The current Visual Basic is no harder to learn than the old VB6. It's different in some ways, which was jarring to anyone who knew VB6 (one of MS's stupider moves), but it's not worse. And VB.Net has the advantage that switching from it to C# is much easier than switching from VB to C++ was.
But I admit I have no idea what the new DB interface stuff is like (or the old) - the free version of VS comes with a free version of MS SQL, right? Anyone ever tried using that from VB.NET?
Almost no one will get tenure these days. The politics is therefore intense for the limited slots. And tenure is no sort of guarantee of a job - it only means you can't be fired "at will". You bet you need to publish, and bring in those grants. (And if you think "academic freedom" is common on campus these days, you really haven't been paying attention.)
Energy from orbit outwards will become vastly, amazingly cheaper the first time we drag a CHON asteroid into orbit, and there are companies with plans to do that. Making fuel from raw materials in space isn't cheap or easy, but it will be far cheaper than boosting fuel to high orbit, and it can evolve as a technology.
Supersonic flight may benefit from creating a plasma envelope, in a similar technology idea as cavitation torpedoes (except on state of mater "up") - beyond current technology, but funding hypersonic missile research would get us closer.
Technology is doing more from the same resources, especially energy. Only the simplest tasks can't be made less energy intensive given sufficient technological cleverness.
"Working retail" was the economic measure used for the study that gave these results - and it meant strictly the "do you want fries with that" type of job - hourly, and unskilled. I believe anthropology degrees also rank lowest as far as average pay after graduation (among common degrees). No idea about the lag, but if it takes you a year and you end up with a job unrelated to what you studied, then arguably you wasted the time and money on college - I know too many people in that boat (including a friend with an engineering degree, come to think of it, though he argues that learning "the engineering mindset" was worth it).
Does anyone know what the "strongly" in SIMP means? If this means "Interact via the strong force", that could make some sense. It doesn't seem to mean "interact strongly with normal matter". If also seems to me quite likely that dark matter could interact (with other dark matter) by some new force that ordinary matter simply ignores (though anything that acts like friction is ruled out).
The goal is practical spaceflight - a still-distant goal. SpaceX is no more or less "private" or shareholder-motivated than Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And there's no rule that says you're only a hero if you work for the government! What kind of statist would you have to be to believe something like that?
I would send that TV back if I had made the mistake of buying it in the first place.
Well, I have a TV that I'm sure does all that shit, but it doesn't bother me because I never use the "Smart" features, I just wanted the best display panel. It can track "HDMI Port 1" to its heart's content, for all I care. The UIs for these "Smart" devices all suck IMO. A laptop with a wireless mouse (and wireless keyboard that I almost never need, except when Netflix decides to log me out) beats every interface I've seen so far.
They're just lazy and making a life choice to be poor
Ignoring the trollish intent for a moment - if you graduate with a degree with "studies" in the name, as opposed to one with "engineering" in the name, or a handful of others, you have made a life choice to be poor.
The fundamental problem, and it's one of America's worst right now, is that you made an uninformed choice to be poor! If the point of a specific university program is to make you a wonderful well-rounded person with no marketable skills, then great, offer that, but tell the high school kids (and their parents) honestly "you have $100k in debt and no employment prospects with this program". Truth in labeling! (And maybe some trust-fund babies will take you up on it.)
Where I went to school, you didn't have to commit to a major right away, and several of the engineering programs made a visit to all of the student dorms to recruit, which was always a mix of "look at the cool things we do" and "we're the Nth best paying major the year after you graduate". IIRC, Materials Science was on top, followed by Chemical Engineering (this was in Texas), followed by CS. But the point is we knew that a non-STEM degree, other than accounting, was the bottom half of that list, and a really poor career prospect.
BTW, apparently an Anthropology degree give you the highest chance to still be working retail after graduation, with Arts/Graphic Design, Sociology, English, and "anything Studies" all on the to-be-avoided list, at least if you're planning for a career outside of the fast-food industry.
Holding all universities' funding hostage to their graduates actually finding work (beyond retail) would be a vast improvement to American life!
There is no trade off needed. A no brainer. If all energy is produced without creating CO2
Producing energy that way costs more today. That's what people don't seem to get: you're talking about reducing everyone's standard of living, significantly (the cost of everything goes back to energy and labor). If that's the best thing for the long run, then fine, but we should be damn sure before we start hurting people for possible future gain. Intense skepticism is always appropriate where politics and economics overlap, and that's what we're talking about here.
How much will it cost to reduce carbon use by X? How much will it cost if we don't? What value of X is the optimal trade-off? Until we have numbers, trying to force people to change is just greed-for-power, or religious zealotry.
Yes, there are a half-dozen names most geeks know. That has nothing to do with day-to-day work in the field. The idea that being a professor isn't a job fraught with politics (both internal and federal) is a bit silly.
Well, this is rigged at the local level, so it's possible to fix it at the state or federal level. Local government is often more responsive, but when it's corrupt it generally can't be fixed at that level. I love to see a state step up and do this - force "last mile" into a utility wherever it locally has legally-granted monopoly status. State governments can also be fairly responsive, at least when issues don't touch car dealerships.
Stuff like this is why I think Net Neutrality discussions miss the mark - you're not going to fix the problem that way, you're only going to cause the cable companies to achieve the same throttling through other technical means. Trying to close technical loopholes via the lawmaking process requires a body of law the size of the tax code.
The fundamental problem is that companies with a legally-granted monopoly for delivering high-speed internet are also allowed to sell content. In a free market, that wouldn't bother me - competition would sort it all out. But "last mile" is about as far from a free market as you can get in most of the country these days, and so we get this as a result.
Last mile needs to become a public utility. Let vendors compete for my business, and I'll pick "just a pipe" or a content company or whatever mix fits my needs.
The usual course of scientific progress is that you have an accepted theory that fails to explain some new data, then a collection of hypotheses that try to make sense of that in different ways, and make different predictions about future data, and then you get new data that falsifies most of them. That's gives a lot of confidence that the survivor was on to something - depending on the odds it could have been right by accident (a remarkable percentage of lottery winners have "systems" to predict the winning lottery numbers, and you can't assign meaning to that without considering the percentage of the population of ticket-buyers with such systems.)
String theory isn't all crazy math that has lost touch with reality - supersymmetry came from string theory, with many concrete predictions, and it would have explained a lot, but the lack of any discoveries at the LHC is pretty damning. String theory had the "collection of hypotheses", which grew into a vast forest of ideas ever further from experiment for lack of the natural culling process.
And this is the problem with climate models IMO. When you have error bars so large in your predictions that 20 years of data doesn't really tell you much (lack of divergence from the null hypothesis), you may be technically falsifiable, but you're not making much progress.
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about
Will you shut up about...
This is exactly the sort of rational discourse I've come to expect from the modern Left.
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about
Will you shut up about...
This is exactly the sort of rational discourse I've come to expect from the modern Left.
Well, there's no data that falsifies relativity or quantum mechanics or the vast majority of the standard model. Does that mean people are spinning their wheels or that those theories are largely correct?
Both GR and QM have made endless falsifiable predictions that have actually been tested, and in the case of QM almost all the key ideas came from failed predictions from previous models. The Higgs boson finding was important mostly because of the long, long chain of wild claims that all had to be true and accurate for it to be found.
String theory made no testable predictions for a generation (sometimes because we didn't have the SCSC to test with, later because of theories that could model any universe thanks to tunable parameters, and so weren't even falsifiable), and got pretty nuts there for a while, with journals publishing long philosophical rants, sometimes without even any equations, or with very few. It was about 25 years with nothing to show for it. The LHC falsified a lot if string theory, and as time goes on the field might actually heal, but it's quite an embarrassment as it is.
an entire world of weather stations and satelites being deliberately made wrong,
And entire worlds worth of ground station data data back at least a century has been "adjusted", always in such a way as to show a warming trend that wasn't there in the raw data (adjusted cooler for older records, warmer for recent records). The 17 years of satellite data we have shows no warming trend.
You seem to think the Earth's atmosphere (and oceans) are as simple as a bottle. The direct effect of the amount of CO2 we're talking about is quite small. Very complex climate models show how that small change might trigger a larger effect, but so far those models don't actually work: the null hypothesis is a better predictor than the models. Given time the science will no doubt get better -- that's what science does -- but don't go pretending it's just simple physics, or you're only arguing for you're own ignorance of the field.
Of course, non of that matters, right? Those who deny the Truth are heretics and unbelievers, who couldn't possibly have a rational argument, so there's no reason to listen to their lies, right? I sure remember words like that from when I was young, but back then it wasn't the Left using them.
On this matter of Climate Change, it will be even colder comfort if our civilization collapses because of it, thus proving even to the biggest deniers that we were right all along. They will still come up with reasons why the disaster is not their fault, and those reasons will likely include you.
If we continue emitting carbon at this rate, it might be a problem - sure, there's some evidence in that direction. If we discontinue all industry and revert to barbarism then we definitely cause the collapse of civilization. Everything's a trade-off. So where's the optimal trade-off? We're far, far away from climate science being good enough to give us any sort of data that's useful for that. Thus far the null hypothesis has been a better predictor of climate than the many climate change models. It's clear we know very little about how the Earth's climate evolves, and in the short term we should focus on learning more, not on making panicked random changes.
What does it mean for an academic to be highly successful?
The government more often makes the political decision to fund their research? If you're going to claim that "ability to write grant proposals that get funding" isn't the key to success in academia, then, clearly, you're an idealist.
See that bit where you write "I think...". Stop thinking
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about. Thinking can only lead to badthought. Not thinking is safe, and avoids unwanted questions that might lable you out-tribe, and thus to be despised.
And if you think science has nothing to do with politics, you really haven't been paying attention. Scientists are no more or less idealists than anyone else, no more or less corruptible, and in the absence of data that people admit falsifies their hypotheses, can spin their wheels for a generation agreeing with one another and accomplishing nothing (see: string theory).
Did you really just describe Govrnment Motors as a company that doesn't depend on the government to protect their failed business model? Their business actually failed, but the corruption was high enough that the government just threw money at them.
It's not about the pipe at all. YouTube has issues completely unrelated to sending the bits the last hop to your PC. That's why they're "back-end" issues.
YouTube's architecture is fairly complicated, with many places where things can go wrong. I can't know where the problem is when a video won't start playing - could be a problem in the CDN, could be a bad server somewhere behind a load balancer, could be the storage used for the video shit the bed, could be a lot of things that have nothing to do with ISPs or bandwidth.
High-scale systems have problems like this all the time - not outages, but some things fail for some customers, and if the impact is small enough, it can take quite some time before someone's pager goes off. When it happens frequently (especially if it takes a long time for a human to intervene), that's a serious problem with the system.
Slashdot Mirror
The current Visual Basic is no harder to learn than the old VB6. It's different in some ways, which was jarring to anyone who knew VB6 (one of MS's stupider moves), but it's not worse. And VB.Net has the advantage that switching from it to C# is much easier than switching from VB to C++ was.
But I admit I have no idea what the new DB interface stuff is like (or the old) - the free version of VS comes with a free version of MS SQL, right? Anyone ever tried using that from VB.NET?
Almost no one will get tenure these days. The politics is therefore intense for the limited slots. And tenure is no sort of guarantee of a job - it only means you can't be fired "at will". You bet you need to publish, and bring in those grants. (And if you think "academic freedom" is common on campus these days, you really haven't been paying attention.)
Energy from orbit outwards will become vastly, amazingly cheaper the first time we drag a CHON asteroid into orbit, and there are companies with plans to do that. Making fuel from raw materials in space isn't cheap or easy, but it will be far cheaper than boosting fuel to high orbit, and it can evolve as a technology.
Supersonic flight may benefit from creating a plasma envelope, in a similar technology idea as cavitation torpedoes (except on state of mater "up") - beyond current technology, but funding hypersonic missile research would get us closer.
Technology is doing more from the same resources, especially energy. Only the simplest tasks can't be made less energy intensive given sufficient technological cleverness.
"Working retail" was the economic measure used for the study that gave these results - and it meant strictly the "do you want fries with that" type of job - hourly, and unskilled. I believe anthropology degrees also rank lowest as far as average pay after graduation (among common degrees). No idea about the lag, but if it takes you a year and you end up with a job unrelated to what you studied, then arguably you wasted the time and money on college - I know too many people in that boat (including a friend with an engineering degree, come to think of it, though he argues that learning "the engineering mindset" was worth it).
Does anyone know what the "strongly" in SIMP means? If this means "Interact via the strong force", that could make some sense. It doesn't seem to mean "interact strongly with normal matter". If also seems to me quite likely that dark matter could interact (with other dark matter) by some new force that ordinary matter simply ignores (though anything that acts like friction is ruled out).
The goal is practical spaceflight - a still-distant goal. SpaceX is no more or less "private" or shareholder-motivated than Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And there's no rule that says you're only a hero if you work for the government! What kind of statist would you have to be to believe something like that?
I would send that TV back if I had made the mistake of buying it in the first place.
Well, I have a TV that I'm sure does all that shit, but it doesn't bother me because I never use the "Smart" features, I just wanted the best display panel. It can track "HDMI Port 1" to its heart's content, for all I care. The UIs for these "Smart" devices all suck IMO. A laptop with a wireless mouse (and wireless keyboard that I almost never need, except when Netflix decides to log me out) beats every interface I've seen so far.
They're just lazy and making a life choice to be poor
Ignoring the trollish intent for a moment - if you graduate with a degree with "studies" in the name, as opposed to one with "engineering" in the name, or a handful of others, you have made a life choice to be poor.
The fundamental problem, and it's one of America's worst right now, is that you made an uninformed choice to be poor! If the point of a specific university program is to make you a wonderful well-rounded person with no marketable skills, then great, offer that, but tell the high school kids (and their parents) honestly "you have $100k in debt and no employment prospects with this program". Truth in labeling! (And maybe some trust-fund babies will take you up on it.)
Where I went to school, you didn't have to commit to a major right away, and several of the engineering programs made a visit to all of the student dorms to recruit, which was always a mix of "look at the cool things we do" and "we're the Nth best paying major the year after you graduate". IIRC, Materials Science was on top, followed by Chemical Engineering (this was in Texas), followed by CS. But the point is we knew that a non-STEM degree, other than accounting, was the bottom half of that list, and a really poor career prospect.
BTW, apparently an Anthropology degree give you the highest chance to still be working retail after graduation, with Arts/Graphic Design, Sociology, English, and "anything Studies" all on the to-be-avoided list, at least if you're planning for a career outside of the fast-food industry.
Holding all universities' funding hostage to their graduates actually finding work (beyond retail) would be a vast improvement to American life!
There is no trade off needed.
A no brainer.
If all energy is produced without creating CO2
Producing energy that way costs more today. That's what people don't seem to get: you're talking about reducing everyone's standard of living, significantly (the cost of everything goes back to energy and labor). If that's the best thing for the long run, then fine, but we should be damn sure before we start hurting people for possible future gain. Intense skepticism is always appropriate where politics and economics overlap, and that's what we're talking about here.
How much will it cost to reduce carbon use by X? How much will it cost if we don't? What value of X is the optimal trade-off? Until we have numbers, trying to force people to change is just greed-for-power, or religious zealotry.
Yes, there are a half-dozen names most geeks know. That has nothing to do with day-to-day work in the field. The idea that being a professor isn't a job fraught with politics (both internal and federal) is a bit silly.
I believe that's how power works in Texas as well. It's a good pattern. Sadly, we have a problem in the US with ideas that make too much sense.
Well, if you call patching vulnerabilities "becoming more secure", then Windows must be "Over 9000!" secure by now.
Only about 1 million more patches to become as secure as Windows (by that definition).
Well, this is rigged at the local level, so it's possible to fix it at the state or federal level. Local government is often more responsive, but when it's corrupt it generally can't be fixed at that level. I love to see a state step up and do this - force "last mile" into a utility wherever it locally has legally-granted monopoly status. State governments can also be fairly responsive, at least when issues don't touch car dealerships.
Stuff like this is why I think Net Neutrality discussions miss the mark - you're not going to fix the problem that way, you're only going to cause the cable companies to achieve the same throttling through other technical means. Trying to close technical loopholes via the lawmaking process requires a body of law the size of the tax code.
The fundamental problem is that companies with a legally-granted monopoly for delivering high-speed internet are also allowed to sell content. In a free market, that wouldn't bother me - competition would sort it all out. But "last mile" is about as far from a free market as you can get in most of the country these days, and so we get this as a result.
Last mile needs to become a public utility. Let vendors compete for my business, and I'll pick "just a pipe" or a content company or whatever mix fits my needs.
The usual course of scientific progress is that you have an accepted theory that fails to explain some new data, then a collection of hypotheses that try to make sense of that in different ways, and make different predictions about future data, and then you get new data that falsifies most of them. That's gives a lot of confidence that the survivor was on to something - depending on the odds it could have been right by accident (a remarkable percentage of lottery winners have "systems" to predict the winning lottery numbers, and you can't assign meaning to that without considering the percentage of the population of ticket-buyers with such systems.)
String theory isn't all crazy math that has lost touch with reality - supersymmetry came from string theory, with many concrete predictions, and it would have explained a lot, but the lack of any discoveries at the LHC is pretty damning. String theory had the "collection of hypotheses", which grew into a vast forest of ideas ever further from experiment for lack of the natural culling process.
And this is the problem with climate models IMO. When you have error bars so large in your predictions that 20 years of data doesn't really tell you much (lack of divergence from the null hypothesis), you may be technically falsifiable, but you're not making much progress.
Right, so what's the optimal trade-off? We need data to make any kind of judgment about that.
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about
Will you shut up about ...
This is exactly the sort of rational discourse I've come to expect from the modern Left.
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about
Will you shut up about ...
This is exactly the sort of rational discourse I've come to expect from the modern Left.
Well, there's no data that falsifies relativity or quantum mechanics or the vast majority of the standard model. Does that mean people are spinning their wheels or that those theories are largely correct?
Both GR and QM have made endless falsifiable predictions that have actually been tested, and in the case of QM almost all the key ideas came from failed predictions from previous models. The Higgs boson finding was important mostly because of the long, long chain of wild claims that all had to be true and accurate for it to be found.
String theory made no testable predictions for a generation (sometimes because we didn't have the SCSC to test with, later because of theories that could model any universe thanks to tunable parameters, and so weren't even falsifiable), and got pretty nuts there for a while, with journals publishing long philosophical rants, sometimes without even any equations, or with very few. It was about 25 years with nothing to show for it. The LHC falsified a lot if string theory, and as time goes on the field might actually heal, but it's quite an embarrassment as it is.
an entire world of weather stations and satelites being deliberately made wrong,
And entire worlds worth of ground station data data back at least a century has been "adjusted", always in such a way as to show a warming trend that wasn't there in the raw data (adjusted cooler for older records, warmer for recent records). The 17 years of satellite data we have shows no warming trend.
You seem to think the Earth's atmosphere (and oceans) are as simple as a bottle. The direct effect of the amount of CO2 we're talking about is quite small. Very complex climate models show how that small change might trigger a larger effect, but so far those models don't actually work: the null hypothesis is a better predictor than the models. Given time the science will no doubt get better -- that's what science does -- but don't go pretending it's just simple physics, or you're only arguing for you're own ignorance of the field.
Of course, non of that matters, right? Those who deny the Truth are heretics and unbelievers, who couldn't possibly have a rational argument, so there's no reason to listen to their lies, right? I sure remember words like that from when I was young, but back then it wasn't the Left using them.
On this matter of Climate Change, it will be even colder comfort if our civilization collapses because of it, thus proving even to the biggest deniers that we were right all along. They will still come up with reasons why the disaster is not their fault, and those reasons will likely include you.
If we continue emitting carbon at this rate, it might be a problem - sure, there's some evidence in that direction. If we discontinue all industry and revert to barbarism then we definitely cause the collapse of civilization. Everything's a trade-off. So where's the optimal trade-off? We're far, far away from climate science being good enough to give us any sort of data that's useful for that. Thus far the null hypothesis has been a better predictor of climate than the many climate change models. It's clear we know very little about how the Earth's climate evolves, and in the short term we should focus on learning more, not on making panicked random changes.
What does it mean for an academic to be highly successful?
The government more often makes the political decision to fund their research? If you're going to claim that "ability to write grant proposals that get funding" isn't the key to success in academia, then, clearly, you're an idealist.
See that bit where you write "I think...". Stop thinking
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about. Thinking can only lead to badthought. Not thinking is safe, and avoids unwanted questions that might lable you out-tribe, and thus to be despised.
And if you think science has nothing to do with politics, you really haven't been paying attention. Scientists are no more or less idealists than anyone else, no more or less corruptible, and in the absence of data that people admit falsifies their hypotheses, can spin their wheels for a generation agreeing with one another and accomplishing nothing (see: string theory).
Great arguments there. That's the typical left-side argument these days: "I'm right because SHUT UP!"
Yes, we get it: people who doubt global warming are not of your tribe - they think badthought and no tolerance can be shown to other tribes.
Did you really just describe Govrnment Motors as a company that doesn't depend on the government to protect their failed business model? Their business actually failed, but the corruption was high enough that the government just threw money at them.
It's not about the pipe at all. YouTube has issues completely unrelated to sending the bits the last hop to your PC. That's why they're "back-end" issues.
YouTube's architecture is fairly complicated, with many places where things can go wrong. I can't know where the problem is when a video won't start playing - could be a problem in the CDN, could be a bad server somewhere behind a load balancer, could be the storage used for the video shit the bed, could be a lot of things that have nothing to do with ISPs or bandwidth.
High-scale systems have problems like this all the time - not outages, but some things fail for some customers, and if the impact is small enough, it can take quite some time before someone's pager goes off. When it happens frequently (especially if it takes a long time for a human to intervene), that's a serious problem with the system.