Maybe for elderly gamers, but when I read the title I was wondering if the story would go to young gamers and I believe for them there is no correlation between gaming skill and beginning driving ability.
Back when my 17 year old son was driving for the first time we were at a left turn stop light and it was green, but not a green turn arrow. He slowly started pulling out to make the turn. He had plenty of time to make it through the intersection before the car in the on-coming lane got to the intersection, but my son was moving uncharacteristically slowly through the intersection. I told him to go faster. I had to say this several times till the point where the on-coming car was well within my personal "danger zone". He finally started going, no incident at all and I asked him about it once we were in the clear. He said that he did not see that on coming car at all. He was paying "hyper" attention to his turn radius.
Anyway, the up shot is that I would have thunk that a kid who can kick my butt at FPSs would have the ability to scan a "real life" scene and similarly be aware of all the action out there.
Oh honestly, you green bottomed hairy hippie! Why plant trees that will cleanly and effectively remove the carbon from the air, when we can invent a MACHINE to do it that will use electricity and require parts and labour and all that? You greenies and your whacky nature ideas. Honestly! How exactly do trees generate jobs?
The problem with trees is they're only a CC solution (carbon capture) and not a storage solution. What we need is to plant a bunch of trees, harvest them, chop them up into sawdust and bury them in the earth. Rinse, repeat. Then we'll have a tree based CCS solution. Plus, if we wait a few million years, we'll also have replacement oil!
I don't understand how this is possible (and I'm posting this before I RTFA).
Assuming gravity travels at the speed of light then we should have the gravity of the object doing the tugging hitting the objects being tugged at the same time light from the tugger is hitting the tuggie.
Then, for us to see it, the light from the tuggie has to travel to us, which would also include the light that the tuggie sees of the tugger... so we should be able to see the tugger. What gives?
I'm saddened by this news. The fellow's comments seem to have been taken entirely out of context and as a result he's out of a job (albeit only a part time position, the Society is more than happy to have him at his "day" job).
He seems to merely have been advocating debating ID if it came up in a biology class. Apparently there's a widespread movement to ignore ID in biology and not take that opportunity to teach kids how ID is not science. Apparently also it's OK to discuss ID in religion class. Well... I don't know about you, but I doubt there will be much discussion of how ID fails as a scientific theory in that class.
I see this as an example of the spread of intolerance. I would have been much happier to see the Royal Society supporting this guy. Essentially thumbing their noses at the public outcry and simultaneously telling those who complain to "take a breath and think about what he's advocating" instead of just giving in to a knee jerk reaction.
ehhh... well played sir, but you know what I mean. And it doesn't affect the general idea... 3 out of 4 super volcanoes should be in ocean areas. What happens when they go boom?
When I first read this article I was immediately reminded of Yellowstone National Park with the phrase "huge bubble of magma". Yellowstone is a well known super volcano. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
With over 75% of the earth being water, it seems natural to assume that there are supervolcanos underwater. My question is... does anyone know and if so what sort of effect do such eruptions have on the marine ecosystem?
I gotta wonder how that 4-year gap played into NASA's decision making process. I'm old enough to recall when the shuttle first launched after a similar gap from the last Apollo mission (which IIRC were missions to Skylab). When the Shuttle blasted off for many of those first missions it was big news and public interest ran high.
I imagine NASA is interested in being in the public eye. I also imagine that there are some there who think this 4-year gap is a horrible thing, but I conjecture that, on balance, NASA gave this gap little weight. The pros balancing the cons.
Ok... there may be reasons to be skeptical of the information, but you should be skeptical regardless of who gave out that info. That's my main beef. There are people who would believe Obama if he said something and disbelieve McCain if he said the exact same thing. Those people are idiots.
It's too easy to be doubting of everything just as it's too easy to be trusting of everything. Problem is both stand in the way of progress. Be reasonable with your doubts and with your "trusts".
In this case, I quickly read through TFA and they also mentioned several other ways to guard against having your laptop stolen. Not only buying a replacement, but backing up the drive, having the drive encrypted and locked, as well as not feeling harried when you go to the airport. Hell... they even pointed out that 60+% (IIRC) of the laptops found by airport personnel are never claimed. Maybe Dell is losing it's shirt on replacement policies it's selling and wants this particular statistic to get out, but I doubt that. I kinda believe this number at face value.
I would be more skeptical if the entity sponsoring the study was one of those credit report watching companies and if they then extrapolated to conjecture that if someone else's laptop is stolen then MY credit info might have been on that laptop, so I should check my credit even more frequently than what's currently recommended. That'd be a huge stretch and would be aimed not only at the folks who had their laptop stolen, but at anyone.
The report isn't saying that only Dell's product can save you. My sense is the report could have been sponsored as part of trying to see if there's a market for a service in this area and that Dell released it to be a good guy.
Really, let's look at who sponsored this study... Dell, and what do they have to gain from having businesses think that their laptops are all going to be lost?
So, take these results with a monstrous rock of salt.
Really? While I understand the nature of conflict of interest, on the spectrum of things that are open to interpretation, this one seems closer to "fact" than "opinion". You walk into an airport with a laptop, you walk out without one, boom... you're one of the 12,000.
Sometimes facts are facts regardless of who's spouting them. If I told you the next new Moon was August 1, would you "take that with a monstrous rock of salt" because I was in the outdoor evening lighting business?
They are offering to exchange them to any owner who is offended, they aren't recalling them.
True. NC seems to have done a reasonable thing. But the little old lady didn't. Her options were to go to NC licensing board and ask for a replacement or to complain so loudly that NC State had to publically announce an exchange program.
I have a sinking suspicion that said "little old lady" will get very upset at others who have elected to NOT exchange their WTF plates. It's really just intolerance no matter what.
And another thing... if she's upset with "WTF" because she knows what it means... what about F*CK? Or F**K? or F***? Or... "frack?" or "fudge?" We're not banning WORDS here... we're banning MEANING. A bit scarier.
That said, electronics should also not be treated any differently than a paper document.
Again, the issues are: A) Should the government make a copy of electronic files crossing the border B) If they do, how will that data be handled
and let's not forget: C) Even if they find something that doesn't necessarily mean that what they found was yours or that you were even aware it was on your laptop.
There are 2 things I've been curious about in the Neural Network area for several years. I'm only a casual reader of this field and not a researcher, so these could have been studied already but I haven't heard anything about them, so....
Firstly, assuming that a neural network starts out as a homogeneous collection of identical neurons and that, after training on a particular task, the network develops specialized sub-areas to handle various sub-parts of the task then the question arises "why did THIS sub-area of the network specialize in THIS sub-task?". Or, to put it another way, if all "sub-areas" of the network are equally likely to become a specialist in some particular sub-task then the struggle between 2 different sub-areas to become THE sole surviving specialist for a given sub-task seems to imply a certain inefficiency in the training/learning process. If this effect is real (and is still a problem in modern neural network research) then it seems that research into forcing sub-areas to specialize sooner will allow the network to spend more time on the actual training task and less on the "in-fighting" for control of particular sub-tasks.
Secondly, I believe all electronic neural networks have a training phase followed by an operating phase. Once in the operating phase, further learning/training stops. But I do not believe biological neural networks work like this. I believe biological networks learn and operate at the same time. I'd like to see an electronic neural network that can learn and operate at the same time. (Maybe that'd require "sleep" in between operating cycles?)
1) since you say your competitor did a spam blast recently... I suggest you put your anti-spam theory to the test and tell your boss that you expect your competitor will see a negative backlash from the spam and they should do something to take advantage of that. For example, put a "Unlike our competitors, we don't spam" statement somewhere in your advertising to highlight this.
2) When I see spam from an otherwise "legit" company I immediately think that they're suddenly not legit. In your case, if I saw spam from your company, I'd think that your travel company is a shell designed solely to get my identifying information for fraudulent purposes. Legit companies don't spam. The funny thing is, this is practically hard-wired into my brain. I'm not believing this out of spite or "voting with my dollars", it's deeper and less emotional than that... getting spam from ANY legit company permanently puts them into a less trustworthy category in my eyes.
Any civilization that's advanced enough to colonize the galaxy and want to use neutrinos for communication will also be advanced enough for various members of its species to take several multi-light year trips during their individual life times.
Assuming they normally live to be 100 years old and assuming that their ships travel at 99.9% the speed of light (just to make the math easier) and that these folks take 5 round-trips of say... 5ly distance each. (note... at 99.9% speed of light a 5.6ly journey will take about 3 months ship-time to complete, I'm reluctant to assume longer ship time than this.) This will add 50 years to these aliens' life expectancy (48 years really. 5 there and back is 10 trips total which takes 50 years outside time but 2.5 years ship time to finish)
So these creatures will live to be 150 years old instead. Hmmm... not as long as I was hoping... thought I could easily get to 1000 year life span.
Great post, and to add to it... the other reward, compensation.
I'm in my 40s, tech background, but a few years ago got an MBA and got exposed to many non-tech types. Most are intelligent, no where near as quantitatively oriented as I am but all reasonably successful in their careers. Then it struck me...
When I was in high school the Valedictorian was also the person most likely to succeed, but as I saw folks who clearly could not have been valedictorians in the biz school class... I realized that smarts may get you moderately high, but not more above that.
Assuming Doctors, Lawyers and Engineers all take the same amount of brain power then, of those three, engineers will make the lowest amount of money over their lifetimes. Add to this the concentration of wealth to the wealthy, the top to bottom pay discrepancy from within a company going from about 35-to-1 in the 70s to 70-to-1 now (IIRC) and there being a zero percent chance of the top earner being a person with an engineering degree you have a bunch of financial reasons why kids don't choose engineering.
One rebuttal to the brain drain from engineering that I heard was that sufficiently talented kids are just not enrolling in engineering classes. It wasn't that we don't have them, it's that they're choosing something else. Their parents may already be making the best they can be with an engineering degree and they want something better. They see what the max upside is of an engineering degree and choose something else.
After 20+ years of high tech careers, Japan may now be experiencing a similar fate. Kids of top level engineers want something better and go elsewhere. Compared to India and China where the salaries that an engineering degree can offer is well better than what their parents made... sure... they'll take that in a heart beat.
I'm a little more knowledgable than the OP, but only just. I've played around with actual circuit creation on those breadboard kits and back in the day when Heathkit was still around.
It strikes me that there's a BIG jump in here somewhere and I'd like someone knowledgeable to weigh in on this.
For all those slow-speed logic circuits I made I do not believe I ever needed to use capacitors, yet when I look at my MoBo I see capacitors all over the place. I've jumped to the conclusion that at high speed there's extra noise on the lines and that the capacitors help to mitigate that noise.
Is this true?
Assuming it is true, I think the OP would also be served by getting a sense of how far he can go w/o having to worry about effects like this.
If this is not true, if the capacitors are needed even for slower speed logic circuits, then... I'll have to dig out my old copy of Art of Electronics myself.
If the civilization lives, say, 200 million light years away, it could have been making a beeline for us since the beginning of mankind and still not be anywhere near reaching us. Most of TFA surrounded life in our galaxy. 200 million light years away is VASTLY bigger than our galaxy. It is a region of space that contains perhaps 1000 galaxies. Our galaxy, in contrast is about 100,000 light years wide.
On the other hand I do disagree with TFA that intergalactic colonization will ever be possible, essentially for the argument you may have inadvertently expressed above. Intergalactically the distances are too vast. But galactically not so much on the time scales he's talking about.
Baseline system: constitution in 1789. Representative to cast votes: congressman. Revocable: elections. Your proposal is a distinction from our modern system without much of a difference. I disagree. The OP's system is different. Firstly, revocable at any time... not just every 2 years Secondly, it occurs to me that the first term a politician is voted into office they are voting their conscience. But by the time the 2nd term runs around, they're canvassing their base and asking them how they think he/she should vote. At this point he's largely indistinguishable from the previous office holder. The OP's system, on the other hand, has the possibility that "my designate" could always be voting his conscience. Especially if I can revoke it at any time and pick anyone who's a valid voter and even further... do it in secret (so my designate doesn't know I'm letting him/her cast my vote too).
You raise a good point about the actual WORK of legislators and that will still need to proceed as you say, but I didn't interpret the OP's system as being a replacement for legislators, more like a replacement for common-man voters.
Lastly... I'd like to see a website where people can answer questions about how they'd vote for something and then that site would spit out their local representative who best matches that voting pattern.
I don't completely understand here, maybe someone can enlighten me.
Firstly, assuming you're OK with using ReiserFS even though the author was convicted then why are we assuming Hans won't be working on this from jail?
Will the government block him? It's not like he's convicted of a computer crime and so can't have access to computers. Will society be better served by having Hans make license plates or having him continue working on ReiserFS, if he so chooses?
It could be that he won't choose to continue the work. But has he stated his intentions in this area?
In general, for a task that can largely be performed anywhere I'm a little confused by the fact that we're assuming he won't be working on it.
Suppose you had a definitive, 100% guaranteed answer to the "discovered vs invented" question. What would it allow you to do that you couldn't do before? What could you predict? What would you gain?
Nothing, nothing and nothing.
An excellent approach to this subject, but I'm not so sure "Nothing" is correct here. It strikes me that those who put mathematical truths (hints of pi and prime numbers, iirc) on board the Pioneer spacecraft felt mathematics was discovered and hence would be a universal language for any alien intelligence who discovered it. So, if we had a definitive answer and it was "invented" I expect we would have changed what we placed on board the Pioneer to communicate with other intelligences.
For my part, I'm in the both camp but in a rather mundane way. I believe the axioms and postulates are invented and everything else from there is discovered.
In a word (or 2) I'd say the perfect balance is battery life. Though this completely ignores the "ultra portable" part, but if you go for battery life it also gets you a not overpowered CPU too. I find high power CPU to be a double whammy wrt battery life. A) the CPU consumes more power and B) the fan runs more often and hence consumes more power. So... if you go for battery life ALONE you'll also get a mid-range CPU with a reasonable fan activation cycle.
Two stories - the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign - represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found.
You know, it might be possible that these topics dominate the news so because they are the most important issues we currently face. Making the claim that the Net is "narrowing" the news agenda based upon this is disingenuous. When I read the summary I thought there may be an economics argument there. While you may be right, these stories are covered because they're important, it could also be the case, just from a mathematical/economics pov that more outlets engender less diversity.
For example, could it be that with fixed dollars to be made in the news reporting business but vastly more reporting outlets (some reporting w/o expectation of making any money) that as soon as one story appears to get a critical mass of attention the other "for profit" news reporters turn their attention there instead of trying to find the "next big story"?
If this is true, then there's an interesting min-max problem here... too few news reporting companies and we run into less diverse coverage as either they don't have time to cover more or there's an active conspiracy going on. Too many news reporting agencies and they are all hyper nervous about making a profit and all grab on to the same popular set of headlines. Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot.
I'm not saying that this IS the case, merely that I'd like to see research on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe for elderly gamers, but when I read the title I was wondering if the story would go to young gamers and I believe for them there is no correlation between gaming skill and beginning driving ability.
Back when my 17 year old son was driving for the first time we were at a left turn stop light and it was green, but not a green turn arrow. He slowly started pulling out to make the turn. He had plenty of time to make it through the intersection before the car in the on-coming lane got to the intersection, but my son was moving uncharacteristically slowly through the intersection. I told him to go faster. I had to say this several times till the point where the on-coming car was well within my personal "danger zone". He finally started going, no incident at all and I asked him about it once we were in the clear. He said that he did not see that on coming car at all. He was paying "hyper" attention to his turn radius.
Anyway, the up shot is that I would have thunk that a kid who can kick my butt at FPSs would have the ability to scan a "real life" scene and similarly be aware of all the action out there.
Apparently not.
Oh honestly, you green bottomed hairy hippie! Why plant trees that will cleanly and effectively remove the carbon from the air, when we can invent a MACHINE to do it that will use electricity and require parts and labour and all that? You greenies and your whacky nature ideas. Honestly! How exactly do trees generate jobs?
The problem with trees is they're only a CC solution (carbon capture) and not a storage solution. What we need is to plant a bunch of trees, harvest them, chop them up into sawdust and bury them in the earth. Rinse, repeat. Then we'll have a tree based CCS solution. Plus, if we wait a few million years, we'll also have replacement oil!
I don't understand how this is possible (and I'm posting this before I RTFA).
Assuming gravity travels at the speed of light then we should have the gravity of the object doing the tugging hitting the objects being tugged at the same time light from the tugger is hitting the tuggie.
Then, for us to see it, the light from the tuggie has to travel to us, which would also include the light that the tuggie sees of the tugger... so we should be able to see the tugger. What gives?
I'm saddened by this news. The fellow's comments seem to have been taken entirely out of context and as a result he's out of a job (albeit only a part time position, the Society is more than happy to have him at his "day" job).
He seems to merely have been advocating debating ID if it came up in a biology class. Apparently there's a widespread movement to ignore ID in biology and not take that opportunity to teach kids how ID is not science. Apparently also it's OK to discuss ID in religion class. Well... I don't know about you, but I doubt there will be much discussion of how ID fails as a scientific theory in that class.
I see this as an example of the spread of intolerance. I would have been much happier to see the Royal Society supporting this guy. Essentially thumbing their noses at the public outcry and simultaneously telling those who complain to "take a breath and think about what he's advocating" instead of just giving in to a knee jerk reaction.
ehhh... well played sir, but you know what I mean. And it doesn't affect the general idea... 3 out of 4 super volcanoes should be in ocean areas. What happens when they go boom?
When I first read this article I was immediately reminded of Yellowstone National Park with the phrase "huge bubble of magma". Yellowstone is a well known super volcano. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
With over 75% of the earth being water, it seems natural to assume that there are supervolcanos underwater. My question is ... does anyone know and if so what sort of effect do such eruptions have on the marine ecosystem?
Great... First it was "Do No Evil" and we all cheered. Now it seems like it's "Do No Evil" and "We decide what's Evil."
Hmmm... kinda sounds like the US Government's stance on torture. Great... just great.
I gotta wonder how that 4-year gap played into NASA's decision making process. I'm old enough to recall when the shuttle first launched after a similar gap from the last Apollo mission (which IIRC were missions to Skylab). When the Shuttle blasted off for many of those first missions it was big news and public interest ran high.
I imagine NASA is interested in being in the public eye. I also imagine that there are some there who think this 4-year gap is a horrible thing, but I conjecture that, on balance, NASA gave this gap little weight. The pros balancing the cons.
Ok... there may be reasons to be skeptical of the information, but you should be skeptical regardless of who gave out that info. That's my main beef. There are people who would believe Obama if he said something and disbelieve McCain if he said the exact same thing. Those people are idiots.
It's too easy to be doubting of everything just as it's too easy to be trusting of everything. Problem is both stand in the way of progress. Be reasonable with your doubts and with your "trusts".
In this case, I quickly read through TFA and they also mentioned several other ways to guard against having your laptop stolen. Not only buying a replacement, but backing up the drive, having the drive encrypted and locked, as well as not feeling harried when you go to the airport. Hell... they even pointed out that 60+% (IIRC) of the laptops found by airport personnel are never claimed. Maybe Dell is losing it's shirt on replacement policies it's selling and wants this particular statistic to get out, but I doubt that. I kinda believe this number at face value.
I would be more skeptical if the entity sponsoring the study was one of those credit report watching companies and if they then extrapolated to conjecture that if someone else's laptop is stolen then MY credit info might have been on that laptop, so I should check my credit even more frequently than what's currently recommended. That'd be a huge stretch and would be aimed not only at the folks who had their laptop stolen, but at anyone.
The report isn't saying that only Dell's product can save you. My sense is the report could have been sponsored as part of trying to see if there's a market for a service in this area and that Dell released it to be a good guy.
Really, let's look at who sponsored this study... Dell, and what do they have to gain from having businesses think that their laptops are all going to be lost?
So, take these results with a monstrous rock of salt.
Really? While I understand the nature of conflict of interest, on the spectrum of things that are open to interpretation, this one seems closer to "fact" than "opinion". You walk into an airport with a laptop, you walk out without one, boom... you're one of the 12,000.
Sometimes facts are facts regardless of who's spouting them. If I told you the next new Moon was August 1, would you "take that with a monstrous rock of salt" because I was in the outdoor evening lighting business?
They are offering to exchange them to any owner who is offended, they aren't recalling them.
True. NC seems to have done a reasonable thing. But the little old lady didn't. Her options were to go to NC licensing board and ask for a replacement or to complain so loudly that NC State had to publically announce an exchange program.
I have a sinking suspicion that said "little old lady" will get very upset at others who have elected to NOT exchange their WTF plates. It's really just intolerance no matter what.
And another thing... if she's upset with "WTF" because she knows what it means... what about F*CK? Or F**K? or F***? Or... "frack?" or "fudge?" We're not banning WORDS here... we're banning MEANING. A bit scarier.
Again, the issues are:
and let's not forget:A) Should the government make a copy of electronic files crossing the border
B) If they do, how will that data be handled
C) Even if they find something that doesn't necessarily mean that what they found was yours or that you were even aware it was on your laptop.
There are 2 things I've been curious about in the Neural Network area for several years. I'm only a casual reader of this field and not a researcher, so these could have been studied already but I haven't heard anything about them, so....
Firstly, assuming that a neural network starts out as a homogeneous collection of identical neurons and that, after training on a particular task, the network develops specialized sub-areas to handle various sub-parts of the task then the question arises "why did THIS sub-area of the network specialize in THIS sub-task?". Or, to put it another way, if all "sub-areas" of the network are equally likely to become a specialist in some particular sub-task then the struggle between 2 different sub-areas to become THE sole surviving specialist for a given sub-task seems to imply a certain inefficiency in the training/learning process. If this effect is real (and is still a problem in modern neural network research) then it seems that research into forcing sub-areas to specialize sooner will allow the network to spend more time on the actual training task and less on the "in-fighting" for control of particular sub-tasks.
Secondly, I believe all electronic neural networks have a training phase followed by an operating phase. Once in the operating phase, further learning/training stops. But I do not believe biological neural networks work like this. I believe biological networks learn and operate at the same time. I'd like to see an electronic neural network that can learn and operate at the same time. (Maybe that'd require "sleep" in between operating cycles?)
I have 2 ideas.
1) since you say your competitor did a spam blast recently... I suggest you put your anti-spam theory to the test and tell your boss that you expect your competitor will see a negative backlash from the spam and they should do something to take advantage of that. For example, put a "Unlike our competitors, we don't spam" statement somewhere in your advertising to highlight this.
2) When I see spam from an otherwise "legit" company I immediately think that they're suddenly not legit. In your case, if I saw spam from your company, I'd think that your travel company is a shell designed solely to get my identifying information for fraudulent purposes. Legit companies don't spam. The funny thing is, this is practically hard-wired into my brain. I'm not believing this out of spite or "voting with my dollars", it's deeper and less emotional than that... getting spam from ANY legit company permanently puts them into a less trustworthy category in my eyes.
YES!!! At long last, we finally have some negative feedback going into the singularity. We're all saved...
Well.. if the government "shuts EFF Patent Busting down" by fixing the patent system, then that would be a Good Thing.
Seriously, even the patent office is complaining about the backlog of patents. I think they want a solution as much as the rest of us.
OK... I'll play!!!
... 5ly distance each. (note... at 99.9% speed of light a 5.6ly journey will take about 3 months ship-time to complete, I'm reluctant to assume longer ship time than this.) This will add 50 years to these aliens' life expectancy (48 years really. 5 there and back is 10 trips total which takes 50 years outside time but 2.5 years ship time to finish)
Any civilization that's advanced enough to colonize the galaxy and want to use neutrinos for communication will also be advanced enough for various members of its species to take several multi-light year trips during their individual life times.
Assuming they normally live to be 100 years old and assuming that their ships travel at 99.9% the speed of light (just to make the math easier) and that these folks take 5 round-trips of say
So these creatures will live to be 150 years old instead. Hmmm... not as long as I was hoping... thought I could easily get to 1000 year life span.
Great post, and to add to it... the other reward, compensation.
I'm in my 40s, tech background, but a few years ago got an MBA and got exposed to many non-tech types. Most are intelligent, no where near as quantitatively oriented as I am but all reasonably successful in their careers. Then it struck me...
When I was in high school the Valedictorian was also the person most likely to succeed, but as I saw folks who clearly could not have been valedictorians in the biz school class... I realized that smarts may get you moderately high, but not more above that.
Assuming Doctors, Lawyers and Engineers all take the same amount of brain power then, of those three, engineers will make the lowest amount of money over their lifetimes. Add to this the concentration of wealth to the wealthy, the top to bottom pay discrepancy from within a company going from about 35-to-1 in the 70s to 70-to-1 now (IIRC) and there being a zero percent chance of the top earner being a person with an engineering degree you have a bunch of financial reasons why kids don't choose engineering.
One rebuttal to the brain drain from engineering that I heard was that sufficiently talented kids are just not enrolling in engineering classes. It wasn't that we don't have them, it's that they're choosing something else. Their parents may already be making the best they can be with an engineering degree and they want something better. They see what the max upside is of an engineering degree and choose something else.
After 20+ years of high tech careers, Japan may now be experiencing a similar fate. Kids of top level engineers want something better and go elsewhere. Compared to India and China where the salaries that an engineering degree can offer is well better than what their parents made... sure... they'll take that in a heart beat.
I'm a little more knowledgable than the OP, but only just. I've played around with actual circuit creation on those breadboard kits and back in the day when Heathkit was still around.
It strikes me that there's a BIG jump in here somewhere and I'd like someone knowledgeable to weigh in on this.
For all those slow-speed logic circuits I made I do not believe I ever needed to use capacitors, yet when I look at my MoBo I see capacitors all over the place. I've jumped to the conclusion that at high speed there's extra noise on the lines and that the capacitors help to mitigate that noise.
Is this true?
Assuming it is true, I think the OP would also be served by getting a sense of how far he can go w/o having to worry about effects like this.
If this is not true, if the capacitors are needed even for slower speed logic circuits, then... I'll have to dig out my old copy of Art of Electronics myself.
On the other hand I do disagree with TFA that intergalactic colonization will ever be possible, essentially for the argument you may have inadvertently expressed above. Intergalactically the distances are too vast. But galactically not so much on the time scales he's talking about.
Firstly, revocable at any time
Secondly, it occurs to me that the first term a politician is voted into office they are voting their conscience. But by the time the 2nd term runs around, they're canvassing their base and asking them how they think he/she should vote. At this point he's largely indistinguishable from the previous office holder. The OP's system, on the other hand, has the possibility that "my designate" could always be voting his conscience. Especially if I can revoke it at any time and pick anyone who's a valid voter and even further... do it in secret (so my designate doesn't know I'm letting him/her cast my vote too).
You raise a good point about the actual WORK of legislators and that will still need to proceed as you say, but I didn't interpret the OP's system as being a replacement for legislators, more like a replacement for common-man voters.
Lastly... I'd like to see a website where people can answer questions about how they'd vote for something and then that site would spit out their local representative who best matches that voting pattern.
I don't completely understand here, maybe someone can enlighten me.
Firstly, assuming you're OK with using ReiserFS even though the author was convicted then why are we assuming Hans won't be working on this from jail?
Will the government block him? It's not like he's convicted of a computer crime and so can't have access to computers. Will society be better served by having Hans make license plates or having him continue working on ReiserFS, if he so chooses?
It could be that he won't choose to continue the work. But has he stated his intentions in this area?
In general, for a task that can largely be performed anywhere I'm a little confused by the fact that we're assuming he won't be working on it.
Suppose you had a definitive, 100% guaranteed answer to the "discovered vs invented" question. What would it allow you to do that you couldn't do before? What could you predict? What would you gain?
Nothing, nothing and nothing.
An excellent approach to this subject, but I'm not so sure "Nothing" is correct here. It strikes me that those who put mathematical truths (hints of pi and prime numbers, iirc) on board the Pioneer spacecraft felt mathematics was discovered and hence would be a universal language for any alien intelligence who discovered it. So, if we had a definitive answer and it was "invented" I expect we would have changed what we placed on board the Pioneer to communicate with other intelligences.For my part, I'm in the both camp but in a rather mundane way. I believe the axioms and postulates are invented and everything else from there is discovered.
In a word (or 2) I'd say the perfect balance is battery life. Though this completely ignores the "ultra portable" part, but if you go for battery life it also gets you a not overpowered CPU too. I find high power CPU to be a double whammy wrt battery life. A) the CPU consumes more power and B) the fan runs more often and hence consumes more power. So... if you go for battery life ALONE you'll also get a mid-range CPU with a reasonable fan activation cycle.
You know, it might be possible that these topics dominate the news so because they are the most important issues we currently face. Making the claim that the Net is "narrowing" the news agenda based upon this is disingenuous. When I read the summary I thought there may be an economics argument there. While you may be right, these stories are covered because they're important, it could also be the case, just from a mathematical/economics pov that more outlets engender less diversity.
For example, could it be that with fixed dollars to be made in the news reporting business but vastly more reporting outlets (some reporting w/o expectation of making any money) that as soon as one story appears to get a critical mass of attention the other "for profit" news reporters turn their attention there instead of trying to find the "next big story"?
If this is true, then there's an interesting min-max problem here... too few news reporting companies and we run into less diverse coverage as either they don't have time to cover more or there's an active conspiracy going on. Too many news reporting agencies and they are all hyper nervous about making a profit and all grab on to the same popular set of headlines. Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot.
I'm not saying that this IS the case, merely that I'd like to see research on it.