Really! Next it will be balck powder kits instead of kids buying the saltpeter, charcoal etc themself. Finding the ingredients was half the fun (trying to blow stuff up being the other half).
I'm in favour of complete, unfettered, no holds barred, scream fire in a theatre, free speech - for adults. When it comes to kids I think there should be some controls on what people can say *to* kids. That may include controlling the level of violence, sex etc. during day and early evening broadcasts. It should definitely include a ban on advertising where the intended target is a child. Yeah, I know that would be tricky to implement, especially with kids programs that are essentially one long commercial for a product. Just call me utopian.
Happens all the time... here in many cities prostitutes are not arrested but their customers are... the providers of the service are seen as victims... the ones paying for the service are seen as criminals.
My knowldege of global warming is pretty much: a large majority of scientists seem to think global warming is caused by greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. That is probably the extent of knowledge of 99% of the population. IMHO one ought to be somewhat perturbed when the populace at large begin demanding immediate political action based on nothing more extensive than that little snippet.
In any case, I say this not because I am a doubter but because I acknowledge my lack of information. However I don't need more information to have problems with the comments of the previous poster.
Evidently the scientist in Mr. Caldwell and yourself feels no need to produce repeatable evidence for this claim. Show us the data, or quit repeating hearsay.
I think anyone with experience in university would acknowlege that things become politicized, including resarch slants.
Clearly such mundane and well-researched explanations for warming as carbon-driven greenhouse effect must not be right, if far-fetched ideas like cosmic rays could be invoked to magically
Sarcasm isn't necessary if you have logic on your side. Being well researched does not mean a theory is correct, nor does something seeming far-fetched mean it is wrong. Other researchers in a specific area not thinking of a particular idea also does not mean the idea is wrong. The attitudes you are displaying do nothing to promote science or the scientific method.
You have done an amazing job researching and writing a book that incorporates absolutely no verifiable scientific fact, but relies exclusively on crackpots, unlikely theories, and misinterpretation of existing science, and you are to be roundly commended for your Herculean efforts. Move over Intelligent Design, there's a new pseudoscience in town.
Apparently the idea contains enough scientific merit that CERN is willing to devote some beam time to it... the number of eperiments considered valuable enough to achieve that are quite small. So your comments make you appear to think that both CERN and the 60 odd researchers willing to test out this hypothesis are... what? Crackpots? Stupid? Gullible?
Really, when you attempt to argue this way you aren't doing yourself any good, or advancing the point of view that you appear to hold. In fact if you want to promote science you should be campaigning for some measurable funds to be devoted to examining other causes for global warming... just in case all the people who are "90% sure" turn out to be wrong. Forget about the unnecessary turmoil to society etc. if the current theories turn out to be wrong... what about the fact that since global warming does seem to be happening we will be pretty thoroughly screwed if X years down the line we find out, too late, that the cause was something else and we have been misdirecting our efforts to mediate it?
The local paper had one of the people heading up the UN study saying something like "the greenhouse gases we have already pumped into the atmosphere will linger there causing further global warming for centuries to come and there isn't anything we can do about that." As soon as someone starts talking about what human capabilities will or won't be centuries from now you can be sure they are BS'ing. Such obvious BS'ing, scare mongering in this case, would be unnecessary if the peson could present conclusive evidence etc. and indulging in it helps none of us. It certainly does nothing to promote a general appreciation of science in the populace. To quote a fictional character "Just stick to the facts Ma'am."
Completely different question I've been wondering about. Aside from warming from greehouse gases (or whatever mechanism you choose) how much warming is taking place simply as a direct result of human activity? Other than a small fraction radiating into space (yes, I know, the whole point of greenhouse gas theory etc.) every joule of energy we expend in manufacturing, transportation, eating... every joule we expend on anything turns into heat. How much of a temperature rise can we expect from that alone?
In my daily paper it says this research was done by an international team that was co-led by Dr. Constantin Polychronakos of Montreal's McGill university. Maybe it is "open biology" because it was done by university scientists whose mission is doing public research, and not because Novartis suddenly got all philanthropic?
- Meccano and Bayko (sort like erector sets) sets - matchbox cars - firecrackers (often put inside the matchbox cars:) - guns (ahhhh, my old the Johny Seven all in one assault weapon....) - more guns (air rifles as we got older) - chemistry sets ( oh yes!) - blowing things up - rope, knives and magnifying glasses - balls to throw, catch and kick - just running/biking around with friends looking for stuff to do - telescopes/binoculars & microscopes - taking things apart (and usually getting them back together)
You had storage tube displays? We would have loved to have storage tube displays... we had to draw our characters on a standard oscilloscope screen by using the computer's DAC channels to directly control the deflection of the scope.
First, if you were already familiar with the material, concepts etc. then perhaps it was a waste for you, but the solution to ethical dilemmas generally do not follow common sense and most people do need to be taught.
Second, if you were well aware of what you were getting into and made a reasoned choice that you continually revisited then I apologise. In my defense I saw and heard comments like yours all the time when I was a student, then as a lecturer and now just as someone who reads the editorial pages of the local papers. They are almost always made by the clueless, frequently in the context of "but nobody told me that it was so hard to get a job dealing with 12th century middle eastern poetry and now I can't find a job and I have huge student loans to repay.... wahhhhhh".
You know what struck me about your post? First, that you felt an ethics course was useless. Second that you really don't want a CS degree - you should hasve gone to a training school not a university. A university degree program is not supposed to be job training, it is supposed to be a broad education. The sad thing is that nobody told you this before you started and by 4th year you don't seem to have figured it out.
The problem is a much deeper-lying one. Universities are selling themselves as steps towards getting jobs. With very rare exceptions (divinity, for instance) this was never the case, nor was it intended to be. They are not vocational institutions, nor are they designed as such.
Yes, but if we don't do that then we will only be letting in a small portion of the population and that looks elitist. Where I am the relevant zeitgeist is that everyone should be able to go to university if they want to do so. Inevitably that means both dumbing down the content and making the result of the process be something that most people want. "A job" is the simplest solution to the latter need.
Eons ago, when I was an undergrad, I frequently had the thought that the place would be significantly improved if 90% of the students stopped attending. Back then the purpose of the university seemed to have become one of both teaching students to be reasonably competent thinkers in one or more areas and to certify them as being competent. I always saw the enormous resources expended upon the altar of certification as a huge impediment to universites being something that would really benefit society. Now they have gone one step further and their purpose seems to be to market themselves as being useful to society at large. A bumper sticker for the modern university could easily be "We do relevent research now and we prepare your children for careers."
normally see just much of what the parent has listed as being part of an Electrical Engineering disciple. In my experience, Computer Science just does not take on these areas...
You should check out a better school then. I agree with the list posted by metlin - that is pretty much what is in a modern computer science curriculum.
Isn't work in multimedia codecs typically done by Electrical Engineers (signal processing, embedded systems)? The design/implementation of MPEG video codecs requires background in signal processing, VLSI techniques, etc....
You mean implementing the algorithms designed by others, perhaps even by people with CS degrees? As for some CS people not knowing about Fourier Transforms... so what? That is an incredibly tiny and specialized bit of knowledge. The first time they need to do something involving transforming between frequency and time domains they will learn about Fourier transforms. That's certainly the way it was for me when I needed to write some analysis software for a physicist. I mean it's not as if FT's are the same difficulty as say string theory.
In my experience it is not uncommon to find versatile people who are competent in more than one domain. For example you might find an EE who can also construct quality software... but I don't think that is the norm. And I don't think it is the norm for an EE to have the same depth of understanding about computation as a CS grad. For example most EE's I've met don't really get NP and why it is important. And that's ok - most CS grads couldn't design a circuit to save their life. The two degrees are for different purposes.
The one that does get me most often though is the attempted hybrid, the so called "Software Engineer's", since they don't seem to be particularly good at engineering or software. Example: I was working with some software engineers and an external disk drive started having problems. I pointed out that the daisy chain hadn't been terminated because someone had taken away the last drive and left the (previously N-1) other drive with the cable dangling free at one end. They didn't understand why that was a problem. When I tried to explain impedance mismatches and signal reflection they wouldn't believe me - they started laughing because they were convinced I was making it up to pull their legs - even after things started working whenI pulled the cable off and properly terminated the drive in front of them. Example: a software engineering grad was working in the cubicle beside me and was trying to debug some firmware with a pretty primitive development tool and wasn't getting anywhere. I can't remember what he asked me but my answer was "take a look at the previous stack frame and see what the variable value was then" and he responded with (I kid you not) "what's a stack frame?"
EE grads and CS grads do not study the same things because they aren't going to be doing the same things when they leave university. The need for one group to feel superior to the other is just silly. A claim by one group to be able to do all their specialized work *and* the specialized work of the other group is just arrogant.
The funny thing is that when I started in physics they basically taught you the math they wanted you to know for a particular course within the physics course itself. The math dept courses that were required tended to be taken after they would have been most useful in physics. For example we did kinematics, E&M and optics but the examples were all simple cases where simple 1st and 2nd order equations or approximations would work... after that I took math course in calculus and DiffEQ's and pretty much everything I had learned in physics the year before dropped out as examples in the math courses. I remember it being a very frustrating experience to have wasted so much time on the "simpler" cases instead of learning the general solutions in the first place.
I found pretty much the same thing when I compared my physics text book to the Feynman lectures. In theory they covered the same material but Feynman basically taught the general case from the get go (assuming that you already had the math you needed) and so covered much more ground much more quickly than the book used at my school.
Where I was an undergrad the CS was a bit lighter on math than that. IIRC by the time I had finished I had taken Calculus (differentiation with one and several variables), Calculus (integration), ODE's, PDE's, Linear Algebra, Linear Programming and Computational Theory. I somehow managed to avoid the stats course.
What exactly do the business majors know "more about programming" than CS majors? What exactly does "know more about programming" even mean? How to program in a clear and concise style? How to comment? Memorizing the entire STL? Because all that is really sbout coding, not programming.
And if you contract and EE to try to do what is taught in CS you will be disappointed because they won't know it. In fact a so-called "Software Engineer" would likely not know everything taught in a CS degree program. If you want someone to do the things taught in a CS degree program then you should hire someone with a CS degree.
I don't think so. The RCMP opened peoples mail for >25 years starting in, iirc, the 50's. Completely illegally. They even had an office within Canada Post in Ottawa and simply had mail re-routed to the office to make opening it easier. All without warrants and all completely illegal. When it became public knowledge Canada's response was basically "oh! Right then, we'd better legalize right away!"...
I know someone in a similar situation - how far away is the antenna tower and does this work well for you?
I've been wondering if there was some way people in rural areas could network by each having one of the off the shelf cheap wireless gateways (with someone on the periphery having adsl/cable/whatever) and relaying to the nearest neighbours... but I'm not a wireless networking guy so I don't really know how feasible that is... anyone know?
ummm, no, that is usually the case but as I said Mounties were sent as part of a peacekeeping force to Haiti. There was quite a stir about it at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
When did the idea of a multigenerational ship become "new" speculation? Science fiction writers have been writing about this for many decades.
Really! Next it will be balck powder kits instead of kids buying the saltpeter, charcoal etc themself. Finding the ingredients was half the fun (trying to blow stuff up being the other half).
I'm in favour of complete, unfettered, no holds barred, scream fire in a theatre, free speech - for adults. When it comes to kids I think there should be some controls on what people can say *to* kids. That may include controlling the level of violence, sex etc. during day and early evening broadcasts. It should definitely include a ban on advertising where the intended target is a child. Yeah, I know that would be tricky to implement, especially with kids programs that are essentially one long commercial for a product. Just call me utopian.
So sorry - too busy downloading... maybe later.
Happens all the time... here in many cities prostitutes are not arrested but their customers are... the providers of the service are seen as victims... the ones paying for the service are seen as criminals.
In any case, I say this not because I am a doubter but because I acknowledge my lack of information. However I don't need more information to have problems with the comments of the previous poster.
I think anyone with experience in university would acknowlege that things become politicized, including resarch slants.
Sarcasm isn't necessary if you have logic on your side. Being well researched does not mean a theory is correct, nor does something seeming far-fetched mean it is wrong. Other researchers in a specific area not thinking of a particular idea also does not mean the idea is wrong. The attitudes you are displaying do nothing to promote science or the scientific method.
Apparently the idea contains enough scientific merit that CERN is willing to devote some beam time to it... the number of eperiments considered valuable enough to achieve that are quite small. So your comments make you appear to think that both CERN and the 60 odd researchers willing to test out this hypothesis are... what? Crackpots? Stupid? Gullible?
Really, when you attempt to argue this way you aren't doing yourself any good, or advancing the point of view that you appear to hold. In fact if you want to promote science you should be campaigning for some measurable funds to be devoted to examining other causes for global warming... just in case all the people who are "90% sure" turn out to be wrong. Forget about the unnecessary turmoil to society etc. if the current theories turn out to be wrong... what about the fact that since global warming does seem to be happening we will be pretty thoroughly screwed if X years down the line we find out, too late, that the cause was something else and we have been misdirecting our efforts to mediate it?
The local paper had one of the people heading up the UN study saying something like "the greenhouse gases we have already pumped into the atmosphere will linger there causing further global warming for centuries to come and there isn't anything we can do about that." As soon as someone starts talking about what human capabilities will or won't be centuries from now you can be sure they are BS'ing. Such obvious BS'ing, scare mongering in this case, would be unnecessary if the peson could present conclusive evidence etc. and indulging in it helps none of us. It certainly does nothing to promote a general appreciation of science in the populace. To quote a fictional character "Just stick to the facts Ma'am."
Completely different question I've been wondering about. Aside from warming from greehouse gases (or whatever mechanism you choose) how much warming is taking place simply as a direct result of human activity? Other than a small fraction radiating into space (yes, I know, the whole point of greenhouse gas theory etc.) every joule of energy we expend in manufacturing, transportation, eating... every joule we expend on anything turns into heat. How much of a temperature rise can we expect from that alone?
In my daily paper it says this research was done by an international team that was co-led by Dr. Constantin Polychronakos of Montreal's McGill university. Maybe it is "open biology" because it was done by university scientists whose mission is doing public research, and not because Novartis suddenly got all philanthropic?
When I was a kid the favourites were:
:)
- Meccano and Bayko (sort like erector sets) sets
- matchbox cars
- firecrackers (often put inside the matchbox cars
- guns (ahhhh, my old the Johny Seven all in one assault weapon....)
- more guns (air rifles as we got older)
- chemistry sets ( oh yes!)
- blowing things up
- rope, knives and magnifying glasses
- balls to throw, catch and kick
- just running/biking around with friends looking for stuff to do
- telescopes/binoculars & microscopes
- taking things apart (and usually getting them back together)
You had storage tube displays? We would have loved to have storage tube displays... we had to draw our characters on a standard oscilloscope screen by using the computer's DAC channels to directly control the deflection of the scope.
You kids and your fancy vector storage scopes.
First, if you were already familiar with the material, concepts etc. then perhaps it was a waste for you, but the solution to ethical dilemmas generally do not follow common sense and most people do need to be taught.
Second, if you were well aware of what you were getting into and made a reasoned choice that you continually revisited then I apologise. In my defense I saw and heard comments like yours all the time when I was a student, then as a lecturer and now just as someone who reads the editorial pages of the local papers. They are almost always made by the clueless, frequently in the context of "but nobody told me that it was so hard to get a job dealing with 12th century middle eastern poetry and now I can't find a job and I have huge student loans to repay.... wahhhhhh".
Are those the sorts of questions that you think an ethics course deals with? You should inform yourself.
I felt a lot of the material was very academic in nature
Wow. Really? And in a university you say? Well, we can't have that, now can we?
You know what struck me about your post? First, that you felt an ethics course was useless. Second that you really don't want a CS degree - you should hasve gone to a training school not a university. A university degree program is not supposed to be job training, it is supposed to be a broad education. The sad thing is that nobody told you this before you started and by 4th year you don't seem to have figured it out.
The problem is a much deeper-lying one. Universities are selling themselves as steps towards getting jobs. With very rare exceptions (divinity, for instance) this was never the case, nor was it intended to be. They are not vocational institutions, nor are they designed as such.
Yes, but if we don't do that then we will only be letting in a small portion of the population and that looks elitist. Where I am the relevant zeitgeist is that everyone should be able to go to university if they want to do so. Inevitably that means both dumbing down the content and making the result of the process be something that most people want. "A job" is the simplest solution to the latter need.
Eons ago, when I was an undergrad, I frequently had the thought that the place would be significantly improved if 90% of the students stopped attending. Back then the purpose of the university seemed to have become one of both teaching students to be reasonably competent thinkers in one or more areas and to certify them as being competent. I always saw the enormous resources expended upon the altar of certification as a huge impediment to universites being something that would really benefit society. Now they have gone one step further and their purpose seems to be to market themselves as being useful to society at large. A bumper sticker for the modern university could easily be "We do relevent research now and we prepare your children for careers."
normally see just much of what the parent has listed as being part of an Electrical Engineering disciple. In my experience, Computer Science just does not take on these areas...
You should check out a better school then. I agree with the list posted by metlin - that is pretty much what is in a modern computer science curriculum.
Isn't work in multimedia codecs typically done by Electrical Engineers (signal processing, embedded systems)? The design/implementation of MPEG video codecs requires background in signal processing, VLSI techniques, etc....
You mean implementing the algorithms designed by others, perhaps even by people with CS degrees? As for some CS people not knowing about Fourier Transforms... so what? That is an incredibly tiny and specialized bit of knowledge. The first time they need to do something involving transforming between frequency and time domains they will learn about Fourier transforms. That's certainly the way it was for me when I needed to write some analysis software for a physicist. I mean it's not as if FT's are the same difficulty as say string theory.
In my experience it is not uncommon to find versatile people who are competent in more than one domain. For example you might find an EE who can also construct quality software... but I don't think that is the norm. And I don't think it is the norm for an EE to have the same depth of understanding about computation as a CS grad. For example most EE's I've met don't really get NP and why it is important. And that's ok - most CS grads couldn't design a circuit to save their life. The two degrees are for different purposes.
The one that does get me most often though is the attempted hybrid, the so called "Software Engineer's", since they don't seem to be particularly good at engineering or software. Example: I was working with some software engineers and an external disk drive started having problems. I pointed out that the daisy chain hadn't been terminated because someone had taken away the last drive and left the (previously N-1) other drive with the cable dangling free at one end. They didn't understand why that was a problem. When I tried to explain impedance mismatches and signal reflection they wouldn't believe me - they started laughing because they were convinced I was making it up to pull their legs - even after things started working whenI pulled the cable off and properly terminated the drive in front of them. Example: a software engineering grad was working in the cubicle beside me and was trying to debug some firmware with a pretty primitive development tool and wasn't getting anywhere. I can't remember what he asked me but my answer was "take a look at the previous stack frame and see what the variable value was then" and he responded with (I kid you not) "what's a stack frame?"
EE grads and CS grads do not study the same things because they aren't going to be doing the same things when they leave university. The need for one group to feel superior to the other is just silly. A claim by one group to be able to do all their specialized work *and* the specialized work of the other group is just arrogant.
The funny thing is that when I started in physics they basically taught you the math they wanted you to know for a particular course within the physics course itself. The math dept courses that were required tended to be taken after they would have been most useful in physics. For example we did kinematics, E&M and optics but the examples were all simple cases where simple 1st and 2nd order equations or approximations would work... after that I took math course in calculus and DiffEQ's and pretty much everything I had learned in physics the year before dropped out as examples in the math courses. I remember it being a very frustrating experience to have wasted so much time on the "simpler" cases instead of learning the general solutions in the first place.
I found pretty much the same thing when I compared my physics text book to the Feynman lectures. In theory they covered the same material but Feynman basically taught the general case from the get go (assuming that you already had the math you needed) and so covered much more ground much more quickly than the book used at my school.
Where I was an undergrad the CS was a bit lighter on math than that. IIRC by the time I had finished I had taken Calculus (differentiation with one and several variables), Calculus (integration), ODE's, PDE's, Linear Algebra, Linear Programming and Computational Theory. I somehow managed to avoid the stats course.
I took software engineering in university.
Then give it back.
We used to say, that if you couldn't handle software engineering, you took computer science.
I'm sure that made you all feel superior. Of course you have to realize that you would have been the only ones saying that.
I don't think I ever heard CS majors comparing themselves to the "Software Engineers". I guess they had better things to do with their time.
What exactly do the business majors know "more about programming" than CS majors? What exactly does "know more about programming" even mean? How to program in a clear and concise style? How to comment? Memorizing the entire STL? Because all that is really sbout coding, not programming.
And if you contract and EE to try to do what is taught in CS you will be disappointed because they won't know it. In fact a so-called "Software Engineer" would likely not know everything taught in a CS degree program. If you want someone to do the things taught in a CS degree program then you should hire someone with a CS degree.
IIRC Workstation also supports cut and paste between windows belonging to different virtualized hosts.
the beginning of Saberhagen's Berserver saga
I don't think so. The RCMP opened peoples mail for >25 years starting in, iirc, the 50's. Completely illegally. They even had an office within Canada Post in Ottawa and simply had mail re-routed to the office to make opening it easier. All without warrants and all completely illegal. When it became public knowledge Canada's response was basically "oh! Right then, we'd better legalize right away!"...
I know someone in a similar situation - how far away is the antenna tower and does this work well for you? I've been wondering if there was some way people in rural areas could network by each having one of the off the shelf cheap wireless gateways (with someone on the periphery having adsl/cable/whatever) and relaying to the nearest neighbours... but I'm not a wireless networking guy so I don't really know how feasible that is... anyone know?
ummm, no, that is usually the case but as I said Mounties were sent as part of a peacekeeping force to Haiti. There was quite a stir about it at the time.
Actually Canada does/did send Mounties out on peacekeeping mission - to Haiti for example.