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.

Explicit language might modify what would otherwise be there only by an implicit doctrine.

In general, a licensor can modify their own terms. So, if you are using the GPL on software to which you hold the copyright, and you add some sort of exception, it applies. You can't do it to other people's software.

I've been reading through that book, and I understand most of his . But on pages 112-113, he appears to despise the bitwise operators, because "In Javascript, [bitwise operators] are very far from the hardware and very slow. JavaScript is rarely used for doing bit manipulation. As a result, in JavaScript programs, it is more likely that & is a mistyped && operator. The presence of the bitwise operators reduces some of the language's redundancy, making it easier for bugs to hide." I read this as "emulators written in JavaScript ought not to exist". He also has something against continue, which I've used often to check preconditions for each element in an array.

So if you're collapsing a comment thread in a 200+ comment page, would you prefer to have to spend some of your data allowance on resending all 190 comments that aren't being collapsed? And if all applications that cannot be efficiently implemented as static HTML with link and form navigation ought to be native, how do you plan to use applications developed by someone who uses an operating system other than the one you use?

'really, everyone in this low-income school has a personal trainer and stylist? And these people manage to have perfect hair as soon as they wake up or after running through the mud?'

US shows (and Canadian ones aimed at the US market too) take this to an extreme in other ways too. Notice that shows about young, broke 20-somethings always have them living in luxurious houses and apartments, usually in swanky city centers where rent is astronomical?

The problem is that the Hollywood remakes aren't very good: they fail to include what made the original so great in the first place. We can see this perfectly with JJ Abram's Star Trek movies: lots of great effects, but a crappy story and over-the-top action without any of the philosophy or character development that made the original Star Trek special.

I could have put up with the bad acting if there had been a good script and a story that made sense. Rewatching some of the original Star Trek is like that: the acting is wooden and the sets are obviously cheap, but there's some fantastic dialog and story telling in there. Hint for writers: if your script relies on everyone in the universe being stupid at the same time, it may be realistic but it's not going to be enjoyable (unless it's a comedy about stupidity).

Props to the io9 link, but don't forget to read Oath of Fealty, by Niven and Pournelle, as well. It already describes, in detail, an arkology in conflict with its surrounding community -- and its vulnerability to terrorist action. The punch line of the book is "Think of it as evolution in action", and there is going to have to be a whole lot of "evolution" happening real soon now, because our technology is on a track that will make it simple for any human to kill any other specific human on the planet, anonymously, well within the next decade. We could end up having to make things like 3d printers completely illegal for private parties to own, once it becomes clear that they can be used to enable anonymous, untraceable murder and untraceable terrorist acts (mass murder) at will.

At some point, our only defense against that kind of thing is going to be the evolution of human sanity or the embracing of the police state at a level we cannot even imagine properly at this time. In Oath of Fealty, the arkology was a kind of police state, but (naturally) a benign one. In context, believable, but in general? Not in a zillion years.

We always live in interesting times, do we not? I vaguely recall a SF story I read a long, long time ago in which the world developed the means for any human with the will to completely destroy the world. If just one person was so unhappy as to want to take their own life, they had the free choice to take the entire human species along with them. If such a choice were available today, how long would the world survive? News events of the last week clearly answer that question, don't they! News events every week answer that question. Our "freedom" to live in a stable, safe society governed by equitable laws is itself at perpetual risk, and that risk is going to increase as consequence-free murder great and small is increasingly enabled by technology. Both murder in the name of one or another political-religious mythology and murder just to get the old man's money, or murder because one happens to be a sociopath.

Interesting times.

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That's why you subject the ancient remedies to modern testing.

And even in cases where they're harmful, at the time it was probably better to suffer with the side-effects than have the original disease. It's no different today; every medication can have negative side effects; we're just better at designing and manufacturing drugs to minimize or eliminate these side effects than before.

You forgot about the ease of delivering that 5 pound block of C4 plus detonator to pretty much anybody that ordered it. It isn't even "just" the Amazon drones. Anybody can capture an Amazon drone (or build their own copy and paint it accordingly) and use it to make a "special delivery" to, well, pretty much anyone. "Special Delivery, Mr. President! It's those "books" you ordered from Amazon!"

You can pack a whole lot of evil into 2 kg of C4 (or whatever the latest/greatest compact explosive is) plus detonator. You can saturate any reasonable defensive system by having 100+ drones attempt a delivery at the same time. You can carpet bomb crowded marketplaces - the drone itself will conveniently supply the shrapnel, or you can fly the drones under cars or into glass-front buildings before detonating. And best of all, you can do it in complete anonymity and safety! The drones will be impossible to track back to a point of origin, flying literally under the radar and in numbers too great to track anyway. You can rent a barn or warehouse, ship in as many amazon-a-likes as you can, load them with Sarin, with Anthrax, with weaponized Ebola or with powdered radioactive waste, or -- what the heck -- with all of these at once, to saturate and overwhelm even emergency response systems with multiple distinct threat vectors, and after launching them with a program that directs them to converge on a given target from all directions after initially moving on "delivery" trajectories to a spread of locations, you can just drive away and be "coming downstairs" from your supposedly occupied room in a Days Inn three states away, having your complementary breakfast, before anybody even figures out what might have happened. Me? I was nowhere near Washington at the time, officer. I was upstairs in my motel room in North Carolina, as the records clearly show!

Mind you, all of this is coming anyway. We're a few years away from self-driving cars, which will take the suicide out of suicide bombing by vehicle. It is possible to build anything from a lightweight delivery drone to an actual cruise missile with a 50 or 100 kg payload and built in GPS already, it's just that they are still rare enough that they would stand out and attract notice, at least during the day (at night, would ANYBODY even notice if you painted it flat black and didn't hang any lights on it? I doubt it). I have little doubt that similar devices aren't already in play as vectors for smuggling through our comparatively porous borders, with more coming. Like most techno-genies, this one cannot easily be put back in its bottle once its time arrives, it can only be delayed a bit, perhaps, maybe. Or we can wait until a small fleet of them are used to kill ten thousand or more people all at once the next time the mall in Washington is filled with people for a protest march or an inauguration, or at the superbowl next year. Then we can choose between putting automated chain guns in turrets all around the big sports arenas and downtown DC (and what can go wrong with that, he asks) or making the damn things illegal to own, purchase, manufacture, possess, deploy or talk about loudly in public, which may not stop their use for evil but might slow it down, at least a bit.

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