In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

- Albert Einstein -

In all sciences, reviewers will often ask authors to cite additional papers and provide some commentary on them. [How do your results differ?] Whether the papers are relevant is difficult to answer.

I have been on both sides of this. As a reviewer, I have often asked that additional papers be cited, sometimes my own. After all, I wouldn't be a reviewer if I didn't have some expertise. As an author, usually I agree the additional citations are relevant. Even I don't think so, I 'suck it up' in order to get my paper published. I'm sure the authors of the papers I reviewed sometimes felt the same way.

Welcome to peer-review.

Terrorist suspect #29773 checking in!

More that that, it is a bad choice of data type. Percentages are generally not ints. Distance measurements are generally not ints.

That's my day job, too, but I think you should take a little more interest. The Stanford and MIT courses are significant steps toward the day when we get replaced.

I don't think it will happen soon, but someday ...

Another thing that is made clear in the New Testament is that the Mosaic law does not apply to Christians (well, non-Jewish Christians, more precisely). The main issue then was circumcision, but most everything else was ruled out as well.

My strategy is that when I get a robocall, I just put the phone down and wait for the robocall to hang up. My thought is that uses up more resources of the robocaller than hanging up right away. Of course, this uses up my resources, too, so it's not all good.

Rather than ruining their dreams, you make this an opportunity to make them realize how important math and science is in CS. If you know a little graphics, you could start by describing how a 3-D model is represented and how it is converted to a 2-D image. If you want a realistic simulation of the world, then you need to compute the physics correctly, meaning trig, algebra, calculus, forces, etc.

The old-fashioned version of online courses, mail correspondence courses, have been around for a long time. Online courses have most of the same problems except for the potential of faster feedback.

Books have been around for even longer. Why take any courses when everything is already in books? I think there is some social reason why most students can't learn by themselves, but need to be physically in a class with other students in the same predicament. I guess it must be something about how all the students are in it together plus a little bit of competition. Of course, teacher-student interaction is a plus, but this aspect is overrated, I think. There are lots of classes where there is little interaction or only a few students are active.

The affluent will be able to pay for private school. What these cuts do is to ensure that the poor get less education. Somehow, most of the affluent folks have become convinced that educating the poor is not worth it. It is hard to see how this will end well.