You're really funny. Brown (http://cs.brown.edu) has no University-wide requirements. We also have one of the best [13th according to some random website Google just showed me] CS departments in the US, and, as an Ivy, I somewhat suspect we're accredited. *cough* </snark>

I came here because I had roughly the same attitude as you, and, looking at the upmodded comments, I'm the only one who seems to be agreeing-ish. That said, most of the other upmodded comments make valid points. Let me elaborate:

Just because you don't have any requirements for gen-ed classes doesn't mean you want to take only CS classes. Almost everyone (all but 1 person I know) in the CS department who came in with our mentality has come to realize

1. taking only CS-ey classes is FAR too much work (at least for Brown's CS classes.)
2. unless every aspect of CS interests you, you'll run out. Don't OD on CS your first couple semesters.
3. being here [Brown] gives you a unique opportunity to take, with little risk, anything that sounds interesting. Taking a general "how to write" class, feh. On the other hand, "Beyond Narnia: The Literature of C.S. Lewis", "Color Me Cool: A Survey of Contemporary Graphic Novels", "Human Sexuality in a Social Context": you're not going to get opportunities like that in your life ever again. Seriously.

Love,
Jon Sailor (cs.brown.edu/~jon)

Erlang's OTP stands for "Open Telecom Platform" and is the set of standard libraries and design patterns included with the language. It has nothing to do with authentication.

Which is why it makes an easy target for a Scheme compiler, right?

http://github.com/dyoo/moby-scheme
http://planet.plt-scheme.org/display.ss?package=moby.plt&owner=dyoo
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/Moby-Bootstrap/

> I find it helpful to [...] draw up finite state machines.

Unless his entire code is written in regular expressions (which, albeit, *would* be a total bitch to maintain), I don't think finite state machines are going to be very helfpul.

Actually, imperative languages are typically based on procedures, not functions. The fact that such languages tend to call procedures "functions" is the confusing bit.

xmonad does what you want with desktops my default. Each of my monitors is bound to one specific workspace at a time; I can switch either monitor independently to any workspace, or manually stretch windows across the gap in between.

You can use xmonad as the window manager for GNOME.

It'll require a little bit of tweaking to make it look normal, though (you'll need to add window decorations, and configure it to make windows floating by default), or you could learn the keyboard shortcuts and use tiling, which sounds like it may work better with the way you want to think about screens anyway. (It sounds terrible, I know, but it's remarkably effective.)

Sure. It's all in what you consider "fundamental", I guess.

" but inefficient isn't the end of the world. Just means it's a first step towards something better."

That's like saying a break in AES to 2^40 isn't the end of the world, it just makes cracking it slightly more efficient. :-P

This was nothing fundamentally new; google "secure multiparty computation." Or, FTFA, Gentry's technique requires a "trillion times" more computational power than existing techniques.

Not that I think his work wasn't awesome-- I've already queued the paper in my reading list. All I'm claiming is that he didn't "solve a major open problem".

That's turboing.