It's because universities are overwhelmingly run by a single ideology (in this case, leftism, but in another time or universe, rightism).
Universities are not hotbeds of leftism, and they never really were. A few universities are or were, but for the most part, here is what life at today's universities is like:
Don't ask the wrong questions
Climb the ladder: you are at school so you can get a good job afterward
Know your place
Pay!
Don't complain about money!
Never question how the system works, and make sure you call anyone who does question the system annoying.
Corporations generally don't care at all about what you say - they just want your money
Yes, they care about money. That's why they care about what you say:
....because as we all know, it is not really free speech if there are no exceptions. After all, "shouting fire in a crowded theater" should be prohibited:
No, it is a statement about the logic semantics of a computer program
Which is all that a computer program is, regardless of how you describe the program, even if you implement the program in hardware.
A program is more than just a sequence of instructions
Of course not; a sequence of instructions is just one way to describe a given program (and there are infinitely many such sequences for a given program).
back in the real world computer programs have other aspects such as readability, extensibility, architecture choices, etc.
You mean like how we do not think of 5 as "S(S(S(S(S(0)))))" when we need to count five things? Yes, for applied or practical purposes we will typically take a few steps back from "foundational" or "rigorous" ways to reason about things like numbers or programs, because we are more concerned with what we are trying to accomplish than with rigorous definitions and proofs. That does not mean that when we count or write a Perl script we have somehow stopped doing math, it only means that we traded rigor for practicality.
When you look at research on code maintenance, what you will find is that mixed in with the CS there is psychology and social science (and usually the authors are both computer scientists and scientists from those other fields). The fact that computer scientists do interdisciplinary work does not mean that computer science includes those other disciplines, nor does it mean that any definition of computer science that fails to account for those other disciplines must be wrong. Mathematicians often work with economists; does that mean that definitions of math that fail to include economics must be wrong?
A fundamental link as much as everything in physics can be translated to an equation
Everything in physics can be modeled using math, assuming certain things about the universe. The Curry-Howard correspondence is not a statement about how to model computer programs nor is it a statement about how to model mathematical proofs, it is a statement about computer programs and about mathematical proofs.
Computer science is not axiomatic, i.e. built from the ground up
Really? When most people write a computer program, they assume the semantics of their programming language (even when you bootstrap a compiler, you need to make assumptions about whatever computational system the bootstrapping code runs on). If you do not call that "axiomatic," then I am not sure what you would say is "axiomatic."
In particular, CS is not a branch of mathematics
Considering that the field of CS began with an effort to classify mathematics and that we have results like the Curry-Howard correspondence, I am not really sure how you can make such a statement.
Software engineering is taught but not required by most CS curricula (at least from what I have seen), which are generally focused on training students to use programming languages and giving them some surface-level exposure to theoretical and practical concepts.
Research code is write-only since it is not worth architecting properly something that is meant for one time use, not because of some supposed lack of software engineering skills.
Except that research code is not always meant for one-time use; there are quite a few research programs that are used in multiple projects, which which are poorly documents, poorly engineered, and hard to run. I have seen a lot of grad students spend weeks trying to figure out how to extend some part of a research project written by some other grad student -- and once they have figured it out, they just hack out the solution, with little attention paid to design or even documenting what they did (it is particularly amusing to see this happen in software engineering research groups). Part of the problem is a lack of demand on the part of PIs, who rarely require that code be documented or well-designed and who are usually more concerned with publishing a paper by some deadline (there are exceptions, usually from groups that are more concerned with solving a problem in the real world than with padding the PI's CV). Another part of the problem is that for most graduate students, the exposure to software engineering tools and practices ended with the use of build systems (and usually did not go very far in to that).
There are exceptions, but let's put it this way: if someone told you they had a PhD in CS, would you assume they could design a maintainable or reliable software system?
As to N.A. and A.M if you ask most mathematician they will tell you those fields are not really math.
Except for those mathematicians who work in applied fields of math, who will tell you that they are mathematicians. Not that people could be biased or anything like that, or that experts might not agree on how to define their field.
The Curry-Howard link is neither here nor there. Math is applied routinely in many sciences,
The Curry-Howard correspondence is not a statement about an application of math in computer science. In simple terms, the correspondence is this: a mathematical proof can be converted into a computer program, and a computer program can be converted into a proof of some mathematical statement. Yes, there are some technicalities here (e.g. a program with an infinite loop), but this is not just some application of math to computer science, it is a fundamental link.
CS theory is not "nonsense" by any stretch of the imagination, even if you are only interested in doing "real world" work. The point of theory for professional programmers is to think about software in unusual ways; this broadens your ability to solve problems. The trend in programming languages over the past few decades has been towards the use of concepts that are common in theoretical CS; if that trend continues (and I suspect it will), theoretical courses will be more relevant as time goes on.
Even C++ now has lambda expressions. Introspection was once a theoretical topic (e.g. Turing machines that can read their own description). Type theoretic concepts (type constructors, dependent types, etc.) are probably going to become more mainstream in the near future.
Eh, most computer scientists are not going to be able to develop a system that meets specifications by a deadline unless they also have software engineering skills. I know expert cryptographers who can barely implement a working software system and who have no idea how to make software for use in real applications. Computer science research projects are usually "write only" software that can only be used by the person that wrote it, because it is written without regard to anything beyond proving a particular point or idea (so-called "grad student code," at least at my institution).
So really, for a real-world project, you probably a (good) software engineer.
Only in the old sense of the word "science," i.e. "knowledge," but then software engineering would also be "science." CS is not about gathering data then forming a theory; it is about developing logic systems from a set of basic assumptions (e.g. the semantics of your programming language, or of a theoretical computational system like a Turing Machine or Lambda Calculus). That would be mathematics (which at one time would have been called "science" as well). CS is a particular branch of mathematics: the branch that is concerned with computational methods, which was originally developed as part of an attempt to classify all mathematics in terms of symbolic manipulation (but which ultimately led to a proof that not all mathematics is symbolic manipulation).
Computer science is a branch of mathematics; software engineering is a collection of methods for applying that math in the "real world." Software engineering is not about state machines, compilers, programming languages, parallel algorithms, etc.; it is about how to use write "concrete" implementations of such things in a way that makes sense for real-world computation.
Here is a rough guide for deciding what to call yourself:
Do you have a set of well-defined methods for designing, documenting, and implementing the software you write? Then you might be a software engineer.
Do you sit down and bang out code a few hours before the deadline, without adhering to a well-defined method of designing the system? If so, you might be a developer.
Of course, many programmers are somewhere in the middle, usually leaning more towards "engineering" when the deadline is months away and "developing" when the deadline is days away.
Re:Online Learning Again
on
MOOC Mania
·
· Score: 2
Universities are financed by the state and the state are the people living in that state. Therefore, all the content the universities produce is payed by those people and the content should be made available, if possible, to all of them.
Most people go to college to get a degree; what outsiders do not generally realize that is that having a degree and being educated are two very different things.
Let's put it this way: I have seen native English speakers, with bachelor's degrees, who have no idea how to compose an essay. I don't just mean the occasional grammar or spelling error (I admit to making plenty of those), I mean an inability to develop an overarching theme or idea, no understanding of connecting phrases or paragraphs, etc.
Worse still, I see plenty of people who graduates CS programs who are utterly clueless basics CS. I have met numerous CS alumni who have never heard of lambda calculus, who have never taken a course in compilers (theory or implementation), and who cannot give even a rough statement of the P vs. NP problem. I see it at the school I am at now, and I saw it at my alma mater (a school that offered a compilers course once every three years, and which never offered a course in complexity theory).
So really, a bachelor's (and even master's) degree can be a pretty hollow thing. Not only does it say nothing about a person's mastery of their field, it often says nothing about a person's interest in their field. I have met people with more interest and motivation at the local 2600 meetings than I have in the CS department -- and most of the people at 2600 meets either went to trade school or community college, and some have nothing beyond a high school diploma.
My point is that a university is only valuable to society if the purpose of the university is to give its students the best education that is feasible with the budget and faculty available. We have diverged from that goal for a long time, and in the past few decades that divergence has accelerated. Universities have become a way for corporations to offload job training, and those universities are becoming more and more like the corporations they serve. I agree with the sentiment that universities should exist for the benefit of society; unfortunately, we are nowhere near that ideal.
The problem seems to be more that a professor would consider being asked questions as their students "bothering" them.
This is not necessarily the professor's fault. Let's put it this way: most universities care more about papers published than undergrad questions being answered, and most colleges want courses to be easier for the undergrads because that is what the students and their parents demand. Professors are under pressure to ignore students and focus on research and to make courses so easy that nobody has to ask any questions.
College "learning"
on
MOOC Mania
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Unfortunately, college learning in practice is not nearly as good as it is in theory. Here's why:
Professors are under pressure to make courses easier, because students and their parents are pressuring the schools to make it easy to get a degree (which most people view as a super-special-certification that entitles them to a high-paying job).
Professors and their graduate students are under pressure to publish papers; this is given considerably more weight by most universities than teaching. Graduate students who actually want to teach and who want to be teachers after graduating often discover that teaching becomes a chore for which there is no reward, and for which they are often punished (if you are an undergrad wondering why your TAs seem hurried, disconnected, or unhappy to be conducting a discussion or lab with you, this is why; it is very likely that they have a deadline to meet with their research, and the class is taking time away from that). By the time a professor has tenure and can actually focus the bulk of their time on teaching, they have spent so many years being beaten down by the publish-or-perish system that they usually forget that they actually wanted to teach.
In departments with "obvious" vocational subjects, like engineering, the demand for courses that are immediately applicable to "real world jobs" vastly outweighs courses that are not immediately applicable to most jobs. In computer science, courses in theoretical topics almost always fall by the wayside, crowded out by courses like "Web Design" and "Mobile Application Development."
Departments that lack an obvious vocational purposes, like humanities departments, have their budgets cut because the school wants to pour money into other departments. This results in fewer courses and lower-quality courses in such departments.
Even students who want to learn are being pressured to just get out and get a job. It is hard to take courses that are interesting but that do not have clear applications to a future career when you have tens of thousands of dollars in loans to repay. This is made worse by the fact that the minority of schools that still demand students take rigorous courses are vastly more expensive than schools that focus on job placement.
You see, academia is not the dreamworld that professors want you to think it is. In reality, academia has been corrupted by corporations, who have found that they can offload job training onto universities and thus save money. Universities cannot be too demanding when it comes to academics, because the vast majority of students are not looking for rigorous academic education, they are just looking for their ticket to a "good job" i.e. a high-paying job.
So while I agree that online education is not better than typical college education, I cannot say that it is worse, only that it is different. College education is broken, but not for the reasons that people think. College is broken because of bureaucracy, publish-or-perish, and the fact that there are MBAs at every level demanding that departments and professors justify their continued existence in terms of dollars and papers published.
One of the traps Intel tends to fall into, at least according to someone I know who worked there during the Itanium "hype days," is that the architecture team does not communicate with the compiler team. Both Itanium and x86 fall into this trap, although x86 is far more illustrative of the problem (most compilers can only take advantage of a small fraction of the total number of x86 instructions; most instructions are too complicated, and most programming languages do not make it easy to specify when such complex instructions are advantageous). I suspect that in a few decades, compiler technology will have advanced enough that Itanium would beat the pants off x86 in typical "enterprise" applications, although by then Itanium will probably have been forgotten.
Even at 25dBi, you have a very narrow beam -- I have such an antenna, and aiming it properly is quite a bit of work.
It is also worth noting that when you hear about long-distance wifi setups (say, 4km, the width of the DMZ), you are usually talking about a directional antenna on both ends and careful aiming. Directional-to-omni is substantially harder, especially when the omni end is transmitting at 1W or less (and a typical laptop or tablet will be transmitting at a much lower power than that). Sector antennas might work, but I doubt it -- not across 4km, and all the North Koreans would have to do is plant a bunch of tall trees in the path of the beam to kill that plan (or just shoot anyone who brings a laptop into the small area where there would be any chance of receiving the signal).
This is not like Voice of America (which, as it turns out, we do transmit into North Korean territory).
SK should put a series of 200 meter high towers with ultra strength directional-antenna open wifi beacons along the DMZ.
Hi, could you take a seat over there? I'm here with BUTU's new reality TV show, "to catch a violator of the laws of physics," and the physics police are waiting outside. I just want to ask you a few questions. Do you think it is appropriate for a/. reader like yourself to just violate the conservative of energy like that?
(OK, jokes aside, the more gain an antenna has, the more directional it needs to be. Thus, if you had a 75dBi antenna [which would be impractically large for 2.4GHz], you would get amazing range but only in a very tiny area, and otherwise you would have no appreciable reception.)
Most studies would indicate that drugs would not aid in many of the mental processes involved in programming
Except that stimulants help people focus, and for programming, that means productivity. Programmers need working memory (which stimulants improve), the ability to think more deeply about abstract problems (which stimulants improve), and the ability to keep working on a problem for extended periods of time (which stimulants improve). That is why coffee is so prevalent in programming and IT jobs. That is also why other stimulants are prevalent, but their legal status makes people keep quiet about them (unless they have a prescription, in which case they keep quiet so as not to invite theft).
more sleep, better nutrition, or more exercise may be the answer
Or drugs. Some people have brain chemistry that leads to more fog than others. Society leaves no room for people who cannot focus, or for people who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality (except religion, which we hold in high esteem), or (perhaps most cruelly) for people who are depressed. Without drugs, a lot of people would suffer.
Really though, it is not just our society. In every society, people have used drugs to do things society demands of them but which they have trouble with. Shamans are expected to have and interpret visions, to speak with gods that nobody else can see or hear, to have their spirits leave their bodies, etc. Guards are expected to stay awake throughout the night. Warriors are expected to be prepared to attack in the middle of the night. Scholars are expected to find answers in books and records, and to do so quickly enough for society to make use of those answers. Drugs are not just about feeling good or dealing with pain; drugs have a long history of being used to accomplish certain goals.
So why pretend that drugs that can clear the mental fog are a bad thing just because they are drugs? Let's stick to talking about the actual negative effects of drugs, like the fact that high doses of stimulants can cause psychosis (even caffeine) or that some stimulants cause brain damage (like methamphetamine, although that also depends on the dose; therapeutic doses of methamphetamine can be safe). If society wants to really solve problems related to drugs, we first need to be honest about why people use them, how people use them, and what happens to people who use them.
Try repeating the above to someone who needs psychiatric medication to function normally or to keep symptoms down to manageable levels. How would you like someone with schizophrenia to try meditating their problems away?
Slashdot Mirror
It's because universities are overwhelmingly run by a single ideology (in this case, leftism, but in another time or universe, rightism).
Universities are not hotbeds of leftism, and they never really were. A few universities are or were, but for the most part, here is what life at today's universities is like:
Corporations generally don't care at all about what you say - they just want your money
Yes, they care about money. That's why they care about what you say:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2000/nov/24/internetnews.internationalnews
....because as we all know, it is not really free speech if there are no exceptions. After all, "shouting fire in a crowded theater" should be prohibited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
...wow. That is all I can say. "Wow."
No, it is a statement about the logic semantics of a computer program
Which is all that a computer program is, regardless of how you describe the program, even if you implement the program in hardware.
A program is more than just a sequence of instructions
Of course not; a sequence of instructions is just one way to describe a given program (and there are infinitely many such sequences for a given program).
back in the real world computer programs have other aspects such as readability, extensibility, architecture choices, etc.
You mean like how we do not think of 5 as "S(S(S(S(S(0)))))" when we need to count five things? Yes, for applied or practical purposes we will typically take a few steps back from "foundational" or "rigorous" ways to reason about things like numbers or programs, because we are more concerned with what we are trying to accomplish than with rigorous definitions and proofs. That does not mean that when we count or write a Perl script we have somehow stopped doing math, it only means that we traded rigor for practicality.
When you look at research on code maintenance, what you will find is that mixed in with the CS there is psychology and social science (and usually the authors are both computer scientists and scientists from those other fields). The fact that computer scientists do interdisciplinary work does not mean that computer science includes those other disciplines, nor does it mean that any definition of computer science that fails to account for those other disciplines must be wrong. Mathematicians often work with economists; does that mean that definitions of math that fail to include economics must be wrong?
A fundamental link as much as everything in physics can be translated to an equation
Everything in physics can be modeled using math, assuming certain things about the universe. The Curry-Howard correspondence is not a statement about how to model computer programs nor is it a statement about how to model mathematical proofs, it is a statement about computer programs and about mathematical proofs.
Computer science is not axiomatic, i.e. built from the ground up
Really? When most people write a computer program, they assume the semantics of their programming language (even when you bootstrap a compiler, you need to make assumptions about whatever computational system the bootstrapping code runs on). If you do not call that "axiomatic," then I am not sure what you would say is "axiomatic."
In particular, CS is not a branch of mathematics
Considering that the field of CS began with an effort to classify mathematics and that we have results like the Curry-Howard correspondence, I am not really sure how you can make such a statement.
Research code is write-only since it is not worth architecting properly something that is meant for one time use, not because of some supposed lack of software engineering skills.
Except that research code is not always meant for one-time use; there are quite a few research programs that are used in multiple projects, which which are poorly documents, poorly engineered, and hard to run. I have seen a lot of grad students spend weeks trying to figure out how to extend some part of a research project written by some other grad student -- and once they have figured it out, they just hack out the solution, with little attention paid to design or even documenting what they did (it is particularly amusing to see this happen in software engineering research groups). Part of the problem is a lack of demand on the part of PIs, who rarely require that code be documented or well-designed and who are usually more concerned with publishing a paper by some deadline (there are exceptions, usually from groups that are more concerned with solving a problem in the real world than with padding the PI's CV). Another part of the problem is that for most graduate students, the exposure to software engineering tools and practices ended with the use of build systems (and usually did not go very far in to that).
There are exceptions, but let's put it this way: if someone told you they had a PhD in CS, would you assume they could design a maintainable or reliable software system?
As to N.A. and A.M if you ask most mathematician they will tell you those fields are not really math.
Except for those mathematicians who work in applied fields of math, who will tell you that they are mathematicians. Not that people could be biased or anything like that, or that experts might not agree on how to define their field.
The Curry-Howard link is neither here nor there. Math is applied routinely in many sciences,
The Curry-Howard correspondence is not a statement about an application of math in computer science. In simple terms, the correspondence is this: a mathematical proof can be converted into a computer program, and a computer program can be converted into a proof of some mathematical statement. Yes, there are some technicalities here (e.g. a program with an infinite loop), but this is not just some application of math to computer science, it is a fundamental link.
Mathematics does not care about grounding or motivation in reality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_mathematics
Also,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry-Howard_Isomorphism
CS theory is not "nonsense" by any stretch of the imagination, even if you are only interested in doing "real world" work. The point of theory for professional programmers is to think about software in unusual ways; this broadens your ability to solve problems. The trend in programming languages over the past few decades has been towards the use of concepts that are common in theoretical CS; if that trend continues (and I suspect it will), theoretical courses will be more relevant as time goes on.
Even C++ now has lambda expressions. Introspection was once a theoretical topic (e.g. Turing machines that can read their own description). Type theoretic concepts (type constructors, dependent types, etc.) are probably going to become more mainstream in the near future.
Eh, most computer scientists are not going to be able to develop a system that meets specifications by a deadline unless they also have software engineering skills. I know expert cryptographers who can barely implement a working software system and who have no idea how to make software for use in real applications. Computer science research projects are usually "write only" software that can only be used by the person that wrote it, because it is written without regard to anything beyond proving a particular point or idea (so-called "grad student code," at least at my institution).
So really, for a real-world project, you probably a (good) software engineer.
Computer science, is a ... science
Only in the old sense of the word "science," i.e. "knowledge," but then software engineering would also be "science." CS is not about gathering data then forming a theory; it is about developing logic systems from a set of basic assumptions (e.g. the semantics of your programming language, or of a theoretical computational system like a Turing Machine or Lambda Calculus). That would be mathematics (which at one time would have been called "science" as well). CS is a particular branch of mathematics: the branch that is concerned with computational methods, which was originally developed as part of an attempt to classify all mathematics in terms of symbolic manipulation (but which ultimately led to a proof that not all mathematics is symbolic manipulation).
Computer science is a branch of mathematics; software engineering is a collection of methods for applying that math in the "real world." Software engineering is not about state machines, compilers, programming languages, parallel algorithms, etc.; it is about how to use write "concrete" implementations of such things in a way that makes sense for real-world computation.
Of course, many programmers are somewhere in the middle, usually leaning more towards "engineering" when the deadline is months away and "developing" when the deadline is days away.
Universities are financed by the state and the state are the people living in that state. Therefore, all the content the universities produce is payed by those people and the content should be made available, if possible, to all of them.
Most people go to college to get a degree; what outsiders do not generally realize that is that having a degree and being educated are two very different things.
Let's put it this way: I have seen native English speakers, with bachelor's degrees, who have no idea how to compose an essay. I don't just mean the occasional grammar or spelling error (I admit to making plenty of those), I mean an inability to develop an overarching theme or idea, no understanding of connecting phrases or paragraphs, etc.
Worse still, I see plenty of people who graduates CS programs who are utterly clueless basics CS. I have met numerous CS alumni who have never heard of lambda calculus, who have never taken a course in compilers (theory or implementation), and who cannot give even a rough statement of the P vs. NP problem. I see it at the school I am at now, and I saw it at my alma mater (a school that offered a compilers course once every three years, and which never offered a course in complexity theory).
So really, a bachelor's (and even master's) degree can be a pretty hollow thing. Not only does it say nothing about a person's mastery of their field, it often says nothing about a person's interest in their field. I have met people with more interest and motivation at the local 2600 meetings than I have in the CS department -- and most of the people at 2600 meets either went to trade school or community college, and some have nothing beyond a high school diploma.
My point is that a university is only valuable to society if the purpose of the university is to give its students the best education that is feasible with the budget and faculty available. We have diverged from that goal for a long time, and in the past few decades that divergence has accelerated. Universities have become a way for corporations to offload job training, and those universities are becoming more and more like the corporations they serve. I agree with the sentiment that universities should exist for the benefit of society; unfortunately, we are nowhere near that ideal.
The problem seems to be more that a professor would consider being asked questions as their students "bothering" them.
This is not necessarily the professor's fault. Let's put it this way: most universities care more about papers published than undergrad questions being answered, and most colleges want courses to be easier for the undergrads because that is what the students and their parents demand. Professors are under pressure to ignore students and focus on research and to make courses so easy that nobody has to ask any questions.
You see, academia is not the dreamworld that professors want you to think it is. In reality, academia has been corrupted by corporations, who have found that they can offload job training onto universities and thus save money. Universities cannot be too demanding when it comes to academics, because the vast majority of students are not looking for rigorous academic education, they are just looking for their ticket to a "good job" i.e. a high-paying job.
So while I agree that online education is not better than typical college education, I cannot say that it is worse, only that it is different. College education is broken, but not for the reasons that people think. College is broken because of bureaucracy, publish-or-perish, and the fact that there are MBAs at every level demanding that departments and professors justify their continued existence in terms of dollars and papers published.
At least according to Wikipedia, Itanium's performance was disappointed when compared to other RISC architectures, ten years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Itanium_.28Merced.29:_2001
One of the traps Intel tends to fall into, at least according to someone I know who worked there during the Itanium "hype days," is that the architecture team does not communicate with the compiler team. Both Itanium and x86 fall into this trap, although x86 is far more illustrative of the problem (most compilers can only take advantage of a small fraction of the total number of x86 instructions; most instructions are too complicated, and most programming languages do not make it easy to specify when such complex instructions are advantageous). I suspect that in a few decades, compiler technology will have advanced enough that Itanium would beat the pants off x86 in typical "enterprise" applications, although by then Itanium will probably have been forgotten.
Even at 25dBi, you have a very narrow beam -- I have such an antenna, and aiming it properly is quite a bit of work.
It is also worth noting that when you hear about long-distance wifi setups (say, 4km, the width of the DMZ), you are usually talking about a directional antenna on both ends and careful aiming. Directional-to-omni is substantially harder, especially when the omni end is transmitting at 1W or less (and a typical laptop or tablet will be transmitting at a much lower power than that). Sector antennas might work, but I doubt it -- not across 4km, and all the North Koreans would have to do is plant a bunch of tall trees in the path of the beam to kill that plan (or just shoot anyone who brings a laptop into the small area where there would be any chance of receiving the signal).
This is not like Voice of America (which, as it turns out, we do transmit into North Korean territory).
SK should put a series of 200 meter high towers with ultra strength directional-antenna open wifi beacons along the DMZ.
Hi, could you take a seat over there? I'm here with BUTU's new reality TV show, "to catch a violator of the laws of physics," and the physics police are waiting outside. I just want to ask you a few questions. Do you think it is appropriate for a /. reader like yourself to just violate the conservative of energy like that?
(OK, jokes aside, the more gain an antenna has, the more directional it needs to be. Thus, if you had a 75dBi antenna [which would be impractically large for 2.4GHz], you would get amazing range but only in a very tiny area, and otherwise you would have no appreciable reception.)
Most studies would indicate that drugs would not aid in many of the mental processes involved in programming
Except that stimulants help people focus, and for programming, that means productivity. Programmers need working memory (which stimulants improve), the ability to think more deeply about abstract problems (which stimulants improve), and the ability to keep working on a problem for extended periods of time (which stimulants improve). That is why coffee is so prevalent in programming and IT jobs. That is also why other stimulants are prevalent, but their legal status makes people keep quiet about them (unless they have a prescription, in which case they keep quiet so as not to invite theft).
What are the students taking now-a-days to get through their studies?
The same things they were taking in the 90s, 80s, 70s, etc.: caffeine, nicotine, and amphetamines.
mind-altering drugs. Other than that, it is obvious that drugs help. Consider caffeine
For a moment there, I thought you were saying that caffeine is not a mind altering drug.
Underlying brain fog probably has a cause
Good luck figuring it out.
This may be physiological or emotional
Do you really think those are different?
more sleep, better nutrition, or more exercise may be the answer
Or drugs. Some people have brain chemistry that leads to more fog than others. Society leaves no room for people who cannot focus, or for people who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality (except religion, which we hold in high esteem), or (perhaps most cruelly) for people who are depressed. Without drugs, a lot of people would suffer.
Really though, it is not just our society. In every society, people have used drugs to do things society demands of them but which they have trouble with. Shamans are expected to have and interpret visions, to speak with gods that nobody else can see or hear, to have their spirits leave their bodies, etc. Guards are expected to stay awake throughout the night. Warriors are expected to be prepared to attack in the middle of the night. Scholars are expected to find answers in books and records, and to do so quickly enough for society to make use of those answers. Drugs are not just about feeling good or dealing with pain; drugs have a long history of being used to accomplish certain goals.
So why pretend that drugs that can clear the mental fog are a bad thing just because they are drugs? Let's stick to talking about the actual negative effects of drugs, like the fact that high doses of stimulants can cause psychosis (even caffeine) or that some stimulants cause brain damage (like methamphetamine, although that also depends on the dose; therapeutic doses of methamphetamine can be safe). If society wants to really solve problems related to drugs, we first need to be honest about why people use them, how people use them, and what happens to people who use them.
Try repeating the above to someone who needs psychiatric medication to function normally or to keep symptoms down to manageable levels. How would you like someone with schizophrenia to try meditating their problems away?
Not all brains are created equal.