That was a very well done presentation even if it was so far over my head that I understood little but, "oooh, pretty".

The pacing was fast, confident, and even had the audience laughing at times. Congratulations.

Now I feel an evil urge to make a joke about how, since your model didn't properly account for "hydrometeor centrifigal whatzits" then it is therefore worthless and you, Mr Orf, like those climate researchers, are in it for the big bucks in grant money to fund your lavish Toyotas and suburban middle class homes.

Or something. I've likely failed at humour. But you've succeeded in your research, kudos.

Wrong on both counts.

Actually, while "we" (us New Worlders) were bailing out the "Old World", "you" were sitting on your asses watching the whole thing unfold for half the first instance and until the fight came to you in the second instance.

Yeah, and how's your armament helping you oppose the gubmint these days? Doesn't seem to have been working out for y'all, whether y'all includes American-borne slaves, anti-Vietnam protesters, civil forfeiture victims, Ferguson protesters with .50 cal rifles pointed at them, victims of the War on (Drugs | Terror | ...).

But y'all manage to keep your own numbers in check with all the guns, so carry on.

I set up OpenSUSE 13.1 in a VM and chose BTRFS on the root (and home?) file system(s).

Since it was a VM for testing, I didn't assign it a huge image space, maybe 8 GB.

Well, after installation and then updating all the packages, I'd run out of disk space before the updates finished.

What a PITA. "snapper" can be used to delete some of the snapshots, but I disagree with the snapshot taking after every package update. I understand it can be useful in some scenarios, but it's something I'd rather have on my /home partition.

That's the sum of my experience with poking at it a bit, other than the KDE version of OpenSUSE is probably the finest looking and most-polished OS I've every had the pleasure of using.

You ought to try travelling to a civilized country sometime.

On the other hand, most of them probably don't want you, so never mind.

Or saw this CGP Grey video entitled "Humans Need Not Apply":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Makes an excellent case that expert systems will be putting white collar workers and professionals out of work real soon now.

Think IBM's Watson applied to medicine, law, engineering, etc.

CGP Grey has an excellent video entitled Humans Need Not Apply which makes a strong case for not just low-skilled workers becoming replaced by automation, but skilled workers, and even professionals.

For example, a lot of lawyer work involves sifting through massive document dumps during disclosure. Solution? Automation.

IBM's Watson is being focused on the medical field for research and diagnostics.

Perhaps it can be "taught" engineering to a sufficient degree to create a glut of unemployed humans in that field too.

Think you can compete with Watson?

The unskilled workers are merely the canary in the coal mine. Your turn is coming.

Been saying it myself for a while:

The "Information Age" has become the age of mis-information and dis-information.

I'll agree and add a couple more topics that engineers often make fools of them self in: politics and climate science.

And, to be fair, it's not just engineers that suffer this; it's any highly trained individual who lacks humility.

1. I'm not interested in being brow beaten by some fool more interested in winning an argument then in addressing the argument.

If you're going to keep attempting an ad hominem then I'm going to simply not talk to you. And then what will you have accomplished? ...you're going to get asinine...

Jeez, pot meet kettle.

To top it off, he addressed your points quite well and it appears that it's you that seems intent upon winning an argument with your long-winded reply, which, of course, doesn't specifically and concretely address the issues raised by the person you're replying to.

Funding to reproduce coming from same institution? So they'll have half the money for original research then. And the suckers tasked with the reproduction won't be advancing their own careers under the Publish (original, ground breaking work) Or Perish model used today.

Like it was stated, in a fairly appropriate analogy, reproducing others' work is akin to re-writing a new software project - in software dev, it's a losing game.

In science it's important, but like in software dev, the boss isn't interested. And while the result may be beneficial, it's hard to convince people that it's a rewarding career move to play catch-up to others' work.

Having said all that, I think we all agree that reproducibility is important -- question is, how to go about it as the current system kinda disfavours it in all but the most important projects.

We need to implement specific, concrete changes -- having grad students do some of that is a good idea, but not sure if it'll completely solve the issue.

But laymen will at least understand what has and has not be verified. That is important. Science cannot be something only scientists understand any more then the law can be something only lawyers understand.

Laymen will never understand cutting edge science (unless they're quite keen on the topic at hand - a miniscule minority), and any layman that thinks they understand the law as well as lawyers generally get their arses handed to them should they attempt pro se representation.

Specialization in complex fields is natural.

+1 Interesting

(accidental Troll mis-mod being undone with this post)

Perhaps you're playing stupid on the Internet, or maybe you're just thick, so I'll spell it out for you.

If the USA wants to spell colour "kulor", England can't stop them.

England "invented" English. USA can do with it what they want.

USA "invented" the Internet. The world can do (or ought to be able to do) with it what it wants.

I believe that is what the +5 Insightful AC above you was getting at.

Yet conservatives may be shocked to learn that their idol Reagan was once a union boss himself. Reagan was the only president in American history to have belonged to a union, the AFL-CIO affiliated Screen Actors Guild. And he even served six terms as president of the organized labor group. Additionally, Reagan was a staunch advocate for the collective bargaining rights of one of the world’s most famous and most influential trade unions, Poland’s Solidarity movement.

And Reagan said this regarding unions:

By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union.

So you modern conservatives even make Ronald Reagan look like a leftist. And guess what? He was no leftist.

That ought to give you reason to consider your blind partisanship, but something tells me that would be highly unlikely.

Agree with the first part, but on BlueTooth headsets - what's one supposed to do with them, take them off and pocket them? That risks losing them. I leave mine in place, even when turned off, when I'm out and about. 'Cause I know I'd lose it otherwise.

Maybe it helps that I grew up in a household where hearing aids were worn by a family member, so having something in the ear was normal. On the other hand, I hated wearing ear buds for the longest time, 'til I recognized the usefulness of them.