This was EXACTLY my experience at The University of Texas, where CS is really applied mathematics, with a focus on AI. I just wanted to learn to code cool shit.
Um, yeah! CS is really applied mathematics. Sounded like you found a dept. doing the right thing. They were right, you were wrong. A CS program should be geared toward producing computer scientists--a breed of mathematician. You wanted to be a programmer. You were wasting their time and resources.
Think of it like a car. You're a mechanic. You work on cars all the time. How much math do you need? Not much, right?
Well, you're an auto-mechanic, not an auto-scientist. The guys who design cars, develop new types of engines, crunch all those numbers from the wind tunnel, you think those guys know some math?
I know this is super-redundant, has been posted in this thread many times, repeated in every thread about education and CS programs, etc., but apparently it bears repeating one more time.
Computer Science is not programming! If your highest ambition in life is to be an adequate programmer, do not waste the resources of your local CS department. They have better things to do. Yes, completing a CS degree might help you be a better programmer, but strangely, a computer science program might also try to teach you some science. Don't say you haven't been warned!
Here's where I earn my flame bait mod. All you whiney little programmers. Oh noes! Math is hard! Well, you don't need a chemistry degree to cook, yet I haven't run into any chefs bitching about how many calc classes they had to take. Wonder why that is.
Oh yeah! Cause despite the fact some understanding of the principals of chemistry might make you a better chef, most people that want to be chefs DONT FARKING SIGN UP FOR CHEMISTRY DEGREES! They go to chef school! So how about all the folks who want to be programmers, go to DeVry or Katherine Gibbs or where ever they teach what you want to learn. Leave the science programs for the folks with some interest in science.
And if a programmer happens to find himself in a science program, deal with it! Drop out, transfer, cheat, whatever. Just stop whining about it all day. It's getting to be re-god-damn-diculous.
I don't get it. Whenever I had an empty slot in my undergrad schedule, I took an extra math course. I ended up with enough math courses to get a second major on my degree. In fact, if memory serves I finished with more math credits than credits in my original intended major (chemistry). So I really don't relate to anyone moaning about how much calc they had to take.
And who's making you take these courses anyway? Has anyone been drafted in CS? Seriously, if you don't like, if it doesn't suit your interests, do something else! I don't spend my life complaining about how much I suck at the violin and how unfair all those music theory classes were. Cause I didn't choose to major in music!
So rather than continuing to annoy the world with how hard your CS program is, just quit and run home to your parents basement.
"The software can avoid abuse of discretionary power of judges as a result of corruption or insufficient training," the paper quoted Zichuan District Court chief judge, Wang Hongmei, as saying.
The scion of a prominent North Shore family avoided jail time yesterday for beating two black teenagers with a metal baton in 2002, but a judge imposed unusual consciousness-raising conditions on the young man for what prosecutors had called a racially motivated assault.
A judge decided two high school athletes can complete the football season this fall before they serve 60-day jail sentences for a car crash caused by a decoy deer placed in a country road. Two teens were injured.
Judges, you don't want to be replaced by golf carts^W^W computers? Then start doing your job.
The Swiftboat ads involved people who actually served during the time that John Kerry did and desired to state their opinion of the illegitimacy of his military decorations and military service in general - exactly who do you think such statements should be coming from?
Who indeed.
One of the veterans who says Kerry wasn't under fire was himself awarded a Bronze Star for aiding others "in the face of enemy fire" during the same incident.
Perhaps Kerry's commanding officer should make a statement.
Elliott, who had been Kerry's commanding officer, was quoted by the Boston Globe Aug 6 as saying he had made a "terrible mistake" in signing the affidavit against Kerry, in which Elliott suggested Kerry hadn't told him the truth about how he killed the enemy soldier. Later Elliott signed a second affidavit saying he still stands by the words in the TV ad. But Elliott also made what he called an "immaterial clarification" - saying he has no first-hand information that Kerry was less than forthright about what he did to win the Silver Star.
In general, the people serving directly with Kerry would be in the position to remark on his service, except in in the cases where those people are proven liars with a political agenda.
Bottom line, the problem with the Swiftboat ads is not in their truth. The problem is the truth didn't matter--it was ALL about politics.
And even if the worst said about Kerry's service is true, it stills compares rather favorably to the service records for George 'stopped showing up physicals when they started giving drug tests' Bush and Dick 'I had other priorities' Cheney.
To bring it around on topic, to do business with people who make it their job to defame and disparage real American heroes does NOT fall under the guidelines of "do no evil."
I can't comment on its linguistic history, but for now (and likely for the rest of our times) the definition of 'terrorist' is, 'the folks on the other side.'
The folks they're fighting against, the ones on our sides? Oh, they're 'freedom fighters.'
By all means lets bring back the mindless liberals who incubated and nurtured Al Qaida.
I don't think it's a good sign that the current Republican party has gone so far out to the right that now Ronald Reagan looks like a "mindless liberal."
I'd like to vote Republican, but I believe in things like responsible government spending (not record deficits and debt), small government (not historic increases in public sector hiring), the checks and balances outlined in the constitution (not a congress that upon finding the president may be breaking the law decides to change the law), the protections mandated by the bill of rights (not warrantless wire taps on US citizens), honoring those who have made extreme sacrifices for my country (not painting as a coward a man who gave 3 limbs in service of this country; not using rumor and innuendo to defame another man who spent several years as a POW in service of this country; not killing, destroying evidence, and covering up in the case of a true role model who left a lucrative career as a professional athlete to serve this country).
I'd vote for a Republican if I could find one who policies I could agree with.
If it helps, don't think of it as a sports game. Think of it as a trainer. The Weeeeeemote is significantly different than the controllers we're used to using with consoles, so it sounds like they decided to bundle software to both highlight and help users adjust to those differences.
$250 w/o a game stills makes this the most affordable console of its generation. And if you think you might actually spend some time playing the sports package, even better.
As for my excitement level, I'm not quite at 'little school girl' but this will be the first console I buy at launch since the Dreamcast (even if it has a stupid, stupid name, why not just call it 'gonads and strife'?).
Analogies are usually less apt than the author claims them to be, but I'll use one anyway: Saying that security through obscurity doesn't offer legal protection against intrusions is like saying that if I hide my house key under the door mat, then anyone is implicitly welcome to use it to come into my house (perhaps even to take my stuff, depending on how far you extend the analogy).
I think your analogy is apt in general, except in this case it wasn't a key under a door mat. Files on an open, non-password-protected web site are like piling up stuff on the sidewalk in front of your house. Telling anyone the url for that open site is like putting a "free stuff here" sign on your pile stuff.
If it turns out there was something on the bottom of the pile you didnt mean to give away, IANAL but I believe the technical term is, "tough titties."
Let's say that he found a green cell was out at (1000,500), leaving a single tiny purple pixel, and a blue cell was weak at (1010,550), leaving a yellow pixel. Next, he'd look at your photographic "evidence". If the cell at (1000,500) has any green component or the cell at (1010,550) has more than 25% blue, he'd suspect the image of having been manipulated. Similarly, if he finds an anomalous dead green pixel in your output image at (1500,750) and a weak blue pixel at (1510,800) he might question that as well.
That's why I'd have to plan ahead...
If I planned ahead, I could make sure my distance and position relative to the camera are consistent with my placement in the final photo.
The scenario in my mind is this: there's a bank heist at 12:05 on the East side. I'm a suspect with no alibi. Just so happens on that same day, a little before noon, there was a car accident on the West side, and someone on the scene took a picture of the clean-up with a digital camera.
If I'm in that picture, that would help in the alibi dept. Police and EMT logs would help establish the time line. So, a few days later at close to the same time of day, on a day with similar weather (to get the lighting right), I get someone to stand in the same spot as the original shutter bug (lucky for me she was standing in mud that still holds her footprints).
I then stand on the side of the road where a crowd of on-lookers had gathered, careful to stand where there was a small gap in the crowd, so I'm in a position I could have occupied in the original photo.
Any color shift, any dead pixels, and systematic anomalies should match between my torso and the surrounding crowd. I don't need to know what hidden data I'm matching. I just know I've matched the conditions creating that data.
Of course, I've only covered those systematic issues. Any random fluctuations that vary from picture to picture won't match up, and I still need to worry about direct evidence of image manipulation (magic wand effects).
My point is not that I could paste myself into a picture with a quality that I would stake my freedom on. My point is only that if you are faking pics and expect your audience to trace elements back to their source, make sure all the elements you have pasted together come from the same source.
A real world image will have a lot of artifacts tying it back to a particular camera make and model, and a base noise level that is a virtual fingerprint identifiable to a specific camera. Are you sure you can manipulate an image that still defeats ALL of these checks, even though you don't know what they all are?
Yes.
Just take a picture with the same camera. There may well be signs the image has been manipulated, but in terms of tying elements of a photograph back to an individual camera, why not just use the same camera? E.g. I have a picture of some independently verifiable event. I take a picture of myself taken with the same camera and photoshop my image into the event to construct an alibi.
That technique may not cover up signs of a "magic wand", but it would take care of matching all the idiosyncrasies of an individual camera. If I planned ahead, I could make sure my distance and position relative to the camera are consistent with my placement in the final photo. This step prevents signs of enlargement/reduction and would make the image correct in terms of artifacts, even though I don't know what they are.
I'm not saying I can produce undetectable fakes, but in terms of the 'aha! the data in this portion of the picture doesn't match the camera firmware' or 'aha! this area of the picture shows a slight blurring from a defect in the lens while this one face in the crowd is in perfect focus' I think I'm covered.
Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
Why would you be "glad to see you're not the first"? Is it not a desireable thing to be the first to do something innovative?
I can see situations where it may be conforting to not be first, if only for the confort of knowing at least one other person in the world shares the same brand of mental illness.
Am I the only one who's walked into an empty conference room and wondered, am I first or was the meeting moved and nobody told me?
MS may be the overwhelming force (for now) in desptop OS, office suites, and web browsers, but we will never again see a market without a significant number of people choosing software that is open, in terms of community-based developement, and free, in terms of personal access to view and modify source code.
In other words, school should be "serious" instead of fun. What's wrong with fun? We try to create a society in which people promote positive emotions, like joy, in themselves and others. I believe positive emotions provide enormous benefits if they're used correctly. There's a reason they're called positive emotions.
I don't think it's fun vs. serious. The note passing, goofing off, whips, chains, chips, dip, are all going to happen with or without computers. The question is...how to say...information vs. knowledge.
Learning how to use PowerPoint, yeah, that's nice. Some might consider that useful information. But for a school-age child, aren't time and resources better spent on knowledge, learning something that might be worth presenting?
I don't think the concern is that student might have too much fun. Think of it this way, growing up you used a pencil. You didn't study the pencil, you just used the pencil. One end writes, the other end erases, occasionally it needs to be sharpened. Now you can go do math or writing or drawing or any of many other wonderful things with your new tool, the pencil. Your teachers didn't have to take class time to trouble shoot your pencil. The school didn't fire the art teacher to hire pencil support.
Computers just aren't as advanced as a pencil yet. You can't just give a kid a computer--you type down here, you see it up here. When every student has a school-issued computer, teachers will have to spend time as tech support, time spent not teaching. Schools will have to redirect resources to hire network admins. The central question has to be, will that dedication of resources to this tool help the students?
If you've gained actual knowledge, adding a word processor to help you present that knowledge is easy. If all you've learned in school is how to use a word processor, where will you get the knowledge of something worth presenting?
Hmm. LaTeX's focus on structural markup might give it some utility here, while producing nicer-looking output (someone's got to read those assignments, you know.)
And learning markup with LaTex is not the same as playing hunt-and-click with a GUI word processor. But I think carriage return/line feed and tab should be enough to create readable reports. (I suspect creative spellings are more the graders' bane.)
Honestly, can any of say we haven't killed time pouring over the minutiae of formatting and presentation when we should have been focused on content? There's no need to facilitate such behavior. Not that presentation isn't important, but things need to be kept in balance.
All the bad things--passing notes/IMs, goofing off in class, exposure to things we don't want our kids exposed to--are gonna happen with or without computers. So in my mind the question is, is our children learning?
No, that's not it. The question is, are the good things that come out of each student having a notebook computer worth the sacrifice? If class size grows as fewer teachers are hired to afford computers/repairs/replacements/upgrades every few years, is it worth it? If we cut the music program to afford network admins, is it worth it? If teachers spend time as tech support instead of teaching, is it worth it?
If our children spend their time learning a particular application instead of learning to think and explore, if we raise a generation of technicians and button mashers instead of scientists and artists, is it worth it? If your children learns PowerPoint in time that could have been spent learning something worth presenting, is it worth it?
One reason I can't stand most public school systems is because too many educators think about their assignments in terms of media instead of in terms of content.
Amen! Any student not yet in college should be able to complete school work in note pad or its equivalent. Except for charts, graphs, illustrations, et al, a text editor is all that's needed. Students should not be fiddling with fonts and margins when they need to be working on content.
And any 'teacher' that in any way allows or encourages a child to be exposed to PowerPoint should be charged with abuse.
Have you never written a paper? These should be done on computers now - most colleges will not accept hand-written work.
For me it was some point in High School when hand written papers became unacceptable. This was not in the time before PCs, but certainly before you could presume every student had access to one with a printer, even at the most affluent schools.
I had an AT clone but no printer. What to do? I typed my papers with a typewriter. No spell check, no cut-n-paste, no fancy fonts. The horror.
Yes, at a certain point teachers should expect typed rather than hand written work. These days that point is probably around kindergarten. But that does not mean the school should have a computer for every student, not should it require every student have a computer.
Schools having trouble retaining experienced and attracting new teachers, having trouble purchasing enough text books for all students, having trouble finding time for art, music, or phys ed after accommodating all the new standardized testing and test prep, such schools certainly don't have the resources for the IT staff to support a computer for each student, let alone the money for the computers themselves.
Wow, that's a pretty phat skinny. Thanks. Why isn't there a 'help' or 'about us' page at Digg.com with similar content? (If there is such a page, it wasn't easily found when I looked.) Or is it a l33t thing? 'If you have to ask, then you can't digg. Dig?'
Anyway, just a quick nug to keep it on topic: When Steven Colbert pulled the wikipedia stunt on his show, some folks held that up as an example of the wiki-system working. The pages targeted by Colbert were locked down before large spread abuse occurred.
While that may be true, it still doesn't address what I think is a more central question to wikipedia operation: how do we know what was on the locked pages was worth protecting? If the information was wrong to begin with--through random mistake or malice--does it really help to stop systematic abuse?
I couldn't tell you if Digg will take over Slashdot, because I couldn't tell you what Digg _is_.
I've been to Digg--it seems to be some sort of story aggregator such as Slashdot or Fark, but they use some made up language that sounds like something out of South Park. You can 'digg' a story, and some one 'diggs' your 'digg', and the 'digger' 'digging' a marklar, I mean 'digg'.
I understand, for example, google gets used as a verb, as in, "I'll goggle that acronym." But when you go to the help on Google, it talks about searching, not googling. When I went to help on Digg, it was all about 'digging'. That's not very helpful if I don't already know when it means to 'digg'.
Can someone give me a Digg-to-english translation of wtf is a 'digg'?
Slashdot Mirror
Um, yeah! CS is really applied mathematics. Sounded like you found a dept. doing the right thing. They were right, you were wrong. A CS program should be geared toward producing computer scientists--a breed of mathematician. You wanted to be a programmer. You were wasting their time and resources.
Think of it like a car. You're a mechanic. You work on cars all the time. How much math do you need? Not much, right?
Well, you're an auto-mechanic, not an auto-scientist. The guys who design cars, develop new types of engines, crunch all those numbers from the wind tunnel, you think those guys know some math?
I know this is super-redundant, has been posted in this thread many times, repeated in every thread about education and CS programs, etc., but apparently it bears repeating one more time.
Computer Science is not programming! If your highest ambition in life is to be an adequate programmer, do not waste the resources of your local CS department. They have better things to do. Yes, completing a CS degree might help you be a better programmer, but strangely, a computer science program might also try to teach you some science. Don't say you haven't been warned!
Here's where I earn my flame bait mod. All you whiney little programmers. Oh noes! Math is hard! Well, you don't need a chemistry degree to cook, yet I haven't run into any chefs bitching about how many calc classes they had to take. Wonder why that is.
Oh yeah! Cause despite the fact some understanding of the principals of chemistry might make you a better chef, most people that want to be chefs DONT FARKING SIGN UP FOR CHEMISTRY DEGREES! They go to chef school! So how about all the folks who want to be programmers, go to DeVry or Katherine Gibbs or where ever they teach what you want to learn. Leave the science programs for the folks with some interest in science.
And if a programmer happens to find himself in a science program, deal with it! Drop out, transfer, cheat, whatever. Just stop whining about it all day. It's getting to be re-god-damn-diculous.
I don't get it. Whenever I had an empty slot in my undergrad schedule, I took an extra math course. I ended up with enough math courses to get a second major on my degree. In fact, if memory serves I finished with more math credits than credits in my original intended major (chemistry). So I really don't relate to anyone moaning about how much calc they had to take.
And who's making you take these courses anyway? Has anyone been drafted in CS? Seriously, if you don't like, if it doesn't suit your interests, do something else! I don't spend my life complaining about how much I suck at the violin and how unfair all those music theory classes were. Cause I didn't choose to major in music!
So rather than continuing to annoy the world with how hard your CS program is, just quit and run home to your parents basement.
Meow.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art icles/2006/08/26/unusual_sentence_in_racial_attack /
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14378978/
Judges, you don't want to be replaced by golf carts^W^W computers? Then start doing your job.
I first read the title as "Programmer Sentencing in China."
I was thinking, man, when they say no Hungarian notation, they mean it!
The Swiftboat ads involved people who actually served during the time that John Kerry did and desired to state their opinion of the illegitimacy of his military decorations and military service in general - exactly who do you think such statements should be coming from?
Who indeed.
Perhaps Kerry's commanding officer should make a statement. http://www.factcheck.org/article231.htmlIn general, the people serving directly with Kerry would be in the position to remark on his service, except in in the cases where those people are proven liars with a political agenda.
Bottom line, the problem with the Swiftboat ads is not in their truth. The problem is the truth didn't matter--it was ALL about politics.
Think there's some question about Kerry's service? How about a guy who lost 3 limbs in the same war? How about a guy who spent a couple years as a POW? All were 'swiftboated.'
And even if the worst said about Kerry's service is true, it stills compares rather favorably to the service records for George 'stopped showing up physicals when they started giving drug tests' Bush and Dick 'I had other priorities' Cheney.
To bring it around on topic, to do business with people who make it their job to defame and disparage real American heroes does NOT fall under the guidelines of "do no evil."
That's just silly. That Google has hired them doesn't preclude a competing interest from hiring them anyway.
What? You think astroturfing scum are above talking money from both sides?
I can't comment on its linguistic history, but for now (and likely for the rest of our times) the definition of 'terrorist' is, 'the folks on the other side.'
The folks they're fighting against, the ones on our sides? Oh, they're 'freedom fighters.'
I don't think it's a good sign that the current Republican party has gone so far out to the right that now Ronald Reagan looks like a "mindless liberal."
I'd like to vote Republican, but I believe in things like responsible government spending (not record deficits and debt), small government (not historic increases in public sector hiring), the checks and balances outlined in the constitution (not a congress that upon finding the president may be breaking the law decides to change the law), the protections mandated by the bill of rights (not warrantless wire taps on US citizens), honoring those who have made extreme sacrifices for my country (not painting as a coward a man who gave 3 limbs in service of this country; not using rumor and innuendo to defame another man who spent several years as a POW in service of this country; not killing, destroying evidence, and covering up in the case of a true role model who left a lucrative career as a professional athlete to serve this country).
I'd vote for a Republican if I could find one who policies I could agree with.
Shouldn't the moon be named after the goddess of gonads?
If it helps, don't think of it as a sports game. Think of it as a trainer. The Weeeeeemote is significantly different than the controllers we're used to using with consoles, so it sounds like they decided to bundle software to both highlight and help users adjust to those differences.
$250 w/o a game stills makes this the most affordable console of its generation. And if you think you might actually spend some time playing the sports package, even better.
As for my excitement level, I'm not quite at 'little school girl' but this will be the first console I buy at launch since the Dreamcast (even if it has a stupid, stupid name, why not just call it 'gonads and strife'?).
If voting worked, it would be illegal.
I think your analogy is apt in general, except in this case it wasn't a key under a door mat. Files on an open, non-password-protected web site are like piling up stuff on the sidewalk in front of your house. Telling anyone the url for that open site is like putting a "free stuff here" sign on your pile stuff.
If it turns out there was something on the bottom of the pile you didnt mean to give away, IANAL but I believe the technical term is, "tough titties."
That's why I'd have to plan ahead...
If I planned ahead, I could make sure my distance and position relative to the camera are consistent with my placement in the final photo.
The scenario in my mind is this: there's a bank heist at 12:05 on the East side. I'm a suspect with no alibi. Just so happens on that same day, a little before noon, there was a car accident on the West side, and someone on the scene took a picture of the clean-up with a digital camera.
If I'm in that picture, that would help in the alibi dept. Police and EMT logs would help establish the time line. So, a few days later at close to the same time of day, on a day with similar weather (to get the lighting right), I get someone to stand in the same spot as the original shutter bug (lucky for me she was standing in mud that still holds her footprints).
I then stand on the side of the road where a crowd of on-lookers had gathered, careful to stand where there was a small gap in the crowd, so I'm in a position I could have occupied in the original photo.
Any color shift, any dead pixels, and systematic anomalies should match between my torso and the surrounding crowd. I don't need to know what hidden data I'm matching. I just know I've matched the conditions creating that data.
Of course, I've only covered those systematic issues. Any random fluctuations that vary from picture to picture won't match up, and I still need to worry about direct evidence of image manipulation (magic wand effects).
My point is not that I could paste myself into a picture with a quality that I would stake my freedom on. My point is only that if you are faking pics and expect your audience to trace elements back to their source, make sure all the elements you have pasted together come from the same source.
Yes.
Just take a picture with the same camera. There may well be signs the image has been manipulated, but in terms of tying elements of a photograph back to an individual camera, why not just use the same camera? E.g. I have a picture of some independently verifiable event. I take a picture of myself taken with the same camera and photoshop my image into the event to construct an alibi.
That technique may not cover up signs of a "magic wand", but it would take care of matching all the idiosyncrasies of an individual camera. If I planned ahead, I could make sure my distance and position relative to the camera are consistent with my placement in the final photo. This step prevents signs of enlargement/reduction and would make the image correct in terms of artifacts, even though I don't know what they are.
I'm not saying I can produce undetectable fakes, but in terms of the 'aha! the data in this portion of the picture doesn't match the camera firmware' or 'aha! this area of the picture shows a slight blurring from a defect in the lens while this one face in the crowd is in perfect focus' I think I'm covered.
That may be, but when the time came, we'd say good bye to all of this, and hello to Billennia Newton John.
Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so
the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at
dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS
WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?
Why would you be "glad to see you're not the first"? Is it not a desireable thing to be the first to do something innovative?
I can see situations where it may be conforting to not be first, if only for the confort of knowing at least one other person in the world shares the same brand of mental illness.
Am I the only one who's walked into an empty conference room and wondered, am I first or was the meeting moved and nobody told me?
I'd say they've already lost.
MS may be the overwhelming force (for now) in desptop OS, office suites, and web browsers, but we will never again see a market without a significant number of people choosing software that is open, in terms of community-based developement, and free, in terms of personal access to view and modify source code.
Bag the cat is out of.
Genie out of the bottle is.
Horses gone, barn door open.
I don't think it's fun vs. serious. The note passing, goofing off, whips, chains, chips, dip, are all going to happen with or without computers. The question is...how to say...information vs. knowledge.
Learning how to use PowerPoint, yeah, that's nice. Some might consider that useful information. But for a school-age child, aren't time and resources better spent on knowledge, learning something that might be worth presenting?
I don't think the concern is that student might have too much fun. Think of it this way, growing up you used a pencil. You didn't study the pencil, you just used the pencil. One end writes, the other end erases, occasionally it needs to be sharpened. Now you can go do math or writing or drawing or any of many other wonderful things with your new tool, the pencil. Your teachers didn't have to take class time to trouble shoot your pencil. The school didn't fire the art teacher to hire pencil support.
Computers just aren't as advanced as a pencil yet. You can't just give a kid a computer--you type down here, you see it up here. When every student has a school-issued computer, teachers will have to spend time as tech support, time spent not teaching. Schools will have to redirect resources to hire network admins. The central question has to be, will that dedication of resources to this tool help the students?
If you've gained actual knowledge, adding a word processor to help you present that knowledge is easy. If all you've learned in school is how to use a word processor, where will you get the knowledge of something worth presenting?
And learning markup with LaTex is not the same as playing hunt-and-click with a GUI word processor. But I think carriage return/line feed and tab should be enough to create readable reports. (I suspect creative spellings are more the graders' bane.)
Honestly, can any of say we haven't killed time pouring over the minutiae of formatting and presentation when we should have been focused on content? There's no need to facilitate such behavior. Not that presentation isn't important, but things need to be kept in balance.
All the bad things--passing notes/IMs, goofing off in class, exposure to things we don't want our kids exposed to--are gonna happen with or without computers. So in my mind the question is, is our children learning?
No, that's not it. The question is, are the good things that come out of each student having a notebook computer worth the sacrifice? If class size grows as fewer teachers are hired to afford computers/repairs/replacements/upgrades every few years, is it worth it? If we cut the music program to afford network admins, is it worth it? If teachers spend time as tech support instead of teaching, is it worth it?
If our children spend their time learning a particular application instead of learning to think and explore, if we raise a generation of technicians and button mashers instead of scientists and artists, is it worth it? If your children learns PowerPoint in time that could have been spent learning something worth presenting, is it worth it?
I'm guessing, no.
Yes, but where will they find snakes that think in Russian?
Amen! Any student not yet in college should be able to complete school work in note pad or its equivalent. Except for charts, graphs, illustrations, et al, a text editor is all that's needed. Students should not be fiddling with fonts and margins when they need to be working on content.
And any 'teacher' that in any way allows or encourages a child to be exposed to PowerPoint should be charged with abuse.
Have you never written a paper? These should be done on computers now - most colleges will not accept hand-written work.
For me it was some point in High School when hand written papers became unacceptable. This was not in the time before PCs, but certainly before you could presume every student had access to one with a printer, even at the most affluent schools.
I had an AT clone but no printer. What to do? I typed my papers with a typewriter. No spell check, no cut-n-paste, no fancy fonts. The horror.
Yes, at a certain point teachers should expect typed rather than hand written work. These days that point is probably around kindergarten. But that does not mean the school should have a computer for every student, not should it require every student have a computer.
Schools having trouble retaining experienced and attracting new teachers, having trouble purchasing enough text books for all students, having trouble finding time for art, music, or phys ed after accommodating all the new standardized testing and test prep, such schools certainly don't have the resources for the IT staff to support a computer for each student, let alone the money for the computers themselves.
Wow, that's a pretty phat skinny. Thanks. Why isn't there a 'help' or 'about us' page at Digg.com with similar content? (If there is such a page, it wasn't easily found when I looked.) Or is it a l33t thing? 'If you have to ask, then you can't digg. Dig?'
Anyway, just a quick nug to keep it on topic: When Steven Colbert pulled the wikipedia stunt on his show, some folks held that up as an example of the wiki-system working. The pages targeted by Colbert were locked down before large spread abuse occurred.
While that may be true, it still doesn't address what I think is a more central question to wikipedia operation: how do we know what was on the locked pages was worth protecting? If the information was wrong to begin with--through random mistake or malice--does it really help to stop systematic abuse?
Good: coming around back on topic. This is infintely more helpful than any help on the actuall Digg site.
I couldn't tell you if Digg will take over Slashdot, because I couldn't tell you what Digg _is_.
I've been to Digg--it seems to be some sort of story aggregator such as Slashdot or Fark, but they use some made up language that sounds like something out of South Park. You can 'digg' a story, and some one 'diggs' your 'digg', and the 'digger' 'digging' a marklar, I mean 'digg'.
I understand, for example, google gets used as a verb, as in, "I'll goggle that acronym." But when you go to the help on Google, it talks about searching, not googling. When I went to help on Digg, it was all about 'digging'. That's not very helpful if I don't already know when it means to 'digg'.
Can someone give me a Digg-to-english translation of wtf is a 'digg'?