As someone who has played the beta, I would recommend not buying Hardline unless it experiences serious revisions. It is, in fact, bad. The new game modes are half-baked king of the hill and capture the flag variations which do little to encourage rewarding team play. The basic mechanics and graphics are exactly the same as BF4, complete with the same bugs and dodgy netcode. Even if they add more maps, there's no more content than was added by any of the BF3 DLCs.

I can see an eventual formal split between "CS" degrees and "Software Engineering" degrees. It seems that CS is to Software Engineering as Physics is to Mechanical Engineering.

It depends on the high school instructor. My high school calculus teacher covered far more material than what was on the exam- actually more material than what was taught in Calculus 1 at my college. Almost everyone who passed that high school class scored an easy 5 on the AP exam.

I graduated from college in 3 years due to AP exams (took 10 and received credit on 8, placement only for one). Collectively, they saved me about $30,000 in tuition, room, and board. This was from a small liberal arts school.

It strikes me as rather odd that supposedly sober-minded scientists abandon the scientific method and engage in magical thinking when it comes to the idea of aliens. Here's why I say that: for meaningful communication to occur with Aliens, our current understanding of physics needs to be essentially wrong. It's possible that we are wrong, but there is not as of yet any evidence to support that hypothesis. It's fine to hypothesize that our current understanding is wrong, but until you have any evidence, making statements like "contact is likely in 50 to 100 years" has gone from science into magical thinking.

Here's why I say our current understanding would need to be wrong: Even assuming extremely generous variables to the Drake equation (say one out of 100 planets in the habitable zone produces intelligent life), and based on our current exoplanet discoveries, it still seems highly probable that any intelligent life form lives further away than is possible to communicate with using methods that are limited to light speed. There is as of yet, no evidence that faster than light communication is possible. None. Unless relativity is essentially wrong, faster than light communication implies time travel.

Realistically, the maximum distance for meaningful light speed communication is about 50-60 light years (short enough that one scientist could send and receive one communication within a human life time). Even expanding that distance to several thousand light years to account for massive coordination across generations (the lifespan of previous successful human civilizations such as the Roman empire), you are still not talking about a lot of prospects for alien pen pals. Simply intercepting a communication stream does us little good if we can't decode it. I would posit that intercepting a communications stream from an alien civilization a billion light years away would have little impact on us beyond a curiosity. We probably couldn't decode it, and the civilization that sent it would likely be millions of years dead.

That doesn't even begin to address the problems of actually traveling to the alien planet (or them traveling to ours). Again, our current understanding of physics basically has to be proven wrong in order for this to be possible. Maybe traveling 4 light years is a technology problem. Traveling 50 light years on a human timescale is beyond our understanding of physics, and, based on current evidence and understanding of physics, actually impossible. Sure, there are fanciful ideas of "generation" star ships and such, but again, that goes way beyond the "50 to 100" years claim thrown out by the article.

Again, we could be wrong, and there could be a way, but there is no scientific evidence yet. Talk about meeting with aliens isn't science. It's fantasy.