Geometry is the antithesis of infinity. He will be "aspiring" to be a number theorist until he is ready to look at numbers beyond the constraints of Geometry.

Well said. The finding of the article is interesting: student's that use laptops tend to attempt to take verbatim notes. The laptop isn't the issue, this is a problem of how to properly take notes. Class time is best used for comprehension rather than rote learning. To that end, an effective use of a laptop during class would be to look things up as the professor talks about them. As stated above, notes are best saved for after class to be taken during study time.

I think you have made a good, reasoned argument.

I just have one important point of caution for you on this statement: "The two atomic bombings killed a quarter million people. On its own, that's horrifying. In the context of the Second World War, that's a rounding error."

While relativity is important in a great many things, it is problematic to use from an ethical point of view. Many atrocities were committed by all sides in WW2. In fact, all sides committed mass atrocities of some kind or another: the fire bombings being particularly awful. This was the reality of WW2 and has given terrible clarity to the reality of what "total war" means.

My point here is simply this: the atomic bombings of Japan were absolutely horrific tragedies. It is an event that stands alone in human history when so many civilians have been killed in an instant. It stands in rare company by the magnitude of civilians that slowly died a truly barbaric death in the hours following. I don't think it is possible to ethically justify total war, and by consequence, no substantive part of it. Thus, while total war was necessary for all sides to wage, all sides had to take unethical actions. I think we would agree on this point: that being ethical in total war would be self-defeating in fact: it would completely ignore the reality of what total war is. This is, simply, where I think people get mixed up about the bombings. They happened because it was total war. But they were not a rounding error on any scale: they were an awful event in our human history that we can only hope is never emulated.

You are challenged by a common struggle for IT professionals who start technical and move up through management. When moving up from within, it is very important to challenge yourself to let go of the old role and start anew. Your starting point when you hire someone should be that you trust and have confidence in them to run the shop under your direction. By retaining any sort of privileges, you would undercut that confidence and place your relationship with your IT staff on crutches.

Develop your abilities to hire well and trust your hiring decisions. Be willing to take a chance: become uncomfortable with your new role. You should have reservations, not about departing from your old role however, but instead about all the changes and unfamiliarity that come with moving to the "top floor". Good luck. It sounds like you are in a great position with a bright future.

As the founder of modern information theory Claude Shannon so eloquently stated: the enemy knows the system (Kerckhoffs's principle). To the question being asked: it is problematic when the information assets are published, like the wikileaks exposure of diplomatic cables. In this instance, however, it is the system being exposed, and not particular information assets (at least to my limited knowledge). Thus, as an organization I think the worry is not about the system you use, but instead about your information assets. There is no simple answer to protecting information assets from insiders short of saying: defense in depth. :)

How eloquent and poignant. Well stated.

It is a challenging proposition: force customers to rent and provide no option to own. This is a natural fit for services, but becomes rather odd for a commodity. It is hard to understand how, in the consumer market, a company can successfully force a customer to pay for a service that they don't use: if I only use Photoshop in March and June, why on earth should I pay for April and May? Subscription models work very well in business, particularly in large organizations, but this will be interesting to watch unfold in the consumer market.

Interesting comments. I find that one of the more common sources of conflict and inefficiency in the work place relates to disconnected expectations. At a cursory level, it sounds like you find yourself in highly bureaucratic organizations but that the style and value of your work may be constructively disruptive. Setting clear and consistent expectations is challenging: it may take several attempts and sometimes fails all together. FWIW.

Your post is very well written and thoughtful. Your introspection and social consciousness are strong indicators that you will find the right path.

I tend to believe that arrogance is a maturation stage in the development process of individuals with a pronounced strength. Like any other stage of development, some take longer than others to grow out of it. Those who persist the longest require an awfully exceptional strength, or far more likely, a growing ecosystem of isolation and denial.

I think humility, in a sense, distinguishes truly bright individuals from those who are merely clever. The acquisition of knowledge is useful, but true understanding requires comprehension of scope and context. Understanding the outer limits of a thing necessarily leads to humility: the expansive nature of most heady subjects is such that no individual can master the whole. Thus, the path to humility is a holistic one, where the path to arrogance requires a myopic view of the world.

My expectation is that an SSD used by a desktop computer is most likely to indicate issues when it is being heavily used. In that sense, an imaging process is a good event.

I have ordered approximately 500 Intel SSD's over the past 18 months (320 series and the 520 series primarily). To date, we have had exactly one fail to my knowledge. It was a 320 series 160 GB with known firmware issue. We have around 80 of that type and size, and the drive that failed did so on first image. We RMA'ed the drive and got a replacement.

I think Vint is correct technically: it certainly doesn't make sense to have tools or technologies become "rights". Yet, I think he is missing the substantive debate that has been ongoing for decades: are human rights solely "negative rights" (e.g. freedom from censorship, etc) or are they also "positive rights" (e.g. freedom to access education).

Now, the whole thing can be restated in terms of what freedom of speech really means and entails. Is it only freedom from oppression, or does it assert some positive rights as well? If it does, then it could follow that the right to free speech means the right to access information, which the internet certainly provides with equanimity.

The core problem for the US government, and whichever of the many branches that is taking responsibility for this or that part of the government's cyber infrastructure, is a lack of pervasive talent among the staff. In order to attract talented staff, it is essential to have a very transparent mission and vision for an organization. Is the US government really committed to securing the infrastructure?

I think your premise is incorrect: evaluating teachers is actually very difficult to do. I think that one way to sum up the challenge is that teacher's don't have a "boss" in the way of most other professions. Consider, for example, in higher ed where a faculty member may have something that amounts to a dotted line to an administrative dean. That dean may have 50 or more faculty under them, with no intervening layers of management. This is obviously untenable by design. One could go on and talk about the dynamics of student evals, department chairs, and student learning outcomes. For the sake of brevity, I'll just say that evaluating a profession that is as much an art as a science is rather difficult. I'm hopeful MET comes up with a good model.

I think it would be most helpful if you covered the entire field of computer science and the IT profession in general. As you said, a lot of kids have a distorted perception of what it may mean to be in the field, and it is important to flesh those things out a bit. Also, talk about your passion for what you do: perhaps the technical challenges you face, the joy of working with technology, etc. You could cover all these things in about 10 minutes, and open for another 10 for questions.