I assume graduate school is not a consideration right now since you're working.
Do you like tinkering? That is the essential skill/attitude. Everyone that I know who is happy and successful in software is a tinkerer. A hacker, in the old and honourable sense of the word. When we were kids (before computers, if you can believe that!) we amused ourselves with homebrew "chemistry experiments" and electronics and taking apart household appliances, especially clocks. Now we do the same thing but in software. (Most of us continue to hack in other fields as well, building airplanes and clocks and furniture.)
The other vital skill is learning. Things keep changing. If you enjoy learning about cool new stuff you'll have no trouble staying employed. If you've written some non-trivial chunks of C/C++ and you have a CS degree from a decent school like Berkeley you'll do fine. Be good at your assigned tasks so you can get it done early and done well. (Try not to get involved in office politics if there is any.) This frees up time to think about cool stuff, whether that's free software or work-related extra credit.
And don't forget there's life out there beyond software and work.
"Universities aren't a place to learn vocational skills."
What do you think an MBA is? MCS?
I believe we were talking about undergraduate education, particularly CS. And vocational skills like PHP or MS-Access scripting or system administration. (It's also unfortunate that in today's society calling something "vocational" is the kiss of death -- it's something that parolees and ex-cons do.) Like being a cabinet maker or blacksmith: you need to be reasonably smart; you spend a few months learning the basics and the tools (PHP or whatever); and you become an apprentice, learning on the job under the guidance of the more experienced.
Of course, that is the theory. As they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they're not. It's unfortunate that today you need to go to college just because everyone does, and because it does make it more likely that you will get a better job regardless of your actual skills and abilities. And at most US colleges you'll get a crappy education by default.
I guess I just have a fantasy that undergraduate education should be about broadening your horizons and learning what's out there before you settle down with a career and family and house and all that.
(Disclaimer: I used to be a CS prof at a US university.)
They spent all their time learning about useless crap like advanced multivariable calculus, matrix theory, and other math crap instead of learning how to program.
Universities aren't a place to learn vocational skills.
This is especially true for CS. If you just want a decent paying job, you can get the needed skills at lots of places like ITT-Tech. You don't need a CS degree to write web front-ends and PHP/SQL scripts, or to be a sysadmin.
If you don't want to learn the theoretical foundations, why get a CS degree? You don't get a physics degree if you want a job fixing cars.
No Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In another comment in this thread, cybercrime points out that The affidavit seeking the court order lists the target's phone number his 15-digit International Mobile Subscriber Identifier, and lists Nextel as the service provider.
Seems to me that in the domain of wireless phones, having the warrant identify the particular handset to be bugged does particularly describe the place.
IIRC, *86 (or *67) does not actually block your Caller ID, it just tells the other phone to ignore the information.
You do not remember correctly. You are thinking of ANI (Automatic Number Identification). If you call a toll-free number, the business always gets your "ANI" number, since they're paying for the call. "Caller ID" (more correctly called "Calling Line ID or CLID) is different, and is blocked with *86 [whatever the correct code is]. ANI and CLID are different fields in the phone signalling mechanism; kind of like the difference between the "From:" and "Received:" headers in SMTP. One is much easier to spoof/block.
...
Whether downloading is illegal or not ignores the real question, which is does it help artists and should it be illegal? Wrong. The question should be about respecting private property of all kinds, no matter who it belongs to.
Copyright is not private property. Copyright is a limited-time government-granted monopoly on the reproduction of intangible works.
I own a bicycle. I own it forever -- my ownership of the bicycle never lapses.
I own the copyright to this message. 70 years [or whatever the Disney Corp. manages to extend it to] after I die, the copyright expires and this message automatically goes into the public domain.
...a slippery slope on which the government tells you what you are allowed and aren't allowed to own.
Nonsense. With copyrights, the government is controlling what I can do with the book I already paid for. And the government already says you are not allowed to own some things -- like other humans.
You need to supply a constant input of angular momentum to keep the discs spinning.
So, where does all this angular momentum you supply go? Remember the term "conservation of angular momentum"?
If the disc is spinning at a certain rate and you want to maintain that rate, you just have to add enough energy to make up for frictional losses. The disc's angular momentum remains constant.
And on what do the frictional losses depend? Bearing friction (depends on type and materials of bearning, and rotation speed) and air drag (depends on type of platter surface and rotation speed). Note that the mass of the disk only has a small effect on bearing friction.
The mass of the disk only makes a difference when you're speeding up or slowing down the disk, not when you just need to maintain a constant speed.
Thank God for this adolescent raging hard-on White House, who have pledged the preserve the sanctity of our precious bodily fluids! Now with Martial Law!
It's not just Vista's WGA we need to worry about. I mean, what better way to take over the world. Develop some cool little free app that EVERYONE starts using. Get it installed on a bajillion computers, then it grabs an auto-update and WHAMMO! You've got... "DUN DUN DUN!!!" SKYNET...
Man, that's brilliant. That's the best plan for world domination I've seen yet, especially if if they all play the cool DUN DUN DUN!!! fanfare as the machines turn on us.
Yes, LaTeX is nice, and in a past life I wouldn't have expected anything else. (Academia -- paper CVs being handed around is how things were done.)
Now, though, I really don't want to have to keep track of any more paper, my desk is already piled high. Nothing beats a simple URL sent in email. (HTML attached to email (not HTML email!) is second.) And just plain HTML, no flash/backgrounds/blink/... Don't set fonts and sizes, let the reader's browser select the fonts to use. (Nothing pisses me off more than having to read a 3-pt font because yor platform and mine are different. Dark blue text on a black background would just complete the disaster.) Only use plain markup: H[1-6], blockquote, dl/ul/ol, em, b, p, etc. Don't use tables for page layout.
Experience should be the first section, because that's what I'll use for an idea of your skills. One paragraph for each job, with an outline of responsibilities and tools used. Try to be brief -- no need for the entire saga, that will get covered in a phone screen or interview. Try to get all the important information on the first page.
Does it really matter if jobs go from LA to Las Vegas or from LA to Toronto or from LA to India? Either way, unless you are willing to follow the job and take the prevailing wage, you are still out of work.
A pretty sentiment, but flawed. Jobs can now move around freely, but there are real obstacles to labour's ability to follow the jobs: immigration, repressive regimes, etc. And of course having labor move implies you're moving n times the number of humans, where n is the number of people supported per wage earner, on average. Disrupting human lives should count for more than corporate profits. At least, more than it currently does, which is zero.
Until we can at least guarantee equal human rights -- the usual rights of freedom of expression, religion, peaceable assembly, due process, habeas corpus, etc. -- we shouldn't allow jobs to move freely. By this criterion you could (almost) justify outsourcing to India, but not to China.
With a population of about 30 million, the state is India's most progressed society in terms of education, literacy and health. In fact, Kerala has the highest Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) in India and the highest Human Development Index. With highest literacy rate in country, highest life expectancy, least population growth, lowest infant mortality, Kerala has been adopted by the world bodies as the role model for developing countries.
Spectacular tropical beaches, monsoon storms, and mountains, too.
... if all that is truly worthless to you, why don't you leave your money in a paper bag on the porch? I mean after all, the doors, locks, security systems, fences and safes are useless right?
Airplanes require oxygen above 13,000 feet MSL, not 18,000... You're confusing the upper limit of oxygen-less flying with the base of class A (IFR-only) airspace....
I'm well aware of the oxygen regulations; I'm an instrument-rated pilot. It's really bad form to be pedantic and then get it wrong. There is no mention of 13,000 in FARs 121.327-335; are you thinking of something else?
A cruising altitude above/below 18,000 is a good rule of thumb for pressurized vs. non-pressurized airplanes. The only exceptions are turbo non-pressurized airplanes like the Bonanza, C-210 etc. -- hardly something an average Joe is likely to ride in.
Most small-to-medium sized pressurized passenger planes do not pressurize the cargo hold. Larger planes do sometimes have a separate, pressurized hold for transporting pets and other pressure-sensitive cargo.
You are mistaken. Ordinary people think of anything smaller than a 737 a "little plane" but even airplanes like the DHC Dash-8 [twin-turboprop, about 35 passengers] have pressurized cargo holds. (I think you need to go down to the Metroliner (ugh!) level before you get storage outside the pressure vessel.) It is true that large airliners have multiple cargo areas, but they are all one pressurized space. The floor and any walls separating cargo areas cannot withstand an 8 psi pressure differential.
A cargo hold is a cold, low pressure, high vibration environment.
It's a popular misconception that pressurized airplanes have un-pressurized (and unheated) cargo spaces.
Why are airliners cylindrical, while buses are not? Pressurization. In a pressurized fuselage, what will happen if there are two chambers separated by the floor -- the pressurized passenger compartment above and an unpressurized hold below? Boom.
If an airplane is pressurized (basically anything that flies over 18,000', i.e. every commercial airplane, is) so is the cargo hold. It's the same environment as the passenger cabin.
Remember kids, this is a prototype! It's 3m long. Do you really think that if/when commercial airplanes use wireless links for control, there won't be any actual security/reliability built in? Engineers aren't idiots, you know, and neither are the people at the FAA. Just look at what's required to get a GPS unit certified for airplane use. If anything, only the business jets will be able to afford wireless.
After all, all airliners are controlled with a wireless multicast network. Or did you think there was a twisted-pair cable between ATC and the pilots?
PS: When I say the FAA has non-idiots, I don't mean to imply there are no idiots there -- the bureaucrats, for instance, are mostly pinheads.
12,500? The only place I can think of in the FARs about 12,500' is for oxygen use in unpressurised planes. Possibly you're thinking of 18,000' -- everything above is Class A, i.e. IFR only.
IFR -- Instrument Flight Rules; there are no visibility and ceiling requirements when you're IFR since you're required to be in contact with ATC and controlled by them. VFR is Visual Flight Rules, i.e. you're flying by looking outside, so obviously there are various visibility and ceiling requirements. Airspace is not divided into IFR and VFR. Individual flights are operating under IFR or VFR. Contrary to what you see on TV, a VFR flight does not need to file a flight plan.
Class A is for IFR traffic only. All other classes allow VFR traffic. The lower classes have various different vis/celing requirements and ATC service. Class G is the lowest, where there is no ATC service and everyone just has to negotiate and cooperate (the "Small Airplane Big Sky" theory of collision avoidance). In the US the only Class G airspace is out west over unpopulated areas, and below a certain height above ground (a few thousand feet depending on various factors). Most airspace in the US is Class E; classes B, C, and D are around airports. In Class E airspace, IFR traffic needs to file a flight plan, get clearance etc. etc. but VFR traffic can just go, provided visibility requirements are met.
"Mode C" is a type of radar transponder. Unlike movie radar with green blips and pings, in the modern radar environment ATC knows not just where an airplane is but also how high it is, thanks to Mode C. In the US, although a Mode C transponder is not required (except within 30 nautical miles from a major airport like JFK), if your airplane has one you are required by law to turn it on. Airplanes that don't have Mode C transponders are usually old small airplanes without electrical systems or radios (like the Piper Cub). Your average Cessna has Mode C.
From a pilot's point of view, UAVs are no more an issue than any other military traffic. UAVs -- like airliners -- will know where the other airplanes are, even without help from ATC. UAVs will be controlled by ATC, just like the airliners and the military. We no more need to get rid of Class E airspace because of UAVs
than because of airlines.
Although in the current political climate anything is possible. Shouldn't you need a clearance to drive on the freeway? A multi-ton chunk of metal travelling a 75 mph is a huge and deadly amount of energy, and elementary safety requires the government know exactly where every car is. Or do you have something to hide?
Jesus Christ, all this TdR flaming is getting ridiculous. His philosophy is clear: he cares about the code, and only about the code; he's not interested in marketing or market share or advocacy. He's a smart guy who doesn't suffer fools gladly, and the Internet makes it possible for every fool to contact him. Small wonder the fools think he's an asshole. (The pity of it is: he really is a pretty nice guy who even has interests other than OpenBSD.)
Since it's obvious that many here haven't actually read what they're flaming about, here's the last question of that interview:
NF: Lots of hardware vendors use OpenSSH. Have you got anything back from them?
TdR: If I add up everything we have ever gotten in exchange for our efforts with OpenSSH, it might amount to $1,000. This all came from individuals. For our work on OpenSSH, companies using OpenSSH have never given us a cent. What about companies that incorporate OpenSSH directly into their products, saving themselves millions of dollars? Companies such as Cisco, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM, Siemens, a raft of medium-sized firewall companies -- we have not received a cent. Or from Linux vendors? Not a cent.
Of course we did not set out to create OpenSSH for the money -- we purposely made it completely free so that the "telnet infrastructure" of the 1980s would die. But it sure is sad that none of these companies return even a fraction of value in kind.
If you want to judge any entity particularly harshly, judge Sun. Yearly they hold interoperability events, for NFS and other protocols, and they include SSH implementation tests as well. Twice we asked them to cover the travel and accommodation costs for a developer to come to their event, and they refused. Considering that their SunSSH is directly based on our code, that is just flat out insulting. Shame on you Sun, shame, shame, shame.
I will say it here -- if an OpenSSH hole is found that applies to SunSSH, Sun will not be informed. Or maybe that has happened already.
Sounds completely reasonable -- just calling a spade a spade and not trying to sugar coat anything.
Deciding that the universe is a particular age is still taking a leap of faith, no matter what age you think it is.
This is the way science works: we observe the universe around us. We ponder and cogitate and come up with a theory, i.e. a mathematical model, that accounts for what we see, and makes predictions about things we have not yet seen. If the prediction was right, the theory is good, and will be the accepted theory until we find an observation that doesn't fit, or come up with a new theory that does a better job of fitting the universe.
Blackbody radiation is the classic example. "Classical" physics (i.e. pre-quantum) cannot model blackbody radiation spectra. Boltzmann, Planck et al came up with a new theory that does explain, so it supplanted classical physics.
So we have a theory -- a mathematical model -- that fits all the strange and puzzling things we see out there, and this theory implies the Big Bang happened 15 billion years ago (or whatever). Until you come up with a better theory, that's the best estimate for the age for the universe. No "faith" required.
Evidently, you still have quite way to go if your first reaction is to damn an entire religion based on the actions a few.
It's useful to draw the distinction between muslims and islamists. Similarly, christian -- for example, Bill Moyers -- vs. christianist -- the ones in the US federal government and The 700 Club.
I think it was on Salon that I first saw christianist.
The problem is that as a result physicists really, really like very elegant theories when there's no particular reason to believe that the Universe itself has the same bias.
We may not have any reason to believe that the Universe is elegant, but we also have no reason to believe that it isn't. So when we find that two very simple and elegant theories (QM and GR) describe so many of our observations, who are we to say the Universe can't be simple and elegant?
Personally, I'm offended that so many lay people "don't believe" in dark matter. Just because we humans can only experience EM interactions (i.e. see, feel, smell, hear) why must everything in the Universe interact with photons?
Our current theory (QM+GR) has certain deficiencies in explaining our observations. Adding "dark matter" fixes many of them, no other theory (including modified exponents rather than good-ol' inverse-square for gravity) does as well. Therefore, until something better -- something that can do a better job of explaining so many things (galactic rotation, cosmic background radiation, galactic collisions) as well -- comes along, dark matter is it. Dark matter isn't around just because it would be kewl to have a closed Universe.
Ditto homogeneity and isotropism. If we don't assume the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic, there's not much we can say about cosmology. And if we do assume it, we can match so much of what we see. So why shouldn't we assume it? Until something better comes along....
... speakers can cause the same damage too (while peeling the paint
off the walls and cracking the windows)
The shocking and sad thing is that the volume doesn't have to be that high to cause permanent damage. I haven't led a particularly bad life as far as sound levels -- not too many rock concerts or gunfire, and I always wore hearing protection while flying. I just hit forty -- and I have squealing (tinnitus) in both ears, and have a little trouble decoding speech if the background's a little noisy.
Now I always have earplugs with me, and I wear them in every loud situation (trains, planes, machine rooms) but it's a little too late. The irony is that now that I'm older, music is a very big part of my life. To think that I wasted the perfect hearing of youth on random loud backgrounds of the city and music I didn't really care for.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume graduate school is not a consideration right now since you're working.
Do you like tinkering? That is the essential skill/attitude. Everyone that I know who is happy and successful in software is a tinkerer. A hacker, in the old and honourable sense of the word. When we were kids (before computers, if you can believe that!) we amused ourselves with homebrew "chemistry experiments" and electronics and taking apart household appliances, especially clocks. Now we do the same thing but in software. (Most of us continue to hack in other fields as well, building airplanes and clocks and furniture.)
The other vital skill is learning. Things keep changing. If you enjoy learning about cool new stuff you'll have no trouble staying employed. If you've written some non-trivial chunks of C/C++ and you have a CS degree from a decent school like Berkeley you'll do fine. Be good at your assigned tasks so you can get it done early and done well. (Try not to get involved in office politics if there is any.) This frees up time to think about cool stuff, whether that's free software or work-related extra credit.
And don't forget there's life out there beyond software and work.
I believe we were talking about undergraduate education, particularly CS. And vocational skills like PHP or MS-Access scripting or system administration. (It's also unfortunate that in today's society calling something "vocational" is the kiss of death -- it's something that parolees and ex-cons do.) Like being a cabinet maker or blacksmith: you need to be reasonably smart; you spend a few months learning the basics and the tools (PHP or whatever); and you become an apprentice, learning on the job under the guidance of the more experienced.
Of course, that is the theory. As they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they're not. It's unfortunate that today you need to go to college just because everyone does, and because it does make it more likely that you will get a better job regardless of your actual skills and abilities. And at most US colleges you'll get a crappy education by default.
I guess I just have a fantasy that undergraduate education should be about broadening your horizons and learning what's out there before you settle down with a career and family and house and all that.
(Disclaimer: I used to be a CS prof at a US university.)
Universities aren't a place to learn vocational skills.
This is especially true for CS. If you just want a decent paying job, you can get the needed skills at lots of places like ITT-Tech. You don't need a CS degree to write web front-ends and PHP/SQL scripts, or to be a sysadmin.
If you don't want to learn the theoretical foundations, why get a CS degree? You don't get a physics degree if you want a job fixing cars.
In another comment in this thread, cybercrime points out that The affidavit seeking the court order lists the target's phone number his 15-digit International Mobile Subscriber Identifier, and lists Nextel as the service provider.
Seems to me that in the domain of wireless phones, having the warrant identify the particular handset to be bugged does particularly describe the place.
You do not remember correctly. You are thinking of ANI (Automatic Number Identification). If you call a toll-free number, the business always gets your "ANI" number, since they're paying for the call. "Caller ID" (more correctly called "Calling Line ID or CLID) is different, and is blocked with *86 [whatever the correct code is]. ANI and CLID are different fields in the phone signalling mechanism; kind of like the difference between the "From:" and "Received:" headers in SMTP. One is much easier to spoof/block.
Look up SS7 for more details.
Copyright is not private property. Copyright is a limited-time government-granted monopoly on the reproduction of intangible works.
I own a bicycle. I own it forever -- my ownership of the bicycle never lapses.
I own the copyright to this message. 70 years [or whatever the Disney Corp. manages to extend it to] after I die, the copyright expires and this message automatically goes into the public domain.
Nonsense. With copyrights, the government is controlling what I can do with the book I already paid for. And the government already says you are not allowed to own some things -- like other humans.So, where does all this angular momentum you supply go? Remember the term "conservation of angular momentum"?
If the disc is spinning at a certain rate and you want to maintain that rate, you just have to add enough energy to make up for frictional losses. The disc's angular momentum remains constant.
And on what do the frictional losses depend? Bearing friction (depends on type and materials of bearning, and rotation speed) and air drag (depends on type of platter surface and rotation speed). Note that the mass of the disk only has a small effect on bearing friction.
The mass of the disk only makes a difference when you're speeding up or slowing down the disk, not when you just need to maintain a constant speed.
Thank God for this adolescent raging hard-on White House, who have pledged the preserve the sanctity of our precious bodily fluids! Now with Martial Law!
Yes, LaTeX is nice, and in a past life I wouldn't have expected anything else. (Academia -- paper CVs being handed around is how things were done.)
Now, though, I really don't want to have to keep track of any more paper, my desk is already piled high. Nothing beats a simple URL sent in email. (HTML attached to email (not HTML email!) is second.) And just plain HTML, no flash/backgrounds/blink/... Don't set fonts and sizes, let the reader's browser select the fonts to use. (Nothing pisses me off more than having to read a 3-pt font because yor platform and mine are different. Dark blue text on a black background would just complete the disaster.) Only use plain markup: H[1-6], blockquote, dl/ul/ol, em, b, p, etc. Don't use tables for page layout.
Experience should be the first section, because that's what I'll use for an idea of your skills. One paragraph for each job, with an outline of responsibilities and tools used. Try to be brief -- no need for the entire saga, that will get covered in a phone screen or interview. Try to get all the important information on the first page.
Until we can at least guarantee equal human rights -- the usual rights of freedom of expression, religion, peaceable assembly, due process, habeas corpus, etc. -- we shouldn't allow jobs to move freely. By this criterion you could (almost) justify outsourcing to India, but not to China.
I'm well aware of the oxygen regulations; I'm an instrument-rated pilot. It's really bad form to be pedantic and then get it wrong. There is no mention of 13,000 in FARs 121.327-335; are you thinking of something else?
A cruising altitude above/below 18,000 is a good rule of thumb for pressurized vs. non-pressurized airplanes. The only exceptions are turbo non-pressurized airplanes like the Bonanza, C-210 etc. -- hardly something an average Joe is likely to ride in.
You are mistaken. Ordinary people think of anything smaller than a 737 a "little plane" but even airplanes like the DHC Dash-8 [twin-turboprop, about 35 passengers] have pressurized cargo holds. (I think you need to go down to the Metroliner (ugh!) level before you get storage outside the pressure vessel.) It is true that large airliners have multiple cargo areas, but they are all one pressurized space. The floor and any walls separating cargo areas cannot withstand an 8 psi pressure differential.
It's a popular misconception that pressurized airplanes have un-pressurized (and unheated) cargo spaces.
Why are airliners cylindrical, while buses are not? Pressurization. In a pressurized fuselage, what will happen if there are two chambers separated by the floor -- the pressurized passenger compartment above and an unpressurized hold below? Boom.
If an airplane is pressurized (basically anything that flies over 18,000', i.e. every commercial airplane, is) so is the cargo hold. It's the same environment as the passenger cabin.
After all, all airliners are controlled with a wireless multicast network. Or did you think there was a twisted-pair cable between ATC and the pilots?
PS: When I say the FAA has non-idiots, I don't mean to imply there are no idiots there -- the bureaucrats, for instance, are mostly pinheads.
IFR -- Instrument Flight Rules; there are no visibility and ceiling requirements when you're IFR since you're required to be in contact with ATC and controlled by them. VFR is Visual Flight Rules, i.e. you're flying by looking outside, so obviously there are various visibility and ceiling requirements. Airspace is not divided into IFR and VFR. Individual flights are operating under IFR or VFR. Contrary to what you see on TV, a VFR flight does not need to file a flight plan.
Class A is for IFR traffic only. All other classes allow VFR traffic. The lower classes have various different vis/celing requirements and ATC service. Class G is the lowest, where there is no ATC service and everyone just has to negotiate and cooperate (the "Small Airplane Big Sky" theory of collision avoidance). In the US the only Class G airspace is out west over unpopulated areas, and below a certain height above ground (a few thousand feet depending on various factors). Most airspace in the US is Class E; classes B, C, and D are around airports. In Class E airspace, IFR traffic needs to file a flight plan, get clearance etc. etc. but VFR traffic can just go, provided visibility requirements are met.
"Mode C" is a type of radar transponder. Unlike movie radar with green blips and pings, in the modern radar environment ATC knows not just where an airplane is but also how high it is, thanks to Mode C. In the US, although a Mode C transponder is not required (except within 30 nautical miles from a major airport like JFK), if your airplane has one you are required by law to turn it on. Airplanes that don't have Mode C transponders are usually old small airplanes without electrical systems or radios (like the Piper Cub). Your average Cessna has Mode C.
From a pilot's point of view, UAVs are no more an issue than any other military traffic. UAVs -- like airliners -- will know where the other airplanes are, even without help from ATC. UAVs will be controlled by ATC, just like the airliners and the military. We no more need to get rid of Class E airspace because of UAVs than because of airlines.
Although in the current political climate anything is possible. Shouldn't you need a clearance to drive on the freeway? A multi-ton chunk of metal travelling a 75 mph is a huge and deadly amount of energy, and elementary safety requires the government know exactly where every car is. Or do you have something to hide?
Since it's obvious that many here haven't actually read what they're flaming about, here's the last question of that interview:
Sounds completely reasonable -- just calling a spade a spade and not trying to sugar coat anything.Blackbody radiation is the classic example. "Classical" physics (i.e. pre-quantum) cannot model blackbody radiation spectra. Boltzmann, Planck et al came up with a new theory that does explain, so it supplanted classical physics.
So we have a theory -- a mathematical model -- that fits all the strange and puzzling things we see out there, and this theory implies the Big Bang happened 15 billion years ago (or whatever). Until you come up with a better theory, that's the best estimate for the age for the universe. No "faith" required.
I think it was on Salon that I first saw christianist.
We may not have any reason to believe that the Universe is elegant, but we also have no reason to believe that it isn't. So when we find that two very simple and elegant theories (QM and GR) describe so many of our observations, who are we to say the Universe can't be simple and elegant?
Personally, I'm offended that so many lay people "don't believe" in dark matter. Just because we humans can only experience EM interactions (i.e. see, feel, smell, hear) why must everything in the Universe interact with photons?
Our current theory (QM+GR) has certain deficiencies in explaining our observations. Adding "dark matter" fixes many of them, no other theory (including modified exponents rather than good-ol' inverse-square for gravity) does as well. Therefore, until something better -- something that can do a better job of explaining so many things (galactic rotation, cosmic background radiation, galactic collisions) as well -- comes along, dark matter is it. Dark matter isn't around just because it would be kewl to have a closed Universe.
Ditto homogeneity and isotropism. If we don't assume the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic, there's not much we can say about cosmology. And if we do assume it, we can match so much of what we see. So why shouldn't we assume it? Until something better comes along....
Now I always have earplugs with me, and I wear them in every loud situation (trains, planes, machine rooms) but it's a little too late. The irony is that now that I'm older, music is a very big part of my life. To think that I wasted the perfect hearing of youth on random loud backgrounds of the city and music I didn't really care for.
Use aluminium foil and aluminium tape -- completely light-tight.