>I can't tell you how many of these bozos who've learned in a "formal" setting can barely manage a coherent if/then statement, much less successfully complete even a small in-house application.

I'm going to start teaching CS in January. My approach will be to have the students writing code every class, which will be automatically tested by code that I write for correctness. If they can't get it done in class, they have until the next class (48 hours later) to finish it.

It is somewhat inspired by the code competitions I used to do. If a CS student can't write code to save his life, why is he taking a programming class?

>Granted, most of the self-taught crowd is weak on specialized algorithms and data structures

This is a bigger weakness than you think. Sure, some concepts like hashing and linked lists can be learned pretty quickly by an auto-didact, but the lack of formal training in discrete math means that their code all too often isn't correct. I can look at a recursive algorithm and immediately see when it was written by someone who never learned to do a proof by induction.

Also, their understanding of big-O notation is often (but not always) weak, and they'll tend to just try to use the one or two structures they understand for everything, which leads to inefficient implementations.

>strangely enough there's a section in the constitution that actually makes vague laws of no effect. Can't remember the section.

That's funny.

Vague laws are the bread and butter of prosecutors.

If you want to read more on the subject, check out the book Three Felonies a Day.

>Does not apply to sting operations...

Your reference says nothing about wire fraud.

Here's the actual law -

"Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both"

It's malleable enough that prosecutors can make it apply to basically anyone.

>Please, cite the violated law. Thank you.

Wire fraud could be used to prosecute pretty much anyone in cases like these, if a US Attorney wanted to do so, which they wouldn't. They never go after their own.

I used to work in the "new" field of computational medicine about 15 years. (Is 15 years new? I don't think so - and some of those heart models well before my time.) The Cardiac Mechanics Computational Group at UCSD, if anyone cares.

Personalized medicine was a very big driver for the models we were working on. You could introduce ischemias or other defects into the modeled heart tissue and observe how it changed the propagation of potentials across the tissue surfaces.

I personally worked on smaller models of just one heart cell, with the purpose being that you could see what the impact various drugs would have without needing to do millions of dollars of testing. Got a drug you know will change the sodium permiability or whatever? Alter the constant in the model, and run it. Proctor and Gamble funded the research that funded me, and was pretty happy with the results, I think.

>Yes, his accent was horrible.

Yeah. I flinched at it. And his sentences were pretty basic. (Wo tai tai shi zhong guo ren, for example.)

That said, it's a nice gesture. When I went to China, people were constantly surprised at seeing a foreigner speak their language. It's a really diplomatic move on his part.

In the lead up to the war, yes, old munitions were one of the big reasons for invading. Remember all the weapons inspectors kicking around Iraq?

And no, they're not duds. They were degraded, not harmless. They could still deal a lot of damage.

In any event, the point is that people keep pointing to this issue as an area where Fox viewers are misinformed, but in reality, it is the other crowd that has it wrong.

>Ya that's a pretty fucking stupid retort.

Facts often seem that way to people who are predispositioned to not believe them.

Degraded, but very much not useless. The cognitive dissonance in your post must give you a headache.

>False equivalence. Although equal airtime for all views is silly, Fox intentionally distorts facts and dialog to fit their agenda. WMD's in Iraq? A certainty, well after all the other news outlets have given up on that

This is a meme that unfortunately puts you on the wrong side of the truth. WMDs were found in Iraq - their old chemical weapons stores were not all destroyed, as promised.

'On June 21, 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released key points from a classified report from the National Ground Intelligence Center on the recovery of a small number of degraded chemical munitions in Iraq. The report stated that "Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent." All are thought to be pre-Gulf War munitions.

These munitions meet the technical definition of weapons of mass destruction, according to the commander of the National Ground Intelligence Center. "These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes ... they do constitute weapons of mass destruction," Army Col. John Chu told the House Armed Services Committee. The munitions addressed in the report were produced in the 1980s, according to Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples. Badly corroded, they could not currently be used as originally intended, though agent remaining in the weapons would be very valuable to terrorists and insurgents, Maples said.' -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Chemical_Weapons_Recovered

> Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.

Sure, there was no fraud or scientific misconduct.

However, the commission findings did confirm a lot of shitty things they were doing, such as coming up with arguably illegal tricks to avoid having to complete FOIA requests, strongarming journals that publish dissenting views in climate science, and a general lack of transparency in a field that requires data openness.

>This is effectively Google's response to OEMs (especially Samsung) putting on atrocious crapware that was ruining the Android experience for many users. e.g. "this is why OEMs can't have nice things".

You have it backwards. The Samsung bloatware is a response to Google's strong-arming vendors on their apps.

Ever wonder why Samsung installs a fucking duplicate app on your device for everything Google does? Samsung Calendar, Samsung memo, Samsung voice, Samsung Apps Store, Samsung Translator, etc?

It's so that they have leverage over Google when Google threatens to remove their apps and force a vendor to use the stone age equivalents. Having duplicate apps means that the threat carries a lot less teeth.

The only people hurt by this conflict are the customers, who have to deal with the shitty situation of two sets of competing apps on the same device.

A lot of people mistakenly think there was not a vote.

>They could have saved a lot of time and harsh words if they let Northern Ireland vote on independence!

They did. Northern Ireland voted to stay in the UK, almost immediately upon the Irish winning their independence from the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

>STEM was never, is never, and will never be a product of "convergent thinking"

Which is what I said, if you go back and re-parse my sentence.

>And I have a problem with your description of art being the source of "divergent thinking"

I never said it was, merely that art *trains* divergent thinking.

>Take the so-called "art" that we have, for example - Music ... these days you listen to one song you listen to all songs --- all of them sound so similar as everybody tries to sound like everybody else --- the beats, the rhythm, who the fuck cares anymore who sings what since they all sound just so much alike

We're not talking about listening to the radio, but art classes in school. Art classes are about the creation of new art, or sometimes the active critique of existing art, but is never the passive garbage you claim it is.