That's where I have been having personal issues lately - all engineering jobs are for creating worthless consumer crap; like the Segway.

Keep in mind that the technology behind the Segway wasn't invented for the Segway; it was invented for this wheelchair.

The Segway got the attention because it's something that had the potential to have a much broader market, considering that the population that can't walk is pretty small.

In addition to what the other reply said: chicken and egg.

Professors on tenure track want publications in highly-rated conferences and journals. Professors who have tenure want their students to get publications in highly-rated conferences and journals. So when they have a good paper, they want to submit to them.

The prof or grad student isn't directly paying the costs of closed journals, so why would they take the risk of submitting their best work to a journal that at best is untested when they think they can get it into one that is highly-respected?

For people to submit good papers to it, the open-access journal needs to be well-respected; to be well-respected it needs to publish good, impactful papers; to publish good, impactful papers people need to submit said papers to it.

Probably we'll get there one day as the quality of papers submitted to open-access journals gradually increase (because while there is little incentive to submit to them, many people will consider little to not be zero), but it'll take time.

However, unlike preventing flying-mammal-caused motorcycle deaths for a couple of years, preventing all polio deaths for a couple of years means we may never have to worry about it ever again.

Attempting to use the handbrake (parking brake, etc. etc.) to stop from speed will almost certainly make your situation a lot worse.

Yeah, it'll make the car smell funny as you're crashing. :-)

I've done some very light investigation of cars recently (mine blew its timing belt with an interference engine and I was trying to determine if it was worth repairing), and from what I can tell, that's still true.

For example, from cars.com, selecting an automatic transmission Civic or Accord adds $741-800. An automatic transmission Jetta TDI adds $1,100. An automatic transmission Miata adds $2,200. An automatic transmission Focus adds $1,095.

Now, those are the prices if you order a custom car, not necessarily what you could get from your dealer. But still, at least coming out of the factory, stick shifts are still cheaper.

We lost "control" decades ago with the advent of vacuum/RPM spark advance, it's been down hill from there. ... If they had just a little bit of an idea about how cars worked, they'd be a whole lot safer...

Actual evidence disagrees with you. Those things that have made it possible to not know as much about what your car is doing, which you say have contributed to a lack of safety, have been a contributor to an impressive decline in automotive deaths and injuries.

That's not to say that things couldn't be better than they are... but you're full of it if you think the situation was better when cars were less complicated.

I stopped reading after the first two paragraphs.

...then you missed the entire point of his post.

Nah, everyone who believes in homeopathy knew the truth right away: you just have to wait a while for the plane to diffuse around, and then even a teaspoon of ocean water will contain enough black box information to solve the mystery. That the "disappearance" hasn't been solved yet is just continuing evidence of the establishment's biases against reality.

Lots of mine (actually, almost all) had assigned paper readings, but now that you can get almost any CS paper you want free on the web collecting said papers into something that your students pick up explicitly is a lot less important than it was 20 years ago. I wouldn't count that anyway -- by "textbook" I really mean, well, a textbook. An attempt to write up of lots of existing, widely-accepted knowledge into a coherent presentation aimed at a "broad" audience. (Broad here is relative of course; I just mean not "here's what we put together for CS #### at Awesome State University.")

I feel like most of what you said is true is true of my program, except that the proportion of people who leave with an MS is a majority. And in my case, I had 3 grad-level classes (compilers, PL, and algorithms) that broadly speaking worked like advanced undergrad classes -- no substantive research portion. Like I said, we didn't use texts either -- but I feel we could have easily. Other classes (with research projects as a large portion of the class) also could have, but had us reading actual papers instead -- presumably in large part to give PhD students practice. :-)

I also wouldn't say that a classes-only MS program would be more specialized, unless you mean "better aimed at someone who wants to work in industry." (But in that case, in some ways a PhD program would be much more specialized than that!)

That being said... I'm not sure any of my grad-level classes had textbooks. I don't think so. :-)

But I still stand by my statement for the following reasons:
1.) There were at least a couple classes where we easily could have
2.) In my grad-level math classes, we used texts
3.) Grad students take more than grad classes (almost always, anyway)
4.) There will be background knowledge in books not covered directly by your classes that will nevertheless be useful.

In grad school, you innovate and push the frontier.

You do that in a PhD program; the question was about a MS. Some masters students to research, but at least where I went to school (on the border of top-10 grad schools in CS) the masters students who do research outside of class were a minority.

Even when working on your PhD, there's a ton of learning about history that you won't have done in undergrad.

Small electronics repair has died entirely...

I'm probably the exception that proves the rule, but a while back I did actually send a pair of headphones in for repair. $30 instead of $100 replacement cost.

I've seen old HP Laserjet 4 models still continue to keep going for almost 20 years.

I have an old HP Laserjet 4+ that's going after almost 20 years (and just passed 23,000 pages). :-)

Code by Charles Petzold

I love this book. I think it would be amazingly fun to create a freshmen seminar class around.