunch? AANA astrophysicist, but I would guess that, if galaxies are more likely to form around black holes, it means that there's a large gravitational pull right at the center of the more mass-dense areas of the universe and thus increases the chance of the universe ending in a big crunch vis-a-vis heat death.
Actually, hospital personnel are supposed to ask for your medical history multiple times. IANA(medical professional), but I read that asking multiple times is intended to make sure the information is as accurate as possible. If I remember correctly (and I can't find the link, sorry), at least one study found a noticeable difference in what patients disclosed of their medical history over the course of a stay in a hospital. Oftentimes, patients would either intentionally cover up some information at first (not mentioning an STD, for example, because of embarrassment) or simply forget to mention something (e.g., forgetting to mention a medication or accidentally giving the wrong dosage).
This is not to say that repeatedly asking a patient under a haze of drugs or pain is the best approach, but there can be valid concerns behind it.
It's true that the master will be better able to help you overcome mistakes, and your point about adaptability is well taken.
You do raise an interesting question, though: can the master actually help the student avoid learning bad habits better than a journeyman (if we assume that the student will eventually move on to work with the master once his/her skills have developed)? I'm trying to think of an activity that I've learned where I didn't pick up bad habits along the way, and I'm coming up blank. I think part of the challenge of learning is being able to re-learn things that you picked up incorrectly at first, and I don't know if working with a master right away (as opposed to after a few years) would really help to skip over those kinds of errors. Again, YMMV.
I've wondered about whether the difference between a top-tier instructor and a merely "good" instructor makes that much of a difference at the beginning. When you are starting to learn something, does it really matter if you are working with the best of the best, or just with someone who knows the basics and can get you started without major mistakes? My impression, from my own experiences in trying to learn various skills, is that I don't have enough of my own knowledge of the activity early on to be able to benefit from the extra wisdom held by the best of the best.
Certainly no one above grade-school level should be citing encyclopedias in their work. However, that's not to say that there is no use for encylopedias (encyclopediae?) beyond that level. They can provide a very useful brief introduction to the topic and even point you towards some of the main academic works on that subject.
This is also one area in which I think wikipedia will lag behind traditional encyclopedias. One of the advantages of having an expert write an article is that they can survey the literature and orient a newcomer to the topic far more effectively than someone who merely knows the facts. Obviously this varies from topic to topic--I'd bet that wikipedia will be more useful for an introduction to the world of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip--but for the traditional academic fields, I think wikipedia has a long way to go in this regard.
Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
After all, the academic jobs that you often get after earning a humanities or social science Ph.D. never have any pointless rules that nonetheless need to be followed.
More importantly, I think your attitude fundamentally misses the point. Just because you don't plan to publish from a class doesn't mean that it's useless to you. Surprisingly enough, you can get practice in reading the scholarly literature for your field, formulating a thesis, seeing possible problems, improving your writing or experimental technique, etc. I'm a doctoral student in philosphy, and while I have no plans to do substantial work in certain subdisciplines, I found those courses very helpful in refining skills that I will use in my particular branch of the field.
Finally, I question how sharp a distinction you can draw between what is important and what is not. Is getting the bibliographic citation for a particular quote important, or is that something that you can just let slide because "getting the article published is what really matters"? Is it really important to acknowledge that one counter-example to your comparative politics hypothesis, or is that something that can be just swept under the rug because your hypothesis is right? I'd be very surprised if that kind of intellectual laziness or sloppiness or dishonesty would remain so self-contained...
The problem is that degrading gracefullly has to occur both ways: in other words, it is not enough that a next-generation email system can send an email to a legacy system, but the next-generation system also has to be able to receive emails from the legacy system. Therein lies the problem: until you shut off the ability to receive from legacy systems, there is (almost*) no advantage to the next generation system because you still will be vulnerable to phishing, spam, etc. from legacy emails.
*I say almost because you could set up a client to whitelist next generation emails or flag legacy emails as insecure, and while those measures are not totally unrealistic they also won't revolutionize email anytime soon.
As an academic, I'm expected to read various works in my discipline in the original language. Even after adjusting for international shipping, it often is as much as $100 cheaper to buy a volume of an author's collected works through (for example) Amazon.de instead of Amazon.com.
Also, a lot of works are not translated and are relatively minor outside of a very narrow discipline, and so American bookstores (online or in the real world) do not carry them. Having access to international bookstores via the internet is crucial for my research.
There's a significant problem you're ignoring, namely when other people share the same name as you. My name is not extremely common, but a Google search on my name comes up with a lot of stuff that isn't me and could be very harmful to my reputation if it were. Even worse, the other person with my name is about the same age as I am, at least as far as I can tell from the pictures, so it's quite plausible that a potential employer could think that was me.
If the approval numbers only went from 46 percent to 53 percent because of the addition of the terrorism clause, that suggests less than 10% of the population believes that the threat of terrrorism justifies more aggressive intelligence techniques. Frankly, I'm surprised that number is so low.
I put my Apple sticker on my Nalgene water bottle. It's pretty darned close to the same shade of white as the volume measurements on the side, so it blends in perfectly.
How does this impact Open Office? Open Office can then read the XML Format because it's declared in the patent. But what O^2 won't be able to do is write the MS Office XML Format [except to violate the patent]. This means: no interoperability [...]
Open Office should still be able to write MS Office's XML because it is a declared standard. Even if they can't do that because it's patented (and I'm not sure why that would be true--anyone and their dog can write an Adobe-compatible PDF precisely because the standard is open), Open Office will still be able to write a standard XML file from the MS XML it opened, and MS Office will still be able to read that file.
The only problematic scenario is if Microsoft decides to break their support for non-MS-extended XML files, but that would be akin to Microsoft dropping support for RTF files today. It's to Microsoft's advantage to support opening as many file formats as possible--otherwise, they lock themselves out of anyone who wants to convert to MS Office but has non-MS generated files.
Until a peer-reviewed journal submits a valid proof of the existence (or non-existence) of God, science is, and must remain, mute on the subject.
Plantinga, Alvin. The Nature of Necessity. New York: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Peer reviewed in journals such as Mind, New Scholasticism, Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
You're making the assumption that the intelligence of a person's choice of video format is equivalent to the value of the content they choose to encode. This simply isn't true. There can be great content that people distribute through closed codecs because they don't know any better, and to simply say, "Don't watch that codec" is an inadequate response.
If "Oops I Did It Again" is considered complex, I'm not sure if this service is for me. Outside of the obvious whiskey-tango-foxtrot question, do you really want to see Britney Spears recommended since you listen to complex orchestral themes?
While I doubt blogs will ever replace the traditional media, they do serve a valuable purpose. They have access to literally thousands of people who are interested in a topic and therefore can muster quite a bit of fact-checking/investigating, something far beyond the capacity of most "traditional" journalists to do when pressed with a deadline. This can both generate new information as well as track down leads more effectively than print media.
Lack of accountability is not necessarily a bad thing in this context, because it represents the pinnacle of the marketplace of ideas - literally any idea can be proposed and defended. There's obviously a great potential for this to support idiocy and fringe hate groups, but those groups will always exist. On the other hand, it provides a useful check on traditional media, who are too often losing their sense of objectivity and urge to find the truth because of media consolidation, need to maintain political access, etc.
Finally, blogs have a unique ability to cater to particular interest groups and focus discussion to a level not seen in traditional media. While you may see it as groupthink, many political blogs in fact engage in sustained debate over the best strategy for their base. If all we had were blogs, you'd be correct that groupthink could run wild. But, there's still the real world to deal with, and any community that wants to interact with others needs to find a way to do so effectively or they simply won't be listened to.
But, the software should still ask for your permission to download those patches. I have no problem with my computer telling me that there are new patches, device drivers, etc. available. I do have a problem when it downloads and installs them without telling me, because it could mess up my computer. I've had devices that were working perfectly fine all of a sudden crash because of a new driver, and I want to be the one that decides whether or not I need to update.
When the extended edition of Two Towers came out, I discovered that the second disc (part two of the movie) was scratched and wouldn't play. When I returned it to the store, the salesperson noted that an unusually large number of people had the same problem with that particular product.
Slashdot Mirror
Is your goal to have a degree because it would be useful to list on a résumé, or do you want the degree because you think the content of the BS in CS would be useful? If it's the latter, then independent study or auditing college courses might be the answer for you. If it's the former, though, you more or less have to accept that the BS is not just a vocational degree--it is a degree from a university that attests to you not only knowing the content of the major but also the gen-ed requirements.
Can anyone comment on how the Google wave protocol deals with spam? Does it have a method for dealing with the problem, or is it vulnerable in all the same ways that SMTP is vulnerable?
It's impossible for guarantee 100% storage integrity, just like it's impossible to guarantee 100% uptime. What you want to ask is what risk of data loss you are willing to take.
This page compares some of the options in terms of Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL). For the amount of space you're looking at (~500gb), a three-way mirror is probably sufficient to last for your lifetime.
But there's always the risk of fat-fingering "rm -rf" or having the building catch fire, so maybe you want to have two synchronized sets of mirrors, stored in different physical locations. Only you can decide if that's too paranoid for you (or not paranoid enough).
So does this discovery change the odds for the universe ending in a heat death or a big crunch? AANA astrophysicist, but I would guess that, if galaxies are more likely to form around black holes, it means that there's a large gravitational pull right at the center of the more mass-dense areas of the universe and thus increases the chance of the universe ending in a big crunch vis-a-vis heat death.
Actually, hospital personnel are supposed to ask for your medical history multiple times. IANA(medical professional), but I read that asking multiple times is intended to make sure the information is as accurate as possible. If I remember correctly (and I can't find the link, sorry), at least one study found a noticeable difference in what patients disclosed of their medical history over the course of a stay in a hospital. Oftentimes, patients would either intentionally cover up some information at first (not mentioning an STD, for example, because of embarrassment) or simply forget to mention something (e.g., forgetting to mention a medication or accidentally giving the wrong dosage).
This is not to say that repeatedly asking a patient under a haze of drugs or pain is the best approach, but there can be valid concerns behind it.
It's true that the master will be better able to help you overcome mistakes, and your point about adaptability is well taken.
You do raise an interesting question, though: can the master actually help the student avoid learning bad habits better than a journeyman (if we assume that the student will eventually move on to work with the master once his/her skills have developed)? I'm trying to think of an activity that I've learned where I didn't pick up bad habits along the way, and I'm coming up blank. I think part of the challenge of learning is being able to re-learn things that you picked up incorrectly at first, and I don't know if working with a master right away (as opposed to after a few years) would really help to skip over those kinds of errors. Again, YMMV.
I've wondered about whether the difference between a top-tier instructor and a merely "good" instructor makes that much of a difference at the beginning. When you are starting to learn something, does it really matter if you are working with the best of the best, or just with someone who knows the basics and can get you started without major mistakes? My impression, from my own experiences in trying to learn various skills, is that I don't have enough of my own knowledge of the activity early on to be able to benefit from the extra wisdom held by the best of the best.
Certainly no one above grade-school level should be citing encyclopedias in their work. However, that's not to say that there is no use for encylopedias (encyclopediae?) beyond that level. They can provide a very useful brief introduction to the topic and even point you towards some of the main academic works on that subject.
This is also one area in which I think wikipedia will lag behind traditional encyclopedias. One of the advantages of having an expert write an article is that they can survey the literature and orient a newcomer to the topic far more effectively than someone who merely knows the facts. Obviously this varies from topic to topic--I'd bet that wikipedia will be more useful for an introduction to the world of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip--but for the traditional academic fields, I think wikipedia has a long way to go in this regard.
Plagiarism under those circumstances is still lying, I guess, and lying is always wrong, but I don't think in these cases that it's the sort of lying that necessarily says much about your professionalism or future behavior-- just that you're the sort of person who gets impatient with pointless rules.
After all, the academic jobs that you often get after earning a humanities or social science Ph.D. never have any pointless rules that nonetheless need to be followed.
More importantly, I think your attitude fundamentally misses the point. Just because you don't plan to publish from a class doesn't mean that it's useless to you. Surprisingly enough, you can get practice in reading the scholarly literature for your field, formulating a thesis, seeing possible problems, improving your writing or experimental technique, etc. I'm a doctoral student in philosphy, and while I have no plans to do substantial work in certain subdisciplines, I found those courses very helpful in refining skills that I will use in my particular branch of the field.
Finally, I question how sharp a distinction you can draw between what is important and what is not. Is getting the bibliographic citation for a particular quote important, or is that something that you can just let slide because "getting the article published is what really matters"? Is it really important to acknowledge that one counter-example to your comparative politics hypothesis, or is that something that can be just swept under the rug because your hypothesis is right? I'd be very surprised if that kind of intellectual laziness or sloppiness or dishonesty would remain so self-contained...
That said, is there any viable alternative?
Generally, nethack doesn't require too much mouse movement.
The problem is that degrading gracefullly has to occur both ways: in other words, it is not enough that a next-generation email system can send an email to a legacy system, but the next-generation system also has to be able to receive emails from the legacy system. Therein lies the problem: until you shut off the ability to receive from legacy systems, there is (almost*) no advantage to the next generation system because you still will be vulnerable to phishing, spam, etc. from legacy emails.
*I say almost because you could set up a client to whitelist next generation emails or flag legacy emails as insecure, and while those measures are not totally unrealistic they also won't revolutionize email anytime soon.
As an academic, I'm expected to read various works in my discipline in the original language. Even after adjusting for international shipping, it often is as much as $100 cheaper to buy a volume of an author's collected works through (for example) Amazon.de instead of Amazon.com.
Also, a lot of works are not translated and are relatively minor outside of a very narrow discipline, and so American bookstores (online or in the real world) do not carry them. Having access to international bookstores via the internet is crucial for my research.
There's a significant problem you're ignoring, namely when other people share the same name as you. My name is not extremely common, but a Google search on my name comes up with a lot of stuff that isn't me and could be very harmful to my reputation if it were. Even worse, the other person with my name is about the same age as I am, at least as far as I can tell from the pictures, so it's quite plausible that a potential employer could think that was me.
If the approval numbers only went from 46 percent to 53 percent because of the addition of the terrorism clause, that suggests less than 10% of the population believes that the threat of terrrorism justifies more aggressive intelligence techniques. Frankly, I'm surprised that number is so low.
I put my Apple sticker on my Nalgene water bottle. It's pretty darned close to the same shade of white as the volume measurements on the side, so it blends in perfectly.
How does this impact Open Office? Open Office can then read the XML Format because it's declared in the patent. But what O^2 won't be able to do is write the MS Office XML Format [except to violate the patent]. This means: no interoperability [...]
Open Office should still be able to write MS Office's XML because it is a declared standard. Even if they can't do that because it's patented (and I'm not sure why that would be true--anyone and their dog can write an Adobe-compatible PDF precisely because the standard is open), Open Office will still be able to write a standard XML file from the MS XML it opened, and MS Office will still be able to read that file.
The only problematic scenario is if Microsoft decides to break their support for non-MS-extended XML files, but that would be akin to Microsoft dropping support for RTF files today. It's to Microsoft's advantage to support opening as many file formats as possible--otherwise, they lock themselves out of anyone who wants to convert to MS Office but has non-MS generated files.
Until a peer-reviewed journal submits a valid proof of the existence (or non-existence) of God, science is, and must remain, mute on the subject. Plantinga, Alvin. The Nature of Necessity. New York: Clarendon Press, 1989. Peer reviewed in journals such as Mind, New Scholasticism, Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
You're making the assumption that the intelligence of a person's choice of video format is equivalent to the value of the content they choose to encode. This simply isn't true. There can be great content that people distribute through closed codecs because they don't know any better, and to simply say, "Don't watch that codec" is an inadequate response.
If "Oops I Did It Again" is considered complex, I'm not sure if this service is for me. Outside of the obvious whiskey-tango-foxtrot question, do you really want to see Britney Spears recommended since you listen to complex orchestral themes?
Lack of accountability is not necessarily a bad thing in this context, because it represents the pinnacle of the marketplace of ideas - literally any idea can be proposed and defended. There's obviously a great potential for this to support idiocy and fringe hate groups, but those groups will always exist. On the other hand, it provides a useful check on traditional media, who are too often losing their sense of objectivity and urge to find the truth because of media consolidation, need to maintain political access, etc.
Finally, blogs have a unique ability to cater to particular interest groups and focus discussion to a level not seen in traditional media. While you may see it as groupthink, many political blogs in fact engage in sustained debate over the best strategy for their base. If all we had were blogs, you'd be correct that groupthink could run wild. But, there's still the real world to deal with, and any community that wants to interact with others needs to find a way to do so effectively or they simply won't be listened to.
You must be new here.
But, the software should still ask for your permission to download those patches. I have no problem with my computer telling me that there are new patches, device drivers, etc. available. I do have a problem when it downloads and installs them without telling me, because it could mess up my computer. I've had devices that were working perfectly fine all of a sudden crash because of a new driver, and I want to be the one that decides whether or not I need to update.
When the extended edition of Two Towers came out, I discovered that the second disc (part two of the movie) was scratched and wouldn't play. When I returned it to the store, the salesperson noted that an unusually large number of people had the same problem with that particular product.