This statement gets thrown around a lot when discussing college, but I just don't see how it holds up. It is very rare for an undergraduate to do any significant research, so most of the learning comes from assignments and probably a little group work.

I'd argue that a big part of it is being given assignments that stretch you more than you've been stretched. You don't have to do original research to be geniuinely challenged and grow from the experience. You just have to be given an assignment that requires you to dig for answers and fail. You have to exhaust most of your options when trying to figure something out. It's something we should probably be doing much more to kids well before they get to college, but college seems to be where we start doing it, so that's where the value is.

Since this is slashdot, there will be a million posts by clever college students who are doing really well in their classes and see them all as a waste of time. "Nothing at a university can challenge me! I'm the hottest shit that ever was shat!" All I can say is that they either didn't choose programs that were challenging enough for their level of talent or they're unusually talented people--the most brilliant of the most brilliant--and the world was not really designed for them. Or they're badly overestimating their level of talent, but that almost never happens.

To anyone who has ever had anything to do with industrial strength desktop support, that post is a giant neon sign that your haven't got a clue.

The AC (not me) is giving solid advice on the subject at hand - for free - when know-it-all's such as yourself empty their bile on them, it discourages that educational charity.

Disclaimer: Degree qualified computer scientist working as C/C++ software engineer for the last 25yrs.

What I want to know is why anybody would expect online education to replace traditional education any more than the printing press and wide availability of books made traditional education obsolete. Widely available course materials are great and we're a richer world now that we have them, but the fact that universities survived the democratization of books should tell us that real schools still add some value above and beyond the raw information.

Ignoramus, most Hollywood films are not made in Hollywood studios, they're not even made in the US.

Downloading is legal in most places, if you think about for a bit the internet simply wouldn't work if it was illegal. The catch is that most torrent clients upload by default, not a problem here in Oz because nobody has ever been sued for "illegal downloading". The MAFIAA have said they will start the US system threatening letters here but they haven't because they know it would be seen by Aussie courts as extortion, which is a 'real' crime. The current communications minister has basically said that if they want legislative help with piracy then they will need to get rid of regional locking and stop price gouging Aussies on content.

The thing about uploading in Oz is that the copyright holder can only sue for REAL damages, the imagined "lost sales" does not come into the equation. If the real damages do not exceed $100 there's nothing the Aussie MAFIAA can do but cry.

You're going to have to come with an explanation for why this historical percentage holds true in the US but not in any other country. My theory is that it's what we generally prefer and when we adjust our tax policies, we do so within that narrow range. There's no magic economic force that reduces the government's take below 20% no matter what we do. We just choose not to raise taxes that high (and when I say, "We choose not to," I really mean, "We elect officials with enough variety in their preferences that they don't all agree to raise taxes that high"). A couple of other points:

1) The difference between 16.9% and 19.2% of GDP is massive. At our current level of GDP, it's well over $300B. The idea that changing tax rates so that the receipts bounce around in that range has no real effect is just silly.
2) I'm happy to give the Republican congress the credit for the things they were involved in, but let's not rewrite history. The deficit trajectory reversed direction before 1995. The 1993 budget was passed with no Republican support and over screams that it would destroy the economy. To my knowledge, there was nothing particularly special about the 1995 budget in terms of deficit reduction.

Once you've rammed through those gates, it's not unreasonable to weigh the possibility that you're doing something like this. If you don't want your intentions to be misunderstood, not ramming the gates is a good place to start.

If you're guarding an NSA facility, your job is to risk your life for the people and secrets inside that facility, not people trying to force their way in. If you try to strong arm your way into an NSA facility, you're probably up to no good. At best you're an unstable person trying to make a political statement and you don't mind putting others in danger to do so. At worst, you're carrying an assault team or a car bomb and things will get infinitely worse if your vehicle is allowed to hit one of those buildings.

The "Let's just see how this plays out" response is the response you get before you try to breach the outer perimter. That's your not-getting-shot-at freebee. Once you've used up that freebee, you don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. It's kind of like breaking into somebody's house at night while their family is sleeping. You get the benefit of the doubt if you stay outside the front door. Once you climb in the window, you've burned through all of your goodwill and nobody really owes you any deference.

All IPCC group reports are finalised via political negotiation except for one group. WG1 is the scientific group, all the others refer back to the WG1 report for factual information, the other groups argue about how to present those facts in their own working group(WG). In 25yrs of incredibly intense scrutiny, nobody has ever found a factual error in the final versions of a WG1 report. That really is a very robust outcome and a credit to the scientists involved.

Only nations that donate to the IPCC budget get a vote on the other reports, last I checked there were ~135 nations who together represent pretty much every political view in the rainbow, it takes a long time for them to agree. The IPCC budget is $5-6M/yr, nobody who actually works on the reports is paid a dime by the IPCC, all of the scientists involved DONATE their time. Their financial accounts are on their web site. Try finding the accounts for an anti-science no-think-tank such Senator Inhofe's barking dog - the heartland institute.

Overly broad non-competes are almost universally unenforceable. The lawyers writing this non-sense know this.

So why, in a world with a professional class of licensed legal experts who write contracts, are lawyers allowed to put obviously illegal and unenforceable stuff into contracts and pay no personal or professional penalty for it? A pilot who regularly disobeyed FAA regulations or a doctor who consistently gave bad medical advice would be penalized, but attornies can write contracts that don't mean anything and the only thing that happens is a judge draws a line through their nonsense and gives them credit for whatever they got right. WTF? With a system like that, *I* could write contracts and take fees from clients.

You really think Amazon wants to take the PR hit by suing a contractor who worked in their warehouse for 10 dollars an hour?

Yeah, I've heard that stuff a lot from employers trying to get ridiculous bullshit into contracts with me. "It says we can burn your home to the ground and sow your fields with salt for no reason, but we'd never actually do it. What? Remove the clause? Well... no."

What's at risk is often forgotten, every web site wants you to register just to post a fucking one line comment on a story. I use a junk email and a fixed password for all of them. Even if someone cracks it, all I have lost is a registration I didn't want in the first place.

If you really believe there's no difference between left and right in Oz, you're simply not paying attention.

I've found that exercise changes what I want to eat far more than the amount I want to eat. The amount probably follows from what I'm eating. If my body is screaming out for celery and I'm eating celery, it's unlikely that I'll eat the equivalent of "one bag of Doritos" in celery. It's celery. I eat it until I've had enough celery and I'll stop. If my body isn't screaming out for celery and I pick up a bag of Doritos, I may eat the whole bag without even noticing it.

I'm guessing that if I were to eat the same food whether I was exercising or not, I would probably not be inclined to eat less. It's just that when I'm working out, my brain starts to see food as fuel, so I acquire the fuel and move on instead of engaging in whatever habitual behaviors normally drove my eating patterns.

And at your size, any exercise at all ramps that number up pretty quickly. My wife was always jealous that when I started exercising at or near her exercise schedule, I burned a ton more calories than she did. The analogy I used was, "You're a Toyota Prius cruising along on electric half the time. I'm one of those Hummers with the tattered American flag rumbling down the freeway." I'm not as big as you are, but I was surprised at how quickly I dropped weight just by doing yoga, which isn't exactly high on the list of calorie burning exercises. There's a world of difference between what it takes to do some of those movements when you weigh 115 pounds vs 205.