You don't need analytically pure sodium if all you want to do is blow stuff up, only if you're doing chemistry research. For the purposes of mayhem, much poorer quality sodium is quite sufficient.
In countries where the wages are lower, the licensing/hardware portion of the TCO will be larger. Linux runs on smaller iron, without licensing costs. It's very simple math.
That's assuming that Microsoft only sell in USD and require local currencies to be converted to dollars and US prices to be paid before they'll make a sale. However, MS, like McDonalds, Sony, Pepsi and other global corporations, tailor their prices to the local markets. Products of these corporations are generally as "affordable" wherever you are.
When I was in India a year ago, I was surprised at how strong the presence of Microsoft was in science.
Hardly surprising considering Microsoft's active sponsorship of the IITs. I don't doubt that if Red Hat start funding research, professorships, scholarships etc that Linux will become equally as popular.
Since most Fortran code is done in research groups that aren't computer groups, they may not all think to buy a real compiler.
No, a research group with limited funding is more likely to buy a commercial compiler. The reason is the quality of code generation. I don't have the numbers to hand, but I have experienced vendor-supplied compilers like SPARCworks producing binaries that run twice as fast as identical code compiled with gcc (probably because gcc has limited ability to leverage platform specific features, and vendors have unlimited ability to do so). On PCs, Watcom had the best compiler for a while, and Motorola's compiler for PPC is the best on that platform. Spending money on a compiler can result in significantly lower hardware costs, particularly if you have few developers and lots of user workstations/compute nodes.
this is true and good, but heh... if you really had a little device the size of AA battery that holds a couple gigajoules in it... i dunno... seems quite dangerous. and sociologically, this danger would be more difficult to manage than the techonological challenges. methinks, anyway.
You might be right, but on the other hand, you could burn down a building using a car battery or a cylinder of butane, and it doesn't happen (at least, not very often, and usually not deliberately).
I think that a few people are inherently destructive and will try to destroy things with any tool that comes to hand, even a rock or a stick, but the majority are not, and will use even immensely powerful tools in safe and productive ways. History certainly suggests so, anyway.
With fuel cells sucking up more of the available oxygens, airlines may have to provide more air--and they might not get around real soon to doing that. I hope it doesn't cause anyone serious breathing problems.
Uhh, dude, with 4 bloody great turbofans on a typical airliner, the last thing you need to worry about is running out of air, short of a catastrophic cabin breach. Or electrical power for that matter. The only reason there aren't power sockets on every seat is the weight of the cabling. Oh, and that you can wire a few seats in business class and charge $$$ for them. Or not, if everyone has days worth of power in their laptops anyway.
no way man, it would suck ass. when you can store enough energy to run a car for 50 years in the size of a gas tank, what happens if something goes wrong (as it obviously will) with the storage? if somebody *intentially* sets it off, etc?
You clearly don't understand the first thing about fusion. The fuel is deuterium, which is commonly found in seawater. If it leaks, sure it's inconvenient, but it's no more dangerous than say butane if you're worried about it exploding. Certainly it is far less dangerous than a tank full of gas.
That's why we aren't running our whole society on fusion power right now: because starting a fusion reaction (at least, without a nuke to kick it off) is hard and sustaining it, even in perfectly controlled conditions, is even harder.
A big bright spot would stand out a bit, wouldn't you think? And since there aren't that many people who regularly try to blind cameras, this guy may just be making himself stick out like a sore thumb!
All the camera can see is that someone is blinding it: not who.
Eh, I would be suprised if those laws that you speak of would hold up to any scrutiny. Simply consider a woman who wears a burka as part of her religious beliefs
You often see on the front doors of bank branches these days instructions to remove motorcycle helmets before entering, so that everyone's face can be captured on CCTV, but mysteriously burkas are not included. I can't think of any reasonable explanation for this disparity.
Third, the imposition of digital television in the USA to comply with the ATSC standards will also require a lot of upgrades to our whole broadcast infrastructure.
This is called the "broken window fallacy" by economists. Intuition suggests that all economic activity adds value, which leads to people saying silly things like war is a boost to the economy. It is not, because it consumes resources that could more profitably be used elsewhere. Will the switchover to digital television result in an increase in the value of television to the consumer (i.e. will it make more people watch more television)? Probably not... so spending money on digital TVs might be nice for TV manufacturers, but will have a negative effect on the economy as a whole.
If the broken window fallacy was not one, then you could get out of any economic slump by destroying buildings and rebuilding them, and you could repeat this as often as you liked to produce economic growth. This clearly is not the case.
We may be in an economic slump right now, but by mid-decade the technological developments I mentioned will need hardware upgrades on a scale that will make the 1990's tech boom seem like a minor even in comparison, since these technological changes will affect everyone.
Same goes for IPv6 and 3G - if it is rolled out by mandate without adding value (not the same thing as having the potential to add value, which is all it is because there's no pressing need), then it's wasted money, because it's costing money that could be invested elsewhere.
Companies need to learn what to outsource and what not to outsource. My personal opinion is that large scale projects need to be internal, with only small, specialized sections outsourced to the appropriate firm.
In my experience the best way to do it is to split the IT function off into a separate business unit with it's own P&L. Other business units are billed for the services that the IT unit provides to them. This has the added benefit of forcing other departments not to make frivolous use of IT. Once the new organization is up and running, then you can really get the benefits of outsourcing: external outsourcers can bid against the IT unit for provision of particular services, and it is very easy to see what would truly benefit from outsourcing and what would not. For example, you might see that it is cheaper (in real money) to keep desktop support internal, but cheaper to outsource printer maintenance. And if your IT unit is really good, they can sell services themselves to other companies, and become a profit rather than a cost center. I could name a couple of major banks who operate this way (but I won't).
It has already matured and will continue to do so. IT does not change every day, in fact since I started working in the industry very little has changed.
Put it this way: innovations in civil engineering happen over decades. Bridges almost never fall down because bridge building is well understood. Innovations in IT happen on timescales of years or even months. Software frequently crashes or fails to meet its requirements because software is poorly understood. How often do you get a new version of a piece of software? (Hint: a lot more often than you need to change the gauge of a railway bridge).
Until software applications can be built with the reliability and repeatability associated with bridges, dams, power stations, airliners et al, the software industry will remain immature.
As a side, and this is/., I see more and more IT shops moving to linux. If Linux gets some half decent Open Source vertical applications then companies will flock to it. Why pay $2,500,000 for an ERP package that you have to tailor?
SAP R/3 et al already are "Open Source" - you get reams and reams of ABAP and can rewrite bits of it however you want (or pay Accenture to do it for you). The thing is that ERP systems are very boring to write and require immense amounts of manpower and industry experience. There is no way there will ever be a free ERP system capable of competing with the big players, because getting paid is the only possible motivation anyone could have to do it. Not only that, what company is going to want to give away the secrets of their best practices to their competitors? You are far more likely to see SAP R/3 running on Linux with Oracle 9i RAC on Linux at the back end.
In a way, you've proved my point. Companies in mature industries don't "flock" to things because they are already at best practices and have been for a long time, and are willing to wait for a new idea to prove itself, which may take years.
I happen to think that that is way groovy. It's about time some other ancient belief systems got in on the planet-naming!
Why, what did they contribute to modern astronomy? A lot of our science is still based on discoveries and theories of the Greeks. The ancient Arabs and Chinese also had an understanding of astronomy as a science rather than a "creation myth". I've never heard of these Tongva, so it's safe to say that their contribution to scientific knowledge is negligible at best. This name is merely another example of European-descended-men-are-bad political correctness.
The "major catastrophe" it is designed to survive is something that physically destroys or isolates many nodes of the network. This was a simple traffic spike.
I've often heard this story that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war, but I'm sure we've all experienced the Internet failing on a pleasant summer's day:-)
Just don't forget that a couple of the most intensely using mobile countries - Sweden and Finland - are also among the least populated countries in the world. the "higher population densities" argument simply doesn't hold water
The populations in Scandanavian countries are largely centralized into a few densely populated areas.
The USA has 278,058,881 people and 69.209 million mobile phones in 9,158,960 sq km, giving 0.25 phones/person and 7.56 phones/sq km. Finland has 5,175,783 people and 2,162,574 mobile phones in 305,470 sq km, giving 0.42 phones/person and 7.08 phones/sq km. So it would appear that you are correct, and the USA has 30.06 people/sq km and Finland has 16.94 people/sq km.
But you cannot really compare Finland to the USA, it would be more accurate to compare Finland with Alaska and the EU with the USA.
Was it really free trade that caused the collapse of the old Soviet Union? Or was it economic brinksmanship on the part of the Reagan administration?
They're the same thing; the capitalist economy made it possible for the West to force the Soviets into a spending competition that a communist economy simply couldn't win. Their political system collapsed without a fight, infinitely preferable to a military confrontation.
If you think free trade frees people how effective do you think it is proving at freeing the people of America's client states?
The problem there is not too much free trade but too little. It is hypocritical of the US and EU to protect domestic industries like farming and steel. Real free trade in those industries would be win-win, for consumers in the West and producers in the Third World.
Whether the fibre is dark or not isn't the problem. "The Internet" can handle the ammount of traffic that an event would create. The problem is the servers that everyone want to access will fail under that load. I bet dollars to donuts that news sites were going down on 9/11, but the sites where you can see chicks going down on each other were just fine that day.
You're probably right; the report notes that the infrastructure was fine but the web servers were overwhelmed. Lighting up that dark fibre would make it easier to deploy Akamai-like solutions to replicate content to distribution points closer to the consumer.
In most European countries the 3G spectrum was auctioned. If the license fees are exorbitant, then the only ones to blame are the participants in the auction.
The telcos were trapped between a rock and a hard place. Fail to win a licence and the stock market would kill you quickly, win one and your own debts would kill you slowly. They all opted for the slow death hoping that they had bought enough time to figure something out.
The telcos have noone to blame but themselves for their problems, and I am sick that one after the other they're asking for government bailouts. Why the heck did we privatise them in the first place if we end up paying for their mistakes anyway?
The fault is the government's, because it did not structure the process to get citizens the best possible service, but to maximize revenue for itself. A better solution would have been a competitive tender or "beauty contest", in which the best technical and economic solutions, indepenently assessed, won. The only winners were the government treasuries, and their appetites are insatiable.
They wouldn't have needed a "bail out" if they were free to do business, but as it is, they are strangled by over-regulation out of Brussels and taxation at home. Privatization is pointless if the private owners aren't free to run the company as they see fit without interference.
Maybe Japan and Europe will lose the current massive advantage they have in Mobile technology, its possible, after all the US is only 2 years or so behind Europe which is 2 years behind Japan.
I don't see it. Europe and Japan have higher population densities and smaller administrative areas, so can economically have much higher densities of cells for a given area. Handsets can't get much smaller before they start to have interface problems, so competition is on features. In the US, unless someone is willing to provide a major-metro-area-only service, handsets are going to need much more power, hence larger batteries, and less room for technological extras, before handsets get too larger.
Also, I'm unimpressed with the rhetoric in this article. He basks in schadenfreude because something his rivals claimed to be unworkable did actually work, then turns around and says what they want to do is unworkable. But he's absolutely right that the European approach of homogenization by diktat from Brussels is bound to fail, particularly after the windfall taxes imposed on the telcos by the governments, disguised as the 3G license fee.
Keynote have oublished a reporton the performance of major web sites on September 11th, 2001.
Of course, there's a lot of dark fibre around, so the capacity is there if it's really needed. Once the current recession is over, we can expect to go back to the days of massive overprovision and redundancy as content and bandwidth providers seek to build in capacity to handle peaks. What will really help is multicasting for video streams, and well-designed caches at ISPs.
I've seen a lot of 'health informatics' degrees lately. Yours would just be a twist on that.
No it wouldn't. Health/Bio Informatics is the study of the use of computation to analyze biological research. It's about algorithms and applications for simulation protein interactions or detecting trends in clinical trial data. It's a focused and integrated academic discipline, not a bunch of randomly assembled courses.
Re:la3wer09uasdfpj0239jasopiefjas0932jopasd09a
on
A Name for My Major?
·
· Score: 2
Anyone with the gumption to tackle these three subjects for seven years doesn't need to impress the average PHB to find himself a job.
I'm sorry, but anyone who spends 7 years on-campus as an undergraduate is nigh-on unemployable. At best it suggests chronic indecisiveness (further suggested by the 3 very difference subjects studied) and at worse, someone who spent 7 years partying on their family's money.
You say "gumption" but he didn't push back the frontiers of knowledge in any of these three fields, nor take any personal or professional risks, just sat in lectures for 7 years. A candidate with "gumption" could have a BS and a PhD in that time - or less. In fact, in the UK, it is not unusual to spend just 3 years on each.
The only thing I can suggest is trying to wrangle things to get a Bachelors and a Masters out of this, rather than 3 Bachelors'. Or become a career academic. As a sometime hirer, I probably wouldn't even bother inviting this candidate for an interview for the above reasons.
I don't think there is a law that says I, as a private individual, can't discriminate against gun owners. If there is, please let me know. And please don't bother to quote the constitution - that's for discrimination by the Federal gov't.
There are plenty of laws that say that private individuals can't discriminate, it just so happens that gun owners aren't protected (at present). If you refuse to contract with gays, blacks, the disabled, etc, you will find yourself in a lot of trouble. You can't even say "abusive" things these days, right to free speech does not protect you from committing a "hate crime" - attacking a man is assault, but attacking a man an also calling him a "nigger" is judged much more harshly.
Slashdot Mirror
Devise a way to rupture the buck when it reaches the bottom
How about some C4? Oh, wait...
What am I missing here?
You don't need analytically pure sodium if all you want to do is blow stuff up, only if you're doing chemistry research. For the purposes of mayhem, much poorer quality sodium is quite sufficient.
In countries where the wages are lower, the licensing/hardware portion of the TCO will be larger. Linux runs on smaller iron, without licensing costs. It's very simple math.
That's assuming that Microsoft only sell in USD and require local currencies to be converted to dollars and US prices to be paid before they'll make a sale. However, MS, like McDonalds, Sony, Pepsi and other global corporations, tailor their prices to the local markets. Products of these corporations are generally as "affordable" wherever you are.
When I was in India a year ago, I was surprised
at how strong the presence of Microsoft was in
science.
Hardly surprising considering Microsoft's active sponsorship of the IITs. I don't doubt that if Red Hat start funding research, professorships, scholarships etc that Linux will become equally as popular.
Since most Fortran code is done in research groups that aren't computer groups, they may not all think to buy a real compiler.
No, a research group with limited funding is more likely to buy a commercial compiler. The reason is the quality of code generation. I don't have the numbers to hand, but I have experienced vendor-supplied compilers like SPARCworks producing binaries that run twice as fast as identical code compiled with gcc (probably because gcc has limited ability to leverage platform specific features, and vendors have unlimited ability to do so). On PCs, Watcom had the best compiler for a while, and Motorola's compiler for PPC is the best on that platform. Spending money on a compiler can result in significantly lower hardware costs, particularly if you have few developers and lots of user workstations/compute nodes.
this is true and good, but heh... if you really had a little device the size of AA battery that holds a couple gigajoules in it... i dunno... seems quite dangerous. and sociologically, this danger would be more difficult to manage than the techonological challenges. methinks, anyway.
You might be right, but on the other hand, you could burn down a building using a car battery or a cylinder of butane, and it doesn't happen (at least, not very often, and usually not deliberately).
I think that a few people are inherently destructive and will try to destroy things with any tool that comes to hand, even a rock or a stick, but the majority are not, and will use even immensely powerful tools in safe and productive ways. History certainly suggests so, anyway.
With fuel cells sucking up more of the available oxygens, airlines may have to provide more air--and they might not get around real soon to doing that. I hope it doesn't cause anyone serious breathing problems.
Uhh, dude, with 4 bloody great turbofans on a typical airliner, the last thing you need to worry about is running out of air, short of a catastrophic cabin breach. Or electrical power for that matter. The only reason there aren't power sockets on every seat is the weight of the cabling. Oh, and that you can wire a few seats in business class and charge $$$ for them. Or not, if everyone has days worth of power in their laptops anyway.
no way man, it would suck ass. when you can store enough energy to run a car for 50 years in the size of a gas tank, what happens if something goes wrong (as it obviously will) with the storage? if somebody *intentially* sets it off, etc?
You clearly don't understand the first thing about fusion. The fuel is deuterium, which is commonly found in seawater. If it leaks, sure it's inconvenient, but it's no more dangerous than say butane if you're worried about it exploding. Certainly it is far less dangerous than a tank full of gas.
That's why we aren't running our whole society on fusion power right now: because starting a fusion reaction (at least, without a nuke to kick it off) is hard and sustaining it, even in perfectly controlled conditions, is even harder.
A big bright spot would stand out a bit, wouldn't you think? And since there aren't that many people who regularly try to blind cameras, this guy may just be making himself stick out like a sore thumb!
All the camera can see is that someone is blinding it: not who.
Eh, I would be suprised if those laws that you speak of would hold up to any scrutiny. Simply consider a woman who wears a burka as part of her religious beliefs
You often see on the front doors of bank branches these days instructions to remove motorcycle helmets before entering, so that everyone's face can be captured on CCTV, but mysteriously burkas are not included. I can't think of any reasonable explanation for this disparity.
as it is an OS by Apple and IBM (well gone but still)
;-)
Maybe they mean this Pink? I know which one I prefer
Third, the imposition of digital television in the USA to comply with the ATSC standards will also require a lot of upgrades to our whole broadcast infrastructure.
This is called the "broken window fallacy" by economists. Intuition suggests that all economic activity adds value, which leads to people saying silly things like war is a boost to the economy. It is not, because it consumes resources that could more profitably be used elsewhere. Will the switchover to digital television result in an increase in the value of television to the consumer (i.e. will it make more people watch more television)? Probably not... so spending money on digital TVs might be nice for TV manufacturers, but will have a negative effect on the economy as a whole.
If the broken window fallacy was not one, then you could get out of any economic slump by destroying buildings and rebuilding them, and you could repeat this as often as you liked to produce economic growth. This clearly is not the case.
We may be in an economic slump right now, but by mid-decade the technological developments I mentioned will need hardware upgrades on a scale that will make the 1990's tech boom seem like a minor even in comparison, since these technological changes will affect everyone.
Same goes for IPv6 and 3G - if it is rolled out by mandate without adding value (not the same thing as having the potential to add value, which is all it is because there's no pressing need), then it's wasted money, because it's costing money that could be invested elsewhere.
Companies need to learn what to outsource and what not to outsource. My personal opinion is that large scale projects need to be internal, with only small, specialized sections outsourced to the appropriate firm.
In my experience the best way to do it is to split the IT function off into a separate business unit with it's own P&L. Other business units are billed for the services that the IT unit provides to them. This has the added benefit of forcing other departments not to make frivolous use of IT. Once the new organization is up and running, then you can really get the benefits of outsourcing: external outsourcers can bid against the IT unit for provision of particular services, and it is very easy to see what would truly benefit from outsourcing and what would not. For example, you might see that it is cheaper (in real money) to keep desktop support internal, but cheaper to outsource printer maintenance. And if your IT unit is really good, they can sell services themselves to other companies, and become a profit rather than a cost center. I could name a couple of major banks who operate this way (but I won't).
It has already matured and will continue to do so. IT does not change every day, in fact since I started working in the industry very little has changed.
/., I see more and more IT shops moving to linux. If Linux gets some half decent Open Source vertical applications then companies will flock to it. Why pay $2,500,000 for an ERP package that you have to tailor?
Put it this way: innovations in civil engineering happen over decades. Bridges almost never fall down because bridge building is well understood. Innovations in IT happen on timescales of years or even months. Software frequently crashes or fails to meet its requirements because software is poorly understood. How often do you get a new version of a piece of software? (Hint: a lot more often than you need to change the gauge of a railway bridge).
Until software applications can be built with the reliability and repeatability associated with bridges, dams, power stations, airliners et al, the software industry will remain immature.
As a side, and this is
SAP R/3 et al already are "Open Source" - you get reams and reams of ABAP and can rewrite bits of it however you want (or pay Accenture to do it for you). The thing is that ERP systems are very boring to write and require immense amounts of manpower and industry experience. There is no way there will ever be a free ERP system capable of competing with the big players, because getting paid is the only possible motivation anyone could have to do it. Not only that, what company is going to want to give away the secrets of their best practices to their competitors? You are far more likely to see SAP R/3 running on Linux with Oracle 9i RAC on Linux at the back end.
In a way, you've proved my point. Companies in mature industries don't "flock" to things because they are already at best practices and have been for a long time, and are willing to wait for a new idea to prove itself, which may take years.
I happen to think that that is way groovy. It's about time some other ancient belief systems got in on the planet-naming!
Why, what did they contribute to modern astronomy? A lot of our science is still based on discoveries and theories of the Greeks. The ancient Arabs and Chinese also had an understanding of astronomy as a science rather than a "creation myth". I've never heard of these Tongva, so it's safe to say that their contribution to scientific knowledge is negligible at best. This name is merely another example of European-descended-men-are-bad political correctness.
The "major catastrophe" it is designed to survive is something that physically destroys or isolates many nodes of the network. This was a simple traffic spike.
:-)
I've often heard this story that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war, but I'm sure we've all experienced the Internet failing on a pleasant summer's day
Just don't forget that a couple of the most intensely using mobile countries - Sweden and Finland - are also among the least populated countries in the world. the "higher population densities" argument simply doesn't hold water
The populations in Scandanavian countries are largely centralized into a few densely populated areas.
The USA has 278,058,881 people and 69.209 million mobile phones in 9,158,960 sq km, giving 0.25 phones/person and 7.56 phones/sq km. Finland has 5,175,783 people and 2,162,574 mobile phones in 305,470 sq km, giving 0.42 phones/person and 7.08 phones/sq km. So it would appear that you are correct, and the USA has 30.06 people/sq km and Finland has 16.94 people/sq km.
But you cannot really compare Finland to the USA, it would be more accurate to compare Finland with Alaska and the EU with the USA.
Was it really free trade that caused the collapse of the old Soviet Union? Or was it economic brinksmanship on the part of the Reagan administration?
They're the same thing; the capitalist economy made it possible for the West to force the Soviets into a spending competition that a communist economy simply couldn't win. Their political system collapsed without a fight, infinitely preferable to a military confrontation.
If you think free trade frees people how effective do you think it is proving at freeing the people of America's client states?
The problem there is not too much free trade but too little. It is hypocritical of the US and EU to protect domestic industries like farming and steel. Real free trade in those industries would be win-win, for consumers in the West and producers in the Third World.
Whether the fibre is dark or not isn't the problem. "The Internet" can handle the ammount of traffic that an event would create. The problem is the servers that everyone want to access will fail under that load. I bet dollars to donuts that news sites were going down on 9/11, but the sites where you can see chicks going down on each other were just fine that day.
You're probably right; the report notes that the infrastructure was fine but the web servers were overwhelmed. Lighting up that dark fibre would make it easier to deploy Akamai-like solutions to replicate content to distribution points closer to the consumer.
In most European countries the 3G spectrum was auctioned. If the license fees are exorbitant, then the only ones to blame are the participants in the auction.
The telcos were trapped between a rock and a hard place. Fail to win a licence and the stock market would kill you quickly, win one and your own debts would kill you slowly. They all opted for the slow death hoping that they had bought enough time to figure something out.
The telcos have noone to blame but themselves for their problems, and I am sick that one after the other they're asking for government bailouts. Why the heck did we privatise them in the first place if we end up paying for their mistakes anyway?
The fault is the government's, because it did not structure the process to get citizens the best possible service, but to maximize revenue for itself. A better solution would have been a competitive tender or "beauty contest", in which the best technical and economic solutions, indepenently assessed, won. The only winners were the government treasuries, and their appetites are insatiable.
They wouldn't have needed a "bail out" if they were free to do business, but as it is, they are strangled by over-regulation out of Brussels and taxation at home. Privatization is pointless if the private owners aren't free to run the company as they see fit without interference.
Maybe Japan and Europe will lose the current massive advantage they have in Mobile technology, its possible, after all the US is only 2 years or so behind Europe which is 2 years behind Japan.
I don't see it. Europe and Japan have higher population densities and smaller administrative areas, so can economically have much higher densities of cells for a given area. Handsets can't get much smaller before they start to have interface problems, so competition is on features. In the US, unless someone is willing to provide a major-metro-area-only service, handsets are going to need much more power, hence larger batteries, and less room for technological extras, before handsets get too larger.
Also, I'm unimpressed with the rhetoric in this article. He basks in schadenfreude because something his rivals claimed to be unworkable did actually work, then turns around and says what they want to do is unworkable. But he's absolutely right that the European approach of homogenization by diktat from Brussels is bound to fail, particularly after the windfall taxes imposed on the telcos by the governments, disguised as the 3G license fee.
Keynote have oublished a reporton the performance of major web sites on September 11th, 2001.
Of course, there's a lot of dark fibre around, so the capacity is there if it's really needed. Once the current recession is over, we can expect to go back to the days of massive overprovision and redundancy as content and bandwidth providers seek to build in capacity to handle peaks. What will really help is multicasting for video streams, and well-designed caches at ISPs.
I've seen a lot of 'health informatics' degrees lately. Yours would just be a twist on that.
No it wouldn't. Health/Bio Informatics is the study of the use of computation to analyze biological research. It's about algorithms and applications for simulation protein interactions or detecting trends in clinical trial data. It's a focused and integrated academic discipline, not a bunch of randomly assembled courses.
Anyone with the gumption to tackle these three subjects for seven years doesn't need to impress the average PHB to find himself a job.
I'm sorry, but anyone who spends 7 years on-campus as an undergraduate is nigh-on unemployable. At best it suggests chronic indecisiveness (further suggested by the 3 very difference subjects studied) and at worse, someone who spent 7 years partying on their family's money.
You say "gumption" but he didn't push back the frontiers of knowledge in any of these three fields, nor take any personal or professional risks, just sat in lectures for 7 years. A candidate with "gumption" could have a BS and a PhD in that time - or less. In fact, in the UK, it is not unusual to spend just 3 years on each.
The only thing I can suggest is trying to wrangle things to get a Bachelors and a Masters out of this, rather than 3 Bachelors'. Or become a career academic. As a sometime hirer, I probably wouldn't even bother inviting this candidate for an interview for the above reasons.
I don't think there is a law that says I, as a private individual, can't discriminate against gun owners. If there is, please let me know. And please don't bother to quote the constitution - that's for discrimination by the Federal gov't.
There are plenty of laws that say that private individuals can't discriminate, it just so happens that gun owners aren't protected (at present). If you refuse to contract with gays, blacks, the disabled, etc, you will find yourself in a lot of trouble. You can't even say "abusive" things these days, right to free speech does not protect you from committing a "hate crime" - attacking a man is assault, but attacking a man an also calling him a "nigger" is judged much more harshly.