Riiiight. Because nobody who has had a picture taken holding a can of beer could possibly benefit from a higher education, or be a net positive for society.
I would say that it betrays a serious lack of judgement.
Specifically, everyone knows that American beers that come in cans are shit. If the prospective student can't even discern that, how can you expect them to perform in rigorous courses?
I don't go to college for the "life experience." I go for the degree.
Then it sounds to me that you're wasting your money.
This isn't to say that a piece of paper to hang on your wall doesn't have value. Especially today, having that piece of paper is a necessary condition to obtain good employment. But if you think that being around hundreds or thousands of academically minded peers, from all different backgrounds, and who possess both the time and the inclination to explore new ideas with you - if you think that is worthless, then you don't belong at a typical university. You should be attending a commuter school, where you could be saving some of those thousands of dollars a semester while still getting your piece of paper to hang on your wall.
Only in this case, the energy comes from slowing down the station, so either you have to speed it back up (just as energy-intensive and therefore expensive as accelerating the supplies beforehand)
That's not strictly true; you're forgetting about relative efficiencies of engines as well as the mechanics of rockets launching from the Earth. For instance, the ISS would have to have ion engines to boost it to it's Earth-Moon orbit, which are far more efficient than chemical fueled rockets. Thus it would be more efficient to in effect boost the cargo container partway with chemical rockets, and then use ion engines or solar sails to make up the rest of the energy needed for the orbit. With a sufficiently large solar array, they could also use a magnetic launcher to jettison the cargo container and make up the energy lost in rendezvous that way.
Of course, all of the above assumes you can come up with a way to capture the cargo container without splatting the station, as you pointed out. However, I remember reading a novel a long time ago that used the idea of speeding up cargo containers as its central conceit. It described a "LEOport" that would accelerate cargo containers on sub-orbital trajectories via a series of magnetic baffles hundreds of kilometers long. I can't remember how the baffles were supposed to be kept in position, or whether the real math (and not just what the author calculated) would support it, but I thought it was a neat idea.
there are biological differences and exceptional individuals who think [outside a] certain way are more likely to be female than male....By engineering a system which dissuades women we not only lose out on a significant number of competent individuals undertaking research (a catastrophe in and of itself), but we lose out on those outliers whose drastically different modes of thought might spur important breakthroughs.
I was with you completely until I got to this point. I believe we need more women in science not for brilliant outliers (though I'll happily accept any who come along), but because women do think differently than men and tend to work more cooperatively and synergistically.
Like you said, practically all rigorous research has shown that the average intelligence on men and women is identical between populations. However, it has also shown that there is far more intelligence variance in male populations than female ones (see the British Journal of Psychology's 2005 study). This extends to a whole host of mental phenomena: men are more likely to have mental illness, women are better at coping with stress, etc. In short, women in general are more mentally stable than men (and thus have fewer outliers).
Additionally, women tend to cooperate much more than men, and as both you and I mentioned earlier, they certainly think and see opportunities differently than men do. When I was an undergraduate in CS, I certainly saw teams of women out preform teams of men who were smarter than they were, but couldn't cooperate well.
Perhaps you were just using outliers to refer to something other than mental variance; we seem to agree other than that.
The evolutionary advantage for the species is obvious: when defective organisms have a tendency to clump together and disable their higher cognitive functions en masse...then they can be easily eliminated through mass extermination.
So, what you're saying is that there's an evolutionary reason for Slashdot. Of course! It all makes sense now!
Still, I wonder when that trait will catch up to the new reality of the Internet age. Wholesale extermination is difficult to accomplish on so geographically diverse a population.
Unfortunately, DF is single-threaded, I believe, which means it won't benefit very much from a cluster (or even multi-core systems). Hopefully Toady will fix that later on.
Can you point me at the wave of innovations in education, IT, health, etc., that have come out of Europe in the past couple decaeds? EU governments have poured and continue to dump trainloads of euros into all of these ventures. Or do you believe that there's something intrinsically special about Americans that makes whatever they spend money be the best in the world?
I will admit that I generally find transportation in the EU, more specifically in Germany, to superior to that typically found in the US. However, I'm not sure how much of that is the result of resources as opposed to population density.
Slashdot Mirror
Riiiight. Because nobody who has had a picture taken holding a can of beer could possibly benefit from a higher education, or be a net positive for society.
I would say that it betrays a serious lack of judgement.
Specifically, everyone knows that American beers that come in cans are shit. If the prospective student can't even discern that, how can you expect them to perform in rigorous courses?
I don't go to college for the "life experience." I go for the degree.
Then it sounds to me that you're wasting your money.
This isn't to say that a piece of paper to hang on your wall doesn't have value. Especially today, having that piece of paper is a necessary condition to obtain good employment. But if you think that being around hundreds or thousands of academically minded peers, from all different backgrounds, and who possess both the time and the inclination to explore new ideas with you - if you think that is worthless, then you don't belong at a typical university. You should be attending a commuter school, where you could be saving some of those thousands of dollars a semester while still getting your piece of paper to hang on your wall.
That would mean that "ignorance of the law" IS a valid excuse.
Don't be ridiculous; it means you'll have to pay an additional licensing fee to read the citation against you.
Only in this case, the energy comes from slowing down the station, so either you have to speed it back up (just as energy-intensive and therefore expensive as accelerating the supplies beforehand)
That's not strictly true; you're forgetting about relative efficiencies of engines as well as the mechanics of rockets launching from the Earth. For instance, the ISS would have to have ion engines to boost it to it's Earth-Moon orbit, which are far more efficient than chemical fueled rockets. Thus it would be more efficient to in effect boost the cargo container partway with chemical rockets, and then use ion engines or solar sails to make up the rest of the energy needed for the orbit. With a sufficiently large solar array, they could also use a magnetic launcher to jettison the cargo container and make up the energy lost in rendezvous that way.
Of course, all of the above assumes you can come up with a way to capture the cargo container without splatting the station, as you pointed out. However, I remember reading a novel a long time ago that used the idea of speeding up cargo containers as its central conceit. It described a "LEOport" that would accelerate cargo containers on sub-orbital trajectories via a series of magnetic baffles hundreds of kilometers long. I can't remember how the baffles were supposed to be kept in position, or whether the real math (and not just what the author calculated) would support it, but I thought it was a neat idea.
there are biological differences and exceptional individuals who think [outside a] certain way are more likely to be female than male....By engineering a system which dissuades women we not only lose out on a significant number of competent individuals undertaking research (a catastrophe in and of itself), but we lose out on those outliers whose drastically different modes of thought might spur important breakthroughs.
I was with you completely until I got to this point. I believe we need more women in science not for brilliant outliers (though I'll happily accept any who come along), but because women do think differently than men and tend to work more cooperatively and synergistically.
Like you said, practically all rigorous research has shown that the average intelligence on men and women is identical between populations. However, it has also shown that there is far more intelligence variance in male populations than female ones (see the British Journal of Psychology's 2005 study). This extends to a whole host of mental phenomena: men are more likely to have mental illness, women are better at coping with stress, etc. In short, women in general are more mentally stable than men (and thus have fewer outliers).
Additionally, women tend to cooperate much more than men, and as both you and I mentioned earlier, they certainly think and see opportunities differently than men do. When I was an undergraduate in CS, I certainly saw teams of women out preform teams of men who were smarter than they were, but couldn't cooperate well.
Perhaps you were just using outliers to refer to something other than mental variance; we seem to agree other than that.
The evolutionary advantage for the species is obvious: when defective organisms have a tendency to clump together and disable their higher cognitive functions en masse...then they can be easily eliminated through mass extermination.
So, what you're saying is that there's an evolutionary reason for Slashdot. Of course! It all makes sense now!
Still, I wonder when that trait will catch up to the new reality of the Internet age. Wholesale extermination is difficult to accomplish on so geographically diverse a population.
Unfortunately, DF is single-threaded, I believe, which means it won't benefit very much from a cluster (or even multi-core systems). Hopefully Toady will fix that later on.
Can you point me at the wave of innovations in education, IT, health, etc., that have come out of Europe in the past couple decaeds? EU governments have poured and continue to dump trainloads of euros into all of these ventures. Or do you believe that there's something intrinsically special about Americans that makes whatever they spend money be the best in the world? I will admit that I generally find transportation in the EU, more specifically in Germany, to superior to that typically found in the US. However, I'm not sure how much of that is the result of resources as opposed to population density.