There goes most of Apple's advertising campaign.

Exactly! Although the outcome would have been worse in the short term, with a depression instead of a recession, the people at these banks who were responsible would have been tossed out on their collective asses as a result. Instead, we "avoided" a recession and bailed out these banks, which not only sets a bad precedent for the long term, but also keeps these people in charge.

I realize this is a simplistic way of looking at things, because there were tens of thousands of innocent people who would have lost their jobs if it weren't for these bailouts. However, starting with a cleaner slate would be better, even if it takes longer to get back to where we were, than letting those responsible and their ilk remain in charge and essentially expect another bailout the next time we're faced with this situation. The government and institutions that it has direct control over, like the Federal Reserve, should not jump in to ostensibly "save the day" when the remedy is worse than the disease.

Are you serious?!? If that one data center is breached/destroyed/offline, the entirety of the US military has been laid bare. The is exactly the kind of situation multi-factor security and redundancy are designed to prevent.

On a separate, yet related, note, most major government data centers that are acknowledged by the government are owned and operated by the Department of Energy, even if they're used by other agencies (think National Laboratories).

Certain versions of Scheme are compiled. My Intro to CS course was taught in Chez Scheme and it's interpreted variant Petite Chez Scheme by the man who actually wrote the compiler. A compiler does not make a better programming language, it just makes a faster one. It's not like these kids are going to be writing anything that's going to perform that much slower in an interpreted vs. a compiled language.

However, JavaScript is not a good beginner language because of its inherent workarounds. The biggest issue I can think of are closures, which are handled differently from any other language I've had to deal with on a regular basis (Java, C#, Python, C, PHP, etc.). I think that alone should be reason enough not to each JavaScript to beginners.

OK, but isn't one of Chrome's "features" the ability for a standard user to install Chrome on their Windows box without Administrator privileges? That doesn't even mention the fact that Chrome's default setting is to auto-update, which, paired with the fact that Chrome gets a new version as fast as (if not faster than) Firefox, means that GP's first point about stability is even more valid.

Rosetta converted a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture to a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) architecture when it converted PowerPC assembly code to x86-64 assembly code. CISC instruction sets allow for multiple low-level operations to execute for a single instruction, while RISC does not. This makes the translation easier because a CISC instruction set is often a super-set of a RISC instruction set. Therefore, the creation of Rosetta was much easier.

Going in the opposite direction, from CISC to RISC is not as easy and virtually guarantees a painfully slow experience as instructions that used to take a single cycle to complete now take multiple cycles. This is not necessarily always the case because there can be one to one mappings between instructions.

I thought the exact same thing. In the same store at checkout, depending on which credit card I use, I get asked for my zip code or I don't. American Express asks for billing zip code, while Visa doesn't. When my mother drove across country from LA, by the time she got to Chicago, she had to personally speak with the credit card company (American Express) to verify that her identity hadn't been stolen.

How many people actually know the zip codes around them? That's why it's the most reliable. My company moved three blocks in downtown Chicago to the other side of the river and went from a 6060* zip to a 6066* zip and we can literally see our old building. How likely is it an identity thief knows the victim's zip code off the top of his head?

I recently graduated from an Information Systems masters program. For the IS program, it was a requirement that we have a recent (i.e. Core 2 or better, wireless N, large HDDs, etc.). Digital note taking was encouraged, at least it felt like it was. Still, every class had some sort of laptop and attendance policy. Usually it was something along the lines of "every student will attend every lecture or face a letter grade deduction" and "laptop use is restricted to note taking only" or "laptops are not to be used in class".

Did people completely ignore the laptop rules? Absolutely. However, the program also mandated that every student be accessible to the program's administrative staff from 9-5 Monday through Friday and either Saturday or Sunday (mostly for interview scheduling). Since it is easier to track down someone by cell phone or instant messenger, everyone needed their laptops and cell phones on at all times.

Yet these same administrative staff were also professors. Most of whom prohibited laptop use in class! Combine all of this with the fact that lectures were posted online after class, and the only real incentive to show up is for participation. Sometimes this was important because the lecture material didn't adequately prepare for exams. Other times, not so much.

To the article's point about "it's my education and I can do with it what I want", there's plenty of truth in that. After all, you don't have to be in college. Still, the retort that it devalues the education of everyone else is also slightly off the mark. It should be obvious to an interviewer or anyone else you come in contact with whether you know what you're talking about or not, regardless of where you went to school. That comes from actually learning the material and not from sitting in a lecture that you're forced to attend. This is why a lot of times I felt that professors who simply taught straight from the book or put all the information in the slides were simply wasting my time by forcing me to attend. If you're prepared for class and the professor doesn't add any real value, then laptop laziness will continue to be a problem. I think we're mistaking the symptom for the disease: namely being prepared for class and having a value-added lecturer.

I'm not trying to troll, but you're comparing teaching an Intro to Computing course, which is presumably for underclassmen, to teaching a Strategic Management capstone course?!? The lower level courses in colleges are where the poorest/newest professors tend to be. It should be quite obvious that a required course for non-majors would result in a less interested student body because they could care less about the subject matter. The upperclassmen, however, should be engaged because they (presumably) have a large selection of courses to choose from and found one they're in interesting/useful/whatever. Teaching lower level courses is usually intended to weed out weak teachers who can't maintain the expected GPA. It's entirely possible that you would still be teaching if you had been moved up to classes only for CS majors. Sadly, many good teachers are stuck in this purgatory because of tenure and other asinine policies that allow outmoded professors to continue teaching a Software Engineering course with overhead slides and printed reports.