The question I would ask is how this thing is powered. Are you going to have to walk around with a giant electrical cord? Is it battery powered? Fuel? How long can this thing go before it runs out of power and you're trapped midway with hundreds of pounds in your arm? Unless there has been some massive, miraculous leap in energy storage technology, my guess is that our friend HAL is still just a novelty toy at this point.
Here's a quick one from an interview on NPR with Walter Mooney of the US Geological Survey. He basically said that scientists had aggressively researched the radon emissions theory a few decades back but the data proved no correlation. Another article from the LA Times interview with Tom Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, and principal investigator on the international Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability. Both gentlemen essentially say that the approach used by Giuliani is not at all a reliable indicator for earthquake predictions.
From the article: Interest in radon as an earthquake signal peaked in the 1970s in California, said Susan Hough, who serves as scientist in charge at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena and is writing a book on earthquake prediction. In 1979, for instance, scientists at Caltech and other institutions said they found changes in gas levels in Southern California wells right before earthquakes in Malibu and Big Bear that year.
"The whole thing deflated when the places where they had detected [radon] had no earthquakes and earthquakes happened in different areas," Hough said.
Boeing's Connexion failed in large part because of bad luck. They introduced their Connexion service back in summer 2001 with large launch customers such as American, Delta, and United Airlines. Unfortunately a few months later you had 9/11 which financially crippled nearly every domestic American airline and brought deep-sixed Connexion's entire business plan. The company struggled to keep it viable for a while, but the small number of foreign airlines and shipping companies wasn't enough; they needed large airlines with heavy business traffic to keep the program viable.
You actually have a lot of different options depending on your current university and future employer.
Based on what you've posted, I'm going to assume that you have no intention of being a college professor or a theoretical researcher. What you're probably looking for then is a terminal masters.
With regards to the CS/IT issue, I would go for the CS degree. It may not be right, but you can always score an IT job with a CS degree; the same can't be said though for getting a serious coding job with an IT degree. You can also get a respectable CS masters degree without having to delve too deeply into the research with a good professional degree. Many universities have this option, and if you have no plans for academia, its a reasonable approach.
If your university offers you the opportunity to get an accelerated BS/MS program, that may be a pretty good option. Several universities offer you the chance to accelerate the process by taking some graduate school courses that satisfy both BS and MS requirements with the hope of getting both in five years. This is a perfectly reasonable option.
An alternative is to get a professional degree, basically a non-thesis masters degree. Since you appear to have no intention of going into advanced research or academia, this would be a solid option and spare you the trouble of having to complete a thesis. Unless you're applying for a research position, many companies will treat an MS and a non-thesis masters about equal.
Personally, I think that a masters in computer science is a perfectly reasonable way of strengthening your resume, particularly if you go for a professional degree without having to deal with a thesis. A lot of large companies treat masters as two or three years of industry experience when you apply for work.
With regards to academic inbreeding, it won't be as big an issue with a terminal masters as long as you come out of a program with a solid reputation.
I would recommend against getting an MBA straight out of undegrad. You will get a lot more out of your MBA program if you go into it after having a few years of industrial experience; many of the things you learn will make a lot more sense after having worked on a few large proejcts and seeing the business aspect first hand. Also, there's nothing wrong with getting an MBA after you get a masters in your technical field.
The irony is that this wasn't the product of the previous, socially conservative Howard government but is instead the product of a left-leaning coalition between Labor and the Greens. True, you do have your single "Family First Party" senator who apparently helped drive this effort, but he alone couldn't have done this alone. Both the members of the Greens and Labor had to be complicit in bringing such a large and crazy scheme forward. As mentioned by someone else, simply blaming Family First is a cop-out; the real villains are the members of the Rudd government who are allowing this sort of drastic plan to move forward.
This serves as a good reminder that even "socially liberal" parties are still just as prone to censorship as their "socially conservative" counterparts.
The reason is because only the military has the money to afford a product like this so early in the development cycle. If this were a civilian product, it would probably be another twenty years for the production costs to reach a point where civilians could afford it. However, for something that's so cutting edge, only the military has the money to afford a product still in prototype.
Believe me, being the good capitalists they are, I'm sure that Lockheed and its partners for this product are already planning on how to sell this to construction companies, medical purposes, etc. Its just that only the military is willing to cough up the insane amounts of capital at this point to get this thing from cocktail napkin to prototype, and these companies are catering to them at this point.
I think the issue isn't a label of Communist or Socialist but association with authoritarianism and anti-Western alignment. Then again, while it may be offensive to Americans and perhaps some members of the Western-bloc, on the flip side, it may become the label of choice for those who seek an alternative to the West.
My concern isn't that these governments are using this software but what they'll require packaged with the distribution.
There's no market for supersonic aircraft at this time. Boeing tested the market for one back at the beginning of this decade, and the response they got was lukewarm at best. Their decision to go with the 787 instead of the Sonic Cruiser is a reflection of shifting global needs: they don't want faster, they want more efficient.
Besides, there were a ton of issues with supersonic aircraft on the environmental front, particularly with noise and emissions.
Confucianism is SQL: highly relational, practiced as a secondary with other languages from LISP to Java and almost never practiced by itself, and continuously debated on whether or not its actually a programming language.
If that's the case, then what was the purpose of the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) that we built in Colorado back in the 1970s? Sure, its budget was gutted back during the Reagan years, but to say that we haven't had any national lab assets focused on renewable energy is misleading. Don't get me wrong, I applaud Chu's dedication to the cause of renewable energy at LBL, but saying that DoE hasn't been focused on this issue is an insult to the good work that NREL scientists have been doing for the last three decades.
Sorry, being born on American soil is hardly a good indicator of loyalty. After all, the most damaging of American spies in recent history weren't foreign immigrants from Asia but Caucasian, American-born males from the heartland. People like Robert Hanssen of Chicago or Aldrich Ames of River Falls, Wisconsin.
Agreed. Even in "corporate" environments, its amazing how the management is willing to help if you can show a real charity that can make good use of surplus merchandise and equipment. The tax write off and the publicity gained with a little bit of spin also provide added incentives that the corporate types will understand.
This should hardly be a surprise to anyone; the United States government already has functioning platforms. Just this month, the Boeing Company test fired a fully working prototype of its Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), a C-130 with a high-energy chemical laser on a rotating turret mounted on the belly of the plane. I don't know if it was a full powered shot, but the press releases indicate that it successfully hit a ground target. Then there's the larger Airborne Laser (ABL), an even bigger laser mounted on a 747 used to shoot down ballistic missiles.
Given that this was the video going out on the international stream, perhaps the issue here is that foreign media didn't bother informing their viewers. Can any non-American Slashdotters confirm that their own national broadcasts made this distinction? I clearly remember that the US broadcasters clearly pointed out that these were animated fireworks, even giving the name of the person who created the animation, and then remembering how fake they looked.
Perhaps the real issue here isn't the dishonesty of the American press but the dishonesty, ignorance, or laziness of non-American broadcasters. This story is after all presented in a UK newspaper.
Not a bad idea on paper, but the Indian Reservations probably have just as equally complex of a regulatory framework as publicly owned lands. There are complex laws about certain percentages of construction labor being from particular tribes, archaeological sites, etc. that can hobble a project in some deep red tape or cripple the engineering pool they can use to build the project.
It's more than just grass and whatnot though. The southwest desert is a vibrant and complex ecosystem with plenty of threatened and endangered species ranging from mojave ground squirrels to about a dozen species of cactus. Toss in Native American archaeological sites and tightly stretched water resources, and what we have is these solar projects running up against the byzantine maze of environmental and land management regulations that have bedeviled a variety of construction projects for decades.
To put it in perspective, it takes over a year to conduct environmental and archaeological studies just to throw up a dozen microwave relay towers. I've seen tens of thousands of dollars charged to just move a single endangered cactus. Now imagine how much more complicated it would be if you were going to set up a massive array of mirrors, transmission lines, and a steam turbine that draws water from an overtapped aquifer.
I suppose you could try and argue that these solar plants are answering a more dire environmental issue that those which these regulations protect and can try to get a waiver, but until Congress makes that decision, the treatment these companies receive is really no different than anyone else who's tried to build out there.
You really have to read the details in order to understand what is being asked here. The survey results show that the content people want controlled are pornography (87%), violent content (86%), spam (83%), advertisements (66%), and slander against individuals (64%). "Politics" came in much lower at 41%, and as the results say, the word they use is not just for raw political power but the more general issue of "public morality and social values." Therefore, the 85% that want greater "censorship" are looking for regulation, not necessarily the silencing of dissidents or censoring critics. This would be similar to the rather strong desire in many Western countries by the general public for greater regulation or policing of the Internet on issues such as identity theft, child pornography, Internet fraud, etc.
The Chinese also naturally go to the government as the first authority to control the Internet because this is the authority that traditionally handles these sorts of issues in Chinese society. Again, given the types of issues that they're primarily concerned with, it's not surprising why they went to the government first.
The Department of Justice has almost 130,000 employees, and as much as some conspiracy theorists would like to believe otherwise, I seriously doubt that they're able to keep track of the individual actions of every single one of them. As even the article has pointed out, these questionable edits are most likely the action of an individual employee making edits on their lunch break, a personal effort instead of an organized one. If this were a coordinated and malicious conspiracy by the government, don't you think they'd be a little more creative in covering their tracks, especially after all the exposure from Wikiscanner last year?
I find the ban on the DoJ's IP address more humorous than anything else. If there's some sort of action in DoJ over the incident, it'll probably be a crackdown on Internet usage for productivity purposes.
As for whether or not "the government" is qualified to edit Wikipedia, who is? Nearly everyone will have some sort of conflict of interest, whether due to their employer, religious creed, or civic affiliation. I don't see why any of over fourteen million Federal civil servants and contractors, let alone the tens of millions of state and local government employees, should be less qualified to edit Wikipedia than any other netizen.
Yes, this initial version doesn't generate a lot of power, but if the military were to actually go through with this plan, it would absorb the initial R&D costs to take orbital solar platforms from scribbles on the back of a cocktail napkin to a real, working prototype. Once the process is proven, then it would be a much smaller economic risk for the private sector to transition the technology to the civilian sector and expand capacity. Very few entities in the United States, let alone the globe, have deep enough pockets to absorb the immense financial risk and ready access to the limited pools of specialized aerospace engineering talent required as the United States military.
Personally, I would rather have the military spending money on technology that has civilian benefits instead of buying yet another set of nuclear weapons.
Agreed. Particularly given the great "success" that Biosphere 2 was, leaving starving scientists at each others' throats while the biosphere around them came to a cataclysmic collapse.
I think you're missing the point that the World Economic Forum was trying to make. Listening to interviews with the co-editors of the report, Soumitra Dutta and Irene Mia, they're referring primarily to the overhead that businesses pay to stay in step with US law. The only significant change in the American business regulatory environment for the last several years is the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the additional regulatory burden that its placed on publicly traded companies. My guess is that they're referring to SOX, adding to the growing chorus among pro-business groups calling for SOX reform or repeal.
I do agree that immigration reform is necessary, but given that the United States has had this problem for years, I can't imagine it resulting in a loss of rank.
Also, the two co-editors made the point that it isn't a matter of the United States sliding, but more that its not growing as rapidly. They still concede that the United States is still the dominant information technology powerhouse in the world with an unrivaled tertiary education system and excellent startup environment. It should also be noted that prior to the 2006 report, the United States was ranked 5 in the 2004-2005 rankings. So a drop in rank this year is hardly a sudden shift in power.
Always room for improvement though.
I second this point. Boeing already did the WiFi for every seat through its now dissolved ConneXions service. The WiFi question was already answered: yes, its possible, but the satellite approach, requiring $100,000 antennas, isn't quite the most economical.
The system mentioned above is as mentioned above for distributing inflight movies and entertainment to the individual units installed at each seat, with the content being distributed from servers aboard the aircraft and not beamed in from satellites or ground stations. The reason that Boeing took this approach was to simplify the wiring job if airlines wanted to reconfigure their seats. I chalk it up to one of those ideas that was good in theory but in practice created more problems than it was worth.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose this secondary patent was found next to the company's patent for an orbital death beam, not that they're all related in any way...
The question I would ask is how this thing is powered. Are you going to have to walk around with a giant electrical cord? Is it battery powered? Fuel? How long can this thing go before it runs out of power and you're trapped midway with hundreds of pounds in your arm? Unless there has been some massive, miraculous leap in energy storage technology, my guess is that our friend HAL is still just a novelty toy at this point.
It took Bush about two years to get around to Iraq. Obama still has plenty of time to catch up with the previous administration's timeline.
Here's a quick one from an interview on NPR with Walter Mooney of the US Geological Survey. He basically said that scientists had aggressively researched the radon emissions theory a few decades back but the data proved no correlation. Another article from the LA Times interview with Tom Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, and principal investigator on the international Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability. Both gentlemen essentially say that the approach used by Giuliani is not at all a reliable indicator for earthquake predictions.
From the article:
Interest in radon as an earthquake signal peaked in the 1970s in California, said Susan Hough, who serves as scientist in charge at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena and is writing a book on earthquake prediction. In 1979, for instance, scientists at Caltech and other institutions said they found changes in gas levels in Southern California wells right before earthquakes in Malibu and Big Bear that year.
"The whole thing deflated when the places where they had detected [radon] had no earthquakes and earthquakes happened in different areas," Hough said.
Boeing's Connexion failed in large part because of bad luck. They introduced their Connexion service back in summer 2001 with large launch customers such as American, Delta, and United Airlines. Unfortunately a few months later you had 9/11 which financially crippled nearly every domestic American airline and brought deep-sixed Connexion's entire business plan. The company struggled to keep it viable for a while, but the small number of foreign airlines and shipping companies wasn't enough; they needed large airlines with heavy business traffic to keep the program viable.
You actually have a lot of different options depending on your current university and future employer.
Based on what you've posted, I'm going to assume that you have no intention of being a college professor or a theoretical researcher. What you're probably looking for then is a terminal masters.
With regards to the CS/IT issue, I would go for the CS degree. It may not be right, but you can always score an IT job with a CS degree; the same can't be said though for getting a serious coding job with an IT degree. You can also get a respectable CS masters degree without having to delve too deeply into the research with a good professional degree. Many universities have this option, and if you have no plans for academia, its a reasonable approach.
If your university offers you the opportunity to get an accelerated BS/MS program, that may be a pretty good option. Several universities offer you the chance to accelerate the process by taking some graduate school courses that satisfy both BS and MS requirements with the hope of getting both in five years. This is a perfectly reasonable option.
An alternative is to get a professional degree, basically a non-thesis masters degree. Since you appear to have no intention of going into advanced research or academia, this would be a solid option and spare you the trouble of having to complete a thesis. Unless you're applying for a research position, many companies will treat an MS and a non-thesis masters about equal.
Personally, I think that a masters in computer science is a perfectly reasonable way of strengthening your resume, particularly if you go for a professional degree without having to deal with a thesis. A lot of large companies treat masters as two or three years of industry experience when you apply for work.
With regards to academic inbreeding, it won't be as big an issue with a terminal masters as long as you come out of a program with a solid reputation.
I would recommend against getting an MBA straight out of undegrad. You will get a lot more out of your MBA program if you go into it after having a few years of industrial experience; many of the things you learn will make a lot more sense after having worked on a few large proejcts and seeing the business aspect first hand. Also, there's nothing wrong with getting an MBA after you get a masters in your technical field.
Good luck with your decision!
The irony is that this wasn't the product of the previous, socially conservative Howard government but is instead the product of a left-leaning coalition between Labor and the Greens. True, you do have your single "Family First Party" senator who apparently helped drive this effort, but he alone couldn't have done this alone. Both the members of the Greens and Labor had to be complicit in bringing such a large and crazy scheme forward. As mentioned by someone else, simply blaming Family First is a cop-out; the real villains are the members of the Rudd government who are allowing this sort of drastic plan to move forward.
This serves as a good reminder that even "socially liberal" parties are still just as prone to censorship as their "socially conservative" counterparts.
The reason is because only the military has the money to afford a product like this so early in the development cycle. If this were a civilian product, it would probably be another twenty years for the production costs to reach a point where civilians could afford it. However, for something that's so cutting edge, only the military has the money to afford a product still in prototype.
Believe me, being the good capitalists they are, I'm sure that Lockheed and its partners for this product are already planning on how to sell this to construction companies, medical purposes, etc. Its just that only the military is willing to cough up the insane amounts of capital at this point to get this thing from cocktail napkin to prototype, and these companies are catering to them at this point.
I think the issue isn't a label of Communist or Socialist but association with authoritarianism and anti-Western alignment. Then again, while it may be offensive to Americans and perhaps some members of the Western-bloc, on the flip side, it may become the label of choice for those who seek an alternative to the West.
My concern isn't that these governments are using this software but what they'll require packaged with the distribution.
Your own article says that the An-124 didn't go into first flight until 1982. I'd say that gives the 747 a few decades as "Queen of the Skies".
There's no market for supersonic aircraft at this time. Boeing tested the market for one back at the beginning of this decade, and the response they got was lukewarm at best. Their decision to go with the 787 instead of the Sonic Cruiser is a reflection of shifting global needs: they don't want faster, they want more efficient. Besides, there were a ton of issues with supersonic aircraft on the environmental front, particularly with noise and emissions.
Confucianism is SQL: highly relational, practiced as a secondary with other languages from LISP to Java and almost never practiced by itself, and continuously debated on whether or not its actually a programming language.
If that's the case, then what was the purpose of the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) that we built in Colorado back in the 1970s? Sure, its budget was gutted back during the Reagan years, but to say that we haven't had any national lab assets focused on renewable energy is misleading. Don't get me wrong, I applaud Chu's dedication to the cause of renewable energy at LBL, but saying that DoE hasn't been focused on this issue is an insult to the good work that NREL scientists have been doing for the last three decades.
Sorry, being born on American soil is hardly a good indicator of loyalty. After all, the most damaging of American spies in recent history weren't foreign immigrants from Asia but Caucasian, American-born males from the heartland. People like Robert Hanssen of Chicago or Aldrich Ames of River Falls, Wisconsin.
Agreed. Even in "corporate" environments, its amazing how the management is willing to help if you can show a real charity that can make good use of surplus merchandise and equipment. The tax write off and the publicity gained with a little bit of spin also provide added incentives that the corporate types will understand.
This should hardly be a surprise to anyone; the United States government already has functioning platforms. Just this month, the Boeing Company test fired a fully working prototype of its Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), a C-130 with a high-energy chemical laser on a rotating turret mounted on the belly of the plane. I don't know if it was a full powered shot, but the press releases indicate that it successfully hit a ground target. Then there's the larger Airborne Laser (ABL), an even bigger laser mounted on a 747 used to shoot down ballistic missiles.
Given that this was the video going out on the international stream, perhaps the issue here is that foreign media didn't bother informing their viewers. Can any non-American Slashdotters confirm that their own national broadcasts made this distinction? I clearly remember that the US broadcasters clearly pointed out that these were animated fireworks, even giving the name of the person who created the animation, and then remembering how fake they looked.
Perhaps the real issue here isn't the dishonesty of the American press but the dishonesty, ignorance, or laziness of non-American broadcasters. This story is after all presented in a UK newspaper.
Not a bad idea on paper, but the Indian Reservations probably have just as equally complex of a regulatory framework as publicly owned lands. There are complex laws about certain percentages of construction labor being from particular tribes, archaeological sites, etc. that can hobble a project in some deep red tape or cripple the engineering pool they can use to build the project.
It's more than just grass and whatnot though. The southwest desert is a vibrant and complex ecosystem with plenty of threatened and endangered species ranging from mojave ground squirrels to about a dozen species of cactus. Toss in Native American archaeological sites and tightly stretched water resources, and what we have is these solar projects running up against the byzantine maze of environmental and land management regulations that have bedeviled a variety of construction projects for decades.
To put it in perspective, it takes over a year to conduct environmental and archaeological studies just to throw up a dozen microwave relay towers. I've seen tens of thousands of dollars charged to just move a single endangered cactus. Now imagine how much more complicated it would be if you were going to set up a massive array of mirrors, transmission lines, and a steam turbine that draws water from an overtapped aquifer.
I suppose you could try and argue that these solar plants are answering a more dire environmental issue that those which these regulations protect and can try to get a waiver, but until Congress makes that decision, the treatment these companies receive is really no different than anyone else who's tried to build out there.
You really have to read the details in order to understand what is being asked here. The survey results show that the content people want controlled are pornography (87%), violent content (86%), spam (83%), advertisements (66%), and slander against individuals (64%). "Politics" came in much lower at 41%, and as the results say, the word they use is not just for raw political power but the more general issue of "public morality and social values." Therefore, the 85% that want greater "censorship" are looking for regulation, not necessarily the silencing of dissidents or censoring critics. This would be similar to the rather strong desire in many Western countries by the general public for greater regulation or policing of the Internet on issues such as identity theft, child pornography, Internet fraud, etc. The Chinese also naturally go to the government as the first authority to control the Internet because this is the authority that traditionally handles these sorts of issues in Chinese society. Again, given the types of issues that they're primarily concerned with, it's not surprising why they went to the government first.
The Department of Justice has almost 130,000 employees, and as much as some conspiracy theorists would like to believe otherwise, I seriously doubt that they're able to keep track of the individual actions of every single one of them. As even the article has pointed out, these questionable edits are most likely the action of an individual employee making edits on their lunch break, a personal effort instead of an organized one. If this were a coordinated and malicious conspiracy by the government, don't you think they'd be a little more creative in covering their tracks, especially after all the exposure from Wikiscanner last year?
I find the ban on the DoJ's IP address more humorous than anything else. If there's some sort of action in DoJ over the incident, it'll probably be a crackdown on Internet usage for productivity purposes.
As for whether or not "the government" is qualified to edit Wikipedia, who is? Nearly everyone will have some sort of conflict of interest, whether due to their employer, religious creed, or civic affiliation. I don't see why any of over fourteen million Federal civil servants and contractors, let alone the tens of millions of state and local government employees, should be less qualified to edit Wikipedia than any other netizen.
Yes, this initial version doesn't generate a lot of power, but if the military were to actually go through with this plan, it would absorb the initial R&D costs to take orbital solar platforms from scribbles on the back of a cocktail napkin to a real, working prototype. Once the process is proven, then it would be a much smaller economic risk for the private sector to transition the technology to the civilian sector and expand capacity. Very few entities in the United States, let alone the globe, have deep enough pockets to absorb the immense financial risk and ready access to the limited pools of specialized aerospace engineering talent required as the United States military. Personally, I would rather have the military spending money on technology that has civilian benefits instead of buying yet another set of nuclear weapons.
Agreed. Particularly given the great "success" that Biosphere 2 was, leaving starving scientists at each others' throats while the biosphere around them came to a cataclysmic collapse.
I think you're missing the point that the World Economic Forum was trying to make. Listening to interviews with the co-editors of the report, Soumitra Dutta and Irene Mia, they're referring primarily to the overhead that businesses pay to stay in step with US law. The only significant change in the American business regulatory environment for the last several years is the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the additional regulatory burden that its placed on publicly traded companies. My guess is that they're referring to SOX, adding to the growing chorus among pro-business groups calling for SOX reform or repeal.
I do agree that immigration reform is necessary, but given that the United States has had this problem for years, I can't imagine it resulting in a loss of rank.
Also, the two co-editors made the point that it isn't a matter of the United States sliding, but more that its not growing as rapidly. They still concede that the United States is still the dominant information technology powerhouse in the world with an unrivaled tertiary education system and excellent startup environment. It should also be noted that prior to the 2006 report, the United States was ranked 5 in the 2004-2005 rankings. So a drop in rank this year is hardly a sudden shift in power. Always room for improvement though.
I second this point. Boeing already did the WiFi for every seat through its now dissolved ConneXions service. The WiFi question was already answered: yes, its possible, but the satellite approach, requiring $100,000 antennas, isn't quite the most economical. The system mentioned above is as mentioned above for distributing inflight movies and entertainment to the individual units installed at each seat, with the content being distributed from servers aboard the aircraft and not beamed in from satellites or ground stations. The reason that Boeing took this approach was to simplify the wiring job if airlines wanted to reconfigure their seats. I chalk it up to one of those ideas that was good in theory but in practice created more problems than it was worth.