No, the main reason is because the PE is primarily a certificate with legal weight, supposedly certifying a reasonable proficiency in a specific field of engineering. That's why PE's tend to be clustered in Civil and Mechanical engineering--the law requires that bridge designs etc. need to be signed off by certified PE-licensed engineers. It's true that those types tend to cluster in government and the bigger contractors like Bechtel. You don't see the license often in Electronic or Software engineers because only certain markets (like Medicine) require legal sign-offs for some products; in the remaining markets it's just a license making it easier to sue you as well as your employer.
As an engineer who has done embedded hardware design for the past 25 years, I'd say your prices are off by a factor of 10 on the low side, at least. Other than excessive optimism on cost, though, you're right on the money on every other point.
Actually, that's my opinion of how Congress should work. It should be like jury duty--your name is called at random from a nationwide pool of eligible voters to serve in Congress for a year or two. You, and the baker from Queens, and the auto mechanic from Des Moines, and the mini-mart owner from Phoenix, etc. You're there as often as the current Congress is. Your job is to pass the important legislation, balance the budget, and monitor and fund (or defund) the other two branches as necessary. Accepting money from lobbyists would be a serious crime. The sooner you get the job done, the sooner you get to go home.
I'd be willing to bet the result would be better all around.
Long-time Gentoo user here, hardcore fiscal conservative / social moderate / small government guy. The Republicans need folks like me and John Ekdahl, but they don't want us. I love this last part from John's blog in TFA:
The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.
Exactly why I left the Republican party and became an independent 20 years ago. They say they want less government, but what they really want is more centralized control their way. I have to hand it to the Democrats, at least they understand and value the importance of local politics and grass-root efforts during an election; waiting until after the election to throw their volunteers under the Big Government bus. The Republicans just mow them down from the start.
Like the Allstate Mayhem commercials. In my long-ago youth I remember ads being much more entertaining and unobtrusive. I was never annoyed by the Dolly Madison commercials during the Peanuts holiday season specials--it actually seems like something is missing when I watch the Peanuts specials on DVD without them. How about Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" Just a few years back the K9 Advantix "Hello Father Hello Mother" puppy commercial was great.
These days it's the same old sterile erectile-dysfunction ad played over and over again until you're ready to throw a heavy object at the screen. Sadly, LCDs don't produce the same satisfying BOOM the old CRTs did.
I have a few suggestions for some really funny erectile dysfunction ads. If anyone from Madison Ave is interested in hearing them, call me.
Don't ask the question "Trade School, CC, or University". Ask the question, "who do I want to work for, doing what, where?" Figure that out, then figure out what education and skill set is required to get considered.
A Fortune 500 is going to want a focused (even specialized) 4-year degree, or higher, from specific schools. A startup in Podunk is going to want a driven jack-of-all-trades, and a CC or Tech degree can be enough to get in the door.
Keep in mind, in ten years everything you learned in school in a technical field except math, fundamental science, reading and writing will be obsolete. Don't spend any more money than necessary learning a specific technical skill--just enough to open the desired door.
The summary and headline is typical media-bait, and the slashdot fish are biting today.
This verdict had nothing to do with earthquake prediction, and everything to do with shirking the responsibilities of their public civil-service positions. At least that's how I read the Nature article. That said, I fail to see how this rises to the level of criminal negligence. If stupidity was criminal, most of my neighbors would be lifers. The people were living in an earthquake zone. Of course there will be earthquakes. Why are they listening to 'experts' telling them otherwise?
Oh, that's right, because they're young. My favorite two quotes from the Nature article: from the young man - "We're not crazy people [who expect earthquake predictions]. We just want accountability." And this: "That night, all the old people in L'Aquila, after the first shock, went outside and stayed outside for the rest of the night [the young man said]. Those of us who are used to using the Internet, television, science--we stayed inside."
It's like those markers on the hillsides in Japan, left by previous generations, warning "Don't build below this point." Do you think the children will actually listen? Yeah, like that will happen.
So true. It's amazing how constrained we are by our own experiences. I've been watching old Outer Limit shows recently, produced in the 1960's. Wonderful examples abound there, such as a future videophone that still uses a rotary dial. Of course, with AT&T being a monopoly again...
I wouldn't bet on it. Maybe the one./ member who crawled out of the basement to watch the movie knows the ending. I still remember going to the 'Fellowship of the Ring' movie when it first came out, and hearing half the audience moan and whine 'whaaa, that's it???' as the movie ended just after Frodo and Sam took off across the river.
Not only are you presuming a large portion of the audience has read the novel, you're presuming everyone in the audience can actually read.
The problem is not patents per se. The problem--as the submission correctly points out--is the frivolous and unscrupulous nature of the patent system these days. The same is true of the copyright system.
Patents and copyrights exist only for the purpose of furthering the common good. Abolishing them so everything is 'free' for everyone does not necessarily further the common good if it discourages innovation or allows large corporations to steal blindly from smaller inventors. Using the patent system like a Banker uses Other People's Money for greedy profiteering doesn't do much for the common good either.
IMO the right solution is for the government to do what it is supposed to do: level the playing field, but not pick the winners. For example, modify the patent system so that the loser pays in any patent case. If you file in court with a weak patent and lose, you pay the defendant's legal fees. Require patent winners to license patents on fair and equitable terms--no more blanket injunctions against a competitor's products. Prohibit the operation of patent-troll firms whose only business is acquiring and filing patent suits. Limit software patents to 5 years max, or abolish them altogether. Limit copyright to life of author and/or 50 years for a business entity.
There's probably a number of other changes that could be made as well that would discourage the dead wood from damming up innovation while still allowing true innovators--and society--to profit from good ideas. It just requires politicians to govern, not pander. That, unfortunately, I don't see happening anytime soon.
Youngster. I saw it at 7. I still vividly remember the Ape/Bone/Tool scene melting into the Space Station on the big screen. Loved it. Yeah, pretty much the entire theater was saying WTF during the last 10 minutes. When you figure it out, let me know.
The better question is: why write applications for one OS? Wouldn't a software developer with children and a mortgage want the largest customer base possible?
I've been running Linux for a decade and a half, both at home and at the company I founded. I've bought many thousands of dollars worth of software over the years on Linux, primarily Engineering apps such as Eagle, VariCAD, FPGA tools, and the like. Most of these apps are built on cross-platform toolkits, and run just fine on Windows, Mac AND Linux. It's not that hard to do.
Personally, I got tired of these OS wars years ago. Fortunately, the Internet is slowly making the 'which OS' question a moot point in the not-too-distant future.
Same here. And that was ten years ago, because I was tired of dealing with IE exploding, Outlook mail viruses, on and on. She can log on, run Firefox to get to Google, run Thunderbird for email, print, play the various free games (mostly the card games), and shut down. I also showed her how to run the regular Ubuntu LTS updates. My service and support calls (for the computer at least) dropped over 90%. I know a couple of her elderly friends who have given up on computers in the interim because they 'caught' Outlook viruses and got tired of cleaning up the mess.
Better still, since the rest of the family knows I use that 'penguin OS thing' and haven't touched a Windows computer since Win2K, they no longer bug me with support questions. Win-win all around.
I always got the impression that the less time you spent in the transport buffer, the better. Sort of like DRAM without ECC. Scotty, of course, figured out a way around that later...
I only wish most of the standards bodies had fair and reasonable terms like $5. Some examples: let's say you want to make a small USB peripheral device. If you want a vendor ID, expect to pay $2000 to the USB-IF. You want an OUI from IEEE so you can create your own Ethernet MAC addresses? That's $1825. How about a copy of the VESA DisplayPort 1.2 standard? They'd prefer you become a member, at $3500 a year. Forget about HDMI. That starts at $10000 a year.
If you're an electronics hobbyist, or someone into the Maker hobbies, or a small manufacturer, forget about it. The big boys don't want you playing in their sandbox. For example, when one company had the bright idea of buying a USB vendor ID (a 16 bit number) and then selling chunks of the associated product ID block (another 16 bit number) to hobbyists and small companies for a small fee, the USB-IF had a fit and shut them down by threatening to sue.
Far too often, standards bodies are more like craft guilds than impartial protectors of the common good. Invariably it is the open and accessible-to-all standards, like those from the IETF, that generate the most long-term economic activity and public good. (Like, the Internet.) But, that notion is not what most 'standards' bodies are about. A standard is not 'Open' when the cost of entry is prohibitive to all but the largest companies, and small companies and individuals need not apply. When I, an individual, can buy a copy of the DisplayPort standard for $5 so I can interface my custom Rasberry Pi device to my monitor, or when I can click on a link on the MPEG LA website and pay $5 for a 'license' to use whatever H.264 encoding software I choose, only then will your premise that I should 'pay' have any validity whatsoever.
Well, at least that's what I think about every time I see this topic come up. As in, I see two main things happening in succession once someone invents the 'live to 600' pill:
1) there will soon be no more children in the world. If your kid has a kid at 25, and that kid has a kid at 25, and so on, and every one living currently has children, well, the numbers get astronomical really fast when everyone is living to 600. Unless you start shipping folks off-planet in technology that doesn't exist yet, using resources that are already depleting, you've got trouble. Forget about your kids having kids. Forget about grandchildren. Enjoy your selfish 600 years, because...
2) they will be the last years of the human race. Unless that pill also cures menopause, after 75 years or so no woman would be able to have children. Currently 2.1 kids is considered 'replacement' level. If everyone lived to 600 and bred at 25, having one kid, there'd be no one 'leaving' until the 23rd generation. If 23 times the world's current population is considered unsustainable, there would have to be limits on having children. Many folks would not be allowed to have them, period. For each succeeding generation, the number of children would have to be adjusted to the carrying capacity of the planet in keeping with the increased lifestyle your desired long life is granting you. The number of fertile females in the gene pool each generation gets smaller and smaller. This is not the sort of trend nature likes, and she can bite. Hard. The longer you extend the lifespan, the smaller the gene pool becomes. Keep in mind, if any one generation goes beyond 50 years without procreating, poof, it's all over. In time.
Those are your choices. Scheduled breeding, with many folks never getting to have children at all and an ever-shrinking gene pool, or annihilation due to over- or under-population. Then again, this is Slashdot, so perhaps breeding is an unfamiliar concept to this audience.
Those are the two big killers of the flying car concept for the masses. It's not a huge problem driving through a wind-blown downpour in a car. It's a much bigger problem when your vehicle is IN that wind. Even today's mostly-automated jetliners have problems with big storms. A flying car would be even less comfortable than a motorcycle when you have to get to work when the cold front is blowing through.
Furthermore, I have yet to see a flying car concept that doesn't have the same weight and balance issues every other plane has. One of the reasons pilots have far more rigorous certification requirements than drivers is because a lot more brain engagement is necessary in flying than driving. You can't just throw that big screen TV you got at Walmart in the trunk of a 2012 flying car and expect a good outcome. Until the Higgs boson makes anti-gravity pickup trucks possible the entire flying car concept is just too inconvenient for the typical use cases of Joe Sixpack.
A well-executed flying car concept could be a boon for pilots who are looking for more convenient transportation options once on the ground, however.
Yes, if you do graphics/animation work (Blender and the like) or 3D CAD, or any of a number of other applications that need accelerated 3D graphics. Particularly if you'd like those apps to be cross-platform, not just on the desktops but on tablets, smartphones and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the main reason is because the PE is primarily a certificate with legal weight, supposedly certifying a reasonable proficiency in a specific field of engineering. That's why PE's tend to be clustered in Civil and Mechanical engineering--the law requires that bridge designs etc. need to be signed off by certified PE-licensed engineers. It's true that those types tend to cluster in government and the bigger contractors like Bechtel. You don't see the license often in Electronic or Software engineers because only certain markets (like Medicine) require legal sign-offs for some products; in the remaining markets it's just a license making it easier to sue you as well as your employer.
As an engineer who has done embedded hardware design for the past 25 years, I'd say your prices are off by a factor of 10 on the low side, at least. Other than excessive optimism on cost, though, you're right on the money on every other point.
Actually, that's my opinion of how Congress should work. It should be like jury duty--your name is called at random from a nationwide pool of eligible voters to serve in Congress for a year or two. You, and the baker from Queens, and the auto mechanic from Des Moines, and the mini-mart owner from Phoenix, etc. You're there as often as the current Congress is. Your job is to pass the important legislation, balance the budget, and monitor and fund (or defund) the other two branches as necessary. Accepting money from lobbyists would be a serious crime. The sooner you get the job done, the sooner you get to go home.
I'd be willing to bet the result would be better all around.
Long-time Gentoo user here, hardcore fiscal conservative / social moderate / small government guy. The Republicans need folks like me and John Ekdahl, but they don't want us. I love this last part from John's blog in TFA:
The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.
Exactly why I left the Republican party and became an independent 20 years ago. They say they want less government, but what they really want is more centralized control their way. I have to hand it to the Democrats, at least they understand and value the importance of local politics and grass-root efforts during an election; waiting until after the election to throw their volunteers under the Big Government bus. The Republicans just mow them down from the start.
Like the Allstate Mayhem commercials. In my long-ago youth I remember ads being much more entertaining and unobtrusive. I was never annoyed by the Dolly Madison commercials during the Peanuts holiday season specials--it actually seems like something is missing when I watch the Peanuts specials on DVD without them. How about Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" Just a few years back the K9 Advantix "Hello Father Hello Mother" puppy commercial was great.
These days it's the same old sterile erectile-dysfunction ad played over and over again until you're ready to throw a heavy object at the screen. Sadly, LCDs don't produce the same satisfying BOOM the old CRTs did.
I have a few suggestions for some really funny erectile dysfunction ads. If anyone from Madison Ave is interested in hearing them, call me.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up for being one of the few posters who actually answered the original question.
This.
Don't ask the question "Trade School, CC, or University". Ask the question, "who do I want to work for, doing what, where?" Figure that out, then figure out what education and skill set is required to get considered.
A Fortune 500 is going to want a focused (even specialized) 4-year degree, or higher, from specific schools. A startup in Podunk is going to want a driven jack-of-all-trades, and a CC or Tech degree can be enough to get in the door.
Keep in mind, in ten years everything you learned in school in a technical field except math, fundamental science, reading and writing will be obsolete. Don't spend any more money than necessary learning a specific technical skill--just enough to open the desired door.
This.
The summary and headline is typical media-bait, and the slashdot fish are biting today.
This verdict had nothing to do with earthquake prediction, and everything to do with shirking the responsibilities of their public civil-service positions. At least that's how I read the Nature article.
That said, I fail to see how this rises to the level of criminal negligence. If stupidity was criminal, most of my neighbors would be lifers. The people were living in an earthquake zone. Of course there will be earthquakes. Why are they listening to 'experts' telling them otherwise?
Oh, that's right, because they're young. My favorite two quotes from the Nature article: from the young man - "We're not crazy people [who expect earthquake predictions]. We just want accountability." And this: "That night, all the old people in L'Aquila, after the first shock, went outside and stayed outside for the rest of the night [the young man said]. Those of us who are used to using the Internet, television, science--we stayed inside."
It's like those markers on the hillsides in Japan, left by previous generations, warning "Don't build below this point." Do you think the children will actually listen? Yeah, like that will happen.
Find a new 'friend'?
So true. It's amazing how constrained we are by our own experiences. I've been watching old Outer Limit shows recently, produced in the 1960's. Wonderful examples abound there, such as a future videophone that still uses a rotary dial. Of course, with AT&T being a monopoly again...
I wouldn't bet on it. Maybe the one ./ member who crawled out of the basement to watch the movie knows the ending. I still remember going to the 'Fellowship of the Ring' movie when it first came out, and hearing half the audience moan and whine 'whaaa, that's it???' as the movie ended just after Frodo and Sam took off across the river.
Not only are you presuming a large portion of the audience has read the novel, you're presuming everyone in the audience can actually read.
The problem is not patents per se. The problem--as the submission correctly points out--is the frivolous and unscrupulous nature of the patent system these days. The same is true of the copyright system.
Patents and copyrights exist only for the purpose of furthering the common good. Abolishing them so everything is 'free' for everyone does not necessarily further the common good if it discourages innovation or allows large corporations to steal blindly from smaller inventors. Using the patent system like a Banker uses Other People's Money for greedy profiteering doesn't do much for the common good either.
IMO the right solution is for the government to do what it is supposed to do: level the playing field, but not pick the winners. For example, modify the patent system so that the loser pays in any patent case. If you file in court with a weak patent and lose, you pay the defendant's legal fees. Require patent winners to license patents on fair and equitable terms--no more blanket injunctions against a competitor's products. Prohibit the operation of patent-troll firms whose only business is acquiring and filing patent suits. Limit software patents to 5 years max, or abolish them altogether. Limit copyright to life of author and/or 50 years for a business entity.
There's probably a number of other changes that could be made as well that would discourage the dead wood from damming up innovation while still allowing true innovators--and society--to profit from good ideas. It just requires politicians to govern, not pander. That, unfortunately, I don't see happening anytime soon.
Well, at least he's learning handwriting. I thought that was gone from the public school system.
Too bad my mod points expired yesterday, or I'd mod you up now.
Planes, boats, women and now software. Cheaper to rent then to buy.
Three is bad? Wait until he starts filming 'The Silmarillion'.
Youngster. I saw it at 7. I still vividly remember the Ape/Bone/Tool scene melting into the Space Station on the big screen. Loved it. Yeah, pretty much the entire theater was saying WTF during the last 10 minutes. When you figure it out, let me know.
The better question is: why write applications for one OS? Wouldn't a software developer with children and a mortgage want the largest customer base possible?
I've been running Linux for a decade and a half, both at home and at the company I founded. I've bought many thousands of dollars worth of software over the years on Linux, primarily Engineering apps such as Eagle, VariCAD, FPGA tools, and the like. Most of these apps are built on cross-platform toolkits, and run just fine on Windows, Mac AND Linux. It's not that hard to do.
Personally, I got tired of these OS wars years ago. Fortunately, the Internet is slowly making the 'which OS' question a moot point in the not-too-distant future.
Same here. And that was ten years ago, because I was tired of dealing with IE exploding, Outlook mail viruses, on and on. She can log on, run Firefox to get to Google, run Thunderbird for email, print, play the various free games (mostly the card games), and shut down. I also showed her how to run the regular Ubuntu LTS updates. My service and support calls (for the computer at least) dropped over 90%. I know a couple of her elderly friends who have given up on computers in the interim because they 'caught' Outlook viruses and got tired of cleaning up the mess.
Better still, since the rest of the family knows I use that 'penguin OS thing' and haven't touched a Windows computer since Win2K, they no longer bug me with support questions. Win-win all around.
Exactly. Talent, understanding, and doing what you love is what separates the great employees from the merely competent or mediocre ones.
I always got the impression that the less time you spent in the transport buffer, the better. Sort of like DRAM without ECC. Scotty, of course, figured out a way around that later...
They would be if Perl was their first language...
I only wish most of the standards bodies had fair and reasonable terms like $5. Some examples: let's say you want to make a small USB peripheral device. If you want a vendor ID, expect to pay $2000 to the USB-IF. You want an OUI from IEEE so you can create your own Ethernet MAC addresses? That's $1825. How about a copy of the VESA DisplayPort 1.2 standard? They'd prefer you become a member, at $3500 a year. Forget about HDMI. That starts at $10000 a year.
If you're an electronics hobbyist, or someone into the Maker hobbies, or a small manufacturer, forget about it. The big boys don't want you playing in their sandbox. For example, when one company had the bright idea of buying a USB vendor ID (a 16 bit number) and then selling chunks of the associated product ID block (another 16 bit number) to hobbyists and small companies for a small fee, the USB-IF had a fit and shut them down by threatening to sue.
Far too often, standards bodies are more like craft guilds than impartial protectors of the common good. Invariably it is the open and accessible-to-all standards, like those from the IETF, that generate the most long-term economic activity and public good. (Like, the Internet.) But, that notion is not what most 'standards' bodies are about. A standard is not 'Open' when the cost of entry is prohibitive to all but the largest companies, and small companies and individuals need not apply. When I, an individual, can buy a copy of the DisplayPort standard for $5 so I can interface my custom Rasberry Pi device to my monitor, or when I can click on a link on the MPEG LA website and pay $5 for a 'license' to use whatever H.264 encoding software I choose, only then will your premise that I should 'pay' have any validity whatsoever.
Well, at least that's what I think about every time I see this topic come up. As in, I see two main things happening in succession once someone invents the 'live to 600' pill:
1) there will soon be no more children in the world. If your kid has a kid at 25, and that kid has a kid at 25, and so on, and every one living currently has children, well, the numbers get astronomical really fast when everyone is living to 600. Unless you start shipping folks off-planet in technology that doesn't exist yet, using resources that are already depleting, you've got trouble. Forget about your kids having kids. Forget about grandchildren. Enjoy your selfish 600 years, because...
2) they will be the last years of the human race. Unless that pill also cures menopause, after 75 years or so no woman would be able to have children. Currently 2.1 kids is considered 'replacement' level. If everyone lived to 600 and bred at 25, having one kid, there'd be no one 'leaving' until the 23rd generation. If 23 times the world's current population is considered unsustainable, there would have to be limits on having children. Many folks would not be allowed to have them, period. For each succeeding generation, the number of children would have to be adjusted to the carrying capacity of the planet in keeping with the increased lifestyle your desired long life is granting you. The number of fertile females in the gene pool each generation gets smaller and smaller. This is not the sort of trend nature likes, and she can bite. Hard. The longer you extend the lifespan, the smaller the gene pool becomes. Keep in mind, if any one generation goes beyond 50 years without procreating, poof, it's all over. In time.
Those are your choices. Scheduled breeding, with many folks never getting to have children at all and an ever-shrinking gene pool, or annihilation due to over- or under-population. Then again, this is Slashdot, so perhaps breeding is an unfamiliar concept to this audience.
Those are the two big killers of the flying car concept for the masses. It's not a huge problem driving through a wind-blown downpour in a car. It's a much bigger problem when your vehicle is IN that wind. Even today's mostly-automated jetliners have problems with big storms. A flying car would be even less comfortable than a motorcycle when you have to get to work when the cold front is blowing through.
Furthermore, I have yet to see a flying car concept that doesn't have the same weight and balance issues every other plane has. One of the reasons pilots have far more rigorous certification requirements than drivers is because a lot more brain engagement is necessary in flying than driving. You can't just throw that big screen TV you got at Walmart in the trunk of a 2012 flying car and expect a good outcome. Until the Higgs boson makes anti-gravity pickup trucks possible the entire flying car concept is just too inconvenient for the typical use cases of Joe Sixpack.
A well-executed flying car concept could be a boon for pilots who are looking for more convenient transportation options once on the ground, however.
Yes, if you do graphics/animation work (Blender and the like) or 3D CAD, or any of a number of other applications that need accelerated 3D graphics. Particularly if you'd like those apps to be cross-platform, not just on the desktops but on tablets, smartphones and the like.