Honestly, I think people should not be able to earn an A+ unless they do extra credit. Too many universities and colleges have professors that give too lenient of grades and it makes people begin to expect it.
Very true. I happened to study in a country where you could earn the highest grade (10) only if you did some significant extra credit, or if you showed that you knew more than the class required in some other way. It highly motivated students to go "above and beyond", and gave a student something to be really proud about when they earned a 10. I also studied in the US, and it's too easy here to get an A - simply do everything that is required with no "thinking outside the box" involved.
Where exactly do you get the notion that people are still learning to write real algorithms in university ? Sure they get shown the result of algorithms. They might even get to implement a binary tree search algorithm (though without the memory allocation part that makes all the difference in real programming). But that's pretty much it.
In decent colleges, they teach you basic algorithm design concepts (e.g. dynamic programming), give some examples, and ask you to come up with a specific algorithm to solve a particular problem. This is hardly as simple as implementing a binary search algorithm (this stuff is typically done in introductory courses). Memory allocation is typically completely irrelevant in Algorithms course.
If a site is not going to treat you with respect and dignity, then take your business elsewhere. A site that measures you in "eyeballs" rather than "contributors" is not something you should be associated with in any way.
Exactly. In fact, Slashdot is one of few sites that are Doing It Right. I was so impressed when I saw the "Disable Advertising" option that I immediately added *.slashdot.org to my AdBlock whitelist (although I should have done it earlier given the amount of time I spend here).
It seems that this argument comes up at least once in every post related to transportation. Please believe me that once you've been in an accident where you were not the guilty party (because of either other driver, vehicle malfunction, or poor road conditions), you will not find this joke even remotely funny.
Actually, I think that it would be better if every person on the road could experience being in a non-serious accident (i.e. without significant injuries) that only involved their car. Maybe then most people would stop thinking that they are above-average drivers.
Start by offering 700MB XVID downloads for about USD$5 from fast servers with fantastic bandwidth.
90s called, they want their 700MB XVIDs back. Nowadays most movies are available in at least 720p, so content providers should match that.
I think one important service that movie studios can provide to attract customers is "online storage". Here's what they should do:
If they provide such service, I'm sure most people would get rid of their TB hard drives and stop pirating movies, as they would know they can watch a movie they liked any time. They would still be able to backup downloaded movies to avoid the case when the servers become unavailable.
One of my professors had a better way to handle this issue - he required all laptop-users to sit in the back of the classroom. This would still allow students to use laptops in class if they want. However, it would move them sufficiently far away so that other students are not distracted by the clickety-clacking and seeing laptop-users playing games or surfing the web (the same distracting effect as if someone in front of you in a movie theater uses a cell phone).
I firmly believe that pen and paper is still a much better way to take notes and learn in class, but I wouldn't prevent students from using laptops as supposedly they pay the same tuition as everyone else. Even if some students doesn't actively listen to the lecture, it is their choice and it's not an excuse to ban them from attending lectures.
Possibly because some races are over-represented in the lower economic stratas, are unable to afford tertiary educations at top-tier institutions and thus, even though they may be competitively intelligent, aren't able to make the most of it.
Oh, come on. There is plenty of opportunities for intelligent minorities to finance their education in college.
Yes, I'm bitter - perhaps that's because most of the benefits listed above didn't apply to me, and I still somehow managed to accomplish my goal of doing a good enough job as an undergrad to be accepted in a top 5 grad school. Upward mobility *does exist* if you're persistent (or desperate) enough.
It's kind of foreign to see someone taking notes in a CS course. I assume it is because CS courses are about understanding the concept instead of memorizing information.
You sound like someone who teaches a particular course and considers it "The CS Course". At my university, you need to take 15 CS courses for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and each one of them requires a different note-taking strategy.
Here's another funny thing about "understanding the concept". Sometimes there are cases when you understand the concept perfectly during the lecture, but when you start doing homework 3 days later, you suddenly realize that now you don't understand it any more. In these cases, going over the most important points in the lecture notes helps you get back on track quickly instead of having to (re-)read the book.
Any given program will expand to fill available memory.
