Unfortunately, other countries have different ideas on the matter. If the US changed the law so that that software wasn't patentable, that might have more of an effect on the world.

Yes, but in that scenario your washing machine would actually pose a physical risk to you and your well-being, as it would be able to start a fire (and a thermite charge large enough to melt the contents of a washing machine would almost certainly start a fire). Bricking your phone, while an asshole move, isn't actually dangerous.

I kind of wonder if they're fishing for the next batch of project managers for information systems projects.

The previous director of DARPA, wasn't so popular with the research community; he was an engineer from industry, and instituted a regime of (fairly unrealistic) GNG (go/no go) targets in programs every year. If sites didn't hit certain scores on the GNG evals, they lost their funding. Which sounds not too bad on the surface - why would you continue to fund an organization that's not doing well? Except that for a number of projects that DARPA does (information and language processing technology, in particular), there's some very difficult problems with have somewhat good problems where you might be able to shave a few points off with refinements of existing approaches. If your funding hinges on meeting targets, rather than trying to solve the problem, you're just not going to pursue a new (but possibly fruitless) approach because the risks are too high.

I kinda viewed that wording as looking for new, fresh, research oriented blood for the organization; perhaps there's an ongoing return to the roots of DARPA - research. Research with a purpose, directed towards a specific goal, with producing something useful at the end, but research that may fail but needs to be done to discover possibly novel approaches to problems that might otherwise go ignored in a wholly results driven system. One can hope.

"getting an education" != "passing an exam".

No shit.

However, to pass the exam, you presumably had to have at least crammed enough information in your brain to be able to perform the aforementioned regurgitation. If you're not even bothering to put in that level of effort (or god forbid, actually fucking learn something), schooling is totally wasted on you.

And it's not just exams kids cheat on - they buy papers or massively crib content from Wikipedia and other sources without attribution, etc. Researching and writing a paper on a subject is a key way you become proficient in the material and learn to apply it. Again, I'm old fashioned, I guess, because my interest in schooling is learning something rather than getting some grades.

If someone "dumb" is doing better than you, you are most likely not as smart as you think you are.

Exactly.

You have my respect, sir.

I think of the purpose of education as getting an education. If you don't ever learn the material well enough to pass exams on your own, it's kind of a waste of time.

And, yeah, I get that people work for grades and the piece of paper at the end of the whole thing, but if you didn't actually learn anything apart from how to cheat well, you missed the whole point. Though you probably stand to have a lucrative career in international finance.

Insightful? Really? All it takes is some half-assed analogy to Apple for the Slashmods to find something insightful?

So does birth control to a CS guy mean banging some chick you met at the bar and telling your wife that the bar chick was just an abstraction and you were really making love to her? The bar chick was just a layer in your relationship?

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Check the validator output.

You're over-analyzing it. It's a joke on the cliche that if it weren't for the US, the French would be speaking German now, and the fact that France helped us out, and we still speak English.

I can't imagine why you would find humans from one longitude to be preferable to humans from another longitude.

I think you have to allow him some latitude to form his own opinions.

The French naval blockade of the Chesapeake Bay and some bad weather up the York River didn't hurt either.

Yeah, if it weren't for the French, Americans would be speaking English today.

It's funny how you never hear of some disgruntled Shi'a in Lebanon taking a rocket launcher to a school and slaughtering a bunch of kids.

You should really read about the history of Lebanese civil war before you stay things like that. And while we're on the subject, look at the situation in Iraq where various sectarian militias are slaughtering one another, as well as innocent civilians.

And we will see this pattern occur again, and again, and again, until we learn that the most effective form of military action is motivated people defending their own land against a foreign invader.

Presumably, we'll also see a corollary pattern - former militants deciding to band together to topple the government and force their ideology on the population, a la the Taliban.

It would be imprudent of me to not post anon, and even more so to quote the source of the information. Financial companies are as touchy as "Trendy Software/Hardware Marketing Companies" when it comes to proprietary information. You have every right to not believe the anecdote, just don't whine when you're the victim of fraud and no one is sticking up for you; we tried to warn you.

I neither believe or disbelieve you. I find your statement lacking in support and indistinguishable from bullshit; this is not to say it's bullshit, merely to say it's just one assertion without sourcing. It could well be true. Of course, phrases like "Trendy Software/Hardware Marketing Companies" make it seem like you have something of an ulterior motive in posting this, but that's not necessarily indicative of bullshit.

And since this is Slashdot, RTFP and point out anywhere that I implied I had evidence of causation.

And since this is Slashdot, RTFP and point out anywhere that I said you'd implied evidence of causation. The phrase gets trotted out constantly, whether or not it's warranted.