Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:

D  <nospam@example.net> wrote:

>
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that I
teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are yo
useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of) the
university level?

>
In the US there is not so much of a clear distinction between college,
university, and trade school.  We have for-profit trade schools that
now call themselves universities, and colleges with full university
programs.

I can think of a number of places that call themselves universities that
have CS programs that are basically programming programs... they exist
to teach kids to write code so they can get a job and only teach the
currently popular buzzwords and have no actual CS anywhere.

Ahh... I did not know that! Sounds very confusing and like you have to be very careful about the school you choose in order not to get tricked with 4 years of B.S.

I can think of one place that calls itself a college which has a CS
program that is almost entirely theoretical... lots of proofs and lots
of algorithm analysis.  Enough programming to be useful but it's expected
students will learn that on their own.  A full year of graph theory, two
years of continuous mathematics.
>
And there is a standard ACM curriculum and there are places that follow it,
but there are a whole lot of places that don't.  I think the ACM curriculum
is very balanced between theory and practice and includes things like an
assembler class and a digital logic class which are not themselves useful
but which need to be taught in order to explain just what a computer actually
is.

This sounds like my all engineering program. It had physics, math, discrete mathematics,
analog and digital electronics, digital logic, assembler, java. The idea was to
build from the ground up, learn to string nand gates together, then move to
assembler, then to java and algorithms, and after that the specializations
started so it depended on if you wanted to continue the low level programming,
mid-level, or high level "fluff".

But all of these places call themselves CS programs even though they have
a huge diversity in what they actually teach.
>
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school programs
with some computing added.  I think those are pretty much worthless, but they
get a lot of students.

I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice FAANG job with
300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)

--scott
>