Sweet, then you'd have something to mount the KC lights and flag on. (So glad it wasn't being tested up north where I'm sure there's not as much to make fun of)
Seriously though, when I saw the video I was wondering what goes into determining dynamic stability of a vehicle when you're tooling around in less gravity. I thought it seemed like the outer set of wheels could be raised/lowered, but maybe that was just an illusion caused by it running across uneven ground.
I'd be willing to be there's been no shortage of simulations in moon gravity to make sure the thing isn't horribly unstable, though.
hmm, I find this as scary as the next guy - but isn't there a part of every geek that finds its fascinating? I'm probably not geeky enough, but no, I don't find it particularly fascinating (I think my disgust with our rush to a construct a police state is overcoming my geekery). I'm sure there will be plenty of well-intentioned, fascinated geeks willing to work on it though.
I suppose it hinges on what the "foregoing powers" actually are--if the "general welfare" clause is a catch-all that lets Congress do anything they deem necessary, then sure, there's no point in arguing over whether *anything* is unconstitutional. I don't know enough about the history of law to say if "common defense and general welfare" ever had a specific, well-defined meaning, or if it really was intended as a catch-all.
"I met with the [ACLU] report authors and they could not point to a single instance of a fusion center violating someone's civil rights or liberties..." And that's from a *Democrat*? In California??!1! That sounds like something I'd expect from Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly or Shawn Hannity, followed up by some, "If you have nothing to hide..." goodness.
See, it wasn't supposed to work like that, at least on paper. The federal government was only *supposed* to have a small list of powers given in the Constitution, and it was supposed to be up to the people wanting to implement new stuff to justify it based on the list of things the feds were allowed to do.
Of course, your question is apparently completely appropriate today, because it seems that government at any level is allowed to do anything they want, unless it's explicity forbidden in the Bill of Rights (and sometimes even that doesn't matter). It appears that nowadays if you can't muster the cash to pay for a squad of lawyers to prove to another squad of lawyers that the government is explicitly not allowed to do something, then it can just happen freely by default.
Oh noes! I've been busted! Honestly, though, maybe I'll give you that it's not the best possible choice if you are the caliber of person that can get accepted to MIT. It's not a bad deal if you're stupid like me and can't get a scholarship anywhere to save your life.
"If that happens to be a place where you get shot at (and there seem to be quite a lot of those nowadays), then that's where you're going, no matter what your degree or where you got it." That is simply untrue.
Do you mean that there's not a lot of "gonna get shot at" posts? Ok, maybe there aren't that many; maybe if we were at war or something there might be a lot of such posts, but what are the odds of that? Or are you are saying that if they need somebody to go to a "gonna get shot at" post that they're gonna be really picky about sending only the bottom of the barrel instead of just expending the least amount of admin effort necessary to fill the billet?
The key is to research what jobs are there and don't believe the recruiter; get anything in writing. I think that's probably the best single piece of advice that can be given to somebody looking into any job that requires X years of commitment. I worked around a few people that got crappy jobs in the military despite having qualifications (degrees, etc.) for much better jobs, most likely because they met the wrong recruiter that had a quota to make.
8+ - I want your billet. More like 16+; including weekends once you through in drills and fixing stupid crap sailors do when they aren't busy. Eh, I wanted to be conservative, since there are some niches in the military where it seems like having to be there for more than an hour after the flag goes up is considered a long stressful day. I had one of the jobs with fun times like having a 1 hour pre-shift brief, standing watch for 12 hours, then having an hour of training (at which we got a lecture from the CO about how we should count ourselves fortunate that we're here working and not dead like the poor guy that was hit by a street sweeper on the way to work), then having to come back 10 hours later to do it all again for weeks at a time with no days off. That's why I'm not there anymore (well, that, and I don't do well in super-structured environments).
...fixing stupid crap sailors do when they aren't busy ROFL..."I'm bored...let's break something! Preferably something new and expensive!"
I suppose I'm just a bit cynical about trusting the military's ability to use people's talents correctly, but I hope I didn't make the military out to be a bad choice, since I came out of it with the ability to step into a decent career. It's probably even a bit better than corporate America in terms of the density of stupid people and bad decisions. And it is true that making a choice like joining the Navy is a good way to avoid landing at a guard shack in Iraq with a rifle.
However, I still don't think the DoD is using active duty military personnel to do a lot of the actual research and engineering tasks, but that's just based on my experience with the Navy. All the people I worked with that were doing those jobs--like nuclear research and power plant design, for example--were civilian employees or contractors, every single one. Maybe they were former enlisted or officers in that field, but they weren't able to do any of the actual "design/build/program something" jobs until they were hired as civilians and put in their time in the civilian side. The active duty officers in those technical fields were little more than supervisors/managers of the enlisted people, and (again, in my limited experience) the enlisted guys actually had most of the direct experience with the technology, while the officers did a lot of admin/paperwork and stood the occasional supervisory watch.
So I still maintain that for 99%+ of the cases, going into the military, with or without a degree, in a technical, not-so-likely-to-be-on-front-lines field, is more likely to result in:
Spending 8+ hours per day sitting in front of a panel full of instruments or wall full of valves
Supervising somebody sitting in front of a panel full of instruments or wall full of valves
Cleaning something
Painting something
Doing paperwork
Supervising people cleaning and painting things
than in doing research. However, having that experience for 6, 12, or 20 years would put one in a good spot to move on to doing R&D for the military for the equipment you used to work with. It just doesn't seem right to me to pitch the military as a good option for jumping into a research opportunity for anybody except the very top-notch graduates in a field.
Why do you think it is that pi often is needed in calculations? Because someone is using the wrong coordinate system. So what coordinate system should I be "using" to find the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter? What is e^(pi*sqrt(-1)) in this coordinate system? Can you perhaps give an example of a situation in which pi is eliminated in a non-trivial calculation by choosing a more correct coordinate system, and explain why is it so bad to have a pi appear in a calculation in the first place?
Anyone joining the military with a college degree (especially from a place like MIT or an ivy) will a) instantly be an officer and b) be a huge commodity and will be put doing some sort of awesome research or tactics, and not be put in line of fire. I'm sorry, but: HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! For starters, there's *not* that many "awesome research and tactics" billets that need to be filled. Second, unless your kinfolk have influence of some kind, you go where the "needs of the [Army,Navy,Air Force,Marines]" dictate they need warm bodies. If that happens to be a place where you get shot at (and there seem to be quite a lot of those nowadays), then that's where you're going, no matter what your degree or where you got it.
The only drawback so far has been that languages like Ruby and Python make people with pointy hair uncomfortable because they're not backed by a Real Company (TM).
What company backs C or C++? Microsoft?
ActiveState, among many other companies, provides commercial Python and Ruby support. And based on my experiences with both, ActiveState provides far better support. Please note the "pointy hair" reference; I'm not saying that such an argument has any merit, just that it's an argument that gets made.:)
Amazingly, every project I've worked on since 2002 has said "we'll write a prototype in (python|ruby), and then rewrite the slow parts in (Java|C)", and every one has just gone and shipped the "prototype".
It's like these system architects don't realize that when your language is only responsible for hooking your GUI toolkit to an RDBMS in a different city, the (Python|Ruby) VM is not going to be your bottleneck.
The complexity of Java (or C, or x86 assembly) is there if we ever need it; I doubt we ever will. My experience sounds similar to yours, and I generally default to writing most everything in Python and dropping out to C if necessary for optimization. The only drawback so far has been that languages like Ruby and Python make people with pointy hair uncomfortable because they're not backed by a Real Company (TM). YMMV of course; I don't work on enterprisey apps that need all the complexity that the Java/.NET people say is so important, so my approach is probably only appropriate for certain niches.
And a stripped-down non-existent API is a way to make things simple? Pretty much all modern languages have very detailed and complete API/framework, and all for the same reason: Why should a programmer have to re-write common routines and data structures for every program? Why bother using a big external library (which can just becomes another dependency) when it can be built into the runtime?
Horse and buggy carriages were much simpler than complex modern cars. We should probably go back to those. Actually, I was just trying to be funny; apparently I failed. I know there are applications that need all that complexity sometimes. But since you brought it up, when I was growing up, my family owned a horse. Maintaining a horse (without a buggy) is *far* more complex and inconvenient than my car. My car doesn't die if I fail to feed it regularly. I don't have to clean out my parking spot every few weeks. I can let my car sit in my driveway for weeks with no attention and it still works when I need it. I only have to actually worry about maintaining it a handful of times per year, and the total cost (in terms of cash and opportunity cost) is far lower.
Although they supposedly give more flexibility, something as essential as reading from and writing to a file becomes a hassle with.NET or Java. It's easy to get lost in whether we need a FileInputStream, or whether we should wrap a FileInputReader in a TextInputBuffer, and so forth. Give me fopen() any day.
The first time I saw what you (supposedly) have to do to read from a file in Java, it pegged my OMGWTF meter. I'm sure there's totally valid reasons for making such simple (and common) tasks so complicated, but apparently I'm not smart enough to understand them. IMHO it's one thing to have the complexity available if it's needed, but it's another to make me endure all that complexity if I don't need it.
Seeing that I have no personal experience with.Net, and seeing that this is Slashdot, I feel totally qualified to poke fun at its stupendous complexity with a quote:
Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple. -E. F. Schumacher
Bah, I'm sure that all our cool toys are totally invulnerable to EM weapons. They're probably completely unhackable and could never be hijacked in any way to be used against US troops or innocent bystanders.
Now looking at your example of Atlantis, just consider if an archaeologist actually found Atlantis, and it demonstrated that an incredibly advanced civilization existed 10,000 years ago.
Do you actually think any archaeologist wants to find something like that which would destroy all that the archaeological community knows about the beginnings of human civilization?
For starters, that's really amazing that you know so much about what goes on in the archaeological community, and even more about the private thoughts and motivations of archaeologists. You must know a whole lot of them, huh?
Anyway, on to my main point: OMFG are you high? Any archaeologist finding real evidence of something like that would see gigantic dollar signs and a chance at amazing fame. Even if they were the small-minded and self-centered idiots you paint them to be, I bet the money and fame that would come from such a discovery would still weigh more than the disruption of their precious communi-tah.
Somebody should troll a terrorist attack, get caught, and then expose the whole mess of no fisa warrant.
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to do the "troll" and "get caught" parts, but the last bit might be really, really hard, because you'd have to make it look like you were serious about it. Once you've put effort into making yourself look like a serious terrorist, it's probably kinda hard to transform into a whistleblower.
And the complexity (in terms of variables, equations, etc.) of all of theoretical physics taken together is probably still less than that of a single big software project.
Which, if you want to be a lawyer about it, really doesn't mean anything: the weight of concepts you need to understand anything in modern theoretical physics is far more complex than the written representation of the theory, just as the weight of concepts you need to understand an avionics system is far more complex than the printout of the code and specs of said system. Now that I read it with my semantic goggles on, you were just comparing apples and oranges.
It wasn't my intent to get into a qualification pissing match, I just wanted to point out that what you were doing is equivalent to a physicist who once took an engineering or C++ course making an off-the-cuff comment that, "the complexity (in terms of circuits, software, assembly diagrams, legal considerations, etc.) of all of engineering taken together is probably still less than that needed to understand a single concept in modern theoretical physics." You're underestimating the depth of a field you know only a little bit about, and that was my point.
I've worked on a few medium-sized software projects, so I have a little appreciation for how complex big software projects can be. Please note that I didn't say anything about software or engineering projects not having lots of detail, or even that they can't rival physics problems in complexity. I just thought it was silly for (I presume) a non-physicist to suggest that the *entire* field of physics is less complex than a big software project.
I wonder how long it takes your brain to adapt to talking to somebody when there's a 1-second+ delay each way? I've had conversations via satellite that seemed to have about a 1/2 second round-trip delay, and it was annoying as hell for the first few minutes.
I think there's different crowds of "big boys." Certainly Google and IBM count as big boys, but I doubt they're heavily dependent on MS tools. I guess it depends on which group of big boys you want to work for.
In my opinion, if you got a CS degree (i.e., not a vocational program), you should be glad they weren't teaching you how to use languages X, Y, and Z. That means they had time to teach you generally applicable ideas that are found in almost every language, and you've got a solid foundation that allows you to become (pun alert) functional in almost any language in a short period of time.
On the other hand, if you were in a jobs training program (IT degree or something similar) and they didn't teach you anything about.Net, then I'd say you should be pissed, since it seems like.Net and/or C# is on at least half the job requirements out there.:)
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Sweet, then you'd have something to mount the KC lights and flag on. (So glad it wasn't being tested up north where I'm sure there's not as much to make fun of)
Seriously though, when I saw the video I was wondering what goes into determining dynamic stability of a vehicle when you're tooling around in less gravity. I thought it seemed like the outer set of wheels could be raised/lowered, but maybe that was just an illusion caused by it running across uneven ground.
I'd be willing to be there's been no shortage of simulations in moon gravity to make sure the thing isn't horribly unstable, though.
I suppose it hinges on what the "foregoing powers" actually are--if the "general welfare" clause is a catch-all that lets Congress do anything they deem necessary, then sure, there's no point in arguing over whether *anything* is unconstitutional. I don't know enough about the history of law to say if "common defense and general welfare" ever had a specific, well-defined meaning, or if it really was intended as a catch-all.
See, it wasn't supposed to work like that, at least on paper. The federal government was only *supposed* to have a small list of powers given in the Constitution, and it was supposed to be up to the people wanting to implement new stuff to justify it based on the list of things the feds were allowed to do.
Of course, your question is apparently completely appropriate today, because it seems that government at any level is allowed to do anything they want, unless it's explicity forbidden in the Bill of Rights (and sometimes even that doesn't matter). It appears that nowadays if you can't muster the cash to pay for a squad of lawyers to prove to another squad of lawyers that the government is explicitly not allowed to do something, then it can just happen freely by default.
Oh noes! I've been busted! Honestly, though, maybe I'll give you that it's not the best possible choice if you are the caliber of person that can get accepted to MIT. It's not a bad deal if you're stupid like me and can't get a scholarship anywhere to save your life.
"If that happens to be a place where you get shot at (and there seem to be quite a lot of those nowadays), then that's where you're going, no matter what your degree or where you got it." That is simply untrue.Do you mean that there's not a lot of "gonna get shot at" posts? Ok, maybe there aren't that many; maybe if we were at war or something there might be a lot of such posts, but what are the odds of that? Or are you are saying that if they need somebody to go to a "gonna get shot at" post that they're gonna be really picky about sending only the bottom of the barrel instead of just expending the least amount of admin effort necessary to fill the billet?
...fixing stupid crap sailors do when they aren't busy ROFL..."I'm bored...let's break something! Preferably something new and expensive!"I suppose I'm just a bit cynical about trusting the military's ability to use people's talents correctly, but I hope I didn't make the military out to be a bad choice, since I came out of it with the ability to step into a decent career. It's probably even a bit better than corporate America in terms of the density of stupid people and bad decisions. And it is true that making a choice like joining the Navy is a good way to avoid landing at a guard shack in Iraq with a rifle.
However, I still don't think the DoD is using active duty military personnel to do a lot of the actual research and engineering tasks, but that's just based on my experience with the Navy. All the people I worked with that were doing those jobs--like nuclear research and power plant design, for example--were civilian employees or contractors, every single one. Maybe they were former enlisted or officers in that field, but they weren't able to do any of the actual "design/build/program something" jobs until they were hired as civilians and put in their time in the civilian side. The active duty officers in those technical fields were little more than supervisors/managers of the enlisted people, and (again, in my limited experience) the enlisted guys actually had most of the direct experience with the technology, while the officers did a lot of admin/paperwork and stood the occasional supervisory watch.
So I still maintain that for 99%+ of the cases, going into the military, with or without a degree, in a technical, not-so-likely-to-be-on-front-lines field, is more likely to result in:
- Spending 8+ hours per day sitting in front of a panel full of instruments or wall full of valves
- Supervising somebody sitting in front of a panel full of instruments or wall full of valves
- Cleaning something
- Painting something
- Doing paperwork
- Supervising people cleaning and painting things
than in doing research. However, having that experience for 6, 12, or 20 years would put one in a good spot to move on to doing R&D for the military for the equipment you used to work with. It just doesn't seem right to me to pitch the military as a good option for jumping into a research opportunity for anybody except the very top-notch graduates in a field.ActiveState, among many other companies, provides commercial Python and Ruby support. And based on my experiences with both, ActiveState provides far better support. Please note the "pointy hair" reference; I'm not saying that such an argument has any merit, just that it's an argument that gets made.
Amazingly, every project I've worked on since 2002 has said "we'll write a prototype in (python|ruby), and then rewrite the slow parts in (Java|C)", and every one has just gone and shipped the "prototype".
It's like these system architects don't realize that when your language is only responsible for hooking your GUI toolkit to an RDBMS in a different city, the (Python|Ruby) VM is not going to be your bottleneck.
The complexity of Java (or C, or x86 assembly) is there if we ever need it; I doubt we ever will. My experience sounds similar to yours, and I generally default to writing most everything in Python and dropping out to C if necessary for optimization. The only drawback so far has been that languages like Ruby and Python make people with pointy hair uncomfortable because they're not backed by a Real Company (TM). YMMV of course; I don't work on enterprisey apps that need all the complexity that the Java/.NET people say is so important, so my approach is probably only appropriate for certain niches.
Horse and buggy carriages were much simpler than complex modern cars. We should probably go back to those. Actually, I was just trying to be funny; apparently I failed. I know there are applications that need all that complexity sometimes. But since you brought it up, when I was growing up, my family owned a horse. Maintaining a horse (without a buggy) is *far* more complex and inconvenient than my car. My car doesn't die if I fail to feed it regularly. I don't have to clean out my parking spot every few weeks. I can let my car sit in my driveway for weeks with no attention and it still works when I need it. I only have to actually worry about maintaining it a handful of times per year, and the total cost (in terms of cash and opportunity cost) is far lower.
Bah, I'm sure that all our cool toys are totally invulnerable to EM weapons. They're probably completely unhackable and could never be hijacked in any way to be used against US troops or innocent bystanders.
For starters, that's really amazing that you know so much about what goes on in the archaeological community, and even more about the private thoughts and motivations of archaeologists. You must know a whole lot of them, huh?
Anyway, on to my main point: OMFG are you high? Any archaeologist finding real evidence of something like that would see gigantic dollar signs and a chance at amazing fame. Even if they were the small-minded and self-centered idiots you paint them to be, I bet the money and fame that would come from such a discovery would still weigh more than the disruption of their precious communi-tah.
(Please forgive me for feeding the troll)
Golly, I've been told. You sure showed me not to challenge the opinion of an engineer on Slashdot!
Let's see, in your original post, you said:
Which, if you want to be a lawyer about it, really doesn't mean anything: the weight of concepts you need to understand anything in modern theoretical physics is far more complex than the written representation of the theory, just as the weight of concepts you need to understand an avionics system is far more complex than the printout of the code and specs of said system. Now that I read it with my semantic goggles on, you were just comparing apples and oranges.
It wasn't my intent to get into a qualification pissing match, I just wanted to point out that what you were doing is equivalent to a physicist who once took an engineering or C++ course making an off-the-cuff comment that, "the complexity (in terms of circuits, software, assembly diagrams, legal considerations, etc.) of all of engineering taken together is probably still less than that needed to understand a single concept in modern theoretical physics." You're underestimating the depth of a field you know only a little bit about, and that was my point.
I've worked on a few medium-sized software projects, so I have a little appreciation for how complex big software projects can be. Please note that I didn't say anything about software or engineering projects not having lots of detail, or even that they can't rival physics problems in complexity. I just thought it was silly for (I presume) a non-physicist to suggest that the *entire* field of physics is less complex than a big software project.
I think you greatly underestimate the complexity of the ideas you need to have under your belt to understand all of theoretical physics.
I wonder how long it takes your brain to adapt to talking to somebody when there's a 1-second+ delay each way? I've had conversations via satellite that seemed to have about a 1/2 second round-trip delay, and it was annoying as hell for the first few minutes.
I think there's different crowds of "big boys." Certainly Google and IBM count as big boys, but I doubt they're heavily dependent on MS tools. I guess it depends on which group of big boys you want to work for.
.Net, then I'd say you should be pissed, since it seems like .Net and/or C# is on at least half the job requirements out there. :)
In my opinion, if you got a CS degree (i.e., not a vocational program), you should be glad they weren't teaching you how to use languages X, Y, and Z. That means they had time to teach you generally applicable ideas that are found in almost every language, and you've got a solid foundation that allows you to become (pun alert) functional in almost any language in a short period of time.
On the other hand, if you were in a jobs training program (IT degree or something similar) and they didn't teach you anything about