It's so interesting to see people's reaction to the whole driver-less car thing. It's incredible to see the kind of ethical thought-experiment that must necessarily go through everyone's mind when they come to this conclusion: How many lives must be saved before I will tolerate someone being brutally slain by a malfunctioning computer?

Every day, children are run down by drivers who are not paying attention, tired, drunk, or just plain don't have time to react. Since a driver-less car is incapable of being drunk, tired, or distracted, then it's a safe bet that they'll be much better at avoiding those accidents that can be avoided. But the reality is that the latter scenario (no time to react) would still lead to the deaths of many children (and others!).

At what point does it become "worth it"? When the driver-less car causes 1/10th as many fatalities? 1/100th? 1/1,000th? How many human deaths must be prevented by letting computers drive cars before we're willing to accept 1 single death by those same computers?

It's a real-life example of the "Trolley Problem"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

Must be a build-up of inhibitory assemblies.

With an email address like "firstname.lastname@gmail.com"! I mean, you might as well have the address "user@example.com"!

What parallel universe did YOU fall into?

Google got totally 6-pooled.

In related news, high school GPA has been shown to be a predictor of college success. Therefore, high school students will all be assigned a GPA of 4.0.

I imagine the success shown by students taking algebra 2 in schools that don't require it is reflected by students taking any elective mathematics courses as part of any curriculum.

You're both right.

Degrees are super important.

So is school.

Every CS undergrad should do at least one internship. More if possible. CS Students have it super-easy. For students in many fields, an internship is a huge expense. The internships are generally unpaid and often leave iterns doing "busy work." But with CS internships, they are generally paid, sometimes they pay quite well, and because of the money involved, you're rarely fetching coffee.

By the time I graduated with my CS degree, I had more than 2 years of real-world development experience with two different organizations. I had 3 job offers to pick from --- months before graduation.

The bottom line is that school isn't just about getting good grades. Work isn't just about showing up and getting your tasks done. Both school and work (while you're a college student) should have the same goal: Building knowledge and experience.

If you think that walking out of school with a 3.8 GPA and no experience can get you a job in today's market, you're just as naïve as someone who thinks that they can get a job with 3 years of experience and no degree. Today's market is incredibly competitive. You need to do everything you can while you're in college so that you can compete with all the qualified, experienced, laid-off folks that are out there looking for jobs with you when you graduate!

Interesting. I didn't know that...

I do appreciate the existentialism, though. I mean, in the end, doesn't every side of a battle see themselves as the patriots and their opponent as the "bad guys"*?

*Insert whatever the term of choice is for the conflict in question. Whether it's Fascists, Commies, Terrorists, or Borg, it's still "the bad guys."