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Comment Re:Oh good lord. (Score 1) 225

Allow me to paraphrase your comment.

Allow me to paraphrase your comment: I'm a jackass who thinks nothing substantial can be said when opinion counts, even when the accomplishments are well-documented and acknowledged by the larger scientific community. I also entertain spurious allegations about Eisenstein having plagiarized his wife, which has no credible evidence.

Comment Re:Oh good lord. (Score 1) 225

Indeed, QED is the most successful theory that man has ever formulated, and Feynman was IMHO far greater than Einstein or Hawking.

Please. Annus Mirabilis papers

That's four groundbreaking papers in one year (1905), any one of which would have made Einstein of historical significance. To follow that up with the only major advance on gravity since Newton 10 years later puts him well past Feynman.

When the first shuttle blew up, NASA picked up the phone and called Feynman, someone that never did anything for NASA before and was not involved in any way with the shuttles, rockets, or even anything astronomy. Feynman figured out what happened quite quickly, went before congress and both explained and demonstrated the problem.

He did good work on the panel, but it was hardly a big mystery as to why the launch failed. There was actually a conference call the night before the launch between NASA and the manufacturers of the O-ring. The latter wanted to scrub the launch because of the cold, but pressure from NASA and worries about an upcoming contract with NASA resulted in a go-ahead.

Feynman was as much a showman as he was a scientist, which explains a lot of his fame. Who were the scientists who shared his Noble Prize for QED? Right.

Don't get me wrong, I like Feynman a lot. But saying he was "far greater than Einstein" is a joke.

Comment Re:Lack of Real, Physical Products (Score 2) 79

The indicator that true creative thinking is dead inside an organization is when it must innovate by acquisition.

This is a strange statement to make, seeing as two of the examples you point to, self-driving cars and Google Glass, are expensive innovations that aren't ready for prime time. First you blame them for creative thinking that fails, then you accuse them of not doing any.

Instead of YOUR employees creating products that grow organically, you pay 100 times as much to buy established or growing products. YouTube, Twitch.tv, Nest, and whoever is next.

What about projects like Google Street View? Sure it debuted in 2007, but that was a year after they acquired YouTube. Google Chrome came out in 2008, and reinvigorated the browser market.

Google has tried a crazy amount of stuff and also made a crazy amount of acquisitions. Some of it sticks, most of it doesn't. Surprise.

Comment Re:Well at least they saved the children! (Score 1, Interesting) 790

If someone is a child molester, I would think it highly likely that they suffer from a mental illness, and need our help.

How do you propose to "help" them? I believe there is no effective way to "help" such people beyond castration.

And the whole "mental illness" angle seeks to remove personal responsibility from the equation. Why not cave in to your worst impulses? You just suffer from a mental illness, and it's up to society to "help" you.

Comment Re:Please NO (Score 3, Interesting) 111

Please everyone just leave T-Mobile alone. They are doing great the last few years.

I agree, but T-Mobile is doing great because they don't *want* to be left alone. They are being so aggressive with their pricing because they want to be targetted for a buy-out. Their parent company, Deutsche Telekom AG, has made it clear that they want out of that business.

Comment Re:Adblock = INFERIOR to hosts files... apk (Score 1) 436

A.) Hosts do more than:

1.) AdBlock ("souled-out" 2 Google/Crippled by default)
2.) Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse"
3.) Request Policy -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

I read through the thread on RequestPolicy, and you were pretty thick when it came to recognizing some key points:

1) RequestPolicy blocks all external sites by default, which means you don't need a "bad" list that needs to be constantly maintained, so it's actually the simpler and more effective solution.

2) The reason to block YouTube from 3rd party sites is to avoid tracking by Google (they own YouTube). With RequestPolicy, I can still watch YouTube videos and avoid the tracking. But that's just one example. RequestPolicy blocks all such requests, so I don't have to worry about YouTube, Amazon, or any other site that probably isn't in the "bad" list from getting tracking info from 3rd party sites by doing something as simple as embedding a link.

3) You mention speed, but give no hard numbers. If, for example, RequestPolicy does its job in less than 1ms, then it doesn't matter if a hosts file is twice as fast or even ten times as fast, because either way the difference is imperceptible. I don't have any speed problems using RequstPolicy, at all.

I'll throw in another point: RequestPolicy is open source, meaning I don't have to trust a binary from "apk" being run as an admin to manage my hosts file. RequestPolicy is also cross-platform.

You can have the last word, as engaging in discussion with you is pointlessly annoying. I'm just leaving this response so that people who are rational can make an informed judgment.

Media

Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling 398

MojoKid (1002251) writes The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can't seem to handle the streaming video service's traffic, boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection. What he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit. Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it's adding extra hops. Speeds didn't get slower, they got much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly jumped to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than when connecting directly with Verizon. Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon's Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn't know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed.

Comment Re: Your Results Will Vary (Score 1) 241

I am honestly very confused about what your point is. In response to another poster,

That poster would be me. Maybe if you read my original post the context would be clear.

Coryoth rebutted that the college was supposed to be about education, not vocational training. You incorrectly assumed that s/he was arguing that college was about creating well-rounded people.

That's the modern reason, where "education" is often synonymous with "well-rounded". I assumed his point was the modern defense, because the vast majority don't go to college anymore just for an "education" with the expectation to remain in Academia. They go there with an expectation of earning a higher-paying job. It's a checkbox on the resume.

The only reason I replied was to point out that the well-rounded person argument isn't one that anyone with a clue seriously makes.

Why? You yourself just said, "requiring students to take classes outside of their major was perhaps a historical anachronism". It's kept around on the "well-rounded" argument, which is essentially what is expressed by many of the people in the article you quoted.

Comment Re: Your Results Will Vary (Score 1) 241

I often see it as a justification for requiring non-major classes, but I have never seen anyone claim that this is the primary goal.

I never said it was the primary goal. What I've been arguing is what I emphasized above. People today go to college expecting to get a higher-paying job, and that's been why I've been questioning the value of being forced to take courses that will most likely not be used in that endeavor. That was the start and context of the argument when you jumped in.

Comment Re: Your Results Will Vary (Score 1) 241

When was the goal of higher education ever to produce well-rounded people?

When being an academic meant you specialized in one field, both in research and teaching. When people stopped going to college to become academics. The only reason it makes sense now to require diverse study is for the well-rounded argument, and it's the argument given whenever I've raised this subject (except with you).

Comment Re: Your Results Will Vary (Score 1) 241

Let's walk this back. You said:

It isn't even about creating well-rounded people, and never really was [..] the curriculum and organization of institutions of higher education---particularly research universities---is still geared toward that Enlightenment ideal of academia.

The bold is what I responded to, in particular the word never. Goals have changed in 400 years.

Comment Re: Your Results Will Vary (Score 1) 241

Because you are a 20 years old know-nothing you arrogant bratand maybe there is more than one thing in the entire wolrd that could be of interest for you ?

Maybe if you weren't an arrogant asshole posting as anonymous coward you wouldn't make such statements. I've been to college and have long-since graduated. Most people go to college because it's a checkbox for higher-paying jobs and a chance to party on their parent's dime and government loans.

Comment Re: Your Results Will Vary (Score 1) 241

The goal of college is NOT to train you like a puppy to do real work.

That's nice and all, but the vast majority of people go to college to get a well-paying job afterwards. That's what the point of the "major" is for.

You want to be trained ? go to a craft school or whatever you call them in your country.

College is a checkbox to get into higher paying jobs, so your suggestion of going to a "craft" school doesn't help.

PLUS YOU GET TO CHOOSE YOUR SUBJECTS so stop bitching!

Err, no, you don't when your major is something like computer science and they force you into heavy calculus courses. That's the topic under discussion. Try to pay attention.

2 years into the job I have greater mastery of pretty much any aspect of the project we are working on, and my skill-set is improving exponentially, while they almost never learn anything beyond what they know because they lack the methods to learn.

Yeah, that's a lot of bullshit. It's impossible to become a programmer without learning. What your one-sided anecdote says is that many workers do just enough to get by, not that they couldn't improve their skills if they applied themselves.

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