That's an easily solved part of the problem. Businesses that have assets that are insured by the government must pay fair rates for that insurance. Use Stallman's progressive rate increases if necessary.
Doesn't seem so bad. Just don't create anything specifically for the use of the school. That lesson plan? Nah, it's for my use, not the school's. Make up a poster for the school dance? Sorry, you'll need a signed waiver from the board before I'll start.
There's this weird worship for big American universities. In some cases they have excellent research and graduate programs but undergrad is undergrad. Except where you're paying big bucks and being a "legacy" makes some kind of difference. In that case there's a profit motive to make things easy enough for everybody to do well.
"Currently, to gather data on 3D imagery we use technologies such as MRI, which in itself not really portable."
We use things like MRI to gather tomographic data. It's for seeing inside. Lytro doesn't do that, and never will.
Currently if you want to do the kind of 3D we're talking about you can buy a Lytro and get low resolution with a lot of data and processing, or you can buy one of the commonly available compact cameras that include two lenses (like this one) and get instant, high res results.
Light bulbs were invented in the 1870s and Edison started wiring up private households with electricity in 1882. Refrigerators were invented in 1756, with commercial refrigeration becoming useful in the 1850s. The first automobile was invented in 1672. They entered mass production in 1902. Antibiotics of various kinds were known to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Scientific study and synthetic production of compounds with antibacterial effects was underway by the 1880s. People in 1910 were certainly aware of the concept of taking medicine when you were sick. Sure, by 1960 antibiotics worked a lot better, but that's kind of an incremental improvement, isn't it?
I'm guessing by your last message that you're pretty young (and probably not overly popular...). You may not remember even the 80s. A lot has changed. Telecommunications, the Internet and computers have had a big effect on our daily lives. Things like satellites, while they technically existed in 1960, were so rare or expensive that they weren't even close to being part of everyday life. You certainly didn't talk to a little box and get a current satellite view of the country. But in 1914 four months salary bought a factory worker a car that would go 70 km/h and run on booze if you wanted to burn it instead of drinking it. Cars were probably relatively more expensive in the 60s.
And your other link is to a tailored protein that interferes with HIV's ability to replicate. Both clearly inventions in any reasonable sense of the word.
By far the best predictor of population growth is female education, not "modernization" or increased energy usage, although the three are often correlated.
In the medium term you're right, slower population growth isn't going to help us much in dealing with our energy problems, but in the Dawn-Stover-exponential-growth-forever long term, population growth has already fallen far off the exponential curve and energy consumption must eventually follow. Long before we cover the entire world with solar cells.
The room temperature, solid state maser, you mean? Meh, just an incremental improvement on the MASER, which was invented in the early 50s.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. The maser you mention will undoubtedly have some effects, but it's hard to tell now whether it will qualify as one of the OPs "fundamental inventions" or not. Just like the transistor when it was invented... interesting toy? Marginal improvement? World changing technology? Time will tell.
Wake up, flip on the lights. Use the wireless remote (!) to flip on the flatscreen, full colour tv (!) to check the weather. A nice, near real time (!) picture from a fleet of geosynchronous (!) Earth observing satellites (!) shows up (which you completely take for granted). You make yourself breakfast using avocados from Central America you got cheap (!) at the supermarket. While you're eating you check the latest news (which is updated in near realtime (!)) and see an interesting item about the Mars rovers (!). Then you hop in your car. Your mom texts (!) your mobile phone (!) which is so small it fits in your jeans pocket (!), lets you talk to anyone in the world instantly (!) and runs all day on a tiny battery (!). You're driving so you ask Siri/Google/whatever (!) to read your message to you (!). Your mom wants to have lunch. You ask your phone (!) to find restaurants in the area. It uses signals from a network of orbiting satellites (!) to find your location (!), then taps into a worldwide data network (!) to find restaurant locations and displays a map. You tap on one (!) you like and your phone uses that same data network to grab the phone number. You call and make reservations. Then you dictate a reply (!) to your mom. When you're finished you tap a button and the satellite radio (!) starts playing again.
And you're almost at work. Someone from 1962 would find himself a lot more out of place in 2012 than someone from 1912 in 1962. 1912 had lots of speculative science fiction too. The reality is that someone from 1912 in 1962 might think ubiquitous electrical power was pretty cool, and cars have come a long way, and airplanes are awesome. Someone from 1962 in 2012 would be constantly amazed by pretty much everything.
Nonsense. There are such new fields. We just tend to name our new units either after old scientists or not after anyone at all, or use already named fundamental units.
The bit. Byte. Word. Base. Base pair. Line of Code. FLOP. SNIP. Gene.
No. Many of the new advances in medicine are things like custom tailored antibodies, gene therapies and various other things that are specifically designed, using our ever advancing ability to manipulate biological systems. There are still a few medically useful compounds that are "discovered" in a rainforest or something, but many of the breakthrough treatments today are designed, i.e. invented.
OMG, we haven't had a once-a-millenium invention in the last fifty years!
The invention of the transistor was a paradigm shift (although I doubt anyone realized it at the time). Those don't happen all the time, nor do they usually happen all at once. First we had vacuum tubes, then crappy transistors, then not so crappy transistors, then ICs, then decent ICs... THEN they started to really change the world.
All those other things you mentioned are real, genuine inventions. Just because you can't look back on them in hindsight and label them "fundamental" doesn't change that.
Essentially the entire first world, except for the Israel, is at sub-replacement fertility rates. The world as a whole is a couple of tenths of a percent above it, and heading down.
So who are you going to get to teach your kids when all that highly qualified faculty packs up and moves somewhere they can find a decent supply of grad students (read: the people who do all the work) who are interested in something other than getting an MBA so they can be upper management, or being on Oprah?
Your private college probably spent a good chunk of that on the football team. Anyway, foreign tuition generally starts at around twice what a domestic student would pay and goes up to... lots more.
You've just made his point nicely. There are a LOT more undergraduates than graduate students. If the absolute number of foreign students is nearly the same that means the proportion of foreign students in grad school is MUCH higher than in undergrad. That means a lot of American students are doing undergraduate degrees and not going to grad school.
I think you've misunderstood. Obama is saying that since there's this pool of highly educated students already in the US, it would make sense to make it easy for them to stay and continue to contribute their expertise to the US.
The idiot submitter is the one who suggested sending all the foreigners home and not letting any more in.
Do you want to whole history? The quick version is that Slashdot got sold to some corporation, and bunch of the decent "editors" left and a bunch of new ones started, and now the whole thing is set up to serve the almighty "impressions" counter.
Not to mention that it's not really your choice. If the US government suddenly said "no more foreign students" the US would experience many of their best (American) professors packing up and leaving.
Being a TA or RA usually doesn't have anything to do with your tuition. You pay full rates no matter what. To make ends meet you TA, which often ends up paying well under minimum wage. RAs sometimes do a little better, but are still dirt cheap for what they're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an easily solved part of the problem. Businesses that have assets that are insured by the government must pay fair rates for that insurance. Use Stallman's progressive rate increases if necessary.
Doesn't seem so bad. Just don't create anything specifically for the use of the school. That lesson plan? Nah, it's for my use, not the school's. Make up a poster for the school dance? Sorry, you'll need a signed waiver from the board before I'll start.
Graduate studies in North America make use of oral exams as well.
Nobody wants to listen to a thousand undergrads stumble over the same questions.
There's this weird worship for big American universities. In some cases they have excellent research and graduate programs but undergrad is undergrad. Except where you're paying big bucks and being a "legacy" makes some kind of difference. In that case there's a profit motive to make things easy enough for everybody to do well.
The Lytro is also effectively doing stereography. Which is fine, because that's how we perceive 3D anyway.
"Currently, to gather data on 3D imagery we use technologies such as MRI, which in itself not really portable."
We use things like MRI to gather tomographic data. It's for seeing inside. Lytro doesn't do that, and never will.
Currently if you want to do the kind of 3D we're talking about you can buy a Lytro and get low resolution with a lot of data and processing, or you can buy one of the commonly available compact cameras that include two lenses (like this one) and get instant, high res results.
Light bulbs were invented in the 1870s and Edison started wiring up private households with electricity in 1882. Refrigerators were invented in 1756, with commercial refrigeration becoming useful in the 1850s. The first automobile was invented in 1672. They entered mass production in 1902. Antibiotics of various kinds were known to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Scientific study and synthetic production of compounds with antibacterial effects was underway by the 1880s. People in 1910 were certainly aware of the concept of taking medicine when you were sick. Sure, by 1960 antibiotics worked a lot better, but that's kind of an incremental improvement, isn't it?
I'm guessing by your last message that you're pretty young (and probably not overly popular...). You may not remember even the 80s. A lot has changed. Telecommunications, the Internet and computers have had a big effect on our daily lives. Things like satellites, while they technically existed in 1960, were so rare or expensive that they weren't even close to being part of everyday life. You certainly didn't talk to a little box and get a current satellite view of the country. But in 1914 four months salary bought a factory worker a car that would go 70 km/h and run on booze if you wanted to burn it instead of drinking it. Cars were probably relatively more expensive in the 60s.
And your other link is to a tailored protein that interferes with HIV's ability to replicate. Both clearly inventions in any reasonable sense of the word.
By far the best predictor of population growth is female education, not "modernization" or increased energy usage, although the three are often correlated.
In the medium term you're right, slower population growth isn't going to help us much in dealing with our energy problems, but in the Dawn-Stover-exponential-growth-forever long term, population growth has already fallen far off the exponential curve and energy consumption must eventually follow. Long before we cover the entire world with solar cells.
The world doesn't like it when you talk about shrinkage. It's sensitive in that area.
The room temperature, solid state maser, you mean? Meh, just an incremental improvement on the MASER, which was invented in the early 50s.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. The maser you mention will undoubtedly have some effects, but it's hard to tell now whether it will qualify as one of the OPs "fundamental inventions" or not. Just like the transistor when it was invented... interesting toy? Marginal improvement? World changing technology? Time will tell.
Wake up, flip on the lights. Use the wireless remote (!) to flip on the flatscreen, full colour tv (!) to check the weather. A nice, near real time (!) picture from a fleet of geosynchronous (!) Earth observing satellites (!) shows up (which you completely take for granted). You make yourself breakfast using avocados from Central America you got cheap (!) at the supermarket. While you're eating you check the latest news (which is updated in near realtime (!)) and see an interesting item about the Mars rovers (!). Then you hop in your car. Your mom texts (!) your mobile phone (!) which is so small it fits in your jeans pocket (!), lets you talk to anyone in the world instantly (!) and runs all day on a tiny battery (!). You're driving so you ask Siri/Google/whatever (!) to read your message to you (!). Your mom wants to have lunch. You ask your phone (!) to find restaurants in the area. It uses signals from a network of orbiting satellites (!) to find your location (!), then taps into a worldwide data network (!) to find restaurant locations and displays a map. You tap on one (!) you like and your phone uses that same data network to grab the phone number. You call and make reservations. Then you dictate a reply (!) to your mom. When you're finished you tap a button and the satellite radio (!) starts playing again.
And you're almost at work. Someone from 1962 would find himself a lot more out of place in 2012 than someone from 1912 in 1962. 1912 had lots of speculative science fiction too. The reality is that someone from 1912 in 1962 might think ubiquitous electrical power was pretty cool, and cars have come a long way, and airplanes are awesome. Someone from 1962 in 2012 would be constantly amazed by pretty much everything.
Nonsense. There are such new fields. We just tend to name our new units either after old scientists or not after anyone at all, or use already named fundamental units.
The bit. Byte. Word. Base. Base pair. Line of Code. FLOP. SNIP. Gene.
No. Many of the new advances in medicine are things like custom tailored antibodies, gene therapies and various other things that are specifically designed, using our ever advancing ability to manipulate biological systems. There are still a few medically useful compounds that are "discovered" in a rainforest or something, but many of the breakthrough treatments today are designed, i.e. invented.
OMG, we haven't had a once-a-millenium invention in the last fifty years!
The invention of the transistor was a paradigm shift (although I doubt anyone realized it at the time). Those don't happen all the time, nor do they usually happen all at once. First we had vacuum tubes, then crappy transistors, then not so crappy transistors, then ICs, then decent ICs... THEN they started to really change the world.
All those other things you mentioned are real, genuine inventions. Just because you can't look back on them in hindsight and label them "fundamental" doesn't change that.
Sorry. Population, without immigration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
Essentially the entire first world, except for the Israel, is at sub-replacement fertility rates. The world as a whole is a couple of tenths of a percent above it, and heading down.
So who are you going to get to teach your kids when all that highly qualified faculty packs up and moves somewhere they can find a decent supply of grad students (read: the people who do all the work) who are interested in something other than getting an MBA so they can be upper management, or being on Oprah?
Your private college probably spent a good chunk of that on the football team. Anyway, foreign tuition generally starts at around twice what a domestic student would pay and goes up to... lots more.
You've just made his point nicely. There are a LOT more undergraduates than graduate students. If the absolute number of foreign students is nearly the same that means the proportion of foreign students in grad school is MUCH higher than in undergrad. That means a lot of American students are doing undergraduate degrees and not going to grad school.
I think you've misunderstood. Obama is saying that since there's this pool of highly educated students already in the US, it would make sense to make it easy for them to stay and continue to contribute their expertise to the US.
The idiot submitter is the one who suggested sending all the foreigners home and not letting any more in.
Do you want to whole history? The quick version is that Slashdot got sold to some corporation, and bunch of the decent "editors" left and a bunch of new ones started, and now the whole thing is set up to serve the almighty "impressions" counter.
Not to mention that it's not really your choice. If the US government suddenly said "no more foreign students" the US would experience many of their best (American) professors packing up and leaving.
I'm not sure I agree. If they can't spell should they really be teaching the world?
Being a TA or RA usually doesn't have anything to do with your tuition. You pay full rates no matter what. To make ends meet you TA, which often ends up paying well under minimum wage. RAs sometimes do a little better, but are still dirt cheap for what they're doing.
I suspect that at least the famous US universities make a tidy profit on foreign students.