I'm sure an advertising company will move heaven and earth to insure ad blockrrs keep working. Sure they will. You can totally believe Google employees when they claim that Google won't kill add blockers.
That makes no sense. Obviously dumb managers routinely propose ideas that smart managers know aren't possible. And it's not like we choose politicians based on intelligence!
What does a wall have to do with racism? It won't affect legal immigration. The voters in a democracy benefit from the ability to control immigration. The richest 100 families are the ones who will be hurt by the ability to control immigration - gotta keep labor costs down. This is why neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want the wall: it would hurt those actually in power.
Can you imagine the ratings for The Amazing Race: Mars with NASA and SpaceX, both launching their respective astronuts to see who gets there first?
NASA doesn't build rockets, the private sector does. What's left of the old school is now ULA, which still launches most NASA stuff, but NASA has used SpaceX as well. AFAIK, Virgin Galactic is the only company with its own astronauts (assuming we count 80 km for astronaut wings, as was the tradition).
The New Space Race is currently between Blue Origin (New Glenn) and SpaceX (Starship). Virgin Galactic is also doing exciting stuff, but they're aiming lower.
Best comment today. As I keep saying, there's just no way the Democrats are going to win this contest of toddler petulance. Some Dems still have a little dignity, after all: they'll never beat Trump's perfectly-optimized build of 100% ego, 0% dignity.
Of course, most of NASA would leave for the private sector before poor suckers are launched at Mars
Most of NASA is the private sector. Very few people actually work directly for NASA, mostly project managers and administrators these days. The guys who build NASA rockets work for ULA, mostly, since the shuttle program ended.
It is great that the New Space Race is on, though, I agree with you there, but it has always been "private sector" doing most of the work, even in the 60s with the original Space Race. New Glenn vs Starship, place your bets (betting tip: New Shepard had a good launch today, while Star Hopper... didn't).
They have not yet solved the problem of humans surviving several months of radiation in space yet -- I'd call that a "new technology that needs to be made", although I suppose 100 tons of lead shielding would probably do the job...
Not quite true. Your thinking in terms of getting to Mars and returning safely. Just not dying of radiation poisoning before you land? Much easier problem. More reasonably, there is some good lightweight shielding, as sibling post pointed out, which is good enough that you'd find plenty of people willing to take the risk. I believe radiation is just not the worst problem with long-term zero-g space flight - you can at least shield against radiation; bone loss is a much harder problem.
The big problem is just the massive delta-v needed for a manned Mars mission (with return), and the tyranny of the rocket equation. We simply can't build a rocket big enough to have that sort of delta-v budget (it's the stuff of "works in Kerbal Space Program", but not so much with real material limits). SpaceX imagines multiple launches, with several parts docked in orbit and many fuel launches.
We do have the tech to do that today, if cost were no issue, but the logistics just don't work. We have the tech to design the components, but not actual tested components, and that's many years of work. Then of course there's the multi-year wait for the launch window, then the travel time itself.
Of course he has the right to do this. All he has to is claim that it's needed for national security, and to declare a national emergency about it. Remember all those emergency powers you granted past Presidents?
He might eventually do that for the wall, though clearly he enjoys the current situation. But for increased NASA funding? That would be a heck of a story even for Trump!
Also, constitutionally he doesn't have the rights to do this.
He certainly has the right to champion it, and when the GOP controlled both houses he had a lot of effective power over the budget. Still not enough to get his wall, of course, but that's only because most Republicans opposed the wall (judge politicians by their actions, not their words: they had 2 years to fund it if they actually wanted it).
There is a good chance we are dealing with early onset Dementia with the president.
Ahh, the "everyone is smart but Trump" brigade comes out. Funny how demented Trump just keeps winning, and embarrassing his opponents. Admittedly, the bar for outsmarting your opponents is really very low in politics.
Maybe this will prompt changes to include dental coverage in with medical and not some half covered separate insurance with limited payout.
I think the difference in insurance companies is just the result of the difference in practitioners. Back when the whole idea was new, companies going around to convince doctors to accept insurance happened to be different from companies focusing on dentists.
I don't think there's any evil conspiracy here, and I'm convinced the limited payout limits the number of crowns your dentist will one day insist you need each year. Funny thing how judgement calls work when profit is at hand.
You don't generally realize how odd the whole situation is until you need dental surgery, and get deep into the confusion of what's covered by dental vs medical insurance.
What exactly would be the point of a university that only teaches future professors? Sounds masturbatory. The research goes hand-in-hand with training the next generation of professionals to benefit form past research.
It's very hard to buy a house without going in to debt unless you're rich,
I didn't buy a house until I could afford to pay cash. This comes before retirement: owning your house outright is the best and first step towards the financial security needed in retirement. But then, I've lived mostly in places with real estate bubbles, where renting was much cheaper than crazy impossible house prices, and that's not generally true.
Most financial advisors will say "no debt except a mortgage", and I think that's fair.
OK, I get your point, but you missed my point. The other thing colleges are for is research. If 99% of colleges collapse and are replaced by trade schools with no research, academic research would effectively stop in the US. That's not good. Without the places that we need a lot of to turn out engineers also being the places that turn out scientists, I don't think that's workable.
But I don't think that works: the modern deal between society and university needs to be "you produce the skilled workers needed in the modern world, and in return you keep a bit and get to do research". If the system collapsed to a few dozen universities offering nothing of practical value, that wouldn't allow for much academic research.
Or would your "white collar trade schools" also have a research focus and a plethora of grad students?
College offers very little to whom? Engineers and doctors? Are those "trade skills"?
Overall, I think the university system in the US has lost its way, and the tuition bubble will pop soon. We've fallen behind the world in STEM graduates, but graduate more people than ever.
Of course universities should be "white collar trade schools, at least in the modern sense of white collar jobs that can't be replaced by automation (e.g., not talking about call center jobs).
China is not a modern military with killer robots.
And lets not forget that the US revolution started with weapons far below the standard for the military at the time. However, before the shooting started, people had been quietly "stealing" (always an inside job) rifles and artillery from armories. Heck, the war started when the British tried to confiscate guns - not hunting rifles, but actual artillery. The only cannon they found were the ones too big to move with small teams of horses.
The arms you currently have in hand are a small factor compared to people willing to fight, and veteran leadership who knows how. US nationalists made British armories their first targets, and a lot of troops were armed with then-modern military weapons that way.
Most revolutions start with military units themselves opposing the government, but armed civilians hitting military bases before they quite know that a war has begun is the other way it plays out.
The very first class of undergraduates to have a CS degree in the US graduated at CMU in 1998
Was that a typo? You're off by decades. CS degrees existed in the 70s, but more as ad-hoc custom programs (I'd bet some university, somewhere, had a program in the 60s) . By the 80s, it was pretty normal for a university to have a CompSci department - heck the school I went to in the late 80s had both a normal CompSci degree, and a related degree in numerical methods for math. The field was well established by the 80s, with professors who had themselves graduated with CompSci degrees not uncommon.
The field just wasn't very popular until the mid-90s. It was only with the financial success of Novell and Microsoft (the dawn of the dot-com bubble) that people started pouring into CS programs because it looked like a good way to make money.
I'm sure there are a couple thousand people in America entering college each year who won't need any job skills. That's not who the university system is for, nor who it should be for. It should be for people who want careers with a skill floor higher than what you can learn on the job, from engineers to doctors. That's a real, concrete benefit to society. Babysitting the scions of noble houses, not so much.
One big thing, is they have all the people who made the last successful product still on staff, who think a particular way. So the next product will be made with the same type of thinking and basically look like and act like the older product,
When did we start talking about Google?
Diversity brings in a new way of looking at the problem.
Absolutely. At least, if you're talking about diversity of technical background, instead of diversity of physical appearance (of all things).
Yeah, in this recurring Slashdot topic, distinguishing between formal education and useful knowledge is critical, as that's the actual topic of debate most of the time.
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I'm sure an advertising company will move heaven and earth to insure ad blockrrs keep working. Sure they will. You can totally believe Google employees when they claim that Google won't kill add blockers.
That makes no sense. Obviously dumb managers routinely propose ideas that smart managers know aren't possible. And it's not like we choose politicians based on intelligence!
What does a wall have to do with racism? It won't affect legal immigration. The voters in a democracy benefit from the ability to control immigration. The richest 100 families are the ones who will be hurt by the ability to control immigration - gotta keep labor costs down. This is why neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want the wall: it would hurt those actually in power.
Can you imagine the ratings for The Amazing Race: Mars with NASA and SpaceX, both launching their respective astronuts to see who gets there first?
NASA doesn't build rockets, the private sector does. What's left of the old school is now ULA, which still launches most NASA stuff, but NASA has used SpaceX as well. AFAIK, Virgin Galactic is the only company with its own astronauts (assuming we count 80 km for astronaut wings, as was the tradition).
The New Space Race is currently between Blue Origin (New Glenn) and SpaceX (Starship). Virgin Galactic is also doing exciting stuff, but they're aiming lower.
Best comment today. As I keep saying, there's just no way the Democrats are going to win this contest of toddler petulance. Some Dems still have a little dignity, after all: they'll never beat Trump's perfectly-optimized build of 100% ego, 0% dignity.
True, but such amounts are rarely spent on something so useless or pointlessly ecologically destructive.
You clearly know nothing of federal budgets! Expensive and pointlessly destructive is 90% of government.
Of course, most of NASA would leave for the private sector before poor suckers are launched at Mars
Most of NASA is the private sector. Very few people actually work directly for NASA, mostly project managers and administrators these days. The guys who build NASA rockets work for ULA, mostly, since the shuttle program ended.
It is great that the New Space Race is on, though, I agree with you there, but it has always been "private sector" doing most of the work, even in the 60s with the original Space Race. New Glenn vs Starship, place your bets (betting tip: New Shepard had a good launch today, while Star Hopper ... didn't).
Woah now, slow down with that wild optimism. It's only been proven that we can launch a 2-seater Tesla into space.
They have not yet solved the problem of humans surviving several months of radiation in space yet -- I'd call that a "new technology that needs to be made", although I suppose 100 tons of lead shielding would probably do the job...
Not quite true. Your thinking in terms of getting to Mars and returning safely. Just not dying of radiation poisoning before you land? Much easier problem. More reasonably, there is some good lightweight shielding, as sibling post pointed out, which is good enough that you'd find plenty of people willing to take the risk. I believe radiation is just not the worst problem with long-term zero-g space flight - you can at least shield against radiation; bone loss is a much harder problem.
The big problem is just the massive delta-v needed for a manned Mars mission (with return), and the tyranny of the rocket equation. We simply can't build a rocket big enough to have that sort of delta-v budget (it's the stuff of "works in Kerbal Space Program", but not so much with real material limits). SpaceX imagines multiple launches, with several parts docked in orbit and many fuel launches.
We do have the tech to do that today, if cost were no issue, but the logistics just don't work. We have the tech to design the components, but not actual tested components, and that's many years of work. Then of course there's the multi-year wait for the launch window, then the travel time itself.
Of course he has the right to do this. All he has to is claim that it's needed for national security, and to declare a national emergency about it.
Remember all those emergency powers you granted past Presidents?
He might eventually do that for the wall, though clearly he enjoys the current situation. But for increased NASA funding? That would be a heck of a story even for Trump!
Also, constitutionally he doesn't have the rights to do this.
He certainly has the right to champion it, and when the GOP controlled both houses he had a lot of effective power over the budget. Still not enough to get his wall, of course, but that's only because most Republicans opposed the wall (judge politicians by their actions, not their words: they had 2 years to fund it if they actually wanted it).
Thanks. It's posts like this that keep Slashdot interesting, rather then just armchair experts making shit up.
There is a good chance we are dealing with early onset Dementia with the president.
Ahh, the "everyone is smart but Trump" brigade comes out. Funny how demented Trump just keeps winning, and embarrassing his opponents. Admittedly, the bar for outsmarting your opponents is really very low in politics.
Maybe this will prompt changes to include dental coverage in with medical and not some half covered separate insurance with limited payout.
I think the difference in insurance companies is just the result of the difference in practitioners. Back when the whole idea was new, companies going around to convince doctors to accept insurance happened to be different from companies focusing on dentists.
I don't think there's any evil conspiracy here, and I'm convinced the limited payout limits the number of crowns your dentist will one day insist you need each year. Funny thing how judgement calls work when profit is at hand.
You don't generally realize how odd the whole situation is until you need dental surgery, and get deep into the confusion of what's covered by dental vs medical insurance.
What exactly would be the point of a university that only teaches future professors? Sounds masturbatory. The research goes hand-in-hand with training the next generation of professionals to benefit form past research.
It's very hard to buy a house without going in to debt unless you're rich,
I didn't buy a house until I could afford to pay cash. This comes before retirement: owning your house outright is the best and first step towards the financial security needed in retirement. But then, I've lived mostly in places with real estate bubbles, where renting was much cheaper than crazy impossible house prices, and that's not generally true.
Most financial advisors will say "no debt except a mortgage", and I think that's fair.
OK, I get your point, but you missed my point. The other thing colleges are for is research. If 99% of colleges collapse and are replaced by trade schools with no research, academic research would effectively stop in the US. That's not good. Without the places that we need a lot of to turn out engineers also being the places that turn out scientists, I don't think that's workable.
Ahh, semantics.
But I don't think that works: the modern deal between society and university needs to be "you produce the skilled workers needed in the modern world, and in return you keep a bit and get to do research". If the system collapsed to a few dozen universities offering nothing of practical value, that wouldn't allow for much academic research.
Or would your "white collar trade schools" also have a research focus and a plethora of grad students?
College offers very little to whom? Engineers and doctors? Are those "trade skills"?
Overall, I think the university system in the US has lost its way, and the tuition bubble will pop soon. We've fallen behind the world in STEM graduates, but graduate more people than ever.
Of course universities should be "white collar trade schools, at least in the modern sense of white collar jobs that can't be replaced by automation (e.g., not talking about call center jobs).
China is not a modern military with killer robots.
And lets not forget that the US revolution started with weapons far below the standard for the military at the time. However, before the shooting started, people had been quietly "stealing" (always an inside job) rifles and artillery from armories. Heck, the war started when the British tried to confiscate guns - not hunting rifles, but actual artillery. The only cannon they found were the ones too big to move with small teams of horses.
The arms you currently have in hand are a small factor compared to people willing to fight, and veteran leadership who knows how. US nationalists made British armories their first targets, and a lot of troops were armed with then-modern military weapons that way.
Most revolutions start with military units themselves opposing the government, but armed civilians hitting military bases before they quite know that a war has begun is the other way it plays out.
Business debt is very different from personal debt. And even then: debt for capex is fine, but debt for opex is shameful.
The very first class of undergraduates to have a CS degree in the US graduated at CMU in 1998
Was that a typo? You're off by decades. CS degrees existed in the 70s, but more as ad-hoc custom programs (I'd bet some university, somewhere, had a program in the 60s) . By the 80s, it was pretty normal for a university to have a CompSci department - heck the school I went to in the late 80s had both a normal CompSci degree, and a related degree in numerical methods for math. The field was well established by the 80s, with professors who had themselves graduated with CompSci degrees not uncommon.
The field just wasn't very popular until the mid-90s. It was only with the financial success of Novell and Microsoft (the dawn of the dot-com bubble) that people started pouring into CS programs because it looked like a good way to make money.
I'm sure there are a couple thousand people in America entering college each year who won't need any job skills. That's not who the university system is for, nor who it should be for. It should be for people who want careers with a skill floor higher than what you can learn on the job, from engineers to doctors. That's a real, concrete benefit to society. Babysitting the scions of noble houses, not so much.
One big thing, is they have all the people who made the last successful product still on staff, who think a particular way. So the next product will be made with the same type of thinking and basically look like and act like the older product,
When did we start talking about Google?
Diversity brings in a new way of looking at the problem.
Absolutely. At least, if you're talking about diversity of technical background, instead of diversity of physical appearance (of all things).
Yeah, in this recurring Slashdot topic, distinguishing between formal education and useful knowledge is critical, as that's the actual topic of debate most of the time.