he information should be encrypted and secured, and leaks should be punishable by prison time. A standard, open algorithm should be created, to convert the information into a simple number (like a "credit score.") Companies pay for access to these scores. Only upon showing direct need, in a court of law, should specific information be given to specific companies, under strict confidentiality. If a particular company needs to know a specific detail about all of their customers, they can petition to be granted access to that information only, under the same confidentiality agreement.
Credit score is not the only thing that companies use to assess your credit worthiness, particularly in the mortgage business. Things like bankrupticies, judgements, how many and what type of credit lines you have had open, how much you have borrowed, are all considerations when taking out a substantial loan such as a mortgage and even a car loan. "Specificall requesting" all that information is just not going to work - even it someone has a 720+ credit score, if they have any judgements against them they have to be paid off before a lender will lend them money. I do agree that there needs to be change - one suggestion I have is that a company should be required to only open up credit lines when they have met with the borrowers in person, no mailing in your signature anymore. This would probably eliminate 90% of identity fraud. If a company reports derogatory credit on your report, and they cannot prove that you opened up an account with them in person, then they should be out of luck. Right now all they have to do is manufacture a bunch of paper showing some personal info, dates accounts opened and when you were late, etc.
Hydrogen gas has too low a fuel density to be useful as rocket fuel. Also, electrolysis requires energy from another source. And no, solar energy will not be sufficient. So its likely that whatever source of energy is present would be used as rocket fuel YOu could use hydrogen peroxide, but both synthesis and combustion require metallic catalysts.
Think about it, if water was really the source of a usable and economical rocket fuel, woudln't NSA, ESA, etc. have switched over to it long ago?
Undergrad research experience is not all its cracked up to be, at least in the sciences. With few exceptions, professors don't want to deal with neophyte undergrads, and all the important research is done at the graduate/post-grad level anyway. If they are lucky enough, undergrads can get some "monkey" work to do - this is especially true the Big Three sciences: biology/physics/chemistry.
FIRST: you assume 10 percent efficiency, whereas average decent cells nowadays are more like 20 with good ones around 30.
The 20-30% solar cells are currently too expensive to be economical.
The only problem with this scenario? due to a lack of widespread investment in solar technology, as opposed to oil or other fossil fuels, solar cells still cost about 5 bucks a watt, so your looking at an upfront investment of about 160 grand to cover my roof in panels.
Solar has had lots of investment - the price/performance ratio just isn't there yet.
I was one of the potential people whose information was obtained. I am not planning on taking action against the univesity nor would I do so even if finacially harmed, unless it can be proved that there was gross negligence. GMU has made a good faith effort to switch IDs from SSNs to the new 'G' numbers. If my information was used to fradulently open acounts under my name, I would estimate primary people responsible are in my estimation:
1) The thief 2) The creditors for their lack proper verification allowing people to open new accounts and charge thousands of dollars with a few tidbits of information
Then, depending on the circumstances: - The makers of whatever software was compromised, be in Windoes, Oracle, IIS, etc. - The administrators of said systems for not securing their systems properly or keeping up with the latest updates
Yeah, the problem with this the Russians were not exactly known for their cultic archaelogical endeavors. Though I suppose when you have the Ark of the Covenant burnign off peoples faces and being sucked up into the sky you're not exactly worried about realism or history.
I think they mean that the C-C and C=C bonds lie in asingle plane so the material is essence flat or "two-dimensional". If you remember chemisty, the carbon atoms exhibit sp2 hybridization which only allows for three sigma and one pi bond. So a single carbon atom binds to only three other carbon atoms(two single bonds and one double bond)
This differs from graphite proper because it is only a single sheet, and thus is not considered an allotrope.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion that all this talk about nanotechnology, cold fusion, AI, life extension, etc. is like Alchemy was to the middle ages. If you are not familiar with the history the study of alchemy was the attempt to 'transmute' various metals into gold. It failed of course, but their attempts did lead to the isolation of a couple elements and a few experimental methods such as distillation, which led to the development of modern chemistry.
Perhaps nanotech, fusion, and AI research will lead to science and technological developments that we haven't even envisioned, much as alchemy did.
I don't have much respect for 'futurists' like Kurzweill who aren't real scientists and don't give good reasons why their technologies are feasible. Biology is a complex science and is nowhere near fully understood. The higher functions of the brain such as memory, for instance, have not been able to be reduced to chemical and electrical interactions. Perhaps they will in 100+ years, but I don't see it happening within my lifetime.
Could you describe more about these "Business Object Servers" and exactly what they do, with a real word concete example, or is it just another buzzword like Microsoft's "Digital Nervous System" I remember from a while back.
Unfortunately, though, quantum mechanics ONLY holds for the subatomic scale
This is definiteily not true, quantum mechanics holds just find for large scale processes, its just that its effects are unoticable. This is called the correspondence principle which is normally studied in third semester physics alongside quantum mechanics and special relatively.
Special relatively does indeed have a consistent relativistic formulation, called the Dirac equation. Its general relativity that is somewhat at odds with quantum mechanics. I never got that far in my univeristy physics studies, however, so I can't really comment further.
Well, that's pretty much true of any job, isn't it? But indeed it's actually easier in this field than in many others -- set up a network at home (see Ask Slashdot a few days back), do some studying and get some certs, etc. Rewrite your resume emphasizing any admin (or security, or DB, etc) experience, etc.
Have you actually done this? Or know anyone who has? When it comes to the interview, businesses don't care what you've played with around at home.
If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you probably don't have either the intelligence or the aptitude to be a good sysadmin or DBA anyway.
I guess my four year CS degree from major state instituition doesn't count for much then. Not to mention the full course in Database Theory. Ask your average DBA if they know the difference between 3NF, BCNF, etc. or what normalization is. Most of the time you get blank stares, which is why so many databases are so screwed up nowadays.
My point is that anyone with a CS degree from a decent program can hack it as a architect or a would make competent DBA/SysAdmin, but DBA/SysAdmins make poor programmers. Unfortunatley boneheaded managers don't see it that way.
You either need a course in remedial reading or critical thinking. Possibly both. I merely mention the demand for those with security clearances. I don't see how that has anything to do with "public dole". Are you suggesting those in e.g. the military are getting money for nothing? You might want to revisit the definition of "dole". Furthermore, there are plenty of jobs in private industry -- from megacorps like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin to small specialist shops -- that have need of people with clearances.
And I am telling you that
Getting a security clearance has precious little to do with merit, I know this from personal experience and
Companies need people with clearnaces now, not six months later when your clearance finally comes through
Lockheed and and Raytheon, private companies?? Haha thanks for the laugh. Without our tax dollars those guys wouldn't be anywhere. Probably about 90% of their receipts come from government contracts, and even if they didn't theres no way a group of investors would have financed their private endeavors without some guarantee of profitability, which is what they get by getting Uncle Same to pay for their R&D. Boeing is a classic example. They used their position in the military aircraft industry to dominate the domestic aircraft industry. Eisenhower even spoke of the military budget "meeting the demands of the aircraft industry", not the reverse as we are led to believe. People in the U.S are ingrained to hate that word "socialism", but in fact we are a socialist country - a corporate socialism. I say this because I've interned for the MI complex and was disgusted by the waste and ineffiency. Those companies get contracts that would never fly in private industry, yet they want to make it seem like its more efficient since its privatized. The profits are often funneled back into congressional campaigns, and don't try to tell me that the only people who have control over who gets awarded contracts are DoD bureaucrats. They might as well just socialize the entire defense industry. Whens the last time that defense spending dropped so much that they've had to fire people in massive numbers?
On the other hand, the demand for sys admins, security specialists, DBAs, etc seems to be increasing. Pay rates vary all over the board depending on experience and particular skills (and how cheap the company is), but this is nothing new
The problem with these jobs, is the only way to really learn how to do them properly is to get a job doing them. But employers won't hire you if you don't have experience. It's a catch 22. Yeah, yeah. I can administer my Debian/Gentoo system and play with Postgres and MySQL all I want. Doesn't mean jack squat to employers.
And that's not counting the huge demand that exists for anyone with a computer background that also has (or had and can renew) a security clearanc
So your are saying should all be in the public dole, isn't this suppose to be a capitalist country?
Whoa 80K, where did you go, MIT? 15K here and I'm was the same situation as you are. I'm getting out of IT. I'm currently taking undergrad chemistry clases and hope to pursue get into an MS program in chemical enginering, or possible pharmacology. I considered science but ruled it out because it seems like you get one shot and if you screw up or it wasn't your original major, you are out for good. The NIH/NSF only have so much money and search committees aren't going to give it to some hack that took his undergrad classes at a lower tier state school four years after he graduated. Hopefully chemical engineering is not like that. The worse I have heard about chemE is that it can be boring. Well, better bored that broke! Yes programming is fun when you are working on interesting projects, but lets admit it, most jobs are just programming boring business logic and eliminating paper. Where's the fun in that. Perhaps I can put those programming skills to use somehow with the chemical engineering or pharmcology degree.
Sometimes I feel that peopld like us got the short end of the straw, but it happened with civil engineers in the 60s/70s and with aeronatical engineers in the early 90s. Thing that really stings is I know idiots who I graduated high school with who pursued non technical fields who are faring better than I. Perhaps the situation will be different in 5 years. I have close relatives in the science field and they don't do it for the money although they make a decent amount(granted it took them 15 years after graduation and I am about 5 or so behind. Perhaps I can start having a life around 40:-| ) I guess we aren't as special as we thought. Good luck.
The author shows how IT oursourcing might be good for the U.S. economy as a whole, but I fail to see how that is going to help the average IT worker.
The author's main point is that by saving money, supposedly it will free up money in sectors such as education, health care, and construction. What the author fails to realize is tha most of the outsourcing WAS in customized applications. It wasn't the big boys like Microsoft, IBM, etc. doing most of the layoffs, it was the smaller shops. In addition, I would call in to question the value of IT spending in each of these industries.
1) Education - need better teachers, not better software. I've taught before and that is the main problems. Computers won't keep Johnny from . Secondary schools are mainly just babysitting
2) Construction - ?? you hire a bunch of drunks to pound some nails in, what do you need computers for. This industry loves cheap labor, I don't see much opportunity here
3) Health services - IT could really shine in this area, but it is such a huge mess that it won't be fixed without government regulation, which means that few will profit from it. I remember this was what MicroStrategy tried to concentrate on back in the mid-late 90s, I suppose they just dropped it after they realized what a colossal mess it was. A bigger problem with health care is the cost of health insurance and the fact that people are living longer and needing more care, long after their productive years are over. Malpractice is another issue effecting this industry.
Really they only way you can make money in the IT sector anymore is you can show businesses that it will save them money. IT is mainly just a cost center nowadays. I don't see this happening for any of those industries.
Also, consider this: Are Windows/Office any cheaper now than it was 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation? I don't have the statistics on hand, but I'd be suprised if it were true. Though I suppose hardware is a bit cheaper.
Consider what happened during the 1980s - 1990s . I suppose you could say it was good for the U.S. "economy*" that all the decent wage manufacturing jobs left the U.S. Consumers got cheaper cars, but workers lost their jobs, and they NEVER came back. If you use the author's analagy and applied it to the manufacturiung sector, then as prices fell on consumer goods, demand should have increased since consumers now had more money which to purpose. Well I suppose that did happen, but the sector never responded, and things only got worse.
Some of them were able to retrain to IT jobs, quite a few were relegated to WalMart. A few years later they also lost their IT jobs. Its just not possible for a 45 year old with three kids and a mortgage to be constantly retraining like this. Quite a few familes have never recovered.
The author suggests that by outsourcing programmers you create more positions in design/interface, interacting with customers and management. But how is someone who has never programmed Only a few with can be a manager/CEO straight out of college. You need some time in the trenches. And if they layoff all these junior positions where are our next batch of managers going to come from? I suppose from whatever country you are outsourcing to.
In short, I don't see no light at the end of the tunnel for those in IT/Programming, which is part of the reason I'm getting out. Luckily I'm still young and have no family, I suppose with the way the U.S. works, from a purely economic standpoint it is uneconomical to have one.
* Interesting how these lassez-faire types hate collectivism yet often resort to a purely aggregate word such as economy, GNP, GDP, etc.
What wonderful news! So in a few years, when modern industrial society has seized up and American life as we've known it comes to halt as a result of the rapidly diminishing fossil fuel supply, our cars will still be shiny!
We have plenty of fossil fuel - its called coal. Not to mention oil shale, tar sands and other sources of petroleum, which some oil companies where considering in the 1970s before it became uneconomic to extract them and the projects were abandoned.
Sorry, but I don't see liquid fuels being beat by electrics for some time due to the power to weight ratio factor or other considerations such as finding a cheap source of hydrogen for fuel cells.
I disagree, KOTOR was quite a snoozefest. The combat pathetically easy as your foes fell before your superweapons and armor and later, your uber jedi powers. Nothing you did made a whole lot of difference in the storyline. Yeah, theres light side/dark side. You can be nice to people or hit them up for money, big deal. Gaining money allows you to buy more uberweapons and armor, which you don't need by now because your are more powerful than Darth Sidous and Yoda put together. You have dozens of health packs, drugs, and greandes ensuring that combat will be no challenge for you. Whats worse you have the D&D equivalent of a "+2 lightsaber" and "+3 jedi robes", etc. Still more you can have T3M4(R2D2 basically) or another character with good computer skill 'spike' the computer to blow up/gas your enemies in certain circumstances. Almost any sense of jediness is lost at this point. Its almost worse than say, the Final Fantasy series.
Besids the combat, the puzzles were pretty darn easy too, I remember Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the N64 had much harder ones, and thats supposed to be a kids game.
The only plusses of the game were the story was pretty decent and the graphics owned. If you like that Interactive movie thing then it might be your bag. Too bad the gameplay sucked though.
Factoring large primes (which RSA is based off of) has not been proven to be NP complete.
Re:Water, not Oil.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 2, Informative
Why would you say H20 is becoming rare? Its not really destroyed like oil is. Plants use it up during photosynthesis, but in the end ti balances out because ells actually water during cellular respiration from glucose.
The problem you refer to may be the rarity of drinking water, but if you solve the energy problem you should solve that problem too. I mean 2/3 of the planet is covered with it.
No it means that some professors in the U.S. are unscrupulous and write their own texts in order to make money, then force the students to buy a new edition every year. The ones that don't write their own are probably getting kickbacks from the publishers, or possibily on the departmental/university level.
In the sense that you only have a limited time/budget, graphics and gameplay are mutalually exclusive to some extent. I remember Brian Hook, formerly of Id, then Verant, had a good article a while back on this topic on the now defunct VoodooExtreme. Too bad I can't find it. Anyway his point was that you either develop the technology, like Id did with Q3, or you develop content, such has Half Life and Deux Ex, which licensed their engines. If you try to do both you end up with colossal failures like Prey (anyone remember that one?)
Slashdot Mirror
he information should be encrypted and secured, and leaks should be punishable by prison time. A standard, open algorithm should be created, to convert the information into a simple number (like a "credit score.") Companies pay for access to these scores. Only upon showing direct need, in a court of law, should specific information be given to specific companies, under strict confidentiality. If a particular company needs to know a specific detail about all of their customers, they can petition to be granted access to that information only, under the same confidentiality agreement.
Credit score is not the only thing that companies use to assess your credit worthiness, particularly in the mortgage business. Things like bankrupticies, judgements, how many and what type of credit lines you have had open, how much you have borrowed, are all considerations when taking out a substantial loan such as a mortgage and even a car loan. "Specificall requesting" all that information is just not going to work - even it someone has a 720+ credit score, if they have any judgements against them they have to be paid off before a lender will lend them money. I do agree that there needs to be change - one suggestion I have is that a company should be required to only open up credit lines when they have met with the borrowers in person, no mailing in your signature anymore. This would probably eliminate 90% of identity fraud. If a company reports derogatory credit on your report, and they cannot prove that you opened up an account with them in person, then they should be out of luck. Right now all they have to do is manufacture a bunch of paper showing some personal info, dates accounts opened and when you were late, etc.
Hydrogen gas has too low a fuel density to be useful as rocket fuel. Also, electrolysis requires energy from another source. And no, solar energy will not be sufficient. So its likely that whatever source of energy is present would be used as rocket fuel YOu could use hydrogen peroxide, but both synthesis and combustion require metallic catalysts.
Think about it, if water was really the source of a usable and economical rocket fuel, woudln't NSA, ESA, etc. have switched over to it long ago?
The water could be a potential source of fuel, thus it (assuming it is water) lying close to the equator would be advantageous for that reason.
Umm... maybe I missed this in my chemistry class, but how could water be used as a fuel ?
Undergrad research experience is not all its cracked up to be, at least in the sciences. With few exceptions, professors don't want to deal with neophyte undergrads, and all the important research is done at the graduate/post-grad level anyway. If they are lucky enough, undergrads can get some "monkey" work to do - this is especially true the Big Three sciences: biology/physics/chemistry.
The 20-30% solar cells are currently too expensive to be economical.
The only problem with this scenario? due to a lack of widespread investment in solar technology, as opposed to oil or other fossil fuels, solar cells still cost about 5 bucks a watt, so your looking at an upfront investment of about 160 grand to cover my roof in panels.
Solar has had lots of investment - the price/performance ratio just isn't there yet.
I was one of the potential people whose information was obtained. I am not planning on taking action against the univesity nor would I do so even if finacially harmed, unless it can be proved that there was gross negligence. GMU has made a good faith effort to switch IDs from SSNs to the new 'G' numbers. If my information was used to fradulently open acounts under my name, I would estimate primary people responsible are in my estimation:
1) The thief
2) The creditors for their lack proper verification allowing people to open new accounts and charge thousands of dollars with a few tidbits of information
Then, depending on the circumstances:
- The makers of whatever software was compromised, be in Windoes, Oracle, IIS, etc.
- The administrators of said systems for not securing their systems properly or keeping up with the latest updates
Real pirates plunder entire cities, ye matey! Thats where the all the pieces 'o eight lie!
Yeah, the problem with this the Russians were not exactly known for their cultic archaelogical endeavors. Though I suppose when you have the Ark of the Covenant burnign off peoples faces and being sucked up into the sky you're not exactly worried about realism or history.
Why do you assume that all women are pro-choice?
I think they mean that the C-C and C=C bonds lie in asingle plane so the material is essence flat or "two-dimensional". If you remember chemisty, the carbon atoms exhibit sp2 hybridization which only allows for three sigma and one pi bond. So a single carbon atom binds to only three other carbon atoms(two single bonds and one double bond)
This differs from graphite proper because it is only a single sheet, and thus is not considered an allotrope.
Thats what I heard about the IT/Software development profession, 5-10 years ago...
I've pretty much come to the conclusion that all this talk about nanotechnology, cold fusion, AI, life extension, etc. is like Alchemy was to the middle ages. If you are not familiar with the history the study of alchemy was the attempt to 'transmute' various metals into gold. It failed of course, but their attempts did lead to the isolation of a couple elements and a few experimental methods such as distillation, which led to the development of modern chemistry.
Perhaps nanotech, fusion, and AI research will lead to science and technological developments that we haven't even envisioned, much as alchemy did.
I don't have much respect for 'futurists' like Kurzweill who aren't real scientists and don't give good reasons why their technologies are feasible. Biology is a complex science and is nowhere near fully understood. The higher functions of the brain such as memory, for instance, have not been able to be reduced to chemical and electrical interactions. Perhaps they will in 100+ years, but I don't see it happening within my lifetime.
Could you describe more about these "Business Object Servers" and exactly what they do, with a real word concete example, or is it just another buzzword like Microsoft's "Digital Nervous System" I remember from a while back.
This is definiteily not true, quantum mechanics holds just find for large scale processes, its just that its effects are unoticable. This is called the correspondence principle which is normally studied in third semester physics alongside quantum mechanics and special relatively.
Special relatively does indeed have a consistent relativistic formulation, called the Dirac equation. Its general relativity that is somewhat at odds with quantum mechanics. I never got that far in my univeristy physics studies, however, so I can't really comment further.
Except that the U.S. goverenment already had a "Kitty Hawk" over 30 years ago.
Have you actually done this? Or know anyone who has? When it comes to the interview, businesses don't care what you've played with around at home.
If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you probably don't have either the intelligence or the aptitude to be a good sysadmin or DBA anyway.
I guess my four year CS degree from major state instituition doesn't count for much then. Not to mention the full course in Database Theory. Ask your average DBA if they know the difference between 3NF, BCNF, etc. or what normalization is. Most of the time you get blank stares, which is why so many databases are so screwed up nowadays.
My point is that anyone with a CS degree from a decent program can hack it as a architect or a would make competent DBA/SysAdmin, but DBA/SysAdmins make poor programmers. Unfortunatley boneheaded managers don't see it that way.
You either need a course in remedial reading or critical thinking. Possibly both. I merely mention the demand for those with security clearances. I don't see how that has anything to do with "public dole". Are you suggesting those in e.g. the military are getting money for nothing? You might want to revisit the definition of "dole". Furthermore, there are plenty of jobs in private industry -- from megacorps like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin to small specialist shops -- that have need of people with clearances.
And I am telling you that
Getting a security clearance has precious little to do with merit, I know this from personal experience and
Companies need people with clearnaces now, not six months later when your clearance finally comes through
Lockheed and and Raytheon, private companies?? Haha thanks for the laugh. Without our tax dollars those guys wouldn't be anywhere. Probably about 90% of their receipts come from government contracts, and even if they didn't theres no way a group of investors would have financed their private endeavors without some guarantee of profitability, which is what they get by getting Uncle Same to pay for their R&D. Boeing is a classic example. They used their position in the military aircraft industry to dominate the domestic aircraft industry. Eisenhower even spoke of the military budget "meeting the demands of the aircraft industry", not the reverse as we are led to believe. People in the U.S are ingrained to hate that word "socialism", but in fact we are a socialist country - a corporate socialism. I say this because I've interned for the MI complex and was disgusted by the waste and ineffiency. Those companies get contracts that would never fly in private industry, yet they want to make it seem like its more efficient since its privatized. The profits are often funneled back into congressional campaigns, and don't try to tell me that the only people who have control over who gets awarded contracts are DoD bureaucrats. They might as well just socialize the entire defense industry. Whens the last time that defense spending dropped so much that they've had to fire people in massive numbers?
The problem with these jobs, is the only way to really learn how to do them properly is to get a job doing them. But employers won't hire you if you don't have experience. It's a catch 22. Yeah, yeah. I can administer my Debian/Gentoo system and play with Postgres and MySQL all I want. Doesn't mean jack squat to employers.
And that's not counting the huge demand that exists for anyone with a computer background that also has (or had and can renew) a security clearanc
So your are saying should all be in the public dole, isn't this suppose to be a capitalist country?
Whoa 80K, where did you go, MIT? 15K here and I'm was the same situation as you are. I'm getting out of IT. I'm currently taking undergrad chemistry clases and hope to pursue get into an MS program in chemical enginering, or possible pharmacology. I considered science but ruled it out because it seems like you get one shot and if you screw up or it wasn't your original major, you are out for good. The NIH/NSF only have so much money and search committees aren't going to give it to some hack that took his undergrad classes at a lower tier state school four years after he graduated. Hopefully chemical engineering is not like that. The worse I have heard about chemE is that it can be boring. Well, better bored that broke! Yes programming is fun when you are working on interesting projects, but lets admit it, most jobs are just programming boring business logic and eliminating paper. Where's the fun in that. Perhaps I can put those programming skills to use somehow with the chemical engineering or pharmcology degree.
:-| ) I guess we aren't as special as we thought. Good luck.
Sometimes I feel that peopld like us got the short end of the straw, but it happened with civil engineers in the 60s/70s and with aeronatical engineers in the early 90s. Thing that really stings is I know idiots who I graduated high school with who pursued non technical fields who are faring better than I. Perhaps the situation will be different in 5 years. I have close relatives in the science field and they don't do it for the money although they make a decent amount(granted it took them 15 years after graduation and I am about 5 or so behind. Perhaps I can start having a life around 40
The author shows how IT oursourcing might be good for the U.S. economy as a whole, but I fail to see how that is going to help the average IT worker.
The author's main point is that by saving money, supposedly it will free up money in sectors such as education, health care, and construction. What the author fails to realize is tha most of the outsourcing WAS in customized applications. It wasn't the big boys like Microsoft, IBM, etc. doing most of the layoffs, it was the smaller shops. In addition, I would call in to question the value of IT spending in each of these industries.
1) Education - need better teachers, not better software. I've taught before and that is the main problems. Computers won't keep Johnny from . Secondary schools are mainly just babysitting
2) Construction - ?? you hire a bunch of drunks to pound some nails in, what do you need computers for. This industry loves cheap labor, I don't see much opportunity here
3) Health services - IT could really shine in this area, but it is such a huge mess that it won't be fixed without government regulation, which means that few will profit from it. I remember this was what MicroStrategy tried to concentrate on back in the mid-late 90s, I suppose they just dropped it after they realized what a colossal mess it was. A bigger problem with health care is the cost of health insurance and the fact that people are living longer and needing more care, long after their productive years are over. Malpractice is another issue effecting this industry.
Really they only way you can make money in the IT sector anymore is you can show businesses that it will save them money. IT is mainly just a cost center nowadays. I don't see this happening for any of those industries.
Also, consider this: Are Windows/Office any cheaper now than it was 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation? I don't have the statistics on hand, but I'd be suprised if it were true. Though I suppose hardware is a bit cheaper.
Consider what happened during the 1980s - 1990s . I suppose you could say it was good for the U.S. "economy*" that all the decent wage manufacturing jobs left the U.S. Consumers got cheaper cars, but workers lost their jobs, and they NEVER came back. If you use the author's analagy and applied it to the manufacturiung sector, then as prices fell on consumer goods, demand should have increased since consumers now had more money which to purpose. Well I suppose that did happen, but the sector never responded, and things only got worse.
Some of them were able to retrain to IT jobs, quite a few were relegated to WalMart. A few years later they also lost their IT jobs. Its just not possible for a 45 year old with three kids and a mortgage to be constantly retraining like this. Quite a few familes have never recovered.
The author suggests that by outsourcing programmers you create more positions in design/interface, interacting with customers and management. But how is someone who has never programmed Only a few with can be a manager/CEO straight out of college. You need some time in the trenches. And if they layoff all these junior positions where are our next batch of managers going to come from? I suppose from whatever country you are outsourcing to.
In short, I don't see no light at the end of the tunnel for those in IT/Programming, which is part of the reason I'm getting out. Luckily I'm still young and have no family, I suppose with the way the U.S. works, from a purely economic standpoint it is uneconomical to have one.
* Interesting how these lassez-faire types hate collectivism yet often resort to a purely aggregate word such as economy, GNP, GDP, etc.
We have plenty of fossil fuel - its called coal. Not to mention oil shale, tar sands and other sources of petroleum, which some oil companies where considering in the 1970s before it became uneconomic to extract them and the projects were abandoned.
Sorry, but I don't see liquid fuels being beat by electrics for some time due to the power to weight ratio factor or other considerations such as finding a cheap source of hydrogen for fuel cells.
I disagree, KOTOR was quite a snoozefest. The combat pathetically easy as your foes fell before your superweapons and armor and later, your uber jedi powers. Nothing you did made a whole lot of difference in the storyline. Yeah, theres light side/dark side. You can be nice to people or hit them up for money, big deal. Gaining money allows you to buy more uberweapons and armor, which you don't need by now because your are more powerful than Darth Sidous and Yoda put together. You have dozens of health packs, drugs, and greandes ensuring that combat will be no challenge for you. Whats worse you have the D&D equivalent of a "+2 lightsaber" and "+3 jedi robes", etc. Still more you can have T3M4(R2D2 basically) or another character with good computer skill 'spike' the computer to blow up/gas your enemies in certain circumstances. Almost any sense of jediness is lost at this point. Its almost worse than say, the Final Fantasy series.
Besids the combat, the puzzles were pretty darn easy too, I remember Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the N64 had much harder ones, and thats supposed to be a kids game.
The only plusses of the game were the story was pretty decent and the graphics owned. If you like that Interactive movie thing then it might be your bag. Too bad the gameplay sucked though.
Factoring large primes (which RSA is based off of) has not been proven to be NP complete.
Why would you say H20 is becoming rare? Its not really destroyed like oil is. Plants use it up during photosynthesis, but in the end ti balances out because ells actually water during cellular respiration from glucose.
The problem you refer to may be the rarity of drinking water, but if you solve the energy problem you should solve that problem too. I mean 2/3 of the planet is covered with it.
No it means that some professors in the U.S. are unscrupulous and write their own texts in order to make money, then force the students to buy a new edition every year. The ones that don't write their own are probably getting kickbacks from the publishers, or possibily on the departmental/university level.
In the sense that you only have a limited time/budget, graphics and gameplay are mutalually exclusive to some extent. I remember Brian Hook, formerly of Id, then Verant, had a good article a while back on this topic on the now defunct VoodooExtreme. Too bad I can't find it. Anyway his point was that you either develop the technology, like Id did with Q3, or you develop content, such has Half Life and Deux Ex, which licensed their engines. If you try to do both you end up with colossal failures like Prey (anyone remember that one?)