The parent clearly fails to realise that Virgin are a terrible provider (unreliable, capped transfers, packet shaping, unusually awful customer service, etc), the only users of which are those without a BT line who cannot afford to have one put in. As for their 'fibre optic' cable: It's plain and simple BS. They may use fibre between exchanges, but SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE. It's not even fibre to the kerb, let alone fibre to the home.
Depends on your region. I use Virgin Media, and there's fibre right up to my front door. Their customer service, historically terrible in the NTL days, has actually got a bit better lately too.
I think that the airbus planes will take control from the pilot. I remember a crash at an airshow a few years back during a touch-and-go caused by the software locking the pilot out and flying into the trees.
I think that moving outside one's native culture/setting is a good idea for anyone. It really helps to gain a wider perspective of the world.
However if you are choosing a career, picking one that massively restricts where you can live and have a good career to maybe twenty cities in the world is probably not going to do you any favours. At some point you will not be in your 20s, you may wish to be close to parents when you have kids (if nothing else because grandparents like to actually see their grandchildren), etc. Surely this article is a sanity check on the health of the industry -- if anyone is seriously giving you the advice "to follow that career, you should consider moving 5000 miles to live in Eastern Europe or China" it's not a healthy industry at the moment. Pick law, med, or accounting -- work anywhere (or at least in many more cities than computing), get paid more, and don't have to deal with "ooh you work in computing, you must be a commicationally-challenged weirdo" stereotypes.
The problem with references, is that they won't give you negative information, only "not explicitly positive" information. This means you need to play "guess what they really mean" when a reference is anything other than glowing, and try to figure out where in the spectrum from flat-out incompetent to average, your potential employee lies.
I've heard that can be the case in the US. As I understand it, the UK and Australia are much more honest and open with references, which seems like a better situation. Maybe the threat of lawyers-at-dawn for giving a bad reference isn't so bad outside the US. According to a lecturer I know, though, it apparently can cause trouble for international applicants to US roles: "the reference isn't end-to-end superlatives; they must be terrible."
It is true that it is difficult for an employer to tell a good employee from a bad employee. Sadly, this has lead to what I can only call "hiring voodoo" -- the irrational belief without evidence that a relatively untrained interviewer will mysteriously be able to find out more about "what a candidate is really like" in an hour than the candidate's university or co-workers (references) found out in several years. Even stranger beliefs have cropped up over the years -- eg that artificial toy questions like "why are manhole covers round?" or "... how would you identify the heavier ball in only two measurements?" say anything meaningful about how a candidate thinks, any more so than handing them the Times crossword to have a go at.
There is what's humorously called the oncologist test for the 'puzzle' questions in interviews. "If you had cancer, would you ask your oncologist this question before you let him mess with your body?" After all, your body is both more complex and more mission critical to you personally than whatever it is you're hiring the candidate to work on, so surely it matters much more how the oncologist thinks...
Superstition is not as easily verifiable as scientific statements. I am not talking about money, science is more expensive that Mythbusters. I am talking about the design of scientific statements.
The director of the scientific institution I grew up in said once that good scientific paper should answer to one yes-or-no question.
That's the ideal. Unfortunately in practice a vanishingly small percentage of scientific papers ever have their experiments reproduced (ie most science is never verified but only subjected to the "does this sound plausible and agree with what I already thought" test of a peer-review). Meanwhile, papers in their analysis regularly overstretch what can really be concluded from the data -- because the importance of the result is a factor in whether or not the paper would be accepted. So, as the original article mentions, we do end up quite regularly with scientific results that are not much better than "rustling grass means lions are coming (even if you live in a country with no lions)". If you are not someone who reads scientific proceedings, quite a few dodgy studies turn up on the BBC website -- the BBC tends to run a general-interest story about "what scientists have discovered" at least once a week, and because they pick the "interesting" ones they usually end up picking ones that have either rediscovered the obvious, or made an overreaching conclusion from miniscule data.
Obviously this varies from field to field within science. But I have an awkward feeling that a large number of studies from the LHC will follow this pattern: the experiments are so hideously expensive to run that the results will be accepted without much experimental checking or reproduction. (And any reproduction could only occur in exactly the same facility, so hidden variables would be that much harder to reveal.)
One solution, at least in the cheaper sciences, is for the research councils (the science funding bodies) to fund studies that intend to reproduce or verify results more often. The issue is that if an experiment is only funded once, it only gets performed once, and never gets verified.
This is a good idea. Base it on a standard description of each concept like an old fashioned text book, but also allow:
- Discussion threads with students and teachers. (moderated, Slashdot style?)
- Contributed examples, again by students and teachers. You could do something like the PHP documentation, where the best contributed examples are prominently displayed at the bottom of the relevant page.
- Interactive tools to illustrate particular concepts.
- Copious linkage to similar resources.
A successful project like this could easily spawn similar projects for the other sciences.
We're trying to do just this sort of thing with the intelligent book, but not just with examples but also exercises that actively help you work through them. (The demo at that link should come live next week, though in a pre-alpha state for an early publicity event.)
Essentially, it's me gradually turning my PhD thesis from a PhD into a publically available tool, and for all subjects, not just maths.
I guess that makes this post a shameless plug, but it is at least for something that is directly on-topic.
Unionizing doesn't even make sense. The IT industry is the one industry more than any other where market forces really are at work: you don't like your job? Go get another. There's a bajillion IT jobs across a bunch of different industries, and IT workers are very, very mobile. You don't need a union, because the active market already protects you from bad management.
Theoretically, no. It's what the economists call a market for lemons -- it is comparatively difficult for a job-seeker to tell the difference between a good IT job and a bad IT job without an investment of effort (essentially trying to get to a mole inside the company rather than just the HR blurb, and then hoping that mole doesn't getting a referral bonus that would influence their account). Because "what makes a good IT job" is rather hard to define and rather hard to find on a checklist -- you'd really have to work there a while to tell. Similarly, the HR department faces the same problem the other way around -- it is extraordinarily hard to tell a good applicant from a bad applicant in a reliable way (which is why we have all these hokum questions about why manhole covers are round, believing it gives us a mystical insight into "the way the applicant really thinks" that their coworkers and university were unable to tell despite spending 1000 times longer working with the applicant -- the hiring equivalent of using the horoscope.) In economic theory, markets for lemons always tend to favour cheap low quality over expensive high quality -- so with a market for lemons in both directions, it is not at all surprising that everyone hates their job, nobody gets paid enough, and the managers are all bitching about their staff too!
Re:Sixty-hour work weeks with no overtime...
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That being said, let me turn this thing on its head. Has anyone thought of addressing the reasons behind why you work 60 hour work weeks? Is it truly because the field demands it or is it because your environment needs improvement?
Theoretically, it's because the way most IT divisions are organised is a broken market -- the teams that bid for work, establish scope (and in economic terms perform the the negotiation over the quantity of work for the remuneration) are not the people that actually have to do the work (in economic terms derive the personal benefit or loss from the success or otherwise of the negotiation). When your manager agrees to expand the scope of a project, it is a little like spending somebody else's money -- rather easier to do than if you have to spend your own. Do you care so much about spending a little more on a coffee if it's on expenses? Neither does your manager care so much about squeezing that one little extra bit work onto your plate -- at least not as much as if it was his own plate.
However, that is not likely to be fixed because the people who benefit from the market being broken are the managers and bid teams. They are well aware that the way the system is set up demands rather more hours out of the low-grade employees than it should, but it is not in their interests to permit an alteration that drives people to be financially less efficent (work / salary). Being more time efficient (work / time) might help you personally, but it is financial efficiency (work / salary) that drives profits -- so it is not economically sensible to allow a reduction in time-on-job, even if the reduction in work performed is proportionally much less.
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Is that one of its first tasks will be to lobby for a law requiring that membership in it become mandatory for anybody practicing in the field. No thank you. Unions are broken for very similar reasons. Basically, any large organization that claims to 'represent' you actually represents itself and only has your interests as a peripheral matter because appearing to cater to them is how it gets political power.
Of course that is also what pushes up the salaries of doctors and lawyers -- there are plenty of tasks that nurses or other less-remunerated people could do that are the legal exclusive purview of doctors, with a carefully restricted supply (limits on the number of medical places). And, like IT, healthcare is something that is largely outsourced -- IBM do not employ their own doctors, they pay for corporate health insurance. Large IT projects are similarly capital intensive, with high cost of failure (and yes IT failings have cost lives in the past), and with a constant requirement for professional development as new technology becomes available. But unlike doctors, computing professionals insist that any old qualification must do, anyone must be able to have-a-go, and employment questions are of the "why are manhole covers round" variety, rather than anything professional. (When did you last ask your oncologist that one before you agreed to let him do some engineering on your body?) Is it any wonder the doctors live in rather nicer houses and don't have to worry so much about unpaid overtime!
Does this present a problem in terms of one of the models of open source? One of the things often discussed on/. is the question of profiting from working in open source.
What's often been suggested is that there's money in support, and that if you create some software, and have experience then supporting it, that you gain a competitive advantage. That the likes of RedHat, MySQL etc will be customer's most likely first port of call.
If companies are simply going to go to someone else, that then suggests that investment in open source software could go down...
Absolutely -- the fundamentals of open-source have a "prisoners' dilemma" in them. Everyone would be better off if everybody contributed to development, but each individual is better off free-loading off everyone else. X development has already, reportedly, stalled somewhat, despite having a bucketload of users. The financials, of course, are leading a lot of the industry in the opposite direction. For example, Google's core algorithms (and any other proprietary Web service) far from being open-source have a "you don't even get to see the object code" policy. But so many Slashdotters still consider Gmail part of an "open source" Linux desktop -- the devil's greatest achievement was to make you think he doesn't exist? (badly misquoting The Usual Suspects)
Inasmuch as the scientific method is concerned, the presumption of a controlling intelligence eliminates the need for some categories of investigation, which ultimately inhibits progress.
For example, if you ask, "why does a person get sick?" and one answers "because God wills it, either as a punishment for sin or as a test of faith." You have eliminated the incentive to investigate into things like bacteria, the immune system, and so on.
By beginning with the premise that there is no controlling intelligence, and that there is some kind of underlying mechanism behind all observable phenomena, you preserve the incentive to formulate hypothesis and test them. Of course, many of the hypotheses will still be wrong, but the process of testing them is what yields the understanding we need to improve our lives.
So, scientifically speaking, atheism is the most useful assumption for maximizing our efforts at perusing knowledge.
Speaking as a practicing scientist, your explanation is incorrect. Science does not begin with the premise of atheism -- it is simply a convention of science that experimental results are not attributed to divine forces. That is quite different -- God could stand next to a scientist, wave to him while he performs an experiment, walk on a handy bit of water, and the scientist's paper would still not discuss God or attribute anything to him even though the scientist would be quite convinced that yes he does exist.
Though many consider that the assertion of the non-existence of an entity for which no demonstrative test can be devised is more well-founded than the assertion of the existence of said entity...logically this is still just a variant of the "ad ignorantium" fallacy. It is clear that where no test can be formulated *either way,* the only warranted conclusion is no conclusion at all. "I don't know if God exists, and I won't know until we can cook up some definitive tests" is the most logically sound response to questions of the ontological status of the divine.
Philosophically, many have pointed out over the centuries that there is an ongoing test: your own existence. From a first person perspective, far from needing evidence to prove there is anything more than physical reality, it's actually rather tough to prove there is a physical reality at all and not just a spiritual one. ("How can I prove the world is not a dream" -- independent experiments don't help because I might have dreamt both of them.) The spiritual/mental side however is proved with a simple "I am". We make the small assumption that since others externally appear to behave in a similar manner to ourselves that internally they have a similar experience of existence -- ie, they also "I am". This assumption implies that we are not ourselves "creating the universe", and the assumption that there must be a third party that "creates" the universe for us to "I am" in follows as being likely. (It's the creation/choice of the rules, rather than the matter, that is important at this step -- eg, "why is our universe not, say, like Conway's game of Life?".) Finding documentary evidence that that third party said hello, and concurred that he did indeed bless this set of mathematical rules to actually "exist" (in the sense that you can "I am" in them), whereas other sets of possible rules do not, then, isn't that surprising.
So just how is "they exist but it is mathematically impossible for them to affect our universe in any way or for us to measure them or conduct any empirical experiment upon them" any different from "they don't exist"? Are they, perchance, Invisible Pink Universes?
As for "winning the lottey", the question "why is the universe like it is" has only ever been a side-issue to the bigger question "why should any universe whatsoever exist at all -- the empty set is perfectly mathematically self-consistent; why should anything be here for us to 'even if I am mistaken, I am'* in"? It's a rhetorical question, but helps to understand the conceptual difference between the mathematical sense of "exists" ("there exists a set that contains possible appliances that can heat bread") and actual concrete existence. Laser toasters exist in the set, but that doesn't mean any really exist. If you believe that being describable (mathematical existence) is the same as real existence, then all the characters Agatha Christie described "existed" and she's the biggest murderer of all time...
We could pursue the silliness even further: if you claim to believe there really are an infinite number of universes, and you are still alive, then you are almost certainly lying. After all, why would you bother getting up in the morning when you can leave it to the infinite number of other yous... the true believers will have long since starved to death knowing it doesn't make any difference, leaving only the versions of themselves that chose not to believe still alive.
Now, St Augustine, the originator of the quote marked with a '*', about a thousand years before Descartes, would claim that this universe exists and the others do not because God, the great I Am, has blessed this universe to be the one that should exist. But of course that's "untestable nonsense" to be ridiculed by Flying Spaghetti Monsters on this forum, whereas believing there's an infinite number of untestable universes including many that actually contain flying spaghetti monsters, of course that's perfectly rational.
Practically it is very difficult to prevent software patents, because as soon as they are outlawed, the applicants just rephrase their patents in terms of a device. A device that happens to contain a chip and some software, but a device nonetheless. (And if devices are forbidden from containing software, there'll just be a quick boom in the "compile to hardware" business.) The device workaround is generally what's happened in the EU, according to a few friends in the patent area. Essentially, it means that so long as a device containing software can [I]infringe[/I] a patent, software is effectively patentable. (And that would be very hard to change -- otherwise non-software patents could be made useless just by jimmying a chip and a few lines of software somewhere into the infringing device.)
Oh I don't know just think if it was implemented in computer science... CS professor: "We now have to have equal numbers of male and female students. The bad news: we had one female applicant, and she withdrew to do law instead. The good news: I guess we get the year off!"
It's amazing. Millions of people around the world, using their product, and they still can't make good money off it. Granted, they give it away for free, but there still should be a lot of money to make in support contracts.
Well, there is... but it's money that's being made by Accenture, Computer Science Corporation, and all the other technology consultancies. That's the snag with the "GPL'ed software plus consulting" business model: sure, there is money to be made in consulting, but 90% of it will be made by established consulting companies that don't have the expensive distraction of having to write the software in the first place and can focus exclusively on the profit-making side.
Or, to put it really harshly, "There's loads of profit to be made in GPL'ed software, for everybody except the fool that's writing it." (Yes, yes, I know that's overstating it, but I thought I'd leave some mod points up for grab for the replies!)
This isn't necessarily his/her intention. The OP could just be looking for some general ideas to get going (or to rule out bad ones before proceeding). I see this as a hypothesis-generating activity, not one in which he/she'd expect to get hypothesis-validating information.
Given the researcher's CV includes teaching software engineering at Boston University for several years, and being a project lead for Lotus for many years before that, I imagine he does already have many ideas and sources already. However, I imagine Ask Slashdot could provide at least two useful things for a PhD: direct data on what the "popular view amongst the technically-minded" is about what makes software better, and a wide and easily-cast net for picking up any links or texts that are in use that he might not be aware of.
His PhD seems to be a late-career attempt to crack the big philosophical nut, rather than an early-twentysomething scratching around for an idea. So this Ask Slashdot question seems to be an attempt to search every corner for data, however unlikely, rather than a lazy lack of effort.
the intelligence divide will continue to separate those who make decisions based on what some authorities say from those who make decisions through their own critical thinking.
Of course if you do decide to use your own critical thinking and you turn out not to be in the top 50% after all, boy are you screwed.
Which part of Australia... I have some good recruiters I use to look for people.
Which ones, and also what are the reasons you've found those ones to be particularly good?
(I'm not the original poster, but I happen to be scoping out a possible move back to Aus, Brisbane preferably but perhaps Sydney or Melbourne, for family reasons.)
At Cambridge University, I've been developing a system called the Intelligent Book, that changes the idea of "an online textbook" into something that might genuinely be more useable and useful than a paper book, and much less cost/effort to write. (Though a paper book certainly can be printed from it.) This has some implications for the textbook market if it does take off, because online collaborative/interactive materials provided by a university tend to be free to students, and increasingly to the wider public.
The public demonstrator is not yet online, so this link just goes to parking, but if you want to revisit it later, it will be gradually going up at http://www.theintelligentbook.com/.
It came out of my PhD, completed a year ago, which in turn was part of a joint project with MIT.
It's not so mad to compare it to those dystopian futures like Soylent Green: PETA seem to be under the strange impression that if artificially grown meat was invented then all the farmers in the world would set their cows and chickens free to live wild with a cheer and a wave. In economic reality, however, if cheap artificial meat was invented, more and more farmers would very quickly send all their cattle to be slaughtered as no longer economic to maintain. It would be the animal apocalypse.
Actually, let's just think about this for a second. You currently pay $300 for the standard Microsoft Office 2007.
Actually, home and student users pay less than half that for the Home and Student Edition (which is the version Microsoft want to take to a subscription model). I've seen that advertised as cheap as US$120 from well-known retailers. Divide that by 4 years for your math, and you'd only have $30/year. I'm not totally convinced MS would be willing to price it anywhere below $50/year, at which point it'd already be more than a 66% price hike.
That sound you just heard was the collective orgasms of the entire RichardDawkins.net forum membership.
The sister project Darwin Correspondence Project provides access to the letters Darwin wrote, including those describing his own views on science and religion.
According to someone close to the project, one of their hopes is that by opening up Darwin's letters to the public and showing how he took a moderate and considerate approach in his own correspondence, we can move away from the invective-filled polarisation that tends to occur in public discussions on science and religion (the RichardDawkins.net forums being the obvious example).
The new site is the largest collection of Darwin's work in history...
Wow, quite a feat. Must have taken some really intelligent design to put all that together and make it work.
I'm sure Antranig Basman (the technical director) will feel duly complimented! And he has fairly strong views on "reasonable design", in webapps anyway: Reasonable Server Faces.
(Ah, any excuse to gratuitously advertise a colleague's work!)
I'm not sure what CS guys get at MIT that they won't be eligible to find at any other college. But if you work your ass of at any other college, with the grades and extras to prove it, I don't see how it matters.
Unless of course you just want to get the "MIT" label for the brand name
Much as I hate to be the fly in the Slashdot's idealistic ointment, that branding is very valuable. It is not simply a branding, it is an endorsement from one of the most respected institutions in the world: if you have an MIT degree, then the MIT admissions panel felt you are one of the brightest of your age group nationwide, because everybody knows that is all they will take. If you have a degree from Bog Standard College, then Bog Standard College's admissions panel endorsed that "they think you could just about get through the course", because everybody knows that is their criteria.
The best employers really go out of their way to try to attract talent from the top institutions. Cambridge University's Computer Lab recruitment fare has more companies with stands than it has students graduating each year. And of course companies often try to hire locally -- if you're after a role with a top technology firm, you'll quickly notice they are mostly clustered around the top universities, and usually have deep links within those universities.
And while you're there, both the best scientists and the best business people in the country will probably be giving free talks at the top institutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your region. I use Virgin Media, and there's fibre right up to my front door. Their customer service, historically terrible in the NTL days, has actually got a bit better lately too.
You're older than you think. It was 20 years ago
However if you are choosing a career, picking one that massively restricts where you can live and have a good career to maybe twenty cities in the world is probably not going to do you any favours. At some point you will not be in your 20s, you may wish to be close to parents when you have kids (if nothing else because grandparents like to actually see their grandchildren), etc. Surely this article is a sanity check on the health of the industry -- if anyone is seriously giving you the advice "to follow that career, you should consider moving 5000 miles to live in Eastern Europe or China" it's not a healthy industry at the moment. Pick law, med, or accounting -- work anywhere (or at least in many more cities than computing), get paid more, and don't have to deal with "ooh you work in computing, you must be a commicationally-challenged weirdo" stereotypes.
I've heard that can be the case in the US. As I understand it, the UK and Australia are much more honest and open with references, which seems like a better situation. Maybe the threat of lawyers-at-dawn for giving a bad reference isn't so bad outside the US. According to a lecturer I know, though, it apparently can cause trouble for international applicants to US roles: "the reference isn't end-to-end superlatives; they must be terrible."
It is true that it is difficult for an employer to tell a good employee from a bad employee. Sadly, this has lead to what I can only call "hiring voodoo" -- the irrational belief without evidence that a relatively untrained interviewer will mysteriously be able to find out more about "what a candidate is really like" in an hour than the candidate's university or co-workers (references) found out in several years. Even stranger beliefs have cropped up over the years -- eg that artificial toy questions like "why are manhole covers round?" or "... how would you identify the heavier ball in only two measurements?" say anything meaningful about how a candidate thinks, any more so than handing them the Times crossword to have a go at.
There is what's humorously called the oncologist test for the 'puzzle' questions in interviews. "If you had cancer, would you ask your oncologist this question before you let him mess with your body?" After all, your body is both more complex and more mission critical to you personally than whatever it is you're hiring the candidate to work on, so surely it matters much more how the oncologist thinks...
That's the ideal. Unfortunately in practice a vanishingly small percentage of scientific papers ever have their experiments reproduced (ie most science is never verified but only subjected to the "does this sound plausible and agree with what I already thought" test of a peer-review). Meanwhile, papers in their analysis regularly overstretch what can really be concluded from the data -- because the importance of the result is a factor in whether or not the paper would be accepted. So, as the original article mentions, we do end up quite regularly with scientific results that are not much better than "rustling grass means lions are coming (even if you live in a country with no lions)". If you are not someone who reads scientific proceedings, quite a few dodgy studies turn up on the BBC website -- the BBC tends to run a general-interest story about "what scientists have discovered" at least once a week, and because they pick the "interesting" ones they usually end up picking ones that have either rediscovered the obvious, or made an overreaching conclusion from miniscule data.
Obviously this varies from field to field within science. But I have an awkward feeling that a large number of studies from the LHC will follow this pattern: the experiments are so hideously expensive to run that the results will be accepted without much experimental checking or reproduction. (And any reproduction could only occur in exactly the same facility, so hidden variables would be that much harder to reveal.)
One solution, at least in the cheaper sciences, is for the research councils (the science funding bodies) to fund studies that intend to reproduce or verify results more often. The issue is that if an experiment is only funded once, it only gets performed once, and never gets verified.
We're trying to do just this sort of thing with the intelligent book, but not just with examples but also exercises that actively help you work through them. (The demo at that link should come live next week, though in a pre-alpha state for an early publicity event.)
Essentially, it's me gradually turning my PhD thesis from a PhD into a publically available tool, and for all subjects, not just maths.
I guess that makes this post a shameless plug, but it is at least for something that is directly on-topic.
Theoretically, no. It's what the economists call a market for lemons -- it is comparatively difficult for a job-seeker to tell the difference between a good IT job and a bad IT job without an investment of effort (essentially trying to get to a mole inside the company rather than just the HR blurb, and then hoping that mole doesn't getting a referral bonus that would influence their account). Because "what makes a good IT job" is rather hard to define and rather hard to find on a checklist -- you'd really have to work there a while to tell. Similarly, the HR department faces the same problem the other way around -- it is extraordinarily hard to tell a good applicant from a bad applicant in a reliable way (which is why we have all these hokum questions about why manhole covers are round, believing it gives us a mystical insight into "the way the applicant really thinks" that their coworkers and university were unable to tell despite spending 1000 times longer working with the applicant -- the hiring equivalent of using the horoscope.) In economic theory, markets for lemons always tend to favour cheap low quality over expensive high quality -- so with a market for lemons in both directions, it is not at all surprising that everyone hates their job, nobody gets paid enough, and the managers are all bitching about their staff too!
Theoretically, it's because the way most IT divisions are organised is a broken market -- the teams that bid for work, establish scope (and in economic terms perform the the negotiation over the quantity of work for the remuneration) are not the people that actually have to do the work (in economic terms derive the personal benefit or loss from the success or otherwise of the negotiation). When your manager agrees to expand the scope of a project, it is a little like spending somebody else's money -- rather easier to do than if you have to spend your own. Do you care so much about spending a little more on a coffee if it's on expenses? Neither does your manager care so much about squeezing that one little extra bit work onto your plate -- at least not as much as if it was his own plate.
However, that is not likely to be fixed because the people who benefit from the market being broken are the managers and bid teams. They are well aware that the way the system is set up demands rather more hours out of the low-grade employees than it should, but it is not in their interests to permit an alteration that drives people to be financially less efficent (work / salary). Being more time efficient (work / time) might help you personally, but it is financial efficiency (work / salary) that drives profits -- so it is not economically sensible to allow a reduction in time-on-job, even if the reduction in work performed is proportionally much less.
Of course that is also what pushes up the salaries of doctors and lawyers -- there are plenty of tasks that nurses or other less-remunerated people could do that are the legal exclusive purview of doctors, with a carefully restricted supply (limits on the number of medical places). And, like IT, healthcare is something that is largely outsourced -- IBM do not employ their own doctors, they pay for corporate health insurance. Large IT projects are similarly capital intensive, with high cost of failure (and yes IT failings have cost lives in the past), and with a constant requirement for professional development as new technology becomes available. But unlike doctors, computing professionals insist that any old qualification must do, anyone must be able to have-a-go, and employment questions are of the "why are manhole covers round" variety, rather than anything professional. (When did you last ask your oncologist that one before you agreed to let him do some engineering on your body?) Is it any wonder the doctors live in rather nicer houses and don't have to worry so much about unpaid overtime!
Absolutely -- the fundamentals of open-source have a "prisoners' dilemma" in them. Everyone would be better off if everybody contributed to development, but each individual is better off free-loading off everyone else. X development has already, reportedly, stalled somewhat, despite having a bucketload of users. The financials, of course, are leading a lot of the industry in the opposite direction. For example, Google's core algorithms (and any other proprietary Web service) far from being open-source have a "you don't even get to see the object code" policy. But so many Slashdotters still consider Gmail part of an "open source" Linux desktop -- the devil's greatest achievement was to make you think he doesn't exist? (badly misquoting The Usual Suspects)
Speaking as a practicing scientist, your explanation is incorrect. Science does not begin with the premise of atheism -- it is simply a convention of science that experimental results are not attributed to divine forces. That is quite different -- God could stand next to a scientist, wave to him while he performs an experiment, walk on a handy bit of water, and the scientist's paper would still not discuss God or attribute anything to him even though the scientist would be quite convinced that yes he does exist.
Philosophically, many have pointed out over the centuries that there is an ongoing test: your own existence. From a first person perspective, far from needing evidence to prove there is anything more than physical reality, it's actually rather tough to prove there is a physical reality at all and not just a spiritual one. ("How can I prove the world is not a dream" -- independent experiments don't help because I might have dreamt both of them.) The spiritual/mental side however is proved with a simple "I am". We make the small assumption that since others externally appear to behave in a similar manner to ourselves that internally they have a similar experience of existence -- ie, they also "I am". This assumption implies that we are not ourselves "creating the universe", and the assumption that there must be a third party that "creates" the universe for us to "I am" in follows as being likely. (It's the creation/choice of the rules, rather than the matter, that is important at this step -- eg, "why is our universe not, say, like Conway's game of Life?".) Finding documentary evidence that that third party said hello, and concurred that he did indeed bless this set of mathematical rules to actually "exist" (in the sense that you can "I am" in them), whereas other sets of possible rules do not, then, isn't that surprising.
So just how is "they exist but it is mathematically impossible for them to affect our universe in any way or for us to measure them or conduct any empirical experiment upon them" any different from "they don't exist"? Are they, perchance, Invisible Pink Universes?
As for "winning the lottey", the question "why is the universe like it is" has only ever been a side-issue to the bigger question "why should any universe whatsoever exist at all -- the empty set is perfectly mathematically self-consistent; why should anything be here for us to 'even if I am mistaken, I am'* in"? It's a rhetorical question, but helps to understand the conceptual difference between the mathematical sense of "exists" ("there exists a set that contains possible appliances that can heat bread") and actual concrete existence. Laser toasters exist in the set, but that doesn't mean any really exist. If you believe that being describable (mathematical existence) is the same as real existence, then all the characters Agatha Christie described "existed" and she's the biggest murderer of all time...
We could pursue the silliness even further: if you claim to believe there really are an infinite number of universes, and you are still alive, then you are almost certainly lying. After all, why would you bother getting up in the morning when you can leave it to the infinite number of other yous... the true believers will have long since starved to death knowing it doesn't make any difference, leaving only the versions of themselves that chose not to believe still alive.
Now, St Augustine, the originator of the quote marked with a '*', about a thousand years before Descartes, would claim that this universe exists and the others do not because God, the great I Am, has blessed this universe to be the one that should exist. But of course that's "untestable nonsense" to be ridiculed by Flying Spaghetti Monsters on this forum, whereas believing there's an infinite number of untestable universes including many that actually contain flying spaghetti monsters, of course that's perfectly rational.
Practically it is very difficult to prevent software patents, because as soon as they are outlawed, the applicants just rephrase their patents in terms of a device. A device that happens to contain a chip and some software, but a device nonetheless. (And if devices are forbidden from containing software, there'll just be a quick boom in the "compile to hardware" business.) The device workaround is generally what's happened in the EU, according to a few friends in the patent area. Essentially, it means that so long as a device containing software can [I]infringe[/I] a patent, software is effectively patentable. (And that would be very hard to change -- otherwise non-software patents could be made useless just by jimmying a chip and a few lines of software somewhere into the infringing device.)
Oh I don't know just think if it was implemented in computer science...
CS professor: "We now have to have equal numbers of male and female students. The bad news: we had one female applicant, and she withdrew to do law instead. The good news: I guess we get the year off!"
Well, there is
Or, to put it really harshly, "There's loads of profit to be made in GPL'ed software, for everybody except the fool that's writing it." (Yes, yes, I know that's overstating it, but I thought I'd leave some mod points up for grab for the replies!)
Given the researcher's CV includes teaching software engineering at Boston University for several years, and being a project lead for Lotus for many years before that, I imagine he does already have many ideas and sources already. However, I imagine Ask Slashdot could provide at least two useful things for a PhD: direct data on what the "popular view amongst the technically-minded" is about what makes software better, and a wide and easily-cast net for picking up any links or texts that are in use that he might not be aware of.
His PhD seems to be a late-career attempt to crack the big philosophical nut, rather than an early-twentysomething scratching around for an idea. So this Ask Slashdot question seems to be an attempt to search every corner for data, however unlikely, rather than a lazy lack of effort.
At Cambridge University, I've been developing a system called the Intelligent Book, that changes the idea of "an online textbook" into something that might genuinely be more useable and useful than a paper book, and much less cost/effort to write. (Though a paper book certainly can be printed from it.) This has some implications for the textbook market if it does take off, because online collaborative/interactive materials provided by a university tend to be free to students, and increasingly to the wider public.
The public demonstrator is not yet online, so this link just goes to parking, but if you want to revisit it later, it will be gradually going up at http://www.theintelligentbook.com/.
It came out of my PhD, completed a year ago, which in turn was part of a joint project with MIT.
It's not so mad to compare it to those dystopian futures like Soylent Green: PETA seem to be under the strange impression that if artificially grown meat was invented then all the farmers in the world would set their cows and chickens free to live wild with a cheer and a wave. In economic reality, however, if cheap artificial meat was invented, more and more farmers would very quickly send all their cattle to be slaughtered as no longer economic to maintain. It would be the animal apocalypse.
The sister project Darwin Correspondence Project provides access to the letters Darwin wrote, including those describing his own views on science and religion.
According to someone close to the project, one of their hopes is that by opening up Darwin's letters to the public and showing how he took a moderate and considerate approach in his own correspondence, we can move away from the invective-filled polarisation that tends to occur in public discussions on science and religion (the RichardDawkins.net forums being the obvious example).
Much as I hate to be the fly in the Slashdot's idealistic ointment, that branding is very valuable. It is not simply a branding, it is an endorsement from one of the most respected institutions in the world: if you have an MIT degree, then the MIT admissions panel felt you are one of the brightest of your age group nationwide, because everybody knows that is all they will take. If you have a degree from Bog Standard College, then Bog Standard College's admissions panel endorsed that "they think you could just about get through the course", because everybody knows that is their criteria.
The best employers really go out of their way to try to attract talent from the top institutions. Cambridge University's Computer Lab recruitment fare has more companies with stands than it has students graduating each year. And of course companies often try to hire locally -- if you're after a role with a top technology firm, you'll quickly notice they are mostly clustered around the top universities, and usually have deep links within those universities.
And while you're there, both the best scientists and the best business people in the country will probably be giving free talks at the top institutions.