A clumsy essay gets totally hysterical reactions

Ok, ok, universities are mighty beacons of pure knowledge, whose purpose has mischievously been misrepresented, by ...er... someone, to the ignorant masses, who in turn have tried to drag the glorious aforementioned institution through the mud of a money driven wrongheaded collectivist dream of prosperity.
But the institution itself stands, pure and hard as diamond, turning a benign look upon the few that can appreciate its true timeless goal. If the obtuse and the greedy are being trodden upon in their sordid, misguided quest for reasonable employment, that is just their desert: the institution has'nt got anything to do with it.

You happy now? Good, now you can go back to prepare your lesson.

Yes, idiots savant do exist. OTOH - Not being able to recall will not to do much to improve your thinking - it may very well make it impossible, depending on how severe it is.

As an Engineering grad, I can see his method massively *NOT* working for math and science subjects: Let's interleave here: I'll do a little limits, a little derivatives, a little integrals, a little tensor algebra. (BTW, that ought to make history - of anything - quite interesting also)

Or: Yeah, I know tht was discussed in class, but I was NOT taking notes, cuz I was focused on understanding, and when I tried to recall, I thought that you said stres, but it's deformation instead, uh?

That'll make for really interesting exams.

Seconded. And, probably because of /.'s readership median age, I notice nobody has even addressed the superiority of liquid design for text reading when the reader needs to change font (usually to get a larger font size). The inability to reflow is what makes PDF suck on the Kindle for instance. Ando no, that does not spell "for the visually impaired" - as anybody approaching the 45-yr-old mark knows. Note that one can still scroll "and" flip while preserving liquid design.

I, for one, don't care. I did install the block extensions (NoScript, AdBlocks) tried them a couple of days, turned them off. The hassle of building whitelists vastly outpaced the convenience of having no flash ads, which I don't look at anyway (not to mention messing with the hosts file to block popunders - which I close as soon as they pop) . Never caught malware from that vector (running linux as my desktop, but also in my windows days).

Cheers-

Now, in my view, that is exactly the problem we are facing today. The speed of trading is vastly outpacing the speed of most human activities, and specifically of all decision-taking and political processes. Frictionless systems tend to be intrinsically instable - that is why friction is a good thing. So too much liquidity is actually BAD - it speeds things up beyond the point where people/communities/nations can think clearly.

The idea of taxing transactions based on their speed (cited elsewhere in this thread) looks terrific under this standpoint (how feasible, I know not). The 6 ms advantage would remain elusive tho'.

So your ideal economic landscape is circa the XVIII/XIX century, in London?

Greetings.

This is so wrong. By this token, Faraday - not famous for is math skills - was a clueless git.

Cheers.

Not really. Understanding the "why" is way more deeper than being able to do the math, and I do not think anybody has worked it out yet. "Why" does the universe behave as it does? Math Will not tell you that. Math, will however, enable you to do the quantitative stuff, without which you would not be able to decide which theory is wrong, and (roughly) by how much.
Cheers,
alf

Agreed, that would be folly - for gazillions of reasons - having informed voters would at that point be the least of them. This is not Athens anymore.
As for federal level ballots in the US (where I lived for a while 20 years ago, so y knowledge may be dated), wouldn't that be a good way to put issues like Roe v. Wade to rest? (may be not a good idea, jus' wonderin')

Cheers,
alf

Well, that's what you did say:

That is assuming, I infer, that some other (governing) body is informed enough. But ultimately, the legitimacy of any organisation, and of its actions, must rest with the people and the people must have the power to decide on *any* such action. Ideally after an information process has taken place. In democratic settings of course. Otherwise you better have sizeable and trustworthy police and army forces available, in which case we do not call it democracy anymore.

Right. I thereby propose that people that can't meet that pathetically low bar be sterilised in order to improve... Darn, we already tried that, also.

Look, buddy, Italy may not have much in the way of oil or coal.... but it does'n t have much in the way of uranium, either, and last time I looked, uranium rich countries were not exactly your "reliable suppliers" type.