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Comment Re:As a voter who normally leans Democrat... (Score 1) 1128

What if the democrats do this and Palin actually wins the general election? Obama kind of sucks, I wish someone good would challenge him. He has proven himself to be a liar and a spineless coward and to continue many of Bush's existing policies. The only difference between him and Bush seems to be that Bush was an idiot so he had an excuse for his behavior, Obama is not so basically he is just evil!!!

Also he has proven that he ignores what the people want as well so of course they are pissed off. He gave wall street a huge bailout, he rammed his healthcare plan through as well, instead of focusing on jobs for normal americans. I mean come on, how much are people going to take?

Still Palin would be a disaster. And if the democrats vote her as his challenger and he continues pissing enough people off so she wins the election, it will be a disaster. I think Palin is the one politician who is worst than George Bush. I'd vote Ron Paul for president, but some of his policies I don't agree with, like eliminating the FDA.... It may do a shitty job, but it is better than nothing..... But Ron Paul does seem to make sense and have integrity in voting for what he believes. He can be trusted (at least now) to vote in line with his ideals and to not compromise them at all, even if it means he is the only Republican to vote for/against some piece of legislation....

Comment Re:But Python is shit due to: (Score 1) 206

I'm sorry I meant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython. Basically the the python interpreter/compiler is implemented in C. So basically while working on the python implementation, there are curly braces due to the C. I don't mean some amalgamation. I mean perhaps he is referring to Guido's rules for contributing to CPython in which case the contributions would be in C.....

Comment LTE seems like a rip off (Score 3, Insightful) 53

first off, this piss poor service that was just advertised. Two minutes to reconnect?? Sounds like it isn't ready for prime time...

Next, look at the per use charges. I'd rather have a slower connection with much hire quotas (or no quota) than a super fast connection with a tiny quota. Good luck to anyone who wants to watch videos.

As it is cell service is a huge rip off, and LTE is even more of a rip off than 3G. But what do you expect from providers who charge a fortune for delivering simple text messages and the rate hasn't gone down as their networks are upgraded...In fact ATT's rate went up (they used to be free to receive, but after the Cingular merger the double charging started....).

Comment What can you do? (Score 1) 473

You can't really change anything. Someday you will die. The whole bible had some quote about the living being conscious that they will die and that is true. But we all gotta die sometime. And in the grand scheme of things a couple years doesn't make a difference. Whether it is a car accident tomorrow, lightning strike or something else, or old age in 50 or 60 years.....And anyway it could also be a motorcycle accident :P I had one of those already, probably it is most likely that the bike will be the death of me :-P Oh well. Look at what happens when you go crazy fearing death like those cowards who give up all their rights due to the remote possibility of terrorism. I'm not saying that the government doesn't need to shape up its intelligence gathering abilities. Even now the agencies are so dysfunctional. But wiretapping the whole internet, giving secret letters that cannot be challenged, locking people in gitmo, giving invasive pat downs or dangerous ionizing radiation, it all seems a bit excessive. Plus a lot of the measures don't really make anyone safer, and are just theatre. Really the truth is that people being more aware is good enough too.

Anyway I wouldn't mind dying at 50 or 60 before dementia and all sorts of muscle/bone ailments and pain starts setting in....

Comment Aww what's the matter stupid government (Score 1) 685

You want to wiretap the whole nation but when someone just looks at the tip of the iceberg as to what you got you go all crazy....I have no doubt that the CIA is looking to assassinate some people over this. Well I say if the government wants to wiretap the whole nation they deserve what they are getting and more. I wish all the hackers/leakers/etc. well and hope they pump the governments of the world dry of information....

Comment I don't know (Score 1) 833

I"m all for whistle blowing in Scandals and in morally ambiguous situations (ie memos saying that some guy was tortured in a foreign country or memos detailing abuses in Iraq Prisons). But lately it seems like Wikileaks is just releasing documents to get some publicity. It is one thing to release leaks, but it is another just to release tons and tons of documents that are not necessarily related to wrong doing. The diplomatic cables are nothing special to me. I would assume every country has similar dialogs so it is no big deal. There's nothing really wrong about any of it for the most part. Maybe there are a couple of tidbits that would have been good to release about specific things. But the overall release just seems to give the us a huge disadvantage in diplomatic relations (since none of the other country documents were released as well). And for no good reason. Even the Iraq documents were too much. Specific Iraq documents showing war time torture offenses, theft of money, etc. would have been fine. But just releasing everything doesn't seem to have a good reason. When I think of whistle blowing I think of exposing illegal/immoral behavior, not just releasing everything for the sake of releasing it. If it was this manning guy I hope they throw the book at him. If he was whistle blowing then I think he still should have lost his job/etc. but maybe not so hard. Releasing every document just seems as a violation of his duty to keep classified information secret for no good reason. He should go to jail for a very long time.

In any case I don't think whistle blowers should be punished if they are really whistle blowing, but then again they probably should get some sort of light punishment. But for someone who is just releasing documents for the hell of it and nothing is classified throw the book at them. I sign a document basically saying I will keep my employer's shit confidential. If he/she is breaking the law, then I can release the stuff to the authorities and in theory I have done the right thing. In reality the authorities are often in bed with the company so I may not. But for normal stuff I wouldn't dream of releasing anything, otherwise it just violates the document I signed. Basically it is a trust thing, if you arbitrarily violate trust then you cannot be trusted with anything. You wouldn't go off airing the dirty laundry of your family usually, unless someone broke the law and even then you may still not go airing it.....

Comment Re:No STEM (Score 1) 542

In math classes, with the exception of numerical analysis, no programming assignments. Basically just homework problems and then exams.

In computer science classes most had at least one programming assignment (a few like data structures and intro programming had many assignments). But there were some that were entirely theory based (or just had a lazy instructor...e.g. I had an operating systems class with no homework assignments.....).

Comment Re:The source of the problem (Score 2, Interesting) 542

Plus there's nothing like the professor asking sitting in the back of the room asking tons and tons of questions about every aspect of the paper deliberately exposing what you know and what you don't know.... But it only works with a good professor. Some can't even be bothered to read the textbook at all even though the class is not the area they are researching.... My biggest pet peeve is when I get an exam and a question is "wrong" but then on further review the answer sheet is wrong. Then the professor has to give everyone credit for that question, even though my version is right and a lot of the other ones are wrong..... That really pisses me off!! Anyway assuming the professor at least read the book, and his lectures are not full of inaccuracies/wild speculation because he is too lazy to look it up, then he has a good idea of what you should know and what you shouldn't. so while questioning you about your paper, he can question using concepts in the book and see if you can apply them. Also some stuff in papers is open to speculation, even that if you have completely no clue then your speculation will be random guesses... Whereas many times based on the way the paper went, you can do an "educated" speculation....

Comment Re:The source of the problem (Score 2, Insightful) 542

Well you can. You just have to have them explain the project/paper and ask questions. I think for computer science the best thing you could do is have a programming project and then an "interview" with the student. If they have no clue at all what they are talking about, then obviously they cheated. If they had someone else do it for them and then they studied the code and looked up everything until they understood it, then I would have no problem giving them an A because they learned the material which is the point of having exams...to make sure they learn the material... In that case it's not much different from slapping together the various algorithms from the text book along with examples from the language documentation for system calls into a coherent program.

Basically everything is copying. It took years to get binary search correct on its own. Most students are just parroting out algorithms from memory that they got from a book which is more or less copying anyway. Programming is really about slapping together a bunch of algorithms/library calls into a coherent program...

Also even an open book take home test is not so easy to cheat on. If you say define term x, define term y, then the answers are in the book/google/bing/etc.. If instead you come up with some problem that uses the stuff but is not so obvious, then only people who really studied will get it. Often the cheaters all get it wrong, and it becomes obvious they cheated because they all get the same exact wrong answer....

Comment Re:No STEM (Score 1) 542

It's been my experience that in many mathematics/computer science classes there are no papers, or very few. I think in computer science only one or two senior level classes had papers in my school. And in graduate school only one 700 level class had a "paper" which was basically a summary of a Research Paper. In social sciences the papers are often more work, requiring the citing of multiple sources. Most of my math classes (at least Calc, Linear Algebra, Discrete, Partial Differential Equations, etc..) were all exams/homework with the homework being optional (except in two math classes where there were a few graded problem sets). However if you don't do the homework, very rarely do you pass the exam....

Comment Re:Slashdotters get Java wrong, again (Score 1) 583

You can write object oriented code with C. Not a real class like C++, but you can write some libraries/pointers and use it so ObjectClass_New(), ObjectClass_Method(ClassPtr). It's just a lot of people do not. Go has something called Embedding which is a way to pass functionality around.

Anyway the right way to program is to write to interfaces and pass those around. The wrong way to program is to make a giant super inheritance hierarchy that gets out of control. I think Go's embedding is the right idea. You can pass functionality around. But the emphasis is on programming to the interface. It makes it just a little bit harder to shoot yourself in the foot with a super complicated inheritance hierarchy.....

Comment What about keeping the books? (Score 2, Interesting) 419

From what I have seen, many of these schemes result in keeping the books for the semester and then losing access at the end. Or you access the book using their proprietary software and then pay a lot more (even more than a print book sometimes) to get permanent access using their proprietary software. And once they abandon that platform you are screwed. I still have all my undergrad textbooks from 10 years ago in computer science/mathematics (except for duplicate ones, ie I tossed the 7th edition of calculus when I got the 8th edition....). And I kept a few of the more interesting general education courses (ie Psychology 101's book). Now, if I was on some proprietary system, I would not have access to those texts anymore. And in some cases, ie one of my grad classes used Introduction to Algorithms by Corman, I would have had to buy the book again while now I didn't. Now Corman has a new edition....but really it is not that different except for a few changes regarding parallel algorithms....

Basically this is a way to kill the used book market. Make sure you have to rent your book every semester. And make sure if years later you go back to school, you will need to buy the book again aka Zune style.

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