I remember MOND theory was debunked as dark matter was proven to be a kind of matter and not an error in Gratitation theory.
Just because MOND isn't the right answer it doesn't follow that the problem cannot be with the model. All that proves is that one specific model doesn't work. And the problems with MOND don't appear to be so much related to dark matter but rather to an inability to predict behavior of galaxy clusters that we can observe. We have direct evidence or workable model for what dark matter is even if we make the (reasonable) assumption that it is indeed some form of matter. It MIGHT be matter but nobody seems to be able to point to any observation or theory that proves that it must be matter while ruling out all other explanations.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that it might be some form of matter we've never observed before but it seems just as likely to me that our model could be wrong in some way. In actual fact we know our models must be incomplete since we haven't yet reconciled the two most important physics models we have in relativity and quantum mechanics. If our understanding of gravity breaks down on a very small scale it's not unreasonable to think we might not fully understand how it works on a very large scale too. I'm not saying out model must be wrong but it seems to me that presuming dark matter is actually matter seems a touch premature just yet. Especially since nobody seems to be able to explain in layman's terms why exotic matter is the only possible answer to the question "what is dark matter?"
Most importantly, Verlinde's paper has as a consequence that dark matter, nemesis of many an astronomer, is nothing more than an illusion.
This has been something I've been asking about for years with no good answer. Namely, what evidence exists to prove that so-called "dark matter" is actually matter rather than a defect in our mathematical model of gravity? Why is this not similar to how Einstein found a better model (relativity) for the phenomena first described by Newton? We're going through all sorts of contortions to try to prove that some mysterious "matter" must be there even though we have no idea what it could possibly be, have no direct observations, and our only evidence for it is inferred from our current models of gravity which we know to be incomplete since they do not work with quantum mechanics. While it certainly might be some form of exotic matter it seems at least equally probable that the answer might instead be that a better model is needed and that our current model is deficient in some way.
Trump is an arrogant ass, but seriously comparing him to one of the most evil mass-murderers in modern history demonstrates a lack of perspective, or at least a severe lack of faith in the people of the US, to think anyone would go along with such schemes.
You're talking about a country with a several hundred year history of slavery and oppression of minorities. It's not shocking AT ALL that scared white people would go along with such schemes. As any person who isn't white how comfortable they feel around police. Even Obama has been pulled over and harassed for no reason other than the color of his skin. I don't have ANY doubt that there is a huge percentage of the US population that would happily go along with schemes to deport or oppress minorities.
I'd hope that you can now understand the angst of conservative voters when President Obama won the last two elections.
You mean a bunch of bigoted white people concerned about a liberal black man holding actual power. Yeah I understand it but I'm not about to excuse their absolutely horrific behavior and blatant lies.
We've always had one party. The Repubcrats and the Demolicans. The same people fund both of them. I don't see why everyone's upset.
Then you are well and truly clueless or you simply don't actually care.
passed Romney care which, although helping the poorest get something resembling crappy healthcare, has pretty much tied the middle class to the same shitty system they had before, except prices went up.
The prices were going up even more before the Affordable Care Act and had been going up for many years prior to it's passage, often by double digit percentages each year. Worse, millions of people were unable to get insurance outside of work before that act was passed. Furthermore losing your job typically meant losing health coverage which is absolutely criminal. Whatever flaws there are in the ACA the republicans have certainly shown zero interest in actually dealing with them or passing laws to make life better for the citizens of this country.
Trump is no better or worse than Hillary
I could not disagree more. He is FAR worse than Clinton in almost every possibly way that I could care about.
The last president that tried to change things in a meaningful way was shot to death in Dallas.
Poppycock. The Voting Rights Act, Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, The Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Freedom Of Information Act, the Wilderness Act, Americorps VISTA, and prohibiting age discrimination in employment all under the Johnson administration aren't meaningful attempts to change things? I could mention honest efforts to change things by most of the presidents that followed as well.
rexit remorse will set in quickly and a D wave will flow into Congress in 2018.
I'm more concerned about 2020 because that election is the one that will determine who gets to gerrymander the congressional seats for the next 10 years. The reason the republicans control congress right now is largely thanks to the results of the 2010 election.
Women don't need "their turn" they're perfectly capable of competing for top jobs.
Really? How many women are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies? How many women have been president? Vice president? How is it that over half the population is women and yet they account for only 20% of congress? If you honestly think it is a level playing field then you are either delusional or sexist.
With all sincerity, next time, yes, vote your conscious. I, a white male small-el libertarian, voted for Jill Stein, and will get shit for it.
You should get shit for it because you know (or should know) that you effectively handed your vote to someone else. There was ZERO chance of Jill Stein getting elected. Nobody will give a shit about whatever "statement" you were clumsily trying to make. Unless our voting system changes (scant chance of that) then any vote for someone other than one of the major party candidates is essentially the same as not voting at all. You effectively decided to let someone else choose the president. You have the right to vote for whoever you like best but you are idiotic for exercising that right in plain denial of the reality of the situation.
the republicans will control all branches. It will be interesting to see what they do with that power in the upcoming years.
"Interesting" is the wrong word. Terrifying is closer to the mark. I'm incredibly disappointed in my country for electing such a pathetic excuse for a human to run the country without any opposition to hold him in check.
Allow your batteries to be replaced by mere mortals and all will be forgiven.
Why do you persist in thinking this would have solved the problem? It wouldn't have solved or even mitigated this problem. 1) Even if the battery were removable you aren't going to remove it while it is actively burning. 2) If the problem were merely a bad batch of batteries it would have been an easy fix. 3) Having the battery being removable does not prevent combustion nor does it meaningfully slow the process. 4) Removable batteries introduces the problem of shoddy third party batteries which could make the problem worse. 5) Removable batteries add cost and complexity that most users will never need or use.
I'm not arguing that removable batteries are a bad idea. Far from it. Merely that they have no relevance to this particular problem.
1. The Android app works better than the Wells Fargo app.
There probably are exceptions but this isn't true as a general proposition.
2. There is a huge network of ATMs that I can use. Probably larger than that provided by any bank.
Seems unlikely. Most ATMs are owned by banks so unless they are reimbursing you this cannot be true.
3. Membership used to be restricted,
Many credit unions still have restricted membership to this day. Not universally true I'll grant but plenty do not accept anyone.
4. Investing services? Do you really invest through your bank and not through a brokerage service like ETrade?
LOTS of people invest through brokerage services provided by their banks. All the big banks have huge investment divisions and are broker dealers.
5. Branches? My credit union has more local branches than the big banks, but the only reason to go into a branch is to deposit money in my HSA.
Maybe you live somewhere weird but this is again just simply not true most places. Plus good luck if you leave your local area. There are LOTS of reasons why people go into a bank branch. If you only do it for one minor reason then you aren't a very complicated customer. I'm in a bank branch at least 1-2X per month for business and personal banking reasons.
if Apple requires some authoritative identification behind each developer (phone #, validated proof of identity}
It's adorable that you think criminals intent on stealing your money would be bothered by the problem of forging one or more sets of false credentials.
Not necessarily. They might be better for a particular customer but you can't claim they are universally "better". Especially since you didn't define what "better" means here. Credit Unions are really just small banks with a novel ownership structure and they might be willing to hustle a bit more to get your business. But there are a lot of drawbacks to credit unions too. They don't usually have the latest and greatest technology. They have fewer ATMs and branches available. Membership can be restricted. Investing services can be limited and pricey if available at all.
For some people Credit Unions are a great deal. That's not true for everyone. For me a Credit Union is basically useless but that's just my particular situation. Your mileage may vary.
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't biased is someone who has never tried to contribute to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia as an organization and as a website generally isn't biased on most topics. Kind of hard to have a bias about some random regurgitation of a technical fact like a chemical or math equation. Some of the people who contribute to Wikipedia very much are biased because most people carry assorted biases with them. But these biases generally don't seem to lean coherently towards one political persuasion or another across Wikipedia but rather are generally confined to specific hot button topics. The hope is that the various biases of the contributors will mostly balance out and the objective facts will remain. This doesn't always happen but it seems to happen often enough that one can say it usually works and not look stupid saying so.
What is amusing/depressing is that some people reflexively claim that any facts that don't match their pre-existing world view must be biased.
You're probably right about the advantage over western Europe, Russia (USSR), and Japan, but it hardly explains the idea of American exceptionalism in the 20th century.
Sure it does. Those were the areas with the highest levels of industry prior to the war. When a war knocks out virtually all of your closest competitors, it's pretty easy to get ahead for a while. Furthermore the US actually made a lot of money rebuilding those parts of the world and providing necessary services.
China was absolutely devastated by Japan. India was a part of the British Empire at the time and suffered accordingly. There was a huge famine in India during WWII which killed about 3 million people.
It only really affected Europe and northern Africa, and several island nations in the pacific.
WWII devastated infrastructure around the entire western pacific rim. Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Philipines, Burma, etc. Of course Europe was hugely damaged as well. India wasn't a big player in the world economy at the time and didn't get investment because the British Empire was falling apart.
So when you need to be able to pay 20 grand after taxes to live near where you work just for the basics, you start to get annoyed that someone living in a cesspool thousands of miles away for pennies on the dollar is arrogant about stealing your job.
The arrogance is all here in the US. We act like we are entitled to earn the highest wages in the world as if it is some sort of divine right. In reality we've had a good run and many have forgotten that we only got those high wages because we out competed everyone else. If we are idle and complacent then wages in the US will fall back towards the mean as surely as gravity. There are lots of smart folks in China and India and elsewhere and there are more of them. China has 4 people for every one in the US and India is the same. All other things being equal China and India should be able to generate the most technical talent just by sheer weight of numbers.
One thing people in the US tend to forget is that the USA was one of the few countries that didn't have to rebuild from scratch after WWII. We got a 30 year head start on the rest of the world because we were protected by two oceans and didn't have all our infrastructure destroyed in the fighting. Now that the rest of the world has rebuilt we've had to compete on a more equal footing and the results haven't always been favorable.
Should we, as an industry, lower our salary expectations -- and that of students entering the field -- to make us more competitive with our peers in India and similar "much cheaper labor than first world" economies? If not, what should we be doing to make ourselves competitive in ways that our peers overseas cannot duplicate?
Looking big picture the only reason anyone is paid a lot for a job comes down to supply and demand. If you need a technical specialist and there aren't a lot of them in the markets available to you then you are going to have to pay a lot for them. That's why professional baseball players can make millions while school teachers sometimes struggle to make ends meet. It has nothing to do with the relative importance of the jobs and everything to do with the availability of adequate talent. There simply aren't a lot of people who can actually hit a major league fastball and so the talent pool is small and the wages are high. Same thing with engineering and other technical talent. There is a limited supply of qualified engineers able to do many of the tech jobs necessary in this country who are also able to be physically located where they are needed.
You only get paid a lot for one of two reasons. You are either doing something important that few others are able to do OR you are doing something necessary that few others want to do. If you can effectively do your job remotely from your co-workers then you should be concerned about competition from overseas. Similarly if what your company is doing can be replicated somewhere with lower labor costs you should similarly be concerned. And of course there is the issue of companies bringing in lower priced talent from other labor markets like with H1B visas. In time I'd expect to see something of a reversion to the mean for wages of US based technical talent just like for most other jobs with abnormally high wages. There are plenty of folks in China and India and elsewhere who are equally smart as US engineers and there are more of them. In time I would expect this to increase the supply of talent in the work pool and wages to decrease correspondingly.
I read that Wikipedia page, and I think you should be careful with using the term "legally binding" as it seems to have a very specific meaning.
Yes it does have a specific meaning and I'm quite confident lawyers have been pouring carefully over that very fact. This is not some novel legal construct we are talking about here. Executive agreements have been used quite often in the past.
The Executive Agreement is an end-run around the Constitutional requirement for Senate approval for treaties. It's a violation of the Constitution that a compliant Supreme Court agreed to.
How do you figure? Executive agreements do not legally bind the US to anything. Basically they are figuratively handshake deals with no consequences for reneging. As long as nothing in the agreement requires an act of Congress or is legally binding to the country the president is under no obligation to consult Congress about the agreement. If Congress has an issue with the agreement they are able to pass legislation forbidding the president from performing to meet the agreement.
Already read it and it doesn't apply here. Microsoft has enough cash that they could buy BOTH Ford and GM at the same time in cash with money left over if the mood moved them. Unless they are completely idiotic they could simply buy their way into a new industry in the (unlikely) event their current one stops being profitable for them. People have this naive idea that just because Microsoft has a cash cow with Windows/Office that they will never be anything else and that their fate is tied to those products. That might have been true once but it isn't true anymore.
Ok, so lack of political will made them financially unreachable. It still happened.
The point is that it did not happen because the USA was suddenly unable to fund NASA. NASA's budget grew for geopolitical reasons and then shrank when those same geopolitical reasons diminished in urgency. Merely a question of priorities rather than capabilities.
It's worth noting that even with the long term funding rate since the mid-70s, NASA could have done a hell of a lot more than it has. Funding is not the only reason for failure here.
I don't think anyone sensible would dispute that NASA hasn't achieved as much as possible. The space shuttle is a huge part of that. While I won't argue that it was completely without value, it did consume a vast and disproportionate amount of resources for a launch system that really wasn't economical or sensible. The idea of a reusable launch vehicle is a good one but the shuttle was a bad design for one.
The weird thing is that Microsoft seems to have adopted suicide as a business model. Their main competitor is Android creeping up with the 'it's all free, in exchange for all of your personal data' business model.
Really? Because nothing Google is doing with Android has replaced a single computer at my office or the office of anyone I know. Some of the kids at the local schools use Chromebooks but that's about it. Android (along with iOS) has the mobile market but there is no evidence that Windows based PCs are going to go away any time soon because of that. Heck the computer I'm typing this on has 6 applications that are critical for my day job which are in no way, shape, or form available on the Android platform and aren't likely to be on that platform anytime soon. Microsoft Office is still the de-facto standard for office documents and that is showing little sign of changing either. (For my part I've standardized my company on LibreOffice... not that it matters)
Microsoft has made some big mis-steps to be sure but they have a Scrooge McDuck pile of cash and a near impenetrable fortress in business PCs. I don't think they are going anywhere any time soon and certainly not about to keel over and die. I'm strongly in the camp that dislikes Microsoft but I'm under no illusion that they are in any real danger of dying.
Considering that Windows 10 was designed as a "one size fits all" solution that is intended to run on machine with limited power, it's not surprising that in this case the performance is an improvement.
I've run Windows10 and Windows7 on some machines I've upgraded for work. There was no user discernible difference in speed or performance. Maybe there was some minor benchmark difference but it certainly wasn't enough to matter. The boot up times are not meaningfully different, the interfaces didn't speed up, and none of the applications run any better. There might be some under the hood improvements but they certainly aren't obvious.
Also they did away with the flashy Windows 7 UI and replaced it with rectangles - another performance improvement that I don't mind. I like minimal, simple things.
Windows 10 is many things but "minimal" and "simple" are not among them. The rectangle thing isn't easier or simpler, particularly if you are talking about Windows 8... shudder.
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I remember MOND theory was debunked as dark matter was proven to be a kind of matter and not an error in Gratitation theory.
Just because MOND isn't the right answer it doesn't follow that the problem cannot be with the model. All that proves is that one specific model doesn't work. And the problems with MOND don't appear to be so much related to dark matter but rather to an inability to predict behavior of galaxy clusters that we can observe. We have direct evidence or workable model for what dark matter is even if we make the (reasonable) assumption that it is indeed some form of matter. It MIGHT be matter but nobody seems to be able to point to any observation or theory that proves that it must be matter while ruling out all other explanations.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that it might be some form of matter we've never observed before but it seems just as likely to me that our model could be wrong in some way. In actual fact we know our models must be incomplete since we haven't yet reconciled the two most important physics models we have in relativity and quantum mechanics. If our understanding of gravity breaks down on a very small scale it's not unreasonable to think we might not fully understand how it works on a very large scale too. I'm not saying out model must be wrong but it seems to me that presuming dark matter is actually matter seems a touch premature just yet. Especially since nobody seems to be able to explain in layman's terms why exotic matter is the only possible answer to the question "what is dark matter?"
Most importantly, Verlinde's paper has as a consequence that dark matter, nemesis of many an astronomer, is nothing more than an illusion.
This has been something I've been asking about for years with no good answer. Namely, what evidence exists to prove that so-called "dark matter" is actually matter rather than a defect in our mathematical model of gravity? Why is this not similar to how Einstein found a better model (relativity) for the phenomena first described by Newton? We're going through all sorts of contortions to try to prove that some mysterious "matter" must be there even though we have no idea what it could possibly be, have no direct observations, and our only evidence for it is inferred from our current models of gravity which we know to be incomplete since they do not work with quantum mechanics. While it certainly might be some form of exotic matter it seems at least equally probable that the answer might instead be that a better model is needed and that our current model is deficient in some way.
Trump is an arrogant ass, but seriously comparing him to one of the most evil mass-murderers in modern history demonstrates a lack of perspective, or at least a severe lack of faith in the people of the US, to think anyone would go along with such schemes.
You're talking about a country with a several hundred year history of slavery and oppression of minorities. It's not shocking AT ALL that scared white people would go along with such schemes. As any person who isn't white how comfortable they feel around police. Even Obama has been pulled over and harassed for no reason other than the color of his skin. I don't have ANY doubt that there is a huge percentage of the US population that would happily go along with schemes to deport or oppress minorities.
I'd hope that you can now understand the angst of conservative voters when President Obama won the last two elections.
You mean a bunch of bigoted white people concerned about a liberal black man holding actual power. Yeah I understand it but I'm not about to excuse their absolutely horrific behavior and blatant lies.
We've always had one party. The Repubcrats and the Demolicans. The same people fund both of them. I don't see why everyone's upset.
Then you are well and truly clueless or you simply don't actually care.
passed Romney care which, although helping the poorest get something resembling crappy healthcare, has pretty much tied the middle class to the same shitty system they had before, except prices went up.
The prices were going up even more before the Affordable Care Act and had been going up for many years prior to it's passage, often by double digit percentages each year. Worse, millions of people were unable to get insurance outside of work before that act was passed. Furthermore losing your job typically meant losing health coverage which is absolutely criminal. Whatever flaws there are in the ACA the republicans have certainly shown zero interest in actually dealing with them or passing laws to make life better for the citizens of this country.
Trump is no better or worse than Hillary
I could not disagree more. He is FAR worse than Clinton in almost every possibly way that I could care about.
The last president that tried to change things in a meaningful way was shot to death in Dallas.
Poppycock. The Voting Rights Act, Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, The Civil Rights Act of 1968, the Freedom Of Information Act, the Wilderness Act, Americorps VISTA, and prohibiting age discrimination in employment all under the Johnson administration aren't meaningful attempts to change things? I could mention honest efforts to change things by most of the presidents that followed as well.
It's gonna be Not Very Fun At All to be a illegal alien in the US for the next couple of years.
As if it's been nothing but roses and daisies up until now...
What actual evidence do you have that Trump will attack minorities?
His comments about latinos. His history of discrimination against blacks. His comments about muslims. His support of white supremacists.
rexit remorse will set in quickly and a D wave will flow into Congress in 2018.
I'm more concerned about 2020 because that election is the one that will determine who gets to gerrymander the congressional seats for the next 10 years. The reason the republicans control congress right now is largely thanks to the results of the 2010 election.
Women don't need "their turn" they're perfectly capable of competing for top jobs.
Really? How many women are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies? How many women have been president? Vice president? How is it that over half the population is women and yet they account for only 20% of congress? If you honestly think it is a level playing field then you are either delusional or sexist.
With all sincerity, next time, yes, vote your conscious. I, a white male small-el libertarian, voted for Jill Stein, and will get shit for it.
You should get shit for it because you know (or should know) that you effectively handed your vote to someone else. There was ZERO chance of Jill Stein getting elected. Nobody will give a shit about whatever "statement" you were clumsily trying to make. Unless our voting system changes (scant chance of that) then any vote for someone other than one of the major party candidates is essentially the same as not voting at all. You effectively decided to let someone else choose the president. You have the right to vote for whoever you like best but you are idiotic for exercising that right in plain denial of the reality of the situation.
the republicans will control all branches. It will be interesting to see what they do with that power in the upcoming years.
"Interesting" is the wrong word. Terrifying is closer to the mark. I'm incredibly disappointed in my country for electing such a pathetic excuse for a human to run the country without any opposition to hold him in check.
Allow your batteries to be replaced by mere mortals and all will be forgiven.
Why do you persist in thinking this would have solved the problem? It wouldn't have solved or even mitigated this problem. 1) Even if the battery were removable you aren't going to remove it while it is actively burning. 2) If the problem were merely a bad batch of batteries it would have been an easy fix. 3) Having the battery being removable does not prevent combustion nor does it meaningfully slow the process. 4) Removable batteries introduces the problem of shoddy third party batteries which could make the problem worse. 5) Removable batteries add cost and complexity that most users will never need or use.
I'm not arguing that removable batteries are a bad idea. Far from it. Merely that they have no relevance to this particular problem.
1. The Android app works better than the Wells Fargo app.
There probably are exceptions but this isn't true as a general proposition.
2. There is a huge network of ATMs that I can use. Probably larger than that provided by any bank.
Seems unlikely. Most ATMs are owned by banks so unless they are reimbursing you this cannot be true.
3. Membership used to be restricted,
Many credit unions still have restricted membership to this day. Not universally true I'll grant but plenty do not accept anyone.
4. Investing services? Do you really invest through your bank and not through a brokerage service like ETrade?
LOTS of people invest through brokerage services provided by their banks. All the big banks have huge investment divisions and are broker dealers.
5. Branches? My credit union has more local branches than the big banks, but the only reason to go into a branch is to deposit money in my HSA.
Maybe you live somewhere weird but this is again just simply not true most places. Plus good luck if you leave your local area. There are LOTS of reasons why people go into a bank branch. If you only do it for one minor reason then you aren't a very complicated customer. I'm in a bank branch at least 1-2X per month for business and personal banking reasons.
if Apple requires some authoritative identification behind each developer (phone #, validated proof of identity}
It's adorable that you think criminals intent on stealing your money would be bothered by the problem of forging one or more sets of false credentials.
Credit unions are better.
Not necessarily. They might be better for a particular customer but you can't claim they are universally "better". Especially since you didn't define what "better" means here. Credit Unions are really just small banks with a novel ownership structure and they might be willing to hustle a bit more to get your business. But there are a lot of drawbacks to credit unions too. They don't usually have the latest and greatest technology. They have fewer ATMs and branches available. Membership can be restricted. Investing services can be limited and pricey if available at all.
For some people Credit Unions are a great deal. That's not true for everyone. For me a Credit Union is basically useless but that's just my particular situation. Your mileage may vary.
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't biased is someone who has never tried to contribute to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia as an organization and as a website generally isn't biased on most topics. Kind of hard to have a bias about some random regurgitation of a technical fact like a chemical or math equation. Some of the people who contribute to Wikipedia very much are biased because most people carry assorted biases with them. But these biases generally don't seem to lean coherently towards one political persuasion or another across Wikipedia but rather are generally confined to specific hot button topics. The hope is that the various biases of the contributors will mostly balance out and the objective facts will remain. This doesn't always happen but it seems to happen often enough that one can say it usually works and not look stupid saying so.
What is amusing/depressing is that some people reflexively claim that any facts that don't match their pre-existing world view must be biased.
You're probably right about the advantage over western Europe, Russia (USSR), and Japan, but it hardly explains the idea of American exceptionalism in the 20th century.
Sure it does. Those were the areas with the highest levels of industry prior to the war. When a war knocks out virtually all of your closest competitors, it's pretty easy to get ahead for a while. Furthermore the US actually made a lot of money rebuilding those parts of the world and providing necessary services.
Neither were India nor China..
China was absolutely devastated by Japan. India was a part of the British Empire at the time and suffered accordingly. There was a huge famine in India during WWII which killed about 3 million people.
It only really affected Europe and northern Africa, and several island nations in the pacific.
WWII devastated infrastructure around the entire western pacific rim. Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Philipines, Burma, etc. Of course Europe was hugely damaged as well. India wasn't a big player in the world economy at the time and didn't get investment because the British Empire was falling apart.
So when you need to be able to pay 20 grand after taxes to live near where you work just for the basics, you start to get annoyed that someone living in a cesspool thousands of miles away for pennies on the dollar is arrogant about stealing your job.
The arrogance is all here in the US. We act like we are entitled to earn the highest wages in the world as if it is some sort of divine right. In reality we've had a good run and many have forgotten that we only got those high wages because we out competed everyone else. If we are idle and complacent then wages in the US will fall back towards the mean as surely as gravity. There are lots of smart folks in China and India and elsewhere and there are more of them. China has 4 people for every one in the US and India is the same. All other things being equal China and India should be able to generate the most technical talent just by sheer weight of numbers.
One thing people in the US tend to forget is that the USA was one of the few countries that didn't have to rebuild from scratch after WWII. We got a 30 year head start on the rest of the world because we were protected by two oceans and didn't have all our infrastructure destroyed in the fighting. Now that the rest of the world has rebuilt we've had to compete on a more equal footing and the results haven't always been favorable.
Should we, as an industry, lower our salary expectations -- and that of students entering the field -- to make us more competitive with our peers in India and similar "much cheaper labor than first world" economies? If not, what should we be doing to make ourselves competitive in ways that our peers overseas cannot duplicate?
Looking big picture the only reason anyone is paid a lot for a job comes down to supply and demand. If you need a technical specialist and there aren't a lot of them in the markets available to you then you are going to have to pay a lot for them. That's why professional baseball players can make millions while school teachers sometimes struggle to make ends meet. It has nothing to do with the relative importance of the jobs and everything to do with the availability of adequate talent. There simply aren't a lot of people who can actually hit a major league fastball and so the talent pool is small and the wages are high. Same thing with engineering and other technical talent. There is a limited supply of qualified engineers able to do many of the tech jobs necessary in this country who are also able to be physically located where they are needed.
You only get paid a lot for one of two reasons. You are either doing something important that few others are able to do OR you are doing something necessary that few others want to do. If you can effectively do your job remotely from your co-workers then you should be concerned about competition from overseas. Similarly if what your company is doing can be replicated somewhere with lower labor costs you should similarly be concerned. And of course there is the issue of companies bringing in lower priced talent from other labor markets like with H1B visas. In time I'd expect to see something of a reversion to the mean for wages of US based technical talent just like for most other jobs with abnormally high wages. There are plenty of folks in China and India and elsewhere who are equally smart as US engineers and there are more of them. In time I would expect this to increase the supply of talent in the work pool and wages to decrease correspondingly.
I read that Wikipedia page, and I think you should be careful with using the term "legally binding" as it seems to have a very specific meaning.
Yes it does have a specific meaning and I'm quite confident lawyers have been pouring carefully over that very fact. This is not some novel legal construct we are talking about here. Executive agreements have been used quite often in the past.
The Executive Agreement is an end-run around the Constitutional requirement for Senate approval for treaties. It's a violation of the Constitution that a compliant Supreme Court agreed to.
How do you figure? Executive agreements do not legally bind the US to anything. Basically they are figuratively handshake deals with no consequences for reneging. As long as nothing in the agreement requires an act of Congress or is legally binding to the country the president is under no obligation to consult Congress about the agreement. If Congress has an issue with the agreement they are able to pass legislation forbidding the president from performing to meet the agreement.
This article is incorrect, if I recall correctly, the U.S. Senate needs to approve all treaties before they take effect in the United States.
Not necessarily true for executive agreements. It's not a legally binding agreement so no ratification by the Senate is apparently required.
You need to read Ozymandias:
Already read it and it doesn't apply here. Microsoft has enough cash that they could buy BOTH Ford and GM at the same time in cash with money left over if the mood moved them. Unless they are completely idiotic they could simply buy their way into a new industry in the (unlikely) event their current one stops being profitable for them. People have this naive idea that just because Microsoft has a cash cow with Windows/Office that they will never be anything else and that their fate is tied to those products. That might have been true once but it isn't true anymore.
Ok, so lack of political will made them financially unreachable. It still happened.
The point is that it did not happen because the USA was suddenly unable to fund NASA. NASA's budget grew for geopolitical reasons and then shrank when those same geopolitical reasons diminished in urgency. Merely a question of priorities rather than capabilities.
It's worth noting that even with the long term funding rate since the mid-70s, NASA could have done a hell of a lot more than it has. Funding is not the only reason for failure here.
I don't think anyone sensible would dispute that NASA hasn't achieved as much as possible. The space shuttle is a huge part of that. While I won't argue that it was completely without value, it did consume a vast and disproportionate amount of resources for a launch system that really wasn't economical or sensible. The idea of a reusable launch vehicle is a good one but the shuttle was a bad design for one.
The weird thing is that Microsoft seems to have adopted suicide as a business model. Their main competitor is Android creeping up with the 'it's all free, in exchange for all of your personal data' business model.
Really? Because nothing Google is doing with Android has replaced a single computer at my office or the office of anyone I know. Some of the kids at the local schools use Chromebooks but that's about it. Android (along with iOS) has the mobile market but there is no evidence that Windows based PCs are going to go away any time soon because of that. Heck the computer I'm typing this on has 6 applications that are critical for my day job which are in no way, shape, or form available on the Android platform and aren't likely to be on that platform anytime soon. Microsoft Office is still the de-facto standard for office documents and that is showing little sign of changing either. (For my part I've standardized my company on LibreOffice... not that it matters)
Microsoft has made some big mis-steps to be sure but they have a Scrooge McDuck pile of cash and a near impenetrable fortress in business PCs. I don't think they are going anywhere any time soon and certainly not about to keel over and die. I'm strongly in the camp that dislikes Microsoft but I'm under no illusion that they are in any real danger of dying.
Considering that Windows 10 was designed as a "one size fits all" solution that is intended to run on machine with limited power, it's not surprising that in this case the performance is an improvement.
I've run Windows10 and Windows7 on some machines I've upgraded for work. There was no user discernible difference in speed or performance. Maybe there was some minor benchmark difference but it certainly wasn't enough to matter. The boot up times are not meaningfully different, the interfaces didn't speed up, and none of the applications run any better. There might be some under the hood improvements but they certainly aren't obvious.
Also they did away with the flashy Windows 7 UI and replaced it with rectangles - another performance improvement that I don't mind. I like minimal, simple things.
Windows 10 is many things but "minimal" and "simple" are not among them. The rectangle thing isn't easier or simpler, particularly if you are talking about Windows 8... shudder.