I know a number of "software engineers". Some didn't finish college and got the job. Some finished, but with unrelated degrees. The rest got four year CS degrees before starting the job. Everyone who finished their BS in CS immediately got jobs.
Compare this to the route to tenure-track professor: 4 years undergrad. 5-7 years of grad school. 2-5 years of post-doc or adjunct. Success rate for PhD graduates of 20% or so.
How in the hell could you possibly rate the "ease of entry" the same? Software engineer should get "A" for easy of entry because you do not even need a degree. Becoming a professor should get an "F", as it is probably the most difficult job to obtain, unless you are talking about community colleges, which are getting more and more competitive by the day. To get one of these jobs, you need years of teaching experience plus master's, either as a low-payed adjunct (I am talking McDonald's wage), or as a K12 teacher. PhD is becoming more and more necessary as well in desirable places to live.
I graduated right along with many of my classmates, and post-docs seem to run 0-2 for industry and 2-3 for tenure track. Bio-science has gotten much worse. Post-docs of 5 years or more just to get in the door anywhere is starting to become the norm.
This is largely due to, in my opinion, the way NSF and NIH have been trying to spend all of the new cash they have received in the last twenty years. Their primary mechanism of funding research is to fund universities, which in turn means creating more graduate students and eventually post-docs. We now have a glut (or an even bigger one). This should not be a surprise. The problem is worse in bio-science precisely because NIH has grown faster than NSF. Both agencies need to find ways to fund permanent jobs with real salaries/benefits, and slow the pipeline into PhD-hood. In the meantime, we have a huge lack of math and science K12 teachers, because many people who would consider such a career are lured away by all the grad school subsidies. Combined with the ludicrious K12 pay scales, which treat kindergarten teachers and physics teachers the same, and you have a huge mess.
Here is my route to becoming a Phd level scientist at a major corporation. Does this sound better or worse than a typical BS in comp sci/eng route?
Four years of college at state university: obviously, just peanut income, graduated with $17k in debt (the rest was covered by scholarship).
One year of technician-level work: $35,000 in fairly cheap area
Five and a half years of graduate school: Lived on a stipend that grew from $16500 to $21000. Location had an average to above average cost of living.
One year of post-doc: Made about $35000, living in one of the most expensive cities on earth.
As of June: Scientist at major corporation. Salary (with bonus) around $80,000 in a very cheap place to live. Typical salary increases will push me to $100,000 in less than ten years (todays dollars) and then relatively flat after that unless I hit it big on the management track.
I would say this is normal for my field. How does it compare to yours? In particular, how unattractive is the fact that a scientist must spend their late 20's living on a wage they could earn at McDonald's?
How do you know how many CDs you would have purchased in the absense of p2p? You don't.
Lots of people bought hundreds, even thousands, of CDs when I was in college back in the early 90s - without p2p. Few people do that now. I am not even a music fan and I have about 300, mostly from that era.
There are countless ways to learn about good music that do not require piracy - far more than in my college days, actually.
Rather, R&D is providing less bang for the buck. It takes far more people, money, and equipment to get far less novel and exploitable information that it did 50 or 100 years ago.
because no one ever earns the money in the first place. That is the tragedy of the dead weight loss, where a win-win exchange is averted because the government tries to take a bigger cut than the net gain between the two traders.
While I would defend the point that government R&D is a waste compared to private R&D (I am a scientist, btw), I said nothing of the sort in my previous post.
Instead, what I said was that taxes are inefficient. The logic is pretty simple. Most taxes we collect (income, payroll, sales, property) are taxes on productive behavior. It is common sense, and easily measurable, that when you tax an activity, you get less of it. Hence, raising taxes causes you, me, your cousin Tony, and just above everyone else to shift their behavior away from doing productive things like working, building homes, or buying and selling, and towards less productive activities. The estimate is that we lose about 20 cents of productivity for each dollar we collect. In other words, society has to pay a buck twenty in order for the government to collect a dollar, at least by the normal route. And this is not counting such costs as the IRS, tax compliance, and the costs of politics itself. As I said, this is Econ 101 stuff.
There is always one glaring flaw with this plan, even if there is a real market failure that could be addressed by the subsidy - taxes are economically inefficient. Typical estimates of the inefficiency of our standard taxes (income, payroll, sales, and property) run between 10 and 60 cents on the dollar collected, with 20 cents being a conservative average. In other words, the government has to remove $1.20 from the economy to collect a dollar. Or, you could say the government pays for everything at a 20% premium.
Even if there is some sort of market failure with respect to open source (it is probably the same one that is cited for R&D in general), trying to cure it with another market failure is not the answer unless the R&D failure is much larger. I once saw a presentation by someone from NSF on this very topic (The Economic Case for Basic Research), and when I pointed this problem out to him, he actually didn't have an answer. I was surprised, given that most of us learned about the inefficiency of taxes in Econ 101.
and then stalls, I hardly think there is any reason to panic. In any case, private R&D dwarfs federal R&D.
NIH needs to get its act together, anyway, and fix the major problems with PhD overproduction it has caused. NIH's primary method of spending money is to give it to university professors, who use it to reproduce. We now have far more PhD's, especially in biosciences, than the system has room for. NIH needs to shift from funding grad students and post-docs to funding full-time salaried permanent positions in federal labs.
Actually, it is worse than this. We also have a massive shortage of K12 science teachers. Why? Because the state governments underpay these positions. If you graduate with a degree in science, and grad school is subsidized while K12 teaching is paid far below market rates, which do you choose?
It should not be a surprise that we have wound up with a glut of underemployed PhDs and no one to teach our children.
Total human happiness is basically directly proportional to the number of people. Five billion people will be approximately half as happy as ten billion. There is no reason to believe that the current population (6.5 billion) or the predicted maximum population (8-9 billion) are unsustainable. Indeed, as technology grows, so does the number of people we can sustain.
Reducing birthrates in the first world, where most of the innovation will come from, will actually make the problem worse, not better. First world countries should be aiming for zero native population growth and a long-term equilibrium of their population as the poorer parts of the world head towards stabilization. Fortunately, they rapidly are. Except for Africa, there are few places in the world where birthrates are problematically high. Even there they are falling. On the contrary, in places like China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Iran, birthrates have been falling like rocks and are rapidly falling to or below replacement levels.
Also, there is a matter of cultural preservation. I think it is important to preserve western culture (as in liberal democracy, respect for human rights, etc). Doing so while having our populations fall like rocks is not necessarily a given.
Nuclear is not a quick fix. Solar is not a quick fix. Biodiesel is not a quick fix. Drilling in ANWR is not a quick fix. Carbon sequestration is not a quick fix. Ethanol is not a quick fix. Methanol is not a quick fix. Hydrogen is not a quick fix. Hydro is not a quick fix. Tidal is not a quick fix. Wind is not a quick fix. Conservation is not a quick fix. Energy efficiency is not a quick fix.
However, if you add them all together, and you might just have a really slow, big pain in the butt fix.
If I hear "such-and-such is not the answer" one more time, I am seriously gonna smack the idiot who says it upside the noggin. There is no single answer!
Do the math...$20 of credit at 20 cents/min? That's 100 minutes a month, assuming I send no text messages. In reality, I use up about half of my credit with texts, so I really have 50 minutes/month at best before I have to start paying additional fees. Compare that to 400 minutes of anytime and unlimited nights/weekends for about the same price in the states. Reception and quality is similar to that of equivalent geographic areas in the US.
In return for that, I get all sorts of cutesy icons and features that I have no interest in using. Japanese phones can do more things than ours, but do not do the important ones as well. The tradeoffs exist more in price than technology. To support all the extra features while maintaining reasonable prices, the Japanese companies have to limit talk time.
you get your basic service plus about $20 of usage credit (at 3-5 cents per text/email and about 20 cents/min for talk, except for in the middle of the night), half-price for calling someone using the same company, a 2 megapixel camera, the ability to check the train schedules and a dozen other bells and whistles that I don't care about.
Which would you rather have?
People keep claiming that Japanese cells are way ahead of American ones. Hogwash. They have lots of irrelevant features that American ones do not have, but they are far worse for doing what is most important - talking to people! For a number of geographic and cultural reasons (which I do not want to go into), the Japanese have chosen a different solution to the trade-offs that naturally exist in any technology. To think that the technology in Japan is magically better is rather silly, especially because cell phones are not manufactured in Japan!
only five are foreigners (American, Brit, and three Chinese). The American and one Chinese are vodafone. Obviously, the sample size is too small to infer anything. The other 87 are Japanese, and vodafone is heavily represented. Actually, the reason I chose vodafone is because my closest Japanese friends/colleagues use it. Of those 87 numbers, probably 20% are my coworkers (generally Japanese graduate students) and 80% are twenty-something Japanese women (what the hell else would be in my cell phone?). I find it funny that everyone seems to think that I would be carrying around a cell phone full of gaijin numbers...hehehehe
Most use Tsuka because they are cheap and it doesn't require the commitments. The large number of Vodafone users listed in my cell are Japanese. Perhaps it has something to do with region. I live in Kansai, not near Tokyo.
friends use Vodafone? It is somewhat harder to talk on your phone here, as talking in public indoors is generally taboo (God, I wish this was true in the states). Hence, they do not need quite as many minutes. On the other hand, ninety minutes is pathetic - a couple of twenty minute calls to friends from out of town will burn all of your spare minutes from the month, and after that you pay through the teeth. This is true for all the companies.
Anyone know what Vodafone's Japan market share is?
on
Vodafone Quitting Japan
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I currently live in Japan and use Vodafone. It seems to me that they hold over a 30% market share among the hundred-odd phone numbers in my cell. In general, the four major companies (docomo at the high end, vodafone and au in the middle, tsuka at the bottom) seem about equally popular.
I don't think this sale is due to failure. Rather, it is just one business selling off a decent little piece to another corporation who wants it more. It happens all the time.
Btw, to whoever said "Japanese cells are 3 years ahead of everyone else", I would respectfully disagree. I'd rather have an American cell. Why? Because I hardly ever use the billion and one stupid bells and whistles in my Japanese phone. What I want to do is be able to talk on my cell phone, which is absurdly expensive in Japan. For nearly $40/month, you only get ninety minutes (and your billion and two text messages and emails eat into this time)! Nor do I find the reception better in Japan than in comparable areas of the US. Reception here is near universal in the major cities unless you are underground, gets a little spotty as you move into the burbs (especially indoors), and fails quite often in the countryside unless you happen to be at a high elevation. Same is true in the states, except we have less area that is city and more that is burb and countryside.
Japanese cells aren't better. Rather, Japanese spend lots more money on them and buy all the bells and whistles that 90% of Western users just don't care about.
funded are falling. This is not because the pie is shrinking, but rather the number of starving people is skyrocketing.
The federal government has really "#$"#ed up scientific research, particularly in biomed, by over-subsidizing the creation of scientists without creating jobs for them. Now countless young people are stuck in "temporary" post-doc land for years, while anyone with the sense to have avoided science is by that age making a comfortable or high salary as an engineer, doctor, lawyer, etc. Needless to say, fewer and fewer Americans are entering science. Go figure.
The last thing we need to do is more business at usual at NIH. We need to quit funding grad students and start funding full-time researchers with real salaries and benefits. The government has it backwards - if they would create good jobs for American scientists, they will get American scientists. Creating scientists for whom there are no jobs is a recipe for disaster.
I could use the banana I am going to eat for dinner to choke you. On the other hand, I could use a suit-case nuclear bomb as a doorstop.
Now given that both of these items have both legitimate and illegitimate uses, should they be treated the same under the law? Of course not, and the reason why should be obvious - the banana has few illegitimate or dangerous uses, and is overwhelmingly used legitimately. The nuclear bomb has few legitimate uses, while its illegitimate uses are many and extreme. Also, even when used legitimately it can generally be replaced by safe alternatives.
As illustrated in the above example, having some legitimate uses is not enough to avoid a ban, nor is having some illegitimate uses enough to justify one. Instead, we must weigh the legitimate and illegitimate uses against one another. The three primary factors in deciding whether legal restrictions would be useful are:
1: What is the ratio of legitimate to illegitimate uses?
2: What alternatives exist to the legitimate uses?
3: How effectively could a ban be enforced?
BitTorrent and the like score quite badly on the first two points - most BT traffic is illegitimate, and there are plenty of legal ways to distribute files. The only question is how effective would any sort of regulation of BT really be.
There are benefits to imaging growing fetuses. They aren't just done "for fun". In the case of the old technology, there were some risks as well. I don't know enough to make a judgement as to whether the risks were worth the gains. With the modern technology, the risks are negligible and it is simply a matter of cost and convenience vs benefits.
Tobacco companies in the 50s were much like "right-wingers against Global Warming" or "left-wing Harvard professors against anyone who dares suggest men and women aren't identical on average" are today - locked into nitpicking obvious scientific truths that differ from the world that they want to exist.
because by then, our technology will be so advanced that we will just dig all the crap up with robots and put it in our new 100,000 year containers. Of course, those will be unnecessary, as after another thouseand years, we will dig it up again and use our mass transporters to teleport it all to the center of Alpha Heptarion 7.
Slashdot Mirror
I know a number of "software engineers". Some didn't finish college and got the job. Some finished, but with unrelated degrees. The rest got four year CS degrees before starting the job. Everyone who finished their BS in CS immediately got jobs. Compare this to the route to tenure-track professor: 4 years undergrad. 5-7 years of grad school. 2-5 years of post-doc or adjunct. Success rate for PhD graduates of 20% or so. How in the hell could you possibly rate the "ease of entry" the same? Software engineer should get "A" for easy of entry because you do not even need a degree. Becoming a professor should get an "F", as it is probably the most difficult job to obtain, unless you are talking about community colleges, which are getting more and more competitive by the day. To get one of these jobs, you need years of teaching experience plus master's, either as a low-payed adjunct (I am talking McDonald's wage), or as a K12 teacher. PhD is becoming more and more necessary as well in desirable places to live.
I graduated right along with many of my classmates, and post-docs seem to run 0-2 for industry and 2-3 for tenure track. Bio-science has gotten much worse. Post-docs of 5 years or more just to get in the door anywhere is starting to become the norm.
This is largely due to, in my opinion, the way NSF and NIH have been trying to spend all of the new cash they have received in the last twenty years. Their primary mechanism of funding research is to fund universities, which in turn means creating more graduate students and eventually post-docs. We now have a glut (or an even bigger one). This should not be a surprise. The problem is worse in bio-science precisely because NIH has grown faster than NSF. Both agencies need to find ways to fund permanent jobs with real salaries/benefits, and slow the pipeline into PhD-hood. In the meantime, we have a huge lack of math and science K12 teachers, because many people who would consider such a career are lured away by all the grad school subsidies. Combined with the ludicrious K12 pay scales, which treat kindergarten teachers and physics teachers the same, and you have a huge mess.
Here is my route to becoming a Phd level scientist at a major corporation. Does this sound better or worse than a typical BS in comp sci/eng route?
Four years of college at state university: obviously, just peanut income, graduated with $17k in debt (the rest was covered by scholarship).
One year of technician-level work: $35,000 in fairly cheap area
Five and a half years of graduate school: Lived on a stipend that grew from $16500 to $21000. Location had an average to above average cost of living.
One year of post-doc: Made about $35000, living in one of the most expensive cities on earth.
As of June: Scientist at major corporation. Salary (with bonus) around $80,000 in a very cheap place to live. Typical salary increases will push me to $100,000 in less than ten years (todays dollars) and then relatively flat after that unless I hit it big on the management track.
I would say this is normal for my field. How does it compare to yours? In particular, how unattractive is the fact that a scientist must spend their late 20's living on a wage they could earn at McDonald's?
How do you know how many CDs you would have purchased in the absense of p2p? You don't.
Lots of people bought hundreds, even thousands, of CDs when I was in college back in the early 90s - without p2p. Few people do that now. I am not even a music fan and I have about 300, mostly from that era.
There are countless ways to learn about good music that do not require piracy - far more than in my college days, actually.
Quit your self-serving attitude.
Halo 42 on a zillion terrahertz processor with one google polygons/second.
than risk the sure-thing known. Wouldn't you?
In the absence of lower spending, a tax break now just means more taxes somewhere else in the future.
Rather, R&D is providing less bang for the buck. It takes far more people, money, and equipment to get far less novel and exploitable information that it did 50 or 100 years ago.
because no one ever earns the money in the first place. That is the tragedy of the dead weight loss, where a win-win exchange is averted because the government tries to take a bigger cut than the net gain between the two traders.
While I would defend the point that government R&D is a waste compared to private R&D (I am a scientist, btw), I said nothing of the sort in my previous post.
Instead, what I said was that taxes are inefficient. The logic is pretty simple. Most taxes we collect (income, payroll, sales, property) are taxes on productive behavior. It is common sense, and easily measurable, that when you tax an activity, you get less of it. Hence, raising taxes causes you, me, your cousin Tony, and just above everyone else to shift their behavior away from doing productive things like working, building homes, or buying and selling, and towards less productive activities. The estimate is that we lose about 20 cents of productivity for each dollar we collect. In other words, society has to pay a buck twenty in order for the government to collect a dollar, at least by the normal route. And this is not counting such costs as the IRS, tax compliance, and the costs of politics itself. As I said, this is Econ 101 stuff.
There is always one glaring flaw with this plan, even if there is a real market failure that could be addressed by the subsidy - taxes are economically inefficient. Typical estimates of the inefficiency of our standard taxes (income, payroll, sales, and property) run between 10 and 60 cents on the dollar collected, with 20 cents being a conservative average. In other words, the government has to remove $1.20 from the economy to collect a dollar. Or, you could say the government pays for everything at a 20% premium.
Even if there is some sort of market failure with respect to open source (it is probably the same one that is cited for R&D in general), trying to cure it with another market failure is not the answer unless the R&D failure is much larger. I once saw a presentation by someone from NSF on this very topic (The Economic Case for Basic Research), and when I pointed this problem out to him, he actually didn't have an answer. I was surprised, given that most of us learned about the inefficiency of taxes in Econ 101.
and then stalls, I hardly think there is any reason to panic. In any case, private R&D dwarfs federal R&D.
NIH needs to get its act together, anyway, and fix the major problems with PhD overproduction it has caused. NIH's primary method of spending money is to give it to university professors, who use it to reproduce. We now have far more PhD's, especially in biosciences, than the system has room for. NIH needs to shift from funding grad students and post-docs to funding full-time salaried permanent positions in federal labs.
Actually, it is worse than this. We also have a massive shortage of K12 science teachers. Why? Because the state governments underpay these positions. If you graduate with a degree in science, and grad school is subsidized while K12 teaching is paid far below market rates, which do you choose? It should not be a surprise that we have wound up with a glut of underemployed PhDs and no one to teach our children.
Total human happiness is basically directly proportional to the number of people. Five billion people will be approximately half as happy as ten billion. There is no reason to believe that the current population (6.5 billion) or the predicted maximum population (8-9 billion) are unsustainable. Indeed, as technology grows, so does the number of people we can sustain.
Reducing birthrates in the first world, where most of the innovation will come from, will actually make the problem worse, not better. First world countries should be aiming for zero native population growth and a long-term equilibrium of their population as the poorer parts of the world head towards stabilization. Fortunately, they rapidly are. Except for Africa, there are few places in the world where birthrates are problematically high. Even there they are falling. On the contrary, in places like China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Iran, birthrates have been falling like rocks and are rapidly falling to or below replacement levels.
Also, there is a matter of cultural preservation. I think it is important to preserve western culture (as in liberal democracy, respect for human rights, etc). Doing so while having our populations fall like rocks is not necessarily a given.
Nuclear is not a quick fix. Solar is not a quick fix. Biodiesel is not a quick fix. Drilling in ANWR is not a quick fix. Carbon sequestration is not a quick fix. Ethanol is not a quick fix. Methanol is not a quick fix. Hydrogen is not a quick fix. Hydro is not a quick fix. Tidal is not a quick fix. Wind is not a quick fix. Conservation is not a quick fix. Energy efficiency is not a quick fix.
However, if you add them all together, and you might just have a really slow, big pain in the butt fix.
If I hear "such-and-such is not the answer" one more time, I am seriously gonna smack the idiot who says it upside the noggin. There is no single answer!
Do the math...$20 of credit at 20 cents/min? That's 100 minutes a month, assuming I send no text messages. In reality, I use up about half of my credit with texts, so I really have 50 minutes/month at best before I have to start paying additional fees. Compare that to 400 minutes of anytime and unlimited nights/weekends for about the same price in the states. Reception and quality is similar to that of equivalent geographic areas in the US.
In return for that, I get all sorts of cutesy icons and features that I have no interest in using. Japanese phones can do more things than ours, but do not do the important ones as well. The tradeoffs exist more in price than technology. To support all the extra features while maintaining reasonable prices, the Japanese companies have to limit talk time.
you get your basic service plus about $20 of usage credit (at 3-5 cents per text/email and about 20 cents/min for talk, except for in the middle of the night), half-price for calling someone using the same company, a 2 megapixel camera, the ability to check the train schedules and a dozen other bells and whistles that I don't care about.
Which would you rather have?
People keep claiming that Japanese cells are way ahead of American ones. Hogwash. They have lots of irrelevant features that American ones do not have, but they are far worse for doing what is most important - talking to people! For a number of geographic and cultural reasons (which I do not want to go into), the Japanese have chosen a different solution to the trade-offs that naturally exist in any technology. To think that the technology in Japan is magically better is rather silly, especially because cell phones are not manufactured in Japan!
only five are foreigners (American, Brit, and three Chinese). The American and one Chinese are vodafone. Obviously, the sample size is too small to infer anything. The other 87 are Japanese, and vodafone is heavily represented. Actually, the reason I chose vodafone is because my closest Japanese friends/colleagues use it. Of those 87 numbers, probably 20% are my coworkers (generally Japanese graduate students) and 80% are twenty-something Japanese women (what the hell else would be in my cell phone?). I find it funny that everyone seems to think that I would be carrying around a cell phone full of gaijin numbers...hehehehe
Most use Tsuka because they are cheap and it doesn't require the commitments. The large number of Vodafone users listed in my cell are Japanese. Perhaps it has something to do with region. I live in Kansai, not near Tokyo.
friends use Vodafone? It is somewhat harder to talk on your phone here, as talking in public indoors is generally taboo (God, I wish this was true in the states). Hence, they do not need quite as many minutes. On the other hand, ninety minutes is pathetic - a couple of twenty minute calls to friends from out of town will burn all of your spare minutes from the month, and after that you pay through the teeth. This is true for all the companies.
I currently live in Japan and use Vodafone. It seems to me that they hold over a 30% market share among the hundred-odd phone numbers in my cell. In general, the four major companies (docomo at the high end, vodafone and au in the middle, tsuka at the bottom) seem about equally popular.
I don't think this sale is due to failure. Rather, it is just one business selling off a decent little piece to another corporation who wants it more. It happens all the time.
Btw, to whoever said "Japanese cells are 3 years ahead of everyone else", I would respectfully disagree. I'd rather have an American cell. Why? Because I hardly ever use the billion and one stupid bells and whistles in my Japanese phone. What I want to do is be able to talk on my cell phone, which is absurdly expensive in Japan. For nearly $40/month, you only get ninety minutes (and your billion and two text messages and emails eat into this time)! Nor do I find the reception better in Japan than in comparable areas of the US. Reception here is near universal in the major cities unless you are underground, gets a little spotty as you move into the burbs (especially indoors), and fails quite often in the countryside unless you happen to be at a high elevation. Same is true in the states, except we have less area that is city and more that is burb and countryside.
Japanese cells aren't better. Rather, Japanese spend lots more money on them and buy all the bells and whistles that 90% of Western users just don't care about.
funded are falling. This is not because the pie is shrinking, but rather the number of starving people is skyrocketing.
The federal government has really "#$"#ed up scientific research, particularly in biomed, by over-subsidizing the creation of scientists without creating jobs for them. Now countless young people are stuck in "temporary" post-doc land for years, while anyone with the sense to have avoided science is by that age making a comfortable or high salary as an engineer, doctor, lawyer, etc. Needless to say, fewer and fewer Americans are entering science. Go figure.
The last thing we need to do is more business at usual at NIH. We need to quit funding grad students and start funding full-time researchers with real salaries and benefits. The government has it backwards - if they would create good jobs for American scientists, they will get American scientists. Creating scientists for whom there are no jobs is a recipe for disaster.
www.omb.gov
How can you confuse "stopped rising" with "cut in half"? Holy partisanship, batman!
I could use the banana I am going to eat for dinner to choke you. On the other hand, I could use a suit-case nuclear bomb as a doorstop.
Now given that both of these items have both legitimate and illegitimate uses, should they be treated the same under the law? Of course not, and the reason why should be obvious - the banana has few illegitimate or dangerous uses, and is overwhelmingly used legitimately. The nuclear bomb has few legitimate uses, while its illegitimate uses are many and extreme. Also, even when used legitimately it can generally be replaced by safe alternatives.
As illustrated in the above example, having some legitimate uses is not enough to avoid a ban, nor is having some illegitimate uses enough to justify one. Instead, we must weigh the legitimate and illegitimate uses against one another. The three primary factors in deciding whether legal restrictions would be useful are:
1: What is the ratio of legitimate to illegitimate uses?
2: What alternatives exist to the legitimate uses?
3: How effectively could a ban be enforced?
BitTorrent and the like score quite badly on the first two points - most BT traffic is illegitimate, and there are plenty of legal ways to distribute files. The only question is how effective would any sort of regulation of BT really be.
There are benefits to imaging growing fetuses. They aren't just done "for fun". In the case of the old technology, there were some risks as well. I don't know enough to make a judgement as to whether the risks were worth the gains. With the modern technology, the risks are negligible and it is simply a matter of cost and convenience vs benefits.
Tobacco companies in the 50s were much like "right-wingers against Global Warming" or "left-wing Harvard professors against anyone who dares suggest men and women aren't identical on average" are today - locked into nitpicking obvious scientific truths that differ from the world that they want to exist.
because by then, our technology will be so advanced that we will just dig all the crap up with robots and put it in our new 100,000 year containers. Of course, those will be unnecessary, as after another thouseand years, we will dig it up again and use our mass transporters to teleport it all to the center of Alpha Heptarion 7.