Government doesn't have ANY ability to know what is right and what is wrong in terms of project, and almost all government projects end up being wrong by the way, government has much worse track record in terms of some value returned per dollar spent than the market
Evidence? I've worked for companies large and small, and waste, mismanagement, and bad investments are the norm.
Also, do you have evidence that "almost all" government projects go wrong?
And as far as value returned per dollar spent, if both the government and and the market do the same thing, the basic costs will be about the same (except that private sector employees are generally paid better). But people in the private sector expect profit on top of the actual expenses.
And so we're seeing news stories about outsourcing that ends up costing more for lower quality results than what we had before the outsourcing fad got started.
It is, after all, just a scam for putting you tax dollars in some rich man's pocket. All the crap about the free market is just propaganda to sell the bad deals to the suckers^w taxpayers.
We could also tax capital gains at the same rate we tax people who actually have to work for their money.
And tax profitable corporations rather than subsidizing them.
Unfortunately, this country has become a cream-skimming operation for the rich. When their wholly-owned legislators have bankrupted us, they'll throw us away and move on to the next country, just like they do when the acquire a business, squeeze it dry, and discard the husk.
FY 2013 Base Budget has a reduction of $5.2 billion compared to FY 2012. The budget for Overseas Contingency Operations (which includes Afghanistan and Iraq) has a separate budget request which shows a reduction of $26.6 billion compared to FY 2012.
That sounds like a big cut, until you look at how much the defense budget has grown since 2001. You'd have to cut about 60 times that much to put us back where we were just over a decade ago. (Or 100 times that much, if you look at total cost rather than just the budget per se.)
And as for our unbudgeted wars, there seems to be a growing consensus that they've cost us 3 or 4 trillion dollars in direct and indirect costs.
Yes, other sciences were against the SSC mainly because they only needed smaller dollops of public funds per project. However, what really irked Congress was Phil Gramm. When it was clear that Fermi Lab outside of Chicago made the most sense because the equipment there could be utilized for the SSC, Brother Phil ramrodded the language to choose Texas instead. As soon as that happened, other Congress Critters decided that they'd had enough and killed it.
That's similar to the way I remember it: as the list of candidate sites was narrowed down, the number of legislators that supported it shrank as well.
Tuition is supposed to pay for the cost of schooling. Please explain why my taxes should pay for your schooling.
The idealized view is that a educated public makes a better society.
The cynical view is that your legislature doesn't give a damn about education, but needs a university as a status symbol.
For a more pragmatic answer, much of modern technology stems from universities. Businesses don't like to invest in basic research because it's not going to make a positive impact on their next quarterly earnings report. But your state taxes support institutions that do keep basic research alive in this country, and your federal taxes boost it (e.g., via the National Science Foundation grand programs).
And even stuff that isn't invented at universities is often invented by people who your tax dollars helped educate. (Yeah, there are some famous examples of non-educated people who did cool stuff, but how much of our total innovation do they account for?)
And finally, university towns tend to have a more educated populace than a similarly-sized town without a university, and so businesses like to locate there. That provides jobs even for non-educated people; every business needs clerical help etc., which may not sound very glamorous, but beats the hell out of flipping burgers for a living.
If you want to whinge, I suspect you'll find that we spend more money on corporate welfare than we do on higher education, and that corporate welfare money just goes into some shareholders' pockets. At least you're getting something, perhaps indirectly, from the public investment in education.
I agree. However, a lot of schools do call it "Computing Science(s)", "Computational Science(s)", or the like.
I like "Information and Computation", but business schools think they have a trademark on the term "Information". But "Information and Computation" is really what the field is all about.
Everything I have seen/heard coming out of Florida, starting with the 2000 elections, moving through the Martin shooting and now this makes me consider Florida to be a 3rd world country embedded within the United States.
Most of the United States is a third-world country embedded within the United States.
You know the saying: A college president's job is to provide sex for the students, parking for the faculty, and a winning for the alumni.
Most athletics departments "make money" by means of rich donors.
There's cause for astonishment if those donors specify that part of the money should go to academics.
A lot of people think it's detestable, but I don't think it actually costs taxpayers any money. It's just sort of a club attached to the university.
Some donors go for immortality rather than entertainment, e.g. a building or lab or endowed chair with their name on it. I don't think many rich people just donate for academics for the good of society.
CS tends to focus to much on coding and high level theory. Some CS programs are so much on the theory you get people who are poor program[er?]s out of them.
You can get fourth-rate students out of any program.
Theory is what teaches programmers to sort in O( n log n ), rather than in O( n^2 ) + brag about some negligible optimization you made that saved a line of code.
If you haven't had all the theory-type classes, you're not qualified for anything more than programming up an algorithm that someone else has carefully specified for you.
Only teaching faculty/staff are expected to teach only. At a research University, you are expected to publish.
Even at a research university, it depends on what they were hired for. Some are teaching-only, some are research-only, some have combined responsibilities.
Well, probably something along the lines of "That department did not publish well enough and the students did not bring in enough money".
The uni in the town where I live has done some downsizing since the economic crunch hit, and basically they look at:
a) How many students are graduating with this degree?
b) How much research grant money is the faculty bringing in?
If the combination of answers is too low, they're honing an axe for your program.
I suspect they also asked themselves whether any billionaire alumni would be offended by the cut, but of course they wouldn't advertise that if they did.
Agree. So often I check the latest xkcd and am dumbstruck by how profoundly not funny it is. I think he should just let it die now (though I'm of course ignorant of important issues such as how much money it's raking in....)
You called it shit, and then described it as profound.
Is any genuine science being done here? Running simulations to model, say, the weather or ocean currents makes sense. You can calibrate them to past data and use them predictively. How does a simulation of the "universe" tell you anything?
Take the starting state and mechanisms suggested by theory, run it, compare the result to the actual universe now.
FWIW, "more particles than the atoms in the computer" would be impossible with current technology since (presumably) you'd need to store at least one bit of state per particle, and current computers need more than an atom to store a single bit.
All you need is two bits. Map all the ones in your data to one location and all the zeros to the other.
Well I once heard that to have a real simulation of the universe, you would need to have a computer the size of the universe. So this is more a rough simulation of the the visible Galaxies.
All models are simpler than the thing being modeled.
However, you can think of the universe as a gigantic computer that is running a program to... compute its future states?
Still killing Afghans and using more drones than ever to execute people who may or may not be involved in terrorism, and their families, and any pets, livestock and passers by that happen to be in the area.
Supposedly the CIA has requested permission from the Administration to expand its operations in Yemen, including using drones to kill anyone who is merely acting suspiciously.
Someday someone will use drones to kill our people in our territory, or waterboard our people that they take prisoner, or ship them off to another country for even more vigorous torture, and then we'll be morally outraged.
Slashdot Mirror
Government doesn't have ANY ability to know what is right and what is wrong in terms of project, and almost all government projects end up being wrong by the way, government has much worse track record in terms of some value returned per dollar spent than the market
Evidence? I've worked for companies large and small, and waste, mismanagement, and bad investments are the norm.
Also, do you have evidence that "almost all" government projects go wrong?
And as far as value returned per dollar spent, if both the government and and the market do the same thing, the basic costs will be about the same (except that private sector employees are generally paid better). But people in the private sector expect profit on top of the actual expenses.
And so we're seeing news stories about outsourcing that ends up costing more for lower quality results than what we had before the outsourcing fad got started.
It is, after all, just a scam for putting you tax dollars in some rich man's pocket. All the crap about the free market is just propaganda to sell the bad deals to the suckers^w taxpayers.
Without the government stealing money (production) from people through taxing productivity
Tell us more about this ethical system that views taxation as stealing.
Presumably you're posting from the anarchist's paradise, Somalia, where all you have to do is pay off the local warlord and pirates.
I'm interested in hearing your proposal for this.
Just rolling back the Bush-era tax cuts would put a huge dent in our deficit.
We could also tax capital gains at the same rate we tax people who actually have to work for their money.
And tax profitable corporations rather than subsidizing them.
Unfortunately, this country has become a cream-skimming operation for the rich. When their wholly-owned legislators have bankrupted us, they'll throw us away and move on to the next country, just like they do when the acquire a business, squeeze it dry, and discard the husk.
The budget for the Department of Defense is being cut though.
http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2013/FY2013_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf
FY 2013 Base Budget has a reduction of $5.2 billion compared to FY 2012. The budget for Overseas Contingency Operations (which includes Afghanistan and Iraq) has a separate budget request which shows a reduction of $26.6 billion compared to FY 2012.
That sounds like a big cut, until you look at how much the defense budget has grown since 2001. You'd have to cut about 60 times that much to put us back where we were just over a decade ago. (Or 100 times that much, if you look at total cost rather than just the budget per se.)
And as for our unbudgeted wars, there seems to be a growing consensus that they've cost us 3 or 4 trillion dollars in direct and indirect costs.
Yes, other sciences were against the SSC mainly because they only needed smaller dollops of public funds per project. However, what really irked Congress was Phil Gramm. When it was clear that Fermi Lab outside of Chicago made the most sense because the equipment there could be utilized for the SSC, Brother Phil ramrodded the language to choose Texas instead. As soon as that happened, other Congress Critters decided that they'd had enough and killed it.
That's similar to the way I remember it: as the list of candidate sites was narrowed down, the number of legislators that supported it shrank as well.
Tuition is supposed to pay for the cost of schooling. Please explain why my taxes should pay for your schooling.
The idealized view is that a educated public makes a better society.
The cynical view is that your legislature doesn't give a damn about education, but needs a university as a status symbol.
For a more pragmatic answer, much of modern technology stems from universities. Businesses don't like to invest in basic research because it's not going to make a positive impact on their next quarterly earnings report. But your state taxes support institutions that do keep basic research alive in this country, and your federal taxes boost it (e.g., via the National Science Foundation grand programs).
And even stuff that isn't invented at universities is often invented by people who your tax dollars helped educate. (Yeah, there are some famous examples of non-educated people who did cool stuff, but how much of our total innovation do they account for?)
And finally, university towns tend to have a more educated populace than a similarly-sized town without a university, and so businesses like to locate there. That provides jobs even for non-educated people; every business needs clerical help etc., which may not sound very glamorous, but beats the hell out of flipping burgers for a living.
If you want to whinge, I suspect you'll find that we spend more money on corporate welfare than we do on higher education, and that corporate welfare money just goes into some shareholders' pockets. At least you're getting something, perhaps indirectly, from the public investment in education.
And as someone who has worked for a university ... I was surprised how none of the IT staff taught classes.
It happens sometimes. I know of an IT staff member who occasionally teaches System Administration.
I think the reason it doesn't happen very often is that IT topics aren't what CS programs usually teach.
I agree. However, a lot of schools do call it "Computing Science(s)", "Computational Science(s)", or the like.
I like "Information and Computation", but business schools think they have a trademark on the term "Information". But "Information and Computation" is really what the field is all about.
Everything I have seen/heard coming out of Florida, starting with the 2000 elections, moving through the Martin shooting and now this makes me consider Florida to be a 3rd world country embedded within the United States.
Most of the United States is a third-world country embedded within the United States.
You know the saying: A college president's job is to provide sex for the students, parking for the faculty, and a winning for the alumni.
Most athletics departments "make money" by means of rich donors.
There's cause for astonishment if those donors specify that part of the money should go to academics.
A lot of people think it's detestable, but I don't think it actually costs taxpayers any money. It's just sort of a club attached to the university.
Some donors go for immortality rather than entertainment, e.g. a building or lab or endowed chair with their name on it. I don't think many rich people just donate for academics for the good of society.
CS tends to focus to much on coding and high level theory. Some CS programs are so much on the theory you get people who are poor program[er?]s out of them.
You can get fourth-rate students out of any program.
Theory is what teaches programmers to sort in O( n log n ), rather than in O( n^2 ) + brag about some negligible optimization you made that saved a line of code.
If you haven't had all the theory-type classes, you're not qualified for anything more than programming up an algorithm that someone else has carefully specified for you.
Only teaching faculty/staff are expected to teach only. At a research University, you are expected to publish.
Even at a research university, it depends on what they were hired for. Some are teaching-only, some are research-only, some have combined responsibilities.
"What were you thinking?"
Well, probably something along the lines of "That department did not publish well enough and the students did not bring in enough money".
The uni in the town where I live has done some downsizing since the economic crunch hit, and basically they look at:
a) How many students are graduating with this degree?
b) How much research grant money is the faculty bringing in?
If the combination of answers is too low, they're honing an axe for your program.
I suspect they also asked themselves whether any billionaire alumni would be offended by the cut, but of course they wouldn't advertise that if they did.
But, really, xkcd is total shit.
Agree. So often I check the latest xkcd and am dumbstruck by how profoundly not funny it is. I think he should just let it die now (though I'm of course ignorant of important issues such as how much money it's raking in....)
You called it shit, and then described it as profound.
Is any genuine science being done here? Running simulations to model, say, the weather or ocean currents makes sense. You can calibrate them to past data and use them predictively. How does a simulation of the "universe" tell you anything?
Take the starting state and mechanisms suggested by theory, run it, compare the result to the actual universe now.
Does the simulated universe contain intelligent lifeforms who have built universe-simulating supercomputers?
Current replies:
No why should it? This one dosnt either
Why not? This one does.
I suppose that covers all the bases.
FWIW, "more particles than the atoms in the computer" would be impossible with current technology since (presumably) you'd need to store at least one bit of state per particle, and current computers need more than an atom to store a single bit.
All you need is two bits. Map all the ones in your data to one location and all the zeros to the other.
if there was a way to reduce entropy in the Universe yet?
Yes, put it in the fridge.
I didn't RTFA, but DEUS sounds like the perfect name for this project.
DEMIURGE would have been better.
Well I once heard that to have a real simulation of the universe, you would need to have a computer the size of the universe. So this is more a rough simulation of the the visible Galaxies.
All models are simpler than the thing being modeled.
However, you can think of the universe as a gigantic computer that is running a program to... compute its future states?
What if the reaction was to bomb Iran into the stone age? With the justification that Iran was using WMDs? Or that Iran was threatening Israel?
Uh... those justifications are already in play. And lots of people in the USA are singing "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran".
Just waiting for an "incident", to pacify the public.
Its funny that you think the word fair comes into play at all when talking about sovereignty. We are not interested in being fair, nor should we be.
Fair in dealings between nations has the same benefits (and risks) as fair in dealings between individuals.
Might Makes Right is a convenient ethical stance when you have overwhelming might. But what goes around tends to come around.
Another proof that US is run by jews who want Iran gone.
You wouldn't be demonstrating the confirmation bias, would you? Just saying...
Nah, he's just been reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I think the bit about Iran was added in the 2001 edition.
Still killing Afghans and using more drones than ever to execute people who may or may not be involved in terrorism, and their families, and any pets, livestock and passers by that happen to be in the area.
Supposedly the CIA has requested permission from the Administration to expand its operations in Yemen, including using drones to kill anyone who is merely acting suspiciously.
Someday someone will use drones to kill our people in our territory, or waterboard our people that they take prisoner, or ship them off to another country for even more vigorous torture, and then we'll be morally outraged.
Now, it really doesn't matter whether Ahmedinejad is capable of moderation or not. He is capable of playing (or actually is) a fanatic.
Kind of like half the politicians in the USA.