There's a store near where I used to live, that's been selling cameras in glasses, pens, ties, transistor radios, electric plugs, etc for a couple of decades. Clearly there are some private investigators, industrial espionage operatives, stalkers and peeping toms that want this stuff. But it's really niche.
That's not just 'really niche', it's kind of a slummy niche. There are plenty of niche products, that very few people really need in anything resembling a serious way, that manage to sell pretty substantial volumes to hobbyist types once the price comes down a bit or a modestly cut-down variant becomes available(just think of the number of people wandering the world and happy-snapping with a DSLR that has never seen anything other than 'kit lens, all settings auto', or the market for black, anodized aluminum objects that are sold as 'tactical' to people who've probably lost more blood to tripping on things than to combat...) That only really happens if the niche users are in some way prestigious or 'aspirational', though.
If you have a really niche product whose niche users offer a significant marketing halo, that means you just need to bring the price down a bit, at least on the lesser models, and the wannabes are yours for the taking.
If your niche product carries the stench of pervs, creeps, and nerds who pride themselves on extreme technology dependence? Less so.
Touchscreen keyboards are also pretty horrid; but the amount of difference that a little haptic buzz, along with on-screen visual feedback and sophisticated autocorrect, makes is significant. Laser projection keyboards are markedly worse.
This, plus kinnect, could be the interface of the future. Install it on the ceiling and you could project a video or keyboard on any flat surface. Never have to look for a remote again. Need a calculator, a recipe, a note pad, facebook, etc?
It looks promising for enhancing the immersion value of relatively small screens; but as an interface it would have to be taken in very small doses. Anyone remember those so damn sci-fi you think that the future just travelled back in time and punched you in the face laser projection keyboards? They suck. Horribly. The ghastliest laptop you've ever had to touch would feel like a Model M, even after spilling something sticky on it, compared to one of those.
For a few big buttons that you only need occasionally, the convenience would probably be worth it; but the nastiest $2 rubber-dome cheapies are so much nicer than 'typing' on a projection that it just isn't fair.
I think I speak for most gaming enthusiasts when I say "focus on hardware that will be more robust for a better part of this next generation and the games that will be on it and skip the gimmicks".
Oh, we assure you that the TPM will be plenty robust, we've been working extra hard on that part!
That seems like a sensible bit of future-proofing. If memory serves, somebody (female) is so-far-successfully spawning a fetus using a donor uterus as we speak. I assume that the engineering challenges of hacking a uterus into a male would be considerably greater, but likely not impossible.
In that vein, what's the leave policy for people who outsource gestation to 3rd-party managed uterine providers? Those are surprisingly cheap in low-wage countries already, and will probably be cheaper still once we figure out how to hack some flavor of large livestock into an efficient batch-gestation platform(Something like a cow is a pretty big animal, it could probably support 4-6 fetuses in parallel, each with its own little gestation nodule...).
The complexity of OpenGL itself may or may not be the issue. To the best of my understanding; both nouveau and the AMD OSS drivers use Gallium3d and Mesa(which can also provide an openGL implementation entirely in software, if you don't mind a lot of waiting). Actually taking advantage of the specialized hardware in a fast and stable way, though, is device specific.
I am by no means a fan of AT&T or Verizon, but the concept of preventing a company from bidding on something in the name of competition strikes me as... anti-competitive. I'm a firm believer in a free market economy and this reeks of giving all the kids a trophy just for playing.
Were you sick the day they discussed 'market power' and 'rent seeking' in EC101?
If it's worth billions more to verizon then you can be sure versizon is going to extract many ties that from the citizenry. So in the end the govt would get more revnue but the people would have less money. I'd rather have the reverse. Moreover the competition may be good.
Honestly, the fact that spectrum auctioning is even being talked about in terms of its revenue value(I can see arguments being made that the 'auction' mechanism is a good one for identifying users most willing to pay, and ensuring that spectrum doesn't go unused, though such arguments need to face up to the empirical reality of examples like "Tons of crazy-useful stuff that we do in the shitty ISM band, not because it's good; but because it's available") suggests a level of conceptual failure that makes my head hurt.
If the government just wants to raise money, 'tax farming' by selling off public assets to the entities most capable of extracting monopoly rents in exchange for a slight premium over what they would otherwise sell for is pitifully inefficient. If they need money, suck it up and acknowledge that it's a tax. Accepting years of substandard and undercompetitive spectrum use in exchange for a bit of cash upfront is just nuts.
does it matter that much if you play on a 4k or 2k screen? the games graphics are anyway not distinguishing between single pixels and the textures are not optimised for 4k. if you would play 2k side by side to 4k (now keeping aside the GPU power), would you realise the difference? 4k makes significant difference for photography and video!
Support varies by engine; but one (reasonably) common thing that people do with games that weren't originally designed with high-resolution widescreens in mind is mess with the field of view. Some games react badly, with all sorts of distortion effects; but it can also create a nice 'peripheral vision' sense that the game originally lacked.
This would also be engine-dependent, in terms of how much it can be tweaked; but it isn't uncommon for (even comparatively low resolution) games to have decent texture assets so that the world doesn't turn to lego when you walk up and talk to somebody/bump into a tree; but it swaps them out for lower-poly and lower resolution models when you are further away in order to save power, and eventually ceases drawing them altogether. If the engine allows it, and you've got the power, just bumping all the sliders to "Fuck yeah, I've got more shader units than some minor deities, MAXIMUM DETAIL AND DRAW DISTANCE!" will be an improvement.
For games that have lots of floating HUD elements, buttons, sidebars, etc(RTS, some of the more cluttered RPGs) it's always handy to have more room around the edges while still having a high resolution view of the action.
The black-body fins fulfil an analogous role(just with more surface area, and without the protective globe since they are in a vacuum anyway. The trouble is that energy dissipation by radiation depends on object temperature.
If you were to operate your spacecraft at a few thousand kelvins, your heatsinks would be bleeding energy into space quite merrily indeed; but your spacecraft would also be largely molten. Down at temperatures things not made of tungsten are happy with, you need comparatively massive cooling fins because their temperature is only high enough to spit a trickle of feeble IR into space.
Microsoft seems to be using this product generation(at least on the consumer side, I'm told that their 'cloud' people have finally decided to get their shit together) as the "Make lots of onerous demands and changes, so that when we back down to what we actually wanted originally in version N+1, this is hailed as an improvement!" generation.
I agree that section 1 is constitutionally-flavored(and agree with you that that is almost certainly why it was included); my point was just that without the context of the constitution and the political climate, those goals can be used to justify everything or nothing.
In the context of the rest of the constitution, along with, say, the prevailing taxation levels and intakes at a given time in history, 'the power to promote the general welfare' is obviously limited by federal resources, states' various powers, and limitations on the state's incursions into individual rights. In the context of the NSF, deciding how to dole out money already collected by the feds for the purposes of science, I would argue that section 1 just provides absolutely no meaningful guidance whatsoever. The NSF already knows how much money it has available, and it has researchers writing grant proposals to make their respective cases, all of which will have at least some promise to fulfill one or more of those objectives.
It will be a matter of practice to see whether section 1 turns out to be harmless or not. If very strictly construed, it could be used to shoot down virtually any research project: "Does your project, described in 10 seconds by an unsympathetic layman, sound wasteful? Dead." If broadly constructed, it is largely ornamental.
It's section 2 that illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how science actually works.
I hadn't thought of that; but that would make most, if not all, mechanical refrigeration options a bit problematic... And I suspect that the guys over in 'Elastomeric Polymers' just give you nasty looks when you say things like "Do you have anything that works at ~cosmic background temperature, and doesn't outgas in hard vacuum?"
He'd probably be conflicted. This 'WWW' stuff is a bunch of pointy-headed eurocommie academic bullshit designed for distributing things like scientific papers and porn; but the network it runs on top of is good, solid, ARPA-designed, National Defense research designed to keep the communications up even when Ivan drops the bomb.
Don't forget good old Conservapedia! The wikipedia clone for people who think that "Relativity", the concept from physics, is related to "Relativism", the philsophical rejection of the concept of moral absolutes...
Thanks, I did not realize things are different in space. So how would one design an active cooling system to dissipate heat in space?
I am not a rocket scientist; but my understanding is that the space-equivalent of a 'heatsink' is a fin, with a surface that approximates a black body as closely as engineering constraints allow, aligned so that as much surface area as possible(the flat faces) receives as little incoming light as possible, with as little as possible exposed to the sun(so, in practice, the alignment is pretty much the opposite of a solar panel, where you want as much surface area getting sunlight as you can and as little being wasted by facing into deep space as you can). Depending on the orbit, and whether your thermal load is constant or can accept variations, this may or may not require the fins to move.
If you need active cooling(as you probably would here, since ultrasensitive IR hardware generates some heat on its own and works less well for every additional kelvin) you use a heat pump of some sort, just as on earth; but your 'sink' is thermal radiation from the fins, rather than conduction from the fins into the atmosphere or coolant water.
The real problem(in addition to the fact that solid-state heat pumps are miserably inefficient, and ones with moving parts have mechanical levels of reliability in an area where you can't just schedule a tech visit), is that thermal radiation alone is miserable compared to conduction/convection into air, which is weak compared to conduction into forced air.
If you have a large enough payload budget, it isn't necessarily insurmountable, all it takes is more surface area radiating heat; but the engineering challenges of having a cryogenic heat pump capable of keeping the instruments at liquid helium temperatures and enough fin surface area to dump the waste heat from both the instruments and the heat pump's own inefficiencies are significant.
Liquid helium isn't cheap, and relying on a consumable cuts mission lifespan; but "just let the helium boil off where you need things to be colder" simplifies the engineering considerably.
Alas, the 'national defense' bit is by far the less problematic portion:
"(1) is in the interests of the United States to
advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare,
and to secure the national defense by promoting the
progress of science;"
Ok, so (1) doesn't include noble goals like "Science, because knowing shit is awesome!"; but it's vacuous enough that nearly anything fits. If it is 'science' it probably helps you(or may help you in the future) manipulate the world in some way, and any positive manipulations count as 'national health, prosperity, or welfare' and any negative ones can be dropped on people we dislike and called 'national defense'.
"(2) is the finest quality, is ground breaking,
and answers questions or solves problems that are of
utmost importance to society at large;"
Here's where it goes downhill: Basic Research, motherfucker, have you heard of it? Contrary to what the movies might have led you to believe, 'science' isn't something that a single multidisciplinarian genius brings from test tube to field-ready superpower within a 10 minute montage set in a 'laboratory' that looks more like a small datacenter set up to impress visitors. And, when a given piece of research is the lucky one to go down in history as "Dr. Somebody Invented X", the writeup will have about a zillion papers of the form "A banal and seemingly pointless characterization of bandgap somethingorother in ionized flebatonium" that seemed like pointless noodling until they turned out to be useful.
C'mon, Lamar, I realize that not much gets past your shit-eating grin and incredible density; but surely you don't imagine that scientists who could be out raking in the nobels and lucrative startup stock by cranking out world-altering research of staggering utility are just holding out on us, and sequencing random beetle genomes because grantwriting is just so much fun? If there were plenty of 'groundbreaking' research that 'answers questions or solves problems of utmost importance to society at large' scientists would be shiving one another with broken Erlenmeyer flasks to be the first to do it. Guess what, most of science is just prep work for the good stuff, much of which we don't even know will be the good stuff until we've already done the prep work.
Clause 1 is just babble, of no real consequence(except perhaps to make paper abstracts and grant proposals even more vaguely optimistic); but clause 2 essentially provides unlimited scope to defund absolutely anything that isn't the final stages of a successful R&D exercise.
Certainly not all of them; but I'm pretty sure that the box they are all plugged in to is, pretty much, using a software layer to abstract the ugly details of dumping traffic between them over a really, really, fat internal bus of some flavor.
And, in many cases, a single fiber is(thanks to software) being sliced up into a bunch of little VLANs to create a logical topology that (while it is ultimately constrained by the physical one) is substantially different than the physical topology, especially once you count aggregated port groups, redundant links, and so on.
'SDN' doesn't mean jack in part because everything except your 20 year old 10Mb hub is already doing some amount of software trickery(even dumb switches keep track of which MAC(s) are on which port, and anything with 'managed' in the title can do quite a bit more), with varying levels of ASIC vs. general-purpose-CPU and varying levels of correlation between the logical topology and the physical topology.
There just isn't a nice bright line(at least in terms of real-world use cases, obviously a VM chattering to itself over a loopback interface is 'software' and a passive ethernet tap is 'hardware') between what is 'software defined' and what isn't. They all obviously depend on hardware to execute the software; but the amount of additional logical complexity slopes up surprisingly smoothly.
Any particular reason you chose the phrase 'sound science' rather than 'science' or 'ecological study' or any of the numerous other phrases that would have meant the same thing?
It's worth noting that that particular phrase has an... interesting... history, going back at least as far as Phillip Morris' pet 'Advancement of Sound Science Coalition', which gradually mutated toward a more general state of optimistic nescience about anything its funders happened to manufacture.
Slavery has been shown over and over to be a poor economic system. Workers work better when well treated. Henry Ford paid more than any other business and it made him filthy rich. Slaves make poor workers and that includes wage slaves.
It's a lot harder to recline in feudal satisfaction at the end of the day, though, if the world doesn't have squalid serfs sweating their little lives away at your whim...
(Unfortunately, I'm only half joking. Especially before things like 'modern medicine' and 'flush toilets' and 'central heating', the delta in actual well-being between a 'not-malnourished peasant' and 'king' pretty much came down to leisure time and how many people would bow and scrape and lick your boots for you. Technology has increased the number of goods that aren't directly social-status based; but feeling high-status is still very much a matter of having somebody to look down on.)
Given the expense of shipping people and supplies into orbit, and the fact that the people you are going to be shipping are generally known in advance, wouldn't it be substantially simpler just to ask them for their preferred beverage mixture and seal that in a single pouch?
This isn't some sort of commercial aviation scenario, where the catering supplier has to do an approximate match against the uncertain tastes of 250 random passengers, which makes modular food much more sensible; or an MRE-type scenario where they have to stamp out a zillion of them and ship them wherever, so it just isn't practical to ensure that Pvt. SomeGuy gets exactly the combination he wants assembled at the factory and supply-chained out to him at firebase nowhere 18 months from now...
Employers can't use a correlation even if there is one, so stop worrying about it. If learning new tricks is important for them they can ask for recent examples during the interview or test the ability directly with a question.
Don't worry. There isn't a shred of discoverable evidence that your age had any bearing on our decision to choose somebody who seemed like a better fit for the FooCorp team.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a store near where I used to live, that's been selling cameras in glasses, pens, ties, transistor radios, electric plugs, etc for a couple of decades. Clearly there are some private investigators, industrial espionage operatives, stalkers and peeping toms that want this stuff. But it's really niche.
That's not just 'really niche', it's kind of a slummy niche. There are plenty of niche products, that very few people really need in anything resembling a serious way, that manage to sell pretty substantial volumes to hobbyist types once the price comes down a bit or a modestly cut-down variant becomes available(just think of the number of people wandering the world and happy-snapping with a DSLR that has never seen anything other than 'kit lens, all settings auto', or the market for black, anodized aluminum objects that are sold as 'tactical' to people who've probably lost more blood to tripping on things than to combat...) That only really happens if the niche users are in some way prestigious or 'aspirational', though.
If you have a really niche product whose niche users offer a significant marketing halo, that means you just need to bring the price down a bit, at least on the lesser models, and the wannabes are yours for the taking.
If your niche product carries the stench of pervs, creeps, and nerds who pride themselves on extreme technology dependence? Less so.
Touchscreen keyboards are also pretty horrid; but the amount of difference that a little haptic buzz, along with on-screen visual feedback and sophisticated autocorrect, makes is significant. Laser projection keyboards are markedly worse.
Really? Because this is from MS this is uncool?
This, plus kinnect, could be the interface of the future. Install it on the ceiling and you could project a video or keyboard on any flat surface. Never have to look for a remote again. Need a calculator, a recipe, a note pad, facebook, etc?
It looks promising for enhancing the immersion value of relatively small screens; but as an interface it would have to be taken in very small doses. Anyone remember those so damn sci-fi you think that the future just travelled back in time and punched you in the face laser projection keyboards? They suck. Horribly. The ghastliest laptop you've ever had to touch would feel like a Model M, even after spilling something sticky on it, compared to one of those.
For a few big buttons that you only need occasionally, the convenience would probably be worth it; but the nastiest $2 rubber-dome cheapies are so much nicer than 'typing' on a projection that it just isn't fair.
I think I speak for most gaming enthusiasts when I say "focus on hardware that will be more robust for a better part of this next generation and the games that will be on it and skip the gimmicks".
Oh, we assure you that the TPM will be plenty robust, we've been working extra hard on that part!
"Goodbye baby Banting; you'll soon need decanting."
I bet your importance and efficacy as an infant-rearer would be substantially more credible if you started lactating a bit more actively...
That seems like a sensible bit of future-proofing. If memory serves, somebody (female) is so-far-successfully spawning a fetus using a donor uterus as we speak. I assume that the engineering challenges of hacking a uterus into a male would be considerably greater, but likely not impossible.
In that vein, what's the leave policy for people who outsource gestation to 3rd-party managed uterine providers? Those are surprisingly cheap in low-wage countries already, and will probably be cheaper still once we figure out how to hack some flavor of large livestock into an efficient batch-gestation platform(Something like a cow is a pretty big animal, it could probably support 4-6 fetuses in parallel, each with its own little gestation nodule...).
The complexity of OpenGL itself may or may not be the issue. To the best of my understanding; both nouveau and the AMD OSS drivers use Gallium3d and Mesa(which can also provide an openGL implementation entirely in software, if you don't mind a lot of waiting). Actually taking advantage of the specialized hardware in a fast and stable way, though, is device specific.
I am by no means a fan of AT&T or Verizon, but the concept of preventing a company from bidding on something in the name of competition strikes me as... anti-competitive. I'm a firm believer in a free market economy and this reeks of giving all the kids a trophy just for playing.
Were you sick the day they discussed 'market power' and 'rent seeking' in EC101?
If it's worth billions more to verizon then you can be sure versizon is going to extract many ties that from the citizenry. So in the end the govt would get more revnue but the people would have less money. I'd rather have the reverse. Moreover the competition may be good.
Honestly, the fact that spectrum auctioning is even being talked about in terms of its revenue value(I can see arguments being made that the 'auction' mechanism is a good one for identifying users most willing to pay, and ensuring that spectrum doesn't go unused, though such arguments need to face up to the empirical reality of examples like "Tons of crazy-useful stuff that we do in the shitty ISM band, not because it's good; but because it's available") suggests a level of conceptual failure that makes my head hurt.
If the government just wants to raise money, 'tax farming' by selling off public assets to the entities most capable of extracting monopoly rents in exchange for a slight premium over what they would otherwise sell for is pitifully inefficient. If they need money, suck it up and acknowledge that it's a tax. Accepting years of substandard and undercompetitive spectrum use in exchange for a bit of cash upfront is just nuts.
does it matter that much if you play on a 4k or 2k screen? the games graphics are anyway not distinguishing between single pixels and the textures are not optimised for 4k. if you would play 2k side by side to 4k (now keeping aside the GPU power), would you realise the difference? 4k makes significant difference for photography and video!
Support varies by engine; but one (reasonably) common thing that people do with games that weren't originally designed with high-resolution widescreens in mind is mess with the field of view. Some games react badly, with all sorts of distortion effects; but it can also create a nice 'peripheral vision' sense that the game originally lacked.
This would also be engine-dependent, in terms of how much it can be tweaked; but it isn't uncommon for (even comparatively low resolution) games to have decent texture assets so that the world doesn't turn to lego when you walk up and talk to somebody/bump into a tree; but it swaps them out for lower-poly and lower resolution models when you are further away in order to save power, and eventually ceases drawing them altogether. If the engine allows it, and you've got the power, just bumping all the sliders to "Fuck yeah, I've got more shader units than some minor deities, MAXIMUM DETAIL AND DRAW DISTANCE!" will be an improvement.
For games that have lots of floating HUD elements, buttons, sidebars, etc(RTS, some of the more cluttered RPGs) it's always handy to have more room around the edges while still having a high resolution view of the action.
The black-body fins fulfil an analogous role(just with more surface area, and without the protective globe since they are in a vacuum anyway. The trouble is that energy dissipation by radiation depends on object temperature.
If you were to operate your spacecraft at a few thousand kelvins, your heatsinks would be bleeding energy into space quite merrily indeed; but your spacecraft would also be largely molten. Down at temperatures things not made of tungsten are happy with, you need comparatively massive cooling fins because their temperature is only high enough to spit a trickle of feeble IR into space.
Microsoft seems to be using this product generation(at least on the consumer side, I'm told that their 'cloud' people have finally decided to get their shit together) as the "Make lots of onerous demands and changes, so that when we back down to what we actually wanted originally in version N+1, this is hailed as an improvement!" generation.
I agree that section 1 is constitutionally-flavored(and agree with you that that is almost certainly why it was included); my point was just that without the context of the constitution and the political climate, those goals can be used to justify everything or nothing.
In the context of the rest of the constitution, along with, say, the prevailing taxation levels and intakes at a given time in history, 'the power to promote the general welfare' is obviously limited by federal resources, states' various powers, and limitations on the state's incursions into individual rights. In the context of the NSF, deciding how to dole out money already collected by the feds for the purposes of science, I would argue that section 1 just provides absolutely no meaningful guidance whatsoever. The NSF already knows how much money it has available, and it has researchers writing grant proposals to make their respective cases, all of which will have at least some promise to fulfill one or more of those objectives.
It will be a matter of practice to see whether section 1 turns out to be harmless or not. If very strictly construed, it could be used to shoot down virtually any research project: "Does your project, described in 10 seconds by an unsympathetic layman, sound wasteful? Dead." If broadly constructed, it is largely ornamental.
It's section 2 that illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how science actually works.
I hadn't thought of that; but that would make most, if not all, mechanical refrigeration options a bit problematic... And I suspect that the guys over in 'Elastomeric Polymers' just give you nasty looks when you say things like "Do you have anything that works at ~cosmic background temperature, and doesn't outgas in hard vacuum?"
Are there actually any exploits available for NEXTstep on 68030?
I don't doubt that vulnerabilities exist; but that's a platform that, er, makes Amiga look like a contender...
He'd probably be conflicted. This 'WWW' stuff is a bunch of pointy-headed eurocommie academic bullshit designed for distributing things like scientific papers and porn; but the network it runs on top of is good, solid, ARPA-designed, National Defense research designed to keep the communications up even when Ivan drops the bomb.
Don't forget good old Conservapedia! The wikipedia clone for people who think that "Relativity", the concept from physics, is related to "Relativism", the philsophical rejection of the concept of moral absolutes...
Thanks, I did not realize things are different in space. So how would one design an active cooling system to dissipate heat in space?
I am not a rocket scientist; but my understanding is that the space-equivalent of a 'heatsink' is a fin, with a surface that approximates a black body as closely as engineering constraints allow, aligned so that as much surface area as possible(the flat faces) receives as little incoming light as possible, with as little as possible exposed to the sun(so, in practice, the alignment is pretty much the opposite of a solar panel, where you want as much surface area getting sunlight as you can and as little being wasted by facing into deep space as you can). Depending on the orbit, and whether your thermal load is constant or can accept variations, this may or may not require the fins to move.
If you need active cooling(as you probably would here, since ultrasensitive IR hardware generates some heat on its own and works less well for every additional kelvin) you use a heat pump of some sort, just as on earth; but your 'sink' is thermal radiation from the fins, rather than conduction from the fins into the atmosphere or coolant water.
The real problem(in addition to the fact that solid-state heat pumps are miserably inefficient, and ones with moving parts have mechanical levels of reliability in an area where you can't just schedule a tech visit), is that thermal radiation alone is miserable compared to conduction/convection into air, which is weak compared to conduction into forced air.
If you have a large enough payload budget, it isn't necessarily insurmountable, all it takes is more surface area radiating heat; but the engineering challenges of having a cryogenic heat pump capable of keeping the instruments at liquid helium temperatures and enough fin surface area to dump the waste heat from both the instruments and the heat pump's own inefficiencies are significant.
Liquid helium isn't cheap, and relying on a consumable cuts mission lifespan; but "just let the helium boil off where you need things to be colder" simplifies the engineering considerably.
Alas, the 'national defense' bit is by far the less problematic portion:
"(1) is in the interests of the United States to
advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare,
and to secure the national defense by promoting the
progress of science;"
Ok, so (1) doesn't include noble goals like "Science, because knowing shit is awesome!"; but it's vacuous enough that nearly anything fits. If it is 'science' it probably helps you(or may help you in the future) manipulate the world in some way, and any positive manipulations count as 'national health, prosperity, or welfare' and any negative ones can be dropped on people we dislike and called 'national defense'.
"(2) is the finest quality, is ground breaking,
and answers questions or solves problems that are of
utmost importance to society at large;"
Here's where it goes downhill: Basic Research, motherfucker, have you heard of it? Contrary to what the movies might have led you to believe, 'science' isn't something that a single multidisciplinarian genius brings from test tube to field-ready superpower within a 10 minute montage set in a 'laboratory' that looks more like a small datacenter set up to impress visitors. And, when a given piece of research is the lucky one to go down in history as "Dr. Somebody Invented X", the writeup will have about a zillion papers of the form "A banal and seemingly pointless characterization of bandgap somethingorother in ionized flebatonium" that seemed like pointless noodling until they turned out to be useful.
C'mon, Lamar, I realize that not much gets past your shit-eating grin and incredible density; but surely you don't imagine that scientists who could be out raking in the nobels and lucrative startup stock by cranking out world-altering research of staggering utility are just holding out on us, and sequencing random beetle genomes because grantwriting is just so much fun? If there were plenty of 'groundbreaking' research that 'answers questions or solves problems of utmost importance to society at large' scientists would be shiving one another with broken Erlenmeyer flasks to be the first to do it. Guess what, most of science is just prep work for the good stuff, much of which we don't even know will be the good stuff until we've already done the prep work.
Clause 1 is just babble, of no real consequence(except perhaps to make paper abstracts and grant proposals even more vaguely optimistic); but clause 2 essentially provides unlimited scope to defund absolutely anything that isn't the final stages of a successful R&D exercise.
Certainly not all of them; but I'm pretty sure that the box they are all plugged in to is, pretty much, using a software layer to abstract the ugly details of dumping traffic between them over a really, really, fat internal bus of some flavor.
And, in many cases, a single fiber is(thanks to software) being sliced up into a bunch of little VLANs to create a logical topology that (while it is ultimately constrained by the physical one) is substantially different than the physical topology, especially once you count aggregated port groups, redundant links, and so on.
'SDN' doesn't mean jack in part because everything except your 20 year old 10Mb hub is already doing some amount of software trickery(even dumb switches keep track of which MAC(s) are on which port, and anything with 'managed' in the title can do quite a bit more), with varying levels of ASIC vs. general-purpose-CPU and varying levels of correlation between the logical topology and the physical topology.
There just isn't a nice bright line(at least in terms of real-world use cases, obviously a VM chattering to itself over a loopback interface is 'software' and a passive ethernet tap is 'hardware') between what is 'software defined' and what isn't. They all obviously depend on hardware to execute the software; but the amount of additional logical complexity slopes up surprisingly smoothly.
Any particular reason you chose the phrase 'sound science' rather than 'science' or 'ecological study' or any of the numerous other phrases that would have meant the same thing?
It's worth noting that that particular phrase has an... interesting... history, going back at least as far as Phillip Morris' pet 'Advancement of Sound Science Coalition', which gradually mutated toward a more general state of optimistic nescience about anything its funders happened to manufacture.
Slavery has been shown over and over to be a poor economic system. Workers work better when well treated. Henry Ford paid more than any other business and it made him filthy rich. Slaves make poor workers and that includes wage slaves.
It's a lot harder to recline in feudal satisfaction at the end of the day, though, if the world doesn't have squalid serfs sweating their little lives away at your whim...
(Unfortunately, I'm only half joking. Especially before things like 'modern medicine' and 'flush toilets' and 'central heating', the delta in actual well-being between a 'not-malnourished peasant' and 'king' pretty much came down to leisure time and how many people would bow and scrape and lick your boots for you. Technology has increased the number of goods that aren't directly social-status based; but feeling high-status is still very much a matter of having somebody to look down on.)
Given the expense of shipping people and supplies into orbit, and the fact that the people you are going to be shipping are generally known in advance, wouldn't it be substantially simpler just to ask them for their preferred beverage mixture and seal that in a single pouch?
This isn't some sort of commercial aviation scenario, where the catering supplier has to do an approximate match against the uncertain tastes of 250 random passengers, which makes modular food much more sensible; or an MRE-type scenario where they have to stamp out a zillion of them and ship them wherever, so it just isn't practical to ensure that Pvt. SomeGuy gets exactly the combination he wants assembled at the factory and supply-chained out to him at firebase nowhere 18 months from now...
Employers can't use a correlation even if there is one, so stop worrying about it. If learning new tricks is important for them they can ask for recent examples during the interview or test the ability directly with a question.
Don't worry. There isn't a shred of discoverable evidence that your age had any bearing on our decision to choose somebody who seemed like a better fit for the FooCorp team.