That was the point though. But software engineering is not treated with respect because 90% of the product is invisible. With regard to the reply you've made below about aerospace engineering, you're right, that is a new field too - but the product is visible, you can see what your money is buying. And even though it's flight, it still builds upon engineering principles accrued over a much longer time span than software engineering does. There no MBAs heading up engineering teams designing and building planes. There are very, very few amateur plane builders selling their rickety winged contraptions (at least not ones made for passenger flights).

Software Development is still a young field. Someone who wants a bridge built can look back in history and see all the horrible consequences of not shutting up and listening to the people who know better than them. There are strict regulations, there are guidelines to follow. Humans have been building stuff since the first ax hit a tree, while the consequences of faulty software has just recently started to manifest itself to the general public. Comparing software engineering to regular engineering is an unfair comparison when regular engineering is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of years of experience.

I heard a saying once, maybe it was here on /. The reason an older programmer is slower than a younger one is because of the number of answers he has to the question "what could possibly go wrong?". That is true on a larger scale for engineering vs. software engineering.

Most large software projects are run by people who have fuck all clue what it entails to produce good software, people who don't see the value in spending another couple grand on a few more weeks of design, people who have clients they sold vapor to and now need the product yesterday. Software that works is easy to produce, and nobody can see the rickety scaffolding underneath, so it is really hard to argue with a non technical manager that something needs to be changed - after all, the shit works doesn't it?

I would, if Chrome supported a NoScript type plugin.

Right, because billions of individual bags of almost pure protein exist as an isolated island in the food chain - bats, fish, frogs and toads, to name a few, all feed on mosquitoes.

The obvious solution is for OP to just stop eating. It can't be that hard, millions of people starve to death of their own free will every year.

Except that this does not get rid of the mosquitoes, only one mosquito species - the rest are perfectly fine. This "solution" does not solve the problem, it just shifts which species carry the disease at the cost of unknown damage to an ecosystem - who knows, the locals might be part of that chain somewhere along the line, and you end up killing the same number of people for a different reason. You can't remove an entire section of the food chain and expect nothing to change - best case scenario is that another species of mosquito takes over. As the quoted ecologist says, there is already a species prevalent in the area, that is also a carrier.

I was asking a question you fucking dimwit - nothing gets in the way of spewing more poorly thought out garbage for you does it?

Says the oil lobby?

Ok, I wrote lucrative in the context of the article, which states that some of the mathematicians do their work for NSA during the summer. To me that meant more money while they're sitting on their sofa anyways - I'll accept your correction though.

It doesn't matter for the bigger picture; The article spends a good deal of time getting the point across, that it needs to become socially unacceptable to accept these kinds of gigs, whether you do it for money, glory or patriotism should amount to the same in the end.

Even better would be if they spent all that time curing the dengue fever and then left the mosquito alone.

It's not a death gene, it is a genetically engineered mosquito that dies, subtle but huge difference. I'd be more concerned with the consequences of killing off a species of mosquito, especially when the one they're targeting isn't the only one carrying the dengue. From TFA:

Classis Big-Corp logic: we can solve this problem (kind of) - so we have to insist that this problem is the one we need to solve in order to solve that other problem (and get paid).

Not really, this is a mathematician calling on other mathematicians to actually think twice before they accept that lucrative summer job at NSA. Other than that, your reply is utter bullshit. If we can't factor in the ethics of the work we do, the assholes down at NSA have already won. It is exactly your kind of mentality that keeps those wheels spinning - just a drop in the ocean, nothing to see here, more along citizen - if I don't do this, someone else will.

What we're witness to in the present is not coping, it is a transition. Productivity has increased massively, to the point where employers can lay off huge chunks of their work force and still churn out the same amount of widgets. This works while other employers have still not done so, thereby ensuring that a majority of the work force is still employed.

But what happens when all of industry arrives at the ~100% automation point, the point where all the employees left are the ones with a CxO title? Laying off workers is the sound economic decision in the short term, but if everyone is doing it, and your customers are basically other companies' employees, what then? You can hide all your ill gotten gains in tax shelters all you want it won't matter.

I think OP is right, we do need a new system from the ground up, and I think it will come about either through foresightedness or through necessity (violence perhaps, I hope not), because the current economic and political models aren't near good enough. And smart .01%'ers will realize this before its too late, because their fortunes will most likely be worth exactly jack shit when a new society emerges to deal with the problems their caste has created.

Oh, how surprising and completely novel of you - what a genuinely modern outlook, all the while hiding behind the aptly named generic user name of anonymous coward.

The justification for deploying weapons is circular, the only reason you need them is because someone else also has them (see: Nuclear Deterrent, MAD). Deploying weapons is a means of getting what you want at the expense of the opponent and your population... They have guns (truth or lie, does not matter) so we must also purchase guns, all the while the other side is using the exact same justification to purchase and deploy guns. That is stone-age retardation at its finest.

I'm not taking sides, because I don't believe either side has a cause worthy of siding with. Whenever a leader of a nation decides that rolling out the guns is the correct cause of action, they automatically lose whatever credibility their stated cause might have had. Leaders acting like school children, but employing the resources of a nation, are pathetic. Resources, mind you, that were created by the people. Leaders, also created by the people, set in place to manage said resources, and they're now playing war? Fucking pathetic, fucking disgusting.

That being said, my original comment was to provide some counter weights to cold fjord's one-sided propaganda spewing garbage. It's a kind of a tradition, he spews right wing nut-job garbage, /. reacts (well, it seems to be less and less, maybe he's being ignored by most by now?).