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Comment Re:Because so many more enter college these days? (Score 1) 841

by dgiaimo (#37966432) Attached to: Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out?

He probably doesn't use those trig identities each day anyway. It's basic stuff, you'd think a math professor will be doing research that's slightly more involved than that! Heck, if your research involves lots of trig identities (somehow), you are dumb if you do it by hand, as you'd be wasting time with inevitable mistakes. If you need lots of trig identities done, you use a symbolic math package to do it for you. I'd think there's plenty of profs out there who do quite high level research and would pretty much suck at some of the undergraduate level stuff. I don't remember the trig identities, even if I could prove or derive every one of them in a couple of minutes.

That is exactly the point. If you are memorizing these identities then you are doing it wrong. It is actually much easier to learn to derive them, since they are all derived in essentially the same way. Memorizing a thousand identities just wastes your time.

Comment Re:Because so many more enter college these days? (Score 3, Insightful) 841

by dgiaimo (#37966332) Attached to: Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out?

Then there's the problem of profs assuming that things were covered in previous classes which weren't covered. When I got back to math, I had to very quickly memorize a huge number of math facts that I hadn't been expected to memorize, which put me at a distinct disadvantage to most of the other students whose teachers had expected them to memorize them.

This is college. If you are not prepared for a class it is *your* responsibility to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. It is *your* job to learn. It is *not* the professor's job to hold your hand as though you were an infant. The sole job of the professor is to point you to the important information in the field and gauge how much you are learning. If you can't handle that, maybe you're not cut out to go to college.

Comment Re:Bad Idea (Score 2) 1219

by dgiaimo (#34726400) Attached to: 'No Refusal' DUI Checkpoints Coming To Florida?
1) How do you read that in the fifth amendment? I just read it through in its entirety and nothing in it precludes a judge from ordering you to take a breathalyzer test.

2) You seem to be forgetting the fundamental tenet of the US legal system which is that, from the point of view of the average citizen, the judge's opinion *is* the law. A judge can issue a warrant for any reason he pleases. Sometimes you have the option of appealing a judge's decision on the grounds that it did not conform to prior case law, but that simply moves the arena into another judge's opinion. Ultimately, your rights are completely determined by what a judge says they are.

Comment Worked for me too (Score 1) 396

by suqur (#11980545) Attached to: Inside the Free iPod Offer
I also used a throwaway email account.

I signed up with Ancestry.com when that was available, which was a free trial. I cancelled that after a week or so, so there were no charges.

I got 3 referrals from a gaming website's forums, and another 2 from my personal website.

Got my free iPod after about 6 or 7 weeks.

This was back in mid July, 2004, so I caught it relatively early.

Pics! http://suqur.shackspace.com/idontbelieve/

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