I would think that a lot of people have a better chance of being astronauts than Hollywood A-Listers, for example. The pool of people wanting to be in the film industry is so much larger. How many people really want to be astronauts? Certainly less than most of the state of California and all those enrolled in film schools, acting classes and the like.

At least these sort of weapons are a potential foot gun. Anyone developing one has to be at somewhat suicidal to want to do so.

HEEHEEheeeheehee

I've switched to Exaile. Does what I want it to, much like Amarok used to. I will have a look at Clementine.

Surely you can't be serious.

And here I thought it was turtles.

You cynical man. For all you know, upper management have a budget flush with cash and have singled out someone in the hard working but unacknowledged IT department for a raise and a promotion.

This. Because rather than the establishment finally admitting that Enoch Powell was right, they are praying for a magical technological solution that will put an end to future riots. A high tech band-aid in other words.

The goal of this study, AFAICT, is to prove Summers wrong in the name of PC. The fact that they mention the Summers controversy in the first paragraph kind of gives that away. Summers was talking about why 'women may have been underrepresented "in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions"'.

It's telling that the authors of this study chose to include data from 86 countries in order to prove their point. In fact, they choose to focus on countries like Tunisia and Bahrain to make their point. Why not the USA, where most of the people in the tenured positions are coming from? Because when they do, the best that they can come up with is a statement like this: "For example, Hyde and collaborators ([20], [25]) reported that girls have now reached parity with boys in mean mathematics performance in the United States, even in high school, where a significant gap in mean performance existed in the 1970s. Likewise, both Brody and Mills ([3]) and Wai et al. ([51]) noted a drop in nonrandom samples of students under thirteen years of age, from 13:1 in the 1970s down to approximately 3:1 by the 1990s in the ratio of U.S. boys to girls scoring above 700 on the quantitative section of the college-entrance SAT examination."

3 to 1 is still huge, and they are trying to make the case that this result might keep going until it is 1:1 like the mean result already nearly is. In fact, that the result of boys:girls in SAT score above 700 (a measure of variance) is still 3 to 1 while there is gender equality in the mean result is an indication that probably 3 to 1 is the most female favorable result that they are going to get. Because the SAT is a proxy IQ test, this is basically saying that while the mean is equal there are 3 times as many men as women in the IQ stratum from which the people who are gifted enough to enter tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions can be drawn from.

But let's ignore that and focus on Tunisia and Bahrain, shall we?

Just because our "route" resulted in our "life" situation, doesn't mean that other routes couldn't produce equally valid and viable "life" conditions. We're not that special.

Not necessarily. So far we only know one planet that has evidence of life (our own). For all we know, many of the specific details of the earth and solar system in which it is found combine to make it much more probable that life is found. There appear to be a lot of planets out there, but none we can yet observe giving evidence of life.

To turn the Feynman license plate example on its head, let's try this thought experiment. It is April, 1901 in New York. You can see several cars, but only one has a license plate (having just been required by law on the 25th of that month). It is for argument's sake "ARW 357". What might we infer about license plates, given that this is the only example we have ever seen? If we say that all license plates will be "ARW 357", we will be wrong. However, we might infer that license plates will contain a mixture of numbers and letters, and 6 in an LLL NNN fashion may be sufficient in a typical state (this combination gives 17+ million combinations, which will be reasonable for many states). The license plate itself will be big enough so that the letters/numbers can be seen from a distance, but not too big to be expensive to produce or unsightly. They will have dark letters on a white background. They will be fixed to the front and back of the car to aid identification when the car is traveling in both directions. None of these details is arbitrary. Go around the world and license plates will look a lot alike in general.

If intelligent life on a per planet basis does turn out to be rare, it stands to reason that there is a reason for this. There may only be a few modalities capable of bearing life or have it come into being on a frequent enough basis. Perhaps only one, and if that is the case then earth will be a good model. In any case, we know that planet earth in our solar system was capable of generating life. We at least know that the earth-like/solar system-like modality is capable of generating at least one instance of intelligent life. This modality is certainly a better bet for finding other examples of intelligent life than any random other configuration.

Other fun things to deal with are the rapid staff turnover, the guarantee that they'll take the code you paid them to write with them to a competitor, and that you might find that you don't even have a copy.

This is the primary thing that always discouraged me from the idea of outsourcing from a business perspective. You want the code you are paying for to be an additional barrier to entry or competitive advantage that you have over your competitors. The last thing you want to do is pay the lion's share of the development costs only for your competitors to get those advantages you have paid for at a discounted rate.

Finally! A disease sent from God to punish people for being Un-American.

I'm not surprised that the idea has been done before as a book. Thanks for providing a pointer.

Somewhere, someplace there is a properly paranoid intelligence out there that is or has shunned the development of radio technology for that very reason (perhaps some sort of hive mind able to exert control over rogue experimentation? It wasn't us though, so I hope for our sake that there is some sort of Mutual Assured Destruction that prevents the doomsday response to the first radio communication, or physical difficulty or impossibility involved.

The very first communications of human origin that alien civilizations might receive will come from Nikola Tesla's attempt to broadcast electrical power through the air a little over a century ago. Provided they have sensitive and directional enough receivers, and can somehow filter out the radio noise from the Sun, that would mean that any civilization within a little over a hundred light years might already be trying to respond to us.

I wonder what exactly they are going to respond to us with. e.g. "Ahh... looks like another civilization just invented radio communications. Very smart of them. It seems their intelligence is only matched by their carelessness. I think it's about time to clue them in as to why they have yet to find intelligent life on any other planet in the galaxy. For a brief second or two they will finally know that there IS life on other planets."

I agree that these classes aren't filler. They are political indoctrination masquerading as "breadth" or whatever they want to call it. And as you say, most engineers would just craft their major to make as many of these classes reinforce their major as best they could. For those classes they couldn't, they'd either lap up, grit their teeth or mindlessly absorb the Marxist viewpoint, depending on their predilection.