If your education puts you in debt that lasts a lifetime, you did it wrong. Yes, not everyone can afford even a public university, but most of the state unis around here have far, far lower tuition than anywhere else. And you can go to a community college for the first two years to knock out those damn Gen Eds for even cheaper than that. Yeah, there's a lot less scholarship money to go around now, but there's still some federal aid money that you can get your hands on too. The problem that I observed from my graduating class was that no one wanted to 'lower' themselves to a public university. Cutting off their nose to spite their face, and all.

Why did such an obvious troll get +4 Informative? Because obviously the justice system with checks and balances is inferior to beating the snot out of someone on what amounts to hearsay.

"In creating a new market for digital imaging Adobe also managed to kill off another market; photo printing and film developing. I'm sure in the corporate halls of companies like Fuji and Kodak, Photoshop is about as popular as a Christmas-time shaved ice vendor in Moscow."

Somehow I doubt that. Photoshop doesn't put glossy paper in your printer or make it easy to print a whole memory card's worth of photos at once. Those were separate developments that led to the widespread adoption of the digital format.

If anything I'd say businesses adopting those all in one kiosks helped kill film. Now instead of needing to set up your own print lab with expensive paper, ink, and printer, you could take your CD or stick to WalMart or CVS.

Eclipse for me is speedy but greedy. If you're willing to let it suck up RAM it'll run perfectly fine.

Way to rip off Cracked.com :P
http://www.cracked.com/article_15229_5-things-hollywood-thinks-computers-can-do.html
Not that I think you actually did. Funny nonetheless though.

Hmm, I see. My post was a bit more snarky than I meant it to be -- I really am curious as to doing it other ways.

You don't use debuggers? Ever? That, to me, seems more inefficient and wasteful than any downsides to developing within an IDE. So when something gets bollocksed up, you just start guessing where the problem is, as opposed to stepping through the program and examining it? Or do you just stick ten thousand print statements in?

Even for the trivial C projects I've had in my CIS courses at uni I was glad to have some basic knowledge on how to use GDB. It's a lot easier, in my mind, to look at the program as it executes and see exactly what broke (bad memory allocation or deallocation, wrong function call, whatever) then to make a change, try again, make another change, try again...

No, what that does is ruin the cohesion between platoon members. You don't want to constantly change who servicemembers are serving with, making it harder to maintain morale when their buddy gets rotated out. That's my two cents at least.

Those are the same restrictions Java Applets have due to the Security Manager, and somehow programmers manage to develop useful applets.

Mod parent up; I wish I had some points to award you.

Yes, but you said it yourself -- smarter students. Not URI students versus Brown students. Smart people who are motivated succeed, regardless of where they earn their degree.

After your first or second job, how many of the interviewers cared about the name of your university versus your performance at your previous jobs? It should make no difference whether you got your BS from a state college or an Ivy League school, provided you've got a good track record as being motivated and a worker who produces results. If you expect to trade on your school's reputation rather than your own ability, perhaps science isn't the field for you.

"The same goes for the reputation of the companies you choose to work for."

Please quote where I said anything about the companies you work for. All I said was that the expense/prestige of your university will likely not be a factor once you graduate.

Now yes, if your school is known for graduating people who are abysmal in their field, that's a problem -- but again, that's something you should be considering when applying. My point isn't that there are schools with superior computer science, engineering, etc. programs, my point is that the cost or fame of a school does not give you a different degree than everyone else. There's no proprietary "MIT Brand" physics that's being taught there. The UMass system still follows Newton's rules. Now you might prefer MIT for other, valid reasons, but you can't claim that MIT's reputation will far outweigh your performance after you graduate. Smart people succeed, regardless of where they go.

"...the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."

Synonymous? Maybe at large colleges, but guess what -- you can get a degree without that experience. It's called a smaller school. Sadly, many of my high school compatriots looked at "name brand" first, and size or cost second, if at all. For any high school slashdotters listening, I have a secret -- it's the same degree. My father went to state school in RI, and was recruited by Raytheon before he'd even graduated. He was working alongside graduates from all the Ivy Leagues, getting paid the same. It doesn't matter what the name on the diploma is, what matters is the effort you put in and the skills you provide for your employer. Save your money, avoid crippling student loan debt, and get those smaller class sizes anyways.

Smaller university equals smaller classes. The largest class I've ever had at my university was 40 students -- hardly unmanageable. Consider these things first, since you're going to school for your degree, not bragging rights, at least ostensibly so.

The word you're looking for is "ostracize," not "ostrichsize." Though turning university bureaucrats into ostriches would be highly amusing.