I'm hoping this particular instance is sarcasm, but this sort of hateful utilitarianism is the reason NASA is being defunded.

Quite frankly, I think we need to look at revenue before we even consider looking at aggressive spending cuts. Granted, the two may go hand in hand, but the amount of money we're losing to corporate tax loopholes and subsidies is staggering. Note: when I say losing, I don't just mean revenue we aren't collecting, but money being paid out in refunds to some of the largest corporations in the country/world. Here's a little food for thought on the subject.

http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=67562604-8280-4d56-8af4-a27f59d70de5
http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2011_the_massive_ceo_rewards_for_tax_dodging
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html

Just take a look at the list of 'riders' on the bill and it will become clear who they represent:

http://www.ombwatch.org/files/budget/OMB_Watch-HR1_Policy_Riders.pdf

It's pretty clear they're not interested in balancing the budget. The republicans are only interested in gutting those agencies responsible for enforcing pesky regulations like wetland preservation, emissions/dumping of hazardous material, the clean water act, etc., defunding institutions like NOAA and anyone else doing any sort of climate studies and generally gutting a wide range of social services provided to low income and middle class Americans, while simultaneously providing criminally large tax breaks for corporations:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1,
http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=67562604-8280-4d56-8af4-a27f59d70de5

That isn't to say the democrats are much (if at all) better, but it should be absolutely clear exactly who the republicans represent.

I think you folks may have missed the point entirely; I may be mistaken, but I don't think economics has anything to do with the ban. It appears the proprietors in question are actively attempting to dissuade from coming in those people incapable/unwilling to detach themselves for a little while from their electronic devices. As the article mentions, cafes have long been places with a social atmosphere, but electronics make it far too easy to seclude yourself in a public setting. As the author says,

My guess here is those coffee shops instituting such a policy are attempting to avoid turning into the abomination that is Starbucks. Sure, you can go in there and purchase a burnt cup of coffee with an unreasonable amount of sugar/corn syrup and get internet access, but those chains are almost entirely silent save the tapping of keys or whine of earbuds. The indie shops would like to keep their social atmosphere, and banning these devices seems to be what works for them.

I think it depends largely on the subject and the professor. From my experience, the basic/introductory classes (e.g. Calculus, first courses in CS and Physics/Engineering, etc.) usually stick to text book problems since there isn't really anything interesting to be said about the topic at that point in time. However, my (better) higher level undergraduate/graduate courses in CS/Math have almost always had unique problem sets unless the professor is unusually lazy.

Even more interestingly, the real numbers are, in fact, entirely equivalence classes of rational sequences.

The author's political biases and so forth aside, the thing I find the most disturbing about the whole subject, which the author sums up nicely, is the following.

That's a nice idea, in theory, but the reality is more often than not you end up with lazy students who are too heavily dependent on behind the scenes garbage collection and tend to write leaky/inefficient code as a result. Teaching the difficult concepts early on, reinforcing those concepts throughout the curriculum and actually holding the students responsible for that kind of material is what creates well disciplined, knowledgeable programmers employers actually want to hire. As tough as it can be to be thrown directly into C/C++ style environments, many places specifically seek out and hire from the (increasingly fewer) institutions which still teach C/C++ as a primary language. If you teach the students good memory management skills with a language like C/C++, which actually forces you to be responsible for your allocations, the simple scripting/interpreted/garbage collecting languages are an absolute breeze to pick up later. At least that's my opinion. Could be I'm just a little biased having been raised on C/C++ in college.

I would argue that the issue is in a bit of a gray area with a Slashdot friendly analogue.

Thinking of the educational system as fundamentally flawed yet still very critical software, the bribe is like a terribly hacked together fix. For the most part, the hack is hideous, most certainly not 'correct' and it probably neglects entirely the fact that things need to be rewritten from the ground up to solve the underlying problems. However, it does solve a lot (or at least some) of the surface problems and keeps things running in a (mostly) functional manner when outright systemic failure isn't at all acceptable.

In other words, perhaps the bribe is (relatively) good to motivate the kids in the interim while the system is rebuilt from the ground up. Of course, that does presuppose that someone actually gives enough of a shit about the educational system to undertake redesigning it...

I'm pretty sure the article's qualms with the infantilization of the end user is not about making the system usable, it was the way in which it was done. Try at least finishing the first paragraph of the article before going on an indignant tirade.

RTFA. It's not a case of being anti-nuclear. The problem is that Entergy couldn't care less about what's going on at the plant and they're allowing leaks, multiple cooling tower collapses due to the wood support structure rotting out, etc. It's a public health concern.

Maybe if people stopped constantly telling kids how difficult math is, there wouldn't be so much related anxiety and self inflicted doubt.

As a grad student (in mathematics) at a liberal arts uni, I teach a low level math class every semester and I also sit through two hours a week of 'help sessions,' where undergrads in any of the low level math classes (from 'College Algebra'--essentially algebra 2--up through calc) can come in and ask questions about homework, past quizzes/tests, general topics, etc. as part of my funding. Being that it is a liberal arts uni, the majority of the undergrads I deal with are most definitely NOT science/math/engineering majors. So, half of the time I spend either teaching or in these help sessions basically amounts to me listening to kids tell me how bad they are at math and how much it scares them...after which, I usually get to play therapist and reassure them that it really isn't that bad. Once they get past the general hysteria and start thinking in a halfway logical manner, they usually pick up on what's going on pretty quickly. Most of them, at least after they've stopped trying to convince themselves that math is some evil entity out to eat them, even comment on how easy it really is. If people would just stop spreading baseless hysteria, I'm pretty sure we'd all be a whole hell of a lot better off.

Walking out of school (May '09) with a 4 year degree and no more experience than some undergrad research and a couple internships, I was offered a $75k/year base salary (I think ~$82k total benefits) in Connecticut, although I'm not sure what the standard of living was like as I turned it down in favor of grad school. Although, I've also heard of other people I knew and went to the same school with getting job offers in the $50-60k/yr range in other places. In either case, I'm pretty sure that as far as science/engineering jobs go, CS probably had the potential for the highest (or at least pretty close to the highest) starting pay of any other degree programs.

I think which path you choose depends on what you want to do. From a foundational strand point, I'd seriously suggest the discrete stuff. In any sort of higher level algorithms classes you should probably be exposed to, you will need the graph theory. On the more practical side, data structures are vital as any sort of practical programmer. Without a decent grasp of the material in a data structures class, I'm pretty sure you're going to struggle finding decent jobs. The other stuff--the continuous math--is a blast (I myself started out CS and have since been wooed into pure math as a grad student), but as some have pointed out, unless you're doing development in computer vision, gaming (physics engines, graphics, etc.) or some sort of scientific computing in a national lab or university, etc. I don't think it's really going to come in handy all that much. Just my $0.02.

I did my undergrad at RPI, which had Linux clusters for general student use, as well as some Sun machines in the computing center. For the Comp. Sci. dept, Labstaff ran almost everything on FreeBSD. Linux/Unix versions of almost all the software they provided were available as well, and probably 90% of the programming work that I did there was in Linux/Unix. I'm now a grad student at the University of Vermont, and I was actually quite surprised to see they have pretty decent linux/unix support. The general clusters are, I believe, AIX and the math dept. has some linux and solaris machines in their cluster. Just like RPI, they too have Linux counterparts for almost all the software they offer (i.e. Matlab, etc.). I think as long as the school has a reasonable Computer Science dept., you'll most likely find pretty good Linux/Unix support at the college level.