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

Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:

Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
 

Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

>
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.

 
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students.  They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.

>
Just one programming class..... in Matlab???  For Engineering.  Ugh.
>
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering.  Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using.  Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate
Fortran in the end.  Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already
understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects.  The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this
point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an
'assembler' of sorts).  Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
>
But, /just/ matlab.  That is so wrong on so many levels.

 
I know of a leading university that gives all engineering students (all
of them), two courses on Python.  The first course is just so students
get a minimum of the Python syntax---of course, the course design calls
it ``how to program''.  The second half of the year is to learn the very
basics of the so-called OOP and then some packages such as numpy, scipy
and matplotlib are *introduced*.

Sigh, no wonder the 'newer grads' all seem to either be unable to
program, or can /only/ program by barely stringin existing libraries
together.  If there isn't a library to do "x", don't bother asking them
to write a program to do "x" (no matter how simple "x" might actually
be).

And what do we see in these courses?  Nearly all engineering students
consider them accessory to their degrees and so they try to ignore these
courses to the maximum because they need to work on calculus and physics.
 
And I can't blame them: these courses are totally uninteresting.  I
would have done the same.

I treated the programming classes as my variant of the "basket weaving"
class.  The easy A where one got to relax vs. the other engineering
classes.