Half-Life 3, as far as I can tell, is languishing at Valve because no one wants to work on it. My understanding is that the general policy is that Valve employees work on projects that interest them, and a team has not formed that is interested in doing HL3. I do not believe it has much to do with their coding process.
While there may be some collateral they have produced for it, I don't actually believe Valve has ever actually started working on HL3, so it isn't a matter of them being behind schedule.
Oddly, I don't know how that policy works, because clearly, the company can't really function if they get bored with projects and don't want to work on them any more. Presumably, once they accept an idea, they're required to finish what they start. The hype around HL3 probably means that the people who might be on that team would need to be good and ready to start down that road. Perhaps they were waiting for the Source 2 engine to come out (which happened just this year).
Software covers too much ground for there to be "one true way", or even really for there to be a need for it.
What is needed is definitions for specific types of software, like mission critical health care systems or airplane software. And to some extent, that already exists. The software in an airplane is not usually going to be buggy and is probably already produced in a manner which rivals the processes that other engineers use for things like building the body of the plane or the wiring.
It's a sysadmin who can code to a certain extent. Most of the sysadmins that I know are now DevOps Engineers.
DevOps is not supposed to be a job title, it was supposed to be a philosophy for Development and Operations interacting. Which meant that you'd still have Developers and still have System Administrators, they'd just integrate more closely.
Needless to say, it now functionally means a sysadmin who can do light coding (useful for software defined cloud stuff like AWS) and understands certain tools like chef, puppet or ansible. Sometimes, it also means that a developer may slip into sysadmin-land from the other side. There is actually a need for this sort of experience, so it has become a job title, to the detriment of whatever the original idea was.
I've worked with Agile and Kanban and DevOps. My assessment of all of those is that they can all work, but only if everyone is on the same page and agrees to work in that way without coercion. That means that the success that one shop has can vary wildly from the success of others. If you have people who are cynical about these processes or try to evade them at important positions, they become bastardized and they don't work because your shop simply is not following the core practices of the methodology.
Ultimately, as I point out to people, Agile is cool if your team likes it and knows how to implement it, but looking down on "waterfall" or suggesting that it is passe is stupid. So-called waterfall got us to the Moon, and built most of the tools that make up the groundwork of what we use today. Ultimately it is about having a consistent, well thought out management strategy, getting buy-in from everyone and sticking to it.
It is far more important for your team to willingly embrace whatever reasonable methodology you are using than it is to find a methodology that promises results and try to force the team into that mold.
People have done research on things like Agile or Kanban, and they work, but they aren't magic words that suddenly make you more productive. Unproductive teams who fail to actually embrace those methodologies will continue to be unproductive. Highly productive teams would probably see no advantage because they already know their business and really should only implement something like that in response to specific difficulties they experience, and then, only with sincere buy-in.
Of course, self-deception is a problem as well. Some people believe that they are more productive than they are. Some people believe a process isn't working when it is. The only way to implement a development/operations methodology is to have sane and practical goals you are trying to reach and then measure your success against those goals. And by sane and practical goals, I don't mean "lines of code", I mean some measure of actual tested, ready-to-ship features that you are delivering, usually aligned with business objectives.
Actually, they do look very similar. Remove the point on the nose of the F-104 and note the positioning of the intakes on both, and you can see the relation. Of course, the U-2's wing and surfaces are much, much larger than the F-104, but that's what was required to turn a fighter into a long range, high altitude recon bird.
I disagree with that sentiment. You don't just pop out new equipment on a short time frame to meet a current threat. You start a war with what you have and hope that you can hold your own until the projects that you started before the war can be finished.
That idea may have worked out in the relatively lazy days of WWII, but even that is an aversion. Most of the best projects that were designed for WWII like your Tigers and your P-51 Mustangs were the result of programs that had started before the war, and in fullest anticipation of an upcoming major war with a known enemy. And they still took a couple of years to be produced, even with their programs working in overdrive on a Total War footing.
That's not going to happen today. Even a major war in the present time is going to take a lot less time than you think. While it could bog down into insurgencies after the main battle, the clash of modern armies will be very brief. Iraq was run over twice, very quickly, and Iraq had a large, battle tested army in the first Gulf War to boot. While it was no Soviet Union, it did have some first line equipment for the time.
Also, modern equipment takes longer to research and produce. What is really going to happen is that we manage to improve what we have already.
However, if we only have B-52s to improve, then we're screwed because a B-52 isn't ever going to be able to do much more than it is doing now which is release lots of cruise missiles under cover of complete air superiority. There's no point in improving a B-52, it's doing about as well as it is going to do. The real advantage will come from wartime experience which improves platforms like the F-35 which are underwhelming, but have considerable room for improvement.
Yes, it isn't law. It doesn't prevent us from more or less complying with it unilaterally, it's just that we aren't binding ourselves to it. That gives everyone else a lot less peace of mind about it, but the US often has its own reasons for basically following the gist of treaties it doesn't ratify, so it usually works out. Usually.
Yes, you want to have the pain until you have pinpointed the problem. Then you can turn off the alarm.
So yes, people need to be very careful about using a "cure" for pain. People who don't feel pain can end up with much more serious damage to themselves from otherwise mundane causes than people who do feel pain.
Ever burn yourself on a stove and yank your hand back? Someone who doesn't feel pain would probably not notice until they figured out that the burning smell was their own charred flesh.
The gun has been around in various forms since the 14th Century. It's not exactly cutting edge at this point.
And if we must have articles about guns, how about on how they work, as opposed to click bait current events stories about mass shootings that appeared *the day before* on CNN.com.
It is a bit of a pre-crime scenario. The theory is that a planned act by more than one person increases the likelihood and the severity of any crime significantly; enough that any combination of people making serious plans to commit a crime need to be stopped before they are able to execute.
However, actual intent to commit a crime needs to be shared with the conspirators. Buying a gun could be proof of intent, but if the presumed plan the conspirators made was to try and kill their target in a way that was undetectable as a homicide, for instance by using poison, it could be argued that the purchase of a gun would not be proof of the conspiracy because a gun could not be used to execute a killing without it being quickly determined to be a homicide. A gun is dangerous, but it did not match the plan, and if it was something like a hunting rifle, it could be suggested that it was just a coincidental purchase. You'd have to link the gun to the conspiracy, you can't just say "gun BAAAAAAD" and demand a conviction.
Admittedly, this is one case where you really have to understand and accept presumption of innocence. I imagine many juries would see "gun purchase" and assume that the defendant was more nefarious because of the possibly coincidental purchase.
Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to engage jointly in an unlawful or criminal act, or an act that is innocent in itself but becomes unlawful when done by the combination of actors. There needs to be more than one person involved. It isn't really punishing preparations for a crime, you're punishing the idea of more than one person coming together with intent to commit a crime. The preparations that the parties are making is merely showing the intent to conspire.
That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted by the medical community by dint of having a test for it.
Actually, it's a spot-on definition. Pull the word apart:
"a-" meaning "without" "theism" meaning a belief in a deity
Granted saying God as opposed to "gods" does tend to limit the definition more than the word would suggest, but that's barely relevant.
Negating a position is not by itself a neutral assertion. Atheism is a positive assertion that there happens to be no god(s) because you believe that not only that there might be no gods, but you assert that they do not exist.
Not knowing, not having a position, and not caring would be agnosticism.
I think the point is that atheists can be dogmatic about what they do believe, not that what they believe is confined to religious views.
Of course, there are a few atheists who you wonder how they would pass their time if there wasn't religion to bash.
There are others who just don't care about religion because it isn't a factor to them, but at the same time, hold beliefs that could challenge some religions for the level of blind acceptance expected.
For instance, your ardent Marxists who actually believed in the endgame of the worker's paradise really had no reason to believe that such a thing could ever actually happen, and yet would kill millions to try and make that happen because some guy wrote a big book suggesting that it would happen that way. Sound familiar?
I think the idea is that there are two types of qualified women.
The first type is the one in your 1:20 ratio. She's competent and can tolerate the environment of a male dominated workplace. She's not the issue.
The second (theoretical) type is also skilled (or at least has the right inclinations and intelligence type), but she's uncomfortable with the male dominated workplace and so she either leaves the field early or never even gets into the field to begin with.
Some believe that the remedy for the second type of woman is seen to be a place where there are more women, period. This allows them to have friends and the ability to have a more balanced environment. The increase in women in general will make it more attractive to the skilled women as well.
Obviously, this is an assumption, but not a necessarily a terrible one. Many people only feel comfortable among people like them. Same goes for gender, skin color or ethnicity.
A lot of this comes down to what the actual value of a more equitable ratio actually is. What are the quantifiable benefits of this sort of parity or diversity? And are those benefits come at the expense of productivity or opportunity for those who are not selected purely on the basis of their gender? Does one benefit outweigh the other? If so, then the feelings and misconceptions of the other side should give way, at least to the extent that the greatest benefit can be achieved.
I think there is a lot of shooting from the hip on this. I'd like someone to tell me:
1) Does having more females in IT being a perceptible benefit to either IT, or themselves? 2) What methods are necessary to achieve those benefits? 3) In the end, do any benefits actually outweigh the costs?
You're absolutely right. You can choose to spend more on education as a part of your GDP and have a better educational bang for the buck.
On the other hand, lower GDP sometimes does come back to roost elsewhere. You might have a free education, but does that translate into opportunity within those countries when you finish your education?
An educated person can do many things, but that doesn't always means they have the chance to do so in their own country, and many times the chance to do so comes in some other country.
Also, it is a bit unwarranted to be offended by being compared to Arkansas' education system. Although popularly considered a backwater, it's not really the same as living in a state like Alabama or Mississippi. There are plenty of good options for education in Arkansas. Although like the rest of the US, higher education is not free, that actually says little about the quality of the education itself, only about it's general availability to anyone who wants an education. While it is a comparative hardship, people can and do pay for university with the aid of grants and loans.
That's sort of like building a large bomb in your house attached to a motion detector pointed at the sidewalk and when a pedestrian gets too close to your house, he trips it and the bomb annihilates the pedestrian and your entire house with you in it. You then point out that it's the pedestrian that triggered it, which is true, but hilariously misses the point.
If you build a system that causes you to launch a preemptive strike without an actual attack underway, it doesn't matter who triggered it. You're still the idiot that created a system that almost launched WWIII when no one was actually attacking you.
Luckily, the Soviet people were not stupid, but the leadership mindset at the time was very much insular and paranoid. The extent to which that was true shocked Reagan himself badly when he realized that they actually believed that we were going to attack.
I remember life in the USA in the early 1980's. We were constantly concerned with nuclear war, but no one actually believed we'd be the ones to fire the first shot of WWIII. We had no interest in actually attacking the Soviet Union, but we were rightfully concerned that they'd roll through Germany with a lot of tanks. And frankly, given the fact that they had shown no qualms about doing so in either 1956 or 1968 in their own allied states, I'd say we had reason to be concerned. The Soviet Union might have been paranoid of an attack, but they earned that paranoia by exporting revolution and outright expansionism.
The summary seems to be assuming that terrorism is a phenomenon that is limited to conservatives or religious folks. Particularly radical Islamists.
In my opinion, their description of religious and terrorist merely means that engineers are more likely to be *religious terrorists*.
There are types of terrorists that are not religious, and actually, you had a lot of Marxist and anarchist terrorists in the past who could not by any means be called "conservative" or "religious".
So really, all this is saying is that engineers tend to be more conservative or religious, so if they become terrorists, it's because they have found a conservative or religious terrorist group to join.
I imagine there is a similar correlation between certain social scientists and Marxist terrorism.
You're assuming that the catapult/accelerator is on the ground, for one thing. Concepts like a launch loop actually put the accelerator at 80km above the Earth and only impart a 3g acceleration on launch. Yes, you have to get there with an existing craft, but that's a much easier thing to do economically.
Don't get me wrong, this is all concept design often requiring things like megastructures. The launch loop would be 2,000km long and suspended by a maglev cable system, for instance. No one has ever done such a thing before. Not even close.
However, I don't think such a megastructure is beyond human capabilities technologically, and while there are intervening steps we need to get through, none of them are really based on speculative science or technology, it's mostly engineering and materials science.
I do have to wonder if it is beyond human capabilities in terms of attention span. The cost would be colossal, but not impossibly high, particularly if we could commit to such a project over a longer period. I just think if humanity said, "We are going to complete a launch system", that it is something we could do. It's not woo-woo Star Trek fake technobabble, it's just really, really hard.
I think energy is the first thing we will be able to get from space, not materials. Space based solar is a project that will provide energy, but without the major concerns of mining and transporting actual matter to Earth. And as you pointed out, once there is sufficient space based power, the mining can become profitable both in space, and in providing materials for Earth.
The sun itself is probably the best energy source we have at this time and it will scale up very well over time. If we can figure out the big hurdles of building the infrastructure and transmission, there could be significant profit to be made in space well before we start mining it. Indeed, the mining might be started by the energy company itself to reduce costs of building more infrastructure by not having to launch them from Earth.
So for this to work, particularly for guys like Musk who barely hit the two-figures billion$, the private market has to be orders of magnitude more efficient then NASA, which does not seem terribly likely because the private market has had years to get beyond the ISS and still has not done so.
We are still relatively early in the Space Age, particularly in comparison with human history. I don't think it is right to say that just because we haven't done it in 50 years that commercial players will never do it. We're still doing things like figuring out reusable launch systems, but we are making progress on those fronts.
Admittedly, there will have to be a point where the businesses do have to make some money, and satellite launches and space tourism are unlikely to advance the profit as much as you'd want. My best bet for such a profitable enterprise would probably be space based solar power. While such a project has significant hurdles that have yet to be overcome, energy production is something we need to have increasing amounts of, and it is incredibly important to make that a renewable, "green" source as our energy requirements grow.
This is not true, really. We could quite conceivably construct catapult systems or other efficient means of getting cargo into orbit.
What we really lack is the will to build such things because even though the eventual payoff would be absolutely unprecedented, there is a colossal upfront cost to realize it and we simply can't force ourselves to either "just do it" or we lose interest when we try and do such things slowly over time.
Nevertheless, providing the ability to obtain resources from the rest of the Solar system would probably prove to be the most profitable investment in the history of mankind... eventually.
Unfortunately, I am wondering if the Great Filter isn't nuclear war or asteroids, but it is instead the inability to develop very long term thinking. Humans seem much less concerned about things that do not directly affect themselves or their recent generations of offspring. I wonder if most lifeforms are in a similar boat, having only evolved to ensure the survival of themselves and their more immediate offspring, and being unable to extend their attention far enough to complete such projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life 3, as far as I can tell, is languishing at Valve because no one wants to work on it. My understanding is that the general policy is that Valve employees work on projects that interest them, and a team has not formed that is interested in doing HL3. I do not believe it has much to do with their coding process.
While there may be some collateral they have produced for it, I don't actually believe Valve has ever actually started working on HL3, so it isn't a matter of them being behind schedule.
Oddly, I don't know how that policy works, because clearly, the company can't really function if they get bored with projects and don't want to work on them any more. Presumably, once they accept an idea, they're required to finish what they start. The hype around HL3 probably means that the people who might be on that team would need to be good and ready to start down that road. Perhaps they were waiting for the Source 2 engine to come out (which happened just this year).
Software covers too much ground for there to be "one true way", or even really for there to be a need for it.
What is needed is definitions for specific types of software, like mission critical health care systems or airplane software. And to some extent, that already exists. The software in an airplane is not usually going to be buggy and is probably already produced in a manner which rivals the processes that other engineers use for things like building the body of the plane or the wiring.
It's a sysadmin who can code to a certain extent. Most of the sysadmins that I know are now DevOps Engineers.
DevOps is not supposed to be a job title, it was supposed to be a philosophy for Development and Operations interacting. Which meant that you'd still have Developers and still have System Administrators, they'd just integrate more closely.
Needless to say, it now functionally means a sysadmin who can do light coding (useful for software defined cloud stuff like AWS) and understands certain tools like chef, puppet or ansible. Sometimes, it also means that a developer may slip into sysadmin-land from the other side. There is actually a need for this sort of experience, so it has become a job title, to the detriment of whatever the original idea was.
I've worked with Agile and Kanban and DevOps. My assessment of all of those is that they can all work, but only if everyone is on the same page and agrees to work in that way without coercion. That means that the success that one shop has can vary wildly from the success of others. If you have people who are cynical about these processes or try to evade them at important positions, they become bastardized and they don't work because your shop simply is not following the core practices of the methodology.
Ultimately, as I point out to people, Agile is cool if your team likes it and knows how to implement it, but looking down on "waterfall" or suggesting that it is passe is stupid. So-called waterfall got us to the Moon, and built most of the tools that make up the groundwork of what we use today. Ultimately it is about having a consistent, well thought out management strategy, getting buy-in from everyone and sticking to it.
It is far more important for your team to willingly embrace whatever reasonable methodology you are using than it is to find a methodology that promises results and try to force the team into that mold.
People have done research on things like Agile or Kanban, and they work, but they aren't magic words that suddenly make you more productive. Unproductive teams who fail to actually embrace those methodologies will continue to be unproductive. Highly productive teams would probably see no advantage because they already know their business and really should only implement something like that in response to specific difficulties they experience, and then, only with sincere buy-in.
Of course, self-deception is a problem as well. Some people believe that they are more productive than they are. Some people believe a process isn't working when it is. The only way to implement a development/operations methodology is to have sane and practical goals you are trying to reach and then measure your success against those goals. And by sane and practical goals, I don't mean "lines of code", I mean some measure of actual tested, ready-to-ship features that you are delivering, usually aligned with business objectives.
Actually, they do look very similar. Remove the point on the nose of the F-104 and note the positioning of the intakes on both, and you can see the relation. Of course, the U-2's wing and surfaces are much, much larger than the F-104, but that's what was required to turn a fighter into a long range, high altitude recon bird.
I disagree with that sentiment. You don't just pop out new equipment on a short time frame to meet a current threat. You start a war with what you have and hope that you can hold your own until the projects that you started before the war can be finished.
That idea may have worked out in the relatively lazy days of WWII, but even that is an aversion. Most of the best projects that were designed for WWII like your Tigers and your P-51 Mustangs were the result of programs that had started before the war, and in fullest anticipation of an upcoming major war with a known enemy. And they still took a couple of years to be produced, even with their programs working in overdrive on a Total War footing.
That's not going to happen today. Even a major war in the present time is going to take a lot less time than you think. While it could bog down into insurgencies after the main battle, the clash of modern armies will be very brief. Iraq was run over twice, very quickly, and Iraq had a large, battle tested army in the first Gulf War to boot. While it was no Soviet Union, it did have some first line equipment for the time.
Also, modern equipment takes longer to research and produce. What is really going to happen is that we manage to improve what we have already.
However, if we only have B-52s to improve, then we're screwed because a B-52 isn't ever going to be able to do much more than it is doing now which is release lots of cruise missiles under cover of complete air superiority. There's no point in improving a B-52, it's doing about as well as it is going to do. The real advantage will come from wartime experience which improves platforms like the F-35 which are underwhelming, but have considerable room for improvement.
Yes, it isn't law. It doesn't prevent us from more or less complying with it unilaterally, it's just that we aren't binding ourselves to it. That gives everyone else a lot less peace of mind about it, but the US often has its own reasons for basically following the gist of treaties it doesn't ratify, so it usually works out. Usually.
Yes, you want to have the pain until you have pinpointed the problem. Then you can turn off the alarm.
So yes, people need to be very careful about using a "cure" for pain. People who don't feel pain can end up with much more serious damage to themselves from otherwise mundane causes than people who do feel pain.
Ever burn yourself on a stove and yank your hand back? Someone who doesn't feel pain would probably not notice until they figured out that the burning smell was their own charred flesh.
The gun has been around in various forms since the 14th Century. It's not exactly cutting edge at this point.
And if we must have articles about guns, how about on how they work, as opposed to click bait current events stories about mass shootings that appeared *the day before* on CNN.com.
It is a bit of a pre-crime scenario. The theory is that a planned act by more than one person increases the likelihood and the severity of any crime significantly; enough that any combination of people making serious plans to commit a crime need to be stopped before they are able to execute.
However, actual intent to commit a crime needs to be shared with the conspirators. Buying a gun could be proof of intent, but if the presumed plan the conspirators made was to try and kill their target in a way that was undetectable as a homicide, for instance by using poison, it could be argued that the purchase of a gun would not be proof of the conspiracy because a gun could not be used to execute a killing without it being quickly determined to be a homicide. A gun is dangerous, but it did not match the plan, and if it was something like a hunting rifle, it could be suggested that it was just a coincidental purchase. You'd have to link the gun to the conspiracy, you can't just say "gun BAAAAAAD" and demand a conviction.
Admittedly, this is one case where you really have to understand and accept presumption of innocence. I imagine many juries would see "gun purchase" and assume that the defendant was more nefarious because of the possibly coincidental purchase.
It sounds like a crime, but it is a harassment charge or possibly an assault, and then only if it was known to the prospective victim.
If it was expressed to a co-conspirator it might be conspiracy to commit murder, but another co-conspirator would be essential for that.
Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to engage jointly in an unlawful or criminal act, or an act that is innocent in itself but becomes unlawful when done by the combination of actors. There needs to be more than one person involved. It isn't really punishing preparations for a crime, you're punishing the idea of more than one person coming together with intent to commit a crime. The preparations that the parties are making is merely showing the intent to conspire.
I've never had an issue with its accuracy, but my casual use case may be a lot more tolerant. That or their data source is more accurate for my area.
That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted by the medical community by dint of having a test for it.
If someone has never heard of a god, and doesn't care, that isn't being an atheist. That's being agnostic.
Atheism is a specific position that there is no god. A person who has never considered the possibility of a deity is not an atheist.
Actually, it's a spot-on definition. Pull the word apart:
"a-" meaning "without"
"theism" meaning a belief in a deity
Granted saying God as opposed to "gods" does tend to limit the definition more than the word would suggest, but that's barely relevant.
Negating a position is not by itself a neutral assertion. Atheism is a positive assertion that there happens to be no god(s) because you believe that not only that there might be no gods, but you assert that they do not exist.
Not knowing, not having a position, and not caring would be agnosticism.
I think the point is that atheists can be dogmatic about what they do believe, not that what they believe is confined to religious views.
Of course, there are a few atheists who you wonder how they would pass their time if there wasn't religion to bash.
There are others who just don't care about religion because it isn't a factor to them, but at the same time, hold beliefs that could challenge some religions for the level of blind acceptance expected.
For instance, your ardent Marxists who actually believed in the endgame of the worker's paradise really had no reason to believe that such a thing could ever actually happen, and yet would kill millions to try and make that happen because some guy wrote a big book suggesting that it would happen that way. Sound familiar?
The best Yahoo can do now is to sell all its assets, gather up all the money and then distribute it back to the shareholders, and then close shop
Reminds me of something Michael Dell said in 1997 about Apple.
Of course, Yahoo doesn't have a Steve Jobs to bring back, so perhaps that really would be the best thing to do.
It's too bad, really. I rather like the Yahoo weather iPhone app.
I think the idea is that there are two types of qualified women.
The first type is the one in your 1:20 ratio. She's competent and can tolerate the environment of a male dominated workplace. She's not the issue.
The second (theoretical) type is also skilled (or at least has the right inclinations and intelligence type), but she's uncomfortable with the male dominated workplace and so she either leaves the field early or never even gets into the field to begin with.
Some believe that the remedy for the second type of woman is seen to be a place where there are more women, period. This allows them to have friends and the ability to have a more balanced environment. The increase in women in general will make it more attractive to the skilled women as well.
Obviously, this is an assumption, but not a necessarily a terrible one. Many people only feel comfortable among people like them. Same goes for gender, skin color or ethnicity.
A lot of this comes down to what the actual value of a more equitable ratio actually is. What are the quantifiable benefits of this sort of parity or diversity? And are those benefits come at the expense of productivity or opportunity for those who are not selected purely on the basis of their gender? Does one benefit outweigh the other? If so, then the feelings and misconceptions of the other side should give way, at least to the extent that the greatest benefit can be achieved.
I think there is a lot of shooting from the hip on this. I'd like someone to tell me:
1) Does having more females in IT being a perceptible benefit to either IT, or themselves?
2) What methods are necessary to achieve those benefits?
3) In the end, do any benefits actually outweigh the costs?
You're absolutely right. You can choose to spend more on education as a part of your GDP and have a better educational bang for the buck.
On the other hand, lower GDP sometimes does come back to roost elsewhere. You might have a free education, but does that translate into opportunity within those countries when you finish your education?
An educated person can do many things, but that doesn't always means they have the chance to do so in their own country, and many times the chance to do so comes in some other country.
Also, it is a bit unwarranted to be offended by being compared to Arkansas' education system. Although popularly considered a backwater, it's not really the same as living in a state like Alabama or Mississippi. There are plenty of good options for education in Arkansas. Although like the rest of the US, higher education is not free, that actually says little about the quality of the education itself, only about it's general availability to anyone who wants an education. While it is a comparative hardship, people can and do pay for university with the aid of grants and loans.
That's sort of like building a large bomb in your house attached to a motion detector pointed at the sidewalk and when a pedestrian gets too close to your house, he trips it and the bomb annihilates the pedestrian and your entire house with you in it. You then point out that it's the pedestrian that triggered it, which is true, but hilariously misses the point.
If you build a system that causes you to launch a preemptive strike without an actual attack underway, it doesn't matter who triggered it. You're still the idiot that created a system that almost launched WWIII when no one was actually attacking you.
Luckily, the Soviet people were not stupid, but the leadership mindset at the time was very much insular and paranoid. The extent to which that was true shocked Reagan himself badly when he realized that they actually believed that we were going to attack.
I remember life in the USA in the early 1980's. We were constantly concerned with nuclear war, but no one actually believed we'd be the ones to fire the first shot of WWIII. We had no interest in actually attacking the Soviet Union, but we were rightfully concerned that they'd roll through Germany with a lot of tanks. And frankly, given the fact that they had shown no qualms about doing so in either 1956 or 1968 in their own allied states, I'd say we had reason to be concerned. The Soviet Union might have been paranoid of an attack, but they earned that paranoia by exporting revolution and outright expansionism.
The summary seems to be assuming that terrorism is a phenomenon that is limited to conservatives or religious folks. Particularly radical Islamists.
In my opinion, their description of religious and terrorist merely means that engineers are more likely to be *religious terrorists*.
There are types of terrorists that are not religious, and actually, you had a lot of Marxist and anarchist terrorists in the past who could not by any means be called "conservative" or "religious".
So really, all this is saying is that engineers tend to be more conservative or religious, so if they become terrorists, it's because they have found a conservative or religious terrorist group to join.
I imagine there is a similar correlation between certain social scientists and Marxist terrorism.
You're assuming that the catapult/accelerator is on the ground, for one thing. Concepts like a launch loop actually put the accelerator at 80km above the Earth and only impart a 3g acceleration on launch. Yes, you have to get there with an existing craft, but that's a much easier thing to do economically.
Don't get me wrong, this is all concept design often requiring things like megastructures. The launch loop would be 2,000km long and suspended by a maglev cable system, for instance. No one has ever done such a thing before. Not even close.
However, I don't think such a megastructure is beyond human capabilities technologically, and while there are intervening steps we need to get through, none of them are really based on speculative science or technology, it's mostly engineering and materials science.
I do have to wonder if it is beyond human capabilities in terms of attention span. The cost would be colossal, but not impossibly high, particularly if we could commit to such a project over a longer period. I just think if humanity said, "We are going to complete a launch system", that it is something we could do. It's not woo-woo Star Trek fake technobabble, it's just really, really hard.
I think energy is the first thing we will be able to get from space, not materials. Space based solar is a project that will provide energy, but without the major concerns of mining and transporting actual matter to Earth. And as you pointed out, once there is sufficient space based power, the mining can become profitable both in space, and in providing materials for Earth.
The sun itself is probably the best energy source we have at this time and it will scale up very well over time. If we can figure out the big hurdles of building the infrastructure and transmission, there could be significant profit to be made in space well before we start mining it. Indeed, the mining might be started by the energy company itself to reduce costs of building more infrastructure by not having to launch them from Earth.
So for this to work, particularly for guys like Musk who barely hit the two-figures billion$, the private market has to be orders of magnitude more efficient then NASA, which does not seem terribly likely because the private market has had years to get beyond the ISS and still has not done so.
We are still relatively early in the Space Age, particularly in comparison with human history. I don't think it is right to say that just because we haven't done it in 50 years that commercial players will never do it. We're still doing things like figuring out reusable launch systems, but we are making progress on those fronts.
Admittedly, there will have to be a point where the businesses do have to make some money, and satellite launches and space tourism are unlikely to advance the profit as much as you'd want. My best bet for such a profitable enterprise would probably be space based solar power. While such a project has significant hurdles that have yet to be overcome, energy production is something we need to have increasing amounts of, and it is incredibly important to make that a renewable, "green" source as our energy requirements grow.
This is not true, really. We could quite conceivably construct catapult systems or other efficient means of getting cargo into orbit.
What we really lack is the will to build such things because even though the eventual payoff would be absolutely unprecedented, there is a colossal upfront cost to realize it and we simply can't force ourselves to either "just do it" or we lose interest when we try and do such things slowly over time.
Nevertheless, providing the ability to obtain resources from the rest of the Solar system would probably prove to be the most profitable investment in the history of mankind... eventually.
Unfortunately, I am wondering if the Great Filter isn't nuclear war or asteroids, but it is instead the inability to develop very long term thinking. Humans seem much less concerned about things that do not directly affect themselves or their recent generations of offspring. I wonder if most lifeforms are in a similar boat, having only evolved to ensure the survival of themselves and their more immediate offspring, and being unable to extend their attention far enough to complete such projects.