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

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.
>
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. 
>
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.