Are you serious? Is it that hard to use a search engine?

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries...

Why they're worthless now: everyone has them, and they're easy or at least predictable enough that they have little predictive value.

Nope. There is an assumption in your statement -- that all college degrees are created equal.

There is a reason certain schools and certain programs are given preferential treatment. You see, in statistics, there are two types of errors -- Type I and Type II.

Imagine a candidate applies to a top school -- pretty much all highly ranked schools and programs would err on the side of Type II. That is, they would rather reject a good candidate than admit a potentially bad candidate. That is not to say it does not happen, just that that is what they try to do.

The reason MIT or Harvard are prestigious is because of this. As an employer, you can use these schools as a filter. It is not that you learn something extraordinary at MIT's engineering department that you wouldn't at, say, Rutgers. But the point is, MIT has a high enough standard for both admission and graduation that you know someone who graduated from MIT is a rock star. The same goes for business schools, law schools, medical schools and so on.

The only exceptions are doctoral programs -- why? Because PhDs have other factors at play, including your area of research and your thesis advisor.

If a department is not serving its stated function, and cannot propose a rational plan for doing so, then it should be eliminated because it's a waste of our money, and therefore our time and effort.

Huh? What does this even mean? You sound as if you are regurgitating the small government propaganda without any sound argument.

The stated function is funding research, and that's getting done. The rational plan is funding scientists who are the most eligible to win the research grants. What is so hard about that?

The problem is the expectation of something "fruitful" to come out of research. As any half-decent scientist will tell you, a lot of good science comes from learning from our failures, and examining questions that may seem pointless today.

NSF grants have funded several amazing scientists and their research -- how do you even *begin* to "measure" the purpose of scientific research? The whole idea behind scientific research is asking questions that may seem trivial or even meaningless. The only viable measure is publications, and even that is meaningless -- would you rather have one outstanding paper every decade or a bunch of pointless papers to check a box?

The myopic outlook that decries large government also decries spending on science and research, never mind the fact that open science is what helps civilization as a whole. Closed research funded by the beck and call of corporations defeats the scientific process -- science is about openness, understanding, and investigating hard questions that may not have tangible benefits for the next few hundred years or more.

And sometimes, that means our time and effort are spent doing absolutely silly things that may have impacts that we do not yet understand. If pursuit of knowledge for its own sake isn't a good enough reason, then I weep for the future of this country.

Because they thought they were being clever, but they weren't? They should really be informed that people saw what they did there. It's for their own good. That way they'll understand the sort of responses they're getting. Or did you think nobody should ever be told what they're doing wrong so that they can be confused for the rest of their lives?

If a department is not serving its stated function, and cannot propose a rational plan for doing so, then it should be eliminated because it's a waste of our money, and therefore our time and effort.

If we don't embrace space travel, and we do embrace life extension, that does seem like a real concern. We're not maintaining our environment well with the population we've got now.

In China, they'll murder you just for tax evasion. Falsifying part numbers and getting caught making China look bad almost certainly qualifies even if the part wasn't involved in an international incident. If you're going to go off to break rocks or get broken up for your internal organs anyway, who cares?

For most people you just insert cable A into socket B and push play. They don't give a fuck. If their disc gets scratched up they will throw it away and buy another one or watch something else. If you just buy the overpriced shit in the store then it all works, especially if you buy all the same brand.

There are at least three numbers which are critical to the calculation of whether college is worth it or not. One is what percentage of successful people are college-educated, one is what percentage of college-educated people are successful, and the last one is what percentage of college-educated people actually applied their education to their life. I have none of these numbers, and you'd have to rely on survey responses for a study asking these questions, so it would probably be a jerkoff waste of time. But the question is much more complex than you suggest.

That makes sense.

Yeah, it was more a case of trying to attack a weak spot. They knew MS was doing all kinds of anticompetitive stuff, but thought the browser bit was an easy target. In actuality, I think the bundling prosecution poisoned the well for the possibility of prosecuting for the real problems.

The premise of privatization (and arguing over the size of government) is taking power away from the government -- whether or not that power rests with private enterprise, you are discarding elements of the government (in this particular instance, science and research away from the government and into the hands of private enterprise).

You remove enough teeth from the government, it becomes powerless. And services necessary for the people fall under the purview of the private enterprise.

I fundamentally disagree with that outcome and feel that private enterprises need more regulation and that the government is still way too beholden to private enterprises.

On what basis?

Cutting the size just because is not a good enough rationale.

I'm agnostic when it comes to the size of the government but given our current crappy patent system, it is downright silly to think short term greed won't override long term progress for the species.

There's no "profit" in investing in pure math or landing a probe on Pluto or conserving a dying species of insect. Scientific curiosity is seldom profitable in the short run.

That is because -- get this -- computer science is not about coding.

It's about math and engineering. Any coding is incidental at best and it's not their job to teach you "programming".

Judging programs on their employability is myopic. If you are smart and logical, then picking up a programming language is trivial.

Most top schools have little to no programming education -- you learn discrete math, graph theory, complexity theory, algorithms, data structures, graphics (which is physics and math), AI (lots of stats and probability), linguistics (if you do NLP) etc.

Even when you learn Operating Systems or Compiler Design, you're learning them from a design point of view. The details of implementation are something you pick up on your own.

You want to teach skills that are transferable and will survive the next programming language or platform fad. Any good CS program teaches that. Learning to code in Java or *nix sysadmin skills are things you should pick up on your own.

Yes, yes it is. Not in the cities, but while living in the cities, via AIWPS. The short explanation is that your shit is pumped into the bottom of ponds with a methane-capturing plastic liner protected from UV damage by virtue of being submerged. Eventually the ponds fill up and they're left to cook momentarily before being sludged out for compost. Heavy metals settle to the bottom and microbes destroy virtually all pathogens and most other contaminants.

Cities are not the problem. Where cities are located is the problem; there's no good reason for them to be in the same place as seaports any longer, for one. And what we choose to do with our technology is a massive problem as well. We have the technologies to solve the problems, but the current "solutions" to these problems are highly profitable. For a tiny slice of the population, of course. And they are maintaining the situation quite aptly.