The Kids in school have much higher knowlege of the computers than the entire staff put together, It's an arms race that the schools will continue to lose until the boards pull their heads out of their asses and hire competent IT professionals at wage levels that ATTRACT competent IT professionals.
Or until they stop giving students access to the computers. Why is it that kids "have" to have computers in school? I bet most folks >=30 years and older here rarely used computers in pre-college ed. Computers for the teachers. Pen and pad for the students.
So by that analogy, someone who burns down a building shouoldn't be prosecuted because they are just expresssing themselves.
Maybe a more appropriate analogy would be a chemist/bio-chemist who engineers poisons or other harmful chemical agents for his/her own education. Maybe the crime is in not protecting others from a danger that was created? Of course, comparing chemistry to a computer program is apples and oranges-- unless the program interferes with a computer that is part of a system tied to health or safety.
the thought of a couple of kids playing a prank and permanently blinding me while I'm on my way to work is very scary.
I was at an ice-cream place with my brother and his girlfriend. Some kids in a passing car "illuminated" us with an ordinary laser pointer. My brother called the cops and gave them the information on the vehicle and what they had done. Not sure what ever happened...
Even those red laser pointers (1-mW) can fuck up your eyes under the correct conditions. Someone shines a greenie in your face (even the 5-mW pointers), and you could probably consider that a legitimate assault-- as far as I know, they are NOT eye-safe like the red pointers. (Any laser people out there willing to post a laser safety evaluation to back me up?) I'm just waiting for them to become mainstream enough that kids start damaging peoples eyes. Then you will see additional constraints on sales, or maybe a requirement that the beam divergence be low enough for use in the board-room, but high enough that they are eye-safe a few meters out.
A reasonable idea, but don't kid yourself. If you seized all of a spammers assets, we as the public would probably pay just as much to fight against the spammer's lawyers.
Put 'em in jail, and they will fight for their freedom. Take away their stuff, and they'll fight to get it back, and then sue the state. Remember, their motivation for spamming was to get rich quick. What better way to get rich quick than to sue?
Maybe we could start a white-collar prison system specifically for high-tech offenders. Then, instead of outsourcing high-tech jobs, big-business and big brother could just hire these prisoners as contractors but at a greatly reduced cost. Think about it, they would be almost as captive as the average tech worker, but with no salary, plus they could use their powers for "good.";-)
Name me 2 things wrong with getting high besides its illegal.
Aside from the punishement that it can put the user's body through, I don't think there is anything "wrong" with getting high. It's when the user is not thinking straight (the whole reason for drug use, right? ) that poor decisions are more likely to be made. And i bet it's those poor decisions (like driving, beating your friends to death, mixing drugs, killing little johnny to get more drugs or money, getting fucked-up or just fucked) that end up causing suffering for the user and other people.
By all means, legalize drugs. But make it legal for me to keep you away from me and my family/friends by any means necessary when you're high.
I'm not a computer scientist (I'm an engineer, and I'm effectively drunk right now), so correct me if I am wrong, but "programmer" and "computer scientist" are not the same thing. From what I've read so far (comments here), a degree is not as important as experience when applying to a job as a programmer. But there are analytical tools that you learn in pursuing a CS degree that (supposedly) make you better in up front analysis of what you are doing or what you are going to do through programming. Not to belittle programmers with this analogy, but it is like comparing draftsmen or "mechanical designers" with mechanical engineers. Sure, you can learn a lot about design by doing design work. But from my own observations and experience, it is usually not a sufficient replacement for the experience of low-level tedious analysis (mathematical or theoretical analysis) that you might get from a degree program. Of course you do not really need to complete a degree to get this experience, and after a few years as the CS degreed folks start to forget everything, it really won't matter. My opinion is that up front, it really pays to have a degree from a recognizable university to acquire your first job. As long as you don't get fired immediately, any employment after that is based mostly on prior work experience. FYI, the company I work for, like many other large companies, uses (stupid) computerized filters to screen applicants. If the HR department sets up the rules to reject resumes that do not indicate that the applicant has a degree, your years of experience are irrelevant, as you will never reach the interview stage. I would guess that this is particularly applicable to early career type jobs.
Something else is going on. They can pick pieces of comet out of the moon if they wanted it. No point in blowing money on this unless it's for defense. Copper my ass.
Or it could just be cheaper than a mission to go to the moon, mine for old comet chunks, and then return them to Earth. If it was for defense (exclusively), I doubt you would be reading about it.
I cant believe scully didn't get it. She was always doing autopsies, and she was hot. In the early episode, you even go booby shots.
That beets a muppet any day.
"Beating the muppet" to booby shots aye? It THAT what they're calling it now? OK then...
Yep. So why (aside from manufacturing polution and high sensor cost) add an extra lossy optical component when you can use a sensor of the same size directly ? I figure that cooling the sensor would be an issue too. Lets not remember that the point of this article is to detroy stuff !
Right. A smaller cell that could absorb the focused light would be more efficient and probably cleaner and more efficient to produce or operate. The issue I was addressing is that you can't really increase the output from the solar cell because you are still limited by the amount of light entering it. Consider this: A flashlight (with beam having a low divergence angle) is shining on a large perfectly efficent solar cell. All of the light is converted to energy. If the same (wide) beam is focused down to a perfecly efficient solar cell that is 1/100 the area of the larger cell, you will see the same energy. To obtain the full energy of the flashlight's beam, the lens would have to be at least as big as the beam cross section at their intersection in space. A cell of that same area as the lens would (theoretically) receive the same power from the flashlight.
So I agree with timmi. But remember that the ore optics you have in your system, the less light will reach the photovoltaic cell. Optics are not perfect. (By the way, mirrors are lighter than lenses, and are easier to build and control.)
IANAPH but it the lens was say 300 feet by 300ft, would it still be possible to focus the light to a 1cm point? And if so, does the size of the lens increse the temperature?
Probably not, and yes. A lens of that size would be extremely difficult to build and operate. Instead, you'd use an array of smaller lenses, or even better, mirrors. If you look at large telescopes, most use mirrors in part because of weight issues and manufacturing issues with lenses over say 1-meter.
The size of the lens does increase temperature, or at least the energy density at the focal point.
A bigger lens (or mirror) can capture and direct more solar energy.
I'm no expert in solar cells, but would it really be possible to increase output of a solar cell just by focusing light to s smaller spot ? If you are focusing light (energy) from a lens that is a square meter in area down to a cell with a 1-cm square area , how is that different than having a cell of 1 square meter in area ? Unless there are marked efficiency differences between a 1-m^2 sensor, and the 1-cm^2 sensor, the energy "captured" would be approximately the same, right ?
Your energy output is going to be equal (in ideal sense, but always less-than that in reality) to the solar energy that hits your light collecting optics, be it a big-ass lens or a photovotaic cell. Its a thermodynamics issue.
It's not so much the wavelength as it is the pulse width (if it is pulsed) and the concentration of the beam.
For a given power beam, a pulsed beam will concentrate energy over a shorter period. This is bad. Concentrating the energy down to a narrower beam or to a point is also bad for similar reasons.
Why do people listen to songs from a band that can only turn out "3 or 4 good tracks", when you could buy an alblum from a good band and get an entire CDs worth of good music?
If they are good tracks, even from an otherwise shitty artist, why wouldn't you want them to listen to ? To "not-like" a song solely because the artist usually spews garbage is as juvenile as mocking the newest teen-band just because they appear routinely in your girlfriend's (or boyfriend's ?) erotic fantasies.
I'm way out of touch on the music industry issue here, but from what I've read, it sounds like many of the complaints have been that people are "forced" to buy crap in order to gain legal access to non-crap or lesser crap. I suppose it would be like hardware vendors requiring that you buy their POS junky computers in order to get one of their wiz-bang video cards.
I know first hand the frustration of buying a really shitty album after having built up high expectations of it; I'm sure the producers would be thrilled to know that I don't really regret it (I got the song I wanted, I just payed too much for it). But they probably don't want to hear that it was the last CD I bought (about 9 months ago)-- not out of protest, but because I really don't listen to much music other than what I already have (80's, 90's. I'm "old.")
Since I anticipate a response to the tune of "but there are so many indie labels and local bands you should listen too ! Free your mind ! Toss aside that mass produced garbage !" Yeah, no shit. I enjoy local bands immensely, when I have time to see them. And let me just remind some of you that just because it's a local band doesn't mean they don't suck too.
I once had to photograph, up close, over 200 naked 18 year old girls for a porn site
Sounds a lot like the work I'm doing right now. Except that I am looking at naked 18 year old girls on a porn site. And I'm not getting paid. And I'm the one saying "Hey, let's fuck."
... have not ever conveyed an original idea to me. They're smart as hell because they know a lot. But they know a lot about what other people have done, and how they have dealt with issues. If a person who understands every page of an advanced engineering textbook is asked to write a book on the same topic, you can be damn sure that that the two books are going to be strikingly similar--even if the author has never seen that first text.
I'm not too faimiar with the whole "blog" thing. (I'm too old ?) But it seems to me that there is an interesting gullibility that people have developmed towards written content and especially towards content posted by "reputable sources." People will "learn" from what they read. Even if what they learn is wrong. The best example I have is ralated to the situation above, where two textbooks, written by two different people during two different eras contain an identical (HUGE, easily shown, but not immediately visible) flaw in the logic of a given proof. (It is obvious that the latter author used the older auhor's text as a learning reference.)
Other good examples are jounal and conference papers, which very often contain references back to papers, the content of which is not relevant to the material in which it was cited. An author sees a paper referenced in an explanation of "A," and then references the same paper in his/her explanation of "A" without verifying that the reference was legit. The authors simply believes that the credible source (other author) is correct, and then "spreads the word." What's even more supriseing is how infrequently the peer review process misses this.
There is also the issue of time. If you look at graduate/academic research in engineering, there are not many "brand spanking new" ideas on anything. Most research (that I've seen) contributes a tiny little piece onto the end of of the state of the art. With time and budget constraints, it kind of makes sense to start with what others have contributed, but it is at the expense of finding a better or significantly different way of doing something.
This assumes that ideas and scripts for TV are conjured up by people. I think that if you could plug a bunch of plot snippets or fragments into my Atari 800XL and then have it arrange them randomly into a 45 minute plot, most of the output would be comparable to what I see on TV. And I'm not even suggesting that the old Atari add anything in the way of plot coherence or flow. Just pump out words at random.
A few points: First, a craft with small inertias would be susceptible to random environmental disturbances: It would get blown around in turbulence. Second, in the case of sensor/electrical noise, the lower inertia of an RC craft would allow the actuating mechanisms to impart a noticable mechanical response to higher frequency noise (F=ma, T=I(dw/dt)). And C, the huge mass of the control surface components of the full-sized helicoptor would not allow their servo control loops to be operated at so high a bandwidth. An analogous situation would be the power steering mechanism of a car vs the steering mechanism of a RC car. (How fast can you alternate between 45-degrees right and 45-degrees left with the RC car ? With the real car ?)
These args also apply to the system response to operator input. A twitchy finger on the RC control will send a twitchy reference signal to the servos on in the RC vehicle. The high-bandwidth servos will move track the "twitchy" reference signal, moving the control surfaces. Being not-so-massive, the RC heli will respond (accelerate) quickly to the change in forces/torques created by those surfaces. A "twitchy" operator in a real heli might impart an equally "twitchy" reference signal to the heli's servos, however, a combination of large-mass, actuator/control system limitations, and mechanical limitations will cause the "twitchy" part of the signal to be low-pass-filtered.
In a calm operating environment with undisturbed air, a RC heli could probably be made to operate like a full size heli by lowpass filtering the commands to the actuators controlling the control surfaces.
You've really lost touch with the size of our defense spending if you think it would take all of it to address these issues.
Too late, you're probably not reading this, but I agree with you entirely. If you read my post carefully, that's exactly what I (thought) I was saying. I've hear other people say that we should direct all defense spending to tackle other issues. Truth is, as you stated, that that is a lot of money-- probably too much to spend solely on say "feeding the homeless." What I was proposing is taking some of the defense money and putting toward programs that would employ the same people (engineers, etc) but not necessarily with defense specific goals. I'd like to see transition of a chunk of $ from defense spending to, say, hybrid electric vehicle research. Again, as you pointed out, we wouldn't need to cut but a small piece of defense budget to fund research into HEVs for a long time. And (my real point) doing this would not strand engineers, scientists, and the high-tech workforce without jobs. Example: Take the same engineers who were building the Comanche, and put them on a HEV R&D.
The fear I was trying to convey is that there are people who would (given the power) cut all defense spending, and put it towards feeding the homeless, and free college, and so on. And this is fine, as long as all of the educated people working in the defense sector have somewhere to go. As an engineer, I would be in deep crap if all of a sudden there was world peace. There just aren't enough "other" engineering jobs that have the stability and security of the defense sector. I really think the government needs to fire up a "race" in an area not defense related, so that there is somewhere to go as defense spending drops. Put another way: Decrease defense spending by X, take 20% of X and put it towards humanitarian and education related persuits if you want to, and take the remaining 80% of X and put it towards government (non-defense-related) high tech research. The money doesn't "go" anywhere; it stays in the country and goes to the same people, but for a different product.
Almost everything I do as an engineer has practical application in addition to military application. Why not fund r&d for the practical application, with the defense application as the secondary goal ? It just seems to make sense. I guess I'm just paranoid about the US becoming less and less capable in math/science/engineering as the demand for local talent drops.
Slashdot Mirror
Or until they stop giving students access to the computers. Why is it that kids "have" to have computers in school? I bet most folks >=30 years and older here rarely used computers in pre-college ed. Computers for the teachers. Pen and pad for the students.
Maybe a more appropriate analogy would be a chemist/bio-chemist who engineers poisons or other harmful chemical agents for his/her own education. Maybe the crime is in not protecting others from a danger that was created? Of course, comparing chemistry to a computer program is apples and oranges-- unless the program interferes with a computer that is part of a system tied to health or safety.
the thought of a couple of kids playing a prank and permanently blinding me while I'm on my way to work is very scary.
I was at an ice-cream place with my brother and his girlfriend. Some kids in a passing car "illuminated" us with an ordinary laser pointer. My brother called the cops and gave them the information on the vehicle and what they had done. Not sure what ever happened...
Even those red laser pointers (1-mW) can fuck up your eyes under the correct conditions. Someone shines a greenie in your face (even the 5-mW pointers), and you could probably consider that a legitimate assault-- as far as I know, they are NOT eye-safe like the red pointers. (Any laser people out there willing to post a laser safety evaluation to back me up?) I'm just waiting for them to become mainstream enough that kids start damaging peoples eyes. Then you will see additional constraints on sales, or maybe a requirement that the beam divergence be low enough for use in the board-room, but high enough that they are eye-safe a few meters out.
A reasonable idea, but don't kid yourself. If you seized all of a spammers assets, we as the public would probably pay just as much to fight against the spammer's lawyers.
Put 'em in jail, and they will fight for their freedom. Take away their stuff, and they'll fight to get it back, and then sue the state. Remember, their motivation for spamming was to get rich quick. What better way to get rich quick than to sue?
Maybe we could start a white-collar prison system specifically for high-tech offenders. Then, instead of outsourcing high-tech jobs, big-business and big brother could just hire these prisoners as contractors but at a greatly reduced cost. Think about it, they would be almost as captive as the average tech worker, but with no salary, plus they could use their powers for "good." ;-)
Aside from the punishement that it can put the user's body through, I don't think there is anything "wrong" with getting high. It's when the user is not thinking straight (the whole reason for drug use, right? ) that poor decisions are more likely to be made. And i bet it's those poor decisions (like driving, beating your friends to death, mixing drugs, killing little johnny to get more drugs or money, getting fucked-up or just fucked) that end up causing suffering for the user and other people.
By all means, legalize drugs. But make it legal for me to keep you away from me and my family/friends by any means necessary when you're high.
And yes, same with acohol.
I'm not a computer scientist (I'm an engineer, and I'm effectively drunk right now), so correct me if I am wrong, but "programmer" and "computer scientist" are not the same thing. From what I've read so far (comments here), a degree is not as important as experience when applying to a job as a programmer. But there are analytical tools that you learn in pursuing a CS degree that (supposedly) make you better in up front analysis of what you are doing or what you are going to do through programming. Not to belittle programmers with this analogy, but it is like comparing draftsmen or "mechanical designers" with mechanical engineers. Sure, you can learn a lot about design by doing design work. But from my own observations and experience, it is usually not a sufficient replacement for the experience of low-level tedious analysis (mathematical or theoretical analysis) that you might get from a degree program. Of course you do not really need to complete a degree to get this experience, and after a few years as the CS degreed folks start to forget everything, it really won't matter. My opinion is that up front, it really pays to have a degree from a recognizable university to acquire your first job. As long as you don't get fired immediately, any employment after that is based mostly on prior work experience. FYI, the company I work for, like many other large companies, uses (stupid) computerized filters to screen applicants. If the HR department sets up the rules to reject resumes that do not indicate that the applicant has a degree, your years of experience are irrelevant, as you will never reach the interview stage. I would guess that this is particularly applicable to early career type jobs.
Or it could just be cheaper than a mission to go to the moon, mine for old comet chunks, and then return them to Earth. If it was for defense (exclusively), I doubt you would be reading about it.
Probably nothing. What you want is a strong, moving or changing field. Death by eddy currents.
"Poochie." Homer's ill-fated socially responsible yet "hip" character on the "Itchy and Scratchy Show."
"Beating the muppet" to booby shots aye? It THAT what they're calling it now? OK then...
Can you get a DNA sample from piss ? Because I have unending supply that they can have.
Yep. So why (aside from manufacturing polution and high sensor cost) add an extra lossy optical component when you can use a sensor of the same size directly ? I figure that cooling the sensor would be an issue too. Lets not remember that the point of this article is to detroy stuff !
So I agree with timmi. But remember that the ore optics you have in your system, the less light will reach the photovoltaic cell. Optics are not perfect. (By the way, mirrors are lighter than lenses, and are easier to build and control.)
Probably not, and yes. A lens of that size would be extremely difficult to build and operate. Instead, you'd use an array of smaller lenses, or even better, mirrors. If you look at large telescopes, most use mirrors in part because of weight issues and manufacturing issues with lenses over say 1-meter.
The size of the lens does increase temperature, or at least the energy density at the focal point. A bigger lens (or mirror) can capture and direct more solar energy.
I'm no expert in solar cells, but would it really be possible to increase output of a solar cell just by focusing light to s smaller spot ? If you are focusing light (energy) from a lens that is a square meter in area down to a cell with a 1-cm square area , how is that different than having a cell of 1 square meter in area ? Unless there are marked efficiency differences between a 1-m^2 sensor, and the 1-cm^2 sensor, the energy "captured" would be approximately the same, right ?
Your energy output is going to be equal (in ideal sense, but always less-than that in reality) to the solar energy that hits your light collecting optics, be it a big-ass lens or a photovotaic cell. Its a thermodynamics issue.
It's not so much the wavelength as it is the pulse width (if it is pulsed) and the concentration of the beam.
For a given power beam, a pulsed beam will concentrate energy over a shorter period. This is bad. Concentrating the energy down to a narrower beam or to a point is also bad for similar reasons.
It's all about how the power is distributed.
Maybe it has something to do with him being 57 in the fifth grade...
when I was in school I was 240 lbs and 5 7 in 5th grade
If they are good tracks, even from an otherwise shitty artist, why wouldn't you want them to listen to ? To "not-like" a song solely because the artist usually spews garbage is as juvenile as mocking the newest teen-band just because they appear routinely in your girlfriend's (or boyfriend's ?) erotic fantasies.
I'm way out of touch on the music industry issue here, but from what I've read, it sounds like many of the complaints have been that people are "forced" to buy crap in order to gain legal access to non-crap or lesser crap. I suppose it would be like hardware vendors requiring that you buy their POS junky computers in order to get one of their wiz-bang video cards.
I know first hand the frustration of buying a really shitty album after having built up high expectations of it; I'm sure the producers would be thrilled to know that I don't really regret it (I got the song I wanted, I just payed too much for it). But they probably don't want to hear that it was the last CD I bought (about 9 months ago)-- not out of protest, but because I really don't listen to much music other than what I already have (80's, 90's. I'm "old.")
Since I anticipate a response to the tune of "but there are so many indie labels and local bands you should listen too ! Free your mind ! Toss aside that mass produced garbage !" Yeah, no shit. I enjoy local bands immensely, when I have time to see them. And let me just remind some of you that just because it's a local band doesn't mean they don't suck too.
Sounds a lot like the work I'm doing right now. Except that I am looking at naked 18 year old girls on a porn site. And I'm not getting paid. And I'm the one saying "Hey, let's fuck."
If I had such an affliction, I would argue that god had helped me.
I'm not too faimiar with the whole "blog" thing. (I'm too old ?) But it seems to me that there is an interesting gullibility that people have developmed towards written content and especially towards content posted by "reputable sources." People will "learn" from what they read. Even if what they learn is wrong. The best example I have is ralated to the situation above, where two textbooks, written by two different people during two different eras contain an identical (HUGE, easily shown, but not immediately visible) flaw in the logic of a given proof. (It is obvious that the latter author used the older auhor's text as a learning reference.)
Other good examples are jounal and conference papers, which very often contain references back to papers, the content of which is not relevant to the material in which it was cited. An author sees a paper referenced in an explanation of "A," and then references the same paper in his/her explanation of "A" without verifying that the reference was legit. The authors simply believes that the credible source (other author) is correct, and then "spreads the word." What's even more supriseing is how infrequently the peer review process misses this.
There is also the issue of time. If you look at graduate/academic research in engineering, there are not many "brand spanking new" ideas on anything. Most research (that I've seen) contributes a tiny little piece onto the end of of the state of the art. With time and budget constraints, it kind of makes sense to start with what others have contributed, but it is at the expense of finding a better or significantly different way of doing something.
This assumes that ideas and scripts for TV are conjured up by people. I think that if you could plug a bunch of plot snippets or fragments into my Atari 800XL and then have it arrange them randomly into a 45 minute plot, most of the output would be comparable to what I see on TV.
And I'm not even suggesting that the old Atari add anything in the way of plot coherence or flow. Just pump out words at random.
Not-too-technical speculation ahead:
A few points: First, a craft with small inertias would be susceptible to random environmental disturbances: It would get blown around in turbulence. Second, in the case of sensor/electrical noise, the lower inertia of an RC craft would allow the actuating mechanisms to impart a noticable mechanical response to higher frequency noise (F=ma, T=I(dw/dt)). And C, the huge mass of the control surface components of the full-sized helicoptor would not allow their servo control loops to be operated at so high a bandwidth. An analogous situation would be the power steering mechanism of a car vs the steering mechanism of a RC car. (How fast can you alternate between 45-degrees right and 45-degrees left with the RC car ? With the real car ?)
These args also apply to the system response to operator input. A twitchy finger on the RC control will send a twitchy reference signal to the servos on in the RC vehicle. The high-bandwidth servos will move track the "twitchy" reference signal, moving the control surfaces. Being not-so-massive, the RC heli will respond (accelerate) quickly to the change in forces/torques created by those surfaces. A "twitchy" operator in a real heli might impart an equally "twitchy" reference signal to the heli's servos, however, a combination of large-mass, actuator/control system limitations, and mechanical limitations will cause the "twitchy" part of the signal to be low-pass-filtered.
In a calm operating environment with undisturbed air, a RC heli could probably be made to operate like a full size heli by lowpass filtering the commands to the actuators controlling the control surfaces.
Too late, you're probably not reading this, but I agree with you entirely. If you read my post carefully, that's exactly what I (thought) I was saying. I've hear other people say that we should direct all defense spending to tackle other issues. Truth is, as you stated, that that is a lot of money-- probably too much to spend solely on say "feeding the homeless." What I was proposing is taking some of the defense money and putting toward programs that would employ the same people (engineers, etc) but not necessarily with defense specific goals. I'd like to see transition of a chunk of $ from defense spending to, say, hybrid electric vehicle research. Again, as you pointed out, we wouldn't need to cut but a small piece of defense budget to fund research into HEVs for a long time. And (my real point) doing this would not strand engineers, scientists, and the high-tech workforce without jobs. Example: Take the same engineers who were building the Comanche, and put them on a HEV R&D.
The fear I was trying to convey is that there are people who would (given the power) cut all defense spending, and put it towards feeding the homeless, and free college, and so on. And this is fine, as long as all of the educated people working in the defense sector have somewhere to go. As an engineer, I would be in deep crap if all of a sudden there was world peace. There just aren't enough "other" engineering jobs that have the stability and security of the defense sector. I really think the government needs to fire up a "race" in an area not defense related, so that there is somewhere to go as defense spending drops. Put another way: Decrease defense spending by X, take 20% of X and put it towards humanitarian and education related persuits if you want to, and take the remaining 80% of X and put it towards government (non-defense-related) high tech research. The money doesn't "go" anywhere; it stays in the country and goes to the same people, but for a different product.
Almost everything I do as an engineer has practical application in addition to military application. Why not fund r&d for the practical application, with the defense application as the secondary goal ? It just seems to make sense. I guess I'm just paranoid about the US becoming less and less capable in math/science/engineering as the demand for local talent drops.
Anyway, I think you misread my post slightly!