Allow me to paraphrase your comment: I'm a jackass who thinks nothing substantial can be said when opinion counts, even when the accomplishments are well-documented and acknowledged by the larger scientific community. I also entertain spurious allegations about Eisenstein having plagiarized his wife, which has no credible evidence.
That's four groundbreaking papers in one year (1905), any one of which would have made Einstein of historical significance. To follow that up with the only major advance on gravity since Newton 10 years later puts him well past Feynman.
When the first shuttle blew up, NASA picked up the phone and called Feynman, someone that never did anything for NASA before and was not involved in any way with the shuttles, rockets, or even anything astronomy. Feynman figured out what happened quite quickly, went before congress and both explained and demonstrated the problem.
He did good work on the panel, but it was hardly a big mystery as to why the launch failed. There was actually a conference call the night before the launch between NASA and the manufacturers of the O-ring. The latter wanted to scrub the launch because of the cold, but pressure from NASA and worries about an upcoming contract with NASA resulted in a go-ahead.
Feynman was as much a showman as he was a scientist, which explains a lot of his fame. Who were the scientists who shared his Noble Prize for QED? Right.
Don't get me wrong, I like Feynman a lot. But saying he was "far greater than Einstein" is a joke.
The indicator that true creative thinking is dead inside an organization is when it must innovate by acquisition.
This is a strange statement to make, seeing as two of the examples you point to, self-driving cars and Google Glass, are expensive innovations that aren't ready for prime time. First you blame them for creative thinking that fails, then you accuse them of not doing any.
Instead of YOUR employees creating products that grow organically, you pay 100 times as much to buy established or growing products. YouTube, Twitch.tv, Nest, and whoever is next.
What about projects like Google Street View? Sure it debuted in 2007, but that was a year after they acquired YouTube. Google Chrome came out in 2008, and reinvigorated the browser market.
Google has tried a crazy amount of stuff and also made a crazy amount of acquisitions. Some of it sticks, most of it doesn't. Surprise.
If someone is a child molester, I would think it highly likely that they suffer from a mental illness, and need our help.
How do you propose to "help" them? I believe there is no effective way to "help" such people beyond castration.
And the whole "mental illness" angle seeks to remove personal responsibility from the equation. Why not cave in to your worst impulses? You just suffer from a mental illness, and it's up to society to "help" you.
I read through the thread on RequestPolicy, and you were pretty thick when it came to recognizing some key points:
1) RequestPolicy blocks all external sites by default, which means you don't need a "bad" list that needs to be constantly maintained, so it's actually the simpler and more effective solution.
2) The reason to block YouTube from 3rd party sites is to avoid tracking by Google (they own YouTube). With RequestPolicy, I can still watch YouTube videos and avoid the tracking. But that's just one example. RequestPolicy blocks all such requests, so I don't have to worry about YouTube, Amazon, or any other site that probably isn't in the "bad" list from getting tracking info from 3rd party sites by doing something as simple as embedding a link.
3) You mention speed, but give no hard numbers. If, for example, RequestPolicy does its job in less than 1ms, then it doesn't matter if a hosts file is twice as fast or even ten times as fast, because either way the difference is imperceptible. I don't have any speed problems using RequstPolicy, at all.
I'll throw in another point: RequestPolicy is open source, meaning I don't have to trust a binary from "apk" being run as an admin to manage my hosts file. RequestPolicy is also cross-platform.
You can have the last word, as engaging in discussion with you is pointlessly annoying. I'm just leaving this response so that people who are rational can make an informed judgment.
I am honestly very confused about what your point is. In response to another poster,
That poster would be me. Maybe if you read my original post the context would be clear.
Coryoth rebutted that the college was supposed to be about education, not vocational training. You incorrectly assumed that s/he was arguing that college was about creating well-rounded people.
That's the modern reason, where "education" is often synonymous with "well-rounded". I assumed his point was the modern defense, because the vast majority don't go to college anymore just for an "education" with the expectation to remain in Academia. They go there with an expectation of earning a higher-paying job. It's a checkbox on the resume.
The only reason I replied was to point out that the well-rounded person argument isn't one that anyone with a clue seriously makes.
Why? You yourself just said, "requiring students to take classes outside of their major was perhaps a historical anachronism". It's kept around on the "well-rounded" argument, which is essentially what is expressed by many of the people in the article you quoted.
I often see it as a justification for requiring non-major classes, but I have never seen anyone claim that this is the primary goal.
I never said it was the primary goal. What I've been arguing is what I emphasized above. People today go to college expecting to get a higher-paying job, and that's been why I've been questioning the value of being forced to take courses that will most likely not be used in that endeavor. That was the start and context of the argument when you jumped in.
When was the goal of higher education ever to produce well-rounded people?
When being an academic meant you specialized in one field, both in research and teaching. When people stopped going to college to become academics. The only reason it makes sense now to require diverse study is for the well-rounded argument, and it's the argument given whenever I've raised this subject (except with you).
You'd think you learn your lesson. The best way to get a domain that is being squatted without paying a ransom is to not show any interest. It used to be domains could be held indefinitely, but ICANN closed that loophole a long time ago, so now it costs money to sit on it.
It isn't even about creating well-rounded people, and never really was [..] the curriculum and organization of institutions of higher education---particularly research universities---is still geared toward that Enlightenment ideal of academia.
The bold is what I responded to, in particular the word never. Goals have changed in 400 years.
Because you are a 20 years old know-nothing you arrogant bratand maybe there is more than one thing in the entire wolrd that could be of interest for you ?
Maybe if you weren't an arrogant asshole posting as anonymous coward you wouldn't make such statements. I've been to college and have long-since graduated. Most people go to college because it's a checkbox for higher-paying jobs and a chance to party on their parent's dime and government loans.
The goal of college is NOT to train you like a puppy to do real work.
That's nice and all, but the vast majority of people go to college to get a well-paying job afterwards. That's what the point of the "major" is for.
You want to be trained ? go to a craft school or whatever you call them in your country.
College is a checkbox to get into higher paying jobs, so your suggestion of going to a "craft" school doesn't help.
PLUS YOU GET TO CHOOSE YOUR SUBJECTS so stop bitching!
Err, no, you don't when your major is something like computer science and they force you into heavy calculus courses. That's the topic under discussion. Try to pay attention.
2 years into the job I have greater mastery of pretty much any aspect of the project we are working on, and my skill-set is improving exponentially, while they almost never learn anything beyond what they know because they lack the methods to learn.
Yeah, that's a lot of bullshit. It's impossible to become a programmer without learning. What your one-sided anecdote says is that many workers do just enough to get by, not that they couldn't improve their skills if they applied themselves.
If being well-rounded "never really was" the point of college education, why are college students force to take an array of courses outside their field of interest?
Yes, I've heard the "well rounded" person argument. I can even accommodate it, to a certain extent, but it would stop at being exposed to ideas versus having to become competent at doing calculus problems in order to pass a course. I personally am not interested in doing calculus and haven't made use of it in over 20 years of programming.
I want you to know/pass calculus because by the time you've worked that hard at that level of proofs, you've mastered *variable control*.
This is silly. You don't need incidental math to learn skills essential to programming. College education wastes countless hours teaching academic stuff that a great majority of programmers will not use on the job, while neglecting critical skills that could be immediately useful in a large .
If you want to teach "variable control", whatever you mean by that, then teach that in respect to programming, not high-level math that will only be used by a tiny percentage.
Just remember that companies like Valve were founded by ex-Microsoft software engineers.
Many of the early employees of Microsoft became millionaires due to stock options, so they could afford to jump ship and do their own thing. I doubt that's true of the people being laid off.
I mean, google + didn't become the next facebook simply because it didn't become the next facebook to enough people. Lets not complicate it, people simply didn't switch. It wasn't some bullshit about real names, or youtube integration, or features facebook didn't have. Facebook just kept critical mass.
Google obviously had an uphill battle trying to steal Facebook's thunder. It was stupid, then, to adopt a Real Name policy and enforce it like dicks instead of trying to differentiate themselves from Facebook.
This ties into YouTube, too. Instead of trying to hamfist their existing userbase into real names and Google+, they could have softselled an automatic, no hassle Google+ account linked to your YouTube account, as is. Instead they antagonized their YouTube base, too. Corporate fuckhead thinking.
Would it have mattered in the end? Who knows, but it was a stupid policy that only put up barriers, instead of trying to go after users who weren't interested in Facebook because of their focus on real names.
Restore the glory of the Internet? You mean to go back to a time when most people posted on Usenet with their real name and email address as their signature? The time when even political discussions were civilized?
What time was this? Because flamewars are as old as Usenet. I agree there's more garbage with anonymity, but let's not pretend it was some kind of utopia.
If a potential employer ever asked me for my Facebook password, I can plausibly say that I have no Facebook account, which they can verify by searching under my real name.
If a potential employer asks for your Facebook password, the proper response is, "Fuck off."
Yes it's sad that she was attacked for her criticisms, but it's sadder that she did not take responsibility, or stand her ground.
The original attack was sadder, and even sadder is for the courts to punish her for it, whether she hired a lawyer or not. Sounds like she's just an average person expressing an opinion that doesn't want to deal with a court hassle for something so mundane. I think you're unfairly blaming the victim here.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never had a positive encounter with a police officer.
Most of mine have been positive. Not a single one has been objectionable. Then again, I'm polite and show the cops respect.
Besides, who can be against reduction of energy use through using it more efficiently?
It's not so simple: Jevons' Paradox
Air traffic control is the most subhuman job in the entire world.
Err, what? I'd take air traffic controller over trash collector or working in a coal mine, or a long list of hideous jobs I could think of.
Allow me to paraphrase your comment.
Allow me to paraphrase your comment: I'm a jackass who thinks nothing substantial can be said when opinion counts, even when the accomplishments are well-documented and acknowledged by the larger scientific community. I also entertain spurious allegations about Eisenstein having plagiarized his wife, which has no credible evidence.
Indeed, QED is the most successful theory that man has ever formulated, and Feynman was IMHO far greater than Einstein or Hawking.
Please. Annus Mirabilis papers
That's four groundbreaking papers in one year (1905), any one of which would have made Einstein of historical significance. To follow that up with the only major advance on gravity since Newton 10 years later puts him well past Feynman.
When the first shuttle blew up, NASA picked up the phone and called Feynman, someone that never did anything for NASA before and was not involved in any way with the shuttles, rockets, or even anything astronomy. Feynman figured out what happened quite quickly, went before congress and both explained and demonstrated the problem.
He did good work on the panel, but it was hardly a big mystery as to why the launch failed. There was actually a conference call the night before the launch between NASA and the manufacturers of the O-ring. The latter wanted to scrub the launch because of the cold, but pressure from NASA and worries about an upcoming contract with NASA resulted in a go-ahead.
Feynman was as much a showman as he was a scientist, which explains a lot of his fame. Who were the scientists who shared his Noble Prize for QED? Right.
Don't get me wrong, I like Feynman a lot. But saying he was "far greater than Einstein" is a joke.
The indicator that true creative thinking is dead inside an organization is when it must innovate by acquisition.
This is a strange statement to make, seeing as two of the examples you point to, self-driving cars and Google Glass, are expensive innovations that aren't ready for prime time. First you blame them for creative thinking that fails, then you accuse them of not doing any.
Instead of YOUR employees creating products that grow organically, you pay 100 times as much to buy established or growing products. YouTube, Twitch.tv, Nest, and whoever is next.
What about projects like Google Street View? Sure it debuted in 2007, but that was a year after they acquired YouTube. Google Chrome came out in 2008, and reinvigorated the browser market.
Google has tried a crazy amount of stuff and also made a crazy amount of acquisitions. Some of it sticks, most of it doesn't. Surprise.
If someone is a child molester, I would think it highly likely that they suffer from a mental illness, and need our help.
How do you propose to "help" them? I believe there is no effective way to "help" such people beyond castration.
And the whole "mental illness" angle seeks to remove personal responsibility from the equation. Why not cave in to your worst impulses? You just suffer from a mental illness, and it's up to society to "help" you.
A.) Hosts do more than:
1.) AdBlock ("souled-out" 2 Google/Crippled by default)
2.) Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse"
3.) Request Policy -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
I read through the thread on RequestPolicy, and you were pretty thick when it came to recognizing some key points:
1) RequestPolicy blocks all external sites by default, which means you don't need a "bad" list that needs to be constantly maintained, so it's actually the simpler and more effective solution.
2) The reason to block YouTube from 3rd party sites is to avoid tracking by Google (they own YouTube). With RequestPolicy, I can still watch YouTube videos and avoid the tracking. But that's just one example. RequestPolicy blocks all such requests, so I don't have to worry about YouTube, Amazon, or any other site that probably isn't in the "bad" list from getting tracking info from 3rd party sites by doing something as simple as embedding a link.
3) You mention speed, but give no hard numbers. If, for example, RequestPolicy does its job in less than 1ms, then it doesn't matter if a hosts file is twice as fast or even ten times as fast, because either way the difference is imperceptible. I don't have any speed problems using RequstPolicy, at all.
I'll throw in another point: RequestPolicy is open source, meaning I don't have to trust a binary from "apk" being run as an admin to manage my hosts file. RequestPolicy is also cross-platform.
You can have the last word, as engaging in discussion with you is pointlessly annoying. I'm just leaving this response so that people who are rational can make an informed judgment.
I am honestly very confused about what your point is. In response to another poster,
That poster would be me. Maybe if you read my original post the context would be clear.
Coryoth rebutted that the college was supposed to be about education, not vocational training. You incorrectly assumed that s/he was arguing that college was about creating well-rounded people.
That's the modern reason, where "education" is often synonymous with "well-rounded". I assumed his point was the modern defense, because the vast majority don't go to college anymore just for an "education" with the expectation to remain in Academia. They go there with an expectation of earning a higher-paying job. It's a checkbox on the resume.
The only reason I replied was to point out that the well-rounded person argument isn't one that anyone with a clue seriously makes.
Why? You yourself just said, "requiring students to take classes outside of their major was perhaps a historical anachronism". It's kept around on the "well-rounded" argument, which is essentially what is expressed by many of the people in the article you quoted.
I often see it as a justification for requiring non-major classes, but I have never seen anyone claim that this is the primary goal.
I never said it was the primary goal. What I've been arguing is what I emphasized above. People today go to college expecting to get a higher-paying job, and that's been why I've been questioning the value of being forced to take courses that will most likely not be used in that endeavor. That was the start and context of the argument when you jumped in.
When was the goal of higher education ever to produce well-rounded people?
When being an academic meant you specialized in one field, both in research and teaching. When people stopped going to college to become academics. The only reason it makes sense now to require diverse study is for the well-rounded argument, and it's the argument given whenever I've raised this subject (except with you).
You'd think you learn your lesson. The best way to get a domain that is being squatted without paying a ransom is to not show any interest. It used to be domains could be held indefinitely, but ICANN closed that loophole a long time ago, so now it costs money to sit on it.
Let's walk this back. You said:
It isn't even about creating well-rounded people, and never really was [..] the curriculum and organization of institutions of higher education---particularly research universities---is still geared toward that Enlightenment ideal of academia.
The bold is what I responded to, in particular the word never. Goals have changed in 400 years.
That doesn't make any sense. You can be an academic in your field of interest without taking an array of courses that have nothing to do with it.
Because you are a 20 years old know-nothing you arrogant bratand maybe there is more than one thing in the entire wolrd that could be of interest for you ?
Maybe if you weren't an arrogant asshole posting as anonymous coward you wouldn't make such statements. I've been to college and have long-since graduated. Most people go to college because it's a checkbox for higher-paying jobs and a chance to party on their parent's dime and government loans.
The goal of college is NOT to train you like a puppy to do real work.
That's nice and all, but the vast majority of people go to college to get a well-paying job afterwards. That's what the point of the "major" is for.
You want to be trained ? go to a craft school or whatever you call them in your country.
College is a checkbox to get into higher paying jobs, so your suggestion of going to a "craft" school doesn't help.
PLUS YOU GET TO CHOOSE YOUR SUBJECTS so stop bitching!
Err, no, you don't when your major is something like computer science and they force you into heavy calculus courses. That's the topic under discussion. Try to pay attention.
2 years into the job I have greater mastery of pretty much any aspect of the project we are working on, and my skill-set is improving exponentially, while they almost never learn anything beyond what they know because they lack the methods to learn.
Yeah, that's a lot of bullshit. It's impossible to become a programmer without learning. What your one-sided anecdote says is that many workers do just enough to get by, not that they couldn't improve their skills if they applied themselves.
If being well-rounded "never really was" the point of college education, why are college students force to take an array of courses outside their field of interest?
Yes, I've heard the "well rounded" person argument. I can even accommodate it, to a certain extent, but it would stop at being exposed to ideas versus having to become competent at doing calculus problems in order to pass a course. I personally am not interested in doing calculus and haven't made use of it in over 20 years of programming.
Or was that too easy?
I want you to know/pass calculus because by the time you've worked that hard at that level of proofs, you've mastered *variable control*.
This is silly. You don't need incidental math to learn skills essential to programming. College education wastes countless hours teaching academic stuff that a great majority of programmers will not use on the job, while neglecting critical skills that could be immediately useful in a large .
If you want to teach "variable control", whatever you mean by that, then teach that in respect to programming, not high-level math that will only be used by a tiny percentage.
Just remember that companies like Valve were founded by ex-Microsoft software engineers.
Many of the early employees of Microsoft became millionaires due to stock options, so they could afford to jump ship and do their own thing. I doubt that's true of the people being laid off.
I mean, google + didn't become the next facebook simply because it didn't become the next facebook to enough people. Lets not complicate it, people simply didn't switch. It wasn't some bullshit about real names, or youtube integration, or features facebook didn't have. Facebook just kept critical mass.
Google obviously had an uphill battle trying to steal Facebook's thunder. It was stupid, then, to adopt a Real Name policy and enforce it like dicks instead of trying to differentiate themselves from Facebook.
This ties into YouTube, too. Instead of trying to hamfist their existing userbase into real names and Google+, they could have softselled an automatic, no hassle Google+ account linked to your YouTube account, as is. Instead they antagonized their YouTube base, too. Corporate fuckhead thinking.
Would it have mattered in the end? Who knows, but it was a stupid policy that only put up barriers, instead of trying to go after users who weren't interested in Facebook because of their focus on real names.
Restore the glory of the Internet? You mean to go back to a time when most people posted on Usenet with their real name and email address as their signature? The time when even political discussions were civilized?
What time was this? Because flamewars are as old as Usenet. I agree there's more garbage with anonymity, but let's not pretend it was some kind of utopia.
If a potential employer ever asked me for my Facebook password, I can plausibly say that I have no Facebook account, which they can verify by searching under my real name.
If a potential employer asks for your Facebook password, the proper response is, "Fuck off."
Yes it's sad that she was attacked for her criticisms, but it's sadder that she did not take responsibility, or stand her ground.
The original attack was sadder, and even sadder is for the courts to punish her for it, whether she hired a lawyer or not. Sounds like she's just an average person expressing an opinion that doesn't want to deal with a court hassle for something so mundane. I think you're unfairly blaming the victim here.