It's some democracy you have there when only Jews and a few token Arabs in the north can vote.
So the 20% of Israel's population that is Arab and can vote are "a few token Arabs in the north"?
Look, I oppose the occupation of the West Bank as much as anyone, but this is obviously about nationality on the Israeli side rather than about ethnicity. No, the two sides are not the same: in Israel, murdering an Arab civilian is considered an atrocity, in the West Bank, murdering a Jewish civilian is considered an accomplishment.
Well yes, obviously, but there's a lot of people with vested interests in saying, "Jews are European, Arabs are Middle-Eastern, and never the twain shall meet."
Well yes, this is very true, but do you see the Middle East building a particle accelerator via international cooperation and then letting Israel in on it?
It's funny how supposedly the bottom half of the country pays no income taxes, but when I was a student and was lucky to get $10,000/year taxable income, I paid income taxes like any good citizen. Care to teach me which tax-breaks I was missing?
You know, you can complain about lolspeak and memes, but I don't think we've really lost any ability to express ourselves. While educated people have certainly read works of literature with excellent emotional expression (Shakespeare or Pratchett come to mind for English-language literature), colloquial speech has simply never included really profound capabilities for emoting. Start trying to talk like a book and you come off as a pretentious toff.
Well now I'm telling you global warming is a serious problem, one that I do something about by not owning a car (bicycles are fine, thanks), living in small dwellings, buying energy-efficient appliances, using local foodstuffs, and doing work myself rather than having an energy-intensive machine do it. I'm working on adding more stuff to this list.
Remember: celebrity advocates for a cause are different from regular advocates for a cause, because all celebrities live basically the same lifestyle while advocates for different causes often live radically different lifestyles.
Low-end schools, yes. Lazy schools that don't want to really put in the pedagogical effort, yes. But also state schools, whose CS departments may be required to take in, and subsequently turn away, students whose primary virtue was being born in the right place. Examples: University of California (all of it, including Berkeley, which has the best-ranked CS department on Earth), University of Maryland at College Park, University of Massachusetts Amherst. None of these universities' admissions offices will turn down a B+ student from their own state whose destiny, as written in the Book of Life and their AP Comp Sci score, is to wash out of computer science at the late 100s or early 200s and go become an IT or English composition major.
The problem with weed-out courses is the way they serve two diametrically-opposed functions. On the one hand, they need to "weed out" the students who simply lack aptitude for a given major and/or career-path. On the other hand, they need to take the students who do have the aptitude and teach them enough to make them functional beginners in the field.
if you couldn't pass that class easily, it was pretty much a given that you wouldn't be successful.
My girlfriend aced her organic chemistry class, but it was still bloody difficult and one of the most intensive courses she ever took. Coming from her, that means it probably violated several of the major anti-torture statutes.
There really ought to be a difference between a course and an exam.
Well that's the issue of weed-out courses all over again, isn't it? They serve two masters: weeding out the unready like an exam, and teaching the ready like a course.
Do you prefer the old-style Beit ha'Miqdash model, in which highly-trained kohanim with knowledge of the Holy Rites leave everyone else at their mercy?
I'm sorry, but seriously? You complain about having to learn physics and calculus, and then you say you want to know about robotics and machine vision? Guess what goes into those? Physics, calculus, and linear algebra!
As to your other topics... Syntax highlighters, grammars and parsers: you mean to tell me your university had no compilers course? Device drivers, debuggers and simple operating systems: you had no operating systems course? Emulators and device drivers: you had no architecture course? Where did you go to school, and what did they teach there?
Hey, nothing wrong with being a lefty. There's still plenty of us social-democrats left lying around, waiting for everyone else to realize how right we are.
That state-level residency thing is normal, at least for college students. When I did my taxes the past two years, the federal and state instructions explicitly stated that a student is considered resident in their "home state", no matter how much or little of the year they actually spend there.
And here's where you're wrong. 16 credits = 48 hours of school-work a week.
So yeah, obviously 30 hours in the whole week is such copious free time that he should have been working on side-projects. I mean hell, what kind of sane person isn't a non-stop careerist all the time to the point that it becomes "play".
(assuming he did the smart thing and got a job in tech)
Because obviously every university freshman in CS is obviously and apparently qualified for a job in software. Obviously. No, they don't have to work food-service to get by at all, ever, because techies are just such innately smart guys that they'll hire other smart guys without the necessity of any skills, experience, or education (yet) for the sheer lulz of having other smart techies around.
If he was just working part time, then he'd have the time needed to work on a project.
I'm just sort of goggling at this statement. The kid had full-time classes and a half-time job. No, he didn't have the time for working on side-projects. I don't see how you could possibly expect that someone working ~60 hours a week has spare time.
And why should they need to? Since when was someone supposed to come out of school with nonzero experience?
Did you have a full-time 40hr/wk job totally outside of CS/IT during the same period that left you with only enough time outside of class to sleep?
My friend, as a matter of fact, comes from the lower-middle economic stratum, so he did work about 20 hours/week in food-service to earn enough money to support himself through school. And yes, he was taking CS. CS degree + 20 hours/week of work - genius => he got to sleep at about 4AM every night, and has no side-projects to show interviewers.
I have a friend who doesn't have any personal projects to show for his 4 years in school. You know why? Because he was working to put himself through school.
I got into several top-of-the-line graduate schools for CS. I decided to leave academy for a well-paid industrial job. When they reform the scientific career path so that I can make enough of a living to raise a family with half-decent job security without moving every 3-4 years, then I'll go back.
I can't help but completely disagree with that. It's not about the Berlin Wall or 9/11, it's about the fact that people can no longer grow up, work decently hard, and expect to find a job with a living wage. Yes, there's a lot of anxiety killing curiosity, but it's because people have lots of genuine reasons to feel anxious.
Slashdot Mirror
Because back before any short-term protection, making a living as a "creative" mostly required patronage of the wealthy.
Nowadays, we have several mechanisms to get around that: government arts funding and copyright are the primary two.
They say 40 is the new 30 and 30 is the new 20....
They keep saying that, despite how stupid it is. I don't know why. I'm 22 and I certainly don't get to live like a 12-year-old.
It's some democracy you have there when only Jews and a few token Arabs in the north can vote.
So the 20% of Israel's population that is Arab and can vote are "a few token Arabs in the north"?
Look, I oppose the occupation of the West Bank as much as anyone, but this is obviously about nationality on the Israeli side rather than about ethnicity. No, the two sides are not the same: in Israel, murdering an Arab civilian is considered an atrocity, in the West Bank, murdering a Jewish civilian is considered an accomplishment.
Well yes, obviously, but there's a lot of people with vested interests in saying, "Jews are European, Arabs are Middle-Eastern, and never the twain shall meet."
Well yes, this is very true, but do you see the Middle East building a particle accelerator via international cooperation and then letting Israel in on it?
Does the Islamic University of Gaza or Birzeit University have particle physicists with the qualifications and desire to work on CERN?
It's funny how supposedly the bottom half of the country pays no income taxes, but when I was a student and was lucky to get $10,000/year taxable income, I paid income taxes like any good citizen. Care to teach me which tax-breaks I was missing?
You know, you can complain about lolspeak and memes, but I don't think we've really lost any ability to express ourselves. While educated people have certainly read works of literature with excellent emotional expression (Shakespeare or Pratchett come to mind for English-language literature), colloquial speech has simply never included really profound capabilities for emoting. Start trying to talk like a book and you come off as a pretentious toff.
Well now I'm telling you global warming is a serious problem, one that I do something about by not owning a car (bicycles are fine, thanks), living in small dwellings, buying energy-efficient appliances, using local foodstuffs, and doing work myself rather than having an energy-intensive machine do it. I'm working on adding more stuff to this list.
Remember: celebrity advocates for a cause are different from regular advocates for a cause, because all celebrities live basically the same lifestyle while advocates for different causes often live radically different lifestyles.
Low-end schools, yes. Lazy schools that don't want to really put in the pedagogical effort, yes. But also state schools, whose CS departments may be required to take in, and subsequently turn away, students whose primary virtue was being born in the right place. Examples: University of California (all of it, including Berkeley, which has the best-ranked CS department on Earth), University of Maryland at College Park, University of Massachusetts Amherst. None of these universities' admissions offices will turn down a B+ student from their own state whose destiny, as written in the Book of Life and their AP Comp Sci score, is to wash out of computer science at the late 100s or early 200s and go become an IT or English composition major.
Workers of the world, unite?
The problem with weed-out courses is the way they serve two diametrically-opposed functions. On the one hand, they need to "weed out" the students who simply lack aptitude for a given major and/or career-path. On the other hand, they need to take the students who do have the aptitude and teach them enough to make them functional beginners in the field.
if you couldn't pass that class easily, it was pretty much a given that you wouldn't be successful.
My girlfriend aced her organic chemistry class, but it was still bloody difficult and one of the most intensive courses she ever took. Coming from her, that means it probably violated several of the major anti-torture statutes.
There really ought to be a difference between a course and an exam.
Well that's the issue of weed-out courses all over again, isn't it? They serve two masters: weeding out the unready like an exam, and teaching the ready like a course.
Do you prefer the old-style Beit ha'Miqdash model, in which highly-trained kohanim with knowledge of the Holy Rites leave everyone else at their mercy?
If I had mod points, you'd be marked -1, Troll.
I'm sorry, but seriously? You complain about having to learn physics and calculus, and then you say you want to know about robotics and machine vision? Guess what goes into those? Physics, calculus, and linear algebra!
As to your other topics... Syntax highlighters, grammars and parsers: you mean to tell me your university had no compilers course? Device drivers, debuggers and simple operating systems: you had no operating systems course? Emulators and device drivers: you had no architecture course? Where did you go to school, and what did they teach there?
Hey, nothing wrong with being a lefty. There's still plenty of us social-democrats left lying around, waiting for everyone else to realize how right we are.
That state-level residency thing is normal, at least for college students. When I did my taxes the past two years, the federal and state instructions explicitly stated that a student is considered resident in their "home state", no matter how much or little of the year they actually spend there.
16 units = 32 hours of schoolwork a week
And here's where you're wrong. 16 credits = 48 hours of school-work a week.
So yeah, obviously 30 hours in the whole week is such copious free time that he should have been working on side-projects. I mean hell, what kind of sane person isn't a non-stop careerist all the time to the point that it becomes "play".
(It's not work, in any event, it's play.)
Oh bullshit.
(assuming he did the smart thing and got a job in tech)
Because obviously every university freshman in CS is obviously and apparently qualified for a job in software. Obviously. No, they don't have to work food-service to get by at all, ever, because techies are just such innately smart guys that they'll hire other smart guys without the necessity of any skills, experience, or education (yet) for the sheer lulz of having other smart techies around.
If he was just working part time, then he'd have the time needed to work on a project.
I'm just sort of goggling at this statement. The kid had full-time classes and a half-time job. No, he didn't have the time for working on side-projects. I don't see how you could possibly expect that someone working ~60 hours a week has spare time.
And why should they need to? Since when was someone supposed to come out of school with nonzero experience?
Did you have a full-time 40hr/wk job totally outside of CS/IT during the same period that left you with only enough time outside of class to sleep?
My friend, as a matter of fact, comes from the lower-middle economic stratum, so he did work about 20 hours/week in food-service to earn enough money to support himself through school. And yes, he was taking CS. CS degree + 20 hours/week of work - genius => he got to sleep at about 4AM every night, and has no side-projects to show interviewers.
Most people today are still not coding in "a modern language with strong types and an efficient compiler".
I have a friend who doesn't have any personal projects to show for his 4 years in school. You know why? Because he was working to put himself through school.
I got into several top-of-the-line graduate schools for CS. I decided to leave academy for a well-paid industrial job. When they reform the scientific career path so that I can make enough of a living to raise a family with half-decent job security without moving every 3-4 years, then I'll go back.
Has hummus really become a sign of hipster-dom? I'm just going to go shoot myself.
I can't help but completely disagree with that. It's not about the Berlin Wall or 9/11, it's about the fact that people can no longer grow up, work decently hard, and expect to find a job with a living wage. Yes, there's a lot of anxiety killing curiosity, but it's because people have lots of genuine reasons to feel anxious.