Not so much. Only the cube farms and colleges have super high numbers of people with degrees, and they are usually not paid all that well.

You just need a useful skill, or contacts, or a record of getting things done, or the ability to convince someone to take a risk on you, or a good idea and the ability to execute it, or an much above average intellect, or ambition, or wealthy parents... in short, you need to stand out somehow.

Upper management at many organizations tends to have large numbers of people with no degree (also many MBAs), electricians and plumbers can make quite a bit of money with a certification instead, starting a business is an option open to everyone, consultants generally do not list education at all, etc.

There are a lot of very good options to make as much or more money than most who go get a bachelors degree, they just require that you not float along and take the standard path.

MDs are an exception due to legal requirements, but medical school does not require a college degree to get in either.

This is part of why I think the government should get entirely out of higher education. No loans, grants, or guarantees beyond those given to any other sort of loan.

Private banks would sort it out in very short order based on what schools and programs actually make a ROI, and tuition would indeed go into free fall. The real key is that you should be able to declare bankruptcy on student loans, possibly with bank having a lien on the degree (and the ability to deny you have it if you default.)

The current system where we let young (and in many cases not all that bright) students take out as much money as they want, then indenture them with a huge loan they cannot discharge by any means other than paying it... is very bad.

I could say the same thing about industry vs academia.

In most fields the cutting edge work is done in industry, and it is the academic world which is woefully out of date. You have no access to this information if you do not work in the industry, so you deal with information which is a few decades old.

The way to get access in this case is to join a company which works in the field (sometimes information is hoarded, sometimes there are industry groups which are good resources.) Getting in sometimes requires a degree, but not always. Increasingly it is not required, as the risk seems to be pretty similar these days between the self educated and those who attended a university.

The exception is... when you need to pass a clueless HR department which does not have the ability to screen on anything except your credentials. HR tends not to have any say unless there are a lot more applicants than open positions, there is no favored candidate going in, and a way to cut the list down is necessary.

The good positions are rarely advertised, they get filled through your contact network. Nobody really cares if or where you went to school if you have 20 years of work behind you, as what you have done is simply more important.

I am less kind than most people, so instead of filtering by education I reduce salary on entry level positions until the number of applicants is appropriate. This is a growing trend due to the obvious benefit to the employer, and one of the reasons you see people making less than their student loan payments in some cases even in what are generally considered well paying fields.

If they work out I can offer more, if not I am out less budget. If colleges were willing and able to ensure competence it would be worth a premium, but as it stands this is not the case.

If it is supposed to be about learning for the sake of learning rather than obtaining useful skills then great, but that makes the advertising a little bit fraudulent.

AGW is about as solid as estimating the results of a chemical reaction in an uncontrolled environment where you know only some of the reactants involved.

What you give implies a warming trend, but trying to account for everything which affects surface temperature to the point where you can give a meaningful number leads to error bars which include both deep freeze and boiling water (although I admittedly recalculated those over ten years ago, I am not aware of any major developments which would warrant redoing that.)

I understand it is the best we can currently do, but our best does not yield an answer most people would consider meaningful.

An honest answer would be something like "What we know implies a warming trend, but we are incapable of putting a number to it at this time." Claiming the kind of certainty the IPCC does is very dishonest, which annoys me enough to be willing to argue it.

And to answer your question:

The energy goes back to space, but this is delayed more than it normally would be if it is absorbed by a CO2 molecule.

The energy absorbed by a CO2 molecule will be emitted as a photon after an average of about ten microseconds (collision rate and therefore pressure will affect this.) The wavelength of the photon depends upon temperature, but due to the very limited absorption spectrum of CO2 it is unlikely to be absorbed by another CO2 molecule. H2O is however far more likely to absorb the photon, and we have a lot more of it in the atmosphere. The potential problem comes about from the interaction of both CO2 and H2O (a very small increase from CO2 amplifying a much larger effect from H2O.)

The reason increasing CO2 has a noticeable effect is due to its small concentration in the atmosphere, as it will not yet absorb the wavelengths it can to extinction.

As concentration increases it becomes "less bad" to increase it further. It should be kept in mind that increasing CO2 concentration will give a logarithmic falloff in absorbed energy. If you increase the concentration of a gas by 1000x, you will get about a 7x increase in absorbed energy.

In short:

We probably will see some warming, but are very unlikely to see a runaway greenhouse effect. A potential future problem which bears some watching is being pitched as a doomsday scenario, and I would consider this is a good example of the phrase "making a mountain out of a molehill."

Aside from physics being a branch of science covering a large number of theories, and evolution being one theory within the branch of science we call biology?

It is difficult to compare them directly for this reason.

Physics tends to make predictions which are then tested, and I tend to dislike physical theories which cannot make predictions we can verify to a high degree of confidence. Evolution has some limited experimentation behind it, but the time scales involved do not allow much in the way of testing this (mostly it is fruit flies and other short lifespan organisms, which is very limited.)

I do not think evolution comes even close to the kind of confidence you need to claim a result in physics (usually considered 95% with carefully controlled statistics to back it), but it is still by far the best explanation we have for how organisms on this planet came to the state they are in. Physics is a much harder science than biology.

The person you replied to may be claiming his "feels" and some writings from some random long dead guys as evidence, but is not entirely wrong about evolution having a lot less evidence to it than some of the more well tested theories in physics (although there are also a few real crackpot theories which get thrown around from time to time in physics.)

Then again religion is not science, and has no place in a science class (even though some people treat religion as science, or science as religion.)

If it is large enough, why not move the laser instead?

You may even be able to do this by reflection without moving more than a very small surface which reflects the correct wavelength. This does not seem like an problem which cannot be solved.

My first thought as to what would stop it is the amount of energy required, as lasers are not very efficient, and melting (or sintering) large objects may take enough energy that the losses involved in transferring energy through a laser may make it inefficient compared to direct heating.

Many people have trouble with javascript being classless. A lot of people associate objects with classes, and are confused by an object oriented language without them.

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You seem to be misinformed.

=== is true if both the type and value match (it will not do type conversion.)

In my case I had 6 AP credits with a score of 4 or 5 (including CS), the college said "choose two". They were also kind enough to clarify that classes that could be tested out of also counted towards this limit.

I could see not taking it for courses in your major, but they seemed not to want students skipping anything if they could prevent it. I suppose they wanted to make money from the classes, but not accepting them makes the entire AP thing a waste of time.

He may have meant checking ZF or something, but I am guessing not.

In any case smaller data size does take less time to process for many instructions, for instance a 32 bit DIV is faster than doing so on 64-bits, even on a 64-bit processor (it takes about a third the time.)

  If you are packing bits it can also save time in transferring from memory (although you need enough bits to make it worthwhile.)

Carbohydrates are not digested at a rate even close to sugar.

Runners will commonly eat a lot of carbohydrates over the couple of days leading up to a race for this reason. It provides long term energy which can be used somewhat rapidly if necessary. I do not get a sugar high when carb loading.

Something like white bread may be different, but I barely consider that food. If the carbohydrates you are eating are sweetened with a ton of fructose that could cause you problems as well.

They do provide a lot of energy for the amount you eat, which is highly useful unless you have problems regulating your calorie intake. If your goal is to eat as much as possible they are probably not a good choice.

Meat only diets are very bad for you, you may want to get your cholesterol checked if you have been on one for a while.

You will not metabolize carbon dioxide from the air, and nitrogen is inert.

Breathing converts oxygen and carbon into carbon dioxide, therefore breathing should actually make you lose weight.

Water may add to weight, but you will keep to a fairly narrow range of water content if you want to survive.

It is that simple, humans are not overunity devices.

How you go about accomplishing it can get complex, various feedback effects complicate what you expend or gain energy wise, and you still need certain substances in your diet in enough quantity to avoid nutritional deficiencies, but you will lose weight if you gain less energy from food than you expend.

Eating as you did in your 20s when you are in your 40s is highly inadvisable. You want to tailor your consumption to match current energy expenditure, not what you were expending 20 years ago.

As you age your dietary needs will change, but you can still find a balance. Energy expenditure through exercise should not change much if it is consistent, but the amount of energy needed for other functions will. If nothing else your cell division rate drops as you age, and eventually goes to nearly zero.

This means you should no longer be eating enough to cover that energy expenditure, as you are no longer expending it. This is going to be less noticeable if you get substantial exercise, as it is a smaller fraction of your energy use.

Short of extremely rare hormone disorders or crippling physical debilities you should be able to control your weight without too much effort, even as you get older.