I'm sorry, you have not the slightest idea what you are talking about. I can assure you that a first year student in engineering would not have the least idea where to start in monitoring temperatures - you need multiple locations - inside a reactor.
You sir - how good are you on thermocouple alloys that don't mind neutrons and containments which can withstand not only neutrons but variable corrosive conditions at high temperatures? It's not just a matter of sticking a stainless steel jacketed thermocouple into an exhaust manifold.
If I had a dollar for every poster on Slashdot who has thought some area of engineering was simple due to simple ignorance on -almost always a his - part, I'd have....quite a lot of dollars.
No mod points but your comment is insightful. I have worked with 3 ex nuclear sub people, one an engineer officer in the USN, one ditto in the RN, and one seaman officer. They were all trained to the Nth degree to do all the right things automatically, but had enough theory to be able to analyse and develop solutions to novel problems. Ships do not run, and wars are not won, by blind adherence to operating procedures.
The mediaeval idea was that hell was in the centre of the Earth - which is why you get volcanoes. In Dante's cosmology, Purgatory was a mountain on the opposite side of the Earth from Jerusalem.
It's remembering this kind of stuff that reminds me why, at bottom, I don't believe the anti-anthropogenic-climate-change brigade; throughout history, the people who opposed the scientists (not the next generation of scientists, the contrarians) have always turned out to be wrong.
There is evidence that drug companies have orchestrated campaigns to get the general public to agitate for their treatments when NICE has identified that they do not work, or do not work well. Many cancer treatments are actually pretty ineffective, but of course dying people clutch at straws - as I may do one day - and if they are told that X treatment is very expensive but may prolong their lives, they will probably demand it. They may not be told that, say, the side effects are awful and they will get six months of life instead of three.
We need NICE because ethical drug companies are no longer ethical, and that in part reflects our demand for magical cures. The really serious problems we face - like TB and avian flu - are of little interest to drug companies because (in the first case) most people affected are poor and cannot afford expensive medicine and (in the second case) vaccines are usually a one or two off and do not represent a continuing revenue stream paid for by insurance. We cannot rely on insurance companies to control public health because their aim is to balance revenue and cost - they are not interested in controlling the diseases of the poor, and they do not want diseases cured to the extent that their revenue goes down. We as taxpayers need agencies like the NIH in the US and the NICE in the UK to advise and regulate in our interests, not those of shareholders only.
No-one will ever read this post, but actually running titles into the body is a long custom and practice. The Pope uses it for Encyclicals, and in the OT books are named by their first word, so that the first word of the Bible, Bereshit, is also the name of the first book. (Ray, being Jewish, will know that. And his posts are almost always (a) pithy and (b) literate.
So this, if it exists, is a very silly fight to pick. You have both God and the Pope against you. Remember that Stalin asked "how many battalions has the Pope?", and that Catholicism was a significant factor in the overthrow of Communism.
It's hard to avoid thinking that this case looks a bit like the Salem Witch Trials, but recurring as farce rather than tragedy. Since Classical Athens, there have always been societies that have an undercurrent of gynophobia and repression of women in general. Rather than apply this proposed test, at vast expense, what we need is for all legal staff involved in the prosecution of cases where there is a sexual element to undergo psychiatric screening to ensure that their desire to prosecute women and girls isn't, itself, a sexual perversion.
The law evolves. That's one of the reasons for juries, and in England the legal test of what a "reasonable man" currently thinks. As a result we no longer execute heretics, in Europe and the more advanced US States we no longer execute people for murder, and we have crimes like fraud which would have been incomprehensible to, say, the Roman Empire.
Currently we are going through a period of almost obsessive prurience - like the time of the Salem Witch Trials. We will doubtless emerge. The law needs to evolve because it reflects the norms of society.
Assume that a judgment is given against you in an EU country, not necessarily the UK, just make sure you don't fly in a plane which lands in the EU, perhaps as a result of getting diverted there.
Remember the Union Carbide execs who evaded responsibility for the Bhopal disaster - they dare not travel to or over the Indian subcontinent.
By the way, by the stupid people in dumb countries I assume you include the many, many US citizens and legislators who think US law applies to the entire world? As for the UK imploding, if it's such a shit hole why do we have so much trouble with would-be immigrants? I suggest you look at the maps of forecast climate change, and find out which country in the Northern Hemisphere is the least likely to suffer major ill effects.
Not so long ago Marina Hyde wrote an article in the Guardian suggesting that Elton John was perhaps less than a 100% altruistic do-gooder. He sued for libel. The case was dismissed by a judge who denied leave to appeal. John tried to appeal. The Appeal Court gave his lawyers, basically, a week to think of an argument why they should be permitted to do so. They have walked away from it, and the Guardian is now promoting Hyde's book attacking all aspects of celebrity culture, which is being published shortly. The case establishes a precedent and raises the bar for libel trials.
Judges and Appeal judges are starting to get it. In the mean time, make sure you post your opinions of bankers and politicians through a suitable proxy onto US servers.
Why can't they reduce the memory allocation of the graphics to 256 or 128Mbyte? Why did an extra SODIMM cost so much? And how much is the lawsuit going to cost them?
If the machine kept freezing and crashing, why didn't they return it under warranty rather than go to law? If I buy a computer and it is obviously faulty, I should expect to exhaust the warranty process before starting a lawsuit, and I should not have to provide a technical explanation of what the supplier did wrong. It's broke, fix it.
Nowadays the concept that you get what you pay for seems obscure to some people. But then, looking at the number of rich and famous people who thought Bernie Madoff's "too good to be true" interest rates were somehow possible, it looks like stupidity is no respecter of class, celebrity or even IQ.
From the perspective of Europeans, the US (which boasts of its civil liberties) actually has some of the most intrusive legal systems in the world. Stuff which is not a matter of law in most countries comes under the purview of lawyers in the US. Why? Because elected DAs and judges are media whores, and because there are too many lawyers.
One of the most sensible British judges, Pickles J, once commented in dismissing a case that there are many things that people do which are annoying, stupid etc., but so long as they do no harm to other people the law should never get involved. Unfortunately, the Labour Government in the UK tries to imitate the US system. (Which is one reason I hope we get rid of them next year.)
Our MP (David Heath, one of the good guys) raised this when it first came out, but I had forgotten. I think we need to target the Lib Dems with this one. How can a private company have private law? Surely this is contrary to EU law? - incidentally, no I am not a Lib Dem, this is not trying to gain support, I will write to any MP or political party that seems to have a clue on an issue, just like the Conservative David Davis seems to have a clue about civil liberties. Maybe we should try him as well.
Can any lawyer comment on this? As I understand it, and I quote, "The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 means that if you use copyright music in public, you must first obtain permission from every writer or composer whose music you intend to play." What is the legal status of a composer/performer combination, not a member of the PRS, posting material to YouTube with a statement to that effect?
I never got that, nor did my physics teacher (who started out as a real physicist.) If we imagine gravity as a deflection in a rubber sheet, why does the object "fall" into it? Because it would only do so if there was an external gravitational field parallel to the deflection. In the absence of that field the object would presumably travel through the space time deflection with unchanged velocity, whereas the analogy requires it to change path so as to lose potential energy and gain kinetic energy as a result of the perpendicular field. So the thought experiment seems to gravity as a deflected rubber sheet into which things fall because of another gravity in an external dimension. To make things worse, the rubber sheet is effectively 2D in a 3D universe. In our 3D universe, what form does the curvature take?
IANAP, I am a simple Java writing hack, and I may be too stupid to understand the explanation, but I find the analogy deeply unhelpful. On the other hand, the effect of gravity waves is easily understood; if I was receiving light from an obect travelling towards me and a gravity wave front passed along the line between us, either the light frequency would rise above nominal, fall below nominal and then return to nominal, or vice versa, as our relative velocity momentarily rose, fell and returned to nominal. There is no reflection involved, merely the normal behaviour of wavefronts, though I imagine the actual phenomenon would be more complicated because, of course, a pure single cycle of a sine wave never happens.
That's what we're getting here. Kudos to all the people who are asking "if Indians having cars is a bad thing, are you going to give up yours?". I'm English, I can take a nuanced view. If it's wrong for one of our former colonies to have little cars that do 60mpg, presumably it is even more wrong for another former colony to have big cars that do 15mpg.
Someone also mocks the Ferrari/Lamborghini comparison. Wrong. To an engineer - that's a real, chartered engineer, not just a jumped up mechanic - Ferraris and Lamborghinis are not very interesting. An example. Evolutionary biologists point out that horses are interesting, not because they are a successful design, but because they are a bit of a failed one. Very few of the world's species are horse based, whereas the beetle design, the bat design, and even the primate design have been wildly successful. (Or look at the dog design, which has proved amazingly flexible, scaling well to a wide range of sizes.) In the same way, few people are motivated to buy Ferraris, whereas the European small hatchback design has proven wildly successful and is the basis of most of the cars on the world's roads, scaling all the way from the Smart car to the "people carrier". The Tata design is interesting because it is likely to be the precursor of what most of the world's drivers are using in 20 years time.
You cannot get from a degree - about theory and how to learn - to becoming a commercial anything in a few months. You are looking at a year post graduation before you know anything. Anything else is unrealistic. I know this advice may seem unhelpful, but I have to tell you that by the time all my kids graduated, they already had a year of work experience, internships, and time spent working abroad (as did I, all those years ago. I learnt a lesson there). None had the slightest trouble getting jobs. That's your competition.
I think you are asking the wrong question. Your problem is to get a job from which you can become a fully experienced programmer. That possibly means getting a job working in support or relatively low level IT and progressing from there. So you need to put that several months of effort into job finding.
Unless you are a really gifted programmer - in which case, quite honestly, you would not need to be asking the question - your main problem is to learn enough about some business area so that you can actually contribute. If you get a job in a company that uses Delphi, or does everything with stored procedures in SQL, learn Delphi or SQL and be thankful.
Someone with a computer science degree should be able to pick up any technology to solve a problem in an appropriate way. You are supposed to understand the concepts behind problem solving, algorithms, data lifecycles and persistence, man/machine interaction, communications protocols, and other stuff like that at an abstract level. Then you look for a problem to solve where you can apply the concepts to design a solution. Your question - C++, Java or C - is like an engineer graduating from Purdue and asking "I want a job in engineering. Should I learn Bridgport, Haas or Hurco machining centers?" The answer of course is "Whatever your employer uses".
Not so long ago we had this theory announced that you would only find life on planets in a region between, in effect, too much solar radiation and so little that water only existed as ice, the idea being that this was a small zone and this made life more unlikely. But now there's evidence that there is long term liquid water under a frozen sea on Enceladus, far beyond that zone, and it looks like gravitational forcing may result in relatively high temperatures on many moons of the giant planets. (incidentally Carolyn Porco is now my favourite female scientist.) So in fact it is even possible that life may be most common on moons, because it looks like there are so many of them.
Without any kind of background in the subject (disclaimer disclaimer) I've begun to wonder if the substrate for the emergence of life on Earth may have been carbon nanotubes or graphene on clays, with various oxidising agents as the energy source. This could apply also to remote moons.
Remember when Zaphod Beeblebrox fixes things in the galactic accounting system by entering a virtual old-style accounting world? How many other big ideas did DNA get to first? - including his request for the universal power brick.
More seriously, the point about visualisation of data is well made. How many people who think they are information literate produce incomprehensible spreadsheets and graphs that conceal reality? However, the example on the web page (oil production) is a terrible one - very hard to read, unnecessary wodges of solid color, everything that upsets Tufte. To make a project like this really work, I think they are going to have to concentrate on what to leave out, as much as what to leave in. And silly avatars don't cut it. Learn from Clippy, guys. I am sure that there is a right way to use data to virtual reality 3D modelling, but, and I can't say this too strongly, when marketing demands more color, more widgets and exciting background sound tracks, tell them to go fornicate off. Thousands of data analysts will thank you.
Your initial case is correct, which is why semiconductors are more reliable than hand assembled hybrids. But on the carpet front you are wrong. The reason is that (just as with hybrids) you can hand make carpets in ways you will never be able to machine make them. I collect Afghans, and believe me you can easily tell the real thing from a machine made fake. (Plus the real ones are worth more every year, while the machine ones are not.)
My guess is that everything on Sennheiser headphones that can be better made by machine, is, and contrariwise. But it's quite likely that in the relatively small production volumes they do not actually have the R&D and buying power to get exactly what they want in things like leads. I like to do my own high-current wiring for SELV, and I have yet to find a "perfect" 35 or 50 sq mm crimp despite checking out all the well known suppliers. As a result, despite using all the proper tools, I spend about 5 minutes just testing each connection after I make it. I suspect that Sennheiser have an analogous problem.
I suspect one reason some of these people are difficult is simply that they have a big brain which makes lots of connections and has lots of ideas, but have to apply it in a very narrow field. Perhaps the quirkiness is partly due to outlying areas of the brain (whole hemispheres?) having nothing to do all day, just like dogs get destructive when they are bored.
I'm putting this forward partly because I know my own boredom threshold is close to zero, but I've been lucky enough to have a portmanteau career - hardware, software, some metallurgy and a ten year spell in management. As a result, I've never got to the top in anything, but I've only twice been bored for very long (and both times I did, I changed jobs.)
The antisocial stuff is a different matter. A lot of (mainly men) get like that when they feel in a position of power. Our own lovely Tony Blair apparently liked to demonstrate his power over civil servants by having meetings with them dressed only in his underpants - look at me, I can go around like this but you have to wear a suit. Other alpha males just like to scream and thump their chests at people while hurling excrement at them, and I believe some non-human primates do this as well.
As a counter example, look at Richard Feynman, who was interested in all kinds of things and had a very varied career. He did quirky things but in a nice way, asuch as giving evidence in court that all kinds of "respectable" people frequented topless bars, because he didn't care that people knew that he did, or exposing the poor security at Los Alamos diplomatically by safebreaking. Robert Oppenheimer too had a very wide variety of interests, which probably helped him retain his sanity when he was persecuted by Strauss and the McCarthyites. Oppenheimer was also tolerant of diversity as a manager, which helped even if it annoyed the military.
So, my 2c worth; what these people need may be to be included, but to be encouraged to widen their interests.
Engineers will always adopt the lowest total cost option because that's what they do. The old saying used to be "an engineer is someone who can do for sixpence what a handyman can do for a pound" - 2c versus 1$ in US terms.
Those of us who were involved, even peripherally, in metal bashing in Europe during the 90s may remember "Herr funfzehn prozent" - the guy from Opel who would guarantee you a supply contract if you could undercut his present supplier by 15% on price, which included warranty and quality costs. One German company found a way to make fuel injector casings by deforming metal rather than by cutting, resulting in a 50% cost saving. I don't recall anybody saying "What a pity Opel decided to use a cheaper identical product rather than a more expensive one". What they said was "Great, we have a long term contract, a patent and an unassailable technical lead."
Seing as how most of the people and corporations who use these tax havens also expect to be able to buy politicians, and create the government corruption in the first place, I find your suggestion paradoxical.
Expecting to use relatively small amounts of bribes to control the Government in order to be allowed to avoid paying taxes is wrong somehow.
Forget missiles. If there is a threat from an aircraft (yes, dear, a blimp or dirigible is an aircraft) that flies at 65000 feet, someone will probably rapidly develop a conventional fighter to reach that high. Aircraft evolve to meet the threat. Alternatively, NASA has achieved about 90000ft with a propellor driven unmanned aircraft, so it shouldn't be beyond the wit of the engineers of any developed country to produce a small payload high altitude prop driven solar powered "cruise missile" to take these things out. The payload probably needs to be no more than a few ounces of explosive and a quantity of small shrapnel.
However, by then the developers will have had the money and moved on to other projects, which is the usual way military R&D works (cynicism borne of experience).
I am told that the FDF is one of, if not the most, technically advanced armed forces in the world, where IT experts have a real opportunity to make a contribution. Is there any one of them who reads Slashdot and can enlighten us? Is this true and, if so, what are they doing right?
Slashdot Mirror
You sir - how good are you on thermocouple alloys that don't mind neutrons and containments which can withstand not only neutrons but variable corrosive conditions at high temperatures? It's not just a matter of sticking a stainless steel jacketed thermocouple into an exhaust manifold.
If I had a dollar for every poster on Slashdot who has thought some area of engineering was simple due to simple ignorance on -almost always a his - part, I'd have....quite a lot of dollars.
No mod points but your comment is insightful. I have worked with 3 ex nuclear sub people, one an engineer officer in the USN, one ditto in the RN, and one seaman officer. They were all trained to the Nth degree to do all the right things automatically, but had enough theory to be able to analyse and develop solutions to novel problems. Ships do not run, and wars are not won, by blind adherence to operating procedures.
It's remembering this kind of stuff that reminds me why, at bottom, I don't believe the anti-anthropogenic-climate-change brigade; throughout history, the people who opposed the scientists (not the next generation of scientists, the contrarians) have always turned out to be wrong.
We need NICE because ethical drug companies are no longer ethical, and that in part reflects our demand for magical cures. The really serious problems we face - like TB and avian flu - are of little interest to drug companies because (in the first case) most people affected are poor and cannot afford expensive medicine and (in the second case) vaccines are usually a one or two off and do not represent a continuing revenue stream paid for by insurance. We cannot rely on insurance companies to control public health because their aim is to balance revenue and cost - they are not interested in controlling the diseases of the poor, and they do not want diseases cured to the extent that their revenue goes down. We as taxpayers need agencies like the NIH in the US and the NICE in the UK to advise and regulate in our interests, not those of shareholders only.
So this, if it exists, is a very silly fight to pick. You have both God and the Pope against you. Remember that Stalin asked "how many battalions has the Pope?", and that Catholicism was a significant factor in the overthrow of Communism.
It's hard to avoid thinking that this case looks a bit like the Salem Witch Trials, but recurring as farce rather than tragedy. Since Classical Athens, there have always been societies that have an undercurrent of gynophobia and repression of women in general. Rather than apply this proposed test, at vast expense, what we need is for all legal staff involved in the prosecution of cases where there is a sexual element to undergo psychiatric screening to ensure that their desire to prosecute women and girls isn't, itself, a sexual perversion.
Currently we are going through a period of almost obsessive prurience - like the time of the Salem Witch Trials. We will doubtless emerge. The law needs to evolve because it reflects the norms of society.
Remember the Union Carbide execs who evaded responsibility for the Bhopal disaster - they dare not travel to or over the Indian subcontinent.
By the way, by the stupid people in dumb countries I assume you include the many, many US citizens and legislators who think US law applies to the entire world? As for the UK imploding, if it's such a shit hole why do we have so much trouble with would-be immigrants? I suggest you look at the maps of forecast climate change, and find out which country in the Northern Hemisphere is the least likely to suffer major ill effects.
Judges and Appeal judges are starting to get it. In the mean time, make sure you post your opinions of bankers and politicians through a suitable proxy onto US servers.
If the machine kept freezing and crashing, why didn't they return it under warranty rather than go to law? If I buy a computer and it is obviously faulty, I should expect to exhaust the warranty process before starting a lawsuit, and I should not have to provide a technical explanation of what the supplier did wrong. It's broke, fix it.
Nowadays the concept that you get what you pay for seems obscure to some people. But then, looking at the number of rich and famous people who thought Bernie Madoff's "too good to be true" interest rates were somehow possible, it looks like stupidity is no respecter of class, celebrity or even IQ.
One of the most sensible British judges, Pickles J, once commented in dismissing a case that there are many things that people do which are annoying, stupid etc., but so long as they do no harm to other people the law should never get involved. Unfortunately, the Labour Government in the UK tries to imitate the US system. (Which is one reason I hope we get rid of them next year.)
Our MP (David Heath, one of the good guys) raised this when it first came out, but I had forgotten. I think we need to target the Lib Dems with this one. How can a private company have private law? Surely this is contrary to EU law? - incidentally, no I am not a Lib Dem, this is not trying to gain support, I will write to any MP or political party that seems to have a clue on an issue, just like the Conservative David Davis seems to have a clue about civil liberties. Maybe we should try him as well.
Can any lawyer comment on this? As I understand it, and I quote, "The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 means that if you use copyright music in public, you must first obtain permission from every writer or composer whose music you intend to play." What is the legal status of a composer/performer combination, not a member of the PRS, posting material to YouTube with a statement to that effect?
IANAP, I am a simple Java writing hack, and I may be too stupid to understand the explanation, but I find the analogy deeply unhelpful. On the other hand, the effect of gravity waves is easily understood; if I was receiving light from an obect travelling towards me and a gravity wave front passed along the line between us, either the light frequency would rise above nominal, fall below nominal and then return to nominal, or vice versa, as our relative velocity momentarily rose, fell and returned to nominal. There is no reflection involved, merely the normal behaviour of wavefronts, though I imagine the actual phenomenon would be more complicated because, of course, a pure single cycle of a sine wave never happens.
Someone also mocks the Ferrari/Lamborghini comparison. Wrong. To an engineer - that's a real, chartered engineer, not just a jumped up mechanic - Ferraris and Lamborghinis are not very interesting. An example. Evolutionary biologists point out that horses are interesting, not because they are a successful design, but because they are a bit of a failed one. Very few of the world's species are horse based, whereas the beetle design, the bat design, and even the primate design have been wildly successful. (Or look at the dog design, which has proved amazingly flexible, scaling well to a wide range of sizes.) In the same way, few people are motivated to buy Ferraris, whereas the European small hatchback design has proven wildly successful and is the basis of most of the cars on the world's roads, scaling all the way from the Smart car to the "people carrier". The Tata design is interesting because it is likely to be the precursor of what most of the world's drivers are using in 20 years time.
I think you are asking the wrong question. Your problem is to get a job from which you can become a fully experienced programmer. That possibly means getting a job working in support or relatively low level IT and progressing from there. So you need to put that several months of effort into job finding.
Unless you are a really gifted programmer - in which case, quite honestly, you would not need to be asking the question - your main problem is to learn enough about some business area so that you can actually contribute. If you get a job in a company that uses Delphi, or does everything with stored procedures in SQL, learn Delphi or SQL and be thankful.
Someone with a computer science degree should be able to pick up any technology to solve a problem in an appropriate way. You are supposed to understand the concepts behind problem solving, algorithms, data lifecycles and persistence, man/machine interaction, communications protocols, and other stuff like that at an abstract level. Then you look for a problem to solve where you can apply the concepts to design a solution. Your question - C++, Java or C - is like an engineer graduating from Purdue and asking "I want a job in engineering. Should I learn Bridgport, Haas or Hurco machining centers?" The answer of course is "Whatever your employer uses".
sorry
Without any kind of background in the subject (disclaimer disclaimer) I've begun to wonder if the substrate for the emergence of life on Earth may have been carbon nanotubes or graphene on clays, with various oxidising agents as the energy source. This could apply also to remote moons.
More seriously, the point about visualisation of data is well made. How many people who think they are information literate produce incomprehensible spreadsheets and graphs that conceal reality? However, the example on the web page (oil production) is a terrible one - very hard to read, unnecessary wodges of solid color, everything that upsets Tufte. To make a project like this really work, I think they are going to have to concentrate on what to leave out, as much as what to leave in. And silly avatars don't cut it. Learn from Clippy, guys. I am sure that there is a right way to use data to virtual reality 3D modelling, but, and I can't say this too strongly, when marketing demands more color, more widgets and exciting background sound tracks, tell them to go fornicate off. Thousands of data analysts will thank you.
My guess is that everything on Sennheiser headphones that can be better made by machine, is, and contrariwise. But it's quite likely that in the relatively small production volumes they do not actually have the R&D and buying power to get exactly what they want in things like leads. I like to do my own high-current wiring for SELV, and I have yet to find a "perfect" 35 or 50 sq mm crimp despite checking out all the well known suppliers. As a result, despite using all the proper tools, I spend about 5 minutes just testing each connection after I make it. I suspect that Sennheiser have an analogous problem.
I'm putting this forward partly because I know my own boredom threshold is close to zero, but I've been lucky enough to have a portmanteau career - hardware, software, some metallurgy and a ten year spell in management. As a result, I've never got to the top in anything, but I've only twice been bored for very long (and both times I did, I changed jobs.)
The antisocial stuff is a different matter. A lot of (mainly men) get like that when they feel in a position of power. Our own lovely Tony Blair apparently liked to demonstrate his power over civil servants by having meetings with them dressed only in his underpants - look at me, I can go around like this but you have to wear a suit. Other alpha males just like to scream and thump their chests at people while hurling excrement at them, and I believe some non-human primates do this as well.
As a counter example, look at Richard Feynman, who was interested in all kinds of things and had a very varied career. He did quirky things but in a nice way, asuch as giving evidence in court that all kinds of "respectable" people frequented topless bars, because he didn't care that people knew that he did, or exposing the poor security at Los Alamos diplomatically by safebreaking. Robert Oppenheimer too had a very wide variety of interests, which probably helped him retain his sanity when he was persecuted by Strauss and the McCarthyites. Oppenheimer was also tolerant of diversity as a manager, which helped even if it annoyed the military.
So, my 2c worth; what these people need may be to be included, but to be encouraged to widen their interests.
Those of us who were involved, even peripherally, in metal bashing in Europe during the 90s may remember "Herr funfzehn prozent" - the guy from Opel who would guarantee you a supply contract if you could undercut his present supplier by 15% on price, which included warranty and quality costs. One German company found a way to make fuel injector casings by deforming metal rather than by cutting, resulting in a 50% cost saving. I don't recall anybody saying "What a pity Opel decided to use a cheaper identical product rather than a more expensive one". What they said was "Great, we have a long term contract, a patent and an unassailable technical lead."
Expecting to use relatively small amounts of bribes to control the Government in order to be allowed to avoid paying taxes is wrong somehow.
However, by then the developers will have had the money and moved on to other projects, which is the usual way military R&D works (cynicism borne of experience).
I am told that the FDF is one of, if not the most, technically advanced armed forces in the world, where IT experts have a real opportunity to make a contribution. Is there any one of them who reads Slashdot and can enlighten us? Is this true and, if so, what are they doing right?