Good luck getting rid of that piece of paper. What most people fail to understand is that there has always been some sort of verification of skills given when people moved from unskilled (i.e. apprentice) to trained (i.e. journeyman) that was recognized throughout a region. The piece of paper might be meaningless after twenty years when you have demonstrable experience, but good luck getting someone to recognize that any training you might have is worth something if you don't have experience to back it up.

Except they are also built for traffic control as well. For some busy streets, the only way you are going to cross it is when the traffic has to stop for red light.

Neural networks have a shaky biological basis at best. More pragmatically, they are a network of perceptrons with sigmoidal output functions. In that cases, yes, more bits of precision can be very relevant. Once you start talking about a deep learning network the updates to individual perceptrons can be very small and 32 bits are needed.

Science doesn't have to make sense to be science

I fully disagree with this statement. So, I will better not get involved in a discussion with you because our positions are too different.

I get the point they were trying to make. Science is concerned with two things:

1. Reproducible: If I tell you what I did, can you reproduce my experiments?
2. Understanding: Given the results of those experiments, can we explain what happened?

Right now the EM Drive is on step one. We are trying to isolate all of the sources of error out of the experiment and make it as clear as possible as to what is going on so that the experiment can be reproduced by another lab. If the other lab can't reproduce it, it's not science and the original experiment is likely wrong. If they can reproduce it, then we can really get into part two and figure out why.

It's entirely possible that now that the article out there for scrutiny that it will end up like the Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly, but it is also possible that the drive is using something like the Mach effect to get the thrust. Completely within the bounds of known physics, but not really seen as a useful effect worth exploring.

The nursing side of things always catches my eye since, in the United States at least, nursing was considered to be a man's field of work at one point. Prior to the American Civil War it was pretty much impossible for a woman to get involved with nursing but the demand for nurses during the war eased of the restrictions since the men were needed elsewhere. Even then women faced an uphill battle at first since since the doctors didn't think they would be able to handle the "blood and guts" of the battle field, operating room, and recovery areas.

After the war you started to see things quickly swing the other way until the late 1890's when women effectively dominated nursing and the field was established as being "women's work."

Who said you need to model the entire universe? You just need to model the parts of the universe that the agents are interacting with directly. Plus, there is also nothing saying that the modeling is done in real time from the standpoint of the modeler. It could be a very slow model, but from the perspective of the agents, the model would be in real time.

So none of the above then?

Systems that were written largely by members of Generation X and marketed by Baby Boomers. But no, keep thinking that everything is the fault of which ever generation is the youngest.

So in other-words, everything started going down hill September 1993?

I'm not sure you could call the NSA a repository of human knowledge though. While they might have a lot of human data, the curation (such as it is) at Wikipedia is what actually makes things useful. Just having a bunch of data in and of itself doesn't mean it's actually useful.

I'd argue that we have a spending problem and a revenue problem. Think of it this way, if you were trying to pay all of you debts off, would you quit your job and find a lower paying one or would you get a second job to until things are paid off?

The biggest sacred cow to fix the federal deficits would be to just reform the tax code and actually have more revenue coming in than is being spent. Discretionary spending is only 30% of the budget with 6%, 64% is mandatory spending and the interest on the debt is only 6%. Even if you cut the discretionary spending completely (ignoring the revenue issues due to that workforce being laid off) you still aren't going to close the gap completely. Tax breaks, on the other hand, are currently $1.18 trillion dollars which is more than the discretionary budget.

Once you have the federal deficits taken care of you can just pretty much let the budget cost on cruise control since your principle shouldn't be getting any bigger at that point. Granted between months in the year you might see some nominal increases in the debt due to short term bonds being sold to smooth out the bumps in the revenue caused by how taxes are filed, in the long run even that would go away if a nice âoerainy day fundâ and âoebufferâ account was established.

Massive spending cuts are completely useless if you are still running a deficit. If you have a balanced budget then you will eventually payoff all of your debts in full and considering the time frames that governments have to work with, who really cares how long it takes as long as the principle is not increasing and the payments are being made on time?

There are some issues with actually getting a balanced federal budget though due to the inconstant way the money comes in and the unpredictability at times as well. It's not like a household budget where barring job loss you pretty much know exactly how much each paycheck is going to be. The federal budget really does need to be running a slight surplus so that a âoerainy day fundâ can be established but usually as soon as a surplus appears politicians want to use that money to gain political capital as opposed to saving it for later on down the road.

I guess it depends on the type of work though. When it comes to writing software, I find that if I get up, go for a walk, chat with some coworkers, etc. - which is technically "unproductive" - that I can move past a roadblock that I was encountering and sometimes wrap a problem up in about thirty minutes. Other-times where the expectation was that you had to sit and code all day, I could easily spend four times as long working on the same problem due to mental fatigue.

Back in 1995 Dilbert highlighted some of the issues with development and engineering type positions and what is considered work - namely, the time spent at home thinking about a problem isn't considered "work."

Nope, the physics professor I had spent the first day talking Sikhism and the Harmandir Sahib (the Golden Temple) and it would come up from time to time after that, although he did some more time actually talking about physics. Sadly, he had a very thick accent so you really had to pay attention to figure out what he was saying to determine if it was even relevant.