University study is very useful to teach you lots of things that human civilization, which has included a boat load of people every bit as smart as you, and quite a number of people a hell of a lot bleeping smarter, has happened to have figured out already.
Anti-intellectualism means that is all BS. It's a radically arrogant---and yet the numbskulls continually complain about those "arrogant elites".
And the 18 year old self-taught know-it-all who really doesn't is prime recidivist offender.
If you have never touched the product or installed the product. WHAT IS YOUR JOB? / WHY DO THEY PAY YOU?
The job of the salesdroid is to figure out which person among the many employees of the client has the actual control over spending money.
They don't consider technical details like that to be their domain and they'd rather fob q's like that onto engineering, because there is no upside to answering it themselves. Waste of their effort and electrons. They don't bs to engineers, only to higher level managers---much better success rate.
They want to talk warm-fuzzy benefits (and implicitly career growth) to the VP who makes the decision because that's how the money flows.
Uh, Bill gates and Sergei Brin were smart enough (and worked hard enough in school) to get into the most selective undergraduate, and graduate programs in the world.
"Someone whose only concern is money won't care about engineering, but there are tons of well paying and stable engineering jobs that do not require formal education."
In 1810, maybe. In 2011 in a developed country, I've never heard of a single one.
"The 10 or 20 kilometers that you can save by using this kind of design is really a small fraction of the distance to cross. It can make you save a few percents of fuel"
It can save you a huge percents of heavy oxidizer. You don't count progress by distance but by velocity and how much of the draggy atmosphere you've escaped. And that you don't need complex staging. And the overall design and flight trajectory minimizes structural risks and loads.
I read the ESA review. As an engineering review for an aerospace project, it's the equivalent of a rave review. It's the best idea I've ever seen for space launch.
Not entirely surprisingly, the plane looks very very much like a SR-71. After all, the laws of physics are the same as they were in 1961.
[quote]The "details" of the engine include "Esa's technical staff have witnessed this "secret technology" on the lab bench and can confirm it works." Wow, something that works in the lab. I'm not impressed.[/quote]
In real aerospace engineering, getting something to work in the lab is a big achievement. The people doing this have been working on it for decades and most of it is known, standard technology.
Why is everybody in a "News for Nerds" site so grumpily anti-intellectual. Kvetching about people who really work hard for a very long time to solve very hard problems.
"We were headed for a two-tier society, comprised of people who used computers and people who programmed computers."
Use your empirical observational skills. Which tier is on top?
"Frank Herbert wrote about this even earlier, saying that the people who allowed computers to do their thinking for them ended up controlled by the people who programmed the computers[1]."
DelusionalRevengeOftheNerdsFanatasyX1000!
The ones who are doing the controlling are computer users who use people who program computers.
If you are somebody who programs computers you are NOT in the top of the 2 tiers---you just have delusions because you aren't in the bottom of the bottom tier.
This is a field that has no significant advances in it since the 1950s. Maybe we hear about a slightly better containment vessel, or we hear about a more powerful laser to heat the gold capsule with hydrogen up, but we have yet to see a fusion reaction that is even near sustainable for more than a few femtoseconds, much less can produce more energy than put in on a consistent basis.
Technically, this isn't true--advancement in the primary parameter has been pretty large since the 1950's, but the scientists also discovered fundamental and difficult problems. Though I agree it is 100% unfeasible for actual utility power production, possibly forever.
The poster might be aware of this, but when Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved deficits don't matter", he meant "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" when it comes to re-electing Republicans.
Cheney didn't say they didn't matter economically and that was the point. GWB's first Treasury Secretary was shocked at Cheney's psychopathic immorality---Cheney didn't give a crap about actual general economic welfare or the future, just more power for his kind of people in order to lower taxes on them.
House Republicans are deficit-cutting dragons until the nanosecond their budget actually can get passed. Then it flips to spend spend spend (on old people & military, no brown people), and what they really want, yet more tax cuts for the rich.
"In fact the first civilization to think this way doesn't even need to be around anymore Just start making some self replicating probes and within a very short (geologically speaking) period of time the entire galaxy will be filled with automated systems capable of snuffing out a fledgling civilization (us). "
So, assuming other green mean people are doing that, it then makes sense to create self-replicating probes which exterminate self-replicating probes. And maybe you shouldn't exterminate other civilizations because then you might lose the chance that they develop self-replicating probes which can arrest any infection of mean self-replicating probes.
And if you're a destructive probe-creator civilization, you have to worry about somebody else hacking and retargeting your probes against you. The best way to do that is to reduce the command-and-control ports, but then you risk a serious loss of control, which is Very Bad when it comes to Weapons of Civilizational Extinction.
Maybe it's better to live and let live and take your chances, and forget about this botnet business. Just make sure you don't really piss anybody off, because you don't know what kind of Powerful Friends they might have sitting behind the dark nebulae.
Making destructive self-replicating probes is a good way of really pissing everybody off.
In the end, the side with the best botnet hackers wins. Are you sure it's you and not them?
That either leaves true belief in what he was saying ("doing god's work")
One underappreciated thing about al-Qaeda. They don't lie. Really! They say all sorts of horrible/crazy/fanatic baloney but I don't remember them ever lying about any factual situation.
You know, it's funny, there's some other guy who wrote a book---people were trying to figure out his angle, but there wasn't one, he really meant every evil word of it.
"Stump the candidate type interviews often escalate into algorithms that would take an algorithms researcher weeks to develop and months to publish."
Actually scientific style algorithms can be (and often are) thought up in a matter of minutes (once you have years of experience). It takes weeks to months to figure out if they can be implemented, and if they work, and to demonstrate to others that they do.
"Or is it smarter to bet on quality, pay above average but also have a more expensive product to balance the budget, have better programmers, have a better product and build an image of quality for the stuff you produce? If you follow the second path, your employees will be earning more than in other companies so i think they wouldn't move jobs as much, so it would make more sense to train them. Is this naive or utopic?"
Hire a small core of expensive, but emotionally rational and non egotistical people. Have them hire and be willing to train, and educate some less experienced people who, could eventually replace them when the first group (voluntarily) moves on.
"The computers and robotics are the solution. That factory is only employing 120 people, but it's employing 120 Americans."
No it's not. They close a higher labor factory in the USA and open an automated factory in the East. After a few years, the local manager --- with government support --- opens a competing factory with the profits also flowing to the Eastern company (and he is CEO and not just a manager). The USA company goes out of business, but the executive who made the decision made enough money in 5 years to provide for his heirs and theirs for their lifetimes, so he doesn't care.
"They're wondering why Apple has the magic touch."
1) there are no contracts for iPad data plans 2) nobody is locked into an existing "pad" phone contract 3) the iPad is better than everybody else's pad 4) for what you get, the iPad is cheaper than everybody else's pad.
There is no rational reason for average people to get a pad other than iPad, other than a much cheaper Kindle or equivalent.
Apple is a hardware company, and is actually very good at designing hardware, and has been for a while. More recently it has gotten good (and big enough) at supply chain management that it can be the lowest cost producer.
The more that hardware moves from "generic boxes in which one sticks generic taiwanese cards" (e.g. Dell from 1990-2003), the more that Apple has an advantage.
Apple has long thought about the combination of industrial design, user interface (hw + sw), and physical integration. The smaller and lighter the device, the more power and heat management matters, and doing this well requires real engineering.
Everybody else assumed that Apple was always going to price their machines much higher than they would---and now they find that Apple isn't, and in fact Apple is pricing the tablets lower than they other guys can do it, because they have better access to the supply chain, and perhaps better engineeering design. A couple of months ago, a slashdot user named "sjobs" (who I believe is the real one) described apple's advantage over the competitors in tablet pricing. If they maintain this price advantage, they will be #1 for a very long time.
No, graduate students and post-docs cost research money. A few very famous professors with stables of graduate students and postdocs bring in the money.
Slashdot Mirror
University study is very useful to teach you lots of things that human civilization, which has included a boat load of people every bit as smart as you, and quite a number of people a hell of a lot bleeping smarter, has happened to have figured out already.
Anti-intellectualism means that is all BS. It's a radically arrogant---and yet the numbskulls continually complain about those "arrogant elites".
And the 18 year old self-taught know-it-all who really doesn't is prime recidivist offender.
If you have never touched the product or installed the product. WHAT IS YOUR JOB? / WHY DO THEY PAY YOU?
The job of the salesdroid is to figure out which person among the many employees of the client has the actual control over spending money.
They don't consider technical details like that to be their domain and they'd rather fob q's like that onto engineering, because there is no upside to answering it themselves. Waste of their effort and electrons. They don't bs to engineers, only to higher level managers---much better success rate.
They want to talk warm-fuzzy benefits (and implicitly career growth) to the VP who makes the decision because that's how the money flows.
Uh, Bill gates and Sergei Brin were smart enough (and worked hard enough in school) to get into the most selective undergraduate, and graduate programs in the world.
"Someone whose only concern is money won't care about engineering, but there are tons of well paying and stable engineering jobs that do not require formal education."
In 1810, maybe. In 2011 in a developed country, I've never heard of a single one.
"The 10 or 20 kilometers that you can save by using this kind of design is really a small fraction of the distance to cross. It can make you save a few percents of fuel"
It can save you a huge percents of heavy oxidizer. You don't count progress by distance but by velocity and how much of the draggy atmosphere you've escaped. And that you don't need complex staging. And the overall design and flight trajectory minimizes structural risks and loads.
I read the ESA review. As an engineering review for an aerospace project, it's the equivalent of a rave review.
It's the best idea I've ever seen for space launch.
Not entirely surprisingly, the plane looks very very much like a SR-71. After all, the laws of physics are the same as they were in 1961.
[quote]The "details" of the engine include "Esa's technical staff have witnessed this "secret technology" on the lab bench and can confirm it works." Wow, something that works in the lab. I'm not impressed.[/quote]
In real aerospace engineering, getting something to work in the lab is a big achievement. The people doing this have been working on it for decades and most of it is known, standard technology.
Why is everybody in a "News for Nerds" site so grumpily anti-intellectual. Kvetching about people who really work hard for a very long time to solve very hard problems.
"We were headed for a two-tier society, comprised of people who used computers and people who programmed computers."
Use your empirical observational skills. Which tier is on top?
"Frank Herbert wrote about this even earlier, saying that the people who allowed computers to do their thinking for them ended up controlled by the people who programmed the computers[1]."
DelusionalRevengeOftheNerdsFanatasyX1000!
The ones who are doing the controlling are computer users who use people who program computers.
If you are somebody who programs computers you are NOT in the top of the 2 tiers---you just have delusions because you aren't in the bottom of the bottom tier.
The reality is that they will do this, and 90% of the power that they will replace will be nuclear bought from France, or expanded coal generation.
"A lot of it should come from solar power plants in northern Africa."
How defensible are the transmission lines against attack?
"Check out their renewable energy policy jihadi comrade, we could cripple Europe for five years if we blow up these lines!'
This is a field that has no significant advances in it since the 1950s. Maybe we hear about a slightly better containment vessel, or we hear about a more powerful laser to heat the gold capsule with hydrogen up, but we have yet to see a fusion reaction that is even near sustainable for more than a few femtoseconds, much less can produce more energy than put in on a consistent basis.
Technically, this isn't true--advancement in the primary parameter has been pretty large since the 1950's, but the scientists also discovered fundamental and difficult problems. Though I agree it is 100% unfeasible for actual utility power production, possibly forever.
And when the population doubles, human ingenuity and the free-market will produce another Nile!
The states could subpoena Amazon for the purchase records of all of their resident's purchases in order to enforce the tax.
Then they offer the residents to pay triple the amount as a "fine" or they get audited and charged with tax evasion.
The poster might be aware of this, but when Dick Cheney said "Reagan proved deficits don't matter", he meant "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" when it comes to re-electing Republicans.
Cheney didn't say they didn't matter economically and that was the point. GWB's first Treasury Secretary was shocked at Cheney's psychopathic immorality---Cheney didn't give a crap about actual general economic welfare or the future, just more power for his kind of people in order to lower taxes on them.
House Republicans are deficit-cutting dragons until the nanosecond their budget actually can get passed. Then it flips to spend spend spend (on old people & military, no brown people), and what they really want, yet more tax cuts for the rich.
"In fact the first civilization to think this way doesn't even need to be around anymore Just start making some self replicating probes and within a very short (geologically speaking) period of time the entire galaxy will be filled with automated systems capable of snuffing out a fledgling civilization (us). "
So, assuming other green mean people are doing that, it then makes sense to create self-replicating probes which exterminate self-replicating probes. And maybe you shouldn't exterminate other civilizations because then you might lose the chance that they develop self-replicating probes which can arrest any infection of mean self-replicating probes.
And if you're a destructive probe-creator civilization, you have to worry about somebody else hacking and retargeting your probes against you. The best way to do that is to reduce the command-and-control ports, but then you risk a serious loss of control, which is Very Bad when it comes to Weapons of Civilizational Extinction.
Maybe it's better to live and let live and take your chances, and forget about this botnet business. Just make sure you don't really piss anybody off, because you don't know what kind of Powerful Friends they might have sitting behind the dark nebulae.
Making destructive self-replicating probes is a good way of really pissing everybody off.
In the end, the side with the best botnet hackers wins. Are you sure it's you and not them?
If the suspect is a known-to-be-extremely-dangerous-mass-murderer that's pretty much what they do.
That either leaves true belief in what he was saying ("doing god's work")
One underappreciated thing about al-Qaeda. They don't lie. Really! They say all sorts of horrible/crazy/fanatic baloney but I don't remember them ever lying about any factual situation.
You know, it's funny, there's some other guy who wrote a book---people were trying to figure out his angle, but there wasn't one, he really meant every evil word of it.
Perhaps the optimal answer is:
"You showed me what appears to be examples of a non-standard meaning for the symbol '='. In this context, what properties do you expect it to have?"
The skill here is "do you notice when requirements are underspecified?"
If the question was meaningful and the interviewer wasn't a jerk, the snarky answer means "you didn't ask enough questions".
"Stump the candidate type interviews often escalate into algorithms that would take an algorithms researcher weeks to develop and months to publish."
Actually scientific style algorithms can be (and often are) thought up in a matter of minutes (once you have years of experience). It takes weeks to months to figure out if they can be implemented, and if they work, and to demonstrate to others that they do.
"Or is it smarter to bet on quality, pay above average but also have a more expensive product to balance the budget, have better programmers, have a better product and build an image of quality for the stuff you produce? If you follow the second path, your employees will be earning more than in other companies so i think they wouldn't move jobs as much, so it would make more sense to train them. Is this naive or utopic?"
Hire a small core of expensive, but emotionally rational and non egotistical people. Have them hire and be willing to train, and educate some less experienced people who, could eventually replace them when the first group (voluntarily) moves on.
alright mate, so ya gonna put another (euphemism for non-aryan) on the barbie?
Come now. Why are you so socialist-collectivist thinking? In a real free-market some true capitalist would surely run fiber to every aircraft.
"Local monopolies for Telco and Cable are government imposed, not free market entities. "
Obviously. In the free market, they would merge.
Other essentials like medical care and education cost literally 2x to 3x to 10x as in pretty much every other first world companies.
"The computers and robotics are the solution. That factory is only employing 120 people, but it's employing 120 Americans."
No it's not. They close a higher labor factory in the USA and open an automated factory in the East. After a few years, the local manager --- with government support --- opens a competing factory with the profits also flowing to the Eastern company (and he is CEO and not just a manager). The USA company goes out of business, but the executive who made the decision made enough money in 5 years to provide for his heirs and theirs for their lifetimes, so he doesn't care.
The robots are made in Germany, for a while.
"They're wondering why Apple has the magic touch."
1) there are no contracts for iPad data plans
2) nobody is locked into an existing "pad" phone contract
3) the iPad is better than everybody else's pad
4) for what you get, the iPad is cheaper than everybody else's pad.
There is no rational reason for average people to get a pad other than iPad, other than a much cheaper Kindle or equivalent.
Apple is a hardware company, and is actually very good at designing hardware, and has been for a while. More recently it has gotten good (and big enough) at supply chain management that it can be the lowest cost producer.
The more that hardware moves from "generic boxes in which one sticks generic taiwanese cards" (e.g. Dell from 1990-2003), the more that Apple has an advantage.
Apple has long thought about the combination of industrial design, user interface (hw + sw), and physical integration. The smaller and lighter the device, the more power and heat management matters, and doing this well requires real engineering.
Everybody else assumed that Apple was always going to price their machines much higher than they would---and now they find that Apple isn't, and in fact Apple is pricing the tablets lower than they other guys can do it, because they have better access to the supply chain, and perhaps better engineeering design. A couple of months ago, a slashdot user named "sjobs" (who I believe is the real one) described apple's advantage over the competitors in tablet pricing. If they maintain this price advantage, they will be #1 for a very long time.
"Charging more for majors that usually pay more doesn't have any kind of relationship to the cost of actually providing the education."
Actually engineering professors get paid more in most schools.
And physicians get paid way way more.
No, graduate students and post-docs cost research money. A few very famous professors with stables of graduate students and postdocs bring in the money.