How exactly is that a good thing? You just said that he's every bit as capable as someone at a top 10 school. If his ability is really the same, he should make the same money. If he doesn't, then you're arbitrarily raising up students based on less meaningful (or entirely meaningless) criteria.

Regardless, a business student is the wrong example for this discussion. The majority of our problems in STEM fields are related to incentives. Scientists and engineers are the foundation of technology and, as a result, society. Yet many scientists end up making pennies doing academic research, or face huge ethical dilemmas working for corporations. Even worse, their degrees often go unused because of the sorry state of the system. It should not be so difficult for them to find meaningful work.

I'm not the first one to say this here or anywhere: Fix the incentives, and the majority of the problems will go away. And please please PLEASE do not let the standards for STEM majors drop anymore. There are already far too many incompetent engineers out here in corporationland.

AC or not, he has a point. There are any number of promising (or at least feasible) energy projects out there that could use a boost. Many of them are small and relatively cheap, as well.

A couple of examples of promising fusion research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell (http://www.emc2fusion.org/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_plasma_focus (http://focusfusion.org/)

The Polywell research is already funded by the Navy, so that might get complicated is we start mixing piles of money, but more funding could speed things up and free up time for the researchers to do more research instead of looking for money. There are tons of these small fusion projects going, each with their own little twist on IEC containment or similar.

Yup, it's on there. We watched it last week. Surprisingly, it was fairly interesting.

I've also heard many times that the Chinese now own all our major banks or some such.

As always, the truth lies somewhere in between the extremes...

You answered your own question, really. 'Normal' people don't care about having stock android, dual-core processors, and the like. They want a phone that also does apps and internet stuff, which means they follow the crowd to an iPhone or get a cheaper Android phone that still does everything but make their coffee in the morning.

Google knows very well who they are targeting with these flagship phones and it's not hurting them one bit. They're trying to show off what Android can do and they're letting the carriers fill the rest of the market. Remember that Google doesn't care about dominating the market with their specific phone. They just want the advertising money and the carriers are doing that for them just fine.

Regardless of the success or failure of the shuttle, that work helped pave the way for the current situation. NASA pioneered a huge amount of research, both successful and less so. You can't take any credit away from them just because the shuttle was less than spectacular. NASA's contributions to knowledge and technology in general over the years have been staggering. Some of that knowledge is relevant, even if it's not a direct copy-and-paste situation for SpaceX.

No... Clearly, the Borg have landed and have begun to assimilate us...

I, for one, welcome our blah blah blah...

Oh dear god don't give them anymore ideas. The last thing we need is for some sympathetic government entity to start checking peoples' collections. (I realize it's unlikely, but we've been surprised and burned too many times in the past...)

Agreed, but most people in technical fields just use PC software to do the same things. Our tools are now much more powerful AND more configurable (depending on what tools you use). For the most part, graphing/programmable calculators really don't do anything but help with tests these days.

Agreed. People should vote with their money. Unfortunately, that's not how the world works these days. Everybody wants the new shiny iWhatever and they're willing to sign away their privacy for it. Hell, a lot of them don't even know what privacy is when it comes to technology. This is only going to get worse with Facebook, et al.

Agree with everything you typed, except the part about regret. They won't regret anything. They'll just blame the government again.

They're afraid of the government doing anything, but if the government doesn't (or can't) do anything, it's their fault for not predicting and preventing. These people are ignorant, paranoid, and have no ability to see the big picture. It will take generations and probably a major disaster before they start to see. By then, there will be some other big problem looming for them to be ignorant about.

Oh yes +10

I'm an engineer who stopped at a BS and jumped into the work force. I don't know how many other engineers I've come across with PhDs and Masters degrees who are next to useless. Hell, I had a professor in college who had several of each. He was a brilliant guy, but was one of the worst teachers we'd ever had. I don't know enough about his research to comment, but looking back, I'm pretty sure he couldn't have made it in industry if his life depended on it. He couldn't even carry a normal conversation with anyone. I don't know how in the hell he was married...

Anyway, my point is: a fancy title and pieces of paper may show that he worked hard and (probably) has a brain, but they do not prove that he is qualified for anything.

It boils down to common sense and practical application of skills. Knowing things is great, but it takes hands-on experience to be truly qualified/competent, in any field.

It is a small company, though not tiny (maybe 50ish, only 15 or so desk folks). He is the only IT guy and he doesn't have direct control over his budget (though he does work with the big wigs when it's set). As far as bitching... I did talk to my boss back when I had that machine and there really wasn't anything either of them could do about it at the time (we're going through some growing pains...).

Now, the problem in this case is not his budget, it's his priorities. He managed to get a special addition to his budget this year to build new machine for most of our office personnel. While I understand that people want newer computers, he really needs to figure out what everyone's needs are and repurpose some of our older, but still usable machines for the people who only use Word/Outlook, rather than buying them new machines that are marginally faster.

Also, I've been hearing about a plan to get iPads for the engineering department to use on the production floor while we're working on machines and such. For the things we'd use them for (primarily inputting data, maybe checking specs and such), cheap netbooks would be more effective and much cheaper. We could then put those extra hundreds of dollars toward upgrading our machines to actually run the software we need. Even just another gig of RAM would be a godsend.

THIS

I'm an engineer who uses Solidworks on a fairly regular basis. Our IT guy either doesn't understand or doesn't care that CAD programs require more horsepower than Word. Ever tried running full-featured CAD software on a 500 MHz with 256 MB RAM? I did that for a good while, and it wasn't more than a few years ago.

Even our 'new' computers are barely adequate Celerons with 1 GB RAM. Yeah, I can get by, but it's an exercise in pain/anger management any time I have to do anything more than a basic drawing. Even those can be frustrating...

If I tried to conveniently spill coffee in it or broke something, I'd get a computer that's even older, and might even end up paying for it or worse. Honestly, I can't imagine doing that, even if the machine were old, useless crap. Maybe I just have too much respect for things.

So the minute it takes a person to sign up for Yahoo/Hotmail/Gmail/whatever is somehow as time consuming as setting up his own system? Regardless of how easy or difficult it is, it's a non-trivial investment of time and resources. No amount of ego from you can change that. Even if I accepted your position, the problem still exists for non-geeks.

Times and technology have changed. Our laws need to catch up before it's too late.