Do you see long term trends in various misconceptions?
It seems subjectively to me that the "vernal equinox egg" deal was WAY more popular in the 80s. Its a random variable on the timescale of a couple years.
Other misconceptions, like "the far side of the moon is always dark" or "the moon always rises at sunset and sets at sunrise" has a relatively constant rate of mis-belief over time.
Another type of misconception is the flash in the pan like the "face on mars" which gets intense media attention for awhile and then fades (permanently?) into obscurity.
Do you see any general trends in the distribution of the three types of misconceptions over time, like one getting more or less popular or... maybe due to social media or something?
I have not bothered to research why its listed as supporting the Spartan-3A DSP 1800 and not the spartan3 dev board I have sitting at home, probably needs more gates? Or depends on some part of the DSP1800's innards? Or simply the dude who did it owned a DSP1800 as opposed to the board I have at home?
and how much do they cost compared to Intel/AMD CPUs of similar performance?
Which vegetable has similar price to an apple or an orange? Perhaps a potatoe?
The thing with FPGAs is... how much do you wanna spend? I know there are simply gigantic FPGA arrays out there, so on one FPGA chip you could probably put a whole Beowulf cluster of a dozen of these things on one chip complete with the ethernet switch that interconnects them. So its kind of meaningless, like debating the weight of a soul.
The goal of a FPGA system is not to be a generic processor, but to use the field programability... you use the embedded CPU for generic "who cares how fast" stuff like a user interface, or a TCP network stack, or a DHCP client. You do all the heavy lifting inside FPGA hardware itself. If you used this CPU for a FPGA based mythtv frontend, you would not write a H.264 decoder in the emulated RISC processor assembly language, you'd use a hardware one (or at least hardware accelerated one) inside the FPGA written in verilog or VHDL. If you're running benchmarks on the FPGA processor trying to optimize it, you're probably doing it Very wrong, or trying some insane level of optimization / price cutting.
Take bitcoins to transfer cash. Doesn't seem overly complicated. I can turn $50 into BTC without much time or effort, send it to them, and they can turn it into euros or whatever they need with little effort. Don't they have a postal mail address where they can accept innumerable forms of psuedo-currency like gift cards, postal stamps, etc? Handling $3.5 million might be a bit labor intensive, maybe they need a slightly smaller budget?
I would never be where I am now without Federal student loans. And they are loans not handouts. I am now pay them back with interest
They are handouts, to the educational-financial complex. Without the loans, they would not have been able to charge you as much as they did. Basically its a stealth tax from you to the university with the bankers and other miscreants making some transaction fees along the way.
I would agree that without the loans, you would not be where you are now, you'd be ahead of where you are by the amount of money you've "paid back".
I'd say it depends on whether it's part of the intended gameplay.
As an analogy, if you shoot at me with a paintball gun on the street, I can demand compensation for my clothes you damaged with your colour. If you do the same during a paintball game I take part in, I can't -- after all, if I didn't want those clothes coloured, I shouldn't have worn them at the paintball game.
IANAL however.
Stealing a base in baseball has an obvious monetary value... should not be too hard to figure out on a league average basis how much a players annual salary changes both for stealing a base and for being a good base-man and pitcher and not getting a base stolen.
Another great example is intercepting a pass in american football (or I suppose, in real football)
If I shoot you with a paintball gun to distract you while you're trying to steal a base, is that a criminal matter, or a civil matter, or a gameplay matter?
you can enter the state's community college system and live at home (working part time hopefully)
Putting some 2011 numbers to it, in a neighboring state, using the public CC a couple blocks from my home:
2410.12 per semester tuition + 158.80 fees (WTF?) * 2 semesters/year = $5137.80 before books and lab costs and supplies, etc. We'll round that up to 5200, which divides nicely into $100/week take home pay. If by some miracle you don't pay any taxes and are not someone elses dependent etc, that is a mere 14 hours per week of work, fairly survivable.
Of course with teen unemployment ranging from 25% to 75% depending on how corrupt your statistician is, I'm not sure if this means anything, as there is an excellent change you'll not be able to find a job. Which at least is good practice for after you graduate and theres no work...
The other problem is my local CC is legendary for only offering paper classes... You "need" 2nd semester o-chem? Well, until we can get 8 people to sign up for it, which has never happened... On the other hand they always offer remedial college algebra and remedial writing classes. It will probably take much more than 2 calendar years to actually take all the "first two year classes".
There was a time when working part time over the summer would be enough to pay ALL college expenses
20 years ago I found sorta-full time (lets say, 30 hrs/wk average) minimum wage work, year around, easily paid for a nice live-by-myself apartment in a nice area, a cheap and rusty yet reliable car, and full to part time tuition while earning my associates degree. No benefits, no health insurance, no dental, nothing. That degree led to a "real job" that had benefits including full tuition reimbursement for my bachelors degree...
Since then, minimum wage has gone from 5 something to 7 something, gas has gone from 90 cents a gallon to $4, my old bachelor apartment rent has gone from $400/month to $575/month, and tuition at the local school has quadrupled due to federal student loans...
The other interesting issue is tuition reimbursement 20 years ago was typically unlimited, other than having to be accredited, C or better grade, and vaguely related my job and/or employer. Then it dropped to $5K/year which at that time was pretty generous, going to school part or quarter time 3 semesters per year, I was paying about $160/credit long term average including all books and fees, I usually spent less than $4K/yr, I had to be careful to submit each semester's expenses in the proper calendar year but it was no big deal.
Since then, reimbursement remains at $5K/yr, but full time tuition at the local engineering school a couple blocks from where I work has risen to... $540/credit (I checked online while writing this), before endless fees and parking permits and $200 each textbooks. Let's round that up to $640/credit. So I would only be able to afford about two semesters per year were I to start another degree. Has the value of the education provided increased by a factor of 4 in the last 20 years?
3. Eliminate 90% of consumer demand thru unemployment, underemployment, credit/financial system implosion, economic bubbles in locally provided services like education and health care. Getting rid of our consumers will balance the lack of Chinese consumer goods. We're on track so far...
How does "cheating" occur? Can somebody explain to me what "cheating" means in this context?
There is no free market, don't be confused by thinking about it. Its simply not relevant.
The Chinese government hands cash to their panel manufacturers to lower their prices so they can put our manufacturers out of business. Then they have two options, they can go the "home appliance route" and make money bu cutting quality so we have to replace our panels every two years, just like Chinese dish washing machines. We'll buy replacements for our broken panels a couple times because it must just be bad luck that they fall apart in 2 years instead of 20, but eventually give up. The other option is explode prices upward, because the capital cost of setting up a competitor is very high and takes a long time, and our government will not help our manufacturers in fact it will stand in the way whenever possible, and finally if we built a plant to sell cheap panels the Chinese govt would merely repeat the same trick, hand cash to their manufacturers to undercut the prices of our new plant, and put our new plant out of business, at which time they can charge whatever they want again.
The USA problem is we think we are human beings and Chinese are not human beings they are just the yellow hordes or whatever subhuman description you'd like. We do not allow panels to be sold here if they were made in the US and toxic waste was dumped into USA drinking water, USA rivers, USA farm fields, etc, because we are civilized humans (mostly) and humans should not have to live in a toxic dump. But the Chinese are not humans, so if we buy panels from people who dump toxic waste into the environment, that is OK with us, because they are just animals. Turns out that proper waste disposal is so expensive that its an economic non-starter to buy American instead of cheap Chinese. I'm not saying I agree with any of it, I'm just clarifying that the only reason we allow it is the US is a profoundly racist country.
OP has no plan, I provide a plan, you say something like "no plan survives contact with the enemy". As a thought experiment if nothing else, the OP needs to at least think about my plan, and if the evidence he sees makes him change his goals, well, then I think all 3 of us win.
Personally I agree with you, he's misguided. Best way for him to see that is for him to research further and come to our conclusion.
If you're gonna do the wrong thing, at least do it effectively, or if you're gonna do the wrong thing, at least do it to excess...
The USA is in a long term serious decline for anything to do with science and engineering. These fields are moving to places like China which put a larger value on education. You'd be well advised to consider moving overseas, because the trend is clear: less and less of this kind of work happens in the United States. The aerospace industry here has been gutted since the 1960's. It still exists to some extent, but not nearly like it used to, and it's declining all the time.
All true. Consider a dual major in a foreign language. I'd suggest Chinese for "general engineering and sciences" but for rocketry I'd totally learn French. Get a job at the ESA. The "official languages" of the ESA are English (check) French and German. 2 outta 3 isn't bad...
The problem with becoming an aerospace engineer is those guys made fat stacks of cash in 1970 designing and testing the shuttle. Then, 40 years of driving taxis. Whoops. Don't want to try and pay off $400K of student loans delivering pizzas.
The people at the 'top' of their fields are almost always talkers rather than doers.
One slight problem with this advice is the guy wants to get into the engineering dept at spacex... the entire "private space industry field" is something like 5 guys and their boss. A small group like that can't afford specialists, especially specialists in schmoozing.
Now if he wanted to get into a giant military industrial complex contractor, thats another thing.
If you really want prestige go to the best graduate program you can get into after you graduate.
Look into transfer programs at the undergrad level. No one cares where you went to for freshman year. Frankly, no one in the educational-industrial complex wants to admit it, but no one cares where you graduated from, once you're older than about 30 yrs.
Look in to transfer programs VERY carefully, don't make my "mistake". In my CS program I had to take calculus 3 times... once in high school (long story; I skipped a grade of math in high school) and once at "cheap" local school and once at "big" school. On the good side, I improved my calculus grade each time up to A+ level. The prof actually kidded me about how I wrote the answer key... well I darn well should have after taking the same class 3 times... By somewhat more careful planning I only had to take intro to sociology once, early american history once, C++ once, "world religions" once, etc
Could I appeal the non-transfer? Eh, maybe. Could I have tested out? Well, since I achieved a A+ without much effort, I should think so. But I had full 100% employer tuition reimbursement, and an A pads my GPA more than a transfer credit, so...
I suggest some military (self?) education, because its a fairly effective way to analyze long term campaigns...
So... your goal... what intel do you have about the goal? When you asked SpaceX what did they say? When you talked to the engineers there, and especially the engineering department management, what did THEY suggest? Tell them the truth and HR will filter / blow you off. Tell them you need to interview an engineering dept manager for a school report, you Might make it thru the filter. Get all 007 on this if necessary. Unless they're here on/. with us, which is possible, I'm not thinking your intel from/. will be worth much.
Next check out the opfor, that being all the other applicants at SpaceX, what is your edge? Teachers naturally try to convince their students the most important techniques for success are being a follower and getting high grades, and many/most kids are stary eyed enough to believe them, the fools. I'm not 100% certain that is remotely relevant. I'm guessing that if SpaceX gets 1000 qualified applicants per position, if you are in fact the #1 GPA in the nation that might help, otherwise you need another strategy... join the model rocket club that the hiring manager is a member of? Something like that?
Finally check out yourself. Very few people pick a career at age 17 and stick with it.
Handwriting is an obsolete skill they will never use in their lives.
because no one is using whiteboards in business meetings, especially small ones.
I have never seen cursive handwriting used in two decades of business meetings. Neat block print, yes. Scribble block print, yes. Flowing artsy calligraphy cursive, never. It's right up there with "shorthand", which I had to learn the rudiments of when I was a teen "because you'll use this all the time"
from the article: "But, a thought - how about we stop destroying hermit crab homes in the first place? Isn't putting too much plastic stuff in the ocean part of the problem? "
Is plastic (ABS) the only thing a Makerbot can work with?
Any 3-d printer can make a shell, or pretty much anything that fits inside its work envelope. A makerbot is one specific type of 3d printer. I'm very intermittently building my own 3-d printer out of aluminum bar stock, following the most recent reprap design, at which point I'll be able to print stuff such as another, bigger reprap printer...
plastic (ABS) implies theres only one plastic that being ABS. I see you didn't even look at the makerbot website, since they sell water soluble PVA and sorta biodegradable PLA. PLA would probably be an OK selection. Pretty much any thermoplastic plastic could theoretically be used if you're willing to make your own extruder, I'm thinking of fooling around with styrene and maybe PE. Even a thermoset plastic could probably be used if you're super motivated and/or crazy.
How long will you still get TVs which accept PAL/NTSC signals?
Until the last analog cable TV channel is replaced with a QAM signal on the last cable TV system in the world.
Its gonna be awhile.
The one good thing is "TVs" have never done more and it keeps getting cheaper to add more silicon. Mandatory NTSC stereo decoders in the 80s. All TVs must support closed captioning since roughly the 90s. All TVs must support the V-chip that no one uses since the 00s. All TVs must support NTSC that few people use since the 10s. I'm sure the TV of the 2050s will have to support that ancient H.264 and "3d" from 2015.
"Someday" it'll be cheaper to buy a large computer monitor and plug it into a mythtv box, but they can cram a lot more into TVs before it gets expensive enough to be worth it..
On the ultra big scale. On the ultra small scale, you're fighting a war, your M1A1 tank (or in this story, F16) requires fuel, you can pump in anything that burns if it helps you stay alive. Been a military doctrine to "burn any fuel you can find" for longer than I've been alive. This results in certain legendary efficiency and volumetric power output issues over the past few decades, like the HMMVW that gets like 5 MPG and only pulls 150 horsepower out of something like a 10 liter engine, BUT, very importantly, if it burns, you can put it in the tank and drive off. You could practically crap in a humvee and would none the less run. I hated driving that Fing thing and it leaked oil every time I did a PMCS, but god help me it could digest and burn anything, the ultimate iron stomach. In my experience.
Its a religious thing. Geologists and science types can admit that petroleum is millions of year old partially decayed vegetable matter, but that is in direct opposition to some popular "old man in the sky told me to be anti-social towards nonbelievers and btw the earth is only 6000 years old" cults. So a press release has to pretend they are magically chemically different, like the bio fuels have organic life force added to them whereas petroleum oil is just dead, although burnable, rock. Think of organic chemistry back when people believed in "life force" vitalism.
you don't need to be a computer scientist to use a
OK lets define "use" as making the computer bend to my will, rather than making me bend to the computer's will. In other words, I wanna install whatever software I want.
Rank the iphone, android, and windows phone in order of education requirements to jailbreak.
My very semi-serious research:
iphone is supposedly jailbreakable with like "click on a website" or something. Or at least it was. Then it either magically worked or was irrecoverably bricked. So I'd say this is roughly lower grade school level.
android takes all kinds of foolishness just to install cyanogenmod, but its well documented. You need about as much skill as it takes to bake a cake, which admittedly most of the marching morons can't do without setting the kitchen on fire. I'd say this is roughly college freshman level.
I don't think anyone uses windows phone so there is not much news out there. I'd say roughly PHD level because you'll be breaking new territory, using something no sane person has ever used before. Kind of like LSD in the early 60s.
The term "Science fiction" is commonly used to encompass a wide range of genres
Yeah, most recently as seen in video, Sci Fi is now wrestling, ghost hunting, and giant monster horror B movies. I am unimpressed.
Much like "begging the question" is commonly used completely inappropriately, mostly as a pompous "filler" rather than what it actually means. Again, an emphatic and vigorous "eh".
So back to Wolfe... am I right or wrong, the only thing sci fi about his book is likely to be playing with numbers so the date is in the future, and Maybe some Heinlein style wordprocessor search and replace work where absolutely nothing is changed but the word "telephone" is replaced with "videophone" and "India" is replaced with the word "Mars"? And there's sword fighting, feudal system, and maybe some magic? That's the impression I'm getting.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you see long term trends in various misconceptions?
It seems subjectively to me that the "vernal equinox egg" deal was WAY more popular in the 80s. Its a random variable on the timescale of a couple years.
Other misconceptions, like "the far side of the moon is always dark" or "the moon always rises at sunset and sets at sunrise" has a relatively constant rate of mis-belief over time.
Another type of misconception is the flash in the pan like the "face on mars" which gets intense media attention for awhile and then fades (permanently?) into obscurity.
Do you see any general trends in the distribution of the three types of misconceptions over time, like one getting more or less popular or ... maybe due to social media or something?
For that matter, are any available now?
http://www.embeddedarm.com/ aka technologic systems
http://beagleboard.org/
http://www.friendlyarm.net/
Look in the embedded market, not the FPS gamer enthusiast market.
Where can I get an OpenRISC CPU and a motherboard that will support it,
http://opencores.org/or1k/FPGA_Development_Boards
I have not bothered to research why its listed as supporting the Spartan-3A DSP 1800 and not the spartan3 dev board I have sitting at home, probably needs more gates? Or depends on some part of the DSP1800's innards? Or simply the dude who did it owned a DSP1800 as opposed to the board I have at home?
and how much do they cost compared to Intel/AMD CPUs of similar performance?
Which vegetable has similar price to an apple or an orange? Perhaps a potatoe?
The thing with FPGAs is... how much do you wanna spend? I know there are simply gigantic FPGA arrays out there, so on one FPGA chip you could probably put a whole Beowulf cluster of a dozen of these things on one chip complete with the ethernet switch that interconnects them. So its kind of meaningless, like debating the weight of a soul.
The goal of a FPGA system is not to be a generic processor, but to use the field programability... you use the embedded CPU for generic "who cares how fast" stuff like a user interface, or a TCP network stack, or a DHCP client. You do all the heavy lifting inside FPGA hardware itself. If you used this CPU for a FPGA based mythtv frontend, you would not write a H.264 decoder in the emulated RISC processor assembly language, you'd use a hardware one (or at least hardware accelerated one) inside the FPGA written in verilog or VHDL. If you're running benchmarks on the FPGA processor trying to optimize it, you're probably doing it Very wrong, or trying some insane level of optimization / price cutting.
Take bitcoins to transfer cash. Doesn't seem overly complicated. I can turn $50 into BTC without much time or effort, send it to them, and they can turn it into euros or whatever they need with little effort.
Don't they have a postal mail address where they can accept innumerable forms of psuedo-currency like gift cards, postal stamps, etc?
Handling $3.5 million might be a bit labor intensive, maybe they need a slightly smaller budget?
I would never be where I am now without Federal student loans. And they are loans not handouts. I am now pay them back with interest
They are handouts, to the educational-financial complex. Without the loans, they would not have been able to charge you as much as they did. Basically its a stealth tax from you to the university with the bankers and other miscreants making some transaction fees along the way.
I would agree that without the loans, you would not be where you are now, you'd be ahead of where you are by the amount of money you've "paid back".
I'd say it depends on whether it's part of the intended gameplay.
As an analogy, if you shoot at me with a paintball gun on the street, I can demand compensation for my clothes you damaged with your colour. If you do the same during a paintball game I take part in, I can't -- after all, if I didn't want those clothes coloured, I shouldn't have worn them at the paintball game.
IANAL however.
Stealing a base in baseball has an obvious monetary value... should not be too hard to figure out on a league average basis how much a players annual salary changes both for stealing a base and for being a good base-man and pitcher and not getting a base stolen.
Another great example is intercepting a pass in american football (or I suppose, in real football)
If I shoot you with a paintball gun to distract you while you're trying to steal a base, is that a criminal matter, or a civil matter, or a gameplay matter?
you can enter the state's community college system and live at home (working part time hopefully)
Putting some 2011 numbers to it, in a neighboring state, using the public CC a couple blocks from my home:
2410.12 per semester tuition + 158.80 fees (WTF?) * 2 semesters/year = $5137.80 before books and lab costs and supplies, etc. We'll round that up to 5200, which divides nicely into $100/week take home pay. If by some miracle you don't pay any taxes and are not someone elses dependent etc, that is a mere 14 hours per week of work, fairly survivable.
Of course with teen unemployment ranging from 25% to 75% depending on how corrupt your statistician is, I'm not sure if this means anything, as there is an excellent change you'll not be able to find a job. Which at least is good practice for after you graduate and theres no work...
The other problem is my local CC is legendary for only offering paper classes... You "need" 2nd semester o-chem? Well, until we can get 8 people to sign up for it, which has never happened... On the other hand they always offer remedial college algebra and remedial writing classes. It will probably take much more than 2 calendar years to actually take all the "first two year classes".
There was a time when working part time over the summer would be enough to pay ALL college expenses
20 years ago I found sorta-full time (lets say, 30 hrs/wk average) minimum wage work, year around, easily paid for a nice live-by-myself apartment in a nice area, a cheap and rusty yet reliable car, and full to part time tuition while earning my associates degree. No benefits, no health insurance, no dental, nothing. That degree led to a "real job" that had benefits including full tuition reimbursement for my bachelors degree...
Since then, minimum wage has gone from 5 something to 7 something, gas has gone from 90 cents a gallon to $4, my old bachelor apartment rent has gone from $400/month to $575/month, and tuition at the local school has quadrupled due to federal student loans...
The other interesting issue is tuition reimbursement 20 years ago was typically unlimited, other than having to be accredited, C or better grade, and vaguely related my job and/or employer. Then it dropped to $5K/year which at that time was pretty generous, going to school part or quarter time 3 semesters per year, I was paying about $160/credit long term average including all books and fees, I usually spent less than $4K/yr, I had to be careful to submit each semester's expenses in the proper calendar year but it was no big deal.
Since then, reimbursement remains at $5K/yr, but full time tuition at the local engineering school a couple blocks from where I work has risen to ... $540/credit (I checked online while writing this), before endless fees and parking permits and $200 each textbooks. Let's round that up to $640/credit. So I would only be able to afford about two semesters per year were I to start another degree. Has the value of the education provided increased by a factor of 4 in the last 20 years?
3. Eliminate 90% of consumer demand thru unemployment, underemployment, credit/financial system implosion, economic bubbles in locally provided services like education and health care. Getting rid of our consumers will balance the lack of Chinese consumer goods. We're on track so far...
Your solutions assume a perfectly liquid and instantaneous market, which China much more closely approximates than us.
Our reaction speed is slower than theirs, therefore in the long run they'll always come out on top.
How does "cheating" occur? Can somebody explain to me what "cheating" means in this context?
There is no free market, don't be confused by thinking about it. Its simply not relevant.
The Chinese government hands cash to their panel manufacturers to lower their prices so they can put our manufacturers out of business. Then they have two options, they can go the "home appliance route" and make money bu cutting quality so we have to replace our panels every two years, just like Chinese dish washing machines. We'll buy replacements for our broken panels a couple times because it must just be bad luck that they fall apart in 2 years instead of 20, but eventually give up. The other option is explode prices upward, because the capital cost of setting up a competitor is very high and takes a long time, and our government will not help our manufacturers in fact it will stand in the way whenever possible, and finally if we built a plant to sell cheap panels the Chinese govt would merely repeat the same trick, hand cash to their manufacturers to undercut the prices of our new plant, and put our new plant out of business, at which time they can charge whatever they want again.
The USA problem is we think we are human beings and Chinese are not human beings they are just the yellow hordes or whatever subhuman description you'd like. We do not allow panels to be sold here if they were made in the US and toxic waste was dumped into USA drinking water, USA rivers, USA farm fields, etc, because we are civilized humans (mostly) and humans should not have to live in a toxic dump. But the Chinese are not humans, so if we buy panels from people who dump toxic waste into the environment, that is OK with us, because they are just animals. Turns out that proper waste disposal is so expensive that its an economic non-starter to buy American instead of cheap Chinese. I'm not saying I agree with any of it, I'm just clarifying that the only reason we allow it is the US is a profoundly racist country.
OP has no plan, I provide a plan, you say something like "no plan survives contact with the enemy".
As a thought experiment if nothing else, the OP needs to at least think about my plan, and if the evidence he sees makes him change his goals, well, then I think all 3 of us win.
Personally I agree with you, he's misguided. Best way for him to see that is for him to research further and come to our conclusion.
If you're gonna do the wrong thing, at least do it effectively, or if you're gonna do the wrong thing, at least do it to excess...
The USA is in a long term serious decline for anything to do with science and engineering. These fields are moving to places like China which put a larger value on education. You'd be well advised to consider moving overseas, because the trend is clear: less and less of this kind of work happens in the United States. The aerospace industry here has been gutted since the 1960's. It still exists to some extent, but not nearly like it used to, and it's declining all the time.
All true. Consider a dual major in a foreign language. I'd suggest Chinese for "general engineering and sciences" but for rocketry I'd totally learn French. Get a job at the ESA. The "official languages" of the ESA are English (check) French and German. 2 outta 3 isn't bad...
The problem with becoming an aerospace engineer is those guys made fat stacks of cash in 1970 designing and testing the shuttle. Then, 40 years of driving taxis. Whoops. Don't want to try and pay off $400K of student loans delivering pizzas.
Andromeda TV series? Why can't Siri look like that?
The people at the 'top' of their fields are almost always talkers rather than doers.
One slight problem with this advice is the guy wants to get into the engineering dept at spacex... the entire "private space industry field" is something like 5 guys and their boss. A small group like that can't afford specialists, especially specialists in schmoozing.
Now if he wanted to get into a giant military industrial complex contractor, thats another thing.
If you really want prestige go to the best graduate program you can get into after you graduate.
Look into transfer programs at the undergrad level. No one cares where you went to for freshman year. Frankly, no one in the educational-industrial complex wants to admit it, but no one cares where you graduated from, once you're older than about 30 yrs.
Look in to transfer programs VERY carefully, don't make my "mistake". In my CS program I had to take calculus 3 times... once in high school (long story; I skipped a grade of math in high school) and once at "cheap" local school and once at "big" school. On the good side, I improved my calculus grade each time up to A+ level. The prof actually kidded me about how I wrote the answer key... well I darn well should have after taking the same class 3 times... By somewhat more careful planning I only had to take intro to sociology once, early american history once, C++ once, "world religions" once, etc
Could I appeal the non-transfer? Eh, maybe. Could I have tested out? Well, since I achieved a A+ without much effort, I should think so. But I had full 100% employer tuition reimbursement, and an A pads my GPA more than a transfer credit, so ...
I suggest some military (self?) education, because its a fairly effective way to analyze long term campaigns...
So... your goal... what intel do you have about the goal? When you asked SpaceX what did they say? When you talked to the engineers there, and especially the engineering department management, what did THEY suggest? Tell them the truth and HR will filter / blow you off. Tell them you need to interview an engineering dept manager for a school report, you Might make it thru the filter. Get all 007 on this if necessary. Unless they're here on /. with us, which is possible, I'm not thinking your intel from /. will be worth much.
Next check out the opfor, that being all the other applicants at SpaceX, what is your edge? Teachers naturally try to convince their students the most important techniques for success are being a follower and getting high grades, and many/most kids are stary eyed enough to believe them, the fools. I'm not 100% certain that is remotely relevant. I'm guessing that if SpaceX gets 1000 qualified applicants per position, if you are in fact the #1 GPA in the nation that might help, otherwise you need another strategy... join the model rocket club that the hiring manager is a member of? Something like that?
Finally check out yourself. Very few people pick a career at age 17 and stick with it.
Handwriting is an obsolete skill they will never use in their lives.
because no one is using whiteboards in business meetings, especially small ones.
I have never seen cursive handwriting used in two decades of business meetings. Neat block print, yes. Scribble block print, yes. Flowing artsy calligraphy cursive, never. It's right up there with "shorthand", which I had to learn the rudiments of when I was a teen "because you'll use this all the time"
from the article: "But, a thought - how about we stop destroying hermit crab homes in the first place? Isn't putting too much plastic stuff in the ocean part of the problem? "
Is plastic (ABS) the only thing a Makerbot can work with?
Any 3-d printer can make a shell, or pretty much anything that fits inside its work envelope. A makerbot is one specific type of 3d printer. I'm very intermittently building my own 3-d printer out of aluminum bar stock, following the most recent reprap design, at which point I'll be able to print stuff such as another, bigger reprap printer...
plastic (ABS) implies theres only one plastic that being ABS. I see you didn't even look at the makerbot website, since they sell water soluble PVA and sorta biodegradable PLA. PLA would probably be an OK selection. Pretty much any thermoplastic plastic could theoretically be used if you're willing to make your own extruder, I'm thinking of fooling around with styrene and maybe PE. Even a thermoset plastic could probably be used if you're super motivated and/or crazy.
Would it possible to build something like this held up by the buoyancy of hot air rather than helium?
Depends on how far you're willing to stretch "like this"
http://www.solar-balloons.com/
How long will you still get TVs which accept PAL/NTSC signals?
Until the last analog cable TV channel is replaced with a QAM signal on the last cable TV system in the world.
Its gonna be awhile.
The one good thing is "TVs" have never done more and it keeps getting cheaper to add more silicon. Mandatory NTSC stereo decoders in the 80s. All TVs must support closed captioning since roughly the 90s. All TVs must support the V-chip that no one uses since the 00s. All TVs must support NTSC that few people use since the 10s. I'm sure the TV of the 2050s will have to support that ancient H.264 and "3d" from 2015.
"Someday" it'll be cheaper to buy a large computer monitor and plug it into a mythtv box, but they can cram a lot more into TVs before it gets expensive enough to be worth it..
On the ultra big scale. On the ultra small scale, you're fighting a war, your M1A1 tank (or in this story, F16) requires fuel, you can pump in anything that burns if it helps you stay alive. Been a military doctrine to "burn any fuel you can find" for longer than I've been alive. This results in certain legendary efficiency and volumetric power output issues over the past few decades, like the HMMVW that gets like 5 MPG and only pulls 150 horsepower out of something like a 10 liter engine, BUT, very importantly, if it burns, you can put it in the tank and drive off. You could practically crap in a humvee and would none the less run. I hated driving that Fing thing and it leaked oil every time I did a PMCS, but god help me it could digest and burn anything, the ultimate iron stomach. In my experience.
Its a religious thing. Geologists and science types can admit that petroleum is millions of year old partially decayed vegetable matter, but that is in direct opposition to some popular "old man in the sky told me to be anti-social towards nonbelievers and btw the earth is only 6000 years old" cults. So a press release has to pretend they are magically chemically different, like the bio fuels have organic life force added to them whereas petroleum oil is just dead, although burnable, rock. Think of organic chemistry back when people believed in "life force" vitalism.
you don't need to be a computer scientist to use a
OK lets define "use" as making the computer bend to my will, rather than making me bend to the computer's will. In other words, I wanna install whatever software I want.
Rank the iphone, android, and windows phone in order of education requirements to jailbreak.
My very semi-serious research:
iphone is supposedly jailbreakable with like "click on a website" or something. Or at least it was. Then it either magically worked or was irrecoverably bricked. So I'd say this is roughly lower grade school level.
android takes all kinds of foolishness just to install cyanogenmod, but its well documented. You need about as much skill as it takes to bake a cake, which admittedly most of the marching morons can't do without setting the kitchen on fire. I'd say this is roughly college freshman level.
I don't think anyone uses windows phone so there is not much news out there. I'd say roughly PHD level because you'll be breaking new territory, using something no sane person has ever used before. Kind of like LSD in the early 60s.
The term "Science fiction" is commonly used to encompass a wide range of genres
Yeah, most recently as seen in video, Sci Fi is now wrestling, ghost hunting, and giant monster horror B movies. I am unimpressed.
Much like "begging the question" is commonly used completely inappropriately, mostly as a pompous "filler" rather than what it actually means. Again, an emphatic and vigorous "eh".
So back to Wolfe... am I right or wrong, the only thing sci fi about his book is likely to be playing with numbers so the date is in the future, and Maybe some Heinlein style wordprocessor search and replace work where absolutely nothing is changed but the word "telephone" is replaced with "videophone" and "India" is replaced with the word "Mars"? And there's sword fighting, feudal system, and maybe some magic? That's the impression I'm getting.