No, they DON'T have the money to throw away. The US space program (the best in the world) has serious money troubles. They are attempting to hold together a serious program by going for the cheaper, lighter technologies (such as this aerobraking) which is fine and good, but the fact remains that the program has been basically gutted ever since the moon flights.
This is deeply sad, in my opinion. What we really need is a shuttle Mark II (that first one is really just a prototype.. a good prototype, but it really needs to get past version 1.1.9.). We need a _real_ space station. We need a program that lets us start mining asteroids, so that we don't have to keep lifting every expensive gram of water up to orbit. And, of course, we need a really good Sh*t Recycler (tm). Heck, even/. needs that!
Nah.. wouldn't work. It would be indistiguishable from coroprate self-back-patting.
The thing is, science works by a method of peer review and community respect: your collegues know you do good work because they read it. Software, on the other hand, is not judged at all...
.. except in the Open Source world. Still, I don't think this would work: software either suceeds or fails; the best Open Source stuff simply does it's job well.. it doesn't discover new things.
But all this misses the point. First you need a good name for the prize/magazine. I preferred the 'Journal of Irreproducable Results' to AIR, but that's just me.
A university does not exist to teach you what you want to know. It exists to teach what you SHOULD know. If you don't want to know history, you obviously don't want a complete education. Buy a book and teach yourself, or go to DeVry.
Thinking that university, or any form of education, is a buyer/consumer system is just downright silly, not to mention in conflict with 800 years of tradition.
I could not disagree with this poster more. In short: you have it entirely backwards. University should not teach any of the things you mention, and it should teach many things that you don't.
This is a topic I feel very strongly about. Univerities are schools that are strongly grounded in some very old traditions in education: scientific education, liberal education, and to some degree artistic education.
Many here will be familiar with scientific education. Artisitic education is just that: learning to paint, draw, scuplt, act, or write. Liberal education is the true heart of the university: the studies of history, literature, philosophy, classics, etc, and is by far the most important.
Technical education (writing in C++, database management, finance, etc etc) in my book have small use in a university context. Technical skills can easily be picked up by anyone with half a brain and a book; I'm a fair expert in half a dozen programming languages, all of which I picked up in my spare time.
What it is NOT possible to pick up in your spare time is an apprection for, say, the historical context of anti-American sentiment in the middle east (just to give a topical example). Or metaphysics. Good arguments regarding how government can work, or could work, or should work, and what some of the smartest people of all time thought about it. What it means (historically or philosophically) to be a citizen. How to design an experiment in a tight way, how to argue a position. How to speak, how to ask questions. How to take notes, now to takle complicated problems or compilicated issues.
In fact, the fact that you have raised this question signals to me that you haven't gotten such an education: education itself is something that has been thought about for centuries (N.B the earilest universities were born 1200 AD or thereabouts) and universities, despite constant change, have for the most part failed to adopt this narrow, supply-and-demand model you seem to be thinking in.
Scientific training gives a different set of skills, also valuable, if with a different emphasis. One gets an appreciation for the scientific traditions, the scientific context for the world around us, together with analytical skills and the ability to wield doubt and argument as weapons against the unknown.
Technical skills such as the ones you discuss are important, sure.. but I wouldn't rank them any higher than, for example, knowning how to drive a car or use a library, things that CAN be taught in universities, but should not be the main focus of such education.
This sort of thinking is insane. I know we're all computer geeks of one form or another, but to make the claim that we would rather have more spooks walking around than more spooks listening to our phone lines is pretty silly.
The argument is:
Govn't needs to know stuff, but we don't want them listening to OUR stuff, which they will, because they don't trust them.
But, if they use spies instead, they won't want to listen to our stuff anymore. Nosiree; I can't imagine an FBI/CIA/MI5/(insert TLA here) agent poking his nose into MY business! After all, I don't do anything bad.. why shouldn't I trust them not to spy on me!
I know that electronic surviellance is much more cost-effective and can be used indiscrimantely.. that's it's power. But we don't need to have technology to have a police state.
Incidentally, I can't see any argument about cryptography really going very far; I doubt many people right now really want to talk about technolgical issues.
I wouldn't even go this far. It's quite likely that the IP addresses for the honey machines just got passed along as good places to hit. The intense growth curve they saw looks to me like their names just getting passed around the community, so that eventually every little script kiddie knew about it.
Thus, the '15 minutes until first attack' may be completely false... I'd be intersted to know how their numbers change when they suddenly change all their IP addresses and domain names.
Slashdot Mirror
Or microsloth trademarking the number '486'. Which they attempted to do.
No, they DON'T have the money to throw away. The US space program (the best in the world) has serious money troubles. They are attempting to hold together a serious program by going for the cheaper, lighter technologies (such as this aerobraking) which is fine and good, but the fact remains that the program has been basically gutted ever since the moon flights.
/. needs that!
This is deeply sad, in my opinion. What we really need is a shuttle Mark II (that first one is really just a prototype.. a good prototype, but it really needs to get past version 1.1.9.). We need a _real_ space station. We need a program that lets us start mining asteroids, so that we don't have to keep lifting every expensive gram of water up to orbit. And, of course, we need a really good Sh*t Recycler (tm). Heck, even
Nah.. wouldn't work. It would be indistiguishable from coroprate self-back-patting.
The thing is, science works by a method of peer review and community respect: your collegues know you do good work because they read it. Software, on the other hand, is not judged at all...
.. except in the Open Source world. Still, I don't think this would work: software either suceeds or fails; the best Open Source stuff simply does it's job well.. it doesn't discover new things.
But all this misses the point. First you need a good name for the prize/magazine. I preferred the 'Journal of Irreproducable Results' to AIR, but that's just me.
A university does not exist to teach you what you want to know. It exists to teach what you SHOULD know. If you don't want to know history, you obviously don't want a complete education. Buy a book and teach yourself, or go to DeVry.
Thinking that university, or any form of education, is a buyer/consumer system is just downright silly, not to mention in conflict with 800 years of tradition.
I could not disagree with this poster more. In short: you have it entirely backwards. University should not teach any of the things you mention, and it should teach many things that you don't.
This is a topic I feel very strongly about. Univerities are schools that are strongly grounded in some very old traditions in education: scientific education, liberal education, and to some degree artistic education.
Many here will be familiar with scientific education. Artisitic education is just that: learning to paint, draw, scuplt, act, or write. Liberal education is the true heart of the university: the studies of history, literature, philosophy, classics, etc, and is by far the most important.
Technical education (writing in C++, database management, finance, etc etc) in my book have small use in a university context. Technical skills can easily be picked up by anyone with half a brain and a book; I'm a fair expert in half a dozen programming languages, all of which I picked up in my spare time.
What it is NOT possible to pick up in your spare time is an apprection for, say, the historical context of anti-American sentiment in the middle east (just to give a topical example). Or metaphysics. Good arguments regarding how government can work, or could work, or should work, and what some of the smartest people of all time thought about it. What it means (historically or philosophically) to be a citizen. How to design an experiment in a tight way, how to argue a position. How to speak, how to ask questions. How to take notes, now to takle complicated problems or compilicated issues.
In fact, the fact that you have raised this question signals to me that you haven't gotten such an education: education itself is something that has been thought about for centuries (N.B the earilest universities were born 1200 AD or thereabouts) and universities, despite constant change, have for the most part failed to adopt this narrow, supply-and-demand model you seem to be thinking in.
Scientific training gives a different set of skills, also valuable, if with a different emphasis. One gets an appreciation for the scientific traditions, the scientific context for the world around us, together with analytical skills and the ability to wield doubt and argument as weapons against the unknown.
Technical skills such as the ones you discuss are important, sure.. but I wouldn't rank them any higher than, for example, knowning how to drive a car or use a library, things that CAN be taught in universities, but should not be the main focus of such education.
Higher education is just that: higher.
This sort of thinking is insane. I know we're all computer geeks of one form or another, but to make the claim that we would rather have more spooks walking around than more spooks listening to our phone lines is pretty silly.
The argument is:
Govn't needs to know stuff, but we don't want them listening to OUR stuff, which they will, because they don't trust them.
But, if they use spies instead, they won't want to listen to our stuff anymore. Nosiree; I can't imagine an FBI/CIA/MI5/(insert TLA here) agent poking his nose into MY business! After all, I don't do anything bad.. why shouldn't I trust them not to spy on me!
I know that electronic surviellance is much more cost-effective and can be used indiscrimantely.. that's it's power. But we don't need to have technology to have a police state.
Incidentally, I can't see any argument about cryptography really going very far; I doubt many people right now really want to talk about technolgical issues.
I wouldn't even go this far. It's quite likely that the IP addresses for the honey machines just got passed along as good places to hit. The intense growth curve they saw looks to me like their names just getting passed around the community, so that eventually every little script kiddie knew about it. Thus, the '15 minutes until first attack' may be completely false... I'd be intersted to know how their numbers change when they suddenly change all their IP addresses and domain names.