Who do you think does all the engineering in China, Taiwan, etc.? There's a LOT more engineers over there than they've sent over here. And considering that 30 years ago, China was a backwater basicallly, your argument doesn't really hold up.
It takes a while for general society to accept changes in the job market like this.
Also, nothing's changed about medicine; you'll still make way more money as a specialist doctor or surgeon, have much, much higher prestige, and you'll get to work in a mixed environment instead of a sausagefest. You'll also be doing far more important work for people and humanity in general.
I don't know what kind of teachers you had, but I didn't have any which encouraged me to take up engineering. I don't remember teachers encouraging anyone to go into any particular career in fact.
No, I think your explanation is BS. A much more likely explanation is that kids learn this stuff from their parents; that's how culture is passed down after all. Some cultures (namely Asian cultures) strongly encourage kids to study math and science and go into envineering. Other cultures, such as the white American culture I came from, encourage kids to ridicule children who like math and computers (that's how it was when I was in school), and to glorify sports and to major in business.
It's 1967, and a bunch of people don't want equal rights for black people; some of them even want to bring back lynchings, and they all want to deny them voting rights, the right to sit anywhere on the bus, the right to use the same drinking fountains and bathrooms, etc.
Are you seriously going to tell me that it's "puerile" to dismiss these people as "assholes"? That we should have a rational discussion with them? Sorry, but fuck that.
It's no different today, it's just the group being oppressed is different (homosexuals/LGBTetc.). Heck, they still don't want them using the same bathrooms.
If you're in favor of making a whole group of people second-class citizens, then you're an asshole, full stop. This isn't about "disagreement", it's about basic human rights. Even Donald Trump thinks trans people should use whatever bathroom they feel comfortable in. There's a little room for rational discussion at the fringes (like the wedding cake issue: equal rights. vs. rights of business owners to choose who to do business with, but this was also mostly settled with the CRA in the 60s, mainly it's just extremist libertarians who want to regress on this out of some misguided notion that "the invisible hand" of "the market" will magically correct this), but not much. Mostly it's just a bunch of religious assholes who want to deny people equal rights under the law, and it's little different from what those peoples' brethren in the 60s and before did to black people.
A more likely explanation is that it's because there are 1.4 billion Chinese and 1.2 billion Indians. There are 7.4 of them for every American.
Wrong. They are a small minority in America. It's not like every Indian or Chinese person who wants to be an engineer comes to America; they have their own schools and the vast majority of Chinese and Indian engineers live in China and India.
Look at the actual percentages for how many Chinese and Indian people (anywhere) go into these professions, compared to black Americans and Hispanics (both in America only and also in Latin America as a whole). I don't have any numbers in front of me, but I suspect that the percentages for Indians and Chinese are much higher, much much higher.
It's absolutely a cultural thing. And no, it's NOT something "we" can change, unless you happen to be black or Hispanic yourself. I'm not, so it's not something I can change any more than I can change misogynistic middle eastern cultures (nor should I; it's not my place to dictate to other cultures how they should be, in fact that would constitute arrogance).
I have a daughter that graduated high school. In her class, most of the top 10 students were female (she was one of them). They all excelled at Math and Science - Calc, AP Physics, AP Chem, etc. She is the only one pursuing a tech degree.
The point is that part of the reason there are less candidates is interest.
Has anyone bothered asking the other girls why they aren't going into tech? And what are they going into instead? Is medicine considered "tech" (I doubt it)? Are they going into that? Considering the relative differences in pay and prestige and job security between tech and medicine, if these girls are smart enough to become doctors, why on earth should they want to become programmers instead?
> My college CS classmates were dominantly Chinese, Middle Eastern and White (in that order), with one or two Indian (eastern) students.
If you are a black or hispanic child, you are much less likely to have a computer growing up than a white child. By the time you get to college you will be miles behind other students that have been tinkering with computers for their whole lives.
If that's the case, how are the Chinese, Indian, and middle eastern kids getting their hands on computers at such young ages? They don't seem to have any problems overcoming any disadvantages they had.
Sorry, I don't buy it. It's not because of having computers growing up, it's because of cultural differences. Asian and middle eastern cultures value engineering and think of it as a prestigious career; black and Hispanic cultures simply do not.
...and is getting millions of Pounds spent on fixing it. Men looking to become primary school teachers get massive incentives, for example.
There's a good reason we don't do that in America: any man who wants to be around little kids like that is automatically deemed a pedophile and has a cloud of suspicion around him. Almost no man is dumb enough to go into that field because of this, even though I'm sure many would like to if society weren't so paranoid about it.
I think the truth is a lot more complicated really, and all we really have is conjecture. My opinion is that: 1) programming and engineering are not very prestigious jobs in the US, unlike medicine or law, and also unlike other societies (like India or China). In addition, these jobs are generally not paid that well (compared to being a doctor), and don't have much upward potential. 1a) layoffs of engineers and programmers are constantly in the news, and have been since I was in high school over 2 decades ago 2) males are far more likely to have very very mild autism-spectrum disorders like Asperger's which cause them to not be terribly social, and prefer jobs where they spend most of their time working on a computer rather than talking to people 3) little girls are generally not encouraged to have an interest in math and science by their parents (and maybe teachers), unlike little boys. It's usually more conservative people who have more kids anyway, so they raise them with these backwards attitudes
Add up all these things, and what you get is that when a girl is really smart and wants a high-paying career, she's going to go into medicine or law. In medicine particularly, the jobs are far more stable, higher paying, you have a direct and positive impact on peoples' lives (I sure as hell can't point to much I've done as helping people), you get far more prestige, and you get to interact with people instead of sit in a noisy open-plan work area, with streams of people walking right by your desk, with headphones on to block out the din, staring at a screen all day, and then being pressured to spend extra unpaid time to meet some arbitrary deadline. Why would a smart woman want this job?
I didn't have to go to those lengths, I just called them up. But they sure kept me on the phone for a long time, and it took two separate calls for some BS reason I don't remember now. Somehow, moving out of the area to a place with no Comcrap service isn't enough to make things quick and easy.
I had Comcast internet for 2 years in NJ. Technically, it worked great. But wait until you want to cancel because you're moving out; that part is a PITA. Also, if you used a debit card for payments, make sure to cancel it so they don't continue to try billing you; they're infamous for that.
Hey, I'm not the one arguing in favor of amalgam here, I'm the one arguing for the resin fillings. But that's good to know, thanks; it makes me feel better about getting rid of my mercury fillings.
That's absolutely true, however, from what I've seen (granted, my perspective is limited) the political crap on Facebook is all far-right-wing hysteria about FEMA camps and the like.
The lies and half-truths on the liberal side are all in the main media outlets like Washington Post, along with the "Correct the Record" people backing Hillary on places like Reddit.
If there's a bunch of CtR people on Facebook, I haven't seen them, but again I admit my perspective is limited.
It seems to me that Facebook might attract the right-wing loonies because the mainstream media is dominated by the pro-corporate-liberal viewpoint (the Hillary camp), and the only media outlets the right-wingers have are places like Breitbart, WND, etc., so Facebook is where they all meet up and talk about their nonsense. The Hillary lovers all congregate on message boards for mainstream media sites because those sites already cater to them, and also on certain subreddits (try making a comment honestly and truthfully critical of Hillary on/r/HillaryClinton and see how fast you get banned! I was amazed when I tried it). Of course, there's a subreddit for Trump too so I imagine that's not much different but overall (again my perspective may be very flawed) it seems like the middle-aged-and-up people who are right-wing fanatics tend to like Facebook for some reason, whereas Reddit generally attracts a younger crowd.
That's not a "library", it's an instruction set. It's two different things. A "library" in software is a collection of subroutines that can be reused from project to project and allow you to develop software faster than having to reinvent the wheel every time. An instruction set is the most primitive way to interact with a CPU, and consists mainly of instructions used to move data and to perform logical or arithmetic operations on it. More modern CPUs (esp. Intel ones) do have more complicated instructions available to do somewhat more advanced operations, and these instructions are then interpreted into simpler RISC instructions in the core, but we're talking about games from the late 1970s here, they used very primitive CPUs, not modern SIMD CPUs with vector coprocessors. Some of them didn't even use CPUs at all; they used discrete logic only.
you don't actually need a large powerful vehicle to pull a boat (they're light)
This isn't true. A canoe or kayak certain is light and can easily be towed with or carried on top of a small car. But something like a cabin cruiser can weigh 4000-7000 pounds (from a quick Google search), plus the weight of the trailer (guessing another 1000-1500 pounds). No car can pull that kind of weight; a Class II hitch maxes out at 2000 pounds. You definitely need a large truck for pulling a boat that size.
Another thing that needs a big truck is pulling a horse trailer. A single horse can be between 800 and 1200 pounds; then add the weight of the trailer, plus you probably want to be able to transport 2-4 of them.
Now, you can certainly argue that no one really *needs* to tow a 20-foot boat or a couple of horses, and if they're rich enough to afford those kinds of toys, then they can also afford a big-ass pollution tax bill for their truck, and I would not argue with that at all. Especially for horses: the women who love horses and become horse owners are, without exception, a bunch of nuts wasting money on a ridiculous hobby to the detriment of everyone around them, and absolutely deserve to be driven into bankruptcy and homelessness with a huge tax bill (because they're so stupid they won't give up their hobby no matter how much it costs them).
Ford has nothing to do with it; these trucks were illegally modified. From the factory, they surely met EPA requirements (assuming they didn't pull a VW).
The states need better enforcement for that stuff.
As far as I know, all the engines that legitimately meet the emissions standards post-process the exhaust, e.g. Mercedes and Cummins engines.
That's my understanding too: they all use DEF ("AdBlue"), which is a form of urea, in the exhaust stream to convert the harmful emissions to something that's not harmful.
The problem seems to be that to do it properly and meet the emissions requirements, you have to use a lot of DEF, so you either need a giant tank of it, or you need to refill it frequently (like every few thousand miles, rather than every 10k-15k miles so it can be done at regular service intervals). This isn't such a problem with bigger vehicles like full-size pickups because they have a lot more room for a big tank; small cars don't have the extra space.
I honestly don't know why this is a problem. It should be easy to design the engines so they simply won't run without DEF, and make the consumer fill it up every so often themselves, if they can't or won't put a big enough tank in the vehicle. Honestly, how hard is it to get people to buy some cheap fluid at the gas station or Walmart and add it every 1k or 3k miles? Most people don't seem to have too much trouble refilling their washer fluid. And literally everyone is able to refill their own gas tank. No one thinks it's an onerous requirement on consumers for their car to need gas (or diesel) in order to run, and that it's somehow a problem that the vehicle will stop running completely if you run out of fuel. So just make the DEF work the same way. If someone is too stupid to keep their DEF tank full, then they shouldn't buy a diesel car, they can buy a gasoline car instead.
I'd like to see a Mercedes diesel hybrid using electric motors to drive all 4 wheels while charging the system with constant speed turbo diesel generator, but I guess they don't see a big enough market to develop such a system.
And I'd like to have a magic unicorn. You talk about this like it'd be trivial to develop; what you're proposing here is a completely different vehicle, not something that can be slapped together in a month. Wheel motors for EVs are extremely problematic; there's a reason Teslas don't use them. The closest you're going to get to something like this is the Chevy Volt. And even that doesn't have fuel economy that's that great: serial hybrids still suffer from conversion losses (generating electricity from fuel, then using that to power motors) that limit their overall efficiency. The parallel hybrid Prius easily beats the Volt's highway fuel economy; the main advantage the Volt has is its all-electric range before the gas engine comes on. The Volt does this by dedicating a lot of room to batteries, but this (plus the gas engine that doesn't run for 60 miles, plus the drive motor) means you have very little space left over in the vehicle for passengers and cargo, plus a lot of weight. It's not too bad, with its clever packaging design, but in terms of usable space and long-range fuel economy, the Prius is the clear winner, plus it costs a lot less too. The bottom line is: if it were that easy and cost-effective to build and sell a serial-hybrid vehicle that would really be worth it in terms of cost and performance and utility, car companies would have already done it. There's good reasons they haven't, besides the Volt.
Slashdot Mirror
Who do you think does all the engineering in China, Taiwan, etc.? There's a LOT more engineers over there than they've sent over here. And considering that 30 years ago, China was a backwater basicallly, your argument doesn't really hold up.
It takes a while for general society to accept changes in the job market like this.
Also, nothing's changed about medicine; you'll still make way more money as a specialist doctor or surgeon, have much, much higher prestige, and you'll get to work in a mixed environment instead of a sausagefest. You'll also be doing far more important work for people and humanity in general.
I don't know what kind of teachers you had, but I didn't have any which encouraged me to take up engineering. I don't remember teachers encouraging anyone to go into any particular career in fact.
No, I think your explanation is BS. A much more likely explanation is that kids learn this stuff from their parents; that's how culture is passed down after all. Some cultures (namely Asian cultures) strongly encourage kids to study math and science and go into envineering. Other cultures, such as the white American culture I came from, encourage kids to ridicule children who like math and computers (that's how it was when I was in school), and to glorify sports and to major in business.
I completely disagree.
It's 1967, and a bunch of people don't want equal rights for black people; some of them even want to bring back lynchings, and they all want to deny them voting rights, the right to sit anywhere on the bus, the right to use the same drinking fountains and bathrooms, etc.
Are you seriously going to tell me that it's "puerile" to dismiss these people as "assholes"? That we should have a rational discussion with them? Sorry, but fuck that.
It's no different today, it's just the group being oppressed is different (homosexuals/LGBTetc.). Heck, they still don't want them using the same bathrooms.
If you're in favor of making a whole group of people second-class citizens, then you're an asshole, full stop. This isn't about "disagreement", it's about basic human rights. Even Donald Trump thinks trans people should use whatever bathroom they feel comfortable in. There's a little room for rational discussion at the fringes (like the wedding cake issue: equal rights. vs. rights of business owners to choose who to do business with, but this was also mostly settled with the CRA in the 60s, mainly it's just extremist libertarians who want to regress on this out of some misguided notion that "the invisible hand" of "the market" will magically correct this), but not much. Mostly it's just a bunch of religious assholes who want to deny people equal rights under the law, and it's little different from what those peoples' brethren in the 60s and before did to black people.
A more likely explanation is that it's because there are 1.4 billion Chinese and 1.2 billion Indians. There are 7.4 of them for every American.
Wrong. They are a small minority in America. It's not like every Indian or Chinese person who wants to be an engineer comes to America; they have their own schools and the vast majority of Chinese and Indian engineers live in China and India.
Look at the actual percentages for how many Chinese and Indian people (anywhere) go into these professions, compared to black Americans and Hispanics (both in America only and also in Latin America as a whole). I don't have any numbers in front of me, but I suspect that the percentages for Indians and Chinese are much higher, much much higher.
It's absolutely a cultural thing. And no, it's NOT something "we" can change, unless you happen to be black or Hispanic yourself. I'm not, so it's not something I can change any more than I can change misogynistic middle eastern cultures (nor should I; it's not my place to dictate to other cultures how they should be, in fact that would constitute arrogance).
I have a daughter that graduated high school. In her class, most of the top 10 students were female (she was one of them). They all excelled at Math and Science - Calc, AP Physics, AP Chem, etc. She is the only one pursuing a tech degree.
The point is that part of the reason there are less candidates is interest.
Has anyone bothered asking the other girls why they aren't going into tech? And what are they going into instead? Is medicine considered "tech" (I doubt it)? Are they going into that? Considering the relative differences in pay and prestige and job security between tech and medicine, if these girls are smart enough to become doctors, why on earth should they want to become programmers instead?
> My college CS classmates were dominantly Chinese, Middle Eastern and White (in that order), with one or two Indian (eastern) students.
If you are a black or hispanic child, you are much less likely to have a computer growing up than a white child. By the time you get to college you will be miles behind other students that have been tinkering with computers for their whole lives.
If that's the case, how are the Chinese, Indian, and middle eastern kids getting their hands on computers at such young ages? They don't seem to have any problems overcoming any disadvantages they had.
Sorry, I don't buy it. It's not because of having computers growing up, it's because of cultural differences. Asian and middle eastern cultures value engineering and think of it as a prestigious career; black and Hispanic cultures simply do not.
...and is getting millions of Pounds spent on fixing it. Men looking to become primary school teachers get massive incentives, for example.
There's a good reason we don't do that in America: any man who wants to be around little kids like that is automatically deemed a pedophile and has a cloud of suspicion around him. Almost no man is dumb enough to go into that field because of this, even though I'm sure many would like to if society weren't so paranoid about it.
I think the truth is a lot more complicated really, and all we really have is conjecture. My opinion is that:
1) programming and engineering are not very prestigious jobs in the US, unlike medicine or law, and also unlike other societies (like India or China). In addition, these jobs are generally not paid that well (compared to being a doctor), and don't have much upward potential.
1a) layoffs of engineers and programmers are constantly in the news, and have been since I was in high school over 2 decades ago
2) males are far more likely to have very very mild autism-spectrum disorders like Asperger's which cause them to not be terribly social, and prefer jobs where they spend most of their time working on a computer rather than talking to people
3) little girls are generally not encouraged to have an interest in math and science by their parents (and maybe teachers), unlike little boys. It's usually more conservative people who have more kids anyway, so they raise them with these backwards attitudes
Add up all these things, and what you get is that when a girl is really smart and wants a high-paying career, she's going to go into medicine or law. In medicine particularly, the jobs are far more stable, higher paying, you have a direct and positive impact on peoples' lives (I sure as hell can't point to much I've done as helping people), you get far more prestige, and you get to interact with people instead of sit in a noisy open-plan work area, with streams of people walking right by your desk, with headphones on to block out the din, staring at a screen all day, and then being pressured to spend extra unpaid time to meet some arbitrary deadline. Why would a smart woman want this job?
I have no problem calling someone an asshole if they think it's acceptable to deny equal rights to classes of people.
I didn't have to go to those lengths, I just called them up. But they sure kept me on the phone for a long time, and it took two separate calls for some BS reason I don't remember now. Somehow, moving out of the area to a place with no Comcrap service isn't enough to make things quick and easy.
I had Comcast internet for 2 years in NJ. Technically, it worked great. But wait until you want to cancel because you're moving out; that part is a PITA. Also, if you used a debit card for payments, make sure to cancel it so they don't continue to try billing you; they're infamous for that.
Hey, I'm not the one arguing in favor of amalgam here, I'm the one arguing for the resin fillings. But that's good to know, thanks; it makes me feel better about getting rid of my mercury fillings.
I'd like to add, if you're seeing that on Facebook, it sounds like you need some new friends.
(And since I seem to see right-wing stuff on there, it looks like I need some new friends too.... )
It doesn't work, it says I need to disable my ad-blocker. No thanks.
I've never even heard of that, but I wish someone would do that to me so I could tell them to fuck off.
That's absolutely true, however, from what I've seen (granted, my perspective is limited) the political crap on Facebook is all far-right-wing hysteria about FEMA camps and the like.
The lies and half-truths on the liberal side are all in the main media outlets like Washington Post, along with the "Correct the Record" people backing Hillary on places like Reddit.
If there's a bunch of CtR people on Facebook, I haven't seen them, but again I admit my perspective is limited.
It seems to me that Facebook might attract the right-wing loonies because the mainstream media is dominated by the pro-corporate-liberal viewpoint (the Hillary camp), and the only media outlets the right-wingers have are places like Breitbart, WND, etc., so Facebook is where they all meet up and talk about their nonsense. The Hillary lovers all congregate on message boards for mainstream media sites because those sites already cater to them, and also on certain subreddits (try making a comment honestly and truthfully critical of Hillary on /r/HillaryClinton and see how fast you get banned! I was amazed when I tried it). Of course, there's a subreddit for Trump too so I imagine that's not much different but overall (again my perspective may be very flawed) it seems like the middle-aged-and-up people who are right-wing fanatics tend to like Facebook for some reason, whereas Reddit generally attracts a younger crowd.
Yes, because the Slashdot crowd is representative of all 40-60 year olds....
That's not a "library", it's an instruction set. It's two different things. A "library" in software is a collection of subroutines that can be reused from project to project and allow you to develop software faster than having to reinvent the wheel every time. An instruction set is the most primitive way to interact with a CPU, and consists mainly of instructions used to move data and to perform logical or arithmetic operations on it. More modern CPUs (esp. Intel ones) do have more complicated instructions available to do somewhat more advanced operations, and these instructions are then interpreted into simpler RISC instructions in the core, but we're talking about games from the late 1970s here, they used very primitive CPUs, not modern SIMD CPUs with vector coprocessors. Some of them didn't even use CPUs at all; they used discrete logic only.
Do you have to use a commercial mailbox at all? Maybe you could just build a big box with a door or something, and paint "MAIL" on it.
They do seem to have commercially-available ones too, though they're a bit pricey:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/dVa...
One of these might be good if you can get your neighbors to share the cost and your local postmaster approves it:
http://www.steelmailbox.com/ht...
Games like Pac-Man and Centipede were not built with compilers or libraries.
you don't actually need a large powerful vehicle to pull a boat (they're light)
This isn't true. A canoe or kayak certain is light and can easily be towed with or carried on top of a small car. But something like a cabin cruiser can weigh 4000-7000 pounds (from a quick Google search), plus the weight of the trailer (guessing another 1000-1500 pounds). No car can pull that kind of weight; a Class II hitch maxes out at 2000 pounds. You definitely need a large truck for pulling a boat that size.
Another thing that needs a big truck is pulling a horse trailer. A single horse can be between 800 and 1200 pounds; then add the weight of the trailer, plus you probably want to be able to transport 2-4 of them.
Now, you can certainly argue that no one really *needs* to tow a 20-foot boat or a couple of horses, and if they're rich enough to afford those kinds of toys, then they can also afford a big-ass pollution tax bill for their truck, and I would not argue with that at all. Especially for horses: the women who love horses and become horse owners are, without exception, a bunch of nuts wasting money on a ridiculous hobby to the detriment of everyone around them, and absolutely deserve to be driven into bankruptcy and homelessness with a huge tax bill (because they're so stupid they won't give up their hobby no matter how much it costs them).
Ford has nothing to do with it; these trucks were illegally modified. From the factory, they surely met EPA requirements (assuming they didn't pull a VW).
The states need better enforcement for that stuff.
As far as I know, all the engines that legitimately meet the emissions standards post-process the exhaust, e.g. Mercedes and Cummins engines.
That's my understanding too: they all use DEF ("AdBlue"), which is a form of urea, in the exhaust stream to convert the harmful emissions to something that's not harmful.
The problem seems to be that to do it properly and meet the emissions requirements, you have to use a lot of DEF, so you either need a giant tank of it, or you need to refill it frequently (like every few thousand miles, rather than every 10k-15k miles so it can be done at regular service intervals). This isn't such a problem with bigger vehicles like full-size pickups because they have a lot more room for a big tank; small cars don't have the extra space.
I honestly don't know why this is a problem. It should be easy to design the engines so they simply won't run without DEF, and make the consumer fill it up every so often themselves, if they can't or won't put a big enough tank in the vehicle. Honestly, how hard is it to get people to buy some cheap fluid at the gas station or Walmart and add it every 1k or 3k miles? Most people don't seem to have too much trouble refilling their washer fluid. And literally everyone is able to refill their own gas tank. No one thinks it's an onerous requirement on consumers for their car to need gas (or diesel) in order to run, and that it's somehow a problem that the vehicle will stop running completely if you run out of fuel. So just make the DEF work the same way. If someone is too stupid to keep their DEF tank full, then they shouldn't buy a diesel car, they can buy a gasoline car instead.
I'd like to see a Mercedes diesel hybrid using electric motors to drive all 4 wheels while charging the system with constant speed turbo diesel generator, but I guess they don't see a big enough market to develop such a system.
And I'd like to have a magic unicorn. You talk about this like it'd be trivial to develop; what you're proposing here is a completely different vehicle, not something that can be slapped together in a month. Wheel motors for EVs are extremely problematic; there's a reason Teslas don't use them. The closest you're going to get to something like this is the Chevy Volt. And even that doesn't have fuel economy that's that great: serial hybrids still suffer from conversion losses (generating electricity from fuel, then using that to power motors) that limit their overall efficiency. The parallel hybrid Prius easily beats the Volt's highway fuel economy; the main advantage the Volt has is its all-electric range before the gas engine comes on. The Volt does this by dedicating a lot of room to batteries, but this (plus the gas engine that doesn't run for 60 miles, plus the drive motor) means you have very little space left over in the vehicle for passengers and cargo, plus a lot of weight. It's not too bad, with its clever packaging design, but in terms of usable space and long-range fuel economy, the Prius is the clear winner, plus it costs a lot less too. The bottom line is: if it were that easy and cost-effective to build and sell a serial-hybrid vehicle that would really be worth it in terms of cost and performance and utility, car companies would have already done it. There's good reasons they haven't, besides the Volt.
Nope, this is Slashdot, where almost everyone has the mentality, "I got mine, fuck you".