In a related story, English majors found to make poor terrorists, as the ability to diagram a sentence or identify themes in literature fails to strike fear into the hearts of millions.
>To the original poster - don't listen to anyone who tells you a computer-related job will kill your love life. Expand your knowledge, be passionate about what you do, and >anyone who (metaphorically) mods you down for it isn't worth knowing. Also remember to shower, and get some nice shirts:)
While you are no doubt correct that a geek profession is not an absolute barrier to a lovelife for a straight guy, there are several things to consider
1)If you become a coder, you will most likely not be meeting a girlfriend at work if your job mostly involves staring at a screen and working only with other guys, particularly if your development organization is isolated in its own building or part of campus. Other professions are more advantageous for meeting women on the job:doctor and teacher are two that come to mind. Studies have shown that an embarrassingly large percentage of people met their mates at work.
2) Development can involve insane schedules if you have poor managers which is the case at most places. Poor management being the #1 reason why most software sucks. Less time for going out and meeting women .
3) You won't be able to talk about your work with most women. Either they will find it tedious or incomprehensible due to the lack of technical background. This is not necessarily a bad thing, most people find 'shop talk' in social settings a boring topic, but it's not nearly as advantageous for dating as saying "I'm in a band, hey you should come see us play." Or "I fly jet fighters" or " "I'm independently wealthy. I devote my time to helping needy kids and saving fuzzy puppies" or "I'm an artist. I'm having an exhibition at xyz gallery."
4) Your daily work environment is not likely to improve your social skills or physique, unlike say, being in sales or an apartment moving company. Various jobs practice different skills. Coding will in fact make you more logical and literal which are not advantageous to forming an emotional connection with someone.
But still, correlation does not imply causation. There are plenty of married geeks, and plenty of people have poor social skills which are often preexisting long before getting into technology.
1000 miles? we can do that today, put some engines on a big enough space rock... I make no warranties as to whether the structural integrity of the Earth could maintain the shape of that crater though. 6 million mile crater? Crater in what exactly? The Earth isn't that large. Are we going to build Dyson Spheres only to put craters in them?
That's a great idea. Any idea of how to reliably select leaders for those qualities, given that the current methods have nothing to do with competency whatsoever?
If the Go Fast Anywhere drive is magic, it can be like the spacefolding ships of Dune. No need for take-off and landing, just appear right on the surface of whatever planet you want to be on. Disappear from said planet the same way. Yeah, you'll need to find the planets first, but since you can Go Fast Anywhere, just spacefold to the near vicinity of the star and use a big radar dish, or synthetic array and telescopic observations to survey the system. No need for "magic star trek sensors", Arecibo works just fine in planetary radar mode, when it has funding. Spectroscopy and physical probes should suffice for the "analyze planets" part, once you're close enough. Yeah, it'll take a bit of time and multiple observations to work out the orbits, so you can predict where the planet will be so you can spacefold to that exact location, but it's not anywhere near impossible. Power sources? A Rickover-style nuclear plant should do fine for powering the electrical system of the ship, weight's not a real issue since we are spacefolding. That's assuming you can't tap whatever magical force powers the spacefold drive for ordinary power. Life support? We've been working with sealed environments for a while now. It's not tremendously difficult, assuming you don't spacefold to say, Venus, Jupiter or Io (radiation) or too close to a star. The relative velocity thing would not be a problem with spacefold drive, as we've seen that it matches velocity perfectly during the fold in the sequel novels because it is not smashed to bits by the planet it appears on.
So yeah, a properly dreamed-up magic Go Fast Anywhere drive would open up the galaxy. Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.
You're talking about the United States of the 60s and early 70s. The U.S. is no longer capable of delivering people to the Moon without a >10 year head start, and hasn't been for 36 years. Given that delivering people *the first time* took 8 years from the first Americans in space to the first landing, one can easily conclude that 21st century America is less capable than it was prior to the first lunar landing. That's mostly because America has been focussing not on physical industry but on intellectual and communications industries. The space program is no longer the mass draw for the best and brightest that it once was.
>Why would a tech-savvy human being be any more useful or valid as a politician than an education-savvy human being?
Oh, I dunno, maybe because the vast majority of Americans are now voting in elections on insecure electronic voting machines? Because the IRS is collecting taxes using patched COBOL code from the 60s? Because warrantless point-and-click wiretaps are a major privacy issue? Because remote-control and autonomous weapons are beginning to be fielded in significant numbers by our armed forces? Because internet crime is on the rise and credit card fraud and "identity theft" impacts hundreds of thousands of americans? Because federal agencies keep losing the American people's data in unencrypted form? Because the content industries keep encroaching upon people's physical property rights and inventing new classes of crimes to protect their bottom line in an ineffectual manner? Despite all the blather about education by the Feds, education is mostly a *state* and local issue.
Total agreement here. When you're playing, you're doing your level best not to die and to frag other players. It's fun, but it's also stressful. When you finally get shot, you can chill for a bit because you're not intently trying not to die at that moment.
Yeah, it even freaked the people in Rainbows End out. Which is why the real techies used illegal Paraguayan chips which allowed them to sidestep the Secure Hardware Environment. On the other hand widespread transparent use of properly administered crypto certs would be a huge boon as it could totally eliminate phishing and identity theft. Of course, the devil is in the details.
Genius in common parlance means a person who has scored above a certain IQ number. I've seen 140 quoted frequently. It's also used colloquially to refer to anybody who actually understands how a computer works, as opposed to someone who has consumer-grade computer skills in word processing and web surfing.
I don't think those 2001 techs were intended to change your life in particular. The title on the article says they were intended to change the world. And they have..
Data Mining: Remember Total Information Awareness? Just about every government anti-terrorist intelligence program that isn't intercept-based or human intelligence based is a data mining program
Biometrics: Fairly important, gotta give those data mining programs something to mine. The ability to authenticate a tape from Osama Bin Laden has been in the news. Facial recognition software has been burgeoning. And cheap thumbprint drives are available off-the shelf. Not to mention new governmental requirements for passports and driver's licenses
Natural Language Processing: Apparently Dragon Naturally Speaking now works really well with just a minimum of training. Internet translators are getting better, but still are pretty awful. I won't speculate about NSA and Echelon's abilities to focus in on keywords.
DRM: It's everywhere, and it sucks.
Robot design has made great strides. iRobot is selling ton of bots for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they've been proven to save lives. Predator and Global Hawk drones are critical tools in both wars. We've got two robots wheeling around on Mars exploring new things every day. And another robot craft in orbit around Saturn.
Microfluidics are becoming important in biotech from what I hear, but it's not my field.
No idea bout microphotonics.
BMI hasn't made it out of the lab, except for the Braingate chip which is still in limited use
Untangling code is not in wide-scale use.
Flexible transistors have not thus far proven important. There's only one device that I know of out there with a flexible screen and it uses digital ink tech,
So, all in all, I'd say MIT did a pretty good job of prediction in 2001.
Actually, if you want to use a computer from 10 years ago, you'd be better off using software from 12 years ago, assuming it didn't require any special drivers. Moore's Law tells us that your 10-year old computer should run 12-year-old software blazingly fast. Whereas 8 year old software will consider your computer ot be already slow.
This is similar to the problem with doctors though. Is a lawyer who wins most of his cases very good, or just very selective about only taking easy cases? A really expert lawyer could be given hard/impossible cases, because he's the only one who has a chance at winning and still lose a lot.
>Just imagine a city full of these devices. People wouldn't need ground garages anymore. Streets could be dug up and replanted to reverse global warming and beautify the city (but >leave enough for bike lanes). No more stoplights, no more running over pedestrians.
Don't be ridiculous, how are people going to bring home groceries with a jet pack? Or a new flatscreen tv? Or a sheet of plywood? Where would you fit the baby seat for taking the little ones to the grandparents? Commuting to work in a thunderstorm would either suck or be really really dangerous with a jetpack. And don't get me started on starling season or bird migrations in general. We'll always need ground streets unless you've got a skytruck/skycar to go with your jetpack. Yes, being able to fly around would be very cool, and I'd probably buy one if they could be made relatively failure resistant and reasonably priced but they can't replace the automobile in all cases any more than motorcycles/bicycles can. So we still need roads.
You could just leave it turned off. That way it will be available to you in an emergency, in case you need to make an outgoing call but it won't be an electronic leash to your irritating friends. That's what my parents do.
Sure, Sun won't have any data centers by 2015. Also no finance, or marketing, or r&d or sales, or procurement, or manufacturing or a cafeteria or a mail room..
I downloaded the 2008 budget just yesterday from here, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy08/browse.html
Ooh, maybe they mean this is the first time the *2009* budget is available just like it is a first every year each time it's posted.
Wikipedia says the cumulative cost of the Hubble program has been 6.5 billion dollars. The population of the United States is approximately 300 million people. That means that the Hubble over its entire lifespan cost every man, woman and child in the United States $21.67 each. So no, all the monies spent on it would not have changed lots of American lives in a big positive way. Considering that all that money was paid over the course of the last 18 years, that means each person paid the equivalent of a little over a dollar per year for the wonderful pictures and discoveries it made. So, are the secrets of the universe, or even just pretty pictures worth a third of a cent per day? I think so. 6.5 billion dollars in the hands of one person is a lot of money. 6.5 billion dollars spread across 300 million people over 20 years is practically nothing. If you want to consider real money, consider the > 450 billion dollars spent over the last 5 years on the Iraq war, or the 450 Billion dollar Defense budget spent every year which doesn't even include war operations.
Slashdot Mirror
In a related story, English majors found to make poor terrorists, as the ability to diagram a sentence or identify themes in literature fails to strike fear into the hearts of millions.
>To the original poster - don't listen to anyone who tells you a computer-related job will kill your love life. Expand your knowledge, be passionate about what you do, and >anyone who (metaphorically) mods you down for it isn't worth knowing. Also remember to shower, and get some nice shirts :)
While you are no doubt correct that a geek profession is not an absolute barrier to a lovelife for a straight guy, there are several things to consider
1)If you become a coder, you will most likely not be meeting a girlfriend at work if your job mostly involves staring at a screen and working only with other guys, particularly if your development organization is isolated in its own building or part of campus. Other professions are more advantageous for meeting women on the job:doctor and teacher are two that come to mind. Studies have shown that an embarrassingly large percentage of people met their mates at work.
2) Development can involve insane schedules if you have poor managers which is the case at most places. Poor management being the #1 reason why most software sucks. Less time for going out and meeting women .
3) You won't be able to talk about your work with most women. Either they will find it tedious or incomprehensible due to the lack of technical background. This is not necessarily a bad thing, most people find 'shop talk' in social settings a boring topic, but it's not nearly as advantageous for dating as saying "I'm in a band, hey you should come see us play." Or "I fly jet fighters" or " "I'm independently wealthy. I devote my time to helping needy kids and saving fuzzy puppies" or "I'm an artist. I'm having an exhibition at xyz gallery."
4) Your daily work environment is not likely to improve your social skills or physique, unlike say, being in sales or an apartment moving company. Various jobs practice different skills. Coding will in fact make you more logical and literal which are not advantageous to forming an emotional connection with someone.
But still, correlation does not imply causation. There are plenty of married geeks, and plenty of people have poor social skills which are often preexisting long before getting into technology.
Best of luck to you.
1000 miles? we can do that today, put some engines on a big enough space rock... I make no warranties as to whether the structural integrity of the Earth could maintain the shape of that crater though. 6 million mile crater? Crater in what exactly? The Earth isn't that large. Are we going to build Dyson Spheres only to put craters in them?
That's a great idea. Any idea of how to reliably select leaders for those qualities, given that the current methods have nothing to do with competency whatsoever?
If the Go Fast Anywhere drive is magic, it can be like the spacefolding ships of Dune. No need for take-off and landing, just appear right on the surface of whatever planet you want to be on. Disappear from said planet the same way. Yeah, you'll need to find the planets first, but since you can Go Fast Anywhere, just spacefold to the near vicinity of the star and use a big radar dish, or synthetic array and telescopic observations to survey the system. No need for "magic star trek sensors", Arecibo works just fine in planetary radar mode, when it has funding. Spectroscopy and physical probes should suffice for the "analyze planets" part, once you're close enough. Yeah, it'll take a bit of time and multiple observations to work out the orbits, so you can predict where the planet will be so you can spacefold to that exact location, but it's not anywhere near impossible. Power sources? A Rickover-style nuclear plant should do fine for powering the electrical system of the ship, weight's not a real issue since we are spacefolding. That's assuming you can't tap whatever magical force powers the spacefold drive for ordinary power. Life support? We've been working with sealed environments for a while now. It's not tremendously difficult, assuming you don't spacefold to say, Venus, Jupiter or Io (radiation) or too close to a star. The relative velocity thing would not be a problem with spacefold drive, as we've seen that it matches velocity perfectly during the fold in the sequel novels because it is not smashed to bits by the planet it appears on.
So yeah, a properly dreamed-up magic Go Fast Anywhere drive would open up the galaxy. Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.
You're talking about the United States of the 60s and early 70s. The U.S. is no longer capable of delivering people to the Moon without a >10 year head start, and hasn't been for 36 years. Given that delivering people *the first time* took 8 years from the first Americans in space to the first landing, one can easily conclude that 21st century America is less capable than it was prior to the first lunar landing. That's mostly because America has been focussing not on physical industry but on intellectual and communications industries. The space program is no longer the mass draw for the best and brightest that it once was.
>Why would a tech-savvy human being be any more useful or valid as a politician than an education-savvy human being?
Oh, I dunno, maybe because the vast majority of Americans are now voting in elections on insecure electronic voting machines? Because the IRS is collecting taxes using patched COBOL code from the 60s? Because warrantless point-and-click wiretaps are a major privacy issue? Because remote-control and autonomous weapons are beginning to be fielded in significant numbers by our armed forces? Because internet crime is on the rise and credit card fraud and "identity theft" impacts hundreds of thousands of americans? Because federal agencies keep losing the American people's data in unencrypted form? Because the content industries keep encroaching upon people's physical property rights and inventing new classes of crimes to protect their bottom line in an ineffectual manner? Despite all the blather about education by the Feds, education is mostly a *state* and local issue.
Nice BTTF ref!
Shields! SHIELDS!
Frog, Blast the vent core! They're Everywhere!
Total agreement here. When you're playing, you're doing your level best not to die and to frag other players. It's fun, but it's also stressful. When you finally get shot, you can chill for a bit because you're not intently trying not to die at that moment.
2 seconds of googling would have revealed ETrade Bank in addition to their brokerage. I just saved you those 2 seconds. You're welcome.
Yeah, it even freaked the people in Rainbows End out. Which is why the real techies used illegal Paraguayan chips which allowed them to sidestep the Secure Hardware Environment. On the other hand widespread transparent use of properly administered crypto certs would be a huge boon as it could totally eliminate phishing and identity theft. Of course, the devil is in the details.
Genius in common parlance means a person who has scored above a certain IQ number. I've seen 140 quoted frequently. It's also used colloquially to refer to anybody who actually understands how a computer works, as opposed to someone who has consumer-grade computer skills in word processing and web surfing.
I don't think those 2001 techs were intended to change your life in particular. The title on the article says they were intended to change the world. And they have..
Data Mining: Remember Total Information Awareness? Just about every government anti-terrorist intelligence program that isn't intercept-based or human intelligence based is a data mining program
Biometrics: Fairly important, gotta give those data mining programs something to mine. The ability to authenticate a tape from Osama Bin Laden has been in the news. Facial recognition software has been burgeoning. And cheap thumbprint drives are available off-the shelf. Not to mention new governmental requirements for passports and driver's licenses
Natural Language Processing: Apparently Dragon Naturally Speaking now works really well with just a minimum of training. Internet translators are getting better, but still are pretty awful. I won't speculate about NSA and Echelon's abilities to focus in on keywords.
DRM: It's everywhere, and it sucks.
Robot design has made great strides. iRobot is selling ton of bots for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they've been proven to save lives. Predator and Global Hawk drones are critical tools in both wars. We've got two robots wheeling around on Mars exploring new things every day. And another robot craft in orbit around Saturn.
Microfluidics are becoming important in biotech from what I hear, but it's not my field.
No idea bout microphotonics.
BMI hasn't made it out of the lab, except for the Braingate chip which is still in limited use
Untangling code is not in wide-scale use.
Flexible transistors have not thus far proven important. There's only one device that I know of out there with a flexible screen and it uses digital ink tech,
So, all in all, I'd say MIT did a pretty good job of prediction in 2001.
Actually, if you want to use a computer from 10 years ago, you'd be better off using software from 12 years ago, assuming it didn't require any special drivers. Moore's Law tells us that your 10-year old computer should run 12-year-old software blazingly fast. Whereas 8 year old software will consider your computer ot be already slow.
This is similar to the problem with doctors though. Is a lawyer who wins most of his cases very good, or just very selective about only taking easy cases? A really expert lawyer could be given hard/impossible cases, because he's the only one who has a chance at winning and still lose a lot.
What has the Son of Mog done this time?
>Just imagine a city full of these devices. People wouldn't need ground garages anymore. Streets could be dug up and replanted to reverse global warming and beautify the city (but >leave enough for bike lanes). No more stoplights, no more running over pedestrians.
Don't be ridiculous, how are people going to bring home groceries with a jet pack? Or a new flatscreen tv? Or a sheet of plywood? Where would you fit the baby seat for taking the little ones to the grandparents? Commuting to work in a thunderstorm would either suck or be really really dangerous with a jetpack. And don't get me started on starling season or bird migrations in general. We'll always need ground streets unless you've got a skytruck/skycar to go with your jetpack. Yes, being able to fly around would be very cool, and I'd probably buy one if they could be made relatively failure resistant and reasonably priced but they can't replace the automobile in all cases any more than motorcycles/bicycles can. So we still need roads.
My Congressman really is doing a fine job. My Senators however suffer from cranio-rectal inversion. The pain of living in a blue area of a red state.
You could just leave it turned off. That way it will be available to you in an emergency, in case you need to make an outgoing call but it won't be an electronic leash to your irritating friends. That's what my parents do.
Sure, Sun won't have any data centers by 2015. Also no finance, or marketing, or r&d or sales, or procurement, or manufacturing or a cafeteria or a mail room..
I downloaded the 2008 budget just yesterday from here, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy08/browse.html Ooh, maybe they mean this is the first time the *2009* budget is available just like it is a first every year each time it's posted.
Wikipedia says the cumulative cost of the Hubble program has been 6.5 billion dollars. The population of the United States is approximately 300 million people. That means that the Hubble over its entire lifespan cost every man, woman and child in the United States $21.67 each. So no, all the monies spent on it would not have changed lots of American lives in a big positive way. Considering that all that money was paid over the course of the last 18 years, that means each person paid the equivalent of a little over a dollar per year for the wonderful pictures and discoveries it made. So, are the secrets of the universe, or even just pretty pictures worth a third of a cent per day? I think so. 6.5 billion dollars in the hands of one person is a lot of money. 6.5 billion dollars spread across 300 million people over 20 years is practically nothing. If you want to consider real money, consider the > 450 billion dollars spent over the last 5 years on the Iraq war, or the 450 Billion dollar Defense budget spent every year which doesn't even include war operations.
Were you using U.S. Gallons or Imperial Gallons?