> The most important Engineering Principle is to measure everything using metrics to guide the process
This sentence is literally meaningless. If you mean 'quantify everything', you're communicating your intent extremely badly, and you're also wrong, because it's not right to try to quantify everything.
> You know, in our times schools (and kids) are no longer what they used to be.
What every single person in reply to my comment is getting wrong is mixing up engineering SKILLS (mathematics, general problem solving, etc.) with engineering PRINCIPLES. Principles are things like "keep it simple" or "safety first." I guess some of these are relevant to programming but it's not like these are particularly difficult concepts to realize (or that software engineering doesn't already have them).
> and we covered bio, chem, physics, math beyond diffeq and engineering fundamentals and techniques
So did we. Do you really think these are engineering principles? Are you that confused?
> is that people from my program often get hired as engineering scientists
I have a graduate degree in engineering science.
What is it with all the pathetic ACs around here?
AC strikes again! No I didn't miss the point. All those things are either self-evident or not related to engineering. Is 'breaking down and analyzing big problems' an engineering principle? If so then politics, law, and art are also engineering.
Those things you mentioned are either not general or are general principles of thinking, not really related to engineering. Understanding of physics is the only one that could be said to be a general engineering principle, but that's kind of a tautology. "To understand physical systems you have to understand physical systems."
> Really? I have a four year engineering degree, and spend the first two years of that learning mostly general principles.
I don't know where you went to school but I spent the first two years learning physics and math. Are you saying general engineering principles include math? If that's what you're saying then we are in full agreement. Programmers should learn math.
> We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying.
Even if we could work on the distros, there's no reason we would. Open source development isn't a bunch of angels selflessly providing gifts to the rest of humanity at their own expense. It's a community based on cooperation and competition like all other human communities. It is NOT WRONG to expect responsibility from someone who's software you're using. Quite the contrary. It's the duty of everyone who uses a Linux distro to point out flaws and areas of improvement, and history has shown that those who repeatedly refuse to listen to these complaints eventually die off.
Let's face it, most open source developers are irresponsible twats who only care about their own intellectual masturbation (and I say this as an open source user and developer). They have no commitments to anything and will happily break years of compatibility just to make the system more 'elegant', something no one except them gives a fuck about. Rarely do you get people who actually care about the users.
More to the point, what the hell are "general engineering principles"? I have a formal training in engineering and no one ever gave me a set of general principles to learn. Based on what I and other engineers do, I'd say the most general engineering skill is how to use ANSYS
But seriously, I've only ever heard the phrase "general engineering principles" from programmers, and it usually stems from a gross lack of understanding of non-software engineering and how relevant software design is to things like building bridges or cars (hint: not at all relevant, except in the trivial sense that all of them involve clicking buttons and sitting in front of a computer for a long period of time. Maybe a "general engineering principle" would be to use an ergonomic chair?
Plenty. Virtually all the AI software of the 60's and 70's is lost now. They were usually written in custom Lisp dialects for which no interpreter exists today. Even if you can find the interpreter code, there's no way you could run them, because they were heavily optimized for custom hardware that is long gone, the companies developing them also long gone, along with critical information that you'd need to write an emulator.
Lisp is especially problematic in this area because of the huge variety of non-standard implementations that were used, but many other languages also have this problem.
That seems like a bizarre example... there are plenty of other stuff that will hang around for a long time. Building ruins will be around for millions of years. Radioactive waste will be around for a long time too (which is why it's so hard to deal with). If there were any civilizations like us in Earth's past, we'd definitely know about them.
By the way, I know you mentioned 0.1% milk in another comment, but the 'drinking milk' that most people buy ranges from 1% reduced-fat milk to 3.3% 'full fat' milk.
I don't know why you feel the need to keep inflating your numbers, even after I've pointed out they're wrong (and you've admitted that you're wrong). You're not off by a factor of 10, you're off by a factor of 100.
Very few bars of chocolate contain 100 g of fat. A snickers bar contains 14 g. I choose it because it's a particularly fatty bar and I wanted to be fair to you. A Mars bar contains less: 11 g, as does a nestle milk chocolate bar.
A freaking meat pie (like http://files.exclusivelyfood.c...) contains 27 g of fat, and that's a lot (it's about the same as a big mac). There are very few foods you eat throughout your day that have 100 g of fat. You'd have to eat five steaks or 3-4 big macs to get that amount of fat in your body.
> in what way are the following dietary guidelines un-sound?
I've been telling you but it seems you lack reading comprehension as well. They're unsound because they are not based on any solid medical evidence, they unnecessarily restrict the types of food people can eat (which leads to many problems on its own, including health problems in many cases), and for all we know they could actually be harmful (too much focus on meat, for one, is _known_ to be harmful).
> is why it's curious that you'd be so invested in whining about it.
I'm not singling out paleo, if that's what you mean. I call out all bullshit equally, whether it's Atkins or paleo or the apple juice diet or whatever Oprah's plugging.
Wrong. A snickers bar contains 14 grams of fat. For 3% milk, that comes out to about 470 grams, or just less than 2 cups. For 'skim' 1.5% milk, twice that, or 3.7 cups. A lot of people drink that much milk for breakfast.
20 liters of 3% milk contains 600 grams of fat. That's a large brick of butter.
How is linking to a meta-meta-study (which includes one of AC's cited studies in it) 'dismissing' anything?
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine
