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Ask Slashdot: Ambitious Yet Ethical Software Jobs?
First time accepted submitter hwaccaly writes "I'm a mid-career developer with a fair amount of experience working on data-intensive, mathematically ambitious software projects for fun — things like physics and systems simulations, written mostly in CUDA, targeted at Tesla GPUs and small clusters. Ideally, I'd like to get paid for this kind of work, but I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either. The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's. And academia pays in degrees, not dollars. So what's left? Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?"
Fifteen years ago I was happy to be in the games industry and saying, "Isn't it nice to have a job for smart technical people that can't possibly be of any use to the military", but now even that's not the case. Plus the industry is wildly volatile and not great or long-term working conditions.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Just a though bu if you are working in the medical industry on something that is killing people today then might not your body count actually be negative? Yes, I can see what you are talking about with animal testing leading to death from your work, but lets assume what you are working on ends up saving lives. Lets say in testing 10000 mice have to be killed to ensure the results from your work are correct (yeah that sucks, no one wants to kill animals) but if that leads to something that helps save peoples lives for the foreseeable future I'd argue that it could easily save more than 10000 people. so treating all lives as equal you are still coming out positive
You consider it unethical to do any computing work for the financial, medical, or pharmaceutical industries? But yet you want a job with a high salary? I think your ethical determinations need some reconsideration.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Ambitious, Ethical, Software
Three words I haven't seen together as anything more than a marketing phrase.
Huh? The academy doesn't pay people? Medical research is a net negative? Maybe you could make some money doing character consulting for an upcoming season of Portlandia.
There's a new industry with opportunities pertaining to your expertise right now...
the exciting world of Bitcoins! :D
Every business or venture has its positives and negatives. The defense industry of course kills people. On the other hand, if we had no military it would not be long before some enterprising country decided that they could annex ours whether we liked it or not. The medical industry of course tests on animals. On the other hand, it preserves human life and perhaps someday -- yours. The gaming industry -- wow, what a waste of time that is. People sitting in front of their computers or televisions when they could be out saving the world -- literally. Perhaps inventing some new power source, medicine, or helping some new immigrant to learn English. On the other hand, just think of all the "blood minerals" that are used to make your hardware you use to code with.
Perhaps the only "ethical" business is to go be a gardener. (And to be frank, I could do that for the rest of my life happily.) On the other hand, I'm not sure the "weeds" would agree.
Visual effects for motion pictures/commercials.
Most of the industry is cpu driven when there's a ton of room for fluid and particle-based simulations to be gpu accelerated. We're at the turning point where the technology exists in a dumb/not useful form but will be good/useful in the very near future.
You can apply for either a massive studio and work in-house on their own proprietary software or try to land a job at autodesk/thefoundry et al and work on software packages that small-mid (and even some large) studios buy licenses for.
No, because all that computing is being done on machines using rare-earth blood minerals mined in Africa, or composed of parts machined in sweat shops in China. Seriously, if you're going to claim that level of ethicality, you should be farming your own veggies in a self sufficient, carbon neutral commune.
We are a very socially conscious company which uses GPU's for video encoding - http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/company/careers/opportunities-at-elemental
There is tons of medical and biological heavy lifting with computers that would prevent animal testing and perhaps prevent the need for double blind medical trials (meaning we wouldn't have to give placebos to critically ill people, and potentially save twice as many people.) Everything from advances in protein modeling and dramatic breakthroughs in analyzing DNA to DNA/RNA origami (designed and implemented first in computers) that will almost certain provide exciting new cures to everything from cancer to autoimmune diseases.
I agree big Pharma is a nasty business, but there are plenty of places where you can make a meaningful contribution to the human condition and at the same time exercise your frontal lobes.
Its not a niche, high performance computing is important to the defense, finance and healthcare industries.
What was your other question? Oh yeah, which things don't offend you. And you're asking us??
You drink the same water. Eat the same food. Consume the same energy.
This all has a price. You think you're a more moral man then Einstein?
Do you know what the first man to discover fire said?
"Ouch"
There is a price. Ambition has it's price. I'm not saying you should be unethical. I'm saying defense work, animal testing, etc aren't unethical. If our people didn't do it then where would we be? Imagine if the US never had defense contractors or scientists and engineers that contributed to the defense industry. What would the soldier go into battle with? Either a sharped stick and loin cloth. Or more likely we'd be forced to buy weapons from an extra national third party and be beholden to their whim whenever we engaged in war.
And what of testing on animals. What medical breakthroughs were only possible because of animal testing? Ask a biologist, a doctor, or any other stripe of medical expert what our medicine would look like without animal testing.
And why do we do animal testing? Because we consider it more ethical then doing it on people. Which is the alternative. Do you want to be the white rat in cage 1173?
Look, I don't want to attack your world view or suggest you need to do things you disagree with... What I am saying is that you benefit from these things every day of your life. I don't understand how people can look down their nose at these methods while at the same time voluntarily benefiting from the consequences.
Would you torture a lab rat to save your mother's life? I mean... torture it. I'm talking live vivisections... Ideally with no anesthesia. Simply bolt it's limbs to the to a board. This is to save your mother's life. I would. I'd take alternative paths if there were better options. But if it was a straight up choice between torturing a little animal and a human being dying. I choose human life every time.
Am I an evil person for making this calculation? Are the millions of men and women that have made this calcuation for generations evil? You eat evil every day. You drink it. You live in an evil society that is part of an evil civilization then. Because my view on this matter is the default setting for our whole civilization going back thousands of years.
In all our long history I'm not sure if we've ever come across another society that believed as you did... that put these things above their own survival. Consider that that is odd because we've encountered many societies and civilizations. That we've never encountered one with your values implies one of two things. Either human beings are genetically predisposed to not value that view. Or any society that does embrace that view dies out. In the end the second would become the first... so perhaps it's all the same.
In any case, if I were you... and I'm not... I would find a field in which you are challenged and valued. Obviously don't go working for demons, but possibly tone down your standards to something a bit more practical. You are not living in a world of saints. We're simply people. We're not entirely good or bad. We simply are. Try to accept that without holding people to unreasonable standards.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Persuade someone pay you to make OpenCL work on free software. (Make sure to avoid the proprietary firmwares...) There are plenty of ethical research projects that could use it. If they pooled (some of) their resources, it would be a fair amount of money. There are some bounties posted as well. And we could really use it. :)
This work could earn you some money AND a degree!
You could try designing Bitcoin mining rigs (no, I'm serious), but I doubt you could do much software improvement over existing mining software.
Unless you consider that "the financial industry" (which would be bizarre).
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
You may have to learn other languages, but that doesn't sound like it should be a problem for you. Regardless, you're going to have to show off your talent in those "for fun" projects.
basically producing food is the only field you left out for yourself, but even that food might be used by the military and most definitely it will be put to some financial use. I don't think with your current ethical rules you could even be building fluid simulations for industry.. or even drag simulations for F1 racers.
you could try to do art though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Meteorology (and earth sciences more generally). Mostly public sector and academic, but there is some private-sector work going on too. Things like forecasting energy output of wind farms tends to be private-sector and involves lots of modelling and number crunching. Similar goes for mining / geology, depending on your ethical view of that.
While being an academic "pays in degrees, not dollars," doing contract work for academic can be rewarding. Most academics are pretty clueless about statistics and are happy to pay someone else goodish rates to do the statistics for them. While it's probably not the HPC wonderland you're after, it will bring you into contact with very diverse research areas and probably involves at least some crunching of big data sets.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
How is fiddling with computers "ethical" when there are people -- and apparently much more important than people, animals -- in the world who don't live perfect, utopian lives? Shouldn't you be out growing organic crops to feed the homeless? Or to feed to rats and bunnies?
You can't hug a child with Euclidean arms! (But you can let a child die of a preventable disease because there's no way to test the vaccine.)
If you're looking for a job, try searching Indeed.com for "CUDA" AND "Must be extremely full of himself".
Is there nothing productive left to do? Is all large scale enterprise dedicated to winning zero-sum or negative-sum games? If so, we ought to just give it all up.
Possibilities for high-powered computation such as you practice:
Aerodynamics -- OK, a lot of this is weapons related, but we are going to want to find some way to keep traveling about to see our loved ones after fuel gets scarce,
Weather and climate -- That is important to the war machines, but also to just about everyone else.
Social networks -- These look like they might take over the lion's share of IT assets in the world. When we have 3 or 4 billion players all wanting to connect with the right people, there must be great opportunities for those who can figure out which people are the right people.
Pharmaceuticals -- Don't you think that computing might be a way to reduce the need for tests on animals?
Engineering -- All the technology that sustains the present energy gluttony will be obsolete in a generation or two and must be replaced. It's a frightening prospect, but it must be fraught with opportunities, too.
Management -- We can hope that the world wants to better than it has at meeting human needs and offering opportunities to many more people, but that means running much closer to the edge than ever before. It can't be done without newer and better systems of management that operate with correct respect for and improved knowledge of scientific facts. If you don't want to work on the political or economic problems of making this happen, there should still be much to do on the scientific end.
And how about weapons? Some weapons are stabilizing and can sustain peace for a good while. Others are destabilizing evil. Can't anyone build the stabilizing kind anymore?
You said you did 3d simulations and you're good at physics.
Bare with me: It isn't CYC, but something based on CYC, I forget the actual name. The premise is that you use a 3d simulation to be imagination space for the AI. You need to write an effective physics simulation and database objects into it. If you write an effective 3d imagination space, you could then talk to the 3d imagination space in natural language. The next step is writing vision/laser detection and other senses to read in the real world and simplify it to the imagination space. Once you got something that can turn its environment into something it can think about and do tasks, you have AI. AI isn't some complex and unable to be understood idea where a machine has thoughts like a human, it can be made like a program that just follows orders. Sure once you had AI, you could fake a personality such as by setting coefficients for desiring to do different tasks.
This project would be a lifetime en devour though. I'd be doing it myself if I had enough resources to survive on for the rest of my life. Alas, I need to try and make video games for the short term, so I can have a shot at having it made to do this science work.
I'd aim small to begin with:
3d imagination space, I'd work with as elementary as objects as I could:
Sphere
Block
Rectangle block
Then I would build complex objects out of them. Just this exercise in and of itself could lead to better and bigger things.
Even though it would be many years down the line, the same goes for when you do vision/laser range finding senses to detect the world:
You'd have a really elementary room, like factories. Modern day robots do vision detection, but on a limited number of things to view: Holes to put screws in mainly. So start with just a room with some spheres and blocks in it, and see if the AI can properly observe what is going on. You don't even need a body, just observe what happens in the room.
To me, AI seems very ambitious, but at least there is a plan to do it. Some people can't even grasp that AI is doable. But it is.
A: Write an imagination space that understands natural language.
B: Do vision detection algorithms that map real world objects to imagination space.
C: Have someone build for you a robot that performs any number of functions, slap the AI in, and you're set.
Mind you imagination space and vision detection algorithms might take a man 50 years to do on his own if he is even capable of doing them at all. You'd really think someone like DARPA or something would be working on this and crank it out in 20 years with a crack team of programmers. And hey maybe they are for all we know:P
God spoke to me
Do that and you will be seen as an upstanding and moral character, at least by those who don't pay for software !! Like yourself. Seems only fitting.
There is a lot of modelling you can do on water levels that uses rainfall, erosion, climate models. This modelling is not just useful for academics, but also useful for governments that want to improve their water management.
You could go and model the decline of rain forests. There are many agencies that keep track of this. These are not acadamic jobs either.
And of course you could go into modelling the climate or dynamics of ecosystems (how do amounts of organisms change in time).
All of these topics are very challenging and very relevant for society.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Mechanical simulations in:
Heat and CFD
FEM for mechanical resistance of parts
Dynamic programming/operational research
Electrical simulations (antennas, or just circuit simulations)
how long until
I find great fault in your medical ethics. You must accept that these things will happen sooner or later, with or without you. And when that happens the animal testing you are opposed of will happen. Without you, this is most likely to happen slower, which means your "ethics" only buys more human deaths who are waiting for the inevitable, but it didn't happen fast enough.
Hope you don't want to have kids.
is the hype in medical and industrial devices. it involves datamining techniques to discover and report a possible future fault in a device. the end effect is tha for example a CT scanner has 99% uptime and a much lower chance of something going wrong during a patient scan. This stuff is being implemented for assembly lines offshore wind farms, AC units, airplanes, pretty much anything...
That's my suggestion. GPU computing is just a tool. I suggest CS, areas such as computer vision or AI. You can make plenty of money, you might have trouble avoiding defense applications, but I'm sure its possible, the field is very broad. You probably need a Master's or PhD in CS if you don't have one.
You say academia pays in degrees, not dollars. Obviously, academics get paid by universities. Why not look into areas of pure science where computing could be helpful?
If you're looking for butt-loads of money then it's probably time to get off your ethical high-horse anyway.
It very hard not to be part of the problem. I struggle with this myself. It might be better to work for a co-operative or a non-profit, but they are often low-pay. If that's not an option, perhaps you can start a company or a co-operative yourself. Not wanting to go there, it's probably better to work for a small company than a large one, because the larger they get the more corrupt and less innovative they often are.
How about medical devices? Things that help and monitor old people and of that kind? Or some inventions to help traffic flows or some other kind of streamlining that actually make things better? You could also consider competing with existing companies that are taking a cut from something and just making it better and taking a smaller cut. That would leave more money for the consumers or governments or whoever is paying for the cut.
Small companies and startups often work on new innovative things and not all of their inventions are evil. They are often better working places in other ways as well. However, it's almost impossible to find a company that can only do good things. The economy is interconnected and there is almost no way of escaping the things that many do and it's quite likely that your company needs to work w/companies that aren't as high-minded as you might be.
There are many variables to this thing and nothing is perfect. When considering the environmental impact, human/labour/animal rights and not ripping off your customers and actually creating something of social value it gets so complicated that you cannot expect to find anything that would be completely satisfactory. Try to look for a lesser evil, a local maximum, if you will and then work to try to make it just a bit better.
And finally, it would actually help if you moved into a country that spends its taxes to build a better society rather than its military. Get a job in Scandinavia, for example. Just doing that would address many of things mentioned above, because we actually have useful laws up here, a working democracy where environmental issues are addressed and labour rights are honoured.
People should vote w/their feet and this doesn't only go for companies, it goes for countries, as well. I dunno if you have a family, but we actually have free schools and universities up here as well as free health care and so forth, but naturally you have to pay taxes to pay for them. However, your overall quality of life is much better this way and the societies are much better because of lower income disparity. How does a 37.5 hour work week sound to you like and actually getting paid for overtime? How about a 5 week vacation? The list goes on and on. I doubt making a few dollars more actually makes the equation more profitable, overall.
If you further consider that I belong to a union and I'm a member of a red/green left alliance party and this makes me no less valued at my workplace you should come to see how different things can be. It is normal to belong to a labour union up here.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
I fail to see why it would be unethical to work for a pharmaceutical company. Drugs improve the quality of people's lives and save them outright in some instances. Even if there is animal testing involved, the immediate question is does the availability of high quality modelling tools reduce the amount of testing required on live subjects. My guess is that it would. Therefore what's unethical about that? And pharmaceuticals are only one aspect of medicine. I'm sure there is plenty of need for physic s simulation in orthopedic, podiatrics, prosthetics and so on.
You think you're a more moral man then Einstein?
When discussing Ethics, Schrödinger's Quantum Cat should be applied (and at the same time, not applied). The issue is so quantumly entangled that you will end up being both simultaneously Ethical and Unethical.
You might as well conjure up an enraged Werner Heisenberg armed with an ethical/unethical electric mosquito swatter. Although he thinks he knows where that ethical/unethical mosquito is, every time he tries to swat it, the little bastard changes position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc. So poor Werner needs to scratch his head again, and think over what is ethical and unethical again.
. . . or maybe he needs to scratch his head and not scratch it simultaneously.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
People who look for oil or shale use hpc all that but then you'd probably consider that bad.
The universe can only be experienced through a single life, no more, no less, so the destruction of any one life is the destruction of an entire universe of experience. For that reason, the "badness" of that death is infinite.
Taking the two implicit premises as true (infinity of the universe and uniqueness of experience), the "infinity of experience" conclusion is fallacious. The universe may be infinite, but any one person's experience is not necessarily so. In fact, I would tend to think personal experiences are finite and unequal.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's.
Animal testing has saved human lives for decades. People against animal testing say that we can use computer models to test drugs. Where, exactly, do they think the data for those computer models are going to come from? It doesn't magic itself into existence.
And that's not even mentioning that the computer models we have are woefully incomplete.
Animal testing is worthwhile science and saves millions of lives in the long run. To say this is unethical and should be stopped means the deaths of millions due to medicine that is never researched.
Where are your so-called "ethics" now, OP?
--
BMO
Ever considered things such as automotive, aerospace or nautical research&development?
I work for an institute which does fundamental research on naval vessels and we develop loads of software which can compute flows and pressures on ship hulls and the likes, as well as predict/calculate performance. We have several scientific clusters, are starting to develop CUDA-based software for grid processing and such. So I'd say plenty of opportunities, you just need to look for them.
I am writing simulation software for both the medical context and the financial business. I am also an idealist like you.
My project for the medical business is the massive parallel simulation of drug trials. These are simulated first to optimise the frequency with which patients visit the doctor (too often = high cost, not often enough = risk of overdose and adverse effects) and the length of the study. It certainly falls in the category of HPC (it is currently running on a 256-core cluster).
Sure, in the end it's just about saving money for drug trials, but this money is then spent on doing more R&D and maybe finding more drugs to help humanity. It is certainly a Good Thing and my part of advancing our species.
The other project is to assess the financial risk of giving small loans to poor people (consumer credit). Sure, it is challenging on a technical level, but it gives less payback in terms of 'advancing the human species' and is in a more ethical grey zone. Maybe the money gained from the interests of these loans ends up in good R&D, but it might well end up being invested in arms trade or oil companies as well.
So I would say: please, go on to a carreer in Medical simulations! You are actually lowering the amount of testing on animals. On top of that, you will even get paid at the end of the month (unlike gaming or entertainment). Doing fluid simulations for the latest Sprite commercial is probably even more challenging, but a lot more volatile and a dog-eat-dog world in terms of job security.
I know a person who works for a private company in Houston forecasting hurricanes and their potential damage. They are very heavy in HPC. Although they have some insurance companies as clients, their main contracts are with the oil industry that have many installations in Texas to worry about. Plus there are many building firms that want to estimate how much resources they have to allocate to fix things quickly.
Animal testing is there to avoid testing on humans. Would you rather have poor humans as victims ? That is what I consider inhumane.
Banks gives money to help people in need, and to help build companies providing jobs. Basicly they are doing good as well. Without banks, society would stop working, and everybody would live in hos own small 20 mile circle, not getting anything from outside.
Defence industry I can understand you don't like. But if you write code for a missile defense system, or a terrorist detection unit, would that really be that bad ?
Of course there is also the option of becoming an independent contractor, then you can pick contracts after your ethics, and write iOS apps to make a living when there are no clients.
Here are two open positions in a both ethical and ambitious company (I work here myself). Of course it requires that you are willing to move to Denmark, but to prove my point this they should still do... http://www.job-support.dk/ads/show.asp?id=152235 http://www.job-support.dk/ads/show.asp?id=152236 PS.We also have development in other locations worldwide (but don't know of any open positions).
1) There are medical projects whose explicit aim is to reduce the need for animal model testing.
2) Academia pays pretty well in CS. Your salary there will have 6 figures and start with 2, maybe 3 if you're sufficiently talented. You won't make a ton more than that unless you get lucky at a startup or go into finance. As far as I've seen, neither medical nor defense actually pays better than academia.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The presence of evil does not imply it's necessity.
While it's possible that animal testing has contributed to medical science in the past, these days it's mostly done in the name of developing pharmaceutical products of dubious social value. I would propose to you that by your equation, any such testing would be highly unethical. Especially when you consider that a lot of the drugs developed ultimately do more harm than good.
While your position about defense projects might make sense historically, it's hard to argue that contemporary projects, like UAVs are justified.
Banking, likewise, could have been said to be justified in the past. These days, though, it's pretty clear that it's just a bunch of assholes trying to make a quick buck and screw everyone else over.
All of these industries (pharmaceuticals, defense, and banking) seemed reasonable in the past. If you can't see today that they are totally evil, you probably never will.
There's this rumor that Mr. Rogers was a sniper in Vietnam. These kind of rumors gain traction easily because people want to believe they are true, as if Mr. Rogers being a sniper somehow makes their depravity more justifiable. If you think there's never been a society that valued morality and did not celebrate violence and depravity and injustice, you just haven't looked hard enough, or you haven't believed in what you found.
Modelling nuclear reactions for Thorium reactor research?
Perhaps you could develop a third-party library for video games, something that uses CPU and (optionally) GPU as well, be it physics, game AI, or graphics related. You could develop it as a hobby like before and later see how sales go.
For example, I have seen SpeedTree licensed in many games including AA+ titles, so they must make some money. A planet engine providing huge, planet-sized playgrounds would be another example. Or, if you don't want to avoid graphics altogether you could write a massive, highly portable and configurable AI library, i.e. tens of thousands of actors following complex plans in parallel.
Heh, don't feel so bad working for the military, a lot of the R&D stuff they do makes sense. Training sims keep their people coordinated without burning resources in live-fire exercises. A lot of their command and control mentality is actually flipping the old hierarchy upside down and pushing the "power to the edge" where the people on the front lines are getting more information and making decisions themselves. Yeah, part of the military exists to employ people to push around our neighbors as part of some political circus, but that's not the part you'll be dealing with or even supporting in any conceivable way.
That said, after saving up a chunk of money I moved out of the military-industrial hotbed and took a job in the gaming industry on an edutainment sim. Yes, the volatility sucks, but I'm having a lot of fun and get to work on more interesting projects which I have much greater personal control over.
Inevitably, I expect the gaming industry to use me up and spit me out, so I kinda expect to start freelancing in green technology development in the future. I'm not exactly sure in the specifics, but I am certain that there's a ton of inefficiency in the way people live and work, and a maybe a decent pile of ethical money to be made optimizing the human environmental condition once people realize it won't be so cheap / easy to simply expand and sprawl to get it "for free"
Visual Effects for the movie industry is using more and more dynamic and complex simulation systems than ever before. Using CUDA and other languages you could likely put your skills to use there and get paid reasonably well. You may have to consider moving house and city etc but the challenges can be large and enjoyable plus the goals are usually aesthetic and depending on where you work, less about money and politics. If your conscience will let you work on things towards that end then it may just be what you're looking for. It does require good communication skills and the ability to work under pressure in a team.
Things like patient monitors (bloodpressure, O2, ECG, fetal monitors) and Diagnostic machines such as X-ray machines and other imaging machines do normaly not require animal testing. But they also use complex signal processing algorithms heavily. Go looking for jobs at Philipps medial, GE, Siemens and the like.
Quite presumptuous. Right or wrong or a matter of opinion, your ethics are not mine, and therefore not "ethical." It sounds like you are some left wing guy, and I admire you for trying to walk your. But your ethics are not mine, and your assumption thereof is arrogant. As an aside, it is funny that you expect to be paid, an ethical leap for such a principled man.
My ethics say you should work for Big Pharma and the DOD. Work for you?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
You can still do the work and refuse payment!
Or consider CUDA coding for charities. YMMV.
In my last job we used a guy to do the hair / mane for the horse. I found this work very rewarding
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L8FsMJQaJs&
We also worked with Disney/Pixar to have Turtle Talk (from Finding Nemo) in several Disney theme parks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-HfSSNSnFs
Often I would see something of the Disney Animation web site. Also check Dreamworks and other studios.
Disney (I see the CUDA coder need pop up once in a while)
https://careers.disneyanimation.com/job_groups/
nVidia themselves
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=3012318&srchIndex=1&trk=njsrch_hits&goback=.fjs_CUDA_*1_*1_I_us_*1_50_1_R_true_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2
See LinkedIn here
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=3169009&srchIndex=3&trk=njsrch_hits&goback=.fjs_CUDA_*1_*1_I_us_*1_50_1_R_true_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2
Keep looking for what will make you truly happy. Don't settle if you don't have to :-)
Hey dude! Get over yourself. Accept what is or find something else to do. You've put up too many road blocks and excuses to stop an army. You will NEVER find the perfect job. Ever! There will always be something you'll hate and you will find those things because you're looking for them. Yikes!
"My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either."
Um - you realize you are using a computer with components from a sweatshop and unpaid foreign labor - right?
I think you should consider the specific company and not the whole industry when rating ethics. There are many important, ethically sound jobs in defence/money/medical industries. And there are certainly inethical stuff going on in industries that are typically considered ethical safe.
Everybody uses broad generalizations.
Either you need to find a suitable Boinc project that you can contribute to or lower your standards a bit.
Just be aware that CUDA programming is useful for many businesses, but the problem is to sell it to them. Of course - you can't just say CUDA, you need to sell it in a way that actually is tasty to the general bean-counter and manager.
And even doing jobs for the medical industry and defense industry can be a good record to have in your CV. Not all projects are aimed at killing people or animal testing. Some of the applications you may be asked to develop may actually lower the amount of animal testing or kills.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There's some use of HPC (although usually in the powerful desktop sense, not the room full of servers sense) in civil and mechanical engineering, simulating forces on wind turbines and other big or otherwise challenging structures. That's where I'm headed in the near future.
Up until the animal cruelty non-sense...
You think the financial industry is perverse and disconnected from reality and you want nothing to do with it : OK I can understand it sounds rational.
You think the defense industry is too big, and ultimately an inefficient way to spend money, even for R&D : Fine. Destroying things is bad => Sounds reasonnable.
But you think that killing a few mices to save millions of humans from a preventable death is bad : WTF ! ?
Dude your "ethical" position won't allow you to do anything.
I mean there are many reason why one would refuse to work for big pharma, but animal cruelty is WAYYYYYYY down that list.
Two keys to life: Have fun and try not to be an asshole.
Which is something you're obviously still working on.
I faced this very question right at the start of my IT career, in 1968. I had been absolutely against arms manufacture, but was given a chance to move from chemistry/thermodynamics (working in the development of domestic gas burners) to a programming job in aerospace. I have loved aeroplanes since I was 5, an avid SF reader, and going from a "budget" of 30 minutes of mainframe time per week (that was FORTRAN so included compile, test, run) to being 100% programming in technical problems was like being invited to the best party ever. I was going to have to accept a small pay cut, but that didn't matter a bit. Then I realized that every line of code would be used for military aircraft as much or more than for civil projects. It was a long night of the soul, but I decided to take the job. I am so glad I did, not least because I found that most of the military people (real aircrew) were the real anti-war guys. They were the ones most concerned about reducing "collateral damage", and pushing for more accurate delivery of - well - death.
I think we did a good job. Today's wars are still terrible, but compared with conflicts such as WW2 they are actually more controlled, especially when hi-tech systems are used. I am older and wiser now, and doubt that we will ever see an end to war, but I do believe that armed conflict is getting "cleaner", at least when developed countries are involved. If we get more precise systems then we should be able to bring conflicts to a quicker end, with less damage to civilian areas and the environment.
So my advice is to reflect on the outcome of improving technology by better simulation and then decide on each job offer as it comes. This is true whatever area you look at, the arms industry is investing in "non-lethal" systems, the drug companies in simulation and "in vitro" testing, so both of these provide chances for really good jobs in which you can make a positive difference to the world.
I suspect that this might lose me some karma, but I think that gaming is probably the least ethical area (killing things should never be fun, even in a virtual world), and I personally would never work in the financial sector, but then that's the ethical dilemma we all face.
nec sorte nec fato
I would say that the first thing to realise is that computers are not important. If you want to get a job in high performance computing, then it is the application that is important. You need to understand *what* it is that you are trying to achieve, as well as the tool you are using to get the job.
So, for example, most of the people working on HPC in meterology have some understanding of meterology. I am a bioinformatician; I have no qualifications or training at all in computing science. But I do have a PhD in genetics. So, the question that I would ask is, what do you want to do with the computer?
In terms of ethics, I agree that it is good to work on something that you are happy with at all levels, but the world is a tangled, and interconnected place. I would share your concerns with working for the arms industry. And some actions of the pharmas can be pretty nasty. However, saying "I don't want to work in a pharma because someone, somewhere down the line *might* do animal research as a result"; true, but, I think that they have to live with their consciences. Someone down the line might also not do animal research as a result. If you want to do HPC, you are likely to be working for a largish company; and large companies are, by definition, large enough that at least one person working for them is likely to be doing something pretty unpleasant.
One interesting aspect of your post is the way you have summarized your ethical restrictions and constraints.
Another interesting aspect of your post is the implied view that you feel many jobs are available to you and these jobs are not OK because of your ethical restrictions.
The Slashdot editorial format is very limited but it sounds like you are using ethics as a way to wall yourself off from several classes of employment.
I would say, revisit your ethical ideas. Ethics is more than a process to wall yourself off from the ambiguities and pain of the world. Ethics is a search for truth. Search is a verb. Go to job interviews, find out all about the kind of projects you might work on. Continue your search for truth.
I don't think you are ready yet for the ethical market. It is unethical to make a decent pile of money. It is even more unethical to pretent to do this on an ethical basis.
...is what I thought it said. Hooray.
Then he would be responsible for even more deaths as the global population explosion will lead to billions of more people being given birth and consequently dying due to too little food and living space.
Whereas military career might help abort all excess births in the first place and thus save billions from both their deaths and births.
So, do you want to cause the problems or pre-empt them?
I myself stick to purely theoretic work and never actually program anything. So teaching might be your line of work...
Why not try a charity such as the BIll and Melinda Gates Foundation? or anything associated with population studies, disease research (both infectious and genetic) and climate science?
All very worthy, all with scad loads of data that need processing.
Give your attitude you would not be of much use to anyone.
Ever considered astronomy?
I suppose this is due to having practically zero time to explain yourself, but your ethics seems almost arbitrary. I can see one wanting to avoid military work due to the possibility that your work might kill people, but what's wrong with finance and medicine? Several other people in the thread have brought up medicine, but I haven't seen any defense of finance.
Now yes, I know that much finance work out there today is pretty nasty, especially stuff like HFT. That said, finance doesn't have to be unethical. It's not an inherently bad thing. At its core, finance is about bringing people together so they can do more together than they could do apart. Good investment changes lives for the better, and is much more reliable than charity because there are many more people willing to lend money than give it outright.
For instance, my mother is a small business owner, doing what she loves for a living. Without enough capital to have started her business, she never would have gotten off the ground and thus would be stuck in some dead end job she hates, and at this point we would have lost our home as my father's income fell dramatically soon after we moved here.
Not all finance work is unethical, it's just a matter of finding a financial institution that tries to do ethical work. I've heard some good things about the field of microfinance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfinance I'm not sure how HPC fits into that particular subfield, but I'd imagine the various microfinance players can use algorithmic work just like any other financial institution.
By the way...you will never find a job where you are not hurting people in some way. Military kills. Medicine has errors and experimentation. Finance must be hard on hopeless cases so others in need may be helped with limited resources and they need to support themselves somehow. Entertainment saps peoples' time and money. Engineering has failures, like bridge collapses and airplane crashes. Mining involves worker deaths, environmental damage, and often exploitation of locals. Agriculture massacres animals, puts bad things into peoples' bodies, and causes environmental damage. Academia comes pretty close to being harmless, but the things you think up may have massive implications (after all, atomic bombs came out of academia) and the resources you consume could help elsewhere. Even charities have administrative waste and need to constantly find people to extract money out of. It doesn't matter what the field is, you'll be doing harm to someone in some way. In this kind of situation, you can't focus excessively on the negatives...you have to look at the balance between the good you are doing and the bad you are doing. Ethically you should strive to have the most positive impact when both good and bad are taken into consideration.
One last thing, you also need to keep in mind that people naturally get paid better when they do unethical work for someone. Doing clearly unethical things is a downside for most people, so the market price for such work is higher in much the same way that the market price is higher for work that is undesirable for other reasons (like jobs where one is in danger or away from home for extended time periods). Lower worker supply drives up the price of labor. So don't look at the high wages given by those need you to do unethical things for them and think you can get paid the same for ethical work. Look for someone doing ethical work that can use your skills first and deal with wages later...they will be lower. If ethics are really important to you then you will be happier in such a job even at a lower wage. The feel-good of doing ethical work is part of your compensation.
In any case, if my argument didn't change your mind...what about working for one of the national laboratories? I was considering working for ORNL due to academic connections I had and they seem to pay a lot better than ordinary academia while doing lots of academic-type work. They also have amazing
What do you mean "software Jobs"? Does mind uploading works already?
And how, on Earth, can he be ethical?
Have you considered astronomy or sub-atomic physics?
For example, Kepler, which examines a vast amount of data trying to find slight dips in stars' brightness to detect exoplanets. Contact the folks at planethunters.org for info and ideas.
Most any large-scale telescope's operation entails finding needles of information in haystack of data. VLT, SKA, etc.
Also take a look at particle physics ala CERN and the search for the Higg's particle. Again, analysis of vast amounts of data that I'd think CUDA skills would be of great help.
For starters, I'd search Wikipedia for telescopes and spider out from there on all the different kinds, and the projects they are used on. Ditto for sub-atomic particles.
Best wishes on your pursuits!
Our software helps save lives - used in airports, schools, across cities, and at large commercial sites around world. Where I work we build enterprise video security, our client application completes video rendering in the GPU via CGFx. We need to improve our video analytics (motion detection, face tracking, recognition, people counting, dropped object detection...) - I want to move it to OpenCV / CUDA ideally supporting scalable TESLA clustering, just need someone else who knows that world to help lead development. Parent company is one of worlds largest, we're a very small office in Austin always looking for talent. Windows/C++, Linux/Python. Bunch of ex video game developers and security industry veterans, and several people in this office with same ethics concerns, myself included.
... but we still arn't 100% sure of how neurons work so while simulating them in a computer might be useful for AI I fail to see how it can be at all useful for medical tests.
You forgot the energy sector -- in particular oil exploration. They have big needs for high-performance computing as well.
But then, they're evil and they pollute the planet.
I guess the only thing that you can do while not working in any of those industries directly is be a teacher.
Pesticides , herbicides, non renewable peat being used up just to grow pretty ickle flowers that will die within a few months anyway.
Etc.
Has plans to distrubute Freedome to every human being on the planet....sounds pretty ethical to me
http://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-InnovationUnderAusterityf2c2012Keynote
http://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-OpenWorldForumKeynote2010
If you're willing to stay with ambitious, but move out of high performance, join edX. edX just raised $60 million, so can afford to hire people at industry salaries. The goals are lofty -- educate 5 billion people, and deeply understand how people learn. It's a not-for-profit -- everything will be released as open source and done for the public good. The dev team has the likes of Ike Chuang, Piotr Mitros, with consulting from Jerry Sussman, Chris Terman, Jacob White, and a number of other well-known personalities.
You really can't get more ambitious or more ethical than that.
If you're in California, the mirror organization is, of course, Khan Academy.
look into the field of Computation Science and Engineering, that's what you want.
You're still supporting an organization dedicated to killing people.
Although it does not have to be this way the term business and ethical rarely should be anywhere near each other these days. We have been stuck in a capitalist loop where businesses set out from the day one to be immoral, unethical, and frequently criminal.
That also applies to academia but it is harder to spot. One clue is to look at how many accrediting bodies exist. They exist to confuse the issue of quality in education. Witness also the political strife when having a public school rating system is proposed. States and counties do not want there schools measured or held to a standard.
For a person whose primary concern is ethics you'll need to start your own business and you'll need to sell it before it gets to big. Once you get size elements within the business will start to do nasty things and it is very hard to ferret all of it out.
There are good people in the open source community trying to do good for large numbers of people. Some might be earning a living and chances are many are not.
This borders on medical, but you could work on brain simulations / interpretations. Good for people who are paralyzed to have smart people trying to fix them. Often takes a lot of heavy simulations.
Ideally, I'd like to get paid for this kind of work, but I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either.
Does your conscience allows you to use GPS, the microwave oven, the Internet and wireless technology? Does your conscience allows you to live in a financially successful society (despite the recent set-backs) which permits you to be a well-paid middle class person with a high standard of living as a rewards of your professional and academic efforts?
There is a difference between a conscience based on educated information, and there is conscience based just on emotion alone. Or call it rationalization if you will, but if you really feel that strongly (and I think you are being rather subjective in an emo type of way), then your chances to a challenging, rewarding job with those skills outside of those fields are almost nil.
I'm with a team at Philips Medical in Cleveland that does image reconstruction for CT scanners. We use CUDA for our HPC stuff right now. I think we have some openings.
I don't know exactly what you mean by the medical industry tests on animals, maybe drugs, but we don't scan animals for our tests. Although, we do keep our interns in the test bay area where they might get some extra ionizing radiation.
Dear Mr Sanctimonious
How dare you imply that:
1.) All medical researchers and scientists are somehow tainted and unethical
2.) You're so great that we need your whiny ass.
I wouldn't let you within 100m of my damn lab.
Yours sincerely
A computational biologist
"push around", what cowardly white washing bullshit, they don't push around our neighbors, the motherfuckers kill them.
I believe for you its likely to remain a hobbyist niche - high performance computing is of course of value to many, many industries but you have placed a constraint on it that makes it difficult to satisfy what otherwise would be an easy to meet requirement. I'm not sure how far your ethical framework extends, but the hints in your OP suggest that its extremely important to you - that is something worthy of respect as you have placed limits on your own development / personal income for matters of principle. May I suggest the following: Go to a more niche site that deals in your field and ask the same question - you are likely to get more specific answers, and perhaps a satisfactory outcome to your dilemma. Also AskSlashdot is like wrapping yourself in deer meat and wandering into a wolf den - you may find the answers discouraging (although I have seen some great posts this time around). I wish you all the best in your hunt.
AMD is massively ramping up their HSA and OpenCL teams, and is very challenged in finding individuals in this sector. Go to their careers website and search for CUDA, the relevant experience will help you get a job in the dev or QA side (both places they need to fill).
In this economy, with millions of people out of work?
Just shut it and get a job. People like you really need a whack upside the head.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I have fairly similar technical expertise to you and work on effects for video.
Forget the ethical aspect, working in defense is the worst thing an ambitious person can do. You think postal workers are bad? You should try working in an industry where 95% of the people used to be in the military and they can't let go of military structure. Nothing is worse than "taking commands" from the idiot civilian you work with, who has cobbled together enough credits from his time in the military (yes, I said "his" because women are completely shunned...see "can't let go of military structure" comment above) to get a fake ass degree from some diploma mill.
I've met more talented people at my new job in 1 year than I met in 17 working in defense.
What you've described seems like a dead on description for computational materials science. Which is still a very active area with plenty of investment for both chemical companies and semiconductor companies. My work is in predictive models for ion sputtering, but there is a ton of really cool stuff being done in other fields. So yeah, ethical exists at least its no more unethical than using computers; without which GPU programming would be difficult.
Everyone that pays taxes does that.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I am not sure how you got to be in your position with the objections that you have. I could understand it if you had written "I am starting out in this field and I have some ethical concerns" but you have been doing it for quite some time
Lower those limits or change work.
I'm a career programmer that has dabbled with machine learning, map/reduce, big data, and would also love to make it my career.
Taking out defense and finance, and I think you'll find that you're taking out most of the jobs that consume these services. I assume you include the NSA under defense, but if not, they have tons of positions in this area.
There are other options, though. Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, and Google (among many others in the tech industry) hire lots of people to do these things. I imagine that sales and marketing are beginning to consume these services, although I am not familiar with that industry, nor do I know of any companies using such techniques in that field. Although you discount the medical field (due to animal testing?), you should look at the gene sequencing industry. They hire tons of people in these fields, and gene sequencing is pretty far removed from animal testing. Supply chain analysis is another area that hires people to do this sort of stuff--the airline industry, for example, has many companies that use big data to perform pricing analysis, flight scheduling, etc.
The hard part is finding such field that is close enough to one you already have experience in. It's tough to break into a new field doing this type of work, unless you're coming straight out of university with a degree in big data.
--Be human.
Companies that provide analytic software for business and government are getting into high-performance computing in a big way. "Big data" is the new big thing.
With your skills and ethical plans, medical industries would be the perfect place for you. They don't do the animal testing for fun, but because there is no software to simulate the effects of the drugs. Testing on animals takes a while and is expensive so that they are of course working on methods to computerize those experiments. And since your skills are in this area, you could get a well paid job AND work towards a future with less testing.
Concentrate on doing a good job at whatever you do and you'll be morally ahead of most people.
Get some pysch help for all the hippie junk you have got in your head.
Plenty of finance jobs are ethical. Work for fraud or anti-money laundering (plenty of high-intensity data work there). Or work for risk management and stop the bad guys.
At lots of institutions risk management is a joke (see JPM's CIO blow-up). But at the GOOD ones, risk management has a seat at every table. It's up to YOU to make sure those a**hole traders aren't going to explode the bank and lose their client's money. Not to mention the shareholders.
Seems pretty ethical to me.
If you still feel bad, decide what an "appropriate" amount of money is for yourself, and give the rest to charity every month.
seriously.
If you can't figure out a career for yourself then perhaps you are not the hot shit programmer you think you are; you assume ethical companies would even want your skills.
Maybe there is an job opening at the smug factory.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There are plenty of companies developing general CAE solutions and on that field there really exists a need for programmers capable of implementing large scale FE analysis using parallel computing. That could be an option. Also your skills would be highly appreciated in weather and marine simulations.
Try the nuclear safety field. The NRC develops simulation codes expressly for analyzing nuclear reactors to ensure they operate safely. NRC does some development internally (they are even hiring right now, although they are entry level, general engineer positions) and it contracts with the national labs like Sandia, Oak Ridge, Argonne, Idaho, and PNL, as well as some commercial companies. They even have had an incubator effort internally to look at applying CUDA-based parallelism to some of their methods.
Only when life does not have a whole lot of other priorities can you afford to split hairs like this.
yeah, you are so special that employers have to accommodate you at any cost. you are so moral that you have not even harmed a fly in your real life otherwise. accepting a paycheck from the normal software industry might be the first in your life so you want to avoid that.
no thanks. please keep to your glass house. there are plenty of ppl around the world with a family and kids and bills who would want that job and money.
go without a job for a couple of years and then let's hear your views again?
Possible industries are gaming, digital movies
Also biotech
I think your conscious is a little bit skewed. The defense company I work for (and you could say this about many of them) creates products that protect our warfighter, not kill the other guy (unless it's absolutely necessary.) All of the products I work on can't even kill people and are also mathematically ambitious such as radar warning detectors. The defense industry gets a bad wrap because people think we're all mindless programmers who write software to kill people when it's actually nothing like that...
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?"
how is this even a technical question? The guy is trying to impose his warped sense of ethics on others and just because he is doing development his question gets posted?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You might consider joining ThoughtWorks (if you can get in.)
http://www.thoughtworks.com/mission-and-values
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ThreePillars.html
They are a global IT consulting/custom software development company with offices in 10 countries.
ThoughtWorks organizes their business around three pillars, the third being "Advocate passionately for social and economic justice." That means that the company generally avoids the same sort of work you would like to avoid AND seeks out work that will make the world a better place.
They also do a lot of cutting edge stuff... they were pioneers in agile and continuous integration 10 years ago when both of those were considered kooky by the mainstream.
I don't know how much --if any-- "mathematically ambitious" work they've had using CUDA but you could be the guy who brings that capability to their customers.
My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either
Get married, have kids. I Stopped having a conscience a couple of months after the wedding
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Dear, running a cluster of processors at peak load for long duration's consumes more than your fair share of energy.
Please consider all the lives, give up computers and become a spoon.
Maybe a novelty spoon so no organic matter shall ever have to suffer as a consequence of your spoony nature.
It's all that's left to you but it should be enough. If you haven't reproduced and don't intend to then the rest of us will be content to let you live.
Since you have many rules which appear to be arbitrary to an outsider, perhaps you should be a consultant? That's the only way you can control what you work on. I know. I've been tricked.
As a new college graduate, I didn't want to work on military projects. My father was career military. Finally, I found one that sounded cool, fun, challenging that would make a difference to the world. I accepted, then 3 months later, they handed me a set of forms to get a DoD clearance. This was after I'd signed a yr lease for an apartment, bought a new car, found a girlfriend and had settled into the job. This was a smallish town with limited employment opportunities. For the next yr, I did programming for the USAF on contract with no hope to get out. I did my job. It wasn't on anything that appeared to be a weapons system at the time. Now I'm not so sure.
The only way to really control what you work on is to be a consultant AND have enough money to walk away from any job you don't like. If you still **need** to work for money, I think you are screwed. Every company that makes money does something that they would rather not have on the front page.
Good luck.
That's pretty much how it goes. We're trapped in this system unless we form new societies. The world is not at peace and therefore all industry reflects that. Thinking outside the box as much as possible and being a good person is all I have to aim for, and trying to spread alternative ways of doing good. In a corrupt and bad world, I think being virally good is all I have to shoot for.
You can't simulate with any certainty how a living thing will react in toto to a new drug--if that were possible we'd save ourselves the hundreds of millions currently spent in clinical testing and we'd just run simulations. But there are things you can usefully simulate even if you lack a full understanding of the biological processes involved. For example, it's fairly routine to simulate a drug's pharmacokinetics based on animal data and analogy to other known drugs. This helps us choose doses for clinical trials, it helps us figure out how many patients we need to test in order to produce robust results. Nothing about this is worthless--good sample size estimates minimize unnecessary patient risk and save money.
I work in the HPC world, and there's plenty of interest for these skills outside of defense and financial. I agree that a lot of it is gov't funded, but locations like NCSA, which are in the process of finalizing acceptance of a huge system from Cray that has GPUs, some of the DOE national labs, or even NASA, are always looking for people like this and have mostly pure scientific agendas. Also, NVidia has been posting a lot lately looking for applications folks.
There's plenty of interesting work, it just takes a little to find it. Check out HPC specific job boards, like the HPCWire Job Bank, for example, or check out the jobs pages of places like NCSA, the DOE labs (LBL, LLNL, etc), NASA, or companies like Cray, NVidia, even Intel, since MIC is coming soon, and will likely be similar to a GPU in how it's programmed.
^ this
One of the big reasons I've stuck around academia so far is that once you have tenure, you can study whatever you want and get paid for it. And until then, you're studying things that are generally harmless but might end up being genuinely useful. It's never too late to head back to school and grab a PhD.
If your concerned about the ethics of other programmers, why not get a job at the free software foundation and produce freely available software libraries for computer processing and graphics works, that has to be the most ethical i can think of at the moment.
First, you're an idiot. To answer your question, though, how about weather simulations. Also astrophysics. Buddy of mine researches black holes; all he seems to do is run long-running cpu-intensive simulations. Not sure how you'd attach yourself to a research group without being a researcher, though.
Computational fluid dynamics for the auto industry? Or do you consider them 'evil' as well?
You may want to take another look at academia.
I work in defense, and the academics who are under contract with us make more money than any of our internal people. They're actually off our scale and require a special memo justifying their large salaries. (Go ahead and read that again: I have to write memos to justify high professor salaries who are off the scale for defense contractors.)
So, if you want to make a lot of money, academia (as long as you're not a student), is a great place. You'll still end up doing work for defense, so if you feel bad about things like weather prediction, disaster relief planning, biofuels and water purification, you should go somewhere else. Of course, if you feel bad about taking advantage of young people, shady immigration policies, abuse of the public trust and an entitlement lifestyle you also shouldn't consider academia. Maybe finance would be better.
Where are you man? are you working as janitor in UCLA now? c'mon man the gang here is waiting to go party!
Subby, you've overlooked a fairly important market segment. There are plenty of companies out there who either develop CAE analysis applications for exactly the platforms you're on, or companies using those applications. Aerospace, energy (oil, gas, coal, biomass, nuclear, hydro, wind), heavy equipment manufacturing, and chemical processing are just a few of the market segments that come to mind.
You could do the work, and then just...give the money to me. I will handle the guilt for you.
Then carving up mouse brains is also worthless, since they are basically a simulation of human brains. That's assuming there is some sort of mouse neurological dis-order that they are trying to fix.
You consider finance, defense, and medical work unethical?
Sorry man, but the poor, conquered, and sick aren't exactly reliable employers.
Try oil industry, the biggest HPC user you didn't mention among the non-ethical! Seriously, the biotech industry and field is much more than the wet work on innocent bunnies, but the work may be of academical in nature. The nautical, energy, space and various software tools industries have all uses for simulation capabilities.
First is weather/climate modelling. If you include planets other than earth, there are a number of organizations doing climate models. Based on the news articles I've seen, lots of them are doing their sims on cheap clusters and/or GPUs. In the US, the first two places that come to mind are NOAA and NASA. For both groups, there are several agencies under their umbrella, each agency having more than one project on the go.
The second is working on a render farm. There are several game companies, CGI and computer animation companies that are getting into very intensive crunching for their modelling and simulation work.
Third, what about very large engineering firms? The kind that build damns, the Chunnel or other huge scale projects. They do a fair bit of modeling, both the structures they build and the environment interactions with that structure require some fairly heavy number crunching.
Fourth, don't be so quick to dismiss Pharmaceutical companies. Yes, virtually all of them do animal testing and yes, a small number of trials are test-to-destruction or test-kill-dissect, requiring numerous lab animals to be sacrificed. However; I have a couple of things to think about regarding that.
1) First, the reason why pharmaceutical companies are getting into the kind of stuff that interests you is so they can reduce, maybe some day eliminate animal testing. If you worked for them, your contribution would help them reduce the need for such tests.
2) Are you a strict Vegan? If you are willing to eat meat, wear leather, use antibiotics or vaccines to save your life, you are already on the same moral level as the researcher who induces cancer and/or tests drugs in lab rats. You are benefiting from the exploitation and deaths of animals every day. I grant you that taking a medicine to save your life is rather different than accepting a pay cheque, but I submit that the person willing to take the medicine while looking down his moral nose at those whose work made it possible is in fact on a lower ethical level than the researcher.
3) I certainly agree that an animals life has value and that we have a duty to preserve the health and welfare of the animals who rely on us for their very existence. However; I value human life even more. I would willingly kill a room full of adorable kitties and puppies if it saved the life of even one child. And the inconvenient fact that the anti-testing crowd likes to ignore is that animal testing saves FAR more lives than it costs. Banting and Best sacrificed numerous dogs, but I'll wager Leonard Thompson thought it was a worthwhile trade. (Insulin saved his life until pneumonia cut him down and pneumonia is, today, also a treatable condition rather than a death sentence thanks in part to animal testing.)
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Academia is likely your best choice for ethical work, and many of them hire developers (though usually not for HPC). And HPC is generally not an easy field to break into without an internship. But what about some of the national research institutions? They do a great deal of useful "ethical" work, and they typically have a bigger budget for HPC than academia. This assumes you're willing to move (the relocation packages are good) because they're pretty sparse. Many positions require a grad degree, but they usually only require a BS and experience for programmer/developer jobs. Some of them do defense contracts too, so ask what projects you would be working on. A few places off the top of my head:
National Center for Atmospheric Research
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Institute for Standards and Technology
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
National Center for Computational Sciences
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
San Deigo Supercomputer Center
There are quite a few others, but these are the ones I'm familiar with. It would be worth looking into these, or developer positions at a large university.
. . . the seeds are in fact the children.
. . . that's if you believe life begins at conception. The OP is clearly one of those that life begins at implantation.
(Sorry, it was too good to pass up.)
. . . the seeds are in fact the children.
. . . that's if you believe life begins at conception. The OP is clearly one of those that believes life begins at implantation.
I hate screwing up a good punch line.
Subby is using the internet, developed by DARPA. And I presume subby also using SSL and other cryptography, which also is born from the military.
And are we supposed to believe subby has never taken any medicines or had the benefit of any medical procedures? Guess you haven't had any vaccines.
Subby--you're not as ethical or as smart as you think you are.
You're still supporting an organization dedicated to killing people.
Depending on which country you work for, you may view it as supporting an organization dedicated to prevention of mass murder.
The US military is controversial to many people, but it was primarily the US military that prevented the spread of Soviet Communism. How many people did the Soviet Union kill - now extrapolate that to what they could have done had they controlled the rest of the world.
Chinese communists did a lot of killing too. Perhaps the US played a role in limiting their damage too. It is tough to say because by the time the Communists came to power the US was dominant enough to contain them and we don't know how aggressive they would have been toward the rest of the world (although as China (still authoritarian but no longer communist) is growing again it is threatening one neighbor with complete conquest and making aggressive territorial claims against other neighbors).
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
With buddyglass, I also vote "you're an idiot". There's plenty of both good and bad going on in those institutions, so go sort it out instead of just simplistically writing them off in your moral tableau. I work in the military/industrial complex, on defensive systems; what's wrong with defending yourself? I came to my present career partly on such moral considerations. So, get your head out of your ass and use it to give your predilections more precise consideration.
With that out of the way, if you're so inclined, go look for creative uses of the things you've become good at. Your scenario in the OP implies doing the bidding of someone else who's doing just that...
you get drafted.
I knew I ran a risk of coming off like a sanctimonious nitwit in the original post, but was felt that I was too constrained by word count to include the standard disclaimers and admissions of hypocrisy. I fully understand the point of most of the responses: that ethics are relative, that some defense work saves lives, that some medical research saves human lives, and that, in general, compromises need to be made in order to survive.
I'm not ethically opposed to all industries that could conceivably be linked to suffering, only those industries that seem outrageously indifferent to it. Military and Big Pharma qualify: corpses are generated daily, you can literally see them. It does seem like a valuable effort to work to minimize the number of corpses generated, but I would be uncomfortable being paid by the generators themselves to do so.
Finance, at least the kind of finance that has a need for HPC, is a weirder case. It's hard to see the corpses (though they exist), but it's not hard to see that the entire "industry" is a simply a compulsory casino. I have no ethical problems with Atlantic City, because I can choose not to give them my money, but no "working man" can opt out of the economy, at the top of which-- even above governmental taxation-- sits a money-siphoning mechanism that serves no visible purpose. Sure, they pay taxes on the money they siphon, but we'd have paid more if they hadn't siphoned it to begin with. The people that work for this mechanism may not have explicitly evil intent, but many of them have illusions that they're doing something more purposeful than "getting it while the getting's good." And in my mind, that's worse.
Although I am, in fact, a vegan, I'm not a hippy, or a preachy gadfly. I've found, through years of iteration, some ethical guidelines that work for me, and I'm comfortable enough in my career that I don't need to make any further compromises. I'm very grateful for that. I don't need to change careers to survive, I'd just enjoy developing more complex software than what I currently get paid to, so I can afford (and hopefully be excused for exercising) some obnoxious ethical discrimination.
Some good suggestions have been made: environmental modeling, NASA, film effects work, energy exploration. What I'm unclear about is how one would go about finding this kind of work without prior experience in the fields. That is, I'm in my mid-thirties, and with only hobbyist/for-fun projects using HPC under my belt, am I qualified to apply for a job at NASA? Film effects sound both fun and harmless. Is that work plentiful? Does it require an extensive reel to get a foot in the door? Searches for "CUDA" and "HPC" on standard job sites haven't turned up much.
Also, I certainly didn't meant to malign academia or imply that academics don't get paid, only to point out that most of the interesting work is done by PhD candidates in pursuit of their thesis projects and by post-doctoral researchers hoping for a professorship. I only have an MS, don't feel like going back to school at this point in my life, and get the sense that non-PhDs in academia are mostly second-class citizens.
For someone with Bush in your nickname, you should be as aware as anyone that there's no connection between taxes collected and money spent. The government is using its credit card now, and with reckless abandon. Taxes only cover the minimum monthly payment.
Some employers will agree to let you refuse to work on certain projects, so if they're doing some things you like and some you don't, you might still consider working there. I knew a Jewish man who worked for a defense contractor that had a large contract to help with the Saudi naval expansion, with which he had problems. They were happy to have him around and had reached an agreement that he would never contribute to that particular project. Some employers are owned and/or run by employees. Though they might be involved in stuff you dislike, if you stick around you may be able to fix that.
Digital effects. Pixar, ILM, or one of the many smaller FX houses.
-- QED
Solve the traveling saleman problem for recycling trucks
Weather modelling? Certainly seems to require some horse power.
teach. if you don't already have a 4 year degree (and thus, easier to go back to get an education degree and credentials), you may still be able to teach at technical colleges and vocational schools with sufficient knowledge and work experience.
Companies like Masten Space Systems need developers with math skills to build guidance and control systems.
EOM.
I honestly wouldn't pay taxes to support the military at all, if I could. What I mean is that I would deduct the 99% of the Defense funding's percentage in the Federal budget from my tax liabilities and conscientiously object.
However, paying taxes in full is enforced by that very regime, because I would have to conscientiously object to all Federal income taxes on Constitutional and sovereign grounds, if it wasn't for threat of imprisonment and/or asset seizure.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
I used to work at a University doing research sponsored by the US Army, my area of expertise was high performance computing. I left to go work at a genetics research laboratory, which is becoming increasingly computationally driven. Historically a lot of our work is what one would consider "embarrassingly parallel", but the rate at which we can produce genetic data is growing exponentially. New approaches to storing and analyzing this data are needed. I've recently been dabbling in CUDA programming, and we are already using FPGAs.
While I know that even in that field there can be some ethical issues that arise, not all types of games, nor even all companies are going to be problematic.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There are real people, in the real world, who would like to walk right in to our borders, slaughter any who stand in their way, and claim our land and resources for themselves. Even if the number of such threats is low today, it could change tomorrow. Since such threats exist, we *need* defenses against them. Such defenceses must, by logical necessity, include means of killing people. As unpleasant as that may seem, to call such research "unethical" is a gross misuse of the term.
Using our defense technology to oppress the innocent would be unethical. Using it to protect the innocent is ethical. Simply having it, and improving it, is ethically neutral. Don't get caught up in extremist pacifist thinking that believes that external threats somehow vanish if we stop defending ourselves from them.
And about animal testing....
If there was a better way of gaining the biological information we need in order to protect ourselves from diseases, I am all for it. But human testing is unacceptable, leaving us with animal testing only. People die every day of diseases/injuries that we could treat if we had the knowledge. In order to save human lives, we simply *need* the knowledge, and we need it *right now.* We have no choice, we *must* do animal testing. That alone, in my opinion, justifies it ethically.
Furthermore, we can do much to keep the testing ethical (not be wasteful, use anesthetics, etc.). Killing and harming animals is horrible, but it remains the lesser of two evils.
If you cling too tightly to your moralistic high horse, to the exclusion of dealing with practical necessity, you won't find much work at all.
Not to mention that a lot of early innovation for computers was done either during war time or was a result of funding DoD projects.
That is why it is unethical to pay any taxes that you could get away with not paying.
Note: This doesn't only apply to Americans.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either. The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's. And academia pays in degrees, not dollars. So what's left? Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?"
Grow up. Seriously. Learn to separate unethical behavior from the institutions where it exists. Learn that EVERY institution and industry has its share of unethical behavior by people and by firms. Working at a financial/medical/defense firm does not make one unethical. The fact that a firm works in the finance/medical/defense industry does not make what the firm does unethical. There are ethical lines that can be crossed but that is true in EVERY industry. If you insist on avoiding any industry and company unless they have a perfect record that fits your particular ethical standards, you are going to find yourself with precisely zero options.
You think animal testing is unethical? Fine. Stop using modern medicines which don't require it. That's a choice you can make for yourself. You'll find yourself without very many options I'm afraid because medicines do need to be tested, not just on animals but on people too. There is NO way to find out if they work without this testing and this testing WILL kill people and animals. That's why it's very strictly controlled so that the net benefit significantly outweighs the risks but the risks will always be there. You can minimize the harm but you can't eliminate it without doing greater harm to the populace.
I can make similar arguments for finance (go ahead and stop banking) or defense (go ahead and live in a lawless place like Somalia) if you think they are unethical. Your choice. Just don't pretend that your ethical standards mean that I'm unethical just because I happen to be an accountant.
Choose two.
and adaptive system software. A lot of companies are using Hadoop/MapReduce/machine-learning (System-R, et al) to understand their user base in order to better serve them (to advertisers)... So, what would you rather have, ads that are irrelevant to your needs (and REALLY irritating), or those that match what your needs are?
And US Imperialism hasn't also caused the deaths of millions around the world? How many puppet regimes did the US install around the world, usually after over throwing democratically elected governments in one form or the other? How many assassinations have been done in the name of "supporting freedom"? Cop yourself on. Your white washing of history would be funny if it isn't that same attitude that is at the helm of US foreign policy and military control.
There is no -1 disagree
Since the rest of this thread is full of fail. I'll make a suggestion.
Two fields with civilian potential are companies that produce medical imaging equipment and image processing. Also potentially software radios.
NASA is investigating GPU processing for their numerical climate ands weather modeling
Okay, set your cluster to the intensive task of finding a 3-million-bit prime, and provably so. There's $100k prize for that. Set it going, and let it run in the background whenever your cluster isn't otherwise engaged. At some point, it may pay off. If you want some tips on things that can help your cluster find the answer, I might be able to discuss some prime-number factoids that could be helpful. Here's one: y = atan2[sin^2[pi*x] * PRODUCT{N=1..x} (x-N) , (x-1) * PRODUCT{N=1..x}(sin(pi*x/N))) Zero with zero slope on every prime, zero with infinite slope on every perfect square, and PI/2 or -PI/2 on every other point. There's other tips as well.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
tell that to the relatives of millions of koreans, vietnamese, and iraqis
I'm not ethically opposed to all industries that could conceivably be linked to suffering, only those industries that seem outrageously indifferent to it.
I happen to married to a physician. I also have a lot of very close friends who are involved in pharmaceutical research. Not one of them could even remotely be described as indifferent or blind to the suffering involved. Nor are any of them unaware of the conflicts of interest that exist. The reason they got involved in the first place is precisely because they hoped to do something about it. You don't have to be blind to the failings of others to be a force for good. In fact I'd say much of our economic success depends on people hoping/believing that they can do something about it.
Finance, at least the kind of finance that has a need for HPC, is a weirder case. It's hard to see the corpses (though they exist), but it's not hard to see that the entire "industry" is a simply a compulsory casino.
I won't deny that some aspects of secondary market finance bear a strong resemblance to a casino. And I won't deny that the industry attracts a disproportionate share of, for lack of a better term, greedy assholes. I really am an accountant and I think you are being too kind when you say it is "hard to see the corpses". It isn't hard at all if you know where to look. Nevertheless, the fundamental purpose of the financial industry is, like medicine, incredibly important to the proper functioning of our society. The importance of financing and economics and the flow of capital they enable to our society almost cannot be overstated. There is a lot more to the financial world than just trading stocks on the NYSE. You can do very good work in the financial world that helps a lot of people (and yourself) and it is not even especially difficult to do so ethically. Frankly the confidence in our financial system depends to a large degree on our confidence in the ethics of the people involved. Companies that lie, cheat and steal are eventually found out and punished by denying them access to capital and sometimes worse.
Regarding simulation, my first job out of college was doing engineering simulations for manufacturing companies. (my undergrad degree is in engineering) There is an ongoing need for physics simulations in all sorts of high end manufacturing. Any very large manufacturing concern will have some amount of need for simulation and many have significant R&D efforts. I'd strongly suggest looking there.
Um - you realize you are using a computer with components from a sweatshop and unpaid foreign labor - right?
That makes him part of the long term project to industrialize china out of poverty and dictatorship. It is working great but quite slow.
Okay, here's another one: surveying.
Right now, there are digital surveyer total stations out there, but they are incredibly time-intensive. I see no reason for that.
Take a typical digital camera, and take a photo of a 1" grid from several different points... and you should be able to map out the actual angles of each pixel. Either do it with a camera with a fixed lens, or do it at distance, to get what it does at x=inf. focus.
Anyhow, if you take... I have to remember this... something like 11 points, and identify each of them on 7 different pictures, you can positively identify the location of the camera in every photo, and every other location in all the photos, in 3-space.
The person doesn't have to pick the exact spot, either. Subtract off the images in the 16x16 square around each point picked, and run it through a fourier transform, and that'll tell you exactly how far off the person's click was, so that you can then find where the actual matching points are, and translate that to an angle.
All that's left is a scaling factor, and you can pick that off of standard data, like the wheelbase of a 1997 Ford F150 pickup truck.
Doing that, will then allow your program to identify the 3-D position of all points in the photo, thus yielding a highly accurate survey. Errors can help refine the camera's lens-data curve.
Point being, it would make surveying tons faster.
Go out, shoot a few photos with your phone, and send them back for analysis... and get out the survey almost instantly.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If your ethics are going to run your life, then drop the hole working for anyone and work for your self. The person says that the banking/finance places are out, the defense places are out, the medical places are out. Probably any other high paying industry would also be out due to this person's ethics. So either grow up and realize that not every company is going to do things the way you like or start your company and run it the way you like.
Wait a minute...
Last week it was unethical to move to a low-tax country to get out of one's social responsibility.
Which one is it?
One area that I haven't seen mentioned is oil and gas. Oil companies have very challenging high performance computing problems (e.g., reservoir simulation, geologic inversion). The hours are good and the salaries are very high. The industry is looking for good people and hiring like mad. I'm not sure where these companies lie on your ethics spectrum.
Who don't believe in ethics, morals, or (un-)enlightened self-interest.
I think the closest you can manage is in research. I'd *love* to work for NASA, but with budget cutting.... Consider other research institutions (I, for example, work for a federal contractor at a very much non-military site - we're, um, life sciences). There are some companies, as well: folks have mentioned gaming cos, though the hot game from the US DoD is not exactly what you want. There's non-military aerospace, or even one of the new civilian space companies.
Oh, and, of course, the chemical industry, though I don't know how you'd feel about the petrochemical industry. There's also transportation, from auto co's to mapping companies.
The market isn't as large, but there are options.
Oh, and I decided a few years ago to relocate (AGAIN, dammit!) from Chicago to DC, to support the agency I support, rather than get a third-shit, er, shift job supporting a trading firm.
mark
To say "go to a country that doesn't have one" is disingeneous at best. They don't exist. That shouldn't prevent a person from justly declaring something to be disordered, nor should it be a reason that people should approve of, support, or help disorder [sin].
"The military is comprised of a couple million citizens". No. I am assuming the poster "e buck" is speaking of the US military. The military makes it very clear that its members are slaves: specifically, the property of the U.S. government.
"I doubt that dairy farmers..." there is something to the primary purpose. We are responsible for the primary purpose of our actions, and not responsible for other peoples' misuse.
"Who are you to discriminate"... again, that is the kind of judgement we are specifically called to do. Not to condemn people, but to judge actions, and thus prevent evil, first and foremost by ourselves and our complicity.
"You benefit from the military." That is your judgement, not his. It depends on YOUR definition of benefit, not his. Who are you to decide what is in his benefit?
"...undereducated as to how..." ad hominem. I'd contend that anyone who has the courage to take a stand against the "easy out" populist view, has probably fully educated himself about the counterclaims. I'd be more inclined to think that someone who touts the easy lines, is undereducated. By I might be wrong.
"Certainly the military doesn't have to do overseas missions... " I'd disagree completely. The country that continually gets into wars batters down its economy and its political structure until it has no choice but totalitarianism -- the first of the missions on our own soil [such as the armed drones, eh?]. After that, the economy fails, and the continual wars result in the country losing a war on its own soil. Our overseas missions will directly cause us to not only "do" missions within the state, but lose them there, and watch the complete decimation of our culture.
Read Hayak, "The Road to Serfdom". If you have, and disagree, then I'll respectfully disagree with you.
If you haven't, then you should: you are undereducated.
If you choose not to, then you are undereducated by choice.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
(Retired IT worker & savings) = FALSE
No more to say
nec sorte nec fato
Thirty years ago I faced similar choices. After graduating at the top of my engineering class, I was being actively recruited by a military research organization and also by a recruiter who wanted me to teach at the Naval Postgraduate School. It's clear that many who've posted above would have had no qualms about taking either position, but I knew I'd have trouble sleeping at night. I'm a hardware guy, and I ended up taking a job at a major manufacturer of test equipment. (I also had an offer from a telecom company.) On the plus side: I was well paid, and I got to learn my craft from a lot of very smart people. On the minus side: I wasn't changing the world and I had little passion for what I was doing. After about a decade, I quit and reevaluated what I could do with my training and experience. That led me to a job designing equipment for environmental monitoring. I make a little less money in this industry but with my experience still six figures. There are compensations: Nearly 20 years later, I still wake up wanting to go to work.
Think carefully about what you could work on that would a) get you excited every day, and b) contribute to improving the world in some way that matters to you. You may find a business or organization that needs someone with your skills, but can't hope to outbid the military. Take the job anyway. Climate modeling has already been mentioned by others. Large scale watershed modeling is a related field. Modeling ocean currents is related as well. Dive down another layer, and you're into computational fluid dynamics. Economic modeling needn't just benefit banks and investors: someone needs to be running those models for the benefit of the exploited and the ignored. My advice is that you begin by thinking about the work you really want to do. Only once you've figured that out should you worry about who can pay you to do it. Some of the most exciting things you think of may have few or no job openings because your prospective employers don't yet know they need you. That problem is solvable. So is funding, even if your dream job happens to be in a non-profit or academic setting. You may have to write grants, run a kickstarter campaign, or even set up your own organization. Socially conscious entrepreneurship can be just as much fun as the traditional kind.
Good luck, and stand by your convictions.
Geophysics has needs for those skills, especially in the oil industry.
Next to that there are some smaller niches, like radio astronomy*, modelling of metals (engine manufacturers and such).
*) Might I suggest looking into the SKA and DOME projects.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Research is loaded with cluster-oriented programming jobs. They're all frothy over CUDA, and it's an exciting time - lots of long-term projects spinning up here and there.
I automate steel and aluminum mills but you can apply what I do to anything from food processing to steel making. We always use the fastest computers to model and control the process. It's fun and I get to work with a lot of very smart people. In fact, I have a meeting with some doctors form China in a few minutes. I get paid better then most because most don't want to do what I do -- keep up with technology, long hours, and travel the world. But they make tanks from steel! Um, nothing here; keep looking.
John Deere in Urbandale Iowa. Feed the world.
There may be opportunities in the 'Smart Grid' revolution. That is a big heavy industry that is not going anywhere and has the scale to have real consequence.
I worked on CT visualization and analysis software for 10 years and found it technically challenging and rewarding with little ethical downside. There are numerous medical domains like pathology where digitization is just beginning and there's an awful lot of data to crunch.
Ethical questions can be posed in any domain, e.g., even if a great new technology can provably help save lives, can its increased cost to the overburdened medical system and potential unknown long term side effects be justified?
You buy into the US propaganda as much as anyone. Native Americans? America is named after an Italian guy. When Columbus landed, there were at MINIMUM 900,000 people living in the current USA (by a study commissioned by the US government. Most estimates tend to put the population at around 10 million. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica. We infected them with smallpox, raped and pillaged their villages and lands, and hunted them down and massacred them in the name of "Manifest Destiny"... we were bringing civility to the savages! WWII? A MINIMUM of 250,000 Japanese civilians in less than a week! INTENTIONALLY! How many millions of civilians have we killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? You don't hear about THAT on the American news networks. Too gruesome for people to stomach, I guess. The US government claims it doesn't keep statistics on civilian deaths (a total lie... read the wikileaks files). Most estimates put Afghan civilian deaths north of 100,000, and Iraq close to 1,000,000. Look at the chaos we have caused in these countries. The governments in place before the war were horrific, but never killed anywheres close to the number of people that we have killed! Europeans defined the borders of the Middle East, grouping together people who have hated each other for thousands of years. As soon as the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan, we left too and the Taliban came to power. One of Osama bin Laden's qualms with the USA is that we abandoned him and his Mujahadeen (who we considered allies at the time... the enemy of my enemy is my friend) by not delivering on promised aid after the war. Yeah, we sure did prevent the spread of communism. America has caused all of these problems!!!!!!!!! The war in Afghanistan was completely justified; Iraq was a total lie, formulated by GWB as retaliation on Saddam for putting a bounty out on Bush Sr while he was prez. I said the day that Bush was "elected", that we would be going to war in Iraq. Providential to the extreme. Coalition carelessness, poor combat strategy (troops can't even fire back because of stupid rules of engagement) and absolutely no coherent plan for afterwards. These people are total clowns, beholden to Boeing and Lockheed and Blackrock and Haliburton and all the rest. Ya'll need to start reading history books that were NOT written in the USA. And watching the BBC or Al Jazeera news. 1000x more accurate and informative than any of the garbage on American "news" channels. Half the censorship (oh think of the children! we mustn't make anyone feel uncomfortable!). How can an informed decision be made, based on incomplete / WRONG information? Because it's all business, dollars and cents, baby! War to finance? Just print more money. Been doing it for decades. The US government is so full of shit, you can't trust not a single word they say. I'm no conspiracy theorist... I inform myself on these topics and their lies are blatantly clear! We are NOT free, we do NOT have the moral high-ground, and we are just as fucking bad as the Soviets. Come to NYC and tell me the NYPD doesn't use gestapo tactics. Seriously. Get stopped once. The only reason we get away with all of this is... nobody else has bombs bigger than ours! Yet. Your best bet is moving to Canada... they don't piss anyone off, nobody wants to bomb THEM!
In energy efficiency, "smart grid," wind, solar and tidal power there must be jobs requiring your skills
Energy as an industry is pretty neutral, you definitely can find mathematical / data-driven research jobs here that won't tax your ethics - even at companies like Shell and BP, there are lots of projects involving renewable energy or improving existing efficiencies to use less fossil fuels, etc.
Healthcare / Pharma is kind of an obvious one.
And of course, tons of retailers have CRM and ERP operations that need data crunching ...
No.
First, the term "imperialism" is debatable. But even if you're right and you ascribe the worst motives possible to American voters and their leaders, you may argue they have caused a lot of deaths, but "millions" would be an exaggeration and the worst accounting tricks you could use would bring you nowhere close to the numbers killed by the regimes that the US military has done so much to contain.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Are you saying that he US military is responsible for the fact that by the time the pilgrims arrived there were hardly any of those 10 million American Indians left because they had been wiped out by disease the Spanish brought with them? The US military was responsible for plagues that happened more than 250 years before the military came into existence?
Forgetting your fevered imagination for a moment, it is true that the US military played a significant role in the final stages of the genocide of the American Indians, but the numbers still pale in comparison to the numbers of killings the US military can be created with preventing. Furthermore, if we stick to the last 100 years we pretty much eliminate the major cases of the US military attacking civilians (the atrocities of the Phillippine-American war - again pretty mild compared to what the US military has prevented - ended just over 100 years ago).
Ignoring for a moment that most of those deaths were the direct result of actions by non-American actors, let's pretend that every single one of those deaths was caused by a US soldier committing murder. Let's pretend that Iraqi Shiites didn't hate Sunnis and Christians and kill them. Let's pretend Iraqi Sunnis never acted on religious hatred either. Let's pretend that fighters coming in from other Muslim countries didn't hide among civilians. We still end up with a balance sheet of the US military saving far more lives that it has taken.
I watched BBC news quite a bit during the US invasion of Iraq. It was very confusing because the news I was getting from the BBC was so different from all the other news I was getting. It turned out the BBC was taking everything Iraqis said - including Baghdad Bob - at face value while disbelieving what the Americans told them. So I would briefly see some other channel showing film of US tanks in the middle of Baghdad and then a few minutes later hear the BBC claiming the US wasn't making much progress penetrating Saddam's defenses. It took a while to figure out just how badly the BBC reporting was.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
tell that to the relatives of millions of koreans, vietnamese, and iraqis
Check your numbers.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
You're the one needing reality check, what American gov. did pales in comparison to what dictators did around the world to their own people never mind others if they had a chance. And as always people like you never fail to miss a little fact that context makes a huuuuge difference.
Andrew Jackson is considered the American Hitler by the natives. Cherokee trail of tears: forced march from fertile lands to a desert. 4,000 dead. Hitler forced the Jews to do the same. Homestead act: move on in! Even though we promissed them the land. Israel does this same thing every day. Seminole Indians in Florida were among the last tribes to resist. They were hunted down and killed by the American military. Just like Rwanda. Smallpox was intentionally spread to native populations, killing at minimum 500,000. Saddam at one point had chem/bio weapons (obviously not when we invaded... clearly a false pretense for war), and used them on his own people. Korean "War": 2.5 million dead civilians Gulf "War": +5000 dead civilians Vietnam: unnecessary war that killed 59,000 Americans. Nearly 1 million Vietnamese (North+South) civilians were killed. That's off the top of my head in a minute. And my numbers are conservative averages from numerous academic/government sources. The USA was not the only actor in these conflicts - but as the most powerful nation on earth, you can damn well bet we killed the most! Please, read the encyclopedia! Not wikipedia, but the real thing! There were ***millions of people already living here***. Deny it all you want. They were here when the white man came, and gone not long after. Let's pretend that the American invasion didn't directly result in all those deaths. Saddam never came close to killing as many of his own people as we have. And society was nowheres near as chaotic as it has been! Lots of Iraqis agree - live was MUCH better under Saddam. At least it was a stable, secular government. Far from good, but better than what we have done! The American news ignores tons of stories, big stories that get lots of coverage in other countries but is not ever reported on here. Every time I leave the USA it's like going to a whole new planet. The fact that Fox News is the most watched in the USA, that CNN is totally absurd (Chilenian miner coverage with fake rescue torpedo? Election hype?) They compensate for a lack of content by using flashy graphics, television "personalities" (not journalists), and fill in the rest with ads. MSNBC is just a joke. BBC international is very fair, and Al Jazeera more-so. It is just politically incorrect to acknowledge that, because they report favorably on some stories about our enemies (because our enemies are 100% completely evil people who hate everything America stands for. yeah.) There is fair criticism for all news agencies, but none moreso than the US "mainstream media"
Furthermore, if we stick to the last 100 years we pretty much eliminate the major cases of the US military attacking civilians
This is only if you ignore all of the protegés, intermediaries and silent-partner deals the US military has backed in things like proxy wars.
The blood of Pinochet's victims, for instance, is ultimately upon American hands. Further examples abound.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Once you have a mortgage and a couple of kids, though, you'll be writing anal probe drivers for the TSA like the rest of us. Moral qualms are a young man's luxury..
According to Eric Raymond, there is no such thing as an ethical software job. All software should be free, which would preclude anyone involved in the production of software of any kind from having an income!
Not sure if this has been posted yet, but you can look here: http://www.gpucomputing.net/?q=jobs
Question: am I selling Misery or something closer to the opposite. I have many no go areas such as selling booze, cigarettes, or gambling. I often give alcohol as a gift but just not to alcoholics or kids; so in each endevour you can find good or bad but with some it becomes clearer and clearer. A simple test is would I regret my product if I read about it in the news. If I made screwdrivers or even axes and someone got murdered with my product I would not feel that I had any responsibility. If I sold crack I would feel bad reading about every crack related bit of news. How do defense engineers fell when their product is raining down on some wedding party? The answer to that question becomes pretty clear if the alternative use for their skills would be developing clean water technology for the kids at that same wedding.
So to answer the original question; unless you are lucky enough to get contacted by someone honorable looking for your skills go look for a problem that can be solved by your skills and solve it. I barely know anyone that I could explain what I could possibly do for them mathematically using the potential of OpenCL or CUDA.
In all our long history I'm not sure if we've ever come across another society that believed as you did... that put these things above their own survival. Consider that that is odd because we've encountered many societies and civilizations. That we've never encountered one with your values implies one of two things. Either human beings are genetically predisposed to not value that view. Or any society that does embrace that view dies out. In the end the second would become the first... so perhaps it's all the same.
"All men are violent," said the violent man. "Are you violent?" the violent man asked a peaceful man. "No, I'm not." said the peaceful man. The violent man then stabbed the peaceful man. "All men are violent," said the violent man.
As the peaceful man died he asked "Why do you think that is?"
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
More and more simulations are happening in VFX and CG animation. Cloth, hair, smoke, fire, water, etc. all require simulation on top of or in addition to the hand animation you see. The data are getting larger every year and the management of the tech to produce these things is highly complex. I love this playground and the only ethical dilemma I face is the crappy movies Hollywood has a tendency to put out.
Mechanical and civil engineering need a lot of processing power to optimize designs and analyze them for safety. That's all good work.
Siesmography data needs lots of analysis to see what is underground, that's useful work even if the mining and drilling corporations are mostly pretty bad. Fact is most private enterprises choose profits over ethics, unless they see a long term cost from the unethical behavior.
-Syrian coup d'état -CIA backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh's democratically elected government -Guatemalan coup d'état, democratically elected government over thrown -Indonesia in the 50's had an autocratic government, after a band of rebels espousing anti communist literature, the US pumps weapons and money leading to increased deaths in the region, US later gives billions of dollars to autocratic government it previously tried to overthrow. -Cuba before uprising, US told Cuban dictatorship that the US could exercise the right to intervene in Cuban political, economic and military affairs if necessary when the US wanted, which it did to rob the Cuban people through the export of its goods and food in a form of economic slavery while General Batista, head of the government took a cut in return for his continued co-operation. This continued for nearly 30 years before uprising occurred, which took aid from where-ever it could, the enemy of the United States offered support to said uprisings, only after the rebel took power did they take the full direction of communism. -Iraq has had CIA backed coup's forming governments only to be toppled by a later CIA backed coup since the 1950's to this very day. The period of time between each overthrow has varied -Brazil in 1964 had a democratically elected government overthrown by rebels who were supported in the form of ammunition, oil, and chemical weapons as well as the US deploying flotilla of ships to be deployed in the area -Greece in 1967 had a democratically elected government overthrown by right wing military colonels which was rumoured to have the active support of the CIA, CIA refuses to comment on the matter -Chile prior to 1973 had a democratically elected government overthrown by military coup which was supported by every means available to the CIA, including black propaganda, weapons, training, money etc. -Argentina in 1976 had a democratically elected government overthrown by military coup with the support of the US, including introducing the coup leaders to public relations companies to manage their image in the US so that they could maintain their support -CIA attempted to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua from 1981-1990 by funnelling arms via puppet Iran regime. -Military government of El Salvador is facing popular uprising and the US government supported the military government while they used death squads to stop political and economic change. -US Supports Philippines dictatorship for decades until it is no longer maintainable at which point withdraws support -Venezuela in 2002 suffers a attempted coup d'état against a democratically elected government, the coup is widely believed to have been organised and supported by the CIA, confirmed by Former US Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen. -Palestinian Fatah party receives $84 billion after elections showed Hamas to be the democratically elected representatives of the people, leading to a protracted civil battle between the two groups as Fatah attempts to hold onto power
That's not to mention direct interventions into Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Zaire, Honduras...
My point is this...
You ask me if my claim of millions of deaths is accurate, in direct numbers affected by US foreign policy, yes I am. When you include the residue and the blow back which the CIA has always known about, I am wrong, its tens of millions. All of this wasn't "because they were communist" it’s because they all made a decision which would benefit their country at the cost of the United States, either economically, militarily or simply just the pantomime on the geo-political stage. All empires have done it in the past. The US is no better, they simply label it superpower and pay off locals to do their direct bidding instead of having their presence their all the time
There is no -1 disagree
And as always, people like you forget that many of those dictators were American sponsored dictators. They then use the excuse of overthrowing said dictators to introduce new leaders once the old ones stopped listening to Washington
There is no -1 disagree
Don't you love your country? Then how about getting with the program. Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
if "US Imperialism" death toll ran into the millions it would still pale in comparison to the USSR and China. BTW, calling Iran of the 1950s a democratically elected government is a bit of a stretch. We put the Shah _back_ in power after the wuss ran away (he was originally put in place in the 1940s because Britain thought he would be easier to control than his dad during WWII).
Though I disagree with you in many ways, here's some help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
Yeah, the US arguably has millions of deaths on its hands from the cold war era.
That said, the communists topped the US over and over again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decossackization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
If you want puppet states and economic corruption, there was plenty to go around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_states
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_of_Germans_in_the_Soviet_Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_republics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(term)
In my opinion though, we shouldn't care so much about the sins of the past. Even an 18 year old in 1970 would be 60 today, and the vast majority of the people who made these decisions are dead or dying today. The USSR doesn't even exist anymore. Learning history is important because we don't want to repeat the bad parts, but we do a terrible disservice to ourselves when we use the past to excuse our present positions and actions.
Cherokee trail of tears: forced march from fertile lands to a desert.
Hey now! I live in that desert.
Homestead act: move on in! Even though we promissed them the land.
Well, why would they want the land? It's a desert, remember?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
you're an idiot. Finance is the base of all modern human progress. Defense may be a bloated scam not unlike the government for which it works, but at least they kill terrorists.
Fighting mass murder with murdering the masses... win?
Are you eating animals? Birds? etc.? Are you using leather products? Did you get your mother's milk? Do you get medicine only from nature or from your doctor?
So, you have always compromised without realising it. You can try to minimise these unethical acts but can not avoid it. Now, if you claim that you have a bundle of experience and knowledge, why don't you start writing really good text books taking help from retired super dudes? Start with mathematics from KG through college, one branch at a time. Find retired volunteer to start schools for teachers (not students) and train them to think. Create tools for them and charge them. Go to private schools and train their teachers. So, here you have ethical and universally usable career and also make money in the long run. Share your profits with those retired but highly qualified scientists, mathematicians etc. Slashdot population is too young to help you with new ideas. Thus, your agenda will be different from text book and teacher mills.
we use HPC to do all sorts of useful stuff for deep space exploration
- processing huge data sets
- finding interplanetary highway trajectories
- designing high performance antennas
- etc.etc.etc
"(Retired IT worker & savings) = FALSE"
Really? I work in IT and I've got plenty of savings. Perhaps you should take basic finance lessons.
So your arguement is no longer that the US is the champion of "freedom and democracy" but simply they were not as bad as the soviets? And we have only touched modern era, when you go into pre-WWII days there is even more blood on the hands of the US government/military. The US has almost always only ever acted in its own interests, it didn't enter World War 2 because they need to stop the Nazi's, they did so because they were attacked by Japan, hell, the US didn't even declare war on Germany! Germany declared war on the US. They didn't fight in Korea to ensure democracy in Korea, they did so because they didn't want another nation which was friendly to the USSR. And by the way, not all communist countries were friendly to the USSR, just like not all capitalist governments were friendly to the US. This was less an idiological conflict, though that may be the underlying cause of the mistrust between the US and the USSR, but it primarily a game of one-upmanship between two nations. That was not a moral battle, do not attempt to portray it as a battle between good and evil, neither side was good, neither side was evil, both did good things and both did bad things.
I am not American, I am not a Russian. I am fortuante enough to be in a position where I didn't grow up hearing either sides propaganda about the other. From my point of view, both sides lied, both said they were for democratic purposes only to topple democratically elected governments simply because they didn't like the outcome of those elections. I'm also not naive enough to think that violence is never the answer, there are times when violence is required, but only when the will of the people is not being adhered to or when you are under threat in the case of minority being surpressed. But the US wasn't concerned with the democratic will of the people or if someone was being oppressed. They were willing to overthrow democratically elected governments, to supress minorities and even surpress majorities only for the purpose of suiting themselves. That is why I don't see the US as an ethical government or military, because they have made unethical decisions. I'm not arguing about who is worse, neither are ethical and that is origin of this discussion
Learning from history is so important that it cannot be overstated. It is only by examining history can the US realise they can't use force to overthrow governments, they will only be fragile and short lived and the unintended consequences usually create a worse situation. I think some people in power are starting to understand this concept, that talking to nations rather than isolate them and force them to more extreme solutions to their problems. However it is a complex answer to a simple question and the attention span of a US election cycle does not allow for complex solutions to things. Which is why the US continues to this day to attempt to strong arm the world to do what it wants.
There is no -1 disagree
Meterological models often have tremendous computing requirements to compare source forecast data with actuals in verifying the models. The models themselves may also have significant processing requirements.
Not all medical uses involve animal trials. For example, most imaging devices (X-Ray, MRI, CAT scan, etc) need significant processing capabilities. Using GPUs to speed results or drive down costs seems to fit ethical ideas.
Geological systems often need similar kinds of heavy processing and may be used for water mapping, seeking fault lines, or to seek fossil fuels.
I'm a different guy, readin's argument probably hasn't changed.
Nobody is perfect and neither are governments composed of imperfect people. People make mistakes, people do selfish and even evil things, and people are behind all of the decisions made by governments. Sometimes this is pretty direct (Stalin led the USSR pretty much directly during his reign) and other times this is filtered through lots of other people and laws (made by imperfect people).
For a large government, small imperfections are often magnified a million times and on the small scale will seem overwhelmingly massive. This isn't made any easier by the fact that large governments have to deal with *all* of the most ridiculous people and governments out there. For instance, the US can't just ignore North Korea. If we took a neutral stance towards NK, then we'd soon have American citizens (and others) trading with NK. Then soon we'd have US civilian hostages and a revitalized NK. What do we do to rescue those hostages? A more powerful NK would lead to NK's neighbors reacting. SK might consider a pre-emptive invasion and it might start its own nuclear program over fears that NK will have nukes and they won't. Japan would also likely decide that it can't rely on the US anymore and militarize. They would likely have nuclear weapons within a year. Who knows how China might react, as they've been allies with NK for a long time but they also seem tired of NK's BS and the reactions of SK and Japan will have a profound impact on their new stance. A big war between NK and somebody else is almost inevitable and the region might even spiral into a much bigger bloodier war between nuclear armed nations. Who's to blame? The US. What did we do? Nothing!
The US can't ignore the world like a small country can because our residual influence is so massive. This isn't unique to the US either, it applies to all really huge nations and nation blocs. We have to make choices, and some of them will be hard and the imperfect people making these hard decisions will inevitably mess things up.
The best we can hope for is high quality and ethical decisions more often. I think the US has a pretty decent track record in that regard compared to those with comparable influence. The Soviets and Chinese each outright murdered tens of millions, and we don't know how much more they quietly swept under the rug. The Axis powers did so much evil and killed so many people, they seem more like comic book villains than something real. The British Empire starved millions in the late 19th century (when there were a lot fewer people). The Mongol empire obliterated Baghdad and turned the whole region into a desert. The Roman republic and empire was built on slavery. etc. etc. It doesn't matter where you look, if there's a major power there's blood, corruption, exploitation...and lots of it.
When you make historical comparisons, the US isn't really so bad.
it didn't enter World War 2 because they need to stop the Nazi's, they did so because they were attacked by Japan, hell, the US didn't even declare war on Germany! Germany declared war on the US.
This still doesn't explain why the US spent the resources they did against the Nazis. Just because some far away country declares war on you doesn't mean you have to respond beyond protecting your borders. The US threw more resources into defeating the Nazis than the Japanese who they were worried might start knocking on their doorstep. It also does nothing to explain the lend-lease program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-lease It's pretty clear that the US administration of the time had its sights set on the Nazis well before Pearl Harbor, and that attack simply gave them the excuse they needed to pull out the stops.
It is only by examining history can the US realise they can't use force to overthrow governments, they will only be fragi
Social Network Analysis and Health Informatics are two fairly young fields that are in all the areas you say you despise, but have none of the ethical drawbacks you list. I was lucky enough to land a job writing SNA applications for a Health Informatics company, and I have never felt more satisfied with my life. I feel I am doing something moral, ethical, challenging, and am doing The Right Thing!. The possible uses of SNA are amazing! So far, it has been used to determine problems in Hospital Emergency Wards, the spread of infectious diseases, tracking Gorilla social structures in the wild to prevent underpopulation of endangered species, and even to determine who will become the next president! Real-world example of SNA: There are some researchers at George Washington University who are developing massively-parallel algorithms which analyse and graph large datasets, like all twitter posts - in real time! That's the university system for you! Real-world Health Informatics: Using software to help hospitals identify and treat persons who have a very painful disease and who need powerful to treat it. These types people show up in ERs and are treated like drug addicts - not medical attention-seeking patients - and have to wait hours for proper identification. By developing applications targeted for these types of people, you can end discrimination, cure diseases, and help improve the like of everyone! All without having to worry about animal testing, war, or anything else whihc may be considered immoral or unethical! (Be sure to check with your IRB before doing any human testing of your own!)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick." --Arthur C. Clarke
I would love to see the basic AutoCAD running on all CUDA cores instead of being single threaded.
When you comment that you will accept no money from the military establishment, consider the form of modern warfare. There are no chunks of metal being hurled, no starving and terrified refugees, no casualties. When that virus destroyed the Iranian nuclear refinement facility, what was the body count? spike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
Casteism