The statement "we're short on engineers" indicates that we have engineering jobs, but not engineering personnel to fill them. What's claimed here is that there are plenty of engineering personnel, but not engineering jobs. Further, the engineers that are out there are clustered in some specific places, and tend to want to stay there when they get laid off. That means certain areas are incredibly competitive, and engineer salaries are depressed. Because there are no jobs, many of our best engineers go into more lucrative fields. For example, financial firms _love_ engineering student, because it's easier to teach a tech-savy quant the mathematics of finance than it is to teach a financial person how to program.
Crux of the argument: we have the people to fill jobs. Obama's plan (engineers > jobs > national prestige restored) is backwards (we need jobs > engineers > national prestige restored). If you want to grow the industry, you need to create more jobs, get salaries up there, and lure people (especially the most capable people) back to the profession with money. You know, like a capitalist.
6000 bugs you never see... which means they may or may not be happening right now... and they may or may not be minor... and if they do happen, you may or may not have some indication that something somewhere broke. That actually sounds worse to me than simple to spot, easy to workaround bugs like "if I open 5 tabs, javascipt stops executing in the first tab".
You have no real choices aside from slogging through all 6,000 to ease your mind, or trusting Mozilla. Since Mozilla keeps exerting considerable resources restructuring GUI design and release records when there are still real bugs, I'm not too confident in their near-term management abilities.
I still remember back in 2005, when I was first looking into how to build extensions. "So let me get this straight... I can bind XBL (essentially CSS for extension dialogs) to the XUL (XML structuring the real meat of extensions) using custom CSS element -moz-biding... which means they've ignored the 'presentation only' goal of CSS, and made it the gateway for a script to control the extension. That seems wrong." Two months later, LiveJournal was compromised using a -moz-binding-based XSS attack. Four months before I noticed this, someone else had already filed a bug. And this was a bug that was actually born receiving attention, because it arose from even older bugs that were being tackled months earlier. If there's a six month turnaround on an arbitrary code execution bug, which received immediate attention after a developer himself files it, what chance do bugs submitted by lowly users have? And the number of unresolved bugs has only increased since then.
Re:Don't care for it, but...
on
The Next Firefox UI
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· Score: 3, Informative
There's a reason my personal firefox config log is labeled "the hoops I jump through.txt". Every release they give me more of what I don't want, and break the add-ons that give me what I do want. It's getting pretty tedious stripping these things down just to build them back up again.
I think the home tab is a good idea... for people who use a home page and also only have 1 of them and also actually revisit it multiple times in the life of a window. So long as the other 85% of us can hide it, that's fine. But there comes a time when "you can customize it" stops being a feature, and starts being an excuse to ignore user wants and do whatever the hell you want. Really, is the UI something that needs to be continually re-defined? Couldn't we spend the effort on something else? Something other than badly imitating Chrome?
For engineering, a MS represents more training and (one would hope) deeper understanding. You can do fine without one, but it may open some doors. Generally a good idea financially speaking. PhDs are a bit of a gamble, in that you become the premiere expert on some very niche subject, and you only have a few years to capitalize on that. And you better love that niche. And if you don't complete it in ~2 years, you will probably never fully recoup the opportunity costs.
For the sciences, PhDs are pretty much required in the long run.
For business, MBAs are an HR person's first cut. Hiring? First, call all the masters holders. Downsizing? First, fire everyone without a masters. Promoting? If one has a masters, it's easy to pick him. Not looking to hire from within? Require an arbitrary degree/years experience/niche expertise combination that cannot be met by in-house candidates. There are plenty of people with masters out there, and it's a safe, quick, easily tested, legally defensible way to sift through people.
For the arts and humanities, you're either going into academia (doctorate required), a field where no degree matters as much as ability, experience, and willingness to work (in which case school is just to filter out the most untalented), or you're going to have a business-related job having nothing to do with your degree (in fact, your degree proves you can show up 90% of the time and do a task of moderate complexity for at least four years). Correspondingly, a higher level degree then shows: 1) you thought you would be in academia, but couldn't hack it all the way to the end, 2) you're moderately talented, potentially useful, but nothing too exceptional, or 3) you were waiting out the economy.
We're telling more and more of our kids that the road to success is a college degree. We need to be telling them that the road to success is in actually being useful, that college is one way that one may become useful, and that not every degree is equally valuable.
"If you're not getting paid to do your masters, don't do it." My first day of grad school orientation, a professor said this. After many skeptical glances around the room, as if to ask "wait, are _you_ getting paid? I'm not", that prof was shooed off the stage, and there was some talk of financial hardship that year. Later, a guy from the union gave a little presentation on why grad assistants should join, starting with "everything in the pamphlet about the union's successes last year applies to permanent staff, not grad students. Grad students are still in a terrible spot, so please join." As with all "doing it wrong" statements, this one does not capture the entire picture, and the picture is changing from year to year.
Most of us were working through school. (The fact that you're working for a university lab or prof doesn't make it somehow less like work.) Some of us were working for a university-owned research lab and got pay+tuition. Most were GRAs to a professor, and getting paid but not pay+tuition. I felt _really_ bad for some of the natural sciences folks who are expected to contribute to the labs as part of their degree without getting paid at all.
Google has wanted to know where every internet user goes for quite a while now. I suspect that if this goes through, gateway.google.com or some such service will be rolled out to let the accused infringers access other sites through Google. And why not? It's good for their "don't be evil" image, it lets them actually view every site visited, it's not an ISP, it will always be a top 200 website, any ISP that blocks it just shot itself in the head, and it could probably swallow the RIAA whole if it wished. Oh, and it could by made the default, one-button-press-to-use proxy in every new version of chrome to roll out. It's not such a sure thing that you could declare this entire RIAA/MPAA exercise pointless, but it makes enough sense that it's hard to think of a reason Google wouldn't do it, or to believe that the ISP agreement has any real hope of combating piracy.
Saw this response. It's an old comment, but just for the record: No, the comics cosmology is more complicated than a Platonist's nightmare. The polytheistic pantheons all exist, and the heads of each also occasionally meet as a "Council of Godheads". Apparently this only includes Earth-based pantheons; alien polytheistic pantheons form their own clubs. Nor does it include the powerful, mystical beings who are worshipped as gods, but which aren't because they are just demons, spirits, ascended wizards, etc., such as Cthon and Shuma Gorath.
Also not present is the Islamo-Judeo-Christian God, who seems to be the "one above all" who created the universe. If this particularly offends you as, say, a Wiccan, you'll have to blame the twin guns of American market forces and primarily Jewish character-creators. You will also have to take it up with His avatar, the Living Tribunal, judgment incarnate.
There are also abstractions of cosmological forces -- Eternity, Infinity, Death, Oblivion -- ultra powerful alien beings (such as Celestials, who are only called "space gods" by lesser beings... which is everyone), and the so called "primordial gods" created when the universe was young. We will not discuss other universes -- neither the countably infinite number of parallel universes arranged in a strand from order to chaos, nor the universes that preceded the mainstream universe in that place in the order as part of the big crunch/big bang cycle, nor the other timelines which can temporarily come into being by overlaying/changing an existing timeline -- at this time.
So in conclusion: "they're not gods, they're aliens" is actually way too simple for the comics, and is absolutely unnecessary for the comparatively simple shared universe of the Avengers movies. It was (kind of) used in Earth X, though.
As constructs get more complicated, so too does the question of what is garbage. For example, If you have a simple linked list with a head node, and that gets deleted, it makes sense for the head and all of the nodes linked from the head to be deleted. If you have a more complex dataset that tries to make effect use of space with copy-by-reference, then you have to keep track of how many pointers are linking to a piece of data. If you have a structure where "lower" nodes may point to "higher" nodes, forming loops, then you can get situations where the node is locked and never considered garbage, even though it is inaccessible to the user's program, and all the references to it are held by other nodes which are similarly inaccessible, and thus garbage.
The problem of detecting these cyclical dependencies can be rather complicated, and there are a couple of ways you can go. Usually, you will have to store more data per node (say, a hierarchy number so that you know when a node is only being references by other, "lower" priority nodes), or use more computing power (say, a crawler process which actively looks for inaccessible cycles of dependencies on heap structures), or even require major program architecture (like a privileged, "border" set of pointers, which force object deletion when no so-privileged pointers link to the object). Garbage collection takes these architectural considerations and consolidates them, making the most efficient use of computer resources and liberating the programmer to worry just about the logic of his program, rather than the edge cases that could cause his program to accidentally choke to death on a some sort of heap memory tumor.
It's overhead that's not always necessary. When it is necessary, programmers want a thoroughly-tested, centralized system to make that overhead as painless as possible.
The move semantics are useful for constructing new classes. Other functionality I'm less certain about. For example class NoCopy {
NoCopy & operator =( const NoCopy & ) = delete;
NoCopy ( const NoCopy & ) = delete; }; as opposed to the old way of doing it: class NoCopy {
private: NoCopy & operator =( const NoCopy & );
private: NoCopy ( const NoCopy & ); };
I suppose you could call in "syntactic sugar", except it actually looks uglier and is harder to read for the lazy overloading of the "=" symbol. They could have just used a keyword, like "skip" or "omit" or "hide" in front of the call, and accomplished the same thing in a way the jives better with what people currently do, and is shorter than the alternative. TFA is pretty fuzzy on what "=default" entails, so I'm going to reserve judgment on that.
The auto keyword could be useful, even if it steps on the toes of the existing auto keyword. Too much use of class names like
can make a class difficult to both read and write. Still, was "auto" really the only word for the job?
TFA is not clear on if the new uniform initialization syntax is a one-size-fits-all fifth option, or if it's being forced as the only option. I doubt they're going to irritate nearly everyone by making it the only option, which would mean that programmers now have to learn the existing 4 methods of initialization, plus this new one to properly be able to read another person's code. If you ever have to look at a container class with instantiation options, good luck with that.
So far as Thor goes, sacrifice was not one of the things that bothered me. I expected Odin to be fine, since it would otherwise be Ragnarok, and I expected Loki to survive, because Loki is the reason the Avengers were formed in the comics. A comic fan and a non-fan viewer will see two slightly different movies, because the viewer may wonder "when does the villain die" while the fan will wonder "how does this sync up with canon and the Avenger movie coming out next year."
Thor was irritating to me only because 1) they had to "science-up" the gods, and 2) because Thor's lesson in humility seemed incomplete and forced due to time constraints.
By point (1), I mean that they could not have true "gods". They had to be "a highly-evolved, long-lived race that primitives on some planes would worship as gods and build a mythos around." Yggdrasil* can't be a literal, mystical tree mapping the 9 worlds of the Norse cosmology, but is a metaphor for a network of wormholes between planets. And so on. I can only assume this was done as a preventative measure, just in case middle-America decided it couldn't cotton to the notion of strange gods in a fantasy, and decided to just stay home instead. (*Sidenote: why on Earth does Yggdrasil need to be in the firefox spellcheck dictionary?)
By point (2), I mean that the intent always seemed to be that Thor would live among the mortals, become a champion to them, and learn humility before he could return to Asgard (or at least get Mjolnir back). He got Mjolnir back at the very end, mostly because Odin (or the director) said "okay, this is running long, let's finish up."
This is DC. Disregard Continuity. They were official labeling all their Golden Age characters as "from Earth 2" (Earth 1 being home to the new version who got to stick around) when Marvel was really starting to take off. Plus, DC also has the most successful elseworlds/what if books. Their characters are brands, so small changes don't really phase fans much. New Batman versus old Batman vs. golden age Batman vs. cowboy Batman vs Batman who fights Aliens and Predator are all basically batman. The stories, minor characteristics, and supporting characters all change from writer to writer anyway. I dare say there is no fanbase that would be affected less by such a major change.
Do you see it being more successful than Crisis on two Earths, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and/or Infinity Crisis? This will be the second official universe reboot, and at least the third mass relaunch. Maybe more, I've lost track. This isn't like other franchise reboots, because other franchises don't get "hot swapped" this way. At the same time, it's not the first time and not a huge surprise to the fanbase, so I doubt you'll get a lot of major complaints.
I've seen this story before, and my response is the same now as then: this is because of different expectations of the nations' leaders.
The Chinese government has full control over everything in its borders: laws, people, economic output. It's leaders can direct the entire nation however they see fit. That means the best leaders have to be able to cope with the things they can't control: the immutable limits of physics and economics. The job of any engineer (which, I might add, is not the same as scientist) is to solve problems in the best way possible with available tools under the available constraints. The Chinese toolbox is wide open, so the constraints are all physical, and an engineer's knowledge is directly applicable.
In the U.S., the people have chosen a different route: the government does what we specifically tell them they can. The constraints are primarily legal, because the government (relatively speaking) is allowed to do very little. A lawyer's ability to navigate the mine field of who is likely to be affected, who is likely to sue, and what is likely to be shot down in court is more useful to the high-level bureaucrat. Actual problems of a sort an engineer or other knowledge worker would face are the responsibility of others. There jobs are derived from a very small part of the very small leeway we give the government. (This abundance of lawyers in government is also why the American people put a premium on military experience, since it's the government department most steeped in harsh, broad-focus, real-world logistics.)
Both of these can be compared to, say, France, where the government is the nexus of the economic, legal, and even social circles. It controls industry more directly at times than the U.S. government, so businessman represent a larger share of leadership (about a third). The legal issues are similar to the U.S., but with the government fundamentally allowed more direct intervention. Hence lawyers and former lower-level bureaucrats each take about another third of the leadership roles.
"You can't help but think that this is the way all programming will be done in the future."
I've heard this before about visual languages, in a couple of different field, but it never pans out. National Instruments tries it with LabVIEW, for example. Unfortunately, dragging around boxes and drawing wire is an even clunkier substitute for odd-looking but simple code like "x=power(10,2)". And as soon as it comes time to inspect code someone else has done, branches, loops, and all? It becomes a monstrous game of "Where's Waldo?".
It's an entertaining idea, but in the end when a written language becomes two cumbersome, one of two approaches are taken: you either come up with a framework of code that generates other code to make the writing easier, or the come up with a new language to handle the most common abstractions and make everything easier
No, in my case I can trace the worst of it directly the the Time Warner Cable channel guide. Slowly rolled out in Austin over a few days, I immediately noticed a huge delay when changing channels, and was able to confirm with friends and neighbors across the city (some who had HD boxes, some not, some with the new guide, some without), that those who had the new channel guide were noticeably slowed (~1s), and those with the old guide didn't see anything unusual... until they too received the "upgrade".
The trouble in this case is that once you've invested a ton of money into an upgrade that clearly doesn't work as planned, it also doesn't make sense to spend more money to fix it or to go back to the old method. Unless the system is completely non-functional or people are bailing in droves, you just have them grin and bear it until the next scheduled upgrade. Say, five years or so.
There was probably a two year period -- late Junior year of high school through first semester of Engineering in college -- where a graphing calculator was kind of useful. Most tests didn't require anything more than an ordinary calculator (if even that). They were generally only concerned with one of the following at a time: 1) your ability to reason (you would prove/demonstrate something basic), 2) your ability to remember the general relationships (you just remember the formulas, the numbers will be ridged to make calculation easy), or your ability to actually set up and do the calculation (you can bring in a sheet of notes, or else a pre-printed note sheet would be given to everyone).
There were some matrix and differential equations you could do, but for the most part it was as easy to solve them by hand as enter them into a calculator. You were being tested on the setup more than the answer itself. Even the differential equations class with the elective Maple/Matlab/Mathematica component to it didn't really demand a graphing calculator for the paper exams. The ability to set up a problem on even an advanced calculator is a minor, niche skill. You demonstrate mild proficiency, and if you ever need it again, it's not completely foreign to you. Otherwise, it serves little educational purpose. At the same time, there is not much benefit for non-STEM students learning specialized software. When they do, they learn something more domain-specific. Such as S as opposed to Matlab as opposed to Mathematica.
There are almost always 3 camps: those that want a lean, mean browser, and those that want a fuller-than-full-featured browser, and the rest (in the majority) who just want a browser that works without a lot of configuration.
Integrated PDF support doesn't please the first camp, but will probably please the latter two. I usually harp about features added by Mozilla that I feel should really be official extensions -- things like Google-supported anti-phishing, the Flock-inspired "star" bookmark system, and this new paper-airplane social sharing system. But at the same time, a LOT of the internet is now PDF, and supporting it with the browser natively would make everything a lot more simple.
"ID is Creationism under a different name." Yes and no (but for purposes of this conversation, no). ID is a poorly-argued theory designed to give creationism the illusion of being scientifically supported. Creationism is the belief in a deity who created the material world. ID is a form of Creationism. Not all Creationism is ID. It is on this basis that I point out the slippery slope wjoust has slid down, and which it's very easy for other employers in thesciences to slide down: religious views do not need to interfere with scientific study, and to believe that they must and that it is therefore right to discriminate against the religious is bigotry. There is nothing in the bill about what is to be taught, or even researched. The bill states that you can't discriminate in one job for unrelated, religiously-charged efforts outside that job. A similar case might be a Jehova's Witness who is fired from a nursing post for her religious stance on transfusions, even though she herself never objected in the workplace and never failed to assist with a transfusion. So long as work and private life are kept separate, on what possible grounds can you justify this inequal treatment?
"And this bill prohibits the disciplining of science teachers for not doing their jobs." Really? And how many primary education science teachers do you know who do original research, which this bill protects? The bill protects researchers, most of who are employed by the government either directly or through grants. At no point does it say "you cannot fire a teacher who deviates from state standards" or "you must hire someone who has insufficient knowledge of the required material." It says that if you are, say an Astronomer who is top in your class, you can't be passed over in favor of a less qualified candidate just because your religious views are the subject of ridicule by contemporary academics.
"But whatever. Creationists cannot be reasoned with." When you are prepared to to through labor rights under the bus just because you don't like the group that would be protected, that is not reasonable. I would encourage everyone reading to ask himself, "is there any time when I've been glad to see labor rights lose?" I for one intend to contact my representatives to speak in favor of both this, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
First, let's make clear what this law means: If you believe that God created the universe, that's not an acceptable reason for an employer to discriminate against you, even in the sciences. That's basic equal protection. This bill further asserts that if you go off and do side research into creationist theory, you can't be dismissed from your paying job just because your employer thinks being visible in your religion makes you (and by extension, them) seem like a nut.
It closes a potential loophole where by in theory it's not OK to discriminate against a person based on religion, and a person's right to speak on their religion is protected, yet somehow speaking on one's religion gives an employer acceptable reason to bypass equal protection laws because the views seem somehow "unprofessional". This is not just an academic exercise: Martin Gaskell was currently suing the University of Kentucky for discrimination when it was discovered that they chose not to hire him (the leading candidate by leaps and bounds) for an astronomy position specifically because of his creationist views, fearful of the ridicule they would receive. Given the fact most research (within Texas' jurisdiction, at least) is done by public universities, the state is entirely within reason making a stand on the issue.
Finally, I would point out that the notion you express that "believing in creationism is a sure sign of a bad scientist" is at best carelessly phrased, and at worst bigotry. Creationism -- the belief that the natural universe was initially created by a supernatural deity -- is a philosophical and religious view distinct from the shaky "theory" of intelligent design. Creationism is not at all at odds with science. Newton was a creationist. Kelvin was a creationist. Darwin was a creationist. Most of the giants of science up until roughly a century ago were creationists. The fact that people like you are quick to lump all of these people together under the heading of "crackpots" for those beliefs demonstrates how it can be professionally dangerous to phrase creationist questions. (Even, oddly enough, if the question is "what holes exist in the current arguments in intelligent design?").
This bill does not promote the teaching of intelligent design. This bill does not encourage research into intelligent design. This bill makes it illegal to discriminate against a researcher for the religious views he expresses outside of the workplace and the research he performs on his own time. And the fact that many people like you are prepared to say, in essence, "rights are cute and all, but not when there's serious work to be done" demonstrates just why it is needed.
Lawyer: "So why did we originally create this feature?" Engineer: "Porn. Mostly the kinky stuff. Tranvestites, golden showers, that sort of thing." Lawyer: "We can't use 'defense of transvestite porn' in a patent," Engineer: "Why not? It's why we made it." Lawyer: "Yeah, but every patent is also a public document, which means it's a potential PR nightmare. Do you want to see 'Patent Protects Porn' on Slashdot?" Engineer: "Actually..." Lawyer: "Forget it. Just come up with something normal people would find both a harmless interest and somehow secretly shameful. Mainstream fringe." Engineer: "...." Lawyer: "Never mind, we'll think of something."
First, let me just state that I agree with you and other posters who point out that abortion is a moral, not a scientific issue, as well as most of your comments on evolution and global warming. Unfortunately, I am going to have to disagree with you on a few points.
First, I find it odd that you snidely ask "did you read the article" when the article clearly states that politicans on both sides of the aisle have been susceptible to the phenomenon, starting with the liberal relativists and moving on the the conservative anti-elitists. While you try to soften your tone a little towards the end, you do exactly what the article, Intron, and other suggest is least productive and the root of the continuing problem: unnecessarily attempt to polarize the conversation.
Second, you further attempt to polarize the conversation with accusations of bias against Intron when he raises a very valid concern. Scientific inquiry is too large a subject not to rely on the division of labor, and at some point trust-based faith. While the key to trust is that it is not invested blindly, it's still no guarantee of correctness. When two camps oppose each other, it is very easy for the lay man (including politicians, who are managers at heart, not truth-seekers) to become confused, forcing him to rely on his other tools to make sense of the debate. In a society that was founded on a distrust of power and its corrupting influence, and taught for years to value the disruptive, transformative power of innovation (by definition, progressing in a leap by bucking established thinking), you can expect that the underdog's voice will carry, even when he's wrong.
And last (because it is least relevant to the discussion at hand), I am a bit concerned with absolute certainty with which you and others insist that a fetus of a given stage is not a person, even as you claim to admit that that is a moral, not scientifically objective statement.. The strongest test ever devised for "personhood" of an unborn child so far has been "can the child survive if removed from the parent and given reasonable care by a surrogate." Because this is a moving target, changing with level of technology and medicine, many don't consider it absolute enough to serve as a true test. Similarly, it is difficult to devise other criteria that do not exclude already born people who are already considered to be persons, such as infants just after birth, the mentally disabled, the comatose, and so on. It is precisely do to a LACK of any strong test that this remains a moral debate even apart from any religious biases. At the very least, you comment must be recognized as your own moral bias, the sort of judgment which you yourself have admitted taint the well in these conversations.
Other countries have high speed rail when it makes sense to have a handful of routes, and they need to shuttle tons of people over that long distance. For example, major cities in Japan lie in a spine of stops along the coast, and no trains need bother with the more mountainous interior. The span of the country is one long route.
There aren't many places like that in the US. In fact, pretty much the only place that would meet that criteria is the metro line that shuttles government employees (and some tourists) into DC from Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. DC serves as a massive labor sink where people come to work jobs the employers (us) refuse to relocate or farm out elsewhere, even though no one can afford to live anywhere remotely close to where they work. That kind of geographic and economic anomaly just doesn't exist in the rest of the country.
In most of the country, people live in far-spread areas, then also commute to far-spread areas. They don't all necessarily move from the suburbs into the city central, and most surely don't move from one major city center to the another. In these cases there is not enough shared route to a rail, no matter how fast they happen to move. Obama wants a toy train to make him feel like "we're no falling behind," even though the transportation infrastructure we use every day -- highways and bridges -- is crumbling from neglect.
More than anything else, the lack or abundance of engineers in a government reflects what the nation and its people expect of the government.
If you think of an engineer's job description as finding the optimum compromise between lofty goals and unpleasant reality available with the tools available, then the role of leadership in China is not that different. The tools are every man, woman, child and institution, and the goals are economic targets and vague nationalistic notions of grandeur.
In the U.S., the situation is different. Previous generations have done a good job of codifying what they want of the government, first and foremost that it should not interfere unless certain conditions are met. The government is looking over society's shoulder, not directing it. Policy begins with what government is legally allowed to do, asks who is likely to sue if anything changes, and then tries to make a rock solid document that will stand up to review when those parties inevitably do sue. The private citizens and industry have far more recourse, and that makes for a political environment favoring lawyers who have experience in this sort of conflict.
Contrast both of these with, say, France, where the state is the fusion point between all industry, government and society. Public and private life, industry and law, all are entangled in complicated ways. In this case, you get a three-way split between lawyers, industry veterans, and engineers, because all three are necessary to the smooth operation of the government.
The lack of engineers in government is not the US's problem, because that's not where engineering effort is needed. The sublimation of all engineering and creative effort to short-term goals for immediate returns is. We were successful in the 60s because all the infrastructure for innovation was laid out for us in the 30s and 40s: industry-wide standards first set out by the military, funding by the military to research new means of assuring future supplies and interoperability, blue sky research at Bell labs that formed the scientific basis of the next generation of practical engineering, major investments in physical infrastructure, and increases in private wealth and the production of consumer goods that allowed more companies to form and leverage economies of scale. The list goes on. If the US is suffering now, it's because we've lived too much for today, and not planned enough for tomorrow's opportunities.
They own the piece of art. They don't own the work. For example, if you buy one of two hundred prints of an artist's latest painting, you just own a print, but the artist retains ownership of the IP (the painting) and all copies (the print). You wouldn't be able to just photocopy (or, according to this court ruling, photograph) and distribute the copies freely. One of the best -- and most annoying -- examples is wedding photos, which the photographer usually retains rights to, even if he sells you prints.
The same is true even if you're sold original works, not copies (such as books, replica painting) or even a singular work (the only existing sculpture, like in this case). This is why copyrights are supposed to expire: eventually, all art should belong to mankind as a whole as part of our common culture. The founding fathers never intended for anyone to be able sit on his laurels and live off a single work for his entire life, much less for three generations of his estate to benefit after his death.
As has already been noted, the interpretation of a picture of a monument as a derivative work subject to protection under copy right is harsh narrowing of fair use rights. While non-profit "reproductions" (say, vacation photos in front of the memorial) would probably still be considered fair use, it gives IP owners with a litigious mindset a very big stick.
Slashdot Mirror
The statement "we're short on engineers" indicates that we have engineering jobs, but not engineering personnel to fill them. What's claimed here is that there are plenty of engineering personnel, but not engineering jobs. Further, the engineers that are out there are clustered in some specific places, and tend to want to stay there when they get laid off. That means certain areas are incredibly competitive, and engineer salaries are depressed. Because there are no jobs, many of our best engineers go into more lucrative fields. For example, financial firms _love_ engineering student, because it's easier to teach a tech-savy quant the mathematics of finance than it is to teach a financial person how to program.
Crux of the argument: we have the people to fill jobs. Obama's plan (engineers > jobs > national prestige restored) is backwards (we need jobs > engineers > national prestige restored). If you want to grow the industry, you need to create more jobs, get salaries up there, and lure people (especially the most capable people) back to the profession with money. You know, like a capitalist.
6000 bugs you never see... which means they may or may not be happening right now... and they may or may not be minor... and if they do happen, you may or may not have some indication that something somewhere broke. That actually sounds worse to me than simple to spot, easy to workaround bugs like "if I open 5 tabs, javascipt stops executing in the first tab".
You have no real choices aside from slogging through all 6,000 to ease your mind, or trusting Mozilla. Since Mozilla keeps exerting considerable resources restructuring GUI design and release records when there are still real bugs, I'm not too confident in their near-term management abilities.
I still remember back in 2005, when I was first looking into how to build extensions. "So let me get this straight... I can bind XBL (essentially CSS for extension dialogs) to the XUL (XML structuring the real meat of extensions) using custom CSS element -moz-biding... which means they've ignored the 'presentation only' goal of CSS, and made it the gateway for a script to control the extension. That seems wrong." Two months later, LiveJournal was compromised using a -moz-binding-based XSS attack. Four months before I noticed this, someone else had already filed a bug. And this was a bug that was actually born receiving attention, because it arose from even older bugs that were being tackled months earlier. If there's a six month turnaround on an arbitrary code execution bug, which received immediate attention after a developer himself files it, what chance do bugs submitted by lowly users have? And the number of unresolved bugs has only increased since then.
There's a reason my personal firefox config log is labeled "the hoops I jump through.txt". Every release they give me more of what I don't want, and break the add-ons that give me what I do want. It's getting pretty tedious stripping these things down just to build them back up again.
I think the home tab is a good idea... for people who use a home page and also only have 1 of them and also actually revisit it multiple times in the life of a window. So long as the other 85% of us can hide it, that's fine. But there comes a time when "you can customize it" stops being a feature, and starts being an excuse to ignore user wants and do whatever the hell you want. Really, is the UI something that needs to be continually re-defined? Couldn't we spend the effort on something else? Something other than badly imitating Chrome?
For engineering, a MS represents more training and (one would hope) deeper understanding. You can do fine without one, but it may open some doors. Generally a good idea financially speaking. PhDs are a bit of a gamble, in that you become the premiere expert on some very niche subject, and you only have a few years to capitalize on that. And you better love that niche. And if you don't complete it in ~2 years, you will probably never fully recoup the opportunity costs.
For the sciences, PhDs are pretty much required in the long run.
For business, MBAs are an HR person's first cut. Hiring? First, call all the masters holders. Downsizing? First, fire everyone without a masters. Promoting? If one has a masters, it's easy to pick him. Not looking to hire from within? Require an arbitrary degree/years experience/niche expertise combination that cannot be met by in-house candidates. There are plenty of people with masters out there, and it's a safe, quick, easily tested, legally defensible way to sift through people.
For the arts and humanities, you're either going into academia (doctorate required), a field where no degree matters as much as ability, experience, and willingness to work (in which case school is just to filter out the most untalented), or you're going to have a business-related job having nothing to do with your degree (in fact, your degree proves you can show up 90% of the time and do a task of moderate complexity for at least four years). Correspondingly, a higher level degree then shows: 1) you thought you would be in academia, but couldn't hack it all the way to the end, 2) you're moderately talented, potentially useful, but nothing too exceptional, or 3) you were waiting out the economy.
We're telling more and more of our kids that the road to success is a college degree. We need to be telling them that the road to success is in actually being useful, that college is one way that one may become useful, and that not every degree is equally valuable.
"If you're not getting paid to do your masters, don't do it."
My first day of grad school orientation, a professor said this. After many skeptical glances around the room, as if to ask "wait, are _you_ getting paid? I'm not", that prof was shooed off the stage, and there was some talk of financial hardship that year. Later, a guy from the union gave a little presentation on why grad assistants should join, starting with "everything in the pamphlet about the union's successes last year applies to permanent staff, not grad students. Grad students are still in a terrible spot, so please join." As with all "doing it wrong" statements, this one does not capture the entire picture, and the picture is changing from year to year.
Most of us were working through school. (The fact that you're working for a university lab or prof doesn't make it somehow less like work.) Some of us were working for a university-owned research lab and got pay+tuition. Most were GRAs to a professor, and getting paid but not pay+tuition. I felt _really_ bad for some of the natural sciences folks who are expected to contribute to the labs as part of their degree without getting paid at all.
Google has wanted to know where every internet user goes for quite a while now. I suspect that if this goes through, gateway.google.com or some such service will be rolled out to let the accused infringers access other sites through Google. And why not? It's good for their "don't be evil" image, it lets them actually view every site visited, it's not an ISP, it will always be a top 200 website, any ISP that blocks it just shot itself in the head, and it could probably swallow the RIAA whole if it wished. Oh, and it could by made the default, one-button-press-to-use proxy in every new version of chrome to roll out. It's not such a sure thing that you could declare this entire RIAA/MPAA exercise pointless, but it makes enough sense that it's hard to think of a reason Google wouldn't do it, or to believe that the ISP agreement has any real hope of combating piracy.
Saw this response. It's an old comment, but just for the record:
No, the comics cosmology is more complicated than a Platonist's nightmare. The polytheistic pantheons all exist, and the heads of each also occasionally meet as a "Council of Godheads". Apparently this only includes Earth-based pantheons; alien polytheistic pantheons form their own clubs. Nor does it include the powerful, mystical beings who are worshipped as gods, but which aren't because they are just demons, spirits, ascended wizards, etc., such as Cthon and Shuma Gorath.
Also not present is the Islamo-Judeo-Christian God, who seems to be the "one above all" who created the universe. If this particularly offends you as, say, a Wiccan, you'll have to blame the twin guns of American market forces and primarily Jewish character-creators. You will also have to take it up with His avatar, the Living Tribunal, judgment incarnate.
There are also abstractions of cosmological forces -- Eternity, Infinity, Death, Oblivion -- ultra powerful alien beings (such as Celestials, who are only called "space gods" by lesser beings... which is everyone), and the so called "primordial gods" created when the universe was young. We will not discuss other universes -- neither the countably infinite number of parallel universes arranged in a strand from order to chaos, nor the universes that preceded the mainstream universe in that place in the order as part of the big crunch/big bang cycle, nor the other timelines which can temporarily come into being by overlaying/changing an existing timeline -- at this time.
So in conclusion: "they're not gods, they're aliens" is actually way too simple for the comics, and is absolutely unnecessary for the comparatively simple shared universe of the Avengers movies. It was (kind of) used in Earth X, though.
As constructs get more complicated, so too does the question of what is garbage. For example, If you have a simple linked list with a head node, and that gets deleted, it makes sense for the head and all of the nodes linked from the head to be deleted. If you have a more complex dataset that tries to make effect use of space with copy-by-reference, then you have to keep track of how many pointers are linking to a piece of data. If you have a structure where "lower" nodes may point to "higher" nodes, forming loops, then you can get situations where the node is locked and never considered garbage, even though it is inaccessible to the user's program, and all the references to it are held by other nodes which are similarly inaccessible, and thus garbage.
The problem of detecting these cyclical dependencies can be rather complicated, and there are a couple of ways you can go. Usually, you will have to store more data per node (say, a hierarchy number so that you know when a node is only being references by other, "lower" priority nodes), or use more computing power (say, a crawler process which actively looks for inaccessible cycles of dependencies on heap structures), or even require major program architecture (like a privileged, "border" set of pointers, which force object deletion when no so-privileged pointers link to the object). Garbage collection takes these architectural considerations and consolidates them, making the most efficient use of computer resources and liberating the programmer to worry just about the logic of his program, rather than the edge cases that could cause his program to accidentally choke to death on a some sort of heap memory tumor.
It's overhead that's not always necessary. When it is necessary, programmers want a thoroughly-tested, centralized system to make that overhead as painless as possible.
The move semantics are useful for constructing new classes. Other functionality I'm less certain about. For example
class NoCopy
{
NoCopy & operator =( const NoCopy & ) = delete;
NoCopy ( const NoCopy & ) = delete;
};
as opposed to the old way of doing it:
class NoCopy
{
private: NoCopy & operator =( const NoCopy & );
private: NoCopy ( const NoCopy & );
};
I suppose you could call in "syntactic sugar", except it actually looks uglier and is harder to read for the lazy overloading of the "=" symbol. They could have just used a keyword, like "skip" or "omit" or "hide" in front of the call, and accomplished the same thing in a way the jives better with what people currently do, and is shorter than the alternative. TFA is pretty fuzzy on what "=default" entails, so I'm going to reserve judgment on that.
The auto keyword could be useful, even if it steps on the toes of the existing auto keyword. Too much use of class names like
can make a class difficult to both read and write. Still, was "auto" really the only word for the job?
TFA is not clear on if the new uniform initialization syntax is a one-size-fits-all fifth option, or if it's being forced as the only option. I doubt they're going to irritate nearly everyone by making it the only option, which would mean that programmers now have to learn the existing 4 methods of initialization, plus this new one to properly be able to read another person's code. If you ever have to look at a container class with instantiation options, good luck with that.
So far as Thor goes, sacrifice was not one of the things that bothered me. I expected Odin to be fine, since it would otherwise be Ragnarok, and I expected Loki to survive, because Loki is the reason the Avengers were formed in the comics. A comic fan and a non-fan viewer will see two slightly different movies, because the viewer may wonder "when does the villain die" while the fan will wonder "how does this sync up with canon and the Avenger movie coming out next year."
Thor was irritating to me only because 1) they had to "science-up" the gods, and 2) because Thor's lesson in humility seemed incomplete and forced due to time constraints.
By point (1), I mean that they could not have true "gods". They had to be "a highly-evolved, long-lived race that primitives on some planes would worship as gods and build a mythos around." Yggdrasil* can't be a literal, mystical tree mapping the 9 worlds of the Norse cosmology, but is a metaphor for a network of wormholes between planets. And so on. I can only assume this was done as a preventative measure, just in case middle-America decided it couldn't cotton to the notion of strange gods in a fantasy, and decided to just stay home instead. (*Sidenote: why on Earth does Yggdrasil need to be in the firefox spellcheck dictionary?)
By point (2), I mean that the intent always seemed to be that Thor would live among the mortals, become a champion to them, and learn humility before he could return to Asgard (or at least get Mjolnir back). He got Mjolnir back at the very end, mostly because Odin (or the director) said "okay, this is running long, let's finish up."
"Sounds like a good way to alienate old fans."
This is DC. Disregard Continuity. They were official labeling all their Golden Age characters as "from Earth 2" (Earth 1 being home to the new version who got to stick around) when Marvel was really starting to take off. Plus, DC also has the most successful elseworlds/what if books. Their characters are brands, so small changes don't really phase fans much. New Batman versus old Batman vs. golden age Batman vs. cowboy Batman vs Batman who fights Aliens and Predator are all basically batman. The stories, minor characteristics, and supporting characters all change from writer to writer anyway. I dare say there is no fanbase that would be affected less by such a major change.
Do you see it being more successful than Crisis on two Earths, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and/or Infinity Crisis? This will be the second official universe reboot, and at least the third mass relaunch. Maybe more, I've lost track. This isn't like other franchise reboots, because other franchises don't get "hot swapped" this way. At the same time, it's not the first time and not a huge surprise to the fanbase, so I doubt you'll get a lot of major complaints.
I've seen this story before, and my response is the same now as then: this is because of different expectations of the nations' leaders.
The Chinese government has full control over everything in its borders: laws, people, economic output. It's leaders can direct the entire nation however they see fit. That means the best leaders have to be able to cope with the things they can't control: the immutable limits of physics and economics. The job of any engineer (which, I might add, is not the same as scientist) is to solve problems in the best way possible with available tools under the available constraints. The Chinese toolbox is wide open, so the constraints are all physical, and an engineer's knowledge is directly applicable.
In the U.S., the people have chosen a different route: the government does what we specifically tell them they can. The constraints are primarily legal, because the government (relatively speaking) is allowed to do very little. A lawyer's ability to navigate the mine field of who is likely to be affected, who is likely to sue, and what is likely to be shot down in court is more useful to the high-level bureaucrat. Actual problems of a sort an engineer or other knowledge worker would face are the responsibility of others. There jobs are derived from a very small part of the very small leeway we give the government. (This abundance of lawyers in government is also why the American people put a premium on military experience, since it's the government department most steeped in harsh, broad-focus, real-world logistics.)
Both of these can be compared to, say, France, where the government is the nexus of the economic, legal, and even social circles. It controls industry more directly at times than the U.S. government, so businessman represent a larger share of leadership (about a third). The legal issues are similar to the U.S., but with the government fundamentally allowed more direct intervention. Hence lawyers and former lower-level bureaucrats each take about another third of the leadership roles.
"You can't help but think that this is the way all programming will be done in the future."
I've heard this before about visual languages, in a couple of different field, but it never pans out. National Instruments tries it with LabVIEW, for example. Unfortunately, dragging around boxes and drawing wire is an even clunkier substitute for odd-looking but simple code like "x=power(10,2)". And as soon as it comes time to inspect code someone else has done, branches, loops, and all? It becomes a monstrous game of "Where's Waldo?".
It's an entertaining idea, but in the end when a written language becomes two cumbersome, one of two approaches are taken: you either come up with a framework of code that generates other code to make the writing easier, or the come up with a new language to handle the most common abstractions and make everything easier
No, in my case I can trace the worst of it directly the the Time Warner Cable channel guide. Slowly rolled out in Austin over a few days, I immediately noticed a huge delay when changing channels, and was able to confirm with friends and neighbors across the city (some who had HD boxes, some not, some with the new guide, some without), that those who had the new channel guide were noticeably slowed (~1s), and those with the old guide didn't see anything unusual... until they too received the "upgrade".
The trouble in this case is that once you've invested a ton of money into an upgrade that clearly doesn't work as planned, it also doesn't make sense to spend more money to fix it or to go back to the old method. Unless the system is completely non-functional or people are bailing in droves, you just have them grin and bear it until the next scheduled upgrade. Say, five years or so.
There was probably a two year period -- late Junior year of high school through first semester of Engineering in college -- where a graphing calculator was kind of useful. Most tests didn't require anything more than an ordinary calculator (if even that). They were generally only concerned with one of the following at a time: 1) your ability to reason (you would prove/demonstrate something basic), 2) your ability to remember the general relationships (you just remember the formulas, the numbers will be ridged to make calculation easy), or your ability to actually set up and do the calculation (you can bring in a sheet of notes, or else a pre-printed note sheet would be given to everyone).
There were some matrix and differential equations you could do, but for the most part it was as easy to solve them by hand as enter them into a calculator. You were being tested on the setup more than the answer itself. Even the differential equations class with the elective Maple/Matlab/Mathematica component to it didn't really demand a graphing calculator for the paper exams. The ability to set up a problem on even an advanced calculator is a minor, niche skill. You demonstrate mild proficiency, and if you ever need it again, it's not completely foreign to you. Otherwise, it serves little educational purpose. At the same time, there is not much benefit for non-STEM students learning specialized software. When they do, they learn something more domain-specific. Such as S as opposed to Matlab as opposed to Mathematica.
There are almost always 3 camps: those that want a lean, mean browser, and those that want a fuller-than-full-featured browser, and the rest (in the majority) who just want a browser that works without a lot of configuration.
Integrated PDF support doesn't please the first camp, but will probably please the latter two. I usually harp about features added by Mozilla that I feel should really be official extensions -- things like Google-supported anti-phishing, the Flock-inspired "star" bookmark system, and this new paper-airplane social sharing system. But at the same time, a LOT of the internet is now PDF, and supporting it with the browser natively would make everything a lot more simple.
Charming.
"ID is Creationism under a different name."
Yes and no (but for purposes of this conversation, no). ID is a poorly-argued theory designed to give creationism the illusion of being scientifically supported. Creationism is the belief in a deity who created the material world. ID is a form of Creationism. Not all Creationism is ID. It is on this basis that I point out the slippery slope wjoust has slid down, and which it's very easy for other employers in thesciences to slide down: religious views do not need to interfere with scientific study, and to believe that they must and that it is therefore right to discriminate against the religious is bigotry. There is nothing in the bill about what is to be taught, or even researched. The bill states that you can't discriminate in one job for unrelated, religiously-charged efforts outside that job. A similar case might be a Jehova's Witness who is fired from a nursing post for her religious stance on transfusions, even though she herself never objected in the workplace and never failed to assist with a transfusion. So long as work and private life are kept separate, on what possible grounds can you justify this inequal treatment?
"And this bill prohibits the disciplining of science teachers for not doing their jobs."
Really? And how many primary education science teachers do you know who do original research, which this bill protects? The bill protects researchers, most of who are employed by the government either directly or through grants. At no point does it say "you cannot fire a teacher who deviates from state standards" or "you must hire someone who has insufficient knowledge of the required material." It says that if you are, say an Astronomer who is top in your class, you can't be passed over in favor of a less qualified candidate just because your religious views are the subject of ridicule by contemporary academics.
"But whatever. Creationists cannot be reasoned with."
When you are prepared to to through labor rights under the bus just because you don't like the group that would be protected, that is not reasonable. I would encourage everyone reading to ask himself, "is there any time when I've been glad to see labor rights lose?" I for one intend to contact my representatives to speak in favor of both this, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
First, let's make clear what this law means: If you believe that God created the universe, that's not an acceptable reason for an employer to discriminate against you, even in the sciences. That's basic equal protection. This bill further asserts that if you go off and do side research into creationist theory, you can't be dismissed from your paying job just because your employer thinks being visible in your religion makes you (and by extension, them) seem like a nut.
It closes a potential loophole where by in theory it's not OK to discriminate against a person based on religion, and a person's right to speak on their religion is protected, yet somehow speaking on one's religion gives an employer acceptable reason to bypass equal protection laws because the views seem somehow "unprofessional". This is not just an academic exercise: Martin Gaskell was currently suing the University of Kentucky for discrimination when it was discovered that they chose not to hire him (the leading candidate by leaps and bounds) for an astronomy position specifically because of his creationist views, fearful of the ridicule they would receive. Given the fact most research (within Texas' jurisdiction, at least) is done by public universities, the state is entirely within reason making a stand on the issue.
Finally, I would point out that the notion you express that "believing in creationism is a sure sign of a bad scientist" is at best carelessly phrased, and at worst bigotry. Creationism -- the belief that the natural universe was initially created by a supernatural deity -- is a philosophical and religious view distinct from the shaky "theory" of intelligent design. Creationism is not at all at odds with science. Newton was a creationist. Kelvin was a creationist. Darwin was a creationist. Most of the giants of science up until roughly a century ago were creationists. The fact that people like you are quick to lump all of these people together under the heading of "crackpots" for those beliefs demonstrates how it can be professionally dangerous to phrase creationist questions. (Even, oddly enough, if the question is "what holes exist in the current arguments in intelligent design?").
This bill does not promote the teaching of intelligent design. This bill does not encourage research into intelligent design. This bill makes it illegal to discriminate against a researcher for the religious views he expresses outside of the workplace and the research he performs on his own time. And the fact that many people like you are prepared to say, in essence, "rights are cute and all, but not when there's serious work to be done" demonstrates just why it is needed.
Lawyer: "So why did we originally create this feature?"
Engineer: "Porn. Mostly the kinky stuff. Tranvestites, golden showers, that sort of thing."
Lawyer: "We can't use 'defense of transvestite porn' in a patent,"
Engineer: "Why not? It's why we made it."
Lawyer: "Yeah, but every patent is also a public document, which means it's a potential PR nightmare. Do you want to see 'Patent Protects Porn' on Slashdot?"
Engineer: "Actually..."
Lawyer: "Forget it. Just come up with something normal people would find both a harmless interest and somehow secretly shameful. Mainstream fringe."
Engineer: "...."
Lawyer: "Never mind, we'll think of something."
First, let me just state that I agree with you and other posters who point out that abortion is a moral, not a scientific issue, as well as most of your comments on evolution and global warming. Unfortunately, I am going to have to disagree with you on a few points.
First, I find it odd that you snidely ask "did you read the article" when the article clearly states that politicans on both sides of the aisle have been susceptible to the phenomenon, starting with the liberal relativists and moving on the the conservative anti-elitists. While you try to soften your tone a little towards the end, you do exactly what the article, Intron, and other suggest is least productive and the root of the continuing problem: unnecessarily attempt to polarize the conversation.
Second, you further attempt to polarize the conversation with accusations of bias against Intron when he raises a very valid concern. Scientific inquiry is too large a subject not to rely on the division of labor, and at some point trust-based faith. While the key to trust is that it is not invested blindly, it's still no guarantee of correctness. When two camps oppose each other, it is very easy for the lay man (including politicians, who are managers at heart, not truth-seekers) to become confused, forcing him to rely on his other tools to make sense of the debate. In a society that was founded on a distrust of power and its corrupting influence, and taught for years to value the disruptive, transformative power of innovation (by definition, progressing in a leap by bucking established thinking), you can expect that the underdog's voice will carry, even when he's wrong.
And last (because it is least relevant to the discussion at hand), I am a bit concerned with absolute certainty with which you and others insist that a fetus of a given stage is not a person, even as you claim to admit that that is a moral, not scientifically objective statement.. The strongest test ever devised for "personhood" of an unborn child so far has been "can the child survive if removed from the parent and given reasonable care by a surrogate." Because this is a moving target, changing with level of technology and medicine, many don't consider it absolute enough to serve as a true test. Similarly, it is difficult to devise other criteria that do not exclude already born people who are already considered to be persons, such as infants just after birth, the mentally disabled, the comatose, and so on. It is precisely do to a LACK of any strong test that this remains a moral debate even apart from any religious biases. At the very least, you comment must be recognized as your own moral bias, the sort of judgment which you yourself have admitted taint the well in these conversations.
Other countries have high speed rail when it makes sense to have a handful of routes, and they need to shuttle tons of people over that long distance. For example, major cities in Japan lie in a spine of stops along the coast, and no trains need bother with the more mountainous interior. The span of the country is one long route.
There aren't many places like that in the US. In fact, pretty much the only place that would meet that criteria is the metro line that shuttles government employees (and some tourists) into DC from Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. DC serves as a massive labor sink where people come to work jobs the employers (us) refuse to relocate or farm out elsewhere, even though no one can afford to live anywhere remotely close to where they work. That kind of geographic and economic anomaly just doesn't exist in the rest of the country.
In most of the country, people live in far-spread areas, then also commute to far-spread areas. They don't all necessarily move from the suburbs into the city central, and most surely don't move from one major city center to the another. In these cases there is not enough shared route to a rail, no matter how fast they happen to move. Obama wants a toy train to make him feel like "we're no falling behind," even though the transportation infrastructure we use every day -- highways and bridges -- is crumbling from neglect.
More than anything else, the lack or abundance of engineers in a government reflects what the nation and its people expect of the government.
If you think of an engineer's job description as finding the optimum compromise between lofty goals and unpleasant reality available with the tools available, then the role of leadership in China is not that different. The tools are every man, woman, child and institution, and the goals are economic targets and vague nationalistic notions of grandeur.
In the U.S., the situation is different. Previous generations have done a good job of codifying what they want of the government, first and foremost that it should not interfere unless certain conditions are met. The government is looking over society's shoulder, not directing it. Policy begins with what government is legally allowed to do, asks who is likely to sue if anything changes, and then tries to make a rock solid document that will stand up to review when those parties inevitably do sue. The private citizens and industry have far more recourse, and that makes for a political environment favoring lawyers who have experience in this sort of conflict.
Contrast both of these with, say, France, where the state is the fusion point between all industry, government and society. Public and private life, industry and law, all are entangled in complicated ways. In this case, you get a three-way split between lawyers, industry veterans, and engineers, because all three are necessary to the smooth operation of the government.
The lack of engineers in government is not the US's problem, because that's not where engineering effort is needed. The sublimation of all engineering and creative effort to short-term goals for immediate returns is. We were successful in the 60s because all the infrastructure for innovation was laid out for us in the 30s and 40s: industry-wide standards first set out by the military, funding by the military to research new means of assuring future supplies and interoperability, blue sky research at Bell labs that formed the scientific basis of the next generation of practical engineering, major investments in physical infrastructure, and increases in private wealth and the production of consumer goods that allowed more companies to form and leverage economies of scale. The list goes on. If the US is suffering now, it's because we've lived too much for today, and not planned enough for tomorrow's opportunities.
They own the piece of art. They don't own the work. For example, if you buy one of two hundred prints of an artist's latest painting, you just own a print, but the artist retains ownership of the IP (the painting) and all copies (the print). You wouldn't be able to just photocopy (or, according to this court ruling, photograph) and distribute the copies freely. One of the best -- and most annoying -- examples is wedding photos, which the photographer usually retains rights to, even if he sells you prints.
The same is true even if you're sold original works, not copies (such as books, replica painting) or even a singular work (the only existing sculpture, like in this case). This is why copyrights are supposed to expire: eventually, all art should belong to mankind as a whole as part of our common culture. The founding fathers never intended for anyone to be able sit on his laurels and live off a single work for his entire life, much less for three generations of his estate to benefit after his death.
As has already been noted, the interpretation of a picture of a monument as a derivative work subject to protection under copy right is harsh narrowing of fair use rights. While non-profit "reproductions" (say, vacation photos in front of the memorial) would probably still be considered fair use, it gives IP owners with a litigious mindset a very big stick.