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Comment What's actually asinine ... (Score 2) 261

A pass / fail / no report first semester is very common in the top universities in the country (e.g. - MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, etc.) and has been for decades. My first semester at JHU back in 1995 was all pass / fail, although you could still make honor roll, etc.

These students are just nominally adults, some have never even been away from home without parental supervision, and most have never had to manage their daily schedule entirely by themselves before.

Giving them a bit of grace and allowing them a couple of months to adjust to an entirely new adult environment -- plus all the new social dynamics that they are encountering for the first time -- is not at all asinine.

What's asinine is expecting all these young kids to be able to immediately adapt to a foreign environment while still performing academically at their top level.

Comment If you eat your dividends, then you will fail (Score 1) 146

The issue isn't really chasing dividend yielding investments.

The problem is young people believing that you can live off (i.e. - consume) those dividends and still end up okay in the end.

If you don't reinvest your dividends -- especially if you are investing in high dividend yielding investments -- then your total return on investment, and therefore net worth, is going to suffer badly.

Comment No, requiring CS in high school is stupid (Score 1) 95

I'm a software engineer with a MS in CS and over 20 years of experience in industry, mostly in research and design.

Computer science and programming are not needed by the general population and will go to waste for the vast majority of people.

Deductive and inductive logic and proofs should already be covered in math courses. Applying proofs to algorithms would make for a nice subtopic in math.

Math courses should be buttressed and CS topics can be used to help do that, but requiring a course of study in CS or programming as a requirement for graduating from high school is stupid and self-serving baloney from code.org.

Comment Re:please no! (Score 1) 95

I'd be interested to hear what sorting problem gets transformed from O(N^2) to O(N!) by use of linked lists?

I would think that in the worst case, a linked list should only give a factor of O(N) worse performance over an O(1) array or hash table lookup.

So, I could see a O(N^2) algorithm becoming O(N^3) but would be very interested to hear how it becomes O(N!) instead?

Comment How is this even a question? (Score 1) 84

How was 'broadband' ever not a telecommunications service?

Today's internet packet switching communications services are just an evolution and massive improvement on our older circuit based phone systems.

Internet communications definitely and obviously fall under the umbrella of telecommunications.

Comment Even K+R admit they messed up types in C (Score 1) 321

To decipher a type in C you often have to read it backwards starting from the name. E.g.:

int const * const x[10];

x is an array of 10 elements of constant pointers to constant integers.

The point being, C is probably one of the last languages to which you should look for guidance on typing variables.

Comment Re:Reputable (Score 1) 230

Toyota has been making similar questionable claims about their development of solid state batteries for more than ten years now. It's all vaporware so far and this PR announcement doesn't sound any different either.

Toyota's announcements about their battery tech should be ignored until they actually demonstrate it, put a price tag on a vehicle with one inside it, sell it at some volume, and 3rd parties can independently evaluate it.

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