I am a college instructor, and I have been for about 7 years now. I'll be upgrading to professor soon, so I can tell you first hand that your observations are quite correct. The undergraduate education system of the USA is considered to be the laughing stock of the academic world. However, our graduate schools are perceived as the best in the world. The reason for this is the utter failure of our public primary schools.

Think of it this way. The average high school graduate in the US can only read on a 6th grade reading level. They come to me, a scholar in the field of Computer Science, and I have to try to teach them complex mathematical ideas that are only truly expressible in a new language. I have a couple of options. I can either dumb down my course to give them a chance, or I can maintain my integrity and demand that they come up to speed. The answer is that I have to do a mixture of them. If I taught as I was supposed to, my student success rate would plummet and my perception scores would be low, hence I would be fired. However, if I make the course too easy, I've polluted my own field in the next generation. Instead, I try to ramp them up with basic skills, but push them just to the edge of what their minds can actually handle. I also try to encourage them in other areas of study outside my own. Most of my students consider me a very tough but fair instructor, and most are grateful for my help. However, I do fail a larger percentage of my students than other instructors. Most have gone the field pollution route.

This is a serious problem in our society. One thing we could do to fix it is stop pushing college so hard. Many of my kids would be better served in a tradeschool than a university, and yet they are pressured to come to me. They waist 4 years of their lives, learn nothing usable, and then end up back where they started.

Oh, and one last thought. About the perception of the rest of the world. If you have a Bachelor's degree, that basically brings you up to par with the high school graduates in other countries. That also brings you up to the level your grandparents in the US had when they finished High School. We need to stop the degradation of the primary schools, but we never will. No child left behind has basically ensured that all future generations of Americans will be too stupid to find their a**hole with both hands.

Yggdrasil -> Slackware -> Redhat (for an hour)->
Debian -> Slackware -> Gentoo -> Knoppix -> Ubuntu ->
Gentoo (Forever!)

UNIX wise, I've owned HP-UX machines, 1 AIX server,
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, then NetBSD

Prior to Yggdrasil, I had a cross compiled linux from scratch sort of setup. Ah, those were good days!

I'm a theoretical computer scientist who slings code for fun. I question the validity of teaching programming as part of computer science. Sadly, that battle was fought, and lost by my side, way back in the early 70's!

The most ethical thing you can do is fully disclose the hack to the media, and to as many websites as possible. This will force the developers to either fix the problem or let the company go down in flames. If you keep it secret, innocent pepole will be harmed when their information is leaked by the faulty code. If you could hack it, others can too. They may be less altruistic about what they find.

Write to 2600, call your local media, write to your newspaper, post the info here, go to the forums, and take the word to the street!

Shoulda used gentoo. If gcc can compile for it, gentoo can do it! Plus it would have been a hack too, as all gentoo boxen are hacks!

And yes, I run gentoo on all my machines and have done so since 2003. (My first gentoo box was in 2002, the rest of my machines were converted a year later.)

I say we implement a program which scrapes all of slashdot's content and presents it in the old format. Add a couple of ads in there and maybe we could make a buck or two off it.

Honestly though, I believe that all the code these "designers" created really amounts to a lengthy suicide note for slashdot. I've been here since 1997, and I won't be here much longer.

One thing I loved about slashdot was the simple theme. No floating themes, no waisted screen real estate. Whether I was on a small screen or a 20" monitor it always worked. This design, however, is poor on all screens. It is annoying and wasteful.

I have been a loyal reader for 13.5 years. I found slashdot mere months after its founding. If you do not undo these changes, I will no longer come here for news. I cannot abide this atrocity. I will tell my students henceforth to avoid this site, and i will actively campaign against it. Change back to something reasonable, and I will continue to evangelize this site to the geeks of tomorrow.

The choice, sadly, is yours.

-Bob, the once loyal

So then basically they feel they are entitled to take away other's civil liberties for their own gains? Maybe hanging isn't too extreme after all!

I'm all for frustrating TSA agents. Those people are traitors to the cause of liberty. 200 years ago, they would have all been hanged. I think frustrating them is a little less extreme, don't you?

Befunge, FTW!

Who would have thought that posting something to a vast world wide network could result in many people seeing it? It's getting so you can't shout out your front door without people hearing you. You also can't post secrets on billboards without them being read by passers by. What is the world coming to?

Lorraine was known to have a crush on Calvin (Marty) back in 1955. Calvin vanishes, George and Lorraine get married and then Loraine gives birth to a child that looks a lot like her high school crush. I know I'd start asking some questions if I were George!

Anyone else immediately flash to Whitehead and Russel's Principia Mathematica? The title led me to assume that this was the "super" version of that, as in a more certain version. In which case, I thought that Kurt Gödel would like to have a word with the author!

I like all the sections that say "Security Officers have been trained to not _______". So you have a trained service monkey, and it has to meet up with a trained higher order primate at a checkpoint!

Of course, "higher order primate" might give a bit too much credit to the TSA goon squad, but they certainly are in fact trained animals. Sadly, like many monkeys, they do occasionally lift shiny objects from innocent bystanders....

I recommend the Saw film franchise. I'm sure many of Jigsaw's games could, with a little creativity, be adapted to typing skills!