...then we had the Slashdot beta, which kinda sucks.

On the bright side, I don't see any GNAA trolls anymore. And just this week, I read someone mention Natalie Portman and hot grits in the same sentence.

Although, lately, I find io9 to be more fun than Slashdot (which, unfortunately, has indeed jumped the shark, thanks to dice).

(BTW, I am European)

Really? We had no idea, given all the vitriol you were spewing.

You are nuts if you think the American education system is a factory model. Go to Asia -- you'll realize exactly what "factory styled" education is.

No matter what your interest, you are asked to do hours upon hours of advanced math and science. At every stage, students are culled if they don't get above a threshold set for those subjects these cultures deem valuable (e.g. math).

You wake up early in the morning for tutoring classes *before* your school, and go to tutoring classes *after* school. And oh, you have oodles and oodles of homework (imagine 600 differential equations problems due over the weekend). And the teachers (or the parents) do not hesitate to call you an idiot if you do poorly.

Sure, it sounds great -- but it also has its flaws. People who want to study arts or the humanities are made to feel like idiots, and have to fight the system. You are constantly made to feel that you are less than adequate -- the opposite of what's happening in the US, where everyone is made to feel great. You become very narrow in your skills and worldview, and lack a holistic outlook. You have a lot of academic knowledge, but very little real world knowledge.

No, the US is quite far cry from a factory styled education.

All good, except....

> don't borrow money... not for a house
That depends - a home is a *secured* loan. You can always 'give it back' and rent. A *humble* home is better than renting for decades.

> You don't need to drink, to ..., to have a spouse or to have children.
No. (Almost all) people *need* a spouse. For love, for the work of life. On the purely economic side, its efficient to have 2 (or 1.5) incomes to pay one mortgage, two people to share household goods, groceries, cooking, cleaning...

> ... you *wlll* have money unless your health significantly fails.
Your health will (almost certainly) fail if you strike it out without a spouse.

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.

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.

You are ascribing power to governments, rather than the people -- therein lies your fallacy.

The idea is that *people* are more powerful and altruistic than individuals or institutions. A government is nothing more than an instrument -- an institution that supposedly represents the people.

If a government is contrary to its people's values, then they should fix the government, not discard it altogether in favor of private enterprise.

You're an idiot. There was a recent article on how Columbia fired two of its eminent public intellectuals. Why? For not bringing in enough grant money. Not because they didn't publish, or not because they weren't any good. No, because they weren't politically savvy enough to bring in grant money.

Both Vance and Hopper had 30 and 26 years at Columbia respectively, and highly respected in their fields. They were let go because the expectation was that they bring in ~80% of their income from outside grants. Not doing research, not publishing, but bringing in *money*. No wonder people like Grigori Perelman hate the current academia.

You aren't doing science then, you are rewarding those that can *market* their subjects well.

But in reality, this should be welcomed.

Really? If you'd read the piece, you will notice that subjects with seemingly little application are the ones that get little to not attention. Because they are neither utilitarian nor do they make them feel good.

Take the Fourier transform for instance -- once upon a time, it would have been considered pure math, but today, DSP wouldn't exist without it. To focus only on those that *we* think are utilitarian can be extremely myopic, not to mention downright arrogant.

This is how science got funded during its first centuries as a discipline when many of the giants of science did their work.

That is downright silly. Just because something was done a certain way is not an argument for not using a better way. Using patrons has always been problematic, because patrons always favored things that they liked, with a vested interest.

If we still did things the way they were done, democracy wouldn't exist. As a concept, it is downright radical and new - giving power to the people?! Imagine that!

Similarly, the idea that people would fund science for the common good is just as radical, and going back to having patrons is pushing us back to the dark ages. We should be moving forward, not backward.

And the area of a unit circle is pi, not tau.

To be honest, my biggest Amazon Prime purchases are around the holidays or events like birthdays/weddings/baby showers etc. It is so much easier to just order something and have it shipped -- the sheer convenience of it all makes it worthwhile.

While I may order a 3-4 orders a month for most of the year, I end up ordering at least three times that during the holidays.

I try and make sure that my local bookstore gets my business -- but sometimes, I just don't have the time or the energy to look for a book, only to find that they don't have it yet. Especially when they're written by authors who aren't particularly mainstream. So, I can pre-order some of these books by my favorite authors, which is a huge perk.

There's also something to be said about impulsive shopping -- for instance, I just saw a book that looked quite interesting, and it was under $10. Normally, shipping would have been expensive relative to the cost of book, but given that I have Prime, I just ordered the book. A few weeks ago, it was a sandwich maker.

Prime Membership also provides you with "subscribe and save" offerings that I take advantage of (whey protein for my workouts, diapers etc).

So, yeah. Personally, I think that even at $99, it is definitely worth the money.

he thinks upto 180% is reasonable