I would recommend video lectures from the Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/). They are organized in nice little chucks of topics and have a large range of topics in math.
A) From what most of what my friends have said, pledging isn't that bad, but it depends on the frat
B) Attend something outside of your normal circle of friends. Join a student organization or club sports team if you like sports. I graduated with a EE degree and I did cheerleading (At a big ten university :) my sophomore and junior year of college. It was a great experience to meet people outside of other engineers.
As a side not, when I was a freshman I thought about joining a frat, but the reason why I didn't join was because people tend to label you based on what frat you belong to. This is especially true if you meet a sorority girl, they will instantly know the reputation of your frat. So just know the reputation of the frat you want to join first before joining.
I would disagree. They signed the contract with rackspace that said they would abide by their polices and if they violated them, they would shut down the site. Nothing is stopping the church from hosting their own website.
That's a nonsense question, because the Constitution doesn't give you the right to use Rackspace's computers in the first place. Rackspace owns them, and has the understandable perception that it's their choice how they get used, not 'rbanffy's.
Counter-example: You own a bookstore located in a mall -- leased space. The mall's managing company says you are no longer allowed to sell Bibles.
Now I'll apply your logic.
"The Constitution doesn't give you the right to use that mall space in the first place. The mall owns it, and has the understandable perception that it's their choice how it gets used, not yours."
Hopefully you can see that something has gone wrong, regardless of legal compliance. Freedom is neither bestowed by a piece of paper nor by men with guns or gavels. It is a cultural trait manifest in our actions. We're not free unless we live like free people.
Would you call yourself a musician if you had no instrument to play? How can you claim to have free speech, if your medium of communication is removed whenever you try to say something unpopular?
Counter-counter-example: you operate a mall and the Ku Klux Klan wants to lease one of your shops.
Note that discrimination because of "race, color, religion, national origin, sex, handicap or familial status" in the sale or rental of real estate is unlawful under the FHA only in the housing market.
What's your point? The issue here isn't whether I think people should or shouldn't be allowed to burn the Koran; it's "what does the 1st Amendment mean?"
The understanding of the 1st amendment is your straw man. By refuting it you believe you successfully refute the argument that this is, in effect, a disturbing form of limitation of free speech by a private corporation who happens to own the machines used to manifest the speech they disagree with.
You absolutely have the right to free speech in the US. But any owner of private property can pretty much ban you from that property, for example (there are certainly some protected exceptions, but in general 'the law' is on their side).
Similarly, Rackspace has the right to stop servicing their customer if they feel the customer has violated the contract. Now, whether or not a court has to step in to determine the validity of the contract, etc, is a completely separate issue.
But this most certainly all has absolutely nothing to do with constitutionally protected speech.
I am not sure the analogies work. It's a Rackspace server on a Rackspace datacenter but nobody is swearing loudly in or carrying weapons into Rackspace's offices.
The weapons being a legal sense. Despite having the legal right to concealed carry, a building can forbid you from bringing it inside.
They are all just cases of someone who is providing a service being able to give stipulations over what can occur there. A church won't let you swear, some places don't want you to concealed carry, and a hosting provider doesn't want you to organize hatred.
In effect, you have your free speech curtailed because you have to express it using someone else's property. Companies like Rackspace may prevent your free speech from reaching anyone for any reason that fits the contract you signed.
I would say that it is absolutely not, at least in my experience. In my lab, which is a bioinformatics lab, perl is still being used heavily. Perl is a great tool for dealing with text files, and little pieces of code that you need to do something quick.
One of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of beginners make, is that they don't break the problem up into sub problems that they can easily solve. What I always tell students is to write some code, and then test it right away. Too many students try and solve the entire problem without compiling once, and then they are bewildered when they have 1000 errors because they forgot a semicolon at the end of each line.
I intentionally program in that style all the time, especially in the absence of a REPL. It's really not much different than writing it out with pen + paper first.
It lets me get the idea out of my head and on to the screen where it can be criticized. Tracking down syntax errors, missing includes, compiler flags, etc. is enough of an independent activity that I often want to do it all at once at the end of the first brain dump. At the beginning I want to be shitting out code, not googling for solutions to GCC's vague neuroses. After that first dump is done and validated, I use it as the first commit and iterate from there.
I prefer to write it out with pen and paper. After all, most of what you do when you code is come up with a solution to a problem and then implement it. It's a lot easier to play with your solution when you're still forming it than after you've already typed it up.
Code is also difficult to read. It's much easier to understand a code flow diagram, or something similar, than it is to comprehend the 100 or so lines that the diagram represents.
I do too (and wow isn't it a wonderful feeling on the rare time when you write a whole page of code and it compiles and runs right the first time?) but I certainly couldn't do that when I first started, and trying to do so just made me get lost in a morass of logic mistakes and compiler error messages. It seems like lots of beginning programmers naturally want to write a ton of code right out of the gate and they have to be taught to do otherwise.
After a few years of teaching new recruits how to program, this still amazes me: so many people will go a day without compiling once!
I mean, I've been programming professionally for 7 years, and much more before. But whenever I need to do something that I haven't done in the last week or so, I still always start with a tiny function to make sure I still remember how to do even the basic stuff, and build from there. E.g., every time I write some new js code, I start with a function that only prints something to the console; then, does the basic functionality, printing results to console; then and only then, start doing more complex things. It always surprises me that people will spend a day or more working without checking even the most basic check that what they're doing works the way they expect.
This is without a doubt a huge benefit of IDEs (and compiled languages, since with interpreted you don't really get the same benefit). I wish more people realized how great the benefit of this: I suspect most people dismiss it without ever trying.
This is the normal way that I write code. But sometimes I feel really confident and write a couple hundred lines without compiling. Then it's always fun to find out - did everything "just work" or did I omit something?
That's pretty much exactly what I do too- I'll start with maybe 10-15 lines before testing. I don't know why ANYONE would go a day without compiling or running
coding is very different kind of task, requiring a very different sort of approach, to the kinds of tasks most people are familiar with. most other tasks are no way near as exacting, etc. we are creatures of habit, we approach new tasks with the kinds of approaches we are familiar with using, and it simply takes time to learn how to approach programming.
Not sure what degree your going for, but I just graduated from college with an EE degree, and I'll be starting grad school next week. Here's my advice:
-Have fun and enjoy classes (Go to them!) You'll learn a lot from your professors and other students even though you may initially feel like they are a waste of time. Also in smaller classes the professor notices.
-Also on classes, it's important to make a good grade, but it is also important what knowledge you take away. There are quite a few fundamental classes that I got an A in, but I retained very little that I am regretting now.
-If you are not being challenged in a class, esp. programming. Talk to the professor, and they will probably find a way to make it more exciting/interesting.
-Like you said, meet as many people as you can. This is esp. true the first semester. Everyone is excited about meeting new people.
-I would also recommend finding something outside of you subject area to balance your life out. For two years I was a cheerleading at my school. Met a lot of cool people/girls.
-Depending on what your major is, you may want to talk to a professor you like and see if you can get a job with them. This will cut down on your personally time for hacking and relaxing but makes up for it with great experience and recommendation letters.
-Once again, if you are doing C.S. or engineering look into REU's, Research Experience for Undergrads. I spend a summer at USC in their robotics lab for an REU, with housing, meals and a stipend paid for by the REU. Awesome time and I got a lot of letter of recommendations.
Here is my best and worst investments. When I was around 14, I wanted to get into the stock market. So, I heard that AMD had beat Intel to the punch with x86-64 chips and Intel was planning on licensing the technology. So I invested in AMD at around 10 and I ended up selling it at around 18. Then took that money and invested in a treasure hunting company at .70 a share and it dropped to .10 a share. They had claimed to have a new technology for finding gold that did not disrupt the reefs, so they would be able to get permits to look for sunken Spanish galleons. Didn't really work out for me, but I was young and I thought it was cool to say that I invested in a gold mining company.
Somewhat weird to me, they really don't feel like an Apple commercial to me. Why isn't Apple talking about its speed, the camera/video recorder, or the "retina" display... Maybe they are trying to make the whole family interested in getting one, or maybe it because everyone still compares every new phone to it so they really don't have to rehash its technical merits. That means they can show off its emotional appeal.
Remember when they advertised how powerful the PowerPC was? I think there was a tank in the ad, implying the chip was so powerful it was weapons grade.
