I'm actually pretty optimistic. I was blown away by the BG miniseries, after expecting it to be absolute shit -- but the things I didn't like about it were mainly rough edges that I suspect will be nicely worn away in a series format, as the actors get more comfortable in their roles.
Re:yeah right
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
sounds like complete bull to me... If ANYTHING there would be MORE now since the 70's when they implemented all the anti-smog and pollution laws. Whoever came up with these results is likely just trying to make a name for themself. Sounds like a pathetic attempt...
Did you RTFA? That's almost exactly the reaction a lot of senior scientists had, but it looks like the evidence is pretty overwhelming. (With the usual caveats about popular journalism being hard to trust when it comes to science reporting, etc.) The thing about pollution laws is, they've helped a lot, but a) a lot of pollution comes from Third World countries that have no pollution laws, or don't enforce the ones they have, and b) the effects of the laws have been pretty much overwhelmed by the fact that we have a lot more people now than we did two or three decades ago.
We've seen this on a small scale where I live, in Denver, the city that gave the world the phrase "brown cloud." When I was a kid in the Seventies, the population of the Denver metro area was about half what it is now, and the pollution was just terrible. During the Eighties, as tougher laws kicked in (AFAIK, Colorado was the second state in the western US, after California, to really get serious about this) things improved dramatically. But through the Nineties, air quality started to get worse again, and we're now just about back to where we were when the laws came into effect. Halve the average emissions, double the population... the math ain't hard.
Every once in a while, the Great Bird of the Galaxy goes for a little drive in the country.
Re:Anyone know how well it actually works?
on
Home DNA Sequencing
·
· Score: 1
Presumably, the way they make money is by licensing the information to drug companies.
Re:Anyone know how well it actually works?
on
Home DNA Sequencing
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, it's a fair question, and to some degree it's difficult to answer, because... well, at this point, a lot of DNA sequence information is kind of like Bernoulli's law before airplanes, or the rules of Boolean algebra before computers. IOW, we know that there's a lot we can do with the information, but we haven't actually built the machines yet.
That being said, there's a lot of useful work going on with at least some DNA sequence information right now. Here (as a comp. bio. grad student) are the ones I can think of at the moment:
Microbial and viral sequence data is probably the most immediately useful, because by comparing the sequences of different strains of pathogens (e.g. HIV) we can track the emergence of these strains, figure out when and where they originated, and hopefully control the most virulent strains.
More excitingly, these little critters tend to have genomes that are really simple; learning, e.g., which genes in a viral genome code for which proteins in its coat allows us to develop new drugs against it. AFAIK, most of the latest generation of AIDS drugs (which don't cure the disease, certainly, but do allow its victims to live much longer and better lives than previously) were developed this way.
In a similar vein to the first item, it's possible to track the evolutionary development of bigger organisms (e.g., us) by comparing changes in sequences between those organisms and their close relatives (e.g., other primates). This kind of "phylogenetics" has already changed a lot of previous assumptions about various organisms' relationships to each other and their common ancestors; it's not an exaggeration to say it's redrawing our picture of the tree of life. This is, of course, pure science rather than engineering; whether you value knowledge for its own sake is up to you. (And if you're a creationist, then please stop reading; I don't like spending my time explaining things to idiots.;)
"Bad" gene sequences are the cause of cancer, and of almost every other non-infectious disease we know of. (Sickle-cell, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, you name it.) Right now, about all we can do is identify individuals who are at higher risk for some form of cancer because of some particular kink in their DNA. That's still important, because it allows those individuals to be more closely tracked and given earlier treatment if and when tumours do appear. However...
We are at the dawn of the gene therapy era. (Like all ages of exploration, it's risky; so far I think the score is something like two patients cured, twenty killed.) It is entirely reasonable to expect that within a decade or two, we will be able to insert "good" copies of "bad" genes, replacing the genes which cause these diseases. This is the whiz-bang stuff that has everyone so excited.
There's plenty more, but this is the stuff I can come up with off the top of my head and with only half a cup of coffee so far this morning.;)
Speech was most definitely not free in Nazi Germany; the Nazi Party had complete freedom of speech, and everyone else had it right up to the point that they disagreed with the party line on Jews and world conquest and... well, just about anything else... at which point they were likely to receive a little visit from the SS. Those Germans who did speak up early during Hitler's rise to power were disposed of, because Hitler, like great tyrants throughout history, understood the power of words very well.
Full freedom of speech would have meant giving a voice to those truly patriotic Germans -- and there were a lot of them -- who wanted to say, "No, you will not haul my friends and neighbors off to death camps because of their religion; no, you will not watch my every move and put my country into a climate of fear; no, you will not send my children off to die in a fruitless war that will bring the wrath of the world down on my home." But they couldn't.
OTOH, there's the problem that most developers got into that line of work because they want to, you know, develop. And most administrators... etc.
The solution, IMO, is for the developers to do exactly as much administration is needed (not nearly as much as most PHB's seem to believe) as a perhaps unpleasant but necessary ancillary duty of their job. Like cleaning out the coffeemaker at least once a week.;) And for the wannabe administrators who don't know jack shit about anything useful to go find a job that makes use of their natural level of talent... like, say, slinging burgers at McDonald's.
Unfortunately, in the real world, we're never going to get rid of the PHB's and their sycophants. (As satisfying as the idea of them having to trade in their suits for fast-food uniforms may be.) So developers will keep doing what the author of the article describes: working around the bullshit to actually get things done.
About the best piece of advice I can give anyone who's caught in a nightmare scenario where there's just too much bullshit to make the above practical is: look for a job at a smaller company. I've been working for a small business, with less PHB bullshit than probably 99% of the corporate development world as a whole, for about five years now, and I love it. You don't get the security you do with $Fortune_500_company_here, granted, and that does bother me sometimes. But the joy of actually being able to go into work and do my job more than makes up for it.
Actually, that works for institutional (corporate / academic / government / etc.) customers as well. The company I work for doesn't generally sell to individual users -- not a whole lot of people at Best Buy shopping for $100,000+ digital microscopy systems.;) But we do try to establish a good relationship with the individuals who are making purchasing decisions at the labs (mostly university and pharmaceutical co., some and government) who are making the decision to buy one of our products.
If you show a serious interest in buying one of our systems, you get a quote which is good for a specified time period. That quote will be itemized to any degree you want. If you order the system we've quoted within that time period, you get exactly what we said we'd deliver, at exactly the price we told we'd charge. If the quote expires, and the price on the system or any of its components has changes, we'll tell you what changed and why.
This approach is the main reason, IMO, that we've seen ~600% growth in the last five years.
This is the only piece of physics that MBA's ever have to learn: if you know almost nothing, even if you do very little work, you'll make a bunch of money.
OTOH, I don't think the atmospheric fringe you can see around the planet, especially on the right-hand edge, is the result of blurriness at all. That's pretty damn cool -- the first photo I can recall seeing of Mars that shows its atmosphere that clearly.
Re:Jelousy
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, that's not quite what happened. AppleLink was the service that eventually became AOL. E-World was a separate, later attempt at an Apple-branded online service; not least because AOL was already well-established by the time e-World was created, it sank like a rock. This was in the mid-Nineties. Not sure of the exact timeframe, but I know that when I bought my first Mac ca. 1995, it came with e-World preinstalled. I never used it, but it had a neat icon.;)
Note that I said "online service," not ISP. E-World's mistake, IMO, and the mistake made by the other big players in the online service world at the time (Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie) was in not taking the Internet seriously enough. They were all advertising themselves on the basis of proprietary content and services at a time when most people wanted to get on this thing they'd heard about called "the Web." AOL pushed (and still pushes) its proprietary content too, of course; but they positioned themselves as a value-added ISP, rather than a proprietary service with true Internet access as an afterthought, much faster than the others, and reaped the benefits.
... of course, almost every major American city west of the East Coast was built on, that's right, railroads. We built and maintained a continent-spanning rail network quite nicely a century ago; are you saying we can't do the same now? As for the expense, consider how much we, the American taxpayers, spend on maintenance of the road and air transport infrastructure. The reflexive American dismissal of rail really pisses me off when politicians want Amtrak to be self-supporting while pouring untold billions into highways and airports. All three forms of transportation are important, and should roughly equal attention.
As opposed to the garden-variety, non-massive nuclear strike?
Well, yeah, actually. Like what would have happened to Washington and Moscow if the Cold War had gone hot, as opposed to what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not just one big boom, but a whole lot of them, one after another, until absolutely nothing is left.
I kind of doubt anyone there is looking at us right now. From the (somewhat fuzzy) description in the article, it sounds like what we're observing is a disc of dust surrounding Vega with proto-planets forming within it. It was probably several hundred million years after the Solar System passed through that phase before life even got started on Earth. According to currently accepted models of planetary formation, those proto-planets would be pretty hellish places right now; their surfaces will be blazing hot and suffering constant bombardment by other, slightly smaller bodies. Being anywhere on the surface of one would be like being at Ground Zero of a massive nuclear strike.
" I don't know how we're going to restrict the spread of advanced biotech knowledge, but I wish I did."
We're not. Deal with it.
Re:Has anyone else noticed this?
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, thanks for posting that. Not only are RH being gutless, they're also being stupid. They may think they can make nice with Microsoft, and Microsoft will smile and nod right up until the moment they squash them flat. Visions of Chamberlain and "peace in our time"... except that there's no English Channel equivalent, nothing to keep BillG's hordes at bay when they finally do turn.
I can't think of a single software company that's done well by taking the soft path with Microsoft. Not one. Hardware companies have done it, by turning themselves into marketing arms of Wintel Inc.; and IBM survived a close partnership with the Beast of Redmond because, well, they're IBM. But Red Hat... hell, I take it back. I was being too kind to them above, comparing them to England. They're, like, Belgium. And with their current attitude, will last about as long against Microsoft as Belgium did against the Wehrmacht.
Oh, I'm not saying that all religious believers are Luddites, at all. Simply that most of the Luddism, especially w.r.t. biology and medicine, seems to use religious justifications for its absurd claims.
Math is an important tool for engineers, but I'd argue that it's not central to what engineering is. Consider the great engineering works of the ancient Romans; without anywhere near the benefit of modern math, they built structures that will almost surely outlast all but the best of today's construction.
In contrast, a program is math given form and power; a better definition of "applied math" would, IMO, as both a mathematician and a computer scientist by training, be hard to find. This is particularly true of the kind of database work I do. Yeah, it's possible to hack together a DBS without understanding set theory, but it is nearly impossible to do it well.
Defining engineering as merely physical objects implies that anyone who builds software does not do a thorough analysis of the design.
Only if you assume that engineers are the only people who design things. But of course they're not. Writers design books, lawyers design cases, bankers design rules for moving money around, military officers design battle plans... are these people therefore "word engineers" and "law engineers" and "financial engineers" and "war engineers"? Of course not. Design is an important job of almost all jobs, including many that have nothing to do with engineering in any meaningful sense of the word.
No, the fanatical Christians' whole point is invalidated; but the grandparent poster's point is right on the money.
Just about major medical advance in history -- dissection of corpses to learn anatomy, sterilization of instruments, immunization, anesthesia, antibiotics, x-rays, blood transfusions -- has met religious opposition when it first came out*. And over time, as the obvious benefits added up, these advances became part of "just the way things are" and almost everyone** stopped complaining about them. But new advances still set off the same alarm bells in the minds of the Luddites, who don't have the grasp of history to see what fools and hypocrites they are.
Plenty of True Believers will happily go to the doctor, take advantage of whatever the latest technology is that's available at that moment to cure what ails them, and then go home and bitch about Those Damn Scientists Interfering With The Will By Meddling With Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. And because of this behavior, unfortunately, there's no selective pressure for that kind of idiocy to die out.
--- * I heartily recommend Jonathan Miller's The Body in Question for an overview of this, as well as other fascinating aspects of medical history.
* With the exception of, e.g., Jehovah's Witnesses and blood transfusions. They may be fanatics, but at least they're consistent fanatics.
Um. The difference between the professions you name above on one hand, and IT on the other, is that there isn't one giant monopoly corporation that is The Face Of [Engineering|Medicine|etc.] in the public mind. I very much fear that any national or international regulating body with legal power would become a tool of that one giant monopoly corporation, or possibly a consortium of that corporation and couple of others... and true software innovation would effectively grind to a halt.
The problem, IMO, is that people want the word "engineer" to mean all sorts of things it shouldn't. My job title is Software Engineer -- but it shouldn't be; it should be Programmer, or Developer, because IMO what I do isn't engineering at all. (What I really do, when you get right down to it, is applied math.) To me, the crucial distinction is, or ought to be, that an engineer makes actual physical objects, whether those objects are airplanes (AE), buildings (CE), cars (ME), or circuits (EE). The expansion of "engineering" into things that have no physical existence, such as software, goes hand-in-hand with other abuses of the language such as calling widgets on a Web page "technologies." I'll barely buy "network engineer," since a large part of setting up a network is determining its physical layout. But people who maintain networks others have set up aren't engineers; they're mechanics.
Except - he didn't rob a bank. I personally can only admire the very, very few rich who give generously. And I can't but admire a man who gives more than 50% of all his posessions to charity. Keep in mind there's many rich who don't see a reason to do that - among them open sources greatest heroes.
The point is that a thief is still a thief. No, Gates didn't rob a bank for his money; he stole it in subtler ways. Look, I'm glad he's giving money to charity, but it doesn't excuse what he did to get that money -- and all the other money that he's not giving away, to buy himself a palatial house and a pretty wife and all the rest of the goodies -- in the first place.
Which "heroes of open source" do you have in mind, BTW? Some of them are pretty well off, but none of them have anywhere near the amount of loot Gates does... and AFAIK, none of them screwed over a bunch of other people to get what they do have.
Response to disclaimer: I'll probably get lynched for saying this, but Gates is actually not a bad guy. Really. He's already given away somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion, roughly half his fortune, and is actively working on giving the rest of it away.
If you rob a bank, and give half your ill-gotten gains to charity, and on your deathbed give away what's left...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually pretty optimistic. I was blown away by the BG miniseries, after expecting it to be absolute shit -- but the things I didn't like about it were mainly rough edges that I suspect will be nicely worn away in a series format, as the actors get more comfortable in their roles.
sounds like complete bull to me... If ANYTHING there would be MORE now since the 70's when they implemented all the anti-smog and pollution laws. Whoever came up with these results is likely just trying to make a name for themself. Sounds like a pathetic attempt...
... the math ain't hard.
Did you RTFA? That's almost exactly the reaction a lot of senior scientists had, but it looks like the evidence is pretty overwhelming. (With the usual caveats about popular journalism being hard to trust when it comes to science reporting, etc.) The thing about pollution laws is, they've helped a lot, but a) a lot of pollution comes from Third World countries that have no pollution laws, or don't enforce the ones they have, and b) the effects of the laws have been pretty much overwhelmed by the fact that we have a lot more people now than we did two or three decades ago.
We've seen this on a small scale where I live, in Denver, the city that gave the world the phrase "brown cloud." When I was a kid in the Seventies, the population of the Denver metro area was about half what it is now, and the pollution was just terrible. During the Eighties, as tougher laws kicked in (AFAIK, Colorado was the second state in the western US, after California, to really get serious about this) things improved dramatically. But through the Nineties, air quality started to get worse again, and we're now just about back to where we were when the laws came into effect. Halve the average emissions, double the population
Every once in a while, the Great Bird of the Galaxy goes for a little drive in the country.
Presumably, the way they make money is by licensing the information to drug companies.
Well, it's a fair question, and to some degree it's difficult to answer, because ... well, at this point, a lot of DNA sequence information is kind of like Bernoulli's law before airplanes, or the rules of Boolean algebra before computers. IOW, we know that there's a lot we can do with the information, but we haven't actually built the machines yet.
That being said, there's a lot of useful work going on with at least some DNA sequence information right now. Here (as a comp. bio. grad student) are the ones I can think of at the moment:
- Microbial and viral sequence data is probably the most immediately useful, because by comparing the sequences of different strains of pathogens (e.g. HIV) we can track the emergence of these strains, figure out when and where they originated, and hopefully control the most virulent strains.
- More excitingly, these little critters tend to have genomes that are really simple; learning, e.g., which genes in a viral genome code for which proteins in its coat allows us to develop new drugs against it. AFAIK, most of the latest generation of AIDS drugs (which don't cure the disease, certainly, but do allow its victims to live much longer and better lives than previously) were developed this way.
- In a similar vein to the first item, it's possible to track the evolutionary development of bigger organisms (e.g., us) by comparing changes in sequences between those organisms and their close relatives (e.g., other primates). This kind of "phylogenetics" has already changed a lot of previous assumptions about various organisms' relationships to each other and their common ancestors; it's not an exaggeration to say it's redrawing our picture of the tree of life. This is, of course, pure science rather than engineering; whether you value knowledge for its own sake is up to you. (And if you're a creationist, then please stop reading; I don't like spending my time explaining things to idiots.;)
- "Bad" gene sequences are the cause of cancer, and of almost every other non-infectious disease we know of. (Sickle-cell, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, you name it.) Right now, about all we can do is identify individuals who are at higher risk for some form of cancer because of some particular kink in their DNA. That's still important, because it allows those individuals to be more closely tracked and given earlier treatment if and when tumours do appear. However
... - We are at the dawn of the gene therapy era. (Like all ages of exploration, it's risky; so far I think the score is something like two patients cured, twenty killed.) It is entirely reasonable to expect that within a decade or two, we will be able to insert "good" copies of "bad" genes, replacing the genes which cause these diseases. This is the whiz-bang stuff that has everyone so excited.
There's plenty more, but this is the stuff I can come up with off the top of my head and with only half a cup of coffee so far this morning.Speech was most definitely not free in Nazi Germany; the Nazi Party had complete freedom of speech, and everyone else had it right up to the point that they disagreed with the party line on Jews and world conquest and ... well, just about anything else ... at which point they were likely to receive a little visit from the SS. Those Germans who did speak up early during Hitler's rise to power were disposed of, because Hitler, like great tyrants throughout history, understood the power of words very well.
Full freedom of speech would have meant giving a voice to those truly patriotic Germans -- and there were a lot of them -- who wanted to say, "No, you will not haul my friends and neighbors off to death camps because of their religion; no, you will not watch my every move and put my country into a climate of fear; no, you will not send my children off to die in a fruitless war that will bring the wrath of the world down on my home." But they couldn't.
OTOH, there's the problem that most developers got into that line of work because they want to, you know, develop. And most administrators ... etc.
;) And for the wannabe administrators who don't know jack shit about anything useful to go find a job that makes use of their natural level of talent ... like, say, slinging burgers at McDonald's.
The solution, IMO, is for the developers to do exactly as much administration is needed (not nearly as much as most PHB's seem to believe) as a perhaps unpleasant but necessary ancillary duty of their job. Like cleaning out the coffeemaker at least once a week.
Unfortunately, in the real world, we're never going to get rid of the PHB's and their sycophants. (As satisfying as the idea of them having to trade in their suits for fast-food uniforms may be.) So developers will keep doing what the author of the article describes: working around the bullshit to actually get things done.
About the best piece of advice I can give anyone who's caught in a nightmare scenario where there's just too much bullshit to make the above practical is: look for a job at a smaller company. I've been working for a small business, with less PHB bullshit than probably 99% of the corporate development world as a whole, for about five years now, and I love it. You don't get the security you do with $Fortune_500_company_here, granted, and that does bother me sometimes. But the joy of actually being able to go into work and do my job more than makes up for it.
Actually, that works for institutional (corporate / academic / government / etc.) customers as well. The company I work for doesn't generally sell to individual users -- not a whole lot of people at Best Buy shopping for $100,000+ digital microscopy systems. ;) But we do try to establish a good relationship with the individuals who are making purchasing decisions at the labs (mostly university and pharmaceutical co., some and government) who are making the decision to buy one of our products.
If you show a serious interest in buying one of our systems, you get a quote which is good for a specified time period. That quote will be itemized to any degree you want. If you order the system we've quoted within that time period, you get exactly what we said we'd deliver, at exactly the price we told we'd charge. If the quote expires, and the price on the system or any of its components has changes, we'll tell you what changed and why.
This approach is the main reason, IMO, that we've seen ~600% growth in the last five years.
On a related note:
Time is money: t = m
Knowledge is power: k = p
Power, of course, is work over time: p = w/t
Therefore, k = w/m, and so m = w/k.
This is the only piece of physics that MBA's ever have to learn: if you know almost nothing, even if you do very little work, you'll make a bunch of money.
OTOH, I don't think the atmospheric fringe you can see around the planet, especially on the right-hand edge, is the result of blurriness at all. That's pretty damn cool -- the first photo I can recall seeing of Mars that shows its atmosphere that clearly.
No, that's not quite what happened. AppleLink was the service that eventually became AOL. E-World was a separate, later attempt at an Apple-branded online service; not least because AOL was already well-established by the time e-World was created, it sank like a rock. This was in the mid-Nineties. Not sure of the exact timeframe, but I know that when I bought my first Mac ca. 1995, it came with e-World preinstalled. I never used it, but it had a neat icon. ;)
Note that I said "online service," not ISP. E-World's mistake, IMO, and the mistake made by the other big players in the online service world at the time (Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie) was in not taking the Internet seriously enough. They were all advertising themselves on the basis of proprietary content and services at a time when most people wanted to get on this thing they'd heard about called "the Web." AOL pushed (and still pushes) its proprietary content too, of course; but they positioned themselves as a value-added ISP, rather than a proprietary service with true Internet access as an afterthought, much faster than the others, and reaped the benefits.
... of course, almost every major American city west of the East Coast was built on, that's right, railroads. We built and maintained a continent-spanning rail network quite nicely a century ago; are you saying we can't do the same now? As for the expense, consider how much we, the American taxpayers, spend on maintenance of the road and air transport infrastructure. The reflexive American dismissal of rail really pisses me off when politicians want Amtrak to be self-supporting while pouring untold billions into highways and airports. All three forms of transportation are important, and should roughly equal attention.
As opposed to the garden-variety, non-massive nuclear strike?
Well, yeah, actually. Like what would have happened to Washington and Moscow if the Cold War had gone hot, as opposed to what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not just one big boom, but a whole lot of them, one after another, until absolutely nothing is left.
I kind of doubt anyone there is looking at us right now. From the (somewhat fuzzy) description in the article, it sounds like what we're observing is a disc of dust surrounding Vega with proto-planets forming within it. It was probably several hundred million years after the Solar System passed through that phase before life even got started on Earth. According to currently accepted models of planetary formation, those proto-planets would be pretty hellish places right now; their surfaces will be blazing hot and suffering constant bombardment by other, slightly smaller bodies. Being anywhere on the surface of one would be like being at Ground Zero of a massive nuclear strike.
" I don't know how we're going to restrict the spread of advanced biotech knowledge, but I wish I did."
We're not. Deal with it.
Yes, thanks for posting that. Not only are RH being gutless, they're also being stupid. They may think they can make nice with Microsoft, and Microsoft will smile and nod right up until the moment they squash them flat. Visions of Chamberlain and "peace in our time" ... except that there's no English Channel equivalent, nothing to keep BillG's hordes at bay when they finally do turn.
... hell, I take it back. I was being too kind to them above, comparing them to England. They're, like, Belgium. And with their current attitude, will last about as long against Microsoft as Belgium did against the Wehrmacht.
I can't think of a single software company that's done well by taking the soft path with Microsoft. Not one. Hardware companies have done it, by turning themselves into marketing arms of Wintel Inc.; and IBM survived a close partnership with the Beast of Redmond because, well, they're IBM. But Red Hat
Oh, I'm not saying that all religious believers are Luddites, at all. Simply that most of the Luddism, especially w.r.t. biology and medicine, seems to use religious justifications for its absurd claims.
Isn't engineering by definition applied math?
... are these people therefore "word engineers" and "law engineers" and "financial engineers" and "war engineers"? Of course not. Design is an important job of almost all jobs, including many that have nothing to do with engineering in any meaningful sense of the word.
Math is an important tool for engineers, but I'd argue that it's not central to what engineering is. Consider the great engineering works of the ancient Romans; without anywhere near the benefit of modern math, they built structures that will almost surely outlast all but the best of today's construction.
In contrast, a program is math given form and power; a better definition of "applied math" would, IMO, as both a mathematician and a computer scientist by training, be hard to find. This is particularly true of the kind of database work I do. Yeah, it's possible to hack together a DBS without understanding set theory, but it is nearly impossible to do it well.
Defining engineering as merely physical objects implies that anyone who builds software does not do a thorough analysis of the design.
Only if you assume that engineers are the only people who design things. But of course they're not. Writers design books, lawyers design cases, bankers design rules for moving money around, military officers design battle plans
That should be "... Interfering With The Will Of God By Meddling ..." above, of course.
No, the fanatical Christians' whole point is invalidated; but the grandparent poster's point is right on the money.
Just about major medical advance in history -- dissection of corpses to learn anatomy, sterilization of instruments, immunization, anesthesia, antibiotics, x-rays, blood transfusions -- has met religious opposition when it first came out*. And over time, as the obvious benefits added up, these advances became part of "just the way things are" and almost everyone** stopped complaining about them. But new advances still set off the same alarm bells in the minds of the Luddites, who don't have the grasp of history to see what fools and hypocrites they are.
Plenty of True Believers will happily go to the doctor, take advantage of whatever the latest technology is that's available at that moment to cure what ails them, and then go home and bitch about Those Damn Scientists Interfering With The Will By Meddling With Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. And because of this behavior, unfortunately, there's no selective pressure for that kind of idiocy to die out.
---
* I heartily recommend Jonathan Miller's The Body in Question for an overview of this, as well as other fascinating aspects of medical history.
* With the exception of, e.g., Jehovah's Witnesses and blood transfusions. They may be fanatics, but at least they're consistent fanatics.
Um. The difference between the professions you name above on one hand, and IT on the other, is that there isn't one giant monopoly corporation that is The Face Of [Engineering|Medicine|etc.] in the public mind. I very much fear that any national or international regulating body with legal power would become a tool of that one giant monopoly corporation, or possibly a consortium of that corporation and couple of others ... and true software innovation would effectively grind to a halt.
The problem, IMO, is that people want the word "engineer" to mean all sorts of things it shouldn't. My job title is Software Engineer -- but it shouldn't be; it should be Programmer, or Developer, because IMO what I do isn't engineering at all. (What I really do, when you get right down to it, is applied math.) To me, the crucial distinction is, or ought to be, that an engineer makes actual physical objects, whether those objects are airplanes (AE), buildings (CE), cars (ME), or circuits (EE). The expansion of "engineering" into things that have no physical existence, such as software, goes hand-in-hand with other abuses of the language such as calling widgets on a Web page "technologies." I'll barely buy "network engineer," since a large part of setting up a network is determining its physical layout. But people who maintain networks others have set up aren't engineers; they're mechanics.
Ah, interesting. Thanks.
The point is that a thief is still a thief. No, Gates didn't rob a bank for his money; he stole it in subtler ways. Look, I'm glad he's giving money to charity, but it doesn't excuse what he did to get that money -- and all the other money that he's not giving away, to buy himself a palatial house and a pretty wife and all the rest of the goodies -- in the first place.
Which "heroes of open source" do you have in mind, BTW? Some of them are pretty well off, but none of them have anywhere near the amount of loot Gates does
If you rob a bank, and give half your ill-gotten gains to charity, and on your deathbed give away what's left
... you're still a bank robber.