Checkout ai-class.com to see some of the ways in which Math gets used in computer science. That class touches on just a few topics and doesn't go very deep. When you work in the machine learning field, there is a lot more math that you'll find helpful.

Maybe they will open source their code and the IP won't entirely go to waste. As for the money, well, it is in someone's bank account. It is not lost, just redistributed. Every day we make bets that seem stupid later but such is life. Sometimes stupid bets payoff (I'm looking at you instagram).

I couldn't agree more. Look at the ai-class.com lectures on probability and compare it with Khan classes and you see a very large gap. The khan class gives you a foundation but it is really just the bottom 30% of what you need to know. Then compare the ai-class.com lectures on NLP with the NLP class at see.stanford.com and you see another large gap. So we need each education site. Each one tends to focus on a different range of the education path and on a different level student. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the same fact taught in a different style.

It is hard to be competitive without funding... We need a yearly funding drive effort like NPR. The biggest problem (and strength?) is that we have a lot of duplicate solutions. We are a large fragmented democracy fighting a well-funding dictatorship with a great PR department. If only we could elect a leader for 2 years and unite against Apple and MS. The irony is that we can't beat them without becoming them...

I've interviewed at companies with a 20-something workforce and it is very awkward. They make it very clear, they only want older employees if they are in the top 5% of the workforce. You have to be a well-known expert (e.g. owing a github project with a large following, published and selling well in the app store, highly ranked on stackoverflow) to have their respect. It doesn't matter if I like that or not; the 20-something people make the decisions. It is evolve and get facebook like jobs or die at a boring company.
My solution, which isn't easy, is to start my own company. I think the 20-something crowd feels that it is so easy to start a company, if a 35+ year-old employee hasn't started one then there must be something wrong. It is a lot like high-school; you have to be hard to get for them to want you.

What is your opinion of the impact of this law? I suspect it has always been the case that the majority of people believe in creationism. I wonder if a tendency to hold religious beliefs is an advantageous adaption. We argue about the incorrectness of a belief in creationism when ironically, it may be society's tendency to hold religious beliefs that have helped our species survive. We may not need those tendencies anymore but I'm not sure they can safely disappear overnight. I don't see a need to change someone's belief creationism even though I don't share it. Science can do amazing things that will change their minds. Science is so powerful that it seems silly to worry about the misconceptions of the deeply religious. Democracy means the majority gets to create laws which are a mistake but the system allows us to fix them later when we're culturally evolved to accept it. Maybe the best way to reduce the belief in creationism is to teach it along side evolution.

There is an earlier /. article today on a new way to think about learning. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/11/1927219/a-better-way-to-program It would be great if there were interactive educational applications like the ones that Bret Victor talks about.

This article is also very interesting. http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/ It points out that, when we learn we need to focus more on recalling the information. Sites like khanacademy present the information in small chunks that are easy to understand but if the student doesn't practice recalling the information, then she/he is at a disadvantage.

Finally, there is this video by Sir Ken Robinson which talks about the issues pretty well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded#!

I just don't get it. China is a major trading partner and holder of american debt. It would be so much easier to sign a peace treaty. The biggest issue I think is taiwan so let's work out a deal to integrate taiwan like they did with hong kong. In exchange for taiwan, we should ask them to strongly motivate north korea to integrate with the south. There are other issues but I don't think they are big enough to go to war over. The richer they become the less problems we will have.

1) Move up the management chain. Stop moving up when you can't take the bs. You don't code anymore. You are still paid well. You have to reduce your reliance on technical skills and switch to people skills. It is messy. I find it hard because the goals are harder to understand. People don't act in their best interests and so doing something illogical (e.g. not allowing an employee to build a better solution because the current solution is owned by someone with more influence than you have) is the better choice if you want to keep your job. It is really hard to avoid becoming the dilbert manager when a dilbert manager decides your fate.
2) Move into sales or marketing. Again you have to tone down your technical skills in favor of people skills. If you move into writing white papers you can keep some of the technical skills but you will need to understand people well enough to influence them. It takes getting used to. I didn't like it at first but so far it has been easier than coding, a little boring but I feel my work is useful to the company and customers. If you move into technical presales you typically get a bonus but you also have to travel a bit more.

We are becoming smart enough to control our natural selection process so that the only selection process that remains is one in which humans to kill each other. It is a catch 22. We're getting smart enough to survive anything the nature can throw at us so we only have ourselves to limit our growth. There are other ways that seem more logical but survival of the best killer has always been the dominate method. We want to think that we've evolved past it but our wars indicate otherwise. As mentioned before, Islam and Judaism share a common origin. Our conflicts are silly. It reminds me of when Nixon escalated the bombing into Cambodia because he didn't want to be the first American president to lose war. Several million people died because one person didn't want a sentence written in a book that one day no one will read.

I always wanted to know how to divide future revenue (after the divorce) for IP that was started but not completed before the divorce. I had thought to just give each party a copy of the IP to finish as they see fit. The alternative is that one party finishes the work and the other party reaps the benefits. This later case seems unfair.

The problem isn't specific to apple but they are the poster child and a protest there would produce the most press. With record breaking profits, it would be awesome if apple spent more to improve working conditions in china.

It is interesting that the left and right need each other as much as they oppose each other. It is a half full vs half empty difference in POV.

Actually, google said, "Mozilla, can we work with you to make firefox radically better?" and Mozilla said "no, we have our own ideas and we don't want you telling us what to do!" and so google created Chrome with the goal of forcing all the vendors to make their browsers better. Sure javascipt performance improvements have been great but can we get a little type safe, pretty please? Writing more than 100K lines of javascript without any type checking is so 1970.

I don't want to rewrite my app for a small market. Just make it easier to build android apps to run on desktop linux.