I was talking with a friend who recently went back to school. He has a degree which doesn't remotely relate to anything he wants to do, and decided that he wanted a computer science degree. But then he shifted gears - he was saying "I could stop after getting the minor, and save all the extra money from the additional year I'd have to go". His logic is that all the interviews he's gone to have asked him whether he's had SQL, Unix, etc. experience. Now that he's been exposed to those, he figures that's it, now he can be hired as a professional software engineer. There seems to be this misconception that if only he had these couple checkboxes ticked, he'd be fine.

Being well rounded isn't about hitting all the checkboxes (or in the case of the summary, getting the appropriate modules). It's about everything that isn't explicitly in those checkboxes. It's about seeing how all those things relate to one another in useful and sometimes unintuitive ways. It's about being able to take everything and go and do something new.

In school, a professor told me that what they were teaching wasn't for our first job out of college, but for our third. It's a bit oversimplified, but it's more or less valid. You get well rounded not so you can handle the stuff that they hire you for initially, but so that as you advance along your career path, you have some scaffolding on which to put all the other things that you learn along the way.

I'm just going to take my foot out of my mouth before someone else beats me to it. Clearly the wrong agency. I'll go back to lurking in the corner.

So, the department that pretends to keep me safe on airplanes is now also the one that pretends to keep me safe from deadly airborne pathogens?

Why is the CDC not holding on to these for safekeeping? Their obvious failure here notwithstanding, I'd think that this is more their bailiwick than DHS's.

It took me a minute to parse this for context. I was grasping at straws for when Michael Jackson and/or the Jackson Five was giving orders to Diana Ross.

I'm having a little trouble parsing the slavery comment.

"In order to ensure you will not use the valuable cotton picking skills you've acquired here at another employer, we've purchased these shackles so that you cannot help another plantation compete with us."

I am an engineer, but I agree with your assessment - I feel fully qualified to act as a doctor. None of my patients have complained, but if by chance one were to survive and make a fuss, I feel sufficiently competent as a lawyer that I'm sure I'd be okay.

It's interesting that you mention this. I actually have a relatively green process that I'm working on for extracting energy from waste, and it's primary source of input energy is "Hip to be Square". We do note high turnover in our lab assistants, however.

But, since I can't even be bothered to read the _entire_ summary, I'm going to retract some of my article-bashing, since they clearly indicate some examples of what they're describing, and all of that seems perfectly reasonable.

The summary specifically calls out physical, intellectual, and emotional. Are they suggesting that in 50 years you'll be able to get a chip implanted because you're depressed? Or stupid? Physical issues are being improved upon markedly. But seriously - fixing perceived issues in how people think seems just wrong. Fixing perceived issues with how people feel doubly so. If this were possible, we'd be squarely in sci-fi AI-controlled-human territory.

Irrational numbers are supernatural.

While I agree that there would be considerable benefit from this, I think that there's a whole mess of tinfoil hat issues here. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that my government is spying on me (not specifically me, but in general). Giving them all the hardware means no more negotiating with service providers (at any level).

No more sneaking around what is or isn't okay. "This is my hardware, and to protect my hardware, I have to install this additional monitoring." There's the whole "If you aren't doing anything wrong..." argument, but let's not assume that giving the government the "means of distribution" is going to be all sunshine and puppy dogs.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy that service providers can do whatever they want, but at least then the competition drives them to all be the best (well, we're assuming that "best" and "most profitable" are related). The government has no such goal. It's possible this would even backfire completely and the government would let it languish - they've got dial-up, so our job is done, etc.

If there's anything I've learned from video games, it's that this is a bad idea.

The answer is two.