Doesn't anyone respect the field of software engineering?
No - and for damm good reason.
I would like to see a bunch of dummies come in off the street and put chemical processing equipment together.
When I hire a chemical engineer - he can do his job without a bunch of buzzwords and handwaving that obscures the reality of what he is doing. That is not true of software engineers. When I hire a chemical engineer - he is more interested in delivering an operable product rather than insisting that [his favorite|the 'latest'] technology be used. That is not true of software engineers. When I hire a chemical engineer, he can provide a spec, and a budget, and a time frame - and have a reasonable chance of hitting those targets. That is not true of software engineers.
In fact, the same is true of virtually every field of engineering except software engineers.
When software 'engineers' can behave like professionals - they'll get respect. Not one minute before.
I've tried Google Maps looking at where I live. I prefer http://www.zillow.com/ which is tens of times better in resolution.
Fascinating. It's got *both* my property line and tax valuation wrong. (Both of which are correct on the County website - and the property line hasn't moved in 90 years....)
If Google (or any philanthropist) wants to really help a poor country, persuading them to depose their theocratic / despotic / fascist / socialist / puppet Governments and replace them with a constitutionally-bound Republic would be a good start.
Don't make me laugh. This country is hardly an example of stablism. We've been around for barely over 200 years, and it amuses me everytime someone thinks we should go "convert" another country to our preferred governmental system.
Given that there is no other goverment *older* than the 220 years our system has lasted... (The British system as currently constituted is about 60 odd years younger, or much less than that given the changes to the role of the House of Lords in the last 60 years.)
If you believe that a "constitutionally-bound Republican government" will end suffering and poverty, I recommend you descend from your ivory tower and walk among the ghettos and homeless shelters of your local city sometime. That you visit some truly poor and struggling families. The belief that education and democracy will end the world's problems is stereotypically naive American thinking.
And now, as Paul Harvey says, for the rest of the story - the part you won't tell because it's inconvient to your thesis. The groups you list are a minority of the US population, and they have a chance to break themselves of that state if they so choose.
A stable monarchy would be a better choice. You will still end up with different social strata (ruling class, middle class, poor class---you are fooling yourself if you believe these do not exist in a republic), but the poorest will be in general better off.
There is not one single historical monarchy where the poor were better off than the poor in the US today. Not one. (One feature of a 'classed' society, unlike the classless one of the US, is that the poor have virtually no rights and no oppurtunities.)
Constantly increasing shareholder value is usually assumed to be the only purpose of a corporation,
It's not an assumption - it's the law that a corporations first and only priority is to protect shareholder value. Shareholders can and have, in the past, kicked out CEO's and gotten settlements from companies who fail to do so.
Every shareholder of Google is aware of this and concedes to it by means of choosing to own their Google stock up to and including today.
The only shareholders that matters is the tiny group that holds voting stock - I.E. Google's inner circle. (None of that stock has been sold to the public, only non-voting stock.) Thus, the consent and awareness of the great majority of the shareholders is moot - they have no rights and no say. (Which is, among other reasons, why I don't hold any GOOG in my portfolio.)
I think the real problem with the GPS systems is placement. We rented a car with GPS Nav recently, and it was infinately more dangerous for me to use while driving then either my handheld GPS, or a map which I could unfold on the steering wheel only to the part I need.
One of the more interesting items from my map collection is one from the 1920's - a plastic envelope with one clear side and ribbons running from each corner. You simply folded the map to display the part you needed, inserted it into the envelope, and used the ribbons to tie the whole affair in the center of your steering wheel.
I would have to say that the negatives of the GPS system are FAR outweighed by the positives.
What positives can possibly outweigh the potential to maim or kill another human being because you [the generic you, not the OP] are distracted by your shiny gadget?
You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place.
If you understood the Wikipedia Way, you would understand why that assertion is a strawman.
It's a basic assertion, repeated again and again, that errors [in the 'pedia] don't survive any length of time.
It's a stone cold fact that they do - by the thousands and tens and of thousands. But each time it's pointed out - 'pedia boosters just bury their heads in the sand and wish and handwave that inconvienent fact away.
Radio Shack went downhill when they made Cellphone and Satellite TV service their primary sales vehicles. They ought to get back to their roots...providing components for tinkerers.
The problems is; what made Radio Shack large wasn't components - it was consumer electronics.
What killed Radio Shack was twofold 1) the decision to move from a franchise based organization to one consisting of only of company owned stores and 2) the decision to narrowly focus on toys and cellphones.
I know this has been a huge plug for Make Magazine...but for goodness sake, when I used to need some obscure part, I knew it could be had cheaply at the Shack...now you have to order a lot of parts.
Make Magazine post dates the changes at the Shack by over a decade. (Make magazine is barely a year old, the Shack changed it's policies nearly fifteen years ago.)
"From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia..."
There is no such article. Try again. The closest that WP comes is the highly contested Poverty in Africa which carefully warns its readers at the top that it is under dispute, and even that article makes no such claim.
But, even though that sentence is rubbish, it's also abundantly clear what is meant. High cereal prices exacerbated the food shortage caused by the drought.
By no possible standard reading of the English lanquage can that sentence be interpreted that way. None.
So, there are two responses : i) correct the sentence so that it reflects the intended meaning [needless to say, someone has already done this].
You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place. This basic error in logic has persisted for over a month.
ii) generalise from this mistake into a lengthy diatribe about the inaccuracy of Wikipedia, pretending there exist infallible sources of information elsewhere.
Had the grandparent post mentioned anything about other sources - you'd have a point. But he didn't. Instead, just like with i), you simply cut and paste the standard Wikipedia cheerleader strawmen - without actually reading and thinking about what he wrote.
The fact is, he isn't generalizing from a single mistake - tens of thousands of mistakes just like it exist all across the Wikipedia. I find at least half a dozen every time I do a random browse across the 'pedia on topics that interest me. (In fact, it's why I stopped editing the 'pedia - I got tired of fixing minor mistakes, again, and again, and again. Not to mention the reversion of re-written and corrected articles back to their faulty states.)
Give me your thoughts on the plan. this is a rough draft, obviously, and I hope that others more knowledgable than me can make corrections where applicable.
I couldn't come up with something more clueless if I drank all the alchohol I've drunk over the past thirty years in a single night.
I have noticed that when I take on too many part time coding projects, I get none of them done right. I have a limit amount of personal coding time (maybe 1 day a week total) and working 1 hour on each of my projects doesn't get me very far on any of them. I do them all half-assed or never even complete them. This is what I see happening with NASA.
On the other hand, I can get a lot done if I just focus on 2 projects or 3 at the most. Focus all my free coding time and energy on the 2 or 3 that I have time to do. This way I actually do a good job on the few things I do pursue, and I actually finish up on them.
The problem with that thesis is this; NASA is a large organization, you are an individual. You are comparing an apple to thousands of square miles of orange groves.
I think this is what gave NASA its early successes. They focused and pushed in specific directions.. that and they had a lot more money back then.
The problem with that thesis is this; NASA is no busier now than it was at any earlier period in it's history.
I wonder if NASA would be better to slim down and focus on two or three goals and and drop everything else. Put it on their todo list, but not actually work on it, till higher priority goals are met. They have a severe shortage of resources, and they aren't the most efficient at using them (being a government agency after all), they could slim down and use all their resources to accomplish a smaller set of goals..
The problem with that thesis is this; NASA doesn't have a fixed pool of resources they can allocate as they decide. Funding, and allocation, comes from Congress. If NASA cancels a project, then Congress just allocates the money elsewhere. (By rough calculation; $.75 on social spending, $.20 for the DoD and $.10 for everything else in the goverment for every dollar not spent by NASA.)
For instance, if NASA took on a task similar to putting a man on the moon. Say.. putting a man on mars.. or putting a base on the moon. Pick one, and dedicate all their research towards it. I think something like this would excite the public more, and perhaps even get more funding.
The problem with that thesis is this; for any given problem 'x', at *least* three quarters of NASA's existing personell and facilities are completely unsuitable for providing any meaningful assistance to that problem.
We used to think it would be the Russians. Little did we know how far China would come in 60 years. When you consider it took the United States approximately 7 years to go from the Mercury program to the Apollo program then the launch of Chinese men into orbit is at the Mercury stage.
Indeed - and they've taken ten years to accomplish what we (the US) accomplished in two during Mercury. But then, the Chinese have made it abundantly clear that they aren't in a race or a rush.
When looking at that we could estimate that China will reach the moon by 2012. And do not think for one moment that Chinese didn't learn from our Apollo and Shuttle programs. I think they'll be looking to put down a manned presence just to thumb their noses at the rest of the western world.
I don't think so. Simple observation, along with the statements of the Chinese show why they have the token program they do: because manned spaceflight (along with ICBM's, CV_'s, and a few other bits and bobs) are What Great Nations Have. They aren't in a race, they aren't looking to set records, they aren't seeking to be top dog - all of those things are ascribed to them, but there is no evidence supporting those assumptions.
Space Adventures has been shopping this craft around for something like five years - routinely announcing a new set of partners and that a first flight is expected 'soon'. Pretty much like anyone else associated with the Russian space program, their main business seems to be not flying - but generating press releases and power points about thier Brave New Future.
As a related matter, I've found myself wondering why encrypted email has not become far more popular - or encrypted IM for that matter.
Because most folks don't have anything to hide - and don't feel like adding another program/step/complication to their email in order to make a political statement that nobody will hear anyhow.
This would be fucking great for fish farms. Fisheries generate a lot of crap-filled water that generally gets pumped into (and pollutes) a local river.
Not really. First you have to obtain electricity from somewhere in order to operate the device - thus generating pollution above and beyond the original. Secondly - you still have to dispose of the (now concentrated) sludge somewhere.
New technologies that could have been developed to get science packages off the ground and into space faster and cheaper get lost because there's no push for more advanced vehicles and technology.
Care to name some of those technologies? (I bet you can't - because there aren't any. Reducing the cost of spaceflight isn't about technology - it's about design and manufacturing and operations.)
I don't know about anyone else, but I pray for the day when science packages based on reconfigurable standard designs can be simply and inexpensively launched from a space station. (A la Star Trek probes.)
It's been tried in real life - and it doesn't work. There are simply too many different enviroments in the Solar System, and too many different instruments that need to be flown. (It's also been tried for satellites that stay in Earth orobit - didn't work there either.)
The mass production would allow us to launch more probes for less, and the orbital launch would save tens of millions on each probe.
Mass production means hundreds or thousands - a number of probes we'll never need. The investment to get to that rate will never be paid back. The main cost of planetary probes isn't the probe itself at any rate - it's the ground operations and science.
There are a number of things TFA doesn't tell you, or misleads you about.
1) The Climate Prediction experiment has been going on for several years now, first as a standalone application (like Seti@home), and now as both as a BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) application.
2) There are multiple BOINC [distributed computing] projects with greater than 10,000 users (see here, and here.) - thus even if the BBC meets it's goal of 10k users, it will still be far from the largest.
As for other resources, petrol is probably the biggest concern, bar none. It's the only material that we can't recycle, replace with nuclear power, sythesize, or mine from elsewhere in our solar system.
Petrol (gasoline) can easily be replaced by alternate power sources powering electrical or hydrogen cars. (Ditto for all the other uses of fossil fuels for heat.)
The big and rarely discussed impact of peak oil isn't going to be heat fuel at all - it's petrochemicals. Plastics, drugs, fertilizers... Each and every one of us probably has the equivalent of a barrel or more of oil within a few yards in these forms. Your average [Wal-Mart|huge big box retail chain] all by itself contains a non-trivial fraction of a tanker's load in these forms.
I was on digg earlier, (sorry/.) and was seriously taken aback by the ignorance of the geek masses there. I never thought someone who spends time looking at cutting edge science would have problems concieving of the validity of the space elevator.
When you look at cutting edge science - it becomes extremely easy to doubt the validity.
The tensile strength of the filament has been built to about 1/3 the necessary strength in less than 3 years.
Not only is it 1/3 of the required strength - that strength is for tiny fibers. Tiny fibers which we don't yet know how to produce in kiloton quantities that a space elevator will require. (Let alone convert the kilotons of fibers into thousands of miles of ribbon.)
A method is in process to produce the filament en-mass when it gets up to strength,
The 'method' is a theoretical one based on the assumed properties of the hypothetical full strength fibers. (There are many unanswered questions about the design of the ribbon - questions that cannot be answered until we have full strength materials to work with.)
every aspect of the project is being chipped away at relentlessly (and with notable progress).
No one denies that there has been a lot of progress in some areas - but only a fool denies that there are still a lot of big showstoppers that haven't been solved. Only a bigger fool thinks that this project is unlike any other attempted by Man in that there are no unknowns as yet undiscovered.
These people are serious. check before scoffing.
Being serious doesn't equate to being close, let alone being sucessful.
I don't know what the actual expected speeds will be, but I don't think that anything over 100 mph will be practical in the atmosphere due to wind resistance.
Never mind the fact that a large variety of things travel much faster with no appreciable resistance problem.
And once you get out of the atmosphere, you have no easy way of dissipating the heat from friction.
On the contrary - radiatior panels are old technology.
The Gulf Stream is not some huge tide-like current hundreds of kilometers wide, instead it's typically only a kilometer or two wide. Indeed if you fly over it (I have a number of times) it appears as a clearly defined 'river', of a much different color then it's surrounding waters, with large swirls & eddies sometimes breaking off of it, cutting through the otherwise featureless ocean.
You confuse what you see (or think you see) with what is actually there. When you actually navigate (submerged) through the Gulf Stream (as I have many times), you find that it *is* in fact tens of kilometers wide.
It's nice that they [Newegg] have wicked cool facility, but if you really want to see some supply chain stuff in action, visit Wal-mart. Now you can order any thing off the Walmart web site and have it delivered free to your local Walmart. Show me how those orders are processed, and as much as I hate Walmart, you'll definitely have my attention.
Wal-mart has pretty much the same setup as in the article. As does Amazon. As does pretty much any other large mail/net store, or heck - any brick and mortar store, that handles large volumes on a JIT or nearly JIT basis.
In fact - the warehouse in the article is pretty much bog standard nowadays.
The only way someone that scared would be able to do anything in that situation is if they had been subject to operant conditioning. They would need to program the soldier's midbrain to fire the weapon, since the forebrain is no longer in use under that much stress. They began to make training as realistic as possible in terms of exposure to violence, and make the thought/action of killing part of a soldier's reflex, so that when the bullets started flying, the American soldier would respond.
They do the same thing over on the strategic side of the house, (I was a Trident missile firecontrolman). We ran count, after count, after count - the whole goal being to burn the sequence into our brains so that when the real thing came, we'd not freeze or think.
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In fact, the same is true of virtually every field of engineering except software engineers.
When software 'engineers' can behave like professionals - they'll get respect. Not one minute before.
It's a stone cold fact that they do - by the thousands and tens and of thousands. But each time it's pointed out - 'pedia boosters just bury their heads in the sand and wish and handwave that inconvienent fact away.
What killed Radio Shack was twofold 1) the decision to move from a franchise based organization to one consisting of only of company owned stores and 2) the decision to narrowly focus on toys and cellphones.
Make Magazine post dates the changes at the Shack by over a decade. (Make magazine is barely a year old, the Shack changed it's policies nearly fifteen years ago.)[snippage the usual Wikipedia cheerleader rhetoric by the OP.]
The fact is, he isn't generalizing from a single mistake - tens of thousands of mistakes just like it exist all across the Wikipedia. I find at least half a dozen every time I do a random browse across the 'pedia on topics that interest me. (In fact, it's why I stopped editing the 'pedia - I got tired of fixing minor mistakes, again, and again, and again. Not to mention the reversion of re-written and corrected articles back to their faulty states.)
Of course, this very article - with hardly a coherent paragraph, shows the trend clealy.
Space Adventures has been shopping this craft around for something like five years - routinely announcing a new set of partners and that a first flight is expected 'soon'. Pretty much like anyone else associated with the Russian space program, their main business seems to be not flying - but generating press releases and power points about thier Brave New Future.
There are a number of things TFA doesn't tell you, or misleads you about.
1) The Climate Prediction experiment has been going on for several years now, first as a standalone application (like Seti@home), and now as both as a BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) application.
2) There are multiple BOINC [distributed computing] projects with greater than 10,000 users (see here, and here.) - thus even if the BBC meets it's goal of 10k users, it will still be far from the largest.
The big and rarely discussed impact of peak oil isn't going to be heat fuel at all - it's petrochemicals. Plastics, drugs, fertilizers... Each and every one of us probably has the equivalent of a barrel or more of oil within a few yards in these forms. Your average [Wal-Mart|huge big box retail chain] all by itself contains a non-trivial fraction of a tanker's load in these forms.
You confuse what you see (or think you see) with what is actually there. When you actually navigate (submerged) through the Gulf Stream (as I have many times), you find that it *is* in fact tens of kilometers wide.
In fact - the warehouse in the article is pretty much bog standard nowadays.