Exactly. Maybe they don't see the bigger picture? Maybe we don't properly motivate with these examples?

If engineers fail at their job, people die. Chemical plants explode, medical devices fail, airplanes crash and burn. How much more impact on society can you have?

I think the problem is the job is too far removed from the feels. You don't have personal direct impact.

And sometimes the conditions are not conducive to family life. I have students starting with a four year degree making over $100k. But they spend lots of time in the gulf on oil rigs. Sometimes people make different life choices.

I know it will never work, but open-standards for stuff is what we really should shoot for.

Email and web were successful because anyone could run servers on the protocol.

Chat was starting to move that way, but nobody seems to use chat anymore. Text or FB message or instagram or twitter.

Social media is all privately controlled and that is bad for us all.

Reader. They had the best RSS reader. It even had decent social functions if you were into it. And they killed it.

I have too much stuff in google docs, but I realize I need to move away from them and never trust the cloud with mission critical anything.

I had a student talk with me about Adderall abuse on campus.

He said it worked great, he could study all night but retention long-term was limited.

He also said he stopped taking Adderall off-script because it made him suicidal.

Whatever happened to coffee?

4,300 over eight years in a city the size of Baltimore is not that big a number. 1-2 a day in a city of 600,000 (metro of 2.7 million) may actually be on the low side of what you would expect.

But hey, math class is tough. OUTRAGE!

I would assume the "church" is still doing good charity works of some sort, even if the optics are bad.

And the "toys" can somewhat be justified. Everyone needs to get around, so a preacher needs a car. A preacher in a giant church has more resources (and obligations) to get around, so maybe a big car (and a driver?) could be justified if they are actually going around ministering.

And a jet seems crazy, but these groups become large national (multinational?) organizations that have members and locations and ministries all over the country. Again, if they have resources, why not let them have a jet if they are doing good works? Now if they only use it to jet to the Bahamas every weekend...

As in many things, the real answer is "it depends."

What do you mean by SMS clients? Do you mean SMS integration?

I have email and chat. Why would I want SMS to get crippled messages or limit myself to a phone platform?

Google Hangouts does chat and video chat and snapchat image type stuff.

It is multiplatform, unlike Factime or SMS messaging. Not sure if Whatsapp has a PC/Mac client.

I have had messaged delayed for some unknown reason on occasion. But overall, it is very solid.

You know what else is caused by global warming? Nearly everything.

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html

I agree. This is my favorite book and I hope they do a decent job of it.

Yeah, I know. They are a much better experience.

Sometimes they offer audio files for just a few dollars more. They are way better, but I am usually too cheap for it. And I don't want any hassle from questionable downloads. So I will stick with my robot voice reading to me for now.

I got my phone to read Kindle books and it changed my life. Look up accessibility settings, iPhone and Android can both do it. Any Kindle book is now read during my commute. Sure, some pronunciation is awful, but giving me an extra 5+ hours reading each week is a godsend.

Your generalization would be true if I was just one of a handful of students who worked up to general engineering principles from rudimentary physics knowledge. However, I can point to hundreds of my peers at MIT who did the same thing, many of whom likely have a much deeper understanding than I do. Given my exposure to the curriculum at CalTech and Stanford, I feel rather confident in stating that engineering students at those schools weren't just given equations and told to memorize them. Instead, they slogged through a series of derivations of those principles and had to build up their own understanding of the meaning behind those derivations. I'm sure that others can chime in about their experiences at other top-tier institutions, such as Berkeley, CMU, and the Ivies.

As an aside, undergraduate research assistantships are becoming more commonplace at some institutions. I agree that most undergraduates will probably not come out publishing papers in prestigious journals or conferences. However, that does not mean that they don't enhance their knowledge and understanding of various concepts.

In short, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of engineers out there with educational experiences that either partly or fully mirror my own. Consequently, you really need to be cautious when you make sweeping generalizations like engineers only spend their time memorizing formulas without reflecting on how those formulas came to be.

There are plenty of incorrect assertions and generalizations made in this post. It honestly reads like a dogmatic diatribe.

As EE/CS undergraduate students, my classmates and I learned the fundamental physics behind various phenomena, not just the high-level equations. That is, we learned why, for example, transistors function they way that they do and why we can rely on simplified equations to characterize their behavior. Most of what we were taught is still covered in the MIT undergraduate curriculum (see courses 6.002, 6.012, 8.012, 8.04, and 8.044).

As EE/CS graduate students, my lab partners and I were responsible for furthering the state of the art. During these years, we had to understand why, for example, our experimental results diverged from our model predictions and how to revise those models accordingly. In some cases, we invalided long-standing, widely taught models and proposed new ones. If we didn't understand the fundamental physics behind these models, we wouldn't have made the contributions that we did. We also wouldn't have had our work published in Science, Nature, and PNAS.

I don't even need to lengthily address your comment that engineers aren't smart. There are plenty of people on Slashdot that can thoroughly invalidate that claim.

I doubt they discount the expected value based on the possibility of a split pot.

Without knowing how many people are playing this round, you don't have totally accurate estimates.