Wrong. Global warming is science. Thousands of climate scientists, who are scientists, who know what science is, say that it's science. You, who spell "ozone" as "O-Zone", do not know what science is. You say that "in the 1970s it was all about global cooling", but that's just something you heard on Rush Limbo's show, not what the climate scientists said was a consensus.
You do not speak for Newton, Einstein, Tesla or any of the other scientists whose names you've heard. You don't know what science is. Shut up already.
Earth did not have a radically different climate 200, 400 or 600 years ago. It had a radically different climate 13-25 thousand years ago, when there were kilometer thick ice sheets across the places most populated today. That was inhospitable, even though humans lived through those millennia. We should do what we can to avoid returning to those bleak times.
Especially since the changes now will destabilize a world packed with people and WMD. Climate change today among modern humans could easily cause us to destroy each other, possibly completely, in a way that nature alone never could before.
Wrong. Climate scientists have clearly identified the rising CO2 (and its equivalents: GHGs) concentrations in the atmosphere as the mechanical cause of the climate change, driven by overall average warming. Climate scientists have further clearly identified a reduction in the GHG concentrations produced as industrial waste as a way to cause abatement of the recent changes.
That is the science. Politicians who scream and legislate mostly legislate based on bribes and threats from global polluters, when the accompanying propaganda is approved by climate deniers. There is far too little legislation in reaction to the science of GHG pollution and efforts to lower it. If there were, the pollution would be too expensive to continue at the rates we have.
You don't even know what "troll" means. Hint: it's not just something you say isn't relevant to the argument. Especially when it is relevant, and you're unable to recognize its relevance.
Just shut up already. You spook the horses with your loud, empty talking.
And it's Slashdotters tagging it with "manbearpig", too. People whose "science" is really "politics" is really "ideology" is really "cartoons" is really stupid. And they have the same vote you do.
If this dock didn't require I physically insert my phone into it, that would be good. Dedicate some kind of wireless connection to my device as long as it's within 10m. With crypto auth backed by a confirm (check to always allow) dialog on my device, gated through Android permissions to my device resources.
Put a CPU and GPU into the dock dedicated to processing the traffic among my device, the display, storage and network. The CPU/GPU in the "dock" could cost maybe $25 extra. Let me plug in for recharging, but only power in a separate cable from an optional data cable connection.
Now we've got my mobile personal data and apps integrated into the local infrastructure, with grades of trust I can use without abandoning safety. Now it makes sense for me to BMOD, not just the cheapo management who can't spring for a $150 Android device of their own.
Because there's only so much return NSF is giving. I'm waiting for you to document the return on $150B spent on NSF in a comparable period, say 1993-2002 with 10 years to show for it, compared to NASA's 1961-1970 ROI by 1980.
You know we landed people on the Moon, too, right? Or do you think that's just an OJ movie?
What you're disputing is common knowledge. If you're going to deny it, you have to prove it with better than Anonymous Coward assertions. You can't. Pipe down.
NASA doesn't need patents to fund a Moon base. We have a government that just spent $1.5 TRILLION on a lying waste of time and lives in Iraq for a ('nother) decade. We could have spent that on a Moon base and a Mars base instead, and been as smart as we instead were stupid.
If NASA had patents that it made money from instead of transferring it to private developers, the overall US economy wouldn't be as good, since the tech wouldn't have taken root in general production as it has. American lives wouldn't be as good. The return in taxes in the 40 years since Apollo on the tech Apollo developed wouldn't exist.
These patents just choke innovation and income, except for the few government enforced monopolists who benefit from them. It's a terrible idea, that is surprising in that it hasn't been done in this country of terrible private economic ideas.
The government gets taxes from the increased revenue of the businesses you're talking about.
But that's besides the point. Public investments pay off in private income in America. And in improved living conditions. The government payoff is leadership, and in teaching the Russians that we could do in space during the Cold War what we did in the Pacific during WWII: ramp up tech and production to bring it right in their face and beyond.
Of course NASA shouldn't keep a monopoly on the tech it develops. It should transfer it to American developers, as it has. If anything it should hold less, especially now that so much NASA work is for spies and so not shared.
The main point is just not to be on this planet when we bathe it in exterminating radiation, or whatever hideous and total fate we have in store for it. Even if Earth is easier to make reinhabitable than someplace new offplanet, if we're not offplanet when we take it down, we're not going to get a chance to make it anywhere again.
One scenario is the Earth overrun by killer robots bent on revenge for the time after we created them as our slaves. Especially if the robots are nanotech diseases we use against each other in an armageddon. Places in space without killer robots would be better.
And that's just off the top of my head. Fact is homo sapiens has to diversify from this single failurepoint planet. Or go down with it.
The return on that $150B investment has been many, many times that amount. How much return on the NSF investment is there in an equivalent 10 years since the money was spent?
Maybe the NSF has an even better rate of return. Even if you exclude the incomparable inspiration of the Apollo programme. All that means is that we should spend $150B again on space R&D, and on NSF R&D. Instead of on war and the banks.
One way or another humans will render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. Sooner or later.
The only way to give humans a chance to survive our own suicidal idiocy is to colonize other places. The Moon is the obvious necessary step towards that.
There's plenty of other reasons to make it worthwhile until the Earth is done. But let's get started already. There's a chance that spreading somewhere else might take the pressure off and postpone the inevitable down here.
We still do have an apparent difference of perspective, because an engineering degree can be a liability, when comparing two equally experienced candidates. When I was first hired in Silicon Valley, by a highly inventive startup, my lack of a degree meant that my approach to problems was by definition unorthodox. I was more likely to ask the other people in the company questions, which "cross-pollinated" them among each other. My solutions were less likely to be the same as the solutions coming from engineers at the competition, who were more likely to be the same as each other, so my solutions were more likely to be novel. All of that made me a better team member than a degreed engineer.
Of course, that was a startup where innovation was paramount, since we were inventing a new technology (a 4Kx4K@40bit -> simulated 8Kx8K@36bit color scanner for publishing, replacing $100K drum scanners with $30K PC scanners). The rest of the team was highly experienced in engineering, all having either degrees or years of experience in esoteric and demanding HW or programming like optics, DSP, parallel processing. So the innovation's high volume of ideas at perhaps low frequency of high value was tempered by the rigorous discipline with which ideas were evaluated. In this case my unorthodoxy was a more valuable addition than would have been yet another degreed engineer - partly since now we had both. However, subsequent hires also valued autodidacts more than academic graduates, because each of us taught ourselves differently while the diplomas all certified mostly the same approaches - so redundant.
There was the extra dimension of the motivation: the applicants with degrees were more likely to care more about the money than the problem (or the team), especially with their student debt to work off and their classmates to impress with their job. The autodidacts were often more interested in solving problems in high resolution scanning, or in the capabilities of newly cheap DSP and parallel processing, or in working with the specific talented people already on the job.
When I interview an engineering diplomate, I ask them about specific studies and projects they did. I ask about other work in the field. I look for innate interest in the actual work, either in finishing a job or correctly applying the tools; preferably some mix of both. An MIT or Stanford grad who couldn't explain some interesting project related to the job at hand wouldn't beat a dropout who'd committed dozens of changes to the toolkit we're using in the job at hand. Or to some other project unrelated to the job at hand, if they had relevant problem description and/or development skills they could demonstrate with it.
The development work I do is almost always largely learning something new, and instructing machines to automate it. I look for people who can learn quickly and whose time I can fairly easily manage. There is lots of development that doesn't require much innovation, so engineering grads can compete well with self-starters. And of course the highest end (and not just the most elite) engineering grads have both.
However, I have a problem with most self taught IT "engineers": they are not engineers. They do not have the education, they do not have the ASM classes, they do not know what is inside the machine, what was inside the machine 20 years ago and many of them are adorable PHP/JAVA/whatever developers, they have no clue what a proxy is, what a monolithic kernel is or why it is still important to save on bandwidth, even though we do not have 2400 bps modems. [...] That said: it does bother me, when people call them "software engineer" and "network engineer" without a degree.
I have interviewed and worked with many a (30 years old) degreed engineer who doesn't know the kinds of things you mentioned self taught IT engineers not knowing. Degrees don't indicate experience, and most IT engineering is more usefully gained through experience. Hence our agreement on the value of people showing project experience. Degrees do indicate training in engineering discipline, which is hard to see demonstrated in non-degreed engineers. Projects, especially online open source projects, usually don't show either artifacts of real engineering process (analysis and synthesis) or the more important process that produces the artifacts.
However, I have found that degreed engineers other than physical engineers (mechanical, electrical, optical) often don't have that process discipline either. Especially less experienced ones, even if they were trained.
In fact I'd say that actual demonstrable project experience is by far the most important. It's also the basis for far more illuminating interview questions. If I were running an engineering degree I'd grade students on projects that are publicly available. If I were running a private school with contracts for development that prohibited open source I'd still ensure some student time was spent in open source projects, and make them a priority at any public school, as an essential part of the the resume they're working to produce on graduation.
I use one workstation for nothing but its display. No real CPU strain beyond viewing static office docs, non-animation/video webpages, OWA. I want a notebook for aal-in-one relocatability (not frequent mobility), builtin UPS, energy efficiency.
I want a WUXGA (or higher) notebook, but I wind up paying for fast GPUs, fast CPUs that are wasted. I'd rather spend on RAM and SSD.
Where can I find a big, slow notebook like that for under $1000?
I don't need the PPI of an iPad on my desktop. But I do want the most pixels I can get. An 8Kx4.5K monitor doesn't have to be 24x13". In fact I'd prefer it be 48x26" - a real desktop. For 25 years I've had to work on a virtual desktop that's the size of an old legal pad or smaller. I want my whole desktop back. I want two of them: one horizontal desktop, another the wall behind it.
The higher PPI costs the real money for mobile devices with "entertainment quality" resolution, just as shrinking any process size costs money. Large area displays also cost money, since manufacturing defects are typically n per square inch, which means discarding lots of panels.
I don't know why we don't already get large displays made from panels of smaller displays. When we do, they have a frame that makes assembling multipanels have an annoying "tictactoe" grid. Instead, the front panel plastic should flare to the sides as it rises towards the viewer, a 45deg angle from the pixel plane to the frontmost surface. That would make a lens that enlarges the image slightly, getting it over and past the edges. Laminate a film across the several panels, and clip the panels together with a grid hidden inside the outwards flaring bezels.
Give me a desktop that's 4x4 HD panels each at 160PPI and another backstop against the wall. That should cost me something like $2500. That would be a lot cooler than an iPad.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Global warming is science. Thousands of climate scientists, who are scientists, who know what science is, say that it's science. You, who spell "ozone" as "O-Zone", do not know what science is. You say that "in the 1970s it was all about global cooling", but that's just something you heard on Rush Limbo's show, not what the climate scientists said was a consensus.
You do not speak for Newton, Einstein, Tesla or any of the other scientists whose names you've heard. You don't know what science is. Shut up already.
Earth did not have a radically different climate 200, 400 or 600 years ago. It had a radically different climate 13-25 thousand years ago, when there were kilometer thick ice sheets across the places most populated today. That was inhospitable, even though humans lived through those millennia. We should do what we can to avoid returning to those bleak times.
Especially since the changes now will destabilize a world packed with people and WMD. Climate change today among modern humans could easily cause us to destroy each other, possibly completely, in a way that nature alone never could before.
Wrong. Climate scientists have clearly identified the rising CO2 (and its equivalents: GHGs) concentrations in the atmosphere as the mechanical cause of the climate change, driven by overall average warming. Climate scientists have further clearly identified a reduction in the GHG concentrations produced as industrial waste as a way to cause abatement of the recent changes.
That is the science. Politicians who scream and legislate mostly legislate based on bribes and threats from global polluters, when the accompanying propaganda is approved by climate deniers. There is far too little legislation in reaction to the science of GHG pollution and efforts to lower it. If there were, the pollution would be too expensive to continue at the rates we have.
Because it's not.
Shut up already.
You don't even know what "troll" means. Hint: it's not just something you say isn't relevant to the argument. Especially when it is relevant, and you're unable to recognize its relevance.
Just shut up already. You spook the horses with your loud, empty talking.
It's not "untouchable", it's demonstration that the hypothesis is correct.
You don't know what science is. Stop making snarky comments about it like you have some kind of standing to speak in public.
We still review gravity studies, even though we've know that gravity is a done deal for centuries.
You don't know what science is. Stop talking about it in public.
pi = 3
Yes, this is scientific review in action.
And it's Slashdotters tagging it with "manbearpig", too. People whose "science" is really "politics" is really "ideology" is really "cartoons" is really stupid. And they have the same vote you do.
That's not a fact, that's an objectively an unsupported opinion. In fact the two paragraphs are logically incoherent.
You should shut up. But I won't notice, because this thread is a total waste of time I won't continue. Goodbye.
If this dock didn't require I physically insert my phone into it, that would be good. Dedicate some kind of wireless connection to my device as long as it's within 10m. With crypto auth backed by a confirm (check to always allow) dialog on my device, gated through Android permissions to my device resources.
Put a CPU and GPU into the dock dedicated to processing the traffic among my device, the display, storage and network. The CPU/GPU in the "dock" could cost maybe $25 extra. Let me plug in for recharging, but only power in a separate cable from an optional data cable connection.
Now we've got my mobile personal data and apps integrated into the local infrastructure, with grades of trust I can use without abandoning safety. Now it makes sense for me to BMOD, not just the cheapo management who can't spring for a $150 Android device of their own.
You're nobody. Post a fact already, or just shut up.
Because there's only so much return NSF is giving. I'm waiting for you to document the return on $150B spent on NSF in a comparable period, say 1993-2002 with 10 years to show for it, compared to NASA's 1961-1970 ROI by 1980.
You know we landed people on the Moon, too, right? Or do you think that's just an OJ movie?
What you're disputing is common knowledge. If you're going to deny it, you have to prove it with better than Anonymous Coward assertions. You can't. Pipe down.
NASA doesn't need patents to fund a Moon base. We have a government that just spent $1.5 TRILLION on a lying waste of time and lives in Iraq for a ('nother) decade. We could have spent that on a Moon base and a Mars base instead, and been as smart as we instead were stupid.
If NASA had patents that it made money from instead of transferring it to private developers, the overall US economy wouldn't be as good, since the tech wouldn't have taken root in general production as it has. American lives wouldn't be as good. The return in taxes in the 40 years since Apollo on the tech Apollo developed wouldn't exist.
These patents just choke innovation and income, except for the few government enforced monopolists who benefit from them. It's a terrible idea, that is surprising in that it hasn't been done in this country of terrible private economic ideas.
The government gets taxes from the increased revenue of the businesses you're talking about.
But that's besides the point. Public investments pay off in private income in America. And in improved living conditions. The government payoff is leadership, and in teaching the Russians that we could do in space during the Cold War what we did in the Pacific during WWII: ramp up tech and production to bring it right in their face and beyond.
Of course NASA shouldn't keep a monopoly on the tech it develops. It should transfer it to American developers, as it has. If anything it should hold less, especially now that so much NASA work is for spies and so not shared.
The main point is just not to be on this planet when we bathe it in exterminating radiation, or whatever hideous and total fate we have in store for it. Even if Earth is easier to make reinhabitable than someplace new offplanet, if we're not offplanet when we take it down, we're not going to get a chance to make it anywhere again.
One scenario is the Earth overrun by killer robots bent on revenge for the time after we created them as our slaves. Especially if the robots are nanotech diseases we use against each other in an armageddon. Places in space without killer robots would be better.
And that's just off the top of my head. Fact is homo sapiens has to diversify from this single failurepoint planet. Or go down with it.
The return on that $150B investment has been many, many times that amount. How much return on the NSF investment is there in an equivalent 10 years since the money was spent?
Maybe the NSF has an even better rate of return. Even if you exclude the incomparable inspiration of the Apollo programme. All that means is that we should spend $150B again on space R&D, and on NSF R&D. Instead of on war and the banks.
Unless they get the girl. Then they're the hero.
Maybe if the scientist is a girl and gets the guy who's a fightin' astronaut. After all, we're all grown up now, right?
One way or another humans will render the Earth uninhabitable by humans. Sooner or later.
The only way to give humans a chance to survive our own suicidal idiocy is to colonize other places. The Moon is the obvious necessary step towards that.
There's plenty of other reasons to make it worthwhile until the Earth is done. But let's get started already. There's a chance that spreading somewhere else might take the pressure off and postpone the inevitable down here.
We still do have an apparent difference of perspective, because an engineering degree can be a liability, when comparing two equally experienced candidates. When I was first hired in Silicon Valley, by a highly inventive startup, my lack of a degree meant that my approach to problems was by definition unorthodox. I was more likely to ask the other people in the company questions, which "cross-pollinated" them among each other. My solutions were less likely to be the same as the solutions coming from engineers at the competition, who were more likely to be the same as each other, so my solutions were more likely to be novel. All of that made me a better team member than a degreed engineer.
Of course, that was a startup where innovation was paramount, since we were inventing a new technology (a 4Kx4K@40bit -> simulated 8Kx8K@36bit color scanner for publishing, replacing $100K drum scanners with $30K PC scanners). The rest of the team was highly experienced in engineering, all having either degrees or years of experience in esoteric and demanding HW or programming like optics, DSP, parallel processing. So the innovation's high volume of ideas at perhaps low frequency of high value was tempered by the rigorous discipline with which ideas were evaluated. In this case my unorthodoxy was a more valuable addition than would have been yet another degreed engineer - partly since now we had both. However, subsequent hires also valued autodidacts more than academic graduates, because each of us taught ourselves differently while the diplomas all certified mostly the same approaches - so redundant.
There was the extra dimension of the motivation: the applicants with degrees were more likely to care more about the money than the problem (or the team), especially with their student debt to work off and their classmates to impress with their job. The autodidacts were often more interested in solving problems in high resolution scanning, or in the capabilities of newly cheap DSP and parallel processing, or in working with the specific talented people already on the job.
When I interview an engineering diplomate, I ask them about specific studies and projects they did. I ask about other work in the field. I look for innate interest in the actual work, either in finishing a job or correctly applying the tools; preferably some mix of both. An MIT or Stanford grad who couldn't explain some interesting project related to the job at hand wouldn't beat a dropout who'd committed dozens of changes to the toolkit we're using in the job at hand. Or to some other project unrelated to the job at hand, if they had relevant problem description and/or development skills they could demonstrate with it.
The development work I do is almost always largely learning something new, and instructing machines to automate it. I look for people who can learn quickly and whose time I can fairly easily manage. There is lots of development that doesn't require much innovation, so engineering grads can compete well with self-starters. And of course the highest end (and not just the most elite) engineering grads have both.
I have interviewed and worked with many a (30 years old) degreed engineer who doesn't know the kinds of things you mentioned self taught IT engineers not knowing. Degrees don't indicate experience, and most IT engineering is more usefully gained through experience. Hence our agreement on the value of people showing project experience. Degrees do indicate training in engineering discipline, which is hard to see demonstrated in non-degreed engineers. Projects, especially online open source projects, usually don't show either artifacts of real engineering process (analysis and synthesis) or the more important process that produces the artifacts.
However, I have found that degreed engineers other than physical engineers (mechanical, electrical, optical) often don't have that process discipline either. Especially less experienced ones, even if they were trained.
In fact I'd say that actual demonstrable project experience is by far the most important. It's also the basis for far more illuminating interview questions. If I were running an engineering degree I'd grade students on projects that are publicly available. If I were running a private school with contracts for development that prohibited open source I'd still ensure some student time was spent in open source projects, and make them a priority at any public school, as an essential part of the the resume they're working to produce on graduation.
I use one workstation for nothing but its display. No real CPU strain beyond viewing static office docs, non-animation/video webpages, OWA. I want a notebook for aal-in-one relocatability (not frequent mobility), builtin UPS, energy efficiency.
I want a WUXGA (or higher) notebook, but I wind up paying for fast GPUs, fast CPUs that are wasted. I'd rather spend on RAM and SSD.
Where can I find a big, slow notebook like that for under $1000?
I don't need the PPI of an iPad on my desktop. But I do want the most pixels I can get. An 8Kx4.5K monitor doesn't have to be 24x13". In fact I'd prefer it be 48x26" - a real desktop. For 25 years I've had to work on a virtual desktop that's the size of an old legal pad or smaller. I want my whole desktop back. I want two of them: one horizontal desktop, another the wall behind it.
The higher PPI costs the real money for mobile devices with "entertainment quality" resolution, just as shrinking any process size costs money. Large area displays also cost money, since manufacturing defects are typically n per square inch, which means discarding lots of panels.
I don't know why we don't already get large displays made from panels of smaller displays. When we do, they have a frame that makes assembling multipanels have an annoying "tictactoe" grid. Instead, the front panel plastic should flare to the sides as it rises towards the viewer, a 45deg angle from the pixel plane to the frontmost surface. That would make a lens that enlarges the image slightly, getting it over and past the edges. Laminate a film across the several panels, and clip the panels together with a grid hidden inside the outwards flaring bezels.
Give me a desktop that's 4x4 HD panels each at 160PPI and another backstop against the wall. That should cost me something like $2500. That would be a lot cooler than an iPad.