As for your cloak and dagger fantasy - you are applying it to an area where fraud is normally very easily discovered so it looks more than a little bit silly and uninformed. People who advance a field frequently repeat the published experiments of other and progress from there - hence fraud stands out like dogs balls when nobody else gets the results that were published. Your professed "spook" skills would be of greater value investigating global finance or local government corruption.
The issue, as I pointed out very clearly above, is not with the corporate labs but with corporate labs with such narrow focus that they are only doing development work.
One person I know spent thirty years getting to the top of his field to be stuck doing mechanical testing of very minor variations of polycarbonate to use in artificial limbs which were all known to be inferior to a version that could no longer be patented. It was a total waste of time, especially since the competition was either using the superior unpatentable version or developing completely different polymers, which they can of course patent just like the minor variations in polycarbonate.
So that's the tight focus of "we need another polycarbonate we can patent" versus "we need a material to do job X". There's not a lot of the latter and there needs to be at least a bit of the latter to avoid someone else coming in to take over your field.
I'm not interesting in indulging your political biases
If you see the above as being related to political bias in any way then I can only conclude that you have a truly fucked up worldview that sees political bias everywhere - and your projection of than onto me and my comment above is deeply insulting.
you won't like that because you think all things corporate are evil
Now that is completely out of left field and fighting words. I'm supposed to find myself evil for working with applied science in private enterprise? How dare you build such a ridiculous strawman in my name. Also if you are depending on an unidentified youtube link to express what you cannot yourself, well that's about ten shades of pathetic isn't it? Can't even bother to write three words to distinguish it from a goatse link - why bother at all?
You failed to express what you intended to prove with the anecdote. By just cutting and pasting it can be taken in many ways. That aside, we have plenty of examples of non-micromanaged research being fruitful, such as the Bell labs one above, which is enough to indicate that at least SOME of it should be done. It turned out to be better to develop the internal combustion engine than just focusing on breeding a better horse.
Yes, the keyword "half" was there in the phrase "more than half" which adequately covers your entire post does it not? Thanks for the "correction", but it wasn't needed as you would have seen if you had done more than focus on keywords.
You are mistaking kicking back against PR agencies, people in politics defining a difference to other people in politics and medicine show "religion" who see science as a threat to their business model for "scientific consensus". Banding together against the barbarians at the gate who wouldn't know the scientific method if it bit them on the arse is not "scientific consensus" - it is a defence of expertise versus wilful ignorance and deliberate lies.
From a variety of sources I have heard that once a scientist reaches a certain level they have to put in far more than half their time chasing grants, which leaves the actual research to poorly supervised students. Apparently there are far more hoops to jump through to get the grants so it's not just relative scarcity - blame red tape that was not there before instead of the senior scientists that are being wasted as data entry staff filling in forms.
Bullshit - it's when the corporations with major labs have NOT been goal oriented that they have hit the pay dirt nobody expected - for instance Bell labs with the transistor and many other things. When a lab becomes nothing but a place to focus on development instead of actual research it only works for a while until someone who is pushing the envelope turns up to eat your lunch. IBM, HP and many others used to put a lot of effort into research without any immediate goal and that was part of the reason they survived for so long, and have been eclipsed by others no that they no longer do it.
There's been a bit of almost Soviet style Lysencoism over the last couple of decades with political appointees over-ruling the scientists that work for them. Put a horse judge in charge and that "heck of a job" just isn't good enough for anything other than judging horses.
What does it matter? When a minor is thrust into a position of power due to their ancestry and not their own efforts what else do you call it? Little Jailbait Princess Dagney is nothing but a symbol of how wonderful the aristocracy is and how common losers like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson got it all wrong.
How many fifteen year old laptop drives have you tried to spin up lately? Now compare that failure rate with optical or tapes. As I wrote above, the life has been extended (it used to be a lot of failures in a lot less than fifteen years) but the underlying modes of failure like the one I mentioned above are still there. Another unpowered failure mode is highly polished parts diffusing together over time so the drive "sticks", once again less of an issue than it used to be due to design changes taking that into account - quite a lot of it done around 2000.
The only thing that makes any sense at all for consumers is USB hard drives
They have a far shorter average offline life than the optical media. For one thing the bearings have a finite life as the lubricant breaks down over time - a lot longer than it used to be but still less on average than media problems with the optical disks. What is viable is to shuffle stuff off those USB drives onto newer ones a few years down the track, but if you are not prepared to do that eventually the optical stuff is going to come out as far more reliable.
That's just shifting the problem to someone who cares far less about the problem than you do. It leaves you one corporate restructure or changed business plan away from losing the lot and one backhoe incident away from not being able to get it when you want it. External USB drives are a very good stopgap or even ongoing solution for home users that don't want to mess about with optical media.
All that said, in purely biological terms there's some people that don't fit the standard definition, let alone the more stringent sporting definitions (eg. the athlete in the 1970s who failed to test as genetically female but has given birth twice without any artificial assistance), so it's nowRe:I thought Nix was only for lice!?here near as sharply defined or simple as you suggest.
but you still can't do stuff like change the shoulder-to-waist ratio, hand and foot sizes, etc
All statistical. Apart from body hair I'm sure it possible to find more "manly" looking women out there than most of the males posting to this site - though outliers people are a pretty varied bunch.
And this is also neglecting many other things, such as that men's and women's brains have different structures
Once again, those people in the middle and statistics come into play, a range instead of ones and zeros.
Only one geologist has been there and we've only got samples from a small number of locations, with not much of an idea about what is even a few inches beneath the surface.
Bit of a long time for the "great men" to be "on strike" isn't it? Since it's set in the USA, IMHO, that book is a kick in the face for both democracy and capitalism. Somehow American society is so useless in Rand's eyes that only a small nobility can keep it going. That is the exact opposite of the reality of the wide road to prosperity in the 1940s and 50s when she wrote the book. That book is not for you or me, it's for someone with a rich daddy that has brought them up to be ruthless and amoral.
Anyway, I think it's poison preying on the young and naive for a wide range of reasons and I've probably vented enough on that. I accept that you have a different view and that you probably do not see it as a deliberate kick in the face to a society that was built by people that actually did something instead of sitting on a throne issuing orders.
Sorry to post so much but the massive clue is about people of ability going away to come back after society has collapsed under the weight of socialism. That should remind you of something. Something from around 1917, and then wishful thinking about it collapsing soon after, which didn't happen in Rand's lifetime. The bit that gets me is all those Rand people of ability can be born to it without having to actually demonstrate it. It's a toxic message that is the antithesis of what modern society in the west is about.
None of them share the radical viewpoint of Ayn Rand
That's my point, they are all heirs to George Washington instead of King George or the Tsar. If you read stuff about or set in 19th century Russia before reading Rand it all stands out like dogs balls - especially little Princess Dagny.
You don't even have to go back as far as Rome. In the 1200s in England rich people were sometimes getting married in Churches because the Church had a nice big hall, then things went on from there. It was seen as a secular thing with a blessing on top if you could get it. It's still very much a secular thing in terms of property etc. One problem we have, especially in the USA, is "fundamentalists" who see religion at the core of EVERYTHING. Anything connected with a Church in any way back when they turned up a century ago is especially a religious issue to them. I think we need a modern Luther to nail stuff on their doors to tell them to be as tolerant as the mainstream that let them exist in the first place.
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As for your cloak and dagger fantasy - you are applying it to an area where fraud is normally very easily discovered so it looks more than a little bit silly and uninformed. People who advance a field frequently repeat the published experiments of other and progress from there - hence fraud stands out like dogs balls when nobody else gets the results that were published. Your professed "spook" skills would be of greater value investigating global finance or local government corruption.
One person I know spent thirty years getting to the top of his field to be stuck doing mechanical testing of very minor variations of polycarbonate to use in artificial limbs which were all known to be inferior to a version that could no longer be patented. It was a total waste of time, especially since the competition was either using the superior unpatentable version or developing completely different polymers, which they can of course patent just like the minor variations in polycarbonate.
So that's the tight focus of "we need another polycarbonate we can patent" versus "we need a material to do job X". There's not a lot of the latter and there needs to be at least a bit of the latter to avoid someone else coming in to take over your field.
If you see the above as being related to political bias in any way then I can only conclude that you have a truly fucked up worldview that sees political bias everywhere - and your projection of than onto me and my comment above is deeply insulting.
Now that is completely out of left field and fighting words. I'm supposed to find myself evil for working with applied science in private enterprise? How dare you build such a ridiculous strawman in my name.
Also if you are depending on an unidentified youtube link to express what you cannot yourself, well that's about ten shades of pathetic isn't it? Can't even bother to write three words to distinguish it from a goatse link - why bother at all?
You failed to express what you intended to prove with the anecdote. By just cutting and pasting it can be taken in many ways.
That aside, we have plenty of examples of non-micromanaged research being fruitful, such as the Bell labs one above, which is enough to indicate that at least SOME of it should be done.
It turned out to be better to develop the internal combustion engine than just focusing on breeding a better horse.
Yes, which is why I wrote "more than half" above.
Yes, the keyword "half" was there in the phrase "more than half" which adequately covers your entire post does it not?
Thanks for the "correction", but it wasn't needed as you would have seen if you had done more than focus on keywords.
You are mistaking kicking back against PR agencies, people in politics defining a difference to other people in politics and medicine show "religion" who see science as a threat to their business model for "scientific consensus".
Banding together against the barbarians at the gate who wouldn't know the scientific method if it bit them on the arse is not "scientific consensus" - it is a defence of expertise versus wilful ignorance and deliberate lies.
From a variety of sources I have heard that once a scientist reaches a certain level they have to put in far more than half their time chasing grants, which leaves the actual research to poorly supervised students. Apparently there are far more hoops to jump through to get the grants so it's not just relative scarcity - blame red tape that was not there before instead of the senior scientists that are being wasted as data entry staff filling in forms.
Bullshit - it's when the corporations with major labs have NOT been goal oriented that they have hit the pay dirt nobody expected - for instance Bell labs with the transistor and many other things. When a lab becomes nothing but a place to focus on development instead of actual research it only works for a while until someone who is pushing the envelope turns up to eat your lunch. IBM, HP and many others used to put a lot of effort into research without any immediate goal and that was part of the reason they survived for so long, and have been eclipsed by others no that they no longer do it.
There's been a bit of almost Soviet style Lysencoism over the last couple of decades with political appointees over-ruling the scientists that work for them. Put a horse judge in charge and that "heck of a job" just isn't good enough for anything other than judging horses.
What does it matter? When a minor is thrust into a position of power due to their ancestry and not their own efforts what else do you call it? Little Jailbait Princess Dagney is nothing but a symbol of how wonderful the aristocracy is and how common losers like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson got it all wrong.
You are just being obtuse. Fine, you like the book, but don't let it make you look like a complete idiot just to pretend it's perfect.
How many fifteen year old laptop drives have you tried to spin up lately? Now compare that failure rate with optical or tapes.
As I wrote above, the life has been extended (it used to be a lot of failures in a lot less than fifteen years) but the underlying modes of failure like the one I mentioned above are still there. Another unpowered failure mode is highly polished parts diffusing together over time so the drive "sticks", once again less of an issue than it used to be due to design changes taking that into account - quite a lot of it done around 2000.
They have a far shorter average offline life than the optical media. For one thing the bearings have a finite life as the lubricant breaks down over time - a lot longer than it used to be but still less on average than media problems with the optical disks.
What is viable is to shuffle stuff off those USB drives onto newer ones a few years down the track, but if you are not prepared to do that eventually the optical stuff is going to come out as far more reliable.
That's just shifting the problem to someone who cares far less about the problem than you do. It leaves you one corporate restructure or changed business plan away from losing the lot and one backhoe incident away from not being able to get it when you want it.
External USB drives are a very good stopgap or even ongoing solution for home users that don't want to mess about with optical media.
All statistical. Apart from body hair I'm sure it possible to find more "manly" looking women out there than most of the males posting to this site - though outliers people are a pretty varied bunch.
Once again, those people in the middle and statistics come into play, a range instead of ones and zeros.
Since they were long dead, most definitely not.
With respect didn't you notice THE MAIN CHARACTER.
Only one geologist has been there and we've only got samples from a small number of locations, with not much of an idea about what is even a few inches beneath the surface.
Bit of a long time for the "great men" to be "on strike" isn't it?
Since it's set in the USA, IMHO, that book is a kick in the face for both democracy and capitalism. Somehow American society is so useless in Rand's eyes that only a small nobility can keep it going. That is the exact opposite of the reality of the wide road to prosperity in the 1940s and 50s when she wrote the book.
That book is not for you or me, it's for someone with a rich daddy that has brought them up to be ruthless and amoral.
Anyway, I think it's poison preying on the young and naive for a wide range of reasons and I've probably vented enough on that. I accept that you have a different view and that you probably do not see it as a deliberate kick in the face to a society that was built by people that actually did something instead of sitting on a throne issuing orders.
Sorry to post so much but the massive clue is about people of ability going away to come back after society has collapsed under the weight of socialism. That should remind you of something. Something from around 1917, and then wishful thinking about it collapsing soon after, which didn't happen in Rand's lifetime. The bit that gets me is all those Rand people of ability can be born to it without having to actually demonstrate it. It's a toxic message that is the antithesis of what modern society in the west is about.
FFS she was immersed in the bullshit factory of Hollywood and wouldn't have known a normal US workplace if it fell on her.
That's my point, they are all heirs to George Washington instead of King George or the Tsar.
If you read stuff about or set in 19th century Russia before reading Rand it all stands out like dogs balls - especially little Princess Dagny.
Maybe you should write a book about such a parallel universe. I'm sure you could make it entertaining if you try.
You don't even have to go back as far as Rome. In the 1200s in England rich people were sometimes getting married in Churches because the Church had a nice big hall, then things went on from there. It was seen as a secular thing with a blessing on top if you could get it. It's still very much a secular thing in terms of property etc.
One problem we have, especially in the USA, is "fundamentalists" who see religion at the core of EVERYTHING. Anything connected with a Church in any way back when they turned up a century ago is especially a religious issue to them. I think we need a modern Luther to nail stuff on their doors to tell them to be as tolerant as the mainstream that let them exist in the first place.