It has to be a branding thing, don't you think? It just can't be mere Linux-geek snobbery; that would be too incredibly stupid after all the years of criticism.
Well, no. The kids who will take that course will have access to scholars for a few short years and then, in most cases, never again. They should be reading Pride and Prejudice, not Pride and Prejudice with Zombies (as much fun as that is), while they have expert guides.
Facetious or not, this might be the most sensible comment here. No one else has said nearly enough about the social life that college offers. Do you really think that millions of kids in their late teens/early twenties are going to stay in their parents' basements studying if there is any alternative available? Which would you have chosen, even at a steep price differential?
Most people here already know that MIT gives away online courses. In an interview about them, an MIT professor laughed at the suggestion that the university was giving away an MIT education. He was right: in your Mom's basement, there's nothing of the intensity of discussion or competition or collaboration that exists at a real school. "Distance education is to education," said Jackson Lears years ago, "as phone sex is to sex."
One more comment. I have urged my own university (a mid-sized brick-and-mortar) for years not to bother developing distance learning except for the bits that are useful in brick-and-mortar classes. I've done this because it's silly to think we can compete with the big boys. If we offer an online math class and Harvard offers an online math class, which would students rather have on their transcripts? I don't mean right now, when online learning is still disorganized and still bound by rules that only make sense for old-style schools; I mean in the near future, when supervised tests are available to certify that students have really learned the material and the rules about having a large percentage of your classes from one school evaporate. In twenty years, the distance learning field will be dominated by a few large players, and the rest will have wasted their effort.
I'll chance my own prediction: distance learning will increase in importance, but will never amount to more than 10% of degrees awarded to people aged 18-24.
Well, it depends on how you word it, really. If you compare officially theist regimes to officially atheist regimes, the latter are way ahead in murders over the last couple of centuries.
I agree. My mind was changed on this topic many years ago by an article in Scientific American in which an education researcher mentioned that you can take a Vietnamese family who speak no English, plunk them down in a horrible part of L.A. with some of the worst schools in America, and their kids will go to Berkeley. It happens all the time, and it's proof that even there, education is available if kids and their parents will go out and get it.
That said, it's true that computers can be useful if used correctly.
Don't worry too much about the mercury; though compact fluorescent bulbs are superior to incandescent for most things, they're really a stopgap. They'll be replaced by LEDs as soon as the cost comes down enough, which (I believe) will be before the mercury begins to be too much of a problem.
Nerds are often psychologically isolated and have grown up without any sense of community or personal involvement. They already reject other people, rejecting any cohesive form of government is just the next step. They felt they were better than anyone else when they were young and (rightly) detested the very broken American public school system. However, because they are actually idiots, and incapable of seeing further than their own nose, they think smashing it all up is the key.
Mostly right, but I think a good deal of the reason for these things is that tech work attracts a certain slightly autistic type that exhibits these characteristics. Also, most young, middle-class Americans have had very easy lives, which allows them to form and maintain the illusion that what they have is due to their own merit--forgetting that billions of people labored for thousands of years to build what they take for granted at birth, and that billions must work together to maintain it.
No doubt there is a cultural component, but the real explanation is much simpler: we send too many kids to college. In 1900 about 5% of the population went to college; now about 55% do. As only about 10% can actually grasp what we think of as a real college education, colleges have had to dumb everything down to get this many students. And at this point, when you need a degree to get hired as a salesman, they aren't even to blame any more.
Are y'all kidding? Did you RTFA? This is the silliest kind of BS social science/business "research" possible. Whatever may be true of meetings, this "study" sure doesn't demonstrate it.
Sheesh.
No doubt people said the same thing about the development of high-level languages. I know Plato said it about writing (which he thought would damage people's ability to remember). These things don't prevent the gifted from learning or working, they just let average people do some kinds of work they couldn't do without them.
I used to be an anarchist myself, but then it occurred to me that all of history and what I know of primate ethology supports the idea that we humans naturally form hierarchical societies. The best we can do, then, is to limit the power of the few--that is, form something like republican governments.
Oh...the Somalia post was brilliant. I'll be stealing it. Thanks.
Yeah, but that's a little too pure-hearted for me. The fact is that an emotional commitment to science means accepting only conclusions that support the perfect regularity of some natural law. Disagree? Think: thousands of people have reported seeing the Virgin Mary over many centuries. Why aren't these observations accepted as evidence of her presence? It is because they do not support the perfect regularity of a natural law.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. I did like Gnome.
Well, no. The kids who will take that course will have access to scholars for a few short years and then, in most cases, never again. They should be reading Pride and Prejudice, not Pride and Prejudice with Zombies (as much fun as that is), while they have expert guides.
Except, of course, for the provably positive probability of error. (Start here if you don't already know about single-event upset.)
Facetious or not, this might be the most sensible comment here. No one else has said nearly enough about the social life that college offers. Do you really think that millions of kids in their late teens/early twenties are going to stay in their parents' basements studying if there is any alternative available? Which would you have chosen, even at a steep price differential? Most people here already know that MIT gives away online courses. In an interview about them, an MIT professor laughed at the suggestion that the university was giving away an MIT education. He was right: in your Mom's basement, there's nothing of the intensity of discussion or competition or collaboration that exists at a real school. "Distance education is to education," said Jackson Lears years ago, "as phone sex is to sex." One more comment. I have urged my own university (a mid-sized brick-and-mortar) for years not to bother developing distance learning except for the bits that are useful in brick-and-mortar classes. I've done this because it's silly to think we can compete with the big boys. If we offer an online math class and Harvard offers an online math class, which would students rather have on their transcripts? I don't mean right now, when online learning is still disorganized and still bound by rules that only make sense for old-style schools; I mean in the near future, when supervised tests are available to certify that students have really learned the material and the rules about having a large percentage of your classes from one school evaporate. In twenty years, the distance learning field will be dominated by a few large players, and the rest will have wasted their effort. I'll chance my own prediction: distance learning will increase in importance, but will never amount to more than 10% of degrees awarded to people aged 18-24.
Not insightful. Many of us have no choice but to use Java apps at work.
You don't have to be sensible, but you should at least get your facts straight.
Well, it depends on how you word it, really. If you compare officially theist regimes to officially atheist regimes, the latter are way ahead in murders over the last couple of centuries.
A modern military force aggressively and methodically assaulting a primarily civilian region...
They aren't given any choice. Hamas, like Hezbollah, deliberately places military equipment and personnel in densely populated civilian areas.
That said, it's true that computers can be useful if used correctly.
Does a “search of my laptop” include data that is automatically downloaded from a remote source—say, on startup?
Don't worry too much about the mercury; though compact fluorescent bulbs are superior to incandescent for most things, they're really a stopgap. They'll be replaced by LEDs as soon as the cost comes down enough, which (I believe) will be before the mercury begins to be too much of a problem.
Mostly right, but I think a good deal of the reason for these things is that tech work attracts a certain slightly autistic type that exhibits these characteristics. Also, most young, middle-class Americans have had very easy lives, which allows them to form and maintain the illusion that what they have is due to their own merit--forgetting that billions of people labored for thousands of years to build what they take for granted at birth, and that billions must work together to maintain it.
Wow! You can't get much more unique than that!
A captain of industry is a greedy capitalist? I'm shocked, shocked.
No doubt there is a cultural component, but the real explanation is much simpler: we send too many kids to college. In 1900 about 5% of the population went to college; now about 55% do. As only about 10% can actually grasp what we think of as a real college education, colleges have had to dumb everything down to get this many students. And at this point, when you need a degree to get hired as a salesman, they aren't even to blame any more.
I don't believe the report lists the colleges involved, but there were over 1800 students from about 80 colleges.
http://www.air.org/news/default.aspx#pew
Are y'all kidding? Did you RTFA? This is the silliest kind of BS social science/business "research" possible. Whatever may be true of meetings, this "study" sure doesn't demonstrate it. Sheesh.
No doubt people said the same thing about the development of high-level languages. I know Plato said it about writing (which he thought would damage people's ability to remember). These things don't prevent the gifted from learning or working, they just let average people do some kinds of work they couldn't do without them.
I used to be an anarchist myself, but then it occurred to me that all of history and what I know of primate ethology supports the idea that we humans naturally form hierarchical societies. The best we can do, then, is to limit the power of the few--that is, form something like republican governments. Oh...the Somalia post was brilliant. I'll be stealing it. Thanks.
Calvin Trillin, a food writer, wrote an interesting column on wine tasting a couple of years ago. There may not be much to it:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020819fa_fa ct
There's a pretty good article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_war ming
Yeah, but that's a little too pure-hearted for me. The fact is that an emotional commitment to science means accepting only conclusions that support the perfect regularity of some natural law. Disagree? Think: thousands of people have reported seeing the Virgin Mary over many centuries. Why aren't these observations accepted as evidence of her presence? It is because they do not support the perfect regularity of a natural law.
This scenario is an almost exact ripoff of a Jan 1995 *Scientific American* article [sciam.com]