I agree absolutely. A diploma is not a piece of paper you paid $100,000 (or whatever) for: it's a guarantee by the college that you have mastered certain skills which employers find useful.
If a college cannot believably make that guarantee, they shouldn't be offering degrees, and shouldn't be accredited.
In short: online courseware + diploma mill =/= college.
Homeschooling can be effective. However, it can be horribly bad too. Me, I'll go by results.
Hey homeschooling parents! I'm a college professor. I'd be happy to have your wunderkind in my classes. Just make sure he shows up with 650 or better on all sections of the SAT, and can write an engaging essay.
If he can do that, I don't care if he's public, private, homeschooled, or raised by wolves. Welcome to college!
If he can't, since you claim he's a brilliant child, his academic failure is your fault. He should sue your ass, and personally I think the State should consider prosecuting you for criminal neglect.
Wow. Talk about a lack of vision. If you've got a precise identification of a pain gene and a sequence of it, you're on the path to identifying the protein it makes and then finding chemicals that bind to that protein, affecting its function.
Who gives a damn about humanely slaughtering cows? This is the starting point to the perfect medication for patients with debilitating chronic pain. It might also be the starting point to drugged-up super-soldiers and, if you can find drugs that turn *on* the pain protein rather than deactivate it, the perfect torture drug.
It's a mixed bag to be sure, but if your imagination is limited to cows, you're not thinking hard enough.
Yes, but neither genetics nor lasers have lead to totally new patterns of living, in the way the automobile, electric power, and electronic communications have.
Anyway, I'm not arguing that life's been boring since 1960 -- though TFA is. I'm saying that 1880-1960 was *especially* interesting.
Yes, but at issue isn't just whether there's more progress now than in the past, but whether it *feels* like it. I doubt you could find a rational measure of "progress" that indicates a true decline. But anticipatory vaporware does lower the future shock value of the real thing.
I have no problem with one person experiencing the joy of going to Mars while the rest of us stay home, so long as that one person paid for it himself.
Yes, I deliberately overstated my original post, and you're right that people do appreciate exploration more when there's a person involved, even if the scientific benefit is negligible.
I was once a huge manned spaceflight proponent, but I learned a huge lesson from the Pathfinder and MER missions: humans like it when exploration is done by people, but they're very flexible about the definition of "people". If you build a robot with good sensors and mobility, on a human scale, people will anthropomorphize the crap out of it. They will cheer for its successes, worry over its problems, idolize and even come to love it. We love those "plucky" Mars rovers almost as much as we loved Neil Armstrong.
The dates listed in the article, 1880-1960, are telling. They correspond to what I call the Age of Electricity. At the start of this period, electric and magnetic forces became well-understood from a physics perspective; by the end of it, we had mastered electrical engineering.
It's not every day that humanity figures out how to use a new fundamental force: after all, there are only four of them. Electricity allows totally new paradigms for energy transmission and communications. It took 80 years to work through the consequences, but I think that even millennia from now it'll stand apart as a singular moment in human history, even more of a big deal than the mastery of fire.
the technology itself had largely been anticipated
True, but it's worth pointing out that one of the great inventions of 1880-1960 was science fiction.(*) There were a lot more people getting paid to anticipate the future in 1969 than in 1880.
(*) Blah blah Mary Shelley Jules Verne yeah yeah whatever.
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
No, but it *is* about the same as looking at someone else's holiday photos.
Don't forget the #1 rule of manned space flight: *you* don't get to go. And if you're stuck on earth, does it really matter if the pictures you're looking at were taken by man or machine?
This is one of those typical popular science articles which totally mixed up the actual present-day achievement with a grandiose vision of the future, so the reader gets a giant dose of future shock when it's not called for.
Look carefully at what's actually built. A tiny vibrating bit of metal with a touch switch. It *looks* like a little bug, but its robotic capabilities are roughly equal to that of a a doorbell.
If the vibrating legs work as claimed, it can move in an uncontrolled, hopefully straight, path. It can't turn. Its only sensor feedback is a single touch switch.
People talk a lot about "emergent systems", but the individual elements need a certain level of complexity for it to work. A pile of paperclips will never get up and walk around, no matter how big a pile you make.
IMO, these microbots don't have enough different physical inputs (sensors) and outputs (actuators) to do anything exciting. Notice what's *not* in the article: no videos of the robots doing anything. The rest of the article is just vision and vapor.
I admit that some of my bias is political. This is irrelevant to the scientific issue, but present nonetheless. But politics aside, when China puts a man on the moon, I will be cheering.
But I stand by what I said, there is a difference in focus. China's future space plans (going by Wikipedia here, sorry) seem to focus on manned missions to orbit, space stations, and a manned moon expedition. They've got a robotic mission to lunar orbit finished, but have no concrete plans for robotic rovers or landers that I can see. Planetary exploration is mentioned, but only vaguely.
In contrast, India is working on manned missions, but they're already working on a robotic lunar rover, and are starting to plan for a robotic Mars mission.
I personally believe that the U.S. space program is too focused on manned spaceflight, so that's why I'm cheering extra hard for India's robots.
Melting a half cm of snow will still cost hundreds of dollars of electricity per km (more if the air is well below freezing), a job that can be done perfectly easily with a couple bucks worth of road salt.
Oh, god, I just realized another reason roadbed solar is a bad idea. Road salt. Electrical wiring under the roadbed. *shudder*...
Before this thread fills up completely with cynical wisecracking Americans, let me be the first to say, as a cynical wisecracking American, go India!
Seriously. You guys have a very solid set of rockets, a good broad focus (China's too focused on manned missions), and the technical skills to make it happen.
Hay guys, I found some nice desert land to put some solar panels on. Lots of nice flat areas, clear skies, and the best bit, it's got power lines running to it already!
I'll take armchair scientists shooting down an experiment over armchair reality TV fans smiling and nodding.
People here may be cynical and underinformed, but at least they're trying to *analyze* the news they hear rather than sitting back with slack jaws, nodding and trusting the boffins.
Slashdot sucks, but it's better than the alternative.
In addition to all the engineering nightmare problems people have already mentioned...
You replace your car tires every few years because the rubber has worn off, right? Well, where did the rubber go? You smeared it all over the highway. A lot of it turns into fine dust, but some of it gets literally welded onto the road surface, even in normal driving when you're not skidding or burning rubber.
All that black rubber is covering the road. The dust filters into the cracks and crevices that allow the road to grip tires in wet weather. The smeared tire goo sticks to everything. If you've ever seen a concrete highway roadbed after a year or two of heavy use, it's covered in black grime.
One of the biggest problems people have been having with rooftop solar panels in long-term use is keeping them clean. They get dusty, birds poop on them, etc., lowering the efficiency dramatically. Highways make rooftops look as clean as a hospital in comparison.
That said, this looks like a good use of $100K. That's chump change for government research. Have these guys make a roadway solar panel, stick it in a real roadway for a year or two, and see what happens.
I'm willing to pay $100K of government money to put a bad idea to bed.
It's better to do something than to sit around. But it's better to sit around than to do something stupid.
Two shipwrecked dudes are sitting on an island. There's a coconut palm. One sits on the beach, hungry, looking out for a passing ship. The other climbs the tree to get some coconuts. Mmm, coconuts. Smart move, tree climbing guy.
Now, same situation. One guy watches for passing ships. The other guy flaps his arm real hard trying to fly up to the top of the tree. Now who's the smart one?
Solar roadways are like the guy trying to fly to coconuts. Compared to our other locations for solar power (rooftops, for instance), highways are the worst possible location. They're filthy, load-bearing, wet, freezing, hot, and occasionally subject to violent impact. It's enough to make a mechanical engineer cry.
Black asphalt converts all absorbed sunlight to heat and then releases it over time, while the solar panels would only release 85%. The only way the solar panels would be better at melting snow is if you could pump energy back through them to warm them up.
And even if you *did* pump all the electricity generated by the panels back into them, it would add up to exactly as much as the asphalt is already absorbing. The only way to melt snow *more* than asphalt is to pump extra electricity in from a nearby power plant. We could do that now, but we don't, because it's ridiculously expensive.
(I estimate the cost to melt 10 cm of snow or 1 cm of solid ice off a roadway 50 m wide and 1 km long to be about $5000.)
"After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks"
I have the same problem anytime I try to do anything involving Linux and hardware, and after years and years of this sort of thing I got fed up and switched back to Mac.
I know Linux is inherently better from a software freedom perspective. I know it has an uphill battle because of limited support from hardware vendors, unlike Windows. I know they're limited by not having control over the hardware like Apple. This is Slashdot heresy, but quite frankly, I DON'T CARE. I want a computer that does the right thing without being asked, without having to spend days searching forums for answers, without having to learn cryptic kernel commands.
Does that mean I should hand in my geek badge and go home? Maybe, but quite frankly, I'd rather spend my time doing geeky things that I want to do, rather than geeky things that my computer forces me to deal with.
A) your comparison between real life execution and losing your account in a video game made me throw up a little bit.
B) You want to add an interesting new "fugitive" mechanic to the game, which requires players to abuse the game to experience? And you think this will *reduce* game abuse? You have a lot to learn about MMOs, my friend.
Energy density! Energy density of gasoline is about 40,000 kilojoules/kg. Energy density of modern flywheels (http://www.mpoweruk.com/alternatives.htm) can reach 1000 kJ/kg.
You need forty times the mass of flywheels to store the same amount of energy.
But if you're on land, you've got plenty of more convenient sources of CO2 than seawater. The details of the design described here sound like a seagoing facility to me.
Howver, to do this, the navy's going to need some serious partnership[s and licence agreements with Doty Energy or i think might face some legal action... They've got 60+ patents on this process...
Hadn't heard of Doty Energy before. I have a feeling you can run Fischer-Tropch on a smaller scale than what you'd build on land... and anyway, fitting a 10-story industrial structure inside an aircraft carrier is not as unreasonable as you might think: those suckers are HUGE.
As for patents, you'd have to be careful not to infringe on recent work, but the basic patent for Fischer-Tropch is well over 100 years old, and long since expired.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree absolutely. A diploma is not a piece of paper you paid $100,000 (or whatever) for: it's a guarantee by the college that you have mastered certain skills which employers find useful.
If a college cannot believably make that guarantee, they shouldn't be offering degrees, and shouldn't be accredited.
In short:
online courseware + diploma mill =/= college.
Homeschooling can be effective. However, it can be horribly bad too. Me, I'll go by results.
Hey homeschooling parents! I'm a college professor. I'd be happy to have your wunderkind in my classes. Just make sure he shows up with 650 or better on all sections of the SAT, and can write an engaging essay.
If he can do that, I don't care if he's public, private, homeschooled, or raised by wolves. Welcome to college!
If he can't, since you claim he's a brilliant child, his academic failure is your fault. He should sue your ass, and personally I think the State should consider prosecuting you for criminal neglect.
So those are the stakes. Are you in or out?
Wow. Talk about a lack of vision. If you've got a precise identification of a pain gene and a sequence of it, you're on the path to identifying the protein it makes and then finding chemicals that bind to that protein, affecting its function.
Who gives a damn about humanely slaughtering cows? This is the starting point to the perfect medication for patients with debilitating chronic pain. It might also be the starting point to drugged-up super-soldiers and, if you can find drugs that turn *on* the pain protein rather than deactivate it, the perfect torture drug.
It's a mixed bag to be sure, but if your imagination is limited to cows, you're not thinking hard enough.
Yes, but neither genetics nor lasers have lead to totally new patterns of living, in the way the automobile, electric power, and electronic communications have.
Anyway, I'm not arguing that life's been boring since 1960 -- though TFA is. I'm saying that 1880-1960 was *especially* interesting.
Yes, but at issue isn't just whether there's more progress now than in the past, but whether it *feels* like it. I doubt you could find a rational measure of "progress" that indicates a true decline. But anticipatory vaporware does lower the future shock value of the real thing.
I have no problem with one person experiencing the joy of going to Mars while the rest of us stay home, so long as that one person paid for it himself.
Yes, I deliberately overstated my original post, and you're right that people do appreciate exploration more when there's a person involved, even if the scientific benefit is negligible.
I was once a huge manned spaceflight proponent, but I learned a huge lesson from the Pathfinder and MER missions: humans like it when exploration is done by people, but they're very flexible about the definition of "people". If you build a robot with good sensors and mobility, on a human scale, people will anthropomorphize the crap out of it. They will cheer for its successes, worry over its problems, idolize and even come to love it. We love those "plucky" Mars rovers almost as much as we loved Neil Armstrong.
And Neil's a whole lot more expensive.
The dates listed in the article, 1880-1960, are telling. They correspond to what I call the Age of Electricity. At the start of this period, electric and magnetic forces became well-understood from a physics perspective; by the end of it, we had mastered electrical engineering.
It's not every day that humanity figures out how to use a new fundamental force: after all, there are only four of them. Electricity allows totally new paradigms for energy transmission and communications. It took 80 years to work through the consequences, but I think that even millennia from now it'll stand apart as a singular moment in human history, even more of a big deal than the mastery of fire.
the technology itself had largely been anticipated
True, but it's worth pointing out that one of the great inventions of 1880-1960 was science fiction.(*) There were a lot more people getting paid to anticipate the future in 1969 than in 1880.
(*) Blah blah Mary Shelley Jules Verne yeah yeah whatever.
Are you sure about this? Trusting our fate to a rocket we hardly know? The Hill will not approve.
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
No, but it *is* about the same as looking at someone else's holiday photos.
Don't forget the #1 rule of manned space flight: *you* don't get to go. And if you're stuck on earth, does it really matter if the pictures you're looking at were taken by man or machine?
This is one of those typical popular science articles which totally mixed up the actual present-day achievement with a grandiose vision of the future, so the reader gets a giant dose of future shock when it's not called for.
Look carefully at what's actually built. A tiny vibrating bit of metal with a touch switch. It *looks* like a little bug, but its robotic capabilities are roughly equal to that of a a doorbell.
If the vibrating legs work as claimed, it can move in an uncontrolled, hopefully straight, path. It can't turn. Its only sensor feedback is a single touch switch.
People talk a lot about "emergent systems", but the individual elements need a certain level of complexity for it to work. A pile of paperclips will never get up and walk around, no matter how big a pile you make.
IMO, these microbots don't have enough different physical inputs (sensors) and outputs (actuators) to do anything exciting. Notice what's *not* in the article: no videos of the robots doing anything. The rest of the article is just vision and vapor.
I admit that some of my bias is political. This is irrelevant to the scientific issue, but present nonetheless. But politics aside, when China puts a man on the moon, I will be cheering.
But I stand by what I said, there is a difference in focus. China's future space plans (going by Wikipedia here, sorry) seem to focus on manned missions to orbit, space stations, and a manned moon expedition. They've got a robotic mission to lunar orbit finished, but have no concrete plans for robotic rovers or landers that I can see. Planetary exploration is mentioned, but only vaguely.
In contrast, India is working on manned missions, but they're already working on a robotic lunar rover, and are starting to plan for a robotic Mars mission.
I personally believe that the U.S. space program is too focused on manned spaceflight, so that's why I'm cheering extra hard for India's robots.
Melting a half cm of snow will still cost hundreds of dollars of electricity per km (more if the air is well below freezing), a job that can be done perfectly easily with a couple bucks worth of road salt.
Oh, god, I just realized another reason roadbed solar is a bad idea. Road salt. Electrical wiring under the roadbed. *shudder*...
Before this thread fills up completely with cynical wisecracking Americans, let me be the first to say, as a cynical wisecracking American, go India!
Seriously. You guys have a very solid set of rockets, a good broad focus (China's too focused on manned missions), and the technical skills to make it happen.
See you at Jupiter someday!
Hay guys, I found some nice desert land to put some solar panels on. Lots of nice flat areas, clear skies, and the best bit, it's got power lines running to it already!
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.868144,-118.22647&z=14&t=h&hl=en
I'll take armchair scientists shooting down an experiment over armchair reality TV fans smiling and nodding.
People here may be cynical and underinformed, but at least they're trying to *analyze* the news they hear rather than sitting back with slack jaws, nodding and trusting the boffins.
Slashdot sucks, but it's better than the alternative.
In addition to all the engineering nightmare problems people have already mentioned...
You replace your car tires every few years because the rubber has worn off, right? Well, where did the rubber go? You smeared it all over the highway. A lot of it turns into fine dust, but some of it gets literally welded onto the road surface, even in normal driving when you're not skidding or burning rubber.
All that black rubber is covering the road. The dust filters into the cracks and crevices that allow the road to grip tires in wet weather. The smeared tire goo sticks to everything. If you've ever seen a concrete highway roadbed after a year or two of heavy use, it's covered in black grime.
One of the biggest problems people have been having with rooftop solar panels in long-term use is keeping them clean. They get dusty, birds poop on them, etc., lowering the efficiency dramatically. Highways make rooftops look as clean as a hospital in comparison.
That said, this looks like a good use of $100K. That's chump change for government research. Have these guys make a roadway solar panel, stick it in a real roadway for a year or two, and see what happens.
I'm willing to pay $100K of government money to put a bad idea to bed.
It's better to do something than to sit around. But it's better to sit around than to do something stupid.
Two shipwrecked dudes are sitting on an island. There's a coconut palm. One sits on the beach, hungry, looking out for a passing ship. The other climbs the tree to get some coconuts. Mmm, coconuts. Smart move, tree climbing guy.
Now, same situation. One guy watches for passing ships. The other guy flaps his arm real hard trying to fly up to the top of the tree. Now who's the smart one?
Solar roadways are like the guy trying to fly to coconuts. Compared to our other locations for solar power (rooftops, for instance), highways are the worst possible location. They're filthy, load-bearing, wet, freezing, hot, and occasionally subject to violent impact. It's enough to make a mechanical engineer cry.
Black asphalt converts all absorbed sunlight to heat and then releases it over time, while the solar panels would only release 85%. The only way the solar panels would be better at melting snow is if you could pump energy back through them to warm them up.
And even if you *did* pump all the electricity generated by the panels back into them, it would add up to exactly as much as the asphalt is already absorbing. The only way to melt snow *more* than asphalt is to pump extra electricity in from a nearby power plant. We could do that now, but we don't, because it's ridiculously expensive.
(I estimate the cost to melt 10 cm of snow or 1 cm of solid ice off a roadway 50 m wide and 1 km long to be about $5000.)
"After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks"
I have the same problem anytime I try to do anything involving Linux and hardware, and after years and years of this sort of thing I got fed up and switched back to Mac.
I know Linux is inherently better from a software freedom perspective. I know it has an uphill battle because of limited support from hardware vendors, unlike Windows. I know they're limited by not having control over the hardware like Apple. This is Slashdot heresy, but quite frankly, I DON'T CARE. I want a computer that does the right thing without being asked, without having to spend days searching forums for answers, without having to learn cryptic kernel commands.
Does that mean I should hand in my geek badge and go home? Maybe, but quite frankly, I'd rather spend my time doing geeky things that I want to do, rather than geeky things that my computer forces me to deal with.
A) your comparison between real life execution and losing your account in a video game made me throw up a little bit.
B) You want to add an interesting new "fugitive" mechanic to the game, which requires players to abuse the game to experience? And you think this will *reduce* game abuse? You have a lot to learn about MMOs, my friend.
-1, pedantic.
Energy density! Energy density of gasoline is about 40,000 kilojoules/kg. Energy density of modern flywheels (http://www.mpoweruk.com/alternatives.htm) can reach 1000 kJ/kg.
You need forty times the mass of flywheels to store the same amount of energy.
"Make your opponent run out of aviation fuel" was the basic strategy used to win World War II in both the European and Pacific theaters.
Dangit, accidentally posted as Coward. The parent's author is the same as the great-grandparent.
No, the navy will be making fuel on land.
But if you're on land, you've got plenty of more convenient sources of CO2 than seawater. The details of the design described here sound like a seagoing facility to me.
Howver, to do this, the navy's going to need some serious partnership[s and licence agreements with Doty Energy or i think might face some legal action... They've got 60+ patents on this process...
Hadn't heard of Doty Energy before. I have a feeling you can run Fischer-Tropch on a smaller scale than what you'd build on land... and anyway, fitting a 10-story industrial structure inside an aircraft carrier is not as unreasonable as you might think: those suckers are HUGE.
As for patents, you'd have to be careful not to infringe on recent work, but the basic patent for Fischer-Tropch is well over 100 years old, and long since expired.